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NSA report shows China hacked 600+ US targets over 5 years

NBC has released a 2014 slide from a secret NSA Threat Operations Center (NTOC) briefing—a map that shows the locations of “every single successful computer intrusion” by Chinese state-sponsored hackers over a five-year period. Over 600 US businesses and institutions were breached during that period. The slide was provided to NBC by an unnamed “intelligence source,” who said the briefing “highlighted China’s interest in Google and defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, and in air traffic control systems… [and] catalogued the documents and data Chinese government hackers have exfiltrated,” the network reported. The report suggests that the NSA has been tracking Chinese cyber-attacks for years and that its own network surveillance of China gives the agency the ability to correlate those attacks with specific sources. The briefing shown to NBC listed locations for the sources of each of the “exploitations and attacks,” NBC reported. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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NSA report shows China hacked 600+ US targets over 5 years

Faster booting, smaller footprint make Windows 10 an easy upgrade for old PCs

A whole bunch of people are going to upgrade to Windows 10. Not everyone . But when you offer free Windows via a nag message delivered to over 80 percent of the user base, you’re going to attract people who wouldn’t have driven to MicroCenter to buy an upgrade DVD. Especially if you bought an eligible PC in Windows 7’s heyday, you will probably be installing the new OS on five- or six-year-old hardware that has long since been forgotten about by the company that sold it to you. Or maybe you bought something during the post-Chromebook era, where Windows PCs dipped back into netbook territory in their quest for a low price tag. We installed Windows 10 on a few of these kinds of systems to see what you can expect, at least if you’re comparing a clean install to a clean install. Current users of both Windows 7 and Windows 8 should expect to recover a few gigabytes of drive space, a few megabytes of system RAM, and a few precious seconds of boot time. Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Faster booting, smaller footprint make Windows 10 an easy upgrade for old PCs

Chrome tests “discarding” background tabs to save memory

How many tabs do you have open right now? I’m currently writing and researching this article, writing and researching another, longer article, listening to SoundCloud, and monitoring Ars chat, TweetDeck, and Parsely—so I’ve got 71 tabs open across my six monitors taking up 10GB of RAM. (I admit that I’m probably on the upper end of things.) I’m not using all of those tabs right now, but I do need them open—open tabs are my to-do list. The problem is that Chrome keeps all of these tabs up and running at 100% whether I’m using them or not. This is bad for memory usage and—if you’re running on a laptop—power usage. A new feature being tested in the nightly “Canary” version of Chrome seems like a boon for heavy tab users like me: it will “discard” tabs that aren’t being used when it encounters a low-memory situation. “Discarding” a tab doesn’t mean forcibly closing a tab, just suspending it and unloading it from memory. The tab itself would still be visible in the tab bar, but unloading it would save your computer the work of keeping it running. The feature has existed in Chrome OS for some time, but now it’s moving over to Windows and Mac OS, with a Linux implementation coming soon. Chrome has a tab ranking system, and it would automatically suspend your “least interesting” tabs when it hits a low-memory situation. A Chromium.org page lists the ranking system for tabs: Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Sony’s profits triple as PS4 sales reach 25 million units worldwide

Sony’s profits have more than tripled year-on-year in the April to June quarter ( PDF link ), thanks to strong sales of camera sensors and the PlayStation 4, which has now sold 25.3 million units globally to date. The company’s overall net profit rose to ¥82.4 billion yen (£425 million, $664 million), significantly surpassing market expectations. Sony moved three million PS4s during the quarter, while peripheral and software shipments also increased, leading to the division’s 12.1 percent increase in sales to ¥288.6 billion (£1.4 billion, $2.3 billion), and an operating profit of ¥19.5 billion (£100 million, $160 million). The PS4 has taken a significant lead in the console market, massively outselling the rival Xbox One and Nintendo Wii U, the latter of which has sold just 10 million units . Sony’s devices division—which makes the camera sensors in high-end phones from Samsung and Apple— continues to grow . The unit saw a 35.1 percent increase in sales to ¥237.9 billion (£1.2 billion, $2 billion). Sales to external customers—i.e., those high-end phone makers—increased 41.2 percent year-on-year. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

