The U.S. and Britain are increasing their collaboration to thwart digital threats. They are planning to launch more attacks against each other to test their defenses and scare away possible enemies.
The U.S. and the U.K. have been working together to prevent cyber attacks for some time, but are going to increase the collaboration. They will combine their expertise to set up “cyber cells” on both sides of the Atlantic to increase sharing information about threats and to work out how to best protect themselves and create a system that lets hostile states and organization know they shouldn’t attack, said U.K. prime minister David Cameron in an interview published by the BBC.
Cyber attacks “are one of the biggest modern threats that we face,” according to Cameron who is visiting Washington for talks with U.S. president Barack Obama. One of the topics high on the agenda is digital security.
The countries will increase the “war games” launched at each other to test defenses. “It is happening already but it needs to be stepped up,” Cameron said, adding that British intelligence service GCHQ and the U.S. equivalent NSA have know-how that should be shared more.
“It is not just about protecting companies, it is also about protecting people’s data, about protecting people’s finances. These attacks can have real consequences to people’s prosperity,” he said.
However, in order to protect companies and citizens better, increased snooping powers to track terrorists on social networks are necessary, said Cameron. He is planning to discuss this issue with Obama and U.S. companies including Google and Facebook.
The increased cooperation between the countries comes in the wake of the Sony hack and the apparent hacking of the U.S. Central Command’s Twitter account by ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), which posted tweets threatening families of U.S. soldiers and claiming to have hacked into military PCs.
Verizon corrected a serious vulnerability in its My FiOS mobile application that granted unfettered access to email accounts, according to a developer who found the problem.
Randy Westergren, a senior software developer with XDA Developers, looked at the Android version of My FiOS, which is used for account management, email and scheduling video recordings.
“Since Verizon has a good amount of my information, I thought it would be a good candidate for research,” Westergren wrote on his personal blog. “I was right, and the results were astonishing.”
The flaw, contained in the application’s API, could have allowed an attacker to read individual messages from a person’s Verizon inbox and even send emails from an account, he wrote.
Westergren looked at the traffic sent back and forth between My FiOS and Verizon’s servers. He found My FiOS would return the content of someone else’s email inbox by simply substituting a different user ID in a request.
He contacted Verizony, which later acknowledged the problem. Verizon issued a fix last Friday, Westergren wrote.
“Verizon’s security group seemed to immediately realize the impact of this vulnerability and took it very seriously,” Westergren wrote. “They were very responsive during this process and even arranged for a free year of FiOS Internet service as a token of their gratitude.”
AMD has developed facial recognition technology to enable users to organize and search video clips based on the people featured in them.
AMD executive Richard Gayle demonstrated to Tom’s Guide how AMD Content Manager, uses facial recognition to browse through a group of local videos to find specific faces.
There is an index that displays the people’s faces that have been detected throughout the video clips.
The user can edit the names of the people as well as add keyword tags to help improve future searches for specific people.
For instance, if you are searching for videos that feature one person, you can click on his or her respective face to pull up the corresponding videos.
Additionally, if you want to narrow a search to a specific person combined with a keyword tag, you can drag the face icon and click on the desired keyword.
Once you click on the video you wish to view, a player appears in the right windowpane, along with a timeline displayed at the bottom with a list of all the people who appear in the video.
The timeline is separated into various coloured boxes to mark the exact moment in the video when each person first appears on screen, so you do not have to watch the entire video to see the bit you want.
The application also has facial recognition capabilities that allow users to do some basic editing, such as compiling a single montage video of any individual or individuals.
While this is pretty good technology, it probably does not have any major use yet on its own.
Gayle said it is unlikely that AMD will release Content Manager in its current form but will license it to OEMs that are able to rebrand the application before offering it on their respective systems.
He claimed that only AMD processors have sufficient power to operate the application, because of the processor’s ability to have the CPU, GPU and memory controller work closely together.
HP is about to put out two tablets later this year.
The names are expected to be the HP Pro Slate 10 EE G1 and HP Pro Tablet 10 EE G1 and they were found on the world wide wibble by Notebook Italia,.
