Diwong

Home Depot has not yet confirmed that a slew of fraudulent transactions came from a breach of its systems, yet an increasing body of evidence is mounting that points to a massive compromise linked to the home-supply retail chain.

Financial institutions first detected the suspected breach when a wave of fraudulent transactions on cards had been used at Home Depot. On Wednesday, journalist and blogger Brian Krebs, who originally broke the story, analyzed the zip codes of a recent batch of stolen cards offered for sale on the underground and found a 99 percent match with the locations of Home Depot's stores.

Such a correlation is a "smoking gun," Lucas Zaichkowsky, enterprise defense architect at AccessData, a digital forensics and security services firm, said in an e-mail interview. Whether Home Depot has been breached is no longer a question, he said.

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Dozens of young Indonesian men have travelled to Iraq and Syria to join Islamic State and fight with them in the region.

Popular picture sharing site Twitpic announced today that it would be shutting down on September 25 after a dispute with Twitter. Twitpic says that Twitter gave the picture host an ultimatum: either drop a 2009 trademark on the term "Twitpic," or lose access to the Twitter API. This loss of access would prevent the easy tweeting of pictures posted to Twitpic.

The company has accordingly decided that rather than cede the trademark it will go out of business. Twitpic founder Noah Everett wrote that trademark application had to face a number of difficulties, the last of which was only recently overcome. Twitter issued its threat during the "published for opposition" phase of the trademark application.

Twitter writes that it is "sad to see Twitpic is shutting down" and notes that it was fine for the sharing service to "operate using the Twitpic name." Twitter's opposition to the trademark was a necessary move to "protect its brand." While Twitpic could plainly have continued to operate without the trademark, giving it up would allow others to also use the Twitpic name.

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Scores of illegal migrants in the French port of Calais unsuccessfully tried to force their way onto a ferry bound for England, officials say.

With Sony's launch event we had the occasion to see their first Android Wear device. Sony presents the SmartWatch 3 and the SmartBand Talk wearable device watches. 

The SmartWatch 3 sports a 1.6" 320x320 TFT LCD run by a 1.2 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex A7 SoC and powered by a 420mAh battery. We find 512MB of RAM and 4GB of system NAND. 

The device is IP68 certified even though it is charged by a standard microUSB port. There's not much to say about the specifications of the watch as Sony has kept it pretty simple. Since Android Wear is not customizeable by OEMs, there is no differentiation between it and previous square Wear smartwatches.

In terms of design, there's only one way I would describe it: rubbery. With the rubber armband extending over the sides of the watch, we're talking a lot of rubber. It feels like one of those child-watches that I remember keenly, only that it's not coloured bright orange, which is kind of ironic because Sony will offer some gaudy colour options such as lime later in the wear. We only had black and white models available at IFA and the black one was already kind of odd looking.

I also found the device too be a bit too big for my taste, but then again I was never fan of big watches. The microUSB port is protected by a little cover which you need to keep lifted up while trying to plug in the cable. I found this very annoying as I couldn't make the cover stay on the side while plugging the cable in - it's so small and fiddly that it took me a good 20 seconds to connect it.

Gallery: Sony SmartWatch 3 & SmartBand Talk Hands-On

The other wearable is the SmartBand Talk. Sony markets it as a "lifelogger" device which tracks your movement via gyroscope and accelerometer and saves the data. The device also allows to be used pretty much as a bluetooth headset, just that it's not a headset. You can talk to it and it has a little speaker. It has a 1.4" curved narrow e-paper display that allows it to extremely power efficient. The band sports a tiny 70mAh battery.

Frankly, I'll admit that I didn't spend too much time with the SmartBand because I simply did not see any use for it. It kinda perplexes me and seems like some little gimmick gadget that you could just skip and get the real deal in the form of a full-fledges smart-watch.

All in all, Sony's new wearables don't seem to be any new groundbreaking inovation. It adds to the wearable ecosystem and I'm surely happy for that - but when it comes to actually buying one, I think people will find better options in devices from the competition.

Leaders meeting at the Nato summit will be discussing ways to tackle Islamic State fighters, as Jeremy Bowen reports.

