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Android in-car initiative with Audi, Nvidia tipped for CES

Written By Unknown on Selasa, 31 Desember 2013 | 16.01

Not to be outdone by Apple's Siri and iOS, Google is reportedly plotting a push into automobiles for its Android software.

According to the Wall Street Journal's unnamed sources, Google and Audi are partnering to use Android for in-car information and entertainment systems. Nvidia is also involved, and other automotive partnerships may be announced during the CES trade show in January. Audi is holding a press conference on January 7.

Google has been flirting with the automotive world for years. Several auto makers rely on Google Maps for navigation, and support a "Send2Car" feature in the Web version of Google Maps. Kia also uses Android to power the dashboard of the 2014 Kia Soul.

The effort to be announced at CES sounds more ambitious, with a full version of Android being installed on in-car dashboards. This could give drivers greater access to Android apps, navigation, and services without needing an Android phone.

Apple, meanwhile, is taking a different approach. With iOS in the Car, auto makers can still have their own dashboard systems while connecting to an iPhone for features such as iMessage integration, music control, and a hands- and eyes-free version of Siri. Auto makers can already add a Siri button to their vehicles, but that effort is slow-going so far.

For years, auto makers have used CES to show off their car tech, but these efforts have always felt incomplete without deeper integration of the two largest mobile operating systems. It sounds like 2014 could be the year that car tech grows up.


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Facebook tops US social networking charts, but users diversifying

Facebook remained the most popular social networking destination among U.S. adults, but users are also turning to other websites for their daily social fix .

Social networks are used by 73 percent of U.S. users above the age of 18, according to a study released on Monday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project on Monday. The study was based on 1,801 adults interviewed from August 7 to Sept. 16 this year.

Facebook was the dominant social networking site, boasting an audience of 71 percent of online U.S. adults, growing from 67 percent late last year.

While Facebook was a universal favorite, some 42 percent of online adults used multiple social networking sites, the study said. Pinterest attracted women, Twitter and Instagram were heavily used by young adults, African Americans and city dwellers, and LinkedIn was favored by college graduates, older users and high-income households.

Usage of all Facebook alternatives grew, according to the survey. LinkedIn was used by 22 percent of U.S. adults online, Pinterest by 21 percent, Twitter by 18 percent and Instagram by 17 percent.

The engagement levels varied, with 63 percent of Facebook users visiting the website at least once a day, and 40 percent visiting multiple times. Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, had 57 percent of users visiting once a day and 35 percent logging in multiple times. Around 46 percent of Twitter users visited at least once, and 29 percent multiple times.

Once viewed as a social networking platform for college students, Facebook is now attracting a larger number of Internet users aged 65 or more, according to the survey. Facebook is used by around 45 percent of U.S. Internet users aged 65 or more, growing from 35 percent late last year.

Twitter and Instagram are becoming more popular among African Americans and users aged 18 to 29. Around 34 percent of African American Internet users in the U.S. adopted Instagram, growing from 23 percent last year. The site was used by 37 percent of users aged between 18 and 29, growing from 28 percent in the comparable period last year.

Women "are four times as likely as men to be Pinterest users," the survey said. Pinterest was used by 33 percent of women and 8 percent of men interviewed for the survey.

The Pew survey does not include information related to usage of sites such as Google+, Tumblr, Reddit and Vine.


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Archos to show sub-$100 smartwatches at CES

Archos announced smartwatches starting at under £50 (US$83) and an Android tablet specially designed to make home automation a breeze.

The new smartwatches have a lean and thin design similar to products from Pebble, and will be compatible with Apple's iOS and Google's Android OS devices, Archos said in a statement. Smartwatches from Pebble are priced at $150.

The company did not provide availability information for the smartwatches, but products will be shown at the International CES trade show in Las Vegas between January 7 and 10.

Smartwatches are used in conjunction with smartphones to show messages, incoming calls, news, weather, social network posts and even webpages. Smartwatches are also being used as fitness trackers. Sony, Samsung and Qualcomm are among the top players in the smartwatch market today, and many companies are expected to show products at CES.

Archos' Smart Home Tablet

Archos' Smart Home Tablet (Click to enlarge)

Archos also announced a lineup of "smart devices" that can gather and automate mundane home tasks. At the center of the lineup is the Smart Home Tablet, a 7-inch Android tablet that can chat with and set up actions for smart meters, plugs, lights, cameras, weather stations and other connected devices. For example, the tablet can be used to activate cameras or switch on lights if a motion sensor captures movement.

To complement the tablet, Archos announced a new weather station that can capture temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide levels, humidity and other environmental information. The monitor can be used indoors or outdoors. The company will also show a connected camera, smart plug and motion tracker at CES.

The tablet can also aggregate information from Android and iOS mobile devices, Archos said.

Archos also announced wearable fitness trackers that can be used to set health goals. The Blood Pressure Monitor can monitor heart activity and pressure, the Activity Tracker functions like a pedometer and the Connected Scale measures weight and body-fat ratio. An Archos app called Connected Self App aggregates information from the health monitors to analyze health activity and set up fitness goals.

The new Archos products are among the first to be based on Bluetooth 4.1, also called Bluetooth Low Energy, which was formally adopted by device makers this month.


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Portrait of the Microsoft Ballmer's successor inherits

Written By Unknown on Senin, 30 Desember 2013 | 16.00

Like a juggler walking away with dozens of objects suspended in the air, Steve Ballmer is leaving his successor at Microsoft not only a tough act to follow but an even tougher act to continue.

During his last months at the company, Ballmer has set in place a string of changes that won't be anywhere near completion when he goes, even if his replacement doesn't come on board until next August, the deadline for him to leave.

That means whoever it is has to come up to speed fast and have the talent to implement Ballmer's plans or to change them mid-course without having things fall apart.

Here is a look at some of what Ballmer leaves and how it might affect the products and services Microsoft sells.

The big management picture

Ballmer is responsible for One Microsoft, the overarching plan announced in July that that relaxes the divisional separations under which the company was organized before.

"This means we will organize the company by function: Engineering (including supply chain and data centers), Marketing, Business Development and Evangelism, Advanced Strategy and Research, Finance, HR, Legal, and COO (including field, support, commercial operations, and IT)," Ballmer said in the memo announcing the changes.

Ballmer (2)Nick Barber

Steve Ballmer

This calls for Microsoft's disparate products to be seen as part of a larger coherent whole, something not immediately obvious considering they range from gaming consoles to data center infrastructure. "All parts of the company will share and contribute to the success of core offerings, like Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox, Surface, Office 365 and our EA offer, Bing, Skype, Dynamics, Azure and our servers," Ballmer wrote. "We will see our product line holistically, not as a set of islands."

Big ideas but even in his overview of how they will be implemented Ballmer leaves a lot to sort out.

For example, Tami Reller is executive vice president of marketing under the new organization, but here's what Ballmer says about the job: "Mark Penn will take a broad view of marketing strategy and will lead with Tami the newly centralized advertising and media functions." This begs the question of who exactly is in charge.

There is similar ambiguity with Dynamics, Microsoft's ERP and CRM software lines. "Kirill Tatarinov will continue to run Dynamics as is, but his product leaders will dotted-line report to Qi Lu, his marketing leader will dotted-line report to Tami Reller and his sales leader will dotted-line report to the COO group."

Tony Bates runs business development and evangelism but also has some uncertain sway over OEM partners. "OEM will remain in [the sales marketing and services group] with Kevin Turner with a dotted line to Tony who will work closely with Nick Parker on key OEM relationships."

The new CEO will be expected to execute these sometimes unclear directives or to sort out who's in charge in particular instances. The structure is flexible, but it leaves some individuals answering to two masters.

Ballmer's plan draws management lines, then creates project management rules that cross them. "Each major initiative will have a champion who will be a direct report to me or one of my direct reports. The champion will organize to drive a cross-company team for success, but my whole staff will have commitment to the initiative's success. We will also have outgrowths on those major initiatives that may involve only a single product group."

Nokia commitment

Ballmer has locked the company in to a $7.2 billion deal to buy Nokia and make use of its phones, phablets, and tablets. While the company's own Surface tablets could have been discontinued it took a $900 million write-down for Surface RT tablets—it's unlikely the board of directors will walk from the Nokia investment.

nokia lumia 1020 color range 100045701 gallery

The practical goal is to sell more phones running the Windows Phone operating system, which held just 3.6 percent of the market share in the third quarter of this year, miles behind Android (81 percent) and significantly lagging Apple's iOS (12.9 percent). The task is to find a strategy for producing and selling the phones in markets where demand is high but still unfulfilled.

To do so means addressing the dearth of signature apps to run on the phones, an area where Android has a significant lead. Microsoft has kicked off Project Siena to help address the problem. Siena is an app to help non-developers develop Windows Phone apps.

OS alignment

Microsoft indicates without much detail that it is somehow bringing its various operating systems closer together in order to promote a common user experience and make it simpler for developers to reuse code when they port a new app from one platform to another. Ballmer has set the company on course to more commonality among Windows (including Windows RT, Xbox and Windows Phone, with some talk of merging Windows Phone and Windows RT into one.

A related but apparently different operating system reform called Threshold has been reported by Mary Jo Foley.

Threshold seems to incorporate a vision he describes in a memo written when he announced One Microsoft. "Our devices must support the same high-value activities in ways that are meaningful across different device types" he wrote. "Developers must be able to target all our devices with a common programming model that makes it easy to target more than one device."

Project Threshold will ensure that all the operating systems support the same set of high-value activities personal expression, decision-making and tasks, social communication, and serious fun. That means a common user interface backed by a common service shell in the cloud that delivers the services to all forms of devices. He outlines what he means in the memo, but it's still pretty vague.

Personal expression seems to incorporate Office 365 the cloud Office service that includes client software—for more producing and viewing complex documents. "These documents will be readable from a browser, but the experience will be infinitely better if read, annotated or presented with our tools," the memo says.

"Decision-making and tasks mean different things in personal versus professional lives, yet they are important in both places," he says in the memo. "Bing, Excel and our InfoNav innovations are all important here."

Social communication is meant to designate "meetings, events, gathering, sharing and communicating." But these activities won't copycat what is already being done via social media.  "We can create new ways to interact through hardware, software and new services...We will not focus on becoming another social network for people to participate in casually, though some may use these products and services that way," he says.

By serious fun he means activities that fully engage participants for a long time during individual sessions. "Interactivity takes engagement and makes things serious; it really requires differentiated hardware, apps and services," he says, broadly pointing to what it might entail.

No doubt there is a plan for that which has not been made public but which the new CEO will be locked into.

Placating OEMs

Ballmer has launched the second generation of its two models of Surface tablets, changing the names from Surface RT to Surface 2 and from Surface Pro to Surface Pro 2, which is a full-blown Windows 8 PC with a touch screen. These will have to be reconciled with whatever Nokia gear might be seen as redundant.

But the larger question for Microsoft is how to continue making Surface devices and selling (formerly Nokia) tablets and PCs without upsetting its OEM partners even more in order to protect OEM revenue.

This is delicate because Microsoft needs to continue its devices initiative given the money it's already invested. Yet it still relies on partners to license its operating system to make devices of their own.

The point is that despite Microsoft hardware partners making arguably better Windows 8 products, the company has bought its way into the hardware business at such a high price that it would be difficult for Ballmer's successor to walk away from his decision. The company has committed to a four-month Surface ad campaign for 2014 and rumors of a Surface Mini coming out sometime next year persist.

Into the cloud

The One Microsoft manifesto Ballmer issued in July sets down the overall plan: create a set of devices that can reach cloud services that include customers' personal data stored in that cloud.

This cloud shell of services that support all its devices is evolving and embraces Azure, Office 365, Xbox Live, and SkyDrive. It represent a lot of parts moving toward the goal of presenting customers with unified and integrated access to all their personal resources.The process is started and is such a key part of the overall Microsoft mission that the new CEO will not be able to back off it and will be challenged to bring it to fruition as quickly as possible.

Personnel

Ballmer seems serious in his manifesto about Microsoft workers being more collaborative. "Collaborative doesn't just mean easy to get along with.' Collaboration means the ability to coordinate effectively, within and among teams, to get results, build better products faster, and drive customer and shareholder value," he says.

Toward that end he eliminated one of the most criticized aspects of working at Microsoft, stack ranking: job performance reviews that pit team members against each other rather than encouraging collaboration. It forces workers to try to stand out individually on collaborative projects in order to avoid bad reviews or even firing. The system could penalize workers unduly or fail to reward them sufficiently because it imposes a bell curve over the performance rankings of each group.

On paper it seems like a good idea to get rid of it as a way to produce better work and better morale, but in practice it's still uncertain what it will unleash. The impact on Microsoft in general has yet to play out.


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Spanish police arrest eight in $45 million global ATM fraud

Spanish police said Sunday eight people have been arrested who allegedly aided a global ring that stole millions from two banks through fraudulent ATM withdrawals.

Six Romanians and two Moroccans are accused of making 446 withdrawals totaling €285,000 (US$392,000) using cloned payment cards at ATMs in Madrid in February, according to a news release from Spain's Interior Ministry. They're also alleged to have stolen €68,000 in December 2012.

Spain's roundup adds to arrests made by the U.S. and Germany in the scam, which saw the Bank of Muscat, based in Oman, and the National Bank of Ras Al-Khaimah PSC, also known as RAKBANK, in United Arab Emirates, lose $45 million.

The well-planned thefts hit the banks twice, in December 2012 and in February, using a network of people who synchronized withdrawals using stolen payment card numbers at ATMs around the world.

U.S. federal prosecutors in New York indicted eight people last May and arrested six in early November. According to court documents, the withdrawal limits were raised on prepaid MasterCard and Visa payment cards.

The limits were increased as a result of a breach of credit card processors in the U.S. and India, which have not been identified.

Spain said its arrests came after Germany detained a key figure who compromised the credit card processors, disabling security features intended to protect accounts such as geographical restrictions and payment limits.

Those arrested in Spain are accused of receiving the prepaid debit card numbers and encoding the numbers onto dummy cards to make the withdrawals.

Spanish police released a video of a raid in which they seized €25,000, payment card encoding devices, 1,000 new magnetic-stripe cards, Apple and other computer equipment, jewelry, perfume and cologne.

The video showed the magnetic stripe card encoding devices, with the model number "MSR605," which is widely available for under $200 on websites such as Amazon and eBay.

RAKBANK suffered $5 million in losses after 4,500 ATM withdrawals were made in 20 countries on Dec. 22, 2012. A second large attack between Feb. 19 and 20 saw the Bank of Muscat lose $40 million, withdrawn by people in 20 countries in just 10 hours.

The New York group is alleged to have withdrawn $2.8 million of RAKBANK's money in thousands of transactions from 140 ATMs around New York. The bulk of it was sent to the organizers of the attacks, according to U.S. prosecutors.

The Interior Ministry said it worked with a U.S. agency on the latest arrests, but did not identify the organization.


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Report: NSA intercepts computer deliveries to plant spyware

A special hacking unit of the U.S. National Security Agency intercepts deliveries of new computer equipment en route to plant spyware, according to a report on Sunday from Der Spiegel, a German publication.

