Category: News

Spies are putting off writers

Posted on January 6, 2015 by - News

spyA survey of writers around the world by the PEN American Centre has found that a significant majority said they were deeply concerned with government surveillance.

Some have said that the spying has meant they have avoided, or have considered avoiding, controversial topics in their work or censored their posts or phone calls.

More than 75 percent of respondents in countries classified as “free,” 84 percent in “partly free” countries, and 80 percent in countries that were “not free” said that they were “very” or “somewhat” worried about government surveillance in their countries.

The survey was conducted anonymously online in Autumn 2014 and yielded 772 responses from fiction and nonfiction writers and related professionals, including translators and editors, in 50 countries.

Smaller numbers said they avoided or considered avoiding writing or speaking on certain subjects, with 34 percent in countries classified as free, 44 percent in partly free countries and 61 percent in not free countries reporting self-censorship. Respondents in similar percentages reported curtailing social media activity, or said they were considering it, because of surveillance.

The executive director of the PEN American Centre, Suzanne Nossel, said that the findings, taken together with those of a 2013 PEN survey of writers in the United States, indicate that mass surveillance is significantly damaging free expression and the free flow of information around the world.

“Writers are the ones who experience encroachments on freedom of expression most acutely, or first,”. Nossel said. “The idea that we are seeing some similar patterns in free countries to those we’ve traditionally associated with unfree countries is pretty distressing.”

The survey added that mass surveillance by the United States government had damaged its reputation as a defender of free expression, with some 36 percent in other “free” countries and 32 percent in “less free” countries saying freedom of expression had less protection in the United States than in their nations.

 

India invented the airplane 7,000 years ago

Posted on January 6, 2015 by - Fun Stuff, News

India_flagThe Indian Science conference has hit the interwebs for the number of bizarre presentations being made.

If you believe the government-backed presentations, the world’s first plane was invented by the Hindu sage Maharishi Bharadwaj. Indian mathematicians also discovered the Pythagorean Theorem but the Greeks got the credit and elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesha got his head because of the superiority of ancient Indian plastic surgeons.

All this is part of a cunning plan by the more nationalist Indian government to push its country’s achievements the only problem is that they appear to have lost their marbles.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the conference on Saturday and urged the nation’s scientists to “explore the mysteries of science.” Modi was the one that said the elephant-trunked, pot-bellied Hindu god Ganesha got his head because of the presence of plastic surgeons in ancient India.

Anand Bodas, the retired principal of a pilot training facility claimed that the Indians invented the airplane because the ancient Vedas say so.

“The ancient planes had 40 small engines.” Also, he said, a flexible exhaust system that modern aviation can’t even approach – probably because they have to obey things like the laws of physics.

Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar, who was present at the session, said ancient Indian science was based on “experience and logic” and “that wisdom must be recognised”.

India’s science and technology minister, Harsh Vardhan, made another startling claim at the conference, saying that ancient Indian mathematicians also discovered the Pythagorean Theorem but that the Greeks got the credit.

Needless to say, Indian boffins are jolly cross about their conference being hi-jacked by pseudo-science nationalists. More than 200 scientists signed an online petition opposing Sunday’s scheduled lecture, called “’Ancient Indian Aviation Technology,” saying it amounted to “giving a scientific platform for a pseudo-science talk”.

“If we scientists remain passive, we are betraying not only the science, but also our children,” the petition said.

Belkin goes big on the internet of things

Posted on January 5, 2015 by - News

Internet of ThingsComms company Belkin is using the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week to demonstrate a range of products that promise to make peoples’ homes more secure.
According to Cnet, the company will introduce four new sensors this year, all based on the firm’s WeMo technology.
WeMo devices require a plug in hub that currently comes with lighting starter kits to communicate with your home wi-fi and let you access the products from anywhere you can get an internet connection.
WeMo is based on the Zigbee language, which is also used by Philips with its Hue systems.
Cnet says that the devices it will introduce include a wireless motion sensor with a 30 foot range which won’t respond to false alarms from your pussy cat or dog because it also includes a heat sensor.
Belkin will also introduce an alarm sensor that responds to smoke or burglar alarms and triggers push notifications so you know something’s up.
It will also include a keyring sensor that can attach to a pet collar so you know whether your dog is comng or going.  The company will also launch a door and window sensor to let you know which apertures have been opened.

