Tag: wired

Square drastically simplifies Internet cash transfers

The screen where users enter their debit card information. Financial startup Square launched a new arm of its business Tuesday that allows two parties to transfer cash between themselves using only their debit card numbers and e-mail. Square Cash may trump similar services like PayPal in ease of use in that it doesn’t require extra bank info, and transactions can happen directly via e-mail. Competitors like PayPal have been able to handle direct debit transactions for some time, though setup is a bit more of a hassle. Users have to enter their checking account numbers and routing numbers and then verify their accounts with two small deposits, so the process can take a few days. With Square Cash, the process begins in e-mail : users send an e-mail to the person they want to pay, cc cash@square.com, and enter the amount in the subject line. If it’s their first transaction, Square sends a second e-mail that leads the user to a screen where they enter their debit card number, expiration date, and ZIP code. Once the person on the other end gets the e-mail and fills out the same form, the transaction is completed in 1-2 days. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Square drastically simplifies Internet cash transfers

Intel’s next-generation Broadwell CPUs delayed due to yield problems

Intel’s next-generation CPUs will arrive slightly later than expected. Intel During the company’s third quarter earnings call yesterday, CEO Brian Krzanich announced that production of Intel’s next-generation Broadwell CPUs would be delayed slightly due to manufacturing issues. CNET reports that a “defect density issue” in the new 14nm manufacturing process was causing lower-than-expected yields, and that Intel’s first round of fixes didn’t improve the yields by the expected amount. Krzanich expressed “confidence” that the issue had been fixed and that it was just a “small blip in the schedule,” and that the CPUs would begin mass production in the first quarter of 2014 rather than the fourth quarter of 2013 as expected. Broadwell’s successor, codenamed Skylake and due in 2015, will apparently not be affected by the delay. Broadwell is a “tick” on Intel’s CPU roadmap, a refined version of the current Haswell architecture built on a new manufacturing process. Intel typically doesn’t introduce a new architecture and a new manufacturing process simultaneously to reduce the likelihood and severity of manufacturing issues like these. Even with the delay, Intel will still be producing 14nm chips while most of its chipmaking competitors (including TSMC and Samsung) are rolling out their 20nm processes. Intel hasn’t gone into much detail on what Broadwell will bring to the table, but smart money says that it will further reduce power usage over Haswell while also increasing CPU and integrated GPU performance incrementally. The company announced at its Intel Developer Forum this year that it was seeing a ” 30 percent power improvement ” over Haswell in early production samples, a number which may stand to improve as the process matures and yields get better. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Intel’s next-generation Broadwell CPUs delayed due to yield problems

New effort to fully audit TrueCrypt raises over $16,000 in a few short weeks

For nearly a decade now, TrueCrypt has been one of the trusty tools in a security-minded user’s toolkit. There’s just one problem, though. No one knows who created the software, and worse still, no one has ever conducted a full security audit on it—until now. Since last month, a handful of cryptographers have newly discussed problems and alternatives to the popular application, which lead on Monday to a public call to perform a full security audit on TrueCrypt. As of Tuesday afternoon, that fundraiser reached over $16,000, making a proper check more likely. Much of those funds came from a single $10,000 donation from an Atlanta-based security firm. “We’re now in a place where we have nearly—but not quite enough—to get a serious audit done,” wrote Matthew Green , a  well-known cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University, on Twitter. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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New effort to fully audit TrueCrypt raises over $16,000 in a few short weeks

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

Ban on most robocalls and text message spam gets stronger this month

New Federal Communications Commission restrictions on telemarketing calls and text messages go into effect Wednesday, October 16. Adopted by the commission last year, the amendment to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) “will require businesses to obtain ‘prior express written consent’ before placing telemarketing calls to mobile phones using an automatic telephone dialing system (ATDS) or an artificial or prerecorded voice, ” a Bloomberg Law summary explains. “The same regulations will now also require businesses to obtain ‘prior express written consent’ before placing telemarketing calls to residential lines using an artificial or prerecorded voice. As a result, effective Oct. 16, oral consent is not enough.” This new restriction applies to text messages as well. The FCC’s order notes that “text messaging is a form of communication used primarily between telephones and is therefore consistent with the definition of a ‘call.'” Thus, the commission said it “concluded that text messages would be subject to the TCPA.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Ban on most robocalls and text message spam gets stronger this month

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”

Ubuntu’s controversial Mir window system won’t ship with 13.10 desktop

Ubuntu 13.04. Ubuntu 13.10 (“Saucy Salamander”) is scheduled for a final release on Oct. 17, but the OS won’t include what was perhaps the biggest and most controversial change planned for the desktop environment. Canonical announced in March that it would replace the X window system with Mir, a new display server that will eventually work across phones, tablets, and desktops. It has proven controversial, with Intel rejecting Ubuntu patches because Canonical’s development of Mir meant it stopped supporting Wayland as a replacement for X. Mir will ship by default on Ubuntu Touch for phones (but not tablets) this month, allowing a crucial part of Ubuntu’s mobile plans to go forward. However, it won’t be the default system on the desktop, because XMir—an X11 compatibility layer for Mir—isn’t yet able to properly support multi-monitor setups. This is a step back from Canonical’s original plan to “Deliver Mir + XMir + Unity 7 on the [13.10] desktop for those cards that supported it, and fall back to X for those that don’t.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Ubuntu’s controversial Mir window system won’t ship with 13.10 desktop

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

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