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Nvidia seeks peace with Linux, pledges help on open source driver

Will Nvidia give Linus a reason to lower his finger? aaltouniversityace Few companies have been the target of as much criticism in the Linux community as Nvidia. Linus Torvalds himself last year called Nvidia the ” single worst company ” Linux developers have ever worked with, giving the company his middle finger in a public talk. Nvidia is now trying to get on Linux developers’ good side. Yesterday, Nvidia’s Andy Ritger e-mailed developers of Nouveau, an open source driver for Nvidia cards that is built by reverse engineering Nvidia’s proprietary drivers. Ritger wrote that “NVIDIA is releasing public documentation on certain aspects of our GPUs, with the intent to address areas that impact the out-of-the-box usability of NVIDIA GPUs with Nouveau. We intend to provide more documentation over time, and guidance in additional areas as we are able.” The first step was releasing documentation of the Device Control Block (DCB) layout in Nvidia’s VBIOS, describing the board’s topology and display connectors. Ritger continued: Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Nvidia seeks peace with Linux, pledges help on open source driver

Blackberry warns of near-$1 billion loss this quarter

Blackberry released a statement on Friday saying that it expects to report an operating loss of almost $1 billion in the coming days. According to The Wall Street Journal , Blackberry overestimated the number of new phones it would sell and is facing an “inventory charge of as much as $960 million and a restructuring charge of $72 million.” Specifically, the company said that it would likely report a loss of $950 million to $995 million for the second quarter. Earlier this week we reported that Blackberry was planning to lay off up to 40 percent of its employees, taking the company from 12, 700 full-time employees to about 7, 620 employees. The WSJ reported today that 4, 500 people will be laid off, lower than earlier estimates. (Is that a silver lining we see?) The Canadian company also reported today that it only sold 3.7 million smartphones in the last quarter, most of which were older phones. To stem the bleeding, Blackberry said that going forward, its “smartphone portfolio will transition from 6 devices to 4; focusing on enterprise and prosumer-centric devices, including 2 high-end devices and 2 entry-level devices.” As Quartz writer Christopher Mims wrote , it’s probably too late for Blackberry to turn around its share of the enterprise market given the latest moves made by Apple and Samsung to get their hardware into the hands of businesspeople. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Blackberry warns of near-$1 billion loss this quarter

Apple releases iOS 7.0.1 update to fix fingerprint scanner

The new iPhone 5S is out and normal folks are getting their fingerprints all over it—exactly what Apple intended with the inclusion of the fingerprint scanner. However, early reviews have included the occasional note that the fingerprint scanner’s ability to enable iTunes purchases didn’t quite work correctly—the iPhone 5S would prompt for a password instead of simply accepting the fingerprint. To address this, Apple has issued an update to iOS 7 for the iPhone 5S (and also for the 5C, though it’s unclear what else the update addresses). Several other outlets are reporting that the update is only 17.5MB, but when I checked via iTunes on my fresh-from-the-box iPhone 5S, I got a download that was 1.39GB in size. We’ll have our full iPhone 5s review up as soon as possible, along with video showing off how the new devices (and their new cameras) work. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

The new lifecycle of your old iPhone

Clifford Joseph Kozak After handling the entire digital expression of your life for one, two, or more years, the most mercenary and practical end that a smartphone can meet is to be sold off secondhand. Wheeling and dealing with used personal electronics is not a new business, but in the last few years, it’s been writ very large with the glut of tiny hand-computers we’re all using lately. Where those devices go after you sell them into wanting hands (Gazelle and NextWorth are two services that make their business on these transactions) has shifted a bit over the years. In the early days of the iPhone, companies were built on the activity of breaking down old iPhones into parts for repairing those still in use (or so some of the shadier companies claimed). Per a report in the New York Times back in 2008, one company named PCS Wireless claimed that 94-95 percent of the second-hand phones it obtained were broken down into parts. The source claimed at the time that the screens alone could fetch $200. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The new lifecycle of your old iPhone

Intel’s Atom CPUs finally get serious with the new Bay Trail architecture

Intel News from a certain other company has overshadowed the 2013 Intel Developer Forum a bit this week, but Intel is hardly sitting still. For well over a year now, the company has been intensifying its efforts in the mobile space, first with Android phones and later with both Windows and Android tablets. The chips the company has been using to make these strides into mobile have all used the Atom branding, which has come a long way since its inclusion in the low-rent netbooks of years past. Chips like Clover Trail and Clover Trail+ have proven that an Intel phone’s battery life can hang with ARM chips from companies like Qualcomm and Nvidia, even if their performance sometimes leaves something to be desired. Now, Intel is ready to take the next step. We’ve talked about its next-generation Atom system-on-a-chip (SoC) for tablets (codenamed Bay Trail ) before, and at IDF this week the company finally announced specific Bay Trail SKUs and devices that will include the chips when they ship later this year. Read 25 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel’s Atom CPUs finally get serious with the new Bay Trail architecture

Fingerprints as passwords: New iPhone Touch ID gets mixed security verdict (Updated)

Chad Miller Of all the new features of Apple’s new iPhone 5S , few have drawn more attention than the built-in fingerprint scanner known as Touch ID. Apple billed it as an “innovative way to simply and securely unlock your phone with just the touch of a finger.” More breathless accounts were calling it a potential ” death knell for passwords ” or using similarly overblown phrases . Until the new phones are in the hands of skilled hackers and security consultants, we won’t know for sure if Touch ID represents a step forward from the security and privacy offered by today’s iPhones. I spent several hours parsing the limited number of details provided by Apple and speaking to software and security engineers. I found evidence both supporting and undermining the case that the fingerprint readers are an improvement. The thoughts that follow aren’t intended to be a final verdict—the proof won’t be delivered until we see how the feature works in the real world. The pros I’ll start with the encouraging evidence. Apple said Touch ID is powered by a laser-cut sapphire crystal and a capacitive touch sensor that is able to take a high-resolution image based on the sub-epidermal layers of a user’s skin. While not definitive, this detail suggests Apple engineers may have designed a system that is not susceptible to casual attacks. If the scans probe deeply enough, for instance, Touch ID probably wouldn’t be tricked by the type of clones that are generated from smudges pulled off a door knob or computer monitor. In 2008, hackers demonstrated just how easy it was to create such clones when they published more than 4, 000 pieces of plastic film containing the fingerprint of a German politician who supported the mandatory collection of citizens’ unique physical characteristics. By slipping the foil over their own fingers, critics were able to mimic then-Interior Minister Wolfgang Schauble’s fingerprint when touching certain types of biometric readers. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Fingerprints as passwords: New iPhone Touch ID gets mixed security verdict (Updated)

Virtual Perfection: Why 8K resolution per eye isn’t enough for perfect VR

So you want me to squeeze two 8K displays into this space? No problem! Give me a decade or so… “Without going into a rant, the term ‘Retina Display’ is garbage, I think.” Palmer Luckey, the founder and creator of the Oculus Rift, is a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to creating the best possible virtual reality experience. So when our recent interview turned toward the ideal future for a head-mounted display—a theoretical “perfect” device that delivers everything he could ever dream of—he did go on a little rant about what we currently consider “indistinguishable” pixels. “There is a point where you can no longer distinguish individual pixels, but that does not mean that you cannot distinguish greater detail, ” he said. “You can still see aliasing on lines on a retina display. You can’t pick out the pixels, but you can still see the aliasing. Let’s say you want to have an image of a piece of hair on the screen. You can’t make it real-size… it would still look jaggy and terrible. There’s a difference between where you can’t see pixels and where you can’t make improvements.” Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Virtual Perfection: Why 8K resolution per eye isn’t enough for perfect VR

California poised to implement first electronic license plates

Advocates say that electronic license plates can be used to display messages, like EXPIRED. Compliance Innovations This week, the California State Senate approved a bill that would create the nation’s first electronic license plate. Having already passed the state’s assembly, the bill now goes to Gov. Jerry Brown (D) for his signature. The idea is that rather than have a static piece of printed metal adorned with stickers to display proper registration, the plate would be a screen that could wirelessly (likely over a mobile data network) receive updates from a central server to display that same information. In an example shown by a South Carolina vendor, messages such as “STOLEN, ” “EXPIRED, ” or something similar could also be displayed on a license plate. The bill’s language says that for now, the program would be limited to a “pilot program” set to be completed no later than January 1, 2017. Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Sudden spike of Tor users likely caused by one “massive” botnet

Tor Project Researchers have found a new theory to explain the sudden spike in computers using the Tor anonymity network: a massive botnet that was recently updated to use Tor to communicate with its mothership. Mevade.A, a network of infected computers dating back to at least 2009, has mainly used standard Web-based protocols to send and receive data to command and control (C&C) servers, according to researchers at security firm Fox-IT. Around the same time that Tor Project leaders began observing an unexplained doubling in Tor clients , Mevade overhauled its communication mechanism to use anonymized Tor addresses ending in .onion. In the week that has passed since Tor reported the uptick, the number of users has continued to mushroom. “The botnet appears to be massive in size as well as very widespread, ” a Fox-IT researcher wrote in a blog post published Thursday . “Even prior to the switch to Tor, it consisted of tens of thousands of confirmed infections within a limited amount of networks. When these numbers are extrapolated on a per country and global scale, these are definitely in the same ballpark as the Tor users increase.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sudden spike of Tor users likely caused by one “massive” botnet

Meet the new hotness: All-in-one 3D printers and scanners

Meet Radiant Fabrication’s Lionhead Bunny. Radiant Fabrication We’ve told you about inexpensive 3D printers. We’ve reported on the first two 3D scanners. And recently, Ars editor Lee Hutchinson took two 3D printers for a spin to reveal what he called a “ maddening journey into another dimension .” But get ready to set aside those old-timey devices—enter the all-in-one 3D printers and scanners . This week, two companies have each announced their own all-in-one 3D printer and scanner. On Tuesday, Radiant Fabrication trumpeted the Lionhead Bunny, a $1, 649 device that the company will make available starting next month (though it appears to be dependent on the success of its forthcoming Kickstarter campaign). In a statement released with its announcement, Radiant Fabrication wrote: Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Meet the new hotness: All-in-one 3D printers and scanners

Ken May

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