brides-cond – Page 6 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Next-gen Ultra HD Blu-ray discs probably won’t be cracked for a while

DVDFab, a software tool for ripping and decrypting DVDs and Blu-ray discs, will not be upgraded to support newer Ultra HD (4K) Blu-ray discs. Fengtao Software, which makes DVDFab, said in a statement that it “will not decrypt or circumvent AACS 2.0 in the days to come. This is in accordance with AACS-LA, (which has not made public the specifications for AACS 2.0), the BDA [Blu-ray Disc Association] and the movie studios.” AACS-LA is the body that develops and licenses the Blu-ray DRM system. Curiously, Fengtao’s announcement comes just a day after SlySoft—the company that makes the ripping tool AnyDVD—ceased operations and vanished from the Web . All that’s left is a cryptic message on SlySoft’s website: “Due to recent regulatory requirements we have had to cease all activities relating to SlySoft Inc.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View original post here:
Next-gen Ultra HD Blu-ray discs probably won’t be cracked for a while

Report: Siri for Mac will be one of OS X 10.12’s major new features

(credit: Apple) Apple’s Siri personal assistant will finally be coming to OS X 10.12 when the OS is released later this year, according to a report from 9to5Mac . According to the report, a Siri icon will live in the menu bar in the upper-right corner of the screen along with icons for Spotlight, the Notification Center, and other features. Users will also be able to use a keyboard shortcut to bring up Siri, which will be an optional feature that can be enabled during first-time setup or in System Preferences (much as it works in iOS today). Microsoft’s Cortana feature made a similar jump from Windows Phone 8.1 to Windows 10 last year, and Google supports its “OK Google” voice commands in Chrome OS as well. Since launching on the iPhone 4S in 2011, Siri has become a mainstay in most of Apple’s products; it spread to the iPad relatively quickly, it came to the Apple TV when it was refreshed last year, and it’s a primary input method for the Apple Watch. OS X already supports an optional Dictation feature for turning speech into text—in other words, the feature is a natural and long-awaited addition to the Mac platform. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

More:
Report: Siri for Mac will be one of OS X 10.12’s major new features

Microsoft kills off Qik, the video messaging service you didn’t know it had

Playing back a conversation, on the Windows Phone version. You’ll be forgiven for having forgotten about Skype Qik, the short video messaging service from Skype that Microsoft launched in October 2014. It offered low friction messaging—no need to create an account, merely having a phone number would do—similar to WhatsApp, SMS, or all sorts of other popular messaging services. Well, now it’s going away. The company says that the major features of Qik have been rolled into the regular Skype apps; video messaging already existed in Skype when Qik was released, and filters were added in October last year. As such, the app isn’t really needed any more, and Qik will stop working on March 24. Skype Qik was a successor to a short video messaging service called Qik that Skype bought in January 2011 for $150 million, just months before Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion. The original Qik service was built around capturing video messages and sharing them with others. It was closed down in April 2014, as Skype introduced its own integrated video messaging capability. In that context, the new Skype Qik was a little strange, as it overlapped strongly with both the previously shuttered service, and the newly-added Skype capabilities. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View original post here:
Microsoft kills off Qik, the video messaging service you didn’t know it had

Valve releases tool to test whether your PC is VR ready

(credit: Valve ) With HTC beginning to take pre-orders for the SteamVR-powered Vive headset in just one week, you may well be wondering if your PC tower is up for running high-end VR without any distracting lag. Worry not: Valve has just released a SteamVR Performance Test Tool to determine whether you are technologically ready to shell out $799 for an HTC Vive . Unlike Oculus’ own Rift Compatibility Tool , which just seems to check your PC parts against a list without actually running a diagnostic, Valve’s tool takes a few minutes to run through a small, non-interactive animation of a GLaDOS robot repair facility. The goal is to “determine whether your system is capable of running VR content at 90fps and whether VR content can tune the visual fidelity up to the recommended level,” according to a Valve blog post . Afterwards, the tool gives an average fidelity rating (on a numerical and Low/Medium/High/Very High scale). It also tells you what percentage of tested frames dipped below the recommended 90 fps for a smooth VR experience and whether any of those frames were bound by the CPU, rather than the GPU. The tool does warn that “the varying CPU cost of positional tracking and processing-intensive applications” could mean actual software runs worse than the test would suggest and warns that it doesn’t test for available USB slots either. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See the article here:
Valve releases tool to test whether your PC is VR ready

Linux Mint hit by malware infection on its website, forum after hack attack

(credit: Wired UK/Shuttershock) Linux Mint forum users, and anyone who downloaded and installed a copy of the 17.3 Cinnamon edition on Saturday have probably been compromised by hackers and need to take action immediately, the distro’s creator has warned. Clem Lefebvre, confirmed in a blog post that the “intrusion” had taken place over the weekend. He said: “Hackers made a modified Linux Mint ISO, with a backdoor in it, and managed to hack our website to point to it.” He added that the resultant malware infection had only affected ISOs downloaded from the Linux Mint site on Saturday, February 20. “As far as we know, the only compromised edition was Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon edition,” Lefebvre said. However, by Sunday it was a different story , with Linux Mint confirming that its forums database had also been targeted in the hack of its systems. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Remains at a Swedish fort tell a story of bloody Iron Age warfare

