Fujifilm X100S

The Fujifilm X100S ($1,299.95 list) is the follow-up to Fuji's groundbreaking X100 digital camera. Like its predecessor it features a retro design that makes it look more like a 1960s-era Leica than a modern digital camera, a hybrid viewfinder system that can toggle between a big, bright optical view and an EVF, and a fast f/2 lens with a 35mm (full-frame equivalent) field of view. The sensor has been upgraded to a 16-megapixel X-Trans CMOS design that is capable of producing some incredible results at extremely high ISO settings, and a notoriously sluggish autofocus system is now a reasonably quick one.

The X100S's field of view is a little narrower than?our current Editors' Choice prime-lens compact camera, the 28mm-equivalent Ricoh GR. The Ricoh has some things working in its favor that the X100S can't match?it's small enough to slide into the pocket of your jeans, and its asking price is $500 less. The X100S is a low-light king, and even though its lens isn't as sharp edge-to-edge as the Ricoh's, you'll be anything but disappointed with the images that it captures. It too deserves to be called Editors' Choice.

Design and Features
Olympus was the first company to wow us with a chic retro design camera with its original digital PEN Micro Four Thirds body. But Fujifilm took the torch and ran with it when it announced the X100 in 2010. From a distance it looks a bit like a chrome Leica M camera, albeit with a few extra dials and a smaller footprint. A silver finish adorns the top plate, bottom plate, and lens, and black leatherette surrounds the body of the camera. It measures just 2.9 by 5 by 2.1 inches (HWD) and weighs just a smidge under a pound. That's a bit heavy for its size, but there's no skimping on the build quality?the X100S feels like a solidly built product. The Leica X2 is almost the same size (2.7 by 4.9 by 2 inches), but a bit lighter at 11.2 ounces. That camera features a 35mm f/2.8 equivalent lens and an image sensor of equal size, but doesn't include any sort of built-in viewfinder.

The lens is a 23mm f/2 design, which delivers the field of view of a 35mm lens in terms of full-frame photography. It's a classic prime design that delivers a moderately wide-angle field of view. There are a few other premium compacts that match that perspective, including the full-frame Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX1. There is a wide-angle adapter available ($349) that broadens the perspective of the X100S to match the 28mm field of view delivered by the Ricoh GR, but it adds a good amount of size and cost to the camera.

Rather than using a mode dial, the X100S takes a more classic approach to setting a shooting mode. The lens has a physical aperture ring with 1-stop clicks from f/2 through f/16, as well as an A setting. The shutter speed dial, located on the top plate, allows you to set the shutter in one-stop increments from 1/4-second to 1/4,000-second, and also has an A setting. Setting the shutter to A and controlling the aperture ring manually puts you in aperture priority mode; setting the aperture to A and adjusting the shutter speed is the equivalent of shutter priority mode. And if you leave both settings to A, you'll experience the equivalent of program shooting. Full manual shooting is also available?just set your ISO, shutter speed, and aperture and go to town. There's an EV indicator bar on the left of the rear LCD and visible in the optical finder as well; it lets you know if you are under or overexposed at current settings. A half-press of the shutter will also show you what the scene will look like when captured, assuming you are using the EVF or rear LCD at that time.

Any shift in exposure can be dialed in using the top-mounted exposure compensation dial. It ranges from -2 to +2 EV in 1/3-stop increments. There's also a programmable Fn button on the top plate, to the right of the shutter release; by default it adjusts the current ISO setting. It can be set manually, or to auto; it's also from here that you'll be able to set the desired minimum shutter speed for auto ISO shooting. The default is 1/60, but you can set it to values ranging from 1/4 to 1/125-second.

There's one way to take control of your shooting, which is essentially an ISO priority mode. If you set the camera to auto ISO but manually select the shutter speed and aperture, the camera will do its best to capture the correct exposure. It's still possible to select a combination that will result in an over or underexposed image. The camera will tell you that you've done this in a couple ways: The shutter speed will turn to red on the information display, and the EV bar will let you know how far over or underexposed that the shot will be. Pentax SLRs have had this feature for years, and it carried on to the Ricoh GR as TAv mode. Recent Nikon SLRs, including the D800 and D7100 have it as well.

There are some additional controls on the rear of the camera. There's a jog switch at the top?pressing it left or right will shift the aperture or shutter speed when shooting in program mode, but only if the ISO is set to a specific value. Pressing it in magnifies the live view frame, helpful for confirming focus. There's also an AEL/AFL button, a button to select the active autofocus point, one to enable macro shooting, another to control the flash output, and a button for white balance control. These last four are at each point of a four-way controller/control wheel that is used to navigate through menus and to move the active autofocus point.

To the left of the LCD you'll find controls to enter playback mode, change the metering pattern, select from continuous drive shooting options, and change between the rear LCD, eye-level finder, or activate an eye-sensor to make that changeover automatic; there's also a control button to the right of the rear LCD that changes how much information is overlaid over the optical finder and live view frame. Finally there's the Q button, in the rear right corner. It brings up a menu that allows you to change most of the settings that we've just listed off, as well as some that relate to the JPG output. These include the color balance (there are some film emulation modes that emulate classic Fuji emulsions like Velvia and Provia) as well as image sharpening and noise reduction, and the LCD brightness. This is also the quickest way to enable or disable the self-timer?you'll have to dive into the camera's main menu to do so if you don't utilize the Q function.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/rrPmI3O5ips/0,2817,2421099,00.asp

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Vine Update Adds Revines Which Are Like Retweets for Vines

In its biggest update yet, Vine is trying to beef up its isolated and popular service?people love Vine, but once you're in Vine, it's so lonely! The billboard new feature? "Revines", which are exactly what they sound like.

The newly updated iOS app now has 15 content channels that make browsing for stuff inside Vine easier. There are also new camera tools. Take that Instagram video. [Vine]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/in-its-biggest-update-since-launching-in-january-vine-661441196

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gdgt's best deals for July 3: RCA 55-inch LED HDTV, Canon EOS 60D

Ready to save some cash on your tech buys? Then you've come to the right place. Our sister site gdgt tracks price drops on thousands of products every day, and twice a week they feature some of the best deals they've found right here. But act fast! Many of these are limited-time offers, and won't last long.

Today's hottest deals include a 55-inch LED HDTV and Canon DSLR available at prices worthy of fireworks-like oohs and ahs. Want the latest deals delivered to your inbox? Join gdgt and add the gadgets you're shopping for to your "Want" list. Every time there's a price cut, you'll get an email alert!

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/07/03/gdgts-best-deals-for-july-3-rca-5/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget

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Glympse scores saving to Evernote on Android, iOS support coming soon

Sharing your location through Glympse has been a time-sensitive affair, with friends and family receiving links to maps that would plot your position for a few hours at most. Now, however, Glympse has partnered with Evernote to save records of your travels. Simply share your current location broadcast to Evernote and the complete trek will be saved to a "My Glympse Trails" folder. Android users are getting the first crack at the new feature starting today, but folks running the iOS app are set to receive the integration shortly. Check your handset for the update or click the bordering source link to grab ahold of the app.

Filed under: Cellphones, Internet, Software, Mobile

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Source: Glympse (GooglePlay)

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All the Google Products That Google Itself Has Killed Dead

Google is responsible for giving birth to tools that have changed the entire world: Google search, Gmail, Android and so forth. It should be celebrated! However, Google is also responsible for the death of many of its own products as it re-focuses its priorities: Google Labs, Google Reader and many other less celebrated Google products. It should be charged with murder!

Read more...

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/dpts1UDgCt4/all-the-google-products-that-google-itself-has-killed-d-665225668

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How the Army of the Future Will Share Battlefield Intelligence

Military technology doesn't simply spring forth fully formed from a DARPA engineer's head like some GI Athena. It requires extensive development cycles and field testing before it's put on the front lines. At this year's semi-annual Network Integration Evaluations (NIE) at the White Sands Missile Range, in New Mexico, Army researchers put a trio of technologies through their paces. Technologies that could radically alter how future wars are waged by delivering a more complete battlefield view to troops in the line of fire.

Read more...

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/rLmoOL6kon0/how-the-army-of-the-future-will-share-battlefield-intel-601950993

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New hardware design protects data in the cloud

Public release date: 2-Jul-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Andrew Carleen
acarleen@mit.edu
617-253-1682
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

A new hardware design makes data encryption more secure by disguising cloud servers' memory-access patterns

CAMBRIDGE, Mass -- Cloud computing -- outsourcing computational tasks over the Internet -- could give home-computer users unprecedented processing power and let small companies launch sophisticated Web services without building massive server farms.

But it also raises privacy concerns. A bank of cloud servers could be running applications for 1,000 customers at once; unbeknownst to the hosting service, one of those applications might have no purpose other than spying on the other 999.

Encryption could make cloud servers more secure. Only when the data is actually being processed would it be decrypted; the results of any computations would be re-encrypted before they're sent off-chip.

In the last 10 years or so, however, it's become clear that even when a computer is handling encrypted data, its memory-access patterns -- the frequency with which it stores and accesses data at different memory addresses can betray a shocking amount of private information.

At the International Symposium on Computer Architecture in June, MIT researchers described a new type of secure hardware component, dubbed Ascend, that would disguise a server's memory-access patterns, making it impossible for an attacker to infer anything about the data being stored. Ascend also thwarts another type of attack, known as a timing attack, which attempts to infer information from the amount of time that computations take.

Computational trade-off

Similar designs have been proposed in the past, but they've generally traded too much computational overhead for security. "This is the first time that any hardware design has been proposed -- it hasn't been built yet -- that would give you this level of security while only having about a factor of three or four overhead in performance," says Srini Devadas, the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, whose group developed the new system. "People would have thought it would be a factor of 100."

The "trivial way" of obscuring memory-access patterns, Devadas explains, would be to request data from every address in the memory -- whether a memory chip or a hard drive -- and throw out everything except the data stored at the one address of interest. But that would be much too time-consuming to be practical.

What Devadas and his collaborators -- graduate students Ling Ren, Xiangyao Yu and Christopher Fletcher, and research scientist Marten van Dijk do instead is to arrange memory addresses in a data structure known as a "tree." A family tree is a familiar example of a tree, in which each "node" (in this example, a person's name) is attached to only one node above it (the node representing the person's parents) but may connect to several nodes below it (the person's children).

With Ascend, addresses are assigned to nodes randomly. Every node lies along some "path," or route through the tree, that starts at the top and passes from node to node, without backtracking, until arriving at a node with no further connections. When the processor requires data from a particular address, it sends requests to all the addresses in a path that includes the one it's really after.

To prevent an attacker from inferring anything from sequences of memory access, every time Ascend accesses a particular memory address, it randomly swaps that address with one stored somewhere else in the tree. As a consequence, accessing a single address multiple times will very rarely require traversing the same path.

Less computation to disguise an address

By confining its dummy requests to a single path, rather than sending them to every address in memory, Ascend exponentially reduces the amount of computation required to disguise an address. In a separate paper, which is as-yet unpublished but has been posted online, the researchers prove that querying paths provides just as much security as querying every address in memory would.

Ascend also protects against timing attacks. Suppose that the computation being outsourced to the cloud is the mammoth task of comparing a surveillance photo of a criminal suspect to random photos on the Web. The surveillance photo itself would be encrypted, and thus secure from prying eyes. But spyware in the cloud could still deduce what public photos it was being compared to. And the time the comparisons take could indicate something about the source photos: Photos of obviously different people could be easy to rule out, but photos of very similar people might take longer to distinguish.

So Ascend's memory-access scheme has one final wrinkle: It sends requests to memory at regular intervals -- even when the processor is busy and requires no new data. That way, attackers can't tell how long any given computation is taking.

###

Written by Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office

---

[ | E-mail | Share ]

?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Public release date: 2-Jul-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Andrew Carleen
acarleen@mit.edu
617-253-1682
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

A new hardware design makes data encryption more secure by disguising cloud servers' memory-access patterns

CAMBRIDGE, Mass -- Cloud computing -- outsourcing computational tasks over the Internet -- could give home-computer users unprecedented processing power and let small companies launch sophisticated Web services without building massive server farms.

But it also raises privacy concerns. A bank of cloud servers could be running applications for 1,000 customers at once; unbeknownst to the hosting service, one of those applications might have no purpose other than spying on the other 999.

Encryption could make cloud servers more secure. Only when the data is actually being processed would it be decrypted; the results of any computations would be re-encrypted before they're sent off-chip.

In the last 10 years or so, however, it's become clear that even when a computer is handling encrypted data, its memory-access patterns -- the frequency with which it stores and accesses data at different memory addresses can betray a shocking amount of private information.

At the International Symposium on Computer Architecture in June, MIT researchers described a new type of secure hardware component, dubbed Ascend, that would disguise a server's memory-access patterns, making it impossible for an attacker to infer anything about the data being stored. Ascend also thwarts another type of attack, known as a timing attack, which attempts to infer information from the amount of time that computations take.

Computational trade-off

Similar designs have been proposed in the past, but they've generally traded too much computational overhead for security. "This is the first time that any hardware design has been proposed -- it hasn't been built yet -- that would give you this level of security while only having about a factor of three or four overhead in performance," says Srini Devadas, the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, whose group developed the new system. "People would have thought it would be a factor of 100."

The "trivial way" of obscuring memory-access patterns, Devadas explains, would be to request data from every address in the memory -- whether a memory chip or a hard drive -- and throw out everything except the data stored at the one address of interest. But that would be much too time-consuming to be practical.

What Devadas and his collaborators -- graduate students Ling Ren, Xiangyao Yu and Christopher Fletcher, and research scientist Marten van Dijk do instead is to arrange memory addresses in a data structure known as a "tree." A family tree is a familiar example of a tree, in which each "node" (in this example, a person's name) is attached to only one node above it (the node representing the person's parents) but may connect to several nodes below it (the person's children).

With Ascend, addresses are assigned to nodes randomly. Every node lies along some "path," or route through the tree, that starts at the top and passes from node to node, without backtracking, until arriving at a node with no further connections. When the processor requires data from a particular address, it sends requests to all the addresses in a path that includes the one it's really after.

To prevent an attacker from inferring anything from sequences of memory access, every time Ascend accesses a particular memory address, it randomly swaps that address with one stored somewhere else in the tree. As a consequence, accessing a single address multiple times will very rarely require traversing the same path.

Less computation to disguise an address

By confining its dummy requests to a single path, rather than sending them to every address in memory, Ascend exponentially reduces the amount of computation required to disguise an address. In a separate paper, which is as-yet unpublished but has been posted online, the researchers prove that querying paths provides just as much security as querying every address in memory would.

Ascend also protects against timing attacks. Suppose that the computation being outsourced to the cloud is the mammoth task of comparing a surveillance photo of a criminal suspect to random photos on the Web. The surveillance photo itself would be encrypted, and thus secure from prying eyes. But spyware in the cloud could still deduce what public photos it was being compared to. And the time the comparisons take could indicate something about the source photos: Photos of obviously different people could be easy to rule out, but photos of very similar people might take longer to distinguish.

So Ascend's memory-access scheme has one final wrinkle: It sends requests to memory at regular intervals -- even when the processor is busy and requires no new data. That way, attackers can't tell how long any given computation is taking.

###

Written by Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office

---

[ | E-mail | Share ]

?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-07/miot-nhd070213.php

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