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Yes, that PC cleanup app you saw on TV at 3 a.m. is a waste

Step one: incite panic. MyCleanPC.com Maybe you’ve seen the ads on the Internet or on TV in the wee hours of the morning. They make lofty promises: get rid of blue screens and error messages! Increase your speed! Clean up your system! But even when these PC cleanup apps aren’t just malware in disguise, the things they’re doing for your PC are often dubious. Many either replicate tasks that can be handled by built-in utilities or do things that could cause more problems than they solve. To highlight just why you and your loved ones should never let these applications anywhere near your PC, we picked one that we’d recently seen ads for: MyCleanPC. It’s the archetypal Windows cleanup app—and you probably shouldn’t install it. Intimidation tactics The standard ad for a PC cleanup app follows the same basic format as this ad from MyCleanPC.com . These ads for PC cleanup products often follow the same basic formula: appeal to people with slow or buggy PCs, throw in a few shots of an operating system that looks kind of like Windows, tack on some “customer testimonials,” and offer a free diagnosis that will make all the problems go away. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Yes, that PC cleanup app you saw on TV at 3 a.m. is a waste

Metamaterials perform image compression before light reaches the sensor

This metamaterial is the aperture of the new microwave imaging device. John Hunt Add image compression to the list of nifty applications for metamaterials. Metamaterials guide light waves to create “ invisibility cloaks ” and bend sound waves to make theoretical noise reduction systems for urban areas. But these materials are tuned to particular wavelengths; some invisibility cloaks don’t work at all visible wavelengths because they leak those wavelengths of light. Now researchers have capitalized on that leakiness to build a new functional device: a microwave imaging system that compresses an image as it’s being collected—not afterward as our digital cameras do. Every pixel in a picture from our digital cameras corresponds to a pixel of information recorded on the detector inside the camera. Once a camera collects all the light intensity information from a scene, it promptly discards some of it and compresses the data into a JPEG file (unless you explicitly tell it to save raw data). You still end up with a decent picture, though, because most of the discarded data was redundant. Compressive sensing aims to ease this process by reducing the amount of data collected in the first place. One way to do this is with a single pixel camera , developed in 2006. These devices capture information from random patterns of pixels around the image, essentially adding the light intensity values of several pixels together. If you know something about the structure of that image—say clusters of bright stars set against a dark sky—you’ll be able to capture that image with fewer measurements than a traditional camera. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Metamaterials perform image compression before light reaches the sensor

Microsoft releases emergency update to patch Internet Explorer bug

Microsoft has released an emergency update to patch a security vulnerability in Internet Explorer that is being exploited in attacks aimed at government contractors and other targeted organizations. The patch fixes a “use after free” bug in versions 6, 7, and 8 of the Microsoft browser and will be automatically installed on affected machines that have automatic updating enabled, Dustin Childs, the Group Manager of the company’s Trustworthy Computing program wrote in a blog post published Monday . The unscheduled release comes just six days after Microsoft’s most recent monthly Patch Tuesday batch of security updates, but it was pushed out to counter an experienced gang of hackers who have infected websites frequented by government contractors to exploit the vulnerability. Monday’s update came hours after Oracle released an unscheduled patch to fix a critical vulnerability in its Java software framework. As Ars reported last week , the zero-day Java exploits were added to a variety of exploit kits that criminals use to turn compromised websites into platforms for silently installing keyloggers and other malware on the machines of unsuspecting visitors. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft releases emergency update to patch Internet Explorer bug

Samsung’s new eight-core Exynos 5 Octa SoC promises not to hog battery

Not to be outdone by Nvidia’s Tegra 4 announcement and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800-series announcement, Samsung took to the stage today to announce the next processor in its Exynos 5 lineup: the Exynos 5 Octa is an eight-core SoC destined for tablets and high-end smartphones. Not all of these CPU cores are created equal: four of them are high-performance Cortex-A15 cores, the very same found in the Exynos 5 Dual that powers the Nexus 10 and Samsung’s ARM Chromebook . The other four are Cortex-A7 CPU cores—these have the same feature set and capabilities as the A15 cores, but are optimized for power efficiency rather than performance. This makes the Exynos 5 Octa one of the first (if not  the first) products to actually use ARM’s big.LITTLE processor switching technology, something we outlined back in October of 2011 . The SoC is designed to dynamically split the workload between the high-performance and the high-efficiency CPU cores based on the task at hand—less strenuous activities like browsing an app store or checking e-mail might be done on the A7 cores, for instance, while gaming and number crunching could be handed off to the A15 cores. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung’s new eight-core Exynos 5 Octa SoC promises not to hog battery

Walmart to sell iPhones with a $45 per month unlimited prepaid plan

Starting this Friday, Walmart will be selling the iPhone for use with wireless provider Straight Talk, which is offering a $45-per-month contract with unlimited voice, data, and texting. This sale will make it one of the cheapest ways —as measured over a two-year period—to get a prepaid iPhone. Walmart says it will offer $25-per-month financing for the phone itself if customers use a Walmart credit card. Straight Talk, which uses AT&T’s towers as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), is becoming an increasingly popular option for prepaid customers who want to use an iPhone without paying high prices. (Full disclosure: I am a Straight Talk customer, and have been since April 2012.) “We believe customers shouldn’t have to choose between saving money and having the latest technology,” said Seong Ohm, senior vice president of Entertainment for Walmart US, said in a statement on Tuesday. “Now customers can have the coveted iPhone with unlimited talk, text, and data without a contract for $70 a month thanks to our exclusive Straight Talk plan and industry first financing offer.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Walmart to sell iPhones with a $45 per month unlimited prepaid plan

Leader of BitTorrent piracy ring sentenced to five years in prison

The leader of the notorious IMAGiNE BitTorrent piracy ring, Jeramiah Perkins, was sentenced on Thursday to five years in prison, the largest sentence for the group’s five top administrators. In August 2012, Perkins pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. After being given the maximum sentence today, Perkins was also ordered to serve three years under “supervised release” and must pay $15,000 in restitution. As we reported in April, the group used infrared and FM receivers and camcorders to capture new releases in movie theaters. In a statement , the Department of Justice cited testimony from the Motion Picture Association of America, calling the group “the most prolific motion picture piracy release group operating on the Internet from September 2009 through September 2011.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Leader of BitTorrent piracy ring sentenced to five years in prison

Apple says Do Not Disturb scheduling is broken until January 8

After reports that iOS 6’s new Do Not Disturb feature stopped resetting according to schedule on New Year’s Day, Apple says scheduling won’t work until next Tuesday, January 8. The Do Not Disturb feature was added to iOS 6 in order to silence what might otherwise be distracting notifications, like those during a meeting or while sleeping. Users can manually turn Do Not Disturb on or off, or can set a scheduled time for Do Not Disturb to kick in automatically and then reset later. For instance, many users set Do Not Disturb to turn on around bedtime and reset the following day. However, users discovered on January 1 that Do Not Disturb did not automatically reset as scheduled. Furthermore, after manually resetting, it wouldn’t engage as scheduled that evening. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple says Do Not Disturb scheduling is broken until January 8

University wins record $1.17 billion verdict against Marvell Semiconductor

flickr / BestBoyZ GmbH A Pittsburgh jury found that hard drive control chips made by Marvell Semiconductor infringe two patents owned by Carnegie Mellon University. Following a four-week trial in federal court, nine jurors unanimously held that Marvell should have to pay $1,169,140,271 in damages—the full sum that CMU’s lawyers had asked for. If the verdict holds up on appeal, it would wipe out more than a year of profits at Marvell, which made a bit over $900 million in 2011. It would also be the largest patent verdict in history, beating out this summer’s $1.05 billion verdict against Samsung for infringing patents and trademarks owned by Apple. The two CMU patents describe a way of reducing “noise” when reading information off hard disks. The jury found that Marvell’s chips infringed claim 4 of Patent No. 6,201,839 and claim 2 of Patent No. 6,438,180 . At trial, Marvell hotly contested that CMU had invented anything new; they argued that a Seagate patent , filed 14 months earlier, describes everything in CMU’s invention. Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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University wins record $1.17 billion verdict against Marvell Semiconductor

“Neuristor”: Memristors used to create a neuron-like behavior

A cartoon showing spikes of activity traveling among neurons. UC Berkeley Computing hardware is composed of a series of binary switches; they’re either on or off. The other piece of computational hardware we’re familiar with, the brain, doesn’t work anything like that. Rather than being on or off, individual neurons exhibit brief spikes of activity, and encode information in the pattern and timing of these spikes. The differences between the two have made it difficult to model neurons using computer hardware. In fact, the recent, successful generation of a flexible neural system required that each neuron be modeled separately in software in order to get the sort of spiking behavior real neurons display. But researchers may have figured out a way to create a chip that spikes. The people at HP labs who have been working on memristors have figured out a combination of memristors and capacitors that can create a spiking output pattern. Although these spikes appear to be more regular than the ones produced by actual neurons, it might be possible to create versions that are a bit more variable than this one. And, more significantly, it should be possible to fabricate them in large numbers, possibly right on a silicon chip. The key to making the devices is something called a Mott insulator. These are materials that would normally be able to conduct electricity, but are unable to because of interactions among their electrons. Critically, these interactions weaken with elevated temperatures. So, by heating a Mott insulator, it’s possible to turn it into a conductor. In the case of the material used here, NbO 2 , the heat is supplied by resistance itself. By applying a voltage to the NbO 2 in the device, it becomes a resistor, heats up, and, when it reaches a critical temperature, turns into a conductor, allowing current to flow through. But, given the chance to cool off, the device will return to its resistive state. Formally, this behavior is described as a memristor. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Neuristor”: Memristors used to create a neuron-like behavior

Sprint offers $2.1 billion to acquire the rest of Clearwire

As most observers  expected , Sprint has finally made a formal offer to acquire the rest of Clearwire. On Thursday, Sprint said it would pay $2.1 billion for the remaining 49.7 percent of Clearwire that it does not currently control. As we reported yesterday , the move is widely seen as a play for Sprint to acquire Clearwire’s valuable 2.5 GHz spectrum, which it would use to offer LTE and strengthen its position against Verizon and AT&T. The bid works out to $2.90 per share—higher than the company’s closing price on Wednesday—but analysts say the offer may not be good enough. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sprint offers $2.1 billion to acquire the rest of Clearwire