Month: August 2016

Enlarge

The HTC 10 is by far the best phone I've ever owned. It has a colourful, sharp screen that at 5.2-inches is big without verging into unwieldy phablet territory, while the all-metal design gives it a premium feel. It's fast too, thanks to a Snapdragon 820 chip and largely untouched version of Android. Its camera excels in low light, the battery easily gets me through a day (extended Pokémon Go sessions not withstanding), and the powerful headphone amp is the best available on a mainstream device. I even like its slightly portly dimensions.

But would I say the HTC 10 is an exciting device? No. If anything, I'd say it's rather dull.

It's a problem that nearly all the big smartphone manufacturers face. That last great bastion of smartphone quality held by Apple—the camera—was matched, if not beaten by nearly all of this year's flagship devices. Even the OnePlus 3, a phone with a premium design and specs, which costs a mere £330, stands toe-to-toe with phones costing twice as much, if not more. Cameras, screens, batteries, operating systems—they're largely the same across devices, and they're all very good. That's a great thing for consumers, but not so much for smartphone makers used to charging a premium for the basics. It takes a special something to stand out.

(credit: Jim Barton)

Dropbox hurriedly warned its users last week to change their passwords if their accounts dated back prior to mid-2012. We now know why: the cloud-based storage service suffered a data breach that's said to have affected more than 68 million accounts compromised during a hack that took place roughly four years ago.

The company had previously admitted that it was hit by a hack attack, but it's only now that the scale of the operation has seemingly come to light.

Tech site Motherboard reported—citing "sources in the database trading community"—that it had obtained four files, totalling 5GB in size, which apparently contained e-mail addresses and hashed passwords for 68,680,741 Dropbox users.

Acer has unveiled some new laptops at IFA in Germany, including the utterly monstrous curved-display 21-inch Predator 21X. Acer says it's the world's first laptop with a curved screen.

The new Predator 21X laptop sits at the very top of Acer's gaming laptop range. The curved screen, which has a resolution of 2560×1080, is powered by two of Nvidia's latest mobile GTX 1080 graphics cards. The screen is G-Sync enabled, too.

CPU-wise, the laptop has a new 7th-gen Kaby Lake Intel Core processor, but we don't know exactly which model. Given the laptop's desktop-replacement aspirations we are probably looking at some kind of quad-core 45W TDP chip, rather than one of the dual-core low-power parts unveiled by Intel this week. Intel isn't planning to release its quad-core Kaby Lake parts until the first quarter of 2017—which incidentally is when the Predator 21X is meant to go on sale.

Since Edward Snowden stepped into the limelight from a hotel room in Hong Kong three years ago, use of the Tor anonymity network has grown massively. Journalists and activists have embraced the anonymity the network provides as a way to evade the mass surveillance under which we all now live, while citizens in countries with restrictive Internet censorship, like Turkey or Saudi Arabia, have turned to Tor in order to circumvent national firewalls. Law enforcement has been less enthusiastic, worrying that online anonymity also enables criminal activity.

Tor's growth in users has not gone unnoticed, and today the network first dubbed "The Onion Router" is under constant strain from those wishing to identify anonymous Web users. The NSA and GCHQ have been studying Tor for a decade, looking for ways to penetrate online anonymity, at least according to these Snowden docs. In 2014, the US government paid Carnegie Mellon University to run a series of poisoned Tor relays to de-anonymise Tor users. A 2015 research paper outlined an attack effective, under certain circumstances, at decloaking Tor hidden services (now rebranded as "onion services"). Most recently, 110 poisoned Tor hidden service directories were discovered probing .onion sites for vulnerabilities, most likely in an attempt to de-anonymise both the servers and their visitors.

Who can forget the now-famous "Tor stinks" slide that was part of the Snowden trove of leaked docs.

Cracks are beginning to show; a 2013 analysis by researchers at the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), who helped develop Tor in the first place, concluded that "80 percent of all types of users may be de-anonymised by a relatively moderate Tor-relay adversary within six months."