Looking at historical trends and performance benchmarks, a team of researchers in Spain have concluded that smartphone chips could one day replace the more expensive and power-hungry x86 processors used in most of the world's top supercomputers.

"History may be about to repeat itself," researchers at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center wrote in a paper titled "Are mobile processors ready for HPC?" The paper was presented at the EDAworkshop13 in Dresden, Germany, this month.

Chip Wars

The researchers point to the history of less expensive chips bumping out faster but higher-priced processors in high-performance systems. In 1993, the list of the world's fastest supercomputers, known as the Top500, was dominated by systems based on vector processors. They were nudged out by less expensive RISC processors like IBM's Power chip, whose use in supercomputers peaked early in the past decade. The RISC chips in turn were eventually replaced by cheaper commodity processors like Intel's Xeon and Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron, which today are used in more than 400 supercomputers on the Top500 list.

The transitions had a common thread, the researchers wrote: Microprocessors killed the vector supercomputers because they were "significantly cheaper and greener," they said.

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Google is feeling the heat over its decision to build its new Hangouts IM and audio/video chat product with proprietary technology that doesn't support server federation via the XMPP industry standard, but the company is defending its move.

Specifically, Google maintains that XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) industry support is weak, which dilutes its purpose as a common protocol, and that its technology hasn't kept up with the times.

Integration urged

This week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation took Google to task over this issue, saying that the move is bad for users from the standpoints of interoperability and privacy.

If there were support for XMPP server federation, Google users would be able to chat with people on other IM services, or with those who host their own chat servers.

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Google has reportedly launched an expansive effort to bring wireless networks and affordable computing to emerging markets such as sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, moves that could bring the Internet to a further billion people.

The wireless networks would be introduced outside the major cities, where wired connections are not possible, but could also be used to help make the Internet faster in urban centers, according to a report Friday in The Wall Street Journal.

The plan would employ airwaves normally reserved for TV broadcasts, if government regulators allow it. Google has also been experimenting with high-altitude balloons to help carry wireless signals over hundreds of square miles, according to the Journal's report, which cites unnamed sources.

In a sense, the project would have similar goals to Google's efforts to provide faster Internet access to consumers in the U.S. The company wants to provide and improve networks all over, allowing people to access new online services, and in the process helping to expand Google's business.

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With an update to its namesake configuration tool, Puppet Labs has introduced a programming language designed to give administrators more flexibility in scripting their deployment routines.

Puppet 3.2.1, the first public release in the Puppet 3.2 series, can also now accept external certificate authorities (CAs), allowing organizations to use their in-house authorization systems with their Puppet deployments.

Puppet is open-source software that system administrators can use to help manage systems. It can be used to automate repetitive tasks, deploy applications and manage the process of adding servers to scale systems.

“Puppet’s configuration language has always been focused on the best combination of simplicity and power, and my goal was always to have it be more like a configuration file than a programming language,” wrote Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of Puppet Labs, in an email interview. “However, as our community has built more sophisticated infrastructures with Puppet Enterprise ... people have needed more power in the language.”

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'Tis the season for college graduations, and that means there are countless fresh grads out there looking for their first real, professional jobs.

Those in IT would be hard-pressed to come up with a better area to focus on than Linux, which is consistently shown to offer higher salaries and more opportunities than do other parts of IT. There's tremendous demand for Linux skills today, so those who possess them are in a nice position as they enter the job market.

The Linux Foundation

But how to begin? I had a chance recently to speak with Jim Zemlin, executive director at the Linux Foundation, for some suggestions. Zemlin recently gave a talk at TEDx (embedded below) focused on lessons he thinks the tech industry has learned from Linux and its creator Linus Torvalds, and he thinks those lessons can be applied equally well to college grads starting out in a Linux career.

Tip 1: 'Don't dream big'

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The amount of cybercriminal activity associated with the Zeus family of financial Trojan programs has increased during the past few months, according to security researchers from antivirus vendor Trend Micro.

