Just as Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) CEO Brian Krzanich opens the regular staff meetings before a dramatically reduced IDF2015 Shenzhen conference, it is a good time to review how government and enterprises don’t see eye to eye when it comes to strategic business.

China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer is world’s fastest supercomputer, at 33 PFLOPS demonstrated and 55 PFLOPS theoretical performance.

Remember the Tianhe-2 machine at Guangzhou Supercomputer Center, the current World’s number one according to Top 500 Supercomputer list? Unlike some other China supercomputers – Tianhe-2 is fully Intel based machine,  the world’s largest assembly of Intel Xeon CPUs and Xeon Phi accelerators.

Even after Intel ‘opened the kimono’ and gave a nearly 70%  discount on its processors and accelerators, it has given Intel, and therefore US technology sector a major foothold in China and Asian region as such. Over the course of past two years, we were involved in a lot of discussions with Intel staff who were not privy to see the financial impact of the deal — and even argued our undoubtedly solid information. We’re not here to report how things should be, or are in marketing and investor presentations to its numerous staff, but how things really are.

During 2015, the Tianhe-2 supercomputer was supposed to be doubled in its size, up to 110 PFLOPs peak, again using the very same Intel processors and accelerators. Since now these are mature products with lower real manufacturing cost for Intel, they could finally make some real money.

Well, it was not to be: our tweety bird from the window chirped to us that Uncle Sam has put this supercomputer centre, together with National University of Defense Technology in Changsha, the system’s creators, and Tianjin centre, among others, on so a so-called “Denial List”, which prevents any high technology from the USA to be sold to these sites. Our sources used even harsher words.

Knowing that these several sites alone are expected to order some 250+ PFLOPS of compute in the next few years (around 500,000 top-end Broadwell-EP Xeon E5v4 processors, or  approximately $1 billion high margin list price) and they were THE Intel friendly ones, this is quite a loss to Intel, thanks to Uncle Sam.

But, what’s worse strategic loss in time is that, based on this decision as an excuse, indigenous China high end processor architectures can now push the government to gradually remove any dependence on US. This means just one thing: an AMD or Intel x86 processor technology is increasingly becoming errata non grata. Should the Chinese government react in force, it will give the Chinese vendors the blank check support to go all the way a developing their Alpha, POWER and MIPS processors for both the government and the mainstream commercial use.

You may think they are not up to the mark, but remember how fast British ARM architecture became the dominant processing architecture in the world. And this group doesn’t need to worry about the antiquated x86 ISA, worry about satisfying the dumbed down shareholder masses, or overpaying their marketing and sales staff, as well as the fat check, golden parachute-protected CxOs.

They have taken the best that the USA has developed (some of key Alpha, GPGPU and MIPS architects left US over the course of past four years, a lot of them due to non-renewed visas) and discarded due to corporate shenanigans, and the continued developing it much farther than anyone expected both on hardware and software side.

Five years ago, ShenWei showed a CPU that performed faster than the fastest GPUs of the time. Now, fifth generation is approaching, slotting between Tesla and FirePro GPGPUs and next-gen Xeon Phi accelerators. However, this is not an accelerator or a GPGPU – this is a CPU.

So, thanks to Uncle Sam, China might not have a 110 PFLOPS Intel based supercomputer but it definitely will launch a 100 PFLOPS system based on upcoming 64-core, TFLOPS-class ShenWei Alpha, with true blue CPUs possibly faster per socket then even the next generation Xeon Phi or Volta/Pascal-based Teslas.  Next, of course 100 PFLOPS Chinese POWER8 or 9 — (thank you IBM) and then possibly even Loongson MIPS – -it may come back into the high end field with renewed government support because of this Uncle Sam move. All are clean, elegant, scalable high end RISC architectures.

So who are the winners and losers from this?

NUDT and Tianhe may be the losers for now, but only short term. They will simply speed up their HPC ARM plan.

Intel comes out the big loser from this and a lot: who will want to do a phased deployment large x86 machine in China now, and worry about future phases? Then comes Uncle Sam himself: they lost even that little bit of influence on the high end China HPC. How is that for “cutting your nose to spite your face?”.

VR WORLD’s  Analysis: US government moves accelerate the Chinese CPU roadmap while curtailing juiciest sales for Intel and other US vendors.

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Mobile World Congress is all about mobility-enhancing technologies. But while much of the technology media is focused on the consumer-facing technologies and devices during the event, MWC also celebrates innovations in the underlying tech that supports our devices and networks. As part of MWC 2015, this author was tasked to be among the panel of judges for the Best Mobile Technology Breakthrough category.

Entries in this field mostly consist of vendors and solution providers with devices or embedded technologies that improve performance, connectivity and platform convergence meant for mobile use.

One of the finalists is Airvana OneCell, which is an LTE small cell system meant for both enterprise and consumer-facing applications, which mobile operators can use to augment their capabilities in servicing customers in urban and indoor settings.

Airvana’s technology is borne out of the need to have strong wireless signals even inside buildings. One limitation of LTE — and wireless signals in general — is that signal strength is significantly reduced with obstructions. Building foundations act like a cage, after all, where radio signals are good at bouncing within the structure, but not necessarily across from inside-to-outside and vice-versa.

“Outdoor macro cell towers cannot fully penetrate building walls to deliver quality LTE service indoors, and upgrading legacy distributed antenna systems (DAS) for LTE is prohibitively expensive,” says Airvana. An alternative would be standalone small cells, but this is not effective in large enterprise settings, because these create many “cell borders.” In addition, these are not easy nor cost-efficient to deploy.

“These borders create large areas of interference between cells that result in low throughput, poor VoLTE quality, frequent handovers, complex RF planning, and macro interference challenges. Furthermore, they have static capacity, limited upgradeability, and support only a single operator.”

A cross-carrier solution

Airvana’s OneCell solution addresses the challenge of delivering consistent, high-speed LTE services for multiple operators, but without the cost and complexity of a DAS. Basically considered as a “cloud RAN”, the solution involves a single baseband controller, with radio points distributed throughout a building or establishment. These radio points act as a single cell, which results in zero cell borders, border interference and handovers — which mean better energy-efficiency for the connected mobile devices.

Industry experts consider cloud RAN as a disruptive technology because of two benefits: centralization and virtualization. Centralizing the baseband means significantly cheaper operational expenses — operators in South Korea, China and Japan have demonstrated 30% to 50% OPEX reduction with the use of such technologies. Meanwhile, virtualization of network functions will reduce capital expenditure, particularly the need to build standalone cell towers or micro-cell sites.

An added benefit of OneCell’s solution is that the nodes connect with each other via regular ethernet connection, and each radio point runs on power-over-ethernet, further reducing the complexity of deployment. According to a study by Real Wireless, deployment of OneCell is 69% less expensive than a traditional DAS. Material savings from the passive infrastructure can reach 90%, while simplified cabling means labor savings of 75% to 90%.

