funny – Page 168

Qualcomm Debuts 10nm Server Chip To Attack Intel Server Stronghold

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom’s Hardware: Qualcomm and its Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies subsidiary announced today that the company has already begun sampling its first 10nm server processor. The Centriq 2400 is the second generation of Qualcomm server SOCs, but it is the first in its new family of 10nm FinFET processors. The Centriq 2400 features up to 48 custom Qualcomm ARMv8-compliant Falkor cores and comes a little over a year after Qualcomm began developing its first-generation Centriq processors. Qualcomm’s introduction of a 10nm server chip while Intel is still refining its 14nm process appears to be a clear shot across Intel’s bow–due not only to the smaller process, but also its sudden lead in core count. Intel’s latest 14nm E7 Broadwell processors top out at 24 cores. Qualcomm isn’t releasing more information, such as clock speeds or performance specifications, which would help to quantify the benefit of its increased core count. The server market commands the highest margins, which is certainly attractive for the mobile-centric Qualcomm, which found its success in the relatively low-margin smartphone segment. However, Intel has a commanding lead in the data center with more than a 99% share of the world’s server sockets, and penetrating the segment requires considerable time, investment, and ecosystem development. Qualcomm unveiled at least a small portion of its development efforts by demonstrating Apache Spark and Hadoop on Linux and Java running on the Centriq 2400 processor. The company also notes that Falkor is SBSA compliant, which means that it is compatible with any software that runs on an ARMv8-compliant server platform. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New Stegano Exploit Kit Hides Malvertising Code In Banner Pixels

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: For the past two months, a new exploit kit has been serving malicious code hidden in the pixels of banner ads via a malvertising campaign that has been active on several high profile websites. Discovered by security researchers from ESET, this new exploit kit is named Stegano, from the word steganography, which is a technique of hiding content inside other files. In this particular scenario, malvertising campaign operators hid malicious code inside PNG images used for banner ads. The crooks took a PNG image and altered the transparency value of several pixels. They then packed the modified image as an ad, for which they bought ad displays on several high-profile websites. Since a large number of advertising networks allow advertisers to deliver JavaScript code with their ads, the crooks also included JS code that would parse the image, extract the pixel transparency values, and using a mathematical formula, convert those values into a character. Since images have millions of pixels, crooks had all the space they needed to pack malicious code inside a PNG photo. When extracted, this malicious code would redirect the user to an intermediary ULR, called gate, where the host server would filter users. This server would only accept connections from Internet Explorer users. The reason is that the gate would exploit the CVE-2016-0162 vulnerability that allowed the crooks to determine if the connection came from a real user or a reverse analysis system employed by security researchers. Additionally, this IE exploit also allowed the gate server to detect the presence of antivirus software. In this case, the server would drop the connection just to avoid exposing its infrastructure and trigger a warning that would alert both the user and the security firm. If the gate server deemed the target valuable, then it would redirect the user to the final stage, which was the exploit kit itself, hosted on another URL. The Stegano exploit kit would use three Adobe Flash vulnerabilities (CVE-2015-8651, CVE-2016-1019 or CVE-2016-4117) to attack the user’s PC, and forcibly download and launch into execution various strains of malware. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Stegano Exploit Kit Hides Malvertising Code In Banner Pixels

Google Says It Is About To Reach 100 Percent Renewable Energy

Google said today it will power 100 percent of its sprawling data centers and offices with renewable energy starting next year. The company said today it has bought enough wind and solar power to account for all the electricity it uses globally each year. In comparison, 44 percent of Google’s power supplies came from renewables last year. From a blogpost: To reach this goal we’ll be directly buying enough wind and solar electricity annually to account for every unit of electricity our operations consume, globally. And we’re focusing on creating new energy from renewable sources, so we only buy from projects that are funded by our purchases. Over the last six years, the cost of wind and solar came down 60 percent and 80 percent, respectively, proving that renewables are increasingly becoming the lowest cost option. Electricity costs are one of the largest components of our operating expenses at our data centers, and having a long-term stable cost of renewable power provides protection against price swings in energy. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Says It Is About To Reach 100 Percent Renewable Energy

