itwbennett writes "According to an announcement on a French government website, police have stopped current searches for missing adults and will not accept new search requests. 'Such 'searches in the interests of the family' were conducted under an administrative procedure almost a century old, introduced to help families separated during the upheavals of World War I to find missing relatives,' according to the French Ministry of the Interior. In a letter to police chiefs announcing the changes, the Ministry advised them to instead 'direct people towards social networks on the Internet, which offer interesting possibilities.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nyder writes "Kim Dotcom posted via Twitter, with a link to Torrentfreak, that he owns a security patent US6078908, titled 'Method for authorizing in data transmission systems.'" Techdirt points out that Dotcom isn't just asking for financial help: Instead, he's asking companies which use two-factor authentication "to help fund his defense, in exchange for not getting sued for the patent. He points out that his actual funds are still frozen by the DOJ and (more importantly) that his case actually matters a great deal to Google, Facebook and Twitter, because the eventual ruling will likely set a precedent that may impact them -- especially around the DMCA." Update: 05/23 14:23 GMT by T : Why is this relevant to Twitter? If you're not an active Twitter user, you might not realize that (after some well publicized twitter-account hijackings), the company is trying to regain some ground on security. Nerval's Lobster writes "Twitter is now offering two-factor authentication, a feature that could help prevent embarrassing security breaches. Twitter users interested in activating two-factor authentication will need to head over to their account settings page and click the checkbox beside 'Require a verification code when I sign in.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apparently all-in-one desktop PCs with touchscreen displays and built-in batteries are a thing now. Sony and Dell have them, Lenovo and Asus have put their own spin on the idea. And now HP is getting in on the action.

The HP ENVY Rove 20 is an all-in-one desktop/tablet that will launch in July for under $1000.

In some ways the Rove 20 looks more like a giant tablet than a desktop PC. It’s basically a big slate with a 20 inch, 1600 x 900 pixel IPS display, 3 USB ports, 802.11ac WiFi, and hybrid storage with a solid state disk and hard drive.

But at nearly 12 pounds, it’s kind of heavy for a tablet. And the built-in kickstand in the back shows what this tablet is really designed for. You can prop it up on your desk and plug in a mouse or keyboard to use it as a full-fledged PC.

Since it can run on battery power though, you can pick it up and carry it anywhere in the house. Put it on a table in the living room and you can watch videos. Carry it to the kitchen and use it to listen to internet radio while looking up recipes.

Or lay it down flat on a table and you can play multiplayer games. It comes with Monopoly and a few other titles preloaded.

HP hasn’t provided all the details about the tablet yet, but it’s expected to feature an Intel Haswell processor.

 

HP Envy Rove is a 20 inch desktop PC that’s also a 12 pound tablet is a post from: Liliputing

An anonymous reader writes "Today Fedora and the Seneca Centre for Development of Open Technology (CDOT) announced the release of Pidora 18, an optimized Fedora remix for the Raspberry Pi. It's based on a brand new build of Fedora for the ARMv6 architecture with greater speed and includes packages from the Fedora 18 package set. It's also the launch of the Pidora name. (The older version of Fedora for the Pi was called the Fedora Raspberry Pi Remix.)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HP has been offering notebooks with 11.6 inch displays and starting prices of $399 as part of the HP Pavilion DM1 line for a few years. Now HP’s low-cost portable notebooks are getting a new name, and a few new features.

The HP Pavilion 11 TouchSmart launches June 26th for $399 and up. And for the first time, HP’s entry-level laptop will sport a touchscreen display and an AMD Temash processor.

This is still a budget notebook, so don’t expect a crazy high-resolution display. The HP Pavilion 11 TouchSmart packs a 1366. x 768 pixel screen.

But it should be faster than the Pavilion DM1 laptops it replaces thanks to the new AMD Temash processor. HP will offer models with AMD A4 dual-core or AMD A6 quad-core processors, which AMD says should offer better performance and longer battery life than the Brazos chips that powered HP’s earlier 11.6 inch laptops.

Other features include VGA and HDMI ports, 3 USB ports, an Ethernet jack and SD card reader, and a user-replaceable battery.

HP brings touch to its budget 11.6 inch notebooks with Pavilion 11 TouchSmart is a post from: Liliputing

It’s shaping up to be a good year for fans of high-resolution laptop displays. Apple may have kicked things off when the company started shipping MacBook Pro notebooks with Retina displays, but this year we’ve also seen notebooks from Google and Toshiba with higher-than-full-HD screens.

Now HP is joining the party with the HP Envy TouchSmart 14. It’s an ultrabook with an optional 3200 x 1800 pixel display.

