california – Page 61

Password cracking experts decipher elusive Equation Group crypto hash

Unraveling a mystery that eluded the researchers analyzing the highly advanced Equation Group the world learned about Monday, password crackers have deciphered a cryptographic hash buried in one of the hacking crew’s exploits. It’s Arabic for “unregistered.” Researchers for Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab spent more than two weeks trying to crack the MD5 hash using a computer that tried more than 300 billion plaintext guesses every second. After coming up empty-handed, they enlisted the help of password-cracking experts, both privately and on Twitter , in hopes they would do better. Password crackers Jens Steube and Philipp Schmidt spent only a few hours before figuring out the plaintext behind the hash e6d290a03b70cfa5d4451da444bdea39 was غير مسجل, which is Arabic for “unregistered”. The hex-encoded string for the same Arabic word is dbedd120e3d3cce1. “That was a shock when it popped up and said ‘cracked,'” Steube told Ars Monday evening. He is the developer behind the free Hashcat password-cracking programs and an expert in password cracking. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Samsung’s first 14nm SoC is a 64-bit, 8-core Exynos aimed at high-end phones

Samsung has just announced a new high-end Exynos 7 Octa SoC . It uses eight CPU cores—a combination of four high-end Cortex A57 cores and four low-end, power-saving Cortex A53 cores in a big.LITTLE configuration—and supports the 64-bit ARMv8 instruction set. However, its most significant new feature is Samsung’s new 14nm manufacturing process, which promises performance and power consumption improvements compared to the existing 20nm process. Samsung is already shipping eight-core 64-bit Exynos chips on its older 20nm process, most notably in the Galaxy Note Edge and some variants of the Galaxy Note 4. Compared to those chips, Samsung claims that the 14nm version “enables up to 20 percent faster speed, 35 percent less power consumption, and 30 percent productivity gain.” Those numbers don’t tell us much in terms of actual clock speeds or performance-per-watt numbers, but it’s safe to assume that the 14nm Exynos 7 will be able to run at higher clock speeds for longer while consuming less power. We don’t know anything about the new Exynos’ GPU yet. The 20nm Exynos 7 Octa uses a high-end Mail-T760 GPU from ARM, and we’ll probably see something similar in the 14nm version. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

More:
Samsung’s first 14nm SoC is a 64-bit, 8-core Exynos aimed at high-end phones

South American ice chemistry records rise of Incas, arrival of Spanish

Ice cores are often relied on to be natural archives of past climate, capturing information that predates both our measurements and our greenhouse gas emissions. They’re a way of having records of the natural world that we don’t have a history of. However, natural archives like these can also act as records of human history, either directly (via fossils or artifacts) or indirectly. In mountainous regions, glacial ice doesn’t go as deep into the past as in Greenland or Antarctica, but it can tell stories of the recent past with excellent resolution. Airborne pollutants, for example, stand out sharply in measurements of the ice. They don’t say “pure as the driven snow” for nothing. Not much of this kind of work has been done in South America, though. Some lake sediment archives have shown the influence of local mining, but the timeline was fuzzy. In a new study, a team led by Chiara Uglietti , now at Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute, has produced a detailed ice core record of air pollution from Peru’s Quelccaya Ice Cap that goes back to the year 793. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

More:
South American ice chemistry records rise of Incas, arrival of Spanish

Deaf group sues Harvard, MIT over online courses

The National Association for the Deaf (NAD) filed a lawsuit (PDF) against Harvard and MIT yesterday, saying the two universities are violating the Americans with Disabilities Act because they don’t properly caption their online course offerings. Harvard’s online courses aren’t really intended for students at the Ivy League university. Rather, the thousands of videos made available are part of the University’s “commitment to equity,” an effort “to create effective, accessible avenues for people who desire to learn but who may not have an opportunity to obtain a Harvard education.” The problem with Harvard’s offering, NAD lawyers say, is that it leaves out hard-of-hearing people. “Much of Harvard’s online content is either not captioned, or is inaccurately or unintelligibly captioned, making it inaccessible for individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing,” the complaint reads. “Just as buildings without ramps bar people who use wheelchairs, online content without captions excludes individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View post:
Deaf group sues Harvard, MIT over online courses

Apple increases the maximum size of iOS app binaries for the first time ever

For the first time since the introduction of the App Store in 2008 , Apple is increasing the maximum size of the app binaries that developers can upload to iTunes Connect. The company announced today that the cap would increase from 2GB to 4GB , though this doesn’t affect the 100MB limit imposed on apps downloaded on cellular networks. iOS app binaries contain both the executable file and all of the images, sounds, and other assets that the app needs—everything from icons to splash screens to UI is all included in one big file. Because of how they’re packaged, these binaries can get rather large. Binaries include all the assets for all the devices they support. If you’re shipping a universal app that supports all iOS 8 devices, for example, you’ve got Retina iPhone assets, Retina and non-Retina iPad assets, and special “3x” assets specifically for the iPhone 6 Plus (Apple’s got a table here ). Universal apps include all of those assets, and the binary you download from the App Store is the same whether you’ve got an old iPhone 4S or a brand-new iPad Air 2. If you’re running on an iPhone, for example, a universal binary will still contain assets for other iPhones and iPads, increasing the amount of space the app needs even though some of those extra assets aren’t needed for your device. Xcode 6 partially supports vector graphics to ease the developer burden of maintaining and generating all these assets, but they’re still stored as PNG files when the binary is built and uploaded. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

VESA publishes Embedded DisplayPort 1.4a standard that supports 8K displays

VESA, the standards body responsible for such luminary technologies as DisplayPort and the omnipresent VESA monitor mount, has published the specification for version 1.4a of Embedded DisplayPort (eDP). The new standard builds upon DisplayPort 1.3, which was published at the end of 2014. In short, eDP 1.4a allows for laptops, smartphones, tablets, and all-in-ones with 8K displays (7680×4320) or high-frequency (120Hz) 4K displays—but it includes a few other neat features, too. eDP 1.4a appears to be almost entirely based on DisplayPort 1.3—which was published in September 2014—with a couple of new features thrown in for good measure. eDP 1.4a specifies four high-speed (HBR3) lanes between the graphics adapter and display, with each lane capable of 8.1Gbps; the lanes can either be used individually, in pairs (more on that later), or all together for a total theoretical bandwidth of 32.4Gbps. That’s enough bandwidth to drive a 4K display (3840×2160) at 120Hz with 10-bit color or an 8K display at 60Hz. Beyond higher bandwidth, one of the more interesting features of eDP 1.4a is Direct Stream Compression (DSC), a standard developed by VESA and MIPI that—as the name implies—compresses the output video signal. According to VESA, the compression is “visually lossless” (i.e., it is lossy, but your games won’t suddenly look like a hand-me-down JPEG). VESA and MIPI say that DSC can reduce the component cost and power consumption of high-resolution displays—a claim that obviously needs to be confirmed once eDP 1.4a devices start shipping. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read this article:
VESA publishes Embedded DisplayPort 1.4a standard that supports 8K displays

15-year-old bug allows malicious code execution in all versions of Windows

Microsoft just patched a 15-year-old bug that in some cases allows attackers to take complete control of PCs running all supported versions of Windows. The critical vulnerability will remain unpatched in Windows 2003, leaving that version wide open for the remaining five months Microsoft pledged to continue supporting it. The flaw, which took Microsoft more than 12 months to fix, affects all users who connect to business, corporate, or government networks using the Active Directory service. The database is built into Windows and acts as a combination traffic cop and security guard, granting specific privileges to authorized users and mapping where on a local network various resources are available. The bug—which Microsoft classifies as MS15-011 and the researcher who first reported it calls Jasbug—allows attackers who are in a position to monitor traffic passing between the user and the Active Directory network to launch a man-in-the-middle exploit that executes malicious code on vulnerable machines. “All computers and devices that are members of a corporate Active Directory may be at risk,” warned a blog post published Tuesday by JAS Global Advisors, the firm that reported the bug to Microsoft in January 2014. “The vulnerability is remotely exploitable and may grant the attacker administrator-level privileges on the target machine/device. Roaming machines—Active Directory member devices that connect to corporate networks via the public Internet (possibly over a Virtual Private Network (VPN))—are at heightened risk.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View post:
15-year-old bug allows malicious code execution in all versions of Windows

Google announces SPDY’s coming demise as HTTP/2 approaches

A little over five years ago, Google unveiled SPDY, a new protocol that it positioned as a more secure, better-performing replacement for hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), the communication protocol on which the Web is built. Today the company announced that it would soon be removing SPDY support from Chrome. That’s because the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been working to update HTTP to produce HTTP/2, an updated revision of a protocol that has not seen any major changes since its introduction in the early 1990s. SPDY’s major goals were to reduce latency and improve security. To reduce latency, it included support for multiplexing—making multiple requests and responses over a single connection, with prioritization for different requests—and for security, it makes the use of TLS compulsory. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Continued here:
Google announces SPDY’s coming demise as HTTP/2 approaches

First transistor built using two-dimensional silicon

Since the isolation of graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon, researchers have developed a number of other two-dimensional materials. (Yes, they are really three-dimensional; it’s just one of the dimensions is only an atom thick, and therefore negligible.) Knowledge of the periodic table would suggest that elements from the same column as carbon would have similar chemical properties, and therefore be excellent candidates for forming two-dimensional sheets. So, why hasn’t more been done with silicon, the next element down the column from carbon? People have actually made silicene, the silicon version of graphene. But they’ve only managed to make tiny patches of it on silver surfaces; under just about any other conditions, it rapidly reacts with the oxygen in air and disintegrates. On Monday, however, researchers announced that they’d managed to create the first device—a field effect transistor—using silicene. Since interactions with silver protected the silicon sheet, the authors fabricated a large sheet on a thin silver surface. They then capped this with aluminum oxide, which also protected the silicene. At this point, they could etch off some of the aluminum, and use the remaining metal as source and drain contacts. By depositing the alumina on a silicon dioxide surface, the resulting device acted as a field effect transistor. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View post:
First transistor built using two-dimensional silicon

Over 300 businesses now whitelisted on AdBlock Plus, 10% pay to play

Since 2011, AdBlock Plus, a popular browser plug-in that blocks online ads, has kept a “whitelist” of websites that are allowed to serve ads despite the presence of the AdBlock Plus plugin. In an e-mail to Ars, AdBlock Plus Communications Manager Ben Williams wrote that currently, the browser extension has granted a pass to “over 300 sites/entities” out of “over 1,500 applicants” to the company’s whitelist. That’s up from October 2013 , when AdBlock Plus allowed the ads of 78 sites or entities out of 777 applicants. To be placed on AdBlock Plus’ whitelist, advertisements must be transparent about being ads, must be appropriate to the site they’re being served on, and must not distort or disrupt the page content, among other criteria. AdBlock Plus goes into more detail about the whitelisting process here . But one important facet of the business plan is that if a company is big enough, AdBlock Plus’ parent company, German start-up Eyeo, asks for a fee in addition to adhering to the “Acceptable Ads” criteria before it allows a company to be whitelisted. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Taken from:
Over 300 businesses now whitelisted on AdBlock Plus, 10% pay to play

Ken May

Tag: california