Maximum PC - All Articles

Anonymous Intercepts FBI and Scotland Yard Conference Call

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:42:21 +0000

An element of hacker group Anonymous announced today that it has intercepted a conference call between the FBI and UK law enforcement wherein they discuss tracking down Anonymous. The 16 minute call was recorded and has been posted on various sites, including YouTube. The FBI and Scotland Yard have confirmed their call was illegally intercepted.

The first few minutes are idle banter between the early arrivals, but from there the conversation moves on to the efforts to identify members of Anonymous and LulzSec. Anonymous beeped out names of suspects and contacts not yet apprehended, but left in the names of those already arrested, including Ryan Cleary and Jake Davis. The call is from January 17th, and the investigators can be heard discussing the case against Cleary and Davis.

It is suspected that Anonymous gained access to law enforcement email where an invitation to the conference all was available. It should be noted that the phone number and password for the call was listed in plain text. This is certainly embarrassing for the FBI and Scotland Yard, and one has to wonder if more releases from that hacked email account will be incoming. 

Head to Head: Amazon Kindle Fire vs. Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:24:06 +0000

If you can’t beat Apple’s iPad, change the rules of the game. Amazon and Barnes & Noble are taking a bath on sales of the $199 Kindle Fire and the $249 Nook Tablet, respectively, and making up for it with profits on sales of electronic merchandise (e-books, videos, music, and apps). The strategy has succeeded in moving a lot of hardware, with each company on track to sell millions of units (although the ratio of Kindle Fire to Nook Tablet sales is greatly in Amazon’s favor so far). Both tablets feature nearly identical 7-inch, 1024x600 LCDs and rely on Wi-Fi for connectivity. Which should tempt you away from the high-end tablets? Only a bloody-knuckled deathmatch will tell.

Round 1: Design

If a plain black slab with a screen is your cup of tea, then drink in the Kindle Fire. Its headphone output and power button (its lone hardware control) are uncomfortably close to its Micro USB port (used for charging and file transfers) across the bottom of the tablet.

No doubt the prettier option, the Nook Tablet sports a raised silver-gray bezel and coated backplate that, in concert with the hollowed-out corner for the microSD slot, give the Nook a visual flare and render it the grippier tablet. The Nook’s hardware volume controls and menu button also score it points. The Kindle Fire offers two speakers to the Nook’s one; but the difference is negligible, and only the Nook offers a built-in microphone.

Winner: Nook Tablet

Round 2: User Interface

Both tablets break a sweat obliterating the UI confines of the Android 2.3 OS they’re built on. The Kindle Fire’s bookshelf-themed homepage displays your favorite and most recently visited web pages, apps, documents, and more, with menu tabs labeled Books, Music, Video, Apps, Web, and so on. It’s a departure from the stock Android UI, but it’s more user friendly than the Nook Tablet’s storefront-feeling UI, which also insists on using “shelves” to display your various media, apps, and files.

The Nook Tablet, on the other hand, preserves more Android functionality, including customizable home screens that help you bypass its convoluted Library shelves. The Nook Tablet’s browser displays more web-page content per screen; and we like its hard menu button, which calls up a shortcut menu for apps, URLs, settings, and more.

Winner: Nook Tablet

Round 3: Storage

You might think that the Nook Tablet’s 16GB of onboard memory combined with its microSD slot means game over for the 8GB, nonexpandable Kindle Fire. But the Nook Tablet reserves most of its onboard memory for content purchased from Barnes & Noble, leaving you just 1GB for everything else. The playing field levels further when you take into account Amazon’s free cloud storage for all Amazon media purchases, plus the 5GB of free cloud storage the company provides for storing your files.

The Nook Tablet can accommodate a microSD card with up to 32GB of capacity, but no card of any capacity is included in the purchase price. What’s more, you must use a computer to transfer files from a memory card to its internal memory. Such lameness defies description, leaving this round a push.

