hash – Page 6 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Intel’s high-end quad-core NUC ships in May for $650

Enlarge / The “Skull Canyon” Core i7 NUC. (credit: Intel) Intel talked a little about its new high-end Core i7 NUC mini PC at CES earlier this year , but today at GDC the company revealed what the final model will look like along with its specs, release date, and cost. The new NUC6i7KYK, codenamed “Skull Canyon,” includes a 2.6GHz (3.5GHz Turbo) 45W quad-core Core i7-6770HQ —not the fastest Skylake laptop chip that Intel can sell you, but definitely one of the fastest. The other main draws are the Iris Pro 580 GPU, which includes 78 of Intel’s graphics execution units and a 128MB eDRAM cache (compared to 48EUs and 64MB of eDRAM in the standard Core i5 NUC we just reviewed ), and the Thunderbolt 3 port which also supports full USB 3.1 gen 2 transfer speeds of 10Mbps. It takes DDR4 memory, M.2 SATA and PCI Express SSDs, and comes with a built-in Intel 8260 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth adapter, just like the Core i5 NUC. It’s got a good port selection, including a full-size HDMI 2.0 port, a mini DisplayPort 1.2 output, four USB 3.0 ports, a headphone jack, an SD card slot, a gigabit LAN port, and an IR sensor for use with remote controls. The HDMI 2.0 port ought to make some HTPC fans happy, since the standard NUCs are still stuck on version 1.4 and can’t view HDCP 2.2-protected content. And this is all in addition to the aforementioned Thunderbolt 3 port; this will be the first NUC since the original to support Thunderbolt, which opens up possibilities for external graphics cards down the line. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel’s high-end quad-core NUC ships in May for $650

Encrypted WhatsApp messages frustrate new court-ordered wiretap

(credit: Hernán Piñera ) The US Department of Justice has opened another legal front in the ongoing war over easy-to-use strong encryption. According to a Saturday report in The New York Times , prosecutors have gone head-to-head with WhatsApp, the messaging app owned by Facebook. Citing anonymous sources, the Times reported that “as recently as this past week,” federal officials have been “discussing how to proceed in a continuing criminal investigation in which a federal judge had approved a wiretap, but investigators were stymied by WhatsApp’s encryption.” The case, which apparently does not involve terrorism, remains under seal. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Encrypted WhatsApp messages frustrate new court-ordered wiretap

TP-Link blocks open source router firmware to comply with new FCC rule

A TP-Link router. (credit: TP-Link. ) Networking hardware vendor TP-Link says it will prevent the loading of open source firmware on routers it sells in the United States in order to comply with new Federal Communications Commission requirements. The FCC wants to limit interference with other devices by preventing user modifications that cause radios to operate outside their licensed RF (radio frequency) parameters. The FCC says it doesn’t intend to ban the use of third-party firmware such as DD-WRT and OpenWRT; in theory, router makers can still allow loading of open source firmware as long as they also deploy controls that prevent devices from operating outside their allowed frequencies, types of modulation, power levels, and so on. But open source users feared that hardware makers would lock third-party firmware out entirely, since that would be the easiest way to comply with the FCC requirements. The decision by TP-Link—described by the company in this FAQ —shows that those fears were justified. (Thanks to Electronic Frontier Foundation Staff Attorney Nate Cardozo for bringing it to our attention.) Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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TP-Link blocks open source router firmware to comply with new FCC rule

Stretchable, glowing capacitors used to make a touch-sensitive robot

(credit: Larson, et. al., Science) For many of us, the term “robot” still evokes an image of R2D2 or a terminator-style collection of metal parts. But there’s no reason to limit our construction materials to hard parts. A number of labs are working on soft-bodied robots, and have shown they can do some rather interesting things, like squeezing through narrow spaces . A team of researchers from Cornell and the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia have taken a soft-bodied robot and made it glow. Their method of producing the light, however, has some interesting side effects: it allows the robot to determine how much it has flexed, and it makes the robot responsive to touch. These days, “glow” is usually synonymous with “LED.” But the authors used a very different technique, relying on what’s called an electroluminescent phosphor—basically, something that glows when it’s place in an alternating electric field. The phosphors (zinc sulfide, in this case) can be embedded in a silicone gel, making them stretchable and bendable. Different dopants in the phosphor will cause it to glow in different colors. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Stretchable, glowing capacitors used to make a touch-sensitive robot

