The consumer gaming world might be in a tizzy about 4K consoles and displays of late, but that resolution standard wasn’t nearly enough for one team of PC tinkerers. The folks over at Linus Tech Tips have posted a very entertaining video showing off a desktop PC build capable of running (some) games at an astounding 16K resolution. That’s a 15260×8640, for those counting the over 132 million pixels being pushed every frame—64 times the raw pixel count of a standard 1080p display and 16 times that of a 4K display. The key to the build is four Quadro P5000 video cards provided by Nvidia. While each card performs similarly to a consumer-level GTX1080 (8.9 teraflops, 2560 parallel cores), these are pro-tier cards designed for animators and other high-end graphic work, often used for massive jumbotrons and other multi-display or multi-projector installations. The primary difference between Quadro and consumer cards is that these come with 16GB of video RAM. Unfortunately, the multi-display Mosaic technology syncing the images together means that mirrored memory doesn’t stack, leading to the rig’s most significant bottleneck. All told, the graphics cards alone would cost over $10,000, including a “quadrosync” card that ties them all together to run a single image across 16 displays. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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London police arrest four in Windows support scam bust
Enlarge / Customers of the telecommunications and Internet provider TalkTalk are among those who have been targeted in a Windows support scam operation in the UK. London Police announced the arrest of four suspected of involvement with the ring today. (credit: Carl Court/Getty Images) City of London Police, collaborating with Microsoft, have made four arrests as the result of a two-year investigation into rings of “Windows support” fraudsters. The arrests, London Police Commander Dave Clark told the press, “are just the beginning of our work, making the best use of specialist skills and expertise from Microsoft, local police forces, and international partners to tackle a crime that often targets the most vulnerable in our society.” The four suspects—a man and woman working together in Surrey, and another couple working from South Shields, Tyneside, are accused of being involved with a scheme operating out of a call center in India. Their role in the scams is not clear. The scam, similar to the one Ars intercepted in January , seeks to convince would-be victims to install remote-access software on their computers and then to set up recurring credit card billing for technical support or anti-virus software. In these cases, the scammers often posed as employees of the UK Internet service providers BT and TalkTalk, saying that they had been authorized by Microsoft to provide technical support. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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London police arrest four in Windows support scam bust
Google’s new algorithm shrinks JPEG files by 35 percent
For obvious reasons, Google has a vested interest in reducing the time it takes to load websites and services. One method is reducing the file size of images on the internet, which they previously pulled off with the WebP format back in 2014, which shrunk photos by 10 percent. Their latest development in this vein is Guetzli , an open-source algorithm that encodes JPEGs that are 35 percent smaller than currently-produced images. As Google points out in its blog post, this reduction method is similar to their Zopfli algorithm that shrinks PNG and gzip files without needing to create a new format. RNN-based image compression like WebP, on the other hand, requires both client and ecosystem to change to see gains at internet scale. If you want to get technical, Guetzli (Swiss German for “cookie”) targets the quantization stage of image compression, wherein it trades visual quality for a smaller file size. Its particular psychovisual model (yes, that’s a thing ) “approximates color perception and visual masking in a more thorough and detailed way than what is achievable” in current methods. The only tradeoff: Guetzli takes a little longer to run than compression options like libjpeg. Despite the increased time, Google’s post assures that human raters preferred the images churned out by Guetzli. Per the example below, the uncompressed image is on the left, libjpeg-shrunk in the center and Guetzli-treated on the right. Source: Google Research Blog
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Google’s new algorithm shrinks JPEG files by 35 percent
How The FBI Used Geek Squad To Increase Secret Public Surveillance
In 2011 a gynecology doctor took his computer for repairs at Best Buy’s Geek Squad. But the repair technician was a paid FBI informant — one of several working at Geek Squad — and the doctor was ultimately charged with possessing child pornography, according to OC Weekly. An anonymous reader quotes their new report: Recently unsealed records reveal a much more extensive secret relationship than previously known between the FBI and Best Buy’s Geek Squad, including evidence the agency trained company technicians on law-enforcement operational tactics, shared lists of targeted citizens and, to covertly increase surveillance of the public, encouraged searches of computers even when unrelated to a customer’s request for repairs. Assistant United States Attorney M. Anthony Brown last year labeled allegations of a hidden partnership as “wild speculation.” But more than a dozen summaries of FBI memoranda filed inside Orange County’s Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse this month in USA v. Mark Rettenmaier contradict the official line… Other records show how [Geek Squad supervisor Justin] Meade’s job gave him “excellent and frequent” access for “several years” to computers belonging to unwitting Best Buy customers, though agents considered him “underutilized” and wanted him “tasked” to search devices “on a more consistent basis”… evidence demonstrates company employees routinely snooped for the agency, contemplated “writing a software program” specifically to aid the FBI in rifling through its customers’ computers without probable cause for any crime that had been committed, and were “under the direction and control of the FBI.” The doctor’s lawyer argues Best Buy became an unofficial wing of the FBI by offering $500 for every time they found evidence leading to criminal charges. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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How The FBI Used Geek Squad To Increase Secret Public Surveillance