“The notorious info-stealing ZeuS/ZBOT variants are re-emerging with a vengeance, with increased activity and a different version of the malware seen this year,” the Trend Micro researchers said Thursday in a blog post.

Zeus, also known as Zbot, is one of the oldest families of financial malware that is still active today. Its main use is online banking fraud, but it can also steal various types of log-in credentials and personal information.

Zeus is no longer actively developed by its original creator. However, its source code was leaked on the Internet in 2011 which resulted in customized versions being created, including Zeus-based Trojan programs like Citadel and GameOver.

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This week Twitter announced a bold expansion of its year-old Twitter Cards program, giving marketers a new way to directly obtain interested business leads via the social media service.

The new Lead Generation Card is squarely aimed at business tweeters, and it functions a lot like its name implies. Marketers can now embed a card within a standard Twitter message, generally promising some sort of promotional offer (such as "50% off on your first visit"). When readers expand the tweet by clicking on the embedded link, they're prompted to send their information to you. The neat trick is that the user doesn't have to fill out an "I'm interested" form. Their name, Twitter user name, and email address are pulled from their Twitter account, so getting in touch is a single-click operation. On the back end, you receive this information directly, after which you can follow up with the reader to make your sales pitch. In conjunction with Promoted Tweets, the promotional punch of the Lead Generation Card could be impressive.

The Lead Generation Card is currently in beta and launched this week to Twitter's managed clients. The company says it will be made available to small- and medium-sized businesses soon.

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The Federal Trade Commission has reportedly launched an investigation into Google’s display ad business amid complaints from rivals that the company is abusing its power in how it sells online-graphical and video ads.

The examination, which has been reported in The Wall Street Journal and other news outlets, concerns a process of grouping ad-related services together known as “tying” or “bundling.” Some of Google’s advertising-technology rivals have complained to antitrust authorities that the company has been bundling those ad services for website publishers so that the publishers would have to use them all rather than just one Google service, reports say.

The FTC and Google both declined to comment on the reports.

The FTC examination is still in its early stages, the reports say, and may not ultimately result in a formal probe.

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Security researchers from antivirus vendor ESET discovered a piece of cyberespionage malware targeting Tibetan activists that uses unusual techniques to evade detection and achieve persistency on infected systems.

The malware, which was dubbed Win32/Syndicasec.A, bypasses the UAC (User Account Control) mechanism in Windows to run arbitrary commands with elevated privileges without prompting users for confirmation.

It exploits a design flaw in the Windows UAC whitelist functionality that was documents back in 2009 by a developer named Leo Davidson. In fact, the malware uses Davidson’s proof-of-concept code with almost no modifications, said Alexis Dorais-Joncas, Security Intelligence Team Lead at ESET, Thursday in a blog post.

This technique is used to execute a second malicious component that registers a piece of Javascript code in the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) subsystem. WMI is a default Windows service that can execute scripts written by system administrators to automate administrative tasks.

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Writing a book, a research paper, or a script may seem intimidating when sitting in front of a blank word-processor window, trying to figure out where to start. Yarny is a cloud-based, distraction-free editor that can help writers stay organized and focused on their work.

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Oracle and managed services provider ServiceKey have come to a proposed settlement of an intellectual-property lawsuit Oracle filed against the company last year.

Oracle sued ServiceKey in February 2012, alleging that it and another company, Federal Business Systems Corporation, were part of a “gray market” conspiracy that unlawfully used Oracle’s software code and log-in credentials with the goal of selling “support on Oracle hardware to customers with no active support contract with Oracle.”

ServiceKey had been paying Oracle for technical support on a small number of computers it owned, but then used its log-in credentials to provide hardware support to third parties, Oracle alleged.

But now Oracle and ServiceKey are poised to settle the suit in a deal that would see ServiceKey pay no monetary damages but face a number of conditions and restrictions, according to a court filing Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

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This might sound a bit creepy, but Google will now let you search through your own photos on Google+ via the main Google Search bar.

