Sony hack snowballs as movie scripts, celebrity phone numbers leaked

Sony Pictures is in full-blown damage-control mode and has called an all-hands meeting following another huge leak of sensitive, confidential info. The new trove of data released by the so-called GOP (Guardians of Peace) includes more private employee info, actor phone numbers and traveling aliases , legal claims against Sony Pictures, film budgets, scripts and more. As pointed out by the WSJ , it also includes private info of some 40, 000 Sony Pictures ex-employees like home addresses, previous salaries and social security numbers. Many of those folks are incensed with the Culver City-based company, which gave them no guidance on how to protect their identities or sign up for credit monitoring. Suffice to say, much of the information could be highly damaging to Sony’s reputation and bottom line. As pointed out by Fusion , the hackers have thrown many of its business practices into the open, which may make future negotiations with high profile actors, technicians and vendors difficult. Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton sent a memo to all employees saying that it had “recognized experts working on this matter” and that the FBI had taken control of the investigation. He also said that employees could meet one-on-one with their managers and called an all-hands meeting for this Friday. Much of the information could be highly damaging to Sony’s reputation and bottom line. Yesterday, Sony released info from the security firm Mandiant, which said the “unprecedented” attack would’ve been difficult to prevent. But many employees expressed disbelief that sensitive info like social securities numbers and salaries would be kept in unprotected folders by a security-conscious company. Some experts also doubt Sony’s claims that the attack was that sophisticated, saying that it should’ve noticed suspicious activity, even if the virus was “undetectable.” One researcher told Mashable that “to protect their image, they need this to be an unpreventable, incredibly sophisticated attack.” Meanwhile, the group allegedly responsible for the hack released another statement along with the leak. The GOP demanded that Sony “stop immediately showing the movie of terrorism” in reference to “The Interview, ” the upcoming Sony Pictures flick that mocks the North Korean government. That marks the first time the hackers have directly referenced the film, which was denounced by the rogue nation. However, another recently discovered email, sent several days ago, demanded monetary compensation instead. All that, along with another email that contained Korean grammatical errors, means investigators still have no idea if the attack came from North Korea or not. Filed under: Home Entertainment , HD Comments Via: Fusion Source: Gist (Github)

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Sony hack snowballs as movie scripts, celebrity phone numbers leaked

A silk casing enables long-lasting, implantable Wi-Fi medical devices

Not the silk casing discussed. Flickr user: CameliaTWU For a variety of medical reasons, it’s useful to implant devices inside the body. These devices may be needed to help regulate the cardiovascular system, or they can release drugs inside the body. Unfortunately, they’re also problematic. Once such a device has served its function, it must be removed, which necessitates another surgery. Plus, the presence can lead to complications such as infection, inflammation, and pain. To address some of these problems, scientists have developed new kinds of circuitry that can safely dissolve in the body. While these water-soluble devices don’t need to be removed, they come with a new problem—they dissolve too quickly for many purposes. So a group of researchers have now reported that they’ve developed a new way to control how long the devices last. The researchers propose that dissolving devices could be encased in a material made from silk protein and magnesium. The advantage of this approach comes from a property of the silk: its crystallinity. Different preparations of silk dissolve in water at different rates depending on their crystallinities. Altering this property allows researchers to choose among a range of dissolution times from only a few minutes up to a few weeks. This gives more control over the duration of the device, which is important, since different medical situations require devices that can last vastly different times. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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A silk casing enables long-lasting, implantable Wi-Fi medical devices

Amazon Instant Just Got 4K Streaming

Amazon’s streaming video service just got an upgrade . Starting today, Prime Instant Video offers 4K Ultra High Definition streaming at no extra charge, so people with compatible TVs will have the option to watch Transparent and a limited selection of movies and television in 4K HD. Read more…

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Amazon Instant Just Got 4K Streaming

Windows 8.1 now natively supports the MKV video format, which has been supported by the Xbox One for

Windows 8.1 now natively supports the MKV video format , which has been supported by the Xbox One for a little while now. Read more…

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Windows 8.1 now natively supports the MKV video format, which has been supported by the Xbox One for

Microsoft makes a nod to subscriptions for Windows 10

Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner Microsoft Even as it has cut the price of Windows— offering it for free on phones and small screen tablets, plus there’s a Bing edition for everything else—Microsoft is still working on ways to monetize its platform. Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner was speaking to investors last week, and GeekWire  reported that profits are still the goal. Asked if the plan was to make Windows a loss leader to draw people into the Microsoft ecosystem, Turner said that the company had “not had any conversations” on this. He reiterated this when asked if the company was going to start losing money on Windows, saying “that’s not any conversations that we’ve had… we’ve got to monetize it differently.” What form might that different monetization take? Turner says that “there are services involved. There are additional opportunities for us to bring additional services to the product and do it in a creative way.” Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft makes a nod to subscriptions for Windows 10

