Tag: portfolio-cond

Obamacare site hits reset button on passwords as contractors scramble

Getting to this page on the Healthcare.gov site is just the start of the battle for would-be insurance customers. Sean Gallagher Amid all the attention, bugs, and work happening at Healthcare.gov in light of the Affordable Care Act, potential registrants talking to phone support today have been told that all user passwords are being reset to help address the site’s login woes. And the tech supports behind Healthcare.gov will be asking more users to act in the name of fixing the site, too. According to registrants speaking with Ars, individuals whose logins never made it to the site’s database will have to re-register using a different username, as their previously chosen names are now stuck in authentication limbo. The website for the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) launched just last week. With all the scrutiny and debate happening, if ever there was a website launch that was “too big to fail, ” this was it.  So, of course, it did—depending on how you define “failure.” The inability of Obamacare portals to keep up with the traffic demands initially put upon them has been seized by politicians and conservative pundits as evidence that Obamacare “is not ready for prime time” in the words of Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). Now, a week later, the site appears to be stabilizing, with waiting times dropping dramatically for those who haven’t been able to register before. A test of the site this morning had me waiting four minutes to get to the signup page; others got on instantly. But problems persist beyond the front door. The contractors responsible for the exchange—CGI Federal for the website itself, Quality Software Systems Inc. (QSSI) for the information “hub” that determines eligibility for programs and provides the data on qualified insurance plans, and Booz Allen for enrollment and eligibility technical support—are scrambling to deploy more fixes. Technical support call center operators continue to handle an onslaught of calls from users who can’t get back into the system after registering. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Obamacare site hits reset button on passwords as contractors scramble

Ban on most robocalls and text message spam gets stronger this month

New Federal Communications Commission restrictions on telemarketing calls and text messages go into effect Wednesday, October 16. Adopted by the commission last year, the amendment to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) “will require businesses to obtain ‘prior express written consent’ before placing telemarketing calls to mobile phones using an automatic telephone dialing system (ATDS) or an artificial or prerecorded voice, ” a Bloomberg Law summary explains. “The same regulations will now also require businesses to obtain ‘prior express written consent’ before placing telemarketing calls to residential lines using an artificial or prerecorded voice. As a result, effective Oct. 16, oral consent is not enough.” This new restriction applies to text messages as well. The FCC’s order notes that “text messaging is a form of communication used primarily between telephones and is therefore consistent with the definition of a ‘call.'” Thus, the commission said it “concluded that text messages would be subject to the TCPA.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Ban on most robocalls and text message spam gets stronger this month

US indicts suspected Anonymous members for leading 2010 “Operation Payback”

Back in 2010, “Operation Payback” involved a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against anti-piracy websites as a way to protest what some members of Anonymous viewed as an overly greedy intellectual property industry. The attack was later revived in early 2011. On Thursday, 13 men were indicted (PDF) in federal court in Virginia on one count of Conspiracy to Intentionally Cause Damage to a Protected Computer. They are accused of using the well-known Low-Orbit Ion Cannon application to conduct DDoS attacks on the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, the United States Copyright Office of the Library of Congress, Visa, MasterCard, and Bank of America. According to the indictment, the victims suffered “significant damage, ” noting specifically that MasterCard suffered at least $5, 000 in losses during a one-year period. (For the record, MasterCard profited $415 million in 2010.) Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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US indicts suspected Anonymous members for leading 2010 “Operation Payback”

Ubuntu’s controversial Mir window system won’t ship with 13.10 desktop

Ubuntu 13.04. Ubuntu 13.10 (“Saucy Salamander”) is scheduled for a final release on Oct. 17, but the OS won’t include what was perhaps the biggest and most controversial change planned for the desktop environment. Canonical announced in March that it would replace the X window system with Mir, a new display server that will eventually work across phones, tablets, and desktops. It has proven controversial, with Intel rejecting Ubuntu patches because Canonical’s development of Mir meant it stopped supporting Wayland as a replacement for X. Mir will ship by default on Ubuntu Touch for phones (but not tablets) this month, allowing a crucial part of Ubuntu’s mobile plans to go forward. However, it won’t be the default system on the desktop, because XMir—an X11 compatibility layer for Mir—isn’t yet able to properly support multi-monitor setups. This is a step back from Canonical’s original plan to “Deliver Mir + XMir + Unity 7 on the [13.10] desktop for those cards that supported it, and fall back to X for those that don’t.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Ubuntu’s controversial Mir window system won’t ship with 13.10 desktop

Microsoft: “System processing” takes up 10 percent of Xbox One GPU time

Wired The Xbox One’s ability to run up to four apps in the background (or on the side via Snap mode) during gameplay and to switch from a game to those apps almost instantaneously obviously comes at some cost to the system’s maximum theoretical gaming performance. Now, thanks to an interview with Xbox technical fellow Andrew Goossen over at Digital Foundry we have some idea of the scale of that performance cost. “Xbox One has a conservative 10 percent time-sliced reservation on the GPU for system processing, ” Goossen told the site. “This is used both for the GPGPU processing for Kinect and for the rendering of concurrent system content such as snap mode.” It’s important to note that additional processing time for the next-generation Kinect sensor is included in that 10 percent number. Still, setting aside nearly a tenth of the GPU’s processing time to support background execution of non-gaming apps is a bit surprising. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Microsoft: “System processing” takes up 10 percent of Xbox One GPU time

2013 iMac teardowns reveal SSD slots, soldered-in CPU in the 21.5” model

All iMacs now leave you an empty PCIe SSD slot to use if you don’t go in for the Fusion Drive or SSD upgrade, but it’s still hard to get at. iFixit Just one day after Apple quietly refreshed its iMac lineup with Intel’s new Haswell processors, the teardown artists at iFixit have pulled both the 21.5-inch and 27-inch models apart to see what makes them tick. One of our chief complaints about last year’s 21.5-inch iMac was how difficult it was to upgrade, and that remains true of this year’s model. You can still access the computer’s two RAM slots if you’re brave enough to attempt the teardown process (which includes tearing apart and replacing some foam padding), and Apple has included an empty PCIe slot on the base model where last year’s model only had an empty spot on the system board. However, the low-end iMac’s use of Intel’s Iris Pro 5200 integrated GPUs means that it uses one of Intel’s R-series CPUs, and those CPUs only come in a soldered-on ball-grid array (BGA) package. The 27-inch model proves a bit easier to upgrade: it still has four user-accessible RAM slots, still leaves people who opt out of the Fusion Drive or SSD upgrades an empty PCIe slot to use, and still uses a socketed Intel CPU for those of you who want to take the trouble to upgrade that component yourselves after the fact. Both the 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMacs were also confirmed to be using triple-antenna (3×3:3) 802.11ac configurations, meaning the iMacs will be capable of the standard’s maximum theoretical transfer speed of 1.3Gbps where the 2013 MacBook Airs used a two-antenna setup capable of 867Mbps speeds. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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2013 iMac teardowns reveal SSD slots, soldered-in CPU in the 21.5” model

Blackberry warns of near-$1 billion loss this quarter

Blackberry released a statement on Friday saying that it expects to report an operating loss of almost $1 billion in the coming days. According to The Wall Street Journal , Blackberry overestimated the number of new phones it would sell and is facing an “inventory charge of as much as $960 million and a restructuring charge of $72 million.” Specifically, the company said that it would likely report a loss of $950 million to $995 million for the second quarter. Earlier this week we reported that Blackberry was planning to lay off up to 40 percent of its employees, taking the company from 12, 700 full-time employees to about 7, 620 employees. The WSJ reported today that 4, 500 people will be laid off, lower than earlier estimates. (Is that a silver lining we see?) The Canadian company also reported today that it only sold 3.7 million smartphones in the last quarter, most of which were older phones. To stem the bleeding, Blackberry said that going forward, its “smartphone portfolio will transition from 6 devices to 4; focusing on enterprise and prosumer-centric devices, including 2 high-end devices and 2 entry-level devices.” As Quartz writer Christopher Mims wrote , it’s probably too late for Blackberry to turn around its share of the enterprise market given the latest moves made by Apple and Samsung to get their hardware into the hands of businesspeople. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Blackberry warns of near-$1 billion loss this quarter

Apple releases iOS 7.0.1 update to fix fingerprint scanner

The new iPhone 5S is out and normal folks are getting their fingerprints all over it—exactly what Apple intended with the inclusion of the fingerprint scanner. However, early reviews have included the occasional note that the fingerprint scanner’s ability to enable iTunes purchases didn’t quite work correctly—the iPhone 5S would prompt for a password instead of simply accepting the fingerprint. To address this, Apple has issued an update to iOS 7 for the iPhone 5S (and also for the 5C, though it’s unclear what else the update addresses). Several other outlets are reporting that the update is only 17.5MB, but when I checked via iTunes on my fresh-from-the-box iPhone 5S, I got a download that was 1.39GB in size. We’ll have our full iPhone 5s review up as soon as possible, along with video showing off how the new devices (and their new cameras) work. Read on Ars Technica | Comments        

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Apple releases iOS 7.0.1 update to fix fingerprint scanner

Intel’s Atom CPUs finally get serious with the new Bay Trail architecture

Intel News from a certain other company has overshadowed the 2013 Intel Developer Forum a bit this week, but Intel is hardly sitting still. For well over a year now, the company has been intensifying its efforts in the mobile space, first with Android phones and later with both Windows and Android tablets. The chips the company has been using to make these strides into mobile have all used the Atom branding, which has come a long way since its inclusion in the low-rent netbooks of years past. Chips like Clover Trail and Clover Trail+ have proven that an Intel phone’s battery life can hang with ARM chips from companies like Qualcomm and Nvidia, even if their performance sometimes leaves something to be desired. Now, Intel is ready to take the next step. We’ve talked about its next-generation Atom system-on-a-chip (SoC) for tablets (codenamed Bay Trail ) before, and at IDF this week the company finally announced specific Bay Trail SKUs and devices that will include the chips when they ship later this year. Read 25 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Intel’s Atom CPUs finally get serious with the new Bay Trail architecture

Fingerprints as passwords: New iPhone Touch ID gets mixed security verdict (Updated)

Chad Miller Of all the new features of Apple’s new iPhone 5S , few have drawn more attention than the built-in fingerprint scanner known as Touch ID. Apple billed it as an “innovative way to simply and securely unlock your phone with just the touch of a finger.” More breathless accounts were calling it a potential ” death knell for passwords ” or using similarly overblown phrases . Until the new phones are in the hands of skilled hackers and security consultants, we won’t know for sure if Touch ID represents a step forward from the security and privacy offered by today’s iPhones. I spent several hours parsing the limited number of details provided by Apple and speaking to software and security engineers. I found evidence both supporting and undermining the case that the fingerprint readers are an improvement. The thoughts that follow aren’t intended to be a final verdict—the proof won’t be delivered until we see how the feature works in the real world. The pros I’ll start with the encouraging evidence. Apple said Touch ID is powered by a laser-cut sapphire crystal and a capacitive touch sensor that is able to take a high-resolution image based on the sub-epidermal layers of a user’s skin. While not definitive, this detail suggests Apple engineers may have designed a system that is not susceptible to casual attacks. If the scans probe deeply enough, for instance, Touch ID probably wouldn’t be tricked by the type of clones that are generated from smudges pulled off a door knob or computer monitor. In 2008, hackers demonstrated just how easy it was to create such clones when they published more than 4, 000 pieces of plastic film containing the fingerprint of a German politician who supported the mandatory collection of citizens’ unique physical characteristics. By slipping the foil over their own fingers, critics were able to mimic then-Interior Minister Wolfgang Schauble’s fingerprint when touching certain types of biometric readers. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Fingerprints as passwords: New iPhone Touch ID gets mixed security verdict (Updated)