Latest News - Page 2707

Samsung is on the forefront of storage technology, leaping directly into the arms of 3D V-NAND flash, and the world of M.2 NVMe PCIe SSDs. The South Korean giant is looking to really heat up the storage space with the industry's first M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD that is blazing fast.

According to Jeeho Baek, the Senior Vice President of Memory Marketing at Samsung: "Our new NVMe SSD will allow for faster, ultra-slim notebook PCs with extended battery use, while accelerating the adoption of NVMe SSDs within the consumer marketplace. Samsung will continue to stay a critical step ahead of others in the industry in introducing a diversity of next-generation SSDs, that contribute to an enhanced user experience through rapid popularization of ultra-fast, highly energy-efficient, compact SSDs".

The new SSD will be capable of 2.2GB/sec and 1.6GB/sec sequential read/writes, respectively. It will arrive with 300,000 IOPS and a form factory of no thicker than 3.73mm, which is as thick as "two stacked nickels" reports WCCFTech. It will only weigh 7g, and use 2mV which is a big drop in power from normal storage products that use up to 50mV.

I might have eviscerated it in my recent review, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the latest instalment in the 'Fast and the Furious' franchise has grossed a spectacular $1 billion at the international box office in just 17 days, joining an elite club of 20 such films - and marks a first for Universal Pictures.

While 1993's 'Jurassic Park' grossed over $1 billion in its combined 1993 and 2013 releases, 'Furious 7' has become the first film to gross that amount in it's initial release. Vice-Chairman of NBC Universal Ron Meyer wrote in a blog-post that "I am incredibly proud of the motion picture team at Universal, the cast and filmmakers of the FAST & FURIOUS for all they have done to take our original idea and evolve it into a huge, global, blockbuster franchise."

As a comparison, the first 'The Fast and the Furious' film in 2001 grossed $207 million worldwide. How's that for stock appreciation? It remains to be seen whether June's release of the much-anticipated 'Jurassic World' can top it, and it's predecessor. After some mediocre years for the 103 year old studio, they'll certainly be hoping.

The Iranian government has a growing cyber arsenal capable of launching more attacks against political rivals and foreign governments, according to the Norse cybersecurity firm and the American Enterprise Institute. Even with international sanctions, the country has been able to create tools used for reconnaissance and intelligence collection from compromised targets.

"Cyber gives them a usable weapon, in ways nuclear technology does not," said Frederick Kagan, director of the American Enterprise Institute's Critical Threats Project, in a statement published by the New York Times. "And it has a degree of plausible deniability that is attractive to many countries."

There is concern that Iran would spend even more money to help develop its cyberweapons - but the country has already continually improved its current attack capabilities. China and Russia have developed capable cyberattack efforts, but cybersecurity experts show the most concern that North Korea and Iran are trying to improve their hacking tools.

There were at least 29 million US healthcare records stolen between 2010 and 2013 in data breaches, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). More than 58 percent of data breaches occurred by theft, with two-thirds of the incidents caused by electronic data that was stored on laptops, USB drives, and other portable media.

Stanford University and Kaiser Permanente researchers studied data breaches that involved at least 500 victims or more, so the 29 million figure could actually be even higher. It's also worth noting that some healthcare patients could have been victimized more than once, as some data may have been duplicated.

Cybersecurity professionals believe 2015 could be the year of healthcare record chaos, as Anthem suffered a breach - and more could be on the way.

Small businesses are a lucrative target for cybercriminals trying to launch ransomware malware attacks, and the problem is only getting worse. Careless employees are tricked, typically using phishing emails, and the custom malware encrypts various files - demanding a ransom payment or the files will be permanently encrypted.

"They set the ransom so low that, as violated as I feel and as much as I wanted to fight, at the end of the day I realized I can pay and get back to work," said Mark Stefanick, president of Advantage Benefits Solutions, in a statement published by the Wall Street Journal. Stefanick chose to pay the $400 ransom so files were quickly decrypted and his company could get back to normal operation.

Around 30 percent of ransomware victims choose to pay the ransom to end the cyberattack, according to Trend Micro chief cybersecurity officer Tom Kellerman. There were at least 250,000 new ransomware samples studied by Intel Security during Q4 2014, a whopping 155 percent increase quarter-over-quarter.

For the first time since launching in 2009, the Microsoft Bing search engine now has over 20 percent market share of the US desktop search market, according to comScore.

Google still leads the way with 64.4 percent of the increasingly competitive market, while Bing has 20.1 percent - Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other companies are trying to adapt to a growing mobile market.

Bing has been a major effort for Microsoft, which has continually dumped money and development time into Bing. The search engine is now integrated into Xbox, Office, Windows and the Windows Phone, as Microsoft wants to try to lure users away from Google.

Star Wars: Battlefront is shaping up to be one of the best-looking games of the year, with the unveiling of the gameplay trailer yesterday, the Star Wars community has been super excited.

We've now found out that Battlefront will be running at 60FPS on both the Xbox One and PS4 thanks to DICE Producer Craig McLeod. He said: "We're making sure, first and foremost, to ensure it runs at 60 frames per second on everything because that's what delivers the best gameplay experience". McLeod continued: "When you couple the talent that we have in the office with the technology and new generation of consoles has allowed us to achieve, that's how you can get these environments that you're seeing which simply wasn't possible before".

The gameplay trailer that the studio released was running at 1080p with 8x MSAA enabled and a very high level of adaptive tessellation has lead to gamers looking at one of the best graphics in a game yet. With a 60FPS target, we should expect no level of MSAA to be used, or at the maximum possibly 2x MSAA on the consoles, and whatever your VGA card is capable of on the PC.

Samsung released their Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge handsets a little over a week ago now, with Qualcomm feeling the loss of getting its Snapdragon processors into the new handsets.

With the previous Galaxy S smartphones, Samsung has usually had its Exynos processor in certain models, while Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor makes it into another. Not this time around, and rightly so since Qualcomm reportedly asks for 2.5 to 5% of the selling price of every handset that is powered by its Snapdragon processor. This is a big chunk of sales, especially when handsets are spilling over the $1000 mark.

Samsung has thus saved itself many millions of dollars by opting for its own Exynos processor in the Galaxy S6 and S6 edge, and after giving Qualcomm $9.2 billion in royalties over four years, this has come to an end. Qualcomm continues to expand its pile of cash, which is hovering at around the $30 billion mark right now. Most of this $30 billion has been made from the patent and licensing royalties, and not just from its processors - a smart move by Qualcomm.

Fresh from the 2015 'Star Wars' Celebration in Anaheim which saw the release of the second teaser from 'The Force Awakens', and the first tantalising render of a Stormtrooper, Electronic Arts have now released the first trailer for the much anticipated game, which promises to originate from "game engine footage".

DICE also made the interesting admission that the game omits a story narrative, but hinges on separate missions, including locales from the original 'Star Wars' trilogy. EA will make available a free downloadable content pack called the 'Battle of Jakku'; the new desert planet glimpsed in both 'Force Awakens' trailers (previously assumed to be Tatooine) and which will serve as a prequel to the film.

The latest 'Battlefront' is the third in the franchise, and the first in a decade. The title will also mark the first 'Star Wars' game to be released for current-gen consoles. 'Battlefront' is scheduled for release on November 17, 2015 for Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

A hacker group with support from the Chinese government has operated for more than 10 years without being detected, able to compromise information from companies and reporters, according to FireEye. Many of the attacks started with social engineering, with victims unknowingly installing the Mysterious Eagle malware onto PCs - so the hacker group could remotely monitor and control the compromised systems.

The APT30 group has been in operation from 2004 and was able to collect information "about journalists, dissidents and political developments in relation to China targeting government and military organizations, and targeting economic sectors of interest to China's economy."

The Chinese government has long been accused of funding cybercriminal groups aimed at compromising western targets - much of the attention is focused on the US government and companies with US customers.

Most headlines featuring hackers tend to focus on cybercriminals trying to breach security protocols for criminal gain - but there is a growing effort to support "white hat" hackers working in an ethnical manner to find security bugs.

"There are actually a lot of good hackers out there that are revealing vulnerabilities and bugs in technology that we all rely on," said Keren Elazari, analyst for GigaOM Research, while speaking during the Atlantic Security Conference, in a statement to CBC's "Mainstreet" program. "A lot of companies are still kind of reluctant to open their doors to hackers... that's something I'm trying to change."

Google, Facebook, Tesla, and other companies rely on so-called "bug bounty" programs that provide cash and other incentives for coders. It can be difficult for internal programmers to try to work out bugs and vulnerabilities in their own software, so having outside help can be critical.

Even with companies spending more on cybersecurity efforts, data security breaches are at an all-time high, the Gartner research group recently said.

However, these high-profile breaches are finally sounding alarm bells among C-level executives - and they may be desperate to spend money - but aren't really sure what they are buying and trying to implement.

The number of security information and event management (SIEM) solutions leads the way in regard to cybersecurity, collecting, saving and analyzing security data. However, trying to sort through all of that data remains rather confusing, but security analytics technology is maturing.

Cybersecurity is a complicated issue that has serious ramifications for the United States and other countries that aren't focusing enough attention on the matter. More national governments are developing programs to attack political rivals, in an effort to steal information and cause data breaches.

"Cyber is a weapon of war," said Ray Boisvert, former head of intelligence for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), in a statement to The Register. "The NASDAQ and Home Depot hacks are examples of this."

There are around 60 countries involved in various forms of cyberespionage, including terrorist groups like Hezbollah, according to US assistant secretary of defense for Homeland Defense and Global Security, Eric Rosenbach. Boisvert thinks that number is accurate, though much of the attention is focused on Russia and China.

