Tag: golf

Fans raise cash to help phone phreaker John Draper, aka Cap‘n Crunch

Aaron Getting An online fundraiser for legendary phone phreaker John Draper , better known as Cap’n Crunch, has passed its target $5,000 in just three days .  Draper himself doesn’t even know who started the fundraiser, but the money is intended to help with his medical bills. According to a recent blog post , he suffers from both degenerative spine disease and C. Diff, an inflammation of the colon . I want to thank with the bottom of my heart for an anonymous person for setting me up with qikfunder…. http://t.co/mwzDLLRpHH — John Draper (@jdcrunchman) September 25, 2014 In conjunction with others in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Draper figured out that a toy whistle given out in boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal emitted a tone at 2600 Hertz. By pure coincidence, that happened to be the tone AT&T used to reset its trunk lines. As a result, Draper became a legend in the nascent world of phone phreaking, a predecessor to early personal computer hacking. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Fans raise cash to help phone phreaker John Draper, aka Cap‘n Crunch

Google stops malicious advertising campaign that could have reached millions

Malicious ads appears on Last.fm after advertising network Zedo serves up malicious content. Courtesy Malwarebytes Google shut down malicious Web attacks coming from a compromised advertising network on Friday. The move follows a security firm’s analysis that found the ad platform, Zedo, serving up advertisements that attempted to infect the computers of visitors to major websites. In an attack that ended early Friday morning, visitors to Last.fm, The Times of Israel, and The Jerusalem Post ran the risk of their computers becoming infected as Zedo  redirected visitors’ systems to malicious servers . Because the advertisements hosted on Zedo’s servers were distributed through Google’s Doubleclick, the attack reached millions of potential victims, Jerome Segura, senior security researcher at Malwarebytes Labs, told Ars. Distributing malware through legitimate advertising networks, a technique known as “malvertising,” has become an increasingly popular way to compromise the systems of consumers and workers alike. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google stops malicious advertising campaign that could have reached millions

Reversible, tiny, faster: Hands on with the USB Type-C plug

Megan Geuss SAN FRANCISCO—Last week, Ars met up with several representatives of the non-profit USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) to check out some of the first USB Type-C connectors off the assembly lines. The Type-C specification was announced in December and finalized in August , and it’s set to bring a number of improvements to its predecessors, in addition to being smaller than the Type-A USB plugs we’re familiar with today. Considering how many USB Type-A devices are still being actively built out there (over 4 billion USB-compatible products are made each year), this smaller, reversible connector represents a significant jump. Jeff Ravencraft, President and COO of USB-IF, told Ars that USB-IF wanted a connector that worked equally well for large and small devices. “We also understand that yeah the consumer maybe has some trouble with putting in that cable connector,” he added of the Type-C’s new-found ability to be plugged in right-side up or upside down, like Apple’s Lightning connector. The new Type-C connector is also slightly bigger than its proprietary cousin, with Type-C sized at approximately 8.4mm by 2.6mm and Lightning coming in at 7.7 mm by 1.7 mm. Unlike the reversible Lightning, but similar to USB connectors before it, the USB Type-C connector has a mid-plate inside the receptacle that the plug surrounds when it’s inserted. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Reversible, tiny, faster: Hands on with the USB Type-C plug

Alibaba raises over $21 billion, making it the biggest IPO ever in the US

Charles Chan When Alibaba stopped trading its shares on Friday, the Chinese e-commerce company had officially logged the biggest Initial Public Offering (IPO) in US history, raising $21.8 billion in its first day on the New York Stock Exchange. The company’s earnings give it a market capitalization of over $200 billion, “putting it among the 20 biggest companies by market cap in the US,” the Wall Street Journal notes. Alibaba’s IPO beat out  record IPOs like Visa’s $17.9 billion IPO in 2008 and General Motors’ $15.8 billion sale in 2010. And Alibaba beat out its peers in the tech sector too, like Facebook (whose first-day earnings were $16 billion) and Google (whose 2004 IPO raised only $1.67 billion—paltry in today’s terms). Earlier this month , the company announced that it would price shares at $66 per share. This morning around 12pm ET, the NYSE gave the go-ahead for the company, whose ticker symbol is BABA, to start trading. Shares started at $92.70, a third larger than what the company was aiming for, and ended the day at $93.89 after reaching a high of $99.70. In after hours trading, Alibaba is just down slightly at $93.60 per share , as of this writing. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Alibaba raises over $21 billion, making it the biggest IPO ever in the US

Texas man must pay $40.4M for running Bitcoin-based scam, court rules

A federal judge in Texas has convicted a local man of conducting a massive Bitcoin-based Ponzi scheme, and ordered him to pay $40.4 million. The court found on Friday that Tendon Shavers had created a virtual bitcoin-based hedge fund that many suspected of being a scam—and it turned out they were right. The Bitcoin Savings and Trust (BTCST) shut down in August 2012, and by June 2013 the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed charges against its founder . In a statement at the time, the SEC said Shavers “raised at least 700,000 Bitcoin in BTCST investments, which amounted to more than $4.5 million based on the average price of Bitcoin in 2011 and 2012 when the investments were offered and sold.” Judge Amos Mazzant wrote: Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Texas man must pay $40.4M for running Bitcoin-based scam, court rules

