Tag: microsoft

How “Game Mode” will make games run better on Windows

SAN FRANCISCO—A few months ago, Microsoft announced that its upcoming Windows 10 Creators Update ( currently in testing ) would include a new ” Game Mode ” that improves the performance of interactive titles running under Windows by at least a few percentage points . At the Game Developers Conference this week, Eric Walston from the Xbox Advanced Technology Group explained a bit about how exactly that Game Mode will “focus the existing hardware on providing the best possible gaming experience.” Currently, on the Windows OS level, a game is just another process among many running simultaneously. With Game Mode, though, Windows will isolate CPU resources to be devoted exclusively to that game process and optimize the GPU to give the game as much attention as possible as well. On the CPU side, Game Mode allocates a majority of the CPU’s cores to be devoted exclusively to the target game, so an eight-core system might get six gaming-dedicated cores when running in Game Mode (depending on what other processes are running). The system then moves threads devoted to other processes off of those gaming-focused cores, reducing thread contention among the various gaming process threads and improving performance. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How “Game Mode” will make games run better on Windows

An Incorrect Command Entered By Employee Triggered Disruptions To S3 Storage Service, Knocking Down Dozens of Websites, Amazon Says

Amazon is apologizing for the disruptions to its S3 storage service that knocked down and — in some cases affected — dozens of websites earlier this week. The company also outlined what caused the issue — the event was triggered by human error. The company said an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process. “Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended, ” the company said in a press statement Thursday. It adds: The servers that were inadvertently removed supported two other S3 subsystems. One of these subsystems, the index subsystem, manages the metadata and location information of all S3 objects in the region. This subsystem is necessary to serve all GET, LIST, PUT, and DELETE requests. The second subsystem, the placement subsystem, manages allocation of new storage and requires the index subsystem to be functioning properly to correctly operate. The placement subsystem is used during PUT requests to allocate storage for new objects. Removing a significant portion of the capacity caused each of these systems to require a full restart. While these subsystems were being restarted, S3 was unable to service requests. Other AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region that rely on S3 for storage, including the S3 console, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) new instance launches, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes (when data was needed from a S3 snapshot), and AWS Lambda were also impacted while the S3 APIs were unavailable. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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An Incorrect Command Entered By Employee Triggered Disruptions To S3 Storage Service, Knocking Down Dozens of Websites, Amazon Says

132 Google Play apps tried to infect Android users with… Windows malware

Enlarge (credit: Palo Alto Networks ) It’s a mystery that left researchers scratching their heads: 132 Android apps in the official Google Play market attempted to infect users with… Windows malware. The apps, which were spawned by seven different developers, mostly contained carefully concealed HTML-based iframe tags that connected to two heavily obfuscated malicious domains. In one case, an app didn’t use iframes but instead used Microsoft’s Visual Basic language to inject an entire obfuscated Windows executable into the HTML. The apps were equipped with two capabilities. One was to load interstitial ads, and the other was to load the main app. The main apps loaded WebView components that were configured to allow loaded JavaScript code to access the app’s native functionality. An example of one infected app’s user interface and underlying code. (credit: Palo Alto Networks ) That was a lot of work considering that the Windows-based malware was incapable of executing on an Android device. On top of that, the two malicious domains in the iframes—brenz.pl and chura.pl—were taken over by Polish security authorities in 2013. So what, precisely, was going on? Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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132 Google Play apps tried to infect Android users with… Windows malware

Gemalto Launches eSIM Technology for Windows 10 Devices

An anonymous reader shares a report: Global digital security firm Gemalto on Tuesday announced it will make available its on-demand connectivity and eSIM technology for Microsoft’s Windows 10 devices. The eSIM is designed to be remotely provisioned by mobile network operators with subscription information and is globally interoperable across all carriers, device makers and technology providers implementing the specification. Gemalto’s On-Demand Connectivity solution gives service providers the capability to deliver a seamless customer experience for connecting consumer and industrial devices. “eSIM technology remains an important investment for Microsoft as we look to create even more mobile computing opportunities, ” said Roanne Sones, General Manager (Strategy and Ecosystem), Microsoft. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Gemalto Launches eSIM Technology for Windows 10 Devices

