Leave Us Alone, MMM Founder, Sergey Mavrodi Writes Nigerian Bloggers, Journalists | Punch

Irked by what he described as bad press against the wonder-bank, Mavrodi Mundial Movement, MMM, its founder, Sergey Mavrodi, has written an open letter to Nigerian journalists, “analysts” and all kinds of “experts” who according to him are guilty of causing unnecessary panic and tension among MMM participants in the country.

Sergey Mavrodi of inventor MMM Mavrodi who expressed his disappointed about the way MMM is being painted in the media, said emphatically that “MMM will be back in January” while stating that the rumour about the scheme collapse should stop. Mavrodi’s open letter is coming after a one-month freezing of confirmed “Mavros” notice was sent to MMM Nigeria participants on Dec 12, 2016.

Sergey Mavrodi went ahead to describe articles from Nigerians journalists and bloggers as “provocative and worthless.” His statement read: “Dear journalists, “analysts” and all kinds of “experts”! Please stop using MMM to gain cheap popularity.

Leave us alone and let us work without interference. I’m just astonished by your irresponsibility and cynical attitude.

Interests of millions of people, your fellow citizens are at stake.

Don’t you have any sympathy for them? Why are you fueling hysteria around MMM and provoking a panic? Why are you doing this so diligently and persistently, what is your purpose? “In fact, absolutely all your provocative and worthless articles and “analyses” (I said “worthless” because you do not have any real information about what happens in the System, and might have never had; you simply invent everything, fabricate it) are merely negative:

“MMM has collapsed!!!.. MMM will not be working in January!!!..” etc.

“Are you intentionally presenting all of it in such a manner and whipping up tension by any means possible in order to increase the ratings of your publications and attract attention to them? Don’t you care about people at all? “So, nothing has collapsed, and MMM will safely resume its work in January, as announced. Suspension of work for holidays is a usual thing, merely working moment, no more than that.

It would have remained a normal, just a part of the usual routine, and might have gone almost unnoticed if it were not for your totally cynical and irresponsible attempts to advertise yourself, create a scandal out of nowhere, and make the most of this news topic in any possible way. “Again, leave MMM alone and let us work.

Nothing has collapsed, and MMM will perfectly resume its work in January. We Can Change the World!”

Will Donald Trump lose out on being president of the US after today's Electoral college votes?

For Anti-Trump supporters, there is still some glimmer of hope that president-elect Donald Trump won't be sworn in as president of the United States come January 2017 due to today's Electoral College votes.
In the recently concluded U.S Presidential election, Trump won the electoral college votes, defeating Clinton in major states, while Clinton won the popular votes, amassing over 2 million votes than her rival.
There's a possibility, though slim, that Trump won't be president if electors in the elctoral college vote decide to vote against the victor and vote against their states' results.
Read the interesting article by CNN.com after the cut.
The 538 members of the Electoral College are set on Monday to make President-elect Donald Trump's victory official.
In all 50 state capitals and the District of Columbia, electors -- chosen by the state parties of the candidate who carried their state, Trump or Hillary Clinton -- will meet to cast their ballots. The gatherings will remove the last bit of drama from 2016's unprecedented election season -- and post-election efforts to persuade Republican electors to vote against Trump, in some cases in violation of state laws requiring electors to support the victor.
Heightening the tension in recent weeks: Clinton actually won the popular vote by about 3 million -- making Trump the worst-performing winner in the popular vote since 1876.
Trump's victory is not, as he has described it, a landslide. He is expected to garner just 56.9% of the electoral vote, assuming all electors vote according to their states' results. That will give Trump the 44th-largest share of the electoral vote out of 54 presidential elections since the modern system started in 1804.
It's a better performance, though, than President George W. Bush's razor-tight victory in 2000 and slightly larger win in 2004.
Bush, too, lost the popular vote -- but Trump lost by a larger margin. He will become the worst-performing president in the popular vote relative to his closest rival aside from Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 and John Quincy Adams in 1824, an election that featured four candidates and was decided by the House of Representatives.
Clinton won 48.2% of the vote to Trump's 46.2% -- a lead of more than 2.8 million votes and more than 2% as of Friday, with that lead expected to grow as the final ballots are tallied.
There's no national meeting of the Electoral College. Instead, electors gather in each state -- usually in the Capitol.