The method, called "interdiction," is one of the most successful operations conducted by the NSA's Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO), which specializes in infiltrating computers, wrote the publication, citing a top-secret document.

"If a target person, agency or company orders a new computer or related accessories, for example, TAO can divert the shipping delivery to its own secret workshops," Der Spiegel wrote.

The workshops, called "load stations," install malware or hardware components that give the NSA access to the computer, it wrote.

Der Spiegel did not say where the documents were obtained, although it is one of several news outlets, including The Washington Post and The Guardian, which possess information leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. He is not mentioned in the story, which was co-authored by filmmaker Laura Poitras, whom Snowden contacted.

The documents leaked by Snowden have prompted a U.S. government review of the NSA's spying activities and its impact on civil liberties and law. Technology companies, calling for stronger privacy controls, contend the agency's tampering with their networks could undermine their businesses.

Der Spiegel wrote that a 50-page "product catalog" it viewed from the NSA described a division called "ANT," which specializes in engineering access to products from companies such as firewall maker Juniper Networks, networking giants Cisco Systems and Huawei Technologies, and Dell.

"For nearly every lock, ANT seems to have a key in its toolbox," the publication wrote.

Another internal NSA presentation showed the agency has access to crash reports sent by computers to Microsoft, Der Spiegel reported. A prompt is sometimes shown during certain problems with Windows, and users are asked if they'd like to send an automated report to the company.

Der Spiegel wrote that the presentation indicated the NSA can intercept these reports from a sea of internet traffic using its XKeyscore tool, an internet monitoring tool revealed in July by The Guardian.

Intercepting the reports "appears to have little importance in practical terms" but provides insights into a targeted person's computer, Der Spiegel wrote.

Another top-secret document described NSA efforts to tap into the SEA-ME-WE-4 undersea telecommunications cable, which stretches from southern France to Thailand and connects Europe with North Africa and the Middle East.

On Feb. 13, the TAO "successfully collected network management information" for the cable, including Layer 2 information that shows circuit mapping, Der Spiegel reported, quoting the document.

Der Spiegel further described some of the TAO's computer exploitation activities, which include trying to redirect a targeted person's computer to servers controlled by the agencies that can deliver spyware.

The NSA and its U.K. counterpart, GCHQ, use a tool called QUANTUMINSERT to tracks a person's internet browsing and at opportune moments direct the user's computer to one of its FOXACID exploitation servers.

One document showed that QUANTUMINSERT was most effective when people were trying to visit the professional networking site LinkedIn, Der Spiegel said. The success rate was more than 50 percent, it said.

The NSA could not be immediately reached for comment Sunday night.


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2013 in Video: Apple's year in review

Written By Unknown on Minggu, 29 Desember 2013 | 16.01

Apple held off on most of its major product updates until the second half of 2013, but with the new iPhones, revamped iPads, and finally, a Mac Pro, and it turned out to be a pretty busy year for Cupertino after all. Relive all of Apple's highs and lows in this video round-up of the year gone by.

Nick Barber , IDG News Service

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Is 2014 the Year of the Smartwatch?

When International CES opens in Las Vegas in early January, a flood of wearable computing devices, including smartwatches, will be on display.

The fledgling smartwatch market is tiny compared to that for smartphones, or even wearable devices like Google Glass or smart bands that cater to fitness and health-monitoring needs.

Still, the smartwatch phenomenon promises to blossom in 2014 as experts expect Google to launch a model by summer followed by Apple sometime in the fall. Even Microsoft is reportedly working on one.

To achieve any degree of greatness, though, these major tech innovators and their smaller competitors must overcome some significant hurdles.

For instance, most of the smartwatches unveiled to date are too expensive, at $200 to $300 each, for widespread adoption. Most of the devices also require a connection to a smartphone via Bluetooth, which implies that users face the added cost of the smartphone and a wireless service contract.

The early smartwatches also lack functionality and mostly run fewer than 20 smartwatch apps.

wearables chart

Several analysts say the so-called value proposition of smartwatches is unclear so far. Sure, you can check your smartwatch for a text message or email or use it to find the time or a weather forecast without having to dig into a pocket or purse to find your smartphone. But is that enough to attract users to the technology?

Some smartwatches (sometimes called smart bands) include sensors that let them double as fitness monitors, which helps expand their functionality to a degree. A few also have cameras, microphones, and speakers.

Beyond those basic price and functionality hurdles, some of the early smartwatches are just plain ugly and far too large (mostly around 2 inches by 1.5 inches) for women to wear on their wrists, say several analysts familiar with the market.

Samsung Galaxy Gear Smartwatch

Samsung Galaxy Gear

That problem suggests the successful smartwatch innovators will—or should—pair up with fashion designers.

"Fashion will be important, whether in smartwatches or Google Glass," said J.P. Gownder, an analyst at Forrester. "Vendors need to up their game on design. They should partner with jewelry and clothing vendors. Tech firms just aren't equipped to deal with fashion by themselves."

Gartner analyst Angela McIntyre said that most of today's smartwatches are too large and dull-looking.

"When I put many of them on, they are wider than my wrist is, and I'm not that small," she said. "These are meant for males to wear, so they are missing half the market right there."

"One of the most difficult issues is the smartwatch face—it's a black box. If they'd make them look like conventional watches, that would help. Yes, I'd like more sparkle, and there are some designs for making them look like regular watches. These devices need more of a value proposition that people will understand and want," she added.

McIntyre summarized the challenges this way: "If a company could get the home run design—one that's right—with more apps and good price points, they could take off, but we haven't seen that design and that solution yet."

Newcomers to the market

The latest smartwatches to become available include Samsung's $300 Galaxy Gear. The Galaxy Gear, launched in the fall, is designed to pair with Galaxy devices like the Note 3 plus-size phone to make phone calls, take pictures, download apps, conduct Web searches, or check email.

The Sony Smartwatch, now in its second generation sells for $200, but cannot make voice calls.

Samsung and eBay recently announced that Galaxy Gear can now notify users of responses to online eBay bids, giving users the ability to make a quick counter-bid. But that kind of app isn't sufficient to justify the cost of a device that largely relies on smartphones to make calls or the smartphone's cellular or Wi-Fi connection to the Internet.

Innovation coming?

Officials at Samsung and elsewhere acknowledge that wearable technology, especially smartwatches, is barely beyond infancy and will likely see substantial innovation in the next two years.

Perhaps Apple will wow consumers globally with an "iWatch" by including technologies like the iBeacon proximity tool that was added to recent iPhone models. The innovative iPod and iPhone turned the consumer electronics market upside down, and Apple could do that again with a smartwatch.

Unfortunately, Apple doesn't exhibit at CES, and the company has yet to officially disclose that it's developing an iWatch smartwatch.

That said, an iWatch with iBeacon technology could usher in a Apple smartwatch world where users could literally open doors equipped with their own transmitters. For instance, a driver could unlock his or her car and start it with such technology. Users could also use the technology make purchases in a store after receiving a discount coupon by authorizing a credit card payment through a previously-stored account with Apple.

Future smartwatches may also include voice and gesture activation capabilities, which would go a long way toward reducing the need for a large touchscreen interface. Voice or gesture control makes it more likely that we'll see an elegant-looking smartwatch with a much smaller face that still has powerful functionality.

Market potential for smartwatches

Analysts at Canalys back in July projected that 5 million smartwatches will ship worldwide in 2014, while Gartner recently said it projects that the global number could reach 7 million next year.

Both the Canalys and Gartner projections are tiny compared to the forecasts that 1 billion or more smartphones will ship in 2014. However, the 2014 smartphone projections are both substantially higher than Canalys' report showing that 500,000 would be shipped this year.

What will work?

Canalys analyst Daniel Matte singled out the $150 smartwatch made by the startup Pebble. That company was started with funding from 85,000 investors found through Kickstarter.

Matta termed the Pebble smartwatch as reasonably successful with more than 200,000 reportedly shipped since its unveiling in early 2013. By comparison, reports have Samsung selling 800,000 Galaxy Gear devices to date, though the number has not been confirmed by the vendor.

"The Pebble is the best smartwatch so far, even though it's fairly basic," Matte said. "The one or two things it does do, it does well, which means it connects well to smartphones and runs apps on the display fairly reliably. It's really early, but it's still not a great device."

The Pebble smartwatch comes in five colors made of a water resistant material and features a 1.26-inch, 144-by-168-pixel e-paper display with an LED backlight. The device weighs 1.3 ounces and can work with both Android and iOS smartphones via Bluetooth 4.0.

The ARM Cortex M3-based smartwatch runs the Pebble OS. The processor runs at up to 80 MHz.

The size of the smartwatch's battery is not disclosed, though Pebble says the device can run for up to seven days between charges.

Pebble says that "thousands" of developers are working on Pebble apps. Some of the apps coming soon include iControl, which can control home alarms, the FourSquare social app and GoPro for taking photos.

Currently, Pebble supports notifications from email or other inputs and alarms, music from the phone and some basic fitness apps. The watch face is customizable.

Matte said the Pebble falls at the upper end of the $100 to $150 sweet spot for what he believes smartwatches should cost to catch on with users.

Like other analysts, Matte said most smartwatches today "aren't very aesthetic or fashionable." He did note that Jawbone and Nike are making fashionable wearable smart band devices for fitness and sports activities, and those could provide design tips for the major smartwatch makers.

Neither the Jawbone or Nike device has a watch-like face in the conventional sense.

The Nike+ Fuel Band SE works with iOS and comes in three sizes and four colors for $149, with a rose gold version for $169. (Nike also has a Nike+ SportWatch GPS for $139.99 that has a conventional watch face.) The Jawbone Up24 has a wrap-around design that works with iOS and comes in two colors for $149.99.

With better designs and many more apps, Matte believes that smartwatches (which he terms smart bands) shipments will reach 40 million globally within several years.

"Smart bands are the next big thing in consumer electronics," he said.

In addition to Samsung, Sony, Nike, and possibly Pebble, other companies expected to show off smartwatches at CES include Basis Science, Burg, Connected Device, Dennco, Ezio, Filip, Kreyos, Kronoz, MetaWatch, Mio, Neptune, Polar, Qualcomm, and TomTom.


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There's no Here there: Nokia pulls map app off iOS

As it turns out, the road to cross-platform mapping compatibility didn't turn out to be as smooth as Nokia hoped.

Earlier this month, Nokia pulled Here Maps, its mobile map offering, from Apple's iOS App Store. The culprit? According to a December 25 report in the Indian Express subsequently picked up by other tech sites including The Wall Street Journal and Engadget, Nokia is blaming iOS 7. Specifically, "recent changes to iOS 7 harm the user experience," Nokia claimed in a statement supplied to several news sites.

iOS users who downloaded Here when it arrived on the App Store more than a year ago may beg to differ. Here Maps received little attention since its debut and even fewer updates. Nokia's app found itself on the business end of tepid reviews from iOS users in the App Store. With Apple telling app makers to make their app submissions compatible with iOS 7 by February 1, 2014, it's likely that Nokia decided to pull the plug on an app it never seemed to show much interest in improving in the first place.

That's a far cry from the fanfare that Nokia's November 2012 announcement that it was expanding its mapping services beyond its own line of smartphones, starting with an iOS version and then a software development kit for Android app makers. "We want to give everyone with any type of device to ability to use this, the best location platform in the industry," said Stephen Elop, then CEO of Nokia at a San Francisco press event to announce the cross-platform push. (Elop has since gone back to Microsoft as part of that company's $7.17 billion purchase of Nokia's devices business.) Now, Nokia's Here site merely directs non-Windows Phone users to access Here Maps via a mobile browser.

You'll forgive iOS users if the news that a little-supported mapping option has disappeared from the App Store hasn't trigged a wave of "Whither iOS?" soul searching. Even if you don't believe that Apple's own Maps app has improved since its disastrous 2012 rollout, there's still the iOS version of Google's mapping program, not to mention apps from GPS specialists like Navigon, TomTom and ALK Technologies. The departure of Here Maps from the iOS App Store probably says more about Nokia's efforts to develop apps for platforms beyond Windows Phone than it does about iOS 7.


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Target confirms customer PINs were taken in breach, but says data is safe

Written By Unknown on Sabtu, 28 Desember 2013 | 16.01

Target has confirmed that hackers obtained customer debit card PINs (personal identification numbers) in the massive data breach suffered by the retailer during the busy holiday shopping season, but says customers should be safe, as the numbers were encrypted.

Some 40 million customer debit and credit cards were affected by the breach, but until now it wasn't clear that PINs were part of the hackers' massive haul.

"While we previously shared that encrypted data was obtained, this morning through additional forensics work we were able to confirm that strongly encrypted PIN data was removed," Target said in a statement on its website Friday. "We remain confident that PIN numbers are safe and secure. The PIN information was fully encrypted at the keypad, remained encrypted within our system, and remained encrypted when it was removed from our systems."

When Target customers use their debit cards, the PIN is secured with Triple DES encryption at the checkout keypads, according to the statement. "Target does not have access to nor does it store the encryption key within our system," it adds. "The PIN information is encrypted within Targets systems and can only be decrypted when it is received by our external, independent payment processor. What this means is that the 'key' necessary to decrypt that data has never existed within Targets system and could not have been taken during this incident."

The company didn't reveal how many PINs were taken, or whether it even knows the total at this point in its probe.

Target is still in the early stages of its investigation into the breach, according to Friday's statement. The company previously said it was working alongside the U.S. Secret Service and Department of Justice on the investigation.

U.S. lawmakers have called for an immediate investigation into Target's security practices. The retailer has said customers will not be forced to pay for any fraudulent charges on their card, and are also eligible to receive credit monitoring at no charge.


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The Internet Archive rekindles early video game consoles with emulation

Let's return to December, 1979. After begging and pleading, your parents gave in and bought you that shiny new Atari Video Computer System (later renamed the Atari 2600). While snow flurried outside, you stayed inside, saving the Earth from those awful Space Invaders.

Now you can relive that possibly-fictional moment from your childhood. The Internet Archive just unveiled The Internet Archive Console Living Room, a new initiative sitting alongside the Historical Software Collection that launched earlier this year.

In total, there are 983 new games for your perusal.

Space Invaders - Atari 2600

You can almost smell 1978 from here.

The Historical Software Collection aims to preserve notable software from PCs past, making it accessible to modern audiences through the Javascript Multi-Emulator Super System (JSMESS). With JSMESS, these old programs can be run right in your browser.

While the Historical Software Collection contained a few games (including the disastrous E.T.), the Internet Archive Console Living Room greatly expands the titles on offer.

Yar's Revenge - Atari 2600

Yar's Revenge—still fun, 30 years later.

"As nostalgia, a teaching tool, or just plain fun, you'll find hundreds of the games that started a billion-dollar industry," writes the Internet Archive.

Currently the Internet Archive hosts games from five early consoles: the Atari 2600 and 7800, the ColecoVision, the Magnavox Odyssey, and the short-lived Astrocade. While other (shadier) sites offered standalone ROMs of these games or emulated them in the browser, this is the first time these titles have been legally obtainable in this manner.

