wired – Page 46 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Cassini points to a hidden ocean on Saturn’s icy moon

I carry an ocean in my womb. NASA/JPL/SSI/J Major Finding liquid water on a body within the Solar System is exciting. The only thing that is probably more exciting is finding an ocean full of it. Today such news comes via Cassini, which has made measurements that show that Saturn’s moon Enceladus has a hidden ocean beneath its icy surface. While orbiting Saturn in 2005, Cassini found jets of salty water spewing from the south polar region of Enceladus. According to Luciano Iess of Sapienza University of Rome, lead author of the new study published in Science , “The discovery of the jets was unexpected.” Geysers require liquid water, and we wouldn’t expect Enceladus to have any. It is too far from the Sun to absorb much energy and too small (just 500km in diameter) to have trapped enough internal energy to keep its core molten. The answer to how the water got there might lie in the details of the moon’s internal structure. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cassini points to a hidden ocean on Saturn’s icy moon

USB-IF posts first photos of new reversible Type-C connector

The new USB Type-C connector compared to current A and B plugs. USB-IF USB Type-A. USB Type-B. Mini-USB Type-A. Mini-USB Type-B. Micro-USB Type-A. Micro-USB Type-B. That special, ugly variant of micro-USB Type-B you need to use for phones with USB 3.0 support. These are the different types of connectors you have to be aware of to use your current USB-equipped computers, phones, tablets, printers, and whatever other accessories you might have. The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) wants to simplify this problem by rallying behind the new Type-C connector, a new specification designed to replace current Type-A and Type-B plugs of all sizes. While we already knew that the USB Type-C connector would be smaller than many existing connectors and that (like Apple’s Lightning cables) it would be reversible, we didn’t know exactly what it would look like before today. The renderings released by the USB-IF today are still subject to change, but they show a Type-C connector that looks pretty much like you’d expect. Current cables usually use different Type-A and Type-B plugs on either end out of necessity—most computers use standard-sized Type-A connectors, while phones and cameras need either mini- or micro-sized Type-B connectors on the other end. Type-C will eventually supersede all of them, providing the same type of connector on both computers and phones. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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USB-IF posts first photos of new reversible Type-C connector

One week before its end of life, 28 percent of Web users are still on Windows XP

Windows XP will receive its last ever security update on April 8th next week. After that, any flaws, no matter how severe, will not be patched by Microsoft, and one would be well advised to not let Windows XP machines anywhere near the public Internet as a result. In spite of this, 28 percent of Web users were still using the ancient operating system in March. This seems unlikely to end well. Net Market Share Net Market Share Chrome has come close to Firefox’s market share a number of times over the years. However, the market share tracker we use, Net Market Share, has never seen Google’s browser actually surpass Mozilla’s—until now. In March, Chrome finally overtook Firefox to claim the second spot. Internet Explorer dropped a quarter of a point, Firefox dropped 0.42 points, and Chrome reaped the reward, gaining 0.68 points. Safari was essentially unchanged, up 0.01 points; likewise Opera, dropping 0.03 points. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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One week before its end of life, 28 percent of Web users are still on Windows XP

Hack of Boxee.tv exposes password data, messages for 158,000 users

A screenshot of the Boxee.tv forums post leading to an 800 megabyte file of leaked user data, including cryptographically hashed passwords. riskbasedsecurity.com Hackers posted names, e-mail addresses, message histories, and partially protected login credentials for more than 158,000 forum users of Boxee.tv, the Web-based television service that was acquired by Samsung last year , researchers said. The breach occurred no later than last week, when a full copy of the purloined forum data became widely available, Scott A. McIntyre, a security researcher in Australia, told Ars. On Tuesday, officials from password management service LastPass began warning customers with e-mail addresses included in an 800 megabyte file that’s still circulating online. The file contains personal data associated with 158,128 user accounts, about 172,000 e-mail addresses, and the cryptographically scrambled passwords that corresponded to those Boxee accounts, LastPass said. The dump also included a wealth of other details, such as user birth dates, IP addresses, site activity, full message histories, and password changes. All user messages sent through the service were included as part of the leak. As Ars has explained before, even when passwords in hacked databases have been cryptographically hashed, most remain highly susceptible to cracking attacks that can reveal the plain-text characters required to access the account . The damage can be especially severe when people use the same or similar passwords to protect accounts on multiple sites, a practice that’s extremely common. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Faster, cheaper, smaller: The state of the system-on-a-chip in 2014

Aurich Lawson/Ars Technica If you’re reading this, the odds are pretty good that you have a smartphone. There’s also a better-than-average chance that you know a little something about the stuff inside that phone—who makes the chips inside and how those chips stack up to the ones in other phones. About a year ago, we wrote a guide covering most of the major players making these chips, and now that this year’s Mobile World Congress is over and done with, we thought it was time to revisit the subject. What’s changed? What’s stayed the same? And what’s going to happen in the next year that you need to know about? We’ll begin by looking at emerging trends before moving on to a bird’s-eye view of where all the major chipmakers stand. This won’t give you an in-depth technical description of every detail, but it should help you understand where this tech is headed in 2014. Read 55 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Faster, cheaper, smaller: The state of the system-on-a-chip in 2014

