Yahoo mail hacked: What to do if you’ve been affected

By Hayley Tsukayama, Friday, January 31, 7:13 AM E-mail the writer

Yahoo Mail users, we have some bad news: It’s time to change your e-mail password.
In a company blog post Thursday night, Yahoo revealed that a number of users’ passwords and usernames were exposed to cyber-attackers who used malicious computer software to gain access to lists of Yahoo Mail credentials.

 Yahoo Mail usernames, passwords taken in breach

Hayley Tsukayama 7:13 AM ET

The company is resetting passwords of affected accounts. Here’s what to do if you own one of them.

The information was likely collected from a third-party database, Jay Rossiter, Yahoo’s senior vice president of platforms and personalization products, wrote in the posting.

 

The company is resetting passwords on accounts that have been affected and is taking steps to allow users to re-secure their accounts. It is sending notification e-mails instructing those users to change their passwords; users may also receive a text message, if they’ve shared their phone number with the company.

It’s a song-and-dance that users may be tiring off, but it is important for Yahoo account holders who were swept up in the attack to change their passwords for immediately. They should also change their log-in credentials for any account that may share their Yahoo password, particularly if they use their Yahoo e-mail as their username. The same is true if you use a similar e-mail address as the username — it’s not a big leap for hackers to think that you may be both jdoe@yahoo.com and jdoe@gmail.com.

Finally, everyone should also be on the lookout for spam, as the attack also appears to have picked up names and e-mail addresses for the most recent contacts from affected accounts, according to the company’s post.

If you get an odd e-mail from the Yahoo account of someone you know, ignore the message, and do not click on any links in the message. (It’s also be nice to let the person whose account has been hacked know about the fraudulent messages, so they can warn others to avoid the e-mails.)
Yahoo has apologized for the inconvenience and has said that it has taken “additional measures” to block attacks on its system. The company did not immediately respond to a request asking how many of its users were affected.

Yahoo is the world's second-largest e-mail provider, and has an estimated 273 million users, according to a report from the Associated Press.

Yahoo email account passwords stolen

Thursday, January 30, 2014

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Lisa Amin Gulezian    
                

SAN JOSE, Calif. (KGO) -- There was a major security breach involving Yahoo email users. Their usernames and passwords have been hacked and Yahoo is not revealing how many of its 273 million users are affected. ABC7 News looks into what you can do to protect yourself.
 

The only reference you will find to the latest Yahoo email security breach is on the company's blog. Yahoo admits hackers used malware to steal user names and passwords to access email accounts.
"Here's the scary thing, they should have at least known of the breach," said Tech analyst Rob Enderle.

Enderle thinks Yahoo was under-secured and still probably doesn't know exactly how this happened. Yahoo itself hasn't said how many customers are affected. Still, this breach could lead to identity and bank account theft, since people often use their email address as their user ID on other accounts. 
"The potential liability and damage to Yahoo's brand if a lot of people are hurt would be immeasurable," said Enderle.

This breach is now the second problem in two months for Yahoo. In December the company had a massive email outage that lasted for days.

Many Yahoo email users didn't even know about the compromised accounts. No official notification went out to all users.

"I think that's negligent on their part... to not say anything," said Doug Ahlquist of San Jose.
"I use it for pretty much everything. So I'm really concerned. I'm worried that people have all of my data going back years," said Kristie Ramirez of San Jose.

Ramirez is a long time Yahoo user. As soon as we told her about the breach, she changed her password on the spot. Experts recommend that everyone do the same.

Yahoo said in a blog post on its breach that "The information sought in the attack seems to be names and email addresses from the affected accounts' most recent sent emails."

That could mean hackers were looking for additional email addresses to send spam or scam messages. By grabbing real names from those sent folders, hackers could try to make bogus messages appear more legitimate to recipients.

Yahoo said it is resetting passwords on affected accounts and has "implemented additional measures" to block further attacks. The company would not comment beyond the information in its blog post. It said it is working with federal law enforcement.

Yahoo email account passwords stolen

AP Photo: Julie Jacobson

​Yahoo president and CEO Marissa Mayer speaks during a keynote address at the International Consumer Electronics Show on Jan. 7 in Las Vegas.

  By Associated Press

The company says it believes the usernames and passwords weren't collected from its own systems, but from a third-party database.

 

NEW YORK — Yahoo said Thursday that usernames and passwords of its email customers have been stolen and used to access accounts, but the company isn't saying how many accounts have been affected.

Yahoo is the second-largest email service worldwide, after Google's Gmail, according to the research firm comScore. There are 273 million Yahoo mail accounts worldwide, including 81 million in the U.S.

Yahoo Inc. said in a blog post on its breach that "The information sought in the attack seems to be names and email addresses from the affected accounts' most recent sent emails."

That could mean hackers were looking for additional email addresses to send spam or scam messages. By grabbing real names from those sent folders, hackers could try to make bogus messages appear more legitimate to recipients.

The bigger danger: access to email accounts could lead to more serious breaches involving banking and shopping sites. That's because many sites use email to reset passwords. Hackers could try logging in to such a site with the Yahoo email address, for instance, and ask that a password reminder be sent by email.

The breach is the second problem for Yahoo's mail service in two months. In December, the service suffered a multi-day outage that prompted Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer issue an apology.

Yahoo said it believes the usernames and passwords weren't collected from its own systems, but from a third-party database. It's not clear why a third-party database would have information on Yahoo accounts.

Yahoo said it is resetting passwords on affected accounts and has "implemented additional measures" to block further attacks.

The company would not comment beyond the information in its blog post. It said it is working with federal law enforcement.

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Fact Check: Did Obama get it right?

AP Photo: Larry Downing, Pool

President Barack Obama delivers the State of Union address before a joint session of Congress in the House chamber on Jan. 28, 2014, in Washington.

  By Calvin Woodward of Associated Press

    

A look at some of the facts and political circumstances behind President Barack Obama's claims in his State of the Union speech, with a glance at the GOP response.

 

WASHINGTON — It seems to be something of an occupational hazard for President Barack Obama: When he talks about his health care law, he's bound to hit a fact bump sooner or later.

