Tag: brides-cond

Bethesda “pushing” against Xbox Live Gold fee for Elder Scrolls Online

So far, Bethesda Softworks (and parent company Zenimax Media) has bucked industry trends by planning a $15 per month subscription for its upcoming The Elder Scrolls Online , adding a bit of insult to injury by including a real-money shop for nonessential items . Now the company says it’s trying to get Microsoft to agree to waive the additional requirement of an Xbox Live Gold subscription for Xbox One players, though without much success so far. Microsoft currently requires a $60/year Xbox Live Gold account to play any and all online games on the system, even otherwise free-to-play titles like World of Tanks . Speaking to the UK’s official Xbox Magazine , though, Zenimax Online Creative Director Paul Sage says the company has “been in talks with Microsoft” about getting a waiver for The Elder Scrolls Online  since the game already has its own subscription fee. “[We’re] seeing whether or not there’s any room to change their minds about that, for folks who are only paying The Elder Scrolls Online and don’t want to pay for an Xbox Live Gold subscription, just to pay The Elder Scrolls Online , ” Sage said. So far Microsoft has been less than responsive to these concerns, reportedly answering, “that’s the way it works, ” but Sage promises that Bethesda will “keep on pushing” on the issue. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Bethesda “pushing” against Xbox Live Gold fee for Elder Scrolls Online

Amazon and Microsoft, beware—VMware cloud is more ambitious than we thought

vCloud Hybrid Service integrates with on-premises VMware deployments. VMware VMware today announced that vCloud Hybrid Service , its first public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud, will become generally available in September. That’s no surprise, as we already knew it was slated to go live this quarter. What is surprising is just how extensive the cloud will be. When first announced, vCloud Hybrid Service was described as infrastructure-as-a-service that integrates directly with VMware environments. Customers running lots of applications in-house on VMware infrastructure can use the cloud to expand their capacity without buying new hardware and manage both their on-premises and off-premises deployments as one. That’s still the core of vCloud Hybrid Service—but in addition to the more traditional infrastructure-as-a-service, VMware will also have a desktops-as-a-service offering, letting businesses deploy virtual desktops to employees without needing any new hardware in their own data centers. There will also be disaster recovery-as-a-service, letting customers automatically replicate applications and data to vCloud Hybrid Service instead of their own data centers. Finally, support for the open source distribution of Cloud Foundry and Pivotal’s deployment of Cloud Foundry  will let customers run a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) in vCloud Hybrid Service. Unlike IaaS, PaaS tends to be optimized for building and hosting applications without having to manage operating systems and virtual computing infrastructure. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Amazon and Microsoft, beware—VMware cloud is more ambitious than we thought

Google confirms critical Android crypto flaw used in $5,700 Bitcoin heist

William Ward Google developers have confirmed a cryptographic vulnerability in the Android operating system that researchers say could generate serious security glitches on hundreds of thousands of end user apps, many of them used to make Bitcoin transactions. This weakness in Android’s Java Cryptography Architecture is the root cause of a Bitcoin transaction that reportedly was exploited to pilfer about $5, 720 worth of bitcoins out of a digital wallet  last week. The disclosure, included in a blog post published Wednesday by Google security engineer Alex Klyubin, was the first official confirmation of the Android vulnerability since Ars and others  reported the incident  last weekend. Klyubin warned that other apps might also be compromised unless developers change the way they access so-called PRNGs, short for pseudo random number generators. “We have now determined that applications which use the Java Cryptography Architecture (JCA) for key generation, signing, or random number generation may not receive cryptographically strong values on Android devices due to improper initialization of the underlying PRNG, ” he wrote. “Applications that directly invoke the system-provided OpenSSL PRNG without explicit initialization on Android are also affected.” Apps that establish encrypted connections using the HttpClient and java.net classes aren’t vulnerable. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Google confirms critical Android crypto flaw used in $5,700 Bitcoin heist