“Pirate Bay Bundle” shares 101 little-known indie games via BitTorrent

Since The Humble Bundle launched in 2010 to almost immediate success , the Internet has been absolutely flooded with similar pay-what-you-want bundles of various indie games. Even amid this flood, a new indie game bundle stands out, both for its selection of titles and its distribution method. The Pirate Bay Bundle is a free collection of 101 small indie titles that I can almost guarantee you’ve never heard of, let alone played. Curator Moshboy describes the collection as an extension of his Underrated Indie Games series of YouTube videos . “Some were made for game jams, others were made just because, some are made by celebrated game makers, many are made by folks that you won’t know,” Moshboy explains. “Many are usually only available to play in your browser, but I managed to convince these wonderful folks to provide me with offline versions.” As the name implies, this massive collection of games is being distributed via a BitTorrent link on The Pirate Bay , with the cooperation of all the creators involved. While other indie bundles have also shared their DRM-free games via BitTorrent, I’m not aware of any that have willingly offered their selections entirely free via the popular and perpetually legally pressured torrent-sharing site (though that hasn’t stopped some people from turning to piracy to save a penny on other bundles). Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Pirate Bay Bundle” shares 101 little-known indie games via BitTorrent

Shields up: Tesla Model S gains (free) titanium and aluminum armor upgrade

Model S 1, concrete block 0. Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk has taken to Medium.com to post about a design change to the expensive-but-awesome Model S electric car: all Model S vehicles manufactured after March 6, 2014 will come with additional titanium and aluminum armor on their underbellies. The Model S carries its thousands of battery cells in a sealed enclosure below the floorpan, and the added armor is intended to protect the enclosure from puncture even under extreme conditions. This in turn should reduce the chances of Model S vehicles catching on fire. Not that the cars catching on fire is much of a thing; Musk is quick to point out that there have been only two Tesla fires resulting from road accidents (one of which involved a Model S being driven at 110 miles per hour directly into—and then through—a concrete wall), versus hundreds of thousands of gasoline vehicle fires last year. Nonetheless, Musk has directed his company to improve the car’s battery armor in an effort to assure customers (and investors) that the Model S really and truly isn’t going to burst into flames if you drive over a curb. The new armor takes the form of a three-part system: there’s a big hollow aluminum bar to deflect objects, a large titanium plate to absorb impacts, and an angled aluminum extrusion to cause the car to “ramp up and over” objects that can’t be crushed or flung aside. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Shields up: Tesla Model S gains (free) titanium and aluminum armor upgrade

Jury: MP3tunes founder must pay $41 million for copyright violations

Michael Robertson, an entrepreneur who has been waging legal feuds against the music industry for more than a decade now, has been ordered to pay $41 million to a record label that sued him. The record label EMI sued MP3tunes back in 2007, and the case finally went to a jury last week in New York federal court. The jury found MP3tunes, and Robertson personally, liable for copyright violations . A separate damages trial ended yesterday, with the jury issuing a verdict of around $41 million. That’s an estimate, because the decision was a “complex, lengthy” verdict that will take the lawyers until next week to calculate precisely, according to a Reuters report on the outcome of the trial. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Jury: MP3tunes founder must pay $41 million for copyright violations

Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency

Michael Mandiberg Researchers said they have uncovered two apps that were downloaded from the official Google Play market more than one million times that use Android devices to mine the Litecoin and Dogecoin cryptocurrencies without explicitly informing end users. According to a blog post published Tuesday by a researcher from antivirus provider Trend Micro, the apps are Songs , installed from one million to five million times, and Prized , which was installed from 10,000 to 50,000 times. Neither the app descriptions nor their terms of service make clear that the apps subject Android devices to the compute-intensive process of mining, Trend Micro Mobile Threats Analyst Veo Zhang wrote. As of Wednesday afternoon, the apps were still available. Mining apps typically consume larger-than-average amounts of electricity and can generate extremely hot temperatures as CPUs, GPUs, or other types of processors strain to perform cryptographic hashing functions required for users to mint new digital coins. The strain can be especially onerous on smartphones, because they’re equipped with hardware that’s much less powerful than that found in traditional computers. The apps discovered by Trend Micro were programmed to mine coins only when devices were recharging. That setting would help prevent batteries from draining quickly, but it would do nothing to prevent devices from overheating or consuming large amounts of bandwidth. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

New dwarf planet found sneaking through the inner Oort Cloud

An artist’s depiction of Sedna, the first of the objects from this class of bodies to have been discovered. NASA A new dwarf planet-like body has been found on the outer edges of the Solar System. This object, called 2012VP 113 , is about 450km wide and is the second body of its class found since the identification of the dwarf planet Sedna in 2003, and it joins an exclusive club composed of some of the strangest objects in the Solar System. The observable Solar System can be divided into three regions: the rocky terrestrial planets and asteroids of the inner Solar System, the gas giant planets, and the icy Kuiper Belt objects, which include Pluto. The Kuiper Belt stretches from beyond Neptune, which is at 30 astronomical units (where 1AU is the typical distance between the Earth and the Sun), to about 50AU. Sedna and 2012VP 113 are strange objects because they reside in a region where there should be nothing, according to our theories of the Solar System formation. Their orbit is well beyond that of Neptune, the last recognized planet of the Solar System, and even beyond that of Pluto, which differs from planets because of its size, unusual orbit, and composition. (Pluto, once considered a planet, is now considered the lead object of a group of bodies called plutinos.) Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments