Monday, 30 September 2013
Sharp shows 7-inch next-generation MEMS display
Sharp on Monday showed off its latest prototypes of a new type of display screen that it says brings several advantages over today's LCD (liquid crystal display) screens.
The screens, called MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) displays for the tiny moving parts they contain, are being developed by the Japanese company in partnership with Qualcomm and were on show at the Ceatec electronics show just outside of Tokyo.
Behind each pixel in a MEMS display is a backlight that flashes red, green and blue in fast succession, and in front of it is a tiny shutter can be opened to let light through.
Synchronized to the backlight, the shutter can control the amount of each color of light allowed through. The eye perceives these flashes as the desired hue.
In contrast, today's LCD screens create colored pixels using three filters. The filters swallow about two thirds of the brightness of the backlight before it leaves the display, said Akira Imai, deputy general manager of Sharp's new business development center.
The MEMS display can allow all the light through, so the intensity of the backlight can be reduced using less power for the display, said Imai.
In a portable gadget, the screen often consumes more power than any other component, so reducing its demands can have a big impact on battery life.
The screens on show at Ceatec were 7-inch models with 800 pixel by 1,280 pixel resolution. The colors were bright and the screen image was sharp, although people viewing the screens did tend to see a brief flash of red, green and blue pixel each time they turned their eyes away from the display. That's something Sharp is working on, said Imai.
Sharp also showed a version of the screen working in several low power modes.
The development work with Qualcomm began earlier this year when the U.S. company said it would invest US$120 million into Sharp. The money, which was invested in two parts, was accompanied by Qualcomm's MEMS expertise. Sharp has a long history in flat-panel display technology, especially LCD, and has recently been working on a new type of display called IGZO, on which the MEMS display is partly based.
Martyn Williams covers mobile telecoms, Silicon Valley and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Martyn on Twitter at @martyn_williams. Martyn's e-mail address is martyn_williams@idg.com
Google Updating Android Apps En Masse Ahead of KitKat
Today's smartphones are capable of incredible things, but only if they've got enough battery power.
Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.Hackers target social media, step up mobile attacks
Social media has become a top target of hackers and mobile devices are expanding that target, IBM reported last week in its X-Force 2013 Mid-Year Trend and Risk Report.
Attacks on businesses are getting increasingly sophisticated, the report said. Some attacks studied by IBM researchers were opportunistic—exploiting unpatched and untested web applications vulnerable to basic SQL injection or cross-site scripting.
Others were successful, the report continued, because they violated the basic trust between end user and sites or social media personalities thought to be safe and legitimate.
"Social media has become a new playground for attackers," said Kevin Skapinetz, program director for product strategy for IBM Security Systems.
The report noted that a growing trend this year is the takeover of social media profiles that have a large number of followers. The trend continues to play a pivotal role in the way attackers are reaching their targets.
"It's one thing to get an email or spam from someone you've never heard of," Skapinetz said in an interview. "It's another thing to have one of your friends have their account compromised and send you a link that might interest you."
Traditional sources of online aggravation can't resist the siren call of social media, either. "Even if email is used in an attack, it will be under guise of coming from a social media account," he said. "Attackers are becoming more operationally sophisticated."
Social media attacks can affect more than the usual suspects, too. Social media exploits affect more than individuals; they can negatively impact enterprise brand reputation and cause financial losses, the report said.
Mobile devices are also becoming a hacker magnet. "Although mobile vulnerabilities continue to grow at a rapid pace, we still see them as a small percentage of overall vulnerabilities reported in the year," the report said.
What may be making matters worse is the proliferation of mobile devices in the workplace under Bring Your Own Device Programs. "BYOD—what a nightmare that can be for any organization," HBGary's Threat Intelligence Director, Matthew Standart, said in an interview.
"It's difficult to protect your data even when you own all your devices and getting visibility into all your devices is a challenge in itself," Standard said. "Allowing users to bring their own devices increases the complexity tenfold."
The IBM report also noted that Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are being used for more than just disrupting service at target sites. The attacks are being used as a distraction, allowing attackers to breach other systems in the enterprise.
"Both attacks and attack threats are being used as decoys," Marc Gaffan, co-founder of Incapsula, said in an interview.
"The attackers will bring down a website, get the IT people focused in a certain direction, tie up their resources on the DDoS attack while a more sophisticated breach is performed with no one paying attention," Gaffan said.
A decoy attack could also be used in conjunction with a phishing attack, he added. For example, a phishing message could be sent to a bank's customers asking them to use an alternative URL because the bank is having trouble with its common web address. A recipient may follow good security practices and paste the common URL for the bank in his browser.
Because the bank is under a DDoS attack, however, they can't connect to the institution, he said. So, in desperation, they click on the URL in the phishing message and get infected.
Those kinds of misdirection DDoS attacks, though, haven't become mainstream. "They are occurring, but they're relatively rare," said Daniel Peck, a research scientist at Barracuda Networks.
The IBM report also questioned the dedication of many organizations to sound security basics. "Many of the breaches reported in the last year were a result of poorly applied security fundamentals and policies and could have been mitigated by putting some basic security hygiene into practice," the researchers wrote.
"Attackers seem to be capitalizing on this 'lack of security basics' by using a model of operational sophistication that allows them to increase their return on exploit," they wrote.
"The idea that even basic security hygiene is not upheld in organizations, leads us to believe that, for a variety of reasons, companies are struggling with a commitment to apply basic security fundamentals," the researchers wrote.
Barry Shteiman, senior security strategist with Imperva, said in an interview that the lack of adherence to basics could be due to a fundamental misunderstanding of security by companies. "They don't understand the difference between a safety belt and auto insurance," he said. "They don't understand that it's more important to protect themselves than to preserve their reputation after a breach has been made."
John Mello writes on technology and cyber security for a number of online publications and is former managing editor of the Boston Business Journal and Boston Phoenix.
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5 free tools to organize your thoughts
You’re full of good ideas, but putting them in writing is easier said than done. Maybe you like to start from the end. Maybe you work from jumbled notes, gradually polishing them into a cohesive piece. No matter what your workflow, a good outliner can help.
Much like mind maps, outliners are thinking aids. But while mind maps appeal to visual thinkers, outliners are great for working directly with text. Both are hierarchical: In a mind map, a main idea branches out into sub-ideas, which then branch out even further. In an outline, a master topic has sub-topics, each with its own sub-sub-topics. And, just as it is with a mind map, what you do with an outline is up to you: You can use it for drafting text, but it also works well as a to-do list for a project.
The best outliners stay out of your way, letting you focus on your text without thinking about the interface. Some outliners even let you forget about the computer you’re using: Cloud-based versions are accessible using any computer, as long as you’re using a modern browser and have an Internet connection. The four cloud-based and single browser-based products reviewed here are useful, but their appeal varies depending on your level of commitment to outlining. Each one starts out free.
Many Web apps go for the Google approach. They try to impress with a sparse homepage decorated by a large leading image. Not The Outliner of Giants. Its homepage features a wall of monospaced text offset by an orange banner, and one single button (“Sign in with Google”). This no-nonsense aesthetic sets the tone for The Outliner of Giants: It takes outlining seriously.
The Outliner of Giants is very full-featured, down to letting you highlight nodes in different colors. It’s easy to get started with The Outliner of Giants. You don’t even need a new user account: Just log in with your Google credentials. Clicking the top-right corner leads you to an Outline About Outliners, a document covering the history and process of this useful task.
Even the documentation takes the form of an outline in the Outliner of Giants. The Outliner of Giants uses key commands for many basic features: Enter adds a new node; Space edits the current one; Tab and Shift-Tab indents and outdents nodes. One feature that’s sorely missing, however, is Undo. I once accidentally converted a single node into its own outline (i.e, “tore it out” of an existing outline) and was unable to revert the change.
Because an outline is a rigidly hierarchical document, it’s important to be able to tag your nodes. This allows you to easily look at all of your nodes that involve a certain character in a story (for example), no matter where it appears in the plot. The Outliner of Giants supports tagging, but not via simple, Twitter-like hashtags: You need to hit Ctrl-T and fill in a dedicated tagging field.
In general, The Outliner of Giants feels powerful and robust—perhaps a bit too robust for casual outliners to use. Its crisp, retro aesthetic is enjoyable, and you can customize it in many ways, from the theme to the syntax you wish to use in your notes (Textile, Markdown, or a rich text editor). The free plan limits you to five outlines, but the paid one ($10/year) offers unlimited outlines, as well as more space for files, more collaborators, and other perks.
Fargo feels decidedly more modern than the Outliner of Giants. It links with your Dropbox account, and it saves any changes you make to your outlines into Dropbox as OPML files (a format commonly used for exchanging information between outliners). Unlike The Outliner of Giants, Fargo is entirely free.
Fargo looks clean and modern, with far less chrome on the screen than The Outliner of Giants. Fargo lets you make text bold or italic using keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-I and Ctrl-B, as you’d expect), but oddly enough, it does not include a keyboard shortcut for creating a link (it does offer a button for this). You can also use the keyboard to reorganize your outline, promoting, demoting, and moving nodes around as needed.
