Today you purchase and install HomeKit home automation devices in existing homes, but Apple wants to go beyond retrofits by building the technology into new homes. “We want to bring home automation to the mainstream,” Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of product marketing, told Bloomberg. “The best place to start is at the beginning, when a house is just being created.” According to a survey by real-estate firm Trulia, twice as many people prefer a newly built house to a pre-owned property, so perhaps the boost that home automation needs is to become standard in new construction.

 

Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

Today you purchase and install HomeKit home automation devices in existing homes, but Apple wants to go beyond retrofits by building the technology into new homes. “We want to bring home automation to the mainstream,” Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of product marketing, told Bloomberg. “The best place to start is at the beginning, when a house is just being created.” According to a survey by real-estate firm Trulia, twice as many people prefer a newly built house to a pre-owned property, so perhaps the boost that home automation needs is to become standard in new construction.

 

Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

David Bunnell, the founder of PC Magazine, PC World, and Macworld, as well as Macworld Expo, has passed away. Fast Company’s Harry McCracken profiles Bunnell’s life and career, including his background as a social activist.

 

Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

David Bunnell, the founder of PC Magazine, PC World, and Macworld, as well as Macworld Expo, has passed away. Fast Company’s Harry McCracken profiles Bunnell’s life and career, including his background as a social activist.

 

Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

In an agreement with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, T-Mobile will pay a total of $48 million in customer benefits, educational donations, and fines because of throttling connection speeds for its largest data users without advance notice. Impacted customers will receive a 20 percent discount on accessories and will be eligible for an additional 4 GB of data per month. T-Mobile CEO John Legere responded in his typically bombastic fashion, tweeting that T-Mobile believes more information is good for customers. Though, apparently, it takes an FCC settlement to make that happen.

 

Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

In an agreement with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, T-Mobile will pay a total of $48 million in customer benefits, educational donations, and fines because of throttling connection speeds for its largest data users without advance notice. Impacted customers will receive a 20 percent discount on accessories and will be eligible for an additional 4 GB of data per month. T-Mobile CEO John Legere responded in his typically bombastic fashion, tweeting that T-Mobile believes more information is good for customers. Though, apparently, it takes an FCC settlement to make that happen.

 

Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

LeakedSource is reporting that the web design platform Weebly was hacked in February, affecting more than 43 million accounts. They have also reported a smaller hack involving 22.5 million Foursquare accounts, which were compromised in December 2013. TechCrunch: "We do not believe that any customer website has been improperly accessed," Weebly said in the notice to users. The company also said that it does not store credit card information, making fraudulent charges unlikely. LeakedSource said it received the Weebly database from an anonymous source and notified Weebly of the breach. In addition to the customer notification emails, LeakedSource claims that password resets are being issued -- but, if you're a Weebly user and you don't receive a password reset, you probably want to change your password anyway. Meanwhile, LeakedSource also identified data from Foursquare, claiming that 22.5 million accounts were compromised in December 2013. The social media company disputes the findings, claiming that email addresses were simply cross-referenced with publicly available data from Foursquare. The data includes emails, usernames and Facebook and Twitter IDs, which could have been scraped from Foursquare's API or search.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US court reinstates lawsuit by four ex-prisoners held in Iraq against military contractors after eight years of appeals.

US court reinstates lawsuit by four ex-prisoners held in Iraq against military contractors after eight years of appeals.

Earlier today, Dyn, an internet infrastructure company, was hit by several DDoS attacks, which interestingly affected several popular websites including The New York Times, Reddit, Spotify, and Twitter that were directly or indirectly using Dyn's services. The attack is mostly visible across the US eastern seaboard with rest of the world noticing a few things broken here and there. Dyn says it's currently investigating a second round of DDoS attacks, though the severity of the outage is understandably less now. In the meantime, the Homeland Security said that it is aware of the attack and is investigating "all potential causes." Much of who is behind these attacks is unknown for now, and it is unlikely that we will know all the details until at least a few days. The attacks however have revealed how unprepared many websites are when their primary DNS provider goes down. ZDNet adds: The elephant in the room is that this probably shouldn't have happened. At very least there's a lot to learn already about the frailty of the internet DNS system, and the lack of failsafes and backups for websites and tech companies that rely on outsourced DNS service providers. "It's also a reminder of one risk of relying on multi-tenant service providers, be they DNS, or a variety of many other managed cloud service providers," said Steve Grobman, chief technology officer at Intel Security. Grobman warned that because this attack worked, it can be exploited again. "Given how much of our connected world must increasingly rely upon such cloud service providers, we should expect more such disruptions," he said. "We must place a premium of service providers that can present backup, failover, and enhance security capabilities allowing them to sustain and deflect such attacks." And that's key, because even though Dyn is under attack, it's the sites and services that rely on its infrastructure who should rethink their own "in case of emergency" failsafes. It may only be the east coast affected but lost traffic means lost revenue. Carl Levine, senior technical evangelist for NS1, another major managed DNS provider, said that the size and scale of recent attacks "has far exceeded what the industry thought was the upper end of the spectrum." "Large companies need to constantly upgrade their flood defenses. Some approaches that worked just a few years ago are now basically useless," said Kevin Curran, senior member with IEEE.We also recommend reading security reporter Brian Krebs's take on this.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pakistan refutes claims of confrontation and deaths as India reports sniper fire along disputed Kashmir border.