Tag: portfolio-cond

Review: Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium Edition hopes to be at your service

Office 365 Home Premium Edition’s lineup of software, ready to stream to your PC today. Today, Microsoft releases Office 2013—the first full release of Microsoft’s latest-generation productivity suite for consumers. Office 2013 has already made a partial debut on Microsoft’s Windows RT tablets, though RT users will get a (slight) refresh with the full availability of the suite. The company gave consumers an open preview of Office last summer, which we reviewed in depth at the time of the suite’s announcement. So there aren’t any real surprises in the final versions of the applications being releasing today, at least as far as how they look and work. Today’s release, however, marks the first general availability of Microsoft’s new subscription model under the Office 365 brand the company has used for its hosted mail and collaboration services for businesses. While the applications in Office are being offered in a number of ways, Microsoft is trying hard to steer consumer customers to Office 365 Home Premium Edition, a service-based version of the suite that will sell for $100 a year. And just as Windows 8’s app store started to fill up as the operating system approached release, the same is true of Office’s own app store—an in-app accessible collection of Web-powered functionality add-ons for many of the core Office applications based on the same core technologies (JavaScript and HTML5) that power many of Windows 8’s interface-formerly-known-as-Metro apps. Now, the trick is getting consumers to buy into the idea of Office as a subscription service and embracing Microsoft’s Office “lifestyle,” instead of something they buy once and hold onto until their computers end up in the e-waste pile. Read 28 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Review: Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium Edition hopes to be at your service

Secret backdoors found in firewall, VPN gear from Barracuda Networks

A variety of firewall, VPN, and spam filtering gear sold by Barracuda Networks contains undocumented backdoor accounts that allow people to remotely log in and access sensitive information, researchers with an Austrian security firm have warned. The SSH, or secure shell, backdoor is hardcoded into “multiple Barracuda Networks products” and can be used to gain shell access to vulnerable appliances, according to an advisory published Thursday by SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab. “This functionality is entirely undocumented and can only be disabled via a hidden ‘expert options’ dialog,” the advisory states. The boxes are configured to listen for SSH connections to the backdoor accounts and will accept the username “product” with no Update: a “very weak” password to log in and gain access to the device’s MySQL database. While the backdoors can be accessed by only a small range of IP addresses, many of them belong to entities other than Barracuda. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Secret backdoors found in firewall, VPN gear from Barracuda Networks

Grammar badness makes cracking harder the long password

Comparison of the size of password search space when treating the password as a sequence of characters or words, or as words generated by grammatical structure. Rao,et al. When it comes to long phrases used to defeat recent advances in password cracking, bigger isn’t necessarily better, particularly when the phrases adhere to grammatical rules. A team of Ph.D. and grad students at Carnegie Mellon University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed an algorithm that targets passcodes with a minimum number of 16 characters and built it into the freely available John the Ripper cracking program. The result: it was much more efficient at cracking passphrases such as “abiggerbetter password” or “thecommunistfairy” because they followed commonly used grammatical rules—in this case, ordering parts of speech in the sequence “determiner, adjective, noun.” When tested against 1,434 passwords containing 16 or more characters, the grammar-aware cracker surpassed other state-of-the-art password crackers when the passcodes had grammatical structures, with 10 percent of the dataset cracked exclusively by the team’s algorithm. The approach is significant because it comes as security experts are revising password policies to combat the growing sophistication of modern cracking techniques which make the average password weaker than ever before . A key strategy in making passwords more resilient is to use phrases that result in longer passcodes. Still, passphrases must remain memorable to the end user, so people often pick phrases or sentences. It turns out that grammatical structures dramatically narrow the possible combinations and sequences of words crackers must guess. One surprising outcome of the research is that the passphrase “Th3r3 can only b3 #1!” (with spaces removed) is one order of magnitude weaker than “Hammered asinine requirements” even though it contains more words. Better still is “My passw0rd is $uper str0ng!” because it requires significantly more tries to correctly guess. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Grammar badness makes cracking harder the long password

Wires smaller in diameter than light waves boost solar cell efficiency

Electron micrograph of indium phosphide (InP) nanowires. Each is 180 nanometers in diameter; this diameter allows them to capture more light, making them effective in a photovoltaic solar cell. Wallentin et al. In the continuing quest to create solar cells, researchers seek new materials, use clever techniques, and look for novel physical phenomena to extract the maximum electricity out of sunlight for the lowest cost. One method of extracting more power at a lower cost relies on creating arrays of nanowires that stand vertically on inexpensive substrates. In contrast to the material in ordinary solar cells, nanowires use less material, can potentially be built with less costly materials, and in principle trap more light thanks to the geometry of the arrays. However, most nanowire solar cells are currently outperformed by their conventional counterparts. A new effort used indium phosphide (InP) nanowires with diameters smaller than the wavelength of the light they were trapping. That trick enabled Jesper Wallentin and colleagues to reach comparable efficiencies and slightly higher voltage than a conventional InP solar cell. While the wires only covered 12 percent of the surface area, they exploited a principle known as resonant trapping to extract over half as much current as a full planar cell of InP. This approach could lead to even greater efficiency at lower cost for solar cells. Many candidates for the next generation of photovoltaic (PV) solar cells are being investigated. Research in this area has two goals that don’t always overlap: maximizing the efficiency of converting sunlight into electric current, and reducing cost per unit of electricity. The advantage of nanowire-based cells lies in using a lot less material, since the entire surface need not be covered in PV material. Additionally, the wires themselves can be fabricated from relatively inexpensive semiconductor materials. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Wires smaller in diameter than light waves boost solar cell efficiency

All backscatter “pornoscanners” to be removed from US airports

Bloomberg is reporting that the TSA will be removing all of the remaining backscatter X-ray machines from US airports. The removal isn’t because of health concerns—instead, the machines’ manufacturer, Rapiscan Systems , failed to meet a US Congress-imposed deadline for altering the machines’ software to produce “generic passenger images,” according to the report. TSA assistant administer for acquisitions Karen Shelton Waters, speaking on behalf of the agency, noted that Rapiscan Systems would absorb the cost for the scanners’ removal, and that the removal is unrelated to Rapiscan’s alleged falsification of the machines’ abilities to protect passengers’ privacy. Nor does the removal appear to be related to ongoing questions about the safety of the backscatter X-ray technology. The CEO of OSI systems, Rapiscan’s parent company, says that rather than pitching the expensive machines into the garbage bin, the TSA will be relocating them to other government agencies. In total, there are 174 Rapiscan backscatter X-ray machines that will be pulled from airports and relocated, on top of the 76 that were  removed last year. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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All backscatter “pornoscanners” to be removed from US airports

Metamaterials perform image compression before light reaches the sensor

This metamaterial is the aperture of the new microwave imaging device. John Hunt Add image compression to the list of nifty applications for metamaterials. Metamaterials guide light waves to create “ invisibility cloaks ” and bend sound waves to make theoretical noise reduction systems for urban areas. But these materials are tuned to particular wavelengths; some invisibility cloaks don’t work at all visible wavelengths because they leak those wavelengths of light. Now researchers have capitalized on that leakiness to build a new functional device: a microwave imaging system that compresses an image as it’s being collected—not afterward as our digital cameras do. Every pixel in a picture from our digital cameras corresponds to a pixel of information recorded on the detector inside the camera. Once a camera collects all the light intensity information from a scene, it promptly discards some of it and compresses the data into a JPEG file (unless you explicitly tell it to save raw data). You still end up with a decent picture, though, because most of the discarded data was redundant. Compressive sensing aims to ease this process by reducing the amount of data collected in the first place. One way to do this is with a single pixel camera , developed in 2006. These devices capture information from random patterns of pixels around the image, essentially adding the light intensity values of several pixels together. If you know something about the structure of that image—say clusters of bright stars set against a dark sky—you’ll be able to capture that image with fewer measurements than a traditional camera. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Metamaterials perform image compression before light reaches the sensor

