TechEye

Greek crisis causes markets to slide
TSMC to be a winner for Apple chips
Google faces attack from within its ranks
More trouble looms on notebook sales
BBC remembers pages that Google has forgotten
China’s computer poachers turn gamekeepers
BT Openreach slammed by Bob the Builder
There’s yet another performance gain for Lithium ion-batteries

Posted: 29 Jun 2015 03:55 AM PDT

Uncertainty over Greece's future in the Eurozone has caused stock markets to slide and the Euro to weaken.

Greece has closed its banks for the week because the European Central Bank has decreed it won't make emergency funding available to the country. Greece has also limited its citizens to withdrawing only 60 Euro a day.

The crisis means tech companies are affected once again – many US multinationals have had to register the effects of the dollar-Euro exchange rate in their quarterly financial results.

The FTSE this morning fell by close to two percent this morning, while France's and Germany's stock markets fell more than three percent. The Euro at press time hovered close to US dollar parity.

Greece has to make a 1.6 billion Euro payment to the International Money Fund (IMF) fund tomorrow with market analysts suggesting that there is now a strong possibility that the country has to exit the Eurozone.

TSMC to be a winner for Apple chips

Posted: 29 Jun 2015 03:29 AM PDT

While the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) already makes semiconductors for Apple that generate 20 percent of its considerable revenues, it looks like the next generation of microprocessors for future iPhones and tablets will make even more money for the foundry giant.

TSMC is a "pure play foundry", that is to say it makes chips at its fabrication plants based on designs from customers that don't have their own manufacturing capabilities, such as Apple, Nvidia and others.

Currently, it and Samsung share the spoils for manufacturing Apple chips, but according to a report in the Taipei Times, TSMC could win 50 percent of the orders from Apple next year for its new chip – the A10 – because of its improved process in its fabrication plants.

TSMC still makes the A8 microprocessor for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus but revenues will decline from that.

Apple typically second sources chips and equipment it sells to hedge against manufacturing problems.

Google faces attack from within its ranks

Posted: 29 Jun 2015 01:45 AM PDT

Legal cases against Google alleging that it indulges in antitrust activities by leveraging its search engine look to be strengthened after a former ally undermined its arguments.

Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor and, according to Bloomberg an ally of Google, co-wrote a paper delivered over the weekend alleging that the firm dishes out its own content rather than operate an even hand to search engine results.

Wu said in the paper, presented at a conference here in Oxford over the weekend, that Google fails to show the best search results at the top of pages it returns.

It doesn't help people by doing that, the paper continued.

However, there may be more to this attack than meets the eye. Because, according to Bloomberg, Yelp – which has an antitrust axe to grind – paid for Wu's work on the paper.

Google degrades the quality and speed of results, according to the paper. But the data may well be used against the search outfit once cases across the world come to court.

More trouble looms on notebook sales

Posted: 29 Jun 2015 01:26 AM PDT

We've seen recently that companies that specialise in making notebooks for others – so called original design manufacturers (ODMs) – have been cautious about the outlook for the future.

Last week, Taiwanese ODM Quanta said it didn't expect anything great from notebook sales. It has diversified its business to sell servers direct and to manufacture watces for Apple.

And today, another major Taiwanese ODM, Wiston, said it didn't expect a lot of growth in the notebook market in the second half of this year.

According to a report in Digitimes, Wistron saw a precipitous drop in notebook shipments in the first half of this year, and the second half looks little better.

Like Quanta, Wistron is hoping to diversify its business by manufacturing other electronic devices and elements.

The writing has been on the wall for X86 notebooks for quite a few quarters now, and it looks like the era of the Windows Intel duopoly is more or less over and done.

BBC remembers pages that Google has forgotten

Posted: 29 Jun 2015 01:19 AM PDT

The BBC has started saving pages which have been deleted from Google under the EU's right to be forgotten law.

The pages are from BBC news and the Beeb does not know who asked Google to take them down or why.

Since a European Court of Justice ruling last year, individuals have the right to request that search engines remove certain web pages from their search results.

Those pages usually contain personal information about individuals.

According to the BBC, it is making it clear to licence fee payers which pages have been removed from Google’s search results by publishing this list of links. Each month, it will republish the list with new removals added at the top.

"We are doing this primarily as a contribution to public policy. We think it is important that those with an interest in the "right to be forgotten" can ascertain which articles have been affected by the ruling. We hope it will contribute to the debate about this issue. We also think the integrity of the BBC’s online archive is important and, although the pages concerned remain published on BBC Online, removal from Google searches makes parts of that archive harder to find," a spokesBeeb said.

As you would expect, the vast majority of the google blocks are on elderly court cases. In other cases we could see why a journalist would want this blocked, but we are not really sure of why Google did it, particularly as literally "just writing boll*cks" should not be enough to get blocked even if the boll*cks concerned were your own.

China’s computer poachers turn gamekeepers

Posted: 29 Jun 2015 01:18 AM PDT

A sea change is happening in China where kids who would normally be hackers are turning into security experts.

Chinese companies are finding themselves being turned over regularly and with the increase in the number of cyber-attacks, many hackers are finding it increasingly lucrative to go above board and join the country’s cyber security industry.

Reuters cited the CV of Zhang Tianqi, a 23-year old Beijinger who spent his high school years infiltrating foreign websites by probing for vulnerabilities on overseas gaming networks.

He is now the chief technology officer of a Shanghai-based cyber security firm which owns Vulbox.com, a site offering rewards for vulnerability discoveries, and internet security media site FreeBuf.com.

Zhang said that there’s a trend of China taking information security very seriously and to tackle a huge problem of cybercrime dozens of cyber security companies are now cropping up across China according to industry observers, populated by young techies with bona fide security skills and work experience at firms like Alibaba, Tencent Holdings and Baidu.

China wants people with local security skills rather than relying on foreign firms like Symantec, Kaspersky and EMC who might have links with foreign governments.

Former hackers say the majority of their peers are joining a burgeoning industry to help China firms fend off the numerous attacks they face themselves, normally from the US and from cut-throat Chinese rivals.

Some of the shift away from hobby hacking might have been spurred by a government crackdown on China’s hacking community five years ago – around the same time Beijing passed a series of laws banning hacking and spamming tools and requiring telecom operators to help suppress attacks.

Many chose to shift from “black hat” activities to “white hat” ones, using their skills to find network vulnerabilities so that they can be fixed.

BT Openreach slammed by Bob the Builder

Posted: 29 Jun 2015 01:17 AM PDT

BT has been slammed for not connecting new building sites with broadband fast enough.

The Guardian brought to light several cases where BT Openreach was dragging its feet providing broadband to new building estates.

A new development in Cambridge has been without broadband for months and while everyone has a phone line for some reason BT can't provide the 'correct cables' for broadband".

Without broadband, the owners can't get other sorts of services which most Brits take for granted, such as Sky.

Openreach claims that 93.5 percent of new lines were installed in time in the last quarter of 2014. It's the 6.5 percent that fail that concern developers who have to face the flak from angry buyers.

Steve Turner of the Home Builders Federation said: "During a site's development house builders put in the infrastructure to carry the cables, but are then totally reliant on the broadband suppliers to install and connect up the telecom lines."

"The industry is as frustrated as those new-home buyers experiencing delays to broadband connectivity," he said,

Openreach blames the delays on "the explosion of housebuilding across the UK", however it is not clear where it is getting its numbers from new homes built rose only 8 per cent last year.

"We are working flat out but we recognise that there's more to do," says a spokesperson.

Turner said Openreach needs to address poor performance. The Federation is helping them better plan resources to ensure that these problems don't persist as the industry expands housing supply.

Last year the telecoms regulator Ofcom ordered Openreach to get its act together and imposed a "quality of service" requirement which obliges it, among other things, to send an engineer within 12 days of a new line being ordered.

It has until next April to meet the new targets and Ofcom says it's currently assessing how it has fared in the first 12 months since they were imposed.

There’s yet another performance gain for Lithium ion-batteries

Posted: 29 Jun 2015 01:16 AM PDT

It seems that the world+dog is coming up with new ways to double the capacity of lithium-ion batteries.

Last week, we told how MIT had come up with a cunning plan and now it seems that Samsung researchers have developed materials that double the power capacity of lithium-ion batteries.

Writing in the popular science magazine Nature, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) said the technology uses silicon cathode material coded with high-crystalline graphene to produce batteries with twice as much capacity as ordinary lithium-ion batteries.

It claimed that the new technology will enhance the performance of mobile devices and electric vehicles.

Son In-hyu SAIT researcher at said that the research has dramatically improved the capacity of lithium-ion batteries by applying a new synthesis method of high-crystalline graphene to a high-capacity silicon cathode. We will continue to improve the secondary cell technology to meet the expanding demand from mobile device and electric vehicle markets.

The lithium-ion battery was introduced in 1991 and its storage capacity has been gradually improved. But the material’s properties have limited improvements to capacity, failing to follow skyrocketing demand from the mobile and electric car industries.

SAIT said its researchers focused on graphene, a relatively new material that is physically strong and highly conductive, to solve this problem.

This material has up to four times the capacity compared with graphite and can double the energy density of ordinary lithium-ion batteries.

Patents covering the new technology have been applied for in Korea, China, Europe and the United States.