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iOS Developers Warned About Taking Shortcuts
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Slapdash developers have been advised not to use the open source JSPatch method of updating their wares because it is as vulnerable as a soft boiled egg, for various reasons.
It’s FireEye that is giving JSPatch the stink eye and providing the warning that it has rendered over 1,000 applications open to copy and paste theft of photos and other information. And it doesn’t end there.
FireEye’s report said that Remote Hot Patching may sound like a good idea at the time, but it really isn’t. It is so widely used that is has opened up a 1,220-wide iOS application hole in Apple users’ security. A better option, according to the security firm, is to stick with the Apple method, which should provide adequate and timely protection.
“Within the realm of Apple-provided technologies, the way to remediate this situation is to rebuild the application with updated code to fix the bug and submit the newly built app to the App Store for approval,” said FireEye.
“While the review process for updated apps often takes less time than the initial submission review, the process can still be time-consuming and unpredictable, and can cause loss of business if app fixes are not delivered in a timely and controlled manner.
“However, if the original app is embedded with the JSPatch engine, its behaviour can be changed according to the JavaScript code loaded at runtime. This JavaScript file is remotely controlled by the app developer. It is delivered to the app through network communication.”
Let’s not all make this JSPatch’s problem, because presumably it’s developers who are lacking.
FireEye spoke up for the open source security gear while looking down its nose at hackers. “JSPatch is a boon to iOS developers. In the right hands, it can be used to quickly and effectively deploy patches and code updates. But in a non-utopian world like ours, we need to assume that bad actors will leverage this technology for unintended purposes,” the firm said.
“Specifically, if an attacker is able to tamper with the content of a JavaScript file that is eventually loaded by the app, a range of attacks can be successfully performed against an App Store application.
Courteys-TheInq
Is nVidia Going All-In On Autonomous Cars?
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Nvidia is applying all that it knows about deep learning to enable autonomous vehicles.
The GPU vendor has launched NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2 which is an autonomous vehicle development platform powered by the 16nm FinFET-based Pascal GPU.
The GPU maker issued a version of DRIVE PX last year to its automotive partners including Audi, BMW, Daimler, Ford and dozens more. This newer version is equipped with two Tegra SOCs with ARM cores plus two discrete Pascal GPUs.
Nvidia said that the new platform is capable of 24 trillion deep learning operations per second ten times more than the last generation.
It can also offer an aggregate of 8 teraflops of single-precision performance which is a four-fold increase over the PX 1 and many times faster than using a slide rule or counting on your fingers.
The development platform includes the Caffe deep learning framework to run DNN models designed and trained on DIGITS, NVIDIA’s interactive deep learning training system.
Nivida wants to take humans out of the drivers’ seat to reduce the one million automotive-related fatalities each year.
Perception is the main issue and deep learning is able to achieve super-human perception capability. DRIVE PX 2 can process 12 video cameras, plus lidar, radar and ultrasonic sensors. This 360 degree assessment makes it possible to detect objects, identify them and their position relative to the car, and then calculate a safe and comfortable trajectory.
Courtesy-Fud
Amazon Has Its Own ARM SoC
Online book seller Amazon is selling its own brand of ARM-based computer chips.
In a move which is a side step from its normal expansion into its own brand of groceries and clothing, Amazon is flogging its own chips which are being made by Annapurna Labs.
Annapurna is an Israeli subsidiary that Amazon acquired a year ago and the chips are called Alpine. They are ARM-based processors are designed to drive home gateways, Wi-Fi routers, and Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices.
They’re meant for things like data centers and cheap smart home devices rather than smartphones and tablet which makes the concept of Amazon selling them seem rather odd. After all if you are a datacenter you usually go to a supplier and buy shedloads of expensive gear. You don’t normally pop into Amazon and do a quick search, even if you are a Prime Member.
Intel currently has the data center sewn up and ARM chip use is still thin on the ground however Amazon has done well in the cloud so peddling chips as part of a product package makes a bit of sense.
It won’t initially be targeting the kind of high-end servers which are powering the Internet of Stuff which is supposed to be the next big thing. Asus, Netgear, and Synology are already producing devices that use Amazon’s Alpine .
Courtesy-Fud
Qualcomm Has A Snapdragon CPU For Cars
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Qualcomm has told the assorted throngs at CES about a new Snapdragon 820 Automotive family of products. It will come in two flavors – a standard 820A and an 820Am that adds an LTE modem.
The chip is designed for in-car navigation and infotainment systems running QNX, Linux, and Android. It has wireless capabilities and can connected to your phone. The LTE version will link to the Internet.
They can manage multiple displays to run the screen in your dashboard and an infotainment screen in the back seat. It also offers support for high-resolution 4K displays for when some company inevitably decides to cram a high-res, high-density screen into one of its cars.
The 820A chips are close cousins ofthe the Snapdragon 820 SoCs that will start shipping in phones later this year and use Qualcomm’s custom-made 64-bit Kryo CPU cores, an Adreno 530 GPU, a Hexagon 680 DSP all cooked up with a 14nm manufacturing process. They will also use the Snapdragon X12 LTE which can manage 600Mbps down and 150Mbps up when the wind is behind it and it is going downhill. There are all the usual 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and other features.
Qualcomm said that it used a “modular approach” in designing the chip, which means that the cars infotainment system can be upgraded with hardware and software updates, thereby enabling vehicles to be easily upgraded with the latest technology.
Car makers could theoretically swap out the chip or the entire package without needing to worry about software changes. Qualcomm specifically mentions upgrading LTE connectivity over the lifetime of the car to keep up with the capabilities of cellular networks.
Qualcomm says the 820A family will begin sampling in Q1 of 2016.
Courtesy-Fud
Nvidia Teams Up With Volvo For Self-Driving Car Computer
January 15, 2016 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Nvidia Corp. took the wraps off of a new, lunchbox-size super-computer for self-driving cars and announced that Volvo Car Group will be the new device’s first customer.
Volvo, of Sweden, is owned by China’s Geely Automotive Holdings.
Nvidia made the announcement at the beginning of the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas. Calls to Volvo’s spokesman in China were not immediately answered.
The new Drive PX 2, said company CEO Jen-Hsung Huang, has computing power equivalent to 150 MacBook Pro computers, and can deliver up to 24 trillion “deep learning” operations – allowing the computer to use artificial intelligence to program itself to recognize driving situations – per second.
Partnerships between automakers and Silicon Valley companies on self-driving technologies are taking center stage at this year’s show.
Also on Monday, General Motors Co. announced a $500 million investment in ride-sharing service Lyft.
Huang didn’t offer revenue projections for Drive PX 2, but automotive is the fastest-growing business segment for Nvidia, whose largest revenue source is video games.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/nvidia-teams-up-with-volvo-for-self-driving-car-computer.html
Is Qualcomm Dropping Kryo?
The Blog site Fudzilla has confirmed that the Kryo core might be the last custom developed CPU core from Qualcomm, at least for now.
The next generation SoC from Qualcomm, let’s call it Snapdragon 8×0, will use ARM Cortex cores. Our industry sources are confident that company’s leadership has put a great deal of pressure on Qualcomm QTI to reduce the cost of R&D and custom CPU core costs an arm and a leg. Using Cortex Cores is cheaper than developing a custom ARM based CPU such as Kyro.
Creating a custom ARM based CPU core is intensive too and Qualcom still has to build a Modem, GPU, DSP, camera ISP, Video processing unit as well connectivity inside of the SoC to provide the differentiating factor to the competition. It just appears that the Core itself probably does not need looking at.
But the move will hardly help Qualcomm compete in hostile and aggressive mobile SoC manufacturers’ competition.