Winner: Tie

Round 4: Performance

While both contestants enter the ring armed with 1GHz dual-core CPUs, the Nook Tablet packs 1GB RAM while the Fire has just 512MB. The Nook Tablet’s additional memory resulted in smoother screen refreshes while reading, web browsing, playing games, streaming video, and so on. Netflix video streams looked much better on the Nook Tablet, and it delivered slightly longer battery life: We streamed Netflix videos on it for more than six hours. B&N’s device delivered better touchscreen responsiveness, too; there were far too many times when we had to repeatedly tap the Fire’s screen before it would register.

Amazon’s much-hyped Silk browser put a hurt on the Nook Tablet’s browser in terms of the SunSpider and BrowserMark benchmarks, consistently outperforming the Nook by 25 to 40 percent. In real-world use, however, the Nook Tablet loaded websites as fast or faster than the Fire.

Winner: Nook Tablet

Round 5: Content Ecosystem

Barnes & Noble claims to stock “thousands” of apps in the Nook store. After browsing the entire site, we’d say “hundreds” is more like it. A vast number of popular Android apps are MIA here, and many apps that are free in other marketplaces must be purchased for the Nook Tablet. Unlike the Fire, the Nook Tablet will not sideload apps, either; it refuses to even recognize .apk files. Amazon’s app store, by comparison, is a Shangri-La of software choices. While it could be argued that the Kindle and Nook e-reader systems are roughly equal in both features and inventory, Amazon’s music and video marketplace is far more robust, and Amazon has the aforementioned cloud storage plus superior tools for synching your purchases to multiple devices. And for $79 per year, Amazon Prime serves up thousands of free movies and TV shows, Kindle book borrowing, and free two-day shipping for Amazon orders.

Winner: Tie

And the Winner Is…

The Nook Tablet was ahead on points going into the final round, but the Kindle Fire unleashed a flurry of value-added blows in the form of Amazon’s cloud storage, massive music and video library (available for sale or rent), and decent app store that knocked the Nook into sweet oblivion. Superior hardware empowers the Nook Tablet to beat the Kindle Fire in some areas (particularly video streaming), but Barnes & Noble’s device is just too limited to be a full-featured tablet. Our opinion might change once we can jailbreak it and install a custom ROM, but the Kindle Fire is the better tablet right out of the box.

Smartphone Sales Leap Ahead of PCs for First Time Ever

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:25:20 +0000

Nobody in their right mind would dump their desktop or notebook PC for a smartphone, but plenty of people are willing to own both as they seek to stay connected and check email on the fly. Underscoring this point is fact that smartphone sales in 2011 skipped ahead of PC sales, and by a pretty wide margin, according to data released by Canalys.

Canalys says vendors shipped 158.5 million smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2011, up 57 percent on the 101.2 million units shipped in the same quarter one year prior. Ending the year on a strong note bumped total global smartphone shipments for 2011 to 487.7 million units, up a whopping 63 percent over 2010.

By comparison, the global PC market grew 15 percent in 2011 to 414.6 million units, and that includes tablet sales, which jumped 274 percent. Tablets accounted for 15 percent of all PC sales in 2011, Canalys said.

"In 2011 we saw a fall in demand for netbooks, and slowing demand for notebooks and desktops as a direct result of rising interest in pads," said Chris Jones, Canalys VP and Principal Analyst. "But pads have had negligible impact on smartphone volumes and markets across the globe have seen persistent and substantial growth through 2011. Smartphone shipments overtaking those of client PCs should be seen as a significant milestone. In the space of a few years, smartphones have grown from being a niche product segment at the high-end of the mobile phone market to becoming a truly mass-market proposition. The greater availability of smartphones at lower price points has helped tremendously, but there has been a driving trend of increasing consumer appetite for Internet browsing, content consumption and engaging with apps and services on mobile devices."

Google's Android platform was by far the most popular in the smartphone segment in 2011, capturing 48.8 percent of the market with 237.8 million units shipped. Apple's iPhone came in a distant second with 93.1 million units shipped for a 19.1 percent share of the market, according to Canalys.

Seized Streaming Site Reappears with Harsh Words for U.S. Authorities

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:00:17 +0000

Well, that didn’t take long. One of the largest streaming sites taken down by U.S. authorities yesterday is already back up and running on a new domain, and boy are they upset. While the Department of Homeland Security ICE division was happy to accept a pat on the back for a job well done, one of the owners of Firstrow, a sports streaming site, says he will not give up until a court shuts the site down.

“The US has prided itself on their ‘innocent before proven guilty’ mantra, yet is clearly hypocritical when it comes to this,” said the unnamed co-owner of Firstrow. The site is back up on firstrowsports.eu after losing top level domains at .com and .tv. The anonymous owner went on to say he does not believe what Firstrow does is illegal as the site is not US-based. 

The European Union has been critical of U.S. domain seizures in the past, but that doesn’t seem to worry law enforcement very much. Yesterday’s domain raid was the largest yet, and mostly targeted sites selling counterfeit NFL merchandise. Do you think non-US sites should have to adhere to US copyright laws?

Micron CEO Steve Appleton Perishes in Plane Crash

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:03:18 +0000

Micron Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Steve Appleton, passed away this morning after a small plane he was piloting crashed at an airport in Boise, Idaho. Appleton, 51, joined Micron not long after his graduation in 1983. He started out on the factory floor and worked his way up to the top when, at age 34, he became the third youngest CEO in the Fortune 500.

"Steve's passion and energy left an indelible mark on Micron, the Idaho community and the technology industry at large," Micron said in a statement on its website.

According to an AP report, Appleton was also a professional stunt plane pilot and former motocross racer. On July 8, 2004, Appleton crashed a stunt plane and sustained several injuries, including a punctured lung and broken bones.

The accident that proved fatal involved a Lancair single-engine experimental propeller plane. Appleton was the only in the plane when it crashed.

It's fair to say Appleton worked hard and played hard, right up until his untimely death.

European Regulators Ask Google to Delay Privacy Policy Changes

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:16:38 +0000

While the uproar over Google’s updated privacy policy has lessened in the U.S., European officials are taking things a step further today. The European Commission has asked Google to delay implementing its new privacy policy so the matter can be fully investigated. The search giant has apparently been taken aback by the proposal.

The Commission is in the process of updating its rules on data protection, and that might account for the new-found interest in Google’s policy. According to Google’s Brussels spokesperson, Google briefed the Commission on the proposed change before it was even announced to the public. He went on toe say Google would be happy to talk things over with regulators if there are any new concerns, but he did not say Google would delay implementation of the new policy.

Google’s new privacy policy is essentially ‘one policy to rule them all.’ Over 60 individual privacy policies from various services are being rolled into one document that spells out what information Google can share internally between services. Do you think the European Commission is justified in asking for a delay?

Ubisoft DRM + Server Switch = Unplayable Games Next Week

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:00:17 +0000

DRM sucks. You know it, we know it, Gabe Newell and CD Projekt know it. Ubisoft apparently never got the memo however, and in the process of switching servers next week, the company will offer up yet another reason for DRM sucktitude. Thanks to that nasty always-on DRM, six games won't be playable whatsoever during the move -- single player included. Plenty of other games will have their multiplayer capabilities "impacted" during the transition, including console versions of the games.

According to a statement by Ubisoft (thanks to the always-useful Slashdot for sending us its way), the transition should start on Tuesday, February 7th; there's no word how long it will take. Single player and multiplayer will both be disabled for the following games:

• Assassin's Creed - MAC
• Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. 2 - PC
• Might & Magic : Heroes VI - PC
• Splinter Cell Conviction - MAC
• The Settlers 7: Paths to a Kingdom - PC
• The Settlers - MAC

Rather than try and list out all the games that will have their multiplayer nerfed, Ubisoft took the easy route and instead decided to list the small handful of games that won't be affected at all. The following will be fully playable at all times; any you don't see here (or above) will have their multiplayer "impacted."

