Tag: yorker-vanity

Five-year-old runs up $2,500 in-app purchase tab with Apple

Five-year-olds know as well as adults do: iPads are fun to play with. Parents who regularly hand their iDevices over to their children, take note: you can still be burned by kids making in-app purchases. The  BBC published a story on Friday highlighting a five-year-old’s impressive feat in running up a £1,700 iTunes bill—about $2,500—after his father entered a passcode to allow him to download a “free” game from the App Store. The details of the situation reveal a series of unfortunate events that led to the truly epic tab, though Apple has since refunded the money. There are a few things the Kitchens could have done better when their son, Danny, began using an iPad to play games. The article doesn’t specify whether Danny’s father entered a passcode for the device, for the App Store, or within the app itself, but the last scenario listed seems most likely. Entering a password to download apps in the App Store used to mean the user could begin charging in-app purchases without re-entering that password for 15 minutes as the default iOS behavior. Apple made that more difficult with iOS 4.3 in early 2011 by requiring the App Store password a second time when in-app purchases are made. Assuming the family’s iPad was running a more recent version of iOS, it sounds like Danny’s father entered his password when Danny began to make purchases, not realizing what he was authorizing. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Five-year-old runs up $2,500 in-app purchase tab with Apple

“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

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“Download this gun”: 3D-printed semi-automatic fires over 600 rounds

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

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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

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Human hearing beats sound’s uncertainty limit, makes MP3s sound worse

Internet Explorer 10 finally released for Windows 7

Four months after Microsoft released Internet Explorer 10 with and for Windows 8, Redmond has finally released a version of the company’s newest browser for its 700 million Windows 7 users in 95 other languages too. The new browser will be available as an optional update immediately. Anyone with the release preview installed will have it sent as an “important” update. That’s significant because Windows Update will, in its default configuration, install it silently and automatically. Over coming months, Microsoft will classify Internet Explorer 10 as “important” in more and more markets to ensure it is installed automatically as widely as possible. This marks a significant change from Microsoft’s past practices. Traditionally, the company has released new browsers only as optional updates, and further, as interactive updates that required clicking through a EULA before installation actually took place. In late 2011, the company changed this policy, converting Internet Explorer 9 to an automatic (“important”) update. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Internet Explorer 10 finally released for Windows 7

Sony patent application measures load times to detect pirated games

Sony seems prepared to unleash a new tool in its never-ending battle against game pirates, using measured load times, of all things, to detect certain illegitimate copies of its games. Sony’s patent for “Benchmark measurement for legitimate duplication validation” was filed way back in August 2011, but it was only published by the US patent office late last week. The patent describes a method for a system that would measure load times for games loaded into a system against a previously measured threshold for what those load times ought to be on a standard, unmodified game and system: For example, if an authentic game title is distributed exclusively on [Blu-ray discs] having a total benchmark load time of 45 seconds on a game console BD drive, the acceptable range of load times could be from 40 to 50 seconds. Thus, a total measured title load time of four seconds would be outside of the acceptable range of total load times for a legitimate media type. Even if the pirated media results in similar overall load times to the original media (if a hacker added an intentional delay, for instance, or if a pirated game on a hard drive loaded similarly to an authentic game on a flash drive), the method described in the patent also measures load times for individual segments of the game code to detect fraudulent copies. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sony patent application measures load times to detect pirated games

Sony unveils thinnest 10.1″ tablet ever—the Xperia Tablet Z

The Sony Xperia Tablet Z, one of the hardiest and most svelte tablets we’ve seen. Sony Sony is unveiling a new Android tablet, the Xperia Tablet Z, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Monday. Sony claims the tablet is not only the “world’s thinnest 10.1-inch tablet” at 6.9 millimeters, but it’s apparently waterproof in up to three feet of water for 30 minutes. Inside, the Xperia Tablet Z has a quad-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, 2GB of RAM, and a 1920×1200 display running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. (Sony has gone scouts-honor that the tablet will be updated to 4.2 “after launch.”) The tablet weighs 495 grams (1.05 pounds) and it has an 8-megapixel rear and 2-megapixel front camera, plus 16GB/32GB storage configurations with a microSD slot than can take up to a 64GB card. The tablet also contains an IR blaster that works with a special version of an app Sony has created called TV SideView. TV SideView integrates with a user’s cable provider and allows users to browse the program guide as well as currently airing content. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sony unveils thinnest 10.1″ tablet ever—the Xperia Tablet Z

Server hack prompts call for cPanel customers to take “immediate action”

The providers of the cPanel website management application are warning some users to immediately change their systems’ root or administrative passwords after discovering one of its servers has been hacked. In an e-mail sent to customers who have filed a cPanel support request in the past six months, members of the company’s security team said they recently discovered the compromise of a server used to process support requests. “While we do not know if your machine is affected, you should change your root level password if you are not already using SSH keys,” they wrote, according to a copy of the e-mail posted to a community forum . “If you are using an unprivileged account with ‘sudo’ or ‘su’ for root logins, we recommend you change the account password. Even if you are using SSH keys we still recommend rotating keys on a regular basis.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Server hack prompts call for cPanel customers to take “immediate action”

Reports: Microsoft planning to unveil Xbox successor at April event

With Sony jump-starting the next-generation console hype train with its PlayStation 4 reveal this week , it seems Microsoft might not be willing to wait for June’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) to unveil its follow-up to the Xbox. Computer & Video Games is reporting that Microsoft is planning a “one-off media event” to show off its new system in early April, based on information from unnamed sources inside and outside of Microsoft. VG247 has corroborated CVG’s information , saying it has “also received word of the April event,” and National Alliance Securities analyst Mike Hickey has previously said he expected Microsoft to announce its console successor in April. Internet sleuths on gaming forum NeoGAF have noted that the company that helped organize Microsoft’s E3 2012 media briefing registered the domain XboxEvent.com just yesterday , suggesting that, um, an Xbox event might be in the works. Practically the entire professional game industry will be gathered together in San Francisco at the end of March for the Game Developers Conference, which would also seem like a natural time for Microsoft to reveal its next-gen plans to an interested audience. Then again, Microsoft could use GDC as a sort of pre-tease tease, letting slip certain small, developer-centric details before a fuller April event. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Reports: Microsoft planning to unveil Xbox successor at April event

Sexy scammers entice men into stripping on webcam, then blackmail them

Police in Singapore have issued an alert citing a dramatic rise in the number of “cyber blackmail” cases being reported. But unlike many cases that target women or teenagers , this latest rash of crimes targets men through social media sites. The Singapore Police Force reports that there have been more than 50 reported cases in the last year where “foreign” women have lured men through invitations on social networks, such as Facebook and Tagged.com, into video sex sessions that are recorded for blackmail purposes. The women “initiate cybersex” with the men over video chat, stripping for them and then encouraging them to do the same. The men are told to perform sex acts on camera for the women, and the video feeds are recorded. The men are then contacted later and told that the videos will be posted in public if the victims don’t wire money to the scammers. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sexy scammers entice men into stripping on webcam, then blackmail them