Back in May SanDisk announced the X300s, which is the company's first SED (Self-Encrypting Drive). The X300s is based on the same Marvell platform as SanDisk's client drives but with the differentiation that the X300s is the only drive that supports encryption via TCG Opal and IEEE-1667 (eDrive) standards. Due to the encryption support the X300s is positioned as a business product since the main markets for encrypted drives are corporations and governments that handle sensitive and confidential data on a daily basis. SanDisk includes Wave's EMBASSY Security Center with every purchase of X300s, which allows Opal encryption on systems that are not eDrive compatible. Dive in to read more about the X300s, Wave's encryption software, and SEDs in general!

You can check out any time you'd like, but you can never... well, you know the song. Aurich Lawson

The hapless, rude Comcast employee who was recorded by a customer during what we can only hope was his worst moment couldn’t have imagined what was about to unfold over the next month. Since then, annoyed Comcast customers have been recording calls and publicly shaming the company into giving them what they were unable to get from long, cringe-worthy conversations with customer service representatives.

One of the latest examples came yesterday from Comcast customer Douglas Dixon of Sacramento County, who spoke with a half-dozen Comcast representatives over an hour and a half. Dixon posted a recording on the Internet and described the experience on reddit. After telling employee #6 that he was recording the call and would post it on the Internet if Comcast couldn’t fix his problem, she said, “That’s fine. There’s no need for you to threaten anybody.”

Dixon’s call was spurred by Comcast’s promise to him and other customers that their speeds would be increased. In Dixon’s case, an e-mail from Comcast on August 5 said his service would be boosted from 50Mbps to 105Mbps as soon as he restarted his modem.

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Me, getting kind of sick.

Since the unveiling of the Oculus Rift two years ago, there have been plenty of people willing to embrace the second coming of virtual reality with open arms and open minds. For at least one development team, though, those open minds have been infected with motion sickness as they try to code virtual reality support into their game.

"We are all extremely excited about VR because we believe it brings unparalleled immersion and that is something we would love to be a part of," developer Aaron Foster wrote on a Steam Community update for outer space horror game Routine. "However, at the moment, we have had to slow down our VR integration as we all get extremely motion sick with the current kits. We will take another look at implementing VR closer to release but for now we can’t fully commit to a VR version of Routine."

It's not clear whether Foster and his team are using the original Oculus development kits, which were shipped widely last year, or the newer "DK2" units that have only just begun to be sent to a handful of early pre-orderers in recent weeks. Our early experiences with Rift prototypes left us with a significant queasy feeling during and just after use, but advancements in head-tracking, image persistence, and resolution have mitigated those problems immensely in more recent versions of the headset.

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At left, a .380 ACP pistol is taped above the knee and is undetected by the Rapiscan scanner. At right, the same pistol is sewn to a pant leg. Security Analysis of a Full-Body Scanner

Researchers are delivering a paper at a security conference Thursday highlighting how easy it is to get weapons through the nude body scanners that have been removed from US airports but have been placed at other government installations across the globe.

The report, given at the Usenix Security Symposium in San Diego, highlights the insecurity of the Rapiscan Secure 1000 Single Pose "backscatter" scanner that once was used throughout the nation's airports but are now deployed at US prisons and courthouses, as well as airports in Africa. The paper, "Security Analysis of a Full-Body Scanner," from researchers at the University of California-San Diego, University of Michigan, and Johns Hopkins University, confirms what even laymen researchers had already discovered: hiding weapons on the side of one's body defeats the machine (PDF).

We performed several trials to test different placement and attachment strategies. In the end, we achieved excellent results with two approaches: carefully affixing the pistol to the outside of the leg just above the knee using tape, and sewing it inside the pant leg near the same location. Front and back scans for both methods are shown in Figure 4. In each case, the pistol is invisible against the dark background, and the attachment method leaves no other indication of the weapon’s presence.

