Latest News - Page 3032

More proof of cyber espionage has surfaced with the discovery of miniFlame, a virus that is small and highly flexible. miniFlame is designed to control systems and steal data and was originally discovered in July 2012. When first discovered, it was thought that the virus was simply a module for the Flame virus.

However, further analysis has shown that the "module" is actually an "interoperable tool that could be used as an independent malicious program, or concurrently as plug-in for both the Flame and Gauss malware." Kaspersky research suggests that there were several versions built during 2010 and 2011, some of which are still on infected machines.

The main findings:

When The Matrix came out in 1999, so many people walked out thinking "are we living in a computer program?" and it looks like physicists are thinking outside the square when it comes to our origins.

Nick Bostrom has hypothesized that the existence of our race could end up being nothing more than the algorithmic results of a computer simulation. It may sound a little nuts, but it sounds no less crazy than some theories given to use by not science and religion.

The best bit of this is that researchers have reached the point where they have a way that they can test this thought experiment. A team of scientists out of the University of Bonn in Germany suggest that even the most powerful Universe simulation would be subject to certain limitations of its host Universe.

One of the biggest games to be released this year, Halo 4, has leaked out nearly a month early. There have been not only pictures of ecstatic gamers playing the game hit the Internet, but it has also reached torrent sites, weighing in at 16.28GB, which points to the game being a dual dual-layer disc game.

A Microsoft spokesperson told game magazine Game Informer:

Borderlands 2 can be considered a success right now, where it has sold 1.8 million copies in the US in just a single month. NPD Games' sale analyst Anita Frazier said on Thursday that Borderlands 2 "exceeded the first month's unit sales of the first game which launched in October 2009 by 234%".

Now, there's one huge problem that I have with NPD's numbers, is that they don't take into consideration digital downloads, such as one of the biggest source of purchases of Borderlands 2 itself, Steam.

I'm sure there have been hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of sales of Borderlands 2 through Steam and these numbers aren't included. This makes the game even more popular than its predecessor considering these numbers aren't taken into consideration.

Felix Baumgartner has become the first skydiver to reach a truly special milestone: skydiving from the edge of our planet toward the ground faster than the speed of sound. Baumgartner reached a top speed of 833.9mph (1342km/h).

Baumgartner, an Austrian skydiver, spent two hours travelling up in a balloon to reach dizzying heights of 128,100 feet, (24 miles or 39km). After which he jumped out of his capsule, and spend four minutes in complete freefall, all in a pressurized spacesuit. This gave Baumgartner a world record for the highest ever freefall.

Once he hit the ground, he took a few steps and dropped to his knees, raising his hands in absolute triumph. Baumgartner said to the media just after his record-breaking skydive:

AMD didn't report strong earnings in the last quarter, and now sources are telling AllThingsD that the CPU and GPU maker could reduce their workforce by as much as 30%. AllThingsD cite sources familiar with the company's plans that AMD will announce next week that they would slice between 20-30% of their employees, which could see up to 3,300 jobs disappear.

The sources have said that the cuts would affect employees in the engineering and sales departments, which have until now, been unaffected by previous rounds of cuts. The AllThingsD's sources also state something a little frightening for the company, that these cuts in the engineering and sales departments could be bad enough that it would force AMD to scale back some of their product offerings.

AMD are set to announce their quarterly earnings on October 18, but the announcement of the employee cuts could be announced a week later on October 25. AMD CEO Rory Read is rumored to have bought in a team of business consultants from McKinsey & Company and BCG to advice the struggling chipmaker. AllThingsD's sources claims that the mood over at team red is not great right now, with employees having feared cuts for a while now, with the source saying "there are a lot of nervous people, and not a lot of getting done right now".

The numbers were not nice to the gaming industry for the month of September. Research firm NPD Group released numbers that showed the industry slumped as a whole by 24 percent, when compared to the same period last year. Total sales for September, including game discs, consoles, and accessories, amounted to $848.3 million, a far cry from the $1.1 billion during the same period last year.

Looking component by component, the hardware sector suffered the biggest decline compared to last year. Sales of consoles declined roughly 39 percent to $210.9 million. Software, which makes up the largest component of gaming industry sales, declined 18 percent to $497.4 million, down from $609.7 million year-over-year.

Accessories were the least affected, declining only 11 percent. They totaled $139.9 million for the month of September. Microsoft wouldn't let this new bring them down, however, as they announced that the Xbox 360 is still the top selling console for the 21st month in a row.

It's not exactly a pretty scene over at OCZ Technology Group Inc right now as their stock continues to plunge towards being worthless. On Wednesday morning, the stock plunged a massive 42 percent to $1.88, down from a close of $3.15 the day prior. Today, the stock has taken another dive, though not quite as large.

