digest – Page 45 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Faster, cheaper, smaller: The state of the system-on-a-chip in 2014

Aurich Lawson/Ars Technica If you’re reading this, the odds are pretty good that you have a smartphone. There’s also a better-than-average chance that you know a little something about the stuff inside that phone—who makes the chips inside and how those chips stack up to the ones in other phones. About a year ago, we wrote a guide covering most of the major players making these chips, and now that this year’s Mobile World Congress is over and done with, we thought it was time to revisit the subject. What’s changed? What’s stayed the same? And what’s going to happen in the next year that you need to know about? We’ll begin by looking at emerging trends before moving on to a bird’s-eye view of where all the major chipmakers stand. This won’t give you an in-depth technical description of every detail, but it should help you understand where this tech is headed in 2014. Read 55 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Faster, cheaper, smaller: The state of the system-on-a-chip in 2014

Shields up: Tesla Model S gains (free) titanium and aluminum armor upgrade

Model S 1, concrete block 0. Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk has taken to Medium.com to post about a design change to the expensive-but-awesome Model S electric car: all Model S vehicles manufactured after March 6, 2014 will come with additional titanium and aluminum armor on their underbellies. The Model S carries its thousands of battery cells in a sealed enclosure below the floorpan, and the added armor is intended to protect the enclosure from puncture even under extreme conditions. This in turn should reduce the chances of Model S vehicles catching on fire. Not that the cars catching on fire is much of a thing; Musk is quick to point out that there have been only two Tesla fires resulting from road accidents (one of which involved a Model S being driven at 110 miles per hour directly into—and then through—a concrete wall), versus hundreds of thousands of gasoline vehicle fires last year. Nonetheless, Musk has directed his company to improve the car’s battery armor in an effort to assure customers (and investors) that the Model S really and truly isn’t going to burst into flames if you drive over a curb. The new armor takes the form of a three-part system: there’s a big hollow aluminum bar to deflect objects, a large titanium plate to absorb impacts, and an angled aluminum extrusion to cause the car to “ramp up and over” objects that can’t be crushed or flung aside. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Shields up: Tesla Model S gains (free) titanium and aluminum armor upgrade

BlackBerry still losing money, just 10 times less than it did last quarter

The BlackBerry Q10. Ars Technica On Friday, BlackBerry announced (PDF) its quarterly earnings. Compared to the previous quarter, the embattled Canadian handset maker seems to have slowed the bleeding. In just three months, it slashed its losses by a factor of 10. In its fourth fiscal quarter ending March 1, 2014, BlackBerry sustained a net loss of $423 million, down from a net loss of $4.4 billion the previous quarter . That harsh third fiscal quarter loss was a driver behind a terrible fiscal 2014 year overall for Blackberry: the company lost $5.8 billion from March 1, 2013 to March 1, 2014. “I am very pleased with our progress and execution in fiscal Q4 against the strategy we laid out three months ago. We have significantly streamlined operations, allowing us to reach our expense reduction target one quarter ahead of schedule,” said John Chen, the company’s CEO, in a statement. “BlackBerry is on sounder financial footing today with a path to returning to growth and profitability.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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BlackBerry still losing money, just 10 times less than it did last quarter

Jury: MP3tunes founder must pay $41 million for copyright violations

Michael Robertson, an entrepreneur who has been waging legal feuds against the music industry for more than a decade now, has been ordered to pay $41 million to a record label that sued him. The record label EMI sued MP3tunes back in 2007, and the case finally went to a jury last week in New York federal court. The jury found MP3tunes, and Robertson personally, liable for copyright violations . A separate damages trial ended yesterday, with the jury issuing a verdict of around $41 million. That’s an estimate, because the decision was a “complex, lengthy” verdict that will take the lawyers until next week to calculate precisely, according to a Reuters report on the outcome of the trial. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Jury: MP3tunes founder must pay $41 million for copyright violations

Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency

Michael Mandiberg Researchers said they have uncovered two apps that were downloaded from the official Google Play market more than one million times that use Android devices to mine the Litecoin and Dogecoin cryptocurrencies without explicitly informing end users. According to a blog post published Tuesday by a researcher from antivirus provider Trend Micro, the apps are Songs , installed from one million to five million times, and Prized , which was installed from 10,000 to 50,000 times. Neither the app descriptions nor their terms of service make clear that the apps subject Android devices to the compute-intensive process of mining, Trend Micro Mobile Threats Analyst Veo Zhang wrote. As of Wednesday afternoon, the apps were still available. Mining apps typically consume larger-than-average amounts of electricity and can generate extremely hot temperatures as CPUs, GPUs, or other types of processors strain to perform cryptographic hashing functions required for users to mint new digital coins. The strain can be especially onerous on smartphones, because they’re equipped with hardware that’s much less powerful than that found in traditional computers. The apps discovered by Trend Micro were programmed to mine coins only when devices were recharging. That setting would help prevent batteries from draining quickly, but it would do nothing to prevent devices from overheating or consuming large amounts of bandwidth. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

New dwarf planet found sneaking through the inner Oort Cloud

An artist’s depiction of Sedna, the first of the objects from this class of bodies to have been discovered. NASA A new dwarf planet-like body has been found on the outer edges of the Solar System. This object, called 2012VP 113 , is about 450km wide and is the second body of its class found since the identification of the dwarf planet Sedna in 2003, and it joins an exclusive club composed of some of the strangest objects in the Solar System. The observable Solar System can be divided into three regions: the rocky terrestrial planets and asteroids of the inner Solar System, the gas giant planets, and the icy Kuiper Belt objects, which include Pluto. The Kuiper Belt stretches from beyond Neptune, which is at 30 astronomical units (where 1AU is the typical distance between the Earth and the Sun), to about 50AU. Sedna and 2012VP 113 are strange objects because they reside in a region where there should be nothing, according to our theories of the Solar System formation. Their orbit is well beyond that of Neptune, the last recognized planet of the Solar System, and even beyond that of Pluto, which differs from planets because of its size, unusual orbit, and composition. (Pluto, once considered a planet, is now considered the lead object of a group of bodies called plutinos.) Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Google: Cloud prices should track Moore’s Law, are falling too slowly

Tharan Parameshwaran Google today continued the trend of cloud services price cuts, while claiming that cloud network operators aren’t cutting average prices quickly enough. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google frequently advertise price cuts , but Google today claimed that “pricing hasn’t followed Moore’s Law : over the past five years, hardware costs improved by 20-30 percent annually, but public cloud prices fell at just 8 percent per year.” In today’s announcement, unveiled at Google’s Cloud Platform Live event , the company said, “We think cloud pricing should track Moore’s Law, so we’re simplifying and reducing prices for our various on-demand, pay-as-you-go services by 30-85 percent.” Moore’s Law is the observation that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles about every two years, bringing steady increases in processing power. One Amazon price cut last year was on the order of 37 to 80 percent for its dedicated instances, so this actually isn’t that unusual. Google declined to say which companies it included in its “public cloud prices” statistic. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google: Cloud prices should track Moore’s Law, are falling too slowly

Microsoft releases source code for MS-DOS and Word

In recognition of their historical importance and commercial irrelevance, Microsoft has given the source code to MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 and Word for Windows 1.1a to the Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View, California. The source is now freely downloadable by anyone, though making practical use of it is an exercise for the reader. This source code joins other important early programs, including Adobe Photoshop 1.0 and Apple II DOS, among the CHM’s collection. Len Shustek, CHM chairman said, “We think preserving historic source code like [MS-DOS and Word] is key to understanding how software has evolved from primitive roots to become a crucial part of our civilization.” The scale of change between then and now is formidable. MS-DOS had just 300kB of source code and occupied as little as 12kB of memory. In 1981, MS-DOS was a key part of IBM’s PC, and the success of the PC—and its clones—made Microsoft the industry giant it is today. Word for Windows is the product that turned WordPerfect from market leader into all-but-irrelevant also-ran. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft releases source code for MS-DOS and Word

Verizon accused of refusing to fix broken landline phone service

Matt Reinbold Verizon has been accused of refusing to fix landline phone service in order to force customers onto Internet packages with voice service that may falter during power outages.The Utility Reform Network (TURN) filed an emergency motion ( PDF ) last week with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) that asked the agency to “order Verizon to repair the service of copper-based landline telephone customers who have requested repair or wish to retain the copper services they were cut off of,” TURN announced . The group accused Verizon of “deliberately neglecting the repair and maintenance of its copper network with the explicit goal of migrating basic telephone service customers who experience service problems.” Verizon spokesperson Jarryd Gonzales told Ars that these claims are “blatantly false.” “We have identified certain customers in fiber network areas who have had recurring repair issues over their copper-based service recently or clusters of customers in areas where we have had recurring copper-based infrastructure issues,” Gonzales wrote in an e-mail. “Moving them to our all-fiber network will improve the reliability of their service. When these customers contact us with a repair request, we suggest fiber as a repair option. If the customer agrees, we move their service from our copper to our all-fiber network. There is no charge for this work, and customers will pay the same rate for their service. Most customers recognize and appreciate the increased reliability of fiber and gladly agree to the move to fiber. Few customers across our service area have chosen to stay with copper and, once on fiber, few ask to return to copper.” Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Verizon accused of refusing to fix broken landline phone service

10,000 Linux servers hit by malware serving tsunami of spam and exploits

Researchers have documented an ongoing criminal operation infecting more than 10,000 Unix and Linux servers with malware that sends spam and redirects end users to malicious Web pages. Windigo, as the attack campaign has been dubbed, has been active since 2011 and has compromised systems belonging to the Linux Foundation’s kernel.org and the developers of the cPanel Web hosting control panel, according to a detailed report published Tuesday by researchers from antivirus provider Eset. During its 36-month run, Windigo has compromised more than 25,000 servers with robust malware that sends more than 35 million spam messages a day and exposes Windows-based Web visitors to drive-by malware attacks. It also feeds people running any type of computer banner ads for porn services. The Eset researchers, who have been instrumental in uncovering similar campaigns compromising large numbers of servers running the nginx, Lighttpd , and Apache Web servers, said the latest campaign has the potential to inflict significant harm on the Internet at large. They explained: Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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10,000 Linux servers hit by malware serving tsunami of spam and exploits