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Sextortionist who hacked Miss Teen USA’s computer sentenced to 18 months

Andrew Cunningham The California computer science student who hacked various women’s computers for the purposes of “sextortion”—including Miss Teen USA 2013, Cassidy Wolf —has been sentenced to 18 months in prison. The sentence comes after Jared James Abrahams pleaded guilty to one count of computer hacking and three counts of extortion last November. According to a press release published Monday afternoon by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, Abrahams “used the nude photos to extort victims by threatening to publicly post the compromising photos or videos to the victims’ social media accounts—unless the victim either sent more nude photos or videos, or engaged in a Skype session with him and did what he said for five minutes.” As Ars Deputy Editor Nate Anderson wrote last year , Abrahams became decently adept at using remote administration tools (RATs), a malware used to spy on victims. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sextortionist who hacked Miss Teen USA’s computer sentenced to 18 months

Detection of primordial gravitational waves announced

The BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) telescope at the South Pole, designed to measure polarized light from the early Universe. Steffen Richter When the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced a press conference for a “Major Discovery” (capital letters in the original e-mail) involving an unspecified experiment, rumors began to fly immediately.  By Friday afternoon, the rumors had coalesced around one particular observatory: the  BICEP  microwave telescope located at the South Pole.  Over the weekend, the chatter focused on a specific issue: polarization in the Cosmic Microwave Background left over from the Big Bang. With the start of the press conference, it’s now clear that we’ve detected the first direct evidence of the inflationary phase of the Big Bang, in which the Universe expanded rapidly in size. BICEP, the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization experiment, was built specifically to measure the polarization of light left over from the early Universe. This light, known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), encodes a lot of information about the physical state of the cosmos from its earliest moments. Most observatories (such as Planck and WMAP) have mapped temperature fluctuations in the CMB, which are essential for determining the contents of the Universe. Polarization is the orientation of the electric field of light, which conveys additional information not available from the temperature fluctuations. While much of CMB polarization is due to later density fluctuations that gave rise to galaxies, theory predicts that some of it came from primordial gravitational waves. Those waves are ripples in space-time left over from quantum fluctuations in the Universe’s earliest moments. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Detection of primordial gravitational waves announced

Google DNS briefly hijacked to Venezuela

BGPMon’s alert on the detection of the change to the route to Google’s primary DNS server. BGPmon.net For about a half hour on Saturday, some requests to one of Google’s DNS servers in the US were re-routed through a network in Venezuela. A false Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) announcement from the Venezuelan network caused the diversion, which affected networks primarily in Venezuela and Brazil, as well as a university network in Florida. It all started at 5:23pm Greenwich Time (UTC). Andree Toonk of the network monitoring service BGPmon.net told Ars that the false routing request was dropped 23 minutes later, “most likely because the network that announced this route realized what happened and rolled back the change (to their router) that caused this.” During the intervening period, he said, traffic may have been re-routed back to Google, or it just may have been dropped. The result was failed DNS requests for those on the affected networks. Network rerouting through bogus BGP “announcements”—advertisements sent between routers that are supposed to provide information on the quickest route over the Internet to a specific IP address, such as the Google DNS service’s 8.8.8.8—have become increasingly common as a tool for Internet censorship. They’re used to stage “man-in-the-middle” attacks on Web users and to passively monitor traffic to certain domains. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google DNS briefly hijacked to Venezuela

In sudden announcement, US to give up control of DNS root zone

Photograph by David Davies In a historic decision on Friday, the United States has decided to give up control of the authoritative root zone file, which contains all names and addresses of all top-level domain names. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), under the United States Department of Commerce, has retained ultimate control of the domain name system (DNS) since transitioning it from a government project into private hands in 1997. With Commerce’s blessing, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) acts as the primary essential governing body for Internet policy. The new change is  in advance of the upcoming ICANN meeting to be held in Brazil in April 2014. Brazil has fumed at revelations of American spying on its political leaders and corporations, which were first revealed in September 2013 as the result of documents distributed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The South American country also threatened to build its “own cloud,” as a consequence of the NSA’s spying. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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In sudden announcement, US to give up control of DNS root zone

Mozilla strives to take Web gaming to the next level with Unreal Engine 4

Around this time last year Mozilla and Epic Games showed off the Unreal 3 game engine running in the browser, using a combination of the WebGL 3D graphics API and asm.js , the high performance subset of JavaScript. Commercial games built using this technology were launched late in the year. With this apparently successful foray into using the browser as a rich gaming platform, Mozilla and Epic today demonstrated a preview of Epic’s next engine, Unreal Engine 4, again boasting near-native speeds. The Web version of UE4 uses Emscripten to compile regular C and C++ code into asm.js. Unreal Engine 4 running within Firefox. Over the past year, Mozilla has improved asm.js’s performance, to go from around 40 percent of native performance, to something like 67 percent of native. Our own testing largely supported the organization’s claims, though we noted certain limitations at the time, such as JavaScript’s lack of multithreading. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Mozilla strives to take Web gaming to the next level with Unreal Engine 4

Refinements, additions, and un-breaking stuff: iOS 7.1 reviewed

Time to update! iOS 7.1 is here, and it fixes a lot of iOS 7.0’s biggest problems. Aurich Lawson There were about six months between the ouster of Scott Forstall from Apple in late October of 2012 and the unveiling of iOS 7.0 in June of 2013. Jony Ive and his team redesigned the software from the ground up in that interval, a short amount of time given that pretty much everything in the operating system was overhauled and that it was being done under new management. The design was tweaked between that first beta in June and the final release in mid-September, but the biggest elements were locked in place in short order. iOS 7.1’s version number implies a much smaller update, but it has spent a considerable amount of time in development. Apple has issued five betas to developers since November of 2013, and almost every one of them has tweaked the user interface in small but significant ways. It feels like Apple has been taking its time with this one, weighing different options and attempting to address the harshest criticism of the new design without the deadline pressure that comes with a major release. We’ve spent a few months with iOS 7.1 as it has progressed, and as usual we’re here to pick through the minutiae so you don’t have to. iOS 7.1 isn’t a drastic change, but it brings enough new design elements, performance improvements, and additional stability to the platform that it might just win over the remaining iOS 6 holdouts. Read 42 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Refinements, additions, and un-breaking stuff: iOS 7.1 reviewed

Popcorn Time reinvents the seedy process of torrenting

We are used to illegal activities looking and feeling far more illegal than this. A new BitTorrent-powered video app has been released that beautifies the torrenting process to the point that TorrentFreak describes it as “Netflix for pirates.” The app, which is available for OS X, Windows, and Linux, shows a catalog of movies and loads them up on a computer in an interface as seamless as that of most legit streaming services, but using means that are generally less than legal. Typically, torrenting a movie (illegally, if it’s copyrighted property) involves seeking out a sketchy torrent website littered with porn ads to download a .torrent file that users hope will actually result in a movie and not, say, a virus. The process’s pitfalls and risks are many, not to mention the potential for getting called out by one’s ISP and, in rare instances, being fined or sued. Popcorn Time eliminates the seedier aspects of torrent location in a slick app that doesn’t involve dealing with files, download speeds, or seeding—at least on the front end. The app began as a Github project that now has over 50 contributors. It is free, open-source, and has no ads or other money-making schemes. The app works by using an API provided by torrent service YTS to stream the file, which is then shared from the user’s computer after the download is completed. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Popcorn Time reinvents the seedy process of torrenting