Facebook acknowledges news feeds are bad at news, vows to improve

Facebook’s News Feed pays attention to trending topics, right, but news feeds have lately seemed to be lacking in news. Following criticism of the lack of current events in Facebook news feeds, Facebook has announced tweaks to its algorithms meant to help surface timely content. The company plans to do this by giving more value to posts that get interactions, such as likes and comments, and pushing posts when that activity seems to be cresting. In the blog post announcing the changes, Facebook wrote that it often prioritizes posts about “trending” topics that appear in the chart of hashtags posted on the right side of users’ homepages. Facebook also places higher value on posts according to how many interactions (likes, comments, shares) they receive. But as things are, some users have noted that Facebook seems to miss news waves , or is late to them, as with the fatal shooting of Mike Brown and the related protests that played out over weeks in August. When Facebook’s curation methods didn’t acknowledge those events, users noticed the news vacuum in their news feeds. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Facebook acknowledges news feeds are bad at news, vows to improve

iCloud for Windows update means PCs can use iCloud Drive before Macs can

iCloud Drive is now available on Windows, but not OS X. Andrew Cunningham Apple officially released iCloud Drive yesterday as part of the iOS 8 update , but it came with a caveat: turning it on disables the “old” way of iCloud syncing, but OS X doesn’t yet support iCloud Drive and won’t until OS X Yosemite is released later this fall. If you use iCloud to sync application data between your phone, tablet, and desktop, this means you’ll need to keep living with the more limited version of iCloud until Yosemite is out (or roll the dice and give the Public Beta a try ). If you’re a Windows user with an iPhone, though, you can go ahead and pull the trigger on that iCloud Drive update now. Apple today released an updated version of the iCloud for Windows application  that adds full support for iCloud Drive. Install the program and sign in, and iCloud Drive will appear in your user profile folder and your Favorites menu in Windows Explorer, much like Microsoft’s own OneDrive cloud storage service. This is the first opportunity that Windows users will have to view and directly manipulate iCloud data, not counting the more limited capabilities of the iCloud.com Web apps, and it’s a nice new addition for people who like iOS but don’t care to use Macs. Otherwise, iCloud for Windows continues to be more limited than iCloud on either iOS or OS X. It can sync with your Photo Stream and sync Safari bookmarks with either Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Chrome, and if you have Outlook 2007 or later installed it will also offer to sync your iCloud mail, calendars, contacts, and reminders. However, it can’t use iCloud Keychain to sync passwords, nor does it provide any kind of “Find My Device” functionality as it does in both iOS and OS X. You can’t sync Notes data directly either, though that feature is accessible via iCloud.com. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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iCloud for Windows update means PCs can use iCloud Drive before Macs can

Apple releases OS X 10.9.5 with fixes, new code signing requirements [updated]

Yesterday evening Apple released OS X 10.9.5 to the general public, the fifth major update for OS X Mavericks. As usual, the update comes with a handful of fixes for user-facing features as well as a small pile of security updates . Many of these security patches are also available for OS X 10.7.5 and 10.8.5 in separate updates. Like OS X 10.9.4 , the update focuses on smaller problems that affect a subset of Macs. The new features include Safari 7.0.6, improved “reliability for VPN connections that use USB smart cards for authentication,” and better reliability for connecting to file servers that use the SMB protocol. For businesses using OS X, the update fixes a problem that could keep system admins from “performing some administrative tasks successfully” on larger groups of Macs, and it also speeds up authentication “when roaming on 802.1x networks which use EAP-TLS.” Among the security updates are fixes for Bluetooth, CoreGraphics generally and the Intel graphics driver specifically, and OS X’s version of OpenSSL among many others. The latter problems were fixed by updating from OpenSSL version 0.9.8y to 0.9.8za. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple releases OS X 10.9.5 with fixes, new code signing requirements [updated]

Watch out, California’s self-driving car permits take effect today

Audi On Tuesday, permits for self-driving cars issued by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) took effect for the first time. Applications for the permits began in May 2014. Only the Volkswagen Group (which includes Volkswagen and Audi cars among others), Mercedes Benz, and Google have been issued permits for their 29 total vehicles. Overall, that represents a miniscule fraction of all 32 million registered cars in the Golden State. Bernard Soriano, a DMV spokesman, told Ars that Tuesday also marked the first time those numbers had been disclosed outside of the agency. “There are a handful of different companies that are completing their application,” he added, noting that the DMV expected to issue more permits soon. “They’re all large automakers.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Watch out, California’s self-driving car permits take effect today

Intel demos next-next-gen “Skylake” processors, coming in late 2015

A Core M CPU package based on the Broadwell architecture. Intel Intel’s Broadwell CPU architecture has only just started rolling out , and most of the processors that use it aren’t even supposed to launch until early next year. The new 14nm manufacturing process is causing the delay , but yesterday at the Intel Developer Forum the company tried to demonstrate that Broadwell’s lateness wouldn’t affect the rest of its roadmap. To that end, Intel highlighted a couple of working developer systems based on the new “Skylake” architecture, as summarized here by Anandtech . The company didn’t go into specific performance or power consumption numbers (both because it’s early and because Intel probably doesn’t want to take the wind out of Broadwell’s sails), but it showed working silicon rendering 3D games and playing back 4K video to prove that the chips are working. The first Skylake processors are reportedly due out late in 2015 following the beginning of volume production in the second half of the year. Here are the basic facts we already know about Skylake: it’s a “tock” on Intel’s roadmap, meaning it introduces a new architecture on a manufacturing process that’s already up and running. In this case, that’s Intel’s 14nm process, which Intel  insists has recovered from its early problems . Some of the CPUs in Intel’s lineup—specifically  mid-to-low-end socketed desktop CPUs —will get their next refresh using Skylake instead of Broadwell. Whether this is because Intel wants to reserve 14nm manufacturing capacity for lower-power, higher-margin chips or because it just doesn’t think the power-consumption-obsessed Broadwell is a good fit for regular desktops is anyone’s guess. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel demos next-next-gen “Skylake” processors, coming in late 2015