Not anonymous: attack reveals BitTorrent users on Tor network
Think that anonymizing BitTorrent tracker connections through Tor makes you harder to track? Think again. A vulnerability was used to identify over 10,000 users' IP addresses via their BitTorrent tracker connections. But it's not just your BitTorrent downloads that are at risk: an attacker can use your BitTorrent connections to de-anonymize other, more secure applications run over Tor.
In a paper released a few weeks ago at the USENIX conference's workshop on Large-scale Exploits and Emergent Threats (LEET), researchers from INRIA France revealed a class of vulnerabilities in the Tor system which threatens the anonymity of many BitTorrent users. The research team, led by Stevens Le Blond, explained an attack methodology which it developed and deployed. The attack exploits a feature of Tor originally introduced to improve anonymity and efficiency, but it also relies on certain aspects of the BitTorrent protocol.
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Two years after buying Pure Digital, Cisco ditches the Flip
Don't look now, but the Flip camera is officially dead. Cisco announced Tuesday morning that it is killing off the line of pocketable video cameras in order to refocus the company around home networking and video. The news was a surprise to even Flip critics, leaving everyone wondering why Cisco bothered to buy Pure Digital (the Flip's former parent company) for $590 million just two years ago.
When Cisco purchased Pure Digital and its Flip line in 2009, many observers were left scratching their heads. Cisco, known for its enterprise and networking prowess, wanted to dive deeper into consumer electronics? The marriage never fully made sense, but we accepted it—most assumed that Cisco was making its own attempt to compete in the handheld market by simply gobbling up one of the hottest little gadget startups at the time. Pure Digital was placed alongside Linksys in Cisco's Consumer Business Group.
Two years later, Cisco's feelings about the acquisition have changed. Cisco announced that it's expanding the Consumer Business Group, but that the Flip business will no longer be part of it. There was no formal explanation given as to why Cisco chose to shut the group down instead of selling it, but Cisco's Global head of PR told Pocket-lint that "Stopping the business rather than selling it was the best course of action for the business."
Indeed, the Flip can't be faring well against the growing number of smartphones with built-in HD cameras. The quality of your typical smartphone video camera is comparable to the Flip, and people have their phones on them all the time. (What's that saying about the best camera being the one you have?) There's no doubt that the line was probably not growing at the rate Cisco would have liked, but the Flip was still holding its ground against competition like Kodak with its own line of small, pocketable video cameras. Pure Digital offered one of the cleanest and easiest to use non-phone video solutions.
As for what Cisco will be doing with the rest of the Consumer Business Group, the company says it will concentrate on home networking and expanding into a video platform for the home. Cisco CEO John Chambers added that the company's consumer efforts would "focus on how we help our enterprise and service provider customers optimize and expand their offerings for consumers, and help ensure the network's ability to deliver on those offerings."
Networking is definitely the theme of Cisco's announcement—not gadgety things like the Flip. The company said it would continue supporting customers of its FlipShare photo sharing service through a "transition plan," but otherwise, about 550 people from Pure Digital's part of the company are now out of a job.
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Do "e-petitions" change government? Germany's experiment
In 2005, Germany's Bundestag launched what many saw as a daring innovation in that country's political process. The Parliament approved an e-petition system in which citizens could submit, sign, and discuss petitions on the Internet. Not only that, but petitioners who gathered 50,000 signatures or more now had the right to public meetings with the Bundestag's petitions committee about the laws they sought to change.
Germans had been able to submit petitions prior to 2005, of course. But the online feature and public meeting requirement were new. Did this radically change German politics? Not a whole lot, say two German scholars in a research paper commissioned by the Bundestag.
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Watch the first 12 minutes of live-action Mortal Kombat Legacy
Last year a live-action trailer for a new Mortal Kombat project took the Internet by storm. While everyone thought it was a viral ad for a new game, an early look at a new movie, or some other madness, the truth was that the people behind the video were trying to drive interest in a new Mortal Kombat film. The film never came to pass, but the same folks were hired to put together a series of shorts to promote the latest Mortal Kombat game. The first 12-minute video has been released.
It stars Jeri Ryan and Michael Jai White, and you can watch it right here. Take a look.
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Google acquisition of PushLife could teach Android to sing
Google is acquiring PushLife, a company that develops mobile media syncing software. The exact terms of the deal haven't been disclosed, but the acquisition is rumored to have cost Google $25 million. The move is significant because the underlying software that powers PushLife's media platform would make a good addition to Google's lineup of services and integrated software for Android.
At the Google IO event last year, the search giant revealed several capabilities that were planned for eventual inclusion in future versions of Android. One such feature was wireless music synchronization and cloud streaming on an Android mobile device. It seems likely that Google has acquired PushLife with the aim of integrating some of the company's services and technology into the upcoming Android music offering.
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Ask Ars: what is a CPU thread?
In 1998, Ask Ars was an early feature of the newly-launched Ars Technica. Now, as then, it's all about your questions and our community's answers. Each week, we'll dig into our question bag, provide our own take, then tap the wisdom of our readers. To submit your own question, see our helpful tips page.
Question: What is a CPU thread (as in "multithreaded CPU," "simultaneous multithreading," etc.)?
Tech pundits, analysts, and reviewers often speak of "multithreaded" programs, or even "multithreaded processors," without ever defining what, exactly, a "thread" is. Truth be told, some of those using the term probably don't really know what it means, but the concept isn't really very hard to grasp. At least, it isn't hard when you look at it from the point of view of the CPU (the operating system definition of a "thread" is another matter).
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Feature: High-performance computing on gamer PCs, Part 2: the software choices
In Part 1 of our series, we detailed the hardware choices and benchmarked the various GPUs and CPUs used in the HPU4Science scientific computation cluster. The cluster is built in a master-worker configuration in which the master dispatches jobs to the workers, compiles and processes the results, and handles data storage. The master is equipped with a dual Intel XEON processor, a four-SSD RAID array for short-term storage, and an array of five 2TB hard drives for archival storage. The networking is a simple Gigabit Ethernet.
Currently, there are three workers in the cluster running Intel i7 or Core 2 Quad processors and using GPUs for highly parallelized computation. In the last paper, the third and newest worker had four GTX 580s that give four TFlops of measured, peak computational performance (this equates to six TFLOPs of theoretical performance, which is the measure used for the Top500 supercomputers list). The hardware for a fourth worker with the same configuration as the third has just arrived, so the cluster will soon comprise a total of four workers with eight GTX 580s, three GTX 480s, three GTX 285s, a C1060 Tesla GPU, and a GTX 295 dual GPU. The estimated computational power of the whole system is 20 TFLOPS in theory, and 12.5 TFLOPS in practice. Some brand new GTX 590s are currently being ordered for a fifth worker, so the total computational power is still increasing.
Obviously, a cluster of this scale requires careful software selection to maximize the performance of the hardware. In this article, we detail the software choices for the HPU4Science cluster and discuss the areas where software and performance collide.
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DNA unlikely to explode in the presence of cellphone radiation
In recent years, people have claimed to suffer from a rather odd disorder. It takes the form of electrosensitivity, and its victims complain of headaches, nausea, and a multitude of other symptoms. All of these symptoms are supposedly due to the electric fields produced by power lines, cellphone towers and, now, the terahertz (THz) sources used in some whole-body scanners. At the extreme end of the scale, there are those who believe that these low-frequency electric fields cause cancer.
There are two problems with these claims: there is no known causative mechanism that goes from low-intensity, low-frequency electromagnetic radiation to sickness. The second problem is that epidemiological studies have shown that the claimed links are mostly spurious. That is not to say that the people who claim symptoms don't experience symptoms, rather the cause of the symptoms is simply unknown.
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UK's Daily Mail: Google is a "parasitic monster"
It appears that somebody at the United Kingdom's Daily Mail had a really bad night's sleep last night. And the first thing he saw when he woke up was the word "Google."
"Why is No.10 in thrall to this parasitic monster?" asks a Mail Online screed.
"No. 10," of course, refers to the Downing Street HQ of that country's Prime Minister, David Cameron. The "parasitic monster" in question comes from Mountain View, California, and is apparently in charge of the wholesale ransacking of British music, landmarks, and literature.
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Kindle now available for $114—with on-screen ads
Amazon has sold loads of cheap Kindles ever since it decided to introduce a WiFi-only model and drop the price to just $139. Now, the company is taking its low-priced-Kindle initiative a step further by introducing on-screen ads to its lowest-price model, allowing the company to drop the price by another $25. The ad-supported Kindles will begin shipping on May 3.
Kindle director Jay Marine revealed the company's plans in an interview with the Associated Press on Monday afternoon. "It was very important that we didn't interfere with the reading experience," Marine told the publication, noting that ads would display across the bottom of the screen and on the Kindle's screen saver, but not while the user was reading a Kindle book. "We think customers are going to love it."
Loving the new Kindle with Special Offers—yes, that's the actual product name—might be somewhat of a stretch for many users. If the ads stay out of Kindle books and remain limited to the navigation screen and screen saver, they will at least be unobtrusive, and users might be OK with that. However, the device will still cost $114; the $25 savings may not be enough to convince some cheapskates. (Call us when the ad-supported Kindle costs $50, and we may be more impressed.) So, loving it might be hard, but liking it is a remote possibility.
On the upside, Amazon doesn't look like it's replacing the previous ad-free version of the WiFi-only Kindle. According to a new ad on the front page of its website, Amazon offers three options: the Special Offers Kindle for $114, WiFi-only Kindle for $139, and the 3G Kindle for $189. The company also said it's introducing an app called AdMash that will allow customers to help choose future (ad-related) screensavers, and that users will be able to specify their screen saver preferences so they only see the images they like the most. These elements combined make the Kindle with Special Offers a little easier to swallow, but we're glad the option is still there to fork over an extra $25 for an advertising-free e-book reader.
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Texas exposes addresses, SSNs of 3.5 million residents
Following last week's massive Epsilon e-mail breach, it feels as if all of us suddenly have a little too much personal information floating around online. And now, a large group of Texans are about to have it a lot worse: the state revealed Monday that personal information for 3.5 million citizens has been exposed to the public, including names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and more.
According to Texas State Comptroller Susan Combs, the data wasn't exposed by a hacker or a group of vigilante scriptkiddies—it ended up on a state-controlled public server after having been passed around between various state agencies. The data came from the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, the Texas Workforce Commission, and the Employees Retirement System of Texas, all of whom transferred the unencrypted data (against state policy) between January and May of 2010. The information was only discovered on the public server on March 31, 2011, meaning it has been available for almost a year.
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Yellowstone volcanic plume much larger than expected
Yellowstone National Park hosts a variety of hot springs and geysers, all powered by a plume of molten rock under its surface. At times in the past, that plume has powered activity that was quite a bit less scenic: massive eruptions that have been capable of covering roughly half of North America with ash. Thus, understanding the structure and evolution of this hotspot has an immense practical value. Now, thanks to an array of sensors funded by the National Science Foundation and some new computing techniques, some researchers have produced a new image of the plume, one that suggests the area of elevated temperatures is much larger than previously suspected.
Yellowstone sits on the same sort of mantle plume that powers the Hawaiian volcanoes. Since it's located in the middle of a continental plate, however, the behavior is quite different. Instead of relatively steady flows of molten rock, mid-continent hotspots tend to produce rare, explosive eruptions. Yellowstone's major eruptions have been separated by hundreds of thousands of years, and have packed an astonishing punch, with each eruption being thousands of times more potent than Mt. St. Helens.
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Dutch government wants penalties for P2P downloads
The Netherlands currently allows private users to download copyrighted songs and movies without penalty, so long as they are for personal use; uploading, however, counts as "distribution" and comes with penalties. This approach is unusual in Europe, and today the Dutch government announced plans to change course. Downloading unauthorized music and movies would become illegal under the new plan, but in return, citizens get some new benefits: no more levies on MP3 players and blank CDs, a new "fair use" right," and a pledge that the government won't pursue "criminalization" of end users.
The government plan was announced by Fred Teeven, the Justice and Security state secretary. Teeven noted that "downloading has long been illegal for games and other software, and this will now also apply to movies and music."
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If you want parole, have your case heard right after lunch
Between the courtroom antics of lawyers, witnesses, and jurors, reason doesn’t always prevail in our legal system. But judges are trained to be impartial, consistent, and rational, and make deliberate decisions based on the case in front of them, right? Actually no, according to a new study in PNAS, which shows that judges are subject to the same whims and lapses in judgment as the rest of us.
The authors examined over 1,000 parole decisions made by eight judges in Israel over a 10-month period. In each parole request, a prisoner appeared in front of a judge, and the judge could either accept or deny the request. The judges heard between 14 and 35 of these cases per day, separated into three distinct sessions. The first session ran from the beginning of the day until a mid-morning snack break, the second lasted from the snack break until a late lunch, and the third lasted from lunch until the end of the day.
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Adobe connects tablets to Photoshop with new Photoshop Touch SDK
Adobe has released an SDK that allows developers to connect to, control, and share data with its flagship Photoshop image editor from Android, BlackBerry, and iOS mobile devices. The Photoshop Touch SDK is currently available in preview form so developers can begin building and testing their own apps, but Adobe has also previewed three iPad apps that it has built to showcase the technology.
Using the Photoshop Touch APIs, developers can create apps that connect to Photoshop CS5 over a TCP connection. Once connected, these apps can control Photoshop functions or share data between the app and Photoshop. "It's now possible for developers to create an eBook of Photoshop tutorials that allows users to drive an Action within Photoshop CS5 from within the eBook," Adobe offered as an example. "Or, if you find yourself inspired by an ocean view, use a tablet device to mix the colors you see and send those colors directly back to Photoshop CS5 without ever leaving the beach."
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ShairPort emulates AirPort Express to receive AirPlay streams
An independent developer has cracked the private key used in Apple's AirPort Express to stream music to approved speakers, potentially allowing third-party software and hardware to receive AirPlay streams without paying Apple's licensing fee. Developer James Laird has released his work as an open source project called ShairPort. While still in its early stages, the project could upset Apple if anyone besides home tinkerers decide to make use of it.
Laird was able to find the private key after reverse engineering his girlfriend's defunct AirPort Express. From there, he wrote ShairPort to emulate the Airport Express—this enabled him to set up other computers to receive streamed music from iTunes or iOS devices. According to the ShairPort v0.02 documentation, the software implements a server to receive Apple's RAOP protocol, and can "probably" support multiple simultaneous streams. Users can even edit the Perl files to set a password for the stream so that only approved devices can connect.
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Adobe moves to subscription model with Creative Suite 5.5
Adobe has announced version 5.5 of all its major software suites for creative professionals. The bulk of upgrades are related to Web, mobile and digital content publishing and, while not every product in the suites are being updated, all suites are touched by the updates. Most notably, with Adobe Creative Suite 5.5, the company is introducing a new subscription payment model that it hopes will make it easier for people wary of the suite's massive price tags.
The apps getting a 5.5 designation are Indesign, Dreamweaver, Flash and its variants, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition and Media Encoder. These .5 releases will become increasingly regular with a 24-month upgrade cycle for full 1.0 upgrades. With the heavy emphasis on new media in the 5.5 release, Adobe picked an appropriate set of tools to launch this midcycle update, as phone models, e-book readers, and other Web trends are moving too fast to keep customer needs addressed with an biennial upgrade cycle.
Specifics of each update are too numerous to cover here but some of the more notable things include Indesign’s improved EPUB3 authoring features and embedded HTML5 movie content for iBooks as well as Dreamweaver CS 5.5’s new HTML5 markup tools. Despite the PR mortar fire between Adobe and Apple, Adobe appears to be showing a strong commitment to HTML5 authoring for both Web and embedded iOS development. Now that Apple has lifted the contentious ban on cross-compilers, Flash is back to being pushed as the one-stop development environment for creatives who need to deploy to a variety of platforms without getting their berets in a tussle writing code.
The biggest news with this update is arguably the new subscription payment model. While products can still be bought individually or in suites, customers can now opt for license usage on a monthly basis. Some example plans are Photoshop (not Extended Edition, retail $699) for $35/month, Design Premium Suite ($1,899 retail) for $95 per month, and CS 5.5 Master Collection ($2,599 retail) for US$129 per month. Those prices are for a yearly commitment—prices are higher without a yearly commitment.
Some people may balk at “renting” Photoshop, but as someone who paid $3,500 just to get access to the $750 yearly fee to the Autodesk Maya subscription, I can tell you those prices with no up-front cost seem very reasonable. It doesn't quite function as a payment plan towards the full price, but you can get upgrade pricing on new versions if you do subscribe. "The subscription offering is not a payment plan, so you would not be able to simply pay off the remainder of a suite’s or application’s price if you’ve owned a subscription for a certain amount of time," an Adobe spokesperson told Ars. "However, a customer is eligible to pay upgrade pricing for a new version of a Suite or application if they’ve completed a one-year subscription plan, or a six month monthly subscription plan."
It’s not hard to imagine what was Adobe’s motivation for the new pricing model. With the US economy still in rough shape, students entering a market of fewer jobs, and an increasing user base in developing economies like India and China, a cheaper entry point is needed. A proliferation of hungry developers making cheap, quality apps like Pixelmator and the increased popularity of direct distribution channels are also likely setting off some alarm bells at Adobe.
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Judge to copyright troll: your "business model" isn't my problem
Ars Technica freelancer Eriq Gardner was recently sued over a photo that appeared in a piece he wrote for us last year. The flimsy lawsuit was quickly dismissed, but the company behind it lives on—and has sued 50+ people in Colorado for their use of the same photo. Now, the federal judge overseeing all these cases has made it clear that he sees through the company's "lawsuit as revenue generation" strategy, and that he's not interested in enabling it. Righthaven is already backing down.
The company at issue here is a Las Vegas litigation firm that finds allegedly infringing newspaper posts and images online, contracts with the newspaper in question for control of the the copyright, and files federal lawsuits against its targets. Since its inception, Righthaven has made the obviously outrageous demand that the entire domain name for the site in question be locked and then turned over to the company. This has never happened, but the threat of massive damages and of losing one's Web address seem calculated to force people into settlements of a few thousand dollars.
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Feature: Meet the senator blocking Big Content's Web censorship plan
Start talking about the Web censorship legislation currently being drafted in both chambers of Congress, and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) becomes an instant quote machine. This isn't just another of the many political issues Wyden has to juggle; the man cares about the Internet. And in his passion to defend it, he's not afraid to ruin his chances of becoming the next ex-senator to head the Motion Picture Association of America.
"You get a lot of folks expressing increasing concern that essentially one part of the American economy, the content industry, is trying to use government as a club to beat up on one of the most promising parts but the economy of the future—the Internet," Wyden told me last week when we talked about the issue. "These major content lobbyists shouldn't be provided the authority to cluster bomb on the 'Net."
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