TechEye |  |
- Samsung to release smartphone
- Anonymous hacks the FBI
- Google might have wasted its cash on a quantum computer
- NHS computer linked to malware
- Lenovo shareholders don't like its "buy everything" plan
| Posted: 04 Feb 2014 02:16 AM PST Although you are unlikely to hear much about it from the Tame Apple Press, Samsung is about to issue a new flagship Galaxy S smartphone this month. Those who have mentioned it claim that features such as a bigger screen will lead to a sharp jump in sales, while claiming that Apple's iPhone will do well because of its er... bigger screen. "A bigger screen for the S5 may not become much of a selling point as Apple is widely expected to introduce large-screen smartphones - Samsung's mainstay products - later this year," Reuters sniffed. Samsung sent out invitations today for the "Samsung unPacked 5" event on February 24 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The launch has been brought forward by around three weeks. That being so, Samsung is preparing for its weakest mobile annual profit growth in seven years as the outfit has to deal with strong currency and the fact that the US market is largely saturated. The S5 is widely expected to feature a bigger screen, an improved rear camera and biometric functions such as iris recognition or a fingerprint scanner. It may also come with an improved Galaxy Gear smartwatch. If Apple were doing a launch like this, the press would be full of frenzied speculation about what it would contain. In fact looking through the wires, it seems that the loyal press is not even speculating that the event will see the launch of the new Samsung phone. Instead they are trotting out the same rubbish about Samsung losing sales to the glorious Apple steamroller in China, even though that is clearly not happening at all.        |
| Posted: 04 Feb 2014 02:15 AM PST The Slovenian branch of Anonymous claims it has hacked the FBI and uploading email addresses and personal information relating to the director to online storage site Pastebin. Black-Shadow of the Slovenian branch of Anonymous said he has posted the FBI domain email addresses and passwords for 68 agents, although the user claims in his post that the collected log-in details are "not all ours". His post also includes a short profile on FBI director James Comey, including sensitive information such as his date of birth, his wife's name, the date they got married, his educational history and even the geographical coordinates of his residence. Handy if you have access to a spare drone or cruise missile. Two internal FBI websites are also included in the post – the FBI's Virtual Academy website from its training division, and the FBI Agents Association. Two of the FBI's domain name servers for its website www.fbi.gov were targeted, and the hackers took information from seven open ports on the servers. Anonymous Slovenia posted the Pastebin link on its Facebook Page, along with the comment "Laughing at your security." We guess that the only thing the Americans could come back at is that the Slovenians serve donkey in their pizza restaurants. Anonymous has been out of the headlines lately thanks mostly to infighting amongst its members. It had developed a reputation for being script kiddies using DoS attacks. This particular take down suggests that there are some good hackers in the organisation who are working despite of the organisation's shortcomings.     |
| Google might have wasted its cash on a quantum computer Posted: 04 Feb 2014 01:31 AM PST Last year boffins were shocked when Google wrote a cheque for $15 million for a quantum computer system called DWave. Now it turns out that the device may not be all it's cracked up to be and it might not be a quantum computer after all and Google was not the only one to fall for it. Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin paid a cool $10 million for the world's first commercial quantum computer from a Canadian start up called D-Wave Systems. Last year, Google and NASA bought a second generation device for about $15 million with Lockheed upgrading its own machine for a further $10 million. At the time, the move was heralded as a new era for quantum computation. Particularly when last year Cathy McGeoch at Amherst College in Massachusetts said she'd clocked the D-Wave device solving a certain class of problem some 3600 times faster than a conventional computer. But now, according to Medium.com, D-Wave has undergone a dramatic change in fortune. A report from a team of physicists from IBM's T J Watson Research Laboratory in Yorktown Heights, NY, and the University of California Berkeley, say that D-Wave's machine may not be quantum at all. Umesh Vazirani, one of quantum computing's early pioneers, pointed out that the method used to define the machine's "quantumness" did not really work. In fact the tests used could easily be explained with another classical algorithm. "We outline a simple new classical model, and show that on the same data it yields correlations with the D-Wave input-output behaviour that are at least as good as those of simulated quantum annealing," he wrote. In other words if the D-Wave computer was not quantum at all, it would still be capable of producing the same results. D-Wave can still argue that its machine is quantum but in a way that is not revealed in these tests. But at some point it'll need to produce evidence to back up this claim and this might be tricky. What is probably embarrassing for Google, NASA and Lockheed Martin is that they could have shelled out tens of millions for a cryogenically cooled pocket calculator or a potentially dead or alive cat.     |
| NHS computer linked to malware Posted: 04 Feb 2014 01:22 AM PST The UK's National Health Service (NHS) website has been redirecting users to a malware-infested websites. Reddit user Muzzers noticed that more than 800 pages of the NHS website were either redirecting users to an advertisement or malware-laden websites. The NHS insisted that the website had not been hacked, but an 'internal coding error' caused the error. "An internal coding error has caused an incorrect redirect on some pages on NHS Choices since Sunday evening," said NHS in a statement. "Routine security checks alerted us to this problem on Monday morning at which point we identified the problem and corrected the code," NHS added. The coding error was due to a typo when a developer accidentally wrote "googleaspis.com" instead of "googleapis.com." The typo was not noticed until the domain was registered by someone in the Czech Republic and used it to push malware. The NHS has also revealed that once it ensures that the coding error has been resolved across the website, it will conduct a full review of the site and will put into place steps that will ensure that such issues do not happen again.     |
| Lenovo shareholders don't like its "buy everything" plan Posted: 04 Feb 2014 01:20 AM PST While Lenovo seems to be buying every tech company in the world this week, it seems that its shareholders are not happy bunnies. Shares in Chinese technology giant Lenovo slumped more than 14 percent in Hong Kong, after it agreed to buy struggling handset maker Motorola from Google for $2.91 billion. The news followed another deal where Lenovo bought IBM's low-end server business for $2.3 billion. Shareholders are apparently spooked about Motorola's profitability and think it was a truly dumb idea to pay such a large amount money to acquire Motorola. Lenovo in 2013 become the world's biggest PC maker, eight years after buying IBM's PC business. However, investors do not think the Motorola brand is strong enough to boost Lenovo and the handset maker has been on a downward trend for the past two years. Under Google, Motorola failed to gain traction in a rapidly evolving smartphone market now dominated by Samsung and Apple. Google lost an arm and a leg on Motorola after buying it for $12.5 billion in 2011. Having said that, Lenovo has shown that it is jolly good at integrating loss making operations in the past and the smart money is riding on the fact it will do it again.
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