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Can Apple read your iMessages? Ars deciphers “end-to-end” crypto claims

Aurich Lawson Ever since the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program came to light three weeks ago, implicated companies have issued carefully worded statements denying that government snoops have direct or wholesale access to e-mail and other sensitive customer data. The most strenuous denial came 10 days ago, when Apple said it took pains to protect personal information stored on its servers , in many cases by not collecting it in the first place. “For example, conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them,” company officials wrote . “Apple cannot decrypt that data. Similarly, we do not store data related to customers’ location, Map searches or Siri requests in any identifiable form.” Some cryptographers and civil liberties advocates have chafed at the claim that even Apple is unable to bypass the end-to-end encryption protecting them. After all, Apple controls the password-based authentication system that locks and unlocks customer data. More subtly, but no less important, cryptographic protections are highly nuanced things that involve huge numbers of moving parts. Choices about the types of keys that are used, the ways they’re distributed, and the specific data that is and isn’t encrypted have a huge effect on precisely what data is and isn’t protected and under what circumstances. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Can Apple read your iMessages? Ars deciphers “end-to-end” crypto claims

The ten fastest supercomputers on the planet, in pictures

A Chinese supercomputer known as Tianhe-2 was today named the world’s fastest machine, nearly doubling the previous speed record with its performance of 33.86 petaflops. Tianhe-2’s ascendance was revealed in advance  and was made official today with the release of the new Top 500 supercomputer list . Tianhe-2 was developed at China’s National University of Defense Technology and will be deployed in the country’s National Supercomputing Center before the end of this year. “The surprise appearance of Tianhe-2, two years ahead of the expected deployment, marks China’s first return to the No. 1 position since November 2010, when Tianhe-1A was the top system,” the Top 500 announcement states. “Tianhe-2 has 16,000 nodes, each with two Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge processors and three Xeon Phi processors for a combined total of 3,120,000 computing cores.” The combined performance of the 500 systems on the list is 223 petaflops, up from 162 petaflops in the previous list released six months ago. A petaflop represents one quadrillion floating point operations per second, or a million billion. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The ten fastest supercomputers on the planet, in pictures

Encrypted e-mail: How much annoyance will you tolerate to keep the NSA away?

Aurich Lawson In an age of smartphones and social networking, e-mail may strike many as quaint. But it remains the vehicle that millions of people use every day to send racy love letters, confidential business plans, and other communications both sender and receiver want to keep private. Following last week’s revelations of a secret program that gives the National Security Agency (NSA) access to some e-mails sent over Gmail, Hotmail, and other services—and years after it emerged that the NSA had gained access to full fiber-optic taps of raw Internet traffic—you may be wondering what you can do to keep your messages under wraps. The answer is public key encryption, and we’ll show you how to use it. The uses of asymmetry The full extent of the cooperation between the NSA and various technology companies is unclear. It will probably remain that way for the foreseeable future. For the time being, however, it seems likely that the standard cryptographic tools used to secure data “in flight”—that is to say, the SSL that protects data traveling between machines on the Internet—remain secure as long as certain best practices are used. Read 55 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Encrypted e-mail: How much annoyance will you tolerate to keep the NSA away?

Behold, the world’s most sophisticated Android trojan

greyweed Recently discovered malware targeting Android smartphones exploits previously unknown vulnerabilities in the Google operating system and borrows highly advanced functionality more typical of malicious Windows applications, making it the world’s most sophisticated Android Trojan, a security researcher said. The infection, named Backdoor.AndroidOS.Obad.a, isn’t very widespread at the moment. The malware gives an idea of the types of smartphone malware that are possible, however, according to Kaspersky Lab expert Roman Unuchek in a blog post published Thursday . Sharply contrasting with mostly rudimentary Android malware circulating today, the highly stealthy Obad.a exploits previously unknown Android bugs, uses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections to spread to near-by handsets, and allows attackers to issue malicious commands using standard SMS text messages. “To conclude this review, we would like to add that Backdoor.AndroidOS.Obad.a looks closer to Windows malware than to other Android trojans, in terms of its complexity and the number of unpublished vulnerabilities it exploits,” Unuchek wrote. “This means that the complexity of Android malware programs is growing rapidly alongside their numbers.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Behold, the world’s most sophisticated Android trojan

