Tag: style-details

Obamacare site hits reset button on passwords as contractors scramble

Getting to this page on the Healthcare.gov site is just the start of the battle for would-be insurance customers. Sean Gallagher Amid all the attention, bugs, and work happening at Healthcare.gov in light of the Affordable Care Act, potential registrants talking to phone support today have been told that all user passwords are being reset to help address the site’s login woes. And the tech supports behind Healthcare.gov will be asking more users to act in the name of fixing the site, too. According to registrants speaking with Ars, individuals whose logins never made it to the site’s database will have to re-register using a different username, as their previously chosen names are now stuck in authentication limbo. The website for the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) launched just last week. With all the scrutiny and debate happening, if ever there was a website launch that was “too big to fail, ” this was it.  So, of course, it did—depending on how you define “failure.” The inability of Obamacare portals to keep up with the traffic demands initially put upon them has been seized by politicians and conservative pundits as evidence that Obamacare “is not ready for prime time” in the words of Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). Now, a week later, the site appears to be stabilizing, with waiting times dropping dramatically for those who haven’t been able to register before. A test of the site this morning had me waiting four minutes to get to the signup page; others got on instantly. But problems persist beyond the front door. The contractors responsible for the exchange—CGI Federal for the website itself, Quality Software Systems Inc. (QSSI) for the information “hub” that determines eligibility for programs and provides the data on qualified insurance plans, and Booz Allen for enrollment and eligibility technical support—are scrambling to deploy more fixes. Technical support call center operators continue to handle an onslaught of calls from users who can’t get back into the system after registering. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Obamacare site hits reset button on passwords as contractors scramble

Ubuntu’s controversial Mir window system won’t ship with 13.10 desktop

Ubuntu 13.04. Ubuntu 13.10 (“Saucy Salamander”) is scheduled for a final release on Oct. 17, but the OS won’t include what was perhaps the biggest and most controversial change planned for the desktop environment. Canonical announced in March that it would replace the X window system with Mir, a new display server that will eventually work across phones, tablets, and desktops. It has proven controversial, with Intel rejecting Ubuntu patches because Canonical’s development of Mir meant it stopped supporting Wayland as a replacement for X. Mir will ship by default on Ubuntu Touch for phones (but not tablets) this month, allowing a crucial part of Ubuntu’s mobile plans to go forward. However, it won’t be the default system on the desktop, because XMir—an X11 compatibility layer for Mir—isn’t yet able to properly support multi-monitor setups. This is a step back from Canonical’s original plan to “Deliver Mir + XMir + Unity 7 on the [13.10] desktop for those cards that supported it, and fall back to X for those that don’t.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Ubuntu’s controversial Mir window system won’t ship with 13.10 desktop

Microsoft: “System processing” takes up 10 percent of Xbox One GPU time

Wired The Xbox One’s ability to run up to four apps in the background (or on the side via Snap mode) during gameplay and to switch from a game to those apps almost instantaneously obviously comes at some cost to the system’s maximum theoretical gaming performance. Now, thanks to an interview with Xbox technical fellow Andrew Goossen over at Digital Foundry we have some idea of the scale of that performance cost. “Xbox One has a conservative 10 percent time-sliced reservation on the GPU for system processing, ” Goossen told the site. “This is used both for the GPGPU processing for Kinect and for the rendering of concurrent system content such as snap mode.” It’s important to note that additional processing time for the next-generation Kinect sensor is included in that 10 percent number. Still, setting aside nearly a tenth of the GPU’s processing time to support background execution of non-gaming apps is a bit surprising. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Microsoft: “System processing” takes up 10 percent of Xbox One GPU time

How the FBI found Miss Teen USA’s webcam spy

RATer’s moniker was “cutefuzzypuppy.” Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock The sextortionist who snapped nude pictures of Miss Teen USA Cassidy Wolf through her laptop’s webcam has been found and arrested, the FBI revealed yesterday. 19-year old Jared James Abrahams, a California computer science student who went by the online handle “cutefuzzypuppy, ” had as many as 150 “slave” computers under his control during the height of his webcam spying in 2012. Watching all of those webcams to see when a young woman changes her clothes takes a serious time commitment, and Abrahams made one; he “was always at his computer, ” according the FBI complaint against him. Abrahams yesterday turned himself in after the complaint was unsealed, and a federal judge released him on a $50, 000 bond. Anatomy of a RATer How did Abrahams get his start learning the intricacies of remote administration tools (RATs), the malware used to spy on his victims? Not surprisingly, he was a regular user of hackforums.net, which features a large RAT forum that I profiled earlier this year . As cutefuzzypuppy, Abrahams asked for plenty of help distributing software like DarkComet to victims, since he “suck[ed] at social engineering” and needed to find better ways to spread his spyware. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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How the FBI found Miss Teen USA’s webcam spy

2013 iMac teardowns reveal SSD slots, soldered-in CPU in the 21.5” model

All iMacs now leave you an empty PCIe SSD slot to use if you don’t go in for the Fusion Drive or SSD upgrade, but it’s still hard to get at. iFixit Just one day after Apple quietly refreshed its iMac lineup with Intel’s new Haswell processors, the teardown artists at iFixit have pulled both the 21.5-inch and 27-inch models apart to see what makes them tick. One of our chief complaints about last year’s 21.5-inch iMac was how difficult it was to upgrade, and that remains true of this year’s model. You can still access the computer’s two RAM slots if you’re brave enough to attempt the teardown process (which includes tearing apart and replacing some foam padding), and Apple has included an empty PCIe slot on the base model where last year’s model only had an empty spot on the system board. However, the low-end iMac’s use of Intel’s Iris Pro 5200 integrated GPUs means that it uses one of Intel’s R-series CPUs, and those CPUs only come in a soldered-on ball-grid array (BGA) package. The 27-inch model proves a bit easier to upgrade: it still has four user-accessible RAM slots, still leaves people who opt out of the Fusion Drive or SSD upgrades an empty PCIe slot to use, and still uses a socketed Intel CPU for those of you who want to take the trouble to upgrade that component yourselves after the fact. Both the 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMacs were also confirmed to be using triple-antenna (3×3:3) 802.11ac configurations, meaning the iMacs will be capable of the standard’s maximum theoretical transfer speed of 1.3Gbps where the 2013 MacBook Airs used a two-antenna setup capable of 867Mbps speeds. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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2013 iMac teardowns reveal SSD slots, soldered-in CPU in the 21.5” model

Nvidia seeks peace with Linux, pledges help on open source driver

Will Nvidia give Linus a reason to lower his finger? aaltouniversityace Few companies have been the target of as much criticism in the Linux community as Nvidia. Linus Torvalds himself last year called Nvidia the ” single worst company ” Linux developers have ever worked with, giving the company his middle finger in a public talk. Nvidia is now trying to get on Linux developers’ good side. Yesterday, Nvidia’s Andy Ritger e-mailed developers of Nouveau, an open source driver for Nvidia cards that is built by reverse engineering Nvidia’s proprietary drivers. Ritger wrote that “NVIDIA is releasing public documentation on certain aspects of our GPUs, with the intent to address areas that impact the out-of-the-box usability of NVIDIA GPUs with Nouveau. We intend to provide more documentation over time, and guidance in additional areas as we are able.” The first step was releasing documentation of the Device Control Block (DCB) layout in Nvidia’s VBIOS, describing the board’s topology and display connectors. Ritger continued: Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Nvidia seeks peace with Linux, pledges help on open source driver

The new lifecycle of your old iPhone

Clifford Joseph Kozak After handling the entire digital expression of your life for one, two, or more years, the most mercenary and practical end that a smartphone can meet is to be sold off secondhand. Wheeling and dealing with used personal electronics is not a new business, but in the last few years, it’s been writ very large with the glut of tiny hand-computers we’re all using lately. Where those devices go after you sell them into wanting hands (Gazelle and NextWorth are two services that make their business on these transactions) has shifted a bit over the years. In the early days of the iPhone, companies were built on the activity of breaking down old iPhones into parts for repairing those still in use (or so some of the shadier companies claimed). Per a report in the New York Times back in 2008, one company named PCS Wireless claimed that 94-95 percent of the second-hand phones it obtained were broken down into parts. The source claimed at the time that the screens alone could fetch $200. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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The new lifecycle of your old iPhone

Virtual Perfection: Why 8K resolution per eye isn’t enough for perfect VR

So you want me to squeeze two 8K displays into this space? No problem! Give me a decade or so… “Without going into a rant, the term ‘Retina Display’ is garbage, I think.” Palmer Luckey, the founder and creator of the Oculus Rift, is a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to creating the best possible virtual reality experience. So when our recent interview turned toward the ideal future for a head-mounted display—a theoretical “perfect” device that delivers everything he could ever dream of—he did go on a little rant about what we currently consider “indistinguishable” pixels. “There is a point where you can no longer distinguish individual pixels, but that does not mean that you cannot distinguish greater detail, ” he said. “You can still see aliasing on lines on a retina display. You can’t pick out the pixels, but you can still see the aliasing. Let’s say you want to have an image of a piece of hair on the screen. You can’t make it real-size… it would still look jaggy and terrible. There’s a difference between where you can’t see pixels and where you can’t make improvements.” Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Virtual Perfection: Why 8K resolution per eye isn’t enough for perfect VR

Sudden spike of Tor users likely caused by one “massive” botnet

Tor Project Researchers have found a new theory to explain the sudden spike in computers using the Tor anonymity network: a massive botnet that was recently updated to use Tor to communicate with its mothership. Mevade.A, a network of infected computers dating back to at least 2009, has mainly used standard Web-based protocols to send and receive data to command and control (C&C) servers, according to researchers at security firm Fox-IT. Around the same time that Tor Project leaders began observing an unexplained doubling in Tor clients , Mevade overhauled its communication mechanism to use anonymized Tor addresses ending in .onion. In the week that has passed since Tor reported the uptick, the number of users has continued to mushroom. “The botnet appears to be massive in size as well as very widespread, ” a Fox-IT researcher wrote in a blog post published Thursday . “Even prior to the switch to Tor, it consisted of tens of thousands of confirmed infections within a limited amount of networks. When these numbers are extrapolated on a per country and global scale, these are definitely in the same ballpark as the Tor users increase.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Sudden spike of Tor users likely caused by one “massive” botnet

Meet the new hotness: All-in-one 3D printers and scanners

Meet Radiant Fabrication’s Lionhead Bunny. Radiant Fabrication We’ve told you about inexpensive 3D printers. We’ve reported on the first two 3D scanners. And recently, Ars editor Lee Hutchinson took two 3D printers for a spin to reveal what he called a “ maddening journey into another dimension .” But get ready to set aside those old-timey devices—enter the  all-in-one 3D printers and scanners . This week, two companies have each announced their own all-in-one 3D printer and scanner. On Tuesday, Radiant Fabrication trumpeted the Lionhead Bunny, a $1, 649 device that the company will make available starting next month (though it appears to be dependent on the success of its forthcoming Kickstarter campaign). In a  statement  released with its announcement, Radiant Fabrication wrote: Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Meet the new hotness: All-in-one 3D printers and scanners