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Atari Online News, Etc. Volume 17 Issue 03
Volume 17, Issue 03 Atari Online News, Etc. January 16, 2015
Published and Copyright (c) 1999 - 2015
All Rights Reserved
Atari Online News, Etc.
A-ONE Online Magazine
Dana P. Jacobson, Publisher/Managing Editor
Joseph Mirando, Managing Editor
Rob Mahlert, Associate Editor
Atari Online News, Etc. Staff
Dana P. Jacobson -- Editor
Joe Mirando -- "People Are Talking"
Michael Burkley -- "Unabashed Atariophile"
Albert Dayes -- "CC: Classic Chips"
Rob Mahlert -- Web site
Thomas J. Andrews -- "Keeper of the Flame"
With Contributions by:
Fred Horvat
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=~=~=~=
A-ONE #1703 01/16/15
~ Hackers Announce WW III ~ People Are Talking! ~ Leap Second "Woes"?
~ New Nintendo 3DS Soon! ~ Google Glass Not Dead! ~ OS Battle Royale?
~ Win 7 Free Support Ends ~ Prank Hack Goes Wrong! ~ The 8080 Chip at 40!
~ Apple's "Swift" Growing ~ Xmas Hacker Arrested! ~ MySpace Coming Back?
-* Remembering Legendary Atari! *-
-* Anonymous Launches #OpCharlieHebdo! *-
-* Obama Calls for Better Cybersecurity Laws! *-
=~=~=~=
->From the Editor's Keyboard "Saying it like it is!"
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I apologize for this week's issue being sent out late this week, but it's
been one of those hectic weeks again. That, and the fact that we had a
lot of interesting material this week just managed to put even more
demand on time. But, here we are again; I think you'll enjoy what we
have to offer this week!
Until next time...
=~=~=~=
->In This Week's Gaming Section - New Nintendo 3DS Coming in February!
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" UK Man Arrested for X-mas Attacks!
Remembering The Legendary Atari Games!
And much more!
=~=~=~=
->A-ONE's Game Console Industry News - The Latest Gaming News!
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A New Nintendo 3DS Is Coming in February, But Its Missing Something
Nintendo would like to sell you a new 3DS. Again.
During a broadcast presentation Wednesday, the company unveiled a new
version of its 3DS handheld system that addresses one of the biggest
complaints about the existing system.
Releasing Feb. 13 for $200, the new system will feature face tracking,
allowing players to see the portables 3D effects regardless of viewing
angle. Previously, you had to be looking at the screen directly from the
center to get any sort of 3D effect.
The New Nintendo 3DS XL, as its officially called, will also have a
faster processor, a slightly longer battery life, and an additional
analog nub on the right side of the system for enhanced controls. Its
compatible with all 3DS games, but certain upcoming new games will work
only with the new system. Nintendo also promised faster downloads,
faster boot-up times, and built-in support for amiibo figures and
near-field communications.
There was one curious omission, though. The New 3DS XL will ship without
an AC charger. If you want to juice it up, youll either have to buy one
separately or use a charger from an existing 3DS. Its a clear signal
that either Nintendo executives believe the market for new 3DS owners at
this point is minimal or theyve just lost their minds.
Nintendo will also offer two limited-edition bundles of the New 3DS XL:
one with a remastered portable take on the classic The Legend of Zelda:
Majoras Mask and one packed with Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate.
Nintendo didnt just talk hardware in Wednesdays presentation. The
company gave plenty of updates on its plans for 2015. Among the
highlights:
New amiibo figures are on the way. The second big wave of amiibo
characters will hit stores March 20, with a redesigned Mario, Peach,
Luigi, Yoshi, and Bowser, along with the debut of Toad. Theyll launch
in conjunction with Mario Party 10 for the Wii U.
Downloadable Wii games are coming to Wii U. Youll finally be able to
launch Wii games without switching to Wii mode on your Wii U, as
Nintendo will offer downloadable copies of select titles starting today
with Super Mario Galaxy 2. Punch-Out!! will follow Jan. 22, and Metroid
Prime Trilogy arrives Jan. 29. Pricing for the downloadable games wasnt
given. Wii mode will still be an option for physical copies of older
games.
Splatoon gets a date, sort of. The ink-based shooter for the Wii U that
was so popular at last years E3 show will finally land on store shelves
in May, said Nintendo, though it didnt offer a precise date.
UK Man Arrested for Christmas Xbox Live and PlayStation Network Attacks
Cyber crime investigators have arrested an 18-year-old man in the UK for
the attacks of the Xbox Live and PlayStation Network that took place over
Christmas. This is something that Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility
for, but at the moment it is not clear whether the man who has been
arrested is associated with the group.
South East Regional Organised Crime Unit (SEROCU) worked in conjunction
with the FBI and the UK's National Cyber Crime Unit to home in on the
unnamed man believed to have been involved in the DDoS attacks. Thousands
of gamers had their Christmases spoiled after the gaming networks were
rendered inaccessible, leading Sony to offer compensation to those
affected.
Investigators said that cyber crime "is an issue which has no boundaries
and affects people on a local, regional and global level", and that
numerous electronic and digital devices had been recovered from the man's
home in Southport. While the arrest will be seen as a victory, the head
of the investigating unit pointed out that there is still a good deal of
work to be done.
In a statement, the crime unit said:
An 18-year-old man was arrested this morning (16/1) in Boundary Street,
Southport on suspicion of unauthorized access to computer material
contrary to section 1 of Computer Misuse Act 1990, unauthorized access
with intent to commit further offenses contrary to section 2 of Computer
Misuse Act 1990 and threats to kill contrary to Section 16 of Offenses
against the person Act 1861.
The arrest is also related to swatting offenses which the unit explains
is the act of providing false information to US law enforcement agencies
about a threat in a particular place. This is likely a reference to the
tweet from a Lizard Squad member that claimed a plane carrying a Sony
executive had a bomb on board. Lizard Squad has also claimed involvement
in the infamous hack of Sony.
Minecraft Breaks 12 World Records
Minecraft has broken 12 world records, according to the newly released
Guinness Book of World Records 2015: Gamer's Edition.
Sure, a few of them are a bit silly (we're looking at you, Snow Golems),
but others are huge, important reminders of just how much Minecraft has
changed gaming in the last few years. For example, did you know Minecraft
had the most popular beta ever? Or that it's the most-played Xbox Live
game?
Check out the full list below.
Longest Marathon on Minecraft: 24 hours and 10 minutes, by Austrian gamer
Martin Fornleitner playing on a Sony Xperia Play handset.
Best-Selling Indie Game: Not including the console versions with big
publishers, Mojang has sold 16,176,201 copies on PC and Mac. Mojang's
website now says that number is over 18 million.
Largest Indie Game Convention: 7500 people attended MineCon 2013.
First Country Modeled at Full Scale in a Video Game: Last year, the
Danish Geodata Agency released a 1:1-scale recreation of Denmark. Yes,
every building and feature of the 16,602 square mile country was
accounted for. It includes four billion blocks.
Largest Real-World Place Created in Minecraft: The UK Ordinance Survey
created a map of Britain and its islands using 22 million blocks to cover
over 86,000 square miles of land. Each block represents 538 square feet.
Most Concurrent Players in One Minecraft World: 2,622 players crammed
into a server run by YouTube channel Yogscast.
Most Popular Game Beta: Over 10 million people played the beta between
December 20, 2012, and November 18, 2011.
Most Minecraft Snow Golems Built in One Minute: 70, accomplished by gamer
Nachtigall Vaz.
Most-Viewed Fan Film Based on a Video Game: "'Revenge' -- A Minecraft
Parody of Usher's DJ Got Us Fallin' in Love -- Crafted Using Noteblocks"
by YouTuber CaptainSparklez was viewed 139,888,399 times when it earned
the record.
Most-Downloaded Minecraft Project: The Dropper, a mod in which you must
fall through obstacles without hitting them, has been downloaded
1,145,546 times.
Most-Played Xbox Live Game: As of May last year, Minecraft Xbox 360
players have spend 1.75 billion hours (or 199,722 years), playing the
game.
Longest Journey in Minecraft: Kurt J. Mac traveled 919,592 miles for
charity in Minecraft's Survival mode.
GameStop Holiday Sales Down Year-Over-Year
GameStop's total global sales during the holiday period were down 6.7%
when compared to the same period in 2013.
The strength of the US dollar was blamed for part of the decline, as
sales were negatively impacted by foreign currency exchange rates.
While the overall sales declined year-over-year, GameStop still reported
$2.94 billion in sales during the busy holiday season. Sales of new
software grew by 5.8%.
GameStop attributed growth in sales of new software to the huge jump in
sales of current-gen software. Xbox One and PS4 software saw a 94%
increase, yet hardware saw a decline of 32% in sales when compared to
the same period in 2013.
The overall decline in sales of hardware was dialed back by an increase
in sales during the month of December 2014. Sale were up 31% over the
previous December.
The company's "pre-owned/value" sales category remained largely
unchanged, seeing a slight increase of just 1%.
It seems that GameStop's adoption of hardware not necessarily associated
with gaming, its mobile and consumer electronics category, was a wise
move. That category was a bright spot for the company, with an increase
of 28% in sales driven by a 75.8% rise in "Technology Brands" revenues.
=~=~=~=
->A-ONE Gaming Online - Online Users Growl & Purr!
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Videogame History Museum Returns to GDC with Prized Atari Exhibit
As the 2015 Game Developers Conference draws closer, organizers are
pleased to confirm that attendees of the March conference can look
forward to the return of the perennially popular Videogame History
Museum exhibit.
After the success of last year's Nintendo exhibit, and to commemorate
Warren Robinetts groundbreaking Adventure on the Atari 2600 - which
he'll be deconstructing in an Adventure Classic Game Postmortem during
the show - The Videogame History Museum will be building an amazing
interactive exhibit within the conference hall paying tribute to the
history of Atari.
Stop by the booth to check out the Museum's assorted artifacts and enjoy
a chance to play Adventure on an original Atari 2600 console. See if you
can find the famous microscopic dot to reveal one of the earliest video
game Easter Eggs and see the message Warren hid in the game; even if
you cant find the dot (its quite microscopic, dont you know) there
will be a ton of other Atari games and assorted historical materials to
enjoy in the exhibit.
That's not all - conference organizers look forward to announcing many
more GDC 2015 sessions and interactive exhibits in the weeks ahead. In
the meantime, don't miss your chance to save money by registering for the
conference early - the deadline to register for passes at a discounted
rate is this month, January 21st!
Remembering The Legendary Atari Games
The congregation that laid the building blocks for the current industry
we are thriving on, Atari Games are known to have changed the trend and
setting of the gaming industry and made it capable of the becoming this
ever changing, futuristic medium of entertainment for one and all.
Atari Games started their journey with trying their hand at arcade games
thus bringing epic games such as Pong, Asteroids and Centipede which hold
a special place in our childhood memories, when we spent hours together
at the arcade engrossed in the seemingly endless fun these games
provided. Not only did Atari master the arcade games zone in their time,
they introduced the industry with the advent of home consoles which
enabled players to stay and home and play the exciting games right there
in the comfort of their home.
With the release of the Atari 2600, the enterprise marked the launch of
the first home console in the history of the industry, this made us
witness a steer the creative heads at Atari were taking to create
something new, little did they know that they would be giving birth to
such a big revolution that would eventually make their original creations
(the arcade games) obsolete to a certain extent. The console introduced
the technology of the use of a microprocessor-based hardware which at
that time worked on a cartridge based storage medium.
By providing games like Combat and Pac-Man with this console , the
developers at Atari brought the sophistication of handling hardware and
the facility of experiencing a gaming session at any point of time at the
whim and fancy of the gamers. This console took the market by a storm
when sales figures for the consoles reached one million and doubled the
next year. The console also hosted the most iconic games like Space
Invaders and other third party games such as Pac-Man by Namco and
Activision's Pitfall.
Since perfection had become a mandatory requirement that was expected
from Atari Games the launch of the Atari 5200 with its poor design and
problematic analog controllers certainly got it fair share of rebuke and
disapproval from fans and critics. Especially when a launch price of $270
was associated with the console.
The reason behind this downfall was not only the technical problems they
faced but also the ardent complaint from developers who left the company
for Activision since they thought that their name was not being
recognized with the success they were working to be attributed for.
After the committing their share of mistakes with Atari 5200, the
Enterprise suffered from a loss creativity which was quite evident in
the reception of their games E.T. the Extraterrestrial and Pac-Man port
which deemed to be over endorsed and spoken about, in comparison to what
they actually had in store for the players, the publicity of these games
described them as fine pieces of art that could mesmerize the beholder
when in reality it did not add up to the credibility it was assigned to
its name in the promotions.
Soon, Nintendo entered the competitive grounds of the gaming world, to
find the pioneers Atari in shards of despair, with launch of NES console
of Nintendo the pressure on Atari tightened since they got an engaging
enemy to compete against. To compete with the NES console Atari launched
the Atari XEGS which was considered as the companys second major venture
in regard with the console background of the enterprise.
The release of this console fell like a faint sound on the ears of a deaf
man, with the global uprising that engaged in the popular use of NES
console and the accommodated arrival of SEGA. Ataris XEGS couldn't face
the existing competition hence the console and its feature gathered a
moot presence that eventually rendered it to be useless.
Post these events in later years Atari contributed two other consoles to
the market Atari Lynx which faced defeat at the hands of Nintendos
Gameboy and the Atari Jaguar which failed on account of many hardware
glitches and implementation flaws.
Over the course of time Atari seemed to have fought rough times and
managed somehow to keep standing up thus maintaining its presence in the
industry but in the times of despair when the company stood on the verge
of bankruptcy , a new game became the deciding factor that would play a
major hand in determining the fate of this enterprise.
Test Drive Unlimited 2 was the last game to be published by Atari Games,
the game suffered immensely with time constraints, technical glitches and
many other problems which landed the enterprise in a state of absolute
turmoil . Early in 2013 Atari Games filed for bankruptcy which was indeed
a sad day in the history of the gaming world.
However, we cannot ignore the fact that Atari Games did create a niche of
recognition for themselves in the industry and it is their effort and
creativity that brought revolutions to our world. Thereby i would always
regard them as pioneers of this industry and they will remain worthy of
the title Legend in my dictionary.
=~=~=~=
A-ONE's Headline News
The Latest in Computer Technology News
Compiled by: Dana P. Jacobson
Obama Calls for Better Cybersecurity Laws
President Obama has a new cybersecurity initiative, which he's outlining
in a series of speeches this week leading up to his State of the Union
address on Jan. 20. Among his proposals is a law that would require
companies to disclose any security breaches within 30 days of detecting
the intrusion.
In the first of these speeches, held today (Jan. 12) at the Federal Trade
Commission, the president also called for laws that would protect the
personal information of students, and outline a bill of rights for
consumers.
Ever since the payment-card breach at Target locations just over a year
ago, retail data breaches have been high on everyone's radar. But
currently there's no federal law requiring companies to inform their
customers of breaches in a timely manner only an uneven smattering of
state laws.
