Tag: wired

Google: Cloud prices should track Moore’s Law, are falling too slowly

Tharan Parameshwaran Google today continued the trend of cloud services price cuts, while claiming that cloud network operators aren’t cutting average prices quickly enough. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google frequently advertise  price cuts , but Google today claimed that “pricing hasn’t followed  Moore’s Law : over the past five years, hardware costs improved by 20-30 percent annually, but public cloud prices fell at just 8 percent per year.” In today’s announcement, unveiled at Google’s Cloud Platform Live event , the company said, “We think cloud pricing should track Moore’s Law, so we’re simplifying and reducing prices for our various on-demand, pay-as-you-go services by 30-85 percent.” Moore’s Law is the observation that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles about every two years, bringing steady increases in processing power. One Amazon price cut last year was on the order of 37 to 80 percent for its dedicated instances, so this actually isn’t that unusual. Google declined to say which companies it included in its “public cloud prices” statistic. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google: Cloud prices should track Moore’s Law, are falling too slowly

Verizon accused of refusing to fix broken landline phone service

Matt Reinbold Verizon has been accused of refusing to fix landline phone service in order to force customers onto Internet packages with voice service that may falter during power outages.The Utility Reform Network (TURN) filed an emergency motion ( PDF ) last week with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) that asked the agency to “order Verizon to repair the service of copper-based landline telephone customers who have requested repair or wish to retain the copper services they were cut off of,” TURN announced . The group accused Verizon of “deliberately neglecting the repair and maintenance of its copper network with the explicit goal of migrating basic telephone service customers who experience service problems.” Verizon spokesperson Jarryd Gonzales told Ars that these claims are “blatantly false.” “We have identified certain customers in fiber network areas who have had recurring repair issues over their copper-based service recently or clusters of customers in areas where we have had recurring copper-based infrastructure issues,” Gonzales wrote in an e-mail. “Moving them to our all-fiber network will improve the reliability of their service. When these customers contact us with a repair request, we suggest fiber as a repair option. If the customer agrees, we move their service from our copper to our all-fiber network. There is no charge for this work, and customers will pay the same rate for their service. Most customers recognize and appreciate the increased reliability of fiber and gladly agree to the move to fiber. Few customers across our service area have chosen to stay with copper and, once on fiber, few ask to return to copper.” Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Verizon accused of refusing to fix broken landline phone service

Spectacular fossil fern reveals Jurassic-era chromosomes

The internal tissues of the fossilized fern. Benjamin Bomfleur A violent death has led to a remarkably lucky preservation. Researchers in Sweden have discovered ferns that were buried suddenly in a volcanic eruption during the Jurassic period. The sudden burial has preserved stunning details of the fern, down to showing the plant’s chromosomes being separated during cell division. In fact, the details are sufficient to determine that its genome hasn’t undergone major changes in at least 180 million years. The fossil was found in a volcanic deposit in southern Sweden. It belongs to a group of plants called the royal ferns (technically, the Osmundaceae ). The group, which includes a number of different species, was already known as a bit of a living fossil, since some of its distinctive features have been seen on plants that are 220 million years old, and a variety of other fossil species look indistinguishable from modern forms. The samples themselves are simply stunning. Not only are the internal details of various plant tissues preserved, but internal details of individual cells have been preserved. These include cells at various stages of the cell division process; darker, dense material shows the chromosomes being split up between the two incipient daughter cells. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Spectacular fossil fern reveals Jurassic-era chromosomes

Oculus Rift “DK2” eyes-on: Finally, VR without the Ocu-latency

Calm down, Oculus DK2! Now’s not the time for fear. That comes later. Today’s announcement about the latest improved version of the Oculus Rift headset was good news for virtual-reality geeks, but it came with two caveats. First, this still isn’t the final model meant for wide consumption, but rather a second stab at the headset’s development kit. And second, it won’t reach its intended, limited audience of developers until July of this year. That’s not soon enough for the GDC-attending contingent at Ars! After all, we’re already desperate to escape our current tech-conference reality, mostly comprising grumpy faced games industry professionals. Thus, gaming editor Kyle Orland and I grabbed our press laminates and hopped the giant Oculus Rift line,  Wayne’s World -style , to take the refreshed headsets for a spin—and grill company founder Palmer Luckey in the process. I have shoved my eyes into the original Oculus headset a few times now, which means that I have no patience for its largest failings: latency and refresh. The original responds just slowly enough to your head’s motions to feel detached, but worse, its tiny screens suffer from a slight frame refresh hitch. Couple those with a low-resolution screen pushed directly into your skull, and even first-person gaming freaks like myself can expect a one-way ticket to Headache Town. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Oculus Rift “DK2” eyes-on: Finally, VR without the Ocu-latency

10,000 Linux servers hit by malware serving tsunami of spam and exploits

Researchers have documented an ongoing criminal operation infecting more than 10,000 Unix and Linux servers with malware that sends spam and redirects end users to malicious Web pages. Windigo, as the attack campaign has been dubbed, has been active since 2011 and has compromised systems belonging to the Linux Foundation’s kernel.org and the developers of the cPanel Web hosting control panel, according to a detailed report published Tuesday by researchers from antivirus provider Eset. During its 36-month run, Windigo has compromised more than 25,000 servers with robust malware that sends more than 35 million spam messages a day and exposes Windows-based Web visitors to drive-by malware attacks. It also feeds people running any type of computer banner ads for porn services. The Eset researchers, who have been instrumental in uncovering similar campaigns compromising large numbers of servers running the nginx, Lighttpd , and Apache Web servers, said the latest campaign has the potential to inflict significant harm on the Internet at large. They explained: Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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10,000 Linux servers hit by malware serving tsunami of spam and exploits