HP will also offer models with 1366 x 768 pixel and 1600 x 900 pixel displays and a starting price of $699 for a model with an Intel processor. I suspect you’ll have to pay a little extra for the highest resolution model.

There’s also a Sleekbook model, which is basically HP’s name for a thin and light notebook featuring an AMD processor instead of an Intel chip.

The HP Pavilion TouchSmart 14 Sleekbook will have a starting price of $480 when it launches on June 5th. Available options include AMD discrete graphics with up to 2GB of dedicated memory and up to 1TB of disk space.

If the TouchSmart name didn’t make it clear, each of these models will also feature touchscreen displays.

via The Verge and The Windows Blog

 

HP Envy TouchSmart 14 ultrabook packs a 3200 x 1800 pixel display is a post from: Liliputing

judgecorp writes "Supporters of the Communications Data Bill (also known as the Snooper's Charter) have lost no time in calling for the Bill to be revived, in response to yesterday's brutal murder of a soldier on the streets of Woolwich, South London. The Bill would have allowed monitoring of all online communications — including who people contact and what websites they visit — but was shelved after Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg opposed it, effectively splitting Britain's coalition government on the issue. Now the fear of new terrorism could rekindle support, based on the argument that even 'lone wolf' attackers use the Internet."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cartoon for Today, May 23, 2013

Amazon is taking its Kindle Fire tablet lineup global. Just a few days after updating the Amazon Appstore to allow users in over 200 countries to download Android apps, Amazon has announced that the Kindle Fire HD and Kindle Fire HD 8.9 tablets are available for pre-order more than 170 countries.

The tablets will begin shipping June 13th.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD is a 7 inch tablet with a 1280 x 800 pixel display, an Android-based operating system, and tight integration with Amazon’s digital book, magazine, music, movie, and app stores.

The Kindle Fire HD 8.9 has a larger 8.9 inch, 1920 x 1200 pixel display and a faster processor.

Both models are available with a choice of 16GB or 32GB of storage.

Up until now the tablets have only been available in limited markets, including the US, Japan, and some European countries. Now they’ll be available in almost every nation or territory on the planet. Amazon’s going big here.

It doesn’t look like the company has any plans to offer its entry-level Kindle Fire worldwide though. That model has a 7 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display and a slightly slower processor than its peers. In the US, it sells for $159 and up, while the starting price of the Kindle Fire HD is $199
.

Amazon now offers Kindle Fire HD tablets in over 170 countries is a post from: Liliputing

zrbyte writes "One-time pads are the holy grail of cryptography — they are impossible to crack, even in principle. However, the ability to copy electronic code makes one-time pads vulnerable to hackers. Now engineers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, have found a way round this to create a system of cryptography that is invulnerable to electronic attack. Their solution is based on a special kind of one-time pad that generates a random key through the complexity of its physical structure, namely shining a light through a diffusive glass plate."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

walterbyrd writes "Late last year, a vigorous and secretive patent troll began sending out thousands of letters to small businesses all around the country, insisting that they owed between $900 and $1,200 per worker just for using scanners. The brazen patent-trolling scheme, carried out by a company called MPHJ technologies and dozens of shell companies with six-letter names, has caught the attention of politicians. MPHJ and its principals may have gone too far. They're now the subject of a government lawsuit targeting patent trolling—the first ever such case. Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell has filed suit in his home state, saying that MPHJ is violating Vermont consumer-protection laws."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Within a few months of launching, Snapchat has made an enormous and lasting impact on the culture of communication on the Internet – and we should all be grateful. They have simplified a security process enough to the point that anybody can use it, while validating the market of the next generation of a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/tarunwadhwa/2013/05/22/why-we-should-celebrate-snapchat-and-encourage-ephemeral-communication/">privacy-preserving ephemeral communication. Most importantly, we may finally get a break from the forced permanence of the Facebook and Google world, where everything you do and share is a data point to be monetized and re-sold to the highest bidder."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

antdude writes "Pew Internet reports that: 'Teens are sharing more info about themselves on social media sites than they have in the past, but they are also taking a variety of technical and non-technical steps to manage the privacy of that information. Despite taking these privacy-protective actions, teen social media users do not express a high level of concern about third-parties (such as businesses or advertisers) accessing their data.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AMD is launching three new families of processors, which the company thinks fill a gap in the market. The new Temash, Kabini, and Richland chips are largely aimed at tablets, hybrids, and ultrathin notebooks and performance notebooks respectively.

It’s not like market leader Intel doesn’t already have those areas covered, but AMD thinks its new processors will offer better performance at a lower price than Intel chips.

