PowerVR goes 4K with GT7900 for game consoles

PowerVR is announcing its new high-end GPU architecture today, in preparation for both Mobile World Congress and the Game Developers Conference (MWC and GDC, respectively). Imagination Technologies has lost some ground to companies like Qualcomm in recent years, but its cores continue to power devices from Samsung, Intel, MediaTek, and of course, Apple. The new GT7900 is meant to crown the Series 7 product family with a GPU beefy enough for high-end products — including 4K support at 60fps — as well as what Imagination is classifying as “affordable” game consoles.

Which mobile apps drain your battery the most?

The anti-virus company AVG Technologies has released its latest report on which Android applications are the most likely to chew through your phone’s data storage, battery life, and data plan. The combined data set is quite interesting, particularly since some of the worst offenders aren’t necessarily applications you’d think of.

AVG collected data on users in the United States, Australia, and the UK and found it was statistically significant enough to draw conclusions from. Data-plan traffic only included transfers over cellular networks, and the storage evaluation included data that the app downloaded after install — not just the listed size in the Google Play store.

Samsung is still lying about the encryption on its Smart TVs

When news broke that Samsung’s Smart TV’s listened to conversations and sent them to a third-party server company, the Korean manufacturer countered by claiming that all data transmissions to and from its televisions were encrypted. When testing demonstrated that the data in question wasn’t encrypted (despite being sent via Port 443, which is typically used for HTTPS traffic), Samsung modified its stance, claiming that new TVs were encrypted properly but older sets were not. This, too, has now been proven false.

Report claims DirectX 12 will enable AMD and Nvidia GPUs to work side-by-side

With the Games Developer Conference right around the corner we’ve started to see more gaming and technology announcements cropping up, but a new report on DirectX 12 is certain to raise the eyebrows of any PC gamer. It’s been reported that DirectX 12 — Microsoft’s upcoming, low-latency, close(r)-to-metal API that replaces DirectX 11 — will be capable of running across AMD and Nvidia GPUs at the same time.

A “source with knowledge of the matter” told Tom’s Hardware that DirectX 12 will support asynchronous workloads across multiple GPUs, and that one extension of this support is that a task could theoretically be split between two different video cards from different manufacturers.

Microsoft to accelerate Bing search with neural network

Google’s engineers have previously estimated that a typical 0.2-second web query reflects a quantity of work spent in indexing and retrieval equal to about 0.0003 kWh of energy per search. With over 100 billion looks per month at their petabyte index, well-executed page ranking has become a formidable proposition. Microsoft’s approach with Bing has been to break the ranking portion of search into three parts — feature extraction, free-form expressions, and machine learning scoring:When we search Google’s web index, we are only searching around 10 percent of the half-a-trillion or so pages that are potentially available. Much of the content in the larger deep web — not to be confused with the dark web — is buried further down in the sites that make up the visible surface web. The indexes of competitors like Yahoo and Bing (around 15 billion pages each) are still only half as large as Google’s. To close this gap, Microsoft has recently pioneered sophisticated new Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology to make massive web crawls more efficient, and faster.

Windows Phone 10 is dead before it even arrives

Windows Phone has a tech journalist problem. A lot of tech journalists, myself included, like Windows Phone. It’s stylish and attractive, and its UI makes sense — at least at the top level, and in a way Windows 8 never did on the desktop. But the way tech journalists get excited about an OS is to have a flagship device, and we haven’t had a really good one since the Nokia Lumia Icon, which Verizon never marketed, and the Lumia 1020 and HTC 8X before it.IDC has released its latest numbers for smartphone OS market share, and unfortunately, it means we can likely close the book on Windows Phone.

