Lenovo's super-light LaVie Z laptop is now available

If you've been jonesing for a featherweight laptop but feel that Apple's MacBook rubs you the wrong way, you're in luck: as promised, Lenovo is now selling the LaVie Z andLaVie Z 360 in the US. Both 13-inch systems largely resemble what you saw in January, and strike a careful balance between brisk performance and a light design that won't strain your shoulder when it's in your bag. They share Quad HD screens, fifth-generation Core i7 processors, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB solid-state drive. The only big difference is the 360's namesake convertible touchscreen, which turns your PC into a makeshift tablet.

Lenovo may have been optimistic about what it could deliver this month, though. The standard Z is ever-so-slightly heavier than claimed at 1.87 pounds, and the models available now are significantly more expensive than what we were quoted a few months ago. You're looking at $1,700 ($1,500 after a discount) for the regular LaVie Z, and $1,850 ($1,699 on sale) for the 360 -- that's at least $200 higher than expected. It's entirely possible that lower-end versions are coming, but you'll have to pay a premium if you simply can't wait.

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The Tablet Is The New General Purpose Computer

Apple’s latest iPad spot demonstrates that tablets have general purpose computing strengths that have never been exhibited by laptops.

Laptops have had decades in the spotlight as our portable computers of choice and were on their way to eradicating desktop machines before tablets came along. But they’ve never managed to exhibit the flexibility of purpose that tablets can.

Apple’s spot presents examples of people using iPads in various real world situations, which is a note they’ve struck before. But this particular spot focuses not just on the things that people are doing with iPads, but specifically things that would be cumbersome, irritating or impossible with a laptop.

It’s a brilliant rotation of the argument that tablets can’t be ‘seriously’ used to create.

In many ways this is the realization of the dream for the original ‘tablet computers’ of Microsoft — something you can view with more or less irony depending on what chances you give the company of succeeding in a crowded space.

 

It’s not that you can’t use a laptop to do any of these things. I’ve used a laptop as a tethered shooting companion for photography for years now. Seeing instant feedback as I shoot speeds up the process and makes editing faster, it’s great. But I’ve never wanted to use a laptop. They’re bulky, they’re not the right form factor and they’re not optimized for easy one-handed operation (not counting the one you hold them with, thank you). And some of these cases, like diving, present an impossible challenge for laptops. They’re simply not the right tool for a lot of jobs.

And I think that more of the jobs laptops aren’t any good at are becoming part of our lives every day.

It’s not as if laptops (or desktops) are going to go away over night, but they’re definitely going to fade in importance as new general purpose computers like the tablet and smartphone grow bolder. And they’ll work in concert to allow us to do stuff better — I wrote this piece on a combination of phone, tablet and computer as I’ve been traveling.

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NSA wants to make a quantum computer that cracks tough encryption

While the NSA can inflitrate many secure systems without breaking a sweat, there are still some encryption methods that it just can't crack. That may not be a problem in the long term, however. The Washington Post has published documents from Edward Snowden which reveal that the agency is researching a "cryptologically useful" quantum computer. The dramatically more powerful hardware could theoretically decode public encryption quickly enough to be useful for national defense; conventional PCs can take years, even when clustered together. That kind of decrypting power is potentially scary, but you won't need to worry about the privacy of your secure content just yet. It's not clear that the NSA is anywhere close to reaching its goal, and any success could eventually be thwarted by quantum-based encryption that's impossible to break by its very nature. Still, the leak is a friendly reminder that we shouldn't take existing security methods for granted.

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Source: Washington Post

Tags: eavesdropping, edwardsnowden, encryption, internet, networking, nsa, privacy, quantum, quantumcomputing, security, surveillance Next: Researchers turn to Twitter in the search for time travelers .fyre .fyre-comment-divider

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Report: NSA Trying To Build A Quantum Computer To Crack Encryption

The National Security Agency wants to build a futuristic super computer that can break most types of encryption, according to documents obtained from Edward Snowden by the Washington Post. No reason to worry yet, however, as the Agency is not even close to figuring out how to build the space-age technology necessary to crack most security procedures.

According to the documents, the computer project is part of a $79.7 million research program, “Penetrating Hard Targets”, suspected to be under classified contracts in a lab in College Park, Maryland.

Encryption, has, since at least the Ancient Greeks, been a method of scrambling information with the noise of arbitrary character strings; only someone with a rubric could determine what is the noise and what is the message. The more noise, or bits, the more difficult it is to crack the code by trial and error. A 1,024-bit encryption could take years (or much longer) to decode.

Quantum mechanics exploits the rather unintuitive concept that matter can exist in multiple states. Quantum computers could calculate problems where bits are both a 1 and 0, or multiple 1s and 0s, potentially increasing the speed of calculations exponentially.

Potentially then, the NSA could build a computer that could decode the most advanced encryption much faster.

Generally speaking, allowing even one organization to have the capability to break encryption is potentially threatening to all security on the web. Though, advances in quantum computing could also have benefits to science and health. So, at this point, the benefits and harms are pretty theoretical.

Either way, according to The Washington Post, such computers are extremely fragile and the NSA is close to only a few of the basic building blocks. “That’s a great step, but it’s a pretty small step on the road to building a large-scale quantum computer,” explained MIT mechanical engineer, Lloyd Seth.

This is why the NSA is also pressuring and paying security experts to create backdoors and exploits.

Read The Post’s full story here.

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NSA can reportedly bug computer equipment before it reaches buyers

Don't think that the NSA always has to wait until people are using technology to start snooping on it. Spiegel has obtained documents which claim that the agency's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) group can intercept computer equipment orders and install tracking hardware or software before the shipments even reach their buyers. The division can target a wide array of hardware, too. Another NSA section, ANT, reportedly has a catalog of tools that can install back doors in everything from Cisco and Huawei network systems through to hard drives from most major manufacturers, including Seagate and Western Digital. Some of these bugs can give the NSA "permanent" access, since they're designed to persist if the owner wipes a device's storage or upgrades its firmware.

The leak suggests that the targeted manufacturers aren't aware of what's happening; Cisco and other firms tell Spiegel they don't coordinate with the NSA. These hardware interceptions are also limited in scope next to remote surveillance programs. The agency isn't confirming any specifics, but it maintains that TAO is focused on exploiting foreign networks. Whether or not that's true, the discoveries show that the NSA's surveillance can reach the deepest levels of many networks.

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Via: Gizmodo

Source: Spiegel (1), (2)

Tags: cisco, dell, edwardsnowden, huawei, internet, networking, nsa, seagate, surveillance, tailoredaccessoperations, tao, WesternDigital Next: Time Machines: Casio gets smart at CES 2000 .fyre .fyre-comment-divider

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Google emulates 1980s-era Amiga computer in Chrome

An emulated version of Amiga's operating system now will run on Chrome using the Portable Native Client software foundation.

(Credit:screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The Amiga 500 lives again -- in Google's browser.

Google developer Christian Stefansen on Thursday resurrected a version of the venerable computer system from the 1980s in the form of a Web app that runs in Chrome. Forty-year-olds who want to relive their childhoods or younger people who want to see just how hard their elders had it can visit the Amiga 500 emulator for Chrome online, boot the machine, and play some games.

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Chrome emulates the old operating system by a Chrome-specific version of the Open Source Universal Amiga Emulator. Stefansen brought its 400,000 lines of code, written in the C programming language originally, to the Portable Native Client (PNaCl) foundation built into Chrome.

The Native Client technology runs software written to run on a particular processor at close to the speeds that native software runs. The approach gives software more direct access to a computer's hardware , but it also adds security restrictions to prevent people from downloading malware from the Web that would take advantage of that power.

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