Tag: production

OEMs to stop selling PCs with Windows 7 by October 31, 2016

In February last year , Microsoft said that it would give a one year warning of when systems with Windows 7 preinstalled would no longer be available from OEMs. That time has finally come to pass. As spotted by Ed Bott , there’s now a date after which Windows 7 OEM preinstalls will no longer be available: October 31, 2016. That same date will also apply to Windows 8.1. Windows 8 preinstalls will end a few months earlier than that, June 30, 2016. This means that after October 31 next year, the only version of Windows that will be available on a new system from a PC builder will be Windows 10. Right now, OEMs can still offer Windows 7 Professional (though not any of the other versions), Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10. Windows 7 will remain supported until January 10, 2020. It left mainstream support earlier this year, so it’s no longer eligible to receive non-security fixes or extra features but still has many years of security updates. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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OEMs to stop selling PCs with Windows 7 by October 31, 2016

How to use Tor Messenger, the most secure chat program around

(credit: Samuel Huron ) On Thursday, the Tor Project released its first public beta of Tor Messenger , an easy-to-use, unified chat app that has security and cryptography baked in. If you care about digital security, you should ditch whatever chat program you’re using and switch to it right now. The app is specifically designed to protect location and routing information ( by using Tor ) and chat data in transit (by using the open source Off-The-Record, or OTR, protocol ). For anyone who has used a similar app (like Pidgin or Adium), Tor Messenger’s interface will be fairly self-explanatory, but there are two notable quirks. First, by default, it will not allow you to send messages to someone who doesn’t support OTR—but there is an option to disable that feature. (We’ll get to that in a minute.) Second, unlike Pidgin or Adium, Tor Messenger cannot log chats, which is handy if you’re privacy-minded. Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How to use Tor Messenger, the most secure chat program around

Windows 10 will be made an automatic “recommended” update early next year

The Windows 10 free upgrade program has so far concentrated on those Windows 7 and 8 users who reserved their copy in the weeks leading up to the operating system’s release. Over the coming months, Microsoft will start to spread the operating system to a wider audience . The Windows 10 upgrade will soon be posted as an “Optional Update” in Windows Update, advertising it to anyone who examines that list of updates. Then, early next year, it will be categorized as a “Recommended Update.” This is significant, because it means that systems that are configured to download and install recommended updates—which for most people is the safest option—will automatically fetch the upgrade and start its installer. The installer will still require human intervention to actually complete—you won’t wake up to find your PC with a different operating system—but Windows users will no longer need to actively seek the upgrade. This mirrors an accidental change that Microsoft did earlier this month. The Windows 10 upgrade was showing up for some people as a recommended update and the installer started automatically. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 10 will be made an automatic “recommended” update early next year

First ever online-only NFL game draws over 15 million viewers

(credit: Jaguars.com ) Over the weekend, the NFL and Yahoo streamed the first ever online-only NFL game , a Bills/Jaguars matchup in London. The game was mostly seen as an experiment for the NFL to test the viability of online distribution for a football game. Yahoo seems happy with the turnout, trumpeting 15.2 million unique viewers and 33.6 million total views for the game. The site also claims 33 percent of the streams came from international users. As Deadspin notes, the numbers were seriously pumped up by Yahoo thanks to auto-playing streams on the Yahoo and Tumblr homepages. Anyone who visited either high-traffic homepage counted as a viewer for the game. Still, Yahoo notes that “460 million total minutes” of the game were streamed, which means that each of the 15.2 million viewers hung around for an average of 30 minutes. When the Yahoo/NFL deal was announced, a CNN Money report said that Yahoo paid “at least $10 million” for the rights to the game. The game was available for free online, supported only by advertising. Yahoo promised advertisers 3.5 million viewers in the United States, so things seem to have gone better than expected. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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First ever online-only NFL game draws over 15 million viewers