Hyperloop—a theoretical, 760 mph transit system made of sun, air, and magnets

Concept sketches of the Hyperloop passenger capsules; note the air intake noses. Tesla Motors The proposed design for the “Hyperloop, ” an ultra-fast transit system that would run between San Francisco and Los Angeles, was revealed today on Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors website. Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, describes a system that moves pods under low pressure through a tube between the two cities following the I-5 freeway, all within a 56-page PDF document . The Hyperloop would consist of aluminum pods inside a set of two steel tubes, one for each direction of travel. These are connected at each terminus. The tubes would be positioned on top of pylons spaced 100 feet apart holding the tube 20 feet in the air, and the tube would be covered by solar arrays to generate its own power. Inside the tubes, the pods would carry people up to 760 miles per hour. The pods would each carry 28 passengers, departing every two minutes from either location (or every 30 seconds at peak times). So each pod would have about 23 miles between each other while traversing the tube. The transport capacity would therefore be about 840 passengers per hour. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Hyperloop—a theoretical, 760 mph transit system made of sun, air, and magnets

FBI director calls on private sector to man up, help with cyber threat

Robert Mueller, FBI Director, says Keith and John are his BFFs. FBI FBI Director Robert S. Mueller, CIA Director John Brennan, and National Security Agency (NSA) Director Gen. Keith Alexander shared the stage on August 8 at the International Conference on Cyber Security  (ICCS), an event cohosted by the FBI and Fordham University in New York. The three spoke on a panel about the future of cybersecurity. Mueller spoke about the Lulzec case and how the FBI caught Hector “Sabu” Monsegur , along with how it will deal with increasingly sophisticated hackers and cybercriminals. Key to the bureau’s success, he said, was “focusing on the individuals behind the keyboards”—with the help of the NSA, CIA, and private industry. “I do believe that in the future, the cyber threat will equal or even eclipse the terrorist threat, ” Mueller said in his opening remarks. “And just as partnerships have enabled us to address the terrorist threat, partnerships will enable us to address the cyber threat. But the array of partners critical to defeating the cyber threat is different. In this case, the private sector is the essential partner.” Getting into hackers’ heads “In the years to come, we will encounter new intrusion methods, hacking techniques, and other unpleasant surprises, ” Mueller said in his prepared remarks for the panel. “And in response, our nation will continue to develop—as we must—the technical skills and tools to prevent these intrusions and limit their damage.” Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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FBI director calls on private sector to man up, help with cyber threat

Mobile startup offers unprecedented plan: 500MB of data, free incoming calls

On Tuesday, the American mobile phone market took one step closer to looking a bit more like the European or Asian markets: free incoming calls, inexpensive outgoing calls, and a focus on data. A Canadian startup, TextNow , just launched a new mobile service in the United States. For $18.99 per month, you get 500MB of data, 750 rollover minutes, and unlimited texting and incoming calls. In the US, it’s the norm for both the sending and receiving parties to be charged for a call. But nearly everywhere else in the world, only the person who originated the call actually pays. “Incoming calls don’t really cost us that much, ” Derek Ting, the company’s CEO, told Ars. “Carriers charge you anyway because they can get away with it.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Mobile startup offers unprecedented plan: 500MB of data, free incoming calls

Update: Researchers say Tor-targeted malware phoned home to NSA

A search reveals the address used in an attack on Tor users’ privacy referenced an IP address belonging to the NSA, routed through SAIC. Malware planted on the servers of Freedom Hosting — the “hidden service” hosting provider on the Tor anonymized network brought down late last week—may have de-anonymized visitors to the sites running on that service. This issue could send identifying information about site visitors to an Internet Protocol address that was hard-coded into the script the malware injected into browsers. And it appears the IP address in question belongs to the National Security Agency (NSA). This revelation comes from analysis done collaboratively by Baneki Privacy Labs , a collective of Internet security researchers, and VPN provider Cryptocloud . When the IP address was uncovered in the JavaScript exploit —which specifically targets Firefox Long-Term Support version 17, the version included in Tor Browser Bundle—a source at Baneki told Ars that he and others reached out to the malware and security community to help identify the source. The exploit attacked a vulnerability in the Windows version of the Firefox Extended Support Release  17 browser —the one used previously in the Tor Project’s Tor Browser Bundle (TBB).  That vulnerability had been patched by Mozilla in June, and the updated browser is now part of TBB. But the TBB configuration of Firefox doesn’t include automatic security updates, so users of the bundle would not have been protected if they had not recently upgraded. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Update: Researchers say Tor-targeted malware phoned home to NSA

Alleged Tor hidden service operator busted for child porn distribution

Catherine Scott On Friday, Eric Eoin Marques, a 28 year-old Dublin resident, was arrested on a warrant from the US on charges that he is, in the words of a FBI agent to an Irish court , “the largest facilitator of child porn on the planet.” The arrest coincides with the disappearance of a vast number of ” hidden services ” hosted on Tor, the anonymizing encrypted network. Marques is alleged to be the founder of Freedom Hosting, a major hidden services hosting provider. While Marques’ connection to Freedom Hosting was not brought up in court, he has been widely connected to the service—as well as the Tormail anonymized e-mail service and a Bitcoin exchange and escrow service called Onionbank—in discussions on Tor-based news and Wiki sites. All those services are now offline. And prior to disappearing, the sites hosted by Freedom Hosting were also distributing malware that may have been used to expose the users of those services. Tor hidden services are a lesser known part of the Tor “darknet.” They are anonymized Web sites, mail hosts, and other services which can only be reached by computers connected to Tor, or through a Tor hidden services proxy website, such as tor2web.org , and they have host names ending in .onion. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Alleged Tor hidden service operator busted for child porn distribution

University of California to allow open access to new academic papers

The University of California—an enormous institution that encompasses 10 campuses and over 8, 000 faculty members— introduced an Open Access Policy late last week. This policy grants the UC a license to its faculty’s work by default, and requires them to provide the UC with copy of their peer-reviewed papers on the paper’s publication date. The UC then posts the paper online to eScholarship , its open access publishing site, where the paper will be available to anyone, free of charge. Making the open access license automatic for its faculty leverages the power of the institution—which publishes over 40, 000 scholarly papers a year—against the power of publishers who would otherwise lock content behind a paywall. “It is much harder for individuals to negotiate these rights on an individual basis than to assert them collectively, ” writes the UC. “By making a blanket policy, individual faculty benefit from membership in the policy-making group, without suffering negative consequences. Faculty retain both the individual right to determine the fate of their work, and the benefit of making a collective commitment to open access.” Faculty members will be allowed to opt out of the scheme if necessary—if they have a prior contract with a journal, for example. Academic papers published in traditional journals before the enactment of this policy will not be made available on eScholarship at this time. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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University of California to allow open access to new academic papers

Older iPhones won’t be banned as Obama Administration vetoes ITC decision

On Saturday, the Obama Administration vetoed the International Trade Commission’s potential ban on a few models of older Apple phones and tablets. Samsung opened the case against Apple with the ITC in 2011, and the commission decided in June that Apple had, in fact, infringed upon a Samsung patent, US Patent No 7, 706, 348 . The decision garnered attention because the patent is considered essential to industry standards, meaning Samsung is required to license the patent (rather than sit on it, or refuse license it to some competitors). The ITC ended up recommending a ban be placed on the infringing products brought forward in the case, which included AT&T models of the iPhone 4, the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 3, iPad 3G, and iPad 2 3G. In June of 2013, Ars wrote  of the ITC’s ban: ”The decision can only be appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the nation’s top patent court. Theoretically, the President can also block an ITC-ordered import ban, but that hasn’t happened since the 1980s.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Older iPhones won’t be banned as Obama Administration vetoes ITC decision