And don't worry—this time around you're getting a lot more than E.T.

A quick trawl through the collection reveals classics like Yar's Revenge, Donkey Kong, Spy Hunter, Joust, Defender, Centipede, and others. Oh, and the atrocious 2600 version of Pac-Man—experience the flickering ghosts for yourself!

Pac-Man Atari 2600

This is not the Pac-Man you're looking for. Unless you hate fun.

The games currently run sans-audio, but the Internet Archive promises to remedy that situation soon. "Like the Historical Software collection, the Console Living Room is in beta—the ability to interact with software in near-instantaneous real-time comes with the occasional bumps and bruises," wrote archivist Jason Scott.

He also promises, "In coming months, the playable software collection will expand greatly."

Me? I've got my hopes pinned on a Vectrex emulator.


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2013 in Video: The year's biggest tech stories

From NSA surveillance to watches that connect to your phone, it was a busy year in tech. Join us for a video round-up of the year's biggest tech stories, including big changes at Microsoft, BlackBerry's ongoing struggles, and Twitter's IPO.

Nick Barber, IDG News Service

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CTIA website shows mobile app data usage

Written By Unknown on Jumat, 27 Desember 2013 | 16.00

A new website launched by mobile trade group CTIA shows smartphone and tablet users how much data is used by popular apps.

KnowMyApp.org, unveiled by CTIA Thursday, allows mobile device owners to estimate an app's data usage before it's downloaded. This is the first tool allowing consumers to learn about an app's data usage before downloading it, although there are tools available to measure an app's data use after downloading, CTIA said.

CTIA has also aimed KnowMyApp.org at app developers, by giving them information about conserving data usage and minimizing impact to battery life, the trade group said.

Visitors to the website can search by app name, operating system or app categories. They can learn now the app was tested, how much data is used when an app is downloaded, at initialization, during active run time and during background time.

The website also includes information about how mobile device owners can conserve data.

KnowMyApp.org currently includes test results for the top 50 paid and free apps from the Apple and Google stores, and CTIA plans to add more apps each month. The trade group invites developers to submit apps to be tested.

The tool was developed through the CTIA's Application Data Usage Working Group, with members including Apple, AT&T, Ericsson, HTC America, Microsoft, Sprint and Verizon Wireless. Intertek developed the mobile app data usage benchmark testing using the AT&T Application Resource Optimizer, an open-source diagnostic tool that captures, analyzes and reports network app data usage to help developers create more efficient apps.


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Amazon offers gift cards, shipping refunds for late deliveries

Amazon.com is offering US$20 gift cards and refunds on shipping charges to customers who did not get their Christmas orders on time.

The online retailer is blaming the delivery companies for the widespread delays.

"Amazon fulfillment centers processed and tendered customer orders to delivery carriers on time for holiday delivery," Mary Osako, a company spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement Thursday. "We are reviewing the performance of the delivery carriers."

The company has refunded any shipping charges associated with impacted shipments in addition to offering the gift card. It did not disclose how many customers had been affected by the delays.

The delays highlight that even as online retail sales are picking up, the physical infrastructure for deliveries may often fall short of the requirements. United Parcel Service of America said on its website on Thursday that it "experienced heavy holiday volume and is making every effort to get packages to their destination as quickly as possible." UPS has resumed normally scheduled service on Thursday, it added.

"UPS stole XMAS this year...waiting for a bunch of packages," wrote an user on Facebook. Competitor FedEx was also criticized online.

"Our 300,000 team members delivered outstanding service during this holiday season, and we experienced no major service disruptions in the week before Christmas despite heavy volume," FedEx said in a statement Thursday. "Every single package is important to us, and we will continue to work directly with customers to address any isolated incidents."

U.S. shoppers using desktops spent about $42.8 billion between Nov. 1 and Dec. 22, up from $38.9 billion in 2012, according to digital analytics firm comScore. The figures do not include purchases through mobile devices.

The complaints about late deliveries came as Amazon.com reported that the entire 2013 holiday season was the best ever for the retailer, with more than 36.8 million items ordered worldwide on Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving in the U.S., which was a record-breaking 426 items per second.

Some other retailers also reported delays.


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Alibaba poised to offer telecom services in China

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group is set to diversify into telecom services, having bagged a license from the Chinese government.

HiChina, a subsidiary of Alibaba, received a MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) license from China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, a spokeswoman from Alibaba said via email on Friday.

Alibaba is not providing further details at this point, she added.

The ministry said Thursday it had issued licenses to 11 private companies in a bid to get greater private sector involvement in the telecom sector and stimulate competition.

Under the MVNO program, the new operators will resell services from China's three state-owned operators - China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom.

The government this month issued 4G licenses to operate LTE TDD (Long-Term Evolution Time Division Duplex) networks in the country to the three operators.

The market opportunity for Alibaba and the other new players could be large if they are able to get the right terms from the incumbent operators. China accounted for 1.2 billion out of a global total of 6.6 billion mobile subscriptions at the end of September, according to a report by Ericsson. The country added 30 million new subscriptions in the third quarter.

Alibaba has been promoting to handset makers in China its own Linux-based mobile operating system, which could get a boost from the group itself offering mobile services. The company could also use its MVNO service to promote some of its e-commerce services and applications.


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Venture capitalist proposes California 2.0, a plan for six new states

Written By Unknown on Selasa, 24 Desember 2013 | 16.01

A prominent venture capitalist proposed on Monday a plan to split California into six new states, including one called "Silicon Valley" that would stretch from San Francisco to San Jose and include the entire region where many of the biggest tech companies have their headquarters.

The plan by Tim Draper, who was an early backer of Skype, Baidu and Hotmail, faces multiple hurdles and would require significant support from among the state's 38 million [m] residents, and from the rest of the country if it makes it any further. He hopes to put the idea plan on the November 2014 ballot, which would require about half a million signatures. On the face of it, the chances of it being realized are low.

But Draper said splitting California would bring real benefits.

"Something's not working in our state, and I'm convinced that it is with the existing system, the existing breadth of industry and varying interests. California is untenable and un-governable," Draper told a sparsely attended news conference at the Silicon Valley school for entrepreneurship that he created and that bears his name. There were about 20 people in the room, although only six appeared to be reporters.

"I'm convinced that the best path for Californians is to create six new states that are unencumbered by trying to balance the interests of people who have very divergent goals and aspirations," he said.

Draper said he believes the interests of the tech industry in Silicon Valley, the defense and entertainment industries in and around Los Angeles, the farms of the state's Central Valley, and a growing medical devices business in the south of the state are best served by local governments.

For Silicon Valley, he said tech companies would benefit from a state government that was more "tech savvy."

When pressed on that assertion, Draper offered regulations covering the tech industry as an example.

"Whenever I try to talk to people in [California state capital] Sacramento, they are not really in touch with what we are trying to accomplish in Silicon Valley," he said. "Here we are working on new communications systems that are always several leaps in front of the bureaucracy. So the bureaucracies are all trying to catch up, and we're not quite sure how we should be governed."

His proposal comes at a time of growing discontent in San Francisco and Silicon Valley at the apparent impact of the tech industry. The massive amount of wealth created by companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter has amplified economic disparities in the area and made the local housing market one of the most expensive in the country.

While the root causes of the social friction in the area are complex, the initiative by the billionaire Draper is already being compared to similar proposals from other local tech elites.

Google founder Larry Page said in May that he thinks there should be a place with looser laws that allow tech companies to experiment. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel has put money behind a plan to build a floating island off the California coast in international waters—away from U.S. regulations and immigration laws. And Stanford University lecturer Balaji Srinivasan, also a venture capitalist, has theorized an "exit" from the U.S. in which Silicon Valley would become "an opt-in society, ultimately outside the United States, run by technology."

