Tag: style-details

Report: Amazon’s next Kindle Paperwhite will pick up a 300 PPI screen

The original Kindle Paperwhite. Cesar Torres Amazon’s Kindle Fire HDX tablets have already broken the 300 PPI barrier, but the sharpest of its E Ink readers sits at a much lower 212 PPI. According to a report from TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino, that may be about to change—Amazon is apparently working on a new version of its backlit Kindle Paperwhite with a 300 PPI display of an unspecified size and resolution. Since E Ink screens are meant to mimic the printed page, a sharper screen would bring the e-reader that much closer to the experience of reading an actual book. While the new e-reader is still apparently “several months away,” we know a little more about its other planned features. On the hardware side, Amazon will reportedly be adding an ambient light sensor to adjust the device’s backlight based on the light in the room you’re in, and hardware buttons for page turning will be making a return (the current Paperwhite relies on touch input for page turning). On the software side, the device’s UI will of course be upscaled to take advantage of the high-density screen, and Amazon will be introducing some new fonts and other tweaks to improve the Kindle’s typography. Finally, the new Paperwhite’s design will be tweaked to bring it more in line with that of the newest Fire tablets. Amazon isn’t the first to bring a high-density e-reader to market. Kobo’s Aura HD has a 265 PPI, 6.8-inch screen and has been out since May, though Kobo is a bigger presence in its home country of Canada than it is in the US. (The Aura HD was supposedly a limited-edition product, but it’s still on sale for $170 six months later so it’s clearly not  that limited.) The newest Paperwhite  will however be the first E Ink reader with access to Amazon’s gigantic e-book library and the Kindle brand, two potent weapons in the battle for e-book market supremacy. Read on Ars Technica | Comments        

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Report: Amazon’s next Kindle Paperwhite will pick up a 300 PPI screen

Google launches Play Newsstand: a hybrid magazine store and RSS reader

The long-rumored Google Play Newsstand for Android has finally launched , and it’s not at all what we were expecting. Early reporting and investigation pinned it as a newspaper section of the Play Store, but it’s much more than that. Google is selling newspapers and magazines under a single banner, and  there’s a visual-heavy RSS reader, sort of like Flipboard. This means Newsstand is replacing two of Google’s existing apps: Google Play Magazines and Google Currents. Google is pitching it as “all your subscriptions in one place.” Like most things “Google” these days, calling it an “app” isn’t really the whole story. There’s also a new section of the desktop Play Store, and some magazines and newspapers are even viewable in the browser. RSS is strictly confined to the app, though. Just like the old Play Magazines, paid content is available as a subscription or on a per-issue basis, and 30-day trials are available for some premium content. RSS feeds, magazines, and newspaper can be downloaded for offline reading later, and there’s also a bookmark function. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Google launches Play Newsstand: a hybrid magazine store and RSS reader

Alleged Windows support scammer forfeits money earned by “fixing” PCs

Well, maybe this guy wasn’t quite as smart as Heisenberg. AMC A man accused of tricking PC users into thinking they had viruses and then offering to “fix” their perfectly fine computers has agreed to pay back every penny he allegedly received in the scam. Navin Pasari is a defendant in one of six complaints that the Federal Trade Commission filed in September 2012 against people and entities accused of leading Windows tech support scams.”According to the complaint against Pasari and his co-defendants, the defendants placed ads with Google, which appeared when consumers searched for their computer company’s tech support telephone number,” the FTC noted in an announcement today . “After getting consumers on the phone, the defendants’ telemarketers allegedly claimed they were affiliated with legitimate companies, including Dell, Microsoft, McAfee, and Norton, and told consumers they had detected malware that posed an imminent threat to their computers. The scammers then offered to rid the computer of the non-existent malware for fees ranging from $139 to $360.” Pasari did not admit wrongdoing but agreed to a proposed  final judgment and order  in which he will forfeit $14,369, “which is the amount of money Mr. Pasari received from the other Defendants,” the document states. The money is being held in escrow and will be transferred to the FTC, assuming the order is approved by a US District Court judge. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Alleged Windows support scammer forfeits money earned by “fixing” PCs

