Category Archives: Uncategorized

Palace on alleged leakage of PNoy phone numbers: He’s very accessible

A day after President Benigno Aquino III’s supposed mobile phone numbers were posted online, Malacañang on Sunday refused to comment on the hacker’s claim of having gained access to the information and said the country’s chief executive has always been easily accessible to the media.
“I don’t have a lot of information on that apart from the fact we don’t want to dignify that particular allegation with a comment,” deputy presidential spokesperson Abigail Valte said on government-run dzRB radio, when asked about the supposed breach into his security.

She said many journalists are aware that the President is easy to contact, “lalo na (sa) matagal nagco-cover sa Pangulong Aquino lalo noong congressman siya ng Tarlac, accessible ang Pangulo at hindi mahirap makipag-usap sa kanya.”
Aquino served as a congressman for three terms before winning a seat in the Senate in 2007, and getting elected as President in 2010.
On Saturday, a hacker posted on Twitter and Facebook what he/she claimed to be Aquino’s phone numbers, but subsequent reports said no one answered the numbers when they were dialed.
When asked if the numbers posted by the hacker are indeed Aquino’s, Valte would only say, “I cannot comment at this time.” — TJD/YA, GMA News

China supercomputer world’s fastest – report

BEIJING – A Chinese supercomputer is the fastest in the world, according to survey results announced Monday, comfortably overtaking a US machine which now ranks second.

Tianhe-2, a supercomputer developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology, achieved processing speeds of 33.86 petaflops (1000 trillion calculations) per second on a benchmarking test, earning it the number one spot in the Top 500 survey of supercomputers.

The tests show the machine is by far the fastest computer ever constructed. Its main rival, the US-designed Titan, had achieved a performance of 17.59 petaflops per second, the survey’s website said.

Five of the world’s 10 fastest computers are installed in the US, the survey said, with the two in China, two in Germany and one in Japan.

The recognition of Tianhe-2, meaning Milky Way-2, as the world’s fastest computer marks the return of the title to China after the machine’s predecessor, the Tianhe-1 was ranked the world’s fastest in November 2010, only to be overtaken by a machine from the US.

Unlike some of its Chinese predecessors, most of the Tianhe-2′s parts are developed in China, except for its main processors, which are designed by US firm Intel.

“Most of the features of the system were developed in China…the interconnect, operating system, front-end processors and software are mainly Chinese,” the list’s website quoted editor Jack Dongarra as saying.

But the US still dominates the overall supercomputer rankings, with 252 systems making the top 500. The number of European machines, at 112 systems remains lower than the number of Asian machines, at 119, the list’s website said.

The supercomputers on the Top 500 list, which is produced twice a year, are rated based on speed of performance in a benchmark test by experts from Germany and the United States. — Agence France-Presse

Virtual reality porn comes to Oculus Rift

Wicked Paradise, an erotic adventure game, is under development for the Oculus Rift virtual reality platform, according to Eurogamer and Kotaku.

“I was always fascinated by the fact that we have hundreds of beautifully crafted shooter games but not a single well designed erotic video game,” said mobile developer Jeroen Van den Bosch, leader of the team working on the game. “Sure there have been some attempts in the past, but they all have been ridiculously bad.
“There is nothing sexy about unrealistic models that move like rusty robots with faulty servos. If you want to genuinely create an erotic atmosphere in a videogame you need to convincingly cross the uncanny valley.”
To ensure the game meets industry standards and survives the stiff competition from other more mainstream games, Jeroen Van den Bosch brought together a versatile eight-man team composed of “seasoned video game industry veterans” who have worked on triple A titles such as Call of Duty, Rage, Madden, Lost Planet, and PlanetSide 2.
Aside from his startup studio’s previous experience with the aforementioned games, den Bosh is also drawing inspiration from BioWare’s seminal sci-fi series, Mass Effect.
“The non-explicit sex scenes in Mass Effect are much more erotic than current available explicit adult video games,” said den Bosch. “This is because you care about the characters in Mass Effect. A player will never feel very attracted to a virtual character if he or she doesn’t care. I believe that virtual reality is the perfect medium for an erotic video game because you can make the player feel really connected to your computer characters.”
At the moment, the game is in the pre-production stage. It will make use of the Unreal Engine, as well as full body motion capture to inject a heavy load of realism into the sex scenes.
Wicked Paradise will be episodic in its release. The preliminary outings will concentrate on heterosexual content for men, with follow-ups doling out heterosexual interactions for women. Future installments will explore LGBT themes.
The Oculus Rift VR headset, which is being developed by the company Oculus VR, is an upcoming virtual reality device featuring a display unit that is mounted on the player’s head. Several games are already in development for the system, including horror titles such as Among the Sleep, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, and, for hardcore veterans of the first-person-shooter, Doom 3: BFG Edition and Doom 4.
Wicked Paradise will be available in 2014. — TJD, GMA News

Google goes ‘Loony’, whips up a balloon-powered Internet

It’s so ‘loony it just might work: Google is working to bring the Internet to the masses by using balloons up in the stratosphere.

Project lead Mike Cassidy said this aims to address the problem of Internet access being out of reach for two out of every three people on earth.
“We believe that it might actually be possible to build a ring of balloons, flying around the globe on the stratospheric winds, that provides Internet access to the earth below. It’s very early days, but we’ve built a system that uses balloons, carried by the wind at altitudes twice as high as commercial planes, to beam Internet access to the ground at speeds similar to today’s 3G networks or faster,” Cassidy said in a blog post.
He added balloons could become an option for connecting rural, remote, and underserved areas, and for helping with communications after natural disasters.
“The idea may sound a bit crazy — and that’s part of the reason we’re calling it Project Loon — but there’s solid science behind it,” he said.
“We imagine someday you’ll be able to use your cell phone with your existing service provider to connect to the balloons and get connectivity where there is none today.
This is still highly experimental technology and we have a long way to go—we’d love your support as we keep trying and keep flying!” he added.
Terrestrial challenges
Cassidy cited  terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity such as jungles, archipelagos, and mountains, making setting up terrestrial connections costly.
He said that in most countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month’s income.
Under the project, Google will free the balloons and let them sail on the winds, and controlling their path through the sky with just wind and solar power.
The next stage is to manage a fleet of balloons sailing around the world, “so that each balloon is in the area you want it right when you need it.”
“We’re solving this with some complex algorithms and lots of computing power,” he said.
Pilot program
Cassidy said Google has started a pilot program in the Canterbury area of New Zealand with 50 testers trying to connect to its balloons.
He said Google launched 30 balloons this week alone, and tried to connect to as many receivers on the ground.
“Over time, we’d like to set up pilots in countries at the same latitude as New Zealand. We also want to find partners for the next phase of our project—we can’t wait to hear feedback and ideas from people who’ve been working for far longer than we have on this enormous problem of providing Internet access to rural and remote areas,” he said. — TJD, GMA News

US program marks birth of one millionth HIV-free baby

WASHINGTON - Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday hailed the 10th anniversary of a US program to battle AIDS, saying it has helped one million babies be born disease-free to mothers infected with HIV.

“Preventing mother to child transmission has been a central pillar of our fight against this disease,” Kerry said at a State Department event.
More effective anti-retroviral drugs and regimens are now dramatically cutting the chances of an infected mother passing on the sickness to her baby during pregnancy or breastfeeding.
The birth of the one millionth HIV-free baby was hailed as part of celebrations to mark the 10th anniversary of the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known by its acronym PEPFAR.
“Thanks to the support of PEPFAR, we have saved the one millionth baby from becoming infected with HIV,” Kerry said, adding it was “a truly landmark moment on the HIV/AIDS timeline.”
“One million babies can grow up happy and healthy, go to school, realize their dreams, break out of this cycle, maybe even have sons and daughters of their own free from the burden and the fear of HIV.”
Namibian Health Minister Richard Nehabi Kamwi said his government would always be “eternally grateful” for PEPFAR’s assistance, which has helped turn the tide against the disease in his country.
The program “represents a decade of hope and renewed health for victims of HIV/AIDS, who without PEPFAR would have succumbed to the deadly pandemic,” he said.
The biggest fall in transmission rates from mother to infant has come since 2009, US Global AIDS coordinator Eric Goosby told AFP.
“Somewhere round 430,000 babies are born annually with HIV and this project that we’ve been in really since the beginning of PEPFAR has intensified over the last three years in partnership with UNAID and UNICEF,” Goosby said.
The program was working to “virtually eliminate pediatric HIV by 2015 and keep their mothers alive,” he said, with the aim of reducing the number of babies born with the infection to around 30,000 annually.
This involves not just identifying the mother, but getting her on a drugs program and keeping her in treatment through the pregnancy and any later ones — not always an easy task in rural Africa.
The chances of a mother infecting her baby once stood at around 30 percent, but now, with the launch of a cocktail of three anti-retroviral drugs, that has dropped to only about two percent, Goosby said.
Launched under former US president George W. Bush, PEPFAR was an initial commitment of some $15 billion over five years aimed specifically at providing anti-retroviral drugs to people infected with HIV.
That has risen to a budget of about $5.5 billion annually, including its contribution to the Global Fund — the world’s largest financing organization of programs to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
Kerry told how during a visit some years ago to Durban, South Africa, he had met orphans robbed of their parents “forced to take on the burden of adulthood at the age of 13, 14, and caring for their younger siblings.”
“We were heartbroken in hearing what these children had been through. You couldn’t help but feel this agony and this total disruption of the way life is supposed to be.”
But with programs like PEPFAR, “when we all looked lost, when this disease appeared to be unstoppable, history will show that humanity and individual humans rose to the challenge.”
“Action was taken, innovations were discovered, hope was kindled and generations were saved,” Kerry said.
Absent a medical breakthrough leading to a cure, experts are working towards a so-called “tipping point” when fewer people contract HIV every year than the number of those going onto treatments.
Kerry also announced that some 13 countries from Botswana to Zimbabwe, including Namibia, were close to that all important “tipping point.”
In Ethiopia and Malawi, the ratio of new HIV infections to the increase of patients on treatment is just 0.3. Ethiopia — which with a population of 84.7 million is the most populous African country after Egypt — for instance registered only 11,000 new cases of HIV in adults in 2011.
Although some 1.7 million people still die every year from AIDS-related illnesses, PEPFAR supports more than 5.1 million on treatment programs.
The program estimates that worldwide more than 16 million children are living without one or both parents who have succumbed to AIDS, while millions more are left vulnerable with their parents chronically ill.  — Agence France Presse

