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VESA publishes Embedded DisplayPort 1.4a standard that supports 8K displays

VESA, the standards body responsible for such luminary technologies as DisplayPort and the omnipresent VESA monitor mount, has published the specification for version 1.4a of Embedded DisplayPort (eDP). The new standard builds upon DisplayPort 1.3, which was published at the end of 2014. In short, eDP 1.4a allows for laptops, smartphones, tablets, and all-in-ones with 8K displays (7680×4320) or high-frequency (120Hz) 4K displays—but it includes a few other neat features, too. eDP 1.4a appears to be almost entirely based on DisplayPort 1.3—which was published in September 2014—with a couple of new features thrown in for good measure. eDP 1.4a specifies four high-speed (HBR3) lanes between the graphics adapter and display, with each lane capable of 8.1Gbps; the lanes can either be used individually, in pairs (more on that later), or all together for a total theoretical bandwidth of 32.4Gbps. That’s enough bandwidth to drive a 4K display (3840×2160) at 120Hz with 10-bit color or an 8K display at 60Hz. Beyond higher bandwidth, one of the more interesting features of eDP 1.4a is Direct Stream Compression (DSC), a standard developed by VESA and MIPI that—as the name implies—compresses the output video signal. According to VESA, the compression is “visually lossless” (i.e., it is lossy, but your games won’t suddenly look like a hand-me-down JPEG). VESA and MIPI say that DSC can reduce the component cost and power consumption of high-resolution displays—a claim that obviously needs to be confirmed once eDP 1.4a devices start shipping. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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VESA publishes Embedded DisplayPort 1.4a standard that supports 8K displays

Palm-sized pwnage: Ars tests the Pwn Plug R3

Imagine for a moment the following scenario: you’re the manager for a busy bank branch in a major city. You come back from lunch and are told by one of your employees that someone from corporate IT dropped by to check on a reported problem with a branch PC. You don’t remember putting in a trouble ticket with IT, but apparently the guy left after looking under a desk and re-plugging a network cable or something. It took less than five minutes. You think nothing of it and go back to approving loans. Three days later, you get a call from the head of corporate security, wanting to know why someone at your branch has been performing wire transfers from the accounts of customers who’ve never used your branch to accounts at offshore banks. A few hours later, you’re unplugging the bank’s network equipment while he’s shouting at you over the phone about gigabytes of corporate data being pulled down from something in your bank. And when the security team and police arrive to investigate, they find a little nondescript box plugged into a network port, connected to a broadband cellular modem. Something like this happened to banks in London last year . A man posing as an IT contractor wired networked keyboard-video-monitor (KVM) switches connected to cellular routers into PCs at two bank branches. The ring involved with the thefts was only caught because they decided to go for a third score, and their “technician” was caught in the act. The digital heists were a variation on the hacker “drop box” strategy: boldly walking into a place of business and planting a device, often hidden in plain sight, to use as a Trojan horse to gain remote access to the business’ network. Read 27 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Google announces SPDY’s coming demise as HTTP/2 approaches

A little over five years ago, Google unveiled SPDY, a new protocol that it positioned as a more secure, better-performing replacement for hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), the communication protocol on which the Web is built. Today the company announced that it would soon be removing SPDY support from Chrome. That’s because the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been working to update HTTP to produce HTTP/2, an updated revision of a protocol that has not seen any major changes since its introduction in the early 1990s. SPDY’s major goals were to reduce latency and improve security. To reduce latency, it included support for multiplexing—making multiple requests and responses over a single connection, with prioritization for different requests—and for security, it makes the use of TLS compulsory. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google announces SPDY’s coming demise as HTTP/2 approaches

Report: iOS 9 will focus mainly on stability and performance

Longtime Apple users speak fondly of the Snow Leopard (10.6) release of OS X. Even though it came with ” no new features ,” it won users over by reducing the footprint of the OS and focusing mostly on refinement. A report from 9to5Mac’s well-sourced Mark Gurman claims that Apple is taking a similar approach with iOS 9, focusing on fixing bugs and optimizing performance rather than adding another big stack of new features to the pile. The report isn’t specific about what Apple will be doing to accomplish those goals, but in any case it’s a departure from the release-first-fix-later approach Apple normally takes with iOS. iOS 7’s biggest problems were addressed by iOS 7.1 six-or-so months later, and so far we’ve seen six minor updates for iOS 8 that have attempted to address everything from bugs to performance and the amount of free space required for update installation. Though stability will be “a tentpole component” of iOS 9, Gurman says that the new operating system will still come with other improvements. Don’t expect a repeat of the “no new features” reveal, in other words. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Report: iOS 9 will focus mainly on stability and performance

Somalia is no safe refuge for torrent site

In the world of online piracy , it seems like it’s one in, one out at the moment. While The Pirate Bay returned last week, Kickass Torrents has now been taken down via a domain name seizure. The site, which was already blocked from direct UK access as a result of high court blocking orders, now turns up an error message when users attempt to access its Somali .so domain. A look at its Whois record shows the site listed as banned. The Somali registry was seen as a safe haven for the site, away from copyright holders and their lawyers, but it appears the takedown was a result of a claim. Several other sites with a .so domain, including the unaffiliated scam site kickasstorrents.so, have also been taken down, which indicates a far-reaching block on any URL with “kickass” in it that is based in the country. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Somalia is no safe refuge for torrent site

Malicious Google Play apps (may have) hosed millions of Android handsets

Security researchers have once again found Google Play offering malicious apps that have been downloaded by millions of Android users. According to a blog post published Tuesday by antivirus provider Avast, the apps include the Durak card game app and at least two other titles. Combined, those apps have been installed as many as 15 million times. Researcher Filip Chytry wrote: When you install Durak, it seems to be a completely normal and well working gaming app. This was the same for the other apps, which included an IQ test and a history app . This impression remains until you reboot your device and wait for a couple of days. After a week, you might start to feel there is something wrong with your device. Some of the apps wait up to 30 days until they show their true colors. After 30 days, I guess not many people would know which app is causing abnormal behavior on their phone, right? Each time you unlock your device an ad is presented to you, warning you about a problem, e.g. that your device is infected, out of date or full of porn. This, of course, is a complete lie. You are then asked to take action, however, if you approve you get re-directed to harmful threats on fake pages, like dubious app stores and apps that attempt to send premium SMS behind your back or to apps that simply collect too much of your data for comfort while offering you no additional value. It’s not the first time Google’s official Android app bazaar has been found to host malicious apps. In the past, it has offered titles laced with surreptitious remote access trojans , Bitcoin miners , and rogue advertising networks . Three years ago, Google introduced a cloud-based scanner that scours Play for malicious apps , but attackers have been known to bypass it . Google officials regularly remove apps from Play when they are found to be malicious. At the time this post was being prepared, all three flagged by Avast remained available for download. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Malicious Google Play apps (may have) hosed millions of Android handsets

Reddit got 55 user data requests in 2014, complied over half the time

Who knew that the “front page of the Internet” would be a source of information for law enforcement? According to a new transparency report released Thursday by reddit, the site has only received a few dozen requests for user data. As reddit wrote: Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Reddit got 55 user data requests in 2014, complied over half the time

iTunes Connect bug logs developers in to other developers’ accounts at random

This morning, a number of developers signed in to Apple’s iTunes Connect service only to be greeted by a list of apps that didn’t belong to them. TechCrunch has a good roundup of tweets from affected developers —it seems that whenever developers signed in with their credentials, they were being granted access to other developers’ accounts at random. As of about noon Eastern today, Apple took the service down to resolve the problem. It also looks like developers won’t be able to submit new apps or invite new testers to TestFlight while iTunes Connect is down. Affected developers can check Apple’s System Status page for developers for updates while they wait for the problems to be resolved (no other developer services appear to be affected by the outage). We don’t yet know whether the outage was caused by some error on Apple’s end or by a security breach like the one that brought all developer systems down in the summer of 2013 . We’ve asked Apple when the service will be back and what caused the login problem in the first place, and we’ll update this article as we have new details. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

Apple Remote Desktop admin tool is updated for the first time in forever

There was one other Apple software update that came out yesterday, though it got lost in the shuffle between OS X and iOS system updates and record-breaking financial results . The venerable Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) application has been bumped from version 3.7.2 to version 3.8. Version 3.7.2 was a relatively minor update issued in March of 2014, and version 3.7 goes all the way back to October of 2013. ARD is pretty far off the beaten path, but the short version is that it’s an administrative tool used primarily by IT people to manage large numbers of Macs. It can do standard remote desktop stuff—viewing and taking control of remote Macs’ screens to perform maintenance or help out end users—but it also has a bunch of other handy capabilities. Among other things, administrators can use ARD to push out updates or other software packages to a bunch of Macs at once, run scheduled maintenance, show user and application usage histories, and view hardware and software information for each computer. The biggest addition to version 3.8 is official support for OS X Yosemite, and the update redesigns the app’s icon and UI to mesh better with Yosemite’s new aesthetic. Older versions of ARD supported Yosemite, but performance was quite a bit slower and image quality was visibly poorer than it was for officially supported versions. Improvements to file copying, Full Screen mode, and viewing multiple client desktops at once round out the update. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple Remote Desktop admin tool is updated for the first time in forever

iOS 8.1.3 released, reduces the space you need to install updates

Apple has just released iOS 8.1.3, the third patch for iOS 8.1 and the sixth update to iOS 8 since its release. The most significant problem addressed by the new update is that it reduces the amount of free space that you need to install software updates, a problem which has proven especially irritating for owners of 8GB and 16GB iDevices. Currently, users who are using most of their storage either need to delete stuff or connect their phones to iTunes to perform updates, a throwback to pre-iOS 5 releases of the operating system. The update squashes a few other bugs too: it fixes problems keeping some users from entering their passwords for Messages and FaceTime; fixes a problem where Spotlight would stop showing locally installed apps among its search results (this is one we’ve run into); and fixes multitasking gestures for iPad users. Finally, 8.1.3 adds a few configuration options to limit iDevices’ functionality during standardized tests. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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iOS 8.1.3 released, reduces the space you need to install updates

Ken May

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