Plus questions over NSA claims on BIOS, what wearable tech really needs, Mossberg's favourites and more
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| A webcam on a computer monitor: is anyone silently watching you? Photograph: Richard A Brooks/AFP/Getty Images |
What does mobile scale mean? >> Benedict Evans
Evans, of Enders Analysis:the entire internet is being changed fundamentally - both the size and the character of the internet are going to look quite different from what we have been used to.Lots to consider there.
First, scale. There are perhaps 900m consumer PCs on earth, and maybe 800m corporate PCs. The consumer PCs are mostly shared and the corporate PCs locked down, and neither are really mobile - at best you can take them from table to table. Those 3bn smartphones will all be personal, and all mobile. So the internet goes from a shared device at home to a screen in everyone's pocket. And that's without considering several hundred million tablets, which blur all of these boundaries.
This means that the internet gets several times bigger. One could talk about time, or engagement, or use, or value, and all of these metrics are problematic, but we go from 1.7bn shared and/or locked down devices on tables to close to 5bn devices most of which are personal and go anywhere. Mobile becomes the dominant part of the internet - we will stop talking about 'mobile internet' in much the same way that no-one talks about 'new media' anymore.
What's the Titan supercomputer been up to? You won't believe It >> AllThingsD
Using first a smaller supercomputer named Anton, scientists at Oak Ridge, the University of Tennessee and the UT-ORNL Joint Institute for Computational Sciences simulated the behavior of 140,000 atoms from the biological signaling mechanisms in E. coli cells…Emphasis in orginal article. Except it almost certainly won't lead to that, but it's a good way to get funding. "Cure illness" is always the claim made. "Understand illness and ameliorate it" is almost always the actual result.
Researcher Igor Zhulin likened it to a "crazy light switch." Previously it had been thought to be more static.
Here's why the discovery is important, and it's not in any way trivial. Identifying this amino acid is the first step on a presumably long path that could in time lead to ways of controlling the signaling process in cells. Once that's understood, it could lead to drugs that could cripple the ability of disease-causing cells to make people sick.
Research shows how MacBook Webcams can spy on their users without warning
Marcus Thomas, former assistant director of the FBI's Operational Technology Division in Quantico, said in a recent story in The Washington Post that the FBI has been able to covertly activate a computer's camera — without triggering the light that lets users know it is recording — for several years.There's a market for a new accessory there.. or just duct tape.
Now research from Johns Hopkins University provides the first public confirmation that it's possible to do just that, and demonstrates how. While the research focused on MacBook and iMac models released before 2008, the authors say similar techniques could work on more recent computers from a wide variety of vendors. In other words, if a laptop has a built-in camera, it's possible someone — whether the federal government or a malicious 19 year old — could access it to spy on the user at any time.
Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins >> Hacker News
This story dates back to December 8th when I initiated an ACH transfer with CoinBase.com for a total sum of $35,104.11. On that very same day, the system informed me that I would be credited with the bitcoins come December 13th.Nada, zilch... and lots of lost value. Then again, $35,000?
December 13th came by and it was this past Friday. No coins ever came in, the only thing CoinBase did was lock in a price for me @ $868.91. Again, they locked in a price and didn't give me coins on the day they told me they would deliver the coins.Ever since the 13th, my transaction page has been showing the following...
NSA claims it thwarted BIOS plot to destroy US computers. Nonsense! >> Graham Cluley
Here's my take.Come on, next you're going to tell us that Amazon isn't going to deliver stuff by drone.
Q: Are BIOS attacks by malware possible?
Yes. For instance, way back in 1998 the CIH (aka Chernobyl) virus was discovered, capable of overwriting the BIOS chip of some computers to make them unbootable. You can read my memories of the Chenobyl virus over on the Naked Security site.
If you were unlucky enough to have a computer which fell foul of the Chernobyl virus, your PC would have been useless. The only fix would have been to open it up and replace the chip.
Q: So, the NSA's description of the BIOS plot is plausible?
Woah. Hang on a minute.
Why wearable tech will be as big as the smartphone >> Wired.com
Fascinating feature which looks at many companies - including Recon - and makes this key point about what wearables really need: to be fashionable.Google Glass seems almost fashionable. But the evidence suggests that out in the real world, it simply isn't; six months into the experiment, even hardcore tech boosters who once wrote glowingly of Glass were seldom seen actually wearing the thing. (And these are some of the least fashion-conscious people on the planet.)Things we use are tools. Things we wear need to be fashionable.
The problem with Google Glass is not that it's bad industrial design. Google, like the rest of Silicon Valley, has learned a great deal about how to make an aesthetically pleasing product. But Glass is meant to be a highly visible addition to someone's body as they walk around in public. That demands more than just a gorgeous product; it demands a fashionable product. And the tricky task for wearables makers will be to understand the distinction.
Walt Mossberg's top products in two decades of tech reviews >> AllThingsD
His final column for the Wall Street Journal is also on ATD. As interesting for the ones he doesn't include as those he does.You can follow Guardian Techblown.com
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