The Tech Corner

The Tech Corner is a weekly technology news and advice column presented each week courtesy of Melvin McCrary at Ga. Computer Depot in Cedartown.

Facebook launches Open Cellular — An open-source Wireless Access Platform

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Wednesday the creation of a new open-source wireless communication platform called Open Cellular that can be easily deployed in remote locations by anyone.

Open Cellular is a doorbell-sized hardware device that could be attached to a pole or tree at a range of heights from where it can deliver a wireless network, from 2G cellphone networks to higher speed LTE, and Wi-Fi networks like those inside your home, or local coffee shop.

Facebook plans to open source the designs for this device so that service providers, researchers, and others can use its designs and control software for free to build their own boxes that are cheap to purchase and maintain.

“We designed Open Cellular as an open system so anyone—from telecom operators to researchers to entrepreneurs—can build and operate wireless networks in remote places,” Zuck said. “It’s about the size of a shoe box and can support up to 1,500 people from as far as 10 kilometers away.”

OpenBTS and YateBTS help communities replace expensive cellular network infrastructure with open source software.

Thanks to the Australian government and a company called Range Networks, you’ll soon be able to find a signal near several research facilities on the continent.

Range has already brought GSM service to Macquarie Island, a small island just outside the Antarctic Circle. This is preferable to Wi-Fi because it provides wider coverage while using less energy. And although the network has a satellite uplink to connect it with the rest of the world, it doesn’t depend on satellites for local communications, which is essential to the safety of field researchers.

GSM networks like the one on the island usually cost about a million dollars to build, says Range Networks CEO Ed Kozel. But Range is able to bring the technology to Antarctica for just a few thousand dollars using an open source platform called OpenBTS, short for Open Base Transceiver Station. All you need to run a GSM network with OpenBTS is radio software and an off-the-shelf Linux server.

Thanks to its barebones approach, the technology is a way of bringing cell service to all sorts of remote populations, from Antarctica to rural Indonesia. Big telecommunications companies are unlikely to build traditional networks in such places because they just wouldn’t be profitable. But the economics of open source are very different.

A search and rescue team in Iceland, used the software to turn one of its helicopters into a flying cellphone tower that can be used to triangulate the location of missing persons.

He’d also like to revolutionize infrastructure the way Android has revolutionized mobile computing. “What Android did for the handset world was enable a whole new wave of companies and technologies it produced a lot of new products and new competition in the smart phone market,” he says. “What Android did for the handsets we’d like to do for the network.”

Gift Card Scams

Recently, brands such as Target, Starbucks, Costco, Shell, Zara, Winstream, Wal-Mart, or Asda are being used as a front for the latest phishing scams.

This scam comes on Facebook or email from crooks claiming to represent Starbucks, Zara, or Costco. If you click on the shared link, you will end up on a webpage encouraging you to share the “offer”, post something nice about Costco/Starbuck/ Zara, and like a Facebook page.

While on the site, victims are giving out their personal identification information, leaving themselves open to identity theft. The gift card, never comes.

There is another scam that brings up Dell Computers’ name. Large retailers such as Costco, Wal-Mart, Asda, or Target advise their customers that they rarely if ever offer these kinds of deals to customers, and never through unsolicited email campaigns. The real ones do have marketing campaigns encouraging people to “like” their posts and share them, but giving away $500 vouchers to millions of Facebook users just doesn’t happen.

Security Alert: New and Cheap Ransomware for Sale on the Dark Web

A new ransomware is being promoted through aggressive advertising campaigns on the Dark web. As we have previously stated, we will never reveal any details or how to get to these sites.

The creators have even uploaded a video to YouTube, showing it in action: It gives the victims 96 hours to pay the ransom or it will delete a random file from the victim’s PC every 6 hours. Also it will add the extension “.locked” to all kidnapped files.

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Challenges Hackers to Create Automated Hacking System

We know that humans are too slow at finding and fixing security bugs, which is why vulnerabilities like Heartbleed, POODLE and GHOST remained undetected for decades and rendered almost half of the Internet vulnerable to theft by the time patches were rolled out.

Now to solve this hurdle, DARPA has come up with an idea: To build a smart Artificial Intelligence System that will automatically detect and even patch security flaws in a system.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected seven teams of finalists who will face off in a historic battle, as each tries to defend themselves and find out flaws without any human control.