TechEye |  |
- Samsung Galaxy S4 threatens childrens’ lives
- Obama risks trade war to defend Apple's patent trolling
- Jobs' Mob rumoured to introduce new tablets on October 22
- Gartner predicts the apocalypse
- Intel wants to examine your DNA
- UK police order foreign copyright take-down notices
- Intel lays claim to the internet of fangs
| Samsung Galaxy S4 threatens childrens’ lives Posted: 09 Oct 2013 01:32 AM PDT A woman said that her Samsung Galaxy S4 exploded and that caused her pram to catch fire. |
| Obama risks trade war to defend Apple's patent trolling Posted: 09 Oct 2013 03:06 AM PDT The US government is encouraging patent troll actions against foreign companies while protecting its own from any counter attacks. It had been thought that President Barrack Obama would intervene to stop Apple winning a patent troll case against Samsung. He had already stepped in and stopped Apple products being banned in the US because they violated Samsung patents. At last this would mean an end to patent trolls trying to shut down their competition using the US International Trade Commission's (ITC) power to block the import of products. Yesterday Obama indicated that he would not stop a Samsung product ban in the US, which means that his move to defend Apple was nothing to do with squashing Patent Trolls, but the first shots in a trade war with South Korea. Basically what Obama is saying is that it is OK for US companies, like Apple, to use patents to prevent rivals from trading in the US, but it is not OK for foreign companies, like Samsung to use its patents in self-defence. US Trade Representative Michael Froman, said in a statement that after carefully weighing policy considerations, including the impact on consumers and competition, advice from agencies, and information from interested parties, he had decided to allow" the import ban. Samsung can now seek a delay in the ban from a US appeals court that will consider the entire case on legal grounds, but the company must be in shock at the unfairness of it all. It had asked Obama to overturn the ban ordered by the ITC on public policy grounds, which was the same relief the president gave Apple in August from an order barring imports of the iPhone 4S. Obama now seems to be saying that the Samsung victory against Apple involved a patent on a basic function of mobile phones that was part of an industry wide standard, rather than features. This repeats the Apple defence case, which was rejected by the ITC. Obama said companies should be limited in their ability to use ownership of standard-essential patents to block competition. Edward Black, president of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, a Washington trade group whose members include Samsung and Google told Bloomberg that the Apple import ban "was based on political pressure and favouritism". He warned that siding with an American company over a Korean one could have trade implications, Froman's office insisted that the nationality of the two companies "played no role in the review process". Samsung has a problem here. Obama has made it clear that Apple can sue it under trademark laws and troll it into the ground. Normally the tactic is to use your own patents to defend yourself. However if Apple wins, Samsung will have to take products off the shelf, but if Samsung wins, it will have its mate Obama overturn the court case. It will be interesting to see how the South Korean government responds to any complaints from Samsung. We would have thought a ban on the iPhone would be an appropriate minimum, followed by crippling tariffs on US owned imports to the country. Either way, defending Apple will cost the Obama administration as foreign companies suddenly realise that they are not equal before US law. |
| Jobs' Mob rumoured to introduce new tablets on October 22 Posted: 09 Oct 2013 02:57 AM PDT Apple will introduce its latest line-up of iPads on October 22. AllThingsD deep throats have claimed that Apple would be updating its tablets in time for holiday shopping. The new iPads will go up against Amazon.com's Kindle Fire tablets, which will be lighter, thinner designs and have more powerful processors. But all things are not well in Apple land. Supply chain sources have warned that Apple may run into a shortage of so-called "retina" displays for the iPad mini which could in turn limit supply of the gadget during the crucial season. The iPhone-maker has come under pressure over the past year to preserve market share and bolster sales against rivals that are rapidly raising specifications and lowering prices. Amazon's new 7-inch Kindle Fire is priced from $229 for 16GB wifi-only models, while Google Inc's second-generation Nexus 7 offers a similar screen size and storage capacity at the same price. In comparison, the cheapest model in Apple's current 7.9-inch iPad Mini lineup with 16GB of storage starts at $329. What is curious is that it looks like Apple's iWatch is still vapourware. While rivals like Samsung have already issued a designs for wearable computer watches which are expected to do everything an iWatch might do, Apple has yet to announce that it will come up with anything similar. |
