RSA's SecurID hacked

RSA says hack won't allow "direct attack" on SecureID tokens Security firm RSA has been the victim of an "extremely sophisticated" attack that has resulted in exfiltration of certain private information, announced Executive Chairman Art Coviello in an open letter published yesterday. The company also filed a note with the SEC, warning of possible risks due to the attack. Since 2006, RSA has been part of EMC. Ars Technica

'Pruned' microchips are leaner and meaner If you had to use a commuting bicycle in a race, you would probably set about removing the kickstand, fenders, racks and lights to make the thing as fast and efficient as possible. When engineers at Houston's Rice University are developing small, fast, energy-efficient chips for use in devices like hearing aids, it turns out they do pretty much the same thing. Gizmag

AMD preparing 3.7GHz Phenom II X4 980 New details about AMD's roadmap continues to come. According to information we receive, AMD, Bulldozer processors in addition to the existing product range will continue to update. Quad-core 3.6GHz processor family as the fastest model running at 975 Black Edition model, the agenda, the AMD Phenom X4, 3.7GHz, running at 980 Phenom X4 Black Edition model also prepared. DonanımHaber (translated)

AT&T shames unauthorized phone tetherers, gives ultimatum AT&T has begun cracking down on smartphone customers—particularly iPhone users—who have been secretly tethering their smartphones to their laptops without paying for a tethering plan. The company sent text messages to the offending users, followed up with an e-mail, that says they've been identified as taking advantage the feature without paying up. Ars Technica

Dell offers unlocked Streak for $99 with purchase of a new PC Dell's Streak 5 tabletphone hasn't held our interest much lately, even with Android 2.2 on board, but Dell's got a new deal that may be too good to pass up. Engadget

Analysis: Is Anonymous a real political movement or a lame gag? The mysterious hackers of Anonymous have been more busy than usual this week. But are they a legitimate movement or a bad joke? TGDaily

Radiation dose chart This is a chart of the ionizing radiation doze a person can absorb from various sources. xkcd

Widespread freezing issue with 17-inch MacBook Pro 2011? Apple forum

"Mario" - SXSW 2011 Film Bumper YouTube (embedded below)

The best new desktops for business

For a business buyer of desktops there are five major concerns: performance, energy, space efficiency, budget and support. Different businesses will have specific requirements from their desktop PCs; this article will look at performance and low power PCs suitable for businesses.

The performance category is most important to CAD, computer aided design, graphical work such as photo and film manipulation and publishing as well as any other role requiring large amounts of memory and processing power on the primary machine of the user. Some roles such as programming require powerful desktop PCs to compile code quickly to allow testing but this can be a shared processing core while the work is done on less powerful machines. In the performance segment the new Sandy Bridge processors are a major step forward for desktop PCs and are now becoming available once more following the recall of the first batch which had issues with port deterioration. On-chip graphics help; if a separate graphics card is not required then costs are lowered and maintenance is easier and with some language extensions it is possible to take advantage of the additional processing cores in the Sandy Bridge graphics to carry out many more calculations. Apple’s iMac is a powerful machine with Apple’s strong appeal for visual designers and artists, powered by a 3.06 GHz dual-core Intel Core 2 Duo processor with an ATI Radeon HD graphics card; it’s a fast all in one machine. Alternatively for a Windows PC the Dell XPS 8300 offers an extremely powerful machine at a good price, available for £560 not including VAT it sports the most powerful of the new Sandy Bridge line up in its unoverclocked form, the i7-2600, a quad core 3.4 gigahertz chip with some built in over-clocking ability for single threaded tasks as well as temporary overclocking of the whole chip to use the latent heat capacity of the heat sinking. This is combined with a useful 4 gigabytes of RAM and up to 4 terabytes of storage.

