secwatcher shares a report from Threatpost: A gamut of kids’ GPS-tracking watches are exposing sensitive data involving 35,000 children — including their location, in real time. Researchers from Pen Test Partners specifically took a look at the Gator portfolio of watches from TechSixtyFour. The Gator line had been in the spotlight in 2017 for having a raft of vulnerabilities, called out by the Norwegian Consumers Council in its WatchOut research. “A year on, we decided to have a look at the Gator watch again to see how their security had improved,” said Vangelis Stykas, in a Tuesday posting. “Guess what: a train wreck. Anyone could access the entire database, including real-time child location, name, parents’ details etc. Not just Gator watches either — the same back end covered multiple brands and tens of thousands of watches.” “At issue was an easy-to-exploit, severe privilege-escalation vulnerability: The system failed to validate that the user had the appropriate permission to take admin control,” reports Threatpost. “An attacker with access to the watch’s credentials simply needed to change the user level parameter in the backend to an admin designation, which would provide access to all account information and all watch information.”

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Source: Slashdot – Attackers Can Track Kids’ Locations Via Connected Watches

Samsung has started mass producing what it says is the industry’s first one terabyte embedded Universal Flash Storage (eUFS) technology for smartphones. “It will give the company’s mobile devices PC-like storage without the need for large-capacity microSD cards,” Engadget reports. “It’ll be incredibly useful if you use your phone to take tons of photos and HD videos — Samsung says it’s enough to store 260 10-minute videos in 4K UHD.” From the report: “The 1TB eUFS is expected to play a critical role in bringing a more notebook-like user experience to the next generation of mobile devices,” said Cheol Choi, EVP of Memory Sales & Marketing at Samsung Electronics. As ZDNet notes, Samsung’s upcoming flagship devices, such as the S10, will most likely come with a 1TB option thanks to its new eUFS technology. After all, Samsung started mass producing its 512GB storage technology back in December 2017 and then debuted it with its new phones early on in the following year.

In addition to offering massive storage, the new eUFS was also designed to be faster than typical SSDs, microSDs and previous revisions of the technology. It has a 1,000-megabyte-per-second sequential read speed, twice that of the usual SSD and faster than its 512GB predecessor. Despite all those, Samsung says it’ll come in the same package size as its 512GB flash memory, so it won’t have to make its big phones even bigger.

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Source: Slashdot – Samsung Develops the First 1TB Storage Chips For Phones

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The study, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that e-cigarettes were nearly twice as effective as conventional nicotine replacement products, like patches and gum, for quitting smoking. The success rate was still low — 18 percent among the e-cigarette group, compared to 9.9 percent among those using traditional nicotine replacement therapy — but many researchers who study tobacco and nicotine said it gave them the clear evidence they had been looking for. The study was conducted in Britain and funded by the National Institute for Health Research and Cancer Research UK. For a year, it followed 886 smokers assigned randomly to use either e-cigarettes or traditional nicotine replacement therapies. Both groups also participated in at least four weekly counseling sessions, an element regarded as critical for success. The findings could give some new legitimacy to e-cigarette companies like Juul, which have been under fire from the government and the public for contributing to what the Food and Drug Administration has called an epidemic of vaping among teenagers. But they could also exacerbate the difficulty of keeping the devices away from young people who have never smoked while making them available for clinical use.

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Source: Slashdot – E-Cigarettes Are Effective At Helping Smokers Quit, a Study Says

The entertainment industry has shut down Dragon Media Inc.’s “Dragon Box” device, which connects to TVs and lets users watch video without a cable TV or streaming service subscription. According to Ars Technica, the company has “agreed to shut down the Dragon Box services and pay $14.5 million in damages to plaintiffs from the entertainment industry.” From the report: Dragon Media was sued in January 2018 by Netflix, Amazon, Columbia Pictures, Disney, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Bros. Dragon Media’s lawyer initially predicted that the lawsuit would backfire on the entertainment industry, but the Dragon Box maker must have decided it had little chance of winning at trial. The plaintiffs and defendant filed a proposed settlement Monday at U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

The settlement requires Dragon Media to “cease all operation of the Dragon Box system” and related services within five days. Under the settlement, “[j]udgment shall be entered against Defendants and in favor of Plaintiffs on Plaintiffs’ claims of copyright infringement, and damages shall be awarded to Plaintiffs in the amount of U.S. $14,500,000,” the document says. Dragon Media, Dragon Media owner Paul Christoforo, and reseller Jeff Williams “[s]hall be further enjoined from operating any website, system, software, or service that is substantially similar to the Dragon Box service,” the settlement says. The settlement also prohibits the defendants from making its source code or other technology available to others.

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Source: Slashdot – Netflix, Amazon, and Hollywood Studios Shut Down Dragon Box