Latest News - Page 2952

Today, Amazon launched a new online fine art store named Amazon Art. This new marketplace will give customers direct access to more than 40,000 works of fine art from over 150 galleries around the world. Amazon says that the new store will showcase artwork from more than 4500 artists and is one of the largest online marketplace collections of original and limited-edition artwork in the world.

"We are excited to bring one of the largest selections of fine art direct from galleries to our customers. Amazon Art gives galleries a way to bring their passion and expertise about the artists they represent to our millions of customers," said Peter Faricy, vice president for the Amazon Marketplace. "We're thrilled to bring the excitement and emotional connection of art to our customers."

"Paddle8 Editions sells works by internationally renowned artists to benefit the world's leading non-profits and cultural institutions. Through our new relationship with Amazon, we can dramatically expand our audience while simultaneously providing access to affordable, limited-edition works by some of the most significant artists working today," said Osman Khan, COO and founding partner of Paddle8. "We're excited to list our artwork on Amazon to make it more convenient for our existing clientele, and to help us reach new clientele."

August holds a special event for stargazers across the nation in the form of the annual Perseid Meteor Shower. This astronomical event occurs on an annual basis and produces more fireballs and "shooting stars" than any other meteor shower. During its peak, stargazers could see more than 100 meteors per hour with some streaking across the sky as bright fireballs.

"We have found that one meteor shower produces more fireballs than any other," Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office said in a statement. "It's the Perseid meteor shower, which peaks on August 12 and 13."

Cook and a team of scientists from NASA have placed meteor observing cameras across the southern United States in an effort to count the amount of fireballs produced during the Perseid event and between 2008 and 2013, the project logged 568 fireballs. This is significantly more than next largest meteor shower event, The Geminids.

The world's smallest re-creation of the Mona Lisa has been painted on a surface that is just 30 microns in width, which is roughly one-third as wide as a human hair. This tiny feat was accomplished by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and used a process known as ThermoChemical NanoLithography, which is similar to the process used to etch the circuitry on the silicon used in microprocessors.

The process uses a precise application of heat in a painstaking process that "paints" the image pixel by pixel. Varying the amount of heat allows for changes in in the darkness of the gray used to illustrate the image. For example, the more heat used in a single pixel, the darker that pixel will be. Likewise, less heat produces a lighter pixel.

"By tuning the temperature, our team manipulated chemical reactions to yield variations in the molecular concentrations on the nanoscale. We've created a way to make independent patterns of multiple chemicals on a chip that can be drawn in whatever shape you want," Jennifer Curtis, an associate professor in the School of Physics and the study's lead author, said in a statement.

Today, Marvell announced that China Mobile's first self-branded smartphone will feature a Marvell ARMADA Mobile PXA988 processor. Dubbed the M601, the Android-based smartphone will feature unified 3G performance thanks to the ARMADA PXA988 which has been designed to deliver high-performance computing with industry-leading graphic capabilities, while at the same time producing best-in-class robust connectivity.

The ARMADA PXA988 is a unified 3G and LTE single-chip solution that integrates a high-performance low-power ARM Cortex A9 application processor alongside cutting-edge cellular modems that support advanced multimedia and graphics capabilities. The PXA988 also features TD-HSPA+ R8 as well as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, FM radio, and GPS.

"I am very pleased to see the launch of China Mobile's first self-branded smartphone, which is a major milestone for China Mobile and over a billion consumers in China. In the past several years, we have seen the fast development of China's 3G TD-SCDMA technology and the rapid growth of the smartphone market, thanks to the close collaboration among China Mobile and global companies, such as Samsung, ZTE, Yulong Coolpad, Lenovo and others," said Weili Dai, President and Co-founder of Marvell. "I am very proud of our collaboration with China Mobile and Marvell's investment in developing advanced TD-SCDMA technology. I am very thankful for the innovation, dedication and contributions made by the China Mobile and Marvell global engineering teams."

Today, CyanogenMod announced that it has added 11 new devices to its 10.1 white list, with most of the devices being of Motorola origin and a few Samsung handsets tossed in. Additionally, three new tablets have been added to the list as well.

