digest – Page 55 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Facebook to rip search opt-out from under those who were using it

Here’s the dialog you’ll see if you were opted out of search, when Facebook gets around to opting you back in. Facebook If you checked that box saying you don’t want to appear in Facebook search results, get ready: soon, that choice is going away. Facebook announced in a blog post Thursday that it’s removing the ability to opt out of appearing in search results, both for friends and globally, for those who’ve had it enabled. Facebook actually removed the search opt-out for everyone who didn’t have it enabled early this year, around the time it introduced Graph Search . Now, ten months later, Facebook is giving the boot to anyone who actually cared enough to opt out, referring to the checkbox as an “old search setting.” Facebook claims that less than one percent of users were taking advantage of the feature. In simpler times, Facebook was smaller and easier to navigate, and everyone had a privacy setting asking “Who can look up your timeline by name?” Now that there are so many profiles that users become confused when they know they have a friend or know someone in a group, but try to find them by search and they don’t appear, says Facebook. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Facebook to rip search opt-out from under those who were using it

Meltdowns at NSA spy data center destroy equipment, delay opening

The NSA’s Utah Data Center. Swilsonmc A massive data center being built by the National Security Agency to aid its surveillance operations has been hit by “10 meltdowns in the past 13 months” that “destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of machinery and delayed the center’s opening for a year, ” the Wall Street Journal reported last night . The first of four facilities at the Utah Data Center was originally scheduled to become operational in October 2012, according to project documents described by the Journal . But the electrical problems—described as arc fault failures or “a flash of lightning inside a 2-foot box”—led to explosions, failed circuits, and melted metal, the report states: The first arc fault failure at the Utah plant was on Aug. 9, 2012, according to project documents. Since then, the center has had nine more failures, most recently on Sept. 25. Each incident caused as much as $100, 000 in damage, according to a project official. It took six months for investigators to determine the causes of two of the failures. In the months that followed, the contractors employed more than 30 independent experts that conducted 160 tests over 50, 000 man-hours, according to project documents. The 1 million square foot data center is slated to cost $1.4 billion to construct. One project official told the Journal that the NSA planned to start turning on some of the computers at the facility this week. “But without a reliable electrical system to run computers and keep them cool, the NSA’s global surveillance data systems can’t function, ” the newspaper wrote. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Meltdowns at NSA spy data center destroy equipment, delay opening

US indicts suspected Anonymous members for leading 2010 “Operation Payback”

Back in 2010, “Operation Payback” involved a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against anti-piracy websites as a way to protest what some members of Anonymous viewed as an overly greedy intellectual property industry. The attack was later revived in early 2011. On Thursday, 13 men were indicted (PDF) in federal court in Virginia on one count of Conspiracy to Intentionally Cause Damage to a Protected Computer. They are accused of using the well-known Low-Orbit Ion Cannon application to conduct DDoS attacks on the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, the United States Copyright Office of the Library of Congress, Visa, MasterCard, and Bank of America. According to the indictment, the victims suffered “significant damage, ” noting specifically that MasterCard suffered at least $5, 000 in losses during a one-year period. (For the record, MasterCard profited $415 million in 2010.) Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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US indicts suspected Anonymous members for leading 2010 “Operation Payback”

Ubuntu’s controversial Mir window system won’t ship with 13.10 desktop

Ubuntu 13.04. Ubuntu 13.10 (“Saucy Salamander”) is scheduled for a final release on Oct. 17, but the OS won’t include what was perhaps the biggest and most controversial change planned for the desktop environment. Canonical announced in March that it would replace the X window system with Mir, a new display server that will eventually work across phones, tablets, and desktops. It has proven controversial, with Intel rejecting Ubuntu patches because Canonical’s development of Mir meant it stopped supporting Wayland as a replacement for X. Mir will ship by default on Ubuntu Touch for phones (but not tablets) this month, allowing a crucial part of Ubuntu’s mobile plans to go forward. However, it won’t be the default system on the desktop, because XMir—an X11 compatibility layer for Mir—isn’t yet able to properly support multi-monitor setups. This is a step back from Canonical’s original plan to “Deliver Mir + XMir + Unity 7 on the [13.10] desktop for those cards that supported it, and fall back to X for those that don’t.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Ubuntu’s controversial Mir window system won’t ship with 13.10 desktop

