HTC

When Apple launched the iPhone 5S with a 64-bit processor, it sent the rest of the spec-obsessed SoC world on a race to catch up. After about a year of lag time, the Android ecosystem has finally started to catch up, with HTC announcing the Desire 510, the first 64-bit Android phone.

The Desire's 64-bit badge comes courtesy of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 410. The first 64-bit Qualcomm chip isn't a high-end monster that rivals the Snapdragon 805; it's instead a low-end chip—Qualcomm's lineup is being upgraded from the bottom up, it seems. The SoC has four Cortex A53 CPU cores running at 1.2GHz, 1GB of RAM, and LTE. The rest of the phone is packing a 4.7-inch 854x480 display, 5MP camera, 8GB of storage (plus a microSD slot), and a 2100 mAh battery.

While the chip is 64-bit, the Desire 510 doesn't actually run any 64-bit software—it runs Android 4.4, a 32-bit OS. The hardware is ready, but the rest of the Android ecosystem still needs to catch up. The first version of Android to support 64-bit apps will be Android L, which is due out sometime this year. Hopefully HTC takes advantage of its forward-looking hardware and updates the OS.

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You may already be dorking.

In a restricted intelligence document distributed to police, public safety, and security organizations in July, the Department of Homeland Security warned of a “malicious activity” that could expose secrets and security vulnerabilities in organizations’ information systems. The name of that activity: “Google dorking.”

“Malicious cyber actors are using advanced search techniques, referred to as ‘Google dorking,’ to locate information that organizations may not have intended to be discoverable by the public or to find website vulnerabilities for use in subsequent cyber attacks,” the for-official-use-only Roll Call Release warned. “By searching for specific file types and keywords, malicious cyber actors can locate information such as usernames and passwords, e-mail lists, sensitive documents, bank account details, and website vulnerabilities.”

That’s right, if you’re using advanced operators for search on Google, such as “site:arstechnica.com” or “filetype:xls,” you’re behaving like a “malicious cyber actor.” Some organizations will react to you accessing information they thought was hidden as if you were a cybercriminal, as reporters at Scripps found out last year. Those individuals were accused of “hacking” the website of free cellphone provider TerraCom after discovering sensitive customer data openly accessible from the Internet via a Google search and an “automated “ hacking tool: GNU’s Wget.

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Accessory Outlet

A Wisconsin woman has filed a lawsuit in New York state court against a shady online retailer, Accessory Outlet, which had threatened her by saying, “You are playing games with the wrong people” after she attempted to cancel an order for a $40 iPhone case that did not arrive on time.

The woman, Cindy Cox, is being represented by the advocacy group Public Citizen, which recently won summary judgment and damages of over $300,000 earlier this year in a related case in Utah involving the French parent company of KlearGear, a similarly unscrupulous vendor. She is seeking declaratory judgment that the company’s self-imposed “debt” of $250 is invalid and that the company engaged in deceptive practices.

“Accessory Outlet is using unfair terms hidden in fine print, along with threatening emails, to bully a customer into keeping quiet about her bad experience with the company,” Scott Michelman, the Public Citizen attorney handling the case, said in a statement. “But terms that prevent a customer from speaking publicly about her transaction and from contacting her credit card company are unreasonable and unenforceable.”

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A sixth-generation iPod Nano embedded in a watch band. Aaron Muszalski

Re/code is reporting that Apple will introduce a wearable device on September 9 alongside two next-generation iPhones. Such a device from Apple has been highly anticipated since the wearable market received newcomers from Samsung, LG, and Motorola.

Apple's entry into this market was originally expected sometime in October based on an earlier report from Re/code. The site has had a good track record of correctly predicting the timing of Apple product releases since the AllThingsD days.

John Paczkowski, who reported the news, says that the coming device will certainly be equipped to make use of Apple’s HealthKit platform for its Health app, as well as HomeKit, which is a platform to connect devices to smart appliances and light bulbs.

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Constructive and destructive interference make this cat out of photons that never actually went through a cat-shaped transparency. Gabriela Barreto Lemos

One item on the long list of strange facts about quantum mechanics is that the mere possibility of something happening is often just as good as it actually happening. For example, the fact that a photon could potentially travel down a given path can be enough to create an interference pattern that requires the photon to take that path.

Something similar is true regarding a phenomenon called quantum interference. A team of researchers from the University of Vienna has now taken advantage of this idea to create a bizarre imaging technique where the photons that actually strike the object being imaged are discarded. The image itself is then built other with photons that were entangled with the discarded ones.

Interference is the ability of two waves, such as photons, to interact either additively or destructively. In the quantum world, whether or not interference occurs depends on the ability to distinguish the two things that are interfering. If they are distinguishable, interference cannot occur. But you don't have to actually distinguish between them in order to block interference. As the authors of the new paper write, "The mere possibility of obtaining information that could distinguish between overlapping states inhibits quantum interference."

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Kyle Orland

For months now, if you bought the $400, Kinect-free version of the Xbox One, the only way to add the 3D camera/microphone setup to your system later was to buy a Kinect secondhand. Today, Microsoft announced that it will begin selling an official standalone version of the Xbox One Kinect with a bundled download of Harmonix's Dance Central Spotlight on October 7 for $150 in the US.

The new Dance Central game comes out next week at a price of $10, with ten packaged songs and additional songs offered as $2 DLC. Subtract that, and Microsoft is valuing the standalone Kinect itself at roughly $140. That's significantly larger than the $100 difference between the Kinect-bundled Xbox One ($500) and the Kinect-free version of the system ($400).

True, there are extra costs associated with selling the Kinect separately (packaging, shipping, inventory, retail space). Still, it seems unlikely that Xbox One purchasers who already refused to essentially add on a $100 Kinect when they bought the system will decide after the fact that they want to spend more money for the benefits of the device.

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Thomas Hawk

Claire McCaskill, the Democratic senator from Missouri, says police departments nationwide should require their officers to wear body cameras in order to qualify for the hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding they receive each year.

McCaskill's comments come in the wake of the Ferguson, Missouri, shooting death of Michael Brown and is one of a myriad of calls in the episode's aftermath for police officers to wear video cams.

"Everywhere I go, people now have cameras," McCaskill said Tuesday during a question-and-answer session with voters in her home state. "And police officers are now at a disadvantage because someone can tape the last part of an encounter and not tape the first part of the encounter. And it gives the impression that the police officer has overreacted when they haven't."

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urbanfeel

It has been a long time since we could reasonably ask whether something should be done about climate change. The much more interesting (and challenging) discussion revolves around the nitty-gritty of how best to do something about the problem. There are many conceivable possibilities, but some will be more expensive, and some will be less effective—there are plenty of variables to consider when plotting the best and wisest path forward.

The most obvious questions to ask about any policy proposal are how much it will cost to implement and how much harm it will help us avoid. But it’s also worthwhile to consider whether the policy might have any positive (or negative) side effects separate from the climate impacts.

We know, for example, that greenhouse gases aren’t the only by-products of burning fossil fuels—there are other types of pollutants as well. Those pollutants have environmental and human health impacts that would be reduced right along with the greenhouse gas emissions if fossil fuel use were to decline.

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Dropbox

Dropbox is so widely used that it's practically a synonym for cloud storage and file sharing, but the company is being squeezed on price and storage options by bigger competitors such as Google and Microsoft.

Today, Dropbox closed some of the gap by announcing that Dropbox Pro will now provide 1TB of capacity for $9.99 a month, the same price as Google Drive and Microsoft's OneDrive. The Dropbox plan costs $99 if you buy a full year subscription.

"Previously, Dropbox had three different Pro plans with 100GB, 200GB and 500GB of storage, priced at $9.99, $19.99, and $49.99 per month, respectively," PCWorld wrote today. Now Dropbox Pro includes just the terabyte plan, though the company also has pricier options for businesses.

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Former IRS official Lois Lerner giving testimony to a Congressional committee in 2013. The IRS says it can't find her e-mails from before 2011—but Justice Watch says they're in disaster recovery backups.

Unnamed Department of Justice attorneys admitted to an attorney from the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch that backups exist of the e-mail messages of former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner. In a press release on the organization’s website, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said that the DOJ official claimed that accessing the specific e-mails in response to a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch against the IRS would be too difficult, as they were retained in an offsite backup for disaster recovery.

Update: An unnamed White House official told The Hill that no new backups had been discovered. "The administration official said that the inspector general is examining whether any data can be recovered from the previously recycled back-up tapes and suggested that could be the cause of the confusion between the government and Judicial Watch," The Hill's Bernie Becker reported.

“Department of Justice attorneys for the Internal Revenue Service told Judicial Watch on Friday that Lois Lerner’s e-mails, indeed all government computer records, are backed up by the federal government in case of a government-wide catastrophe,” Fitton said in the statement. “The Obama administration attorneys said that this back-up system would be too onerous to search. The DOJ attorneys also acknowledged that the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) is investigating this back-up system. We obviously disagree that disclosing the emails as required would be onerous, and plan to raise this new development with Judge Sullivan.”

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Dropbox was one of the first of the major cloud file storage and sharing services that still exist today. But since its inception, there has been increasing competition from other companies. One way that these companies have competed is on their features for creation and collaboration. Microsoft offers Office, and Google offers Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Another area of competition has been with pricing and storage. All these services offer their user a certain amount of free storage, with options to pay a monthly or annual fee to upgrade to a larger amount. For quite some time now there has been a disparity between the price per gigabyte of storage on Dropbox and the price on Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive. Microsoft offers 1TB (defined as 1024GB) of storage plus a Microsoft Office subscription for a fee of $6.99 per month for a single user, or $9.99 per month for a family of up to five people to share plus 5 Microsoft Office installs. Google Drive also offers 1TB (defined as 1000GB) for $9.99 per month. Until today Dropbox Pro offered only 100GB to subscribers paying $9.99 per month, but with this update Dropbox is bringing their pricing in line with the competition and giving Dropbox Pro users 1TB (defined as 1000GB) of storage. This 1TB tier is now the only plan for Dropbox Pro, and I personally think some users would have appreciated a less expensive plan that maintained the old 100GB of space.

The enhancements to Dropbox Pro also include new features on top of the greatly increased storage. Dropbox Pro users now have access to new sharing controls like passwords on shared links, shared links that expire after a certain amount of time, and view-only permissions on shared folders. A new remote wipe feature has also been created to be used in the event that a device is lost or stolen.

It looks like competition in the cloud storage space is really paying off for users. With Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, and Google Drive all adopting essentially the same pricing it's now up to Apple to deliver their new iCloud pricing and replace their current price of $100 per year for a measly 50GB of storage.

More than a year after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked secret documents describing the breadth and depth of US surveillance, policy makers continue to debate the legal framework for such monitoring.

Yet a number of technology startups are blazing ahead to create a range of products that promise to restore people's privacy online. Silent Circle, WhisperSystems, and Wickr offer a variety of services, from private instant messaging to secure data storage to encrypted phone calls. Other companies, such as Blackphone, have focused on creating a secure smartphone for the privacy-conscious.

And even newer ideas are in the offing. A small Silicon Valley technology firm, for example, has designed a plug-in black box for smartphones that can encrypt a voice call on the fly and is seeking funding on Kickstarter. Called JackPair, the box can be connected between a smartphone and the user's headphones and encrypt conversations with another JackPair user, said Jeffrey Chang, founder of AWIT Systems, the firm behind the product.

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Seagate's largest drives are 4TB and 6TB in size, but they'll be getting even larger soon enough. Seagate

Solid-state drives get most of the love from gadget sites these days—they're faster and cheaper than ever, and they're a great way to extend the life of an older computer. If you need to store more than a terabyte of data, however, you still need to turn to old fashioned spinning hard drives. To that end, Seagate yesterday announced an 8TB hard drive that's a full two terabytes larger than the largest drives on the market today.

The drive that's being announced is aimed at the enterprise market, so it's not something consumers will be able to get their hands on in the near-term—for now, the biggest drive available to most folks will be a mere 6TB in size. Once the 8TB begins shipping in bulk, though, we'd expect to see them available on sites like Newegg and Amazon, especially since they'll fit in current 3.5-inch drive bays.

