Author: Nick Farrell

Inventor of LEDs cross at Nobel snub

Posted on October 10, 2014 by - News

NobelNick Holonyak, who invented the first visible-light LEDs is a little miffed that he never got a Nobel Prize for his work.

This is particularly so now that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics to three inventors of the blue light-emitting diode.

While Holonyak is not exactly complaining that he isn’t among them, he is a little cross that they got the prize while his 1962 invention has never been singled out for recognition by the academy.

He told the Associated Press that he was an old guy now, but found it insulting.

The Nobel Foundation highlighted the great potential social impact of blue LEDs, which made LED bulbs possible and could help dramatically reduce the amount of energy the world expends on lighting.

However you have to wonder why blue LEDs get the prize while  Holonyak never got much recognition.

Before Holonyak’s red LED, there was the infrared LED, along with even earlier discoveries, and there is a host of other researchers who could share credit in the device’s development.

Holonyak, who won the IEEE Medal of Honor (sic) in 2003 , originally set out to develop a red diode laser. In the process, he also succeeded in creating a red LED. Holonyak and several of his colleagues later went on to use compound semiconductors similar to those used to create the first LED to develop a transistor laser, a device capable of emitting both electrical and optical signals.

Microsoft CEO faces karma from foot in mouth

Posted on October 10, 2014 by - News

foot and mouthThe Microsoft boss has said sorry to his women employees after making a huge howler on the subject of equal pay.

In answer to a question from the floor, “What do you advise women who are interested in advancing their careers, but not comfortable … with asking for a raise?” Multiple studies have suggested that women in the workplace earn roughly three quarters of the salary, on average, compared to male counterparts doing the same job.

Satya Nadella said that women who don’t ask for raises have “good karma” and that not asking for equal pay with men is a “superpower”,

His exact words were: “women who don’t ask for raises have a “superpower … because that’s good karma, that’ll come back … that’s the kind of person that I want to trust.”

It is not as if he said the comment in private either. He said it on a stage at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference, held in Phoenix, where no one is likely to take offence.

“It’s not really about asking for the raise,” Nadella told the audience, “but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along”.

We guess that at that point the conversion was drowned out by the cries of a thousand PR bunnies throwing themselves into Nadella’s mouth to stop him speaking.

Needless to say when he got back to the office there was a very cross representative from the PR department with an apology all written for him to send to all female employees who are being advised not to apply for raises.

Nadella wrote that he answered that question completely wrongly.

“I believe men and women should get equal pay for equal work. And when it comes to career advice on getting a raise when you think it’s deserved, Maria’s advice was the right advice. If you think you deserve a raise, you should just ask.”

We suspect that Nadella will have to spend a little more time on the Wheel of Birth and Death to escape his karma on that one.

US thinks it is legal to invade foreign servers

Posted on October 9, 2014 by - News

Battle_erieThe US government claims it has a constitutional right to hack the servers of foreign companies based overseas.

Apparently when the French-backed terrorists usurped their legitimate King it was with the sole aim of ruling the world and committing illegal acts in other countries.

The Justice Department made the announcement in the ongoing prosecution of Ross Ulbricht. The government believes that Ulbricht is the operator of the Silk Road illicit drug website.

The case involves how the US government found the Silk Road servers in Iceland. Ulbricht said government claims that a leaky CAPTCHA on the site’s login led them to the IP address was “implausible” and that the government may have unlawfully hacked into the site. His view is backed by Nicholas Weaver, a Berkeley computer scientist who said the story is full of holes.

Assistant US Attorney Serrin Turner countered (PDF) said that even if it were a lie such an investigative measure would not have run afoul of the Fourth Amendment.

The SR Server was located outside the United States, the Fourth Amendment would not have required a warrant to search the server, whether for its IP address or otherwise so it is acceptable.

Turner added, “Given that the SR Server was hosting a blatantly criminal website, it would have been reasonable for the FBI to ‘hack’ into it in order to search it, as any such ‘hack’ would simply have constituted a search of foreign property known to contain criminal evidence, for which a warrant was not necessary.”

The FBI denied using wiretaps in the FBI’s investigation. Ulbricht did not even become a suspect in the FBI’s investigation until well after the SR Server was searched. No information collected from Ulbricht, through a wiretap, was ever used to locate the SR Server.

Still it must be a little worrying for US citizens to know that their constitutional protection from US spooks stops at the border.

 

EMC needs to spin off VMware

Posted on October 9, 2014 by - News

ElderlyspinneraActivist investor Elliott Management is trying to get data storage products outfit EMC to spin off its VMware virtualization software unit or merge with someone else.

The outfit penned a 13-page letter to the company’s board which was signed by portfolio manager Jesse Cohn and warned that EMC’s structure of combining several businesses obscured its enormous value.

Elliott, which has $25 billion under management, owns a 2.2 percent stake in EMC and said it was writing a letter to help inform EMC’s board on its “current review process” of how to maximize long-term value at EMC.

EMC’s “federation strategy” comprises a core data-storage unit, a virtualization software unit VMware, enterprise security business RSA and cloud-computing software maker Pivotal.

EMC held merger talks with HP recently that broke down. Elliott said the acquisition interest in EMC’s assets on the part of several large companies that make strategic sense.

So far, EMC has publicly said it plans to keep its company together. But pressure is building as other technology companies recently have been spinning off operations in an attempt to become more agile and capitalize on faster-growing businesses.

It is a Luddite world, claims PayPal co-founder

Posted on October 9, 2014 by - News

LudditePeter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, said that we live in a world where science is hated and real technological progress has stalled.

Thiel told the Gartner Symposium/IT this week that there is little innovation out there and he blames the fact that we are living in a financial, capitalistic age.

He said that this is a period in history when  people generally dislike science and technology. Movies “all show technology that doesn’t work, that … kills people, that it is bad for the world.”

Terminator, The Matrix, Avatar, Elysium and Gravity. The message of Gravity is that “you never want to go into outer space”. The movie industry is reflecting and feeding a public bias against science, he said.

Thiel added that technology has a much different meaning today than it did in the 1950s or 1960s. During that period, it meant computers and rockets, underwater cities, new forms of energy and all sorts of supersonic airplanes. Since then, there “has been this narrowing” view that technology is mostly information technology, he said.

While advances today may be enough to dramatically improve business efficiencies and create great new companies, “it’s not clear it’s always enough to take our civilization to the next level,” said Thiel.

Thiel thinks that there is a lack of any conviction. If you have conviction around getting certain things done, a very short list of things, that’s how you really push for progress,” whether in a corporation or government.

He said that the Manhattan project, which built a nuclear bomb in 3.5 years, and led to the moon landing in the 1960s was a complex coordination around a well-defined plan, which is very out of fashion.

Su in, Read out at AMD

Posted on October 9, 2014 by - News

readChipmaker AMD has announced that its Chief Operating Officer Lisa Su will replace Rory Read as chief executive officer.

Read has been doing the job for three years and analysts do not seem sad to see him go, they are only concerned about the timing. Earnings announcements are next week and an exit like this would suggest that the news is bad.

AMD has seen its market value nearly halved since Read took over in 2011 as the company lost market share to Intel. The outfit has been expanding into new markets such as game consoles and low-power servers and it aims to obtain half of its revenue from those additional businesses by the end of 2015, but progress has been too slow for the cocaine fuelled of Wall Street.

Su however is a popular choice amongst investors and customers.

It is not clear how Read was pushed out. Asked repeatedly on a conference call about the unexpected timing of AMD’s leadership change, Read said it was the result of a long-term succession strategy.

He said that the changeover was well planned, well understood.

Read’s response to the slump in PCs was to slashed the company’s workforce, hire a new senior management team, including Su, and launched AMD’s move into new markets, including ARM-based servers, digital signs and medical devices.

Su, who is 44, said her top focus would be on product development and that she would also simplify AMD and sharpen its focus. She joined AMD in 2012 and is widely seen as one of AMD’s most valuable executives.

AMD promoted Su to chief operating officer in June, increasing expectations among investors that she might eventually replace Read.

AMD said its board was discussing with Su the terms of her employment. She is currently paid an annual base salary of $650,000, the company said.

Read will remain with the company as an advisor until the end of the year.

Brown Dog snuffles the 99 percent

Posted on October 8, 2014 by - News

cover-image-530x360A team of boffins is developing a search engine which can find all the data on the world wide web which cannot be seen by search bots.

The engine, dubbed Brown Dog, searches the web for uncurated data and makes it accessible to scientists.

Kenton McHenry, who along with Jong Lee lead the Image and Spatial Data Analysis division at the National Center for Supercomputing Application (NCSA) said that the information age has made it easy for anyone to create and share vast amounts of digital data, including unstructured collections of images, video and audio as well as documents and spreadsheets.

But the ability to search and use the contents of digital data has become exponentially more difficult because digital data is often trapped in outdated, difficult-to-read file formats and because metadata–the critical data about the data, such as when and how and by whom it was produced–is nonexistent.

McHenry and his team at NCSA have been given a $10 million, five year award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to manage and make sense of vast amounts of digital scientific data that is currently trapped in outdated file formats.

So far they have come up with a Data Access Proxy (DAP) which transforms unreadable files into readable ones by linking together a series of computing and translational operations behind the scenes.

Similar to an internet gateway, the configuration of the Data Access Proxy would be entered into a user’s machine settings and then forgotten. Data requests over HTTP would first be examined by the proxy to determine if the native file format is readable on the client device. If not, the DAP would be called in the background to convert the file into the best possible format readable by the client machine.

The second tool, the Data Tilling Service (DTS), lets individuals search collections of data, possibly using an existing file to discover other similar files in the data.

Once the machine and browser settings are configured, a search field will be appended to the browser where example files can be dropped in by the user. Doing so triggers the DTS to search the contents of all the files on a given site that are similar to the one provided by the user.

While browsing an online image collection, a user could drop an image of three people into the search field, and the DTS would return images in the collection that also contain three people. If the DTS encounters a file format it is unable to parse, it will use the Data Access Proxy to make the file accessible.

The Data Tilling Service will also perform general indexing of the data and extract and append metadata to files to give users a sense of the type of data they are encountering.

McHenry said the two services are like the Domain Name Service (DNS) in that they can translate inaccessible uncurated data into information.

According to IDC, a research firm, up to 90 percent of big data is “dark,” meaning the contents of such files cannot be easily accessed.

Brown Dog is not only useful for searching the Deep Web, it could one day be used to help individuals manage their ever-growing collections of photos, videos and unstructured/uncurated data on the Web.

Infosys accused of being anti-American

Posted on October 8, 2014 by - News

Ashoka's Queen - Wikimedia CommonsA US court will hear how the Indian outsourcing outfit Infosys is alleged to have adopted racist policies against Americans.

The case, filed in a federal court in Wisconsin, is from four IT workers around the country who are suing the company for “ongoing national origin and race discrimination”.

The court documents include an account by Samuel Marrero, who worked as a recruiter in Infosys’s talent acquisition unit from 2011 until May 2013.

According to him recruiters were encouraged to focus their efforts on Indian candidates and “stick to the talent we’re used to”,

Marrero asked if the company only wanted Indian talent and was told by managers “Yes. They know our style and culture”.

The Infosys officials are identified in the lawsuit, one with the title of “senior vice president and global head,” the other as a “global enterprise officer lead.”

Marrero said that he “frequently complained” to higher-ups at Infosys during these weekly calls that many of the highly qualified American candidates they had presented were being rejected in favour of Indians.

As a result 90 percent of Infosys’ workforce is South Asian, and the high percentage is intentional.

In about October 2012, in response to one of these complaints, Infosys’ global enterprise lead allegedly said, “Americans don’t know shit”.

Adobe spies on Epub users

Posted on October 8, 2014 by - News

indians-010aAdobe has been spying on users  of Digital Editions 4, the newest version of its Epub app.

For some reason Adobe’s Epub app, seemed to be sending an lot of data to Adobe’s servers and hacker mates of the Digital Reader  have confirmed that Adobe is tracking users in the app and uploading the data to their servers.

Benjamin Daniel Mussler, the security researcher who found the security hole on Amazon.com, has also confirmed it to be true.

Adobe is gathering data on the ebooks that have been opened, which pages users read, and in what order. However, it gets worse. All of the data, including the title, publisher, and other metadata for the book is being sent to Adobe’s server in clear text to allow any spook, Chinese hacker, private eye, to hack into the stream and read it.

Just when you think Adobe could not be dumber, the outfit is not just tracking what users are doing in its own app; it is also scanning your computer and gathering the metadata from all of the ebooks sitting on your hard drive too. Once it has read every ebook it uploads that data to Adobe’s servers too.

Nate Hoffelder  the hack who found the breach described it as a “privacy and security breach so big that [he is] still trying to wrap my head around the technical aspects, much less the legal aspects.”

To be fair this kind of mistake is common as lots have been caught sending data in clear text, and others have been caught scraping data without permission. LG was caught in a very similar privacy violation last November when one of their Smart TVs was shown to be uploading metadata from a user’s private files to LG’s servers in clear text.

It is probably not deliberate, just what security experts technically call “bloody stupid”.

The  software has violated so many privacy laws in the US, goodness knows how many it will have broken in a civilised country like Germany where privacy is taken more seriously. The Frankfurt Book Fair is coming up later this week. Adobe will be exhibiting at the trade show so we guess that the Germans will be interrogating a few executive – that ways to make you talk, apparently.

 

Apple’s bendy turkey now faces hair-gate

Posted on October 8, 2014 by - News

appleIt looks like Apple’s reputation for design success is hair today, gone tomorrow.

Already the iPhone 6 range has had to deal with the fact that its aluminium frame can be bent but now has to deal with the fact that its design pulls out the hair on your head and beard.

Twitter users have made #hairgate a rising social media trend.

The problem happens where the aluminium meets the glass which has a space which is ideal for catching hair and pulling it out.  If only there was a company which was famous for its design which did not make such basic mistakes.

Apparently Apple fanboys are divided as to whether treat #beardgate as a separate trend, or simply as a subset of #hairgate. Other Applefans cannot grow a beard and don’t care.

Apple has been refusing to comment about it. However, if its press office had been required to handle the Black Death it would have waited six months before claiming that it only affected a small number of people.

Apple’s silence is fuelling a range of gags. The Twitter account of the Atlanta International Fashion Week speculating that it may be an elaborate plot against hipsters for whom facial hair has become de rigeur. Another user tweeted: “Congrats, Apple, for finally getting hipsters to shave”.

Gillette posted: “Your phone may be smarter than ever, but leave the shaving to the experts.”

The tame Apple press is rushing to quote the standard Apple fanboys in denial posts instead.

“I have iPhone 6. Doesn’t bend and doesn’t snag hair. Who thinks up these things? Apple haters? Competitors?” tweeted John Wooten.

After all, who wants to be the idiot who spent a fortune on a phone so poorly designed it bends and rips your hair out. Only a complete moron would do that – so it is better to pretend you bought a great product, claim it is perfect and people will not laugh at you.

Apple’s design for an iWatch was also mocked by Swiss Watch Makers which said that it looked like it had been designed by a first year design student.

Samsung, Microsoft argue over the best city in the world

Posted on October 8, 2014 by - News

Times_Square,_New_York_City_(HDR)Microsoft and Samsung cannot agree on the best city in the world to hatch out peace. Samsung thinks that Hong Kong is the best while Microsoft believes that it should be New York.

Samsung has started an arbitration proceeding in Hong Kong against Microsoft as the Seattle behemoth attempts to give it a Chinese burn over smartphone patent royalties.

The arbitration was disclosed in a court filing as part of a federal lawsuit Microsoft filed in August in New York accusing Samsung of refusing to make royalty payments to Microsoft after the software company announced its intention to acquire Nokia’s handset business.

Samsung specifically wanted the Hong Kong office of the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce. It is not clear why Hong Kong was chosen – perhaps it was the good shopping, better access to Dim Sung, pork in a bun and the students revolting.

The arbitration was started under the terms of a business collaboration agreement “to resolve a dispute concerning the calculation of success credits under that agreement,” Samsung said.

Jennifer Crider, a spokeswoman for Microsoft, said the companies’ contract provided that the “appropriate venue to interpret the business collaboration agreement is New York”. After all, if they could make an arbitration there, they could make it anywhere and they could go all through the night because the city never sleeps.

The arbitration came just days after Microsoft filed an amended complaint in its New York lawsuit asking the court to rule that it did not breach a business collaboration agreement with Samsung.

Microsoft in the complaint also wants Samsung to pay $6.9 million interest on more than $1 billion in royalty payments which it delayed in protest of the Nokia deal.

Microsoft claims Google Android mobile system uses some of its technology, and most hardware makers, including Samsung, have agreed to pay patent royalties on Android handsets.

Motorola Google  said no and has been in litigation against Microsoft since 2010.

US government can post your snaps on Facebook

Posted on October 7, 2014 by - News

thumb-mark-zuckerberg-facebook-pro-4566The US government claims it has the right to steal your photos and pretend to be you on social networking sites so that it can trick your friends into admitting illegal acts.

The Justice Department is claiming that a federal agent had the right to impersonate a young woman online by creating a Facebook page in her name without her knowledge. The agent managed to do this by stealing pictures from the woman’s seized mobile and sticking racy pictures of her and even one of her young son and niece to a fake social media account.

The woman, Sondra Arquiett, who then went by the name Sondra Prince, discovered that the spooks had stolen her ID in 2010 when a friend asked about the pictures she was posting on her Facebook page. There were risqué pictures of her posing on the hood of a BMW with her legs spread, and others with her in her underwear.

The account was actually set up by US Drug Enforcement Administration special agent Timothy Sinnigen who had arrested Arquiett, alleging she was part of a drug ring. A judge decided that that the single mom was a bit player who accepted responsibility and sentenced her to probation.

While she was awaiting trial, Sinnigen created the fake Facebook page using Arquiett’s real name, posted photos from her seized cell phone, and communicated with at least one wanted fugitive — all without her knowledge.

Facebook’s “Community Standards” say that “Claiming to be another person, creating a false presence for an organisation, or creating multiple accounts undermines community and violates Facebook’s terms” and there there is no exception for cops and spooks.

The bogus Facebook page is still there though.

The DEA’s actions might never have come to light if Arquiett, now 28, hadn’t sued Sinnigen, accusing him in federal district court in Syracuse, New York, of violating her privacy and placing her in danger.

The government’s response said that: “Defendants admit that Plaintiff did not give express permission for the use of photographs contained on her phone on an undercover Facebook page, but state the Plaintiff implicitly consented by granting access to the information stored in her mobile and by consenting to the use of that information to aid in an ongoing criminal investigations.”

In other words the US government can come into your house take your photographs and post them online if it thinks it can use them to arrest your friends.  When Arquiett gave permission for the FBI to look at her phone she cannot have imagined that she would have consented to her data being used in like that, but apparently the US Justice department thinks it is OK.

One in three jobs replaced by IT by 2025

Posted on October 7, 2014 by - News

rewardposterCrystal ball readers at analyst outfit Gartner have seen a future where robots and drones replace  a third of all workers by 2025.

At the start of its major US conference, the Symposium/ITxpo Gartner’s research director Peter Sondergaard predicted a future where a drone may be your eyes and ears.

In five years, drones will be a standard part of operations in many industries, used in agriculture, geographical surveys and oil and gas pipeline inspections, he said.

He also predicted a rise in the a “super class” of technologies that perform a wide variety of work, both the physical and the intellectual kind, said Sondergaard.

Machines, for instance, have been grading multiple choice for years, but now they are grading essays and unstructured text.

This cognitive capability in software will extend to other areas, including financial analysis, medical diagnostics and data analytic jobs of all sorts, Sondergaard said.

Gartner predicts one in three jobs will be converted to software, robots and smart machines by 2025. The new digital businesses require less labour and machines will be make sense of data faster than humans.

 

Samsung blue over low profits

Posted on October 7, 2014 by - News

samsung-hqDepending on smartphones appears to have cost Samsung – the company is headed for its first annual earnings drop since 2011.

The company has revealed its July-September profit would be the lowest in more than three years and the short-term prospects for smartphones were uncertain.

Samsung is finding that its market share is falling thanks to the rise of Chinese rivals like Lenovo and Xiaomi.

Samsung said in a regulatory filing on Tuesday that operating profit for the third quarter likely fell 59.7 percent to $3.8 billion which was lower than the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street predicted.

This would mark the South Korean giant’s weakest quarterly profit since the second quarter of 2011 and the fourth consecutive quarter of earnings declines on a yearly basis.

Samsung said that although “uncertainty” persisted in the mobile business, which accounted for nearly 70 percent of its 2013 operating profit, it “cautiously expects” higher shipments of new smartphones and strong seasonal demand for TV products.

Operating margin for the smartphone business fell substantially in the quarter due to higher marketing expenditure and sharply lower average selling prices, as the proportion of shipments for high-end devices fell and prices for older models dropped, Samsung said.

The belief amongst analysts is that Samsung will be back with stronger volumes once it revamped its product lineup.  The outfit released its Galaxy Note 4 in recent months, featuring metal frames which will fix the accusation that its use of plastic had harmed sales.

Samsung also aims to launch more cost-competitive devices in the mid-to-low end segments. Analysts expect these products to appear by the end of October.

It is widely expected that Samsung would release a new mid-tier product late this month valued at between $300 and $400. The new device would use similar components to the flagship Galaxy S5 smartphone which is priced at about $500.

Samsung’s chip division is doing well. Samsung is the world’s top memory chipmaker and the returns from its memory business in the third quarter improved sequentially due to strong seasonal demand.

Poettering attacks Linux’s “you know who”

Posted on October 7, 2014 by - News

lennartpoettering-620x411The open source movement fails to attract new members because its existing membership base is populated by a******** with few social skills led by Linus Torvalds who sets a poor example, according to a Linux expert.

Lennart Poettering,  a Red Hat engineer and one of the creators of the controversial systemd system, penned a rant on his bog which was worthy of Linus Torvalds and ironically blamed Torvalds for a lot of the problems.

“Open Source community is full of a******s, and I probably more than most others am one of their most favourite targets. I get hate mail for hacking on Open Source. People have started multiple ‘petitions’ on petition web sites, asking me to stop working (google for it). Recently, people started collecting Bitcoins to hire a hitman for me (this really happened!). Just the other day, some idiot posted a ‘song’ on YouTube, a creepy work, filled with expletives about me and suggestions of violence. People post websites about boycotting my projects, containing pretty personal attacks,” he steamed.

Systemd was adopted by most major Linux distributions, including Debian, Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and Ubuntu, but there is still a lot of hate against it.

Poettering blames a lot of the nutcase problems on a circle that plays a major role in kernel development, and first and foremost Linus Torvalds himself.

“Torvalds is considered a role model, but he is quite a bad one. If he posts words like “[specific folks] …should be retroactively aborted. Who the f*ck does idiotic things like that? How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?” (google for it), then that’s certainly bad,” steamed Poettering.

Poettering said he finds it “particularly appalling” that Torvalds regularly defends this approach and advertises this as an efficient way to run a community. He said that it was not just Torvalds, but a certain group of people around him who use the exact same style, some of which semi-publicly dream up the best ways to kill Poettering.

All this means that if anyone is going to get interested in Linux they are going to need a thick skin to deal with the high A*rsehole count in the community.  He thinks most normal humans can’t be bothered.