password – Page 18 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Mini-desktops are a rare bright spot in a shrinking PC industry, says Intel

Intel’s Haswell NUC sitting on top of Gigabyte’s larger (but more powerful) Brix. Intel sees mini-PCs as one of the rare PC markets where growth is possible. Andrew Cunningham The wider PC industry isn’t doing so well, and last week’s news that Sony would be selling off its VAIO business is just the latest indication. That doesn’t mean things are all bad—there’s still some growth to be found, and one area where it’s happening is in mini-desktops like Intel’s NUC or Asus’ upcoming Chromebox . Intel tells us that sales of truly tiny PCs (things near the size of the NUC, Gigabyte’s Brix Pro , or Lenovo’s M93p Tiny ) have gone from “almost zero in 2012” to over a million units in 2013. And yet, these mini desktops don’t always make sense. If you want something compact for your desk that saves you cable clutter, an all-in-one will frequently be a better option. If you want something more powerful, a more traditional micro ATX or even mini ITX PC can be purchased or built for less money, often with a greater amount of CPU and GPU power. We spoke with Lisa Graff , Vice President of Intel’s PC Client Group, to get a better idea of how these desktops are doing and who exactly is buying them. Business-friendly features in a tiny package Graff came in from the datacenter group last year to run Intel’s desktop business. “When I came in there were a number of areas in desktop that were growing, kind of bucking the trend of some of what we’re seeing in the PC business,” Graff told Ars. “And as we started to drill in, this was one of the areas—all-in-ones were clearly a growth area, but this mini-desktop, really, the growth has been incredibly strong.” Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Mini-desktops are a rare bright spot in a shrinking PC industry, says Intel

Biggest DDoS ever aimed at Cloudflare’s content delivery network

Ruthanne Reid A distributed denial-of-service attack targeting a client of the content delivery network Cloudflare reached new highs in malicious traffic today , striking at the company’s data centers in Europe and the US. According to a Twitter post by Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, the full volume of the attack exceeded 400 gigabits per second—making it the largest DDoS attack ever recorded. The attack used Network Time Protocol (NTP) reflection , the same technique used in recent attacks against gaming sites by a group called DERP Trolling. NTP is used to synchronize the time settings on computers across the Internet. The attack made fraudulent synchronization requests to NTP servers that caused them to send a flood of replies back at the targeted sites. Reflection attacks have been a mainstay of DDoS tools and botnets, but the use of NTP in such attacks is relatively new. Last year’s attack on Spamhaus , which previously set the record for the largest DDoS ever, used a Domain Name Service (DNS) protocol attack—a much more common approach that takes advantage of the Internet’s directory service, forging requests for DNS lookups from the intended target and sending them to scores of open DNS servers. The size of the traffic directed back at the target from these requests far exceeds the size of the requests sent to the DNS servers, which is why the technique is often called a DNS amplification attack. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Biggest DDoS ever aimed at Cloudflare’s content delivery network

Newegg’s answer to Amazon Prime: $50 per year for expedited shipping

Newegg If you’re the type of person who makes electronics purchases on a whim but then agonizes over which shipping to choose, you may be happy to hear about Newegg Premier . Taking a page out of Amazon’s playbook, the venerable electronics retailer launched its “Newegg Premier” program on Tuesday. For $50 per year, subscribers will get “free expedited shipping” of three days or less, early-access to sales, free and no-fee returns, and a “dedicated customer service telephone number” (all similar benefits to Amazon Prime). But unlike its competitor, Newegg Premier won’t give you access to Alpha House (sorry, John Goodman) or any of the company’s other online media. “We always seek ways to improve the customer experience, and implementing a benefit program is the latest example of how we’re making it easier and more rewarding to shop at Newegg.com,” said Soren Mills, chief marketing officer of Newegg North America, in a statement . “Free expedited shipping is in itself a great benefit, but beyond that we’re including many other perks to enhance the shopping experience.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Newegg’s answer to Amazon Prime: $50 per year for expedited shipping

New Google Chrome feature warns users when browser has been hijacked

Google engineers have added a new feature to the Chrome browser that automatically warns users when browsing settings have been altered by malicious software. The new protection was unveiled in a blog post published Friday by Linus Upson, Google’s vice president of engineering. It is designed to augment a feature introduced in October that allows users to return Chrome settings to a factory-fresh state with the click of a single button. Malicious code frequently included with screensavers and other free software can surreptitiously make any number of changes to Chrome settings. Injecting ads into webpages and blocking the ability to revert settings to those previously chosen by the user are two of the more common ways unscrupulous developers tamper with browser options. The hijackings were among the top issue users reported in Chrome help forums when the reset button was introduced in October. Upson explained: Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New Google Chrome feature warns users when browser has been hijacked

Intel closes AppUp, its PC app store (Intel had a PC app store?)

We’re apparently not the only ones who forgot AppUp was a thing—the store closes in March. Intel Intel’s AppUp store for Windows apps has been around since January of 2010, though you could be forgiven for forgetting about it. Intel apparently wants to forget, too: the company announced today that the AppUp store will be closing its doors on March 11, 2014, “after which no new content or apps will be available for download.” An extensive FAQ about the closing covers most of the important facts. E-mail support for AppUp apps will be available until June 15, 2014. The AppUp client application and some apps will continue to function after the store closes, but many applications “require communication with the AppUp client and may not work after May 15, 2014.” Apps purchased through AppUp will no longer receive updates once the store closes, nor will Intel be able to send product keys for keyed apps after March 11. If you want to download the AppUp client and install it now, you’ll either need to find it from another download source or contact Intel customer service. Intel is offering refunds for some paid apps here , but that page isn’t yet functional, and it’s not clear what criteria a purchase will need to meet to be eligible for a refund. Refunds will only be available between now and December 19, 2014. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel closes AppUp, its PC app store (Intel had a PC app store?)

