Latest News - Page 2850

As the situation grew more tense in the Ukraine and Russia over the annexing of Crimea, so did malicious activity between the two states in cyberspace.

According to a new report from security company FireEye, malware "callbacks" - where communications from compromised machines go back to the attacker's first stage server- increased dramatically over the period. Although the reasons cannot be known for sure, FireEye says it sees a "likely correlation" between the number of callbacks to Russia and Ukraine and the intensification of the crisis.

For 2013, Russia was seventh place in the amount of malware callbacks but in March 2014 it jumped to third place - at the same time its parliament authorized the use of force in Ukraine and Putin incorporated Crimea into the Russian Federation.

Seagate was an early investor in SandForce. At one time, we expected to read about Seagate acquiring the company that brought SSDs to the mainstream market but LSI stepped in before that could happen. As part of LSI, SandForce contributed to two product divisions, Accelerated Solutions Division and Flash Components Division. Seagate will acquire both for $450 million in cash.

The acquisition strengthens Seagate's position in the SSD market. Seagate also has a strategic agreement in place with Samsung for advanced NAND flash supply. Current Seagate 600 SSDs use Micron NAND flash and Seagate 1200 SSDs use Samsung flash so the company has the flash side covered.

The acquisition comes at a good time for everyone involved. The SandForce team has the most anticipated NAND flash controller coming to market later this year, SF370. The SF3700 is the first controller to run both SATA and PCIe on the same silicon and early first hand testing at LSI's AIS event last year proved SandForce's claims of over 1800 MB/s sequential reads.

Google has admitted in a blog post that its entire workforce suffers from a clear lack of gender and racial diversity.

Senior vice president of People Operations at Google, Laszlo Bock, penned a blog post - in which he says Google is the first to admit it's "miles" from where the company wants to be in terms of diversity.

In the opening paragraph, Bock says the company has generally been reluctant to disclose official figures on the diversity of its workforce. And it's not difficult to see why from a PR point of view - the official numbers in a new report break down the workforce by gender and ethnicity. Just 30 percent of Google are women, while 61 percent are of a white ethnicity, and 30 percent Asian, leaving just ten percent who are "two or more races," Hispanic, Black or "other" all together.

Autonomous cars are something that will be on the market in the next several years. Vehicles that can drive themselves and passengers to and from locations with no intervention will revolutionize the way people travel. Autonomous vehicles will be very helpful for those who can't drive due to medical or other reasons.

One of the places where autonomous vehicles will definitely be adopted is in the taxi market. Not having to pay a driver will significantly, increase profits for taxi and for hire car services. Uber has announced that it plans to adopt self-driving cars in the future.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick says that the company will adopt autonomous cars when they are readily available and made the comment at the Code Conference in California recently. Uber also announced that it was making a partnership with AT&T at the conference to pre-load its app on some smartphones. The upside to replacing drivers for passengers is that fares could be lower.

Imagine being able to talk to anyone in their native language even if you don't speak their language yourself. That would be something that would help a lot of people communicate for business or just for fun. Microsoft has announced a new tool that can turn Skype into a personal translator service allowing people to talk via Skype even if they don't speak the same language.

Microsoft gave a demo where a worker talked with a colleague in English while the colleague spoke German. With the new feature, Skype is a real-time text and speech translator. The new Skype Translator feature will launch later this year as a Windows 8 beta app. Eventually it will make its way to all Skype users.

Microsoft's new tool has the potential to be very valuable to a lot of people. Skype is easy to use and is already in use by 300 million people around the world making this perhaps one of the most important innovations that Microsoft has come up with in recent years.

During its event in San Francisco this morning, Samsung launched the Digital Health Initiative, pushing open software and hardware platforms to the next level, investing $50 million to help startups and companies work together. The company previously announced the Samsung Catalyst Fund, a $100 million offering, in what could innovate digital health in the future.

The recently announced Simband wearable is one piece of the puzzle, offering a hardware platform for others to build off of. Innovation of medical sensors, which unlike hospitals don't require additional government scrutiny, is moving along with the idea of "intelligent digital health" being promoted by Samsung.

Focused on software, the Samsung Architecture for Multimodal Interactions (SAMI) relies on cloud-based sensor data that is open and secure. The software relays heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, hydration, glucose concentrations, and other readings, which can be stored online and shared with medical professionals.

There has been some talk over the last several months that Microsoft needs to spin off its Xbox business. Microsoft's new CEO Satya Nadella told the attendees at the very first code conference that he has no intention of spinning off the Xbox business. He also said that he was very pleased at how the Microsoft game console business was going.

Nadella said that all of Microsoft's hardware know-how comes from the Xbox division. "It is the thing that is really going to power all the experiences on all the devices today and tomorrow," Nadella said. "In order to be in the hunt for those experiences, and get it right, you do need to from time to time build devices, so you don't leave anything to chance."

The rumor that Microsoft might spin off the Xbox division surfaced late last year for the first time. Paul Ghaffari from Vulcan Capital said, "The search business and even Xbox, which has been a very successful product, are detracting from that. We would want them to focus on their best competencies. My view is there are some parts of that operation they should probably spin out, get rid of, to focus on the enterprise and focus on the cloud."

Yesterday we wrote some news up about performance on NVIDIA GeForce GPUs being superior to that of AMD... well, we should've waited 24 hours. AMD has just dumped out a very impressive, and unexpected set of Catalyst drivers that offer huge performance gains on Ubisoft's open-world hacking game.

AMD's new Catalyst 14.6 Beta drivers offer improvements of up to 25% for Watch Dogs on Radeon R9 290X at 1920x1080 with 4x MSAA enabled, and up to 28% improvement on the same GPU at 2560x1600 with 4x MSAA enabled. When Radeon R9 290X CrossFire scaling is in play with Watch Dogs at 4K (or 3840x2160 with 4x MSAA enabled) we see 92% scaling.

There are plenty of other improvements in the drivers, with Murdered Soul Suspect seeing 16% more performance at 2560x1600 with 4x MSAA enabled, and much more. You can download the new AMD Catalyst 14.6 Beta drivers for Windows here.

Canadian tech enthusiasts or simply those passing through the country can now breathe a collective sigh of relief. In a boost to, ahem, cloud computing, the country has now officially given the all-clear to use of electronic devices during all phases of airplane flights.

This covers e-readers, smartphones, tablets, computers and cameras as long as said devices are not transmitting and in flight mode. The changes were made possible thanks to an amendment to the Canadian Aviation Regulations.

"By collaborating with our aviation partners, we are able to offer airlines the tools they need to safely enable passengers to use portable electronic devices on airplanes," said Lisa Raitt, Minister of Transport, adding that this change maintains "the highest standards of aviation safety." In an official boast-sheet, Transport Canada said the country's record in aviation is one of the best in the world.

Copyright holders and the City of London police have been working hand in hand to bring down Torrentz.eu, the largest torrent search platform on the internet.

A special request from Britain's Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit saw the domain name being suspended as part of wider efforts to put the brakes on access to copyrighted material. The move follows warning letters and previous campaigns to suspend domain names of sites allegedly affiliated with torrent hosting.

The operator of Torrentz told TorrentFreak that although the domain name has been suspended by the registrar following a British police request, it is still registered to Torrentz and the team hopes to move the site elsewhere.

More details about the Intel's next generation HEDT processor lineup 'Haswell-E' has surfaced. The new HEDT lineups will be launched at three price segments to replace Core i7-4820K, i7-4930K and i7-4960K processors. The newer lineups will be using Intel X99 chipset and will have 2011 pins. However it is being reported that it won't be compatible with the existing LGA 2011 socket.

It is also known that Haswell-E will be the first to use DDR4-SDRAM memory, and therefore will support DDR4-2133 MHz out of the box. All three processors have a TDP rated at 140W.

It is expected that the HEDT processor lineups will be launched later this year.

New details have surfaced that sheds more light over the upcoming Devil's Canyon CPU and the unlocked Pentium series processors. It was previously reported that the Devil's Canyon will use a new packaging and better thermal paste.

There are two of such CPUs: i7 with Quad Core and hyper threading, and i5 which uses quad-core. The i7-4690K is clocked at 4 GHz with turbo boost up to 4.4 GHz, along with 8MB L3 Cache and 88w TDP. This is said to be priced for around $362.

The i5-4960K has a base clock of 3.5 GHz with turbo boost of up to 3.9 GHz paired with a 6MB L3 Cache and also has a TDP of 88w. This processor will be priced for ~$254.

Samsung has a new patent application out there that shows some tech that may eventually make its way into the firm's next generation smartwatch. The patent app outlines several new bits including a circular face, gesture controls, and image recognition. The gesture tech supports different hand gestures and movements to launch certain apps.

The app also shows a feature that lets users tap on the screen to control items around the house remotely. Other features that the patent highlights for smartwatches include sensors for monitoring pulse and the ability to show inactivity.

The smartwatch described in the patent is expected to be one of Samsungs first entries into the market with Android Go as the OS. One of the more interesting features of the watch will be its ability to identify barcodes, images, and objects. The user would only need to point the device at an image to read a barcode or read text with optical character recognition.

Frozen has been an absolute smash hit for Disney, where it has crossed the $1 billion mark, grossing a total of $1.21 billion, and counting. This means that Frozen has officially overtaken Iron Man 3 for the spot of the fifth highest-grossing movie of all time.

Where Disney received a big boost in the box office department was from the Japan release of the animated hit, where it has been sitting in the number one position of the Japanese box office for 11 weeks in a row now, pulling in a huge $193.7 million in Japan alone. Frozen is now the fourth biggest movie of all time in Japan, and Disney's highest money-making of all time in the country.

When it comes to Western movies in Japan, Frozen has overtaken every other movie apart from James Cameron's Titanic, and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

Watch Dogs launches just hours from now, so you'd better get the companion app, ctOS Mobile. ctOS Mobile is available for both iOS and Android, is free, has no microtransactions and doesn't require players to own Watch Dogs, either.

