Summary: Apple has shown that having control over the hardware and software has its advantages, and BlackBerry once demonstrated that same success. Can this same model be applied to Android and Windows Phone?
Apple is the sole source of iOS devices and BlackBerry is the only maker of BlackBerry OS/10 smartphones. But the rest of the mobile world also looks to be moving toward a dominant manufacturer for each mobile operating system. (Image: Samsung)As James Kendrick stated, Samsung is Android, and, as we see in market share reports, Nokia is Windows Phone. Can the likes of HTC, Huawei, LG, Asus, and Motorola continue to compete against these behemoths?
Samsung
Reports this week indicated that Google is worried about Samsung's dominance because it fears that Samsung might try to renegotiate its commercial terms. While data shows that Samsung ships the majority of Android smartphones and has the one true device that consumers consider over the iPhone, currently the Galaxy S III, there are other players that have better designs and lower-cost phones for the new smartphone owner.
Samsung is dominant with Android, but also has Tizen plans. They have just dabbled in Windows Phone, but if this platform ever takes off, they could carpet bomb the market with phones potentially running on three mobile platforms.
Nokia
Nokia is serious about getting Windows Phone devices into the hands of consumers at every price point, and its announcement at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2013 of the Lumia 520 and 720 continues to fill out its lineup. Nokia not only offers compelling hardware, but distinguishes itself from the others with value-added software and services.
There has been talk in the past of Microsoft purchasing Nokia, and as Nokia continues to dominate the Windows Phone market, this idea doesn't seem that far-fetched.
Is either really likely?
Apple has shown that having control over the hardware and software has its advantages, and in the past BlackBerry demonstrated the same success. Can this same model be applied to Android and Windows Phone? Windows Phone seems more likely to me, since it is a very controlled platform, like iOS, and Nokia is so dominant in this market. Android has many more players, and is marketed as a more open platform, so even with Samsung's dominance I don't see Android becoming a single manufacturer platform anytime soon. I don't want to see that either as companies like HTC, LG, and Motorola are making better hardware now and have compelling offerings.
Some people have a lot more spare time than us. Perhaps they don't have jobs, children, partners and DIY to do or require any sleep. We say this because, collectively, they seem to be filling up YouTube with fake videos. If it's not eagles grabbing babies, it's faked hands-on videos with the next Galaxy S phone.
That's right, a phone that hasn't been announced yet has appeared in video. In the video, the imaginary device is shown in a variety of scenarios, including with the obligatory laser keyboard, that the unwashed masses seem to think is the be-all and end-all of human technological achievement, despite their being (a) available for ages now (b) utterly awful to use.
The imaginary specs are said to include a 13-megapixel camera, and a 1080p Grand AMOLED screen. There's also a 2.0GHz 4 quad-core processor, which could mean there are four quad-core processors in the new Samsung Galaxy S IV. It also runs Key Lime Pie, which is a reasonable guess.
The video also describes it as "the most thinnest one", thinner than both the iPhone 5 and Galaxy S III, both of which are actual, real phones, so a future phone is both thinner, and lighter than real devices. Which is easy to do, when you don't have to actually follow the laws of physics.
The model number is shown as GT-I9500, which doesn't really make a huge amount of sense, given the original Galaxy S was GT-I9000, the SII was the GT-I9100 and the SIII is the GT-I9300. But, if you're going to make something up, why not let your imagination run free with the model number too?
As cross as we are about this sort of thing - blame it on a post-Christmas rage - we must admit that logic, and the specs that are floating around match. We wouldn't be surprised if the finished phone does end up looking a bit like this, and the specs are probably not far off the mark - with a single quad-core processor though, rather than four of them. Still, that laser keyboard thing is still rubbish, and you'll never convince us otherwise.
In recent years Apple and its rivals have shifted their fight from the desktop to the pocket. Now the wearable tech becomes their new battleground. There are three different sources have confirmed that Apple is already planning an iWatch. 100 designers are working on the project according to the latest rumors. While Samsung is also applying its design teams to the task of making a similar device, Galaxy Altius Active or Fortius, which is the alleged smartwatch.
The iWatch is a Bluetooth smart watch which will hook up to an iPhone or iPad, feature a 1.5-inch OLED RiTdisplay screen, and sport a touchscreen front, much like the sixth-generation iPod nano. The sources within the supply chain say the device is already in an advanced stage and that its lauch is expected in the first half of 2013.
While the Samsung Galaxy Altius Active is reported to run a proprietary operating system – AltinusOS and it will sport 235MB of RAM. According to the leaked pictures, its app navigation screen bears a resemblance to the tiles seen on Windows Phone. The smartwatch will come with three accessories, compatible with your wrist, your bike, and with a protective cover.
With Sony offering another example in the form of its Android-compatible smartwatch, it is notable that Apple and Samsung appear to be preparing to face off yet again in a new market.
While the last 10 years have seen the rapid, consumerist adoption of HDeverything — from TVs to DVDs to digital cameras — another far superior technology has been making the slow crawl from laboratory, to prototype, to the brink of public testing: Ultra High Definition TV, or UHDTV for short. With a resolution of 7680×4320 (8K or 4320p), UHD is comparable to IMAX — and 16 times larger than HD’s paltry 1920×1080. A single 8K frame consists of 33 million pixels — higher resolution than almost every DSLR on the market.
UHDTV (also called Super Hi-Vision) has been entirely conceived and developed by NHK, Japan’s public broadcasting organization. Starting in 2003, NHK effectively strapped 16 HDTV cameras together to create a single 30-minute UHD clip. In 2005, a UHD TV program was transmitted over a 240km (160 miles) fiber optic network — and in 2010, NHK managed to transmit UHD from the UK to Japan, over the internet. Earlier in 2012, following various tech advances, NHK finally demonstrated the first shoulder-mounted UHDTV video camera — and now, the Japanese broadcaster has successfully transmitted UHDTV 4.2km (2.6 miles) over conventional, UHF airwaves.
One of NHK's prototype 8K cameras -- pretty chunky
This is no mean feat: At 120 frames per second (UHD allows for 24, 25, 50, 60, and 120 fps), a raw 7680×4320 video feed clocks in at 48 gigabits per second (Gbps). The Super Hi-Vision spec (SMPTE 2036) supports 22.2-channel sound, too, which comes in at around 50Mbps. After compression (NHK has developed a special codec for Super Hi-Vision), the entire stream clocks in at around 500Mbps. To put this into perspective, a 1080p TV channel signal (over the air) is around 10Mbps. The new 802.11ac WiFi standard can reach similar speeds (500Mbps), but over tens of meters — not 4.2km.
How does NHK transmit 500Mbps over a few miles, then? Using OFDM (orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing), MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output, i.e. using more than one antenna), and two 8MHz UHF radio cahnnels. OFDM and MIMO, which are already used by many wireless technologies including digital terrestrial TV (DVB-T), 802.11ac andLTE, allow a vast amount of data to be squeezed into a single bandwidth block.
The huge transmission distance is simply a function of the transmission frequency and power. UHF channels in Japan fall between 400 and 800MHz, while WiFi generally uses 5GHz. Longer waves (VHF and UHF) can travel further without being attenuated by obstacles (such as houses) and atmospheric conditions. While we don’t know the exact transmission power used by NHK, we’re probably talking about 35 to 150 watts; WiFi is usually around 100 milliwatts — and stronger signals travel farther. It might help to think of NHK’s UDHTV broadcast as simply being a high-powered, one-way version of 900MHz LTE.
84 inches of pure beauty
Moving forward, the main takeaway is that it’s actually possible — right now — to transmit 8K television shows (and movies!) over the air. The main problem, though, is that there isn’t a single commercial display on the market that’s capable of displaying that resolution. Even 4K (2160p) televisions — which have a quarter of the resolution of UHDTV — are incredibly rare. Earlier this year at CES, Sharp showed off an 84-inch 8K TV (the world’s first, apparently), and LG showed off a beautiful 4K OLED unit (which is due to launch in 2013).
For the time being, then, 1080p HDTV and 3D are here to stay — but in a few years, when (if?) 3D loses its vogue, 8K will be ready to strike.