Like Intel, AMD has been working to reduce power consumption while improving performance and stepping up graphics performance in all of its latest processors. The lowest power Temash chips have a TDP of just 3.9 watts and AMD says it could power tablets that get up to 10 or 11 hours of battery life.

AMD says we should see dozens of tablets and notebooks with its latest chips in the coming months, including models from most major PC makers.

Temash

We’ve already seen Temash chips start to hit the market in devices like the Acer Aspire V5-122 notebook. But AMD actually has 3 different Temash chips designed for tablets and small-screen notebooks with touchscreen displays.

The company is positioning these chips as low-cost competitors to Intel’s Celeron or Pentium chips which fill the space between Intel Atom and Intel Core i3.

The AMD A4-1200 is a 1 GHz dual-core processor with AMD Radeon HD 8180 graphics clocked at 225 MHz.

It has a TDP of 3.9 watts, and in that space, you shouldn’t expect any miracles from an x86 processor. This chip is primarily aimed at what Intel calls “performance tablets,” and probably won’t offer a stellar experience with more demanding Windows apps.

The A4-1200 is basically AMD’s answer to an Intel Atom chip, and while it should offer significantly better graphics than a Clover Trail processor, it’s too early to say how it will stack up against Intel’s Bay Trail chips due out later this year in terms of CPU and graphics performance.

AMD also offers the A4-1250, which is an 8W version with Radeon HD 8210 graphics at 300 MHz. This chip is aimed at notebooks with screens smaller than 13 inches, which qualify for low-cost Windows 8 licenses.

In other words, the low-cost mini-notebooks that AMD and Microsoft don’t want to call netbooks, but which basically fill the same niche.

The AMD A6-1450 should offer a bit more performance. It’s the chip used in the Acer Aspire V5-122, and it’s a 1 GHz quad-core processor with an 8W TDP, support for burst speeds up to 1.4 GHz, and 300 MHz Radeon HD 8250 graphics which can overclock to 400 MHz.

AMD’s Temash chips feature new “Jaguar” cores which the company says offer up to twice the computing performance of the “Bobcat” cores used in the last-generation chips, code-named “Hondo” and “Brazos.”

At the same time, AMD says the new chips offer a 20 to 25 percent improvement in battery life. That’s partially because the Southbridge Controller has been integrated into the chip, making Temash processors true SoC (System on a Chip) components.

While AMD is promising better graphics performance than you’ll see in comparable Ivy Bridge or Haswell chips from Intel, AMD is also banking on price. The company thinks that we’ll tablets with Temash chips for well under $500, and notebooks that are a bit less expensive than their Intel-powered counterparts.

AMD Temash

But I think that might be a bit optimistic: You can already pick up an ASUS VivoBook X202E notebook with an 11.6 inch touchscreen display and an Intel Core i3 for less than the price of an Acer Aspire V5-122 with a Temash chip.

Kabini

If Temash chips are designed to compete with Intel’s budget processors, Kabini is designed to go head-to-head with Intel’s mid-range chips all the way up to Core i3.

AMD Kabini

These processors use a bit more power than Temash chips, with TDPs ranging from 9W to 25W, which means you’ll need a bigger battery if you want to get the same kind of all-day battery life. But AMD says the new chips are about 25 percent more efficient than last year’s Brazos chips.

That means all things being equal, you could slot a Kabini chip into a laptop that had been powered by Brazos and get 2-3 hours of additional battery life.

At the same time, AMD says Kabini graphics performance is up to 88 percent better than Brazos.

Initially there will be 5 Kabini chips, divided into 2 categories. The E-Series “Essential” chips are dual-core processors that pick up where Brazos left off, but use a little less power while offering improved performance.

The higher-end A-series quad-core chips are better suited for mid-range laptops and hybrids.

The 1 GHz dual-core AMD E1-2100 is the lightest weight of the bunch, with a TDP of 9W and Radeon HD 8210 graphics clocked at 300 MHz.

At the top end you’ll find the AMD A6-5200 25W chip which is a 2 GHz quad-core processor with Radeon HD 8400 graphicsclocked at 600 MHz.

Richland

While AMD’s new Richland chips are the most powerful notebook chips the company is rolling out this summer, it’s interesting to see that the company isn’t trying to compete with Intel’s highest-performance Core i7 processors.

Instead, AMD says its Richland chips are meant to offer CPU performance that’s on par with a Core i3 or Core i5 chip while offering better graphics, a few special features (such as AMD’s own brand of wireless display technology, which it says is faster than Intel WiDi), and lower prices.

In other words, you should be able to pick up a laptop with an AMD A10-5757M quad-core CPU for less than the cost of a similar model with an Intel Core i5 chip. At least that’s AMD’s plan — it’ll be up to individual PC makers to set actual prices.

