newsletters – Page 21 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

One week before its end of life, 28 percent of Web users are still on Windows XP

Windows XP will receive its last ever security update on April 8th next week. After that, any flaws, no matter how severe, will not be patched by Microsoft, and one would be well advised to not let Windows XP machines anywhere near the public Internet as a result. In spite of this, 28 percent of Web users were still using the ancient operating system in March. This seems unlikely to end well. Net Market Share Net Market Share Chrome has come close to Firefox’s market share a number of times over the years. However, the market share tracker we use, Net Market Share, has never seen Google’s browser actually surpass Mozilla’s—until now. In March, Chrome finally overtook Firefox to claim the second spot. Internet Explorer dropped a quarter of a point, Firefox dropped 0.42 points, and Chrome reaped the reward, gaining 0.68 points. Safari was essentially unchanged, up 0.01 points; likewise Opera, dropping 0.03 points. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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One week before its end of life, 28 percent of Web users are still on Windows XP

Reuters: Next iPhone will come with 4.7” or 5.5” screen

Satire – The iPhone 5S (Parody) Ad Reuters reports that Apple’s next iPhone will be available in both 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch screen versions —considerable increases over the current iPhone 5S and 5C models’ 4-inch displays. Reuters cites “supply chain sources” for the information, which could mean anything from a Foxconn vice president down to a factory janitor. According to Reuters, three separate suppliers have been tapped to produce the larger LCD panels: Japan Display, Sharp, and LG Display. The existence of the displays themselves isn’t necessarily the point of the Reuters report, though—according to Reuters, not only are the two unannounced display sizes planned, but the 5.5-inch version might already be facing production problems. The report speculates that the displays will contain the same in-cell touch sensor technology that Apple has been using since the iPhone 5’s debut . This kind of display incorporates touch sensors directly into the screen’s glass, making it considerably more complex to manufacture than displays with separate glass, panel, and sensor elements. Making in-cell displays in quantity at the larger 5.5-inch size is apparently difficult, which is why the screen manufacturers are said to be leading with 4.7-inch screens. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Reuters: Next iPhone will come with 4.7” or 5.5” screen

Hack of Boxee.tv exposes password data, messages for 158,000 users

A screenshot of the Boxee.tv forums post leading to an 800 megabyte file of leaked user data, including cryptographically hashed passwords. riskbasedsecurity.com Hackers posted names, e-mail addresses, message histories, and partially protected login credentials for more than 158,000 forum users of Boxee.tv, the Web-based television service that was acquired by Samsung last year , researchers said. The breach occurred no later than last week, when a full copy of the purloined forum data became widely available, Scott A. McIntyre, a security researcher in Australia, told Ars. On Tuesday, officials from password management service LastPass began warning customers with e-mail addresses included in an 800 megabyte file that’s still circulating online. The file contains personal data associated with 158,128 user accounts, about 172,000 e-mail addresses, and the cryptographically scrambled passwords that corresponded to those Boxee accounts, LastPass said. The dump also included a wealth of other details, such as user birth dates, IP addresses, site activity, full message histories, and password changes. All user messages sent through the service were included as part of the leak. As Ars has explained before, even when passwords in hacked databases have been cryptographically hashed, most remain highly susceptible to cracking attacks that can reveal the plain-text characters required to access the account . The damage can be especially severe when people use the same or similar passwords to protect accounts on multiple sites, a practice that’s extremely common. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Faster, cheaper, smaller: The state of the system-on-a-chip in 2014

Aurich Lawson/Ars Technica If you’re reading this, the odds are pretty good that you have a smartphone. There’s also a better-than-average chance that you know a little something about the stuff inside that phone—who makes the chips inside and how those chips stack up to the ones in other phones. About a year ago, we wrote a guide covering most of the major players making these chips, and now that this year’s Mobile World Congress is over and done with, we thought it was time to revisit the subject. What’s changed? What’s stayed the same? And what’s going to happen in the next year that you need to know about? We’ll begin by looking at emerging trends before moving on to a bird’s-eye view of where all the major chipmakers stand. This won’t give you an in-depth technical description of every detail, but it should help you understand where this tech is headed in 2014. Read 55 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Faster, cheaper, smaller: The state of the system-on-a-chip in 2014

“Pirate Bay Bundle” shares 101 little-known indie games via BitTorrent

Since The Humble Bundle launched in 2010 to almost immediate success , the Internet has been absolutely flooded with similar pay-what-you-want bundles of various indie games. Even amid this flood, a new indie game bundle stands out, both for its selection of titles and its distribution method. The Pirate Bay Bundle is a free collection of 101 small indie titles that I can almost guarantee you’ve never heard of, let alone played. Curator Moshboy describes the collection as an extension of his Underrated Indie Games series of YouTube videos . “Some were made for game jams, others were made just because, some are made by celebrated game makers, many are made by folks that you won’t know,” Moshboy explains. “Many are usually only available to play in your browser, but I managed to convince these wonderful folks to provide me with offline versions.” As the name implies, this massive collection of games is being distributed via a BitTorrent link on The Pirate Bay , with the cooperation of all the creators involved. While other indie bundles have also shared their DRM-free games via BitTorrent, I’m not aware of any that have willingly offered their selections entirely free via the popular and perpetually legally pressured torrent-sharing site (though that hasn’t stopped some people from turning to piracy to save a penny on other bundles). Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Pirate Bay Bundle” shares 101 little-known indie games via BitTorrent

