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Why NSA spied on inexplicably unencrypted Windows crash reports

The National Security Agency’s X-KEYSCORE program gives the spy agency access to a wide range of Internet traffic. Any information that isn’t encrypted is, naturally, visible to passive Internet wiretaps of the kind the NSA and other intelligence agencies use. This in turn will typically expose such things as e-mails, online chats, and general browsing behavior. And, according to slides published this weekend by Der Spiegel , this information also includes crash reports from Microsoft’s Windows Error Reporting facility built in to Windows. These reports will tell eavesdroppers what versions of what software someone is running, what operating system they use, and whenever that software has crashed. Windows also sends messages in the clear whenever a USB or PCI device is plugged in as part of its hunt for suitable drivers. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Why NSA spied on inexplicably unencrypted Windows crash reports

Apple’s incremental 2013—and what to expect in 2014

The trouble with the Apple beat is that everyone wants it to be as exciting and newsworthy as it was in 2007 when Apple announced the iPhone, or in 2010 when the original iPad dropped. Among both the tech press and enthusiasts, Apple is a victim of its own success—every year that the company doesn’t redefine a product category, the pundits get a bit more bored. In 2013, almost every one of Apple’s new hardware and software releases refined something that came before. While that might seem boring to early adopters, Apple continues to be a master of iteration, improving its products in noticeable and useful ways every single year. Here, we’ll look back at everything Apple has put out this year—and what we might expect in 2014. The iPhone Apple put a whole lot of marketing muscle behind the iPhone 5C, which is essentially a year-old phone. Andrew Cunningham In the strictest sense, Apple actually delivered two new iPhones this year: the iPhone 5S and the iPhone 5C . The 5S was the only truly new one, though—it delivered the expected improvements to the SoC and the camera while introducing a new hardware feature in the form of the TouchID fingerprint sensor. In contrast, the 5C is just an iPhone 5 with slightly upgraded cellular hardware and some colorful plastic. Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple’s incremental 2013—and what to expect in 2014

Game of Thrones illegal downloads exceed TV viewers for second year

The most-torrented shows of 2013, according to Torrent Freak. Torrent Freak Game of Thrones again turned out to be the most-pirated TV show of 2013, according to a report from Torrent Freak. The show was downloaded an estimated 5.9 million times, besting its proportion of conventional television viewers, which clocks in at 5.5 million. That is a 37 percent increase from 2012, when Torrent Freak estimated Game of Thrones was downloaded 4.28 million times. As the New York Times points out , illegal downloads grew about 10 percent in 2013, with 327 million unique users navigating 13.9 billion webpages that handle pirated movies and TV. The shows Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, The Big Bang Theory , and Dexter contributed another 14.3 million downloads between them. 2013 also saw plenty of industry leaders endorsing illegal downloading in one way or another. Game of Thrones director David Petrarca said the show thrives on “cultural buzz” in part generated by pirates; Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said that Game of Thrones ’ status as the most pirated show was “ better than an Emmy ;” Netflix stated that it uses piracy statistics to determine what types of shows to produce or license; Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan said piracy ” helped… in terms of brand awareness .” The Walking Dead executive producer Gale Ann Hurd disagreed , calling the idea that piracy does good for content a “mistaken belief” and saying the activity is not something “we should encourage.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

After sailing the domain name seas, Pirate Bay returns to Sweden

Aurich Lawson After nearly two weeks of bouncing its domain name around the globe, The Pirate Bay has returned to its home port. The notorious BitTorrent site originally went from .se to .sx (Sint Maarten), but it didn’t stop there—in recent days, it has shifted from .ac (Ascension Island) to .pe (Peru) to .gy (Guyana). Now, as of Thursday, it’s back to the comforts of .se (Sweden). Neither The Pirate Bay blog nor its Twitter feed offered any explanation. The move to .sx originally took place back in April 2013 when a Swedish prosecutor filed a motion to seize thepiratebay.se, piratebay.se, and thepiratebay.is. The registrar, the Internet Infrastructure Foundation, has said previously that it would only do so after being served by a Swedish court. “Our actions would largely be determined by the contents of the order and the issuing party,” the agency wrote in June 2012. “Accordingly, we will assess the situation on a case-by-case basis if such an order is issued.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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After sailing the domain name seas, Pirate Bay returns to Sweden

US report predicts CO2 emissions have peaked, energy independence near

Well-sited wind power is cheaper than coal, but the good sites aren’t evenly distributed throughout the US. NREL/DOE Although there are some reasonable questions about the value of making long-term projections about energy use, doing so is one of the duties of the US’ Energy Information Agency. On Monday, the EIA released an overview of a report in which it attempts to track the trends in the energy economy of the US out to 2040. The report contains some eye-popping predictions, including a huge (but brief) boom in domestic oil production, a near balance between energy imports and exports, and a peak in carbon emissions that’s already in our past. Energy predictions are fraught with uncertainty, but this report contains more than most, since it’s predicated on having the entire period out to 2040 covered by legislation and rules that are already on the books. At the moment, that would include the expiration of a tax credit that promotes the installation of renewable power facilities, something that Congress has already renewed several times. Perhaps more significantly, the EPA’s rules governing greenhouse gas emissions from existing facilities are still being formulated but are likely to be in effect for most of the period under consideration. This probably explains why the EIA predicts that the slice of domestic energy production that comes from renewables only increases from 11 to 12 percent over the next 30 years. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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US report predicts CO2 emissions have peaked, energy independence near

