digest – Page 33 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Apple releases iOS 8.0.1 with HealthKit, keyboard, iPhone 6 fixes

iOS 8.0.1 fixes a handful of bugs with the new update. Andrew Cunningham Apple has just released iOS 8.0.1, the first update to the new operating system that reached the public last week . The update is available through iTunes or as an over-the-air update for any device that runs iOS 8—the iPhone 4S or newer, iPad 2 or newer, and the fifth-generation iPod Touch. Though it comes just a week after iOS 8’s release, the 8.0.1 update fixes a wide-ranging list of problems. Apple has fixed the bug that was keeping HealthKit-compatible apps from working, and it corrected a problem where third-party keyboards could be toggled off after entering a passcode. The company also addressed photo library access for third-party apps, “unexpected cellular data usage when receiving SMS/MMS messages,” the Ask To Buy feature of Family Sharing, something keeping ringtones from being restored from iCloud backups, and “a bug that prevented uploading photos and videos from Safari.” Those updates are available for all devices, but the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus get one specific fix that is meant to make the Reachability feature more consistent. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple releases iOS 8.0.1 with HealthKit, keyboard, iPhone 6 fixes

Alibaba raises over $21 billion, making it the biggest IPO ever in the US

Charles Chan When Alibaba stopped trading its shares on Friday, the Chinese e-commerce company had officially logged the biggest Initial Public Offering (IPO) in US history, raising $21.8 billion in its first day on the New York Stock Exchange. The company’s earnings give it a market capitalization of over $200 billion, “putting it among the 20 biggest companies by market cap in the US,” the Wall Street Journal notes. Alibaba’s IPO beat out record IPOs like Visa’s $17.9 billion IPO in 2008 and General Motors’ $15.8 billion sale in 2010. And Alibaba beat out its peers in the tech sector too, like Facebook (whose first-day earnings were $16 billion) and Google (whose 2004 IPO raised only $1.67 billion—paltry in today’s terms). Earlier this month , the company announced that it would price shares at $66 per share. This morning around 12pm ET, the NYSE gave the go-ahead for the company, whose ticker symbol is BABA, to start trading. Shares started at $92.70, a third larger than what the company was aiming for, and ended the day at $93.89 after reaching a high of $99.70. In after hours trading, Alibaba is just down slightly at $93.60 per share , as of this writing. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Alibaba raises over $21 billion, making it the biggest IPO ever in the US

Hack runs Android apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers

The official Android Twitter app running on Mac OS. Ron Amadeo If you remember, about a week ago, Google gave Chrome OS the ability to run Android apps through the ” App Runtime for Chrome .” The release came with a lot of limitations—it only worked with certain apps and only worked on Chrome OS. But a developer by the name of ” Vladikoff ” has slowly been stripping away these limits. First he figured out how to load any app on Chrome OS, instead of just the four that are officially supported. Now he’s made an even bigger breakthrough and gotten Android apps to work on any desktop OS that Chrome runs on. You can now run Android apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The hack depends on App Runtime for Chrome (ARC), which is built using Native Client , a Google project that allows Chrome to run native code safely within a web browser. While ARC was only officially released as an extension on Chrome OS, Native Client extensions are meant to be cross-platform. The main barrier to entry is obtaining ARC Chrome Web Store, which flags desktop versions of Chrome as “incompatible.” Vladikoff made a custom version of ARC, called ARChon , that can be sideloaded simply by dragging the file onto Chrome. It should get Android apps up and running on any platform running the desktop version of Chrome 37 and up. The hard part is getting Android apps that are compatible with it. ARC doesn’t run raw Android app packages (APKs)—they need to be converted into a Chrome extension—but Vladikoff has a tool called ” chromeos-apk ” that will take care of that, too. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hack runs Android apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers

Artificial sweeteners may leave their users glucose intolerant

Flickr user Bukowsky18 People who are watching their weight will often opt for a diet soda, reasoning that the fewer calories, the better. But the availability of drinks and foods made with artificial sweeteners like saccharin, sucralose, and aspartame hasn’t seemed to help much with our booming obesity levels. Now, some researchers might have identified a reason for this: the sweeteners leave their users with elevated blood glucose levels. But they don’t seem to act directly on human metabolism. Instead, the effects come through alterations in the bacterial populations that live inside us. The paper that describes this work, which was performed by a large collaboration of researchers from Israel, is being released by Nature today. The researchers note that epidemiological studies about the effects of artificial sweeteners have produced mixed results; some show a benefit, while others indicate that they’re associated with weight gain and diabetes risk. Given that human populations haven’t given us a clear answer, the researchers turned to mice, where they could do a carefully controlled study. They started taking a group of genetically matched mice and spiking their drinking water with either sucrose or a commercial prep of an artificial sweetener (either saccharin, sucralose, or aspartame). After five weeks, they checked the blood glucose levels of these animals. Eleven weeks later, the groups that were given the artificial sweeteners all had elevated blood glucose levels compared to those that received sucrose. This is typically a sign of metabolic problems, most often caused by insulin losing its effectiveness. It can be a precursor to type 2 diabetes. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

iPhone 6 and 6 Plus pre-orders break record, top 4 million in one day

The iPhone 5S (left) next to the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus. Which size is the one for you? Megan Geuss On Monday, Apple confirmed that its iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus pre-order numbers broke records for the smartphone line, as they combined to rack up over four million purchases in the first 24 hours they were on sale. As we reported —and Apple’s announcement confirmed—many of those pre-orders won’t ship to customers until October. The pre-orders, which started early Friday morning in nine nations , handily surpassed the first-day numbers of the iPhone 5; that model received over two million pre-orders in 2012 , though its actual first-weekend sales upon retail launch reached five million . That doesn’t mean Apple’s first-week in-store supply will be able to feed the sort of demand that the iPhone 6 is generating. Anybody curled up in a sleeping bag in front of an Apple Store right now, however, can take comfort in the fact that Apple will make “additional supply” of both models available to purchase at 8am local time this coming Friday. All four major American carriers’ stores will also have phones available on Friday, as well as “additional carriers and select Apple Authorized Resellers.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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iPhone 6 and 6 Plus pre-orders break record, top 4 million in one day

Hacker exploits printer Web interface to install, run Doom

Doom on a printer’s menu screen! Personally, we can’t wait until someone makes Descent playable on a toaster. Context Internet Security On Friday, a hacker presenting at the 44CON Information Security Conference in London picked at the vulnerability of Web-accessible devices and demonstrated how to run unsigned code on a Canon printer via its default Web interface. After describing the device’s encryption as “doomed,” Context Information Security consultant Michael Jordon made his point by installing and running the first-person shooting classic Doom on a stock Canon Pixma MG6450. Sure enough, the printer’s tiny menu screen can render a choppy and discolored but playable version of id Software’s 1993 hit, the result of Jordon discovering that Pixma printers’ Web interfaces didn’t require any authentication to access. “You could print out hundreds of test pages and use up all the ink and paper, so what?” Jordon wrote at Context’s blog report about the discovery , but after a little more sniffing, he found that the devices could also easily be redirected to accept any code as legitimate firmware. A vulnerable Pixma printer’s Web interface allows users to change the Web proxy settings and the DNS server. From there, an enterprising hacker can crack the device’s encryption in eight steps, the final of which includes unsigned, plain-text firmware files. The hacking possibilities go far beyond enabling choppy, early ’90s gaming: “We can therefore create our own custom firmware and update anyone’s printer with a Trojan image which spies on the documents being printed or is used as a gateway into their network,” Jordon wrote. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

