Tag: brides-cond

US gov’t secures first-ever win against Android app pirates

The hacked Android Market apps of SnappzMarket and AppBucket. Archive.org On Monday, American prosecutors announced that two of the four men involved  with two Android piracy sites, snappzmarket.com and appbucket.net, have pleaded guilty to copyright infringement. The case marks the first time that US authorities have successfully prosecuted a case involving pirate app stores. The FBI shut down the sites listed above in August 2012 and filed charges against the quartet of men in January 2014. The two men, Nicholas Anthony Narbone, 26, of Orlando, Florida, and Thomas Allen Dye, 21, of Jacksonville, Florida, pleaded guilty to one count each of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. They are set to be sentenced in the coming months. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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US gov’t secures first-ever win against Android app pirates

Xbox One gamepads finally, unofficially supported on PC

Not seen here: the Xbox One controller’s USB port that hackers have finally bent to their will. We at Ars have argued about which next-gen video game controller is more comfortable , but what hasn’t been up for discussion is that we want to use both pads on our computers. Both have USB connections, after all, and we’ve been racking up controller-friendly PC games lately. But neither Microsoft nor Sony has released official drivers to get their newest controllers working via that connection. That’s a bit crazy, as Microsoft’s choice to officially support PC gaming using the 360 pad helped make it the de facto standard for non-mouse-and-keyboard play for computer gamers. With the Xbox One controller, on the other hand, we’ve had to go the seedy, indirect path, installing unofficial drivers while crossing our fingers. Shortly after its launch, DualShock 4 buyers lucked out with an unofficial PC patch, but Xbox One controller owners had their chance shot down after Microsoft asked hacker Chris Gallizi  to stop developing his own workaround . Thankfully, another hacker made his own attempt this month before conferring with Microsoft, meaning that Windows users can finally add next-gen pads to their PC arsenal. At this time, hacker  Lucas Assis’ patch is quite inelegant, even though it received an update last week that fixed issues with the controller’s triggers. You’ll need to install an unofficial driver and two applications (linked in the video tutorial above) before the controller will even work, and you’ll probably want to install the paid XPadder app afterward to enjoy full support for your Steam library. Many games we tested didn’t work without that latter addition tossed on top. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Xbox One gamepads finally, unofficially supported on PC

Verizon accused of refusing to fix broken landline phone service

Matt Reinbold Verizon has been accused of refusing to fix landline phone service in order to force customers onto Internet packages with voice service that may falter during power outages.The Utility Reform Network (TURN) filed an emergency motion ( PDF ) last week with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) that asked the agency to “order Verizon to repair the service of copper-based landline telephone customers who have requested repair or wish to retain the copper services they were cut off of,” TURN announced . The group accused Verizon of “deliberately neglecting the repair and maintenance of its copper network with the explicit goal of migrating basic telephone service customers who experience service problems.” Verizon spokesperson Jarryd Gonzales told Ars that these claims are “blatantly false.” “We have identified certain customers in fiber network areas who have had recurring repair issues over their copper-based service recently or clusters of customers in areas where we have had recurring copper-based infrastructure issues,” Gonzales wrote in an e-mail. “Moving them to our all-fiber network will improve the reliability of their service. When these customers contact us with a repair request, we suggest fiber as a repair option. If the customer agrees, we move their service from our copper to our all-fiber network. There is no charge for this work, and customers will pay the same rate for their service. Most customers recognize and appreciate the increased reliability of fiber and gladly agree to the move to fiber. Few customers across our service area have chosen to stay with copper and, once on fiber, few ask to return to copper.” Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Verizon accused of refusing to fix broken landline phone service

Spectacular fossil fern reveals Jurassic-era chromosomes

The internal tissues of the fossilized fern. Benjamin Bomfleur A violent death has led to a remarkably lucky preservation. Researchers in Sweden have discovered ferns that were buried suddenly in a volcanic eruption during the Jurassic period. The sudden burial has preserved stunning details of the fern, down to showing the plant’s chromosomes being separated during cell division. In fact, the details are sufficient to determine that its genome hasn’t undergone major changes in at least 180 million years. The fossil was found in a volcanic deposit in southern Sweden. It belongs to a group of plants called the royal ferns (technically, the Osmundaceae ). The group, which includes a number of different species, was already known as a bit of a living fossil, since some of its distinctive features have been seen on plants that are 220 million years old, and a variety of other fossil species look indistinguishable from modern forms. The samples themselves are simply stunning. Not only are the internal details of various plant tissues preserved, but internal details of individual cells have been preserved. These include cells at various stages of the cell division process; darker, dense material shows the chromosomes being split up between the two incipient daughter cells. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Spectacular fossil fern reveals Jurassic-era chromosomes

Oculus Rift “DK2” eyes-on: Finally, VR without the Ocu-latency

Calm down, Oculus DK2! Now’s not the time for fear. That comes later. Today’s announcement about the latest improved version of the Oculus Rift headset was good news for virtual-reality geeks, but it came with two caveats. First, this still isn’t the final model meant for wide consumption, but rather a second stab at the headset’s development kit. And second, it won’t reach its intended, limited audience of developers until July of this year. That’s not soon enough for the GDC-attending contingent at Ars! After all, we’re already desperate to escape our current tech-conference reality, mostly comprising grumpy faced games industry professionals. Thus, gaming editor Kyle Orland and I grabbed our press laminates and hopped the giant Oculus Rift line,  Wayne’s World -style , to take the refreshed headsets for a spin—and grill company founder Palmer Luckey in the process. I have shoved my eyes into the original Oculus headset a few times now, which means that I have no patience for its largest failings: latency and refresh. The original responds just slowly enough to your head’s motions to feel detached, but worse, its tiny screens suffer from a slight frame refresh hitch. Couple those with a low-resolution screen pushed directly into your skull, and even first-person gaming freaks like myself can expect a one-way ticket to Headache Town. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Oculus Rift “DK2” eyes-on: Finally, VR without the Ocu-latency