Espionage malware infects raft of governments, industries around the world

Kaspersky Lab Security researchers have blown the whistle on a computer-espionage campaign that over the past eight years has successfully compromised more than 350 high-profile targets in 40 countries. “NetTraveler,” named after a string included in an early version of the malware, has targeted a number of industries and organizations, according to a blog post published Tuesday by researchers from antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab. Targets include oil industry companies, scientific research centers and institutes, universities, private companies, governments and governmental institutions, embassies, military contractors and Tibetan/Uyghur activists. Most recently, the group behind NetTraveler has focused most of its efforts on obtaining data concerning space exploration, nanotechnology, energy production, nuclear power, lasers, medicine, and communications. “Based on collected intelligence, we estimate the group size to about 50 individuals, most of which speak Chinese natively and have working knowledge of the English language,” the researchers wrote. “NetTraveler is designed to steal sensitive data as well as log keystrokes, and retrieve file system listings and various Office of PDF documents.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Espionage malware infects raft of governments, industries around the world

Apple issues OS X 10.8.4 update, includes iMessage and FaceTime fixes

OS X 10.8.4 comes with a long list of fixes. Andrew Cunningham After several weeks of beta testing, Apple has released OS X version 10.8.4 for all Macs running Mountain Lion. The update fixes a long list of minor issues  and some security bugs as the OS nears its first birthday. Those hoping for major changes to OS X will have to wait until Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) next week, at which Apple is widely expected to show off Mountain Lion’s successor. Quite a few of 10.8.4’s fixes are aimed at businesses. There are fixes that will help Calendar work better with Microsoft Exchange servers, compatibility and speed improvements to OS X’s Active Directory integration, improvements to compatibility with “certain enterprise Wi-Fi networks,” and fixes to issues with the SMB and NFS network sharing protocols. As ever, Apple is annoyingly nonspecific about the exact problems these updates solve, but network administrators with OS X clients may find something to like about the new update. Other squashed bugs will be of more interest to consumers. For example, there’s an iMessage fix that will prevent out-of-order messages, a fix for a FaceTime issue that would prevent calls to international numbers, and an update to Safari (now at version 6.0.5) that “improves stability for some websites with chat features and games.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple issues OS X 10.8.4 update, includes iMessage and FaceTime fixes

Windows 8.1 gains boot-to-desktop to attract business users

At TechEd North America today, Microsoft unveiled a host of features coming in Windows 8.1 that should make the operating system more appealing to business users. Windows 8.1 is a free update to Windows 8 that will ship  later this year . On top of bringing back a Taskbar-visible Start button , Windows 8.1 will give enterprises a lot more control over the operating system’s appearance. Chief among these controls is the ability to boot straight to the desktop, a feature found in prerelease versions of Windows 8 but not officially supported in the final version. Additionally, IT departments can now exact more control over the Start screen, fixing its layout and prepopulating it with tiles for corporate apps. At its most extreme, this will allow IT departments to turn Windows 8 machines into kiosks, booting into specific Metro apps. If the built-in capabilities aren’t sufficient, Microsoft will be releasing an embeddable version. The catchily-named Windows Embedded 8.1 Industry will be for use in things like point-of-sale systems and ATMs. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 8.1 gains boot-to-desktop to attract business users

