Tag: techeye

Firm makes 3D food printer

Posted on September 3, 2014 by - News

candyA start up said it will make a 3D food printer that will be able to churn out sweets.

3D Ventures aims to make the machine cost less than $500 and the first product in its range, dubbed Candy, will not only make cookies, but even print chocolates.

How will it work? The company says that people can design food on their PCs and then transfer it to an SD card.  The dispenser can be filled with semi-solids.

3D Ventures is aiming to fund the machines with Kickstarter money. A rep said: “It is a great way to spend time with family, and with Candy, users know exactly what is going into their food and can make it look any way they like.”

He added that the company wanted to turn 3D industry “on its head” by selling it at a great price.  It’s aimed at impulse buyers, and professional confectioners.

Tere’s a video all about it here.

 

Google gets into Quantum Lolcats

Posted on September 3, 2014 by - News

OgleSearch engine Google has decided that it wants to get into the business of working out if cats are potentially alive or dead.

It has created a research team led by physicist John Martinis from the University of California Santa Barbara to build new quantum information processors based on superconducting electronics.

Dubbed the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, the whole thing is a  collaboration between Google, NASA Ames Research Centre and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) to study the application of quantum optimisation related to artificial intelligence.

The idea is that by having an integrated hardware group, the Quantum AI team will now be able to implement and test new designs for quantum optimisation and inference processors based on recent theoretical insights as well as our learnings from the D-Wave quantum annealing architecture.

It will also be able to have someone who can feed and stroke the cats, which may or may not be alive.

Google has become more interested in artificial intelligence in recent years, probably because human intelligence seems to be suffering in the US as the nation stops teaching science in favour of a theory that someone’s invisible friend created the universe 6,000 years ago.

In January, Google bought privately held artificial intelligence company DeepMind Technologies, which says it all, really.

 

Woe never ends for Renesas

Posted on September 3, 2014 by - News

renesas-chips (1)Japanese chipmaker Renesas is still in trouble and might have to make even deeper cuts to its organisation.

The outfit has just finished a restructuring and is focusing its business on the automotive and industrial sectors and has pulled it back into the black after years of losses.

However Renesas Chairman and CEO Hisao Sakuta said that the company still had too many people and he expects people to quit.

Renesas was hit hard by the March 2011 earthquake which shut a key chip plant for months and sent customers looking for other suppliers.  The company was rescued by government-backed funds but had to sell an integrated chip factory in northern Japan to Sony.  Renesas SP Drivers will be sold to Synaptics for $475 million.

Renesas has so far cut more than 10,000 jobs and racked up $3.3 billion in cumulative net losses over the last four financial years.

It had its fifth round of a voluntary early retirement programme in September which was taken up by 361 employees.  So far the group work force had shrunk to 27,200 as of end-March from 42,800 two years earlier.

Last week, Renesas unveiled a chip using new technologies that it aims to eventually apply to autonomous driving, which merges together feeds from cameras fitted to the car to create a 3D image and can detect pedestrians within several meters of a vehicle.

Test shipments of the chip begin this month, while full production and supply will likely begin in 2016, Renesas said. It is also developing technologies that will enable valet parking of a car by itself, without a driver inside.

Google serves up tat

Posted on September 3, 2014 by - News

telescopeSearch engine Google has come up with a novel way of getting people to update their browsers to something a little more recent.

Users of browsers which can remember the use of shoulder pads and Duran Duran are suddenly getting served up search results which are just as old.

An Opera 12.17 user complained on a Google help desk that, Google’s homepage reverted to the old version him. If he searched for something, the results are shown with the current Google look, but the homepage itself is the old look with the black bar across the top. It seemed to affect only the Google homepage and image search. However he still got the latest news.

Opera is currently using version 24, version 12 was bought out in June 7, 2011.

A Google spokesman said that there was not a fault with Google, in fact it was proof that the “encouragement” to upgrade was working perfectly. He suggested politely that if the user wanted a modern Google they should run a modern browser to support it.

“We’re continually making improvements to Search, so we can only provide limited support for some outdated browsers. We encourage everyone to make the free upgrade to modern browsers — they’re more secure and provide a better web experience overall,” the spokesman wrote on the thread.

Strangely, the help desk thread continued with people using old browsers insisting that there must be a fault with Google’s programming. After all, there was nothing wrong with working with the same version of Safari which was blessed by Steve Jobs while he was young and healthy is there?

NATO goes nuclear on cyber option

Posted on September 3, 2014 by - News

wenn2114091NATO is going to revise its treaty so that a cyber attack on one of its members will count as a hostile threat for all of them.

The plan is that when President Obama meets with other NATO leaders later this week, they are expected to ratify the idea that a cyberattack on any of the 28 NATO nations could be declared an attack on all of them, similar to a ground invasion or an airborne bombing.

This should put the fear of god into Russia, which was believed behind computer attacks that disrupted financial and telecommunications systems in Estonia in 2007 and Georgia in 2008, and is believed to have used them in the early days of the Ukraine crisis as well.

NATO is a bit behind when it comes to cyber security, although it now has just built a nice new computer security centre.  It does run computer exercises but it possesses no cyberweapons of its own and has no cunning plan how it might use the weapons of member states to strike back in a computer conflict.

The United States and Britain, have spent billions of dollars on secret computer offensive programs but they have not told NATO leaders what kind of weapons they might contribute in a NATO-led computer conflict.

The change in NATO’s definition of an “armed attack” will leave deliberately unclear what would constitute a cyberattack so large that the alliance might think that this would be a declaration of war.

Apparently the alliance is hoping that the impact of the attack will help define the matter. Defence experts point out that deterrence is all about ambiguity, and the implicit threat that NATO would enter a computer conflict in defence of one of its members is full of those ambiguities.

Apple faces firestorm over celeb hacking

Posted on September 3, 2014 by - News

lawrrenceIt appears that the Tame Apple Press are finally giving up on Jobs’ Mob and admitting that the leak of racy celebrity photos was actually caused by a security fault on Apple’s iCloud.

Earlier this week it looked like Apple was going to avoid any mention in the hack as the press insisted that such an attack on the iCloud was impossible because it had this magical thing called “encryption.” Apple even went as far as denying that the iCloud was breached by hackers who posted nude pictures of celebrities.

Photos from the celebrities were stolen individually, the company said. The celebrity accounts were “compromised by a very targeted attack on user names, passwords and security questions, a practice that is all too common on the Internet,” Apple insisted.

However by yesterday it was clear that Apple was not going to get away with that. Journalists were starting to ask real security experts about how hackers got the information and it was fairly clear that there was a bit of a tiny weeny hole in the iCloud.

Reuters, which normally spins pro-Apple adverts pretending to be news, sheepishly admitted that the highly public affair remains potentially one of Apple’s worst public crises in years. Speculation continues to spread on blogs about flaws in the iCloud service.

Brandwatch, a company that analyses sentiment on social media, blogs and other sites, found Apple had received 17,000 mentions on Twitter were related to the security breach and the negative words associated Apple’s iCloud service include “violation,” “disgusting violation,” “criminality,” “failure,” “glitch” and “disappointment”.

What is worrying Reuters is that it could upset Apple’s coming launch of the iPhone 6 which actually includes features that use the iCloud for mobile payments. After all, if you are in the middle of a security crisis the last thing you want is to tell potential customers that the same technology which handed over naked pictures of beautiful celebs to the paparazzi can be doing the same thing with your credit card information.

“This could be a scary time publicly for Apple,” JD Sherry, vice president of cybersecurity provider Trend Micro wrote in a Tuesday blogpost. “They haven’t had many, Antennagate and Apple Maps come to mind, and this would most likely trump those.”

 

Apple’s iWatch delayed – report

Posted on September 2, 2014 by - News

Taroko Gorge, Taiwan. Picture Mike MageeManufacturers on high tech island Taiwan are reporting that Apple’s iWatch is unlikely to see the light of day until 2015.

Speaking under terms of anonymity to Taiwanese wire Digitimes, the vendors say there’s still a way to go because components are still in their engineering verification stage and then has to undergo production verification testing.

And, more than that, vendors who make the components that go into the iWatch haven’t yet received firm orders from Apple.

Although Apple is holding one of its signature press conferences on September 9th, the company is unlikely to announce the iWatch then, Digitimes says.

Yesterday Swatch said it would enter the now rather competitive arena of wearable technology with a smart watch.  The jury is still out whether the world and its dog actually wants to wear this kind of device, however.

Microsoft tried to introduce a smart watch in the 1990s but the idea went down like a lead balloon.

Tech VCs flock to London

Posted on September 2, 2014 by - News

london-undegroundDN Capital is going to create a $200 million VC fund based in the Smoke and will invest o software digimedia, mobile apps and e-commerce firms.

But it’s not the only VC firm to set up shop in London. Tech investments worth around $1.4 billion have arrived over the last six months.

The firms include Index Ventures, Balderton Capital, Santander and Google Ventures.  And Dan Cobley, who used to run Google Europe said he will set up Brightridge Capital in London with funds reckoned to amount to $84 million.

