Thursday, March 21, 2013

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Samsung wants to kill Taiwan

Posted: 21 Mar 2013 04:43 AM PDT

Samsung is taking a page out of the Chinese communist playbook, as it apparently wants to kill Taiwanese competitors like Hon Hai and TSMC.

According to Business Today magazine, Samsung's top policy makers decided to adopt the "kill Taiwan" strategy after the 2008 crisis. The two prime targets for Samsung's onslaught are TSMC, the world's largest foundry for hire, and Hon Hai, which is basically the name Foxconn uses when it doesn't want people to talk about overworked workers leaping to their deaths from sweatshop dorms.

An industry expert told Focus Taiwan that going after Hon Hai doesn't make much sense, as the company is not in direct competition with Samsung. In fact, the two companies could even step up their cooperation this year. In some circles Samsung's decision to invest in Sharp is viewed as an effort to undermine Taiwanese hardware makers, by creating a new axis of evil which would include Samsung, Sharp and Hon Hai.

Hon Hai was apparently aware of the Sharp deal ahead of time, but did not wish to comment, and neither did TSMC. In fact, TSMC seems more at risk than Hon Hai, as Samsung is aggressively expanding its contract chip manufacturing business.

Coincidentally, Hon Hai and Sharp are Apple partners and TSMC is also expected to land an order from Apple to build next generation A-series application processors. 

South Korea cyber attack traced back to China

Posted: 21 Mar 2013 04:15 AM PDT

South Korean investigators have traced back Wednesday's cyber attack that crippled the country's banking system to Chinese servers. Although Chinese IP addresses were used in the attack, North Korea remains the prime suspect.

IP addresses can be manipulated and there is a chance that the attackers were merely hiding behind Chinese servers. South Korea has accused the North of launching massive cyber attacks in the past, and the general consensus among observers is that it is behind the latest attack. The attack disabled close to 32,000 computers used by three banks and three media outlets. Regulators believe the attack originated from a single organisation.

The attack came amid high tensions in the Korean peninsula and it represents an escalation of North Korean rhetoric. A few weeks ago North Korea carried out its third nuclear test and it made numerous threats against South Korea and US interests in the region. On Wednesday North Korea said it would attack US bases in Okinawa and Guam if provoked, reports Reuters. Since it doesn't not take much to provoke Kim Jong-un, the US better watch its step in the Pacific.

North Korea also used the opportunity to tell the world that it now has drones of its own. The state news agency reported that its glorious armed forces carried out a mock drone attack on the South, staged for Kim Jong-un's viewing pleasure. The drones went on to complete the mission and deliver a super-precision attack on enemy targets. On the same day, a missile defence unit successfully shot down a target that mimicked a Tomahawk cruise missile.

Needless to say, the reports cannot be independently confirmed, but our guess is that Pentagon analysts find them quite amusing. 

Lone rodent blamed for Fukushima nuclear disaster

Posted: 21 Mar 2013 03:36 AM PDT

Tepco, the operator of the ill-fated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant might have found the culprit responsible for the plant’s partial meltdown and it has four legs and a wiggly tail. 

Of course, the disaster was caused by an earthquake, followed by a  massive tsunami, but it was preventable. The plant experienced an extended blackout that disabled its cooling systems, causing multiple reactors to overheat, suffer partial meltdowns and release enough radiation to create more than five Godzillas.

Now, it seems the unfortunate power outage might have been caused by an equally unfortunate rat, who found his way into a switchboard, caused a short circuit and was promptly dispatched to Rat Heck. Engineers found the rat’s body inside a faulty switchboard, and discovered that he’d been gnawing away at the wires when he met his maker.

Tepco had previously blamed the faulty switchboard for the power failure. The outage cut off the flow of cooling water to four pools used to store more than 8,800 spent fuel rods. It took the company almost two days to restore cooling to the pools. Sadly, efforts to cool down the reactors weren’t as successful.

Now it seems that a single rat might have contributed to the biggest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, which seems like an improvement, as the Chernobyl disaster was completely avoidable. It was caused by Soviet paranoia and general stupidity. Someone in the chain of command conveniently forgot to tell reactor operators that lowering graphite tipped control rods in RMBK reactors can cause a brief power surge when reinserted into the core. The same phenomenon was observed at the Ignalina nuke plant a couple of years earlier, but nobody got the memo, leaving large chunks of Belarus and Ukraine irradiated and uninhabitable. 

