user agreement – Page 4 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

ResetPlug is a $60 device to keep you trapped in crappy Wi-Fi hell

If you need this, you probably deserve this. (credit: ResetPlug ) It’s Monday night and you finally collapse into your favorite chair after a day that started at 5:00am. The dogs are crated, the kids are in bed, and your spouse has graciously agreed to do dinner clean-up. You lean your head back and sigh. There’s a whole week’s worth of worry stacked up in your forebrain, but for the next 20 minutes, none of it will matter. The tablet is warm in your hands as you tap the Netflix app, and you smile in anticipation of the one truly good thing that you’ll get to experience today. The theme song is already playing in your head: “Un— BREAKABLE! They’re alive, dammit! It’s a mir -a-cle!” For the next 20 minutes, you can escape. …except you can’t, because instead of transporting you away from your worries, the stupid screen is showing a giant-ass error message: “Netflix is not available.” The vein in your forehead—you know the one, right at your hairline—starts throbbing. You can feel it. You know what comes next. You can already see it in your mind. You’re going to have to go upstairs into your youngest’s room—because for some incredibly insane reason the cable drop is in there, which makes you want to find the person who built the damn house and throttle them to death with six feet of coax—and you’re going to have to reach back under the kid’s bed, over the dust and the dog hair and the Lego bricks and broken Star Wars toys and whatever the hell else is under there and find the damn plug for the damn router. After you unplug and plug it back in, you’re going to have to lie there watching the damn lights on the stupid thing blink for minutes—whole minutes!—while your tiny window of Netflix time slowly trickles away. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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ResetPlug is a $60 device to keep you trapped in crappy Wi-Fi hell

Verizon: Network sabotage during strike disrupted thousands of customers

Poorly maintained equipment, as shown in a union complaint about Verizon maintenance. (credit: Communications Workers of America ) Verizon says its network has suffered 57 incidents of vandalism in seven states in the two weeks since 36,000 workers went on strike . The “incidents of sabotage,” mostly involving the severing of fiber optic cables or damage to terminal boxes, “have cut off thousands of Verizon customers from critical wireline services,” the company said Wednesday . Under normal conditions, there are only about a half-dozen incidents of sabotage over the course of a year, a Verizon spokesperson told Ars today. Verizon says it is still investigating the incidents and hasn’t pinned the blame on anyone specific. But the company’s announcement pointed out that “these malicious actions take place as Verizon is experiencing a strike.” Verizon reported similar incidents of vandalism during another strike in 2011 . Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Verizon: Network sabotage during strike disrupted thousands of customers

The Wheel of Time turns… into a “cutting-edge TV series”

Cover art for the first Wheel of Time novel. (credit: Tor Books) After a rough false start , it looks like Robert Jordan’s fantasy epic The Wheel of Time will be coming to television after all. The news was delivered on the series’ Google+ page by Jordan’s widow, Harriet McDougal, who owns the copyright to the novels and has controlled the franchise’s direction since Jordan’s death in 2007. We have few details about the project at this point, aside from assurances that a “major studio” will have more to share soon: Wanted to share with you exciting news about The Wheel of Time . Legal issues have been resolved. The Wheel of Time will become a cutting edge TV series! I couldn’t be more pleased. Look for the official announcement coming soon from a major studio —Harriet Optioning The Wheel of Time makes sense, given the appetite for TV adaptations of dense, sprawling fantasy series. HBO’s Game of Thrones and Starz’s Outlander have both been successful, and Wheel of Time is a firmly established property that has the added benefit of actually being a finished story already. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The Wheel of Time turns… into a “cutting-edge TV series”

