golf – Page 65 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Sudden spike of Tor users likely caused by one “massive” botnet

Tor Project Researchers have found a new theory to explain the sudden spike in computers using the Tor anonymity network: a massive botnet that was recently updated to use Tor to communicate with its mothership. Mevade.A, a network of infected computers dating back to at least 2009, has mainly used standard Web-based protocols to send and receive data to command and control (C&C) servers, according to researchers at security firm Fox-IT. Around the same time that Tor Project leaders began observing an unexplained doubling in Tor clients , Mevade overhauled its communication mechanism to use anonymized Tor addresses ending in .onion. In the week that has passed since Tor reported the uptick, the number of users has continued to mushroom. “The botnet appears to be massive in size as well as very widespread, ” a Fox-IT researcher wrote in a blog post published Thursday . “Even prior to the switch to Tor, it consisted of tens of thousands of confirmed infections within a limited amount of networks. When these numbers are extrapolated on a per country and global scale, these are definitely in the same ballpark as the Tor users increase.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sudden spike of Tor users likely caused by one “massive” botnet

Lenovo’s new Yoga 2 Pro has the same flexible hinge, 3200×1800 display

The new Yoga 2 Pro is a high-res follow-up to one of the better convertible laptop designs on the market. Lenovo The original IdeaPad Yoga was one of our favorite early convertible laptops, not least because the “convertible” part didn’t ruin the “laptop” part. Its many contortions were also genuinely useful, even if the weight and exposed keyboard made it a bit too awkward to use as a dedicated tablet. We got a belated 11-inch version of the original Yoga a bit earlier this year, but today at IFA, Lenovo has formally announced a pair of true sequels that look to improve the design without radically altering its formula. From the folding hinge to the bright “clementine orange” color, the Yoga 2 Pro is very much a successor to the first Yoga. It loses some weight and some thickness, dropping to 0.61 inches thick and 3.06 pounds from the 0.68 inches and 3.4 pounds of the original. It also includes Intel’s new Haswell processors (and its new integrated GPUs—there’s no dedicated graphics option available), but the biggest upgrade is the 13.3-inch 3200×1800 touchscreen. At 276 PPI, this is a substantial upgrade over the 1600×900 display of the original, though the (included) Windows 8.1 Pro can have some issues with high-PPI displays . Like the older Yoga, the new one is indistinguishable from a regular laptop most of the time. Lenovo The other specs are a mixed bag—you’ve got 8GB of DDR3L, standard 128, 256, and 512GB SSDs, a backlit keyboard, and Bluetooth 4.0 (all good), but there’s only one USB 3.0 port (the other is USB 2.0) and a frustratingly low-end 2.4GHz-only 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter. We understand laptops that don’t ship with 802.11ac yet, since that’s still a new standard and many people won’t have upgraded to a compatible router just yet. But to ship a high-end laptop without dual-band 802.11n seems like a seriously missed opportunity. The laptop also promises around six hours of battery life, which would have been on the low end of average for an Ivy Bridge Ultrabook but is a bit disappointing for a Haswell model. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Lenovo’s new Yoga 2 Pro has the same flexible hinge, 3200×1800 display

Windows 8 more widely used than OS X, IE still on the rise

Net Market Share In July, Windows 8 passed Windows Vista in market share. In August, it passed every single version of Apple’s OS X, combined. Internet Explorer 10 grew sharply, too, with almost one in five Internet users now on the latest version of Microsoft’s browser. Net Market Share Windows 8 made substantial gains in August, picking up 2.01 points of share. This is 37 percent growth on July’s figure. Windows XP also fell substantially, losing 3.53 points. With luck, this might mean that Windows XP is finally on the way out. It has less than a year until it stops receiving free security patches from Microsoft; once this happens, it will essentially be in a state of permanent zero day exploits. Even this level of decline isn’t enough to see the operating system eradicated in time for its end of life. That’s good news for spammers, who’ll have plenty of zombie machines to recruit into botnets, but bad news for everyone else. Net Market Share Net Market Share Among desktop browsers, Internet Explorer was up 0.99 points, Firefox was up 0.59 points, and Safari was up 0.17 points. Chrome, however, was down significantly, losing 1.76 points. This means that yet again Chrome has closed in on Firefox, almost passing it, only to fall back. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 8 more widely used than OS X, IE still on the rise

Balky carriers and slow OEMs step aside: Google is defragging Android

Ron Amadeo Android 4.3 was released to Nexus devices a little over a month ago, but, as is usual with Android updates, it’s taking much longer to roll out the general public. Right now, a little over six percent of Android users have the latest version. And if you pay attention to the various Android forums out there, you may have noticed something: no one cares. 4.3’s headline features are a new camera UI, restricted user profiles, and support for new versions of Bluetooth and OpenGL ES. Other than the camera, these are all extremely dull, low-level enhancements. It’s not that Google is out of ideas, or the Android team is slowing down. Google has purposefully made every effort to make Android OS updates as boring as possible. Why make boring updates? Because getting Samsung and the other OEMs to actually update their devices to the latest version of Android is extremely difficult. By the time the OEMs get the new version, port their skins over, ship a build to carriers, and the carriers finally push out the OTA update, many months pass. If the device isn’t popular enough, this process doesn’t happen at all. Updating a phone is a massive project involving several companies, none of which seem to be very committed to the process or in much of a hurry to get it done. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Balky carriers and slow OEMs step aside: Google is defragging Android

How “cell tower dumps” caught the High Country Bandits—and why it matters

Surveillance footage of one of the robbers. On February 18, 2010, the FBI field office in Denver issued a “wanted” notice for two men known as “the High Country Bandits”—a rather grandiose name for a pair of middle-aged white men who had been knocking down rural banks in the northern Arizona and Colorado, grabbing a few thousand dollars from a teller’s cash drawer, and sometimes escaping on a stolen all terrain vehicle (ATV). In each of their 16 robberies, the bandits had a method: “The unknown male identified as suspect number one often enters the banks in rural locations near closing time and brandishes a black semi-automatic handgun. Suspect number one then demands all the money from the teller drawers. He obtains an undisclosed amount of money, puts it in a bag, orders everyone on the ground, then exits the banks with a second suspect. They have been seen leaving the banks on a green or maroon four-wheel ATV with suspect number two driving.” Investigators had bank surveillance footage of the robberies, but the bandits wore jackets, ski masks, and gloves and proved hard to track down. It wasn’t for a lack of witnesses or police effort, either. At one 2009 robbery in Pinetop, Arizona, for instance, the bandits got away with $3, 827. Witnesses saw a man run from the bank and into a residential area, “looking around as if he were lost.” Witnesses later saw the man tear out of the area on an ATV driven by another man. Police followed their escape route and found the spot where the ATV left the road through a freshly-cut barbed wire fence. The cops followed the tracks 17 miles northwest of town before losing the trail completely. Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How “cell tower dumps” caught the High Country Bandits—and why it matters

In historic vote, New Zealand bans software patents

A major new patent bill, passed in a 117-4 vote by New Zealand’s Parliament after five years of debate, has banned software patents. The relevant clause of the patent bill actually states that a computer program is “not an invention.” Some have suggested that was a way to get around the wording of the TRIPS intellectual property treaty which requires patents to be “available for any inventions, whether products or processes, in all fields of technology.” Processes will still be patentable if the computer program is merely a way of implementing a patentable process. But patent claims that cover computer programs “as such” will not be allowed. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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In historic vote, New Zealand bans software patents

Bethesda “pushing” against Xbox Live Gold fee for Elder Scrolls Online

So far, Bethesda Softworks (and parent company Zenimax Media) has bucked industry trends by planning a $15 per month subscription for its upcoming The Elder Scrolls Online , adding a bit of insult to injury by including a real-money shop for nonessential items . Now the company says it’s trying to get Microsoft to agree to waive the additional requirement of an Xbox Live Gold subscription for Xbox One players, though without much success so far. Microsoft currently requires a $60/year Xbox Live Gold account to play any and all online games on the system, even otherwise free-to-play titles like World of Tanks . Speaking to the UK’s official Xbox Magazine , though, Zenimax Online Creative Director Paul Sage says the company has “been in talks with Microsoft” about getting a waiver for The Elder Scrolls Online since the game already has its own subscription fee. “[We’re] seeing whether or not there’s any room to change their minds about that, for folks who are only paying The Elder Scrolls Online and don’t want to pay for an Xbox Live Gold subscription, just to pay The Elder Scrolls Online , ” Sage said. So far Microsoft has been less than responsive to these concerns, reportedly answering, “that’s the way it works, ” but Sage promises that Bethesda will “keep on pushing” on the issue. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bethesda “pushing” against Xbox Live Gold fee for Elder Scrolls Online

Cry (foam-padded) havoc! A day at Darkon’s Bellum Aeternus II

Armies face off during a bridge battle at Bellus Aeternum II in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. Jonah Gallagher PATUXENT RIVER STATE PARK, Maryland—For four days, the Darkon Wargaming Club took over a section of a park outside Upper Marlboro that once served as a grass airfield. Temporarily, it became a combination of festival encampment and battleground. The event was the second edition of Bellum Aeternuthe club’s invitational event for live-action role-play (LARP) and combat, open to participants from across the medieval-themed LARP community. As I described in my feature on the first Bellum Aeternus last November , Darkon is a live-action combination of fantasy tabletop role-play (like Dungeons and Dragons ) and wargaming (like Warhammer ), combining a full-contact battle sport with a strategic land warfare game and scenario-driven adventures. Darkon is an offshoot of the “boffer” combat gaming community that originally sprung up in Maryland, Washington DC, and Northern Virginia. Unlike the Society for Creative Anachronism’s armored combat , Darkon and similar combat games use padded weapons for safety and to allow unarmored (and occasionally barely dressed) participants. Unlike Dagorhir , from which Darkon and most of the other US fantasy combat LARP games evolved, Darkon incorporates a magic system that has spellcasters throwing beanbag “fireballs” and “lightning bolts” in combat. Participants also use other magic to avoid taking hits in battle or rendering opponents’ defenses useless. And unlike Amtgard, another fantasy LARP, Darkon allows for some serious full-contact combat—using tactics such as “shield bashing” to knock opponents over and allowing the use of bows with pad-tipped arrows. The combination of archers and spellcasters drives some of those from other, larger game communities to distraction. It changes the balance of the combat game from pure martial beatdown to one where players with a wide range of physical abilities can take part. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cry (foam-padded) havoc! A day at Darkon’s Bellum Aeternus II

In surveillance era, clever trick enhances secrecy of iPhone text messages

Creative Heroes A security researcher has developed a technique that could significantly improve the secrecy of text messages sent in near real time on iPhones. The technique, which will debut in September in an iOS app called TextSecure, will also be folded into a currently available Android app by the same name. The cryptographic property known as perfect forward secrecy has always been considered important by privacy advocates, but it has taken on new urgency following the recent revelations of widespread surveillance of Americans by the National Security Agency. Rather than use the same key to encrypt multiple messages—the way, say PGP- and S/MIME-protected e-mail programs do—applications that offer perfect forward secrecy generate ephemeral keys on the fly . In the case of some apps, including the OTR protocol for encrypting instant messages , each individual message within a session is encrypted with a different key. The use of multiple keys makes eavesdropping much harder. Even if the snoop manages to collect years worth of someone’s encrypted messages, he would have to crack hundreds or possibly hundreds of thousands of keys to transform the data into the “plaintext” that a human could make sense of. What’s more, even if the attacker obtains or otherwise compromises the computer that his target used to send the encrypted messages, it won’t be of much help if the target has deleted the messages. Since the keys used in perfect forward secrecy are ephemeral, they aren’t stored on the device. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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In surveillance era, clever trick enhances secrecy of iPhone text messages

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

Substantial news out of Redmond this morning: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is retiring within the next 12 months. Ballmer has been a prominent fixture at Microsoft since joining the company in 1980. Prior to becoming the CEO, Ballmer was active in a number of Microsoft divisions, with a particular focus on the sales side of the house. He took over chief executive duties when Bill Gates stepped down in January 2000. Though much pilloried in the tech press for Microsoft’s more recent missteps, including Windows RT and, most famously, Windows Vista, Ballmer’s tenure as CEO has been a positive one for Microsoft—at least from a revenue perspective. Under his leadership, Microsoft’s net income has increased to $23 billion, with annual revenue climbing from $25 billion to $70 billion, with an average annual profit growth of over 16 percent. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments