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Google has just released Chrome version 17, which brings several minor enhancements to the company's web browser— including a new web address preloading feature and improved protection against malicious downloads.
The new Chrome introduces a preemptive rendering" feature that will automatically begin loading and rendering a page in the background while the user is typing the address in the omnibox (the combined address and search text entry field in Chrome's navigation toolbar). The preloading will occur in cases when the top match generated by the omnibox's autocompletion functionality is a site that the user visits frequently.
When the user hits the enter key and confirms the autocompletion result, the prerendered page will display almost instantly. The feature extends Chrome's existing predictive page loading functionality to autocompletion results. Unlike Chrome's instant search capability, however, the autocompletion preloading waits until the user hits the enter key before displaying the rendered page.
Google has also added some new security functionality to Chrome. Every time that the user downloads a file, the browser will compare it against a whiltelist of known-good files and publishers. If the file isn't in the whitelist, its URL will be transmitted to Google's servers, which will perform an automatic analysis and attempt to guess if the file is malicious based on various factors like the trustworthiness of its source. If the file is deemed a potential risk, the user will receive a warning.
Google says that data collected by the browser for the malware detection feature is only used to flag malicious files and isn't used for any other purpose. The company will retain the IP address of the user and other metadata for a period of two weeks, at which point all of the data except the URL of the file will be purged from Google's databases.
Users who are concerned about the privacy implications of this functionality can prevent the browser from relaying this information to Google by disabling the phishing and malware protection features in the browser's preferences. You can refer to the official Chromium blog for additional details about the malware detection feature.
Chrome 17 is available through the browser's automatic updater and can also be downloaded from Google's website. More information about the new release is available in the official Google Chrome blog
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Intel has announced that its Haswell architecture, due to ship some time in 2013, will include hardware support for transactional memory.
Transactional memory is a promising technique designed to make the creation of reliable multithreaded programs easier. It does this by using a transactional model wherein complex operations can be performed concurrently, in isolation from each other, with those operations either completing or being undone as if they'd never been started—a model that developers are already familiar with from database programming.
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If you ask people what a game developer does, most of them would give a simple answer—they make games. But if you ask someone what a game publisher does, most casual observers would have a much harder time giving you an answer. And these days, a lot of people in the game industry might have some questions about that, too.
The DICE Summit on Wednesday hosted an interesting discussion of whether the traditional publisher role—which primarily involves supporting developers and marketing their titles—really has a place in a gaming world that's rapidly discarding old ideas and business models.
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Critics slam SSL authority for minting certificate for impersonating sitesWed, 08 Feb 2012 18:30:00 -0600
Critics are calling for the ouster of Trustwave as a trusted issuer of secure sockets layer certificates after it admitted minting a credential it knew would be used by a customer to impersonate websites it didn't own.
The so-called subordinate root certificate allowed the customer to issue SSL credentials that Internet Explorer and other major browsers would accept as valid for any server on the Internet. The unnamed buyer of this skeleton key used it to perform what amounted to man-in-the-middle attacks that monitored users of its internal network as they accessed SSL-encrypted websites and services. The data-loss-prevention system used a hardware security module to ensure the private key at the heart of the root certificate wasn't accidentally leaked or retrieved by hackers.
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The white plastic MacBook is officially dead for good after Apple notified resellers that it will no longer be available to educational institutions. The 13" machine was essentially killed off for most of the public last July, but the budget laptop continued to be available to schools for the last six months. Now, however, the machine has officially been EOL'd (End of Lifed), bringing the old iBook legacy to an end once and for all.
As noted by MacRumors, Apple informed resellers of the product EOL on Wednesday, saying they had ended the educational distribution channel for the machine. It's unlikely that Apple has been actively manufacturing white MacBooks up to this point, either—it's not public how long the company did manufacture it (if at all) past last July, but its cancellation this week was likely due to the end of whatever remaining supply was available.
When Apple made the white MacBook unavailable to the public last year, it was on the same day the company introduced its 11" MacBook Air for $999—the same price the as the MacBook. Apple doesn't typically like to sell Macs for much cheaper than that for extended periods of time, so it was only a matter of time before the white MacBook bid the world farewell.
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RIAA still raging against Google, Wikipedia for "misuse of power" in SOPA battleWed, 08 Feb 2012 17:22:00 -0600
Cary Sherman, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, is a sharp guy with degrees from Cornell and Harvard Law. When we've spoken in the past, Sherman has shown a keen grasp of the issues. But as head of a major trade group and lobbying association, Sherman is not above hand-waving demagoguery, a trait on full display in yesterday's strangely angry New York Times op-ed.
In it, Sherman throws down the gauntlet. Not interested in playing the "humble" card, Sherman apparently believes he's going to get better results in his quest to revive something like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) by resorting to rank insults. He follows the line of attack carved out by MPAA boss Chris Dodd, who last month called the anti-SOPA Internet blackout "an irresponsible response," "an abuse of power," "a dangerous and troubling development," and a "gimmick."
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Russians finally hit Antarctic Lake Vostok after 20-year drilling projectWed, 08 Feb 2012 16:42:00 -0600
After several days of uncertainty, the head of Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute has confirmed that a drilling project that started over 20 years ago has finally made it through nearly four kilometers of ice to reach Lake Vostok. The lake is similar in size to one of the smaller Great Lakes of North America, but has been buried under an enormous sheet of ice for about 30 million years.
We already know strange things go on in the environments that have been trapped under ice in the Antarctic—witness the blood falls, which spill out of a glacier that has trapped an iron-based ecosystem on the frozen continent. That raises the chance that Lake Vostok harbors microbes that have survived the cold and crushing pressures underneath a different ice sheet. Unfortunately, we won't know until next year, since the team cleared out before retrieving samples from the bottom of their bore hole.
Although some people might fear unleashing 30 million year old bacteria into the modern world, most of the contamination worries went in the opposite direction: this may be a unique and untouched ecosystem, and it would be tragic if the precautions the Russians put in place weren't sufficient to keep surface bacteria from hitching a ride on the drilling equipment. But some are already speculating that we may be able to drop a robotic submersible into the bore hole and explore the lake remotely.
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Microsoft, Google, and Apple talk up "fair and reasonable" patent license feesWed, 08 Feb 2012 16:13:00 -0600
Microsoft today issued a brief statement promising to make "essential patents" available to competitors at fair and reasonable licensing rates, and promised not to sue companies making products that infringe these patents. The actual patents themselves weren't disclosed, but Microsoft joins both Google and Apple in making recent statements on so-called fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) licensing terms. Such licensing terms designate certain patents as essential to complying with industry standards, making them available for licensing at (supposedly) lower-than-usual rates.
Google, or at least someone close to the company, said earlier this week that it will continue offering Motorola Mobility patents under fair terms after completing its acquisition of the company. (Coincidentally, Microsoft sued Motorola in November 2010 for refusing to offer patent licenses under fair terms.) Apple, meanwhile, went directly to the European standards body behind 3G wireless networking, suggesting that standard licensing rates be set for the patents necessary to build mobile devices. Apple has apparently refused to pay the royalty fees demanded by Motorola and Samsung, saying they are excessive for patents covered by FRAND obligations.
Microsoft's statement today was titled "Microsoft's support for industry standards," and says the following:
- Microsoft will always adhere to the promises it has made to standards organizations to make its standard essential patents available on fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory terms.
- This means that Microsoft will not seek an injunction or exclusion order against any firm on the basis of those essential patents.
- This also means that Microsoft will make those essential patents available for license to other firms without requiring that those firms license their patents back to Microsoft, except for any patents they have that are essential to the same industry standard.
- Microsoft will not transfer those standard essential patents to any other firm unless that firm agrees to adhere to the points outlined above.
Despite many of the big players pledging support for a more standardized licensing process, we imagine there will still be plenty of patents left over for legal battles to continue.
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Paul McCartney concert stream will test the waters on live Apple TV viewershipWed, 08 Feb 2012 15:20:06 -0600
Apple may indeed be using the Apple TV to test the live broadcasting waters, as evidenced by its recent decision to stream former Beatle Paul McCartney's live performance this Thursday. The company "announced" via a banner on iTunes that the stream would take place at 7pm PST on February 9 both on iTunes (for Mac and PC) as well as the Apple TV—the first livestream of its kind for Apple's set-top box.
This isn't the first time Apple has streamed live (usually music-related) content via iTunes, but it will be the highest-profile and the first available to Apple TV users. The company is not charging for the stream—it will be free to help boost the profile of McCartney's recent album release, Kisses on the Bottom—and it will be viewable via the Apple TV's "Internet" menu under "iTunes Live."
The reason this is significant is because of long-standing rumors that Apple is looking for ways to challenge traditional TV delivery methods, like cable and satellite. There has been buzz that Apple might try to launch its own TV subscription service, while others (myself included) believe Apple is more likely to begin allowing third-parties to create "apps" for the Apple TV that will let them stream their own live content with ads. Apple will undoubtedly be watching its viewer numbers during the McCartney concert on Thursday, and if it sees anything encouraging coming from Apple TV viewers, it may be able to use those statistics to woo more content producers to give it a shot as well.
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The city of Tyler, Texas, is better known as the nation’s “rose capital” than as a hotspot of the technology industry. It’s a quiet, conservative city of about 100,000, full of wide streets and big trucks.
This week, though, Tyler is the site of a remarkable battle over the history of the World Wide Web—a trial that could affect the future of e-commerce. The federal courthouse downtown is packed to the brim with dozens of lawyers, representing the world’s biggest Internet companies, including Yahoo, Amazon, Google and YouTube.
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Forget transparent aluminum: researchers make iron invisible to X-raysWed, 08 Feb 2012 15:00:04 -0600
Transparency is generally a property of a material's density or crystal structure, and varies depending on the wavelength of light. However, transparency can also be achieved by exploiting quantum interference between energy level transitions in atoms. Up until now, such transparency has been confined to optical wavelengths, due to the typical energies of atomic transitions.
Transitioning between energy levels within atomic nuclei (instead of electron transitions) involves much higher energies, corresponding to hard X-ray frequencies. Ralf Röhlsberger, Hans-Christian Wille, Kai Schlage, and Balaram Sahoo of the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Germany have induced transparency in iron-57 nuclei, using an X-ray laser to drive the nuclei to resonance. The experiment not only made the iron nuclei nearly vanish, but also slowed the X-ray photons to a small fraction of their usual speed. This result holds out the tantalizing possibility of quantum optics in the nuclear regime, providing us new ways of manipulating light at far higher energies than have previously been possible.
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Apple hoping to secure standardized royalties for 3G wireless patentsWed, 08 Feb 2012 14:35:00 -0600
Apple is attempting to stop the use of "standards essential" patents on 3G technology as legal bludgeons against smartphone competitors. To make its case, the company has gone directly to the standards body behind 3G wireless networking, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). In a letter to ETSI dated last November (but only recently uncovered by the Wall Street Journal) Apple suggested that patents offered as part of wireless networking standards should be governed by standardized royalty rates and barred from being used as the basis for legal injunctions.
As the war over smartphone supremacy has spilled over into the courtroom, some players—including Samsung and Motorola—have taken to leveraging patents essential to 3G wireless networking standards in lawsuits largely aimed at Apple. Those patents were offered up to the ETSI to help create 3G standards on the condition that they be licensed on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.
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Data shows Vita's missing backward compatibility could cost Sony salesWed, 08 Feb 2012 14:25:00 -0600
Kotaku is reporting that Sony will not be bringing its Japanese UMD Passport program to North America, removing the only method for PlayStation Vita owners to play their collection of PlayStation Portable universal media discs (UMDs) on the new handheld (PSP games downloaded from the PlayStation Network will still work on the Vita, however). While this is obviously bad news for anyone who wants to play their battered old copy of Lumines on a slightly larger screen, it made us wonder how important backward compatibility really is to a system's retail success.
We were perfectly ready to speculate wildly on that very topic, but it turns out there's no need. Someone has actually crunched the numbers and tried to develop a statistical model to show just how valuable backward compatibility is for a portable system's overall market share. And the results show that Sony just might pay a price for its decision to ignore all the UMD owners out there.
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Google paying users to track 100% of their Web usage via little black boxWed, 08 Feb 2012 13:33:00 -0600
Google is working to collect information about Internet users that it can't get from just monitoring its own browser, services, and Android devices. The company has set up a new program called Screenwise, which offers money to users who install a black box on their home network to "measure Internet use." A smaller amount of money will go to those who install a browser extension on their computers that will do the same thing.
Google quietly started up the Screenwise data collection program Tuesday night, taking the e-mail addresses of people who are interested in "add[ing] a browser extension that will share with Google the sites you visit and how you use them." For their participation, Google offers the extension users a $5 Amazon gift card for signing up and another $5 gift card for every three months they stay with the program. Less publicly, Google also started looking for people who would install a piece of hardware on their network to do more extensive monitoring.
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The Windows 8 Consumer Preview—notably it's not being called a "beta"—will be launched on February 29th. Microsoft will launch it at an event it's hosting in Barcelona to coincide with Mobile World Congress.
Taking full advantage of the opportunity afforded by the leap year, the release will just hit Microsoft's previously announced "late February" date. Redmond has no comment (yet) on whether the event will be Webcast.
Releasing the Consumer Preview of a desktop operating system at a conference for cellular communications might seem strange. But with Windows 8's tablet ambitions and the leaked information that Windows Phone 8 will probably use the Windows 8 kernel, this is a desktop operating system that won't be confined to the desktop.
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The popularity of the Firefox Web browser has grown tremendously in recent years, but there is one region where it is practically ubiquitous. Firefox has consistently held 80 percent market share in Antarctica.
The Firefox enthusiasts at the bottom of the world are now launching their own community group in collaboration with Mozilla. A new Mozilla Antarctica website went live on Tuesday of this week, the 191st anniversary of the first documented landing on mainland Antarctica.
The Mozilla Antarctica community group started as a joke. Mozilla's David Boswell included a reference to an Antarctic community group as an easter egg when he developed the global Mozilla community map. The idea soon took on a life of its own when Boswell began working with a group of Antarctic enthusiasts to make the joke a reality.
There isn't much on the Mozilla Antarctica website yet, but it promises to deliver interviews with Antarctic Firefox users and (of course) nyan-penguins. For more details about the community group's mission, check out the about page on the Mozilla Antarctica website.
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TuneCore: first iTunes Match royalties are "magic money" out of "thin air"Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:12:00 -0600
Music distribution service TuneCore has described the royalties from iTunes Match as "magic money that Apple made exist out of thin air for copyright holders," signaling early support of the service from one part of the music industry. TuneCore CEO Jeff Price made the proclamation in a blog post on Tuesday, making the first iTunes Match royalty payments sound like nothing less than a miracle. Without any details on how much individual musicians are taking home, however, it's not clear whether iTunes Match pays better or worse than similar services.
TuneCore is a service used by many independent musicians and artists that allows them to distribute their music on major music stores like iTunes and Amazon. The idea is to use TuneCore's resources—instead of the artist's limited resources—to achieve wider distribution to a major audience, and for what amounts to as a minimal cost to the musician. TuneCore isn't the only service that does this—CD Baby is another popular option—but it remains one of the larger collectives of indie musicians online.
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The spice must flow: new model describes the evolution of desert dunesWed, 08 Feb 2012 11:45:22 -0600
Understanding dunes is important, since he who controls the Spice controls the Universe… That’s the last Dune joke, I promise.
Understanding the mechanisms behind desert sand dune formation and evolution actually is useful, since migrating dune fields threaten agricultural areas and human habitats. At the edges of dune fields, habitats can transition from lifeless deserts to areas covered in vegetation over fairly short distances. Various factors, such as the supply and transport rates of sand and groundwater, along with vegetation density, have all been proposed as key influences on this transition point, but nobody has come up with a model describing the evolution of dune fields.
Until now, that is. A team led by Douglas Jerolmack, joined by others at the Universities of Pennsylvania, Alabama, and Temple University, published a paper in a recent issue of Nature Geoscience that focused on the gypsum dunes of White Sands National Monument, New Mexico. The team came up with a model describing both the transport of the sand that forms the dunes and the changes in vegetation, relating to the levels of groundwater underneath the sand.
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Etc: Microsoft has published a post on its Building Windows 8 blog that describes some of Windows 8's power management features, and the influence this has had on the multitasking model used by Metro-style applications.Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:20:23 -0600
Microsoft has published a post on its Building Windows 8 blog that describes some of Windows 8's power management features, and the influence this has had on the multitasking model used by Metro-style applications.
Read More: Building Windows 8
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My wife, who is professionally interested in the politics of the Czech Republic, doesn't usually find ways to connect her work and mine. So she was surprised to see this week that the European protests against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) have now reached the highest levels of the Czech government.
Prime Minister Petr Nečas has announced that the Czech Republic will follow Poland and suspend ratification of ACTA, which has become a local lightning rod after 22 EU countries signed on last month. Ratification still needs to take place in various national parliaments.
Anonymous has been attacking government websites, while the Czech Pirate Party has organized street protests in Prague. The Pirate Party isn't happy about the "suspension," though; they want to see full-blown withdrawal from the whole process.
"By no means would the government admit a situation where civic freedoms and free access to information would be threatened," Necas said, according to the Prague Daily Monitor. He added, "I want to emphasise that no checks of laptops on the borders, no monitoring of Internet users, no filtrations and similar things have ever threatened in the Czech Republic. No such threat has ever existed for a single moment."
Neighboring Slovakia has also expressed doubts. Economic Minister Juraj Miškov said he opposes any deal that "would curtail basic human rights in any shape or form, particularly the right to freedom and privacy and that will superimpose copyright protection over these rights."
ACTA may still pass in central European parliaments, but not before gettting a closer look.
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Etc: The Joy of Tech has posted a new comic inspired by our coverage of Facebook (not) deleting photos. Exciting!Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:03:30 -0600
The Joy of Tech has posted a new comic inspired by our coverage of Facebook (not) deleting photos. Exciting!
Read More: Joy of Tech, Ars coverage
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Etc: Good news 2010 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and iMac owners: you can now use Lion Internet Recovery thanks to a new EFI Firmware update.Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:15:15 -0600
Good news 2010 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and iMac owners: you can now use Lion Internet Recovery thanks to a new EFI Firmware update.
Read More: MacStories
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For cold water corals, warming is beating acidification to drive a growth spurtWed, 08 Feb 2012 08:00:11 -0600
The release of excess CO2 from the combustion of fossil fuels, deforestation, and other processes doesn’t just affect our air; it also affects our oceans. The oceans absorb as much as 30 percent of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which lowers their pH. Thus, our emissions have two large consequences for our oceans: warmer temperatures and increased acidity.
These changes may have a profound effect on coral growth, since corals are sensitive to both temperature and pH. There is mounting evidence that coral health has been declining in recent years. But what, exactly, is affecting coral? A new study in Science shows that current changes in coral growth may have more to do with the ocean’s temperature than its pH.
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Cryptographers have cracked the encryption schemes used in a variety of satellite phones, a feat that makes it possible for attackers to surreptitiously monitor data received by vulnerable devices.
The research team, from the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, is among the first to analyze the secret encryption algorithms implemented by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute. After reverse engineering phones that use the GMR-1 and GMR-2 standards, the team discovered serious cryptographic weaknesses that allow attackers using a modest PC running open-source software to recover protected communications in less than an hour.
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Hackers aligned with Anonymous have exposed hundreds of e-mail messages from the webmail server of Syria's Ministry of Presidential Affairs, the support ministry for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Among the exposed e-mail messages was a set of talking points for Assad's interview with Barbara Walters in December 2011.
A translation of the e-mail sent by Sheherazad Jaafari, a press attaché at the Syrian mission to the United Nations, to Assad aide and former Al Jazeera journalist Luna Chebel, provided helpful hints for Assad to manipulate American opinion about what was going on in Syria. The message suggested that "it is hugely important and worth mentioning that 'mistakes' have been done in the begining of the crises because we did not have a well-organized 'police force.' American psyche can be easily manipulated when they hear there are 'mistakes' done and now we are 'fixing it.'"
Jaafari suggested comparing what was happening in Syria to US law enforcement's response to the Occupy Wall Street protests.
Along with the release of these e-mails, Anonymous also exposed the passwords of 78 accounts on the Ministry's servers. Of the passwords revealed, 31 were "12345" and a number were minor variations on that. Some of the other passwords in the set included:
- iloveyou
- 123vivasyria
- system
- honda2011
- testing
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