Both tablets are powered by an Intel quad-core Bay Trail Atom Z3735F processor. Accompanying the processor package is 2GB of RAM, as well as 32GB of internal storage. Both the Pro Slate and Pro Tablet come with 10.1-inch displays, as well as 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and NFC.
The Pro Slate sticks with Android, while the Pro Tablet opts for Windows 8.1. The tablets mean they will each come with a stylus, but it would appear that the stylus is just a stand in for your finger, rather than doing anything useful.
Pro Slate will set you back $400.00 and Pro Tablet cost $499.
HP has yet to officially announce either device.
New evidence coming from two LinkedIn profiles of AMD employees suggest that AMD’s upcoming Radeon R9 380X graphics card which is expected to be based on the Fiji GPU will actually use High-Bandwidth Memory.
Spotted by a member of 3D Center forums, the two LinkedIn profiles mention both the R9 380X by name as well as describe it as the world’s firts 300W 2.5D discrete GPU SoC using stacked die High-Bandwidth Memory and silicon interposer. While the source of the leak is quite strange, these are more reliable than just rumors.
The first in line is the profile of Ilana Shternshain, an ASIC Physical Design Engineer, which has been behind the Playstation 4 SoC, Radeon R9 290X and R9 380X, which is described as the “largest in ‘King of the hill’ line of products.”
The second LinkedIn profile is the one from AMD’s System Architect Manager, Linglan Zhang, which was involved in developing “the world’s first 300W 2.5D discrete GPU SOC using stacked die High Bandwidth Memory and silicon interposer.”
Earlier rumors suggest that AMD might launch the new graphics cards early this year as the company is under heavy pressure from Nvidia’s recently released, as well as the upcoming, Maxwell-based graphics cards.
Rumors from China suggest that the chip designer Mediatek is apparently on the verge of launching 10- and 12-core system on chips.
Mediatek has forced rival Qualcomm to launch 64-bit and Octacore processors when the latter had openly dismissed them only a few months earlier.
But the thoughts are that a 10 or a 12-core processor might be taking the Nintendo a bit as there are few in the market which would want one. The thinking is that Mediatek might want to launch this chip for the server market.
Recently Mediatek advertised for a Principal Hardware Engineer (Server Power Architect) which required ”Hands-on experience in maximizing performance of a parallel computing system within a low power envelope.”
Sony CEO Michael Lynton has told the Associated Press that the firm’s computer systems are still down, but, and thank someone for this, film and television production has not stopped a beat.
Yes, Sony, the firm that bought us a remake of Annie and a very divisive blunt edged political comedy called The Interview in the past couple of months, is still firing on production cylinders, if not sending emails.
A long interview with Associated Press finds Lynton not mentioning the North Korea words, but admitting that the hackers that have it between its teeth are pretty good at what they do and that Sony is on a real learning experience.
“We are the canary in the coal mine, that’s for sure,” said the CEO. “There is no playbook for this, so you are in essence trying to look at the situation as it unfolds and make decisions without being able to refer to a lot of experiences you’ve had in the past or other people’s experiences. You’re on completely new ground.”
Despite what you might have been led to believe, the assault on Sony has not been very costly, according to Lynton, who said that the firm has not had much more than a ripple to contend with.
“What I’m hearing so far is that they’re very manageable,” he added. “They’re not disruptive to the economic well being of the company.”
There has been some internal disruption, though, and Lynton said that staffers are paid with paper checks.
He confirmed that Sony’s technology people did scuttle about looking for workarounds and started using old BlackBerry handsets as part of a boots and braces response.
In the case of the latter, at least one firm was pleased about this news.
January 21, 2015 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
Mozilla’s partnership with Yahoo has quadrupled the search provider’s usage by those running Firefox in the U.S., but the browser’s users still prefer Google, according to data from an Irish analytics company.
Data provided to Computerworld by StatCounter showed that Yahoo’s search engine referred more than four times the number of pages visited by Firefox 34 than did the browser’s predecessor, Firefox 33, in the U.S.
Mozilla changed the default search from Google to Yahoo when it released Firefox 34 on Dec. 1. Firefox 33, which a small percentage of users continue to run, uses Google as its default search provider.
StatCounter’s numbers, described as usage share, are based on the number of page views each browser accumulates on the three million sites that deploy the firm’s analytics package, so they are more an indication of activity than a user tally. The company counts page referrals from search providers, not search queries.
As of Jan. 6, Yahoo’s search usage share on Firefox 34 was 32.2%, or more than four times the 7.5% that Yahoo had on Firefox 33 on the same day.
The Yahoo increase in Firefox 34 came at the expense of Google, which had a 60.8% share in that version, significantly lower than the 86.1% in Firefox 33. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Bing search engine, at 5.5% in Firefox 34, was only slightly up from the 5.4% in Firefox 33.
On Jan. 6, StatCounter’s search provider usage shares for all browsers in the U.S. were 75.3% for Google, 12.4% for Bing and 10.5% for Yahoo. In other words, Firefox 34 users were more than three times likelier to reach a destination page from a Yahoo search than the U.S. average because of the new default.
January 20, 2015 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
Mobile device owners around the world are getting faster wireless broadband as LTE-Advanced and smartphones that can take advantage of the technology finally start to take off.
A year ago, LTE-Advanced was only available in South Korea, but it’s now available in 31 countries (including Australia, France, Germany, U.K. and the U.S.) and more are on the way, according to industry organization GSA (Global mobile Suppliers Association).
“There is a lot of activity at the moment,” said Alan Hadden, president at GSA.
LTE-Advanced is a collection of different technologies, but the one mobile operators are implementing first is called carrier aggregation. It lets operators treat up to three radio channels in different frequency bands as if they were one and send data to users at higher speeds.
Bandwidths at up to 300Mbps are possible, though not all LTE-Advanced networks and devices can muster that. For example, Apple’s new iPhones use a version of carrier aggregation that tops out at 150Mbps, and not all operators have the spectrum to offer that.
However, regardless of which version of LTE-Advanced a network or device supports, the technology offers users higher speeds than ever before.
Chances are greater that you’ll get access to LTE-Advanced if you live in a big city. For example, U.S. operator AT&T has so far upgraded its network in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Miami, Honolulu, Chicago, Oklahoma City, Dallas and Houston.
The technology has been held back due to a lack of supporting devices, but that will change this year thanks to a greater variety of modems from Qualcomm and Intel.
Source
MediaTek has introduced its first System on Chip (SoC) specifically designed for Android Wear. The MediaTek MT2601 sports to ARM Cortex-A7 cores and Mali 400 MP graphics.
The company said the chip is designed for wearables and enables designers to create new products with more features in a smaller footprint. The MT2601 has 41.5% fewer components and lower power consumption than other chipsets in the space.
The dominant SoC in Android Wear devices is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 400, which powers practically all Android Wear watches except the Moto 360. However, the Snapdragon 400 was not designed for wearables – it is an all-rounder, usually found in mid- to entry-level Android phones.
MediaTek thinks it can do a bit better with a bespoke design. The MT2601 is clocked at 1.2GHz, and comes in a PCBA package measuring 480mm2. The small PCB size enables its use on even smaller devices and MediaTek was keen to point out that it doesn’t skip on features, as it can interface with a range of external sensors and wireless connectivity solutions.
“The MT2601 has an incredibly small die size and is highly optimized for cost and power performance. The platform solution, comprised of MT2601 integrated with Android Wear software, will fuel the maker revolution and empower the application developer community worldwide to create a broad range of innovative applications and services,” said J.C. Hsu, General Manager of New Business Development at MediaTek.
This is not MediaTek’s first crack at wearables. In September, the company launched MediaTek Labs and its first wearable chip, the Aster MT2502A. This particular SoC was not designed for Android Wear, as it’s a tiny ARM7 EJ-S chip clocked at 260MHz and intended for use in smaller wearables, such as fitness trackers.
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