Tag: ars

VMware Fusion, Workstation team culled in company restructure

(credit: Ferran Rodenas ) Members of VMware’s “Hosted UI” team—the developers responsible for the virtualization company’s Workstation and Fusion desktop products—were apparently laid off on Monday as part of a restructuring of the company that was announced yesterday. The developers were just a part of a larger layoff as the company moved to cut costs and brought aboard a new chief financial officer. “VMware… announced a restructuring and realignment of approximately 800 roles,” a company spokesperson said in a press release Monday, “and plans to take a GAAP charge estimated to be between $55 million and $65 million related to this action over the course of the first half of 2016. The company plans to reinvest the associated savings in field, technical and support resources associated with growth products.” In a blog post ,  Christian Hammond , a former member of the Hosted UI team, reported the layoff, along with concerns about the future of the “award winning and profitable” desktop virtualization products. “VMware lost a lot of amazing people, and will be feeling that for some time to come, once they realize what they’ve done,” Hammond wrote. “It’s a shame. As for our team, well, I think everyone will do just fine. Some of the best companies in the Silicon Valley are full of ex-VMware members, many former Hosted UI, who would probably welcome the chance to work with their teammates again.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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VMware Fusion, Workstation team culled in company restructure

Verizon FiOS default speed now 50Mbps—double FCC’s broadband definition

(credit: bluepoint951 ) Despite claiming that the government’s definition of “broadband” shouldn’t have been increased to 25Mbps,Verizon is now phasing out its 25Mbps fiber service and making 50Mbps the default minimum. A year ago, the Federal Communications Commission voted to boost the definition of broadband from 4Mbps downstream/1Mbps upstream to 25Mbps/3Mbps. The definition affects policy decisions and the FCC’s annual assessment of whether broadband is being deployed to all Americans quickly enough. Verizon unsuccessfully lobbied the FCC to keep the old definition, saying that “a higher benchmark would serve no purpose in accurately assessing the availability of broadband.” Verizon still offers speeds as low as 512kbps downloads and 384kbps uploads  in areas where it hasn’t upgraded copper DSL lines to fiber. Verizon DSL goes up to 15Mbps/1Mbps, if you’re close enough to Verizon Internet facilities. Mayors in 14 East Coast cities including New York City  recently criticized Verizon for leaving many customers with copper only. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Verizon FiOS default speed now 50Mbps—double FCC’s broadband definition

Why the calorie is broken

(credit: Getty Images) Calories consumed minus calories burned—it’s the simple formula for weight loss or gain, but dieters often find that it doesn’t work. Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley of Gastropod investigate for Mosaic science , where this story first appeared . It’s republished here under a Creative Commons license. “For me, a calorie is a unit of measurement that’s a real pain in the rear.” Bo Nash is 38. He lives in Arlington, Texas, where he’s a technology director for a textbook publisher. He has a wife and child. And he’s 5’10” and 245 lbs—which means he is classed as obese. Read 44 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Why the calorie is broken

Doctor Who gets lengthy sabbatical as showrunner Steven Moffat quits

Doctor Who fans prepare to be bitterly disappointed: you won’t be getting your timey-wimey fix this year, because season 10 won’t hit our screens until 2017, the BBC has confirmed. The reason? Long-running showrunner Steven Moffat has run out of puff. He will pass the baton (OK, Sonic Screwdriver) to Chris Chibnall—the creator of ITV’s gripping whodunnit, Broadchurch —who will take over the iconic British sci-fi drama at the start of season 11. The BBC, which fiendishly buried this news late on Friday night in the hope that no-one would notice, has promised a Christmas Day special, but that will be the first and only time a new episode of the much-loved show will appear on the TV this year. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Doctor Who gets lengthy sabbatical as showrunner Steven Moffat quits

After FBI briefly ran Tor-hidden child-porn site, investigations went global

(credit: Andrew ) In 2015, the FBI seized a Tor-hidden child-porn website known as Playpen and allowed it to run for 13 days so that the FBI could deploy malware in order to identify and prosecute the website’s users. That malware, known in FBI-speak as a “network investigative technique,” was authorized by a federal court in Virginia in February 2015. In a new revelation, Vice Motherboard has now determined that this operation had much wider berth. The FBI’s Playpen operation was effectively transformed into a global one, reaching Turkey, Colombia, and Greece, among others. Motherboard’s Joseph Cox wrote on Twitter on Friday that he was able to find a document describing this infiltration as something called “Operation Pacifier” by using creative “Google-fu.” Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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After FBI briefly ran Tor-hidden child-porn site, investigations went global

