yorker-vanity – Page 26

Tech support scammer threatened to kill man when scam call backfired

Tech support scammers should probably just hang up the phone when a scam call goes wrong. But one scammer took things to a new level by threatening to kill a man who pointed out that the scammer was trying to steal money. As we’ve reported numerous times , scammers pretending to work for Microsoft tech support call potential victims, tell them their computers are infected, convince them to provide remote access, and then charge them hundreds of dollars to fix imaginary problems. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Tech support scammer threatened to kill man when scam call backfired

In major goof, Uber stored sensitive database key on public GitHub page

Uber is trying to force GitHub to disclose the IP address of every person that accessed a webpage connected to a database intrusion that exposed sensitive personal data for 50,000 drivers. The court action revealed that a security key unlocking the database was stored on a publicly accessible place, the online equivalent of stashing a house key under a doormat. Uber officials have yet to say precisely what information was contained in the two now-unavailable GitHub gists . But in a lawsuit filed Friday against the unknown John Doe intruders, Uber lawyers said the URLs contained a security key that allowed unauthorized access to the names and driver’s license numbers of about 50,000 Uber drivers . The ride-sharing service disclosed the breach on Friday, more than two months after it was discovered. “The contents of these internal database files are closely guarded by Uber,” the complaint stated. “Accessing them from Uber’s protected computers requires a unique security key that is not intended to be available to anyone other than certain Uber employees, and no one outside of Uber is authorized to access the files. On or around May 12, 2014, from an IP address not associated with an Uber employee and otherwise unknown to Uber, John Doe I used the unique security key to download Uber database files containing confidential and proprietary information from Uber’s protected computers.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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In major goof, Uber stored sensitive database key on public GitHub page

Intel unveils its next mobile maneuver: Atom x3, x5, and x7

BARCELONA, Spain—At Mobile World Congress 2015, Intel has unveiled its latest in a very long line of attempts at securing a beachhead in the mobile market: the Atom x3, Atom x5, and Atom x7 SoCs. As the naming implies, the Atom x3 is a low-end part that is probably destined for developing markets in countries such as India and China. The Atom x5 and x7, however, are quad-core 14nm Cherry Trail chips with Broadwell-class Intel HD graphics. Performance-wise, the x5 and x7 chips should be pretty good—but right now we only have Intel’s own benchmarks to go on. There’s also no word from Intel on the power consumption of the new chips, which is rarely a good sign when you’re trying to break into a highly competitive, entrenched market. Let’s start at the bottom. Atom x3 is essentially rebranded SoFIA, but now along with a 3G version there is a new chip (the x3-C3440) with an integrated LTE modem. Rather unusual despite its use of the Atom brand name, the x3 is a 28nm chip that isn’t being built at Intel’s own fabs. Instead, Intel is using a foundry (most likely TSMC or Rockchip), primarily because it isn’t cost effective for Intel to build chips with integrated modems on its own bleeding-edge 14nm node. The top-end Atom x3, the x3-C3440, has a quad-core CPU and Mali 720 MP2 GPU (yes, that’s a GPU designed by ARM Holdings). We probably won’t see the Atom x3 in Western markets; it will be cheaply fabricated in Asia, and it will be used in very cheap phones and tablets. We have asked Intel what CPU core is being used by Atom x3, but the company hasn’t yet responded. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel unveils its next mobile maneuver: Atom x3, x5, and x7

