Intel to release thumb-sized PCs

Posted on November 21, 2014 by - News

thumbs downChipzilla has said that it is shrinking PCs to thumb-sized “compute sticks” that will be out next year.

The stick will plug into the back of a smart TV or monitor “and bring it intelligence to that,” claimed senior vice president and general manager of the PC Client Group Kirk Skaugen.

A device the size of a USB stick was shown on stage, but its capabilities were not demonstrated, so we will have to take Intel’s word that it was not a thumb drive Skaugen picked up and waved around before the press conference.

Although, to be fair, the technology is already in the marketplace. Skaugen likened the compute stick to similar thumb PCs offered by PC makers with the Android OS and ARM processor.

Dell’s $129.99 Wyse Cloud Connect, plugs into an HDMI port, can turn a screen or display into a PC, gaming machine or streaming media player.

Skaugen claimed the devices will be an extension to laptops and mini-desktops, which have Core desktop processors in small PCs that can be handheld.

Normally these thumb sized PCs do not have internal storage, but can be used to access files and services in the cloud. The Wyse Cloud Connect has wi-fi and Bluetooth.

Skaugen thinks that the market for such devices is in the tens of millions of units,. The compute stick will bring x86 computing to fanless designs.

Intel makes low-power Atom processors for mobile devices, which could fit into thumb-sized PCs.

 

Lollipop causes headaches for old Nexus users

Posted on November 21, 2014 by - News

kojakThe Tame Apple Press is rubbing its hands with glee that Google’s latest OS, Lollipop, appears to break old versions of its  flagship Nexus tablet.

The BBC , which is a big fan of Apple gear, seems to have spun the story as if the bug broke all Android machines, when actually the OS has positive reviews.

“Early adopters of Google’s latest Android operating system are warning others of problems with the software, “thundered Auntie only to admit in the next paragraph the bugs only affected Nexus 7 users. The Nexus 7 came out in 2012.

There is no doubt that there is something wrong with Lollipop and its reaction to some of the gear under the bonnet of an Ancient Nexus 7, but frankly, it is amazing it upgraded at all.

The BBC hints that more problems have not arisen because the OS is only available to a limited number of machines, because many network operators and device manufacturers have yet to complete their own tests.

Ironically, the OS was supposed to revamps the system’s user interface, offers greater control over notifications, and makes changes to the way the OS executes code, which Google said should mean fewer “temporary glitches” than before.

Android Lollipop adapts its look to suit smartwatches, smartphones and tablets

Nvidia, LG and Motorola have also released Android Lollipop updates for some of their handsets and tablets.

The work around for Nexus 7 users is to turn off Google Now, change transitions to zero and limit it to two background apps maximum.

Several Android Lollipop users have also highlighted compatibility problems with Air-based apps.

Apple said sorry  in September after faults with iOS 8 caused some of its new iPhones to be unable to make and receive calls, which was supposed to be the phone’s main job.

Intel announces 3D NAND-Flash

Posted on November 21, 2014 by - News

IMFT Sign - Lehi

Rob Crooke, VP & GM of Intel’s Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) Solutions Group was last up in the company’s day long Investor Meeting today in Santa Clara.

Though last, he had the most newsworthy announcement about the company’s future memory intentions.

Intel announced it is back in the memory business – 3D NAND-Flash that is (mass production in-house is conditional though).

Crookes’ revelation ends any rumination on Intel-Micron Flash Technologies 3D Flash development – it also includes SK Hynix when the device goes into production 2Q 2015. Evidently those who have been nice have early sample devices according to sources.

The specifics:

  • 4G hole array 32 layers deep | (216 x 216)(Array) x 25(Layers) x 2(MLC) = 256 Gbits
  • 1TB in 2 mm package
  • SSDs: 10TB and up planned
  • Production 2H 2015 – IMFT (Lehi, Utah facility mentioned) & SK Hynix
  • Intel can also produce internally
  • Replacement of HDD with SSD in all PC and Mobile devices

Crooke allowed that the devices will not use Intel’s cutting edge 14nm technology but a slightly relaxed geometry  – Micron is on record at 16nm geometries for 3D NAND. The openly known fact that prevaricating about Flash Geometries may hold sway – a hefty dose of caveat emptor is recommended.

The announcement coincides with reports that Intel and Micron are involved in a project with EMC2-DSSD – an effort to produce the first NAND-Flash In-Memory Database appliance.  The proffered memory type may be a custom type expressly tailored for the application and may be produced in-house by Intel – more on this as roll-out time nears.

Amnesty releases anti-spying software

Posted on November 20, 2014 by - News

amnestyHuman rights organisation Amnesty International said today it and other organisations have released software to detect spyware.

The software – called Detekt – scans PCs and detects surveillance software, some of which is used by governments to spy on journalists and other activists.

Marek Marczynski, head of military security and police at Amnesty said: “Goverments are increasingly using dangerous and sophisticated technology that allows them to read activists and journalists’ private emails and remote turn on their computer’s camera or microphone to secretly record their activities.”

He claimed the used the technology “in a cowardly attempt to prevent abuses from being exposed”.

The software is being made available by Amnesty, by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Privacy International and Digitale Gesellschaft.

Marczynski said: “Detekt is a great tool which can help activists stay safe but ultimately the only way to prevent these technologies from being used to violate or abuse human rights is to establish and enforce strict controls on their use and trade.”

Assange still faces extradition

Posted on November 20, 2014 by - News

Flag of EcuadorA Swedish court today confirmed that an arrest warrant against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange still stands, and the country wants him extradited.

Assange, who is holed up in the Ecuador embassy in London, faces charges of sexual assault, charges that he strenuously denies.

He jumped bail and sought sanctuary in the embassy two years ago.  He claims the reason why he’s avoiding extradition is because he fears he will be extradited to the USA to face serious secrecy charges.

The Stockholm court of appeal said that Assange is suspected of crimes of a serious nature.  It refused to withdraw the warrant because, it said, it fears he will avoid legal proceedings or punishment.

In 2012 he lost an appeal with the UK Supreme Court to avoid extradition and that’s when he took to the embassy, where Sweden, the UK and the USA have no jurisdiction.

The charges relate to accusations of sexual misconduct and rape from two women when he visited Sweden in 2010.

British police are waiting to arrest him and extradite him the moment he leaves the embassy.

AMD introduces Carrizo SOCs

Posted on November 20, 2014 by - News

AMD's John ByrneIntel rival AMD said it has added two system on a chip (SoC) devices to its semiconductor roadmap.

The Carrizo and the Carrizo-L are being positioned as the firm’s answer to the mobile market.

The chips will support Microsoft DirectX 12, OpenCL 2.0, AMD’s Mantle and Freesync and support for Windows 10, when that emerges next year.

AMD senior VP John Byrne said his company is building on its existing intellectual property portfolio.

He said “our goal is to improve APU energy efficiency by a factor of 25 times by 2020”, and said the company would work with the latest industry standards.

The Carrizo microprocessor combines an X86 CPU core called Excavator with its next generation Radeon graphics in what AMD claims will be the world’s first heterogeneous system architecture compliant SoC.

The chips will ship in the first half of next year, Byrne said.

Apple iWatch faces further delays

Posted on November 20, 2014 by - News

Photo of China from satellite - Wikimedia CommonsLabour shortages in China mean that Apple’s iWatch is likely to be delayed even further, and is causing problems for other multinationals too.

According to Digitimes, the labour shortages are so severe that people like Dell have asked their original design manufacturers (ODM) to start making machines early so they won’t be caught short in 2015.

The lead ODM for the Apple iWatch is Taiwanese company Quanta Computer.

But there’s bright news for manufactuers. It appears orders for notebooks are showing a surge in the fourth quarter of this year even though things will follow a familiar pattern in the first quarter of 2015 with orders few and far between.

The labour shortages have existed for some years but Digitimes thinks they will be worse than ever in 2015, exacerbated by the lunar New Year which causes mass migration of people in mainland China.

The ODMs are mostly Taiwanese companies which have outsourced their manufacturing to mainland China as tensions eased between the two countries.

IBM strengthens cloud security

Posted on November 20, 2014 by - News

bluemixEnterprise IT firm IBM doesn’t think that people trust the cloud enough and has introduced tools to help developers strengthen their offerings.

The recipe is called Bluemix which although it sounds as it might be a kind of cement, is actually IBM’s platform as a service (PaaS).

Bluemix is intended to help build applications to use the benefits of cloud computing without stumbling into the quagmires of compliance, regulation and performance that are the baggage of public clouds.

It has introduced a private application programming interface (API) as part of Bluemix and that lets developers build cloud which connect data from legacy back end systems and link them to mobile and social networking applications.

Bluemix gives access to a cloud hosted in an IBM cloud centre, more or less anywhere across the world. Developers will be able to use services from IBM’s Bluemix catalogue including Watson APIs for data analutics and its Aspera data integration tools.

Customers will have the choice of using an IBM data centre in their own country, to avoid regulatory problems companies might face as well as giving better performance because public clouds have so-called “noisy neighbours”.

Creditors fume at Apple and GT deal

Posted on November 20, 2014 by - News

Bank-imageCreditors of GT Advanced Technologies are fuming that the outfit got too little in its proposed settlement with Apple over legal claims stemming from a deal to supply sapphire screens.

GT Advanced shocked investors by filing for bankruptcy in October in a case that was initially shrouded in secrecy due to confidentiality agreements with Apple. GT Advanced’s chief operating officer has said in court papers that the iPhone maker pulled a “bait and switch” to force the sapphire maker into a money-losing deal in 2013.

Apple agreed to release GT Advanced from the deal and allow it to sell more than 2,000 sapphire furnaces located in Mesa, Arizona.

The agreement needs approval by US Bankruptcy Court Judge Henry Boroff, who has been hearing the Chapter 11 bankruptcy case in Springfield, Massachusetts. He is not too happy about things dot com.

But holders of GT Advanced’s notes, including Aristeia Capital and an affiliate of Wolverine Asset Management, said in court papers the “extraordinary allegations against Apple … call into question the adequacy of the settlement agreement.”

The concept that Apple breached its contract and acted unfairly as GT Advanced’s lender and the fact that Apple’s claims on GT Advanced’s equipment were unsecured would put Jobs’ Mob among the last creditors to be paid, not the first as Apple claimed.

Apple has denied GT Advanced’s allegations. In court filings, Apple has called the accusations “scandalous and defamatory” and “intended to vilify Apple and portray Apple as a coercive bully.”

However, the noteholders want access to internal records and documents from Apple and GT Advanced to investigate if the settlement lets Apple off too cheaply. The noteholders asked Boroff to postpone the settlement hearing, currently scheduled for Nov. 25, to give them time to complete their investigation.

GT Advanced said it is negotiating with potential buyers for its sapphire furnaces and said in court papers an extended delay in approving the Apple settlement could hurt its ability to reorganise and repay its creditors.

Hon Hai ties up with Innolux

Posted on November 20, 2014 by - News

Hon-HaiHon Hai Precision Industry has tied up with flat panel maker Innolux and is investing $2.8 billion in a panel producing plant in Taiwan.

Hon Hai is desperately trying to find new revenue streams which do not depend on the fruity themed cargo cult, Apple.  Earlier this year it bought stakes in a Taiwanese mobile network provider and a South Korean IT services provider.

Under the plan, the pair will buy equipment for the facility located in the southern city of Kaohsiung and which is expected to start production in the second half of 2016.

The plant, which will make low-temperature polysilicon panels, predominantly for use in smartphones, was built in 2008, but was mothballed due to financial constraints after the 2008 global financial crisis.

The plans are still awaiting final approval from the boards of both companies, but it seems likely that Hon Hai will stump up for the majority of the cash. The Innolux representative said the investment may take the form of a new joint-venture company.

Hon Hai already holds a nine percent stake in Innolux though its various subsidiaries. It is all a little mysterious dot com.

 

China firewalls the cloud

Posted on November 20, 2014 by - News

great wallChina has expanded its Great Firewall of China to include a major hosting and cloud services company.

According to internet freedom watchdog GreatFire.org, the EdgeCast content delivery network (CDN), which “provides cloud services to thousands of websites and apps in China”, has been partially blocked.

A number of major international companies have been affected by the block, including The Atlantic, Sony Mobile, and websites related to the Firefox web browser.

Filtering escalated this week with an increasing number of popular web properties impacted and even many domains being partially blocked.

The blocking of a major CDN such as EdgeCast marks a significant escalation in the efforts of Chinese censors to keep the country’s internet free of unwanted outside influence.

Charlie Smith, founder of GreatFire, told the South China Morning Post that taking down so many sites in one go will have a huge economic impact – online commerce, trade, even academia will all be affected by this.

“While the economic cost is huge, the authorities are also risking upsetting Chinese netizens who suddenly wake up to find out that they cannot access a plethora of websites.”

The problem, as far as China is concerned, is that free speech activists and anti-censorship groups such as GreatFire have been using cloud services to create mirrors of sensitive information which cannot be blocked.

This included the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) report on the use of offshore tax havens by Chinese businessmen and officials. The report was uploaded to Amazon’s cloud servers, which, because of their design and encryption, are impossible to block on an individual website or page basis.

However killing off the entire cloud domain would cause significant harm to the businesses of the thousands of Chinese websites, including major corporations, who  depend on its services for database management and other cloud computing.

GreatFire said in a blog post since the Great Firewall cannot distinguish traffic to our mirror sites and other traffic to the cloud provider which means they cannot block access to its mirror sites without blocking access to all the sites hosted by the CDN.

It sees this as a form of ‘collateral freedom’ which hinges on the gamble that the Chinese authorities will not block access to global CDNs because they understand the value of China being integrated with the global internet.

It looks like the authorities do not care and are just going to cut China off from the global internet, rather than letting that work around happen.

Ironically, China hosted the World Internet Conference in Zhejiang province. Talks include “An interconnected world shared and governed by all” and “Cross-border e-commerce and economic globalisation.”

Intel’s Knight’s Hill cut down to 10nm

Posted on November 20, 2014 by - News, Products

intel_log_reversedIntel is telling the world+dog that it talks to that its third-generation Xeon Phi, codenamed Knight’s Hill, will use 10nm technology and its second iteration of Omni-Path fabric. TechEye and ChannelEye are not in Intel’s good books again, so we have to sneak under the radar.

Intel is not talking to us any more. Sniff.

Knight’s Hill is a long way from being in the shops. We still have to see the 14nm Knight’s Landing which is not going to be in the shops until summer of 2015. This could mean that Knights Hill is likely for 2017.

Knight’s Landing will use the same Silvermont architecture that powers Intel’s Bay Trail but it will  support four threads per CPU — currently Silvermont doesn’t use hyper-threading marchitecture at all.

The reason we are interested in Knight’s Hill is that information on it is about as rare as a 1970s TV star who has not been investigated by operation YewTree, and we wonder why Intel is talking about it at all.

Perhaps it might because Intel is attempting to reassure customers that there’s a roadmap stretching out beyond the Knight’s Landing product and the 14nm node.

Intel’s Omni-Path scaling architecture debuts next year. Omni-Path is Intel’s next-generation networking interconnect that handles up to 100Gbps of bandwidth and uses silicon photonics technology for signalling. The new standard offers up to 48 ports per switch compared to 36 ports on other top-end standards, and is designed to lower the cost of huge build-outs by reducing the total number of switches. The long  term goal is to reduce latency and allow for effective scaling as the industry pushes forwards towards exascale. Bring back Pat Gelsinger!

Future versions of the core will likely expand both the onboard memory pool (16GB is expected for Knight’s Landing; Knight’s Hill could pack 32GB or more), add additional bandwidth, and likely increase the interconnect performance between the CPU and the associated MIC.

According to Extreme Tech  Intel might push its AVX standard up as high as 1024-bit registers, if the HPC crowd wants it. Adding wider registers is a simple way to boost performance The current AVX specification allows for extensions of up to 1024 bits in length, however, so Intel could do this. [Does anybody apart from Extreme Tech believe this Intel crap any more? Ed.]

 

Android Trojan could be bane of corporations

Posted on November 20, 2014 by - News

hitchhikers_guide_marvinOne of the longest running multipurpose mobile botnets has been updated to become stealthier and more resilient and it could be a major headache for businesses.

Dubbed NotCompatible, the botnet is mainly used for instant message spam and rogue ticket purchases, but it could be used to launch targeted attacks against corporate networks because the malware allows attackers to use the infected devices as proxies.

Researchers from security firm Lookout said that the mobile Trojan was discovered in 2012 and was the first Android malware to be distributed as a drive-by download from compromised websites.

Devices visiting such sites would automatically start downloading a malicious Android application package file. Users would then see notifications about the finished downloads and would click on them, prompting the malicious application to install if their devices had the “unknown sources” setting enabled.

A newly found version of the Trojan program, called NotCompatible.C, encrypts its communications with the C&C servers, making the traffic indistinguishable from legitimate SSL, SSH or VPN traffic.

Lookout security researchers wrote in their bog that the malware can also communicate with other infected devices directly, forming a peer-to-peer network that offers powerful redundancy in case the main C&C servers are shut down.

The Lookout researchers believe that the botnet is likely rented to other cybercriminals for different activities and the Trojan’s proxy capability makes it a potential threat to corporates.

If a device infected with NotCompatible.C is brought into an organisation, it could give the botnet’s operators access to that organisation’s network, the Lookout researchers said.

“Using the NotCompatible proxy, an attacker could potentially do anything from enumerating vulnerable hosts inside the network, to exploiting vulnerabilities and search for exposed data.”

“We believe that NotCompatible is already present on many corporate networks because we have observed, via Lookout’s user base, hundreds of corporate networks with devices that have encountered NotCompatible,” the Lookout researchers said.

Ah, the unternet of thangs ain’t what they used to be.

 

Amazon squeezes Royal Mail profits

Posted on November 19, 2014 by - News

Royal Mail CEO Moya GreenRoyal Mail declared profits of £279 million today, a fall of 21 percent compared to the six months to the end of September in 2013.

And the recently privatised firm, which said when it went public that it would concentrate on parcel deliveries, warned that Amazon schemes to deliver its own parcels would likely threaten its future.

Amazon is experimenting with all sorts of ways to cut out services like Royal Mail including whacky experiments using drones down to using taxi cabs to deliver parcels to its customers.

Royal Mail, as part of its privatisation, intends to restructure itself in its financial year 2016, a move which will save over £700 million a year but will also affect jobs.

CEO Moya Green said she was pleased with the company’s overall performance but said “the UK parcels market remains challenging”.

Shares in the PLC fell on the news.

SAP to stop buying companies

Posted on November 19, 2014 by - News

sapbeerAfter a spending spree that saw it spending over $7 billion software company Concur, German CRM giant appears to have decided enough is enough.

CEO Bill McDermott told a conference in Barcelona today that SAP is going to “step down” its acquisition efforts.

It had pledged to buy itself into a position of real power in the market, but according to a report by Reuters it was going to tuck itself into bed and that would probably put people to sleep.

SAP has seen some tough times in the recent past but McDermott believes it now has a business plan that will see it do reasonably well between 2015 and 2020.

SAP’s major competitors include Salesforce, Oracle and Workday and that market is becoming increasingly competitive.

McDermott’s strategy is to sell more of its products through the cloud, and that makes it just like every other vendor and therefore more vulnerable to competition too.