BAD HARDWARE WEEK

The National Security Agency has tapped a senior official within the Homeland Security Department to serve as its inaugural civil-liberties and privacy officer, NSA chief Keith Alexander announced Wednesday.

At present, such data is stored on the agency’s datacenters. In government’s aim to resolve legal and privacy concerns, President Obama has ordered the agency to offload storage of this data onto third-party datacenters. Information can then be accessed through encrypted searches.
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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: Well that seems like a joke in a unpleasant situation when mr Snowden is currently their unofficial PR with office in Russia. :)
Anyway best wishes for latest NSA officer,  but I am somehow confident that he will be desirable there like a pig in Tehran !  

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer insists the long-stumbling Internet company has finally regained its stride, even though its revenue is still stuck in reverse.
Revenue dropped 6 percent in the fourth quarter, the same rate of decline experienced for all of 2013.
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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: well, ¸DON'T KNOW does it regain its stride, but hackers regained Yahoo mail accounts !
The company is resetting passwords on accounts that have been affected and is taking steps to allow users to re-secure their accounts.

Andrew Feldman announced today that the company AMD is preparing to sample its new eight-core ARM SoC (codename: Seattle).

The company also boasts huge cost savings over Intel Xeon solutions for similar memory support, but won't reveal exactly how much an A1100 will end up costing.The Opteron A1100 will begin sampling in March, ahead of OEM announcements towards the end of the year. AMD are predicting ARM solutions will occupy 25% of the server market by 2019, and the Opteron A1100 is major step to achieving this.
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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: Ironically to Intel , Seattle is a Headquarter of Microsoft corp.
Redmond is a city in King County, Washington, United States, located 16 miles (26 km) east of Seattle.
But is that name game a reason for Morgan banker to make a suicide ?

The bank worker who died after falling from the roof of JP Morgan's European headquarters in Canary Wharf this morning has been named as Gabriel Magee, a senior IT programmer.
Mr Magee had been finishing his computing degree at the University of New Mexico while interning at Intel, where he stayed for two years before heading to Wall Street at Morgan.
"The 9th floor roof of JP Morgan is visible from my office window," tweeted Hetal V Patel. "For a long time the body was left cordoned and unattended. Weird. #Wharf."
The JP Morgan building has been the headquarters of the bank's Europe, Middle East and Africa operation since July 2012. It was previously occupied by Lehman Brothers, whose staff left with their belongings in cardboard boxes after the investment bank filed for bankruptcy on September 15, 2008.

 Russian Bank Halts All Cash Withdrawals
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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: Ironically, before Intel internship banker was a pilot.
In 1977, Morgan Stanley opened its European headquarters in London, where it now has over 5,000 staff. More than 3,000 further people are located in the firm's other European offices in Amsterdam, Athens, Budapest, Frankfurt, Geneva, Glasgow, Luxembourg, Madrid, Milan, Moscow, Munich, Paris, Stockholm and Zurich where offer a full range of services covering mergers, acquisitions, restructurings, fixed income and equity financing, as well as secondary trading, research, foreign exchange, commodities, securities lending, asset management and prime brokerage.

Based in London, DeepMind was founded by games prodigy and neuroscientist Demis Hassabis, along with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman.
DeepMine helps you by sifting, sorting, summing, searching all your orders to provide a clean table and graph of top products, variants, and options. 


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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK:

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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: But its x86 processor wasn't :) And ...

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This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy about nuclear weapons, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”
Although “Strangelove” was clearly a farce, with the comedian Peter Sellers playing three roles, it was criticized for being implausible.
With great reluctance, Eisenhower agreed to let American officers use their nuclear weapons, in an emergency, if there were no time or no means to contact the President. Air Force pilots were allowed to fire their nuclear anti-aircraft rockets to shoot down Soviet bombers heading toward the United States. And about half a dozen high-level American commanders were allowed to use far more powerful nuclear weapons, without contacting the White House first, when their forces were under attack and “the urgency of time and circumstances clearly does not permit a specific decision by the President, or other person empowered to act in his stead.”
Although the Air Force now denies this claim, according to more than one source I contacted, the code necessary to launch a missile was set to be the same at every Minuteman site: 00000000.
In the spring of 2013, nineteen launch officers at Minot Air Force base in North Dakota were decertified for violating safety rules and poor discipline. In August, 2013, the entire missile wing at Malmstrom Air Force base in Montana failed its safety inspection. Last week, the Air Force revealed that thirty-four launch officers at Malmstrom had been decertified for cheating on proficiency exams—and that at least three launch officers are being investigated for illegal drug use
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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: Well, now marihuana is legal in a many US states. :)
Completed in 1985, the Russian counter attack system was known as the Dead Hand. Once it was activated, Perimeter would order the launch of long-range missiles at the United States if it detected nuclear detonations on Soviet soil and Soviet leaders couldn’t be reached. Like the Doomsday Machine in “Strangelove,” Perimeter was kept secret from the United States; its existence was not revealed until years after the Cold War ended.

Open your Gmail account. Click on the gear icon in the top right and select Settings from the menu.

In the General tab on the Settings page, look for the section that says: Email via Google+.

Click on the dropdown menu next to "Who can email you via your Google+ profile?" You can pick one of four choices: Anyone on Google+, Extended Circles, Circles, or No One. Make your selection and then click Save Changes at the bottom of the page.

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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: Thanks to CNET

On January 1984 Apple created something why 1984 will not be Orewellian 1948 !
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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: Well, 30 years later check what free world and its Big Brother NSA can do in computing:

• It can track the numbers of both parties on a phone call, as well location, time and duration. (More)
• It can hack Chinese phones and text messages. (More)
• It can set up fake internet cafes. (More)
• It can spy on foreign leaders' cell phones. (More)
• It can tap underwater fiber-optic cables. (More)
• It can track communication within media organizations like Al Jazeera. (More)
• It can hack into the UN video conferencing system. (More)
• It can track bank transactions. (More)
• It can monitor text messages. (More)
• It can access your email, chat, and web browsing history. (More)
• It can map your social networks. (More)
• It can access your smartphone app data. (More)
• It is trying to get into secret networks like Tor, diverting users to less secure channels. (More)
• It can go undercover within embassies to have closer access to foreign networks. (More)
• It can set up listening posts on the roofs of buildings to monitor communications in a city. (More)
• It can set up a fake LinkedIn. (More)
• It can track the reservations at upscale hotels. (More)
• It can intercept the talking points for Ban Ki-moon’s meeting with Obama. (More)
• It can crack cellphone encryption codes. (More)
• It can hack computers that aren’t connected to the internet using radio waves. (More)
• It can intercept phone calls by setting up fake base stations. (More)
• It can remotely access a computer by setting up a fake wireless connection. (More)
• It can install fake SIM cards to then control a cell phone. (More)
• It can fake a USB thumb drive that's actually a monitoring device. (More)
• It can crack all types of sophisticated computer encryption. (Update: It is trying to build this capability.) (More)
• It can go into online games and monitor communication. (More)
• It can intercept communications between aircraft and airports. (More)
• (Update) It can physically intercept deliveries, open packages, and make changes to devices. (More)

The move comes nine years after Lenovo bought IBM's PC businesss including the Thinkpad PC notebook brand and means that IBM will let go of its entry-level and mid-range server and storage products. 
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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: The future of X86 server business seems bright like the future of PC business has been in 2005 ! :)
Oh, by the way 7,500 server related jobs flee to China.  YES; WE CAN ! :)

Leadership in a a new era of jobless !
That led CEO Ginni Rometty to announce that senior staff would not take their 2013 bonuses.

When Intel close new 450mm wafer fab and investment money divert to paying manufacturers for use of new old Bay Trail processor !
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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: That is called intelligent marketing on fair competition. :)

Just a switching performance optimization.
The 16nm node represents TSMC's first use of FinFETs, a.k.a. vertical transistors. Indeed, this node basically just adds FinFETs to the existing 20nm process, thus it provides almost no gain in packing in more transistors per area of die, although it does offer benefits in lower power or higher performance.
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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: 16nm is known in expert terminology as half node. And it will be at disposal in 2015, at best scenario. 14nm? Will it offer full scale advantage we will only see. Just as nobody knows will Intel offer scaling down 22nm process at 14nm at all. All the rest is INTELLIGENT MARKETING :)

That is the final question.
If not in 2016, then never.
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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK:

 Why is Intel confident that 40 million tablets will ship in 2014 with its Bay Trail processors? Here's one good reason.


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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: 40 millions Intel's tablets will cannibalize 40 M Intel's laptops. And Intel will pay for it ! Seems like opening doors to AMD's Kaveri this year. That is why this year will be flat for Intel. Even more without 14nm processor newbies.

  Microsoft indicated this week that it has fixed a Windows XP resource-hog problem associated with the system's SVCHOST.EXE processes. The fix also seems not to require any actions by Windows XP users or IT pros to take effect.
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 99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: Wait a minute. How it is fixed at XP users that don't allow OS updates ?? Seems through .NET framework even if they are at the highest XP OS security level.
Elementary my dear Watson: Windows XP is dead,  but VIVA NSA !

 Bitcoin is gaining popularity as an investment instrument and medium of monetary exchange, but what could be exciting for Bitcoin fans is the claim that the crypto-currency could soon be worth $100,000 per BTC.
However , here is an impressive list what NSA actually still can do:

• It can track the numbers of both parties on a phone call, as well location, time and duration. (More)
• It can hack Chinese phones and text messages. (More)
• It can set up fake internet cafes. (More)
• It can spy on foreign leaders' cell phones. (More)
• It can tap underwater fiber-optic cables. (More)
• It can track communication within media organizations like Al Jazeera. (More)
• It can hack into the UN video conferencing system. (More)
• It can track bank transactions. (More)
• It can monitor text messages. (More)
• It can access your email, chat, and web browsing history. (More)
• It can map your social networks. (More)
• It can access your smartphone app data. (More)
• It is trying to get into secret networks like Tor, diverting users to less secure channels. (More)
• It can go undercover within embassies to have closer access to foreign networks. (More)
• It can set up listening posts on the roofs of buildings to monitor communications in a city. (More)
• It can set up a fake LinkedIn. (More)
• It can track the reservations at upscale hotels. (More)
• It can intercept the talking points for Ban Ki-moon’s meeting with Obama. (More)
• It can crack cellphone encryption codes. (More)
• It can hack computers that aren’t connected to the internet using radio waves. (More)
• It can intercept phone calls by setting up fake base stations. (More)
• It can remotely access a computer by setting up a fake wireless connection. (More)
• It can install fake SIM cards to then control a cell phone. (More)
• It can fake a USB thumb drive that's actually a monitoring device. (More)
• It can crack all types of sophisticated computer encryption. (Update: It is trying to build this capability.) (More)
• It can go into online games and monitor communication. (More)
• It can intercept communications between aircraft and airports. (More)
• (Update) It can physically intercept deliveries, open packages, and make changes to devices. (More)

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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: Thus, NSA obviously can't decipher Bitcoin encryption and terrorists could use it as a natural hidden device for paying their evil deeds? :)

XP securities will be patched until then.
We hope that Microsoft will find new CEO until then :)
Menawhile, Apple Devices To Reach Parity With Windows PCs In 2014 !


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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: Apple devices obviously steal from PC domain, that reached its peak in 2011. What is the next thing? Well, the things itself in cloud. That it is why Google want your home thermometers and smoke detectors control. So, Android kicks Microsoft dominance even more. In year 2015 XP will only cannibalize only Win OSs and harm no one else, being the concept from the past century. Meanwhile, until July 2015 , Win OS share might drop only to 250M units ! as it was before blind Vista announcement. Well that was a deadly mistake ! But the same year we saw Apple's rise beyond Mac.
What was Next from Apple ? The threat of Macs switching from x86 to ARM from 2012.
Apple leaves X86 boat just in time as we see from the first diagram. Will it be deadly devastating for X86? Well, judge yourself.
Slumping Intel to cut more than 5,000 jobs in 2014
Since Intel's stock hit a five-year high of $29.27 in May 2012, the shares have fallen by 12 per cent. Meanwhile, the Standard & Poor's 500 index has climbed by 31 per cent.
Asked during the earnings call about Fab 42, Brian Krzanich, Intel’s chief executive said, “When you start these construction projects, you have to start them three years in advance. They are some of the most complex construction projects imaginable. We started this one three years ago. Our view of the PC industry and PC growth three years ago was much more robust than it is today.

Intel has confirmed it is leaving vacant a massive new multibillion-dollar computer-chip factory in Chandler that President Barack Obama once touted as a symbol of the future of U.S. manufacturing.
Obama, who visited the construction site in January 2012, used it as the backdrop for a speech stressing the importance of expanding domestic manufacturing.



We can meet this challenge, and we'll remind the world once again just why the United States of America is the greatest nation on Earth. (Applause.)
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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: We have to wait Win 9 till mid next year to see its doors possibly opened. Fab's number 42 is actually answer to all question, but  only in Hitchhiker's guide  to the Samsung Galaxy. :)
The new facility worth $5B would once produce transistors with a minimum size of 14 nanometers. 
Intel’s newest technology, which is being developed in Oregon and is expected to be deployed in high volumes this year, will be built in an existing facility in Chandler rather than in the new building. 14 nm technology node manufacturing at Intel will obviously wait the next TACK. Just like US economy, after Obama. Anyway,  450mm fab produces 2+ times more chips per wafer than current 300mm one in CHandler. That means Intel halved its future planned production ! Simpy because there is no more demand growth !

CVE-2012-0158 (the MSCOMCTL.OCX remote code execution vulnerability fixed with
Microsoft’s MS12-027 security bulletin)

Web links to Oracle Java exploits (CVE-2013-0422 and CVE-2012-1723)
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 99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: Word and Excel unfixed vulnerabilities and now in Java

Z-Wave is a key enabling technology driving the "Internet of Things

List of some names.

A hacker has found a backdoor to wireless combination router/DSL modems that could allow an attacker to reset the router’s configuration and gain access to the administrative control panel. The attack, confirmed to work on several Linksys and Netgear DSL modems, exploits an open port accessible over the wireless local network.



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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK:

If you still believe Dual_EC_DRBG hardware was not back doored on purpose, please keep reading.
They are monitoring your accounts and selling the data to the governments !
Unbelievably. Error report in XP and other Microsoft operating systems is ENABLED by default. So what ? In case of system error (that might struck intentionally  from some NSA friendly sites) Drwatson.exe will report and send unencrypted error log to Microsoft.
DrWatson will create memory dump log with routine Master Key Extraction And Volume Identification extraction.
Now let me help you:  what Texas Cryptologic center does with all traffic sent to Microsoft domain ? See PREVIOUS BAD HARDWARE BELOW.
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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: Switch off error reporting, immediately ! Or ...

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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: Intel and Samsung might be faster than the rest of industry, BUT WOULD WE BELIEVE IN THEIR PROPRIETARY CLAIMS ?

If a target person, agency or company orders a new computer or related accessories, for example, TAO can divert the shipping delivery to its own secret workshops. The NSA calls this method interdiction. At these so-called “load stations,” agents carefully open the package in order to load malware onto the electronics, or even install hardware components that can provide backdoor access for the intelligence agencies. All subsequent steps can then be conducted from the comfort of a remote computer.
These minor disruptions in the parcel shipping business rank among the “most productive operations” conducted by the NSA hackers, one top secret document relates in enthusiastic terms. This method, the presentation continues, allows TAO to obtain access to networks “around the world.”

Picture above: RC6 via UDP attack
To trick targets into visiting a FoxAcid server, the NSA relies on its secret partnerships with US telecoms companies. As part of the Turmoil system, the NSA places secret servers, codenamed Quantum, at key places on the internet backbone. This placement ensures that they can react faster than other websites can. By exploiting that speed difference, these servers can impersonate a visited website to the target before the legitimate website can respond, thereby tricking the target’s browser to visit a FoxAcid server.” reported the post on The Guardian.

But, don't worry too much about, there is no doubt in your safety anyway, because :)

You are 35,079 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist
You are 33,842 times more likely to die from cancer than from a terrorist
obesity is 5,882 to 23,528 times more likely to kill you than a terrorist
you are 5,882 times more likely to die from medical error than terrorism
you’re 4,706 times more likely to drink yourself to death than die from terrorism
you are 1,904 times more likely to die from a car accident than from a terrorist
your meds are thousands of times more likely to kill you than you know
you’re 2,059 times more likely to kill yourself than die at the hand of a terrorist
you’re 452 times more likely to die from risky sexual behavior than terrorism
you’re 353 times more likely to fall to your death … than die in a terrorist attack
you are 271 times more likely to die from a workplace accident than terrorism
you are 187 times more likely to starve to death in America than be killed by terrorism
you’re about 22 times more likely to die from a brain-eating zombie parasite than a terrorist
you are more than 9 times more likely to be killed by a law enforcement officer than by a terrorist
you are 37 times more likely being crushed to death by TV or furniture” than being killed by a terrorist
Americans are 110 times more likely to die from contaminated food than terrorism
you are more likely to be killed by a toddler than a terrorist
you are four times more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a terrorist.

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 99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: Cheers ! :)