Android antivirus apps are useless — here’s what to do instead

It seems like you can’t go a week without one security firm or another producing a statistic illustrating just how much Android malware there is in the wilds of the internet. More often than not, these reports come with a few reminders that the company’s own security suite can protect you from these nasty bits of code, which is true some of the time. However, Android is by its very nature more secure than a desktop computer, so maybe you don’t need these security apps. You’ve probably already got what you need.

The scare tactics

The most recent Android malware report comes from Symantec, which says 17% of all Android apps are malware. Shocking and upsetting, right? This is being widely reported as, “1 in 5 Android apps are malware.” These headlines certainly make it seem like your phone is ripe for infection, but the real numbers are much more nuanced.

As is common with these reports, Symantec is sampling the entirety of the Android application ecosystem. That means apps that are hosted in the Google Play Store, and those that live outside it in alternative app markets and direct download sites. It’s not clear from the report, but I’d bet warez/pirated APKs make it into the data as well. The odds that you’ll come across these apps in your journeys are slim.

Symantec has confirmed that only a very small fraction of malware apps are ever spotted in the Play Store, and they are quickly pulled. Google has an automated system that scans incoming apps in the Play Store to watch for malicious behavior. There’s also a human review process in place for anything that looks even a little bit questionable. Google just started doing this a few months ago, mainly as a way to keep copycat apps and obvious scams from slipping through the cracks.

We’ve all been programmed by PC malware, which can sneak onto your system simply because you visited the wrong website with a vulnerable browser. These “drive-by downloads” aren’t feasible on Android without a pre-existing infection. On Android, you have to physically tap on a notification to install an APK downloaded from a source outside the Play Store. Even then there are security settings that need to be manually bypassed.

The solution pushed by AV companies is to install a security suite that manually scans every app, monitors your Web traffic, and so on. These apps tend to be a drain on resources and are generally annoying with plentiful notifications and pop ups. You probably don’t need to install Lookout, AVG, Symantec/Norton, or any of the other AV apps on Android. Instead, there are some completely reasonable steps you can take that won’t drag down your phone.

What you should do to stay safe

Your first line of defense is to simply not mess around with Android’s default security settings. To get Google certification, each and every phone and tablet comes with “Unknown sources” disabled in the security settings. If you want to sideload an APK downloaded from outside Google Play, all you need to do is check that box. Leaving this disabled keeps you safe from virtually all Android malware, because there’s almost none of it in the Play Store.

There are legitimate reasons to allow unknown sources, though. For example, Amazon’s Appstore client sideloads the apps and games you buy, and many reputable sites re-host official app updates that are rolling out in stages so you don’t have to wait your turn. If you do take advantage of this feature, the first time you do so a box will pop up asking you to allow Google to scan for malicious activity. This is known as Verify Apps and it’s part of Google Play Services on virtually all official Android phones.

Users have been rooting their Android phones ever since the first handsets hit the market, but it’s less common these days, as the platform offers many of the features people used to root in order to acquire. Using rooted Android is basically like running a computer in administrator mode. While it’s possible to run a rooted phone safely, it’s definitely a security risk. Some exploits and malware needs root access to function, and otherwise it’s harmless even if you do somehow install it. If you don’t have a good reason to root your phone or tablet, just don’t open yourself up to that possibility.

Android apps also exist that might not be “malware” per se, but you might not want them on your phone because they snoop through your data. Most people don’t read the permissions for the apps they install, but the Play Store does make all that information available. If you’re worried about privacy, check apps to see if they request things like access to your contacts, SMS sending/receiving, and fine location. If an app has reason to access these modules (like a social networking app), you’re probably fine. If, however, a flashlight app is asking for your contact list, you might want to think again.

It really just takes a tiny bit of common sense to avoid Android malware. If you do nothing else, keeping your downloads limited to the Play Store and other 100% trustworthy sources will keep you safe from almost all threats out there. The antivirus apps are at best redundant and at worst a detriment to your system performance.

The ultimate guide to staying anonymous and protecting your privacy online

Now more than ever, your online privacy is under attack. Your ISP, advertisers, and governments around the world are increasingly interested in knowing exactly what you’re up to when you browse the web. Whether you’re a political activist or simply someone who hates the idea of third-parties snooping around, there are plenty of tools available to keep prying eyes off of your traffic.

In this post, I’m going to highlight 12 tools you can use to increase your online privacy. Some methods are more complicated than others, but if you’re serious about privacy, these tips will help you remain anonymous on the open Web. Of course, Internet security is a topic in and of itself, so you’re going to need to do some reading to remain thoroughly protected on all fronts. And remember, even the most careful among us are still vulnerable to imperfect technology.

The Onion Router (Tor)

If anonymity is what you’re after, The Onion Router (Tor) is what you need. It uses a vast network of computers to route your Web traffic through a number of encrypted layers to obscure the origin of the traffic. Tor is a vital tool for political dissidents and whistleblowers to anonymously share information, and you can just as easily use it to help protect your privacy.