AMD separates its Richland chips into two groups. The LV and ULV line are low-voltage chips with dual or quad-core designs and TDPs of 25 watts or less.

Intel owns the trademark on the term “ultrabook,” so technically you won’t ever see an AMD processor in a notebook that’s called an ultrabook. But Richland low voltage chips are designed to go into the same sorts of laptops with thin and light designs.

There are also more powerful A-Series chips with TDPs of 35W, clock-speeds as high as 2.9 GHz, and higher-performance graphics. Those chips will likely need a little more breathing room than you get in a notebook that’s just 0.8 inches thick, so it’s the lower-power Richland chips that are reserved for the ultrabook-like laptops.

Like Kabini and Temash, AMD has also improved energy efficiency. The company says you should get around 1-2 hours more battery life from a notebook with a Richland processor than you would have saw from a model with an AMD Trinity chip.

Software and other features

In addition to improving the performance and efficiency of its latest chips, AMD has also built-in support for some new types of software.

For instance, the Temash A6 processor and Richland A8 and A10 chips include support for AMD’s new Face login and 3D gesture-control software.

Face login uses facial recognition software to let you login to your PC simply by looking at the camera. The gesture controls use your device’s existing camera to let you move your hands or other body parts around to control your PC without investing in any special controller hardware like a Leap Motion device.

As mentioned above, Intel is also building support for wireless display technology into its chips, allowing you to stream content from your PC to a supported external display over a wireless network.

Most of those special features are designed for Windows at this point. While AMD says its new chips do support Linux-based software including Ubuntu and Android, the company isn’t currently pushing its new chips for Android tablets or Linux laptops.

ARM

Intel has announced plans to release its first chips based on ARM architecture in 2014. At this point the company is only talking about processors for servers. But it’s likely that AMD is also looking at the tablet and convertible/hybrid notebook space.

NVIDIA has already shown that it’s possible for a company primarily known for making high performance graphics chips to leverage ARM’s low-power designs to make powerful processors for mobile devices.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see AMD follow suit within the next year or two.

AMD launches next-gen chips aimed at tablets, notebooks, and hybrids is a post from: Liliputing

sciencehabit writes "Physicists have long known that quantum mechanics allows for a subtle connection between quantum particles called entanglement, in which measuring one particle can instantly set the otherwise uncertain condition, or 'state,' of another particle—even if it's light years away. Now, experimenters in Israel have shown that they can entangle two photons that don't even exist at the same time. Anton Zeilinger, a physicist at the University of Vienna, says that the experiment demonstrates just how slippery the concepts of quantum mechanics are. 'It's really neat because it shows more or less that quantum events are outside our everyday notions of space and time.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the midst of the major press blitz surrounding its annual I/O Conference, Google dropped some unfortunate news about its instant messaging plans. In several places around the web, the company is replacing the existing "Talk" platform with a new one called "Hangouts" that sharply diminishes support for the open messaging protocol known as XMPP (or sometimes informally Jabber), and also removes the option to disable the archiving of all chat communications. These changes represent a switch from open protocols to proprietary ones, and a clear step backward for many users.

Backsliding on Interoperability

Google's earlier full support for XMPP meant that users could chat with people on other instant message services, or even who host their own chat servers. This kind of decentralization is a good thing: it decreases lock-in to any particular service, which in turn lets the services compete on important factors like quality, uptime, or respect for user privacy.

Some users, for example, may not want to provide Google with information about the content of their messages, or even when and from where they have logged in, or to whom they are chatting frequently. Information about the people that users are chatting with can be sensitive—remember, that data was at the center of an earlier privacy backlash when Buzz, an earlier social effort, made it public by default.

Allowing federation between services lets users make these choices themselves. Here's an explanation of the importance of federation from Google's own documentation of its Talk platform, in a section called "Open Communications":

[Service choice] allows you to choose your service provider based on other more important factors, such as features, quality of service, and price, while still being able to talk to anyone you want.

Unfortunately, the same is not true with many popular IM and VOIP networks today. If the people you want to talk to are all on different IM/VOIP services, you need to sign up for an account on each service and connect to each service to talk to them.

The new Hangouts protocol raises precisely the concerns Google outlines above. Users are given only the choice to use Google's chat servers or to cut themselves off from people who do. Worse, Google users aren't presented with any notice about the change: their buddies who use jabber.org, member.fsf.org, or any number of other XMPP servers, will simply not appear as available for chat.

These changes are the result of Google dropping a particular subset of the XMPP standard—namely server-to-server federation. But for now, Google still supports client-to-server connections, which means that as long as you are logging in with a Google chat account, you can chat using any compliant application.