Larger drives like this are commonly used to increase the capacity of network-attached storage devices without having to totally replace them. In consumer desktops, spinning hard drives continue to offer a cost-per-gigabyte ratio far superior to SSDs, useful if you need a lot of storage but don't need it to be particularly speedy. Modern chipsets will even allow you to use a smaller SSD as a cache to boost the speed of your computer without sacrificing storage capacity.

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NVIDIA has been anything but shy about their GPU virtualization aspirations, making it a focal point for the company’s development since the launch of their first GRID cards back in 2012. The company sees GPU virtualization as becoming increasingly important for enterprises – just as CPU virtualization has over the last decade – and in the last 2 years has been working on executing a plan on break into the GPU virtualization market. Their hardware was in many senses the easy part, and served to solve the chicken and egg problem that many technologies face. The hard part? Bringing up the software ecosystem to make use of this hardware.

Which is why the company is particularly excited about this year’s VMworld conference, VMWare’s annual virtualization technical conference. After seeding the market with hardware and spending their time working with major virtualization software developers such as VMWare and Citrix, NVIDIA’s efforts are finally coming to fruition as these products integrate support in their hypervisors for the GPU virtualization mechanisms required to make the most of NVIDIA’s hardware. To that end NVIDIA and VMWare are announcing a pair of NVIDIA-centric developments from this year’s show.

First and foremost, GRID vGPU support on VMware’s vSphere product is nearing completion. With the final version expected to be launched next year, NVIDIA and VMware are now in the process of launching an early access program for existing users to begin end-user trials.

This program is targeted at existing GRID users who are already making use of VMWare’s more limited functionality vSGA and vDGA modes, which utilize graphics API wrappers or directly mapped (1:1) GPUs respectively. With vGPU support now up and running, clients can now experiment with time sharing the GPUs directly. This offers potentially much greater density than vDGA’s directly mapped GPUs, but is still going through real hardware and allowing full access to NVIDIA’s GPU drivers and features instead of the much more limited generic Direct3D 9ish feature set that vSGA offers. In NVIDIA’s world vGPU support doesn’t fully supplant either vSGA or vDGA, but it offers a middle ground between the high density of vSGA and the performance of vDGA, while also offering a higher density option that maintains full GPU access and functionality.

Meanwhile NVIDIA’s second announcement of the day is focused on the client side of the usage model, specifically when it comes to Chromebooks. As previously announced by Google and VMware, the firms have been working to bring VMware BLAST support to Chromebooks, and today NVIDIA is announcing that they will be the hardware launch partner for this project. The company’s Tegra K1 SoC will be the first Chromebook SoC to support BLAST, with NVIDIA leveraging K1’s hardware video decoder to decode the BLAST video stream.

Acer’s recently announced K1-powered Chromebook 13 devices will in turn be the first Chromebooks out the door with this functionality. With the Chromebook software stack already bordering on being a thin client environment, NVIDIA, Google, and VMware believe using Chromebooks as actual thin clients is a natural extension of the device’s functionality. Meanwhile Chromebooks’ mass-market appeal means that the cost of these devices kept low due to their high production volume, allowing for what amounts to a 13” 1080p thin client laptop to sell for under $300, a much lower price than previous thin client devices.

Ultimately for NVIDIA this furthers their own efforts in a twofold manner. By providing a strong economic incentive for virtualization this helps server hardware sales, but it also means NVIDIA gets a piece of the pie through client hardware sales. Meanwhile for VMware this furthers the reach of their own virtualization platforms, both figuratively and literally by getting more laptop-style thin clients on to the market.

Finally, as part of their keynote presentation, VMware has a short video from NVIDIA on the announcement, including a brief showcase of the Chromebook thin client in action.

California has been hit by its worst drought in a century and many say the problem is only going to get worse.

Players eager for new Mario Kart content won't have to wait for an entirely new game on an entirely new system this time around: Nintendo today announced the first paid downloadable expansion for a Mario Kart title, in the form of two Mario Kart 8 DLC packs planned for November of this year and May 2015.

