This is the second bout of attacks from the group of technology tearaways, according to Motherboard, which reports on the Clapper problem and its connection to a group known as Crackas With Attitude.

A member of the group, a young chap called Cracka, told Motherboard that access to a range of Clapper accounts had been seized, and that Clapper and the CIA haven’t a clue what’s going on.

“I’m pretty sure they don’t even know they’ve been hacked. You asked why I did it. I just wanted the gov to know people aren’t fucking around, people know what they’re doing and people don’t agree #FreePalestine,” he said.

The claims were supported by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which confirmed that something has happened and that the authorities are looking into it.

“We’re aware of the matter and we reported it to the appropriate authorities,” said spokesman Brian Hale, before going mute.

Cracka, representing himself on Twitter as @dickreject, is less quiet. He has tweeted a number of confirmatory and celebratory messages that are not particularly flattering about the CIA and its abilities.

This is the group’s second bite at the CIA cherry. The teenagers walked into the personal email account of CIA director John Brennan last year and had a good look around. Some of the impact of this was washed away when it was discovered that Brennan used an AOL account for his communications.

“A hacker, who describes himself as an American high school student, has breached the CIA boss’s AOL email account and found a host of sensitive government files that one assumes a government official shouldn’t be sending to his personal email address,” said security comment kingpin Graham Cluley at the time.

“I’m not sure what’s more embarrassing. Being hacked or having an AOL email account.”

Courtesy-TheInq

What makes it interesting is that it has a built-in keypad that allows it to be PIN protected when inserted into any device and can be set to ‘self-destruct’ after 10 incorrect log-in attempts. Better still, it comes with an aluminium cover to prevent the self-destruct accidentally being triggered in your bag.

Compatible with USB up to 3.1, it offers speeds of up to 135MBps read and 40MBps write. It is also designed to be OS independent, and includes up to 256-bit AES protection without any drivers on the host device.

“We are excited to add DataTraveler 2000 to our existing line-up of fast and encrypted USB flash drives for organisations and SMBs,” said Valentina Vitolo, flash business manager at Kingston. “It is the perfect option to deploy in the workforce where a uniform encrypted data storage solution that works on many different operating systems is in use.”

The device will be available later in the quarter. Prices are to be announced, but capacities will range from 16GB to 64GB.

Next up is the KC400, the latest addition to the SSDNow range powered by an eight-channel Phison controller and quad-core internal processor. It will be available is capacities from 128GB to 1TB with speeds of 550/540MBps read/write on the 256GB drive.

The MobileLite range of WiFi-enabled SD card readers has been expanded with the addition of the Wireless G3 and Wireless Pro. The G3 offers a 5600mAh onboard battery to charge mobile devices via the mobile app, and makes it even easier to transfer to and from mobile devices.

Both offer wireless 802.11ac connectivity, while the Pro edition adds an extra little something in the form of a 64GB flash storage option. Both have USB 3.0 and SD card slots, with an adapter for microSD. There’s also an Ethernet port so you can use it as a hotel room hotspot.

Last up, following on from the success of the HyperX CloudII headset, Kingston has released a special edition for Xbox One users which has garnered the moniker of ‘official’. It adds an inline volume control and comes in a hard-shell case.

This year’s offerings are less focused on the traditional Kingston flash product lines, and once again don’t increase capacities.

Courtesy-TheInq

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

Based on the firm’s fourth generation Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture and built using a 14nm FinFET fabrication process, the upcoming architecture is a big jump from the current 28nm process.

AMD said that it expects shipments of Polaris GPUs to begin in mid-2016, offering improvements such as HDR monitor support and better performance-per-watt.

The much smaller 14nm FinFET process means that Polaris will deliver “a remarkable generational jump in power efficiency”, according to AMD, offering fluid frame rates in graphics, gaming, virtual reality and multimedia applications running on small form-factor thin and light computer designs.

“Our new Polaris architecture showcases significant advances in performance, power efficiency and features,” said AMD president and CEO Lisa Su. “2016 will be a very exciting year for Radeon fans driven by our Polaris architecture, Radeon Software Crimson Edition and a host of other innovations in the pipeline from our Radeon Technologies Group.”

The Polaris architecture features AMD’s fourth-generation GCN architecture, a next-generation display engine with support for HDMI 2.0a and DisplayPort 1.3, and next-generation multimedia features including 4K h.265 encoding and decoding.

GCN enables gamers to experience high-performance video games with Mantle, a tool for alleviating CPU bottlenecks such as API overhead and inefficient multi-threading. Mantle, which is basically AMD’s answer to Microsoft’s Direct X, enables improvements in graphics processing performance. In the past, AMD has claimed that Kaveri teamed with Mantle to enable it to offer built-in Radeon dual graphics to provide performance boosts ranging from 49 percent to 108 percent.

The new GPUs are being sampled to OEMs at the moment and we can expect them to appear in products by mid-2016, AMD said. Once they are in the market, we can expect to see much thinner form factors in devices thanks to the much smaller 14nm chip process.

Courtesy-TheInq

The idea that IPv6 remains so far behind its saturated incumbent, IPv4, is horrifying given that three continents ran out of IPv4 addresses in 2015. Unfortunately, because the product isn’t ‘end of life’ most internet providers have been working on a ‘not broken, don’t fix it’ basis.

But 2016 looks to be the year when IPv6 makes its great leap to the mainstream, in Britain at least. BT, the UK’s biggest broadband provider, has already committed to switch on IPv6 support by the end of the year, and most premises will be IPv6-capable by April. Most companies use the same lines, but it will be up to each individual supplier to switch over. Plusnet, a part of BT, is a likely second.

IPv6 has a number of advantages over IPv4, most notably that it is virtually infinite, meaning that the capacity problems that the expanded network is facing shouldn’t come back to haunt us again. It will also pave the way for ever faster, more secure networks.

Some private corporate networks have already made the switch. Before Christmas we reported that the UK Ministry of Defence was already using the protocol, leaving thousands of unused IPv4 addresses lying idle in its wake.

IPv6 is also incredibly adaptable for the Internet of Things. Version 4.2 of the Bluetooth protocol includes IPv6 connectivity as standard, making it a lot easier for tiny nodes to make up a larger internet-connected grid.

Google’s latest figures suggest that more than 10 percent of users are running IPv6 connections at the weekend, while the number drops to eight percent on weekdays. This suggests that the majority of movement towards IPv6 is happening in the residential broadband market.

That said, it is imperative that businesses begin to make the leap. As Infoblox IPv6 evangelist Tom Coffeen told us last year, it could start to affect the speed at which you are able to trade.

“If someone surfs onto your site and its only available in IPv4, but they are using IPv6, there has to be some translation, which puts your site at a disadvantage. If I’ve not made my site available in IPv6, I’m no longer in control over where that translation occurs.”

In other words, if you don’t catch up, you will soon get left behind. It was ever thus.

Courtesy-TheInq

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

According to Ars Technica Under the handle “GPUOpen” AMD is releasing a slew of open-source software and tools to give developers of games, heterogeneous applications, and HPC applications deeper access to the GPU and GPU resources.

In a statement AMD said that as a continuation of the strategy it started with Mantle, it is giving even more control of the GPU to developers.

“ As console developers have benefited from low-level access to the GPU, AMD wants to continue to bring this level of access to the PC space.”

The AMD GPUOpen initiative is meant to give developers the ability to use assets they’ve already made for console development. They will have direct access to GPU hardware, as well as access to a large collection of open source effects, tools, libraries and SDKs, which are being made available on GitHub under an MIT open-source license.

AMD wants GPUOpen will enable console-style development for PC games through this open source software initiative. It also includes an end-to-end open source compute infrastructure for cluster-based computing and a new Linux software and driver strategy

All this ties in with AMD’s Boltzmann Initiative and an HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) software suite that includes an HCC compiler for C++ development. This was supposed to open the field of programmers who can use HSA. A new HCC C++ compiler was set up to enable developers to more easily use discrete GPU hardware in heterogeneous systems.

It also allows developers to convert CUDA code to portable C++. According to AMD, internal testing shows that in many cases 90 percent or more of CUDA code can be automatically converted into C++ with the final 10 percent converted manually in the widely popular C++ language. An early access program for the “Boltzmann Initiative” tools is planned for Q1 2016.

AMD GPUOpen includes a new Linux driver model and runtime targeted at HPC Cluster-Class Computing. The headless Linux driver is supposed to handle high-performance computing needs with low latency compute dispatch and PCI Express data transfers, peer-to-peer GPU support, Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) from InfiniBand that interconnects directly to GPU memory and Large Single Memory Allocation support.

Apparently the fruity cargo cult Apple has already signed up to adopt the technology, which means that the rest of the world’s press will probably notice.

According to the Commercial Times TSMC will have 85,000-100,000 wafers fabricated with the foundry’s in-house developed InFo packaging technology in the second quarter of 2016.

TSMC has disclosed its InFO packaging technology will be ready for mass production in 2016. Company president and co-CEO CC Wei remarked at an October 15 investors meeting that TSMC has completed construction of a new facility in Longtan, northern Taiwan.

TSMC’s InFo technology will be ready for volume production in the second quarter of 2016, according to Wei.

TSMC president and co-CEO Mark Liu disclosed the company is working on the second generation of its InFO technology for several projects on 10nm and 7nm process nodes.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/tsmc-goes-fan-out-wafers.html

Most of the entry level, mainstream and even performance graphics cards from both Nvidia and AMD will rely on the GDDR5. This memory has been with us since 2007 but it has dramatically increased in speed. The memory chip has shrunken from 60nm in 2007 to 20nm in 2015 making higher clocks and lower voltage possible.

Some of the big boys, including Samsung and Micron, have started producing 8 Gb GDDR5 chips that will enable cards with 1GB memory per chip. The GTX 980 TI has 12 chips with 4 Gb support (512MB per chip) while Radeon Fury X comes with four HMB 1.0 chips supporting 1GB per chip at much higher bandwidth. Geforce Titan X has 24 chips with 512MB each, making the total amount of memory to 12GB.

The next generation cards will  get 12GB memory with 12 GDDR5 memory chips or 24GB with 24 chips. Most of the mainstream and performance cards will come with much less memory.

Only a few high end cards such as Greenland high end FinFET solution from AMD and a Geforce version of Pascal will come with the more expensive and much faster HMB 2.0 memory.

GDDR6 is arriving in 2016 at least at Micron and the company promises a much higher bandwidth compared to the GDDR5. So there will be a few choices.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/will-gddr5-rule-in-2016.html