Apple and Samsung have their own CPU cores. Huawei uses Cortex architecture but has its own SoCs for the 100 million phones it sold this year. These are businesses that are either very hard or impossible for Qualcomm QTI SoCs to get. Every Samsung SoC manufactured and sold in Samsung phones is one less for Qualcomm.
MediaTek might be the winner in this case, as MediaTek makes rather unique processors that are designed to compete well against those who use close-to-reference Cortex ARM solutions. MediaTek is the only deca core in three cluster architecture but we still have to see it in action before we pronounce anyone winner or loser.
Qualcomm will have to focus on its strengths of its late 2016 successor to Snapdragon 810. The strengths of Qualcomm lay in superior modem performance and a great Adreno GPU. However they will lose an advantage of a custom core that might bring a bigger difference from the competition.
This is certainly not something we expected but it is happening.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/is-qualcomm-dropping-kryo.html
Smartphone Buyer Fatigue Hampering Growth
January 12, 2016 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
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Apple and Samsung dominate global smartphone markets with several new flagship handsets unveiled each year.
But after years of fantastic growth in smartphone sales, the pace of growth is slowing overall, including for the two smartphone giants. Market research firm IDC recently said that 2016 will be the first year that overall smartphone growth will slow to below 10%.
There is even talk among analysts that the latest models don’t have enough compelling new features to lure customers to a competitor’s device. Others say smartphone buyer’s fatigue has set in.
Buyer’s fatigue is a concern in the U.S. and other developed countries where the smartphone market is viewed as a “replacement” market because the market is already saturated: Nearly everyone already owns a smartphone. A focus on emerging countries by Apple and Samsung still requires them to find low-cost alternatives to compete with the likes of Huawei and others.
“Consumers are fatigued about new phone features that they can’t easily relate to any improvement in their personal use cases,” said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moore Insights & Strategy. “Samsung has been one of the worst offenders of this in the last few years. If consumers can’t relate, then they need to be educated.”
Most recently, reports that Samsung would add a pressure-sensitive displayand high-speed charging port to its Galaxy S7 phone drew a few yawns. That’s because Apple added the pressure-sensitive display to the iPhone 6S last summer, and a new USB Type-C fast charging port is already available in LG and Huawei smartphones.
While it is to Samsung’s advantage to keep up with Apple and others rivals, analysts disagree over whether these latest improvements will provoke an iPhone user to switch to a Galaxy.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/mobile-category/smartphone-buyer-fatigue-seen-hampering-growth.html
Sony To Acquire Toshiba’s Sensor Business
November 4, 2015 by admin
Filed under Consumer Electronics
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Toshiba Corp is offload its image sensor business to Sony Corp for around 20 billion yen ($164.68 million) as part of a restructuring plan laid out earlier this year, sources with knowledge of the deal said on Saturday.
Toshiba, whose businesses range from laptops to nuclear power, is undergoing a restructuring after revelations this year that it overstated earnings by $1.3 billion going back to fiscal 2008/09.
Image sensors, which are used in digital cameras and smartphones, are part of Toshiba’s system LSI semiconductor business. Toshiba plans to sell its image sensor manufacturing plant in Oita, southern Japan, and pull out of the sensor business altogether, said the sources, who declined to be identified.
The sale is likely to be finalized soon, the sources said.
Toshiba is considering several options for its system LSI semiconductor business and its discrete semiconductor business and that debate is ongoing, a Toshiba official said when contacted.
An official from Sony declined to comment.
Masashi Muromachi, who became Toshiba’s CEO following the accounting scandal, has promised to restructure lower-margin businesses.
The deal for the image sensor business would be the beginning of the restructuring, Nikkei reported earlier on Saturday.
Sony is already a dominant player in the image sensor market, with its products used in phones made by China’s Xiaomi and India’s Micromax Informatix Ltd.
Courtesy-http://www.thegurureview.net/consumer-category/sony-to-acquire-toshibas-sensor-business.html
Is Canon Betting Its Future On IoT?
Canon has announced that it is joining the raft of technology companies attempting to take on the Internet of Things (IoT) through what it is calling the ‘Imaging of Things’.
Speaking at the firm’s EXPO 2015 event in Paris on Tuesday, Canon CEO Fujio Mitarai talked up the firm’s global vision for the future as the IoT becomes more pervasive.
“Canon is showing how the world of imaging is expanding rapidly in the age of the IoT,” said Mitarai.
“In the future nearly everything will be connected through smart devices. These rely on built-in cameras or sensors and the data they generate. As a result, Canon predicts that the IoT will largely depend on the ‘Imaging of Things’.”
To take on this future, Mitarai plans to overhaul Canon’s business structure to build a network of smaller Canon companies and thus create an “ecosystem of innovation”.
The CEO said that these companies have been designed to “harness innovation and creative talents from across the regions”, and will include more investment in what Canon does but on a more local level in different regions across the world, as opposed to all of the innovation being created in Tokyo, as it is at the moment.
This will allow “regional independence and international collaboration [to be] put into practice”, Mitarai said.
In this new “network of companies”, Mitarai explained that each regional headquarters will manage local R&D and manufacturing, as well as service and support customised to its market.
In Europe, the smaller Canon companies will focus on printing and network video surveillance, and the firm has already brought in specialists in these business areas such as Océ, Axis and Milestone Systems.
Mitarai said that, along with its global reputation for cameras, this will make Canon the largest printing and network video surveillance company in the world.
On a B2B level, the move is also about helping other firms build new competitive advantages and improve services for their own customers.
“We are changing our own operation model and go to market structure to build more expertise in these areas and connect with our customers,” said Jeppe Frandsen, head of the Production Printing Group at Canon Europe.
“Our customers are changing so we are now looking at a way customers are changing to what their customers want – new ways to do business together.”
Canon’s EXPO 2015 event was also an opportunity for the company to show off many of the latest projects from its R&D centre in Tokyo for the first time in Europe.
These tie in with the firm’s new focus as it launches smaller companies in more regional areas, and include a range of innovative practices such as responding to society’s monitoring needs, 3D printing as part of a partnership with 3D Systems in Europe, and graphic arts via investment in digital print technologies.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/technology-2/is-canon-betting-its-future-on-iot.html
U.S. LTE Speeds Drop
October 5, 2015 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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The U.S. has dropped to No. 55 in LTE performance as speeds rise rapidly in countries that have lept ahead some early adopters of the popular cellular system.
The average download speed on U.S. 4G networks inched up to 10Mbps (bits per second) in the June-August quarter, according to research company OpenSignal. That was an improvement from 9Mbps in the previous quarter, but the country’s global ranking fell from 43rd as users in other countries made much larger gains.
The U.S. was one of the first countries with commercial LTE service when Verizon Wireless launched its network in late 2010. But other countries that adopted the system later started with better technology, and some have secured more frequencies or rolled out enhancements that U.S. carriers haven’t embraced as much, OpenSignal said.
New Zealand scored the highest average speed in the quarter with 36Mbps, coming up from nowhere in the rankings. But perennial standouts like South Korea and Singapore kept getting faster, too. The average LTE speed in Korea is now 29Mbps (up by 4Mbps), and in Singapore it’s 33Mbps, up by 5Mbps.
OpenSignal collects data on cellular performance through a free app that mobile subscribers can use to measure the speed they’re getting and find faster networks. The results announced Wednesday are based on readings from more than 300,000 users worldwide, the company said.
Countries like Hungary, the Dominican Republic and Morocco beat the U.S. in average LTE speed, but they aren’t necessarily smartphone paradises. Mobile users in America can use LTE more of the time, for example, because their carrier’s networks are built out. Subscribers in the U.S. are on LTE 78 percent of the time, on average, making the country No. 10 for what OpenSignal calls “time coverage.” Moroccan LTE may be fast, but 49 percent of the time, users there don’t get it, for example.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/mobile-category/u-s-falls-to-55th-place-worldwide-for-lte-speeds.html