Aftermarket CarPlay console coming this fall, costs between $500 and $700

Soon, you’ll be able to use Apple’s CarPlay without buying a whole new car. Apple So far, consoles compatible with Apple’s CarPlay feature have only been integrated into a handful of high-end cars. If you want to use the feature without buying an entirely new vehicle, Alpine Electronics will soon be able to hook you up—Nikkei reports that the company will begin selling a standalone CarPlay console in the US and Europe this fall. The console is “likely” to have a 7-inch display and will reportedly cost between $500 and $700. Alpine already sells a lineup of entertainment and navigation systems , and it’s possible that this new CarPlay-compatible version will offer similar features when there’s no iPhone connected to it. Current CarPlay-compatible vehicles offer the CarPlay interface when an iPhone is connected, but it’s available as an alternative to the automakers’ own software solutions rather than a complete replacement. CarPlay was first demonstrated as “iOS in the Car” at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference last year and was officially released earlier this year as part of the iOS 7.1 update . It provides access to Apple Maps’ turn-by-turn navigation features, your music and podcasts, and a handful of third-party streaming services approved by Apple; as of this writing, there’s no public API that developers can use to support the feature independently. CarPlay requires a compatible in-dash display and an iPhone 5, 5C, or 5S connected via a Lightning cable. Rumors of a wireless version of CarPlay persist, but it’s not clear whether these first CarPlay-compatible displays will be able to operate wirelessly when (and if) that capability arrives. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Aftermarket CarPlay console coming this fall, costs between $500 and $700

Flowing salt water over graphene generates electricity

An image of graphene, showing defects in its single-atom thickness. UC Berkeley Hydroelectricity is one of the oldest techniques for generating electrical power, with over 150 countries using it as a source for renewable energy. Hydroelectric generators only work efficiently at large scales, though—scales large enough to interrupt river flow and possibly harm local ecosystems. And getting this sort of generation down to where it can power small devices isn’t realistic. In recent years, scientists have investigated generating electrical power using nano-structures. In particular, they have looked at generating electricity when ionic fluids—a liquid with charged ions in it—are pushed through a system with a pressure gradient. However, the ability to harvest the generated electricity has been limited because it requires a pressure gradient to drive ionic fluid through a small tube. But scientists have now found that dragging small droplets of salt water on strips of graphene generates electricity without the need for pressure gradients. In their study, published in Nature Nanotechnology , researchers from China grew a layer of graphene and placed a droplet of salt water on it. They then dragged the droplet across the graphene layer at different velocities and found that the process generated a small voltage difference. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Flowing salt water over graphene generates electricity

Your Clever Password Tricks Aren’t Protecting You from Today’s Hackers

Security breaches happen so often nowadays, you’re probably sick of hearing about them and all the ways you should beef up your accounts. Even if you think you’ve heard it all already, though, today’s password-cracking tools are more advanced and cut through the clever password tricks many of us use. Here’s what’s changed and what you should do about it. Read more…

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Your Clever Password Tricks Aren’t Protecting You from Today’s Hackers

NSA used Heartbleed nearly from the start, report claims [Updated]

Citing two anonymous sources “familiar with the matter,” Bloomberg News reports that the National Security Agency has known about Heartbleed, the security flaw in the OpenSSL encryption software used by a majority of websites and a multitude of other pieces of Internet infrastructure, for nearly the entire lifetime of the bug—“at least two years.” The sources told Bloomberg that the NSA regularly used the flaw to collect intelligence information, including obtaining usernames and passwords from targeted sites. As Ars reported on April 9, there have been suspicions that the Heartbleed bug had been exploited prior to the disclosure of the vulnerability on April 5 . A packet capture provided to Ars by Terrence Koeman , a developer based in the Netherlands, shows malformed Transport Security Layer (TSL) Heartbeat requests that bear the hallmarks of a Heartbleed exploit. Koeman said the capture dates to November of last year. But if the NSA has been exploiting Heartbleed for “at least two years,” the agency would have needed to discover it not long after the code for the TLS Heartbeat Extension was added to OpenSSL 1.0.1, which was released on March 14, 2012. The first “beta” source code wasn’t available until January 3, 2012 . Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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NSA used Heartbleed nearly from the start, report claims [Updated]

Whitehat hacker goes too far, gets raided by FBI, tells all

A whitehat hacker from the Baltimore suburbs went too far in his effort to drive home a point about a security vulnerability he reported to a client. Now he’s unemployed and telling all on reddit . David Helkowski was working for Canton Group, a Baltimore-based software consulting firm on a project for the University of Maryland (UMD), when he claims he found malware on the university’s servers that could be used to gain access to personal data of students and faculty. But he says his employer and the university failed to take action on the report, and the vulnerability remained in place even after a data breach exposed more than 300,000 students’ and former students’ Social Security numbers. As Helkowski said to a co-worker in Steam chat, “I got tired of being ignored, so I forced their hand.” He penetrated the university’s network from home, working over multiple VPNs, and downloaded the personal data of members of the university’s security task force. He then posted the data to Pastebin and e-mailed the members of the task force anonymously on March 15. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Whitehat hacker goes too far, gets raided by FBI, tells all

LAPD officers monkey-wrenched cop-monitoring gear in patrol cars

Cliff The Los Angeles Police Commission is investigating how half of the recording antennas in the Southeast Division went missing, seemingly as a way to evade new self-monitoring procedures that the Los Angeles Police Department imposed last year. The antennas, which are mounted onto individual patrol cars, receive recorded audio captured from an officer’s belt-worn transmitter. The transmitter is designed to capture an officer’s voice and transmit the recording to the car itself for storage. The voice recorders are part of a video camera system that is mounted in a front-facing camera on the patrol car. Both elements are activated any time the car’s emergency lights and sirens are turned on, but they can also be activated manually. According to the Los Angeles Times , an LAPD investigation determined that around half of the 80 patrol cars in one South LA division were missing antennas as of last summer, and an additional 10 antennas were unaccounted for. Citing a police source, the newspaper said that removing the antennas can reduce the range of the voice transmitters by as much as a third of the normal operating distance. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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LAPD officers monkey-wrenched cop-monitoring gear in patrol cars

Critical crypto bug exposes Yahoo Mail passwords Russian roulette-style

Mascamon at lb.wikipedia Lest readers think “catastrophic” is too exaggerated a description for the critical defect affecting an estimated two-thirds of the Internet’s Web servers , consider this: at the moment this article was being prepared, the so-called Heartbleed bug was exposing end-user passwords, the contents of confidential e-mails, and other sensitive data belonging to Yahoo Mail and almost certainly countless other services. The two-year-old bug is the result of a mundane coding error in OpenSSL , the world’s most popular code library for implementing HTTPS encryption in websites, e-mail servers, and applications. The result of a missing bounds check in the source code, Heartbleed allows attackers to recover large chunks of private computer memory that handle OpenSSL processes. The leak is the digital equivalent of a grab bag that hackers can blindly reach into over and over simply by sending a series of commands to vulnerable servers. The returned contents could include something as banal as a time stamp, or it could return far more valuable assets such as authentication credentials or even the private key at the heart of a website’s entire cryptographic certificate. Underscoring the urgency of the problem, a conservatively estimated two-thirds of the Internet’s Web servers use OpenSSL to cryptographically prove their legitimacy and to protect passwords and other sensitive data from eavesdropping. Many more e-mail servers and end-user computers rely on OpenSSL to encrypt passwords, e-mail, instant messages, and other sensitive data. OpenSSL developers have released version 1.0.1g that readers should install immediately on any vulnerable machines they maintain. But given the stakes and the time it takes to update millions of servers, the risks remain high. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Critical crypto bug exposes Yahoo Mail passwords Russian roulette-style

Microsoft looking into Xbox 360 emulation through Xbox One

Mark Derricutt When the Xbox One was announced last year, many Xbox 360 owners were upset that the system wouldn’t be backward compatible with 360 games . Now, there’s some indication that Microsoft is looking to remedy this situation through emulation, though the specific timing or form that the emulation will take is still unclear. Microsoft’s still-nebulous plans for Xbox 360 emulation via the Xbox One come from a Q&A session at last week’s Build developers conference , as reported by Kotaku AU . When an audience member asked if there were “plans for an Xbox 360 emulator on Xbox One,” Microsoft Partner Development Lead Frank Savage responded: There are, but we’re not done thinking them through yet, unfortunately. It turns out to be hard to emulate the PowerPC stuff on the X86 stuff. So there’s nothing to announce, but I would love to see it myself. The change in architecture between the Xbox 360’s PowerPC processor and Xbox One’s x86 chip has  long been  suspected as the main reason that the newer system can’t natively play games from its predecessor. The PS4 saw a similar architecture change from the PS3 and also lacks native backward compatibility. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft looking into Xbox 360 emulation through Xbox One

Creepshots: Microsoft discovers an on-campus peeping tom

Microsoft’s lush RedWest campus. Microsoft On July 24, 2013, a Microsoft vendor employee working at the company’s RedWest campus in Redmond had a piece of good fortune—he found a Muvi USB video camera just lying in the footpath between buildings. He picked up the camera, only later taking a look at the footage on the device, which revealed that his good fortune was actually evidence of a crime. The Muvi camera contained “upskirt” video footage of women climbing stairs or escalators—or sometimes just standing in checkout lines—and some of it had been shot on Microsoft’s campus. The vendor employee reported the incident to Microsoft Global Security, who took possession of the camera on July 26. To find the camera’s owner, two Global Security investigators pulled up Microsoft’s internal security camera footage covering the RedWest footpath. They began by locating the moment when the vendor employee walked into the frame, paused, and bent down to retrieve the camera off the ground. Investigators then rewound the footage to see who had dropped it. At the 11:24am mark, they saw a man in a collared shirt and reddish pants walk out of a RedWest building and walk along the footpath. Then, at 11:25am, the vendor employee appeared and picked up the camera. At 11:26am, the man in the reddish pants suddenly returned to the picture. According to a later report from the Redmond Police Department, he was “rushing” back to the RedWest building he had just left and appeared “nervous, frantically looking around.” He eventually used a keycard to re-enter the RedWest building. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Creepshots: Microsoft discovers an on-campus peeping tom

Cassini points to a hidden ocean on Saturn’s icy moon

I carry an ocean in my womb. NASA/JPL/SSI/J Major Finding liquid water on a body within the Solar System is exciting. The only thing that is probably more exciting is finding an ocean full of it. Today such news comes via Cassini, which has made measurements that show that Saturn’s moon Enceladus has a hidden ocean beneath its icy surface. While orbiting Saturn in 2005, Cassini found jets of salty water spewing from the south polar region of Enceladus. According to Luciano Iess of Sapienza University of Rome, lead author of the new study published in Science , “The discovery of the jets was unexpected.” Geysers require liquid water, and we wouldn’t expect Enceladus to have any. It is too far from the Sun to absorb much energy and too small (just 500km in diameter) to have trapped enough internal energy to keep its core molten. The answer to how the water got there might lie in the details of the moon’s internal structure. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cassini points to a hidden ocean on Saturn’s icy moon