TechEye |  |
- Nvidia suffers in slowing market
- Apple continues to lose market share
- Pricey Linux banking trojan appears
- Snowden's email service pulls plug instead of complying with US gov
- China has a big Windows XP problem
- Top WaPo journalist pens open missive to Jeff Bezos
| Nvidia suffers in slowing market Posted: 09 Aug 2013 04:48 AM PDT GPU maker Nvidia has warned that its current-quarter revenue will be below analyst estimates. Nvidia, has suffered as people have put off buying new PCs, where the company gets the majority of its sales. The company has been investing on its Tegra mobile processor business as it bets on its graphics expertise to make high-performance processors for mobile devices. Nvidia expects current-quarter revenue of $1.05 billion while analysts, on average, estimated $1.09 billion. Tegra does not appear to be the panacea that Nvidia hoped. Its Tegra business will be flat this year, and the company needs to integrate LTE features on upcoming Tegra versions to make them compatible with high-end carrier networks. Analysts thought that the Tegra business would suffer because smartphone and tablet makers have been opting for more sophisticated chips such as those made by Qualcomm. Second-quarter revenue fell 6.4 percent to $977.2 million, while net income fell to $96.4 million, from $119 million a year earlier. Jen-Hsun Huang, president and chief executive officer of Nvidia, remained his usual optimistic self and claimed that the Nvidia's GPU business continued to grow. " We look forward to a strong second half, with new Tegra 4 devices coming to market, Shield is moving beyond the US and broader sampling of Project Logan, our next-generation Tegra processor, which brings Kepler, the world's most advanced GPU, to mobile," he enthused. |
| Apple continues to lose market share Posted: 09 Aug 2013 04:17 AM PDT Although you would not know it, Apple is fast sliding towards a state where it will have the same market share of smartphones market that it has for PCs. While it's mostly reported that Apple as being the top smartphone manufacturer that does not really shine any light on how enormour or competitive the market really is. According to IDC, Apple makes just 13.2 percent of the smartphones on the market - and that number is falling. Last quarter it was 16.6 percent. Samsung has a larger market share than Apple, and the rest of the market is largely carved up by othere Android devices. Google's Android OS has increased its global market share to 79.3 percent in the second quarter from 69.1 percent at the sime time last year. BlackBerry dropped to 2.9 percent from 4.9 percent in 2012. It has fallen behind Microsoft, which is now at number four in OS share. IDC said that the main reason Apple has doing so well is that that its phones are so much more expensive than Android gear, so there's a higher profit margin. Excluding subsisidies from phone companies, the average iPhone cost $710 in 2012 - roughly $300 more than the average smartphone. But that higher price tag is also denting mass sales. IDC estimated that Apple's second-quarter profit was $5.99 billion with an operating margin of 33 percent, compared to Samsung's profit of $5.63 billion profit with a 19 percent operating margin. |
| Pricey Linux banking trojan appears Posted: 09 Aug 2013 03:53 AM PDT Open sourcers can be quite vocal about the general lack of malware for Linux based systems, but a new banking trojan has popped up, surprising the community. Most of the world still runs on Windows, so by comparison, Linux doesn't get much in the way of malware. However, RSA's Limor Kessem wrote in his blog about a new Linux banking trojan called "Hand of Thief" which suggests malicious code writers have worked out there's some value in open source malware after all. Security research Graham Cluley said that the "Hand of Thief" is a lot of work for Linux malware. It compromises form grabbers for HTTP and HTTPS sessions running on a variety of browsers, blocking infected computers' access to anti-virus websites and security patches, and virtual machine detection. All this makes it harder for anti-virus researchers to reverse engineer its code. In addition, "Hand of Thief" incorporates an admin panel, allowing a criminal to control the remote computers that have been successfully hijacked around the world. Kessem said that the trojan has been tested on 15 different flavours of Linux, including Ubuntu, Fedora, and Debian, and is being offered for sale with free updates in underground web forums for as much as $2,000. The writers expect to push the cost to $3,000, with a $550 fee for major version updates, as features are introduced in the near future. Cluley said that is quite a high cost for a piece of malware, but small compared to the potential money that could be made by successfully compromising and infecting unprotected Linux computers. |
| Snowden's email service pulls plug instead of complying with US gov Posted: 09 Aug 2013 03:16 AM PDT NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's privacy driven email service, Lavabit, has decided to shut down rather than cooperate with a court order that demanded it work with the US government. It is the first such company known to have closed rather than comply with government surveillance. Founder Ladar Levison wrote on the company's blog that he had a choice. He could have been forced to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. Levison said government-imposed restrictions prevented him from explaining what exactly led to his company's crisis point. While he would have liked to explain his decision under the First Amendment, he said, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. "As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests," Levison wrote. Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the Guardian that it was the first time a service provider chose to shut down rather than comply with a court order they felt violated the Constitution. There are signs that others are following. Silent Circle, another provider of secure online services, is killing off its own encrypted email offering, Silent Mail. The company said that although it had not received any government orders to hand over information, "the writing is on the wall". Snowden was a Lavabit customer. A Lavabit email address believed to come from Snowden invited reporters to a press conference at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport in mid-July. Levinson said he intended to mount a legal challenge and a favourable decision would allow him to resurrect Lavabit as an American company. He warned that he would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to any company with physical ties to the United States. |
| China has a big Windows XP problem Posted: 08 Aug 2013 09:29 AM PDT As Microsoft prepares to pull the life-support plug on Windows XP, China is scratching its head and wondering what it should do. China has eight months before Windows XP gets its last last security update and in that time it has to work out what to do with millions of XP installs. Net Applications said that 37.2 percent of the globe's personal computers ran Windows XP last month which means that there must be about 570 million machines. But according to Network World, some countries are going to suffer more than others. Only 16.4 percent of US computers run the aged software. But in China 72.1 percent of the country's computers rely on it and will be sitting ducks for any exploits that come along. China has been slowly shedding its dependence on Windows XP, but if it continues at its current rate XP will still be on between 65.2 percent and 65.7 percent of its personal computers. |
| Top WaPo journalist pens open missive to Jeff Bezos Posted: 08 Aug 2013 09:27 AM PDT Pulitzer Prize winning veteran journalist Gene Weingarten has penned an open letter to Amazon boss and new Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos that urges him to recognise the quality staffers of the WaPo. There's another open letter in the comment section from FriendsDontLetFriendsVoteRepublican: "Dear Mr. Bezos -- Thank you for not allowing the Kochroaches to get their hands on the Post. Sincerely, Intelligent People Everywhere". |
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