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PNAS

Materials scientists may have many clever tricks up their sleeves, but with a several-billion-year head start, evolution has already beaten them to the creation of some amazing materials. One of the most astonishing natural systems is the skin of cephalopods such as squid, octopus, and cuttlefish. These animals can sense their background and control tiny structures that can radically change their skin color in a matter of seconds, allowing amazing feats of camouflage.

Now, an international consortium of researchers has decided that if you can't beat nature, you can at least copy it. The researchers have developed a flexible structure that can sense ambient conditions and adjust its color to match them. At the moment, it only works in black and white, but it's a start.

The color-shifting structures in the skin of cephalopods, termed chromatophores, rely on three layers to rapidly alter coloration. The top is a pigmented structure with muscles that allow it to expand and contract, altering the amount of light of different wavelengths that get absorbed. Below that is a reflective layer, which can also be actively altered by the nervous system. Below that is a passive white pigment that reflects incidental light. By varying the behavior of the two overlying layers, the animals are able to radically alter their visual appearance.

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final gather / flickr

In June, the US Supreme Court decided the Alice v. CLS Bank case, tweaking patent law in a way that suggests a lot more patents should be thrown out as overly abstract.

Samsung hoped that case would allow it to knock out two patents that Apple had successfully used against it in the long-running patent war between the two smartphone leaders. Last month, Samsung lawyers filed papers arguing that Apple's patents on universal search and "swipe-to-unlock" are exactly the type of basic ideas that the US Supreme Court wants to see rejected.

US District Judge Lucy Koh has now ruled that Samsung won't get a last-minute Alice reprieve. In a short five-page order (PDF), Koh found that Samsung didn't raise any defenses from the area of patent law that Alice relates to, Section 101, and it can't do so now.

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401(k) 2012

Comcast’s proposed $45.2-billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable has been criticized by angry customers, consumer advocacy groups, and even some members of Congress.

But Comcast has plenty of support, too, much of it from politicians and organizations that benefit from its political and charitable donations. With the deadline to submit initial comments on the merger to the Federal Communications Commission set to expire Monday, a number of elected officials and charities have urged the FCC to think favorably of Comcast during its merger review.

Charities supporting the acquisition include the Greater Washington Urban League, the Urban League of Broward County in Florida, the Boys and Girls Club of Rockford, Illinois, and the United Way of Tucson in Arizona. "Comcast has dedicated itself to advancing organizations like ours through financial support and partnerships," the Greater Washington Urban League wrote.

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Almost two weeks ago in Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown. The incident kicked off protests in the racially divided town, and Wilson has been in hiding since the shooting.

Four days ago, a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to support Wilson was launched, and as of Friday afternoon it had brought 5,901 donations totaling $234,990. However, money wasn’t the only thing people were giving to the crowdfunding campaign: the campaign page quickly found itself drowning in hateful, racist commentary.

"We are NOT gonna let that racist bastard Sharpton and his kind railroad you into prison," said a $50 donor under the name Mark Milazzo. "Wake up White America!"

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Lenovo has added three ThinkCentre desktop PCs to its stable of business devices this week. The three devices span the range of desktops, with the ThinkCentre E63z being an All-In-One, the ThinkCentre M53 being classified as a “tiny” desktop, and the ThinkCentre M79 offering the more traditional Small Form Factor (SFF) and Mini Tower models.

 

ThinkCentre M79 Mini Tower

The typical office PC is likely a Mini Tower or SFF desktop, and the ThinkCentre M79 is an AMD A-Series APU equipped desktop offering optional Solid State Drive (SSD) or Solid State Hybrid Drive (SSHD) storage options in the SFF or Mini Tower configurations. Many businesses have moved to dual-displays for their desktop workers, and the M79 supports that out of the box, but also offers an optional second DisplayPort connector for those that want to move up to three displays. As a business PC, it also employs the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) version 1.2 for enhanced security feature support such as Bitlocker. It also includes version 3.0 of the Lenovo Intelligent Cooling Engine which controls the desktop acoustics and temperatures.  Also of benefit to the business crowd, the M79 has a 15 month guaranteed hardware cycle to allow for an easier time managing system images. The ThinkCentre M79 is available now starting at $449.

ThinkCentre M73 photo which shares the form factor with the M53

The micro desktops from Lenovo have been around for a while, and the latest model to join the group is the ThinkCentre M53. Though larger than the NUC, the M53 is still extremely compact at 7.2” x 7.16” x 2.5” and can be vertically or horizontally arranged or can be mounted on the back of a monitor with VESA mounting holes on the underside of the device. The M53 shares accessories and power connectors with the other “tiny” computers from Lenovo which is always appreciated. The ThinkCentre M53 is available soon with a starting price of $439.

