A British-based luxury phone maker which made its name selling $50,000 smartphones decked out in alligator leather and titanium and fitted with sapphire screens, has applied to the courts to be placed in administration after running of out money to pay staff and suppliers, (paywalled) reports British outlet The Times. In a witness statement filed in the High Court in London yesterday, the report adds, the company's last remaining director Jean-Charles Charki, said that Vertu was insolvent and unable to meet its June 30 payroll obligations of about 500,000 euros. From an earlier report: According to a juicy new report in the Telegraph, employees are worried about the future of the company after noticing that production had been running at reduced capacity. Employees are apparently worried about their unpaid wages, as well as pension contributions taken out of their paychecks without being added into the company's retirement fund. Sources inside the company also told the Telegraph that Vertu has unpaid debts with suppliers such as Qualcomm and Microsoft, and bills from waste management, pest control, and other property services.

The processor powering Microsoft's HoloLens augmented reality headset has been a mystery -- until now. During the annual Hot Chips conference in Cupertino, California, Microsoft revealed some juicy details about the secretive chip. PCWorld reports: "The HoloLens' HPU is a custom 28nm coprocessor designed by TSMC, The Register reports. The chip packs 24 Tensilica digital signal processor (DSP) cores. As opposed to more general-purpose CPU cores, DSPs are a specialized technology designed for rapidly processing data flowing in from the world -- a no doubt invaluable asset while rendering augmented reality environments in real time. Microsoft's HPU also contains roughly 65 million logic gates, 8MB of SDRAM, and 1GB of traditional DDR3 RAM. It draws less than 10W of power, and features PCIe and standard serial interfaces. The HPU's dedicated hardware is up to 200 times faster than performing the same calculations via software on the less-specialized 14nm Intel Cherry Trail CPU. Microsoft added custom instructions to the DSP cores that allow the HPU to churn through HoloLens-specific tasks even faster, The Register reports. The HPU can perform roughly 1 trillion calculations per second, and the data it passes to the CPU requires little additional processing."

1sockchuck writes: Does it make sense for state to offer tax incentives to lure huge data center projects? After an extended debate, legislators in Michigan have approved tax breaks for a $5 billion data center in Grand Rapids. The project from Switch, which previously built the SuperNAP in Las Vegas, brought the debate into stark relief due to the size of the project — an estimated 2 million square feet of data center space. States competing for projects often find themselves in a bind, since the highly-automated facilities create a limited number of permanent jobs, but many states already offer juicy incentives. Michigan ultimately sought a middle path, tying the tax breaks to job creation goals. If the data center jobs don't materialize, the breaks disappear.

An anonymous reader writes with this history of SQL injection attacks. From the Motherboard article: "SQL injection (SQLi) is where hackers typically enter malicious commands into forms on a website to make it churn out juicy bits of data. It's been used to steal the personal details of World Health Organization employees, grab data from the Wall Street Journal, and hit the sites of US federal agencies. 'It's the most easy way to hack,' the pseudonymous hacker w0rm, who was responsible for the Wall Street Journal hack, told Motherboard. The attack took only a 'few hours.' But, for all its simplicity, as well as its effectiveness at siphoning the digital innards of corporations and governments alike, SQLi is relatively easy to defend against. So why, in 2015, is SQLi still leading to some of the biggest breaches around?"

hackingbear writes Bummed that you're home alone on date night, or stuck in your mom's basement, yet again? Don't worry. A new gadget or some scuba gear could help. Observed on November 11 — or "11.11," for the date with the most 1s — Singles Day, which started out as a joke among a group of male college students attending Nanjing University in the 1990s, has become the world's biggest online shopping day, thanks to the e-commerce prowess of China's Alibaba Group. On this day last year, they sold twice what all US companies sold on Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. This year, Alibaba has decided to take its 11.11 promotions worldwide, highlighting global brands including online jewelry store Blue Nile, clothing brand Juicy Couture, and even Costco. Amazon has tried to get a piece of the action. The Seattle-based company launched promotions for the holiday last year on its Chinese site, and it's done so again this year.

stephendavion (2872091) writes Hackers who compromised the servers of Domino's Pizza have demanded a ransom of €30,000 or they will publish the records of more than 600,000 customers – including their favourite toppings. "Earlier this week, we hacked our way into the servers of Domino's Pizza France and Belgium, who happen to share the same vulnerable database," wrote Rex Mundi [the name the perpetrators go by]. "And boy, did we find some juicy stuff in there!"

tsu doh nimh writes "A compromise at a U.S. company that brokers reservations for limousine and Town Car services nationwide has exposed the personal and financial information on more than 850,000 well-heeled customers, including Fortune 500 CEOs, lawmakers, and A-list celebrities. Krebsonsecurity.com writes about the break-in, which involved the theft of information on celebrities like Tom Hanks and LeBron James, as well as lawmakers such as the chairman of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. The story also examines the potential value of this database for spies, drawing a connection between recent personalized malware attacks against Kevin Mandia, the CEO of incident response firm Mandiant. In an interview last month with Foreign Policy magazine, Mandia described receiving spear phishing attacks that spoofed receipts for recent limo rides; according to Krebs, the info for Mandia and two other Mandiant employees was in the stolen limo company database."

