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Meet the new hotness: All-in-one 3D printers and scanners

Meet Radiant Fabrication’s Lionhead Bunny. Radiant Fabrication We’ve told you about inexpensive 3D printers. We’ve reported on the first two 3D scanners. And recently, Ars editor Lee Hutchinson took two 3D printers for a spin to reveal what he called a “ maddening journey into another dimension .” But get ready to set aside those old-timey devices—enter the all-in-one 3D printers and scanners . This week, two companies have each announced their own all-in-one 3D printer and scanner. On Tuesday, Radiant Fabrication trumpeted the Lionhead Bunny, a $1, 649 device that the company will make available starting next month (though it appears to be dependent on the success of its forthcoming Kickstarter campaign). In a statement released with its announcement, Radiant Fabrication wrote: Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Meet the new hotness: All-in-one 3D printers and scanners

Windows 8 more widely used than OS X, IE still on the rise

Net Market Share In July, Windows 8 passed Windows Vista in market share. In August, it passed every single version of Apple’s OS X, combined. Internet Explorer 10 grew sharply, too, with almost one in five Internet users now on the latest version of Microsoft’s browser. Net Market Share Windows 8 made substantial gains in August, picking up 2.01 points of share. This is 37 percent growth on July’s figure. Windows XP also fell substantially, losing 3.53 points. With luck, this might mean that Windows XP is finally on the way out. It has less than a year until it stops receiving free security patches from Microsoft; once this happens, it will essentially be in a state of permanent zero day exploits. Even this level of decline isn’t enough to see the operating system eradicated in time for its end of life. That’s good news for spammers, who’ll have plenty of zombie machines to recruit into botnets, but bad news for everyone else. Net Market Share Net Market Share Among desktop browsers, Internet Explorer was up 0.99 points, Firefox was up 0.59 points, and Safari was up 0.17 points. Chrome, however, was down significantly, losing 1.76 points. This means that yet again Chrome has closed in on Firefox, almost passing it, only to fall back. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 8 more widely used than OS X, IE still on the rise

Balky carriers and slow OEMs step aside: Google is defragging Android

Ron Amadeo Android 4.3 was released to Nexus devices a little over a month ago, but, as is usual with Android updates, it’s taking much longer to roll out the general public. Right now, a little over six percent of Android users have the latest version. And if you pay attention to the various Android forums out there, you may have noticed something: no one cares. 4.3’s headline features are a new camera UI, restricted user profiles, and support for new versions of Bluetooth and OpenGL ES. Other than the camera, these are all extremely dull, low-level enhancements. It’s not that Google is out of ideas, or the Android team is slowing down. Google has purposefully made every effort to make Android OS updates as boring as possible. Why make boring updates? Because getting Samsung and the other OEMs to actually update their devices to the latest version of Android is extremely difficult. By the time the OEMs get the new version, port their skins over, ship a build to carriers, and the carriers finally push out the OTA update, many months pass. If the device isn’t popular enough, this process doesn’t happen at all. Updating a phone is a massive project involving several companies, none of which seem to be very committed to the process or in much of a hurry to get it done. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Balky carriers and slow OEMs step aside: Google is defragging Android

Feds plow $10 billion into “groundbreaking” crypto-cracking program

Wikimedia The federal government is pouring almost $11 billion per year into a 35, 000-employee program dedicated to “groundbreaking” methods to decode encrypted messages such as e-mails, according to an intelligence black budget published by The Washington Post. The 17-page document, leaked to the paper by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, gives an unprecedented breakdown of the massive amount of tax-payer dollars—which reached $52 billion in fiscal 2013—that the government pours into surveillance and other intelligence-gathering programs. It also details the changing priorities of the government’s most elite spy agencies. Not surprisingly, in a world that’s increasingly driven by networks and electronics, they are spending less on the collection of some hard-copy media and satellite operations while increasing resources for sophisticated signals intelligence, a field of electronic spying feds frequently refer to as “SIGINT.” “We are bolstering our support for clandestine SIGINT capabilities to collect against high priority targets, including foreign leadership targets, ” James Clapper, director of national intelligence, wrote in a summary published by the WaPo . “Also, we are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit Internet traffic.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

How “cell tower dumps” caught the High Country Bandits—and why it matters

Surveillance footage of one of the robbers. On February 18, 2010, the FBI field office in Denver issued a “wanted” notice for two men known as “the High Country Bandits”—a rather grandiose name for a pair of middle-aged white men who had been knocking down rural banks in the northern Arizona and Colorado, grabbing a few thousand dollars from a teller’s cash drawer, and sometimes escaping on a stolen all terrain vehicle (ATV). In each of their 16 robberies, the bandits had a method: “The unknown male identified as suspect number one often enters the banks in rural locations near closing time and brandishes a black semi-automatic handgun. Suspect number one then demands all the money from the teller drawers. He obtains an undisclosed amount of money, puts it in a bag, orders everyone on the ground, then exits the banks with a second suspect. They have been seen leaving the banks on a green or maroon four-wheel ATV with suspect number two driving.” Investigators had bank surveillance footage of the robberies, but the bandits wore jackets, ski masks, and gloves and proved hard to track down. It wasn’t for a lack of witnesses or police effort, either. At one 2009 robbery in Pinetop, Arizona, for instance, the bandits got away with $3, 827. Witnesses saw a man run from the bank and into a residential area, “looking around as if he were lost.” Witnesses later saw the man tear out of the area on an ATV driven by another man. Police followed their escape route and found the spot where the ATV left the road through a freshly-cut barbed wire fence. The cops followed the tracks 17 miles northwest of town before losing the trail completely. Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How “cell tower dumps” caught the High Country Bandits—and why it matters

In historic vote, New Zealand bans software patents

A major new patent bill, passed in a 117-4 vote by New Zealand’s Parliament after five years of debate, has banned software patents. The relevant clause of the patent bill actually states that a computer program is “not an invention.” Some have suggested that was a way to get around the wording of the TRIPS intellectual property treaty which requires patents to be “available for any inventions, whether products or processes, in all fields of technology.” Processes will still be patentable if the computer program is merely a way of implementing a patentable process. But patent claims that cover computer programs “as such” will not be allowed. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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In historic vote, New Zealand bans software patents

Bethesda “pushing” against Xbox Live Gold fee for Elder Scrolls Online

So far, Bethesda Softworks (and parent company Zenimax Media) has bucked industry trends by planning a $15 per month subscription for its upcoming The Elder Scrolls Online , adding a bit of insult to injury by including a real-money shop for nonessential items . Now the company says it’s trying to get Microsoft to agree to waive the additional requirement of an Xbox Live Gold subscription for Xbox One players, though without much success so far. Microsoft currently requires a $60/year Xbox Live Gold account to play any and all online games on the system, even otherwise free-to-play titles like World of Tanks . Speaking to the UK’s official Xbox Magazine , though, Zenimax Online Creative Director Paul Sage says the company has “been in talks with Microsoft” about getting a waiver for The Elder Scrolls Online since the game already has its own subscription fee. “[We’re] seeing whether or not there’s any room to change their minds about that, for folks who are only paying The Elder Scrolls Online and don’t want to pay for an Xbox Live Gold subscription, just to pay The Elder Scrolls Online , ” Sage said. So far Microsoft has been less than responsive to these concerns, reportedly answering, “that’s the way it works, ” but Sage promises that Bethesda will “keep on pushing” on the issue. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bethesda “pushing” against Xbox Live Gold fee for Elder Scrolls Online

