Month: October 2016

To beat crypto, feds have tried to force fingerprint unlocking in 2 cases

Enlarge (credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images News) Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles have been successful in getting judicial approval for two highly unusual searches. The warrants allowed the authorities to force suspects, who were inside their California homes, to press their fingerprints on a seized smartphone to see if it would unlock, Ars has learned. On Sunday, Forbes published the first-known redacted court filing associated with the search of a home in Lancaster, California, about 70 miles north of downtown Los Angeles. The 12-page memo  filed in federal court outlines the government’s argument as to why it believes it can conduct such a search under the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, which protect against unreasonable search and seizure, and against compelled self-incrimination, respectively. The Lancaster document is dated May 9, and Forbes managed to contact an unnamed resident at the home, who confirmed that the search had taken place. That person said that “neither they nor any relatives living at the address had ever been accused of being part of any crime, but declined to offer more information,” according to Forbes . Read 25 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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To beat crypto, feds have tried to force fingerprint unlocking in 2 cases

Tesla bans customers from using autonomous cars to earn money ride-sharing

Enlarge On Thursday night, Tesla announced the new Model X and Model S electric vehicles will now come with the necessary hardware to allow them to drive completely autonomously at a future point in time. But buried in the notes about this new functionality there was also a warning to future Tesla owners: don’t expect to be able to use your EV driving for Uber, Lyft, or any other ride-sharing service that isn’t owned by Tesla. On Tesla’s website , the section that describes the new “Full Self-Driving Capability” (A $3,000 option at the time of purchase, $4,000 after the fact) states “Please note also that using a self-driving Tesla for car sharing and ride hailing for friends and family is fine, but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible on the Tesla Network, details of which will be released next year.” In Elon Musk’s ” Master Plan part 2 ,” the company’s CEO included plans for a Tesla ride-sharing network, which we know know will be called the Tesla Network. However, no other information about this program has escaped into the wild as yet. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Tesla bans customers from using autonomous cars to earn money ride-sharing

Teslas will now be sold with enhanced hardware suite for full autonomy

Enlarge (credit: Tesla) Late Wednesday, Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk announced that the company would be adding its own hardware to new all new Tesla cars to allow up to Level 5 autonomy. In the automotive industry, Level 5 denotes a fully self-driving vehicle. Musk said that it would be some time before Tesla’s software would advance to meet capabilities of the new hardware available, which the company is calling “Hardware II.” Still, the CEO stressed that all new cars would come with the new hardware suite, even if the software isn’t activated. The hardware includes eight cameras for a 360-degree view, twelve ultrasonic sensors, “forward-facing radar with advanced processing,” and an Nvidia Titan GPU that’s capable of 12 trillion operations per second. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Teslas will now be sold with enhanced hardware suite for full autonomy

T-Mobile punished by FCC for hidden limits on unlimited data

Enlarge T-Mobile USA failed to adequately disclose speed and data restrictions on its “unlimited data” plans and has agreed to pay a fine and provide some benefits to customers, the Federal Communications Commission said today. Like other carriers, T-Mobile slows the speeds of its unlimited data customers after they’ve used a certain amount of data each month; when these customers connect to congested cell towers, they receive lower speeds than customers without unlimited data plans. The throttling is applied after customers use 26GB in a month. “Under its ‘Top 3 Percent Policy,’ T-Mobile ‘de-prioritizes’ its ‘heavy’ data users during times of network contention or congestion,” the FCC said in an announcement today. “This potentially deprived these users of the advertised speeds of their data plan. According to consumers, this policy rendered data services ‘unusable’ for many hours each day and substantially limited their access to data.” Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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T-Mobile punished by FCC for hidden limits on unlimited data

Vudu Movies On Us Offers Thousands of Free Movies, If You Don’t Mind Some Ads

It’s annoying to pay for a movie service and wonder where all the good movies are . Vudu’s hoping that you won’t mind that feeling quite as much if you get your movies for free (with a few ads, of course). Read more…

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Vudu Movies On Us Offers Thousands of Free Movies, If You Don’t Mind Some Ads

Spanish Police Arrest Their First Ever eBook Pirate

An anonymous reader writes: Spain’s Ministry of the Interior has announced the first ever arrest of an eBook pirate. The suspect is said to have uploaded more than 11, 000 literary works online, many on the same day as their official release. More than 400 subsequent sites are said to have utilized his releases. The investigation began in 2015 following a complaint from the Spanish Reproduction Rights Centre (CEDRO), a non-profit association of authors and publishers of books, magazines, newspapers and sheet music. According to the Ministry, CEDRO had been tracking the suspect but were only able to identify him by an online pseudonym. However, following investigations carried out by the police, his real identity was discovered. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Spanish Police Arrest Their First Ever eBook Pirate

