privacy-rights – Page 41 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Apple releases OS X 10.9.3 with improved 4K support, restored USB sync

Fire up your updaters—there’s a slightly newer and better version of OS X in town. Andrew Cunningham Following its usual months-long testing process, Apple released OS X version 10.9.3 to the general public today. The third major update to the operating system provides the usual blend of security patches, bug fixes, new (and restored) features, and future-proofing enhancements. As was discovered shortly after the first 10.9.3 beta was released, the new update improves 4K display support specifically on the 2013 Mac Pro and the 15-inch 2013 Retina MacBook Pro. When those computers are connected to a 4K display, they should be able to display images in OS X’s HiDPI “Retina” scaling mode by default, and they should support the faster 60Hz refresh rate on compatible monitors. “Retina” mode will make on-screen images larger and sharper, while the refresh rate increase will make UI animations, videos, and games look and feel smoother and more responsive (provided the GPU is capable of rendering them at 60 frames per second in the first place). Though the 13-inch 2013 Retina MacBook Pro has the hardware it needs to drive similar 4K displays—a Thunderbolt 2 port with DisplayPort 1.2 support and one of Intel’s Iris 5100 GPUs—that specific computer is not mentioned in Apple’s release notes. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple releases OS X 10.9.3 with improved 4K support, restored USB sync

Samsung to launch first AMOLED-equipped tablets at June 12 event

Samsung We’ve previously talked about Samsung’s “flood the market” strategy for phones, but the company applies the same tactic to tablets, too. After releasing the Note 10.1 seven months ago and an entire line of NotePro and TabPro tablets in February, the company has announced yet another tablet event planned for June 12. According to the invite, this event is for the Samsung Galaxy Tab line. While it’s frankly getting harder and harder to try to nail down just what tablet goes where in the Samsung spectrum (which one is the flagship?) the Tabs are usually the mid-range/mainstream devices. This event location would suggest otherwise, though, as it’s being held in The Theater at Madison Square Garden, the former site of the NFL Draft. The event will even be livestreamed on Samsung’s YouTube channel . Rumor has it that this run of tablets will be the first to incorporate Samsung’s AMOLED displays. Samsung’s AMOLED manufacturing has so far not been up to the task of producing a panel large enough or cheaply enough to fit into a tablet, forcing the company’s older devices to use LCDs. Samsung’s AMOLED panels on phones are so mature that it’s difficult to tell the difference between them and LCD, so we aren’t sure how significant this change will be to consumers. The invite seems to confirm the change to AMOLED displays, which shows a top-down view of the new tablets with light gushing from the screen onto the colored background. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung to launch first AMOLED-equipped tablets at June 12 event

Photos of an NSA “upgrade” factory show Cisco router getting implant

NSA techs perform an unauthorized field upgrade to Cisco hardware in these 2010 photos from an NSA document. A document included in the trove of National Security Agency files released with Glenn Greenwald’s book No Place to Hide details how the agency’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit and other NSA employees intercept servers, routers, and other network gear being shipped to organizations targeted for surveillance and install covert implant firmware onto them before they’re delivered. These Trojan horse systems were described by an NSA manager as being “some of the most productive operations in TAO because they pre-position access points into hard target networks around the world.” The document, a June 2010 internal newsletter article by the chief of the NSA’s Access and Target Development department (S3261) includes photos (above) of NSA employees opening the shipping box for a Cisco router and installing beacon firmware with a “load station” designed specifically for the task. The NSA manager described the process: Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Photos of an NSA “upgrade” factory show Cisco router getting implant

Microsoft sticking to its guns so far, leaving XP unpatched and exploited

Last month’s Patch Tuesday was meant to bring with it the final ever updates for Windows XP. However, Microsoft went ahead and released another patch for the ancient operating system to fix a flaw that was being exploited in the wild. This month’s Patch Tuesday looks like it’s going to play out a little differently. Microsoft released a critical update for Internet Explorer addressing a flaw in every version from 6 to 11. Although the company says that it’s aware of in-the-wild exploitations of the flaw, this time it says it won’t fix Windows XP. Promise . Of course, last month’s end of support should have meant the same thing, and for no particularly good reason, it didn’t. Microsoft cited the “proximity” of the previous flaw to the end of support as its rationale for issuing the update, but this month’s bugs seem barely less proximal. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft sticking to its guns so far, leaving XP unpatched and exploited

New planet-hunting hardware needs just a minute to image an exoplanet

PNAS Most of the exoplanets we’ve detected have been spotted during transits, when they pass between their host star and Earth. Almost all the others have been inferred based on the fact that they gravitationally tug at their host star as they orbit around it. Very few exoplanets have been imaged directly, but that may be about to change. Earlier this week, scientists revealed the first images taken with a new instrument, the Gemini Planet Hunter, which has been installed on the (you guessed it) Gemini South telescope located in the Chilean Andes. The new hardware is so efficient that a known exoplanet that once took over an hour and considerable post-processing to image was apparent in a one-minute exposure, with no processing needed. The twin Gemini telescopes (Gemini North is in Hawaii to image the northern sky) are already some of the most advanced hardware on the planet, featuring adaptive optics that correct the gaze of an eight-meter mirror. But directly imaging a planet is a distinct challenge due to the relative brightness of the planet relative to the host star. In terms of our own Solar System, Jupiter would appear 10 9 times fainter than the Sun when imaged at a distance. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Watch out for data caps: Video-hungry cord cutters use 328GB a month

