Author: Eva Glass

Eva Glass first rose to prominence in The INQUIRER. She continues to work behind the scenes to dig out the best stories.

MP hits out at Welsh blog site

Posted on September 10, 2014 by - News

hocThe Tory MP for Aberconwy, Guto Bebb, has hit out at a local anonymous blog site in an attempt to prevent trolling and malicious gossip.

Bebb asked Michael Penning, the policing minister, in an adjournment debate what the Home Office attitude was to sites such as “Thoughts of Oscar”, which he said “is probably best described as a small town poison pen letter blog”.

He alleged that over year the site had harassed, abused, libelled and targeted individuals, businesses, council officials and local councillors anonymously.

He said that he had attempted to ignore the blog, but earlier this year he alleged “the site published a number of libels against me” so he took the matter to the North Wales police. A number of his constituents had approached him to say that they had been attacked by the site but they had been told by North Wales police that nothing could be done and the police could take no action.

Two constituents who ran local businesses used a private detective to trace individuals associated with the blog.

The policing minister, Michael Penning, said harassment and trolling is an offence and there are many pieces of legislation to deal with it.

He said he didn’t know how the North Wales police interpreted in north Wales but prosecutions have taken the place in the rest of the country. You can find the full debate here.

Broadcom intros combo chip

Posted on September 10, 2014 by - News

broadcom_logoSemiconductor firm Broadcom has completed work on integrating global navigation satellite system and a sensor hub combination chip on the same die.

The company said the chip will be used to create apps for health, fitness and so called “life logging”, by providing software with an always on background location. Life logging means a mobile device knows where you are and the chip will manage functions to maximise battery life.

The integrated global navigation chip will provide a direct connection to wi-fi technology and so will improve battery power and context awareness.

The chip, the BCM4773 allows information from wi-fi, Bluetooth Smart, GPS and MEMS (micro electro-mechanical systems) to be calculated on one SoC (system on a chip) instead of having to use the application processor.  The design, claims Broadcom, will reduce the printed circuit board area by 34 percent and can offer up to 80 percent power savings.

Broadcom says the chip will support five different satellite systems including GPS, GLONASS, SBAS, QZSS and BeiDou.  The chip is already in production.

Microsoft improves its Azure offerings

Posted on September 10, 2014 by - News

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeSoftware company Microsoft said it has added features to its “cloud-first” media services.

The features incude HD quality live streaming, protection capabilities and a service to simply indexing audio and video content.

In addition, Microsoft has added four industry partners to its Azure Media Services including Telestream’s Wirecast, NewTek TriCaster, Cires21 and JW Player.

Microsoft said it is indtroducing faster encoding speeds and more cost effective billing.  The better Azure Media Encoder is billed on output GBs while it used to be based on both input and output GBs – that means cost savings, the company claims.

The Azure Media Indexer is a content extraction service to index media libraries so they can be searched by keywords, phrases or clips and also create transcripts of audio files.

Researchers exploit UHF spectrum

Posted on September 10, 2014 by - News

Knightly, Anand and GuerraBoffins at Rice University said they have discovered how to effectively use the unused UHF TV spectrum, creating streams of data over wireless hotspots that could operate for miles.

Edward Knightly, professor at the Rice department of electrical and computer engineering, said: “The holy grail of wireless communications is to go both fast and far.  Usually you can have or the other but not both.  Wireless local area networks today can serve data very fast, but one brick wall and they’re done. UHF can travel far, but it hasn’t had the high capacity of wi-fi.”

The researchers will show a multiuser and multiantenna transmission scheme for UHF at a conference in Hawaii today.

The UHF spectrum became available after the move to digital TV. UHF signals travel for miles and would be useful to provide broadband capabilities for remote communities.

Lead researcher Narendra Anand said: “When comparing UHF and wi-fi, there’s usually a tradeoff of capacity for range or vice versa. Imagine that the wi-fi access point in your home or office sends data down a 100-lane highway, but’s only one mile long.  For UHF, the highway is 100 miles long but only three or four lanes wide, and you cannot add any lanes.”

He said that efficiently using the lanes of UHF involves a multiantenna transmission technique that allows access by many people using the same channel simultaneously.

Pictured here from left to right are researchers Edward Knightly, Narendra Anand and Ryan Guerra.

Scientists crystallise light

Posted on September 10, 2014 by - News

Princeton University crystallised lightPrinceton University scientists have locked together photos and created crystallised light.

The reason for the scientists doing this somewhat unusual thing is because they’re aiming at developing room temperature superconductors.

Hakan Tureci, an assistant professor of electrical engineering, said: “We are interested in exploring – and ultimately controlling and directing – the flow of energy at the atomic level. The goal is to better understand current materials and processes and to evaluate materials that we cannot yet create.”

The research could also lead to more efficient computers.  Current computers use classical mechanics. But, said the researchers: “The world of atoms and photons obeys the rules of quantum mechanics, which include a number of strange and very counterintuitive features. “

Building a quantum computer would allow many problems to be solved that can’t be using the mechanical model.  Building a quantum computer is, however, very difficult, the researchers said.

Tureci pointed out that sometimes light acts like a wave and other times a particle – a photon. “Here we set up a situation where light effectively behaves like a particle in the sense that two photons can interact very strongly,” he said. “In one mode of operation light sloshes back and forth like a liquid, in the other it freezes.”

Scientists develop malware tool

Posted on September 9, 2014 by - News

Malware, Wikimedia CommonsA team of researchers at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) claims to have developed a tool to analyse numbers of apps to trace the origin and family of malware.

Guillermo Suarez de Tangil, a researcher at the computer science department at the university, said malware can be in smartphones and even in washing machines.

“The amount of malware is constantly increasing and it is becoming more intelligent for that reason,” he said.  “Security analysts and market administrators are overwhelmed and cannot afford exhaustive checking for each app.”

The tool is called Dendroid and will track down the family and nature of the malware.  “Developers generally reuse components of other malwares, and that precisely is what allows us to construct this genetic map,” he said.

He said antivirus software used in smartphones use detection engines based on signatures and its effectiveness is questionable, largely because smartphone resources are limited compared to a PC.

Smartphones to aid Parkinson’s victims

Posted on September 9, 2014 by - News

smartphones-genericA team of software developers at Aston University have designed tech that will help doctors diagnose Parkinson’s disease.

According to the BBC, it is hard for doctors to be sure of a diagnosis without being able to monitor their speech and movements over a period of time.

But because smartphones have motion detectors, GPS capabilities as well as a microphone, it’s possible to provide additional data for doctors once a patient has left a surgery.

Apparently, changes in people’s voices can be an early symptom of the disease and in a recent study 17,000 individuals provided voice samples over the phone. And motion sensors can be used to measure the way a person moves.

Aston University, in cooperation with the University of Rochester NY are looking for 2,500 people to download the app to their smartphones and perform different tests.

You can find more at the BBC, here.

Google squeezed by Europe again

Posted on September 9, 2014 by - News

330ogleGoogle is facing further pressure from the European Commission over its dominance of the search market.

EC competion czar Joaquin Almunia said that the organisation is likely to take a look into its Android mobile operating system as well as its dominance in the mobile market.

The EC first started an investigation into possible abuse of its leading position in 2010, and believes the search giant may be anti-competitive.

Last weekend, Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, said on his blog that his company’s search engine was just part of the web landscape.  That follows adverts from a group of publishers accusing the company is too dominant .  It has an estimated 90 percent market share in Europe.

Schmidt rebutted those claims, saying that it isn’t promoting its own products at the expense of its competition. People often go directly to news sites and go to travel sites directly, rather than using Google.

He claimed that the increasing use of apps on smartphones and tablets bypassed Google completely.  He claims that Google is just interested in helping users.

Google is not evil.  But it’s not a non-profit organisation.

Storage software gets boost

Posted on September 9, 2014 by - News

emcRevenues from the worldwide storage software market rose by 6.3 percent in the second quarter of this year, according to figures from IDC.

It said revenues during Q2 2014 came to nearly $3.8 billion.

The leaders in the pack were  EMC, IBM and Symantec which had markt shares of 25.9 percent, 16 percent and 13.3 percent respectively.

Data protection and recovery software showed bigger growth, up 10.2 percent in the quarter, compared to the same quarter in 2013.  Revenues for those totalled $1.45 billion. storage infrastructure sales amounted to $448 million.  Storage and device management software sales rose by 4.1 percent to stand at $708 million.

Eric Sheppard, research director of storage software at IDC said there was broad growth over most markets.

”Sales of data protection and recovery software accounted for almost 60 percent of the spending during the quarter, driven by a market wide move to improve application resiliency, continued uptake in appliance based offering and healthy attach rates within the integrated systems market”, he said.

Homes to be packed with gizmos

Posted on September 9, 2014 by - News

chateauIn just eight years time, ordinary family homes will be bursting with technology.

That’s a prediction market research firm Gartner is making for 2022.  Its report said a home in affluent societies, at least, could have over 500 smart devices.

So what are these devices to be?  It estimates a wide range of domestic equipment will become “smart”, inasmuch as they’ll include some level of sensing and intelligence and the ability to communicate wirelessly.

And such vacuum cleaners and washing machines won’t cost more to have “smartness”, with semiconductor economies of scale meaning that a chip won’t cost more than about one US dollar.

Your cooker will be smart, your TVs will be smart, your fitness equipment will be smart, your security will be smart, your toaster will be smart. Everything will be smart as the internet of things starts to cast its spell over our world.

But it won’t be all plain sailing, because ordinary people might not want all this “smartness”.  Products which incorporate intelligence must be easy to use and not require a degree in geekiness. And if smartness can’t be relied upon and start failing – well your house might not be such a home.

BBC wades into VPN pirates.

Posted on September 9, 2014 by - News

Capture-of-BlackbeardThe BBC has told the Australian government that it would be wise to consider all users of VPNs as pirates.

In a submission to the Australian Government on the issue of online piracy, the BBC said that ISPs should be obliged to monitor their customers’ activities.

If a punter uses VPN-style services and consume a lot of bandwidth it should be assumed that they are stealing content.

BBC Worldwide has now presented its own views to the Aussie Federal Government and it is clear that the corporation wants new anti-piracy measures to go further than ever before.

The BBC moaned that the recent leaking of the new series of Doctor Who to file-sharing networks acted “as a spoiler” to the official global TV premiere.

“Despite the BBC dedicating considerable resources to taking down and blocking access to these Doctor Who materials, there were almost 13,000 download attempts of these materials from Australian IP addresses in the period between their unauthorised access and the expiration of the usual catch-up windows,” the BBC wrote.

The BBC wants to ISPs leant on and set up a graduated response scheme of educational messages backed up by punitive measures for the most persistent of infringers.

Those sanctions could lead to a throttling of a users’ internet connection but should not normally lead to a complete disconnection.

The BBC said that ISPs should not only forward notices, but also spy on their customers’ Internet usage habits.

Aunty said that the situation has been made worse by the adoption of virtual private networks and proxy servers by some users, allowing them to circumvent geo-blocking technologies and further evade detection.

In Australia, the sticking point is who should pay for all this. The ISPs believe they should not have to pay for anything, but the BBC thinks that the costs need to be shared.

“In light of the fact that a large inducement for internet users to become customers of ISPs is to gain access to content (whether legally or illegally), it is paramount that ISPs are required to take an active role in preventing and fighting online copyright infringement by establishing and contributing meaningfully to the cost of administering some form of graduated response scheme,” the BBC wrote.

Intel expands Xeon E5 family

Posted on September 9, 2014 by - News

The-Meaning-of-Life-monty-python-17864160-852-480Intel has expanded its Xeon E5 family and giving them higher core counts, the more advanced Haswell-EP architecture, and DDR4.

The result, at least on paper, turns the E5 into a top of the range server chip and a big leap for the entire Xeon E5 series.

The Xeon E5 v2 chips, based on Ivy Bridge, topped out at 12 cores per socket, however the new cores can manage 18 cores per socket.

What makes the new chips slightly less appealing is that there is an increase in the power draw, the Xeon E5 v2 family ranged from 50W to 150W, whereas the Xeon E5 v3 family will span 55W – 160W in a single workstation configuration.

It is all possible because of the Haswell architecture which doubled certain cache bandwidths and introduced features like AVX2, which offers a theoretical near-doubling of floating point performance.

AVX2 did not turn out as sexy as Intel had hoped because most consumer software does not got a benefit from using it.

But in high performance computing, database processing, and other enterprise tasks it is starting to get noticed. Intel has also provided full support for DDR4. Exactly how much DDR4 you can use per socket will depend on your the clock speed and the restrictions on these systems are fairly tight. DDR4-1866 will only allow two DIMMs per channel.

Other features include integrated USB 3.0 support, a full suite of SATA 6G ports, and up to four 10 GigE ports.

 

Microsoft responds to Getty legal

Posted on September 8, 2014 by - News

gavelA lawsuit issued by Getty Images against Microsoft last week has resulted in the software giant climbing down.

Getty Images alleged that Microsoft threatened its vast library of copyright images with a widget for its search engine called Bing Image.  That beta software allowed people to embed images into their own web site.

But Getty complained that gave access to its images and threatened its business. It said in its allegation against Microsoft that Bing trawled the website and found as many images as was possible, and copied and indexed every image it came across, ignoring the copyright status of the pictures and without asking permission from copyright owners.

Now Microsoft has taken down the widget saying on its website only that it had temporarily removed it. No doubt its legal advisors are talking to Getty’s legal advisors.

Cyber Threat Alliance signs majors

Posted on September 8, 2014 by - News

symantecTwo major security players – Intel McAfee and Symantec – have team up with other vendors and joined the Cyber Threat Alliance (CTA).

The CTA was originally formed by Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks in May this year.  The aim of the alliance is to coordinate industry players to combat cyber hackers by collaborating on threats and sharing intelligence.

Information share will include info on zero day vulnerabilities, botnet command and control, mobile threats and shared malware samples.

The CTA has issued an open invitation to other organisations that share in its goals. It hopes that other major league security players will join them. It is offering membership not just to tech vendors, but to government agencies, non profit groups and corporations too.

Symantec VP Adam Bromwich said that because security breaches are bigger, cost more and happen more often, it’s teamed up to be a founding member of the CTA.

Vincent Weafer, a senior VP at Intel McAfee, said the industry need to cooperate and collaborate to prevent such threats.  “This cyber alliance provides a critical framework for educating each otheron the infrastructure and evolving tactics behind these attacks, he said.

HP beefs up security

Posted on September 8, 2014 by - News

HPAccessData and HP are to get closer to each other by increasing security assessment and quick fixes for global organisations.

HP’s service arm, Rapid Incident Respons Services is intended to help corporations quickly investigate what’s gone wrong after a hack and provide forensic evidence of incidents.

HP will now provide further services using AccessData’s Resolution One to give advance warning of security threats and provide alerts to prevent networks, endpoints, mobile devices and applications being compromised.

AccessData claims its ResolutionOne offering will extend HP’s own service with capabilities including root cause analysis, full packet capture network forensics, data on hardware, assessment of malware, and auditing across enterprises.  ResolutionOne also lets security and response teams collaborate in real time with automated batch processing to eradicate threats.

AccessData says it has over 130,000 users in law enforcement, at law firms, government agencies and corporations.