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Detection of primordial gravitational waves announced

The BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) telescope at the South Pole, designed to measure polarized light from the early Universe. Steffen Richter When the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced a press conference for a “Major Discovery” (capital letters in the original e-mail) involving an unspecified experiment, rumors began to fly immediately.  By Friday afternoon, the rumors had coalesced around one particular observatory: the  BICEP  microwave telescope located at the South Pole.  Over the weekend, the chatter focused on a specific issue: polarization in the Cosmic Microwave Background left over from the Big Bang. With the start of the press conference, it’s now clear that we’ve detected the first direct evidence of the inflationary phase of the Big Bang, in which the Universe expanded rapidly in size. BICEP, the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization experiment, was built specifically to measure the polarization of light left over from the early Universe. This light, known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), encodes a lot of information about the physical state of the cosmos from its earliest moments. Most observatories (such as Planck and WMAP) have mapped temperature fluctuations in the CMB, which are essential for determining the contents of the Universe. Polarization is the orientation of the electric field of light, which conveys additional information not available from the temperature fluctuations. While much of CMB polarization is due to later density fluctuations that gave rise to galaxies, theory predicts that some of it came from primordial gravitational waves. Those waves are ripples in space-time left over from quantum fluctuations in the Universe’s earliest moments. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Detection of primordial gravitational waves announced

GitHub puts founder on leave, kicks wife out of office after harassment claim

GitHub’s staff. GitHub GitHub has placed one of its three cofounders on leave and barred the cofounder’s wife from the office while it investigates allegations made by a former employee. Engineer Julie Ann Horvath announced this past weekend that she had left GitHub, describing a toxic office culture in an e-mail interview with TechCrunch . The wife of the cofounder played a prominent role in Horvath’s account. Julie Ann Horvath. “I met her and almost immediately the conversation that I thought was supposed to be casual turned into something very inappropriate,” Horvath told TechCrunch. “She began telling me about how she informs her husband’s decision-making at GitHub, how I better not leave GitHub and write something bad about them, and how she had been told by her husband that she should intervene with my relationship to be sure I was ‘made very happy’ so that I wouldn’t quit and say something nasty about her husband’s company because ‘he had worked so hard.’” Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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GitHub puts founder on leave, kicks wife out of office after harassment claim

Google DNS briefly hijacked to Venezuela

BGPMon’s alert on the detection of the change to the route to Google’s primary DNS server. BGPmon.net For about a half hour on Saturday, some requests to one of Google’s DNS servers in the US were re-routed through a network in Venezuela. A false Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) announcement from the Venezuelan network caused the diversion, which affected networks primarily in Venezuela and Brazil, as well as a university network in Florida. It all started at 5:23pm Greenwich Time (UTC). Andree Toonk of the network monitoring service BGPmon.net told Ars that the false routing request was dropped 23 minutes later, “most likely because the network that announced this route realized what happened and rolled back the change (to their router) that caused this.” During the intervening period, he said, traffic may have been re-routed back to Google, or it just may have been dropped. The result was failed DNS requests for those on the affected networks. Network rerouting through bogus BGP “announcements”—advertisements sent between routers that are supposed to provide information on the quickest route over the Internet to a specific IP address, such as the Google DNS service’s 8.8.8.8—have become increasingly common as a tool for Internet censorship. They’re used to stage “man-in-the-middle” attacks on Web users and to passively monitor traffic to certain domains. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google DNS briefly hijacked to Venezuela

Google search redesign hews closer to competitor DuckDuckGo

Google’s makeover kicks the underlined URL to the curb, with a few other changes. Experiencing mild disorientation while using Google today? Google has quietly rolled out a subtle redesign for its search results that, among other things, removes the age-old hyperlink underline, bumps the font size two points, and evens out the line spacing. Google search results have gotten incremental changes over the years, and the search page certainly no longer looks like it did when the site first launched. Jon Wiley, the lead designer for Google search, took to Google+ Wednesday to say that the new look “improves readability and creates an overall cleaner look.” Having gone nearly a decade without underlined hyperlinks, we here at Ars wholeheartedly agree with the decision. The redesign moves Google up and away from competitors like Yahoo and Bing , which preserve the underline. However, it only catches Google up to the upstart DuckDuckGo, which does not use underlines and is cleaner still on its search results page, with truncated URLs for each result. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google search redesign hews closer to competitor DuckDuckGo

