Tag: privacy-rights

Heartbleed is the gift that keeps on giving as servers remain unpatched

Within four days of the first public reports of a major flaw in OpenSSL’s software for securing communications on the Internet, mass attacks searched for and targeted vulnerable servers. In  a report  released this week, IBM found that while the attacks have died down, approximately half of the original 500,000 potentially vulnerable servers remain unpatched, leaving businesses at continuing risk of the Heartbleed flaw. On average, the company currently sees 7,000 daily attacks against its customers, down from a high of 300,000 attacks in a single 24-hour period in April, according to the report based on data from the company’s Managed Security Services division. “Despite the initial rush to patch systems, approximately 50 percent of potentially vulnerable servers have been left unpatched—making Heartbleed an ongoing, critical threat,” the report stated. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Heartbleed is the gift that keeps on giving as servers remain unpatched

Mapping Wi-Fi dead zones with physics and GIFs

A simulated map of the WiFi signal in Jason Cole’s two-bedroom apartment. Jason Cole A home’s Wi-Fi dead zones are, to most of us, a problem solved with guesswork. Your laptop streams just fine in this corner of the bedroom, but not the adjacent one; this arm of the couch is great for uploading photos, but not the other one. You avoid these places, and where the Wi-Fi works becomes a factor in the wear patterns of your home. In an effort to better understand, and possibly eradicate, his Wi-Fi dead zones, one man took the hard way: he solved the Helmholtz equation . The Helmholtz equation models “the propagation of electronic waves” that involves using a sparse matrix to help minimize the amount of calculation a computer has to do in order to figure out the paths and interferences of waves, in this case from a Wi-Fi router. The whole process is similar to how scattered granular material, like rice or salt, will form complex patterns on top of a speaker depending on where the sound waves are hitting the surfaces. The author of the post in question , Jason Cole, first solved the equation in two dimensions, and then applied it to his apartment’s long and narrow two-bedroom layout. He wrote that he took his walls to have a very high refractive index, while empty space had a refractive index of 1. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Mapping Wi-Fi dead zones with physics and GIFs

Apple’s wearable device will be revealed September 9, Re/code says

A sixth-generation iPod Nano embedded in a watch band. Aaron Muszalski Re/code is reporting that Apple will introduce a wearable device on September 9 alongside two next-generation iPhones. Such a device from Apple has been highly anticipated since the wearable market received newcomers from Samsung, LG, and Motorola . Apple’s entry into this market was originally expected sometime in October based on an earlier report from Re/code. The site has had a good track record of correctly predicting the timing of Apple product releases since the AllThingsD days. John Paczkowski, who reported the news, says that the coming device will certainly be equipped to make use of Apple’s HealthKit platform for its Health app, as well as HomeKit, which is a platform to connect devices to smart appliances and light bulbs. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple’s wearable device will be revealed September 9, Re/code says

US courts trash a decade’s worth of online documents, shrug it off

US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta. Kevin / flickr The US Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) has deleted nearly a decade’s worth of documents from four US appeals courts and one bankruptcy court. The deletion is part of an upgrade to a new computer system for the database known as Public Access to Court Electronic Records, or PACER. Court dockets and documents at the US Courts of Appeals for the 2nd, 7th, 11th, and Federal Circuits, as well as the Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California, were maintained with “locally developed legacy case management systems,” said AOC spokesperson Karen Redmond in an e-mailed statement . Those five courts aren’t compatible with the new PACER system. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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US courts trash a decade’s worth of online documents, shrug it off

Seagate’s new 8TB hard drive is for all you digital hoarders

Seagate’s largest drives are 4TB and 6TB in size, but they’ll be getting even larger soon enough. Seagate Solid-state drives get most of the love from gadget sites these days—they’re faster and cheaper than ever , and they’re a great way to extend the life of an older computer. If you need to store more than a terabyte of data, however, you still need to turn to old fashioned spinning hard drives. To that end, Seagate yesterday announced an 8TB hard drive that’s a full two terabytes larger than most drives on the market today. The drive that’s being announced is aimed at the enterprise market, so it’s not something consumers will be able to get their hands on in the near-term—for now, the biggest drive available to most folks will be a mere 6TB in size . Once the 8TB begins shipping in bulk, though, we’d expect to see them available on sites like Newegg and Amazon, especially since they’ll fit in current 3.5-inch drive bays. Larger drives like this are commonly used to increase the capacity of network-attached storage devices without having to totally replace them. In consumer desktops, spinning hard drives continue to offer a cost-per-gigabyte ratio far superior to SSDs, useful if you need a lot of storage but don’t need it to be particularly speedy.  Modern chipsets will even allow you to use a smaller SSD as a cache to boost the speed of your computer without sacrificing storage capacity. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Seagate’s new 8TB hard drive is for all you digital hoarders

Jawbone opens a window to our humanity-tracking future

Jawbone’s graph of users who were woken up by the earthquake in California early Sunday. Jawbone Wearable computing company Jawbone released a graph  on Monday showing its users being woken up by the 6.0-magnitude earthquake centered in the Napa Valley region of California on Sunday morning. 120 people were injured, a lot of wine went to waste, and a few people wearing Jawbone’s Up fitness bands lost some sleep, according to a huge spike in the percentage of users who were up and moving in affected regions at about 3:20am (close to 80 percent in Berkeley, Vallejo, and Napa Valley itself). The graph accurately plots the nexus of the earthquake, with smaller spikes of activity in more distant regions, including San Francisco and Oakland (around 60 percent of users), Sacramento and San Jose (25 percent), and Modesto and Santa Cruz, with only a tiny bump of a few percent from the baseline. Together, the locations form a basic map of the earthquake’s reach, not dependent on scientific measurements and existing equipment waiting for a disaster, but just a large, distributed population wearing tracking devices . The Up bands don’t collect location data themselves, so they can’t pinpoint where a user was asleep with perfect certainty. Rather, the data is based on the locations logged by the app used to store users’ information, which always records a user’s location when the app is opened. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Jawbone opens a window to our humanity-tracking future

Leaked slides show details for next-gen Intel mini-PCs, new CPUs

According to the slides, there will be three new NUC boards spread across give different boxes, all launching in the first half of 2015. FanlessTech We’re generally fans of Intel’s NUC (“Next Unit of Computing”) mini-PCs, which use Ultrabook parts to create reasonably capable desktop PCs that can fit just about anywhere. When last we heard about new Broadwell-based versions of the boxes, they were due to launch in late 2014, but delays of higher-performance Broadwell parts  has apparently pushed them back. New Intel slides from FanlessTech now show seven new NUC boxes launching in the first half of 2015. The slides also tell us what kind of boxes we can expect, though there are no big surprises here; the Broadwell NUC lineup is broadly similar to that of Haswell. There appear to be three boards: one high-end Core i5 model, one middle-end Core i3 model, and one Core i5 model with Intel’s vPro technology integrated to make it more appealing to enterprises. All appear to come in two types of enclosures, one with extra room for a 2.5-inch SATA III hard drive and one without. This makes for a total of six Broadwell NUC boxes. The revised NUC roadmap. FanlessTech All six boxes will share most of the same ports and features: two display outputs, Ethernet, four USB 3.0 ports, NFC, M.2 slots for SSDs, support for up to 16GB of RAM, and changeable lids (these may just be for customization purposes, though past rumors have suggested that some could be used as wireless charging pads). The vPro models will use two mini DisplayPorts while the standard i5 and i3 boxes will use one mini DisplayPort and one micro HDMI port, and all models appear to come with Intel’s 7265 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0 adapter soldered on—with current models, you must supply your own mini-PCI Express Wi-Fi card. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Leaked slides show details for next-gen Intel mini-PCs, new CPUs

Prosecutors hit Silk Road suspect Ross Ulbricht with new drug charges

The US government claims these are Ross Ulbricht’s fraudulent identification cards. United States Attorney’s Office, Southern District of NY Federal prosecutors have tacked on three new charges in the criminal case against Ross Ulbricht, the suspect that the government has identified as the mastermind of the Silk Road online drug marketplace. According to a 17-page amended indictment filed late Thursday night, the government added one count of “narcotics trafficking,” one count of “distribution of narcotics by means of the Internet,” and ” conspiracy to traffic in fraudulent identification documents .” Previously, Ulbricht had been indicted in February 2014 on four formal criminal offenses: narcotics trafficking conspiracy, continuing criminal enterprise, computer hacking conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Prosecutors hit Silk Road suspect Ross Ulbricht with new drug charges

California DMV says Google’s self-driving car must have a steering wheel

Left: Google’s prototype car. Right: the eventual final design. Google Traditionally, Google’s self-driving car prototypes have taken existing cars from manufacturers like Toyota and Lexus and bolted on the self-driving car components. This is less than ideal, since it limits the design possibilities of the car’s “vision” system and includes (eventually) unnecessary components, like a steering wheel and pedals. However, Google recently built a self-driving car of its own design, which had no human control system other than a “go” button. The California DMV has now thrown a speed bump in Google’s car design, though, in the form of  new rules  that require that all self-driving cars allow a driver to take “immediate physical control” if needed. The new law means Google’s self-designed car will need to have a steering wheel and gas and brake pedals any time it hits the public road. According to  The Wall Street Journal , Google will comply with the law by building a “small, temporary steering wheel and pedal system that drivers can use during testing” into the prototype cars. The report says California officials are working on rules for cars without a steering wheel and pedals, but for now, a human control system is mandatory. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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California DMV says Google’s self-driving car must have a steering wheel

Blizzard no longer expects World of Warcraft subscriber growth

The World of Warcraft isn’t usually this empty, but it’s getting there… For about six years after its early 2005 launch, it looked like there was nothing that could stop the runaway success of Blizzard’s World of Warcraft , which grew to a peak of 12 million paid subscribers by the end of 2010. Since then, though, the game has seen a long, mostly uninterrupted slide in its player numbers, with only 6.8 million subscribers as of July . Blizzard obviously isn’t happy about this trend for one of its biggest products but seems to have accepted that things aren’t going to change any time soon. “We really don’t know if [ World of Warcraft ] will grow again,” lead game designer Tom Chilton told MCV in a recent interview. “It is possible, but I wouldn’t say it’s something that we expect. Our goal is to make the most compelling content we can.” A new expansion pack like the upcoming Lords of Draenor could juice those subscriber numbers, as previous expansion packs have seemed to do. Chilton seems to see a bit of diminishing returns in this strategy, however. “By building expansions, you are effectively building up barriers to people coming back. But by including the level 90 character with this expansion, it gives people the opportunity to jump right into the new content.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Blizzard no longer expects World of Warcraft subscriber growth