News and Editorials (1736)
LG will be the producer of the next smartphone from the Nexus line, according to The Korea Times sources. However, the launch is not expected soon, at least not at the Google I/O conference, which is being held this month.
Blackberry and Samsung have made it through the first round of testing for use in DoD (Department of Defense) networks. For Blackberry this is something of a return, but it establishes that their new Blackberry 10 OS is up to scratch for the DoD. For Samsung this is a first for them although the OS is a version of Android called Knox. Knox is a hardened version of Android that Samsung created to specifically address the security needs of enterprise users.
Kim Swift and his team at Airtight Games have presented their new game which was developed exclusively for OUYA console, called Soul Fjord. The game is currently in its final stages, and Airtight Games has released several trailers to interested gamers, from which we can see what to expect from this game once it appears on the market.
Every once in a while we run into a very addictive game, and the best thing about them is that they are not created by some huge studios and not too expensive, but rather focus on fun and innovation. One of those games is, without a doubt, Fez.
MSI has introduced two interesting keyboards designed for gamers, but also for home and business users. Presented model GK-601 and Classic are the mechanical type keyboards with Cherry MX Red switches.
TDK announced withdrawal from the market of Blu-ray media by the end of March next year. Leaving this segment is part of the company's restructuring program of operations, cutting costs and relegating less profitable business department.
A warning has been sent out to financial institutions and government agencies as the collective known as Anonymous has announced their OpUSA. The Operation as put forth by the hackvist group is supposed to target banks and government websites and is supposed to kick off on May 7th. Some security experts are advising the targeted organizations to prepare for Distributed Denial of Service Attacks and harden their sites against them.
Back in October of 2011 just before the launch of Windows 8 and RT, Steve Ballmer was working very hard to convince other people that his vision for Windows 8 was an accurate one. Ballmer was convinced that Windows 8 and RT would be in millions of homes and be the most successful OS that Microsoft had released. For many people this was just business as usual simply because a company would never say anything otherwise. Can you imagine a company coming out and saying “yeah, we know this is a crappy bit of software, but we want you to buy it anyway”? Still even with that in mind Microsoft was working on building up some good hype behind Windows 8.
How would you feel if one day you noticed that your GPU was going crazy even when your computer was sitting idle? We imagine that you would start scanning your system for viruses after an initial reboot. Now on top of that imagine how you would feel if your anti-malware scans started pointing fingers at the client software of an online service you typically trust. This is exactly what members of competitive e-sports group ESEA E-Sports Entertainment Association found after a recent update to their client software.
Microsoft earlier this year introduced the possibility of leaving a short video message via Skype. Interestingly, this functionality was only available on competing platforms - Mac, iOS and Android.
Samsung is starting a mass production of new 20-nanometer LPDDR3 memory chips in 4 GB capacity. According to the manufacturer, it is the first memory chips for mobile phones that will be a performance comparable with the memory modules used in personal computers.
Bad video games are nothing new there are about as many of them as there are bad TV shows and movies. However, even when a producer knows that a TV show or movie is bad they still are going to do everything they can to get people to go and see it. There are many techniques that are used to do this, but one of my least favorites is when they dig through the move and show you all the “good parts” in a trailer in order to entice you into spending your money. Now although this is bad it is not really illegal, just very misleading and dishonest. So what would you do is the scenes shown in an ad were not actually in the movie, or looked nothing like the final picture? Would it be false advertising? Would it make things worse if the CEO of the movie studio claimed that the scenes were part of the movie? I am sure that it would oddly enough this exact thing has happened, but with a game instead of a movie.
The FBI and a few other groups would like to put a law in place which would allow them to fine companies that refuse to hand over information regardless of the reasons for not choosing to do so. This plan is part of an increasing effort to force companies to share user information with the government. On the surface the idea looks pretty straight forward. Law Enforcement and other Government Agencies want to be able to track down people that might be using the internet and internet communication services to commit crimes. Sounds legit right?
Malware, spyware, viruses these are all things that are part of the modern computing experience. When you are online you always have to be aware of the dangers of these items. Over the years the developers of malware have become more and more clever at disguising their wares from users and anti-malware programs. This is something that you would expect of this group as in many cases they are looking to gather money, information or pull your system into their botnets (which can also equal money). However what you would not expect is for a legitimate company to use the same tactics to build their own spyware to assist governments and law enforcement.
Remember Path? You know them, the social community that was accused of abusing access to their members’ mobile address books? Well they are at it again. The problem popped up not that long after they got into trouble for collecting information illegally including personal information about minors. They were reprimanded and fined $800,000 (which to a large business is still not that much). You would think they would have learned their lesson about this. Sadly it still seems to be an issue and Path argues that it this is all about maintaining the user experience.
The company botObjects announced ProDesk3D, 3D color printer for home and business users. The printer uses PLA containers with five colors, and the company claims that like traditional inkjet printers can mix primary colors to help users obtain the desired final color of the "printed" object.
Back when Apple first started their legal campaign against Samsung they (Apple) were also beginning to break away from Samsung. This was understandable as there were and still are rumors (unconfirmed) that the whole legal argument started over the pricing of parts. The rumors claimed that Apple approached Samsung looking for preferential pricing and threatened to seek legal remedies if Samsung did not go along. Now we know that at least part of this it true. Apple did go to Samsung about pricing and also brought up their concerns about Samsung’s push into the smartphone market. If the rest is true no one but Apple and Samsung know for certain, but Apple did file a big suit against Samsung and have also been gradually pulling away from their Samsung as a primary supply partner ever since.
New Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 runs on Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), has a 7 inch touchscreen display in WSVGA resolution (1024 600 pixels, 169 PPI), and contains a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor and 1 GB of RAM.
Scientists at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and those from Carnegie Mellon University conducted a study on Bitcoin transactions and came up with devastating results. According to their data, 45% of these transactions end up as a fail, often taking with them the money from the users, and those who survive the transaction are also those who have the most traffic, and are most exposed to attack.
The HX 50 is a 20.4 megapixel camera with a built-in image stabilizer and is special for being the smallest and lightest device with 30x optical zoom. Even if you zoom to a maximum of 30x, HX50 camera will stabilize each photo twice as good as the Cyber-shot HX200V camera, according to Sony.
According to Blackberry consumers will become tired of tablets in the next five years. Now, considering the massive growth that the tablet market has had over the past 2-3 years that might sound a little off the mark. To be perfectly honest we thought the claim was a little unusual when we first heard it as well. However Blackberry is not the only company that is foreseeing a future after the tablet has run its course. Not that long ago Gabe Newell said that he felt that touch enabled devices like the tablet were a transition device which would have a limited life span. He did not know what the next step in the evolution is but he was pretty convinced that touch was not going to stay the standard for long.
After Microsoft changed the logo for the firm itself, Windows and Office last year, now it's turn for the other important products to do the same. Bing, Skype, Xbox and Yammer (business social network) are the next to get new logos. The design was discovered at the conference that was recently held in Norway.
It seems that these days everyone is involved in trade or mining of the Bitcoin, and it did not go unnoticed at the Canadian tax authorities (CRA/ARC - Canada
Asus has announced Xonar Essence STU, very interesting DAC with integrated headphone amplifier. The device, according to Asus, has the same internal design as the critically acclaimed Xonar Essence ST/STX Series sound cards for audiophiles.
A video game developer has decided to use an interesting approach to piracy. Instead of trying to prevent their game from being downloaded illegally they actually pushed out their own release for people to download. Now this may sound counterproductive, but they have a plan and one that they hope will help to stop future piracy. They have decided to add piracy and its “effects” to the torrent release.
There has been a few articles that popped up over the weekend crowing about Microsoft’s Windows 8 and how it has jumped in numbers from 0 to 7.4% market share in a single quarter. The claim is interesting and also very misleading if you actually take the time to read the data used as a basis for this claim. In most of the articles that we read the data source is from Strategy Analytics which does not show ANY data that represents Q4 12 to Q1 13 they instead cover same quarter year to year (Q1 12 compared to Q3 13).
Developers and other lucky ones who got the first copies of the Google Glass on testing revealed more details about this interesting gadget. Among them is Jay Lee, who with the help of Liam McLaughlin managed to find the USB debugging options of Glass and connect them to computer via Android ADB.
New Apple patent shows a method of finding and accessing capabilites of a car with the help of mobile devices and Bluetooth.
It looks like Intel is branching out in other directions in terms of operating system partners. Currently they work with both Microsoft and Apple as the primary processor for systems running these two competing OSes. Now Intel is looking to the tablet and mobile market as they cozy up with Google’s Android. Although the announcement is fairly recent many have heard the rumblings through a few teasing comments made on the internet.
In November 2012 a jury found Apple guilty of patent infringement against patent troll… sorry non-participating entity, VirnetX. VirnetX claimed that Apple was in violation of a few patents that they own. These patents relate to video and text messaging. VirnetX has also filed a new suit against Microsoft for some of the same patents claiming that Microsoft’s license for Skype does not cover what they are using these technologies for. So you can see that VirnetX keeps themselves busy.
