Samsung’s new eight-core Exynos 5 Octa SoC promises not to hog battery

Not to be outdone by Nvidia’s Tegra 4 announcement and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800-series announcement, Samsung took to the stage today to announce the next processor in its Exynos 5 lineup: the Exynos 5 Octa is an eight-core SoC destined for tablets and high-end smartphones. Not all of these CPU cores are created equal: four of them are high-performance Cortex-A15 cores, the very same found in the Exynos 5 Dual that powers the Nexus 10 and Samsung’s ARM Chromebook . The other four are Cortex-A7 CPU cores—these have the same feature set and capabilities as the A15 cores, but are optimized for power efficiency rather than performance. This makes the Exynos 5 Octa one of the first (if not  the first) products to actually use ARM’s big.LITTLE processor switching technology, something we outlined back in October of 2011 . The SoC is designed to dynamically split the workload between the high-performance and the high-efficiency CPU cores based on the task at hand—less strenuous activities like browsing an app store or checking e-mail might be done on the A7 cores, for instance, while gaming and number crunching could be handed off to the A15 cores. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View original post here:
Samsung’s new eight-core Exynos 5 Octa SoC promises not to hog battery

Walmart to sell iPhones with a $45 per month unlimited prepaid plan

Starting this Friday, Walmart will be selling the iPhone for use with wireless provider Straight Talk, which is offering a $45-per-month contract with unlimited voice, data, and texting. This sale will make it one of the cheapest ways —as measured over a two-year period—to get a prepaid iPhone. Walmart says it will offer $25-per-month financing for the phone itself if customers use a Walmart credit card. Straight Talk, which uses AT&T’s towers as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), is becoming an increasingly popular option for prepaid customers who want to use an iPhone without paying high prices. (Full disclosure: I am a Straight Talk customer, and have been since April 2012.) “We believe customers shouldn’t have to choose between saving money and having the latest technology,” said Seong Ohm, senior vice president of Entertainment for Walmart US, said in a statement on Tuesday. “Now customers can have the coveted iPhone with unlimited talk, text, and data without a contract for $70 a month thanks to our exclusive Straight Talk plan and industry first financing offer.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

More:
Walmart to sell iPhones with a $45 per month unlimited prepaid plan

Adobe almost does something amazing by accident

It seemed like an intriguing deal. An old version of Adobe Creative Suite—the 2005 vintage CS2, to be precise—became freely downloadable from Adobe, with nothing more than a free-to-create Adobe ID required from users. Although basically useless for Mac users, as CS2 is only available for PowerPC, for Windows users this is a powerful, if not quite cutting edge, suite of graphics apps. This looked like a clever move from Adobe. Photoshop is widely held to be one of the most routinely pirated applications there is. In making an old but still servicable version of the software it appeared that Adobe was offering a good alternative to piracy: instead of using a knock-off copy of CS6, just use CS2. A free CS2 would also go some way toward starving alternative applications of oxygen. Given the choice between a free copy of CS2 and downloading, say, the GIMP, one imagines that many users would plump for the commercial application. It’s more of a known quantity, with a more polished user interface. And Photoshop is, frankly, the gold standard of bitmap image editing. Even an older version has a prestige that GIMP doesn’t. This is not to say that CS2 is necessarily superior to the GIMP; it may or may not be. It doesn’t really matter; Photoshop has a reputation and respect that the GIMP doesn’t have, and even if some might argue that it was undeserved, it influences the decisions users make. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Visit site:
Adobe almost does something amazing by accident

Leader of BitTorrent piracy ring sentenced to five years in prison

The leader of the notorious IMAGiNE BitTorrent piracy ring, Jeramiah Perkins, was sentenced on Thursday to five years in prison, the largest sentence for the group’s five top administrators. In August 2012, Perkins pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. After being given the maximum sentence today, Perkins was also ordered to serve three years under “supervised release” and must pay $15,000 in restitution. As we reported in April, the group used infrared and FM receivers and camcorders to capture new releases in movie theaters. In a statement , the Department of Justice cited testimony from the Motion Picture Association of America, calling the group “the most prolific motion picture piracy release group operating on the Internet from September 2009 through September 2011.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

More here:
Leader of BitTorrent piracy ring sentenced to five years in prison

Apple says Do Not Disturb scheduling is broken until January 8

After reports that iOS 6’s new Do Not Disturb feature stopped resetting according to schedule on New Year’s Day, Apple says scheduling won’t work until next Tuesday, January 8. The Do Not Disturb feature was added to iOS 6 in order to silence what might otherwise be distracting notifications, like those during a meeting or while sleeping. Users can manually turn Do Not Disturb on or off, or can set a scheduled time for Do Not Disturb to kick in automatically and then reset later. For instance, many users set Do Not Disturb to turn on around bedtime and reset the following day. However, users discovered on January 1 that Do Not Disturb did not automatically reset as scheduled. Furthermore, after manually resetting, it wouldn’t engage as scheduled that evening. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Originally posted here:
Apple says Do Not Disturb scheduling is broken until January 8

