Dead Rising 2 and Crackdown announced as ‘Games with Gold’ Xbox LIVE titles for August

In a recent post on the official Xbox Wire website, Microsoft has announced the upcoming titles that will be offered free to Xbox LIVE Gold subscribers for the month of August. The futuristic open-world sandbox action shooter Crackdown will be offered for the first half of August, followed by the quirky post-apocalyptic zombie slayer Dead Rising 2.

Accompanying Dead Rising 2 is the DLC pack Dead Rising 2: Case Zero ($4.99), which expands upon the game’s story arc even further.

Crackdown ($14.99) Aug. 1-15

Dead Rising 2 ($29.99) Aug. 16-31

Both games are part of Microsoft’s Games with Gold initiative for Gold subscribers, which provides Gold users with two free games per month– a promotion that was doubtless set into place to combat Sony’s highly acclaimed PlayStation Plus program via PSN.

The games are a bit dated–with Crackdown releasing in 2007 and Dead Rising 2 in 2010–yet Microsoft has chosen an array of popular titles and gaming favorites for their rewards program.

“As our way of saying things to our qualifying Xbox LIVE Gold members, we’re giving you two free Xbox 360 games each month for the rest of the year. Each game will be available to download only for a limited time, so grab them before they’re gone and keep them no matter what.”

The program debuted in July with Fable III and Assassin’s Creed II being featured, giving gamers the chance to experience each retail game in their entirety. Additionally Microsoft has revealed that the games are available forever and are playable offline.

Capcom’s action-packed zombie-slayer. Dead Rising 2, has been hailed across the world as a fantastic release, earning many accolades. Crackdown has provided millions of gamers a unique and chaotic sandbox experience and paved the way for the sequel, which broke even more grounds for the franchise.

Be sure to head on over to Microsoft’s official Games with Gold page for more details, and download the games before the opportunity passes!

iOS 7 code hints that Apple is working with Samsung on its A7 processor

Every year we hear rumors that Apple is taking steps to move away its chip business from Samsung, one of its biggest rivals in the market. However, according to code found in iOS 7 beta, Apple might still be working with Samsung for its next generation A7 processor.

Despite the fact that both companies are tough rivals in the global smartphone market, they do quite a lot of business together as well. Samsung is also rumored to be providing Retina display panels for Apple’s next generation iPad mini. For long, Samsung has developed chips for Apple’s mobile devices. Recently it was rumored that Apple would move all of this business away from Samsung to TSMC, but later reports suggests that Apple would stick with Samsung because apparently TSMC can’t yet produce chips at the quantity Samsung is able to.

Inside the iOS 7 beta filesystem, a developer called Nick Frey has discovered references to s5l8960x processor. The version number is higher than s5l8950x and sl58955x which correspond to both the A6 and A6X processor respectively. 9to5Mac claims that analysis done by someone familiar with Apple’s chip design process reveals that the main system on chip may include Samsung components, particularly for powering the display. The same source has also reportedly revealed that processing speed issues for A7 and A8 processors have also been resolved.

The next generation A7 processor will debut in upcoming Apple devices, the iPhone 5S is believed to be the first such device to be powered by the A7 chip.

New Apple patent focuses on controlling car environment through an iPhone

Apple has filed for a new patent today in which it describes being able to use an iPhone to control a car or home environment. Essentially, the technology described would allow users to control the world around them.

Titled “Automatic configuration of self-configurable environments,” the patent describes a system that is capable of automatically adjusting configurable object’s around the user based on their preferences through a mobile device, such as an iPhone. The patent contains an example of a car’s cockpit. In theory, users would be able to configure seats, steering wheel, mirrors and other functions straight from their iPhone. This can be particularly useful for people who share a car, every driver could have their own preferences be automatically configured by the car.

The same system can also be used to control environments in a hotel or house. For example, the iPhone would be able to configure climate controls, lighting, television and other home automation settings. The same device may also be able to control entertainment systems as well as household appliances.

There is a caveat here. For this system to reach end users, Apple would rely heavily on third party manufacturers that actually make these products. Car manufacturers would have to build in support for Apple’s system in their new vehicles. Home appliance and control manufacturers would have to do the same. With its patent, Apple has presented only half of the solution. Lets wait and see how long the other half takes to materialize.

Source: [AppleInsider]

flex cable for sixth generation iPod touch spotted online

In all of the products that Apple is rumored to be releasing in the near future, there’s no mention of a new iPod touch. Today a purported flex cable of the sixth generation iPod touch has been spotted, leading many to believe that the company might launch a refreshed model of its prime music player.

Apple has said in the past that the iPod touch accounts for almost have of its total iPod sales. It is no doubt a great device, one that serves as the perfect entry level device for those who want to get a feel of the iOS ecosystem. Just last year Apple released the fifth generation iPod touch with massive upgrades, such as a bigger display, better internal hardware and a range of color options. This is the first that we’ve heard of the possibility of a new iPod touch being released this year.

By just looking at this flex cable it is impossible to form an idea about the improvements that the alleged sixth generation iPod touch will bring. The particular cable is tasked with connected the power and volume buttons at the top of the device with the iPod’s internal hardware. There obviously remains the possibility that this component doesn’t belong to the next generation iPod at all, the authenticity of this leak can definitely be called in to question.

For now, the company itself hasn’t hinted if it plans on refreshing the entire iPod line, or even just the iPod touch. We’ve not heard any rumors about this prospect recently. Nevertheless, if the sixth generation iPod touch is going to be released soon, we’re going to be seeing a lot of such leaks in the near future then.

Source: [LetemSvetemApplem]

HP-made Android smartphones are back in the rumor mix, could see daylight this year

If we take the general state of the PC market, which is being bled dry by the incredible evolution of smartphones, plus increased competition from brands like Lenovo or Acer, Hewlett-Packard needs something of a saving grace and it needs it quick. Like a Hail Mary pass.

Okay, maybe not something as desperate as a Hail Mary pass, since HP is after all the worldwide PC leader, but the company has to try everything in its power to innovate or change something.

Enter HP’s first ever Android-based smartphone. Wait, is that a real thing? Apparently so, even though we highly doubt it’ll look similar to the render from a couple of weeks back. But it is coming, according to Digitimes, and might get a commercial release by the end of this year.

Furthermore, the Taiwanese online publication mentions more than once HP is developing “smartphones” (as in the plural form), so it’s not out of the question to see several handhelds branded by the Palo Alto-based company up on store shelves in the next few months.

Unfortunately, the only other thing Digitimes “reveals” in its latest report is that HP has “been collaborating with Taiwan-based supply chain makers” to develop said smartphones (yay for vagueness), with everything about specs and features remaining wrapped in a big, fat cloak of mystery.

I don’t know about you, but even if I don’t particularly love HP (I’ve only owned one of their laptops and am never going back), I’m keeping my fingers crossed for them to make it in the smartphone décor. With Samsung and Apple so far ahead of everyone else right now, we desperately need the competition.

Via [Android Beat] and [Digitimes]

APIs for call and SMS blocking found in Windows Phone GDR2 update

Code found in Windows Phone’s GDR2 update suggests Microsoft is prepping up the ability to block unwanted calls and SMS, a feature the company has not officially mentioned thus far.

The GDR2 update for Windows Phone mostly brings under-the-hood changes such as support for FM radio, ability to set a default camera app, etc., but one low-level change that Microsoft may have forgotten to mention is support for blocking calls and SMS, APIs for which have been found hiding inside the Windows Phone 8 GDR2 emulator code.

Apparently, GDR2 has the capability to block and filter calls (and SMS), with the option to block specific numbers, numbers not stored in your address book, and also private numbers. However, there’s no user-facing interface for these APIs in devices like the Nokia Lumia 925 and 1020 that come with GDR2 out of the box, so it is possible it is a feature accessible by only carriers and by third-party developers to bake into their apps, or it could also be preliminary code that will find its legs in the GDR3 update later this year as a default feature of the OS.

Also, as far as third-party apps are concerned, it will be interesting to see how these will sit in the background and block calls/SMS, as Windows Phone doesn’t exactly allow apps to do anything in the background unless they’re using the GPS, playing music, or are waiting for incoming push messages from social networks and the like. Microsoft will probably add call blocking to the list of tasks third-party apps are allowed to carry out in the background, though we’ll have to wait for more info on that front to know what they have in mind.

Via: WMPoweruser | Source: Twitter

AMD’s upcoming 8-Ball marketing campaign to emphasize APU price-performance advantage

AMD’s top channel salesman sat down with VR-Zone to talk about his upcoming program to pitch the current breed of Richland APUs as an ”almost as good” alternative to Intel’s Haswell processors.

AMD is planning an upcoming promotion with system builders and e-tailers called “8-Ball” to highlight the A10-6800K’s cost advantage over the Haswell i5-4670K.

As Roy Taylor, AMD’s vice president of global channel sales, explained to VR-Zone (full interview coming soon), not enough people know about the virtually imperceptible performance gap in real world scenarios between, for example, the Richland A10-6800K ($149) and the Haswell i5-4670K ($239), although they are priced worlds apart.

Taylor’s logic comes down to this: Intel’s i5-4670K is $100 more expensive on average than the A10-6800K and a supporting motherboard usually costs between $30-$40 more. Looking at that $140 cost gap, the performance gap is pretty narrow. The Richland A10 has 3,618 PC Mark 8 Home score while the i5-4670k hits 3,688 — a 70 point/2% difference.

“Benchmarks are our friend,” Taylor said. “In rational measures of products, we win.”

Neither Taylor nor AMD PR would shed any light on the exact starting date of this deal, but hinted it would roll out within the next few weeks.

BioShock Infinite for Mac release date is August 29th, pre-orders begin today

BioShock Infinite for Mac release date has finally been unveiled. The game will be available from August 29th, prospective customers can start placing their pre-orders from today.

This latest iteration of the BioShock franchise was released for conventional gaming consoles back in March. Back then, Aspyr had announced that it would be releasing BioShock Inifinite for Mac in this summer. Today they have finally made the release information available, and have also provided details on pre-order bonus material, as well as support for SteamPlay.

First and foremost, lets look at the system requirements that BioShock Infinite for Mac demands. You must have a Mac that has an Intel Core 2 Duo or higher processor with at least 4G of RAM, 30MB of hard disk space and OS X 10.8.4 and later versions. Nvidia GeFore 640M, ATI Radeon HD 3870, Intel HD 4000 or better video cards with 512 MB or greater video memory are also required.

From August 29th, you will be able to purchase and download BioShock Infinite for Mac. It will be available from the Mac App Store. Since it has SteamPlay support, you will just have to purchase the title once in order to play it on both Mac and PC through Steam. Pre-orders through GameAgent, Aspyr’s distribution service, will come with “Columbia’s Finest DLC,” as well as a 20 percent discount off the $59.99 price tag of the game.

1,700 Russian websites go dark in protest to ‘Russian SOPA’

On Thursday, 1,700 Russian websites went dark in opposition to a new anti-piracy law enabling the Russian government to ‘blacklist’ websites hosting copyright-breaching material.

The new law, which is being compared to the American SOPA bill, allows Roskomnadzor (the Federal Supervision Agency for Information Technologies and Communications) to ‘blacklist’ websites at the order of a court. Also similar to SOPA is the response rendered by the Internet to this new law – namely, that 1,700 websites in the country chose to go offline in demonstration of their opposition.

Campaigners in the country share concerns similar to those of America over the SOPA bill – that it may be used, ultimately, to restrict information and communication on the Internet. Participators in the blackout temporarily replaced their homepages with a warning, including a link to a government petition. While the petition has acquired 76,000 signatures so far, parliament will not consider it unless it reaches 100,000.

The new law covers intellectual materials such as films and TV shows, although strangely discludes music, which certainly numbers among the most pirated forms of media. At the request of copyright owners, websites are required to take down allegedly offending materials until a court can review the request. If the material is not removed within three days of the request, then Roskomnadzor will order ISPs to block the website entirely.

The potential for this law to be abused is immediately apparent to citizens abroad. While 1,700 innocent websites might not suddenly blink out of existence (as the blackout might suggest), the law is already an extension of an earlier change in the Act for Information which gave Roskomnadzor the power to remove more harmful content, such as information on drugs, self-harm and child abuse.

That law has been twisted to grant the government just a little more power – who knows if it will be twisted yet again?

Source: TechWeekEurope

HTTPS is vulnerable to BREACH exploit – feds lack easy solution

According to the CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team), there is not an easy solution for the BREACH HTTPS vulnerability which was showcased on Thursday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.

The BREACH vulnerability was demonstrated on Thursday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. Its existence comes as sour news at this time, especially after Facebook’s culmination of two year’s effort to protect all of its users using HTTPS, and the increasingly depressing news about the government’s habits of spying on Internet users.

The exploit called BREACH, short for Browser Reconnaissance and Exfiltration via Adaptive Compression of Hypertext, manipulates data compression to pry out doses of information from HTTPS protected data, including email addresses, security tokens, and other plain text strings.

It was possible in the past to mitigate the CRIME attack off of which BREACH is based, but an advisory issued by CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team) reveals that it currently does not have a comprehensive solution to the new security vulnerability, and urges webmasters to investigate whether they are susceptible to it. Since different applications and web programs work in different ways, there is not really a one-size-fits all vulnerability, or solution to any such vulnerabilities – not yet.

“We are currently unaware of a practical solution to this problem,” the CERT advisory stated. “However, the reporters offer several tactics for mitigating this vulnerability. Some of these mitigations may protect entire applications, while others may only protect individual webpages.” states the CERT advisory statement.

That list of tactics, which may be of interest to web developers who would like a head start in beating BREACH, can be found on the BREACH attack website.

Source: Ars Technica

Apple looking to improve its Maps service, hiring full time mapping experts

Apple’s homegrown Maps service, which replaced Google Maps on iOS devices, didn’t get off to a good start. It appears that the company is hard at work to make the service better, it is currently in the process of hiring many full time experts in the mapping field.

When Apple announced iOS 6 last year, it revealed that Google Maps would no longer be the default provider of the mapping service, as it had been since the very first iPhone was launched back in 2007. Apple presented its own offering, simply called Maps. However the service didn’t have a flawless launch. Users complained of bad experiences, so much so that Apple CEO Tim Cook had to issue a public apology in September 2012 for the substandard mapping experience in iOS 6.

Fast forward one year and it appears that the company has made some progress. Moreover, it plans to invite over 400 million iOS users to “Help Improve Maps,” a feature that users will have to opt-in to when they’re initially setting up the yet to be publicly released iOS 7 firmware on their iOS devices. Basically the company will anonymously store a device’s coordinate information, with the user’s consent. This will aid the company in figuring out how accurate are the driving time estimates that Maps shows to users, among other things.

As spotted by AppleInsider, the company’s jobs website has dozens of open positions on the Maps team. One such position is the Maps Ground Truth Local Experts, who are going to be tasked with quality assessment of Apple Maps in their region as well as with providing feedback on unique requirements for local maps and the collection of ground truth information. Other positions include that of a software engineer for Maps Navigation, Maps Senior Data Scientist, Traffic Accuracy Domain expert and a lot more. It remains to be seen how long will it take for the changes and improvements to trickle down, but one thing is for sure, the mapping experience on iOS is going to get a lot better in the near future.

HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4 Google Play Editions receiving Android 4.3 update

Google has hit the button on the Android 4.3 Jelly Bean update for the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4 Google Play edition phones, following through on their promise of speedier updates for both devices. 

So this is what Google meant by “timely updates” for their Play editions (GPe) of the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4 – both devices are now receiving the Android 4.3 update, less than two weeks after Google’s Nexus devices hopped on to the latest iteration of Jelly Bean. If you thought the “Google Play Edition” experiment was doomed to fail, this should be enough to change your mind.

The update weighs around 150MB for the Galaxy S4, and 185MB for the HTC One. Among the general new features and improvements included in Android 4.3, the update brings increased icon sizes on the widget panels on both devices, working IR blaster for the HTC One, Bluetooth tethering is now an option on the GPe S4 and the background in the settings menu on the device has been changed to match that of stock Android.

While the update’s rollout is now live, you’ll probably need to wait a few more days before it shows up on your device, owing to the staged nature of such updates (you can try forcing a check from the Settings » About phone » System updates menu on your phone). Rest assured though: Google has no intentions of reneging on their promise of speedier updates, making sure your $600+ investment in these Google Play devices was justified.

Have any of you received Android 4.3 on your Google Play edition device yet?

Via: Engadget

Apple Seeks Obama Reprieve on IPhone Import Ban

Apple Inc. (AAPL) may learn as early as today whether President Barack Obama and U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman will intervene to let it keep selling all versions of its iPhone 4 and iPad 2 in the U.S.

Obama and Froman have until midnight Washington time on Aug. 4 to overturn an import ban imposed by the U.S. International Trade Commission, which found June 4 that some older Apple devices infringed a Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) patent for a way data is transmitted.

Enlarge image

The import ban applies to the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 3G models designed for networks run by AT&T, T-Mobile US Inc. and two regional carriers in Texas and Alaska. Photographer: Chris Goodney/Bloomberg

No president has overturned an ITC import ban since Ronald Reagan did it in 1987, in a case involving Samsung. Cupertino, California-based Apple is counting on Obama’s increased interest in patent disputes to win another exception.

“I would hope that if he decides to wade in, that he would do so in a way that aims for more reasonable and coherent intellectual property policies to remove some of the gamesmanship,” said Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research. “That would be a lot more helpful than if it was seen as protecting a U.S. company versus a Korean one.”

If no action is taken by the deadline, Apple would have to stop selling the affected devices on its website and its stores, and wouldn’t be able to bring any new devices into the U.S. Phones and tablets already on store shelves for companies like AT&T Inc. or Best Buy Co. (BBY) could remain for sale.

The import ban applies to the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 3G models designed for networks run by AT&T, T-Mobile US Inc. and two regional carriers in Texas and Alaska.

IPhone 4 models sold for other networks weren’t impacted, nor were newer devices including the iPad mini and iPhone 5. Apple counts on older iPhone models, often given away with a two-year contract, to entice people it hopes will become loyal customers.

Ecosystem Enticement

“They rely on some of the older models to feed the ecosystem and get people into the wonderful world of Apple,” said Will Stofega, program director at researcher IDC in Framingham,Massachusetts.

Sales of older models helped Apple top analysts’ earnings projections in the fiscal third quarter. The company is expected to release updated versions of the iPhone and iPad later this year.

“The smartphone market at the high-end is largely saturated,” Golvin said. “Anyone who is well-heeled and wants one already has one. It’s the latecomers, for whom price is all-important, that are the ones who are still out there. Not having that product to sell to those customers would be a big impediment.”

Standard Patents

The Samsung patent is for a way data is transmitted over communications networks. It’s a feature in a widely used technological standard established by a number of companies.

Companies that get together to establish industry standards have the advantage of ensuring their inventions are included in that standard so everyone uses them. In turn, they pledge to license any relevant patents on “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory” terms.

Obama’s administration in January sent the ITC proposed guidelines to consider before issuing import bans based on a finding that standard-essential patents were infringed.

It said that while patent owners have the right to exclude others from using their inventions, the public benefit of allowing that is limited when it comes to standards patents. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed a similar paper with the agency last year.

‘Unwilling Licensee’

Four senators wrote to Froman on July 30, asking him to “assess the substantial public interest considerations” regarding the use of standard-essential patents at the ITC. The senators were Democrats Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Barbara Boxer of California, and Republicans Mike Lee of Utah and James Risch of Idaho.

Apple and Microsoft Corp. have promised not to use any patents they have on industry standards to block competing products. Samsung and Google Inc. (GOOG), which owns Motorola Mobility and the Android operating system that’s the most popular platform for mobile phones, reserved the right to use them if the other side is considered an “unwilling licensee.”

Samsung, based in Suwon, South Korea, said Apple has refused to negotiate licensing terms, and overturning the trade agency’s finding of infringement would “create incentives for implementers to unreasonably refuse to negotiate.”

Samsung demanded 2.4 percent of Apple’s iPhone and iPad revenues, which would come to about $18 per phone -- a figure Apple called unreasonable.

Global Outlier

Companies won’t want to create new products that comply with industry standards if they fear a patent owner demanding high royalties, Apple argued in its filing with the trade representative. It said the ITC was an “outlier internationally and domestically” on the issue.

Samsung, which is under investigation by European regulators on allegations of patent misuse, agreed to not seek sales bans based on any of its standard-essential patents on that continent. It made no such promise in the U.S. and defended its position, saying Apple refused to a licensing deal on any terms.

Two U.S. judges have said Google’ Motorola Mobility unit can’t use standard-essential patents to seek bans of products.

One of those rulings, against Apple, is scheduled for arguments at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington on Sept. 11. The other involves a Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)breach-of-contract complaint against Google that’s scheduled for trial in Seattle later this month.

Apple can ask that court to put the current order on hold until the underlying infringement finding is reviewed. While the Federal Circuit doesn’t often grant such requests, it might in this case because of the case coming up in September, said Rodney Sweetland, a patent lawyer with Duane Morris in Washington.

The Apple case against Samsung is In the Matter of Electronic Digital Media Devices, 337-796, and Samsung’s case is In the Matter of Electronic Devices, Including Wireless Communication Devices, Portable Music and Data Processing Devices, and Tablet Computers, 337-794, both U.S. International Trade Commission (Washington).

SMS ban in J&K is irrelevant

The short message service (SMS) ban on prepaid mobile phones in Jammu and Kashmir seems ill-conceived since Twitter, Facebook and other smartphone facilities are freely available. A telecom firm executive said the ban was "irrelevant as a security exercise". 

Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) authorities say the ban has been imposed by the state government and not the union government. 

SMS facility on post paid mobile phones is available across the state, but with a rider -- you cannot send more than 100 sms messages from your mobile phone in a day. 

The SMS facility on prepaid phones was withdrawn in 2008 during the Amarnath land row agitation after the authorities said such a facility on prepaid phones, most of which had been provided to consumers by the service providers without any proper verification, was being used by anti-social elements. 

"SMS facilities were being used by anti-social elements for spreading rumours during the Amarnath land row agitation of 2008. It had become difficult to trace the miscreants because investigations revealed that most of the misused mobile phones had been sold to customers without any proper verifications," said a senior intelligence officer here. 

A petition filed before the state human rights commission had challenged the ban earlier this year, holding that since the situation had changed in Jammu and Kashmir since 2008 and as the smartphone facilities allowed free dissemination of information through Twitter, facebook, WhatsApp and other such facilities the ban on SMS facility on prepaid phones had lost its relevance. 

The petition before the state human rights commission had said: "A Smartphone service like WhatsApp allows exchange of messages using only the internet data plan. It does not matter whether you have a prepaid or postpaid phone connection." 

"It also allows the creation of groups, unlimited messages, audio and video messages. In the wake of such a strong and powerful service being available freely to Jammu and Kashmir residents, it is beyond any sensible reason to ban the affordable SMS service on prepaid phones," the petition added. 

"Last year, Union Minister Sachin Pilot during a visit to Jammu and Kashmir had also said that people needed and deserved this service." 

After the various service providers came under strong criticism for issuing prepaid mobile phones without a foolproof verification process in the state, the service providers like BNSL, Airtel, Aircel, Idea, Vodafone and Reliance have put in place a strict verification process for issuance of SIM cards. 

"After we have started strictly adhering to a foolproof verification process the misuse of any SIM card can be traced within minutes. The rationale behind continuing the ban on the SMS facility in the state is not only technically irrelevant as a security exercise, it also puts our subscribers to unnecessary hardship besides affecting our revenues," said a BSNL executive here.

Wikipedia will go ‘secure’ to beat NSA surveillance

Just days after reports revealed that National Security Agency (NSA) in the US actively looked at what people read on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation announced on its website that it would implement HTTPS for logged-in users. 

The foundation, a non-profit organization, manages Wikipedia. The S in HTTPS stands for secure. 

Two days ago, Guardian newspaper revealed that with the help of a tool called XKeyscore, NSA was monitoring web users who accessed Wikipedia, the world's 7th most popular website. 

Wikimedia said that to start with, it would offer HTTPS connection to all logged-in users from August 21. It will then gradually roll-out HTTPS for all users as well as implement additional security measures to make it harder for governments to snoop on Wikipedia users. However, it did not specify any deadlines for the additional security measures. 

Following the Guardian report, Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, had revealed on Twitter that the website was planning to switch to HTTPS from HTTP but there were a few bugs that had delayed the process. 

"Our current architecture cannot handle HTTPS by default, but we've been incrementally making changes to make it possible. Since we appear to be specifically targeted by XKeyscore, we'll be speeding up these efforts," Wikimedia said on its website. 

On Friday Wales announced the Wikimedia decision and tweeted, "I challenge the rest of the industry to join us. Encryption is a human rights issue." 

HTTPS is more secure compared to HTTP. Websites using HTTPS establish a secure connection between their servers and the user's computer and greatly minimize the privacy risk. The secure connection means that third parties like government agencies or internet service providers (ISPs) can not read the content of data that a website and its users exchange. 