ThinkCentre E63z All-In-One

The final business aimed desktop is an all-in-one device called the ThinkCentre E63z. This unit features an integrated 19.5” display with optional touch, and an integrated camera and stereo speakers to allow for voice over IP and other collaboration software usage. Models equipped with the optional Core i3 CPU include an additional HDMI port, a card reader, and a Rapid Charge USB port for charging mobile devices. The E63z is available now starting at $479, with the Core i3 models available later this year.

We do not have a full list of specifications for these devices at this time, but those should be available on the Lenovo site when they devices are made for sale.

Source:

Lenovo

Much like the recent swathe of X99 motherboard previews we have seen, memory manufacturers are getting on board with showcasing their DDR4 memory modules to use with the Haswell-E platform. Unlike the CPUs from Intel, there is no formal NDA as such, allowing the media to report the design and specifications, although because real-world performance requires the CPU, no-one is able to post benchmark numbers.

The new DDR4 from G.Skill is the next DRAM module manufacturer to come out with an official press release, and following the previous high performance Ripjaws DDR3 range G.Skill will introduce its memory under the Ripjaws 4 moniker with a new heatspreader design.

G.Skill’s press release confirms the voltage ranges for DDR4, with 1.2 volts being standard on 2133 MHz to 2800 MHz kits, with the higher performance modules at ≥3000 MHz and above requiring 1.35V. The product line that G.Skill is aiming to release at launch is quite impressive with all the 1.2 volt modules in 16GB, 32GB and 64 GB kits. Due to the extra binning and higher tolerances of the more performance oriented kits, the DDR4-3000 C15 will be in 16GB or 32GB kits, DDR4-3000 C16 will be in a kit 32GB and the top line 3200 MHz C16 will be in a 16GB kit only.

G.Skill is reporting full XMP 2.0 support, and that this new module design matches the 40mm height of previous Ripjaws designs, allowing previous CPU coolers to be matched with this generation. As the modules are launched, the three colors G.Skill is pursuing are blue, red and black. I know G.Skill monitors our news, so if you really want another color in there, make a note in the comments.

Preorder pricing puts these modules at:

DDR4-2133 C15 4x4GB: $260
DDR4-2400 C15 4x4GB: $280 / £240
DDR4-2666 C15 4x4GB: $300 / £290
DDR4-3000 C15 4x4GB: $400 / £380

DDR4-2133 C15 4x8GB: $480
DDR4-2400 C15 4x8GB: $530 / £440
DDR4-2666 C15 4x8GB: $550 / £500

Source: G.Skill

Gallery: G.Skill Announces Ripjaws DDR4, up to DDR4-3200

On Thursday, 25-year-old Philip Danks was sentenced to 33 months in jail by a Wolverhampton judge for pirating a copy of Fast and Furious 6. Danks bragged that he was the first person in the world to seed the illicit recording, which he recorded from the back of a local cinema in May 2013. His upload was downloaded around 700,000 times.

The court also ruled that Michael Bell, the boyfriend of Danks' sister, played a part in distributing the film. He was sentenced to 120 hours of community service.

The film's distributor, Universal Pictures, argued to the judge that Danks' upload cost the company about £2.5 million. Danks had also sold DVD copies of the movie for £1.50 each. He said his total profit from the scheme was about £1,000.

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Julien GONG Min

Censorship of the Internet in China is a heavily studied but little-understood process, driven by both private networks and government employees and having effects that are hard to measure. To better understand it, a group of researchers tested censors and filters by attempting to post over a thousand bits of content on various social networking sites. They found that there was an aggressive pre-filtering process that holds a high number of submissions for review before they're posted—and that the results are actually undermining China's censorship mission. The filters tend to hamstring pro-government content as often as they block anti-government writing.

Part of the authors' process involved setting up a social media site of their own within China to see what standards they would be subjected to and what tools they would have to use in order to comply with the country's censorship requirements. They found that sites have an option to install automated review tools with a broad range of filter criteria. Censorship technology is decentralized, they wrote, which is a technique for "[promoting] innovation" in China.

Most research that has been done on Chinese censorship is largely based on what posts exist on the Internet at one point and then do not at a later time, indicating that they were pulled by censors. While that behavior is easily observed, there is another layer to the censorship system whereby users' posts get held for review by censors before they're made public. This new study attempted to figure out what sort of posts would get held for review, what would eventually make it through, and what might escape suspicion at either the posting or review stage, only to be removed later.