Amazon and Microsoft, beware—VMware cloud is more ambitious than we thought

vCloud Hybrid Service integrates with on-premises VMware deployments. VMware VMware today announced that vCloud Hybrid Service , its first public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud, will become generally available in September. That’s no surprise, as we already knew it was slated to go live this quarter. What is surprising is just how extensive the cloud will be. When first announced, vCloud Hybrid Service was described as infrastructure-as-a-service that integrates directly with VMware environments. Customers running lots of applications in-house on VMware infrastructure can use the cloud to expand their capacity without buying new hardware and manage both their on-premises and off-premises deployments as one. That’s still the core of vCloud Hybrid Service—but in addition to the more traditional infrastructure-as-a-service, VMware will also have a desktops-as-a-service offering, letting businesses deploy virtual desktops to employees without needing any new hardware in their own data centers. There will also be disaster recovery-as-a-service, letting customers automatically replicate applications and data to vCloud Hybrid Service instead of their own data centers. Finally, support for the open source distribution of Cloud Foundry and Pivotal’s deployment of Cloud Foundry will let customers run a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) in vCloud Hybrid Service. Unlike IaaS, PaaS tends to be optimized for building and hosting applications without having to manage operating systems and virtual computing infrastructure. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Amazon and Microsoft, beware—VMware cloud is more ambitious than we thought

Cry (foam-padded) havoc! A day at Darkon’s Bellum Aeternus II

Armies face off during a bridge battle at Bellus Aeternum II in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. Jonah Gallagher PATUXENT RIVER STATE PARK, Maryland—For four days, the Darkon Wargaming Club took over a section of a park outside Upper Marlboro that once served as a grass airfield. Temporarily, it became a combination of festival encampment and battleground. The event was the second edition of Bellum Aeternuthe club’s invitational event for live-action role-play (LARP) and combat, open to participants from across the medieval-themed LARP community. As I described in my feature on the first Bellum Aeternus last November , Darkon is a live-action combination of fantasy tabletop role-play (like Dungeons and Dragons ) and wargaming (like Warhammer ), combining a full-contact battle sport with a strategic land warfare game and scenario-driven adventures. Darkon is an offshoot of the “boffer” combat gaming community that originally sprung up in Maryland, Washington DC, and Northern Virginia. Unlike the Society for Creative Anachronism’s armored combat , Darkon and similar combat games use padded weapons for safety and to allow unarmored (and occasionally barely dressed) participants. Unlike Dagorhir , from which Darkon and most of the other US fantasy combat LARP games evolved, Darkon incorporates a magic system that has spellcasters throwing beanbag “fireballs” and “lightning bolts” in combat. Participants also use other magic to avoid taking hits in battle or rendering opponents’ defenses useless. And unlike Amtgard, another fantasy LARP, Darkon allows for some serious full-contact combat—using tactics such as “shield bashing” to knock opponents over and allowing the use of bows with pad-tipped arrows. The combination of archers and spellcasters drives some of those from other, larger game communities to distraction. It changes the balance of the combat game from pure martial beatdown to one where players with a wide range of physical abilities can take part. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cry (foam-padded) havoc! A day at Darkon’s Bellum Aeternus II

In surveillance era, clever trick enhances secrecy of iPhone text messages

Creative Heroes A security researcher has developed a technique that could significantly improve the secrecy of text messages sent in near real time on iPhones. The technique, which will debut in September in an iOS app called TextSecure, will also be folded into a currently available Android app by the same name. The cryptographic property known as perfect forward secrecy has always been considered important by privacy advocates, but it has taken on new urgency following the recent revelations of widespread surveillance of Americans by the National Security Agency. Rather than use the same key to encrypt multiple messages—the way, say PGP- and S/MIME-protected e-mail programs do—applications that offer perfect forward secrecy generate ephemeral keys on the fly . In the case of some apps, including the OTR protocol for encrypting instant messages , each individual message within a session is encrypted with a different key. The use of multiple keys makes eavesdropping much harder. Even if the snoop manages to collect years worth of someone’s encrypted messages, he would have to crack hundreds or possibly hundreds of thousands of keys to transform the data into the “plaintext” that a human could make sense of. What’s more, even if the attacker obtains or otherwise compromises the computer that his target used to send the encrypted messages, it won’t be of much help if the target has deleted the messages. Since the keys used in perfect forward secrecy are ephemeral, they aren’t stored on the device. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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In surveillance era, clever trick enhances secrecy of iPhone text messages