Month: April 2016

If your Windows computer is running Apple's QuickTime media player, now would be a good time to uninstall it.

The Windows app hasn't received an update since January, and security researchers from Trend Micro said it won't receive any security fixes in the future. In a blog post published Thursday, the researchers went on to say they know of at least two reliable QuickTime vulnerabilities that threaten Windows users who still have the program installed.

"We’re not aware of any active attacks against these vulnerabilities currently," they wrote. "But the only way to protect your Windows systems from potential attacks against these or other vulnerabilities in Apple QuickTime now is to uninstall it."

Google addresses found in short URLs associated with a single user in Austin, Texas, courtesy of Google's old 5-character short URL tokens. (credit: Vitaly Shmatikov)

Two security researchers have published research exposing the potential privacy problems connected to using Web address shortening services. When used to share data protected by credentials included in the Web address associated with the content, these services could allow an attacker to gain access to data simply by searching through the entire address space for a URL-shortening service in search of content, because of how predictable and short those addresses are.

Both Microsoft and Google have offered URL shortening services embedded in various cloud services. Microsoft included the 1drv.ms URL shortening service in its OneDrive cloud storage service and a similar service (binged.it) for Bing Maps—"branded" domains of the bit.ly domain shortening service; Microsoft has stopped offering the OneDrive embedded shortener, but existing URLs are still accessible. Google Maps has an embedded a tool that creates URLs with the goo.gl domain.

Vitaly Shmatikov of Cornell Tech and visiting researcher Martin Georgiev conducted an 18-month study in which they focused on OneDrive and Google Maps. "We did not perform a comprehensive scan of all short URLs (as our analysis shows, such a scan would have been within the capabilities of a more powerful adversary)," Shmatikov wrote in a blog post today, "but we sampled enough to discover interesting information and draw important conclusions." One of those conclusions was that Microsoft's OneDrive shortened URLs were entirely too easy to traverse.

(credit: George Mason University)

Magnetic media, in the form of tapes and disks, have had a long run as the primary means of digital storage. In this hardware, clusters of magnetic atoms are set in a single magnetic orientation, which can be read back to determine whether a bit has a value of one or zero. Advances in capacity mostly come from figuring out how to make those clusters smaller. The ultimate limit, of course, would be a single atom, but here, quantum fluctuations will keep the bit from being stored stably. Single atom magnets have been created, but they have ended up holding a random value within a fraction of a second.

Now, a team of Swiss researchers has identified the two quantum effects that cause most of the problems for these single atom magnets and figured out how to limit them. The result is a device where individual atoms can hold onto their orientation for dozens of minutes. The big downside? It needs to be kept near absolute zero to work.

Magnetism in a bulk material, like a bar magnet, arises from the behavior of individual atoms within the material—more specifically, the behavior of some of the electrons orbiting those atoms. Although it would be possible for individual atoms to flip their orientation, the magnetic field created by all the neighboring atoms makes doing so very improbable. As a result, groups of atoms tend to maintain their orientation indefinitely, allowing us to stably write bits to them.

(credit: Apple)

iOS, watchOS, tvOS, OS X. One of these things is not like the others, but it may not be that way for long. Today Apple launched a landing page detailing some of its environmental initiatives—an interesting read in its own right that builds upon some of what the company talked up at the iPhone SE event last month—and attentive readers will note that the page refers to the Mac's operating system not as OS X, but as "MacOS." This, along with a reference to "MacOS" buried in OS X 10.11.4 that was noticed by the Brazilian site MacMagazine a couple of weeks back, suggests that Apple is planning a change to its Mac operating system's branding for the first time in quite a while.

Apple's Mac operating system has gone through twelve major revisions and countless minor updates since the first OS X developer betas came to light in 1999, but for the better part of two decades the operating system has always been called "Mac OS X" or just "OS X." This may be Apple's opportunity to ditch that "ten" branding, modernizing it and bringing it in line with the rest of Apple's software platforms without necessarily declaring any particular update worthy of bumping the version number up to eleven.

Of course, nothing is certain until we get our first look at Apple's new operating systems at WWDC in June. But a branding change would make sense, especially if Apple took some time out of its opening day presentation to shine a light on the kind-of-neglected-looking Mac lineup (Macs and OS X were barely mentioned at all at the event in March or the iPhone 6S event last September).