New cache design speeds up processing time by 15%

Texas A&M Supercomputing Transistors keep getting smaller and smaller, enabling computer chip designers to develop faster computer chips. But no matter how fast the chip gets, moving data from one part of the machine to another still takes time. To date, chip designers have addressed this problem by placing small caches of local memory on or near the processor itself. Caches store the most frequently used data for easy access. But the days of a cache serving a single processor (or core) are over, making management of cache a nontrivial challenge. Additionally, cores typically have to share data, so the physical layout of the communication network connecting the cores needs to be considered, too. Researchers at MIT and the University of Connecticut have now developed a set of new “rules” for cache management on multicore chips. Simulation results have shown that the rules significantly improve chip performance while simultaneously reducing the energy consumption. The researcher’s first paper, presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Computer Architecture, reported gains (on average) of 15 percent in execution time and 25 percent energy savings. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New cache design speeds up processing time by 15%

10,000 Linux servers hit by malware serving tsunami of spam and exploits

Researchers have documented an ongoing criminal operation infecting more than 10,000 Unix and Linux servers with malware that sends spam and redirects end users to malicious Web pages. Windigo, as the attack campaign has been dubbed, has been active since 2011 and has compromised systems belonging to the Linux Foundation’s kernel.org and the developers of the cPanel Web hosting control panel, according to a detailed report published Tuesday by researchers from antivirus provider Eset. During its 36-month run, Windigo has compromised more than 25,000 servers with robust malware that sends more than 35 million spam messages a day and exposes Windows-based Web visitors to drive-by malware attacks. It also feeds people running any type of computer banner ads for porn services. The Eset researchers, who have been instrumental in uncovering similar campaigns compromising large numbers of servers running the nginx, Lighttpd , and Apache Web servers, said the latest campaign has the potential to inflict significant harm on the Internet at large. They explained: Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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10,000 Linux servers hit by malware serving tsunami of spam and exploits

Sextortionist who hacked Miss Teen USA’s computer sentenced to 18 months

Andrew Cunningham The California computer science student who hacked various women’s computers for the purposes of “sextortion”—including Miss Teen USA 2013, Cassidy Wolf —has been sentenced to 18 months in prison. The sentence comes after Jared James Abrahams pleaded guilty to one count of computer hacking and three counts of extortion last November. According to a press release published Monday afternoon by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, Abrahams “used the nude photos to extort victims by threatening to publicly post the compromising photos or videos to the victims’ social media accounts—unless the victim either sent more nude photos or videos, or engaged in a Skype session with him and did what he said for five minutes.” As Ars Deputy Editor Nate Anderson wrote last year , Abrahams became decently adept at using remote administration tools (RATs), a malware used to spy on victims. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sextortionist who hacked Miss Teen USA’s computer sentenced to 18 months

Detection of primordial gravitational waves announced

The BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) telescope at the South Pole, designed to measure polarized light from the early Universe. Steffen Richter When the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced a press conference for a “Major Discovery” (capital letters in the original e-mail) involving an unspecified experiment, rumors began to fly immediately.  By Friday afternoon, the rumors had coalesced around one particular observatory: the  BICEP  microwave telescope located at the South Pole.  Over the weekend, the chatter focused on a specific issue: polarization in the Cosmic Microwave Background left over from the Big Bang. With the start of the press conference, it’s now clear that we’ve detected the first direct evidence of the inflationary phase of the Big Bang, in which the Universe expanded rapidly in size. BICEP, the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization experiment, was built specifically to measure the polarization of light left over from the early Universe. This light, known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), encodes a lot of information about the physical state of the cosmos from its earliest moments. Most observatories (such as Planck and WMAP) have mapped temperature fluctuations in the CMB, which are essential for determining the contents of the Universe. Polarization is the orientation of the electric field of light, which conveys additional information not available from the temperature fluctuations. While much of CMB polarization is due to later density fluctuations that gave rise to galaxies, theory predicts that some of it came from primordial gravitational waves. Those waves are ripples in space-time left over from quantum fluctuations in the Universe’s earliest moments. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Detection of primordial gravitational waves announced

GitHub puts founder on leave, kicks wife out of office after harassment claim

GitHub’s staff. GitHub GitHub has placed one of its three cofounders on leave and barred the cofounder’s wife from the office while it investigates allegations made by a former employee. Engineer Julie Ann Horvath announced this past weekend that she had left GitHub, describing a toxic office culture in an e-mail interview with TechCrunch . The wife of the cofounder played a prominent role in Horvath’s account. Julie Ann Horvath. “I met her and almost immediately the conversation that I thought was supposed to be casual turned into something very inappropriate,” Horvath told TechCrunch. “She began telling me about how she informs her husband’s decision-making at GitHub, how I better not leave GitHub and write something bad about them, and how she had been told by her husband that she should intervene with my relationship to be sure I was ‘made very happy’ so that I wouldn’t quit and say something nasty about her husband’s company because ‘he had worked so hard.’” Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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GitHub puts founder on leave, kicks wife out of office after harassment claim