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Submission + - Wolf In Sheep's Clothing: Comcast Kisses-Up To Obama, Agrees On Net Neutrality (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Comcast is one of two companies to have earned Consumerist's "Worst Company in America" title on more than one occasion and it looks like they're lobbying for a third title. That is, unless there's another explanation as to how the cable giant can claim (with straight face) that it's in agreement with President Barack Obama for a free and open Internet. Comcast issued a statement of its own saying they back the exact same things, it just doesn't want to go the utility route. Comcast went on to list specific bullet points that they're supposedly in wholehearted agreement with, such as: Free and open Internet. We agree — and that is our practice. No blocking. We agree — and that is our practice. No throttling. We agree — and that is our practice. Increased transparency. We agree — and that is our practice. No paid prioritization. We agree — and that is our practice. Really? Comcast conveniently fails to address the giant elephant in the room whose name is Netflix. Earlier this year, Netflix begrudgingly inked a multi-year deal with Comcast in which the streaming service agreed to pay a toll to ensure faster delivery into the homes of Comcast subscribers, who prior to the deal had been complaining of frequent buffering and video degradation when watching content on Netflix. Comcast would undoubtedly argue that it's not a paid fast lane, but it's hard to see the deal as anything other than that.

Submission + - Apple Disables Trim Support On 3rd Party SSDs In OS X (hothardware.com) 1

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: One of the disadvantages to buying an Apple system is that it generally means less upgrade flexibility than a system from a traditional PC OEM. Over the last few years, Apple has introduced features and adopted standards that made using third-party hardware progressively more difficult. Now, with OS X 10.10 Yosemite, the company has taken another step down the path towards total vendor lock-in and effectively disabled support for third-party SSDs. We say "effectively" because while third-party SSDs will still work, they'll no longer perform the TRIM garbage collection command. Being able to perform TRIM and clean the SSD when its sitting idle is vital to keeping the drive at maximum performance. Without it, an SSD's real world performance will steadily degrade over time. What Apple did with OS X 10.10 is introduce KEXT (Kernel EXTension) driver signing. KEXT signing means that at boot, the OS checks to ensure that all drivers are approved and enabled by Apple. It's conceptually similar to the device driver checks that Windows performs at boot. However, with OS X, if a third-party SSD is detected, the OS will detect that a non-approved SSD is in use, and Yosemite will refuse to load the appropriate TRIM-enabled driver.

Submission + - Ubisoft Points Finger At AMD For Assassin's Creed Unity Poor Performance (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Life is hard when you're a AAA publisher. Last month, Ubisoft blamed weak console hardware for the troubles it had bringing Assassin's Creed Unity up to speed, claiming that it could've hit 100 FPS but for weak console CPUs. Now, in the wake of the game's disastrous launch, the company has changed tactics — suddenly, all of this is AMD's fault. An official company forum post currently reads: "We are aware that the graphics performance of Assassin's Creed Unity on PC may be adversely affected by certain AMD CPU and GPU configurations. This should not affect the vast majority of PC players, but rest assured that AMD and Ubisoft are continuing to work together closely to resolve the issue, and will provide more information as soon as it is available." There are multiple problems with this assessment. First, there's no equivalent Nvidia-centric post on the main forum, and no mention of the fact that if you own an Nvidia card of any vintage but a GTX 970 or 980, you're going to see less-than ideal performance. According to sources, the problem with Assassin's Creed Unity is that the game is issuing tens of thousands of draw calls — up to 50,000 and beyond, in some cases. This is precisely the kind of operation that Mantle and DirectX 12 are designed to handle, but DirectX 11, even 11.2, isn't capable of efficiently processing that many calls at once. It's a fundamental limit of the API and it kicks in harshly in ways that adding more CPU cores simply can't help with.

