Tag: reprints

Optical transistor switches states by trapping a single photon

NIST Optical connections are slowly replacing wires as a means of shuffling bits in between systems—there are already plans afoot to have different components within a single system communicate via an optical connection. But, so far at least, all the processing of those bits is taking place using electrons. Yesterday’s edition of Science includes a demonstration of an all-optical transistor that can be switched between its on and off states using a single photon. Although it’s an impressive demonstration of physics, the work also indicates that we’re likely to stick with electrons for a while, given that the transistor required two lasers and a cloud of a cold atomic gas. The work relied on a cold gas of cesium atoms. These atoms have an extremely convenient property: two closely separated ground states, each with a corresponding excited state. All of these states are separated by an energy that corresponds to a specific wavelength of light, so using a laser of that wavelength allows you to shift the system into a different state. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Optical transistor switches states by trapping a single photon

Verizon would end “century of regulation” by killing wireline phone, says NY AG

Hurricane Sandy caused widespread damage in Fire Island, New York. Fireisland.com New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman this week accused Verizon of trying to “depart from a century of telephone service regulation” by ending wireline telephone service in a part of Fire Island devastated by Hurricane Sandy in October, 2012. In addition, Schneiderman has accused Verizon of violating a state order by telling customers outside of Fire Island that they should accept wireless phone service instead of repairs to their landline service. He says Verizon should be fined $100, 000 per customer, per day. Verizon says it has not violated the state order, and that its offer of wireless service outside Fire Island is strictly optional. Verizon is, however, trying to gain state approval to end wireline service entirely in western Fire Island. Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Verizon would end “century of regulation” by killing wireline phone, says NY AG

Windows 8 vaults past Vista, IE10 continues to surge

Net Market Share Windows 8 passed a milestone of sorts in June, passing Windows Vista’s market share to become the third-most used version of Windows on the Internet. Internet Explorer 10 continued to show strong growth too, fueled this time by automatic updating. Google Chrome put in a strong performance, offsetting losses made earlier in the year. Its growth was to the detriment of Mozilla’s Firefox, which fell significantly. Net Market Share Net Market Share Microsoft’s browser made a slight gain, up 0.16 points to 56.15 percent (a two year high). Firefox was down 1.48 points to 19.15 percent—the lowest share the open source browser has seen for more than two years. Chrome rose 1.43 points to a 17.17 percent share. Safari was more or less unchanged, up 0.09 points to 5.55 percent. Opera lost 0.19 points for a share of 1.58 percent, a level not seen since August last year. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 8 vaults past Vista, IE10 continues to surge

Google making the Web faster with protocol that reduces round trips

Can Google’s QUIC be faster than Mega Man’s nemesis, Quick Man? Josh Miller Google, as is its wont, is always trying to make the World Wide Web go faster. To that end, Google in 2009 unveiled SPDY , a networking protocol that reduces latency and is now being built into HTTP 2.0. SPDY is now supported by Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and the upcoming Internet Explorer 11 . But SPDY isn’t enough. Yesterday, Google released a boatload of information about its next protocol, one that could reshape how the Web routes traffic. QUIC—standing for Quick UDP Internet Connections—was created to reduce the number of round trips data makes as it traverses the Internet in order to load stuff into your browser. Although it is still in its early stages, Google is going to start testing the protocol on a “small percentage” of Chrome users who use the development or canary versions of the browser—the experimental versions that often contain features not stable enough for everyone. QUIC has been built into these test versions of Chrome and into Google’s servers. The client and server implementations are open source, just as Chromium is. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google making the Web faster with protocol that reduces round trips

Password complexity rules more annoying, less effective than lengthy ones

Few Internet frustrations are so familiar as the password restriction . After creating a few (dozen) logins for all our Web presences, the use of symbols, mixed cases, and numbers seems less like a security measure and more like a torture device when it comes to remembering a complex password on a little-used site. But at least that variety of characters keeps you safe, right? As it turns out, there is some contrary research that supports both how frustrating these restrictions are and suggests it’s possible that the positive effect of complexity rules on security may not be as great as long length requirements. Let’s preface this with a reminder: the conventional wisdom is that complexity trumps length every time, and this notion is overwhelmingly true. Every security expert will tell you that “Supercalifragilistic” is less secure than “gj7B!!!bhrdc.” Few password creation schemes will render any password uncrackable, but in general, length does less to guard against crackability than complexity. A password is not immune from cracking simply by virtue of being long—44,991 passwords recovered from a dump of LinkedIn hashes last year were 16 characters or more. The research we describe below refers specifically to the effects of restrictions placed by administrators on password construction on their crackability. By no means does it suggest that a long password is, by default, more secure than a complex one. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Password complexity rules more annoying, less effective than lengthy ones

