Month: March 2016

SAN FRANCISCO—Xbox’s spring press showcase could have begun in any number of ways, but Xbox chief Phil Spencer just had to get something off his chest. In a bizarre move, the head of Microsoft's gaming efforts devoted a good chunk of the event’s 30-minute state-of-the-union speech to an Internet tiff he got himself into the prior week.

The issue began in early February when Microsoft announced that its big Spring 2016 game, Quantum Break, would launch simultaneously on Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs in April. Some fans cried foul, pointing to prior promises that QB would be an "Xbox One-exclusive" game—never mind that the new PC version didn't impact the Xbox One release at all.

Spencer took to Twitter to respond to someone who said he'd canceled his pre-order over the news, leading to the hilarious fact that Spencer repeatedly addressed someone who goes by the handle @The_CrapGamer. And while Spencer seemed to understand that some Xbox owners were wary of Microsoft "erod[ing] some of the exclusivity that [they] feel like [they] have on Xbox," his immediate response to that was to spell out a future in which Xbox could possibly stop being a hardware line and start being a service.

As much as it was exciting to see Technics unveil a followup to its legendary SL-1200 turntable, there is the small issue of its price. Priced at £3,000/$4,000, the new SL-1200G will cost far more than the original SL-1200MK2, which was just £400 before it was discontinued in 2010. And if you're a DJ that needs two of them for cutting, scratching, and mixing, you may need to sell a kidney first.

Paying a premium for audio equipment certainly isn't unheard of in audiophile circles—see the £300 Ethernet cable—but Technics has been taking some flak for the SL-1200G's high price, particularly as it doesn't boast things like a "monofilament" bearing system, or a "low resonance sandwich construction." Speaking to What Hi-Fi, Technics CTO Tetsuya Itani claimed that because the SL-1200G was a complete redesign—requiring a new manufacturing process and new tools—the price had to go up.

"Because the original 1210 turntables were manufactured for so many years, the manufacturing process had got to a very low cost. Now we need to invest in all the tools again, and the price now is much higher than the 1970s," Itani explained. "We began to study just a few months prior to IFA, maybe summer 2014, for the new SL-1200. We learned that it was impossible [to make the same deck], as almost all the tools for manufacturing were gone or heavily damaged—only one die remained, and that was for the dust cover."

Morgan Motor Company

The new Morgan EV3. It won't break any speed records, but it will put a smile on your face.

5 more images in gallery

Last month we revealed that the Morgan Motor Company, maker of classic-looking (and in some cases classically built) sports cars plans to electrify its line up. At the Geneva auto show it took the wraps off the first of those electric vehicles, called the EV3.

It's based on the company's 3 Wheeler, a fun and back-to-basics sports car that normally gets its power from a two-cylinder bike engine. Instead of the motor from S&S, the EV3 has a 61hp/46kW electric motor and a 20kWh lithium ion battery pack.

That gives the EV3 a quite respectable range of 150 miles (241km). Top speed is said to be over 90 mph (144km/h) and 0-62 mph (0-100 km/h) takes about nine seconds. That might not seem like much but given the bare-bones nature of the EV3, we're pretty sure it's more than sufficient for back road thrills.

Enlarge (credit: Aviram et al.)

More than 13 million websites and e-mail services protected by the transport layer security protocol are vulnerable to a newly discovered, low-cost attack that decrypts sensitive communications in a matter of hours and in some cases almost immediately, an international team of researchers warned Tuesday. More than 97,000 of the top 1 million most popular Web properties are among the vulnerable HTTPS-protected sites.

The attack works against TLS-protected communications that rely on the RSA cryptosystem when the key is exposed even indirectly through SSLv2, a TLS precursor that was retired almost two decades ago because of crippling weaknesses. The vulnerability allows an attacker to decrypt an intercepted TLS connection by repeatedly using SSLv2 to make connections to a server. In the process, the attacker learns a few bits of information about the encryption key each time. While many security experts believed the removal of SSLv2 support from browser and e-mail clients prevented abuse of the legacy protocol, some misconfigured TLS implementations still tacitly support the legacy protocol when an end-user computer specifically requests its use. The most notable implementation subject to such fatal misconfigurations is the OpenSSL cryptographic library, which on Tuesday is expected to release an update that makes such settings much less likely to occur.

Recent scans of the Internet at large show that more than 5.9 million Web servers, comprising 17 percent of all HTTPS-protected machines, directly support SSLv2. The same scans reveal that at least 936,000 TLS-protected e-mail servers also support the insecure protocol. That's a troubling finding, given widely repeated advice that SSLv2—short for secure sockets layer version 2—be disabled. More troubling still, even when a server doesn't allow SSLv2 connections, it may still be susceptible to attack if the underlying RSA key pair is reused on a separate server that does support the old protocol. A website, for instance, that forbids SSLv2 may still be vulnerable if its key is used on an e-mail server that allows SSLv2. By the researchers' estimate, that leaves 13.6 million HTTPS-protected websites and a significant number of TLS-protected e-mail servers open to attack.

Enlarge / Trying out a nonfunctional Glyph prototype at CES 2015. Props to the Avegant people, because the shipping model looks pretty much exactly like this. (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

The Avegant Glyph is a screen that you wear on your face. That’s the simplest way to describe it. The whole device looks like a pair of outsized Beats headphones, complete with huge chunky body and thick plastic headband; the parts that go on your ears are indeed headphones, but that huge headband hides a 720p DLP screen (though "screen" isn’t quite right, as we’ll see) and the optics necessary to make the display work.

When you put it on, you look a lot like you’re wearing someone’s parody of what a VR headset is supposed to look like (personally, I think the effect rather resembles the popular "cyber woman with corn" stock photo). But the technology actually delivers a very high fidelity image—and for a first-generation hardware project borne of a Kickstarter, even delivering a product at all can be considered a success. Viewed through that lens, the Glyph is a hit.

But after spending a week with a "Founder’s Edition" version of the headset, I’m not entirely sure I’d want to spend the money for one—and it might not be for the reason you’re expecting.