At the beginning of today's trading, OCZ's stock was valued at $1.84. It has now dived nearly 22 percent to $1.46, at the time of writing. But why is OCZ's stock in the toilet all of a sudden? Well, it stems from OCZ delaying the filing of its financial results for the second quarter for fiscal year 2013.

In the press release detailing the delay, OCZ warned investors that the second quarter revenue would be "materially lower" than the guidance released on September 5, 2012. This decrease is blamed upon "the impact of customer incentive programs." The company now expects to report a "significant net loss."

Its big and its coming. Mass Effect 3's Omega DLC is the biggest and most expensive expansion for the game yet, according to BioWare. The expansion will be making an appearance on PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 on November 27 for 1200 Microsoft Points, or $15 for those not using Xbox 360.

Omega apparently will be "double the size" of the largest Mass Effect 3 DLC, which probably means double the game content of the Leviathan DLC pack. It will also be the most expensive DLC for Mass Effect 3, coming in at the $15/1200 MS Point mark as previously discussed. This ties the most expensive DLC for the series.

According to Eurogamer, "The existence of an Omega-based storyline has been known about since before Mass Effect 3 launched. The missions were originally included in early versions of the game's script, before being excised (and presumably expanded) for use in a separate DLC pack. An image of Aria T'loak's squadmate icon was actually broadcast during an official BioWare Pulse video."

A family in Sealy, Texas had a birthday party ruined when they received a box of notepads instead of the iPad they thought they had purchased from Walmart. It seems they fell victim to a scam that was running rampant last year, albeit a slightly funnier version. Previously, the scammer had used perfectly weighted clay so that the box would be the same weight.

It's slightly funnier that they used notepads to replace an iPad, basically trading the electronic version back for the paper version. But anyway, Bobbi Linden purchased the iPad as a gift for her daughter, who then opened and discovered the issue. I wonder what she must have been thinking? "Is this some sort of joke?" comes to mind.

The family then returned to Walmart to fix things up, but the manager was fully unhelpful. "She was just saying she has never seen it happen before and she couldn't help us," said Linden's daughter Courtney Akers. However, Walmart has since fixed the problem. Linden will be getting a full refund as well as a new iPad and apology for the mistake.

If only they had had this feature a couple of months ago, I would have missed that really important going away party, but alas, they have only been testing it with a small portion of their user base, and I clearly wasn't one of them. The feature I'm referring to is one that sends a reminder notification to the regular notification center an hour before an event starts that you RSVP'd "yes" to.

This feature should be of great use, and I'm not sure why they haven't done a complete rollout as of yet. Certainly just having the event on the rarely-checked right-hand side of the screen helps somewhat, but I certainly barely look to that portion of the screen as there is really no useful information over there.

US Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, has earned of cybersecurity on Thursday during a speech that the agency is aware of foreign hackers that have remotely gained access to control systems for vital American infrastructure. Examples of this would be chemical, electricity and water plants.

Panetta stated:

I was laying in bed last night and grabbed my Nexus 7 that I have on my bedside table, I turned it on and hit the Google Play store to have a look around. I noticed that the menu looked different, so I looked closer and noticed that "Magazines" now appeared - finally, the Australian Play Store has magazines!

Cool, I thought, I'll check it out and purchase a magazine to see how it is. I download the app, purchase a magazine from an Australian technology magazine "PC & Tech Authority", lay down and proceed to enjoy reading it. Well, I couldn't because Google Play Magazines doesn't quite work yet.

The app itself doesn't open, and requires an update, which you can't tap the option to do so. You can see in the picture above, just below where it says "GOOGLE INC.", there should be an "Update", and "Open" tab, but there is not. So I have now wasted $4.99 on a magazine that I can't read. I'm sure it'll work soon enough, but it's disappointing to see Google launch a new section of their Play store, and have it fail on day one.

Japanese telco NTT DoCoMo has unveiled a great-looking smartphone from Sharp, the Aquos Phone Zeta SH-02E, the first smartphone to bake the IGZO display. IGZO's display uses indium gallium zinc oxide technology that promises higher translucency compared to normal LCDs.

This technology reduces the demand for backlighting on the screen which should result in reduced battery use. The phone sports a 4.9-inch, 1280x720-pixel display, a 16-megapixel rear-facing camera, 1.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro chip, Adreno 320 graphics, NFC and 4G LTE compatibility through NTT DoCoMo's network.

The IGZO display-powered Sharp Aquos Phone Zeta SH-02E comes with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich out of the box, which is probably the only downer on an otherwise well-specced smartphone. There's no word on whether this will land anywhere outside of Japan, yet.