For our readers who have never heard of CyanogenMod, it is a custom ROM for Android devices and is widely believed to be one of the best alternate Android ROMs on the market. Cyanogen 10.1 is based on Android 4.2 Jelly Bean and is closer to stock Android than any other custom ROM. The development team behind CyanogenMod says that work on CM 10.2 is already underway and that it will be based on Android 4.3 Jelly Bean. They alluded to what could be the next generation of Custom ROMs with a top secret project named Nemesis that will feature a new camera app called Focal.

The list below contains the names of all the new devices that been added to the 10.1 white list.

This morning, Nokia Asha owners have one more reason to use the phone today. Nokia has announced that the popular professional networking site LinkedIn has just released an app for the full-touch versions of its Asha smartphones, making it even easier to stay in touch with colleagues and coworkers.

"LinkedIn for Nokia Asha essentially brings the most popular features of LinkedIn to an app built specifically for Asha touch devices," said LinkedIn's Giovanni Iachello, responsible for international product management. It's made up of four main features:

LinkedIn for Asha smartphones is not just about existing members though, but also about attracting new members to the site. "If you're not a member you have the option to sign up and get started right away," adds Giovanni.

Imagine the convenience of having a laptop that boasted 10 hours of battery life, yet only requires two hours in the sun to fully recharge. Sounds pretty nice, doesn't it? Well that fantasy is now a reality thanks to a Canadian company called WeWi Telecommunications and their revolutionary Ubuntu-based laptop dubbed the SOL. The laptop was designed with developing countries in mind where one may need computational power, but reliable grid-based electricity is something of a scarcity.

The SOL will feature a dual-core Intel Atom D2500 clocked at 1.86GHz with built-in Intel GMA 3600 graphics. 2GB stock or 4GB of RAM is optionally available alongside a 320 GB Seagate HDD. A 1366 x 786 pixel, 13.3-inch WXGA display is featured with a 3-megapixel webcam. Audio is headed up by a Realtek ALC661 HD chip with two built-in speakers and a built-in microphone.

Connectivity is headed up by three USB 3.0 ports and an HDMI port. 10/100 LAN and 802.11 b,g,n Wi-Fi is present alongside 3G/4G World Multimode LTE and Bluetooth 4.0. A headphone jack and an SD card reader round out the features. The SOL features fold-out solar panels on the back of the screen which allow the device to charge up in just two hours after spending a full 10 hours powered on. Expected to retail for around $300, more info is expected in a few days pending a company announcement.

This morning, TT eSports officially announced the launch of the POSEIDON, an illuminated gaming keyboard. TT eSports says that they built the POSEIDON with the goal of providing a quality Cherry MX switch-based keyboard, while retaining an extremely affordable price, allowing more gamers around the world the chance to experience the difference a mechanical keyboard can make. Our own Anthony Garreffa got a chance to check out the POSEIDON back in June at Computex 2013.

The keyboard is constructed out of a hefty ABS plastic body that gives the keyboard a very solid feel and virtually removes all flex when pushing down on the keyboard. TT eSports says the POSEIDON was designed meticulously with no shortcuts being taken in the construction or overall function, giving this mechanical keyboard a premium feel while retaining a budget friendly price.

The POSEIDON is a pretty bare-bones gaming keyboard that provides everything you need without excessive clutter from macro keys or extra functionality. It is truly a plug-and-play experience with no extra software needed, allowing it to become the "ultimate plug-and-play" keyboard for gaming at home or on the go. The POSEIDON will retail at an MSRP of $79.99 and will begin shipping out worldwide later this month. Below I have listed some of the features that make the POSEIDON a leader in its class.

One would think this is fear mongering, but it's real, and it's here. Security experts are now warning website operators to test their HTTPS traffic, as it might be vulnerable to a new crypto attack that can be used to take users' information.

The attack is called Browser Reconnaissance and Exfiltration via Adaptive Compression of Hypertext, or BREACH, and was detailed in a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) "BREACH vulnerability in compressed HTTPS" advisory issued on Friday. The DHS warned that "a sophisticated attacker may be able to derive plaintext secrets from the ciphertext in an HTTPS stream."

The vulnerability was exposed last Thursday at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas by Salesforce.com Lead Product Security Engineer, Neal Harris, along with Salesforce.com Lead Security Engineer, Yoel Gluck. Their HTTPS crypto attack can watch "the size of the cipher text received by the browser while triggering a number of strategically crafted requests to a target site" according to exploit details provided to the DHS by Prado.

