Tag: techeye

CHiPs steal nude pictures in car arrests

Posted on October 27, 2014 by - News

ss3399539_-chipsUS traffic cops  (CHiPs) have been using mobile search laws to steal naked pictures of hot women they er pull over.

According to an East Bay California Highway Patrol officer, accused of stealing nude photos of a DUI suspect claimed officers have stolen images for years.

Officer Sean Harrington of Martinez confessed to stealing explicit photos from the suspect’s phone, and said he forwarded those images to at least two other CHP officers.

Harrington called the photo stealing a “game” and said he had done the same thing to female arrestees a “half dozen times in the last several years.”

His reasoning is that others were doing it so why should he be the only one punished.

Photos were discovered missing when a suspect said she synced her phone after her arrest and noticed when six photos were sent from her phone to another account.

Richard Madsen, the victim’s attorney said that the pictures were private and should not be seen by anyone.

In a written statement to KPIX 5, CHP Commissioner Joseph Farrow said, “The allegations anger and disgust me. We expect the highest levels of integrity and moral strength from everyone in the California Highway Patrol and there is no place in our organization for such behaviour.”

What would Ponch say?

 

A load of meatballs? Italians might get free wi-fi

Posted on October 27, 2014 by - News

Spaghetti_and_meatballs_(cropped)The Italian government has come up with a novel way of fixing its aging and creaking broadband – it is going to introduce free wi-fi for tourists.

Italy has a problem in that its fixed line system is run by Telecom Italia which is broke and can’t afford to make any changes. The Telco is pretty much a monopoly which does not sit well with regulators.  At the same time no one really wants to fix it because that would take time and money.  Meanwhile there are American tourists shouting in the middle of Roma that they can’t stream their movies to their loved ones back in the Land of the Free.

Italian MPs’ answer is to provide free Wi-Fi in thousands of public places where foreigners are likely to hang out.  People will still not get it in their homes, but if they nip down to the local square with their mobile they might get a connection, along with a loud bloke wearing a Hawaiian shirt who is telling everyone how old the buildings are.

Under the plan, large shops, taxis, airports, law courts and other public places would have to set up an Internet connection and offer no-password wireless access free.

The plan is being pushed by Sergio Boccadutri, a member of the ruling Democratic Party  and has the backing of 100 MPs.

“Free Wi-Fi would have a big cultural impact and help the economy recover, starting from industries such as tourism.”

It will cost $6.3 million over three years as a contribution to buying equipment. The proposers aim to bring the bill before parliament by mid-2015.

In a recent study, penetration of broadband services with a speed exceeding 30 Megabits per second in Italy is lower than 1 percent, well below the European average of 6 percent.

Amazon is an illusion claims mystic Ballmer

Posted on October 27, 2014 by - News

SteveBallmerMouthAgapeIt seems that since he has left Microsoft, the shy and retiring former Vole Steve “there is a kind of hush” Ballmer has been taking some time out to consider the nature of reality.

Now when Buddha hit the same level in his meditations, he concluded that death and suffering was all an illusion, but Ballmer contemplated his navel, he concluded that the online retailer Amazon is not real.

Sharing his spiritual realisations on the Charlie Rose Show, Ballmer said that he didn’t  know what to say about Amazon before explaining why he’s wary of the company.

He said that the company made no money and in his world, you’re not a real business until you make some money.

“I have a hard time with businesses that don’t make money at some point.”

Amazon came up short of analyst expectations and on Thursday posted a $437 million loss for the third quarter, or a loss of 95 cents a share. That followed a net loss of $126 million during the second quarter. Its stock has fallen eight percent today as a result.

Ballmer said it’s OK for a company not to make money for a few years, but he’s perplexed with Amazon, which had yet to post a profit in two decades.

“If you are worth $150 billion, eventually somebody thinks you’re going to make $15 billion pre tax,” Ballmer said. “They make about zero, and there’s a big gap between zero and 15.”

Ballmer said that every business is expected to have is the capability to make money, and it requires  discipline and a certain kind of mindset.

“As a businessman, if you ask me what I’m proud of, I’m proud of the fact that I made $250 billion under my watch as CEO.”

So St Steve still has a problem working out that materiality is also an illusion.

Apple and Google Play blocked

Posted on October 27, 2014 by - News

onedollarIt is starting to look like the numbers of retailers who back Apple, Google pay is shrinking rather than growing, and that US retailers are rushing to set up their own system instead.

When Apple launched Apple Pay in September, the list of retailers who backed it was long, but in the weeks following the launch, some major retailers have blocked it in favour of a competing option set to debut in 2015.

Apple Pay was operational at NFC terminals at Rite Aid and CVS, both non-Apple Pay partners, but was reportedly disabled over the course of the last 48 hours.

A CVS employee said that the company disabled NFC payments over the weekend which would also prevent Google Wallet users from using NFC payments.

A leaked memo, revealed on Friday by Slashgear, suggested that the retailers have decided they want nothing to do with Apple Pay and are working with a group of large retailers to develop a mobile wallet that allows for mobile payments attached to credit cards and bank accounts directly from a smart phone. We expect to have this feature available in the first half of 2015.

The new payment system mentioned in the alleged leaked Rite Aid memo is a solution developed by Merchant Customer Exchange  called CurrentC. Other confirmed major retailers included in the system will be CVS, Kmart, Sears, Target, Walmart, Best Buy and 7 Eleven, the cream of the crop of mainstream retailers in the US.

The Tame Apple Press is screaming blue murder at the scheme which is likely to allow merchants to avoid paying credit card processing fees and give them more information about customers.  Everyone knows that this sort of data should be in the hands of technology companies rather than retailers.

But what this means is that Apple Pay may have the traction that the Tame Apple Press claimed.

British Queen uses Twitter

Posted on October 24, 2014 by - News

Queen Elizabeth IIQueen Elizabeth II took advantage of opening a new technology gallery at the London Science Museum this morning by getting down and dirty and tweeting the world.

The first tweet by the Queen said: “It is a pleasure to open the Information Age exhibition today at the @ScienceMuseum and I hope people will enjoy visiting. Elizabeth R.”

She sent the tweet via the Palace’s @BritishMonarchy account.

The new gallery at the Science Museum includes Sir Tim Berner-Lee’s NeXT computer – he’s the chap who invented the World Wide Web.

The main theme of the gallery is communications and includes old kit such as business computer Leo, how mobile phones work, and how the digital revolution is changing the world.

British sponsors of the exhibition include plucky chip designer ARM and BT.

Dell takes aim at HP business

Posted on October 24, 2014 by - News

Andy Zollo, channel director Dell EMEAThe decision by HP to split itself into two will offer opportunities for Dell to take more business.

That’s according to Andy Zollo, director of channels at Dell EMEA, who said today that its own plans will allow it to sell software, services and hardware to a number of new customers.

Zollo said that Dell had embarked on a series of roadshows throughout Europe over the last several weeks to educate its partners on opportunities open to them.

Dell – formerly known primarily as a hardware company – now has a wide portfolio of products and has appointed partner development managers to offer one single “backside to kick”.

He said Dell now has a much closer relationship with a wide range of partners aimed at introducing them to enterprise customers.

Zollo said that any major change to an organisation – such as recently happened with HP – tends to have a disruptive effect, and Dell will feed on the changes that are bound to happen.

Networks compromised by Backoff malware

Posted on October 24, 2014 by - News

Huntsman spider, Wikimedia CommonsSecurity company Damballa said it had recorded a 57 percent increase in Backoff Malware between August to September.

It compiles its reports from enterprise customers and global ISPs.

The biggest challenge for IT security teams is to find genuine attacks on networks from an avalanche of security alerts typically received.

During the third quarter of this year, Damballa noted the most affected enterprises received 138,000 events daily, up 32 percent from the second quarter. Enterprise customers said that’s an average of 37 infected devices per day.

But Damballa noted that Backoff, which is targeted POS (point of sales) malware infected 1,000 businesses.  The type of enterprises that suffered showed the malware had managed to bypass network prevention controls and while active, was hidden in networks.

Brian Foster, the CTO of Damballa, struck a pessimistic note saying the figures show prevention controls can’t stop malware infections.  “POS malware and other advanced threats can, and will, get through so we can’t completely build the walls around the network highter,” he said.

Enterprises need to look to build better better intelligence to idenify real threats.  “We’d advise enterprises to be prepared, to get ahead by assuming they will be compromised, and take proactive measures,” he added.

Intel revises its pay outs for vendors

Posted on October 24, 2014 by - News

Intel-logoIt looks as if Intel will stop providing pay outs – in euphemistic terms – subsidies, for people making mobile phones using its technology.

According to Taiwanese wire Digitimes, while Intel had an apparently sparkling set of financial results recently, it is going to restrict these payouts to all but the biggest players

It is significant that despite these sparkling results, Intel’s mobile unit, as we reported yesterday, was a loss making venture.  Intel beancounters don’t like making losses.

Digitimes said that Intel is concentrating on reducing costs for the bill of materials making up smartphones.  The writing on the wall for Intel has been clear to the chip giant for quite some time.  Vendors using ARM chips and non-Windows operating systems feel a little bit freer to pursue their own path.

According to the same report, Asustek, one of the bigger Taiwanese vendors, ordered over seven million Intel Atom processors but the level of rebates remains unclear.

Asustek will almost certainly continue getting pay offs from Intel because it’s estimated it will soak up at least fifteen million processors during the calendar year 2015.

Apple apologist hack hit by instant karma

Posted on October 24, 2014 by - News

burke

Samuel Burke

Just when you thought that Apple’s super bendy, overpriced, low spec iPhone 6 could not be a bigger lemon, it turns out that using its Pay function will cost you an arm and a leg.

It seems that not just the design geniuses at Apple need firing for the iPhone 6, but the programmers should also get a written warning and a lecture from HR.

Jobs’ Mob’ much over praised Apple Pay double charges users for no apparent reason. Multiple users have reported being charged twice for a single purchase when using the new NFC-based mobile payments system, which just went live on October 20.

Fortunately, at least one person who suffered from having their bank accounts emptied by their shiny toys were the same people who had been praising it to the skies when the iPhone 6 was launched.

The Tame Apple Press’s appropriately named CNN Tech reporter Samuel Burke  who rushed to Apple’s defence during bendgate by insisting that the iPhone 6 did  not bend found himself dealing with some instant karma for telling people about how brilliant the product was.

Burke moaned he was billed twice for every Apple Pay purchase he made with his Bank of America card via Apple Pay. Multiple Twitter users reported the same problem, and most complaints are coming from those Bank of America cards.

The Bank of America claims that the problem is with Apple Pay and not the bank, according to Burke’s report, and said in a statement that all duplicate charges will be reimbursed.

Apple of course trotted out its usual line that only a small number of users were affected and insisted it was a Bank of America problem.

Tech firm paid IT workers $1.21 an hour

Posted on October 24, 2014 by - News

Oliver_Twist_-_Samhällsroman_-_Sida_005A San Jose based outfit, Electronics for Imaging paid several employees from India as little as $1.21 an hour to help install computer systems at the company’s Fremont headquarters.

The highly skilled workers, who could have earned more cash by sitting with a cup and dog on a string in the high street, worked up to 122 hours a week between September 8, 2013, and December 21, 2013.

Investigators from the division’s US Labour Department’s wage and hour division learned that the technicians were flown in from the employer’s office in Bangalore, India. The workers were paid in Indian rupees.

Susana Blanco, district director said: “We are not going to tolerate this kind of behaviour from employers.”

The $1.21 an hour was the lowest wage paid to workers that Blanco said she was aware of in the Northern California district. The record had been held by Bloom Energy which was ordered to pay back wages to 12 workers from Mexico who were being paid $2.66 an hour in Mexican pesos. The workers were repairing power generators.

Sylvia Allegretto, a UC Berkeley research economist and co-chair of the university’s Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics told the Mercury News that it was amazing that employers believed they could get away with this.

An anonymous tip prompted the US Department of Labour to investigate the case, which resulted in more than $40,000 in back wages paid to the eight employees and a fine of $3,500 for Electronics for Imaging.

Electronics for Imaging said it brought some IT employees from India temporarily to help its local IT team with the relocation.

Beverly Rubin, vice president of HR Shared Services with Electronics for Imaging said that during this assignment, they continued to be paid their regular pay in India, as well as a special bonus for their efforts on this project.

“During this process we unintentionally overlooked laws that require even foreign employees to be paid based on local US standards.”

The back wages were based on the difference between the $1.21 an hour that was paid and the California minimum wage of $8 an hour, she said. The entire $40,156 in back wages was distributed directly to the eight affected workers.

So an IT worker is hired at the same rate as someone who flips burgers.  Even at that rate, it is still economic for a company to bring in workers from India.

Google hires Oxford boffins to provide AI

Posted on October 24, 2014 by - News

oxford-robesGoogle is finding itself a little short on intelligence and has been seen snuffling around near the Oxford headquarters of TechEye.

When cornered, near one of the wheelie bins at the back of public house the Kite, a Google staffer explained that the search engine was expanding its artificial intelligence initiative. Apparently, they are hiring more than half a dozen leading academics and experts in the field and announcing a partnership with Oxford University to “accelerate” its efforts.

Apparently, Google will make a “substantial contribution” to establish a research partnership with Oxford’s computer science and engineering departments, and Oxford will return the favour by holding one of its famous dinners.

Google did not provide any financial details about the partnership, saying only in a post on its blog that it will include a program of student internships and a series of joint lectures and workshops “to share knowledge and expertise.”

Google is building up its artificial intelligence capabilities as it strives to maintain its dominance in the Internet search market and to develop new products such as robotics and self-driving cars. In January Google acquired artificial intelligence company Deep Mind for $400 million according to media reports.

The Oxford boffins will be joining Google’s Deep Mind team, including three artificial intelligence experts whose work has focused on improving computer visual recognition systems. Among that team is Oxford Professor Andrew Zisserman, a three-time winner of the Marr Prize for computer vision.

The four founders of Dark Blue Labs will also be joining Google where they will be will be leading efforts to help machines “better understand what users are saying to them.”

Google said that three of the professors will hold joint appointments at Oxford, continuing to work part time at the university.

 

Microsoft says it is still researching

Posted on October 24, 2014 by - News

2007_7young-frankensteinMicrosoft has not given up on research and development, despite closing its Silicon Valley lab.

Writing in his bog, Harry Shum, Executive Vice President, Technology & Research said that the recent shuttering of the Silicon Valley lab really hurt.

He said that no one at Microsoft felt good about the fact that a significant number of friends and colleagues were laid off.

“These people contributed to the success of Microsoft over many years. As one can readily imagine, the decisions made about how the cuts were implemented within MSR were extremely complicated and personally painful,” Shum said.

There had been some concern in the wider technology community that Microsoft would walk away from the huge amounts of research work it has done. However, Shum said that the closures did not mean that Vole had given up on inventing stuff.

“Microsoft Research still stands strong at 1000+ persons in labs worldwide, making it one of the largest research institutions of its kind in the world, either industrial or academic, “he said.

“Microsoft Research continues to be one of the very few organisations in industry that does true academic style open research. We will continue to collaborate with the academic research community not only in moving forward the state of the art in computing but also in developing computing talent around the world,” he added.

Microsoft results better than expected

Posted on October 24, 2014 by - News

SmaugMicrosoft reported higher than expected quarterly revenue, helped by stronger sales of its phones, Surface tablets and cloud-computing products for companies.

The cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street had been a little concerned that Microsoft might  suffer from am industry shift toward lower-margin cloud services.

Redmond shares, which have climbed 33 percent over the past year, rose another three percent in after-hours trading. You can pick up a good used share, with low mileage, for $46.36.

The Volish results fly in the face of negative earnings results from tech bellwethers Oracle, IBM, SAP, VMware, and EMC.

Big Blue’s miserable results were expected to be repeated by Microsoft  as all of them had made tentative inroads into the cloud, which generally yields thinner margins.

Microsoft did not disclose its cloud-based revenue for the fiscal first quarter, but said commercial cloud sales rose 128 percent, while sales of services based on its Azure cloud platform rose 121 percent.

Perhaps more importantly, it said gross profit margin in the unit that includes Azure rose 194 percent, despite rising infrastructure costs, which includes the huge expense of building and operating datacenters.

In the last four years, Microsoft’s gross profit margin has drifted down to about 65 percent from above 80 percent, largely due to its move into tablets and phones.

Microsoft is predicted to make $6 billion a year in cloud revenue soon, which would make it the industry’s largest cloud. However would still be only about six percent of overall expected revenue this fiscal year.

CEO Satya Nadella, in a conference call with analysts, said that Microsoft was the only company with cloud revenue that is growing at triple digit rates.

Nadella was keen to stress that Microsoft is more focused on selling higher-margin services via the cloud to its commercial customers.

Microsoft’s fiscal first quarter profit actually fell 13 percent, largely due to an expected $1.1 billion charge related to mass layoffs announced in July.

However it still collected a profit of $4.5 billion compared with $5.2 billion, or 62 cents per share, in the year-ago quarter. It easily beat Wall Street’s forecasts.

Revenue rose 25 percent to $23.2 billion, thanks to the phone business it bought from Nokia in April.  Lumia smartphones sales hit 9.3 million in the first full quarter since the close of the Nokia deal. Sales of the Surface tablet more than doubled to $908 million from $400 million last year.

 

 

Algorithms gouge online buyers

Posted on October 24, 2014 by - News

smartphone-shoppingA study by a team of researchers at the Northeastern University have discovered that online shops target people based on their profiles and charge some more than others for the same products.

The team said that people regularly receive personalised content, such as specific offers from Amazon.  That, the study shows, can be to a person’s advantage but e-commerce sites manipulate search results and customise prices without anyone knowing.

The researchers looked at 16 popular e-commerce sites, including 10 general shops and six hotel and car rental sites,to measure price discrimination and price steering.

“We have found numerous instances of price steering and discrimination on a variety of top e-commerce site,” they said in a report.

Some sites altered prices by hundreds of dollars and travel sites showed inconsistencies in a higher percentage of cases.

They said Expedia and hotels,com “steered a subset of users towards more expensive hotels”.

The team said that price differences were significant in some of the cases. Amazon and Ebay were excluded from the study and so too were firms like Apple.

Although the researchers said they contacted the sites they surveyed, they did not say how or if the companies replied.

Amazon invests in German datacentres

Posted on October 23, 2014 by - News

amazonsMany people might think that Amazon is where you buy your books, your Hue lights and your CDs but behind the scenes it is  becoming a major player in the datacentre business.

And now, according to the Financial Times, Amazon will build several datacentres in Frankfurt in a bid to allay customers’ fears that their data is housed in places where security and privacy are not as high a priority as in Germany.

The FT reports that the EU has much stricter data protection laws than other territories.  And, of the EU countries, Germany has the best privacy control.

A senior VP of Amazon Web Services told the FT that many of its German customers would prefer to have their data held locally. Although a figure hasn’t been placed on the German infrastructure investment, it’s believed that such a project will require a multimillion dollar investment.

US providers like Google, Rackspace and others compete with Amazon but are based in the USA.  Amazon is believed to generate revenues from its cloud business amounting to over $5 billion during 2014.