wired – Page 53 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Exponential algorithm making Windows XP miserable could be fixed

Tom Carden Windows XP is really old, and we would suggest that you don’t use it unless you really have no option. For the most part, however, that age doesn’t really manifest itself. Sure, the operating system is missing the security features, hardware acceleration, and built-in support for things like USB 3 that newer versions of Windows have, but old software doesn’t have the same issues as, say, old cars. Old software generally runs as well today as it did when it was brand new. But Windows XP users have noticed that this isn’t entirely true. A bunch of them have found that the old operating system is working considerably worse than when it was released in 2001. The problem is that—especially among those who are still using Internet Explorer 6 or 7—each time you boot your Windows XP machine, it slows to a crawl. There’s a built-in process, svchost.exe, chewing up the entire processor, sometimes for an hour or more at a time. Wait long enough after booting and the machine will eventually return to normalcy. But an hour can be a long time to wait. Loss of horsepower and trouble starting up are common enough problems in old cars, but we don’t really expect the same things to happen on old PCs. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

North Korea attempts to purge online memory of executed leader

Kim Il Sung (left) is the founder of modern North Korea and the grandfather of current dictator Kim Jong Un. Tormod Sandtorv On Thursday, foreign policy watchers worldwide were stunned when North Korea announced the execution of Jang Song Taek , a top government official. Jang was the uncle of Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s young dictator, and also served as vice chairman of the National Defense Commission of North Korea . However, beyond the whims of North Korea’s leader, the Hermit Kingdom appears to have now also taken the unusual step of attempting to remove all references to Jang Song Taek from state-controlled Internet outlets, primarily the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). The KCNA website , which is hosted in Japan, appears to have suffered an outage briefly on Friday , and subsequently, past articles appeared scrubbed of mentions of Jang. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sprint wants to buy T-Mobile and leave US with just three major carriers

Masayoshi Son (left), poses with a Storm Trooper at Sprint owner SoftBank’s launch of the iPhone 3GS in 2009. Danny Choo Sprint is “working toward a possible bid for rival T-Mobile” but is first examining regulatory concerns that could prevent such a merger, the Wall Street Journal reported today . A merger would leave the US cellular market with only three major carriers, although a combined Sprint/T-Mobile would perhaps be a more formidable opponent to market leaders AT&T and Verizon Wireless. AT&T attempted to buy T-Mobile, but it dropped those plans in December 2011 after opposition from the Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Sprint hasn’t made a final decision on a bid, but it could happen in the first half of 2014 and be worth more than $20 billion “depending on the size of any stake in T-Mobile that Sprint tries to buy,” the Journal reported. “But it would likely face tough opposition from antitrust authorities, who worry consumers could suffer without a fourth national competitor to keep a check on prices,” the report said. AT&T’s takeover bid for T-Mobile would have been $39 billion.The Journal ‘s sources indicate that Sprint is wary of wasting time on a deal that might not come to fruition, but the company’s owner is leading the charge. “Driving the current effort is SoftBank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son, an aggressive acquirer who bought control of Sprint earlier this year and has made no secret of his desire to grow in the US via further deals,” the Journal wrote. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

British Library sticks 1 million pics on Flickr, asks for help making them useful

In 2008, the British Library, in partnership with Microsoft, embarked on a project to digitize thousands of out-of-copyright books from the 17 th , 18 th , and 19 th centuries. Included within those books were maps, diagrams, illustrations, photographs, and more. The Library has uploaded more than a million of them onto Flickr and released them into the public domain. It’s now asking for help. Though the library knows which book each image is taken from, its knowledge largely ends there. While some images have useful titles, many do not, so the majority of the million picture collection is uncatalogued, its subject matter unknown. Next year, it plans to launch a crowdsourced application to fill the gap, to enable humans to describe the images. This information will then be used to train an automated classifier that will be run against the entire corpus. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Ukranian fraudster and CarderPlanet “Don” finally sentenced to 18 years

401(K) 2012 In 2001, a group of 150 Russian-speaking hackers gathered at a restaurant in Odessa to found CarderPlanet . It ultimately became one of the world’s most notorious fraudulent credit card data websites, and it was shut down in 2004 . On Thursday, one of the site’s founders, Roman Vega (aka “Boa”), was sentenced to 18 years in prison by a United States federal judge. Vega’s case has been going on for quite some time. The Ukrainian credit card fraudster was arrested, prosecuted, and convicted in Cyprus in 2003. Then, he was brought to the United States in 2004 to face federal charges in California, to which he pleaded guilty. By 2007, Vega faced fresh charges in New York. By early 2009, Vega pleaded guilty to those charges, but then he attempted to withdraw his plea in 2011. Various motions were filed, but by May 2012, the judge denied his request and his plea stood. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Ukranian fraudster and CarderPlanet “Don” finally sentenced to 18 years

Valve: First version of SteamOS to be released to the masses on Friday

Valve PC gamers who are champing at the bit to build their very own ” Steam Machines ” won’t have to wait long to start tinkering, as Valve has revealed that its recently announced SteamOS will be available this Friday. The announcement comes alongside word from Valve that its prototype Steam Machines , along with the companion Steam Controller , will be shipped out to 300 randomly selected US beta testers on Friday. Valve plans to notify the lucky testers via e-mail at 2 pm Pacific today, and beta participants will get a special badge on their Steam accounts so journalists and fellow players can start bugging them for their impressions incessantly. If you’re not part of that lucky group of 300, though, you’re probably more interested in the fact that “SteamOS will be made available when the prototype hardware ships… downloadable by individual users and commercial OEMs.” More information about that release is coming soon, the company says, but Valve is already warning that “unless you’re an intrepid Linux hacker already, we’re going to recommend that you wait until later in 2014 to try it out.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Valve: First version of SteamOS to be released to the masses on Friday

The first smartring has an LED screen, tells time, and accepts calls

Forget smartwatches —smartrings are the new thing now. An Indiegogo campaign for a product called the “Smarty Ring” has hit its funding goal. Smarty Ring is a 13mm-wide stainless steel ring with an LED screen, Bluetooth 4.0, and an accompanying smartphone app. The ring pairs with a smartphone and acts as a remote control and notification receiver. The ring can display the time, accept or reject calls, control music, trigger the smartphone’s camera, and initiate speed-dial calls. It will also alert the wearer with light-up icons for texts, e-mails, Facebook, Twitter, Google Hangouts, and Skype. It supports dual time zones and comes with a countdown timer, a stopwatch, and an alarm. It can work as a tracker for your phone, too—if your smartphone is more than 30 feet away from the ring, Smarty Ring will trigger an alarm. The ring supports Android and iOS—as long as your device has Bluetooth 4.0, it should be compatible. The creators are promising 24 hours of battery life from the whopping 22 mAh battery, and charging happens via a wireless induction pad. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

New US spy satellite features world-devouring octopus

United Launch Alliance via ODNI President Obama is out to put the public’s mind at ease about new revelations on intelligence-gathering, but the Office for the Director of National Intelligence can’t quite seem to get with the program of calming everyone down. Over the weekend, the ODNI was pumping up the launch of a new surveillance satellite launched by the National Reconnaissance Office. The satellite was launched late Thursday night, and ODNI’s Twitter feed posted photos and video of the launch over the following days. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Report: Spotify will introduce free mobile streaming next week

Spotify will soon allow its ad-supported users to stream music for free on their mobile devices, according to reports from the Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch . The company is reportedly holding an event next week to announce the service tweak, which takes a bit of the incentive away from subscribing. The Journal reports that Spotify has been negotiating for nearly a year to get mobile streaming rights, and it finally has the blessing of Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group. The rights holders and Spotify not only had to agree on rates but on how the music could be used. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Report: Spotify will introduce free mobile streaming next week

Kingpin behind large chunk of world’s malware exploits led lavish life

A screenshot showing BlackHole statistics. Group-IB An online crime kingpin arrested in October and charged with creating and distributing the Blackhole exploit kit may have had his hand in as much as 40 percent of the world’s malware infections, according to information released by the security firm that helped track him down. The 27-year-old Russian, identified only as Paunch, allegedly earned about $50,000 per month selling BlackHole subscriptions for as much as $500 per month, according to a report published Friday by security firm Group-IB. He is also alleged to be behind the much more expensive Cool Exploit Kit and a “Crypt” service used to obfuscate malware to go undetected by antivirus programs. With more than 1,000 customers, he was able to lead a lavish lifestyle that included driving a white Porsche Cayenne, Group-IB said. A man Group-IB identifies as “Paunch” standing in front of a Porsche Cayenne. Group-IB Exploit kits are the do-it-yourself tools used to embed crimeware into hacked or malicious websites so they target a host of vulnerabilities found on end-user computers. People who visit the websites are exposed to “drive-by” attacks that are often able to install highly malicious software on the computers with no sign that anything is amiss. Group-IB estimated that Paunch may have supplied the code used in as much as 40 percent of the PC crimeware infections worldwide. Researchers arrived at that guess by gauging sales of BlackHole and Cool, which they said accounted for about 40 percent of world revenue for exploit kits. Even assuming that some crimeware is installed independent of exploit kits, it’s hard to overstate the role these two kits played in seeding the Web with exploit code that installed malware used in bank fraud and other forms of online crime. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Kingpin behind large chunk of world’s malware exploits led lavish life