hash – Page 4 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Volkswagen makes it official—it’s buying back 500,000 2.0L diesels

(credit: Spanish Coches ) In San Francisco this morning, US District Judge Charles Breyer said Volkswagen Group would buy back nearly 500,000 2.0L diesel vehicles which were discovered in September to have software that illegally disabled the emissions control system during normal driving conditions. VW Group is facing some 600 lawsuits that Judge Breyer is overseeing collectively, and the German automaker was compelled by court order to present a plan for fixing the faulty vehicles by today. Specifics of the plan will be hammered out in the coming months. Volkswagen will also set up a fund for people who bought certain diesel Jettas, Golfs, Passats, Beetles, and Audi A3s after 2009. Breyer said this would offer customers “substantial compensation,” on top of the car buyback . Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Volkswagen makes it official—it’s buying back 500,000 2.0L diesels

Out-of-date apps put 3 million servers at risk of crypto ransomware infections

(credit: Dr F. Eugene Hester, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) More than 3 million Internet-accessible servers are at risk of being infected with crypto ransomware because they’re running vulnerable software, including out-of-date versions of Red Hat’s JBoss enterprise application , researchers from Cisco Systems said Friday. About 2,100 of those servers have already been compromised by webshells that give attackers persistent control over the machines, making it possible for them to be infected at any time, the Cisco researchers reported in a blog post . The compromised servers are connected to about 1,600 different IP addresses belonging to schools, governments, aviation companies, and other types of organizations. Some of the compromised servers belonged to school districts that were running the Destiny management system that many school libraries use to keep track of books and other assets. Cisco representatives notified officials at Destiny developer Follett Learning of the compromise, and the Follett officials said they fixed a security vulnerability in the program. Follett also told Cisco the updated Destiny software also scans computers for signs of infection and removes any identified backdoors. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Out-of-date apps put 3 million servers at risk of crypto ransomware infections

Help save 17 years of PC game modding history

The FileFront logo, as it existed before the 2010 renaming to GameFront. One of the Web’s oldest and largest repositories for classic and current PC gaming mods will be shutting down for good later this month. GameFront announced today that its servers will be going offline on April 30 and that “any files not downloaded by that time will no longer be accessible.” “Since our founding as FileLeech almost 20 years ago, we have always strived to offer the best file hosting alongside quality gaming content,” former GameFront staffer Ron Whitaker wrote. “To all of our fans who have supported us throughout the years, we thank you for making us your destination for gaming files. Despite name changes, ownership changes, and staff changes, you have always made our jobs rewarding and fun.” The shutdown is a blow to those who rely on GameFront for access to tens of thousands of mods, demos, patches, tools, maps, skins, and add-ons for PC games dating back to the mid-’90s. It’s especially significant to those looking for mods and patches for older games with smaller communities or defunct publishers, which can be hard or impossible to find elsewhere. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Help save 17 years of PC game modding history

Netflix quietly rolls out HDR content, starts with first season of Marco Polo

(credit: Netflix ) Netflix is bumping up the video quality of one of its original shows in an effort to get ahead of the high dynamic range (HDR) streaming game. According to a report by FlatPanelsHD , Netflix released the first season of Marco Polo in HDR as well as 4K, and more HDR-capable shows will come soon. Season two of the show has been confirmed for release in June 2016. Netflix’s corporate communications manager Yann Lafargue confirmed that certain programs will support HDR streaming now but was cryptic about shows to come in the future. “We are indeed live with HDR. It works with compatible TVs, both in HDR10 and Dolby Vision,” Lafargue told FlatPanelsHD. “We have season one of Marco Polo for now, but much more content should be available shortly, so stay tuned.” HDR improves picture quality by making blacks darker and whites brighter, resulting in an image sharper and crisper than that of regular HD. Netflix appears to be embracing HDR more than 4K at the moment, although the company has been streaming some 4K content since 2014. At that time, Netflix’s 4K content was limited not only by the number of shows available but also by the few TVs that could support the resolution. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Netflix quietly rolls out HDR content, starts with first season of Marco Polo

Chrome 50 ends support for Windows XP, OS X 10.6, other old versions

Google Chrome version 50 was released to the browser’s stable channel yesterday, and in addition to a handful of new features and security fixes , the update also ends support for a wide range of operating systems that have been supported since Chrome launched on those platforms. Windows XP, Windows Vista, OS X 10.6, OS X 10.7, and OS X 10.8 are no longer supported. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, since Google promised last November to end support for these older OS versions in April of 2016. Old versions of Chrome installed on these OSes won’t stop working (for now), but they’ll no longer receive updates and there’s no guarantee that things like Google account sign-in and data syncing will continue to work. If you’re still using one of these operating systems, you have a couple of options. One is to upgrade to a newer OS, assuming your hardware can handle it. Security patches for Windows XP stopped in April of 2014 , and patches for OS X 10.6 stopped a few months before that . Updates for OS X 10.7 and 10.8 ended roughly when versions 10.10 and 10.11 were released, respectively, since Apple’s unofficial policy is to provide security fixes for the most recent OS X release and the two previous releases. Windows Vista is still getting bare-minimum security patches from Microsoft, but that ends in April of 2017 . Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Chrome 50 ends support for Windows XP, OS X 10.6, other old versions

