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Developer screenshots may show off Apple’s “iOS in the Car” progress

Steve Troughton-Smith One of the features Apple talked about when it unveiled iOS 7 at its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) back in June was “iOS in the Car,” a vehicle integration feature that would let drivers with supported vehicles talk to Siri, listen to and respond to text messages, use Maps, and perform other tasks without removing their hands from the wheel. That feature was absent from the original iOS 7 release, but rumors suggest it will be supported in the iOS 7.1 update that’s currently in beta testing. While Apple’s promotional page for iOS 7 shows some early screenshots of what iOS in the Car might look like, new screenshots pulled from developer Steve Troughton-Smith’s Twitter feed and published by 9to5Mac purport to show off a refined version of the interface. Apple Maps is the only usable app as of this writing, suggesting that the screenshots were taken in the iOS Simulator that shipped with the XCode developer tools rather than on actual hardware, but we can still see the basic UI changes that Apple has made since the original demo. There’s a left-aligned bar with the time, connection status, and a software Home button that appears to be persistent across all of the screenshots, and the rest of the interface’s graphics, fonts, and buttons closely mirror those used throughout iOS 7. A safety warning screen like the one used in most GPSs. Steve Troughton-Smith The list of apps should grow once the feature is actually released. Steve Troughton-Smith For most people, iOS in the Car’s biggest drawback will be that it requires a new car to support all of its features. Though Apple says a number of automakers (including Acura, Chevy, Ferrari, Honda, Hyundai, Infiniti, Jaguar, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Opel) are interested in bringing the feature to some of their 2014 models, replacing a car to use a new feature is a bit more onerous than buying new cables or other accessories. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Developer screenshots may show off Apple’s “iOS in the Car” progress

Supreme Court will hear case on police search of cell phones

On Friday, the Supreme Court said that it would weigh in on whether it is legal for police officers to search the contents of a suspect’s cell phone when they are arrested. Specifically, the high court will take up two cases from California and Massachusetts, both arising from criminal prosecutions, that have brought to question the admissibility of evidence obtained through a search of the suspect’s phone after arrest. The legal decision will come down to whether searching cell phones without a warrant is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure. Earlier court precedent has allowed police officers to search all the items that a person has on them at the time of arrest. But as phones have grown to include e-mail, bank history, and location data, the potential problems with the old standards have become more apparent. A Supreme Court ruling, at least, would give some clarity as to how such situations should be handled. Reuters notes that 91 percent of Americans now have cellphones, and over half of those can connect to the Internet. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Sleeping spacecraft Rosetta nearly ready to wake up for comet landing

ESA The Rosetta spacecraft is due to wake up on the morning of January 20 after an 18-month hibernation in deep space. For the past ten years, the three-ton spacecraft has been on a one-way trip to a 4 km-wide comet. When it arrives, it will set about performing a maneuver that has never been done before: landing on a comet’s surface. The spacecraft has already achieved some success on its long journey through the solar system. It has passed by two asteroids—Steins in 2008 and Lutetia in 2010—and it tried out some of its instruments on them. Because Rosetta’s journey is so protracted, however, preserving energy has been of the utmost importance, which is why it was put into hibernation in June 2011. The journey has taken so long because the spacecraft needed to be “gravity-assisted” by many planets in order to reach the necessary velocity to match the comet’s orbit. Rosetta’s path through the inner Solar System. When it wakes up, Rosetta is expected to take a few hours to establish contact with Earth, 673 million km (396 million mi) away. The scientists involved will wait with bated breath. Dan Andrews, part of a team at the Open University who built one of Rosetta’s on-board instruments, said, “If there isn’t sufficient power, Rosetta will go back to sleep and try again later. The wake-up process is driven by software commands already on the spacecraft. It will wake itself up autonomously and spend some time warming up and orienting its antenna toward Earth to ‘phone home.’” Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sleeping spacecraft Rosetta nearly ready to wake up for comet landing

Point-of-sale malware infecting Target found hiding in plain sight

Cyberslayer Independent security journalist Brian Krebs has uncovered important new details about the hack that compromised as many as 110 million Target customers, including the malware that appears to have infected point-of-sale systems and the way attackers first broke in. According to a post published Wednesday to KrebsOnSecurity, point-of-sale (POS) malware was uploaded to Symantec-owned ThreatExpert.com on December 18, the same day that Krebs broke the news of the massive Target breach . An unidentified source told Krebs that the Windows share point name “ttcopscli3acs” analyzed by the malware scanning website matches the sample analyzed by the malware scanning website . The thieves used the user name “Best1_user” to log in and download stolen card data. Their password was “BackupU$r”. KrebsonSecurity The class of malware identified by Krebs is often referred to as a memory scraper, because it monitors the computer memory of POS terminals used by retailers. The malware searches for credit card data before it has been encrypted and sent to remote payment processors. The malware then “scrapes” the plain-text entries and dumps them into a database. Krebs continued: Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Point-of-sale malware infecting Target found hiding in plain sight

Google Play Movies & TV comes to iOS, minus the store and offline support

Google loves itself some iOS apps. Its newest addition to Apple’s platform is Google Play Movies & TV , Google’s video content store. To call the app a “store” on iOS is a bit of a misnomer, as buying content from the iOS app isn’t possible, thanks to Apple’s restrictions. What it can do is play existing content that you’ve purchased on an Android device or through the Google Play Web interface . There isn’t much to the app. Movies and TV shows are broken out into separate categories, and everything is displayed as a large thumbnail. The individual content pages show a short description, a minimal list of credits, and the all-important “play” button. The app supports Google’s Chromecast via a button in the top right corner, and that’s about it. It’s simple, but a movie player doesn’t really need to be complicated. Compared to the Android version, there are a few things missing. The lack of a store means Google’s recommendation engine is missing too, which leads to of a lot of blank-looking pages. The biggest omission is offline support—there is no way to download a video for later offline viewing, so make sure you have a great Internet connection before pressing “play.” In fact, the app doesn’t work over a cellular connection at all—Wi-Fi is required. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google Play Movies & TV comes to iOS, minus the store and offline support

Critical Microsoft, Adobe, and Oracle updates: Like dental floss for your PC

drueckert.com I was still wiping the sleep from my eyes this morning when the nagging voice kicked in: before trawling the Internet for news, you better install yesterday’s security updates. It wasn’t a pleasant thought, given the raft of patches released yesterday by Microsoft, Adobe, and Oracle for a variety of products. But as someone who has covered computer security for eight years, I’ve come to make updating a top priority. And for good reason. A large percentage of the booby-trapped websites that surreptitiously install malware on visitors’ machines exploit vulnerabilities that have already been patched. The recent hack on Yahoo’s ad network , for instance, targeted two security flaws in the Java software framework that Oracle had fixed 17 and 24 months ago, Trend Micro reported in a blog post . Those who visited compromised Yahoo servers with up-to-date systems were immune to those attacks. By contrast, people using unpatched software were exposed to malicious payloads that installed the Dorkbot and Gamarue trojans, as well as malware that turned visitors’ machines into Bitcoin miners. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Critical Microsoft, Adobe, and Oracle updates: Like dental floss for your PC

Imagination Technologies boosts GPU speeds by 50 percent with Series 6XT

Imagination Technologies While most companies are withholding their big phone and tablet-related news until Mobile World Congress next month, this year’s CES is shaping up to be a busy one for mobile chip designers. Nvidia unveiled the latest version of its Tegra SoC last night, and this morning Imagination Technologies took the wraps off of some new graphics IP for mobile chips. There are two new designs being announced today, both relatives to the PowerVR Series 6 GPUs that are beginning to ship in phones and tablets today. At the top-end is the new PowerVR Series 6XT , which promises a 50 percent performance improvement and better power consumption compared to Series 6. These improvements come entirely from architectural optimizations, not more execution resources—the new GX6250, GX6450, and GX6460 parts use two, four, and six of Imagination’s “computer clusters,” the same number available in Series 6 GPUs. There’s also a GX6240 part, which uses two clusters but is “area-optimized” to take up less space in an SoC die. Like Series 6, Series 6XT supports DirectX 10, OpenGL ES 3.0 , and OpenCL 1.x on the API side. The Series 6XT GPU. The other GPU design being announced today is the Series 6XE series, which are being targeted to especially inexpensive or small SoCs. The G6050 and G6060 are both “half-cluster” parts—the two chips are identical aside from the G6060’s PVIRC2 lossless image compression support. The G6100 and G6110 are single cluster parts, again differentiated by PVIRC2 support in the G6110. The GPUs support only DirectX 9 shader model 3, a step down from the Series 6 and Series 6XT parts, but still support OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenCL 1.x. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Imagination Technologies boosts GPU speeds by 50 percent with Series 6XT

