I was there. Stop laughing.
Like some new-found lover, the touch screen friendly Glider Gloves promise to keep you warm without cramping your style. Will they be true to their word and become a long-term keeper, or is this just another weekend tryst roused by empty promises? Get the intimate details in our full review.
It’s not the only game in town – not by a long shot – but many had high hopes that storage locker MEGA would deliver where competitors like Dropbox and Skydrive fall short: elbow room.
Apparently, Dotcom planted all his seed money in the lawyers’ garden, and forgot to retain a few competent techs during the whole “architecture” phase of this project.
If MEGA’s HTML-5 frontend is the handsome, youthful face of the company, then the servers and security code are surely the true picture of Dorian Gray.
“It’s a nice website, but when it comes to cryptography they seem to have no experience […] Quite frankly it felt like I had coded this in 2011 while drunk.” – Nadim Kobeissi, creator of Crytocat.
Security researchers have discovered multiple, fundamental flaws with Dotcom’s distributed paradigm:
“If you were hosting one of Mega’s CDN [content delivery network] nodes (or you were a government official of the CDN hoster’s jurisdiction), you could now take over Mega and steal users’ encryption keys,” (source)
And just for the hat trick, Steve Thomas has discovered how to decipher the confirmation email sent by MEGA, allowing you to unlock any data stored by the email recipient on the servers. Email is of course comparatively easy to intercept as plain text, so this should be a very present concern for users.
All of these security holes, coupled with near-to-useless responsiveness for the entire post-launch week, and Dotcom is off to a very shaky start indeed.
Still, our hopes are high that all the concerns can be addressed quickly, and if so, MEGA may yet emerge as a real online storage contender (provided they get on the cross-platform horse in a big hurry). But let this be a lesson: If you’re going to launch a tech company, it’s probably unwise to skimp on the tech.
With its growth phase grinding to a halt, investors are ditching Apple’s former orchard for greener pastures. Unfortunately for Tim Cook, this means he is no longer perched atop the world’s most valuable company. Apple’s market cap lead over runner-up Exxon has been steadily eroding since the dizzying highs of September 2012. Now the also-ran oil megacorp is snubbing its nose at Cook &Co., taunting the familiar old schoolyard chant, “Slow and steady wins the race!“.
It would be silly to suggest Apple is in its death throws. They’re still hammering shut the crates on the company’s best quarter ever. Yet the parallels to Microsoft during its meteoric rise in the late 90’s before leveling off are all too apparent. This is what happens when bean-counters usurp the visionaries in growing companies.
Unless Apple can find a way to bring something new and exciting to market again, they’re doomed to repeat history as so many companies have before them (GM, IBM, Blackberry – we’re looking at you). Releasing catch-up products like like the iPhone 5 and iPad Mini is a consequence of the company slipping into a reactive development phase, willing to fall in line rather than stand at the head of it.
So without a new game-changer to tip the market on it’s ear, poor old Apple will have to settle for being a gigantic, successful and extremely profitable company for at least the next decade. Not bad for second place.
Part 1 of the (lengthy) rip and encode guide for optical media is now online. You’ll find it linked at the top of the page under “Guides”.
Part 1 covers decryption and ripping to a lossless MKV format. Parts 2 and 3 (still to come) will cover re-encoding and setting up a home media server. Stay tuned for more!
MEGA’s current end-user experience.
24 hours into what’s turning out to be one of the biggest startup launches in history, Kim Dotcom’s MEGA site is struggling under an unprecedented load.
Now topping 1 million registered souls, the soup-to-nuts encrypted storage cloud is still incapable of providing service to most of its users.
MEGA’s primary host, Cogent’s German operation, is scaling services to try and keep up with demand, but most visitors are stuck staring at the puffy, insubstantial cumulus loading gif.
If you’re lucky enough to make it this far, you’ll find the interface to be simple but functional, and very polished for a launch product.
Given Dotcom’s history with the film industry’s hired goons, it remains to be seen if his new service will face any real legal challenges. Billed as a direct, secure competitor to the likes of Dropbox, iCloud and SkyDrive, MEGA is lawyered-up and swears it’s walking the straight and narrow.
Will Kim Dotcom dodge the legal bullets and prove himself a true rainmaker?
Get the story: ArsTechnica (excellent coverage), ZDNet, Bloomberg
SSH windows via PuTTY running on the author’s MS Surface. A tear was shed by tech admins around the globe.
The Royal Smart People over at XDA have handed the world a little slice of freedom via their new Jailbreak for Windows RT.
Clorkr’s original exploit made waves earlier this month, but it wasn’t until XDA user netham45 packaged the whole thing up (about a week ago) into a tidy .bat file that the vulnerability truly brought power to the people. As of today, the refined version 1.1 works with the most recent updates to RT and will jailbreak almost any Windows RT device in a minute or less.
This isn’t your Mom’s (read: iPhone) jailbreak. Don’t expect to install Hackulous and grab all your favourite games for free. In fact, this jailbreak doesn’t allow copying Microsoft’s App Store programs at all – that’s not the intention, and hopefully never is.
So what does it do? Well, dear reader, it permits the desktop-mode interface to run anything compiled for Windows ARM (not x86, but read on). Some very kind gear-heads have re-compiled several applications so far that will run natively, and the list is growing daily. Among the high-profile programs ported so far:
Also, notably, the Bochs x86 emulator has been ported over, which opens the door to a whole new horizon of apps on the ARM-based RT platform. Some crafty masochists are already running Win98SE in emulated mode to enjoy the games of yesteryore.
Other notable but unfinished ports rumored to be in the works include Firefox, Thunderbird, Apache and of course the Linux kernel. Provided Microsoft doesn’t call in the Gestapo FBI to somehow take all this down, there is a very bright future for the RT homebrew community.
UPDATE: Audicity has been ported over. This could be a game changer for a few important reasons (upcoming article).
UPDATE2: VirtuaWin ported as well. Great productivity tool, especially for smaller screens.
Visit the XDA forum here to find out more and download the jailbreak script.