discipline – Page 4 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

There are limits to 2FA and it can be near-crippling to your digital life

A video demonstration of the vulnerability here, using a temporary password. (credit: Kapil Haresh) This piece first appeared on Medium and is republished here with the permission of the author. It reveals a limitation in the way Apple approaches 2FA, which is most likely a deliberate decision. Apple engineers probably recognize that someone who loses their phone won’t be able to wipe data if 2FA is enforced, and this story is a good reminder of the pitfalls. As a graduate student studying cryptography, security and privacy (CrySP ), software engineering and human-computer interaction , I’ve learned a thing or two about security. Yet a couple of days back, I watched my entire digital life get violated and nearly wiped off the face of the Earth. That sounds like a bit of an exaggeration, but honestly it pretty much felt like that. Here’s the timeline of a cyber-attack I recently faced on Sunday, July 23, 2016 (all times are in Eastern Standard): That’s a pretty incidence matrix (credit: Kapil Haresh) 3:36pm— I was scribbling out an incidence matrix for a perfect hash family table on the whiteboard, explaining how the incidence matrix should be built to my friends. Ironically, this was a cryptography assignment for multicast encryption. Everything seemed fine until a rather odd sound started playing on my iPhone. I was pretty sure it was on silent, but I was quite surprised to see that it said “Find My iPhone Alert” on the lock screen. That was odd. Read 20 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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There are limits to 2FA and it can be near-crippling to your digital life

AMD unveils Radeon Pro SSG graphics card with up to 1TB of M.2 flash memory

While graphics cards with more than 8GB of memory might seem like overkill to gamers, those in the creative industries like VFX and 3D modelling can’t get enough of the stuff. After all, VFX studios like MPC often create scenes that require upwards of 64GB per frame to render . The trouble is, even the most capacious graphics card—AMD’s FirePro S9170 server GPU—tops out at 32GB GDDR5, and there are steep cost and design issues with adding more. AMD has come up with another solution. Instead of adding more expensive graphics memory, why not let users add their own in the form of M.2 solid state storage? That’s the pitch behind the all new Radeon Pro SSG (solid state graphics), which was revealed at the Siggraph computer graphics conference on Monday. The Radeon Pro SSG features two PCIe 3.0 M.2 slots for adding up to 1TB of NAND flash, massively increasing the available frame buffer for high-end rendering work. The SSG will cost you, though: beta developer kits go on sale immediately for a cool $9999 (probably £8000+). Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The quest to get a unique SNES CD-ROM prototype working again

Part 1 of Ben Heck’s SNES-CD restoration project (part 2 at the bottom of this post). Since a prototype of the fabled, unreleased SNES-CD (aka the “Nintendo PlayStation”) was first found and disassembled last year, we’ve learned enough about this one-of-a-kind piece of hardware to actually emulate homebrew games as if they were running on its CD-ROM drive. The prototype console itself, though, has never been fully functional—it couldn’t generate sound, the CD-ROM drive wouldn’t spin up, and, after a recent trip to Hong Kong, it actually stopped generating a picture. That’s when the prototype’s owners, Terry and Dan Diebold, went to famed gaming hardware hacker Ben Heck . They want this piece of gaming history up and running again. Heck documented his efforts in a fascinating two-part YouTube series that reveals a lot about the system and what makes it tick. Terry Diebold starts off talking about how he first discovered the prototype SNES while boxing up an estate sale, where it was sold in a lot alongside CDs, cups, saucers, and other knickknacks. After paying $75 for the entire lot, Diebold recalls, “if you break it down to everything I did buy, I probably paid a nickel for it.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The quest to get a unique SNES CD-ROM prototype working again

