Tag: newsletters

Windows 8.1 to go RTM in “late August”

During its Worldwide Partner Conference in a rainy and humid Houston today, Windows CFO Tami Reller announced that Windows 8.1, the free update to Windows 8, will be made available to OEMs by “late August, ” with devices reaching the market by the holiday season. Windows 8 was released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012. Microsoft is promoting a faster release cadence across its entire range of products, and Windows 8.1 is arguably the first mass-market consumer product from the company that will benefit from this new release schedule. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Windows 8.1 to go RTM in “late August”

Mass-login attack on Nintendo fan site hijacks 24,000 accounts

Almost 24, 000 user accounts on Nintendo’s main fan site have been hijacked in a sustained mass-login attack that began early last month, the company said. The wave of attacks on Club Nintendo exposed personal information associated with 23, 926 compromised accounts, including users’ real names, addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses, according to a press release Nintendo issued over the weekend. The campaign began on June 9 and attempted more than 15.5 million logins over the following month. Attackers likely relied on a list of login credentials taken from a site unrelated to Nintendo. Club Nintendo offers rewards to Nintendo customers in exchange for having them register their products, answer surveys, and provide personal data. The site operates internationally and has about four million users in Japan, the primary region of most affected users. Things came to a head on July 2, when the wave of logins crested. By Friday, July 5, Nintendo had reset passwords on the site. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Mass-login attack on Nintendo fan site hijacks 24,000 accounts

Google making the Web faster with protocol that reduces round trips

Can Google’s QUIC be faster than Mega Man’s nemesis, Quick Man? Josh Miller Google, as is its wont, is always trying to make the World Wide Web go faster. To that end, Google in 2009 unveiled SPDY , a networking protocol that reduces latency and is now being built into HTTP 2.0. SPDY is now supported by Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and the upcoming Internet Explorer 11 . But SPDY isn’t enough. Yesterday, Google released a boatload of information about its next protocol, one that could reshape how the Web routes traffic. QUIC—standing for Quick UDP Internet Connections—was created to reduce the number of round trips data makes as it traverses the Internet in order to load stuff into your browser. Although it is still in its early stages, Google is going to start testing the protocol on a “small percentage” of Chrome users who use the development or canary versions of the browser—the experimental versions that often contain features not stable enough for everyone. QUIC has been built into these test versions of Chrome and into Google’s servers. The client and server implementations are open source, just as Chromium is. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google making the Web faster with protocol that reduces round trips

Microsoft, like Google, asks secret court if it can publish data sharing total

In a new legal filing made public on Wednesday, Microsoft submitted a motion (PDF) to the notoriously secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) saying that the company “continues to seek—to correct the misimpression, furthered by such inaccurate media reporting, that it provides the United States Government with direct access to its servers and network infrastructure and, thereby, indiscriminately discloses Microsoft users’ information to the Government.” The filing was submitted on June 19, 2013, just one day after Google’s similar motion . Like Google, Microsoft said it “seeks to report aggregate information about [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] orders and [FISA Amendments Act] directives separately from all other local, state, and federal law enforcement demands.” Tech companies are presumably attempting to get FISC to allow them to release this information so that they can show there isn’t a hand-in-glove relationship between these corporations and the federal government. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft, like Google, asks secret court if it can publish data sharing total

Vast majority of malware attacks spawned from legit sites

Google The vast majority of sites that push malware on their visitors are legitimate online services that have been hacked as opposed to those hosted by attackers for the purposes of distributing malicious software, Google security researchers said Tuesday. The data, included for the first time as part of the safe browsing section of Google’s regular transparency report, further challenges the myth that malware attacks happen only on disreputable sites, such as those that peddle porn, illicit software (“warez”), and similar content. For instance, on June 9 only 3,891 of the sites Google blocked as part of its Safe Browsing program were dedicated malware sites, while the remaining 39,247 sites that were filtered offered legitimate services that had been compromised. In all, Google blocks about 10,000 sites per day as part of the program, which is designed to help people using Firefox, Chrome, and other participating browsers to steer clear of phishing scams and drive-by malware attacks. The program is also designed to inform webmasters of infections hitting their site and to take steps to fix the problems. In all, the Safe Browsing program helps protect about 1 billion people per day. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Vast majority of malware attacks spawned from legit sites

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?

New OS X uses Windows file sharing by default

@darth News about the new release of OS X, ” Mavericks ,” is trickling out as developers and other WWDC attendees post information about it to the Internet. However, hidden a bit down in Apple’s OS X Mavericks Technology Overview document is an interesting tidbit: SMB2 is replacing AFP as the default file sharing protocol for OS X. AFP— Apple Filing Protocol —has a long pedigree that stretches all the way back to the Mac’s early days (and even a bit before that). Contemporary AFP piggybacks on top of TCP/IP for transport, but it supports a few Mac-specific things that other network file protocols don’t, like type and creator codes. These don’t matter as much as they used to, but OS X’s HFS+ file system supports a pretty rich amount of metadata, and AFP transports and preserves that metadata. But AFP isn’t particularly friendly to non-Apple systems, and no operating systems other than OS X support it natively. This wouldn’t be such a big deal, except that one of OS X’s killer features, Time Machine, only works over a LAN with destinations that support AFP. This is at least in part because of Time Machine’s reliance on Unix hard links, and also in part because it has to be able to ensure that any OS X files with HFS+ specific metadata are correctly preserved. This in turn means that third-party Time Capsule devices have to rely on reverse-engineered implementations of AFP to continue functioning, and OS X updates occasionally break third-party Time Capsule devices, sometimes for weeks. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New OS X uses Windows file sharing by default

Apple unveils OS X 10.9, “Mavericks”

Apple today unveiled OS X 10.9 at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), showing off the first major revision of the Mac’s operating system since last year’s Mountain Lion . Apple has apparently run out of cat names and is now naming releases after places in California, where OS X is developed. The new OS X is thus named ” Mavericks .” Developers are being given a preview version of Mavericks today. It will be available to the general public in the fall. New features include tabs in the Finder, allowing multiple Finder windows to be drawn together in tabs. Apple is bringing tagging to documents—any tags you add to a document will appear in the Finder sidebar and in iCloud. Multiple tags can be added to each document, and these tags will allow new search capabilities. Mavericks will make life easier for users who have multiple monitors. Menus will be spread across the different displays, and users will be able to take a window full-screen on one display without disturbing the desktop on another display. HDTVs connected to Apple TV boxes can also act as displays. Mission Control has been “super charged for multiple displays,” Apple said, making it easier to drag apps and windows from one monitor to another. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple unveils OS X 10.9, “Mavericks”