And a bigger benefit for enterprises: convergence across carriers. “Large enterprises and public spaces are typically multi-operator environments, and OneCell is designed to cost-effectively support multiple wireless providers with a single infrastructure,” says Airvana. “Architecture is designed to allow operators to take advantage of upcoming LTE capabilities, such as carrier aggregation, Coordinated Multipoint (CoMP) and distributed Multi-User MIMO (MU-MIMO) via software upgrades, without replacing any installed equipment.”

Full signal bars

Scalability and cost efficiency are the most relevant benefits for enterprises and other establishments that require indoor wireless broadband connectivity. Meanwhile, for consumers, it means excellent connectivity even within buildings, for a “five signal bar experience.”

“There’s a clear interest among operators in serving indoor enterprise environments with scalable, distributed solutions that are also cost-effective,” says Ed Gubbins, senior analyst at Current Analysis. The potential market for OneCell’s technology is 1 billion users, as the Chelmsford, MA-based firm has dealings with mobile operators from Europe, Asia and North America.

The direction here is clear: the combination of centralized and distributed architectures provided by technologies like the OneCell are a boon to those seeking scalable and cost-efficient means to improve quality of service for mobile broadband users.

The post MWC 2015: Airvana OneCell Enables Stronger Indoor LTE appeared first on VR World.

Apple (NASDAQ:APPL) announced Monday that is plans to construct two data centers in Europe and Denmark to power iTunes and iOS services for customers across Europe.

These two data centers are to be powered by 100% renewable energy, and will create thousands of new jobs during the process.

“We are grateful for Apple’s continued success in Europe and proud that our investment supports communities across the continent,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, in a press release. “This significant new investment represents Apple’s biggest project in Europe to date. We’re thrilled to be expanding our operations, creating hundreds of local jobs and introducing some of our most advanced green building designs yet.”

Apple’s decision to build these data centers in Europe comes with two sets of advantages. First, having servers outside of US soil keeps data away from the quickly expanding surveillance state. While there are court rulings which state that US firms must hand over data even if abroad, these may not survive the court circuit of continuous appeals. Because of this trend, Europe has seen an uptick in data center construction as firms opt to harbor data in jurisdictions with less intrusive laws on state surveillance.

This also gives Apple a chance to tap into its massive cash reserves that are stored outside the US. Should Apple repatriate that cash to the US it would need to pay tax on it. Keeping it outside the US both puts the cash to work and also saves Apple from the tax burden.

Apple says that both centers will be operational by 2017.

The post Apple Building 100% Renewable Energy Powered Data Centers in Europe appeared first on VR World.

India-based software and services giant Infosys (NYSE:INFY, BOM:500209) has announced the acquisition of enterprise automation startup Panaya, in a deal that values the US-based startup at $200 million. This investment is in line with the strategic thrusts of Infosys’ new CEO, Vishal Sikka, who aims to incorporate better use of automation and artificial intelligence in accomplishing repetitive tasks for client-based projects.

At its core, Panaya is a SaaS platform that enables enterprises to automate the testing process for managing their enterprise resources planning (ERP) software updates — Oracle EBS, SAP and SalesForce — particularly tracking potential pain points and coding issues, then making recommendations for fixes. However, the potential is greater. “The acquisition of Panaya is a key step in renewing and differentiating our service lines,” says Sikka in announcing the acquisition. “This will help amplify the potential of our people, freeing us from the drudgery of many repetitive tasks, so we may focus more on the important, strategic challenges faced by our clients.”

A $42.5 billion company, Infosys has been facing challenges in growing its business in the wake of Sikka’s ascent as CEO and managing director, after stepping down from his post as head of technology at German enterprise software giant SAP. The firm faces management churn and high attrition rates among its 160,000 staff globally, even as it is the second-largest IT outsourcer in India. The Panaya acquisition is thus more of an intellectual property acquisition than one of customer or data. By incorporating enterprise automation, Infosys can potentially improve the efficiency of its business services that range from banking, finance, manufacturing and other industries.

Prior to acquisition, Panaya has raised $59 million in at least six funding rounds, so far, with a $20 million Series E round announced in January 2015. For its part, Infosys has expressed interest in acquiring Europe-based technology firms to bolster its presence in the region, which is considered to be a difficult market for the Bangalore-based company, with high language and cultural barriers.

The post Infosys Banks on AI with Acquisition of Enterprise Automation Startup Panaya appeared first on VR World.

Google Taiwan (NASDAQ: GOOGL) launched a tutorial and training program – the Digital Mars Initiative – to help college graduates hook up with local companies and eventually get hired.

“Why ‘Digital Mars Initiative?’ The name ‘Mars’ came into the picture because these ‘Martians’ think differently with more innovative and new ideas and we are helping them to get into the digital marketing field,” said Stanley Chen (陳俊廷), Google Taiwan’s country director.

Chen made his remarks during a press conference at Google Taiwan’s headquarters on Feb. 5. During previous conversations with Google’s vendors, Chen said, he has often heard complaints that employers had hard time recruiting the right talents while college graduates had a hard time getting hired, because what they have learned on the campus may not be the advantage for them to be recruited.

“We decided to offer the chance to help, train and recruit these young men and help our friends in different industries find their right employees at the same time,” Chen said.

Chen said that the 60 companies in 13 industries participated in the program and offered up to 170 vacancies in marketing, gaming, e-commerce and mass communications, while the average monthly paycheck for these jobs would fall between US$967 and US$1,451. The “Digital Mars Initiative” is the largest talent recruiting project across the Asia-Pacific region, Chen said, and is aiming to help at least 2,000 Taiwanese college graduates by the end of this year.

Those who register online will receive free courses by Google, including digital marketing and keyword advertising – the Good Adwords.  After they complete the courses, Google will also offer chances for them to be certified.

“Google is optimistic about the potential and competitive advantage of the Taiwanese workforce and will continue to strengthen local young people’s abilities through diverse and long-term talent cultivation projects,” said Google Taiwan Managing Director Chien Lee-feng (簡立峰).

The post Google Taiwan Lanches “Digital Mars Initiative” appeared first on VR World.

Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) may have had a financial black hole with all the tablet and phone spends over the past few years fighting the ARM incumbency. Obviously, the outlay was so bad that the whole division had to fold under the PC Client one, leaving the latter’s boss Kirk Skaugen with the tough job on the integration – or, most likely, pushing Core microarchitecture approach further down the price scale to counter the increasingly complex ARM cores.

On the other hand, the high end Enterprise division had yet another stellar year, with little competition to bother about. Xeons are everywhere, and approaching 95% of the worldwide server and related CPU market is about as good as it gets before it becomes an absolute monopoly. The cores are mature and well tuned, as well as the ecosystem from memory to I/O to boards and everything else that matters.

On that subject, Haswell brought something really important to the table, overlooked by many: its AVX2 instruction extensions now handle the more common integer, not just floating point, operations. If in the future the address calculations are added to the roster, you pretty much don’t need the old base X86 set. Most of the software that matters is already AVX optimised, and more will follow. Would a SIMD and vector style pure AVX ISA, at some point, replace the old X86 within Intel?