Two CPUs, two batteries, two OSes: Asus announces Transformer Book Trio

The Asus Transformer Book Trio takes the dockable tablet concept to the next level. Asus Asus has long offered a line of Android tablets that slot into keyboard docks, but at its Computex press conference it announced it would be taking this concept one step further. Its new Transformer Book Trio is a tablet running Android (an unspecified version of Jelly Bean, to be a bit more precise); when docked, it becomes a Haswell-equipped Windows 8 Ultrabook. The laptop contains all the ingredients for a standard Ultrabook in its base: a 4th-generation Haswell CPU, 1TB of storage, an unspecified amount of RAM, and a 33WHr battery. Behind the 11.6-inch 1080p display is an entirely separate computer based on Intel’s Clover Trail+ Atom platform: the 2GHz Atom Z2580, 2GB of RAM, 64GB of solid-state storage, and a 19WHr battery. When the laptop is docked, Engadget reports that a button press will switch between the Windows 8 installation in the base and the Android installation in the lid. Undocking the lid switches the tablet to a full-time Android tablet, though since the hardware is x86-based, one wonders if Windows 8 couldn’t be installed on it with some effort. The device combines a couple of concepts that Asus is already using elsewhere. Its Transformer Pad tablets have long been keyboard-dockable, and the Transformer AiO also uses a detachable screen to double as a tablet (though in that case the tablet’s hardware is ARM-based). Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Two CPUs, two batteries, two OSes: Asus announces Transformer Book Trio

Haswell is here: we detail Intel’s first 4th-generation Core CPUs

Intel is announcing the first of its fourth-generation Core processors based on the “Haswell” architecture. Intel Intel has been releasing information about Haswell, its next-generation CPU architecture, for months now. Our coverage has already been fairly extensive—we’ve already got a nice overview of Haswell’s CPU architecture itself, along with a primer on its brand-new integrated GPUs . All we need to know now is specific product information, and Intel is finally giving us our first official taste of that today. This morning’s announcements revolve around high-end quad-core chips in the Core i7 and Core i5 families, 12 for desktops and ten for laptops. If you’re looking for specific information about U- and Y- series low-voltage chips for Ultrabooks or anything belonging to the Core i3, Pentium, or Celeron families, you’ll have to wait a little while longer. We’ll be sure to pass that information along as we have it. What we’ll do here is present a high-level recap of the CPU, GPU, and chipset enhancements Intel is introducing in Haswell. After that, we’ll break down the specific CPUs that Intel is announcing today, and the kinds of systems you’re likely to find them in. Note that all of this information is coming directly from Intel—they’re not going to out-and-out make things up, but they’re definitely going to present their CPUs in the best possible light. We’ll be putting all of the below performance claims to the test as we begin to review Haswell-based systems later this summer. Read 30 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Haswell is here: we detail Intel’s first 4th-generation Core CPUs

Tim Cook confirms: Apple spending $100 million to build new Macs in Texas

Apple is looking to bring even more Mac production back to the states. Andrew Cunningham Last week, we learned that Apple was looking to devote about $100 million to bring the manufacturing of one of its Mac product lines back to the United States. At yesterday’s Senate hearings on the company’s untaxed overseas pile of cash, Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed that the new Mac would be manufactured in Texas. The computer will also “include components made in Illinois and Florida and rely on equipment produced in Kentucky and Michigan.” Moving away from solid facts and into informed speculation, AllThingsD  notes that longtime Apple manufacturing partner Foxconn has facilities in Texas that may be used to build the new Mac. Apple is also building a campus in Austin, Texas, indicating that the company may continue to expand in the state. The new Mac is likely to be an updated version of one of Apple’s existing product lines—a new MacBook Air refresh looks possible for the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference next month—but we don’t know which just yet. If Apple were to move production of any of its product lines back into the country’s borders, it makes sense to start with Macs—they still sell well, but compared to the iPhone and iPad they make up a relatively small portion of Apple’s sales, and Apple has less to lose if there are hiccups. The company has been testing the waters with domestic production since at least the launch of the 2012 iMac. Some of these computers (including our 21.5-inch review unit  but  not our  27-inch review unit ) are (or were) already being made domestically, most likely nearer to Apple’s California headquarters . Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Tim Cook confirms: Apple spending $100 million to build new Macs in Texas