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Techradar |
- Rumour: News Corp to layoff 550 MySpace employees
- Winklevoss Twins suing Facebook again
- Winklevoss Twins suing Facebook again
- 5 headsets for Skype and gaming tested
- Nintendo says 3DS could damage youngsters' eyes
- In Depth: Learn from the hackers: how to avoid website exploits
- Most internet users spend under £7 a month on content
- Most internet users spend under £7 a month on content
- Review: Yamaha RX-V1067
- Exclusive: Skype rejects Chinese VoIP ban
| Rumour: News Corp to layoff 550 MySpace employees Posted: 31 Dec 2010 07:17 AM PST  News Corporation is rumoured to be considering laying off half of MySpace's workforce, which currently totals 1,100 employees. While there is no official word on any plans for restructuring, News Corp execs have made no secret of the fact that the company may consider selling its recently rebranded social network, should a suitable buyer make a satisfactory offer in the near future. MySpace has been a problem MySpace's COO Chase Carey said in no uncertain terms last month: "We've been clear that MySpace has been a problem. "Current losses are not acceptable or sustainable. But we know that we have to work very hard in [the] coming months to get this thing sustainable," he said, adding, "We judge in quarters, not in years." The reports of impending layoffs come from All Things Digital, which claims to have multiple sources familiar with the matter informing them that up to 50 per cent of MySpace's 1,100 workforce could be up for the chop in early 2011. News Corp reportedly gave MySpace employees the last week of December off work to save cash. Not the nicest of Christmas bonuses! MySpace recently rebranded itself as an entertainment portal that users can use in conjunction with (and easily connecting to) their Facebook accounts. 
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| Winklevoss Twins suing Facebook again Posted: 31 Dec 2010 05:22 AM PST  The Winklevoss twins are attempting to sue Mark Zuckerberg for apparently stealing the idea for Facebook from them yet again, despite already being offered a $65 million (£41.85 million) settlement The 'Winkelvii' (as Jesse Eisenberg's character refers to them in The Social Network) claim to have originally come up with the idea for Facebook, which they claim Mark Zuckerberg stole from them while at Harvard University. Unhappy Winklevii Seemingly unsatisfied with being offered $65 million as a pay-off already, it seems that the twins feel that there is a principle at stake here. Hence Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss are suing Facebook in Federal Court again, The pair told the New York Times how they plan to pursue Zuckerberg in US courts until they feel justice is done. The Winklevii recount in interminable detail how they first met Zuckerberg in the infamous Kirkland House dining room, the layout of Zuckerberg's Harvard dorm and how they feel he stole the basic idea for Facebook from a website concept they had called Harvard Connection. Beyond all that rather dull detail, the twins also claim that Facebook has violated the US Securities Act of 1934 when it drew up the original settlement deal for $65 million. All good fodder for The Social Network 2, perhaps? 
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| Winklevoss Twins suing Facebook again Posted: 31 Dec 2010 05:22 AM PST The Winklevoss twins are attempting to sue Mark Zuckerberg for apparently stealing the idea for Facebook from them yet again, despite already being offered a $65 million (£41.85 million) settlement The 'Winkelvii' (as Jesse Eisenberg's character refers to them in The Social Network) claim to have originally come up with the idea for Facebook, which they claim Mark Zuckerberg stole from them while at Harvard University. Unhappy Winklevii Seemingly unsatisfied with being offered $65 million as a pay-off already, it seems that the twins feel that there is a principle at stake here. Hence Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss are suing Facebook in Federal Court again, The pair told the New York Times how they plan to pursue Zuckerberg in US courts until they feel justice is done. The Winklevii recount in interminable detail how they first met Zuckerberg in the infamous Kirkland House dining room, the layout of Zuckerberg's Harvard dorm and how they feel he stole the basic idea for Facebook from a website concept they had called Harvard Connection. Beyond all that rather dull detail, the twins also claim that Facebook has violated the US Securities Act of 1934 when it drew up the original settlement deal for $65 million. All good fodder for The Social Network 2, perhaps? 
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| 5 headsets for Skype and gaming tested Posted: 31 Dec 2010 04:00 AM PST  Looking for headphones that you can use to make Skype calls and for gaming? Windows: The Official Magazine has taken a quick look at five pairs. Genius HS-04U - £22.70 This cheap and cheerful headset lights up like a fair ride when it's plugged in, which is an unnecessary distraction. The problems don't end there – we couldn't adjust the volume, resulting in a deafening experience. They don't feel particularly well built, and the sound leaked so much that we wondered if any was actually going into our ears. Avoid. Verdict: 2/5 Logitech Wireless Gaming Headset G930 - £136 Logitech's über-expensive cans are wireless, so you can be 40 feet from your PC and still hear what's going on. The buttons enable you to skip and pause music, too. For music, they're a little washed-out, but the surround sound set-up makes them ideal for gamers who don't want to clutter their desks. Verdict: 4/5 Griffin MyPhones - £29.99 Not strictly a headset – these don't include a microphone – but they're a set of headphones designed especially for kids, and they automatically limit the volume to 85 decibels, which is slightly louder than an average conversation. The also have interchangeable, customisable inserts, and the sound quality is surprisingly decent. Verdict: 4/5 AKG Harman GHS 1 - £99.99 This headset neatly folds up to a compact size, making it perfect for gamers on the go, or people who want to use Skype while on holiday. Despite the fact that they don't completely cover your ears, the sound they produce is surprisingly meaty, with impressive bass. We're not quite so sure about the day-glo orange cable, though… Verdict: 3/5 Plantronics .Audio 655 DSP - £27.04 Plantronics' headphones look and feel a little plasticky, but they certainly deliver a rich, clear sound, and they're surprisingly cheap, too. The boom microphone does a really good job of picking up your voice, and it automatically mutes when it's moved into the up position. The headset also supports Skype 4.0, for high quality voice calls. Verdict: 5/5 
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| Nintendo says 3DS could damage youngsters' eyes Posted: 31 Dec 2010 02:14 AM PST  Nintendo has put a health and safety notice on its website stating that the new 3DS handheld – due for release early next year – is unsuitable for young children. The 3D visuals which the device makes possible could damage young children's eyesight, the games company explains. Under-sixes not welcome Nintendo issued the following statement on its Japanese website, explaining that kids under the age of six could suffer from stunted eye development as a result of using the 3DS. The 3DS will come equipped with a parental lock which will allow parents to turn off the 3D feature. Nintendo also advises gamers to rest every 30 minutes in order to not cause undue stress on the eyes. 3DS launch rumours The Nintendo 3DS is rumoured to be launching in the UK on March 18, priced £200. Nintendo is still to confirm or deny those particular rumours. The company is planning a number of press events in January in Amsterdam and New York, where we expect to hear more on the plans for the 3DS launch, as well as getting hands-on time with the launch line-up of games for the new handheld. The 3DS allows gamers to play games without the need for unsightly (and costly) 3D specs, with a number of Nintendo's publishing and development partners already preparing some major AAA-titles for the console. 
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| In Depth: Learn from the hackers: how to avoid website exploits Posted: 31 Dec 2010 02:00 AM PST  When large data breaches are announced, the media can go overboard with its portrayal of hackers as uber-geeks with flashing fingers and skills that are almost supernatural in origin. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. By using basic tools and a logical approach, hackers turn websites into playgrounds full of interesting servers to explore, subvert and destroy. There are databases to plunder; there are pages to deface. But just what is their approach, and how can we learn to avoid it? Footprints on the web Once a hacker finds a website that could be worth exploring, their first task is to create a detailed profile of the target, called a footprint. This identifies the basic building blocks of the site and enables the hacker to draw a map of how everything fits together. Unfortunately, the way websites work provides hackers with lots of useful information without them having to do much. If there's a login process, for example, they know there's a database containing usernames and passwords. If the site has an ecommerce element, they know there's a shopping cart product in use, or some handcrafted and potentially vulnerable code to try to subvert. Similarly, a catalogue of products indicates another database, which could link to a stock control server and possibly also a re-ordering application containing information about trade accounts. The hacker will also survey links to ad servers that feed content into the site. They will also consult the DNS records for the domain. DNS is the only way to keep track of what's on the internet and where it all is. But it also gives information about all the publicly accessible servers owned by a domain, regardless of whether their addresses and names are meant for public consumption. When I began working as a network security consultant, I found that it was easy to shock clients by showing them their DNS records, and then drawing a map of how I believed their servers were plumbed together. Some network admins had been naïve enough to think that all their important servers needed public IP addresses, making them easy to profile prior to an attack. DNS information Windows and Linux have tools capable of interrogating DNS, but they're fiddly command line utilities. Luckily, plenty of websites provide easy access to DNS information, including Kloth.net. Enter the name of a domain you're interested in (such as pcplus.co.uk) and press [Enter]. In the answers section that appears, you'll see lines containing the domain name and associated IP addresses.
