Author: Nick Farrell

Ebooks worse than paper

Posted on August 21, 2014 by - News

kindle-waterBad news for readers of ebooks, a team of boffins have worked out that if you read information on a tablet you are less likely to take it in.

A new study which found that readers using a Kindle were “significantly” worse than paperback readers at recalling when events occurred in a mystery story.

The study gave 50 readers the same short story by Elizabeth George to read. Half read the 28-page story on a Kindle, and half in a paperback, with readers then tested on aspects of the story including objects, characters and settings.

Anne Mangen of Norway’s Stavanger University, a lead researcher on the study, was looking for differences in the immersion facilitated by the device, and in emotional responses.

What she found was that Kindle readers performed significantly worse they were asked to place 14 events in the correct order.

The researchers think that “the haptic and tactile feedback of a Kindle does not provide the same support for mental reconstruction of a story as a print pocket book does”.

Mangen said that When you read a paper book, it is possible to make sense of the flow of the book because your fingers feel a pile of pages on the left growing, and shrinking on the right.  This gives the reader a tactile sense of progress.

A similar test in Norway gave kids texts to read in print, or in PDF on a computer screen, followed by comprehension tests. She and her fellow researchers found that “students who read texts in print scored significantly better on the reading comprehension test than students who read the texts digitally.”

What is worrying is that “research shows that the amount of time spent reading long-form texts is in decline, and due to digitisation, reading is becoming more intermittent and fragmented”, with evidence indicating that the use of devices might negatively impact cognitive and emotional aspects of reading..

Mangen said that there needed to be research and evidence-based knowledge provided to publishers on what kind of devices should be used for what kind of content; what kinds of texts are likely to be less hampered by being read digitally, and which might require the support of paper.

 

 

Half of users share their passwords

Posted on August 21, 2014 by - News

face-palmMore than half of users risk their computer being hacked because they share their passwords or sign up for automatic log on to mobile apps and services.

Research by security outfit Intercede said that while more than half of users thought security was important they putting their personal data at risk by sharing usernames and passwords with friends, family and colleagues.

The survey of 2,000 consumers also questioned whether these passwords are strong enough to protect consumers’ applications and the data they hold.

Half of respondents stated that they try and remember passwords rather than writing them down or using password management solutions, suggesting that consumers are relying on easy to remember combinations and using the same password across multiple sites and devices.

Richard Parris, CEO of Intercede said that we need so many passwords today, for social networking, email, online banking and a whole host of other things, that it’s not surprising consumers are taking shortcuts with automatic log ins and easy to remember passwords.

The research revealed that consumers are not only sharing passwords but also potentially putting their personal and sensitive information at risk by leaving themselves logged in to applications on their mobile devices, with over half of those using social media applications and email admitting that they leave themselves logged in on their mobile device.

Parris said that consumers are also compromising their bank and credit card details by selecting ‘Remember me’ or ‘Keep me signed in’ options.

Of those that use Amazon and other shopping sites, 21 per cent said they were automatically logged in, while the figures stood at 16 per cent for mobile banking and 12 per cent for PayPal.

Apple’s smart watch launch slips

Posted on August 20, 2014 by - News

stop-watchThe Duke Nukem  of mobile products , Apple’s Smartwatch is set to be delayed yet again, according to the latest report from KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.

Kuo has been telling anyone who will listen that Apple is having production issues surrounding its new smartwatch.

“We reiterate our view that iWatch, as compared to existing products, and as Apple’s (US) first attempt at a wearable device, represents a much higher level of difficulty for the company as regards component and system design, manufacturing and integration between hardware and software,” says Kuo.

The problem is that Apple wants the iWatch’s to be small and have a flexible AMOLED display which is new territory for a smartwatch.  Apple is also having difficulty water proofing the gizmo which is an area which Jobs’ Mob has not had to worry about much before.

He said that if the reports are correct that Apple will use sapphire glass for the iWatch display that could also put a spanner in the works. Sapphire glass is much tougher and flexible than the kind of toughened glass used in smartphones, but also a lot more difficult to produce.