Western countries are preparing to tighten sanctions on Russia over its action in Ukraine, US and British officials say.

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Today Huawei launches the successor to the Ascend Mate, the Mate 7 and a new mid-range device called the Ascent G7. I've got my hands on a Mate 7 and managed to play a bit with the G7 today at Huawei's event in Berlin. The Mate 7 directly attacks Samsung's Note lineup in the phablet sector, while the G7 being still very big at 5.5" is more of a budget device while trying to make little compromises.

First up, let's see the raw specs that both devices offer.

  Ascend Mate 7 Ascend G7 SoC Hi3630 "Kirin 925"
4xCortex A15 @ 1.8GHz
4xCortex A7 @ 1.3GHz
 Mali T628MP4 GPU @ 600MHz MSM8916 "Snapdragon 410"
4xCortex A53 @ 1.2GHz
Adreno 306 GPU RAM/NAND

2 GB LPDDR3 & 16GB NAND  or
3GB LPDDR3 & 32GB NAND
 & microSD

2GB LPDDR3, 16GB NAND
&  microSD Display 6" 1080p JDI IPS-NEO  5.5" 720p IPS  Network 2G / 3G / 4G LTE FDD & TDD
(HiSilicon Balong IP block UE Category 6 LTE) 2G / 3G / 4G LTE FDD or TDD
(Qualcomm MDM9x25 IP block UE Category 4 LTE) Dimensions 157 x 81 x 7.9mm, 185 grams ? x ? x 7.6 mm, 165 grams Camera

13MP Sony IMX214 BSI sensor,
 F/2.0, 28mm wide angle lens

5MP FFC non-spherical lens

13MP Sony IMX214 BSI sensor,
 F/2.0, 28mm wide angle lens

5MP FFC 88° angle lens

Battery 4100 mAh, 3.85V, 15.78 Whr 3000 mAh, 3.85V, 11.55 Whr OS Android 4.4.2 with EmotionUI 3.0 Android 4.4.2 with EmotionUI 3.0  Connectivity 802.11a/b/g/n/ac + BT 4.1, USB2.0, GPS/GNSS, MHL, DLNA, NFC 802.11a/b/g/n/ac + BT 4.1, USB2.0, GPS/GNSS, MHL, DLNA, NFC SIM Size MicroSIM & NanoSIM MicroSIM & NanoSIM

Let's start up with the Ascend Mate 7. The first thing you notice is that this is a big device. Coming with a 6" screen this is one of the bigger candidates in the phablet space. What Huawei has done is reduce the bezels on the device as much as possible, that in the end  the resulting device dimensions only slightly outsize the newly announced Note 4 with its 5.7" screen. The new JDI manufactured IPS-NEO screen promises a constrast ratio of 1500:1 and also brings with it increased brightness and reduced power, with Huawei stating 15% better transmissitivity and 15% reduced power consumption. We'll be sure to test this display to the fullest extent, as at first glance it seems outstanding. Filling up a 83% bezel-to-device-footprint ratio this is currently the most "screen" on a device out there. I have to point out that Huawei was very misleading in its rendered presentation pictures as it portrayed the phone as such that it gave an impression that the screen begins immediately where the bezel ends, however in reality there's another 3mm of black nothingness on both sides before you meet the first pixels.

The same HiSilicon Hi3630 powers the Mate 7 that was released for the Honor 6, however it gets a slight 100MHz clock boost on the A15 cores and gets brandished as the Kirin 925. I made sure to ask a Huawei representative if we'd see various regional models offering various connectivity options, and to my delight this time we have full use of the Balong category 6 LTE modem provided in the SoC as the device offers full RF and antenna support for both FDD and TDD on the global model. Only variations will be select Chinese models which need to support a wider range of TDD bands to take advantage of their national carrier's networks. This is all backed by two redundant antennas on the top and bottom of the device. Apparently the device is able to switch between them as the main connectivity antenna if the attenuation on either gets too high due to external influences like gripping or holding the device. Huawei reports a 40% reduction in call drops and a 15dB gain in signal strength.

Huawei was trying to praise a so called i3 co-processor, but this is something that devices have had since the Note 2 in the form of external "sensorhubs" which are most of the time little ARM Cortex M3 microcontrollers, with Qualcomm first integrating them into their SoCs such as the Snapdragon 800.

The body of the Mate 7 houses an enormous 4100mAh battery offering 15.78Wh of power: this is more battery capacity than found in the Nexus 7 2013, but inside a phone. Huawei made this possible by dedicating a very large amount of internal device space to the battery alone, with it taking the whole width of the device and filling up from the top of the bottom bezel up to the fingerprint sensor in height. This is all encased in an aluminium body and keeping a thickness of 7.9mm at the thickest point in the center of the device. Even though it is made of aluminium, the device is still able to offer NFC with help of a little gap above the camera and the NFC coil surrounding the camera and flash; the top and bottom parts of the Mate 7 remain plastic. Huawei tried to spin a 3.5mm thickness at the edges, but I'd say 5mm is the more realistic measurement that we see on the sides of the device. The ergonomics are very pleasing and the build quality is top notch.

On the bottom we find a standard microUSB 2.0 connector, which is oddly enough not in the very middle of the device and makes for a strange asymetry in terms of design. The power button is found on the right side at thumb's reach and the volume rocker is located right above it. On the left side we have the main SIM tray and the secondary tray that may house both a nanoSIM and a microSD card, which by the way means the phone has full dual-SIM capabilities.

The camera setup is relatively established while offering the same IMX214 camera sensor as found on the Honor 6. The G7 offers by the way the same optics system. The F2.0 28mm wide angle lens is a welcome addition that I hope more manufacturers would adopt. On the front camera we see a 5MP sensor, and with something Huawei names a non-spherical lens, which I'll have to investigate more to see what it brings.

The main attraction of the Mate 7 is the new fingerprint sensor found below the back camera. This is a touch-sensor manufactured by Swedish company FPC, which may be the FPC1020 that was announced late last year. As such, Huawei is the first manufacturer following Apple's TouchID to offer a full touch sensor as opposed to a swipe implementation as found on Samsung's devices. It offers full 360° print rotation readout support, no matter if you have wet fingers or not. Huawei implements a RF sensing ring around the sensor that makes it possible to detect your finger even when the device is sleeping (as it will wake the device up). This allows for turning on of the devie and unlocking in a single action. I tested out the feature and it works perfectly. The fingerprint registration is identical to Apple's, with you having to press your fingerprint multiple times for better characterization of your fingerprint. The success rate was near 100% for what I didn't consider a very serious registration procedure on my part. The touch sensor can also be used as a camera shutter button when taking photos.

On the software side we see an update of EmotionUI to version 3.0. I've been working on the Honor 6 review for the last few weeks which had version 2.3 on it, and the change is quite enormous as we go for a full redesign from 2.x's pre-iOS 7 style to literarly a new design language that seems to outright copy iOS 7 in many aspects. I'll dwell into the software more in the following weeks, but I can already say that this is now my favorite custom Android framework and skin implementation out of all OEMs out there, as it brings not only design, but also a termendous amount of exclusive and useful features with it.

Gallery: Huawei Ascend Mate 7 Hands-On

The G7 on the other hand is a more mixed bag. It is a 5.5" 720p phone with a new Snapdragon 410 SoC, and is rightfully so a mid-range phone priced at 299€. As mentioned before, it offers the same camera setup as the Mate 7. The 7.6mm thin body housing a 3000mAh battery (which at time of writing I now considered small compared to the Mate 7's) is made out of plastic and was noticeably less impressive than the Mate 7's. Huawei didn't communicate its exact dimensions but it felt similar in size to the G3 considering both have 5.5" screens. I really don't have that much to say about it, and neither did Huawei as the presenter at the unveiling offered an excrutiating 12 minute presentation with very little substantial content.

Gallery: Huawei Ascend G7 Hands-On

The Huawei Ascend Mate 7 and the G7 both come in either silver and gold, with the Mate 7 and G7 having each  respectively an additional option of black and grey. At 499€ for 2GB/16GB and 599€ for the 3GB/32GB models the Mate 7 will be available end of october in China and Hong Kong and UK, Germany, Italy, France and Spain in Europe, with a global launch following that. The G7 with its 299€ MSRP will be available end september in Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Hungary, the Netherlands Turkey, Poland, Norway, South Africa and Mexico, with other markets to follow.

Least to say I was impressed by the Mate 7. It seems like a great device overall - I know that the SoC has some faults (specially GPU performance) and you will be able to read about that soon as I finish up the Honor 6 review, however the phone's build quality, great screen, connectivity features and gigantic battery all make up for it.

Fight for the Future

Next week, some of the biggest tech companies will lead a symbolic “Internet Slowdown” to protest the Federal Communications Commission’s network neutrality proposal.

“Several top websites—including Etsy, Kickstarter, Foursquare, WordPress, Vimeo, reddit, Mozilla, Imgur, Meetup, Cheezburger, Namecheap, Bittorrent, Gandi.net, StartPage, BoingBoing, and Dwolla—announced that they will be joining more than 35 advocacy organizations and hundreds of thousands of activists in a day of action that will give a glimpse into what the Internet might look like if the FCC’s proposed rules go into effect,” a blog post today from the advocacy group “Fight for the Future” said.

The FCC’s proposal would require Internet service providers to provide a vaguely defined minimum level of service to all legal applications and websites, but it would not prevent ISPs from charging companies for faster access to Internet users. Net neutrality advocates argue that so-called “fast lanes” will divide the Internet into different tiers, with deep-pocketed companies having unfair advantages over smaller ones. But the FCC isn’t allowed to issue stronger restrictions on fast lanes unless it takes the controversial step of reclassifying broadband as a utility or "common carrier" service.

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The comedian Joan Rivers has died at the age of 81, her daughter has announced.

Jennifer Hall

Some species of dinosaur were astonishingly enormous compared to anything alive on land today, which becomes obvious the moment you stand in the shadow of their skeletons in a museum. This is a key reason why we remain fascinated with these long-extinct beasts. The colossal size of the long-necked species like Brachiosaurus stretches the limits of our imaginations and exhausts our vocabulary. And nothing quite gets the hyperbole flowing like the discovery of a gigantic new dinosaur.

So meet Dreadnoughtus, the 65-ton, 26-meter-long plant-eating behemoth from the latest Cretaceous—84 to 66 million years ago—found in Argentina. It is named after the World War I British battleship Dreadnought.

This discovery comes only a few months after another team of Argentine researchers reported a slightly older, and apparently even larger, long-necked dinosaur. That discovery dominated the science news for days, to the point where elderly relatives, who never took much of an interest in my career in science, were phoning me up to ask how something so huge could have possibly existed.

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I use my phone more often to log in to on-line accounts than I use a computer. I can assure you it's not because typing passwords on a tiny keyboard is fun. For most of us, we just have instant access to our phones at any given time during the day. more>>

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});It's still technically the day before the IFA show in Berlin, but companies continue to make pre-show announcements about all of their phones, tablets, and PCs. Yesterday, we took a look at all of the products that Toshiba, Acer, and Asus were planning to release between now and the end of the year, plus a single gaming notebook from Lenovo.

Today is a bigger day, if only because of the size of the companies involved. Dell, HP, and Lenovo are the three biggest sellers of PCs, both worldwide and in the US, at least according to most estimates. Today all three are taking the wraps off the majority of their product lines. Many of the trends remain the same, however: you'll see low-cost Windows PCs priced to compete with Chromebooks, some mini desktops to address an actively growing segment of the PC market, and a few more Broadwell systems with Intel's Core M chips inside.

Dell

All of the Windows PCs Dell is unveiling today are actually business PCs in the Latitude and Optiplex lines—perhaps not the most exciting machines, but likely more lucrative and profitable to Dell than the majority of its mid- to low-end consumer PC lines. Businesses often have money to spend on equipment that consumers just don't have, and they're willing to pay more for easy-to-service machines that will last the three-to-five years most business computers are expected to last. Dell told us that its decision to return to being a private company last year made it easier to focus on important but "unsexy" machines like these.