Microsoft: “System processing” takes up 10 percent of Xbox One GPU time

Wired The Xbox One’s ability to run up to four apps in the background (or on the side via Snap mode) during gameplay and to switch from a game to those apps almost instantaneously obviously comes at some cost to the system’s maximum theoretical gaming performance. Now, thanks to an interview with Xbox technical fellow Andrew Goossen over at Digital Foundry we have some idea of the scale of that performance cost. “Xbox One has a conservative 10 percent time-sliced reservation on the GPU for system processing, ” Goossen told the site. “This is used both for the GPGPU processing for Kinect and for the rendering of concurrent system content such as snap mode.” It’s important to note that additional processing time for the next-generation Kinect sensor is included in that 10 percent number. Still, setting aside nearly a tenth of the GPU’s processing time to support background execution of non-gaming apps is a bit surprising. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft: “System processing” takes up 10 percent of Xbox One GPU time

How the FBI found Miss Teen USA’s webcam spy

RATer’s moniker was “cutefuzzypuppy.” Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock The sextortionist who snapped nude pictures of Miss Teen USA Cassidy Wolf through her laptop’s webcam has been found and arrested, the FBI revealed yesterday. 19-year old Jared James Abrahams, a California computer science student who went by the online handle “cutefuzzypuppy, ” had as many as 150 “slave” computers under his control during the height of his webcam spying in 2012. Watching all of those webcams to see when a young woman changes her clothes takes a serious time commitment, and Abrahams made one; he “was always at his computer, ” according the FBI complaint against him. Abrahams yesterday turned himself in after the complaint was unsealed, and a federal judge released him on a $50, 000 bond. Anatomy of a RATer How did Abrahams get his start learning the intricacies of remote administration tools (RATs), the malware used to spy on his victims? Not surprisingly, he was a regular user of hackforums.net, which features a large RAT forum that I profiled earlier this year . As cutefuzzypuppy, Abrahams asked for plenty of help distributing software like DarkComet to victims, since he “suck[ed] at social engineering” and needed to find better ways to spread his spyware. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

2013 iMac teardowns reveal SSD slots, soldered-in CPU in the 21.5” model

All iMacs now leave you an empty PCIe SSD slot to use if you don’t go in for the Fusion Drive or SSD upgrade, but it’s still hard to get at. iFixit Just one day after Apple quietly refreshed its iMac lineup with Intel’s new Haswell processors, the teardown artists at iFixit have pulled both the 21.5-inch and 27-inch models apart to see what makes them tick. One of our chief complaints about last year’s 21.5-inch iMac was how difficult it was to upgrade, and that remains true of this year’s model. You can still access the computer’s two RAM slots if you’re brave enough to attempt the teardown process (which includes tearing apart and replacing some foam padding), and Apple has included an empty PCIe slot on the base model where last year’s model only had an empty spot on the system board. However, the low-end iMac’s use of Intel’s Iris Pro 5200 integrated GPUs means that it uses one of Intel’s R-series CPUs, and those CPUs only come in a soldered-on ball-grid array (BGA) package. The 27-inch model proves a bit easier to upgrade: it still has four user-accessible RAM slots, still leaves people who opt out of the Fusion Drive or SSD upgrades an empty PCIe slot to use, and still uses a socketed Intel CPU for those of you who want to take the trouble to upgrade that component yourselves after the fact. Both the 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMacs were also confirmed to be using triple-antenna (3×3:3) 802.11ac configurations, meaning the iMacs will be capable of the standard’s maximum theoretical transfer speed of 1.3Gbps where the 2013 MacBook Airs used a two-antenna setup capable of 867Mbps speeds. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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2013 iMac teardowns reveal SSD slots, soldered-in CPU in the 21.5” model

