Russian scientists save spaced out randy lizards

Posted on July 28, 2014 by - News

Tlizardhe Russian space agency Roscosmos has managed to gain control over a satellite crewed by randy lizards who are keen to test out sex in zero gravity.

Mission control said that it has manage to gain positive control over the agency’s orbiting Foton-M4 satellite. Launched a week ago, Foton-M4 carries a primarily biological payload made up of geckos, flies, plant seeds, and various micro-organisms which was supposed to test out how lower orders of life bonk when there is no gravity.

The satellite made headlines late last week when just a few days after launch, ground control lost communication with the satellite and could no longer send it commands.

Apparently the satellite’s five-gecko crew, four females and one male, were sent aloft by Russian scientists in order to study the effects of microgravity on sex and reproduction are safe. Scientists are spying on the geckos and then slice up the randy couples when the satellite returns to Earth at the conclusion of its two-month mission.

If they had not fixed Foton-M4 it would remain in its 357-mile orbit for about four months—two months longer than the provisions for its biological payload would last. The Geckos having bonked themselves to exhaustion would have run out of food and begun to eat each other, and not in a good way. The survivors would have been burnt to a crisp on re-entry.

Now that the spacecraft is functioning normally, the lizards can get to it safe in the knowledge that their death will not take place until they are safely in a Russian lab back on the planet.  Now all that can go wrong is a reptile dysfunction.

 

 

 

 

Apple misses a Beats. Buys lemon

Posted on July 28, 2014 by - News

head10When Apple bought the groovy headphone maker Beats for $3 billion, legions of fanboys in the press rushed to claim that it was the deal of the century.

It seems that Apple might have bought itself a bag of pain after Bose filed a lawsuit that accuses the headphone maker of infringing upon several of its patents.

The suit claims that Bose lost sales because Beats nicked its patented noise-cancelling technology in its Studio and Studio Wireless headphone lines.

To make matters worse, Beats advertises that the technology “can also be used for noise cancellation when no music is played” which is something Bose has a patent on. “Thus, Beats specifically encourages users to use the infringing functionality. Beats advertises no method to turn off features that cause end users to directly infringe.”

Apple appears to have bought a company whose products infringe on five US patents: patent 6,717,537, titled “Method and Apparatus for Minimizing Latency in Digital Signal Processing Systems;” patent 8,073,150, a “Dynamically Configurable ANR Signal Processing Topology;” patent 8,073,151, a “Dynamically Configurable ANR Filter Block Technology;” patent 8,054,992, which specifies a method for high frequency compensating; and patent 8,345,888, which covers “Digital High Frequency Phase Compensation.”

Bose never mentions Apple in the 22-page complaint, and the Tame Apple Press insists that the lawsuit has come about because Jobs’ Mob paid such a high price.

Some magazines have even implied that Bose is being a patent troll saying that this is not the first time Bose has sued a competitor over patents. It sued Able Planet last year over its noise-cancelling headphones, and reached a settlement. In April, Bose sued Monster for selling headphones that infringe a Bose patent related to “fit and retention characteristics” of their in-ear headphones. That case is in its early stages.

Bose has also filed a complaint with the US International Trade Commission against Beats over the same infringement claims. That means the patent lawsuit filed in federal court will be stayed while the ITC case gets resolved first.

Either way this is going to get messy for Apple. It already paid what many considered was too much for Beats and it is going to have another expensive court battle to fight.

 

Don’t fear the Big Blue Apple Alliance

Posted on July 28, 2014 by - News

blue-appleThe glorious alliance between soft fruit Apple and Big Blue has not put the fear of Jehovah into other potential fruity alliances.

According to Reuters  top executives at Dell and BlackBerry scoffed at the deal with their best scoffing sticks.

The pair have been trying to re-invent themselves, and some of the tame Apple press claims that the glorious Apple-IBM alliance will stuff up their efforts.

John Swainson, who heads Dell’s global software business, said that the Apple-IBM made a good press release but there was nothing in it which was worth taking seriously.

Swainson, who spent over two decades in senior roles at IBM, point out that IBM reps will be unable to flog Apple gear to their client base. He said that they were rubbish at selling that sort of thing when it had an IBM logo on it, so they are going to be just as pants at trying to sell stuff with an Apple on it.

While it is true that Apple products are better marketed, Swainson said they lack the depth of security features that many large business clients like banks need.

BlackBerry Chief Executive John Chen told the Financial Times that the alliance was like when “two elephants start dancing”,

Dell and BlackBerry have declined to discuss whether they would consider teaming up, but some analysts, bankers and others have argued in the past that a partnership between the two underdogs potentially made sense.

Dell has a huge sales team, vast network of business clients and is focused on growing its security and device management capabilities which is everything that BlackBerry needs.

Dutch can outsource spying

Posted on July 25, 2014 by - News

dutch-childrenThe Dutch courts have ruled that while the government is forbidden to snoop on its citizens over the internet, it is allowed to use data stolen from them by the American spooks.

The Hague District Court Dutch ruled that intelligence services can receive bulk data that might have been obtained by the US National Security Agency (NSA) through mass data interception programs, even though collecting data that way is illegal under Dutch law.

A civil case filed by a coalition of defence lawyers, privacy advocates and journalists who sued the Dutch government wanted a court order to stop the AIVD and MIVD from obtaining data from foreign intelligence agencies that was not obtained in accordance with European and Dutch law.

NSA’s mass data collection programs violate human rights guaranteed by international and European treaties including the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the lawyers argued.

However, the court said that under Dutch law, Dutch intelligence services are allowed to collaborate with the NSA. The NSA in turn is bound by US law which, in general, does not conflict with the human rights convention privacy requirements.

Since raw data is shared in bulk, less stringent safeguards are necessary than would apply when the data is examined and used, the court said. It added that there would be a big difference between receiving data and using it for individual cases.

The court said it only ruled on general grounds, assessing the actions of the state in general. It suggested the outcome could be different when individual lawsuits or complaints were filed with the relevant institutions.

The lawyers bringing the case were furious and dubbed it “incomprehensible.”

In a statement, they said that innocent citizens’ privacy rights should prevail over the interests of intelligence services. Because the data exchanged in bulk involves information on many innocent people, safeguards that are more stringent are needed.

They plan to appeal the ruling.

Chromebooks outclass iPads

Posted on July 25, 2014 by - News

classApple’s dominance over the tablet market is slumping but one thing that the Tame Apple Press is failing to say is that they are being eclipsed by Chromebooks.

Jobs’ Mob has admitted that it only sold 13.3 million iPads, down nine percent from last year, but Apple CFO Luca Maestri insisted that in education, the iPad remains the tablet of choice with 85 percent share of the US education tablet market. She said that Apple had sold 13 million iPads to education customers globally.

But while Apple leads the academic market for tablets, not all schools are buying iPads to give to students; they’re also buying laptops, including Chromebooks. In otherwords, while Apple is leading tablet sales, that is because its main rival is not providing tablets.

Chromebooks run ChromeOS on what would best be described a cheap laptop hardware – although there are a few premium models like the Pixel – with an Intel CPU. Google has a number of hardware partners, including Acer, which lead the pack with 30 percent of the Chromebook market.

Apparently, sales have been so good that Google only recently added tablets to the range.

Google reported a few days ago that it sold a million Chromebooks to schools last quarter (another 800,000 were sold to consumers. While that might not look nearly as impressive as Apple’s 13 million iPads, the numbers suggest  that Google could be selling as many Chromebooks to schools as Apple is selling iPads.

You can work it out. If schools bought five million iPads in the 17 months,  Apple averaged under a million iPads sold to schools each quarter – an average which is less than the million Chromebooks sold.

So why are Chromebooks doing so well?  They are cheaper and they have keyboards so you can do a lot more with them.

Intel kicks AMD in its low end

Posted on July 25, 2014 by - News

kung-fuAMD’s results have revealed a weakness in the outfit’s bread and butter lower end chips which is being exploited by Intel.

Intel’s  Atom Bay Trail is taking notebook share from AMD and  consumer-notebooks do not appear to be making up the missing cash.  It seems that Intel has been doing a much better job of convincing OEMs to Atom Bay Trail than AMD. This means that as demand for laptops has stabilised, Chipzilla is in a stronger position.

Barrons  said that its recent conversations with notebook ODMs indicate that AMD is ceding material share to Intel’s Atom Bay Trail platform in the sub-$399 computing market.

Intel’s cunning plan, which was to focus on the low-end x86 computing segment after giving up on the netbook in 2012, is paying off.  It still has a long way to go before it has the sort of control of that market that it has with overall PC processor sales. It has been estimated that Intel has half of the low end market in comparison to 80 per cent overall in PC processors.

One of Chipzilla’s sales points is that Atom Bay Trail 4-watt processors have outperformed AMD’s 26-watt processors in performance benchmarks.

If that is correct, then the only thing that is holding AMD together is that its APU business division. It has increased 20 percent or more over the past six months thanks to the recently launched Kaveri and Beema APUs. This will make  AMD’s desktop APU sales increasingly dependent on expansion from Application Service Providers which some analysts have written off as unlikely.

It might be simply another example where Intel has nobbled a key rival while its back was turned.

 

IE is back to being Internet Exploder

Posted on July 25, 2014 by - News

rage-explosionAfter years of keeping its security flaws down in its Internet Explorer range, Microsoft appears to be under siege from malware writers.

Bromium Labs analysed public vulnerabilities and exploits from the first six months of 2014. The research determined that Internet Explorer vulnerabilities have increased more than 100 percent since 2013.

This makes IE worse than Java and Flash for vulnerabilities.

It does not appear to be Microsoft’s fault. Hackers had been increasingly targeting Internet Explorer and Vole had responded by a progressively shorter time to first patch for its past two releases.

In contrast, the number of Java zero-days have declined and in the first six months of 2014, there has not been a single public Java exploit.

Bromium thinks that so much attention was paid to JAVA exploits in 2013 and countermeasures such as disabling Java may have had a role in forcing attackers to switch to new targets this year. This resulted in a drop in Java being targeted generally.

The hackers have been using Action Script Spray which is an emerging technique that bypasses address space layout randomisation (ASLR) with a return-oriented program (ROP) chain.

Rahul Kashyap, chief security architect, at Bromium said web browsers have always been a favourite avenue of attack, but hackers are not only getting better at attacking Internet Explorer, they are doing it more frequently.

He said that Action Script Sprays are a new technique and similar techniques will start to appear in the months to come. This is further evidence that the world of Web browser plugins presents a weak link that is just waiting for exploitation.

Web browser release cycles are compressing and the interval between the general availability of a new release and the appearance of the first security patches has been decreasing recently, he noted.

“This may represent greater efforts on the part of software manufacturers to secure their products, or it may represent products being released to market with less security testing than earlier versions received,” Kashyap said.

Tory wants magical protection

Posted on July 25, 2014 by - News

alumni_rogues2On the 40th anniversary of the development of Dungeons and Dragons, a Tory politician has called for treasure, weapons and other magical goods in online roleplaying games to be protected by real laws.

Mike Weatherley, who is David Cameron’s chief adviser on things IP, wants those who swipe valuable items in video games to get the same sentences as burglars

It is not clear where the move will leave chaotic evil Elvin thieves who do very else in the games. Weatherley has asked ministers to consider passing a law that would mean people “who steal online items in video games with a real-world monetary value receive the same sentences as criminals who steal real-world items of the same monetary value”.

It is the sort of thing that only a gamer would come up with and Weatherley, the MP for Hove, East Sussex is a Warcraft player himself.

He said that since players can spend serious amounts of real-world cash on items, even though they exist only online, they should be offered the same protection as victims of theft in the world of solid objects.

“If you’ve spent £500 building up your armed forces and someone takes them away online, I guess you can feel hard done-by and you want your £500 back,” he told Buzzfeed.

Weatherley said that it was important that people lose the perception from some people is that if you steal online it is less of a crime than if you steal physically.

It could equally cause a few problems. In 2008, a woman in Tokyo realised her virtual husband had divorced her without warning, and as revenge she used the man’s login information to delete his avatar. She effectively committed virtual murder although she was jailed for “illegally accessing a computer and manipulating electronic data”.

A Dutch court has ruled that virtual goods are real goods and that if you steal them you have committed a real theft.

Qualcomm is a monopoly – report

Posted on July 24, 2014 by - News

monoplyMobile chipmaker Qualcomm has been accused of running a monopoly by China’s antitrust watchdog.

The state-run Securities Times newspaper reported on Thursday that Qualcomm’s chief executive Steven Mollenkopf  held talks in China to see what could be done about the problem.

Watchdog, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), snarled that the US chipmaker was suspected of overcharging and abusing its market position In wireless communication standards, allegations which could see it hit with record fines of more than $1 billion.

However the NDRC, did not say whether the regulator had determined that Qualcomm had abused its monopoly, just that it had confirmed it had one.

Qualcomm was charging lower royalties for patents to undercut competitors who have similar technology and maintain market share. The report also said that Qualcomm, as the only provider of chips for high-end phones, can dictate those licensing fees.

The Securities Times report said the NDRC was probing Qualcomm’s local sales data and that Qualcomm President Derek Aberle has been communicating with the NDRC over issues relating to the anti-monopoly investigation.

Under China’s anti-monopoly law, the NDRC can impose fines of between one and 10 percent of a company’s revenues for the previous year. Qualcomm earned $12.3 billion in China for its fiscal year ended September 29, or nearly half of its global sales.

Hole found in Edward Snowden

Posted on July 24, 2014 by - News

black_holeSecurity experts have found a flaw that could expose the identities of people using a privacy-oriented operating system touted by Edward Snowden.

The news came two days after widely used anonymity service Tor acknowledged a similar problem, making this a bad week for those who do not want their information made public.

The most recent finding concerns a heavily encrypted networking program called the Invisible Internet Project, or I2P. It is used to send messages and run websites anonymously and ships along with the specialized operating system “Tails.”

Tails was what Snowden used to communicate with journalists in secret.

I2P is supposed to obscure the Internet Protocol addresses of its roughly 30,000 users, but anyone who visits a booby-trapped website could have their true address revealed, making it likely that their name could be exposed as well.

The hole was found by researchers at Exodus Intelligence which warned people might think the technology is safe because Snowden used it.

Tails launches from a DVD or USB stick and is designed to maintain privacy even when a computer or network has been hacked.

The I2P flaw will be fixed, in what a spokesman for the I2P project called the “near future.” In the meantime, he said, users should disable JavaScript.

Exodus is normally seen as one of the bad guys, working with one of a dozen or more companies known to sell secret security flaws to intelligence agencies and spooks. In this case, Exodus alerted I2P and Tails to the problem and said it would not divulge the details to customers until the problem has been fixed.

 

Boffins print memory onto paper

Posted on July 24, 2014 by - News

postitA group of researchers from Taiwan has emerged from smoke filled labs with a method that uses ink-jet technology to print working memory on an ordinary piece of paper.

If the invention takes off then electronics printed on paper could could lead to applications such as smart labels on foods and pharmaceuticals or as wearable medical sensors.

While engineers have managed to print transistors and solar cells on paper, in the past, they have been unable to do memory.

Paper is made of fibre making it difficult to lay down the thin, uniform layers of materials that typical memory technologies need.

To get around this problem, the team, led by Ying-Chih Liao, Si-Chen Lee, and Jr-Hau He of National Taiwan University decided to build resistive random access memory (RRAM), a relatively new type of memory with a structure simple enough to cope with such surface variations.

In an RRAM device, an insulator can be set to different levels of electrical resistance by applying a voltage across it; one level of resistance corresponds to the 1s of digital logic, the other to the 0s. So each bit in RRAM consists of an insulator sandwiched by two electrodes.

The device was built with silver, titanium dioxide, and carbon, although other combinations of a metal, an insulator, and a conductor could be used. They started by using a screen-printing process to coat a carbon paste onto the paper to form the bottom electrode. The process was repeated 10 times to reduce roughness, then the coated paper was cured at 100 °C for 10 minutes in a vacuum.

Ink was made by mixing TiO2 nanoparticles in acetyl acetone and used an ink-jet printer to deposit a layer of the particles on top of the carbon, where it would act as the insulator. Once that dried, the researchers used a solution of ethylene glycol and water containing silver nanoparticles, and they printed silver dots on top of the TiO2 layer to serve as top electrodes.

The memory paper was robust and could be bent at least 1,000 times with no degradation in performance.

LG is back from the dead

Posted on July 24, 2014 by - News

return-of-draculaThe troubled smartphone maker LG is apparently back from the dead and reporting a a record quarter for mobile phone sales.

LG said that it sold 14.5 million handsets over the last quarter, its highest total ever and 20 percent more than last year. More than a third of those were LTE models.

Most of the success was due to the well-reviewed top-of-the-line G3 handset, along with strong sales of its mid-range L products.

LG’s mobile division earned $3.5 billion and put an end to a hat trick of three straight quarters of losses. Home entertainment also performed well, climbing 3 percent on the strength of higher-margin UltraHD 4K sets. All that resulted in an operating profit of $599 million.

Analysts think that LG is taking advantage of a slump in the fortunes of Apple and Samsung to claw its way back into favour. For a while there it did look like LG was about to go the way of Blackberry as a mobile phone company whose days were limited.

While the company is not generating the sorts of numbers that Samsung and Apple can, its sales figures are going up and not down.

Apple faces class action for treating employees badly

Posted on July 24, 2014 by - News

oliverFour former retail and corporate Apple employees who filed a lawsuit against the over  labour violations managed to “upgrade” their lawsuit to class-action status.

The status was awarded because it was believed that more than 20,000 current and former Apple employees were harmed by Apple’s management antics.

The four people who originally filed the suit had different experiences with Apple, saying the company violated California’s Labour Code and Wage Orders with its actions. These included making people work long hours without a break and receiving their paycheques late.

It has taken years to get the case to court as Apple has been fighting tooth and nail with voluminous briefing and lengthy oral arguments.

In the end however the California Superior Court granted Plaintiffs’ motion and certified the case as a class action, appointing Plaintiffs and Plaintiffs’ counsel (Hogue & Belong) as the class representatives and class counsel on behalf of approximately 20,000 Apple employees.

Apple now faces claims of meal period, rest period and final pay violations affecting approximately 20,000 current and former Apple employees, rather than just four.

It is not clear how much cash this is going to cost Apple if it is found guilty as no financial demand has been made in the case.

It has been a bad time for Apple lately which has just been told by a court that its long-standing policy of locking in staff using no-poaching agreements with other companies was illegal.

Apple alongside co-conspirators Google, Intel and Adobe agreed to settle for $324 million with the tech workers who filed the class action.

Nvidia shows off its SHIELD tablet

Posted on July 23, 2014 by - News

nvidia-gangnam-style-330pxNvidia has officially announced its new SHIELD tablet  and SHIELD wireless controller which is powered by its powered by their Tegra K1 System on a Chip.

The graphics chip maker has been developing the Android-based SHIELD portable to create what appears to be a mix of SHIELD portable and the Tegra Note 7, but featuring updated technology and better materials.

All this is supposed to create a gaming-oriented tablet to consumers with the screen de-coupled from the controller.

The original SHIELD portable and the Tegra Note 7, were built around Nvida’s Tegra 4 processor. The SHIELD tablet, however, is powered by the newer Tegra K1, which features quad ARM A15 cores and 192 Kepler-class graphics cores.

The SHIELD tablet’s specifications makes it one of the more powerful tablets on the market. It has 2GB of RAM and an 8”, full-HD IPS display, with a native resolution of 1920×1200. There are also a pair of 5MP cameras on the SHIELD tablet (front and rear), 802.11a/b/g/n 2×2 MIMO WiFi configuration, GPS, a 9-axis motion sensor, and Bluetooth 4.0 LE.

There is a WiFi-only version and a 32GB version coming with LTE connectivity as well. N

Nvida  is using a mostly untouched version of Android to run the thing with a few pre-installed applications, and control panels for the SHIELD’s gaming features.

The gaming features include the ability to stream games directly to Twitch, Nvida’s ShadowPlay technology, PC Streaming, Nvida GRID cloud gaming support, and access to the new SHIELD hub.

The SHIELD tablet is also one of a select few mobile devices that has been certified to stream Netflix 1080p content.

 

Microsoft vows to end Nokia losses

Posted on July 23, 2014 by - News

nokia-lumiaSoftware giant Microsoft said that it will get its loss-making Nokia phone unit to break even within two years.

Bringing in Nokia into the Vole hill cost Microsoft a seven percent dip in quarterly profit and Redmonds chief financial Vole Amy Hood said that the company plans to take $1 billion in costs out of the Nokia operation and stop its losses by fiscal 2016 following massive job cuts announced last week.

This statement pacified the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street who did not expect Vole to act that quickly to stop Nokia haemorrhaging Microsoft’s bottom line.

Microsoft shares hit new 14-year highs over the past week, and were up 1.1 percent at $45.33 after hours.

Nokia’s Lumia smartphones, while well-reviewed, have not been as successful as Microsoft hoped, capturing no more than four percent of the global market. Lumia sales hit 5.8 million for the nine weeks of the quarter that Nokia was part of Microsoft.

Vole is in the process of drastically reducing Nokia’s operation, closing some facilities and cutting about half of its 25,000 workforce, as it looks to rein in costs and refocus on cloud-computing.

The fact that the PC market recovered after two years of declines, helped sales of Microsoft’s core Windows and Office products in the quarter.

Overall quarterly revenue rose 17 percent to $23.38 billion, above analysts’ average estimate of $23 billion, although the bulk of that was due to the addition of sales from Nokia.

Microsoft reported fiscal fourth-quarter profit of $4.61 billion compared with $4.96 billion last year.