TechEye |  |
- Republican politician arrested for Facebook IPO fraud
- Google engineer spills the beans on DRM
- HTC nicked Nokia's power-saving technology
- Adobe's subscription idea pays off
- Nvidia moves into servers
- Nvidia announces more Tegra vapourware
- How Apple and Intel killed Thunderbolt
- Intel delays getting a new CEO
- 3D IC market to see stable growth through 2016
- 3G, 4G USB modems wide open to attack
| Republican politician arrested for Facebook IPO fraud Posted: 20 Mar 2013 03:39 AM PDT A US Republican politician has been arrested and charged with using the Facebook IPO as a Ponzi scam. Craig Berkman, 71, told investors he had access to scarce pre-IPO shares of Facebook and other social media companies such as LinkedIn, Groupon and Zynga. According to an announcement from the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Berkman made "Ponzi-like" payments to earlier investors and funded personal expenses, including costs in a bankruptcy case. US attorney Preet Bharara in Manhattan said that Berkman collected more than $8 million from various schemes by capitalising on the market obsession with Facebook's IPO. He used their gullibility like an ATM to fund his own living expenses and pay court-ordered claims to victims of his past misdeeds. Berkman was arrested at his home in Odessa, Florida, and appeared briefly before a federal magistrate in Tampa. The Manhattan US Attorney's Office charged Berkman with two counts of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud. Each count carries a maximum of 20 years in prison. In one scam more than 50 investors sent $4.6 million into a bank account controlled by a Berkman entity called Ventures Trust II. Berkman told investors the funds would be used to buy pre-IPO shares of Facebook, but instead the "vast majority" was transferred to other accounts Berkman controlled for his own personal benefit. According to Oregon Live, Berkman is a big name in Oregon politics and served for a time as the head of the state's Republican Party. He lost in the Republican primary for governor in 1994, and he explored a bid for governor in the 2002 race. |
| Google engineer spills the beans on DRM Posted: 20 Mar 2013 03:37 AM PDT DRM software is nothing to do with protecting software companies from piracy, a Google engineer has claimed. Writing in his blog, Ian Hickson said that discussions about DRM focus on the fact that it does not work. However, this discussion focuses on faulty logic which claims that the purpose of DRM is to prevent people from copying content while allowing people to view it. Hickson claims that the purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations but to give content providers leverage against creators of playback devices. He said that content providers have leverage against distributors, because distributors can't legally distribute copyrighted material without permission. But if that was the only leverage content producers had, users would obtain their content from those content distributors, and then use third-party content playback systems to read it. In no cases does DRM stop people from violating a copyright and in most cases the only people who are stopped from doing anything are the player providers who are forced to provide a user experience that, rather than being optimised for the users, puts potential future revenues first. For example, they are forced to make people play ads, or build artificial obsolescence into content so that if you change ecosystem, you have to purchase the content again. Hickson said that the fact that DRM doesn't work is missing the point. It is working really well in the video and book space, even if the DRM systems have all been broken. Licensed DVD players still enforce the restrictions and mass market providers can't create unlicensed DVD players, so they remain a black or gray market curiosity. Hickson said that DRM failed in the music space not because DRM is doomed, but because the content providers sold their digital content without DRM, they enabled all kinds of players they didn't expect. Had CDs been encrypted, iPods would not have been able to read their content, because the content providers would have been able to use their DRM contracts as leverage to prevent it. He thinks that DRM's purpose is to give content providers control over software and hardware providers, and it is doing a damn fine job. |
| HTC nicked Nokia's power-saving technology Posted: 20 Mar 2013 03:33 AM PDT A German court has decided that Taiwan's HTC pinched Nokia's power saving technology. Nokia has been having a field day with HTC claiming that it infringed more than 22 of its patents with some of its products. The German courts are the East Texas patent case magnets of Europe and a popular venue for those who own a few patents and want to find a sympathetic court. The former rubber boot maker, Nokia, is reported to be pleased with the decision and said that the patent HTC will have to pay out on refers to a technology for saving battery power while connected to a network. HTC shrugged and said that its German business would not be be affected by the Mannheim regional court's ruling as it covers only three handsets that the company no longer imports into the country. It will appeal the decision while continuing efforts to have the patent declared invalid by the German Federal Patents Court and the English Patents Court. Nokia has asserted the power-saving patent against HTC in the UK and at the United States International Trade Commission. A hearing on that will take place in the United States to start in two months. HTC has paid Apple a bomb to make sure that Cupertino leaves it alone in its thermonuclear patent war against Android. |
