Bitcoin Ponzi Scheme
Defense Department Contractor Arrested For Falsifying SpaceX Reports / UK Tells NATO Of Russia Hacking / BlueKeep Backdoor Nightmare / Huawei IP Thefts / Newspapers Dead In Five Years
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From DSLreports’ front page: Thursday Morning Links
Broadband Monopolies Are Acting Like Old Phone Monopolies. Good Thing Solutions to That Problem Already Exist eff.org
The future of AT&T is an ad-tracking nightmare hellworld theverge.com
SpaceX Again Delays Starlink Internet Satellite Launch nytimes.com
Broadband Data Usage Report: Internet-only Homes Use Almost Twice as Much Data as Bundled Homes telecompetitor.com
Sprint MVNO Altice May Continue to Oppose T-Mobile Merger lightreading.com
Huawei-Scrubbing 5G Bill Introduced — Would fund extraction of Chinese telecom tech from U.S. nets multichannel.com
Rural/Urban Digital Divide Bill RE-Introduced — Would create standard for reasonably comparable service multichannel.com
DOJ Attorneys Reportedly Ready to Block T-Mobile/Sprint Merger gizmodo.com
EE says it will roll out the UK’s first 5G network on May 30, beating Vodafone by a month, in six cities, including London, Edinburgh, and Belfast theverge.com
Razer says it will shut down its Ouya and Forge TV services on June 25, marking the official end of the crowdfunded Android game console, discontinued in 2015 polygon.com
From Engadget: The Bitcoin Ponzi scam that won’t go away
In an industry rife with scams, one cryptocurrency trading startup — USI Tech — was paying real dividends on its customers’ investments.
At least, it appeared to be.
In reality, USI Tech was a classic Ponzi scheme. It offered outrageous rates of return and encouraged investors to boost their earnings by introducing more people to the USI Tech family, with the fees from new investors then used to pay off existing customers.
It wasn’t long before authorities in the United States, Canada and New Zealand caught up with the company and issued cease and desist orders. Just a few months later, an estimated tens of millions of dollars had vanished from investors’ accounts.
But that wasn’t the end of USI Tech’s story. It simply set up shop under a different name: Eyeline Trading. When authorities caught on to the rehashed scam, Eyeline rebranded again to its current form: WealthBoss, which is active today.
Are you investing in cryptocurrency? My advice is, if you don’t know what makes the value of a thing go up and down, you probably ought not to be an investor. Read More.
From Loren Grush at The Verge: Engineer charged with faking inspection reports for parts used in SpaceX rockets
A man from upstate New York has been charged with providing false inspection reports and test certifications for parts used in SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, as well as vehicles from other aerospace contractors employed by the Defense Department. The misconduct was brought to light thanks to an investigation from NASA’s inspector general, the FBI, and the Air Force’s office of special investigations.
The man, James Smalley, was a quality assurance engineer at PMI Industries, a machining company in Rochester, New York that makes various aerospace parts. In January of 2018, SpaceX directed the firm SQA Services to do an internal audit, which found that numerous PMI inspection reports and test certifications — used to confirm the safety and quality of a part — had forged inspector signatures on them. Specifically, Smalley allegedly photocopied signatures of the SQA inspector and then copied and pasted them onto the reports.
“According to the criminal complaint, James Smalley took the act of forgery to a new level,” Gary Loeffert, an FBI Buffalo special agent-in-charge, said in a statement. “A potentially catastrophic level with the potential to not only cost millions of dollars, but also jeopardize years of irreplaceable work.”
Smalley is accused of tampering with up to 38 reports of critical parts used in SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rocket line, according to the US Attorney’s Office in the Western District of New York. The investigation also found that up to 76 PMI pieces had either been rejected during inspection or never inspected at all; they were sent to SpaceX anyway. All in all, up to 10 of SpaceX’s government missions may have been affected by the suspect parts, including seven for NASA, two for the Air Force, and one for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Some of the falsified reports even revolved around parts meant to be used in the launch of NASA’s new exoplanet-hunting spacecraft, TESS, in April of 2018. However, NASA’s inspector general had been alerted to the forgeries before the launch.
If convicted, Smalley could face up to 10 years in prison, as well as pay a $250,000 fine, according to the US Attorney’s Office.
Catalin Cimpanu writes for Zero Day over at ZDnet: UK says it warned 16 NATO allies of Russian hacking activities
… “I can disclose that in the last 18 months, the National Cyber Security Centre has shared information and assessments with 16 NATO Allies — and even more nations outside the Alliance — of Russian cyber activity in their countries,” said Britain Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Jeremy Hunt in a speech at the National Cyber Security Centre today.
Hunt said “Russia’s intelligence services are targeting the critical national infrastructure of many countries in order to look for vulnerabilities.”
“This global campaign also seeks to compromise central government networks,” the British official added.
“We have regularly provided technical knowledge to help our partners to counter the threat.”
While on the topic, Hunt has urged nations to band together and create a deterrent for state-sponsored hackers to attack other countries. The UK and its intelligence partners have been slowly moving to a name-and-shame approach when dealing with cyber-attacks.
Read More about this story from ZDnet.
Dan Goodin at Ars Technica: Why a Windows flaw patched nine days ago is still spooking the Internet
It has been nine days since Microsoft patched the high-severity vulnerability known as BlueKeep, and yet the dire advisories about its potential to sow worldwide disruptions keep coming.
Until recently, there was little independent corroboration that exploits could spread virally from computer to computer in a way not seen since the WannaCry and NotPetya worms shut down computers worldwide in 2017. Some researchers felt Microsoft has been unusually tight-lipped with partners about this vulnerability, possibly out of concern that any details, despite everyone’s best efforts, might hasten the spread of working exploit code.
Until recently, researchers had to take Microsoft’s word the vulnerability was severe. Then five researchers from security firm McAfee reported last Tuesday that they were able to exploit the vulnerability and gain remote code execution without any end-user interaction. The post affirmed that CVE-2019–0708, as the vulnerability is indexed, is every bit as critical as Microsoft said it was.
Finish this article by clicking here.
Cale Guthrie Weissman at FastCompany: NYT editor predicts almost all newspapers will die in 5 years
New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet has a bleak forecast for the future of print media. Late last week at the International News Media Association World Congress, the editor spoke about the state of journalism, the world, and the newspaper he runs. The conversation was sprawling, but Baquet did have one very specific prognostication to make.
When asked about the future of newspapers, the executive editor said:
The greatest crisis in American journalism is the death of local news . . . I don’t know what the answer is. Their economic model is gone. I think most local newspapers in America are going to die in the next five years, except for the ones that have been bought by a local billionaire.
That is a certainly a depressing outlook. Of course, he’s probably not wrong, either. A recent Pew Research report found that, despite the fact that most Americans believe local news organizations to be doing well, very few are actually paying for those subscriptions. And while print advertising continues to plummet, more small outlets are shutting down.
Baquet works for one of the few journalism organizations that are thriving in the digital age, but even he didn’t have an answer for the local news crisis. “I don’t know what the model is for covering the school boards in Newark, New Jersey,” he said. “That makes me nervous. And despite the fact that there are some rich people championing media, there is no way the entire industry can rely on the kindness of deep-pocketed strangers.”
From Catherine Shu at TechCrunch: Semiconductor startup CNEX Labs alleged Huawei’s deputy chairman conspired to steal its intellectual property
A San Jose-based semiconductor startup being sued by Huawei for stealing trade secrets has hit back in court documents, accusing the Chinese firm’s deputy chairman of conspiring to steal its intellectual property, reports The Wall Street Journal. In court filings, CNEX Labs, which is backed by the investment arms of Dell and Microsoft, alleges that Eric Xu, who is also one of Huawei’s rotating CEOs, worked with other Huawei employees to steal its proprietary technology.
The lawsuit, set for trial on June 3 in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas, started in 2017 when Huawei sued CNEX and one of its founders, Yiren “Ronnie” Huang, a former employee at Huawei’s Santa Clara office, for stealing its technology and using unlawful means to poach 14 other Huawei employees. CNEX filed a countersuit the following year. Huawei has denied the startup’s allegations in court filings.
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