A newly published Apple patent application sets out a way for a virtual SIM card to be built into an embedded secure element which can, in turn, be attached to an NFC controller chip.
An NFC-related patent application filed by Apple in November 2010 has now been made public by the US Patent and Trademark Office.
From a lonely rusted tower in a forest north of Moscow, a mysterious shortwave radio station transmitted day and night. For at least the decade leading up to 1992, it broadcast almost nothing but beeps; after that, it switched to buzzes, generally between 21 and 34 per minute, each lasting roughly a second—a nasally foghorn blaring through a crackly ether.
It appears nothing is safe from computer hackers. Governments tremble at the thought of their secrets finding their way into the wrong hands, and standard computer users worry about their bank details and credit card numbers.
Christine Silberhorn, a professor of quantum optics at the University of Paderborn in Germany, believes she might have the answer in the special properties that light exhibits.
The BlueGene/Q processors that will power the 20 petaflops Sequoia supercomputer being built by IBM for Lawrence Livermore National Labs will be the first commercial processors to include hardware support for transactional memory. Transactional memory could prove to be a versatile solution to many of the issues that currently make highly scalable parallel programming a difficult task. Most research so far has been done on software-based transactional memory implementations.
Most of the speculation surrounding Apple at the moment is when the iPhone 5 will be released or the next iPad. But there has also been reports surfacing about the company working on having LTE after images emerged of equipment that had been installed in stores. This is continuing with claims that Apple are looking to have LTE in many devices including the iPad 3.
Windows is very democratic in its allocation of CPU time - just about any program you run gets full access to every processor core by default. This sounds like a good idea at first, but it isn't.
Yes, some of the programs you run need to consume all the CPU power you have available, but there are plenty of others that are less important. Many of those system tray icons represent tools that you need to run, but aren't exactly critical. There's no need for them to have the same level of access to your CPU as, say, that game you're going to play next.
It looks like we can add security to the growing list of killer apps for Hadoop. The open-source, data-processing tool is already popular for search engines, social-media analysis, targeted marketing and other applications that can benefit from clusters of machines churning through unstructured data — now it’s turning its attention to security data.
Researchers at U.C. Berkeley have discovered that some of the net’s most popular sites are using a tracking service that can’t be evaded — even when users block cookies, turn off storage in Flash, or use browsers’ “incognito” functions.
FLICKERING lights are annoying but they may have an upside. Visible light communication (VLC) uses rapid pulses of light to transmit information wirelessly. Now it may be ready to compete with conventional Wi-Fi.
"At the heart of this technology is a new generation of high-brightness light-emitting diodes," says Harald Haas from the University of Edinburgh, UK. "Very simply, if the LED is on, you transmit a digital 1, if it's off you transmit a 0," Haas says. "They can be switched on and off very quickly, which gives nice opportunities for transmitting data."
Like the idea of a fully transparent cell phone, e-reader, or other device?
Stanford University graduate student Yuan Yang has come up with a way to make a see-through lithium ion battery, and it could pave the way for completely see-through flexible electronics (some partially transparent gadgets already exist). Developed in conjunction with Yi Cui, a professor of photon science at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the battery would cost nearly the same as a regular battery if produced on a mass scale, the creators say.
