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Monday, December 30th, 2013
| Time |
Event |
| 3:49p |
Documents reveal top NSA hacking unit http://www.osnews.com/story/27488/Documents_reveal_top_NSA_hacking_unit The German newspaper Der Spiegel has unveiled a whole bunch of stuff about the NSA and its tools that defy belief. Their tools and actions go way beyond what we already knew; we're not just talking passive information gathering through cables and such, but way, way more.
For instance, the NSA can divert shipments of purchased computers and equipment to their own secret workshops, where malware and spying hardware is added to these products before they are then shipped onward to the buyers. They also intercept Windows crash reports as they are sent from users' computers to Microsoft's servers. Worse yet, they can reportedly add special hardware to drones that can wirelessly infect computers from up to 8 kilometres away.
We've only seen the tip of the iceberg here. The fact that no heads are rolling in Washington over this illustrates just how corrupt and undemocratic the US government has become. | | 5:16p |
Haiku improves its processor support http://www.osnews.com/story/27489/Haiku_improves_its_processor_support In a blog post from Haiku developer Pawel Dziepak he describes the work he has been doing on improving processor support. Most notably removing the 8 processor limit. From the blog post:
The main scheduler logic has been completed and now I am concentrating mainly on bug fixes, adjusting tunables and some minor improvements. I also removed gSchedulerLock, a spinlock I mentioned in my last post, and replaced it with more fine grained locking. An new interfaces for cpufreq and cpuidle modules has been created together with a cpufreq module for Intel Sandy Bridge or newer cores and cpuidle module for all processors that support C-states and invariant TSC. Furthermore, IRQs (including MSI) can be now directed to an arbitrary logical processor. Implementation of inter-processor interrupts has been improved so that it avoids acquiring any lock if it is not necessary and supports multicast interrupts. And, last but not least, 8 processor limit has been removed. | | 5:56p |
Xiaomi's Hugo Barra details China's insane technology market http://www.osnews.com/story/27490/Xiaomi_s_Hugo_Barra_details_China_s_insane_technology_market If you ever wondered why many people say the US and Europe are irrelevant targets for new and existing technology companies compared to China, just watch this Le Web interview with Hugo Barra - who recently left Google's Android team to join Chinese device maker Xiaomi. In it, he compares China's most popular internet services with their western counterparts - and 'our' services pale in comparison to China's.
The most impressive number? China now has 500 million smartphone users. Six months ago, it was 'only' 250 million. That's the scale and growth we're talking about here. I often hear people say "yeah, but China is mostly poor people with a few rich ones on top" - well, these figures prove otherwise. And the growth is far, far from over.
That's why I always chuckle whenever a major western company only highlights US figures. It just means they missed that huge, fat, Chinese boat. | | 6:48p |
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