Month: February 2019

Enlarge / Giant PlayStation button icons. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

A Japanese patent application recently filed by Sony Interactive Entertainment is being seen by many as a hint that the next PlayStation could be fully backward compatible with PS4 software. However, a close reading suggests the patent could also describe existing methods to get original PS4 software working on the PS4 Pro.

Patent Application 2019-503013 (as discovered recently by the Hokanko-Alt blog) describes a method for "impersonating CPU ID for backward compatibility." A machine translation of that patent details a method for "deceiving legacy application[s]" into thinking they are running on the original CPU they were designed for, rather than a more modern processor. This is done in part to prevent "synchronization errors" that could "prematurely overwrite the data still used by another component of a new device," due to speed differences, for instance.

That certainly sounds like it could describe a way to run older PS4 games smoothly on a pending PS5. But it could also describe what the PS4 Pro already does to run applications coded for the slower original PS4.

Enlarge / President Donald Trump welcomes Crown Prince Shaikh Mohammad bin Zayed Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi in the Oval Office of the White House on May 15, 2017 in Washington, DC. (credit: Pool/Getty Images)

On January 30, Reuters released two investigative reports on hacking activities of the United Arab Emirates' National Electronic Security Authority (NESA) targeting political leaders and activists, suspected terrorists, and the governments of Qatar, Turkey, and Iran. The report is the latest evidence of an ongoing cyberwar by the UAE and its ally Saudi Arabia against Qatar, and the UAE has been enlisting US and Israeli experts to help. Reuters' sources also said that the project targeted American citizens for surveillance.

Citing documents reviewed by Reuters and eight individuals who claimed to have worked as US contractors supporting the operation (referred to as Project Raven), the report claims that Baltimore-based CyberPoint and the UAE-based firm DarkMatter—ostensibly hired to help NESA build a threat monitoring and defensive capability similar to the National Security Agency/Central Security Service National Threat Operations Center (NTOC)—also had a secret task of providing NESA with an offensive cyber capability. Some of the US citizens employed by CyberPoint and later by DarkMatter were former NSA analysts who worked at NTOC or, in some cases, NSA's Tailored Access Operations unit.

If US contractors targeted American citizens for a foreign government by using electronic surveillance, that would be in violation of US law—and potentially fatal for companies such as CyberPoint, which has done work for the US government at the Patent and Trademark Office, DARPA, and other agencies. Ars attempted to reach CyberPoint executives for comment, but we received no response before publication. However, Ars was able to reach Daniel Wolfford, a former NSA analyst, former director of threat intelligence at DarkMatter, and now co-founder of a Dubai-based cybersecurity and cryptocurrency firm called Advanced Analysis. Wolfford strongly denied the accusation.

Enlarge / Itanium 9500 dies. (credit: Intel Germany)

If you're still using Intel's Itanium processors, you'd better get your orders in soon. Intel has announced that it will fulfill the final shipment of Itanium 9700 processors on July 29, 2021. The company says orders must be placed no later than January 30, 2020 (spotted by Anandtech).

The Itanium 9700 line of four- and eight-core processors represents the last vestiges of Intel's attempt to switch the world to an entirely new processor architecture: IA-64. Instead of being a 64-bit extension to IA-32 ("Intel Architecture-32," Intel's preferred name for x86-compatible designs), IA-64 was an entirely new design built around what Intel and HP called "Explicitly parallel instruction computing."

High performance processors of the late 1990s—both the RISC processors in the Unix world and Intel's IA-32 Pentium Pros—were becoming increasingly complicated pieces of hardware. The instruction sets the processors used were essentially serial, describing a sequence of operations to be performed one after the other. Executing instructions in that exact serial order limits performance (because each instruction must wait for its predecessor to be finished), and it turns out isn't actually necessary.

Enlarge / The Galaxy S9 camera camera assembly. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

This week, Samsung is finally updating its flagship devices to the latest version of Android, Android 9 Pie. The US versions of the Galaxy Note 9 and Galaxy S9 have both been getting Android 9 Pie updates across the various device/carrier combos. So far, we've seen reports of the Galaxy S9 and S9+ getting updated on Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T, while the Note 9 on AT&T has also been updated. We're sure more device/carrier combos will start trickling in over the next few days.

Samsung is still very slow at shipping Android updates. Android 9 Pie came out August 6, so Samsung is about six months late with the update. That's extremely uncompetitive compared to devices like the Google Pixel or the Essential Phone, which both got Android 9 Pie on day one. It's also pretty embarrassing to compare Samsung's update speed to HMD's Nokia phones. $270 Nokia devices get updated in about three months, while Samsung's $1,000 smartphone has to wait twice that long. The good news this year is that this is at least the current version of Android. Last year, Samsung updated the Galaxy S8 to Android 8.0 while other phones were on Android 8.1. I would call this a victory for Samsung—finally being on the latest version of Android—but the situation is probably due to the fact that we never got a .1 release for Android 9, so the 9.0 release is pretty old at this point.

Android 9 Pie brings a number of improvements to Android, although with Samsung's need to rebrand and reskin the Android UI, not all of them have made the jump to Samsung devices. According to Verizon's update bulletin, you'll still get features like Adaptive Battery—an AI-powered traffic controller for app power usage (which actually works!)—the new AI-powered brightness controls, and gesture navigation. Android 9 Pie came with a big UI revamp of Android, and Samsung is calling its reskin of this UI the "One UI." They've all been touched by the hand of Samsung, but you still get new Pie UI features like the horizontal Recent Apps screen and notification panel improvements.