Without a doubt, the easiest way to get started is by downloading the Tor Browser Bundle. This customized branch of Firefox automatically connects to the Tor network, and includes some of the privacy-enhancing browser extensions discussed later in this post. This package has everything you need to use Tor successfully, but you’ll also need to change your web surfing behavior to retain as much anonymity as possible. You need to make sure to abide by the Tor warnings, and remember that this isn’t a magic bullet for internet privacy. It still has weaknesses. For more information, we have an entire story on installing and using Tor.

VPN

If you’re very serious about maintaining your anonymity, consider investing in a VPN solution like TorGuard or Private Internet Access. These services essentially allow you to disguise your traffic. Your real IP address will be hidden from the world, and your traffic will remain indecipherable to nosy ISPs or governments.

Even if your government is actively on the lookout for VPN traffic, you can still benefit from so-called “stealth VPNs.” TorGuard offers its stealth VPN service at no additional cost, and it will make government detection and interference much harder to accomplish. For those of you being held hostage by your government, VPNs are by far the best bet for bypassing censorship and snooping.

DNS leak testing

Even if you’re using a privacy service (like a VPN) to hide your IP address, it’s still possible to give away clues to your identity via your DNS traffic. Thankfully, it’s easy to detect if your configuration is leaking your DNS information. Simply head over to DNSLeakTest.com, and run the extended test.

If the results show the third-party DNS service you’re using (like TorGuard), you’re set. If your ISP’s DNS info shows up, you have a DNS leak. Follow the steps listed on the “How to fix a DNS leak” page, and then test yourself again to make sure everything is working as intended.

Virtual machines

Keep in mind, your browser isn’t the only vector for third parties to invade your privacy. PDFs and other seemingly harmless files can serve as homing beacons, and potentially alert government entities when you’re viewing planted contraband. To prevent any sort of unintended breach of privacy, you should open suspect files inside of a virtual machine.

Load up your favorite Linux distribution inside of VirtualBox, configure it to your liking, and then save a snapshot of your VM. Next, download your desired file (using the protections illuminated in this article), and then shut off your virtual machine’s access to the Internet. Once you’re sure that the VM is cut off completely from the network, you can now open the file safely. Read what you need to read, make notes, and then shut down the virtual machine. Next time you need to view a file inside a VM, you’ll have your snapshot ready to go.

Blocking third-party cookies

Third-party cookies are one of the most common methods that advertisers use to track your browsing habits. If you visit two sites using the same advertising service, rest assured that the advertiser is keeping tabs on that information. Thankfully, every major Web browser offers the ability to turn off tracking cookies. Without third-party cookies, advertisers have to work much harder to monitor which pages you visit. While this is far from a panacea, it shuts down the most common vector used by advertisers to build usage profiles.

Blocking location data

In recent months, many sites have begun using location data to offer specific services, and serve targeted advertisements. Mapping applications obviously have legitimate reasons for gathering location data, but that same technique can be used to help identify who you are. Any legitimate browser should offer the ability to toggle on and off location data, and I recommend leaving it off completely. At the very least, demand that websites prompt you for access before gathering the data.

That said, IP-based geolocation data is incredibly trivial to acquire, so remain vigilant. If you’re browsing the Web without a proxy or a VPN, you’re effectively broadcasting your IP to every server you come across, and that information can be used against you. It’s not necessarily something you have to worry about constantly, but it’s worth keeping that fact in the back of your mind if you’re criticizing your local dictator or blowing a whistle on the NSA.

Do not track

The “Do not track” HTTP header is an optional message that browsers can send to Web servers. You can easily enable it in your browser’s settings, but it’s rather limited in scope. For this to work at all, the Web server needs to be configured to respect this flag. There is absolutely no requirement of any kind that any website needs to obey this setting, so don’t expect widespread protection from trackers. Still, you don’t have much to lose. The only potential issue here is that it’s an additional datapoint for browser fingerprinting. But if enough people are using it, that shouldn’t be a real issue.

Plug-in management

Even if your browser is configured properly to hide your identifying information, plug-ins can still be used to endanger your anonymity. If you’re serious about remaining anonymous, you should avoid running plug-ins all together. Unfortunately, that can leave a number of popular websites completely unusable. To solve this problem, I recommend a hybrid approach.

First of all, you need to configure your browser to require your approval to run any plug-in. Chrome and Firefox offer this functionality by default, and extensions offer this capability in other browsers. Next, you need to make sure you’re running sandboxed plug-ins. While this is mostly considered a security issue, a rogue plug-in could certainly be used to gather your personal information by an organization like the NSA. Chrome can be configured to completely disallow un-sandboxed plug-ins, but it can be trickier with some other browsers. Windows users can opt to run their browsers inside of an application called Sandboxie, so even less sophisticated browsers can receive similar benefits.

JavaScript blocking

JavaScript is an incredibly powerful language, but it also has the capability of leaking out identifying information. By design, it can deliver detailed information to any Web server about your setup. What plug-ins do you have enabled? What size screen are you using? Those small pieces of information can add up, and make tracking your usage profile easier for advertisers and governments. Worse, unpatched JavaScript exploits could potentially be used to trick your browser into giving up even more identifying information.