Microsoft rolls out $29 phone

Posted on January 5, 2015 by - News

microsoft-in-chinaTech giant Microsoft started the New Year by announcing it was releasing a feature phone which will be priced at $29.
The Nokia 215 is aimed at emerging markets and for people who want a second phone and don’t have very much money.
The phone can connect to the internet but only at speeds of 237 kbps but the big selling point is its battery life which has nearly a month’s stand by time.
In addition, the Nokia 215 comes with a camera and has a screen about two and a half inches in size.  The camera’s resolution is 0.3 megapixels.
Software included is Bing Search, Opera, Facebook and Twitter.
The phone comes with either one or two SIM slots and is expected to be released across the world during the first quarter of this year.
While there is still considerable demand in poorer countries for affordable phones, Microsoft cannot expect to make that much money out of this market.
And, in addition, it faces competition from Chinese companies who have started delivering phones with far more sophisticated features for not that much more money.

 

Chinese phone company revenues soar

Posted on January 5, 2015 by - News

android-china-communistXiaomi Technology, which is beginning to challenge smartphone players including Samsung and Apple, turned over close to $12 billion in 2014, according to its CEO.
Lei Jun, the CEO of the company, said the revenues rose 135 percent compared to 2013, in a blog on the company’s website.
The company isn’t public but that hasn’t stopped it denting sales of the global giants as well as having an impact on another Chinese manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, Huawei.
Lei claimed that Xiaomi shipped over 60 million phones in 2014, an increase of 227 percent compared to 2013.
But while Xiaomi might well be making waves and causing its competitors some alarm, it’s doing so using a model which doesn’t yield big profits. Estimates are that its margins are in the low single digits.
Although Xiaomi remains a private firm, it is receiving investment from a number of big names in Asia and Reuters claimed the market value of the company is as much as $45 billion.

 

Utilities start spending on IT

Posted on January 5, 2015 by - News

server-racksRestructuring and mergers are creating something of a boom in IT spending for utility companies in Western Europe.
That’s the conclusion of market research company IDC, which said a survey showed that the move demonstrates optimism in the sector.
Western European utility companies are taking steps to improve their maintenance and run operations, said IDC.  That in turn is allowing them to make cost savings and to use some of these cost savings to increase their IT budgets.
The utility companies are also outsourcing their IT, with 41 percent of their spending spent outside of their own organisations.
Close to two thirds of those budgets are decided by internal IT departments but the remainder of the spend is directed by separate business units.
Customer service, support and services are largely used as the criteria for their IT budget spends, said IDC.

 

Nvidia takes the licensing route

Posted on January 5, 2015 by - News

nvidia-gangnam-style-330pxIn a bid to generate more revenues, graphics firm Nvidia is to start licensing its GPU designs to other companies.
Nvidia has already started licensing its “Kepler” graphics processor and, according to Digitimes Research, it will do the same for its future processor Maxwell.
The move is not entirely unexpected – Nvidia is following in the footsteps of British chip company ARM.  ARM’s business is essentially rooted in licensing – its engineers design cores which are then fabricated by its customers.
The research house claims that although Nvidia has, in principle, been ready to license its intellectual property since June 2013, the big leap forward will come with the release of its Maxwell processor.
It believes Maxwell will show a performance boost of as much as 160 percent and that will be a revenue generator for the company.
Nvidia has a collection of something over 7,000 patents and has recently been increasingly litigious, filing lawsuits against giants Samsung and Qualcomm for allegedly infringing its patents.  It may find that these two companies will not necessarily become customers unless courts find in Nvidia’s favour.

Melting your hard drive is not always destruction of evidence

Posted on January 5, 2015 by - News

stock-footage-melting-iron-in-the-foundry-iron-castingA US court has ruled that sometimes it is OK to melt your hard drive and you will not be accused of destroying evidence.

Malibu Media was carrying out a file-sharing lawsuit against an alleged file-sharer. The defendant said that the hard drive failed and it had to be replaced. Malibu Media claimed that this act alone constituted destruction of evidence and wanted victory declared and the file sharer crucified as a warning to others  – or something like that.

Magistrate judge Mark  Dinsmore said recommended that Malibu Media’s “Motion for Sanctions Against Defendant for the Intentional Destruction of Material Evidence” be denied.

Malibu Media, is a porn company, which is having a few of its cases stick lately, particularly its flick “Pretty Back Door Baby” which appeared on BitTorrent in 2012.

The defendant explained that the drive was taken to recycling where it would be melted down.  Malibu pointed out that the Defendant received notice of this lawsuit in October 2012 through the letter from Comcast and that the hard drive that Defendant replaced in early 2013 could have, “contained evidence of Plaintiff’s copyrighted works.”

However, the court said that   the porn company had failed every element of the test for proving that the evidence was destroyed before the defendant knew he was being sued.

“Sanctions for spoliation therefore may not be imposed simply because evidence was destroyed; instead, such sanctions are appropriate only if the evidence was destroyed for the purpose of hiding adverse information,” the court said.

The court noted that the defendant received notice of this lawsuit at the beginning of October 2012, but did not destroy the hard drive until “late February 2013”.

Had Defendant truly wished to hide adverse information, the Court finds it unlikely that Defendant would have waited nearly five months to destroy it. In fact, the Defendant’s continued use of the hard drive for the months after he learned of the litigation suggests that the hard drive contained no information to hide at all, or that Defendant did not intend to hide any such information.

There was also evidence that Plaintiff, however, did not serve the complaint on Harrison until April 2013, after Defendant had arranged to order the replacement hard drive, and after the recycling of Defendant’s hard drive.

The Defendant testified that the service of the complaint was the first time that he became aware that he was personally being sued for copyright infringement. At the time of the destruction in February 2013, Defendant was not even certain he had been sued, making it much less likely that he destroyed the hard drive to hide information that could prove damaging in this litigation.

The Defendant also had a receipt for the hard-drive something that he showed the court. The court felt that it was unlike he would have produced the receipt showing the purchase of the hard drive had Defendant wished to hide the purchase of the replacement hard drive.

It puts the porn company’s entire case on the back foot. Suddenly there was no evidence to suggest that the destroyed drive was involved in the alleged acts of copyright infringement and no conspiracy to destroy evidence. The court also sided with the defendant that the drive was not even used for the purposes of using BitTorrent.

Microsoft Xbox SDK leaked by open sourcers

Posted on January 5, 2015 by - News

rms-meets-open-sauce-detail (1)Software giant Microsoft has had the embarrassment of having its Xbox One SDK leaked to the great unwashed by an open sauce group calling itself H4LT.

H4LT insists that it is not a hacker group, but is distributing the SDK to improve the software.

“Progress is achieved faster than alone. Something kept between us will not achieve anything. Share it with the community equals creativity and research. Shared is how it should be. The SDK will basically allow the community to reverse and open doors towards homebrew applications being present on the Xbox One,” the group announced to Hot Hardware .

The SDK for any given product is available behind some degree of registration and does not necessarily cost users. So getting your paws on a copy was not a matter of sneaking it out of a heavily guarded back vaults using minis.

The SDK includes Microsoft’s Pix which shows that the Xbox One’s has an optional seventh core for game programming. There are also multiple Xbox Kinect tools, including the Kinect Studio and the Kinect Visual Gesture Builder.

Kinect also has an app for testing and creating applications that listen for speech.

The group has also claimed that once the SDK is out, people who have knowledge or has in the past reversed files related to the Windows 8 operating system should definitely have a go at reversing some files in there.

The Xbox One is practically a stripped Windows 8 device and has introduced a new package format that hasn’t had much attention. This format is responsible for updating the console and storing applications Games are under the category of ‘Applications’ on the Xbox One and is a modification of Virtual Hard Disks.