Fargo supports many keyboard shortcuts, and displays them in an overlay similar to the one Gmail uses. Fargo offers somewhat limited support for formatting your text using Markdown, but it will render only when you export the file. Until you do, any text you marked as bold will just show surrounded with two asterisks, even once you’re done editing the node. This feels inconsistent, because if you use the toolbar button or Ctrl-B to make text bold, it immediately renders as bold.
One feature notably missing from Fargo is text search. There’s no way to search through your outline. If you’re working with a large outline that is mostly collapsed, that could leave you blindly rummaging through the outline looking for the node you need. There is also no support for tagging nodes, or any sort of filtering, making Fargo useful mainly for smaller outlines in which you won’t easily get lost.
Checkvist is a fast, mature, polished outliner with innovative keyboard shortcuts. Where most outliners (and applications in general) use Ctrl-key combinations, Checkvist uses Vim-like keystroke sequences. Want to add a note to a node? Hit ‘nn’. To open the actions context menu, tap ‘aa’, then use the arrow keys to navigate it.
One of the coolest things about Checkvist is its unique shortcut keys. Unlike Fargo, Checkvist lets you easily undo operations with a quick tap of Ctrl-Z, or by clicking a button on the screen. You can also filter your outline according to tags, keywords, or due dates. Search is live: Just start typing, and the list filters down to whatever you’re typing. If the node you need is collapsed, Checkvist will automatically expand it and highlight the string you’re typing. And despite all of this power, Checkvist is very responsive and fast.
Checkvist lets you undo operations, a feature not available on all outliners. Checkvist supports its own text-only syntax for including links, and you can use HTML tags for making text bold or italic, or adding images. Markdown support is available, but it’s switched off by default. You can enable it in the settings.
Checkvist’s free version offers more than enough functionality for most users. If you need full HTTPS support, file attachment, repeating tasks, and task assignment options (for collaborating with others), the paid version costs $3 per month.
Oak Outliner is as simple as it comes. Think Notepad, only in your browser, and with some outlining features. It lives in your browser, but not in the cloud, so it does a couple of things a little differently from what you’d expect from a native application or even a cloud-based service. Most notably, it saves the outline as HTML5 local storage, automatically and in the background. Also, you can’t edit more than one outline at a time in the browser. Within these minimalist confines, however, it gets the job done.
Oak Outliner feels almost like Notepad in your browser. Like any outliner, Oak Outliner lets you collapse nodes, indent and outdent them, and shuffle them around. You can also format text using Markdown. That’s about it.
It doesn’t offer a way to filter nodes according to tags, search collapsed nodes, or an explicit way to save your work. There’s no export functionality, either. While most outliners let you export to OPML, Oak Outliner’s export features are limited to copying and pasting your work into another document.
Oak Outliner is simple to use, but it does include documentation, just in case. What you gain with Oak Outliner is simplicity. There’s practically nothing to fiddle with: It’s just a page with text. It doesn’t require an Internet connection, and it has no user accounts. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes sophisticated software can get in your way rather than help you get things done. Not Oak Outliner, which is about as bare bones as it gets. It’s also entirely free.
WorkFlowy is an outliner that wants to change the way you manage information. It starts out as a single master document, but it encourages you to create an ever-deeper hierarchy, starting with two overarching topics, “Work,” and “Personal.” From there, you can begin outlining and journaling your entire life.
With its elegant looks and uncluttered interface, WorkFlowy is a joy to use. Yes, it’s ambitious, and I’m not saying you have to use WorkFlowy this way. But WorkFlowy just might be polished enough to pull it off. Its interface uses animations in a simple, non-distracting way that makes everything feel more engaging. It features excellent keyboard shortcuts, and you can use it as a to-do list and mark items as completed.
As befitting a product that prides itself on supporting a deep hierarchy, WorkFlowy lets you tag items using both hashtags and people (@name), and it smoothly autocompletes your tags based on any tags you’ve created before. It also has live search, for quickly and effectively filtering your outlines. And to help you use its power, documentation is offered as a series of short, no-nonsense videos demonstrating every aspect of the product.
What really makes WorkFlowy special is how it handles scoping. Many outliners let you zoom in on a specific node and make the rest of the outline disappear. But there’s something about the WorkFlowy interface, and the animation used for zooming, that makes a zoomed-in node feel like its own document. If you do use WorkFlowy to outline your entire life, you’d likely have to upgrade from the free version (which is limited to 500 monthly documents) to the $5/month plan (which supports unlimited outlines and includes Dropbox sync).
When zooming in on a subnode in WorkFlowy, it feels like its own document. It doesn’t take long to decide which outliner works the way you do. Just pick one of these five—they’re all free to start—and see where it takes you. No matter which you end up choosing, or even if you outline using just a regular text editor or Microsoft Word (which has an outlining mode of its own), creating an outline of your ideas is a great way to overcome writer’s block and say what you have to say.
Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
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