The feature helps you find photos you uploaded on Google+ by typing the “my photos” prefix followed by your search term in the Google Search box. What’s interesting about this feature is that thanks to a hefty dose of maching learning, Google can recognize general concepts in your photos, so you can search for specific terms such as food, flowers, or sunsets rather than relying on file or album names.

For example, you can search for “my photos from San Francisco last year” or “my photos of food” and Google Search will display a set of results from your uploads. Google says this feature works only when you are signed into your Google+ enabled Google account, and the results are only visible to you, although they are displayed from the main Google Search page.

The custom search terms for your photos are currently available only in English on Google.com. You can also use the semantic photo search in the photos module on Google+.

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Recently I splurged on a new laptop, a 13.3-inch Samsung Series 9 Ultrabook. Incredibly thin, light, and fast, it overjoyed me from the moment I unpacked it.

It wasn't long, though, before my joy turned to frustration. Although it booted with lightning speed, Internet access seemed slow. In fact, sometimes I couldn't load Web pages at all.

As usual when dealing with a mystery like this, I used the invaluable SpeedTest to help pin down the problem. Sure enough, the Samsung was having intermittent connectivity slowdowns and outages. My router wasn't to blame, and for once neither was Comcast.

But what exactly was going on? Surely a brand new computer—especially one as advanced and expensive as this—could reliably connect to the Internet.

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SAP has abruptly reorganized its development strategy, with SuccessFactors CEO and cloud strategy chief Lars Dalgaard leaving the company and executive board member Vishal Sikka now tapped to lead a single software development unit.

Sikka has been a champion of SAP’s HANA in-memory database platform, which has been positioned as the future convergence point for all of SAP’s technologies. After Friday’s announcement, those plans may speed up. All SAP development staffers will report to Sikka as of June 1.

As for Dalgaard, he will leave SAP as of June 1 “to become an investor,” and will “continue to play an active role as an advisor to the SAP cloud business,” SAP said. Dalgaard’s exit comes less than two years after SAP purchased SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion.

Dalgaard was scheduled to appear earlier this month at SAP’s Sapphire conference but ended up canceling due to a death in the family. He also has a child who has been battling leukemia.

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If you recall, Hurricane Sandy last fall flooded data centers, forced major network hubs to run on generators, and even sparked a fuel bucket brigade to keep servers running.

Well, take note: It looks like we’re in for another bad hurricane season. Federal officials said today that the East Coast could easily see a repeat of last year.

Oh, and by the way, the GOES-13 satellite that helps them track Atlantic storms is offline and officials haven’t been able to get it operating properly since yesterday.

The Atlantic hurricane season, which begins June 1, will be an “above normal and possibly extremely active hurricane season,” Kathryn Sullivan, an ex-astronaut and acting administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said at a briefing Thursday.

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Google plans to upgrade the security of its SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates, an important component of secure communications.

SSL certificates are used to encrypt communication and verify the integrity of another party with which a user is interacting. Its strength lies in the length of the private signing keys used for the certificates.

Keys that are less than 1,024 bits are considered weak, and 512- and 768-bit keys have been factored to reveal a private key. Google has been using 1,024-bit keys, but will move to 2,048-bit keys, wrote Stephen McHenry, Google's director of information security engineering, in a blog post Thursday.

"We will begin switching to the new 2048-bit certificates on August 1st, to ensure adequate time for a careful rollout before the end of the year," he wrote. "We're also going to change the root certificate that signs all of our SSL certificates because it has a 1024-bit key."

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Manuel Araoz, a 23-year-old developer in Argentina, has an idea for Bitcoin that doesn't focus on money.

Araoz, who works in game development, launched a service this week called Proof of Existence. It's essentially a notary public service on the Internet, an inexpensive way of using Bitcoin's distributed computing power to allow people to verify that a document existed at a certain point in time.

Araoz envisions it as a way to fight efforts to distort or lie about data. "My idea was to give journalists or private statistical agencies the ability to certify data at a certain point in time. If someone denies the data, you have something that proves the data existed," he said.

The Bitcoin system uses a distributed computing network to transfer the virtual currency from computer to computer. Part of the system involves "miners," or computers that cryptographically verify those transactions, which are entered into a public ledger called the "blockchain."

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Commuting is tough. Working out of your car all day is tougher. From traveling salesmen to offsite service professionals to couriers, millions of people worldwide spend their nine-to-five hours behind the wheel. And they need to stay in touch—online, dialed in, and powered up—all day. That’s not easy to do when you’re constantly on the move.

Allow us to show you how to remain a useful member of the information age even when your workdays can take you on trips of dozens or hundreds of miles.

Power

Few cell phones and far fewer laptops will get you through an entire day of serious work without being plugged in and recharged at some point along the way. Fortunately, your car is a mobile electricity generator. How best to get power out of your vehicle and into the gadgets that need it?

Many of today’s automobiles feature USB ports, which are fine for recharging your phone. But if you want to charge your notebook (or even most tablets) you’ll need something with more juice. Here are two options that give you a standard A/C adapter via your 12-volt cigarette lighter socket.

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My, how quickly the tables can turn in the fickle world of consumer technology.

When Microsoft’s designers and engineers took to the drawing board to dream up Windows 8, the 9.7-inch iPad was the 800-pound gorilla of the tablet market, gobbling an insane amount of market share and laughing at Android’s attempts to break Apple’s stranglehold on slates. The future, it seemed, lay in big screens.

Then the Kindle Fire, the Nook tablet, and Google’s Nexus 7 appeared. Consumers fell in love with smaller, cheaper tablets overnight, and on October 23, 2012, Apple capitulated to popular demand and released an iPad mini of its own.

Three days later, Microsoft released Windows 8 to the public. With a design optimized for 10-inch-plus displays, it was already behind the times.

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Yahoo has acquired PlayerScale, a startup developer of infrastructure software for cross-platform gaming, adding to its string of recent acquisitions.

The Internet giant said in a Twitter message Thursday that it would continue to support the gaming development platform, which PlayerScale claims powers games played by over 150 million people worldwide and is adding over 400,000 new users every day.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

"We will continue to support our existing product and deliver new services to help you grow and manage your success in cross-platform gaming -- whether it's casual, social or mobile," PlayerScale CEO Jesper Jensen said in a post on his company's website.

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Google has released a beta version of Chrome that introduces what the company describes as “richer” notifications from the browser’s apps and extensions.

The Chrome browser has been able to display this type of notification for more than two years, but Google has now revamped the interface and functionality for these alerts, the company said on Thursday.

Google

The purpose of the enhancements is to boost the effectiveness of these notifications, which remind users of meetings logged in Google Calendar, alert them about incoming Gmail or IM chat messages and display urgent headlines from news applications.

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For all the controversy surrounding Windows 8, it's a solid OS under the hood. And based on a list of API clues discovered by a former Nokia and Silverlight developer, it should only get better with the Windows Blue update.

Based on an extensive examination of the software APIs found within Windows Blue (now offically called Windows 8.1 by Microsoft), developer Justin Angel compiled a lengthy list of more than 25 features that he says will be included in the updated OS: the possibility of ultra-HD "4K" screen support, lock-screen calls, HDR photo support, better multi-screen formatting, and much more. 

Angel teased out the new features by examining the APIs he found in the leaked build of Windows 8.1 (version 9385), which appeared online at the beginning of May. Other Microsoft watchers have installed and played around with the leaked OS—Paul Thurrott published a thorough examination of its forward-facing features—but Angel's API deep-dive reveals even more hidden secrets.

