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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

Meltdowns at NSA spy data center destroy equipment, delay opening

The NSA’s Utah Data Center. Swilsonmc A massive data center being built by the National Security Agency to aid its surveillance operations has been hit by “10 meltdowns in the past 13 months” that “destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of machinery and delayed the center’s opening for a year, ” the Wall Street Journal reported last night . The first of four facilities at the Utah Data Center was originally scheduled to become operational in October 2012, according to project documents described by the Journal . But the electrical problems—described as arc fault failures or “a flash of lightning inside a 2-foot box”—led to explosions, failed circuits, and melted metal, the report states: The first arc fault failure at the Utah plant was on Aug. 9, 2012, according to project documents. Since then, the center has had nine more failures, most recently on Sept. 25. Each incident caused as much as $100, 000 in damage, according to a project official. It took six months for investigators to determine the causes of two of the failures. In the months that followed, the contractors employed more than 30 independent experts that conducted 160 tests over 50, 000 man-hours, according to project documents. The 1 million square foot data center is slated to cost $1.4 billion to construct. One project official told the Journal that the NSA planned to start turning on some of the computers at the facility this week. “But without a reliable electrical system to run computers and keep them cool, the NSA’s global surveillance data systems can’t function, ” the newspaper wrote. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Meltdowns at NSA spy data center destroy equipment, delay opening

US indicts suspected Anonymous members for leading 2010 “Operation Payback”

Back in 2010, “Operation Payback” involved a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against anti-piracy websites as a way to protest what some members of Anonymous viewed as an overly greedy intellectual property industry. The attack was later revived in early 2011. On Thursday, 13 men were indicted (PDF) in federal court in Virginia on one count of Conspiracy to Intentionally Cause Damage to a Protected Computer. They are accused of using the well-known Low-Orbit Ion Cannon application to conduct DDoS attacks on the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, the United States Copyright Office of the Library of Congress, Visa, MasterCard, and Bank of America. According to the indictment, the victims suffered “significant damage, ” noting specifically that MasterCard suffered at least $5, 000 in losses during a one-year period. (For the record, MasterCard profited $415 million in 2010.) Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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US indicts suspected Anonymous members for leading 2010 “Operation Payback”

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

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

Apple releases iOS 7.0.1 update to fix fingerprint scanner

The new iPhone 5S is out and normal folks are getting their fingerprints all over it—exactly what Apple intended with the inclusion of the fingerprint scanner. However, early reviews have included the occasional note that the fingerprint scanner’s ability to enable iTunes purchases didn’t quite work correctly—the iPhone 5S would prompt for a password instead of simply accepting the fingerprint. To address this, Apple has issued an update to iOS 7 for the iPhone 5S (and also for the 5C, though it’s unclear what else the update addresses). Several other outlets are reporting that the update is only 17.5MB, but when I checked via iTunes on my fresh-from-the-box iPhone 5S, I got a download that was 1.39GB in size. We’ll have our full iPhone 5s review up as soon as possible, along with video showing off how the new devices (and their new cameras) work. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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

Ken May

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