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Input Devices

Samsung's Advanced Chips Give Its Cameras a Big Boost 192

Posted by Soulskill from the welcome-to-the-bigs dept.
GhostX9 writes: SLR Lounge just posted a first look at the Samsung NX1 28.1 MP interchangeable lens camera. They compare it to Canon and Sony full-frame sensors. Spoiler: The Samsung sensor seems to beat the Sony A7R sensor up to ISO 3200. They attribute this to Samsung's chip foundry. While Sony is using 180nm manufacturing (Intel Pentium III era) and Canon is still using 500nm process (AMD DX4 era), Samsung has gone with 65nm with copper interconnects (Intel Core 2 Duo — Conroe era). Furthermore, Samsung's premium lenses appear to be as sharp or sharper than Canon's L line and Sony's Zeiss line in the center, although the Canon 24-70/2.8L II is sharper at the edge of the frame.
Space

Astronomers Record Mystery Radio Signals From 5.5 Billion Light Years Away 121

Posted by samzenpus from the from-the-depths-of-space dept.
sarahnaomi writes For the first time ever, astronomers have captured an enormous radio wave burst in real time, bringing us one step closer to understanding their origins. These fleeting eruptions, called blitzars or FRBs (Fast Radio Bursts), are truly bizarre cosmic phenomena. In the span of a millisecond, they emit as much radiation as the Sun does over a million years. But unlike other super-luminous events that span multiple wavelengths—gamma ray bursts or supernovae, for example—blitzars emit all that energy in a tiny band of the radio light spectrum. Adding to the mystery is the rarity of blitzar sightings. Since these bursts were first discovered in 2007 with Australia's Parkes Telescope, ten have been identified, the latest of which was the first to be imaged in real time.
Programming

Interviews: Alexander Stepanov and Daniel E. Rose Answer Your Questions 42

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
samzenpus (5) writes "Alexander Stepanov is an award winning programmer who designed the C++ Standard Template Library. Daniel E. Rose is a programmer, research scientist, and is the Chief Scientist for Search at A9.com. In addition to working together, the duo have recently written a new book titled, From Mathematics to Generic Programming. Earlier this month you had a chance to ask the pair about their book, their work, or programming in general. Below you'll find the answers to those questions."
Censorship

Microsoft Outlook Users In China Hit With MITM Attack 35

Posted by samzenpus from the right-back-at-you dept.
DavidGilbert99 writes A month after it blocked Google's Gmail, the Chinese government now stands accused of hacking Microsoft's Outlook email service, carrying out man-in-the-middle attack to snoop on private conversations. From ZDNet: " On Monday, online censorship watchdog Greatfire.org said the organization received reports that Outlook was subject to a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack in China....After testing, Greatfire says that IMAP and SMTP for Outlook were under a MITM attack, while the email service's web interfaces were not affected.

Comment Re: betteridge's law of headlines (Score 0) 489

by Billly Gates (#48850755) Attached to: Windows 10: Can Microsoft Get It Right This Time?

Why? You upgrade your phone each release? Chrome too. Is your cell phone 10 years old?

  Windows 10 has a fast and slow rings. Slow is pro and upgraded every other year. Enterprise is 3 years. Running 10 year old operating systems is rediculous and puts an undue burden on Web and software developers. Internet users suffer as a result. See IE 6?

Windows 10 is designed to be upgraded via sccm and each release will be a .1 so shit won't break if rumor is true. No hell like XP to 7 migrations at all.

Submission + - Researchers Use Siri to Steal Data From iPhones (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Using Apple's voice-activated Siri function, security researchers have managed to steal sensitive information from iOS smartphones in a stealthy manner. Luca Caviglione of the National Research Council of Italy and Wojciech Mazurczy of the Warsaw University of Technology warn that malicious actors could use Siri for stealthy data exfiltration by using a method that’s based on steganography, the practice of hiding information.

Dubbed "iStegSiri" by the researchers, the attack can be effective because it doesn’t require the installation of additional software components and it doesn’t need the device’s alteration. On the other hand, it only works on jailbroken devices and attackers somehow need to be able to intercept the modified Siri traffic.

The attack method involves controlling the “shape” of this traffic to embed sensitive data from the device. This covert channel could be used to send credit card numbers, Apple IDs, passwords, and other sensitive information from the phone to the criminal mastermind, researchers said in their paper.

Comment Yep!!! (Score 2) 489

by unixisc (#48850743) Attached to: Windows 10: Can Microsoft Get It Right This Time?

Businesses have still been buying Windows 7, AFAICT. Once Windows 10 is out, they may well be more receptive.

This one is not difficult for Microsoft to get right. They had the right interface w/ Windows 7 on desktops/laptops. That needs to be the Windows 10 interface for those devices. For tablets, one could be given a choice of the 7 or 8 interface, and for phones, the interface is just fine.