Submission + - U.S. government issues alert about Apple iOS "Masque Attack" threat (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Three days after security company FireEye warned of an iPhone/iPad threat dubbed "Masque Attack", the U.S. government has issued a warning of its own about this new risk by malicious third-party apps to Apple iOS devices. US-CERT warned: https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/a... "This attack works by luring users to install an app from a source other than the iOS App Store or their organizations’ provisioning system. In order for the attack to succeed, a user must install an untrusted app, such as one delivered through a phishing link." Revelations of Masque came on the heels of a related exploit (that also threatens Macs) called WireLurker.

Submission + - Google quadruples Nobel Prize in Computing to $1M (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: The Association for Computing Machinery has announced that its annual A.M. Turing Award, sometimes called the Nobel Prize in Computing, will now come with a $1M award courtesy of Google. Previously, the award came with a $250K prize funded by Google and Intel. The award, which goes to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community," is generally doled out in February or March. This past March, the winner was Microsoft Research principal Leslie Lambert. The ACM says the bigger prize should raise the award's visibility.

Submission + - Nvidia Shield Tablet Gets Android Lollipop Update, Half Life 2 EP1 And GRID (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Nvidia's Shield Tablet is only a few months old, but Nvidia is already updating the device with a freshly minted OS, a refreshed Shield Hub and access to the company's newly upgraded GRID Game Streaming service. A number of new Tegra K1 optimized games are arriving as well, as well as a new game bundle which includes Half Life 2 Episode 1. The SHIELD Tablet Android Lollipop update will feature Android's new "material design" interface and improved app performance, according to Nvidia. The update will also come preloaded with a new version of Nvidia's own Dabbler drawing and painting app (Dabbler 2.0). In addition to a new interface inspired by Lollipop's design language, Dabbler 2.0 will offer full support for layers and it'll allow users to share their sessions over Twitch. Previously, accessing the Nvidia's GRID beta meant streaming games from a GRID server cluster on the west coast, but Nvidia is expanding the service with server clusters located in Virginia, Europe and Asia. For the best possible user experience, streaming games from the cloud must incur minimal latency, and adding more servers in strategic locations not only affords Nvidia greater capacity, but minimizes latency as well. Nvidia says the GRID service will be available in North America this month, Western Europe in December and Asia sometime next year. The company's GRID service gives gamers access to 20 top titles currently, including Batman Arkham City, Borderlands 2 and Psychonauts, among others, and Nvidia is planning to add new games every week.

Submission + - Samsung Sues Nvidia, Velocity Micro; Nvidia Fires Back With Hilarious Retort (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: A few months ago, Nvidia sued Samsung and Qualcomm for alleged infringement on various GPU patents, despite the fact that these patents were ancient, extremely broad, and could easily be used to sue anyone in the mobile industry. Samsung responded this week by counter-suing Nvidia over an equally broad set of patents — and then upped the ante by suing Velocity Micro. Velocity Micro, if you haven't heard of them, is a small boutique builder in Richmond Virginia. This isn't a case of "David vs. Goliath" so much as a case of Goliath ambushing David in high school and beating him up for his lunch money. If Nvidia's lawsuit just "happened" to target the two firms who have stolen its market share thanks to repeated delays in Nvidia's own products, Samsung just "happened" to target a tiny company with a fast time to trial and convenient jurisdiction. So far, this is all the kind of pointless arguing that enriches trial lawyers and not much else. What makes it amusing is that, buried in Samsung's filing, is the following claim: "Nvidia's claim that the Nvidia Shield tablet has the world's fastest mobile process is a false and misleading statement of fact. Rather, standard benchmarking tools such as Primate Labs' Geekbench 3 reveals that the Tegra K1 SOC is not the world's fastest mobile processor. The Exynos 5433 SoC, as used in the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 mobile computing device, scores higher in both the single-core and multi-core Geekbench 3." You know you've gotten desperate to make a point when you ask the court to rule on the finer points of mobile SoC marketing. As expected, Nvidia had more than a few datapoints to show Tegra K1's performance that were counter to Samsung's claim.

