Category: News

Chinese make iWatch for $40

Posted on March 12, 2015 by - News

Screen Shot 2015-03-09 at 18.15.41China is already making cloned copies of Apple’s Watch for just $40 which look the same and appear to do the same things.

Knockoff versions of the Apple Watch can be found at Huaqiangbei electronics market in the southern city of Shenzhen, and others are being sold nationwide via popular e-commerce websites.

The fakes look exactly like an iWatch but have names like “Ai Watch” and “D-Watch,” they cost between 250 yuan and 500 yuan ($40 to $80). Apples effort will set you back $300-$15,000.

They run Android and have been adjusted to look like an Apple interface. Some use Apple-like icons on the home screen.

The copycats say that the hardware is a doddle, but the software is the tricky bit.

Apparently the sellers will get better over time and soon it will be impossible to tell the two products apart. But the fact that they can make such clones based on leaks, and pictures released on Apple, makes you wonder why it took Jobs’ Mob two years to come up with the same product for nearly ten times the price.

Their efforts were made easier when Apple dropped most of the expected functionality while keeping the price the same. Still you get what you pay for… oh.

 

 

Kaspersky finds more US snoops

Posted on March 12, 2015 by - News

spyMoscow-based Kaspersky Labs has uncovered more evidence indicating that the US National Security Agency is behind a particularly successful hacking group.

“Equation Group” ran the most advanced hacking operation ever uncovered and was untouched for more than 14 years.

Kaspersky researchers did not say that the hackers were the NSA, saying only that the operation had to have been sponsored by a nation-state with nearly unlimited resources to dedicate to the project.

However the mountain of  evidence that Kaspersky provided  strongly implicated the spy agency.

The strongest new tie to the NSA was the string “BACKSNARF_AB25” discovered only a few days ago embedded in a newly found sample of the Equation Group espionage platform dubbed “EquationDrug.” “BACKSNARF,” according to page 19 of this undated NSA presentation, was the name of a project tied to the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations.

“BACKSNARF” joins a host of other programming “artifacts” that tied Equation Group malware to the NSA. They include “Grok,” “STRAITACID,” and “STRAITSHOOTER.” Just as jewel thieves take pains to prevent their fingerprints from being found at their crime scenes, malware developers endeavor to scrub usernames, computer IDs, and other text clues from the code they produce. While the presence of the “BACKSNARF” artifact isn’t conclusive proof it was part of the NSA project by that name, the chances that there were two unrelated projects with nation-state funding seems tiny.

The code word is included in a report Kaspersky detailing new technical details uncovered about Equation Group.

Among other new data included in the report, the timestamps stored inside the Equation Group malware showed that members overwhelmingly worked Monday through Friday and almost never on Saturdays or Sundays. The hours in the timestamps appeared to show members working regular work days, an indication they were part of an organised software development team.

The timestamps show the employees were likely in the UTC-3 or UTC-4 time zone, a finding that would be consistent with people working in the Eastern part of the US.

 

 

Gigaom runs out of cash

Posted on March 11, 2015 by - News

map-of-internetTechnology web site Gigaom has closed down, after saying it had run out of cash.

Gigaom was started by our old friend Om Malik and had around six and a half million pages views a month.

But advertising revenue for small sites is at an all time low, following the disintermediation of adverts for the web.

Tom Foremski, from Silicon Valley Watcher, said that one of the biggest problems of the internet is that there is no value attached to good quality media content.

He said: “We still have no satisfactory business model that can save the media industry from the disruptive economic forces of the web, that continue to hound its shrinking news rooms and dwindling pools of exhausted professionals.”

Part of the problem, Foremski said, is that a shift to accessing the web via mobile phones means it’s almost impossible to make money from adverts.

He said it’s likely that it’s nearly impossible to make a living as an independent publisher because unless your web views are sky high, the return on adverts is tiny.

Sound systems face wireless revolution

Posted on March 11, 2015 by - News

Screen Shot 2015-03-11 at 14.24.31Home audio systems are undergoing a sea change because of the popularity of mobile phones, according to a report from IHS Technology.

The analysts said that shipments of connected audio products – that includes wireless speakers, wireless sounders and connected AV receivers will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 88 percent.

In unit terms, that’s a rise from 1.5 million units in 2010 to close to 66 million units in 2016.

Paul Erickson, a senior analyst at IHS, said that its penetration of tablets and smartphones and streaming services including Spotify that are creating a shift in peoples’ perception.

“Consumers are seeking ways to wireless play audio from their mobile devices on speakers in the room they’re in, in multiple rooms in a household, and on speakers carried with the. This need will drive strong global growth in wi-fi and Bluetoosh connected speakers over the next few years,” he said.