That's important for a number of reasons. A major one is that no official Google client supports Off-the-Record (OTR) encryption, which is increasingly a critical component of secure online communication. If both participants in a chat are using Off-the-Record encryption, they've got a secure end-to-end line, which means nobody except the two of them—including their service provider—can read their messages.

Changes to History

Unfortunately, another change from Google may force users to make a hard choice about whether to use those external clients like Pidgin, Adium, Gibberbot, or Chatsecure to chat. In particular, the dilemma comes from the way Google has changed how it archives chats and presents them to the user.

Previously, users could disable "chat history," which would prevent instant messages from being saved to to their Gmail account. Under the new settings, users who don't want to keep a copy of their conversations accessible through Gmail must disable the re-named "Hangout History" on an individual basis with each contact.1 The catch is that users can only disable Hangout History with an official Google Hangouts client.

So privacy conscious users who want to use Off-the-Record encryption where possible, but to keep messages out of their Gmail accounts in any case, are out of luck. And if they wish to continue chatting with their friends on Google chat, they can't even take their business elsewhere.

As of last week, Google is prompting users to replace the Android Talk app with Hangouts, and to switch to Hangouts within Gmail in the Chrome browser. Be advised before updating of the cost to openness of making these "upgrades."

What Should Google Do?

In public explanations of its dropping XMPP support, Google has said that it was a difficult decision necessitated by new technical demands. But even if this new protocol responds to different technical requirements, that shouldn't prevent the company from making it public and interoperable. Releasing the specifications for Google Hangouts would be a good first step. Releasing free/open source clients and servers should follow. It's clear that some of Hangouts' video features have been implemented in some very Google-specific ways. But that's no excuse for leading us toward a world where the only practical choices are proprietary chat clients and protocols.

Another easy move that would benefit users would be for Google to support Off-the-Record encryption in its official Hangout clients. If such meaningful privacy options were available to users, it might mitigate the harms of offering privacy settings only via Google's proprietary apps.

In Google's "Open Communications" documentation quoted above, the company explains why it made a commitment to open communication channels:

Google's mission is to make the world's information universally accessible and useful. Google Talk, which enables users to instantly communicate with friends, family, and colleagues via voice calls and instant messaging, reflects our belief that communications should be accessible and useful as well.

We're frustrated and disappointed to see Google take these steps back from that mission.

• 1. To be clear, even the earlier setting was far from perfect from a privacy perspective: disabling chat history only kept the logged messages out of your Gmail account, and didn't prevent other users, or Google itself, from keeping a record of the conversation.

Related Issues: PrivacySecurity
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The Bad Astronomer writes "A Minuteman III missile launch from California early Wednesday morning created a weird, expanding halo of light seen from the CFHT observatory on Hawaii's Mauna Kea. The third stage of the missile has ports that open and dump fuel into the near-vacuum. This cloud expands rapidly as a spherical shell, shock-exciting the air molecules and causing them to glow, creating the bizarre effect."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

First time accepted submitter Bas_Wijnen writes "3D printing is being condemned in the media because of the potential for printing guns. Engineers at Michigan Tech believe there is far more potential for 3D printers to make our lives better rather than killing one another. To encourage thinking about constructive uses of 3D printing technology Michigan Tech Open Sustainability Technology (MOST) Lab and Type A Machines sponsor the first 3-D Printers for Peace Contest. Designers are encouraged to consider: If Mother Theresa of Ghandi had access to 3D printing what would they print? What kind of designs could help reduce military spending and conflict while making us all safer and more secure? Anyone in the United States may enter and there is no cost."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "The open-source Intel Linux graphics driver has hit a milestone of now being faster than Apple's own OpenGL stack on OS X. The Intel Linux driver on Ubuntu 13.04 is now clearly faster than Apple's internally-developed Intel OpenGL driver on OS X 10.8.3. when benchmarked from a 'Sandy Bridge' class Mac Mini. Only some months ago, Apple's GL driver was still trouncing the Intel Linux Mesa driver."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

astroengine writes "In a recent batch of images beamed back to Earth from Mars rover Curiosity's MAHLI camera, obvious signs of wear and tear could be seen in the 'skin' of the robot's wheels. Considering Curiosity is only 281 sols (Mars days) into its mission and roved less than a kilometer after landing, surely this doesn't bode well? Fortunately, there's good news. 'The wear in the wheels is expected,' Matt Heverly, lead rover driver for the MSL mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told Discovery News. 'We will continue to characterize the wheels both on Mars and in the Marsyard, but we don't expect the wear to impact our ability to get to Mt. Sharp.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.