TechEye |  |
- IBM makes push into Africa
- Toshiba makes Muromachi a permie
- Apple, Microsoft and Google sign global warning pledge
- Blackberry mulls smartphone pull out
- Nearly all Android phones vulnerable to a single text
- Lenovo claims first for Windows 10
- Superfast device promises ultrafast computing
| Posted: 28 Jul 2015 06:13 AM PDT
The aim is to expand its Technical Academy to educate profressionals in analytics, cloud and big data. IBM is cooperating with the Kenya Education Network for certification courses for 40 universities in the country. The courses are being offered free of charge and are intended to give graduate students with entry level IT job skills. Local academic staff are being supported by IBM scientists as well as an information portal and while the courses are in English, they're going to be offered in French and in other African languages. IBM said that by 2017 the certifications will be available to over 35,000 students across the continent.        |
| Toshiba makes Muromachi a permie Posted: 28 Jul 2015 01:22 AM PDT
Muromachi took over after CEO Hisao Tanaka resigned after an independent probe found that he had been aware the company had inflated its profits by $1.2 billion over several years. Executives have also been resigning over their roles in the country’s biggest accounting scandal in years. While better known for its IT products, in Japan the outfit was infamous for supplying reactors to the Fukushima nuclear power station. The company’s appointments committee, which includes external directors decided on the new appointment. Toshiba will propose the plan at an extraordinary shareholders’ meeting in September. Seen as a "safe pair of hands", Muromachi was not implicated in the accounting irregularities that saw the departure of eight executives last week. The third-party committee’s report said Tanaka and vice chairman Norio Sasaki pressured business divisions to meet difficult targets. They knew they were overstating profits and delaying reporting losses. Much of the problem appears to be the Japanese culture of never questioning authority. Although many Japanese shareholders would wish that if Toshiba was going to follow any tradition, it should be one were dishonoured CEOs should gut themselves in the car park.     |
| Apple, Microsoft and Google sign global warning pledge Posted: 28 Jul 2015 01:21 AM PDT
The Obama government has launched its Climate Action Plan to cut pollution, and many have signed the American Business Act on Climate pledge to do their part. According to the White House, the Climate Action Plan will cut six billion tons of carbon pollution up to 2030. It would be equalled by removing all cars from US roads for more than four years. In addition, Chinese President Xi Jinping has promised that China will curb its emissions by 2030. The big three tech companies have signed the American Business Act on Climate pledge. They said that it represents their support for a "strong result in the Paris climate negotiations" and a commitment to fight climate change. It is not clear what will happen if the Republicans get in next year. Many of them refuse to believe in climate change because it would mean the Bible was lying when God promised there would be no more floods to wipe out mankind. Big business – apart, apparently these tech companies – hates the idea too. It complains that it will force them to spend more money to make their factories carbon safe. The hope is that with Google, Redmond and Apple behind a scheme, more companies will think it is a good idea.     |
| Blackberry mulls smartphone pull out Posted: 28 Jul 2015 01:19 AM PDT
BlackBerry's CEO John Chen revealed the Canadian company was looking to further reduce the phones they release a year, dropping it from about four phones a year to about one or two. While this is done as a means to cut costs, the signs are the decline of BlackBerries might not stop there. BlackBerry has hinted that it is willing to exit the smartphone market should its turnaround efforts fail. Already the company is shifting its strategy, moving beyond hardware and starting to concentrate in software and security. Chen also notes that competing with Chinese and Indian OEMs for the lower-end market isn't ideal. He said the low-end phone is not BlackBerry's “sweet spot” and that high-end gear aimed at the working professional would be more profitable. Blackberry recently announced plans for an Android handset. This could be the company's last-ditch try at creating hardware and oddly mirrors the approach taken by Nokia before it sold itself to Microsoft.
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| Nearly all Android phones vulnerable to a single text Posted: 28 Jul 2015 01:17 AM PDT
Mobile security expert Joshua Drake, from Zimperium zLabs warned that sometimes phones parse the attack code before the message being opened. This makes the exploits silent and the user would have little chance of defending their data. The vulnerabilities are the worst Android flaws ever uncovered, Drake claimed. Drake had warned Google about the six bugs and Google has sent out patches to its partners. However most manufacturers have not made fixes available to protect their customers. "All devices should be assumed to be vulnerable," Drake said. He believes as many as 950 million Android phones could be affected, going on figures suggesting there are just over 1 billion in use. Only Android phones below version 2.2 are unaffected. The bug is in Stagefright which is an Android media playback tool. All attackers send out exploits as mobile phone numbers. From there, they could send an exploit packaged in a Stagefright multimedia message. This allows them to write code to the device and steal data from sections of the phone that Stagefright controls. Recording of audio and video, and snooping on photos stored in SD cards would be possible. Bluetooth would also be hackable via Stagefright. The victim might never know they had even received a message. Drake found that when the exploit code was opened in Google Hangouts it would "trigger immediately before you even look at your phone."     |
| Lenovo claims first for Windows 10 Posted: 27 Jul 2015 07:13 AM PDT
It also said it is ready to upgrade Lenovo Windows 7 SP1 and 8.1 devices to Windows 10. It claims it's shipping product with its own aps including the Companion 3.0 optimisation tool, Lenovo settings that senses attached devices, and Lenovo ReachIt and Cortana natural language and contextual search tool later on this year. Lenovo said it will roll out desktops, laptops and tablets that use Windows 10. The company said that the optimisation tool keeps machines running at their best performance. Lenovo did not detail all of the devices its shipping in two days time. I expect we'll have to wait for two days to find out what they are.     |
| Superfast device promises ultrafast computing Posted: 27 Jul 2015 06:38 AM PDT
And this, they said, could well form the basis of very fast optical computing. Scientists have known for a while of the concept using lasers but they need too much energy and they're not suitable for integrating into chips. At Duke, researchers made semiconductor quantum dots emit light at over 90 billion gigaherz and they believe the "plasmonic" device could form the basis for optical computing chips. The team is working to sandwich a single quantum dot in the gap between a silver nanocube and gold foil – the quantum dots are six nanometres wide and create a directional efficient emission of photos that can be switched on and off. They explained that when a laser shines on the surface of a 75 nanometre silver cube, free electrons oscillate together and create their own light. Gleb Akselrod, a postdoctoral researcher at Duke said that the scientific community has shown interest in replacing lasers with LEDs for short distance optical communications. Akselrod said the team has made an important step towards solving these problems. The illustration shows a nanoscale view of the superfast fluorescent system. The uqantum dots (pink) are sandwiched between the silver nanocube and a thin gold foil.     |
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