Tag: password

Windows 9 preview could materialize as soon as next month

Microsoft could be shipping a preview release of the next major version of Windows—codenamed “Threshold,” and expected to be named “Windows 9″—in either late September or early October, according to sources speaking to ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley . The preview will be widely available to anyone who wants to install it. The final version of the operating system is currently believed to be scheduled for spring 2015. Microsoft has all but confirmed some of the features that Threshold will ship with, including a new hybrid Start menu that includes bits of the old Windows 7 Start menu alongside new live tiles and the ability to run modern Metro applications in windows. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See more here:
Windows 9 preview could materialize as soon as next month

Internet routers hitting 512K limit, some become unreliable

Chart courtesy of Renesys, a subsidiary of Dyn From performance issues at hosting provider Liquid Web to outages at eBay and LastPass, large networks and websites suffered a series of disruptions and outages on Tuesday. Some Internet engineers are blaming the disruptions on a novel technical issue that impacts older Internet routers. At the heart of the issue, the growth of routable networks on the Internet overwhelmed the amount of memory set aside in infrastructure hardware, typically routers and switches, that determines the appropriate way to route data through the Internet. For the first time, the lists of routable networks—also called border gateway protocol (BGP) tables—surpassed a significant power of two (two to the 19th power or 512K). Many older routers limit their use of a specialized, and expensive, type of memory known as ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM) to 512K by default. When the tables outgrew the space allotted for them, the routers shut down or slowed. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See more here:
Internet routers hitting 512K limit, some become unreliable

Xbox One to get far better at playing pirated TV shows

The Xbox One Digital TV Tuner. Microsoft The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 aren’t just games consoles; a succession of software updates has made them into rich media boxes, capable of playing all manner of video and audio on your TV. The Xbox One and PlayStation 4, by contrast, have thus far offered a rather sad and limited media experience. On the Xbox One, at least, that experience is about to get a whole lot better, as Microsoft revealed today at Gamescom in Germany. A new media player app for the console is being released with support for playback from USB devices and, later in the year, DLNA streaming from other devices on the home network, including Windows PCs. This is in addition to its existing ability to have content pushed by network devices. On its own, this would merely bring the Xbox One’s media capabilities up to the same level as those found in the older Xbox 360, but Microsoft is going a step further with substantially wider format support. The company has published a full list  of supported codecs, but one stands out: support for MKV containers. While MKV is a rarity in the world of explicitly authorized video, it’s quite abundant in the murky world of pirated TV shows. Native MKV support will make watching this content substantially easier on the Xbox One. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See more here:
Xbox One to get far better at playing pirated TV shows

Tiny, reversible USB Type-C connector finalized

The USB Type-C cable and its various connector designs. USB-IF The USB Promoter Group announced today that it has finalized the design of the USB Type-C plug , a new type of USB plug that’s designed to completely replace every size of all current USB connectors. Like Apple’s Lightning cables, the new connector is reversible so that it can be used in any orientation. According to the USB-IF’s press release ( PDF ), the new connector is “similar in size” to current micro USB 2.0 Type-B connectors (the ones you use for most non-Apple phones and tablets). It is designed to be “robust enough for laptops and tablets” and “slim enough for mobile phones.” The openings for the connector measure roughly 8.4mm by 2.6mm. As we’ve reported previously , cables and adapters for connecting Type-C devices into older Type-A and Type-B ports will be readily available—the prevalence of these older ports will make any industry-wide shift to USB Type-C an arduous, years-long process. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See the original post:
Tiny, reversible USB Type-C connector finalized

Lyft: Uber scheduled, canceled 5,000 rides to hassle us

The Uber smartphone app. Uber CNN reports that people associated with car-on-demand service Uber have been attempting to sabotage an Uber competitor, Lyft, by ordering and canceling as many as 5,000 rides since October 2013. Lyft drivers have also complained that Uber employees will call them to take “short, low-profit rides largely devoted to luring them to work for Uber.” Uber reportedly used the ride request-and-cancellation tactic earlier this year on another competitor, Gett, to the tune of around 100 rides. Those ride calls were placed by employees as high in the company as Uber’s New York general manager, Josh Mohrer. The calls serve a number of purposes: frustrating drivers, wasting their time and gas approaching a fare that won’t come through, and occupying them to artificially limit driver availability, if only temporarily. Lyft claims to have sussed out the fake requests using phone numbers used by “known Uber recruiters.” Lyft claims that one Uber recruiter requested and canceled 300 rides from May 26 to June 10, and it said that recruiter’s phone number was associated with 21 more accounts with 1,524 canceled rides between them. However, in this instance, there’s no evidence that the cancellations were suggested by Uber corporate, according to CNN. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View article:
Lyft: Uber scheduled, canceled 5,000 rides to hassle us

