golf – Page 30 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

CryptoLocker look-alike searches for and encrypts PC game files

Crypto-based “ransomware” has become a lucrative business for cybercriminals. Since the arrival of CryptoLocker on the scene last year, a number of copycat malware packages have appeared to compete in the cyber-extortion market, encrypting victims’ photos and other personal files with a key that will be destroyed if they don’t contact the malware’s operators and pay up. Recently, a new variant has emerged that seeks to raise the stakes with a particular class of victim by specifically seeking out files related to a number of popular PC games, as well as Valve’s Steam gaming platform. The malware, which is a variant of the crypt-ransomware called TeslaCrypt, superficially looks like CryptoLocker. But according to a number of security researchers who have analyzed the malware, it shares little code with CryptoLocker or its more well-known successor CryptoWall. And while it will also will target photos and documents, as well as iTunes-related files, as Bromium security researcher Vadim Kotov noted in an analysis on Bromium Labs’ blog , TeslaCrypt also includes code that specifically looks for files related to more than 40 specific PC games, gaming platforms, and game developer tools. The games include both single player and multiplayer games, though it isn’t clear how targeting some of the multiplayer games would affect users other than requiring a re-install. The games targeted include a mix of older and newer titles— for example, Blizzard’s StarCraft II and WarCraft III real-time strategy games and its World of Warcraft online game are targeted. Also on TeslaCrypt’s hit list: Bioshock 2, Call of Duty, DayZ, Diablo, Fallout 3, League of Legends, F.E.A.R, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, Minecraft, Metro 2033, Half-Life 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Resident Evil 4, World of Tanks, Metin 2, and The Elder Scrolls (specifically, Skyrim-related files), as well as Star Wars: The Knights Of The Old Republic. There’s also code that searches for files associated with games from specific companies that affect a wide range of titles, including a variety of games from EA Sports, Valve, and Bethesda, and Valve’s Steam gaming platform. And the game development tools RPG Maker, Unity3D and Unreal Engine are targeted as well. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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CryptoLocker look-alike searches for and encrypts PC game files

reddit CEO Ellen Pao: harassment complaints fell on deaf ears at Kleiner Perkins

SAN FRANCISCO—Interim reddit CEO Ellen Pao, a former junior partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, finally took the stand today in the high-profile gender discrimination case that she brought against the firm three years ago. Pao maintained a firm tone throughout the day, even looking at the jury occasionally while answering questions from her lawyer about her early days at Kleiner. It’s the first opportunity that Pao has taken to elaborate on the gender discrimination claims she made in 2012. And the questioning started by going all the way back to the day Pao was hired at Kleiner Perkins. Pao, a Mandarin-speaking, Princeton-educated engineer with law and business degrees from Harvard, applied to Kleiner Perkins in 2005. At the time, the firm was looking to expand its investments in China. She seemed like a perfect fit, her lawyer Therese Lawless said. In addition to Pao’s language skills, she had years of experience working with 90’s startups like WebTV, Tell Me Networks, and Danger Research (whose team went on to join the team that created Android). She also spent time with bigger companies like Microsoft and BEA Systems. Read 35 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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reddit CEO Ellen Pao: harassment complaints fell on deaf ears at Kleiner Perkins

Apple releases iOS 8.2 today with Apple Watch support and plenty of bug fixes

SAN FRANCISCO—iOS 8.2 has been in development for several months now, and today Apple is formally releasing the update to the public. It’s available as an over-the-air update or through iTunes for any device running iOS 8, including the iPhone 4S, 5, 5C, 5S, 6, and 6 Plus; all iPads except the first-generation model; and the fifth-generation iPod Touch. The biggest feature update is support for the Apple Watch. The device will work with the iPhone 5 and newer models, but it will not work with iPads or iPods. Once you’ve tethered a watch to your phone, a new companion app will allow you to change the watch’s settings, organize its Home screen, and make other changes. We’ll take a longer look at this companion app when the time comes to review the Apple Watch itself. For those of you with other iDevices and/or no particular interest in the Apple Watch, there are still plenty of reasons to install the update. HomeKit will allow users to control devices at home Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple releases iOS 8.2 today with Apple Watch support and plenty of bug fixes

Office for Mac 2016 hands-on: A vital upgrade, with some kinks to work out

The starting point when you open the new Word for Mac looks a lot more like the Windows version than it used to. 14 more images in gallery Office for Mac has often played second fiddle to the flagship Windows version that powers Microsoft’s productivity software empire, but it’s important for plenty of computer users nonetheless. It’s thus good to see Microsoft nearly finished with a long-awaited update that brings the OS X and Windows versions of Office closer together in style, while adding integrations with Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage. A preview version of Office for Mac 2016 was released today , and there’s enough to give Mac users reason to look forward to the final bits and reminders of bugginess that can afflict Microsoft software for the Mac. The preview for OS X Yosemite is free to download and use until its official release in the second half of 2015. It includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote. We’ve already covered the Outlook and OneNote redesigns, so we’ll just focus on Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in this brief hands-on. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Water droplets bounce off these new self-cleaning surfaces

Every day, we interact with a myriad of surfaces ranging from soft fabrics to hard metals. Inevitably, this means we have to spend our time cleaning them. A class of self-cleaning materials would certainly make our lives easier. Previous attempts to create these materials have focused on developing surfaces that are rough and waxy; these cause water droplets to roll along the surface, picking up dirt and dust due as it goes. These materials have been relatively successful, but they have many limitations. For example, they’re easily worn away and easily contaminated by oils like those found on our skin. Luckily, scientists have now developed a waterproof, self cleaning coating that can be applied to materials that are as soft as cotton and as hard as glass. This coating is composed of titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles with two size distributions, delivered as a suspension in ethanol containing the chemical perfluorooctyltriethoxysilane. After application, the ethanol is allowed to evaporate for 180 seconds before the coating is ready for use. This coating can be sprayed, dipped, or painted onto a surface, and it maintains its performance after several types of damage. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Water droplets bounce off these new self-cleaning surfaces

DNS enhancement catches malware sites by understanding sneaky domain names

A researcher at OpenDNS Security Labs has developed a new way to automatically detect and block sites used to distribute malware almost instantaneously without having to scan them. The approach, initially developed by researcher Jeremiah O’Connor, uses natural language processing and other analytics to detect malicious domains before they can attack by spotting host names that are designed as camouflage. Called NLPRank , it spots DNS requests for sites that have names similar to legitimate sites, but with IP addresses that are outside the expected address blocks and other related data that hints at sketchiness. The practice of using look-alike domain names as part of an effort to fool victims into visiting websites or approving downloads is a well-worn approach in computer crime. But recent crafted attacks via “phishing” links in e-mails and social media have gone past the well-worn “typo-squatting” approach by using domain names that appear close to those of trusted sites, registered just in time for attacks to fly under reputation-scoring security tools to make blacklisting them harder. Fake domain names such as update-java.net and adobe-update.net, for example, were used in the recently discovered “Carbanak” attacks on banks that allowed criminals to gain access to financial institutions’ networks starting in January 2013 and steal over $1 billion over the next two years. Many security services can screen out malicious sites based on techniques such as reputation analysis—checking a centralized database to see if a site name has been associated with any malware attacks. But because attackers are able to rapidly register new domains with scripted systems that look relatively legitimate to the average computer user, they can often bypass reputation checks—especially when using their specially crafted domain names in highly targeted attacks. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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DNS enhancement catches malware sites by understanding sneaky domain names

Now you can easily send (free!) encrypted messages between Android, iOS

On Monday, Open Whisper Systems announced the release of Signal 2.0 , the second version of its app for iOS. What makes this latest release special is that it allows users to send end-to-end encrypted messages, for free, to users of Redphone and TextSecure, Android apps supported by Open Whisper Systems that encrypt calling and text messages, respectively. Previously, this kind of cross-platform secure messaging cost money in the form of a monthly subscription fee that both the sender and the receiver of the message had to pay. (Or, encrypting messages cost considerable time and effort to implement without a dedicated app.) Signal and its Android counterpart TextSecure are unique in that they use forward encryption, which generates temporary keys for each message, but still allow asynchronous messaging through the use of push notifications and “prekeys.” Ars reported on the implementation details in 2013 . Open Whisper Systems has pulled ahead of other privacy apps by making its interface easy for a person who doesn’t know too much about encryption to use. It’s also open source, so it can be vetted by experts, and its open encryption protocol can be adopted by other messaging apps. In fact, last November, messaging platform Whatsapp deployed Open Whisper Systems’ protocol for its 500 million Android users . Still, until now communicating with iOS users from an Android phone has been much more challenging. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Now you can easily send (free!) encrypted messages between Android, iOS

