IBM Partnering with Canonical to Produce Linux Based Mainframes
IBM has announced a partnership with Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, that will create a new Linux powered mainframe known as LinuxONE. As part of the effort IBM is planning to use a monthly subscription model to help "drive mainframe usage to a wider audience" while also seeking "deeper involvement with other open source projects" and "contributing a huge cache of mainframe code to open source and participating in the newly launched Open Mainframe Project." Two systems named after Penguins will be available, Emperor for large customers and Rockhopper for entry level users. Principal analyst at Pund-IT Charles King described the partnership stating, "It should help IBM by opening doors in customers where Canonical is particularly strong. But Canonical is likely to benefit even more through exposure to the large enterprises that make up IBM’s traditional mainframe customer base."
Source: Tech Crunch
Read More ...
Mozilla Working on a Built-in Ad Blocker for Firefox
Spend any amount of time on the Internet and odds are you'll install an ad blocker onto your Web browser of choice. You can tailor the ad blocker to block everything, certain ads, or to skip your favorite websites (like OCC), but all ad blockers are an extra installation. However, Mozilla is working on something in its Developer and Aurora builds of Firefox that may interest plenty of people. Mozilla has improved its tracking protection features in those two builds far beyond what its previous Do Not Track thing accomplished, and when enabled, chances are you won't see any ads on those websites. There still may be some ads, but for the most part, they're all gone, and without needing to install a separate ad blocker.
Right now, the enhanced tracking protection is only available in Firefox's private browsing mode and only in the Developer and Aurora builds. It is, of course, very early in development, as Mozilla still needs to figure out how to block the tracking without actually blocking the ads. Somehow I don't think too many people would mind if that didn't happen. One down side to the whole thing is the enhanced tracking may not ever arrive in the normal, non-private browsing mode, but that is a small price to pay.
Source: Geek
Read More ...
ECS Announces Z170-CLAYMORE Motherboard
ECS has announced the latest addition to its LEET line of motherboards, the Z170-CLAYMORE, targeted at the 14nm sixth generation Intel Core processors using the Z170 chipset. The board combines a Realtek RTL8110AS Ethernet port with the LEET network manager to provide LAGFree gaming which means "stable and lower latency while gameplay, communicate, downloading and web browsing at the same time." The CLAYMORE is also the first board to support HDMI 2.0 output with support for 4K UHD resolutions at up to 60 FPS. Gamers will have access to all of the graphical power they could want with five PCI Express Gen3 slots, optimized for dual graphics cards with independent bandwidth for each slot.
Source: Press Release
Read More ...
Intel Skylake Processors Facing Supply Shortage
The CEO of Asustek reported that there was a shortage of the latest Intel Skylake processors in the market, news that was then confirmed by Intel. Desktop and mobile processors are both feeling the effects of the shortage despite the fact that the reasons behind the shortage are unclear. Asustek CEO Jerry Shen addressed the shortage in a recent earnings conference stating, "In September we are going to produce a lot of ‘Skylake’ products, but we expect significant shortage of ‘Skylake’ globally, not just for Asus." Intel spokesman Daniel Snyder attempted to address the shortage stating, "We are experiencing supply tightness due to strong demand and expect additional volume to be available as Q3 progresses." It is also worth noting that once the processors get to manufacturers, there will be multiple additional weeks before products can get in the hands of consumers due to shipping times.
Source: Kit Guru
Read More ...
11 Security Flaws Found in Browsers
There is a lot involved in making a program run, and a lot of places something can go wrong, opening up vulnerabilities. Finding these issues can be difficult though, which is why tools are being created to analyze and find the problems, and awards are being given to support these efforts. The Internet Defense Prize is an example of this and has recently been awarded to researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
The researchers built a tool called CAVER for finding type confusion or bad casting errors. These issues can be used by an attacker to corrupt memory, causing malicious code to run instead of what is intended. It specifically looks at C++ problems, such as Chrome and Firefox and found some 11 vulnerabilities between them. The developers of both browsers confirmed and fixed the issues.
Source: Georgia Institute of Technology
Read More ...
Hardware Roundup: Monday, August 17, 2015, Edition
A new week is upon us, with several items to help get it started right. The Noctua NH-D15S CPU cooler is a slightly tweaked model of the older NH-D15 featuring an offset asymmetrical design and a single center-mount 140mm fan. We also have the Cooler Master QuickFire XTi, a full-size model of its popular mechanical keyboard line that comes with Cherry MX switches and blue/red backlighting. For some more control of your games, the Tt eSPORTS BLACK V2 Gaming Mouse gets put to the test to see how much it's been improved. Rounding things off for today is a look at DirectX 12 CPU and GPU performance in Stardock's Ashes of the Singularity benchmark.
CPU Cooling
Noctua NH-D15S @ ThinkComputers
Keyboards/Mice
Cooler Master QuickFire XTi @ LanOC Reviews
Tt eSPORTS BLACK V2 Gaming Mouse @ Madshrimps
Miscellany
DX12 GPU and CPU Performance Tested: Ashes of the Singularity Benchmark @ PC Perspective
Read More ...
New Solid State Memory Technology Developed
Solid state memory has had a profound effect on the present as it has enabled great speed, efficiency, and mobility in many devices. While traditional hard drives are still very useful, the advantages of SSDs cannot and are not being ignored. Naturally then, ways to improve SSDs are constantly being worked on, and researchers at Rice University have developed a new memory technology that could give Flash memory a run for its money.
This new technology is based on tantalum oxide, which is a common insulator. The device itself is a sandwich of platinum, tantalum, nanoporous tantalum oxide, graphene, and more platinum. The platinum parts are the two electrodes for the device, with the graphene separating them from the rest, preventing it from migrating into the tantalum. The tantalum and tantalum oxide layers are what store the information. An electrical current causes the oxygen ions and vacancies to move, changing the position of the barrier between them. Fortuitously the flow of oxygen ions actually acts as a barrier from crosstalk between the bits, which allows the device to achieve much higher densities than other tantalum oxide memories.
What the researchers have created could store 20 GB to a crossbar array, if suitably dense crossbar devices can be made. It also requires one hundred times less energy than current devices, uses only two electrodes, unlike Flash memory that requires three, and can be made at room temperature, so the dense crossbar array is only major hurdle left to commercialization.
Source: Rice University
Read More ...
Former Kaspersky Lab Employees Claim Company Targeted Rivals with Fake Malware
Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, which is one of the largest security companies in the world, continues to develop some of the best security suites available for consumers and businesses. Despite their excellent reputation, former employees of the company have just recently went public with details that surround unethical practices. The former employees claim that for more than a decade, with activity peaking between 2009 and 2013, Kaspersky Lab went on a mission to damage the reputation of its rivals by developing fake malware. The fake malware would trigger security suites developed by companies such as Avast, AVG, Microsoft, and others into classifying the harmless files as viruses. The former employees noted that some doctored files were even sent to VirusTotal, a website that provides free virus, malware, and URL online scanning through the use of 40 antivirus solutions.
Eugene Kaspersky, the co-founder of Kaspersky Lab and the individual that former employees say ordered some of the attacks due to his anger over companies emulating his software, has publically denied the allegations and stated that "Such actions are unethical, dishonest and their legality is at least questionable." Despite this, Reuters was previously told by executives at Avast, AVG, and Microsoft that someone had attempted to introduce false positives in recent years, though the each company had no comment on Kaspersky Lab possibly targeting them.
Source: Reuters
Read More ...
Available Tags:IBM , Linux , Mozilla , Firefox , Intel , Security , Hardware ,
No comments:
Post a Comment