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November 07, 2015

Sony VGP-BPS13/Q Battery new-laptopbattery.com

Meanwhile, portable electronics get lighter, cheaper, and double in power every few years. The iPhone 6s has a 3D touch screen and ultrabooks are thin and powerful. A new smartwatch has more computing power than the Apollo moon landing spacecraft. The lithium-ion batteries they run on, however, havenâ€™t changed that much since Sony started selling them in 1991. You still canâ€™t drive an electric car from London to Edinburgh on a single charge (unless you have £55,000 to spare for a Tesla S).As a group, Chromebooks are among the least expensive laptops you can buy, but even in this budget-minded segment, Lenovo's 100S Chromebook stands out by offering a lot of laptop for very little money. For a starting price of $179.99, you get a lightweight 11.6-inch laptop with solid performance and more than 11 hours of battery life. As you might expect, Lenovo cuts a few corners to get there, but if you can live with shortcomings like a mediocre display and weak audio, the 100S Chromebook is a really compelling buy.
From an aesthetic perspective, the Lenovo 100S Chromebook is about as simple as it gets. The laptop's outer casing is made entirely of black plastic with a subtle textured pattern. Inside, the Chiclet-style keyboard and bezels are made of a black matte plastic.

The palm rest is (you guessed it) black, and picks up fingerprints very easily. It's simple, but it would fit in anywhere from a boardroom to a dorm room. A metallic frame around the touchpad adds just a touch of class.

While the mostly plastic build makes this Chromebook very light and portable, it doesn't feel durable. It's so light that it feels like you could break it with your hands, and the hinge is a little floppy. If you travel with it, you might want to invest in a laptop bag or sleeve to protect it.

You can take the 100S with you just about anywhere. It measures 11.81 x 8.23 x 0.78 inches -- small enough to fit in almost any bag -- and weighs a mere 2.52 pounds. These measurements fall in line with those of other recent ultraportables. The Asus EeeBook X205TA (11.2 x 7.6 x 0.6 inches and 2.16 pounds) is slightly lighter and smaller. The Dell Chromebook 11 is noticeably thicker and heavier, at 11.6 x 7.9 x 0.91 and 2.8 pounds, while the HP Stream 11 (12 x 8.1 x 0.78 inches and 2.74 pounds) is only slightly larger and heavier.

Keyboard and Touchpad
The Lenovo 100S Chromebook's keyboard is a bit stiff but better than you might expect for a notebook this cheap. The keys have a full 2 mm of travel -- more than most mainstream laptops -- and require 65 grams of force to actuate, which, in theory, would lead to great tactile feedback but, in practice, makes them feel somewhat mushy.

On the bright side, there's almost no flex -- something we often experience on cheaper notebook keyboards. Everything is just the tiniest bit cramped in the 11-inch body, but it's still serviceable. Using 10fastfingers.com, I was able to keep up the same typing speed I do on a Dell office keyboard: roughly 100 words per minute. On the 100S, however, my error rate hit 4 percent, compared to my usual 1 or 2 percent.

The buttonless touchpad is accurate but requires a fair amount of force to click. Clicks registered better on the bottom half of the touchpad than on the top half, leading to an annoying number of unresponsive clicks until I finally adjusted to only pressing the very bottom.The webcam's photos are noisy (especially in low light) and muddy. In a photo taken in our well-lit Manhattan office, my face was very blurry, and the details in my hair and beard were lost.

The 100S is powered by a 2.16-GHz Intel Celeron N2840 processor with 2GB of RAM. It's fairly snappy for light loads, but it maxed out once I really got to work on it. With a Google Doc and 10 Chrome tabs open and Spotify streaming in the background, tabs lagged when I switched between them. When I added a game of Cut the Rope in the background, this lag was even more noticeable.

On synthetic tests, the 100S Chromebook also fell far short of other recent (albeit larger and more expensive) Chromebooks. It completed the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark in 589.9 milliseconds, which is much slower than the 1.5-GHz Celeron 3205U-powered Dell Chromebook's time of 367 ms and the 1.7-GHz Intel Celeron 3215U-powered Toshiba Chromebook 2 (1.70 GHz Intel Celeron 3215U, 4GB of RAM), which took 324.9 ms.

On the Oort Online WebGL benchmark, which tests how well a computer can render graphics in a browser, the 100S had a score of 1,430. In a test where higher scores are better, it was obliterated by the Dell Chromebook 13 and Toshiba Chromebook 2, which scored 5,050 and 5,070, respectively.

As someone who has been researching, and writing about, side-channel attacks for the best part of a decade now, none of this came as any real surprise. While these attack vectors remain in the theoretical domain of the uber nerd, they are not of any great threat to the rest of us.

Sure, there have been plenty of practical demonstrations of how sounds waves or processor timing information can be used to attack crypto systems, but they all rely upon a raft of 'as long as' and 'assuming that' conditions which tend not to exist in actual use-case scenarios.

Nothing to see here then, you may think, and nothing to write about either for that matter. However, what if I were to tell you that side-channel attacks (in the broadest possible sense) were evolving into the real world realm? What if I were to suggest that maybe we do need to worry about them after all when the bad guys can destroy your device when you plug in a USB killer stick, can get at your smartphone data through the remote voice hacking of Siri/Google Now or access your network password using your smartwatch?

Don't panic, I'm not suggesting anything of the sort. In actual fact, I think the whole side-channel threat remains as overblown as always. Let me explain why, using those three examples. The smartwatch route to stealing your password is a classic example of why these side-channel type attacks are, for the most part, a complete crock.

MoLe can't even get the acronym thing right as it apparently stands for 'Motion Leaks through Smartwatch Sensors' and was a labs-based attack demonstrating how motion sensors in your smartwatch could be used to determine the keystrokes entered while typing.

In theory, it works just fine. In reality it's a total non-starter as the attack worked with a single and specific watch (Samsung Gear Live) which the target needed to be wearing on their left hand, and which the attacker had already managed to get malware installed upon. The attacker had to be wearing the exact same model watch.

Then, the victim also needed to be typing one word at a time, in valid English only, and not using a hunt and peck style of two finger typing but 'proper' typing using appropriate fingers. All of which makes it hugely unlikely that anyone would ever actually get their password hacked by this so-called smartwatch threat.

So what about the much-reported Siri or Google Now remote voice hack then? According to Wired, researchers at ANSSI, which is a French government IT security agency, have demonstrated that they can trigger voice commands on smartphones without the user knowing, and from a whole five metres away.

These commands could be used to initiate calls, send texts, turn the smartphone into an eavesdropping device by calling the number of the attacker, or perhaps install drive by malware by visiting the right URL. Sounds alarming, doesn't it? More so when the technicalities of converting electromagnetic waves into electrical signals that mimic the audio from the smartphone microphone and fool the device into thinking voice commands are being sent are revealed.

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