Monday, April 8, 2013

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Controversial Samsung design guru speaks out

Posted: 08 Apr 2013 05:42 AM PDT

A year ago a series of reports claiming that former BMW designer Chris Bangle joined Samsung sprung up all over the net, but the move was never confirmed and the entire episode was quickly forgotten. 

Although Bangle is still not talking about his actual role at Samsung, he does appear to have one, and he is now apparently some sort of design guru at the company. On the face of it, an ex-BMW designer sounds like a pretty good find for Samsung, but Bangle is a controversial designer to say the least.

In a recent Forbes interview, Bangle outlined his vision for driverless cars, Samsung’s innovative process and tech trends in general. He pointed out that Samsung has been making a strategic commitment to improving design and if the Galaxy Sx sales figures are anything to go by, and they are, the approach is working. He also concluded that autonomous cars might be huge, as they are practically “an inevitability”. 

However, there are quite a few challenges. Bangle pointed out that driverless cars are not the same thing as planes on autopilot and that quite a few kinks need to be ironed out before they hit the market. 

“The speed at which things can go wrong and the margin for error correction in a car is radically different from airplanes under most conditions, and the cross-cumulative effects of contextual disturbances means that car companies cannot really simulate everything in advance,” said Bangle. “Trying to get approved protocols for all possible accidents is an impossible task – so someone will be carrying some risk. I think that until that issue is solved autonomous cars will remain the “next big thing”, despite the fact practically all the technical issues are resolved.”

Now for some bad news. Bangle is more controversial than any car designer who has put pencil to paper over the last three decades. His tenure at BMW was especially controversial and simply bringing up Bangle’s name in a casual conversation with BMW fans is usually more than enough to start an argument. 

Bangle’s 7-series is often considered the ugliest BMW ever, and it even made the Time magazine list of the 50 Worst Cars of All Time. A fellow designer described Bangle’s BMW Z4 as something “designed with a machete”, but then again BMW never exactly distanced itself from Bangle’s design philosophy. 

What was Bangle’s response? Well, he acknowledged that his designs do not look good in photographs, and told critics that they should see the cars in real life before judging them on their looks. Since blind people don’t tend to buy cars, perhaps he could redesign some Samsung cameras to make vehicles look a little more appealing. Or, a cheaper approach to making Bangle’s 7-series look good in photos is to simply leave the lens cap on.

DEA messes with Apple fanboy's heads

Posted: 08 Apr 2013 03:05 AM PDT

The US Drug Enforcement Agency has been accused of messing with Apple fanboy's heads by pretending that it cannot read their iMessages.

Last week Cnet got its paws on a "leaked" Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) memo suggesting that messages sent via Apple's own iMessage system were untappable and were "frustrating" law enforcement.

The memo moaned that encryption used in Apple's iMessage chat service had stymied attempts by federal drug enforcement agents to eavesdrop on suspects' conversations.

It seemed that a February 2013 criminal investigation was affected and the DEA warns that because of the use of encryption, "it is impossible to intercept iMessages between two Apple devices" even with a court order.

This meant that CNet was effectively providing proof that Apple's product was so superior that it had law enforcement unable to match it. The implication is that if you wanted true privacy you should buy an iPhone. CNet has been doing this sort of thing a lot lately. Recently it ran a story celebrating the three year milestone for the iPad along with links to where you can buy one.

But there was some faulty logic in the memo. It implied that Apple had some brilliant security which even the Feds could not crack and it also implied that Jobs' Mob did not have control over its own network.

It is true that Apple boasts of end-to-end encryption, but Apple itself holds the key because it means that when you boot up a new iOS device, you automatically get access to your old messages.

This means that Apple is storing those messages in the cloud and can decrypt them if it needs to.

What the email really only suggests that law enforcement can't get those messages by going to the mobile operators. It says nothing about the ability to get those same messages by going to Apple directly. And, in fact, in many ways iMessages may be even more prone to surveillance, since SMS messages are only stored on mobile operators' servers for a brief time, whereas iMessages appear to be stored by Apple indefinitely.

According to Tech Dirt the memo appears to have been leaked to CNet to falsely imply that iMessages are actually impervious to government snooping. But Julian Sanchez at the Cato Institute comes up with two plausible theories.

The first is that this is part of the feds' effort to convince lawmakers to make it mandatory that all communications systems have backdoors for wiretapping and the other is that it's an attempt to convince criminals that iMessages are safe, so they start using them falsely believing their messages are protected.

 

 

Intel ships Haswell with USB bug

Posted: 08 Apr 2013 03:01 AM PDT

Intel's "Haswell" chip is now shipping to major PC makers, despite the fact that it has a bug which causes your USB drive to disappear.

A secret source told CNet that Intel's fourth-generation core, aka Haswell, is "shipping to customers now and will launch later this quarter". It will announce the official shipping at IDF Beijing this week.

Haswell was expected by June and is targeted at Ultrabooks and hybrids. Chipzilla insists that Haswell's new microarchitecture will deliver "the single largest generation-to-generation battery life improvement in Intel history".

We are also expecting an announcement that Chipzilla will have its next-generation Atom chip for smartphones, "Merrifield," shipping by the end of the year about the same time as "Bay Trail" which is its next-gen Atom chip for tablets.

But according to a note that Intel sent to hacks, it appears that the Haswell launch will be marred by a technical problem with the chipset. Some chipsets with the bug will be "in production" during the initial ramp.

Intel has confirmed that there is no chance of data loss or corruption because of the bug, and it has only been noticed with a small subset of USB SuperSpeed thumb drives and does not affect other USB peripherals.

The bug can cause USB 3.0 devices, like thumb drives, to disappear after entering standby. In some cases, removable devices have to be reconnected again.

It looks like Intel is pushing ahead with the launch of Haswell and hoping that not enough people notice. It is a fairly safe bet as USB SuperSpeed thumbnail drives are thin on the ground. 

EA in battle over "worst company" award

Posted: 08 Apr 2013 02:54 AM PDT

EA Games is likely to be named the worst company in the US by the Consumerist magazine, beating off some stiff competition from the telephone companies, and seems to want to compound the issue by blaming homophobes.

As news that EA was likely to win the award for the second time, EA's COO Peter Moore did his level best to show the world why his outfit was such a clear winner.

Writing in his blog, Moore admitted mistakes and promised to "do better" but decided to wade into Consumerist magazine and its readers for saying such nasty things about EA.

"This is the same poll that last year judged us as worse than companies responsible for the biggest oil spill in history," writes Moore.

Well, not quite, BP won the award in 2011 when it managed the biggest oil spill in history. Last year, however, when EA won it, BP had not done anything so publicly evil.

Moore claimed that the complaints against EA last year were because of its support of SOPA and that they didn't like the ending to Mass Effect 3. The only problem with that argument is that the analysis of the reasons for EA's inclusion in last year's finale makes no mention of Mass Effect 3 or SOPA.

But writing in its own blog, Consumerist said that what seemed to have won the award for EA is its habit of buying up smaller, successful developers with the intention of milking the intellectual properties that made these acquired companies so attractive. EA has exclusivity on popular sports games that keeps retail prices up for the rest of the gaming industry.

Customers do not like EA's use of microtransactions or in-game purchases. Many customers believe that EA's view of microtransactions is to put out broken or deliberately incomplete games with the ultimate goal of selling add-on content that should have been included in the first place.

Mass Effect 3, while not the cause of EA's award, did show why the company won its award. Wanting to make a buck out of a successful franchise, EA rushed out the third and final instalment of the series in 2012. It wrecked the plot, and was so bad that the company had to release an "extended cut" ending before it was lynched by some highly cross gamers who had been fans of the series for years.

Moore lit out against the SimCity DRM claims. "Many continue to claim the Always-On function in SimCity is a DRM scheme," writes Moore. "It's not. People still want to argue about it. We can't be any clearer – it's not. Period."

But his silliest reason for EA likely to win the award was because the people who complained were homophobes. Moore claimed that EA's decision to allow users to create lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) characters in some of its games has resulted in a voting campaign orchestrated by conservatives.

Moore said that in the past year, EA had received thousands of emails and postcards protesting against its policy of allowing players to create LGBT characters in its games. There are posts on conservative websites urging people to protest its LGBT policy by voting EA the worst company in America, he claimed.

Consumerist, however, said that if there is any such campaign, it is odd that no one had mentioned it before. While any number of tech and video game sites and forums have been writing the WCIA polls, its analytics show absolutely no incoming traffic from any political, let alone conservative, sites.

So far in all the nominations against EA no one mentioned anything about sexual orientation. 

Microsoft begs XP users to upgrade

Posted: 08 Apr 2013 02:51 AM PDT

Microsoft is kindly asking users of Windows XP to upgrade to something a bit less ancient, again. XP has been around for a decade and it is still used on 15 to 20 percent of PCs, depending on who you ask. 

Redmond plans to cut off support for the venerable operating system on 8 April 2014, which means users have a year to upgrade, or face more vulnerabilities and security risks. However, XP still remains surprisingly popular, especially among SMBs and some home users. They feel it gets the job done and see no point in upgrading to a new Windows 7 box, but then again Windows XP is older than iOS, Android, Facebook and YouTube.

It is also worth noting that Microsoft sold millions of XP licences for first generation nettops and netbooks, based on Atom processors, years after XP stopped shipping on regular desktops and lappies. Upgrading these systems to Windows 7 probably isn’t an option for most users. 

Microsoft insists the only way to stay safe is to upgrade to a new OS, and since the cutoff date is just a year from now, time is slowly running out. Then again, users of ancient XP PCs might very well choose to upgrade to something else, like Linux or in some cases even Chrome and Android.

With millions of XP boxes out there, it is more than likely that quite a few users won’t heed Redmond’s warnings. Microsoft’s decision to ditch XP could also create more opportunities for peddlers of alternative low cost systems based on free operating systems. 

Top US tech companies face class action

Posted: 08 Apr 2013 02:49 AM PDT

The great and glorious names of the tech business are facing a class action over what might have been a trade cartel to control employee movements.

According to Electronics Weekly US judge Lucy Koh has paved the way for a class action lawsuit against Intel, Apple, Google, Pixar, Adobe, Lucasfilm and Intuit.

She said that there was enough evidence of a sustained personal effort by the corporations' own chief executives to monitor and enforce no headhunting rules on their employees.

Koh named and shamed Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Pixar President Ed Catmull, Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell and Intel CEO Paul Otellini.

She told lawyers for the plaintiffs to re-model their case against the companies and re-file it to instigate a major class-action suit. When they do this she will hear it.

The plaintiffs' lawyers hope to have 100,000 clients among the employees of the defendant companies.

It is not as if the tech companies do not know something is afoot. They have already settled similar antitrust claims against them with the US DoJ. However this could cost the tech industry a fortune and force companies to start seeing their employees as people rather than objects.

If the case is proved, it means that the companies ran a secret agreement not to poach each other's staff and to stop tech experts defecting to other companies. This saved them a fortune because they did not have to pay extra money to keep staff. 

Thieves steal hi-tech toilet

Posted: 08 Apr 2013 02:47 AM PDT

As public toilets have become hi-tech, it appears that they have become a target for criminals to point at.

Japan's cops are hoping to flush out a group which has been on a roll stealing hi-tech toilets. Although the expensive loos have all the electronic gadgets on board, they do not have anything inside which allows them to raise the lid on the thefts.

In the latest case, a man living in the town of Fukuchiyamashi, Kyoto, called the police after he discovered that the light of a nearby parking lot had been vandalised with white spray paint. It was only when the cops arrived on the scene that they discovered the toilet had been stolen from a nearby park.

The thieves took the entire multi-function toilet, complete with its accompanying hand rails from the public restroom. Further investigations showed that the special washlet-style toilet seat and lid from another toilet were also missing. These don't come cheap and the estimations are that the thieves had gotten away with over $3000 worth of gear. We guess this is bad for the local council's bottom line as they are already having to paper the cracks during the recession.

Sankei News West said that it was rare that thieves take a whole loo, normally they are content to stuff it full of paper or write their names on the walls. But it is clear that those who nicked the loo wanted to pass it on.

It is not clear why anyone would poo-poo the idea that there is a movement against high-tech public loos, or a rage against the latrine,  but it is certain that at the moment the police have nothing to go on. 
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