You actually get pretty decent build quality for the price. by Andrew Cunningham
Google's Caesar Sengupta introduces HP's Chromebook 11.
Andrew Cunningham
Until now, Chromebook buyers have had to make a choice. You could get eithera cheap laptop with cheap components or the premium-but-ridiculously-expensiveChromebook Pixel. When Google says that HP's new $279 Chromebook 11 is "inspired" by the Pixel, it's not about components—the Chromebook 11 lacks the high-resolution touchscreen, the high-end Ivy Bridge CPU, and the solid aluminum construction—the Pixel's banner features. Rather, it's about making a laptop that makes enthusiasts happy without the Pixel's sticker shock.
That begins with the screen. It's an 11.6-inch 1366×768 non-touch affair (that's a non-remarkable resolution, though in a laptop this size it's more reasonable than it is in a 13-inch-or-larger system), but the most significant thing about it is that it's an IPS panel instead of the low-quality TN panel that has come with every cheap Chromebook to date. Nothing tanks an otherwise good laptop like a bad display, and the low contrast ratio and shallow viewing angles of the screens in theSamsung ChromebookorAcer's C7 Chromebookmade those computers more difficult to recommend despite their low prices.
The panel in the Chromebook 11, on the other hand, is glossy with nice colors and deep blacks—not AMOLED deep, but great for the money. If you've ever wondered to yourself why a $199 tablet can offer a higher-quality display than a $600 laptop, the Chromebook 11 was made specifically for you.
Put the broom down. They come in peace. by Casey Johnston
The Nest Protect: a speaker, a lighted ring, and a giant button.
Nest
The designers of theNest "learning" thermostatplan to improve another chronically annoying household device: the smoke and carbon monoxide detector. The company's new “Nest Protect” can be controlled via a mobile app and, most importantly, features a giant, lighted button that will immediately cancel any alarms.
According to Nest, the Protect has one sensor each for heat, light, carbon monoxide, and smoke; it can also sense movement and ultrasonic signals. In addition to an audible alarm, a lighted ring on the device will change color to alert users about household dangers. A set of Protects networked together can even help determine in which room a problem is occurring, and the lighted ring on the device is bright enough that it can light a dark room if it senses a person walking past.
Both the mobile app and the company's website can alert a Nest Protect owner when the battery in a Protect is low, a fact the device will also communicate several times via a spoken voice (i.e., no chirps).
Based on my own anecdotal experience, humanity spends far more time stalking the cryptic noises smoke detectors make or yanking the devices from the wall when they go off at the wrong times than it does being grateful to them for saving us from a fiery demise. Our relationship with these lifesavers is, at best, strained—but we maintain a strategic alliance.
The Nest Protect costs $129, about $100 more than a run-of-the-mill smoke detector. Preorders are open now, with shipments starting in early November.
The earliest tablets on offer from US carriers were sold without subsidies and with high plan costs. Sprint seems set to correct that mistake—somewhat. In an announcement yesterday, Sprint said that it wouldoffer Samsung's Galaxy Tab 3 7.0 with LTE for just $49.99 to new and eligible subscribers, along with a two-year contract. The addition of the tablet will cost just $5 per month on top of a subscriber's monthly plan fees, and the device will be supported by Sprint's One Up annual upgrade program. The Tab 3 will be available in white on October 11, with a "Midnight Black" option to follow in time for the holidays.
For those who need a refresher, the7" slateruns Samsung's flavor of Android 4.2 on Qualcomm silicon (a 1.6GHz Snapdragon 400) and pushes a 7" 1024×600 display. Not exactly top-shelf stuff. The Wi-Fi version is available for $199 from most major e-tailers, and AT&T earlier this year announced its plan to offer its own LTE variant.
Performance on the Tab 3 may not be groundbreaking, but if you've been looking to add some mobility to your tablet computing, it may be a solution for you.
Like those giant newsroom touchscreens, but less silly. by Jason Inofuentes
Sharp
If you have been itching for a 4K Thunderbolt Display from Apple, you may be waiting a little while longer. Sharp is prepared to scratch that itch, though, and intends to add full pen and touch compatibility with OS X later this year. The announcement comes fromMac Otakara(Japanese link) and comes after July's announcement of thePN-K322B32-inch professional display.
Sharp's IGZO display technology drives these high resolutions without sacrificing power efficiency, and the company just announceda 15.6-inch model. The road to ultra high-definition (UHD) displays on every desk is a long one, though; this beauty is expected to cost upwards of $5,000 when it hits stateside. By then, visual professionals should expect to be able to whip their stylus across an array of 8 million pixels.
There's more display news from Sharp, too. At CEATEC Japan 2013 today, Sharp was the recipient of an award for its MEMS-IGZO exhibition that showcased a combination color e-paper MEMS and IGZO LCD display. The prototype display features always-on capability, similar to E Ink, and the color richness and pixel density that IGZO can bring while sipping less power than current technology. It will still be a while before we see the combo displays in handsets and tablets, but they may be worth the wait.
A massive data center being built by the National Security Agency to aid its surveillance operations has been hit by "10 meltdowns in the past 13 months" that "destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of machinery and delayed the center's opening for a year,"the Wall Street Journalreported last night.
The first of four facilities at the Utah Data Center was originally scheduled to become operational in October 2012, according to project documents described by the Journal. But the electrical problems—described as arc fault failures or "a flash of lightning inside a 2-foot box"—led to explosions, failed circuits, and melted metal, the report states:
The first arc fault failure at the Utah plant was on Aug. 9, 2012, according to project documents. Since then, the center has had nine more failures, most recently on Sept. 25. Each incident caused as much as $100,000 in damage, according to a project official.
It took six months for investigators to determine the causes of two of the failures. In the months that followed, the contractors employed more than 30 independent experts that conducted 160 tests over 50,000 man-hours, according to project documents.
The 1 million square foot data center, filled with supercomputers and storage equipment to maintain surveillance information, is slated to cost $1.4 billion to construct. One project official told the Journalthat the NSA planned to start turning on some of the computers at the facility this week. "But without a reliable electrical system to run computers and keep them cool, the NSA's global surveillance data systems can't function," the newspaper wrote.
Project officials are still trying to determine the cause of the meltdowns, and they disagree about whether proposed fixes will work. Backup generators have failed repeated tests, cooling systems "remain untested," and "there are also disagreements among government officials and contractors over the adequacy of the electrical control systems."
The Army Corps of Engineers is overseeing construction and promised to make sure the data center is "completely reliable" before allowing it to go online.
Crackers tap new sources to uncover "givemelibertyorgivemedeath" and other phrases. by Dan Goodin
Aurich Lawson
Early last year, password security researcher Kevin Young was hitting a brick wall. Over the previous few weeks, he made steady progress decoding cryptographically protected password data leaked from thethen-recent hack of intelligence firm Stratfor. But with about 60 percent of the more than 860,000 password hashes cracked, his attempts to decipher the remaining 40 percent were failing.
The so-called dictionary attacks he mounted using lists of more than 20 million passwords culled from previous website hacks had worked well. Augmented with programming rules that substituted letters for numbers or combined two or more words in his lists, his attacks revealed Stratfor passwords such as "pinkyandthebrain", "pithecanthropus", and "moonlightshadow". Brute-force techniques trying every possible combination of letters, numbers, and special characters had also succeeded at cracking all passwords of eight or fewer characters. So the remaining 344,000 passwords, Young concluded, must be longer words or phrases few crackers had seen before.
"I was starting to run out of word lists," he recalled. "I was at a loss for words—literally."
He cracked the first 60 percent of the list using the freely availableHashcatandJohn the Ripper password-cracking programs, which ran the guesses through the sameMD5 algorithmStratfor and many other sites used to generate the one-way hashes. When the output of a guessed word matched one of the leaked Stratfor hashes, Young would have successfully cracked another password. (Security professionals call the technique an "offline" attack because guesses are never entered directly into a webpage.) Now, with his arsenal of dictionaries exhausted and the exponential increase in the time it would take to brute force passwords greater than eight characters, Young was at a dead end. In the passwords arms race, he was losing. Young knew he needed to compile new lists of words he never tried before. The question was where to find the words.
After cracking 60 percent of passwords leaked in the hack of Stratfor, Kevin Young mined the Internet for longer passphrases.
Kevin Young
A free cracking dictionary anyone can compile
Young joined forces with fellow security researcher Josh Dustin, and the cracking duo quickly settled on trying longer strings of words found online. They started small. They took a single article fromUSA Today, isolated select phrases, and inputted them into their password crackers. Within a few weeks, they expanded their sources to include the entire contents of Wikipedia and the first 15,000 works of Project Gutenberg, which bills itself as the largest single collection of free electronic books. Almost immediately, hashes from Stratfor and other leaks that remained uncracked for months fell. One such password was "crotalus atrox". That's the scientific name for the western diamondback rattlesnake, and it ended up in their word list courtesy ofthis Wikipedia article. The success was something of an epiphany for Young and Dustin.
"Rather than try a brute force that makes sense to a computer but not to people, let's use human beings because people typically make these long passwords based on things that humans use," Dustin remembered thinking. "I basically utilized the person who wrote the article on Wikipedia to put words together for us."
A crotalus atrox, aka western diamondback rattlesnake.
Almost immediately, a flood of once-stubborn passwords revealed themselves. They included: "Am i ever gonna see your face again?" (36 characters), "in the beginning was the word" (29 characters), "from genesis to revelations" (26), "I cant remember anything" (24), "thereisnofatebutwhatwemake" (26), "givemelibertyorgivemedeath" (26), and "eastofthesunwestofthemoon" (25).
Many animal species consist of members that will only mate once before dying. This reproductive strategy, often seen in fish and insects, can make evolutionary sense when the species is able to produce a lot of offspring from that single mating. Given that salmon can release thousands of eggs when they spawn, a single mating can produce a lifetime's worth of offspring.
That's not true for mammals, though. Raising young internally limits the number you can produce from a single mating, while the extensive post-natal care required by mammalian young ensures that the female has to stick around for a while after giving birth. But males don't always participate in postnatal care, so it probably shouldn't be a surprise to learn that there are mammals out there that engage in what researchers are terming "suicidal reproduction." The problem is that the behavior only occurs in a small number of marsupial species, and researchers have been arguing for 30 years about why that is the case. Now, some Australian researchers have come up with an answer: a combination of sperm competition and promiscuous females.
The marsupials that engage in this "one strike and you're out" approach to mating all die off because of a general immune failure that happens shortly after mating. This has nothing to do with the process of mating itself; in fact, it starts well in advance of mating, as the males build up a store of sperm and then permanently shut their gonads down. The question wasn't so much how the males' death takes place, but why. What sort of evolutionary advantage could this provide?
One hint came from the fact that the species that have this life cycle (technically called semelparity) are all small insect eaters. The possibility that they were all related species led to the suggestion that there might be something that genetically predisposed them to this lifestyle. Another idea was that the species might live in an environment where the availability of food was severely limited; thus, the males dying would free up resources to make their progeny more successful.
But a bit of biogeography suggested something else might be at play. The suicidal reproduction was mostly found in species at the far southern end of the range of marsupials. In fact, the new paper notes that male survival after mating drops the further you get from the equator. In these cooler environments, most insect populations experience a boom in the summer and are pretty sparse the rest of the year.
This in turn causes the females to time their reproduction to the availability of the calories needed to support it. The net result is that the entire female population in these species is ready to mate within a narrow window of time. With mate availability at a premium, they mate with pretty much any male available (the authors refer to the females as "mating promiscuously").
The authors hypothesized that the males' evolutionary response to this situation is to engage in what's called sperm competition. To confirm this, they measured the relative testes size of these and several related species. As male survival went down, the testes size relative to their body went up. The males that engaged in suicidal reproduction also mated for twice as long (an average of 9.4 hours!) as their less-competitive relatives. These are signs, researchers conclude, that the males are trying to ensure that their sperm is what does the fertilizing, even if the female goes on to mate with others.
The huge amount of resources expended on mating, combined with the fact that survival in small mammals is pretty low to begin with, means that the males are unlikely to survive to mate a second time anyway. So instead, they simply tune their bodies to make the most out of the one chance they get. And at an average of 9.4 hours, it's hard to say that they don't accomplish this.
Android Police has scored aset of screenshotsfrom the next version of Google Hangouts, and it looks like Google is finally ready to integrate SMS messaging into the product. One screenshot shows messages displaying in the Hangouts app, marked as "xxmins via SMS." Another shows the settings screen with an option to "Turn on SMS" which will "Send and receive SMS with Hangouts." The report says the screenshots are from version 1.3 of Hangouts (the current version is 1.2) and that SMS delivery reports, MMS, and video sharing support are also included.
Android Police has a solid track record of getting access to early bits of Android, having acquired advanced copies ofAndroid 4.2 andAndroid 4.0in the past. (Full disclosure: I wrote those articles). While the site can't give a firm release date, chances are this is part of the coming wave of Android KitKat improvements.
Unifying the stock texting app and Google Hangouts is probably the Android community's most requested feature. It would bring Google's confusing mess of messaging apps down from three apps to two. There used to be fourmessaging apps (Google Talk, G+ Messenger, the stock texting app, and Google Voice), so this is an ongoing project for Google. If this change makes it into version 1.3, we'll be down to Google Voice and Google Hangouts.
That's right, there's still no Google Voice support. Hopefully that's next on the agenda.
ARM-based Chromebook uses a Samsung Exynos SoC and an IPS display. by Andrew Cunningham
The new HP Chromebook Pixel 11.
Andrew Cunningham
Google has announced yet another member of the Chromebook family this morning: the HP Chromebook 11, a new smaller system from HP that joins itsPavilion Chromebookandits upcoming Chromebook 14. The system is available now from Google Play, Amazon, Best Buy, and other retailers starting at $279.
One of Google's stated aims with the laptop was to bring some features of the Chromebook Pixel down to a more affordable price point. While the high-resolution touchscreen and the all-metal construction obviously didn't make it, the computer does sport a 1366×768 non-touch IPS display, a significant step up in color and viewing angles from the TN panels we've seen in cheap Chromebooks to date. The system also retains the Pixel's multicolored light bar on the lid. The laptop comes in white or black plastic with one of four accent colors (red, blue, green, and yellow, Google's standard colors), and while the body is plastic it is underlaid with a magnesium frame.
On the inside, the specifications also take a step down from the Pixel, though they're still not too shabby. Like last year's Samsung Chromebook, the Chromebook 11 sports a dual-core ARM SoC from Samsung (the exact same chip, in fact—the Exynos 5250 combines two Cortex A15 CPU cores with one of ARM's quad-core Mali-T604 GPUs). This chip won't come near the performance of an Ivy Bridge chip from Intel, but it should be more than sufficient for Chrome OS, and it also allows the laptop to be completely fanless. 2GB of RAM, 16GB of solid-state storage, dual-band 802.11n, Bluetooth 4.0, and up to six hours of battery life are also standard.
The Chromebook 11's full-size keyboard, which at least at first blush actually has pretty good key travel. Like the Chromebook Pixel, the speakers are hidden beneath it.
Andrew Cunningham
Finally, the laptop includes a pair of USB 2.0 ports and charging via a tablet-and-phone-like micro USB port (which can also output video via the SlimPort standard, much like the recent Nexus devices). The system also comes with 100GB of Google Drive storage for two years, a 60-day free trial of Google Play Music All Access, and 12 free GoGo Inflight Internet sessions. A 4G version will be available, but pricing and availability has not been announced.
We'll be going hands-on with the HP Chromebook 11 later today, at which point we'll be posting impressions of the laptop's construction and more pictures.