A Roman coin found at the site of Sandby Borg, whose inhabitants probably included a number of unemployed Roman soldiers. (credit: Max Jahrehorn Oxides) On Öland, an icy island off the coast of Sweden, archaeologists have unearthed the remains of a 1,500-year-old fort whose inhabitants were brutalized in such an extreme way that legends about it persist to this day. As researchers piece together the fort’s final days, it sounds like they’re telling a horror story. Possibly hundreds of people sheltering behind the fort’s defenses were executed and abandoned, their bodies left to rot in place without burial. Their wounds were indicative of execution. And some of their mouths were stuffed with goat and sheep teeth, possibly a dark reference to the Roman tradition of burying warriors with coins in their mouths. None of their considerable wealth was looted, which is highly unusual. Researchers have found barely hidden valuables in every house they’ve excavated. Even the livestock was left behind after the slaughter, locked up to die of starvation. This is even more bizarre than the lack of looting. On an island with scarce resources, it would have been considered a waste for victors (or neighbors) to leave healthy horses and sheep behind after battle. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read the original:
Remains at a Swedish fort tell a story of bloody Iron Age warfare

Massive US-planned cyberattack against Iran went well beyond Stuxnet

(credit: Aurich Lawson) The Stuxnet computer worm that destroyed centrifuges inside Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment site was only one element of a much larger US-prepared cyberattack plan that targeted Iran’s air defenses, communications systems, and key parts of its power grid, according to articles published Tuesday. The contingency plan, known internally as Nitro Zeus, was intended to be carried out in the event that diplomatic efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear development program failed and the US was pulled into a war between Iran and Israel, according to an article published by The New York Times . At its height, planning for the program involved thousands of US military and intelligence personnel, tens of millions of dollars in expenditures, and the placing of electronic implants in Iranian computer networks to ensure the operation targeting critical infrastructure would work at a moment’s notice. Another piece of the plan involved using a computer worm to destroy computer systems at the Fordo nuclear enrichment site, which was built deep inside a mountain near the Iranian city of Qom. It had long been considered one of the hardest Iranian targets to disable and was intended to be a follow-up to “Olympic Games,” the code name of the plan Stuxnet fell under. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

More here:
Massive US-planned cyberattack against Iran went well beyond Stuxnet

Netflix finishes its massive migration to the Amazon cloud

(credit: Netflix) Netflix has been moving huge portions of its streaming operation to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for years now, and it says it has finally completed its giant shift to the cloud. “We are happy to report that in early January of 2016, after seven years of diligent effort, we have finally completed our cloud migration and shut down the last remaining data center bits used by our streaming service,” Netflix said in a blog post that it plans to publish at noon Eastern today. (The blog should go up at this link .) Netflix operates “many tens of thousands of servers and many tens of petabytes of storage” in the Amazon cloud, Netflix VP of cloud and platform engineering Yury Izrailevsky told Ars in an interview. Netflix had earlier planned to complete the shift by the end of last summer . Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See original article:
Netflix finishes its massive migration to the Amazon cloud

IRS website attack nets e-filing credentials for 101,000 taxpayers

The US Internal Revenue Service was the target of a malware attack that netted electronic tax-return credentials for 101,000 social security numbers, the agency disclosed Tuesday. Identity thieves made the haul by using taxpayers’ personal data that was stolen from a source outside the IRS, according to a statement . The attackers then used an automated bot against an application on the IRS website that provides personal identification numbers for the electronic filing of tax returns. In all, the hackers made unauthorized queries against 464,000 social security numbers but succeeded against only 101,000 of them. No personal information was obtained from the IRS systems. Agency officials are flagging the accounts of all affected taxpayers and plan to notify them by mail of the incident. The IRS is also working with other government agencies and industry partners to investigate the hack or stem its effects. The hack occurred last month. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

McDonald’s kale salad has more fat and calories than a double Big Mac

(credit: Tim Deering/Flickr ) In an effort to offer healthier menu items, McDonald’s has unveiled a new salad with a “nutrient-rich lettuce blend with baby kale,” shaved parmesan, and chicken (grilled or fried). Like many fast-food salads, it may seem like a healthy option at first, but it’s not. The salad, when paired with the restaurant’s Asiago Caesar Dressing, packs more fat, calories, and salt than a double Big Mac—that’s a sandwich with four beef patties. (credit: McDonald’s ) While the nutrition check on a McDonald’s item may not come as a shock, the unhealthy salad option falls into a bigger trend of restaurant meals—fast food or not, eating out is hard on your waistline and health. (credit: McDonald’s ) In one recent study, researchers found that 92 percent of large-chain, local-chain, and mom-and-pop restaurants served meals that exceeded the calorie intake for a healthy meal . The study included 364 meals from restaurants in three cities: Boston, San Francisco, and Little Rock, Arkansas. The meals covered American, Chinese, Greek, Indian, Italian, Japanese, Mexican, Thai, and Vietnamese-style cuisine. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See more here:
McDonald’s kale salad has more fat and calories than a double Big Mac