So it went Tuesday night, when he declared that Medicare premiums have stayed flat thanks to the law, when they've gone up. As for an even bigger theme of his State of the Union address, the president's assertion that "upward mobility has stalled" in America runs contrary to recent research, while other findings support him.

Related: Empower Americans, not government, GOP says in response

Related: Energy secretary held from State of Union speech

A look at some of the facts and political circumstances behind his claims, along with a glance at the Republican response to his speech:

OBAMA: "Because of this [health care] law, no American can ever again be dropped or denied coverage for a preexisting condition like asthma, back pain or cancer. No woman can ever be charged more just because she's a woman. And we did all this while adding years to Medicare's finances, keeping Medicare premiums flat, and lowering prescription costs for millions of seniors."

THE FACTS: He's right that insurers can no longer turn people down because of medical problems, and they can't charge higher premiums to women because of their sex. The law also lowered costs for seniors with high prescription drug bills. But Medicare's monthly premium for outpatient care has gone up in recent years.

Although the basic premium remained the same this year at $104.90, it increased by $5 a month in 2013, up from $99.90 in 2012. Obama's health care law also raised Medicare premiums for upper-income beneficiaries, and both the president and Republicans have proposed to expand that.

Finally, the degree to which the health care law improved Medicare finances is hotly debated. On paper, the program's giant trust fund for inpatient care gained more than a decade of solvency because of cuts to service providers required under the health law. But in practice those savings cannot simultaneously be used to expand coverage for the uninsured and shore up Medicare.

OBAMA: "Today, after four years of economic growth, corporate profits and stock prices have rarely been higher, and those at the top have never done better. But average wages have barely budged. Inequality has deepened. Upward mobility has stalled."

THE FACTS: The most recent evidence suggests that mobility hasn't worsened. A team of economists led by Harvard's Raj Chetty released a study last week that found the United States isn't any less socially mobile than it was in the 1970s. Looking at children born between 1971 and 1993, the economists found that the odds of a child born in the poorest 20 percent of families making it into the top 20 percent hasn't changed.

"We find that children entering the labor market today have the same chances of moving up in the income distribution (relative to their parents) as children born in the 1970s," the authors said.

Still, other research has found that the United States isn't as mobile a society as most Americans would like to believe. In a study of 22 countries, economist Miles Corak of the University of Ottawa found that the United States ranked 15th in social mobility. Only Italy and Britain among wealthy countries ranked lower. By some measures, children in the United States are as likely to inherit their parents' economic status as their height.

OBAMA: "We'll need Congress to protect more than 3 million jobs by finishing transportation and waterways bills this summer.  But I will act on my own to slash bureaucracy and streamline the permitting process for key projects, so we can get more construction workers on the job as fast as possible."

THE FACTS: Cutting rules and regulations doesn't address what's holding up most transportation projects, which is lack of money. The federal Highway Trust Fund will run out of money in August without action. To finance infrastructure projects, Obama wants Congress to raise taxes on businesses that keep profits or jobs overseas, but that idea has been a political nonstarter.

The number of projects affected by the administration's efforts to cut red tape is relatively small, said Joshua Schank, president and CEO of the Eno Center for Transportation, a think tank. "The reason most of these projects are delayed is they don't have enough money. So it's great that you are expediting the review process, but the review process isn't the problem. The problem is we don't have enough money to invest in our infrastructure in the first place."

OBAMA: "More than 9 million Americans have signed up for private health insurance or Medicaid coverage."

THE FACTS: That's not to say 9 million more Americans have gained insurance under the law.
The administration says about 6 million people have been determined to be eligible for Medicaid since Oct. 1 and an additional 3 million roughly have signed up for private health insurance through the new markets created by the health care law. That's where Obama's number of 9 million comes from. But it's unclear how many in the Medicaid group were already eligible for the program or renewing existing coverage.

Likewise, it's not known how many of those who signed up for private coverage were previously insured. A large survey released last week suggests the numbers of uninsured gaining coverage may be smaller. The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index found that the uninsured rate for U.S. adults dropped by 1.2 percentage points in January, to 16.1 percent. That would translate to roughly 2 million to 3 million newly insured people since the law's coverage expansion started Jan. 1.

OBAMA: "In the coming weeks, I will issue an executive order requiring federal contractors to pay their federally funded employees a fair wage of at least $10.10 an hour, because if you cook our troops' meals or wash their dishes, you shouldn't have to live in poverty."

THE FACTS: This would be a hefty boost in the federal minimum wage, now $7.25, but not many would see it.

Most employees of federal contractors already earn more than $10.10. About 10 percent of those workers, roughly 200,000, might be covered by the higher minimum wage. But there are several wrinkles. The increase would not take effect until 2015 at the earliest and it doesn't apply to existing federal contracts, only new ones. Renewed contracts also will be exempt from Obama's order unless other terms of the agreement change, such as the type of work or number of employees needed.

Obama also said he'll press Congress to raise the federal minimum wage overall. He tried that last year, seeking a $9 minimum, but Congress didn't act.

REP. CATHY McMORRIS RODGERS of Washington, in her prepared Republican response: "Last month, more Americans stopped looking for a job than found one. Too many people are falling further and further behind because, right now, the president's policies are making people's lives harder."

THE FACTS: She leaves out a significant factor in the high number of people who aren't looking for jobs: Baby boomers are retiring.

It's true that a large part of the still-high unemployment rate is due to jobless workers who have given up looking for a job. There are roughly three people seeking every job opening, a circumstance that can discourage others from trying. But one big reason people aren't seeking employment is that there are so many boomers — the generation born in the immediate aftermath of World War II — and therefore more than the usual number of retirements.

Associated Press writers Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Christopher S. Rugaber, Joan Lowy, Sam Hananel and Tom Raum contributed to this report.

 

Matthew Herper, Forbes Staff

I cover science and medicine, and believe this is biology's century.

1/28/2014    

The Proposed Republican Replacement For ObamaCare Is A Big Tax Hike

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Yesterday, three Republican Senators — Tom Coburn (Okla.), Richard Burr (N.C.), and Orrin Hatch (Utah) – put forward a plan to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. They call it the Patient CARE Act, and my colleague Avik Roy says it is “the most credible plan yet” offered by the GOP.

