Tag: lucky-modern

Ubisoft pulls upcoming holiday titles off Steam [Updated]

Update:  It seems all three games discussed below are now back up  on the US Steam store, though they are still unavailable in the UK. We’ll continue to monitor the situation and reach out for comment from Ubisoft and Valve. Original Story PC gamers who want to download upcoming Ubisoft titles like Far Cry 4 , The Crew , and Assassin’s Creed: Unity won’t be able to go through Valve’s Steam service, it seems. The Steam store pages for all three of those holiday titles have been taken down, being pulled in the UK early yesterday and disappearing in the US and other countries over last night and into this morning. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Follow this link:
Ubisoft pulls upcoming holiday titles off Steam [Updated]

GM’s next-gen infotainment system to run Android—not Android Auto—in 2016

The 2015 Cadillac ATS coupe with integrated LTE. It’s basically a big red smartphone. Ron Amadeo Harman International, the car infotainment manufacturer, recently spilled the beans on a “next-gen” infotainment system it is building for General Motors.  Automotive News  has quotes from the company’s CEO, Dinesh Paliwal, who describes an Android-based system with an app store and “instant” boot up. The report says that Harman is “working closely” with Google to make the system a reality. This system isn’t Android Auto. Unlike regular Android, Android Wear, and Android TV, Android Auto isn’t an operating system. It doesn’t live on the car’s computer, it doesn’t control peripherals, and it doesn’t have an app store. Like Apple’s CarPlay, Android Auto is just a “casted” interface. Your plugged-in smartphone sends a custom interface to the car’s screen and receives touch events, but the car still has to run some other operating system. Harman won a $900 million contract from GM to build the system, and judging by the Harman CEO’s description, this is an actual embedded Android system that will power the entire infotainment setup. That typically includes the audio system, air conditioning, navigation, voice recognition, phone calls, reverse cameras, and Internet access. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Visit site:
GM’s next-gen infotainment system to run Android—not Android Auto—in 2016

Crypto attack that hijacked Windows Update goes mainstream in Amazon Cloud

Underscoring just how broken the widely used MD5 hashing algorithm is, a software engineer racked up just 65 cents in computing fees to replicate the type of attack a powerful nation-state used in 2012 to hijack Microsoft’s Windows Update mechanism. Nathaniel McHugh ran open source software known as HashClash to modify two separate images—one of them depicting funk legend James Brown and the other R&B singer/songwriter Barry White—that generate precisely the same MD5 hash, e06723d4961a0a3f950e7786f3766338. The exercise—known in cryptographic circles as a hash collision—took just 10 hours and cost only 65 cents plus tax to complete using a GPU instance on Amazon Web Service. In 2007, cryptography expert and HashClash creator Marc Stevens estimated it would require about one day to complete an MD5 collision using a cluster of PlayStation 3 consoles . The MD5 hash for this picture—e06723d4961a0a3f950e7786f3766338—is precisely the same for the one below. Such “collisions” are a fatal flaw for hashing algorithms and can lead to disastrous attacks. The practical ability to create two separate inputs that generate the same hash is a fundamental flaw that makes MD5 unsuitable for most purposes. (The exception is password hashing. Single iteration MD5 hashing is horrible for passwords but for an entirely different reason that is outside the scope of this post.) The susceptibility to collisions can have disastrous consequences, potentially for huge swaths of the Internet. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Visit site:
Crypto attack that hijacked Windows Update goes mainstream in Amazon Cloud

iOS 8.1.1 said to address iPhone 4S and iPad 2 performance problems

Have an iPhone 4S running iOS 8? You’re due for a speed increase. Andrew Cunningham Late yesterday, Apple released the first beta build of iOS 8.1.1 to developers . The first update to iOS 8.1 will include customary bug fixes, but the preliminary release notes suggest a far more interesting development: the update promises to improve performance on the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 , two of the oldest devices that support iOS 8. This would address one of our biggest criticisms of iOS 8, which in our testing was significantly slower on these older devices than iOS 7 was. Apps took longer to launch, and the user interface was often jerky and inconsistent in ways that it wasn’t before. Apple has a long history of speeding up new iOS versions on old hardware post-release— iOS 4.1 on the iPhone 3G , iOS 7.1 on the iPhone 4 , and now iOS 8.1.1. It would be nice if performance on older hardware was better optimized in the first place, but newer hardware obviously takes precedence. When the final version of iOS 8.1.1 is released, we’ll throw it on an iPhone 4S and iPad 2 to see how much the performance really improves. Although they’re not mentioned by name in the release notes, we’d also expect the improvements to help the original iPad Mini and the fifth-generation iPod Touch, which are internally similar to the 4S and iPad 2. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

More:
iOS 8.1.1 said to address iPhone 4S and iPad 2 performance problems

In Detroit and other cities, nearly 40 percent go without Internet

It may be hard to believe, but there are big cities in the US where 30 to 40 percent of residents have no Internet access at all. And among those who are online in America’s worst-connected cities, a sizable percentage get by with only cellular Internet. That’s according to 2013 census data compiled by Bill Callahan, director of  Connect Your Community 2.0 , a group promoting Internet access for residents of Cleveland, OH, and Detroit, MI. Callahan published charts on his blog yesterday  showing how many households lack Internet access in the 25 worst connected cities in the US (out of 176 that have at least 50,000 households). In Laredo, TX, 40.2 percent of the 65,685 households have no Internet access, not even mobile broadband on a phone. Detroit was second in this list with 39.9 percent of households lacking Internet. In all 25 cities, at least 29.8 percent lacked Internet access. The 25 cities varied in size from 52,588 households (Kansas City, KS) to 255,322 households (Detroit). Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See more here:
In Detroit and other cities, nearly 40 percent go without Internet

Hearthstone bot maker closes shop after Blizzard crackdown

A status screen from the now defunct Hearthcrawler software. Blizzard seems to have scored a decisive win in the never-ending battle against automated “bot” programs that play games like Hearthstone without human intervention. Crawlerbots, maker of the popular Hearthcrawler bot,  announced this morning that it is closing up shop in the wake of a recent crackdown on users of the automated play tools. In what’s dubbed as its “last official announcement,” Crawlerbots writes that “the recent ban wave in Hearthstone hit a lot of users. After discussing this with Blizzard, it’s clear we have to take off our services/products now. Please note that we’re not going to be commenting further on this.” “Thank you all for being part of our community,” the message continues. “We are very sad about this but you also know botting is against the rules and we all knew that the day when our products doesn’t [sic] work anymore would come. With tears in our eyes we have to say bye.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Taken from:
Hearthstone bot maker closes shop after Blizzard crackdown

NTSB: SpaceShipTwo broke apart when “feathering” activated early

Ground imagery showing the destruction of SpaceShipTwo. Kenneth Brown/Reuters The Guardian has a good summary of how things are proceeding with the two-day-old National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation into the destruction of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo , which occurred at approximately 10:12am PDT on October 31. Some eyewitnesses reported seeing an explosion when the craft broke up, prompting speculation that the accident had something to do with SpaceShipTwo’s hybrid rocket engine—an engine that was making its first flight with its new fuel. However, at a press conference Sunday afternoon, acting NTSB chairman Christopher Hart said that crash investigators had already located the cause of the accident that injured 43-year old pilot Peter Siebold and took the life of 39-year old co-pilot Michael Alsbury: the spacecraft’s “feathering” mode had been engaged early. This put SpaceShipTwo in a high-drag configuration unsuitable for powered flight, and the craft then broke apart. The feathering functionality is designed to be used in the later stage of SpaceShipTwo’s flight. It changes the shape of the craft, swinging its wings upward and allowing them to move to the optimum angle to slow the craft down on descent, like a shuttlecock falling to the ground in a game of badminton. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read this article:
NTSB: SpaceShipTwo broke apart when “feathering” activated early

Egypt jails 8 men for 3 years after same-sex wedding video goes viral

Eight men accused of participating in a same-sex wedding on a Nile riverboat in Egypt were handed a three-year prison term Saturday for committing “debauchery,” state run media said. Ahram Online reported  that the Prosecutor-General Hisham Barakat viewed the one-minute video, said to be filmed in April, and concluded it was of two men getting married. Eight men who were aboard the riverboat were detained in September after the minute-long video went viral on YouTube and other sites, Ahram Online said. They were jailed for broadcasting footage that “violates public decency,” CNN said . Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Continue reading here:
Egypt jails 8 men for 3 years after same-sex wedding video goes viral

“The Devil had possessed his netbook”—and other tales of IT terror

Few things are scarier than 4Chan. But our readers told a few stories that spooked us. Paul van der Werf Earlier this week, we asked readers to share their most frightening tales of technology terror and support horror. And via both comments and Twitter (using the hashtag #ITTalesofTerror), in poured stories that raised goosebumps from those of us who have worked in IT at one point or another. After reading through them, we’ve picked out some reader favorites and a few of our own. Some of us at Ars were inspired to recount further tales of horror from our own IT careers—including one of mine that I’ve saved for last; it should cause a shudder of recognition from our more veteran readers and a bit of schadenfreude from those too young to remember five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks. The chamber of horrors Many readers had short tales of terror about mishaps in the closed spaces where we hide our network infrastructure. Eli Jacobowitz (@creepdr on Twitter) shared a short, shocking scenario by tweet : “Raccoons in the network closet (not kidding).” David Mohundro shared another story of a somewhat more smelly infrastructure invasion that brings new meaning to “data scrubbing”: “I saw our IT guys lugging shop vacs through the lower parking deck one day. There was a sewage backup into the server room.” Read 24 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Original post:
“The Devil had possessed his netbook”—and other tales of IT terror

FTC fines online dating service $616,000 for using “virtual cupids”

More and more people are becoming familiar with the joys—and frustrations—of online dating. A recent Pew study found that 10 percent of the US public is using online dating services, and a full 38 percent of those people say they are “single and looking.” There’s enough money to be made as an Internet matchmaker that it’s apparently sparking some companies to push the boundaries of what’s legal. Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission disclosed that  it reached a settlement with JDI Dating Ltd. , a UK company that runs 18 dating sites that it claims have over 12 million members. The sites include CupidsWand.com, FlirtCrowd.com, and FindMeLove.com. JDI will have to pay $616,165 in redress, and it must stop business practices that were said to violate both the FTC Act and a newer law that regulates recurring billing online. JDI’s dating sites would make fake profiles, which the company called “virtual cupids,” and have them send computer-generated messages to new users who had created profiles but hadn’t yet paid. On JDI’s websites, users received an e-mail notifying them that another user sent them a “wink” within minutes of joining. Then they got additional winks, messages, and photo requests, supposedly from other members in their geographic area. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Continued here:
FTC fines online dating service $616,000 for using “virtual cupids”