Blackberry warns of near-$1 billion loss this quarter

Blackberry released a statement on Friday saying that it expects to report an operating loss of almost $1 billion in the coming days. According to The Wall Street Journal , Blackberry overestimated the number of new phones it would sell and is facing an “inventory charge of as much as $960 million and a restructuring charge of $72 million.” Specifically, the company said that it would likely report a loss of $950 million to $995 million for the second quarter. Earlier this week we reported that Blackberry was planning to lay off up to 40 percent of its employees, taking the company from 12, 700 full-time employees to about 7, 620 employees. The WSJ reported today that 4, 500 people will be laid off, lower than earlier estimates. (Is that a silver lining we see?) The Canadian company also reported today that it only sold 3.7 million smartphones in the last quarter, most of which were older phones. To stem the bleeding, Blackberry said that going forward, its “smartphone portfolio will transition from 6 devices to 4; focusing on enterprise and prosumer-centric devices, including 2 high-end devices and 2 entry-level devices.” As Quartz writer Christopher Mims wrote , it’s probably too late for Blackberry to turn around its share of the enterprise market given the latest moves made by Apple and Samsung to get their hardware into the hands of businesspeople. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Blackberry warns of near-$1 billion loss this quarter

Fingerprints as passwords: New iPhone Touch ID gets mixed security verdict (Updated)

Chad Miller Of all the new features of Apple’s new iPhone 5S , few have drawn more attention than the built-in fingerprint scanner known as Touch ID. Apple billed it as an “innovative way to simply and securely unlock your phone with just the touch of a finger.” More breathless accounts were calling it a potential ” death knell for passwords ” or using similarly overblown phrases . Until the new phones are in the hands of skilled hackers and security consultants, we won’t know for sure if Touch ID represents a step forward from the security and privacy offered by today’s iPhones. I spent several hours parsing the limited number of details provided by Apple and speaking to software and security engineers. I found evidence both supporting and undermining the case that the fingerprint readers are an improvement. The thoughts that follow aren’t intended to be a final verdict—the proof won’t be delivered until we see how the feature works in the real world. The pros I’ll start with the encouraging evidence. Apple said Touch ID is powered by a laser-cut sapphire crystal and a capacitive touch sensor that is able to take a high-resolution image based on the sub-epidermal layers of a user’s skin. While not definitive, this detail suggests Apple engineers may have designed a system that is not susceptible to casual attacks. If the scans probe deeply enough, for instance, Touch ID probably wouldn’t be tricked by the type of clones that are generated from smudges pulled off a door knob or computer monitor. In 2008, hackers demonstrated just how easy it was to create such clones when they published more than 4, 000 pieces of plastic film containing the fingerprint of a German politician who supported the mandatory collection of citizens’ unique physical characteristics. By slipping the foil over their own fingers, critics were able to mimic then-Interior Minister Wolfgang Schauble’s fingerprint when touching certain types of biometric readers. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Fingerprints as passwords: New iPhone Touch ID gets mixed security verdict (Updated)

Virtual Perfection: Why 8K resolution per eye isn’t enough for perfect VR

So you want me to squeeze two 8K displays into this space? No problem! Give me a decade or so… “Without going into a rant, the term ‘Retina Display’ is garbage, I think.” Palmer Luckey, the founder and creator of the Oculus Rift, is a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to creating the best possible virtual reality experience. So when our recent interview turned toward the ideal future for a head-mounted display—a theoretical “perfect” device that delivers everything he could ever dream of—he did go on a little rant about what we currently consider “indistinguishable” pixels. “There is a point where you can no longer distinguish individual pixels, but that does not mean that you cannot distinguish greater detail, ” he said. “You can still see aliasing on lines on a retina display. You can’t pick out the pixels, but you can still see the aliasing. Let’s say you want to have an image of a piece of hair on the screen. You can’t make it real-size… it would still look jaggy and terrible. There’s a difference between where you can’t see pixels and where you can’t make improvements.” Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Virtual Perfection: Why 8K resolution per eye isn’t enough for perfect VR