• Anno 2070 - PC
• Assassin’s Creed Revelations - OnLive, PC, PS3, X360
• Driver® San Francisco - PC, OnLive, PS3, X360
• Just Dance 3 - X360
• The Settlers Online - PC web-based

Isn't DRM grand? I think you may be driving gamers into Pirate Bay's arms, Ubisoft.

Dropbox Offers Up To 5GB Of Additional Space To Beta Build Users

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:42:25 +0000

Dropbox has a lot of things going for it, but if you use the cloud storage service with any regularity, there's a good chance you'll bang up against the 2GB offered in the free version fairly quickly. (Assuming that you don't Gmail account chain trick outlined in our Dropbox Cheat Sheet, that is.) If you're chafing at your no-cost bonds, the service is giving you an opportunity to add up to another 5GB of space absolutely free -- if you're willing to be a guinea pig, that is.

Dropbox is still working out kinks in its as-yet-unreleased automatic photo and video upload support, you see. As this forum post outlines, if you download the experimental beta build (links found in aforementioned post), Dropbox will toss another 500MB of space your way the very first time you automatically upload a photo or video. After that, you'll get another 500MB of free storage space for every additional 500MB worth of photos/videos you upload. There's a 4.5GB cap on that, though, not counting the 500MB awarded for your original upload. Plenty of other tweaks and new features are also included in the build. (Thanks to Engadget for pointing the offer out.)

Dropbox also offers an Android version of the beta build, complete with all the same abilities and offers. It's not up in Android Market -- being a Beta build and all -- but you can nab the .apk file with this link that comes courtesy of Pocket Lint.

Motorola, Woot.com Sold Refurbished Xooms With Previous User Data Intact

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:20:54 +0000

Quick question: what's the one thing you should absolutely, positively do any time you trade in or return a piece of used tech? Answer: wipe the hard drive. If you already knew that, you might want to spread the word to your friends and neighbors, because Motorola forgot to wipe the info off of a bunch of used Xoom tablets it recently sold to enthusiastic Woot.com buyers. Oops!

"A bunch" is a relative statement, of course, as is the "around 100" number Motorola tosses out in its press release outlining the goof. Over 6,200 refurbished Wi-Fi tablets were sold by Woot.com during the affected period between October and December, so 100 isn't a terribly high percentage -- unless it's your info left on a Xoom hard drive, that is.

From Motorola's press release:

It is possible that users might have stored photographs and documents. They may have also stored user names and passwords for email and social media accounts, as well as other password-protected sites and applications.

To try and make things right, Motorola is offering anybody who bought, then returned a Xoom at Amazon Best Buy, BJ’s Wholesale, eBay, Office Max, Radio Shack, Sam’s Club, or Staples  a free two-year membership in Experian’s ProtectMyID Alert. The company is also trying to track down the affected units and ensure that data from previous users is wiped.

Ukraine Latest to Crackdown on Illegal File Sharing

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 14:08:15 +0000

This isn’t the best time to be in charge of a file-sharing site, with authorities around the world  — everywhere from the United States to Middle-earth (or New Zealand as it’s known more popularly) to Sweden — currently on a rampage against online file repositories brimming with unauthorized content. Ukrainian authorities are the latest to crackdown on online file sharing, having taken down popular file-sharing site Ex.ua a couple of days back. But that’s not where the story ends. You know the drill: hit the jump for more.

Usually, such takedowns quickly become a cause célèbre among hacktivists, who flock to avenge their demise. This particular case is no different. Following Ex.ua’s takedown by the Ukrainian authorities, enraged Internet users attacked government sites in retaliation. These people targeted the official sites of the country’s president and interior minister using the tried-and-tested distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) technique.

In a statement on Wednesday, the Ukrainian authorities said Ex.ua had been under investigation since July last year, apparently after a number of companies complained against the site. But Microsoft Ukraine, one of the companies named as a complainant in the matter by the Ukrainian interior ministry, is said to have denied being the “immediate initiator of the EX.UA inspection” as is being claimed.

The ministry claims to have seized 200 servers containing as much as 6,000 TB worth of files in a raid on the site’s office.