FCC adds spectrum to Wi-Fi—but you likely need a new router to use it

Jason Alley The Federal Communications Commission last week said it will add 195MHz of spectrum to Wi-Fi’s 5GHz band. This move is designed to relieve congestion in Wi-Fi networks, particularly in areas of widespread simultaneous usage like airports and sports stadiums . It could help your home network too, but not right away—routers available in stores today may not be able to use the new spectrum at all . Finding out definitively whether today’s routers will support the new spectrum is difficult, partly because the FCC still has to issue specific rules governing its use. We’ve hit up router vendors and other industry people to find out whether software updates might let current routers access the new spectrum. While the results were a bit muddled, it seems safe to say no one is guaranteeing today’s routers will get the benefit of the new 195MHz. Even the latest routers supporting the ultra-modern 802.11ac standard may be left behind. Cisco refused to comment at all, telling us only “Cisco has not made any announcements about this so cannot discuss at this time.” Buffalo told us “the chip vendors will need to work on it” and that “they will at least to have to make changes to the hardware driver. … The magnitude of that change will determine if Buffalo is able to use the same hardware.” Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FCC adds spectrum to Wi-Fi—but you likely need a new router to use it

New features, new fixes: OS X Server’s six-month checkup

It has now been roughly half a year since the release of Mountain Lion . If Apple sticks to its new yearly release cadence for new OS X versions, that means we’re probably about halfway to OS X 10.9. That doesn’t mean the OS has stood still, though—two point updates have since tweaked the operating system’s functionality and stability, and this is even more true of OS X’s buttoned-up cousin, OS X Server . While Windows Server rarely picks up major new features outside of service packs, OS X Server is like the client version of OS X in that it sometimes takes a couple of point updates for its features to stabilize. Since July, we’ve received two point updates for OS X Server, and they’ve changed things around enough that it merits revisiting our original guide and pointing out what has changed. We’ll be focusing on the major user-facing changes here, but for a complete list of everything that has been changed and fixed you may also want to look at the complete release notes for OS X Server 2.1.1 and 2.2 . Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New features, new fixes: OS X Server’s six-month checkup

Fastest Wi-Fi ever is almost ready for real-world use

Wilocity’s wireless chips allow 4.6Gbps transmission over the 60GHz band. Wilocity In a quiet suite removed from the insanity of the Consumer Electronics Show expo floor, a company aiming to build the fastest Wi-Fi chips in the world demonstrated its vision of wireless technology’s future. On one desk, a laptop powered a two-monitor setup without any wires. At another, a tablet playing an accelerometer-based racing game mirrors its screen in high definition to another monitor. Across the room, a computer quickly transfers a 3GB file from a wireless router with built-in storage. The suite was set up in the Las Vegas Hotel by Wilocity , a chip company specializing in wireless products using 60GHz transmissions, which are far faster than traditional Wi-Fi. Avoiding the show floor is a good idea if you’re worried about Internet connectivity, because thousands of vendors are clogging the pipes. But that’s not why Wilocity was here—they’d be able to perform the demo even in the busiest parts of CES without interference because they’re not relying on the congested bands used by regular Wi-Fi. Read 24 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Fastest Wi-Fi ever is almost ready for real-world use

Walmart to sell iPhones with a $45 per month unlimited prepaid plan

Starting this Friday, Walmart will be selling the iPhone for use with wireless provider Straight Talk, which is offering a $45-per-month contract with unlimited voice, data, and texting. This sale will make it one of the cheapest ways —as measured over a two-year period—to get a prepaid iPhone. Walmart says it will offer $25-per-month financing for the phone itself if customers use a Walmart credit card. Straight Talk, which uses AT&T’s towers as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), is becoming an increasingly popular option for prepaid customers who want to use an iPhone without paying high prices. (Full disclosure: I am a Straight Talk customer, and have been since April 2012.) “We believe customers shouldn’t have to choose between saving money and having the latest technology,” said Seong Ohm, senior vice president of Entertainment for Walmart US, said in a statement on Tuesday. “Now customers can have the coveted iPhone with unlimited talk, text, and data without a contract for $70 a month thanks to our exclusive Straight Talk plan and industry first financing offer.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Walmart to sell iPhones with a $45 per month unlimited prepaid plan