In 2012, a Florida man said he filmed himself going through two different US airport security checkpoints using virtually the same method and got metal objects through the scanners undetected. The TSA responded that the "machines are safe."

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Ebola virus survivor Dr Kent Brantly has described how he is "thrilled to be alive" after contracting the infection while working in Liberia.

The actual game has a lot more text than this screenshot implies.

I've been thinking about depression a lot in the past week or so. The catalyst, as you might expect, was Robin Williams' unexpected death by suicide and the subsequent reports that the famous comedian and actor suffered from severe bouts of depression. That someone who seemed so outwardly successful and happy could succumb to something so dark inside of him was a chilling wake-up call for me and many others to reexamine ourselves and the people close to us.

In the wake of that news, as so often happens with a high-profile suicide, there have been countless explainers, analyses, and ruminations written on the reality of depression and how to deal with it both as a sufferer and a supporter of those dealing with it. These pieces have been illuminating and informative in their own ways, but the coincidentally well-timed release of an unassuming text-based game called Depression Quest has become one of the most gripping and educational views on the subject, at least for me.

Depression Quest has been available as a download for a while now, but it launched on Steam as a free/pay-what-you-want download last week, on the same day as Robin Williams' death (a coincidence creator Zoe Quinn expressed a great deal of ambivalence about). The game plays out like a semi-randomized choose-your-own-adventure book; you read a page of text describing an everyday situation, you choose from a number of decisions for how to deal with it, then you read about the consequences. There are occasional tone-setting still images, some light background music, and ambient noise accents in the background, but for the most part, the game plays out in your imagination.

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Two weeks ago Marvell announced their first PCIe SSD controller with NVMe support, named as 88SS1093. It supports PCIe 3.0 x4 interface with up to 4GB/s of bandwidth between the controller and the host, although Marvell has yet to announce any actual performance specs. While PCIe 3.0 x4 is in theory capable of delivering 4GB/s, in our experience the efficiency of PCIe has been about 80%, so in reality I would expect peak sequential performance of around 3GB/s. No word on the channel count of the controller, but if history provides any guidance the 88SS1093 should feature eight NAND channels similar to its SATA siblings. Silicon wise the controller is built on a 28nm CMOS process and features three CPU cores.

The 88SS1093 has support for 15nm MLC and TLC and 3D NAND, although I fully expect it to be compatible with Micron's and SK Hynix' 16nm NAND as well (i.e. 15nm TLC is just the smallest it can go). TLC support is enabled by the use of LDPC error-correction, which is part of Marvell's third generation NANDEdge technology. Capacities of up to 2TB are supported and the controller fits in both 2.5" and M.2 designs thanks to its small package size and thermal optimization (or should I say throttling). 

The 88SS1093 is currently sampling to Marvell's key customers and product availability is in 2015. Given how well Intel's SSD DC P3700 fared in our tests, I am excited to see more NVMe designs popping up. Marvell has known to be the go-to controller source for many of the major SSD manufacturers (SanDisk and Micron/Crucial to name a couple), so the 88SS1093 will play an important part in bringing NVMe to the client market.

Vietnam's lotus gardens are capitalising on an increasingly popular source of revenue. In midsummer when the flowers bloom, young and old flock to the gardens to have their pictures taken.

Yesterday, NASA announced that its scientists have studied the unexpected persistence of an ozone-destroying chemical and have come to the conclusion that there must be some unidentified source of the substance. The item in question, carbon tetrachloride (CCl4), was banned in 1989 as part of the Montreal Protocol, which was intended to reduce the levels of ozone-destroying chemicals in the atmosphere.

In general, the protocol has worked; atmospheric levels of the chemicals covered by the treaty have dropped, and there are indications that Antarctica's annual ozone hole has stabilized. Levels of carbon tetrachloride have also dropped. The hitch is that they're not dropping as fast as we think they should, based on what we know of atmospheric chemistry.

That situation implies that we have one of two things wrong: either there are sources of the chemical that are still leaking it into the atmosphere, or our understanding of what's going on in the atmosphere is wrong. But NASA scientists have now taken data about existing sources and plugged them into a chemistry-climate model and concluded that the data best fits an unknown source. By their own admission, the scientists are mystified about what that source could be. Qing Liang of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center was quoted as saying, "It is now apparent there are either unidentified industrial leakages, large emissions from contaminated sites, or unknown CCl4 sources."

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Thousands of people have taken to the streets in Gaza for the funerals of three senior senior Hamas military commanders who were killed in an Israeli rocket strike.

Chromebox is Chromebox. Acer

In the last year or two, we've seen the diversity of the Chromebook ecosystem expand as more PC companies have gotten on board. There are Intel Chromebooks, ARM Chromebooks, convertible Chromebooks, small Chromebooks, and big Chromebooks. These devices are all appreciably different from one another.

It's more difficult to do that with a Chromebox, as Acer's newly announced Chromebox CXI shows. Acer will sell you a system with a Haswell-based 1.4GHz Intel Celeron 2957U, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi, and a decent port selection for $179.99, or $219.99 for a 4GB version. This is, incidentally, the same list of features you can already get from Asus' Chromebox, which also costs $179.99.

Both boxes are VESA-mountable and can support two displays via their HDMI and DisplayPort connectors—the only real difference is that Acer's box is designed to sit on its side, while Asus' is intended for horizontal use. The box measures 6.51 by 5.12 by 1.3 inches, slimmer than Asus' entry but taller and deeper. It's up to you to decide which one best suits your needs.

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Pro-Russian rebels, who had taken control of eastern Ukraine, are under pressure as government forces fight to regain control.

Thousands of demonstrators are camping outside the Pakistani parliament, demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif over allegations of corruption.

Mark Zuckerberg in front of his original "The Facebook" profile. Niall Kennedy

Prosecutors say it took decades for Bernard Madoff to pull off one of the largest financial scams in US history to the tune of $65 billion, an elaborate Ponzi scheme perpetrated against the upper crust of society.

But perhaps there's an even bigger scam afoot, and it involves the ownership of Facebook. The social networking site is valued at $190 billion and used by billions of people daily across the globe.

Unlike Madoff's intricate accounting scheme that netted him a life sentence in 2009, the criminal proceedings surrounding the ownership of Facebook, at its core, rely on a two-page document—a contract that is either forged or worth billions of dollars. Either Facebook Chief Mark Zuckerberg, as an 18-year-old Harvard University student, promised half of his company to a rural New York man named Paul Ceglia, or he didn't.

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Moscow correspondent Steven Rosenberg looks at the closure of a number of McDonald's restaurants in Russia.

Tuberculosis, an often fatal bacterial infection of the lungs, was a scourge in the days before antibiotics. It's caused by a species of Mycobacteria, most of which live harmlessly in watery environments. Understanding how some of these have managed to make the leap to human lungs has turned out to be rather complicated. Further evidence of this comes from a study published Wednesday that suggests that infectious strains of the bacteria managed to cross the Atlantic before the first European strains did—carried in the lungs of seals.

Getting things wrong about the history of tuberculosis seems to be a regular pastime of the people who study infectious diseases. Originally, due to some genetic similarities, people had proposed that we had picked it up from farm animals. But a careful study of evolutionary trees recently showed that it's likely that cows actually picked up tuberculosis from us, rather than the other way around.

Similarly, the study of the strains found in the Americas had suggested that all of the bacteria present here had been derived from the European version. Which suggested that, along with other lovely gifts like smallpox, the disease was brought to the New World by the first European settlers.

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There has been a standoff between police and protesters in Indonesia awaiting a court decision over the presidential election result.

The world's oldest man has been named as Sakuri Momoi, who is 111 years old and living in Japan.