Malicious computers caught snooping on Tor-anonymized Dark Web sites

Enlarge / A map of hidden services directories detected as malicious. The trust of the Tor anonymity network is in many cases only as strong as the individual volunteers whose computers form its building blocks. On Friday, researchers said they found at least 110 such machines actively snooping on Dark Web sites that use Tor to mask their operators’ identities. All of the 110 malicious relays were designated as hidden services directories, which store information that end users need to reach the “.onion” addresses that rely on Tor for anonymity. Over a 72-day period that started on February 12, computer scientists at Northeastern University tracked the rogue machines using honeypot .onion addresses they dubbed “honions.” The honions operated like normal hidden services, but their addresses were kept confidential. By tracking the traffic sent to the honions, the researchers were able to identify directories that were behaving in a manner that’s well outside of Tor rules. “Such snooping allows [the malicious directories] to index the hidden services, also visit them, and attack them,” Guevara Noubir, a professor in Northeastern University’s College of Computer and Information Science, wrote in an e-mail. “Some of them tried to attack the hidden services (websites using hidden services) through a variety of means including SQL Injection , Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) , user enumeration, server load/performance, etc.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Malicious computers caught snooping on Tor-anonymized Dark Web sites

VLC 3.0 nightlies arrive with (sort of working) Chromecast support

Grab the latest build of VLC and you’ll see a “Render Output” option in the “Tools” menu. 6 more images in gallery Streaming online content to a Chromecast is fast and easy, but what if you have local files on your desktop that you want to get on the big screen? There are a few niche apps out there that will serve, but one of the biggest media players, VLC, is working on built-in support for Google’s Chromecast. Recently the nightly build servers started pumping out early, unstable builds of VLC with Chromecast support, so I gave it a try. You won’t find the familiar “cast” button that you see in many apps in this VLC build. Instead, the “Tools” menu has a new option called “Render Output”—this screen is for playing media on something other than the computer screen in front of you. It will detect and display Chromecasts on your local network, and the detection process seems to work great. You just pick the device you want to use and hit “OK.” If you’re playing media you’ll need to stop it, and then once you hit play the casting process should start. I got an “unknown certificate” error at first, but, after accepting it, the usual Chromecast stuff started to happen. My TV turned on and switched to the right input. A Chromecast logo appeared, the loading bar popped up—and then it failed. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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VLC 3.0 nightlies arrive with (sort of working) Chromecast support

Gwent: The collectible card game that’s more than just a Witcher spin-off

Didn’t you hear? Collectible card games are all the rage these days, what with Blizzard’s Hearthstone sporting over 20 million players, Magic: The Gathering going through some kind of renaissance, and publishers like Bethesda definitely not trying to cash in on the whole thing with games like The Elder Scrolls: Legends . And so at this year’s E3 we have yet another entry in the genre from developers CD Projekt Red, a Witcher 3 spin-off called Gwent . The difference is, Gwent is far more than just a collectible card game. This one has an honest-to-god proper storyline. There’s even an open-world map to explore. For the uninitiated, Gwent was originally a collectible card game embedded into the vast world of The Witcher 3 . Only, as player data began to trickle in, CD Projekt Red discovered that many players were spending hours roaming inns during quests just to play Gwent . Some even ignored the main game entirely. This was more than enough incentive for the developer to spin Gwent off into its own free-to-play game across PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. And in true CD Projekt Red fashion, it’s gone a little overboard in the process. Instead of just pitching players against each another in one-on-one card battles, Gwent features several single-player campaigns, each of of which has its own unique storyline and lead character, is fully voice acted, and is brought to life via some highly stylised 2D drawings that gently slide across the screen. There’s even an overworld map where, in the demo I was shown at least, you control a cute 2D Geralt to explore and find hidden snippets of story, or extra cards to add to your deck. Each campaign is said to last a whopping 10 hours or so too. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Gwent: The collectible card game that’s more than just a Witcher spin-off

Acer unveils a liquid-cooled laptop, simplified UI tablet for “super-seniors”

(credit: Valentina Palladino) NEW YORK—Acer has been busy, and the company showed off some of its latest work at an event in New York City today. Acer announced a slew of new laptops and PCs, many of which build upon some of its other recently released products. The Switch Alpha 12 laptop is the juiced-up version of its Aspire Switch 12 S that was announced back at CES. Instead of the Switch 12 S’s Core M processor, the Alpha 12 supports sixth-generation Core i3U, i5, and i7 processors. But Acer is pushing this device as an efficient and cool laptop above anything else. Engineers built the Switch Alpha 12 with a liquid cooling system and a fanless design. The heat created from the device powers the cooling system, keeping temperatures down. And since it lacks a fan all together, operating sounds are kept quiet. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

