Tag: golf

What Are the Practical Differences Between Different Tire/Rim Sizes?

I learned to drive on a five-speed Datsun 280ZX that had 195/70 R14 tires. (If you don’t understand what those numbers mean, read this breakdown of tire codes .) Yes, 14-inch wheels sporting tires with high sidewalls. This was normal in the ’80s, but nowadays the rage is to have beefier rims with low-profile tires, a trend that I suspect was advanced by car renderings. Every automotive renderer seems to draw rims that threaten to bottom out inside the wheel wells, with only the faintest sliver of black to indicate there’s any rubber on them. Nowadays you’d be hard-pressed to find 14″ wheels on any car claiming to offer sporty performance. Volkswagen’s GTI, as one example, comes standard with 15″ wheels, but I’m guessing most buyers ponying up for a GTI over the Golf upgrade to the 16″, 17″ or 18″ wheel options. Which wheel size is faster? Which size is preferred if you live in rainy Oregon versus dry Arizona? Which size offers more comfort, makes more noise, or handles better? To find out, Tyre Reviews tried out three different rim and tire sizes—225/45 R17, 225/40 R18, and 225/35 R19—on Goodyear’s test track in the south of France. Some of the results are surprising. By the bye, how brilliant are Goodyear’s executives for decreeing that their test track be located in the south of France?

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What Are the Practical Differences Between Different Tire/Rim Sizes?

Rare US version of the N64’s disc-drive add-on unearthed near Seattle

Jason Lindsey That’s quite the find! 6 more images in gallery Nintendo has launched a few pieces of hardware in Japan that never made their way to the West, including the backlit Game Boy Light and the Satellaview online attachment for the Super Famicom. But the best-known of Nintendo’s Japan-only hardware has to be the 64DD—as in, the disk-drive attachment for the Nintendo 64 that landed with a whopping thud in Japan in 1999. Though Nintendo of America had originally hinted at the add-on launching in the United States, that never happened, even though the company had once reached out to Western developers about making software for the system—and taking advantage of its disks’ maximum 38MB of rewritable memory (which was huge compared to the N64’s 32KB memory cards). But that doesn’t mean an American 64DD  never existed. A game-console collector announced on Tuesday that he had discovered an English-language version of the 64DD hardware—and based on insider Nintendo knowledge, this is almost certainly a retail prototype, as opposed to a dev kit. Former Sierra game developer Jason Lindsey took to the Assembler Games forums this week—where you’ll find no shortage of classic and rare gaming topics —to show off his latest acquisition. Lindsey told the forum that he had purchased a “prototype for the US version of the 64DD.” His attached photos include two screens of the 64DD’s boot-up sequence, which normally contains kanji characters asking players to insert a disk; his unit, however, offers those instructions in English. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Rare US version of the N64’s disc-drive add-on unearthed near Seattle

FDIC was hacked by China, and CIO covered it up

Insuring deposits, but not your identity. Thanks, FDIC. (credit: Matthew G. Bisanz ) A report published by the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology today found that hackers purported to be from China had compromised computers at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation repeatedly between 2010 and 2013. Backdoor malware was installed on 12 workstations and 10 servers by attackers—including the workstations of the chairman, chief of staff, and general counsel of FDIC. But the incidents were never reported to the US Computer Emergency Response Team (US-CERT) or other authorities, and were only brought to light after an Inspector General investigation into another serious data breach at FDIC in October of 2015. The FDIC failed at the time of the “advanced persistent threat” attacks to report the incidents. Then-Inspector General at FDIC, Jon Rymer, lambasted FDIC officials for failing to follow their own policies on breach reporting. Further investigation into those breaches led the committee to conclude that former FDIC CIO Russ Pittman misled auditors about the extent of those breaches, and told employees not to talk about the breaches by a foreign government so as not to ruin FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg’s chances of confirmation. The cascade of bad news began with an FDIC Office of the Inspector General (OIG) investigation into the October “Florida incident.” On October 23, 2015, a member of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s Information Security and Privacy Staff (ISPS) discovered evidence in the FDIC’s data loss prevention system of a significant breach of sensitive data—over 1,200 documents, including Social Security numbers from bank data for over 44,000 individuals and 30,715 banks, were copied to a USB drive by a former employee of FDIC’s Risk Management Supervision field office in Gainesville, Florida. The employee had copied the files prior to leaving his position at FDIC. Despite intercepting the employee, the actual data was not recovered from him until March 25, 2016. The former employee provided a sworn statement that he had not disseminated the information, and the matter was dropped. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FDIC was hacked by China, and CIO covered it up

Posing as ransomware, Windows malware just deletes victim’s files

Scammers, via Cisco Talos Ranscam’s “ransom note”: Pay us and then we’ll make everything better. 2 more images in gallery There has been a lot of ingenuity poured into creating crypto-ransomware, the money-making malware that has become the scourge of hospitals, businesses, and home users over the past year. But none of that ingenuity applies to Ranscam, a new ransom malware reported by Cisco’s Talos Security Intelligence and Research Group. Ranscam is a purely amateur attempt to cash in on the cryptoransomware trend that demands payment for “encrypted” files that were actually just plain deleted by a batch command. “Once it executes, it, it pops up a ransom message looking like any other ransomware,” Earl Carter, security research engineer at Cisco Talos, told Ars. “But then what happens is it forces a reboot, and it just deletes all the files. It doesn’t try to encrypt anything—it just deletes them all.” Talos discovered the file on the systems of a small number of customers. In every case, the malware presented exactly the same message, including the same Bitcoin wallet address. The victim is instructed: Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Posing as ransomware, Windows malware just deletes victim’s files

Virulent auto-rooting malware takes control of 10 million Android devices

Security experts have documented a disturbing spike in a particularly virulent family of Android malware, with more than 10 million handsets infected and more than 286,000 of them in the US. Researchers from security firm Check Point Software said the malware installs more than 50,000 fraudulent apps each day, displays 20 million malicious advertisements, and generates more than $300 million per month in revenue. The success is largely the result of the malware’s ability to silently root a large percentage of the phones it infects by exploiting vulnerabilities that remain unfixed in older versions of Android. The Check Point researchers have dubbed the malware family “HummingBad,” but researchers from mobile security company Lookout say HummingBad is in fact Shedun, a family of auto-rooting malware that came to light last November  and had already infected a large number of devices. For the past five months, Check Point researchers have quietly observed the China-based advertising company behind HummingBad in several ways, including by infiltrating the command and control servers it uses. The researchers say the malware uses the unusually tight control it gains over infected devices to create windfall profits and steadily increase its numbers. HummingBad does this by silently installing promoted apps on infected phones, defrauding legitimate mobile advertisers, and creating fraudulent statistics inside the official Google Play Store. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Virulent auto-rooting malware takes control of 10 million Android devices

Windows 10 Anniversary Update nears RTM with bugfixes galore

With its August 2 release date growing closer, the Windows 10 Anniversary Update is nearing completion. A steady stream of new builds for Windows Insiders on the fast track has been released over the past few weeks. The latest build, 14383, came out today and includes a wide range of fixes. As with many of its predecessors, this build has been made available simultaneously for Windows 10 on the desktop and Windows 10 Mobile; Microsoft is intending to ship the Anniversary Update simultaneously for PC, phone, and Xbox One when that release date arrives. Windows Central is reporting that according to its sources, the build one newer than today’s release, 14384, is the first candidate for what would formerly be known as Release To Manufacturing (RTM). With Windows now being delivered “as a service,” the old RTM terminology isn’t favored by Redmond any more—not least because many people will download the update rather than have it preinstalled by a PC manufacturer—but the concept that RTM represents endures. The “RTM” build will be the one released on August 2 to people in the stable channel, and then after several months of regular Patch Tuesday updates, it will be released as the Current Branch for Business. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 10 Anniversary Update nears RTM with bugfixes galore

Blizzard job posting outs plans for new Diablo game

Is it time to change that “III” into a “IV”? (credit: Blizzard) Just because Blizzard finally got a wholly new franchise out the door this year doesn’t mean the game maker isn’t keen on milking its older franchises for everything they’re worth. But one of those series, Diablo , has seen a bit of a content freeze since its 2014 expansion launched. While the company loves refreshing a game launch with expansion packs, Diablo III has been sitting idly. Now we might know why. A brand-new “unannounced” entry in the Diablo world was, er, announced on Friday by way of an official job posting for—get this—the next entry’s  director . It’s the game-news equivalent of New Line Cinema saying a new Lord of the Rings film is coming but, whoops, Peter Jackson’s not involved, and they could really use a new person to get this thing up and running. The post seeks someone to “lead the Diablo series into the future.” While such a public push for a series director might read like an attempt to bring more diversity into the hiring pool, we’d frankly be shocked to see anybody other than the industry’s old-guard vets fulfilling application requirements such as five years of game-directing experience and shipping “multiple AAA products as a game director or creative director.” The job posting mentions nothing about virtual reality or other experimental hardware. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Blizzard job posting outs plans for new Diablo game

Wi-Fi gets multi-gigabit, multi-user boost with upgrades to 802.11ac

(credit: Aurich Lawson) The Wi-Fi Alliance industry group is now certifying products that can deliver multi-gigabit speeds and improve coverage in dense networks by delivering data to multiple devices simultaneously. The new certification program, announced today , focuses on the so-called “Wave 2” features of the 802.11ac specification. 802.11ac is a few years old , but it includes several important features that were not available at launch. One such feature is MU-MIMO (multi-user, multiple-input, and multiple-output), which we wrote a feature on in May 2014. MU-MIMO is powered by multi-user beamforming technology that lets wireless access points send data streams to at least three users simultaneously. Without MU-MIMO, routers stream to just one device at a time but switch between them very fast so that users don’t notice a slowdown except when lots of devices are on the network. With the 80MHz channels supported in 802.11ac Wave 1, each data stream could provide up to 433Mbps and, when coupled with MU-MIMO routers, can send up to 433Mbps to at least three users simultaneously for a total of 1.3Gbps. But in addition to supporting MU-MIMO, Wave 2 also doubles the maximum channel bandwidth from 80MHz to 160MHz, boosting the potential throughput of each stream to 866Mbps. Wave 2 also supports four spatial streams instead of three, further boosting the theoretical maximum capacity. Technically, 802.11ac supports up to eight streams, but the certification program is still at four. Delivering eight streams with these data rates would use a lot of electricity. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Clinton’s private e-mail was blocked by spam filters—so State IT turned them off

Part of an e-mail thread discussing workarounds to keep Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server from being blocked by security filters at the State Department. 2 more images in gallery Documents recently obtained by the conservative advocacy group Judicial Watch show that in December 2010, then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her staff were having difficulty communicating with State Department officials by e-mail because spam filters were blocking their messages. To fix the problem, State Department IT turned the filters off—potentially exposing State’s employees to phishing attacks and other malicious e-mails. The mail problems prompted Clinton Chief of Staff Huma Abedin to suggest to Clinton, “We should talk about putting you on State e-mail or releasing your e-mail address to the department so you are not going to spam.” Clinton replied, “Let’s get [a] separate address or device but I don’t want any risk of the personal [e-mail] being accessible.” The mail filter system—Trend Micro’s ScanMail for Exchange 8—was apparently causing some messages from Clinton’s private server (Clintonemail.com) to not be delivered. Some were “bounced;” others were accepted by the server but were quarantined and never delivered to the recipient. According to the e-mail thread published yesterday by Judicial Watch, State’s IT team turned off both spam and antivirus filters on two “bridgehead” mail relay servers while waiting for a fix from Trend Micro. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Clinton’s private e-mail was blocked by spam filters—so State IT turned them off

Instagram will start automatically translating image captions soon

(credit: Instagram) On the heels of announcing that it has reached 500 million active monthly users, Instagram says it will soon add a translation feature to its app. Through a post on the image-sharing app, the company announced that within a month, users will be able to translate image captions, comments, and profile bios using a new translate button. The Facebook-owned social media app will structure its translations similarly to its parent company. When you come across a post you want to translate into a language that isn’t your default language, you can hit the “See Translation” button to convert it into the language you’ve chosen in your profile’s language settings. Both Facebook and Twitter have translation features already, so this addition brings Instagram up to par with its competition in that respect. Considering that  80 percent of Instagram’s user base lives outside the United States, this feature will likely be welcomed by many. There’s no word on how many languages Instagram will support with the first rollout of this feature. The company does explain on its Help website that if a translation isn’t showing up, it might be because the app doesn’t currently support that language or couldn’t detect the initial language being used. It also warns users that translations may not be available for older posts. The full translation feature should be ready for most users by July. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Instagram will start automatically translating image captions soon