Tag: vanity-fair

PSA: Xbox Live Gold now comes with two new Xbox One games every month

Xbox One owners will soon get a bit more value out of their optional $60 ( or less ) annual membership. Starting in July, Microsoft will begin offering two free Xbox One games to Gold members as part of its existing Games With Gold program every month. Xbox One owners will be able to download Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag starting on July 1 and indie puzzle-platformer So Many Me on July 16. A similar twice-monthly release schedule for free Xbox One games will continue into the future, Microsoft said. Gold members will also be able to download two Xbox 360 games each month, as they have since the program began in June of 2013. Until now, though, Microsoft has generally made only one Xbox One title available through Games for Gold each month. As usual, Xbox One Games for Gold titles claimed and downloaded during their monthly availability window will be playable as long as the Gold membership is maintained (Xbox 360 games can be kept permanently, regardless of future membership). Sony has made 46 PlayStation 4 games available through the similar PlayStation Plus program in the 20 months the system has been available in North America, increasing from a general rate of one per month in the early days to an average of three or four titles every month in 2015. Both Sony and Microsoft’s free game programs are dominated by smaller indie titles, with the occasional AAA release thrown in months after its initial release. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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PSA: Xbox Live Gold now comes with two new Xbox One games every month

As French taxi drivers protest, UberBoat arrives in Istanbul as on-demand ferry

As taxi drivers across France  protested  UberPop in several cities nationwide, on the other side of Europe, Uber quietly launched UberBoat in Istanbul on Thursday. Uber As the name implies, the service allows people to summon boats to ferry them across the Bosphorous Strait, the waterway separating the European and Asian sides of Turkey’s largest city. Uber is working with an existing boat company, Navette-Tezman Holding , to provide the maritime service. According to Bloomberg , public ferries currently serve roughly 20 different routes and are quite affordable to most locals at the price of 2.15 Turkish lira (81¢) per ride. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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As French taxi drivers protest, UberBoat arrives in Istanbul as on-demand ferry

Samsung silently disabling Windows Update on some computers

Microsoft MVP Patrick Barker, who spends a large portion of his life analysing, debugging, and helping other people troubleshoot Windows, has discovered that Samsung is actively disabling Windows Update on some of its PCs. Barker stumbled across the issue while trying to assist a user who found that Windows Update “kept getting disabled randomly.” By using Auditpol and registry security auditing, Barker discovered that a program called Disable_Windowsupdate.exe was being run every time the PC booted up—and that EXE file, unfortunately, belonged to Samsung’s SW Update suite. SW Update is exactly what it sounds like: it’s one of those bundled OEM tools that ostensibly keeps all of your PC’s software and drivers up-to-date. In this case, though, SW Update also installs a service that regularly downloads and executes a file called Disable_Windowsupdate.exe directly from Samsung’s servers. The file  is even digitally signed by Samsung (but don’t run it unless you want to disable Windows Update). Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung silently disabling Windows Update on some computers

AMD Fury X reviews show strong 4K performance, but doesn’t beat 980 Ti overall

The first reviews for AMD’s top-of-the-line Radeon R9 Fury X —which sports the first iteration of stacked High Bandwidth Memory (HMB)  and a huge 8.9-billion-transistor Fiji GPU—have landed, showing performance almost as good as the identically priced Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti. While that not might be the total landslide AMD fans might have been hoping for, the Fury X is the first time in a long time that AMD has been competitive with Nvidia at the high-end: not just in terms of price, but  performance as well. Naturally, there are some caveats to the Fury X’s performance, the biggest being that at 1080p resolution it’s easily beaten out by the GTX 980 Ti, and in some cases even the GTX 980. That’s not too surprising given the Fury X’s focus on memory bandwidth, which comes into play when larger textures are being shuffled in and out of memory. That said, it’s unlikely anyone buying a £550/$650 graphics card is looking to play at 1080p (unless they’re into 100 FPS and higher gaming). At 1440p and 4K resolutions the Fury X more than holds its own. Over at Tom’s Hardware , the site found the Fury X bested the GTX 980 Ti and Titan X running Far Cry 4 at 1440p by around 10 FPS, with a similar lead in the game at 4K. Performance at 4K is definitely a high point for the Fury X, where in games like The Witcher 3, Metro Last Light, and Shadow of Mordor , it beat the Nvidia cards. But in Grand Theft Auto V , it was the GTX 980 Ti that was faster at both 1440p and 4K. This was a theme across the reviews of most sites, with the two cards trading blows across a range of games. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AMD Fury X reviews show strong 4K performance, but doesn’t beat 980 Ti overall

Airplanes grounded in Poland after hackers allegedly attack flight plan computer

Around 1400 passengers at Warsaw’s Chopin (Okecie) airport in Poland were grounded on Sunday after hackers allegedly attacked the computer system used to issue flight plans to the airplanes. The source of the attack isn’t yet known. The alleged hack targeted LOT, the state-owned flag-carrying Polish airline. Reuters is reporting that the attack took place on Sunday afternoon, and was fixed about five hours later. 10 LOT flights were cancelled and about a dozen more were delayed, according to a LOT spokesman. The spokesman didn’t provide any details of what had actually occurred, though he did give away this one tantalising morsel: “We’re using state-of-the-art computer systems, so this could potentially be a threat to others in the industry.” The spokesman said that flights that were already in the air were not affected by the hack and could land normally. Also, the hack didn’t affect the airport itself; it was just the LOT computers. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Airplanes grounded in Poland after hackers allegedly attack flight plan computer

500Mbps broadband for $55 a month offered by wireless ISP

An Internet service provider called  Webpass  sells consumers 500Mbps upload and download speeds for just $55 a month—and instead of selling it over fiber or cable, the company says it delivers the service with point-to-point wireless technology. The service is targeted at multi-unit residential buildings and businesses; the company also plans to install fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) in some locations, but hasn’t done so yet. Webpass was started in 2003 in San Francisco, raising the speeds over the years as wireless technology has improved, but founder Charles Barr says it’s pretty common for people to tell him that they’ve “never heard of Webpass.” That’s because the point-to-point service Webpass offers is only financially feasible in big cities, and even then not in single family homes. “We’re building-specific,” Barr, who was a network administrator before founding Webpass, told Ars. “It does me no good to put a billboard up in the city and say, ‘hey, call Webpass,’ and have half the city call and say, ‘I live in a single-family home, can you bring me service for $55?’ The answer is no. But if you’re in one of our residential buildings or one of our commercial buildings, you’ve heard of Webpass because we market very specifically to those buildings, or it’s word of mouth.” Read 33 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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500Mbps broadband for $55 a month offered by wireless ISP

Former red light camera CEO pleads guilty to bribery, fraud in Ohio

A former CEO of Redflex, the embattled red light camera vendor, has pleaded guilty to bribery and wire fraud in Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio. In December 2013, Ars reported on red light cameras nationwide, and in particular, Redflex’s four cameras in the central California town of Modesto. Karen Finley was indicted on related charges in August 2014 in Chicago. She pleaded not guilty, and had been set to go to trial in October 2015. But new court filings show she is now scheduled to change her plea in August 2015. As prosecutors wrote in a statement on Friday: Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Former red light camera CEO pleads guilty to bribery, fraud in Ohio

Microsoft partners with Valve VR and Oculus, shows Minecraft for HoloLens

LOS ANGELES—At Microsoft’s pre-E3 press conference , the company announced a strategic partnership with Valve VR, complementing its partnership with Oculus, which was revealed last week at an Oculus press conference in San Francisco. In other VR news, Microsoft invited Mojang’s brand director, Lydia Winters, to the stage to demo a version of Minecraft built specifically for Microsoft’s HoloLens . Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Studios Kudo Tsunoda told the audience that Microsoft is “working closely with Valve to make Windows 10 the best platform for VR gaming.” Valve’s own SteamVR development kit is still in development, but Ars got a chance to play with it at Valve’s office in Seattle last week. Microsoft also reiterated that it would be partnering with Facebook-owned Oculus VR with the goal of getting the Xbox One controller to interoperate with the  consumer-ready version of the Oculus Rift , which will be launched in the first quarter of 2016. Users will be able to play VR games through the Oculus Rift using their Xbox One controller, and they’ll be able to stream games through Windows 10 to the headset. Oculus also announced last week that it would launch its own hand-held controllers called Oculus Touch to allow for more natural gestures and movements through virtual worlds, but Oculus Touch is still in prototype mode and won’t be available until after Oculus’ launch. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft partners with Valve VR and Oculus, shows Minecraft for HoloLens

Intercepted WhatsApp messages led to Belgian terror arrests

The FBI has been lobbying hard to get unfettered access to the messages passed by encrypted messaging services. But they apparently didn’t need that level of access to WhatsApp messages sent between members of an alleged Chechen jihadist group operating in Belgium. According to a report by Bloomberg , a pair of men were arrested and warrants were issued for three others for allegedly preparing for a terrorist attack in Belgium. The arrests followed raids in which 16 people were detained, which Belgian law enforcement officials said was the result of “working with U.S. authorities to monitor suspects’ communications on WhatsApp Inc.’s messaging service,” Bloomberg’s Gaspard Sebag reported. The police investigation began after they obtained information about a man who had returned to Belgium after fighting as a jihadi in Syria. Ars reached out to WhatsApp and to Facebook, which completed its acquisition of WhatsApp in October. A spokesperson from Facebook declined to comment on the matter. But WhatsApp began providing end-to-end (E2E) encryption of its messages last November with the incorporation of security researcher Moxie Marlinspike’s WhisperSystems encryption protocol  TextSecure. In theory, if TextSecure were in use by the alleged terrorists, the content of their messages would have been very difficult to read; the TextSecure protocol continuously changes pairs of encryption keys with each new message. But it’s uncertain that the messages were encrypted—particularly since E2E encryption is not supported by the Apple iOS version of WhatsApp, and group messages and images aren’t supported by TextSecure yet. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intercepted WhatsApp messages led to Belgian terror arrests

US Army website defaced by Syrian Electronic Army

Early today, the official website of the US Army (www.army.mil) was defaced by attackers claiming to be with the Syrian Electronic Army. In addition to a message on the page claiming attribution, the attackers also included a pop-up message to anyone visiting: “Your commanders admit they are training the people they have sent you to die fighting.” One of several messages popped up by the defaced Army.mil sites. At the time of publication, the Army main homepage is down, although other Army websites have not been affected. However, the website of the US Strategic Command —the joint Department of Defense command overseeing space and nuclear forces—is also down, as is the official page for US Cyber Command hosted on its domain. Screenshots of the attack were posted this afternoon on a Syrian Electronic Army Twitter account, one which has in the past posted links to “leaked” files about connections between the US, Turkish, and Saudi Arabian governments and Syrian rebels. This account has also previously shared information about defacements of other websites (including that of the International Business Times and the Telegraph last year) and the hijacking of Twitter accounts belonging to a number of western media outlets. The SEA claims to have created its own distribution of Linux based on Ubuntu for use by its supporters. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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US Army website defaced by Syrian Electronic Army