And security commentator Bruce Schneier was also ticked off this week, taking issue with IBM's open letter denying it handed data over to the NSA. According to Schneier, IBM's wording of the denial, such as saying it didn't hand information over to NSA under PRISM, has left Big Blue wiggle room to hide what it did hand over. He said:We know you haven't provided data to the NSA under PRISM. It didn't use that name with you. Even the NSA General Counsel said: PRISM was an internal government term that as the result of leaks became the public term. What programme did you provide data to the NSA under?It seems rather obvious that you haven't provided the NSA with any data under a bulk collection surveillance program. You're not Google; you don't have bulk data to that extent. So why the caveat? And again, under what program did you provide data to the NSA?He also argues that IBM has played a game of geographical semantics to hide what went on as well:
Okay, so you say that you haven't provided any data stored outside the US to the NSA under a national security order. Since those national security orders prohibit you from disclosing their existence, would you say anything different if you did receive them? And even if we believe this statement, it implies two questions. Why did you specifically not talk about data stored inside the US? And why did you specifically not talk about providing data under another sort of order?And finally, a man has triumphed in the UK's Supreme Court after a 16-year legal battle over a laptop he bought at PC World. Richard Durkin attempted to buy a laptop in 1998 with just one requirement - a modem. As the sales assistant was unsure about the model's specs, they said he could take it away and bring it back the next day if there wasn't any modem. They took a £50 deposit and signed him up to a credit agreement.Naturally, the laptop didn't have a modem so he tried to return it the next day. The store manager refused to accept the laptop back and kept him on the credit deal. Durkin managed to sue PC World to get his deposit back but couldn't shake the credit agreement. Even though he no longer had the laptop, HSBC-owned HFC Bank, the lender, kept demanding payment, with the result that Durkin got a black mark on his credit score.
After being marked as a defaulter, Durkin went to sheriff's court in Aberdeen where he was awarded £116,000 in damages, but that decision was overturned when he tried for a higher payout in a court in Edinburgh. Eventually, he got the right ruling in Supreme Court in London, but the court was only able to award him £8,000 because of a legal technicality. Durkin said:Although I am disappointed that the supreme court was unable to restore to me the full damages awarded by the sheriff – even though it was clear they were sympathetic to my position – this decision is a great victory for all consumers, and I am proud to have been the driving force behind it.Taking a case to any court is a huge stress, but taking it to the highest court in the land with all the risks that go with it was the most stressful thing that anyone could voluntarily put themselves through.But sometimes you have to do what is right and not what is easy. This case was not all about me – it was about principle for all consumers. I always felt that PC World and HFC Bank had acted disgracefully towards me, and I have now been proved right.
The next generation of millennial kids are a lonely group of slab-fondlers who would rather watch films and movies alone in their bedrooms, it has been claimed.According to a survey from Deloitte, teens and people in their twenties have ditched the telly and now spend more time watching stuff on their smartphones, computers or fondleslabs.“The idea that TV is only watched on a TV isn’t true any more,” said Gerald Belson, vice chairman of Deloitte's North American media and entertainment division.Deloitte's survey says 32 per cent of trailing millennials aged between 14 and 24 watch movies or TV shows on their laptop or desktop, while nine per cent use their smartphone, seven per cent use a fondleslab and 44 per cent watch television.Some 92 per cent of the “matures” group in the survey, being aged above 67, primarily watch programmes or films on the telly, with just six per cent using a laptop.“Boomers” of between 48 and 66 years old are also big telly fiends, with 88 per cent watching the goggle box.
Belson added: Consumers are often now able to watch the content they want on the device of their choosing. As an example, they have decoupled the notion that TV shows have to be watched on home TVs. This trend is particularly evident in trailing millennials, who indicated they now spend more time watching television and movie content on non-traditional devices than on TVs.The Digital Democracy survey also found that 37 per cent of Americans are now digital omnivores who own a computer, smartphone and fondleslab, a figure which has grown by 42 per cent since previous year.There has been a 33 per cent increase in tablet ownership and increased take up by women, who now make up 45 per cent of the digital omnivores.A group of Chinese researchers reckon they're close to a practical method of harvesting the static electricity you generate when tapping and swiping the screen of your smartphone as backup power for the phone itself.As anyone who's jumped back swearing at their hand when all they wanted to do was open a door in the office can attest, the human body can build up a quite considerable static charges. Turning it into useful electricity, however, is a little more challenging.
