TechEye |  |
- FCC to relax phone use on planes
- Samsung ordered to pay Apple millions
- GPUs could find network use
- Ballmer might buy WinAmp
- Microsoft plays a game with Google fears
- Internet cafés are dying out
- BP accused of using internet trolls
| FCC to relax phone use on planes Posted: 22 Nov 2013 02:51 AM PST The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is going to suggest passengers can use mobile phones on planes in a move likely to infuriate a lot of people. |
| Samsung ordered to pay Apple millions Posted: 22 Nov 2013 01:25 AM PST A Silicon Valley jury ordered Samsung Electronics to pay Apple $290 million for copying iPhone and iPad features. According to CNET, Apple will be gravely disappointed. The previous jury awarded Apple $1.05 billion, but US District Judge Lucy Koh ordered the new trial and tossed out $450 million of the damages after concluding the previous jury did not add up properly Samsung is expected to appeal the latest verdict but in the meantime has to focus on a third trial in March to consider Apple's claims that Samsung's newest devices on the market also copied Apple's technology. Apple has been trying to convince the world that it invented the smartphone and anyone who comes up with something can compete with its iPhone must have copied the idea. It has so far been very successful in US courts, but done less well in foreign courts where judges do not believe that Steve Jobs invented the rounded rectangle. Samsung has had mixed results in its counter attacks. It tried initially to sue Apple for using technology which were part of agreed standards and earned the wrath of the EU. Samsung lawyer William Price argued Apple is misconstruing the breadth of its patents to include such things as the basic rectangle shape of most smartphones today. Apple attorney William Lee blamed Samsung’s copying for the reason that Jobs’ Mob phones are not in everyone’s hands. "Apple can never get back to where it should have been in 2010," Lee told the jury. The case was fought around 15 minutes away from Apple's Cupertino headquarters, and several prospective jurors were dismissed because they had links to the company. Apple laywers made frequent moves to try to inflame patriotic passions by urging jurors to help protect American companies from evil overseas rivals. Samsung complained and the judge had to tell jurors to ignore such appeals. Samsung again demanded a halt to the trial after the US Patent and Trademark Office told Apple it was planning to invalidate a patent protecting the "pinch-to-zoom" feature. This was one of the things that the jury had to consider. That defence did not work, but will probably form the basis for an appeal |
| Posted: 22 Nov 2013 01:23 AM PST A researcher working for the US Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has found that GPUs make ideal tools for capturing details about network data. Fermilab's Wenji Wu told CIO that GPU-based network monitors keep pace with all the traffic flowing through networks running at more than 10Gbps. As bandwidth has skyrocketed, network analysis tools have found it hard to keep up. To make matters worse, network admins want to inspect operational data in real-time. All this is done with standard x86 processors or customer ASICs which are limited in what they can do. CPUs have the memory of a goldfish and tend to drop packets. ASICs have the memory bandwidth but are an arse to programme. They also can't split processing duties into parallel tasks which is very important these days. In a paper, Wenji that GPUs have "a great parallel execution model." They offer high memory bandwidth, easy programmability, and can split the packet capturing process across multiple cores. Nonitoring networks requires reading all the data packets as they cross the network, which requires more parallelism than you can poke a stick at. Wenji has built a prototype at Fermilab to demonstrate the feasibility of a GPU-based network monitor, using a Nvidia M2070 GPU and an off-the-shelf NIC to capture network traffic. Not only did it not catch fire, it could be easily be expanded with additional GPUs, he said. The GPU-based system was able to speed performance by as much as 17 times. Compared to a six core CPU, the speed up from using a GPU was threefold. If this is the case then the makers of commercial network appliances could use GPUs to boost their devices' line rates. Developers could save a bomb by using pre-existing GPU programming models such as the Nvidia's CUDA, Wenji said. |
| Posted: 22 Nov 2013 01:21 AM PST The dark satanic rumour mill has manufactured a hell on earth yarn that Microsoft's Steve Ballmer is to write a cheque for the iconic, but soon to be shuttered WinAmp. Yesterday we revealed how WinAmp was about to go the way of the Dodo after AOL announced it could not be bothered running it any more. Now, according to Techcrunch AOL is talks with Microsoft to sell WinAmp, along with Shoutcast, a media streaming service also developed by Nullsoft. It had not been known that Shoutcast was about to go the way of WinAmp. The deal is not yet finalised and both sides have yet to work out a price. The rumour might also have been started by those who want to save both services. As far as rumours go, only the AOL side of it makes any sense. AOL wants to close WinAmp and Shoutcast and would love to sell them to make a bit of dosh out of it. The company is more interested in being a web publisher than a music man. After all there is shedloads of money in web-publishing and AOL is legendary for its fantastic business ideas. Vole has not done well on the music side. There was the Zune, which was brilliant, and its own Windows Media Player which was nearly as useful. It chucked a lot of cash at Xbox Music basket, which works on the Xbox 360, Windows 8, Windows RT, Windows Phone 8,iOS and Android devices, offering free, ad-supported streaming, subscriptions, and downloaded music. So we are not sure what good WinAmp would do. Shoutcast has a platform that acts as a portal to over 50,000 radio stations which might find a use in the Xbox Music platform but WinAmp would be a little surplus to requirements. There is also the small matter that many people installed WinAmp because it was not iTunes or Microsoft. |
