TechEye

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• China has 2 million people monitoring the internet
• Russia turns Winter Olympics into spy fest
• Samsung advertises with pirates
• Queue forms to squeeze Blackberry
• Microsoft cries sell out for Surface 2
• Microsoft continues to touch our hearts
• Get ready to buy your last light bulb ever

China has 2 million people monitoring the internet Posted: 07 Oct 2013 06:22 AM PDT According to Chinese state media, the country hires two million people to run and monitor its "Great Firewall". Beijing News has reported that many employees are performing keyword searches and checking tens of millions of messages being posted each day. The number of employees highlights just how low tech and human intensive the operations are. Even then, staff are unable to prevent comments that are deemed by the government to be undesirable from being published and reposted. The "web police" are hired by the government's propaganda arm, as well as by commercial sites. China has more than 500 million internet users, making it the world's largest online population. If a western country wanted to set up a similar operation it would have its work cut out to justify it. According to our estimates, if David Cameron wanted to establish a "great firewall of Britain" he would have to hire roughly 210,000 people to keep up. Of course, British labour is not cheap, so it might be worth considering outsourcing such an operation to China.

Russia turns Winter Olympics into spy fest Posted: 07 Oct 2013 03:52 AM PDT Not only has the Russian government made its Winter Olympics a no go zone for gay people, Putin's people are about to mount a spy fest which will make the NSA look like a bunch of liberal namby-pambies. According to the Guardian, the Black Sea resort of Sochi has apparently been wired so that Russian spy agency the FSB can log all visitor communications. Any athletes and spectators attending the Winter Olympics in Sochi in February will have to deal with some of the most invasive and systematic spying and surveillance in the history of the Games, it is claimed. A dossier compiled by a team of Russian journalists looking into preparations for the 2014 Games shows tenders from Russian communication companies describing a telephone and internet spying capability not seen before. It will give the FSB a pass to intercept any telephony or data traffic and even track the use of sensitive words or phrases mentioned in emails, webchats and on social media. According to the journalists, Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, major amendments have been made to telephone and wi-fi networks in the Black Sea resort to ensure extensive and all-permeating monitoring and filtering of all traffic. The spies are using Sorm, which is Russia's system for intercepting phone and internet communications. This technology is being modernised across Russia, but particular attention has been paid to Sochi given the large number of foreign visitors expected next year. It will allow deep packet inspection to filter users by particular keywords. The Russian state has already threatened gay atheletes and homosexual spectators with arrest if they show up for the games and protest, so we guess we now know how they will find out. Soldatov and Borogan claim the FSB has been working since 2010 to upgrade the Sorm system to ensure it can cope with the extra traffic during the Games. All telephone and ISP providers have to install Sorm boxes in their technology by law, and once installed, the FSB can access data without the provider ever knowing. What might spook readers in the UK is that during a rare FSB press conference this week, an official, Alexei Lavrishchev said that the London Olympics featured far more intrusive measures. The British installed CCTV cameras in the loos and even the Russians would not think of that, Lavrishchev said.

Samsung advertises with pirates Posted: 07 Oct 2013 03:39 AM PDT Samsung has been outed as one of the top advertisers on one of the Ukraine's largest file-sharing sites. Big Content groups have formed an initiative called "Clear Sky" in Ukraine, which seems to be focused on naming and shaming the advertising antics of Samsung, Nokia, Canon, Carlsberg and Coca Cola. According to Torrent Freak, Clear Sky sees funding of P2P sites by well-known international brands as a major problem. The Ukraine has been branded by the US as one of the top piracy havens in the world, and in a bid to "counter this image" local big content groups set up Clear Sky. The coalition's goal is to find ways to combat online piracy. Stage one is naming and shaming international companies who advertise with pirates. Ex.ua and FS.ua have millions of visitors per week and generate a healthy revenue stream through ads, some of which are paid by global companies. Nearly 10 percent of all ads on the two file-sharing sites are financed by well-known international brands. Nearly half of all those ads come from Samsung. A big chunk of Samsung's advertising budget in the Ukraine goes to the two file-sharing sites according to the report. We had a look at both sites this morning to look for a screenshot and found them rather short on adverts. We guess it was just a bad day.

Queue forms to squeeze Blackberry Posted: 07 Oct 2013 03:31 AM PDT Now the word is out, there's apparently a queue to buy troubled Canadian mobile outfit Blackberry. Cisco, Google and SAP have been seen snuffling around corporate HQ looking for bargains and measuring the curtains. Reuters' deepthroats have said that the three are interested in buying all or parts of Blackberry. Until now it had been assumed that a group, led by BlackBerry's biggest shareholder, Fairfax Financial Holdings, would get the nod to take the company private for $4.7 billion. That bid which has faced some skepticism because analysts can’t work out where the money is coming from and suspect that Fairfax is out on the street busking with a dog on a string. Other interest has come from Intel, LG and Samsung. It is expected that, while the phones themselves have been written off as lemons, BlackBerry's secure server network and patent portfolio is worth a fair bit. There will not be much left of Blackberry’s $2 billion cash pile in the coming years, analysts warn. Another financial group which has shown interest is Cerberus Capital Management. This would be appropriate, as Blackberry is half way to the underworld already.