Prison phone companies fight for right to charge inmates $14 a minute

(credit: Jason Farrar ) The Federal Communications Commission is about to face another lawsuit, this time over a vote to cap the prices prisoners pay for phone calls. Yesterday’s vote  came after complaints that inmate-calling companies are overcharging prisoners, their families, and attorneys. Saying the price of calls sometimes hits $14 per minute, the FCC has now capped rates at 11¢ per minute. “None of us would consider ever paying $500 a month for a voice-only service where calls are dropped for seemingly no reason, where fees and commissions could be as high at 60 percent per call and, if we are not careful, where a four-minute call could cost us a whopping $54,” FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn said before yesterday’s vote. Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Prison phone companies fight for right to charge inmates $14 a minute

Breaking 512-bit RSA with Amazon EC2 is a cinch. So why all the weak keys?

(credit: martinak15 ) The cost and time required to break 512-bit RSA encryption keys has plummeted to an all-time low of just $75 and four hours using a recently published recipe that even computing novices can follow. But despite the ease and low cost, reliance on the weak keys to secure e-mails, secure-shell transactions, and other sensitive communications remains alarmingly high. The technique, which uses Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service , is described in a paper published last week titled Factoring as a Service . It’s the latest in a 16-year progression of attacks that have grown ever faster and cheaper. When 512-bit RSA keys were first factored in 1999, it took a supercomputer and hundreds of other computers seven months to carry out. Thanks to the edicts of Moore’s Law – which holds that computing power doubles every 18 months or so – the factorization attack required just seven hours and $100 in March, when “FREAK,” a then newly disclosed attack on HTTPS-protected websites with 512-bit keys , came to light. In the seven months since FREAK’s debut, websites have largely jettisoned the 1990s era cipher suite that made them susceptible to the factorization attack. And that was a good thing, since the factorization attack made it easy to obtain the secret key needed to cryptographically impersonate the webserver or to decipher encrypted traffic passing between the server and end users. But e-mail servers, by contrast, remain woefully less protected. According to the authors of last week’s paper, the RSA_EXPORT cipher suite is used by an estimated 30.8 percent of e-mail services using the SMTP protocol , 13 percent of POP3S servers . and 12.6 percent of IMAP-based e-mail services . Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Breaking 512-bit RSA with Amazon EC2 is a cinch. So why all the weak keys?

Toyota 2050 plans to cut CO2 from its new cars by 90 percent

Earlier today, Toyota unveiled a bold new plan for the company’s sustainability efforts. By the year 2050, it plans to have cut CO 2 emissions from its new cars by 90 percent (compared to 2010). Toyota also wants to completely eliminate CO 2 pollution from new car manufacturing, as well as over the entire lifecycle of a car including its recycling. These are bold goals. The company says it will build off the success of its Prius hybrids to cut vehicle emissions. Advanced hybrid powertrains will be a big research focus, and the company even gave a shout-out to silicon carbide supercapacitors. In addition, big things are planned for hydrogen. The Japanese government has been incentivizing its car industry to work with fuel cells, and road cars are starting to appear. The Toyota Mirai is already in production and coming to America, even if the fueling stations it will depend upon are few and far between. Completely eradicating CO 2 from the production and recycling of new cars is an equally big challenge. The company wants all its production factories to have zero emissions, in part through renewable energy and fuel cells. And it has goals to promote recycling and conservation around the world. More specifics are included in Toyota’s new environmental action plan —its sixth so far—which runs from 2016-2020. That means it will be a few years before we can judge if Toyota’s commitment to the environment is succeeding. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Toyota 2050 plans to cut CO2 from its new cars by 90 percent