Submission + - Intel Claims Chip Suppliers Will Flock To Its Mobile Tech But Can They Deliver? (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: It has been over six years since Intel first unveiled its Atom CPUs and detailed its plans for new, ultra-mobile devices. The company's efforts to break into smartphone and tablet sales, while turning a profit, have largely come to naught. Nonetheless, company CEO Brian Krzanich remains optimistic. Speaking to reporters recently, Krzanich opined that the company's new manufacturing partners like Rockchip and Spreadtrum would convert entirely to Intel architectures within the next few years. Krzanich has argued that with Qualcomm and MediaTek dominating the market, it's going to be tougher and tougher for little guys like Rockchip and Spreadtrum to compete in the same spaces. There's truth to that argument, to be sure, but Intel's ability to offer a competitive alternative is unproven. According to a report from JP Morgan, Intel's cost-per-wafer is currently estimated as equivalent to TSMC's average selling price per wafer — meaning TSMC is making money well below Intel's break-even. Today, Intel is unquestionably capable of building tablet processors that offer a good overall experience but the question of what defines a "good" experience is measured in its similarity to ARM. It's hard to imagine that Intel wants to build market share as an invisible partner, but in order to fundamentally change the way people think about Intel hardware in tablets and smartphones, it needs to go beyond simply being "as good" and break into territory that leaves people asking: "Is the ARM core just as good as the Intel chip?"

Submission + - Rejection: Guy Proposes With 99 iPhone 6s And She Says No Thanks (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Ah, nothing says "I love you" like 99 iPhone 6 handsets arranged in a heart? Unfortunately, a Chinese programmer somehow came up with the not-so-brilliant idea of spending around $82,000 on the aforementioned smartphones as part of a horribly conceived marriage proposal on November 11, otherwise known and celebrated as "Singles' Day" in China. The poor fellow (literally, the dude might be poor after spending two years worth of salary on the 99 iPhones) gathered a group of friends to stand around in a circle as he and his girlfriend took center stage inside the iPhones arranged in a giant heart. We're not sure what that many smartphones have to do with marriage, and apparently the gesture was lost on his girlfriend as well. She answered "No," and in that instant, she also provided hilarious fodder for the internet. However, the best observation might be, one could say that "he now has 99 problems and a wife ain't one."

Submission + - Imagination Technologies Announces Scalable PowerVR Series7 GPUs (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Imagination Technologies envisions its new PowerVR Series7 architecture powering the next billion mobile and embedded GPUs, at least according to their announcement today. As the latest generation of the PowerVR Rogue GPU architecture, the PowerVR Series7 represents a robust lineup that's scalable from 16 to 512 arithmetic logic units (ALUs), which translates into 20+ GFLOPS to near 1.5TFLOPS of performance, depending on configuration. The company is targeting a wide range of products, everything from wearables and IoT (Internet of Things) devices (Series7XE GPUs), to next-generation servers and 3D gaming consoles (Series7XT GPUs). For lower end and embedded devices, Series7XE GPUs fit the bill. They're based on a single scalable cluster of up to 32 multi-threaded multi-tasking ALU cores. The PowerVR Series7XT family of GPUs, on the other hand, are performance oriented for 3D gaming and GPU compute chores. These GPUs target mid-range to high-end applications, including smartphones and tablets, though also extend on up to Ultra HD TVs, game consoles, and high-performance server compute chores. According to Imagination Technologies, the Series7XE and Series7XT offer up to 100 percent and 60 percent performance increases, respectively, compared to equivalent configurations in the PowerVR Series6 line.

