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Apple clamps down on high-score cheaters with Game Center update

Believe it or not, there are some people in this world who think that faking a high score to be top dog on the global Game Center leaderboard is both big and clever. Of course, most of us know better, so it’s with a great deal of relief that Apple’s latest developer-facing is looking to deal with the problem. The company is letting app developers manage the top 100 tables for their games themselves, so if they spot a faker, they can delete it without having to refer the problem to Apple. Now we’ll all just have to knuckle down and earn those bragging rights the old-fashioned way. Filed under: Software , Apple Comments Via: Touch Arcade Source: Apple

CAPTCHA Busted? Company Claims To Have Broken Protection System

sciencehabit writes “A software company called Vicarious claims to have created a computer algorithm that can solve CAPTCHA with greater than 90% accuracy. If true, the advance would represent a major breakthrough in artificial intelligence. It would also mean that the internet will have to start looking for a new security system. The problem, however, is that Vicarious has provided little evidence for its claims, though some well-known scientists are behind the work.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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CAPTCHA Busted? Company Claims To Have Broken Protection System

Database hacking spree on US Army, NASA, and others costs gov’t millions

Marcus W Federal prosecutors have accused a UK man of hacking thousands of computer systems, many of them belonging to the US government, and stealing massive quantities of data that resulted in millions of dollars in damages to victims. Lauri Love, 28, was arrested on Friday at his residence in Stradishall, UK following a lengthy investigation by the US Army, US prosecutors in New Jersey said. According to prosecutors, the attacks date back to at least October 2012. Love and other alleged hackers are said to have breached networks belonging to the Army, the US Missile Defense Agency, NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and others, in most cases by exploiting vulnerabilities in SQL databases and the Adobe ColdFusion Web application. The objective of the year-long hacking spree was to disrupt the operations and infrastructure of the US government by stealing large amounts of military data and personally identifying information of government employees and military personnel, a 21-page indictment said. “You have no idea how much we can fuck with the US government if we wanted to,” Love told a hacking colleague in one exchange over Internet relay chat, prosecutors alleged. “This… stuff is really sensitive. It’s basically every piece of information you’d need to do full identity theft on any employee or contractor” for the hacked agency. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Database hacking spree on US Army, NASA, and others costs gov’t millions

Lost Star Wars Footage Found On LaserDisc

drxenos writes “A LaserDisc purchased on eBay was found to contain raw footage from Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi. From the article: ‘The origin of the LaserDisc isn’t entirely clear, but it was purchased for $699 off eBay, apparently once used to demonstrate Lucasfilm’s EditDroid station — one of the first digital film editing systems sold nearly 30 years ago. Ironically, George Lucas himself never used EditDroid to make a movie; the Star Wars clips were loaded simply to show off its capabilities to prospective buyers.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Lost Star Wars Footage Found On LaserDisc

Relive the ’80s and Run Windows 1.01 in Your Browser

In these smartphone-studded days, it’s easy to forget how computers worked. Once you had to run programs off of floppy disks and wait ages for everything to load. Luckily for your nostalgia, some bored developers are keeping the past alive with full-featured emulators that run in your browser. Read more…

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Relive the ’80s and Run Windows 1.01 in Your Browser

A Cyber Attack Against Israel Shut Down An Entire Road Last Month

Hackers managed to infiltrate and shut down an enormous tunnel system in Israel last month, causing massive traffic jams for eight hours, according to the AP. Though their sources indicate that the attack didn’t come from a state actor, this first strike opens up a whole new world of cyber warfare. Read more…

A Fully Loaded Mac Pro Could Cost You $14,000

The cheapest Mac Pro you can buy, Apple informed us last week , will cost you $3, 000. That’s a pretty penny, sure, but not outrageous for a workstation these days. What if, though, you spec it out as far as you can go? That’s when we hit new car territory. Read more…

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A Fully Loaded Mac Pro Could Cost You $14,000

LG G Flex announced with vertically-curved 6-inch 720p screen, ‘self-repairing’ back cover

LG’s unveiled all the details for its often-leaked , curved screen smartphone. Weighing in at 177g with a 6-inch (but 720p) display, it’s powered by a Snapdragon 800 processor and 2GB of RAM, with a 13-megapixel camera housed between two rear control buttons, which is now an LG thing. In comparison to Samsung’s Galaxy Round , the screen on the G Flex arcs from top to bottom, not side-to-side, which at least makes a little more sense to us, hopefully fitting in better to the curvature of the users’ face. We’re yet to handle either curved phone IRL just yet, however, when we’ll be able to offer up a better perspective on how both devices actually feel. Like LG’s recent G2 , there’s high-fidelity audio recording and playback, dual-window app functionality and tap-to-wake on that substantial touchscreen. There’s also special animations, depending on where and how you unlock the phone. The Korean press release is also reporting that there’s a self-healing coating that can repair hairline scratches on the rear of the phone. LG says they are repaired “within minutes.” Korean smartphones with the power to control the elements are, however, still TBC. The G Flex will arrive on Korea’s three major carriers next month — but (again) there’s no word on global roll-out, hinting that the smartphone could well be a test model for the company. We’ve added the confusingly Google-translated release after the break. Filed under: Cellphones , Mobile , LG Comments Via: The Verge Source: Newswire

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LG G Flex announced with vertically-curved 6-inch 720p screen, ‘self-repairing’ back cover

Seagate introduces a new drive interface: Ethernet

It’s not time to say goodbye to the old storage network quite yet, but a new combination of cloud, networking, and storage technology might mark the beginning of the end for SANs—Seagate has introduced a new storage architecture that puts Ethernet directly on the disk drive. Called the Kinetic Open Storage Platform, the new approach turns disks themselves into servers, delivering data over the network to applications using an open application interface. The Kinetic platform is a combination of an open programming interface and intelligence and a network interface installed in the storage device itself. It’s targeted mostly at companies looking to adopt the same sort of architecture in their data centers that they use to connect to cloud storage providers such as Amazon. While the architectural approach Seagate is taking is an evolution of work already done by cloud giants such as Google and Facebook, it turns cloud-style storage into a commodity. And that could change how companies small and large think of networked storage—especially as they move toward using newer software development approaches to build their applications or move applications built on Amazon or other cloud services back within their firewalls. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Review: Tesla Motors all-electric Model S is fast—but is it a good car?

This is the first of two pieces we’re publishing on the all-electric Tesla Model S. The other is a video that documents our journey from Houston to Austin and back in the car, and it can be viewed right here . My videographer Steve uttered a single strained curse as inertia’s invisible hand pushed us back into the leather with enough force to knock the camera mount out of alignment. The Tesla’s acceleration was instant, ludicrous, neck-snapping—more appropriate for a roller-coaster than a car. The camera’s point of view was now skewed sideways from this morning’s careful alignment, but Steve didn’t reach for it because we had just gone from 70 miles per hour to north of 100, and we were still going strong. I should have slowed down, because I-10 out west of Houston is the natural habitat of humorless state troopers, but I didn’t. The breathtakingly flat torque curve of the Model S begs to be explored. The pedal under my right foot was just pure magic . No shifting of gears or howling engine here—the only sound was the ever-increasing rush of air as we hurtled toward the car’s 130 mph limiter. And as we accelerated, my prejudices about electric cars were forcibly rearranged. Read 104 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Review: Tesla Motors all-electric Model S is fast—but is it a good car?

Ken May

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