Meet WordHound, the tool that puts a personal touch on password cracking

Dan Goodin, Ars Technica In the vexing pursuit of passwords that are both easy to remember and hard to crack, many people embed clues into their login credentials, choosing for instance, “playstationplaystationdec2014” to safeguard a recently created gaming account or “L0an@ w0rk!” for an IT administrative account at a financial services company. Now, a whitehat hacker is capitalizing on the habit with a tool that automates the process of launching highly targeted cracking attacks. Dubbed WordHound, the freely available tool scours press releases, white papers, and Twitter accounts belonging to companies or sites that have recently suffered security breaches. The software then generates a list of commonly found words or phrases that attackers can use when trying to convert cryptographic hashes from compromised password databases into the corresponding plaintext passcodes. The tool, devised by security consultant Matthew Marx, was unveiled Wednesday at Passwords 14 conference in Las Vegas. “People are influenced greatly by their environment when choosing a password,” Marx, who works for consultancy MWR Info Security , told Ars. “It could be a work environment, their personal life, or the sport teams they like. I wanted to create a tool that leveraged this human vulnerability.” Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See the article here:
Meet WordHound, the tool that puts a personal touch on password cracking

Researchers design flat sheet that can fold itself into a robot, walk away

Seth Kroll, Wyss Institute As if a brain-like processing chip weren’t bad enough news for us humans, this week’s edition of Science also describes a robot that, after being laid out as a flat sheet, can fold itself into the appropriate shape to take its on-board electronics for a walk. Why would we possibly want self-assembling, flat-packed electronics of this kind? The authors of the Science paper, who are part of a Harvard/MIT collaboration, offer two reasons. First, it’s much easier to assemble something as a planar surface. With the right layers in place, it’s simple to cut them into the appropriate shapes and then embed the electronics where they’re needed, since there’s no awkward internal spaces to deal with. The second reason is that it’s easy to transport things when they’re shaped like a sheet. Since the devices can assemble themselves, they can be shipped to any destination and used without any hassle or high-level technical knowledge. Of course, having a good idea and actually knowing how to create a self-assembling device are two different things. Fortunately, the ability to construct elaborate three-dimensional items from a flat sheet is a solved problem, thanks to origami. Software like  Origamizer  can even determine how to cut and fold a sheet in order to produce a specified three-dimensional structure. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Visit link:
Researchers design flat sheet that can fold itself into a robot, walk away

Netflix surpasses HBO in subscriber revenue

Reed Hastings’ Facebook update boasting about Netflix’s (possibly temporary) victory over its unwilling adversary. Netflix has surpassed HBO in subscriber revenue, according to a status update from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on Wednesday. The company is now pulling in $1.146 billion compared to HBO’s $1.141 billion, and it boasts  50.05 million subscribers , according to its second-quarter earnings reported in July. Netflix has long seen HBO as a competitor in terms of audience and, more recently, in produced content. While HBO has slowly started to come down from the ivory cable tower and be more flexible about how it offers its subscriptions, Netflix has been making gains. Hastings acknowledged that HBO still surpasses Netflix “in profits and Emmy’s [sic], but we are making progress.” Hastings has said many times before that he considers HBO to be a media company that is well-positioned in the changing distribution landscape, where power is shifting away from cable providers and toward Internet streaming. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See the original post:
Netflix surpasses HBO in subscriber revenue

In major shift, Google boosts search rankings of HTTPS-protected sites

In a shift aimed at fostering wider use of encryption on the Web, Google is tweaking its search engine to favor sites that use HTTPS to protect end users’ privacy and security. Sites that properly implement the transport layer security (TLS) protocol may be ranked higher in search results than those that transmit in plaintext, company officials said in a blog post published Wednesday . The move is designed to motivate sites to use HTTPS protections across a wider swath of pages rather than only on login pages or not at all. Sites that continue to deliver pages over unprotected HTTP could see their search ranking usurped by competitors that offer HTTPS. Facebook is also getting more serious about encryption, with plans to acquire PrivateCore , a company that develops encryption software to protect and validate data stored on servers. In Wednesday’s post, Google Webmaster Trends Analysts Zineb Ait Bahajji and Gary Illyes noted that Google was among the first sites to offer end-to-end HTTPS protection by default across virtually all of its properties. It has also offered a variety of tools to help sites detect and recover from security breaches. They went on to write: Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Link:
In major shift, Google boosts search rankings of HTTPS-protected sites

Internet Explorer to start blocking old Java plugins

This month’s Patch Tuesday update for Internet Explorer will include a new feature: it will block out-of-date ActiveX controls. More specifically, it will block out-of-date versions of the Java plugin. Although Microsoft is describing the feature as an ActiveX block, the list of prohibited plugins is currently Java-centric. Stale versions of Flash and Silverlight will be able to stick around, at least for now, though Microsoft says that other out-of-date ActiveX controls will be added to the block list later. Old, buggy versions of the Java plugin have long been used as an exploit vector, with Microsoft’s own security report fingering Java in 84.6 to 98.5 percent of detected exploit kits (bundles of malware sold commercially). Blocking obsolete Java plugins should therefore go a long way toward securing end-user systems. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See more here:
Internet Explorer to start blocking old Java plugins