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Crossbar’s RRAM to boast terabytes of storage, faster write speeds than NAND

Hardware makers often sing the praises of their latest and greatest flash memory , but the folks at Crossbar are ready to show them up with resistive RAM (RRAM) that they’ve been quietly working on. Compared to NAND, RRAM comes in at half the size and boasts 20 times faster write speeds (140MB/s), reads data at 17MB per second, guzzles 20 times less power and has 10 times more endurance. Since RRAM is non-volatile memory, it can keep data even when it’s powered off, á la NAND. As if that weren’t enough, 3D stacking construction allows for several terabytes of storage, endowing one 200 x 200mm chip with one terabyte. Unlike many tech breakthroughs however — we’re looking at you, graphene — this one is just about ready to find its way into finished products. Crossbar has manufactured RRAM within a standard chip factory, and claims that it can be churned out easily with existing production infrastructure. According to the firm, it’s in the fine-tuning process and plans to introduce the tech into the world of embedded SoCs. Sure, the outfit is the exclusive holder of some RRAM patents, but it aims to license its know-how to system-on-a-chip creators. Filed under: Storage Comments Via: VentureBeat Source: Crossbar

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Crossbar’s RRAM to boast terabytes of storage, faster write speeds than NAND

Samsung Begins Mass Production of Industry’s First 3D NAND Flash

Lucas123 writes “Samsung has announced it is mass producing the industry’s first three-dimensional (3D) Vertical NAND (V-NAND) flash memory that breaks through current planar NAND scaling limits, offering gains in both density and non-volatile memory performance. The first iteration of the V-NAND is a 24-layer, 128Gbit chip that will eventually be used in embedded flash and solid-state drive applications, Samsung said. It provides 2 to 10 times higher reliability and twice the write performance of conventional 10nm-class floating gate NAND flash memory. Initial device capacities will range from 128GB to 1TB, ‘depending on customer demand.’ ‘In the future, they could go considerably higher than that, ‘ said Steve Weinger, director of NAND Marketing for Samsung Semiconductor. Samsung’s process uses cell structure based on 3D Charge Trap Flash (CTF) technology and vertical interconnect process technology to link the 3D cell array. By applying the latter technologies, Samsung’s 3D V-NAND can provide over twice the scaling of current 20nm-class planar NAND flash.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Samsung Begins Mass Production of Industry’s First 3D NAND Flash

Update: Researchers say Tor-targeted malware phoned home to NSA

A search reveals the address used in an attack on Tor users’ privacy referenced an IP address belonging to the NSA, routed through SAIC. Malware planted on the servers of Freedom Hosting — the “hidden service” hosting provider on the Tor anonymized network brought down late last week—may have de-anonymized visitors to the sites running on that service. This issue could send identifying information about site visitors to an Internet Protocol address that was hard-coded into the script the malware injected into browsers. And it appears the IP address in question belongs to the National Security Agency (NSA). This revelation comes from analysis done collaboratively by Baneki Privacy Labs , a collective of Internet security researchers, and VPN provider Cryptocloud . When the IP address was uncovered in the JavaScript exploit —which specifically targets Firefox Long-Term Support version 17, the version included in Tor Browser Bundle—a source at Baneki told Ars that he and others reached out to the malware and security community to help identify the source. The exploit attacked a vulnerability in the Windows version of the Firefox Extended Support Release  17 browser —the one used previously in the Tor Project’s Tor Browser Bundle (TBB).  That vulnerability had been patched by Mozilla in June, and the updated browser is now part of TBB. But the TBB configuration of Firefox doesn’t include automatic security updates, so users of the bundle would not have been protected if they had not recently upgraded. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Update: Researchers say Tor-targeted malware phoned home to NSA

Indian IT firm accused of discrimination against “stupid Americans”

Sean MacEntee Infosys, an Indian IT software and services company with offices throughout the world, has been accused of discriminating against American job applicants. One Infosys employee who raised concerns about the company’s hiring practices was repeatedly called a “stupid American, ” the lawsuit states. Infosys has about 15, 000 employees in the US “and approximately 90 percent of these employees are of South Asian descent (including individuals of Indian, Nepalese, and Bangladeshi descent), ” the lawsuit states . Infosys allegedly achieved this ratio “by directly discriminating against individuals who are not of South Asian decent in hiring, by abusing the H-1B visa process to bring workers of South Asian descent into the country rather than hiring qualified individuals already in the United States, and by abusing the B-1 visa system to bring workers of South Asian descent into the United States to perform work not allowed by their visa status rather than hiring individuals already in the United States to perform the work.” Infosys “used B-1 visa holders because they could be paid considerably lower wages than other workers including American-born workers, ” the lawsuit states. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Indian IT firm accused of discrimination against “stupid Americans”