Google confirms Chromebook Pixel 2, but tempers expectations

As Google likes to point out, the original Pixel was intended to be both a proof-of-concept for a high-end Chromebook (rather than a fully fledged consumer product), and a platform for development. This time around, Google appears to be stressing this intent much more — making it clear (through public relations!) that, basically, the Pixel 2 isn’t for you, effectively preventing all sales criticism before it arises.Two years ago, Google released theflashy, expensive Pixel in order to show off the potential of the Chromebook. The hefty $1,300 price tag and lofty specs seemed to suggest that Google misunderstood the market for its new laptop ecosystem — the Chromebook ended up making a splash in the more affordable educational and workplace market, which is the exact opposite market into which a $1,300 laptop would fall. Affordable Chromebooks took off — specifically Acer’s Core i3 offering — but the Pixel remained an amusing pariah of high-end potential. Despite the lack of sales success, the Pixel is coming back, and it aims to be a little less ridiculous by being more specialized than the first.

New EPIC camera to photograph Earth in a way it has never been before

That’s not all, though. What makes this interesting is that the camera will also capture the sunlit face of Earth in its entirety — the first time this has happened since the Galileo mission to Jupiter in the 1990s. A lone satellite has actually never done this before, either. The way it is now, multiple satellites have to photograph the Earth from different vantage points, after which scientists then piece the photos together.Earth will soon be photographed in a way it never has been before. Onboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite is a Lockheed Martin-built camera called EPIC (Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera). The National Oceanic and Atmosphere Association (NOAA) and NASA plan to use EPIC to collect atmospheric data.

Nvidia slapped with class-action lawsuit over GTX 970 memory issues

Nvidia’s CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, hasn’t directly responded to the class-action lawsuit allegations, but he has written a blog post responding to the larger situation. Said post isn’t likely to win many converts to Nvidia’s way of thinking, since Huang refers to the memory issue as a “feature,” noting that “Instead of being excited that we invented a way to increase memory of the GTX 970 from 3GB to 4GB, some were disappointed that we didn’t better describe the segmented nature of the architecture for that last 1GB of memory.”

He then claims that this was done because games “are using more memory than ever.”

Battery power alone used to track Android phones

Android (specifically a Nexus 4) was used to test this location tracking scheme, but it would work equally well on any mobile device that offered network access and battery stats. Tracking location based on battery activity is predicated on the assumption that the farther a device is from the a cell tower, the more power it uses to maintain a connection. The same is true when it’s inside a building or otherwise obscured by structures.The phone you carry around all day has a myriad of different sensors that measure everything from location to barometric pressure. Apps usually have to adhere to the permission control system built into platforms like iOS and Android to get that information, but a team of researchers at Stanford University has devised a way to collect location information without talking to the GPS hardware. All they need to figure out where you’ve been is access to the battery levels.

NSA, GCHQ colluded to steal SIM encryption keys for millions of phones

Edward Snowden’s data trove continues bearing fruit — and the implications of the latest release are dark for anyone who cares even slightly about mobile privacy. According to the once-secret documents, the NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ, engaged in a massive operation against one of the world’s largest mobile SIM card manufacturers, Gemalto. To understand the significance of this release it helps to know a bit about how SIMs are used. When you use 3G or 4G connections, the connection between your device and your cell phone carrier is encrypted. That encryption isn’t perfect, but cracking it is still time-consuming, particularly if the goal is to monitor millions of people simultaneously.

Battery builder A123 Systems sues Apple for poaching employees, implies Apple Car is happening

A123’s complaint alleges that five of its top researchers have been lured away by Apple in violation of their noncompete agreements. Said agreements (we’ve reprinted part of one below) forbid an employee from working for any competitor of A123 Systems and forbid employees who leave the company from soliciting their fellow co-workers from jumping ship alongside them.Lithium-ion battery manufacturer A123 Systems has sued Apple, alleging that the smartphone and tablet manufacturer has been poaching its employees. Some of you may remember A123 Systems high-profile bankruptcy from several years ago — the company collapsed in 2012 after a meteoric ascent. Post-bankruptcy, A123 Systems was bought by Chinese conglomerate Wanxiang, and it has continued to develop battery technology and win customers for its stationary installations through the present day.