On Friday, asteroid 2012 DA14 will pass within 17,200 (27,700km) of Earth. DA14 is about 50 meters wide, and will be the closest ever fly-by of a celestial body that astronomers have known about in advance — at a distance of 17,200 miles, DA14 will actually travel inside the orbit of Earth’s geosynchronous satellites. If that wasn’t thrilling enough, though, celestial mining company Deep Space Industries is saying that the asteroid, if we were to harvest its resources, may contain nearly $200 billion of minerals and water.
Deep Space Industries (DSI) is a new company that recently announced that it plans to launch asteroid-prospecting FireFly spacecraft in 2015, and then larger, asteroid-mining DragonFly craft in 2016. DA14 doesn’t have the right orbit for DSI to chase down and harvest, but that isn’t really the point. With a diameter of 50 meters and a mass of 190,000 metric tons, DA14 is nothing more than an average-sized asteroid — and yet, if harvested, it would yield somewhere in the region of $65 billion of water, and $130 billion in minerals. The global metals and mining industry currently has a value of around $3 trillion — or 15 DA14-sized asteroids.
As for the actual composition of DA14, all we know is that it’s an L-type asteroid. Depending on their spectral shape, color, and albedo (i.e. what the asteroid looks like through a telescope), asteroids are allocated a class. The most common class is C-type, which are carbonaceous asteroids, meaning they are mostly composed of carbon-rich compounds, such as hydrocarbons. L-type asteroids are a sub-section of S-type (stony) asteroids, which are usually rich in metal silicates.
There are two basic concepts when it comes to actually harvesting these resources. The first, which is the route that DSI is taking, is simply landing a spacecraft on an asteroid with an agreeable orbit, mining your resources, and then returning to Earth. The second, which is much more exciting and more pertinent to DA14, is snaring a nearby asteroid and dragging it into an Earth or Moon orbit. A recent study [PDF] carried out by KISS/NASA showed that it’s actually somewhat feasible to grab a 7-meter-wide asteroid in a bag, and then drag it back to a Moon orbit. Once there, it’s much easier to mine the asteroid’s resources.
As for why we’re so interested in harvesting minerals from asteroids, there are two simple reasons: a) Earth’s resources are finite, and b) It is incredibly expensive to launch resources from Earth into space. Water and minerals harvested from asteroids are already in space — they don’t need to be lifted on the backs of incredibly expensive rockets. If we ever want to colonize the Solar System or beyond, establishing a foundry on the Moon (or Mars) and harvesting asteroids for resources would be a very sensible first step.
Incidentally, we’re almost certain that DA14 won’t collide with Earth — but if it does, a 50-meter asteroid impact literally isn’t the end of the world. Unless it lands on someone, anyway — in which case, you’ll be smooshed to smithereens.
Europol, the European police agency, said Wednesday that it had dismantled one of the most efficient cybercrime organizations to date, led by Russians who had managed to extort millions of euros from online users across more than 30 countries — mostly European — by persuading them to pay spurious police fines for abusive use of the Internet.
The Russian head of the crime network was arrested in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in December. This month, the Spanish police arrested 10 other people — six Russians, two Ukrainians and two Georgians — along the Costa del Sol, a popular vacation destination in southern Spain, where the criminals are believed to have had their main base of operations.
The search continues, however, for other possible cells operated by the criminal network outside of Europe, investigators said.
The criminal threat, essentially a form of online extortion called ransomware, relied on malware that authorities believe was developed by the Russian-led gang. It locked a user’s computer, and send a message in the form of a fake police warning, demanding 100 euros ($134) to unlock it.
“This is the first major success of its kind against a very new phenomenon that we have only identified in the last two years,” Rob Wainwright, the director of Europol, said at a news conference at the Interior Ministry in Madrid. “This is a mass marketing scam to distribute this thousands of times and rely on the fact that even if only 2 percent fall victim to the scam, it is still a very good pickup rate.”
Mr. Wainwright estimated that 3 percent of those victimized had paid the fake fines. Europol did not give an overall estimate of how much money the criminals might have gained, but in Spain alone they are believed to have collected more than 1 million euros ($1.3 million), said Francisco MartÃnez, Spain’s secretary of state for security.
Computer security experts in the United States recently estimated that computer criminals make more than $5 million a year on ransomware, though many say that is too conservative.
