Battery will warn you before it explodes

Picture, Stanford UniversityScientists at Stanford University claim to have developed a so-called “smart” lithium ion battery that warns people before it overheats and bursts into an inferno.

The scientists claim that the early warning system uses a very thin copper sensor deposited on top of a conventional battery separator.

The use of such a device is clear, following a recent accident where a person’s smartphone burst into flames while she was using it.

Yi Cui, associate professor of materials science at Stanford, said: “Our goal is to create an early warning system that saves lives and property.  The system can detect problems that occur during the normal operation of a battery, but it does not apply to batteries damaged in a collion or other incident.”

Last year Boeing grounded its 787 Dreamliner fleet after batteries caught fire.  Then there was the famous incident in 2006 when a Dell notebook caught fire in Japan.

But while the odds of batteries catching fire are one in a million, said Cui, hundreds of millions of computers and smartphones are sold every year.

The smart separator will alert people when it’s time to change their batteries, just in case.

Google plays Amazon red herring

red herringAs Google continues to be investigated by the European Union, chairman Eric Schmidt has decided to deflect criticism by saying that Amazon is its biggest search rival.

In a speech in Berlin, Schmidt – who has repeatedly denied that Google is a monopolistic player – he also took time to diss rivals Bing and Yahoo, saying they don’t matter at all.

According to the BBC, Schmidt said that people didn’t see Amazon as a search engine but most people go there when they want to buy something, rather than Google.

How Schmidt thinks this kind of argument will have any weight with the European Union is hard to fathom.

He said: “Amazon is answering users’ questions and searches, just as we are.”

Google isn’t the be and end of it all, added Schmidt. In a note of paranoia he suggested that somewhere will be new technology that will topple it from its premier position.

Salesforce strikes with lightning

Salesforce logoMajor CRM company Salesforce said it has introduced a version of Salesforce1 called Lightning, intended to help customers build mobile apps.

According to the company, developers and users can create purpose built apps for screens of every type of shape and size, including tablets, laptops, smartphones and wearables.

Lightning has a new interface and Salesforce claims is optimised for any device.

Salesforce dubs this tehnique as Platform as a Service (PaaS).  People can use pre-built components such as feed, list chart, search navigation or build their own Lightning Components.

The Lightning Process Builder lets people create enterprise workflows and visually automate complex operations including follow up emails, vendor porcurement and order fulfilment.

Lightning Framewrk and Schema Builder are now generally available, while Lightning Components is in beta test and likely to appear in February 2015, along with other elements of the product.

Boffins unveil sort of cloak of invisibility

invisibleScientists at Penn State university believe they have made considerable process in developing what they describe as a sort of cloak of invisibility. It’s not that, of course.

Postdoctoral fellow Zhi Hao said: “Previous attempts at cloaking using a single metasurface layer were restricted to very small sized objects. Also the act of cloaking would prevent an enclosed antenna or sensor from communicating with the otuside world.

So a group of scientists in the electrical engineering faculty at Penn say it’s developed a thin metamaterial coating that lets objects to function normally even though they don’t seem what they are.

The so called “illusing coatings” use a thin flexible substrate with copper patterns. When a device is probed by a radio frequency (RF) source, the scattered signature seems to be a dielectric material like silicon.

How does it work? The researchers take the object and surround it with either air or foam and then apply the ultrathin layer of dielectric with copper patterns designed for wavelengths they wish to cloak.

The practical benefits of the research could improve the way RF ID tags work or redistribute energy make things more rather than less visible.

Samsung commercialises 60GHz Wi-Fi

samsung-hqSamsung is developing 60GHz Wi-Fi technology that it says can manage  data transmission speeds of up to 4.6Gbps, or 575MB per second.

This is a five-fold increase from 866Mbps, or 108MB per second which is the maximum speed possible with existing consumer electronics devices.

If it does what it says on the tin, it would take a 1GB movie  less than three seconds to transfer between devices, while uncompressed high definition videos can easily be streamed from mobile devices to TVs in real-time without any delay.

Kim Chang Yong, Head of DMC R&D Center of Samsung Electronics said that Samsung has successfully overcome the barriers to the commercialization of 60GHz millimeter-wave band Wi-Fi technology, and will commercialise the technology.

“New and innovative changes await Samsung’s next-generation devices, while new possibilities have been opened up for the future development of Wi-Fi technology, ” Kim said.

Samsung’s 802.11ad standard 60GHz Wi-Fi technology maintains maximum speed by eliminating co-channel interference, regardless of the number of devices using the same network.

In other words, it closes the gap between theoretical and actual speeds, and exhibits actual speed that is more than 10 times faster than that of 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi technologies.

Commercially adopting 60GHz Wi-Fi technology has been difficult because it uses millimeter waves that travel by line-of-sight which have weak penetration properties.

Using millimeter-wave circuit design, high performance modem technologies and by developing wide-coverage beam-forming antenna, Samsung was able to successfully achieve the highest quality, commercially viable 60GHz Wi-Fi technology, Kim said.

Samsung also improved the overall signal quality by developing a micro beam-forming control technology that optimises the communications module in less than 1/3,000 seconds, if the environment changes. The company also developed the world’s first method that allows multiple devices to connect simultaneously to a network.

60GHz is an unlicensed band spectrum across the world, and commercialisation is expected as early as next year. Samsung plans to apply this new technology to a wide range of products, including audio visual and medical devices, as well as telecommunications equipment. The technology will also be useful for the Samsung Smart Home and other  Internet of Things projects.

Apple destroyed Santa’s home

screen480x480The fruity cargo cult Apple should be declared public enemy number one in Finland for the damage it caused to the nation’s economy.

The country’s Prime Minister Alexander Stubb said that Apple’s products have affected its mobile device and paper industries to such a level that it caused an economic downturn. It has  also caused the Nordic country to endure a sovereign debt rating downgrade.

Stubb said that Finland had two industrial problems and two champions which went down — Nokia in the ICT sector, and the other has to do with the forest and paper industry.”

“One could say that the iPhone killed Nokia and the iPad killed the Finnish paper industry, but we’ll make a comeback.”

Of course it is not Apple’s fault – there were shedloads of other technology companies which cleaned Nokia’s clock and the paper industry had been suffering for a while.

Statistics from the Finnish Forest Research Institute found that the forest and paper industry has contracted over the last few years, with the institute’s most recent report for 2013 warning of a “poor situation” for paper production, as well as a forecast that exports would continue to shrink in 2014.

The rise of electronic devices cannot be directly blamed for the paper industry’s issues in the country, the rise of online publications at the expense of newspapers could be seen as a contributing factor. Stubb hopes that instead of flogging trees to newspapers, they might make a nice form of bio energy. Perhaps the Finns should follow Sweden and move into flat pack furniture as a better use for its trees.

 

Sandworm team uses Microsoft bug

dune-sandwormFor the last five years, Russian hackers have conducted a single operation to spy on computers used by NATO, the European Union, Ukraine and companies in the energy and telecommunications sectors.

Cyber intelligence firm iSight said it did not know what data had been found by the hackers, though it suspected they were seeking information on the Ukraine crisis, as well as diplomatic, energy and telecom issues.

According to iSight, which dubbed the operation “Sandworm Team” because it found references to the “Dune” in the software code used by the hackers, the operation used a variety of ways to attack the targets over the years.

Things have become worse since August since the Sandworm Team  found a hole of their in most versions of Windows to exploit.

ISight said it told Microsoft about the bug and held off on disclosing the problem so the software maker had time to fix it.

A spokesVole said the company plans to roll out an automatic update to affected versions of Windows today.

iSight said they believed the hackers are Russian because of language clues in the software code and because of their choice of targets.

Hulquist said the hackers were supported by a nation state because they were engaging in espionage, not cybercrime.

For example, in December 2013, NATO was targeted with a malicious document on European diplomacy. Several regional governments in the Ukraine and an academic working on Russian issues in the United States were sent tainted emails that claimed to contain a list of pro-Russian extremist activities.

Hulquist said its researchers had uncovered evidence that some Ukrainian government computers were infected, but they were unable to confirm specific victims among those systems that had been targeted.

The iSight research is the latest in a series of private sector security reports that link Moscow to some of the most sophisticated cyber espionage uncovered to date.

 

 

 

Chip price war unlikely

Normans_BayeuxSamsung does not expect a price war to break out in the semiconductor industry next year even though it is ramping up capacity.

CEO Kwon Oh-hyun said that he will have to “wait and see how things will go next year, but there definitely will not be any game of chicken”,

Memory chip makers have reported strong profits this year thanks to better-than-expected demand for PCs and servers.  Most analysts believe industry conditions will remain favourable in 2015.

But Samsung’s plan to invest $14.67 billion in a new South Korea chip plant stoked concerns about the industry’s profit outlook. Some investors worry that the firm could ramp up supply and undercut prices to squeeze Hynix and Micron’s bottom line.

Cooler heads have pointed out that Samsung’s plant will not begin production  until 2017. They say margins in the memory business are important to Samsung, given the mobile division’s falling smartphone profits.

 

 

Governments and businesses harvest voices

Harvest_time_in_Romania,_1920Businesses and governments around the world increasingly are harvesting voiceprints for future biometric based security systems.

Mike Goldgof, an executive at Madrid-based AGNITiO said companies like his have helped enter more than 65 million voiceprints into corporate and government databases.

The system is starting to be used. Barclays recently experimented with voice printing as an identification for its wealthiest clients. It was so successful that Barclays is rolling it out to the rest of its 12 million retail-banking customers.

Iain Hanlon, a Barclays executive, said that voice biometrics will be the de facto standard in the next two or three years.

It works based on the idea that a timbre of each person’s voice is unique. Typical speaker recognition software compares those characteristics with data held on a server. If two voiceprints are similar enough, the system declares them a match.

So far, the largest implementation identified by the AP is in Turkey, where mobile phone company Turkcell has taken the voice biometric data of some 10 million customers using technology provided by market leader Nuance Communications.

US coppers use the technology to monitor inmates and track offenders who have been paroled.

In New Zealand, the Internal Revenue Department collected its 1 millionth voiceprint, leading the revenue minister to boast that his country had “the highest level of voice biometric enrollments per capita in the world.”

In South Africa, roughly 7 million voiceprints have been collected by the country’s Social Security Agency, in part to verify that those claiming pensions are still alive.

Councils snoop on employees, residents

fingerprintHard evidence shows that UK councils behave far worse than Google and employ cameras to check whether their own employees and residents follow the made up rules council officials operate.

It has emerged CCTV cameras follow every movement of the binmen as they pick up wheelie bins, and binmen are called to task if they get a tiny iota wrong.

A letter from a man called Robert Brown – waste and recycling operations manager at Oxford City Council, a functionary for the body  – confirms that a corporation operating binmen has cameras watching all the time to see what both their employees and residents are up to.

We have asked for full YouTube footage of the probably daily snooping, by back door cameras watching both employees and residents, in the hope there might be transparency.

Brown said to a resident of back water Mill Street, in Oxford: “We have taken the time to check out our inboard cameras and can confirm that your bin was not presented correctly when our operatives came to service your street.”

The resident told TechEye: “My bin was where it had been for the last four and a half year years. It is a narrow street and I would not care to put a bin on the pavement because people are trying to take their children to school and walk on the narrow street.”

Oxford City Council’s Brown produced one sample of video and four photographs to demonstrate the local resident was in the wrong, but posed the question to TechEye about surveillance of both staff and the people that pay Oxford City Council’s functionary bills.

A local resident told TechEye – on conditions of anonymity – that the binmen had been happy to deliver the blue bin to its inevitable consignment in a Grunwald’s vehicle but that he was puzzled that what she thought was a mistake on the behalf of the binmen, turned out to be an act of mass surveillance.

At press time, Oxford City Council was unable to reply because they only operate between the hours of nine to five, Monday to Friday. We’ll try tomorrow to get a definitive answer from Robert Brown – that is to say his representatives on earth, the press officers at Oxford City Council.

As you can see, from the pictures, below  there is a lack of cohesive advice to both binmen and residents.  We at TechEye are also concerned at the lack of transparency and intrusion from Oxford City Council and its representatives.  More on Tuesday.

morebins

bins

UK high on Google purge lists

OgleThe European Court of Justice told Google that it had to remove information under its so-called “right to be forgotten” law and now it has emerged that one in 10 requests came from the UK.

According to the BBC, Google has taken down nearly 500,000 links from its search engine since May.  And, of those, 63,616 were UK requests.

Google doesn’t have to take down sites on requests, but people have a right to appeal if it decides not to.

Out of the 498,737 URLs it looked at, based on 146,357 requests, France accounted for the most requests, followed by Germany and then the UK.  Of the requests it received, Google removed 41.8 percent, and left 58.2 percent of them online.

Google said it gt a request from a defrocked vicar to remove two links covering an investigation of sexual abuse accusations.  It didn’t remove the pages.

Facebook accounted for most requests to remove references, followed by profileengine.com

IT vendors expect cash bonanza from India

Narendra Modi, India's PM - picture Wikimedia CommonsNext year the Indian government is likely to spend a staggering $7.2 billion on information technology, promising rich pickings for vendors that can surf the wave.

According to market research firm Gartner, that figure will be a five percent increase over this year and the $7.2 billion cake includes plums that cover hardware, software, IT services and telecomms.

Anurag Gupta, a research director on the subcontinent for Gartner, reckons IT services will be worth $1.8 billion in 2015, and the business process outsourcing segment will grow by 22 percent during this year.

Government spending on software is likely to be worth $910 million in 2015 – much of that being on vertical software.

Gupta said the new government’s aims are only able to be achieved by using technology and digital government, in particular broadband penetration, cloud initiatives, and public private partnership.

Intel suffers from industry nervousness

Intel-logoChip giant Intel puts out its quarterly results tomorrow but its shares dropped last Friday after Microchip issued a revenue warning.

Microchip said it was ready for another industry correction and, according to financial analysts at Seekingalpha.com, “the entire semiconductor space was reeling on Friday”.  That applied particularly to behemoths like Intel.

But other things may help Intel’s share price, according to the financial analysts.  There were reports that Apple will delay its 12.9-inch iPad to 2015 and that will give Intel a window of opportunity to steal market share on its chips, if the reports are true.

Intel will report its third quarter earnings tomorrow afternoon, US time.

Analyst Bill Maurer at Seeking Alpha said the fact that Intel planned to buy back a cool $4 billion worth of shares will have an impact on its bottom line – a positive one, that is.

As a result of Microchip’s revenue warning on Friday, Intel (ticker: INTC) lost over five percent on the stock exchange.  Intel still makes huge gross margins and had predicted when it released its second quarter earnings that gross margins would be 66 percent, and revenues $14.4 billion or so.

Stay away from Google, Dropbox and Facebook

Edward_SnowdenAnyone worried about their privacy should spurn Dropbox, Facebook, and Google as they suffered from Ebola,  according to whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Talking to the New Yorker Festival, by remote conferencing, Snowden said people should seek out encrypted tools and stop using services that are “hostile to privacy”.

He named Dropbox,” because it does not support encryption, and you should consider alternatives like SpiderOak. He seemed to be behind the times on this one as Dropbox has supported encryption since June. In fact, the only difference between the two is that SpiderOak encrypts the data while it’s on your computer, as opposed to only encrypting it “in transit” and on the company’s servers.

While Facebook and Google have improved their security, they remain “dangerous services” that people should avoid. His final piece of advice on this front: Do not send unencrypted text messages, but instead use services like RedPhone and Silent Circle.

Snowden dismissed claims that increased encryption on iOS will hurt crime-fighting efforts. Even with that encryption, he said law enforcement officials can still ask for warrants that will give them complete access to a suspect’s phone, which will include the key to the encrypted data.

Microsoft solves wearable keyboard problems

Typewriter_adler1_keyboardWhile Apple has been attracting all the press for its iWatch vapourware, it appears that Microsoft has solved some of the serious design problems for wearable computers.

One of the biggest problems for wearables is an interface which people with normal sized fingers can use.

Microsoft might have come up with the most logical solution for typing on small size displays running Google’s Android Wear platform.

Volish boffins have built an analogue keyboard prototype for Android Wear that eliminates the need to tap at tiny letters and has you write them out.

The method involves using the entire screen which is important if you are using a 1.6-inch smartwatch with a software keyboard that has 10 keys across.

A spokesVole said that using the whole screen allows each letter to be entered rather comfortably, even on small devices. Some handwriting systems can be used without even looking at the screen. Finally, handwriting interfaces require very little design changes to run on round displays.

Microsoft is making the software public to receive feedback from users.

It’s free and should work with any Android Wear app that uses text input, though it needs to be side loaded using Android Debut Bridge.

You can see it in action here http://msrvideo.vo.msecnd.net/rmcvideos/230860/230860.mp4