Under federal law, though, electors must gather on December 19. And each elector must sign six copies certifying their votes for president and vice president.
Two ballots go to the National Archives. One goes to the president of the Senate. Two go to their state's chief elections officer. And one goes to a local judge.
After Monday's votes, there is still one last step: On January 6, Congress has to officially count the electoral votes. Vice President Joe Biden will preside over the count.

Lawmakers can technically object -- in writing, with objections signed by at least one House and one Senate member -- to individual electoral votes or entire states' results. If the House and Senate support that objection, the vote or votes in question are thrown out. But that has never happened.

After the votes are counted, the results are final, and Trump is officially set for his inauguration at noon onJanuary 20.

The world’s biggest SSD has arrived: 13TB

Flash storage company Fixstars has decided to shatter all previous flash storage records. The company’s new pair of SSD drives clock in at 10TB and 13TB respectively — larger than the largest spinning disks (Seagate just announced 8TB and 10TB hard drives).


This is the first time, to my knowledge, that we’ve seen a flash storage manufacturer beat traditional spinning disks in terms of absolute storage capacity — but that capability comes at a premium. First, as Fixstars own benchmarks illustrate, the company’s hardware favors steady performance over maximum speed.


These drives aren’t intended for consumers. Fixstars has previously stated that it optimizes its drives for sequential read/write workloads, including object storage, streaming content distribution, CG/VFX production, and video processing. The price tag on the drive further drives (badump-ching) that point home — at $19,000 for the 13TB version, this drive isn’t coming cheap. The total cost works out to about $1.46 per GB — far higher than the current cost of a conventional drive.

On the other hand, this is a 2.5-inch SSD with 13TB of data storage. Some premium is to be expected, given that it’s no trivial task to combine, test, and validate that much NAND per drive. The Fixstars 13000M uses a specialized disk controller designed by the company and 15nm Toshiba MLC NAND memory. Sequential speed is listed as 580MB/s, sequential write is 540MB/s. Power consumption is 3W at idle and up to 6.5W under load.

Finally, while this is technically a 2.5-inch drive, it’s got a 15mm height on it. You won’t be plugging it into a laptop anytime soon. Fixstars primary focus is in software development; the company offered the first CUDA-optimized Linux OS way back in 2010. Many of its current products focus on optimizing multi-core software or development environments that simplify programming for heterogeneous architectures.

Despite the recent advent of 3D NAND flash memory, we don’t expect to see consumer drives hitting these kinds of capacities in the near future. A $19,000 price point is still an achievement in the grand scheme of things, but NAND flash prices would need to fall to between 7-8 cents per GB for this drive to cost under $1,000. 3D NAND isn’t expected to drive costs that low, at least not any time in the near future.

New Smart Cam Can Distinguish Between Cats, Cat Burglars and Cars

Netatmo on Monday announced a smart security camera and floodlight combo at CES 2016.
The Presence camera is designed for outdoor use and can identify objects such as people, animals and vehicles.

The camera, which connects to a rectangular floodlight, can be customized to send alerts to a smartphone app or desktop browser based on what it sees and where it sees it.
For example, it could be customized to ignore cars that pass by a home but send an alert when a vehicle enters the driveway.
All video the camera captures is stored locally on a standard SD card. That means no monthly cloud storage costs or fees for a homeowner who wants to see the camera feed after receiving an alert.
Bankrupt Model
"Not paying a monthly fee is a really big deal for us," said Netatmo COO Matthew Broadway. "We think it's a bankrupt model to sell people a product and then pay for that product over and over again through subscription fees."

By storing the camera's video locally, the company also avoids privacy issues that could arise when video is stored in a cloud run by a third party, he told TechNewsWorld.
"We decided to stay clear of that," Broadway said. "We store all the video on the camera itself and tell the user, 'It's your video. You keep it. We don't want to touch it.'"

With on-camera storage, of course, there's always the chance that the storage card will be stolen. However, all video on the SD card is encrypted with bank-level security, he noted. In addition, it can be viewed only in the camera with which the video was shot or the individual smartphone paired to it.

If users are worried about losing the video on a card, they can set up a server and mirror there what's captured on the card.

DIY Market

Broadway expects Presence to be popular among do-it-yourself homeowners.

"I think DIY will be a big thing for us," he said.

"If you have a floodlight already on your property, you can simply take that off and put our camera in its place, and you get a camera and a floodlight in one," Broadway continued.
The trend toward DIY monitoring is growing, noted Blake Kozak, a principal analyst at IHS Technology.