Google Is Rolling Out Android 7.1.1

Google is rolling out Android 7.1.1 for Pixel and Nexus smartphones, including the Nexus 6, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Nexus 9, Pixel, Pixel XL, Nexus Player, Pixel C and General Mobile 4G (Android One). You can download it over-the-air when it becomes available “over the next several weeks” or flash it yourself. Engadget details some of the new features found in Android 7.1.1: As for what you can find from a feature perspective, Google has added support for its “image keyboard” that lets you easily find and send pictures and GIFs without leaving your messaging app of choice. Google says it’ll work inside of Hangouts, Allo, and the default Messaging app. Ironically enough, the feature has been available in the Gboard iOS keyboard that Google launched in the spring, but it’s good to see it coming to more Android phones now. Android 7.1.1 also includes Google’s latest set of more diverse emoji, specifically focused on showing a “wider range of professions” for women. And it also contains the excellent app shortcut feature that originally launched on the Pixel — if you press and hold on an app’s icon, a sub-menu of shortcuts will show up. You’ll be able to quickly send a message to a specific contact or navigate to a saved location using these shortcuts, for example. They’re very much like the “force touch” shortcuts found on the iPhone, but that doesn’t make them any less useful. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Is Rolling Out Android 7.1.1

Virginia Police Spent $500K For An Ineffective Cellphone Surveillance System

Cell-site simulators can intercept phone calls and even provide locations (using GPS data). But Virginia’s state police force just revealed details about their actual use of the device — and it’s not pretty. Long-time Slashdot reader v3rgEz writes: In 2014, the Virginia State Police spent $585, 265 on a specially modified Suburban outfitted with the latest and greatest in cell phone surveillance: the DRT 1183C, affectionately known as the DRTbox. But according to logs uncovered by public records website MuckRock, the pricey ride was only used 12 times — and only worked seven of those times. According to Virginia’s ACLU director, “each of the 12 uses cost almost $50, 000, and only 4 of them resulted in an arrest [raising] a significant question whether the more than half million dollars spent on the device and the vehicle…was a wise investment of public funds.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Virginia Police Spent $500K For An Ineffective Cellphone Surveillance System

Lawyer Sues 20-Year-Old Student Who Gave a Bad Yelp Review, Loses Badly

20-year-old Lan Cai was in a car crash this summer, after she was plowed into by a drunk driver and broke two bones in her lower back. She didn’t know how to navigate her car insurance and prove damages, so she reached out for legal help. Things didn’t go as one would have liked, initially, as ArsTechnica documents:The help she got, Cai said, was less than satisfactory. Lawyers from the Tuan A. Khuu law firm ignored her contacts, and at one point they came into her bedroom while Cai was sleeping in her underwear. “Seriously, it’s super unprofessional!” she wrote on Facebook. (The firm maintains it was invited in by Cai’s mother.) She also took to Yelp to warn others about her bad experience. The posts led to a threatening e-mail from Tuan Khuu attorney Keith Nguyen. Nguyen and his associates went ahead and filed that lawsuit, demanding the young woman pay up between $100, 000 and $200, 000 — more than 100 times what she had in her bank account. Nguyen said he didn’t feel bad at all about suing Cai. Cai didn’t remove her review, though. Instead she fought back against the Khuu firm, all thanks to attorney Michael Fleming, who took her case pro bono. Fleming filed a motion arguing that, first and foremost, Cai’s social media complaints were true. Second, she couldn’t do much to damage the reputation of a firm that already had multiple poor reviews. He argued the lawsuit was a clear SLAPP (strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation). Ultimately, the judge agreed with Fleming, ordering the Khuu firm to pay $26, 831.55 in attorneys’ fees. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Lawyer Sues 20-Year-Old Student Who Gave a Bad Yelp Review, Loses Badly

British Film Institute To Digitize 100,000 Old TV Shows Before They Disappear

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Thousands of British TV programs are to be digitized before they are lost forever, the British Film Institute says. Anarchic children’s show Tiswas and The Basil Brush Show are among the programs in line for preservation. The initiative was announced as part of the BFI’s five-year strategy for 2017-2022. “Material from the 70s and early 80s is at risk, ” said Heather Stewart, the BFI’s creative director. “It has a five or six-year shelf life and if we don’t do something about it will just go, no matter how great the environment is we keep it in. “Our job is make sure that things are there in 200 years’ time.” The BFI has budgeted $14.3 million of Lottery funding towards its goal of making the UK’s entire screen heritage digitally accessible. This includes an estimated 100, 000 of the “most at-risk” British TV episodes and clips held on obsolete video formats. The list includes “early children’s programming, little-seen dramas, regional programs and the beginnings of breakfast television.” The issue for the BFI, Ms Stewart added, was also to do with freeing up storage space. “We have a whole vault which is wall-to-wall video. If we digitized it, it would be in a robot about the size of a wardrobe, ” she said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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British Film Institute To Digitize 100,000 Old TV Shows Before They Disappear

VLC Media Player Previews 360-degree Video Support

VideoLAN has released a technical preview of VLC Media Player 3.0 with 360-degree video support. The new build handles videos following the Spatial Video format, and photos and panoramas following the Spherical spec (the official test page has sample files). From an article on SoftwareCrew:The files play back just like any other video, but you can now left-click and drag within the screen or use the numeric keypad arrows to look around. VideoLAN says there are multiple display modes — Zoom, Little Planet and Reverse Little Planet — although we couldn’t immediately see how they were activated. This initial release is only available for Windows and Mac, but eventually 360-degree support will arrive for Android, iOS and Xbox One, with VR headset support likely to arrive in 2017. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For the First Time, Living Cells Have Formed Carbon-Silicon Bonds

From a ScienceDaily alert: Scientists have managed to coax living cells into making carbon-silicon bonds, demonstrating for the first time that nature can incorporate silicon — one of the most abundant elements on Earth — into the building blocks of life. While chemists have achieved carbon-silicon bonds before — they’re found in everything from paints and semiconductors to computer and TV screens — they’ve so far never been found in nature, and these new cells could help us understand more about the possibility of silicon-based life elsewhere in the Universe. After oxygen, silicon is the second most abundant element in Earth’s crust, and yet it has nothing to do with biological life. Why silicon has never be incorporated into any kind of biochemistry on Earth has been a long-standing puzzle for scientists, because, in theory, it would have been just as easy for silicon-based lifeforms to have evolved on our planet as the carbon-based ones we know and love. Not only are carbon and silicon both extremely abundant in Earth’s crust – they’re also very similar in their chemical make-up. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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For the First Time, Living Cells Have Formed Carbon-Silicon Bonds

Google’s DeepMind Made an AI Watch Close To 5000 Videos So That It Surpasses Humans in Lip-Reading

A new AI tool created by Google and Oxford University researchers could significantly improve the success of lip-reading and understanding for the hearing impaired. In a recently released paper on the work, the pair explained how the Google DeepMind-powered system was able to correctly interpret more words than a trained human expert. From a report: To accomplish the task, a cohort of scientists fed thousands of hours of TV footage — 5000 to be precise — from the BBC to a neural network. It was made to watch six different TV shows, which aired between the period of January 2010 and December 2015. This included 118, 000 difference sentences and some 17, 500 unique words. To understand the progress, it successfully deciphered words with a 46.8 percent accuracy. The neural network had to recognize the same based on mouth movement analysis. The under 50 percent accuracy might seem laughable to you but let me put things in perspective for you. When the same set of TV shows were shown to a professional lip-reader, they were able to decipher only 12.4 percent of words without error. Thus, one can understand the great difference in the capability of the AI as compared to a human expert in that particular field. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google’s DeepMind Made an AI Watch Close To 5000 Videos So That It Surpasses Humans in Lip-Reading

Ken May

Tag: funny