A few years ago, we nearly saw a Halo feature film from director Neill Blomkamp. At the time, he wasn't a big director, and the Halo film collapsed under the weight of its two financiers, 20th Century Fox and Universal Pictures, pulling out of the project at the last minute.

This was reportedly due to concerns over the ever-increasing budget, and Microsoft's cut. Lord of the Rings director, Peter Jackson, had hired Neill Blomkamp to direct the Halo movie, which would've been Blomkamp's first full-length film. When the Halo film collapsed, Jackson and his partner, Fran Walsh, decided to go with producing Blomkamp's District 9, a sci-fi flick based on one of his short films.

District 9 was released in 2009 to a huge praise from critics and viewers, going as far as receiving an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. When talking with Hero Complex, Blomkamp said: "The luck is the fact that Peter and Fran let me make [District 9] out of the ruins that were Halo. What happened out of that was learning to trust my ideas. If Halo had come out and succeeded or failed, I wouldn't have learned that."

Ok, before you read this post, please make sure you've gone to your cupboard and picked up your salt, because you're going to need it. Over at the Chiphell forums, it looks like some users have found some details on a CPU from AMD.

Considering AMD aren't releasing their 28nm Steamroller-based "Kaveri" APUs until next year, I'd like to know where this new processor is coming from. The new processor in question is codenamed "Baeca", or the Phenom IV X12 170 processor, on a 25nm process. This processor is pretty incredible, with 12 cores and a base clock speed of 6GHz.

All of this is wrapped into a beautiful 75W package, and includes 24MB of L3 cache. The new processor would come with a bunch of new instruction sets, including 3DNow(+), AMD-V and AMD-IV. The new processor would also arrive on the AM4 socket, which is a 1356-pin variant. The leaker of the information has said that this processor would launch in the second half of 2014, after AMD launch their new Steamroller-based Kaveri APUs.

I've said it once, and I'll say it again, there is no privacy anymore. If you're connected to an electronic device, or live in a country with electricity and technology, then you're monitored in one way or another. But just how bad can it get?

Well, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) have been receiving tips from the National Security Agency (NSA). DEA officials in a highly secret office dubbed the Special Operations Division (SOD) are assigned to handle tips from the NSA. These tips are added to a DEA database that includes "intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records."

The SOD's work is completely classified, so that DEA cases that started from NSA tips can't be tracked back to the NSA as its source. But what exactly does the DEA do? Well, they create a story of how they came to the case, in something they call "parallel construction," reports Reuters. Reuters explains this: "Some defense lawyers and former prosecutors said that using "parallel construction" may be legal to establish probable cause for an arrest. But they said employing the practice as a means of disguising how an investigation began may violate pretrial discovery rules by burying evidence that could prove useful to criminal defendants."

California-based start-up, Crossbar Inc., have just dived onto the storage radar with a totally new way of storage technology which they're calling "Resistive RAM" or RRAM.

Resistive RAM is a huge leap for storage, capable of storing 1TB of data on a 200 sq. mm chip, something that is smaller than a postage stamp. RRAM technology uses a three-layer structure, is also stackable and scalable, which means multiple terabytes of storage can be crammed into one 3D chip package with chips stacked on top of each other.

The start-up claims that these chips will feature 20x faster write performance, 20x lower power consumption and 10x more endurance when compared to "today's best-in-class NAND flash memory." I'm sure that our in-house storage editors Chris and Paul are rubbing their hands with glee right now.

It's getting to that time of the year where we hear more and more about Apple's product releases, with two new videos to show you. The first, below, is of the fifth-generation iPad.

As you can see, the video shows the front and back shells to the iPad 5, assembled together for the first time. The Apple logo looks to have gone through a little change, instead of the silver logo we're accustomed to, it's a transparent or translucent logo. We should expect Apple to launch the fifth-generation iPad as soon as next month.

As for the budget iPhone 5C, we have that video, above. The iPhone 5C video shows the rear shell and front bezel parts from the budget iPhone, which we should expect to arrive to our hands as the iPhone 5C.

In the ongoing saga of NSA spying, it appears that not even the darknet is safe. Today, reports came in that an exploit has been discovered in the Tor version of Firefox 17 that comes packaged with the Tor browser bundle. An exploit in the browser's code allowed malware to be injected into the system which then beamed the machine's hostname and MAC address back to a remote server in Reston, Virginia.

The exploit was based on a vulnerability that arises when websites on the darknet attempted to run JavaScript. After a little digging, sources found that the remote server located just outside of Washington DC then sent those hostnames and MAC addresses to NSA servers located all over the country. The exploits as well as the NSA spying were discovered by Baneki Privacy Labs, a collective of Internet security researchers, and VPN provider Cryptocloud.

The vulnerability is only present in the Windows version of the Firefox Extended Support Release 17 browser that was bundled with the Tor Browser Bundle before June of this year. Because automatic updating is turned off in this version, anyone who downloaded the Tor Browser Bundle before June is susceptible to the spying. Tor recommends that users download the new version of the Browser Bundle to stay secure.

Today, Roku announced that Verizon's RedBox Instant service is now available on the Roku 3, Roku 2, Roku HD, and Roku LT set-top boxes and the Roku Streaming Stick. The new service allows not only Verizon subscribers but everyone else to access the app and rent and purchase new releases on-demand.

RedBox Instant is also offering a one-month free trial of its subscription service that includes free unlimited streaming of a list of "hit movies" and four DVD credits to be used at RedBox kiosks. Users can download the app by visiting the Roku Channel Store and searching for the RedBox Instant by Verizon logo. Below is a list of features that Roku says is available via RedBox Instant:

Today, the Washington Post officially announced that it would be selling its operations to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for a reported $250 million. The 135-year-old Washington Post is being sold because of the current owners' unsuccessful attempts to thwart years of newspaper-industry challenges. The company hopes that Bezos, with his tax savvy business skills, can help steer the company a new direction that will once again return it to being an industry leader.

Bezos says that the values of the Post do not need to change, but things about the company will change. We are sure this means that the Post will become much more intertwined into the Internet and a reduction in its print media levels could be on the horizon. In a statement to the Washington Post's staff, Bezos had the following to say:

According to an interview with website Eurogamer, Ubisoft has planned the end of the popular Assassin's Creed franchise. Ashraf Ismail, game director for Assassin's Creed: Black Flag, told the interviewer that "an overarching narrative for the game" is in existence, but not much more info was given.

"We have multiple development teams, then we have the brand team that sits on top and is filled with writers and designers concerned with the series' overall arc," Ismail explained. "So there is an overall arc and each iteration has its place inside this."

Lubrizol says that since the game is a yearly title, there is still room left to fit more inside this arc but there is a definitive end to the franchise. Ubisoft's CEO Yves Guillemot said that being an annual franchise allows the team to tease future plot points and inject NPCs and players who might be seen in future installments of the series.

Today, Sony announced a new MMO installment to the EverQuest franchise. The company says that the game will not follow in the footsteps of traditional leveling systems often found in MMOs but will instead feature approximately 40 classes at launch with players having the chance to mix and match abilities as they play through the game.

The new game will also feature a fully destructible voxel-based world in which all changes the players make on the world will remain permanent. The game will also be able to react to the decisions that players make and will proactively present players with quests that match a player's gaming style. The game will launch free to play sometime later this year, but no official launch date has been set.

Today, LG Electronics announced three new additions to its IPS 21:9 UltraWide line of PC monitors. LG says that "the new monitors enable users to work on multiple files simultaneously as well as maximize their movie and gaming experience." The three new models--29EA73, 29EB73 and 29MA73--all feature LG's 29-inch IPS 21:9 display but differ in feature sets.

The 29MS73 model features a built-in TV tuner as well as the new Extra View picture and teacher feature that gives users the ability to access TV schedules, smartphone games, and other content in the extra window while watching TV at the same time. The 29EB73 model features an ergonomic adjustable stand that makes it easy to reposition the monitor to a comfortable height to reduce neck strain, stress, and to create a more productive work environment. It appears that the 29EA73 is a normal PC monitor with not many extra features.

All of the new UltraWide monitors feature a new enhanced four-screen split feature which automatically divides this display into four segments to allow quick and easy multitasking from the desktop. The segments are repositionable with just a few mouse clicks and there is a built-in Dual Link-up feature that allows users to simultaneously access and view information stored from to external devices such as smartphones or other PCs.