Clearly, the world has made a lot of progress over the past three decades: instead of blaming pinko commies for nuclear tragedies we've moved onto rodents. The rat did it.

The fact that the Fukushima Daiichi plant was built on the coast and that its cleverly designed redundant generators were all flooded in a matter of minutes probably had nothing to do with the disaster at all. 

Why in the name of Jobs did Apple hire Kevin Lynch?

Posted: 21 Mar 2013 03:06 AM PDT

This week Apple made the surprise announcement that it was hiring its long running enemy Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch as vice president of technology.

Industry watchers who have been following Cupertino's antics to kill off Flash on the internet were surprised.

Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was public in his condemnation of Flash as a tool for rich-content playback and blamed it for breaking his beloved iPhone. In April 2010, he posted on Apple's website that Flash was flawed with regard to battery life, security, reliability and performance.

Jobs wrote that he had routinely asked Adobe to show him Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, but the company couldn't manage it.

Much of Adobe's public relations pushback to Apple's criticism came from Lynch. It was his idea to have a corporate video shot for an Adobe developer conference in 2009 where he ran over an iPhone over with a steamroller. Until 2010 he was going on record saying that Flash was superior to HTML5.

This has made some Apple fanboys question his appointment. Just like Christians ask themselves WWJD?, so does the new Apple enclave, but there's a difference in the J.

Lynch is something that the new batch of Apple fanboys are not. He actually was one of those who put up with the early Macs. He developed software for General Magic, an internal project at Apple. This means that he knows where the bodies are buried deep inside Apple's operating system: he worked with Macs in the days when they still caught fire.

Lynch is also up to speed on mobile devices and cloud subscriptions, two areas of focus for Adobe over the past few years and areas that that Apple wants to be made king. Adobe did really well at getting its products into the cloud and putting in place the elements of a subscription model. In fact, if it had not done so, its results would have been worryingly bad. Adobe has some evidence to prove it managed to survive a crippling recession based on its subscription model.

Apple wants to get onto the cloud and not just to deal with its load from iCloud, iTunes and other services. It has not been enormously successful so far. Its MobileMe products fell short of expectations and Lynch is just the person to spruce them up. He might also be helping Apple develop a subscription model which works and takes Apple away from the dependence on its partners.

Clearly, the steamroller has been consigned to the past in the interests of such expediency.

Whether Lynch himself can stomach working for the same fruity zealots who forced him to come up with such campaigns remains to be seen. It is a little difficult to come back from complaining about a company - and then asking to work for them to lower the standards of the world.

EFF fears DRM inside HTML5 standard

Posted: 21 Mar 2013 02:37 AM PDT

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is fighting a new move by Big Content to install DRM into the HTML 5 web standard.

The World Wide Web Consortium's HTML5 Working Group is looking at an idea to allow Encrypted Media Extensions, or EME into the core of web standards.

While the Working Group claims that EME does not add DRM to the HTML5 specification the EFF claims that this is like saying "we're not vampires, but we are going to invite them into your house".

According to EFF spokesperson Peter Eckersley for the last 20 years there has been an ongoing struggle between two views of how web technology should work.

One philosophy has been that the beb needs to be a universal ecosystem that is based on open standards and fully implementable on equal terms by anyone, anywhere, without permission or negotiation. It was this philosophy which gave us HTML and HTTP which lead to wikis, search engines, blogs, webmail, applications written in JavaScript, repurposable online maps and other goodies.

Then there is another view pushed by corporations that have tried to seize control of the web with their own proprietary extensions, Eckersley said.

These are the likes of Adobe's Flash, Microsoft's Silverlight, Apple, phone companies, and others who want more restrictive platforms which are intended to be available from a single source or to require permission for new ideas.

Eckersley added that that whenever these technologies have become popular, they have inflicted damage on the open ecosystems around them. Websites using Flash or Silverlight can't be linked, indexed, translated by machine, accessed by users with disabilities, and might not work on some devices.

"The EME proposal suffers from many of these problems because it explicitly abdicates responsibilty on compatibility issues and let web sites require specific proprietary third-party software or even special hardware and particular operating systems," Eckersley said.

The EME's authors calle these "content decryption modules", or CDMs. EME's authors keep saying that what CDMs are, and do, and where they come from is totally outside of the scope of EME. They claim that EME can't be thought of as DRM because not all CDMs are DRM systems.

But if the client can't prove it's running the particular proprietary thing the site demands, it will not render the site's content.

Eckersley said that this is against what the World Wide Web Consortium is supposed to do, that is, creating comprehensible, publicly-implementable standards that guarantee interoperability.

The EFF's view is that the WWW Consortium was not supposed to be on hand to bring about an explosion of new mutually-incompatible software and of sites and services that can only be accessed by particular devices or applications.

While there are claims that EME is not itself a DRM scheme, specification author Mark Watson admitted that in most cases it was and that implementations would inherently require secrets outside the specification's scope.

According to Eckersley, the DRM proposals at the W3C exist in an attempt to appease Hollywood, which has been angry about the internet and wants it switched off by next Tuesday.

It has always demanded that it be given elaborate technical infrastructure to control how its audience's computers function so that it can allow movies onto the web with its own DRM restrictions.

"Movie studios have used DRM to enforce arbitrary restrictions on products, including preventing fast-forwarding and imposing regional playback controls, and created complicated and expensive "compliance" regimes for compliant technology companies that give small consortiums of media and big tech companies a veto right on innovation," Eckersley warned.

The EFF said that allowing DRM to exit undermines the reasons for which HTML5 exists. It was supposed to build an open ecosystem alternative to all the functionality that is missing in previous web standards, without the problems of device limitations, platform incompatibility, and non-transparency that were created by platforms like Flash.

HTML5 was supposed to be better than Flash, and excluding DRM is exactly what would make it better, Eckersley added. 

Intel declares the end of big standalone tablets

Posted: 21 Mar 2013 02:30 AM PDT

While Steve Jobs claimed that any tablet smaller than nine inches was doomed to fail, Intel's PC business chief doesn't see much of a future for big stand-alone tablets.

According to CRN, Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel's PC Client Group, said at the Intel Solutions Summit 2013 in Los Angeles that he believes the 10-inch tablet form factor will "rapidly erode" this year.

Skaugen thinks smaller 7- to 8-inch tablets will replace them, and that larger 10-inch tablets will be incorporated by notebook-tablet hybrids with convertible displays and detachable screens.

This would make Jobs spin in his grave, but it could be true. Jobs failed to see that people would want smaller cheaper tablets, while at the same time still needing a proper keyboard.

Skaugen said that the lines between tablets, smartphones and notebooks are beginning to blur. Of course, as far as Chipzilla is concerned that is all about hybrid Ultrabooks, touchscreen-based notebooks with either convertible displays or detachable screens, but no one seems particularly interested in them either.

Intel thinks that larger, 13-inch Ultrabooks will likely have convertible tablet functionality, while smaller 11-inch Ultrabooks will have detachable screens that act as stand-alone tablets.

Skaugen said all new Ultrabooks will run Haswell and will require touchscreen support. This should put a nail into the coffin of large tablets.

Intel believes the two-for-one value proposition of having a working notebook with a touchscreen tablet will win over both consumers and business users, he said.

Haswell-based Ultrabooks will also have facial recognition and voice recognition technology, faster solid-state drives, slimmer yet more durable chassis, and higher resolution displays.

It is still not clear if the world's economy is going to pick up enough for people to afford Intel's brave new world. After all, tablets worked because consumers could not afford laptops. Smaller tablets did better because consumers could not afford bigger models. It looks that the industry is moving to cheap and cheerful more than anything else. This means that Intel would be better off trying to sell cheaper designer handbags. 

Microsoft bans used games

Posted: 21 Mar 2013 02:21 AM PDT

Software giant Microsoft is certain to declare war on the second hand video games industry and a leak has confirmed that its new Xbox will not allow them to run.

Rumours of an anti used game system for Microsoft's next-generation 'Durango' Xbox console were leaked a couple of months ago, but according to VGleaks, there is evidence that the Vole is pressing ahead with the moves.

VGleaks has a very good deepthroat in Microsoft and come up with accurate specifications for Durango before. This time it has provided screenshots of an Xbox Development Kit (XDK) for Microsoft's next-generation console.

These confirm a number of previous rumours that every next-gen console will include a hard drive with enough capacity to "hold a large number of games". All games are said to be installable to the drive, and "play from the optical drive will not be supported", which sounds bad for backwards compatibility.

This means that Durango game installations will be mandatory, while at the moment Xbox 360 games can be installed to HDD, but they require the disk to run. Durango titles cannot directly access data on discs once they're installed, suggesting that the next-gen console may not require the disk to play games post-installation.

This means that Vole is developing an anti-used games system that requires activation codes for 50GB-capacity Blu-ray discs. There are references to an "always on, always connected" console which means that the machine will have to phone home to check that the software is not pirated or second-hand.

This is exactly the same sort of DRM which made SimCity unplayable and cost the EA Games CEO his job this week.

The leak also shows that there will be a new high-fidelity Kinect sensor without a tilt motor to be sold with every console. Microsoft recently showed a next-generation Kinect sensor without tilt motors which means that the new unit will be a lot smaller and compact.

The new Xbox is expected to come out in time for the Christmas rush. 

Oracle blames sales teams for poor results

Posted: 21 Mar 2013 02:06 AM PDT

Oracle has blamed its salesforce for its rubbish miss in third-quarter software sales and warned that its ailing hardware business will lose more ground this quarter.

It is not clear why Oracle should be suffering. Its sales teams have been boosted over recent months and it should be doing much better.

The storage maker had consulted its tarot cards and come up with a one to 11 percent rise in new software licenses and internet-based subscriptions in the May quarter. Either that, or Larry Ellison might need to be thrown into the volcano of his pacific island.

It is difficult to escape the news that Oracle's February quarter revenue miss was its worst since the November quarter of 2011.

CFO Safra Catz told Information Week that the sales force had lost its sense of urgency.

"Since we've been adding literally thousands of new sales reps around the world, the problem was largely sales execution, especially with the new reps as they ran out of runway in Q3," Catz said.

Wall Street is not so certain. It blames tepid spending by governments and corporations in an uncertain global environment. But Catz said that is not true, it is just lazy sales teams spending too much time dozing.

There are other figures within Oracle's bottom line which are not that great. Its hardware division, for example, is still pretty poor, and the outfit is facing greater competition in cloud or web-based software from the likes of IBM, SAP and Salesforce.

Revenue from Oracle's hardware division fell to $671 million from $869 million in the year-ago quarter. The division's revenue has fallen every quarter since Oracle bought it.

Other analysts think that Oracle's May-quarter software sales projection was in line with expectations and that is because some of the deals that slipped in the third quarter were probably signed in the fourth.

Oracle posted a two percent drop in new software sales and web-based software subscriptions to $2.3 billion in its fiscal third quarter. Investors scrutinise new software sales because they generate high margin, long-term maintenance contracts and are an important barometer of future profit.

Overall, Oracle's revenue dipped one percent to $9 billion, just missing the $9.382 billion analysts had expected on average. 

MEMS, MEMS everywhere and not a drop to drink

Posted: 20 Mar 2013 01:31 PM PDT

Before long now, it will become the norm to have detailed, indoor, 3D maps - accessible on your smartphone. Using intelligent software combined with sensing equipment, particularly with Microelectricomechanical Systems, the sort of tiny devices you find in smartphones, like accelerometers.

MEMS are often just milimetres in dimension which means they can be unintrusively placed pretty much anywhere. You name it - if there is a need for something to be sensored, they have an application. As components, they may not be as sexy as the latest Snapdragon chip, but they will also be crucial for building an intelligent world wherever precision is necessary.

Stefan Finkbeiner, CEO of Bosch Sensortec GmbH, sat down with TechEye for a chat. Bosch Sensortec, currently top in terms of revenue, we're told, is well placed in the market for a couple of reasons. It got into the market very early and its R&D is in-house, meaning it knows where it wants to go with its own designs. Because Bosch is not a microprocessor company, Finkbeiner said, all of them are potential partners for the company. Chances are, if you have one of the household name smartphones, it's almost certain to have Bosch equipment in there.

Though the more obvious applications right now are things like your phone understanding which way it's being held and miniature microphones, there are some pretty interesting possible use cases. For indoor mapping, Finkbeiner told us, "all the hardware is available and in the phones", whch high end phones often shipping with a pressure sensor. This means it is a software question, but detailed indoor maps will be available to the public. If a company thought it was a good idea, they could put MEMS in a shoe to measure certain factors. Or, Finkbeiner said, you could put MEMS on clothes: you would need power and an interface but they could also be put into a wristband, glasses, or other items of clothing and you'd "have very smart navigation that can communicate with your smartphones".

"A lot of them will go into smartphones but not just smartphones," Finkbeiner said. They could have applications in gaming, for example with an item to wear on your head, so the console would understand precisely which direction you're looking. On a bigger scale, this could extend to limbs. It would be possible to build MEMS into wearable items when driving a car, for example, a head display that keeps track of your line of sight.

"I'm sure a lot of cases will come up we don't even think about now," Finkbeiner said. There could be "security applications where you could tell when someone is opening a door and if it should be open - or on a window, even just with an accelerometer".

Due to their precision, the tiny devices can be applied to check for vital life signs. At the MEMS Industry Group's MEMS Congress last year, we heard from one professor who said MEMS could have an application in detecting early-onset Parkinson's disease, as they were able to pick up tremors that would otherwise go unnoticed.

As new products come out, there will be new applications, for example, the idea of a smart watch with no display could force new sensors or applications for existing sensors. Business wise, MEMS is worth a punt at the moment: with the upcoming hype that the Internet of Things - connectivity everywhere - will build, the mini machines could be found in almost every nook and cranny.

Some MEMS barely visible, magnified, next to a 2 euro coin.

South Korean banks report massive cyber attack

Posted: 20 Mar 2013 06:40 AM PDT

Computer networks at several South Korean banks and TV broadcasters crashed simultaneously early Wednesday. The attack paralysed ATMs across the country starting at 0520 GMT and they were still down six hours later.

South Korean officials sprang into action and set up a cyber crisis team, but it seems the large scale attack simply overwhelmed the infrastructure. Targets included Shinhan Bank, Nonghyup Bank, Munhwa Broadcasting Corp., YTN and Korea Broadcasting System.

Although nobody has claimed responsibility for the attack and South Korean officials are still not pointing fingers, most observers believe the attack was initiated by North Korea because, well, it's North Korea.

The malware used in the attack apparently wrecked computers, destroying their ability to reboot. Some operators reported seeing skulls on the screens before their imperialist machines went struck down by the righteous malware of reunification. Tech support clearly had a bad day, but some services were restored a few hours later

The attack is described as the biggest cyber onslaught against South Korea in more than two years. The fact that simultaneous, coordinated attacks were carried out points to an attacker with plenty of resources, such as a state sponsored group. North Korea is widely believed to have a rather capable cyber warfare unit created to hack US and South Korean networks.

The level of sophistication used in the attacks tends to be surprising, given the state of North Korea's economy and infrastructure. It is one thing to recruit hackers in the US, Europe or Japan, but finding suitable candidates in a country with virtually no internet and frequent power outages can't be easy.

However, it might be worth the effort. South Korea operates some of the fastest broadband networks on the planet and the economy is heavily dependent on broadband access. This also poses a massive security risk, as many facilities can be targeted by cyber attacks. A more serious attack could potentially wreak havoc on South Korea's 21st century infrastructure.

The South Korean military has also raised its cyber attacks readiness alert level, but it doesn't appear to have been targeted. The market didn't like the attack one bit and South Korean stocks tumbled, with the Kospi Index losing 1 percent. The won slid 0.5 percent.

In contrast, North Korea is practically Kim Jong-unhackable. Not because it has the best cyber security programme on the planet, or the wisest and greatest supreme leader, but because it has almost no internet infrastructure at all. Launching a cyber attack against North Korea would basically be like targeting an Amish community with an electromagnetic pulse weapon. 

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