Satechi adds aluminum 7-port USB 3.0 hub to its product line

Now that USB 3.0 has become mainstream in the Mac market, we're hearing about a lot more USB 3.0-based drives and accessories. Of course, once you've run out of ports on your Mac, you either need to swap devices or get yourself a hub. Satechi, the company that wowed us with a 10-port USB 3.0 hub earlier this year, has just announced the 7-port USB 3.0 Premium Aluminum Hub (US$69.99, specially priced now for $54.99).
Made from aluminum and echoing the design of Apple's Wireless Keyboard and Magic Trackpad, the hub is perfect for any of your favorite Macs, from the thin MacBook Air to the latest iMac. It's powered through an included wall adapter, and comes with either white or black trim. Best of all, it's available now through Satechi's website and Amazon.
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Server Sales are Down as Cloud Apps Abound at The Expense of IBM, Enterprise Giants

Gartner Research reports worldwide server sales are down 5 percent for the first quarter of the year, with IBM, HP and other members of the top five taking the biggest hit. Server shipments declined 0.7 percent.
But the drop in server sales is not at all surprising. Cloud apps are popping up by the thousands across the market, as the developer movement speeds up. But these apps are not surfacing from that souped-up x86 server made for big workloads. Developers instead are turning to the cloud. Enterprise companies are buying fewer of those high-priced machines that customers once bought when IT budgets were plentiful.
According to Gartner, x86 server shipments were flat during the quarter, with revenues up 1.8 percent. Server revenues reflect the problems that the vendors face. All of the top five vendors suffered revenue declines in the first quarter of 2013 except for Dell which grew 14.4 percent.
gartnersource
RISC/Itanium Unix servers had a 38.8 percent drop in shipments and were down 35.8 percent in vendor revenue compared to the same quarter last year. Mainframes showed a 3.6 percent increase in worldwide revenue. They will never die.
These numbers don’t mention Google, Facebook or Amazon but they might as well, because they are buying up servers. But not the Rolls Royce versions; they’re buying the budget-variety, cheap machines as stripped-down as they can get them and are having servers made for them by the gross from companies like Quanta, which is killing it in the server business. Quanta is selling one out of every seven servers sold.
It gets even more disruptive when considering the Open Compute Project. The open hardware organization, spearheaded by Facebook, is making a notable impact through its efforts to open-source servers and network switches. Quanta is planning to roll out more products based on OpenCompute specifications.
The server business foreshadows what’s to come. Enterprise companies will have to adapt to a new rock-bottom-priced server market and an open-source movement quickly gaining steam.
Tags: Quanta, facebook, open compute project, IBM, HP
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Facebook to take a stand against rape jokes, gender hate speech


kyrshen

Facebook has announced plans to renew its effort toward monitoring, and where appropriate, removing gender-related hate speech from its users, per a post on the company’s Facebook Safety page Tuesday. In its most recent battle, Facebook appears to be trying to differentiate what is “cruel and insensitive” and what is “distasteful humor” in order to answer complaints from groups including Women, Action, and the Media.
WAM wrote an open letter to Facebook on May 21 that asserted the company seems to apply its hate speech mandates unevenly when that hate speech is gender-based. The group cites several Facebook fan pages, including “Fly Kicking Sluts in the Uterus” and “Raping your Girlfriend,” which have now been removed but were presumably present at the time of WAM’s writing.
WAM claims that pages like these and others that constitute hate speech toward women are allowed to exist while similar hate speech pages based on religion, race, and sexual orientation are quickly moderated. WAM cites hateful images or content that get a media spotlight as the exception:
You have also acted inconsistently with regards to your policy on banning images, in many cases refusing to remove offensive rape and domestic violence pictures when reported by members of the public, but deleting them as soon as journalists mention them in articles, which sends the strong message that you are more concerned with acting on a case-by-case basis to protect your reputation than effecting systemic change and taking a clear public stance against the dangerous tolerance of rape and domestic violence.
Facebook explicitly mentions WAM in its response and acknowledges that its rules on hate speech may be unevenly applied when the content is gender-based. “In recent days, it has become clear that our systems to identify and remove hate speech have failed to work as effectively as we would like, particularly around issues of gender-based hate,” Facebook wrote.
The company dances around the issue of defining hate speech versus insensitive humor at length and without any real conclusion within the post. “Humor” is cited twice as a confounding factor in what is and is not hate speech. The confusion over that distinction is one the Internet has been painfully aware of lately, with uproar over a rape joke told by Daniel Tosh that sparked discussion on jokes on rape versus jokes on rape culture, as well as criticism of the broadly rape-themed comedy of Sam Morril.
“We work hard to remove hate speech quickly, however there are instances of offensive content, including distasteful humor, that are not hate speech according to our definition,” Facebook says. “In these cases, we work to apply fair, thoughtful, and scalable policies.”
Facebook most clearly applies discipline, it says, when the hate speech is oriented towards action: for instance, a page used to plan hate crimes.
But the company noted this standard is not evenly applied, and a lot of non-gender-based discriminatory content gets removed even if it’s not specifically organizing action and is just non-specific, knuckle-dragging hatred. The post states that recently, gender-related hate speech content is getting flagged but not removed in a timely fashion. Other times, “content that should be removed has not been or has been evaluated using outdated criteria.”
Going forward, Facebook states that it will review and update guidelines that its user operations team uses to identify hate speech. The company will also tweak their training to reflect new standards for what constitutes hate speech. Facebook noted that it is testing a feature that requires a user who says a “hate speech” page is actually merely “cruel and insensitive humor” to associate it with their “authentic identity” in order for it to remain on Facebook.
“These are complicated challenges and raise complex issues,” Facebook said of the problems its woman-hating users have raised. The company will work with WAM and Everyday Sexism to “identify resources or highlight areas of particular concern for inclusion in the training” of employees in charge of targeting and removing the offending content.
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TuneIn Raises $25M Round Led by IVP, Already Surpassed 1 Billion Listening Hours on this Year

TuneIn, the popular online radio service, today announced that it has raised a $25 million funding round led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) with participation from many of its previous investors, including Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures, and General Catalyst Partners. Jules Maltz, a General Partner at IVP, who will join the TuneIn board of directors.
TuneIn Raises $25M Round Led By IVP, Already Surpassed 1B Listening Hours This Year
TuneIn also today announced that it surpassed 1 billion listening hours for this year in April, making it the top online destinations for live audio content (and likely the #2 online music destination behind Pandora).
image
As TuneIn’s CEO John Donham told me earlier this week, the company plans to use this new round of financing, which comes less than a year after it raised a $16 million round in 2012, to continue to invest in content and its product.

One area the service is clearly going to focus on is on providing more services for the broadcasters that opt to use its services to get access to online listeners. While Donham didn’t go into details, he did note how many local stations still run the same local ads online, even though the online listener is often anything but local. The company, it seems, may soon allow these broadcasters to substitute their local ads for more targeted messages.
As for adding content on the platform, Donham said that while TuneIn already features quite a bit of content (over 70,000 FM, AM, HD and online radio stations and 2 million on-demand programs), the ultimate goal is obviously to “have everything.”
One group of stations it may have trouble with, though, is Clear Channel’s lineup. Clear Channel, which owns the competing iHeartRadio platform, is using a walled garden strategy in his view, while TuneIn offers an open platform for stations. He does believe, however, that it is still very early in the game (and he cited this new funding round as an example) and that the business is really just starting out to live up to its potential.
TuneIn says it currently has about 40 million active listeners in over 230 countries and territories. It powered 227 million listening sessions of more than 60 seconds in March. The service recently launched its TuneIn Live service and a major redesign on the desktop. The majority of its growth, however, comes from mobile listeners, where it is still experiencing “triple-digit growth,” according to Dunham, as well as from the automotive market, where TuneIn is now available on over 30 platforms.
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How to Enable Two-Factor Authentication on All your Accounts

Twitter rolled out two-factor authentication last week, joining a growing group of tech companies to support the important security feature. Two-factor authentication can help mitigate the damage of a password breach or phishing attack.