To search for a possible web server, add www. to the start of the domain and press [Enter]. This time you'll see the domain's web server. If you change the query type to 'MX' and click 'Look it up', the answers section will contain the name of the computer acting as the local mail server (technically called the mail exchanger). This name may be the same as the web server, but if it has a different name, enter it into the 'Domain' input box to see its details. Another important part of this process is the use of a port scanner such as nmap to discover what services are running on each internet-facing server. See nmap in action at www.nmap-online.com. The default IP address is your own computer.
To scan it for open ports, click the 'I agree with terms of service' and then click 'Scan now'. Enter an email address for the site to notify when the scan is complete, along with a password to access the results. Nmap sends carefully crafted packets to each potentially open port and analyses the information returned to discover not only what's running, but sometimes even detailed information about the running operating system and its TCP/IP stack. This can aid hackers in profiling a website and formulating a coming attack. If a mail server is also running port 80, there's a good chance that connecting to it via a web browser will reveal a web mail interface that may have exploitable bugs. However, if the hacker is met by a default Apache web server installation page, it may be that system administrator installed the web server but has forgotten about it. It's likely that the software has never been patched and is vulnerable to a range of exploits. By examining the verbiage returned with the web page, the hacker can determine the exact release of the software and any extra modules installed. Finding a NetBIOS service running (ports 137 and 139) indicates that the server runs Windows. An SQL service (port 1143) indicates that there's a database engine running, and so on.
It's possible to build a detailed map of a domain's capabilities and vulnerabilities from this process. Once the hacker has constructed a detailed footprint of the website's hardware and basic software, their attention turns to the web applications. Computer science says that above a certain level of complexity, no program can ever be free of bugs. Luckily for the hacker, less skilled programmers keep making the same basic assumptions and mistakes in the logic of web applications. The first task is to map out how the apps work. The hacker begins with a simple click-through of the site to note the names of the pages and what they contain – which ones need authentication, for example. This tells them a great deal, but they can also delve deeper by mapping out the actual directory structure on the server. Directory mapping is a matter of noting down the paths in the URL bar of the browser during the click-through. This reveals a lot of detail about the structure of the site, and can give indications about the skill of the web designer. Some structures reveal the hand of a site-builder program at work, in which case a hacker can consult a list of known exploits for sites made with that program.
The hacker notes the methods pages use to pass data from input boxes to PHP scripts. Do they use the GET or POST methods? Each implies the type of processing used by the site's scripts, and may provide ideas about testing for weaknesses in the way rogue input values are dealt with. The web is set up to serve the index file of any URL you enter, so the hacker will try adding likely directory names to the domain name to see what he can find. For example, for www.victimsite.com, they might try 'www.victimsite.com/admin' to see if they can access an administration page. Another great source of hidden directories is the 'robots.txt' file. This is a plain text file that sits in the root directory of websites and contains directives to search engines about which directories are OK to index and which aren't. The 'robots.txt' file has to contain a list of all the directories that the hacker shouldn't know about, which highlights the need to avoid putting anything on a site that you wouldn't want to find on Google. Where you can't avoid this, don't give files obvious names. So-called helper files are also a useful source of information for the hacker. Cascading style sheets, Java classes and embedded JavaScript all give an indication of the skill level of the person who coded the site. This gives an idea of the kinds of errors to expect. One of the biggest mistakes made in trying to secure a site is to have users validate themselves using JavaScript embedded in the login page. To the developer, the ease of use, compatibility across browsers and speed all seem like benefits, but the advantages are all on the side of the hacker. The attack begins The hacker now has a footprint of your site, a list of hidden directories and a map of how the scripts fit together to make up the site's applications. What now? They have many options to choose from. The simplest is to point a password-cracker at the administrator account and leave it to gain entry for the purposes of stealing information that can be sold on, or to simply deface the site. This childish activity is normally associated with 'script kiddies' – teenagers who consider themselves hackers, but just run scripts developed by others. Real hackers will begin to explore weaknesses in the services identified as part of the footprint. On discovering an SQL service, for example, they can try connecting a telnet client to the port to gain command line access to the database management system (DBMS). Similarly, FTP and Telnet services are easily attacked using password crackers and by exploiting bugs in their software with buffer overflow attacks that can give command line access to the server. A more knowledgeable hacker still will try to break or bypass the validation code applied to an input field on a web page to see what happens. Validation code is supposed to take the values of input fields and sanitise them, rejecting data that's clearly wrong. If an input field is supposed to contain a number, for example, its validation should reject input if it contains anything other than the digits 0-9. If the hacker enters letters and doesn't get an error message, he can tell that the validation code is lacking. If the input field is for a part number, it may form the basis of a query to a back-end SQL database. That being the case, the hacker will ask what happens if they enter the SQL statement termination symbol (the ' symbol), followed by their own query. If this works, they could then ask the database for a list of tables. If they find ones that store customer details and credit card information, it's game over. 
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| Most internet users spend under £7 a month on content Posted: 31 Dec 2010 01:54 AM PST  A new report detailing US consumers online buying habits indicates that, whilst the markets for downloading apps, music, games and other content is growing, most consumers spend less than $10 (£6.46) a month on downloads. Reassuringly, for businesses selling content online, 65 per cent of US consumers regularly pay to access or download content online. It's just a shame that they don't pay more! Pew Research report The Pew Research Center report, released Thursday this week, confirms that the typical user pays between $1 to $10 per month for downloads or online streaming services Nearly half of those in the survey pay for either smartphone apps or music downloads. 18 per cent pay for a digital newspaper or magazine, although only 11 per cent had paid for premium content when they were able to access a paper or magazine's website for free. 10 per cent of those in the survey had paid to download e-books, while only 2 per cent admitted to having paid for online porn. A minority of heavy downloaders means that the average monthly payment for online content is $47 (£30.37) 
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| Most internet users spend under £7 a month on content Posted: 31 Dec 2010 01:54 AM PST A new report detailing US consumers online buying habits indicates that, whilst the markets for downloading apps, music, games and other content is growing, most consumers spend less than $10 (£6.46) a month on downloads. Reassuringly, for businesses selling content online, 65 per cent of US consumers regularly pay to access or download content online. It's just a shame that they don't pay more! Pew Research report The Pew Research Center report, released Thursday this week, confirms that the typical user pays between $1 to $10 per month for downloads or online streaming services Nearly half of those in the survey pay for either smartphone apps or music downloads. 18 per cent pay for a digital newspaper or magazine, although only 11 per cent had paid for premium content when they were able to access a paper or magazine's website for free. 10 per cent of those in the survey had paid to download e-books, while only 2 per cent admitted to having paid for online porn. A minority of heavy downloaders means that the average monthly payment for online content is $47 (£30.37) 
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| Posted: 31 Dec 2010 01:30 AM PST  I'm weary of annually having to upgrade my AV receiver each time the HDMI standard changes, and gaining one more HDMI input with each new model. Why don't the manufacturers understand that all AV sources use HDMI and, at this end of the market, accept we're likely to need more than four? But I have now found an AV receiver that actually has more digital than analogue inputs and enough HDMI ports for all my components, including two more that can work at the same time. So with 3D video switching and audio return catered for, Yamaha's RX-V1067 does seem quite well futureproofed. It also has support for nine speakers and pre-outs for two subwoofers, giving you plenty of setup options. You can either bi-amp the fronts in a 7.1 system, or add a pair of front 'presence' speakers for a more cohesive sound using Yamaha's many Cinema DSP modes. Note there are only seven 105W amplifiers on board, so you'll need to add a stereo amp for the other two. Battleship build The unit itself is huge and heavy, like all the best AV receivers, with a rigid chassis and newly developed heat sink that also absorbs vibration. Inside, the symmetrical power amp layout keeps the signal path as simple as possible and there's also a Pure Direct button for cutting out the video signal for hi-fi listening. The crisp and glossy fascia houses a large LCD display with the lower half finished in more traditional brushed aluminium. Huge volume and source select dials flank the oil-damped, drop-down flap that conceals the rest of the controls and front AV inputs. This is where the eighth HDMI input lurks. Connectivity at the back is superb. It's heartening to see that composite video inputs have finally given way to HDMI ports. The Ethernet port allows networking with other DLNA devices and give you access to thousands of web-based radio stations. Yamaha has also supplied zippy onscreen graphics that now make setting up and controlling this sophisticated beast very easy indeed. The excellent YPAO auto calibration system is a godsend, too. Just plug the mic in and it'll generate all of the sound effects needed to set the speaker levels for you. You're free to go back and fine tune if you wish. In plain Dolby Digital mode, this amp has instant appeal. It packs enough power to make my six M&K speakers sing and the steering of effects between them feels effortless. Using Wolfman on Blu-ray as a test disc, the Yamaha receiver sounds exceptionally dynamic, placing sound in all corners of the room and building seamlessly from rustling leaves in a midnight forest to roaring and screaming with no uncomfortable jarring at the top-end. The balance feels lean and open with plenty of accurate treble clarity, but there's enough low-end information to give a neutral overall sound. The big advantage here is the speaker flexibility. I preferred to have the Yamaha switched into 7.1 mode, but using a single surround back speaker, for movie listening. However, wiring two additional speakers above and to the sides of the front pair and choosing the 'presence' mode has the effect of spreading the sound wider and higher, which can really enhance music. This is the 3D soundstage, to which removable stickers on the front of the unit cryptically elude. The best option then is to add a stereo amplifier and drive all nine speakers at the same time. I was able to achieve a very convincing 9.2 home cinema from this reasonably priced receiver. And with all of the speakers in place, you can make the most of Yamaha's numerous DSP modes, which are all sorted into Music and Movie categories. Sonically, the Yamaha is a big success and its feature set is commendable. Yes, the lack of Wi-Fi networking is annoying, and the handset is a bit basic, but it should be able to hold its own at this price point. In fact, thanks to its futureproofed connectivity and 3D capability, it could be the last AV receiver you'll have to buy for a few years at least. Related Links
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| Exclusive: Skype rejects Chinese VoIP ban Posted: 31 Dec 2010 01:13 AM PST  The Chinese government has moved to ban non-Chinese VoIP/internet telephony services in China, though Skype is refusing to accept the ban. The Telegraph reported on Thursday 30 December that China had announced that it had made the use of Skype illegal in the country. The Chinese government announced that all internet phone calls were to be banned in China apart from those made over the two state-owned networks, China Unicom and China Telecom. Skype to be illegal "[This] is expected to make services like Skype unavailable in the country," read a report in the Communist party newspaper People's Daily. For its part, Skype is refusing to accept the ban. When asked directly if China has banned or restricted the use of Skype anywhere in China, including on PCs or mobile phones, a Skype spokesperson said: "No, users in China currently can access Skype via TOM Online, our majority JV partner. TOM Online offers local versions of Skype for Windows, MAC as well as mobile platforms such as Symbian and Windows Mobile. More details can be found at skype.tom.com." When pressed and asked if Skype can see such a move as possible, the Skype spokesperson added: "We do not comment on speculation." China is now the world's largest market for VoIP calls. The Chinese ministry of Industry and Information Technology has so far declined to comment on when the new regulations will be put in place. 
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