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- Privacy groups wade into UK gov, it's a telco conspiracy
- MIT researcher comes up with bargain super-database
- Samsung researching brain-controlled devices
- Facebook creates international incident
- Samsung praised for tin mining review
- AMD unleashes Jaguar embedded SoCs
- Finance sector agitates against US social media privacy laws
| Privacy groups wade into UK gov, it's a telco conspiracy Posted: 23 Apr 2013 03:43 AM PDT The government and communications providers are conspiring to keep the effects of the Communications Data Bill under wraps, according to a damning letter from privacy advocates. The Bill was always going to be controversial. It enables police and security services to monitor internet activity and email communications subject to a warrant being issued, though stopping shot of gaining access to email content. A draft version of the Bill was published in October, and it is thought that a finalised version could be ready for the Queen’s Speech in May. According to a challenging letter sent by major privacy activist groups, communications providers could be ordered to store all customers' comms data for a year, and give police access to the records via a "filter" which would operate like a search engine for a vast database. Privacy watchdogs are concerned that the data does not just include the content of communications but all the details connected to it. It wants ISPs to withdraw their support for the Bill. Big Brother Watch, Privacy International and the Open Rights Group have penned a strongly-worded letter accusing major UK telcos, including BT, Virgin, O2, Sky and TalkTalk, of complying with a government attack on privacy. According to the Telegraph, the letter said that the telcos have appeared willing to be co-opted as an arm of the state to monitor every single one of their customers. It says that this is a dangerous step, exacerbated by their silence. The telco's customers have not had the opportunity to comment on these proposals and most have no idea such a policy was being considered. The letter said that this is a critical failure not only of government, but a betrayal of the telco customers' interests. "You appear to be engaged in a conspiracy of silence with the Home Office, the only concern being whether or not you will be able to recover your costs," the letter told the telcos. Computerworld has reported that the privacy groups also attacked the lack of transparency with which negotiations have been conducted, with much of the policy discussions taking place “behind closed doors”. It implied that that the ISPs were bending to the will of the Home Office over privacy concerns. |
| MIT researcher comes up with bargain super-database Posted: 23 Apr 2013 03:36 AM PDT MIT researcher Todd Mostak has invented a new parallel database that allows for crunching complex spatial and GIS data in milliseconds. Dubbed MapD, the database uses off-the-shelf gaming GPUs in the same way that you would use a rack of mini supercomputers. Mostak reports performance gains upwards of 70 times faster than CPU-based systems. According to Data Informed, it all started when he was at the Center of Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard in 2012 and trying to map tweets for his thesis project on Egyptian politics during the Arab Spring uprising. He found that it was taking hours or even days to process the 40 million tweets he was analysing. While he saw the value of geolocated tweets for socio-economic research, he did not have access to a system that would allow him to map the large dataset quickly for interactive analysis. MapD will be released to the great unwashed under an open source business model similar to 10gen and its company MongoDB. Mostak said that while people had written little research pieces about algorithms no one had tried to build an end-to-end system. What was strange for MIT was that Mostak was not really a techie and had no background in computer science. Mostak wanted to test the theory that poorer neighbourhoods in Egypt are more likely to be Islamist. He looked at geocoded tweets from around Cairo during the Arab Spring upraising. He examined if the tweet writer followed known Islamist politicians or clerics. He cross-referenced the language in the tweets with forums and message boards he knew to be Islamist to measure sentiment. He also checked the time stamps to see if Twitter activity stopped during the five daily prayers. He then plotted the Islamist indicators from 40 million tweets, ranging from August 2011 through March 2012, against 5,000 political districts from the Egyptian census. The system was based around a $200, mid-level consumer graphics card, with two GeForce Titan GPUs made by Nvidia. It was able to crunch data at the same speed of the world's fastest supercomputer in the year 2000 and cost $5,000 to build. He said that it uses SQL queries to access the data, and with its brute force GPU approach, it could work not only geographic and mapping applications but machine learning, trend detection and analytics for graph databases. |
| Samsung researching brain-controlled devices Posted: 23 Apr 2013 03:06 AM PDT Samsung is reportedly spending R&D money on developings ways to control a phone by the human brain. According to MIT Technology Review, Samsung's Emerging Technology Lab is collaborating with Roozbeh Jafari, assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Texas, Dallas, on the early-stage research. This involves placing a cap "studded with EEG-monitoring electrodes" atop the head of a convenient person, who then concentrates on an onscreen icon blinking at a particular rate. If the person concentrates hard enough, they can launch and interact with software. While Samsung indicated that mind-controlled mobile devices are quite a way off, if they ever appear in a market-ready form at all, it could be the next step in controlling a mobile gadget. After all, a fifteen years ago they would say that you were mad if you thought it possible to use voice, touch, gesture, and eye movement to control and interact with mobile devices. Brain research has been experimenting with lots of potentially new devises lately. Researchers at Duke University, the Edmond and Lila Safra International Institute for Neuroscience of Natal in Brazil, and the Neoscience Research Institute at Beijing's Peking University implanted rats with sets of micro-electrodes in the brains. This allowed for the real-time transfer of what the researchers termed "behaviourally meaningful sensorimotor information" between two rats separated by thousands of miles. This means that multiple brains could be linked into a "net" that could facilitate the exchange of information over long distances. |
| Facebook creates international incident Posted: 23 Apr 2013 02:52 AM PDT Facebook is in hot water after it refused to take down a fake page which claimed to be the Aussie ambassador to the EU. Former Aussie Liberal leader Brendan Nelson is incandescent with rage after Facebook refused to take down the page which claims to be written by him. The page attacked Aussie PM Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, and while he thought this was pretty lame, he was worried that he knew people who were interacting with the fake account believing it was genuinely him. He wrote to Facebook in the US specifically drawing the account to their attention and asking that it be removed. Since he was ambassador to Belgium, Luxembourg, NATO and the EU, he was concerned about the potential for it to cause damage to the reputation of Australia. But even in his position of relative official seniority, he could not do anything about it. In fact Facebook didn't even respond. He told the Financial Review that Facebook was frankly the least responsive organisation he had ever dealt with. Coming from someone who has dealt with Australian government officials before this is a pretty bold claim. Nelson got the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and intelligence security agencies to look at his problem, and there was nothing they could do about it either. We guess that the only way to get the American outfit's attention is to declare war on the former colony. A touch drastic, but no Aussie can ever let a diplomatic slur pass it by. |
| Samsung praised for tin mining review Posted: 23 Apr 2013 02:40 AM PDT Samsung has been bitten on the rump by environmental watchdogs after it was caught using tin from Indonesia's Bangka Island in its products. According to Friends of the Earth, mining on the island is unregulated and dangerous to the communities living there. There are also allegations of child labour in the mining sector on Bangka Island. Tin mined from the island of 625,000 inhabitants is used by many electronics manufacturers in the solder used to create circuit boards. But the mining destroys tropical forests, kills coral and "wrecks lives", Friends of the Earth says. Samsung admitted to using tin mined from Bangka Island and has promised to work with its suppliers to find a better plan. In an email sent to the charity, Samsung said it is "undertaking a thorough investigation of our supply chain in the region to better understand what is happening, and what part it plays". Samsung did not have a direct relationship with tin suppliers from Bangka Island. It knows that some of the tin used for manufacturing originates from this area, the company said. Craig Bennett, FoE's director of policy and campaigns, praised Samsung for taking an industry lead by tracking its supply chains all the way to Indonesia's tin mines and committing to taking responsibility for helping tackle the devastating impact that mining tin for electronics has on people and the environment. Another smartphone maker, Apple must now follow suit and come clean about its whole supply chains, right back to where and how construction materials are sourced, Bennett said. |
| AMD unleashes Jaguar embedded SoCs Posted: 23 Apr 2013 02:32 AM PDT AMD has introduced a series of embedded chips based on the new Jaguar core and Radeon 8000 graphics. The new G-series SoCs will be available in five distinct flavours, ranging from a 2GHz quad-core to frugal dual-cores clocked at 1GHz. Pricing range from $49 to $72 and AMD claims they will be powerful enough to beat any Atom and get away with its lunch money. There is a twist. The chips also feature an “X” moniker on the logo, which denotes x86 chips, but AMD plans to introduce embedded chips based on ARM cores as well. The x86 G-series parts will cater to power envelopes ranging from 9W to 25W, while upcoming ARM chips should bring much lower power consumption, less than 3W. Now that AMD is committed to ARM in server and embedded parts, it seems more than likely that it will eventually come up with consumer oriented ARM application processors. AMD is unsurprisingly still mum and it’s not talking about any consumer ARM plans just yet. As for the current crop of Jag based embedded parts, AMD claims they are capable of delivering top notch performance, particularly in the GPU department. With DirectX 11, UVD 3 and the usual HD 8000 feature set, AMD believes the chips could end up in smart TVs, gaming systems, set-top boxes as well as a wide range of more tedious, industrial applications. "With a 33 percent smaller footprint, low power consumption and exceptional performance, the new AMD Embedded G-Series SOC sets the bar for content-rich multimedia and traditional workload processing that is ideal for a broad variety of embedded applications,” said Arun Iyengar, vice president and general manager, AMD Embedded Solutions. AMD clearly has high hopes for Jaguar and by the looks of it the new core will be the best thing coming out of the embattled chipmaker this year. With console design wins under its belt, embedded SoCs and upcoming low-end APUs, Jaguar is already looking like a winner. |
| Finance sector agitates against US social media privacy laws Posted: 22 Apr 2013 09:40 AM PDT Financial securities regulators are leading the charge against initiatives to prevent companies keeping tabs on employees' social media accounts, stressing that the potential for abuse takes urgency over worker privacy. A few states kick started efforts last year to prevent bosses looking up employees on websites such as Facebook or Twitter, however, sections of the financial industry are seeking certain exemptions - citing instances of 'red flags' where people could be misusing their personal accounts to spread confidential information. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, is Wall Street's self regulator, and it thinks for practical reasons some exceptions should be made for the world of finance. Regulators, the Wall Street Journal reports, are concerned that existing and upcoming privacy laws could put investors under financial strain - particularly if trading advice goes viral through social media or in the case of rogue tweets where companies are tipped in an overly favourable light. The official line of concern is that the virality of social media could make it easier for Ponzi or other fraud schemes to emerge, and harder to police, if attempts to investigate are blocked by state laws. Before the Californian social media privacy laws came into effect at the beginning of this year, industry group the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association - SIFMA - was leaning on the state to drop the bill. However, it passed anyway, leading SIFMA to moan that customers are put at risk as it is more difficult to "detect serious problems". Similarly, the Financial Services Institute said existing legislation and further changes will be creating a "significant headache for brokerage firms". |
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