TechEye |  |
- McAfee notes enormous rise in spam
- Oculus Rift cofounder dies in freak accident
- AMD wants to nuke Intel’s NUC
- Razer boss slices rivals about poor PC design
- US lifts sanctions on tech exports to Iran
- Hackers take Eve Online offline
- Google supports public virus disclosures
- Turkey's Erdogan claims social media is a "menace"
- Apple fanboys sack staff photographers
- Asus goes tablet crazy, launches Haswell
| McAfee notes enormous rise in spam Posted: 03 Jun 2013 05:01 AM PDT Spam is continuing to prove problematic for computer users, while social networking worms are also wriggling further into threat lists, McAfee has said in its latest report.        |
| Oculus Rift cofounder dies in freak accident Posted: 03 Jun 2013 04:35 AM PDT Oculus Rift cofounder Andrew Scott Reisse was killed in a freak accident over the weekend. Reisse was struck and killed by a car in a cross walk just a few miles from his office. The tragic incident was apparently the culmination of a lengthy police chase. Following the crash, the three suspects fled the car, but they were eventually arrested. The 21-year-old driver of the car will face murder charges. The Oculus Rift team paid its respects to Reisse in a brief statement, describing him as a brilliant computer engineer, a nature lover, hiker and avid photographer. He was also a founding member of the team. “His code is embedded in thousands of games played by millions of people around the world. Words cannot express how sorely he will be missed or how deeply our sympathy runs for his family,” the team said. Oculus Rift developer kits are shipping out. Sadly though, Reisse won’t see his brainchild hit the market.     |
| Posted: 03 Jun 2013 04:28 AM PDT Earlier this year Intel surprised the world with a range of NUC kits, which featured some impressive hardware in a tiny package. Although it was never intended to be a huge market success, the highly integrated NUC was viewed as the next logical step in desktop evolution. AMD clearly got the message as it is apparently working on similar designs of its own. Speaking in a conference call last week, AMD public relations manager Peter Amos confirmed that the company is indeed working with partners on Kabini based 4x4-inch designs, reports Xbit Labs. Although AMD’s systems will feature the same form factor, they will end up a bit slower. Most Intel NUC boards and barebones are based on Ivy Bridge Core i5 and Core i3 parts, which are pretty fast – and expensive. However, the cheapest Intel NUC is powered by the frugal Celeron 847 and this seems to be the one AMD is gunning for. Kabini can’t match the Core i3 in terms of performance, but it should have no trouble wiping the floor with the Celeron 847. In addition, Kabini has better graphics and it could end up a bit cheaper than Intel’s offering.     |
| Razer boss slices rivals about poor PC design Posted: 03 Jun 2013 04:07 AM PDT Min-Liang Tan, the outspoken CEO of Razer has blamed bad managers for the decline of the PC industry. Talking to the Verge, Tan said that people have been keen to talk about the death of the PC recently. But the PC is not being trampled to death by the consumer - it is suffering from awful decisions by the PC makers themselves. Of course, he says Razer's Blade laptop lineup is an example of the sort of innovative products that HP, Dell, and other major computer companies aren't producing. Last week the outfit updated its Blade laptop line refreshing its 17-inch model and adding a 14-inch laptop. Tan said that it's been a long time since anyone's been passionate about a PC. HP's done a horrible job with it and so has Dell. He thinks that companies don't want to do anything with the PC anymore. HP tried to get rid of its PC division and Dell decided it was an enterprise company instead. Tan said that Razer, a company known mostly for gaming mice and keyboards, is finding an opportunity to enter the PC market and it is doing rather well, he claimed. Tan said that the company cannot make enough Blade laptops and Edge tablets fast enough to meet demand. He is not saying the exact numbers, but we will have to take his word for it. He claims that people want phones and tablets, but they still want PCs too. What consumers don't want, however, are the sorts of computers HP, Dell, and other major players are putting out. Tan admits that it makes no sense that a small outfit like his should be pushing the envelope. Apple too, which did an incredible job in terms of industrial design, dropped the ball when it moved out of the 17-inch space. This move gave Razer an increase in orders from developers for its 17-inch Blade laptop now called the Blade Pro, Tan said.     |
| US lifts sanctions on tech exports to Iran Posted: 03 Jun 2013 03:57 AM PDT The Obama administration has lifted a set of US sanctions that used to bar sales of consumer electronics and software to Iran. The sanctions were originally imposed back in 1992. Two decades later, the US Treasury department has issued a general licence permitting exports of US hardware and software to ordinary Iranians, although Iranian government agencies will still have to look elsewhere, Bloomberg reports. Although it might look like an admission that the sanctions never really worked in the first place, the US is still trying to maintain its Great Satan image by arguing that the new policy is intended to help Iranians communicate through social media. The cunning plan is to help Iranians overcome communications restrictions imposed by the autocratic regime and overthrow it. Last time the Iranians took to the streets in great numbers, in the so-called Green Revolution, they faced a violent crackdown in the streets of Tehran and other major cities. Although more communications gear will probably be welcome by the Iranians, an iPhone doesn’t really help when you are confronted by droves of armed thugs. In addition, it is not like Iran is in a tech blackout. Quite the opposite, tech loving Iranians always manage to find ways of importing banned hardware and the country has no shortage of tech savvy geeks who know how to get around government restrictions and censorship.     |
| Hackers take Eve Online offline Posted: 03 Jun 2013 03:45 AM PDT Hackers have taken the Eve Online game offline with a huge denial of service attack. The Tranquility cluster, which houses EVE Online and web servers, were taken out over the weekend. According to Eve Online's Facebook page, the company mobilised a taskforce of internal and external experts to evaluate the situation. It took a couple of hours to realise that the whole system was stuffed and to switch it off while the backup plans were sorted out. An attempt to reopen Eve Online failed and it was decided to keep the Tranquility servers and its associated websites back down for further investigation - and an exhaustive scan of the entire infrastructure. The fear is that the hackers might have used the DDoS to try and hit customer records or other key parts of the infrastructure. This morning engineers were close to finishing, and Eve Online tweeted a thank you to users for their patience. Some Eve Online users have used their time to clean their bedrooms and some brave souls even ventured outside.     |
| Google supports public virus disclosures Posted: 03 Jun 2013 03:43 AM PDT Google has announced that the search engine will support security researchers publicising details of critical vulnerabilities under active exploitation after just seven days. This means that is a security expert finds a flaw, Google will have just seven days to fix it before the researcher can make it all public. If it is adopted widely it would mean that vendors have less time to create and test a patch than the previously recommended 60-day disclosure deadline for the most serious security flaws. Writing in their blog, Google developers Chris Evans and Drew Hintz, said that the goal of the change is to prompt vendors to more quickly seal, or at least publicly react to, critical vulnerabilities and reduce the number of attacks that proliferate because of unprotected software. It would mean an end to the days of vendors using responsible disclosure to delay issuing a fix as long as possible, sometimes even years. Only once a patch is issued does a researcher reveal details of the software flaw. Under the concept of full disclosure, both the company and the public are given details at the same time. Google broke ground on the problem when it issued the 60-day notice almost three years ago. It was seen as a compromise between full and responsible disclosures for critical vulnerabilities, particularly those that require complex coding to fix. But since there are now zero-day exploits targeting unpatched software Google has decided that things need to be sped up. The standing recommendation is that companies should fix critical vulnerabilities within 60 days. If a fix is impossible, they should notify the public about the risk and offer workarounds. Based on Google's experience, more urgent action, within seven days, is appropriate for critical vulnerabilities under active exploitation. The pair acknowledge a week's notice is unrealistic in some instances. But, they believe, it provides enough time for a company to provide mitigations — such as temporarily disabling a service or restricting access — to reduce the risks of further exploits in the wild. The same deadline will apply to those bughunters who discover vulnerabilities in Google products too, they said.     |
| Turkey's Erdogan claims social media is a "menace" Posted: 03 Jun 2013 03:32 AM PDT The Turkish prime minister is blaming social media for the fact that people are not doing what they are told. Recep Tayyip Erdogan was moaning as thousands of people took to the streets to shout him out of government. Poor Erdogan - there once was a time when you could just put cops on the street and beat the problems away with a baton. Then it was just a matter of convincing the silent majority that any unrest was simply an extremist fringe. But with social media sites running snaps of the protests, Erdogan is upset that people are calling him a "dictator" and no one is believing him when he calls the thousands of protestors a few extremists. Erdogan has been in charge for more than a decade. Many Turks see him as an uncompromising figure with his fingers in too many pies. He is kept in power by a large base of conservative Turks. The ordinary media has hardly mentioned any of the protests. Erdogan moaned to Bloomberg that Twitter was a menace. "The best examples of lies can be found there," he said. "To me, social media is the worst menace to society". Erdogan called the protests "ideological" and manipulated by an opposition "unable to beat (the government) at the ballot box." He said that if he wanted he could call out his supporters to run the opposition from the streets. However he "is urging calm," he said in an interview with Haberturk television.     |
| Apple fanboys sack staff photographers Posted: 03 Jun 2013 03:21 AM PDT In another decision which is proof that Apple fanboys should never be given control of the budget, the Chicago Sun-Times has fired all of its photographers. The Apple fanboys in control of the organ think that reporters with iPhones can do the job of professional photographers much better. The newspaper's entire photography staff of 28 people are to get the boot while its reporting staff receive "iPhone photography basics" training to start producing their own photos and videos. According to the Cult of Mac, the move is part of a growing trend towards publications using the iPhone as a replacement for fancy, expensive DSLRs. It follows what is seen as the success of Time magazine which used its iPhone hacks to take snaps of photos on the field and upload to the publication's Instagram account. Even the photo used on the cover issue of Time was taken on an iPhone. Sun-Times photographer Alex Garcia points out that the "idea that freelancers and reporters could replace a photo staff with iPhones is idiotic at worst, and hopelessly uninformed at best". We guess that is the sort of logic the management does not really understand. While some events can be snapped on a mobile phone, in the same way that they could be on an old instamatic camera, the quality can not, at present, match professional equipment with a pro behind the lens. For a smartphone camera to be any use, you have to be up close and right in the middle of it all. For some events that is just impossible - so now we will have generation or two of newspapers running photos of people with their heads cut off, picking their noses, or scratching their bums. Anyone who thinks an Apple camera can take better snaps than an even a basic SLR camera has never used one. And any Apple fanboy who thinks they can take photos better than a professional snapper just because they have an expensive toy from Jobs' Mob needs counselling. These were not taken on an iPhone.     |
| Asus goes tablet crazy, launches Haswell Posted: 03 Jun 2013 01:35 AM PDT At a very loud and very packed press conference here in Le Meridien, Taipei, Asus decided to make transformation the theme.     |
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