Month: April 2016

A surprisingly large number of developers are posting their Slack login credentials to GitHub and other public websites, a practice that in many cases allows anyone to surreptitiously eavesdrop on their conversations and download proprietary data exchanged over the chat service.

According to a blog post published Thursday, company researchers recently estimated that about 1,500 access tokens were publicly available, some belonging to people who worked for Fortune 500 companies, payment providers, Internet service providers, and health care providers. The researchers privately reported their findings to Slack, and the chat service said it regularly monitors public sites for posts that publish the sensitive tokens.

Still, a current search on GitHub returned more than 7,400 pages containing "xoxp." That's the prefix contained in tokens that in many cases allow automated scripts to access a Slack account, even when it's protected by two-factor authentication. A separate search uncovered more than 4,100 Slack tokens with the prefix "xoxb." Not all results contained the remainder of the token that's required for logging in, but many appeared to do just that. By including valid tokens in code that's made available to the world, developers make it possible for unscrupulous people to access the private conversations between the developers and the companies they work for and to download files and private Web links they exchange.

Enlarge / Our Alphabet org chart. Welcome the new hardware division. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Google is building a hardware division. That's according to a report from Re/code, which says that Google is forming a new division with former Motorola President Rick Osterloh at the helm.

Motorola was the old "Google hardware division" that Google decided it didn't want. Osterloh originally joined Google via the company's Motorola purchase in 2011 and was named CEO of Motorola after Dennis Woodside left. Google sold Motorola to Lenovo in 2014, and Osterloh left Motorola last month after some Lenovo "reorganization" at Motorola. Google has now snapped him up. Osterloh becomes a senior vice president at Google, which puts the hardware group on equal footing with Android, Ads, Search, and YouTube.

According to the report, the Google Hardware Division will absorb most of the hardware projects inside Google. There's the good stuff from the Chrome/Android division like Nexus devices, Chromecasts, and Chromebooks, along with Google and Alphabet's struggling hardware projects that haven't had much of a home—OnHub, ATAP (the Advanced Technology and Projects group), and Google Glass. OnHub was born in Alphabet's "Access" division that also houses Google Fiber. OnHub is a router that promises to someday become a smart home device, but so far it hasn't materialized. ATAP has yet to ship an actual piece of hardware and recently had its leader—former DARPA head Regina Dugan—leave for Facebook. Google Glass failed rather spectacularly in the public and later become a forgotten-about group under Tony Fadell's leadership, but not part of Nest. Re/code notes that there's also apparently a new "living room" group in the hardware division.

(credit: Getty Images | Martin Hospach)

The Federal Communications Commission today proposed new price regulations for so-called “business data services,” potentially bringing Comcast and other cable companies under a type of regulatory regime that already applied to phone companies such as AT&T and Verizon.

The price rules won’t extend to home Internet or the typical broadband service that companies buy to get their employees online. Instead, this form of data connectivity—also called “special access”—is sometimes thought of as the Internet equivalent of a barrel of oil.

Even if you don’t know what a barrel of oil costs, its price affects how much you pay for gas. Similarly, special access prices can affect what ordinary consumers pay for mobile broadband. Wireless carriers buy special access to supply bandwidth for their cellular data networks, so the prices charged can indirectly affect the monthly bills paid by smartphone users.

The low end of the Chromebook market is well-served, partly because Chromebooks do best in the cash-strapped education market and because the simplicity (and limitations) of ChromeOS are a better fit for budget hardware. For people who want something high-end, there’s always the $999 Chromebook Pixel, but that leaves a big space in between for people who want to make something that looks and feels nice but doesn’t cost a ton.

Certainly, there have been efforts. The Toshiba Chromebook 2 had a gorgeous 1080p IPS screen but a relatively weak Intel CPU. Dell’s Chromebook 13 is solidly mid-range, though the best features (including a 1080p screen, faster chips, and more RAM) are reserved for the higher-end models. And now there’s the HP Chromebook 13, which is merely a decent Chromebook at its $499 starting price but a full-on Chromebook Pixel competitor if you’re willing to pay more.

At $499, you get a 13.3-inch 1080p screen, a Skylake-based 1.5GHz Pentium 4405Y (which despite its name is a relative to the low-power Core M), 4GB of 1866MHz DDR3 RAM, and a 1080p screen, which isn’t bad for the price. A Core M-derived Pentium is still going to deliver stronger performance (particularly in the single-threaded CPU and the graphics departments) than the Atom-derived Celerons and Pentiums that ship in many low-end Chromebooks.

A remake of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is apparently in the works after the official Call of Duty Twitter account replied to a 16-month-old tweet with two emoji: pile of poo and jeans.

@ngusvanderslott

— Call of Duty (@CallofDuty) April 27, 2016

In December 2014, Angus Varderslott announced that he would "literally shit [his] pants" with excitement if he ever learned of a Call of Duty 4 remaster. Call of Duty 4 was a landmark title. It was the first Call of Duty game set in the present day, after a series of World War II-themed titles, and it set the standard for "cinematic" first-person shooters. While these days the series is derided as being rather formulaic and linear, the first Modern Warfare title held genuine surprises, with an extraordinarily tense sniper mission in the ruins of Pripyat (the Ukrainian city abandoned after the Chernobyl disaster) and the death of one of the player characters in the aftermath of a nuclear strike.

The tweet reply suggests that Varderslott had better take a trip to the laundry.

Forza 6 Apex's weather effects weren't shown in motion beyond a mere trailer tease, so we're curious whether rain detail will impact 4K performance. (credit: Microsoft/Turn 10)

After its late-February tease, Microsoft Studios and Turn 10 are finally ready to unleash the Forza Motorsport racing series on PCs—and as we reported at the game's reveal event, it's coming in an unusual way. Forza Motorsport 6 Apex will launch exclusively on Windows 10 PCs on Thursday, May 5, in the form of a free "open beta" downloadable from the Windows Store. Based on our early Apex impressions, PC players are essentially getting a limited trial version of last year's Xbox One racer as opposed to a particularly new experience.

Having seen Forza 6 Apex in the flesh, we know the game will be a huge conversation starter for PC gamers for many reasons. For one, if high-end PC owners can replicate the 4K-resolution, 60-frames-per-second performance that we saw on Turn 10's monstrous test rig, they'll be in for the most incredible public demo of DirectX 12 technology yet released. Forza 6 Apex's real-time demo looked incredible, as that silky-smooth refresh rate faced zero stutters while rendering giant textures and gorgeous lighting effects.

Nighttime racing in 4K.

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On the other hand, it remains to be seen exactly how well Apex will scale on weaker PCs; Turn 10 currently recommends at least a 3.7Ghz i3 processor and 2GB of VRAM. Also, since the game is tied to the beleaguered Universal Windows Platform (UWP), users may once more face issues like the inability to disable v-sync and a forced borderless, full-screen mode.