Google Has To Pay $17 Million For Dropping Cookies In Apple's Safari Browser For iPhone

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-17-million-cookie-settlement-2013-11

Google and Apple are at it again. On Monday, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced that Google had reached a settlement with 37 states including Washington D.C., Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Maryland, New Jersey, Texas and California over placing unauthorized cookies in the Safari Web browser found on various Apple devices. 

The case began in 2011 and 2012 when the states discovered tracking of Safari users after visits to Google's DoubleClick ad network. Cookies are small files embedded in a computer that contain trace amounts of data based on visitor history. Based on the information they have, cookies offer its clients the ability to make tailored Web pages. In the statement given by Schneiderman, he said that Google directly violated customers privacy who deserve the right to know if someone is following them while they browse the Web. He continued by asserting that Google had violated several privacy laws as well.

Google will have to pay $17 million to the 37 states in the lawsuit.

Google changed the coding for DoubleClick in 2011 to bypass the privacy settings found in Safari despite the fact that the browser blocks third party programs like this.

Google seemed happy to reach the settlement. The company wanted to ensure it respected customers privacy so it removed these ad cookies from Apple's servers. Google promised it would give consumers more information about their b! rowsing history. Google acknowledged in the settlement that it would only override cookie blocking settings for urgent situations such as fraud or identity theft.

 

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Bitcoin mining motherboards promise huge profits (for your energy provider)

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/18/asrock-bitcoin-motherboards/

As Bitcoins have become more valuable, they've also become much harder to accumulate using the mathematical process known as "mining." This air of futility hasn't fazed ASRock, however, as the company has revealed two new motherboards that promise to help DIY-ers to "join the gold rush now!" The H61 Pro BTC and H81 Pro BTC are both Intel socket boards, with the latter being Haswell compatible, and their main party trick is to carry extra PCIe slots and power connectors so you can exploit the compute power of up to six graphics cards simultaneously.

What ASRock doesn't specify, however, is how much profit one of its fully-loaded mining motherboards might deliver. So, although we're quite deliberately not experts at this stuff (aside from a bit of armchair interest), we plugged some numbers into the Bitcoin Profitability Calculator, based on six Radeon HD 7990 cards running in parallel, and discovered that this monster of a system might never actually break even, due to its ridiculously high energy costs. This could well explain why all the big boys use dedicated ASIC boards for mining these days, instead of consumer-grade hardware.

Filed under: Desktops

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Via: Bit-tech

Source: ASRock [1], [2]

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NVIDIA unveils Tesla K40 accelerator, teams with IBM on GPU-based supercomputing

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/18/nvidia-unveils-tesla-k40-and-ibm-deal/

NVIDIA's Tesla GPUs are already mainstays in supercomputers that need specialized processing power, and they're becoming even more important now that the company is launching its first Tesla built for large-scale projects. The new K40 accelerator only has 192 more processing cores than its K20x ancestor (2,880, like the GeForce GTX 780 Ti), but it crunches analytics and science numbers up to 40 percent faster. A jump to 12GB of RAM, meanwhile, helps it handle data sets that are twice as big as before. The K40 is already available in servers from NVIDIA's partners, and the University of Texas at Austin plans to use it in Maverick, a remote visualization supercomputer that should be up and running by January.

As part of the K40 rollout, NVIDIA has also revealed a partnership with IBM that should bring GPU-boosted supercomputing to enterprise-grade data centers. The two plan on bringing Tesla GPU support to IBM's Power8-based servers, including both apps and development tools. It's not clear when the deal will bear fruit, but don't be surprised if it turbocharges a corporate mainframe near you.

Filed under: Desktops, Peripherals, NVIDIA

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Source: NVIDIA

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Google working on RAW support and improved camera features for Android

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/18/google-camera-API-raw-support-android/

Nokia may be the first to have delivered RAW photography in a smartphone, but there's evidence to suggest that Google isn't too far behind. A month-old batch of code, recently spotted by app developer Josh Brown, reveals that work has been underway on a new Android camera API that could allow smartphones to store uncompressed images alongside JPEG ones, drastically increasing the amount of correction and manipulation that can be accomplished after an image has been captured.

A second snippet from the API suggests that Android may get some level of stock support for modular or external cameras, perhaps like Sony's QX10 and QX100, although the meaning of the words is slightly ambiguous:

The camera device is removable and has been disconnected from the Android device, or the camera service has shut down the connection due to a higher-priority access request for the camera device.

Ars Technica has pointed out some other potential changes that are buried in the documentation, and rightly suggests that any imaging-related improvements would be a good thing for Android right now. Even with Sony's Xperia Z1, which contains one of the most powerful sensors currently found in an Android phone, it's the software that holds things back more than anything else, so extra features in the underlying OS could provide manufacturers with just the nudge they need.

Filed under: Cellphones, Cameras, Mobile, Google

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Via: Ars Technica

Source: Google Git, Josh Brown (Google+)

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People Are Starting To Buy Those $35 'Raspberry Pi' Mini-Computers

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/people-are-starting-to-buy-those-35-raspberry-pi-mini-computers-2013-11

Over 2m Raspberry Pi computers have been sold globally since going on sale for around £30 in February 2012.

It took a year to sell the first million of the card-sized barebones computers, but sales accelerated in 2013, with the 2m milestone being reached in the last week of October.

"It took us almost exactly a year to sell the first million Raspberry Pis," wrote Liz Upton from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. "Going on that basis, we calculated that we might, if we were lucky, reach the second million around January 2014, or slightly afterwards – we were confident we’d get there by the end of February 2014.

“It was a bit of a shock at the end of last week when we got the latest sales figures and discovered that the 2,000,000th Raspberry Pi was sold in the last week of October," Upton continued.

A basic computing platform for hobbyists, teachers, pupils and corporations alike

The Raspberry Pi is a credit card-sized, bare-bones computer that uses a smartphone-like ARM processor to provide a basic and extensible computing platform for hobbyists, teachers, pupils and corporations.

The small computer has USB ports for a keyboard and mouse, an Ethernet port, a SD card slot, and an HDMI port for connecting to a monitor or a TV. It runs a variant of the free open-source operating system Linux, which powers many web servers and Android smartphones.

Nearly 40,000 Raspberry Pis produced a week in Wales

In October, it was announced that 1m Raspberry Pis had been manufactured in Britain.

The initial batch of the computer were made in C! hina , but a partnership between the Raspberry Pi Foundation, RS Components and Premier Farnell saw all Raspberry Pi manufacturing moved to a Sony-owned manufacturing plant in Pencoed, Wales, in September 2012.

Since June 2012, production of Raspberry Pis at the Pencoed factory has been ramped up from just 204 a week to nearly 40,000 in April 2013.

'More work to do to ensure that schools are ready for this new wave of mini-computers'

The Raspberry Pi has often been hailed as the affordable, programmable computer for schools, and while it certainly is a step in the right direction, school IT infrastructure isn’t keeping pace.

“Since its launch last year, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has been on a mission to transform the education experience for students, but is it delivering? The reality is that there is more work to do to ensure that schools are ready for this new wave of mini computers," explained Nick Williams, senior product manager at networking specialist Brocade.

“Whilst the devices on offer to schools have taken a quantum leap in affordability and accessibility, schools still exist with 20-year-old networking technology and the sums just do not add up," Williams said.

• In November, an affordable 9in high-definition screen for use with the Raspberry Pi smashed its funding goal in just 50.5 hours

This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk

SEE ALSO: Here's What People Are Actually Using That $35 'Raspberry Pi' Computer For

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