We have previously reported that AMD would be unveiling its next generation GPUs in Q2 2015, which ends on May 31st, but we've just heard some news during AMD's Q1 2015 conference call directly from AMD CEO Lisa Su herself.

During the call, Su said that AMD will talk about their upcoming graphics products launches "later this quarter", with Su reiterating that the company "would like to see some regain of share in both the desktop and the notebook business". As for AMD's plans for 2H 2015, Su had the following to say: "In the second half of the year, I think we would like to see our products take a strong position as well as hopefully the market gets stronger as well".

Cyanogen has announced a new strategic partnership with Microsoft, something that would see the company "integrate popular Microsoft services across the Cyanogen Operating System".

The new partnership will see Cyanogen integrating and distributing Microsoft's consumer apps and services "across core categories, including productivity, messaging, utilities, and cloud-based services". The press release adds "As part of this collaboration, Microsoft will create native integrations on Cyanogen OS, enabling a powerful new class of experiences".

Cyanogen's CEO, Kirt McMaster, said: "People around the world use Cyanogen's operating system and popular Microsoft services to engage with what matters most to them on their mobile devices. This exciting partnership with Microsoft will enable us to bring new kinds of integrated services to mobile users in markets around the world".

Exclusive: We are knee deep in our benchmarking of Grand Theft Auto V, where we've benchmarked it on various VGA cards at 1920x1080 (1080p), 2560x1440 (1440p), 3840x2160 (4K) and even 6480x3840 (triple 4K).

During our testing, we were pushing our VRAM usage up to around 7GB or so, but it was when we had our triple Acer XB280HK monitors in NVIDIA's 4K Surround that we saw something that had our jaws drop: 14GB of VRAM was being used. Yes, Grand Theft Auto V at maxed settings at 6480x3840 with anti-aliasing enabled has the game using 14GB of VRAM, and beyond.

We heard about F1 2015 when we reported on DiRT 4 yesterday, but it has been confirmed that F1 2015 will be spinning its tires on the PS4 at 1080p, and the Xbox One at 900p, both at 60FPS.

With F1 2015 being designed exclusively for the current generation consoles, it has allowed the studio to utilize the new graphics engine and handling model with much higher levels of detail. The visual side of the new graphics engine has been improved dramatically over the previous generation engine, thanks to the increased horsepower in the Xbox One and PS4.

Codemasters has teased: "F1 2015 marks an exciting new chapter for Codemasters and FORMULA ONE; it's a shift in direction for the game series, on new formats and our brand new game engine, with the game set to be released earlier in the season, launching this June". The studio continued: "The handling is a vast improvement from our previous games. In particular our new tyre model is a superb step forward towards realism, letting you explore where the limit is and allowing you to instantly feel much more connected with the car. You can now experience the changes in grip caused by temperature changes, wear, car set-up, debris and weather conditions".

The sequel to the 1982 sci-fi classic 'Blade Runner' seems to be slowly moving towards fruition, with Harrison Ford signed on for "the best thing I've ever read", but now with 'Gangster Squad' heartthrob Ryan Gosling in talks to star.

According to Variety, producers are keen to cast Gosling in the starring role, alongside Harrison Ford, with the film set "several decades" after the original's 2019 dystopian future.

Helmed by French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve and produced by Ridley Scott, 'Blade Runner 2' is expected to go into production next year for a 2017 release, to mark the 35th anniversary of the original.

We heard previous rumblings about a November release window for Star Wars: Battlefront, to coincide with the cinema release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but it looks like November 17 might be the day.

According to Polygon's sources, we can expect Star Wars: Battlefront to be released on November 17, but we'll find out more information tomorrow at 1:30pm ET during the Star Wars Celebration that is still rocking along in Anaheim, California. EA has teased that gamers can expect more on Battlefront at that time, but someone has spotted the source code on the news page for the official site, which has gamers excited.

The source code teases: "The latest news and updates for Star WarsTM Battlefront . Available November 17, 2015 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC".

Last year's debilitating attack on Sony Pictures by hacking collective 'the Guardians of Peace' which flung the darkest secrets of the studio into the public domain has now been published by WikiLeaks, with 30,287 documents and 173,132 available as a searchable database.

In making the material available, Julian Assange has described the correspondence as "newsworthy and at the centre of a geo-political conflict. It belongs in the public domain. WikiLeaks will ensure it stays there". The press release states that "WikiLeaks' publication of The Sony Archives will ensure this database remains accessible to the public for years to come", and will no doubt continue to embarrass the company well into the future."

Sony Pictures have criticised the move in a statement to the LA Times, saying the company "vehemently disagree with WikiLeaks' assertion that this material belongs in the public domain and will continue to fight for the safety, security, and privacy of our company and its more than 6,000 employees."