Drones Are Here!

No, this isn’t a scene still from the new remake of “*batteries not included.” On Monday London’s “Yo! Sushi” restaurant showcased the “itray,” a flying service device propelled by miniature, remote-controlled helicopter blades.

New World Record in Wireless Data Transmission

Wireless data transmission has just got faster after a team of German researchers achieved a record 40 Gbps transmission rate. This is the biggest wireless transmission rate ever demonstrated and it matches the data transmission speed for fiber optic.

The project was conducted by a joint team of German scientists from applied physics and technology institutes. The researchers achieved the 40 Gbps wireless data transmission record rate at a frequency of 240 GHz over a one-kilometer distance.

The 240 GHz transceiver chip, measuring only 1.5 x 4 mm.

This speed means that data off a complete DVD can be transmitted in less than a second. For comparison, some of the fastest Wi-Fi connectivity solutions on the market at the moment have a top data transmission speed of 300 Mbps.

The team developed a 240 GHz transmitter and receiver chip that only measures 4×1.5mm and is based on semi-conductor technology which uses high carrier mobility transistors. This technology makes it possible to use frequencies up to 300 GHz with receivers and transmitters that are actually compact and integrated circuits.

German scientists say that in this high frequency range, the atmosphere shows low attenuation and this actually enables directional broadband radio links. This makes the entire wireless data transmission system easier to set up and the signal more resistant to bad weather conditions, they said.

The project may also mark another first in the field of data transmission: having radio links transmit glass fiber data rates. The glass fiber signal would be fed into a radio link without any transcoding and then be transmitted and redirected to glass fiber.

Scientists say the 40Gbps transmission rate may be only the beginning, as higher frequency data rates are likely to be achieved over the following years. In the near future, this radio link system can be used to provide broadband Internet connections to rural areas and other places that are difficult to access by traditional optical fiber networks.

Government Forces Benefits Claimants to use Windows XP and IE6

THE UK GOVERNMENT has shown it’s at the forefront of modern technology and online services with its latest form for claiming benefits online.

Those who want to claim Attendance Allowance, Disability Living Allowance or Overseas State Pension can simply visit the Gov.UK website, where they are then pointed to the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) website to fill out a form online.

So far, so impressive, in that the government is allowing citizens to apply for benefits over the web, rather than having to fill out forms and send them in via the post or visit offices in person.

However, it seems that many of those claimants could fall at the first hurdle due to some rather outdated stipulations about the computer systems supported by the DWP.

“This service doesn’t work with some modern browsers and operating systems,” the DWP notes. “We are considering how best to provide this service in future. You may want to claim in another way.”

That is putting it mildly. Normally, we’d take the time to go through these system requirements and highlight only the most interesting points, but in this case we’ve decided to make an exception and post them here in their full glory, as we couldn’t word them better than the DWP.

“The service does not work properly with Macs or other Unix-based systems even though you may be able to input information.

“You are likely to have problems if you use Internet Explorer 7, 8, 9 and 10, Windows Vista or a smartphone. Clearing temporary internet files may help but you may wish to claim in another way.

“There is also a high risk that if you use browsers not listed below, including Chrome, Safari or Firefox, the service will not display all the questions you need to answer. This is likely to prevent you from successfully completing or submitting the form. You may wish to claim in another way.”

And now on to the much more restricted list of what your computer needs to be running if you actually want to claim a benefit online.

“The service was designed to work with the following operating systems and browsers. Many of these are no longer available:

• Microsoft Windows 98: Internet Explorer versions 5.0.1, 5.5 and 6.0, Netscape 7.2
• Microsoft Windows ME: Internet Explorer version 5.5 and 6.0, Netscape 7.2
• Microsoft Windows 2000: Internet Explorer version 5.0.1, 5.5 and 6.0, Netscape 7.2, Firefox 1.0.3, Mozilla 1.7.7
• Microsoft Windows XP: Internet Explorer 6.0, Netscape 7.2, Firefox 1.0.3, Mozilla 1.7.7.”

For the few of you out there wanting to claim benefits online who manage to dig out some old Windows machine from a basement or loft running an old enough version of IE or Firefox, there are further obstacles to getting any money out of the government.

“This service is not available on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings from 1.00am to 1.30am because of essential maintenance work. We apologise for any inconvenience,” warns the DWP.

Perhaps that’s when their hamsters change shifts – you know, the ones that run inside wheels keeping government IT systems up and running.

We often speculate here at The INQUIRER that the government favours proprietary systems, and doesn’t do enough to open up bid tenders to smaller suppliers and open source outfits. On the basis of the above evidence, we’re concerned that the government is taking its mission to extremes.

Google Reportedly in Negotiations to Buy WhatsApp Messenger

An “inside source” has told Digital Trends that Google and WhatsApp are close to making a deal. The source says that Google want to buy the very successful WhatsApp multi-platform messaging service but the WhatsApp team are “playing hardball” and trying to squeeze more cash out of the Mountain View search giant.

WhatsApp is available for all the major, and minor, mobile platforms including Android, iOS, Windows Phone and BlackBerry. If Google could acquire it then build it into its existing services to unify its messaging options it could achieve a big user boost. WhatsApp is extremely popular; it’s the most popular mobile app in over 100 countries and on New Year’s Eve 2012 a record 18 billion WhatsApp messages were sent and received by users.

Will Google make it free but ad sponsored?

WhatsApp’s monetization scheme is different to Google’s ads and sponsored search approach. The popular messaging app is currently supported by a $0.99 yearly fee and also generates revenue through partnerships with mobile telcos who offer WhatsApp usage add-ons to mobile tariffs. It will be interesting to see if a Google acquisition would change this model drastically.

Facebook has recently initiated a push into mobile with Facebook Home. Mr Zuckerberg also realises the importance of messaging to engage users and the Chat Heads application is probably the most important part of the launcher/suite after the Facebook Cover Feed home screen itself. Incidentally both Facebook and Google have reportedly approached WhatsApp before, late in 2012.

Google has been rumoured to be getting ready to launch a messaging service called Babel to tie together all its communications services into a unified hub. Could a WhatsApp acquisition and integration be an almost off-the-peg solution with the advantage of a huge existing user base? We should find out more about these plans by the time Google I/O takes place in May or earlier if the deal is sealed.

AMD To Unleash The Centurion – FX at 5GHz

AMD’s focus for the start of this year has been on explaining the virtues of Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) and driving up gaming interest with the impressive Never Settle bundle, available for most mainstream and high-end Radeon cards.

With attention directed elsewhere, AMD’s beleaguered FX processors have, it seems, been consigned to the ash heap of history. These chips do without the baked-in graphics present on APUs and, while perfectly reasonable in their own right, are overshadowed by Intel’s third-generation Core ‘Ivy Bridge’ processors.

So how about this as a rumour for a Friday morning? Though AMD will never go on record and confirm this, we have it on good authority that the chip-maker will soon be releasing a super-FX chip. Based on the same ‘Vishera’ architecture powering the current FX-8350, which runs at up to 4.2GHz, this new FX, codenamed ‘Centurion’, is to be made available in very limited quantities.

This so-called Centurion is guaranteed to run at 5GHz, on air, though we don’t know exactly what voltage or supporting hardware will be required for this lofty speed.

Here’s the kicker; our sources indicate that this limited-edition chip is set to cost a whopping $795 – this is not a typo! Yup, back to the pricing of FX chips of old. Is there any way that you, the readers, can countenance such pricing for an architecture that’s been in the doldrums of late? Let us know your thoughts

Anonymous – #Operation Rohingya

Anonymous have posted the following:

Greetings Citizens of the World.

It is vital the information we are going to share with you is made viral as quickly as possible. The ethnic Rohingya people of Myanmar Burma in Southeast Asia are about to be massacred. Barbarous acts are being carried out by Neo-Nazi racist groups like the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party, Arakan Liberation Army, NaSaKa border police and 969 monks led by Monk Wirathu, the self proclaimed Bin Laden of Buddhism. The Government of Myanmar is orchestrating these crimes.

The persecution of the Rohingya people is severe. The Burmese junta considers them to be sub-human and denies them almost all basic human rights. They are subject to torture, gang rape, starvation, slave labor, and forced to reside in the most dire camps in the world – some call these refugee camps but they are actually concentration camps. Over the past few months, thousands of Rohingya have been encouraged onto boats and sent out to sea with not enough food or fuel, and left there to die. Many boats were attacked and sunk, with women and children on board.

Already the violence in Burma has spread beyond the Rohingya to include all Muslims, with ‘warm ups’ to the anticipated massacre taking place against Burmese Muslims in Meiktila, Naypyidaw and Yangon. Dead and burning bodies, including children, are now lying in the streets.

While the United States claims to defend human rights, their record clearly reflects a government that will only intercede when their business interests are threatened. While politicians occasionally pay lip service to the horrific conditions in Myanmar no action is ever taken. The only people neglecting the situation in Myanmar worse than the U.S. are the press who consistently ignored these atrocities or reported them as ‘ethnic clashes’. We consider the media to be complicit in concealing them from the rest of the world.

The Rohingya have been told to expect a third massacre starting the last week in March. Rakhine have declared they will leave no Rohingya left on the land, just a few left as exhibits for the museum.

The acts of genocide being committed against the Rohingya people must no longer be ignored. We call on the Anonymous collective to stand with those for whom no one else will stand. We call on Anonymous and all supporters of human rights to stand against this great injustice, to give the Rohingya a voice, before they are completely eliminated.

Operation Rohingya engaged.
We are Anonymous.
We are Legion.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
Tyrants of the world, expect us!

To date (24:03:2013 23:00 GMT)

TANGO DOWN: List of websites taken offline:

For the latest details and the operation Visit: leaksource.wordpress.com

IE10, Chrome & Firefox Java exploited

During March Patch Tuesday of 2013, Microsoft released seven new security bulletins, with four rated as critical, and others as Important. Most interesting one was MS13-027, which is rated as “important” because the attack requires physical access to the vulnerable machine.

This flaw allows anyone with a USB thumb drive loaded with the payload to bypass security controls and access a vulnerable system even if AutoRun is disabled, and the screen is locked. Flaw exposes your Windows PCs to major risk. If you remember Stuxnet, worm was injected to Iran’s nuclear program system using USB thumb drive.

Windows typically discovers USB devices when they are inserted or when they change power sources (if they switch from plugged-in power to being powered off of the USB connection itself).

To exploit the vulnerability an attacker could add a maliciously formatted USB device to the system. When the Windows USB device drivers enumerate the device, parsing a specially crafted descriptor, the attacker could cause the system to execute malicious code in the context of the Windows kernel.

Because the vulnerability is triggered during device enumeration, no user intervention is required. In fact, the vulnerability can be triggered when the workstation is locked or when no user is logged in, making this an unauthenticated elevation of privilege for an attacker with casual physical access to the machine.

Microsoft admits the flaw could “open additional avenues of exploitation that do not require direct physical access to the system,” once the USB based exploit is successful.

The vulnerabilities addressed by Microsoft do not include those exploited by security researchers at the recent Pwn2Own hacking competition at the CanSecWest Conference in Vancouver.

64-bit ARM Support Merged Into LLVM

GCC has had support for 64-bit ARM, a.k.a. AArch64, going back to last summer for using the open-source compiler with next-generation ARMv8 hardware. Being merged today is finally support for the LLVM compiler infrastructure with an experimental 64-bit ARM/AArch64 back-end target.

Adding fourty-five thousand lines of new code to the LLVM tree is a patch that adds support for ARM’s 64-bit architecture to LLVM. This target is currently experimental and not built by default, but requires a compile-time switch for enabling. However, there’s already talk amongst developers about enabling 64-bit ARM support by default. This work was merged into mainline LLVM this morning and will thus be found in the LLVM 3.3 release due out in a couple months’ time.

This initial AArch64 LLVM compiler support covers Assembly for all scalar instructions except for the late addition CRC instructions, code generation features needed for C++0x and C99, compilation support for the small memory model, absolute and position-independent code support, GNU-style TLS, and debugging support.

The 64-bit ARM compiler support, however, has yet to undergo any performance tuning for the greatest compiler performance. With there still being a few months to go until LLVM 3.3 is released, this will likely be achieved before the AArch64 LLVM support is in any released version.

Another limitation is that there isn’t any NEON support for the AArch64 experimental target because the developer says there was “an outbreak of batshit insanisty in [ARM's] legal department.”

The initial AArch64/ARMv8 instruction set support for LLVM can be found by cloning the LLVM SVN/Git repository where this big patch landed today.

LLVM 3.3 should be a fantastic release since aside from the 64-bit ARM support will also be the AMD Radeon GPU back-end, likely the enabling by default of the new loop vectorizer, and many other features for this open-source compiler infrastructure.

British MI6 Replaces al-Qaeda Bomb Recipe with Cupcakes

British MI6 intelligence officers hacked into the Islamic extremist website and magazine, Inspire, and replaced bomb-making instructions with a recipe on how to make cupcakes, media reports said on Friday.

The incident marks the first time that foreign agents were able to breach and alter the website, which is reported to be linked with al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

The magazine’s original page entitled “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom,” was corrupted, reported The Associated Press.

“We’re increasingly using cybertools as part of our work,” a U.K. foreign official told AP.

When a user attempts to download the PDF of the quarterly magazine page on how to make the bomb, they are redirected to scrambled computer code, reported The Daily Telegraph.

The code was placed into the 67-page magazine by the British intelligence officers and was actually a recipe for “The Best Cupcakes in America,” initially published on Ellen DeGeneres’s show, according to the newspaper. It also included a recipe for a Mojito Cupcake.

Just thought you might find this as funny as I did.

Free WiFi Service for London’s Black Cabs Approved

Soon there will be no where left to hide in London Town. The city is quickly becoming one giant WiFi hotspot, just as mayor Boris Johnson promised. Its iconic red phone boxes, the Thames, the Underground and even a minicab company have all been hooked up with free wireless. Now a plan has been approved to turn every famous black cab into a rolling 802.11 beacon. Company Eyetease has received approval from Transport for London to equip the vehicles with WiFi antennas that will provide 15 minutes of free high-speed data in exchange for sitting through a 15-second commercial. As the cabs ride through the city, the on board router will dynamically switch between 3G and 4G networks to maintain a constant connection. And, in an effort to get cab drivers hooked for the early 2013 launch, the CabWiFi service will provide special driver accounts that provide unlimited and commercial free service. The only thing left to do is figure out what it says about the city that its residents can’t go 15 minutes in a cab without high speed internet access. Maybe you can Google it at the next red light.

Source: engadget.com