Google challenges U.S. Surveillance Court on First Amendment grounds

SEATTLE - Google Inc asked the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to allow it to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests it receives separately from criminal requests, on First Amendment grounds.

In its filing, Google requested the court to allow it to publish the aggregate number of national security requests it receives, including disclosures under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), claiming it as part of its First Amendment right to free speech.
“In light of the intense public interest generated by the Guardian’s and Post’s erroneous articles, and others that have followed them, Google seeks to increase its transparency with users and the public regarding its receipt of national security requests, if any,” the Google filing said.
Google’s move comes after other tech companies, including Microsoft Corp, Facebook Inc and Apple Inc released limited information about the number of surveillance requests they receive under an agreement they struck with the U.S. government last week.
Under that agreement, the companies were only allowed to disclose aggregate requests for data made by government agencies without showing the split between surveillance and criminal requests, and only for a six-month period.
The companies are scrambling to assert their independence after documents leaked to the Washington Post and the Guardian newspapers suggested they had given the U.S. government “direct access” to their computers as part of a National Security Agency program called Prism.
The disclosures about Prism, and related revelations about broad-based collection of telephone records, have triggered widespread concern and congressional hearings about the scope and extent of the information-gathering.
Google said it asked the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation on June 11 to publish the aggregate number of national security requests, but said it was told such an act would be unlawful.  — Reuters

Microsoft: Raid on cybercrime ring freed millions of PCs from botnet

BOSTON- Microsoft Corp said that an assault it led earlier this month on one of the world’s biggest cyber crime rings has freed at least 2 million PCs infected with a virus believed to have been used to steal more than $500 million from bank accounts worldwide.

“We definitely have liberated at least 2 million PCs globally. That is a conservative estimate,” Richard Domingues Boscovich, assistant general counsel with Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, said in an interview on Tuesday.
He said the vast majority of infected machines were in the United States, Europe and Hong Kong.
Microsoft and the FBI, aided by authorities in more than 80 countries, on June 5 sought to take down 1,400 malicious computer networks known as the Citadel Botnets by severing their access to infected machines. Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit is working with its partners overseas to determine exactly how many of the Citadel botnets are still operational.
“We feel confident that we really got most of the ones that we were after,” he said. “It was a very, very successful disruptive action.”
The ringleader, who goes by the alias Aquabox, and dozens of botnet operators remain at large and the authorities are working to uncover their identities. Boscovich said he suspects Aquabox is in Eastern Europe.
The botnets, which were run from “command and control” servers at data hosting centers around the world, were used to steal from hundreds of financial institutions, according to court documents that Microsoft filed to get permission to shut down servers in the United States that were being used to run the operation.
Data center operators typically are not aware that their servers are being used to run botnets.
The ring targeted firms of all sizes, from tiny credit unions to global banks such as Bank of America, Credit Suisse, HSBC and Royal Bank of Canada.
Citadel is one of the biggest botnets in operation today. Microsoft said its creator bundled the software with pirated versions of the Windows operating system.
The FBI, which on Tuesday declined to comment on its progress in its investigation of Citadel, has said it is working closely with Europol and other overseas authorities to capture the unknown criminals.
Cyber criminals typically infect machines by sending spam emails containing malicious links and attachments, and by infecting legitimate websites with computer viruses that attack unsuspecting visitors. Some bot herders rent or sell infected machines on underground markets to other cyber criminals looking to engage in a wide variety of activities including credit card theft and attacks on government websites.
The Citadel software disables anti-virus programs on infected PCs so they cannot detect malicious software. It surfaced in early 2012 and is sold over the Internet in kits that cost $2,400 or more.  — Reuters

Yahoo to free up dormant IDs to ‘loyal’ and new users

Yahoo Mail users who barely used their email accounts over the last 12 months risk losing their Yahoo IDs, a ranking executive of the Internet firm said in a blog post.

Yahoo SVP for platforms Jay Rossiter said the new development is part of their “next big push” of giving loyal and new users sign up for the Yahoo ID they always wanted.
“So, how are we making these Yahoo! IDs available? We’re freeing up IDs, that have been inactive for at least 12 months, by resetting them and giving them a fresh start,” Rossiter said.
By mid-July, he said anyone can have a shot at scoring the Yahoo ID they want.
In mid-August, users who staked a claim on certain IDs can return to Yahoo to see if they got those IDs, he added.
However, Yahoo ID users who let their accounts grow dormant for 12 months can still keep their IDs, Rossiter said: “All you have to do is log on to any Yahoo! product before July 15th.”
A separate article on PC World said Yahoo did not specify how many accounts were currently dormant.
But it said Yahoo is trying to attract more users to its products like Flickr, mail, weather and search.
Yahoo redesigned Yahoo Mail last December, promising users of speedier performance. Recently, it forced users to switch to the new version of Mail, as older versions including Mail Classic were being discontinued.  — ELR, GMA News

MMDA unveils widescreen ‘transparency’ monitor

Now, the public can take part in keeping tabs on employees of the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority, via a widescreen TV display at the MMDA’s head office in Makati City.

MMDA Chairman Francis Tolentino on Friday unveiled the monitor, which he dubbed the “transparency governance wall,” radio dzBB’s Sam Nielsen reported.
The monitor, installed at the MMDA headquarters’ lobby, has feeds from 48 closed-circuit television cameras mounted in the eight-story building housing the MMDA’s offices.
With it, Tolentino said the public can see the transactions at MMDA headquarters.
He said the monitor is part of the agency’s efforts to be transparent, as well as to boost security at the eight-story building where the headquarters is located.
The “transparency governance wall” is the latest CCTV-based initiative of the MMDA, coming after the recent launch of a program that streams CCTV feeds on major thoroughfares in Metro Manila and Rizal province.  — ELR, GMA News

Ready for a 3D touchscreen?

Soon, future tablets, smartphones and mobile devices may sport touchscreens that not only let you pinch and zoom, but also let you poke and stretch them as well.

The screen, which its creators described as 2.5-D instead of full 3-D, has a flexible liquid rubber sheet laid over actuators, and sits under a Kinect-based camera that projects images onto the sheet, Discovery News said.
“If you pull on it, the sheet makes a little mountain. Poke it and it dents. Rub your finger on it and it senses the friction. Stretch it and it shows the distortion on the image,” it said.
Discovery News said the camera also measures how deep the screen is poked into it or how far its stretched.
Appropriately, the device designed by Massachussetts Institute of Technology Media Lab’s Dhairya Dand and Rob Hemsley was named Obake – a mythical Japanese shapeshifting spirit.
Dand and Hemsley said today’s 3D displays are not true 3D but mere optical illusions.
“We created a 2.5D display that is shape changing with the help of actuators, depth cameras, projector and a silicone screen. ‘Obake’ (o-baa-keh) as we lovingly call it, imagines how we would interact with elastic display. We could literally pinch and pull them!” they said.
“Create mountains by pulling them out of the screen, draw rivers with your fingers, elevate an entire terrain to see a cut section view. Make your data come alive,” they added.
The two also said current state-of-the-art touchscreens still assume 2D images, while many 3D displays do not exploit the range of gestural controls.
Long way to go
But Discovery News noted it will take some time before this technology finds its way into a mobile device as small as a smartphone.
“Actuators are relatively large, and there would have to be room for pressing in as well as extruding, and the need for a projector. Odds are this technology will first show up on tabletop applications,” it said.  — ELR, GMA News