TechEye |  |
- AMD overclocker breaks world record
- Google claims Gmail spam monopoly
- US threatens sanctions against Snowden protectors
- MIT plants false memories in mice
- EA claims Sim City atrocity was a success
- British ISP tells "Kim Jong Cameron" to jog on
- NSA's Utah data centre capacity estimated
- Asus, Google, reveal new Nexus 7
| AMD overclocker breaks world record Posted: 26 Jul 2013 04:30 AM PDT AMD's A10 6800K processor is not exactly slow, but it seems that with a bit of tweaking it can go much faster. Legit Reviews reports how an overclocker by the handle of "Stilt" holds the top spot on HWBot for the fastest CPU frequency for an A10 6800K APU. Stilt managed to clock the chip at 8,203MHz (8.2GHz), which is also the 19th fastest frequency recorded of any chip. According to his CPU-Z screenshot, he pushed the vCore to 1.976V and cooled he whole thing with liquid nitrogen. A Radeon HD 7750 graphics card, Asus F2A85-V Pro motherboard, and 8GB of AMD RAM were all there too assist. While it is a world record for the chip, Stilt's A10 6800K is also the 18th fastest chip ever created. This is not bad for a $149.00 chip which only received mediocre reviews. Its normal resting speed is 3.6GHz. |
| Google claims Gmail spam monopoly Posted: 26 Jul 2013 04:02 AM PDT Google has started putting adverts in the space reserved for e-mail messages in Gmail users' inboxes. While Google has been installing adverts alongside Gmail messages for years, these new ads appear as messages that can be opened like e-mails and forwarded to others. The adverts appear in the new "promotions" tab of Gmail's new multi-tab interface, and they're marked with a pale yellow background and labelled "ad" just in case you can't spot them. In a statement, Google said that the ads are part of the Promotions tab in the new inbox in Gmail. You can see the old style of advert if you disable the Promotions tab. The adverts are likely to hack off those who came to Gmail because it is so good at weeding out spam. Now it seems that Google has purged inboxes from spam to peddle spam of its own. Google said that the advertising will keep Google and Gmail free to use. It said that it worked hard to make ads safe, unobtrusive, and relevant. Google also said the new ads are more relevant than earlier Gmail ads. They replace the old-style ads above the inbox or to the right of messages unless people disable the Promotions tab. Apparently the adverts can't be marked as spam, but if you close them they will go away - until you refresh the browser. Users can go to Gmail's ads preferences manager to block specific advertisers. |
| US threatens sanctions against Snowden protectors Posted: 26 Jul 2013 03:56 AM PDT A US Senate panel has voted unanimously to push for trade sanctions against Russia or any other country that offers asylum to former spy agency contractor Edward Snowden. The 30-member Senate Appropriations Committee wants Secretary of State John Kerry to meet with congressional committees to come up with sanctions against any country that takes Snowden in. They claim that Snowden is a spy and not a whistleblower who showed that the US was slurping data on its own citizens and snooping on its allies. Snowden is still holed up in a Moscow airport where he had fled to escape capture and trial in the United States. He has asked for temporary asylum in Russia until he can reach a country that will shelter him. Bolivia, Nicaragua and Venezuela have offered sanctuary to Snowden. It is just the small matter of getting him there first. But the US wants to make sure that those nations are aware that they will not be able to peddle their goods to the US if that happens. It is not clear if they will be banning the export to those nations of iconic goods such as Coke, Pepsi and Apple iPhones. Republican US Senator Lindsey Graham told Reuters that the move was to attract the attention of any country which considers granting Snowden safe harbour. Graham does not seem to care that much about hacking off Moscow. Graham went on to bang the drum about Russia by shouting about Moscow allying with Iran and Moscow's support for Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Graham so far has suggested the US consider boycotting the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia. While Moscow might not be too bothered about US sanctions, the US has a number of programs that provide international trade benefits to developing countries, including Bolivia and Venezuela. The country also has a free trade agreement with Nicaragua that could come under scrutiny. |
| MIT plants false memories in mice Posted: 26 Jul 2013 03:30 AM PDT A bunch of MIT researchers have worked out a way to give mice false memories. According to a study published in the journal Science, the experiment was designed to examine the phenomenon called false memory syndrome. False memories are events which never happened often caused by brain errors. We store these in our mind which still manage to influence behaviour. MIT used genetically modified mice that allowed for certain neurons to be activated with a flash of light. The technique enabled the researchers to activate a memory that caused a mouse to believe it had experienced electrical shocks in a particular box, even though no such thing had happened there. By manipulating the memory engram-bearing cells in the hippocampus, the research team convinced a few unsuspecting mice that they had experienced a shock to their feet when one had never actually occurred. When the animal was put back in the chamber where the fake shock happened it fearfully froze, indicating that it remembered getting shocked in that chamber. What this means is that your memories are just activities of different cells, and they can take the place of an actual event that happened by activating some cells in the brain. The team thinks their research will reach a point where it is possible to replace or delete memories which cause problems for a person. |
| EA claims Sim City atrocity was a success Posted: 26 Jul 2013 03:07 AM PDT EA Games is doing its level best to play down the disaster which was the launch of its most recent Sim City game. According to VentureBeat, EA Games' Frank Gibeau is reframing the whole disaster by boasting the company had flogged 2 million copies. He added that the number of people logging in and playing is holding steady. All those problems Sim City had were only in the first week of the launch and caused because EA had underestimated demand in the first month, he said. That is not how we remember it. In fact, we think it was probably the worst launch since North Korean's last 'satellite'. EA made the same mistake the world has come to expect of it - thinking that DRM will save the day. In this case, users of Sim City had to log in to EA's servers to verify that they had a legitimate copy. The only problem is that EA had forgotten to buy enough servers to run its DRM system so the whole lot crashed. In the first three days it was also clear that the game did not work and EA had to issue patches that disabled chunks of features. Fans were also cross that the game did not have an offline mode. In fact, EA said it was impossible to play the game offline. But it turned out that this was not quite true and EA had installed some code in the game which limited it to offline play for... 20 minutes. Then it was discovered that the GlassBox Engine which powered the life in the game was doing some odd things. A simulated human would not go to their home at night, they would just go to the nearest home, We would have thought that this could have caused all sorts of marital and social problems. Instead of driving on empty roads, sims would take the shortest path available, when that led straight into congestion. Building bi-passes was pointless because they would ignore them. Then there was the small matter of the sewage plants exploding. It was one of the most catastrophic launches in video game history and even after EA fixed the server problem, the software didn't work properly. Yet Gibeau seems to gauge those sales, most of them based on preview coverage and pre-release media, as a success. In other words, a game is now a success if a publisher drums up enough excitement and hype for people to buy a broken game - never mind the enormous disappointment and outrage afterwards. |
| British ISP tells "Kim Jong Cameron" to jog on Posted: 25 Jul 2013 10:23 AM PDT A British ISP has told customers that if they want censorship they should choose another company - or move to North Korea. In response to David Cameron's enormously unpopular porn censorship crusade, Andrew & Arnolds said: "The government wants us to offer filtering as an option, so we offer an active choice when you sign up, you choose one of two options: "- Unfiltered internet access - no filtering of any content within the A&A network - you are responsible for any filtering in your own network, or"- Censored internet access - restricted access to unpublished government mandated filter list (plus Daily Mail web site) - but still cannot guarantee kids don't access porn" If potential customers pick the latter, A&A tells them they'll have to either pick a different ISP or move to North Korea. "Our services are all unfiltered". A&A asks if that is enough of a choice for Cameron. The response goes on to say it is not up to the ISP to censor what customers do online. "We do not try and log or limit what you are accessing," it says, adding "it is your responsibility to stick to the laws that apply to you." What follows is some convincingly snarky reasoning behind the company's actions, including welcoming customers to set up their own adult content filters and suggesting that parental responsibility - shock - might be more effective than a catch-all state censorship policy that is technically doomed to fail anyway. Later down the page there's some pretty solid advice on how to protect yourself from snooping, and a call to use encryption for all normal web traffic wherever possible. Cameron's "opt-in" option for all adult content is seen by critics as a slippery slope that could lead to wider censorship for anything the state doesn't think much of. It is widely seen outside the pages of the Mail as a power grab dressed up as a moral crusade which has set a nasty precedent for web freedoms. *British musician Dan Bull coined 'Kim Jong Cameron' in this NSFW-y open letter to the prime minister. |
| NSA's Utah data centre capacity estimated Posted: 25 Jul 2013 10:21 AM PDT Every since the revelation that US spooks are spying on the internet activities of citizens around the world, the attention has focused on a new government database being built in Utah. The site is supposed to be the place which will house and process data collected from telephone and ISPs, satellites, fiber-optic cables and bugs When it opens in September it is supposed to hold "yottabytes" of data, according to Wired or five "zettabytes" according to NPR, in other words more data than puny human brains are really able to comprehend. But Forbes has got its paws on the blueprints of the data centre and is starting to work out that the actual storage capacity is comparatively low. It's still pretty big. After all the administration buildings, power sources and back-up generators are factored out, spooks have room for 100,000 square feet of servers. Impressive, but perhaps not enough room for a yottabyte of data. Brewster Kahle is the engineering genius behind the Internet Archive, and Kahle estimates that a space of that size could hold 10,000 racks of about a billion dollars' worth of servers. Kahle thinks each rack would be capable of storing 1.2 petabytes of data. Kahle says that voice recordings of all the phone calls made in the US in a year would take up about 272 petabytes, or just over 200 of those 10,000 racks. This means that the facility can potentially hold up to 12,000 petabytes, or 12 exabytes. Internet infrastructure expert Paul Vixie told Forbes that Kahle's calculations were a little on the high side. Assuming larger 13 square feet racks would be used, factoring in space between the racks, and assuming a lower amount of data storage per rack, he came up with an estimate of less than 3 exabytes of data capacity for the facility. This would limit the US spying to 24-hour recordings of what every one of Philadelphia's 1.5 million residents was up to for a year. The defence from the US government is that it is only collecting metadata. But this data can tell you a lot about people and all of their social connections and habits, like who they talk to and where they go. While it may be technically unlikely that the NSA is storing every communication exactly, it can help the state decide who, when and where to target before zooming in on them through other back doors. As the numbers are speculation, to put it into perspective, the Utah facility would still hold a lot of data. Google uses multiple data centres for a single exabyte of info. |
| Asus, Google, reveal new Nexus 7 Posted: 25 Jul 2013 08:50 AM PDT Asus and Google have made official a new Nexus 7 tablet, a 7 inch device with wireless charging and the "sharpest ever" tablet screen. The screen is Full HD with 323ppi and an IPS panel with a 178 degree viewing angle, as well as Corning Glass to prevent scratches. The screen is LED backlit 1920x1200 resolution. There's now a "grippy" soft touch exterior to make the device more drop-proof, with the tablet weighing in at 290g. Under the bonnet is a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro 8064 quad core and 2GB RAM. It will come in 16GB and 32GB flavours for storage. Google boasts the energy efficiency has "up to 10 hours battery life" and the sound is powered by Fraunhofer, who put together the MP3 encoding format. It has dual band wi-fi and a 4G LTE option, too. Unlike the previous iteration, there's a camera on the front and the back, 1.2 megapixel and 5 megapixel respectively.
The new Nexus 7 is the first device to ship with Android Jelly Bean 4.3, which will sport new features like restricted profiles - that will let parents limit access to mature content. Android 4.3 has Bluetooth Smart on it, too. Google apps like Chrome, Maps, YouTube, Hangouts and Google Now will be pre-installed. In the UK, the Nexus 7 will be available over the next couple of weeks from Google Play, Amazon, Argos, Asda, Currys, Carphone Warehouse, Ebuyer, John Lewis, PCWorld, Shop Direct, Sainsbury's and Tesco. The 16GB and 32GB wi-fi models will cost £199 and £239 respectively. The LTE 32GB version will be available for £299. Senior veep for Android, Chrome and Apps at Google, Sundar Pichai, said in a statement: "It is now thinner, lighter and faster, with the world's highest resolution screen in a 7-inch tablet". Full specs:
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