Low power desktop PCs are the choice of many environmentally conscious businesses both to save money though the significant power savings, especially through the use of power-efficient data centres where computation per watt is becoming the name of the game and to demonstrate their commitment to the ideas they are making in their mission statement. As the demand has grown in this area there are a number of good options available and it is only set to improve, in a big way in fact, as mobile phone processors which are designed from the very beginning to use minimal power are becoming powerful enough and the operating systems mature enough that they are beginning to migrate into laptops and desktop computers. Current market options include the tiny Fit PC2i, barely larger than an external hard drive, it can drive a widescreen display via DVI and has built in Wi-Fi, USB ports and a microSD card reader with an Intel Atom Z530 1600 MHz chip to do the processing, along with 2 GB of RAM and a 160 GB hard disk. Power use ranges from 6 Watts at a low CPU usage level up to 8 Watts at full power. The price is quite steep for the product, between £245 and £545 not including VAT. Visually it is striking and extremely space-efficient, it will have an impact on anyone who sees it but is expensive for what you get. More powerful but still energy efficient desktop computers come in the form of Lenovo’s Blue Sky desktop computers. Able to run on as little as 45 Watts on either an AMD Athlon 64 bit dual core or an AMD Sempron with hard drives from 80 GB up to 750 GB and 4 GB of RAM they are fully powered desktop computers that take little space at a size similar to that of a phonebook that also have a low speed fan for quietness, making them ideal for crowded environments.

Google's Content-Farm Algorithm Yields Bitter Harvest

Google recently deployed a new algorithm meant to lower the rankings of so-called content farms -- sites that churn out low-quality content built only to catch Google rankings and drive advertising. In many cases, the algorithm has done its job and Google searches are now cleaner. But some legitimate websites say they've been caught in the crossfire and unfairly demoted.

Late last month, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) deployed a new algorithm intended to improve the quality of its search results, and as some critics feared, the results have in several cases hurt legitimate websites.

The algorithm was meant to clamp down on website owners gaming the system to raise their standings in search results.
Perhaps two of the most prominent accused system-gamers in recent months were J.C. Penney and Overstock.com. Both allegedly got multiple sites to link back to them to improve their site rankings, though both companies have denied this was a deliberate act backed by top management.
Prominent as they are, J.C. Penney and Overstock were basically one-off players whose nuisance was abated when they were called out by Google. A far worse problem is that of content farmers -- sites that basically churn out junk or copy content in a targeted manner to game Google's website ranking system.
These content farms have plagued Google for years, leading to several attempts by the Internet search giant to weed them out.
The latest Google algorithm, nicknamed "Farmer Update," is the latest such attempt.

The Farming of Content

What constitutes a content farm is open to debate.
A general consensus is that the label applies to websites that lift content almost entirely from other sites. However, that's also true of sites that churn out patterns of words that satisfy Google's algorithms, using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.
One example of using SEO techniques is to create content based on topics currently hot on the Web. For example, a story about actress Elizabeth Taylor that may be trending now would spur content farms to create content about the actress, mentioning her name as frequently as possible.
Overdoing or misusing SEO techniques is called "black hat SEO" in the business. However, the difference between legitimate and black hat SEO can sometimes be a matter of opinion.
It's sometimes difficult to mechanically distinguish between unwanted garbage and legitimate sites using any of these techniques -- churning out content or using SEO. That possibly led to the "Farmer Update" algorithm sweeping up a few legitimate sites in its hunt for content farmers.

Fluctuations in the Harvest

"Content farms are obviously the prime offenders, but there are concepts and approaches thin-content sites use that spill over to all kinds of sites," Adam Audette, CEO of AudetteMedia, pointed out.
Product pages with text supplied by manufacturers that are repeated across "dozens, hundreds even" of e-commerce sites, duplicate content that's created from mass syndication of news, and comparison shopping networks are examples of thin-content sites, Audette told TechNewsWorld.
Legitimate victims reportedly include Cult of Mac, a popular Apple-focused blog;onedayonejob.com; and Complete Review. These sites apparently saw a sharp drop in Google search rankings just after the algorithm went into effect, though Cult of Mac's standing was later reportedly restored.
One site, Mahalo, was hit so hard by the new algorithm that founder Jason Calacanis reportedly laid off 10 percent of its staff.
Calacanis did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

Reaping What You Sow

Still, it's almost a given that some legitimate sites will get clobbered by Google's algorithm.
"We've seen collateral damage happen with just about every large Google update," AudetteMedia's Audette said. "It's part of the Google landscape."
Overall, however, the new algorithm seems to have managed to weed out some of the bad players. Searchmetrics' analysis of 39 content farm-style domains showed they suffered an average fall of 57 percent in performance.
"Suite101.com, blippr.com and answerbag.com are definite examples of content farm-style domains," Horst Joepen, Searchmetrics' CEO, told TechNewsWorld. All were affected by the change in Google's algorithm.
However, sites such as Wikihow.com, Answers.yahoo.com, Instructables.com,Howstuffworks.com and eHow.com gained in terms of absolute visibility.
Absolute visibility refers to the absolute change in the index value, Joepen said. This is calculated to indicate an estimated number of visitors to a site daily. "Wikihow, for example, recorded an approximately additional 200,000 visitors per day from their organic search results," he added.
News portals such as MSN.com, Mashable.com, ZDnet.com and Wired.com also saw their search result rankings improve after Farmer Update was introduced.
"From where we sit on the SEO side, there isn't much collateral damage in this release," AudetteMedia's Audette said. "In several cases, our clients are faring better after the release of the algorithm."

A Knight in Rusty Armor

Perhaps the "Farmer Update" algorithm isn't designed to take out all content farms plaguing Google.
"Google's calculation may be to keep the two or three largest farms in the mix while cutting off the smaller ones," Mark Ballard, a senior analyst at the Rimm-Kaufman Group, told TechNewsWorld.
"This way, they preserve a good chunk of the content farm traffic and its revenue, while making their results appear less cluttered," Ballard added.
That may not sit well with owners of legitimate websites, who suffer from the impact of content farmers on their search rankings.

How to Survive Being Collateral Damage

Owners of legit sites that have been hammered by Farmer Update should assess their historical practices, strengths and weaknesses and see if there's anything in their profiles that could be deemed against Google's webmaster guidelines, AudetteMedia's Audette suggested. Then, they should file a re-inclusion request with Google.
"Low-quality pages on one part of a site can impact the overall ranking of that site," Google spokesperson Jake Hubert pointed out.
Publishers who feel they were wrongly impacted can post in Google's webmaster forums, Hubert added.
Legit website owners should also look to diversify.
"Google represents the lion's share of revenue potential," Audette stated. "However, I think marketers need to diversify and start looking beyond Google, to YouTube, Bing, and social media," he added.

Ubisoft Attacks Music Gaming With a Real Ax

With the demise of "Guitar Hero," it began to look like "Rock Band" had cornered the music video game market. But along comes "Rocksmith," an upcoming title that allows the user to play along using a real guitar plugged into the video game console. It's certainly a departure from the simplistic controllers used by other games, but will requiring players to jam with a real instrument limit its popularity?

The October release of Electronic Arts (Nasdaq: ERTS)' "Rock Band 3" turned a lot of heads with its so-called Pro guitar controller that looks and feels more like a real guitar than any previous title in the series. But now another publisher, Ubisoft, is taking things a step further, having just revealed an upcoming game called "Rocksmith" that will actually let players plug in a real guitar to play along.

Rocksmith

The game will come with a special USB cable that connects to the quarter-inch jack slot found in any electric guitar. Other than that, few of the game's details have been disclosed, but that hasn't prevented speculation from flowing freely.
Precarious Timing
Presently, the future of the music video game genre is murky. It was just a matter of weeks ago that Activision shut down its legendary "Guitar Hero" franchise. The "Guitar Hero" brand apparently just couldn't compete with "Rock Band," which has become the de facto band simulation game.
The introduction of a new music game focused on playing guitar seems almost suicidal in that context, Jordan Cressman, an analyst at Market Communications, told TechNewsWorld. "This is like opening up a Chinese restaurant in place of a Japanese restaurant that just went out of business. It may seem like a completely different endeavor, but will it be all that more enticing in the eyes of consumers?

"The closure of 'Guitar Hero,' which was for years one of Activision's most valuable brands, means one thing: Consumers have chosen what they want out of a musical instrument simulation game, and they want 'Rock Band.' It's going to be very difficult for a new company to come in and convince them otherwise, especially if they see the real guitar aspect as nothing more than a gimmick," said Cressman.
The shattering of Activision's "Guitar Hero" studio may have come at an unfortunate time for Ubisoft, but the fact is that development on "Rocksmith" has likely been underway for quite a while. Back in 2009, Ubisoft posted a job listing for a lead designer in what it referred to as "an exciting new cross-platform music-based game." That could very well have been "Rocksmith."

What Ubisoft Can Bring to the Table

Aside from a few games for the Nintendo DS, Ubisoft has virtually no experience creating guitar-based music titles. However, the company has recently gained acclaim for its dance games like "Just Dance" and "Michael Jackson: The Experience," so it has learned some of the tools of the trade when it comes to making rhythm-based music games.
The game promises to have music from such artists as The Animals, David Bowie, Nirvana, and The Rolling Stones, and its debut trailer says it's for all audiences, "whether you've performed on a stage or never played at all."
However, Chris Morris, freelance video game journalist, is skeptical. "Ask anyone who's tried to play guitar after mastering the plastic 'Rock Band controller' -- playing a real guitar is difficult. It can take years of training to be able to competently perform a rock song," Morris told TechNewsWorld.
"Rocksmith will most likely not be for the casual gamer, but it will open up a new market," he added. "There are 'Rock Band' players who want to learn how to play the guitar, and there are real guitarists who want to have a better guitar-playing simulation in a game. Rocksmith will cater to these crowds."

Built for a Limited Audience?

The game is unlikely to have the same blockbuster success as "Rock Band," Morris said, since most casual gamers won't have the time, desire, and skill to learn the complex finger maneuvering required to play a real guitar.
"Most people who play 'Rock Band' are quite happy with the experience they get, and don't have any aspiration to break out an authentic Gibson five-stringer."

America's Perilous Patchwork of Privacy Laws

The United States, unlike many other developed nations, does not have a federal consumer data protection law. Instead, a patchwork of laws apply in different situations. We have laws that apply to medical records, other laws that apply to banking records, still others that apply to data collected by the government, and so on. And some of those laws are stronger than others.

As a concept, the notion of online privacy seems to rank right up there with the Tooth Fairy.

Facebook has declared that all posts by members on their walls are public property; Google(Nasdaq: GOOG) keeps getting into trouble with various governments over the data its Street View cars collect; and you can forget about your Tweets being private -- the Library of Congress is recording them.
"Consumers can't expect much privacy in online services like Google, Facebook and Twitter," Rainey Reitman, activism director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told TechNewsWorld.
There are few laws protecting consumers on the Web, Reitman pointed out. Meanwhile, law enforcement "continues to seek ways to expand their online surveillance powers."
For example, a federal magistrate judge in Virginia has ruled that the government can collect the private records of three Twitter users as part of its investigation into WikiLeaks, and that it can prevent those users and the public from seeing some of the documentation submitted to justify obtaining those records.
This could set a precedent that will let the government secretly amass information related to individuals' communications over the Internet, the EFF has cautioned.

Federal Thud and Blunder

Even when the federal government tries to introduce new services, new problem areas open up.
For example, the United States Department of Transportation has come up with the Next Generation 911 Project in an attempt to let consumers contact emergency services through multiple means, including text messaging, photos and email.
However, the EFF pointed out in comments filed with the Federal Communication Commission that the proposal might provide data such as medical histories to first responders. That's a well-intentioned move that could backfire because, as the EFF stated, 911 calls are subject to public disclosure in most parts of the country. This could conceivably make details about a person's illness or medical history publicly available to anyone who asks for them.

Gimme Shelter

"We can expect very little privacy when we visit Google or Facebook," Darren Hayes, a professor at Pace University's Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems in New York City, told TechNewsWorld.
For example, the Google search engine saves the searches users make. This could be used to identify the searchers.
Google's end user license agreement "clearly states that they are allowed to read through your Gmail messages," and your emails may end up on Google even if you don't have an account with the Internet giant because they may have been forwarded by the recipient, Hayes remarked.
Facebook has a similar privacy policy and apparently believes it's entitled to use images, Hayes stated.

The Yin and Yang of Being Online

It seems nobody's nailed down just how much control we should, or want to, have over our personal information on the Internet.
For example, users often put an astonishing amount of personal information on social networking sites to which they belong, or on their personal websites. At the same time, many of them scream in outrage when they're tracked online.
Consumer objections to online tracking have led the major browser vendors to work on plans to implement so-called do-not-track features into their products. This will let consumers indicate when they don't want to be observed online.
For example, Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) Internet Explorer 9 browser, which was released earlier this week, includes beefed-up controls that let users control what information about their behavior they're wiling to share with others.
Consumer resentment at online tracking is fueled to a large extent by targeted online ads -- a poll conducted jointly by Gallup and USA Today in December found that 67 percent of respondents don't think advertisers should be allowed to match ads to their specific interests based on websites they've visited.
However, consumers' outrage is perhaps overblown -- if you leave tracks on public sites, which many free online communities and services are, you can hardly complain when someone collates that information.
"Surfing the Internet should be viewed as no different than walking down Main Street," Daren Orzechowski, a partner at the law firm White & Case, suggested.
"The problem is that people do not think this way when using a computer in their home," Orzechowski remarked.

What Is Privacy, Anyway?

Privacy "is a right to be free from unauthorized observation or intrusion," Orzechowski told TechNewsWorld.
However, the scope of that right is defined by the law. While Europe has "very strict" laws around data privacy and protection, the United States framework is "much more relaxed" for now, Orzechowski said.
That then raises the question of what is the scope of the right to privacy.
"In the constitutional area, where the government is involved, the law is much clearer," Orzechowski said. "In the private sector, it is not, and that is the issue being debated."
New privacy laws or regulations may emerge in the next year or two, Orzechowski added.
In the meantime, consumers would do well to remember that the Constitution doesn't contain any guarantee of privacy.
"I think there is an unsupported view by the general public that there is a broad right to privacy, when in reality any such rights, to the extent they actually exist, are not as broad as people think," Orzechowski warned.

Where Is the Law?

Part of the problem with protecting our privacy is that the United States, unlike other developed nations, does not have a federal consumer data protection law, the EFF's Reitman pointed out.
Instead, we have a patchwork of laws that apply in different situations. We have laws that apply to medical records, other laws that apply to banking records, still others that apply to data collected by the government, and so on. Some of those laws are stronger than others, Reitman said.
Another part of the problem is that these laws are based on an outdated model that associates consumers' privacy rights with demonstrable financial harm.

Critics Poke Holes in Android vs. iPhone Browser Test

Blaze.io has concluded that Android's embedded browser is about 50 percent faster than the one found in Apple's iOS mobile operating system, based on a series of tests the company performed. However, critics have questioned the test's methodology as well as Blaze's motives in conducting and publicizing the study.

The browser in Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) Android mobile operating system is more than 50 percent faster than the browser found in Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) iOS, according to companyBlaze.io.

Blaze tested the embedded browsers in Android 2.3 (aka "Gingerbread") and iOS 4.3. These were WebView and UIWebView, respectively.
The tests were conducted against websites of Fortune 1,000 corporations.
Also among Blaze's findings is that although both Google and Apple claim they've sped up JavaScript in Android 2.3 and the browser in iOS 4.3, respectively, it had no impact on browser speed.
However, shortly after the results were publicized, information surfaced suggesting the tests could be flawed.