Hands-on with the fastest LTE network in Europe: 400Mbps down, 45Mbps up

LONDON—Today, I got to play around with Europe’s (and probably the world’s) fastest LTE network: when I opened up Speedtest.net, depending on how many people were standing in the room, my download speed was between 350 and 400Mbps, my upload speed was around 45Mbps, and my ping latency was just 20ms. Funny enough, beyond Speedtest.net, it is actually quite hard to use 400Mbps of bandwidth. When I loaded up a 4K video from YouTube, I only used around 40Mbps, or 10 percent, of my wireless uber-pipe. Ars Technica certainly loaded very quickly indeed. As it stands today, there are very few websites or services that will let you pull data down at 400Mbps, or where being able to download at 400Mbps even makes much sense. If we’ve learned anything from the last few decades of telecoms and networking, however, it’s that Internet usage will always expand until every last inch of available bandwidth is consumed. So while 400Mbps might seem a little bit over the top today, in five years you’ll probably wonder how you ever survived with anything less. For some background, I had a 400Mbps LTE connection at my disposal because I had been invited to Wembley Stadium in London to try out the first deployment of Category 9 LTE in the UK. It was a “live” deployment in that it used commercially available hardware, but it was still very much a tech demo—the Cat 9 base station only covered a small portion of the stadium, and there were only a handful of devices in the world configured to connect to this specific LTE network. The LTE network was operated by EE (one of the UK’s big four wireless carriers), the LTE base station was made by Huawei, and the mobile device that I used was a smartphone powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 SoC . Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Remote valet mode and revolutionized parking: Ford’s Smart Mobility

Ford has a plan to help cut car emissions, and this time it doesn’t have anything to do with batteries, hybrid powertrains, or clever engine technology. Instead, the company is focusing on improving the parking experience, and its answer involves a crowdsourced real-time database of occupied and empty parking spots across the country, and remote control vehicles enabled by off-the-shelf commercial 4G LTE. At first glance that might not sound like it has much to do with reducing vehicle CO 2 emissions, but according to Ford, their data shows that hunting for parking spaces in urban environments can account for between 20 and 30 percent of a vehicle’s emissions. To find out more about what Ford has been working on, we spoke with Mike Tinskey, director of vehicle electrification and infrastructure at Ford. He told Ars about a pair of research projects that the car maker has been working on as part of a larger program called Smart Mobility. Smart Mobility involves 25 different experiments and pilot studies around the world, but these two have both been developed in conjunction with a team at Georgia Tech here in the US; Ford has had a long-running relationship with the group, which Tinskey describes as being analogous to the company’s research and advanced modeling arm for sustainability. According to Tinskey, Smart Mobility exists at the intersection of mobility and sustainability, with the overall goal of finding novel ways to reduce CO 2 . “When you look for places to do that, you start looking at antiquated things like parking, where people waste a lot of time, and a lot of CO 2 ,” he said. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Samsung’s first 14nm SoC is a 64-bit, 8-core Exynos aimed at high-end phones

Samsung has just announced a new high-end Exynos 7 Octa SoC . It uses eight CPU cores—a combination of four high-end Cortex A57 cores and four low-end, power-saving Cortex A53 cores in a big.LITTLE configuration—and supports the 64-bit ARMv8 instruction set. However, its most significant new feature is Samsung’s new 14nm manufacturing process, which promises performance and power consumption improvements compared to the existing 20nm process. Samsung is already shipping eight-core 64-bit Exynos chips on its older 20nm process, most notably in the Galaxy Note Edge and some variants of the Galaxy Note 4. Compared to those chips, Samsung claims that the 14nm version “enables up to 20 percent faster speed, 35 percent less power consumption, and 30 percent productivity gain.” Those numbers don’t tell us much in terms of actual clock speeds or performance-per-watt numbers, but it’s safe to assume that the 14nm Exynos 7 will be able to run at higher clock speeds for longer while consuming less power. We don’t know anything about the new Exynos’ GPU yet. The 20nm Exynos 7 Octa uses a high-end Mail-T760 GPU from ARM, and we’ll probably see something similar in the 14nm version. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung’s first 14nm SoC is a 64-bit, 8-core Exynos aimed at high-end phones

South American ice chemistry records rise of Incas, arrival of Spanish

Ice cores are often relied on to be natural archives of past climate, capturing information that predates both our measurements and our greenhouse gas emissions. They’re a way of having records of the natural world that we don’t have a history of. However, natural archives like these can also act as records of human history, either directly (via fossils or artifacts) or indirectly. In mountainous regions, glacial ice doesn’t go as deep into the past as in Greenland or Antarctica, but it can tell stories of the recent past with excellent resolution. Airborne pollutants, for example, stand out sharply in measurements of the ice. They don’t say “pure as the driven snow” for nothing. Not much of this kind of work has been done in South America, though. Some lake sediment archives have shown the influence of local mining, but the timeline was fuzzy. In a new study, a team led by Chiara Uglietti , now at Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute, has produced a detailed ice core record of air pollution from Peru’s Quelccaya Ice Cap that goes back to the year 793. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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South American ice chemistry records rise of Incas, arrival of Spanish

Deaf group sues Harvard, MIT over online courses

The National Association for the Deaf (NAD) filed a lawsuit (PDF) against Harvard and MIT yesterday, saying the two universities are violating the Americans with Disabilities Act because they don’t properly caption their online course offerings. Harvard’s online courses aren’t really intended for students at the Ivy League university. Rather, the thousands of videos made available are part of the University’s “commitment to equity,” an effort “to create effective, accessible avenues for people who desire to learn but who may not have an opportunity to obtain a Harvard education.” The problem with Harvard’s offering, NAD lawyers say, is that it leaves out hard-of-hearing people. “Much of Harvard’s online content is either not captioned, or is inaccurately or unintelligibly captioned, making it inaccessible for individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing,” the complaint reads. “Just as buildings without ramps bar people who use wheelchairs, online content without captions excludes individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Deaf group sues Harvard, MIT over online courses

Wheel of Time TV pilot producers sue Robert Jordan’s widow for defamation

The tale of the late-night Wheel of Time pilot that aired in a paid infomercial slot on FXX has taken another odd turn. Producers Red Eagle Entertainment LLC and Manetheren LLC have filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for central California against Harriet McDougal (widow of James Rigney, who wrote the Wheel of Time novels under the pen name Robert Jordan), her company, Bandersnatch Group Inc., and twenty unnamed other persons (“Does 1-20”). The suit alleges that McDougal’s statements about her lack of involvement in the pilot’s production constitute breach of contract, slander, and interference with contractual relations and prospective economic relations; the suit demands declaratory relief and a jury trial. With the pilot coming essentially out of nowhere and airing with no fanfare, very few fans of the series were even aware of its existence until after the fact; it was clear that the production was accomplished in very little time and on a minimal budget. The resulting effort (titled “Winter Dragon”) did not resemble the series prologue very closely, and it quickly drew strong rebuke from McDougal, who claimed the pilot was made “without my knowledge or cooperation,” and that no one from Robert Jordan’s estate has been involved in any way with it. McDougal claims that Universal currently holds the rights to the Wheel of Time TV series, not Red Eagle Entertainment, and that the pilot made no mention of Universal or her own company, the Bandersnatch Group. That statement was apparently interpreted by Red Eagle Entertainment LLC—the corporate entity that produced the pilot and also claims to hold the television rights to The Wheel of Time —as fighting words. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Wheel of Time TV pilot producers sue Robert Jordan’s widow for defamation

Apple increases the maximum size of iOS app binaries for the first time ever

For the first time since the introduction of the App Store in 2008 , Apple is increasing the maximum size of the app binaries that developers can upload to iTunes Connect. The company announced today that the cap would increase from 2GB to 4GB , though this doesn’t affect the 100MB limit imposed on apps downloaded on cellular networks. iOS app binaries contain both the executable file and all of the images, sounds, and other assets that the app needs—everything from icons to splash screens to UI is all included in one big file. Because of how they’re packaged, these binaries can get rather large. Binaries include all the assets for all the devices they support. If you’re shipping a universal app that supports all iOS 8 devices, for example, you’ve got Retina iPhone assets, Retina and non-Retina iPad assets, and special “3x” assets specifically for the iPhone 6 Plus (Apple’s got a table here ). Universal apps include all of those assets, and the binary you download from the App Store is the same whether you’ve got an old iPhone 4S or a brand-new iPad Air 2. If you’re running on an iPhone, for example, a universal binary will still contain assets for other iPhones and iPads, increasing the amount of space the app needs even though some of those extra assets aren’t needed for your device. Xcode 6 partially supports vector graphics to ease the developer burden of maintaining and generating all these assets, but they’re still stored as PNG files when the binary is built and uploaded. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Ken May

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