Tag: california

Notorious BitTorrent tracker Demonoid back online, website still down

As of Monday, well-known BitTorrent tracker Demonoid is back online . Three months ago, the tenacious tracker was chased out of its Ukrainian host, likely under pressure from American authorities. It may also have been driven offline due to a denial of service attack. According to the IP address linked to the tracker, the new host appears to be physically located in Hong Kong . The website, meanwhile, remains down. TorrentFreak points out that in previous closures, Demonoid’s tracker appeared before its website came back online, indicating that the site’s return may be coming soon. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Notorious BitTorrent tracker Demonoid back online, website still down

Kim Dotcom has new “Mega” domain, says this one won’t be shut down

After the government of Gabon shut down his Me.ga domain , Kim Dotcom needed a new country to let him host the domain that will be home to the successor of file-sharing site Megaupload. That country will be New Zealand, as Dotcom is now the owner of Mega.co.nz . The exact same site that was originally hosted at Me.ga can now be found at the New Zealand domain. On Twitter, Dotcom announced “New Zealand will be the home of our new website: http://Mega.co.nz – Powered by legality and protected by the law.” When Gabon shut down Me.ga, Dotcom blamed “the reach of the US and Vivendi,” as the Me.ga domain was provided by Gabon Telecom, a subsidiary of the Vivendi entertainment company. Although New Zealand police raided Dotcom’s house 10 months ago because of criminal copyright charges filed against him in the US, he seems confident that New Zealand won’t shut down the domain itself. Ultimately, getting a domain will probably be among the least challenging aspects of running Mega, which is expected to launch in January. But Dotcom has a plan for that too. To avoid copyright charges, Dotcom promises Mega “encrypts and decrypts your data transparently in your browser, on the fly,” and that the encryption keys are only controlled by the user, not Mega. And to avoid the reach of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Dotcom plans to run his servers with hosting services outside the US. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Kim Dotcom has new “Mega” domain, says this one won’t be shut down

Best of both worlds: Setting up Wi-Fi for iOS on 2.4 and 5GHz

For a while, it seemed that Wi-Fi was becoming a victim of its own success. In many cities, there are numerous active Wi-Fi networks on those preciously few non-overlapping channels—that’s in addition to microwaves, bluetooth, cordless phones, and baby monitors, which all share the 2.4GHz band. But since about 2007, Apple has also built support for 802.11n Wi-Fi on the 5GHz band into its computers and Airport line of Wi-Fi base stations. Now, the iPhone 5 and the latest iPod touch also have that support. (The iPad has had it since day one.) So, how do you set up a Wi-Fi network that makes the most of this confluence of Wi-Fi bands? Not created equal First of all, it’s important to realize that the two bands are created very differently. The 2.4GHz band suffers from lack of non-overlapping channels and interference from other devices. But the lower frequencies pass through walls and floors reasonably well. The 5GHz band on the other hand, has a much larger number of channels—and they don’t overlap—but the higher frequencies have reduced range, even in open air. In addition to this, Apple only supports using two channels as a single, double-speed wide channel in the 5GHz band. If all else is equal, 5GHz is twice as fast as 2.4GHz. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Best of both worlds: Setting up Wi-Fi for iOS on 2.4 and 5GHz

Judge blocks California’s new ban on anonymity for sex offenders

ax2groin On Tuesday, voters in California overwhelmingly approved Proposition 35, which ratcheted up penalties for those convicted of sex crimes, including human trafficking. The proposition included a provision requiring registered sex offenders to disclose to law enforcement all of their Internet connections and online identities. On Wednesday, two of the 73,900 registered sex offenders in the state who would be affected by the law filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of these provisions. The two plaintiffs argued that forcing them to expose their online identities would violate their First Amendment right to speak anonymously. Their appeal is supported by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Late on Wednesday, Judge Thelton Henderson granted a temporary restraining order barring the law from going into effect until he had time to consider the plaintiffs’ constitutional arguments. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Judge blocks California’s new ban on anonymity for sex offenders

How Georgia doxed a Russian hacker (and why it matters)

Aurich Lawson On October 24, the country of Georgia took an unusual step: it posted to the Web a 27-page writeup  (PDF), in English, on how it has been under assault from a hacker allegedly based in Russia. The paper included details of the malware used, how it spread, and how it was controlled. Even more unusually, the Georgians released pictures of the alleged hacker—taken with his own webcam after the Georgians hacked the hacker with the help of the FBI and others. The story itself, which we covered briefly earlier this week , is fascinating, though it remains hard to authenticate and is relayed in a non-native English that makes for some tough reading. But what caught my eye about the whole cloak-and-dagger tale is the broader points it makes about hacking, jurisdiction, and the powerful surveillance devices that our computers have become. It’s also an example of how hacks and the alleged hackers behind them today play an increasing role in upping geopolitical suspicions between countries already wary of one another. Georgia and Russia have of course been at odds for years, and their conflict came to a head in a brief 2008 war; Russia still maintains a military presence in two tiny breakaway enclaves that Georgia claims as its own. Read 29 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How Georgia doxed a Russian hacker (and why it matters)