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The Chart That Could Sink Obamacare Chris Conover Contributor

 

Except the Coburn-Burr-Hatch plan (read it here) amounts, among other things, to a big tax increase. The main way that it remains budget neutral is by making employer-provided health insurance plans, which are currently not taxed, partially taxable as income. In fact, this income replaces income that, under ObamaCare, comes from taxing companies, including the tax on medical device companies paid by firms like Medtronic MDT +0.23% and Stryker SYK +1.47%.
This fact has not escaped the notice of some prominent health reform allies. “It is a huge tax increase on workers without any confidence that they will be able to afford health insurance in the future,” says Bob Kocher, a partner at venture capital firm Venrock who previously worked in the Obama administration.

It is “essentially a very large Republican tax increase,” says Ezekiel Emanuel, the Diane V.S. Levy and Robert M. Levy University Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania and another former Obama advisor. “It’s quite clear the plan is to put a bigger burden on middle class Americans.”

Here’s what the Senators propose: right now, health insurance is not taxed as income. This is arguably the original sin of the U.S. healthcare system, which has insulated consumers from health costs and allowed prices to skyrocket. During World War II, wages were frozen but pensions and benefits were exempted; in 1943 the Internal Revenue Service ruled that these benefits weren’t taxable, either.

Many health economists believe this is a bad thing, because it shields people from paying their own premiums, and Coburn, Burr, and Hatch deserve credit for tackling this head on. But that doesn’t make this any more politically workable – or appealing to those of us who get health insurance through our employers.

They write:

Therefore, our proposal caps the tax exclusion for employee’s health coverage at 65 percent of an average plan’s costs. The value of employer-sponsored health insurance would be capped and indexed to grow at an annual rate of CPI +1.

Taxing 35% of the average plan – and more than that for plans that are above-average, as half are, could amount to a substantial tax. Tying the growth of the tax-exempt portion of the plan to the Consumer Price Index would also limit the cost of plans, pushing cost-saving measures.

How big a tax might this be for an average American family? Ezekiel has some numbers. The average employer health plan for a family of four costs $16,351, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the employer covers 72% of that, or $11,772. Thirty-five percent of $11,772 is $4,120.35. The employee’s share of the Social Security and Medicare payroll tax is 7.65%, or $315.21. Assuming this family of four is in the 25% marginal income tax bracket, that would add another $1,030.09, for a total tax increase of $1,345.

Up to 300% of the poverty line, there would be subsidies to help people buy insurance. It’s not immediately clear how these compare to the subsidies offered by Obamacare; they don’t look greater.

Removing a bunch of corporate taxes so that the middle class can pay more seems like a political non-starter, even given the public backlash against Obamacare. This plan would likely mean that more people would lose insurance, or be forced to go to smaller networks of doctors. Those are the same criticisms levied against the Affordable Care Act.

Another notable thing about the proposal is how much of the ACA it keeps: it gets rid of state healthcare exchanges, but it keeps the basic structure of trying to keep people in the insurance system (in this case by making pre-existing conditions something that insurers can’t use against you until you fail to sign up for coverage – and then you get slammed) and of paying subsidies to help poor people get insurance. Allowing less comprehensive benefits and allowing insurers to charge five times as much for their sickest and oldest customers as for their youngest and healthiest, compared to three times under Obamacare, could lower the cost of insurance for young people and get more of them in the system.

“The plan makes specific proposals worthy of serious consideration- although I doubt it receives it at this moment,” says Ronald Williams, the former chairman of Aetna. “Perhaps in the future it could be the foundation of serious conversations which could lead to bipartisan evolution of the current bill.”

What the plan does emphasize is the degree to which any plan to reform the insurance system can seem like a zero-sum game – the money has to come from somewhere. For insurers involved in the ObamaCare exchanges, like Humana, Molina Healthcare, and Centene, the legislative roller-coaster ride may be far from over.

Senator Hatch’s office did not return a request for comment.

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FBI warns retailers to expect more credit card breaches

AP Photo: Jeff Chiu
              

Retail, credit card and bank industry executives have become increasingly concerned about the security of payment card networks after Target, the No. 3 U.S. retailer, disclosed one of the biggest retail cyber attacks in history.
          

 By Jim Finkle and Mark Hosenball of Reuters

 The FBI distributed a confidential report to retail companies describing the risks posed by malware that infects cash registers and credit-card machines.

 

WASHINGTON — The FBI has warned U.S. retailers to prepare for more cyber attacks after discovering about 20 hacking cases in the past year that involved the same kind of malicious software used against Target Corp in the holiday shopping season.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation distributed a confidential, three-page report to retail companies last week describing the risks posed by "memory-parsing" malware that infects point-of-sale (POS) systems, which include cash registers and credit-card swiping machines found in store checkout aisles.

Related: Neiman Marcus says 1.1M cards may be compromised

"We believe POS malware crime will continue to grow over the near term, despite law enforcement and security firms' actions to mitigate it," said the FBI report, seen by Reuters.

"The accessibility of the malware on underground forums, the affordability of the software and the huge potential profits to be made from retail POS systems in the United States make this type of financially motivated cyber crime attractive to a wide range of actors," the FBI said.

The report was dated Jan. 17 and entitled "Recent Cyber Intrusion Events Directed Toward Retail Firms." A spokeswoman for the FBI confirmed the agency had issued the report as part of efforts to share information about threats with the private sector.

Related: More US retailers hacked on holidays

Related: Fury and frustration over Target data breach

Retail, credit card and bank industry executives have become increasingly concerned about the security of payment card networks after Target, the No. 3 U.S. retailer, last month disclosed one of the biggest retail cyber attacks in history.

The attack ran undetected for 19 days during the busy holiday shopping season and resulted in the theft of about 40 million credit and debit card records. The personal information of 70 million customers was also compromised.

Luxury retail chain Neiman Marcus has said it too was the victim of a cyber attack, and sources have told Reuters that other retail chains have also been breached. Neiman Marcus said about 1.1 million customer cards were exposed by a data breach from July 16 to Oct. 30 last year.

In all these attacks, cyber criminals used memory-parsing software, also known as a "RAM scraper." When a customer swipes a credit or debit card, the POS terminal grabs the transaction data from the magnetic stripe and transfers it to the retailer's payment processing provider. While the data is encrypted during the process, RAM scrapers extract the information while it is in the computer's live memory, where it very briefly appears in plain text.

RAM scraping technology has been around for a long time, but its use has increased in recent years. Developers of the malware have also enhanced its features to make it more difficult to be detected by anti-virus software deployed on POS systems running Windows software.

MALWARE ON SALE UNDERGROUND

The FBI said in its report that one variant of the malicious POS software, known as Alina, included an option that allowed remote upgrades, making it tougher for corporate security teams to identify and eradicate it. The report said at least one type of malware has been offered for sale for as much as $6,000 in a "well-known" underground forum.

"The high dollar value gained from some of these compromises can encourage intruders to develop high sophistication methodologies, as well as incorporate mechanisms for the actors to remain undetected," the report said.

A spokesman for the Washington-based National Retail Federation, a trade group, said he had no immediate comment.

One cyber security consultant who has reviewed the FBI report, said the findings were troubling for the retail industry.

"Everybody we work with in the retail space is scared to death because they don't have a lot of defenses to prepare against these types of attacks," said the consultant, who is advising several retailers in current investigations.

"This is not just based on anybody saying 'This is going to happen.' This is based on statistical data that the FBI is seeing," said the consultant, who was not authorized to publicly comment on the details of the report.

Retailers need to move quickly to get better tools in their networks that can analyze traffic patterns on the fly and identify any unusual activity, said another expert in retail security, who has audited POS systems to find vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit.

The expert said it is more difficult for small-to-mid sized retailers to do this because they do not have as much money and expertise as major retailers.

The FBI report said the bulk of the POS malware cases that the agency has investigated involve small-to-mid sized local or regional businesses, whose estimated losses each range from tens of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars.

The United States Secret Service usually takes the lead in credit card breach investigations for the federal government, though the FBI sometimes opens its own cases or asked to assist. The Secret Service is leading the investigations into the breaches at Target and Neiman Marcus.

A spokesman for the Secret Service declined to comment on the FBI report to retailers.

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Comcast seen increasing speeds solely as a way to further gouge customers

By Brad Reed on Oct 2, 2013 at 1:05 PM

Email @bwreedbgr

It’s true that Comcast has been aggressively boosting the speeds on its network, but it may only be a pretense for getting its customers to fork out even more money per month than they already do. The Washington Post’s Timothy Lee takes a look at several charts showing both speed and pricing tiers for Comcast and concludes that the company is acting “more and more like a monopolist” because “while every tier of Comcast service is faster than it was a decade ago, the rate of progress has been dramatically higher for customers who pay the most.”

What this means from a customer’s perspective is that the speed of Comcast’s entry-level option for Internet service has barely grown at all while the top broadband speeds have significantly accelerated in terms of both speed and cost. Lee notes that Comcast is now offering 505Mbps service for a wallet-incinerating $400 per month while also offering 105Mbps service for a less expensive but still very pricey $115 a month. What makes these prices particularly glaring, he says, is that both Google Fiber and municipal fiber networks such as the one in Chattanooga, Tenn. are offering a 1Gbps service for just $70 a month.

That Comcast can credibly charge such high prices even as others charge much less money for faster service indicates that the firm faces little real competition in most of its markets and is thus able to extract monopoly rents, Lee concludes.

“The hallmark of competitive technology markets is that consumers are routinely given more than they think they need,” Lee writes. “Even entry-level smartphones today are dramatically more powerful than the best cell phones of a few years ago. Competition forces companies like Apple and Samsung to produce the most powerful phones they can build without worrying about whether customers ‘need’ the faster speeds. In other words, Comcast’s strategy only works because Comcast faces limited competition in many markets.”

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In Reedsburg, high-speed Internet means 'gigabit' fast

2014-01-18T01:00:00Z In Reedsburg, high-speed Internet means 'gigabit' fastPeter Rebhahn Times-Press Wiscnews.com

 Peter Rebhahn Times-Press

 

Matt Minor, technician for the Reedsburg Utility Commission, looks over a key component of the utility’s gigabit Internet service – an ethernet service access platform -- in the utility’s central office Friday.

  

The Reedsburg Utility Commission recently passed a milestone when it completed rollout of gigabit Internet service to all homes and businesses.

And while it’s a hard fact to check, city officials are pretty sure that Reedsburg is the first community in Wisconsin to claim that distinction.

“If somebody else is out there, they’re not publicizing it very much,” said Brett Schuppner, utility commission general manager.

The news places the city in a select national club, according to information from the Federal Communications Commission.

One year ago, when FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski issued the Gigabit City Challenge, which called for at least one gigabit community in all 50 states by 2015, just 42 U.S. communities could claim the distinction.

“We want more Reedsburgs,” said Maria Alvarez Stroud, director of the Madison-based Center for Community Technology Solutions.

The center is an arm of the University of Wisconsin-Extension formed to help state communities develop and expand high-speed Internet service for the betterment of residents’ lives and to boost economic development.

Alvarez Stroud said she knows of no other Wisconsin community that can make the same claim as Reedsburg, though plenty are working to catch up.

“We’re engaged with about 25 different counties at this point who are trying to figure this out,” Alvarez Stroud said.

Schuppner said the utility commission began its rollout of high-speed Internet in the 1990s and early 2000s with a limited build-out to schools.

About 10 years ago, Schuppner said, the city committed to slowly expanding its fiber-optic network to all homes and businesses.

High-speed Internet is not a technical term and is subject to interpretation by users, whose needs may vary. ‘Gigabit’ is a more precise term that describes data that moves at the rate of one billion bits per second. Translation: Very fast.

According to the FCC, a gigabit connection is about 100 times faster than an average DSL or cable connection. It means a typical movie downloads in seven seconds and 100 songs or photos in three seconds.

Jim Allen, executive director of the Sauk County Development Corp., said Reedsburg has forced other communities to play catch-up.

“It’s really, really interesting that the Reedsburg utility is the first one in the state to do this and I’m glad that they’re in my county, because maybe that will foster other changes in other parts of my county because it’s needed everywhere,” Allen said.

Once, Allen said, community leaders prided themselves for providing leading-edge Internet technology to their industrial parks.

“Well, it’s no longer just industrial parks,” Allen said. “It’s an entire community thing.”
Allen said a trend for people to work from home, whether entrepreneurs with self-created jobs or employees of large companies working away from offices, is here and growing.

“There are a lot of people out there working out of their homes, and if you don’t have that strong broadband connection it makes doing that work very hard,” Allen said.

Alvarez Stroud said communities are awakening to the need for fast Internet service. He cited Oneida County in northeast Wisconsin, which recently passed a resolution declaring the intention to develop the best high-speed Internet access of any rural Wisconsin county.

But, Alvarez Stroud said, expansion of fiber-optic networks across the state can’t happen overnight.
“I hope it won’t take a decade,” she said.

While Reedsburg’s competitive advantage might not be permanent, Kristine Koenecke, executive director of the Reedsburg Area Chamber of Commerce, is stoked about the development opportunities offered by a community she said is “second to none” when it comes to Internet technology.

“A lot of businesses that are looking for a new home are definitely putting the technology needs in their list of top three, maybe even two things they’re looking for,” Koenecke said.

Allen said the U.S. Department of Labor projects Sauk County needs to create 3,000 jobs in the next decade to keep pace with demographic trends.

“If we want to fill those 3,000 new jobs that we feel should be created in this county then we need to have this kind of technology because that’s what companies are looking for,” Allen said.
Well done, Reedsburg, Allen said.

“They saw what was needed and didn’t wait for it to catch up to them,” Allen said. “They became the leader in making that happen in this state.”

Schuppner said the city’s decision a decade ago to take responsibility for the rollout of a fiber-optic network to all addresses, including homes, instead of relying on private companies to expand service made all the difference.

“That’s what really distinguishes us compared to other telecommunication utilities,” Schuppner said.

Widower surprises couple by picking up their tab

Brooke Lefferts TODAY contributor

Jan. 14, 2014

Courtesy of Lee Ballantyne

 

Lee and Carol Ballantyne.

 

When a recently-widowed Canadian man dining alone picked up the tab for a couple sitting nearby last week, he never expected his act of kindness to go viral.

But someone snapped a picture of the sweet note he left explaining why he'd taken care of the bill, and when the photo made its way to Reddit, it quickly spread, touching people around the world.

Lee Ballantyne, 65, of Barrie, Ontario lost his wife, Carol on December 30th. He was eating by himself at local restaurant Cicco’s when seeing the couple next to him reminded him of his late wife, which inspired his spontaneous act of generosity.

“I just wanted to write what I felt at the time so I scrawled it on a napkin,” Ballantyne told TODAY.com.

"You don’t know me, but my beautiful wife of 43 years died last week," read his handwritten note. "Tonight I dined alone for the first time. You remind me of us many years ago. Please allow me to buy your dinner. It will put a smile on Carol’s face and make me happy… for now."

Ballantyne handed the note to the waitress and asked her to put the couple’s bill on his credit card before leaving. The waitress asked Cicco’s owner Lindsay Weiss to help her present the unexpected gesture to the diners.

Weiss said the reaction was emotional for everyone. “They [the couple] were beyond touched and grateful. I cried. The waitress and chef cried. It was one of the kindest gestures I’ve ever witnessed,” Weiss told TODAY.com.

Ballantyne was surprised to get a phone call later that evening from the diner who'd received his note. The man thanked him for the meal and expressed his condolences, and said he and his wife would like to take Ballantyne to dinner in the near future.

Several Cicco’s staff members posted the note on social media to spread news of the good deed, and in just a few days, it had spread across the Internet as hundreds of thousands of people were moved by Ballantyne’s act.

“It was just a simple gesture and it seemed like an ideal time to do that. I guess I had a selfish motive, I wanted to make myself feel good. And it did for a while. It still does,” Ballantyne said.

Carol, who was 62 when she died, had experienced several health problems in recent years. She was diagnosed with lupus and fibromyalgia five years ago, and suffered from chronic bowel obstructive disease, which required her to be fed intravenously for more than a year. In October, facing lung cancer, she chose to undergo chemotherapy treatments but her immune system was not strong enough to handle them.

Lee and Carol had three sons and five grandchildren. The family was astounded by how quickly the photo of Lee’s note spread online, where it has been viewed over 800,000 times, prompting news stories across the globe.

Ballantyne says the family is grateful for the opportunity to share Carol’s memory with the world.
“My wife’s strength and joy of life is now known to millions of people just because of that gesture so I accomplished something there. I’m glad people got to know a little about Carol,“ Ballantyne said.

How to Open a Bottle of Wine with Everything But a Corkscrew

Rachel Tepper             

 

Say you’re stranded on a desert island with nothing but a bottle of wine and—inexplicably!—the contents of your entire junk drawer. But a corkscrew is nowhere to be found amidst the clutter.

 

What do you do?

This is a stressful time for you, being shipwrecked and all. You need that full-bodied Malbec with notes of black cherry and mild acidity that has landed on your island with you. Here’s how you’re going to get the damn thing open. We’re not saying these methods are easy or particularly safe, but you’re in a jam, and they WILL get the job done. Proceed with caution.

1. With a shoe.


Good thing you were wearing dress shoes when your plane went down! And, astonishgly, there’s a nice hard wall on this desert island.

2. With a bike pump.


And you thought you wouldn’t have use for that bike pump you happen to have. Silly you!

3. With house keys.


Be relieved you didn’t forget your keys at home. Hopefully you have some mirrored shades, which in this video seem integral to making this approach work.

4. With a toothbrush.


Dental hygiene is important. So is maintaining a good buzz.

5. With a steak knife.


Too bad there isn’t any steak around to go with that knife. Whatevs, get drinking!

6. With a screwdriver and a piece of string.


This one involves string and knots. How nautical! Next step: building a raft.

7. With a wire hanger.


Bonus: Afterward the wire can be fashioned into a trap for catching fish. (We’re trying to be helpful, people.)

8. With a screw hook.


Works just like a corkscrew, except shipwreck-ier!

9. With a metal file.


Afterward, use the file to fashion a crude hut using tree branches and coconut fronds. Shelter! (Warning: This video has a certain nails-on-the-chalkboard sound quality that may induce a real immediate for wine).

10. With a pair of hot tongs.


Just start a fire using those ol’ Girl Scouts skills, and heat up them port tongs.

11. With a power drill.


Wait, there’s electricity on this island? It’s friggin’ inhabited, you dingaling! Why are you wasting time drinking wine? Go get help!

Sheesh.

Even refrigerators are getting hacked into now

Even refrigerators are getting hacked into now

Incredible karate kick knockout

http://msnvideo.msn.com/?channelindex=2&from=en-us_msnhpvidmod#/video/ea05bab4-3000-41b4-9687-df1c80b0aa8c

Inflation in 2014: How much more will you pay?

Inflation in 2014: How much more will you pay?

Companies paying the most -- and least -- in taxes

Companies paying the most -- and least -- in taxes

Target breach takes shape: Hints at malware and hackers

Devin Coldewey NBC News

 

Joe Raedle / Getty Images

 

A customer uses the credit card scanner at a Target store; the software running on this POS system was compromised by hackers.

 

The massive security breach at Target that some are calling the biggest in history is slowly emerging from the mystery with which the company has been careful to shroud it. Security blogs are piecing together a picture of the hackers and the software they used to swipe data from tens of millions of customers — but much is still unknown.
According to information posted by Brian Krebs, the security expert who broke the story of the breach to begin with, the attack appears to have been done with malware for sale on a forum frequented by hackers. This software sits inside the point of service (POS) device and logs every credit card going through. It's not an uncommon type of attack, but the scale is unprecedented.

Krebs cites sources "close to the Target investigation" as saying that the hackers compromised the security of a Target web server, then somehow parlayed that breach into access to the company's internal network — from which they could distribute the malware to all vulnerable POS devices.

An aging, Windows XP Embedded-based POS operating system with insufficient virus detection capabilities may be at fault, but the malware, a variant of a known bit of card-skimming software called BlackPOS, appears to have been carefully modified to avoid detection by existing security software.

The hackers then had a network of compromised POS units logging credit cards all day, and could retrieve that data from the Target internal network whenever it was convenient to them. In a scan of Target's systems uploaded to (and subsequently removed from) security site ThreatExpert.com, the hackers' login name and password ("Best1_user" and "BackupU$r") can even be seen.

Video: The security breach that affected Target customers who shopped between Nov. 27 to Dec. 15 was only the tip of the iceberg – the company has now announced hackers tapped into Target’s entire customer database.

 

Target may not be sharing the rest of the details publicly, but they are cooperating with the U.S. government, which according to a Reuters report sent out a 16-page document Thursday to other retailers describing the techniques used in the breach.

And who are these masked men? Security Affairs got hold of a video demonstrating how to operate the malware in question — no doubt intended for users. But the hacker hosting it briefly and irresponsibly reveals a webpage in the background showing what is presumed to be his profile on VKontacte, Russia's biggest social network.

This surprising lapse of operational security has led to the identification of, if not the hackers themselves, then at least their nationalities and some pseudonyms under which they are operating. They appear to be Russian and Ukranian, and the leader goes by the name "Wagner Richard" — though that may only be a clue that he enjoys the opera.

More details will surely come to light when the government's memo leaks (as such documents often do) and when more forensic analysis has been done on the software used in the hack. Target is also scheduled to testify before Congress in the near future.

If you think you might have been affected, there are a few simple steps you can take to minimize your risk — and since the full extent of the breach is not yet known, it might be best to be proactive.
Devin Coldewey is a contributing writer for NBC News Digital. His personal website is coldewey.cc.

Check out this great MSN video - Unbelievable pool trick shot artist!

Check out this great MSN video - Unbelievable pool trick shot artist!

Russell Johnson, the Professor on 'Gilligan's Island,' dead at 89

Russell Johnson, the Professor on 'Gilligan's Island,' dead at 89

10 things not to buy in 2014

10 things not to buy in 2014

3 boys assaulted girl before her suicide: Reports

AP Photo: Family photo provided by attorney Robert Allard

Audrie Pott hanged herself about a week after being sexually assaulted.

 By Associated Press

Two 16-year-old boys and a 17-year-old boy reportedly admitted to participating in the sexual assault and possessing photos of Audrie Pott.

 

SARATOGA, Calif. — Three teenage boys have admitted to sexually assaulting a 15-year-old Northern California girl who later committed suicide after photographs of the attack were circulated to classmates, according to published reports.

The San Jose Mercury News first reported the case, soon followed by the San Francisco Chronicle on Wednesday.

In September, two 16-year-old boys admitted in Santa Clara County Juvenile Court to participating in the sexual assault and possessing photos of the girl, Audrie Pott, the newspapers reported, citing documents and other sources. Both crimes are felonies.

In addition, a 17-year-old boy admitted to the same two felonies, the papers said.

The boys' names have not been released, but two have been ordered to serve 30 days —during weekends— in juvenile detention, and the third was sentenced to 45 consecutive days. That is in stark contrast to the maximum 10-year sentence they might have received as adults.

Related: Calif. town still reeling from teen girl's suicide

Their sentences are also more lenient than those imposed on two 16-year-olds in Steubenville, Ohio, who received one and two years in juvenile detention, respectively, in a case that has been widely compared to the Pott case.

Audrie Potts hanged herself on Sept. 10, 2012, eight days after attending a party at a friend's house in Saratoga, Calif. After drinking Gatorade laced with alcohol, she fell asleep and later woke with her pants off and with lewd comments scribbled all over her body
.
In the week following the party, Audrie learned that cellphone photos had been taken of her during the assault and shared through text messages, her family said.

The three defendants have been sued by Audrie's parents, Lawrence and Sheila Pott.
"We cannot publicly comment on any aspect of any criminal proceedings involving these young men," their lawyer, Robert Allard, said in a statement Tuesday.

Christopher Arriola, Santa Clara County's supervising deputy district attorney for juvenile justice, said he was also prohibited from commenting on the case.

Calls and e-mails to the boys' lawyers Tuesday were not returned, the Mercury News

Health care signups: More older Americans so far: Associated Press

Health care signups: More older Americans so far: Associated Press

Robert Gates: My memoir has been 'hijacked' by politics

Eun Kyung Kim TODAY

 

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates clarified claims he supposedly made about President Obama’s commitment to the military surge in Afghanistan, saying Monday he “absolutely believed” the commander-in-chief supported the mission at the time.

Gates told TODAY’s Matt Lauer that the president fully supported the November 2009 surge but began to have reservations by the following spring.

“But as late as December 2010, he was still saying we were on the right track in Afghanistan,” he said. “So it was in our private conversations that he would express these reservations about whether it was working. But the decisions were right, and I believe that he believed it would work. “

Gates has been under fire for statements made in his new memoir, “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War,” that suggested Obama lacked commitment to decisions he made about his strategy in Afghanistan.

On TODAY, Gates said Obama’s concerns paralleled those of President George W. Bush in 2006 about his Iraq strategy.

On Iraq, Gates said that he never claimed Obama opposed the military operation purely for political reasons.

“What I say in the book was that the president conceded that a lot of opposition to the surge had been political. He never said that his opposition was political. In fact, his opposition was consistent with his opposition to the war all along,” Gates said.

Pool / Getty Images

 

In 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Gates (R) sat in on a press conference with President Obama after a meeting in the Cabinet Room.

 

Hillary Clinton, however, admitted while campaigning for the White House in 2008 that her opposition to Iraq was political, Gates said.

“It was such an anomaly, because in the whole time I served with Secretary Clinton, I never heard her as Secretary of State discuss domestic politics in any way, shape or form as influencing her recommendations to the president or her views on issues of national security,” Gates said.

Gate said his claim should not hurt Clinton should she decide to make another run for the White House.

“I think there’s a difference when you’re in the Senate and you're campaigning for office, and when you have the responsibility of office. And when she had the responsibility of office, as I say, I never heard her bring domestic politics into the issue.”

Gates said he wasn’t surprised by the reaction his book has received, just disappointed.

“The book has sort of been hijacked by people along the political spectrum to serve their own purposes, taking quotes out of context,” he said. “It’s sort of the political warfare in Washington that I decry in the book.”

Gates also defended his book as a fair to all it covers.

“I think the book is very even-handed. I don’t vilify anybody and I make clear that I have a lot of respect for both President Bush and President Obama.”

In his memoir, Gates also describes the personal impact of his long government career, which has included stints with the CIA and the National Security Council. While serving various administrations, he has visited numerous military cemeteries, servicemen on the front lines and wounded soldiers recovering in hospitals.

“I’ve been through a number of wars, beginning with Vietnam, but generally from antiseptic offices," he said. "And seeing these young people up front, up close, on the front lines in Afghanistan and in Iraq, seeing them in the hospital, seeing their families, had a huge impact on me.”

6 CEOs under pressure in 2014

6 CEOs under pressure in 2014

Check out this great MSN video - Gator Stunt Goes Wrong

Check out this great MSN video - Gator Stunt Goes Wrong

                     
Apple's New Mac Pro

David Pogue    

        

 

The new Mac Pro is an insanely powerful, expensive computer ($3,000 and up — way up). It’s designed for high-end tasks: video, photo and music editing, for example. Medical work. Scientific simulations. Designers who want to connect five or six screens.

And it has the most Applish design Apple has ever done. It’s an out-there, controversial, very brave trashing of everything we ever knew about desktop computer shapes.

It’s not beige. It’s not plastic. It’s not even rectangular. Instead, it’s a small, silvery-black aluminum cylinder, about 10 inches tall and 6½ inches across, completely featureless except for a panel of connectors on the back.



Ask people what they think this futuristic-looking object is, and you’ll hear a lot of “ashtray,” “vase,” “trash can” and “espresso machine.” Occasionally: “the love child of Darth Vader and R2-D2.”

In the typical obsessive Apple fashion, this computer doesn’t even have a power brick; the power transformer is concealed inside for sleeker looks. All that snakes out to the wall outlet is a single black cord. (It’s worth noting, too, that this computer is manufactured in the United States. No worries about Chinese sweatshops.)

With the slide of a lock switch on the back, you can lift the shell off of the Mac Pro, revealing the crazy sci-fi guts inside (and making it easy to install more memory).



The labels for the connectors glow white for a few seconds when you move the computer — a lovely, helpful touch, especially in a dimly lit video-editing suite.



But come on: a cylinder! That’s so Apple, isn’t it? This is, after all, the company that made a transparent computer (the iMac), a computer with no keys (the iPad) and a phone with hardly any buttons.

Sometimes, Apple’s radical designs come at the expense of usability. You know, like how the MacBook Air laptop is astonishingly thin — but doesn’t let you insert a DVD or swap batteries.
That, then, is the question on the Mac Pro: Is it so artsy that it’s less useful?

In some ways, the compact, stunning cylinder is a huge improvement on the hulking, 20-inch-tall, 40-pound design of the previous Mac Pro model. The new one is desktoppable and one-hand carryable. And the cylindrical design creates an efficient chimney effect that keeps the circuitry cool but amazingly silent. (There’s only one fan — not eight, as in the old Mac Pro — and you really have to strain to hear it.)

On the other hand, the whole point of the Mac Pro has always been expandability. The old Mac Pro’s cavernous interior could accommodate added hard drives, optical drives, expansion cards and so on.
But in its embrace of the cylinder, Apple has turned its Pro computer inside out. There’s no room for anything new inside. You can’t insert a hard drive, a circuit board or a DVD burner.

You can add all of those components — externally — if they have Thunderbolt connectors. Those are tiny jacks, incredibly fast, wildly versatile; the Mac Pro has six of them. Unfortunately, there aren’t many Thunderbolt gadgets yet. (This directory lists about 150 of them, in all the usual categories — storage, video capture, chassis that can hold specialized cards, multichannel audio boxes and so on.)

So is that it, then? Apple expects you to buy the world’s most breathtaking, compact workstation and then surround it with a tangle of mismatched, cluttery, external peripherals?



Apple says that misses the point. The world is changing, it says. The “everything crammed into one computer” model is going away. Nowadays, professional creative companies install centralized storage — shared network hard drives tucked away in a server closet somewhere. That arrangement gets the bulk, heat and noise away from you, the creative genius.

Apple also points out that the old Mac Pro had room for four hard drives, two DVD drives and four expansion cards, but those were arbitrary numbers. It was far too much wasted capacity for some people, not enough for others (like video editors who need many terabytes of storage). In response, Apple designed the new Mac Pro to be only the brain, with all of its organs external, so that you can build precisely the system you need.

You might buy those arguments; you might not. And even if you agree with Apple’s assertion that external expansion is the future, you might not like it. It might mean replacing a lot of gear you’ve already invested in, or finding adapters that accommodate their new, external status.

It all boils down to whether you need what the Mac Pro offers: ridiculous horsepower. You can read all about it here, but the point is that every wire, every circuit, every chip has been designed for speed. Intel’s new Xeon processors. Up to 64 gigabytes of memory. Four USB 3.0 jacks. Two gigabit Ethernet jacks (you can connect to two office networks at once). An HDMI jack so you can connect a TV directly (a big deal for video editors).

No SD memory-card slot, though. No traditional spinning hard drive, either. Instead, the main “hard drive” is made of flash memory, of the sort inside MacBook Airs, tablets and phones. Saving files and opening them are ridiculously fast — this flash drive is 10 times faster than most hard drives. But even if you max it out to 1 terabyte ($800 more), that’s not much storage for video editors; again, external storage is going to be part of your future.

The Mac Pro’s ace in the hole is two top-of-the-line graphics cards. In the olden days, these circuit boards were dedicated to the task of displaying images on your screens. Now, though, they’re screamingly fast computers in their own right — and the Mac Pro is designed to assign them some of the work the main processing chip would normally do. Many hands make light work, you know.

So it must come as a shock to learn that the Mac Pro isn’t especially fast at many everyday tasks. Macworld’s benchmark testing found that the new Mac Pro is actually slower than an ordinary iMac in iMovie, iTunes, Aperture, Parallels and the desktop.

Yet in tests of high-end, data-crunchy apps like Final Cut Pro X, Photoshop, iPhoto, HandBrake and Mathematica, the Mac Pro was faster than any Mac ever tested. These, of course, are precisely the kinds of programs that professionals use. For them, time is money, and the Mac Pro can save both.

In fact, the latest Final Cut version, 10.1, has been specially rejiggered to exploit the Mac Pro and its dual graphics cards. Apple says that it can manipulate and process 4K video — a new standard of video with four times the picture resolution of HDTV — fluidly and easily, without stuttering or lagging. I tried that, using a drive full of 4K video footage, and it turns out to be true. (A MacBook, on the other hand, can’t handle that 4K footage without gasping.)



You’ll be encouraged to buy a 4K TV in the next couple of years, but I’m not sold on it; when you sit at a normal viewing distance from your TV, the additional resolution is invisible to your eye. 4K may fizzle just the way 3D TV did.

But that’s just it: The Mac Pro, in every possible way, is a bet on the future.



Apple watchers should be used to this routine: Apple predicts a change in the technological tide, builds computers accordingly and enrages the masses who’ll have to adapt to (and pay for) the new ways of doing things. (See also: the time Apple eliminated dial-up modems, the time it killed off floppy drives and the time it eliminated DVD drives.)

But here’s the really maddening part: Apple almost always turns out to be right.
True, maybe those tech trends come about, or at least get accelerated, because Apple throws its weight behind them.

To justify buying a Mac Pro, it helps to have a job that calls for the Mac Pro’s kind of horsepower — like 4K video editing. And to have software that exploits its multicore processor and those high-speed graphics processors. And to have add-ons with Thunderbolt connectors. And to work at a company that uses centralized storage.

Fortunately, all of that will start coming faster now. That is, the future imagined by the Mac Pro will arrive sooner because of the Mac Pro. In the end, the Mac Pro isn’t just a shiny cylinder that’s built for the future; it’s also a nifty bit of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Yahoo Tech is a brand new tech site from David Pogue and an all-star team of writers.

5 huge CEO pay raises

5 huge CEO pay raises

IRS: Identity theft prosecutions doubled in 2013

Stephen Ohlemacher The Associated Press

 

The Internal Revenue Service is seeing a big jump in thieves stealing Social Security numbers to fraudulently claim tax refunds, the agency said Tuesday.

Susan Walsh / AP file

 

The IRS says prosecutions for identity theft doubled in 2013.

 

The IRS launched 1,492 criminal investigations into identity theft last year, a 66 percent increase from the year before. Prosecutions and indictments more than doubled. The numbers dwarf those from just two years ago.

In all, the IRS said it has flagged 14.6 million suspicious tax returns since 2011, blocking more than $50 billion in fraudulent refunds.

New IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told reporters this week that stopping identity theft was a top priority for the agency.

"The people working on that are confident that while it's a growth industry for the last two or three years that it's getting under control," Koskinen said at his introductory news conference Monday. "I would stress that it's an area that has everybody's attention."

In a common scam, thieves use stolen Social Security numbers to file tax returns early in the filing season so they can claim refunds before legitimate taxpayers file their returns. The IRS, which prides itself on issuing quick refunds, often sends out refunds before it receives documents verifying wages and other income from employers and financial institutions.

Koskinen said waiting for such documents could delay refunds for months. This year, the IRS boasts on its website that it expects to issue "more than nine out of 10 refunds in less than 21 days."

A recent inspector general's report said the IRS is stepping up efforts to fight identity theft but thieves are getting more aggressive.

The IRS issued $4 billion in fraudulent tax refunds in 2012 to people using stolen identities, according to the inspector general's report released in November. The IRS sent a total of 655 tax refunds to a single address in Lithuania, and 343 refunds went to a lone address in Shanghai, the report said.

The agency said it has since improved its computer filters to flag suspicious refunds, including cases in which many refunds go to the same address. On Tuesday, the IRS said more than 3,000 agents were working to fight identity theft.

The agency said a coast-to-coast sweep in January 2013 led to 109 arrests and 189 indictments.
The issue has exploded in just a few years. In the 2011 budget year, the IRS recommended 218 cases of suspected identity theft for prosecution, a number that grew to 1,257 last year. The number of indictments grew from 165 to 1,050 in the same period.

Last year, 438 people were sentenced in identity theft cases, the IRS said. Sentences ranged from two months in prison to more than 26 years.