Category: News

Microsoft readies streamlined browser

Posted on December 30, 2014 by - News

windows10Even though Windows 10 will not now be ready until the second half of next year, Microsoft is going to show off its latest version in mid January.

And it’s bowing to the inevitable by throwing out much of the clunky code that makes up Internet Explorer and introducing a streamlined browser called Spartan, according to reports.

Microsoft was late to the internet game in the 1990s and has had trouble catching up with competitors ever since.

Microsoft wants its browser to be a lot more like more popular browsers like Firefox and Google Chrome, and to try to shake off perceptions that its behind the times.  It will allow extensions to the browser and it will be backwards compatible with previous versions.

According to Mary Jo Foley at ZD Net, Windows 10 will ship with both Spartan and Internet Explorer 11 – something of a kludge in itself.

The version of Windows 10 that Microsoft will show off is called the Windows 10 Technical Preview and will include a number of additional features in the long build up to its release in the second half of next year.

Microsoft is also likely to port the Spartan browser to other operating systems, such as Android.

Worm found at nuclear control system

Posted on December 30, 2014 by - News

Shin Kori nuclear power plant, South Korea: Wikimedia CommonsA South Korean company was hit by what authorities described as a low risk computer worm.

The Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co was hit by a hack earlier this month and data stolen from its system.

But the South Korea energy ministry said today that the control systems for three nuclear reactors were unaffected by the hack, according to a Reuters report.

The energy minister told the South Korean parliament that the worm was most likely transmitted to the computer systems by an infected USB device – a claim that some have their doubts about.

The CEO of Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power told the parliament that all of the country’s reactors were invulnerable to viruses and worms.  But nevertheless he said that the firm was hiring more IT security staff to be on the safe side.

Some people believe that North Korea is behind attacks on South Korea computer installations.  The two countries are still technically at war with each other.

Top word of 2014 is an icon

Posted on December 30, 2014 by - News

smiliesEvery year the Global Language Monitor (GLM) scans the internet to see which are the top words used.

But this year, the top word isn’t a word at all – it’s an emoticon of a heart, the symbol of love.

GLM believes that English is going through a huge sea change because of the number of emoticons now used – its says the Unicode Consortium now recognises a thousand emoticons as part of the language.

The next nine most popular words are hashtag – that’s # and used by the twitterati and Defacebook aficionados; to vape – that’s smoking an electronic cigarette; blood moon – four total eclipses of the moon in 18 months; nano; photo bomb – when people burst into others’ photographs; caliphate; privilege – the supposed advantages of having light coloured skin; bae – that’s your bosom buddy; bash tag – using a hashtag as an offensive word weapon; transparency; sustainable; and lastly, clickbait.

Big Data, says GLM, is number on the tech buzzword list.

The top word in 2000 was Chad and the top phrase dot com.

Analysts tip tablet sales

Posted on December 30, 2014 by - News

new-ipadDespite evidence that sales of tablets showed signs of decline in 2014, one market intelligence is bucking the trend by predicting healthy sales in 2015.

ABI Research said that although 2014 was “lacklustre”, it predicted that there will be solid growth during the next five years with shipments of tablets close to 290 million units in 2019.

But the growth is not for every vendor – Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble and Google will show year on year falls in shipments.

On the other hand, Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, LG, Microsoft and Samsung are predicted to show higher volumes in 2014.

Senior analyst Jeff Orr doesn’t have good news for Apple.  He said: “Historically, Apple has counted approximately 35 percent of its iPad sales in the last calendar quarter of the year.  Unless Apple can pull off a 32+ million unit quarter, sales for 2014 will be down for the first year since the iPad launched.”

He said that Apple probably shipped 68 million iPads in 2014, but managed to sell 74 million in 2013.

On the operating systems front, Android has 54 percent of branded tablets, Apple iOS has fallen to 41 percent, and Windows 8 has a meagre five percent of shipments.

Intel set to cancel notebook subsidies

Posted on December 29, 2014 by - News

intel_log_reversedMoney that Intel has diverted to notebook manufacturers to stimulate demand for the machines is set to dry up next year.

That’s according to Taiwanese government quango Market Intelligence and Consulting (MIC), which also predicts the PC industry will flatline or even fall during the year.

Analyst Charles Chou told the Taipei Times that firms that got subsidies from Intel in an attempt to push notebook sales will find themselves out of pocket when Intel cancels the subsidies.  He said that the only growth areas were likely to be Chromebooks and sales of machines to educational markets.

But in brighter news he said that we’ll all see more affordable 4K LCD TVs in 2015. He expects that the market wordwide will hit close to 30,000 units.

But if you don’t want a 40-inch or above LCD TV, the news is not too bright.  32-inch panels don’t have big margins and the manufacturers are concentrating their efforts on making ever bigger LCD TVs, in a pursuit of healthier profits.

However, the manufacturers can’t pull the plug on 32-inch or smaller LCD TVs because people in many countries don’t have the money to spend on mega TVs.

It’s also likely they don’t have the space, either.

Twitter becomes urban planning tool

Posted on December 29, 2014 by - News

Layout of businesses, nightlife and leisure areas in Madrid using Twitter are illustrated here. The uncolored part corresponds to residential areas.Computer scientists believe that Twitter is a good way to aid urban planning and land use.

Brother and sister scientists Enrique and Vanessa Frias-Martinez have ussyed a report suggesting that geolocalised tweets can be used for urban planning. Vanessa is a scientist at the University of Maryland while her brother works for Spanish telco Telefonica.

According to Enrique Frias-Martinez, geolocalised tweets are useful for planning because of the number of people tweeting on where they are and what they’re up to.

He said: “Thanks to the increased use of smartphones, social networks like Twitter and Facebook have made it possible to access and produce information ubiquitously.”

He said that Twitter can include latitude and longitude and information can be captured more efficiently than by using questionnaires.  It’s also far cheaper and more accurate than using traditional methods, he said.

The pair have mapped land use in New York, Madrid and London. The pair have published their paper in the journal Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence.

Hacker clones fingerprints

Posted on December 29, 2014 by - News

Ursula von der Leyen - Wikimedia CommonsA German hacker said he cloned the thumb print of defence minister Ursula von der Leyen using little more than an ordinary digital camera.

The BBC said Jan Krissler grabbed several photographs of von der Leyen’s thumb at different angles during a press conference last October.

Although fingerprint recognition is not considered particularly secure, some vendors use them to access devices.

Back in the 2000s, some Japanese banks adopted fingerprints as a chief biometric to access ATMs, but abandoned them after gangsters demonstrated that one way to circumvent security was to chop off peoples’ index fingers and use them to get money from the hole in the wall.

Companies are experimenting with other biometrics such as vein recognition and iris recognition.

Cheap Chromebook wave approaches

Posted on December 29, 2014 by - News

chromebookA number of vendors plan to release large screen Chromebooks in the first half of 2015 with prices set to challenge Wintel based notebooks.

Google has laid out a reference framework for Chromebooks which means they will cost less than $300 per unit, according to a report from market intelligence firm Digitimes Research.

Dell and Acer will take the lead in cutting prices, with the former introducing a 15.6-inch Chromebook and Acer will introduce a model with the same size screen early next year.

Both are set to use Intel’s Broadwell-U microprocessor and the prices will mean stiff competition as Microsoft wants its hardware partners to produce notebooks costing less than $250.

However, Microsoft cannot hope to get hardware vendors to make Windows 8.1 with Bing machines for the same price point and with similar performance. Although Microsoft has cut licensing fees for Windows in an attempt to beat off competition from Chromebooks, the bill of materials to make notebooks precludes screens 15 inches and above.

China blocks Gmail

Posted on December 29, 2014 by - News

Photo of China from satellite - Wikimedia CommonsReports said that the Chinese government blocked access to Gmail accounts on Friday in a bid to further throttle Google.

A freedom of speech group, GreatFire.org, claimed the government was making an attempt to wipe out any Google presence in mainland China, according to a Reuters report.

While practically all of Google’s services have been throttled in mainland China, its email service Gmail was available to people until a block was imposed on Friday.

That block is still in place today. The Chinese government operates a regime which some have dubbed the Great Firewall of China which prevents citizens from seeing internet content that it doesn’t like.

China does not officially admit that it censors some internet services and maintains that it’s all in favour of foreign investment.

Apart from Google.

Iran expands smart censorship

Posted on December 29, 2014 by - News

Achaemenid_Elite_ImmortalsThe former religiously tolerant Achaemenid empire, which became the religiously less tolerant Sassanid Empire before becoming the cross-eyed religiously intolerant Iran wants to expand its policy of “smart filtering” of the Internet.

For those who came in late, the Iranians have a policy of censoring undesirable content on websites without banning them completely.

The policy appears to follow President Hassan Rouhani’s push to loosen some social restrictions, but it was not clear if it would mean more or less internet freedom. Iranians on Twitter expressed concern that, as part of the new policy, the government would try to block VPN access to such sites.

Communications Minister Mahmoud Vaezi said  that this smart filtering plan is implemented only on one social network in its pilot study phase and this process will continue gradually until the plan is implemented on all networks.

He appeared to be referring to Instagram, the photo-sharing site owned by Facebook, which is already being filtered, but not blocked.

“Implementing the smart filtering plan, we are trying to block the criminal and unethical contents of the Internet sites, while the public will be able to use the general contents of those sites,” Vaezi told a news conference.

The policy would be fully in place by June 2015, he said.

What they are after is snaps of porn to images of women not wearing the mandatory Islamic dress as well is politically damaging comments.

The Iranian government has been worried by the rise of social media.  It was used in the anti-government protests of 2009 to organise and spread news about a movement that was eventually crushed by security forces.

Former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, floated the idea of replacing the unternet with a national intranet that would not be connected to the worldwide web, however that seemed a little too silly to fly.

 

LG in sabotage probe

Posted on December 29, 2014 by - News

lg-ultra-hdProsecutors raided the headquarters of LG as part of a probe into whether the South Korean company had damaged the washing machines of rival Samsung Electronics at retail stores in Germany.

Apparently there is an increasingly bitter rivalry between the two companies which compete in home appliances, TVs and smartphones.

Samsung had asked the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office to investigate LG employees who were seen deliberately destroying several of its premium washing machines on display at two stores in September ahead of the IFA electronics show in Berlin.

Investigators searched the Seoul offices of LG home appliance head, Jo Seong-jin, and others and secured documents and computer hard disks related to the IFA fair, Yonhap News Agency said. They also combed through LG Electronics’ home appliance factory in the southeastern city of Changwon and gave it a rigorous parting.

LG said that it regretted today’s raid.

“Our company – a global company – was raided as a result of a rival’s unilateral and excessive claims, and we are concerned that this would seriously undermine our corporate activities and external credibility,” it said.

It appears that Samsung is a little worried that someone might sabotague its stands at the forthcoming CES show.

Samsung sued LG Electronics employees after the incident in Germany, and LG said the company has counter-sued Samsung employees.

Prosecutors banned LG’s Seong-jin from leaving the country ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to be held January 6.

 

Driverless cars could kill off ambulance chasers

Posted on December 29, 2014 by - News

 ambulanceOne of the first casualties from the introduction of driverless cars could be the end of ambulance chasing personal injury lawyers.

Google, which just announced a “fully functional” prototype of its self-driving car, is looking for auto industry partners to bring the technology to market within the next five years.

According to legal blogger Eric Turkewitz, who is a a personal injury lawyer with the Turkewitz Law Firm in New York, the  matter of lawsuits regarding the cars will, he thinks will be reduced by the number of collisions due to human error.

“Each year about 30,000 people will die in the US from car crashes, and about two million are injured, and that is after considering a significant drop in fatalities from safer cars and seat belts over the prior decades.”

The cars will see the other cars/pedestrians and slow down or stop despite the daydreaming, being drunk, or having a snooze. The number of deaths will be reduced. Your insurance premiums will be theoretically reduced.

“And that meanest the need for my services as a personal injury attorney will be reduced,” he sadly said.

What might save his job is the fact that regulators and insurance companies are reluctant to embrace even incremental steps that allow hands-free driving.

Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, who predicts hands-free driving systems will not be offered soon because of legal and insurance barriers.

Federal safety regulators say they still need to do more research on the potential safety and benefits of autonomous technology. Odd really, they didn’t do that when the car first came out.

Hollywood makes up settlement figures

Posted on December 29, 2014 by - News

1910-carl-laemmleFor years Hollywood has been claiming that it has made giant settlement figures with those it considered pirates, to use fear to drag the IT industry into doing its bidding.

But now, thanks to the Sony hack, those figures are being questioned.

At the end of 2013, Hollywood claimed it managed to get  IsoHunt to ‘pay’ $110 million and Hotfile agreeing to ‘pay’ $80 million. In both cases, we noted that there was no chance that those sums would ever get paid.

TorrentFreak has been combing through the Sony emails and found that the Hotfile settlement was really just for $4 million, and the $80 million was just a bogus number agreed to for the sake of a press release that the MPAA could use to scare others.

“The studios and Hotfile have reached agreement on settlement, a week before trial was to start. Hotfile has agreed to pay us $4 million, and has entered into a stipulation to have an $80 million judgment entered and the website shut down,” the email from Sony’s SVP Legal reads.

The $4 million was paid out, in three separate payments, but Hollywood would have lost a fortune bringing the case.

It is also unlikely that any of the $4 million went back to any content creators, it would have been used to fund MPAA’s vast “anti-piracy” machine, allowing it to be used for other lawsuits and funding investigations by state Attorneys General.

It makes you wonder if anything they say involving money has any shred of truth.

 

Qualcomm’s Chinese nightmare to spread

Posted on December 29, 2014 by - News

1900-intl-forces-including-us-marines-enter-beijing-to-put-down-boxer-rebellion-which-was-aimed-at-ridding-china-of-foreigners-Making China’s antitrust probe go away is going to cost Qualcom more in the long run.

Word on the street is that other countries are going to have a look at the firm’s highly profitable patent licensing business, and may even call into question its worldwide contracts with smartphone makers such as Apple and Samsung.

China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) is close to completing a 13-month investigation into the US chipmaker as soon as possible.  It will almost certainly mean that Qualcomm will have to write a cheque for a record fine and change the way it licenses its technology to handset makers in China.

Qualcomm has tried to paint the situation as being part of the sort of problems western companies have working in China but it seems that the mess will not end behind the bamboo curtain. Anti-trust probes in Europe and by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) seem to be connected to China’s investigation, Qualcomm has admitted.

Qualcomm is the top patent holder for mobile phone technology, including many that form industry standards like CDMA and LTE. Charging royalties based on the mobile phone selling prices, even those made with competitors’ chips, provided more than half of its $8 billion net income in 2014.

The NDRC, one of China’s anti-trust regulators, has said it suspects Qualcomm of overcharging and abusing its market position in wireless communication standards.

Qualcomm is expected by industry sources to agree to changes in how it charges royalties on mobiles flogged in China, which will hurt its bottom line.

It could affect its contractual relationships not just with local manufacturers such as Huawei, Lenovo, ZTE and Xiaomi, but also with bigger global players that make and sell phones in China, such as Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics.

Daft patent war averted

Posted on December 24, 2014 by - News


3fe8db8858c39f54433f183e26cf400f94346c028d4ae31c8ec349fc12868e98What was shaping up to be the daftest and most expensive patent war in history has been averted.

Apple and Microsoft had teamed up to form a super patent troll called the Rockstar Consortium in a bid to take out Android. The Troll outbid Google, Intel  – and a few others – in buying thousands of Nortel patents.

The “Rockstar Consortium” was not subject to promises that Apple and Microsoft initially made  to license the patents under reasonable terms and launched its patent attack on Android last year.

It seems that a a settlement of sorts has been reached. Rockstar has agreed to sell its patents to RPX (with Google and Cisco picking up much of the bill).  RPX has so far been a “good guy” in that it collects patents to stop trolling.

It’s making sure that basically anyone can license these patents under FRAND (fair and reasonable, non-discriminatory) rates. The price being paid is approximately $900 million.

This is considerably less than the $4.5 billion Microsoft and Apple paid but this was for only 4,000 of the 6,000 patents.  It is safe to assume that Apple and Microsoft kept the 2,000 valuable patents.

Google and Cisco will license these patents to stop the majority of the lawsuits and can defend themselves if they feel threatened.

Cisco’s Mark Chandler celebrated the deal as a “common sense” solution. And, it certainly beats all out patent litigation war. But it’s still just about moving money around, rather than encouraging innovation. He notes that in settling this as a group, it helps keep things from getting totally out of control.