University wins record $1.17 billion verdict against Marvell Semiconductor

flickr / BestBoyZ GmbH A Pittsburgh jury found that hard drive control chips made by Marvell Semiconductor infringe two patents owned by Carnegie Mellon University. Following a four-week trial in federal court, nine jurors unanimously held that Marvell should have to pay $1,169,140,271 in damages—the full sum that CMU’s lawyers had asked for. If the verdict holds up on appeal, it would wipe out more than a year of profits at Marvell, which made a bit over $900 million in 2011. It would also be the largest patent verdict in history, beating out this summer’s $1.05 billion verdict against Samsung for infringing patents and trademarks owned by Apple. The two CMU patents describe a way of reducing “noise” when reading information off hard disks. The jury found that Marvell’s chips infringed claim 4 of Patent No. 6,201,839 and claim 2 of Patent No. 6,438,180 . At trial, Marvell hotly contested that CMU had invented anything new; they argued that a Seagate patent , filed 14 months earlier, describes everything in CMU’s invention. Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

More:
University wins record $1.17 billion verdict against Marvell Semiconductor

Anonymous sets sights on an old enemy—the Westboro Baptist Church

That link? It leads to a survey entitled, “Interactive Butthurt Report v. 2.0.” Nothing is beneath the Westboro Baptist Church, as evidenced by the group’s announcement to picket outside Sandy Hook Elementary School in wake of the recent tragedy. The group’s most recent, perhaps most deplorable decision has apparently irked one of its oldest enemies : infamous hacker collective Anonymous. In response to the WBC’s plans early today, Anonymous tweeted , “It’s so nice of #WBC to provide the internet with a list of their twitter handles…” Roughly one hour later, they revealed their plans for the WBC : “#WBC GodHatesFags Site Admin gets #DOX’d via: Anonymous.” DOX, of course, refers to the work Anonymous did to find and publish a list of WBC members complete with e-mails, phone numbers, and even home addresses—all for the adoring public to access. In addition to the DOXing, Anonymous has repeatedly promoted a whitehouse.org petition to have the WBC recognized legally as a hate-group . The petition was created on Friday and it has already doubled the required 25,000 signatures. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read More:
Anonymous sets sights on an old enemy—the Westboro Baptist Church

Google phasing out ActiveSync push mail for free customers

Calling it “Winter cleaning,” Google has announced that from January 30, 2013, users of Google Mail, Calendar, and Contacts will no longer receive Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) support on their accounts. EAS provides push mail and synchronization of contacts and calendars to a number of mobile platforms, including iOS, Symbian, and Windows Phone. It’s also one of the protocols that Windows 8’s Metro Mail app uses, as does Outlook 2013. Currently, users of Google’s services can enable EAS support to use their Google accounts with suitable devices. After the cut off, existing users will continue to be able to use EAS with their devices, but those users won’t be able to add new devices. All future devices will have to use IMAP for their mail, CalDAV for calendar sync, and CardDAV for contact sync. Android and iOS users can use these protocols, but many others will be left high and dry. Push mail, in particular, could be left behind, as many platforms (including iOS) don’t support the IMAP IDLE push mail feature. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Originally posted here:
Google phasing out ActiveSync push mail for free customers

How to bring down mission-critical GPS networks with $2,500

Enlarge / The phase-coherent signal synthesizer with its top cover removed. The $2,500 device can be used to severely disrupt mission-critical GPS equipment used by the military and private industry. Nighswander et al. Scientists have devised a series of novel and inexpensive attacks that can severely disrupt mission-critical global positioning systems relied on by the military and a variety of industrial players, including airlines, mining companies, and operators of hydroelectric plants and other critical infrastructure. Unlike previous GPS attacks, the one developed by a team of scientists from Carnegie Mellon University and a private navigation company exploits software bugs in the underlying receivers. That allows the attacks to be stealthier and more persistent than earlier exploits, which primarily relied on signal jamming and spoofing. Prototype hardware that cost only $2,500 to build is able to cause a wide variety of GPS devices within a 30 mile radius to malfunction. Because many of those devices are nodes on special networks that make GPS signals more precise, the attacks have the effect of disrupting larger systems used in aviation, military, and critical infrastructure. The PCSS, or phase-coherent signal synthesizer, that they developed simultaneously receives and transmits civil GPS signals. It carries out many of the same things done by spoofers used in earlier GPS attacks. But instead of merely providing false information designed to compromise the accuracy of the GPS readings, it includes data that exploits weaknesses in the firmware of nearby receivers, many of which use the Internet to share their readings with other machines. The success of the PCSS is the result of an almost complete lack of authentication in the devices that send and receive GPS signals. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View article:
How to bring down mission-critical GPS networks with $2,500

New Mac trojan tricks users into paying pricey cell phone fees

Doctor Web Researchers have discovered new Mac-based malware that’s designed to trick users into paying pricey subscription fees. Dubbed Trojan.SMSSend.3666, the trojan masquerades as “VKMusic 4 for Mac,” a name that closely resembles an app used to listen to music on a popular Russian social networking site, according to a report published on Wednesday by Russia-based antivirus provider Doctor Web. An installer prompts users for a cell phone number, purportedly as part of the registration process. Users who respond to a subsequent text message then receive a bill charged to their mobile account. “Trojans of this family used to plague Windows users, but Trojan.SMSSend.3666 targets owners of Apple computers,” Wednesday’s advisory stated. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read More:
New Mac trojan tricks users into paying pricey cell phone fees