Reuters begins iWatch adverts

Posted on January 5, 2015 by - News

ef391361d47e87c2209be9fbaa094fdfThe once legendary news agency Reuters  has begun hawking Apple’s up and coming toy watch, which is being delivered two years behind the competition, and  without any killer apps.

Reuters ran a story this morning saying that “Apple’s forthcoming smartwatch poses a conundrum for advertisers: How to tap the enticing possibilities of the tiny gadget without overwhelming consumers with messages.”

Is it? Well not really. Some company mobile-marketing firm TapSense plans to release an Apple Watch ad-buying service at CeBit and since there is no way that Reuters can write a positive iWatch story this week it has had to run with this one.

According to Reuters: “The service will provide a first glimpse of how businesses can serve up ads on the watch, even though the gadget will not be available until later this year.”

Surely that is only a problem if the iWatch was “ground-breaking, new technology” which had not already been in the market place for two years and been greeted by a loud sounding yawn by the rest of the world.

But Reuters warns the same qualities that render the watch exciting to Madison Avenue, such as the ability to detect customers approaching a store and to zap an ad directly to their wrists, also risk alienating those customers.

Is it?  The iPhone has been around for years and it has never used that sort of technology. Instead what TapSense seem to be selling are interactive wallpapers on the watch dial with brand logos and personalised clock faces.

The watch’s main screen allows the display of several tiny icons, including for email, weather, time, and potentially a few favourite service and retail apps.

The start-up is exploring using Apple Watch’s location-based features to target new customers. Apple has not added global positioning on the Apple Watch, but apps can track location as the device is tethered to a smartphone.

Reuters admits that it is not clear if the iWatch will create a new mass-market category, Venture capitalist Fred Wilson caused a stir last week by predicting the watch “will not be the home run product that iPod, iPhone, and iPad have been”.

But with the mainstream press pushing non-stories to the great unwashed about the vapourware, it does have a chance of selling more than its rivals.

 

Nvidia puts high-end graphics in car

Posted on January 5, 2015 by - News

indy1909Nvidia unveiled a new processor aimed at powering high-end graphics on car dashboards as well as auto-pilot systems.

Before the Consumer Electronics Show, Nvidia Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang said the Tegra X1 chip would provide enough computing for automobiles with displays built into mirrors, dashboard, navigation systems and passenger seating.

“The future car is going to have an enormous amount of computational ability,” Huang said. “We imagine the number of displays in your car will grow very rapidly.”

The Tegra X1 has twice the performance of its predecessor, the Tegra K1, and will come out in early 2015, Nvidia said.

A platform combining two of the X1 chips can process data collected from up to 12 high-definition cameras monitoring traffic, blind spots and other safety conditions in driver assistance systems, Huang said.

The chips can help detect and read road signs, recognise pedestrians and detect braking vehicles before you do.

Nvidia has been struggling to compete against larger chipmakers like Qualcomm in smartphones and tablets and thinks that its Tegra mobile chips will be better off in cars and is already supplying companies including Audi, BMW and Tesla.

In the third quarter, revenue from Tegra chips for automobiles and mobile devices jumped 51 percent to $168 million. While this is not bad it is a Fiat 500 to Nvidia’s Mac Truck of total revenue of $1.225 billion.

 

Intel joins the glasses crowd

Posted on January 5, 2015 by - News

Joe_90_(TV)Vuzix has told the world+dog that the small time chipmaker Intel has invested $24.8 million in the company to speed up the launch of its internet-connected specs.

Intel bought preferred stock that is convertible into common shares equivalent to 30 percent of Vuzix, Vuzix said in a press release.

New York-based Vuzix develops computerised, internet-connected glasses and other video eyewear aimed at consumers, businesses and entertainment.  Intel is dead keen to get its foot in the door of such market having been too late into the smartphones and tablets fad.

It is the second big deal to be announced in a month. In December, Italy’s Luxottica said it was joining forces with the US chipmaker to develop glasses that combine its top fashion brands with technology that could allow wearers to access information about their health or location.

Intel has also teamed up with watch retailer Fossil and fashion brand Opening Ceremony to develop wearable devices such as fashion bracelets with communications features and wireless charging.

