Nintendo's Wii U, the successor to famous Wii issued last year, was very interesting for some customers at the first sight while others were not so much impressed, but on one thing they all agreed, console's performances were not as expected. Aware of this, Nintendo recently decided to push out the first major software upgrade for their new console and dealt with that aspect.
Are you still sure that you want to sign up for that online service? Well you might want to think twice considering recent news. Last year we watched as Blizzard, LastFM, LinkedIn and others had their security breached and user information stolen. Now there is another online service that has had their security broken and their users’ information exposed to attackers. The online deals site LivingSocial fell victim to a cyber-attack that left over 50 Million (yes 50 Million) users’ data exposed.
Codenamed Raring Ringtail, a new version of Ubuntu 4.13 brings a number of improvements despite the fact that there are no some radical big news here. Canonical have decided to polish already existing elements of the operating system in this version 13.04. Among other things, according to recent statements new Ubuntu 13.04 should ,thanks to the work on the code for the version of Ubuntu intended for smartphones and tablets, have a better performance and be more frugal with energy.
Apple was found guilty of infringing on the copyright of three Chinese authors by allowing their books to be purchased through iTunes. The Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People's Court found that Apple should have known the books were protected under copyright and not posted them. This was even more true considering that one of the plaintiffs, Mai Jia has works that have been on the Best Seller lists in China.
Microsoft has announced the date of official launch of the new-generation Xbox console. The company has sent out invitations to certain media to presentation of the new generation Xbox, which will be held on May 21st at Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, starting at 10 a.m. local time.
Apple has released the schedule of this year's WWDC (10-14. June) Conference which is held every year in San Francisco and regularly used to introduce new Apple gadgets and software. Usually the content of the conference is to some extent hidden, but it seems that Apple this year has something different in mind. It was announced that on the conference we will see a new version of OS X but also much more interesting iOS.
Looks like HTC was not really guilty in the story about the use of microphones that were designed exclusively for Nokia. Contrary to previous allegations, the company now can sell the device HTC One in the Netherlands.
A couple of days ago the internet lit up with AMD’s announcement of their new Jaguar SoCs. These new G-series embedded processors were boasting some rather healthy improvements in performance including a claim of a 113% increase in performance over older x86 SoCs and a rather bold claim of a 125% increase in performance over Intel’s Atom. But while the new embedded APU with its 8000 series GPU should have been big news all on its own, what really caught people’s attention was a little x in the corner. As it turns out this X is intended to denote an x86 version of the G-Series SoC…
Spanish manufacturer of mobile phones based on the Firefox OS, Geeksphone, on the first day of the sales sold out all copies of the mobile phones that are now intended primarily for software developers.
Today I read some very interesting news. According to a few news outlets the Australian Federal Police have arrested another “leader” of the group formerly known as LulzSec. This would make the 2nd top dog of the Anonymous splinter group to have been taken in by authorities. So the question is; who is the real LulzSec leader? Is it Hector Monsegur (Sabu) who was caught in New York and turned informant for the FBI to avoid a lot of jail time or is it 24 year old Mathew Trevor Flannery who went by the name Aush0k?
The latest Asha 210, which is available in versions with one or two SIM slots is the latest in a series of cheap QWERTY phones that comes with a dedicated button for a popular social app - before that we already had the opportunity to meet with the HTC ChaCha Facebook button and now Asha 210 comes with dedicated key for mega popular WhatsApp.
BlackBerry has announced prices and date for the start of sales of their Q10 smartphone in the U.S. market. BlackBerry Q10 is second company's smartphone running BlackBerry 10 (after the current model Z10), and with physical keypad remains loyal to the original BlackBerry design.
Some of you might remember the days of the “P” rating CPUs. It was an interesting time when you never really knew what you were actually getting in terms of clock speed. Instead you were able to get a CPU named something like P333 or P500. This was an attempt by some manufacturers to show their “P”erformance rating in relation to Intel’s Pentium. Cyrix, AMD, and a couple of others used this to sell CPUs. Unfortunately everyone knew that the P did not really stand for performance it really meant Pentium equivalency. A Cyrix P667 was supposed to perform as well as an Intel Pentium 667 (at least on paper). Sadly this just confused the market more and we all had the fun of trying to figure out what our CPUs were really doing. Now we might be seeing the trend return, but perhaps in reverse as AMD has announced the Centurion CPU.
In 2012 there was more than 1 data breach per day and of these 365 plus breaches about 80% managed to get some sort of data. This is a pretty scary number when you think about it, but it actually pales by comparison to the number of personal accounts that are compromised due to poor security, weak passwords, and malware designed to steal passwords. So what do you do to help prevent this? A simple answer is to just not have any online accounts so there is no chance of getting your account compromised. However, we know that this is not really a viable solution so it is fortunate that many companies are finally turning to two-step authentication to help mitigate this type of attack.
According to unnamed sources close to Microsoft, Redmont giant will in the coming update of Windows 8, colloquially called Windows 8.1, restore the Start button to its original position - first spot in the taskbar. Ejecting the Start button from the taskbar has been one of the most controversial releases of Windows 8, and in parallel with the release of a new version of Microsoft operating system appeared a great number of applications that have brought it back (Start8, StartIsBack, Pokki, StartMenu8 and others).
AMD expanded their offer of embedded solutions with a new generation APU's based on the Jaguar architecture. The new APU's, or better to say SoC's because beside x86 cores and graphics combine and southbridge functions with TDP ranging from 9-25 watts depending on the model, and will replace existing embedded APU Solutions from Series G on the market. Architecture Jaguar is used in the chip that will power the upcoming Playstation 4, and probably a new Xbox.
LG Display announced operating results for the first three months of the year and they are worse than in the previous quarter.
Online privacy is a big issue in the US and around the world. Every day we as consumers dump information about ourselves into the web in the form of email, texts, tweets, Facebook updates, documents purchasing habits and more. We put our trust in the companies that maintain that data and have faith that the laws that should protect our private information are being followed and even more to the point enforced. Sadly it seems that we have never really had a right to have our personal information protected after it leaves our computers and enters the Internet.
Logitech continues to improve their department of gaming peripherals. The company last month united peripherals for gamers into a single Logitech G product line and introduced a redesigned six keyboards and mouses, and two new headsets.
According to analyst firm ChangeWave survey, every fifth respondent would buy the Apple watch. Of course, provided that the device is introduced first. The survey was conducted in March on 1713 people in the U.S.
Scientists from the MIT's Media Lab have presented the concept of flexible screens that you can literally pinch, pull out or push in.
Microsoft has embarked on a campaign claiming that they are concerned about your privacy on the internet. The campaign is a direct attack at Google who does not have the best track record when it comes to protecting people’s privacy. In fact Google is currently under investigation for establishing policies that violate EU privacy laws. Microsoft is taking advantage of commotion around Google’s privacy problems to try and bring people over to their side. This move, when looked at is as interesting as it is funny.
As we wrote earlier today the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act has passed through the US House of Representatives. This is not an act that anyone, other than the corporations that lobbied for it, wants. CISPA brings nothing to the table that agencies already do not have, or cannot get with the right requests to the courts. Instead it removes many (almost all) individual rights and turns your private data into a commodity that can be passed around without any legal recourse.
According to security firm Lookout, recently there was 32 apps on Google Play that contained malicious software called BadNews. Applications were from 4 different developer accounts, and were downloaded between 2 and 9 million times. Lookout immediately warned Google, which has suspended the accounts and disabled download of suspicious applications.
Last week while most people were more concerned about anti-gun bills and then the bombings in Boston, The US House of Representatives passed one of biggest threats to online privacy that we have ever seen. The Bill called the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) was presented under the guise National Security, but in reality opens up a loop hole for companies that collect personal information about their users and in some cases want to trade of even sell these to other companies for money or other services. As you can imagine many corporations were eager to see this bill passed including the movie and recording cartels as this is a great way to track users’ movements over the internet.
There has been an interesting shift in the market over the last few months as we watch another former AMD engineer/executive return to the fold. AMD has announced that Raja Koduri will be bringing his graphic expertise back to AMD. Koduri was preceded by Mark Papermaster and Jim Keller who both left Apple for AMD last year. These returns are interesting in that Apple was once seen as the company to work for and, according to many analysts, had an almost unlimited earning and growth potential. However, after the death of Steve Jobs Apple has slumped and the once loud predictions of Apple reaching $1,000 per share are long gone as the stock continues to drop.
New software development package for BlackBerry 10.1 points to a number of news that are expected in the new version of BlackBerry operating system for mobile devices.
IBM could soon sell its department of x86 architecture servers, says the Wall Street Journal. According to well-informed unofficial sources, IBM is already in negotiations for the sale of this department that genrated generated 4.9 of the total 15.4 billion dollars in revenue from the sale of servers.
After the Xonar U7, Asus has this week unveiled another sound card. This time they presented Xonar Phoebus Solo model, card from ASUS ROG product line for gamers.
Apple has its own Game Center, and Google does not really have something similar. That is, at the moment no, but according to the Android Police in application My Glass, which comes with Google Glass there are calls and a list of options related to a future version of Google's network game service that would be a counterpart to Apple's Game Center.