"A lot of end users are a bit tired of the monthly payments for professional monitoring services," he told TechNewsWorld. "They're looking for alternatives."
Not First Rodeo

When the floodlight is off at night, the camera uses infrared technology to detect objects.
Since the unit is designed as a floodlight replacement, it requires AC power.

"Batteries sound great, but in any product that has batteries, it's always the batteries that go wrong first," Netatmo's Broadway said.

Presence isn't Netatmo's first smart camera. At last year's CES, it introduced Welcome, a sub-US$200 indoor camera that uses facial recognition to identify people who appear within the unit's purview. There have been reports of slow performance in recognizing faces, which may be why that tech was omitted from Presence.

Hack Lets PS4 Run Linux

HAcking team fail0verflow last week demonstrated a hack of Sony's PlayStation 4 game console that allows anyone running the modification to run the Linux OS on the appliance.

The demo was part of a lightning talk session at the 32nd Chaos Communication Congress.

The hackers used exploits in FreeBSD, PS4's operating system and WebKit, which powers the game console's browser.

Both the OS and browser are open source and vulnerable to security exploits, according to Marcan, a member of failOverflow. The PlayStation 4 is based on the x86 architecture.

The ability to run a modification "was the way to go for the PS4," said Marcan.

The hacking team isn't interested in piracy or free games from the exploit. Those who are can "write an exploit, point it to our loader and you'll get Linux," Marcan added. The team will help those who are interested to "get it hooked up/debugged if needed," but those who want free games should "go away."

The hack will be a nuisance that Sony engineers will likely block to ensure no additional threats to its ecosystem and network.

No harm will come to the hardware though. The only threat is just to Sony's security risk," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.

"There is no upside for Sony to allow it. I expect Sony will do everything it can to shut it down," Enderle told LinuxInsider.

Hacking Details

The code is in a raw state, with some components not releasable. Some of it was reverse engineered from Sony modifications to FreeBSD and needs to be rewritten and cleaned up, according to the hacking team.

Its goal is to get the patches upstreamed in the Linux kernel, but that process will take time. In the meantime, failOverflow members have opened a work-in-progress repository to share contributions as soon as is practical.

The group does not plan to release exploits, but it expects that other people will, according to Marcan.

Blocking Attempts

Sony, which declined to comment on the situation, may have no choice but to prevent all clandestine activity involving running Linux on its game console.

"The problem with allowing any other operating system to run on your equipment is that you can break things whenever you patch your system. Then users get angry when something does not work," said Enderle.

Given all the breaches taking place, companies really don't want another operating system running that they don't control, he said. Permitting that could allow access to Sony's network if somebody breached an appliance and followed it upstream.

"Plus, the PS4 was never designed to be a PC. You have to ask, why do the hack?" Enderle said, suggesting that the intention might be to cheat the system or do something nefarious.

CES 2016: Hand-on with LG's roll-up flexible screen

If you're in the business of making TV cabinets - look away now.

For the rest of you, feast your eyes on a remarkable innovation-in-progress.

LG Display has been working on its fully flexible screen for some time now, but it's at this year's CES the BBC was given the exclusive first hands-on.

The screen can be rolled up and scrunched around, and the display is full HD.

The one I played with was 18in (45.7cm) corner to corner, but the team at LG say they're aiming for screens that are 55in and beyond.

At that size they will be able to produce a screen quality of 4K, they say - that's four times HD.

Right now, the resolution is 1,200 by 810 pixels.

How did they do it? Of course they wouldn't share the precise details, but the crucial technological leap has been moving from LED TVs to OLED TVs.

The O stands for organic, and it removes the necessity of a back panel providing light to the screen. Therefore, it bends.

Why would you want a bendable TV? LG says it's ideal for making displays, like in a shop, but also for people who no longer want to sacrifice an entire corner of a room to a television.

With a bendable screen like this, you can roll it up and pop it in a cupboard until you need it again.
Dead pixels

Unfortunately - and you knew this bit was coming - LG isn't able to say how much it would eventually cost, or indeed, when it will actually be sold at all. At the moment, the team is buried in the prototype stage.

"The larger prototype is expected in the near future. But as for a commercial product, we're still planning the timing," says KJ Kim, LG Display's vice president of its marketing division.

That can be translated as it'll be a while yet.

Because while the screen is remarkable, it suffers a few flaws.

The night-time demo we saw, with quick flashing lights, was designed to conceal the numerous "dead" pixels in the display.

Dead pixels are those that have been damaged, so instead of emitting the correct colour just get appear as a tiny empty square.

There were several dead pixels on the screen and, after I played around with it a bit more, several more emerged.

Right now, the screen can only be rolled up in one direction, which isn't a limitation, really, but something they will need to suss out before it comes to market.

Also, it's crucial to point out that the screen can be rolled, but not folded.

Folding would permanently damage it, and therefore the screen doesn't represent a chance for something many have lusted over for a while, an interactive video newspaper that feels just like the paper product.

But we're getting there.

BlackBerry Sees the Android Light

   BackBerry on Friday announced that it would introduce an Android smartphone later this year.The announcement came during the company's Q2 earnings call. The device will be known as the "Priv" and will be built around user privacy, said CEO John Chen.

"Priv combines the best of BlackBerry security and productivity with the expansive mobile application ecosystem available on the Android platform," he added.

Short on Details

BlackBerry didn't offer any specifics about the Priv beyond the name -- nothing about pricing, U.S. carrier partners or any handset specs. However, rumors have been abundant since earlier this year, when the company unveiled a slider phone at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, Spain.

The Priv could feature a slide-out keyboard. It could be powered by a 1.8-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor and offer 3 GB of RAM. It might have a 5.4-inch screen with 2560x1440 resolution, and 18mp rear-facing and 5mp front-facing cameras.

What is clear is that the new device will move BlackBerry much closer to the Android ecosystem.

"It is Android with BlackBerry on top," said Ramon Llamas, research manager for wearables and mobile phones at IDC.

It has the "BlackBerry" name, so users can be assured it won't stray away from network and security roots, he told the E-Commerce Times."It could bring Google users to he secure platform, while providing the 1.5 million apps to BlackBerry in the process.

BlackBerry's Own Flavor

Handset makers favor Android because it's open source, and they can tweak it to give their devices distinguishing features. BlackBerry likely will do that with its Priv as well, so that even though it will run Android, it will have functionality that's unique to BlackBerry devices.

"BlackBerry has leveraged the Android OS infrastructure since the launch of BlackBerry 10. That offered compatibility with some Android apps," said Ian Fogg, head of the mobile and telecoms team at IHS Technology.

"What it lacked was full support for the Google Play services, and what is striking about Priv is that it will run a flavor of Android that leverages the full ecosystem of Android," he told the E-Commerce Times.

It also could be a more secure device, Fogg added.

This is an opportunity for someone to create that truly secure phone running Android, but how much security it will offer is something we won't know until it ships," explained Fogg.
BlackBerry 10 Lives On

BlackBerry was quick to point out that it isn't abandoning its own operating system. It will launch the next update for BlackBerry 10 -- version 10.3.3 -- by March.

The move to Android will require the company to take on a two-platform support strategy, but it could gain support among app developers.

"BlackBerry had a come-to-Jesus moment and realized that it simply doesn't have the customer base for enough developers to justify developing for BB10," said Roger Entner, principal analyst at Recon Analytics.

"Size matters, and Android's got size," he told the E-Commerce Times. "If the product has the same enterprise credentials as the BB10 device, then IT departments won't care."


Duality of BlackBerry

Even though Chen has pledged continued support for BB10, the company would have to succeed where many others have failed if it really were intent on pursuing a multiplatform strategy.

"History has never been kind to those companies that have had multiplatform plans," suggested Llamas.

The investments and efforts required are not insignificant, he noted. Each platform requires a dedicated team to keep it up and running.

Mark Zuckerberg to build AI to help at home and work

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has said he plans to build artificial intelligence (AI) to help him around the house and with his work.

In a Facebook post, he said his personal challenge this year would be to build a "simple AI" like Jarvis from Hollywood blockbuster film Iron Man, referring to the AI butler.

Mr Zuckerberg plans to share his progress over the course of the year.

Last month, he made headlines for plans to donate 99% of his stake in Facebook.

He had to defend his philanthropic venture -launched to celebrate the birth of his daughter- after critics argued that it could provide a way for the founder to avoid paying tax on the sale of his shares.
'Control everything'

On Monday, Mr Zuckerberg said he would start to build the AI with technology that is already out there and teach it to understand his voice to control everything in his home from music and lights to temperature.

"This should be a fun intellectual challenge to code this for myself," Mr Zuckerberg said.

"I'll teach it to let friends in by looking at their faces when they ring the doorbell," he said. "I'll teach it to let me know if anything is going on in Max's (his daughter's) room that I need to check on when I'm not with her."

For Facebook, he added that the system would help him visualize data in virtual reality and help him build better services, as well as lead his company.

His announcement comes as Facebook is in the midst of AI initiatives such as building an assistant through its Messenger app for users.

The tech billionaire said a part of the motivation behind this year's challenge was the reward of building things yourself.

His previous personal challenges have included learning Mandarin, reading two books a month and meeting a new person everyday, he said.

Backspace Flaw Enables Linux Zero-Day Attack

Researchers last week revealed a zero-day flaw that lets attackers take over a Linux system by pressing the backspace key repeatedly.

Pressing backspace 17 to 20 times will overwrite the highest byte of the return address of the grub_memset() function, ultimately causing a reboot by redirecting control flow to the 0x00eb53e8 address, according to theCybersecurity Group at the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia.

The flaw is in Grub v 1.98 and later. Grub is the bootloader used by most Linux systems, including some embedded systems

Why the Attack Works

The processor's interrupt vector table, or IVT, resides at address 0x0.

At this stage of the boot sequence, the processor is in protected mode, which Grub2 enables from the start.

Virtual memory is not enabled; there is no memory protection and the memory is readable, writable and executable; the processor executes the 32-bit instruction set even in 64-bit architectures; the processor automatically handles self-modifying code; and there is no stack smashing protector or address space layout randomization.

In other words, the system is naked.

The integer underflow fault impacts both the grub_password_get() function and the grub_username_get() function.

Pressing the Backspace key 28 times when Grub asks for the username will show whether a system is at risk.

If the machine reboots or a rescue shell is displayed, it is.


The Danger of the Flaw

Attackers can access the Grub2 rescue function without authentication. Then they can deploy malware into a system through various means, including running a BASH shell, or they can patch the code of Grub2 in RAM to be always authenticated and then return to normal mode.

They can elevate privileges to whatever extent they desire or copy the entire disk; destroy any data, including the Grub; or overwrite ciphered disks, causing a denial-of-service attack.

The bug can be fixed by preventing cur_len overflows. Major Linux vendors -- Red Hat, Ubuntu and Debian -- have fixed the flaw, and the researchers have created an emergency patch.

Much has been made of the relative security of Linux systems compared to Microsoft PCs, but this flaw shows Linux users "have to be at least as observant and reactive as everyone else," observed Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the

Google plans to remove Oracle’s Java APIs from Android N

You can’t develop the world’s top mobile operating system without getting into a few legal tussles. Google has been embroiled in a complex lawsuit with Oracle over the Java programming language since 2010. The case centers on whether or not Google infringed on Oracle’s copyright when it copied sections of the Java APIs in Android. Now, Google has confirmed that it will be doing away with all the standard Java APIs in the next version of Android. Instead, it will use only the open source OpenJDK.

The ongoing battle between Oracle and Google has been messy, to say the least. It all goes back to the way Java APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are used in Android. If you want programs to communicate with each other, you need an API, andOracle thinks it should be able to copyright those. Computer scientists tend to disagree because APIs are essential for interoperability.

Android apps are mostly written in Java, then compiled by the operating system to native code and run. The part of the system that handles this used to be known as Dalvik virtual machine, but has since been replaced by the more efficient ART (Android Runtime). Most of the code in Google’s VM is original (Google says it’s about 97%), but it still uses Oracle’s Java APIs.

This has been a sticking point for the last few years. After a jury found in favor of Google, a appeals court mostly reversed that judgement. A petition for the Supreme Court to hear the case was rejected earlier this year, and the case now sits at a lower court waiting to decide on Google’s fair use argument. In the meantime, Google is making sure this isn’t an issue going forward.



Because Android is open source (Java is mostly open as well), you can see all the code commits to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Some developers noticed a large change pop up the other day that affects 8,902 files. Further digging revealed that it was related to the Java APIs in Android. When asked about this, Google confirmed that it is moving away from the standard Java implementation and will instead use OpenJDK.

Google didn’t mention the case against Oracle, but it seems clear that’s the reason for the change. Google claims using the OpenJDK will create a common code base for developers. It also has the benefit of being completely open source and not controlled by the overly litigious Oracle. Even if Google wins the fair use argument, that doesn’t mean future fair use arguments would hold up. It’s best to just move away from Oracle’s platform.

Google says the switch to OpenJDK will take place in the N release of Android. That’s expected to happen at some point in 2016. That doesn’t change anything about the current legal battle. If the court finds that Java APIs aren’t covered by fair use, Google might end up paying out a large pile of cash to Oracle.