Behold, the world’s most sophisticated Android trojan

greyweed Recently discovered malware targeting Android smartphones exploits previously unknown vulnerabilities in the Google operating system and borrows highly advanced functionality more typical of malicious Windows applications, making it the world’s most sophisticated Android Trojan, a security researcher said. The infection, named Backdoor.AndroidOS.Obad.a, isn’t very widespread at the moment. The malware gives an idea of the types of smartphone malware that are possible, however, according to Kaspersky Lab expert Roman Unuchek in a blog post published Thursday . Sharply contrasting with mostly rudimentary Android malware circulating today, the highly stealthy Obad.a exploits previously unknown Android bugs, uses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections to spread to near-by handsets, and allows attackers to issue malicious commands using standard SMS text messages. “To conclude this review, we would like to add that Backdoor.AndroidOS.Obad.a looks closer to Windows malware than to other Android trojans, in terms of its complexity and the number of unpublished vulnerabilities it exploits,” Unuchek wrote. “This means that the complexity of Android malware programs is growing rapidly alongside their numbers.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Behold, the world’s most sophisticated Android trojan

Chinese supercomputer destroys speed record and will get much faster

Lights on the Tianhe-2 supercomputer change color depending on the power load. Jack Dongarra A Chinese supercomputer known as Tianhe-2 has been measured at speeds of 30.65 petaflops, or 74 percent faster than the current holder of the world’s-fastest-supercomputer title. The speed is remarkable partly because the Intel-based Tianhe-2 (also known as Milkyway-2) wasn’t even running at full capacity during testing. A five-hour Linpack test using 14,336 out of 16,000 compute nodes, or 90 percent of the machine, clocked in at the aforementioned 30.65 petaflops. (A petaflop is one quadrillion floating point operations per second, or a million billion.) Linpack benchmarks are used to rank the Top 500 supercomputers in the world . The Top 500 list’s current champion is Titan, a US system that hit 17.59 petaflops. Tianhe-2 achieved 1.935 gigaflops per watt, which is slightly less efficient than Titan’s 2.143 gigaflops per watt. Tianhe-2’s numbers were revealed this week in a paper by University of Tennessee professor Jack Dongarra, who created the Linpack benchmarks and helps compile the bi-annual Top 500 list. Dongarra’s paper doesn’t say whether Tianhe-2’s Linpack measurement was officially submitted for inclusion in the Top 500 list. Ars has asked him if the measurement will put Tianhe-2 on top when the next list is released, but we haven’t heard back yet. In any case, the new Top 500 rankings will be unveiled on June 17. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Chinese supercomputer destroys speed record and will get much faster

Internet Explorer 10 takes chunks out of IE9, Windows 8 closes on Vista

Net Market Share One wonders what the browser market would look like if Microsoft had enabled automatic updates before. Though the overall positions in the market were little changed in May, one thing is clear: Internet Explorer 10’s uptake is fast, in a way that no older version of the browser has ever been. Net Market Share Net Market Share Internet Explorer was up slightly, picking up 0.18 points for a 55.99 percent share of the desktop market. Firefox had stronger growth, up 0.33 points to 20.63 percent. Chrome was the month’s big loser, dropping 0.61 points to 15.74 percent—its lowest share since August 2011. Safari was marginally up, adding 0.08 points to reach an all-time high of 5.46 percent. Opera ended the month up 0.04 percent points, at 1.77 percent. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Internet Explorer 10 takes chunks out of IE9, Windows 8 closes on Vista

Microsoft promises annual Windows Server updates, can IT cope?

