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New anti-speech low: buyer sued over negative eBay feedback

Ratings are important on eBay. Lots of buyers use them to assess the quality and reliability of particular sellers, and lots of sellers will go to great lengths to keep perfect or near-perfect ratings. But an Ohio company named Med Express has shown it’s willing to go further than other sellers: it’s willing to litigate. When Med Express got its first piece of negative feedback, it filed a lawsuit , insisting that the feedback be removed from eBay. Amy Nicholls paid $175 for a microscope light, as well as $12 for shipping. She was annoyed when she had to pay an extra $1.44 in postage due and left feedback complaining about that inconvenience. Med Express asked her to remove the feedback and she refused. The company complained that because it offered to refund her the $1.44, she should have taken down the feedback, which had the potential to hurt its business. (In the past six months, Med Express has 142 pieces of positive feedback and only one negative review.) Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New anti-speech low: buyer sued over negative eBay feedback

Pirate Bay co-founder indicted on charges of hacking, fraud

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg. Nicolas Vigier On Wednesday, a Swedish court indicted Gottfrid “anakata” Svartholm Warg—the Pirate Bay founder who has been held in a Swedish detention facility for more than six months . “A large amount of data from companies and agencies was taken during the hack, including a large amount of personal data, such as personal identity numbers ( personnummer ) of people with protected identities,” Swedish prosecutor Henrik Olin said in a statement . Gottfrid was indicted with three other co-defendants, and the four have been charged (Google Translate) with serious fraud, attempted aggravated fraud, and aiding attempted aggravated fraud. The trial has been scheduled for late May in Stockholm. Svartholm Warg’s defense attorney, Ola Salmasson, told Ars that he had not yet seen the specific indictment, so he could not comment. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Pirate Bay co-founder indicted on charges of hacking, fraud

How an accountant created an entire RPG inside an Excel spreadsheet

A communique from the emperor, above, expresses interest at my formidable skill in killing bunnies and koalas with rocks. Sometimes it’s not always easy (or possible) to install your favorite games on your work computer. Sometimes, some Solitaire or maybe a little collaborative Bomberman is as much as you can get away with when you can’t install anything downloaded from the Internet. And you’d better make sure whatever you’re playing actually looks like work to any nearby screen snoopers around the office. Throughout a few months ending this past February, Cary Walkin created the perfect solution to this problem: an entire RPG made of a spreadsheet and many macros. The game, called  Arena.Xlsm , is a turn-based RPG encompassed entirely in an Excel file. Users can download that and use it to progress through levels, collect items, and battle enemies and bosses with melee and ranged attacks as well as spells. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How an accountant created an entire RPG inside an Excel spreadsheet

New security protection, fixes for 39 exploitable bugs coming to Java

A dialog box presented by Java when it encounters an application that isn’t signed by a digital certificate. Java.com Oracle plans to release an update for the widely exploited Java browser plugin. The update fixes 39 critical vulnerabilities and introduces changes designed to make it harder to carry out drive-by attacks on end-user computers. The update scheduled for Tuesday comes as the security of Java is reaching near-crisis levels. Throughout the past year, a series of attacks hosted on popular websites has been used to surreptitiously install malware on unwitting users’ machines. The security flaws have been used to infect employees of Facebook and Apple in targeted attacks intended to penetrate those companies. The vulnerabilities have also been exploited to hijack computers of home and business users. More than once, attackers have exploited one previously undocumented bug within days or weeks of patching a previous “zero-day,” as such vulnerabilities are known, creating a string of attacks on the latest version of the widely used plugin. In all, Java 7 Update 21 will fix at least 42 security bugs, Oracle said in a pre-release announcement . The post went on to say that “39 of those vulnerabilities may be remotely exploitable without authentication, i.e., may be exploited over a network without the need for a username and password.” The advisory didn’t specify or describe the holes that will be patched. Security Exploration, a Poland-based security company that has discovered dozens of “security issues” in Java, has a running list of them here . Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New security protection, fixes for 39 exploitable bugs coming to Java

Huge attack on WordPress sites could spawn never-before-seen super botnet

CloudFlare Security analysts have detected an ongoing attack that uses a huge number of computers from across the Internet to commandeer servers that run the WordPress blogging application. The unknown people behind the highly distributed attack are using more than 90,000 IP addresses to brute-force crack administrative credentials of vulnerable WordPress systems, researchers from at least three Web hosting services reported. At least one company warned that the attackers may be in the process of building a “botnet” of infected computers that’s vastly stronger and more destructive than those available today. That’s because the servers have bandwidth connections that that are typically tens, hundreds, or even thousands of times faster than botnets made of infected machines in homes and small businesses. “These larger machines can cause much more damage in DDoS [distributed denial-of-service] attacks because the servers have large network connections and are capable of generating significant amounts of traffic,” Matthew Prince, CEO of content delivery network CloudFlare, wrote in a blog post describing the attacks. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Huge attack on WordPress sites could spawn never-before-seen super botnet

Microsoft tells Windows 7 users to uninstall faulty security update (Updated)