All of this is why Kuo said that “While we are positive on iWatch and believe that the advantages of the design and business model behind it are difficult to copy, we think, given the aforementioned challenges, that the launch could be postponed to 2015.”

He said that Apple might show off the watch at an October event, but will delay the immediate release.

Jobs’ Mob is already in trouble with the project. It is so late getting the product to market the ground has well and truly been picked over by rivals.  The only real takers for smartwatches are the sporting types, which is not exactly Apple’s target market.

 

Ballmer quits Microsoft board

Posted on August 20, 2014 by - News

ballmerThe shy and retired CEO of Microsoft Steve “there is a kind of hush” Ballmer has announced that he is leaving the company completely.

Ballmer was Microsoft’s 30th employee, its first business manager and was the top Vole for over a decade. Now, after 34 years with the company, Ballmer is leaving behind his last foot hold in the company — a seat on the board.

In a letter to Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s new CEO, Ballmer explained that he’s leaving the company’s board of directors effective immediately because he has become a little too busy playing with his NBA team.

Ballmer wrote that he saw a combination of Clippers, civic contribution, teaching and study taking up a lot of time.

He will still me keeping his fortune tied up in Voleware and most of the letter is spent encouraging Nadella and giving advice.

“Microsoft will need to be bold and make big bets to succeed in this new environment,” he told Nadella. “Our board must also support and encourage that fearlessness for shareholders to get the best performance from Microsoft. You must drive that.”

He also worried about Microsoft’s stock performance: outside of index funds, probably because he still owns more Microsoft shares than anyone.

“I bleed Microsoft, have for 34 years and I always will,” he concluded. “I promise to support and encourage boldness by management in my role as a shareholder in any way I can.”

Nadella wrote back that Microsoft will thrive in “the mobile-first, cloud-first world”.

Sadly the place will be a lot quieter now that Steve has gone.

Hackers accessed nuclear power watchdog

Posted on August 20, 2014 by - News

 

Picture thanks to Wiki Commons

Picture thanks to Wiki Commons

Hackers managed to gain access to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission three times, according to a Nextgov report.

The hackers on two occasions were foreigners and the last was an unknown person or group.  The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission governs America’s nuclear power providers. Ironically making sure that they are secure.

Apparently an investigation into the source of the third hack was scuppered because logs of the incident had been destroyed.

Intruders used basic hacking techniques to get at the NRC’s computers. One attack linked to a foreign country or individual involved phishing emails that coerced NRC employees into submitting their login credentials. The second one linked to a foreign government or individual used spearphishing, or emails targeted at specific NRC employees, to convince them to click a link that led to a malware site hosted on Microsoft’s cloud storage site SkyDrive, now called OneDrive.

The third attack involved breaking into the personal account of a NRC employee. After sending a malicious PDF attachment to 16 other NRC employees, one person was infected with malware.

NRC spokesman David McIntyre insisted that the NRC computer security team “detects and thwarts” most hacking attempts.

Sony bemused at PS4 success

Posted on August 20, 2014 by - News

PS4Even the marketing people at Sony can’t work out why its PS4 is selling so well.

Sony is cleaning Microsoft’s clock in the console wars despite the fact that the two products are pretty much the same spec with the same price.

It has sold more than 10 million PS4 consoles have been sold in the nine months since launch. It’s a bigger number than anyone anticipated, and even  the president of Sony’s Worldwide Studios, Shuhei Yoshida, doesn’t know why.

He was a bit nervous because he did not completely understand what’s happening. Sony has had marketing people look into this early success, and have found that a lot of PS4 owners did not own a PS3, or any last-gen console at all.

He said that normally when you see a great sales number, instinct tells us we should be concerned about future sales. If Sony sold this number of units at this stage in the game there would be no more consumers it can sell to in the future.

It seems that is not the case and a lot of the PS4s are being flogged to those who have never owned one of Sony’s consoles in the past.

It does not answer the question why, but according to our nephew it is because the Xbox does not have as many good games as the PS4 yet.

Chinese hackers steal 4.5 million hospital data

Posted on August 19, 2014 by - News

snap dragonA top US hospital operator has admitted that Chinese hackers broke into its computer systems and stole data on 4.5 million patients.

Community Health Systems sheepishly said that the attack occurred in April and June of this year, but it was not until July that it was finally spotted.

It told the US Securities and Exchange Commission that the attack was carried out by a group based in China that used “highly sophisticated malware” to attack its systems.

The attacker was able to bypass the company’s security measures and successfully copy and transfer certain data outside the company.

The group is apparently known to US federal law enforcement authorities, which are now investigating.

Stolen were patient names, addresses, birthdates, telephone numbers and Social Security numbers of the 4.5 million people who were referred to or received services from doctors affiliated with the company in the last five years.

However the stolen data did not include patient credit card, medical or clinical information, but still ranks as the second largest disclosed attack to hit the US medical industry in the last few years.

What is still not clear is why the Chinese government would want the medical details of 4.5 million, it is not really as if it could benefit from any ID fraud. However it might be a Chinese criminal gang.

Boffins may make a quantum breakthrough

Posted on August 19, 2014 by - News

fatter catA team of boffins at the University of Chicago has announced it has developed a way to observe, control, and manipulate the behaviour of a single electron with the help of lasers.

In terms of quantum physics, this is a way of telling if Schrodinger’s cat is really dead or alive, or just has escaped the box and is asleep on a soft bed somewhere.

An electron is an elementary subatomic particle that is a fundamental constituent of matter, having a negative charge. It is found in all atoms and acts as the primary carrier of electricity in solids.

To manipulate a single electron at the quantum level the researchers used a laser light in ultra-fast pulses which in turn managed the quantum state of an electron inside a nanosecond defect, which is naturally found in diamonds.

The method used was also able to observe and track the properties of the single electron, as well as how the electron changes over a set period of time.

David Awschalom, who led the project, said that his research was a precursor for creating and developing semiconductor “quantum bits” and other microscopic technology and molecular powered computing which would increase computer speeds dramatically.

It would also mean that scientists will finally be able to find that pesky cat.

Blackberry turns back on phones

Posted on August 19, 2014 by - News

ripeunripeThe other fruity company which once had the world in the palm of its hand, Blackberry, is now turning its back on handsets and created a new business unit that will combine some of its most brilliant ideas and patents.

Dubbed BlackBerry Technology Solutions the outfit will be headed by Sandeep Chennakeshu, the former president of Ericsson Mobile Platforms and former chief technology officer of Sony-Ericsson.

John Chen, BlackBerry’s executive chairman and chief executive officer said that by combining all these assets into a single business unit will work rather well and open new revenue streams.

Chen has already stripped out much of Blackberry’s consumer-oriented businesses, sold property and laid off employees.

Analysts say that the new unit reinforces the fact that Blackberry’s days as a handset vendor are behind it as it moves “very aggressively” toward a different business.

Blackberry has not had much luck flogging its gear in the consumer market. It could not get its products out on time and faced stiff competition from other smartphone.

Chennakeshu, who has 73 patents to his name,  is well known in the wireless, electronics and semiconductor industries.

BlackBerry Technology Solutions includes QNX, the company that BlackBerry bought and used to develop the operating system that became the platform for its new smartphones, and Certicom, a former independent Toronto-area company with advanced security software.

BlackBerry Technology Solutions will also include BlackBerry’s Project Ion, which is an application platform focused on machine-to-machine Internet technology, Paratek antenna tuning technology and about 44,000 patents.

 

Azure fails

Posted on August 19, 2014 by - News

cloud (264 x 264)Microsoft has fixed a worldwide outage on its Azure cloud computing service, which occurred across multiple regions.

Partial disruptions began as of 1.40pm on Aug. 18, the company said on the Azure website.

This is bad news for Microsoft which is touting its cloud-based platform for creating, deploying and maintaining online applications and services such as websites and web-hosted applications. As such, it has to work 24/7 or customers will be severely put out.

Azure is used by governments and corporations around the world, supports various programming languages, tools and frameworks.

Microsoft said that Azure services such as virtual machines, cloud services, mobile services, service bus, site recovery, HDInsight, websites and Storsimple were down during the outage.

However, Vole insisted that the core platform components were working properly throughout and only a small subset of customers were affected by the outage.

Still reports of outages might make many firms question if moving to the cloud is such a good idea, or if they can get the same levels of reliability on-site.

IBM gets thumbs up for Lenovo sale

Posted on August 18, 2014 by - News

thumbs-up-or-downUS regulators have approved the sale of IBM’s server business to the Chinese outfit, Lenovo.

There had been fears that the deal would be put on ice because the US is currently going through a McCarthy era paranoia over all things Chinese. The NSA was scared that the Chinese would start installing backdoors into their servers, probably because that is just the sort of thing that they would do.

IBM has already divested $16 billion in annual revenue over the past decade from low-margin businesses like personal computers and printers.

However, despite the fact that there was some concern about the deal by the Committee on Foreign Investment agreed that it was probably safe.

Lenovo has been through the secretive CFIUS process three times before and has won approval each time. In this case, it is believed that it argued that all the top-secret server operations would remain under the control of IBM.

CFIUS, an interagency group chaired by the Treasury Secretary, reviews deals that could bring U.S. businesses under foreign ownership and is required by law to assess any transaction involving a state-owned firm.

Lenovo said in a statement that it remains on track to close the IBM server deal by the end of the year.

In fact the deal is more likely to help Lenovo sell its gear in China and the company is less concerned about its US sales. Lenovo has many contacts to sell goods to Chinese companies and Beijing is trying to localize its IT purchases in the wake of revelations about US spying.

Facebook warns about satire

Posted on August 18, 2014 by - News

facebokSocial notworking site Facebook is so worried that people have been posting bogus stories as truth that it is experimenting with a satire tag.

The problem is that – generally speaking – people in America can’t tell the difference between a news story with the headline “New Study Finds Humans Shouldn’t Spend More Than 5 Consecutive Hours Together” and a real scientific study.

To be fair it is tricky to spot the difference. The woman who posted a story which claimed that turmeric was the perfect cure for Ebola was being serious as were the posts which claimed vaccines were full of mercury and give kids autism.

It has not helped that some US publications cannot tell the difference between satire and just “making stuff up” so these very unfunny or dim stories are easily confused with fact.

All that could be outdated, however, as Facebook is currently testing the infamous “satire” tag that will distinguish fake news from the real deal. If you click on an Onion article, for example, Facebook would then automatically tag related articles with the aforementioned “satire” text in the headline.  Sadly, this does not apply to the Daily Mail articles which are still being presented as true.

Facebook said that it is all in the testing stage and the idea came from feedback that people wanted a clearer way to distinguish satirical articles from others in these units.

Assange claims great escape

Posted on August 18, 2014 by - News

GreatEscape1WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says he will “soon” get out of Ecuador’s embassy in London, although he is keeping the information how a secret, even after calling a press conference to discuss it.

Assange, who clearly does not understand the meaning of open disclosure, has been locked up in the embassy for more than two years to avoid extradition to Sweden on a sex case because he believes he is important enough for the US to bother trying to extradite him.

The US did not bother trying to extradite him when he was in the UK, which was far more likely than Sweden to hand him over.

The 43 year old, who is apparently sick with heart and lung problems, gave a press conference amid speculation in the tabloids that he was set to hand himself over.

Assange confirmed he is leaving the embassy soon, but not for the reasons that “the Murdoch press and Sky News are saying at the moment”.

Assange, was not going to tell anyone how he was getting out the embassy which made the entire press conference a waste of time. Instead the conference was yet another opportunity for the media hungry Assange to restate the same dull excuses for why he is the only person who should not face a court case when two people make a complaint about him

Police have been stationed at the compound since Assange requested political asylum from Ecuador in June 2012, ready to arrest him if he sets foot outside. He has cost the UK taxpaper a bomb and ironically that has meant that he has been effectively under house arrest.

 

Cannabis makes better batteries

Posted on August 15, 2014 by - News

thanks Wikipedia

thanks Wikipedia

Boffins have been cooking “certain substances” in their cauldrons and have come up with a way of turning cannabis into   high-performance energy storage devices.

They “cooked” cannabis bark into carbon nanosheets and built supercapacitors “on a par with or better than graphene”.

We guess that it will be the first computer to run for several hours before insisting on a pizza and several boxes of pringles.

According to ASC Nano, which we get for the “Where is the green Nanowire” competition, Dr David Mitlin of Clarkson University, New York said that people were always asking him “why hemp” and his answer is “why not”.

He said he could dash off graphene-like materials for a thousandth of the price  and we’re doing it with waste.

Now the hemp that he is growing is legal and is not the sort of stuff that gets you stoned. He said that there was absolutely no overlap in his recreational activities.

In countries including China, Canada and the UK, hemp can be grown industrially for clothing and building materials.

The only problem is that the leftover bast fibre – the inner bark – typically ends up as landfill.

Dr Mitlin’s team looked at the fibres and recycled them into supercapacitors that rely on sharp bursts of power. In electric cars, for example, supercapacitors are used for regenerative braking.

Graphene might be great for commercial supercapacitors, it is prohibitively expensive to produce and hemp based versions might be a lot more useful.

Mitlin’s team experimented with all flavours of biowaste – from peat moss to eggs. Most recently, they turned banana peel into batteries.

He said that with banana peels, you can turn them into a dense block of carbon – we call it pseudo-graphite – and that’s great for sodium ion batteries,” he explained.

“But if you look at hemp fibre its structure is the opposite – it makes sheets with high surface area – and that’s very conducive for super capacitors.”

Mitlin’s peer-reviewed journal paper ranks the device “on par with or better than commercial graphene-based devices”.

Hemp cannot do all the things graphene can, but for energy storage, it works just as well. And it costs a fraction of the price -$500-1,000 a tonne.”

Blue screens hit Black Tuesday

Posted on August 15, 2014 by - News

Backstreet_Boys_-_Black_&_Blue_album_coverThree different patches from this week’s Black Tuesday crop are causing Blue Screens of Da’ath,   causing some users to plunge into the abyss.

MS14-045/KB 2984615 kernel-mode driver patches, KB2976897 and KB2982791, have been implicated in triggering Blue Screen Stop 0x50 messages since users starting updating their systems this week.

Most of the people suffering from most of the glitches say they are using 64-bit Windows 7 but the  Windows 8.1 “Update 2” fix that adds the ruble character as an official currency marker in Win 8.x and Win7, KB 2970228, also seems to be causing the problem, too.

There is no word from Microsoft on the problem yet, but it would appear that if you have not upgraded your system on Patch Tuesday it might be a good idea not to do so for little while.

You just knew that something was going to go wrong when you saw the number of patches that Microsoft was asking you to install.

Microsoft released 41 updates, including one that fixed an Internet Explorer vulnerability that may allows hackers to take control of a computer.

Included in the updates were two patches that were meant to fix “critical” problems. The first one, with the title “Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer,” addresses 26 vulnerabilities: one publicly disclosed and 25 that were privately reported. In the most severe cases, the vulnerability may allow attackers to have the same rights as the legitimate user. The security hole can be exploited when a user views a malicious website using Internet Explorer. Before the patch, users who had administrative rights on their computers were more susceptible to the security flaw.

Another critical patch, with the Bulletin ID MS14-043, is meant to fix a security flaw in Windows Media Centre that may also allow for remote code execution.

Aside from the critical patches, there were updates that have been labelled as “Important.” The software that have been tapped for the patches include OneNote, SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint Server, .NET Framework and Microsoft Windows itself. The problems range from the remote code execution, elevation of privileges and security features bypass.