| Gartner predicts the apocalypse Posted: 09 Oct 2013 02:54 AM PDT It seems that analysts at Gartner have been channelling the dead spirit of the founder of the Luddite movement, General Ned Ludd, and started seeing technology as bringing about the end of the world. Gartner claims that there will be some major changes in technology soon, which will reduce the need for workers. This will bring about social unrest, the analyst firm warned. Common thinking is that like the industrial revolution, which inspired Ludd’s Luddites, it's all about jobs. Not Steve Jobs. Jobs. Daryl Plummer, a Gartner analyst at the research firm's Symposium ITxpo said the digital revolution is not following the same path. It is leading to a decline in the overall number of people required to do a job. Outfits like Kodak, which once employed 130,000, are competing with Instagram's 13. Gartner also sees social unrest movements, similar to Occupy Wall Street, emerging again by 2014. Tom Seitzberg, director of international IT operations for Genomic Health in San Francisco told Computerworld that he agreed with Big G. Every society lives from the backbone from a strong middle class. If you get just a top level, a small amount of very rich people and a very large piece of very poor people, it leads to social unrest. Gartner predicted that by 2016, the 3D printing of tissues and organs, called bioprinting, will cause a global debate about regulating the technology or banning it. Bioprinting is just one aspect of 3D, but it illustrates, dramatically, the potential of this technology, Big G said. Printing products will lead to distribution systems changes and cause changes to software and the way work is done, the report claims After shuffling his tarot deck, Plummer said that by 2018, 3D printing will result in the loss of at least $100 billion a year in intellectual property globally. This could be particularly hard on a small business as it is easy to steal an entire business. By 2017, 80 percent of consumers will give up private information in exchange for some type of benefit and by 2020, enterprises and government will fail to protect 75 percent of sensitive data. By 2024, machines will play a bigger role in protecting humans with "non-overridable 'smart systems. Cars are already getting this technology, such as a braking system that can respond faster than a human, he said. By 2017, 10 percent of computers will be learning and speech recognition will improve, he predicted. More than five percent of sales from global IT firms will come from wearable computers in 2020. No mention of jetpacks. |
| Intel wants to examine your DNA Posted: 09 Oct 2013 02:40 AM PDT Fashion bag maker Intel is sprucing up supercomputer design so that some top boffins can have half a chance to understand DNA codes. Chipzilla has signed a deal with imec and five Flemish universities to set up the ExaScience Life Lab on the imec campus in Leuven. The objective of the collaboration is to come up with new supercomputer ideas that will generate breakthroughs in life sciences and biotechnology. The supercomputers will be designed to accelerate the processing of entire genome sequences. At the moment an analysis takes approximately 48 hours and the thought is that computer design is falling behind. There will also be an expected explosion of genome data becoming available in the coming years. According to Intel, the lab will examine the use of computer simulations in the life sciences. Testing hypotheses through computer simulation both cells and tissues instead of through wet-lab testing saves considerable amounts of time and cost associated to lab tests Intel lab manager Luc Provoost said that Chipzilla has an extensive network of research labs in Europe. Once operational, the ExaScience Life Lab will be our European centre of excellence for high performance computing in the life sciences.. Later the plan is to collaborate with Janssen Pharmaceuticals to build even more powerful DNA supercomputers. |
| UK police order foreign copyright take-down notices Posted: 09 Oct 2013 02:09 AM PDT City of London coppers are threatening foreign ISPs to shut down their businesses if they do not close pirate sites. Letters have been sent to at least one foreign ISP, EasyDNS, threatening to report the company to ICANN unless they close sites, which coppers have been tipped off, are pirate sites. There is no evidence presented to the EasyDNS, nor any court order to back it up. The police are basically threatening a company on the say-so of Big Content telling them which site to shut down. In this case, the police want a bittorrent search engine switched off. It is not hosting the torrent files locally and is probably not what many would consider a pirate site. If the ISP does not freeze the whois record, redirect the DNS for the domain to 83.138.166.114 and permit no further changes to it, the London Police say that they will contact ICANN and say that the ISP is found to have 'permitted illegal activity in the registration or use of domain names'." Writing in his bog, the owner of EasyDNS Mark Jeftovic pointed out that there was a complete lack of due process when it comes to domain name takedowns. It is not clear who has decided what is illegal and what makes someone's site a criminal. But what is alarming is the threat to refer the matter to ICANN if he didn't play along. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but I always thought it was something that gets decided in a court of law, as opposed to "some guy on the internet" sending emails. While that's plenty reason enough for some registrars to take down domain names, it doesn't fly here," he wrote. Jeftovic said his company had an obligation to his customers and is bound by its Registrar Accreditation Agreements not to make arbitrary changes to our customers' settings without a valid Form of Authorisation. If he did not do that, he needed a legal basis. To get a legal basis something has to happen in court. He said that the largest, most egregious perpetrators of online criminal activity right now are our governments, which are spying on their own citizens, illegally wiretapping private communications. "If I can't make various governments and law enforcement agencies get warrants or court orders before they crack my private communications then I can at least require a court order before I take down my own customer," he added |
| Intel lays claim to the internet of fangs Posted: 08 Oct 2013 11:38 AM PDT After realising that it’s a bit behind the rest of the semiconductor world, Chipzilla (tick: INTC) has rolled out some marchitecture and claiming it’s still on the roadmap – especially about the internet of things/fangs. |
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