Raspberry Pi 3 - New $35 Micro Computer now with Built-in Bluetooth & WiFi

While celebrating its computer's fourth birthday, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has launched a brand new Raspberry Pi today.

Great news for all Micro-computing fans – A new, powerful Raspberry Pi 3 Model B in town.

Months after introducing just $5 Raspberry Pi Zero, Raspberry Pi Foundation has introduced its third major version of the Raspberry Pi, the successor of the Raspberry Pi 2 that was launched back in February last year.

The Raspberry Pi is a highly simple computer that looks and feels very basic, but could be built into a number of geeky projects. Due to its low-cost appeal, the Raspberry Pi has become the most popular computer yet with 8 Million units already sold.

Raspberry Pi 3 — Built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth

Although previous versions of Raspberry Pi needed USB adapters to get Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, credit card-sized Raspberry Pi 3 Model B has built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity.

The new version of the Pi supports 802.11n Wi-Fi (2.4GHz only) and Bluetooth 4.1, freeing up its four USB ports for other purposes.

The Raspberry Pi 3 is also getting a speed jump from a 32-bit processor, 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex A7, to a faster 64-bit processor, quad-core 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A53 CPU.

The new Raspberry Pi is expected to give 50 percent faster performance than the previous version due to architectural improvements and increase in clock speeds, says Eben Upton, CEO of Raspberry Pi.

At a launch event today the Raspberry Pi Foundation said it has worked closely with Microsoft to ensure full compatibility between the new Pi 3 board and Windows 10 IoT.

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B: The $35 MicroComputer

The Raspberry Pi 3 is still just $35, but might be the biggest when looking at its specifications:

• 1.2GHz Quad-Core Broadcom BCM2387 ARM Cortex-A53 processor
• Graphics upgrade from 250MHz to 400MHz Dual Core VideoCore IV GPU
• 802.11n Wi-Fi
• Bluetooth 4.1 (Bluetooth Classic and LE)
• Support 1080p video at 60fps using the H.264 format, up from 30fps
• 1GB RAM (same as the previous version)
• MicroSD Card Slot
• Operating System: Operating System Boots from Micro SD card, running a version of the Linux operating system or Windows 10 IoT
• Ethernet connectivity remains at 100Mbps
• Requires a 2.5A input power
• Video Output: HDMI (rev 1.3 & 1.4, Composite RCA (PAL and NTSC)
• Audio Output: 3.5mm jack, HDMI, USB 4 x USB 2.0

The all-new and powerful version of Raspberry Pi 3 brings a host of new hardware that makes it a much more powerful computer.

The Raspberry Pi 3 costs $35/£30 only (nearly Rs. 2,400), same as the Raspberry Pi 2 and is available for sale from its partners Element14 and RS Components.

The company said it will also introduce a Raspberry Pi BCM2837-based Compute Module 3, an even smaller board designed for industrial applications, in the next few months. The Compute Module won't include any WiFi connectivity, but will have the same 1.2GHz Cortex A53 processor and 1GB RAM as the Raspberry Pi 3.

Facebook Enhances Everyone’s Like With Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, Angry Buttons

Humanity has been boiled down to six emotions. Today after tests in a few countries, Facebook is rolling out its augmented Like button “Reactions” to all users.

This article has been boiled down to six emotions too.

Like – Facebook designed Reactions so Liking is still as easy ever. You’ll see the Like button on every post, but now if you tap and hold on it (or hover on desktop), the Like will expand to reveal the other emotions: Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry. Drag your finger across and you can select one.

Now instead of a Like count, posts will display the total Reaction count, and show the icons of the most popular Reactions. This way, Facebook doesn’t have to clutter the feed with individual counts of each emotion. If you do want to know the breakdown, you can tap the Reaction count and see who felt what.

This design is smart because if you don’t want to use Reactions, you don’t have to, and there aren’t six buttons on every post.

Love – Reactions were created after Mark Zuckerberg told his team “I want to really make it easy for people to give other types of feedback than the Like button in News Feed” according to News Feed engineering manager Tom Alison. Sometimes when a friend shares a post about a tragedy or something that annoys them, it doesn’t feel right to Like it, and commenting can be awkward, but you still want to express empathy.

For example, if something sad happens to a friend, Liking isn’t right, but adding a generic “sorry” comment can feel cold. By hitting the animated Sad button, you can express your condolences and solidarity. With any luck, this will encourage people to be more vulnerable on Facebook. Instead of the constant Success Theater where people only share the highlights of their lives, they might be more real with their friends.

Wow – By adding Reactions, Facebook will now have a much more accurate perception of what we feel and what kind of posts resonate with each of us. It could eventually use that knowledge to better filter the News Feed to show more things that Wow us.

Facebook writes “if someone uses a Reaction, we will infer they want to see more of that type of post. In the beginning, it won’t matter if someone likes, “wows” or “sads” a post. Over time we hope to learn how the different Reactions should be weighted differently by News Feed to do a better job of showing everyone the stories they most want to see.”

Eventually, if you enjoy getting your blood pumping, it could show you more posts that stir up Angry reactions. Or if you’re addicted to cute cats, it could surface more Loveable pet photos.

Haha – We comment “Lol” on so many posts that Facebook thought there could be a simpler way. To design Reactions, it looked at the most common one-word comments and stickers used on News Feed posts, grouped them together, and found that these six emoji capture almost every way people feel across cultures.

By standardizing emotions, Facebook could make it easier for people to connect across language barriers. I might know enough Spanish to read a friend’s post, but not how to comment with any kind of complexity. Now I can leave a Reaction, and be confident they understand what I mean.

Sad – Facebook seems to have blatantly copied Path’s design for the expandable Like button with extra emotions, yet refused to acknowledge the fellow social network as an inspiration when I asked.

Facebook has always been cavalier about poaching ideas from others, all the way back to the social network’s origin at Harvard. More recently it’s taken to mimicking Twitter’s real-time and trending features, and Snapchat’s ephemerality and content capturing with apps like Poke and Slingshot.

Sometimes there’s just a Right way to design something, and it’s hard to build it differently once you’ve seen it. But tech companies can’t seem to just accept the idea of influences, and no one ever wants to admit they were inspired by someone else.

Angry – There’s still no “Dislike” button, and that’s sure to piss some people off.

Here is how to use it

How Samsung plans to keep the Galaxy S7 cool

As hardware makers cram more power into smartphones, the heat produced by the CPU and GPU becomes more of a problem. Samsung hopes to address this issue with the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge by using liquid cooling. 

"Whoa, liquid cooling?" I hear you scream at your screens. "Doesn't that mean pipes and radiators and water and so on?"
The sort of liquid cooling we're talking about here isn't like the liquid cooling systems that performance gamers use to cool their PCs. Instead, what we're talking about here is a closed-loop heat pipe technology.

There's still a liquid involved, but only a drop, and this is safely held inside metal tubes that are made of copper or aluminum. The liquid, which in this case is probably water or ethylene glycol, passes over an evaporator where it is exposed to the heat of the CPU of GPU. Here it is turned into a gas, and this vapor then makes its way along tiny tubes to a diffusion plate or radiator, where the heat is given off and the vapor turns back into a liquid and then makes its way back to the evaporator.

Note that the diffusion plate doesn't feature a fan or such, and there are no pumps inside the heat pipe moving the liquid and vapor about. It's a purely passive device, and its purpose is to take the heat from the CPU and GPU and dissipate it over a larger area, preventing the formation of hot-spots, and hopefully putting an end to overheating (which was a problem that Qualcomm had with the Snapdragon 810).

All of this sounds big and clumsy, but it isn't. Fujitsu has a heat pipe system designed specifically for smartphones where the pipes are only 0.1mm thick, and the evaporator and diffusion plates are only 0.6mm and 1.0mm thick, respectively

And the Samsung Galaxy S7 isn't the first smartphone to feature liquid cooling. Microsoft's Lumia 950 and Lumia 950xl both use liquid cooling. Sony's use of the technology goes further back, to the Xperia X2, which was released in March of 2014.

Why use liquid cooling? It's probably being used for a number of reasons. First, Qualcomm had problems with the Snapdragon 810 overheating, a problem that resulted in Samsung passing up on the chip for the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge. The liquid cooling would certainly help to prevent this issue from happening again.

Another reason is that smartphone makers are using more and more glass in their smartphones. Because glass is a poor conductor of heat, hot spots can form on the device, and even if the back is metal, these hot spots can make the device uncomfortable to hold when it's running demanding apps.

Also, let's not forget that "liquid cooled" looks good on the sales material. I have little doubt that by this time next year, every major smartphone manufacturer (with the exception of Apple) will be touting liquid cooling as a feature on high-end devices.

Warning ! Linux Mint Website Hacked & ISO replaced with Backdoored Operating System

Are you also the one who downloaded Linux Mint on February 20th? You may have been Infected!

Linux Mint is one of the best and popular Linux distros available today, but if you have downloaded and installed the operating system recently you might have done so using a malicious ISO image.

Here's why:

Last night, Some unknown hacker or group of hackers had managed to hack into the Linux Mint website and replaced the download links on the site that pointed to one of their servers offering a malicious ISO images for the Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon Edition.

"Hackers made a modified Linux Mint ISO, with a backdoor in it, and managed to hack our website to point to it," the head of Linux Mint project Clement Lefebvre said in a surprising announcementdated February 21, 2016.

Who are affected?

As far as the Linux Mint team knows, the issue only affects the one edition, and that is Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon edition.

The situation happened last night, so the issue only impacts people who downloaded the above-mentioned version of Linux Mint on February 20th.

However, if you have downloaded the Cinnamon edition or release before Saturday 20th, February, the issue does not affect you. Even if you downloaded a different edition including Mint 17.3 Cinnamon via Torrent or direct HTTP link, this does not affect you either.

What had Happened?

Hackers believed to have accessed the underlying server via the team's WordPress blog and then got shell access to www-data.

From there, the hackers manipulated the Linux Mint download page and pointed it to a malicious FTP (File Transfer Protocol) server hosted in Bulgaria (IP: 5.104.175.212), the investigative team discovered.

The infected Linux ISO images installed the complete OS with the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) backdoor Tsunami, giving the attackers access to the system via IRC servers.

Tsunami is a well-known Linux ELF trojan that is a simple IRC bot used for launching Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

Hackers vs. Linux Mint SysAdmins

However, the Linux Mint team managed to discover the hack, cleaned up the links from their website quickly, announced the data breach on their official blog, and then it appears that the hackers compromised its download page again.

Knowing that it has failed to eliminate the exact point of entry of hackers, the Linux Mint team took the entire linuxmint.com domain offline to prevent the ISO images from spreading to its users.

The Linux Mint official website is currently offline until the team investigates the issue entirely. However, the hackers' motive behind the hack is not clear yet.

"What we don't know is the motivation behind this attack. If more efforts are made to attack our project and if the goal is to hurt us, we’ll get in touch with authorities and security firms to confront the people behind this," Lefebvre added.

Hackers Selling Linux Mint Website's Database

The hackers are selling the Linux Mint full website's database for a just $85, which shows a sign of their lack of knowledge.

The hack seems to be a work of some script kiddies or an inexperienced group as they opted to infect a top-shelf Linux distro with a silly IRC bot that is considered to be outdated in early 2010. Instead, they would have used more dangerous malware like Banking Trojans.

Also, even after the hack was initially discovered, the hackers re-compromised the site, which again shows the hackers' lack of experience.

Here's How to Protect your Linux Machine

Users with the ISO image can check its signature in an effort to make sure it is valid. 

To check for an infected download, you can compare the MD5 signature with the official versions, included in Lefebvre's blog post.

If found infected, users are advised to follow these steps:

• Take the computer offline.
• Backup all your personal data.
• Reinstall the operating system (with a clean ISO) or format the partition.
• Change passwords for sensitive websites and emails.

You can read full detail about the hack here. The official website is not accessible at the time of writing. We’ll update the story when we hear more.

Linux Foundation Introduces "Zephyr", a tiny OS for Internet Of Things

The 21st century is witnessing a great change over in the daily life of folks with the advent of IoT devices that are capable of talking to each other without any human intervention.

Yeah! Now you do not have to individually cascade an instruction to each of your home devices to accomplish a task. All have gone automated with the actuators and sensors which are infused into the home appliances.

The fact is that your IoT devices would only comply within the family of same manufacturers. For example, if you have a Samsung smart refrigerator, and your wearable device is from Apple or any other vendors, then it couldn't sync as both are from different genres.

No need to worry now!

Zephyr: Future of IoTs

The Linux Foundation has broken all the barriers of compatibility issues by releasing a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) for Internet of Things devices, dubbed "Zephyr". This OS enables connected devices to communicate with the same protocol.

So, no more digital barricades between your thermostat and your wearable devices, as they could communicate with each other using the same protocols.

The Zephyr project is supported by multiple platforms like NXP Semiconductors, Synopsys, and UbiquiOS Technology and is licensed under Apache 2.0.

Why is Zephyr so important?

Zephyr stands out from the crowd as it provides a scalable, customizable, secure and open source operating system to be used across multiple architectures.

Doing so, Zephyr could help solve many of the current limitations that prevent, so far, Internet of Things from becoming really mainstream.

Zephyr is expected to take the best of both sides: low-consumption as well as speed. 

Here's some key points about Zephyr:

• Scalability: Universality of Interconnected devices
• Umbrella Platform: All smart devices could run under a single roof.
• Baby Footprint Kernel: Zephyr kernel can run on 8kb memory devices
• Modularity: Supports to integrate 3rd party modules for additional functions as intended by the developer.
• Licensing: As startups does not have to bother about any licensing clash, as a unique license file would be mailed to everyone.

Apart from the special features, Zephyr also supports technologies including Bluetooth, Bluetooth Low Energy, IEEE 802.15.4, 6Lowpan, CoAP, IPv4 and IPv6, NFC, Arduino 101, Arduino Due, Intel Galileo' Gen 2, and NXP FRDM-K64F Freedom board.

Security in Mind

Since connected devices are most hack prone items, these devices may malfunction when gets compromised.

However, Linux is more concerned about the Security of Individuals, and generally open source software is considered more secure, as anyone can inspect flaws and debug the code.

For this, the Linux Foundation is maintaining a dedicated security working group and a delegated security maintainer to be available through IRC Chats, so that anyone could help report the vulnerabilities in open discussions.

Although there are many other alternatives available for Internet of Things RTOS like Brillo from Google, Rocket from Intel, and Ubuntu Core from Canonicals, nothing would be as fascinating as Zephyr.