Mass hack attack on Yahoo Mail accounts prompts password reset

Yahoo said it is resetting passwords for some of its e-mail users after discovering a coordinated effort to compromise accounts. Attackers behind the cracking campaign used usernames and passwords that were probably collected from a compromised database belonging to an unidentified third party, according to Jay Rossiter, Yahoo senior vice president of platforms and personalization products, who wrote an advisory published Thursday . A large percentage of people use the same password to protect multiple Internet accounts, a practice that allows attackers holding credentials taken from one site to compromise accounts on other sites. There’s no evidence the passwords used in the attack came from Yahoo Systems. “Our ongoing investigation shows that malicious computer software used the list of usernames and passwords to access Yahoo Mail accounts,” Rossiter wrote. “The information sought in the attack seems to be names and e-mail addresses from the affected accounts’ most recent sent e-mails.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Mass hack attack on Yahoo Mail accounts prompts password reset

Soylent gets tested, scores a surprisingly wholesome nutritional label

Soylent It’s official: all-in-one meal supplement (or replacement) Soylent has a nutrition label . In a blog post two weeks ago, Soylent founder Rob Rhinehart noted that the company had decided to produce a single 2,000-kilocalorie version for their initial production run; beta versions (including the 0.89 Beta formula we tried) came in male and female variants. The single launch formula means that a single nutritional label can be applied to all the packages of Soylent going out the door. In its shipping form, a three-serving bag of Soylent clocks in at 2,010kcal, with 630kcal from fat—that’s with the combined package of canola and fish oil added into the mix. All together, a full day’s worth of Soylent 1.0 will give you 1,050mg of sodium, 3,465mg of potassium, 252 total grams of carbs (including 24g dietary fiber and 6g of sugars), and 114g of protein. There’s no cholesterol in the dry ingredients; the oil mix adds about 15 percent of your daily recommended cholesterol intake (specific numbers on the oil aren’t included as part of the label). Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Soylent gets tested, scores a surprisingly wholesome nutritional label

Drilling surprise opens door to magma-powered electricity

Gretar Ívarsson Can enormous heat deep in the Earth be harnessed to provide energy for us on the surface? A promising report from a geothermal borehole project that accidentally struck magma—the same fiery, molten rock that spews from volcanoes—suggests it could. The Icelandic Deep Drilling Project, IDDP , has been drilling shafts up to 5km deep in an attempt to harness the heat in the volcanic bedrock far below the surface of Iceland. But in 2009 a borehole at Krafla, Northeast Iceland, reached only 2,100m deep before unexpectedly striking a pocket of magma. The molten rock was intruding into the Earth’s upper crust from below at searing temperatures of 900 to 1000 degrees Celsius. This borehole, IDDP-1, was the first in a series of wells drilled by the IDDP in Iceland looking for usable geothermal resources. A special report in this month’s Geothermics journal details the engineering feats and scientific results that came from the attempt to harness the incredible geothermal heat. (The only previous case like this was in Hawaii in 2007, but that well was sealed in concrete.) Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Drilling surprise opens door to magma-powered electricity

Lavabit goes head to head with feds in contempt-of-court case

In oral arguments heard on Tuesday, Lavabit and federal prosecutors each presented their cases in front of three judges from the 4 th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia. This particular case is an appeal of contempt-of-court charges against Lavabit, a now-defunct e-mail hosting service that once offered secure communication. In the summer of 2013, Lavabit was ordered to provide real-time e-mail monitoring of one of its users, widely believed to be Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor-turned-leaker. When Lavabit told the feds that the only way it could hand over communications was through an internal process that would deliver results 60 days after anycommunication was sent, the authorities returned with a search warrant for Lavabit’s SSL keys , which could decrypt the traffic of all of Lavabit’s users. Ladar Levinson, the CEO of Lavabit, handed over the SSL keys but then shut down his 10-year-old business rather than expose all of Lavabit’s users. Levinson now faces charges of contempt-of-court. The case is proving to be difficult for both parties, as well as presiding judges Roger Gregory, Paul Niemeyer, and Steven Agee, to parse. As PC World reports : “Attorneys from both Lavabit and the US government agreed that the legal issues between them could have been resolved before heading to court, though neither party seemed to have an adequate technical answer of how Lavabit could have successfully passed unencrypted data to a law enforcement agency in order to meet the government’s demands.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Lavabit goes head to head with feds in contempt-of-court case

Streaming comes to Steam: run on your gaming rig, play on your laptop

Valve is not done redefining itself yet. The gaming juggernaut added ‘operating system developer’ to ‘games studio’ and ‘digital media distributor’ with the introduction of SteamOS. And now it’s adding ‘streaming service’ to its repertoire. The service , currently in beta, allows users to stream game play from one PC to any other PC in their home. Invited users run a beta version of the Steam client on their computers and have settings for adjusting the amount of bandwidth the stream consumes. Though work is in progress to make streaming an option from OS X and Linux machines, the service is primarily aimed at Windows PCs to start. The Windows focus may, in part, be a result of the relatively larger library of Windows games on Steam. Valve’s Linux-based SteamOS has one big limitation compared with the full Steam experience: it can only run games compatible with Linux. That limitation may be mostly put to rest when a Steam Box is now paired with a Windows PC, allowing users to run any game in the Steam library either natively in the Steam Box or streamed. The other key benefit to the new streaming option is convenience. Graphically rich games often suffer when run on thermally limited notebooks. Decoding a video stream requires drastically less computing power than rendering a 3D environment, so gaming on a modestly specced laptop could become much more satisfying. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments