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Encrypted e-mail: How much annoyance will you tolerate to keep the NSA away?

Aurich Lawson In an age of smartphones and social networking, e-mail may strike many as quaint. But it remains the vehicle that millions of people use every day to send racy love letters, confidential business plans, and other communications both sender and receiver want to keep private. Following last week’s revelations of a secret program that gives the National Security Agency (NSA) access to some e-mails sent over Gmail, Hotmail, and other services—and years after it emerged that the NSA had gained access to full fiber-optic taps of raw Internet traffic—you may be wondering what you can do to keep your messages under wraps. The answer is public key encryption, and we’ll show you how to use it. The uses of asymmetry The full extent of the cooperation between the NSA and various technology companies is unclear. It will probably remain that way for the foreseeable future. For the time being, however, it seems likely that the standard cryptographic tools used to secure data “in flight”—that is to say, the SSL that protects data traveling between machines on the Internet—remain secure as long as certain best practices are used. Read 55 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Encrypted e-mail: How much annoyance will you tolerate to keep the NSA away?

How OS X “Mavericks” works its power-saving magic

Apple execs talk up the new features in OS X Mavericks. At yesterday’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) keynote, Apple made some bold claims about the future of battery life in its laptops. A new 13-inch Macbook Air, for instance, should now run a full 12 hours on a single charge , up from 7 in the previous model. Assuming that testing bears out Apple’s numbers, how did the company do it? The obvious part of the answer is “Haswell”—but that turns out to be only part of the story. The power efficiency gains found in Intel’s new Haswell CPUs should provide modest gains in battery life, and such gains were widely expected. Back in January, Intel claimed that the new Haswell CPUs featured the “largest generation-to-generation battery life increase in the history of Intel” and said that the chips were the first of its architectures designed “from the ground up” for Ultrabooks and tablets. The new chips run at lower clockspeeds and at lower wattages. Less expected was the announcement of OS X 10.9 “Mavericks” and its own focus on mobile power usage. While Apple made a few comments during the keynote about the new technologies meant to enable longer battery life, more information appeared later in the day with the separate release of a Core Technology Overview (PDF) document that offers a high-level look at some of the Mavericks internals. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How OS X “Mavericks” works its power-saving magic

Behold, the world’s most sophisticated Android trojan

greyweed Recently discovered malware targeting Android smartphones exploits previously unknown vulnerabilities in the Google operating system and borrows highly advanced functionality more typical of malicious Windows applications, making it the world’s most sophisticated Android Trojan, a security researcher said. The infection, named Backdoor.AndroidOS.Obad.a, isn’t very widespread at the moment. The malware gives an idea of the types of smartphone malware that are possible, however, according to Kaspersky Lab expert Roman Unuchek in a blog post published Thursday . Sharply contrasting with mostly rudimentary Android malware circulating today, the highly stealthy Obad.a exploits previously unknown Android bugs, uses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections to spread to near-by handsets, and allows attackers to issue malicious commands using standard SMS text messages. “To conclude this review, we would like to add that Backdoor.AndroidOS.Obad.a looks closer to Windows malware than to other Android trojans, in terms of its complexity and the number of unpublished vulnerabilities it exploits,” Unuchek wrote. “This means that the complexity of Android malware programs is growing rapidly alongside their numbers.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Behold, the world’s most sophisticated Android trojan

Chinese supercomputer destroys speed record and will get much faster

Lights on the Tianhe-2 supercomputer change color depending on the power load. Jack Dongarra A Chinese supercomputer known as Tianhe-2 has been measured at speeds of 30.65 petaflops, or 74 percent faster than the current holder of the world’s-fastest-supercomputer title. The speed is remarkable partly because the Intel-based Tianhe-2 (also known as Milkyway-2) wasn’t even running at full capacity during testing. A five-hour Linpack test using 14,336 out of 16,000 compute nodes, or 90 percent of the machine, clocked in at the aforementioned 30.65 petaflops. (A petaflop is one quadrillion floating point operations per second, or a million billion.) Linpack benchmarks are used to rank the Top 500 supercomputers in the world . The Top 500 list’s current champion is Titan, a US system that hit 17.59 petaflops. Tianhe-2 achieved 1.935 gigaflops per watt, which is slightly less efficient than Titan’s 2.143 gigaflops per watt. Tianhe-2’s numbers were revealed this week in a paper by University of Tennessee professor Jack Dongarra, who created the Linpack benchmarks and helps compile the bi-annual Top 500 list. Dongarra’s paper doesn’t say whether Tianhe-2’s Linpack measurement was officially submitted for inclusion in the Top 500 list. Ars has asked him if the measurement will put Tianhe-2 on top when the next list is released, but we haven’t heard back yet. In any case, the new Top 500 rankings will be unveiled on June 17. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Chinese supercomputer destroys speed record and will get much faster

Espionage malware infects raft of governments, industries around the world

Kaspersky Lab Security researchers have blown the whistle on a computer-espionage campaign that over the past eight years has successfully compromised more than 350 high-profile targets in 40 countries. “NetTraveler,” named after a string included in an early version of the malware, has targeted a number of industries and organizations, according to a blog post published Tuesday by researchers from antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab. Targets include oil industry companies, scientific research centers and institutes, universities, private companies, governments and governmental institutions, embassies, military contractors and Tibetan/Uyghur activists. Most recently, the group behind NetTraveler has focused most of its efforts on obtaining data concerning space exploration, nanotechnology, energy production, nuclear power, lasers, medicine, and communications. “Based on collected intelligence, we estimate the group size to about 50 individuals, most of which speak Chinese natively and have working knowledge of the English language,” the researchers wrote. “NetTraveler is designed to steal sensitive data as well as log keystrokes, and retrieve file system listings and various Office of PDF documents.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Espionage malware infects raft of governments, industries around the world

Apple issues OS X 10.8.4 update, includes iMessage and FaceTime fixes

OS X 10.8.4 comes with a long list of fixes. Andrew Cunningham After several weeks of beta testing, Apple has released OS X version 10.8.4 for all Macs running Mountain Lion. The update fixes a long list of minor issues  and some security bugs as the OS nears its first birthday. Those hoping for major changes to OS X will have to wait until Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) next week, at which Apple is widely expected to show off Mountain Lion’s successor. Quite a few of 10.8.4’s fixes are aimed at businesses. There are fixes that will help Calendar work better with Microsoft Exchange servers, compatibility and speed improvements to OS X’s Active Directory integration, improvements to compatibility with “certain enterprise Wi-Fi networks,” and fixes to issues with the SMB and NFS network sharing protocols. As ever, Apple is annoyingly nonspecific about the exact problems these updates solve, but network administrators with OS X clients may find something to like about the new update. Other squashed bugs will be of more interest to consumers. For example, there’s an iMessage fix that will prevent out-of-order messages, a fix for a FaceTime issue that would prevent calls to international numbers, and an update to Safari (now at version 6.0.5) that “improves stability for some websites with chat features and games.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple issues OS X 10.8.4 update, includes iMessage and FaceTime fixes

Microsoft promises annual Windows Server updates, can IT cope?

Windows Server 2012 will be updated this autumn to Windows Server 2012 R2. This will be the first in a series of more or less annual updates to the Windows Server platform. It’s not just the operating system that’ll get these regular updates, either. On the server side, System Center and SQL Server are also going to be on an annual cadence. On the client side, Visual Studio will be too. Even though Windows Server 2012 is less than a year old, Microsoft promises a stack of new features for the R2 iteration. Hyper-V, in particular, has some compelling improvements: legacy-free, UEFI-booting “generation 2” virtual machines, faster live migration, live cloning of VMs, online disk resizing, and support for live migration, backup, disk resizing, and dynamic memory for Linux guests. Windows’ pooled storage system, Storage Spaces, is set to become a lot smarter. Pools can use a mix of solid state and spinning disk media, and the Storage Space software will automatically move hot data off the spinning disks and onto the solid state ones. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft promises annual Windows Server updates, can IT cope?