London & Partners, Mayor Boris “No Man is an Island” Johnson promotional company, thinks that London is the place for investors looking for high growth.

Gordon Innes, CEO of London & Partners said that the Smoke “is increasingly the place to be for investors.  Funds based in London have access to the cream of the European technology scene, meaning they have the opportunity to invest in the great companies being created in booming clusters such as London’s Tech City”.

Windows XP refuses to die

Posted on September 2, 2014 by - News

Microsoft campusData from StatCounter Global Stats showed that Windows XP s still the world’s second most popular operating system.

That’s despite the fact that earlier this year Microsoft pulled the plug on XP, apart from on embedded devices.

StatCounter said that Windows 8.1 now has more volume than Windows 8.0 – representing 7.5 percent of OS share.

Windows 7.0 refuses to go away – it has a market share of 50.3 percent in the USA, with XP on 12.9 percent.  Windows 7 is expected to be EOLed next year, forcing the world+dog over to 8.1 in preparation for the introduction of Windows 9.

The figures are based on 15 billion page views per month to over three million websites – it’s possible to distinguish between 8 and 8.1 because the latter has a distinct user agent.

StatCounter data is here.

Russian sex mad geckos die in space

Posted on September 2, 2014 by - News

lizardA team of sex mad geckos who were sent by the Russians to see what they could do in zero gravity returned to earth stone dead.

The geckos were sent aboard Russian satellite Foton M-4 to study effects of zero gravity on reproductive systems.

According to officials at the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems, the geckos – four females and one male died a week before the landing.

Apparently the satellite’s other randy cargo, the fruit flies were still alive and bred like crazy in space.

As the Foton satellite was not equipped to transmit live feeds back, Russian scientists will have to pick apart the 44 days of footage to know when exactly and why the geckos met their death.

Other than the fruit flies the entire experiment was a disaster. The Foton-M4 satellite was launched on 19 July, 2014 from the Baikonur space centre in Kazakhstan. Though slated for two months, the capsule was recalled after 44 days following problems that began a few days after the launch.

Logicalis buys into wi-fi outfit

Posted on September 2, 2014 by - News

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeIT firm Logicalis said it has taken a 51 percent stake in a German company.

ITUMA, which is privaly owned, offers wi-fi services including 3D in location navigation, product promotions and retail ordering.

Why is Logicalis interested in this kind of stuff?  President and COO Mark Rogers said because it can get exclusive rights to the wi-fi products and services.  He said: “[It] is expected to achieve significant market penetration, driven off the back of customers’ investment in wireless or in pre-packaged managed and cloud services.”

He also said that will complement its existing partnership with Cisco and Logicalis will offer services across all the countries it operates in.

The software ITUMA has allows indoor navigation, product information and location.

ITUMA CEO Simon Marg said that the deal will allow it to spread its wings to Logicalis’ customers and companies across the world.

Celebrity leak was Apple cock up

Posted on September 2, 2014 by - News

lawrrenceThe coverage of the leak of celebrity photos from Apple’s iCloud has been surprisingly free of blaming Job’s Mob for the leak.  

In fact, some of the coverage has even praised Apple’s security for its magical encryption which apparently absolved Jobs’ Mob of all the blame for the hack.

The large-scale hacking found snaps on the accounts of Kim Kardashian, Rihanna, Cara Delevingne, Ariana Grande, Victoria Justice and Selena Gomez.

However Next Web has found proof hat the leaks were caused by a breach in Apple’s iCloud service.

A Python script emerged on GitHub that appears to have allowed malicious users to ‘brute force’ a target account’s password on Apple’s iCloud, thanks to a vulnerability in the Find My iPhone service.

The vulnerability allegedly discovered in the Find My iPhone service appears to have let attackers use this method to guess passwords repeatedly without any sort of lockout or alert to the target. Once the password has been eventually matched, the attacker used it to access other iCloud functions.

The tool was published for two days before being shared to Hacker News and Apple has moved to actually fix the hole.

Find My iPhone  has been used before for such attacks.  It that case hackers were holding victims ransom, locking their phones and demanding money in exchange for giving their phone back.

The Independent reported that Apple has “refused to comment” on any security flaw in iCloud today. So the Tame Apple press can go on telling users that Apple security is perfect.

EU watchdog investigation approves Micros takeover

Posted on September 2, 2014 by - News

watchdogEU watchdogs, which have been snuffling around the hindquarters of Oracle’s $5.3m takeover of Micros have barked that the deal has come up smelling of roses.

Oracle’s $5.3m takeover of retail and hospitality technology firm Micros Systems still has to get shareholder approval.

