Tag: portfolio-cond

Google search redesign hews closer to competitor DuckDuckGo

Google’s makeover kicks the underlined URL to the curb, with a few other changes. Experiencing mild disorientation while using Google today? Google has quietly rolled out a subtle redesign for its search results that, among other things, removes the age-old hyperlink underline, bumps the font size two points, and evens out the line spacing. Google search results have gotten incremental changes over the years, and the search page certainly no longer looks like it did when the site first launched. Jon Wiley, the lead designer for Google search, took to Google+ Wednesday to say that the new look “improves readability and creates an overall cleaner look.” Having gone nearly a decade without underlined hyperlinks, we here at Ars wholeheartedly agree with the decision. The redesign moves Google up and away from competitors like Yahoo and Bing , which preserve the underline. However, it only catches Google up to the upstart DuckDuckGo, which does not use underlines and is cleaner still on its search results page, with truncated URLs for each result. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google search redesign hews closer to competitor DuckDuckGo

Mozilla strives to take Web gaming to the next level with Unreal Engine 4

Around this time last year Mozilla and Epic Games showed off the Unreal 3 game engine running in the browser, using a combination of the WebGL 3D graphics API and asm.js , the high performance subset of JavaScript. Commercial games built using this technology were launched late in the year. With this apparently successful foray into using the browser as a rich gaming platform, Mozilla and Epic today demonstrated a preview of Epic’s next engine, Unreal Engine 4, again boasting near-native speeds. The Web version of UE4 uses Emscripten to compile regular C and C++ code into asm.js. Unreal Engine 4 running within Firefox. Over the past year, Mozilla has improved asm.js’s performance, to go from around 40 percent of native performance, to something like 67 percent of native. Our own testing largely supported the organization’s claims, though we noted certain limitations at the time, such as JavaScript’s lack of multithreading. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Mozilla strives to take Web gaming to the next level with Unreal Engine 4

How CIA snooped on Senate Intel Committee’s files

CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The CIA gave Senate Intelligence Committee staffers access to its data offsite—in a leased facility the CIA controlled. It sounds like something out of Homeland : at a secret location somewhere off the campus of the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA leases a space and hires contractors to run a top-secret network, which it fills with millions of pages of documents dumped from the agency’s internal network. But that’s apparently exactly what the CIA did for more than three years as part of an agreement to share data with the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on its controversial detention and interrogation program. And it’s also how the agency was able to gain access to the computers and shared network drive used by committee staffers in a search that Senator Diane Feinstein contended today  crossed multiple legal and constitutional boundaries. In a speech on the Senate floor this morning, Feinstein detailed the strange arrangement and accused the CIA of breaking its agreement with the committee on multiple occasions. She also accused the agency of reportedly filing a criminal report against committee staffers with the Justice Department in “a potential effort to intimidate this staff.” The details shared by Feinstein show the length to which the CIA went to try to control the scope of the data that was shared with Senate staffers—and still managed to give them more than some officials in the agency wanted to. Even with multiple levels of oversight, the CIA managed to hand over the data along with an internal review of that very data, which included the agency’s own damning assessment of the interrogation program. Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How CIA snooped on Senate Intel Committee’s files

Refinements, additions, and un-breaking stuff: iOS 7.1 reviewed

Time to update! iOS 7.1 is here, and it fixes a lot of iOS 7.0’s biggest problems. Aurich Lawson There were about six months between the ouster of Scott Forstall from Apple in late October of 2012 and the unveiling of iOS 7.0 in June of 2013. Jony Ive and his team redesigned the software from the ground up in that interval, a short amount of time given that pretty much everything in the operating system was overhauled and that it was being done under new management. The design was tweaked between that first beta in June and the final release in mid-September, but the biggest elements were locked in place in short order. iOS 7.1’s version number implies a much smaller update, but it has spent a considerable amount of time in development. Apple has issued five betas to developers since November of 2013, and almost every one of them has tweaked the user interface in small but significant ways. It feels like Apple has been taking its time with this one, weighing different options and attempting to address the harshest criticism of the new design without the deadline pressure that comes with a major release. We’ve spent a few months with iOS 7.1 as it has progressed, and as usual we’re here to pick through the minutiae so you don’t have to. iOS 7.1 isn’t a drastic change, but it brings enough new design elements, performance improvements, and additional stability to the platform that it might just win over the remaining iOS 6 holdouts. Read 42 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Refinements, additions, and un-breaking stuff: iOS 7.1 reviewed

Popcorn Time reinvents the seedy process of torrenting

We are used to illegal activities looking and feeling far more illegal than this. A new BitTorrent-powered video app has been released that beautifies the torrenting process to the point that TorrentFreak describes it as “Netflix for pirates.” The app, which is available for OS X, Windows, and Linux, shows a catalog of movies and loads them up on a computer in an interface as seamless as that of most legit streaming services, but using means that are generally less than legal. Typically, torrenting a movie (illegally, if it’s copyrighted property) involves seeking out a sketchy torrent website littered with porn ads to download a .torrent file that users hope will actually result in a movie and not, say, a virus. The process’s pitfalls and risks are many, not to mention the potential for getting called out by one’s ISP and, in rare instances, being fined or sued. Popcorn Time eliminates the seedier aspects of torrent location in a slick app that doesn’t involve dealing with files, download speeds, or seeding—at least on the front end. The app began as a Github project that now has over 50 contributors. It is free, open-source, and has no ads or other money-making schemes. The app works by using an API provided by torrent service YTS to stream the file, which is then shared from the user’s computer after the download is completed. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Popcorn Time reinvents the seedy process of torrenting

