Tegra 3 includes 5th "stealth" core to optimize power efficiency
NVIDIA released a couple white papers this week detailing some of the design decisions behind its upcoming quad-core Tegra 3 mobile processor, codenamed "Kal-El." In particular, Kal-El aims to bring desktop-like performance in gaming and video, and nearly double the raw compute performance of current dual-core ARM-based mobile chips, while still saving power. To do so, Kal-El uses a combination of four "fast process" cores mated to a 5th "low power process" core that handles idle background processing tasks.
Kal-El includes four ARM Cortex A9-based cores designed on a 40nm process. The transistors that make up these cores can be switched at higher frequencies while using a lower operating voltage compared to, say, transistors on a 65nm process. Optimizing Kal-El for higher operating frequencies allowed NVIDIA to lower the operating voltage of the cores.
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Still on Windows XP? Don't wait until Windows 8 to upgrade!
Businesses have dragged their feet on upgrading from the ten-year-old Windows XP to newer versions of Microsoft’s operating system. First, they skipped Windows Vista en masse after the OS was the target of scorn from critics and IT analysts. Now, they are making the upgrade to Windows 7, but analysts at Gartner are worried some XP-using businesses will consider skipping Windows 7 in anticipation of next year’s release of Windows 8.
This would not be wise, Gartner and other analyst firms say. Microsoft will end support for Windows XP in April 2014. For a home user, that is a long time away. But enterprises have long deployment cycles for new operating systems that depend heavily on budgets, internal processes and third-party vendors updating applications to support the latest version of Windows.
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US government looks to fight botnets with ISP code of conduct
The Department of Homeland Security and National Institute of Standards and Technology are looking to beat back the kudzu of spam generators, distributed denial of service zombies, and other botnets, and they want your cooperation—on a totally voluntary basis, of course.
After a long and escalating string of high-profile attacks on government and corporate sites using botnets like the Low Orbit Ion Cannon, botnets are obviously high on DHS's "to-kill" list. But while the government has had some success in attacking botnets directly, as it did in April when the FBI went after the Coreflood botnet, McAfee researchers estimate that the number of systems infected with botnet malware is growing at an average of 4 million per month.
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India seeks to disable satellite phones at the border to fight terrorism
If you absolutely need global voice and data connectivity, no matter how remote the terrain, how war-torn the locale, or how repressive the local government, you need a satellite phone. Their go-everywhere capabilities makes them a natural choice for news outfits and ship owners, and their hard-to-tap nature makes them perfect for coordinating terrorism. That's the reason the government of India has just proposed a broad new international framework for limiting the geographical reach of satphones. Step across GPS-defined boundaries, and the phone would no longer function.
India recently introduced its proposal at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the UN telecoms agency based in Geneva; Ars has seen a copy of the document. It's incredibly sketchy, running to only three paragraphs, but it makes the case for a new international standard to limit the reach of satphones.
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Ars subscriber chat: Law professor James Grimmelmann
New York Law School Professor James Grimmelmann joins us tomorrow, September 22, at 2pm ET/1pm CT/11am PT to take your burning questions about Internet law. A graduate of Harvard (comp. sci. degree) and Yale Law (J.D.), Grimmelmann recently authored a terrific in-depth look at smartphone litigation for Ars.
If you're an Ars subscriber, please join us (in this very post) for 45 minutes of scintillating Internet law discussion. Grimmelmann will take your questions on everything from copyright law to privacy to Google (especially Google Book Search!). Or ask him about his article. It's up to you.
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Codemasters' F1 2011 brings F1 back to gaming, but remains niche
This year's installment of the official Formula 1 racing game, Codemaster's F1 2011 has just arrived. Formula 1 is often referred to as the pinnacle of motorsport, and this year's championship is 19 races long, starting with Australia back in March and finishing in Brazil at the end of November. The cars are lightweight, high powered monsters, designed in-house by each team. Codemasters' F1 game lets you live out the life of a virtual F1 driver, complete with being able to answer somewhat inane press questions with the obligatory "for sure."
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Diablo 3 on consoles? Why the game may work better with a controller
Diablo 3 is big news in the world of gaming, with gamers eagerly checking their Battle.net accounts to see if they've been granted access to the closed beta. The title is just as addictive as the previous entries in the series, although the skill system has been reworked to allow for more flexibility in combat and crafting, and is set to become a more attractive option for old gear. One aspect of the game that hasn't changed is the controls: you still click your mouse to lead your character around the screen, and click on specific enemies to attack them.
This may be the control method we're used to, but Blizzard has been testing the game on console-style controllers, and now the game's director says the game may be improved by taking direct control of your character.
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Sprint customers new and old get hotspot data cap of 5GB
Say goodbye to real and true unlimited data, Sprint customers: the company will start capping data used via phone hotspot to 5GB per month, according to a leaked internal document. Even existing customers won’t be exempt from the new cap, and will be migrated to a new plan enforcing the limit after a friendly reminder from their carrier.
Sprint has been tightening its belt in a number of other ways, including killing off its Sprint Premier upgrade program and raising upgrade fees. The changes come as the company’s 4G network becomes more widespread and just before it is apparently due to start selling the new iPhone, as Apple has reportedly scheduled an event to announce the new handset on October 4. Sprint representatives confirmed the new cap to Ars via e-mail, but did not provide any reasons for the change.
Under the new rule, Sprint’s formerly unlimited mobile hotspot feature will remain the same price at $29.99 per month, but will allot only 5GB of data. Once that amount is used, customers will be charged $0.05 per megabyte. Sprint notes that tablets acting as hotspots are exempt from the data limit.
The plan goes into effect October 2 for new customers. In the document, Sprint notes that existing customers will be notified via bill messages or postcards “being sent in October and November” that they will be forcibly migrated to the new plan, effective on the first day of the next bill cycle after they receive their notice.
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iPhone, Android users worry about security, but don't know what to do
iOS and Android users don't seem to share the same views on much when it comes to the mobile space, but they both appear to have concerns about security threats to their devices. According to recent data from the NPD Group, users of both platforms are worried about having their credit card info stolen, device theft, hackers accessing personal information, harmful apps, and unwanted location tracking. Very few have chosen to do anything besides worry, however.
The breakdowns between iOS and Android users are similar for each security point, but overall, a lower percentage of iPhone owners expressed concern for most items than Android users. For example, 46 percent of Android owners and 38 percent of iPhone owners were worried about their credit card information being stolen. Similarly, 46 percent of Android owners and 37 percent of iPhone owners worried about hackers accessing personal information, and 43 percent of Android owners versus 37 percent of iPhone owners were worried about acquiring viruses or spyware.
Despite these slight differences, when averaged together, most of the numbers floated around the 40 percent mark (give or take) for most items in the list. NPD expressed concern, however, in the low number of users who had taken any kind of security measures—the firm said that more than 25 percent of all smartphone owners (35 percent of iPhone owners) had no idea how to acquire any kind of security software for their devices. And among those who did know but still had no security products installed, one quarter said they were too expensive.
"Consumers are both unaware of security for their phones and reluctant to pay for it when they are aware," NPD's Stephen Baker said in a statement.
This is apparently one area where Android users—the ones who know how to obtain security software, that is—are much more conscientious than iPhone owners. NPD says 30 percent of Android users have some kind of security product installed, compared to only 6 percent of iPhone owners. Then again, the reason for that seems to be because iPhone owners seem to value their physical devices (and physical safety) a bit more than their personal information:
"Even though iPhone users are less concerned than Android users about device security, they are still clearly worried," Baker said. "Their biggest concerns were much more likely to be fears that their iPhone would be stolen or damaged, than any unwanted or harmful activities."
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Feature: The Web's rapid release cycle—and how IT departments can tame it
Nowhere is the intersection between the consumer world and the enterprise domain more significant than on the Web. In the consumer space, we depend on services like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, and Amazon; in the corporate world, we have custom line-of-business applications and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications such as Google Apps and Office 365. The same core set of technologies and infrastructure underpins both, and this creates quite a conundrum for many enterprises. The consumer world favors a policy of rapid releases, which is anathema to business.
Thanks to Web browsers and Web apps, however, corporate IT departments increasingly find themselves forced to adjust to this newer, faster world. So how can businesses respond?
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Gunpoint hands on: an intelligent indie spy thriller—with breakable glass
Tom Francis writes for PC Gamer, and he's creating Gunpoint in his spare time. He is apparently doing this just to make the rest of us feel bad about not crafting tense, enjoyable indie games for our own enjoyment. This is his first game, and he's had to teach himself how to code. Francis' goal may be to make James Franco appear lazy.
Gunpoint puts you in the shoes of a spy with preternatural jumping abilities, and it's your job to break into a series of buildings, steal files from a computer, and then escape. You can jump on top of the guards to knock them out, or grab them and go through a window to deliver a killing blow. If they see you, they pull their gun and shoot you dead. This unforgiving mechanic is one of the joys of the game.
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"Google rigs its results," say critics at Senate antitrust hearing
"Google abandoned these core principles [of fair play] when they started interfering with profits and profit growth," said Nextag CEO Jeff Katz today before a Senate antitrust hearing on the search giant. "Today, Google doesn’t play fair. Google rigs its results, biasing in favor of Google Shopping and against competitors like us."
Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman joined the firing squad and told senators that "Google is no longer in the business of sending people to the best sources of information on the Web. It now hopes to be a destination site itself for one vertical market after another, including news, shopping, travel, and now, local business reviews."
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Oracle sends mixed messages with new database appliance
Oracle's strategic position on the systems business it inherited in its acquisition of Sun can result in some interesting mixed messages. In a conference call on Tuesday, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said, "I don't care if our commodity x86 businesses go to zero." On Wednesday, the company announced the immediate availability of a new database appliance, built on SunFire commodity x86 hardware.
Admittedly, the Oracle Database Appliance isn't exactly commodity, though it is targeted at mid-sized businesses. The default configuration of the system is a cluster of two dual-processor servers based on Intel Xeon processors running Oracle Linux, 12TB of disk storage, and 73GB of solid-state storage built into a single 4U rack-mountable unit. The 12TB of disk storage is triple-mirrored for fault tolerance, so the effective storage of the system is about 4TB.
But the hardware is just a delivery vehicle for Oracle's software. It comes loaded with Oracle 11g, and Oracle Real Application Clusters for server failover—and a "pay as you go" software license that allows customers to incrementally add more processors as required. So while the server ships with 24 processor cores installed on its four Xeon processors, customers can opt to only pay for as few as two to run the database, and expand their capacity by adding more licenses instead of hardware.
On the upside, the Database Appliance has the advantage of being pretuned for Oracle's software, with relatively simple management software for configuration. But Oracle hasn't had a lot of success with these database-in-a-box solutions in small and mid-sized organizations before, largely because they can't afford Oracle DBAs. And considering that the appliance will probably face stiffer competition from software-as-a-service offerings in the SMB market than from IBM or Hewlett-Packard, it's not really clear who is going to buy this thing—other than large organizations who want to drop it into their data centers instead of buying high-end Oracle servers. That's not exactly what Larry Ellison is driving for, I'm sure.
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Gamers discover protein structure that could help in war on HIV
The players of the online protein-folding game Foldit (which we’ve reported on before) outperformed scientists by discovering the structure of a protein involved in the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus (M-PMV). The M-PMV is a retrovirus, like HIV, that causes AIDS in monkeys and apes. Understanding its structure will help researchers develop antiretroviral drugs that can fight HIV—but this has been a mystery for over a decade.
Now, with the help of groups of (generally) non-scientist players and their pattern-recognition skills, scientists from the University of Washington have joined with groups including "Foldit Contenders Group" and "Foldit Void Crushers Group" to model the crystal structure of the M-PMV retroviral protease (PR), a protein responsible for viral growth.
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Designing a sheepdog to herd photons
One of the nice things about electronic devices is that it is really easy to guide electrons. Even if you don't use wires, you can use a combination of electric and magnetic fields to control where electrons go. We can do this right down to the level of single electrons and really small distances. Light, however, is a different story.
Sure, we have optical fibers, optical elements like lenses and mirrors, and, of course, lasers. To an extent, these tools give us the sort of control that we have over electrons. But this doesn't extend down to the single photon level or to very small optic hardware like photonic devices. The analogy would be that we have the optical equivalent of transmission lines and switching stations, but we don't have an optical radio or integrated circuit—no, the current generation of integrated optics doesn't count.
Control at the single photon level requires some particularly careful engineering. Rising to the challenge is a group of researchers at the Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics (AMOLF) in the Netherlands who have developed a tool that lets them precisely control how light gets into a device.
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Windows 8 secure boot could complicate Linux installs
PC users who run Windows and Linux on the same machine will want to do some research before purchasing a Windows 8 computer. That's because systems with a "Designed for Windows 8" logo must ship with UEFI secure booting enabled—a move that prevents booting operating systems that aren’t signed by a trusted Certificate Authority.
This could pose a problem for Linux users, though in practice most can just change UEFI settings to disable secure boot before installing the open-source OS. But users will have to depend on hardware vendors to make this option possible in the first place.
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Serious Sam 3 interview: you don't need cover to have strategy
Serious Sam 3 looks like a throwback to the action games of my youth: no cover system, huge levels, and an emphasis on all-out action. Spot a pile of ammunition in the middle of a calm street? Get ready for a swarm of enemies. Croteam, the game's developer, knows what works within the Serious Sam formula, and these are aspects of the game that won't be changed.
I recently had the chance to chat with Croteam CEO Roman Ribaric about the game's design, and it would be hard to find a man more at peace with the game his studio is creating. "Serious Sam 3: BFE is a culmination of everything we’ve learned from developing the previous games in the series, while also adding in some of the things that just weren't possible back in 2001 or 2002," he told Ars.
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The best changes IT can make: top 5 reader suggestions
Last week we asked the IT experts in our audience a simple question: what are the most productive changes an IT department can make today? Your responses were tremendous. Let’s take a look at the top suggestions.
Embrace consumerization
“As an IT Director myself, trained in the IT environment of 8-10 years ago, accepting the ‘consumerization’ of IT was a bit difficult for me,” writes severusx. “However, I can attest to the big increase in efficiency it provides my department. Our company has about 150 users that are highly geographically dispersed, and due to high turnover and high management costs, I made the decision early on to only provide company-owned assets to the ‘corporate’ employees located at our central offices and a few select territory directors. The rest of our users are provided access to company resources via Web services like Outlook Web Access and SalesForce.com. This in turn provided me with the ability to cut back on help desk staff and focus on the job of building the right type of IT structure to promote growth in a new company.”
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Upcoming Adobe Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 push for 3D games
New versions of Adobe Flash Player and AIR will be arriving by October, Adobe announced in a press release today. Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 are intended to provide “console-like quality” to game developers on PC platforms and improve performance on Android phones, and will be accompanied by support in the Flash Builder and Flex development tools by the end of the year.
The new versions of Flash and AIR will have hardware-accelerated rendering for 2D and 3D graphics up to 1,000 times faster than Flash Player 10 and AIR 2, Adobe said in a press release. The package will include the ability to display 1080p video with Flash-based apps on iOS devices with H.264 hardware decoding, as well as APIs for using accelerometers and near-field communications chips.
Captive runtime will also be a new feature, and users will no longer need to have pop-ups pestering them to update their players yet again. Adobe is working with Microsoft in hopes that Flash can eventually appear on the Windows Phone platform, though no date is set; likewise, the company is also trying to improve Flash in capable Android phones.
We’re not so sure about the renewed commitment to “console-like quality”—PC games are good in their own right. Still, the renewed commitment to mobile platforms is promising, and yet another indicator that the company is determined not to let any of the mobile platforms slip by.
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Kindle e-books now available to borrow from 11,000 US libraries
Amazon has finally announced its long-anticipated Kindle lending library, allowing Kindle and Kindle app users to borrow Amazon's e-books from thousands of libraries across the US. Users will be able to find the Kindle books on their participating public library's website and check them out through Amazon, which will send the book directly to users' devices over Whispersync.
"Libraries are a critical part of our communities and we're excited to be making Kindle books available at more than 11,000 local libraries around the country," Amazon's Kindle director Jay Marine said in a statement. "We're even doing a little extra here—normally, making margin notes in library books is a big no-no. But we're fixing this by extending our Whispersync technology to library books, so your notes, highlights and bookmarks are always backed up and available the next time you check out the book or if you decide to buy the book."
The ability to make notes and highlights—and subsequently sync them back to the system for review later—is certainly a major plus. The downside, of course, is that the e-books have to be "returned" after a certain period of time, just like any other library book. Amazon doesn't specify on its site how long the books are borrow-able for, but when asked, Amazon spokesperson Kinley Campbell said that the expiration time varies by library and by the book.
"Generally [it will be] 7-14 days," Campbell told Ars. "We recommend checking with local libraries on questions related to availability and specific books."
Seven to 14 days isn't a lot of time to read an entire book for some people, but it's hard to argue with free, borrowed books. Our only complaint with this announcement is that there seems to be no comprehensive list of the 11,000 participating libraries—even Amazon's FAQ page about public library books remains vague on this question. The requirement is that the library offers e-books via third party service OverDrive, though, so it's safe to assume that most major libraries will be participating to some degree or another. (You Chicagoans out there get to be lazy, as I've already confirmed that Kindle books can be found via the CPL website).
Edit: Removed links to Amazon due to technical (CMS) problems on our end. See comments for proper links for now.
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New JavaScript hacking tool can intercept PayPal, other secure sessions
On Friday, a pair of security researchers will present a hacking tool which they
claim decrypts secure Web requests to sites using the Transport Layer Security 1.0 protocol and SSL 3.0, allowing a person or program to hijack sessions with financial websites and other services. Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong are unveiling their Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS tool, dubbed BEAST, at the Ekoparty security conference in Buenos Aires.
The tool is based on a blockwise-adaptive chosen-plaintext attack, a man-in-the-middle approach that injects segments of plain text sent by the target's browser into
the encrypted request stream to determine the shared key. The code can be injected into the user's browser through JavaScript associated with a malicious advertisement
distributed through a Web ad service or an IFRAME in a linkjacked site, ad, or
other scripted elements on a webpage.
Using the known
text blocks, BEAST can then use information collected to decrypt the target's AES-encrypted requests, including encrypted cookies, and then hijack the no-longer secure
connection. That decryption happens slowly, however; BEAST
currently needs sessions of at least a half-hour to break cookies using keys
over 1,000 characters long.
The attack, according to Duong, is capable of intercepting sessions with PayPal and other services that still use TLS 1.0—which would be most secure sites, since
follow-on versions of TLS aren't yet supported in most browsers or Web server
implementations.
While Rizzo and Duong believe BEAST is the first attack against SSL 3.0 that decrypts HTTPS requests, the vulnerability that BEAST exploits is well-known; BT chief security technology officer Bruce Schneier and UC Berkeley's David Wagner pointed out in a 1999 analysis of SSL 3.0 that
"SSL will provide a lot of known plain-text to the eavesdropper, but there seems to be no better alternative." And TLS's vulnerability to man-in-the middle attacks was made public in 2009. The IETF's TLS Working Group published a fix for the problem, but the fix is unsupported by SSL.
PayPal spokesperson Anuj Nayar issued this statement regarding the threat embodied by BEAST: “We’ve seen speculation about new research into the security of the SSL technology used by most websites around the world. This research has not been made public, but we have already been looking into the SSL technology employed on the PayPal website and reinforcing our security. We’ll continue to do so once the research is released in the coming week. In the meantime, we can reassure our customers that PayPal’s top priority is the security of their accounts and their personal and financial information. We have dedicated teams of information security experts who continually review and strengthen our security systems. We’ll further review this once we have details of the research later in the week.”
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If an Icelandic volcano erupts, would tragic history repeat?
Beginning in 1783, Iceland endured an eight-month-long volcanic eruption that left a seemingly endless haze covering the landscape. The dry fog of microscopic aerosol particles, mostly sulfur oxides, caused the deaths of fully 20 percent of Iceland’s population, along with 75 percent of their livestock.
The effects of the eruption at Laki were not limited to Iceland. In the Netherlands, trees dropped their leaves in June, as if signaling a very early autumn. The number of deaths recorded in England that year was 10-20 percent above average. Reports of deaths and health problems came from as far away as Italy.
The mouthful that was Eyjafjallajökull reminded us in 2010 that volcanoes can easily bring air travel to a grinding halt, but what would happen if an eruption on the scale of Laki occurred today?
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