Titus Andronicus writes "fuse-exfat, a GPLv3 implementation of the exFAT file system for Linux, FreeBSD, and OS X, has reached 1.0 status, according to an announcement from Andrew Nayenko, the primary developer. exFAT is a file system designed for sneaker-netting terabyte-scale files and groups of files on flash drives and memory cards between and among Windows, OS X, and consumer electronics devices. It was introduced by Microsoft in late 2006. Will fuse-exfat cut into Microsoft's juicy exFAT licensing revenue? Will Microsoft litigate fuse-exfat's developers and users into patent oblivion? Will there be a DKMS dynamic kernel module version of the software, similar to the ZFS on Linux project? All that remains to be seen. ReadWrite, The H, and Phoronix cover the story."

bill_mcgonigle writes "Updating the previous story, Forbes and Gigaom are now reporting that Intel is running an internal startup aimed at offering an internet-connected set top box with a-la-carte 'cable' channel subscriptions. They also apparently plan to record everything and offer all content on-demand. While some are skeptical that content providers will give up their cable cash cow and they've run into licensing problems already, perhaps the economic effects of cord-cutters will finally make this business model viable."

An anonymous reader writes "The Register is reporting that the hacking collective GhostShell has announced it has [dumped] around 1.6 million account details purloined from government, military, and industry. The [hacking] group said in a statement: 'we have prepared a juicy release of 1.6 million accounts/records from fields such as aerospace, nanotechnology, banking, law, education, government, military, all kinds of wacky companies & corporations working for the department of defense, airlines and more.'"

J. Dzhugashvili writes "Nvidia 'The Way It's Meant To Be Played' splash screens are all over major PC games. AMD's developer relations program used to be a much lower-profile affair, but that's changed recently. New and upcoming games like Sleeping Dogs, Dishonored, Medal of Honor Warfighter, Far Cry 3, BioShock Infinite, and the Tomb Raider reboot are all part of AMD's Gaming Evolved program. As it turns out, that's because AMD's new executive team is more keen on gaming than their predecessors, and they've poured more money into the initiative. The result: closer relationships between AMD and game developers/publishers, better support for Radeon-specific features in new titles, and juicy game bundle offers."

chicksdaddy writes "Google could tell you about its privacy practices except, well....they're private. That's the conclusion privacy advocates are drawing after the Federal Trade Commission took a black marker to an independent audit of the company's privacy practices before releasing it to the group EPIC in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Security Ledger is reporting that the FTC released a copy of a Price Waterhouse Coopers audit of Google that was mandated as part of a settlement with the FTC over complaints following a 2010 complaint by EPIC over privacy violations in Google Buzz, a now-defunct social networking experiment. However, the agency acceded to Google requests to redact descriptions of the search giant's internal procedures and the design of its privacy program."

puddingebola writes "Jurors in the Apple v. Samsung case will receive a 100 page 'instructions to the jury' document. They will also receive a multi-page form with numerous questions to come to a verdict. From the article: 'The document, which both sides have yet to agree on, is still in its draft stage. In Samsung's case, it's 33 questions long, and stretched across 17 pages. For Apple, it's 23 questions spread over nine pages.' Perhaps this is standard in patent trials? Perhaps road sobriety tests will soon include hopping on one foot while juggling?" As usual, Groklaw has the juicy details on the battle over writing the jury instructions.

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Megan Garber writes that in high school, Paul Ryan's classmates voted him as his class's 'biggest brown noser,' a juicy tidbit that is a source of delight for his political opponents but considered an irrelevant piece of youthful trivia to his supporters. 'But it's also a tension that will play out, repeatedly, in the most comprehensive narrative we have about Paul Ryan as a person and a politician and a policy-maker: his Wikipedia page,' writes Garber. Late Friday night, just as news of the Ryan choice leaked in the political press — the first substantial edit to that page removed the 'brown noser' mention which had been on the page since June 16. The Wikipedia deletion has given rise to a whole discussion of whether the mention is a partisan attack, whether 'brown noser' is a pejorative, and whether an old high school opinion survey is notable or relevant. As of this writing, 'brown noser' stands as does a maybe-mitigating piece of Ryan-as-high-schooler trivia: that he was also voted prom king. But that equilibrium could change, again, in an instant. 'Today is the glory day for the Paul Ryan Wikipedia page,' writes Garber. 'Yesterday, it saw just 10 [edits]. Today, however — early on a Saturday morning, East Coast time — it's already received hundreds of revisions. And the official news of the Ryan selection, of course, is just over an hour old.' Now Ryan's page is ready to host debates about biographical details and their epistemological relevance. 'Like so many before it, will be a place of debate and dissent and derision. But it will also be a place where people can come together to discuss information and policy and the intersection between the two — a town square for the digital age.'"