Intel’s 800Gbps cables headed to cloud data centers and supercomputers

Intel’s pitch for Silicon Photonics. Intel and several of its partners said they will make 800Gbps cables available in the second half of this year, bringing big speed increases to supercomputers and data centers. The new cables are based on Intel’s Silicon Photonics technology that pushes 25Gbps across each fiber. Last year, Intel demonstrated speeds of 100Gbps in each direction, using eight fibers. A new connector that goes by the name “MXC” holds up to 64 fibers (32 for transmitting and 32 for receiving), enabling a jump to 800Gbps in one direction and 800Gbps in the other, or an aggregate of “1.6Tbps” as Intel prefers to call it. (In case you’re wondering, MXC is not an acronym for anything.) That’s a huge increase over the 10Gbps cables commonly used to connect switches and other equipment in data centers today. The fiber technology also maintains its maximum speed over much greater distances than copper, sending 800Gbps at lengths up to 300 meters, Intel photonics technology lab director Mario Paniccia told Ars. Eventually, the industry could boost the per-line rate from 25Gbps to 50Gbps, doubling the overall throughput without adding fibers, he said. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel’s 800Gbps cables headed to cloud data centers and supercomputers

iOS 7.1 released, improves iPhone 5S stability, iPhone 4 speed, and more

After months of testing, iOS 7.1 is finally here. Andrew Cunningham Apple has just released iOS 7.1, the first major update to iOS 7 . The new update provides a variety of security and stability fixes, some speed improvements, and UI tweaks that refine the new design introduced back in December. The update is available for all devices that can run iOS 7: the iPhone 4, 4S, 5, 5C, and 5S; the iPad 2, both Retina iPads, both iPad minis, and the iPad Air; and the fifth-generation iPod touch. The update brings a whole pile of fixes. It addresses a crashing bug with the iPhone 5S, improves speed on the iPhone 4, introduces the new CarPlay feature, adds new accessibility options, and makes a handful of other refinements to the UI. The first iOS 7.1 beta was released to developers back in mid-November, and four additional betas have been issued since then. Throughout the beta cycle, Apple has continuously adjusted the operating system’s user interface, polishing it and making it more consistent. We’ve been playing with the iOS 7.1 betas for a few months now, and we’ll be publishing a full review of the software after we’ve spent a little more time with the final release. We’ll also be revisiting our original article about performance on the iPhone 4 later today. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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iOS 7.1 released, improves iPhone 5S stability, iPhone 4 speed, and more

Teens get banned from an app after vicious attacks and threats

simon_bramwell The developers of Yik Yak , an app that works as an anonymous message board for up to 500 people in close proximity to one another, have selectively disabled the app’s use in Chicago following vicious sniping and rumor mongering by children using it at school. WLS-TV in Chicago reports that people in the city won’t be able to use Yik Yak until the developers figure out a way to get youth usage under control. Apps for sharing information anonymously like Wut and Secret have seen a recent surge in popularity. In the case of Wut and Secret, users are connected to people they actually know—Secret uses the mobile device’s contact list, and Wut’s (anonymous) contacts are powered by Facebook. Yik Yak, by contrast, connects a large swath of people—friends, enemies, and strangers—based entirely on their location. Among middle and high schoolers, this becomes many lockers’- and bathroom walls’-worth of pain and drama. WLS-TV reports students in Chicago have used it to spread rumors about rape, and in other locales, schools have been evacuated because of bomb threats on the service. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Teens get banned from an app after vicious attacks and threats

Microsoft is a “2.5-trick pony” according to Steve Ballmer

In Conversation with Steve Ballmer at Saïd Business School Most companies fail, successful companies are often one-trick ponies, but Microsoft is a two-and-a-half trick pony, according to former CEO Steve Ballmer, speaking at Oxford’s Said Business School . He was responding to a question about why Microsoft had failed to innovate in the mobile space, particularly given that it had invented the tablet computer way before it was popularized by Apple. “Most tech companies fail,” Ballmer replied. “They are zero-trick ponies. They never do anything well and they go away. You are a genius in the industry if you are a one-trick pony. You get some innovation right and then spin it. I am very proud of the fact that [Microsoft] has done at least two tricks. Tricks are worth billions and billions and billions of dollars.” Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft is a “2.5-trick pony” according to Steve Ballmer

Critical crypto bug leaves Linux, hundreds of apps open to eavesdropping

A. Strakey Hundreds of open source packages, including the Red Hat, Ubuntu, and Debian distributions of Linux, are susceptible to attacks that circumvent the most widely used technology to prevent eavesdropping on the Internet, thanks to an extremely critical vulnerability in a widely used cryptographic code library. The bug in the GnuTLS library makes it trivial for attackers to bypass secure sockets layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protections available on websites that depend on the open source package. Initial estimates included in Internet discussions such as this one indicate that more than 200 different operating systems or applications rely on GnuTLS to implement crucial SSL and TLS operations, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the actual number is much higher. Web applications, e-mail programs, and other code that use the library are vulnerable to exploits that allow attackers monitoring connections to silently decode encrypted traffic passing between end users and servers. The bug is the result of commands in a section of the GnuTLS code that verify the authenticity of TLS certificates, which are often known simply as X509 certificates . The coding error, which may have been present in the code since 2005 , causes critical verification checks to be terminated, drawing ironic parallels to the extremely critical “goto fail” flaw that for months put users of Apple’s iOS and OS X operating systems at risk of surreptitious eavesdropping attacks. Apple developers have since patched the bug . Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Critical crypto bug leaves Linux, hundreds of apps open to eavesdropping