Windows 8.1 gains boot-to-desktop to attract business users

At TechEd North America today, Microsoft unveiled a host of features coming in Windows 8.1 that should make the operating system more appealing to business users. Windows 8.1 is a free update to Windows 8 that will ship  later this year . On top of bringing back a Taskbar-visible Start button , Windows 8.1 will give enterprises a lot more control over the operating system’s appearance. Chief among these controls is the ability to boot straight to the desktop, a feature found in prerelease versions of Windows 8 but not officially supported in the final version. Additionally, IT departments can now exact more control over the Start screen, fixing its layout and prepopulating it with tiles for corporate apps. At its most extreme, this will allow IT departments to turn Windows 8 machines into kiosks, booting into specific Metro apps. If the built-in capabilities aren’t sufficient, Microsoft will be releasing an embeddable version. The catchily-named Windows Embedded 8.1 Industry will be for use in things like point-of-sale systems and ATMs. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 8.1 gains boot-to-desktop to attract business users

Two CPUs, two batteries, two OSes: Asus announces Transformer Book Trio

The Asus Transformer Book Trio takes the dockable tablet concept to the next level. Asus Asus has long offered a line of Android tablets that slot into keyboard docks, but at its Computex press conference it announced it would be taking this concept one step further. Its new Transformer Book Trio is a tablet running Android (an unspecified version of Jelly Bean, to be a bit more precise); when docked, it becomes a Haswell-equipped Windows 8 Ultrabook. The laptop contains all the ingredients for a standard Ultrabook in its base: a 4th-generation Haswell CPU, 1TB of storage, an unspecified amount of RAM, and a 33WHr battery. Behind the 11.6-inch 1080p display is an entirely separate computer based on Intel’s Clover Trail+ Atom platform: the 2GHz Atom Z2580, 2GB of RAM, 64GB of solid-state storage, and a 19WHr battery. When the laptop is docked, Engadget reports that a button press will switch between the Windows 8 installation in the base and the Android installation in the lid. Undocking the lid switches the tablet to a full-time Android tablet, though since the hardware is x86-based, one wonders if Windows 8 couldn’t be installed on it with some effort. The device combines a couple of concepts that Asus is already using elsewhere. Its Transformer Pad tablets have long been keyboard-dockable, and the Transformer AiO also uses a detachable screen to double as a tablet (though in that case the tablet’s hardware is ARM-based). Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Two CPUs, two batteries, two OSes: Asus announces Transformer Book Trio

Seat of Power: the computer workstation for the person with everything

MWE Lab’s Emperor 1510 LX—don’t call it a chair. MWE Labs Science fiction is filled with cherished seats of power, workstations that put the universe a finger-touch or a mere thought away. Darth Vader had his meditation pod, the Engineers of Prometheus had their womb-like control stations, and Captain Kirk has the Captain’s Chair. But no real-life workstation has quite measured up to these fictional seats of power in the way that Martin Carpentier’s Emperor workstations have. The latest “modern working environment” from Carpentier’s Quebec City-based MWE Lab is the Emperor 1510 LX. With a retractable monitor stand that can support up to five monitors (three 27-inch and two 19-inch), a reclining seat with thigh rest, a Bose sound system, and Italian leather upholstery, the Emperor 1510 LX looks more like a futuristic vehicle than a workstation.  And it’s priced like a vehicle, too—it  can soon be yours for the low, low price of $21,500. Tale of the Scorpion In 2006, Carpentier was slaving away as a web designer when he reached a breaking point. He was tired of his tangle of cables, the struggle to manage multiple monitors, and the horrible ergonomics that came with a standard computer desk. Inspired by the emperor scorpion, Carpentier modeled his workstation after its tail, with the monitors suspended at the stinger. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Seat of Power: the computer workstation for the person with everything