Tag: digest

Comcast to issue discounts for days-long outage caused by bad update

Even this DSL-loving turtle thought Comcast’s service was too slow this week. Comcast Comcast attempted to update its X1 cable platform this week, but it ended up causing a lengthy outage for many customers. The company apologized yesterday and promised to issue credits to compensate customers for the time they weren’t able to use their TV service. Customer reports suggest that Internet service went down as well. “We know some of our customers may have missed their favorite shows off and on over the past few days and were unable to easily reach our customer care representatives for assistance… and we’re really sorry,” Comcast Senior VP Charlie Herrin wrote . Herrin’s new job is fixing Comcast’s disappointing customer service. His announcement yesterday, titled, “Our mistake: making it right for customers,” continues: In the process of upgrading the X1 platform with new services and features, a technical issue arose that caused problems for our customers. We’re working now to identify the customers who were impacted to personally apologize and proactively give them credits which we plan to have out to them within the next two weeks. This issue was our fault and we want to make it right. So what happened? While we were deploying an upgrade to the X1 platform, we discovered an issue in the way the software that updates X1 was configured. We immediately stopped the deployment, and our engineers began working to identify the root cause and fix the issue. While service has returned to normal for most X1 customers, our engineers are now going back over this issue and taking extra steps to prevent it from happening again. The fix we’ve put in place should be automatic—customers don’t need to do anything (such as rebooting or unplugging the box). Thanks to our customers who have been patient with us, and to our employees who have been working around the clock on this. Outages were reported  in Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and other cities. According to customer reports at DownDetector.com, more customers experienced Internet outages than TV outages, with 10 percent reporting a “total blackout.” We’ve asked Comcast whether the faulty update also caused Internet outages but haven’t received an answer yet. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Comcast to issue discounts for days-long outage caused by bad update

GM’s next-gen infotainment system to run Android—not Android Auto—in 2016

The 2015 Cadillac ATS coupe with integrated LTE. It’s basically a big red smartphone. Ron Amadeo Harman International, the car infotainment manufacturer, recently spilled the beans on a “next-gen” infotainment system it is building for General Motors.  Automotive News  has quotes from the company’s CEO, Dinesh Paliwal, who describes an Android-based system with an app store and “instant” boot up. The report says that Harman is “working closely” with Google to make the system a reality. This system isn’t Android Auto. Unlike regular Android, Android Wear, and Android TV, Android Auto isn’t an operating system. It doesn’t live on the car’s computer, it doesn’t control peripherals, and it doesn’t have an app store. Like Apple’s CarPlay, Android Auto is just a “casted” interface. Your plugged-in smartphone sends a custom interface to the car’s screen and receives touch events, but the car still has to run some other operating system. Harman won a $900 million contract from GM to build the system, and judging by the Harman CEO’s description, this is an actual embedded Android system that will power the entire infotainment setup. That typically includes the audio system, air conditioning, navigation, voice recognition, phone calls, reverse cameras, and Internet access. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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GM’s next-gen infotainment system to run Android—not Android Auto—in 2016

Crypto attack that hijacked Windows Update goes mainstream in Amazon Cloud

Underscoring just how broken the widely used MD5 hashing algorithm is, a software engineer racked up just 65 cents in computing fees to replicate the type of attack a powerful nation-state used in 2012 to hijack Microsoft’s Windows Update mechanism. Nathaniel McHugh ran open source software known as HashClash to modify two separate images—one of them depicting funk legend James Brown and the other R&B singer/songwriter Barry White—that generate precisely the same MD5 hash, e06723d4961a0a3f950e7786f3766338. The exercise—known in cryptographic circles as a hash collision—took just 10 hours and cost only 65 cents plus tax to complete using a GPU instance on Amazon Web Service. In 2007, cryptography expert and HashClash creator Marc Stevens estimated it would require about one day to complete an MD5 collision using a cluster of PlayStation 3 consoles . The MD5 hash for this picture—e06723d4961a0a3f950e7786f3766338—is precisely the same for the one below. Such “collisions” are a fatal flaw for hashing algorithms and can lead to disastrous attacks. The practical ability to create two separate inputs that generate the same hash is a fundamental flaw that makes MD5 unsuitable for most purposes. (The exception is password hashing. Single iteration MD5 hashing is horrible for passwords but for an entirely different reason that is outside the scope of this post.) The susceptibility to collisions can have disastrous consequences, potentially for huge swaths of the Internet. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Crypto attack that hijacked Windows Update goes mainstream in Amazon Cloud

iOS 8.1.1 said to address iPhone 4S and iPad 2 performance problems

Have an iPhone 4S running iOS 8? You’re due for a speed increase. Andrew Cunningham Late yesterday, Apple released the first beta build of iOS 8.1.1 to developers . The first update to iOS 8.1 will include customary bug fixes, but the preliminary release notes suggest a far more interesting development: the update promises to improve performance on the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 , two of the oldest devices that support iOS 8. This would address one of our biggest criticisms of iOS 8, which in our testing was significantly slower on these older devices than iOS 7 was. Apps took longer to launch, and the user interface was often jerky and inconsistent in ways that it wasn’t before. Apple has a long history of speeding up new iOS versions on old hardware post-release— iOS 4.1 on the iPhone 3G , iOS 7.1 on the iPhone 4 , and now iOS 8.1.1. It would be nice if performance on older hardware was better optimized in the first place, but newer hardware obviously takes precedence. When the final version of iOS 8.1.1 is released, we’ll throw it on an iPhone 4S and iPad 2 to see how much the performance really improves. Although they’re not mentioned by name in the release notes, we’d also expect the improvements to help the original iPad Mini and the fifth-generation iPod Touch, which are internally similar to the 4S and iPad 2. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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iOS 8.1.1 said to address iPhone 4S and iPad 2 performance problems

In Detroit and other cities, nearly 40 percent go without Internet

It may be hard to believe, but there are big cities in the US where 30 to 40 percent of residents have no Internet access at all. And among those who are online in America’s worst-connected cities, a sizable percentage get by with only cellular Internet. That’s according to 2013 census data compiled by Bill Callahan, director of  Connect Your Community 2.0 , a group promoting Internet access for residents of Cleveland, OH, and Detroit, MI. Callahan published charts on his blog yesterday  showing how many households lack Internet access in the 25 worst connected cities in the US (out of 176 that have at least 50,000 households). In Laredo, TX, 40.2 percent of the 65,685 households have no Internet access, not even mobile broadband on a phone. Detroit was second in this list with 39.9 percent of households lacking Internet. In all 25 cities, at least 29.8 percent lacked Internet access. The 25 cities varied in size from 52,588 households (Kansas City, KS) to 255,322 households (Detroit). Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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In Detroit and other cities, nearly 40 percent go without Internet

GTA V’s new console/PC re-release to add optional first-person view

Since its launch as a top-down, sprite-based crime simulator in 1997, the Grand Theft Auto series has always taken place strictly from a third-person perspective. That’s set to change on November 18, as the previously announced re-release of Grand Theft Auto V hits the Xbox One and PS4 with a series-first optional first-person perspective. The new first-person mode goes a lot farther than unofficial mods that have tried to add a behind-the-eyes perspective to GTA games in the past. “You have to change pretty much everything,” GTA V animation director Rob Nelson told IGN in a promotional interview talking about the new feature. “I mean, if you want to do it right. We have a very solid third-person animation system, but you don’t just put the camera down there and expect to see the guns, aim, and shoot. All those animations are new when you switch to first-person, because it all has to be animated to the camera, to make it feel like a proper first-person experience that I think people would expect. All the timings have to be re-evaluated.” Other little details added for the benefit of the new view include recoil on weapons, view-restricting goggles and helmets when piloting certain vehicles, and a cell phone menu that your character now actually holds in front of his face. The official trailer for the new mode seems to show the perspective automatically swiveling around to view important story and character moments. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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GTA V’s new console/PC re-release to add optional first-person view

