Computer Press!

questionable Android mobile wallpaper app that collects your personal data and sends it to a mysterious site in China, has been downloaded millions of times, according to data unearthed by mobile security firm Lookout.

That means that apps that seem good but are really stealing your personal information are a big risk at a time when mobile apps are exploding on smartphones, said John Hering, chief executive, and Kevin MaHaffey, chief technology officer at Lookout, in their talk at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas today.

“Even good apps can be modified to turn bad after a lot of people download it,” MaHaffey said. “Users absolutely have to pay attention to what they download. And developers have to be responsible about the data that they collect and how they use it.”

The app in question came from Jackeey Wallpaper, and it was uploaded to the Android Market, where users can download it and use it to decorate their phones that run the Google Android operating system. It includes branded wallpapers from My Little Pony and Star Wars, to name just a couple.

It collects your browsing history, text messages, your phone’s SIM card number, subscriber identification, and even your voicemail password. It sends the data to a web site, www.imnet.us. That site is evidently owned by someone in Shenzhen, China. The app has been downloaded anywhere from 1.1 million to 4.6 million times. The exact number isn’t known because the Android Market doesn’t offer precise data. The search through the data showed that Jackeey Wallpaper and another developer known as iceskysl@1sters! (which could possibly be the same developer, as they use similar code) were collecting personal data. The wallpaper app asks for “phone info,” but that isn’t necessarily a clear warning.

The Lookout executives found the questionable app as part of their App Genome Project. Lookout is a mobile security firm, and it logged data from more than 100,000 free Android and iPhone apps as part of the project to analyze how apps behave. It found that the apps access your personal data quite often. On Android, each user is asked if they give their permission to access an app, but on the iPhone, where Apple approves apps, no permission is needed.

Read More: http://mobile.venturebeat.com/2010/07/28/android-wallpaper-app-that-steals-your-data-was-downloaded-by-millions/

A new research breakthrough from Intel combines silicon chips and lasers to transmit data at 50 gigabits per second — and someday, maybe as fast as a terabit per second.

The 50-Gbps speed is enough to download an HD movie from iTunes, or up to 100 hours of digital music, in less than a second.

The technology, known as silicon photonics, can be used as a replacement for copper wires to connect components within computers, or between computers in data centers.

“The fundamental issue is that electronic signaling relying on copper wires is reaching its physical limits,” says Justin Rattner, chief technology officer for Intel, which announced the breakthrough Tuesday. “Photonics gives us the ability to move vast quantities of data across the room or planet at extremely high speeds and in a cost-effective manner.”

Photonics refers to the generation, modulation, switching and transmission of light, and can be done using lasers or light-emitting diodes.

Over the next two years, Intel hopes to perfect the technology by improving the efficiency of the lasers, as well as the packaging and assembly of the silicon chips and the manufacturing techniques needed to churn out millions of these modules.

“We have a good sense of the challenges here and what it takes to put all the components together, so we expect the technology to be widely deployed by the middle of the decade,” says Mario Paniccia, director of the Photonics technology lab at Intel.

Copper cables are the lifeblood of computing today. But they are limited by length because of the signal degradation that comes with using them over distances.

“At speeds of 10 Gbps and higher, it is difficult to move electrons fast enough and with enough signal strength to beat the tradeoffs,” says Rattner.

This limits the design of computers, forcing processors, memory and other components to be placed just inches from each other, says Intel. The alternative is to transmit data over optical fiber, but that is expensive and also limited.

“It’s not an issue if you are using only a few of them in an undersea cable,” says Rattner, speaking about optical fiber cables. “But if you want to have optics widespread, from consumers to supercomputers, the cost has to be taken down or it is not practical.”

That’s where integrated silicon photonics could come in. Using silicon-based chips and the same manufacturing process currently used for those chips, photonics modules could replace copper connections.

It could change how computers and data centers are designed in the future, says Intel. Earlier this year, the company showed its Light Peak technology that uses optics to deliver bandwidth of 10 Gbps and higher. Silicon-based photonics can go much higher, reaching tera-scale data rates, says Intel.

Here’s how the silicon photonics prototype works to achieve the 50-Gbps rate. Each module has a silicon transmitter and a receiver chip. The transmitter chip has four lasers whose light beams travel into an optical modulator. The modulator encodes data onto them at 12.5 Gbps. The four beams are then combined to output a total data rate of 50 Gbps.

Read More http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/07/silicon-photonics-50-gbps/#ixzz0v3eszt7H

High Performing Laptop Is Stuck Squarely in the Past

Seeing — and lifting — the AVA Direct Clevo W880CU brings back fond memories of days gone by. Those were the days when laptop makers didn’t give a flip about how big and bulky their laptops were, as long as they managed to wedge every last state-of-the-art component into the system. Battery life didn’t matter and neither did looks. Also irrelevant was price: Gaming nuts would pay upwards of five grand for these machines.

In recent years, the market has changed, as vendors have managed to get high-end components into slimmer, sexier chassis and keep prices headed downward, too. Today, you can get a top-performing laptop without the bulk and without much effort.

And so the Clevo W880CU arrives, a machine trapped in the past, despite modern amenities bolted onto it, including a USB 3.0 port, 1080p display and a pre-release version of Nvidea’s new GeForce GTX 480M graphics card. Under the hood, just about everything else is up to snuff, too: 1.73-GHz Core i7 processor, 4 GB of RAM and a 500-GB hard drive. About the only piece lacking, on paper at least, are a Blu-ray drive (the 1080p screen isn’t nearly as dazzling with old DVDs), and a brightness upgrade on said LCD — it’s the dimmest screen we’ve seen in more than a year.

Read More: http://www.wired.com/reviews/product/pr_ava_direct

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.

Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/exclusive-google-cia/#ixzz0v3cdvUic

Chip-makers are busy designing microprocessors that most programmers can’t handle

In 1975, future Hall of Famer Roger Staubach had the football but little else in a playoff game against the Minnesota Vikings. Behind by four points at midfield with 24 seconds to go, the Dallas Cowboys quarterback closed his eyes, threw the ball as hard as he could, and said a Hail Mary. (For you soccer fans, this would be like David Beckham taking a shot on goal from midfield late in injury time.)

His prayer was answered. Staubach’s receiver collided with a Viking defender just as the ball arrived but nevertheless managed to pin the football against his leg, scoring the touchdown that took the Cowboys to the Super Bowl. (Imagine Beckham’s long ball beating the goalie.) Ever since that game, a desperate pass with little chance of success has been labeled a Hail Mary.

Thirty years later, the semiconductor industry threw the equivalent of a Hail Mary pass when it switched from making microprocessors run faster to putting more of them on a chip—doing so without any clear notion of how such devices would in general be programmed. The hope is that someone will be able to figure out how to do that, but at the moment, the ball is still in the air.                                                                  Illustration: Harry Campbell

To Study Further Visit the Source

Source:   http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/the-trouble-with-multicore

Every week I grab New York Magazine and flip to the last page to see their despicably funny Approval Matrix. I like it so much in fact that I decided to shamelessly rip it off — robot style.

Did you notice there’s been a proliferation of robot infants, robot toddlers, and robot children in the past few years? It seems roboticists enjoy becoming parents to bionic babies. They build them for a good reason: These bots help researchers not only learn more about robotics but also investigate human cognition, language acquisition, and motor development. Some Japanese researchers even say robot babies could help introduce young people to the wonders of parenthood and boost birth rates. Yes, robot babies help make real babies!

Check out our reality matrix below, where we rated each robot according to its similarity to humans and its technical capabilities. What’s the coolest? Cutest? Creepiest? And did we forget any? Let us know.

To read more follow the sources

Source:                 http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/invasion-of-the-robot-babies-infographic