AT&T turns data caps into profits with new fees for content providers

Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock AT&T today confirmed a long-rumored plan to monetize wireless data caps by charging content providers for the right to serve up video and other media without chewing up consumers’ monthly data limits. Sometimes called 1-800-DATA, AT&T billed the plan as “a new way for eligible 4G customers to enjoy mobile content and apps over AT&T’s wireless network without impacting their monthly wireless data plan.” Basically, the price of data is being charged to content providers instead of consumers. The rates for consumers and business will be similar. “We will offer AT&T Sponsored Data providers a wide range of options,” an AT&T spokesperson told Ars. “Customers will be billed according to usage, with costs varying by amounts of usage. Rates are comparable to consumer rates.” Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AT&T turns data caps into profits with new fees for content providers

Putting Windows and Android on the same PC doesn’t solve anyone’s problems

PC makers at CES may announce Windows PCs that run Android apps. But should you do something just because you can? Andrew Cunningham CES begins in just a few short days, but rumors about what we’ll be seeing there are already in full-swing. It’s a fair bet that the usual suspects will show up—phones, tablets, PCs, maybe even a Linux-powered gun or two—but the things that stick out usually end up being the Flavors of the Year. These are often technologies that are cool in theory but fail to light the world on fire in practice. Netbooks, 3D TVs, and the first run of Android tablets are all members of this illustrious group, and so far baubles like 4K TVs and smartwatches look like worthy heirs to the throne. One such upcoming flavor, according to a report from The Verge , is an Intel-backed initiative that combines Windows 8.1 and Android on the same device. Rather than combine an Android tablet with a Windows PC like Asus’ Transformer Book Trio , these computers will seamlessly run Android apps within a Windows environment, probably by way of a virtualization layer like Bluestacks . This idea is in no way new, though the report suggests that a larger push is imminent. The initiative makes some sense for Intel and the OEMs. For Intel, it’s a way to offer tablet makers something that they can’t get from ARM chips like those from Qualcomm or Nvidia: the ability to provide full Windows 8.1 app compatibility combined with Android app compatibility. For the OEMs, it’s (theoretically) a way to patch gaps in Windows 8.1’s improving-but-spotty app store by giving consumers Android tablet apps that they (theoretically) know and love. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Putting Windows and Android on the same PC doesn’t solve anyone’s problems

GOG’s managing director: Gamer resistance to DRM is stronger than ever

GOG.com’s Guillaume Rambourg giving Jenga advice. Digital games distribution site GOG (Good Old Games) has spent the last five years offering classic videogame titles DRM-free to its customers. Earlier in 2013, the site launched an indie publishing platform which allowed independent developers to submit their games for sale through GOG—an alternative to Steam’s contentious Greenlight initiative . Wired.co.uk spoke to Guillaume Rambourg, managing director of GOG.com, to discuss DRM, anti-sales, and why exactly the site was offering the original Fallout games free of charge. Wired.co.uk: What was the story behind setting up the GOG.com website? Rambourg: It all began in the mid-90s, when friends Marcin Iwinski and Michal Kicinski started their business as retail distributors in Poland. Back then, Poland was a very highly pirated market, with most gamers using outdated hardware and not having too much money to spend on games. That’s a tough market to break into: one where people aren’t used to paying for games. Read 32 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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GOG’s managing director: Gamer resistance to DRM is stronger than ever