Intel’s 800Gbps cables headed to cloud data centers and supercomputers

Intel’s pitch for Silicon Photonics. Intel and several of its partners said they will make 800Gbps cables available in the second half of this year, bringing big speed increases to supercomputers and data centers. The new cables are based on Intel’s Silicon Photonics technology that pushes 25Gbps across each fiber. Last year, Intel demonstrated speeds of 100Gbps in each direction, using eight fibers. A new connector that goes by the name “MXC” holds up to 64 fibers (32 for transmitting and 32 for receiving), enabling a jump to 800Gbps in one direction and 800Gbps in the other, or an aggregate of “1.6Tbps” as Intel prefers to call it. (In case you’re wondering, MXC is not an acronym for anything.) That’s a huge increase over the 10Gbps cables commonly used to connect switches and other equipment in data centers today. The fiber technology also maintains its maximum speed over much greater distances than copper, sending 800Gbps at lengths up to 300 meters, Intel photonics technology lab director Mario Paniccia told Ars. Eventually, the industry could boost the per-line rate from 25Gbps to 50Gbps, doubling the overall throughput without adding fibers, he said. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel’s 800Gbps cables headed to cloud data centers and supercomputers

Review: Mophie’s Space Pack doubles your iPhone’s battery, storage, and size

The Mophie Space Pack is an iPhone case with an integrated battery and 16 or 32GB of internal storage. Andrew Cunningham Specs at a glance: Mophie Space Pack Storage 16 or 32GB integrated NAND Ports MicroUSB 2.0 for charging Size 5.66″ 2.57″ x 0.63″ (143.76 x 65.28 x 16mm) Weight 2.80 oz (79.38g) Battery 1700mAh Warranty 1 year Starting Price $149.95 for 16GB, $179.95 for 32GB Compatibility iPhone 5 and 5S only. Not compatible with fifth-gen iPod touch or iPhone 5C. I bought one of Mophie’s external battery packs not long after we reviewed one in mid-2012 , and since then it’s become one of my favorite travel companions. My phone is in near-constant use while I’m traveling for work, whether I’m transmitting communications to the Ars Orbiting HQ , tethering my computer to my phone, or shooting some quick on-the-fly video or pictures without digging out my DSLR. The upside to an external battery pack is that I can plug pretty much anything into it, from an iPhone to an Android tablet to a Chromebook 11 . The bad thing is that you have to remember to have it on you, and you also need to carry around the necessary cables at all times. That’s where Mophie’s Space Pack comes in—it’s a revised version of the company’s Juice Pack battery cases with a twist. In addition to a 1,700mAh battery, it includes either 16GB or 32GB of storage that you can use to augment your iPhone’s internal storage. It’s not for everyone, but for some iPhone 5 and 5S users among you, it just might be able to kill three birds with one stone. The case The case slides on to your iPhone 5 or 5S. Pull the two parts back apart to get the phone out of the case. Andrew Cunningham The case itself is very similar to Mophie’s existing Juice Pack Plus or Juice Pack Air, the largest and second-largest battery cases the company sells. Its 1,700mAh battery is identical to the Air, and they share roughly equal physical dimensions and weight (the Space Pack is very slightly larger and heavier, but it’s hard to tell the difference). It comes apart in two pieces that slide onto the phone and interlock. The bottom of the case has a male Lightning connector that goes into the phone, but you charge the case itself with the same micro USB port that you might find in an Android or Windows phone or tablet. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Review: Mophie’s Space Pack doubles your iPhone’s battery, storage, and size

Teens get banned from an app after vicious attacks and threats

simon_bramwell The developers of Yik Yak , an app that works as an anonymous message board for up to 500 people in close proximity to one another, have selectively disabled the app’s use in Chicago following vicious sniping and rumor mongering by children using it at school. WLS-TV in Chicago reports that people in the city won’t be able to use Yik Yak until the developers figure out a way to get youth usage under control. Apps for sharing information anonymously like Wut and Secret have seen a recent surge in popularity. In the case of Wut and Secret, users are connected to people they actually know—Secret uses the mobile device’s contact list, and Wut’s (anonymous) contacts are powered by Facebook. Yik Yak, by contrast, connects a large swath of people—friends, enemies, and strangers—based entirely on their location. Among middle and high schoolers, this becomes many lockers’- and bathroom walls’-worth of pain and drama. WLS-TV reports students in Chicago have used it to spread rumors about rape, and in other locales, schools have been evacuated because of bomb threats on the service. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Teens get banned from an app after vicious attacks and threats