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.

Apple makes more tablets

Posted on August 12, 2014 by - News

tabletDespite losing ground to more reasonably priced tablets, the fruity cargo cult is bashing out some more.

According to Bloomberg  Apple’s suppliers have begun manufacturing new iPad tablets in a desperate bid to revive flagging sales.

Apple has seen growth plummet from 2012, as larger phones became more popular and people delayed replacing their tablets.

Bloomberg said that mass production of the iPad with a 9.7-inch (24.6-cm) screen has already started, and it is likely to be unveiled by the end of current quarter or early next quarter.

A new version of the 7.9-inch iPad mini is also entering production and is likely to be available by the end of the year, Bloomberg said.

Even if the tablets don’t make any impact on the consumer market, Apple must be hoping that its partnership with IBM might net a few more sales by entering into a largely untapped corporate market.

That is if IBM can convince corporations that they really want less secure Apple gear on networks which are mostly based around Microsoft.

Apple shipped 13.2 million iPads in the June quarter, 8 percent less than a year earlier. Sales of the devices, which accounted for 15 percent of Job’s Mobs’  revenue, fell short of Wall Street’s expectations for the second quarter in a row.

Microsoft’s bottom line stripped

Posted on August 11, 2014 by - News

spankingMicrosoft is being seriously spanked by people buying naked PCs and installing pirated versions of its operating system, particularly in China.

Vole said that too few people in emerging markets are willing to pay for legitimate copies and this is holding back the spread of its newest Windows 8 version.

Ironically analysts say even buyers of pirate software prefer older versions and more than 90 percent of PCs in China, are running pre-8 versions of Windows.

Microsoft is trying to tackle the problem by offering Windows 8 at a discount to PC manufacturers who install its Bing search engine as the default. And it’s giving away versions of Windows 8 for phones and some tablets.

However Reuters  thinks that masks the fact that Redmond never really worked out how to get people in emerging markets to pay for its software.

In 2011, then CEO Steve Ballmer told employees that, because of piracy, Microsoft earned less revenue in China than in the Netherlands even though China bought as many computers as the United States.

This hurts Microsoft because 56 percent of its global revenue and 78 percent of operating profit came from Windows and Office.

In China PC makers working on wafer-thin margins see the operating system is one of the costliest parts of the machine.

The result is that up to 60 percent of PCs shipped in the emerging markets of Asia, have no Windows operating system pre-installed and carry some free, open source operating system like Linux. However once the owners get them home they just download a hot copy of Windows and Office.

Some Chinese retailers even offer “bundles” of pirated copies of Microsoft software alongside the main sale.

Microsoft has had a job getting respected firms like Lenovo to stop shipping naked PCs, but the Chinese firm countered that its margins were too low. China announced a new law requiring PCs to be shipped with operating systems. That merely dented piracy rates, which fell to 79 percent in 2009 from 92 percent in 2004.

Lenovo has reached an agreement with Microsoft in June to ensure that Lenovo PCs sold in China would come pre-installed with a genuine Windows operating system.

The way Microsoft has done this is to push the price of Windows low enough to make it worth a PC maker’s while. The cost of a Windows license has fallen to below $50 from as high as $150.  So far it is not clear if that has worked.

 

For all wif-fi needs — ask the cat

Posted on August 11, 2014 by - News

cat-at-laptop-275A US bloke has catapulted into five minutes of fame in the silly season by wiring his grannie’s cat up to sniff out wi-fi networks in his neighbourhood.

Security researcher Gene Bransfield seized his nan’s moggie Coco and stuffed his collar loaded with a Spark chip, a Wi-Fi module, a GPS module, and a battery. Bransfield reasoned that Coco would visit most places in the area and he could use the moggie to sniff out networking catastrophes such as unsecured, or at least poorly secured, wireless access points. These were then categorised by Bransfield as good, bad or cataclysmic.