Jury: MP3tunes founder must pay $41 million for copyright violations

Michael Robertson, an entrepreneur who has been waging legal feuds against the music industry for more than a decade now, has been ordered to pay $41 million to a record label that sued him. The record label EMI sued MP3tunes back in 2007, and the case finally went to a jury last week in New York federal court. The jury found MP3tunes, and Robertson personally, liable for copyright violations . A separate damages trial ended yesterday, with the jury issuing a verdict of around $41 million. That’s an estimate, because the decision was a “complex, lengthy” verdict that will take the lawyers until next week to calculate precisely, according to a Reuters report on the outcome of the trial. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Jury: MP3tunes founder must pay $41 million for copyright violations

New dwarf planet found sneaking through the inner Oort Cloud

An artist’s depiction of Sedna, the first of the objects from this class of bodies to have been discovered. NASA A new dwarf planet-like body has been found on the outer edges of the Solar System. This object, called 2012VP 113 , is about 450km wide and is the second body of its class found since the identification of the dwarf planet Sedna in 2003, and it joins an exclusive club composed of some of the strangest objects in the Solar System. The observable Solar System can be divided into three regions: the rocky terrestrial planets and asteroids of the inner Solar System, the gas giant planets, and the icy Kuiper Belt objects, which include Pluto. The Kuiper Belt stretches from beyond Neptune, which is at 30 astronomical units (where 1AU is the typical distance between the Earth and the Sun), to about 50AU. Sedna and 2012VP 113 are strange objects because they reside in a region where there should be nothing, according to our theories of the Solar System formation. Their orbit is well beyond that of Neptune, the last recognized planet of the Solar System, and even beyond that of Pluto, which differs from planets because of its size, unusual orbit, and composition. (Pluto, once considered a planet, is now considered the lead object of a group of bodies called plutinos.) Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Google: Cloud prices should track Moore’s Law, are falling too slowly

Tharan Parameshwaran Google today continued the trend of cloud services price cuts, while claiming that cloud network operators aren’t cutting average prices quickly enough. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google frequently advertise price cuts , but Google today claimed that “pricing hasn’t followed Moore’s Law : over the past five years, hardware costs improved by 20-30 percent annually, but public cloud prices fell at just 8 percent per year.” In today’s announcement, unveiled at Google’s Cloud Platform Live event , the company said, “We think cloud pricing should track Moore’s Law, so we’re simplifying and reducing prices for our various on-demand, pay-as-you-go services by 30-85 percent.” Moore’s Law is the observation that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles about every two years, bringing steady increases in processing power. One Amazon price cut last year was on the order of 37 to 80 percent for its dedicated instances, so this actually isn’t that unusual. Google declined to say which companies it included in its “public cloud prices” statistic. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google: Cloud prices should track Moore’s Law, are falling too slowly

Microsoft releases source code for MS-DOS and Word

In recognition of their historical importance and commercial irrelevance, Microsoft has given the source code to MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 and Word for Windows 1.1a to the Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View, California. The source is now freely downloadable by anyone, though making practical use of it is an exercise for the reader. This source code joins other important early programs, including Adobe Photoshop 1.0 and Apple II DOS, among the CHM’s collection. Len Shustek, CHM chairman said, “We think preserving historic source code like [MS-DOS and Word] is key to understanding how software has evolved from primitive roots to become a crucial part of our civilization.” The scale of change between then and now is formidable. MS-DOS had just 300kB of source code and occupied as little as 12kB of memory. In 1981, MS-DOS was a key part of IBM’s PC, and the success of the PC—and its clones—made Microsoft the industry giant it is today. Word for Windows is the product that turned WordPerfect from market leader into all-but-irrelevant also-ran. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft releases source code for MS-DOS and Word

Verizon accused of refusing to fix broken landline phone service

Matt Reinbold Verizon has been accused of refusing to fix landline phone service in order to force customers onto Internet packages with voice service that may falter during power outages.The Utility Reform Network (TURN) filed an emergency motion ( PDF ) last week with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) that asked the agency to “order Verizon to repair the service of copper-based landline telephone customers who have requested repair or wish to retain the copper services they were cut off of,” TURN announced . The group accused Verizon of “deliberately neglecting the repair and maintenance of its copper network with the explicit goal of migrating basic telephone service customers who experience service problems.” Verizon spokesperson Jarryd Gonzales told Ars that these claims are “blatantly false.” “We have identified certain customers in fiber network areas who have had recurring repair issues over their copper-based service recently or clusters of customers in areas where we have had recurring copper-based infrastructure issues,” Gonzales wrote in an e-mail. “Moving them to our all-fiber network will improve the reliability of their service. When these customers contact us with a repair request, we suggest fiber as a repair option. If the customer agrees, we move their service from our copper to our all-fiber network. There is no charge for this work, and customers will pay the same rate for their service. Most customers recognize and appreciate the increased reliability of fiber and gladly agree to the move to fiber. Few customers across our service area have chosen to stay with copper and, once on fiber, few ask to return to copper.” Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Verizon accused of refusing to fix broken landline phone service