Investigators suggested on Wednesday that the software used by the criminals could also be aimed at online users who were actually likely to have made unlawful use of the Internet, by picking up key words linked to illegal activities like child pornography or illicit file swapping. That would make the threat of a fine for abusive use of the Web more believable for the user.
Mr. Wainwright emphasized the complexity of the software, with as many as 48 mutations of the virus detected.
“It used the idiom and logo of each specific police service,” he said. “Even Europol and my own name have been used to defraud citizens.”
In most cases of ransomware, victims do not regain access to their computer unless they hire a technician to remove the virus manually. In Spain, after thousands of complaints, the Interior Ministry set up a Web site to help users uninstall the virus. The Web site received about 750,000 visits last year.
The Spanish police received 1,200 official complaints about the virus since it was first detected in Spain in May 2011.
But he said that it also allowed them to “keep track of victims in Spain, Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere” from their base in southern Spain. “These people could have operated from anywhere but somehow found it more convenient to do so from Spain,” Mr. RodrÃguez said.
The Spanish police said six of the 10 people arrested this month had already been detained, charged with money laundering, fraud and involvement in a criminal organization. The four others remain under investigation. Europol offered no details on the Russian who was suspected of leading of the gang who was arrested in December.
The Spanish police also seized several computers and more than 200 credit cards. They said the suspects also had 26,000 euros ($35,000) in cash, which they were planning to transfer to Russia on the day of their arrest.
Europol and other police agencies are still trying to determine just how much money the criminals gained and what it was used for. The gang laundered the money in Spain and elsewhere and sent it to Russia via electronic payments.
Europol started its investigation in December 2011 from its operational center in The Hague, after six countries reported more than 20,000 victims of the virus. While the virus generally came with a police warning, the gang is believed to have used different versions to deceive more users, including one fraudulent message that was designed to look as if it had been sent by the Spanish association that defends artists’ copyrights.
Media companies, it’s time to fire up those firewalls.
The New York Times has reported that Chinese hackers secretly attacked its networks for four months. The timing of the attacks syncs with stories it ran investigating the family wealth of Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao, the newspaper said.
At the core of the attacks was the email account of Shanghai bureau chief David Barboza, who wrote the stories investigating Wen’s family. Hackers also targeted the email account of Jim Yardley, The Times’s South Asia bureau chief in India.
According to executive editor Jill Abramson, there was no evidence that the hackers had actually accessed sensitive files or emails. This means either they were the worst hackers in the world or The Times really has no idea what the hackers got their hands on.
The report is significant because it shows just how easy it can be to infiltrate the networks of multinational media organizations. Clearly it’s not just the military and utilities companies that have to worry about being hacked by foreign bad guys.
Adobe has issued an emergency fix to its Flash software, yet another incident where Flash shows vulnerabilities to hacks and exploits.
Flash is one of the most notorious pieces of software for exploits, along with Java. Steve Jobs famously blasted Flash and blocked it from working on the iPhone and iPad over several issues including security concerns.
The latest Flash exploit targets people who use Flash in the Safari browser on Mac and the Mozilla Firefox browser on Macs and PCs. Adobe also warns that there are attacks happening in email as well — users are tricked into opening a Microsoft Word document attached to an email, but it actually hacks the computer using “malicious Flash content.”
Adobe recommends that all users of Flash immediately update to the latest version of the software to protect from these latest exploits. We think it’s a good idea too.
The latest fixes designed to block the exploits are specifically for Windows and Mac OS X. That said, Adobe also has issued new versions of Flash for Linux and Android as well.
The Federal Aviation Administration is in the midst of upgrading its air traffic control system at a cost of tens of billions of dollars. A big price might not fix an even bigger problem, though, as hackers suggest that system could be compromised.
The FAA is already in the process of rolling out its Next Generation Air Transportation System, of NextGen, a state-of-the-art program that will keep tabs on every plane in US airspace using GPS technology in lieu of relying on traditional radar. In the wake of a series of incidents where GPS signals were spoofed, though, serious problems could emerge in the coming years.
