Siri won't help you hide a body today. Back in 2012, however... Casey Johnston

Update: The Gainesville police department has clarified that, while a department detective did show a screenshot of the "hide my roommate" query from the suspect's phone, the question was not necessarily asked in connection with the alleged murder. The suspect's attorney told CBS Miami that the query was found "among hundreds of pictures that were on Bravo’s phone and that the search may not have been initiated by his client." The CBS report also notes that the suspect admitted to beating the victim the night of the alleged murder, and that police found the shovel with which the victim was buried. Original story is below.

A murder suspect may have actually used a Siri Easter egg while hiding the body of his victim, according to a news report Tuesday from the Palm Beach Post and later picked up by BuzzFeed. Gainesville, Florida detective Matt Goeckel presented evidence in court Tuesday that showed the suspect, Pedro Bravo, telling Siri, "I need to hide my roommate." He received as suggestions: "Swamps. Reservoirs. Metal Foundries. Dumps."

The response from Siri was originally meant to be a macabre joke; it's one of the virtual assistant's first Easter eggs from when it launched on iOS in 2011. According to the Gainesville police, Bravo actually asked his phone for advice when looking for somewhere to hide roommate Christian Aguilar's body on September 20, 2012, after the two had a fight.

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An Arbor Networks graphic showing the sudden drop-off in network traffic from Syria on November 29, 2012 as the country was essentially erased from network routing tables.

In a Wired interview with well-known National Security Agency journalist James Bamford that was published today, Edward Snowden claimed that the US accidentally took most of Syria off the Internet while attempting to bug the country's traffic. Snowden said that back in 2013 when he was still working with the US government, he was told by a US intelligence officer that NSA hackers—not the Assad regime—had been responsible for Syria’s sudden disconnect from the Internet in November and December of 2012.

The NSA's Tailored Access Office (TAO), Snowden said, had been attempting to exploit a vulnerability in the router of a “major Internet service provider in Syria.” The exploit would have allowed the NSA to redirect traffic from the router through systems tapped by the agency’s Turmoil packet capture system and the Xkeyscore packet processing system, giving the NSA access to enclosures in e-mails that would otherwise not have been accessible to its broad Internet surveillance.

Instead, the TAO’s hackers “bricked” the router, Snowden said. He described the event as an “oh shit” moment, as the TAO operations center team tried to repair the router and cover their tracks, to no avail.

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Bravely exploring tombs... but only on Xbox, to start.

Update (August 13): In an interview with Eurogamer, Microsoft's Phil Spencer clairified that the Tomb Raider deal is a timed exclusive, though he wouldn't comment on the precise length of the deal. "Obviously the deal does have a duration. I didn't buy the IP in perpetuity," he said.

Spencer also said that the game will be coming to Xbox 360 as well as Xbox One.

Original story: Since its start in 1996, the Tomb Raider series has been proudly platform agnostic, launching on PlayStation, PC, and Sega Saturn back in the day. So it came as some surprise this morning when Microsoft announced that Rise of the Tomb Raider will be coming exclusively to Xbox One in time for the 2015 holiday season.

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The Shadow Realms teaser shown at EA's Gamescom press conference last night.

Last night's pre-Gamescom press conference from Bioware owner EA didn't bring any additional news about the still-nebulous Mass Effect 4, but it did bring the surprising announcement of a quite different kind of game from the studio best known for epic single-player RPGs. Shadow Realms is more directly inspired by tabletop RPGs, pitting a single "Shadowlord" (read: Dungeon Master) against a team of four heroes drawn from the usual set of RPG classes in a trap-filled dungeon.

In an announcement post, lead designer James Ohlen notes that while previous Bioware RPGs have been successful in their own ways, "The stories always come to an end and AI systems can’t replace the creativity of a human Dungeon Master. Shadow Realms aims to change that."

Unlike a traditional Dungeon Master, though, the Shadowlord in Shadow Realms won't be an all-seeing omnipotent force hovering over the battlefield and controlling dice rolls. Instead, as Bioware explains, he or she will invisibly roam the dungeon halls from an over-the-shoulder perspective, "setting traps, casting spells, summoning monsters, and controlling any monster in the level."

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The 3-2-1 data backup strategy involves keeping three copies of all essential data, spread over at least two different devices with at least one of them being off-site or disaster-resistant in some way. It is almost impossible to keep copies of large frequently updated data sets current in an off-site data backup strategy. This is where ioSafe's disaster-resistant units come into the picture. Products such as the SoloPRO and the ioSafe N2 show how ioSafe has continued to innovate in this space. The ioSafe 1513+ is their most ambitious product to date, attempting to place Synology's most powerful 5-bay NAS unit inside a fire- and waterproof package. Read on for a closer look at the hardware and performance of the unit.

Samsung today announces the new Galaxy Alpha, a mid-range "premium" built device that creates a new range in Samsung's lineup. The Alpha totes a 4.7" 1280x720 AMOLED screen, coming with either a yet unnanounced Exynos 5430 SoC with 4 A15 cores running at 1.8GHz and 4 A7 cores running at 1.3GHz and a Mali T628MP6 GPU for the international market, or with a Snapdragon 801 SoC for select markets such as the US. Both versions come with 2GB of memory on board.

A new 12MP rear sensor and a 2.1MP front camera can be found. 

The device comes in a new aluminium frame, marking this as a change in build material from Samsung's usual plastic. The phone is extremely thin at only 6.7mm and weighing a lightweight 115g. The footprint of 132.4 x 65.5mm matches the 4.7" screen format of the phone. The back cover is removable and sports a 1860mAh replaceable battery. Strangely, Samsung omitted a microSD card slot in this device which comes at a standard 32GB of internal storage space. We find the same fingerprint and heatbeat sensor as on the S5, however it lacks the waterproofing of the former. It's shipping with Android 4.4.4 KitKat version with the same TouchWiz iteration as the S5.

More interestingly the international version of the device should sport LTE-A category 6 with help of an Intel XMM7260 modem. This would be the first device announced with Intel's new LTE modem and mark a break from Qualcomm's dominance in the sector.

The Alpha is an intriguing device that apparently to wants to fill in a gap in Samsung's lineup which has seen device size go up with each iteration of the S-series. The 720p screen, its slimness and design seems to target directly the iPhone instead of other high-end Android handsets, pricing should also end up in the higher end.

Source: SamsungTomorrow

Today it was announced by the USB-IF (USB Implementers Forum) that the latest USB connector which we first caught a glimpse of in April has been finalized, and with this specification many of the issues with USB as a connector should be corrected. USB, or Universal Serial Bus, has been with us for a long time now, with the standard first being adopted in 1996. At the time, it seemed very fast at up to 12 Mbps, and the connector form factor was not an issue on the large desktop PCs of the day, but over the years, the specifications for USB have been updated several times, and the connectors have also been updated to fit new form factor devices.

In the early ‘90s, when USB was first being developed, the designers had no idea just how universal it would become. The first connectors, USB-A and USB-B, were not only massive in size, but the connection itself was only ever intended to provide power at a low draw of 100 mA. As USB evolved, those limitations were some of the first to go.

First, the mini connectors were introduced, which, at approximately 3 mm x 7 mm, were significantly smaller than the original connector, but other than the smaller size they didn’t correct every issue with the initial connectors. For instance, they still had a connector which had to be oriented a certain way in order to be plugged in. As some people know, it can take several tries to get a USB cable to connect, and has resulted in more than a few jokes being made about it. The smaller size did allow USB to be used on a much different class of device than the original connector, with widespread adoption of the mini connectors on everything from digital cameras to Harmony remotes to PDAs of the day.

USB Cables and Connectors - Image Source Viljo Viitanen

In January 2007, the Micro-USB connector was announced by the USB-IF, and with this change, USB now had the opportunity to become ubiquitous on smartphones and other such devices. Not only was the connector smaller and thinner, but the maximum charging rate was increased to up to 1.8 A for pins 1 and 5. The connection is also rated for at least 10,000 connect-disconnect cycles, which is much higher than the original USB specification of 1,500 cycles, and 5,000 for the Mini specification. However once again, the Micro-USB connector did not solve every issue with USB as a connector. Again, the cable was not reversible, so the cable must be oriented in the proper direction prior to insertion, and with USB 3.0 being standardized in 2008, the Micro connector could not support USB 3.0 speeds, and therefore a USB 3.0 Micro-B connector was created. While just as thin as the standard connector, it adds an additional five pins beside the standard pins making it a very wide connection.

With that history behind us, we can take a look at the changes which were finalized for the latest connector type. There are a lot of changes coming, with some excellent enhancements:

• Completely new design but with backwards compatibility
• Similar to the size of USB 2.0 Micro-B (standard Smartphone charging cable)
• Slim enough for mobile devices, but robust enough for laptops and tablets
• Reversible plug orientation for ease of connection
• Scalable power charging with connectors being able to supply up to 5 A and cables supporting 3 A for up to 100 watts of power
• Designed for future USB performance requirements
• Certified for USB 3.1 data rates (10 Gbps)
• Receptacle opening: ~8.4 mm x ~2.6 mm
• Durability of 10,000 connect-disconnect cycles
• Improved EMI and RFI mitigation features

With this new design, existing devices won’t be able to mate using the new cables, so for that reason the USB-IF has defined passive cables which will allow older devices to connect to the new connector, or newer devices to connect to the older connectors for backwards compatibility. With the ubiquity of USB, this is clearly important.

There will be a lot of use cases for the new connector, which should only help cement USB as an ongoing standard. 10 Gbps transfer rates should help ensure that the transfer is not bottlenecked by USB, and with the high current draw being specified by connectors, USB may now replace the charging ports on many laptops as well as some tablets that use it now. The feature that will be most helpful to all users though is the reversible plug, which will finally do away with the somewhat annoying connection that has to be done today.

As this is a standard that is just now finalized, it will be some time before we see it in production devcies, but with the universal nature of USB, you can expect it to be very prevalent in upcoming technology in the near future.

 

Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell in 2012. billsorrell.com

MPHJ Technology became infamous by sending out thousands of letters demanding $1,000 per worker from small businesses using basic scan-to-e-mail functions. The company says it owns several patents that cover those basic functions and has sent out more than 10,000 letters demanding payment.

That behavior led MPHJ to be the first patent troll ever to be sued by the government. Vermont Attorney General Bill Sorrell filed a lawsuit against MPHJ in May of last year that accuses MPHJ of making misleading statements in its demand letters and doing "little, if any, due diligence to confirm that the targeted businesses were actually infringing its patents." In addition to targeting a variety of small businesses, MPHJ sent letters to two Vermont nonprofits that help disabled residents and their caregivers.

For the past year, MPHJ has pushed back, demanding that its case be heard in federal court and even suggesting that the Vermont AG should be sanctioned for going after it.

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One of the main features Intel was promoting at the launch of Haswell was TSX – Transactional Synchronization eXtensions. In our analysis, Johan explains that TSX enables the CPU to process a series of traditionally locked instructions on a dataset in a multithreaded environment without locks, allowing each core to potentially violate each other’s shared data. If the series of instructions is computed without this violation, the code passes through at a quicker rate – if an invalid overwrite happens, the code is aborted and takes the locked route instead. All a developer has to do is link in a TSX library and mark the start and end parts of the code.

News coming from Intel’s briefings in Portland last week boil down to an erratum found with the TSX instructions. Tech Report and David Kanter of Real World Technologies are stating that a software developer outside of Intel discovered the erratum through testing, and subsequently Intel has confirmed its existence. While errata are not new (Intel’s E3-1200 v3 Xeon CPUs already have 140 of them), what is interesting is Intel’s response: to push through new microcode to disable TSX entirely. Normally a microcode update would suggest a workaround, but it would seem that this a fundamental silicon issue that cannot be designed around, or intercepted at an OS or firmware/BIOS level.

Intel has had numerous issues similar to this in the past, such as the FDIV bug, the f00f bug and more recently, the P67 B2 SATA issues. In each case, the bug was resolved by a new silicon stepping, with certain issues (like FDIV) requiring a recall, similar to recent issues in the car industry. This time there are no recalls, the feature just gets disabled via a microcode update.

The main focus of TSX is in server applications rather than consumer systems. It was introduced primarily to aid database management and other tools more akin to a server environment, which is reflected in the fact that enthusiast-level consumer CPUs have it disabled (except Devil’s Canyon). Now it will come across as disabled for everyone, including the workstation and server platforms. Intel is indicating that programmers who are working on TSX enabled code can still develop in the environment as they are committed to the technology in the long run.

Overall, this issue affects all of the Haswell processors currently in the market, the upcoming Haswell-E processors and the early Broadwell-Y processors under the Core M branding, which are currently in production. This issue has been found too late in the day to be introduced to these platforms, although we might imagine that the next stepping all around will have a suitable fix. Intel states that its internal designs have already addressed the issue.

Intel is recommending that Xeon users that require TSX enabled code to improve performance should wait until the release of Haswell-EX. This tells us two things about the state of Haswell: for most of the upcoming LGA2011-3 Haswell CPUs, the launch stepping might be the last, and the Haswell-EX CPUs are still being worked on. That being said, if the Haswell-E/EP stepping at launch is not the last one, Intel might not promote the fact – having the fix for TSX could be a selling point for Broadwell-E/EP down the line.

For those that absolutely need TSX, it is being said that TSX can be re-enabled through the BIOS/firmware menu should the motherboard manufacturer decide to expose it to the user. Reading though Intel’s official errata document, we can confirm this:

We are currently asking Intel what the required set of circumstances are to recreate the issue, but the erratum states ‘a complex set of internal timing conditions and system events … may result in unpredictable system behaviour’. There is no word if this means an unrecoverable system state or memory issue, but any issue would not be in the interests of the buyers of Intel’s CPUs who might need it: banks, server farms, governments and scientific institutions.

At the current time there is no road map for when the fix will be in place, and no public date for the Haswell-EX CPU launch.  It might not make sense for Intel to re-release the desktop Haswell-E/EP CPUs, and in order to distinguish them it might be better to give them all new CPU names.  However the issue should certainly be fixed with Haswell-EX and desktop Broadwell onwards, given that Intel confirms they have addressed the issue internally.

Source: Twitter, Tech Report

 

A GIF-ified version of the key part of the P.T. reveal of Silent Hills SunhiLegend / NeoGAF

Amid all the announcements at Sony's pre-Gamescom press conference today, one stood out as particularly baffling: the brief mention of an immediately downloadable PS4 "playable teaser" for a horror game simply being called P.T, from unknown studio 7780s. The mystery has now been solved, with P.T. revealed as a stealth announcement for a new Silent Hill game from Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima.

After wandering through a dark, creepy house lit primarily by a flashlight, the P.T. demo culminates with a cut scene showing a rain-soaked street. The name Hideo Kojima pops up alongside noted film director Guillermo Del Toro as the camera pans up to show a character modeled after The Walking Dead star Norman Reedus.

The game name Silent Hills then appears against a white background, followed by a disclaimer warning "This game is a teaser. It has no direct relation to the main title."

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That nice orange disk? Get rid of it, and the black hole can eat much faster. NASA

As far as we can tell, nearly every galaxy out there has a supermassive black hole at its core. And when these black holes are actively ingesting matter, they create quasars, the brightest objects we've ever detected. Quasars appear to be present in some of the earliest galaxies we can detect, from when the Universe was only six percent of its current age.

That's a bit of a problem. The radiation a black hole emits while swallowing matter places a speed limit on the amount of matter it can ingest. Currently, we simply don't know how black holes got big enough to power a quasar less than a billion years after the birth of the Universe. But a paper from last week's edition of Science suggests that the stars present at the galaxy's core might cause gravitational instabilities that let the black hole overcome the speed limit on its growth.

Black holes are famous for having a point of no return, a distance where even photons cannot escape their gravitational draw. But beyond that point, the infalling matter can form what's called an accretion disk, where its interactions with the intense magnetic and gravitational fields send copious amounts of matter and energy flowing away from the black hole.

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Language and math have always been part of the core public school experience in the US; science, by contrast, has often been considered an optional topic. But the combination of a push for greater standards and a recognition of science's increasing role in our high-tech economy has resulted in the adoption of science requirements by many states. Now, an analysis of US census data suggests that the increased push for science may have a negative effect: an increase in the dropout rate in states that have adopted science requirements.

