Month: March 2016

The Xbox One is about to become a development platform for everyone. With this summer's anniversary update, developers creating UWPs will be able to turn their Xbox Ones into a development unit and use them to debug and test applications, and all they'll need is a Windows developer registration (a one-off $19 for individuals, $99 for corporations).

Rebooting the Xbox into development mode.

But there's one category of application that they won't be able to write: games. Microsoft already has schemes for creating games on Xbox, with its existing partner program and independent developer scheme, ID@Xbox. Any developers that want to submit UWP games will have to be a member of ID@Xbox. While that doesn't cost anything, it's also not open to everyone in the way that Windows developer registration is. Companies have to be approved for ID@Xbox and subsequently agree to an NDA.

This stands in contrast to desktop Windows, where UWP games are open to any developer, and Microsoft is doing its best to actively encourage their development. The company is making UWPs in Windows 10 better for gaming in the Anniversary Update, by giving developers control of v-sync and access to G-Sync and FreeSync, the adaptive frame rate technology from Nvidia and AMD, respectively.

Baltimore's Union Memorial is one of the hopitals hit by Samsam, an autonomous ransomware strain spread by exploiting JBoss servers. (credit: MedStar)

Baltimore's Union Memorial Hospital is the epicenter of a malware attack upon its parent organization, MedStar. Data at Union Memorial and other MedStar hospitals in Maryland have been encrypted by ransomware spread across the network, and the operators of the malware are offering a bulk deal: 45 bitcoins (about $18,500) for the keys to unlock all the affected systems.

Reuters reports that the FBI issued a confidential urgent "Flash" message to the industry about the threat of Samsam on March 25, seeking assistance in fighting the ransomware and pleading, "We need your help!" The FBI's cyber center also shared signature data for Samsam activity to help organizations screen for infections. But the number of potential targets remains vast, and the FBI was concerned that entire networks could fall victim to the ransomware.

According to sources who spoke to the Baltimore Sun, the malware involved in MedStar's outages is Samsam, also known as Samas and MSIL. The subject of a recent confidential FBI cyber-alert, Samsam is form of malware that uses well-known exploits in the JBoss application server and other Java-based application platforms. As Ars reported on Monday, Samsam uses exploits published as part of JexBoss, an open-source security and penetration testing tool for checking JBoss servers for misconfiguration.

San Francisco is still pleasingly sunny, and we're still on the scene for Microsoft's Build developer conference. Day 2 brings another keynote and we'll be liveblogging it from Moscone Center.

Starting at 8:30am PDT, we're expecting to see a fair bit of coding on stage, lots of Visual Studio, and the latest new features to be added to Microsoft's Azure platform. The ability for Windows to run Linux apps is sure to be shown off, something that will no doubt make many developers very happy.

This is the first Build since Microsoft bought Xamarin, and we'd expect at least some time spent talking about just what that's going to mean both for Xamarin developers and existing Windows ones.

(credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is offering new tools to help developers build interactive bots that understand natural language, the company announced at its Build conference today.

There are two key components, which are available in preview and are both part of the larger Cortana Intelligence Suite. "The first, Microsoft Cognitive Services, is a collection of intelligence APIs that allows systems to see, hear, speak, understand and interpret our needs using natural methods of communication," Microsoft said. "The second, the Microsoft Bot Framework, can be used by developers—programming in any language—to build intelligent bots that enable customers to chat using natural language on a wide variety of platforms including text/SMS, Office 365, Skype, Slack, the Web and more."

Though Microsoft's own "Tay" bot became a public relations nightmare, the company demonstrated how artificial intelligence applications built with Microsoft technology can be useful in the real world. Most impressive right now is "Seeing AI," an application to help blind people navigate the world, built by a blind Microsoft software engineer named Saqib Shaikh.

(credit: Ben Salter)

More than ever, websites are blocking users of the anonymizing Tor network or degrading the services they receive. Data published today by Web security company CloudFlare suggests why that is.

In a company blog post entitled "The Trouble with Tor," CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince says that 94 percent of the requests the company sees coming across the Tor network are "per se malicious." He explains:

That doesn’t mean they are visiting controversial content, but instead that they are automated requests designed to harm our customers. A large percentage of the comment spam, vulnerability scanning, ad click fraud, content scraping, and login scanning comes via the Tor network. To give you some sense, based on data from Project Honey Pot, 18% of global email spam, or approximately 6.5 trillion unwanted messages per year, begin with an automated bot harvesting email addresses via the Tor network.

A graph in the blog post shows that nearly 70 percent of Tor exit nodes were listed as "comment spammer" nodes at some point over the last year.

Enlarge / Satellite imagery of the seaward edge of Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. Thwaites Glacier accounts for a big chunk of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and it's vulnerable to major retreat. (credit: Knut Christianson)

It’s obvious that a warming climate will mean less glacial ice and higher sea level, but putting a precise number on these things is another matter. The landscapes concealed beneath the great ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are complex in hugely important ways. The interplay of ocean currents, which deliver warmer water to eat away at the underside of floating ice shelves, also varies regionally and even locally. And the ice itself is a dynamic thing, flowing in response to changes at the coastal edges.

So while we use measurements in the present and records from the past to forecast the future, we're stuck with scientific uncertainty, which means we need the language of risk analysis to discuss things sensibly. What is the possible range of sea level rise? And what are the probabilities for different parts of this range?

While some work in this regard has already been done, we're continually sharpening those assessments. As data and knowledge accumulate, our models of the ice sheets become more reliable guides to the future.