Facebook tries cloaking probe into data leak involving 1 million accounts

Facebook officials told a blogger to keep their discussions with him private as they investigate claims he acquired names and e-mail addresses belonging almost one million account holders for $5 through a publicly available service online. “Oh and by the way, you are not allowed to disclose any part of this conversation,” member’s of Facebook’s platform policy team said during a tape-recorded telephone conversation, according to a blog post published by Bogomil Shopov, who describes himself as a “community and technology geek” who lives in Prague, Czech Republic. “It is a secret that we are even having this conversation.” Shopov said Facebook officials set up the conversation after an earlier blog post claiming he purchased data for one million Facebook users online for just $5. The blogger said it was impossible for him to determine exactly how recent the data was, although several of the entries he checked contained accurate e-mail addresses for people he knew. In addition to containing names and e-mail addresses, the cache he purchased also contained profile IDs. In an e-mail to Ars, Shopov said he suspects the data came from a third-party developer. The website selling the information has since removed the post that advertised the data, but for the time being it’s still available in Google cache . Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Facebook tries cloaking probe into data leak involving 1 million accounts

Better on the inside: under the hood of Windows 8

Windows 8’s most obvious—and most divisive—new feature is its user interface . However, it would be a mistake to think that the user interface is the only thing that’s new in Windows 8: there’s a lot that’s changed behind the scenes, too. Just as is the case with the user interface, many of the improvements made to the Windows 8 core are motivated by Microsoft’s desire to transform Windows into an effective tablet operating system. Even those of us with no interest at all in tablets can stand to take advantage of these changes, however. For example, Windows 8 is more power efficient and uses less memory than Windows 7; while such work is critical to getting the software to run well on low-memory tablets with all-day battery life, it’s equally advantageous for laptop users. The biggest single piece of technology that is new to Windows 8 is, however, squarely Metro focused: it’s a large set of libraries and components called WinRT. I’ve already written extensively about what WinRT is, so I won’t be getting into that here, but there are system capabilities that WinRT apps can use (or are forced to use) that are interesting in their own right. Read 77 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Better on the inside: under the hood of Windows 8

IBM prepares for end of process shrinks with carbon nanotube transistors

Carbon nanotubes sit on top of features etched in silicon. IBM Research The shrinking size of features on modern processors is slowly approaching a limit where the wiring on chips will only be a few atoms across. As this point approaches, both making these features and controlling the flow of current through them becomes a serious challenge, one that bumps up against basic limits of materials. During my visit to IBM’s Watson Research Center, it was clear that people in the company is already thinking about what to do when they run into these limits. For at least some of them, the answer would involve a radical departure from traditional chipmaking approaches, swithching from traditional semiconductors to carbon nanotubes. And, while I was there, the team was preparing a paper (now released by Nature Nanotechnology ) that would report some significant progress: a chip with 10,000 working transistors made from nanotubes, formed at a density that’s two orders of magnitude higher than any previously reported effort. During my visit to Watson, I spoke with George Tulevski, who is working on the nanotube project, and is one of the authors of the recent paper. Tulevski described nanotbues as a radical rethinking of how you build a chip. “Silicoon is a solid you carve down,” he told Ars, “while nanoubes are something you have to build up.” In other words, you can’t start with a sheet of nanotubes and etch them until you’re left with the wiring you want. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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IBM prepares for end of process shrinks with carbon nanotube transistors

Storage Spaces explained: a great feature, when it works

Windows Home Server was never a particularly popular product, but it did bring some interesting features to the table for the few who used it and became fans. One of these features was called Drive Extender, and its claim to fame was that it allowed users to pool their system’s hard drives so that they were seen by the operating system as one large hard drive. This obviated the need to keep track of the amount of free space across several disks, and it also allowed users to automatically mirror their data to multiple disks at once, keeping their files safe in the event of drive failure. Microsoft killed Drive Extender not long before pulling the plug on the Windows Home Server entirely , but the intent behind it lives on in Windows 8’s new Storage Spaces feature: “Storage Spaces is not intended to be a feature-by-feature replacement for that specialized solution,” wrote Microsoft’s Rajeev Nagar in a blog post introducing the feature, “but it does deliver on many of its core requirements.” In essence, Storage Spaces takes most of Drive Extender’s underlying functionality and implements it in a way that is more technically sound; early versions of Drive Extender sometimes corrupted data when copying files between drives and mangled file metadata, but the underlying filesystem improvements made to support Storage Spaces should make it much more robust, at least in theory. Read 40 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Storage Spaces explained: a great feature, when it works

$99 Raspberry Pi-sized “supercomputer” hits Kickstarter goal

A prototype of Parallella. The final version will be the size of a credit card. Adapteva A month ago, we told you about a chipmaker called Adapteva that turned to Kickstarter in a bid to build a new platform that would be the size of a Raspberry Pi and an alternative to expensive parallel computing platforms. Adapteva needed at least $750,000 to build what it is calling “Parallella”—and it has hit the goal. Today is the Kickstarter deadline, and the project is up to more than $830,000  with a few hours to go. ( UPDATE : The fundraiser hit $898,921 when time expired.) As a result, Adapteva will build 16-core boards capable of 26 gigaflops performance, costing $99 each. The board uses RISC cores capable of speeds of 1GHz each. There is also a dual-core ARM A9-based system-on-chip, with the 16-core RISC chips acting as a coprocessor to speed up tasks. Adapteva is well short of its stretch goal of $3 million, which would have resulted in a 64-core board hitting 90 gigaflops, and built using a more expensive 28-nanometer process rather than the 65-nanometer process used for the base model. The 64-core board would have cost $199. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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$99 Raspberry Pi-sized “supercomputer” hits Kickstarter goal