Detection of primordial gravitational waves announced

The BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) telescope at the South Pole, designed to measure polarized light from the early Universe. Steffen Richter When the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced a press conference for a “Major Discovery” (capital letters in the original e-mail) involving an unspecified experiment, rumors began to fly immediately.  By Friday afternoon, the rumors had coalesced around one particular observatory: the  BICEP  microwave telescope located at the South Pole.  Over the weekend, the chatter focused on a specific issue: polarization in the Cosmic Microwave Background left over from the Big Bang. With the start of the press conference, it’s now clear that we’ve detected the first direct evidence of the inflationary phase of the Big Bang, in which the Universe expanded rapidly in size. BICEP, the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization experiment, was built specifically to measure the polarization of light left over from the early Universe. This light, known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), encodes a lot of information about the physical state of the cosmos from its earliest moments. Most observatories (such as Planck and WMAP) have mapped temperature fluctuations in the CMB, which are essential for determining the contents of the Universe. Polarization is the orientation of the electric field of light, which conveys additional information not available from the temperature fluctuations. While much of CMB polarization is due to later density fluctuations that gave rise to galaxies, theory predicts that some of it came from primordial gravitational waves. Those waves are ripples in space-time left over from quantum fluctuations in the Universe’s earliest moments. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Detection of primordial gravitational waves announced

Google DNS briefly hijacked to Venezuela

BGPMon’s alert on the detection of the change to the route to Google’s primary DNS server. BGPmon.net For about a half hour on Saturday, some requests to one of Google’s DNS servers in the US were re-routed through a network in Venezuela. A false Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) announcement from the Venezuelan network caused the diversion, which affected networks primarily in Venezuela and Brazil, as well as a university network in Florida. It all started at 5:23pm Greenwich Time (UTC). Andree Toonk of the network monitoring service BGPmon.net told Ars that the false routing request was dropped 23 minutes later, “most likely because the network that announced this route realized what happened and rolled back the change (to their router) that caused this.” During the intervening period, he said, traffic may have been re-routed back to Google, or it just may have been dropped. The result was failed DNS requests for those on the affected networks. Network rerouting through bogus BGP “announcements”—advertisements sent between routers that are supposed to provide information on the quickest route over the Internet to a specific IP address, such as the Google DNS service’s 8.8.8.8—have become increasingly common as a tool for Internet censorship. They’re used to stage “man-in-the-middle” attacks on Web users and to passively monitor traffic to certain domains. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google DNS briefly hijacked to Venezuela

How to set up your own private instant messaging server

For the past few years, I’ve run my own XMPP-based instant messaging server. It’s an incredibly convenient way for my wife and I to send links back and forth to each other while we’re on our computers, and I very much like the idea of not having to depend on a third party for the exchange of simple messages. Not that Google is going to mine a lot of useful data out of our instant messages anyway (though they would be able to tell that we like funny cat pictures)—still, the server has come in extremely handy on occasions in the past. Getting the server application set up is quite easy, and even better, it works with any XMPP-compatible instant messaging application—Adium, Pidgin, Trillian, and just about anything else that can speak the open XMPP protocol. The video below will walk through the process of setting up and installing Prosody , a lightweight Lua-based instant messaging server application. We’ll be using Ubuntu 12.04 for our server, though Prosody is a cross-platform application and will run on Windows, OS X, and a number of different Linuxes. Strap in, grab your server, and let’s roll! Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How to set up your own private instant messaging server

In sudden announcement, US to give up control of DNS root zone

Photograph by David Davies In a historic decision on Friday, the United States has decided to give up control of the authoritative root zone file, which contains all names and addresses of all top-level domain names. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), under the United States Department of Commerce, has retained ultimate control of the domain name system (DNS) since transitioning it from a government project into private hands in 1997. With Commerce’s blessing, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) acts as the primary essential governing body for Internet policy. The new change is  in advance of the upcoming ICANN meeting to be held in Brazil in April 2014. Brazil has fumed at revelations of American spying on its political leaders and corporations, which were first revealed in September 2013 as the result of documents distributed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The South American country also threatened to build its “own cloud,” as a consequence of the NSA’s spying. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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In sudden announcement, US to give up control of DNS root zone

Mozilla strives to take Web gaming to the next level with Unreal Engine 4

Around this time last year Mozilla and Epic Games showed off the Unreal 3 game engine running in the browser, using a combination of the WebGL 3D graphics API and asm.js , the high performance subset of JavaScript. Commercial games built using this technology were launched late in the year. With this apparently successful foray into using the browser as a rich gaming platform, Mozilla and Epic today demonstrated a preview of Epic’s next engine, Unreal Engine 4, again boasting near-native speeds. The Web version of UE4 uses Emscripten to compile regular C and C++ code into asm.js. Unreal Engine 4 running within Firefox. Over the past year, Mozilla has improved asm.js’s performance, to go from around 40 percent of native performance, to something like 67 percent of native. Our own testing largely supported the organization’s claims, though we noted certain limitations at the time, such as JavaScript’s lack of multithreading. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Mozilla strives to take Web gaming to the next level with Unreal Engine 4