Tag: wired

Facebook tries cloaking probe into data leak involving 1 million accounts

Facebook officials told a blogger to keep their discussions with him private as they investigate claims he acquired names and e-mail addresses belonging almost one million account holders for $5 through a publicly available service online. “Oh and by the way, you are not allowed to disclose any part of this conversation,” member’s of Facebook’s platform policy team said during a tape-recorded telephone conversation, according to a blog post published by Bogomil Shopov, who describes himself as a “community and technology geek” who lives in Prague, Czech Republic. “It is a secret that we are even having this conversation.” Shopov said Facebook officials set up the conversation after an earlier blog post claiming he purchased data for one million Facebook users online for just $5. The blogger said it was impossible for him to determine exactly how recent the data was, although several of the entries he checked contained accurate e-mail addresses for people he knew. In addition to containing names and e-mail addresses, the cache he purchased also contained profile IDs. In an e-mail to Ars, Shopov said he suspects the data came from a third-party developer. The website selling the information has since removed the post that advertised the data, but for the time being it’s still available in Google cache . Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Facebook tries cloaking probe into data leak involving 1 million accounts

Better on the inside: under the hood of Windows 8

Windows 8’s most obvious—and most divisive—new feature is its user interface . However, it would be a mistake to think that the user interface is the only thing that’s new in Windows 8: there’s a lot that’s changed behind the scenes, too. Just as is the case with the user interface, many of the improvements made to the Windows 8 core are motivated by Microsoft’s desire to transform Windows into an effective tablet operating system. Even those of us with no interest at all in tablets can stand to take advantage of these changes, however. For example, Windows 8 is more power efficient and uses less memory than Windows 7; while such work is critical to getting the software to run well on low-memory tablets with all-day battery life, it’s equally advantageous for laptop users. The biggest single piece of technology that is new to Windows 8 is, however, squarely Metro focused: it’s a large set of libraries and components called WinRT. I’ve already written extensively about what WinRT is, so I won’t be getting into that here, but there are system capabilities that WinRT apps can use (or are forced to use) that are interesting in their own right. Read 77 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Better on the inside: under the hood of Windows 8

IBM prepares for end of process shrinks with carbon nanotube transistors

Carbon nanotubes sit on top of features etched in silicon. IBM Research The shrinking size of features on modern processors is slowly approaching a limit where the wiring on chips will only be a few atoms across. As this point approaches, both making these features and controlling the flow of current through them becomes a serious challenge, one that bumps up against basic limits of materials. During my visit to IBM’s Watson Research Center, it was clear that people in the company is already thinking about what to do when they run into these limits. For at least some of them, the answer would involve a radical departure from traditional chipmaking approaches, swithching from traditional semiconductors to carbon nanotubes. And, while I was there, the team was preparing a paper (now released by Nature Nanotechnology ) that would report some significant progress: a chip with 10,000 working transistors made from nanotubes, formed at a density that’s two orders of magnitude higher than any previously reported effort. During my visit to Watson, I spoke with George Tulevski, who is working on the nanotube project, and is one of the authors of the recent paper. Tulevski described nanotbues as a radical rethinking of how you build a chip. “Silicoon is a solid you carve down,” he told Ars, “while nanoubes are something you have to build up.” In other words, you can’t start with a sheet of nanotubes and etch them until you’re left with the wiring you want. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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IBM prepares for end of process shrinks with carbon nanotube transistors

$99 Raspberry Pi-sized “supercomputer” hits Kickstarter goal

A prototype of Parallella. The final version will be the size of a credit card. Adapteva A month ago, we told you about a chipmaker called Adapteva that turned to Kickstarter in a bid to build a new platform that would be the size of a Raspberry Pi and an alternative to expensive parallel computing platforms. Adapteva needed at least $750,000 to build what it is calling “Parallella”—and it has hit the goal. Today is the Kickstarter deadline, and the project is up to more than $830,000  with a few hours to go. ( UPDATE : The fundraiser hit $898,921 when time expired.) As a result, Adapteva will build 16-core boards capable of 26 gigaflops performance, costing $99 each. The board uses RISC cores capable of speeds of 1GHz each. There is also a dual-core ARM A9-based system-on-chip, with the 16-core RISC chips acting as a coprocessor to speed up tasks. Adapteva is well short of its stretch goal of $3 million, which would have resulted in a 64-core board hitting 90 gigaflops, and built using a more expensive 28-nanometer process rather than the 65-nanometer process used for the base model. The 64-core board would have cost $199. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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$99 Raspberry Pi-sized “supercomputer” hits Kickstarter goal

