ars – Page 24 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Microsoft to step up the pace of delivering Windows 10 builds

Though the plan was to give Windows 10 preview a series of regular updates, there hasn’t been a new build since January. Windows 10 has two public release channels. The fast channel is meant to get more regular updates, and so get new features sooner, while the slow channel is meant to be more thoroughly tested and a little more stable. Both channels have been quiet lately. While there’s no immediate change on that front—a new public candidate build is in testing but it’s not done yet—testers of the new operating system should take note: the fast channel is due to get faster. Gabe Aul, a General Manager in Microsoft’s Operating Systems Group tweeted today the fast channel is going to go faster , and if you want a more stable situation, you should switch to the slow channel . Further, Aul says that the company may introduce additional channels, perhaps to offer even more cutting edge builds. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft to step up the pace of delivering Windows 10 builds

Internet providers ordered to stop hiding the true size of monthly bills

New rules for home Internet providers and wireless carriers require them to be truthful about how much their service actually costs. As part of the transparency requirements in the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality order , Internet providers have to clearly detail all charges, such as modem rental and installation fees, and disclose the full monthly price that will go into effect after any promotional pricing expires. The new disclosure rule is more specific than a previous one, the FCC said. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

reddit CEO Ellen Pao: harassment complaints fell on deaf ears at Kleiner Perkins

SAN FRANCISCO—Interim reddit CEO Ellen Pao, a former junior partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, finally took the stand today in the high-profile gender discrimination case that she brought against the firm three years ago. Pao maintained a firm tone throughout the day, even looking at the jury occasionally while answering questions from her lawyer about her early days at Kleiner. It’s the first opportunity that Pao has taken to elaborate on the gender discrimination claims she made in 2012. And the questioning started by going all the way back to the day Pao was hired at Kleiner Perkins. Pao, a Mandarin-speaking, Princeton-educated engineer with law and business degrees from Harvard, applied to Kleiner Perkins in 2005. At the time, the firm was looking to expand its investments in China. She seemed like a perfect fit, her lawyer Therese Lawless said. In addition to Pao’s language skills, she had years of experience working with 90’s startups like WebTV, Tell Me Networks, and Danger Research (whose team went on to join the team that created Android). She also spent time with bigger companies like Microsoft and BEA Systems. Read 35 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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reddit CEO Ellen Pao: harassment complaints fell on deaf ears at Kleiner Perkins

Apple releases iOS 8.2 today with Apple Watch support and plenty of bug fixes

SAN FRANCISCO—iOS 8.2 has been in development for several months now, and today Apple is formally releasing the update to the public. It’s available as an over-the-air update or through iTunes for any device running iOS 8, including the iPhone 4S, 5, 5C, 5S, 6, and 6 Plus; all iPads except the first-generation model; and the fifth-generation iPod Touch. The biggest feature update is support for the Apple Watch. The device will work with the iPhone 5 and newer models, but it will not work with iPads or iPods. Once you’ve tethered a watch to your phone, a new companion app will allow you to change the watch’s settings, organize its Home screen, and make other changes. We’ll take a longer look at this companion app when the time comes to review the Apple Watch itself. For those of you with other iDevices and/or no particular interest in the Apple Watch, there are still plenty of reasons to install the update. HomeKit will allow users to control devices at home Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple releases iOS 8.2 today with Apple Watch support and plenty of bug fixes

The Ambassador who worked from Nairobi bathroom to avoid State Dept. IT

The current scandal roiling over the use of a private e-mail server by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is just the latest in a series of scandals surrounding government e-mails. And it’s not the first public airing of problems with the State Department’s IT operations—and executives’ efforts to bypass or work around them. At least she didn’t set up an office in a restroom just to bypass State Department network restrictions and do everything over Gmail. However, another Obama administration appointee—the former ambassador to Kenya—did do that, essentially refusing to use any of the Nairobi embassy’s internal IT. He worked out of a bathroom because it was the only place in the embassy where he could use an unsecured network and his personal computer, using Gmail to conduct official business. And he did all this during a time when Chinese hackers were penetrating the personal Gmail inboxes of a number of US diplomats. Why would such high-profile members of the administration’s foreign policy team so flagrantly bypass federal and agency regulations to use their own personal e-mail to conduct business? Was it that they had something they wanted to keep out of State’s servers and away from Congressional oversight? Was it that State’s IT was so bad that they needed to take matters into their own hands? Or was it because the department’s IT staff wasn’t responsive enough to what they saw as their personal needs, and they decided to show just how take-charge they were by ignoring all those stuffy policies? Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The Ambassador who worked from Nairobi bathroom to avoid State Dept. IT

Apple becomes part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, AT&T gets the boot

Dow Jones has issued a press release this morning announcing that as of March 19, there will be a change to the list of companies that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average: AT&T is out, and Apple is in. According to the press release, the change is due in part to Visa’s upcoming 4:1 stock split, which will effectively lower Visa’s stock price and its effect on the index. To balance this reduction in Visa’s price—which the press release says can have “a material impact on sector representation”—Apple is being added to the index. The DJIA membership is fixed at thirty stocks , and so in order to add a company to it, one must be removed. The Dow has chosen to drop AT&T, leaving telecommunications to be represented on the index by AT&T’s rival Verizon—which, the release explains, is very similar to AT&T but has a higher market capitalization. The last time any membership changes were made to the DJIA was in September 2013, when Goldman Sachs, Nike, and Visa were added. AT&T has been a member of the DJIA since November 1999. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple becomes part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, AT&T gets the boot

