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Archive for the ‘internet’ category: Page 258

Jun 7, 2017

IBM squeezes 30 billion transistors into a fingernail-sized chip

Posted by in categories: computing, internet, mobile phones, neuroscience

Who said Moore’s Law was dead? Certainly not IBM or its chip partners Globalfoundries and Samsung. The trio has developed a transistor manufacturing process that should pave the way for 5-nanometer chips. While the team etched the chip using the same extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) used for the breakthrough 7nm chip, it ditched the common FinFET (fin field effect) transistor design in favor of stacks of silicon nanosheets. The switch makes it possible to fine-tune individual circuits to maximize their performance as they’re crammed into an incredibly small space. How small? At 5nm, the group says it can squeeze 30 billion transistors into a chip the size of a fingernail (see below) — not bad when the 7nm chip held 20 billion transistors a couple of years ago.

IBM sees the technique helping its own cognitive computing efforts as well as the Internet of Things and other “data-intensive” tasks. However, it’s also painting a rosy picture for the future of mobile devices — it imagines phones having “two to three times” more battery life than current devices. That’s likely optimistic (phone makers tend to focus on speed over longevity), but it won’t be shocking if future hardware is both faster and wrings out a little more from every charge.

Just don’t expect to see real-world examples of this for a while. We haven’t even seen devices shipping with 7nm chips (they’re not expected until 2018 at the earliest), so it could easily be a couple of years or more before 5nm arrives. Still, that 5nm is even on the roadmap is important. Chip designers won’t have to reinvent the wheel to get meaningful improvements, and you won’t have to worry about device performance growing stale for at least the next few years.

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Jun 7, 2017

Research alliance builds new transistor for 5nm technology

Posted by in categories: computing, engineering, internet, mobile phones, nanotechnology

IBM, its Research Alliance partners Globalfoundries and Samsung, and equipment suppliers have developed an industry-first process to build silicon nanosheet transistors that will enable 5 nanometer (nm) chips. The details of the process will be presented at the 2017 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits conference in Kyoto, Japan. In less than two years since developing a 7nm test node chip with 20 billion transistors, scientists have paved the way for 30 billion switches on a fingernail-sized chip.

The resulting increase in performance will help accelerate cognitive computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and other data-intensive applications delivered in the cloud. The power savings could also mean that the batteries in smartphones and other mobile products could last two to three times longer than today’s devices, before needing to be charged.

Scientists working as part of the IBM-led Research Alliance at the SUNY Polytechnic Institute Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering’s NanoTech Complex in Albany, NY achieved the breakthrough by using stacks of silicon nanosheets as the device structure of the transistor, instead of the standard FinFET architecture, which is the blueprint for the semiconductor industry up through 7nm node technology.

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Jun 5, 2017

Forget far-right populism – crypto-anarchists are the new masters

Posted by in categories: internet, robotics/AI

More worrying than the internet’s role in the rise of far-right populism is the digital tsunami poised to engulf us: AI and and ‘crypto-anarchists’ are radically restructuring life – and politics – as we know it.

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Jun 2, 2017

A Net Neutrality Nightmare? / Part II (Future A to Z)

Posted by in categories: futurism, information science, internet, journalism, law, media & arts, software, strategy, supercomputing

The recent efforts to remove Net Neutrality have given many a sense of impending doom we are soon to face. What happens to an Internet without Net Neutrality? Advocates have a vision of the possible results — and it is quite the nightmare! In this segment of Future A to Z, The Galactic Public Archives takes a cheeky, yet compelling perspective on the issue.

Part 1 / Part 2

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May 30, 2017

How to Incentivize Bitcoin miners after all 21M BTC are awarded

Posted by in categories: bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, economics, innovation, internet, mathematics

Individuals who mine Bitcoins needn’t be miners. We call them ‘miners’ because they are awarded BTC as they solve mathematical computations. The competition to unearth these reserve coins also serves a vital purpose. They validate the transactions of Bitcoin users all over the world: buyers, loans & debt settlement, exchange transactions, inter-bank transfers, etc. They are not really miners. They are more accurately engaged in transaction validation or ‘bookkeeping’.

There are numerous proposals for how to incentivize miners once all 21 million coins have been mined/awarded in May 2140. Depending upon the network load and the value of each coin, we may need to agree on an alternate incentive earlier than 2140. At the opening of the 2015 MIT Bitcoin Expo, Andreas Antonopolous proposed some validator incentive alternatives. One very novel suggestion was based on game theory and involved competition and status rather than cash payments.