New wireless charging gear promises 3x faster charging

Faster charging, like Qualcomm’s “Quick Charge 2.0” (branded as “Turbo Charging” on the Nexus 6), is one of the nicest new smartphone features available. If we can’t make a battery last all day with heavy use, we can at least make it charge faster. The faster charging is possible because these devices charge at a higher voltage—instead of the normal 5 watts from a standard USB charger, these hit about 14 watts. These faster chargers have left wireless chargers in the dust, though. Today’s Qi charging pads still only put out 5W, the same as a slow wired charger. Freescale Semiconductor, a company that provides various chips to OEMs, is out to fix that. Today the company announced integrated circuits for 15 watt wireless chargers —a wireless solution that should be just as fast as a hardwired turbo charger. Of course, you will need new hardware to make this work. Freescale’s solution will require a new chip in your smartphone or tablet and a new charging pad. The good news is that this isn’t a new standard. Freescale’s chips can be tweaked to be compliant with Qi charging, which is found in many smartphone, or with lesser-used standards like the Power Matters Alliance. The Qi “medium power” standard is actually good up to 120W, provided the pad and device support it. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New wireless charging gear promises 3x faster charging

Facebook Finally Lets You Search For Specific Posts

Facebook is getting some long overdue functionality to help you find not just people and pages, but also specific posts from the past. So as in the example above, if you search for your friend Jessica’s wedding, it’ll search full posts for keywords “Jessica” and “wedding” and hopefully return the result you were looking for. It’s hard to believe this is new. Read more…

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Facebook Finally Lets You Search For Specific Posts

Samsung 850 EVO SSD takes its storage into the third dimension

Things have advanced quite a bit since our last thoroughly in-depth look at how solid state disks work, and Samsung has been one of the biggest companies leading the charge toward faster, denser solid state drives. Its 840 EVO was the first consumer SSD to use TLC NAND—that’s triple-level cell NAND, which can store three bits per memory cell instead of one or two. Now, Samsung’s newest consumer SSD takes NAND density a step further, stacking the memory cells on top of each other in a complex sandwich. The 850 EVO, formally announced this morning , uses 32-layer TLC “V-NAND,” where the “V” stands for “vertical.” As we discussed previously at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show, Samsung is the only SSD manufacturer that makes ” the whole widget “—it’s the only vertically integrated OEM that builds every part of the SSDs it sells, including the NAND that actually holds the data. This gives the company a distinct advantage over other SSD manufacturers—most of whom source their NAND from Samsung. The 850 EVO is set to be released in four capacities: 120GB, 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB. These are all decimal measurements, not binary—so that “1TB” is properly one trillion bytes, not 1024GB (there are official IEC units for binary measurements, but I’ll eat glass before I start saying ” tebibyte “). The quoted numbers on Samsung’s site look pretty good for a consumer-level drive: max sequential read speeds of 540MB/s, max sequential write speeds of 520MB/s, and relatively high IOPS across a variety of read and write regimes. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung 850 EVO SSD takes its storage into the third dimension

Powerful, highly stealthy Linux trojan may have infected victims for years

Researchers have uncovered an extremely stealthy trojan for Linux systems that attackers have been using to siphon sensitive data from governments and pharmaceutical companies around the world. The previously undiscovered malware represents a missing puzzle piece tied to “Turla,” a so-called advanced persistent threat (APT) disclosed in August by Kaspersky Lab and Symantec . For at least four years, the campaign targeted government institutions, embassies, military, education, research, and pharmaceutical companies in more than 45 countries. The unknown attackers—who are probably backed by a nation-state, according to Symantec—were known to have infected several hundred Windows-based computers by exploiting a variety of vulnerabilities, at least two of which were zero-day bugs. The malware was notable for its use of a rootkit that made it extremely hard to detect. Now researchers from Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab have detected Linux-based malware used in the same campaign . Turla was already ranked as one of the top-tier APTs, in the same league as the recently disclosed Regin  for instance. The discovery of the Linux component suggests it is bigger than previously thought and may presage the discovery of still more infected systems. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Powerful, highly stealthy Linux trojan may have infected victims for years