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A new iPhone screen size doesn't come along every day—the last one happened in 2012, when the iPhone 4S (left) was replaced by the iPhone 5 (right). Jacqui Cheng

We're just a few weeks out from the expected launch of Apple's next iPhone, which means the ever-noisy rumor mill is spinning even more quickly than usual. Rather than bombarding you continuously every time a blurry picture of a circuit board leaks, we're going to gather up the most relevant stuff for your perusal, applying a healthy amount of skepticism along the way. This week, the scuttlebutt is about the phone's larger screen, which may be its most obvious and most widely anticipated feature.

Finding resolution This is supposedly a close-up shot of the new iPhone's display panel. Feld & Volk

First up, we have some rumors from earlier this week on the screen's resolution—Apple will want to hold on to the "Retina" moniker it's been using for its screens since the iPhone 4, and that means maintaining or beating the 326 PPI density of its current screens. One report, based on a close-up photo of what is supposedly an iPhone display panel, claims a resolution of 1704×960. Another, based on a string found in the latest Xcode 6 beta, claims a resolution of 1472×828.

The new iPhone is rumored to come in two different screen sizes, one 4.7-inch and one 5.5-inch. At 4.7 inches, those rumored resolutions would come out to 416 PPI and 359 PPI, respectively. At 5.5 inches, they would come out to 356 PPI and 307 PPI. Assuming that we do get two different iPhones in two different sizes, it's theoretically possible for both resolutions to be correct: the higher resolution might belong to the 5.5-inch model, while the lower resolution could apply to the 4.7-inch model. At this point there's not a lot of proof one way or the other.

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Courtesy of Custom PC Review

At Flash Memory Summit, Toshiba was showcasing their latest 15nm 128Gbit MLC NAND wafer that has been developed in partnership with SanDisk. I simply could not resist to calculate the die size as Toshiba/SanDisk has not published it and die size is always the basis of any semiconductor cost analysis. Unfortunately I was too busy running between meetings that I did not take a photo of the wafer, so I am borrowing the picture from Custom PC Review.

To estimate the die size, I used the same method as with Samsung's second generation V-NAND. Basically I just calculated the amount of dies in both X and Y axes of the wafer as that gives as an approximation of the die size since we know that the diameter of the wafer is 300mm. 

The 15nm node from Toshiba/SanDisk is extremely competitive. Its bit density is essentially equivalent to Samsung's V-NAND, so it is no wonder that Toshiba and SanDisk are betting heavily on their 15nm node before moving to 3D in early 2016. Compared to other 2D NAND dies, the 15nm node is a clear winner from bit density standpoint as Micron's 16nm MLC does not even come close.

Toshiba's and SanDisk's secret lies in two-sided sense amp and all bit line (ABL) architecture, which reduce the size of the peripheral circuits and sense amplifier, resulting in higher memory array efficiency. Based on my estimation, the array efficiency (i.e. how big portion of the die is dedicated to memory cells) is about 80%, which is typical for a 128Gbit capacity. Higher capacities tend to yield better array efficiency since the peripheral circuitry does not scale as well as the memory cells do, so increasing the die capacity is one of the key solutions in lowering the cost per gigabyte.

Since nobody has yet taken a cross-section of the 15nm die, it is hard to say for sure what Toshiba and SanDisk are doing to shrink the dimensions. There is no mention of high-K dielectrics, so that seems unlikely and if history is any guidance, then Toshiba/SanDisk is simply increasing the aspect ratio by making the floating gate taller to compensate for the smaller feature size and keep the overall floating gate volume similar. That also helps to maintain the gate coupling ratio because the control gate is still wrapped around the floating gate and with a taller floating gate the capacitance between the gates should remain sufficient despite the increasing proximity of the floating gates. 

The production of Toshiba/SanDisk 15nm NAND node is currently ramping up and SSDs based on the new node are expected in Q4'14.

A survivor of an Islamic State massacre in Iraq says that initially the militants had promised not to hurt the people in his village.

Photograph by Stan Weichers

Earlier this year, a weak earnings report and wave of store closures had us thinking about the long, slow decline of brick-and-mortar game retail. Today, things look a little brighter, with GameStop reporting healthy sales growth along with an incredible factoid about its centrality to the modern console software market.

"Our hardware and software market share continues to expand and is now at an all time high as we go into the critical holiday season," GameStop President Tony Bartel said during an earnings call. “We continue to sell over one half of all PS4 and Xbox One titles.”

