Thursday, September 24, 2015

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Selfies more dangerous than sharks

Posted: 24 Sep 2015 01:37 AM PDT

maxresdefaultThe narcissistic act of taking a selfie is more dangerous to your health than a Great White Shark.

More people have died while trying to taking a 'selfie' than from shark attacks this year, according to the Huffington Post. 
This year eight people have been killed by sharks, but 12 have lost their life while trying to take a photo of themselves.

A 66-year-old tourist from Japan recently died after falling down some stairs while trying to take a photo at the Taj Mahal in India.

In July, a woman from Mississippi was gored to death by a bison while visiting Yellowstone National Park. She had been trying to take a selfie in close proximity to the animals.

Some people just suffered near death experiences. In May when a 21-year-old woman survived accidentally shooting herself in the head while posing for a selfie with a gun in Moscow, the BBC reported.

Of course we don't think that these people removing themselves from the gene pool have done humanity much harm, but the the situation is worrying Russian officials so much that it distributed an illustrated booklet to warn people of dangerous scenarios involved in taking such pictures as part of its Safe Selfie campaign.

In a statement, campaign organiser  Yelena Alekseyeva said: "Our booklet reminds you of how to take a safe selfie, so it is not the last one you will ever take."

The campaign's motto is: "Even a million 'likes' on social media are not worth your life and well-being".  We suspect the sort of people who need to read the booklet are the last people who will do so.

Groupon downsizes

Posted: 24 Sep 2015 01:36 AM PDT

before-and-after-pet-fit-club2.jpg.pagespeed.ce.hhSl6c1-q0X9JD1-lV4hOnline discount outfit Groupon is slashing its staff and pulling out of several countries in a sign that all is not well.

The company is cutting 1,100 jobs mostly in its sales and customer service departments.  This will cost $35 million.

Groupon is also ceasing operations in several markets internationally: Morocco, Panama, The Philippines, Puerto Rico, Taiwan, Thailand and Uruguay will all be closing.

The closures come on top of recent exits in Turkey and Greece and a sell-off of a controlling stake in Groupon India to Sequoia.

Writing in his bog, the ironically named COO Rich Williams said that it is all about the size of your feet.

"We believe that in order for our geographic footprint to be an even bigger advantage, we need to focus our energy and dollars on fewer countries."

The short statement Groupon has filed with the SEC notes that between $22 million and $24 million of the charges will come in Q3 2015, and that the full restructure should be completed by September 2016.

"Substantially all of the pre-tax charges are expected to be paid in cash and will relate to employee severance and compensation benefits, with an immaterial amount of the charges relating to asset impairments and other exit costs.

Cost savings from the cuts will be reinvested in the business.

For the past several years, Groupon has been on a long-term mission to rebalance its strategy from a focus on daily deals to a more diverse business based around local commerce. The company has had mixed success, though.

Cisco does deal with Chinese

Posted: 24 Sep 2015 01:35 AM PDT

the Cisco kidNetwork gear maker Cisco is forming a joint-venture with Chinese server maker Inspur to sell  networking and cloud computing products in China.

The Silicon Valley firm has been suffering behind the bamboo curtain because of political pressure and declining sales.

Cisco and Inspur said they would invest $100 million in the project, although they offered few other details.

However this deal is typical of a growing number of tie-ups between Chinese and US technology firms which are part of a cunning plan to get government regulators off the backs of the big multi-nationals.

Microsoft is to partner with Baidu and Chinese state-owned private investment firm Tsinghua Unigroup on cloud technology. Dell announced last week it would invest $125 billion over five years in China. IBM pledged to help develop China’s advanced chip industry with a “Made with China” strategy.

Chipmakers Intel and Qualcomm are developing chips with smaller Chinese companies.

Similar to its dealings with the foreign auto industry in decades past, Chinese officials have made clear to foreign technology firms that market access depends on their sharing technology and cooperating with Chinese industry.

Cisco’s market share has fallen in China, where its products have been labelled a cybersecurity threat by state media and government-affiliated experts.

 

 

Putin’s minions can’t crack Tor

Posted: 24 Sep 2015 01:34 AM PDT

Vladimir Putin - Wikimedia CommonsTsar Putin was willing to write a $59,000 cheque to anyone able to crack Tor, but now it seems that the company that took the contract is going to spend double that trying to get out of it.

The Central Research Institute of Economics, Informatics, and Control Systems—a Moscow arm of Rostec has paid $150,000 to hire a law firm tasked with negotiating a way out of the deal, according to a database of state purchase disclosures.

Lawyers from Pleshakov, Ushkalov and Partners will work with Russian officials on putting an end to the Tor research project.

Russia's Interior Ministry posted a contract seeking a group "to study the possibility of obtaining technical information on users and users' equipment of Tor anonymous network". Tsar Putin was obviously concerned that his subjects could talk about him behind his back using encryption so he could not read it.

The number of Tor users in Russia has jumped about 40 percent from the beginning of the year, to more than 175,000, according to data from the Tor Project, which develops the service. Tor is partly funded by the US government, had $3.53 million in revenue in 2013, the last year it reported financials on its web.

Millions of fingerprints are compromised

Posted: 23 Sep 2015 10:37 AM PDT

A fingerprintThieves who used technology defects to attack the US Defense Department stole 5.6 million fingerprints, it has emerged.

The Office of Personnel Management had originally said that only 1.1 million fingerprint records had been stolen.

The disclosure, according to Reuters, means that 21.5 million American citizens had their social security details stolen. Reuters believes that the Chinese government is behind the hack.

Fingerprints of individuals stolen include people that work at the Pentagon, Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The US government is downplaying the theft and claiming it is no big deal.

Biometrics is big business. It's still not entirely clear why the US government had a system so vulnerable that the thieves barely needed a key to just walk in and steal the data.

China has consistently denied it countenances hacking. But the received wisdom is that all governments sanction and perform hacks, almost as a matter of routine.

IT systems are inherently insecure.

Spending on IT security continues

Posted: 23 Sep 2015 07:04 AM PDT

Barbed wireSpending on IT security will realise sales of $75.4 billion this year, a rise of close to 4.7 percent compared to 2014.

Gartner said the increase in spend is due to government initiatives, more legislation and highly publicised data breaches.

But because of the strength of the US dollar, pricing in some regions will rise by as much as 20 percent and that will force customers to reduce spending towards the end of this year.

There will be a rebound in spending in 2016, Gartner predicts.

Elizabeth Kim, a research analyst at the firm, said that interest in security technologies is because of cloud, mobile computing and the internet of things.

Vendors will benefit from an increased interest in endpoint detection, threat intelligence and cloud security tools, including encryption.

She predicts that enterprises will invest in network "sandboxing" coupled to network firewalls and content security packages. These "sandboxes" allow enterprises to detect threat outside of the core networks but are seen as too expensive to midsize enterprises, or enterprises which don't have enough dedicated IT staff.

Connection speeds in Europe up

Posted: 23 Sep 2015 06:51 AM PDT

Ruins in YorkA survey by Akamai said that connection speeds in Europe were showing a healthy growth by and large with seven countries in the global top 10 countries.

Akamai said that all European countries it surveys showed average connection speeds were above the 10 Mpbs threshold.

Sweden achieved the top spot in Europe with a 16.1 Mbps average connection speed.

Globally, average peak connection speeds rose by 12 percent to 32.5 Mbps. Nine of the countries had speeds of at least 50 Mbps with Romania topping the list with an average peak connection speed of 72.1 Mbps.

The UK had average connection speeds of 11.8 Mbps – a rise of 7.6 percent year on year, but that leaves the country at number 19 in the worldwide broadband lead table.

In the second quarter, the UK showed 85 percent of broadband was at 4 Mbps or more. The average page load time for a broadband connection was 3138 ms in the second quarter.

Chip maker predicts poor sales

Posted: 23 Sep 2015 06:39 AM PDT

Picture courtesy of Wikimedia CommonsThe Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) makes semiconductors for a number of companies including Qualcomm, Apple, Mediatek and others but it today said revenues for its fourth quarter wouldn't be as buoyant as it first thought.

TSMC said its revenues would show the first fall in the quarter for four years.

In a statement it said that while its third financial quarter would do better than it expected because of a better exchange rate between the US dollar and the Taiwanese dollar, it expected a decline in its fourth quarter.

Although TSMC did not give a reason for the decline, there's evidence that slack demand for smartphones and other electronics devices will be responsible for the decline.

The company said in the summer that inventories of chips in PCs, tablets and smartphones remained high.

Despite the fluctuations in the chip maker's fortunes, TSMC still expects that it will show sales growth of close to 10 percent.

Sensor sales reveal smartphone trends

Posted: 23 Sep 2015 06:27 AM PDT

ChinaSamsung is being squeezed by competition from Apple at the high end and competition from Chinese manufacturers at the low end.

That's the conclusion of IHS Technology. The market research company has assessed sales of smartphone sensors and thinks that although Samsung and Apple continue to be the dominant consumers of sensors for smartphones, they are both set for declines between now and 2019.

Samsung currently has a market share of 23 percent but that will fall to 15 percent by 2019. Meanwhile Apple currently takes 47 percent of smartphone sensors but that will fall to 34 percent over the next four years.

Apple's share will fall because of growth of the overall smartphone market, but Samsung, although affected by the same phenomenon, faces stiff competition from Xiaomi and other Chinese hardware manufacturers.

The share from the Chinese manufacturers currently stands at 20 percent but that share will grow to 38 percent in 2019, IHS believes.

Marwan Boustany, a senior analyst at IHS said the Chinese original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) will try any new technology that lets them compete with the better known brand names.

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