Ubisoft's ctOS Mobile app includes two modes, the first is Race - where the distance between checkpoints are short for gamers who have GPS enabled. The second is Free Ride, which opens up the distance of the checkpoints and turns the GPS off. As Watch Dogs gamers reach the checkpoints, they gain time, with gamers sitting on their mobile devices using the ctOS Mobile app can hack the city through a top-down view.

Using the mobile app, they can trigger barricades, set off explosions, call in assists from helicopter-stationed snipers, and the police. ctOS Mobile players have the task of stopping the gamers in Watch Dogs, and if they assist, they win. Just don't download the torrent copy of Watch Dogs, folks.

With Watch Dogs going on sale tomorrow, and some people already enjoying the open-world hacking title - but with Bitcoin miners attacking their system - NVIDIA GeForce owners are going to be enjoying increased performance, and better graphics.

NVIDIA worked closely with Ubisoft Montreal for Watch Dogs, as it fell under NVIDIA's Gameworks program. NVIDIA's Gameworks helps developers with a set of tools in order to fully utilize all of NVIDIA's technologies, something we saw in a video not too long ago. This is great for NVIDIA users, but AMD Radeon owners will not see these extra effects on PC, on top of reduced performance.

Forbes editor Jason Evangelho wrote a piece, benchmarking two cards against each other: the $500 Radeon R9 290X against the GeForce GTX 770 priced at $300. You can see in the image above that the $300 GPU does quite well for itself, keeping up with, and in one test beating the R9 290X which is $200 more. So, GeForce users - enjoy your increased performance and graphical bells and whistles enabled, but AMD fans - you're out of luck. It'll still run without a problem, but consider this like Mantle on Battlefield 4 - there are benefits on both sides of the GPU war.

If you were really looking forward to the Marvel Ant-man movie with Paul Rudd playing the titular character, some bad news has surfaced. Reports indicate that the film has been hit with controversy. The director set to helm the film was Edgar Wright. Wright had been working to get the film to theaters for over 8-years.

Reports indicate that Wright has now walked away from the project over creative differences with Marvel Studios. Wright has directed some odd comedy movies over the years including Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World's End.

The upside to the announcement is that despite Wright leaving the project, Marvel plans to replace him and the project will move on. A new director will be announced shortly according to Marvel and the launch date for the film hasn't been changed.

For a very long time the telephone industry has enjoyed government subsidies designed to help them roll out telephone service into rural parts of the country. The goal was to get people that live in rural America the same sort of communications tech that people in major cities get. As the years pass and fewer and fewer people use home telephone service the FCC has been working to repurpose some of those telephone subsidies.

The FCC announced a plan in 2011 that would use some of the funds from the telephone subsidies to subsidize the roll out of broadband internet access to rural America. Telephone firms pushed back hard against that change out of fear of losing subsidies. The FCC has now won the right to use some of the money from those subsidies to spread broadband in rural parts of the US. The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the challenge leveled by telephone companies as unpersuasive opening the doors for re-tasking of subsidies.

"After years of good faith efforts faltered, voting to approve the comprehensive reform of universal service and intercarrier compensation continues to be one of my proudest moments at the FCC,"� wrote commissioner Mignon Clyburn. "The reforms are changing the lives of millions of Americans who will receive broadband for the first time."�

Kids love to play games on tablets and smartphones. The problem that some parents have is that many of the games available for the iPad and iPhone aren't exactly educational. Some would also prefer their kids to play with toys that aren't digital. A new series of games have surfaced from a company called Tangible Play that combines digital and real-world play for an interesting experience.

The game series has three games known collectively as Osmo for kids that are able to connect with physical toys that children can touch and feel in the real-world. The games include Newton, Words, and Tangram. The games come with a stand to hold the tablet at a specific angle and a clip that goes over the camera.

That clip directs the camera to the surface where the game is being played. The game is then able to mimic the actions kids take in the real-world on the screen of the tablet. Newton is a drawing app that can create obstacles to play a game. Words is sort of like Scrabble. Tangram is a puzzle game that lets you match the shape on the screen using flat pieces. Osmo is currently crowdfunding and needs $50,000. During funding, the game will sell for $49 with the normal street price being $99.

In a twist of fate, a game about hacking the world around you, has malware and hacks built into the illegal copy of it. The torrent of Ubisoft's upcoming open-world hacking game Watch Dogs is hiding some serious malware.

For those who are downloading Watch Dogs over torrents are finding themselves with some pretty serious malware, that makes the people who distributed the copy money through installing a Bitcoin miner onto gamers' PCs. Not only that, but the pirated copy of Watch Dogs is plagued with bugs, with it increasing CPU consumption by as much as 25% by running a process named "winlogin.exe" which shouldn't be confused with the legitimate "winlogon.exe".

We would suggest not downloading Watch Dogs illegally in the first place, grabbing it from the store or Steam, but if you have downloaded the torrent - the best and most thorough way of ridding your PC of the malware and Bitcoin miner associated would be to format your entire drive. Sure, you can run an anti-virus or anti-malware software, but a Bitcoin miner isn't a virus, so you might find yourself in a spot of trouble.