Ars Technica reports that a Federal court in Pennsylvania ruled Wednesday that the Fifth Amendment protects from compelled disclosure the passwords that two insider-trading suspects used on their mobile phones. In this case, the SEC is investigating two former Capital One data analysts who allegedly used insider information associated with their jobs to trade stocks—in this case, a $150,000 investment allegedly turned into $2.8 million. Regulators suspect the mobile devices are holding evidence of insider trading and demanded that the two turn over their passcodes. However, ruled the court , "Since the passcodes to Defendants' work-issued smartphones are not corporate records, the act of producing their personal passcodes is testimonial in nature and Defendants properly invoke their fifth Amendment privilege. A"

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alphadogg writes: The U.S. has fallen to No. 55 in LTE performance as speeds rise rapidly in countries that have leapfrogged some early adopters of the popular cellular system. The average download speed on U.S. 4G networks inched up to 10Mbps (bits per second) in the June-August quarter, according to research company OpenSignal. That was an improvement from 9Mbps in the previous quarter, but the country's global ranking fell from 43rd as users in other countries enjoyed much larger gains.

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An anonymous reader writes: An advisory from CERT warns that all web-browsers, including the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera, have 'implementation weaknesses' which facilitate attacks on secure (HTTPS) sites via the use of cookies, and that implementing HSTS will not secure the vulnerability until browsers stop accepting cookies from sub-domains of the target domain. This attack is possible because although cookies can be specified as being HTTPS-specific, there is no mechanism to determine where they were set in the first place. Without this chain of custody, attackers can 'invent' cookies during man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks in order to gain access to confidential session data.

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Over three winters in the waters of a Svalbard fjord, scientists have catalogued surprisingly high levels of animal activity during the long polar night.

During his US visit, Xi Jinping has promised to increase foreign investment and maintains China's economy is growing.

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla launched Firefox 41 yesterday. Today, Adblock Plus confirmed the update "massively improves" the memory usage of its Firefox add-on. This particular memory issue was brought up in May 2014 by Mozilla and by Adblock Plus. But one of the bugs that contributed to the problem was actually first reported on Bugzilla in April 2001 (bug 77999).

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