US gov’t threatened Yahoo with $250K daily fine if it didn’t use PRISM

Yahoo reports that it is on the verge of releasing 1,500 pages of documents related to a long court battle over its participation in the PRISM program, a National Security Agency program revealed last summer as part of the Snowden leaks. A leaked top-secret slide about PRISM shows that Yahoo was one of the first participants, having begun contributing to the database in March of 2008. It did so under severe duress. Company executives believed the government’s demand for data was “unconstitutional and overbroad” and fought it in court. “Our challenge, and a later appeal in the case, did not succeed,” explained Yahoo General Counsel Ron Bell in a blog post published today. “The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC)… ordered us to give the U.S. Government the user data it sought in the matter.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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US gov’t threatened Yahoo with $250K daily fine if it didn’t use PRISM

Intel demos next-next-gen “Skylake” processors, coming in late 2015

A Core M CPU package based on the Broadwell architecture. Intel Intel’s Broadwell CPU architecture has only just started rolling out , and most of the processors that use it aren’t even supposed to launch until early next year. The new 14nm manufacturing process is causing the delay , but yesterday at the Intel Developer Forum the company tried to demonstrate that Broadwell’s lateness wouldn’t affect the rest of its roadmap. To that end, Intel highlighted a couple of working developer systems based on the new “Skylake” architecture, as summarized here by Anandtech . The company didn’t go into specific performance or power consumption numbers (both because it’s early and because Intel probably doesn’t want to take the wind out of Broadwell’s sails), but it showed working silicon rendering 3D games and playing back 4K video to prove that the chips are working. The first Skylake processors are reportedly due out late in 2015 following the beginning of volume production in the second half of the year. Here are the basic facts we already know about Skylake: it’s a “tock” on Intel’s roadmap, meaning it introduces a new architecture on a manufacturing process that’s already up and running. In this case, that’s Intel’s 14nm process, which Intel insists has recovered from its early problems . Some of the CPUs in Intel’s lineup—specifically mid-to-low-end socketed desktop CPUs —will get their next refresh using Skylake instead of Broadwell. Whether this is because Intel wants to reserve 14nm manufacturing capacity for lower-power, higher-margin chips or because it just doesn’t think the power-consumption-obsessed Broadwell is a good fit for regular desktops is anyone’s guess. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel demos next-next-gen “Skylake” processors, coming in late 2015

A big chunk of the Sierra Nevada caught fracturing on video

If you like geology, you’re used to relying on an active imagination. Most geologic processes occur too slowly to see them play out for yourself. Many of the exceptions are dangerous enough that you might not want a front row seat or rare enough that the odds of being there to witness it are disheartening. Sometimes, though, the Earth throws us a bone—or in this case, a gigantic slab of granite. One interesting way that rocks weather and crumble apart is called “exfoliation.” Like the skin-scrubbing technique, this involves the outermost layers of exposed igneous or metamorphic bedrock sloughing off in a sheet. Over time, this tends to smooth and round the outcrop—Yosemite’s Half Dome providing a spectacular example. We’re not entirely sure just what drives the peeling of an outcrop’s skin like this, but the classic explanation is that it’s the result of bringing rocks that formed at great pressure up to the surface. Once there, the outer layers can expand slightly, creating a physical mismatch with the layers below them. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

[Update] iFixit cracks open the Moto 360, finds smaller battery than advertised

Hey that’s not 320 mAh. iFixit/Ron Amadeo iFixit has gotten ahold of the Moto 360 and applied the usual spudgers and heat packs to rip open the little round smartwatch. There weren’t too many surprises (everything is round!) except for the battery: it’s smaller than advertised. In iFixit’s pictures, the 360’s battery is only labeled as 300 mAh, 20 mAh less than advertised . The 300 mAh battery has only 75 percent of the capacity of the 400 mAh battery found in the LG G Watch, and together with the OMAP 3 processor, it’s not a great combination for all-day battery life. We’ve asked Motorola for a comment about the smaller battery in iFixit’s 360, but the company hasn’t gotten back to us yet. We’ll update this post if we hear anything. The company’s response is below. As for the rest of the device, the round LCD looks pretty much the same as it does on the outside, and even the main PCB is round. iFixit managed to nail the processor down to an OMAP3630 , which as we suspected is built on a 45nm process. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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[Update] iFixit cracks open the Moto 360, finds smaller battery than advertised