While benchmark optimization has been a hot topic, recently it has faded into the background as the industry adjusted. Previously, we saw changes such as an automatic 10% GPU overclock that was almost never achieved in normal applications, and behavior that would automatically plug in all cores and set the CPU frequency to maximum. Now, most OEMs have either stopped this behavior. Even if an OEM hasn't stopped such behavior, there are options that make it possible to use the altered CPU/GPU governor in all applications.

Unfortunately, I have to talk about a case where this isn't true. While I've been working on reviewing the Ascend P7 and have found a lot to like, I am sure that the Ascend P7 alters CPU governor behavior in certain benchmarks. For those that are unfamiliar with the Huawei Ascend P7, it's considered to be Huawei's flagship smartphone. As Huawei's flagship, it's equipped with a Kirin 910T SoC, which has four Cortex A9r4 CPUs running at a maximum of 1.8 GHz, and two gigabytes of RAM. As a flagship smartphone, it also has a five inch display with a 1080p resolution.

To test for differences in governor behavior, we'll start by looking at how the P7 normally behaves when faced with a benchmark workload. I haven't seen any differences in GPU behavior as the governor seems to stay clocked at an appropriate level regardless of the benchmark. At any rate, the behavior is noticeably quite reluctant when it comes to reaching 1.8 GHz. For the most part this only happens in short periods, and there is a great deal of variation in clock speeds, with an average of about 1.3 GHz throughout the test.

Here, we can see a significant difference in the CPU frequency curve. There's far more time spent at 1.8 GHz, and the frequency profile is incredibly tight outside of the beginning and end. The average frequency is around 1.7 GHz, which is significantly higher than what we see in the renamed version of the benchmark.

While this graph is somewhat boring, it's important as it shows that only three cores are plugged for the full duration of the test. Any noticeable deviation from this pattern would definitely be concerning.

When running the same workload on the Play Store version of GFXBench, we see that four cores are plugged for almost the entirety of the test. While I'm not surprised to see this kind of behavior when combined with altered frequency scaling, it's a bit disappointing. Strangely, this policy doesn't seem to be universal either as I haven't seen evidence of altered behavior in Huawei's Snapdragon devices. This sort of optimization seems to be exclusive to the HiSilicon devices. Such behavior is visible in 3DMark as well, although it doesn't seem to happen in Basemark OS II or Basemark X 1.1.

Huawei Ascend P7 Performance   Play Store Renamed Perf Increase GFXBench T-Rex 12.3 10.6 +16% 3DMark Ice Storm U/L 7462 5816 +28.3%

While normally such optimizations have a small effect, in the case of the affected benchmarks the difference is noticeable and quite significant. Needless to say, it's not really acceptable that Huawei is doing this, and I'm disappointed that they have chosen this path.

In response to this issue, Huawei stated the following:

"CPU configuration is adjusted dynamically according to the workload in different scenarios. Benchmark running is a typical scenario which requires heavy workload, therefore main frequency of CPU will rise to its highest level and will remain so for a while. For P7, the highest frequency is 1.8GHz. It seldom requires CPU to work at the highest frequency for long in others scenarios. Even if the highest level appears, it will only last for a very short time (for example 400 ms). Situation is the same for most devices in the market."

Unfortunately, I'm not sure how this statement explains the situation, as two identical workloads performed differently. While I was hoping to see an end to rather silly games like this, it seems that this path before OEMs stop this kind of behavior will continue on for longer than I first expected. Ultimately, such games don't affect anyone that actually knows how to benchmark SoCs and evaluate performance, and one only needs to look to the PC industry to see that such efforts will ultimately be discovered and defeated.

 

MSI has several lines of gaming notebooks catering to different types of users. At the high-end is the GT series that supports the fastest mobile CPUs and GPUs while the GE series caters more towards the cost-conscious buyers. Somewhere in the middle is the GS line, which offers similar (or slightly higher) specifications to the GE series but delivers everything in a refined and more attractive chassis. Read on to find out how the GS60 with a 3K display compares to the other gaming laptops.