From TV trailblazer to IP afterthought: TiVo bought for $1.1 billion

(credit: cncphotos ) Entertainment company Rovi announced that it has officially acquired DVR maker TiVo in a deal worth $1.1 billion. Rovi will pay for the deal mostly in stock at $10.70 per share, with approximately $277 million to be paid in cash at $2.75 per share. Rovi’s CEO Tom Carson will continue to run the company, although it will now assume the “iconic TiVo brand” as its name. The deal seems to be centered on patents. According to The New York Times , Rovi’s interactive TV program guides account for less than half of its $526 million revenue last year, while the rest is made up of its licensed intellectual property. TiVo made a name for itself with its DVR technology, but the patents that make its DVR hardware and software work are proving to be more valuable. Together, Rovi and TiVo have over 6,000 patents issued and pending in the digital entertainment space. “Rovi’s acquisition of TiVo, with its innovative products, talented team, and substantial intellectual property portfolio, strengthens Rovi’s position as a global leader in media discovery, metadata, analytics, and IP licensing,” Carson said in a statement . “It’s an exciting time as the media and entertainment landscape undergoes a significant evolution…. By working together, Rovi and TiVo will revolutionize how consumers experience media and entertainment and at the same time build value for our stockholders.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A Comcastic miracle: Data caps will go from 300GB to a terabyte

Comcast today announced that it will boost its data cap from 300GB per month to 1TB beginning June 1, but will also charge more to customers who want unlimited data. Comcast has been trialling different caps in various cities in preparation for a potential nationwide rollout. Typically, customers would get 300GB per month and have to pay another $10 for each additional 50GB when they go over. Comcast also allowed customers to pay an extra $30 to $35 a month for unlimited data, depending on the city. After the June 1 change, fewer customers will need to buy unlimited data—but it will cost them $50 a month to do so instead of $30 or $35. Overage fees will stay the same, $10 for each additional 50GB. Thus far, Comcast has allowed customers to exceed the cap in three “courtesy months” before charging them overage fees. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

7 million unsalted MD5 passwords leaked by Minecraft community Lifeboat

(credit: Lifeboat ) As security breaches go, they don’t get more vexing than this: 7 million compromised accounts that protected passwords using woefully weak unsalted MD5 hashes, and the outfit responsible, still hadn’t disclosed the hack three months after it came to light. And as if that wasn’t enough, the service recommended the use of short passwords. That’s what Motherboard reported Tuesday about Lifeboat , a service that provides custom, multiplayer environments to gamers who use the Minecraft mobile app. The data circulating online included the e-mail addresses and hashed passwords for 7 million Lifeboat accounts. The mass compromise was discovered by Troy Hunt, the security researcher behind the Have I been pwned? breach notification site. Hunt said he had acquired the data from someone actively involved in trading hacked login credentials who has provided similar data in the past. Hunt reported that some of the plaintext passwords users had chosen were so weak that he was able to discover them simply by posting the corresponding MD5 hash into Google. As if many users’ approach to passwords were lackadaisical itself, Lifeboat’s own Getting started guide recommended “short, but difficult to guess passwords” because “This is not online banking.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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7 million unsalted MD5 passwords leaked by Minecraft community Lifeboat

New Windows 10 build: New Start menu, notifications, and pen features

The new Pen Workspace. (credit: Microsoft) At its Build developer conference a few weeks ago, Microsoft announced the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, a major update for Windows 10 due this summer. One of its biggest aspects was substantially reworked and improved pen support (“Ink” in Microsoft terminology) intended to make pen applications easier to find and use and to make stylus use more powerful. A new Windows build that provides the first access to these new features, version 14328, has just been promoted to the fast ring . The core of this new support is the Windows Ink Workspace, a panel that provides instant access to pen-powered apps. Pressing the eraser button on a Surface Pen will show the panel instead of its current action (which opens OneNote). The Anniversary Update also comes with a trio of new pen apps: Sketchpad, a sketching app; Screen sketch, a screenshot annotation app; and a new Sticky Note app. New Sticky Notes. (credit: Microsoft) The new build contains a lot more than just Ink improvements. The Start menu has been revised to make All Apps permanently visible, and in tablet mode, All Apps is now full-screen. Also in tablet mode, the taskbar can autohide without being autohide in desktop mode. The taskbar clock now shows on all monitors on multihead systems, and the calendar now shows your appointments. The Action Center notification system has had its layout refined to show more notifications and now includes rich Cortana notifications. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New Windows 10 build: New Start menu, notifications, and pen features

