Tag: ad-choices

Using new Corvette’s valet-recording tech could be a felony in 12 states

© General Motors Over the past few months, General Motors and its Chevrolet dealerships have been selling the 2015 Corvette with an interesting feature called Valet Mode. Valet Mode records audio, video, and driving statistics of the person in the driver’s seat when the driver isn’t around, thus keeping low-life valets from being too loose with their filthy mitts while inside a Corvette owner’s fancy car. Trouble is that in at least 12 states, using Valet Mode might be considered a felony. Federal wiretapping laws generally require only one party to consent to a recording of an interaction. But in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington, all parties are required to consent before a recording happens. So if a Corvette owner turns on Valet Mode in California and turns the car over to the unknowing attendant, that Corvette owner could be committing a felony. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Using new Corvette’s valet-recording tech could be a felony in 12 states

Samsung has more employees than Google, Apple, and Microsoft combined

Samsung loves “big.” Its phones are big, its advertising budget is big, and as you’ll see below, its employee headcount is really big, too. Samsung has more employees than Apple, Google, and Microsoft combined . We dug through everyone’s 10-K (or equivalent) SEC filings and came up with this: Samsung Electronics vs the headcounts of other companies. Ron Amadeo At 275,000 employees, Samsung ( just Samsung Electronics) is the size of five Googles! This explains Samsung’s machine-gun-style device output; the company has released around 46 smartphones  and 27 tablets  just in 2014. If we wanted to, we could cut these numbers down some more. Google is going to shed 3,894 employees once it finally gets rid of Motorola. Over half of Apple’s headcount—42,800 employees—is from the retail division, putting the non-retail part of the company at only 37,500 employees. The “Sony” on this chart only means “Sony Electronics,” the part of the company that is most comparable to Samsung Electronics. Sony Group has a massive media arm consisting of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Sony Music Entertainment, and Sony Financial Services. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung has more employees than Google, Apple, and Microsoft combined

Google stops malicious advertising campaign that could have reached millions

Malicious ads appears on Last.fm after advertising network Zedo serves up malicious content. Courtesy Malwarebytes Google shut down malicious Web attacks coming from a compromised advertising network on Friday. The move follows a security firm’s analysis that found the ad platform, Zedo, serving up advertisements that attempted to infect the computers of visitors to major websites. In an attack that ended early Friday morning, visitors to Last.fm, The Times of Israel, and The Jerusalem Post ran the risk of their computers becoming infected as Zedo  redirected visitors’ systems to malicious servers . Because the advertisements hosted on Zedo’s servers were distributed through Google’s Doubleclick, the attack reached millions of potential victims, Jerome Segura, senior security researcher at Malwarebytes Labs, told Ars. Distributing malware through legitimate advertising networks, a technique known as “malvertising,” has become an increasingly popular way to compromise the systems of consumers and workers alike. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google stops malicious advertising campaign that could have reached millions

AMD’s “heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access” coming this year in Kaveri

AMD AMD wants to talk about HSA, Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA), its vision for the future of system architectures. To that end, it held a press conference last week to discuss what it’s calling “heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access” (hUMA). The company outlined what it was doing, and why, both confirming and reaffirming the things it has been saying for the last couple of years. The central HSA concept is that systems will have multiple different kinds of processor, connected together and operating as peers. The two main kinds of processor are conventional: versatile CPUs and the more specialized GPUs. Modern GPUs have enormous parallel arithmetic power, especially floating point arithmetic, but are poorly-suited to single-threaded code with lots of branches. Modern CPUs are well-suited to single-threaded code with lots of branches, but less well suited massively parallel number crunching. Splitting workloads between a CPU and a GPU, using each for the workloads it’s good at, has driven the development of general purpose GPU (GPGPU) software and development. Read 20 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AMD’s “heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access” coming this year in Kaveri

OS X 10.9 said to focus on the “power user”

OS X 10.9 will reportedly focus on the “power user,” according to sources speaking to 9to5Mac . The release, code-named “Cabernet,” isn’t expected to significantly overhaul how the operating system functions, but will reportedly bring over more iOS features that could benefit OS X. What might those features be? According to 9to5Mac’s sources, Apple has been “testing a new multi-tasking system” that’s similar to the app-switcher within iOS. “The multitasking feature will be functional for applications in the background, according to this person. Additionally, Apple could use app-pausing technologies from iOS to pause background application processes in OS X,” the site wrote, though apparently it’s unclear whether this feature will make the official 10.9 release. The other “power user” features reportedly include modifications to the Finder that would bring a tabbed browsing mode, an updated version of Safari with “a redesigned backend for improved page loading, speed, and efficiency,” and the ability to keep different Spaces open on separate monitors. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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OS X 10.9 said to focus on the “power user”

Linux 3.9 brings SSD caching and drivers to support modern PCs

mtellin Linux creator Linus Torvalds last night announced the release of version 3.9 of the kernel. Available for download at kernel.org , Linux 3.9 brings a long list of improvements to storage, networking, file systems, drivers, virtualization, and power management. H-Online editor Thorsten Leemhuis has an excellent rundown of what’s new in Linux 3.9 . One new feature, listed as “experimental,” allows SSDs to act as caches for other storage devices. “This feature is able to speed up data writes, as it allows the faster SSD to first cache data and then, in a quiet moment, transfer it to the slower hard drive,” Leemhuis wrote. Linux maintainers have also done some driver work that might improve the sometimes questionable support for desktops and laptops. New drivers include support for Intel 802.11ac Wi-Fi components, as well as trackpads used in Samsung’s ARM-based Chromebook and the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition Ultrabook . The Kernel’s driver for AMD Radeon graphics chips was updated to support Oland chips in the 8500 and 8600 Series Radeon video cards, in addition to AMD’s forthcoming Richland chips. The driver code for HD audio codecs is also now “leaner and more robust.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Linux 3.9 brings SSD caching and drivers to support modern PCs

Google didn’t comply with Argentina’s request to remove NSFW video of president

In a newly released dataset covering the second half of 2012, Google reports a record amount of total government requests worldwide to remove content from the company’s sites and services. As usual, under the “ Notes ” section, Google provides some potentially humorous insight  on why governments want certain content to be removed. Google noted wryly: “We received a request [from Argentina] to remove a YouTube video that allegedly defames the [Argentine] President by depicting her in a compromising position. We age-restricted the video in accordance with YouTube’s Community Guidelines.” It didn’t take us long to find the video in question, by the Miami-based Argentine-Venezuelan rock band The Rockadictos. The band’s September 2012 music video (genuinely NSFW) depicts a CGI version of the Argentine president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, engaging in lewd behavior. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google didn’t comply with Argentina’s request to remove NSFW video of president

FBI denied permission to spy on hacker through his webcam

Sorry FBI, you can’t randomly hijack someone’s webcam. Stefano Maffei A federal magistrate judge has denied (PDF) a request from the FBI to install sophisticated surveillance software to track someone suspected of attempting to conduct a “sizeable wire transfer from [John Doe’s] local bank [in Texas] to a foreign bank account.” Back in March 2013, the FBI asked the judge to grant a month-long “ Rule 41 search and seizure warrant ” of a suspect’s computer “at premises unknown” as a way to find out more about this possible violations of “federal bank fraud, identity theft and computer security laws.” In an unusually-public order published this week , Judge Stephen Smith slapped down the FBI on the grounds that the warrant request was overbroad and too invasive. In it, he gives a unique insight as to the government’s capabilities for sophisticated digital surveillance on potential targets. According to the judge’s description of the spyware, it sounds very similar to the RAT software that many miscreants use to spy on other Internet users without their knowledge. (Ars editor Nate Anderson detailed the practice last month.) Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FBI denied permission to spy on hacker through his webcam

Apple supercharges R&D with extra $500 million spent in last six months

Apple product sales are flattening out a bit compared to last year, save for iPads. Casey Johnston Apple boosted its research and development spending by 33 percent in the second quarter of 2013 compared to the same period last year, according to a quarterly report filed with the Securities Exchange Commission. If the rate of spending continues, Apple could drop over $4 billion on R&D this fiscal year. During the quarter ending March 30, 2013, Apple spent $1.119 billion on R&D, compared to $841 million from a year ago. In the first six months of its fiscal year, Apple has spent $2.129 billion total on R&D, while it spent only $1.599 billion last year. Apple stated that the spending for the quarter was up 33 percent due to “an increase in headcount” and “expanded R&D activities.” The statement went on to say that the “focused investments” in R&D are “directly related to timely development of new and enhanced products that are central to the Company’s core business strategy. As such, the Company expects to make further investments in R&D to remain competitive.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple supercharges R&D with extra $500 million spent in last six months

BitTorrent Sync creates private, peer-to-peer Dropbox, no cloud required

BitTorrent today released folder syncing software that replicates files across multiple computers using the same peer-to-peer file sharing technology that powers BitTorrent clients. The free BitTorrent Sync application is labeled as being in the alpha stage, so it’s not necessarily ready for prime-time, but it is publicly available for download and working as advertised on my home network. BitTorrent, Inc. (yes, there is a legitimate company behind BitTorrent ) took to its blog to announce  the move from a pre-alpha, private program to the publicly available alpha. Additions since the private alpha include one-way synchronization, one-time secrets for sharing files with a friend or colleague, and the ability to exclude specific files and directories. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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BitTorrent Sync creates private, peer-to-peer Dropbox, no cloud required