Free Press The average cord cutter—a person who watches online video instead of subscribing to a cable TV package—isn’t all that far away from going over the typical data usage limits enforced by Internet service providers. Not all ISPs enforce caps. But Comcast, the nation’s largest broadband provider, is rolling out 300GB monthly limits in parts of its territory with $10 charges for each additional 50GB. Time Warner Cable, which Comcast is trying to acquire, offers an optional plan with a measly 30GB cap in exchange for a $5 monthly discount, but almost everyone sticks with the unlimited plan. Sandvine’s latest Global Internet Phenomena report released today, based on measurements in March, says that Internet users in the United States who appear to be cord cutters “consume on average 212GB a month, more than seven times the usage of a typical subscriber. These ‘cord cutters’ consume an average of 100 hours of video a month and account for 54 percent of total traffic consumed each month.” Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Bringing Windows 8-style multitasking to iPads isn’t as simple as it seems

“I just need to write about this Murloc rush deck. For work.” Aurich Lawson Apple is planning to add a split-screen multitasking mode to its iPads in iOS 8, according to “sources with knowledge of the enhancement in development” speaking to 9to5Mac . The feature will supposedly allow two applications to run side-by-side while the tablet is in landscape mode, not unlike the similar Snap feature in Windows 8.1 or the multi-window mode supported on many of Samsung’s phones and tablets . iPad applications have always used the tablet’s entire screen, which keeps things simple but can feel restrictive for heavy multitaskers. Though 9to5Mac’s sources have been accurate in the past, as with all rumors, this report should be taken with a continuous stream of salt until you actually see Apple get up on stage and announce it. If it’s true, this new display mode implies big changes to the way that iPad apps are designed and the way that they interact with each other, and we wanted to take a look at the hurdles in iOS and the iPad hardware that would have to be dealt with to make this feature a reality. We’ll also be making some informed guesses about how Apple might jump over them. Resolution independence Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bringing Windows 8-style multitasking to iPads isn’t as simple as it seems

Encrypted or not, Skype communications prove “vital” to NSA surveillance

Last year, Ars documented how Skype encryption posed little challenge to Microsoft abuse filters that scanned instant messages for potentially abusive Web links. Within hours of newly created, never-before-visited URLs being transmitted over the service, the scanners were able to pluck them out of a cryptographically protected stream and test if they were malicious. Now comes word that the National Security Agency is also able to work around Skype crypto—so much so that analysts have deemed the Microsoft-owned service “vital” to a key surveillance regimen known as PRISM . “PRISM has a new collection capability: Skype stored communications,” a previously confidential NSA memo from 2013 declared. “Skype stored communications will contain unique data which is not collected via normal real-time surveillance collection.” The data includes buddy lists, credit card information, call records, user account data, and “other material” that is of value to the NSA’s special source operations. The memo, which was leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and released Tuesday by Glenn Greenwald to coincide with the publication of his book No Place to Hide , said the FBI’s Electronic Communications Surveillance Unit had approved “over 30 selectors to be sent to Skype for collection.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Encrypted or not, Skype communications prove “vital” to NSA surveillance

Teen arrested for 30 “swatting” attacks against schools, security reporter

Police in the Canadian city of Ottawa said they arrested a 16-year-old male charged with carrying out so-called “swatting” attacks that targeted 30 North American targets. One of the targets included KrebsOnSecurity reporter Brian Krebs , who was previously on the receiving end of a vicious swatting attack that resulted in a team of police pointing guns at him as he opened the front door of his Virginia home. Krebs said the recent attacks were preceded by taunts from someone controlling the Twitter handle @ProbablyOnion . The last tweet made from that account, made on Thursday, stated: “Still awaiting for the horsies to bash down my door.” The individual didn’t have long to wait. That same day, the 16-year-old was arrested, according to press releases here and here issued by the Ottawa Police Service and the FBI, respectively. Swatting refers to the act of knowingly giving authorities false information about bomb threats, the taking of hostages, or similar threats in progress with the goal of tricking heavily armed police to raid the location of an innocent person or group. According to authorities, the unnamed 16-year-old allegedly carried out swatting attacks on 30 targets, including schools in North America that responded with lockdowns or evacuations. The minor was charged with 60 criminal offenses, including public mischief, mischief to property, uttering death threats, and conveying false info with intent to alarm. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Teen arrested for 30 “swatting” attacks against schools, security reporter

Microsoft boosts cloud security, network performance, compute power, and more

At TechEd in Houston today, Microsoft announced a wide range of updates to its Azure cloud platform. As has become customary for Azure updates, the new features announced today include a mix of previews of brand-new capabilities, and general availability releases of features previously only in preview. In the general availability bucket are a set of new networking options for connectivity to Azure. Currently, Azure users connect to Azure through a mix of public Internet addresses and private VPNs, with all traffic going over the Internet. The new ExpressRoute capability provides a third option: direct private connections to Azure, either through exchange providers, or by connecting Azure to existing corporate WANs. ExpressRoute will be offered with a 99.9 percent SLA and four bandwidth tiers: 200Mbps, 500Mbps, 1Gbps, and 10Gbps. Though now generally available, the connectivity is currently limited to connections via two US sites—Silicon Valley and Washington, DC—and London. Microsoft intends to make it available in 13 further locations by the end of the year. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft boosts cloud security, network performance, compute power, and more