Exposed: YouPorn passwords in all their plain-text glory

February 22, 2012 By

As one of the top 100 websites in the world, the free porn video website, YouPorn, has a lot of subscribers. And as of late Tuesday night, at least 6,400 of those subscriber's passwords were exposed in a data dump on Pastebin that paired email addresses with plain text passwords. The list of YouPorn logins is thought to have been captured from a public-facing server, leaving YouPorn a bigger share of the blame for permitting lazy security.

Naturally, this creates a problem for thousands of people who may want to keep their enthusiasm for erotica secret, and having an e-mail address connected with the site is certainly a breach of privacy on a grand scale. Even if those affected don't care who knows they frequent X-rated sites, there's still the danger that someone will use the plain-text password to access other accounts with more important information in them, as people tend to use the same passwords to login to multiple different Websites.

It appears that the dump is the work of an unknown hacker. While YouPorn appears to have shut down the breached server, the damage is largely done. Portions of the list have been published around the Internet, and analysis of the list is taking all kinds of permutations. OZ Dump Centa divvied up the e-mail addresses by provider (the largest portion of YouPorn accounts were linked to Hotmail addresses, followed by Gmail). Technology researcher Ashkan Soltani made a word cloud of the most popular stolen passwords. While YouPorn has not made a public statement about the breach, the data-leak is a reminder that passwords should never be repeated across logins for different sites.

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Adobe lays out the future for Flash: a platform for the next 5-10 years

February 22, 2012 By

Adobe has published its roadmap for its Flash browser plugin and its AIR desktop application counterpart. More releases, more features, and more performance, are all planned, but on fewer platforms: Adobe is giving up entirely on supporting smartphone browsers, sticking to the core desktop platforms for its plugin—and with a big question mark when it comes to Windows 8.

The company sees Flash as having two main markets that will resist the onslaught of HTML5: game development, and premium (read: encrypted) video. To that end, the features it has planned for future updates focus on making Flash faster, with greater hardware acceleration and improved script performance, and more application-like, with keyboard input in full-screen applications, and support for middle- and right-mouse buttons.

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San Francisco Launches The 2012 Innovation Portfolio, From Open Taxi Data To Beta Tests In City Hall

February 22, 2012 By
San-Francisco-1

San Francisco may not have intended to be become the startup mecca that it is today, but now the city government is working hard to make itself as friendly as possible to tech entrepreneurs. Makes sense, considering that there are 1,539 tech companies and 30,000 tech jobs in the city now — a number that’s been growing fast as older industries like high finance continue to suffer through the recession.

What that means is this. Mayor Ed Lee, who came to power last year with heavy support from the local tech scene, is announcing a new initiative today at the TechFellow awards ceremony, that has some intriguing ideas for making the city itself more relevant to the booming industry within it.

Broadly, the so-called 2012 Innovation Portfolio is trying to do everything from helping founders making it easier to complete the paperwork for creating a company, to giving developers new access to city data, to introducing new ways for citizens to share their opinions with the city, to actually testing out tech products at City Hall itself. A number of other cities in the US and around the world have been working on similar initiatives, so as a resident I can personally say that I’m happy to see this happening.

Especially because the city’s awful taxi system is getting opened up to innovation.

Here’s a closer look at key pieces of the portfolio, based on documents provided to me from the city — plus my own editorializing.

Business One-Stop: Having been through the awful state and federal paperwork for founding a company myself, this one sounds very helpful. The city will launch an online service that allows businesses to “answer simple step-by-step questions and be presented with a clear roadmap of the required steps and forms to complete” founding paperwork online. It’s not clear if this is only for companies that make California their federal home — that might be an issue for tech companies, which normally federally incorporate in Delaware due to its business-friendly bureaucracy. The city is aiming for at least one section of the new site to be online by the end of this year.

ImproveSF: Slated for this spring, the site will let any citizen provide answers to major civic problems — budget savings (which the city has struggled to make happen), and revitalization plans for the middle part of Market Street are two examples.

Open Taxi Access: “In our City, 50% of taxis sit empty, many concentrate downtown and at SFO, and central dispatch doesn’t work, so we want to work with you in solving this problem,” the city states frankly in its presentation on the initiative. Exactly. In fact, this type of problem has helped Uber’s town car service become a hit with residents. To kick this effort off, the city is planning an event for February 24 and 25 “to help the City redefine taxi access and help us define next steps.” Look for TechCrunch to be all over this project.

Hackathons 2.0: Similar to the taxi initiative, the idea here is to bring “hackathon” developer events put on by tech organizations to specific city issues. It promises “user-centered” hackathons for civic topics like veterans services, payments, and transportation. Events are already planned with the California College of Art, Black Founders, Mozilla and GAFFTA.

Open Data: In addition to taxis and the hackathons, the city is more generally trying to make all sorts of other data available to developers — it says it already has 60 apps built on its data, according to its presentation. The broader data plan includes working for legislation that will make information more easily available to the public, and providing more than 200 of its own data sets online. “As part of this effort, the City is moving to a cloud-based data sharing service for launch in March” — I’m not sure what that means, but I guess a central online repository for the data sets? I’ll update if I find out more.

SmartPDFs: In parallel with the open data efforts listed above, the city also wants to make paperwork easier for all of its citizens. This means moving paper-based processes online so you don’t need to print and fax and mail everything. The pilot launch has started and look for deployment across city agencies over the year.

Separately, the city says it’s beginning to test out new technology at City Hall — including Yammer, and Cozybit and 802.11s mesh networking.

You can find more details on the city’s “Innovation” site, here. Partners include sf.citi (which we covered more here), along with Code For America, CCOL, the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development, and SPUR.

[San Francisco cityscape photo via Mr. Thorngren's social studies blog.]



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Feature: Mastered for iTunes: how audio engineers tweak music for the iPod age

February 22, 2012 By

In an age when Apple has become the top music retailer without selling a single physical disc, audio engineers are increasingly creating specially mastered versions of songs and albums designed to counteract the audio degradation caused by compression. Though audiophiles typically scoff at paying for compressed audio, preferring vinyl or high-end digital formats such as DVD-A, mastering engineers are doing their best to create digital masters that can pass through Apple's iTunes algorithms with minimal sonic corruption.

To highlight work done to improve the sound of compressed music files, Apple recently launched a "Mastered for iTunes" section on the iTunes Store. It now also provides a set of recommendations for engineers to follow when preparing master files for submission to the iTunes Store. To qualify for the "Mastered for iTunes" label, Apple says that files should be submitted in the highest resolution format possible, and remastered content should sound significantly better than the original.

How does this work? Ars spoke with Masterdisk Chief Engineer Andy VanDette, who recently completed a project remastering the bulk of Rush's back catalogue. As part of the process, VanDette created special versions of each song specifically for uploading to the iTunes Store. He described the often lengthy, trial-and-error process of trying to make iTunes tracks sound as close as possible to polished CD remasters.

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OnLive Adds “Cloud-Accelerated Browsing” To Its Streaming-Desktop Stable

February 22, 2012 By
yodawg

You’re probably familiar with OnLive, the company that made its mark by streaming brand new console and PC games to whatever devices could support a high-bandwidth video stream. Many doubted its technology to begin with (including yours truly – Is OnLive OnCrack?) but they’ve more or less delivered on their promises, and have also been expanding the services they offer. Most recently they introduced OnLive Desktop, which streamed a Windows 7 desktop to your iPad.

That was mainly focused on productivity – Office apps and such. Now they’ve added web browsing to the table. Yes, they will stream live video of a web browser running in a datacenter to your device, which almost certainly already has a web browser.

If that sounds crazy, it’s probably because it kind of is. But maybe it’s crazy like a fox. Their accelerated browser is a full-on desktop browser running on a gigabit connection. It can load files and display them to you in the video stream faster than you can load them on your own device. And of course it has Flash. It’s certainly more capable than, say, Safari on iPad, but is it really better?

The problem is that the average consumption experience doesn’t really benefit from being streamed. Flash is rarely critical to use from a tablet (though it can be nice), and big attachments are often virtualized already – big PDFs and video files can be viewed or streamed online without a tedious download process. The few cases where a window into a high-speed but generic browser is better than the built-in one are probably overshadowed by the inevitable downsides of interacting with a virtual, video desktop: lag and occasional poor image quality.

You’ll have to shell out to give it a try; the iOS app is free and you can access productivity tools (if they have the spare bandwidth for you), but for the browser and desktop you’ll need to drop $5 per month. Soon you’ll also be able to pay $10 per month for extra space and custom desktop apps. It’s the beginning of something cool, but at the moment it seems a hard sell.



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Backpack Hangers, Coin Flips, and Slow YouTube [From The Tips Box]

February 22, 2012 By
Readers offer their best tips for keeping your backpack from messing up your floor, making decisions when you don't have a coin, and speeding up YouTube on the iPhone. More »


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Browser Shootout Shows Minor Variations In Performance – It’s Still A Matter Of Taste

February 22, 2012 By
pushing-the-finish-line

The browser wars are in a tense state of suspension right now. The once-obvious advantages of one and disadvantages of another can’t be counted on as much as they could a year ago, and fast-changing standards and interaction methods have produced a sort of uneasy détente while everyone awaits the browser equivalent of the Manhattan Project to catapult them into the atomic age.

Tom’s Hardware just did a nice, thorough examination of the available browsers on Windows 7 and Ubuntu, and the findings are really mixed. It used to be that Firefox always won, and we could all make fun of IE. Then Chrome came and won all the speed benchmarks. And then there was Opera. Now it’s a mess. How do you pick the browser that’s best for you? Easy: you flip a coin.

The benchmarks are what you’d expect: standards compliance, HTML5 stuff, Javascript speed, hardware acceleration. It’s such a mixed bag of victories and losses by various parties that you can barely draw any conclusions. In the end, the winner (Firefox) is far from decisive, and is often “weak” in things at which the runner-up, Chrome, excels. And vice versa. Meanwhile Opera takes a few wins home, IE is the best at memory management (but little else), and Safari cleans up in page load times (but little else).