Top tech cars of the Chicago Auto Show: Honda Pilot leads the pack

Honda stole the Chicago Auto Show this week with the unveiling of a tech-centric Honda Pilot midsize SUV. Chicago is the last of the major fall-winter US auto shows that ranged from Los Angeles to Las Vegas (CES is an auto show) to Detroit and Washington. Chicago bills itself as the nation’s largest auto show, meaning in the number of car-prospecting attendees after press and charity days. LA, Detroit, and New York have more impact in the number of new car intros, journalists, and high-level execs. Scheduling a new-car intro in Chicago is a crapshoot: fewer journalists around to cover it, but if you’re the most important car there, you win. That’s the case with the 2016 Pilot.

Samsung promises yet another fix for slowed 840 EVO SSDs

Samsung’s 840 EVO SSDs were among the cream of the solid-state crop in 2013,boasting fast speeds and big-time storage capabilities at a (then) record low cost. But some buyers noticed a troubling occurrence: As time went on the drive’s read performance could plummet, all the way down to sub-100MB per second speeds. That’s amammoth dip from the drive’s claimed 520MBps maximum.

Fortunately, Samsung was able to identify the root cause of the problem—a combination of usual NAND cell degradation and an unusual NAND management issue—and issued a fix in Ocotber. Problem solved!

US judge dismisses antitrust case against Google over Android apps

A U.S. federal judge has dismissed an antitrust lawsuit that charges Google harmed consumers by forcing Android handset makers to use its apps by default, but gave the plaintiffs three weeks to amend their complaint.

The two consumers who filed the suit failed to show that Google’s allegedly illegal restrictive contracts on manufacturers of Android devices resulted in higher prices on phones, U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman said in a Feb. 20 ruling.

The complainants, who were seeking class-action status for the lawsuit, said that Google required manufacturers including Samsung Electronics to set the search giant’s own apps as default options on Android-based phones, restricting access to competing software such as Microsoft’s Bing search engine. The complaint alleged that this practice limited competition in the search engine market, stifled innovation and resulted in higher prices for phones.

Prominent developer criticizes HTTP/2 protocol, claims politics drove adoption process

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) completed work on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol 2 (HTTP/2) standard earlier this week. This new protocol will replace current versions of HTTP (1.0 and 1.1) and is the largest single update to the standard since it debuted more than 25 years ago. Most analysts and websites that have covered the announcement positively, but at least one major developer, Poul-Henning Kamp, has publicly spoken out against the project.

SCS is putting much effort to secure official licenses of trucks

Our effort to secure official licenses of trucks to put into our games continues, now our focus is on Northern America. Courting the truck manufacturers - getting their attention and reaching the decision makers - is really not easy at all for a small company like SCS Software coming from outside of the transportation industry. The licensing negotiations in some cases take years to complete, and sometimes we are asked to prove that we are really taking this seriously.

Nvidia kills mobile GPU overclocking in latest driver update, irate customers up in arms

Nvidia’s mobile Maxwell parts have won significant enthusiast acclaim since launch thanks to excellent performance and relatively low power consumption. Boutique builders and enthusiasts alike also tend to enjoy pushing the envelope, and Maxwell’s manufacturing characteristics apparently make it eminently suited to overclocking. Now, apparently, Nvidia is cracking down on these options with a driver update that removes the overclocking features that apparently some vendors sold to customers.

Samsung’s Smart TVs don’t just spy, they transmit your speech in unencrypted plaintext

The TV that David Lodge tested is a 2.5 year-old UE46ES8000, not the latest model. Samsung is now saying that its latest televisions are encrypted and that it’s just older devices that lack the feature. Exactly what qualifies as an “older” device is unclear — the UE46ES8000 was a high-end device at launch, with a price tag of £1500-2000 (review sites vary on this figure), or $2300-$3000.

When news broke that Samsung’s Smart TVs actively monitor what users say and transmit that information to third parties, the company snapped into action with the usual reassurances that it takes user data seriously, follows best practices, and would never, ever, share information with untrusted third parties or individuals. It’s taken a bit over a week for such reassurances to unravel — new research shows that Samsung TVs don’t just transmit what you say, it sends that information in unencrypted plaintext without even bothering to use HTTPS.

Russian search giant Yandex demands antitrust action against Google because of Android search

Yandex isn’t fighting over Google’s scraps in Russia as many search providers are around the world. Yandex owns the majority of the search market in Russia, but its share recently fell below 60 percent. That’s cause for concern from where Yandex sits, so is it time to change up the business? Compete harder? Nope, get regulators to hassle Google.As Google’s influence over technology continues to grow, so do the calls from competitors for regulatory agencies to slam on the brakes. Such is the case in Russia where a competing search company has filed a complaint with Russia’s anti-monopoly regulator to investigate the way Google manages Android. It’s not some small-scale nobody competitor, though, this is Yandex — Russia’s largest search provider. Yandex claims the way Google integrates its search services in Android is anti-competitive, but it really just sounds like Yandex wants to have its cake and eat it too.

Lenovo PCs ship with adware that destroys system security, breaks HTTPS

Lenovo is selling PCs equipped with a pre-installed adware package that destroys the security of HTTPS and creates a perfect man-in-the-middle (MTM) scenario against the host PC. The software in question is called Superfish Visual Discovery, and its basic function — it injects advertising into browser sessions — is bad enough. Superfish’s five-alarm functionality is that it installs its own signed root certificates to a user’s operating system. What this means, in essence, is that Superfish substitutes its own signed certificate for the certificate that’s supposed to be provided by the actual website.

ET deals: Xbox One with two free games for $350

The latest generation of consoles has been around for over a year now, and some prime deals have finally started popping up. Not only have there been occasional price drops, but bundles add loads of additional value as well. If you still haven’t jumped in, now’s the time. The Xbox One is currently on sale bundled with two free games, and we found a deal that will net you a $50 eGift card as well.

So, what does the Xbox One have to offer? It comes standard with a 500GB hard drive, an HDMI input, and HDMI output, optical audio output, three USB 3.0 ports, Blu-ray support, 802.11b/g/n WiFi support, a wireless controller, a power adapter, and a chat headset. And of course, it supports major streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Instant, and HBO Go.

Stunning NASA video showcases the beauty of our sun

The probe contains a number of scientific instruments, including tools for measuring extreme ultraviolet radiation, a Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI), and the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, built by Lockheed Martin, which provides “continuous full-disk observations of the solar chromosphere and corna” in seven extreme ultraviolet channels. The SDO generates a reported 1.5TB of data per day, and has a 130Mbit linkage with Earth.NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which launched in 2010, recently celebrated its five-year anniversary. To celebrate, NASA cut together a stunning time-lapsed video showcasing the amazing vistas the SDO probe has captured to date. The SDO probe was designed to measure the structure and creation of the sun’s magnetic field, as well as to investigate how changes within the sun impact the Earth.

Why Apple should build its own car

Here are five reasons for Apple to move forward with a new car.Can Apple build a new car? It’s no more laughable than the idea that Apple, or Radio Shack, could create a personal computer infrastructure in the 1970s and challenge the dominance of IBM mainframes or Digital Equipment Corp. minicomputers. Multiple published reports of the past week say Apple has hired hundreds of people known for automotive expertise, with an eye toward Apple building a car of its own. The most likely car would be an electric vehicle in the shape of a small minivan or crossover. Even if the Apple iEV never goes forward, the thinking is that Apple has nicely hedged its bets. Research into big electric batteries translates into future iPhones or iWatches that run longer. A carbon fiber car shell that saves lives might make for an indestructible iPhone.