user agreement – Page 28 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Google announces SPDY’s coming demise as HTTP/2 approaches

A little over five years ago, Google unveiled SPDY, a new protocol that it positioned as a more secure, better-performing replacement for hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), the communication protocol on which the Web is built. Today the company announced that it would soon be removing SPDY support from Chrome. That’s because the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been working to update HTTP to produce HTTP/2, an updated revision of a protocol that has not seen any major changes since its introduction in the early 1990s. SPDY’s major goals were to reduce latency and improve security. To reduce latency, it included support for multiplexing—making multiple requests and responses over a single connection, with prioritization for different requests—and for security, it makes the use of TLS compulsory. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google announces SPDY’s coming demise as HTTP/2 approaches

Report: iOS 9 will focus mainly on stability and performance

Longtime Apple users speak fondly of the Snow Leopard (10.6) release of OS X. Even though it came with ” no new features ,” it won users over by reducing the footprint of the OS and focusing mostly on refinement. A report from 9to5Mac’s well-sourced Mark Gurman claims that Apple is taking a similar approach with iOS 9, focusing on fixing bugs and optimizing performance rather than adding another big stack of new features to the pile. The report isn’t specific about what Apple will be doing to accomplish those goals, but in any case it’s a departure from the release-first-fix-later approach Apple normally takes with iOS. iOS 7’s biggest problems were addressed by iOS 7.1 six-or-so months later, and so far we’ve seen six minor updates for iOS 8 that have attempted to address everything from bugs to performance and the amount of free space required for update installation. Though stability will be “a tentpole component” of iOS 9, Gurman says that the new operating system will still come with other improvements. Don’t expect a repeat of the “no new features” reveal, in other words. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Report: iOS 9 will focus mainly on stability and performance

Somalia is no safe refuge for torrent site

In the world of online piracy , it seems like it’s one in, one out at the moment. While The Pirate Bay returned last week, Kickass Torrents has now been taken down via a domain name seizure. The site, which was already blocked from direct UK access as a result of high court blocking orders, now turns up an error message when users attempt to access its Somali .so domain. A look at its Whois record shows the site listed as banned. The Somali registry was seen as a safe haven for the site, away from copyright holders and their lawyers, but it appears the takedown was a result of a claim. Several other sites with a .so domain, including the unaffiliated scam site kickasstorrents.so, have also been taken down, which indicates a far-reaching block on any URL with “kickass” in it that is based in the country. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Somalia is no safe refuge for torrent site

Malicious Google Play apps (may have) hosed millions of Android handsets

Security researchers have once again found Google Play offering malicious apps that have been downloaded by millions of Android users. According to a blog post published Tuesday by antivirus provider Avast, the apps include the Durak card game app and at least two other titles. Combined, those apps have been installed as many as 15 million times. Researcher Filip Chytry wrote: When you install Durak, it seems to be a completely normal and well working gaming app. This was the same for the other apps, which included an IQ test and a history app . This impression remains until you reboot your device and wait for a couple of days. After a week, you might start to feel there is something wrong with your device. Some of the apps wait up to 30 days until they show their true colors. After 30 days, I guess not many people would know which app is causing abnormal behavior on their phone, right? Each time you unlock your device an ad is presented to you, warning you about a problem, e.g. that your device is infected, out of date or full of porn. This, of course, is a complete lie. You are then asked to take action, however, if you approve you get re-directed to harmful threats on fake pages, like dubious app stores and apps that attempt to send premium SMS behind your back or to apps that simply collect too much of your data for comfort while offering you no additional value. It’s not the first time Google’s official Android app bazaar has been found to host malicious apps. In the past, it has offered titles laced with surreptitious remote access trojans , Bitcoin miners , and rogue advertising networks . Three years ago, Google introduced a cloud-based scanner that scours Play for malicious apps , but attackers have been known to bypass it . Google officials regularly remove apps from Play when they are found to be malicious. At the time this post was being prepared, all three flagged by Avast remained available for download. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Malicious Google Play apps (may have) hosed millions of Android handsets

First transistor built using two-dimensional silicon

Since the isolation of graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon, researchers have developed a number of other two-dimensional materials. (Yes, they are really three-dimensional; it’s just one of the dimensions is only an atom thick, and therefore negligible.) Knowledge of the periodic table would suggest that elements from the same column as carbon would have similar chemical properties, and therefore be excellent candidates for forming two-dimensional sheets. So, why hasn’t more been done with silicon, the next element down the column from carbon? People have actually made silicene, the silicon version of graphene. But they’ve only managed to make tiny patches of it on silver surfaces; under just about any other conditions, it rapidly reacts with the oxygen in air and disintegrates. On Monday, however, researchers announced that they’d managed to create the first device—a field effect transistor—using silicene. Since interactions with silver protected the silicon sheet, the authors fabricated a large sheet on a thin silver surface. They then capped this with aluminum oxide, which also protected the silicene. At this point, they could etch off some of the aluminum, and use the remaining metal as source and drain contacts. By depositing the alumina on a silicon dioxide surface, the resulting device acted as a field effect transistor. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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First transistor built using two-dimensional silicon

Over 300 businesses now whitelisted on AdBlock Plus, 10% pay to play

Since 2011, AdBlock Plus, a popular browser plug-in that blocks online ads, has kept a “whitelist” of websites that are allowed to serve ads despite the presence of the AdBlock Plus plugin. In an e-mail to Ars, AdBlock Plus Communications Manager Ben Williams wrote that currently, the browser extension has granted a pass to “over 300 sites/entities” out of “over 1,500 applicants” to the company’s whitelist. That’s up from October 2013 , when AdBlock Plus allowed the ads of 78 sites or entities out of 777 applicants. To be placed on AdBlock Plus’ whitelist, advertisements must be transparent about being ads, must be appropriate to the site they’re being served on, and must not distort or disrupt the page content, among other criteria. AdBlock Plus goes into more detail about the whitelisting process here . But one important facet of the business plan is that if a company is big enough, AdBlock Plus’ parent company, German start-up Eyeo, asks for a fee in addition to adhering to the “Acceptable Ads” criteria before it allows a company to be whitelisted. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Over 300 businesses now whitelisted on AdBlock Plus, 10% pay to play

Pilot’s selfies “likely” caused fatal crash, flight investigators say

A pilot’s selfies “likely” caused a single-engine plane crash outside Denver that killed the pilot and sole passenger last year, the National Transportation Safety Board has concluded. The NTSB probe said investigators discovered a GoPro camera near the wreckage that captured footage aboard the two-seater Cessna 150 taken on May 30 and on the day of the May 31 crash. “Based on the evidence of cell phone use during low-altitude maneuvering, including the flight immediately before the accident flight, it is likely that cell phone use during the accident flight distracted the pilot and contributed to the development of spatial disorientation and subsequent loss of control,” the NTSB said . Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

iTunes Connect bug logs developers in to other developers’ accounts at random

This morning, a number of developers signed in to Apple’s iTunes Connect service only to be greeted by a list of apps that didn’t belong to them. TechCrunch has a good roundup of tweets from affected developers —it seems that whenever developers signed in with their credentials, they were being granted access to other developers’ accounts at random. As of about noon Eastern today, Apple took the service down to resolve the problem. It also looks like developers won’t be able to submit new apps or invite new testers to TestFlight while iTunes Connect is down. Affected developers can check Apple’s System Status page for developers for updates while they wait for the problems to be resolved (no other developer services appear to be affected by the outage). We don’t yet know whether the outage was caused by some error on Apple’s end or by a security breach like the one that brought all developer systems down in the summer of 2013 . We’ve asked Apple when the service will be back and what caused the login problem in the first place, and we’ll update this article as we have new details. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

Apple releases OS X 10.10.2 with a pile of security, privacy, and Wi-Fi fixes

Apple has just released the final build of OS X 10.10.2, the second major update for OS X Yosemite since its release. Version 10.10.1, published just a month after Yosemite’s release, focused mostly on quick fixes for the new OS’ most noticeable problems. Apple has been issuing betas for 10.10.2 since November, though, and a longer testing period usually implies that there are more extensive fixes. First up, the new release is supposed to fix more of the Wi-Fi problems that some users have been experiencing since Yosemite’s launch. 10.10.1 also included Wi-Fi fixes, though it apparently didn’t resolve the problems for all. The new update will also address “an issue that may cause webpages to load slowly” and improve general stability in Safari, all of which should go a long way toward improving Yosemite’s network and Internet performance. Several privacy and security problems that we’ve reported on have been resolved in 10.10.2, as well. Though Apple will still share limited search and location information with Microsoft to enable Spotlight’s Bing-powered Web searching feature, the company has fixed a bug that caused Spotlight to “load remote e-mail content” even when the setting was disabled in Mail.app itself. Our original report describes why this is a problem: Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple releases OS X 10.10.2 with a pile of security, privacy, and Wi-Fi fixes

Don’t cry for the Google Play edition program; it was already dead

Earlier this week, the last of the Google Play edition Android phones in Google’s online storefront were listed as ” no longer available for sale .” When contacted for comment, Google had nothing to say, but it’s not hard to read between the lines here. The last new Google Play phone was introduced in the spring of 2014. Plans for a Galaxy S5 GPe phone made it far enough that official press photos leaked out into the wild , but the phone never materialized. The program hit its peak early last year, when a full half-dozen devices were listed all at once: the Galaxy S4 , the HTC Ones M7 and M8 , the first-generation Moto G , the Sony Z Ultra , and the LG G Pad 8.3 . Like doomed kids making their way through Willy Wonka’s factory, they silently dropped out one by one. Now they’re all gone, and it looks a whole lot like the program has wrapped up. If so, it’s a quiet, inconspicuous end to a quiet, inconspicuous program. Normally we’d say that fewer choices for Android shoppers would be a bad thing, but the changes Google has made to Android since the GPe program was introduced had already rendered it mostly irrelevant. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Don’t cry for the Google Play edition program; it was already dead