Quote:Computex, one of the largest tech tradeshows, has announced that they'll be one of the first conferences to bring back onsite in-person tradeshows in the aftermath of the Covid-19 shutdowns. Its upcoming show, Computer 2021, will occur from June 1st thru June 4th, 2021, and will be held in Taipei, Taiwan, at the normal locations: Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center and the Taipei International Convention Center.

Quote:MSI CEO and GM Sheng-Chang Chiang, has passed away at the age of 56, resulting from a fall from a building.

The report comes via Taiwanese news site ET Today, which reports that Chiang passed away as a result of head injuries caused by the fall. Police are currently investigating the circumstances of the fall, and the cause is unknown at this time. Chiang was rushed to the hospital but ultimately succumbed to his injuries.

Quote:Somebody needs to convince Matt Damon to make a movie about getting the Spaceborne Computer back to Earth. The Linux device is comprised of two Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) servers that, according to the BBC, should have returned three months ago but are instead stranded in space with no guaranteed way to get back.
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Here's the good news: both servers remain operational some 530-odd days after their August 2017 trip up to the ISS. As noted above, the original goal was to bring them back to Earth three months ago, so their continued operation is a good sign of their ability to work without a lot of maintenance.

The BBC said a Russian rocket failure in October 2018 delayed the servers' return flight. HPE senior content architect Adrian Kasbergen told the BBC that "right now they haven’t got a ticket" back to Earth, but the hope is to bring them back in June 2019. In the meantime, well, maybe Damon will rally behind the servers.

Quote:Given these factors above, it’s not too surprising that 4K Blu-ray discs in the U.S accounted for only 5.3% of sales while even the aging DVD format still claims 57.9% according to the latest data from 2018. Those figures wouldn’t look too promising to Samsung either, whose existing 4K Blu-ray players have to compete with Sony, LG and Panasonic models while also failing to deliver complete HDR format support.

As for the 4K HDR Blu-ray format itself, it has been damaged by Samsung’s recent announcement but it’s not quite ready for the grave yet. The numbers of new ultra HD Blu-ray titles being released do keep increasing despite the very low market penetration mentioned above, and the 4K HDR disc format has its loyal share of followers. Most crucially of all, there are still several other major electronics brands that still make players for these discs.

One thing that’s also really worth mentioning in all this is just how genuinely good the 4K HDR Blu-ray format is. We think it absolutely deserves a longer future and more growth.
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Despite its benefits however, the 4K Blu-ray market might still never really take off seriously unless its ideal fan-base keeps buying more of the discs that do get released, and maybe Samsung has seen certain writing on the wall indicating this.

Quote:It may seem like a lifetime since the last video format war, but it’s been barely a decade since Blu-ray trounced HD DVD. The format, backed by Sony, brought full HD video into homes just as HDTVs became affordable, and it was ready for the future with enough capacity for 4K video. Nothing lasts forever, but Blu-ray is waning faster than anyone in the early 2000s would have expected. Samsung has announced that it is done making new Blu-ray players.
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You won’t need to ponder too long to figure out what’s going on here. Consumers just don’t buy as many physical discs as they used to. Blu-ray usage is already in decline just a decade after it won the format war, and there’s no new physical disc to replace it. Instead, everyone is heading to streaming services.

Both Netflix and Amazon offer all-you-can-eat 4K streaming on select content, and online stores like Vudu, iTunes, and Google Play all offer 4K purchases and rentals. The quality of 4K streaming content is arguably not as good as a 4K Blu-ray, but most consumers don’t seem to care. They’re watching more Netflix and buying fewer physical discs. It’s also much easier to stream 4K content than it used to be. Some TVs can do it out of the box, and a 4K-enabled box like the Roku Premiere only costs $40. The best 4K Blu-ray players cost $300-500, and even the cheapest ones are almost $100.

It might take a while for 4K Blu-ray to taper off completely. Image quality enthusiasts will keep purchasing the players and discs as long as they’re able, but you may not see budget-friendly options much longer.

Quote:Mayhem is a water cooled supercomputer, of sorts, capable of finding, validating, and patching security vulnerabilities in code. While this method isn’t altogether new, what is new is how Mayhem will actually exploit the vulnerability first, obtaining proof of vulnerability (anything that would lead to elevated privileges or root access), rather than just flagging what may be a false positive. This is akin to the type of code a black-hat hacker might use to gain access.

One of Mayhem’s first tests came by setting it loose on every program in the Debian Linux distribution, where it found 14,000 unique vulnerabilities -- 250 of which were new, never before discovered.
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After winning the competition, David Brumley (cofounder and CEO of ForAllSecure) stated that ForAllSecure would sell Mayhem’s services to early adopters like the U.S. Government. Additionally, Brumley stated that Mayhem will work alongside humans for now, but he believes that in the future, machines will handle the job solo.

