Personal Tech

MS teases Joy Division fans with Unknown Pleasures Zune

"Love will tear us apart..."

James Sherwood Thu 5 Jun 2008 // 11:53 UTC

It appears that Microsoft chiefs are closet Joy Division fans: it has commissioned a limited edition Zune, featuring etchings from one of the band’s album covers.

Zune_joy_division

Microsoft's Joy Division Zune: an unknown pleasure... if you live outside the US

Peter Saville designed the bizarre mountain range-esque artwork for the much-lauded Mancunian band’s Unknown Pleasures album, which was released way, way back in 1979, long before Zune, Xbox, Office and even Windows.

An (if you will) 'rockumentary' about the band is being released on DVD later this month, providing fans with further visual thrills following last year's Control. Microsoft has jumped on the bandwagon and commissioned Saville to create a Zune etched with an adaptation of his album artwork.

Only 500 of the “custom black” 80GB Zune players will be made, but all come pre-loaded with a copy of the documentary. Each one is set to cost $400 (£200/€260).

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BT: 'Quantum radios' could boost 5G network range

Tech exploits electromagnetically induced transparency to form highly sensitive electric field detector

Dan Robinson Thu 19 May 2022 // 09:15 UTC

Brit telecoms giant BT is undertaking a trial of new antenna technology that may boost the range of 5G networks and reduce mobile network energy consumption.
The receiver technology works by exploiting a quantum effect called "electromagnetically induced transparency" to form a highly sensitive electric field detector. According to BT, this could theoretically make it over 100 times more sensitive than traditional receivers, allowing it to detect weaker signals and thus extend the range of a mobile network deployment.
Regular readers will no doubt have become twitchy at the mention of the word "quantum" so we asked BT if it could supply us with a simple explanation of how the new antenna technology works. It told us:

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Logitech Pop: Stylish, portable, but far from the best typing experience

For tiny Venn diagram wedge who want the feel of a mechanical keyboard plus, er, emoji keys

Matthew Hughes Thu 19 May 2022 // 08:30 UTC

So many mechanical keyboards put function ahead of form. Put less charitably, they're ugly as sin. The Logitech Pop, a $100 wireless mechanical keyboard, tries to play both sides of the field.

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Google's first report on Privacy Sandbox hits UK watchdog's inbox

No 'reportable concerns' yet plenty of concerned feedback

Richard Speed Thu 19 May 2022 // 07:57 UTC

As Google's self-imposed "late 2023" deadline to kill all third party cookies in its Chrome browser looms, the giant has handed in its first quarterly Privacy Sandbox report to the UK's competition regulator.
As a reminder, the Competition Market's Authority (CMA) took exception to Google's Privacy Sandbox cookie cull amid worries on several fronts that the project might shut out competing ad companies in favor of the search giant.
Against a backdrop of added scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators in the US, Europe, and the UK at a time when Google faces broad antitrust scrutiny and litigation, the search giant made a number of commitments to the UK's CMA, one of which was a regular report on progress with its Privacy Sandbox proposals.

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Despite ban, China surges back to second place on bitcoin mining charts

Miners behind the Great Firewall may never have downed tools, say Cambridge crypto-boffins

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Thu 19 May 2022 // 07:30 UTC

China has become the world’s second most prolific miner of bitcoin – or maybe it always was – according to new data from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF).
The Centre on Tuesday announced its latest hashrate data analysing activity from September 2021 to January 2022 and found the USA is home to 37.84 percent of mining capacity, ahead of China at 21.11 percent, Kazakhstan ‘s 13.22 percent and Canada’s 6.48 percent.
China banned mining and trading cryptocurrency in May 2021 – and re-iterated that ban in fact it did so several times in 2021 alone, and on other occasions in preceding years.

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Microsoft-backed robovans to deliver grub in London

British startup Wayve gets supercomputing leg up

Brandon Vigliarolo Thu 19 May 2022 // 06:58 UTC

Microsoft is pumping supercomputing oomph as well as funds into a British-born autonomous vehicle startup.
On Wednesday Wayve, the upstart in question, confirmed it has struck a deal with Microsoft – not surprising since Redmond has already sunk a chunk of change into the business – to use Azure to train next-gen self-driving machines from data collected from human drivers out on the road. Richard Branson, Meta AI Chief Yann LeCun, and other heavyweights are also early investors alongside the Windows giant.
"Joining forces with Microsoft to design the supercomputing infrastructure needed to accelerate deep learning for autonomous mobility is an opportunity that we are honored to lead," said Alex Kendall, CEO of Wayve.

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Voyager 1 space probe producing ‘anomalous telemetry data’

Engineers debugging at 160 bits per second, with 41 hours latency

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Thu 19 May 2022 // 06:32 UTC

NASA engineers are investigating anomalous telemetry data produced by venerable space probe Voyager 1.
A Wednesday announcment states that the probe is operating normally, receiving and executing commands from Earth, and still doing science and phoning home with data.
But Voyager 1’s attitude articulation and control system (AACS) – kit that helps point the probe’s antenna towards Earth - does not currently “reflect what’s actually happening onboard.”

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Your snoozing iOS 15 iPhone may actually be sleeping with one antenna open

No, you're not really gonna be hacked. But you may be surprised

Jeff Burt Thu 19 May 2022 // 06:02 UTC

Some research into the potentially exploitable low-power state of iPhones has sparked headlines this week.
While pretty much no one is going to utilize the study's findings to attack Apple users in any meaningful way, and only the most high-profile targets may find themselves troubled by all this, it at least provides some insight into what exactly your iOS handheld is up to when it's seemingly off or asleep. Or none of this is news to you. We'll see.
According to the research, an Apple iPhone that goes asleep into low-power mode or is turned off isn't necessarily protected against surveillance. That's because some parts of it are still operating at low power.

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China will produce one in five of the chips it uses in 2026, says analyst

Well short of planned 70 percent domestic capacity

Laura Dobberstein Thu 19 May 2022 // 05:15 UTC

China’s integrated circuit (IC) production has failed to keep pace with its appetite for silicon, with market research firm IC Insights predcicting the nation will produce only one in five ICs it uses in 2026.
That figure is a increase from 2021's one in six, and reflects eight percent compound annual growth rate from 2021 to 2026. But it means China will miss its own targets for locally-made-and-consumed silicon.
“Although China has been the largest consuming country for ICs since 2005, it does not necessarily mean that large increases in IC production within China would immediately follow, or ever follow” said the firm in a bulletin on Wednesday.

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Tencent happily parting ways with loss-making cloud customers

Cutting costs across sprawling business as COVID makes life hard in China

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Thu 19 May 2022 // 02:58 UTC

Chinese tech giant Tencent has recorded its first ever quarter-to-quarter revenue fall, warned that COVID-19 lockdowns will hurt messing with its business, and cautioned against assumptions that Beijing is ready to enthusiastically support tech companies.
On its Q1 2022 earnings call yesterday, the company offered more explanation of its shifting cloud strategy.
Chief strategy officer James Mitchell told investors the company is pleased to have shown loss-making cloud customers the door, and “proactively scaled back … deeply discounted infrastructure-only contracts for basic services such as cloud compute and content delivery network.” Projects that had high costs and/or relied on sub-contractors have also been scaled back.

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Google Russia goes broke after bank account snatched

We're shutting down as we can no longer pay staff, bills, web giant says

Katyanna Quach Thu 19 May 2022 // 01:28 UTC

Google Russia is shutting down and filing for bankruptcy after Vladimir Putin's government confiscated the Chocolate Factory's bank account in the nation.
"The Russian authorities' seizure of Google Russia's bank account has made it untenable for our Russia office to function, including employing and paying Russia-based employees, paying suppliers and vendors, and meeting other financial obligations," a Google spokesperson confirmed to The Register in a statement on Wednesday.
"Google Russia has published a notice of its intention to file for bankruptcy."

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Patch your VMware gear now – or yank it out, Uncle Sam tells federal agencies

Critical authentication bypass revealed, older flaws under active attack

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Thu 19 May 2022 // 00:41 UTC

Uncle Sam's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued two warnings in a single day to VMware users, as it believes the virtualization giant's products can be exploited by miscreants to gain control of systems.
The agency rates this threat as sufficiently serious to demand US government agencies pull the plug on their VMware products if patches can’t be applied.
Of the two warnings, one highlights a critical authentication bypass vulnerability – CVE-2022-22972, rated 9.8 out of 10 on the CVSS scale – that VMware revealed on Wednesday.

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