Tag: digest

OS X 10.8.4 beta suggests 802.11ac is coming soon to a Mac near you

Amid the sea of text, a revealing phrase: 802.11ac. 9to5Mac Before rolling them out to the public through Software Update, Apple regularly releases beta versions of its minor OS X updates to registered developers and other selected testers. These patches are normally routine—a security patch here, a new driver there—but they occasionally reveal tidbits about where Apple is taking OS X and, by extension, its Mac lineup. A new build of OS X 10.8.4 was released to beta testers today, and 9to5Mac cracked it open in short order. Hidden in the operating system’s “WiFi-frameworks” folder is a brand-new reference to 802.11ac Wi-Fi , a new standard that promises bandwidth of up to 1.3Gbps. The fastest Wi-Fi chips in today’s Macs support 802.11n at speeds of either 450Mbps (for devices with three antennae like the iMac or MacBook Pro) or 270Mbps (for devices like the MacBook Air with only two antennae), making the new standard quite the potential upgrade. As with previous Wi-Fi upgrades, the new 802.11ac adapters and routers will also be backward-compatible with 802.11n, g, b, and a-based devices. Routers and adapters that support 802.11ac first began to appear on the market last year, and have slowly proliferated as the months have gone on. We saw quite a few 802.11ac routers at this year’s CES , and 802.11ac chips from the likes of Broadcom should begin to show up in many consumer devices this year. Even some smartphones (the HTC One in particular) are beginning to ship with the new standard, so it wouldn’t be a surprise if Apple made the jump in this year’s Macs. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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OS X 10.8.4 beta suggests 802.11ac is coming soon to a Mac near you

Intel wants to kill the traditional server rack with 100Gbps links

If Intel gets its way, old-school server racks will go the way of the dinosaurs. David Monniaux Intel is working to replace the traditional server rack with a more efficient architecture that separates CPU, storage, power, and networking resources into individual components that can be swapped out as needed. Power and cooling would be shared across CPUs, rather than having separate power supplies for each server. Server, memory, network, and storage resources would all be disaggregated and shared across the rack. Incredibly fast interconnects will be needed to prevent slowdowns because disaggregating components pushes them further apart, and Intel is thus building an interconnect that’s capable of 100Gbps. “We are developing a rack-scale architecture,” Lisa Graff, VP and general manager of Intel’s data center marketing group, said in a briefing with reporters last week. “We’re working with end users, OEMs, and ISVs to drive common standards in a reference architecture.” Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel wants to kill the traditional server rack with 100Gbps links

Waiting for a 1TB SSD below $1 per GB? Crucial says wait no more

Crucial announced in a press release this morning that it has begun selling its latest round of consumer-grade solid-state disks (SSDs), the M500 . The 2.5-inch SATA III SSDs are the follow-up to Crucial’s M4 SSDs, which are a pretty popular choice for people adding SSDs to existing systems (I think I have four or five M4s scattered in computers around my house). The drives use 20nm MLC NAND sourced from Micron (and if you’re not sure what MLC NAND is, we’ve got a great SSD primer right here ), along with a Micron-provided SSD controller. Performance for the M500 drives is what you’d expect from a drive in this class: sequential read and write speeds of 500MB per second and 400MB per second. But the big news about the announcement is the capacities. The M500 is available in standard pedestrian capacities of 120GB and 240GB, as well as a large capacity of 480GB, but the top-end SKU is the exciting one: 960GB for just $599.99 (62¢ per raw GB). The MSRPs for the smaller capacities are $129.99 for the 120GB (about $1 per raw GB), $219.99 for the 240GB (about 91¢ per raw GB), and $399.99 for the 480GB (about 83¢ per raw GB). Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Waiting for a 1TB SSD below $1 per GB? Crucial says wait no more

Report: Xbox 360 successor can tolerate only brief Internet interruptions

Kotaku is citing two unnamed sources that it says “have a perfect track record in getting these kinds of things right” to report that Microsoft’s follow-up to the Xbox 360 will need a working Internet connection to start games and apps. And the site goes on to write that the system will only tolerate brief interruptions in that connection while the game or app is being used. “Unless something has changed recently, Durango consumer units must have an active Internet connection to be used,” one source told the site, referring to the internal code name for Microsoft’s next system. “If there isn’t a connection, no games or apps can be started. If the connection is interrupted, then after a period of time—currently three minutes, if I remember correctly—the game/app is suspended and the network troubleshooter started.” Another source said this requirement was still in effect on development hardware as recently as two weeks ago. Information suggesting that the next Microsoft console will need to be online is nothing new; numerous leaks and rumors have pointed in that direction throughout the last year or so. However, this is the first serious suggestion that such connectivity would need to be more or less continuous while a game is being played, rather than just checked once when a game or app is launched. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Report: Xbox 360 successor can tolerate only brief Internet interruptions

Apple puts age ratings front and center on app product pages

The old App Store app page layout, left, and new layout, right. Apple has pushed the age ratings for its App Store apps to the top of the product pages in an effort to make buyers, especially parents, more aware of the type of content they’re getting. The age ratings are now directly below the app-maker’s name, and they sit above the user ratings. Apple has faced some disgraces lately with apps that have gained the spotlight only to blindside unexpecting users with adult content. The short-video sharing app Vine was featured as an App Store Editors’ Choice shortly before porn surfaced within the app’s Editors’ Picks ; the image-sharing app 500px was also yanked for its pornographic pictures. Both apps now have a 17+ rating slapped on them. While Apple’s new prominent app ratings won’t solve the unpredictable-user-generated-content problem, they will get parents and guardians to pay more attention to what kinds of apps they are downloading. This change also follows Apple’s addition of an “Offers In-App Purchases” label to app product pages to help account-owning parents anticipate which apps will allow their kids to wantonly bill items within an app—before they get the credit card bill. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Apple puts age ratings front and center on app product pages

A flood of prank iMessage texts shows the app can be crashed easily

Human can’t be blamed for thinking this show of affection comes off as a little clingy. Adam Bell/The Next Web On Friday, The Next Web reported that a group of iOS developers were experiencing rapid-fire texts over iMessage, causing bothersome and repetitious messages and notifications. While the prank wasn’t serious on the level of, say, a full-scale DDoS of a bank website , and concern over spam via iMessage is not new either, the unwanted messages were fresh proof of some problems with the iMessage app, specifically in the lack of good spam-detection in iMessage, and in the lack of a way for users to block a message sender. One of the recipients of the spam, an iOS jailbreak tool and app developer who goes by the moniker iH8sn0w , informed The Next Web of the prank when it happened. iH8sn0w told Ars over Twitter that he simply disabled the handle that was getting flooded. “It’s just a bunch of kids bored playing with AppleScript,” he said. Another app and extension developer for iOS devices, Grant Paul, reported on Twitter that he was getting spammed on iMessage with very large messages, causing his iMessage app to crash. “The iMessage spammer has now completely locked me out of my iOS Messages app, by sending long strings of Unicode chars. Definitely a DoS,” Paul wrote on his Twitter account . Ars reached out to Paul but has not yet heard back from him. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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A flood of prank iMessage texts shows the app can be crashed easily

How the maker of TurboTax fought free, simple tax filing

This story was co-produced with NPR . Imagine filing your income taxes in five minutes—and for free. You’d open up a prefilled return, see what the government thinks you owe, make any needed changes and be done. The miserable annual IRS shuffle, gone. It’s already a reality in Denmark, Sweden, and Spain . The government-prepared return would estimate your taxes using information your employer and bank already send it. Advocates say tens of millions of taxpayers could use such a system each year, saving them a collective $2 billion and 225 million hours in prep costs and time, according to one estimate. Read 49 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How the maker of TurboTax fought free, simple tax filing

“Cloud gaming” has a future—just maybe not in the cloud

Nvidia’s Shield tablet can stream full PC games from your Steam library as long as you’re using a GeForce graphics card. This may be the best way to stream your PC games to your tablet. Andrew Cunningham In practically every one of its major press conferences since last year’s GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia has reminded us that they want to virtualize the graphics processor. The company wants to take it out of the computer on your lap or on your desk and put it into a server somewhere without you noticing the difference. It introduced the concept at GTC 2012. Then over the course of the next year, Nvidia unveiled the actual graphics cards that would enable this tech, started selling them to partners, and also stuck them in Nvidia Grid-branded servers aimed at both gamers and businesses . The difference between Nvidia’s initiatives and more traditional virtualization is that the company’s products support relatively few users for the hardware they require. The Grid gaming server supports 24 users per server box and the Visual Computing Appliance (VCA) only supports eight or 16 depending on the model. Most virtualization is all about dynamically allocating resources like CPU cycles and RAM to give as many users as possible the bare minimum amount of power they need. Instead, Nvidia’s is about providing a fixed number of users with a pretty specific amount of computing power, thus attempting to recreate the experience of using a regular old computer. There are situations where this makes sense. Given the cost of buying and maintaining workstation hardware, Nvidia’s argument for the VCA seems more or less convincing. But I’m slightly less optimistic about the prospect for the Grid gaming server, or any cloud gaming service, really—call it leftover skepticism from OnLive’s meltdown earlier this year . Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Cloud gaming” has a future—just maybe not in the cloud

Nvidia plans to turn Ultrabooks into workstations with Grid VCA server

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang directs a demo of the Grid Visual Computing Appliance (VCA) during his GTC 2013 keynote. Andrew Cunningham SAN JOSE, CA—One of the announcements embedded in Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang’s opening keynote for the company’s GPU Technology Conference Tuesday was a brand new server product, something that Nvidia is calling the Grid Visual Computing Appliance, or VCA. The VCA is a buttoned-down, business-focused cousin to the Nvidia Grid cloud gaming server that the company unveiled at CES in January. It’s a 4U rack-mountable box that uses Intel Xeon CPUs and Nvidia’s Grid graphics cards ( née VGX ), and like the Grid gaming server, it takes the GPU in your computer and puts it into a server room. The VCA serves up 64-bit Windows VMs to users, but unlike most traditional VMs, you’ve theoretically got the same amount of graphical processing power at your disposal as you would in a high-end workstation. However, while the two share a lot of underlying technology, both Grid servers have very different use cases and audiences. We met with Nvidia to learn more about just who this server is for and what it’s like to use and administer one. Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Nvidia plans to turn Ultrabooks into workstations with Grid VCA server

Chameleon botnet steals millions from advertisers with fake mouseclicks

Security researchers have discovered a botnet that is stealing millions of dollars per month from advertisers. The botnet does so by simulating click-throughs on display ads hosted on at least 202 websites. Revealed and dubbed “Chameleon” by the Web analytics firm spider.io because of its ability to fool advertisers’ behavior-tracking algorithms, the botnet is the first found to use display advertisements to generate fraudulent income for its masters. In a blog post today, spider.io reported that the company had been tracking Chameleon since December of 2012. Simulating multiple concurrent browser sessions with websites, each bot is able to interact with Flash and JavaScript based ads. So far, more than 120,000 Windows PCs have been identified—95 percent of them with IP addresses associated with US residential Internet services. The company has issued a blacklist of the 5,000 worst-offending IP addresses for advertisers to use to protect themselves from fraud. While in many respects the botnet simulates human activity on webpages to fool countermeasures to clickfraud, it generates random mouse clicks and mouse pointer traces across pages. This makes it relatively easy for bot-infected systems to be identified over time. The bot is also unstable because of the heavy load it puts on the infected machine, and its frequent crashes can also be used as a signature to identify infected systems. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Chameleon botnet steals millions from advertisers with fake mouseclicks