US watchdogs probe mobile security

The US authorities are to investigate the security of mobile devices, and in particular the way in which software updates are distributed.

The Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission are looking to “better understand, and ultimately to improve” practices. To this end, letters have been sent to operators asking about procedures for reviewing and releasing updates, and to eight device makers about how patches are issued to address vulnerabilities.

“There have recently been a growing number of vulnerabilities associated with mobile operating systems that threaten the security and integrity of a user’s device, including ‘Stagefright’ in the Android operating system, which may affect almost one billion Android devices globally”, a statement said.

Infotainment upgrade takes center stage with 2017 Land Rover Discovery Sport

In the two years that have progressed since Land Rover launched the Discovery Sport line in the US (replacing the aging LR2), plenty of advancements have been made in terms of in-car technology. Thus, in updating its midsize utility vehicle for 2017, Land Rover's focused nearly entirely on technology.

BlackBerry offers lawful interception for devices, but no backdoors

Wants to differentiate from rivals offering end-to-end encryption.

Mobile device maker BlackBerry is taking a different tack in the encryption debate, saying its smartphones have lawful interception capabilities for government surveillance purposes.

BlackBerry chief operating officer Marty Beard told the FedTalks government information technology summit in the United States that the company takes a balanced approach on interception.

According to Fedscoop, which first reported Beard's remarks, this approach differentiates Blackberry from its competitors, who are "all about encryption all the way."

Best infotainment systems - ultimate guide to in-car tech

We rate 10 of the top infotainment set-ups on the market

Around 73 per cent of British adults don’t understand how to use all of their car's features, according to research by BookMyGarage.com. That may sound like a case of ‘don’t know, don’t care’, but at the same time 54 per cent bought their particular vehicle because of the systems it offered.

So, if people are tempted by hassle-saving gadgets but can’t work out how to use them, what's the point? We teamed up with tech site Alphr.com to put the kit to the test to establish whether it's user-unfriendly or simply that owners have all the gear but no idea.

Is the internet becoming less secure?

There’s been no shortage of scandals surrounding internet security within recent months. A seemingly endless stream of websites appear to be hacked, with companies such as vTech, Ashley Madison and TalkTalk, to give a few high-profile examples, having their databases compromised.

These security breaches have been detrimental to the image of these companies. TalkTalk was perhaps hit the hardest, with 101,000 customers leaving on the back of the hacking scandal.

NVIDIA Extends Their Datacenter Performance Lead In Neural Network Computing at #GTC16

At NVIDIA NVDA +0.62%’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2016 in San Jose, California the company announced products based on their latest GPU architecture, code-named Pascal. This conference is traditionally attended by some of the leading researchers in GPU-accelerated compute technologies and over the past few years has become increasingly focused on Deep Neural Networks (DNN). DNNs are the latest key to artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive computing. Incredible strides have been made over the last three years in AI thanks to Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Companies like Google GOOGL -0.20%, Microsoft MSFT -0.17%, IBM IBM -0.07%, Toyota, Baidu and others are looking at deep neural networks to help solve many of their complex analytical and data-rich problems. NVIDIA is helping these companies  to harness the power of their GPUs to accelerate the deep learning these systems need to do. Thanks to NVIDIA’s early involvement in deep neural networks research and their latest GPU hardware, the company is in the driver’s seat right now when it comes to delivering silicon to accelerate deep neural networks.

The rise of the micro-data center

The recent 451 Research London conference threw up some interesting thoughts on how data centers might develop over the next few years, where micro-data centers – down to and including the ‘Bring Your Own’ variety – could play an important role.

Some interesting thoughts came to the fore during the recent `Business of Cloud, Data Center and Hosting Summit’ run by analyst firm 451 Research. While the background was painted from sets of figures based on solid research of trends in cloud usage across the cloud services marketplace, the best thoughts were of the still-arguable, ‘we-reckon…’ variety.