password – Page 24 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

OS X Mavericks comes out today—and it’s free

Hang ten and get gnarly, dudes. OS X 10.9 Mavericks is here. Named for a totally tubular surf spot in California, the latest Apple desktop operating system will be thundering our way today. Like Lion and Mountain Lion before it, it will be available in the Mac App Store. Upgraders can download the software for no cost. The release was announced as part of Apple’s October 22 press event at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, CA. The new operating system brings a lot of under the hood changes, including a fix for OS X multi-monitor support. Another hotly anticipated feature is Finder Tabs, which takes a page from tabbed Web browser behavior and should allow users more flexibility when managing files. Visually, the new operating system has banished some of the more despised skeuomorphic elements that have crept onto the desktop over time. Apple’s PR images show that things like iCal’s leather stitching have been excised, leaving many applications less “touchable” but also less visually cluttered. Efficient resource usage is also a major theme in the updated operating system. Apple’s computer sales are dominated by portables, and Mavericks includes a great number of named features built to reduce the amount of power a Mac consumes and keep it running longer. In fact, Apple says that merely by installing Mavericks, Haswell-equipped Mac portables like the Macbook Air will gain at least an extra hour of battery life. Additionally, Mavericks gets a little smarter about memory management, compressing applications in memory and dynamically allocating memory to the GPU based on performance requirements. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Apple unveils redesigned 9.7” iPad Air, available November 1

The big iPad just got a little smaller. Apple has just announced the fifth-generation version of its 9.7-inch flagship tablet, and as expected the tablet has gotten its first major design overhaul since the iPad 2 came out in early 2011. It’s now the “iPad Air.” The device will be available on November 1, and the entry level 16GB price will start at $499 for Wi-Fi only, and $629 with cellular data capabilities. The large iPad will be getting a tidy performance boost from Apple’s new 64-bit A7 SoC, which made its debut in the iPhone 5S. Apple is promising an 8x improvement in CPU performance and a 72x improvement in GPU performance over the original iPad. The device also gets its Wi-Fi upgraded to MIMO technology, gaining multiple multiple antennas provide to transfer data at up to 300Mbps over 802.11n. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple unveils redesigned 9.7” iPad Air, available November 1

How Apple’s Address Book app could allow the NSA to harvest your contacts

Ashkan Soltani Overlooked in last week’s revelation that the National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of e-mail address books around the world was this surprising factoid: Apple makes this mass collection easier because the Address Book app that by default manages Mac contacts doesn’t use HTTPS encryption when syncing with Gmail accounts. As a result, addresses that automatically travel between Macs and Google servers are sent as plain text , independent privacy researcher Ashkan Soltani wrote in The Washington Post last Monday. He provided the above screenshot demonstrating that Address Book contents appear in the clear to anyone who has the ability to monitor traffic over a Wi-Fi network or other connection. His observation came 15 months after another Mac user also warned that the Mac app offered no way to enable HTTPS when syncing e-mail address lists with Gmail . “It appears that it’s an Apple issue,” Soltani told Ars, referring to the inability to enable HTTPS when Apple’s Address Book is updated to a user’s Gmail account. “Their other products support Gmail over via HTTPS, so I suspect it would be a three-line fix in the contacts to alleviate this problem.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How Apple’s Address Book app could allow the NSA to harvest your contacts

Soylent gets a $1.5 million infusion of venture capital

EVERYBODY SOYLENT. Lee Hutchinson TechCrunch is reporting that Rob Rhinehart’s Soylent, the nutritionally complete meal replacement shake/drink mix, has just closed out a $1.5 million seed funding round from a wide mix of investors led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lerer Ventures. This is on top of the $1.5 million in pre-orders the company already amassed as part of its crazy-successful crowdfunding run earlier this year. The project has been a poster child for crowdfunding success—in fact, the sheer volume of orders has caused its own set of delays in scaling Soylent from a hand-mixed product for a few dozen testers to a mass-produced meal replacement for hundreds of thousands of customers. Rhinehart and company have discussed the ongoing growing pains on the official Soylent blog . The round of funding should give the Soylent crew some breathing room. TechCrunch reports that the company has finalized the 1.0 formulation of the product and will be moving some amount of manufacturing in-house. The company is also moving offices from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and Soylent will bring in a “culinary director” to help evolve the product’s flavor and (currently extremely chalky) mouthfeel. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Soylent gets a $1.5 million infusion of venture capital

Wikipedia editors, locked in battle with PR firm, delete 250 accounts

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Flickr user: Niccolò Caranti Wikipedia editors have disabled hundreds of paid Wikipedia editing accounts in recent weeks as part of a campaign against so-called “sockpuppetry.” The efforts were described in a statement published this morning by the Wikimedia Foundation, in which director Sue Gardner acknowledged that “as many as several hundred” accounts belong to editors who are being paid to promote products or services on the site. That’s a violation of Wikipedia policies and terms of use, Gardner noted. “As a result, Wikipedians aiming to protect the projects against non-neutral editing have blocked or banned more than 250 user accounts,” continued Gardner. “The Wikimedia Foundation takes this issue seriously and has been following it closely.” The statement follows reports earlier this month in the The Daily Dot and last week in Vice . The stories describe the increasing amounts of money flowing toward paid editing of English-language Wikipedia pages. According to both articles, Wikipedia editors attribute the growth in paid edits to a company called Wiki-PR . Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Wikipedia editors, locked in battle with PR firm, delete 250 accounts