So why do I say you can flip a coin? Because first of all, don’t use Safari. It’s just not good enough, and unless you are compelled to use it for some purpose, it has no advantage over the rest and plenty of disadvantages. And don’t use IE (except for testing), because it still has trouble rendering properly, despite some interesting features. You can use Opera, but if you are, you’ve already made that decision and aren’t likely to go back on it any time soon. But for “regular” users who want to use popular plugins, ensure compliance with various webpages and apps that may or may not be built properly, and be sure of a very regular update schedule, Firefox and Chrome are really your only options.

And which should you choose? If you really don’t know, flip a coin. If you try to argue against it when it lands on Firefox, install Chrome. If you don’t like it, install Firefox. Or use both. The fact is right now, for the average user, it doesn’t matter much, and both browsers are great. I use Firefox for reasons that are trivial, yet nonetheless more important than performance or under the hood differences. But I wouldn’t recommend it over Chrome for anyone but myself.

Don’t get me wrong: there are differences between the browsers, and the results are worth going through if the browser is a mission-critical item for your work or you are seriously worried about a certain type of performance. Of course, in a couple months, all these positions might be reversed. So you’ll have to take that coin out again.



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Iron-based superconductors respond well to pressure

February 22, 2012 By

Superconductivity—the ability of certain materials to conduct electricity with no resistance—continues to be one of the most challenging fields in materials science. On the one hand, the effect appears reliably in a number of materials, although only at very low temperatures. Those temperatures went up with the discovery of copper-based (cuprate) superconductors in 1986. In the last four years, iron-based superconductors have been developed and seen the maximum temperature of their superconducting transition pushed higher, although it's still cold compared to both the cuprates and room temperature. But the exact way in which these superconductors perform their tricks is still unclear.

One form of iron-based superconductors, the chalcogenides, are very unusual, since they are strongly magnetic—in other superconductors strong magnetism destroys the effect. ("Chalcogenide" is pronounced with a hard "ch" as in "chemistry", and refers to the presence of the chalcogenide element selenium.) Now, a new report in Nature indicates that they have another unusual property: high pressures, which normally kill superconductivity, can cause them to undergo a phase transition that not only restores the behavior, but raises the critical temperature.

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Google’s Official Chat Extension Frees Chat from Your Browser Tabs, Lets You Start IMs and Hangouts from Anywhere [Instant Messaging]

February 22, 2012 By
Chrome: Google's chat feature is useful for sending quick IMs and starting video chat sessions, but you can only view it when you're on a Google page like Gmail. Google has released an official Chrome extension that detaches it from your browser, allowing you to view it no matter what web page you're viewing. More »


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As Journalists And Video Bloggers Are Killed, SyriaPioneer Lives On

February 22, 2012 By
Rami

It goes without saying that the death of veteran Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin and the French photographer Remi Ochlik – after an artillery shell hit their makeshift press centre in the Syrian city of Homs – is tragic. It’s also testament to the lengths to which journalists often go to get the story. But equally, the use of new technology by ‘citizen journalists’ has been equally significant in documenting the deadly acts of the Syrian government against its own people.

Among those killed in yesterday’s attack on the journalists’ position were three activists. One of those was video blogger Rami Ahmad al-Sayed, who was also known as “Syria Pioneer“. Ahmad al-Sayed had uploaded over 200 videos to various platforms of the killing and destruction in his area. We wrote about him and his video only this week when the Syrian government blocked Bambuser, the live video platform he was using.

Colvin was a decorated foreign correspondent. Ochlik had won a World Press Photo award. Obviously al-Sayed / Syria Pioneer had not had the chance to win such accolades. But his live broadcasts, using the startup video platform Bambuser did their part in showing the world what was going on in Syria.

His footage of the bombing of Homs was aired all over the world by BBC World, SkyNews, Al Jazeera and many more. Live video from the roof where Rami and his friends positioned their camera was broadcast all over the world. A collection of some of that output is contained in a tribute at Storyful. Be warned, much of it is harrowing to watch.

We know from Bambuser that Rami was accompanying three people to a civil hospital when he died. The car was believed to have been the target of mortar fire. While the others died instantaneously, Rami was badly injured but died from his wounds later in the hospital.

Born in 1985, father of a little girl aged a year and a half called Marym (pictured), his last message for his friends was sent to Bambuser:

“Babaamr is facing a genocide right now. I will never forgive you for your silence. You have all just given us your words but we need actions. However, our hearts will always be with those who risk their life for our freedom. I know what we need! We need campaigns everywhere inside Syria and outside Syria, and now we need all people in front of all embassies all over the world. In a few hours there will be NO place called BabaAmr and I expect this will be my last message and no one will forgive you who talked but didn’t act.”

But although a family has lost a husband and father, Syria Pioneer lives on, bringing live footage from inside Homs: because Rami’s friends and colleagues have resumed using the account.

Rami’s pioneering work, using the platforms of the new technology world, will not have been in vain.

You can get Syria Pioneer’s live channel on Bambuser right here.



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