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OS X 10.8.4 beta suggests 802.11ac is coming soon to a Mac near you

Amid the sea of text, a revealing phrase: 802.11ac. 9to5Mac Before rolling them out to the public through Software Update, Apple regularly releases beta versions of its minor OS X updates to registered developers and other selected testers. These patches are normally routine—a security patch here, a new driver there—but they occasionally reveal tidbits about where Apple is taking OS X and, by extension, its Mac lineup. A new build of OS X 10.8.4 was released to beta testers today, and 9to5Mac cracked it open in short order. Hidden in the operating system’s “WiFi-frameworks” folder is a brand-new reference to 802.11ac Wi-Fi , a new standard that promises bandwidth of up to 1.3Gbps. The fastest Wi-Fi chips in today’s Macs support 802.11n at speeds of either 450Mbps (for devices with three antennae like the iMac or MacBook Pro) or 270Mbps (for devices like the MacBook Air with only two antennae), making the new standard quite the potential upgrade. As with previous Wi-Fi upgrades, the new 802.11ac adapters and routers will also be backward-compatible with 802.11n, g, b, and a-based devices. Routers and adapters that support 802.11ac first began to appear on the market last year, and have slowly proliferated as the months have gone on. We saw quite a few 802.11ac routers at this year’s CES , and 802.11ac chips from the likes of Broadcom should begin to show up in many consumer devices this year. Even some smartphones (the HTC One in particular) are beginning to ship with the new standard, so it wouldn’t be a surprise if Apple made the jump in this year’s Macs. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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OS X 10.8.4 beta suggests 802.11ac is coming soon to a Mac near you

Intel wants to kill the traditional server rack with 100Gbps links

If Intel gets its way, old-school server racks will go the way of the dinosaurs. David Monniaux Intel is working to replace the traditional server rack with a more efficient architecture that separates CPU, storage, power, and networking resources into individual components that can be swapped out as needed. Power and cooling would be shared across CPUs, rather than having separate power supplies for each server. Server, memory, network, and storage resources would all be disaggregated and shared across the rack. Incredibly fast interconnects will be needed to prevent slowdowns because disaggregating components pushes them further apart, and Intel is thus building an interconnect that’s capable of 100Gbps. “We are developing a rack-scale architecture,” Lisa Graff, VP and general manager of Intel’s data center marketing group, said in a briefing with reporters last week. “We’re working with end users, OEMs, and ISVs to drive common standards in a reference architecture.” Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel wants to kill the traditional server rack with 100Gbps links

Vudu offices burglarized and customer info stolen

Usually when customer info is snatched up by a ne’er-do-well, it’s done digitally . Video streaming service Vudu, however, was the victim of an old fashioned burglary on March 24th of this year when someone broke into its offices and stole hard drives with customer data on them. According to an e-mail sent out to users today, those HDDs ” contained customer information, including names, email addresses, postal addresses, phone numbers, account activity, dates of birth and the last four digits of some credit card numbers.” Thankfully, the full CC numbers aren’t kept by Vudu, but all the same, the service is giving affected accounts AllClear ID protection for free for one year. Vudu’s also requiring users to reset their passwords today — despite the fact that the passwords on the stolen drives are encrypted — to ensure that everything will be safe and sound moving forward. [Thanks, @steveymacjr and everyone who sent this in] Filed under: Internet , HD Comments Source: Vudu forum , Vudu

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Vudu offices burglarized and customer info stolen

Hackers Swipe Unreleased Game From Ubisoft

hypnosec writes with news that a group of Russian hackers has compromised the security of Ubisoft’s digital distribution platform, uPlay, finding a way for users of the service to download any of its games for free. What makes this particularly notable is that the hackers found a copy of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, an unreleased spin-off of Far Cry 3 that hasn’t even been officially announced (except as part of an April Fool’s joke. The hackers posted a half-hour of gameplay footage to YouTube, and Ubisoft took uPlay down to fix the security vulnerability. They say no user information was compromised. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hackers Swipe Unreleased Game From Ubisoft

The Search Engine More Dangerous Than Google

mallyn writes “This is an article about a search engine that is designed to look for devices on the net that are not really intended to be viewed and used by the general public. Devices include pool filters, skating rink cooling system, and other goodies. ‘Shodan runs 24/7 and collects information on about 500 million connected devices and services each month. It’s stunning what can be found with a simple search on Shodan. Countless traffic lights, security cameras, home automation devices and heating systems are connected to the Internet and easy to spot. Shodan searchers have found control systems for a water park, a gas station, a hotel wine cooler and a crematorium. Cybersecurity researchers have even located command and control systems for nuclear power plants and a particle-accelerating cyclotron by using Shodan. … A quick search for “default password” reveals countless printers, servers and system control devices that use “admin” as their user name and “1234” as their password. Many more connected systems require no credentials at all — all you need is a Web browser to connect to them.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The Search Engine More Dangerous Than Google

FBI’s Smartphone Surveillance Tool Explained In Court Battle

concealment writes with news that a court battle has brought to light details on how the FBI’s “stingray” surveillance tool works, and how they used it with Verizon’s help to collect evidence about an alleged identity thief. Quoting: “Air cards are devices that plug into a computer and use the wireless cellular networks of phone providers to connect the computer to the internet. The devices are not phones and therefore don’t have the ability to receive incoming calls, but in this case Rigmaiden asserts that Verizon reconfigured his air card to respond to surreptitious voice calls from a landline controlled by the FBI. The FBI calls, which contacted the air card silently in the background, operated as pings to force the air card into revealing its location. In order to do this, Verizon reprogrammed the device so that when an incoming voice call arrived, the card would disconnect from any legitimate cell tower to which it was already connected, and send real-time cell-site location data to Verizon, which forwarded the data to the FBI. This allowed the FBI to position its stingray in the neighborhood where Rigmaiden resided. The stingray then “broadcast a very strong signal” to force the air card into connecting to it, instead of reconnecting to a legitimate cell tower, so that agents could then triangulate signals coming from the air card and zoom-in on Rigmaiden’s location. To make sure the air card connected to the FBI’s simulator, Rigmaiden says that Verizon altered his air card’s Preferred Roaming List so that it would accept the FBI’s stingray as a legitimate cell site and not a rogue site, and also changed a data table on the air card designating the priority of cell sites so that the FBI’s fake site was at the top of the list.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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FBI’s Smartphone Surveillance Tool Explained In Court Battle

Waiting for a 1TB SSD below $1 per GB? Crucial says wait no more

Crucial announced in a press release this morning that it has begun selling its latest round of consumer-grade solid-state disks (SSDs), the M500 . The 2.5-inch SATA III SSDs are the follow-up to Crucial’s M4 SSDs, which are a pretty popular choice for people adding SSDs to existing systems (I think I have four or five M4s scattered in computers around my house). The drives use 20nm MLC NAND sourced from Micron (and if you’re not sure what MLC NAND is, we’ve got a great SSD primer right here ), along with a Micron-provided SSD controller. Performance for the M500 drives is what you’d expect from a drive in this class: sequential read and write speeds of 500MB per second and 400MB per second. But the big news about the announcement is the capacities. The M500 is available in standard pedestrian capacities of 120GB and 240GB, as well as a large capacity of 480GB, but the top-end SKU is the exciting one: 960GB for just $599.99 (62¢ per raw GB). The MSRPs for the smaller capacities are $129.99 for the 120GB (about $1 per raw GB), $219.99 for the 240GB (about 91¢ per raw GB), and $399.99 for the 480GB (about 83¢ per raw GB). Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Waiting for a 1TB SSD below $1 per GB? Crucial says wait no more