Intel unveils its next mobile maneuver: Atom x3, x5, and x7

BARCELONA, Spain—At Mobile World Congress 2015, Intel has unveiled its latest in a very long line of attempts at securing a beachhead in the mobile market: the Atom x3, Atom x5, and Atom x7 SoCs. As the naming implies, the Atom x3 is a low-end part that is probably destined for developing markets in countries such as India and China. The Atom x5 and x7, however, are quad-core 14nm Cherry Trail chips with Broadwell-class Intel HD graphics. Performance-wise, the x5 and x7 chips should be pretty good—but right now we only have Intel’s own benchmarks to go on. There’s also no word from Intel on the power consumption of the new chips, which is rarely a good sign when you’re trying to break into a highly competitive, entrenched market. Let’s start at the bottom. Atom x3 is essentially rebranded SoFIA, but now along with a 3G version there is a new chip (the x3-C3440) with an integrated LTE modem. Rather unusual despite its use of the Atom brand name, the x3 is a 28nm chip that isn’t being built at Intel’s own fabs. Instead, Intel is using a foundry (most likely TSMC or Rockchip), primarily because it isn’t cost effective for Intel to build chips with integrated modems on its own bleeding-edge 14nm node. The top-end Atom x3, the x3-C3440, has a quad-core CPU and Mali 720 MP2 GPU (yes, that’s a GPU designed by ARM Holdings). We probably won’t see the Atom x3 in Western markets; it will be cheaply fabricated in Asia, and it will be used in very cheap phones and tablets. We have asked Intel what CPU core is being used by Atom x3, but the company hasn’t yet responded. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel unveils its next mobile maneuver: Atom x3, x5, and x7

Intel forges ahead to 10nm, will move away from silicon at 7nm

This week at the 2015 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), Intel will provide an update on its new 10nm manufacturing process and new research on how it’s maintaining the march of Moore’s law to 7nm and beyond. The first chips based on Intel’s new 10nm process are expected in late 2016/early 2017, and the company says it’s hoping to avoid the delays that haunted the belabored release of 14nm Broadwell. To hit 7nm, Intel says new materials will be required—as in, it looks like 10nm will finally be the end of the road for silicon. The most likely replacement for silicon is a III-V semiconductor such as indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs), though Intel hasn’t provided any specific details yet. ISSCC 2015, being held in San Francisco this week, is where all the big players in silicon (Intel, Samsung, TSMC, IBM, etc.) meet to talk about their latest manufacturing processes and how they might go about overcoming the current barriers to smaller, faster, and denser computer chips. It’s not unusual for Intel to have one of the largest presences at the conference, and this year is no different: it will be presenting three papers on its 14nm technology, hosting sessions on a variety of topics, and Mark Bohr—one of Intel’s most esteemed researchers—will be sitting on a panel that discusses Moore’s law beyond 10nm. The steady march of new CMOS processes driving ever smaller transistors. Intel Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel forges ahead to 10nm, will move away from silicon at 7nm

If you skipped Windows 8, here’s some new stuff you get with Windows 10

It’s a shame that Windows 8’s interface was so divisive. The UI dominated the conversation around the OS to the extent that its other, subtler changes got buried. People who stuck with Windows 7 never saw these updates at all. Windows 10, as we’ve covered, is Microsoft’s effort to repackage Windows 8’s improvements in a way that will be more appealing to Windows 7 loyalists. As if to drive that point home, Microsoft is giving current Windows 7 users a whole year after launch to hop on the Windows 10 train at no charge . Microsoft has made a bunch of changes to Windows in the last two years that have nothing to do with the new user interface. This list doesn’t have anything new on it, but if you’re still running Windows 7 and you decide to upgrade to Windows 10, it’ll be new to you, and you’ll get to use it all without having to figure out how to live life without a Start menu. (If you’re interested in seeing some of the UI stuff that you’ll be sidestepping, ZDNet’s Ed Bott recently published this piece about Windows 8 features that got cut from Windows 10). Read 27 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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If you skipped Windows 8, here’s some new stuff you get with Windows 10