Apple has s suffered another loss of sorts as one of the post-trial sales bans instituted by Judge Koh has been overturned by an appeals court. The federal appeals court ruled that Apple would not suffer significant harm by the infringement that was found during the trial, and as such removed the sales ban.

The Next Web put it beautifully when they described Samsung's arguments: "Samsung argued, somewhat humiliatingly, that the sales of the Galaxy Nexus were so poor that they didn't pose a threat to Apple's iPhone and that the unified search feature was not essential to the success of its device. The appeals court apparently agrees."

An excerpt of the official order:

Verizon will begin selling the DROID RAZR HD and DROID RAZR MAXX HD on October 18. The new devices continue the design of the popular DROID Android devices that Verizon has been selling for several years now. Of course, they feature updated specifications to keep up with the competitors offerings.

The devices sport a 4.7-inch 1280x720 resolution screen powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor. Wireless is complete with 4G LTE and NFC connectivity, still features saved for higher-end models. The RAZR HD sports 16GB of internal storage and will set you back $199.99 with a new two-year contract.

The RAZR MAXX HD is very similar, but will set you back $299.99 with a new two-year contract. Why the cost difference? Well, the MAXX comeds with a 30 percent larger battery and 32GB of internal storage. Verizon's full press statement is below:

In a continuing effort to make Google Chrome more secure, Google enters the browser into hacking competitions. One of the hacking competitions stopped requiring participants to fully disclose how an exploit was performed, so Google decided to start hosting their own. Known as Pwnium competition, Google hands out awards from $20,000 to $60,000 depending on the exploit.

In this case, a hacker managed to win $60,000, the highest award amount, for exploiting a security hole in Chrome on Tuesday. "We're happy to confirm that we received a valid exploit from returning pwner Pinkie Pie," Google announced in a Chromium blog. "This pwn relies on a WebKit Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) compromise to exploit the renderer process and a second bug in the IPC layer to escape the Chrome sandbox. Since this exploit depends entirely on bugs within Chrome to achieve code execution, it qualifies for our highest award level as a 'full Chrome exploit,' a $60,000 prize and free Chromebook."

Of course, Google's team immediately started patching the exploit as soon as it was discovered and had a patch pushed out in just 10 hours. The hacker who performed this exploit also picked up $60,000 in the first competition that was held earlier this year. If Pinkie Pie can keep this up, he could support himself nicely with this income.

Couch vacationing just got even easier as Google has just released their biggest update ever to Street View. With more than 250,000 miles of roads around the world updated and double the number of special collections, Google is the definitive mapping application and couch vacationing service.

Google specifically calls out the use of couch vacationing (my term, not theirs) in their announcement: "Street View, as you know, is a useful resource when you're planning a route or looking for a destination, but it can also magically transport you to some of the world's picturesque and culturally significant landmarks."

Google even throws in what I take to be a jab at Apple: "We hope you enjoy taking a virtual stroll around some of the world's beautiful places, and stay tuned for more Street View updates as we look to make our maps more comprehensive and useful for you." Apple does insist that their maps are getting better, but they have a long way to go to catch up to Google.

The rumors proved correct in this instance. Today, Samsung has officially outed the Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini, the little brother of their flagship Galaxy S3 device. I just want to take a moment to complain: why did they have to continue to extend the name of the device? The name was already long enough before they attached "Mini" to it.

Now that that is out of the way, let's move on to what you really want to hear about, the specifications. The device sports the rumored 4-inch screen, which should give it broader appeal among customers. It's powered by Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, which is in turn interpreted by a dual core 1GHz SoC.

The device's design is extremely similar to its larger older brother. It features the same NFC, S Bean feature, and curvy design elements. The rear-facing camera is a 5 megapixel sensor if auto-focus and flash. It sports 8GB of internal storage and up to a 32GB microSD card. Customers should be able to purchase the device in early November.

OCZ, a maker of popular solid state drives, lost their CEO recently, but not to fear as the Board of Directors has picked a new replacement from its Board of Directors. Enter Ralph Schmitt, the former CEO of PLX Technologies up until Monday. Tuesday morning, the new OCZ CEO held a conference call and laid out his plans.

"Our actions will be based on innovation, quality, and profitability. Our focus will be to further penetrate OEMs and the enterprise market," he said on the conference call. "OCZ is committed to supporting our customers. We have already made great strides in discontinuing value products and non-core products. Focusing strategy on enterprise. We have lost credibility but we will win it back. We will focus on predictable, sustainable, & profitable results, but this will not happen overnight."

OCZ is planning to trim away at its value offerings as a company of its size just can't have as many as they do. Along with this, OCZ had offered customer incentives that were also too big. The CEO is looking to make the company profitable and work on its image: