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Showing posts from November, 2015
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DELL TO FIX FLAW OF ITS OWN MAKING THAT PUTS ITS COMPUTERS AT RISK !!!! http://www.cnet.com/news/dell-to-fix-flaw-that-puts-its-computers-at-risk/ Computer maker Dell warned late Monday of a security hole affecting recently shipped computers that could leave users vulnerable to hackers. The issue affects computers made by Dell that come with a particular preinstalled customer service program. Through a certificate that would identify the computer to Dell support staff, this program makes the computers vulnerable to intrusions and could allow hackers to access encrypted messages to and from the machines, Dell said. There is also a risk that attackers could attempt to reroute Internet traffic to sites that look genuine but are in fact dangerous imitations. Dell said that customers should take steps to remove the certificate from their laptops, offering instructions on how to do that manually. Starting Tuesday, it also plans to push a software update to computers to check fo
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MANY ANDROID APPS TALK TO PRIVATE SERVERS …AND IT’S OFTEN NOT CLEAR WHY **** http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/218370-many-android-apps-talk-to-private-servers-and-its-often-not-clear-why A recent report on Android application behavior points to a startling amount of back-end Internet traffic with no benefit to the end-user but a significant impact on battery life. Researchers with MIT and Global InfoTek recently performed an extensive analysis of the top Google Play applications and found a great deal of communication that doesn’t appear to impact any aspect of the customer’s application experience. What the  team found  is that 62.7% of the connections made by major Android applications (defined as the top 20 apps in the Google Play Store, disregarding chat programs) could be classified as “covert.” Blocking these applications from connecting to online sources resulted in no visible or measurable change in how the app functioned on the user’s PC.
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ANDROID APPS NOW ASK FOR OVER 200 KINDS OF PERMISSIONS: PEW RESEARCH !!! http://www.extremetech.com/mobile/217914-android-apps-now-ask-for-over-200-kinds-of-permissions-pew-research If you’ve got Android, you know it shows you a list of permissions an app wants you to accept during installation — and often, it seems like the app wants permission to do an awful lot of things. Pew Research must have had the same thought, because the company looked at the 1,041,336 apps in Google Play back between June and September 2014 and found 235 different kinds of permissions requested. In the report, Pew said that in the year since they collected the data, Android had been upgraded twice in that time from Kitkat (4.4) to Lollipop (5.x), and then again to Marshmallow (6.0). However, since Google’s own  Android Dashboard  indicates that Kitkat (4.x) is still the most common version accessing its app store (37.8%), with Lollipop (5.x) close behind at 35.6% and the recently rele
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Google Aims For China Launch Of Google Play App Store Next Year – Sources !!! http://in.reuters.com/article/2015/11/21/alphabet-china-idINKCN0T91JV20151121 Google , part of Alphabet Inc ( GOOGL.O ), aims to launch the China version of its Google Play smartphone app store next year, according to people familiar with the matter, its first major foray in the market since ending  localized  product support in 2010. The Google Play app store would be set up specifically for China, and not connected to overseas versions of Google Play, two of the people said. They said Google intends to comply with Chinese laws on filtering content that might be viewed as sensitive by the ruling Communist Party, and laws requiring the company to store the app store's data within China.  A Singapore-based Google spokesman declined to comment. Google largely pulled its services out of China five years ago after refusing to continue self-censoring its search results. It has
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MICROSOFT WINDOWS TURNS 30: A BRIEF RETROSPECTIVE !!!! http://www.extremetech.com/computing/218336-microsoft-windows-turns-30-a-brief-retrospective Thirty years ago today, on November 20, 1985, Microsoft released version 1.0 of its new graphical shell called Windows. Much has been written about how Microsoft copied the Macintosh and Lisa, and how in turn Apple had copied from Xerox PARC — feel free to watch  Pirates of Silicon Valley  for a quick refresher, or read some of the excellent books written about these companies like  Accidental Empires or  Hackers  for more accurate details than what the movie offered. Here’s where we’d normally say something like “and the world was never the same,” except that for the first several years, the world remained exactly as it was, because Windows 1.0 sucked. For example, it didn’t even let you overlap windows — that didn’t come until Windows 2.0 (then known as Windows/286 and Windows/386). Instead, you just tiled them on the scree
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MIT AND NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY WILL TEST NASA’S HUMANOID ROBOTS FOR FUTURE SPACE MISSIONS !!! http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/218217-mit-and-northeastern-university-will-test-nasas-humanoid-robots-for-future-space-missions NASA is gearing up for a new push in human spaceflight with the development of the Orion crew vehicle and Space Launch System. Launching humans into space allows missions to be much more flexible and detailed than a solely robotic one, but there are still times you might prefer to put a robot at risk rather than a human. That’s why NASA has been interested in humanoid  robots  in recent years. To get ready for the day when humans and robots will team up, the agency has awarded advanced prototype automatons to two universities to conduct research. The robot on its way to college is known as R5 or “Valkyrie.” It stands 6 feet tall and weighs in at a hefty 290 pounds. The design is not entirely new — you might remember Valkyrie from its appearance in the
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Nvidia unveils Pascal specifics — up to 16GB of VRAM, 1TB of bandwidth !! Nvidia may have unveiled bits and pieces of its  Pascal architecture back in March , but the company has shared some additional details at its GTC Japan technology conference. Like AMD’s Fury X, Pascal will move away from GDDR5 and adopt the next-generation HBM2 memory standard, a 16nm FinFET process at TSMC, and up to 16GB of memory. AMD and Nvidia are both expected to adopt HBM2 in 2016, but this will be Nvidia’s first product to use the technology, while AMD has prior experience thanks to the Fury lineup. HBM vs. HBM2 HBM and HBM2 are based on the same core technology, but HBM2 doubles the effective speed per pin and introduces some new low-level features, as shown below. Memory density is also expected to improve, from 2Gb per DRAM (8Gb per stacked die) to 8Gb per DRAM (32Gb per stacked die). Nvidia’s quoted 16GB of memory assumes a four-wide configuration and four 8Gb
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A NETWORK OF ARTIFICIAL NEURONS LEARNS TO USE HUMAN LANGUAGE !!!!   A computer simulation of a cognitive model entirely made up of artificial neurons learns to communicate through dialogue starting from a state of tabula rasa. http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-11/13/artificial-neurons-human-language The ANNABELL model is a cognitive architecture entirely made up of interconnected artificial neurons, able to learn to communicate using human language starting from a state of 'tabula rasa' only through communication with a human interlocutor. A group of researchers from the University of Sassari (Italy) and the University of Plymouth (UK) has developed a cognitive model, made up of two million interconnected artificial neurons, able to learn to communicate using human language starting from a state of "tabula rasa," only through communication with a human interlocutor. The model is called ANNABELL (Artificial Neural Network with Adaptive Behavior
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"INTEL" REPORTEDLY PREPPING 10-CORE BROADWELL-E PROCESSORS WITH 25MB L3 CACHE !!!! Intel is now working on the successor to Haswell-E, and if recent rumors are true, the company is going to address this discrepancy with the upcoming Broadwell-E. The upcoming family will launch with multiple SKUs that should address the needs of both gamers and other high-end users who have more use for threads and less for clock speed. According to Chinese site XFastest, the Core i7-6950X will be a 10-core, 20-thread CPU with a base clock of 3GHz, an unknown Turbo frequency, and 25MB of L3 cache. That’s two more cores than the current Core i7-5960X, with an equivalent clock speed and the same cache allocation on a per-core basis. In August 2014, Intel released the first Haswell-E processor, the  Core i7-5960X . Unlike its predecessors, the Core i7-5960X jumped to eight cores and 16 threads — but the lower clock speeds that this required paradoxically made the chip a less-than-grea
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The solution to faster computing....sing to your data !!!! http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151103064603.htm  Nothing is more frustrating that watching that circle spinning in the centre of your screen, while you wait for your computer to load a programme or access the data you need. Now a team from the Universities of Sheffield and Leeds may have found the answer to faster computing. The world's 2.7 zettabytes (2.7 followed by 21 zeros) of data are mostly held on hard disk drives: magnetic disks that work like miniaturised record players, with the data read by sensors that scan over the disk's surface as it spins. But because this involves moving parts, there are limits on how fast it can operate. For computers to run faster, we need to create "solid-state" drives that eliminate the need for moving parts -- essentially making the data move, not the device on which it's stored. Flash-based solid-state disk drives have achieved this,
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Know what a FPGA is? Then the Snickerdoodle is for you ...and better than the Raspberry Pi !!!! http://www.extremetech.com/computing/216866-know-what-a-fpga-is-then-the-snickerdoodle-is-for-you-and-better-than-the-raspberry-pi Snickerdoodle is a $55 ARM-based development board that launched as a competitor to the popular $35 Raspberry Pi. Snickerdoodle is currently in crowdfunding mode , with a projected product release date of March 2016 if the group reaches its funding goal. I spoke with Ryan Cousins, who is the co-founder and CEO of krtkl, Inc ., the company attempting to manufacture the Snickerdoodle. He told me that the initial idea was to create a product for high-end industrial robotics projects. However, he and his team realized there might be interest in the board from makers and other hobbyists. The main difference between the Snickerdoodle and other single-board systems like the popular Arduino and Raspberry Pi products is the inclusion of a Field Programmabl