privacy-rights – Page 42 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

New Intel chipsets speed up your storage, but they’re missing new CPUs

The 9-series chipsets pile a few new features on top of the previous-generation 8-series chipsets. Intel Last year at around this time, Intel was releasing its brand-new Haswell CPU architecture and its 8-series chipsets out into the world for back-to-school season. About a year before that, it was doing the same for its Ivy Bridge architecture and 7-series chipsets. This year, we’re getting more new chipsets, but they aren’t coming with a new CPU architecture—just some mildly refreshed Haswell processors, some of which we’ve covered already . We’ll get to the new chipsets in a moment, but first let’s talk about the elephant in the room: Intel’s near-silence on the next-generation Broadwell CPUs. We’ve had a few snippets of information about the company’s next CPU architecture, but since announcing a delay late last year the company has said little on the issue. Mass production was supposed to ramp up in the first quarter of 2014, and that quarter has come and gone. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New Intel chipsets speed up your storage, but they’re missing new CPUs

Router company that threatened a reviewer loses Amazon selling license

The Medialink router that was reviewed. Mediabridge Update 5/8/2014 19:44 CT: On Thursday, Mediabridge Products posted an official statement about this incident to its Facebook page, clarifying its position and saying that Amazon has revoked its selling privileges. (Thanks to PrimalxConvoy for the tip). In the statement, the company says that it did not actually sue the Amazon reviewer, but that it did insist that the reviewer’s “untrue, damaging, and disparaging statements” be taken down. “It’s our sincere belief that reasonable people understand that not only is it within our rights to take steps to protect our integrity, but that it should be expected that we would do so when it is recklessly attacked,” Mediabridge Products wrote. “The reviewer has since changed his review completely to remove the libelous statements, but unfortunately not before having an army attack us on the internet.” The company did not give any clue as to the terms of Amazon’s rescinding of Mediabridge’s selling license, but only said at the end of its statement “Unfortunately, as a result of our attempt to get this reviewer to do the right thing & remove his untrue statements about our company, Amazon has revoked our selling privileges. Many hard-working employees whose livelihood depended on that business will likely be put out of a job, by a situation that has been distorted & blown out of proportion.” Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Four weeks on, huge swaths of the Internet remain vulnerable to Heartbleed

Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock More than four weeks after the disclosure of the so-called Heartbleed bug found in a widely used cryptography package , slightly more or slightly less than half the systems affected by the catastrophic flaw remain vulnerable, according to two recently released estimates. A scan performed last month by Errata Security CEO Rob Graham found 615,268 servers that indicated they were vulnerable to attacks that could steal passwords, other types of login credentials, and even the extremely sensitive private encryption keys that allow attackers to impersonate websites or monitor encrypted traffic. On Thursday, the number stood at 318,239. Graham said his scans counted only servers running vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL crypto library that enabled the “Heartbeat” feature where the critical flaw resides. A separate scan using slightly different metrics arrived at an estimate that slightly less than half of the servers believed to be vulnerable in the days immediately following the Heartbleed disclosure remain susceptible. Using a tool the researcher yngve called TLS Prober, he found that 5.36 percent of all servers were vulnerable to Heartbleed as of April 11, four days after Heartbleed came to light. In a blog post published Wednesday , he said 2.33 percent of servers remained vulnerable. It’s important to remember the results don’t include the number of Heartbleed-vulnerable servers providing services such a virtual private networks or e-mail. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Four weeks on, huge swaths of the Internet remain vulnerable to Heartbleed

Epic announces crowdsourced dev model for next Unreal Tournament

It’s been a long six-and-a-half years since we’ve gotten a new Unreal Tournament game (not counting expansion packs), but today marks the beginning of the end for that wait. Epic announced that work on a new game, simply titled Unreal Tournament , begins today for PC, Mac, and Linux, and the process will heavily involve participation from the modding and player community from the get go. While a “small team of UT veterans” at Epic will be spearheading the development of the game, everything from design decisions to art direction will primarily “happen in the open, as a collaboration between Epic, UT fans, and [Unreal Engine 4] developers,” Epic says. The developers are inviting everyone from regular players to experienced modders from sites like Polycount to sign up at the Unreal Engine forums and use an official wiki to take direct part in driving the game’s direction. Already, mere minutes after the announcement, those forums are filled with players discussing everything from series maps and weapons they’d like to see return to things like VR headset compatibility. Epic says it will be “many months” until the game is in any sort of playable state, but when it is playable it “will be free. Not free to play, just free.” Source code will be made available directly from GitHub as it is updated, and modders will even be able to fork their own builds if they want to take the project in a new direction. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Epic announces crowdsourced dev model for next Unreal Tournament

New guidelines outline what iPhone data Apple can give to police

If you store your stuff on iCloud, Apple can provide most of that information to law enforcement if it’s requested. Andrew Cunningham We’ve known (or suspected) for some time that Apple can provide data from iOS devices to US law enforcement, whether that data is stored on Apple’s iCloud servers or on a password protected phone or tablet . In an effort to be more transparent about this process, Apple yesterday posted an extensive document describing what data the company can provide to law enforcement and the processes for requesting that data. The document outlines two basic types of data: information stored on Apple’s servers and information stored locally on iOS devices. Information on Apple’s servers includes both data associated with your Apple ID—your basic contact information, customer service records, your transaction history both in Apple’s retail stores and in the online iTunes and App Stores, and iTunes gift card information—and data associated with your iCloud account. All account data stored on Apple’s servers is obtainable “with a subpoena or greater legal process.” The short version is that essentially anything you’ve backed up to or stored on iCloud is available for Apple to fork over to law enforcement, including connection logs and IP addresses you’ve used. Apple has access to 60 days of iCloud mail logs that “include records of incoming and outgoing communications such as time, date, sender e-mail addresses, and recipient e-mail addresses”; any e-mail messages that the user has not deleted; and any other information that can be backed up to iCloud. As of this writing, this list includes contacts, calendars, browser bookmarks, Photo Stream photos, anything that uses the “documents and data” feature (which can include not just word processors but also photo and video apps, games, and data from other applications), and full device backups. Subscriber information requires a “subpoena or greater legal process,” e-mail logs require a court order or search warrant, and e-mail or other iCloud content requires a search warrant. Any iCloud information that the user deletes cannot be accessed. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New guidelines outline what iPhone data Apple can give to police

