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.

Workers carry out maintenance on the transmitter towers of the 1,127ft (344m) John Hancock Center in Chicago.

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

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.

Russian aid lorries are heading for Ukraine although it is unclear if officials will allow them to travel past the border.

Israel and the Palestinians have agreed to extend their ceasefire by five days. The BBC's Yolande Knell reports.

There has been a fourth night of violence on the streets in Missouri after an unarmed black teenager was shot dead by police. Freelance Journalist Mariah Stewart describes what she saw on Wednesday evening.

Version:next-20140814 (linux-next) Released:2014-08-14

A deluge in the New York area has broken rainfall records, causing flooded roads and traffic chaos.

Pope Francis has landed in South Korea for a five-day visit, his first trip to Asia since he became pontiff

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.”

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Version:3.16.1 (stable) Released:2014-08-14 Source:linux-3.16.1.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-3.16.1.tar.sign Patch:patch-3.16.1.xz ChangeLog:ChangeLog-3.16.1

Version:3.15.10 (EOL) (stable) Released:2014-08-14 Source:linux-3.15.10.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-3.15.10.tar.sign Patch:patch-3.15.10.xz (Incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-3.15.10

The BBC's Sharanjit Leyl tours the USS Michigan, a nuclear submarine which includes three women in its 170-strong crew.

Version:3.14.17 (longterm) Released:2014-08-14 Source:linux-3.14.17.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-3.14.17.tar.sign Patch:patch-3.14.17.xz (Incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-3.14.17

Version:3.10.53 (longterm) Released:2014-08-14 Source:linux-3.10.53.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-3.10.53.tar.sign Patch:patch-3.10.53.xz (Incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-3.10.53

Version:3.4.103 (longterm) Released:2014-08-14 Source:linux-3.4.103.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-3.4.103.tar.sign Patch:patch-3.4.103.xz (Incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-3.4.103

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.

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments