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Hack of Boxee.tv exposes password data, messages for 158,000 users

A screenshot of the Boxee.tv forums post leading to an 800 megabyte file of leaked user data, including cryptographically hashed passwords. riskbasedsecurity.com Hackers posted names, e-mail addresses, message histories, and partially protected login credentials for more than 158,000 forum users of Boxee.tv, the Web-based television service that was acquired by Samsung last year , researchers said. The breach occurred no later than last week, when a full copy of the purloined forum data became widely available, Scott A. McIntyre, a security researcher in Australia, told Ars. On Tuesday, officials from password management service LastPass began warning customers with e-mail addresses included in an 800 megabyte file that’s still circulating online. The file contains personal data associated with 158,128 user accounts, about 172,000 e-mail addresses, and the cryptographically scrambled passwords that corresponded to those Boxee accounts, LastPass said. The dump also included a wealth of other details, such as user birth dates, IP addresses, site activity, full message histories, and password changes. All user messages sent through the service were included as part of the leak. As Ars has explained before, even when passwords in hacked databases have been cryptographically hashed, most remain highly susceptible to cracking attacks that can reveal the plain-text characters required to access the account . The damage can be especially severe when people use the same or similar passwords to protect accounts on multiple sites, a practice that’s extremely common. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Faster, cheaper, smaller: The state of the system-on-a-chip in 2014

Aurich Lawson/Ars Technica If you’re reading this, the odds are pretty good that you have a smartphone. There’s also a better-than-average chance that you know a little something about the stuff inside that phone—who makes the chips inside and how those chips stack up to the ones in other phones. About a year ago, we wrote a guide covering most of the major players making these chips, and now that this year’s Mobile World Congress is over and done with, we thought it was time to revisit the subject. What’s changed? What’s stayed the same? And what’s going to happen in the next year that you need to know about? We’ll begin by looking at emerging trends before moving on to a bird’s-eye view of where all the major chipmakers stand. This won’t give you an in-depth technical description of every detail, but it should help you understand where this tech is headed in 2014. Read 55 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Faster, cheaper, smaller: The state of the system-on-a-chip in 2014

BlackBerry still losing money, just 10 times less than it did last quarter

The BlackBerry Q10. Ars Technica On Friday, BlackBerry announced (PDF) its quarterly earnings. Compared to the previous quarter, the embattled Canadian handset maker seems to have slowed the bleeding. In just three months, it slashed its losses by a factor of 10. In its fourth fiscal quarter ending March 1, 2014, BlackBerry sustained a net loss of $423 million, down from a net loss of $4.4 billion the previous quarter . That harsh third fiscal quarter loss was a driver behind a terrible fiscal 2014 year overall for Blackberry: the company lost $5.8 billion from March 1, 2013 to March 1, 2014. “I am very pleased with our progress and execution in fiscal Q4 against the strategy we laid out three months ago. We have significantly streamlined operations, allowing us to reach our expense reduction target one quarter ahead of schedule,” said John Chen, the company’s CEO, in a statement. “BlackBerry is on sounder financial footing today with a path to returning to growth and profitability.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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BlackBerry still losing money, just 10 times less than it did last quarter

Jury: MP3tunes founder must pay $41 million for copyright violations

Michael Robertson, an entrepreneur who has been waging legal feuds against the music industry for more than a decade now, has been ordered to pay $41 million to a record label that sued him. The record label EMI sued MP3tunes back in 2007, and the case finally went to a jury last week in New York federal court. The jury found MP3tunes, and Robertson personally, liable for copyright violations . A separate damages trial ended yesterday, with the jury issuing a verdict of around $41 million. That’s an estimate, because the decision was a “complex, lengthy” verdict that will take the lawyers until next week to calculate precisely, according to a Reuters report on the outcome of the trial. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Jury: MP3tunes founder must pay $41 million for copyright violations

Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency

Michael Mandiberg Researchers said they have uncovered two apps that were downloaded from the official Google Play market more than one million times that use Android devices to mine the Litecoin and Dogecoin cryptocurrencies without explicitly informing end users. According to a blog post published Tuesday by a researcher from antivirus provider Trend Micro, the apps are Songs , installed from one million to five million times, and Prized , which was installed from 10,000 to 50,000 times. Neither the app descriptions nor their terms of service make clear that the apps subject Android devices to the compute-intensive process of mining, Trend Micro Mobile Threats Analyst Veo Zhang wrote. As of Wednesday afternoon, the apps were still available. Mining apps typically consume larger-than-average amounts of electricity and can generate extremely hot temperatures as CPUs, GPUs, or other types of processors strain to perform cryptographic hashing functions required for users to mint new digital coins. The strain can be especially onerous on smartphones, because they’re equipped with hardware that’s much less powerful than that found in traditional computers. The apps discovered by Trend Micro were programmed to mine coins only when devices were recharging. That setting would help prevent batteries from draining quickly, but it would do nothing to prevent devices from overheating or consuming large amounts of bandwidth. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

New dwarf planet found sneaking through the inner Oort Cloud

An artist’s depiction of Sedna, the first of the objects from this class of bodies to have been discovered. NASA A new dwarf planet-like body has been found on the outer edges of the Solar System. This object, called 2012VP 113 , is about 450km wide and is the second body of its class found since the identification of the dwarf planet Sedna in 2003, and it joins an exclusive club composed of some of the strangest objects in the Solar System. The observable Solar System can be divided into three regions: the rocky terrestrial planets and asteroids of the inner Solar System, the gas giant planets, and the icy Kuiper Belt objects, which include Pluto. The Kuiper Belt stretches from beyond Neptune, which is at 30 astronomical units (where 1AU is the typical distance between the Earth and the Sun), to about 50AU. Sedna and 2012VP 113 are strange objects because they reside in a region where there should be nothing, according to our theories of the Solar System formation. Their orbit is well beyond that of Neptune, the last recognized planet of the Solar System, and even beyond that of Pluto, which differs from planets because of its size, unusual orbit, and composition. (Pluto, once considered a planet, is now considered the lead object of a group of bodies called plutinos.) Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Google: Cloud prices should track Moore’s Law, are falling too slowly

Tharan Parameshwaran Google today continued the trend of cloud services price cuts, while claiming that cloud network operators aren’t cutting average prices quickly enough. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google frequently advertise price cuts , but Google today claimed that “pricing hasn’t followed Moore’s Law : over the past five years, hardware costs improved by 20-30 percent annually, but public cloud prices fell at just 8 percent per year.” In today’s announcement, unveiled at Google’s Cloud Platform Live event , the company said, “We think cloud pricing should track Moore’s Law, so we’re simplifying and reducing prices for our various on-demand, pay-as-you-go services by 30-85 percent.” Moore’s Law is the observation that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles about every two years, bringing steady increases in processing power. One Amazon price cut last year was on the order of 37 to 80 percent for its dedicated instances, so this actually isn’t that unusual. Google declined to say which companies it included in its “public cloud prices” statistic. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google: Cloud prices should track Moore’s Law, are falling too slowly

Microsoft releases source code for MS-DOS and Word

In recognition of their historical importance and commercial irrelevance, Microsoft has given the source code to MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 and Word for Windows 1.1a to the Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View, California. The source is now freely downloadable by anyone, though making practical use of it is an exercise for the reader. This source code joins other important early programs, including Adobe Photoshop 1.0 and Apple II DOS, among the CHM’s collection. Len Shustek, CHM chairman said, “We think preserving historic source code like [MS-DOS and Word] is key to understanding how software has evolved from primitive roots to become a crucial part of our civilization.” The scale of change between then and now is formidable. MS-DOS had just 300kB of source code and occupied as little as 12kB of memory. In 1981, MS-DOS was a key part of IBM’s PC, and the success of the PC—and its clones—made Microsoft the industry giant it is today. Word for Windows is the product that turned WordPerfect from market leader into all-but-irrelevant also-ran. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft releases source code for MS-DOS and Word

Facebook purchases VR headset maker Oculus for $2 billion [updated]

Aurich Lawson Giant social networking company Facebook has just announced it has “reached a definitive agreement” to acquire virtual reality headset maker Oculus for $400 million in cash and 23.1 million shares valued at $1.6 billion. Oculus can earn another $300 million if it reaches unspecified performance milestones, and the deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2014. In announcing the deal, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg indicated that the move is about much more than gaming, and goes well beyond the kneejerk FarmVille VR jokes that propagated at warp speed immediately in the announcement’s wake. “While the applications for virtual reality technology beyond gaming are in their nascent stages, several industries are already experimenting with the technology,” Facebook said in a blog post . “Facebook plans to extend Oculus’ existing advantage in gaming to new verticals, including communications, media and entertainment, education, and other areas,” he wrote. “Mobile is the platform of today, and now we’re also getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow,” Zuckerberg said in a statement. “Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever and change the way we work, play, and communicate.” Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Facebook purchases VR headset maker Oculus for $2 billion [updated]

Xbox One gamepads finally, unofficially supported on PC

Not seen here: the Xbox One controller’s USB port that hackers have finally bent to their will. We at Ars have argued about which next-gen video game controller is more comfortable , but what hasn’t been up for discussion is that we want to use both pads on our computers. Both have USB connections, after all, and we’ve been racking up controller-friendly PC games lately. But neither Microsoft nor Sony has released official drivers to get their newest controllers working via that connection. That’s a bit crazy, as Microsoft’s choice to officially support PC gaming using the 360 pad helped make it the de facto standard for non-mouse-and-keyboard play for computer gamers. With the Xbox One controller, on the other hand, we’ve had to go the seedy, indirect path, installing unofficial drivers while crossing our fingers. Shortly after its launch, DualShock 4 buyers lucked out with an unofficial PC patch, but Xbox One controller owners had their chance shot down after Microsoft asked hacker Chris Gallizi to stop developing his own workaround . Thankfully, another hacker made his own attempt this month before conferring with Microsoft, meaning that Windows users can finally add next-gen pads to their PC arsenal. At this time, hacker Lucas Assis’ patch is quite inelegant, even though it received an update last week that fixed issues with the controller’s triggers. You’ll need to install an unofficial driver and two applications (linked in the video tutorial above) before the controller will even work, and you’ll probably want to install the paid XPadder app afterward to enjoy full support for your Steam library. Many games we tested didn’t work without that latter addition tossed on top. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Xbox One gamepads finally, unofficially supported on PC

Ken May

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