99.6% of new smartphones run iOS or Android; RIP Windows and Blackberry
Enlarge (credit: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images) Remember those crazy days in 2011 and 12 when we thought that the mobile market might become a three-horse race between Android, iOS, and Windows Mobile, with Blackberry bringing up the rear? Well, I have bad if unsurprising news: by the end of last year, 99.6 percent of all new smartphones ran either Android or iOS—a return to the status quo that Ars first wrote about way back in 2009 . According to the latest figures from Gartner , both Android and iOS expanded their share of the market in 2016, while sales of Windows and Blackberry continued their free fall to the base of the cliff. Gartner, a research company that derives its figures from a range of sources, says that just 1.1 million Windows smartphones were sold in Q4 2016, down from 4.4 million in Q4 2015. Similarly, Blackberry device sales fell from 906,000 to 208,000. The action at the top of the sales table, between Apple and Samsung, was a little more exciting. For the first time since Q4 2014 Apple has apparently retaken pole position from Samsung, with 77 million iPhones shifted last quarter versus 76.8 million units for the Korean chaebol. Samsung still shipped the most smartphones over the course of 2016, but its share of the market decreased from 22.5 percent to 20.5. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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99.6% of new smartphones run iOS or Android; RIP Windows and Blackberry
Google Brain super-resolution image tech makes “zoom, enhance!” real
(credit: Google Brain) Google Brain has devised some new software that can create detailed images from tiny, pixelated source images. Google’s software, in short, basically means the “zoom in… now enhance!” TV trope is actually possible. (credit: Google Brain) First, take a look at the image on the right. The left column contains the pixelated 8×8 source images, and the centre column shows the images that Google Brain’s software was able to create from those source images. For comparison, the real images are shown in the right column. As you can see, the software seemingly extracts an amazing amount of detail from just 64 source pixels. Of course, as we all know, it’s impossible to create more detail than there is in the source image—so how does Google Brain do it? With a clever combination of two neural networks. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Google Brain super-resolution image tech makes “zoom, enhance!” real
These Ultra Close-Up Images of Saturn’s Rings Are Mind-Blowing
Though NASA’s Cassini spacecraft is sadly nearing the end of its mission, the brave li’l orbiter is putting on quite the grand finale . Cassini, which is currently in its ring-grazing phase around Saturn, has just sent back some stunning images of the gas giant’s many rings. Read more…
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These Ultra Close-Up Images of Saturn’s Rings Are Mind-Blowing
Etcher Is the Easiest Way to Make a Raspberry Pi SD Card
Windows/Mac/Linux: While it’s gotten easier over the years to make a Raspberry Pi SD card, it’s still a little confusing for people new to the idea of burning images. Etcher is a cross-platform tool that simplifies the process dramatically. Read more…
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Etcher Is the Easiest Way to Make a Raspberry Pi SD Card
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft sent photos of Saturn’s north pole
As Cassini winds down its 20-year mission to Saturn, the spacecraft will maneuver into a series of weeklong orbits, allowing it to get a closer look at the planet’s famous rings as it flies by. Although there are still a few days before Cassini grazes Saturn’s rings, its cameras have already sent back some initial shots of some interesting features near the planet’s northern hemisphere. The images below, for example, show the same view of a hexagonal-shaped jetstream over the planet’s north pole , as seen from about 400, 000 miles above the planet and through four different spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of light ranging from violet to infrared. (The curved lines you see beyond the edge of the planet are the rings, of course.) Although the images Cassini sends back are relatively small — just 256 by 256 pixels square in their original format — NASA calculated that each pixel represents about 95 miles of space and each side of the jetstream is about as wide as Earth itself. Cassini will pass by the outer edges of the planet’s rings on December 11 and it should start sending back images of the rings themselves a few days later. After that, Cassini will continue circling Saturn until April 22, when it will get a closer look at the moon Titan and another orbital adjustment in the process. That final orbit will swing the spacecraft back between the planet and its rings 22 more times before it finally takes a dive into the atmosphere and loses signal around September 15, 2017.
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NASA’s Cassini spacecraft sent photos of Saturn’s north pole
Satellite Images Show the Extent of Puerto Rico’s Huge Blackout
Earlier this week, a fire at a power plant in Puerto Rico set off a series of failures across the island’s aging electrical grid. These before-and-after pics from space show what it looks like when 1.5 million customers suddenly lose power. Read more…
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Satellite Images Show the Extent of Puerto Rico’s Huge Blackout