Tag: golf

Bitcoin pool GHash.io commits to 40% hashrate limit after its 51% breach

Antana GHash.io announced that “it is not aiming to overcome 39.99 [percent] of the overall Bitcoin hashrate,” in a new statement published Wednesday . This marks a clear departure from the large Bitcoin pool’s recent flirtations with 51 percent . If that threshold is crossed for sustained periods of time, it concentrates power in ways that Bitcoin’s decentralized design normally does not allow. “If GHash.io approaches the respective border, it will be actively asking miners to take their hardware away from GHash.io and mine on other pools,” the statement continues. “GHash.io will encourage other mining pools to write similar voluntary statements from their sides.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bitcoin pool GHash.io commits to 40% hashrate limit after its 51% breach

It may be “barely an operating system,” but DOS still matters (to some people)

By your command. Sean Gallagher Earlier this month, I spent a day working in the throwback world of DOS. More specifically, it was FreeDOS version 1.1, the open source version of the long-defunct Microsoft MS-DOS operating system. It’s a platform that in the minds of many should’ve died a long time ago. But after 20 years, a few dozen core developers and a broader, much larger contributor community continue furthering the FreeDOS project by gradually adding utilities, accessories, compilers, and open-source applications. All this labor of love begs one question: why? What is it about a single-tasking command-line driven operating system—one that is barely up to the most basic of network-driven tasks—that has kept people’s talents engaged for two decades? Haven’t most developers abandoned it for Windows (or, tragically, for IBM OS/2 )? Who still uses DOS, and for what? To find out, Ars reached out to two members of the FreeDOS core development team to learn more about who was behind this seemingly quixotic quest. These devs choose to keep an open-source DOS alive rather than working on something similar but more modern—like Linux. So, needless to say, the answers we got weren’t necessarily expected. Read 22 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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It may be “barely an operating system,” but DOS still matters (to some people)

Judge orders unmasking of Amazon.com “negative” reviewers

A federal judge has granted a nutritional supplement firm’s request to help it learn the identities of those who allegedly left “phony negative” reviews of its products on Amazon.com. The decision means that Ubervita may issue subpoena’s to Amazon.com and Cragslist to cough up the identities of those behind a “campaign of dirty tricks against Ubervita in a wrongful effort to put Ubervita at a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace .” (PDF). According to a lawsuit by the maker of testosterone boosters, multivitamins and weight loss supplements, unknown commenters  had placed fraudulent orders “to disrupt Ubervita’s inventory,” posted a Craigslist ad “to offer cash for favorable reviews of Ubervita products,” and posed “as dissatisfied Ubervita customers in posting phony negative reviews of Ubervita products, in part based on the false claim that Ubervita pays for positive reviews.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Judge orders unmasking of Amazon.com “negative” reviewers

Emergency Windows update revokes dozens of bogus Google, Yahoo SSL certificates

Microsoft has issued an emergency update for most supported versions of Windows to prevent attacks that abuse recently issued digital certificates impersonating Google and Yahoo. Company officials warned other undiscovered fraudulent credentials for other domains may still be in the wild. Thursday’s unscheduled update revokes 45 highly sensitive secure sockets layer (SSL) certificates that hackers managed to generate after compromising systems operated by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) of India, an intermediate certificate authority (CA) whose certificates are automatically trusted by all supported versions of Windows. Millions of sites operated by banks, e-commerce companies, and other types of online services use the cryptographic credentials to encrypt data passing over the open Internet and to prove the authenticity of their servers. As Ars explained Wednesday , the counterfeit certificates pose a risk to Windows users accessing SSL-protected sections of Google, Yahoo, and any other affected domains. “These SSL certificates could be used to spoof content, perform phishing attacks, or perform man-in-the-middle attacks against Web properties,” a Microsoft advisory warned. “The subordinate CAs may also have been used to issue certificates for other, currently unknown sites, which could be subject to similar attacks.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Emergency Windows update revokes dozens of bogus Google, Yahoo SSL certificates

Crypto weakness in smart LED lightbulbs exposes Wi-Fi passwords

Context In the latest cautionary tale involving the so-called Internet of things, white-hat hackers have devised an attack against network-connected lightbulbs that exposes Wi-Fi passwords to anyone in proximity to one of the LED devices. The attack works against LIFX smart lightbulbs , which can be turned on and off and adjusted using iOS- and Android-based devices. Ars Senior Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson gave a good overview here of the Philips Hue lights, which are programmable, controllable LED-powered bulbs that compete with LIFX. The bulbs are part of a growing trend in which manufacturers add computing and networking capabilities to appliances so people can manipulate them remotely using smartphones, computers, and other network-connected devices. A 2012 Kickstarter campaign raised more than $1.3 million for LIFX, more than 13 times the original goal of $100,000. According to a blog post published over the weekend , LIFX has updated the firmware used to control the bulbs after researchers discovered a weakness that allowed hackers within about 30 meters to obtain the passwords used to secure the connected Wi-Fi network. The credentials are passed from one networked bulb to another over a mesh network powered by 6LoWPAN , a wireless specification built on top of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard . While the bulbs used the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) to encrypt the passwords, the underlying pre-shared key never changed, making it easy for the attacker to decipher the payload. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Crypto weakness in smart LED lightbulbs exposes Wi-Fi passwords

Deep-sea streaming: 500-mile NEPTUNE cabling brings Internet to the ocean floor

Your home Ethernet cable doesn’t deal with any of this ish—pictured here, a sea star and a squat lobster—behind some desk. NEPTUNE Canada The Juan de Fuca tectonic plate is by far one of the Earth’s smallest. It spans just a few hundred kilometers of the Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia coast. But what the Juan de Fuca lacks in size it makes up for in connectivity. It’s home to a unique, high-speed optical cabling that has snaked its way across the depths of the Pacific seafloor plate since late 2009. This link is called NEPTUNE—the North-East Pacific Time-Series Underwater Networked Experiment—and, at more than 800 kilometers (about 500 miles), it’s about the same length as 40,000 subway cars connected in a single, long train. A team of scientists, researchers, and engineers from the not-for-profit group Oceans Network Canada maintains the network, which cost CAD $111 million to install and $17 million each year to maintain. But know that this isn’t your typical undersea cable. For one, NEPTUNE doesn’t traverse the ocean’s expanse, but instead loops back to its starting point at shore. And though NEPTUNE is designed to facilitate the flow of information through the ocean, it also collects information about the ocean, ocean life, and the ocean floor. Read 52 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Deep-sea streaming: 500-mile NEPTUNE cabling brings Internet to the ocean floor

$1,099 iMac review: lose 50% of your performance to save 18% of the money

Technically, this is the $1,299 iMac, not that you’d be able to tell the difference. Andrew Cunningham Apple’s new $1,099 iMac will undoubtedly be a popular computer. People in the know who want the most computing bang for their buck would be smarter to step up to a higher-end model, but there are plenty of people—casual users, schools, businesses—who just want an iMac that’s “fast enough,” not one that’s “as fast as it could possibly be.” For those people, we obtained one of the new entry-level iMacs so we could evaluate its performance. On paper, it sounds like a big step down—you’re going from a quad-core desktop processor and GPU to a dual-core Ultrabook processor and GPU. This new iMac and the base MacBook Air models in fact use the exact same processor, even though historically there’s been a big performance gap between MacBook Airs and iMacs. In practice, the story is more complicated. Let’s talk about what the new low-end iMac changes, and then we’ll spend some time looking at processor performance. Read 29 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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$1,099 iMac review: lose 50% of your performance to save 18% of the money

The Witcher coming to iOS, Android, WP8 as a free-to-play MOBA game

For a video game, the jump from “series” to “franchise” can have its seriously awkward moments. At what point does it make sense for a beloved game character to show up in different genres, like puzzle, sports, or kart-racing games? It’s a question worth posing to the folks at Polish design studio CD Projekt Red, who today publicly unveiled the first major spin-off for the company’s plot- and morals-loaded RPG series The Witcher . Thankfully, The Witcher: Battle Arena  seems more logical for the series than, say, Dr. Geralt of Rivia’s Mean Bean Machine , as the game will pit the series’ heroes and villains against each other in three-on-three “MOBA”-styled combat by the end of this year. The game’s unveiling didn’t come with a grand pronouncement of new twists on the genre; rather, CD Projekt Red appeared to justify the game’s existence on the fact that quality MOBA games simply don’t exist on smartphones and tablets. “I dare you to name three MOBA games on mobile devices,” Tadek Zielinski said in a Eurogamer report , adding, “We don’t want to fight with League of Legends or Dota . We are a humble company. It wouldn’t be wise to go against guys who are working on it for such a long time.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The Witcher coming to iOS, Android, WP8 as a free-to-play MOBA game

Steam reaches highest-ever concurrent user count at over 8 million

Aurich Lawson Over the weekend, Steam’s annual summer video game sale posted its final list of bargains, gathering the two-week sale’s most popular discounts for one last hurrah. Steam sales veterans, heeding the usual advice of “wait until the last day,” responded in kind by storming the service during the sale’s final 24 hours. On Steam’s official statistics page, which logs the past 48 hours of activity, the service confirmed just how big that last hurrah was, counting over 8 million simultaneous live users on Sunday . That’s a new peak for the service, which had crossed the 7 million concurrent mark this past December. Valve Software, operators of the Steam store, announced during January’s Steam Dev Days that the service had reached 75 million active users, which comes shy of the 186 million accounts we measured in April . A NeoGAF thread talking about the Steam numbers showed that they compare well to Xbox Live’s 48 million members (both Gold and otherwise) as of May 2013 and PSN’s 110 million members as of July 2013. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Steam reaches highest-ever concurrent user count at over 8 million