Microsoft, like Google, asks secret court if it can publish data sharing total

In a new legal filing made public on Wednesday, Microsoft submitted a motion (PDF) to the notoriously secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) saying that the company “continues to seek—to correct the misimpression, furthered by such inaccurate media reporting, that it provides the United States Government with direct access to its servers and network infrastructure and, thereby, indiscriminately discloses Microsoft users’ information to the Government.” The filing was submitted on June 19, 2013, just one day after Google’s similar motion . Like Google, Microsoft said it “seeks to report aggregate information about [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] orders and [FISA Amendments Act] directives separately from all other local, state, and federal law enforcement demands.” Tech companies are presumably attempting to get FISC to allow them to release this information so that they can show there isn’t a hand-in-glove relationship between these corporations and the federal government. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft, like Google, asks secret court if it can publish data sharing total

OS X is holding back the 2013 MacBook Air’s 802.11ac Wi-Fi speeds

Apple’s 2013 MacBook Air and new Airport Extreme Base Station are the company’s first 802.11ac products, and there are some bugs that need to be worked out. Apple Apple’s 2013 MacBook Air doesn’t look like much of an upgrade from the outside, but the story is different on the inside. We’ve spent the better part of a week using the new Air and measuring just how Intel’s new Haswell processors , the PCI Express-based SSD , and the 802.11ac Wi-Fi adapter change the laptop compared to last year’s model. The new Wi-Fi chip was the change that I was the most eager to get my hands on. I’m always looking to boost my network speeds, but I’ve been waiting for hardware based on the new 802.11ac standard to become more widely available before upgrading everything on my network. Reviewing both the new Air and Apple’s new 802.11ac-capable Airport Express Base Station simultaneously would give me a chance to see just how close the lauded “Gigabit Wi-Fi” would come to fulfilling its promises. I was unpleasantly surprised by the results. Both the 2012 and 2013 MacBook Airs use four antennas to transmit data—two to send data and two to receive it. Each set of antennas can theoretically send and receive 150Mbps (or 18.75MBps) using 5GHz 802.11n for a total of 300Mbps (37.5MBps). Under 802.11ac, the size of each stream is increased to 433Mbps, making for a maximum theoretical link speed of 866Mbps (108.25MBps) in the 2013 MacBook Air. Actual network transfer speeds rarely (if ever) come within spitting distance of these theoretical maximums, but we would at least expect the actual 802.11ac transfer speeds to increase by a similar percentage compared to 802.11n. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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OS X is holding back the 2013 MacBook Air’s 802.11ac Wi-Fi speeds

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

Espionage malware infects raft of governments, industries around the world

Kaspersky Lab Security researchers have blown the whistle on a computer-espionage campaign that over the past eight years has successfully compromised more than 350 high-profile targets in 40 countries. “NetTraveler,” named after a string included in an early version of the malware, has targeted a number of industries and organizations, according to a blog post published Tuesday by researchers from antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab. Targets include oil industry companies, scientific research centers and institutes, universities, private companies, governments and governmental institutions, embassies, military contractors and Tibetan/Uyghur activists. Most recently, the group behind NetTraveler has focused most of its efforts on obtaining data concerning space exploration, nanotechnology, energy production, nuclear power, lasers, medicine, and communications. “Based on collected intelligence, we estimate the group size to about 50 individuals, most of which speak Chinese natively and have working knowledge of the English language,” the researchers wrote. “NetTraveler is designed to steal sensitive data as well as log keystrokes, and retrieve file system listings and various Office of PDF documents.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Espionage malware infects raft of governments, industries around the world

Apple issues OS X 10.8.4 update, includes iMessage and FaceTime fixes

OS X 10.8.4 comes with a long list of fixes. Andrew Cunningham After several weeks of beta testing, Apple has released OS X version 10.8.4 for all Macs running Mountain Lion. The update fixes a long list of minor issues  and some security bugs as the OS nears its first birthday. Those hoping for major changes to OS X will have to wait until Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) next week, at which Apple is widely expected to show off Mountain Lion’s successor. Quite a few of 10.8.4’s fixes are aimed at businesses. There are fixes that will help Calendar work better with Microsoft Exchange servers, compatibility and speed improvements to OS X’s Active Directory integration, improvements to compatibility with “certain enterprise Wi-Fi networks,” and fixes to issues with the SMB and NFS network sharing protocols. As ever, Apple is annoyingly nonspecific about the exact problems these updates solve, but network administrators with OS X clients may find something to like about the new update. Other squashed bugs will be of more interest to consumers. For example, there’s an iMessage fix that will prevent out-of-order messages, a fix for a FaceTime issue that would prevent calls to international numbers, and an update to Safari (now at version 6.0.5) that “improves stability for some websites with chat features and games.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple issues OS X 10.8.4 update, includes iMessage and FaceTime fixes