Windows Server 2012 will be updated this autumn to Windows Server 2012 R2. This will be the first in a series of more or less annual updates to the Windows Server platform. It’s not just the operating system that’ll get these regular updates, either. On the server side, System Center and SQL Server are also going to be on an annual cadence. On the client side, Visual Studio will be too. Even though Windows Server 2012 is less than a year old, Microsoft promises a stack of new features for the R2 iteration. Hyper-V, in particular, has some compelling improvements: legacy-free, UEFI-booting “generation 2” virtual machines, faster live migration, live cloning of VMs, online disk resizing, and support for live migration, backup, disk resizing, and dynamic memory for Linux guests. Windows’ pooled storage system, Storage Spaces, is set to become a lot smarter. Pools can use a mix of solid state and spinning disk media, and the Storage Space software will automatically move hot data off the spinning disks and onto the solid state ones. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft promises annual Windows Server updates, can IT cope?

France removes Internet cut-off threat from its anti-piracy law

This street art in eastern France reads: “Hadopi: The French Internet is under control!” mathias France finally put an end to the most extreme measure of its famous “three strikes” anti-piracy regime: no one will face being cut off from the Internet. The law is better known by its French acronym, Hadopi. In the last few years under the law, the Hadopi agency famously set up a system with graduating levels of warnings and fines . The threat of being cut off entirely from the Internet was the highest degree, but that penalty was never actually put into place. “Getting rid of the cut-offs and those damned winged elephants is a good thing. They’re very costly,” Joe McNamee, of European Digital Rights, quipped to Ars. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sony, Lego team up to create programmable, interactive Lego bricks

A newly revealed partnership seeks to bring the interactivity of Sony’s video games to the world of Lego’s physical bricks and characters. At a 25th anniversary open house for Sony’s Computer Science Laboratories in Japan , the companies showed off Toy Alive, a prototype project that uses simple Lego bricks with embedded microchips that can be controlled with a PC or a DualShock gamepad. The Toy Alive team is currently showing off a tiny, remote-controlled platform that can be controlled with a DualShock gamepad to play a chase game monitored by a webcam and computer software. Other bricks use translucent red plastic and built-in, computer-controlled LEDs to make a Lego house look like it’s on fire or to activate an actuator that causes Lego models to explode into pieces. The team is even experimenting with tiny wireless cameras that can give a minifig-eye view of a scene for a bit of augmented reality. Lego has long supported interactivity in its toys through its Mindstorms line of robotics aimed at programmers and students. But with Toy Alive, the team is trying to “keep the pieces small and simple so that children can use them with other toys,” according to associate researcher Alexis Andre, who has been working on the project for about a year. “It’s a mixture of video games and toys, and how do you make toys more interactive? How do you provide a platform for the children to do whatever they want to do?” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sony, Lego team up to create programmable, interactive Lego bricks

Two CPUs, two batteries, two OSes: Asus announces Transformer Book Trio

The Asus Transformer Book Trio takes the dockable tablet concept to the next level. Asus Asus has long offered a line of Android tablets that slot into keyboard docks, but at its Computex press conference it announced it would be taking this concept one step further. Its new Transformer Book Trio is a tablet running Android (an unspecified version of Jelly Bean, to be a bit more precise); when docked, it becomes a Haswell-equipped Windows 8 Ultrabook. The laptop contains all the ingredients for a standard Ultrabook in its base: a 4th-generation Haswell CPU, 1TB of storage, an unspecified amount of RAM, and a 33WHr battery. Behind the 11.6-inch 1080p display is an entirely separate computer based on Intel’s Clover Trail+ Atom platform: the 2GHz Atom Z2580, 2GB of RAM, 64GB of solid-state storage, and a 19WHr battery. When the laptop is docked, Engadget reports that a button press will switch between the Windows 8 installation in the base and the Android installation in the lid. Undocking the lid switches the tablet to a full-time Android tablet, though since the hardware is x86-based, one wonders if Windows 8 couldn’t be installed on it with some effort. The device combines a couple of concepts that Asus is already using elsewhere. Its Transformer Pad tablets have long been keyboard-dockable, and the Transformer AiO also uses a detachable screen to double as a tablet (though in that case the tablet’s hardware is ARM-based). Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Two CPUs, two batteries, two OSes: Asus announces Transformer Book Trio

