http://hdguru.com/hd-guru-2015-ces-top-picks-awards/

Quote:Top Pick Ultra High Definition Blu-ray: Panasonic UHD Player

Leave it to Panasonic, with its ability to work with the movie industry closely through its Broadcast and Professional division and its Hollywood Research Lab, to come up with the world’s first UHD Blu-ray disc player.

We were fortunate to view the unit being set-up by Panasonic engineers to confirm it did indeed play a Ultra High Definition Blu-ray demo disc feeding Panasonic’s Top Pick Award-winning CX850.

The new format’s capabilities go far beyond 3840 x 2160 resolution. The new players and discs will be able to play 4K UHD up to 60 fps (frames per second, currently almost all movies are shot at 24 fps). Plus, a number of 2015 top UHD TVs will be able to accept and play 10-bit video (1024 gradations between black and white) as opposed to the 8-bit (256 gradations) limitation of HDTV Blu-ray, cable and broadcast content. The player can also accept and send HDR and wide color gamut metadata to UHD TVs that can accept it.

Panasonic expects to ship the player before the end of 2015.

http://www.maximumpc.com/lenovo_takes_he...ptops_2015
Just another good reason to build your own PC.

Quote:It's not too often that Lenovo gets dinged for making a bad decision. After all, Lenovo is the top supplier of PCs in the world, and it didn't get there through a series of mishaps. Nevertheless, Lenovo has come under fire for installing hidden software on its consumer laptop and desktop PCs that injects third-party ads on Google searches and websites. Even worse, Lenovo reportedly gave Superfish permission to issue its own security certificates, which allows it to hijack SSL/TLS connections to websites, also known as a man-in-the-middle attack.

Superfish is intended to help consumers find and discover products by analyzing images on the web. The visual search tool could allow you to look up an item you've stumbled upon but might not know the name of, or to find similar products that are perhaps more affordable.

Unfortunately, Superfish has been found to do more than it says. After users complained about it on Lenovo's forums, Lenovo social media program manager Mark Hopkins sought to extinguish the flames by telling users that Lenovo had removed the software, at least for now.

"Due to some issues (browser pop up behavior for example), with the Superfish Visual Discovery browser add-on, we have temporarily removed Superfish from our consumer systems until such time as Superfish is able to provide a software build that addresses these issues. As for units already in market, we have requested that Superfish auto-update a fix that addresses these issues," Hopkins said.

He went on to defend the software and tout its merits, though didn't address complaints that it's injecting its own self-signed certificates and intercepting web traffic, behavior that was confirmed on Twitter by a security engineer at Google.

BBC News spoke with security expert Prof Alan Woodward who described Superfish as being "like Google on steroids." He also said that people have shown it can intercept pretty much anything on the web.

"If someone went to, say, the Bank of America then Superfish would issue its own certificate pretending to be Bank of America and intercept whatever you are sending back and forth," Woodward said.

Users do have the option of declining the software when firing up their laptop or desktop for the first time, though according to The Guardian, some have complained that it installs anyway, and stays installed even if the software is uninstalled.

2-18-2015

Vanilla Ice Arrested, Charged in Burglary

Vanilla Ice has been charged in connection with a home burglary in Lantana, Fla., adjacent to where he was renovating a home for his reality show “The Vanilla Ice Project,” authorities confirm

Ice — the stage name of Robert Van Winkle — was taken into custody Wednesday and is being charged with burglary and grand theft in connection with an incident that happened sometime within the past month, said Lantana police chief Sean Scheller. Numerous items of furniture, a pool heater, bicycles and more were stolen.


According to a Lantana police press release, during an investigation into the house adjacent to the one Ice was renovating, authorities obtained a search warrant and found several of the stolen items at Ice’s residence in Palm Beach County, determining that the former rapper “played a role” in the crime. The items have since been identified and returned to the rightful owner.

Scheller said Ice has been cooperative in investigations. Ice has hosted his series on the DIY Network, where he improves and flips houses, since 2010.

2-18-2015

Oklahoma bans History class and replaces with Bible class

Fisher’s bill was approved by the Education committee on an 11-4 vote. 

2-16-2015

CHULA VISTA - Imagine watching a man and woman making out on the ground in front of a store as you shopped with your teenager.


That's exactly what happened to a store full of people in Chula Vista, but it got way more explicit. It eventually turned into a full-blown sexual escapade in front of minors.

A man and woman, who Chula Vista police said had just met on the trolley, getting down and dirty in front of Christina's dress shop. Peterson said the man and woman seemed oblivious to the fact that it was 3:30 p.m. and they were surrounded by people in a shopping strip mall.


“They were rolling on the ground making out and getting sexual,” she said.

http://www.kaspersky.com/about/news/viru...-Espionage
HOLY SHIT.

Quote:GReAT has been able to recover two modules which allow reprogramming of the hard drive firmware of more than a dozen of the popular HDD brands. This is perhaps the most powerful tool in the Equation group’s arsenal and the first known malware capable of infecting the hard drives.

By reprogramming the hard drive firmware (i.e. rewriting the hard drive’s operating system), the group achieves two purposes:

An extreme level of persistence that helps to survive disk formatting and OS reinstallation. If the malware gets into the firmware, it is available to “resurrect” itself forever. It may prevent the deletion of a certain disk sector or substitute it with a malicious one during system boot.
“Another dangerous thing is that once the hard drive gets infected with this malicious payload, it is impossible to scan its firmware. To put it simply: for most hard drives there are functions to write into the hardware firmware area, but there are no functions to read it back. It means that we are practically blind, and cannot detect hard drives that have been infected by this malware” – warns Costin Raiu, Director of the Global Research and Analysis Team at Kaspersky Lab.
The ability to create an invisible, persistent area hidden inside the hard drive. It is used to save exfiltrated information which can be later retrieved by the attackers. Also, in some cases it may help the group to crack the encryption: “Taking into account the fact that their GrayFish implant is active from the very boot of the system, they have the ability to capture the encryption password and save it into this hidden area,” explains Costin Raiu.

http://www.maximumpc.com/intel_rumored_d...ugust_2015

Quote:Rumor has it that Intel is delaying the release of its 14nm Skylake desktop CPUs until around the end of August instead of late in the second quarter as originally scheduled. Keeping in mind that none of this is official -- Intel hasn't made any Skylake announcements that have to do with release dates -- a leaked slide earlier this month showed both Skylake-U (mobile) and Skylake-S (desktop) parts at the tail end of Q2.

Both represent Intel's 6th Generation Core processor line and are considered "tocks" in Intel's alternating "tick-tock" release cycle (a tick is typically a die shrink of an existing architecture, while a tock is a brand new architecture). The desktop variant will require a new socket (1151) and will coincide with Intel's 100 Series chipset, which among other things will introduce a significant PCIe upgrade with more lanes.

According to Digitimes and whatever sources it has within the motherboard industry, Intel has supposedly put to the word out to mobo makers about the delay. If true, it's expected to have a sort of domino effect by screwing with the production and shipment plans for a Haswell refresh and Broadwell-U for the second quarter of 2015. It could also delay the development of Broadwell chips with a 65W TDP.

This will also impact PC sales in general. Vendors were hoping to show off Skylake systems at Computex 2015 in June, and this obviously puts a wrinkle into those plans.

Quote:According to a new report on our sister site VR-Zone Chinese, Intel is likely to debut its upcoming Skylake-S desktop CPU lineup based on the new Skylake architecture at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2015 scheduled to be held on 15th August.

The SKUs that are likely to be announced in August include the K series unlocked chips and the normal locked chips. The most powerful of the K series unlocked SKU is expected to have a TDP of 95W while the other chips will have a TDP of 65W and 35W. It is believed that all of these new SKUs will come with the new Intel GT2 graphics that features 24 execution units. Both quad-core and dual-core parts are expected to be part of the new Skylake-S lineup.

Intel’s Skylake CPU lineup is expected to be the most impressive announcement from the company this year as it brings a major leap in performance and will be built on a 14nm manufacturing process. The Skylake family of processors will boast of a higher IPC and improved graphics performance along with higher power efficiency.

Along with the Skylake-S line, Intel is also expected to debut the Skylake-U lineup of processors targeted at the notebook segment with 28W and 15W TDP SKUs.

2-14-2015

Newest GeForce GTX 900M Drivers Disable Overclocking, Users Grab Pitchforks



GeForce R347 (347.29)

The driver doesn’t have overclocking tools and third-party tools are not supported. Some users responded by heading over to the Nvidia GeForce forums to lodge their complaints, hoping to get a response from an Nvidia representative – and it worked.


“Unfortunately GeForce Notebooks were not designed to support overclocking,” wrote Nvidia’s Manuel Guzman. “Overclocking is by no means a trivial feature, and depends on thoughtful design of thermal, electrical, and other considerations. By overclocking a notebook, a user risks serious damage to the system that could result in non-functional systems, reduced notebook life, or many other effects.”

Guzman goes on to say that Nvidia’s mistake was to allow overclocking in the first place, rather than to take it out. “There was a bug introduced into our drivers which enabled some systems to overclock. This was fixed in a recent update. Our intent was not to remove features from GeForce notebooks, but rather to safeguard systems from operating outside design limits.”

Nvidia’s explanation did little to calm forum users, who had left another 150 comments before publication. Whether Nvidia considers the situation resolved isn’t clear, but laptop owners who bought gaming laptops with overclocking in mind aren’t likely to put down their pitchforks anytime soon.

2-12-2015

US gas pump hacked with 'Anonymous' tagline

Researchers at Trend Micro have found evidence that at least one internet-facing gas pump in the United States has been hacked by an actor using the call-sign of the hacking group Anonymous.

Statistics provided by Trend Micro indicate that gas-pump vulnerabilities are currently a uniquely American attack vector, since the U.S. contains 98.350% of the world’s internet-facing gas pump control mechanisms

Locking this thread as it is having issues with the latest post plug-in after merging threads

2-12-2015

US gas pump hacked with 'Anonymous' tagline

Researchers at Trend Micro have found evidence that at least one internet-facing gas pump in the United States has been hacked by an actor using the call-sign of the hacking group Anonymous.

Statistics provided by Trend Micro indicate that gas-pump vulnerabilities are currently a uniquely American attack vector, since the U.S. contains 98.350% of the world’s internet-facing gas pump control mechanisms