Nation-wide radio station hack airs hours of vulgar “furry sex” ramblings

(credit: TJJSvdM ) Some Tuesday morning listeners of KIFT, a Top 40 radio station located in Breckenridge, Colorado, were treated to a radically different programming menu. Instead of the normal fare from Taylor Swift, The Chainsmokers, or other pop stars, a hack by an unknown party caused one of the station’s signals to broadcast a sexually explicit podcast related to the erotic attraction to furry characters . The unauthorized broadcast lasted for about 90 minutes . KIFT wasn’t the only station to be hit by the hack. On the same day, Livingston, Texas-based country music station KXAX also broadcast raunchy furry-themed audio . And according to an article posted Wednesday by radio industry news site RadioInsight.com, the unauthorized broadcasts from a hobbyist group called FurCast were also forced on an unnamed station in Denver and an unidentified national syndicator. “All in all the FurCast aired for an hour, possibly two,” Jason Mclelland, owner and general manager of the KXAX Radio Group, wrote in an e-mail. “During that time they talked about sex with two guys and a girl in explicit details and rambled on with vulgar language not really having much of a point to the podcast. I’m assuming there was no real reason for this hack.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Nation-wide radio station hack airs hours of vulgar “furry sex” ramblings

All-bacterial battery makes a nutrient when charged, eats it to discharge

Diagram of a microbial fuel cell that runs on acetate, one half of the bacterial battery described here. (credit: Oak Ridge National Lab ) The chemical that powers most of our cellular processes is produced through something called the electron transport chain. As its name suggests, this system shuffles electrons through a series of chemicals that leaves them at a lower energy, all while harvesting some of the energy difference to produce ATP. But the ultimate destination of this electron transport chain doesn’t have to be a chemical. There are a variety of bacteria that ultimately send the electrons off into the environment instead. And researchers have figured out how to turn these into a fuel cell, harvesting the electrons to do something useful. While some of these designs were closer to a battery than others, all of them consumed some sort of material in harvesting the electrons. A team of researchers in the Netherlands figured out how to close the loop and create an actual bacterial battery. One half of the battery behaves like a bacterial fuel cell. But the second half takes the electrons and uses them to synthesize a small organic molecule that the first can eat. Its charging cycle is painfully slow and its energy density is atrocious, but the fact that it works at all seems rather noteworthy. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Why Microsoft needed to make Windows run Linux software

It’s bash, it’s Windows, it’s not a virtual machine. Perhaps the biggest surprise to come from Microsoft’s Build developer conference last week was the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). The system will ship as part of this summer’s Anniversary Update for Windows 10. WSL has two parts; there’s the core subsystem, which is already included in Insider Preview builds of the operating system , and then a package of software that Canonical will provide. The core subsystem is what provides the Linux API on Windows, including the ability to natively load Linux executables and libraries. Canonical will provide bash and all the other command-line tools that are expected in a Linux environment. Microsoft is positioning WSL strictly as a tool for developers, with a particular view to supporting Web developers and the open source software stacks that they depend on. Many developers are very familiar with the bash shell, with building software using make and gcc , and editing text in vi or emacs . WSL will give these developers versions of these tools that are equal in just about every regard to the ones you get on Linux, because they’ll be the ones you get on Linux running unmodified on Windows. Read 22 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Why Microsoft needed to make Windows run Linux software

Nvidia unveils first Pascal graphics card, the monstrous Tesla P100

The first full-fat GPU based on Nvidia’s all-new Pascal architecture is here. And while the Tesla P100 is aimed at professionals and deep learning systems rather than consumers, if consumer Pascal GPUs are anything like it—and there’s a very good chance they will be—gamers and enthusiasts alike are going to see a monumental boost in performance. The Tesla P100 is the first full-size Nvidia GPU based on the TSMC 16nm FinFET manufacturing process—like AMD, Nvidia has been stuck using an older 28nm process since 2012—and the first to feature the second generation of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2). Samsung began mass production of faster and higher capacity HBM2 memory back in January. While recent rumours suggested that both Nvidia and AMD wouldn’t use HMB2 this year due to it being prohibitively expensive—indeed, AMD’s recent roadmap suggests that its new Polaris GPUs won’t use HBM2 —Nvidia has at least taken the leap with its professional line of GPUs. The result of the P100’s more efficient manufacturing process, architecture upgrades, and HBM2 is a big boost in performance over Nvidia’s current performance champs like the Maxwell-based Tesla M40 and the Titan X/Quadro M6000. Nvidia says the P100 reaches 21.2 teraflops of half-precision (FP16) floating point performance, 10.6 teraflops of single precision (FP32), and 5.3 teraflops (1/2 rate) of double precision. By comparison, the Titan X and Tesla M40 offer just 7 teraflops of single precision floating point performance. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Nvidia unveils first Pascal graphics card, the monstrous Tesla P100

Frontier customers still have problems three days after Verizon changeover

Former Verizon customers who were switched over to Frontier Communications on Friday are still reporting outages and other problems today. Verizon sold its FiOS and DSL networks in California, Florida, and Texas to Frontier, but the transition has not been smooth. On Friday, Frontier acknowledged a “technical issue” involving the integration of systems, but the company said it had been fixed by 9:30am ET that morning. That assurance seems to have been premature, with customers still reporting problems on DownDetector and Twitter throughout the weekend and today. “Onto the 4th day without Internet or any working account…any timeframe guys? This is getting really crazy!” one California customer complained today. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Frontier customers still have problems three days after Verizon changeover