March 2016 – Page 120 – news.buyenne.com

E-mail inventor Ray Tomlinson, who popularized @ symbol, dies at 74

“I am frequently asked why I chose the at sign, but the at sign just makes sense.”

If you’ve ever sent an e-mail, you can thank Raymond Samuel Tomlinson for putting the @ symbol there.

On Friday, Tomlinson died of suspected heart failure. He was 74.

Tomlinson was born in Amsterdam, New York in 1941, and he earned a master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1967, he joined Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), a company that played a key role in the development of the ARPANET, a precursor to the modern Internet.

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S@d News: E-Mail-Pionier Ray Tomlinson gestorben

Der Programmier Ray Tomlinson ist im Alter von 74 Jahren gestorben. Er nutzte erstmals das @-Zeichen für Netzwerkadressen und gilt als Erfinder der E-Mail-Kommunikation. (E-Mail, Spam)

Apple is Running BitTorrent Trackers in Cupertino

Apple is not known for being friendly towards BitTorrent software in its App Store but it appears the technology giant isn’t averse to using the technology itself. In fact, according to data provided by “Internet of things” search engine Shodan, Apple is running BitTorrent trackers from dozens of IP addresses in Cupertino.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Although not absolutely essential for making BitTorrent work these days, torrent trackers are always handy things to have. A bit like a policeman directing traffic, they ensure that BitTorrent clients can find each other quickly in order to share content.

Torrent indexes such as The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents (that don’t have a tracker) make the headlines regularly but it’s relatively rare for standalone BitTorrent trackers to make the news. They’re generally considered a bit of a techie phenomenon and to the casual torrent user they’re a silent benefit.

Nevertheless, trackers are interesting. For example, private torrent communities such as What.cd would have a big problem existing without one, since relying on magnet links would open the site’s torrents up to the public and destroy their privacy. In this scenario, trackers are great tools for putting What.cd’s users in touch with each other, relatively securely.

But while trackers are most closely associated with torrent sites, other organizations use them too. Indeed, after doing some digging around on “Internet of Things” search engine Shodan this week we were surprised to discover Apple running tracker services on around three dozen IP addresses located at its headquarters in Cupertino.

On the most common tracker port 6969, active trackers can be found on several IP addresses allocated to Apple including 17.17.17.102, 17.17.17.108, 17.17.17.30, 17.17.17.59, 17.17.17.8, 17.17.17.15, 17.17.17.133, 17.17.17.110, 17.17.17.138, 17.17.17.248, 17.17.17.56 and 17.17.17.248.

Trackers services can also be found running on (HTTP) port 80 on IP addresses including 17.17.17.220, 17.17.17.41, 17.17.17.44, 17.17.17.170, 17.17.17.58, 17.17.17.21, 17.17.17.104, 17.17.17.102, 17.17.17.133, 17.17.17.59, 17.17.17.108, 17.17.17.27, 17.17.17.5, 17.17.17.15, 17.17.17.24, 17.17.17.243, 17.17.17.68 and 17.17.17.41.

According to Shodan, IP address 17.17.17.102 reports trackers running on port 6969 and port 80.

TorrentFreak contacted Apple to learn more about the purpose of these trackers but at the time of publication we hadn’t received a response. However, we did manage to reach Shodan CEO John Matherly who told us that his company carries out several checks beyond a port being open to ensure its results are accurate.

“To determine whether a computer is running a BitTorrent tracker Shodan sends a connection request with a transaction ID of 0x34925,” Matherly told TF.

“If the host responds to the connection request with a valid BitTorrent tracker response (i.e. with an action, transaction id and connection id) AND the transaction ID matches what the Shodan crawler originally sent (0x34925) then it is considered a BitTorrent tracker.”

The Shodan CEO couldn’t shine any additional light on Apple’s need for BitTorrent trackers but he joined us in the theory that the company probably uses them for internal distribution, possibly like Twitter and Facebook do already.

In 2010, Twitter announced that BitTorrent made server deployment 75 times faster than before.

“Using the file-sharing protocol, we launched a side-project called Murder and after a few days (and especially nights) of nervous full-site tinkering, it turned a 40 minute deploy process into one that lasted just 12 seconds,” an engineer reported at the time.

Facebook also uses BitTorrent to quickly shift large quantities of data and back in 2010 the company raved over its benefits.

“BitTorrent is fantastic for this, it’s really great,” the company said. “It’s ‘superduper’ fast and it allows us to alleviate a lot of scaling concerns we’ve had in the past, where it took forever to get code to the webservers before you could even boot it up and run it.”

A TF source who prefers to remain anonymous says that after running the Apple IP addresses against an eight million torrent database, none of them produced a match, something which boosts the ‘internal use’ theory. That said, in an ideal world internal processes shouldn’t really be exposed to the public, so it remains unclear why Shodan is reporting public facing BitTorrent trackers at Cupertino.