However, the government agencies, hackers and internet service providers can still collect this data and possibly read it if they can break the encryption. 

Initially, only banks and other organizations mindful of cyber security risks used HTTPS. But gradually email service providers and e-commerce websites started using it on their login pages. Currently, popular websites like Google, Facebook and Twitter use HTTPS but the majority of websites, including big ones like Yahoo! still rely on HTTP. 

World's most used but unsafe ATM pin numbers revealed

Representational image - DNA

A study has revealed that the world’s most popular four-digit ATM PIN number combinations, like 1234, are the most dangerous combinations and can be guessed easily.
The Huffington Postreports that there are 10,000 different possible four-digit ATM PIN numbers, but almost 11 percent of PINs are the most easiest to crack.
A study by Data Genetics has discovered the most dangerous PIN numbers by analyzing 3.4 million passwords.
The top 10 most commonly used PIN numbers found out by the study are 1234, 1111, 0000, 1212, 7777, 1004, 2000, 4444, 2222, 6969
The top 10 most common passwords make up over 20 percent of all of the passwords found, the report added.
Meanwhile, 26.83 percent of all passwords could be guessed by attempting the top 20 most popular combinations.
The study also revealed that four digit numbers starting with 19, for 19th century, are also bad passwords.
Meanwhile, the study also found out the best, but least popular, passwords to be 8068, 8093, 9629, 6835, 7637, 0738, 8398, 6793, 9480, 8957.

USB accelerates to 10 Gbps

Universal Serial Bus, the connectivity standard so ubiquitous the world has long stopped caring about the derivation of the USB acronym, has just been upgraded to 10 Gbps.

The upgrade comes in the form of a .1 release, USB 3.1, that is backwards compatible with USB 3.0 and 2.0 kit. The new speed will only be achievable with kit using USB 3.1, but such products will work just fine in older USB ports.

The move to USB 3.1 was foreshadowed back in January 2013, so is no surprise, not even to Intel, whose Architecture Group veep Alex Peleg says in the canned statement (PDF) noting the new spec that “The industry has affirmed the strong demand for higher through-put, for user-connected peripherals and docks” and “Intel is fully committed to deliver on this request.”

We mention Chipzilla because it's been pushing its own Thunderbolt I/O standard as an alternative to USB. Those efforts have been less than astoundingly successful, as peripheral-makers have not adopted the standard, leading PC-makers like Acer towalk away because there's no point adding a feature users don't want.

Thunderbolt's still faster than USB 3.1 – the second version of Intel's baby hums along at 20 Gbps – and it has daisy chaining tricks that USB doesn't match. USB's retort is to point to the scoreboard of signed-up, productive, peripheral-makers. Thunderbolt's list mentions fewer than 120 products using the technology.

The USB 3.1 logo

The USB Implementers Forum says it has 800 members, and the space fiend alone knows how many products they collectively offer.

Information sessions on USB 3.1 kick off on August 21st. There's no word on when kit using the new version of the standard will land, but as the standard's been kicked around between USB forum members for ages there are few impediments to its implementation. The Reg sees no reason version 3.1's new logo won't appear on products by the new year. ®

HTC One Dual SIM Coming Soon to India, Spotted on Company’s Official Site

No Attachments

Vincent van Gogh

Failing to Succeed

Apple's app and content give-aways designed to lure customers to the Apple Store

Apple has recently updated its Apple Store app and is giving away some freebies. The first free app is puzzle game Color Zen, which is normally 99 cents, and each week Apple will give away media from iTunes, an iBook or a new app. To load the content onto your iOS device, you need to be inside your local Apple Store. Those buying a new iOS device will have the free content installed by Apple Store employees during the personal setup process.

Apple CEO Tim Cook admits that only a small percentage of iOS users are aware of the Apple Store app and hopes to raise that figure while getting more people into an Apple Store to buy the iPhone. While the executive says that 20% of iPhonesales are made in the Apple Store, the Consumer Intelligence Research Partners say that the figure iscloser to 15%. The CIRP says that the answer isn't sending more people into the same ol' Apple Stores. According to their data, Apple needs to open more Apple Stores if they want to increase the percentage of iPhone sales being made from their retail stores.

In other words, handing out bribes in the form of free 99 cent apps and content is not the answer.

Download the Apple Store app and visit a real store to get free downloads

source: 9to5Mac via MapleSyrup