Jailbreaking now legal under DMCA for smartphones, but not tablets

Yutaka Tsutano The Digital Millennium Copyright makes it illegal to “circumvent” digital rights management schemes. But when Congress passed the DMCA in 1998, it gave the Librarian of Congress the power to grant exemptions. The latest batch of exemptions, which will be in force for three years, were announced on Thursday. Between now and late 2015, there will be five categories of circumvention that will be allowed under the Librarian’s rules, one fewer than the current batch of exemptions , which was announced in July 2010. The new exemptions take effect October 28. The new batch of exemptions illustrate the fundamentally arbitrary nature of the DMCA’s exemption process. For the next three years, you’ll be allowed to jailbreak smartphones but not tablet computers. You’ll be able to unlock phones purchased before January 2013 but not phones purchased after that. It will be legal to rip DVDs to use an excerpt in a documentary, but not to play it on your iPad. None of these distinctions makes very much sense. But Congress probably deserves more blame for this than the Librarian of Congress. Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Jailbreaking now legal under DMCA for smartphones, but not tablets

Apple updates iPad with Lightning, A6X, “global” LTE support

At a special media event on Tuesday, Apple announced that it would begin shipping a new fourth-generation iPad on November 2. The updated device features Apple’s new Lightning connector introduced on the iPhone 5 and fifth-generation iPod touch. In addition, it will also include a custom-designed A6X processer and a newer Qualcomm 4G LTE baseband chip that is compatible with more LTE networks around the globe. The revision comes just six months before Apple typically launches new iPad hardware around late March or early April. However, Apple CEO Tim Cook said Apple was “putting its foot on the gas” and revising the iPad even faster than before. Jacqui Cheng The new A6X processor is built around the custom ARM core Apple designed for the iPhone 5, which offers twice the processing performance of the A5X. However, it has apparently included some changes to the graphics cores used, as Apple claims it also has double the graphics performance as well. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple updates iPad with Lightning, A6X, “global” LTE support

Cisco machine gets listed by blackhat org that rents out hacked PCs

Enlarge KrebsonSecurity.com A computer running inside the corporate network of Cisco Systems is one of about 17,000 machines that is being rented out to online miscreants looking to get a foothold inside Fortune 500 companies, according to a published report. The Windows Server 2003 system uses Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol so it can be remotely accessed by anyone with the login credentials. It’s listed on Dedicatexpress.com, a service that allows anyone in the world to access hacked computers at specific organizations, KrebsonSecurity reported . Remarkably, the username for the box is “Cisco” and the corresponding password is—you guessed it—”Cisco.” “Businesses often turn on RDP for server and desktop systems that they wish to use remotely, but if they do so using a username and password that is easily guessed, those systems will soon wind up for sale on services like this one,” reporter Brian Krebs wrote. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cisco machine gets listed by blackhat org that rents out hacked PCs

Dept. of Veterans Affairs spent millions on PC software it couldn’t use

Rolling out new software to a few thousand users is an involved process for any organization. But installing software that affects hundreds of thousands of PCs as part of a response to a data breach while under embarrassing scrutiny is a task that would challenge even the most well-managed IT departments. And, apparently, the Office of Information Technology (OIT) at the Department of Veterans Affairs’ answer to that challenge was to sweep it under the rug. After removable hard disks containing unencrypted personal identifying information of  26 million military veterans  were stolen from the home of a VA employee in 2006, then-Secretary of Veterans Affairs   R. James Nicholson mandated that the VA’s Office of Information Technology install encryption software on all of the department’s notebook and desktop computers. But while the VA purchased 400,000 licensees for Symantec’s Guardian Edge encryption software, more than 84 percent of those licenses—worth about $5.1 million, including the maintenance contracts for them—remain uninstalled, a  VA Inspector General’s audit  has found. The VA’s OIT purchased 300,000 licenses and maintenance agreements for Guardian Edge in 2006 and continued to pay for maintenance on those licenses for the next five years. And in 2011, the VA purchased 100,000 more software licenses from Symantec and extended maintenance on all 400,000 licenses for two years. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Dept. of Veterans Affairs spent millions on PC software it couldn’t use

Analyst calls AMD “un-investable,” downgrades rating

Another day, and AMD inches even closer to irrelevance . Just one day after the company posted pretty terrible quarterly earnings (“Net loss $157 million, loss per share $0.21, operating loss $131 million”), followed by a 16 percent drop in the company’s stock price and job cuts of 1,800 (15 percent of its global workforce), two financial analysts have now downgraded the company. It certainly doesn’t help things that the company’s CFO resigned abruptly last month, either. In a financial analysis report released Friday, Bernstein Research‘s Stacy Rasgon wrote: Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Analyst calls AMD “un-investable,” downgrades rating