Enormous Martian ocean evaporated into space

NASA scientists have published details of a huge ocean that once covered half of Mars’ northern hemisphere but was lost to space over millennia. Writing in the journal Science, the astronomers explained how they used the ratio of two different kinds of water to estimate how wet the red planet was 4.5 billion years ago. “Early Mars (4.5 billion years ago) had a global equivalent water layer at least 137 meters deep,” they say. Martian water molecules are just like those on Earth—they’re made of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms. But there are two kinds of hydrogen—the normal type, and one that’s a little heavier, called deuterium. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Enormous Martian ocean evaporated into space

In major goof, Uber stored sensitive database key on public GitHub page

Uber is trying to force GitHub to disclose the IP address of every person that accessed a webpage connected to a database intrusion that exposed sensitive personal data for 50,000 drivers. The court action revealed that a security key unlocking the database was stored on a publicly accessible place, the online equivalent of stashing a house key under a doormat. Uber officials have yet to say precisely what information was contained in the two now-unavailable GitHub gists . But in a lawsuit filed Friday against the unknown John Doe intruders, Uber lawyers said the URLs contained a security key that allowed unauthorized access to the names and driver’s license numbers of about 50,000 Uber drivers . The ride-sharing service disclosed the breach on Friday, more than two months after it was discovered. “The contents of these internal database files are closely guarded by Uber,” the complaint stated. “Accessing them from Uber’s protected computers requires a unique security key that is not intended to be available to anyone other than certain Uber employees, and no one outside of Uber is authorized to access the files. On or around May 12, 2014, from an IP address not associated with an Uber employee and otherwise unknown to Uber, John Doe I used the unique security key to download Uber database files containing confidential and proprietary information from Uber’s protected computers.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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In major goof, Uber stored sensitive database key on public GitHub page

Hands-on with the fastest LTE network in Europe: 400Mbps down, 45Mbps up

LONDON—Today, I got to play around with Europe’s (and probably the world’s) fastest LTE network: when I opened up Speedtest.net, depending on how many people were standing in the room, my download speed was between 350 and 400Mbps, my upload speed was around 45Mbps, and my ping latency was just 20ms. Funny enough, beyond Speedtest.net, it is actually quite hard to use 400Mbps of bandwidth. When I loaded up a 4K video from YouTube, I only used around 40Mbps, or 10 percent, of my wireless uber-pipe. Ars Technica certainly loaded very quickly indeed. As it stands today, there are very few websites or services that will let you pull data down at 400Mbps, or where being able to download at 400Mbps even makes much sense. If we’ve learned anything from the last few decades of telecoms and networking, however, it’s that Internet usage will always expand until every last inch of available bandwidth is consumed. So while 400Mbps might seem a little bit over the top today, in five years you’ll probably wonder how you ever survived with anything less. For some background, I had a 400Mbps LTE connection at my disposal because I had been invited to Wembley Stadium in London to try out the first deployment of Category 9 LTE in the UK. It was a “live” deployment in that it used commercially available hardware, but it was still very much a tech demo—the Cat 9 base station only covered a small portion of the stadium, and there were only a handful of devices in the world configured to connect to this specific LTE network. The LTE network was operated by EE (one of the UK’s big four wireless carriers), the LTE base station was made by Huawei, and the mobile device that I used was a smartphone powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 SoC . Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Remote valet mode and revolutionized parking: Ford’s Smart Mobility

Ford has a plan to help cut car emissions, and this time it doesn’t have anything to do with batteries, hybrid powertrains, or clever engine technology. Instead, the company is focusing on improving the parking experience, and its answer involves a crowdsourced real-time database of occupied and empty parking spots across the country, and remote control vehicles enabled by off-the-shelf commercial 4G LTE. At first glance that might not sound like it has much to do with reducing vehicle CO 2 emissions, but according to Ford, their data shows that hunting for parking spaces in urban environments can account for between 20 and 30 percent of a vehicle’s emissions. To find out more about what Ford has been working on, we spoke with Mike Tinskey, director of vehicle electrification and infrastructure at Ford. He told Ars about a pair of research projects that the car maker has been working on as part of a larger program called Smart Mobility. Smart Mobility involves 25 different experiments and pilot studies around the world, but these two have both been developed in conjunction with a team at Georgia Tech here in the US; Ford has had a long-running relationship with the group, which Tinskey describes as being analogous to the company’s research and advanced modeling arm for sustainability. According to Tinskey, Smart Mobility exists at the intersection of mobility and sustainability, with the overall goal of finding novel ways to reduce CO 2 . “When you look for places to do that, you start looking at antiquated things like parking, where people waste a lot of time, and a lot of CO 2 ,” he said. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments