Swap noise for a ginger afro

Posted on July 31, 2014 by - News

silentpowerThe Silent Power PC has swapped  its noisy electric fans in favour of a copper afro.

In place of a conventional fan, the unit uses an open-air metal foam heatsink that boasts an enormous surface area thanks to the open-weave filaments of copper. It looks like a Brillo Pad, or that the unit secretly wants to audition for the lead role in a 1970’s version of Shaft.

The Silent Power creators say that the circulation of air through the foam is so efficient in dissipating heat that the exterior surface temperature never rises above 50° C.

The rest of the kit is conventional enough. It has an Intel quad-core i7-4785T 2.2 GHz processor, 8 or 16 GB of RAM, Nivida GTX 760 graphics card, and the usual array of USB, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, HDMI, DVI, and audio ports, along with Windows 8.1 as standard

But the whole thing is kept fanless by using a copper base, which is in direct contact with the CPU and GPU via thermal paste, forms the top of the chassis and absorbs heat and releases it evenly to the copper foam on top.

The difference is that its heat dissipation is 500 times greater than that offered by conventional fin-type heatsink systems and is more than sufficient to maintain adequately low operating temperatures. The CPU and GPU are on the top of the stack, rather than in the bottom of the case to help keep it cool.

It is not a big machine either – Just 6.2x 4x 2.75 inches. It does need an external power supply but you have to lose something when you get that small.

Installed in the machine is a sensor that the team says can detect movement to wake the unit up from standby as the user approaches. Conversely, if the user leaves the proximity of the device, the sensor detects the lack of movement and automatically locks the system.

The machine is only a prototype, German startup Silent Power is running its own crowdfunding campaign with a goal of €45,000 (US$60,000) to get the unit into production.

Pre-ordering of one of three versions of the PC for $930 gets you the base 8 GB RAM, 500 GB HDD version. If you splash out $1,030 you will get the 26 GB RAM, 500 GB HDD model and the top of the range $1,550 model will have 16 GB RAM, 1,000 GB SSD PC. Of course, you will have to wait until spring of 2015 to pick it up.

 

Samsung sulks as profits slump

Posted on July 31, 2014 by - News

sulkingSamsung reported its worst quarterly profit in two years and moaned about uncertain earnings prospects for its key handset business.

The fact it gave such a doomed profits prophecy and kept its interim dividend unchanged from last year, put the shares of the outfit on track for their worst fall in nearly eight months.

Samsung expects July-September handset shipments to pick up by 10 percent from the previous quarter and said it planned to release a new premium smartphone employing a new design and material.

The outfit is suffering from its low end being squeezed from Chinese rivals like Xiaomi and has promised price cuts.

Those plans were pretty much want everyone thought it would do Samsung remained downbeat about its third-quarter prospects, with its mobile division expecting a decline in average sales price in the current quarter from the April-June period.

Senior Vice President Kim Hyun-joon said that considering intensifying competition of price and specifications as well as the release of new competing models, it is difficult to expect earnings to improve from the second quarter.

For April-June, Samsung said operating profit fell 24.6 percent annually to $7.03 billion, matching its guidance. It was the third straight quarter of profit decline and its weakest result since the second quarter of 2012.

Profit for the mobile division fell to about $4.42 billion from $6.28 billion a year ago.

Samsung’s mobile division executives returned a quarter of their first-half bonuses and have downgraded to economy seats for shorter flights.

Researcher IDC warned that Samsung’s second-quarter global smartphone market share slipped to 25.2 percent from 32.3 percent a year ago.

Samsung’s guidance on its memory business was bullish, tipping its 2014 shipment growth for both DRAM and NAND memory chips to outpace the broader market.

Government hackers take down Tor

Posted on July 31, 2014 by - News

glastonbury-torOne of the last refuges of dissidents in oppressive regimes has been taken down by hacker agencies working for the US government.

The Tor system, which was often the only way that dissidents could communicate in repressive regimes or that whistle blowers could leak their information, warned that many of its users might have been identified by government-funded researchers.

Tor Project leader Roger Dingledine said the service had identified computers on its network that had been altering Tor traffic for five months in an attempt to unmask users connecting to what are known as “hidden services.”

Dingledine said it was “likely” the attacking computers were operated on behalf of two researchers at the Software Engineering Institute, which is housed at Carnegie-Mellon University, but funded mainly by the US Department of Defence. The computers have been removed from the network, but the damage has already been done.

The pair had been scheduled to speak on identifying Tor users at the Black Hat security conference next month. After Tor developers complained to Carnegie-Mellon, officials there said the research had not been cleared and cancelled the talk.

Dingledine said that users who operated or accessed hidden services from early February through July 4 should assume they were affected.

Those navigating to ordinary websites should be in the clear.

Hidden services include underground drug sites such as the shuttered Silk Road, as well as privacy-conscious outfits such as SecureDrop, which is designed to connect whistle blowers with media outlets.

Dingledine said the physical locations where the hidden services were housed could have been exposed, although probably not the content on them that was viewed by a visitor.

All that matters now is if the spooks will just pop around to the researchers with a warrant and ask that they hand over all the details.

The FBI had no immediate response to questions about whether it would seek the data and the Defence Department was not sure if it had the right to raw research from the Institute.

Dingledine advised users to upgrade to the latest version of its software, which addresses the vulnerability that was exploited. He warned that attempts to break Tor were likely to continue.

 

 

 

Apache flaw scalps Android

Posted on July 30, 2014 by - News

apacheA four year-old hole in a critical part of Google’s Android OS could leave mobile devices that use it susceptible to attack.

Researchers at the firm Bluebox Security said that Android verifies mobile applications using the Apache Harmony module. This module has a flaw in it.

The vulnerability affects devices running Android versions 2.1 to 4.4.

According to Bluebox, Apache Harmony affects Android’s verification of digital signatures that are used to vouch for the identity of mobile applications.

Application signatures are the basis of the Android application trust model and link different applications with a reputable certificate authority.

Mobile application signatures on Android are secured using a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) with certificate authorities.

But the package installer component of older versions of Android do not attempt to determine the authenticity of certificate chains that are used to vouch for new digital identity certificates.

This means that a hacker can build a certificate and claim it has been issued by another identity, and the Android cryptographic code will not check.

If a hacker faked an Adobe Systems certificate vulnerable versions of Android will treat the application as if it was actually signed by Adobe.

It would give it access to local resources, like the special webview plugin privilege, that can be used to sidestep security controls and virtual ‘sandbox’ environments.

Apache Harmony was abandoned in 2011 and was supposed to offer an open source alternative to Oracle’s Java technology. Google turned to Harmony as an alternative means of supporting Java after failing to strike a deal with Oracle to license Java.

Google continued to use Android libraries that were based on Harmony code even after the project was abandoned.

Google said that it is working with Bluebox to fix the vulnerability and has quickly issued a patch that was distributed to Android partners.

 

Consoles doomed says Doom man

Posted on July 30, 2014 by - News

doomJohn Romero, best known for his on Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake says that consoles are being killed off by PCs and mobile consoles.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz   at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, Romero said that free-to-play is shaking up the industry.

He said that with a PC you have free-to-play and Steam games for five bucks,” said Romero. “The PC is decimating console, just through price. Free-to-play has killed a hundred top studios.

Romero’s games involve providing the first episode free and if play more, then you pay up.

He said that everyone was getting better at free-to-play design, and it is going to lose its stigma at some point. People will settle into the mindset that there is a fair way of doing it, and the other way is the “dirty way.”

Romero said that with this model there were some technological advantages of PC over consoles.

“With PCs if you want a faster system you can just plug in some new video cards, put faster memory in it, and you’ll always have the best machine that blows away PS4 or Xbox One,” he said.

Romero also thinks that VR headsets are unlikely to make a significant impact on the gaming world.

He said that before using Oculus, he had heard many vets in the industry saying this is not like anything they had seen before.

While he thought that it was amazing, Romero could not see a good future for VR right now.

“It encloses you and keeps you in one spot – even the Kinect and Move are devices I wouldn’t play because they just tire you out,” Romero said.

“VR is going away from the way games are being developed and pushed as they go back into multiplayer and social stuff. VR is kind of a step back, it’s a fad.”

Man beat Apple 42 times

Posted on July 30, 2014 by - News

gala_appleA 24 year old managed to scam the fruity cargo cult Apple more than 42 times – at least in Florida.

The Tampa Bay Times  said that Sharron Laverne Parrish tricked Apple Store employees in 16 states starting around December 2012 into accepting fake authorisation codes to buy $309,768 worth of Apple goods.

He was arrested by the US Secret Service special agents working alongside Apple and Chase Bank security. US spooks often get involved in cases involving currency scams.

Parrish visited Apple Stores and tried to buy products with four different debit cards, which were all closed by the banks. When his debit card was inevitably declined by the Apple Store, he would protest and offer to call his bank.

He did not call the bank, of course. He would just give the Apple Store employees a fake authorisation code with a certain number of digits, which is normally provided by credit card issuers to create a record of the credit or debit override.

What Parrish had worked out was that as long as the number of digits is correct, the override code itself does not matter.

However because Apple employees overrode the initial declination against the instructions of Chase Bank, Apple suffered the loss because of this fraud.

Applied Micro Circuits frightens Intel

Posted on July 30, 2014 by - News

godApplied Micro Circuits has begun shipping a new kind of low-power server chip that might cause its rival Intel a headache in the data centre business.

Applied Micro Circuits announced it is shipping its new X-Gene “microserver” 64-bit chips, made with ARM designs. X-Gene is being touted as a Server-on-a-Chip which combines 10/40g mixed signal I/O with top-of-class, ARMv8 64-bit cores running at up to 2.4 Ghz, with an enterprise-class memory subsystem.

The company said that it has already made a million dollars from the chips and expects “meaningful” revenue from the chips in the quarters ending in December and March as shipments build.

Chief Executive Officer Paramesh Gopi told analysts on a conference call that there was a backlog for X-Gene, both in the September quarter and December quarter, as well as the March quarter.

Microservers have yet to be meaningfully adopted, but the belief is that data centres can be made more cost effective and energy efficient by using them.

Chipzilla will lose shedloads if the server market moves towards such technology and cannot lose even a few percentage points of market share.

Intel spokesman Bill Calder said that while Intel was not taking the competition lightly, he thought that the much-hyped threat of ARM servers getting any significant market segment share any time soon has been vastly overplayed.

Microservers will probably end up in data centres run by major Internet companies and for use in high-performance computing.

Intel executives in the past have said microserver chips being developed by Applied Micro Circuits, Advanced Micro Devices and other small rivals were unproven and not a serious threat to its server chip business.

In the past couple of years, Intel has launched its own low-power chips, designed with its own architecture, in anticipation of a potential move toward microservers.

Apple and Samsung lose out

Posted on July 30, 2014 by - News

1920s-telephone-advertApple and Samsung’s European bottom lines are being kicked by a surge of interest in local smartphones.

A report from Netbiscuits suggests that customers are becoming increasingly frustrated at the mobile market monoculture and Apple and Samsung are experiencing their first major challenge from disruptive European vendors.

Head of global research at Netbiscuits Duncan Clark said that his report marks a dramatic shift in mobile market share which are mirrored in Asia were emerging local vendors in Asia have been doing well.

French company Wiko and bq in Spain have muscled a “Top 50 devices” spot in their own countries for the first time ever.

Coupled with increased fragmentation in Asian markets as cheaper brands enter the market, it seems that smaller, companies are gaining popularity around the world and disrupting dominant players.

It is still early days yet, but it does show that the Golden Age where Apple and Samsung rule the smartphone world is coming to a close.

 

 

 

 

Intel builds custom chips for Oracle

Posted on July 29, 2014 by - News

oracleIntel’s new business building custom chips for punters who build their own servers appears to have been gaining some momentum.

Last year, Intel started offering custom chip designs to Facebook and eBay and now it has managed to get Oracle signed up.

The difference with the Oracle deal is that Chipzilla is making custom processors to sell to customers.

According to DatacenterDynamics  Oracle wanted a processor whose performance profiles could be changed on demand based on workload.

Intel built Oracle’s E7-8890 v2 on the Xeon E7-8895 v2 processor but gave it the ability to put its cores into ultra-low power states and then bring them back up as needed.

The 8890 v2 model is the top of the Xeon line, the only one with RAS capabilities and other high-end functions found in the Itanium and other RISC processors.

The 8890 has 15 cores running at 2.8 GHz and 37.5 MB of cache per core for high performance analytics or in-memory databases.

With the 8895, Intel allowed the processor to act like an 8890, 8891 or 8893 while in operation and without having to shut down and restart.

The technology was already there. Intel already does something similar with its consumer Core processors called Turbo Boost. If a dual core, 3.0GHz processor is running a single-threaded app, it will shut down one core and run the other at 3.4Ghz, for example.

The 8895 is used in Oracle’s Exadata Database Machine X4-8,an 8-processor rack system with up to 12 TB of system memory 672 terabytes of disk, 44 terabytes of high-performance PCI Flash, 240 database CPU cores, and 168 CPU cores in storage to accelerate data-intensive SQL.

There are limits to the deal. Intel will not be open to chip suggestions from Oracle’s hardware competitors like HP and Dell. The Oracle deal was oriented around its database and other business application software.

Samsung delays Tizen

Posted on July 29, 2014 by - News

tizen-(1)Samsung’s plans to get its Tizen phone into the shops have been delayed, with the initial planned third quarter launch in Russia abandoned.

The Korean electronics maker had been hoping that Tizen would cut its dependency on Android.

The phone was supposed to be tried out in Russia sometime in the third quarter, but Samsung said it needed more time to enhance the “Tizen ecosystem.”

This comes as no real surprise as there had been rumblings at a recent Tizen developer’ conference two weeks ago, but this was put down to a dodgy fish supper.

Samsung did not say exactly what was wrong with Tizen but it would appear to be concerns about the availability of apps and related services that are needed to make the product sell.

Network operators NTT DoCoMo and France’s Orange pulled out of promotional campaigns launching the Tizen phone because of a lack of Apps.

Samsung has already launched Tizen smartwatches and cameras, but wants to get it into smartphones so that it has greater control over its phones operating system. Its license agreement with Google restricts its freedom to make more than cosmetic changes to the Android system.

 

Hackers hack Amazon’s cloud

Posted on July 29, 2014 by - News

Amazon-Cloud-OutageHackers have worked out a way to break into Amazon’s cloud and install DDoS malware.

The hole is thanks to a vulnerability in distributed search engine software Elasticsearch which is a popular open-source search engine server. The software was  developed in Java that allows applications to perform full-text search for various types of documents through a REST API (representational state transfer application programming interface).

Elasticsearch is commonly used in cloud environments and is used on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine and other cloud platforms.

Versions 1.1.x of Elasticsearch have support for active scripting through API calls in their default configuration. For some reason this does not require authentication which is how the malware writers have broke into the systm.

Elasticsearch’s developers have not released a patch for the 1.1.x branch, but starting with version 1.2.0, released on May 22, dynamic scripting is disabled by default.

Kaspersky Lab has found variants of Mayday, a Trojan program for Linux that’s used to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

One of the new Mayday variants was found running on compromised Amazon EC2 server instances.

Kaspersky Lab researcher Kurt Baumgartner said that it was not the only victim. The attackers break into   virtual machines run by Amazon EC2 customers by exploiting the CVE-2014-3120 vulnerability in Elasticsearch 1.1.x, which is still being used by some organisations in active commercial deployments despite being superseded by Elasticsearch 1.2.x and 1.3.x.

Baumgartner saw the early stages of the Elasticsearch attacks and that the hackers modified publicly available proof-of-concept exploit code for CVE-2014-3120 and used it to install a Perl-based Web shell. This gave them a backdoor script that allows remote attackers to execute Linux shell commands over the Web. The script, downloads the new version of the Mayday DDoS bot, detected as Backdoor.Linux.Mayday.g.

Microsoft’s Nokia plans as clear as mud

Posted on July 29, 2014 by - News

cunning-planFor a while we had been wondering what Microsoft was doing with its Nokia purchase. For the last week, Vole has been doing its best to slim down the former maker of rubber boots, but there did not seem to be much logic to it.

When the shy and retiring Microsoft CEO Steve “there is a kind of hush” Ballmer wrote a $7 billion cheque for the company we all wondered how an elephant like Vole was going turn around a giant Lemming like Nokia.

Nokia cost Microsoft eight cents from its earnings per share last quarter, but the costs are starting be contained.

CEO Satya Nadella, who replaced Steve Ballmer in February expects Nokia to break even by 2016.

The plan appears to be to focus on high and low cost Windows smartphones, suggesting a phasing out of feature phones and Android smartphones.

Two business units, smart devices and mobile phones, would become one, thereby cutting overlap and overhead. Microsoft would reduce engineering in Beijing and San Diego and unwind engineering in Oulu, Finland.

It would exit manufacturing in Komarom, Hungary; shift to lower cost areas like Manaus, Brazil and Reynosa, Mexico; and reduce manufacturing in Beijing and Dongguan, China.

Expected to die will be the Nokia X Android phones, Asha and Series 40 phones.

Nadella said that devices, he said, “go beyond” hardware and are about productivity. “I can take my Office Lens App, use the camera on the phone, take a picture of anything, and have it automatically OCR recognised and into OneNote in searchable fashion. There is a lot we can do with phones by broadly thinking about productivity.”

It would seem that Redmond wants the sale of a smartphone to mean other sales.

This all makes sense when you factor in Microsoft’s goal to have the next generation of Windows, Windows 9 as a single operating system.

This would mean then that while Nokia might lose the smartphone market it will have a new role driving network access to corporate cloud systems.

Chinese regulators gun for Microsoft

Posted on July 29, 2014 by - News

microsoft-in-chinaIt seems that after claiming the rump of Qualcomm, the Chinese antitrust regulators want to take a bite out of Microsoft.

Apparently representatives from China’s State Administration for Industry & Commerce (SAIC) popped in for a quiet chat to the Microsoft offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chengdu.

No one is actually saying what the conversation was about, but it is not thought that the Chinese water torture was used at this point of the investigation.

SAIC is not just in charge of antitrust matters, it also takes the lead in any bribery and corruption investigations as well as intellectual property rights abuse cases,

A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company was happy to answer the government’s questions but did not say what those questions were.

Qualcomm is facing penalties that may exceed $1 billion in one such Chinese antitrust probe, following accusations of overcharging and abusing its market position.

Needless to say this is getting the US jolly cross. It favours letting businesses do whatever they like or senators are not going to get their usual Christmas presents from their favourite lobby group.

The US Chamber of Commerce earlier this year urged Washington to get tough with Beijing on its use of anti-competition rules, and warned that “concerns among U.S. companies are intensifying”.

Microsoft has been having a little bit of trouble in Big China lately. Earlier this month, activists said Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage service were being disrupted.

In May, central government offices were banned from installing Windows 8, Microsoft’s latest operating system, on new computers. This ban has not been lifted, as multiple procurement notices since then have forbidden the use of Windows 8.

Linus Torvalds wades into the GCC 4.9.0 compiler

Posted on July 28, 2014 by - News

torvaldsAn Open Source compiler has been blasted by Linus Torvalds as being ‘pure and utter s***’ and ‘terminally broken’ after a random panic was discovered in a load balance function in Linux 3.16-rc6.

GCC was designed by Open Source Pope Richard Stallman to provide a free software compiler for open saucy projects. It has been through many different incarnations and the latest hit the streets earlier this month.

The new version has upset the King of Linux, Linus Torvalds, after it appeared to break the 3.16-rc kernel. Torvalds did not mince his words at his disgust describing the compiler as retarded as a sloth that was dropped on the head as a baby.

In a rant which is vaguely like a John Cleese parrot sketch  Torvalds said that: “Lookie here, your compiler does some absolutely insane things with the spilling, including spilling a constant. For chrissake, that compiler shouldn’t have been allowed to graduate from kindergarten. We’re talking “sloth that was dropped on the head as a baby” level retardation levels.”

Torvalds said there is no way that the problem is within his kernel, and claims that the compiler is creating broken code while also warning that those testing the kernel shouldn’t compile it with gcc-4.9.0.

He said that the problem is in the latest version, because the compiler was reliable until now.

 

 

Linux in Spain causes Microsoft pain

Posted on July 28, 2014 by - News

ValenciaIt has been a couple of bad weeks for Microsoft as more anti-Volish governments have been announcing successful open source operations.

Last week we had the British cabinet office moving away from Microsoft’s open document standard, and this week we have the Spanish praising Linux.

The government of the autonomous region of Valencia (Spain) has been waxing lyrical about Lliurex, a customisation of the Edubuntu Linux distribution.

Lliurex is used on more than 110,000 PCs in schools in the Valencia region, saving some 36 million euro over the past nine years, the government says.

The Lliurex distribution is managed through the Ministry of Finance and Public Administration. During installation, users can choose between several variants, tailored for example for use at home, in schools or by small and medium-sized enterprises.

Sofia Bellés, Director General of the region’s Information Technologies Department said that the new version will ease maintenance and management of PC equipment in schools in the region.

The software has also been optimised to save time in creating PC labs and is allowing better control over printing, reducing printing costs.

Liurex is one of several free software projects used by Valencia. It is using LibreOffice, a free and open source suite of office productivity applications, is used on all the 120,000 desktop PCs of the administration, including schools and courts. Using LibreOffice will help save the administration 1.5 million euro per year, the government said last year.

Last week, the administration of Extremadura, another Spanish region, revamped the website of its Linex distribution, also used in schools. Linex is installed on about 70,000 PCs and laptops in schools.