Quote:Something highly unusual on these pages, a first, only and last Letter from the Editor. The occasion is, alas, not a happy one: Hardware.Info will cease publication for the English audience by the end of this year. At least, for the English audience that is not relying on Google Translate or similar services to peruse our Dutch site. After New Year's Eve - possibly one or two days later, depending on how hung-over the IT guys will be - the plug will be pulled, the curtain will fall, you get the picture.

Quote:Joel failed to do his research. The ACLU's investigation was deeply flawed: https://itif.org/publications/2018/07/30...lic-safety
"The ACLU may be reluctant to release its code because it appears to have poorly implemented the software. The ACLU has admitted that it only used a confidence threshold of 80 percent. This threshold is suitable for some uses, such as tagging friends on social media, but Amazon recommends using a 99 percent threshold when higher levels of accuracy are necessary, such as in law enforcement. Indeed, Dr. Matt Wood, who oversees machine learning at Amazon Web Services, says that the ACLU’s reported error rate would drop from 5 percent to 0 percent at this higher confidence level.

Similarly, the ACLU may be reluctant to release its data because doing so could undermine its claims of bias. The ACLU says that Rekognition is biased because nearly 40 percent of the incorrect matches were people of color, while only 20 percent of members of Congress are people of color. Indeed, at first glance, this may seem like bias. But is that the right metric? What if the database of mugshots consisted of 60 percent people of color? Whether intentional or not, it is possible that the ACLU built its mugshot database to make it more likely for people of color to be wrongly matched if racial minorities were disproportionately represented in the dataset.

Certainly, it is possible that Rekognition performs better on lighter-skinned individuals compared to darker-skinned ones. Indeed, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) regularly tests many facial recognition algorithms and has documented how error rates vary by race and gender, and companies like Microsoft and IBM have announced initiatives to address these discrepancies. However, the ACLU was selective in claiming bias: It failed to publicize the fact that less than 4 percent of the false matches were female even though women hold 20 percent of the seats in Congress.

It is unclear what error rate and level of bias groups such as the ACLU are willing to accept. The standard should not be perfection, but rather better than the rates humans achieve today. And by that metric, facial recognition technology is clearly a positive step forward. Not only does it dramatically outperform humans in terms of matching speed (and cost), but it also beats humans on accuracy. And while different algorithms have variations in terms of accuracy depending on race and gender, these differences generally pale in comparison to well-documented human biases.

The ACLU’s most recent gimmick is unfortunately another setback for legitimate uses of facial recognition by law enforcement, which not only includes identifying suspects—as was the case in the Capital Gazette shooting—but also aiding victims of human trafficking and child exploitation.
Moreover, it is a distraction from legitimate efforts to improve facial recognition, as well as necessary conversations about how to address serious instances of abuse, misconduct, and bias in policing."

Quote:Given these events, you’d be forgiven for thinking Apple is the last place you should send a laptop for repair, which is probably part of why Apple has taken steps to ensure you won’t be going anywhere else. As Vice details, documents distributed through the Apple Authorized Service Provider program show that Apple has introduced software lockouts into the MacBook Pro repair system. If Apple’s proprietary system configuration software isn’t run after the laptop is repaired, the system will lock itself and scream that an unauthorized repair has been performed. The software activates for any repair that involves the MBP’s display assembly, logic board, keyboard, touchpad, or Touch ID board. The report said iMac Pros are impacted if the motherboard or any flash storage are touched. And the system won’t function again unless an Authorized Service Provider runs the Apple Service Toolkit 2 on it.
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Several years ago, we called Apple a dongle company that happened to make smartphones. This may have been the right idea, but it targeted the wrong product category. Apple is now clearly focused on pushing up Services revenue, and a recent story highlighted that much of that growth has come from increased sales of things like AppleCare as opposed to App Store sales or movie downloads. It’s also come from growth in the payments Apple demands from Google, reportedly up to $9B to serve as the default search engine on iOS. You might not think of that as a “service” payment Apple collects, but Apple does.

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see the pattern here. Apple has created a situation in which its products are seen as cutting-edge and often copied by competitors (and yes, Apple copies its competitors as well). Its focus on specific device characteristics has often led other companies to pursue similar capabilities, thereby pushing the industry to focus on these particular traits. But when you put an all-glass back on a smartphone or require a laptop to run a piece of software that only your company has access to in order to be certified for repair, you’re making a series of deliberate decisions with downstream ramifications.

Apple will undoubtedly claim that its Apple Service Toolkit 2 represents proprietary information because it connects to and “talks” to a proprietary Apple processor. But this was undoubtedly part of the plan from the beginning — build a system with proprietary parts, then design proprietary software to communicate with them.

If you’re one of the Apple fans that’s been hoping the company would kick Intel out of its laptops and create its own processors to replace them, shifts like this ought to give you pause. Apple is using its own homegrown T2 chip as a means to lock down its entire ecosystem and freeze out third-party repair stores. It’s scarcely going to back off this behavior if it starts building its own SoCs for its laptops. And its service pricing can cost more than half the cost of a new device if you didn’t buy its extremely expensive extended warranty.

Quote:A recent move by Apple, however, illustrates just how illusory that access is, and how little the company cares when consumers get screwed. Anders G da Silva recently contacted Apple when he discovered multiple movies he had purchased on iTunes were no longer available for him to watch. The company’s response to him is below:
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Here’s a crazy idea. Maybe Da Silva deserves a refund because Apple falsely represented that it had the right to sell a product it actually offered for a very long rental period. I realize that legally, the company undoubtedly crafted its contracts to cover its ass, but this is not solely a legal issue. This is a question of how ownership is perceived culturally, not just legally, and the only bottom line Apple cares about is its own. That’s how one of the most powerful companies on the planet suddenly becomes a meek, shrinking violet at the mercy of titanic forces it can scarcely comprehend. The App Store is a “store front.” No, the App Store is a distribution portal through which billions of dollars flows every single year. The question of whether or not the App Store wields sufficient power to be considered a monopoly is headed to the Supreme Court, and Apple has the unmitigated gall to declare itself a “store front” so it can avoid making a customer whole after revoking access to content he’d paid for.

If you care about actually retaining access to a piece of content, buy it physically. Apple could’ve demanded that its customers retain the right to play works they purchased in perpetuity. It didn’t. And if Apple doesn’t care enough about its customers to ensure they retain access to content they paid full purchase price for, or even enough to refund their money in an event like this, there’s no reason it should see another dime of yours.

Quote:Google hasn’t commented exactly on what feedback it received from this 2014 experiment, but whatever it got led it to move away from origin chips. That particular feature never made it out of Chrome’s beta releases. And while I recognize that Google’s concerns about URL security and legitimacy are accurate, it seems disingenuous for the very company that helped turn URLs from simple links to sprawling aggregate lists stuffed with other data to pretend it played no part in fostering the very disaster it now wants to fix. There was a time when I didn’t need to install browser extensions just to copy a URL out of Google Chrome without it being stuffed with a ton of crap that I, as the end-user, don’t need and extract no value from.

That fact alone should raise eyebrows when Google declares it wants to improve the internet for the good of everyone, banishing those pesky URLs in the process. If you know how to read them, URLs tell you a great deal about how data is being fed to publishers regarding your activities online. It’s by no means everything — in fact, there’s an ocean of other data also being passed along under the hood — but there’s still value in being able to see and analyze that information when needed.

It’s telling that Google’s preferred options for URLs back in 2014 fundamentally obfuscates so much of this information. It’s the ultimate method of hiding data — people can’t notice the degree of information being extracted from their lives and relayed about them based on how much they click if they literally can’t see that the URL contains such data in the first place. And while 10 years ago such concerns might have seemed banal, we now know that each of these data points represents a mosaic that’s been woven around all of us. There is literally no such thing as unimportant data. Ironically, we can thank Google itself for teaching us that lesson. If, after all, such information was unimportant or non-valuable, why would anyone be bothering to collect it in the first place?

URLs suck. They’re unwieldy. They’re confusing. They’re inconvenient to communicate to people if you don’t have a pen and paper handy, and good URLs that stick in your head the first time you hear them are difficult to come by. The proliferation of domain extensions allows for tremendous flexibility but also opens the door to copycat sites, squatters, phishers, and all manner of other neer-do-wells. Google isn’t wrong about these points. I don’t think anyone particularly enjoys having to share the sorts of links that transform into four pages of seemingly random code when pasted into an IM box.

But it’ll be a cold day in hell before I’d trust Google, of all companies, to come up with a replacement scheme. I don’t doubt that Google would attempt to solve many of the genuine security issues that plague the URL concept. It’s everything they’d likely bake in beside it that I’m unwilling to countenance. The companies that helped break the existing system shouldn’t be the ones in charge of fixing it.

Quote:It has been revealed that Amazon has a small selection of staff based in America defending the firm’s practices. Around 16 accounts, which contain “FC ambassador” in the bio, have been created by Amazon staff in the last few weeks and jump into action to defend the company when people criticise the company on Twitter over issues such as toilet breaks, the monotony of warehouse work, pay and conditions, and management relations.
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To Amazon's credit, it's good to see the firm coming clean about these actions when there are undoubtedly other firms who take similar actions anonymously.

Quote:Google has acknowledged that it still tracks users who disable Location Tracking, after an investigation from The Associated Press. It’s not the first time the company has slammed into privacy problems related to its phones — in November 2017, the company acknowledged it tracked cell phones that didn’t have a SIM card installed by checking the address of local cell tower masts. Turning phones off and enabling all of Android’s privacy features did nothing to stop the problem, but Google promised to cease such behavior forthwith.

Nine months later, here we are. This exact cause may be different, but the issue is the same. Google rolls out features it claims will respect or enhance the end user’s privacy. End users believe it. Then, at some later point, we discover it’s not true. And Google’s response to the AP’s investigation has been to simply reword the text.