University of Cambridge study finds 87% of Android devices are insecure

The study’s estimate of the proportion of known “insecure,” “maybe secure” and “secure” devices over time. (credit: androidvulnerabilities.org ) It’s easy to see that the Android ecosystem currently has a rather lax policy toward security, but a recent study from the University of Cambridge put some hard numbers to Android’s security failings. The conclusion finds that “on average 87.7% of Android devices are exposed to at least one of 11 known critical vulnerabilities.” Data for the study was collected through the group’s ” Device Analyzer ” app, which has been available for free on the Play Store since May 2011. After the participants opted into the survey, the University says it collected daily Android version and build number information from over 20,400 devices. The study then compared this version information against 13 critical vulnerabilities (including the Stagefright vulnerabilities ) dating back to 2010. Each individual device was then labeled “secure” or “insecure” based on whether or not its OS version was patched against these vulnerabilities, or placed in a special “maybe secure” category if it could have gotten a specialized, backported fix. As for why so many Android devices are insecure, the study found that most of the blame sits with OEMs. The group states that “the bottleneck for the delivery of updates in the Android ecosystem rests with the manufacturers, who fail to provide updates to fix critical vulnerabilities.” Along with the study, the University of Cambridge is launching ” AndroidVulnerabilities.org ,” a site that houses this data and grades OEMs based on their security record. The group came up with a 1-10 security rating for OEMs that it calls the “FUM” score. This algorithm takes into account the number of days a proportion of running devices has no known vulnerabilities ( F ree), the proportion of devices that run the latest version of Android ( U pdate), and the mean number of vulnerabilities not fixed on any device the company sells ( M ean). The study found that Google’s Nexus devices were the most secure out there, with a FUM score of 5.2 out of 10. Surprisingly, LG was next with 4.0, followed by Motorola, Samsung, Sony, and HTC, respectively. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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University of Cambridge study finds 87% of Android devices are insecure

How Soviets used IBM Selectric keyloggers to spy on US diplomats

(credit: Etan J. Tal ) A National Security Agency memo that recently resurfaced a few years after it was first published contains a detailed analysis of what very possibly was the world’s first keylogger—a 1970s bug that Soviet spies implanted in US diplomats’ IBM Selectric typewriters to monitor classified letters and memos. The electromechanical implants were nothing short of an engineering marvel. The highly miniaturized series of circuits were stuffed into a metal bar that ran the length of the typewriter, making them invisible to the naked eye. The implant, which could only be seen using X-ray equipment, recorded the precise location of the little ball Selectric typewriters used to imprint a character on paper. With the exception of spaces, tabs, hyphens, and backspaces, the tiny devices had the ability to record every key press and transmit it back to Soviet spies in real time. A “lucrative source of information” The Soviet implants were discovered through the painstaking analysis of more than 10 tons’ worth of equipment seized from US embassies and consulates and shipped back to the US. The implants were ultimately found inside 16 typewriters used from 1976 to 1984 at the US embassy in Moscow and the US consulate in Leningrad. The bugs went undetected for the entire eight-year span and only came to light following a tip from a US ally whose own embassy was the target of a similar eavesdropping operation. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How Soviets used IBM Selectric keyloggers to spy on US diplomats

Unionized video game voice actors overwhelmingly approve strike vote

Members of the SAG-AFTRA union have overwhelmingly approved a measure authorizing an “interactive media” strike that could have wide-ranging impact on the availability of professional voice talent for video game projects. The union announced today that 96.52 percent of its members voted in favor of the strike. That’s well above the 75 percent threshold that was necessary to authorize such a move, and a result the union is calling “a resounding success.” Despite the vote, union members will not strike immediately. Instead, a strike can now be called whenever the union’s National Board decides to declare it. Armed with that knowledge, SAG-AFTRA will be sending its Negotiating Comittee back to talk with major game publishers including EA, Activision, Disney, and Warner Bros., which are signatories to a current agreement with the union. After their old agreement technically expired at the end of 2014, both sides have failed to reach a new understanding in negotiation sessions in February and June. SAG-AFTRA is looking for a number of concessions from the game industry, including “back end bonus” royalties for games that sell at least two million units, “stunt pay” for “vocally stressful” work, and more information to be provided about projects before time-consuming auditions are scheduled. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Unionized video game voice actors overwhelmingly approve strike vote