“Nuclear” exploit kit service cashes in on demand from cryptoransomware rings

The web console for Nuclear, the customer-friendly malware-as-a-service platform. Some Nucleus infrastructure operating on DigitalOcean servers was recently disrupted. (credit: Check Point) Security researchers at Cisco Talos and Check Point have published reports detailing the inner workings of Nuclear, an “exploit kit” Web service that deployed malware onto victims’ computers through malicious websites. While a significant percentage of Nuclear’s infrastructure has been recently disrupted, the exploit kit is still operating—and looks to be a major contributor to the current crypto-ransomware epidemic. Introduced in 2010, Nuclear has been used to target millions of victims worldwide, giving attackers the ability to tailor their attacks to specific locations and computer configurations. Though not as widely used as the well-known Angler exploit kit , it has been responsible for dropping Locky and other crypto-ransomware onto over 140,000 computers in over 200 countries, according to statistics collected by Check Point (PDF). The Locky campaign appeared to be placing the greatest demand on the Nuclear pay-to-exploit service. Much of Talos’ data on Nuclear comes from tracking down the source of its traffic—a cluster of “10 to 15” IP addresses that were responsible for “practically all” of the exploit infrastructure. Those addresses were being hosted by a single cloud hosting provider—DigitalOcean. The hosting company’s security team confirmed the findings to Talos and took down the servers—sharing what was on them with security researchers. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Nuclear” exploit kit service cashes in on demand from cryptoransomware rings

Sony PS4K is codenamed NEO, features upgraded CPU, GPU, RAM—report

Sony may be tight-lipped for now, but it’s looking increasingly likely that it will release an updated version of the PlayStation 4 later this year. So far the rumoured console has gone under the moniker PS4K or PS4.5, but a new report from gaming site GiantBomb suggests that the codename for the console is “NEO,” and it even provides hardware specs for the PlayStation 4’s improved CPU, GPU, and higher bandwidth memory. Original PS4 NEO CPU 8 Jaguar Cores @ 1.6GHz 8 Jaguar Cores @ 2.1GHz GPU AMD GCN, 18 CUs @ 800MHz Improved AMD GCN, 36 CUs @ 911MHz Memory 8GB GDDR5, 176GB/s 8GB GDDR5, 218GB/s Those specs include a CPU clock speed bump from 1.6GHz to 2.1Ghz, an improved AMD GPU with 36 Compute Units (CU) running at 911MHz, and a memory bandwidth bump up to 218GB/s. While GiantBomb noted that the CPU cores remain based on AMD’s Jaguar architecture—which was originally a chip developed for laptops—the GPU specs tie into recent rumours that AMD had landed big design wins for its new Polaris architecture. Should the PS4 NEO GPU feature 36 CUs, that would mean around 2304 stream processors—effectively doubling the amount from the old chip. According to TechPowerUp , those specs are extremely similar to AMD’s Polaris 10 “Ellesmere” chip, which is rumoured to be used in an upcoming standalone Radeon R9 480 graphics card. While AMD has refused to comment on the scuttlebutt—telling Ars “we do not comment on rumour or speculation”—the company has noted in the past that the focus of Polaris is on power efficiency and ” console-class gaming on a thin-and-light notebook .” Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sony PS4K is codenamed NEO, features upgraded CPU, GPU, RAM—report

Windows 10 Anniversary Update: Google’s WebM and VP9 codecs coming to Edge

The Windows 10 Anniversary Update, due this summer, will expand the range of video and audio codecs that are supported by the Edge browser. Microsoft is adding the VP9 video codec, the Opus audio codec, and the WebM container format . VP9 and WebM are both spearheaded by Google. Google bought video codec company On2 in 2010 with the intent of opening up On2’s VP8 codec to serve as an open source, royalty-free alternative to the open but royalty-incurring H.264. Unfortunately, groups claiming to have patents that covered VP8 emerged. Google ultimately came to an agreement with those groups in 2013 to ensure the codec’s royalty-free status, but by then, H.264 was too firmly entrenched to displace. VP9 is a successor to VP8 that is more efficient and essential for the growing demand for 4K video. Along with Microsoft and others, Google has joined the Alliance for Open Media to promote VP9’s development and try to ensure that it remains royalty-free. As with VP8 before it, VP9 is covered by patents, but the companies hope that they own all the relevant patents and hence are in a position to grant a royalty-free license. Microsoft announced in September 2015 that it was starting work on VP9 for Edge. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 10 Anniversary Update: Google’s WebM and VP9 codecs coming to Edge