New Technology News

Monday, November 24, 2014

Well Thanksgiving week is upon us here in the land of stars and stripes, and in anticipation of all the social events soon to besiege us, more than a few Linux bloggers have been practicing keeping their favorite barstools warm down at the blogosphere's Punchy Penguin Saloon. How chilly would those stools get if we were all flitting here and there from this party to that? It would be truly unkind. Much better to stay put and keep to ourselves in a comfortable place where inane small talk is frowned upon.

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Thoughts of Thanksgiving for All That Is FOSS

6:42 PM

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Well Thanksgiving week is upon us here in the land of stars and stripes, and in anticipation of all the social events soon to besiege us, ...

The new full-disk encryption feature that's enabled by default in Android 5.0 Lollipop comes at a hefty price in terms of performance, according to a recent benchmark report. In fact, when full-disk encryption is enabled, random read performance drops by 62.9 percent, while random write performance falls by 50.5 percent, AnandTech reported late last week. Sequential read performance, meanwhile, drops by a whopping 80.7 percent. The bottom line is "serious negative implications for device performance in any situation where applications are reading or writing to disk," the report concludes.

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Lollipop's Encryption Takes a Hefty Toll

4:23 PM

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The new full-disk encryption feature that's enabled by default in Android 5.0 Lollipop comes at a hefty price in terms of performance,...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has announced a nonprofit organization that will aim to secure the entire Web. Let's Encrypt, starting in summer 2015, will offer free server certificates to help websites transition from HTTP to the more secure HTTPS protocol. EFF is partnering with Akamai, Mozilla, Cisco, iDenTrust and University of Michigan researchers. HTTPS has been around for years, but "certificate management and TLS in general tends to be a bit of a black art," said Stephen Ludin, chief architect at Akamai.

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EFF Spearheads Safer Web Initiative

12:39 PM

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has announced a nonprofit organization that will aim to secure the entire Web. Let's Encrypt, start...

Welcome, dear readers, to our weekly look at the latest, greatest, and poorest gadgets to be revealed to the world. Hark as yours truly extols the virtues and horrors of two wildly different tablets, a smart kitchen scale, and video games requiring patience, among other objects. Don't shovel dirt on Nokia as a manufacturing brand just yet. It's not like the planet needs another well-known consumer gadget maker whipping up Android tablets, and yet here we are. I just have to question why in heaven's name Nokia thought it wise to make the N1 look just like an iPad.

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Gadget Ogling: Dueling Tablets, a Smart Scale, and Slooow Games

9:44 AM

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Welcome, dear readers, to our weekly look at the latest, greatest, and poorest gadgets to be revealed to the world. Hark as yours truly ex...

I attended Demo in Silicon Valley last week and, as always, it showcased things likely to mature in the market 12 to 14 months into the future. The presenters are small companies, hand-selected because they offer something unique and forward-looking. You have to feel a bit sorry for the folks doing the demonstrations, because they have one shot to do this right, and often the god of technology exhibits his or her sense of humor and something doesn't work.

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A View of the Future: Demo 2014

7:42 AM

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I attended Demo in Silicon Valley last week and, as always, it showcased things likely to mature in the market 12 to 14 months into the fu...

Apple is a company that bucks trends, that does things its own way, that manages its business through highly tuned cycles. One thing Apple barely does at all, though, is offer any sort of special deal or sale price. Not even on Black Friday. Or Cyber Monday. Or just because. Heck, when Apple celebrated 25 billion App Store downloads, it gave one person a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card. At 50 billion App Store downloads, another $10,000 gift card. That was pretty exciting and fun.

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