Science & Technology

Is your Belkin broken?

It would appear that for some reason Belkin routers can no longer connect to the Internet. As of midnight EDT many Belkin router owners took to Twitter to all point out their Belkin routers were suffering from some sort of fault or demonic possession. At 9:30am PDT Belkin acknowledged the issue and an hour later, issued a workaround. Belkin has not yet revealed the cause of the mass outage. There are many, many annoyed users out there furious at Belkin and their ugly side can be seen on Twitter. One thing is for sure you can take away power, gas and water but don’t meddle with someone’s internet connection.

Update #2: Belkin says all routers should now be fixed.

We have confirmed that the internet connectivity issue is now resolved.

If your service has not yet been restored, please unplug your router and plug it back in after waiting 1 minute. Wait 5 more minutes and the router should reconnect. If you have any further issues, please contact our support at (800) 223-5546.

We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience to our customers. We are taking a number of actions to eliminate this sort of incident from reoccurring

Update #1: Belkin’s official statement.

Starting approximately midnight on October 7, Belkin began experiencing an issue with a service configured in certain Belkin router models that causes a failure when it checks for general network connectivity by pinging a site hosted by Belkin. We know this issue has affected select older Wireless-N Belkin router models including F9K1102, F9K1105, F9K1113 and F9K1116. We are continuing to investigate other possible routers that may have been affected. We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible. Until there is a fix in place, we have identified a workaround for customers that are using the F9K1102 and F9K1105 routers to regain internet connectivity. That work-around as well as ongoing updates can be found at our outage status page for more information:http://www.belkin.com/outage

Work emails illegal after 6pm!

France is such a strange place. An aluring draw is felt with thinking of french bread, wine and le romancing! Another addition might just be a winner for those who hate the bleep of a blackberry when relaxing at home with a Bourgogne Chardonnay and a saucy french movie. If working in Franceland you will no longer be bothered by your beret wearing boss, a deal has been signed between employers federations and unions to say that employees will have to switch off work phones and avoid looking at work email, while firms cannot pressure staff to check le massages.

Michel de La Force, chairman of the General Confederation of Managers, has said that “digital working time” would have to be measured. Some emailing outside of office hours would be allowed but only in “exceptional circumstances”. Obviously there has to be exceptions however the move echoes Volkswagen’s rule to stop sending emails to their employees 30 minutes after their shift ends and only resume 30 minutes before. 

Some will be hoping for an opt in, opt out policy as 24 hour sales and self employment could potentially suffer, however for those in big business with pressure from Le Grande Fromage, this will be a breath of fresh air.

EU court rejects requirement to keep data of users by telecom companies

On Tuesday the European Union’s highest court overthrew a rule that required telecoms companies to store the communications data of EU citizens for up to two years, on the grounds that it infringed on basic rights. The court ruled that the directive “exceeded the limits” of proportionality.

“The Court takes the view that, by requiring the retention of those data and by allowing the competent national authorities to access those data, the directive interferes in a particularly serious manner with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data,” it said.

“Furthermore, the fact that data are retained and subsequently used without the subscriber or registered user being informed is likely to generate in the persons concerned a feeling that their private lives are the subject of constant surveillance,” the court added in a statement.

The rule had required telecoms service providers to keep traffic and location data as well as other information needed to identify a user, but not the content of the communication. This directive was introduced by Brussels in March 2006 after bombings on public transport in Madrid and London.

The UK government says it is carefully considering the implications of the ruling so you can guarantee they will take their time and drag their feet.

Source [BBC]

Snapdragon Reveals 808 and 810 Chips for Next Year

It looks like Qualcomm is just never satisfied with impressing mobile tech geeks. They continue to push the envelope, even when we are already blown away by the amazing tech they show off. Their latest creations scheduled to debut next year are the Snapdragon 808 and 810. Here’s a quick spec breakdown of these powerhouse chipsets, 

Snapdragon 808 MSM8992: (The 808 differs from the 810 primarily with a different core arrangement and slightly slower GPU and memory interface.)

• CPU: 2 Cortex A57 cores + 4 Cortex A53 cores (hexa-core, big.LITTLE arrangement)
• ISA: 32-bit/64-bit ARM v8-A, 20nm
• GPU: Adreno 418
• Memory bandwidth: 64-bit LPDDR4-933
• LTE: Cat 6/7 LTE, built-in
• eMMC interface: 5.0
• Wi-Fi: no (requires separate Wi-Fi module)
• Camera ISP: 12-bit dual-ISP
• H.256 encode/decode: no/yes

Snapdragon 810 MSM8994: (The 810 is the higher-end of the two chipsets, and is designed to follow-up the Snapdragon 805, which is coming later this summer.)

• CPU: 4 Cortex A57 cores + 4 Cortex A53 cores (octo-core, big.LITTLE arrangement)
• ISA: 32-bit/64-bit ARM v8-A, 20nm
• GPU: Adreno 430
• Memory bandwidth: 64-bit LPDDR4-1600
• LTE: Cat 6/7 LTE, built-in
• eMMC interface: 5.0
• Wi-Fi: no (requires separate Wi-Fi module)
• Camera ISP: 14-bit dual-ISP
• H.256 encode/decode: yes/yes

It looks like Qualcomm is now starting to make excellent use of the big.LITTLE architecture, which makes their stuff a bit more similar to Samsung’s Exynos. Regardless of how things are evolving in the mobile tech world, Qualcomm seems to be on the leading edge.

Google working on smart contact lenses

Google Glass could be a thing of the past. There is a rumour that Google is now working on smart contact lenses. The USPTO patent application filed by the search giant doesn’t look to be quite as capable as Google Glass, instead a “multi-sensor contact lens” working as a basic input device. This would connect to either a watch or Smartphone and this would provide the brain of the operation. 

Intomobile are reporting that Google have filed such a patent as illustrated on the right. They theorise this lens could also be able to pick cues from the environment, bundling a number of sensors for light, pressure, temperature, conductivity and electric field, all of which would be combined with a control circuit and power source embedded outside the user’s physical field of vision. So no brains would be included in this lens with all computing happening at a different location (smartphone?).

It does not seem so long ago that Google Glass seemed like a crazy dream that we wouldn’t see until 2020. However, time and tech are on our side for this and this really doesn’t seem to be to far out of reach. Next up, the Google Underpants!