Under Draper's proposal, the six new states would be called Jefferson, Silicon Valley, North California, Central California, West California and South California.

The proposal includes a provision that centers on one of Silicon Valley's basic tenants: Competition is good.

The breakup of the state wouldn't happen until at least 2018 and would require an act of Congress. Before that time, residents of each county could vote to redraw the proposed boundaries so their county could join a different state from the one Draper is prescribing, "thereby creating competition in proposed governance which will lead to better and more responsive governance."

While Draper's chances of realizing his vision might be slim, the plan will almost certainly serve to continue the debate about the power of the technology industry and how it interacts and is regulated by government.

Draper is probably hoping for support from the tech community for his plan. He first disclosed it to TechCrunch, a website that tracks Silicon Valley startups, and Monday's news conference wasn't in one of the state's major cities but in San Mateo, close to the heart of Silicon Valley.


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Security researcher cancels talk at RSA conference in protest

Security researcher Mikko Hypponen has canceled his talk at a RSA security conference in San Francisco, reacting to a report that the security division of EMC allegedly received US$10 million from the U.S. National Security Agency to use a flawed random number generator in one of its products.

In an open letter on Monday to Joseph M. Tucci, chairman and CEO of EMC, and(Art Coviello, executive chairman of RSA, Hypponen, who is chief research officer at Finnish security company F-Secure, referred to a report by Reuters which stated that RSA accepted a random number generator from the NSA, and set it as the default option in its product BSafe, in return for the payment from the NSA.

The RSA took money "secretly" from the NSA to embed the Dual EC DRBG (Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator) technology into its BSafe toolkit, according to the report on Friday.

The number generator used in a 2006 standard of federal agency National Institute of Standards and Technology came under scrutiny after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden suggested it provided back-door entry to NSA snooping, according to reports.

RSA has denied entering into a secret contract with the NSA. "We made the decision to use Dual EC DRBG as the default in BSAFE toolkits in 2004, in the context of an industry-wide effort to develop newer, stronger methods of encryption. At that time, the NSA had a trusted role in the community-wide effort to strengthen, not weaken, encryption," it said in a statement Sunday.

Hypponen said RSA had not denied receiving $10 million from the NSA to use the random number generator. "You had kept on using the generator for years despite widespread speculation that NSA had backdoored it," he wrote.

The researcher said he didn't expect EMC or the conference to suffer as a result of the alleged deals with the NSA. Nor did he expect other conference speakers to cancel. Most of the speakers at the conference are American so why would they care about surveillance that's not targeted at them but at non-Americans, Hypponen wrote. Surveillance operations by U.S. intelligence agencies are targeted at foreigners, he added.

"However I'm a foreigner. And I'm withdrawing my support from your event," the Finnish researcher wrote. He had earlier tweeted that "If the Reuters story is true, I - for one - will be cancelling my invited talk and my panel participation in the upcoming RSA Conference."

The RSA conference runs from Feb 24 to 28. Among the keynote speakers and other speakers, listed on the website for the conference, are executives from Microsoft, Juniper Networks, Cisco, McAfee, Symantec and Hewlett-Packard. Hypponen was to speak on "Governments as Malware Authors" at the conference. The researcher said he had spoken eight times at RSA conferences in the U.S., Europe and Japan. "You've even featured my picture on the walls of your conference walls among the 'industry experts,'" he wrote in the letter.

EMC could not be immediately reached for comment on Hypponen's decision.


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Create a digital Yule log on your HDTV

I have a dream every holiday season. It's Christmas Eve, and I'm sitting in front of a roaring fire. Christmas carols are echoing through the living room. Faithful friends who are dear to me gather near to me. The scene is something out of a Hallmark card.

Now if only my fireplace would co-operate.

Unfortunately, the fireplace in my house may as well have been stamped "For Display Purposes Only." The fireplace seems to have been designed by people with only a passing familiarity with fire safety codes. It's built shallow and the hearth is practically non-existant. What I'm trying to say is, one spark from the fireplace and my Christmas tree will be lit up all right, but probably not in the manner that local fire marshals would find advisable. So like millions of apartment dwellers or people who live in fireplace-free homes, it seems that I'll be dreaming of a Yule log-free Christmas.

That is, unless I take this holiday traditional digital.

You don't necessarily need a fireplace to enjoy a Yule log's warming glow.

If you're a sucker for tradition but a bit trepidatious around open flame, you can still enjoy the visual delights of your very own Yule log with none of the fire hazards. All you'll need is a TV and a streaming media box and you can enjoy the figurative-though-not-literal warming glow of a digital Yule log.

The digital Yule log, of course, traces its roots back to 1966, when a mad genius by the name of Fred M. Thrower fretted about how New Yorkers without fireplaces might enjoy the cozy feel of a Yule log. Since Fred M. Thrower also happened to be CEO of WPIX-TV, he was actually in the position to do something about it. And he do something he did: he had his channel air footage of a Yule log burning on the TV screen. The idea turned out to be a smash and quickly spread to other TV stations in other cities across the country.

Taking Fred M. Thrower's innovation into this century is simple, provided you've got a cool head and a set-top box that either lets you connect to YouTube or, better yet, one of Apple's mobile devices.

The YouTube option

The easiest way to get a holiday fire roaring on your TV is to let the people uploading videos to YouTube do all the hard work for you. All you need is a streaming box with its own YouTube channel. Both the Apple TV and Chromecast let you watch YouTube on your big-screen TV, as do the latest gaming consoles from Microsoft and Sony. And last week, a YouTube channel finally arrived on Roku 3 players just in time for the holidays. Truly, it's a Christmas miracle!

digital yule log youtube apple tv

Getting a Yule log up on your TV is as easy as finding the YouTube channel on your streaming media box (an Apple TV, in this case).

So navigate your way to your device's YouTube channel and search for "Yule Log." You'll want to eyeball the videos to make sure that the picture quality, sound, and run time are up to your exacting standars, but here are a few that we found sufficiently jolly as part of our search.

  • 2 Hours Logs Burning in Fireplace: It looks good on the big screen, but that promised two-hour run time is actually one hour and 49 minutes. Santa doesn't cotton to fibbers, my log-burning friend.
  • Best Yule Log: "Best" is such a subjective term, but this is an hour and 53 minutes of wood-crackling goodness.
  • HD Fireplace Video: "Filmed just outside Hamburg, Germany on a winter evening," the YouTube description reads. Ooooooooh—a foreign film!
  • WPIX Yule Log: Just eight minutes and 33 seconds long, but why not take a moment to admire Fred M. Thrower's contribution to world culture?
digital yule log youtube search

Search for 'yule log' on YouTube and you'll have a lot of options to choose from.

There's a problem with these videos, unfortunately: The virtual fire may go out long before you're ready to stop celebrating the holiday, and getting videos to loop on your set-top box may require manual intervention, reducing your holiday cheer by at least 10 percent. You're also at the mercy of whatever audio comes with the video, whether that's a crackling fire (good!) or holiday music that sounds like it's being tapped out on a Casio keyboard (less good). If you have the time and the good sense to listen to the advice of my colleague Christopher Breen, you can find other ways to fill your home with holiday music. But let's not kid ourselves: Old St. Nick's sleigh is almost here and you've not much time to get your living room into the holiday spirit.

The AirPlay option

If relying on the vagaries of YouTube doesn't sound like a great plan for spreading holiday cheer, there's another trick you can try—provided you've got an Apple TV and an iOS device handy. Through the magic of AirPlay—the streaming technology that lets you wirelessly stream audio and video from your iOS device to your high-definition TV—you can deliver a crackling fire, Prometheus-like, to the big screen. You'll need an iPhone 4S or later, a fifth-generation iPod touch, or an iPad 2 or later to make your TV show exactly what's on your iOS device. And in this case, that's a cleansing blast of fire.

Now all you need to do is find a half-decent fireplace simulator in the iOS App Store, and here, I'm afraid, the pickings thin out just a tad. While in the early days of the App Store, any developer with a rudimentary knowledge of coding could whip up an app that simulated a roaring fire, many of those apps have gone years without an update. In my testing, only two apps pass muster, and both come with significant caveats.

fireplace hd plus

Fireplace HD+ has a number of scenes you can display on your Apple TV. This is one of the more festive options.

Fireplace HD+ has the benefit of having gotten an update this calendar year. It gives you a choice of five different fireplaces, though a few are cheesier than others. (Seriously, there's an animated flames option that wouldn't look out of place in A Heavy Metal Holiday Christmas special from the 1980s.) The app offers a selection of radio channels, and you can even search for channels by artist or song title to help slightly personalize the musical accompaniment for your holiday fire. The app supports AirPlay streaming to your Apple TV, and while I had better performance without enabling the radio music, the $1 Fireplace HD+ gave me a nice fire on my TV with a minimum of fuss.

But you know what? I like to pick my own music to play alongside my digital Yule log. That's why the app of choice for Michaels family holiday gatherings has been A Very Cozy Fireplace HD. Like Fireplace HD+, it costs $1, runs on both an iPad or an iPhone, and beams a burning log to your Apple TV-connected monitor as if by magic. And it also give you the option to have musical accompaniment, including Playlists from your device's Music library. It's pretty glorious.

You can pick your own music with A Very Cozy Fireplace HD, though that can create some problems if you're running the current version on an iOS 7 device.

Or at least, it was. The jump to iOS 7 hasn't been kind to A Very Cozy Fireplace HD. As the developer acknowledges on the app's App Store page, "playing your own iPod music along with the fire video over AirPlay to an Apple TV can have mixed results" for iOS 7-powered devices. In my case, "mixed results" means "wouldn't work at all." I can stream the crackling fire just fine, but adding my own music causes the app and my Apple TV to stop speaking to one another. While that may be a nice recreation of many family gatherings over the holidays, it's not what I'm looking for in a festive app.

Ah, but before you cancel Christmas—or hope for a last-minute update to A Very Cozy Fireplace—I found a workaround that just might save the holiday. If you've got an old iOS device lying around that you've not yet updated to iOS 7, AirPlay streaming on A Very Cozy Fireplace works as intended. I dug into my personal Isle of Misfit Toys for an aging iPhone with a cracked screen; it's not much on looks, but it's still running iOS 6, so I'm able to enjoy a roaring fire and my own music on my Apple TV courtesy of A Very Cozy Fireplace, just like Fred M. Thrower would have wanted.

This article updates a previous post with the most recent information as of December 23, 2013.


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Beyond fingerprints: FBI enlists biometrics to solve crimes

Written By Unknown on Senin, 23 Desember 2013 | 16.00

Nearly 80 years after it began collecting fingerprints on index cards as a way to identify criminals, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is moving to a new system that improves the accuracy and performance of its existing setup while adding more biometrics.

By adding palm print, face, and iris image search capabilities, the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division (CJIS) hopes to improve the accuracy of identity searches, make it easier to positively identify and track criminals as they move through the criminal justice system, and provide a wider range of tools for crime scene investigators.

To take full advantage of all of the new capabilities, however, federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies may need to update their own systems to be able to capture the data, forward it to the FBI, and search against the nationwide database.

"Most booking stations are starting to gather all of the modalities—fingerprints, palm, and face and iris," says Jon Kevin Reid, assistant section chief in the CJIS division. But many regional and local law enforcement systems don't yet capture all of that information, and will need to upgrade their own systems to reap the benefits from the new system.

timeline

The current database, the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint ID System (IAFIS), includes information on 135 million criminals and terrorists, as well as civil servants and other citizens who work in "positions of trust."

Since its launch in 2008, the $1.2 billion Next Generation Identification (NGI) project has been incrementally replacing pieces of the aging IAFIS and adding new features (see the text box below).

To date, the agency has upgraded the ten-print system hardware and software, launched a new palm-print search capability and is currently piloting face recognition services with an eye toward full deployment next year. An iris recognition pilot will commence next summer.

"NGI is a seven-year program and we're in the last year," says Reid. By the end of 2014, the agency plans to have all new functions rolled out and the entirety of IAFIS decommissioned.

Mobile ID

The recently released mobile ID system is one of the more compelling new features in NGI. It lets officers in the field use a handheld fingerprint scanner during a traffic stop and run a two-fingerprint check against the NGI's newly created Repository of Individuals of Special Concern (RISC).

That subset of the criminal master file includes "the worst of the worst," Reid explains, such as criminals with outstanding warrants,known sex offenders and suspected and known terrorists. Responses come back within six seconds, Reid says.

So far, 13 states are using RISC, and the State of Michigan is currently implementing it, says Scott Blanchard, manager of the automated print identification section at the Michigan State Police.

Core upgrades

In NGI, the ten-print system has also been improved because it now runs on a more powerful, 1000-blade server farm—the old IAFIS system runs on 64 blades—and uses enhanced recognition algorithms. "NGI is faster, more accurate, and has better process flows than IAFIS had," says Blanchard.

fingerprint

Fingerprints are more accurate than facial recognition for identifying individuals.

The matching accuracy rate has risen from 92 percent to 99 percent while average response time has dropped from two hours to ten minutes. "That changes the game at the local police station," says Art Ibers, director of the NGI program at government contractor Lockheed Martin.

But the time improvement is for matching fingerprints scanned under controlled conditions, such as at a police booking station. Matching latent fingerprints—those found at a crime scene—is much more difficult. With an accuracy rate of just 25 percent, IAFIS wasn't highly effective for investigators. By contrast, the upgraded NGI capabilities rolled out in May 2013 have had an accuracy rate well above 80 percent for latents, due to an improved algorithm that takes advantage of more compute horsepower, Reid says.

Going for the palm

A national palm-print database, deployed in May 2013, should also help investigators because palm prints are left at the crime scene 30 percent of the time. "There will be significant leads around cold cases that we couldn't have gotten before," Reid says.

palm print database

Palm prints are left at the crime scene 30 percent of the time.

The State of Michigan has been taking palm prints for five years, but Blanchard says there have been a few kinks getting up and running with the new system. "The FBI has placed requirements on palm print submissions that most states are not meeting," he says.

In a palm capture, NGI requires that the whole hand be captured, not just the palm. "They are trying to compare the fingers from the palm capture to the fingerprints that were rolled to make sure the palm matches the person. Many agencies aren't meeting that requirement. We are capturing just the palm, not the entire hand," Blanchard explains.

In some cases the biometric devices that local law enforcement is using to collect data may need to be modified or replaced entirely. "Until this issue gets resolved, the usefulness of the palm database is limited," he says.

Many law enforcement computer systems are now playing catch-up, both for machine-to-machine data sharing between their own booking systems and NGI, and for workstation software that queries the NGI system. For example, the Western Identification Network, used by law enforcement agencies in eight states in the Pacific Northwest, doesn't yet support sharing of the new biometric data, and workstation software used by law enforcement in Seattle to search the new NGI database needs to be updated as well.

Current plans call for these features to be added over the course of next year.

"We are experimenting with workarounds" until the software is upgraded over the next year, says Carol Gillespie, manager of the King County Regional Automated Fingerprint Identification System in Seattle.