Media devices sold to feds have hidden backdoor with sniffing functions

(credit: AMX) A company that supplies audio-visual and building control equipment to the US Army, the White House, and other security-conscious organizations built a deliberately concealed backdoor into dozens of its products that could possibly be used to hack or spy on users, security researchers said. Members of Australia-based security firm SEC Consult said they discovered the backdoor after analyzing the AMX NX-1200 , a programmable device used to control AV and building systems. The researchers first became suspicious after encountering a function called “setUpSubtleUserAccount” that added an highly privileged account with a hard-coded password to the list of users authorized to log in. Unlike most other accounts, this one had the ability to capture data packets flowing between the device and the network it’s connected to. “Someone with knowledge of the backdoor could completely reconfigure and take over the device and due to the highest privileges also start sniffing attacks within the network segment,” SEC Consult researcher Johannes Greil told Ars. “We did not see any personal data on the device itself, besides other user accounts which could be cracked for further attacks.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Media devices sold to feds have hidden backdoor with sniffing functions

Skylake users given 18 months to upgrade to Windows 10

Intel Skylake die shot. (credit: Intel) If you own a system with an Intel 6th generation Core processor—more memorably known as Skylake—and run Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, you’ll have to think about upgrading to Windows 10 within the next 18 months. Microsoft announced today that after July 17, 2017, only the “most critical” security fixes will be released for those platforms and those fixes will only be made available if they don’t “risk the reliability or compatibility” of Windows 7 and 8.1 on other (non-Skylake) systems. The full range of compatibility and security fixes will be published for non-Skylake machines for Windows 7 until January 14 2020, and for Windows 8.1 until January 10 2023. Next generation processors, including Intel’s ” Kaby Lake “, Qualcomm’s 8996 ( branded as Snapdragon 820 ), and AMD’s “Bristol Ridge” APUs (which will use the company’s Excavator architecture, not its brand new Zen arch) will only be supported on Windows 10. Going forward, the company says that using the latest generation processors will always require the latest generation operating system. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Skylake users given 18 months to upgrade to Windows 10

Security firm sued for filing “woefully inadequate” forensics report

(credit: ErrantX ) A Las Vegas-based casino operator has sued security firm Trustwave for conducting an allegedly “woefully inadequate” forensics investigation that missed key details of a network breach and allowed credit card thieves to maintain their foothold during the course of the two-and-a-half month investigation. In a legal complaint filed in federal court in Las Vegas, Affinity Gaming said it hired Trustwave in October 2013 to investigate and contain a network breach that allowed attackers to obtain customers’ credit card data. In mid January 2014, Trustwave submitted a report required under payment card industry security rules on all merchants who accept major credit cards. In the PCI forensics report, Trustwave said it had identified the source of the data breach and had contained the malware responsible for it. More than a year later after Affinity was hit by a second credit card breach, the casino operator allegedly learned from Trustwave competitor Mandiant that the malware had never been fully removed. According to the December, 2015 complaint : Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Rightscorp agrees to pay $450,000 for illegal robocalls

(credit: SRU.edu ) Online copyright enforcer Rightscorp has agreed to pay $450,000 to end a lawsuit accusing the company of making illegal calls to cell phones. Morgan Pietz, an attorney who played a key role in bringing down Prenda Law, sued Rightscorp in 2014 , saying that the company’s efforts to get settlements from alleged pirates went too far. Rightscorp’s illegal “robocalls” violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), a 1991 law that limits how automated calling devices are used. The class-action lawsuit claimed that some Rightscorp targets were receiving one robocall on their cell phone per day. It’s generally illegal to have automated devices call cell phones. Earlier this week, Pietz and his co-counsel filed court papers outlining the settlement. Rightscorp will pay $450,000 into a settlement fund, which will be paid out to the 2,059 identified class members who received the allegedly illegal calls. Each class member who fills out an “affidavit of noninfringement” will receive up to $100. The rest of the fund will pay for costs of notice and claim administration (about $25,000) and attorneys’ fees and costs, which cannot exceed $330,000. Rightscorp will also “release any and all alleged claims” against the class members. The company had accused the 2,059 class members of committing 126,409 acts of copyright infringement. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Rightscorp agrees to pay $450,000 for illegal robocalls

Multi-gigabit cable modems ready to help you blow past your data cap

(credit: CableLabs ) Next-generation cable modems that can deliver multi-gigabit speeds have been certified by CableLabs, the cable industry’s research and development lab. The new modems use version 3.1 of DOCSIS (the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification), cable’s answer to fiber Internet speeds. The first DOCSIS 3.1 certifications were earned by Askey, Castlenet, Netgear, Technicolor, and Ubee Interactive, according to the announcement by CableLabs . The group’s testing confirms that the modems comply with the new DOCSIS spec. DOCSIS 3.1 reduces network latency and will enable “high-speed applications including Virtual and Augmented Reality, advanced video technologies such as Ultra High Definition 4K television, tele-existence and medical imaging, and gaming,” CableLabs said. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Multi-gigabit cable modems ready to help you blow past your data cap