It is all early days yet, but it seems that Intel is preparing the ground.

 

 

LCD TVs on the rebound

Posted on January 2, 2015 by - News

lgscreensWhile times were slack for LCD TVs during 2013, the market swung sharply upwards in 2014 and times ahead look rosy too.

That’s the prediction market research company Displaysearch makes, saying that total units shot up by 10 percent in the third quarter of 2014.  It estimates that total shipmets for 2014 will amount to 223 million units, a rise of seven percent over the year before.

Sales were particularly strong in North America and Asia Pacific, according to senior research analyst Paul Gagnon.  He said growth was fuelled by people replacing older flat panel TVs while in Asia many had moved away from CRT (cathode ray tube) TVs to LCD TVs.

Larger screen sizes apears to be the name of the game, as vendors seek to encourage people to upgrade.  And there’s increasingly strong demand for 4K LCD units – Displaysearch estimates that the market for these will grow by over 50 percent in 2015, amounting to 32 million units.

But there’s a warning to manufacturers too – Gagnon said that they have to be careful they don’t end up with too much stock during the first quarter of this year.

That might be bad news for them, but it’s likely to make the price of units cheaper for the common man and woman if there is an overstock crisis.

Apple sued over goldfish sized memory

Posted on January 2, 2015 by - News

AJ21D2 Goldfish swimming in bowl. Image shot 2004. Exact date unknown.The fruity cargo cult, Apple has been sued by some of its customers for tinkering with the memory on the iPhone.

The  lawsuit claims that that upgrades to the iOS 8 operating system are causing the phone’s memory to fill up, and that the company has misled customers about it.

Miami residents Paul Orshan and Christopher Endara accuse Apple of “storage capacity misrepresentations and omissions” relating to Apple’s 8GB and 16GB iPhones, iPads and iPods. Orshan has two iPhone 5 and two iPads while Endara had purchased an iPhone 6.

They say that upgrades to the operating system end up taking up as much as 23 percent of the storage space on their devices and they have lots of  8 x 10 coloured glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one to prove it.

“In addition to making material misrepresentations and omissions to prospective purchasers of Devices with iOS 8 pre-installed, Apple also makes misrepresentations and omissions to owners of Devices with predecessor operating systems,” according to the complaint, which seeks class-action status for others who bought 16GB devices.

“These misrepresentations and omissions cause these consumers to ‘upgrade’ their Devices from iOS 7 (or other operating systems) to iOS 8,” it said. “Apple fails to disclose that upgrading from iOS 7 to iOS 8 will cost a Device user between 600 MB and 1.3 GB of storage space – a result that no consumer could reasonably anticipate.”

The motive for the alleged crime is that it encourages customers to move to the monthly-fee-based iCloud storage system. Apple “aggressively” marketed the iCloud about the same time that it launched the new OS.

“Using these sharp business tactics, Defendant gives less storage capacity than advertised, only to offer to sell that capacity in a desperate moment, such as when a consumer is trying to record or take photos at a child or grandchild’s recital, basketball game or wedding,” the lawsuit contends. “To put this in context, each gigabyte of storage Apple short-changes its customers amounts to approximately 400-500 high resolution photographs.”

 

Sony sues for hacker leak

Posted on January 2, 2015 by - News

leakSony has been sending out  legal notices to those publishing its leaked e-mails.

Over the holidays Sony threatened Twitter with legal action if they allow users to publish the leaked e-mails Sony calls “stolen”.

A DMCA notice was sent to Twitter demanding that the tweets be taken down because the e-mails were copyrighted. Twitter so far has not done anything about the tweets.

Online media outlets and blogs such as Buzzfeed and Torrentfreak have been publishing leaked information too, and it is possible that Sony is testing the legal waters of stopping the spread of embarrassing information by going after a soft target.

Of course, that has not worked and Twitter has kept the accounts of its users up and running.

It is a moot point if Sony will stop any more embarrassing details from the hack coming to light. After all the US Government could not stop embarrassing information being leaked online via Wikileaks and other news sites.