NSA’s automated hacking engine offers hands-free pwning of the world

Since 2010, the National Security Agency has kept a push-button hacking system called Turbine that allows the agency to scale up the number of networks it has access to from hundreds to potentially millions. The news comes from new Edward Snowden documents published by Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept today. The leaked information details how the NSA has used Turbine to ramp up its hacking capacity to “industrial scale,” plant malware that breaks the security on virtual private networks (VPNs) and digital voice communications, and collect data and subvert targeted networks on a once-unimaginable scale. Turbine is part of Turbulence, the collection of systems that also includes the Turmoil network surveillance system that feeds the NSA’s XKeyscore surveillance database. While it is controlled from NSA and GCHQ headquarters, it is a distributed set of attack systems equipped with packaged “exploits” that take advantage of the ability the NSA and GCHQ have to insert themselves as a “man in the middle” at Internet chokepoints. Using that position of power, Turbine can automate functions of Turbulence systems to corrupt data in transit between two Internet addresses, adding malware to webpages being viewed or otherwise attacking the communications stream. Since Turbine went online in 2010, it has allowed the NSA to scale up from managing hundreds of hacking operations each day to handling millions of them. It does so by taking people out of the loop of managing attacks, instead using software to identify, target, and attack Internet-connected devices by installing malware referred to as “implants.” According to the documents, NSA analysts can simply specify the type of information required and let the system figure out how to get to it without having to know the details of the application being attacked. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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NSA’s automated hacking engine offers hands-free pwning of the world

Refinements, additions, and un-breaking stuff: iOS 7.1 reviewed

Time to update! iOS 7.1 is here, and it fixes a lot of iOS 7.0’s biggest problems. Aurich Lawson There were about six months between the ouster of Scott Forstall from Apple in late October of 2012 and the unveiling of iOS 7.0 in June of 2013. Jony Ive and his team redesigned the software from the ground up in that interval, a short amount of time given that pretty much everything in the operating system was overhauled and that it was being done under new management. The design was tweaked between that first beta in June and the final release in mid-September, but the biggest elements were locked in place in short order. iOS 7.1’s version number implies a much smaller update, but it has spent a considerable amount of time in development. Apple has issued five betas to developers since November of 2013, and almost every one of them has tweaked the user interface in small but significant ways. It feels like Apple has been taking its time with this one, weighing different options and attempting to address the harshest criticism of the new design without the deadline pressure that comes with a major release. We’ve spent a few months with iOS 7.1 as it has progressed, and as usual we’re here to pick through the minutiae so you don’t have to. iOS 7.1 isn’t a drastic change, but it brings enough new design elements, performance improvements, and additional stability to the platform that it might just win over the remaining iOS 6 holdouts. Read 42 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Refinements, additions, and un-breaking stuff: iOS 7.1 reviewed

First OS X 10.9.3 beta improves support for 4K displays

An OS X 10.9.3 beta running in Retina mode on what appears to be a 39-inch Seiki 4K display. 9to5Mac OS X 10.9.2  was just released last week, but Apple has already begun testing for version 10.9.3, and the update will apparently come with some goodies for users of 4K displays. According to a report by 9to5Mac , the new update enables HiDPI “Retina” scaling on 4K displays that didn’t offer the option in previous OS X versions. It’s possible to enable HiDPI display modes on any monitor in OS X with some tweaking, but Apple is apparently interested in supporting Retina-style output on high-resolution monitors by default. Apple made a big 4K push with its new Mac Pro, which can support up to three 4K displays at once thanks to its twin GPUs and six Thunderbolt 2.0 ports. However, the company doesn’t yet make its own 4K Thunderbolt Display—current Mac Pro buyers can add $3,600 32-inch Sharp 4K displays  to their orders, or they can bring their own monitors. 9to5Mac’s testing was conducted with what appears to be a 39-inch Seiki Digital display , which as of this writing can be had on Amazon for $500 (though it doesn’t support a 60Hz refresh rate at 4K). According to others who have installed the new beta , 10.9.3 also apparently enables 60Hz 4K output on the 2013 Retina MacBook Pros. The Intel and Nvidia GPUs that power these MacBooks were previously capable of 60Hz 4K output when running Windows, but were limited to lower refresh rates in OS X. Higher refresh rates make for a smoother, more pleasant viewing experience, and are especially useful when editing movies, playing games, or in any other activities where response time is important. Those with older Macs likely won’t see 60Hz 4K support even after installing the update—the 2013 Retina MacBook Pros and 2013 Mac Pro are the only systems that support the requisite DisplayPort 1.2 spec. iMacs, MacBook Airs, and the Mac Mini will need to wait for a Thunderbolt 2 upgrade before they can drive high-resolution displays at the higher refresh rate. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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First OS X 10.9.3 beta improves support for 4K displays