Hack of Cupid Media dating website exposes 42 million plaintext passwords

A hack on niche online dating service Cupid Media earlier this year has exposed names, e-mail addresses and—most notably—plain-text passwords for 42 million accounts, according to a published report. The cache of personal information was found on the same servers that housed tens of millions of records stolen in separate hacks on sites including Adobe , PR Newswire , and the National White Collar Crime Center, KrebsonSecurity journalist Brian Krebs reported Tuesday night . An official with Southport, Australia-based Cupid Media told Krebs that user credentials appeared to be connected to “suspicious activity” that was detected in January. Officials believed they had notified all affected users, but they are in the process of double-checking that all affected accounts have had their passwords reset in light of Krebs’s discovery. The compromise of 42 million passwords makes the episode one of the biggest passcode breaches on record. Adding to the magnitude is the revelation the data was in plain-text, instead of a cryptographically hashed format that requires an investment of time, skill, and computing power to crack. As Krebs noted: Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Hack of Cupid Media dating website exposes 42 million plaintext passwords

Feds arrest ATM thieves after discovering $800,000 stuffed in a suitcase

Noah Coffey Federal authorities have arrested five more men accused of taking part in a 21st-century bank heist that siphoned a whopping $45 million out of ATMs around the world in a matter of hours. Prosecutors said the men charged on Monday were members of the New York-based cell of a global operation and contributed to the $45 million theft by illegally withdrawing $2.8 million from 140 different ATMs in that city. The arrests came after the defendants sent $800,000 in cash proceeds in a suitcase transported by bus to a syndicate kingpin located in Florida, US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Loretta E. Lynch said . Photos seized from one defendant’s iPhone showed huge amounts of cash piled on a hotel bed and being stuffed into luggage, she said. The heists took place during two dates in December 2012 and targeted payment cards issued by the National Bank of Ras Al-Khaimah PSC in the United Arab Emirates and the Bank of Muscat in Oman respectively. Prosecutors dubbed the heists “unlimited” operations because they systematically removed the withdrawal limits normally placed on debit card accounts. These restrictions work as a safety mechanism that caps the amount of loss that banks normally face when something goes wrong. The operation removed the limits by hacking into two companies that processed online payments for the two targeted banks, prosecutors alleged in earlier indictments. Prosecutors didn’t identify the payment processors except to say that one was in India and the other was in the United States. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Feds arrest ATM thieves after discovering $800,000 stuffed in a suitcase

Password hack of vBulletin.com fuels fears of in-the-wild 0-day attacks

János Pálinkás Forums software maker vBulletin has been breached by hackers who got access to customer password data and other personal information, in a compromise that has heightened speculation there may be a critical vulnerability in the widely used program that threatens websites that use it. “Very recently, our security team discovered sophisticated attacks on our network, involving the illegal access of forum user information, possibly including your password,” vBulletin Technical Support Lead Wayne Luke wrote in a post published Friday evening . “Our investigation currently indicates that the attackers accessed customer IDs and encrypted passwords on our systems. We have taken the precaution of resetting your account password.” The warning came three days after user forums for MacRumors—itself a user of vBulletin—suffered a security breach that exposed cryptographically hashed passwords for more than 860,000 users . When describing the attack, MacRumors Editorial Director Arnold Kim said the compromise in many ways resembled the July hack of the Ubuntu user forums , which also ran on vBulletin. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Password hack of vBulletin.com fuels fears of in-the-wild 0-day attacks

Android 4.4 KitKat, thoroughly reviewed

After three Jelly Bean releases in a row, Google has unleashed a major revision to the world’s most widely used operating system. With the  Nexus 5  comes Android 4.4 “KitKat.” KitKat brings a ton of enhancements: support for hidden system and status bars, printer support, and lower memory usage. It also has a number of user-level improvements, including a new dialer, a Google-infused home screen, and a whole pile of UI refinements. The lower memory usage is particularly important because Google hopes this is the feature that will finally kill Gingerbread and other older versions of Android. Ice Cream Sandwich raised the system requirements for Android quite a bit, and to this day you still see lower-end phones shipping with Gingerbread because of the lower barrier to entry. Unfortunately, the only device that currently runs KitKat is the Nexus 5, which has a whopping 2GB of RAM, so there isn’t much memory testing that we can do right now. We’ll have to wait for actual low-memory hardware running KitKat to evaluate any of the low-memory requirement claims. We  can   take a look at just about everything else, though. We believe KitKat is the biggest Android release since Ice Cream Sandwich. Google has touched nearly every part of the OS in some way, so there’s a lot to cover. Read 47 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Android 4.4 KitKat, thoroughly reviewed

Hack of MacRumors forums exposes password data for 860,000 users

MacRumors MacRumors user forums have been breached by hackers who may have acquired cryptographically protected passwords belonging to all 860,000 users, one of the top editors of the news website said Tuesday evening. “In situations like this, it’s best to assume that your MacRumors Forum username, e-mail address and (hashed) password is now known,” Editorial Director Arnold Kim wrote in a short advisory . He went on to advise users to change their passwords for their MacRumors accounts and any other website accounts that were protected by the same passcode. The MacRumors intrusion involved “a moderator account being logged into by the hacker who then was able to escalate their privileges with the goals of stealing user login credentials,” Kim said. The company is still investigating how the attacker managed to compromise the privileged account. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Hack of MacRumors forums exposes password data for 860,000 users

How one site beat back botnets, spammers and the “4chan party van”

Aryan Blaauw One Sunday late last month, administrators at Orlando, Florida-based TorGuard were in high spirits. They had just successfully rebuffed the latest in a series of increasingly powerful denial-of-service attacks designed to cripple their virtual private networking service. Despite torrents of junk traffic that reached peaks as high as 15Gbps, the admins had neutralized the offensive by locking down the TorGuard servers and then moving them behind the protective services of anti-DoS service CloudFlare. “This seemed to anger the attackers, however, because on Monday things got a bit more personal,” TorGuard administrator Ben Van Pelt told Ars. “Unable to spam, DDoS, hack, or social engineer us, they employed the tactics of the ‘4chan party van.’ Throughout the day our office received multiple unrequested deliveries from local pizza chains, Chinese food, and one large order of sushi. A handful of local electricians and plumbing services were also disappointed to be turned away. To my knowledge no fake calls have been placed to law enforcement yet, however nothing would surprise me at this point.” The two-month-long campaign of harassment and attacks, which Van Pelt suspects was carried out by a competing virtual private networking service, illustrates the lengths some people will go to goad their online adversaries. His experience provides a vivid account of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a relentless stream of distributed denial-of-service attacks and ultimately what can be done to mitigate them. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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How one site beat back botnets, spammers and the “4chan party van”

Cisco-threatening open switch coming from Facebook, Intel, and Broadcom

Cisco Nexus switches. pchow98 Six months ago, Facebook announced that its Open Compute Project (OCP) would develop a top-of-rack switch that could boot nearly any type of networking software. With the help of Intel, Broadcom, and others, the consortium devoted to open hardware specifications would develop a rival to Cisco’s network hardware. Today, Facebook and friends described the first tangible steps they’ve taken toward reaching that goal. Intel, Broadcom, Mellanox, and Cumulus Networks have contributed specs and software that bring the Open Compute Project closer to a finished switch design. Frank Frankovsky, VP of hardware design and supply chain operations at Facebook and head of the Open Compute Project, announced the latest developments in a blog post and conference call with reporters today. Frankovsky says the project is on track to “help software-defined networking continue to evolve and flourish,” since open source software-defined networking systems could be installed on Open Compute switches. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Cisco-threatening open switch coming from Facebook, Intel, and Broadcom