New DisplayPort 1.4 standard can drive 8K monitors over a USB Type-C cable

(credit: VESA) Today, most new computers with DisplayPort or USB Type-C connectors support the DisplayPort 1.2 standard, which provides enough bandwidth to drive a 4K display at 60Hz over a single cable. In late 2014, VESA published the DisplayPort 1.3 standard, which increased the available bandwidth enough to drive 60Hz 5K displays or 30Hz 8K displays over a single cable. And today, VESA has finalized and released the DisplayPort 1.4 spec , which can drive 60Hz 8K displays and supports HDR color modes at 5K and 8K. The physical interface used to carry DisplayPort data—High Bit Rate 3 (HBR3), which provides 8.1Gbps of bandwidth per lane—is still the same as it was in DisplayPort 1.3. The new standard drives higher-resolution displays with better color support using Display Stream Compression (DSC), a “visually lossless” form of compression that VESA says “enables up to [a] 3:1 compression ratio.” This data compression, among other things, allows DisplayPort 1.4 to drive 60Hz 8K displays and 120Hz 4K displays with HDR “deep color” over both DisplayPort and USB Type-C cables. USB Type-C cables can provide a USB 3.0 data connection, too. The standard includes a few other features, most of which are targeted at home theater buffs: Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New DisplayPort 1.4 standard can drive 8K monitors over a USB Type-C cable

OS X blacklist accidentally disables Ethernet in OS X 10.11

Enlarge / An errant update may have disabled your Mac’s Ethernet port recently. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) If you’re having problems with your Mac’s Ethernet port this morning, the culprit may be an errant automatic update that Apple published over the weekend. Luckily, the damage isn’t permanent: an Apple support article posted yesterday will walk you through diagnosing and fixing the problem, which involves connecting to your network via Wi-Fi and running a software update command in the Terminal. If you’re reading this and your Ethernet port is working fine, odds are good that you’ve already installed the follow-up update released to fix the problem. The culprit is an update for the System Integrity Protection feature for OS X, the El Capitan feature that protects some system folders and keeps unsigned or incorrectly signed kernel extensions (or “kexts,” roughly analogous to drivers in a Windows or Linux machine) from loading. In this case, the kext used to enable the Ethernet port on Macs was blacklisted—if you restarted your Mac after applying this update but before your computer had a chance to download the quickly issued fix, you’ll find yourself without an Ethernet connection. This blacklist isn’t updated through the Mac App Store like purchased apps or OS X itself. Rather, it uses a seamless auto-update mechanism that executes in the background even if you haven’t enabled normal automatic updates. Apple uses a similar mechanism to update OS X’s anti-malware blacklist, a rudimentary security feature introduced in 2011 following the high-profile Mac Defender malware infection and occasionally used to push other critical software updates . Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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OS X blacklist accidentally disables Ethernet in OS X 10.11

Pentium? Core i5? Core i7? Making sense of Intel’s convoluted CPU lineup

Intel’s Skylake-based Pentium G4500. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) Our creative director Aurich Lawson is building a PC to power a custom arcade cabinet, and he was having trouble picking a processor. Not because he didn’t know what he needed, but because he was having trouble matching what he needed (the cheapest quad-core CPU that meets the recommended requirements for Street Fighter V ) with what Intel was offering (five different obfuscated brands spread out over multiple sockets and architectures). And if you’re building a PC now after having been out of the game for a few years, it can be exceptionally confusing. Around the turn of the millennium you just had Celeron and Pentium. One name meant “cut-down low-end” and one meant “high-end, more features,” and you just bought the fastest one you could reasonably afford. Things got a little more confusing in the Core and Core 2 days (the Core branding continues to survive alongside the Celeron and Pentium brands), but you could at least use names like “Core Solo” and “Core 2 Quad” to guess which architecture and how many cores you were getting. Now there are three separate Core brands, Pentium and Celeron brands, and a long series of letters that you need to know to figure out what CPU you’re getting. It’s been a few years since the last time we demystified Intel’s CPU lineup, and in truth things haven’t changed too much. In broad strokes, the rules are the same. But Intel has introduced and retired a few CPU architectures and brands since then. We’ll run down the basics for both desktops and laptops to help you make some sense of things whether you’re building a computer or buying one from someone else. Read 38 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Report: Siri for Mac will be one of OS X 10.12’s major new features

(credit: Apple) Apple’s Siri personal assistant will finally be coming to OS X 10.12 when the OS is released later this year, according to a report from 9to5Mac . According to the report, a Siri icon will live in the menu bar in the upper-right corner of the screen along with icons for Spotlight, the Notification Center, and other features. Users will also be able to use a keyboard shortcut to bring up Siri, which will be an optional feature that can be enabled during first-time setup or in System Preferences (much as it works in iOS today). Microsoft’s Cortana feature made a similar jump from Windows Phone 8.1 to Windows 10 last year, and Google supports its “OK Google” voice commands in Chrome OS as well. Since launching on the iPhone 4S in 2011, Siri has become a mainstay in most of Apple’s products; it spread to the iPad relatively quickly, it came to the Apple TV when it was refreshed last year, and it’s a primary input method for the Apple Watch. OS X already supports an optional Dictation feature for turning speech into text—in other words, the feature is a natural and long-awaited addition to the Mac platform. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Report: Siri for Mac will be one of OS X 10.12’s major new features

Microsoft kills off Qik, the video messaging service you didn’t know it had

Playing back a conversation, on the Windows Phone version. You’ll be forgiven for having forgotten about Skype Qik, the short video messaging service from Skype that Microsoft launched in October 2014. It offered low friction messaging—no need to create an account, merely having a phone number would do—similar to WhatsApp, SMS, or all sorts of other popular messaging services. Well, now it’s going away. The company says that the major features of Qik have been rolled into the regular Skype apps; video messaging already existed in Skype when Qik was released, and filters were added in October last year. As such, the app isn’t really needed any more, and Qik will stop working on March 24. Skype Qik was a successor to a short video messaging service called Qik that Skype bought in January 2011 for $150 million, just months before Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion. The original Qik service was built around capturing video messages and sharing them with others. It was closed down in April 2014, as Skype introduced its own integrated video messaging capability. In that context, the new Skype Qik was a little strange, as it overlapped strongly with both the previously shuttered service, and the newly-added Skype capabilities. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft kills off Qik, the video messaging service you didn’t know it had

Tiny micro-supercapacitors built directly on a chip

(credit: Drexel University ) Since the tech boom began decades ago, we’ve seen a dramatic transformation of electronics. Today, some technological dreamers are talking about “smart environments” where electronics are seamlessly integrated into our environment, providing comfort and convenience. For these dreams to be achieved, we need to get electronics—not just the chips—miniaturized to the point where sensors can be pervasive. This involves developing high-performance electrochemical storage devices to enable long-lived sensors and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. But efficient miniaturized energy storage devices have proven to be challenging to create; it can be done, but it’s hard to integrate the results with other electronics. Supercapacitors According to an article in Science , an international team of scientists has now reported some progress in this area—specifically with the design of micro-supercapacitors. Supercapacitors are a class of materials that can store energy through accumulation of charge at the surface of a high-surface-area carbon sheet. They typically have a good cycle life, moderate energy density (6 Wh/kg), and high power densities (> 10 kW/kg). Supercapacitors are a great replacement for batteries in applications that require high power delivery and uptake with a very long charge-discharge cycle life; micro-supercapacitors are the same kind of material but much, much smaller. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Tiny micro-supercapacitors built directly on a chip