Microsoft representatives declined to comment on what they called rumors and speculation. Angel is no stranger to diving deep into Microsoft products. Last December, he made news when he discovered a method to pirate Windows Store downloads by turning trial versions into full-version apps.

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Intel’s upcoming family of Core processors, code-named Haswell, will offer 50 percent more battery life in laptops than did their “Ivy Bridge” predecessors, Intel said on Thursday.

Haswell chips were designed with laptops and tablets in mind, and the main focus was on lowering power consumption, said Rani Borkar, corporate vice president and general manager of the Intel Architecture Group, in a media briefing.

The longer battery life won’t come with a cost to performance, according to Borkar. And in idle or standby mode the chips will do even better, extending battery life by up to 20 times, she said.

The improvements are vital for Intel and its PC-making partners. PC sales are in one of their worst slumps ever, with users snapping up tablets and smartphones instead for mobile computing. Any improvements Intel can offer will help keep the PC market alive.

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Deploying an update of its DB2 database, IBM is pitching its SmartCloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) for use in data reporting and analysis.

“We’re the only player in the marketplace that has [a cloud service] for data-in-motion—being able to analyze data in real time,” said Bob Picciano, IBM’s general manager for Information Management.

Starting in the second half of this year, the IBM SmartCloud IaaS will start using version 10.5 of IBM’s DB2 database, which should be generally available by early June. One new set of technologies that will come with this database, collectively called BLU Acceleration, can speed data analysis by 25 times or more, IBM claimed.

IBM also announced that SmartCloud can now run copies of SAP’s HANA in-memory database, initially for test and development jobs.

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SoftBank has received all the necessary state approvals for the Japanese mobile carrier to acquire a majority stake in Sprint Nextel for US$20 billion, the companies announced.

On Thursday, California Public Utilities Commission voted to approve the transaction, giving the companies the final state approval needed for the transaction. The two companies filed applications in 23 states and the District of Columbia.

Still on the table for Sprint is a $25.5 billion counteroffer from Dish, a satellite TV service provider. This week, SoftBank gave Sprint permission to negotiate with Dish.

Still, Sprint and SoftBank appear to be moving forward with their deal. The companies continue to work with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and other agencies on approval of the deal, they said in a press release. The two companies anticipate closing the deal by July 1, they said.

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U.S. companies should be allowed to take aggressive countermeasures against hackers seeking to steal their intellectual property, contends the private Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property.

The 100-page report, released this week, stops just short of recommending that the U.S. allow businesses to actively retrieve stolen information from within an intruder’s network, and to disable or destroy it without any limitations.

However, the report does make clear that some so-called hack-back options be available if simpler attempts to deter IP theft fail, which will likely gain the attention of rights advocacy groups.

The commission is co-chaired by Dennis Blair, former U.S. Director of National Intelligence and Jon Huntsman, former U.S. Ambassador to China.

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Microsoft has made it official: The new-and-improved Kinect that will ship with the Xbox One later this year will also come to Windows in 2014.

The Windows version will offer the same improvements found in the Xbox One’s Kinect. The device has a wider field of view, better depth detection, an improved noise-canceling microphone, more precise skeletal tracking, and ambient light detection.

But don’t expect Kinect to replace your PC’s mouse and webcam anytime soon. Microsoft still envisions Kinect primarily as a product for businesses and organizations, though the company expects consumers to interact with the motion controller in public places.

Microsoft

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Welcome to the dawn of the SSD age. Solid-state drives now offer great performance at affordable prices, which is why more and more users are choosing them in new PCs and adding them to older ones.

I'm a big fan myself, but I want to share a cautionary tale. About six months ago, an acquaintance of mine installed an SSD in his laptop. Initially, he was delighted: the drive helped his system boot faster and run longer between trips to the wall socket.

Then, one day, out of the blue, the drive died. No clicking, no "imminent failure" message, no warning of any kind--just a dead drive.

It's under warranty, but so what? He has a laptop that won't boot and data he can't access.

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