Microsoft has pulled a Windows 7 security update released as part of this month’s Patch Tuesday after discovering it caused some machines to become unbootable. Update 2823324 , which was included in the MS13-036 bulletin , fixed a “moderate-level vulnerability” that requires an attacker to have physical computer access to be able to exploit a targeted computer, Dustin Childs, a group manager in the Microsoft Trustworthy Computing group, wrote in a blog post published Thursday evening. The company has now pulled it from the bulletin and is advising at least some Windows users who have installed it to uninstall the update following the guidance here . MS130-26 was one of nine bulletins released on Monday to fix 13 separate vulnerabilities. “We’ve determined that the update, when paired with certain third-party software, can cause system errors,” Childs wrote. “As a precaution, we stopped pushing 2823324 as an update when we began investigating the error reports, and have since removed it from the download center.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft tells Windows 7 users to uninstall faulty security update (Updated)

Intel wants to kill the traditional server rack with 100Gbps links

If Intel gets its way, old-school server racks will go the way of the dinosaurs. David Monniaux Intel is working to replace the traditional server rack with a more efficient architecture that separates CPU, storage, power, and networking resources into individual components that can be swapped out as needed. Power and cooling would be shared across CPUs, rather than having separate power supplies for each server. Server, memory, network, and storage resources would all be disaggregated and shared across the rack. Incredibly fast interconnects will be needed to prevent slowdowns because disaggregating components pushes them further apart, and Intel is thus building an interconnect that’s capable of 100Gbps. “We are developing a rack-scale architecture,” Lisa Graff, VP and general manager of Intel’s data center marketing group, said in a briefing with reporters last week. “We’re working with end users, OEMs, and ISVs to drive common standards in a reference architecture.” Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel wants to kill the traditional server rack with 100Gbps links

Waiting for a 1TB SSD below $1 per GB? Crucial says wait no more

Crucial announced in a press release this morning that it has begun selling its latest round of consumer-grade solid-state disks (SSDs), the M500 . The 2.5-inch SATA III SSDs are the follow-up to Crucial’s M4 SSDs, which are a pretty popular choice for people adding SSDs to existing systems (I think I have four or five M4s scattered in computers around my house). The drives use 20nm MLC NAND sourced from Micron (and if you’re not sure what MLC NAND is, we’ve got a great SSD primer right here ), along with a Micron-provided SSD controller. Performance for the M500 drives is what you’d expect from a drive in this class: sequential read and write speeds of 500MB per second and 400MB per second. But the big news about the announcement is the capacities. The M500 is available in standard pedestrian capacities of 120GB and 240GB, as well as a large capacity of 480GB, but the top-end SKU is the exciting one: 960GB for just $599.99 (62¢ per raw GB). The MSRPs for the smaller capacities are $129.99 for the 120GB (about $1 per raw GB), $219.99 for the 240GB (about 91¢ per raw GB), and $399.99 for the 480GB (about 83¢ per raw GB). Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Waiting for a 1TB SSD below $1 per GB? Crucial says wait no more

Ubuntu “Raring Ringtail” hits beta, disables Windows dual-boot tool

A ring-tailed cat, a type of raccoon and inspiration for Ubuntu Raring Ringtail. Wikimedia Commons Ubuntu 13.04, scheduled for release on April 25, is now available for testing in its second and final beta release. Nicknamed “Raring Ringtail,” Ubuntu 13.04 is one of the final releases that’s just for desktops and servers. By this time next year, Canonical intends to release a single version of Ubuntu targeting all form factors, including smartphones and tablets. Ubuntu developers decided to disable a tool that allows easy installation of Ubuntu alongside an existing Windows instance. Wubi, short for Windows-based Ubuntu Installer, lets users install Ubuntu on the same disk partition as a Windows instance. “Due to various bugs in Wubi that have not been addressed in time for this Final Beta, the Ubuntu team will not be releasing the Wubi installer with 13.04,” a Raring Ringtail technical overview states . “Combined with the fact that Wubi has not been updated to work with Windows 8, and the focus on mobile client over desktop, the Foundations team does not expect Wubi to be in a releasable state for 13.04.” This doesn’t mean users can’t dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu. Without Wubi, dual-booting is slightly more complicated to set up and requires separate disk partitions. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Ubuntu “Raring Ringtail” hits beta, disables Windows dual-boot tool

Report: Xbox 360 successor can tolerate only brief Internet interruptions

Kotaku is citing two unnamed sources that it says “have a perfect track record in getting these kinds of things right” to report that Microsoft’s follow-up to the Xbox 360 will need a working Internet connection to start games and apps. And the site goes on to write that the system will only tolerate brief interruptions in that connection while the game or app is being used. “Unless something has changed recently, Durango consumer units must have an active Internet connection to be used,” one source told the site, referring to the internal code name for Microsoft’s next system. “If there isn’t a connection, no games or apps can be started. If the connection is interrupted, then after a period of time—currently three minutes, if I remember correctly—the game/app is suspended and the network troubleshooter started.” Another source said this requirement was still in effect on development hardware as recently as two weeks ago. Information suggesting that the next Microsoft console will need to be online is nothing new; numerous leaks and rumors have pointed in that direction throughout the last year or so. However, this is the first serious suggestion that such connectivity would need to be more or less continuous while a game is being played, rather than just checked once when a game or app is launched. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Report: Xbox 360 successor can tolerate only brief Internet interruptions