Tag: techeye

IBM gets thumbs up for Lenovo sale

Posted on August 18, 2014 by - News

thumbs-up-or-downUS regulators have approved the sale of IBM’s server business to the Chinese outfit, Lenovo.

There had been fears that the deal would be put on ice because the US is currently going through a McCarthy era paranoia over all things Chinese. The NSA was scared that the Chinese would start installing backdoors into their servers, probably because that is just the sort of thing that they would do.

IBM has already divested $16 billion in annual revenue over the past decade from low-margin businesses like personal computers and printers.

However, despite the fact that there was some concern about the deal by the Committee on Foreign Investment agreed that it was probably safe.

Lenovo has been through the secretive CFIUS process three times before and has won approval each time. In this case, it is believed that it argued that all the top-secret server operations would remain under the control of IBM.

CFIUS, an interagency group chaired by the Treasury Secretary, reviews deals that could bring U.S. businesses under foreign ownership and is required by law to assess any transaction involving a state-owned firm.

Lenovo said in a statement that it remains on track to close the IBM server deal by the end of the year.

In fact the deal is more likely to help Lenovo sell its gear in China and the company is less concerned about its US sales. Lenovo has many contacts to sell goods to Chinese companies and Beijing is trying to localize its IT purchases in the wake of revelations about US spying.

Facebook warns about satire

Posted on August 18, 2014 by - News

facebokSocial notworking site Facebook is so worried that people have been posting bogus stories as truth that it is experimenting with a satire tag.

The problem is that – generally speaking – people in America can’t tell the difference between a news story with the headline “New Study Finds Humans Shouldn’t Spend More Than 5 Consecutive Hours Together” and a real scientific study.

To be fair it is tricky to spot the difference. The woman who posted a story which claimed that turmeric was the perfect cure for Ebola was being serious as were the posts which claimed vaccines were full of mercury and give kids autism.

It has not helped that some US publications cannot tell the difference between satire and just “making stuff up” so these very unfunny or dim stories are easily confused with fact.

All that could be outdated, however, as Facebook is currently testing the infamous “satire” tag that will distinguish fake news from the real deal. If you click on an Onion article, for example, Facebook would then automatically tag related articles with the aforementioned “satire” text in the headline.  Sadly, this does not apply to the Daily Mail articles which are still being presented as true.

Facebook said that it is all in the testing stage and the idea came from feedback that people wanted a clearer way to distinguish satirical articles from others in these units.

Cannabis makes better batteries

Posted on August 15, 2014 by - News

thanks Wikipedia

thanks Wikipedia

Boffins have been cooking “certain substances” in their cauldrons and have come up with a way of turning cannabis into   high-performance energy storage devices.

They “cooked” cannabis bark into carbon nanosheets and built supercapacitors “on a par with or better than graphene”.

We guess that it will be the first computer to run for several hours before insisting on a pizza and several boxes of pringles.

According to ASC Nano, which we get for the “Where is the green Nanowire” competition, Dr David Mitlin of Clarkson University, New York said that people were always asking him “why hemp” and his answer is “why not”.

He said he could dash off graphene-like materials for a thousandth of the price  and we’re doing it with waste.

Now the hemp that he is growing is legal and is not the sort of stuff that gets you stoned. He said that there was absolutely no overlap in his recreational activities.

In countries including China, Canada and the UK, hemp can be grown industrially for clothing and building materials.

The only problem is that the leftover bast fibre – the inner bark – typically ends up as landfill.

Dr Mitlin’s team looked at the fibres and recycled them into supercapacitors that rely on sharp bursts of power. In electric cars, for example, supercapacitors are used for regenerative braking.

Graphene might be great for commercial supercapacitors, it is prohibitively expensive to produce and hemp based versions might be a lot more useful.

Mitlin’s team experimented with all flavours of biowaste – from peat moss to eggs. Most recently, they turned banana peel into batteries.

He said that with banana peels, you can turn them into a dense block of carbon – we call it pseudo-graphite – and that’s great for sodium ion batteries,” he explained.

“But if you look at hemp fibre its structure is the opposite – it makes sheets with high surface area – and that’s very conducive for super capacitors.”

Mitlin’s peer-reviewed journal paper ranks the device “on par with or better than commercial graphene-based devices”.

Hemp cannot do all the things graphene can, but for energy storage, it works just as well. And it costs a fraction of the price -$500-1,000 a tonne.”

Blue screens hit Black Tuesday

Posted on August 15, 2014 by - News

Backstreet_Boys_-_Black_&_Blue_album_coverThree different patches from this week’s Black Tuesday crop are causing Blue Screens of Da’ath,   causing some users to plunge into the abyss.

MS14-045/KB 2984615 kernel-mode driver patches, KB2976897 and KB2982791, have been implicated in triggering Blue Screen Stop 0x50 messages since users starting updating their systems this week.

Most of the people suffering from most of the glitches say they are using 64-bit Windows 7 but the  Windows 8.1 “Update 2” fix that adds the ruble character as an official currency marker in Win 8.x and Win7, KB 2970228, also seems to be causing the problem, too.

There is no word from Microsoft on the problem yet, but it would appear that if you have not upgraded your system on Patch Tuesday it might be a good idea not to do so for little while.

You just knew that something was going to go wrong when you saw the number of patches that Microsoft was asking you to install.

Microsoft released 41 updates, including one that fixed an Internet Explorer vulnerability that may allows hackers to take control of a computer.

Included in the updates were two patches that were meant to fix “critical” problems. The first one, with the title “Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer,” addresses 26 vulnerabilities: one publicly disclosed and 25 that were privately reported. In the most severe cases, the vulnerability may allow attackers to have the same rights as the legitimate user. The security hole can be exploited when a user views a malicious website using Internet Explorer. Before the patch, users who had administrative rights on their computers were more susceptible to the security flaw.

Another critical patch, with the Bulletin ID MS14-043, is meant to fix a security flaw in Windows Media Centre that may also allow for remote code execution.

Aside from the critical patches, there were updates that have been labelled as “Important.” The software that have been tapped for the patches include OneNote, SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint Server, .NET Framework and Microsoft Windows itself. The problems range from the remote code execution, elevation of privileges and security features bypass.

 

Gartner thinks of Internet of Thongs

Posted on August 15, 2014 by - News

LOD_Cloud_Diagram_as_of_September_2011While the Internet of Fangs is not with us yet, analysts at Gartner claim that the hype surrounding it has reached its peak.

Each year the research firm puts out a Hype Cycle of emerging technologies, in which it provides a report card for various trends and buzzwords.

This year the Internet of Thongs (IoT) tops the list above some other words such as wearable user interface and consumer 3D printing.

Gartner believes that emerging technologies go through a natural process in which they are triggered by some innovation, then they rise to a peak of inflated expectations.

Big G thinks that as the technologies mature, markets become hacked off that they failed to bring about a cure for cancer before they start to become mainstream and just part of everyday technology.

This year the list is topped by IoT, wearable user interfaces and natural-language question answering which are also just about at the top of their hype. All three of those technologies will be commonplace in the market within 5 to 10 years, Gartner predicts.

Some buzzwords do make it into the mainstream. Cloud computing was something that as just hype and talked about non-stop before it became real. Hybrid Cloud Computing is headed that way, but was still more hyped. Not to mention Chipzilla and the Vole.

Big Data and in-memory database management systems are just beyond the peaks of their hype, while gamification which is when you give rewards using game techniques is coming down from its peak hype. Last year, big data topped the list as the most buzzworthy of tech terms.

3D printing appears everywhere.  Consumer 3D printing is at the peak of its hype, while enterprise 3D printing and 3D scanning are both maturing toward mainstream, according to Gartner.

Gartner has a look that the buzzwords of tomorrow too. These include autonomous vehicles, predictive analytics, smart robots, holographic displays, software-defined anything, quantum computing and the connected home.

Gartner said that its hype graph is useful for companies to work out when it is the best time to release their product.

What worries us is when the Tibetan monks jump on the bandwagon and we get the Internet of No-Things.

Scanner troll kicked

Posted on August 15, 2014 by - News

kung-fuMPHJ Technology which sent out thousands of letters demanding $1,000 per worker from small businesses using basic scan-to-e-mail functions, has just received a kicking from a court.

The outfit claims to own several patents that cover those basic functions and has sent out more than 10,000 letters demanding payment.

It was the first patent troll ever to be sued by the government in which Vermont Attorney General Bill Sorrell accused MPHJ of making misleading statements in its demand letters.

The troll did not really bother to check that the targeted businesses were actually infringing its patents and sent letters to two Vermont nonprofits that help disabled residents and their caregivers.

MPHJ has not given up and is demanding that its case be heard in federal court and even suggesting that the Vermont attorney general should be punished for daring to stand up to it.

However a federal judge kicked the case back into state court and rejected MPHJ’s invitation to punish the state.

MPHJ appealed all the way to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, insisting that its case was closely related to the validity of its patents and that Vermont should be forced into federal court, where all patent cases are heard.

However, now that final appeal didn’t work and a panel of Federal Circuit judges rejected MPHJ, saying it didn’t have jurisdiction to overturn the federal judge’s decision.

The Vermont case is one of three fronts where MPHJ is battling the government. In Nebraska, a judge agreed that its patent demand letters were constitutionally protected free speech which is a bizarre defence. That state’s attorney general, Jon Bruning, has appealed the decision. MPHJ also tried to sue the FTC, which the watchdog is fighting.

It is not clear if MPHJ will win or lose its case in Vermont. The outfit’s hand was strengthened when the drugs companies convinced the US senate not to bring in an anti-patent-troll reform bill. If it does win then it can hassle every small business in the US which happens to have a scanner.

Qualcomm is in denial

Posted on August 15, 2014 by - News

bad-dogQualcomm, under investigation for possible monopolistic practices in China, said it had no direct financial links with an antitrust expert.

Zhang Xinzhu, a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and one of China’s leading antitrust experts was sacked from a government advisory post after state media reported he had received payments from Qualcomm.

Qualcomm is being investigated by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), one of China’s three antitrust regulators, over how the company licenses its patents and prices its chipsets.

The chipmaker did not hire Zhang directly. When it was investigated by the NDRC it hired Global Economics Group to produce an economic analysis for submission to the regulator. Global Economics Group employed Zhang Xinzhu.

The official Xinhua News Agency reported on Wednesday that Zhang had been fired from the State Council’s expert commission on competition issues for taking “huge rewards” from Qualcomm. The implication was that Qualcomm had been bribing Zhang to suggest that the regulators should be nice to the American chipmaker.

Qualcomm paid Global Economics its standard rates for the firm’s services,” Trimble said, and did not have “any financial dealings” with Zhang directly.

Qualcomm’s analysis was submitted to the NDRC in May and had three principal authors, including Zhang.

The Chinese said that Zhang had “contravened work discipline” and been removed from his position on the anti-monopoly committee.

The news agency said “certain multinational companies” had been attempting to delay antitrust probes, including spending money to gain support on experts groups and complaining of being picked on for being foreign.

“Against this backdrop, hiring relevant ‘experts’ from government departments to ‘speak on behalf of foreign companies’ is a violation of discipline … This matter should be gotten to the bottom of and bought to light,” Xinhua said.

The 21-member anti-monopoly academic experts group from which Zhang was dismissed was established in 2011. The group is seen to serve the principal role of providing the bureaucracy with the supporting arguments needed to justify its industrial policy aims.

But Zhang has been critical of the NDRC, and claimed that the regulator had acted outside of its jurisdiction and misused antitrust principles. It appears that the regulator, might just want him out of the way.

Don’t plug an iPhone into a PC

Posted on August 14, 2014 by - News

Apple_iPhone_5_white-330x330Security experts at the Georgia Institute of Technology have discovered that Apple’s already dismal record on security on its iPhone is made worse when the shiny toy is plugged into a  computer.

The attack takes advantage of design problems in iOS in which for some reason the Apple geniuses believed that they should trust anyone who connects to the phone with a USB,

Tielei Wang, a co-author of the study and research scientist at the institute said that Apple overtrusted the USB connection.

It all started when Wan and his team developed some malware called Jekyll, an iPhone application with well-masked malicious functions that passed Apple’s inspection and briefly ended up on its App Store.

However, that was not good enough, as it was pointed out that no one could see his or her malware in the huge App store.

Wang said they set out to find a way to infect a large number of iOS devices and one that didn’t rely on people downloading their malicious app.  The attack required the use of “botnet herders” to install malware onto PCs.

Apple requires a person to be logged into his account in order to download an application from the App Store. Wang and the researchers developed a man-in-the-middle attack that tricked the Apple device that’s connected to a computer into authorising the download of an application using someone else’s Apple ID.

As long as the application still has Apple’s digital signature, it does not even need to still be in the App Store and can be supplied from elsewhere.

To stop Apple refusing to publish the malware on its App store Wang’s team found they could sneak a developer-provisioning file onto an iOS device when it was connected via USB to a computer.

This allows a self-signed malicious application to be installed. Legitimate applications could also be removed and substituted for look-alike malicious ones. All this can be done without a user knowing.

While it sounds convoluted, it is worthwhile if you are attempting to take over a large number of iOS devices.

It is also worthwhile if you are state-sponsored hackers wanting to carry out a targeted attacks aimed at just a few users.

Apple has known about the problem for nearly a year now and is yet to fix it.  At the moment, Wang said, the best advice is to not connect your phone to a computer, especially if you think the computer might be infected with malware.

 

“Murderer” relied on Apple to hide body

Posted on August 14, 2014 by - News

appleThe award for the most stupid Apple fanboy of the year has to go to a bloke who relied on Apple’s Siri to find him a good place to hide the body of his murder victim.

A Florida man currently on trial for murder reportedly attempted to use Siri to garther ideas about where to bury the body of his dead roommate, a court was told.

Prosecutors said that a University of Florida student named Pedro Bravo was incandescent with rage with his roommate in late September of 2012 over a dispute involving an ex- girlfriend and strangled him

Bravo then turned on Siri on his iPhone and entered the following query, “I need to hide my roommate”.

Siri was rather helpful and asked him what kind of place he was looking for? Swamps. Reservoirs. Metal Foundries. Dumps.

Following Siri’s advice, police say he buried the body in a makeshift grave in a forest close to Bravo’s apartment. During the same period he asked Siri for advice on where to hide the body, also used a flashlight app nine times which detectives think helped him see while he buried the body.

What Bravo did not know was that during a murder inquiry, Siri will squeal like a stuck pig to the cops and all computer records are handed over.

The trial is continuing, and even if Bravo didn’t do it, his conversation with Siri makes him look a little suspicious.

 

NSA recruits cyberbots

Posted on August 14, 2014 by - News

TerminatorWhistleblower Edward Snowden claims that the NSA is building a cyberbot which could wage an automatic cyber-war without needing humans.

Snowden said that the agency is developing a cyber defence system that would instantly and autonomously neutralise foreign cyberattacks against the US, and could be used to launch retaliatory strikes.

Dubbed MonsterMind, the project makes it clear that US spooks do not read enough science fiction and have no real idea about what could possibly go wrong.

Snowden told Wired  that the system involves algorithms which would scour massive repositories of metadata and analyse it to differentiate normal network traffic from anomalous or malicious traffic. Armed with this knowledge, the NSA could instantly and autonomously identify, and block, a foreign threat.

Apparently, it is not exactly rocket science. If the NSA knows how a malicious algorithm generates certain attacks, this activity may produce patterns of metadata that can be spotted.

However it is a little like a digital version of the Star Wars initiative President Reagan proposed in the 1980s in that it would probably cost a bomb and never actually do what it says it will.

To make matters worse, Snowden suggests MonsterMind could one day be designed to return fire—automatically, without human intervention—against the attacker. However, whatever way it does this, it could break the internet and there will almost certainly be collateral damage.

For example if the hacker operated through a proxy in a third party country, MonsterMind would cheerfully destroy computers in that country. Microsoft has experience of the effects of following such a policy, when it attempted to take out two botnets it disabled thousands of domains that had nothing to do with the malicious activity Microsoft was trying to stop.

Spotting malicious attacks in the manner Snowden describes would, he says, require the NSA to collect and analyze all network traffic flows in order to design an algorithm that distinguishes normal traffic flow from anomalous, malicious traffic.

This would mean that the NSA would have to be intercepting all traffic flows and violating the Fourth Amendment.

It would also require sensors placed on the internet backbone to detect anomalous activity.

 

Routers start to forget the net

Posted on August 14, 2014 by - News

forget-it-forget-me-1962(1)The worldwide web is slowing down as routers start to forget about some parts of the internet.

Internet speeds are slowing and some sites would not load because Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing tables have hit the limit, and older routers are failing.

Many tier-one internet service providers (ISPs), and in turn, the last mile ISPs they support are providing bad service throughout the US and some parts of Canada.

Level 3, AT&T, Cogent, Sprint, Verizon, and others have suffered from serious performance problems at various times on yesterday and it is likely to get worse.

Some Web hosting companies, such as LiquidWeb, and its sites have been effectively knocked offline.

BGP is the routing protocol used to share the master routes, or map, of the internet. Some routers have to process 512K routes which is much more than they were designed to handle. Some old hardware and software is just crashing or ignore newly learned routes in protest.

Internet engineers knew this problem was coming was early as May and predicted that something unpleasant was going to hit the fan in August. In fact, they were lucky that it did peak in August as most of Europe is closed.

It is strange that the telcos did not heed the warning, rush out, and buy some newer routers. Apparently, they were too busy fiddling or something. So it looks like telcos and ISPs are having to call their engineers back off their hols to fix the problem. However, it does mean that the internet is going to be rubbish for a couple of weeks.

Robots take over Twitter

Posted on August 14, 2014 by - News

metropolisMore than 8.5 percent of Twitter’s customers are not real, but are account-holding, automated programmes.

In its most recent quarterly filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Twitter admitted that about 23 million, or 8.5 percent of Twitter’s monthly active users, “hold accounts that are programmatically updated “without any discernible additional user-initiated action.”

Known as Twitterbots, or simply “bots,” the programs are used for an array of different purposes ranging from the creation of revenue-generating URLs to the acquirement of instant followers for those willing to buy them.

The ease with which the bots can be created could be a problem for the social network as the the market’s confidence in Twitter is linked primarily to its viability as an advertising platform.

Twitter’s market value has fluctuated drastically since its IPO as investors pondered if the site really was worth the money.  If people think that one in ten of Twitter customers is not real that they will be even more concerned.

 

 

 

Wikipedia shocked by hatred

Posted on August 13, 2014 by - News

walesThe Wikimedia movement’s 10th Wikimania conference at the London Barbican  turned out a little more badly than expected.

Normally the event is a love fest between the editors and staff of Wikipedia all centred on the founder Jimmy Wales.

But according to wikipediocracy  the event was spoiled as the British Press failed to share the love and kicked the event to death.

Wales made the mistake of being interviewed in a Newsnight interview with James O’Brien, in which Wales insisted that the right to be forgotten only covered links and should adjudicated by a court of law.

Wales is a member of Google’s advisory board and his theory is that European taxpayers should pay, without limitation, for their already-overburdened court systems to deal with every single revenge-porn complaint Google receives under the ruling.

However Wales should have chosen his sparing person a little more carefully  O’Brien, has been repeatedly defamed in his Wikipedia biography has little love for the way Wackypedia operates.

“I could go on Wikipedia now and describe you as believing in fairies and a man whose – I don’t know – favourite drink is the blood of freshly slaughtered kittens. That’s neither history nor truth, but it could be on Wikipedia,” O’Brien snarled at Wales.

When Wales started laughing O’Brien growled:  “It’s not funny, if you’re sort of an ordinary person and you have a degree of public profile, and people have deliberately altered your Wikipedia page. I have spoken publicly about my children having been born as a result of fertility treatment. And my Wikipedia page, which I didn’t even know existed, contained a phrase along the lines of ‘he wasn’t man enough to impregnate his own wife’. That was there for weeks, months possibly, until my wife found it. Shouldn’t that be your priority?”

All Wales could come up with was that it was up to the victims to police his site.

What Wales did not get was that that three years of their own spying scandals, the UK press is big on privacy so when Wales proudly tried to put a positive spin on their refusal to grant any of the 304 “content removal requests” wackypedia had received in the past two years, it came out badly.

The Guardian published a profile of Wales that referred to his past as an “internet pornographer” and said that Wikipedia is populated by “self-selecting cliques” that pay more attention to the site’s coverage of female porn stars than to its listing of women writers.

Ironically Wikimania ended with a presentation by Jimmy Wales on “civility”. This seemed to involve talking about users who have a reputation in the community for creating good content, and for being incredibly toxic personalities.

Wales said, stating that “these editors cost us more than they’re actually worth”. It was a “big mistake” to tolerate them, he continued, receiving rapturous applause.

At least he has learned something.

Senators fire rocket at SpaceX

Posted on August 13, 2014 by - News

spacex-grasshopperIt seems that SpaceX has rattled the chains of the defence establishment and is doing its job a little too well.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is putting payloads into orbit for less money than the big government contractors charge and it appears that has angered those in the defence community who have been making a fair bit of dosh flogging more expensive projects and gear to NASA.

In the US when a corporate feels threatened it uses one of its tame lobby senators to go on the attack and so far their weapon of choice has been Senator Richard Shelby. He threw needless layers of bureaucracy at SpaceX .

Now it appears that more senators have been drawn in on the side of the other defence contractors.

Three House members—Mike Coffman, Mo Brooks, and Cory Gardner have sent a memo to NASA demanding that the agency investigate what they call “an epidemic of anomalies” with SpaceX missions.

The three are insisting that as a contractor, the company should be accountable to the American taxpayer. On this they are on a sticky wicket. According to Space News, NASA did not actually pay for the development of the Falcon 9; Elon Musk did so there is no public funds being used to develop the rockets in the first place.

The three senators are also moaning that SpaceX has experienced launch delays and other problems that has prevented payloads getting into space. However that is normal and it is unlikely that NASA could have done any better.

The congressmen’s complaint that SpaceX is behind schedule is also deeply ironic when the Sentator’s chum’s own project NASA’s Space Launch System—a next generation rocket that is supposed to replace the Shuttle—is also delayed.

Space expert Phil Plait  thinks that what the big defence contractors are worried about is that the space launch system is so behind that  SpaceX is catching up with its Dragon V2 and the Falcon Heavy which will launch next year.  The Space Launch System will not test launch until 2017.

Plait said that it is a transparent attempt from members of our Congress to hinder a privately owned company that threatens their own interests.

Boeing, which is the major SLS contractor has a big plant in Alabama, Brooks’ and Shelby’s home state. The United Launch Alliance has its HQ in Colorado, home to Gardner and Coffman – coincidence perhaps?

 

App promises to shut up Satan

Posted on August 13, 2014 by - News

devilA phone App is marketing itself with the magical ability of causing the Satan, the Prince of Darkness, and infernal ruler of the world, to stop speaking.

The Shut Up, Devil! App, is based on the concept that whenever the Devil shows up, a good Christian user is unable to remember a pithy bible verse which can be guaranteed to send Satan back to where he lives.  Our last known contact address for Satan was the troubled Northborough Estate in Slough.

While Christians cannot carry a bible with them, they do always have a mobile phone, which makes it apparently appropriate to use to call an invisible friend to deal with an invisible enemy.

It is bible search with a category for just about any issue you face—anxiety, depression, fear, lustful thoughts about your neighbour’s dog etc.

Select a category and you’re presented with related cards. Each card features a relevant scripture and a personalised version designed for you to read aloud like a magic spell to make the devil run away. You can share a card with your friends on your social networks which will make sure that you keep them.

The press release we have says:

“Thousands already use the app and report transformed thinking and great victory in spiritual warfare. I know that you’ll experience the same, and in just a short time you’ll realize that you’re no longer under attack—you are on the attack!”

The app conception stemmed from Charisma House’s upcoming book, Silence Satan by Kyle Winkler, which releases in September. Winkler is founder of Kyle Winkler Ministries, a media and teaching ministry broadcasting on the Christian Television Network. It is available on the iPhone and Android so is truly interdenominational.

Satan was too busy running a Tea party meeting in Texas to respond to our calls.