brides-cond – Page 45 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Samsung to launch first AMOLED-equipped tablets at June 12 event

Samsung We’ve previously talked about Samsung’s “flood the market” strategy for phones, but the company applies the same tactic to tablets, too. After releasing the Note 10.1 seven months ago and an entire line of NotePro and TabPro tablets in February, the company has announced yet another tablet event planned for June 12. According to the invite, this event is for the Samsung Galaxy Tab line. While it’s frankly getting harder and harder to try to nail down just what tablet goes where in the Samsung spectrum (which one is the flagship?) the Tabs are usually the mid-range/mainstream devices. This event location would suggest otherwise, though, as it’s being held in The Theater at Madison Square Garden, the former site of the NFL Draft. The event will even be livestreamed on Samsung’s YouTube channel . Rumor has it that this run of tablets will be the first to incorporate Samsung’s AMOLED displays. Samsung’s AMOLED manufacturing has so far not been up to the task of producing a panel large enough or cheaply enough to fit into a tablet, forcing the company’s older devices to use LCDs. Samsung’s AMOLED panels on phones are so mature that it’s difficult to tell the difference between them and LCD, so we aren’t sure how significant this change will be to consumers. The invite seems to confirm the change to AMOLED displays, which shows a top-down view of the new tablets with light gushing from the screen onto the colored background. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung to launch first AMOLED-equipped tablets at June 12 event

Microsoft sticking to its guns so far, leaving XP unpatched and exploited

Last month’s Patch Tuesday was meant to bring with it the final ever updates for Windows XP. However, Microsoft went ahead and released another patch for the ancient operating system to fix a flaw that was being exploited in the wild. This month’s Patch Tuesday looks like it’s going to play out a little differently. Microsoft released a critical update for Internet Explorer addressing a flaw in every version from 6 to 11. Although the company says that it’s aware of in-the-wild exploitations of the flaw, this time it says it won’t fix Windows XP. Promise . Of course, last month’s end of support should have meant the same thing, and for no particularly good reason, it didn’t. Microsoft cited the “proximity” of the previous flaw to the end of support as its rationale for issuing the update, but this month’s bugs seem barely less proximal. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft sticking to its guns so far, leaving XP unpatched and exploited

New planet-hunting hardware needs just a minute to image an exoplanet

PNAS Most of the exoplanets we’ve detected have been spotted during transits, when they pass between their host star and Earth. Almost all the others have been inferred based on the fact that they gravitationally tug at their host star as they orbit around it. Very few exoplanets have been imaged directly, but that may be about to change. Earlier this week, scientists revealed the first images taken with a new instrument, the Gemini Planet Hunter, which has been installed on the (you guessed it) Gemini South telescope located in the Chilean Andes. The new hardware is so efficient that a known exoplanet that once took over an hour and considerable post-processing to image was apparent in a one-minute exposure, with no processing needed. The twin Gemini telescopes (Gemini North is in Hawaii to image the northern sky) are already some of the most advanced hardware on the planet, featuring adaptive optics that correct the gaze of an eight-meter mirror. But directly imaging a planet is a distinct challenge due to the relative brightness of the planet relative to the host star. In terms of our own Solar System, Jupiter would appear 10 9 times fainter than the Sun when imaged at a distance. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

New Intel chipsets speed up your storage, but they’re missing new CPUs

The 9-series chipsets pile a few new features on top of the previous-generation 8-series chipsets. Intel Last year at around this time, Intel was releasing its brand-new Haswell CPU architecture and its 8-series chipsets out into the world for back-to-school season. About a year before that, it was doing the same for its Ivy Bridge architecture and 7-series chipsets. This year, we’re getting more new chipsets, but they aren’t coming with a new CPU architecture—just some mildly refreshed Haswell processors, some of which we’ve covered already . We’ll get to the new chipsets in a moment, but first let’s talk about the elephant in the room: Intel’s near-silence on the next-generation Broadwell CPUs. We’ve had a few snippets of information about the company’s next CPU architecture, but since announcing a delay late last year the company has said little on the issue. Mass production was supposed to ramp up in the first quarter of 2014, and that quarter has come and gone. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New Intel chipsets speed up your storage, but they’re missing new CPUs