Level 3 claims six ISPs dropping packets every day over money disputes

Network operator Level 3, which has asked the FCC to protect it from ” arbitrary access charges ” that ISPs want in exchange for accepting Internet traffic, today claimed that six consumer broadband providers have allowed a state of “permanent congestion” by refusing to upgrade peering connections for the past year. Level 3 and Cogent, another network operator, have been involved in disputes with ISPs over whether they should pay for the right to send them traffic. ISPs have demanded payment in exchange for accepting streaming video and other data that is passed from the network providers to ISPs and eventually to consumers. When the interconnections aren’t upgraded, it can lead to congestion and dropped packets, as we wrote previously regarding a dispute between Cogent and Verizon . In a blog post today , Level 3 VP Mark Taylor wrote: Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Level 3 claims six ISPs dropping packets every day over money disputes

Fitbit designer calls Project Ara the “IKEA chair” of smartphones

Magnets, how do they work? Google’s eventual, modular Project Ara smartphone will answer that question and more once its first “millions of units” ship in 2015’s first half. Project Ara To some extent, Gadi Amit, the tech-design guru who owns New Deal Design and helms the team behind devices like Fitbit, is letting go. His latest project forced him to. It’s called Project Ara , a smartphone concept that began as a Motorola product before Google bought the company. Project Ara strays from Amit’s string of simple, elegant, self-contained products. This phone is not like a fitness band or a more efficient camera; it doesn’t solve a single, immediate goal and then step out of the way. Rather, Project Ara demands experimentation and customization, forcing everyone outside of the Project Ara team to become the phone’s designers. In Amit’s eyes, especially in the modern phone era, that has become the point. The mission, even. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Fitbit designer calls Project Ara the “IKEA chair” of smartphones

Maryland police to live-tweet prostitution sting

Elvert Barnes/Flickr Maryland’s Prince George’s Police Department (PGPD), which covers part of the Washington, DC metropolitan area, announced on various social media platforms that it will be live-tweeting a prostitution sting operation “sometime next week.” What could possibly go wrong? Despite a headline that reads as if it were written by The Onion —or perhaps its latest viral media parody spinoff Clickhole —the PGPD explains that its decision to employ this “unprecedented social media tactic” stems from the desire to shame prostitutes and others involved in “the oldest profession” and to let them know that “this type of criminal behavior is not welcome in Prince George’s County.” According to information provided on their Blogger, Twitter, and Facebook accounts, the PGPD will be documenting the planned takedown with frequent updates during the arrests, tweeting photos and arrestee information. The planned takedown in Maryland will target johns, not prostitutes themselves, and will be set up using online ads, according to the department. The PGPD elaborated: Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Maryland police to live-tweet prostitution sting

Cox plans gigabit Internet for residential customers this year

Cox Communications President Pat Esser said the cable company will roll out gigabit broadband to residential customers this year. During an interview with Bloomberg yesterday , Esser said: Delivering gigabit speeds to business service customers has always been a high priority to us, and for years we’ve delivered gigabit broadband to commercial customers across the country. We’re working on our roadmap now around the residential side of the business to bring gigabit speeds to customers this year. I’m talking about plans over time for all of our customers in all of our markets having residential gigabit broadband speeds available to them, and we’re excited about it. Over the next two to three weeks we’ll be announcing which markets we’re starting in. Esser didn’t mention whether this would be a fiber-to-the-home service, but at another point he noted, “We have this very robust network, fiber very deep in the network.” Cox offers fiber-to-the-premises for business customers needing 1Gbps or 10Gbps throughput. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cox plans gigabit Internet for residential customers this year

Hulu to launch free mobile content, new iOS app this summer

Free Hulu users will enjoy more full, ad-supported TV episodes this summer, and those ads will quite possibly force Pizza Hut pizza down their throats. Future app updates will add “extra cheese” as an option (we hope). This morning, Hulu CEO Mike Hopkins announced at a New York event that the streaming media service would begin offering select free content to mobile users “this summer.” Currently, Hulu requires a “Plus” subscription to watch its full-length TV and film content on anything other than a desktop Web browser, while non-paying app users are limited to brief video clips until they cough up $7.99 a month. Like Hulu’s free and paid content up until this point, the free-for-mobile summer content will remain advertising-backed. Though the free shows in question haven’t been announced, Hulu used the event to promote its next wave of internally produced programming, including new seasons of The Awesomes and Deadbeat , and it’s tempting to assume that the free mobile access will lean toward some of the only-on-Hulu selection. The move may very well have come in response to individual networks releasing more apps, particularly Comedy Central’s recent self-titled app that serves free, ad-supported episodes for all users (along with a deeper video selection after a user logs in with cable subscription information). Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hulu to launch free mobile content, new iOS app this summer