TechEye |  |
- Half of Britons have a tablet
- US experiments with intellectual devolution
- Huawei products do have backdoors
- Steve Ballmer owns the mods
- Samsung releases 110-inch TV
| Posted: 31 Dec 2013 02:17 AM PST Latest figures in from the bean counters at Deloitte show that half of Britons are now using the keyboardless netbooks known as tablets. Apparently there were more than 12 million tablets sold in the UK in 2013. By adding up the numbers and dividing by their shoe size this means that by the end of January, half of Britons will own or have access to a tablet, up from 36 percent from last summer. Deloitte believed the tablets' growth had been driven by the value end of the market, which had made the touch-screen devices available as children's gifts and for those unwilling to pay for more expensive models." The numbers were helped by the rise of budget tablets including Amazon's Kindle Fire, for which prices start at £199, Tesco's Hudl and Argos's £99 tablet. The last, as we reported, is now unavailable. Paul Lee, Deloitte's head of technology, media and telecoms research, said that tablets had gained popularity with extraordinary speed, and manufacturers will have to work hard to stay on top of the evolution of the market. It seems that people are finally starting to listen to Bill Gates who argued that that there were shedloads of uses for tablets. Now there appear to be more users and use cases for tablets than many had imagined, he said. The key turned out to be getting the balance of form, function and price right. Online retailers have been slashing prices and promoting e-books to appeal to those who received tablets for Christmas.        |
| US experiments with intellectual devolution Posted: 31 Dec 2013 02:11 AM PST US tea party and religious nutjobs are celebrating that their campaign to turn the US into Christian Saudi Arabia appears to be working. The latest figures from the Pew Research Center's Religion and Public Life Project show that a third of Americans reject the idea of evolution. They insist, against all evidence, that "humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time," Pew said in a statement. This is a change from 2009 when more accepted that animals were subject to the laws of evolution but humans were not. According to researcher Cary Funk, a Pew senior researcher who conducted the analysis, the change has come amongst people calling themselves Republicans. Apparently, these are less likely to believe that humans have evolved over time. Republicans are generally getting thicker and less likely to accept science. The report shows that 43 percent of Republicans and 67 percent of Democrats say humans have evolved over time, compared with 54 percent and 64 percent respectively four years ago. As you might expect, among religious groups, white evangelical Protestants topped the list of those rejecting evolution, with 64 percent of those polled saying they believe humans have existed in their present form since the beginning of time. This has been a standard belief for about a century. A quarter of those surveyed told Pew "a supreme being guided the evolution of living things". This is even weirder. It means that there is a large slice of the US public which does not believe in evolution but does not believe that god created everything either.     |
| Huawei products do have backdoors Posted: 31 Dec 2013 02:09 AM PST Der Spiegel hack and hacker Jacob Applebaum has found proof that products made by the Chinese outfit Huawei do have backdoors to allow access to spying. This was the central reason why US Senators banned Huawei from taking US government projects claiming that the company was a tool of the Chinese military. The only problem was that the backdoors being placed in the Huawei gear were put there because US spooks wanted to spy on everyone and the Chinese outfit was just doing what it was told. A bit on the nose really to do what you are told by US spooks and then lose your contracts because you are following their security instructions. Applebaum found that if any company tried to use traditional and reliable US companies, because they feared Chinese intrusion, they would find the same backdoor installed. Talking to the 30th Chaos Computer Club conference in Hamburg, Germany, Applebaum presented a snapshot of dozens of zero day exploits used to spy on both US citizens and foreigners. It looks like the NSA can use zero-day exploits to spy on communications passing through the switches and routers of all the world's largest networking vendors, Dell Cisco, Juniper Networks and Huawei. Dell and HP servers have a backdoor as well as smartphones of Apple and Samsung. Applebaum dubbed the companies collaborators with the spooks who had left their customers vulnerable. "Fuck them for collaborating, and for leaving us vulnerable," he said. He hoped that by naming and shaming them they would close the backdoors on the spooks. Apparently the backdoor is in the server hardware systems at the BIOS level. The NSA's documents boast that these exploits work across servers running the Microsoft Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and even Sun Solaris operating systems. This gives away the spook's cunning plan. After all how many people in Al Qaida are using Solaris? Applebaum asked the crowd. Dell's best-selling PowerEdge servers (1850, 2850, 1950, 2950) all feature a vulnerability that allows the NSA to post spyware iton the BIOS using either remote access or via the inserting of a USB drive. A related NSA exploit, dubbed GODSURGE, uses a JTAG debugging interface in the Dell PowerEdge 1950 and 2950. A JTAG debugging interface is usually used to test the BIOS/firmware for bugs, but it can also be used to reflash the BIOS from scratch. HP's Proliant 380DL G5 server can be opened using IRONCHEF, which extracted data from the server using two-way RF communication. The NSA has also developed an exploit for tapping Apple's iPhone called DROPOUTJEEP and another for Vole's Windows Phone called TOTEGHOSTLY, Applebaum said.     |
| Posted: 31 Dec 2013 01:07 AM PST The shy and soon to be retiring Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has started a Brighton riot over the word "mod". Ballmer, who describes himself as a "bit of a rocker" apparently, wants to re-open the long dead 1964 war with the "mods" by claiming he owns the rights to the word. If any Vesta driving fur-collared anoraks describe themselves as a mod he is threatening to sue them. Mary Jo Foley on ZDNet found an odd trademark from Vole for the word Mod. She thinks that Vole wants to use the word as a replacement for 'Metro', In August 2012, just before launching Windows 8, Microsoft officials admitted that the name Metro to describe the tiled interface and design language at the heart of its Windows Phone and Windows operating systems would have to go. One of the problems is a naming dispute with the German partner Metro Group. Since then the Voles have been scratching their furry heads trying to come up with a better name. Some teams have favoured "immersive," while others have used "Windows Store" or "Windows 8". Then on December 28, Microsoft applied for trademarks for "Windows Mod," "Office Mod" and "Microsoft Office Mod" which means that Mod will be the new Metro. It could be something else. It could just be simply Steve Ballmer having a touch of the Quadrophenias and trying to wipe the mods from the face of the planet. Certainly if he attaches the name to Windows 8 he will do more damage to the movement than a baseball bat wielding "Mick the Wild One".     |
| Posted: 31 Dec 2013 01:05 AM PST Samsung has been showing off a 110-inch TV that has four times the resolution of standard high-definition TVs. It might be something for the person who has more money than sense and just won the lottery as it is likely to set you back $150,000. The giant telly is part of a move toward ultra HD TVs, as manufacturing bigger TVs using OLED is too expensive. Samsung and LG Electronics, the world's top two TV makers, thought that OLED would be the cure for the industry blues. OLED screens are ultrathin and can display images with enhanced clarity and deeper colour saturation. However the technology could not be main streamed and the pair are still struggling to mass produce larger and affordable TVs with OLED. Sony and Panasonic appear to have given up completely. UHD TV demand is expected to rise despite dearth of content and it is believed that its price will come down faster than that of the OLED TVs. The reason is that he growth will come from cost conscious China. Chinese telly companies are also trying to push the standard. However these sets have a lower price and a more standard size. Samsung's 110-inch UHD TV measures 2.6 meters by 1.8 meters. It will be available in China, the Middle East and Europe. So far Samsung said it has sold ten of them. NPD DisplaySearch thinks global sales of ultra HD TV sets will surge from 1.3 million this year to 23 million in 2017. More than half of the shipments will be taken by Chinese companies between 2013 and 2017, according to NPD.     |
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