be quiet! is a German company that specializes in low-noise computer PSUs and coolers, and they are slowly making their way into the North American market. Today we have their Power Zone 850W CM in our labs for review, an apparently popular but expensive power supply. Read on to see if it warrants the high price.

Collaboration between the US and Russia on the International Space Station (ISS) could be jeopardised as tensions between the two nations create political disputes.

One of the highlights of ASUS’ ROG Computex Press Event was the announcement of the Maximus VII Impact, the successor to the popular mini-ITX ROG Impact range of motherboards.  Today the motherboard is officially released from ASUS HQ, with stock coming to regions shortly.  We reviewed the Maximus VI Impact last year and was appropriately impressed by the effort to include so many features in the mini-ITX platform – ASUS is hoping that this Z97 upgrade kicks it up a notch.

Similar to the Maximus VI, the order of the day is extra PCBs in order to add features.  The power delivery is upgraded to the ROG 9-series design, and the audio add-on SupremeFX card moves up with fewer filter caps in a more optimized output.  The mPCIe Combo moves up to revision four which includes a PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slot and a mini-PCIe slot with a bundled 802.11ac dual band WiFi module.  Note that when the M.2 slot is occupied, the PCIe slot will reduce to PCIe 3.0 x8, although our previous testing of a similar feature shows no frame rate difference at 1080p.

The Impact Control on the rear panel uses the same two-digit debug as the previous version, along with ROG Connect and a Clear CMOS button, but the two buttons included are for the KeyBot and SoundStage functionality introduced with the Maximus VII range.  KeyBot is a feature to enable macros with any keyboard with the ASUS software, and SoundStage acts as a configurable op-amp that modifies various aspects of the audio output to be more suited for various styles of gaming.

Interestingly enough the rear of the Impact Control is another PCB, holding two 4-pin fan headers to compliment the 4-pin CPU fan header on the top left and the chassis header on the right of the motherboard.  Also of note is the rear panel, where a single block of USB ports uses two USB 3.0 ports and two USB 2.0 ports – this configuration I have not seen on a motherboard before and could pave the way for something on most motherboards for the future.

The DRAM slots use single side latches on the power delivery side, and the power connectors are gladly on the outsides of the motherboard. This follows the start button, a fan header and a USB 3.0 header.  The front panel header is also on the right side of the DRAM slots.  The SATA 6 Gbps ports are unfortunately just inside the DRAM slots and all in the same direction, perhaps causing issues with trying to remove locking cables.

The socket area is up against Intel specifications, suggesting that CPU coolers might be up against the power delivery or tall memory modules.  The audio is buffeted by Sonic Rader II, an onscreen representation of directional audio, and networking comes via the 802.11ac WiFi and an Intel I218-V with GameFirst III.

We are awaiting information from ASUS’ US office for pricing and availability.

This story will sound familiar, but it's not a repeat. A month after AOL's Ryan Block posted an audio recording of a Comcast cancellation call that even a Comcast executive called "painful to listen to," another customer has posted a video showing how difficult it was for him to cancel service.  Aaron Spain: Comcast put me on hold until they closed.

Chicago resident Aaron Spain explained in the video Monday that he was on hold for more than three hours, showing the time of the call on his phone as proof. He was calling to cancel Comcast "after a month of trying to get them to fix my service," he said. Spain was transferred to the retention department, but didn't actually get to talk to anyone. After using a different phone to call back the same number, Comcast's automated assistant told Spain, "I'm sorry, but our offices are now closed."

Comcast admitted fault, telling news sites today that “Under no circumstances is this the experience we want our customers to have. Our goal is to be respectful of our customers’ time and fix any issues the first time. We take this very seriously, and after investigating Mr. Spain’s situation, we want to apologize to him and acknowledge that his experience was completely unacceptable.”

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While we mentioned this in our Galaxy Alpha launch article, Samsung is finally announcing the launch of their new Exynos 5430 SoC.

The main critical upgrade that the new chips revolve around is the manufacturing process, as Samsung delivers its first 20nm SoC product and is also at the same time the first manufacturer to do so.

On the CPU side for both the 5430, things don’t change much at all from the 5420 or 5422, with only a slight frequency change to 1.8GHz for the A15 cores and 1.3GHz for the A7 cores. We expect this frequency jump to actually be used in consumer devices, unlike the 5422’s announced frequencies which were not reached in the end, being limited to 1.9GHz/1.3GHz in the G900H version of the Galaxy S5. As with the 5422, the 5430 comes fully HMP enabled.

A bigger change is that the CPU IP has been updated from the r2p4 found in previous 542X incarnations to a r3p3 core revision. This change, as discussed by Nvidia earlier in the year, should provide better clock gating and power characteristics for the CPU side of the SoC.

On the GPU side, the 5430 offers little difference from the 5422 or 5420 beyond a small frequency boost to 600MHz for the Mali T628MP6.

While this is still a planar transistor process, a few critical changes have been made that make 20nm HKMG a significant leap forward from 28nm HKMG. First, instead of a gate-first approach for the high-K metal gate formation, the gate is now the last part of the transistor to be formed. This improves performance because the characteristics of the gate are no longer affected by significant high/low temperatures during manufacturing. In addition, lower-k dielectric in the interconnect layers reduce capacitance between the metal and therefore increase maximum clock speed/performance and reduce power consumption. Finally, improved silicon straining techniques should also improve drive current in the transistors, which can drive higher performance and lower power consumption. The end-effect is that we should expect an average drop in voltage of about 125mV, and quoting Samsung, a 25% reduced power.

In terms of auxiliary IP blocks and accelerators, the Exynos 5430 offer a new HEVC (H.265) hardware decoder block, bringing its decoding capabilities on par with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 805.

Also added is a new Cortex A5 co-processor dedicated to audio decoding called “Seiren”. Previously Samsung used a custom FPGA block called Samsung Reprogrammable Processor (SRP) for audio tasks, which seems to have been now retired. The new subsystem allows for processing of all audio-related tasks, which ranges from decoding of simple MP3 streams to DTS or Dolby DS1 audio codecs, sample rate conversion and band equalization. It also provides the chip with voice capabilities such as voice recognition and voice triggered device wakeup without external DSPs. Samsung actually published a whitepaper on this feature back in January, but we didn’t yet know which SoC it was addressing until now.

The ISP is similar to the one offered in the 5422, which included a clocking redesign and a new dedicated voltage plane.

The memory subsystem remains the same, maintaining the 2x32-bit LPDDR3 interface, able to sustain frequencies up to 2133MHz or 17GB/s. We don’t expect any changes in the L2 cache sizes, and as such, they remain the same 2MB for the A15 cluster and 512KB for the A7 cluster.

The Galaxy Alpha will be the first device to ship with this new SoC, in early September of this year.

Ryan Lackey (left) holds up a prototype PORTAL travel router during his Def Con presentation with Marc Rogers (right). Sean Gallagher

The news over the past few years has been spattered with cases of Internet anonymity being stripped away, despite (or because) of the use of privacy tools. Tor, the anonymizing “darknet” service, has especially been in the crosshairs—and even some of its most paranoid users have made a significant operational security (OPSEC) faux pas or two. Hector “Sabu” Monsegur, for example, forgot to turn Tor on just once before using IRC, and that was all it took to de-anonymize him. (It also didn’t help that he used a stolen credit card to buy car parts sent to his home address.)

If hard-core hacktivists trip up on OPSEC, how are the rest of us supposed to keep ourselves hidden from prying eyes? At Def Con, Ryan Lackey of CloudFlare and Marc Rogers of Lookout took to the stage (short their collaborator, the security researcher known as “the grugq,” who could not attend due to unspecified travel difficulties) to discuss common OPSEC fails and ways to avoid them. They also discussed their collaboration on a set of tools that promises to make OPSEC easy—or at least easier—for everyone.

Called Personal Onion Router To Assure Liberty (PORTAL), the project is a pre-built software image for an inexpensive pocket-sized “travel router” to automatically protect its owner’s Internet traffic. Portal provides always-on Tor routing, as well as “pluggable” transports for Tor that can hide the service’s traffic signature from some deep packet inspection systems.

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Gwyneth Anne Bronwynne

A suspect accused of stealing a cell phone called 911 to report her alleged victim for harassment, according to a report from Komo News Tuesday. Police responded to the call when the suspect said the victim was "following her and refusing to leave her alone."

The Seattle Police Department relayed the suspect's story: she was sitting on the bus with her boyfriend near a sleeping 21-year-old man who suddenly woke up and accused the couple of taking his phone. According to the alleged victim, he was listening to music on his phone with his eyes closed when the music suddenly stopped. When he looked up, he alleged, the suspect and her boyfriend were holding his phone.

When he accused them of taking his device, he reported that the couple began punching and kicking him and then ran off the bus. He followed them, and the boyfriend ran away while the woman paused to call 911. Komo News reported that police arrived on the scene, and the woman continued to insist that she had not taken the phone until officers noticed a phone-shaped bulge in her pocket. She was arrested and taken to King County Jail for investigation of robbery as well as for allegedly possessing three grams of crack.

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Today in Cologne, Germany at Gamescom 2014, Razer revealed their latest updates for their line of peripherals. Launching with a new feature dubbed Chroma, Razer announced three updated devices for the 2015/2016 timeframe: the BlackWidow Ultimate keyboard, DeathAdder gaming mouse, and Kraken 7.1 headset. Presumably these devices will be similar to the existing line of Razer peripherals, with the key difference being Chroma, which provides customizable multi-colored backlighting.

The BlackWidow Ultimate keyboard is perhaps the most eye-catching of the three, and it appears similar to Corsair's RGB-backlit K70 and K95 keyboards with per-key lighting. The difference is in the details of course, and Razer uses their own custom Green/Orange switches, so the feel will be slightly different from the Corsair models. The DeathAdder and Kraken aren't quite as advanced, in that there are fewer backlights available – the scroll wheel and Razer logo on the DeathAdder are linked to the same color, while the ear cups on the Kraken are likewise linked. One interesting feature however is that all three devices can be synchronized via Razer's cloud-based Synapse software.

Like other RGB backlit devices, Chroma in theory allows up to 16.8 million colors, though as we've noted before overlap among the colors means the "useful" palette is going to be more like 20-40 colors. Besides selecting individual colors, Razer offers several effects for colors as well. Spectrum cycling is for those that want to show the full rainbow of colors, while breathing causes the backlight to pulse one or two colors on and off every seven seconds. The BlackWidow keyboard offers several additional options, including the ability to customize each individual key and save/load templates optimized for various games. Reactive mode causes the individual keys to light up when pressed and then fade out with three time delays for fading to black (slow, medium, and fast), and finally there's a wave effect that cycles the colors on the keyboard in a wave.

Razer has a web demonstration showing what the various effects look like, or you can watch the promo video on YouTube. Razer will also be providing an open Chroma SDK to allow game developers and users full access to the devices, providing the potential for an even deeper level of customization (e.g. reactive mode with multiple colors should be possible). Pricing for the devices has not been announced, but both the Chroma-enabled devices will be available starting in September 2014. The Chroma SDK meanwhile is slated for release in "late 2014".

Gallery: Razer Announces Chroma Keyboard, Mouse, and Headset

A Craigslist-like website that facilitates weapons sales between buyers and sellers cannot be liable for the actions of its users, including the murder of a woman by a handgun advertised on the site, a federal appeals court ruled.

The case decided Tuesday by the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals concerns a woman murdered in 2011 with a .40-caliber handgun that a Seattle man advertised on Armslist for $400. A Canadian man bought the weapon.

Demetry Smirnov, the gun purchaser, murdered Jitka Vesel in Chicago with that weapon after an online romance soured. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. The man who sold him the gun, Benedict Ladera, was handed a year in jail for illegally selling the firearm, as federal regulations prohibit the transfer of weapons to people in another state or country, the appeals court said.

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Amazon

Amazon just announced its new Local Register service, a mobile card reader and app that allows merchants to swipe cards and take payments without a traditional card reader. The service is akin to those from Square and PayPal, which both use a physical card reader that plugs into a phone or tablet's headphone jack and lets customers swipe magnetic stripe cards.

As Amazon's done many times before with books, tablets (not phones), and hosting services, among other things, the company is dramatically undercutting the incumbent companies right out of the box. Amazon's card reader only costs $10, and the company has promised that customers who register for the service before October 31 will only be charged 1.75 percent on all transaction fees made through the swipe reader until January 1, 2016. Outside of that deal, merchants using Amazon Local Register are charged 2.5 percent for each swiped transaction and 2.75 percent for all manually keyed-in purchases.

That's compared to Square and PayPal, which charge 2.75 and 2.7 percent, respectively, on swiped transactions. Both competitors charge 3.5 percent + $0.15 for manually keyed transactions. Square and PayPal both offer their card readers for free when a customer registers with them, but the true cost of the readers is in the transaction fees. Amazon, for its part, says the first $10 in transaction fees will be credited back to the customer to make up for the cost of the swipe device.

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Famed Konami game creator Hideo Kojima seems determined to break news every single day of this week's Gamescom expo. After yesterday's revelation that Kojima is working on a new entry in the Silent Hill franchise, today comes news that Metal Gear Solid V will see release on the PC as well as consoles.

The news leaked by way of an early post to the Konami website, and it was confirmed during a live gameplay presentation and interview with GameTrailers' Geoff Keighley, which is ongoing. The website blurb suggests that both the introductory Ground Zeroes and the more substantial Phantom Pain episodes will be coming to Windows via Steam.

Metal Gear Solid V is the first game to run on Konami's new Fox Engine, and we can't wait to see what the PC modding community does with the landscape of Kojima's futuristic Afghanistan.

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The release of the Vector marked as a change in OCZ's strategy. With a new CEO, OCZ's goal was to change the company's brand image from being a low-cost value brand to a higher-end, high performance and quality SSD manufacturer. For the first time, OCZ decided not to release a value version (Agility-level drive) of its Barefoot 3 platform and only focused on the higher-end market with the Vector and Vertex 4xx lineups. Almost two years later since the introduction of the Vector, OCZ is now finally comfortable with bringing the Barefoot 3 platform to the mainstream market and the ARC 100 acts as the comeback vehicle. 

OCZ ARC 100 Specifications Capacity 120GB 240GB 480GB Controller OCZ Barefoot 3 NAND Toshiba A19nm MLC Sequential Read 475MB/s 480MB/s 490MB/s Sequential Write 395MB/s 430MB/s 450MB/s 4KB Random Read 75K IOPS 75K IOPS 75K IOPS 4KB Random Write 80K IOPS 80K IOPS 80K IOPS Steady-State 4KB Random Write 12K IOPS 18K IOPS 20K IOPS Idle Power 0.6W 0.6W 0.6W Max Power 3.45W 3.45W 3.45W Encryption AES-256 Endurance 20GB/day for 3 years Warranty Three years MSRP $75 $120 $240

Similar to Vector 150 and Vertex 460, one of the main focuses in the ARC 100 is performance consistency and OCZ remains to be one of the only manufacturers that reports steady-state performance for client drives. The biggest difference to Vector 150 and Vertex 460 is in the NAND department as the ARC 100 utilizes Toshiba's second generation 19nm NAND, i.e. A19nm as Toshiba calls it. Despite the smaller process node NAND OCZ is rating the ARC 100 at the same 20GB of writes per day for three years as the Vertex 460, although the ARC 100 is slightly slower in performance and also drops bundled cloning software and 3.5" adapter.

Given the smaller cell size of the A19nm NAND, OCZ is able to price the ARC 100 more aggressively. At higher capacities OCZ is able to hit the $0.50/GB mark and the ARC 100 is actually very price competitive with Crucial's MX100, which has been our favorite mainstream SSDs for the past couple of months. I am getting back from the US tomorrow and my review samples are already waiting for me at home, so you should expect to see the full review next week!

Chart courtesy of Renesys, a subsidiary of Dyn

From performance issues at hosting provider Liquid Web to outages at eBay and LastPass, large networks and websites suffered a series of disruptions and outages on Tuesday. Some Internet engineers are blaming the disruptions on a novel technical issue that impacts older Internet routers.

At the heart of the issue, the growth of routable networks on the Internet overwhelmed the amount of memory set aside in infrastructure hardware, typically routers and switches, that determines the appropriate way to route data through the Internet. For the first time, the lists of routable networks—also called border gateway protocol (BGP) tables—surpassed a significant power of two (two to the 19th power or 512K). Many older routers limit their use of a specialized, and expensive, type of memory known as ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM) to 512K by default.

When the tables outgrew the space allotted for them, the routers shut down or slowed.

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Bravely exploring tombs... but only on Xbox, to start.

Of all the announcements from Sony and Microsoft at their pre-Gamescom press conferences yesterday, the one that seemed to get the most attention is an old title with a new console home. The announcement that Square Enix would be bringing Rise of the Tomb Raider as a timed exclusive for Xbox consoles was so surprising in part because third-party console exclusives have been getting rarer for about a decade now (see our companion piece on the history of the practice).

It's not like third-party console exclusives are unheard of even these days. Microsoft made a large bet that EA's Titanfall would be a big enough system seller to justify keeping it off the PS4. The upcoming Sunset Overdrive might be an even bigger coup for Microsoft, coming from an Insomniac Games studio best known for PlayStation exclusives like Ratchet & Clank and Resistance.

Sony has secured a number of big-budget third-party exclusives for the PS4's future as well, including From Software's Bloodborne, Capcom's Deep Down, and Ready at Dawn's The Order: 1886. And both Microsoft and Sony have been gobbling up their fair share of smaller indie titles as "console exclusives" in recent months, even though most of those games are also available on PC or mobile platforms often months beforehand.