Jeff Bezos buys The Washington Post for $250 million in cash

Some big (and surprising) news in the media industry today: The Washington Post has just confirmed that it and its affiliated publications have been acquired by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for $250 million in cash. The announcement notes that Amazon “will have no role in the purchase, ” and that Bezos himself “will buy the news organization and become its sole owner when the sale is completed, probably within 60 days.” The statement goes on to explain that “The Post Co. will change to a new, still-undecided name and continue as a publicly traded company without The Post thereafter.” In an interview with the paper, the Post Co.’s chief executive, Donald Graham, says that “The Post could have survived under the company’s ownership and been profitable for the foreseeable future. But we wanted to do more than survive, ” adding, “I’m not saying this guarantees success but it gives us a much greater chance of success.” In a letter to Post employees, Bezos says that he “won’t be leading The Washington Post day-to-day, ” but that “there will of course be change at The Post over the coming years, ” and that “we will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment.” Developing… Comments Via: @Romenesko (Twitter) Source: The Washington Post (1) , (2)

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Jeff Bezos buys The Washington Post for $250 million in cash

The First 3D Printed Rifle Now Fires Multiple Rounds—Without Breaking

The Canadian sucessor to the Liberator’s attempt at bringing plastic firearms to the masses has apparently just gotten one step closer to his goal. After firing one semi-successful, barrel-cracking shot from his newly designed 3D-printed rifle, the Grizzly, a YouTube user going only by “Matthew” was able to fire a full 14 shots before the gun gave way. Read more…        

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The First 3D Printed Rifle Now Fires Multiple Rounds—Without Breaking

First Ever Public Tasting of Lab-Grown Cultured Beef Burger

vikingpower writes “Today, at 14:00 Western European Time (9:00 am Eastern), Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University ( the Netherlands ) will present a world first: he will cook and serve a burger made from Cultured Beef in front of an invited audience in London. The event will include a brief explanation of the science behind the burger. You can witch the event live, online. The project’s fact sheet is to be found here (pdf).”e Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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First Ever Public Tasting of Lab-Grown Cultured Beef Burger

Simple technique puts graphene capacitors on par with lead-acid battery

If the bottom is a layer of graphene in a super capacitor, then storage can be increased by making the solution above it as low-volume as possible. Lawrence Livermore National Lab Individual pieces of graphene have some pretty amazing properties, but finding a way to produce bulk materials that make good use of those properties has been rather challenging. Now, researchers have figured out a way to make graphene-based electrodes in bulk through a process so simple that it can be adapted to the manufacturing techniques that we currently use to make paper. And the resulting capacitors, at least in these test cases, had storage capacities that approached those of lead-acid batteries. Those of us who have taken basic physics tend to think of capacitors as two parallel, charge-holding plates, since that’s how they’re taught. But electrochemical capacitors perform a similar trick on a much smaller scale, by having the charges held by individual ions that absorb to an electrode. To boost capacity, the simplest thing to do is to increase the surface area for the ions to interact with. That’s why graphene seems so appealing; since it’s only a single atom thick, it should be possible to stick a tremendous amount of surface into a relatively small volume. The problem, however, has been getting the ions into the graphene itself in order for them to interact. Once the graphene is prepared, lots of factors like pore size and inter-sheet spacing come into play, since these control how quickly ions can get into the graphene. A team at Australia’s Monash University came up with an easy solution to this: put the ions in place during the manufacturing process. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Simple technique puts graphene capacitors on par with lead-acid battery

Attacking the popular Kwikset lock: open in 15 seconds with a screwdriver and a paper clip

Kwikset makes an incredibly popular line of reprogrammable locks that can be easily re-keyed, meaning that landlords don’t have to physically change the locks when their tenants move out.        

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Attacking the popular Kwikset lock: open in 15 seconds with a screwdriver and a paper clip

New York Times Sells Boston Globe At 93% Loss

An anonymous reader writes “The New York Times announced this morning that it has sold the Boston Globe newspaper and related assets, including the Boston.com website and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette daily paper, to John Henry, the principal owner of the Boston Red Sox. The price was $70 million in cash, a small fraction of the $1.1 billion the Times paid to acquire the Globe in 1993, and does not include assumption of the Globe’s pension liabilities, estimated at $110 million, which will remain with the Times. Since then the paper’s weekday circulation has fallen from 507, 000 to 246, 000 (including digital), mirroring the declining fortunes of many other daily newspapers across the country. Henry, who also owns the Liverpool FC and various other sports- and media- related properties, made his fortune in the investment industry; however, his hedge fund company recently closed after several years of poor performance.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New York Times Sells Boston Globe At 93% Loss