From MUD to MMOG: The making of RuneScape

When he was a boy, growing up in Nottingham, England, Andrew Gower couldn’t afford to buy all of the video games he wanted to play. Rather than mope, he rallied. A wunderkind programmer, Gower created his own versions of the most popular games, pieced together from clues printed in text and image in the pages of video game magazines. Gower’s take on Lemmings— the 1991 Amiga game that was developed by DMA Design six years before the studio made Grand Theft Auto— was his masterwork. “I was proud of that game,” he says. “It was the first [computer game] I’d made that didn’t look like it had been put together by a kid.” Gower would grow up to become, along with his brothers Paul and Ian, the co-founders of Jagex Games Studio and creators of its flagship title RuneScape. It’s one of the longest-running massively-multiplayer online games (MMOG), in which players quest together across the Internet in a fantasy world that, like Facebook, continues to rumble and function even when an individual logs off. Launched in 2001, the earliest version of the game looked rather like a fantasy-themed version of The Sims . Characters were viewed from a divine camera, looking down on the action from an isometric perspective. RuneScape takes place in the world of Gielinor, where gods roam among men. The game eschews a linear storyline, allowing players to set their own goals and objectives. Now in its third iteration (the basic game was superseded by a new version in both 2004 and 2013, each of which upgraded its graphics and overhauled the underlying code base), RuneScape has reached an enviable milestone in the fickle world of MMOs: 15 years old. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Apple announces new 4-inch “iPhone SE,” starting at $399

Behold, the iPhone SE. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) CUPERTINO, Calif.—It’s a big day for small phones. Today, Apple announced its anticipated “iPhone SE,” Apple’s first new 4-inch phone since the iPhone 5C and 5S were released in the fall of 2013. The phone is a throwback in a lot of ways. It’s got the same 1136×640 resolution screen as the iPhone 5 family, and its general design borrows much more from those older phones than it does from the thinner, more rounded 6 and 6S. It looks like and is probably best described as “an iPhone 5S but faster.” Apple VP Greg Joswiak introduced the device, noting that there was great demand for a smaller iPhone. “We sold 30 million 4-inch iPhones in 2015,” he said. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple announces new 4-inch “iPhone SE,” starting at $399

Review: Much-improved Iris GPU makes the Skylake NUC a major upgrade

Andrew Cunningham The new Skylake NUC. 10 more images in gallery Intel’s “Next Unit of Computing” (NUC) mini desktops started off as interesting curiosities, experiments to see just how much computer could fit in a desktop PC that you could hold in your hand. Each subsequent generation has refined the overall concept and added other niceties, making it more and more like a solid consumer-ready computer (albeit one that makes you provide your own RAM and SSD and OS). We looked at Intel’s fourth-generation NUC based on its still-relatively-new Skylake processors. On the outside, less has changed than ever before—Intel has settled on a “look” for the NUC and it’s not messing with the design much. On the inside, you get enough cool upgrades that you can almost forgive Intel’s CPU performance for improving so little in the last three or four years. Model breakdown Specs at a glance: Intel NUC NUC6i7SYK (as reviewed) OS Windows 10 x64 CPU 1.8GHz Core i5-6260U (Turbo Boost up to 1.9GHz) RAM 16GB 2133MHz DDR4 (supports up to 32GB) GPU Intel Iris 540 (integrated with 64MB eDRAM) HDD 256GB Samsung SM951 PCIe SSD Networking 867Mbps 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2, Gigabit Ethernet Ports 4x USB 3.0, 1x mini DisplayPort 1.2, 1x HDMI 1.4b, headphones, SD card slot Size 4.53” x 4.37” x 1.26” (115 x 111 x 32mm) Other perks Kensington lock, swappable lids, IR receiver Warranty 3 years Price ~$400 (barebones), about $755 as configured There are four Skylake NUCs as of this writing. Two include a Core i5-6260U with an Iris 540 integrated GPU, and two use a slower Core i3-6100U processor and a slower HD 520 GPU. Each processor comes in two cases: a taller one that makes room for a 2.5-inch hard drive or SSD, and a shorter one that doesn’t. Otherwise, all models share the same basic design, port layout, and other features. Read 27 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Review: Much-improved Iris GPU makes the Skylake NUC a major upgrade