The principle comes from the idea that any authentication system—whether it's the deadbolt on your front door, the lockscreen on your smartphone, or the bouncer at a secret clubhouse—works by confirming something you know, something you have, or something you are. Each of these are called "factors."

Normal password logins just check whether you knowa password, which means anybody else who learns it can log in as you. Adding a second factor—in this case, checking something youhave, your phone—means that even if your password is compromised by, say, a keylogger in an Internet cafe, or through a company's security breach, your account is safe.

That's important because phishing, which is one of the most common way in which individual accounts are compromised, only gets information about passwords. Require a different factor, and phishing attacks become much more complicated and much less effective.

One example of two-factor authentication in the offline world is ATM cards. Normally, you need to both have a card and know its PIN in order to make a withdrawal. Online two-factor authentication brings the same concept to your services and devices.
As they become more popular, these systems have gotten increasingly user-friendly; it doesn't have to be a difficult trade-off of convenience for security. Here's how to enable two-factor authentication on Twitter, as well as on Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Apple, and Microsoft.

Twitter

Twitter has named its two-factor authentication system "Login Verification," and its announcement provides a straightforward guide on how and why to use it. It directs you toyour account's settings page, where enabling the option is basically a one-click affair.
How to Enable Two-Factor Authentication on All Your Accounts
Unfortunately, for now Twitter only supports two-factor authentication by SMS, so if you don't want to attach your phone number to your account, or don't have reliable or secure phone service, it may not fit. Many of the other services outlined here already offer support for standard and secure offline authentication protocols. Hopefully Twitter will follow suit.

Google

Google was one of the first major services to make two-factor authentication (it calls it "2-Step Verification") widely available. It's got a landing page that explains two-factor authentication generally, and a single settings page for configuring it across various Google services.
How to Enable Two-Factor Authentication on All Your Accounts
Because many people use apps and devices without two-factor authentication support to connect to Google services, it's useful to also understand Google's one-time password system.

Google's Authenticator app, which is available on iOS, Android, and Blackberry, can generate login codes for any compliant service (including Facebook, Dropbox, and Microsoft) and is a popular choice.

Dropbox

How to Enable Two-Factor Authentication on All Your Accounts
Dropbox has a very clear tutorial on enabling two-factor authentication within that site, and supports authentication over SMS or over any of the popular authentication apps. You can enable the option in the Security section of your account settings, and it will require an authentication code whenever you sign into Dropbox on a new device or computer.

Facebook

Facebook calls its two-factor authentication "Login Approvals," and it allows you to use a mobile app to generate authentication codes while offline. You can enable it in the Security section of your account settings — and while you're there, it's worth taking a minute to review the other options on that page.
How to Enable Two-Factor Authentication on All Your Accounts
Note that while Facebook only officially supports codes from its own mobile apps, clicking the "Having Trouble?" link will show you a key you can enter into another authentication app, like Google's Authenticator.

Apple

How to Enable Two-Factor Authentication on All Your Accounts
Apple's two-factor authentication can be used to secure Apple IDs against unauthorized logins on new devices and changes to your account information. It is only compatible with devices that support SMS or Find my iPhone notifications, and for now it is only available in the U.S., UK, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand. You can turn it on in the "Password and Security" section of your Apple ID settings.

Microsoft

Microsoft is a new entry to the two-factor authentication game, rolling out the option only last month. It's a welcome addition, given that a single Microsoft account can access an Outlook inbox, devices like the Xbox console or Surface tablet, and of course Skype. You can turn it on in the "Security Info" section of your account settings.
How to Enable Two-Factor Authentication on All Your Accounts
There's an Authenticator app available for Windows Phone, and Microsoft's system is compatible with other authentication apps such as Google's. Also, as with Google, some devices and apps that use a Microsoft account don't support two-factor authentication, and use one-time passwords.
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GoEuro takes on the challenge of multi-modal European travel

After closing a $4 million round in March, led by Battery Ventures and Hasso Plattner Ventures, Berlin-based multi-mode travel search platform GoEuro has now launched its website in open beta in the U.K. and Germany, as the first stage of its European rollout.
The startup is aiming to simplify the problem of figuring out the best mode of transport to get from A to B — whether that’s coach, train or plane. Basically the platform is designed to cut out the legwork of Googling things yourself, by suggesting nearby airports and train routes to connect up where you’d like to go — and also estimating the entire length of travel time. So, for example, not just the flight time but also the waiting time at the airport.
After pulling in diverse data sources to offer various route options, it also makes it easier to visualise which routes are best and compare the cost of different travel options – displaying a comparative chart based on what’s cheapest or fastest. ”What we’re trying to do at GoEuro is we’re trying to bring all modes of travel across Europe on the same platform — that’s air, rail bus and cars,” says CEO Naren Shaam. “We show everything in terms of total travel time, and total price. So I can have a true comparison of what’s the cost.”
Users enter their start point and destination and GoEuro calculates suggested routes and prices. In the U.K. GoEuro says it’s still working on integrating coach companies so there’s not currently any bus data. The platform will also not include urban public transport options in any markets — such as London buses — but rather is designed for helping travellers make longer distance travel plans.
goeuro-uk
GoEuro is partnering with travel companies in its chosen markets to get access to real-time timetable data, so there’s no screen-scraping going on. “All our data is real-time data. So we partner, for example in Germany we used Deutsche Bahn, in the U.K. we use Rail Easy to get real-time schedules, real-time prices and seat availabilities,” Shaam explains. “Our technology allows you to bring all the different sources of data on the same platform. For a user I can now compare the two as if it’s the same, and I can combine them. So I can put a train leg next to air.”
Currently it doesn’t support booking within the platform — instead linking out to the external travel suppliers’ websites to purchase tickets — but that’s something GoEuro plans to integrate into its platform in future, says Shaam.
He also says the plan is to ramp up the number of markets it covers in Europe, but it’s not currently disclosing which markets it plans to tap next. Asked whether GoEuro might look to launch a service outside Europe Shaam said it’s not currently planning anything, noting that the U.S. is not so well suited for this type of travel logistics engine, being so much more focused on air travel. He added that it may work well in other markets such as India, China and South America so GoEuro plans to license its underlying technology.
goeuro-trains
Asked how it can succeed in an ambitious travel aggregation space that others have tried and failed to keep on trucking in before — thinking of the likes of Zoombu which took the ‘acquihire’ route out — Shaam says: “The difference between us and some of the others who have tried is we take a very good balance of technology to commercial. So we actually go out, actively pursue contracts that are difficult to get… and we bring technology. And both of these combine with the final, I would say, most important thing is a very simple user experience.”
Its business model is based on taking a cut of booked travel. Shaam says the startup is already making revenue. GoEuro has a growing team, now 14-strong — up from 10 in March. As it scales up to new European markets it will be looking to grow that significantly, he adds.
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AMD's Opteron X-series targets Intel Atom for the microserver CPU market

AMD might not be able to keep up (down?) with Intel in the CPU power consumption race, so it's taking another tack with the new Opteron X-series: horsepower. It just announced the Opteron X1150 and X2150 64-bit processors for microservers, part of the Jaguar-codenamed family of CPUs arriving in the next-gen Xbox One and Sony PS4 consoles. Thanks to its ultra-low power 6-watt Atom S1200 chips, Intel excels in the low-power server market, and at 9W and 11W respectively (minimum), AMD's CPUs consume considerably more juice. But AMD is pitching them as a better solution overall, thanks to those four cores (compared to two in the Atom), integrated AMD Radeon HD 8000 graphics on the X2150 model, support for 32GB of RAM and integrated SATA ports. AMD's chips are pricier, though, at $64 (X1150) or $99 (X2150) compared to $54 for Intel's Atom S1200 (all in quantities of 1,000). To top it off, Intel has new 64-bit Atom SoCs coming soon promising even lower power consumption -- possibly leaving AMD to play catch-up again.

AMD Launches the AMD Opteron X-Series Family: the Industry's Highest Performance Small Core x86 Server Processors
Twice the Performance and More Power-Efficient Than the Top Performing Intel(R) Atom(TM) Processor
SUNNYVALE, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 05/29/13 -- AMD (NYSE: AMD) today unveiled a new family of low power server processors: the AMD Opteron™ X-Series optimized for scale-out server architectures. The first AMD Opteron X-Series processors, formerly known as "Kyoto," are the highest density, most power-efficient small core x86 processors ever built1. The new X1150 and X2150 processors beat the top performing Intel Atom processor on key performance benchmarks2, including single thread and throughput performance with superior power-efficiency, twice the cores and L2 cache with a more advanced pipeline architecture, higher integration and support for up to 32 gigabytes of DRAM -- 4x more than the Intel Atom processor.
The AMD Opteron X-Series processors come in two variants. The AMD Opteron X2150, which consumes as little as 11 watts, is the first server APU system-on-a-chip integrating CPU and GPU engines with a high-speed bus on a single die. This enables customers to take advantage of leading-edge AMD Radeon™ HD 8000 graphics technology for multimedia-oriented server workloads. The AMD Opteron X1150, which consumes as little as 9 watts, is a CPU-only version optimized for general scale-out workloads.
"The data center is at an inflection point and requires a high number of cores in a dense form factor with integrated graphics, massive amounts of DRAM and unprecedented power efficiency to keep up with the pace of innovation of Internet services," said Andrew Feldman, corporate vice president and general manager, Server Business Unit at AMD. "AMD has a proud history of server innovation, and the AMD Opteron X-Series processors challenge the status quo by providing unmatched capabilities to drive the most energy-efficient servers in the industry."
The AMD Opteron X-Series processors are now the world's premier small-core x86 APUs and CPUs, ideal for next-generation scale-out web and cloud applications ranging from big data analytics to image processing, multimedia content delivery, and hosting.
"Fundamental changes in computing architectures are required to support space, power and cost demands organizations need to deliver compelling, new infrastructure economics," said Paul Santeler, vice president and general manager, Hyperscale Server business segment, HP. "The new x86 AMD Opteron X-Series processors integrated into future HP Moonshot servers will continue to push the boundaries of power efficiency for social, mobile, cloud and big data workloads."
The AMD Opteron X-Series versus Intel Atom S1260
AMDIntel Atom S1260AMD Advantage
x86 CPU Cores422X
GPU Cores128 AMD Radeon HD 8000 CoresNoneAMD Only
Max. DRAM Per Socket32GB8GB4X
Max. DRAM SpeedDDR3-1600DDR3-13331.2X
L2 Cache2MB1MB2X
Throughput performance28.9@2GHz (CPU) (est.)213.0@2GHz2.2X
Single Thread Performance10.0@2GHz(CPU)(est.)25.2@2GHz1.9X
Integrated Sata PortsYesNoAMD Only
CPU
  • 4 "Jaguar" 64-bit x86 cores
Frequency:
  • X1150 CPU - up to 2 GHz
  • X2150 APU - up to 1.9 GHz
Power Consumption:
  • X1150 - as low as 9 Watts
  • X2150 - as low as 11 Watts
Graphics (X2150 APU only)
  • 128 AMD Radeon™ HD 8000 cores
  • Graphics Core Next Architecture
  • Video encode/decode offload
  • Video compression offload
Memory Interface:
  • 64-bit DDR3 with ECC (up to 1600 MHz)
  • Up to 32 GBytes of DRAM (SODIMM & UDIMM)
Integrated I/O:
  • PCI-e® Gen 2 - 8 lanes
  • USB 2.0 - 8 ports
  • USB 3.0 - 2 ports
  • Video Interfaces - DisplayPort, VGA, HDMI®
  • Serial-ATA2/3 - 2 ports
Package
  • 24.5mm x 24.5mm FT3 BGA
ModelCPU CoresCPU Configurable FrequencyGPU CoresGPU Configurable FrequencyTDP Range1KU Pricing
X11504Up to 2.0GHzN/AN/A9-17W$64
X21504Up to 1.9GHz128266 to 600MHz11-22W$99

The AMD Opteron X2150 APU and X1150 CPU are generally available now for a cost of $99 and $64, respectively, in 1K quantities. More information can be found on AMD's web site.

About AMD
AMD (NYSE: AMD) is a semiconductor design innovator leading the next era of vivid digital experiences with its ground-breaking AMD Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) that power a wide range of computing devices. AMD's server computing products are focused on driving industry-leading cloud computing and virtualization environments. AMD's superior graphics technologies are found in a variety of solutions ranging from game consoles, PCs to supercomputers. For more information, visit http://www.amd.com.
AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, AMD Opteron, AMD Radeon and combinations thereof, are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Other names are for informational purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.
1 Based on AMD's small core Opteron™ processor Model X1150 vs. Intel® Atom™ Model S1260, Intel's highest performance small core processor. Highest density based on cores/rack. Since Opteron X-Series has double the number of cores of Intel Atom S1200 series, it has the double the density among small core x86 processors. Most power efficient small core x86 processor as measured by SPECint®_rate_base2006 estimates divided by TDP.
2 SPEC and SPECint are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. The comparison presented reflects competing AMD and Intel 2.0GHz processors. Throughput performance estimates are based on SPECint®_rate_base2006 results using all four threads of each processor. Single thread performance estimates are based on SPECint®_rate_base2006 results using one thread of each processor. The results stated are estimates based on measurements in AMD labs as of May 2, 2013. For the latest SPECint®_rate_base2006 results, visit http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/. Configuration information: 1 x AMD Opteron™ processor Model X1150 in "Olive Hill" Reference platform server, 8GB (2 x 4GB DDR3-1600) memory, Red Hat Enterprise Linux® Server Release 6.3 x86_64 OS, GCC 4.7.2 Compiler. 1 x Intel Xeon processor Model S1260 in Supermicro 5017A-EF server, 8GB (2 x 4GB DDR3-1333) memory, Red Hat Enterprise Linux® Server Release 6.3 x86_64 OS, GCC 4.7.2 Compiler.
*Based on the capability of the Kyoto memory controller and expected 16GB DIMM availability.
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Apple agrees to $53 million settlement for some iPhones, iPods denied warranty coverage

Apple
Documents have been filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California for a $53 million settlement between Apple and customers denied warranty coverage on their iPods and iPhones due to water damage. The case is due to Apple's policy not to extend warranty coverage on devices where the indicator tape inside them showed exposure to liquids, however plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit argued the indicator could change color due to moisture or humidity. Apple does not acknowledge any wrongdoing in the settlement, which is still awaiting approval from the court, however customers with warranty claims denied prior to June 2010 (iPod touch) or December 31st, 2009 could be eligible for as much as $300 depending on the device owned and how many claims are filed. The scenario the plaintiffs cite is just the kind of thing we worried about back in 2006, and will probably remain in the back of our minds if we need to have any of our hardware serviced in the future no matter how much Apple and others work on more advanced detection systems.


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