Enlarge (credit: Nicholas Eckhart ) Office Depot and its sister retailer OfficeMax have stopped using a technically dubious piece of malware-scanning software after two news services caught the stores recommending costly fixes for PC infections that didn’t exist. According to an  investigation conducted by KIRO TV News , four out of six stores in Seattle and Portland, Oregon claimed that out-of-the-box PCs showed “symptoms of malware” that required as much as $180 for repairs and protection. The computers, according to the report, had never been connected to the Internet and were diagnosed as free of malware by security firm IOActive. A separate TV News team from WFXT in Boston reported on Friday that the same free scanning service OfficeMax offers similarly misdiagnosed two of three brand-new PCs as potentially infected. Officials at Office Depot, the parent company that operates both chains, said they are suspending use of software known as PC Health Check for scanning customers’ computers for malware. The officials went on to say they didn’t condone the conduct reported by the TV news organizations and have undertaken a review of the assertions. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Office Depot caught claiming out-of-box PCs showed “symptoms of malware”

Napster and Metallica, together again—and they look so happy about it, too! (credit: Sam Machkovech) Metallica’s first full album in eight years launched on Friday, and as with most modern albums, it went on sale on a variety of digital storefronts. One of those sellers was more noteworthy than the others, of course, as the album launch coincided with Metallica’s first-ever warm, hugging embrace of Napster. Earlier this week, the band and company announced that Metallica’s entire catalog would finally launch on the Napster service on Friday. The $10/month music service currently resembles all-you-can-stream subscription services like Spotify and Google Play Music, and Napster’s fee now includes every published song by Hetfield and Co., from 1983’s Kill ‘Em All to this week’s Hardwired… To Self-Destruct . Of course, the Napster of today is different than the Napster that drummer Lars Ulrich lashed out against in 1999 . What was once a totally free, peer-to-peer service for the trading of MP3s has since been shuffled from corporate handler to corporate handler. After its transformation to an iTunes-styled MP3 store, Napster was taken over by Best Buy in 2008 before being dealt to Rhapsody three years later. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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It only took 17 years: Metallica’s full catalog is now on Napster

Enlarge (credit: Samy Kamkar) The perils of leaving computers unattended just got worse, thanks to a newly released exploit tool that takes only 30 seconds to install a privacy-invading backdoor, even when the machine is locked with a strong password. PoisonTap, as the tool has been dubbed, runs freely available software on a $5/£4  Raspberry Pi Zero device . Once the payment card-sized computer is plugged into a computer’s USB slot, it intercepts all unencrypted Web traffic, including any authentication cookies used to log in to private accounts. PoisonTap then sends that data to a server under the attacker’s control. The hack also installs a backdoor that makes the owner’s Web browser and local network remotely controllable by the attacker. (credit: Samy Kamkar) PoisonTap is the latest creation of Samy Kamkar, the engineer behind a long line of low-cost hacks, including a password-pilfering keylogger disguised as a USB charger , a key-sized dongle that jimmies open electronically locked cars and garages , and a DIY stalker app that mined Google Streetview . While inspiring for their creativity and elegance, Kamkar’s inventions also underscore the security and privacy tradeoffs that arise from an increasingly computerized world. PoisonTap continues this cautionary theme by challenging the practice of password-protecting an unattended computer rather than shutting it off or, a safer bet still, toting it to the restroom or lunch room. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Meet PoisonTap, the $5 tool that ransacks password-protected computers

Enlarge Yesterday a commercial Alaska Airlines plane pumped with a blend of traditional jet fuel and wood biofuel flew from Seattle to Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C. The flight was the first to use a 20 percent blend of biofuel made of leftover wood from timber harvests in the Pacific Northwest. It’s not the first to use a biofuel mixture in general though—in June, Alaska Airlines flew two test flights on jet fuel mixed with biofuel made from non-edible parts of corn, and in March of this year, United Airlines pledged to use a 30 percent biofuel mixture on its flights from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The United Airlines fuel is produced by a company called AltAir Fuels that depends on a variety of biological source materials “from used cooking oil to algae.” Alaska Airlines’ wood-based fuel was developed by a Colorado-based company called Gevo , which partnered with the Northwest Advanced Renewables Alliance (NARA) to develop the wood waste into isobutanol, which it then converted to jet fuel. Gevo also created the corn waste biofuel mixture that Alaska Airlines flew with in June. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Wood waste alcohol converted to jet fuel, used in Alaska Airlines test flight

(credit: Alpha six ) Cloud backup and storage provider Backblaze has published its latest batch of drive reliability data. The release covers failure information for the 67,642 disks that the company uses to store nearly 300PB of data. This is actually fewer disks than the company had  last quarter , even though the total capacity has gone up. That’s because Backblaze has been upgrading, replacing 2TB disks from HGST and Western Digital with new Seagate 8TB ones. While this upgrade offers size and energy savings, it’s only worthwhile if the failure rate is contained; any more than 2-3 times the failure rate and Backblaze says the migration won’t be worth it. Annualized drive failure rates. (credit: Backblaze ) Fortunately, the findings from last quarter appear to be holding true. The widely expected bathtub curve—high failure rates at the start and end of the drives’ lives, with a period of low failure rates in the middle—isn’t in evidence. The 8TB Seagate drives so far are showing an annualized failure rate of 1.6 percent; that’s identical to the (consistently reliable) 2TB disks from HGST and substantially better than the 8.2 percent seen from the WDC disks. With only a quarter of the number of drives required, this is a clear savings. Presuming things don’t take a turn for the worse, the move will mean greatly reduced failures even as the total storage capacity goes up. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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8TB disks still looking solid, seem to be some of Seagate’s best

Enlarge (credit: EnGoPlanet) A New York-based startup called EnGoPlanet has installed four streetlights in a plaza off the Las Vegas Strip that are powered exclusively by solar and kinetic energy. The installations aren’t mere streetlights though—they also power a variety of environmental monitors, support video surveillance, and, for the masses, offer USB ports for device charging. The streetlights are topped by a solar panel crest, and have “kinetic tiles” on the ground below them. These panels reportedly can generate 4 to 8 watts from people walking on them , depending on the pressure of the step. The renewable energy is then collected by a battery for use at night. The solar-plus-kinetic energy design is useful on those rare Vegas days without too much sun—as long as there is still plenty of foot traffic. The four streetlights have a host of sensors that collect information, and details on what kind of information is collected are sparse. In EnGoPlanet’s promotional video , a quick slide lists the streetlights’ additional capabilities: environmental monitoring, air quality monitoring, video surveillance, and the ever-vague “smart analytics.” If the bright side of progress is more environmentally-friendly streetlights, the dark side is that as you replace those old analog streetlights you get the addition of video surveillance from a private company. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Las Vegas gets “kinetic tiles” that power lights with foot traffic

(credit: Bonnie Natko ) Researchers said they have discovered a simple way lone attackers with limited resources can knock large servers offline when they’re protected by certain firewalls made by Cisco Systems and other manufacturers. The denial-of-service technique requires volumes of as little as 15 megabits, or about 40,000 packets per second, to sever the Internet connection of vulnerable servers. The requirements are in stark contrast to recent attacks targeting domain name service provider Dyn and earlier security site KrebsOnSecurity and French Web host OVH . Those assaults bombarded sites with volumes approaching or exceeding 1 terabit per second. Researchers from Denmark-based TDC Security Operations Center have dubbed the new attack technique BlackNurse. In a blog post published Wednesday , the researchers wrote: Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New attack reportedly lets 1 modest laptop knock big servers offline

Enlarge (credit: Peter Bright) Most of the PC OEMs have refreshed their Skylake systems to include Intel’s new Kaby Lake chips. Kaby Lake parts are for the most part drop-in replacements for Skylake parts—same chipsets, same power envelopes and cooling requirements—and some manufacturers have taken advantage of this fact. Dell’s new XPS 13 is in most regards identical to the old XPS 13, for example, except for the processor swap. Some manufacturers have been a little more ambitious; HP’s updated Spectre x360  adds Thunderbolt 3 and Windows Hello support as well as slashing the size and weight. Microsoft, however, has gone for none of these routes. The Surface Pro 4 with its Skylake processor remains the current iteration of the company’s productivity-oriented tablet and hasn’t changed since its introduction. The Surface Book, the laptop that can do double duty as a tablet, also remains a Skylake system. But Microsoft has made an upgrade of sorts to the Surface Book range in the form of an even more expensive version that sits at the very top of the range: the Surface Book with Performance Base. Specs at a glance: Microsoft Surface Book with Performance Base Base Best As reviewed Screen 3000×2000 13.5″ (267 PPI), 10-point capacitive PixelSense touchscreen OS Windows 10 Pro CPU Intel 6th generation Core i7 RAM 8GB 16GB 16GB GPU Intel HD Graphics 520 + Nvidia GeForce GTX 965M 2GB SSD 256GB 1TB 1TB Networking 802.11ac/a/b/g/n with 2×2 MIMO antennas, Bluetooth 4.0 Ports Mini-DisplayPort, headphones, SD, 2 USB 3.0 Cameras Rear: 8MP autofocus, 1080p video Front: 5MP, 1080p video, infrared facial recognition Size 12.30×9.14×0.59-0.90″ (312×232×14.9-23 mm) Weight 3.68 lb (1.647 kg) Battery 18 Wh (tablet) + 62 Wh (base) Warranty 1 year Price $2,399 $3,299 $3,299 Sensors Ambient light sensor, accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer Charger 65W Other features Surface Pen, TPM 2.0 The Surface Book’s big party trick is that the screen portion is the part that contains the computer; it has batteries, a processor, RAM, storage, and everything else. The keyboard base, the part that in a regular laptop houses the computer parts, contains only the keyboard, touchpad, and battery. On higher-end models the keyboard base also contains a discrete Nvidia GPU. This GPU is non-standard; it doesn’t neatly line up with any of Nvidia’s usual mobile parts, and while it’s faster than the Intel integrated graphics, it’s not as quick as the more mainstream numbered parts. Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Surface Book with Performance Base: A lot more graphics in a little more weight

Enlarge (credit: Tesla) On Monday morning, Tesla announced that new electric vehicles ordered after January 1, 2017 will not have unlimited free access to its network of Supercharger stations. The company began rolling out its network of fast-charging stations four years ago, with free unlimited access for Model S and Model X owners (although at one point it was a $2,500 option for the base Model S EV). Earlier this year we learned that those 400,000+ buyers of the new Model 3 EV would not have unfettered access to the Supercharger network. Now it appears that limit will apply to the more expensive vehicles in its range as well. While the details have not been fully revealed yet, Tesla says that from next year, new vehicles will only get the first 400kWh each year for free—after that point the cost of electricity will be passed on to the owner. Prices per kWh will vary regionally, but Tesla says it does not intend the Supercharger network to ever become a profit center. At the same time, this move isn’t suddenly going to cause owning a Tesla to become as expensive as owning other $100,000 vehicles. Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics ‘ energy prices, at a national average of 14¢ per kWh, we think it unlikely that, even with overheads, a full Supercharge would cost more than $20. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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No unlimited free Supercharging for Teslas ordered after January 1, 2017