Technology News

Is the iPhone hurting AT&T's brand?


The Apple iPhone has boosted AT&T's subscriber numbers, but network problems and a bevy of complaints from frustrated customers are likely hurting the company's reputation. While a recent survey by the consulting firm CFI Group found that iPhone users are the most loyal smartphone users with 90 percent saying they'd recommend the device to a friend, half of all iPhone owners surveyed said they would like to jump ship to another provider if given the chance. And for the first time, AT&T has scored worse than all four major U.S. wireless operators in terms of overall customer satisfaction for smartphones. According to the survey, AT&T scored 69 out of 100 among users, and 73 among non-iPhone owners. Verizon Wireless was the most satisfying carrier with a score or 79 out of 100 among smartphone users. Even Sprint Nextel, which has struggled to retain customers due to its poor reputation, scored better than AT&T among smartphone users. It got a 74 out of 100 in terms of customer satisfaction. The figures are among the first to quantify growing dissatisfaction with AT&T's network. "AT&T has never fared great in customer satisfaction surveys," said Doug Helmreich, program director with CFI Group. "But they've never been last. Now AT&T is coming up last among smartphone users. The iPhone has been a cash cow for AT&T, but that cash comes at a cost in terms of overall satisfaction

Banking Trojan steals money from under your nose



Researchers at security firm Finjan have discovered details of a new type of banking Trojan horse that doesn't just steal your bank log-in credentials but actually steals money from your account while you are logged in and displays a fake balance. The bank Trojan, dubbed URLZone, has features designed to thwart fraud detection systems which are triggered by unusual transactions, Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technology officer at Finjan, said in an interview Tuesday. For instance, the software is programmed to calculate on-the-fly how much money to steal from an account based on how much money is available. It exploits a hole in Firefox, Internet Explorer 6, IE7, IE8, and Opera, and it is different from previously reported banking Trojans, said Ben-Itzhak. The Trojan runs an executable only on Windows systems, he said. The executable can come via a number of avenues, including malicious JavaScript or an Adobe PDF, he added. The specific Trojan Finjan researchers analyzed targeted customers of unnamed German banks, according to the latest Finjan report. It was linked back to a command-and-control server in Ukraine that was used to send instructions to the Trojan software sitting inside infected PCs. Finjan has notified German law enforcement, Ben-Itzhak said. "It's a next generation bank Trojan," he said. "This is part of a new trend of more sophisticated Trojans designed to evade antifraud systems." Finjan researchers were able to trace the communications from the code on an infected machine back to the command-and-control server, which was left unsecured, according to Ben-Itzhak. On that server, they saw the LuckySploit administration console and were able to see exactly what types of rules the Trojan was written to follow and statistics on victims. About 90,000 computers visited the sites housing the malware and 6,400 of them were infected, a 7.5 percent success rate, he said. Of those whose computers installed the Trojan, a few hundred had money stolen from their bank accounts, he said. During the span of 22 days in mid-August, the criminals behind the Trojan stole the euro equivalent of nearly $438,000.








Introducing the bra that is meant to be taken off


This week the Annals of Improbable Research hosted its 19th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. As CNET News' Elinor Mills wrote, this year was no less ignoble than the previous 18, with such delightful discoveries as applications for panda poo and observations from a lifetime of knuckle cracking.
Except for one award: the gas mask bra, which, while ridiculous and hilarious at face value, has far more going on below the, er, neckline.
Elena Bodnar, who lives in Chicago, got her start as a scientist in Ukraine, when she witnessed the devastating effects of the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster in 1986. She noticed, among other things, that women were wearing bras that may have been lacy but were certainly not life-saving.
At the ceremony, Bodnar demonstrated her invention, which she said could have prevented people from breathing in Iodine-131 in the wake of Chernobyl. She graciously gave pink bras (each of which can turn into two gas masks) to actual Nobel laureates (yes, even the men, who now have the option to enjoy the bras without shame--not to mention any likely real effect--in the privacy of their own homes).
The bra's patent abstract, which also includes an attempt to make "positionable" a word, somehow manages to be as boring as other patent abstracts:

a global leader and technology innovator in mobile communications, reinforced its aggressive strategy in smartphones by announcing the first Android mobile device which will give LG a broader and more dominant position in this expanding market.
The announcement of LG’s first Android-powered smartphones comes only a week after the world’s third largest mobile phone company announced that it would be introducing three new Windows Mobile smartphones in the next few weeks. These developments underscore LG’s commitment to offering greater consumer choice in the expanding smartphone category.
The new LG-GW620 features a 3-inch full touchscreen and slide out QWERTY keypad to meet the growing needs of consumers who rely on their mobile phones for more than just making calls. The LG-GW620 benefits from an operating system that was created from the ground up to take advantage of the many mobile applications and services developed by search leader Google.