So far, WordPress denied 43% of DMCA takedown requests in 2015

This week WordPress released the latest edition of its recurring transparency report , revealing 43 percent of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests it received have been rejected in the first six months of 2015. It’s the lowest six-month period shown in the report, though it only dates back to 2014. However, WordPress said this headline figure would be even higher if it “counted suspended sites as rejected notices.” That change in calculation would bump the WordPress DMCA denial rate to 67 percent between January 1 and June 30, 2015. In total, the publishing platform received 4,679 DMCA takedown requests as of June 30, identifying 12 percent of those as “abusive.” The top three organizations submitting these requests were Web Sheriff, Audiolock, and InternetSecurities. “Not surprisingly, the list is dominated by third party take down services, many of whom use automated bots to identify copyrighted content and generate takedown notices,” WordPress noted. The company wrote at length about this practice in April, both explaining and condemning the general procedure. “These kind of automated systems scour the Web, firing off takedown notifications where unauthorized uses of material are found—so humans don’t have to,” WordPress wrote . “Sounds great in theory, but it doesn’t always work out as smoothly in practice. Much akin to some nightmare scenario from the Terminator , sometimes the bots turn on their creators.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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So far, WordPress denied 43% of DMCA takedown requests in 2015

Qualcomm quarterly profits plummet 47 percent year-over-year

Qualcomm, the world’s largest supplier of chips for mobile phones, is reeling after announcing a 47 percent drop in quarterly profit compared to the same period in 2014. On Wednesday, the San Diego-based firm said that it made $1.2 billion in net income during the third fiscal quarter of 2015, down from $2.2 billion a year ago. As a way to bounce back, the company also announced that it would be cutting 15 percent of its workforce, and would “significantly reduce [our] temporary workforce.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Qualcomm quarterly profits plummet 47 percent year-over-year

Heavy Rains Destroy Major Freeway Bridge In Southern California

Areas of Southern California saw rare summer thunderstorms this weekend, with rainfall that broke July records all over the state. So much rainfall, in fact, that flash flooding dislodged a bridge and collapsed a section of the 10 Freeway—the major east-west freeway that links Los Angeles and Phoenix. Read more…

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Heavy Rains Destroy Major Freeway Bridge In Southern California

Why Airplane Flights Are Taking Slightly Longer Every Year

In the future, hopping on a plane from LA to Honolulu might take a minute longer than it does today. You probably won’t miss that lost moment, but the airline industry will: The tiny additional flight time could amount to thousands of extra hours and millions of dollars of additional jet fuel each year. Read more…

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Why Airplane Flights Are Taking Slightly Longer Every Year

New iPod Touch’s A8 CPU running at 1.1GHz, includes 1GB of RAM

The new iPods that Apple announced this morning were outed a couple of weeks ago, but the insides of the new iPod Touch were still a surprise: Apple put an A8 in the new Touch, the same SoC that powers the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. The iPod Touch is quite a bit smaller than either iPhone, though, and preliminary benchmarks suggest that the chip’s speed has been reduced somewhat to keep the temperature down and the battery life up. Geekbench tests run by TechCrunch say the A8 in the Touch is running at about 1.1GHz, down from 1.3GHz in both iPhones. They also confirm that the A8 includes 1GB of RAM, the same amount as the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. The scores in that Geekbench run suggest that the slowed-down A8 is roughly equivalent to the 1.3GHz Apple A7 chip in the iPhone 5S , which if accurate still represents a substantial improvement over the A5 in the fifth-generation Touch (Primate Labs’ John Poole told us that he believes the listed clock speed to be accurate). What we don’t know is whether the GPU’s speed has been similarly reduced and how aggressively the A8 in the Touch will throttle its speed as it warms up. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New iPod Touch’s A8 CPU running at 1.1GHz, includes 1GB of RAM

Nintendo asks GitHub to make Javascript-based Game Boy emulator disappear

This week, GitHub posted a takedown notice it received from Nintendo of America’s legal representation. The Mario makers believe that a popular Javascript-based Game Boy Advance emulator hosting its source on GitHub violated the company’s copyright for the games involved. “Nintendo requests that GitHub, Inc., disable public access to the website at http://jsemu.github.io/gba/,” the letter reads. “This website provides access to unauthorized copies of Nintendo’s copyright-protected video games and videos making use of Nintendo’s copyrighted Pokémon characters and imagery in violation of Nintendo’s exclusive rights.” The takedown notice cites both the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and GitHub’s own ” Guide to Filing a DMCA Notice .” In total, Nintendo identified more than 20 games and two franchises ( Metroid and Pokémon ) with patents being infringed, and the individual titles run the gamut of popular ( Pokémon Silver and Gold ) to obscure (remember Golden Sun ?). The company requested GitHub immediately remove 32 unique URLs corresponding to various emulators. The notice denotes each individual patent and infringing URL, and the sites in question now deliver 404s. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Nintendo asks GitHub to make Javascript-based Game Boy emulator disappear

Ken May

Tag: california