Four weeks on, huge swaths of the Internet remain vulnerable to Heartbleed

Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock More than four weeks after the disclosure of the so-called Heartbleed bug found in a widely used cryptography package , slightly more or slightly less than half the systems affected by the catastrophic flaw remain vulnerable, according to two recently released estimates. A scan performed last month by Errata Security CEO Rob Graham found 615,268 servers that indicated they were vulnerable to attacks that could steal passwords, other types of login credentials, and even the extremely sensitive private encryption keys that allow attackers to impersonate websites or monitor encrypted traffic. On Thursday, the number stood at 318,239. Graham said his scans counted only servers running vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL crypto library that enabled the “Heartbeat” feature where the critical flaw resides. A separate scan using slightly different metrics arrived at an estimate that slightly less than half of the servers believed to be vulnerable in the days immediately following the Heartbleed disclosure remain susceptible. Using a tool the researcher yngve called TLS Prober, he found that 5.36 percent of all servers were vulnerable to Heartbleed as of April 11, four days after Heartbleed came to light. In a blog post published Wednesday , he said 2.33 percent of servers remained vulnerable. It’s important to remember the results don’t include the number of Heartbleed-vulnerable servers providing services such a virtual private networks or e-mail. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Four weeks on, huge swaths of the Internet remain vulnerable to Heartbleed

Epic announces crowdsourced dev model for next Unreal Tournament

It’s been a long six-and-a-half years since we’ve gotten a new Unreal Tournament game (not counting expansion packs), but today marks the beginning of the end for that wait. Epic announced that work on a new game, simply titled Unreal Tournament , begins today for PC, Mac, and Linux, and the process will heavily involve participation from the modding and player community from the get go. While a “small team of UT veterans” at Epic will be spearheading the development of the game, everything from design decisions to art direction will primarily “happen in the open, as a collaboration between Epic, UT fans, and [Unreal Engine 4] developers,” Epic says. The developers are inviting everyone from regular players to experienced modders from sites like Polycount to sign up at the Unreal Engine forums and use an official wiki to take direct part in driving the game’s direction. Already, mere minutes after the announcement, those forums are filled with players discussing everything from series maps and weapons they’d like to see return to things like VR headset compatibility. Epic says it will be “many months” until the game is in any sort of playable state, but when it is playable it “will be free. Not free to play, just free.” Source code will be made available directly from GitHub as it is updated, and modders will even be able to fork their own builds if they want to take the project in a new direction. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Epic announces crowdsourced dev model for next Unreal Tournament

Intel and Google boast 11-hour battery life with upcoming Chromebooks

Intel Intel Intel likes Chrome OS. Need proof? The company is apparently the number-two contributor to the operating system’s code after Google itself. Intel and Google also co-hosted a small event in San Francisco today, intended to highlight Intel’s commitment to Chrome OS and the number of PC OEMs that are shipping Intel-equipped Chromebooks. Many of Intel and Google’s announcements were about products we already knew about: there’s a multi-colored HP Chromebox coming in June for an as-yet-undisclosed price, and LG’s Chromebase all-in-one will be here later this month for $349. Both Acer and Dell are also tweaking their existing 11-inch Chromebooks, providing a faster Core i3 CPU option to complement the lower-end Celeron offerings. The Acer version will cost $349 when it launches later in the summer, while the Dell model will ship later in the year. Intel and Google started by telling us more about Chrome devices we’ve already met. Intel The truly new Chromebooks announced at the presentation used Intel’s Bay Trail platform rather than the more common Haswell chips. These gadgets share a number of characteristics: like the ARM Chromebooks we’ve seen so far, they’re fanless. Intel says they’ll run for “up to” 11 hours, compared to around 10 hours for Haswell designs, and they’ll include Intel’s 802.11ac Wi-Fi adapters instead of the single- and dual-band 802.11n adapters most current Chromebooks use. Bay Trail Chromebooks are going to give up a significant amount of CPU and GPU performance compared to even the slowest Haswell chips, but the other benefits may outweigh that hit. Bay Trail comes to Chromebooks. Intel Asus, Acer, Toshiba, and Lenovo will be the first PC OEMs to ship Bay Trail-based Chromebooks, not counting a basic education-focused reference design that Intel showed off during the presentation. Asus is offering both 11-inch (C200) and 13-inch (C300) Bay Trail Chromebooks with dual-core Bay Trail Celeron chips (the N2830 , to be exact), 2GB of RAM, 16GB of solid-state storage, 1366×768 displays, and 802.11ac. The 11-inch model weighs 2.5 pounds, while the 13-inch model is 3.1 pounds, and the lineup will reportedly start at $250 . The Toshiba and Acer models weren’t shown, and we don’t yet know anything about specific specifications, pricing, or availability for either of them. Lenovo’s Chromebooks are a little more intriguing . The company is offering two models, the N20 and the N20p. Both use 11.6-inch 1366×768 displays, quad-core Bay Trail Celeron chips, 2GB or 4GB of RAM, 16GB of solid-state storage, and about eight hours of battery life. The difference between the two is that the N20p integrates a Yoga-like flexible hinge and a touchscreen that can be flipped backward (though it won’t sit flush against the bottom of the laptop like the regular Yogas will). The standard N20 will start at $279 when it’s available in July, and the N20p will start at $329 in August. The event also played up Chrome OS’ momentum in the marketplace, though no one who spoke used specific sales numbers. They chose instead to focus on other metrics—that seven of the top 20 best-selling laptops on Amazon are Chromebooks, that the Asus Chromebox has been the best-selling desktop on Amazon since it was introduced, and that Amazon customer reviews on these devices are generally favorable. Eight major PC OEMs are now selling Chrome OS devices, and they’re available in 20 countries (with nine more countries to follow). Chromebooks were initially available from just two PC OEMs, but six more have since joined them. Intel The Q&A session with representatives from Acer, Lenovo, Dell, and Google yielded few substantive answers to the most interesting questions. Can we expect a Chrome OS tablet, as has occasionally been rumored ? Are any of the OEMs planning to build a machine more like the Chromebook Pixel and less like a netbook? What about Chromebooks with larger screens since most of the current crop includes 11.6-inch panels? The reps would only give some version of “we’re always evaluating new form factors” before moving on. Even if the computers highlighted and announced today aren’t mind-blowing individually, the breadth and variety of the Chrome OS ecosystem as a whole has become quite impressive in the last two years. There’s still a conspicuous gap between the Acer C720 and HP Chromebook 11 at the bottom of the laptop pile and the Chromebook Pixel at the top of it, but as of this summer Chrome OS will come in pretty much any form factor you could want. In 2011 all we had were a couple of lackluster netbooks that retailed for $499 . Now you can even grab touch-enabled laptops, mini desktops, and all-in-ones for well below that price. All we need to do is wait another couple of years to see whether this is the birth of a vibrant new post-PC ecosystem or a netbook-style gold rush. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Intel and Google boast 11-hour battery life with upcoming Chromebooks

