Month: July 2016

Europol’s Internet Referral Unit (IRU) celebrated its first birthday at the weekend, but civil liberties organisations are worried that it goes too far in its efforts to keep the Web free from extremist propaganda.

The IRU has been up and running since July 2015 as part of the European Counter Terrorism Centre (ECTC) in the Hague. The unit is charged with monitoring the Internet for extremist propaganda and referring “relevant online content towards concerned Internet service providers” in particular social media. Much was made of how the IRU could "contact social network service provider Facebook directly to ask it to delete a Web page run by ISIS or request details of other pages that might be run by the same user."

Although companies are not required to take down the content, European Commission figures from April 2016 show that the IRU had an effective removal rate of 91 percent. At that time it had assessed more than 4,700 posts across 45 platforms and sent over 3,200 referrals for Internet companies to remove content. The totals now are closer to 8,000 and 7,000, and Europol told Ars it will publish full details in the coming days.

(credit: 东方)

China’s Internet censorship body has warned online media not to use stories found on social networks as the basis of news reports without first asking permission from the authorities. The Cyberspace Administration of China said: “It is forbidden to use hearsay to create news or use conjecture and imagination to distort the facts.”

According to a story in the South China Morning Post: "No website is allowed to report public news without specifying the sources, or report news that quotes untrue origins."

The latest crackdown on Internet media comes just days after Xu Lin, formerly the deputy head of the Cyberspace Administration of China, replaced his boss, Lu Wei, as the guardian of China’s online world. The SCMP notes: “Xu is regarded as one of President Xi Jinping’s key supporters,” and this move is seen as a further tightening of Xi’s grip on cyberspace.

(credit: SimonQ)

The second Oracle v. Google trial drew to a close in May, when a jury found that Google's use of certain Java APIs wasn't a copyright infringement. But court filings from last week show that Google isn't done delivering punishment to Oracle, which started the litigation back in 2010.

Google will be filing a motion for sanctions against Oracle and its law firm, Orrick, Sutcliffe & Herrington. The motion relates to statements by Oracle attorney Annette Hurst, who revealed financial arrangements between Google and Apple that were confidential—until she discussed them in open court at a January 14 discovery proceeding.

Speaking in open court, Hurst said that Google's Android operating system had generated revenue of $31 billion and $22 billion in profit. She also disclosed that Google pays Apple $1 billion to keep Google's search bar on iPhones.

(credit: Mark Walton)

I love a good PR stunt or outlandish claim as much as the next guy. You know, where a company decides that the best way to tell people about a new product is to slaughter a few goats and serve fake entrails up to guests, or declare that a certain developer is going to make you his bitch. That sort of thing. Imagine my delight, then, when AMD's Raja Koduri took to the stage during the unveiling of the RX 480 to declare that, with two of them in Crossfire, they were faster than Nvidia's GTX 1080, and would cost far less. Everyone was intrigued.

Here's the thing about making bold claims involving competitor products, though: you'd better be damn sure those claims stand up under scrutiny, because sooner or later, someone is will actually test it.

So with the RX 480 in shops, and the initial batch of press reviews near universally declaring it an excellent graphics card for the budget-minded gamer (something I agreed with too), it's time to put AMD's bold claims to the test. Are two AMD RX 480s faster than a GTX 1080?

Last week, AMD released its budget-minded RX 480 graphics card to largely critical acclaim. Unfortunately, the positive reception has been overshadowed by reports that the RX 480 exceeds its 150W target TDP. Furthermore, that extra power draw seems to be coming from the PCIe bus, with the card pulling as much as 90W from its PCIe slot, far exceeding the specified 75W maximum and potentially causing stability issues with certain motherboards.

The tests, conducted by Tom's Hardware, caused quite the stir over on Reddit. Some Reddit users even conducted their own tests on retail versions of the RX 480, with some (though not all) throwing up similar results. AMD has now issued a statement, admitting that the tuning on certain RX 480 cards is "not optimal."

As you know, we continuously tune our GPUs in order to maximise their performance within their given power envelopes and the speed of the memory interface, which in this case is an unprecedented 8Gbps for GDDR5. Recently, we identified select scenarios where the tuning of some RX 480 boards was not optimal. Fortunately, we can adjust the GPU's tuning via software in order to resolve this issue. We are already testing a driver that implements a fix, and we will provide an update to the community on our progress on Tuesday.

While AMD's statement doesn't indicate precisely what's causing the issues with the RX 480, if it is exceeding its 150W target, either something is causing the card to run in the wrong power state, or it's exceeding its power limit and needs to be throttled back. There's some speculation that AMD was simply too ambitious with the RX 480's power draw, and that the addition of an 8-pin power connector would solve the issue, as well as open up far more headroom for overclocking.