April 2012 – Page 19

Worst IT Security Breaches Ever Infographic

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Intel 313 SSDs bring improved caching to ultrabooks, desktops, life in general

Just like Intel’s older 311 batch of small cache SSDs, the new 313 series is designed to sit alongside a traditional spinning HDD in order provide a tasty blend of speed and capacity. These newer drives are still SATA II, so there’s no 6Gbps action here, but they use superior 25nm SLC flash, offer faster speeds for the same price (starting at $120 for 20GB) and are explicitly approved for use in the coming wave of Ultrabooks — so don’t be surprised if that’s where you meet ’em next.

Intel 313 SSDs bring improved caching to ultrabooks, desktops, life in general originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 06 Apr 2012 07:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink PC World | source Intel | Email this | Comments

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Intel 313 SSDs bring improved caching to ultrabooks, desktops, life in general

Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 Will Be Magic on the iPad [Blip]

Wizards of the Coast finally realized how amazing the Magic: The Gathering Duels of the Planeswalkers series would be on the iPad, with Apple’s tablet joining PC, PlayStation Network, and Xbox Live when the game’s 2013 installment launches this summer. More »

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Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 Will Be Magic on the iPad [Blip]

Dropbox enables drag-and-drop uploads on web browsers

Finished convincing friends, family and perfect strangers alike to sign up to Dropbox — and selfishly upping your own storage in the process. The cloud storage service has just made changes to its web-baser interface, adding drag-and-drop functionality from your folders and desktop. The feature works across Chrome, Firefox and Safari browsers and once the site detects the movement, it’ll start uploading to that ethereal data cloud in the sky. You can start dragging those files around at the source now.

Dropbox enables drag-and-drop uploads on web browsers originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 06 Apr 2012 05:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink The Next Web | source Dropbox blog, Dropbox | Email this | Comments

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Dropbox enables drag-and-drop uploads on web browsers

Coming To a War Near You: Nuclear Powered Drones

An anonymous reader writes “American scientists and engineers are researching a new generation of UAV’s that would be nuclear-powered. Why do this? They would have the capacity to stay over a target area for months and only be limited by the ordinance they could drop on a potential foe. They would be similar to a nuclear attack submarine but not limited to the amount of food on-board. The article notes: ‘The blueprints for the new drones, which have been developed by Sandia National Laboratories – the U.S. government’s principal nuclear research and development agency – and defense contractor Northrop Grumman, were designed to increase flying time “from days to months” while making more power available for operating equipment, according to a project summary published by Sandia,’ the paper reported.”

Samsung Employees Conspired To Sell AMOLED Tech; 11 Arrested

zacharye writes with this snippet from BGR: “Nearly a dozen suspects have been arrested and charged with crimes related to the theft and sale of AMOLED display technology under development at Samsung. Yonhap News Agency on Thursday reported that 11 suspects either currently or formerly employed by Samsung Mobile Display have been arrested. One 46-year-old researcher at Samsung is believed to have accepted a payment of nearly $170,000 from an unnamed ‘local rival firm’ in exchange for trade secrets pertaining to proprietary Samsung technology used in the company’s AMOLED panels…”

Thousands of New York sex offenders blocked from online gaming networks

There are a few thousand fewer registered sex offenders playing on online gaming networks today thanks to “Operation: Game Over,” a joint effort between the New York attorney general’s office and half a dozen gaming companies to purge the convicted felons from their servers.

New York state law requires convicted sex offenders to register their e-mail addresses, screen names, and other online aliases with the state. Companies including Microsoft, Sony, Apple, Blizzard, EA, Disney Interactive, and Warner Bros. are now using this information to block 3,580 users from their networks, according to an announcement made this morning by New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman.

Calling the project a first-of-its-kind effort to “ensure online video game systems do not become a digital playground for dangerous predators,” Schneiderman defended the need for the restrictions by highlighting the case of Richard Ketovic, a Monroe County, NY man who last month pled guilty to sexually abusing a 10-year-old boy after first making contact through Xbox Live.

“By leveraging the online identity information all registered sex offenders are required to provide, we are able to help reduce potentially harmful situations,” Microsoft VP and Deputy General Counsel Rich Wallis said in a statement. “We’re supportive of Attorney General Schneiderman’s efforts to make the Internet, including online gaming environments like Xbox Live, safer for everyone.”