Finally, it’s interesting to take the existence of these trackers and place that alongside Apple’s aggressive stance towards the millions of customers who would also like to use torrent software on Apple devices. On several occasions the company has removed torrent applications from its App Store yet the company seems happy to benefit from the technology itself.

If Apple responds to our request for comment, we’ll be sure to update this article.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Razer Blade Stealth review: What happens when gamers make a regular laptop?

Without a GPU, it’s just a competent Ultrabook with mediocre battery life.

Andrew Cunningham

The Razer Blade Stealth, Razer's first computer that isn't exclusively targeted at gamers.

9 more images in gallery

Razer launched its very first laptop, the astronomically expensive 17-inch Razer Blade, almost five years ago. Since then, the company's lineup has grown. It launched a smaller version of the Blade a couple years later, followed by a tablet experiment and some desktops designed and sold in partnership with Lenovo.

Up until now, all of those PCs focused on gaming. You could use them all for general productivity tasks, but if you didn’t plan to play games there were other, better, cheaper options readily available. The Razer Blade Stealth, on the other hand, is positioned to compete directly with regular Ultrabooks from Dell, HP, and other more pedestrian PC makers. Razer still had gaming in mind when it designed the Blade Stealth—a separate Thunderbolt dock can house a dedicated desktop GPU that you connect to the laptop with a Thunderbolt cable—but that accessory is optional and isn’t due out for another month or two.

In fact, the company asked that we evaluate the Blade Stealth primarily as an Ultrabook and not as a gaming laptop, partly because it’s targeting a wider market and partly because its integrated GPU won’t stand up to laptops with dedicated graphics chips. As a laptop for a more general audience, the Blade Stealth has its good points, but the comparison to heavy hitters like Dell’s XPS 13 isn’t always flattering.

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No longer virtual: First impressions—and many hours—with HTC’s Vive Pre

Near-final room-scale VR finally steps out of showrooms and into a cluttered office.

The HTC Vive Pre comes with everything seen here. Some assembly required. Your parents help you put it together. From HTC! (credit: Kyle Orland)

For about a year now, we've been absolutely wowed by short, controlled demos of the virtual reality tech in the SteamVR-powered HTC Vive. But enjoying a slick demo in a curated show floor booth is one thing. Having a Vive in your house to play with at your leisure is another.

Ahead of its upcoming consumer launch, Valve has sent us loaner units of its near-final HTC Vive Pre to test in the Ars Orbiting HQ. I've spent a large portion of the past few days immersed in Valve's room-scale vision of virtual reality, whiling away hours blind to the real world around me and trying not to kill myself walking around my office (which has never been cleaner, to make sure there are no tripping hazards about).

We'll have fuller reviews of the hardware and the most interesting VR experiences as we get closer to the Vive's early April 9 release. For now, here are some scattered impressions of what it's like having room-scale virtual reality in your very own room.

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16-year-old who distributed his teacher’s nude pics faces felony charges

“When you’re 16, just being sorry… is not enough anymore.”

(credit: WSPA)

A South Carolina high school teacher resigned from her job last week, after being told she would face disciplinary proceedings because a student grabbed racy pictures off her phone.

Now local news outlets are reporting that the 16-year-old boy who distributed her pictures will face felony charges. The teen has been charged with violating the state's Computer Crimes Act and "aggravated voyeurism," Union Police Chief Sam White told TV station WSPA. The student's phone contained other sexual pictures as well, White added.

Last month, the student opened Arthur's unlocked phone, found partially-nude pictures of her, and then took photos of the teacher's pictures with his own phone. He then distributed them to other students. Arthur said she took the pictures as a Valentine's Day present for her husband.

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Half of inventions “arise unexpectedly” from serendipity—not direct research

Research institutions are the least likely inspirations for that spark of creativity.

Dr. Horrible invented this Freeze Ray while singing and thinking about a lady named Penny. (credit: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog)

If you're smashing your face into the keyboard trying to come up with a brand-new invention, you need to stop and go for a walk. You could also try watching a movie about an unrelated topic. A new book on the process of invention, Inventology by Pagan Kennedy, reveals that roughly half of all inventions started as ideas or discoveries that people had while working on something else.

As Kennedy writes in a recent New York Times article:

One survey of patent holders (the PatVal study of European inventors, published in 2005) found that an incredible 50 percent of patents resulted from what could be described as a serendipitous process. Thousands of survey respondents reported that their idea evolved when they were working on an unrelated project—and often when they weren’t even trying to invent anything.

Kennedy's book, which grew out of a series of articles for the Times about unusual inventions, explores how people invented everything from sliced bread to the airport wheelie bag. The thread that runs through all of the inventors' stories is what Kennedy dubs "serendipity," or stumbling across an idea by chance. The question is whether this kind of serendipity can actually be fostered and encouraged or must simply strike like lightning.

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