Hackers who took control of PC microphones siphon >600 GB from 70 targets

Enlarge (credit: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ) Researchers have uncovered an advanced malware-based operation that siphoned more than 600 gigabytes from about 70 targets in a broad range of industries, including critical infrastructure, news media, and scientific research. The operation uses malware to capture audio recordings of conversations, screen shots, documents, and passwords, according to a blog post published last week by security firm CyberX. Targets are initially infected using malicious Microsoft Word documents sent in phishing e-mails. Once compromised, infected machines upload the pilfered audio and data to Dropbox, where it’s retrieved by the attackers. The researchers have dubbed the campaign Operation BugDrop because of its use of PC microphones to bug targets and send the audio and other data to Dropbox. “Operation BugDrop is a well-organized operation that employs sophisticated malware and appears to be backed by an organization with substantial resources,” the CyberX researchers wrote. “In particular, the operation requires a massive back-end infrastructure to store, decrypt, and analyze several GB per day of unstructured data that is being captured from its targets. A large team of human analysts is also required to manually sort through captured data and process it manually and/or with Big Data-like analytics.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hackers who took control of PC microphones siphon >600 GB from 70 targets

MAME Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary

After years of work, a fan has finally completed a MAME version of Atari’s unreleased game Primal Rage II this week, one more example of the emulator preserving digital history. Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes MAME.net: Way back in 1997, Nicola Salmoria merged a few stand-alone arcade machine emulators into the first Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. Could he have possibly imagined the significance of what he’d built? Over the past two decades, MAME has brought together over a thousand contributors to build a system that emulates more machines than any other program. But MAME is more than that: MAME represents the idea that our digital heritage is important and should be preserved for future generations. MAME strives to accurately represent original systems, allowing unmodified software to run as intended. Today, MAME documents over thirty thousand systems, and usably emulates over ten thousand. MAME meets the definitions of Open Source and Free Software, and works with Windows, macOS, Linux and BSD running on any CPU from x86-64 to ARM to IBM zSeries. A 20th-anniversary blog post thanked MAME’s 1, 600 contributors — more than triple the number after its 10th anniversary — and also thanks MAME’s uncredited contributors. “if you’ve filed a bug report, distributed binaries, run a community site, or just put in a good word for MAME, we appreciate it.” I’ve seen MAME resurrect everything from a rare East German arcade game to a Sonic the Hedgehog popcorn machine. Anybody else have a favorite MAME experience to share? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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MAME Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary

Encrypted Email Is Still a Pain in 2017

Bristol-based software developer James Stanley, who used to work at Netcraft, shares how encrypted emails, something which was first introduced over 25 years ago, is still difficult to setup and use for even reasonably tech savvy people. He says he recently tried to install Enigmail, a Thunderbird add-on, but not only things like GPG, PGP, OpenPGP were — for no reason — confusing, Enigmail continues to suffer from a bug that takes forever in generating keys. From his blog post: Encrypted email is nothing new (PGP was initially released in 1991 — 26 years ago!), but it still has a huge barrier to entry for anyone who isn’t already familiar with how to use it. I think my experience would have been better if Enigmail had generated keys out-of-the-box, or if (a.) gpg agreed with Enigmail on nomenclature (is it a secring or a private key?) and (b.) output the paths of the files it had generated. My experience would have been a lot worse had I not been able to call on the help of somebody who already knows how to use it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Encrypted Email Is Still a Pain in 2017

Microsoft Teases Windows 10’s Upcoming ‘Project Neon’ Design Language

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Windows Central: Microsoft just gave developers a sneak peek at Project Neon, Microsoft’s upcoming design language for Windows 10 that aims to add fluidity, animation and blur to apps and the operating system. We exclusively revealed that this was in the works in late 2016, and today Microsoft has given us a first peak at what Project Neon will look like. During the Windows Developer Day livestream, an image of Project Neon was seen the background of one of the PowerPoint slides being shown off on stage. Although not much, it’s further confirmation that this is the end goal for Windows 10’s UI, and Project Neon will be bringing a fresh coat of paint to apps. Project Neon should benefit all types of Windows 10 devices, including Windows 10 Mobile, HoloLens and even Xbox. We’re still several months away from Project Neon being everywhere in Windows 10, and we’re expecting to see more at BUILD this coming May. In fact, a lot of the Project Neon APIs are available in the latest Insider Preview builds of Windows 10, meaning developers can already begin taking advantage of these new user interfaces and design language! Animations and transitions are a big deal with Project Neon, with the goal of making the operating system and apps feel like they work together. Peter Bright does a good job summarizing the looks of the screenshot via Ars Technica: “The picture shows a refreshed version of the Groove music app on a Windows desktop. The fundamentals of the app and its layout aren’t changed, underscoring that Neon is very much an iteration of the current Metro/Microsoft Design Language (MDL). The window has shed its discrete title bar and one pixel border, with the application content now extending to the very edge of the window. The search text field no longer has a box around it, and the left hand pane has a hint of translucency to it.” You can view the screenshot here and judge it for yourself. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Teases Windows 10’s Upcoming ‘Project Neon’ Design Language

Windows 10 is getting a picture-in-picture mode

Microsoft just made it easier to use multiple applications at once on Windows 10 , especially when dealing with video-focused programs. The company released Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 15031 to developers today, and the main attraction is the introduction of so-called Compact Overlay windows. The new feature allows users to run a program in a small window that’s pinned above other applications, so it can be seen without being as intrusive as a standard window. Compact Overlay windows appears useful when dealing with video. For example, keeping a YouTube clip or Skype call visible in the corner would make it easier for users to do things like take notes or check email while not losing sight of the video. The good news for developers is that Compact Overlay windows “work just like normal windows in all other ways, ” so it should be relatively painless to adapt existing programs to be compatible with the feature. It’s unclear if Compact Overlay windows can be resized or used with Snap (a feature just pulled from Xbox One ). We’ve asked Microsoft to clarify. The update also adds full-screen Game Bar support for 52 games, including Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto titles. Microsoft isn’t the only company dabbling in picture-in-picture modes. Apple last year debuted a similar feature for MacOS , which works in much the same way, but is only compatible with Safari and iTunes. Compact Overlay windows are only available to developers at the moment, although Microsoft says that the Skype Preview and Movies & TV apps will soon be updated to take advantage of the new feature. Source: Windows

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Windows 10 is getting a picture-in-picture mode

Six Flags and Samsung unveil ‘mixed reality’ rollercoaster

To many of us, roller coasters are just fine without extra visual stimulation. However, last year, several amusement parks introduced virtual reality devices, letting you fly through space or a gargoyle-infested dystopia. Six Flags and Samsung have done that one better now with the New Revolution Galactic Attack mixed reality experience. As before, Six Flags is using Samsung’s Gear VR headset, but now it’s using the passthrough camera on the Galaxy phones, letting you see the virtual content overlaid on the real world. Samsung says the Six Flags experience “enables millions of consumers to experience virtual reality for the first time.” However, the passthrough camera on the Gear VR won’t deliver mixed reality that’s as good as something like Microsoft’s Hololens , which overlays virtual content onto the real world, not a camera view. However, it’ll at least give folks a view of the outside rather than locking them in a digital box. On top of the virtual imagery, there’s a level of gamification. “As riders drop at high speeds, the mixed reality view changes to a completely immersive, virtual reality environment and a fighter spaceship cockpit materializes and envelops the riders into a tunnel of light, ” the PR breathlessly explains. From there, you’ll be brought into one of three (virtual) drone bays, “each of which offer a completely different gaming experience and three different endings, ” Six Flags explains. As before, the VR is synchronized to the ride movements, so that you don’t experience any not-so-virtual puking. The featured ride at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, CA is the New Revolution, the first-ever looping roller coaster built in 1976. While not the park’s most diabolic ride, the LA Times advises riders to keep their heads back “or you’ll get your ears boxed.” At the Six Flags Discovery Kingdom in Vallejo, CA, the New Revolution Galactic Attack will be available on floorless looping Kong coaster. Source: Six Flags

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Six Flags and Samsung unveil ‘mixed reality’ rollercoaster