Wednesday, May 28, 2014

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Chipzilla pushes into China with Rockchip deal

Posted: 28 May 2014 02:16 AM PDT

Fashion bag maker Chipzilla has hatched out a way to push into the busy Chinese market by doing a deal with Chinese mobile chipmaker Rockchip.

Under the deal, Rockchip will to make chips for inexpensive tablets running Google Android platform for Intel.

Rockchip makes low-end mobile devices that often cost less than $100 and are popular in China. Intel gains access to Rockchip's ability to quickly launch inexpensive mobile chips as well as access to the company's strong relationships with local Chinese manufacturers who would not think about buying an Intel chip.

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said that Rockchip was bringing a speed and execution that would not otherwise get done. They also bring these relationships and partnerships that go well beyond what Intel can manage.

Under the agreement, Rockchip and Intel will make a quad-core mobile chip using Intel's architecture and branding, Intel said.

Krzanich said the agreement with Rockchip does not include an investment between the two companies. Intel said the chip will include 3G connectivity and be available in the first half of 2015. 

Iranians want Mark Zuckerberg in court

Posted: 28 May 2014 02:14 AM PDT

A conservative Iranian court has started a case against instant messaging services WhatsApp and Instagram and summoned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg over complaints of privacy violation.

The Iranian court in the southern province of Fars opened the cases against the social networks after citizens complained of breaches of privacy.

You can tell that the Iranian judges are going to be fair and reasonable. They even called Zuckerberg a Zionist because he grew up in New York in a Jewish family. Zuckerberg is actually an atheist.

Nevertheless the Iranians think that either he or his official attorney must appear in court to defend himself and pay for possible losses.

Zuckerberg, whose company owns WhatsApp and Instagram, is likely to tell the court to go forth and multiply. Even if he wanted to show up, Iran is still under international sanctions over its disputed nuclear activities and it is difficult for US citizens to secure travel visas. If he did show up there was a possibility that he might end up stoned, and not in a nice way.

It is fairly likely that the privacy case is just a pretext to get Facebook and WhatsApp banned in Iran. The more extreme conservatives see the World Wide Web as a threat because it enables its population to be informed, rather than told. Hell, they might even learn that there are different takes on the Muslim faith in which the prophet, peace be upon him, talks about treating women as equals and not the property of men. 

Courts deliver knockout blow to copyright trolls

Posted: 28 May 2014 02:13 AM PDT

A federal appeals court has killed off a copyright takedown scam aimed at pornography downloaders which was being run by AF Holdings, an arm of copyright troll Prenda Law.

AF hit on an idea that it would ask an ISP for IP addresses thousands of downloaders, once it had the list it would contact the account holders and threaten expensive litigation if they do not settle promptly. Faced with the prospect of hiring an attorney, often in a distant court, most subscribers-including those who may have done nothing wrong-will choose to settle rather than fight.

Circuit Judge David Tatel, writing for United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, called the lawsuit "a quintessential example of Prenda Law's modus operandi" in reversing a lower court ruling that would have forced a half-dozen ISPs to identify account holders associated with 1,058 IP addresses.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has welcomed the ruling. EFF Staff Attorney Mitch Stoltz said. "For the defendants, it will come down to risking being named in a lawsuit over a pornographic movie, or settling for less than the cost of hiring an attorney. As a matter of law and basic fairness, a copyright plaintiff needs to show that its case is on solid ground before putting hundreds of Internet users into that kind of bind."

AF Holdings has never actually brought a copyright case to trial, yet is reported to have "earned" $15 million over three years using the scheme.

The court's reversal was based on an inability to demonstrate that more than a handful of 1,058 individuals it sought to identify even lived in the District of Columbia.

Cox, AT&T, and Bright House each stated that they had no subscribers at all in the District of Columbia; indeed, they do not even offer service here. AF Holdings could not possibly have had a good faith belief that it could successfully sue the overwhelming majority of the 1,058 John Doe defendants in this district.

The court also ruled that seeking the identities as part of a single lawsuit was impermissible because there was no reason to believe that the targets acted together.

EFF said that the decision is "a crushing blow for copyright trolls".

Brin: I am too weird for Google+

Posted: 28 May 2014 02:11 AM PDT

Google co-founder Sergey Brin said that it was probably a silly move for him to have worked on the social notworking arm Google+.

Speaking at Recode's Code Conference Brin said he's "not a very social person" and does not like people much.

According to the Verge,  Brin called himself "kind of a weirdo" and said that he only used Google+ to post pictures of his kids to his family. He now thinks that any previous professional focus on the social network was misguided.

"It was probably a mistake," he said, "for me to be working on anything tangentially related to social to begin with."

Brin is now happily working on his company's semi-secret skunkworks group, Google X. Google X is working on a range of projects, including a contact lens that measures glucose, in addition to augmented reality wearable device Google Glass. The good part about this is that since it is secret, Brin does not have to talk to many people about it.

He did show off the lab's latest creation at the conference a self-driving car that navigates without a steering wheel, but that is about all the human contact he needs for a year or so. 

Skype can do real time translations

Posted: 28 May 2014 02:09 AM PDT

Software king of the world Microsoft has opened its kimono on a "real-time" language translation feature for Skype.

Chief executive Satya Nadella said Vole would launch a test version of the service, dubbed Skype Translator, for Windows 8 later this year.

The internet-based phone service has been facing increased competition and has been trying to come up with ways to attract more users.

Skype currently has 300 million monthly users globally and Nadella thinks that this is a good way to make sure that you can compete with anybody without language barriers.

So far there is no indication if the service will be offered for free or if the users will have to pay a fee. Or how good it will be.

Vole recently published a blog saying that researchers at Microsoft Research and the University of Toronto had made a breakthrough in reducing the error rate in speech recognition by over 30 per cent by using Deep Neural Networks (DNN).

DNN is patterned after human brain behaviour and allows researchers to train more discriminative and better speech recognisers than previous methods.

The theory is that as Vole adds more data to the system it will get better results.

Gurdeep Pall, corporate vice president of Skype said the latest feature was a result of "decades of work" in speech recognition, automatic translation and machine learning technologies research.

"It is early days for this technology, but the Star Trek vision for a Universal Translator isn't a galaxy away, and its potential is every bit as exciting as those Star Trek examples."

Still no word if it will understand English as it is spoken in er England.
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