Weekend tech reading: First Tizen phone falls short, UPS to raise prices, Haswell-E DDR4 scaling

The first Tizen smartphone isn't an "Android killer" – it's a bad Android clone This is the Samsung Z1 -- the world's first Tizen phone. After one of the bumpiest pre-launch situations in recent memory, Samsung's home-grown OS has finally hit smartphones. Tizen, if you'll recall, is Samsung's "Android Killer." While Samsung rose to power on a wave of Android devices, it was also quietly developing its own OS in the background. If Samsung ever got tired of Google's Android requirements, Tizen would be there as a cold war threat and good negotiation leverage for Google Play licensing talks. Ars Technica

The world's email encryption software relies on one guy, who is going broke The man who built the free email encryption software used by whistleblower Edward Snowden, as well as hundreds of thousands of journalists, dissidents and security-minded people around the world, is running out of money to keep his project alive. Werner Koch wrote the software, known as Gnu Privacy Guard, in 1997, and since then has been almost single-handedly keeping it alive with patches and updates from his home in Erkrath, Germany. Now 53, he is running out of money and patience with being underfunded. Pro Publica

Did chip espionage, IP theft give Samsung its 14nm manufacturing lead? For most of the past decade, the semiconductor industry has been led by the same pair of companies: Intel was the most-advanced integrated device manufacturer (IDM) and led the entire market, while TSMC was the most advanced contract manufacturer (sometimes called a pure-play foundry). Samsung's leapfrog over TSMC to become the 14nm provider of choice. A recent article has argued that Samsung's sudden change in fortunes was no fortuitous accident... ExtremeTech

The Qualcomm reign on smartphones and tablets is almost over; all hail MediaTek Out of all of the ARM manufacturers who looked to herald in the smart device revolution, Qualcomm was the one who enjoyed the most success. But that's going to change very, very soon. We've reached the summit. It's over. It's finished. Competition is the backbone of capitalism, and no single manufacturer can ever claim persistent, unchallenged dominance forever. Enter MediaTek. A relatively unknown semiconductor company headquartered in Taiwan... Neowin

The man squatting on millions of dollars worth of domain names ​In case you haven't heard, everything is about branding these days, personal or otherwise. And one early internet entrepreneur is banking on the idea that, in order to have a strong #brand, you need a strong domain to go with it. So, for the last 21 years, Gary Millin and his colleagues at ​World Accelerator have been slowly accumulating a veritable treasure trove of seemingly premium "generic" domain names. Motherboard.Vice (also, Life inside a secret Chinese Bitcoin mine:)

The continuing struggle of being an indie dev We hear, again and again, that with tools like Unity and the App Store that it's never been easier to make a quick buck cranking out some games. At its peak, Candy Crush was raking in well over a million dollars every day. Flappy Bird, Five Nights at Freddy's -- these games dominate news stories and make their creators huge lumps of cash, but they are exceptionally rare rags-to-riches success stories. The real stories of independent developers that want to keep making games is much grimmer. USgamer

UPS to apply surcharges to residential packages after costs surge United Parcel Service Inc said on Tuesday it will start applying surcharges for residential packages this year after its costs soared during the recent disappointing holiday season. UPS also reported that fourth-quarter profit fell from a year ago but forecast earnings within the range of estimates. UPS, the world's largest package delivery company, warned in late January it would report a fourth-quarter profit below its forecast and market expectations. Reuters

DDR4 Haswell-E scaling review: 2133 to 3200 with G.Skill, Corsair, ADATA and Crucial For any user interested in performance, memory speed is an important part of the equation when it comes to building your next system. This can apply to any user, from integrated graphics throughput to gaming and prosumer environments such as finance or oil and gas. Individuals with an opinion on memory speed fall into two broad camps, from saying faster memory has no effect, to the 'make sure you get at least XYZ'. AnandTech

Arthur C. Clarke accurately describes the 21st century...in 1976 In 1964, Isaac Asimov wrote up a set of predictions about life in 2014. He was pretty close on a few and way off on others. That same year, author and inventor Arthur C. Clarke appeared on the BBC and described a world of instant global communication made possible by satellites. He talked briefly about the coming wonders of telemedicine and ubiquitous telecommuting. CNet (also, Ian Ballantine made paperbacks required reading)

Massive Utah cyberattacks -- up to 300 million per day -- may be aimed at NSA facility Five years ago, Utah government computer systems faced 25,000 to 30,000 attempted cyberattacks every day. At the time, Utah Public Safety Commissioner Keith Squires thought that was massive. "But this last year we have had spikes of over 300 million attacks against the state databases" each day: a 10,000-fold increase. The Salt Lake Tribune

The trouble we expected: Dark Souls II's producer on leveling up the game What's the key to making the Dark Souls franchise work? This interview doesn't get much closer to answering that question, but it does offering a glimpse into the thinking behind the series' development, as Bandai Namco Games prepares to release the latest edition of the title: Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin. Gamasutra