Chinese Vendor Could Pay $34.9M FCC Fine In Signal-Jammer Sting

alphadogg writes A Chinese electronics vendor accused of selling signal jammers to U.S. consumers could end up leading the market in one dubious measure: the largest fine ever imposed by the Federal Communications Commission. The agency wants to fine CTS Technology $34, 912, 500 for allegedly marketing 285 models of jammers over more than two years. CTS boldly—and falsely—claimed that some of its jammers were approved by the FCC, according to the agency’s enforcement action released Thursday. Conveniently, CTS’ product detail pages also include a button to “report suspicious activity.” The proposed fine, which would be bigger than any the FCC has levied for anti-competitive behavior, or a wardrobe malfunction, comes from adding up the maximum fines for each model of jammer the company allegedly sold in the U.S. The agency also ordered CTS, based in Shenzhen, China, to stop marketing illegal jammers to U.S. consumers and identify the buyer of each jammer it sold in the U.S. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Chinese Vendor Could Pay $34.9M FCC Fine In Signal-Jammer Sting

Amazon Announces ‘Fire Phone’

Amazon has unveiled the Fire Phone. It runs a modified version of Android, and it will launch exclusively for AT&T’s network. The screen is a 4.7″ IPS LCD (they tested from 4.3″ to 5.5″, and decided 4.7″ worked best for single-hand use), with an emphasis on brightness. It runs on a quad-core 2.2GHz processor with 2GB of RAM, and an Adreno 330 GPU. It has a rear-facing, 13-megapixel camera using an f/2.0 five-element lens with image stabilization. There’s a dedicated physical button on the side of the phone that will turn it on and put it into camera mode when pressed. The phone comes with dual stereo speakers that produce virtual surround sound. Amazon wants the phone to be distinctive for its ability to provide video content, both from a hardware and software perspective. The Fire Phone runs Mayday, Amazon’s live tech support service for devices. They also demonstrated Firefly, software that recognizes physical objects using the phone’s camera, as well as TV shows and songs it hears. It runs quickly, often identifying things in less than a second (and it pulls up an Amazon product listing, of course). It can even recognize art. Firefly has its own dedicated physical button on the phone, and Amazon is providing a Firefly SDK to third parties who want to develop with it. Another major feature of the Fire Phone is what Amazon calls “dynamic perspective.” Using multiple front-facing cameras, the phone tracks the position of a user’s head, and uses that to slightly adjust what’s displayed on the screen so content is easier to see from the new angle. It allows for gesture control of the phone — for example, you can tilt the phone to scroll a web page or move your head slightly look around a 2-D stadium image when browsing for available seats. Putting your thumb on the screen acts like a mute button for the head tracking, so it isn’t confused when you look up from the screen or turn your head to talk to somebody. It’s an impressive piece of software, and they’ve made an SDK available for it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Amazon Announces ‘Fire Phone’

Unisys Phasing Out Decades-Old Mainframe Processor For x86

angry tapir writes: Unisys is phasing out its decades-old mainframe processor. The chip is used in some of Unisys’ ClearPath flagship mainframes, but the company is moving to Intel’s x86 chips in Libra and Dorado servers in the ClearPath line. The aging CMOS chip will be “sunsetted” in Libra servers by the end of August and in the Dorado line by the end of 2015. Dorado 880E and 890E mainframes will use the CMOS chip until the servers are phased out, which is set to happen by the end of 2015. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Unisys Phasing Out Decades-Old Mainframe Processor For x86

IRS Lost Emails of 6 More Employees Under Investigation

phrackthat writes with an update to Friday’s news that the IRS cannot locate two years worth of email from Lois Lerner, a central figure in the controversy surrounding the IRS’s apparent targeting of Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny. Now, the IRS says there are another six workers for whom the agency cannot locate emails. As with Lerner, they attribute the unrecoverable emails to computer crashes. Among them was Nikole Flax, who was chief of staff to Lerner’s boss, then-deputy commissioner Steven Miller. Miller later became acting IRS commissioner, but was forced to resign last year after the agency acknowledged that agents had improperly scrutinized tea party and other conservative groups when they applied for tax-exempt status. Documents have shown some liberal groups were also flagged. … Lerner’s computer crashed in the summer of 2011, depriving investigators of many of her prior emails. Flax’s computer crashed in December 2011, Camp and Boustany said. The IRS said Friday that technicians went to great lengths trying to recover data from Lerner’s computer in 2011. In emails provided by the IRS, technicians said they sent the computer to a forensic lab run by the agency’s criminal investigations unit. But to no avail. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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IRS Lost Emails of 6 More Employees Under Investigation

Cable Boxes Are the 2nd Biggest Energy Users In Many Homes

SpzToid (869795) writes 224 million U.S. cable TV set-top boxes combined consume as much electricity as produced by four giant nuclear reactors, running around the clock. They have become the biggest single energy user in many homes, apart from air conditioning. Cheryl Williamsen, a Los Alamitos architect, has three of the boxes leased from her cable provider in her home, but she had no idea how much power they consumed until recently, when she saw a rating on the back for as much as 500 watts — about the same as a washing machine. A typical set-top cable box with a digital recorder can consume as much as 35 watts of power, costing about $8 a month for a typical Southern California consumer. And the devices use nearly as much power turned off as they do when they are turned on. The article outlines a voluntary industry agreement that should make a dent in this power consumption (it “calls for a power reduction in the range of 10% to 45% by 2017”), but makes the point that much larger gains are possible: “Energy experts say the boxes could be just as efficient as smartphones, laptop computers or other electronic devices that use a fraction of the power thanks to microprocessors and other technology that conserves electricity. Ideally, they say, these boxes could be put into a deep sleep mode when turned off, cutting consumption to a few watts. At that rate, a box could cost less than $1 a month for power, depending on how much it is used.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Cable Boxes Are the 2nd Biggest Energy Users In Many Homes

Artificial Pancreas Shows Promise In Diabetes Test

An anonymous reader writes A cure for Type 1 diabetes is still far from sight, but new research suggests an artificial “bionic pancreas” holds promise for making it much more easily manageable. From the article: “Currently about one-third of people with Type 1 diabetes rely on insulin pumps to regulate blood sugar. They eliminate the need for injections and can be programmed to mimic the natural release of insulin by dispensing small doses regularly. But these pumps do not automatically adjust to the patient’s variable insulin needs, and they do not dispense glucagon. The new device, described in a report in The New England Journal of Medicine, dispenses both hormones, and it does so with little intervention from the patient.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Artificial Pancreas Shows Promise In Diabetes Test

EU, South Korea Collaborate On Superfast 5G Standards

jfruh writes The European Commission and the South Korean government announced that they will be harmonizing their radio spectrum policy in an attempt to help bring 5G wireless tech to market by 2020. While the technology is still in an embryonic state, but one South Korean researcher predicts it could be over a thousand times faster than current 4G networks. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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EU, South Korea Collaborate On Superfast 5G Standards

Microsoft Runs Out of US Address Space For Azure, Taps Its Global IPv4 Stock

alphadogg (971356) writes “Microsoft has been forced to start using its global stock of IPv4 addresses to keep its Azure cloud service afloat in the U.S., highlighting the growing importance of making the shift to IP version 6. The newer version of the Internet Protocol adds an almost inexhaustible number of addresses thanks to a 128-bit long address field, compared to the 32 bits used by version 4. The IPv4 address space has been fully assigned in the U.S., meaning there are no additional addresses available, Microsoft said in a blog post earlier this week. This requires the company to use the IPv4 address space available to it globally for new services, it said.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Runs Out of US Address Space For Azure, Taps Its Global IPv4 Stock

Tesla Releases Electric Car Patents To the Public

mknewman (557587) writes with a welcome followup to the broad hints that Tesla might release some of its patents for others to use patents that it has amassed. Now, Elon Musk writes on the company’s blog: Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology. Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Tesla Releases Electric Car Patents To the Public