The post Year-End Thoughts: Intel Goes High-End in 2015? appeared first on VR World.

Koss Headphones had a 2014 full of flagship products launched this year, with its sights aimed at an optimistic future. The NFC enabled BT540i simplified Bluetooth listening on mobile devices, then their ergonomic SP330 & SP540 delivered comfortable music enjoyment for all. Finally, Koss will end the year on a high note with its new Pro4S stereophones, geared toward studio and music monitoring.

But what are “studio” headphones, and what makes them different from other models? Most headphones may have a compensated or enhanced EQ to tailor towards certain listener preferences — i.e. more bass. Reference or studio monitoring needs to be free of any tuning, for those who need to listen to an accurate representation of their content, like audio engineers and music producers.

So, we put the Pro4S to the test all month — at home, at a Hollywood recording studio, and on a TV production. Here’s what we found:

The design

The Pro4S is a full-sized, circumaural studio headphone that is a fine blend of transparent sound, comfortable durability, and practical design. Weighing a hair under 7 oz (195 g), even as an over-ear model, it’s compact and light enough for use in any environment.

Its tough, aluminum internal frame is encased by both metal and plastic molding, and outfitted with soft, breathable materials for the best strength and comfort. The headband is supported with memory foam and mesh cloth that feels weightless, even after many hours of wear. The ear cup hinges are also metallic and soft-locking, for added durability without creating temporal pressure.

Comfort and weight are vital for studio applications, where engineers can log many more hours of use than home listeners. That’s why the Pro4S also features the same “D-profile” ear cups first featured on Koss’ classic Pro4AAA, and its recent SP series headphones. Because of this shape, you’ll get great passive isolation that’s evenly distributed more naturally around your ear.  These cast aluminum ear cups have a high quality feel, and are fashioned with a shaved silver trim that may scratch easily, which isn’t a deal breaker for us, but still worth mentioning.

The cups lay flat for storage inside an included soft clamshell case, and the hinges can fold the ear cups towards the headband for further portability. This especially helps for location audio work, where space is limited and mobility is key. The headband is adjustable at discreet steps, and even at full extension, there doesn’t seem to be any signs of stress when bending or tweaking the phones.

Another key feature on the Pro4S is its dual-entry detachable cord. The circuitry automatically routes a stereo signal to both drivers, regardless of which side you plug into. Plus, the remaining open end becomes a pass-through output, so you could daisy chain another Pro4S alongside it.

The included 4.5 ft. (1.4 m) cable is coiled in the middle, in between two long straight sections. This distributes the cable’s weight more evenly, and helps clear up obstructions when plugging into any source. This is also half the length and weight of Sony’s MDR-7506 coiled cable, which is almost 10 ft. long.

While a longer cable could be more accommodating, Koss hit the right mark in length versus obstructiveness, with the added convenience of simply unplugging oneself from the cord entirely. The only downside is if this cable is misplaced, users will have a hard time finding a replacement other than what’s provided by Koss, because of the recessed ports on the Pro4S.

Made with rugged materials, comfortable cushioning, and lined with a simple silver trim, the Koss Pro4S is dressed to impress and made with comfort in mind. Aesthetics and features are great, but does it have the sound signature to match?

The sound

Studio or reference headphones are usually advertised to have a flat frequency response, where, ideally, all signals are reproduced uniformly across all frequencies without bias (example above). The Pro4S is driven by Koss’ new SLX40 elements that are tuned for reference, delivering what they advertise as “incredibly accurate and unbiased sound”.

Its specs seem to be on-par with other studio models, with a few differences:

• Response: 10 Hz – 25 kHz
• Sensitivity: 99 dB SPL
• Impedance: 35 Ohms
• THD: <0.3% average (@400 Hz – 1 kHz, 95 dB SPL)
• Max Load: 500 mW

While response and sensitivity are where they need to be, its has a lower impedance and load rating than most models. This is probably to accommodate a wide range of home studio setups and listening, but may have less gain headroom for some professional board outputs.

We lent these stereophones to several engineers in the music and film audio worlds, and their feedback was consistent. The Pro4S, in general, has the soundscape of a studio headphone, but seems to have a character of its own, with additional warmth in the mid range, and clarity in higher registers. However, no frequency bands seem exaggerated, and it retrieves enough detail in all ranges to gauge how tracks sit in a mix.

There are moments when this perceived slight emphasis can sit on the harsh side, when it comes to certain instrumentation. One of the music engineers who tested our Pro4S had difficulty assessing if the twang of an overdriven Telecaster was distorting. Upon switching back to his usual pair, this wasn’t the case.

Despite its accented soundscape, the Pro4S at least provides listeners with a pleasurable experience. For what it’s worth, casually listening to finished music with this pair is actually not as thin or lacking as other studio models. It may not perform like a true “reference” model, but it can at least produce a more neutral sound to a variety of subjective preferences.

The industry

This isn’t to discount the clarity of the Pro4S, which is especially beneficial for tracking vocals. We tested out this pair at a Hollywood dubbing stage, and could properly judge tonal differences between the originally recorded dialogue and the replacement voice-overs. These sessions can last for many hours a day, but there were no complaints of discomfort from the recording team. They especially enjoyed the detachable cord, so they could quickly leave the board for a coffee, without having to take off the headphones entirely.

We also lent the Pro4S to a couple production sound mixers, who primarily record on-set dialogue. Even on an upcoming reality TV series, where there are many mic sources and inputs involved, and characters unpredictably speaking to one other, the Pro4S could retrieve enough detail from all sources to properly EQ and mix. While on location, these headphones are great for long listening sessions, but its materials may heat up considerably on a warm day outside.

Let’s take a moment to compare the Pro4S to two current favorites in the biz — Sony’s workhorse MDR-7506, considered an industry standard, and Sennheiser’s more compact HD25-1, another widely compatible reference pair. All three of these headphones are geared towards professional markets, and the Pro4S seems to be the middle ground that addresses issues with current models.

The 7506’s are considered the standard and used in a variety of applications. It’s also circumaural, with minimal pressure around the ear, and a neutral soundscape that is uniform from production to post. The earcups fold inward towards the headband, but because it has a much longer cable, the 7506 can easily become a tangled mess during storage.

The on-ear HD25’s are more compact and also great for many situations, especially while on location. They have great isolation, and seem to distribute pressure evenly across the adjustable headband. However, the on-ear style can become fatiguing during long sessions, especially if the listener is wearing glasses.

Take the isolation and compactness of the HD25’s, with the sound and comfort of the 7506, add a detachable cable, and the Pro4S is a nice marriage between the two.

The verdict

Not only is the Pro4S quite possibly the most comfortable pair of headphones of its class, it has class too. It may have a sound signature that slightly deviates from a promise of “incredibly accurate and unbiased sound”, but as always, Koss’ functional design and build quality places the listening experience as a whole first and foremost. At $149 USD, the Pro4S is worth experiencing, no matter where your studio happens to be.

The post Koss Headphones Pro4S: Monitoring With Class appeared first on VR World.

In case you missed hearing about the stunt that TGI Fridays was doing for the holidays, the “Mistletoe Drone” was a remotely controlled quadcopter with mistletoe hanging beneath it.

The quadcopter would be flown around the restraunt as a sort of roving kiss-cam.  You know it as that entertaining thing that you enjoy at sporting events, so why wouldn’t you want it when you go out to eat?  The seasonal promo has been jumping around from location to location with success and without incident until December 4th at the chain’s Sheepshead Bay location. The operator had a 10 inch quadcopter that he encouraged a reporter from Courier Life to let land on her hand.  When she flinched after the quadcopter touched down it went careening into the photographer’s face.

Reports say that the operator David Quiones stated that there had been no incidents before and even blamed the reporters.  Though it should be noted that operators of RC aircraft need to be in control of what they are piloting and use the utmost caution to prevent injury to others. A spokeswoman for TGI Fridays said that the prior events had no casualties and dismissed the reporter’s concerns about future injuries.  What is most troubling is the statement of the operator to the reporters, which Quiones said “If people get hurt, they’re going to come regardless. People get hurt in airplanes, they still fly.  There is a risk involved — anything flying, there is risk.”

It is amazing that there have not been issues before as flying copters inside that are that powerful is a very dangerous thing to do.  The 23 inch six motor copter that they also use did not have blade protectors for  whirling 5 inch blades when the Courier Life photographed it flying around.  These blades are spinning at very high rates of speed and are very dangerous and should be protected in a situation like this.  It is peculiar since there are photos at other locations that show the same copter with protectors on.  One can only be thankful it was the smaller of the two that inflicted the damage, as the larger one most definitely would have been much more gruesome.

The post TGI Fridays' Mistletoe Drone Stunt Ends The Obvious Way appeared first on VR World.

1. Regin. /ˈreɪɡɪn/ 1. (Norse myth) a dwarf smith, tutor of Sigurd, whom he encouraged to kill Fafnir for the gold he guarded.

Regin is essentially a murderous dwarf who is caught/killed by his own greed. This Norse mythology is at the core a description of the Regin virus that has injected itself across the globe and today has finally been brought to light by Symantec and Kaspersky researchers. The Regin cybvervirus is a virus that has been tracked over the course of the past few years by security firms like Symantec, Kaspersky and McAfee, but they simply did not have enough data to build the whole picture of the computer virus’ scope nor its target. As a result, this research has been going on for quite some time and today multiple security companies have published their findings on the Regin malware and what it seeks to accomplish once it has infected a system.

According to Symantec’s research, Regin is being used as a covert espionage tool to go after very specific targets and infect them at a very deep level to either gain access to information or to gain access to a user of that network’s information. They say that Regin is a very complicated and highly encrypted piece of malware that hides its final form from anyone looking to find it unless they have access to all five stages of the malware’s unpacking. They detail the process in their technical whitepaper but it is essentially a multi-stage virus that hides its ultimate target and execution unless users can obtain every form/stage of the virus’ unpacking until it becomes the final payload.

This multi-stage approach is similar to what was seen from Duqu and Stuxnet and is once again very likely to be a sovereign-built piece of malware from some government. And as you can see, the targets that it goes after are very broad and appear to be focused mostly developing countries with Russia, Belgium and Germany being the exceptions. Those countries according to Kaspersky are:

Algeria
Afghanistan
Belgium
Brazil
Fiji
Germany
Iran
India
Indonesia
Kiribati
Malaysia
Pakistan
Russia
Syria

However, if you use Symantec’s data, the list of countries actually expands to include Saudi Arabia, Austria, Ireland and Mexico.

Regin Countries

Additionally, Kaspersky discovered a strong attack on GSM networks, especially in the case of Belgium where an entire operator was infiltrated by this malware and had publicly announced that they had been attacked, but were not aware of the perpetrator nor the target. What’s interesting, however, is that both Kaspersky and Symantec had discovered that this malware’s structure and payload delivery system (the mutli-stage approach) were specifically designed to obscure the malware’s existence and once it had infected a system it was designed to be inconspicuous as it continued to linger on the infected system, making detection incredibly difficult.

The post Regin: Stuxnet's Best Spying Malware Cousin appeared first on VR World.

1. Regin. /ˈreɪɡɪn/ 1. (Norse myth) a dwarf smith, tutor of Sigurd, whom he encouraged to kill Fafnir for the gold he guarded.

Regin is essentially a murderous dwarf who is caught/killed by his own greed. This Norse mythology is at the core a description of the Regin virus that has injected itself across the globe and today has finally been brought to light by Symantec and Kaspersky researchers. The Regin cybvervirus is a virus that has been tracked over the course of the past few years by security firms like Symantec, Kaspersky and McAfee, but they simply did not have enough data to build the whole picture of the computer virus’ scope nor its target. As a result, this research has been going on for quite some time and today multiple security companies have published their findings on the Regin malware and what it seeks to accomplish once it has infected a system.

According to Symantec’s research, Regin is being used as a covert espionage tool to go after very specific targets and infect them at a very deep level to either gain access to information or to gain access to a user of that network’s information. They say that Regin is a very complicated and highly encrypted piece of malware that hides its final form from anyone looking to find it unless they have access to all five stages of the malware’s unpacking. They detail the process in their technical whitepaper but it is essentially a multi-stage virus that hides its ultimate target and execution unless users can obtain every form/stage of the virus’ unpacking until it becomes the final payload.

This multi-stage approach is similar to what was seen from Duqu and Stuxnet and is once again very likely to be a sovereign-built piece of malware from some government. And as you can see, the targets that it goes after are very broad and appear to be focused mostly developing countries with Russia, Belgium and Germany being the exceptions. Those countries according to Kaspersky are:

Algeria
Afghanistan
Belgium
Brazil
Fiji
Germany
Iran
India
Indonesia
Kiribati
Malaysia
Pakistan
Russia
Syria

However, if you use Symantec’s data, the list of countries actually expands to include Saudi Arabia, Austria, Ireland and Mexico.

Regin Countries

Additionally, Kaspersky discovered a strong attack on GSM networks, especially in the case of Belgium where an entire operator was infiltrated by this malware and had publicly announced that they had been attacked, but were not aware of the perpetrator nor the target. What’s interesting, however, is that both Kaspersky and Symantec had discovered that this malware’s structure and payload delivery system (the mutli-stage approach) were specifically designed to obscure the malware’s existence and once it had infected a system it was designed to be inconspicuous as it continued to linger on the infected system, making detection incredibly difficult.

The post Regin: Stuxnet's Best Spying Malware Cousin appeared first on VR World.

Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) and Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) have jointly announced that they have successfully tested the world’s first inter-company interoperability between Qualcomm’s Cat9 LTE (Category 9) MSM mobile chipsets and Ericsson’s LTE-A (LTE-Advanced) network infrastructure.

This test was done between the two companies in order to prove that interoperability is already possible on Cat9 hardware from both companies. Since, Qualcomm is both an infrastructure and client chipset company while Ericsson is only infrastructure since the company folded up the ST-Ericsson’s joint venture that produced competing products to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors.

The two companies were able to achieve the Cat9 450 Mbps speeds thanks to carrier aggregation (combining multiple frequencies/bands) that Qualcomm’s chipsets and Ericsson’s infrastructure are both capable of doing. Ericsson actually even tells us which hardware they accomplished this on, their RBS 6000 family of base stations for macro and small cell networks. Which means these are fairly small base stations and fairly short distance connections. Additionally, thanks to Ericsson’s specs of the RBS 6000, we know that Qualcomm and Ericsson used 60 MHz 3x carrier aggregation in order to deliver the Cat9 LTE speeds of 450 Mbps.

Qualcomm, unfortunately, doesn’t tell us which Snapdragon chipset this is that’s running the new 450 Mbps speeds, but they do say that it is a future chipset which could be something coming next year or something 2 or 3 years from now. We simply can’t know. But what we do know is that the carriers are very very unlikely to deliver anything anywhere near these speeds. The unfortunate reality, however, is that right now there are no carriers in the US even technically capable of delivering three 20 MHz different bands of  LTE based on their spectrum allocation. And even if they had the spectrum holdings to enable Cat9 LTE with carrier aggregation, they wouldn’t even have the backend to support it.

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Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) has launched its latest Tesla CUDA compute card, the Tesla K80 today at Supercomputing 2014 (SC14) in New Orleans.

This follows Nvidia’s announcement last week that it had been awarded a $325 million Department of Energy grant with IBM to help build two 100 Petaflops+ machines for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Those supercomputers are expected to be built in 2017 and will use Nvidia’s yet-t0-be-built Volta GPU which comes after Pascal which comes after Maxwell, which is what Nvidia is currently using in their consumer graphics cards, but hasn’t quite started to use in professional just yet. So, until then, people looking for the fastest compute cards are going to want to look at Nvidia’s new Tesla K80.

Nvidia’s new Tesla K80 dual GPU compute card is an interesting product because it once again brings back Nvidia’s dual GPU Tesla products and increases the amount of compute you can squeeze onto a single card. Logically, you would think that the K80 would naturally be two K40’s smacked together into a single card, but that’s not accurate. In order to build the K80, Nvidia actually went with GPUs with similar shader core counts as the Tesla K20, but what’s most important is that they actually did double the onboard memory of the K80 from the K40 to 24 GB of GDDR5. Whenever we talk to anyone looking to do large simulations or scenes, their number one complaint is that they can never have too much VRAM and Nvidia appears to be listening to them by packing a whopping 24 GB of GDDR5 per card or 12GB of GDDR5 per GPU.

According to Nvidia’s specifications for the Tesla K80, it has 4992 shader cores (double that of the K20) which turns out to slightly less than double that of the K40, this is because Nvidia is using two GK-210 GPUs rather than the K40’s GK-110B. However, if you look at Nvidia’s performance claims, they state that the Tesla K80 is capable of 8.74 teraflops single-precision and 2.91 teraflops double-precision. This is more than double that of the K40 GPU which it seeks to replace and almost double that of the K10, Nvidia’s first dual GPU Tesla card. That’s the fantastic thing about Nvidia’s own Tesla cards, the K80 is a Kepler based dual GPU card while the K10 is also a Kepler based dual GPU card and the performance difference is nearly double simply by going from the GK-104 GPU design to the GK-110 (full-blown) Kepler GPU design. The Tesla’s K80 two GK210 GPUs each have 13 SMs that are clocked at 562 Mhz base, 875 Mhz boost thanks to Nvidia’s new GPU boosting features for this Tesla card, a Tesla first and something that came over from the consumer cards. Either way, its a great achievement and this is Nvidia’s next step before introducing a Maxwell-based Tesla compute card.

Nvidia’s Tesla K80 Compute Card – Note, no display out since this is a compute card

Also, if you look at the double-precision performance, it is more than 30 times faster than the original dual Kepler GPU card, the K10 and more than twice as fast as the K40 which means that Nvidia makes up for the lack of shader cores somewhere else. One of those places is in the card’s memory bandwidth which is pumped up to a whopping 480 GB/s which pretty much removes memory bandwidth as a bottleneck in most applications. Unfortunately, even though this card does have double the GPUs and double the memory of the K40, it doesn’t quite have double the memory bandwidth, which once again points to a likelihood of lower memory clock speeds than the K40. If one were to simply double the K40’s memory bandwidth, you would be looking at 566 GB/s, not the current 480 GB/s on the K80, but even so, this pretty much dwarfs anything on the market by over 150 GB/s anyways.

That card would be AMD’s own FirePro W9100, which has been very competitive with Nvidia’s K40 and offers 2,816 stream processors, 16GB GDDR5 memory and 320 GB/s memory bandwidth. This comes out to a peak performance of 5.24 teraflops peak single-precision floating-point performance and 2.62 teraflops peak dual-precision floating-point performance, meaning that now the ball is back in AMD’s court with today’s announcement.

In fact, Nvidia’s Tesla compute cards are also enabling some of the most recent scientific breakthroughs like the ongoing Rosetta mission that the ESA has embarked upon, which most recently landed a probe on a comet. “The Tesla K80 dual-GPU accelerators are up to 10 times faster than CPUs when enabling scientific breakthroughs in some of our key applications, and provide a low energy footprint,” said Wolfgang Nagel, director of the Center for Information Services and HPC at Technische Universität Dresden in Germany. “Our researchers use the available GPU resources on the Taurus supercomputer extensively to enable a more refined cancer therapy, understand cells by watching them live, and study asteroids as part of ESA’s Rosetta mission.”

There is currently no pricing information available for the K80 based on the information we were given by Nvidia, however you can probably ballpark that it will cost upwards of $5000 since the K40 originally sold for that price but has since been discounted down to $3,000 very likely in anticipation of today’s announcement. In terms of availability, Nvidia Tesla K80 dual-GPU compute cards will be available from a variety of server manufacturers, including ASUS, Bull, Cirrascale, Cray, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, Inspur, Penguin, Quanta, Sugon, Supermicro and Tyan, as well as from NVIDIA reseller partners.

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Today, the Department of Energy has announced that is has granted $425 million to build two new supercomputers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories as part of a broader CORAL initiative which is a collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne and Lawrence Livermore. $325 million of that will be spent on the actual supercomputer building while an additional $100 million will be used for the FastForward2 program, which is designed to encourage and enable hardware vendors to increase performance and efficiency for the next generation.

The first supercomputer, to be known as Summit, will be installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and will replace the currently existing ‘Titan’ supercomputer which is capable of a peak performance of 27 petaflops. Summit will be capable of delivering between 150 and 300 peak petaflops and will be used for ‘open science’. The Sierra supercomputer, designed to replace the existing Sequoia will be used for nuclear security simulations and will be capable of speeds in excess of 100 petaflops as well. Both systems will be faster than the world’s fastest supercomputer right now, Tianhe-2 in China, which currently clocks in at 55 petaflops of peak performance. Argonne’s hardware win is yet to be announced, but will be unveiled at a later date.

