Dutch government website outage caused by cyber-attack

Cyber attackers caused the outage of Dutch government websites and a prominent satirical news portal for most of Tuesday, a Dutch government official said on Wednesday.

The outage affected most of the central government’s main websites but phones and emergency communication channels remained online. Other websites, including GeenStijl.nl, which mocks politicians and religions, were also hit by the “distributed denial of service” attack, Rimbert Kloosterman said.

“Our people are investigating the attack together with the people from the National Centre for Cyber Security,” said Kloosterman, an official at Government Information Service, which runs the websites.

The attack affected the network of hosting provider Prolocation, which could not immediately provide details. The outage began at 0900 GMT on Tuesday and lasted for more than seven hours.

Just a day before, The Newsweek Twitter feed was briefly hacked purportedly by a group associated with the Islamic State. Several posts to Newsweek’s Twitter feed referenced Cyber Caliphate, a hacker group affiliated with the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the hacking.

Newsweek did not say how the account was accessed. Grant Burningham, front page editor of Newsweek, said that the attack was “a pretty garden-variety attack” but did not elaborate.

The breaches are the latest hacks of high-profile social media accounts. In January, the New York Post and UPI’s Twitter feed, as well as Twitter and YouTube accounts of the US military’s Central Command, were hacked.

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Google Maps can now be used to book Uber rides in India

There have been a lot of Uber specific announcements off late. Yet another new announcement is its partnership with Google Maps. It looks like you can now book Uber rides through Google Maps. This service was first introduced in select countries abroad back in May last year.

If you have the Google Maps and Uber app installed on your phone, and if you are looking for ways to get from point A to B, you will be provided with a list of options. These options include covering the distance via public transport, walking as well as via Uber rides.

At the moment, Google Maps provides you with the estimated pick up time and the approximate fare for the ride. Tapping on Uber option takes you into the Uber app from where you can make further bookings. At the moment, the service is available on UberX and not on UberGo and Uber Black.

This integration is currently live for a lot of iPhone users. The rollout of this feature is gradual and we are yet to see on Android handsets.

Earlier today, we read about Uber releasing some India specific services such as ‘Send Status’. It enables passengers to share ride details with their contacts in real time. The app also has an “SOS” button to call the local police directly.

A spokesman said the functions were the first market-specific safety features launched by Uber. The company also said it plans to launch safety features in other countries soon.

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File-sharing site RapidShare to shut down on March 31

One of the most popular file-sharing service, RapidShare, has called it quits. It has announced that it will shut down the service on March 31.

After March 31, all accounts will no longer be accessible and get deleted automatically. The service also states that customers will be able to use Standard Plus (€49.99 per month) and Premium (€99.99 per month) subscriptions only until February 28.

RapidShare has also asked its users to secure and move all the data until March, as there won’t be an option to retrieve it in April.

Founded in May 2002, RapidShare was a one-click file hosting service that was once among the world’s 50 most popular websites. According to VentureBeat, the service claimed to have 10 petabytes of files uploaded to its servers in 2009, and had hundreds of millions of visitors per month in 2010. It was quite popular and grew quickly as pirates used it often to swap various content, adds the report.

The site hasn’t explicitly disclosed any reason for the closure. It hasn’t even updated its social media pages, for a while now. However, the increasing cloud-based file sharing sites is speculated to be one of the reasons why RapidShare has decided to shut shop.

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Xiaomi violating orders, selling non-Qualcomm phones: Here’s all you need to know about Ericsson-Xiaomi legal battle

Xiaomi India has been embroiled in a legal battle with Ericsson. According to the latest reports, Ericsson has claimed that Xiaomi is violating the Delhi High Court’s order by still selling phones with the MediaTek-based chipsets via a website called www.xiaomishop.com. But Xiaomi’s lawyers have refuted the claim saying that the company has absolutely no stake in the website and in fact some third party is misusing its name.

This issue first surfaced when in early December, a Delhi High Court interim order restrained Xiaomi as well as Flipkart from selling handsets in India as it was infringing on Swedish telecom firm Ericsson’s patents.

The order was passed on the plea of Ericsson that Xiaomi had been violating its eight patents pertaining to AMR, EDGE and 3G technologies in the field of telecommunication. According to SpicyIP, Xiaomi reportedly infringed upon the patents: Standard, Essential Patents (SEPs) which are subject to FRAND (Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory) terms. It added that these are the same patents on which Ericsson had sued Indian companies such as Micromax, Gionee and Intex. Ericsson having registered patents had all the rights to pull up any company infringing on them.

Ericsson was able to get an ex-parte injunction against Micromax – which means that the other side (here Micromax) did not have chance to presents its case. Ericsson then asked Micromax to produce a huge royalty fee which was to be deposited in the courts.

Ericsson said that it had invited Xiaomi to use its patented technology by obtaining a license, but instead of doing so, the Chinese manufacturer launched its devices in India in July 2014. Ericsson stated that it made attempts for 3 years to get Xiaomi to buy their licenses for products compliant with GSM, EDGE and UMTS/WCDMA.

Xiaomi later announced that it would suspend the sale of its smartphones in India, prompting vice president Hugo Barra in putting out a statement to that effect. At the time, Xiaomi was selling the entry level Redmi 1s at Rs 5,999 and the Redmi Note 3G at Rs 8,999. Around this time, Xiaomi had already received around 150,000 registrations for the next sale of Xiaomi Redmi Note on Flipkart. There was no way out for Xiaomi but to have talks with Ericsson.

Around Dec 16th, the Delhi High Court allowed Xiaomi to sell and import phones based on Qualcomm chipsets only. This would mean, Redmi Note 3G which ran on MediaTek MT6592 SoC, would be debarred from future sales in India.

The court’s order which allows Xiaomi to sell Qualcomm-based handsets still stands and the next hearing is scheduled for March 18th.

This recent claim by Ericsson regarding sale of MediaTek-chipset sporting Xiaomi handsets has been refuted by Xiaomi. According to India head Manu Jain, the online shop www.xiaomishop.com is not authorised by Xiaomi to sell phones anywhere in the world including India. It is not a Xiaomi entity either. In fact, Jain claims that Xiaomi intends to take legal action against the portal as it has continued selling Xiaomi products despite being requested by the company not to do so. By selling Xiaomi products without their express permission, the web portal is also infringing on Xiaomi’s trademarks according to Jain.

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Yahoo can’t be indefinitely gagged about subpoena, US Judge rules

Law enforcement cannot indefinitely forbid Yahoo from revealing a grand jury subpoena that seeks subscriber account information, a U.S. judge ruled, because doing so would violate the company’s free speech rights.

US Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal in San Jose, California on Thursday wrote that the government’s request would prohibit Yahoo from disclosing the subpoena, even years after the grand jury concluded its probe. The court order does not disclose the target of the federal investigation.

“In an era of increasing public demand for transparency about the extent of government demands for data from providers like Yahoo, this cannot stand,” Grewal wrote.

Representatives for Yahoo and the U.S. Department of Justice could not immediately be reached for comment on Friday.

Internet companies such as Yahoo, Twitter and Facebook have sought to clarify their relationship with U.S. security agencies and law enforcement, and to challenge secret orders to turn over information, as they seek to re-assure users that they will safeguard their personal information.

In this case, however, the government’s secrecy request was presented directly to the judge outside of the presence of Yahoo lawyers or attorneys for the target of the probe, according to the ruling.

Instead of asking that Yahoo be gagged for 60 or 90 days, the government asked that the company be gagged until further order of the court. The government did not demonstrate why such an indefinite request was necessary, Grewal wrote.

“The government is free to try again to make such a showing,” Grewal wrote. “Alternatively, it may submit a renewed request justifying a finite period.”

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Goodbye Gtalk: Starting February 16, Google will force you to switch to Hangouts

Starting February 16, users will have to move away from Google Talk and embrace Hangouts, whether they like it or not. Yes, Google is all set to force users to switch to Hangouts, as it seems to be the future for the search giant.

This isn’t surprising as Google had already made it clear as Gtalk was unavailable for download from Google. Lats year, GTalk was suddenly replaced with Hangouts and most people started finding it very confusing. Users looking to download Gtalk were redirected to Google Hangouts download page.

However, this week, Google has made it quite clear that GTalk will no longer be operational starting Feb 16.Moreover, looks like, Google wants to bind the desktop version to Chrome, forcing users to move to Chrome.Could WhatsApp churning out a web client be the reason for this?

Most users are accustomed to the familiar Gtalk interface, which is also believed to load better than Google Hangout on slow internet connections.

Though Google tried to bring everything – phone calls, sms, messaging and video conferencing – in one place, it hasn’t worked. Hangouts isn’t as popular as WhatsApp, WeChat or some other messaging apps. 

Find out why Google Hangouts isn’t as popular as WhatsApp, WeChat or others.

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