Let that sink in for a second: a single chain of gaming stores sells more individual Xbox One and PS4 games than all the big box stores, retail websites, and direct digital downloads combined. That doesn't sound like a business that's on the verge of collapse. Total, year-over-year sales growth of 25 percent for the quarter, including a 16 percent increase in new software sales, also sounds pretty healthy for GameStop.

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Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department

The tale of an iPhone stolen from a burglarized Southern California home sits at the intersection of Web culture and the swap meet.

A woman in the Los Angeles suburb of Santa Clarita reported to authorities that her home had been ransacked July 30, and among the missing items were cash and an iPhone. But in what appeared to be another episode of Thieves Gone Stupid, the victim's iCloud account was hit with pictures, including a selfie of a cute couple posing on a pillow.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department released the selfie days ago, saying that the unidentified people in the image were persons of interest. The story, with the couple's picture, went viral. On Thursday, the whodunit got even stranger. The man in the photo told NBC Los Angeles that neither he nor his girlfriend committed the burglary.

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At this year’s Computex, I had the opportunity to sit down with Mrs. Shalley Chen, ADATA’s President, to discuss the current trends in the memory and SSD business, as well as get an overview of ADATA’s future plans. Mrs. Chen has been with ADATA since the company was founded in 2001 and is also the wife of the founder, Simon Chen. Before stepping in as President in April this year, Mrs. Chen served as an Executive Vice President. Mrs. Chen also holds a degree in business management from the Ming Chuan University in Taiwan.

Before we get into the actual interview, I want to provide a brief overview of ADATA. The company generates over $1 billion in yearly revenue, which makes ADATA one of the largest memory companies in the world.  Over a half of the revenue comes from the APAC (Asia-Pacific) region, which is logical given ADATA’s Taiwanese roots and the size of the Asian market. The North and Latin America region ranks as the second largest revenue source with about 15% share in total revenue, followed by Europe and other smaller regions. In the interview Mrs. Chen hinted that Asia, Europe and especially Russia are potential future growth areas for ADATA since the memory and SSD markets are still in a developing stage, whereas in the US the markets are more mature.

ADATA has had an office in the US since 2002 and employs 41 people across two offices in Los Angeles and Miami. These are both sales and customer support offices with the LA office in charge of North America while the Miami office is responsible for Latin America. All R&D is done in Taiwan at ADATA HQ whereas production is split between ADATA’s owned factories in China and Taiwan. While in Taiwan I took advantage of the offer to visit ADATA’s headquarters and the Taiwanese factory, as well as take some images for another article. Ever since the company was founded, ADATA has been a memory centric company. Like many companies of a similar nature, the mission, as it stood from day one, is to become the global leading brand of memory products. Although the product portfolio has grown over the years to include newer products such as USB flash drives, external hard drives, SSDs, memory cards, and, more recently, mobile power banks - fundamentally ADATA is still a memory company. Over half of ADATA’s revenue is generated by DRAM sales, and market researches rank ADATA as the Number Two DRAM module supplier in the world.

Given the high competition in the memory and SSD business, the question I always put to the manufacturers is this: what differentiates you from all the other brands? There are a dozen consumer focused DRAM companies, and there is little room for innovation or differentiation in the industry. Mrs. Chen told me that ADATA’s best weapon against the competition starts from the diversity of the product portfolio to the close relations with both chip suppliers and distributors. Mrs. Chen was keen to point out that ADATA makes products for all three major markets (client, enterprise and industrial), giving ADATA several different revenue sources, and the percentage of revenues from enterprise and industrial is getting bigger and bigger. This directly implies that the enterprise and industrial segments are substantial to ADATA.

Big enterprise OEMs like Intel and Samsung are typically interested only in large enterprises that buy upwards of tens of thousands of units, which leaves the small to medium size enterprise market to OEMs like ADATA to fight for the rest of the market. For example, some of Samsung’s enterprise products are only available to large OEMs (like EMC, Dell etc.), which leaves a niche for OEMs like ADATA and other smaller OEMs to offer better support for small to medium size enterprises. This also lends a benefit to work directly with the OEM for any customization.

Like other fabless DRAM and SSD manufacturers, ADATA does not manufacture the chips they use – ADATA have to buys them from the likes of Micron and Samsung. I asked if ADATA has ever thought about moving to chip fabrication, but the answer was negative. The main reason is the cost of a fab, and investing billions of dollars is a large risk. If we look at the major semiconductor fabricators, most of them have been in the industry for decades, developing new technologies as the research progresses. As a result, it would be extremely difficult for a new player to gain any significant market share without innovation or a wide product portfolio and mountains of investment (it is worth noting that innovation can come from start-ups that have new technology but get acquired). Another point ADATA raised is that it has close relations with DRAM and NAND suppliers, and thus has no need for a chip fab. In the end, the DRAM module industry is all about managing inventory against cost and potential sales, so the competitive advantage lies in forecasting the demand and managing the inventory efficiently.

The same applies to SSD controller development. Even though controllers can be fabricated by a third party, the capital required for the development and manufacturing is still a large sum. ADATA raised STEC as an example, which took the path to design its own controller platform but got into serious financial trouble due to the cost of the development.  STEC ended up being acquired by Western Digital. ADATA does, however, have its own SSD firmware development team that has been in action since 2007. ADATA believes that the firmware team will play a key role to ensure competitiveness in the future. At this point in time, the team is mainly focusing on industrial SSD firmware development but there will be a change towards more unique firmware in the consumer side as well.

One of the big topics at Computex was the state of DDR4, and ADATA was heavily presenting its DDR4 portfolio at the show. Given ADATA’s position, the company wants to be the leader in DDR4 and will aim to push the new technology quite aggressively to both consumers and enterprises. ADATA is one of Intel’s six Haswell-E/X99 launch partners (the others are Micron, Samsung, Hynix, Kingston and Crucial), so there should be plenty of ADATA DDR4 available when the X99 platform launches later this year.

I asked ADATA whether the market for DDR4 will any different from current DDR3 from an OEM perspective. Mrs. Chen replied that DDR4 is different in the sense that right now DDR4 is mostly an enterprise product and will be sold through B2B marketing. The enterprise segment, due to the demand of more units per sale, also gets a greater benefit from DDR4, which is due to the lower voltage and higher frequency. The stereotypical scenario of hundreds of racks with each server equipped with eight to sixty-four DIMMs or more, lower power consumption on one module adds up and is thus always welcome. The speed should help enterprise workloads due to the tendency to be more often bound by memory performance than client workloads.

For the end-users, ADATA showed us there will be branded products at retail as well, but until the mainstream platform adopts DDR4, the enterprise segment will be the main market. In terms of production, ADATA believes that DDR4 will overtake DDR3 in H1’15 for the enterprise market, but the same will not happen in the consumer side until sometime in 2016.

All in all, there is a lot going on in both DRAM and SSD industries at the moment, so it will be interesting to see how the market reacts. We would like to thank Mrs. Chen and ADATA for their time giving us the opportunity to discuss the DRAM and SSD markets. As part of my visit to ADATA, I also met with ADATA’s DRAM and SSD directors to discuss their technology at a lower level. Keep your eyes peeled for that article in due course.

More than a hundred people are known to have died in Nepal in recent flooding and landslides caused by torrential rain in the area.

A Soyuz rocket carrying two satellites which will make up part of a new European sat-nav system, blasts off from French Guiana.

A Soyuz rocket carrying two satellites which will make up part of a new European sat-nav system, blasts off from French Guiana.

When a British Ars reader went to delete his Ashley Madison account, this is what he saw.

Earlier this week, Ars got an e-mail from a reader named Rob Plant. “I think most right-thinking people have been dismayed by the tactics of charging for picture take downs—what is worrying to me is that these practices now seem to have been taken up by more legitimate websites.”

Ars has long covered the scourge of “revenge porn,” in which seedy websites post revealing photos of unwilling people and then charge those victims a fee to take the photos down. But Plant was writing about a site called Ashley Madison, which markets itself as a dating website for married people to find accomplices in extra-marital affairs. (Its slogan is blunt: “Life is short. Have an affair.”) The website has been around since 2001, and although it's taken some guff for allegations that it populates its network with fake profiles of women, it still boasts 29 million users worldwide, most of whom are presumably not fake.

The way it works is this: Ashley Madison allows people to sign up for free with "Guest" accounts, which permit users to send and receive photos and “winks.” Guest accounts can also reply to messages sent by a member. To become a "Full Member," one must buy credits, as opposed to, say, paying a monthly subscription. Full Members can initiate messages and chats with their credits, and women can send messages “collect." After first contact (and guidelines of the Prime Directive permitting) messages between the two users are free.

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Islamic State militants have been accused of a number of atrocities in Iraq and Syria - but it is not just people from the region who have been fighting for the group.