Several officials, including Attorney General Eric Holder, have been
calling for a federal data breach disclosure law for almost a year. Now
Obama is throwing his weight behind the cause as well. Obama's proposed
legislation would also make it illegal to sell customer identity data
abroad, which is usually the end result of a data breach. Obama also
called for consumers to have better access to credit scores.
Obama's other cybersecurity proposals include a Student Digital Privacy
Act, under which personal information gathered from students in
educational contexts could only be used for educational purposes, and
not sold to advertising companies.
"Whether they are texting or tweeting, or on Facebook, or Instagram, or
Vine, our children are meeting up, and they are growing up, in
cyberspace. It is all-pervasive," said Obama in his speech today. "And
Michelle and I are like parents everywhere: we want to make sure that
our children are being smart and safe online. That's a responsibility of
ours as parents. But we need partners."
In addition, Obama is calling on Congress to pass a legislative version
of the White House's Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, a 2012 document
arguing that consumers have the right to choose when and how their
personal information is used by online companies.
Tomorrow (Jan. 13), Obama will visit the Department of Homeland Security,
and urge the public and private sectors to collaborate and share
information pertaining to security tools and threats.
On the same day that Obama kicked off his cybersecurity initiative, a
group claiming to represent ISIS took control of the US Central
Command's Twitter and YouTube channels.
Hackers Announce "World War III" on Twitter
Hackers took over the Twitter accounts of the New York Post and United
Press International on Friday, writing bogus messages, including about
hostilities breaking out between the United States and China.
One tweet posted under the UPI account quoted Pope Francis as saying,
"World War III has begun."
Another message delivered on the Post account said the USS George
Washington, an aircraft carrier, was "engaged in active combat" against
Chinese warships in the South China Sea.
The tweets were subsequently deleted.
A Post tweet later noted that "Our Twitter account was briefly hacked and
we are investigating."
The fake tweets were not just about war. One posted on UPI said "Just in:
Bank of America CEO calls for calm: Savings accounts will not be affected
by federal reserve decision."
The Post is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
Several media organizations have had their Twitter feeds hacked over the
past two years including Agence France-Presse, the BBC and others.
A Pentagon official said the tweet about hostilities with China was "not
true."
Anonymous Launches #OpCharlieHebdo, Attacks Terrorist Social Media
Anonymous-affiliated attackers claim to have taken down dozens of "Jihad
sites" in retaliation for last week's horrifying terrorist attacks in
France.
Anonymous on Friday and Saturday launched #OpCharlieHebdo, releasing
multiple video statements saying that defending freedom of expression has
always been one of its core tenets.
One Anonymous-affiliated account has released a list of 500+ targeted
Twitter accounts belonging to purported terrorists, and another has
promised a list of targeted "Jihad" Facebook profiles.
In what can only be described as ironic, those wearing the Anonymous cloak
are promising to "cripple" the free speech of terrorists in retaliation
for the deaths.
That's what a masked, hooded figure with a computer-generated voice
threatened as he sat in front of a desk holding a piece of paper:
We will be crippling all terrorist outlet websites and terminating all
terrorist social media accounts. We will dump personal information on
every terrorist we come across. We will not sleep until we bring you to
your knees.
Anonymous isn't the only entity that wants to clamp down on extremist
online content.
In the wake of the attacks, several European countries - France, Germany,
Latvia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland,
Sweden and the UK - called for a limited increase in internet censorship.
While the internet must remain "in scrupulous observance of fundamental
freedoms, a forum for free expression, in full respect of the law," the
nations' interior ministers said, internet service providers (ISPs) need
to help "create the conditions of a swift reporting of material that aims
to incite hatred and terror and the condition of its removing, where
appropriate/possible."
The UK has recently moved to block such extremist content, with its big
ISPs - BT, TalkTalk, Virgin Media, and Sky - having agreed to filter such
material so that people won't read things that might induce sympathy for
terrorists.
We're not in the habit of cheering on Anonymous, and this is no exception.
In this case, those claiming the Anonymous brand aren't serving to bring
terrorists to justice.
We share the outrage and sympathy for those affected by the Paris
attacks, and we join Anonymous in extending our deepest condolences to
victims and their survivors.
But we have to note that Anonymous is a group of people taking it upon
themselves to decide what makes a target worthy of attack.
Enough of attack.
Enough.
Let the intelligence agencies use their (disturbingly well-honed)
surveillance skills to go after those responsible for such horrific
acts.
When A Prank Goes Wrong:
Student Indicted After Hacking Rival College's Calendar
A 21-year-old Georgia Tech student named Ryan Gregory Pickren allegedly
pulled a football-rivalry prank that could wind up marking him as a felon
for the rest of his life.
Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia - two universities in the US -
are the arch-rivals. On 29 November 2014, they had a big game coming up.
Two days before the game, Pickren, a computer engineering student at
Georgia Tech, allegedly trespassed into the University of Georgia's
computer network to post a message on its online calendar.
The message:
Sat., November 29, 2014/ 12:00 pm/ Get Ass Kicked by GT.
Tom Jackson, UGA's vice president for public affairs, told the Athens
Banner-Herald that the entry was discovered shortly after it was posted
on Thanksgiving and taken down about an hour after it popped up.
Local police launched an investigation but didn't arrest Pickren.
However, a prosecutor submitted evidence to a grand jury, which indicted
Pickren on 16 December.
He's now out after posting a $5,000 bond.
Under Georgia state law, a person is guilty of computer trespass when they
alter, damage or in any way cause a computer, computer network or computer
program to malfunction, regardless of how long the disruption lasts.
It's a felony offense that's punishable by a maximum of 15 years in prison
and a $50,000 fine.
Does this young man really stand to serve 15 years in jail for tinkering
with an online calendar as a sports-related prank?
It's highly unlikely, given that this is his first offense and judges
rarely hand out maximum sentences.
When we mention maximum sentences, a large part of the rationale is to
get across worst-possible case scenarios, as well as to give an idea of
how seriously a given state treats a given crime.
After all, in the US maximum sentences can vary widely from state to
state, and from judge to judge.
One thing that's made clear by the 15 year maximum punishment in Georgia
is that the state, like many others, doesn't take computer trespassing
lightly.
That's a hell of a deep stain to leave on a young man's record, all for
the sake of a prank, all meant as a big raspberry over a football game.
Trespassing into networks can have catastrophic and expensive
repercussions.
As a computer engineering student with a minor in computer science, he
should have known better.
This kind of prank just isn't worth the lulz.
Need Some Espionage Done? Hackers Are for Hire Online
The home page of Hackers List, a website that matches hackers with
people looking for someone to delete embarrassing photos or retrieve a
password.
A man in Sweden says he will pay up to $2,000 to anyone who can break
into his landlords website. A woman in California says she will pay $500
for someone to hack into her boyfriends Facebook and Gmail accounts to
see if he is cheating on her.
The business of hacking is no longer just the domain of intelligence
agencies, international criminal gangs, shadowy political operatives and
disgruntled hacktivists taking aim at big targets. Rather, it is an
increasingly personal enterprise.
At a time when huge stealth attacks on companies like Sony Pictures,
JPMorgan Chase and Home Depot attract attention, less noticed is a
growing cottage industry of ordinary people hiring hackers for much
smaller acts of espionage.
A new website, called Hackers List, seeks to match hackers with people
looking to gain access to email accounts, take down unflattering photos
from a website or gain access to a companys database. In less than three
months of operation, over 500 hacking jobs have been put out to bid on
the site, with hackers vying for the right to do the dirty work.
It is done anonymously, with the websites operator collecting a fee on
each completed assignment. The site offers to hold a customers payment
in escrow until the task is completed.
In just the last few days, offers to hire hackers at prices ranging from
$100 to $5,000 have come in from around the globe on Hackers List, which
opened for business in early November.
For instance, a bidder who claimed to be living in Australia would be
willing to pay up to $2,000 to get a list of clients from a competitors
database, according to a recent post by the bidder.
I want the client lists from a competitors database. I want to know who
their customers are, and how much they are charging them, the bidder
wrote.
Others posting job offers on the website were looking for hackers to
scrub the Internet of embarrassing photos and stories, retrieve a lost
password or change a school grade.
The rather matter-of-fact nature of the job postings on Hackers List
shows just how commonplace low-profile hacking has become and the
challenge such activity presents for law enforcement at a time when
federal and state authorities are concerned about data security.
Hacking into individual email or social media accounts occurs on a fairly
regular basis, according to computer security experts and law enforcement
officials. In September, the Internet was abuzz when hackers posted nude
photos of female celebrities online.
It is not clear just how successful Hackers List will prove to be. A
review of job postings found many that had yet to receive a bid from a
hacker. Roughly 40 hackers have registered with the website, and there
are 844 registered job posters. From the postings, it is hard to tell
how many of the job offers are legitimate.
The site did get a favorable review recently on hackerforhirereview.com,
which specializes in assessing the legitimacy of such services. The
reviewer and owner of that site, who would identify himself only as
Eric in emails, said he gave his top rating to Hackers List because
its a really cool concept that limits the ability of customers and
hackers to take advantage of one another.
In light of the novelty of the site, its hard to say whether it violates
any laws.
Arguably some of the jobs being sought on Hackers List breaking into
another persons email account are not legal.
The founders of Hackers List, however, contend that they are insulated
from any legal liability because they neither endorse nor condone illegal
activities.
The website includes a 10-page terms and conditions section to which all
users must agree. It specifically forbids using the service for any
illegal purposes.
Some experts say it is not clear whether Hackers List is doing anything
wrong in serving as a meeting ground for hackers and those seeking to
employ them.
Yalkin Demirkaya, president of the private investigation company Cyber
Diligence, and a former commanding officer of the New York Police
Departments computer crimes group, said a crackdown would depend on
whether law enforcement officials saw it as a priority. He said Hackers
List may skate by because many of the people posting the ads are
probably overseas.
But Thomas G. A. Brown, a senior managing director with FTI Consulting and
former chief of the computer and intellectual property crime unit of the
United States attorneys office in Manhattan, said hacker-for-hire
websites posed problems.
Hackers for hire can permit nontechnical individuals to launch
cyberattacks with a degree of deniability, lowering the barriers to entry
for online crime, Mr. Brown said.
The website, which is registered in New Zealand, is modeled after several
online businesses in which companies seeking freelancers can put projects
out to bid. Some have compared the service to a hackers version of the
classified advertising website Craigslist. Hackers List even has a
Twitter account (@hackerslist), where it announces the posting of new
hacking assignments.
Still, the three founders of Hackers List are not willing to go public
with their own identities at least not yet.
After registering with the website and beginning an email conversation,
a reporter contacted one of the founders. Over a period of weeks, the
founder, who identified himself only as Jack, said in a series of
emails that he and two friends had founded Hackers List and that it was
based in Colorado. Jack described himself as a longtime hacker and said
that his partners included a person with masters degree in business
administration and a lawyer.
He said that the three were advised by legal counsel on how to structure
the website to avoid liability for any wrongdoing by people either
seeking to hire a hacker, or by hackers agreeing to do a job. The
company, he said, tries to do a small background check on the hackers
bidding on jobs to make sure they are legitimate, and not swindlers.
We all have been friends for a while, Jack said in an email, adding
that Hackers List was kind of a fluke occurrence over drinks one
night.
We talked about a niche and I built it right there, he said. It kind
of exploded on us, which was never expected.
Hackers List began its website several months after federal prosecutors
and F.B.I. agents in Los Angeles completed a two-year crackdown on the
hacker-for-hire industry. The investigation, called Operation Firehacker
by the F.B.I., led to the filing of criminal charges against more than a
dozen people across the country involved in either breaking into a
persons email account or soliciting a hacker for the job.
In New York, information uncovered during the investigation in Los Angeles
led to the arrest in 2013 of Edwin Vargas, a New York Police Department
detective at the time, who was charged with paying $4,000 for the hacking
of the email accounts of 43 people, including current and former New York
police officers. Mr. Vargas, who pleaded guilty in November 2013 and was
sentenced to four months in prison, said he had been motivated by
jealousy and wanted to see whether any of his colleagues were dating an
ex-girlfriend who is the mother of his son.
The F.B.I. investigation also involved the cooperation of the authorities
in China, India and Romania, because a number of the websites where the
hackers advertised their expertise were based overseas.
Still, the market for hackers, many of whom comply with the law and act
more like online investigators, shows no signs of slowing. Many companies
are hiring so-called ethical hackers to look for weaknesses in their
networks.
David Larwson, a director of operations with NeighborhoodHacker.com,
which is incorporated in Colorado, said he had seen increased demand from
companies looking to make sure their employees are not obtaining
sensitive information through hacking. He said in an email that companies
were increasingly focused on an insider threat leading to a breach or
unauthorized release of information.
On its website, NeighborhoodHacker describes itself as a company of
certified ethical hackers that works with customers to secure your
data, passwords and childrens safety.
Microsoft, Google Tangle Over Windows Security Patch
Microsoft Corp has complained publicly about tech rival Google Inc
revealing a security flaw in its Windows 8.1 system just days before
Microsoft was scheduled to roll out a fix for the problem, potentially
exposing users to hacking.
The spat highlights an ever-present tension in the software security
sector between those who believe flaws should be revealed sooner rather
than later to put pressure on companies to tackle the issues, and
developers who sometimes need more time to come up with a solution.
In this case, Google is in the former camp, through its "Project Zero"
team, which scans all types of software for bugs and reports problems
privately to the developers who created them. Google gives developers
90 days to fix a problem before making the issue public.
That happened on Sunday, when Google posted a security bulletin
concerning weaknesses in the user profile creation process in Windows
8.1, which could allow hackers to take control of a computer. Google had
initially told Microsoft about the problem on Oct. 13.
Microsoft plans to publish a fix this week as part of its regular
security update, known in the industry as "Patch Tuesday."
"We asked Google to work with us to protect customers by withholding
details until Tuesday, Jan. 13, when we will be releasing a fix,"
Microsoft executive Chris Betz wrote in a blog on the company's site on
Sunday.
"Although following through keeps to Google's announced timeline for
disclosure, the decision feels less like principles and more like a
'gotcha,' with customers the ones who may suffer as a result."
Microsoft Has Ended Free Tech Support and Feature Updates for Windows 7
Unlucky for some: Its January 13, 2015, and that means the end of free
support for Windows 7.
That doesnt mean your computer is going to automatically stop working,
but it does mean Microsoft will no longer offer free help and support if
you have problems with your Windows 7 software from this point on. No
new features will be added, either.
Microsoft is keen to move users onto Windows 8 instead to find out
more, check out our how-tos, troubleshooting, news and reviews of
Windows 8. Alternatively, you can wait for Windows 10 later this year.
Windows 7 was released in 2009. It sold over 100 million copies in six
months and remains hugely popular. More stable than predecessor Windows
Vista and more familiar than its radically redesigned successor
Windows 8, version 7 is still estimated to be running half the worlds
PCs.
As of today, Windows 7 has moved from mainstream support free help for
everyone to extended support, which means Microsoft will charge for
help with the software. That will end in 2020, when Microsoft turns out
the lights on Windows 7 for good.
If youre worried about security, Microsoft will continue to patch
security issues, so if you do stick with Windows 7, your computer
shouldnt suddenly become vulnerable to hackers targeting the software.
The next generation of Microsofts venerable operating system is
Windows 10 its skipping 9, for some reason which is due in the
second half of this year. Microsoft is set to make an announcement about
Windows 10 a week from now on 21 January, so stick with us to find out
what Gates mates have up their sleeves.
The Leap Second Is About To Rattle The Internet.
But Theres A Plot To Kill It
The Qantas Airways computers started crashing just after midnight. A few
hours later, as passengers started flying home from weekend getaways,
there were long delays in Brisbane, Perth, and Melbourne, and the
computers still didnt work. Qantas flight attendants were forced to
check passengers in by hand.
That Sunday morning in July 2012 was a disaster for Amadeus IT Group, the
Spanish company responsible for the software that had computer screens
flickering at Qantas kiosks. But it wasnt entirely the companys fault.
Most of the blame lay with an obscure decades-old timing standard for the
UNIX operating system, a standard fashioned by well-intentioned astronomer
time lords. They were working for an international standards body, a
precursor of the International Telecommunications Union, which today
officially tells clock-keepers how to tell the rest of the world what time
it is. Back in 1972, they decided to insert the occasional leap-second
into Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the standard most of the world uses
to set wristwatches.
Weve had 25 of these leap seconds since then, and were about to get our
26th. This week, the modern time lords announced that the next leap second
will arrive at 11:59 pm and 60 seconds on June 30. That has some computer
experts worried. Amadeus wasnt the only company to go glitchy during the
last leap-second. Reddit, Foursquare, and Yelp all blew up thanks to the
leap second and the way it messed with the underlying Linux operating
system, which is based on UNIX.
The trouble is that even as they use the leap second, UNIX and Linux
define a day as something that is unvarying in length. If a leap second
happens, the operating system must somehow prevent the applications from
knowing that its going on while still handling all the business of an
operating system, says Steve Allen, a programmer with Californias Lick
Observatory. He likens it to the problem facing the HAL 9000, the
fictional onboard computer in Stanley Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey,
which loses its mind after it is programmed to lie. All the problems that
crop up are, in a metaphorical sense, the HAL 9000 problem. You have told
your computer to lie. I wonder what it will do, he says.
The Linux kernel folks arent expecting any major issues when July 1 comes
around, but the situation is unpredictable. Back in 2012, Linux creator
Linus Torvalds told us: Almost every time we have a leap second, we find
something. And this time around, there will be problems again. Torvalds
doesnt think theyll be as widespread as they were three years ago, but
theyre largely unavoidable. The reason problems happen in this space is
because its obviously rare and special, and testing for it in one
circumstance then might miss some other situation, he says.
As a result, some insiders are trying to abolish the leap second, in favor
of more reliable system. But they may or may not succeed. Yes, we already
have atomic clocks that dont need leap seconds, and some standard time
systems already use these clock. GPS has worked off of atomic clocks for
decades, leap-second free. But some believe UNIX and Linux, its
ultra-popular clone, should continue to get their time from the
leap-second-friendly UTC standard. They want man and machine to remain in
line.
You can think of the whole mess as a kind of cosmic struggle between
machines, which consider a day to be 86,400 seconds, and humans, who think
of a day as one spin of Planet Earth. For thousands of years, one rotation
of the earth was indeed the best way of measuring 86,400 seconds, but it
turns out this is an imperfect method.
The moons gravitational pull on the earths water messes with things. So
do earthquakes. In fact, there are many factors that can slow up or speed
up the earths spin, much like an ice skater extending and pulling back
her arms.
If the world moved completely to atomic clocks, then after tens of
thousands of years, noon would fall in the middle of the night. And long
after that, spring would be the season, here in the US, that starts in
November.
Switching to something like the GPS system seems like an obvious way
around this. Let the computers have their crazy time and leave UTC for
human wristwatches. But things arent quite so simple. Some think
abandoning UTC would lead to more time-translation problems. And because
so many computers are already hard-coded to use the UTC standard, weaning
them from it would be a big and nasty piece of coding work. It would
just cause other problems instead, Torvalds says. Many worse problems.
With the next leap second looming, some of our current day time lords are
looking to abolish the whole idea at the next meeting of the
International Telecommunications Union, the group that responsible for
UTC. The leap second question has been openly debated for 15 years, but
this November, it will come to a head at the 2015 World
Radiocommunication Conference in Geneva, according to Wayne Whyte, a NASA
program manager who chairs the group thats studying whether to drop the
leap-second.
Will it get passed? Nobody knows for sure, but people who follow the time
war say that some members of the ITU really dont like the idea. Its a
really complicated issue, says Marek Kukula, the public astronomer with
the Royal Observatory Greenwich. Some of the contributing factors are
cultural and emotional, he says.
Kukula wouldnt be surprised to see the debate tabled for another decade
or two. My impression is that theyre not desperate to come to a
conclusion, he says. And in their position, I totally understand how
they feel.
None of this will be much use to Udo Seidel, over at Amadeus Software.
The ITU meeting doesnt happen until months after the June leap-second,
so hes quietly building out a set of test tools that allow system
administrators to simulate the leap-second effect and see if everything
crashes.
Seidel was working at Amadeus back in 2012 when it systems crashed, so
hes probably one of the first people youd expect to call for is
abolition. But when I ask him what he thinks, he grows thoughtful on the
phone. Whimsical, even.
We should keep the earth and its computers in alignment he tells me. To
him, it just feels like the right thing to do. And besides, hes a
technologist. If we cannot manage to make our systems handle a leap
second, he says, then we have bigger problems.
Googles Latest Invention Is Fantastic and A Little Scary
Google on Tuesday was granted an interesting new patent that describes a
highly advanced piece of Internet browsing technology that might also be
a bit scary to some extent, as it only proves how powerful the companys
artificial intelligence will become.
U.S. Patent No. 8,935,798, called Automatically enabling private browsing
of a web page, and applications thereof, describes means for a computer
to automatically enable private browsing on a webpage when it determines
that the pages content might require more privacy.
That would mean that all a user has to do to surf the web privately would
be to simply start loading the desired pages, at which point the browser,
likely Googles Chrome browser, would switch on private mode when certain
content is detected.
The method seems harmless enough, and appears to be helpful, as the user
would not have to constantly remember to protect his or her privacy by
selecting incognito mode. Private browsing prevents other sites from
collecting some user data, and stops the browser from recording browsing
history, though ISPs and anyone else monitoring traffic would still be
able to see what pages a user has visited incognito.
At the same time, Googles main revenue source is advertising, with the
company trying to best profile its customers in order to target them with
suitable ads. With that in mind, its not clear what kind of data Google
would still collect from users once such an invention is in place.
After all, from the looks of it, private mode is only enabled after a user
enters a URL in the browser, so in theory, Google would still be able to
record that particular site visit and link it to a users profile for
future ads. Google wouldnt even have to keep track of everything the
user is doing once private mode is enabled, as it could simply keep
track of the kind of sites a user is likely to view in incognito mode.
On the other hand, this is just a patent for the time being, and the
technologies described in it might never be used. Furthermore, its
likely Google would thoroughly explain this new privacy-enhancing feature
before its actually deployed in future Chrome browser versions for
desktop or mobile.
Windows 10, Chrome OS Battle Royale To Benefit PCs This Year
Laptops with Microsofts Windows 10 will be in a heavyweight bout with
Chromebooks for market dominance later this year, but no matter who wins,
PC shipments will benefit from the clash.
Worldwide PC shipments are expected to decline by a lower-than-expected
rate of 3.3 percent this year, and fall by just 1.8 percent in 2016, as
Windows 10 and Chromebooks help stop years of bleeding in the PC market,
IDC said on Monday. Shipments declined by 4.7 percent last year when
compared to 2013.
The release of Windows 10 could appeal to businesses that want to upgrade
PCs but passed on the maligned Windows 8, said Jay Chou, senior research
analyst at IDC.
Windows 10 addresses many of the complaints aimed at Windows 8, and its
preview version has received positive reviews, Chou said.
The OS could do well in the U.S. market, but its hard to project if
consumers will immediately upgrade PCs, Chou said.
A lot depends on whether Microsoft offers the OS as a free upgrade or
charges for the OS. If Windows 10 is free, people may choose not to
upgrade hardware, Chou said.
Lenovo and Dell have already issued ringing endorsements for Windows 10,
saying customers are anxious to upgrade to the new OS especially after
the controversial Windows 8. One of the appeals is the return of the
Start menu, and a stronger focus on the desktop.
Microsoft has the home court advantage, with the installed base, Chou
said. If Microsoft can help PCs be price competitive, then there is this
home-court advantage to maintain Windows share.
But Windows 10 faces a challenge from Chromebooks, which are low-cost
laptops with Googles Chrome OS. Chromebooks are gaining strength, and
helped PC shipments during the fourth quarter last year. Chromebooks
were popular with students and consumers during the holiday shopping
season, and will increase their appeal as more people move to Web-based
computing.
Worldwide PC shipments totaled 80.8 million units during the fourth
quarter, declining by just 2.1 percent compared to the same quarter last
year. Of all PCs, laptops accounted roughly 50 to 55 percent of all
shipments, of which 4 to 6 percent were Chromebooks.
Many Chromebooks cost under $250 and are packed with features, which makes
them attractive, Chou said.
A lot of times the build quality is better than the netbooks we saw years
ago, Chou said.
Microsoft is trying to battle Chrome OS through a series of low-cost
laptops and desktops that run on Windows 8 with Bing, which is licensed at
no cost to PC makers. The low-cost laptops have minimal storage and are
mostly for people who dont need heavy computing resources, and mostly use
them to surf the web, do social media and store files online. HP sells
Windows-based Stream laptops and an all-in-one starting at under US$200.
It remains to be seen how Microsoft adapts Windows 10 to battle Chrome OS.
Microsoft is expected to share more details about Windows 10 at a
January 21 event on its Redmond, Washington, campus.
But no doubt, a strong end to 2014 has set the tone for a better PC market
this year. Lenovo was the worlds top PC vendor during the fourth quarter
last year, shipping 16.05 million units, up by 4.9 percent compared to the
same quarter in 2013. HP came close to regaining the top spot it
previously held, shipping 15.88 million units and growing by 15.1 percent.
In third place was Dell, shipping 10.88 million units, an 8.5 percent
increase. A rebounding Acer grew its shipments by 3.2 percent to reach
6.22 million units. Apple was the worlds fifth largest PC vendor during
the quarter, shipping 5.75 million units, up by 18.9 percent. Asustek was
bumped out of the top five list during the quarter.
Google Glass Is Not Dead
Google ending its Glass Explorer program yesterday sparked a round of
eulogies for the oft-ridiculed face computer. Thats premature at best.
In its current form, Glass is undoubtedly dead, but theres no reason to
believe Google wont relaunch it with a new version in the coming month
likely around its annual I/O developer conference.
Despite plenty of early hype and generally positive coverage, Glass turned
into a public relations issue for Google the day it went on sale. Google,
which is typically quick to cancel failing projects, decided to stoically
sit this one out.
Now, Glass is becoming its own business unit inside of Google, Tony
Fadell will oversee the program, and sales to businesses, developers and
schools will continue. Google is also encouraging developers to continue
writing apps for the platform. Those are not signs that Google plans to
cancel the platform. With Fadell in charge, I doubt Google will only
focus on business use cases. Fadell doesnt do enterprise.
The official line from Google is that the team learned what it could from
the Explorer Program and is now working on the next version of Glass,
which will launch whenever its ready. There are plenty of reasons to be
cynical about this, but so far, Googles actions indicate that it plans
to do exactly what it says it will.
Sure, the current Explorer Program is done, but how many units was Google
actually still selling through that? One a week? When Google opened Glass
sales to everybody, there was barely a reaction. Also, the hardware was
badly due for a revision anyway. It was already outdated the day Glass
launched and over the almost two years it was on sale, it only received
minor updates. Software updates stopped a few months ago, too.
Since Google launched Glass, it has hopefully learned how to market it
better that is, without this kind of limited Explorer program that
only exasperated the myths.
With its investment in Magic Leap, Google now also has access to what
looks to be pretty revolutionary augmented-reality technology. Combine
that with all of the other tech weve seen over the last two years and
everything else the Glass team hopefully learned (including how not to
market it) and the next version could actually be much more
interesting.
Depending on what Google does, the next version of Glass could easily
become a colossal failure. If its only better hardware with some
software improvements, reactions will be the same. By keeping the old
Glass on the market for as long as it did, Google only perpetuated the
negativity around it until it became mainstream. That may be the biggest
challenge for Glass 2.0 that and Robert Scoble liking it.
Newly Unearthed Emails Show Apple Knew Google
Glass Was Going To Flop from Day 1
Its been a couple of years since Google first started showing off Google
Glass to the world, and in that time we have never heard any rumor that
Apple was working on a device to compete with the digital headset. And
now a new report from Business Insider may explain why: One of Apples
most important executives seemingly thought it would be a bomb from the
start.
Business Insider has obtained some emails that were sent by Apple
marketing chief Phil Schiller to tech blogger Abdel Ibrahim of The Tech
Block after reading one of his posts making fun of Google Glass.
I cant believe they think anyone (normal) will ever wear these things,
Schiller wrote. It reminds me of the push to market video goggles a few
years back.
There are many, many reasons Google Glass has a very big public image
problem and one of them is definitely how awkward the device makes people
look while theyre wearing it. The other issue was that many people felt
uncomfortable around people wearing Glass because they were always
worried they were being secretly filmed by the device.
At any rate, if or when Google comes out with a second-generation model,
we imagine its going to look a lot different than the dorky Borg-like
headset it first showed off in 2012.
Apple's New Programing Language Swift Is 'Swiftly' Growing
Apple's new programming language Swift, has skyrocketed since its release
last year, suggests a new report.
The new programming language, launched as an alternative to Objective-C
is already the 22nd most popular language. The report from analyst firm
RedMonk noted that the Swift's new spot is up 46 spots from three months
ago.
"Growth like that is "unprecedented" in the firm's four years of ranking
programming languages," said RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady.
"When we see dramatic growth from a language it typically has jumped
somewhere between five and 10 spots, and the closer the language gets to
the Top 20 or within it, the more difficult growth is to come by," he
noted.
The rankings have been determined based on a correlation of language
discussions on Stack Overflow and language usage on GitHub.
Java and JavaScript remained at the first two spot respectively, followed
by PHP, Python, C#, C++, Ruby, CSS, C and Objective-C.
"The most important takeaway is that the language frequently written off
for dead and the language sometimes touted as the future have shown
sustained growth and traction and remain, according to this measure, the
most popular offerings," O'Grady added.
Could MySpace Make A Mini Comeback?
Today the question heard around the (tech) world: MySpace is still a thing?
The Wall Street Journal reported that MySpaces user numbers are actually
growing, years after it became the overlooked stepsister of the social
media world. The site saw 575 percent growth in unique users in the last
year. Of course, 525 percent of 0 is still 0, so to prove its thesis the
WSJ cited a surprising statistic: MySpace still has 50 million monthly
active users.
It looks like MySpace is making a mini comeback
kind of. Theres one
caveat to the user data: A big chunk of the companys monthly actives
come on Thursdays due to the popularity of Throwback Thursday, the social
media phenomenon where people post old pictures of themselves under the
hashtag #tbt. Former Myspace fans crack open their childhood digital
vault to find the goods. Members of the tech media probably did the same
today after seeing the WSJ story. Proud to say I remembered my high
school email (ringringeksie@hotmail.com
.dont ask) and password in one
go.
MySpaces resurgence cant be entirely chalked up to the #tbt craze. Tim
Vanderhook, the CEO of MySpace parent company Viant Inc., said that young
people in the 17 to 25 age demographic are using it regularly. They watch
enough videos on the site to make MySpace the 16th most popular online
video provider according to Comscore. The social site started as a place
for music and entertainment creators and fans to connect, so that still
represents the bulk of the activity.
MySpaces new site focuses on delivering video and music.
Given that MySpace was once the queen bee of social, the company still has
1 billion users registered across the world, information that advertisers
want to get their hands on. The company has partnered with undisclosed
online media companies and advertisers to do some type of cross
referencing of user information, to see whether online ads actually
convert to sales.
Its unlikely the company will ever near the heights of its former glory,
but that doesnt mean it couldnt reestablish itself as a tool for a
particular sect of music-loving youth. From the sounds of it, Viant Inc.
is eking every potential drop of profit it can. The
believed-to-be-defunct service lives on; perhaps a shadow of its former
self, but still very much alive.
MySpace Tom, who left the company long ago under NewsCorps failed reign,
now spends his days traveling the world instagramming beautiful, albeit
seemingly photoshopped, shots of cultural and natural landmarks. Ive
reached out to him to hear his thoughts on MySpaces small resurgence,
and Ill update this if I hear back.
Facebook at Work Launches So You Can Never Not Be on Facebook
Facebook is doing everything it can to monopolize your time online,
ramping up efforts in video, messaging, and news, among other media. Now
its unveiling a whole new portal that officially acknowledges what you
already do anyway: spend all your time at work on Facebook. Called
Facebook at Work, the service announced Wednesday works pretty much just
like regular Facebook, except you use it to connect to colleagues who may
or may not be friends. Most important of all, the color scheme is
different, which lets your boss looking over your shoulder know that,
even though youre on Facebook, youre still working.
For now, Facebook says its making Facebook at Work available to a
handful of partners, who will be testing the product ahead of its
full-blown launch, tentatively slated for later this year. Facebook
itself says its been using Facebook at Work internally for years.
We have found that using Facebook as a work tool makes our work day more
efficient, Lars Rasmussen, Facebooks director of engineering, tells
WIRED. You can get more stuff done with Facebook than any other tool
that we know of, and wed like to make that available to the whole
world.
Efficiency and spending time on Facebook at work may sound like a
contradiction in terms. But if Facebook can actually make a tool that
helps people get things done at the office, the company will have
succeeded in finding a way to command even more of your screen time,
especially if youre not constantly worrying about minimizing that
window. Facebook makes money when you see and click ads on the site,
whether youre at work or at home. The more time your eyes are on
Facebook, the more of your attention it can monetize.
The way Rasmussen explains it, Facebook at Work has the same look, apps,
and tools as the Facebook weve seen before. It will exist as a separate
portal on the desktop, as well as on separate apps for iPhones and
Android devices. A mobile Web version will also be available. The only
thing that looks different is the color scheme of Facebook at Works
interface, which is shaded white instead of Facebooks trademark blue
making it easy for employers to tell whether youre on personal
Facebook or Facebook at Work
with a glance.
Other than that, the same familiar features are all in place, including
News Feed, Search, Groups, Events, Messenger, and photo and video sharing
functions. But youll have a separate Facebook identity specifically for
sharing with colleagues. According to Rasmussen, you dont actually have
to have a personal Facebook account at all to use Facebook at Work if
your company decides to sign up for the service.
Facebook at Work will revolve around colleagues in much the same way that
regular Facebook revolves around family and friends. For example, your
News Feed will populate with posts shared by the coworkers who you
already interact with the most, Rasmussen says. The posts that see more
shares will spread further, until the entire company might see it.
For Facebook, a move into enterprise makes a whole lot of sense as it
seeks new avenues for expansion. Facebooks monthly active user base
stands at 1.35 billion, according to the company, but growth has slowed
as the addressable market of users not already on Facebook dwindles.
Work is one place Facebook still has not reached out to potential users,
at least not officially.
Once users do sign up, however, they are by far the most engaged compared
with any other social network. According to a recent Pew Research survey,
70 percent of them logged on daily, a significant increase from the
63 percent who did so in 2013. This suggests that, with 52 percent of
online adults using some kind of social media site, Facebook still acts
as a kind of online home base for many.
Still, unlike a plethora of work-themed social networking tools
including LinkedIn, Salesforces Chatter, Microsofts Yammer, and the
popular messaging tool Slack Facebook has been harder for its users to
justify using at the office. Even Rasmussen acknowledges the problem.
Some people are less comfortable than others using their personal
Facebook in the work context, he says. With Facebook at Work, you get
the option of completely separating the two.
With so many Web services competing for peoples attention, both at home
and at work, Facebook really has no choice but to head to the office. The
company has shown a peerless ability to fuse peoples personal lives and
online lives. If it can do the same for our work lives, thats at least
eight more hours we spend glued to Facebook. Which is exactly what
Facebook hopes well do.
The 8080 Chip at 40: What's Next for The Mighty Microprocessor?
It came out in 1974 and was the basis of the MITS Altair 8800, for which
two guys named Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote BASIC, and millions of
people began to realize that they, too, could have their very own,
personal, computer.
The Altair 8800, based on the Intel 8080, was the first commercially
successful home hobbyist PC.
Now, some 40 years after the debut of the Intel 8080 microprocessor, the
industry can point to direct descendants of the chip that are
astronomically more powerful (see sidebar, below). So what's in store for
the next four decades?
For those who were involved with, or watched, the birth of the 8080 and
know about the resulting PC industry and today's digital environment,
escalating hardware specs aren't the concern. These industry watchers are
more concerned with the decisions that the computer industry, and
humanity as a whole, will face in the coming decades.
While at Intel, Italian immigrant Fredericco Faggin designed the 8080 as
an enhancement of Intel's 8008 chip - the first eight-bit microprocessor,
which had debuted two years earlier. The 8008, in turn, had been a
single-chip emulation of the processor in the Datapoint 2200, a desktop
computer introduced by the Computer Terminal Corp. of Texas in late 1970.
Chief among the Intel 8080's many improvements was the use of 40 connector
pins, as opposed to 18 in the 8008. The presence of only 18 pins meant
that some I/O lines had to share pins. That had forced designers to use
several dozen support chips to multiplex the I/O lines on the 8008, making
the chip impractical for many uses, especially for hobbyists.
"The 8080 opened the market suggested by the 8008," says Faggin.
As for the future, he says he hopes to see development that doesn't
resemble the past. "Today's computers are no different in concept from
the ones used in the early 1950s, with a processor and memory and
algorithms executed in sequence," Faggin laments, and he'd like to see
that change.
He holds out some hope for the work done to mimic other processes,
particularly those in biology. "The way information processing is done
inside a living cell is completely different from conventional computing.
In living cells it's done by non-linear dynamic systems whose complexity
defies the imagination - billions of parts exhibiting near-chaotic
behavior. But imagine the big win when we understand the process.
"Forty years from now we will have begun to crack the nut - it will take
huge computers just to do the simulations of structures with that kind of
dynamic behavior," Faggin says. "Meanwhile, progress in computation will
continue using the strategies we have developed."
Nick Tredennick, who in the late 1970s was a designer for the Motorola
68000 processor later used in the original Apple Macintosh, agrees. "The
big advances I see coming in the next four decades would be our
understanding of what I call bio-informatics, based on biological
systems," he says. "We will start to understand and copy the solutions
that nature has already evolved."
Carl Helmers, who founded Byte magazine for the PC industry in 1975, adds,
"With all our modern silicon technology, we are still only implementing
specific realizations of universal Turing machines, building on the now
nearly 70-year-old concept of the Von Neumann architecture."
How we will interface with computers in the future is of more concern to
most experts than is the nature of the computers themselves.
"The last four decades were about creating the technical environment,
while the next four will be about merging the human and the digital
domains, merging the decision-making of the human being with the
number-crunching of a machine," says Rob Enderle, an industry analyst
for the past three decades.
Moore's Law (as predicted by Gordon Moore, Intel's co-founder, in 1965),
says that the number of components that can be put on a chip at the same
price can be expected to double every two years. Since the first
commercialized 8-bit microprocessor was introduced in 1974 there has
been time for 20 doublings, generating a growth factor of 1,048,576.
Examining one of the latest high-end descendants of the 8080, the Intel
Core i7-5960X, shows that growth has indeed been massive, but not equal
for all specs. For example, memory has indeed gone up by a factor of a
million, from 64KB to 64GB. But the number of transistors on the
processor itself has gone up by a factor of 433,333, from 6,000 to 2.6
billion.
Clock speeds in modern chips have been limited by heat-dissipation
problems, and the 3GHz clock speed of the latest processor is 1,500 times
the 2MHz speed of the 8080.
The i7-5960X has eight cores, whereas the 8080 had only one (itself). The
8080 required about four clock cycles to perform a machine-level
instruction, for performance of about 500,000 instructions per second.
The rule of thumb today is four instructions per cycle, giving the i7,
with eight cores, performance of 96 billion instructions per second, or
192,000 times more than the 8080.
Of course, additional factors like memory speed and capacity, storage
speed and capacity, large on-chip memory caches, and the inclusion of
graphics and audio processors also increase the capacities of modern
systems.
Meanwhile, the 8080's 1974 retail price was $360, which (with inflation)
would be $1,740 today. The initial single-unit price of the i7-5960X in
2014 was $1,059, a reduction of nearly 40%.
The next four decades could theoretically produce another 20 doublings,
leading to another improvement factor of roughly 200,000, producing a
device roughly 40 billion times more powerful than the original 8080. In
40 years' time, the chip could cost (in 2014 dollars) about $635. More
than likely, though, points of diminishing returns will be encountered,
as is already the case with clock speeds, causing the industry to adopt
one or more alternate architectures, as some experts predict.
This merging will involve people learning how to perform direct brain
control of machines, much as they now learn to play musical instruments,
predicts Lee Felsenstein. He helped design the Sol-20 (one of the first
8080-based hobbyist machines) and the Osborne 1, the first mass-market
portable computer.
"I learned to play the recorder and could make sounds without thinking
about it - a normal process that takes a period of time," he notes.
Learning a computer-brain interface will likewise be a highly interactive
process starting in about middle school, using systems that are initially
indistinguishable from toys, he adds.
"A synthesis of people and machines will come out of it, and the results
will not be governed by the machines nor by the designers of the
machines. Every person and his machine will turn out a little different,
and we will have to put up with that - it won't be a Big Brother,
one-size-fits-all environment," Felsenstein predicts.
"An effortless interface is the way to go," counters Aaron Goldberg, who
heads Content 4 IT and has been following the technology industry as an
analyst since 1977. "Ideally it would understand what you are thinking
and require no training," considering the computational power that should
be available, he adds.
"Interaction with these devices will be less tactile and more verbal,"
says Andrew Seybold, also a long-time industry analyst. "We will talk to
them more and they will talk back more and make more sense. That's either
a good thing or a scary thing."
Some observers believe increasingly powerful computers could bring
problems.
"In the next four decades the biggest issue is what happens when devices
become smarter, more capable and more knowledgeable than we are," says
Goldberg. "If you follow the curve we will clearly be subordinate to the
technology. The results could be terrifying, or empowering. There may
always be tension between the two. Much as it has been thrilling to live
in this generation, the next should be really exciting - but the
problems will also be much bigger."
"There's a lot of concern that we are developing the race that will
replace us," adds Enderle, fears that have been articulated by
scientists and others, from tech entrepreneur Elon Musk to renowned
physicist Stephen Hawking. "We could create something so smart that it
could think that it would be better off without us," Enderle adds. "It
would see that we're not always rational and fix the problem, either by
migrating off-planet as many hope, or by wiping out the human race."
Not everyone agrees with the doomsday scenario. "I am a meliora
conservative regarding computer technology's future," counters Byte
magazine's Helmers. (Meliora is Latin for "ever-better," and it is the
motto of Helmers' alma mater, the University of Rochester.) "Given
another 40 years of creative engineering minds building on the vast
past achievements of prior creative minds, our technology will be
meliora to the nth degree."
Either way, "The CPU is only a small part of the problem these days;
it's what we do with it that's the problem," adds Bob Frankston, who
co-invented VisiCalc, the first PC "killer app," in 1978.
"You will have the equivalent of Watson in your wristwatch or embedded
inside you - what will you then want to do?" wonders Jonathan Schmidt,
one of the designers of the Datapoint 2200. Watson is the name of the
IBM artificial intelligence entity famous for winning the TV quiz show
"Jeopardy!" against two human champions in 2011.
Ted Nelson, who invented the term hypertext in the 1960s and whose
still-unrealized Project Xanadu has many features in common with the
later World Wide Web, pretty much rejects both the past and the future.
"Advances? It has all turned to crap and imprisonment," he says. As for
the next four decades, "More crap, worse imprisonment." (Nelson's
Xanadu would give all users file access, including editing privileges.
Users on today's Web can do only what a specific site lets them do.)
Some experts have predicted, or called for, specific advances. For
example, Stan Mazor, who as a chip designer at Intel was involved in the
8008, says machine vision may be the next frontier.
"When computers can see, we will have a large leap forward in compelling
computer applications," says Mazor. "Although typical multiprocessors
working on a single task saturate at around 16 CPUs, if a task can be
partitioned, then we might see 100,000 CPUs on a chip. Vision's scene
analysis might be one of those problems suitable for large-scale
parallelism."
"Why can't we use the computing power we have available today to make
computers communicate with humans more efficiently, without the need for
programming languages, operating systems, etc?" asks Marcian E. "Ted"
Hoff, who was Mazor's boss at Intel during the 8008 project. "There has
been insufficient progress in natural language processing, a
disappointment I hope will be remedied."
"I am a bit concerned about the whole cloud thing," Hoff adds. "Consider
that the delay due to a few inches of wire between a CPU chip and its
memory now corresponds to several [CPU] instructions. Local storage has
never been cheaper. And yet we are planning to move our data miles and
miles away, where its security is questionable, and the time to reach it
is several orders of magnitude longer than with local storage. And
consider the bandwidth requirements."
Nick Tredennick, a former design engineer at Motorola who worked on the
MC68000 microprocessor and a co-founder of chip-maker NexGen, calls for
hardware that is configurable according to the needs of the software. "We
need to make the hardware accessible to programmers, not just logic
designers. I predicted that years ago, but it did not happen." He
foresees that micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) combined with the
Internet of Things should lead to buildings and bridges that can report
when they are stressed and otherwise need maintenance.
As for the cumulative future result of the rising tide of computer power,
"I don't think it will be world peace, or a human lifespan of 300 years,"
says Frankston. "Whatever it is, it will be the new normal, and people
will complain about 'kids these days.'"
=~=~=~=
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