Coco sniffed out dozens of wi-fi networks, with four of them using easily broken WEP security, and another four that had no security at all.

Bransfield dubbed the whole method as “WarKitteh” which is sort of a mixture of wardriving and lolcat and apparently, you can convert your moggie to something more useful for only a $100.

Of course, everyone knows that cats are evil and only get away with it because they purr and are so so soft and any network work is bound to be part of some devilish plot. “WarKitteh” allows a hacker to send their moggie out with the same collar, identify open Wi-Fi connections, hack them and use them to do evil hacker sorts of things.

Cats are a notoriously unreliable network tool. They may spend 23 hours catatonic and then, when they finally move, will go nowhere near anyone’s wi-fi for days.

Nanomagnets improve supercomputers

Posted on August 8, 2014 by - News

magnet-manNanomagnet computer chips appear to make supercomputers run more efficiently, according to  researchers at the Technical University of Munich in Germany.

Irina Eichwald and her team of boffins have been using microchips made from tiny magnets rather than conventional power-hungry transistors may enable intensive number-crunching tasks.

On traditional silicon the bits of information, 0s and 1s, are represented by voltages across a transistor, each of which needs its own wire. Magnets can do the same job by switching their pole orientation: pointing north-south represents 1, say, and south-north is 0.

Eichwald found that flipping poles takes less energy than running current through a wire, so they need less power to run.

Nanomagnets have already been seen on microchips  but have been placed only on a single layer because they need extra space to work properly.

Now Eichwald has worked out a way to rival the density of transistor-based designs and grown a chip which is 100 nanomagnets deep.

Her team made a logic gate from stacked arrays of nanomagnets. Instead of wires, a handful of magnets above the chip induced magnetic fields. The magnets then flip their orientation one after the other, like dominoes, to the magnet performing the actual operation. In a test, the magnetic chip used 1/35th of the power a transistor used.

“A huge number of computing processes can now be done simultaneously with very low power consumption as you don’t need the connecting wires transistors need. You only need to generate a magnetic field across the chip,” says Eichwald.

New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329812.800-magnets-join-race-to-replace-transistors-in-computers.html#.U-RmOPmSyUY  says that the technology is one of a few which is in the race to replace silicon.

Questions posed about mega-hack

Posted on August 8, 2014 by - News

wargames-hackerQuestions have been raised among the security community about a huge attack on US systems which is alleged to have stolen 1.2 billion user name and password combinations and more than 500 million email addresses.

The hack was discovered by an outfit called Hold Security and was claimed to include confidential material gathered from 420,000 websites, including household names, and small Internet sites.

Hold Security has a history of uncovering significant hacks, including the theft last year of tens of millions of records from Adobe Systems, so it should have been seen as a reliable source.

The company said the attack was found after more than seven months of research and was being carried out by a Russian cyber gang which is currently in possession of the largest cache of stolen data. While the gang did not have a name, we dubbed it “CyberVor”.

All cool stuff, but many of the comments about the hack online centre on the fact that Hold Security happens to offer a $120/month breach notification service so that people can find out if the hackers have their passwords on file.

Others have focused on the fact that Hold Security timed the announcement to fit with the Black Hat Security conference to spark a debate on password security.

PC World  said there were unanswered questions about the hack.

Hold Security said the hacking group started out buying stolen credentials on the black market, then used those credentials to launch other attacks. However, it is unclear how many credentials they bought and how many of the 1.2 billion they culled themselves. In other words, this database, if it exists, could be full of ancient data.

It is also not clear if the passwords that are alleged to be stolen came from important financial sites or less important ones. It is also questionable what the hackers would do with those details.

If they are fresh credentials for important services like online banking, they are ripe to be used to siphon money from online accounts. If they are older or from little-used services, they might be used to send spam by email or post it in online forums.

 

 

Keith Alexander is a programming genius

Posted on August 7, 2014 by - News

KeithAlexanderThe former head of the NSA, Keith Alexander, has been getting into trouble for charging companies millions of dollars to tell them how to keep his former employers out of their systems.

The argument is that he is using all the material he gathered at the NSA to make a nice little earner in retirement. If he were a whistle-blower, they would lock him up, but since he is an adviser to corporates and is not giving out military operations details he can do what he likes.

However we think that the security community and the Senate is being a little hard on Keith, after all if a patent application is correct he is clearly a programming genius.

In the six months since he left the NSA, Alexander has come up with brand new anti-hacking concept that will have shedloads of patents. The former NSA chief said that IronNet has already signed contracts with three companies and that he hopes to finish testing the system by the end of September.

Now he could not have come up with that idea when he was at the NSA, because he would have been expected to use it for his job and to help his country, which is more or less what he was paid for.

This means that he had to come up with it after he left office in March. This means he not only wrote the code managed to make it work. This makes him a software genius and an organisational wiz-kid who displays skills we have not seen in a former military man.

In an interview to the Associated Press he said that if he retired from the Army as a brain surgeon, it be OK for him to go into private practice and make money doing brain surgery.

“I’m a cyber-guy. Can’t I go to work and do cyber stuff,” he asked. But he’s not. In the Army, he just managed “cyber guys.”

His system involves “behavioural modelling” as its secret sauce. The technology has been looked at by security experts but so far no one has got it go. Well other than Alexander which shows what sort of genius he must have been.

Intel plans another “new era”

Posted on August 6, 2014 by - News

broadwellChipmaker Intel is has been telling hacks and hackettes that it is going to be lifting the kimono on a “new era” of hardware next month.

It’s unclear what Intel could be announcing at IFA 2014 on September 5, 2014, in Berlin, Germany.  The smart money is on the company applying liberal coats of candle grease to wax lyrical about its next gen CPUs.

For those who came in late, Intel is widely expected to release new 5th-generation processors based on the company’s Broadwell architecture towards the end of this year.

After all Intel has already spilled the beans on its Core M, a super-thin processor that could pave the way for ultra-thin laptops and hybrids. They have also talked about Llama Mountain, a concept device powered by Core M that’s only 7.2mm thick and wears a 12.5-inch display.

Intel’s IFA 2014 presentation could also contain more information about these two devices as well, but that would be old news.

Intel needs to grab a few headlines its Devil’s Canyon CPU was found to offer a modest performance boost over older Intel chips and was greeted by a loud sounding yawn from the press.

Nomura’s dodgy maths goes Azure

Posted on August 6, 2014 by - News

mathsWhen you work on a newspaper you usually get a spanking from a grumpy sub-editor if you use the phrase “the world’s biggest” in a story. Which is why Nomura analyst Rick Sherlund has found himself in hot water by claiming that Microsoft’s Azure is headed to be the largest cloud in the world.

While everyone admits that Azure is doing very well, people were a little surprised when Sherlund claimed that Redmond was on track to make $5.7 billion revenue from Azure.

Apparently his prediction was by adding up some numbers from Microsoft’s last earnings.  Redmond said that cloud revenue grew 147 percent year-over-year. This led Nomura analyst Sherlund to predict Microsoft will hold the crown as top cloud by revenue by the end of 2014.

However there are those who have been questioning Sherlund’s maths InfoWorld  said that all Azure numbers are impressive but they are a long way from being the world’s biggest cloud.

It said that it is not clear that Microsoft’s “cloud revenue” is “Azure” in fact Redmond has been clear to keep the two things apart. It points out that it is not clear how much of Microsoft’s cash comes from Azure.

Amazon is seeing that slowed growth during its last earnings call, but it also revealed that its cloud business climbed 90 percent over the past year.

Given that AWS offered five times the compute capacity of the other 14 cloud providers in the Gartner Magic Quadrant combined as of August 2013, 90 percent growth is huge. So while Azure might grow like crazy, so is the competition.

This means that Redmond will even be close to having the biggest cloud by the end of the year. It will almost certainly continue to build out public cloud services that enterprises buy – just not the world’s biggest.

Apple and Samsung declare truce

Posted on August 6, 2014 by - News

soldiers-2The thermonuclear patent war between Apple and Samsung is only going to be fought in the US.

The two sides have negotiated a sort of truce, where the only court battles between the two will be fought in US courts.  It is a bit like Israel and Hamas agreeing to shoot at one another only in one district of Gaza.

Samsung Electronics said that it and Apple would continue to pursue existing cases in US courts. The two companies did not strike any cross-licensing deal.

However it is widely seen as a start and a significant lessening of corporate hostilities after years of bitter patent disputes over the intellectual property rights for mobile designs and technology.  The move will end legal fights in more than 12 countries in Asia, North America and Europe.

In any event, a win in the US will mean bigger awards for damages than other countries.

But some analysts have said that the two companies would eventually bury the hatchet and sign a cross-licensing deal.

 

Blackberry crush over

Posted on August 5, 2014 by - News

blackberry-juicerThe long and painful restructuring of Canada’s Blackberry mobile phone outfit is officially over.

According to an internal memo, spotted by Reuters. BlackBerry’s Chief Executive John Chen has said that the restructuring notification process and the workforce reduction that began three years ago is now behind the company.

So if your bottom is on a seat and you are reading the memo, then your job is safe for now.

Chen said that “barring any unexpected downturns in the market” Blackberry will be starting to hire staff in some areas such as product development, sales and customer service.

He thanked those who stayed with the company through the process and did not flee like rats from a sinking ship.

To give an idea of the scale of the cuts, over the last three years BlackBerry has lost 60 percent of its staff.

Chen, who took the reins at BlackBerry roughly eight months ago, has moved rapidly to stabilize the company by selling non-core assets, partnering to make the company’s manufacturing and supply chain more efficient, and raising cash through property sales.

In the memo, Chen told employees that he believes BlackBerry is now well on its way to recovery and that he is confident the company will meet its goal of being cash flow positive by the nd of the current fiscal year.

Chen stressed in the memo there was “no margin for error to complete BlackBerry’s turnaround to success,” and he called on employees to remain focused as the company rolls out an upgrade to its device management system and its new Passport and Classic devices later this year.

IBM applies science to HR cloud

Posted on August 4, 2014 by - News

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeBig Blue said that it has introduced cloud software and initiatives aimed at using analytics and workforce science to human relations.

The buzzwords IBM is using are “workforce engagement and transformation” – it is introducing a talent and change consulting practice supported by 100 behavioural scientists.

The big idea is to use social analytics to identify “top performers”, and guard against people leaving or being poached.

IBM did a survey which revealed that two out of five CEOs believe a big threat to keeping top people on comes from organisations outside their sectors.

The three cloud based applications are Kenexa Predictive Hiring, Kenexa Workforce Readiness and Kenexa Predicting Retention. IBM is starting to sell these cloud based products today.

Viglen wins Toshiba gong

Posted on August 4, 2014 by - News

ViglenBritish outfit Viglen said Toshiba likes it so much it has given it Platinum Partner of the year and Education Partner of the year status.

Qualification for these accolades is based on successful reselling of Toshiba products and adding value to the mix.

Viglen said it is now one of the biggest Toshiba resellers in the UK, meaning it can offer better support, reduce costs, and simplify IT procurement.

Viglen CEO Bordan Tkachuk said his company offered a set of value added services, including besoke service.

It considers itself to be a leading IT supplier in the UK education and public sectors.

Pictured here from left to right are Toshiba’s Mark Byrne, Nick Offin, head of channels, Viglen’s CEO Tkachuk and Neil Bramley, sales director Europe, Toshiba.

Apple wins approval for settlement

Posted on August 4, 2014 by - News

novità-apple-2013The fruity cargo cult Apple has managed to get a court to accept a settlement in a case where it ran an ebook racket with other publishers to jack up the price.

Apple has always denied that its super cool pricing cartel idea was illegal and that it did anything wrong.  In fact it is appealing its conviction.  The settlement is conditional on Apple not getting the case overturned on appeal.

US District Judge Denise Cote approved a $450 million settlement of claims Apple harmed consumers by conspiring with five publishers to raise e-book prices on Friday. In approving the settlement, Cote overcame concerns she had expressed over a settlement provision allowing Apple to pay just $70 million if related litigation were to drag out.

That accord calls for Apple to pay $400 million to consumers and $50 million to lawyers if the federal appeals court in New York upholds Cote’s findings, and nothing if the Cupertino, California-based company wins its appeal.

But if the appeals court overturns Cote and returns the case to her, perhaps for a new trial, Apple will owe only $US50 million to consumers and $US20 million to lawyers.

But in Friday’s decision, she noted that the states and consumers “strongly believe” such a scenario is unlikely, and that the settlement has provisions to reduce its likelihood.

She also said the plaintiffs agreed to provide more details about the settlement to consumers, to help them decide whether to accept its terms or sue Apple separately.

China bans Symantec and Kaspersky

Posted on August 4, 2014 by - News

great wallThe Chinese government has banned anti-virus companies Symantec and Kaspersky Lab from working on government contracts behind the bamboo curtain.

A Chinese media report suggested Beijing is expanding efforts to limit use of foreign technology and Symantec, which is owned by the US and Kaspersky, which has Russian owners are no longer allowed to apply for government contracts.

The state-controlled People’s Daily reported that government procurement office had approved the use five anti-virus software brands, all from China: Qihoo 360, Venustech, CAJinchen, Beijing Jiangmin and Rising.

Kaspersky is apparently not giving up and is going to have a word with the Chinese authorities about this matter. It is too premature to go into any additional details at this time.

Beijing is keen on promoting use of domestic information technology products after leaks from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden raised concerns about foreign surveillance programmes.

Symantec said that that China had banned use of one of its data loss prevention products and it was currently in talks about the ban. However, a Symantec spokeswoman said that there was no indication of a ban on the company’s flagship anti-virus software programs.

In May Chinese authorities had banned government use of Windows 8 “to ensure computer security after Microsoft ended support for its Windows XP operating system”, which was widely used in China.

USB drives pose big risk

Posted on August 1, 2014 by - News

Dangerous-USBUSB drives are so insecure they should not be allowed near a corporate network, according to the latest research from two security boffins.

SR Labs’ Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell have come up with a collection of proof-of-concept malicious software to show how the security of USB devices is fundamentally broken.

The malware they created, called BadUSB, can be installed on a USB device to completely take over a PC and alter files installed from the memory stick, or even redirect the user’s internet traffic.

BadUSB does not live in the flash memory storage of USB devices, but in the firmware that it. The attack code can remain hidden even if the data has been wiped.

The researchers said that there is no easy fix because it exploits the way that USBs are designed.

They reverse engineered the firmware that runs the basic communication functions of USB devices which is the controller chips that allow the devices to communicate with a PC and let users move files on and off them.

Unless the IT guy has the reverse engineering skills to find and analyse that firmware, “the cleaning process doesn’t even touch the files we’re talking about.”

All USB devices from keyboards and mice to smartphones have firmware that can be reprogrammed in the same way.

Nohl and Lell have tested their attack on an Android handset plugged into a PC.

And once a BadUSB-infected device is connected to a computer, Nohl and Lell could do more or less what they liked.

The malware can hijack internet traffic too, change a computer’s DNS settings to siphon traffic. It can also spy on a computer’s activity.

BadUSB’s ability to spread from USB to PC and back raises makes it impossible to use USB devices securely at all.