However, the EC said the planned purchase of the Columbia, Maryland-based company, announced in late June, raises no competitive issues as far as the EU was concerned and can go ahead.

The commission thought that the combined market share of Micros and Oracle was limited and many strong competitors would remain after the acquisition.

Micros sells mobile and cloud services, consulting, hardware, and point-of-sale software for restaurants, hotels and retail. Its own board unanimously approved the transaction.

It had been suggested that Larry Ellison only wrote a cheque for Micros to divert attention away from a series of disappointing quarterly results from Oracle, a cloud strategy that is still forming, and concerns about application growth.

It was the biggest deal that Oracle had done for a long time. In fact, it was the largest since Oracle bought Sun Microsystems in 2010 for $7.4billion. In 2008, it paid $8.5bn to take over BEA Systems but its most expensive purchase remains PeopleSoft, bought for $10.3bn in 2005.

Oracle president and CFO Safra Catz said that the sale would make Oracle a lot of dosh straight away and help the company to expand over time.

Micros management and employees will form a dedicated business within Oracle.

US tech companies rally against China

Posted on September 2, 2014 by - News

55_Days_at_Peking-633098393-largeUS companies are moaning that Chinese regulators are ganging up on Western tech outfits in a bid to shut them out.

The American Chamber of Commerce in China is fuming about a series of investigations scrutinising at least 30 foreign firms, as China enforces its 2008 anti-monopoly law.

According to the Chamber, multinational firms are under “selective and subjective enforcement” using “legal and extra-legal approaches,” the Chamber said in a report.

A survey of 164 members showed 49 percent of respondents felt foreign companies were being singled out in recent pricing and anti-corruption campaigns, compared to 40 percent in a late 2013 survey of 365 members. Twenty-five percent said they were uncertain, or did not know, and 26 percent said no.

Lester Ross, vice chairman of the chamber’s policy committee, said the expansion of the enforcement was welcome in principle, but regulators were using “extra-legal” means to conduct investigations.

“They have taken what are, in many instances, vague or unspecified provisions in the law and moved to enforce them, and sought to enforce those means through processes that do not respect the notion of due process or fairness,” Ross said.

The Chamber wrote to Secretary of State John Kerry and Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew and asked them to get tough with Beijing on its use of anti-competition rules.

China is using competition law to advance industrial policies that nurture domestic companies, the U.S. Chamber, based in Washington, said in the letter.

It is not just the Americans who are concerned. The European Union Chamber of Commerce in China in August expressed its concern over the antitrust investigations, saying China was using strong-arm tactics and appeared to be unfairly targeting foreign firms.

The Chinese argue that some business operators in China have not adjusted their practices in accordance with the anti-monopoly law.  Others have a clear understanding of the laws, but they take the chance that they may escape punishment.

Anti-trust watchdogs have bitten Qualcomm’s local subsidiary after it said in February the company was suspected of overcharging and abusing its market position in wireless communication standards.  Yesterday Microsoft was given 20 days to reply to queries on the compatibility of its Windows operating system and Office software suite.

Microsoft defies judge’s cloud ruling

Posted on September 2, 2014 by - News

cloud 1A US judge has demanded that software giant Microsoft hand over emails which are stored on a foreign server to the government. Microsoft however has refused to do so until its appeal is heard in another court.

Apparently, the emails are sitting on a server in Ireland. If the ruling stands then it means that Microsoft could fall foul of EU law, where the emails are stored and if Redmond does allow the data to fall into US government hands, it can kiss good-bye to billions of EU cloud business.

Practically it means that if you have your data stored in a cloud owned by a US company you are effectively giving that data to US spooks. In fact, the US government could then sell on that data to US business rivals.

Chief Judge Loretta Preska of the US District Court in Manhattan had on July 31 upheld a magistrate judge’s ruling on the emails.  It is not clear why the government wants to read the emails just that it applied for a warrant.

Microsoft has been desperate to prove to customers that it does not allow the US government unchallenged access to personal data on its servers.

Preska had delayed enforcement of the government’s search warrant so Microsoft could appeal.

But prosecutors later said that because her order was not a “final, appealable order” and because Microsoft had yet to be held in contempt, there was no legal reason to enforce the stay.

Preska agreed, saying her order “merely confirmed the government’s temporary forbearing of its right to stay enforcement of the order it secured.”

Microsoft is still refusing to comply with the judge’s order, pending attempts to overturn it. A spokesVole said that everyone agreed this case can and will proceed to the appeals court. This is simply about finding the appropriate procedure for that to happen,

This appears to be the first case in which a corporation has challenged a US search warrant seeking data held abroad. It is backed by AT&T, Apple, Cisco Systems and Verizon.