If you want to be truly anonymous, you’re going to need to disable JavaScript. Of course, that’s easier said than done. Many websites rely on JavaScript for core functionality, so you’d be effectively knee-capping your Web browser. Thankfully, there is a way to have your cake and eat it too. By using a browser extension like NoScript or scriptno, you can personally manage which domains are given permission to run JavaScript in your browser. This way, you can whitelist domains and webpages that you trust, but you can bypass all of the baggage that comes along with running any ol’ JavaScript that comes along on the web.

Ghostery browser extension

If you’re serious about protecting your privacy, consider installing Ghostery in Firefox, Chrome, Opera, IE, or Safari. This adorable little browser extension allows you to block trackers from all over the web in one place. Better yet, it displays just exactly which tracking services are being used on your favorite websites, and allows you to dynamically enable or disable tracking as you see fit. Can’t live without the Facebook widget on your favorite blogs? Just whitelist it. It’s simple to use, and extremely customizable. If you hate the idea of being spied on by advertisers, this is exactly the extension you’re looking for.

HTTPS Everywhere browser extension

In spite of the infamous Heartbleed vulnerability, SSL is still your best bet for keeping your Web traffic private. If you want to keep nosy packet sniffers out of your business, your Web traffic should always be going through SSL connections. Sadly, not every website supports SSL. Even worse, many websites that do support SSL still default to unencrypted connections — and the Electronic Frontier Foundation wants to change that. The HTTPS Everywhere browser extension, provided for free by the EFF, forces SSL connections on countless websites. Chrome, Firefox, and Opera users can all take advantage of this wonderful extension, and keep important Web traffic private and secure.

Panopticlick

How easy is it for Web servers to identify you by your browser? It all depends on how it’s configured, really. To see just how much identifying information your browser is giving away, head on over to Panopticlick. This handy little tool, owned and operated by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, quickly tells you just exactly what your browser is broadcasting to the world. The more information given away, the easier it will be to identify you. If you want to improve your Panopticlick score, take a moment to read Peter Eckersley’s article on the matter, and adjust your configurations as you see fit.

Justified paranoia

You might not think you have anything to hide, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy the benefits of online privacy. Some of these recommendations are a real hassle to live with — I’m well aware. It’s a lot easier to shove your fingers in your ears, and pretend like the NSA and your ISP aren’t watching every move you make. But what you browse is your business, and your business alone. Now is the time to stand up for yourself, and take back your privacy.

What is 802.11ax WiFi, and will it really deliver 10Gbps?

Wireless standards tend to get proposed, drafted, and finally accepted at what seems like a glacial pace. It’s been roughly 17 years since we began to see the first 802.11b wireless routers and laptops. In the intervening time, we’ve only seen three more mainstream standards take hold since then: 802.11g, 802.11n, and now 802.11ac. (I’m leaving out some lesser-used ones like 802.11a for the purposes of this story.)

Now a new standard looms over the horizon. And if you thought that your new 802.11ac router’s maximum speed of 1,300Mbps was already fast, think again. With 802.11ac fully certified and out the door, the Wi-Fi Alliance has started looking at its successor, 802.11ax — and it looks pretty enticing. While you may have a hard time getting more than 400Mbps to your smartphone via 802.11ac, 802.11ax should deliver real world speeds above 2Gbps. And in a lab-based trial of technology similar to 802.11ax, Huawei recently hit a max speed of 10.53Gbps, or around 1.4 gigabytes of data transfer per second. Clearly, 802.11ax is going to be fast. But what is it exactly?

What is 802.11ax WiFi?

The easiest way to think of 802.11ax is to start with 802.11ac — which allows for up to four different spatial streams (MIMO) — and then to massively increase the spectral efficiency (and thus max throughput) of each stream. Like its predecessor, 802.11ax operates in the 5GHz band, where there’s a lot more space for wide (80MHz and 160MHz) channels.

With 802.11ax, you get four MIMO (multiple-input-multiple-output) spatial streams, with each stream multiplexed with OFDA (orthogonal frequency division access). There is some confusion here as to whether the Wi-Fi Alliance and Huawei (which leads the 802.11ax working group) mean OFDA, or OFDMA. OFDMA (multiple access) is a well-known technique (and is the reason LTE is excellent for what it is). Either way, OFDM, OFDA, and OFDMA refer to methods of frequency-division multiplexing — each channel is separated into dozens, or even hundreds, of smaller subchannels, each with a slightly different frequency. By then turning these signals through right-angles (orthogonal), they can be stacked closer together and still be easily demultiplexed.

According to Huawei, the use of OFDA increases spectral efficiency by 10 times, which essentially translates into 10 times the max theoretical bandwidth, but 4x is seeming like more of a real-world possibility.

This lovely diagram shows you North America’s 5GHz channels, and where those 20/40/80/160MHz blocks fit in. As you can see, at 5GHz, you won’t ever get more than two 160MHz channels (and even then, only if you live in the boonies without interference from neighbors).

How fast is 802.11ax?

If we go for the more conservative 4x estimate, and assume a massive 160MHz channel, the maximum speed of a single 802.11ax stream will be around 3.5Gbps (compared with 866Mbps for a single 802.11ac stream). Multiply that out to a 4×4 MIMO network and you get a total capacity of 14Gbps. If you had a smartphone or laptop capable of two or three streams, you’d get some blazing connection speeds (7Gbps equates to around 900 megabytes per second; 10.5Gbps equates to 1,344MB/sec).

In a more realistic setup with 80MHz channels, we’re probably looking at a single-stream speed of around 1.6Gbps, which is a quite reasonable 200MB/sec. Again, if your mobile device supports MIMO, you could be seeing 400 or 600MB/sec. And in an even more realistic setup with 40MHz channels (such as what you’d probably get in a crowded apartment block), a single 802.11ax stream would net you 800Mbps (100MB/sec), or a total network capacity of 3.2Gbps. (Read: How to boost your WiFi speed by choosing the right channel.)

802.11ax range, reliability, and other factors

So far, neither the Wi-Fi Alliance nor Huawei has said much about 802.11ax’s other important features. Huawei says that “intelligent spectrum allocation” and “interference coordination” will be employed — but most modern WiFi hardware already does that.

It’s fairly safe to assume that working range will stay the same or increase slightly. Reliability should improve a little with the inclusion of OFDA, and with the aforementioned spectrum allocation and interference coordination features. Congestion may also be reduced as a result, and because data will be transferred between devices faster, thus freeing the airwaves for other connections.

Otherwise, 802.11ax will work in roughly the same fashion as 802.11ac, just with massively increased throughput. As we covered in our Linksys WRT1900AC review, 802.11ac is already pretty great. 802.11ax will just take things to the next level.

Do we need these kinds of speeds?

The problem, as with all things WiFi, isn’t necessarily the speed of the network itself — it’s congestion, and more than that even, it’s what the devices themselves are capable of. For example, even 802.11ax’s slowest speed of 100MB/sec is pushing it for a hard drive — and it’s faster than what the eMMC NAND flash storage in most smartphones can handle as well. Best-case scenario, a modern smartphone’s storage tops out at around 90MB/sec sequential read, 20MB/sec sequential write — worst case, with lots of little files, you’re looking at speeds in the single-megabyte range. Obviously, for the wider 80MHz and 160MHz channels, you’re going to need some desktop SSDs (or an array of desktop SSDs) to take advantage of 802.11ax’s max speeds.

Of course, not every use-case requires you to read or write data to a slow storage medium. But even so, alternate uses like streaming 4K video still fall short of these multi-gigabit speeds. Even if Netflix begins streaming 8K in the next few years (and you thought there wasn’t enough to watch in 4K!), 802.11ax has more than enough bandwidth. And the bottleneck isn’t your WiFi; It’s your internet connection. The current time frame for 802.11ax certification is 2018 — until then, upgrading to 802.11ac (if you haven’t already) should be a nice stopgap.

AMD details new power efficiency improvements, update on ’25×20′ project

 

Energy efficiency is (if you’ll pardon the pun) a hot topic. Foundries and semiconductor manufacturers now trumpet their power saving initiatives with the same fervor they once reserved for clock speed improvements and performance improvements. AMD is no exception to this trend, and the company has just published a new white paper that details the work it’s doing as part of its ’25×20′ project, which intends to increase performance per watt by 25x within five years.

If you’ve followed our discussions on microprocessor trends and general power innovation, much of what the paper lays out will be familiar. The paper steps through hUMA(Heterogeneous Unified Memory Access) and the overall advantages of HSA, as well as the slowing rate of power improvements delivered strictly by foundry process shrinks. The most interesting area for our purposes is the additional information AMD is offering around Adaptive Voltage and Frequency Scaling, or AVFS. Most of these improvements arespecific to Carrizo — the Carrizo-L platform doesn’t implement them.

AVFS vs DVFS

There are two primary methods of conserving power in a microprocessor — the aforementioned AVFS, and Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling, or DVFS. Both AMDand Intel have made use of DVFS for over a decade. DVFS uses what’s called open-loop scaling. In this type of system, the CPU vendor determines the optimal voltage for the chip based on the target application and frequency. DVFS is not calibrated to any specific chips — instead, Intel, AMD, and other vendors create a statistical model that predicts what voltage level a chip that’s already verified as good will need to operate at a given frequency.

DVFS is always designed to incorporate a significant amount of overhead. A CPU’s operating temperature will affect its voltage requirements. And since AMD and Intel don’t know if any given SoC will be operating at 40C or 80C, they tweak the DVFS model to ensure a chip won’t destabilize. In practice, this means margins of 10-20% at any given point.

According to Naffziger, this overhead corresponds to a great deal of waste, because modern CPU power consumption tends to scale by the square of the voltage increase (and closer to the cube if leakage is considered). A 10% increase in voltage is therefore roughly a 20% increase in power consumption.

AVFS, in contrast, uses a closed-loop system in which on-die hardware mechanisms manage the voltage — by taking real-time measurements of the junction temperature and current frequency, and adjusting the voltage to match them. This method eliminates the power waste discussed above by eliminating the traditional guard bands that are required to ensure proper operation of every piece of silicon.

There’s another advantage of AVFS that Naffziger doesn’t mention, though it’s not clear how relevant this is to AMD’s own interests: It can reduce the impact of process variation.

One of the differences between semiconductor manufacturing and more mundane products is that a semiconductor manufacturer doesn’t really “know” what kind of chips it built until it tests them. Every wafer of chips will have its own unique characteristics — some chips will use less voltage than others, some will hit higher clock speeds, and some won’t work at all. A well-known SoC design built on a mature node will suffer much less variation than a cutting-edge chip on brand-new process technology. But there’s always some degree of variance.

This variance is sometimes referred to as the process strength.

This graph shows three types of devices. The “Weak” device runs at 800MHz and draws the least power, but has the lowest available clock headroom. This chip won’t overclock well at all. A “Nominal” device will draw slightly more power, but has more frequency headroom, should the manufacturer choose to use it. A “Strong” device has the highest potential frequency headroom and requires less voltage to hit its maximum clock than a “Nominal” device — but its overall power consumption is higher at the same frequency and voltage because it leaks more power. Under DVFS, the manufacturer would fix each of these CPUs at 1V — the amount of voltage the weakest chip needs in order to ensure smooth operation.

AVFS, on the other hand, offers more options. By measuring and adjusting the voltage in real time, AVFS can determine that only the “Weak” chip needs a full 1V to operate. The “Nominal” chip can run at 0.95V, while the Strong chip can actually run at 0.9V. AVFS thus compensates for variation in process technology to ensure a more uniform product experience, and may improve yields as well.

Will AVFS give Carrizo a boost?

After years of promises from AMD with precious little to show for the company’s CPU efforts (unless you count the collapse of its core business as a victory), enthusiasts are understandably skeptical about what Carrizo will offer. The good news on this front is that AVFS isn’t just an idea AMD pulled out of its hat. It’s an understood tradeoff that adds design complexity on the chip, but can help compensate for foundry variation, and is generally believed to improve power consumption by at least the 20% figure that AMD is claiming. Some publications claim benefits up to 45% depending on workload (bear in mind that these are very different chips and target markets).

Reducing power consumption by 20% should allow for better battery life. But it’s not clear yet how this power tuning will impact performance. In theory, AMD should be able to hit higher boost frequencies, but this white paper notes AMD “has designed power management algorithms to optimize for typical use rather than peak computation periods that only occur (briefly) during the most demanding workloads. The result is a number of race-to-idle techniques to put a computer into sleep mode as frequently as possible to reduce average energy use.”

AMD is also baking in new support for the S0i3 idle state with Carrizo. S0i3 idles the chip in a deeper sleep than previous modes, and this should improve overall laptop battery life when the system isn’t in use.

It’s an open question, at this point, whether these techniques and strategies are flexible enough to enable higher performance during those high-use periods while still cutting overall power consumption. While a few Carrizo benchmarks have leaked to date, they aren’t very useful, at least without knowing more about the power and frequency bands the leaked chips are targeting — especially since leaked data is based on engineering samples, and may not be representative of final performance.

Here’s what I expect overall: Carrizo includes a number of power management techniques that are generally touted as reducing power consumption. It integrates more components on-die (another power reduction measure) and it offers support for idle power modes that previous AMD chips couldn’t use. When you pack all these improvements together, it’s reasonable to assume Carrizo will offer significant improvements in battery life. Exactly how much will depend on the OEMs themselves — we’ve seen plenty of evidence around Core M to illustrate that the decisions OEMs make around cooling and components have drastic impacts on the devices themselves.

Performance information suggests that Carrizo’s top-end chips may be slightly faster than Kaveri, but AMD’s own guidance suggest that the chip will be strongest in the low power bands below 35W. If Carrizo mimics Kaveri in this regard, it will see significant improvements in the 15-20W range, but may tie its predecessor’s performance at the 35W band.

After talking to Sam Naffziger, we don’t expect these improvements and capabilities to be a one-off function. AMD has yet to reveal any specifics of its plans for Zen in this regard, but there’s every reason to think we’ll see future chips leveraging capabilities like AVFS as well.

US government blocks Intel, Chinese collaboration over nuclear fears, national security

A major planned upgrade to the most powerful supercomputer in the world, the Chinese-built Tianhe-2, has been effectively canceled by the US government. The original plan was to boost its capability, currently at ~57 petaflops (PFLOPS), up to 110 PFLOPS using faster Xeon processors and Xeon Phi add-in boards. The Department of Commerce has now scuttled that plan. Under US law, the DoC is required to regulate sales of certain products if it has information that indicates the hardware will be used in a manner “contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States.”

According to the report, the license agreement granted to China’s National University of Defense Technology was provisional and subject to case-by-case agreement. Intel, in other words, never had free reign to sell hardware in China. Its ability to do so was dependent on what the equipment was used for. The phrase “nuclear explosive activities” is defined as including: “Research on or development, design, manufacture, construction, testing, or maintenance of any nuclear explosive device, or components or subsystems of such a device.”

In order to levy such a classification, the government is required to certify that it has “more than positive knowledge” that the new equipment would be used in such activities. But the exact details remain secret for obvious reasons. For now, the Tianhe-2 will remain stuck at its existing technology level. Intel, meanwhile, will still have a use for those Xeon Phis — the company just signed an agreement with the US government to deliver the hardware for two supercomputers in 2016 and 2018.

Implications and politics

There are several ways to read this new classification. On the one hand, it’s unlikely to harm Intel’s finances — Intel had sold hardware to the Tianhe-2 project at a steep discount according to many sources, and such wins are often valued for their prestige and PR rather than their profitability. This new restriction won’t allow another company to step in, even if such a substitution were possible — it’s incredibly unlikely that IBM, Nvidia, or AMD could step in to offer an alternate solution.

It’s also possible that this classification is a way of subtly raising pressure on the Chinese as regards to political matters in the South China Sea. China has been pumping sand on to coral atolls in the area, in an attempt to boost its territorial claim to the Spratly Islands. The Spratly Islands are claimed by a number of countries, including China, which has argued that its borders and territorial sovereignty should extend across the area. Other nations, including the Philippines, Brunei, Vietnam, and the US have taken a dim view of this. Refusing to sell China the parts to upgrade its supercomputer could be a not-so-subtle message about the potential impact of Chinese aggression in this area.

China’s Loongson processor. The latest version is a eight-core chip built on 28nm.

Restricting China’s ability to buy high-end x86 hardware could lead the country to invest more heavily in building its own CPU architectures and investing with alternative companies. But this was almost certainly going to happen, no matter what. China is ambitious and anxious to create its own homegrown OS and CPU alternatives. The Loongson CPU has continued to evolve over the last few years, and is reportedly capable of executing x86 code at up to 70% of the performance of native binaries thanks to hardware-assisted emulation. Tests on the older Loongson 2F core showed that it lagged ARM and Intel in power efficiency, but the current 3B chip is several generations more advanced. These events might spur China to invest even more heavily in that effort, even though the chip was under development long before these issues arose.

Clear smart glass that generates its own electricity

It may seem like everything is becoming “smart” these days, but sometimes a new breakthrough makes you stand up and take notice. The latest one involves smart glass, which we’ve seen various types of in the past. Smart glass means more than just scratch- or shatter-resistant, like the Corning Gorilla Glass on your phone. It means the glass has some kind of special properties, like shifting tint in the sun, or preventing heat from passing through it.

That in and of itself is nothing new, either. But now a team of researched have developed a new kind of smart glass containing materials that enable the triboelectric effect, which captures the energy inherent in static electricity that occurs when two different materials collide. In other words, the glass can not only change color, but create electricity as well, as Phys.org reports.

Back in January, we reported on a flexible nanogenerator that also utilized the triboelectric effect to generate power for mobile devices by moving your body, using your skin as a source of static electricity. And we’ve seen nano-sized triboelectrics before, although they weren’t transparent.

The idea behind the smart glass is certainly different, but still pretty simple. It works like this: Glass is often subject to the elements, like rain and heavy winds. When those things collide with glass, you’ve got your necessarily two materials for the triboelectric effect. So the team developed a dual-layer glass to harness it.

The first layer contains nanogenerators that capture the positively charged energy in water droplets, which comes from rubbing against the air on the way down from clouds, the report said. The second layer holds two charged plastic sheets with tiny springs between them; as wind pressure increases on the glass, the plastic sheets are pushed closer together, creating an electric current.

The resulting glass is completely clear at first, but then develops a blue tint as it generates up to 130mW of electricity per square meter of glass. That won’t power your refrigerator, but it’ll charge your phone. And it’s sounding as if the blue tint is pretty light, i.e. still perfectly see-through, and not murkier and just translucent instead of transparent.

The next step: figuring out how to store the generated energy using embedded, also-transparent super-capacitors. The researchers also said they’re looking into how to integrate the glass with wireless networking, since there’s no separate power source needed. This is all in contrast to something like a fully transparent solar cell, which could turn every window in your home into a power source via solar energy. If and when just one of these transparent products can make it to market, it could have a profound effect on the market for renewables — and the way we power everyday devices in our homes.

DirectX 12, LiquidVR may breathe fresh life into AMD GPUS, thanks to asynchronous compute

With DirectX 12 coming soon with Windows 10, VR technology ramping up from multiple vendors, and the Vulkan API already debuted, it’s an exceedingly interesting time to be in PC gaming. AMD’s GCN architecture is three years old at this point, but certain features baked into the chips at launch (and expanded with Hawaii in 2013) are only now coming into their own, thanks to the improvements ushered in by next-generation APIs.

One of the critical technologies underpinning this argument is the Asynchronous Command Engine (ACEs) that are part of every GCN-class video card. The original HD 7900 family had two ACE’s per GPU, while AMD’s Hawaii-class hardware bumped that even further, to eight.

AMD’s Hawaii, Kaveri, and at least the PS4 have eight ACE’s. The Xbox presumably does as well.

AMD’s Graphics Core Next (GCN) GPUs are capable of asynchronous execution to some degree, as are Nvidia GPUs based on the GTX 900 “Maxwell” family. Previous Nvidia cards like Kepler and even the GTX Titan were not.

What’s an Asynchronous Command Engine?

The ACE units inside AMD’s GCN architecture are designed for flexibility. The chart below explains the difference — instead of being forced to execute a single queue via pre-determined order, even when it makes no sense to do so, tasks from different queues can be scheduled and completed independently. This gives the GPU some limited ability to execute tasks out-of-order — if the GPU knows that a time-sensitive operation that only needs 10ns of compute time is in the queue alongside a long memory copy that isn’t particularly time sensitive, but will take 100,000ns, it can pull the short task, complete it, and then run the longer operation.

Asynchronous vs. synchronous threading

The point of using ACE’s is that they allow the GPU to process and execute multiple command streams in parallel. In DirectX11, this capability wasn’t really accessible — the API was heavily abstracted, and multiple developers have told us that multi-threading support in DX11 was essentially broken from Day 1. As a result, there’s been no real way to tell the graphics card to handle graphics and compute in the same workload.

GPU pipelines in DX11 vs. DX12

AMD’s original GCN hardware may have debuted with just two ACEs, but AMD claims that it added six ACE units to Hawaii as part of a forward-looking plan, knowing that the hardware would one day be useful. That’s precisely the sort of thing you’d expect a company to say, but there’s some objective evidence that Team Red is being honest. Back when GCN and Nvidia’s Kepler were going head to head, it quickly became apparent that while the two companies were neck and neck in gaming, AMD’s GCN was far more powerful than Nvidia’s GK104 and GK110 in many GPGPU workloads. The comparison was particularly lopsided in cryptocurrency mining, where AMD cards were able to shred Nvidia hardware thanks to a more powerful compute engine and support for some SHA-1 functions in hardware.

When AMD built Kaveri and the SoCs for the PS4 and Xbox One, it included eight ACEs in those chips as well. The thinking behind that move was that adding more asynchronous compute capability would allow programmers to use the GPU’s computational horsepower more effectively. Physics and certain other types of in-game calculations, including some of the work that’s done in virtual reality simulation, can be handled in the background.

Asynchronous shader performance in a simulated demo.

AMD’s argument is that with DX12 (and Mantle / Vulkan), developers can finally use these engines to their full potential. In the image above, the top pipeline is the DX11 method of doing things, in which work is mostly being handled serially. The bottom image is the DX12 methodology.

Whether programmers will take advantage of these specific AMD capabilities is an open question, but the fact that both the PS4 and Xbox one have a full set of ACEs to work with suggests that they may. If developers are writing the code to execute on GCN hardware already, moving that support over to DX12 and Windows 10 is no big deal.

A few PS4 titles and just one PC game use asynchronous shaders now, but that could change.

Right now, AMD has only released information on the PS4’s use of asynchronous shaders, but that doesn’t mean the Xbox One can’t. It’s possible that the DX12 API push that Microsoft is planning for that console will add the capability.

AMD is also pushing ACE’s as a major feature for its LiquidVR platform — a fundamental capability that it claims will give Radeon cards an edge over their Nvidia counterparts. We’ll need to see final hardware and drivers before making any such conclusions, of course, but the compute capabilities of the company’s cards are well established. It’s worth noting that while AMD did have an advantage in this area over Kepler, which had only one compute and one graphics pipeline, Maxwell has one graphics pipeline and 32 compute pipes, compared to just 8 AMD ACEs. Whether this impacts performance or not in shipping titles is something we’ll only be able to answer once DX12 games that specifically use these features are in-market.

The question, from the end-user perspective, obviously boils down to which company is going to offer better performance (or price/performance ratio) in the next-generation DX12 API. It’s far too early to make a determination on that front — recent 3DMark 12 benchmarks put AMD’s R9 290X out in front of Nvidia’s GTX 980, while Star Swarm results from earlier this year reversed that result.

What is clear is that DX12 and Vulkan are reinventing 3D APIs and, by extension, game development in ways we haven’t seen in years. The new capabilities of these frameworks are set to improve everything from multi-GPU configurations to VR displays. Toss in features like 4K monitors and FreeSync / G-Sync support, and it’s an exciting time for the PC gaming industry.

How USB charging works, or how to avoid blowing up your smartphone

The tech world has finally coalesced around a charging standard, after years of proprietary adapters and ugly wall wart power supplies. Well, sort of: We’re already seeing some fragmentation in terms of the new USB-C connector, which could eventually replace USB, as well as what is thankfully turning out to be a short-lived obsession Samsung had with larger USB Micro-B connectors for its Galaxy line. But aside from that, and with the obvious exception of Apple’s Lightning connector, micro USB has destroyed the industry’s penchant for custom ports.

Ten years ago, you always had to make sure you had the correct power supply for each of your gadgets. Usually, that power supply wasn’t even labeled. Today, you can charge your phone at your friend’s house, plug your Kindle into any computer, and download photos from a digital camera directly to your TV, all thanks to a standardized connector. In its place, though, there’s a new problem: USB power. Not all USB chargers, connectors, and cables are born equal. You’ve probably noticed that some wall chargers are stronger than others. Sometimes, one USB socket on a laptop is seemingly more powerful than the other. On some desktop PCs, even when they’re turned off, you can charge your smartphone via a USB socket. It turns out there’s a method to all this madness — but first we have to explain how USB power actually works.

New specifications

There are now four USB specifications — USB 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and 3.1 — in addition to the new USB-C connector. We’ll point out where they significantly differ, but for the most part, we’ll focus on USB 3.0, as it’s the most common. The other important fact is that in any USB network, there is one host and one device. In almost every case, your PC is the host, and your smartphone, tablet, or camera is the device. Power always flows from the host to the device, but data can flow in both directions.

Okay, now the numbers. A USB socket has four pins, and and a USB cable has four wires. The inside pins carry data (D+ and D-), and the outside pins provide a 5-volt power supply. In terms of actual current (milliamps or mA), there are three kinds of USB port dictated by the current specs: a standard downstream port, a charging downstream port, and a dedicated charging port. The first two can be found on your computer (and should be labeled as such), and the third kind applies to “dumb” wall chargers.

In the USB 1.0 and 2.0 specs, a standard downstream port is capable of delivering up to 500mA (0.5A); in USB 3.0, it moves up to 900mA (0.9A). The charging downstream and dedicated charging ports provide up to 1500mA (1.5A). USB 3.1 bumps throughput to 10Gbps in what is called SuperSpeed+ mode, bringing it roughly equivalent with first-generation Thunderbolt. It also supports power draw of 1.5A and 3A over the 5V bus.

USB-C is a different connector entirely. First, it’s universal; you can put it in either way and it will work, unlike with USB. It’s also capable of twice the theoretical throughput of USB 3.0, and can output more power. Apple is joining USB-C with USB 3.1 on its new MacBook, and so is Google with the new Chromebook Pixel. But there can also be older-style USB ports that support the 3.1 standard.

The USB spec also allows for a “sleep-and-charge” port, which is where the USB ports on a powered-down computer remain active. You may have noticed this on your desktop PC, where there’s always some power flowing through the motherboard, but some laptops are also capable of sleep-and-charge.

Now, this is what the spec dictates. But in actual fact there are plenty of USB chargers that break these specs — mostly of the wall-wart variety. Apple’s iPad charger, for example, provides 2.1A at 5V; Amazon’s Kindle Fire charger outputs 1.8; and car chargers can output anything from 1A to 2.1A.

Can I blow up my USB device?

There is a huge variance, then, between normal USB ports rated at 500mA and dedicated charging ports which range all the way up to 3,000mA. This leads to a rather important question: If you take a smartphone which came with a 900mA wall charger, and plug it into a 2,100mA iPad charger, as an example, will it blow up?

In short, no: You can plug any USB device into any USB cable and into any USB port, and nothing will blow up — and in fact, using a more powerful charger should speed up battery charging.

The longer answer is that the age of your device plays an important role, dictating both how fast it can be charged, and whether it can be charged using a wall charger at all. Way back in 2007, the USB Implementers Forum released the Battery Charging Specification, which standardized faster ways of charging USB devices, either by pumping more amps through your PC’s USB ports, or by using a wall charger. Shortly thereafter, USB devices that implemented this spec started to arrive.

If you have a modern USB device — really, almost any smartphone, tablet, or camera — you should be able to plug into a high-amperage USB port and enjoy faster charging. If you have an older device, however, it probably won’t work with USB ports that employ the Battery Charging Specification. It might only work with old school, original (500mA) USB 1.0 and 2.0 PC ports. In some (much older) cases, USB devices can only be charged by computers with specific drivers installed.

There are a few other things to be aware of. While PCs can have two kinds of USB port — standard downstream or charging downstream — OEMs rarely seem to label them as such. As a result, you might have a device that charges from one port on your laptop, but not from the other. This might be a trait of older computers, as there doesn’t seem to be a reason why standard downstream ports would be used, when high-amperage charging ports are available. In a similar vein, some external devices — hard drives and optical drives, most notably — require more power than a USB port can provide, which is why they include a two-USB-port Y-cable, or an external AC power adapter.

Otherwise, USB has certainly made charging our gadgets and peripherals much easier than it ever has been. And if the new USB-C connector catches on — and it looks like it will — things will get even simpler, because you’ll never again have to curse after plugging it in the wrong way.