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Aurich Lawson

Since practically the dawn of the video game console, game makers have tried to set their systems apart with games made in-house by first-party studios or from wholly owned second-party subsidiaries. But the idea of large, independent third-party developers releasing games exclusively on one console or the other has risen and fallen in popularity over gaming's short history.

When a few Atari programmers split off to form Activision in 1979, they weren't eager to tie themselves exclusively to their former employer's console. Activision games like Pitfall and River Raid appeared on the Intellivision and Colecovision as well, even though Atari's dominant sales position ensured plenty of other third-party titles would end up only on the Atari 2600. Still, even first-party developers weren't immune to cross-platform development in those days: Coleco published games like Donkey Kong and Zaxxon on the Atari 2600 and Intellivision, as well as its own Colecovision.

The idea of the third-party exclusive really came into its own during the 8-bit era, mainly because Nintendo forced it to. To publish games on the ultra-popular Nintendo Entertainment System, licensees had to agree to a strict non-compete clause that guaranteed those games would be exclusive to Nintendo's system for two years. Most developers were more than willing to sign on the dotted line to get access to the NES' tens of millions of players, squeezing out external game development resources for upstart challengers like the Sega Master System and Atari 7200.

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A "mammoth" that last walked on the Norfolk coast more than 700,000 years ago returns to the beach.

Zoomar

A decade ago today—August 13, 2004—former MTV VJ Adam Curry spoke these words, recorded in his car in rural Belgium while driving to the Netherlands:

“Well, good morning everybody, and welcome to the Daily Source Code. Thank you very much for taking the time to download this MP3 file. Some of you may have received it overnight as an enclosure in your aggregator. In that case, thanks for subscribing. So first what I’d like to do is to explain exactly what this is, and what the Daily Source Code is going to be.”

Now, Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code (DSC) was not the very first podcast ever recorded. That honor belongs to Christopher Lydon, who recorded one back in July 2003. (Amazingly, Lydon is still going strong with Radio Open Source, which now exists as both a podcast and a public radio show on WBUR in Boston.)

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Stammer's wanted poster. FBI

A US fugitive on the lam for 14 years in connection with child sex abuse and kidnapping charges was apprehended in Nepal after authorities scanned his "wanted" poster with facial recognition tech.

The FBI announced the arrest Tuesday of Neil Stammer, a 48-year-old New Mexico musician and juggler who skipped out on charges in 1999. The announcement came two months after James Comey, the FBI director, told lawmakers that the agency was "piloting the use of mug shots, along with our fingerprint database, to see if we can find bad guys by matching pictures with mug shots."

The hunt for Stammer went from cold to hot back in January. At the time, FBI fugitive hunter Russ Wilson had just been assigned to the bureau's Albuquerque, New Mexico, division—where he said the Stammer case caught his eye.

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An Iranian mathematician working in the US has become the first ever female winner of the celebrated Fields Medal.

Samsung

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Samsung has officially announced its first metal phone in a very long time: the Samsung Galaxy Alpha. Normally, Samsung goes all-out in the specs department and puts all the pieces in a plastic case—but the Galaxy Alpha is all about design over specs.

Specs at a glance: Samsung Galaxy Alpha Screen 1280×720 4.7" (312 PPI) AMOLED OS Android KitKat 4.4.4 with TouchWiz CPU Octa Core (Quad 1.8GHz + Quad 1.3GHz) RAM 2GB Storage 32GB, not expandable Networking 802.11b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS Ports Micro-USB 2.0, headphones Camera 12MP rear camera, 2.1MP front camera Size 132.4mm × 65.5mm × 6.7mm Weight 115g Battery 1860 mAh

The Galaxy Alpha is a 4.7-inch device that uses a metal frame, but it's not an undisputed new flagship and doesn't have top-tier specs. The screen resolution is 1280×720, which works out to 312 PPI, below the pixel density of most Android flagships (~430 PPI) but right in the iPhone 5S range (326 PPI).

Samsung's official blog lists the processor as either an "Octa Core (Quad 1.8GHz + Quad 1.3GHz)," which would be an Exynos processor, or a "Quad Core 2.5GHz" processor, which sounds like a Snapdragon processor (either an 801 or 805) that might land in the US version. The processor will be paired with 2GB of RAM, which again is not top-of-the-line for Android but should still make for a perfectly serviceable device.

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