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Cortana for all: Microsoft’s plan to put voice recognition behind anything

When Microsoft introduced the Cortana digital personal assistant last year at the company’s Build developer conference, the company already left hints of its future ambitions for the technology. Cortana was built largely on Microsoft’s Bing service, and the Cortana team indicated those services would eventually be accessible to Web and application developers. As it turns out, eventually is now. Though the most important elements are only available in a private preview, many of the machine learning capabilities behind Cortana have been released under Project Oxford, the joint effort between Microsoft Research and the Bing and Azure teams announced at Build in April. And at the conference, Ars got to dive deep on the components of Project Oxford with Ryan Gaglon, the senior program manager at Microsoft Technology and Research shepherding the project to market. The APIs make it possible to add image and speech processing to just about any application, often by using just a single Web request. “They’re all finished machine learning services in the sense that developers don’t have to create any model for them in Azure,” Gaglon told Ars. “They’re very modular.” All of the services are exposed as representational state transfer (REST) Web services based on HTTP “verbs” (such as GET, PUT, and POST), and they require an Azure API subscription key. To boot, all the API requests and responses are encrypted via HTTPS to protect their content. Read 38 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cortana for all: Microsoft’s plan to put voice recognition behind anything

Don’t look now, but 3DS emulation is becoming a thing

Given enough time and attention from the development community, it’s practically inevitable that any video game console can and will be emulatable on a general-use computer. Hardware makers, always wary of the piracy implications of such a development, may hope that doesn’t happen until many years after that console ceases to be commercially viable. Unfortunately for Nintendo, that seems unlikely in the case of the 3DS. The Citra emulation project has been in the works for at least a year , but developers reached a breakthrough last December when they managed to load Ocarina of Time 3D for the first time. That title has now been shown running at nearly full speed on Citra with the help of an OpenGL renderer (though some visual artifacts still exist). Since then, compatibility work has continued on a seemingly game-by-game basis.  Virtual Console titles were shown off in February, and just this week team members posted evidence of Animal Crossing New Leaf , Super Monkey Ball 3D , and even the system’s home menu  running through emulation. There are a few homebrew demos available as well, including emulators for other systems running inside of the 3DS emulator and the kind of Minecraft port that’s seemingly required for all emulation projects these days. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Don’t look now, but 3DS emulation is becoming a thing

With vinyl sales on the rise, this startup lets anyone press their own LP

We often talk about the lost magic of owning a physical thing , whether that’s books, CDs, or the wondrous black slab of plastic that is the vinyl record. Holding that object in your hand, flicking through its dog-eared pages and admiring its intricately crafted artwork, imparts a sense of ownership that you just can’t replicate with a Kindle or a convenient subscription to Spotify. The trouble is, making physical objects is hard , not to mention expensive. That’s especially true of the vinyl record, where pressing plants aren’t exactly ten a penny. And yet, despite the high cost of manufacturing and end price to the consumer, vinyl sales are very much on the up. According to Nielsen , vinyl album sales in the US have grown an impressive 260 percent since 2009, reaching 9.2 million units last year, while in the UK sales reached a 20-year high of 1.29 million in 2014 . Of course, these numbers are but a tiny fraction of music sales as a whole, but—regardless of whether it’s customers chasing that creamy analogue sound, or there are just a lot more hipsters around these days—there’s a demand to be satisfied. But if you’re not a big record label with deep pockets, getting the capital together to produce a run of vinyl is tricky. Even if you do raise the cash, how do you decide how many to make? Too few and people are left wanting; too many and you’re left with stock you can’t sell. It’s a problem that the recently launched Qrates  is hoping to solve. Qrates is an intriguing mix of the old and the new, consisting of a vinyl pressing service, a crowdfunding system, and a digital store all rolled into one. Using the site’s online tool, you can upload your music, design the label and sleeve, choose your preferred playing speed (33 or 45), the weight and colour of the actual record, and how many you’d like (there’s currently a nice low minimum order of 100). Qrates gives you an estimated cost, and then works with a regional pressing plant to fulfil your order. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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With vinyl sales on the rise, this startup lets anyone press their own LP

