Ubisoft holding Assassin's Creed event on February 27:TECH4COMP

Looks like it’s about time for a new Assassin’s Creed game. According to a tweet by MCV, Ubisoft is going to hold an event on February 27. The interesting thing is that the event is said to be centred around the Assassin’s Creed franchise. The most probable outcome of the event is bound to be the announcement of a new Assassin’s Creed game, as Ubisoft has an annual cycle with the series.

It could be interesting to speculate on what the next Assassin’s Creed game may be about. Previous games have been about Desmond and his ancestry, but with the definitive end of his story in Assassin’s Creed III, one has to wonder if Ubisoft will still stick to the Animus plot device, or whether the company will ditch all pretense and keep the game set in some time during history without any science-fiction elements.

Considering that the event is a whole week after Sony’s imminent PlayStation event, one could also speculate that Ubisoft will be unveiling a new Assassin’s Creed game for the next-gen PlayStation. This could also mean that the PlayStation 4 will come out in October or November, as those are the months when Assassin’s Creed games are generally released every year.

Recently, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot told investors that the company is working on a new installment in the Assassin’s Creed series, and it will feature a new protagonist in a new setting. Guillemot made the announcement during an earnings call presentation where he also noted that the last iteration of the game, Assassin's Creed III, has sold 12 million units worldwide. Gaming analysts expect that the new game will be announced at the coming E3 video game expo in Los Angeles this June. Back in January, the company had released a new DLC for the multiplayer component of Assassin's Creed III. The DLC, titled the Battle Hardened Pack, was included as part of the Assassin's Creed III Season Pass. The pack included new characters such as the Governor, the Highlander and the Coyote Man, and it also featured new maps of Charlestown, Fort St-Mathieu and Saint Pierre. Along with these, there were new achievements and trophies for those who have explored the main game to its fullest.  Late last year, Ubisoft had revealed that Assassin's Creed III is the fastest selling game in the company's history. According to the company, in solo missions alone, players have accumulated more than 82 centuries of gaming time and committed more than 3 billion assassinations.  The Assassin’s Creed series deals with a secret war between Assassins and Templars that has gone on for millennia. The Assassins are fighting to preserve the free will of people while the Templars seek to control the masses. The first game was set during the Holy Crusades in Jerusalem and had protagonist Altaïr ibn-La'Ahad jumping from rooftops and sneaking into groups of people in order to identify and assassinate his targets. The second game was set during the Renaissance era in Florence. The main protagonist here was Ezio Auditore, who starts out as a vengeful teenager and ends up as a highly-skilled master of Assassins. Altaïr also featured in this sequel and the aged assassin’s last few days are shown. The secondary protagonist of the series is Desmond Miles. The last game in the series puts you in the shoes and body of Connor Kenway, as you witness the American Revolution take its course.

Acer Aspire S7 MS2363 Review:TECH4COMP

Ultrabooks and hybrid PCs can be truly remarkable pieces of hardware but in order to find them, you have to look at the ones costing close to a lakh as these are generally the flagship models. We’ve already seen some from Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung and Sony and now, it’s time to take a look at Acer’s flagship offering called the Aspire S7. 

Design and Build 
The notebook has a killer design and is guaranteed to turn heads as soon as you take it out of your bag. The Aspire S7 features an incredibly sleek aluminium body that’s just 12.2mm thick when closed. Add to this the diamond-like mosaic pattern on the lid and we have one extremely good looking notebook. The body is scratch resistant and so is the glass protecting the screen which happens to be Corning’s Gorilla Glass 2. The hinge is incredibly sturdy as well and opens to almost 180 degrees.

Despite the slim chassis, the S7 features two USB 3.0 ports, headphone jack, a microSD card slot and a microHDMI port around the back. The ultrabook also features two break-out adapters for LAN and VGA. The LAN adapter is powered by a USB port whereas the VGA adapter slots into the microHDMI port. You could alternately also use a microHDMI to regular HDMI cable. Also in the box is the charging adapter, a carrying pouch and an expandable battery pack. This secondary battery strip clips onto the back and docks with the charging port, thereby extending the S7’s battery life. You can use the notebook without the battery pack as well, if you don’t want the excess bulk. The battery is completely sealed up and we have large vents at the back for releasing the hot air. The dual fan mechanism of sucking in cool air from one end and releasing it from the other keeps the Aspire S7 quite cool under normal working conditions.

Opening up the lid, we find a generous trackpad and backlit, island styled keys. Acer has gone with aqua blue backlighting instead of the typical white. This looks cool and is also easy on the eyes in the dark. We would have liked for the backlit keys to automatically kick in once the ambient light dims, but that doesn’t happen. The S7 is not exactly a hybrid but rather a standard Ultrabook with a touchscreen. There’s no secret switch to flip it into tablet mode or any such trickery.