Submission + - Start-Up Vsenn Emerges From Stealth With Project Ara Modular Phone Competitor (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: When Phonebloks visionary Dave Hakkens began evangelizing the idea of a modular phone with interchangeable components, many scoffed at the idea saying it couldn't be done or wasn't commercially feasible, that is until Google stepped up and backed a team of engineers for Project Ara. Ultimately, Project Ara's proof of concept efforts bore fruit and the vision is quickly becoming reality, now with apparently new competitors entering the fray. A start-up company by the name of Vsenn has come out of cover to disclose it's intention to start a "smartphone evolution" and it also turns out that company has been co-founded by a former Nokia Android X Program Manager. The company also makes some lofty promises and has set big goals, noting not only modular hardware design but "guaranteed updates, maximum security and customizable looks." From encryption to secure VPN cloud services and back covers that are easily changed out, Vsenn seems to be targeting not only "Phonebloks-style" modularity and customizations like Project Ara but also some of the secure device and communication hot buttons that both Apple and Google have been acting on on as of late with iOS and Android Lollipop.

Submission + - CNN Anchors Caught On Camera Using Microsoft Surface As An iPad Stand (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Since the release of its Surface Pro 3 tablet, Microsoft has pushed their new slate hard. It's as if the company wanted it to overwrite that part of our memory that recalls the Surface RT and it's monumental losses. This past August, we saw the company make a big move by deploying a boatload of Surface Pro tablets to every team in the NFL, gratis. All season so far, coaches and even players have made use of them to plan their next course-of-action, and for the most part, they seemed to be well-received. Unlike some of the products Microsoft tries to get us to adopt, the Surface Pro 3 really is a solid tablet / convertible. Unfortunately, at least where the CNN political team is concerned, Microsoft hasn't one over a few anchors, like they have in NFL, when they were supplied with brand-new Surface Pros. In recent shots captured and tweeted about, a Surface Pro 3 can be seen acting as an "iPad stand" and quite an expensive one. As humorous as this is, it might not seem that interesting if it were just one correspondent who pulled that stunt. Let's be honest, some people just like their iPads. That wasn't the case, though. There were at least two commentators using an iPad on the same set, despite having the Surface right in front of them and seemingly hiding it behind Microsoft's darling Windows 8 slate.

Submission + - Net Neutrality Alone Won't Solve ISP Throttling Abuse, Here's Why (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Net neutrality is an attractive concept, particularly if you've followed the ways the cable and telco companies have gouged customers in recent years, but only to a limited extent. There are two problems with net neutrality as its commonly proposed. First, there's the fact that not all traffic prioritization is bad all of the time. Video streams and gaming are two examples of activities that require low-latency packet delivery to function smoothly. Email and web traffic can tolerate significantly higher latencies, for example. Similarly, almost everyone agrees that ISPs have some responsibility to control network performance in a manner that guarantees the best service for the most number of people, or that prioritizes certain traffic over others in the event of an emergency. These are all issues that a careful set of regulations could preserve while still mandating neutral traffic treatment in the majority of cases, but it's a level of nuance that most discussions of the topic don't touch. The larger and more serious problem with net neutrality as its often defined, however, is that it typically deals only with the "last mile," or the types and nature of the filtering an ISP can apply to your personal connection.

Submission + - Mac OSX Users Report iCloud Uploads Local Temp Data, Even Confidential Stuff (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: There's a fine line to balance when it comes to providing users with a comprehensive backup service and providing that service in a manner that fundamentally compromises the security of the people it's supposed to be protecting. According to security researchers, iCloud has thoroughly breached that barrier thanks to unwelcome changes baked into OS X 10.10 (Yosemite). Here's the problem: Prior to now, if you were working in an application, even a basic application like TextEdit (the Mac version of Notepad), and you quit the application, the machine would automatically save your documents and open the application with your previously-entered information when you relaunched it. It turns out that in the latest version of OS X, previous working states aren't just saved to your local system, they're saved to documents and uploaded to iCloud. That might seem like a way to help users synchronize documents across a system but it's also a gaping security hole. Unsaved documents in plaintext, as well as images are now uploaded to Apple's servers.

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