Exponential algorithm making Windows XP miserable could be fixed

Tom Carden Windows XP is really old, and we would suggest that you don’t use it unless you really have no option. For the most part, however, that age doesn’t really manifest itself. Sure, the operating system is missing the security features, hardware acceleration, and built-in support for things like USB 3 that newer versions of Windows have, but old software doesn’t have the same issues as, say, old cars. Old software generally runs as well today as it did when it was brand new. But Windows XP users have noticed that this isn’t entirely true. A bunch of them have found that the old operating system is working considerably worse than when it was released in 2001. The problem is that—especially among those who are still using Internet Explorer 6 or 7—each time you boot your Windows XP machine, it slows to a crawl. There’s a built-in process, svchost.exe, chewing up the entire processor, sometimes for an hour or more at a time. Wait long enough after booting and the machine will eventually return to normalcy. But an hour can be a long time to wait. Loss of horsepower and trouble starting up are common enough problems in old cars, but we don’t really expect the same things to happen on old PCs. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

North Korea attempts to purge online memory of executed leader

Kim Il Sung (left) is the founder of modern North Korea and the grandfather of current dictator Kim Jong Un. Tormod Sandtorv On Thursday, foreign policy watchers worldwide were stunned when North Korea announced the execution of Jang Song Taek , a top government official. Jang was the uncle of Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s young dictator, and also served as vice chairman of the National Defense Commission of North Korea . However, beyond the whims of North Korea’s leader, the Hermit Kingdom appears to have now also taken the unusual step of attempting to remove all references to Jang Song Taek from state-controlled Internet outlets, primarily the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). The KCNA website , which is hosted in Japan, appears to have suffered an outage briefly on Friday , and subsequently, past articles appeared scrubbed of mentions of Jang. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sprint wants to buy T-Mobile and leave US with just three major carriers

Masayoshi Son (left), poses with a Storm Trooper at Sprint owner SoftBank’s launch of the iPhone 3GS in 2009. Danny Choo Sprint is “working toward a possible bid for rival T-Mobile” but is first examining regulatory concerns that could prevent such a merger, the Wall Street Journal reported today . A merger would leave the US cellular market with only three major carriers, although a combined Sprint/T-Mobile would perhaps be a more formidable opponent to market leaders AT&T and Verizon Wireless. AT&T attempted to buy T-Mobile, but it dropped those plans in December 2011 after opposition from the Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Sprint hasn’t made a final decision on a bid, but it could happen in the first half of 2014 and be worth more than $20 billion “depending on the size of any stake in T-Mobile that Sprint tries to buy,” the Journal reported. “But it would likely face tough opposition from antitrust authorities, who worry consumers could suffer without a fourth national competitor to keep a check on prices,” the report said. AT&T’s takeover bid for T-Mobile would have been $39 billion.The Journal ‘s sources indicate that Sprint is wary of wasting time on a deal that might not come to fruition, but the company’s owner is leading the charge. “Driving the current effort is SoftBank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son, an aggressive acquirer who bought control of Sprint earlier this year and has made no secret of his desire to grow in the US via further deals,” the Journal wrote. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers

Ever wonder why most e-mail clients hide images by default? The reason for the “display images” button is because images in an e-mail must be loaded from a third-party server. For promotional e-mails and spam, usually this server is operated by the entity that sent the e-mail. So when you load these images, you aren’t just receiving an image—you’re also sending a ton of data about yourself to the e-mail marketer. Loading images from these promotional e-mails reveals a lot about you. Marketers get a rough idea of your location via your IP address. They can see the HTTP referrer , meaning the URL of the page that requested the image. With the referral data, marketers can see not only what client you are using (desktop app, Web, mobile, etc.) but also what folder you were viewing the e-mail in. For instance, if you had a Gmail folder named “Ars Technica” and loaded e-mail images, the referral URL would be “https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#label/Ars+Technica”—the folder is right there in the URL. The same goes for the inbox, spam, and any other location. It’s even possible to uniquely identify each e-mail, so marketers can tell which e-mail address requested the images—they know that you’ve read the e-mail. And if it was spam, this will often earn you more spam since the spammers can tell you’ve read their last e-mail. But Google has just announced a move that will shut most of these tactics down: it will cache all images for Gmail users. Embedded images will now be saved by Google and the e-mail content will be modified to display those images from Google’s cache, instead of from a third party server. E-mail marketers will no longer be able to get any information from images—they will see a single request from Google, which will then be used to send the image out to all Gmail users. Unless you click on a link, marketers will have no idea the e-mail has been seen. While this means improved privacy from e-mail marketers, Google will now be digging deeper than ever into your e-mails and literally modifying the contents. If you were worried about e-mail scanning , this may take things a step further. However, if you don’t like the idea of cached images, you can turn it off in the settings. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers

Valve: First version of SteamOS to be released to the masses on Friday

Valve PC gamers who are champing at the bit to build their very own ” Steam Machines ” won’t have to wait long to start tinkering, as Valve has revealed that its recently announced SteamOS will be available this Friday. The announcement comes alongside word from Valve that its prototype Steam Machines , along with the companion Steam Controller , will be shipped out to 300 randomly selected US beta testers on Friday. Valve plans to notify the lucky testers via e-mail at 2 pm Pacific today, and beta participants will get a special badge on their Steam accounts so journalists and fellow players can start bugging them for their impressions incessantly. If you’re not part of that lucky group of 300, though, you’re probably more interested in the fact that “SteamOS will be made available when the prototype hardware ships… downloadable by individual users and commercial OEMs.” More information about that release is coming soon, the company says, but Valve is already warning that “unless you’re an intrepid Linux hacker already, we’re going to recommend that you wait until later in 2014 to try it out.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Ken May

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