Seat of Power: the computer workstation for the person with everything

MWE Lab’s Emperor 1510 LX—don’t call it a chair. MWE Labs Science fiction is filled with cherished seats of power, workstations that put the universe a finger-touch or a mere thought away. Darth Vader had his meditation pod, the Engineers of Prometheus had their womb-like control stations, and Captain Kirk has the Captain’s Chair. But no real-life workstation has quite measured up to these fictional seats of power in the way that Martin Carpentier’s Emperor workstations have. The latest “modern working environment” from Carpentier’s Quebec City-based MWE Lab is the Emperor 1510 LX. With a retractable monitor stand that can support up to five monitors (three 27-inch and two 19-inch), a reclining seat with thigh rest, a Bose sound system, and Italian leather upholstery, the Emperor 1510 LX looks more like a futuristic vehicle than a workstation.  And it’s priced like a vehicle, too—it  can soon be yours for the low, low price of $21,500. Tale of the Scorpion In 2006, Carpentier was slaving away as a web designer when he reached a breaking point. He was tired of his tangle of cables, the struggle to manage multiple monitors, and the horrible ergonomics that came with a standard computer desk. Inspired by the emperor scorpion, Carpentier modeled his workstation after its tail, with the monitors suspended at the stinger. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Seat of Power: the computer workstation for the person with everything

FiOS customer discovers the limits of “unlimited” data: 77TB a month

Yes, Virginia, there is a limit to what Verizon will let you do with FiOS’ “unlimited” data plan. And a California man discovered that limit when he got a phone call from a Verizon representative wanting to know what, exactly, he was doing to create more than 50 terabytes of traffic on average per month—hitting a peak of 77TB in March alone. “I have never heard of this happening to anyone,” the 27-year-old Californian—who uses the screen name houkouonchi and would prefer not to be identified by name—wrote in a post on DSLreports.com entitled ” LOL VZ called me about my bandwidth usage Gotta go Biz. ” “But I probably use more bandwidth than any FiOS customer in California, so I am not super surprised about this.” Curious about how one person could generate that kind of traffic, Ars reached out to houkouonchi and spoke with him via instant message. As it turns out, he’s the ultimate outlier. His problem is more that he’s violated Verizon’s terms of service than his excessive bandwidth usage. An IT professional who manages a test lab for an Internet storage company, houkouonchi has been providing friends and family a personal VPN, video streaming, and peer-to-peer file service—running a rack of seven servers with 209TB of raw storage in his house. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FiOS customer discovers the limits of “unlimited” data: 77TB a month

Microsoft talks about Xbox One’s internals, while disclosing nothing

Here’s the money shot: the back of the console has a power connector, HDMI in and out (for the purposes of hooking your cable box up to the console), optical audio out, two USB ports, the Kinect port, an IR Out port, and an Ethernet jack. Kyle Orland The Xbox One is full of technology and after its big reveal, Microsoft talked a little about what’s going into the console, giving some tidbits of info about what makes it tick. Hardware Microsoft says that the Xbox One has five custom-designed pieces of silicon spread between the console and its Kinect sensor. It didn’t elaborate on what these are. There’s a system-on-chip combining the CPU and GPU, which we presume to be a single piece of silicon, and there’s at least one sensor chip in the Kinect, perhaps replacing the PrimeSense processor used in the Xbox 360 Kinect, but what the others might be isn’t immediately clear. Possibilities include audio processors, on-chip memory, and USB controllers. One of the key questions about the AMD-built, 64-bit, 8-core SoC is “how fast is it?” At the moment, that’s unknown. Microsoft claims that the new console has “eight times” the graphics power of the old one, though some aspects of the new system are even more improved; for example, it has 16 times the amount of RAM. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft talks about Xbox One’s internals, while disclosing nothing