Level 3 claims six ISPs dropping packets every day over money disputes

Network operator Level 3, which has asked the FCC to protect it from ” arbitrary access charges ” that ISPs want in exchange for accepting Internet traffic, today claimed that six consumer broadband providers have allowed a state of “permanent congestion” by refusing to upgrade peering connections for the past year. Level 3 and Cogent, another network operator, have been involved in disputes with ISPs over whether they should pay for the right to send them traffic. ISPs have demanded payment in exchange for accepting streaming video and other data that is passed from the network providers to ISPs and eventually to consumers. When the interconnections aren’t upgraded, it can lead to congestion and dropped packets, as we wrote previously regarding a dispute between Cogent and Verizon . In a blog post today , Level 3 VP Mark Taylor wrote: Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Level 3 claims six ISPs dropping packets every day over money disputes

Infecting DVRs with Bitcoin-mining malware even easier than you suspected

The dialog that appears when users want to manually change the default password on their EPCOM Hikvision S04 DVR. Sans Institute It took just one day for a low-end, Internet-connected digital video recorder to become infected with malware that surreptitiously mined Bitcoins on behalf of the quick-moving attackers. The feat, documented in a blog post published Monday by researchers at the security-training outfit Sans Institute, was all the more impressive because the DVR contained no interface for downloading software from the Internet. The lack of a Wget , ftp, or kermit application posed little challenge for the attackers. To work around the limitation, the miscreants used a series of Unix commands that effectively uploaded and executed a Wget package and then used it to retrieve the Bitcoin miner from an Internet-connected server. Monday’s observations from Sans CTO Johannes Ullrich are part of an ongoing series showing the increasing vulnerability of Internet-connected appliances to malware attacks. In this case, he bought an EPCOM Hikvision S04 DVR off eBay, put it into what he believes was its factory new condition, and connected it to a laboratory “honeypot” where it was susceptible to online attackers. In the first day, it was probed by 13 different IP addresses, six of which were able to log into it using the default username and password combination of “root” and “12345.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Infecting DVRs with Bitcoin-mining malware even easier than you suspected

Fitbit designer calls Project Ara the “IKEA chair” of smartphones

Magnets, how do they work? Google’s eventual, modular Project Ara smartphone will answer that question and more once its first “millions of units” ship in 2015’s first half. Project Ara To some extent, Gadi Amit, the tech-design guru who owns New Deal Design and helms the team behind devices like Fitbit, is letting go. His latest project forced him to. It’s called Project Ara , a smartphone concept that began as a Motorola product before Google bought the company. Project Ara strays from Amit’s string of simple, elegant, self-contained products. This phone is not like a fitness band or a more efficient camera; it doesn’t solve a single, immediate goal and then step out of the way. Rather, Project Ara demands experimentation and customization, forcing everyone outside of the Project Ara team to become the phone’s designers. In Amit’s eyes, especially in the modern phone era, that has become the point. The mission, even. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Fitbit designer calls Project Ara the “IKEA chair” of smartphones