Month: October 2016

(credit: Wikimedia Commons user Tabercil)

A 36-year-old Ryan Collins from Pennsylvania was sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to hacking the Apple and Google accounts of more than 100 celebrities, including Jennifer Lawrence, Aubrey Plaza, Rihanna, and Avril Lavigne. Collins stole personal information, including nude photos, from the celebrities.

The photos were famously posted on 4chan and reddit in 2014. Collins pleaded guilty to hacking the celebrities’ accounts in May, but he did not plead guilty to posting the images on the Internet. “Investigators have not uncovered any evidence linking Collins to the actual leaks or that Collins shared or uploaded the information he obtained,” the Department of Justice (DOJ) noted.

According to The Guardian, Collins ran a phishing scheme from November 2012 to September 2014, sending celebrities e-mails that appeared to be from Apple and Google, requesting their user names and passwords.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

In all the discussion of virtual reality over the last couple of years, one company with a strong presence in both PC and console gaming has been conspicuously absent: Microsoft. Microsoft owns the PC platform that the high-end VR headsets (Facebook's Oculus Rift, HTC's Vive) run on, and while the Xbox One is in second place in the living room, it's nonetheless a major gaming platform. Yet when asked about its VR plans, the company had nothing to say; the closest thing to any involvement was bundling Xbox controllers with the Rift.

Even more peculiarly, Microsoft did nonetheless claim to have ambitions in the VR space. In June, the company said that Windows Holographic, the variant used on the HoloLens augmented reality headset, would be made available for third-party hardware, both VR and AR. In August, the company went a step further, saying that a 2017 update to Windows 10 would put these 3D features into the standard Windows 10 desktop system.

It turns out that that's just the start of it. This update, which will be called the Creators Update, contains a ton of 3D functionality. At its presentation yesterday, Microsoft demonstrated scanning physical objects on a phone, creating 3D scenes in a new Paint 3D application, 3D printing them, and viewing them on AR and VR headsets. 3D creation is being pushed to the foreground.

Enlarge

Recently a cache of 2,337 e-mails from the office of a high-ranking advisor to Russian president Vladimir Putin was dumped on the Internet after purportedly being obtained by a Ukrainian hacking group calling itself CyberHunta. The cache shows that the Putin government communicated with separatist forces in Eastern Ukraine, receiving lists of casualties and expense reports while even apparently approving government members of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic. And if one particular document is to be believed, the Putin government was formulating plans to destabilize the Ukrainian government as early as next month in order to force an end to the standoff over the region, known as Donbass.

Based on reporting by the Associated Press's Howard Amos and analysis by the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, at least some of the e-mails—dumped in a 1-gigabyte Outlook .PST mailbox file—are genuine. Amos showed e-mails in the cache to a Russian journalist, Svetlana Babaeva, who identified e-mails she had sent to Surkov's office. E-mail addresses and phone numbers in some of the e-mails were also confirmed. And among the documents in the trove of e-mails is a scan of Surkov's passport (above), as well as those of his wife and children.

A Kremlin spokesperson denied the legitimacy of the e-mails, saying that Surkov did not have an e-mail address. However, the account appears to have been used by Surkov's assistants, and the dump contains e-mails with reports from Surkov's assistants. The breach, if ultimately proven genuine, would appear to be the first major publicized hack of a Russian political figure. And in that instance, perhaps this could be a response to the hacking of US political figures attributed to Russia.

The biggest questions around Apple's new MacBook Pro design were about how the company was going to balance its own design priorities—making things thinner and lighter and removing ports wherever possible—with the features its "pro" users regularly request and use—more performance, good input devices, and more connectivity.

I was able to spend about 15 minutes looking at and touching the new Pros. We'll be examining performance thoroughly in our full review, so in my hands-on session I focused primarily on trying out the new keyboard, the new trackpad, and the Touch Bar that Apple spent so much time on today.

Enlarge

Porsche's new 718 Boxster and Cayman sports cars mark the dawn of a new era for German automaker. Along with the recently refreshed 911 Carerra, they represent the future for the company, a future that has a lot of purists down in the dumps. This new duo represents the death of the naturally aspirated flat-six engine in mainstream models. In its place is a future of downsized, turbocharged, direct-injection engines, and having driven the new cars recently, we can report that the purists should have little to worry about. Those new engines are rather clever pieces of engineering with a direct link to Porsche's latest-and-greatest all-conquering race car, the 919 Hybrid.

That engine

Over the years, Porsche has rightly won quite a reputation for the flat-six engines it builds, and as such the new family of turbocharged engines has a lot to live up to. According to to Markus Baumann, who was in charge of engine development, the keys to the new motor were ensuring it kept Porsche's traditional free-revving nature and characteristic sound. On top of that, engine capacities have been "right-sized" for the 21st century. For the 718, that means losing a pair of cylinders—space constraints in the new chassis (and presumably a desire to differentiate the cars from the more expensive 911) mean there's a choice of two four-cylinder horizontally opposed "boxer" engines.