Details of the Tests

Blaze used an iPhone 4 running iOS 4.3 and a Google Nexus S smartphone running Android 2.3 for its tests.
"We chose the Nexus S since it's the poster boy for Android 2.3," Guy Podjarny, Blaze's chief technical officer, told LinuxInsider.
The methodology Blaze outlined appears impressive. It loaded Web pages from the sites of the Fortune 1,000 companies three times on each device, on different days, and used the median load times as a basis for comparison.
Results with speeds greater than 40 seconds or less than 400 milliseconds were weeded out because these indicate network and server errors, Blaze said.
The tests were conducted over WiFi in an area with good reception. They were conducted at night to eliminate noise and to maintain consistent results.
Measurements were conducted using a custom app developed by Blaze that uses the platform's embedded browser. This loads a page on demand and measures how long that takes. Load times were calculated using the "Document Complete" callback from the browser, which Blaze contends is a standard way of measuring a Web page's load time.
To distinguish mobile sites from non-mobile ones, Blaze loaded the same 1,000 pages through Internet Explorer 8 and compared the number of resources required to load the page on the iPhone versus the number required for IE 8.
If the desktop browser required 30 or more additional resources, the site was designated as mobile, meaning it had a customized version for mobile device access.

The Test Results

The tests showed that the Android browser was 52 percent faster on average than the iOS browser. Also, Android was faster on 84 percent of the sites tested.
Blaze also found that, although Apple and Google had optimized the JavaScript engines in iOS 4.3 and Android 2.3 and boasted of the resulting performance improvements, browsing speed wasn't really different when it came to loading Web pages.
Blaze used real websites in its tests because custom-created benchmarks, such as the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark that's normally used, don't reflect the actual user experience.
That's to be expected, because the SunSpider benchmark tests the core JavaScript language only, according to its Web page.
However, when tested against mobile-specific sites, Android 2.3 was only 3 percent faster than Safari on iOS, Blaze said. Mobile sites tend to be smaller and lighter than regular Web pages.

Putting Out the Fire

However, the tests are perhaps not quite what they're made out to be.
"I'm skeptical because I think Blaze have an ulterior motive in conducting tests, seeing that they optimize Web performance," Mark Beccue, a senior analyst at ABI Research, told LinuxInsider.
The results shouldn't be taken as set in stone, because the speed of native browsers on mobile devices is affected by the processing chips used, Webkit, and the network, Beccue pointed out. "The Android browser's speed is particularly hardware-dependent because the operating system is licensed to different hardware vendors," he added.
Finally, the Nexus S is not the best test platform because "it's not a widely used phone," Beccue cautioned.
Meanwhile, The Loop points out that using an embedded browser is not the same as using the official browser.
UIWebView, which Blaze tested, is based on Safari but didn't receive any of the updates Safari did in iOS 4.3, The Loop claimed.
Blaze did not respond to follow-up calls to discuss these issues.

But Really, Who Cares?

Perhaps the difference in speed may not be all that important, suggested Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.
"On this last cycle, other things have started to take precedence over speed -- safety and the ability to take advantage of the new multi-core processors," Enderle told LinuxInsider. "Once you realize that speed problems generally come from the network or plug-ins you may decide to focus more on other aspects of the browser, such as safety, in order to differentiate your product."
Further, the browser is not a focus of Apple's, Enderle pointed out.
"Apple feel the browser is something they have to have, but not something that differentiates the product positively, nor is it something that helps lock the customer into the Apple ecosystem," Enderle stated.
For Google, on the other hand, the browser is "critical to what they provide, and their future is Web-based, so they invest a great deal in making their browser competitive," Enderle remarked.

New connection bar in Gmail for iPhone

Using Gmail in Safari on your iPhone gives you access to fast search, conversation view, stars, labels, and more. But it’s sometimes frustrating not knowing whether your email has been sent or whether your phone has a functioning internet connection at all. To address this, we recently introduced the “connection bar.” The connection bar appears at the bottom of the screen when needed to give you the info you want— and then gets out of the way.

The connection bar appears when the app launches and is checking for new mail:


It also appears when your phone is offline, back online and sending, and then again when it finishes sending all messages:


You can see this improvement by visiting gmail.com from your iPhone or iPod Touch’s browser (iOS4 only). Don’t see the new changes yet? Try clearing your cache and refreshing the page. And if you like using Gmail in mobile Safari, get to it faster by tapping the “+” at the bottom of the screen and then “Add to Home Screen.”