Hearthstone bot maker closes shop after Blizzard crackdown

A status screen from the now defunct Hearthcrawler software. Blizzard seems to have scored a decisive win in the never-ending battle against automated “bot” programs that play games like Hearthstone without human intervention. Crawlerbots, maker of the popular Hearthcrawler bot,  announced this morning that it is closing up shop in the wake of a recent crackdown on users of the automated play tools. In what’s dubbed as its “last official announcement,” Crawlerbots writes that “the recent ban wave in Hearthstone hit a lot of users. After discussing this with Blizzard, it’s clear we have to take off our services/products now. Please note that we’re not going to be commenting further on this.” “Thank you all for being part of our community,” the message continues. “We are very sad about this but you also know botting is against the rules and we all knew that the day when our products doesn’t [sic] work anymore would come. With tears in our eyes we have to say bye.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hearthstone bot maker closes shop after Blizzard crackdown

NTSB: SpaceShipTwo broke apart when “feathering” activated early

Ground imagery showing the destruction of SpaceShipTwo. Kenneth Brown/Reuters The Guardian has a good summary of how things are proceeding with the two-day-old National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation into the destruction of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo , which occurred at approximately 10:12am PDT on October 31. Some eyewitnesses reported seeing an explosion when the craft broke up, prompting speculation that the accident had something to do with SpaceShipTwo’s hybrid rocket engine—an engine that was making its first flight with its new fuel. However, at a press conference Sunday afternoon, acting NTSB chairman Christopher Hart said that crash investigators had already located the cause of the accident that injured 43-year old pilot Peter Siebold and took the life of 39-year old co-pilot Michael Alsbury: the spacecraft’s “feathering” mode had been engaged early. This put SpaceShipTwo in a high-drag configuration unsuitable for powered flight, and the craft then broke apart. The feathering functionality is designed to be used in the later stage of SpaceShipTwo’s flight. It changes the shape of the craft, swinging its wings upward and allowing them to move to the optimum angle to slow the craft down on descent, like a shuttlecock falling to the ground in a game of badminton. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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NTSB: SpaceShipTwo broke apart when “feathering” activated early

Egypt jails 8 men for 3 years after same-sex wedding video goes viral

Eight men accused of participating in a same-sex wedding on a Nile riverboat in Egypt were handed a three-year prison term Saturday for committing “debauchery,” state run media said. Ahram Online reported  that the Prosecutor-General Hisham Barakat viewed the one-minute video, said to be filmed in April, and concluded it was of two men getting married. Eight men who were aboard the riverboat were detained in September after the minute-long video went viral on YouTube and other sites, Ahram Online said. They were jailed for broadcasting footage that “violates public decency,” CNN said . Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Egypt jails 8 men for 3 years after same-sex wedding video goes viral

Beyond gaming, the VR boom is everywhere—from classrooms to therapy couches

Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock Welcome to Ars UNITE, our week-long virtual conference on the ways that innovation brings unusual pairings together. Today, a look at how virtual reality excitement is happening beyond the world of gaming. Join us this afternoon for a live discussion on the topic with article author Kyle Orland and his expert guests; your comments and questions are welcome. When Oculus almost single-handedly revived the idea of virtual reality from its ‘90s vaporware grave, it chose the 2012 Electronic Entertainment Expo as the place to unveil the first public prototype of the Rift headset. The choice of a gaming convention isn’t that surprising, as the game industry has been the quickest and most eager to jump on potential applications for VR. Gaming has already demanded the majority of the attention and investments in the second VR boom that Oculus has unleashed. But just as the Rift itself is the result of what Oculus calls a “peace dividend from the smartphone wars,” other fields are benefiting from virtual reality’s gaming-driven growth. Creators all over the world are looking beyond entertainment to adapting head-mounted displays for everything from psychotherapy, special-needs education, and space exploration to virtual luxury car test drives, virtual travel, and even VR movies. The well-worn idea of “gaming on the holodeck” may be driving much of the interest in virtual reality, but the technology’s non-gaming applications could be just as exciting in the long term. Read 42 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Beyond gaming, the VR boom is everywhere—from classrooms to therapy couches