"If I can inject 50 extra flights onto an air traffic controller's screen, they are not going to know what is going on,"Canadian computer consultant Brad Haines told NPR last year. Because Haines and others can emulate unencrypted and unauthenticated GPS signals sent from imaginary planes, he says NextGen stands to warrant some upgrades before it’s ready for the rest of the world.
"If you could introduce enough chaos into the system – for even an hour – that hour will ripple though the entire world's air traffic control,” Haines told NPR.
Haines’ ideas are outrageous, but not exactly out of this world. Just last year, a Texas college professor spoofed, or faked, GPS signals in order to hijack an unmanned aerial vehicle right in front of the US Department of Homeland Security. The United States stands to have as many as 30,000 UAVs, or drones, flying overhead by the end of the decade. When Todd Humphreys of the University of Texas at Austin spoke with RT though, he said those aircraft could come down if hackers have their way.
“The navigations systems of these drones have a variety of sensors,” Humphreys told RT, “…but at the very bottom is a GPS unit — and most of these drones that will be used in the civilian airspace have a civilian GPS unit which is wide open and vulnerable to this kind of attack. So if you can commander the GPS unit, then you can basically spoon feed false navigation information to the navigation center of these drones.”
“Spoofing a GPS receiver on a UAV is just another way of hijacking a plane,” the professor added in an interview with Fox News.
Indeed, the system implemented by the FAA under NextGen will rely on similar technology. With the deep pockets of the government involved in NextGen, though, the GPS signals sent by planes flying overheard are likely to be encrypted. What damage could still be done remains a mystery for now, though, since the FAA is unwilling to let hackers perform any testing to see what could be carried out.
"I still wonder if it would be possible to fool the system on the edges," Nick Foster, a colleague of Haines, told NPR. "I think the FAA should open it up and let us test it."
The FAA isn’t all that willing for the time being, though, and perhaps with good reason: a 2009 report filed by the Wall Street Journal found that civilian air-traffic computer networks have been penetrated multiple times in only a few short years. At the time, the Journal cited a federal report issued by the US Department of Transportation that they said “warned that the Federal Aviation Administration's modernization efforts are introducing new vulnerabilities that could increase the risk of cyberattacks on air-traffic control systems.”
Meanwhile, a report released just last month by the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged that America’s critical infrastructures, including the transportation sector, were subject to unprecedented cyberattacks in 2012.
“The threat of hackers interfering with our air-traffic control systems is not just theoretical; it has already happened,"Rep. Tom Petri (R- Wisconsin) told the Journal for their 2009 report. "We must regard the strengthening of our air-traffic control security as an urgent matter."
Taylor Amerding of CSO says the NextGen system will cost taxpayers $27 billion, plus an additional $10 billion from the commercial aviation industry, in order to implement in full. Once it is rolled out, the FAA will still use radar to track flights, but only in addition to relying on GPS signals.
"Don't for a moment believe there won't be radar anymore," aviation specialist Martin Fisher tells CSO. "Commercial aircraft will still have anti-collision radar and proximity alarms." copy right & courtesy to RT.
At the 11th Annual J.P. Morgan Tech Forum at CES 2013 today, Windows Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Financial Officer Tami Reller announced that Windows 8 has sold 60 million licenses to date. This represents the cumulative sales of Windows 8 including both upgrades and sales to OEMs for new devices. This is a similar sales trajectory that we saw with Windows 7.
We have seen a significant increase in the number of Windows 8 certified systems since general availability at the end of October. There are now more than 1,700 certified systems for Windows 8 and Windows RT. I suggest reading this post from Nick Parker putting the spotlight on several very cool new Windows 8 PCs announced by our OEM partners this week at CES.
This week we also highlighted strong growth in developers building for Windows 8. Since the opening of the Windows Store the number of apps has quadrupled and we passed the 100 million app download mark – just two months after general availability.
UPDATE 1/10: You can read the full transcript of Tami’s presentation at the J.P. Morgan Tech Forum at CES 2013 by Click Here
You need to install dotnetFramework 3.5 and Remote Admin tools for Windows 2008 R2.
no worry, we can accomplish theses two in single command let on PowerShell.
Open Power Shell with Administrative rights ( I prefer the same user which you choose to prepare Domain Controller)
command lets.
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