| Microsoft plays a game with Google fears Posted: 22 Nov 2013 01:19 AM PST Microsoft is running an anti-Google marketing campaign where you can buy products which slag off the search engine outfit. For a year Vole has been running a year-long anti-Google Scroogled campaign highlighting what it sees as the Mountain View company's various dodgy practices and underhand use of user data. Its latest trick is to sell off Scroogled word-cloud T-shirts with "Scroogled synonyms" like sold out, fleeced, scammed, conned, cheated, fooled, double-crossed, defrauded, hoodwinked, swindled, and duped. There is also the "Keep calm while we steal your data" mugs, to "Step into our Web" shirts. Vole's idea was to promote Bing by bashing Google's practice of "selling their shopping search results to a high bidder". Of course Google fans can point out that the US Federal Trade Commission ordered Google and Bing to distinguish between search results and ads better on their webpages. This suggests that Google and Bing are as bad as each other. But Vole is not just going after Google, it released a video poking fun at the iPhone 5S. Apple fanboys complained that it was poor taste because their iConnic savour had not risen from the dead yet. Fox News is now asking its viewers if Microsoft should abandon the campaign because it is not funny. We would have thought if things should be abandoned because they are not funny, the first to go should be Fox News. |
| Posted: 22 Nov 2013 01:17 AM PST Internet cafes, which were once the communication hub in developing countries, are fast dying out. According to Quartz the reason is the rise in smartphones which are making the need to go into a café largely redundant. In Rwanda, one café went from 200 customers per day to just ten and in India they are suffering too—some in the southern city of Mysore have opted to sell stationery or sweets instead of web access. Café owners have diversified their offerings to include flight bookings, mobile phone top-up cards, and accessories for various gadgets. Cafés in Myanmar, where mobile penetration is extraordinarily low are seeing the same trend happen there. More developed markets had seen cafés survive to cater for immersive online gaming. But the number of these sorts of cafes in South Korea fell to 15,800 last year from 19,000 in 2010. The number of cafes in China, meanwhile, dropped seven percent to 136,000 in 2012 from the previous year. All this flies in the face of a five-year study released by the University of Washington in July found that Web users in some developing countries continue to rely on public venues like cafes and libraries for Web access even when smartphones are available. It insisted that one technology does not replace the other and mobile phones do not solve access problems. |
| BP accused of using internet trolls Posted: 22 Nov 2013 01:15 AM PST Petrol outfit BP has been accused of hiring internet "trolls" to attack and threaten people who do not like the way the outfit has handled the spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. After the single largest environmental disaster in US history, BP hired PR company Ogilvy & Mather to run a BP America Facebook page. The page was meant to encourage interaction with BP, but when people posted anti-BP comments it was noticed that they were attacked, bullied, and sometimes directly threatened. An anonymous poster called "Marie" has produced boxes of documents and well-researched information that she thinks shows that the people harassing BP's critics online worked for BP or Ogilvy. She has passed these documents on to the body investigating the disaster, GAP. GAP investigator Shanna Devine told Al Jazeera the documentation of more serious threats made on the BP page was clear enough to start an investigation of its own. Threats began on the FB page, but then escalated offline. Threats included identifying where somebody lived, an internet troll referring to having a shotgun and making use of it. Marie provided the firm and Al Jazeera with files of complaint letters, computer screenshots of the abuse, and a list of Facebook profiles used by the people who harassed her and others. The attacks were racist, sexist, and threatened posters with legal action and violence. They've insinuated that some commenters are 'child molesters'. The goal was to get those posting negative comments to leave facebook. One one troll used the name "Griffin" and makes several allusions to gun violence. In one case "Griffin" threatened to shoot an environmentalist with his .50 calibre gun. Another, named "Ken Smith" edited a photo of a BP critic's pet bird into the crosshairs of a gunsight. |
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