The issue that MS has in the Tablet/phone space is that Windows RT/Windows Phone is a late entrant to the market, and alien to the ARM platform - Windows CE notwithstanding. Also, MS doesn't have the Wintel apps to leverage that space, and is therefore at a disadvantage. I have a Lumia, and the main issue for me has never been the interface. It's the fact that most of the apps suck, and also, most of the popular apps in the market are present on iOS and Android, but not on the Windows Phone. As a result, the phone is partly useful for professionals (has Skype, Office, OneNote, ADP, Concur, and a few useful apps) but pretty poor as a general purpose phone.

While Microsoft has done a good job in having a common development platform, it would do well to regulate what goes into its app store. Right now, too much of it is crap, in sharp contrast to iOS. Not sure about Android

Windows

Windows 10: Can Microsoft Get It Right This Time? 489

Posted by samzenpus from the tenth-time's-a-charm dept.
An anonymous reader shares this article about what Microsoft needs to accomplish with Windows 10 in order to make gains in the mobile market and everywhere else. "Later this week Microsoft will provide more details of Windows 10, most likely focusing on how the new operating system will look and feel on smartphones and tablets. According to Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft is likely to unveil a version of Windows 10 that's expected to work on Windows Phones and smaller Windows tablets running ARM and perhaps Intel processors. Microsoft will be hoping that by making it easier for developers to build for tablets and smartphones it can take some of its dominance of the desktop world and port that to the mobile world. That may help a bit, but will not in itself create the breakthrough that Microsoft wants: when it comes to mobile, Microsoft's Windows Phone is still a distant third in a two-horse race."

Submission + - Report: NSA Can Hijack Existing Malware Botnets (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: According to a new report derived from the treasure trove of documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the NSA uses hijacks existing criminal botnets for its own purposes. Computers already infected by run-of-the-mill crooks might find themselves repurposed by the NSA, and then launching attacks that would be difficult to trace back to the shadowy security agency.

Submission + - Microsoft Outlook Users In China Hit With MITM Attack

Submitted by BarbaraHudson
BarbaraHudson writes: Online censorship watchdog Greatfire.org said the organization received reports that Outlook was subject to a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack in China. A MITM attack intrudes on online connections in order to monitor and control a channel, and may also be used to push connections into other areas — for example, turning a user towards a malicious rather than legitimate website.

The attack involved a pop-up warning message in the email client. Once clicked upon, the user's emails, contacts and passwords could then be logged by the cyberattackers.

The attack on Microsoft systems comes after recent MITM attacks which reportedly have taken place against Google, Yahoo and Apple in China. Users of foreign services, such as Microsoft's Outlook or Gmail, are being forced to use local services instead — which the Chinese government can monitor to weed out signs of dissent.

Submission + - GCHQ intercepted emails from The New York Times, Reuters, BBC, and others (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: GCHQ's bulk surveillance of electronic communications has scooped up emails to and from journalists working for some of the US and UK's largest media organisations, analysis of documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.

Emails from the BBC, Reuters, the Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde, the Sun, NBC and the Washington Post were saved by GCHQ and shared on the agency's intranet as part of a test exercise by the signals intelligence agency.

Submission + - Astronomers Caught Some of Space's Most Mysterious Radio Bursts in Real Time (vice.com)

Submitted by sarahnaomi
sarahnaomi writes: For the first time ever, astronomers have captured an enormous radio wave burst in real time, bringing us one step closer to understanding their origins.

These fleeting eruptions, called blitzars or FRBs (Fast Radio Bursts), are truly bizarre cosmic phenomena. In the span of a millisecond, they emit as much radiation as the Sun does over a million years. But unlike other super-luminous events that span multiple wavelengths—gamma ray bursts or supernovae, for example—blitzars emit all that energy in a tiny band of the radio light spectrum.

Adding to the mystery is the rarity of blitzar sightings. Since these bursts were first discovered in 2007 with Australia’s Parkes Telescope, ten have been identified, the latest of which was the first to be imaged in real time.

Submission + - Windows 10: Can Microsoft get it right this time?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Later this week Microsoft will provide more details of Windows 10, most likely focusing on how the new operating system will look and feel on smartphones and tablets. According to Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft is likely to unveil a version of Windows 10 that's expected to work on Windows Phones and smaller Windows tablets running ARM and perhaps Intel processors. Microsoft will be hoping that by making it easier for developers to build for tablets and smartphones it can take some of its dominance of the desktop world and port that to the mobile world. That may help a bit, but will not in itself create the breakthrough that Microsoft wants: when it comes to mobile, Microsoft's Windows Phone is still a distant third in a two-horse race.
Power

Microsoft Researchers Use Light Beams To Charge Smartphones 65

Posted by samzenpus from the power-up dept.
angry tapir writes A group of Microsoft researchers has built a prototype charger for smartphones that can scan a room until it locates a mobile device compatible with the system and then charge the handset using a light beam. The researchers say they can achieve efficiency comparable to conventional wired phone chargers. The biggest barrier? Smartphones don't (yet) come with solar panels attached.

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