Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock “See! That shit keeps popping up on my fucking computer!” says a blond woman as she leans back on a couch, bottle-feeding a baby on her lap. The woman is visible from thousands of miles away on a hacker’s computer. The hacker has infected her machine with a remote administration tool (RAT) that gives him access to the woman’s screen, to her webcam, to her files, to her microphone. He watches her and the baby through a small control window open on his Windows PC, then he decides to have a little fun. He enters a series of shock and pornographic websites and watches them appear on the woman’s computer. The woman is startled. “Did it scare you?” she asks someone off camera. A young man steps into the webcam frame. “Yes,” he says. Both stare at the computer in horrified fascination. A picture of old naked men appears in their Web browser, then vanishes as a McAfee security product blocks a “dangerous site.” Read 65 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Tag: wired
EA not altering return policy for furious SimCity buyers
Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock Electronic Arts has indicated that it will not be altering its usual digital refund policy in the wake of SimCity server issues that have led to access problems and scaled-back features for players that are able to log in, days after the game’s North American release. “In general we do not offer refunds on digital download games,” EA tweeted through its official Origin account yesterday, directing people to the company’s online policy on returns and cancellations . While downloadable games purchased in North America are not be refunded “as a general policy,” EA does offer a “14-day unconditional guarantee” on any physical product sold through the Origin store. European customers, however, may be able to withdraw their downloadable purchase during a 14-day “Cooling Off period” as outlined on EA’s European return policy page . The recent tweet comes after a message posted to EA’s forums by Community Manager Raven on Tuesday, stating that “[i]f you regrettably feel that we let you down, you can of course request a refund for your order… though we’re currently still in the process of resolving this issue.” That message has now been revised to simply say “please review our refund policy here .” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
See the article here:
EA not altering return policy for furious SimCity buyers
Microsoft comes to its senses, allows Office 2013 to move PCs
In a substantial regression from the terms offered for Office 2010, the original Office 2013 license died with your PC . You couldn’t install a retail copy of Office on a new PC, even if you removed it from the old one. But after much public outcry, Microsoft has relented . The Office 2013 terms and conditions are being updated so that transfers are allowed. You’ll be allowed one transfer every 90 days unless the transfers are due to hardware failures. (In that case they can be made immediately.) The change is effective immediately, but it will take some time before it trickles out to the activation servers. If you’re transferring Office 2013 to a different PC and activation fails, you’ll have to call customer support. Microsoft insists that the support people know the score and will be able to activate you manually. Read on Ars Technica | Comments
Visit site:
Microsoft comes to its senses, allows Office 2013 to move PCs
How two volunteers built the Raspberry Pi’s operating system
Aurich Lawson When you buy a Raspberry Pi, the $35 computer doesn’t come with an operating system. Loading your operating system of choice onto an SD card and then booting the Pi turns out to be pretty easy. But where do Pi-compatible operating systems come from? With the Raspberry Pi having just turned one year old , we decided to find out how Raspbian —the officially recommended Pi operating system—came into being. The project required 60-hour work weeks, a home-built cluster of ARM computers, and the rebuilding of 19,000 Linux software packages. And it was all accomplished by two volunteers. Like the Raspberry Pi itself, an unexpected success story Although there are numerous operating systems for the Pi, the Raspberry Pi Foundation recommends one for the general populace. When the Pi was born a year ago, the recommended operating system was a version of Red Hat’s Fedora tailored to the computer’s ARM processor. But within a few months, Fedora fell out of favor on the Pi and was replaced by Raspbian. It’s a version of Debian painstakingly rebuilt for the Raspberry Pi by two volunteers named Mike Thompson and Peter Green. Read 53 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Read the article:
How two volunteers built the Raspberry Pi’s operating system
VMware will hate this: Amazon slashes cloud prices up to 28 percent
OH MY GOD, Amazon’s having a FIRE… sale . This is bad for business! 20th Century Fox Television Last week, VMware’s top executives displayed just how worried they are about the competitive threat posed by Amazon’s cloud computing service. With customers able to spin up virtual machines in Amazon data centers, VMware is concerned fewer people will buy its virtualization tools. According to CRN , VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger told service partners at the company’s Partner Exchange Conference that if “a workload goes to Amazon, you lose, and we have lost forever.” VMware COO Carl Eschenbach jumped on the Amazon theme, saying, “I look at this audience, and I look at VMware and the brand reputation we have in the enterprise, and I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books.” Given VMware’s view of Amazon, Gelsinger and Eschenbach won’t like the latest news from the “bookseller,” which also happens to be a large IT services provider. Amazon today announced price reductions of up to 27.7 percent for Elastic Compute Cloud Reserved Instances running Linux/UNIX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Reserved instances requiring up-front payments already provide discounts over “on-demand instances,” which can be spun up and down at will. Using reserved instances requires a little more advance planning to make sure you get the most bang for your buck—although customers who buy more than they need can sell excess capacity on Amazon’s Reserved Instance Marketplace . Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Continue Reading:
VMware will hate this: Amazon slashes cloud prices up to 28 percent
Trigger word: e-mail monitoring gets easy in Office 365, Exchange
I’m in ur email, watching ur filez. Diana Dee Sophia Exchange 2013 and Office 365 include a new feature that can peek into e-mail messages and enclosed documents, then flag them, forward them, or block them entirely based on what it finds. This sort of data loss prevention technology has become increasingly common in corporate mail systems. But its inclusion as a feature in Office 365’s cloud service makes it a lot more accessible to organizations that haven’t had the budget or expertise to monitor the e-mail lives of their employees. As we showed in our review of the new Office server platforms , the data loss prevention feature of Microsoft’s new messaging platforms can detect things like credit card numbers, social security numbers, and other content that has no business travelling by e-mail. Because of how simple it is to configure rules for Microsoft’s DLP and security features, administrators will also have the power to do other sorts of snooping into what’s coming and going from users’ mailboxes. Unfortunately, depending on the mix of mail servers in your organization—or which Exchange instances you happen to hit in the O365 Azure cloud—they may not work all the time. And they won’t help defeat someone determined to steal data via e-mail. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Read More:
Trigger word: e-mail monitoring gets easy in Office 365, Exchange
“Download this gun”: 3D-printed semi-automatic fires over 600 rounds
The white portion of this AR-15, known as the “lower,” was manufactured using 3D printing. Defense Distributed Cody Wilson, like many of his Texan forebears, is fast-talkin’ and fast-shootin’—but unlike his predecessors in the Lone Star State, he’s got 3D printing technology to further his agenda. Wilson’s non-profit organization, Defense Distributed , released a video this week showing a gun firing off over 600 rounds—illustrating what is likely to be the first wave of semi-automatic and automatic weapons produced by the additive manufacturing process. Last year, his group famously demonstrated that they could use a 3D-printed “lower” for an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle—but the gun failed after six rounds. Now, after some re-tooling, Defense Distributed has shown that it has fixed the design flaws and can seemingly fire for quite awhile. (The AR-15 is the civilian version of the military M16 rifle.) Read 34 remaining paragraphs | Comments
See more here:
“Download this gun”: 3D-printed semi-automatic fires over 600 rounds
Bitcoin reaches an all-time trading high of over $33
After rising steadily over the last several months, Bitcoin has reached an all-time high according to data on Bitcoin Charts . As of this writing, Mt. Gox , the most popular Bitcoin trading site (which announced on Wednesday that its operations would move to Silicon Valley), recorded a high price of $33.22 per Bitcoin. There’s no single explanation as to why Bitcoin has continued to rise, accelerating particularly over the last month. That said, it’s been clear that interest in the digital currency has been rapidly rising, as any regular reader of Ars knows. It’s likely that online gambling has played a part. As we’ve reported earlier this year, one Bitcoin-based site took in $500,000 in profit in just six months in 2012—and Bitcoin gambling is set to get even bigger . For now, gambling with the cryptocurrency, like using Bitcoins in general, remains in a legal grey area (which may be part of the appeal as well). Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
View article:
Bitcoin reaches an all-time trading high of over $33
Adobe releases third security update this month for Flash Player
Adobe has released an emergency security update for its widely used Flash media player to patch a vulnerability being actively exploited on the Internet. The company is advising Windows and Mac users to install it in the next 72 hours. An advisory the software company issued on Tuesday said only that affected Flash flaws “are being exploited in the wild in targeted attacks designed to trick the user into clicking a link which directs to a website serving malicious Flash (SWF) content.” It identified the bugs as CVE-2013-0643 and CVE-2013-0648 as indexed in the common vulnerabilities and exposures database . The advisory added the exploits targeted the Firefox browser. A spokeswoman said no other attack details are available. Adobe’s advisory assigns a priority rating of 1 to Flash versions that run on Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X computers. The rating is reserved for “vulnerabilities being targeted, or which have a higher risk of being targeted, by exploit(s) in the wild.” The priority for Linux users carries a rating of 3, which is used to designate “vulnerabilities in a product that has historically not been a target for attackers.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
View original post here:
Adobe releases third security update this month for Flash Player
Human hearing beats sound’s uncertainty limit, makes MP3s sound worse
New Jersey Modern audio compression algorithms rely on observations about auditory perceptions. For instance, we know that a low-frequency tone can render a higher tone inaudible. This perception is used to save space by removing the tones we expect will be inaudible. But our expectations are complicated by the physics of waves and our models of how human audio perception works. This problem has been highlighted in a recent Physical Review Letter , in which researchers demonstrated the vast majority of humans can perceive certain aspects of sound far more accurately than allowed by a simple reading of the laws of physics. Given that many encoding algorithms start their compression with operations based on that simple physical understanding, the researchers believe it may be time to revisit audio compression. Time and frequency: Two sides of the same coin You’ll notice I didn’t say, “human hearing violates the laws of physics,” even though it was very tempting. The truth is that nothing violates the laws of physics, though many things violate the simplified models we use to approximate them. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments
More:
Human hearing beats sound’s uncertainty limit, makes MP3s sound worse