Major players in the market will include Samsung, LG, Sony, Bose, Denon, and DTS.

And while prices for connected multi-room speakers are high, they will still be adopted by many people. Sony, Samsung and LG are all expected to put serious marketing bucks into the equation.

Apple faces watch attack

Posted on March 11, 2015 by - News

Screen Shot 2015-03-09 at 18.15.41If Apple thinks it will have the smart watch market to itself, it had better think again. Traditional vendors of watches are on the march.

According to Reuters, the Swiss watch industry is preparing itself to parachute into the smart watch sector, following Apple’s announcement of a range of glitzy wrist watches earlier this week.

The report said that a number of big players in the watch business are quietly preparing to introduce smart watches – including Swatch, Guess, Richmond and LVMH. Richemonte owns the Montblanc brand.

Apparently, the companies believe that Apple may ignite the taste of youngsters for watches and they hope to make sales off the back of the rush of publicity the Apple iWatch has generated.

Swatch publicly confirmed in January that it was ready for the smart watch and its device won’t be tied just to the Apple iPhone but will support the Android operating system too.

And, perhaps crucially, it will have much longer battery life than Apple’s offering.

Guess, too, has far advanced plans for a smart watch.

Perhaps more crucially, the traditional timepiece manufacturers have long established routes to market and unparalleled distribution know how.

Notebook sales fell in February

Posted on March 11, 2015 by - News

notebooksA report said there were large falls in shipments of notebooks in January and February.

Digitise Research said that shipments for the five multinational brands and the top three manufacturers – original design manufacturers – fell by 13 percent and 18 percent in February.

One major reason, the analysts say is because there are high levels of stocks of models intended for home use left over from last year. Fluctuations in exchange rates also caused a decline in sale.

However, it appears that Hewlett Packard managed to buck the trend and in February its notebook shipments rose by 30 percent. It had managed to make adjustments to its overstock and also made significant sales of units for the educational market to India.

Lenovo fell behind HP in the top five, but it was Acer and Asustek which really took a hit, with falls in shipments of as much as 40 percent, Digitimes Research said.

The ODMs, who make notebooks to be rebranded by others, also saw their shipments fall during the period.

 

Microsoft opens up Visual Studio to Java developers

Posted on March 11, 2015 by - News

microsoft-in-chinaMicrosoft has opened its Visual Studio Application Insights cloud software telemetry service so that Java developers can come up with new Azure designs.

For those who came in late, Application Insights is part of the Visual Studio Online set of services that Redmond announced in November 2013. It gathers and generates reports on usage and performance data for online applications.

These can be accessed through the Microsoft Azure Portal – which means you need an Azure subscription to use Application Insights.

The service had only allowed for the connection web applications and apps written using Microsoft’s own ASP.Net framework. But the new rules allow the same kind of monitoring to Java applications.

Microsoft is also offering support for Application Insights in its new version of the Azure Tookit for Eclipse.

A free trial of Application Insights is available. After that, pricing depends on the level of Visual Studio Online service you need and the amount of Azure resources you consume each month.

Boffins make quantum leap

Posted on March 11, 2015 by - News

Wallpaper-quantum-leap-32404651-1280-720UC Santa Barbara’s physics professor John Martinis has come up with a “major milestone” towards quantum circuitry.

The team has apparently worked out a way to self-checks for errors and suppress them, preserving the qubits’ state and imbuing the system with some semblance of reliability.

Keeping qubits error-free, or stable enough to reproduce the same result is one of the major hurdles for boffins on the forefront of quantum computing.

Julian Kelly, graduate student researcher and co-lead author of a research paper that was published in the journal Nature wrote that one of the biggest challenges in quantum computing is that qubits are inherently faulty. If you store some information in them, they’ll forget it.

Unlike classical computing, in which the computer bits exist on one of two binary  positions, qubits can exist at any and all positions simultaneously. They hide in various dimensions and play with cats apparently.

This is called “superpositioning” and it gives quantum computers their phenomenal computational power, but it is also this characteristic which makes qubits prone to “flipping,” especially when in unstable environments.  It hard to process information if it disappears.

The error process involves creating a scheme in which several qubits work together to preserve the information. To do this, information is stored across several qubits.

If we build this system of nine qubits, which can then look for errors, they are responsible for safeguarding the information contained in their neighbours, he explained, in a repetitive error detection and correction system that can protect the appropriate information and store it longer than any individual qubit.

“This is the first time a quantum device has been built that is capable of correcting its own errors,” said Fowler. For the kind of complex calculations the researchers envision for an actual quantum computer, something up to a hundred million qubits would be needed, but before that a robust self-check and error prevention system is necessary. Well, let’s see, eh?

Car industry can’t do computer security

Posted on March 11, 2015 by - News

jalopyWhile every tech company and its dog is trying to slam their technology into cars, it is starting to look like the automotive industry can’t cope with the need for security.

A Dallas law firm has filed a lawsuit against three major automakers claiming they have failed to take basic measures to secure their vehicles from hackers.

The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California by attorney Marc Stanley, is on behalf of three vehicle owners and “all others similarly situated”. It alleges that the cars are open to hackers who can take control of basic functions and endanger the safety of the driver and passengers.

“Toyota, Ford and GM have deliberately hidden the dangers associated with car computer systems, misleading consumers,” Stanley said in a statement.

But the case is bringing to light problems which may bedevil the car industry in the future. After all if they are having problems with the security on cars now, how are they going to manage when autodriven vehicles are in charge.

Modern cars and light trucks contain less than 50 separate electronic control units (ECUs) — small computers connected through a controller area network (CAN) or other network such as Local Interconnect Networks or Flexray.

New high tech cars will contain shedloads of them, and if hacked could be driven by hackers into walls or other cars.

The court case claims that the car companies are also habitually secretive about these sorts of problems – something that does not bode well if you are sitting in the back of a self drive taxi.

“Disturbingly, as defendants have known, their CAN bus-equipped vehicles for years have been (and currently are) susceptible to hacking, and their ECUs cannot detect and stop hacker attacks on the CAN buses. For this reason, defendants’ vehicles are not secure, and are therefore not safe,” the lawsuit states.

Last year, at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, two industry experts released a 92-page report revealing “the 20 most hackable cars.”

DARPA reported that the defect represents a “real threat to the physical well-being of drivers and passengers.” Before releasing its study, DARPA shared its finding with car manufacturers so they could address the vulnerabilities, “but they did nothing,” the lawsuit states.

HP creates cloud server line

Posted on March 11, 2015 by - News

Every silver has a cloudy liningThe maker of expensive printer ink, HP said that it is creating a server family for cloud providers.

The project is being done as a joint venture with Foxconn, a partnership announced last year to create cloud-optimised servers. HP has been building servers from Foxconn for a year, but is now giving a name to its server line: Cloudline.

According to HP, its systems are based on standards-based principles and use rack scale computing.

With rack scale systems, functions that were previous located in the server, such as cooling and power, may be part of the rack. The systems will likely be deployed in multi-vendor environments, although users want uniformity in controls.

HP will use the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI), an open management platform, and other systems that help provide a uniform way of managing hardware.

The hyperscale x86 server market has been growing fast, and this has led to increasing numbers of original design manufacturers (ODM), such as Taiwan’s Quanta entering the game.

HP is announcing these OpenStack systems at the Open Compute Summit and will begin taking orders on some of the systems at the end of this month. The systems use Intel Xeon E5 v3 processors and come in five configurations, including a two-socket (2P) server sled configuration and 1U configurations. No word on pricing yet.

Why did Minecraft get the works?

Posted on March 11, 2015 by - News

turkTurkey has been fast becoming a place where anything can get banned from the internet for the lamest excuses.

You can be banned for insulting the dead hero Atatürk, you can be blocked for revealing tapes proving government corruption and not it seems you can be censored for playing Minecraft.

A Turkish ministry claims that the game is “too violent” after a report from Turkey’s Family and Social Policies Ministry.

The decision whether or not to band Minecraft is currently in the hands of the Turkish courts as the ministry has submitted their report of the game being too violent to the legal affairs department, as well as instructions for the legal process to begin the ban.

A portion of the report was said to say:  “Although the game can be seen as encouraging creativity in children by letting them build houses, farmlands and bridges, mobs [hostile creatures] must be killed in order to protect these structures. In short, the game is based on violence.”

It seems that the Ministry is little concerned that kids might grow up confusing the game world and reality, possibly even “going as far as torturing animals without knowing what kind of pain they’re causing the creature”.

We guess that like other countries concerned about game violence, Turkey is a peaceful place which does not have any violence at all. Any that happens of course is not born out of a frustration with a corrupt, increasingly autocratic government, but Angry Birds or Tetris which were never banned.

Wikimedia sues the NSA

Posted on March 10, 2015 by - News

Screen Shot 2015-03-10 at 14.21.01The Wikimedia Foundation, along with other human rights organisations, has taken legal action against the National Security Agency (NSA) and the US Department of Justice (DoJ).

Wikimedia, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, allege that the NSA surveillance programme breaks US laws on freedom of speech.

The NSA’s surveillance work violates a number of matters covered by the US Constitution, Wikimedia Foundation alleges.

According to the BBC, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation claims that the NSA is “training the backbone of democracy” and this activity collects data which is too wide to conform to US laws.

The Wikimedia Foundation alleges that the NSA and the DoJ have spied on Wikipedia and so violated privacy laws and challenged intellectual freedom.

The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, hopes that the lawsuit will end the NSA’s trawling internet traffic.

 

Clarizen goes for cloud busting projects

Posted on March 10, 2015 by - News

cloudbustAn Israeli start up that kicked off specialising in project management software claims that its cloud software now has widespread applications for all enterprises that need to manage the shape of their business.

Clarizen, which started eight years ago specialising in project management and is now based in the USA. A number of blue chip and public sector bodies are using its software as a collaborative tool to manage initiatives in the cloud.

With 10 employees in the UK and 200 people worldwide, Clarizen customers include several NHS units, Barclaycard, Unipart, Wells Fargo, Hayes Recruitment, Machete, and a number of financial enterprises.

Russell Hanley, who was the first UK employee 18 months ago, said his company aimed to connect what he dubbed “islands of activity” in an organisation, uniting discussions, process and content.

He said that the product was 100 percent based in the cloud and device and browser independent – and an example of software as a service (SaaS).

The software, he said, should be treated just like a mobile phone app. It’s sold using a subscription model and the cost depends on the number of users, the type of access and whether organisations opt in for support, maintenance and training.

Hanley said Clarizen is set to create data centres in the UK and in Holland. He said that his customers want cloud compliance, but there are few enterprises with no presence in the cloud.

Clarizen is a privately listed company that received its third round of VC funding last year of $35 million.

Standards start for the internet of things

Posted on March 10, 2015 by - News

Internet of ThingsWhile there’s no doubt that in the next few years things ain’t what they used to be, and everything will be connected, there’s a distinct lack of standards right now.

But, according to a report from heavyweight analyst Frost & Sullivan (F&S), the move to standardise the IoT is taking shape.

It said a number of standardisation bodies in Europe and the US are working towards standard privacy policies and how devices will work together.

F&S said a committee has been formed by the European Telecommunications Standard Institute to work on machine to machine privacy standardisation.

And the Open Automative Alliance is a group of car companies and tech partners working worldwide to create a standard Android platform so that cars and mobiles will work together.

Analyst Svapnadeep Nayak said IoT needs an open architecture and worries enterprises worry because they want to maintain the integrity of their data.

Kayak thinks that by using a common cloud infrastructure with one application programming interface (API) for all sectors, IoT will bring down the costs of deployment and improve the efficiency of data streaming from gadgets and devices everywhere.

Intel’s Xeon SoC to ARM wrestle

Posted on March 10, 2015 by - News, Products

arm-wrestlingIntel has lifted the veil on a new Xeon D family of processors which are the company’s first ever Xeon-based System-on-Chip (SoC).

The news is bad for ARM because it is wanted to dominate the microserver market and this package is exactly what it does not want out there.

The Xeon D line is built on Intel’s 14nm process technology and combines the performance of Xeon chips with the size and power savings of a SoC.

Intel says the Xeon D delivers up to 3.4x faster performance node and up to 1.7x better performance per watt compared to the company’s Atom C2750, which is part of Intel’s second-generation 64-bit SoC family.

Xeon D is the third generation and it’s actually based on Intel’s 14nm Broadwell architecture.

This puts Intel in the running for those customers who want low-power, high density infrastructure products. In fact Intel says that it can deliver  server class reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features in an ultra-dense, low-power device.

Cisco, HP, NEC, Quanta Cloud Technology, Sugon, and Supermicro have sworn their loyalty to the chip, before all their dark gods, and are committed to building microserves based on Intel’s new Xeon D options.

This means ARM has not got much time before actual products are out there.

Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group at Intel said that the growth of connected devices and demand for more digital services has created new opportunities for information and communication technology,” said.

“By bringing Intel Xeon processor performance to a low-power SoC, we’re delivering the best of both worlds and enabling our customers to deliver exciting new services.”

Intel’s kicking things off with two Xeon D processors, the D-1540 with 8 cores, 16 threads, 2GHz, 45W TDP and D-1520 with its 4 cores, 8 threads, 2.2GHz, 45W TDP. These have memory controllers capable of up to 128GB of addressable memory.

They also feature an integrated platform controller hub (PCH), integrated I/Os, and two integrated 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports.

All of this is based on Intel’s Broadwell so should give a reasonable performance per watt.