Features
Speaking of displays, the S7 crams in 1920 x 1080 worth of pixels into an 11.6-inch screen, resulting in extremely sharp images and text. The LED backlit TFT LCD display is also very bright so you can easily use it outdoors. The model we received (MS2363) is powered by an Intel Core i7-3517U running at 1.9GHz. RAM maxes out at 4GB and we have SSDs in RAID 0 configurations, racking up the storage capacity to 256GB. This sort of SSD configuration is the first we’ve seen in Ultrabooks and should blow the roof off when it comes to read/write speeds. The S7 runs on Windows 8 64-bit and comes bundled with McAfee trial version and some Acer apps like cloud storage, maintenance, backup and restore, etc.  

Performance 
The Acer Aspire S7 is easily one of the most powerful Ultrabooks you’ll find in the market. This is not because of the Core i7 CPU but has more to do with the two SSDs in RAID. The read and write speeds are off the charts and are easily more than double the speeds we’ve seen in Ultrabooks to date. What’s really remarkable is that Acer has managed to fit all of this into such a slim chassis. Windows 8 is already known to be quick and on the S7, it simply flies. Waiting time to open and install apps is close to instantaneous and loading times for anything are almost non-existent. Take a look at the score sheet compared to the other Ultrabooks we’ve tested.  

	Acer Aspire S7 MS2363	Sony VAIO Duo 11	Dell XPS 12
PC Mark 7 (Higher is better)
Overall	4880	4867	4685
Lightweight	3363	3263	3126
Productivity	2392	2285	2224
Creativity	9626	9540	9067
Entertainment	3293	3466	3335
3DMark Vantage - Entry (Higher is better)
Overall	9988	11356	10523
GPU	10447	12935	11806
CPU	8825	8311	7936
CineBench R11.5 (multi-core)	2.7	2.42	2.38
Real World Tests(Lower is better)
File compression: 100 MB files to 7zip @ultra, 256-bit encryption	73	86	87sec
Video encoding: 1 min MPEG to x.264 MPEG-4 (2nd pass)	62	68	69sec
Ray tracing: POVRay (800x600 AA 0.3)	40	46	46sec
CrystalDiskMark (Higher is better)
Sequential read MB/s	907.8	450	450
Sequential write MB/s	701.1	241.3	264
4k read MB/s	19.7	21.39	15.8
4k write MB/s	159.4	40.86	38.4

The S7 manages to stay cool under normal operations but once the CPU usage increases, the fans kick in. This causes a very audible sound, which can get a bit annoying after a while. The notebook does get hot but it’s mostly the area above the keyboard while underneath it stays warm, so it’s still comfortable to use on your lap. The touchscreen, while being super sensitive and accurate, is not of much use since you can’t use the S7 in true tablet mode. It’s nice for flipping through pictures and stuff but that’s about it. You anyways have all the Windows 8 gestures mapped to the trackpad anyways so we could’ve done with a regular screen as well. The keyboard has good spacing but the keys themselves feel a little too rigid as there’s not much travel. This does not give you as much confidence when typing so it could be an issue if your work involves a lot of typing, like mine for instance. The trackpad works well and the mouse buttons are easy to click without having to use much effort. Finally, the S7’s speakers have the Dolby Home Theatre enhancements, which manage surprisingly good audio quality and volume given the size of the chassis.  

Battery Life 
With the extra battery attached, the Aspire S7 ran for 2-hours and 20-minutes in Battery Eater Pro, which roughly translates to about 4-5-hours of actual, real-world usage. Without the extra battery pack, you still get a respectable 1 hour and 10 minutes in Battery Eater Pro, which is what most mid-range, 15-inch notebooks deliver. The reason we’re calling this respectable is because the S7 is less than half the size of most mid-range notebooks and a lot slimmer than most Ultrabooks for that matter.

New arrests in News of the World phone-hacking probe:TECH4COMP

London (CNN) -- Six people were arrested Wednesday in what London's Metropolitan Police is calling a separate phone-hacking conspiracy at Rupert Murdoch's defunct News of the World newspaper.

All of them are journalists or former journalists, police said.

Tabloid hacking report: Who won? Who lost?

Dozens of people, including Murdoch protégé Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson, a former adviser to prime Minister David Cameron, already have been arrested and several have been charged with phone hacking and related crimes.

Police say Wednesday's arrests are part of a separate conspiracy to hack phones, primarily from 2005 to 2006, at the News of the World.

Police say Wednesday's arrests are part of a separate conspiracy to hack phones, primarily from 2005 to 2006, at the News of the World.

How Murdoch bounced back from his 'most humble day'

Three men and two women were arrested in London and one woman in Cheshire, in northern England.

Searches are being carried out at several addresses, police said.

"In due course officers will be making contact with people they believe have been victims of the suspected voicemail interceptions," a police statement said.

Murdoch closed the Sunday tabloid, one of the world's best-selling English-language newspapers, in 2011 over the phone-hacking scandal.

Three police investigations were created to look into allegations of phone hacking, bribery of public officials and computer hacking.

Rupert Murdoch: The last press baron

Brooks and Coulson are both former News of the World editors. Brooks later became chief executive of News International, a UK subsidiary of Murdoch's News Corp. empire. Coulson went on to become Cameron's director of communications before resigning early in 2011.

The hacking scandal prompted Cameron to set up an independent, judge-led inquiry -- named for Lord Justice Leveson, its chairman -- to make recommendations on journalistic ethics and examine the relationship of the press with the public, police and politicians.

Facebook hacked,says no user data loss:TECH4COMP

Facebook says it was recently hacked, though it says no data about its more than a billion users was compromised.

The company described the "sophisticated attack" in a blog post on Friday, saying it took place in January when a small number of employees visited a compromised website that installed malware on their machines.

"As soon as we discovered the presence of the malware, we remediated all infected machines, informed law enforcement and began a significant investigation that continues to this day," Facebook Security said in the post.

Facebook, the largest social network in the world, is the latest high-profile site to be hacked this year. Twitter announced a similar intrusion earlier this month, and major news organizations including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post have also admitted to being hacked.

The news sites attributed the breaches to hackers working for the Chinese government, but neither Facebook nor Twitter mention China when describing their attacks.

"Facebook was not alone in this attack. It is clear that others were attacked and infiltrated recently as well," said the blog post. "As one of the first companies to discover this malware, we immediately took steps to start sharing details about the infiltration with the other companies and entities that were affected. "

Unlike Twitter, Facebook said it has found no evidence that any user information was compromised. Twitter said that user names, encrypted passwords and e-mail addresses for as many as 250,000 users were potentially grabbed by the hackers. It reset passwords for all affected accounts.

The string of hacks have primarily exploited vulnerabilities in the programming language Java, which is installed on most computers by default. Facebook said the site responsible for its attack took advantage of a previously unknown Java vulnerability, which Oracle patched on February 1.

In January, the Department of Homeland Security issued an alert about the security-challenged software and recommended people turn it off on their computers. Apple turned off Java by default for its OS X users as a precaution. Full instructions on how to disable Java on any computer can be found on Oracle's website. If you must use Java, make sure that you have downloaded the latest updates, which include key security patches.

Facebook said it will continue to work with law enforcement and others in the industry to prevent future attacks.

Sony Xperia Z and Xperia ZL: Specifications review:TECH4COMP

Sony’s twin 5-inch full HD phones have surely put the Japanese electronic giant back on the smartphone map. The company was in danger of becoming

Sony’s twin 5-inch full HD phones have surely put the Japanese electronic giant back on the smartphone map. The company was in danger of becoming irrelevant after releasing phones with outdated hardware at the wrong time. However, this year, Sony was bang on time with the Xperia announcements at CES in January.  The Xperia twins – Z and ZL – have a lot of specs in common, but a few differences as well. So it makes sense to bring the two under one banner. Then there’s the fact that Sony Mobile’s India website lists both as coming soon to India. A March release is what rumours predict, but whenever they do, the two phones will have enough time in the market before the Samsung Galaxy S4 juggernaut rolls around. OS – Android 4.1 Jelly Bean with Sony’s customised skin The Xperia Z and ZL are the first Sony phones to launch with Jelly Bean on board. Besides the Project Butter goodies, JB also brings in an improved notification drawer. Sony has decided to slap their own customised skin on top of the stock UI. This is not a bad thing per se; the UI looks more or less similar to stock, without adding any extraneous bulk like Timescape or Mediascape, which brought down Sony’s earlier phones. However, it does give some more options for users to customise their homescreens, including adding and removing them, unlike stock Android. The Xperia Z has a waterproof shell Cellular network – LTE-ready  Both phones are LTE-ready handsets but support different bands depending on the country-specific variants. The various bands supported are 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 for GSM, 850 / 900 / 1700 / 1900 / 2100 for HSDPA and 800 / 850 / 900 / 1800 / 2100 / 2600 for LTE. Both phones use Micro SIMs for cellular connectivity.  Display – 5-inch full HD Both the Z and ZL have the same display and a stellar one at that. The 5-inch full HD screen has a resolution of 1920 X 1080. Besides, Sony has included their homebrewed Bravia Mobile Engine 2 feature that makes colours more vivid and enhances brilliance, while watching videos or viewing images. Both smartphones are also decked up with shatter-proof and scratch-resistant glass to keep the glorious display away from harm. Form factor and weight – Z is waterproof, ZL is a tiny dynamite Sony has gone two different ways when designing the two phones. Even though they share the internals, there is a good deal of difference in their sizes. The Xperia Z, for starters, is an impossible 7.9mm thin and Sony has managed to do that and also give it water-proof and dust-proof capabilities. It is IP57 certified, which means it is water resistant up to 1 meter and 30 minutes. Design wise, the Z is a block of glass with cutouts on the side to fit in the volume buttons, the classy and hard-to-miss power button and of course various flaps to cover the USB ports, the 3.5mm audio jack and the SIM and microSD slots. It features a glass back that is unbroken save for the camera lens on the top left corner. It looks to be a very solidly built handset from close-up pictures. Sony has designed prominent power buttons for both phones The Xperia ZL, on the other hand, is slightly thicker at 9.8mm, but it has a smaller footprint. To put it in perspective, the Xperia Z is 139mm tall, while the ZL, with the same screen real estate, is only 131.6mm tall. That actually makes it shorter than the Nexus 4 and the Samsung Galaxy S3, both of which have smaller displays. A 5-inch screen on a smaller body makes great sense, especially for people with smaller hands. Sony has to be commended for this engineering feat at a time when most manufacturers don’t mind going bigger. The ZL is not water or dustproof like its brother, but instead brings easy access to ports through a small flip cover on the back. The back itself loses the glass in favour of a more grippy surface, less likely to slide off angled desks.  Wi-Fi – Everything but the sink In this department, Sony has thrown all the WLAN features one could ask for. The Xperia Z supports Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n bands, but the ZL loses support for a band and also does not have dual-band Wi-Fi. Multimedia content can be sent to your TV or HTPC thanks to the DLNA support and Wi-Fi Direct can be used to share files with other phones on the same WLAN connection. Both also have the Wi-Fi hotspot capability to share the phone’s Wi-Fi connection with other devices. SoC – Quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro with Adreno 320 GPU For once Sony has kept up with the competition and launched phones with the latest chipsets. It has included the same processor-GPU combo in both phones, so performance wise there shouldn’t be any difference. Speaking of performance, early reviews state that the phones pretty much fly through any task and commend Sony for optimising the processor’s performance for their Android skin. The Qualcomm MDM9215M or APQ8064 chip has four Krait cores, clocked at 1.5GHz each. The Adreno 320 GPU has performed admirably in the past and we have no reason to doubt that the CPU-GPU combo shouldn’t blaze through everyday tasks and Android menus. Both phones have Sony's Mobile Bravia Engine 2 ticking underneath Storage – 16GB internal memory with microSD slots Both phones have the same 16GB of internal storage and pack in microSD card expansion slots. This is especially cool considering the Xperia Z is water-proof. In the Z, this is under a flap on the left side of the phone, while the ZL has a small door on the back, which can be pulled open to access the card slot. Surprisingly, the maximum storage capacity differs in the Z and ZL. The former has a maximum expansion of 32GB, but the ZL gets double that.  Rear cameras The camera on the Xperia Z is touted to be one of the best performers out there. The 13.1 megapixel Exmor RS sensor on the Z has great features. It comes with an LED flash and has support for geo-tagging, touch focus, face detection, image stabilisation, HDR and Sony’s 3D sweep panorama. It can also shoot 1080p video and in recording mode has continuous autofocus, a video light, video stabiliser function and HDR video, a first for smartphones. The Xperia ZL’s camera is a 13-megapixel one, with the same sensor. However, it does not have the video HDR mode. A nice touch in the ZL is the inclusion of the physical shutter key, which has not been included in the Xperia Z for reasons of waterproofing.  Front-facing cameras The phones have slightly different front-facing cameras too. The Xperia ZL goes for an odd placement of this camera. It is on the bottom right corner of the phone, below the display. Sony claims this setup is better for a wider view of the subject during video calls or self-shots. This one is a two megapixel camera and can also shoot 1080p video. The Xperia Z has a more traditional front-facing camera placement and has a 2.2 megapixel sensor, also capable of full HD videos at 30fps. The Xperia ZL's front camera is placed below the display Sensors – The basics covered Accelerometer, gyroscope, proximity sensors and compass are found on both handsets. Some variants of the Xperia ZL also have a barometer to get an air pressure reading.  GPS – Just like the rest Nothing out of the ordinary here. Sony has built in GLONASS support as well as Assisted GPS. Most modern phones come with these and it would have been a glaring omission.  NFC Both phones have NFC chips and Sony has even released a wide range of accessories and speakers to use this feature. You can also buy programmable tags or chips and assign actions like enabling Wi-Fi or putting the phone in silent mode, which will get activated when the phone comes in contact with the tags. Sony has a number of apps on the Google Play Store as well that can be used with NFC-enabled devices.  Battery – 2330 MaH on the Xperia Z and 2370 MaH on the Xperia ZL Surprisingly, Sony has put in a slightly lower capacity battery on the Xperia Z. Even so, that much juice should ideally get you through the entire day, with moderate usage. Heavy email users and gamers might need to carry the charger or a battery pack. Neither phone’s battery is accessible or removable.  The bottom line We have yet to see the Xperia twins in person, but on paper, both look rock solid. The Xperia Z has the advantage of being impervious to liquids and dust. So you can actually record your shower songs if the thought strikes. The Xperia ZL on the other hand is an engineering feat, one that we want more manufacturers to explore. At the moment, it is hard to pick between the two. While it’s great that the Xperia Z is water-proof, it does come at the cost of having to fiddle with flaps every time you want to charge it or use the headphone jack. The Xperia ZL also has some demerits – the door on the back to access the Micro SIM and microSD card comes to mind.  Going just by specifications, they sound absolutely phenomenal. The HTC Butterfly is the only full HD phone to be launched in India and the new Xperias will be in direct competition with it. We found the Butterfly to be an admirable performer in our review. It will be interesting to see how the Xperia Z and ZL fare in comparison. We can’t wait to get our hands on both the handsets. Watch this space for all the first impressions, in-depth reviews as well as software updates coverage on both the phones.

Anonymous India hacks IIPM and 16 other URLs:TECH4COMP

Anonymous India, in a recent protest against the Department of Telecommunications’ (DoT) blockade of 78 URLs that criticised a private MBA institution, hacked and brought downIIPM’s (Indian Institute of Planning and Management) website on Saturday. The blockade had been directed by a Gwalior Bench of the Madhya Pradesh High Court on Februray 14, 2013. News of the hack attack has been trending across Twitter and has seen a barrage of comments from the Twitterrati.

Reports have it that the hacker group kept the IIPM’s URL, and 16 other links carrying content from IIPM, down and out for 9 hours. The online community was in an uproar over the blockade as it seemed to indicate how a private body made unjust use of the Indian judiciary to clean its reputation online.

The blockade came as a shock to 73 of the 78 URL owners which were taken down under the court’s directive without prior intimation to the owners. Medianama, the first website to post the news, was in fact one of the websites that belongs to the list of blocked URLs, which also includes that of University Grants Commission (UGC). Nikhil Pahwa of Medianama had posted the “order”, a PDF document issued by DoT, owing to which the online media fraternity was informed about the blockade. It also seems like a mockery of India’s education system whereby UGC, a deemed government education set up, has been gagged by a local judiciary body.

UGC’s portal carried a notice released in July 2012 which mentioned that “IIPM is not a university within the meaning of section 2(f) of the UGC Act, 1956”. Reports further add that in reaction to this notice, IIPM Founder, Arindham Chaudhari, stated that he was proud of the fact that IIPM was not affiliated to a corrupt institution like that of UGC and that he is glad that malicious content on IIPM is off the web. Chaudhari also made a comment on Firstpost saying, “I suspect that UGC — at the behest of some of our petty competitors with dirty past records of filth and cheating, and public notices against them — had been deliberately spreading misleading information about IIPM to hurt its business interests and had even gone to the extent of falsely calling IIPM a fake university.” Perhaps, the self-proclaimed marketing guru is glad that his private institution has come into the limelight without many efforts from his end. The controversy has definitely given mileage to Chaudhari’s crusade against those who have been accusing IIPM for making a business out of middle class MBA aspirants. Here are a couple of tweets posted over the controversy:  Anonymous India (@OpIndia_revenge)- "#TangoDown iipm.in #IIPMScam. Reason: Got court order to block URLs criticizing them including the UGC (Govt Body) notice" Gursimran Khamba (@gkhamba) - "If Arindam was as good at marketing as he says he is he would've used this controversy to say 'IIPM - No 1 in internet exposure'". Sumit Kumar (@kumar_sumit) - "@opindia_revenge:On a lighter side #IIPM has done one thing which none of us could do .. they got a govt url blocked .. :) #UGC #GOI"