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Download this Adobe Flash update now (again!), and other news for Feb. 21, 2014
For the second time this month, Adobe has released an emergency update to its Flash Player software on OS X and Windows. What's wrong with it this time? Here's what the researchers who discovered the latest vulnerability had to say: This threat actor clearly seeks out and compromises websites of organizations related to international security policy, defense topics, and other non-profit sociocultural issues. The actor either maintains persistence on these sites for extended periods of time or is able to re-compromise them periodically. This actor also has early access to a number of zero-day exploits, including Flash and Java, and deploys a variety of malware families on compromised systems. Based on these and other observations, we conclude that this actor has the tradecraft abilities and resources to remain a credible threat in at least the mid-term. Mac users can confirm what version they're running with this tool. The current, secure version (as of the time of this writing) is 12.0.0.70. Older versions put your system at risk. Users can manually download the latest version of Flash here. In other news: A teenaged Jony Ive almost gave up on a career in industrial design, but was talked out of it by renowned designer Tom Karen. Apple has registered several more new generic top-level domains including apple.technology, ipad.technology, iphone.technology, and mac.technology. Google is launching 'Project Tango,' a 3D-Mapping smartphone containing "customized hardware and software designed to track the full 3D motion of the device, while simultaneously creating a map of the environment." And it looks awesome.
Download this Adobe Flash update now, and other news for Feb. 5, 2014
Adobe has released a "critical" update for Flash that addresses a zero day exploit that allows hackers to gain complete control of a Mac or Windows system. And people wonder why Steve Jobs and Apple disliked Adobe Flash so much? In a security bulletin Adobe posted online, it said: Adobe has released security updates for Adobe Flash Player 12.0.0.43 and earlier versions for Windows and Macintosh and Adobe Flash Player 11.2.202.335 and earlier versions for Linux. These updates address a critical vulnerability that could potentially allow an attacker to remotely take control of the affected system. Adobe is aware of reports that an exploit for this vulnerability exists in the wild, and recommends users update their product installations to the latest versions. Mac users can check what version of Adobe Flash is running on their system by using this tool. The current, secure version (as of the time of this writing) is 12.0.0.44. Older versions put your system at risk. Users can manually download the latest version of Flash here. In other news: Apple has released the fifth beta of iOS 7.1. The latest beta sees continued tweaks to iOS 7, some of which appeared in earlier betas. Noticeable changes include new Siri voices for UK and Australian English, Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. The shift key on iOS 7's keyboard has also received a redesign. Speaking of that iOS 7.1 beta 5... Apple has made it impossible to jailbreak iOS 7.1 using Evasi0n. Apple has also released a new beta of OS X Server 3.1. Developers can download it here. The Economic Times is reporting that Apple has already begun manufacturing on the iPhone 4 again. It says Apple is going to use the phone's lower pricing to regain lost market share in India, Indonesia and Brazil. When meeting with the Turkish president yesterday, Tim Cook confirmed that a "unique" flagship Apple Store will open in Istanbul in the future.
Climb high in Scaffold Now, a Tetris-inspired platformer
Scaffold Now provides a unique spin on the classic puzzle game Tetris by turning it into a platformer. Finally, a version of Tetris where the line piece isn't the most valuable and coveted thing. Scaffold Now is a simple Flash game in which you must drop blocks to the ground to help your little mushroom-looking character climb higher. The board scrolls up, so you'll need to climb in order to keep from being swallowed up by the bottom of the screen. If that happens, it's game over and your character goes to the same hellacious purgatory all cleared lines must go. You can play Scaffold Now by heading over to the game's website, though we'd be remiss if we didn't point out it can be a little janky at times. Scaffold Now's controls aren't the most precise and the game periodically locked up during our trials, though these hiccups did little to discourage our attempts to reach the peak of Mount Tetris.
Relightable Dome creates interactive images where you control the light source
Stitching together a bunch of images to create a single picture is hardly a new concept. Panoramas are old hat, and Google is even using 360-degree photos to help guide your shopping decisions. But a team of students at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, with the help of a few others, are taking a slightly different approach. The Relightable Dome, or Relightable Photobooth, uses Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) technology which captures an object or person under a variety of lighting conditions then combine it into a single, interactive photo. Inside the box is a concave surface studded with 81 LED flashes. A custom microcontroller inside triggers each flash in sequence and a camera mounted at the rear captures an image at each stop. And, while the enclosure is custom, the camera doesn't need to be. At the back is simply a bracket that practically any shooter can be mounted on, though in this case it was a Canon DSLR. The pictures are then stitched together on a laptop using a piece of open source software and a special algorithm to create an interactive image where you control the light source. The whole process, from triggering the first flash to final file takes less than five minutes.
One Shots: Find the chicken
Will there ever be a game as visually distinctive and memorable as Glitch? Considering that I'm still getting screenshots in from a game that was canned almost a year ago, I doubt it. Reader Phinneas gave me this maddening puzzle that has consumed my days as I pore over it looking for the chicken. Where? Where? Where could it be? Under that tentacle-plant-thing? Under the next? Lurking beyond the frame? Oh, what trickery is this? "This picture is of my favorites of the game's last few days," Phinneas said with an implied taunt in his voice. "I still hold out hope that it will be resurrected someday." As I continue to look for the chicken, you can move on to the rest of our week's submissions!
Safari tops Fixya mobile browser usability scores
Fixya is a Q&A website that compiles fix-it requests for a variety of items from cars and chainsaws to routers and monitors. Recently, the site turned its attention to mobile browsers, looking through a total of 61,582 different help requests for the category to determine which browser had the best usability score. The winner? Apple Safari for iOS. The company combined and analyzed data from the problem impressions on its site, mixed it in with market share data from NetMarketShare, and came up with a usability score. The higher the score, the fewer problem impressions Fixya saw in relation to total market share for a browser. Safari came in at 1.31, with the stock Android browser falling well behind at 0.87, Opera coming in at 0.70, Chrome at 0.64 and Internet Explorer dropping the ball at 0.28. When it came to Safari, most of the so-called issues dealt with the lack of Flash support in the mobile browser, along with the UI. However, it should be noted that most of the numbers were gathered prior to the release of iOS 7, so many of the UI issues (e.g., lack of screen real estate) have been addressed. The full report is available on the Fixya blog, and goes into tremendous detail about the pros and cons of every mobile browser.
Super Hexagon creator unveils free browser-based puzzler Naya's Quest
Terry Cavanagh recently released a new flash-based game, Naya's Quest. The enjoyable little adventure game has players traversing through an abandoned town to "the edge," an isometric world full of puzzling rooms. The attractive, challenging platformer also has a catchy soundtrack, which Cavanagh created and released on BandCamp. Cavanagh is best known for crafting VVVVVV and Super Hexagon. Naya's Quest is one of six free games listed on Cavanagh's site, and one that you should probably spend time with right now.
Gallery: The Tokyo Game Show 2013 Square Enix/Play Arts Booth
An annual staple of the Tokyo Game Show's shopping area, this year's Square Enix/Play Arts booth spared no expense in showcasing the future of its incredibly cute and/or highly detailed lines of action figures and statues. Now, we don't really have room for this sort of stuff in our tiny, hopeless apartments, but we'd be lying if we said we haven't already priced out Ikea display cases for some of this loot. But for the folks out there with ample shelf space and a proclivity for placing plastic personnel on pedestals, take note: You want some Metal Gear? You want some tiny little adorable Theaterhythm dudes? You want a hyper-future robotic samurai Batman? Our gallery has you covered, yo.
Composite lighting technique lets amateurs produce well-lit photos in minutes (video)
Hobbyist photographers don't often have the luxury of elaborate lighting rigs. However, Adobe and Cornell University have developed a new software technique that could bring pro-grade illumination to a wider audience. Known as computational lighting design, the solution simplifies a familiar trick that combines shots taken with a camera's external flash placed in different positions. The software uses multiple sample photos to create composite images that emphasize color, edge lighting and fill lighting; editors just have to balance those three light values to get the desired effect. While the code is still unpolished, it's good enough that even beginners can produce well-lit masterpieces in less than 15 minutes. Adobe believes that the technique could reach future versions of apps like Lightroom or Photoshop, so don't be surprised if still-life photography catches on in the near future.
Samsung unveils first SSDs with 3D V-NAND memory, but only for enterprise
Well, that was quick. Samsung said it was producing the world's first 3D vertical NAND memory just a week ago, and it has already started building the first SSDs based on that memory. Unfortunately, they're not meant for the enthusiast crowd: the new 480GB and 960GB drives are instead designed for enterprise-class servers, where V-NAND's blend of high capacity and reliability makes the most sense. Don't be too forlorn, however. Samsung promises that the new memory will eventually reach PC-oriented SSDs, which could bring spacious flash storage to a much wider audience.
Crossbar's RRAM to boast terabytes of storage, faster write speeds than NAND
Hardware makers often sing the praises of their latest and greatest flash memory, but the folks at Crossbar are ready to show them up with resistive RAM (RRAM) that they've been quietly working on. Compared to NAND, RRAM comes in at half the size and boasts 20 times faster write speeds (140MB/s), reads data at 17MB per second, guzzles 20 times less power and has 10 times more endurance. Since RRAM is non-volatile memory, it can keep data even when it's powered off, á la NAND. As if that weren't enough, 3D stacking construction allows for several terabytes of storage, endowing one 200 x 200mm 200mm2 chip with one terabyte. Unlike many tech breakthroughs however -- we're looking at you, graphene -- this one is just about ready to find its way into finished products. Crossbar has manufactured RRAM within a standard chip factory, and claims that it can be churned out easily with existing production infrastructure. According to the firm, it's in the fine-tuning process and plans to introduce the tech into the world of embedded SoCs. Sure, the outfit is the exclusive holder of some RRAM patents, but it aims to license its know-how to system-on-a-chip creators. Update: Thanks to those readers who spotted our error on the silicon area -- it's now been fixed.
Samsung ships first 3D vertical NAND flash, defies memory scaling limits
The main challenge in producing higher-capacity flash storage is one of scale -- as density goes up, so does cell interference and the chances of a breakdown. Samsung may have overcome that barrier (if temporarily) by mass-producing the first 3D vertical NAND memory, or V-NAND. Instead of putting memory cells on a conventional 2D plane, the company reworked its long-serving Charge Trap Flash technology to create a 3D cell structure with more breathing room. The result is flash that improves both reliability and speed at higher densities; Samsung claims that the new technology is 2-10X more reliable than its ancestors, and twice as quick at writing data. The initial V-NAND chip offers a 128-gigabit (16GB) capacity that we've seen before, but its underlying technique should scale quickly when a chip can include as many as 24 stacked cell layers. Although Samsung hasn't named the first devices with V-NAND inside, we won't be surprised if our next phone or SSD is particularly spacious.
Refresh Roundup: week of July 29th, 2013
Your smartphone and / or tablet is just begging for an update. From time to time, these mobile devices are blessed with maintenance refreshes, bug fixes, custom ROMs and anything in between, and so many of them are floating around that it's easy for a sizable chunk to get lost in the mix. To make sure they don't escape without notice, we've gathered every possible update, hack, and other miscellaneous tomfoolery we could find during the last week and crammed them into one convenient roundup. If you find something available for your device, please give us a shout at tips at engadget dawt com and let us know. Enjoy!
iblazr wants to bring more professional lighting to your iOS photos
Someone at Apple is probably going to put my name on yet another blacklist, but it has to be said -- the iPhone camera flash sucks. In general, it doesn't have enough power to light up subjects that are more than just a few feet away, there's no way to adjust the temperature of the light, and ... well, the list goes on and on. Fortunately Kiev-based iblazr lab has a Kickstarter that's nearing its goal of US$58,000 to start production of iblazr, a tiny, yet sophisticated flash and light for iOS and Android devices that comes with an accompanying app to deftly synchronize shutter and flash. The images here show how well the iblazr and its app work together for fill-in flash, and just how powerful the iblazr is compared to the standard iPhone flash (iPhone flash on top, iblazr below): The team, headed by Vlad Tislenko, produced a very good promo video that you can view below. At this time, you can back the project and get an iblazr when they ship sometime in December starting at just $39.
ASUS' RAIDR Express PCI-e SSD is compatible with both legacy and UEFI BIOS
These days, it's fairly easy to find a PCI Express-based SSD to transform one's desktop -- Angelbird, Fusion-io, Micron and ASUS will sell you one, just to name a few. That said, the last of those three has just revealed a new entrant that will certainly catch the eye of many, as the RAIDR Express claims to be the first PCI-e SSD to be compatible with both legacy and UEFI BIOS. The so-called DuoMode feature is joined by 240GB of storage space, sequential 830MB/s read and 810MB/s write speeds and a reported 620,000 hours mean time between failure (MTBF). You'll also find the latest LSI SandForce controller, Toshiba-built 19nm MLC flash, and 100,000 4K read/write input/output operations per second (IOPS). The bundled RAMDisk utility allows users to dedicate up to 80 percent of a computer's available RAM for use as a high-speed virtual drive, and if you needed any further proof that it's fast, look no further than in the video after the break. Curiously, ASUS isn't talking pricing just yet, but it should start shipping in the very near future.
Samsung unveils not-so-entry-level SSD 840 EVO with up to 1TB of space
Disappointed that most entry-level solid-state drives are limited in capacity, speed or both? You'll be happy with Samsung's newly unveiled SSD 840 EVO, then. While it's badged as a starter model, the 2.5-inch SATA drive carries up to 1TB of storage, or twice as much as the regular SSD 840. Thanks to both 10nm-class flash memory and a multi-core MEX memory controller, the EVO range is also faster than you'd expect from the category. Depending on the model, sequential write speeds have doubled or tripled versus the original series, peaking at 520MB/s; the flagship 1TB edition can read at a similarly blistering 540MB/s. Samsung doesn't yet have US pricing for the SSD 840 EVO line, although it expects the drives to reach "major" markets worldwide by early August, with other regions coming later.
Innodisk outs embedded SATA nanoSSD, nets 480MB per second from one chip
While single-chip SSDs are clearly known quantities, they usually run at a much more leisurely pace than their larger counterparts. Innodisk doesn't think size and speed have to be contradictory -- it just unveiled an embedded version of its nanoSSD that performs almost as well as its much bigger counterparts. The µSSD-based SATA chip has a tiny footprint (0.63 x 0.79 inches) and draws just 1W of peak power, but can still read at up to 480MB/s and write at 175MB/s. As such, it's one of the few SSDs that can theoretically stuff desktop-class storage into a smartphone or tablet. Whether or not it will is another matter. Innodisk hasn't named customers for the nanoSSD so far, which leaves us guessing just where or when we'll see the drive in a finished product.
Apple patent application teams up multiple smartphone flashes for better lighting
Smartphone camera flashes are notoriously weak compared to dedicated models, but what if you could fire them from several handsets at once? Since none of us have the millisecond timing needed to do it manually, Apple has filed a patent application to let any number of iOS (or other devices with a flash) fill in the light automatically. It'd work by using a master device as the camera, which would trigger slave devices positioned around the subject to fire their flashes when the shutter is opened. A test image would first be taken and analyzed by the software, which would then remotely adjust the intensity of the slave flashes to produce the final photo. The filing allows for virtually any device with a sensor to act as the capture device and a broad variety of illumination devices, including dedicated lights, smartphones, tablets or camera flashes -- though we imagine Apple would concentrate on its own products. If you're already planning to use friend #1 for a kicker light, friend #2 as an eye-light and friend #3 as a hair light on that next outing, please remember it's still just an application for now.
Super Mario Crossover upgrades to version 3.0
If you've forgotten about Super Mario Bros. Crossover, allow us to refresh your memories. Developed by Exploding Rabbit, Super Mario Bros. Crossover is a browser-based game that allows players to run and jump their way through Super Mario Bros. using a variety of characters from other game properties. In celebration of the crossover game's third anniversary, Exploding Rabbit decided it's time to unveil version 3.0 of the game in a new trailer.Of the newer updates to Super Mario Bros. Crossover, the game's new levels stand out. Taken from one of Mario's more obscure appearances, Super Mario Bros. Special, the landscape of the levels changes with the game's difficulty settings. The game also received new skins, including ones inspired by the Castlevania series and Super Mario Bros. 2.Exploding Rabbit raised $53,509 on Kickstarter in June 2012 to fund the development of its original platformer, Super Retro Squad.[Thanks, Jay!]
The Perfect Ten: Final moments of MMOs, part 2
LAST TIME ON THE PERFECT TEN: Games were shut down, tears were shed, memories were dragged unwillingly from long-term storage, and videos were shown. Also, Marty totally suckered Biff into driving into a truck full of manure and then got his parents to kiss at a dance so that he wouldn't be erased from the space-time continuum. AND NOW FOR THE EXCITING CONCLUSION! Is it completely morbid to want to revisit (or see for the first time) the final moments of MMOs? Yes, but also no. Really, it's just interesting to me, and I have no great agenda at play here. Sometimes seeing how a game goes out can tell you a lot about its community and dev team. So join us now as we hit the second half of 10 videos showing the last few minutes of these online RPGs.