Recognizing mug shots

face recognition

Using face recognition algorithms to search for a match against another photo is new.

Mug shots have long been a staple of IAFIS, but the FBI's Interstate Photo System Facial Recognition Pilot project, launched in February 2012 in three states, now lets participating law enforcement organizations use face recognition to search against over 15 million of those images. The system returns a ranked list of potential matches. The service will be fully deployed next June.

Using face recognition algorithms to search for a match against another photo is new; it matches the photo taken at the booking station or from a crime scene with mug shots in the NGI database that have a high probability of being a match.

Face recognition isn't nearly as accurate as fingerprints when identifying individuals. "If you had a perfect gallery it would be in the 80 percent range for matching," Reid says. But that's for the best case. Most existing mug shots weren't taken with facial recognition in mind. The right pose and high image quality increase the odds of finding a match.

But image quality for mug shots varies widely and when matching against crime scene evidence, such as images from security cameras, the accuracy degrades significantly from that best case.

Nonetheless, face recognition is proving to be an effective tool during active investigations for the Michigan State Police. "The system has been very beneficial in attempting to identify unknown subjects who commit crimes of identity theft and fraud," says Pete Langenfeld, manager of the digital image analysis section.

The response time for an inquiry has averaged less than three minutes, he says. And because the people who commit such crimes often cross state lines, investigators don't need to contact every jurisdiction to see if they have a face recognition program. But, he cautions, "Any candidate derived from a facial recognition search should be considered an investigative lead only, and not positive identification."

Experimenting with iris recognition

CJIS has been working with the Federal Bureau of Prisons and National Sheriffs Association to launch a pilot iris recognition project, but whether it will eventually be included in the new NGI/IAFIS system is still undecided. "We know there are business cases, but is it something we want to support at the national level?" Reid asks. A formal pilot will be deployed in the summer of 2014, he says.

box2

Iris recognition, while very accurate, is unlikely to supplant the well-established ten-print system for criminal identification purposes, and it's of limited use for investigations because, as Reid points out, "There isn't an iris left at the scene." So far, the best use for iris recognition has been in tracking criminals as they pass through the criminal justice system. "Prisons like it because you can do it without having to touch the individual," Reid says.

The Michigan State Police aren't capturing iris images during booking, but Blanchard says they have been experimenting with the technology as a way to provide access to secure rooms. "It's more secure than access cards and cleaner [and] less intrusive than fingerprints," he says. "If it's more efficient and cost effective, we'll roll it out department-wide."

While it's more costly than other biometrics, iris recognition system prices have been coming down. And in some applications, Blanchard says, the added security and reliability may be worth the extra cost.

To date, NGI has been returning twice as many identifications with multimodal biometrics as it did with the old IAFIS system. While Blanchard has been pleased with the new system's performance, he says it will take time for the majority of law enforcement agencies to get set up to collect and share the new classes of biometric data.

"It's a revolutionary change," Reid adds—one that should improve law enforcement's effectiveness, particularly for criminal activity that crosses state lines.


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U.S. government moves to block further litigation in NSA surveillance cases

The U.S. government again claimed state-secrets privileges in a move to block two lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the National Security Agency's monitoring of Americans' phone communications and email, according to court filings late Friday.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in a filing in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, that even though aspects of the government's surveillance programs have been disclosed, further litigation of the lawsuits would jeopardize secrets of operational details necessary for state security.

The government also declassified and made public a variety of material and documents related to the cases and to surveillance programs initiated by former U.S. President George Bush, including earlier assertions of state-secrets privileges.

For the first time, the government officially disclosed that "President Bush authorized NSA to collect: (1) the contents of certain international communications, a program that was later referred to as the Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP), and (2) telephony and Internet non-content information (referred to as metadata) in bulk, subject to various conditions."

President Bush issued authorizations approximately every 30-60 days, according to the declassified material on the Tumblr page of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The programs initiated by President Bush operated for several years under executive power before coming under judicial and congressional oversight. The NSA's surveillance included warrantless monitoring of email and phone calls. The two lawsuits in the Northern District of California District Court challenge the legality of a Congress-approved, modified version of that warrantless surveillance.

Many formerly secret operational details of the NSA's surveillance have come to light in the wake of disclosures made by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden to the media.

Nevertheless, continued litigation of the California court cases could compromise national security, Clapper said in the Friday court filing.

"In my judgment, disclosure of still-classified details regarding these intelligence-gathering activities, either directly or indirectly, would seriously compromise, if not destroy, important and vital ongoing intelligence operations," Clapper wrote.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is leading one of the District Court cases, slammed the government filings.

"The governments attempt to block true judicial review of its mass, untargeted collection of content and metadata by pretending that the basic facts about how the spying affects the American people are still secret is both outrageous and disappointing," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn in a statement.

In the Northern District of California case led by the EFF, Carolyn Jewel is the plaintiff suing on behalf of AT&T customers. In the companion case, plaintiff Virginia Shubert is suing on behalf of all Americans.

State-secrets privileges allow the government to prevent sensitive information from being revealed in court, even if that means a case must be dismissed for lack of evidence. The Department of Justice wants Judge Jeffrey Wright to dismiss the NSA cases without ruling on the constitutionality of the surveillance programs.


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Apple and China Mobile sign deal to sell iPhones

Apple plans to offer the iPhone to more than 760 million China Mobile customers next month, which could help it increase its share from the fifth position in this growing market.

The company already sells its phones in China through two other carriers in the country—China Telecom and China Unicom—but a deal with China Mobile, the largest in the country, had eluded it for some time. One reason is that China Mobile uses a different wireless telecommunications standard from its competitors.

As part of an agreement announced Sunday, Apple's iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c will be available from China Mobile and Apple retail stores in China on January 17. Preregistration of the phones will begin on the carrier's website and through its customer service hotline from Wednesday.

The pricing of the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c for China Mobile will be available at a later date, Apple said in a statement.

Apple's share of the Chinese smartphone market reached 8 percent in the third quarter, according to research firm Canalys. Samsung Electronics was the largest player with a 21 percent market share, followed by Lenovo with a 13 percent share. Local player Yulong Computer Telecommunication with 11 percent market share and Huawei with 9 percent share took the third and fourth places.

China issued 4G licenses in December to three local carriers including China Telecom, which has been deploying base stations across the country using a 4G technology known as LTE TDD (Long-Term Evolution Time Division Duplex). Apple had been unwilling previously to support China Telecom's TD-SCDMA (Time Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access) 3G network technology, but on Sunday it announced that the iPhones would run on both the 4G TD-LTE and the 3G TD-SCDMA networks.

China Mobile's 4G services will be available in 16 cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen by the end of this year, according to a joint statement by the two companies. By the end of 2014, China Mobile plans to complete the rollout of more than 500,000 4G base stations, which will cover more than 340 cities with 4G service, it added.

In September, Apple added NTT DoCoMo, Japan's largest carrier, to its list of customers for the iPhone.


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Shopping for last-minute tech gifts? Here's our one stop guide

Written By Unknown on Minggu, 22 Desember 2013 | 16.00

You've only got a few more shopping days until Christmas, and you're still not sure what to get—or even where to start.

Not to worry—for the past month-and-a-half, we've been making a list and checking it twice for a wide array of laptops, scanners, and other hardware. We've put it all in one place, so you can know which products should be at the top of your list and what to keep in mind on those last-second shopping sprees.

Our product picks

Looking for a portable? Here are our favorites:

We also printer picks if you're in the market for a new printer:

As for other items that may be on your holiday list:

Our buying advice

These buying guides will tell you what to look for—and what to avoid—when shopping for tech.

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