While acknowledging that current game consoles already have parental controls that could protect children from unwelcome advances, Schneiderman argued that “parents often do not realize that gaming consoles have these capabilities.” He also noted that 27 percent of teenagers aged 12 to 17 play games online with people they don’t know.

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Thousands of New York sex offenders blocked from online gaming networks

Spam levels still low a year after Rustock botnet takedown

In March 2011, a Microsoft-led team targeted and decapitated the Rustock botnet, and a dramatic decrease in spam traffic was noticed almost immediately. It turns out that a full year later, spammers have not been able to fill the gaping hole left by Rustock’s absence.

Just before the Rustock takedown, “spam levels were around the 150 billion mark daily,” security vendor Commtouch said in a new analysis. “Spam levels dropped immediately after that takedown and have continued to decrease ever since. In the first quarter of 2012, an average of 94 billion spam emails were sent per day There is no sign of a return to pre-Rustock spam levels.”

Rustock was responsible for sending 30 billion spam e-mails a day, and thus its takedown alone can’t account for the entire drop in spam volume. Commtouch said the sustained improvement was a combination of multiple botnet takedowns, as well as “increased prosecution of spammers and the source industries such as fake pharmaceuticals and replicas.”

Spam accounted for 75 percent of all e-mails sent in the first three months of 2012, according to Commtouch’s “April 2012—Internet Threats Trend Report.” Commtouch said it is “tempting” to conclude that a decade-long growth in spam has been permanently reversed, but the signs are not all good. Commtouch estimates that 270,000 zombie computers were activated each day for the purposes of sending spam in the first quarter of 2012, up from 209,000 in the last quarter of 2011. There had been a drop in November because of the “Esthost” botnet takedown, but “spammers have worked to source new zombies since the start of 2012,” Commtouch said.

Commtouch’s estimates are based on traffic going through its GlobalView Cloud service, which handles more than 10 billion transactions each day, including “URL and spam queries from millions of endpoints.” The data does not include internal corporate traffic.

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Spam levels still low a year after Rustock botnet takedown

YouTube lets you watch 1080p 2D videos in ‘3D’ with your anaglyph specs

Another day, another bit of news out of Mountain View. Stereoscopic 3D videos have been on YouTube for nearly three years, and since last year, the site has given viewers the option to transform “short-form” 2D content to 3D — with a single click on the settings bar, that is. Today, the beta feature comes to 1080p videos, meaning you’ll now be able to watch your favorite Phillip DeFranco and Shay Carl vlogs with extra chromatic impact in full HD. YouTube notes that it’s “constantly improving the underlying conversion technology,” which figures out how to simulate the effect based on characteristics of the video itself and true 3D videos uploaded to the site. We’d say there’s still something slightly amiss about using folding blue and red glasses to watch two-dimensional HD video in faux anaglyph 3D, but you can make the call for yourself by reading up about the magic at the source link below.

YouTube lets you watch 1080p 2D videos in ‘3D’ with your anaglyph specs originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 05 Apr 2012 14:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | source The Official YouTube Blog | Email this | Comments

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YouTube lets you watch 1080p 2D videos in ‘3D’ with your anaglyph specs

First superradiant lasers produce nearly no photons (and that’s expected)

Lasers by their nature emit light where each photon has nearly the same frequency. That “nearly” is good enough for most applications, but there are still cases where we’d like to do better: atomic clocks, gravitational wave detectors, and tests of variations in physical constants. All of these bump up against the limits of current lasers. A laser with a more stable frequency known as a superradiant laser has been studied theoretically, and now a prototype has been built shows what must be done to make it a practical reality.

Justin G. Bohnet et al. (of JILA/NIST) constructed a demonstration superradiant laser using ultracold rubidium atoms, in which the laser’s photons act to synchronize the electronic transitions within the atoms. While a standard laser has many photons present in the laser cavity, this superradiant laser has a cavity that, at any given time, may be empty of photons. Where in a normal laser the light is coherent and the atoms are uncorrelated, in a superradiant laser, it’s the atoms that are coherent, transitioning between energy states in concert. While the prototype is not a fully-working superradiant laser, it shows what steps are necessary to construct the real thing, and demonstrates how it should work.