Nasa Beams HD Video From Space Via Laser

 

 

 

 

 

 US space agency Nasa said Friday it has successfully beamed a high-definition video from the International Space Station to Earth using a new laser communications instrument, a technology demonstration that could help fundamentally change the way of communication in future deep space missions.

The transmission of the 175-megabit video entitled "Hello, World," took only 3.5 seconds, which corresponds to a data transmission rate of 50 megabits per second and would have taken more than 10 minutes using traditional downlink methods, Xinhua quoted Nasa as saying.
The entire video test, which occurred Thursday, lasted 148 seconds, the agency said.
Nasa said the technology demonstration called Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science (OPALS) focused laser energy to reach data rates between 10 and 1,000 times higher than current space communications, which rely on radio waves.
"Because the space station orbits Earth at 17,500 miles per hour, transmitting data from the space station to Earth requires extremely precise targeting," the agency said in a statement. "The process can be equated to a person aiming a laser pointer at the end of a human hair 30 feet away and keeping it there while walking."
To achieve this extreme precision during Thursday's demonstration, Nasa said the OPALS locked onto a laser beacon emitted by the Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory ground station at the Table Mountain Observatory in Wrightwood, California.
"It's incredible to see this magnificent beam of light arriving from our tiny payload on the space station," said Matt Abrahamson, OPALS mission manager at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
"We look forward to experimenting with OPALS over the coming months in hopes that our findings will lead to optical communications capabilities for future deep space exploration missions," he added.

After 'Godzilla Attack!' US Warns About Traffic-Sign Hackers

 

 

 

  

 

After hackers played several high-profile pranks with traffic signs, including warning San Francisco drivers of a Godzilla attack, the U.S. government advised operators of electronic highway signs to take "defensive measures" to tighten security.

Last month, signs on San Francisco's Van Ness Ave were photographed flashing "Godzilla Attack! Turn Back" and highway signs across North Carolina were tampered with last week to read "Hack by Sun Hacker."
The Department of Homeland Security's Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team, or ICS-CERT, this week advised cities, highway operators and other customers of digital-sign maker Daktronics Inc to take "defensive measures" to minimize the possibility of similar attacks.
It said that information had been posted on the Internet advising hackers how to access those systems using default passwords coded into the company's software. "ICS-CERT recommends entities review sign messaging, update access credentials and harden communication paths to the signs," the agency said in an alert posted on Thursday.
Jody Huntimer, a representative for Daktronics, declined to say if the recent attacks involved the bug reported by ICS-CERT.
"We are working with the ICS-CERT team to clarify the current alert and will release a statement once we have assessed the situation and developed customer recommendations," Huntimer said via email.
Krebs on Security, a widely read security blog, posted a confidential report from the Center for Internet Strategy, or CIS, which was sent to state security officials. It warned that the pranks created a public safety risk because drivers often slow or stop to view the signs and take pictures.

CIS also predicated that amateur hackers might attempt to hack into other systems in the coming weeks following the May 27 release of "Watch Dogs," a video game from Ubisoft focused on hacking critical infrastructure.
"CIS believes it is likely that a small percent of Watch Dog players will experiment with compromising computers and electronic systems outside of game play," the report said.

 

Theo smartphone case packs wirelessly charged backup battery

Designers at Theo Elements are looking to swell the ever-growing ranks of 3rd-party wireless charging solutions on the market with Theo Power – a case fitted with a both wireless charging technology and a removable back-up battery pack.

• 
• 
• 

Theo Power currently exists as a set of test models ready to work with the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the iPhone 5/5s. The designers are aiming to raise enough funds via Kickstarter to get the product to market later this year.
The unit consists of three components: the case itself, a removable battery, and a charging pad. It's reinforced for physical protection and works with Qi-standard charging, the most common market standard for wireless charging technology on the market today. LG’s Nexus 5, HTC’s Droid DNA, and the Nokia Lumia 920 are all examples of phones that have Qi-standard wireless charging abilities built in.
Similar to the Duracell Powermat, Theo Power incorporates a battery into the design. In this case it's a slimline 1500 mAh battery (for reference, the Galaxy S4 works has a 2600 mAh battery and the iPhone 5s uses a 1560 mAh battery) that can be charged simultaneously with the phone, though the company says that its "Smart Charge" functionality will ensure that the device is charged first. The battery can also be removed from the case and charged separately, or the case and phone can be charged via both a cable and wireless charging to significantly reduce charging time.
The system also allows the case/battery to be used for charging any other device you’ve got on hand – just so long as the cord matches your port. For example, the iPhone 5/5s Theo Power case can also charge the iPad Air or iPad mini. Reserve battery levels are monitored through LED indicators on the front of the case.

Theo Power can be ordered in advance of shipping for $50 through the product’s Kickstarter page. The company has set an estimated delivery date of July 2014 for the first batch of cases. Nearer the end of the year, Theo Power will go on sale for $119.99 if it hits its crowdfunding goals.

 

Scientists from CERN and MIT launch encrypted email service

The privacy of the data that we put online has been a hot topic over the last year. In order to protect against unwanted snooping, a group of scientists has created a new secure email service. ProtonMail provides end-to-end encryption, meaning that even the company itself can't even see the content of your messages.

• 
• 
• 

The service started being developed in 2013 by a group of CERN scientists who wanted a more secure and private internet, in part as a response to the Edward Snowden leaks. "We began thinking about this problem long before the Snowden leaks, but the leaks were what drove us to take action, as they truly demonstrated how much online privacy had eroded," company co-founder Andy Yen told Gizmag.
The company is advised by the MIT Venture Mentoring Service and is developed, in part at MIT. Earlier this year, ProtonMail was a semi-finalist in the 2014 MIT 100K Startup Launch competition. The initial team, however, was formed via a CERN Facebook group made-up of scientists from CERN that, in some way, wanted to help improve society.

The group held "hackathons" to work on the idea, and much time was spent identifying the problems with existing means encrypting email and trying to find solutions. "What we quickly found out was that existing solutions were much too complicated to be used by the general public and this led us on the path towards creating an easy-to-use solution," explained Yen.
One of the other difficulties the group encountered was getting web browsers to manage the encryption process. The team found that its approach to the encryption of data required a lot of processing power and that web browsers tended not to be "high performance" enough to carry it out. As such, a great deal of work was undertaken to ensure that the encryption process could be made to work on all types of devices, and on older browsers.
ProtonMail uses end-to-end encryption. "End-to-end encryption basically means the user's data is encrypted before it leaves their computer and can only be decrypted by the recipient," says Yen. "With this system, the ProtonMail servers never have access to unencrypted user data and cannot actually read any of our users' emails."

ProtonMail touts a number of other features that are used to improve its security. The company is incorporated in Switzerland and has all of its servers based there too, allowing its users to benefit from that country's strict privacy laws. IP addresses are not logged and no personal information is required in order to sign up for an account. For paid accounts, users can pay with Bitcoin, and even cash.
The term "NSA proof" has been used widely elsewhere to describe ProtonMail, but it's a term that Yen is not keen on. "We don't like the term because our goal is not to guard against only the NSA," he points out. "There are many other organizations we also want to protect against. People often ask us if ProtonMail is 100 percent secure, and our answer is that it is impossible to have 100 percent security. What ProtonMail does is makes mass surveillance by organizations, such as the NSA, so difficult that it is no longer practical."

Samsung unveils first Tizen-based smartphone

 The South Korean firm, probably best known for its popular line of Galaxy smartphones, has unveiled its first device to run the open source Tizen OS. The handset, known as the Samsung Z (no Android, no Galaxy), looks solid on the spec sheet and will launch first in Russia.

The handset is powered by an unspecified 2.3 GHz quad core CPU, backed up by 2 GB RAM and with 16 and 32 GB storage options, as well as a microSD card slot for expansion up to 64 GB. The device is packing 8 MP and 2.1 MP cameras on the front and rear, and a range of sensors including an accelerometer, gyroscope, fingerprint scanner and heart rate sensor.
The smartphone’s biggest hiccup is its somewhat disappointing 4.8-inch 1280 x 720 display. This isn’t quite a flagship device, so it’s understandable that not all the hardware will be high-end, but it would have been nice to see a full HD offering on Tizen’s first proper outing.
The handset runs on Tizen 2.2.1, features LTE connectivity and is kept running by a 2,600 mAh battery. Though a battery of that size seems generous for a device carrying a 720p screen, with no details on the CPU, it’s not possible to say what sort of battery life that will translate into.

The device’s faux-leather back clearly references the company’s popular Android-powered Galaxy range, but the styling is less accomplished with square shoulders and a bland design language. It’s a clean look, but there’s nothing particularly high-end about it. On the plus side, the handset comes in at a trim 8.5 mm (0.33 in) and weighs just 136 g (0.3 lb).
Looking past the hardware, what’s easily the most interesting thing about the device is its software. Tizen OS is an HTML5-friendly, open source platform steered by Samsung and Intel, and designed to be scalable over a range of devices, from smartphones to laptops and beyond.
Though there is some significant buzz surrounding the software, it’s difficult to see it seriously competing with the likes of Android and iOS, whose superior app selection and years of fine tuning make them near impossible to match at this point. Samsung seems to be aware of this issue, offering special promotional offers to new developers and hosting local app challenges in Russia and other CIS countries around the device’s launch.
As previously stated, the Samsung Z will hit Russian shores first, launching in two colors (black and gold) in Q3 2014. Though we do know that the device will see wider release in the future, there’s no word yet on what it will actually cost.

Apple’s new Swift language explained: A clever move to boost iOS, while holding Android apps back

18
inShare

While Apple’s WWDC keynote yesterday was full of exciting new changes and features, one piece of news caught everyone off guard: With iOS 8 and OS X 10.10, and the the latest version of the Xcode developer tools, Apple has introduced a whole new programming language called Swift. According to Apple, Swift will make it a lot easier and more fun to develop apps for both iOS and OS X — in contrast to the current language, Objective-C, which has been likened by esteemed programmers to pulling teeth. Swift will also apparently bring a significant performance boost over Objective-C programs.
While Apple is being fairly coy about the exact reasoning behind the launch of Swift, it’s probably to reel in more developers, who will then create more apps, ensuring the continued dominance of iOS app ecosystem. But hey, we’re getting ahead of ourselves: What is the Swift programming language, anyway? And how can switching to a new programming language provide a massive 50% performance boost over a language that is already considered to be pretty fast?

What is Swift?

A small example of some Swift source code

For a start, the Swift language bears no relation to the Swift (A6) CPU architecture or the existing Swift parallel scripting language. Obviously, when Apple decides on a name for a product, it doesn’t let existing products or trademarks get in the way.

In the words of Apple, Swift is like “Objective-C without the C.” The introduction to Swift on the Apple developer website outlines Swift as safe, concise, and interactive (your code is interpreted and rendered in a live “Playground” view in the Xcode IDE).

In this context, “safe” mostly refers to the fact that the language is type safe — but thanks to type inference, type declarations are less onerous, making Swift more concise than C or Objective-C. The Switch statement is also is also safer and easier to use than the C counterpart. The two-phase initialization process for classes, slightly tweaked from the Objective-C way of doing things, also improves safety. Along with type inference, Swift also introduces very concise closures (lambdas).

A larger Swift source code sample, this time showing the Switch statement. It’s fairly human-readable, even for non-programmers.

On the compilation and runtime side of things, Swift targets the same Cocoa (OS X) and Cocoa Touch (iOS) APIs, and uses the same LLVM as Objective-C. Swift code can co-exist with Objective-C code in the same project, encouraging adoption.

A deep analysis of Swift is beyond the scope of this story, but in general it shares a lot of similarities with other modern languages, such as Rust, with a lot of popular ideas and patterns that have been assimilated from other languages. There will be a lot of cries that Apple copied/imitated/ripped off other languages — but ignore them. When it comes to programming languages, this kind of imitation and embrace-and-extent evolution is the norm, and a sign that everything is working as intended.

For programmers and the otherwise technically inclined, Apple has published a free 500-page Swift Programming Language book if you want to learn more about the language. You’ll need an Apple Developer account (free) to download the beta of Xcode 6, which fully supports Swift.

 Swift performance, compared to Python and Objective-C

Will Swift apps be faster than Objective-C apps?

On stage at WWDC, Apple’s Craig Federighi showed some interesting graphs that appeared to show a huge 40-50% performance lead for Swift over Objective-C. He did not say that apps written in Swift would be faster than Objective-C, though. And he was very picky about which benchmarks he showed. In reality, Swift is very unlikely to be significantly faster than Objective-C. They are both statically typed, compiled languages — using the same LLVM compiler, no less. To obtain such a graph, Apple probably had to choose an Objective-C feature that is known to be slow/buggy — or intentionally optimize a Swift feature, purely for the sake of producing a pretty graph.

We look forward to doing some real benchmarking in the coming weeks and months, though, as Swift apps start pop up on the App Store.

Why did Apple release Swift?

It all boils down to this question. Why, with a huge pool of developers who are already very knowledgeable in the ways (and quirks) of Objective-C, is Apple releasing a new programming language? Doesn’t the world already have enough programming languages? Why didn’t Apple choose another modern language, like Rust or Go?
There are a variety of possible answers, depending on how cynical you are. The nicest explanation is that Objective-C is a horrible language to learn — and so the introduction of Swift will massively increase the number of developers who are happy and willing to develop iOS and OS X apps. (The counterpoint to this is that we may then see a lot more junk apps in the App Store.)

The LLVM logo

A more complete explanation is that Objective-C is an old language — it just had its 30th birthday — and so it does make sense to introduce a newer language that more closely conforms to the modern methods of app development. As a corollary to this, Apple is the creator and curator of Swift, meaning it has a lot more flexibility to add and change functions as time goes by, rather than being forever shackled by the Objective-C framework. Think of it as an investment in the future.
The cynical explanation is that Apple wants to use its heft to weaken the Android app ecosystem. Thanks to their shared support for C, and tools to port Objective-C to Java, it’s currently fairly easy to port an app from iOS to Android. Porting Swift apps to Android, on the other hand, would be a lot more time consuming.
In reality, it’s probably a mix of all three reasons. Ultimately, there are a lot of good reasons for creating your own, tailor-made programming language. The difficult bit is in getting people to use and embrace the new language. Apple, with its captive army of millions of developers, certainly won’t have that problem.

 

                  AMD Launches New Mobile APUs

                                                

The new APUs supports 12 compute cores, Ultra HD resolutions and the Heterogeneous System Architecture

inShare

Following Intel’s announcement earlier this week, arch rival AMD has announced the new Kaveri line of APUs at Computex in Taipei.

Bernd Lienhard, Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Client Business Unit, AMD, said, “With a combination of superior total compute performance, stunning graphics and efficient power usage alongside industry-first technologies, these new APUs set a new bar for cutting-edge consumer and commercial PCs.”

As with the desktop version, the mobile Kaveri APU also features AMD's Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, which enables gamers experience high-performance video games with Mantle, a tool for alleviating CPU bottlenecks such as API overhead and inefficient multi-threading. Mantle, which is basically AMD's answer to Microsoft's Directx, enables improvements in graphics processing performance. AMD claims that Kaveri teamed with Mantle enables it to offer built-in Radeon dual graphics to provide performance boosts ranging from 49 percent to 108 percent.

The Kaveri mobile APU architecture features up to 12 compute cores—four CPU plus eight GPU—to deliver better performance and responsiveness on devices across various workloads and applications. It also supports Ultra HD (UHD) 4K resolutions and new video post-processing enhancements that can upscale HD 1080p videos to 4K quality on UHD-enabled monitors and TVs.

The new Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) allows the CPU and GPU to work together by quickly dividing and directing the tasks toward the appropriate cores and reducing the fetch cycles from the system memory. Analysts expect that HSA can be a potential game changer for AMD once the software platform makers start creating software that can take advantage of the new architecture.

In other news AMD announced new x86 AMD Embedded G-Series system-on-chip (SoC) for embedded applications, including early adoption by HP for thin client deployment in healthcare, finance, education and retail, as well as Advantech for industrial applications in rugged environments.

AMD Embedded G-Series platform, ships with features such as  error-correction code (ECC) memory support, dual- and quad-core variants, and a discrete-class GPU and I/O controller on the same die. The new G-Series processors are pin-compatible across the AMD G-Series SoC and works at around 5W TDP.

AMD has not announced pricing of the new SKUs. Broad availability is forecasted for Q32014.