Microsoft is a “2.5-trick pony” according to Steve Ballmer

In Conversation with Steve Ballmer at Saïd Business School Most companies fail, successful companies are often one-trick ponies, but Microsoft is a two-and-a-half trick pony, according to former CEO Steve Ballmer, speaking at Oxford’s Said Business School . He was responding to a question about why Microsoft had failed to innovate in the mobile space, particularly given that it had invented the tablet computer way before it was popularized by Apple. “Most tech companies fail,” Ballmer replied. “They are zero-trick ponies. They never do anything well and they go away. You are a genius in the industry if you are a one-trick pony. You get some innovation right and then spin it. I am very proud of the fact that [Microsoft] has done at least two tricks. Tricks are worth billions and billions and billions of dollars.” Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft is a “2.5-trick pony” according to Steve Ballmer

Critical crypto bug leaves Linux, hundreds of apps open to eavesdropping

A. Strakey Hundreds of open source packages, including the Red Hat, Ubuntu, and Debian distributions of Linux, are susceptible to attacks that circumvent the most widely used technology to prevent eavesdropping on the Internet, thanks to an extremely critical vulnerability in a widely used cryptographic code library. The bug in the GnuTLS library makes it trivial for attackers to bypass secure sockets layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protections available on websites that depend on the open source package. Initial estimates included in Internet discussions such as this one indicate that more than 200 different operating systems or applications rely on GnuTLS to implement crucial SSL and TLS operations, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the actual number is much higher. Web applications, e-mail programs, and other code that use the library are vulnerable to exploits that allow attackers monitoring connections to silently decode encrypted traffic passing between end users and servers. The bug is the result of commands in a section of the GnuTLS code that verify the authenticity of TLS certificates, which are often known simply as X509 certificates . The coding error, which may have been present in the code since 2005 , causes critical verification checks to be terminated, drawing ironic parallels to the extremely critical “goto fail” flaw that for months put users of Apple’s iOS and OS X operating systems at risk of surreptitious eavesdropping attacks. Apple developers have since patched the bug . Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Critical crypto bug leaves Linux, hundreds of apps open to eavesdropping

MtGox code posted by hackers as company files for bankruptcy protection

Cross Office Shibuya Medio, the office building in Tokyo that is home to MtGox and Mark Karpeles’ other companies. Tokyo Apartments As MtGox CEO Mark Karpeles and his lawyers officially filed for court-supervised restructuring of the Bitcoin exchange, someone posted a chunk of code to Pastebin that would appear to lend credence to Karpeles’ contention that his company was hacked. The block of PHP code appears to be part of the backend for MtGox’s Bitcoin exchange site, and it includes references to IP addresses registered to Karpeles’ Web hosting and consulting company, Tibanne . In an update to the MtGox website late Monday, the company reasserted its claim that it had been hacked through an exploit of a weakness in its exchange website code. “Although the complete extent is not yet known, we found that approximately 750,000 bitcoins deposited by users and approximately 100,000 bitcoins belonging to us had disappeared,” the company’s spokesperson said in the latest update at the MtGox website. “We believe that there is a high probability that these bitcoins were stolen as a result of an abuse of this bug and we have asked an expert to look at the possibility of a criminal complaint and undertake proper procedures.” That loss was discovered on February 24. On the same day, the company found “large discrepancies between the amount of cash held in financial institutions and the amount deposited from our users. The amounts are still under investigation and may vary, but they approximate JPY 2.8 billion [$27 million US].” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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MtGox code posted by hackers as company files for bankruptcy protection