In rare move, Silicon Valley county gov’t kills stingray acquisition

The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors has halted a plan to approve the purchase of a cell-site simulator , better known as a stingray. The secretive surveillance devices can be used to determine a phone’s location, but they can also intercept calls and text messages. During the act of locating a phone, stingrays also sweep up information about nearby phones—not just the target phone. Earlier this year, Ars reported on how the FBI is actively trying to “prevent disclosure” of how these devices are used in local jurisdictions across America. The move, happening in one of the primary counties in Silicon Valley, marks an unusual occasion that a local government has turned away from federal funds that would be used to acquire such a device. The device was approved initially during a February 24, 2015 meeting, despite a testy exchange between the Santa Clara Sheriff’s Office and Supervisor Joe Simitian, a former state senator with a penchant for an interest in privacy issues. Simitian’s office didn’t immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment. Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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In rare move, Silicon Valley county gov’t kills stingray acquisition

Boeing 787 Dreamliners contain a potentially catastrophic software bug

A software vulnerability in Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner jet has the potential to cause pilots to lose control of the aircraft, possibly in mid-flight, Federal Aviation Administration officials warned airlines recently. The bug—which is either a classic integer overflow or one very much resembling it—resides in one of the electrical systems responsible for generating power, according to memo the FAA issued last week . The vulnerability, which Boeing reported to the FAA, is triggered when a generator has been running continuously for a little more than eight months. As a result, FAA officials have adopted a new airworthiness directive (AD) that airlines will be required to follow, at least until the underlying flaw is fixed. “This AD was prompted by the determination that a Model 787 airplane that has been powered continuously for 248 days can lose all alternating current (AC) electrical power due to the generator control units (GCUs) simultaneously going into failsafe mode,” the memo stated. “This condition is caused by a software counter internal to the GCUs that will overflow after 248 days of continuous power. We are issuing this AD to prevent loss of all AC electrical power, which could result in loss of control of the airplane.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Boeing 787 Dreamliners contain a potentially catastrophic software bug

Behold: the drop-dead simple exploit that nukes Google’s Password Alert

Less than 24 hours after Google unveiled a Chrome extension that warns when user account passwords get phished , a security researcher has devised a drop-dead simple exploit that bypasses it. This benign proof-of-concept exploit looks almost identical to a Google login page, and is typical of a malicious phishing page that attempts to trick people into entering their user name and password. If Google’s freely available Password Alert extension was better designed, it would provide a warning as soon as someone tried to log into the page with their Google password. Instead, the warning is completely suppressed. (Note: although Ars fully trusts the researcher, readers are strongly advised not to enter passwords for Google accounts they use for anything other than testing purposes.) A video of the bypass exploit is here Bypassing Google’s Password Alert “Protection” “It beggars belief,” Paul Moore, an information security consultant at UK-based Urity Group who wrote the exploit, told Ars. “The suggestion that it offers any real level of protection is laughable.” He went on to say Google would do better devoting its resources to supporting the use of password managers, since most of them provide much more effective protections against phishing attacks. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Behold: the drop-dead simple exploit that nukes Google’s Password Alert

Spam-blasting malware infects thousands of Linux and FreeBSD servers

Several thousand computers running the Linux and FreeBSD operating systems have been infected over the past seven months with sophisticated malware that surreptitiously makes them part of a renegade network blasting the Internet with spam, researchers said Wednesday. The malware likely infected many more machines during the five years it’s known to have existed. Most of the machines infected by the so-called Mumblehard malware are believed to run websites, according to the 23-page report issued by researchers from antivirus provider Eset. During the seven months that they monitored one of its command and control channels, 8,867 unique IP addresses connected to it, with 3,000 of them joining in the past three weeks. The discovery is reminiscent of Windigo, a separate spam botnet made up of 10,000 Linux servers that Eset discovered 14 months ago. The Mumblehard malware is the brainchild of experienced and highly skilled programmers. It includes a backdoor and a spam daemon , which is a behind-the-scenes process that sends large batches of junk mail. These two main components are written in Perl and they’re obfuscated inside a custom “packer” that’s written in assembly , an extremely low-level programming language that closely corresponds to the native machine code of the computer hardware it runs on. Some of the Perl script contains a separate executable with the same assembly-based packer that’s arranged in the fashion of a Russian nesting doll. The result is a very stealthy infection that causes production servers to send spam and may serve other nefarious purposes. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Spam-blasting malware infects thousands of Linux and FreeBSD servers

Rogue Silk Road DEA agent arrested with “go bag,” 9mm pistol

SAN FRANCISCO—Federal prosecutors successfully argued Wednesday that Carl Mark Force, the former Drug Enforcement Administration agent who allegedly went rogue during the investigation of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, should not be granted bail. “I am not prepared to release him today,” United States Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Laporte said during the Wednesday hearing. She heard 90 minutes of argument from government lawyers and from one of Force’s defense attorneys. After the hearing, Force was transferred from Santa Rita Jail in nearby Alameda County to San Francisco County Jail. Read 36 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Rogue Silk Road DEA agent arrested with “go bag,” 9mm pistol

170-year-old champagne provides clues to past winemaking

Divers discovered bottles in a shipwreck off the Finnish Aland archipelago in the Baltic Sea in 2010. After tasting the bottles on site, the divers realized they were likely drinking century-old champagne. Soon after, 168 unlabeled bottles were retrieved and were identified as champagnes from the Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin (VCP), Heidsieck, and Juglar (known as Jacquesson since 1832) champagne houses. A few of the recovered bottles had been lying horizontal in close-to-perfect slow aging conditions. Discovery of these wines, likely the oldest ever tasted, unleashed a flood of questions. When were these wines produced? What winemaking processes were in use at the time? Where was the wine going when the shipwreck occurred? An analytic approach A team of scientists gathered to search for the answers through the application of current analytical techniques, an approach called archaeochemistry. Using a combination of targeted and nontargeted modern chemical analytic approaches, the researchers aimed to uncover aspects of the winemaking practices. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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170-year-old champagne provides clues to past winemaking

Microsoft’s Office 365 “lockbox” gives customers last word on data access

One of the concerns that keeps many companies from adopting software-as-a-service for e-mail and other collaboration services has been the issue of who has control over the security of the content. Today at the RSA Conference, Microsoft is announcing changes to its Office 365 service that will allay some of those concerns, giving customers greater visibility into the security of their applications and control over what happens with them. At the same time, it will potentially be harder for government agencies and law enforcement to secretly subpoena the contents of an organization’s e-mail. In an interview with Ars, Microsoft’s general manager for Office 365 Julia White outlined the three new features, which are being announced in a blog post from Office 365 team Corporate Vice President Rajesh Jha today . Office 365 will now include a “Customer Lockbox” feature that puts customer organizations in control of when Microsoft employees can gain access to their data, requiring explicit permission from a customer before systems can be accessed to perform any sort of service on their Office 365 services. The capability will be turned on by the end of 2015 for e-mail and for SharePoint by the end of the first quarter of 2016. “We have automated everything we can to prevent the need for our people having to touch customer data,” White told Ars. “It’s almost zero—there are very rare instances when a Microsoft engineer has to log in to a customers’ services. Now we’re going to, in those rare instances, make customer approval mandatory to do so.” That would also apply to law enforcement requests for access, White acknowledged. “When the customer opts into the Lockbox, all requests would go into that process. So it’s a customer assurance of transparency. We want to systematically look at what kind of control and transparency customers want and provide it to them,” White said. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft’s Office 365 “lockbox” gives customers last word on data access