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American warplanes have continued to launch air strikes on Islamic State fighters in northern Iraq, many from the USS HW Bush in the Persian Gulf.

On Thursday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said that Google settled a complaint in which the FTC alleged that Google unlawfully charged parents for unauthorized in-app purchases made by their children. Google will provide full refunds to customers who were charged for purchases they did not approve, with a minimum payment of $19 million in refunds.

“Google has also agreed to modify its billing practices to ensure that it obtains express, informed consent from consumers before charging them for items sold in mobile apps,” the FTC wrote in a press release.

The FTC says that since Google introduced in-app purchases in 2011, it has heard from parents whose children racked up “hundreds” of dollars in in-app purchases, which ranged from $0.99 to $200. In the first year that Google permitted in-app purchases, the company did not require any password or other verification to bill the user through the Play Store. By 2012, Google introduced a pop-up box that asked for a password and informed consumers about in-app purchases, but the pop-up didn't tell the consumer how much they were being charged, nor did it tell them that entering a password would open up a 30-minute window for kids to go crazy with in-app purchases before they had to enter the password again.

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New York Apple Store Simon Greig

Labor rights groups said Thursday that a Chinese factory producing iPhone and iPad parts was found "to have a number of serious health and safety, environmental, and human rights violations."

The groups, US-based China Labor Watch and Green America, said the 20,000 workers at the Catcher Technology-owned plant in Suqian were exposed to aluminum-magnesium alloy sheddings without protective equipment and encountered locked safety exits, forced unpaid overtime, and other labor violations.

The groups' findings from its August investigation—which they say they also found the dumping of industrial fluids and waste into groundwater and rivers—comes days before Apple's Tuesday event, presumably the unveiling of the company's newest mobile device.

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Two sheets of molybdenum disulfide show why it's so hard to find any place to put impurities of any sort inside what's essentially a single molecule. Nano.gov

As chip manufacturers are getting close to the limits of their ability to scale features down, materials scientists are working hard to provide the raw materials that would let us build circuitry from individual molecules, such as carbon nanotubes. One class of molecules that may find a home in future chips is sheets of material that are a single atom thin.

Although graphene, a sheet of carbon atoms, tends to attract the most attention, there are actually a variety of atomically thin materials. And, while graphene is not normally semiconducting, a number of the alternatives are. One of these alternatives, molybdenum disulphide (MoS2), has already been used to create functional electronics. Unfortunately, the performance of these circuits has been erratic. Now, a collaboration of researchers at Rutgers University and Los Alamos National Lab has figured out why: hooking up wires to an atomically thin material is really hard. Fortunately, they've also figured out a solution.

Although MoS2 appears to have what it takes to make great circuitry, early attempts at using it have been inconsistent. As the authors of the new paper note, the mobility values (a measure of how quickly electrons move through the circuit) reported for these circuits can vary by as much as a factor of 400. The problem, the authors suspected, comes from wiring up the circuits. Although it's easy to deposit metal on top of an atomically thin material like MoS2, it's another thing entirely to make sure electrons can easily hop across that junction.

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A dual processor system sounds awesome to the home user but in reality it is almost entirely a professional market. The prosumer has to use Xeons at JEDEC memory speeds and then ensure that the software is NUMA aware, especially if it decides searching for data in the other processor's L3 cache. However now that GIGABYTE Server is selling to the prosumer via Newegg, they sent us the GA-7PESH3 for review.

Microsoft announced three new mid-range Lumia phones at IFA today. The Lumia 730, 735, and 830 are mid-range, mid-size handsets that will be launched globally this month.

The 730 and 735 are positioned as the ideal phones for Skype and selfies. The two are close siblings in a similar style to the Lumia 630 and 635—the 730 is a dual SIM, 3G handset; the 735 is a single SIM, 4G LTE device.

Stylistically, they look like so many Lumias before them: brightly colored polycarbonate unibody handsets with gentle curves.

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