Tag: reprints

Sharp says there is “material doubt” over its corporate survival

Sharp , the century-old stalwart of Japanese electronics, is in deep trouble . On Thursday, the company said it sustained a ¥249.1 billion ($3.12 billion) loss for its latest quarter, the second year it had suffered record deficits. The company still has about $10 billion of debt. “As operating and net loss for the six months ended September 30, 2012 were huge, continuing from the previous year, cash flows from operating activities were negative,” the company wrote in its quarterly earnings report (PDF). Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sharp says there is “material doubt” over its corporate survival

First look: Pandora 4.0, the new mobile frontier

Enlarge / Pandora 4.0: the new look Pandora Here comes Pandora 4.0, a big remake of the music service’s mobile listening environment. If you are a Pandora fan, get ready for expanded playlist, station-making, lyric-reading, personal profile, and social networking power on your smartphone. The new service creates a “unifying” experience across web and mobile devices, the company proclaims. It also represents about six or seven years of planning, thinking, and development for the outfit. Back in 2005, iPhone and Android mobile gadgets were gleams in the eye of Apple and Google. Pandora, however, was transforming radio and music distribution with its sophisticated “genome” powered song recommendation algorithm. Millions of users were clicking thumbs up or down to millions of tunes on, well, millions of Pandora channels. By 2007, Pandora was a huge hit. It was, however, mostly a desktop computer hit. “We started thinking about creating a mobile service in 2004,” Pandora CTO Tom Conrad told us in an interview. “We wanted to unify the Pandora experience.” That meant an experience that was easy from the start, that allowed users to individualize their environment and get more of what they wanted, and that was “ubiquitously available.” Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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First look: Pandora 4.0, the new mobile frontier

Facebook tries cloaking probe into data leak involving 1 million accounts

Facebook officials told a blogger to keep their discussions with him private as they investigate claims he acquired names and e-mail addresses belonging almost one million account holders for $5 through a publicly available service online. “Oh and by the way, you are not allowed to disclose any part of this conversation,” member’s of Facebook’s platform policy team said during a tape-recorded telephone conversation, according to a blog post published by Bogomil Shopov, who describes himself as a “community and technology geek” who lives in Prague, Czech Republic. “It is a secret that we are even having this conversation.” Shopov said Facebook officials set up the conversation after an earlier blog post claiming he purchased data for one million Facebook users online for just $5. The blogger said it was impossible for him to determine exactly how recent the data was, although several of the entries he checked contained accurate e-mail addresses for people he knew. In addition to containing names and e-mail addresses, the cache he purchased also contained profile IDs. In an e-mail to Ars, Shopov said he suspects the data came from a third-party developer. The website selling the information has since removed the post that advertised the data, but for the time being it’s still available in Google cache . Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Facebook tries cloaking probe into data leak involving 1 million accounts

IBM prepares for end of process shrinks with carbon nanotube transistors

Carbon nanotubes sit on top of features etched in silicon. IBM Research The shrinking size of features on modern processors is slowly approaching a limit where the wiring on chips will only be a few atoms across. As this point approaches, both making these features and controlling the flow of current through them becomes a serious challenge, one that bumps up against basic limits of materials. During my visit to IBM’s Watson Research Center, it was clear that people in the company is already thinking about what to do when they run into these limits. For at least some of them, the answer would involve a radical departure from traditional chipmaking approaches, swithching from traditional semiconductors to carbon nanotubes. And, while I was there, the team was preparing a paper (now released by Nature Nanotechnology ) that would report some significant progress: a chip with 10,000 working transistors made from nanotubes, formed at a density that’s two orders of magnitude higher than any previously reported effort. During my visit to Watson, I spoke with George Tulevski, who is working on the nanotube project, and is one of the authors of the recent paper. Tulevski described nanotbues as a radical rethinking of how you build a chip. “Silicoon is a solid you carve down,” he told Ars, “while nanoubes are something you have to build up.” In other words, you can’t start with a sheet of nanotubes and etch them until you’re left with the wiring you want. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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IBM prepares for end of process shrinks with carbon nanotube transistors

Cisco machine gets listed by blackhat org that rents out hacked PCs

Enlarge KrebsonSecurity.com A computer running inside the corporate network of Cisco Systems is one of about 17,000 machines that is being rented out to online miscreants looking to get a foothold inside Fortune 500 companies, according to a published report. The Windows Server 2003 system uses Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol so it can be remotely accessed by anyone with the login credentials. It’s listed on Dedicatexpress.com, a service that allows anyone in the world to access hacked computers at specific organizations, KrebsonSecurity reported . Remarkably, the username for the box is “Cisco” and the corresponding password is—you guessed it—”Cisco.” “Businesses often turn on RDP for server and desktop systems that they wish to use remotely, but if they do so using a username and password that is easily guessed, those systems will soon wind up for sale on services like this one,” reporter Brian Krebs wrote. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cisco machine gets listed by blackhat org that rents out hacked PCs