In order to achieve this level of performance, the laboratories participating in the CORAL initiative are harnessing the power of IBM’s (NYSE: IBM) Power 9 architecture CPUs and Nvidia’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) yet-t0-be-announced Volta GPUs. This means that since this machine is expected to come online in 2017, that we can very likely expect to see Volta GPUs in 2017. The project will use Mellanox’s interconnect technologies to connect the systems together, but in order to connect the GPU to the CPU, they will be using Nvidia’s own NVLink GPU interconnect. NVLink is Nvidia’s own proprietary interconnect specifically designed to increase the communication speed between GPUs and Nvidia is working with IBM to get this interconnect embedded directly into the IBM Power CPUs that will be powering these different supercomputer designs. Additionally, the Summit supercomputer will also be using IBM’s own IBM Elastic Storage using GPFS technology and will store 120 petabytes of data.

The system as a whole, Summit, will only use 10% more power than Titan but will deliver approximately 5-10 the performance of Titan, illustrating where supercomputer designs are headed and how the Department of Energy is really trying to drive high performance increases while also promoting energy efficiency. The expected performance for Summit has already been stated to be between 150 and 300 petaflops, however, this is thanks to over 3400 compute nodes, each delivering 40 teraflops of performance alone. Each node will consist of IBM Power 9 CPU(s) and Nvidia Volta GPU(s), unfortunately we do not know if each node will be a dual processor node or how many GPUs will fit into each node, but the expectation would be a dual processor node with at least 2 GPUs per node.

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This hardware win for IBM and Nvidia is a huge one because it illustrates that the Open Power partnership between the two companies is working and that it can enable IBM to ship more CPUs. This is a very big deal for IBM and Nvidia because this is the first supercomputer in the US in a long time that will be built without either Intel or AMD CPUs. It also means that Nvidia will finally make use of NVLink, which they announced will be coming out with the Pascal GPU, the predecessor to Volta. Nvidia has already said we can expect to see Pascal in 2016, which means the transition from Pascal to Volta will be a fairly quick one.

The Department of Energy has stated that the whole purpose of these new supercomputer designs is to enable exascale computing. Both Coral and FastForward2 are supposed to enable hardware manufacturers to help their customers build efficient and powerful suptercomputers capable of over 1 exaflop (or 1000 petaflops). And if they can get the Summit supercomputer to 300 petaflops, that’s going to be a huge step forward to achieving exascale computing and an exaflop supercomputer.

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Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) reported fairly mixed numbers across the board for its fiscal Q3 2015 quarter, which is represented mostly by the calendar third quarter of the year.

In the third quarter, Nvidia reported a record $1.23 billion in revenues and profit of $173 million, which translates to an EPS of $0.31. This is compared to the previous quarter, where Nvidia saw $1.103 billion in revenue and $128 million in profit or an EPS of $0.22. Nvidia also improved over the same quarter a year ago even more significantly where that quarter only had $1.054 billion in revenue and $119 million in revenue  or an EPS of $0.20. Nvidia saw both revenue and profitability increase double digits for both quarter over quarter and year over year, which should make any investor in Nvidia very happy. The margins did slip almost a whole percentage point, but they also significantly improved revenue and profitability.

Nvidia’s revenue increase to $1.23 billion can be attributed to growth across the board for the company in multiple business segments. Revenue for its GPU business grew 13% from the previous quarter and notebooks grew 36%, fueled by the release of its new Maxwell GTX GeForce consumer cards and mobile gaming GPUs. Nvidia states that mobile gaming notebooks more than doubled from a year ago, indicating much stronger PC gaming growth than analysts had been dooming and glooming.

Tesla GPU sales increased strongly, representing another record quarter for revenue driven mostly by large project wins in GPU compute with cloud providers and government customers. The company also saw Quadro revenue continue to be strong, also helped along by its launch of the new Quadro line, including the K5200, which is squarely aimed at Adobe users. As a result, the whole business unit saw a 13% increase in revenue due to the Maxwell release and seasonal increase in consumer PCs, which is going to only continue into the next quarter.

Tegra processors grew 51 percent from a year ago, mostly led by automotive infotainment systems, mobile devices, embedded systems and SHIELD tablet sales. Automotive infotainment revenue alone nearly doubled year over year, which can strongly be attributed to Tegra’s renewed strength compared to last year. As a whole the business unit saw revenue go up 11% sequentially. Nvidia has won some seriously significant automotive design wins, including Honda and will create a very good baseline of sales for Nvidia in the Tegra business unit regardless of mobile device seasonality.

Nvidia also saw a $66 million license payment from Intel from their settlement and licensing agreement.

Nvidia guided its revenue to be about $1.2 billion, essentially flat with the last quarter. They also expect margins to stay about the same if not increase a bit from the last quarter and operating expenditures to increase slightly. Overall, next quarter should really be a fantastic one for Nvidia as it is traditionally the strongest quarter for most of their consumer products and they are currently putting the hurting on AMD in consumer GPU sales, they are also in the newly announced HTC Nexus 9, which means that Tegra shipments should be very good in the fourth quarter and should drive up its profitability in the business segment. Overall, Nvidia’s expectations for Q4 are very conservative and there’s a very good chance they will outperform significantly.

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At Intel Capital’s (NASDAQ: INTC) 15th annual Global Summit at the Hyatt Regency in Huntington Beach, the company announced 16 new additions to the its portfolio adding $62 million in investments to the expected $355 million it plans to invest this year. If one were to look at all 16 of these new investments that Intel Capital has made, they are clearly in sectors where Intel believes that it needs to be more involved or grow itself.

The primary sectors that Intel is investing into are in the new devices/wearables space, the wireless space, processor and SoC development and Big Data and analytics. These four areas represent large potential growth areas for Intel as a company, which makes sense because Intel Capital’s role is to help to facilitate technologies that can help the product development and growth of Intel’s dozen or so different business units. Below we’ve listed a few of the most interesting of the 16 companies that Intel Capital has announced as new portfolio companies.

One of the companies that Intel is investing into is called Avegant, which is the maker of the Glyph head mounted display which is supposed to be a personal theater device that allows you to watch movies personally as if you were watching them in your own personal theater. The Glyph has already raised more than $1.5 million from Kickstarter backers, so Intel’s investment clearly indicates that the people at Avegant have a future beyond Kickstarter.

Braigo labs is yet another exciting startup, that Intel Capital is investing in this year. What makes Braigo so interesting is that it was actually founded by at 13 year old using Intel’s Edison computing platform. One of the things Shubham Banerjee, the founder of Braigo, has created is the Braigo v1.0 which is a Lego Braille printer to assist the blind using printing of braille for things on the web that also reduces the price of a Lego minstorm built printer all the way down to $350 which makes it vastly more accessible to education and home use.

Another company that Intel Capital has announced that will become a portfolio company is Eyefluence. Eyefluence is a Reno, Nevada which has their own eye-tracking technology which is designed to follow where a user is looking and to integrate that into any AR or VR headset so that use of wearables becomes easier and more natural.

Intel Capital has also added Screenovate Technologies which is a company that offers mobile solutions to OEMs and manufacturers for productivity, entertainments and education. Its technology enables smartphone and tablet users to wirelessly ‘beam’ their movies, games, presentations and other content to larger usually stationary displays.

PrecisionHawk is a company that takes aerial data gathered from small UAVs a cloud-based platform in order to more effectively deliver actionable information to clients in civilian industries. It is not a competitor to companies that fly UAVs for the military because it focuses on civilian UAV and civilian data gathered from those UAVs. And by integrating cloud data and aggregation of that data, there are powerful things that can be learned by their customers at likely much lower costs than doing land surveys, the old fashioned way.

Prelert is now a portfolio company that says it packages data science into downloadable applications for every day users. But what it really does is to use machine-learning predictive analytics to learn the behavioral patterns of large populations of individuals users devices and resources. This can help a company to predict when it will need to increase their cloud resources on the fly in order to save money and simultaneously deliver the best experience using the cloud.

Last but not least is Ossia, which is the creator of the Cota, a smart antenna technology that allows for wireless power transmission of up to 30 feet without line of sight, something that will certainly excite any mobile user. This technology isn’t like the currently available inductive or magnetic resonant charging systems, but rather a new and unique proprietary standard. The company makes some pretty significant claims about their technology’s capabilities, but it is still in development and Intel’s investment should help them productize it.

In addition to all of these new and exciting companies and technologies, Intel Capital also had some notable people in attendance at this year’s invite-only event with distinguished speakers including the former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, Stanford President John L. Hennessy, record-setting polar explorer Ben Saunders and former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt.

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Pepcom, a popular CES venue, held their ghoulish-holiday-themed show at Moscone Center in San Francisco this week. The horror of it all was that the event was not well attended.

Journalists usually flock to see the big name vendors up close and personal along with some newer companies all lined up booth-to-booth in one room. Not this time.

Free booze and tables of diet-destroying hors d’oeurves didn’t even draw a crowd. When the show closed, the leftovers could have gone into doggie bags for everyone who did attend.

Open bar on the left didn’t guarantee attendees.

Vendors had their wares spread out on 4×8 tables to draw everyone’s attention. We’ll briefly talk about a few things before doing more in depth coverage of those items that caught our interest.

Lenevo’s Yoga 2 tablet comes with an f2.2 8MP rear camera with Auto focus and glare reducing glass. There is also a 1.6M HD front camera. The tablet runs the Intel Atom Processor Z3745 (2M cache, 4 cores, up to 1.86 GHZ) and Android 4.4 KitKat. Sound projects from twin large chamber front facing Dolby Audio speakers. The Yoga 2 claims a battery life of 18 hours on a single charge.

Aimed at the business world, Lenovo’s ThinkPad Helix for business comes with Windows 8.1 (64 bit) and runs an Intel Core M processor. It has a digitizer pen and optional finger print security.

For both business and play, take a look at the Horizon 2s, an all-in-one tabletop PC at 15mm thin. It has an Aura multi-user interface and Android compatible multi-device sharing. Plus, it comes with more than 40 multi-user gaming and education applications.

Plantronics’  Voyager Legend UC headset can be used with multiple devices: PC, smartphone or tablet. The voice command menu lets you vocalize commands, such as answering calls, checking battery level, and redialing. Noise cancellation is accomplished with enhanced DSP (Digital Signal Processing).

Creative’s Sound Blaster is always a favorite for gamers and audiophiles. The Inferno and X7 were on hand for inspection. The Muvo mini was shown in four colors. It is a wireless, portable, and water proof speaker that passes IP66 standards for weather conditions.

LifeTrak  wearables include the Brite R450 featuring light exposure monitoring, advanced sleep monitoring, ECG heart rate, and fitness tracking. Its claim to fame is that the device needs no recharging and is waterproof. The light exposure reading is important as it checks exposure to overall and blue light levels, letting you know if you need more or less natural light which can enhance your mood and energy levels during the day as well as prepare you for a good rest at night.

Charlotte Johs, Logitech global vice president of computer peripherals, said of their wireless mouse M320: “We used a handcrafted process … and this design technique allowed us to achieve a dynamic, curved shape with a soft rubber grip that is naturally comfortable for the hand.” It efficiently puts itself to sleep automatically when not used to preserve battery time.

If mousing is getting to you, the Logitech Bluetooth Multi-Device Keyboard K480 can be used with your computer, smartphone and tablet via its Easy-Switch dial. The universal keyboard connects to three different Bluetooth wireless devices simultaneously. They can be a Windows, Mac or Chrome OS computer and an Android or iOS tablet or smartphone.

Escort is for those bad boys who try to beat the system. Their Passport radar detectors strive to be a stay-out-of-jail device with English and Spanish voice alerts to help you hit the brakes in a timely manner. The sticky-cup, windshield-mount detectors are designed around the company’s DSP patent and promise fewer false alerts. Their latest model the Max2 retails for $599.95.

A smart camera with Wi-Fi video keeps tabs on Tabby, but only alerts you if there is human – or zombie? – encroachment. Face detection technology eliminates movements of pets, cars, trees, and other non-human forms from its alert system. Simplicam streams live video to your smartphone from the Closeli Cloud and alerts you of any human movement entering our home. Images are saved in the Closeli Cloud for one, 11, or 21 days depending on the yearly subscription you prefer with rates of $49.99 to $229.99. Peace of mind, priceless. The video shows how it works.

Stay tuned to BSN* for more Pepcom coverage.

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Everything started with one partnership. For almost three years, Lenovo (HKG: 0992) and NEC (TYO:6701) have been in cooperative agreement, as both companies attempt to reach the top of the PC market in Japan. While Lenovo is already the leading PC manufacturer in the world, one Japanese opinion lays out a few more points: three short but important reasons that might just complete Lenovo’s enclosure of the market in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Extension of Lenovo’s partnership with NEC

At the beginning of October this year, Lenovo extended its partnership with NEC by 10 years, pushing the two companies’ contract until 2026. NEC was once Japan’s primary PC distributor, until changes to the Japanese PC market eventually led the company to just hold about a fifth of the country’s PC market shares today. The partnership with Lenovo, which was established last January 2011, worked well to keep its ailing business alive.

But what does this contract extension have to do with Lenovo’s business plans in Japan? The NEC brand is still a well established name in Japan, having its roots way back during the 1970’s. Even with its falling PC business today, it still provides other IT services and products. The strong combination of Lenovo’s international PC dominance, and NEC’s traditional popularity as a PC brand, helped the two companies gain a firm grasp on the country’s PC market (especially within the business and enterprise sectors). In other words, the partnership provided more benefits than what was initially expected.

Decision to preserve the NEC brand

Connected with the extension of the two companies’ partnership is Lenovo’s decision to preserve the NEC brand. As mentioned earlier, the status of the brand was pivotal in securing a significant PC market share in Japan, thus forming the primary reason for this decision. However, more than just maintaining the name, preserving the NEC brand also means that a different marketing approach can be used using two separate brands.

Lenovo could have easily phased the NEC brand out by completely acquiring the company after the contract expires in 2016. However, the company instead chose to extend the contract, albeit at a condition that Lenovo’s shares would be increased by 66.6% (from 51%), and NEC’s shares reduced to 33.4% (from 49%). This opportunity allows NEC to still operate as a separate brand, with its own line of products and services.

Separate establishment of Lenovo Enterprise Solutions

Focusing on the other side of its business operations, Lenovo had also opened a deal with IBM to acquire its x86 server business. The establishment of Lenovo Enterprise Solutions recently was the first step to this, using the newly established business arm to open Japan’s PC server market.

The strange point in this is that NEC is also a player in Japan’s server market, and was in fact the highest share holder by 23.6% last year. Lenovo’s decision not to place the business under the partnership’s wing was a move to keep NEC as the highest share holder in the country’s PC server market. Separation of Lenovo Enterprise Solutions would allow continuation of its operations as another business entity, keeping the server product line up for Lenovo’s ThinkCentre brand (which was also acquired from IBM) still open to the Japanese tech market.

Lenovo’s determination to win over the Japanese PC market may not completely depend on its partnership with NEC, but in conclusion, NEC’s reputation as a brand seems to have been too good for the company to pass up. It could also be a matter of tradition however, making sure that the brand is still there for more years to come.

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So, it seems like Karma has a way of sorting things out in this world and today’s news about MCX’s CurrentC  program already getting hacked pretty much sorts that out. MCX’s CurrentC is supposed to be the retailers’ own version of Apple Pay, a direct competitor in fact. But recently, MCX retailers that already have pre-installed NFC hardware have disabled it in order to prevent Apple Pay from working in their stores. This is because all of the MCX retailers are still wanting to push for their CurrentC solution rather than Apple Pay.

Within the last 36 hours, we learned that unauthorized third parties obtained the e-mail addresses of some of our CurrentC pilot program participants and individuals who had expressed interest in the app. Many of these email addresses are dummy accounts used for testing purposes only. The CurrentC app itself was not affected.

We have notified our merchant partners about this incident and directly communicated with each of the individuals whose email addresses were involved. We take the security of our users’ information extremely seriously. MCX is continuing to investigate this situation and will provide updates as necessary.

What’s amusing about all of this is that it is a replay of what happened with Google Wallet when Google launched it YEARS ago. In fact, talking to tellers about their Apple pay solution at Wholefoods and whether or not it supported Google Wallet, they simply had NO idea it existed or if they supported it. What’s funny is that they seemed shocked that Google Wallet had already existed for years before Apple pay but got virtually no support from retailers and carriers. Sure, there are places where you can regularly pay with Google Wallet, like 7/11, but the reality is that Google Wallet primarily struggled because the carriers didn’t want it to succeed.

The carriers simply didn’t want Google Wallet to succeed because they saw it as a challenger to their own potential NFC payment solutions, especially Verizon. Verizon actually disabled Google Wallet on their version of the Galaxy Nexus and as a result, Google Wallet didn’t work on Verizon’s network for a long time. Why did Verizon do that? Because they had their own Google Wallet competitor, formerly known as ISIS, now known as Softcard. So, in reality, Apple is running into the same opposition that Google did, except they are more loved by consumers and when their ideas are shot down or blocked by competitors it becomes a big deal and consumers get upset and start to organize boycotts.

Either way, the backstory is important to understand why CurrentC, Apple Pay and Google Wallet are at odds with each other, but it doesn’t change the fact that Google Wallet and Apple Pay are clearly more secure solutions than MCX’s own CurrentC which appears to be insecure well before its launch. Nobody is going to want to use a technology like CurrentC if they can’t protect consumers, ESPECIALLY when CurrentC does not connect to a credit card but rather directly to a debit card meaning that if anyone were to ever hack your CurrentC account they would have immediate access to your own money and could clear out your bank account. This is one of the biggest complaints about CurrentC right now, and a lot of people are right to be uneasy about it.

If you want to learn more about CurrentC, we recommend you check out their FAQ where they answer a lot of questions, some poorly albeit.

Some good examples of their confusing FAQs are the fact that they mention that they support credit cards, but then they say that they will support credit cards in the future. They have no problems supporting debit cards and checking accounts though.

• Provide consumers with multiple ways to pay at their favorite merchants, including merchant gift cards, credit cards and debit accounts and personal checking accounts. MCX has plans to add additional forms of payment, including credit cards.

Then they talk about merchant exclusivity…

Does MCX Require its Merchants to Only Offer CurrentCTM?

MCX merchants make their own decisions about what solutions they want to bring to their customers; the choice is theirs. When merchants choose to work with MCX, they choose to do so exclusively and we’re proud of the long list of merchants who have partnered with us. Importantly, if a merchant decides to stop working with MCX, there are no fines.

They say that merchants can make their own decisions about what solutions they want to bring to consumers, but then they say that merchants that choose to work with MCX choose to do so exclusively. Meaning, they want you to believe that merchants can pick between solutions, but what they really mean is that you can pick to use MCX or not, and if you do, you can’t really use anything else because that’s how it works. CurrentC is really an awful solution for consumers and is purely designed for the retailers to maximize their profitability and control. MCX is a retailer platform while Apple Pay and Google Wallet are consumer platforms.

The post CurrentC, Apple Pay Competitor, Already Hacked appeared first on VR World.

AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) announced late yesterday that Forrest Norrod, formerly Dell’s VP & GM for Server Platforms would be joining the company to take Lisa Su’s position which she had left vacant after ascending to the position of CEO. That puts him in charge of AMD’s entire Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom business unit (EESC) as well as managing all aspects of strategy, business management, engineering, and sales for AMD’s EESC business.

Forrest Norrod comes from over 10 years of working at Dell and having valuable enterprise and server experience, where AMD needs it most. What will be interesting to see is how he will help shape AMD’s future enterprise and server businesses in ways that will set them up for success, because as it stands right now they are in an awful place in terms of server market share and overall sales. Thankfully for Norrod, AMD is already building ARM server chips and shipping them to customers and is working on new ARM and x86 core IP as well, which should give him and his team even more ammunition, come 2016.

Forrest Norrod – AMD

The truth is that Norrod has a long road ahead of him and there’s no doubt that he’s a qualified person for the job, it also may result in AMD having a closer relationship with Dell and getting more AMD products inside of Dell’s own servers.

After all, AMD currently has quite a good relationship with HP, but that hasn’t been enough to get them serious amounts of enterprise design wins to the point where they could actually gain some market share. It is going to be a very big uphill climb, but it really seems like Su has picked the right man for the job and now we just have to see where it will go from here.

“Forrest is an industry veteran whose strong track record of establishing and growing businesses strengthens our leadership team. Forrest’s unique combination of engineering,” Su said in a press release about the new hire. “Business management and technical expertise at both the chip and system level make him ideally suited to lead AMD into an expanded set of markets where our differentiated technology assets provide a competitive advantage.”

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