eldavojohn writes "You may recall from last week the news item concerning FunnyJunk's extortion ... er ... threat of defamation lawsuit against The Oatmeal highlighting a fairly pervasive problem of rehosting content — in this case web comics. Instead of expediting a payment of $20,000 to FunnyJunk, Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal decided to crowd source the money (with 8 days left he has only garnered 900% of his goal) and donate it to charity after sending a picture of it to FunnyJunk. Charles Carreon (the man who has FunnyJunk) has made statements of Inman saying 'I really did not expect that he would marshal an army of people who would besiege my website and send me a string of obscene emails.' In an interview Carreon says 'So someone takes one of my letters and takes it apart. That doesn't mean you can just declare netwar, that doesn't mean you can encourage people to hack my website, to brute force my WordPress installation so I have to change my password. You can't encourage people to violate my trademark and violate my twitter name and associate me with incompetence with stupidity, and douchebaggery. And if that's where the world is going I will fight with every ounce of force in this 5'11 180 pound frame against it. I've got the energy, and I've got the time.' Well it appears that Carreon has filed suit over these matters alleging 'trademark infringement and incitement to cyber-vandalism.' Speaking of douchebaggery, Charles Carreon curiously fails to mention that he first incited all of his users to harass The Oatmeal anyway they can which they dutifully did. One last juicy detail is that Carreon is also suing the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society to which Inman's crowd sourced money is going. Luckily, Inman's lawyer appears to be fully competent and able to address Carreon's complaints."

Hugh Pickens writes "Micah Sifry, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, writes that Barack Obama may be struggling in the polls and even losing support among his core boosters, but when it comes to the modern mechanics of identifying, connecting with and mobilizing voters, as well as the challenge of integrating voter information with the complex internal workings of a national campaign, Obama's data analysis team is way ahead of the Republican pack. Alone among the major candidates running for president, the Obama campaign not only has a Facebook page with 23 million 'likes' (roughly 10 times the total of all the Republicans running), it has a Facebook app that is scooping up all kinds of juicy facts about his supporters and inside the Obama operation, his staff members are using a powerful social networking tool called NationalField, which enables everyone to share what they are working on. 'The holy grail of data analysis is data harmonization, or master data management,' says Alex Lundry, a Republican data-mining expert at TargetPoint Consulting. 'To have political talking to finance and finance talking to field, and data is flowing back and forth and informing the actions of each other — it sounds easy, but it's incredibly hard to implement.' Sifry writes that if the 2012 election comes down to a battle of inches, where a few percentage points change in turnout in a few key states making all the difference, we may come to see Obama's investment in predictive modelers and data scientists as the key to victory."

MrSeb writes "After waiting for more than a month, Google has unveiled its mysterious Dart programming language... and you're going to kick yourself for getting so preemptively excited. Dart is a new programming language that looks like Java, acts a lot like Java, runs inside a virtual machine like Java... but ominously, it also has a tool that converts Dart code into JavaScript. Language-wise, its features are unlikely to knot your panties: there are classes and interfaces, it is optionally typed (you can switch between untyped prototype code to an enterprise app with typing), the syntax is very lackluster, there's a very strong concurrency model, and Google is promising lots of juicy libraries that can be leveraged by developers. Basically, the language isn't meant to be exciting: in Google's own words, it's designed to be 'familiar and natural' — and indeed, if you write Java or C# code, Dart will probably feel very approachable."

angry tapir writes "A US appeals court has ruled on two patent lawsuits that pit Rambus against two competing DRAM makers, sending both cases back to district courts for reconsideration. The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit vacated a lower court ruling requiring Hynix Semiconductor to pay Rambus damages and fees totaling US$397 million for the use of its patents in DRAM chips." Here's the issued opinion (PDF) in Hynix v. Rambus. The opinion in the other case (PDF), pitting Rambus against Micron, contains this juicy snippet: "On August 26, 1999, Rambus held the 'shredding party' it had planned as part of its third-quarter intellectual property litigation readiness goals. Rambus destroyed between 9,000 and 18,000 pounds of documents in 300 boxes."

lothos writes "Pornography will have its own top-level domain, dot-XXX, the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers decided today." Ars Technica has a short but thoroughly-linked article tracing some of the long history (in Internet time) behind the push for .xxx. See also ICANN's announcement of the approval, and — for all the juicy details — the rationale behind the decision (PDF).

joabj writes "In what may be its first investment in an open source software company, Microsoft has quietly invested in TurboHercules, which maintains the Hercules open source IBM mainframe emulator. Perhaps the potential for purloining customers from the juicy mainframe market outstrips any misgivings Microsoft may have about open source. You might remember TurboHercules: In March, it filed an antitrust complaint with the EU over IBM's tying of its mainframe OSes with its hardware." A story from earlier this year gives more information on the related conflict between Hercules and IBM over patents.