Obama administration launches “tech surge” to improve Healthcare.gov

The Department of Health and Human Services announced on October 20 that the agency has launched a “tech surge” to make improvements to the troubled Affordable Care Act (ACA) health insurance exchange website , HealthCare.gov. The move comes as President Barack Obama reportedly prepares to speak about the site’s issues at an event today highlighting the ACA, frequently referred to as “Obamacare.” Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius had previously blamed most of the problems experienced by citizens visiting the site on unexpected demand. But as problems have continued, the White House has grown increasingly frustrated with the site’s performance. An administration official told the Washington Post that the president and others in the administration “find [the problems with HealthCare.gov] unacceptable.” While HealthCare.gov is being operated almost entirely by a team of contractors, HHS is now stepping in to take an active role in resolving the site’s problems. In a blog post , an unidentified agency spokesperson wrote “Our team is bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the team and help improve HealthCare.gov.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Obama administration launches “tech surge” to improve Healthcare.gov

The Navy’s newest warship is powered by Linux

The USS Zumwalt getting a coat of paint at Bath Iron Works. The ship is exotic in many ways, but it runs on off-the-shelf computing technology. General Dynamics Bath Iron Works When the USS Zumwalt (DDG 1000) puts to sea later this year, it will be different from any other ship in the Navy’s fleet in many ways. The $3.5 billon ship is designed for stealth, survivability, and firepower, and it’s packed with advanced technology. And at the heart of its operations is a virtual data center powered by off-the-shelf server hardware, various flavors of Linux, and over 6 million lines of software code. On October 10, I flew up to Rhode Island to visit Raytheon’s Seapower Capability Center in Portsmouth, where engineers assembled and pre-tested the systems at the heart of the Zumwalt and are preparing to do the same for the next ship in line, the USS Michael Monsoor—already well into construction. There, Raytheon’s DDG-1000 team gave me a tour of the centerpiece of the ship’s systems—a mockup of the Zumwalt’s operations center, where the ship’s commanding officer and crew will control the ship’s sensors, missile launchers, guns, and other systems. Over 20 years ago, I learned how to be a ship watch stander a few miles from the Raytheon facility at the Navy’s Surface Warfare Officer School. But the operations center of the Zumwalt will have more in common with the fictional starship USS Enterprise’s bridge than it does with the combat information centers of the ships I went to sea on. Every console on the Zumwalt will be equipped with touch screens and software capable of taking on the needs of any operator on duty, and big screens on the forward bulkhead will display tactical plots of sea, air, and land. Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The Navy’s newest warship is powered by Linux

Windows 8.1: What a difference a year makes

Windows 8 was an ambitious operating system. Microsoft’s goal was, and still is, to have a single operating system that can span the traditional PC, the tablet, and everything in between . To do this, the company introduced a new kind of application —the “Modern” or “Metro” style application. It created a new style of interaction—an edge-based UI for touch users, a hot-corner based one for mouse users. And it developed a new application launcher—the Start screen. Microsoft retained the familiar Windows desktop for running traditional mouse and keyboard driven Windows software. Windows 8 worked. It was a viable operating system, and in broad strokes, it fulfilled Microsoft’s dream of one operating system for tablets and PCs. But Windows 8 was far from perfect. Its problems were in three main areas. Read 91 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Ubuntu 13.10 review: The Linux OS of the future remains a year away

After the customary six months of incubation, Ubuntu 13.10—codenamed Saucy Salamander—has hatched. The new version of the popular Linux distribution brings updated applications and several new features, including augmented search capabilities in the Unity desktop shell. Although Saucy Salamander offers some useful improvements, it’s a relatively thin update. XMir, the most noteworthy item on the 13.10 roadmap, was ultimately deferred for inclusion in a future release. Canonical’s efforts during the Saucy development cycle were largely focused on the company’s new display server and upcoming Unity overhaul, but neither is yet ready for the desktop. Due to the unusual nature of this Ubuntu update, this review is going to diverge a bit from the usual formula. The first half will include a hands-on look at the new Unity features. The second half will take a close look at the Ubuntu roadmap and some of the major changes that we can expect to see over the course of the next several releases. Read 46 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Ubuntu 13.10 review: The Linux OS of the future remains a year away

Intel’s next-generation Broadwell CPUs delayed due to yield problems

Intel’s next-generation CPUs will arrive slightly later than expected. Intel During the company’s third quarter earnings call yesterday, CEO Brian Krzanich announced that production of Intel’s next-generation Broadwell CPUs would be delayed slightly due to manufacturing issues. CNET reports that a “defect density issue” in the new 14nm manufacturing process was causing lower-than-expected yields, and that Intel’s first round of fixes didn’t improve the yields by the expected amount. Krzanich expressed “confidence” that the issue had been fixed and that it was just a “small blip in the schedule,” and that the CPUs would begin mass production in the first quarter of 2014 rather than the fourth quarter of 2013 as expected. Broadwell’s successor, codenamed Skylake and due in 2015, will apparently not be affected by the delay. Broadwell is a “tick” on Intel’s CPU roadmap, a refined version of the current Haswell architecture built on a new manufacturing process. Intel typically doesn’t introduce a new architecture and a new manufacturing process simultaneously to reduce the likelihood and severity of manufacturing issues like these. Even with the delay, Intel will still be producing 14nm chips while most of its chipmaking competitors (including TSMC and Samsung) are rolling out their 20nm processes. Intel hasn’t gone into much detail on what Broadwell will bring to the table, but smart money says that it will further reduce power usage over Haswell while also increasing CPU and integrated GPU performance incrementally. The company announced at its Intel Developer Forum this year that it was seeing a ” 30 percent power improvement ” over Haswell in early production samples, a number which may stand to improve as the process matures and yields get better. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel’s next-generation Broadwell CPUs delayed due to yield problems