Western Digital is no stranger to media streaming, but until now its specialty has been moving content off a set-top box and onto your television. Now, though, the company is getting into the wireless game as well: it just announced its first networking products, including four dual-band routers and an Ethernet switch. Across the board, the routers use WD’s so-called FasTrack technology to prioritize bandwidth-hogging activities like movie streaming, video chats and online gaming. And, like any modern-day router worth its salt, they include options for parental controls, as well as setting up a guest network.

At the high end, the N900 Central (pictured) doubles as network-attached storage, suggesting WD was eager to put its hard drive know-how to good use. That’ll be available in 1TB and 2TB flavors, and you can use a WD 2 Go website to access the drive remotely. (There are also iOS and Android apps, with a Windows Phone version coming soon.) Rounding out the list, it has four Ethernet ports and one USB connection.

Similarly, the N900 router is rated for top speeds of 900 Mbps, except it lacks the built-in storage. In its place, it has seven Gigabit sockets, along with two USB ports. Moving on down the line, the N750 and N600 each have four Ethernet ports and two USB openings, with the N750 maxing out at 750 Mbps and the N600 — well, you get the idea. Lastly, that switch has eight Gigabit ports if increasing your wired connections is what you’re really after. With the exception of the storage-enhanced N900 Central, these are all available today, with prices ranging form $70 for the switch, $80 for the N600, $120 for the N750 and $180 for the N900. The N900 Central won’t be available until next quarter, and will cost either $300 or $350 depending on whether you go for the 1TB or 2TB model.

Continue reading Western Digital enters the router market, higher-end models include built-in hard drives

Western Digital enters the router market, higher-end models include built-in hard drives originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Jun 2012 08:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Western Digital enters the router market, higher-end models include built-in hard drives

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing business run by internet retailer Amazon, today announced a revamp to its support offerings. The company cut the prices for its premium (paid) support offerings, while also automatically enrolling its customers in the “Basic” support tier for free. In conjunction with the changes, AWS also rebranded its support tiers from Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum to new, more descriptive names: Basic, Developer, Business and Enterprise.

For enterprise customers, there comes another big change, too: support pricing is now being based on usage as opposed to a flat fee, which could potentially translate to cost-savings for some customers as it now offers levels of pricing below the previous flat 10% fee.

All of the plans announced today include support for an unlimited number of cases, are contact-free and are available worldwide.

The new, free Basic support offering available now to all customers includes 24/7 customer service for account and billing issues, and technical support for system health issues.

The full description of the revamped plans is below:

• Basic (Expanded free tier): Upon signup for AWS, all customers are automatically enrolled in Basic support for free. Added features in this tier include immediate, around-the-clock access to customer service by email or phone for billing and account issues, and technical support for system health issues. Customers continue to have access to technical FAQs, best practices guides, the AWS Service Health Dashboard, and the AWS Developer Forums, which are monitored and responded to by AWS support engineers.
• Developer ($49/month and 1:1 customer support): Previously called the Bronze tier, the Developer tier includes all components of the Basic tier, plus the following: 12-hour response time to support cases submitted, 1:1 customer support for any AWS-related question, and access to AWS Technical Support Engineers via email through the AWS online support center during local business hours to help configure, operate, and maintain core AWS services and features. The Developer plan is $49 per month.
• Business (Access to AWS Trusted Advisor): Previously called the Gold tier, the Business tier includes all components of the Basic and Developer tiers, plus the following: one-hour response time to support cases submitted and support engineers available 24/7 via phone, chat or email. In addition to chat capabilities, new features include access to AWS Trusted Advisor, a program that monitors AWS infrastructure services, identifies customers’ usage patterns, and notifies customers when opportunities exist to save money, improve system performance, or close security gaps. Customers also receive support for the most common third-party software running on AWS. The Business tier minimum pricing has been reduced from $400 to $100 per month and a 3% usage-based pricing tier has been added to the existing pricing tiers of 10%, 7%, and 5%.
• Enterprise (New pricing based on usage vs. flat fee): Previously called the Platinum tier, the Enterprise tier provides customers with all of the features of the Business tier, plus 15-minute response time for mission-critical issues, and a dedicated Technical Account Manager who is intimately familiar with the customer’s specific AWS architecture. Technical Account Managers will also conduct periodic business reviews for infrastructure planning, report metrics, collaborate on launches, and connect customers to AWS Solutions Architects as needed. The Trusted Advisor program is also available to all Enterprise tier customers. The Enterprise tier minimum pricing has been reduced from a flat 10% usage fee to usage-based pricing tiers of 10%, 7%, 5% and 3%.

In January, Amazon added its Trusted Advisor service to its Gold and Platinum offerings, which monitors customers’ use of AWS and recommends configuration changes and new services that may help them save money, improve system performance, and close security gaps. You’ll notice that Trusted Advisor still remains only available to those in the top two tiers today, however.

Amazon’s move to cut support pricing is an important change in terms of its ability to remain competitive in an increasingly crowded cloud computing business, especially in terms of keeping enterprise customers happy. And by cutting prices on a key area like support, enterprise and business customers will be less likely to jump to a competitor’s product.

More details on the new pricing options are available here.

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Amazon Web Services Announces Price Cuts On Premium Support, Free Basic Support For All

As much as we liked the My Xbox Live app on iOS, it left out any practical control of a real, live Xbox 360 — and left Android users in the cold. The 1.5 update to the app puts those issues largely to bed. iPhone and iPod touch owners now have access both the Quickplay content browsing from the Windows Phone version as well as a direct, button-for-button remote. Android users are unfortunately denied full-on navigation, but they can now at least check their Xbox Live profiles, friend statuses and the highlighted games du jour. Microsoft is silent on when Android and iPad fans will be steering their Xboxes without gamepads, though everyone else is free to jump in today.

My Xbox Live update for iPhone brings direct remote control, Android users join the party too originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Jun 2012 15:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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My Xbox Live update for iPhone brings direct remote control, Android users join the party too

Online attackers are actively exploiting a vulnerability in Internet Explorer that allows them to execute malicious code on computers that visit booby-trapped websites, researchers said in an advisory that underscores the importance of installing a Microsoft patch as soon as possible.

The exploit of a critical IE bug, reported by researchers from antivirus provider McAfee, means there are two newly disclosed vulnerabilities in Microsoft products under attack. On Tuesday, Microsoft warned of a separate vulnerability in all supported versions of Windows that was also actively being exploited.

The most immediate significance of the McAfee report is this: If you run Windows and haven’t installed Tuesday’s batch of security fixes, you should stop whatever else you’re doing and run them now.

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Attention all Windows users: patch your systems now

For all its (largely software-based) shortcomings, RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook really isn’t that bad a tablet, even if RIM ended up losing a fair bit of money on some of them.

This past weekend, a user named BusinessCat2000 posted a video (see above) of his PlayBook running a slew of iOS apps on the CrackBerry forums. Jaws dropped, legality was questioned, advice was thrown around, but the feat eventually turned out to be real.

CrackBerry editor Kevin Michaluk followed up and did his due diligence by having Mr. BusinessCat load up a few other applications — namely SketchMobile and the iMore app — to demonstrate that things actually work the way they’re supposed to without any trickery involved. The developer passed those tests in video form, but not before offering some insight into how he was able to make it work:

The CPU isn’t emulated on Playbook (though it is on Windows). It works very similarly to how WINE works to run Windows applications on Linux. The app binary is mapped into memory and imports are resolved to point to my own implementation of the various APIs needed. iOS actually uses a few open APIs already, which Playbook supports just as well (GL ES, and OpenAL). The bulk of the work has been in implementing all of the objective C classes that are required. The ARM code of the applications run as-is – the armv6/v7 support on PB/iDevices are pretty much identical, and the code is designed to run in USR mode. No SWIs, GPIO accesses or any of that kind of shenanigans.

It’s own app ecosystem aside, the PlayBook has also gained some notoriety for its relatively newfound ability to run Android apps (so long as they’re repackaged and submitted to the BlackBerry App World that is), and with this it seems like the little tablet has learned a new wonderful new trick.

Of course, running a few iOS apps does not an iPad make, so anyone looking to trick out their PlayBook, the actual process of getting iOS apps up and running on the PlayBook still requires a fair amount of work — it took less than an hour to get the iMore app working on the PlayBook, but that’s not the sort of process that’s likely to be adopted by anyone but the most hardcore PlayBook buffs. Still, this new feature is a damned impressive one, and could become a real crowd pleaser if given enough time in the oven.

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Developer Teaches RIM’s PlayBook A New Trick: How To Run iOS Apps

tsu doh nimh writes “The Justice Department on Monday announced the arrest of a Dutch man wanted for coordinating the theft of roughly 44,000 credit card numbers. The government hasn’t released many details about the accused, except for his name and hacker handle, ‘Fortezza.’ But data from a variety of sources indicates that Fortezza was a lead administrator of Kurupt.su, a large, recently-shuttered forum dedicated to carding and Internet fraud. Krebsonsecurity.com provides some background on Fortezza, who ‘claimed to be “quitting the scene,” but spoke often about finishing a project with which he seemed obsessed: to hack and plunder all of the other carding forums.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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U.S. Govt. Appears To Have Nabbed Kurupt.su Carding Kingpin

Barely two full days have elapsed since Tim and the gang announced the gawkily-named MacBook Pro with Retina Display, and already the screwdriver-wielding mavens at iFixit have torn one apart. What did they find? The Samsung-made SSD and Hynix RAM are non-upgradeable, forcing you to decide how much of both you’ll need now and in the future. Meanwhile, the battery is glued to the housing and that gorgeous display is fused into the assembly, so it’ll be expensive to replace should the worst happen. Speaking of its power reserves, this laptop is packing 95 Wh of juice — capable of seven hours of life and shocking the engineer silly when he tried to disassemble it. If you’d like to see the intermediate stages of this gadget-autopsy, head on via our source link.

iFixit tears the MacBook Pro with Retina Display to pieces, gets a few shocks on the way originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Jun 2012 08:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iFixit tears the MacBook Pro with Retina Display to pieces, gets a few shocks on the way

Who needs food to be cooked by people? With the Let’s Pizza vending machine, you can have pizza made from scratch in only 2 and a half minutes. While it might not be that great compared to restaurant pizzas, it would be amazing to run into this thing when you’re drunk and all the pizza places are already closed.

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Mmmmm…Vending Machine Pizza

The Internet’s head exploded yesterday at the news that FunnyJunk had sent a $20,000 legal demand letter to The Oatmeal, asserting that the Oatmeal’s complaint about FunnyJunk’s users reposting Oatmeal content was, itself, an offense warranting a $20,000 settlement.

This act of monumental chutzpah (“You want ME to pay YOU $20,000 for hosting MY unlicensed comics on your shitty website for the past three years?”) was matched by Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman’s response: to promise to raise $20,000 for cancer charities, but before it was turned over to them, to photograph himself standing astride the pile of money and forward this photo, along with a cartoon depicting Funnyjunk’s lawyer’s mother trying to seduce a bear, to FunnyJunk and its counsel.

The fundraiser was a smashing success, blowing past the $100,000 mark in a day. Now, MSNBC has caught up with FunnyJunk’s counsel, Charles Carreon, a storied attorney who made his reputation litigating the sex.com case. They find Carreon in a state of sheer bewilderment as he confronts the enormous storm of bad will, negative publicity, and public disapprobation he and his client find themselves amidst. As he says, “I’m completely unfamiliar really with this style of responding to a legal threat.”

I’d be tempted to feel some sympathy for Carreon, save for the fact that the interview closes with this: “He also explains that he believes Inman’s fundraiser to be a violation of the terms of service of IndieGoGo, the website being used to collect donations, and has sent a request to disable the fundraising campaign.” It’s hard to feel sympathy for someone who wants to take over $100,000 away from cancer charities because of a supposed violation of someone else’s fine-print.

“I really did not expect that he would marshal an army of people who would besiege my website and send me a string of obscene emails,” he says.

“I’m completely unfamiliar really with this style of responding to a legal threat — I’ve never really seen it before,” Carreon explains. “I don’t like seeing anyone referring to my mother as a sexual deviant,” he added, referencing the drawing Inman posted…

“I don’t think that what I did was unreasonable,” Carreon says while discussing the initial demands sent to Inman. He tells me that while this situation is unique, he is typically open to negotiation. He ended the conversation with a promise to keep me updated on how things are resolved and on whether he takes any legal action against the folks who have been harassing him since Inman’s “BearLove Good Cancer Bad” fundraising campaign started.

“It’s an education in the power of mob psychology and the Internet,” Carreon told me.

It’s a testimony to the power of smart people to fool themselves that Carreon can clearly see the ugliness of “mob psychology,” but not the ugliness of legal intimidation.

Also, I’m rather amused by MSNBC’s treatment of the cartoon of the mother and the bear (above).

Cartoonist turns lawsuit threat into $100K charity fundraiser

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FunnyJunk’s bewildered lawyer: “I’m completely unfamiliar really with this style of responding to a legal threat”

(YouTube link)

You haven’t lived until you’ve heard Alice Cooper perform Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” at Bonnaroo. -via The Week

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Alice Cooper Covers Lady Gaga