This isn't to say that science is bad for students. "That there is positive impact of rigorous coursework when chosen by students is not controversial," researchers based at the Washington University School of Medicine wrote in a recent study, "but there has been ongoing debate over the effects of requiring a more difficult high school curriculum for everyone."

The authors relied on data obtained by the US Census Bureau, through the actual census and annual surveys the Bureau performs. (For data junkies, it's worth noting that all of the data is publicly available from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series website.)

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The 15 states in which the ACLU knows that police use cell phone tracking devices. ACLU

The Federal Communications Commission said it will investigate the “illicit and unauthorized use” of cell phone tracking and interception devices, commonly known as IMSI catchers or stingrays.

A newly published letter from FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler to Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) states that Wheeler has created a task force that recently took “immediate steps to combat the illicit and unauthorized use of IMSI catchers. The mission of this task force is to develop concrete solutions to protect the cellular networks systemically from similar unlawful intrusions and interceptions.”

Relatively little is known about how stingrays are used by law enforcement agencies nationwide, although documents have surfaced showing how they have been purchased and used in some limited instances. Worse still, cops have lied to courts about the use of such technology. Not only can stingrays be used to determine location, but they can also intercept calls and text messages. Grayson seems primarily concerned with stingray use by criminals, terrorists, and foreign government agents.

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Flickr user: Intel Free Press

Lean operations and a lack of technical staff make non-governmental organizations a prime, and relatively soft, target for well-funded adversaries, according to an academic study of a four-year campaign targeting one such group.

In a paper to be delivered at the USENIX Security Conference next week, six academic researchers analyzed nearly 1,500 suspicious e-mail messages targeting the World Uyghur Congress (WUC). The team found that, while the malware managed to reliably evade detection by many antivirus programs, the attacks were relatively unsophisticated, using known vulnerabilities that had already been patched. The social engineering tactics, however, were very targeted and convincing, with the majority written in the native language, referring to events of interest to the NGO and appearing to come from known contacts, said Engin Kirda, a professor of computer science at Northeastern University and a co-author of the paper.

"You read about sophisticated attacks, but the malware that we analyzed was pretty standard," Kirda said. "It was not some ground breaking obfuscation or malware."

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When the Blackphone team arrived at Def Con last week, they knew they were stepping into a lion’s den. In fact, that's exactly why they were there. The first generation Blackphone from SGP Technologies has been shipping for just over a month, and the company’s delegation to DefCon—including Silent Circle Chief Technology Officer Jon Callas and newly hired SGP Technologies Chief Security Officer Dan Ford—was looking to both reach a natural customer base and get help with further locking down the device.

Ask and you shall receive. Jon “Justin Case” Sawyer, the CTO of Applied Cybersecurity LLC, walked up to the Blackphone table at Def Con and told them he rooted the phone. And those who followed him on Twitter received an abbreviated play-by-play.

What followed, however, was not what Sawyer or the Blackphone team counted on: a BlackBerry blogger at N4BB leapt on one of Sawyer’s tweets and wrote a story with the erroneous headline, “Blackphone Rooted Within 5 Minutes.” By the time Sawyer was presenting on Sunday at Def Con with Tim Strazzere, the story had been picked up by a number of blogs and websites—and nearly all of them didn’t bother getting further details from Sawyer or Blackphone.

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Since the announcement and revocation of Microsoft's "Family Sharing" features on Xbox One, we've been waiting for someone to come up with a fair and logical way of sharing generalized gameplay experiences with friends over the Internet. Steam's library-wide Family Sharing features were a step in the right direction, but Sony's newly announced Share Play feature sounds like the Internet game sharing we've been waiting for.

Announced at Sony's pre-Gamescom press conference today, Share Play is being sold as a "virtual couch" that lets you in effect "pass the controller" to friends online even if they don't own a copy of the game. That means you'll be able to play simultaneous cooperative and competitive games with your PSN friends, even if the game is only designed for local multiplayer. Alternatively, an online friend can take over for you in single-player games to help with a particularly difficult section.

It all happens without the need for the second online player to buy or download anything, Sony said, although both players will need to have a PlayStation Plus account. While Sony didn't get technical at the press event, it seems the feature works through the same kind of Gaikai-fueled game-streaming/screen-sharing technology that powers PlayStation Now and PS4 Remote Play on the Vita.

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Apple's ethnicity numbers in the US may be more diverse than other giant tech companies, but today's charts don't explain how Apple Store employees fit into sub-categories like "tech" and "leadership." Apple

On Tuesday, Apple joined a growing list of tech companies issuing diversity reports about hiring practices, and like its peers, Apple's report broke down ethnicity and gender percentages in the categories of "tech," "non-tech," and "leadership." Taken at face value, the report paints Apple as a company with a higher percentage of underrepresented groups among its tech and leadership ranks.

However, unlike companies like Facebook, Google, and Yahoo, Apple counts a massive number of retail employees among its ranks—today's report listed a total of 98,000, and retail included more than 32,000 employees in 2012 (a number that has assumedly expanded since). Tuesday's report failed to clarify exactly how Apple Store employees fit into the new statistics. A Re/code report alleged that the "leadership" category included Apple Store management, but Apple's own report didn't indicate either way.

According to the report compiled internally by Apple human resources, Apple's worldwide tech hiring includes 20 percent women, as opposed to Google's 17 percent. In the US, Apple's tech category includes seven percent Hispanic and six percent black employees; those ethnicity numbers are each at least four percent higher than all other companies who've reported thus far. Apple's leadership percentages also outpace the others in diversity, including 28 percent women worldwide (topping Facebook and Yahoo at 23 percent), along with an American count of six percent Hispanic and three percent black.

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Our contribution to the bad jokes. Sorry. Aurich Lawson

Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft, is officially the new owner of the NBA's Los Angeles Clippers, according to a league announcement.

The newly unemployed Ballmer has paid $2 billion for the team (which, as I understand it, plays a variant of the popular game netball). The price is a record sale for an NBA team.

Ballmer's efforts to buy the team have been delayed by a court case between the team's former owners, Donald Sterling and his estranged wife, Shelly. Donald Sterling attempted to block the sale negotiated by Shelly Sterling, but a California probate court allowed the sale to go through.

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US Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Virginia. Alan Kotok

Recently, the US Patent and Trademark Office concluded an internal investigation that it began about two years ago. The investigation resulted in a bruising 32-page report, finding that a significant fraction of the roughly 7,900 patent examiners at the US Patent and Trademark Office routinely lie about their hours worked. About half of those examiners work from home, but even the half in the office have proven hard to supervise.

But that strongly worded report didn't end up on the desk of the inspector general. Instead, Commerce Department Inspector General Todd Zinser was given a 16-page scrubbed-up version of the report with inconclusive findings. The potentially incendiary quotes and cases in the original report were all gone.

Eventually, Zinser got the original report when it was given to him by an unnamed patent office worker. Now The Washington Post has published both versions, along with an article highlighting some of the worst abuses. The original suppressed report paints a portrait of dysfunction at a large government office that's rarely in the spotlight.

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The Xbox One Digital TV Tuner. Microsoft

The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 aren't just games consoles; a succession of software updates has made them into rich media boxes, capable of playing all manner of video and audio on your TV. The Xbox One and PlayStation 4, by contrast, have thus far offered a rather sad and limited media experience. On the Xbox One, at least, that experience is about to get a whole lot better, as Microsoft revealed today at Gamescom in Germany.

A new media player app for the console is being released with support for playback from USB devices and, later in the year, DLNA streaming from other devices on the home network, including Windows PCs. This is in addition to its existing ability to have content pushed by network devices.

On its own, this would merely bring the Xbox One's media capabilities up to the same level as those found in the older Xbox 360, but Microsoft is going a step further with substantially wider format support. The company has published a full list of supported codecs, but one stands out: support for MKV containers. While MKV is a rarity in the world of explicitly authorized video, it's quite abundant in the murky world of pirated TV shows. Native MKV support will make watching this content substantially easier on the Xbox One.

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