Tag: newsletters

Apple’s stock price falls to lowest point in six months

On Friday Apple’s stock price closed at $527.68 per share , the lowest it’s been in six months . Since September, the company has lost about 25 percent of its value from its peak of $702 per share. So what’s gone wrong? Analysts say that Apple has had a string of misfortunes lately, ranging from missed  earnings estimates ,  management shakeups , missteps on mapping software , supply chain problems , and increased pressure from competitors. “I think it’s the perfect storm for Apple,” Van Baker, an analyst with Gartner Research, told Ars. “There’s a combination of a lot of things, and add to that, people are starting to think that Apple won’t bring out something that’s truly innovative every few years.” Read 20 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple’s stock price falls to lowest point in six months

Notorious BitTorrent tracker Demonoid back online, website still down

As of Monday, well-known BitTorrent tracker Demonoid is back online . Three months ago, the tenacious tracker was chased out of its Ukrainian host, likely under pressure from American authorities. It may also have been driven offline due to a denial of service attack. According to the IP address linked to the tracker, the new host appears to be physically located in Hong Kong . The website, meanwhile, remains down. TorrentFreak points out that in previous closures, Demonoid’s tracker appeared before its website came back online, indicating that the site’s return may be coming soon. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Notorious BitTorrent tracker Demonoid back online, website still down

Kim Dotcom has new “Mega” domain, says this one won’t be shut down

After the government of Gabon shut down his Me.ga domain , Kim Dotcom needed a new country to let him host the domain that will be home to the successor of file-sharing site Megaupload. That country will be New Zealand, as Dotcom is now the owner of Mega.co.nz . The exact same site that was originally hosted at Me.ga can now be found at the New Zealand domain. On Twitter, Dotcom announced “New Zealand will be the home of our new website: http://Mega.co.nz – Powered by legality and protected by the law.” When Gabon shut down Me.ga, Dotcom blamed “the reach of the US and Vivendi,” as the Me.ga domain was provided by Gabon Telecom, a subsidiary of the Vivendi entertainment company. Although New Zealand police raided Dotcom’s house 10 months ago because of criminal copyright charges filed against him in the US, he seems confident that New Zealand won’t shut down the domain itself. Ultimately, getting a domain will probably be among the least challenging aspects of running Mega, which is expected to launch in January. But Dotcom has a plan for that too. To avoid copyright charges, Dotcom promises Mega “encrypts and decrypts your data transparently in your browser, on the fly,” and that the encryption keys are only controlled by the user, not Mega. And to avoid the reach of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Dotcom plans to run his servers with hosting services outside the US. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Kim Dotcom has new “Mega” domain, says this one won’t be shut down

Judge blocks California’s new ban on anonymity for sex offenders

ax2groin On Tuesday, voters in California overwhelmingly approved Proposition 35, which ratcheted up penalties for those convicted of sex crimes, including human trafficking. The proposition included a provision requiring registered sex offenders to disclose to law enforcement all of their Internet connections and online identities. On Wednesday, two of the 73,900 registered sex offenders in the state who would be affected by the law filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of these provisions. The two plaintiffs argued that forcing them to expose their online identities would violate their First Amendment right to speak anonymously. Their appeal is supported by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Late on Wednesday, Judge Thelton Henderson granted a temporary restraining order barring the law from going into effect until he had time to consider the plaintiffs’ constitutional arguments. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Judge blocks California’s new ban on anonymity for sex offenders

Apple’s @me and @mac e-mail users now have @icloud, too

Owners of @me.com and @mac.com e-mail addresses—relics of Apple’s past attempts at offering cloud services—now own an @icloud address too. The company began sending out e-mails to those who have accounts on the old domains on Tuesday, letting them know they can now take advantage of Apple’s latest e-mail service in the form of iCloud. But worry not: if you’ve been using your old addresses but moved your account to iCloud earlier this year, you’ll still be able to keep using them (whether or not you choose to use the new @icloud.com address). The move was foreshadowed earlier this year as part of an iOS 6 prerelease beta to developers. In the iOS 6 Beta 3 changelog, Apple stated those signing up for new Apple IDs, as well as those enabling Mail on iCloud for the first time, would automatically receive an @icloud.com address. But if you had an existing @me.com address from the MobileMe days, or even a @mac.com address from the .Mac days, you would receive an iCloud address that matched the username you previously had. That appears to be the case now with Apple alerting users to the change. As pointed out by our friends at TidBITS , there’s no difference in implementation—if you want to make use of the new address, you just have to add it to your mail client. If you don’t want to use the new address, however, you don’t have to. You can stick to the old ones, as long as you weren’t one of the stubborn few who didn’t move your MobileMe account to iCloud before the beginning of August. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Apple’s @me and @mac e-mail users now have @icloud, too

Kim Dotcom now plans to give New Zealand free broadband pipe to US

The route of the proposed trans-Pacific fiber link. Pacific Fibre On the heels of the announcement of Megaupload’s pending resurrection as Me.ga , Kim Dotcom has come up with a yet another way to promote himself, annoy the US and New Zealand governments, and rally public support in his battle to stop his extradition and end the copyright infringement case against him: he wants to give everyone in New Zealand free broadband service. The core of the plan is to revive the failed Pacific Fibre , an effort to create a broadband link from Australia and New Zealand directly to the US by way of a submarine cable to Los Angeles. The effort went bankrupt in August before reaching its goal. Dotcom’s plan is to complete the link, and to sell high-speed connections to government, businesses and foreign telecommunications companies—while giving New Zealand ISPs free access to provide connectivity for individual residents. “For every foreign user downloading from NZ (paid),” Dotcom posted on Twitter, “a Kiwi can download from outside NZ (free). The key: Storing data foreign users want in NZ.” Dotcom contends that the high-speed link would make New Zealand an attractive location for data centers; the country’s current shortage of global connectivity makes it an “Internet backwater,” he said. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Kim Dotcom now plans to give New Zealand free broadband pipe to US

How Georgia doxed a Russian hacker (and why it matters)

Aurich Lawson On October 24, the country of Georgia took an unusual step: it posted to the Web a 27-page writeup  (PDF), in English, on how it has been under assault from a hacker allegedly based in Russia. The paper included details of the malware used, how it spread, and how it was controlled. Even more unusually, the Georgians released pictures of the alleged hacker—taken with his own webcam after the Georgians hacked the hacker with the help of the FBI and others. The story itself, which we covered briefly earlier this week , is fascinating, though it remains hard to authenticate and is relayed in a non-native English that makes for some tough reading. But what caught my eye about the whole cloak-and-dagger tale is the broader points it makes about hacking, jurisdiction, and the powerful surveillance devices that our computers have become. It’s also an example of how hacks and the alleged hackers behind them today play an increasing role in upping geopolitical suspicions between countries already wary of one another. Georgia and Russia have of course been at odds for years, and their conflict came to a head in a brief 2008 war; Russia still maintains a military presence in two tiny breakaway enclaves that Georgia claims as its own. Read 29 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How Georgia doxed a Russian hacker (and why it matters)

Sharp says there is “material doubt” over its corporate survival

Sharp , the century-old stalwart of Japanese electronics, is in deep trouble . On Thursday, the company said it sustained a ¥249.1 billion ($3.12 billion) loss for its latest quarter, the second year it had suffered record deficits. The company still has about $10 billion of debt. “As operating and net loss for the six months ended September 30, 2012 were huge, continuing from the previous year, cash flows from operating activities were negative,” the company wrote in its quarterly earnings report (PDF). Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sharp says there is “material doubt” over its corporate survival

Curiosity’s first chem test: Sands of Mars taste a lot like volcano

NASA/JPL After a few dry runs, the Curiosity rover has now put its chemistry set to use at a site called the Rock Garden. For the first time, we’ve operated an X-ray diffraction system on another planet, telling us something about the structure of the minerals in the Martian soil. The first results tell us the sand the rover has driven through contains some material that wouldn’t be out of place near a volcano on Earth. Curiosity comes equipped with a scoop that lets it pick up loose soil from the Martian surface and drop it into a hatch on the main body. From there, the samples can be directed into a variety of chemistry labs. Yesterday, NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory revealed the first results obtained by the Chemistry and Mineralogy (or CheMin) instrument, the first time anything of this kind has been operated on another planet. We have a lot of ways to look at the composition of the material on Mars’ surface. We can look at the absorption of light by materials (including from orbit), which can tell us a lot about its likely composition. The rover itself has a number of spectrometers, which can also tell us about the chemical composition of rocks, as well as wet and dry chemistry labs. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Curiosity’s first chem test: Sands of Mars taste a lot like volcano

Better on the inside: under the hood of Windows 8

Windows 8’s most obvious—and most divisive—new feature is its user interface . However, it would be a mistake to think that the user interface is the only thing that’s new in Windows 8: there’s a lot that’s changed behind the scenes, too. Just as is the case with the user interface, many of the improvements made to the Windows 8 core are motivated by Microsoft’s desire to transform Windows into an effective tablet operating system. Even those of us with no interest at all in tablets can stand to take advantage of these changes, however. For example, Windows 8 is more power efficient and uses less memory than Windows 7; while such work is critical to getting the software to run well on low-memory tablets with all-day battery life, it’s equally advantageous for laptop users. The biggest single piece of technology that is new to Windows 8 is, however, squarely Metro focused: it’s a large set of libraries and components called WinRT. I’ve already written extensively about what WinRT is, so I won’t be getting into that here, but there are system capabilities that WinRT apps can use (or are forced to use) that are interesting in their own right. Read 77 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Better on the inside: under the hood of Windows 8