Month: August 2016

Enlarge (credit: Parallels)

Like clockwork, Parallels releases a new version of its desktop virtualization software for Mac computers every year. They often coincide with major new versions of the Windows and Mac operating systems, requiring major software changes to bring new Windows features to Apple computers or to make sure everything keeps working properly.

Parallels Desktop 12 for Mac is thus being announced today, but there isn't much to be excited about. While Parallels can run just about any operating system in a virtual machine, its primary purpose is letting Mac users run Windows applications. For that use case, last year's Parallels Desktop 11 release is still good enough.

There was an obvious reason to upgrade to Parallels 11 last year for people who wanted to run Windows 10 on a Mac. That's because Parallels 11 was the only version to support Windows 10 in Coherence Mode, which lets Windows applications run on a Mac in their own windows and integrate with the Mac's Notification Center. Without Coherence Mode, Windows applications are all contained in a single window that displays Microsoft's whole operating system.

(credit: NIST)

Cisco Systems has confirmed that recently-leaked malware tied to the National Security Agency exploited a high-severity vulnerability that had gone undetected for years in every supported version of the company's Adaptive Security Appliance firewall.

The previously unknown flaw makes it possible for remote attackers who have already gained a foothold in a targeted network to gain full control over a firewall, Cisco warned in an advisory published Wednesday. The bug poses a significant risk because it allows attackers to monitor and control all data passing through a vulnerable network. To exploit the vulnerability, an attacker must control a computer already authorized to access the firewall or the firewall must have been misconfigured to omit this standard safeguard.

"It's still a critical vulnerability even though it requires access to the internal or management network, as once exploited it gives the attacker the opportunity to monitor all network traffic," Mustafa Al-Bassam, a security researcher, told Ars. "I wouldn't imagine it would be difficult for the NSA to get access to a device in a large company's internal network, especially if it was a datacenter."

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

Aetna announced Monday that due to grave financial losses, it will dramatically slash its participation in public insurance marketplaces set up by the Affordable Care Act. In 2017, Aetna will only offer insurance policies in 242 counties scattered across four states—that’s a nearly 70-percent decrease from its 2016 offerings in 778 counties across 15 states.

The deep cuts have largely been seen as a blow to the sustainability of the healthcare law, which has seen other big insurers also pull out, namely UnitedHealth group and Humana. But the explanation that Aetna was forced to scale back due to heavy profit cuts doesn’t square with previous statements by the company.

In April, Mark Bertolini, the chairman and chief executive of Aetna, told investors that the insurance giant anticipated losses and could weather them, even calling participation in the marketplaces during the rocky first years “a good investment.” And in a July 5 letter (PDF) to the Department of Justice, obtained by the Huffington Post by a Freedom of Information Act request, Bertolini explicitly threatened that Aetna would back out of the marketplace if the department tried to block its planned $37 billion merger with Humana.

Alien invasion might be a lot weirder than you think. That's the premise of Arrival, a first contact story told from the point of view of linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) who is the first to translate the language of the mysterious "heptapods" whose ships arrive on Earth seemingly just to make conversation.

If this movie is even a quarter as good as the novella it's based on, we're in for a damn fine story. (For those who have not had the pleasure of reading it, Chiang's collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, has just been reissued as a handsome paperback.) Though the film is dramatizing the alien visitation with international politics and war threats, the original story explores a more personal crisis. Without giving away spoilers, the central idea is that the heptapods' written language allows the reader to know the ending of a sentence at the moment they start reading it. Based in part on the aliens' mathematics—and informed by the Earthly mathematics of Fermat's Principle—the heptapods' language changes the consciousness of humans who decipher it, essentially allowing them to remember the future.

So what happens when a conversation with an alien changes your perception of linear time? In Chiang's story, it raises questions about whether you will make the same life decisions despite knowing when people will die—indeed, knowing when you will die. The result is a moving, intense exploration of temporality, linguistics, and the human psyche. It's clear that some of these themes are going to come up in the movie, too, though with the added dramatics of some kind of standoff with Russia.

(credit: Joint Quantum Institute)

If you know me, you know that I tend to get obsessive about imaging. I usually stick to optical microscopes, but occasionally the folks who play with electrons and ions do something exciting, too. A recently published paper on ion microscopy has me pretty excited at the moment, which is about all the excuse I need to dig in.

Ion microscopy is similar to electron microscopy. In a typical electron microscope, you fire a beam of electrons at a sample and examine the angles at which the electrons scatter. These angles are directly related to the surface of the sample, so with a few optics (magnetic lenses, in the case of electrons), you get an image. Because electrons are heavy and energetic, they have a very short wavelength, so smaller features can be imaged.

After the development of the electron microscope, scientists realized that you can do similar things with ions—the nucleus of an atom with some or all of the electrons stripped off it. Hence, ion microscopy.

Always keeping your house tidy and spotless may earn you the label of “neat freak”—but “super happy” may be a more accurate tag.

When people voluntarily take on unpleasant tasks such as housework, they tend to be in particularly happy states, according to a new study on hedonism. The finding challenges an old prediction by some researchers that humans can be constant pleasure-seekers. Instead, the new study suggests we might seek out fun, uplifting activities mainly when we’re in bad or down moods. But when we’re on the up, we’re more likely to go for the dull and dreary assignments.

This finding of “flexible hedonism,” reported Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may seem counterintuitive because it suggests we sabotage our own high spirits. But it hints at the idea that humans tend to make sensible short-term trade-offs on happiness for long-term gains.

A federal appeals court says the maker of an online spying tool can be sued on accusations of wiretapping. The federal lawsuit was brought by a man whose e-mail and instant messages to a woman were captured by the husband of the woman. That husband used that data as a "battering ram" as part of his 2010 divorce proceedings.

It's the second time in a week that a federal court has ruled in a wiretapping case—in favor of a person whose online communications were intercepted without consent. The other ruling was against Google. A judge ruled that a person not using Gmail who sent e-mail to another person using Gmail had not consented to Gmail's automatic scanning of the e-mail for marketing purposes. Hence, Google could be sued (PDF) for alleged wiretapping violations.

For the moment, the two outcomes are a major victory for privacy. But the reasoning in the lawsuit against the makers of the WebWatcher spy program could have ramifications far beyond the privacy context—and it places liability on the producers of spyware tools.

(credit: Peter Kaminski / flickr)

SAN FRANCISCO—Oracle lawyers argued in federal court today that their copyright trial loss against Google should be thrown out because they were denied key evidence in discovery.

Oracle attorney Annette Hurst said that the launch of Google Play on Chrome OS, which happened in the middle of the trial, showed that Google was trying to break into the market for Java SE on desktops. In her view, that move dramatically changes the amount of market harm that Oracle experienced, and the evidence should have been shared with the jury.

"This is a game-changer," Hurst told US District Judge William Alsup, who oversaw the trial. "The whole foundation for their case is gone. [Android] isn't 'transformative'; it's on desktops and laptops."