A problem this research team, led by Peking University's Bo Meng, is trying to address is to make the generator efficient without requiring that it be grounded to earth.In this paper at Applied Physics Letters, they outline their approach, in which rather than grounding their STEG (single-friction-surface triboelectric generator), the body is used as an electrode, as per this circuit diagram:“When finger taps the friction surface and separates, the two contact surfaces compose a friction pair and get electrostatically charged owing to the difference in electron-attracting abilities ... finger skin shows a tendency to donate electrons in contact electrification. After electrostatically charged, it operates similarly as an out-of-plane gap closing electrostatic generator. Under repeated tapping and separating cycles, charge moves forward and back between the induction electrode and the charged finger skin via the external loads.”
Using a surface of micro-patterned polydimethylsiloxane, the researchers claim they were able to achieve an output voltage of 200V with a current density of 4.7 micro-Amps per square centimetre. That's not about to replace the battery on your laptop computer, but the researchers say “the STEG could be a potential power source for low-power electronics, especially for wearable devices”.The Dreamcolor screen itself certainly has a je ne sais quoi about it. 10-bit colour might not sound like much, but it's 10-bit per channel RGB, so it's 30-bit in total, so we're into beeellions of colours here – or 1,073,741,824 colour variations to be precise.HP has recently released revamped standalone Dreamcolor monitors, but if you're on the move, and using an ZBook 17 equipped with one, then you'll be looking at something rather special. It's not just the colour vibrancy and depth, you also get exceptionally good viewing angles. This is probably just as well because you can open the ZBook up so that the screen lies completely horizontal, just like in the old days, and the anti-glare display also does an excellent job of minimising reflections.
In general, Windows 7 boot times are not as impressive as Windows 8, but you'll still get to the login screen in under 15 seconds. Beyond that, Adobe Premiere Pro CC took 7 seconds to load and Photoshop CC a fraction over five seconds, which should satisfy most eager creatives. The Crucial SSD takes the credit for most of the niftiness here, delivering 427MB/s read and 207MB/s write speeds in CrystalDiskMark.The PCMark 8 scores were difficult to judge as the dodgy ZBook couldn’t run the Home settings test (it kept crashing) but could manage the Work test and gave a score of 5054. By contrast, the replacement ZBook could run all the tests, but the Work score was a mere 4021, producing a best Home score of 3880. It did make me wonder whether HP had done some performance tweaking in the replacement model to get the best out of the graphics card, as this notched up an impressive casual gaming figure of 97.73fps at full HD.When put to task, the fans would chip in a bit, sounding fairly industrial from the side venting at times. Oh and if you're wondering about the battery life, the PCMark 8 benchmark clocked up 1hr 57mins, from the 8-cell 83Whr removable battery, so you can probably double that with frugal usage.
HP Mobile Workstations come with all the usual security baggage that you'll not find on the consumer models, such as HP Client Security (which never failed to nag me to configure it with every reboot). Rather than go over that again here, if you're interested take a look at our HP Elitebook review for more.HP's Connection Manager was another regular pop-up every time a drive of any description was attached, enabling control over what storage could be accessed. It would appear when attaching Thunderbolt devices and yet often the devices themselves wouldn't mount. As mentioned in several of my Thunderbolt storage reviews, the issue goes away when an AS Media driver is installed, enabling PCs to play nice with this abundant controller chip.Needless to say, Thunderbolt performance was plenty fast, limited only by the media and arrays being used. Moreover, using an Elgato Thunderbolt dock, additional interfacing could be accessed, but not before additional drivers were installed to get the Ethernet and USB side of this accessory working – more of an Elgato issue than HP's.