| Adobe's subscription idea pays off Posted: 20 Mar 2013 03:22 AM PDT Adobe's moves to get its clients to shift to a subscription model appear to be paying off. The outfit raised its full-year adjusted earnings forecast claiming that more customers chose its subscription-based model than expected. Adobe has been shifting to web-based subscription service Creative Cloud since last year from a traditional licensing model. Edward Jones analyst Josh Olson told Reuters that not only did customers convert to the new business model, the package appeared attractive enough to bring in new business. Creative Cloud enables a customer to subscribe to the company's Creative Suite that includes its popular design titles such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash and Dreamweaver. Adobe said its Creative Cloud has 500,000 paid individual members and free and trial memberships exceeded two million, which the company said could lead to more paid membership. The outfit added about 153,000 net paid subscriptions during the first quarter and that it expects to reach 1.25 million paid subscriptions by the end of this year. The rest of the results were not great but generally better than most people expected, given the current climate. Net income fell to $65.1 million in the first quarter from $185.2 million last year a year earlier. This is still better than Wall Street expected. Total revenue fell four percent to $1 billion due to the transition to the subscription model, but beat analysts' expectation of $986 million. Subscription revenue more than doubled to $224.3 million. Accountants think that the adoption of subscription model tends to lower revenue in the short term as fees are collected monthly, instead of upfront one-time payment. |
| Posted: 20 Mar 2013 02:45 AM PDT Nvidia has taken the wraps off a server product that allows low-end computers to perform graphics-intensive tasks. The move is being seen as a push into new markets as its traditional PC market loses steam. Chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang said the product, called the GRID Virtual Computing Appliance, would give SMEs access to powered up graphics for tasks like image processing without the need for top-tier PCs. Huang claims it is the same as giving all employees a virtual high-end PC under your desk. The system is based on a server rack filled with Intel Xeons, memory chips and several of Nvidia's high-end GPUs. It will be priced starting at $24,900, plus $2,400 a year for a licence and it is not clear how many people that will serve. Nvidia wants HP, IBM and Dell to sell the product to larger companies. Nvidia also announced upcoming Tegra mobile processors, including one codenamed Logan expected to be launched in 2014. Another, codenamed Parker, will be 10 times as powerful as current chips when it is released in 2015. According to Reuters , Huang admitted that Microsoft's launch of its Windows RT operating system last year fell short of his expectations. The Surface brand tablet, which runs Windows RT and uses Nvidia's Tegra processors, has not captured customers' imaginations, he said. Windows RT was disappointing because Nvidia expected it to have sold more than it did. Nvidia also plans in the second quarter to start shipping a hand-held gaming device with its upcoming Tegra 4 processor and a built-in screen. Dubbed Project Shield, the hand-held will run Android games currently found on smartphones and tablets and can also stream video games from PCs. |
| Nvidia announces more Tegra vapourware Posted: 20 Mar 2013 02:43 AM PDT Nvidia unveiled a few interesting products and technologies at the GPU Technology Conference on Tuesday, but its decision to spill the beans on upcoming Tegra chips was probably the most significant announcement. Here is why. Something went wrong and Nvidia was forced to delay the Tegra 4 by at least a quarter. It then went into damage control mode and showed off the Tegra 4i, with a reference phone design in tow. The Tegra 4i is based on the old A9 architecture, but like the Tegra 4 it is a 28nm chip and it has beefier graphics. It also has an integrated LTE modem, which means it should get more phone design wins. Nvidia now appears to be leveraging its GPU design prowess, which is a good thing. Although Nvidia is usually associated with snappy graphics chips, the first three generations of its Tegra SoCs did not offer world beating graphics. In fact they were routinely outperformed by other high end ARM chips, namely Apple’s A-series parts with huge Imagination Technologies graphics cores. Things might be about to change in fourth generation chips and if all goes well, Nvidia might even grab the GPU lead with subsequent generations. |
| How Apple and Intel killed Thunderbolt Posted: 20 Mar 2013 01:45 AM PDT It is starting to look like Intel's and Apple's plan to kill off firewire and USB with Thunderbolt is grinding into a Titanic iceberg. It all seemed too good to be true. Intel and Apple had winning technology which was much faster than anything else on the market. While USB 2.0 was followed by USB 3.0, which allowed data to be transferred at speeds of up to five gigabits per second, Thunderbolt could top that. Thunderbolt was being seen in Apple gear including the MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac Mini and MacBook Air. Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard, Acer and Asus have also developed machines that use Thunderbolt. But that is where the technology ground to a halt. USB 3.0 has become practically universal and appeared in notebooks and desktops from every manufacturer, including Dell, Sony, Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard, Acer and Asus. Apple has sheepishly started adding USB 3.0 to its machines, even while it says that Thunderbolt is superior. Part of the problem is that Intel relied too much on Apple, which had no particular interest in keeping the cost of the products down. This resulted in technology that was far too expensive for most punters to be bothered with. For example, you can pick up a 1TB, USB 3.0-supported hard drive for less than $100 which is nearly half the cost of a 1TB Thunderbolt hard drive. AMD is about to stick its oar in and will probably kill off the Thunderbolt completely. AMD wants to release a low-cost Thunderbolt competitor in 2013 which it has dubbed Lightning Bolt. The technology was unveiled last year and while some argue about its superiority, it does mean that there will be more alternatives to Thunderbolt which are much cheaper. Then there is the news that developers are trying to increase the USB 3.0 transfer speeds from 5Gbps to 10Gbps. If this can be achieved, it will eliminate one of Thunderbolt's key advantages. What Intel and Apple should have done, if they wanted the technology to gain any traction, was to subsidise the early work on Thunderbolt until it had a market presence. But Apple was too keen to make an outrageous mark up on Thunderbolt peripherals which only its limited fanbase was stupid enough to pay for. As a result, Thunderbolt is going to be as dead as a dodo as a flood of cheaper technology hits the market and Apple and Intel will be left with nothing for their efforts. |
| Intel delays getting a new CEO Posted: 20 Mar 2013 01:43 AM PDT Chipzilla has decided that there is no hurry getting itself a nice shiny new CEO, according to the strokers of beards and people in the know at analyst outfit Piper Jaffray. Paul Otellini is being put out to pasture in mid-May and the debate has so far been about if he is to be replaced by an insider or an outsider. But Piper Jaffray believes the decision on a new chief has been delayed, something it thinks is jolly silly. In a research note, Piper Jaffray analyst Gus Richard wrote that Intel needs a new CEO fast to take it beyond the traditional PC market and boldly go where no chip maker has gone before. Part of the problem is not that the chipmaker can’t find anyone to rule them but they have some rather good candidates and cannot decide. Richard claims that Intel has narrowed down CEO candidates to two internal and one external, but the final decision appears to be slipping. According to CNET, Intel has narrowed the search to Brian Krzanich, Intel executive vice president and chief operating officer, Dadi Perlmutter, executive vice president and general manager of the Intel Architecture Group and chief product officer of Intel, and Sanjay Jha, former CEO of Motorola Mobility. Richard wishes that the Intel airheads would hurry up and decide because the outfit needs to make some major decisions about future businesses, such as contract manufacturing. Chipzilla said that it wants to have a replacement by the time CEO Paul Otellini retires in mid-May, meaning the company could be in limbo for two months and the pole is getting lower all the time. Intel spokesperson Chuck Mulloy insists that the process is under way and there are no glitches. So far no white smoke has been seen on the roof of Intel HQ. Richard points out that without a CEO, Intel is a rudderless ship driven more by external forces than internal decisions. Chipzilla needs to work out fast if the company will licence ARM and improve its ability to be a foundry. Any major decision like this will have to wait for a new CEO. The fact that the decision looks to be delayed is not a positive sign. Some analysts, and the media, are trying to talk up Intel as a chip foundry and seem desperate, against all evidence, that it should be selling chips to Apple. |
| 3D IC market to see stable growth through 2016 Posted: 19 Mar 2013 08:27 AM PDT The global 3D integrated circuit market is forecast to grow by 19.7 percent between 2012 and 2016, with the major growth driver being strong demand for memory products, particularly flash memory and DRAM. 3D integrated circuits help improve the performance and reliability of memory chips, and as an added benefit the resulting chips are smaller and cheaper. However, chips based on 3D circuits face thermal conductivity problems which might pose a challenge to further growth. According to Infiniti Research, the biggest 3D IC vendors at the moment are Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE), Samsung., STMicroelectronics and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC). IBM, Elpida, Intel and Micron are also working on products based on 3D ICs. Intel was a 3D IC pioneer and it demoed a 3D version of the Pentium 4 back in 2004. The overly complicated chip offered slight performance and efficiency improvements over the 2D version of the chip, which really isn't saying much since Prescott-based Pentium 4s were rubbish. The focus then shifted on memory chips and some academic implementations of 3D processors, but progress has been relatively slow, hence any growth is more than welcome. |
| 3G, 4G USB modems wide open to attack Posted: 19 Mar 2013 08:18 AM PDT A couple of Russian security researchers have found that the majority of 3G and 4G USB modems handed out by mobile operators to unsuspecting customers are wide open to attacks. Macworld Australia reports the researchers tested multiple 3G and 4G sticks obtained from Russian telcos over the past few months and concluded that they pose a serious security threat. Most USB modems are produced by Chinese hardware makers Huawei and ZTE, and they are sold across the world with different mobile operators' stickers on top. Sadly though, researchers Nikita Tarakanov and Oleg Kupreev could not test baseband attacks against Qualcomm chips used in the modems because in Putin's Russia it is illegal to own your own GSM base station, unless you are an intelligence agency or a telecom operator. Since practically all Russian oligarchs, politicians and crime bosses have a KGB background, we are rather surprised to see this limitation enforced. In other words, there is still a lot of research to be done, but Tarakanov and Kupreev have already managed to demonstrate multiple ways of attacking the modems through software flaws. Since many modems are identical, their software is very similar and it is possible to make an image of the modem's file system, modify it and save it back on the modem. Tarakanov said this is surprisingly easy to do using free tools available from Huawei and other manufacturers. Malware can easily detect the type of modem used and hijack it with malicious customisations of the code. The configuration files, which are also found on the modem, are in plain text and they are easy to modify. Attackers can simply reroute traffic to their servers and redefine DNS servers used for the internet connection. They can also tinker with custom configuration drives in such a way that the modems install malware instead of an antivirus program. In addition, most modems are configured to automatically receive software updates from a single server. An attacker could potentially compromise the update server and take over heaps of modems handed out by multiple carriers. Worse, Tarakanov said he did not even look for vulnerabilities in the actual modem drivers installed in the OS, but he is quite confident that they have vulnerabilities as well. |
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