The packs will be available for pre-purchase starting today at $8 separately or together for $12. Each one contains eight new tracks, four new vehicles, and three new playable characters. Players that buy both packs will also gain immediate access to eight new color schemes for Yoshi and Shy Guy.

The packs also represent the first major crossover content from Nintendo's other franchises to appear in the Mario Kart series. DLC owners will be able to play as Link from The Legend of Zelda, the Villager and Isabelle from Animal Crossing, and race in a kart inspired by the Blue Falcon hovercraft from F-Zero.

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BBC Newsnight's Stephen Smith visits Dover to assess how much of a threat buddleia is to native species

Seagate recently rebooted their NAS offerings, completely revamping their 2013 Business Storage lineup and dropping that software platform altogether. In its place, they adopted a Debian-based offering, NAS OS, development of which was started by LaCie prior to their acquisition by Seagate. In their 2014 lineup, Seagate has two classes of products, the NAS and the NAS Pro. While the former is suitable for workgroups of 1 to 25 clients, the Pro version pushes that up to 50. Read on for results from our evaluation of the 4-bay NAS Pro offering.

While normally one might expect high end phones to get the latest and greatest features first, this time we see a bit of a surprising reversal. The Desire 510 is HTC's first 64-bit phone, and the first announced device with Snapdragon 410. For those that aren't familiar with Snapdragon 410, it has four Cortex A53 CPU cores running at 1.2 GHz, along with an Adreno 306 GPU which suggests that it is a mild modification of the current Adreno 305 GPU that we see in the Snapdragon 400. Overall, this should make for a quite fast SoC compared to Snapdragon 400, as Anand has covered in the Snapdragon 410 launch announcement.

While it may seem strange that ARMv8 on Android phones is first to appear on a budget smartphone, it's quite easy to understand how this happened. Looking at Qualcomm's roadmap, the Snapdragon 810/MSM8994 is the first high-end SoC that will ship with ARMv8, and is built on a 20nm process. As 20nm from both Samsung and TSMC have just begun appearing in shipping chips, the process yield and production capacity isn't nearly as mature as 28nm LP, which is old news by now.

At any rate, outside of the SoC the Desire 510 is a relatively standard budget phone. As this phone ships with Android 4.4 it's likely that it is running in AArch32 mode only, with AArch64 coming with Android L. The display is a 4.7" size, with FWVGA resolution (854x480) which makes for a rather low 208 DPI. This will be the cheapest LTE phone in HTC's product line, and also has support for a Dot View case. I've included the rest of the specs below, but for the most part the key point of interest is the SoC.

  HTC Desire 510 SoC MSM8916 1.2 GHz Snapdragon 410 RAM/NAND 1 GB RAM, 8GB NAND + microSD Display 4.7” FWVGA (854x480) Network 2G / 3G / 4G LTE (Qualcomm MDM9x25 UE Category 4 LTE) Dimensions 139.9 x 69.8 x 9.99mm, 158 grams Camera 5MP rear camera, .3MP/VGA FFC Battery 2100 mAh (7.98 Whr) OS Android 4.4 with Sense 6 Connectivity 802.11b/g/n + BT 4.0, USB2.0, GPS/GNSS, DLNA SIM Size MicroSIM

The only additional comment I have to make is that there is no 5 GHz WiFi. This is probably a WCN3620 part like the Moto G. While there's no word on pricing, HTC will have to price this near the price of the Moto G for it to be reasonably competitive. The Desire 510 should find its way to Europe, Asia, and the United States.

Hewlett-Packard is recalling millions of computer power cords over possible fire and burn risks, the company announced Tuesday.

Customers who purchased a notebook or mini notebook computer between September 2010 and June 2012 may have an affected cord. Adapters sold during that time may also be affected. Eligible customers can fill out a form to receive a free replacement cord.

“HP believes that certain power cords shipped with notebook PC products and AC adapter accessories may pose a risk of a fire and burn hazard to customers,” the company stated on its website. “We are taking this action as part of our commitment to provide the highest quality of service to our notebook customers.”

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