I envision an alternative approach—one that also addresses the problem of miners and users having different goals. In an ideal world the locus of users should intersect more fully with the overseers…

To achieve this, I have proposed that every wallet be capable of also mining, even if the wallet is simply a smartphone app or part of a cloud account at an exchange service. To get uses participating in validating the transactions of peers, any transaction fee could be waived for anyone who completes 1 validation for each n transactions. (Say one validation for every five or ten transactions). In this manner, everyone pitches in a small amount of resources to maintain a robust network.

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May 25, 2017

1 Bitcoin (BTC) will be worth $100,000???

Posted by in categories: bitcoin, internet

Bitcoin has terrible UX…in our journey into tech we purchased a few pounds worth on a paper wallet on a bitcoin ATM machine to experiment with and gain familiarity with this new form of internet money.

The paper wallet has an illegibly long code that needs to be typed in or QR code scanned in to get the part bitcoin uploaded to an online usable form of bitcoin.

Bitcoins can be lost because of this bad UX/UI issue.

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May 24, 2017

Scientists Have Found a Way to Photograph People Through Walls Using Wi-Fi

Posted by in categories: computing, holograms, internet, mobile phones

Wi-Fi can pass through walls. This fact is easy to take for granted, yet it’s the reason we can surf the web using a wireless router located in another room.

However, not all of that microwave radiation makes it to or from our phones, tablets, and laptops. Routers scatter and bounce their signal off objects, illuminating our homes and offices like invisible light bulbs.

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May 14, 2017

NYU Accidentally Leaked a Top-Secret Code-Breaking Supercomputer to The Entire Internet

Posted by in categories: cybercrime/malcode, encryption, internet, supercomputing

Confidential details of a top-secret encryption-breaking supercomputer were left completely exposed on an unsecured computer server belonging to New York University (NYU), according to a new report.

While it’s not uncommon for even critical-level infrastructure to suffer potentially catastrophic security breaches, what makes this event different is that there was seemingly no foul-play or attempts to hack into NYU’s systems.

Instead, it looks like somebody may have just forgotten to secure their classified data properly, exposing hundreds of pages of information on a covert code-breaking machine co-administered by the Department of Defence, IBM, and NYU.

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May 12, 2017

Malware, described in leaked NSA documents, cripples computers worldwide

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, cybercrime/malcode, government, health, internet, privacy

Malicious software that blocks access to computers is spreading swiftly across the world, snarling critical systems in hospitals, telecommunications and corporate offices, apparently with the help of a software vulnerability originally discovered by the National Security Agency.

The reports of the malware spread began in Britain, where the National Health Service (NHS) reported serious problems throughout Friday. But government officials and cybersecurity experts later described a far more extensive problem growing across the Internet and unbounded by national borders. Europe and Latin America were especially hard hit.

“This is not targeted at the NHS,” British Prime Minister Theresa May told reporters. “It’s an international attack, and a number of countries and organizations have been affected.”

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May 12, 2017

The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data

Posted by in categories: economics, energy, internet

But there is cause for concern. Internet companies’ control of data gives them enormous power. Old ways of thinking about competition, devised in the era of oil, look outdated in what has come to be called the “data economy” (see Briefing). A new approach is needed.


A NEW commodity spawns a lucrative, fast-growing industry, prompting antitrust regulators to step in to restrain those who control its flow. A century ago, the resource in question was oil. Now similar concerns are being raised by the giants that deal in data, the oil of the digital era. These titans—Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft—look unstoppable. They are the five most valuable listed firms in the world. Their profits are surging: they collectively racked up over $25bn in net profit in the first quarter of 2017. Amazon captures half of all dollars spent online in America. Google and Facebook accounted for almost all the revenue growth in digital advertising in America last year.

Such dominance has prompted calls for the tech giants to be broken up, as Standard Oil was in the early 20th century. This newspaper has argued against such drastic action in the past. Size alone is not a crime. The giants’ success has benefited consumers. Few want to live without Google’s search engine, Amazon’s one-day delivery or Facebook’s newsfeed. Nor do these firms raise the alarm when standard antitrust tests are applied. Far from gouging consumers, many of their services are free (users pay, in effect, by handing over yet more data). Take account of offline rivals, and their market shares look less worrying. And the emergence of upstarts like Snapchat suggests that new entrants can still make waves.

Continue reading “The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data” »