Microsoft cries sell out for Surface 2 Posted: 07 Oct 2013 03:25 AM PDT Microsoft is having another crack at telling the world its latest Surface tablet is a sell-out. For those who came in late, this is what the Vole told us about its first Surface, something it later admitted was a lie. In fact it was made to look really stupid when the Surface was found to be a huge turkey. However, a recent tweet from Microsoft's developer profile shows that Vole is either telling the truth, or has learned nothing from the last fiasco. The tweet said the Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2 tablets are about to become a lot harder to get hold of because both units are already in short supply, and that they're close to selling out. When the first Surface Pro hit the market we were reliably informed that it was in very short supply and would sell out in no time at all. That may have been because Microsoft didn't order many of the things in the first place. Initial stocks of the Surface Pro were more paltry than a Bernard Mathews' Christmas dinner. Unless all the models actually exploded, it should have sold out. This is a trick the Vole has copied from Apple and is designed to create hype where there is none. In Apple's case, it usually manages to sell a fair few million on launch day, whereas Microsoft hardware doesn't. In the case of the Surface 1, Microsoft claimed it had sold out when it hadn't come close. The Surface 2 doesn't look like a bad device. It should do well, but we just find it difficult to believe Microsoft's tweet machine that it already is.

Microsoft continues to touch our hearts Posted: 07 Oct 2013 03:00 AM PDT Software behemoth Microsoft has also been in the forefront of hardware almost forever - hey don't forget the mouse. Although it’s been a little bit late to the game with tablets and that, it has multiple projects that it believes will be game changers in the future. Alex Butler, senior research director, at Microsoft Cambridge, showed off quite a number of projects that may, one day, be turned into products you can buy. Butler told the audience at IEF2013 in Dublin: “Touch is everywhere in today’s age and we’re all used to touching, typing and swiping. We think this is all very natural. New hardware enables new types of software and touch has just opened the door.” Butler’s unit - Microsoft Research - has 850 futuristic people around the world.  “We’re a little like a university, looking 5, 10 or 15 years ahead without being tied to products,” he said. “Stuff does feed into the product line. The applied sciences group look at new materials and technologies.” He said that Microsoft continues to work on the surface table – that’s a table not a tablet folks, but, he said,  it’s still a little underexploited. Microsoft wants to create a very thin table design that uses infrared to sense a whole variety of objects. It’s essentially a low resolution camera with 1,000 sensors in it, he said. It’s also experimenting with SideSight for small form factors using side sensors, which works much lke paper.  Mouse 2.0 adds multi-touch to a mouse and uses diffuse illumination. A project called Digits which involves a camera worn on your body that leaves your fingers free, allows you to, for example, turn virtual knobs. KinectFusion lets you digitise 3D into building a model of anything you’re looking at and lets you perform virtual touch on practically anything.  It’s extended that to scalable KinectFusion which lets you walk through a space and digitise the entire world you’re perambulating. It’s also working on Augmented Projectors using handheld projectors. Its Surface Physics software allows simulation including forces like friction. Microsoft is working on fusing pen and touch as well as working on proximity and hover technologies. Its SecondLight project uses a sheet which can be made opaque or milky and uses touch and a camera to virtually lift objects off the screen and drop them elsewhere on the display.   It’s also working on see through 3D to develop things in other dimensions.  Vermeer is a stereographic display that also uses holographs. It renders 3,000 frames a second to generate all the views.   Another project works on soft ferro-magnetic input devices which are basically squishy rather than hard surfaces. Its TouchMover is an activated 3D display which pushes back. Butler said that one of the obstacles to its research is that LCD manufacturers don’t appear to want to develop the high speed technology that could essentially enable a new era of touch applications. He demonstrated a 1000Hz project that uses ultra touch so response to your finger appeared instantaneous.  There’s a little too much latency, or slowness as we call it, in current LCD tech.

Get ready to buy your last light bulb ever Posted: 07 Oct 2013 02:59 AM PDT Plessey, for people of a certain age, is a name to conjure with and being of a certain age, well blow me down because the outfit is still going, albeit in a different form. Michael Le Goff, the CEO of Plessey, told the audience at the forum in Dublin that his firm had acquired the assets of the company including some fabs, and saw a bright future in, er bright LEDs. The company is in a joint venture with the University of Cambridge and is creating LEDs using GaN (Gallium Nitride) on silicon substrates. That, he said, will  create low cost LEDs so that lights will cost a fiver rather than £20 or £30. Plessey is not the only company to take this approach. Samsung is developing GaN on Si, and so are Toshiba, Osram, TSMC.   But, Le Goff asserted, Plessey is  first to market and is now developing its LED roadmap.  “Because we have our own fab and reactors we’re fully integrated,” he said. The LED market will be worth $200 billion by 2020, amounting to half of the lighting market. “The LED lamp is self-cannibalising because the lifetime is about 30 years. We’ll see LEDs embedded in our homes and people won’t need to screw bulbs into sockets,” he said. “The lightbulb is a remnant of a 100 year old technology. There are massive opportunities in solid state lightning as the technology moves into the sub 20 nanometre area,” he said. Essentially, he concluded, when the tech is cheap enough, you’ll die before your lights die. Plessey is looking to find a partner in China to take advantage of the large market.

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