Netgear’s new Nighthawk router doubles as a Plex server

Video streaming is becoming one of the main things we do on the internet, and few things in life are more annoying than having to wait for a clip to finish buffering. To keep up with our growing appetites for speed, Netgear has unveiled the Nighthawk X10 router, which it says is the fastest in the world. It’s got a 1.7GHz quad-core processor onboard that the company says is the speediest in a home router, as well as Quad Stream Wave 2 WiFi architecture that helps the device get up to 7.2 Gbps. Plus, it supports the latest 802.11ad standard . But what’s really interesting about the Nighthawk X10 is its Plex Media support that lets you turn any USB 3.0 flash drive or hard disk into a server, without requiring a computer. Previous devices in the popular Nighthawk line have also had USB ports onboard, but the X10 is the first to offer Plex firmware in its app to let you set up one or both of the two connected drives as a server. There’s no real limit to the storage size of the drives you can attach. Other non-speed-related goodies that come with the X10 include new mobile support for OpenVPN, so you can tap into your home network even when you’re overseas. The Nighthawk X10 is now available for $500, which is more expensive than prior models. That’s because, as Netgear explained, the new iteration is more like a mini PC than a mere router. If you’re a Plex fan, or prize having a really fast, high-end router that can keep your videos and backed up files available wherever you are, that price may be worth it. Otherwise, you might be better off finding a cheaper option.

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Netgear’s new Nighthawk router doubles as a Plex server

‘Cultlike’ Devotion: Apple Once Refused To Join Open Compute Project, So Their Entire Networking Team Quit

mattydread23 writes: Great story about the Open Compute Project from Business Insider’s Julie Bort here, including this fun tidbit: “‘OCP has a cultlike following, ‘ one person with knowledge of the situation told Business Insider. ‘The whole industry, internet companies, vendors, and enterprises are monitoring OCP.’ OCP aims to do for computer hardware what the Linux operating system did for software: make it ‘open source’ so anyone can take the designs for free and modify them, with contract manufacturers standing by to build them. In its six years, OCP has grown into a global entity, with board members from Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Intel, and Microsoft. In fact, there’s a well-known story among OCP insiders that demonstrates this cultlike phenom. It involves Apple’s networking team. This team was responsible for building a network at Apple that was so reliable, it never goes down. Not rarely — never. Building a 100% reliable network to meet Apple’s exacting standards was no easy task. So, instead of going it alone under Apple’s secrecy, the Apple networking team wanted to participate in the revolution, contributing and receiving help. But when the Apple team asked to join OCP, Apple said ‘no.’ ‘The whole team quit the same week, ‘ this person told us.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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‘Cultlike’ Devotion: Apple Once Refused To Join Open Compute Project, So Their Entire Networking Team Quit

Samsung 960 Pro review: The fastest consumer SSD you can buy

(credit: Edward Chester) The all new Samsung 960 Pro, released today, is the follow up to last year’s 950 Pro . It offers the same core set of features, with an M.2 form factor , four-lane PCIe 3.0 interface, NVMe communication standard, and 3D V-NAND. But the 960 Pro isn’t just a minor spec bump. Samsung has seriously cranked up the speed (and capacities) of its flagship drives to the point where such ludicrous performance may be lost on all but the most demanding of users. These are some seriously hardcore SSDs. Where the 950 Pro was available in just 256GB and 512GB versions, the 960 Pro starts at 512GB, with 1TB and 2TB versions also available. For the first time, you can reasonably consider replacing an entire array of spinner hard drives or even 2.5-inch SATA SSDs with these things—so long as you’ve got the cash, of course. With a 256GB starting capacity, Samsung was able to offer the speed, longevity, and warranty of the 950 Pro to those only able to budget £170 ($199) for an SSD. But with the 960 Pro starting at $329 for the 512GB model  (probably ~£330), rising to $629 for 1TB, and an eye-watering $1,299 for 2TB, you’ll need to save some extra pennies to buy one, or wait it out for the Evo drives Samsung is launching later this year. Although a marked step down from the Pro range in some regards, the Evos are in theory faster than the 950 Pro drives for less money (thanks to using cheaper and more tightly packed TLC V-NAND). The 250GB will cost just $129 (~£130), 500GB will be $249 and 1TB will cost $470. There won’t be a 2TB version of the 960 Evo. Read 35 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung 960 Pro review: The fastest consumer SSD you can buy

XG.fast DSL does 10Gbps over telephone lines

(credit: Bob Dormon / Ars Technica UK) Nokia has achieved a connection speed of 5Gbps—about 625MB/sec—over 70 metres of conventional twisted-pair copper telephone wire, and 8Gbps over 30 metres. The trial used a relatively new digital subscriber line (DSL) protocol called XG.fast (aka G.fast2). XG.fast is the probable successor of G.fast , which was successfully trialled in a few countries over the past couple of years and will soon begin to commercially roll out. (In an unusual turn of events,  the UK will probably be the first country with G.fast .) Fundamentally, both G.fast and XG.fast are best described as “VDSL on steroids.” Basically, while a VDSL2 signal frequency maxes out around 17MHz, G.fast starts at 106MHz (it can be doubled to 212MHz) and XG.fast uses between 350MHz and 500MHz. This means that there’s a lot more bandwidth (the original meaning of the word), which in turn can be used for transferring data at higher speeds. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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XG.fast DSL does 10Gbps over telephone lines