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SolarCity to give Nest thermostats to 10,000 new customers in California

Written By Unknown on Rabu, 15 April 2015 | 16.00

Smart thermostat maker Nest has plenty of experience helping utilities manage peak demand through its Rush Hour Rewards program, which involves pre-cooling participating homes in anticipation of an energy rush hour and throttling AC usage during such a period. This spares the utility company the high cost associated with bringing additional power plants online while earning the user a sweet reward. Nest now intends to wield similar magic on the generation side of the energy equation.

Rooftop solar installer SolarCity announced a partnership with Nest today in which it will give away 10,000 Nest Learning Thermostats to select, new customers in California. The campaign, announced in a blog post, requires that the customer have Nest-compatible central air-conditioning units.

It is pertinent to note here that Google has invested more than $580 million in SolarCity over the last five years, with the latest investment coming as recently as February.

SolarCity says its Nest partnership is aimed at helping users of its photovoltaic systems maximize energy savings, and will ultimately usher in an era where "SolarCity can regulate the home's air conditioner, pool pump and other appliances based on the availability of inexpensive, clean solar power."

The company outlined a scenario in which the Nest automatically shuts off the AC while you're at work, and begins pre-cooling the home using power from the PV array just as you're about to return. The idea is that this entire solar energy-based pre-cooling exercise will lessen your dependence on the grid during evenings—when demand peaks, but the PV system is offline—and deliver maximum energy savings.

Why this matters: The two companies are hinting that we could see much tighter integration between PV systems and smart-home products as a result of this partnership. That's why it appears to be a win-win situation for everyone involved: SolarCity, Google, and and their customers.

"This initial deployment will be the distributed project in the U.S. where we learn and implement new standards for what's possible and what is in the shared interests of customers, solar companies, utilities, and the grid," Nest Energy Products Director Ben Bixby told Utility Drive.


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Intel sales sag under PC slowdown

The PC business enjoyed a bit of a revival last year as companies replaced older systems running Windows XP. Those upgrades are mostly done now, and the slower market has hit Intel's financial results.

The chip maker reported first-quarter revenue of $12.8 billion on Tuesday, flat from the same quarter last year and a bit lower than financial analysts had been expecting, according to a poll by Thomson Reuters.

Intel blamed lower than expected sales of business PCs but said the decline was offset by strong sales of servers and other data center products. The company had already cut its forecast for the quarter last month.

Its profit for the quarter, ended March 28, was $2.0 billion, or $0.41 per share, both up slightly from last year and in line with expectations.

Intel is battling at least two problems at the moment: a gradual decline in the PC business and an inability to make much headway against chip-design company ARM in smartphones.

Intel used to break out the financial results from its division that sells smartphone and tablet chips; last year that group lost $4.2 billion.

It made a change last quarter and no longer breaks out those numbers, so it's hard to see how its low-power Atom chips are selling. Instead, Intel lumps them together with the group that makes laptop and desktop PC chips.

That combined division, called the Client Computing Group, reported revenue of $7.4 billion for the last quarter, down 8 percent year over year, Intel said.

Its Data Center Group, which sells Xeon server processors, did better. Revenue there was $3.7 billion, up 19 percent from last year. Its smaller Internet of Things division also did well.

The PC business hasn't been this bad for a while. Shipments tumbled to a six-year low last quarter, according to research firm IDC. Another research firm, Gartner, predicts a single-digit percentage decline for the full year.

The upgrades from XP, brought on by the end of support for that operating system last year, have slowed, and companies are now waiting for Windows 10 before making purchases, IDC said. The OS is expected toward the end of the year.


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Satechi joins the connected-home fray with a color-tunable bulb and smart plug

Bluetooth-enabled LED bulbs and smart plugs are coming out of the woodwork. San Diego-based Satechi is just the latest manufacturer to enter this emerging space. The firm, which sells a broad collection of PC, smartphone, and tablet accessories, launched the Spectrum IQ Bulb and the IQ Plug late last week.

We recently put half a dozen connected, color-tunable LED bulbs through their paces to see how they stacked up. The 8-Watt Spectrum IQ Bulb has a clear advantage over most of those products in at least one department: price. At $35, it is among the most affordable options on the market. The bulb can be controlled via Bluetooth using any Android or iOS device, which eliminates the need for a hub or bridge.

The accompanying mobile app allows you to turn the bulb on or off, alter its brightness, and change the color (up to 16 million colors to choose from). Although the company itself makes no mention of the bulb's lumens output, a couple of users over at Amazon reckon it's no brighter than a 40W incandescent. The IQ Bulb is rated for 25,000 hours of use.

Satechi IQ Plug Satechi

Bluetooth is mounting a serious challenge to the Z-Wave and ZigBee standards when it comes controlling home lighting.

The IQ Plug also has a $35 price tag, but is currently being sold at an introductory price of $30. Designed to fit into any standard AC power socket, it allows you to use your smartphone or tablet to turn whatever device is plugged into it on or off. You can also create schedules for the same. Satechi's app will also report on the power consumption of the device you plug into it, although you'll need to be within 49 feet of the device to control or monitor it.

The story behind the story: Smart luminaries and plugs are great entry points for anyone wanting to jump on the connected-home bandwagon. They are relatively inexpensive, remarkably foolproof, and clearly useful.


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Windows vulnerability can compromise credentials

Written By Unknown on Selasa, 14 April 2015 | 16.00

A vulnerability found in the late 1990s in Microsoft Windows can still be used to steal login credentials, according to a security advisory released Monday.

A researcher with security vendor Cylance, Brian Wallace, found a new way to exploit a flaw originally found in 1997. Wallace wrote on Monday the flaw affects any PC, tablet or server running Windows and could compromise as many as 31 software programs.

He wrote the flaw was not resolved long ago, but that "we hope that our research will compel Microsoft to reconsider the vulnerabilities."

The vulnerability, called Redirect to SMB, can be exploited if an attacker can intercept communications with a Web server using a man-in-the-middle attack.

Windows or a program running on Windows can then be directed to communicate with a malicious SMB (server message block) server, which can then force an application to divulge the username, domain and hashed password of the person logged in, Wallace wrote.

Cylance disclosed its findings on Feb. 27 to the Computer Emergency Readiness Team at Carnegie Melon University, which issued an advisory.

CERT wrote that although the collected credentials are encrypted, attackers could try brute-force techniques—which involves trying to guess a password—until access is gained.

There are some mitigations. An attacker needs to be on the same network as a victim. It is also possible to block an attack by stopping outbound traffic on TCP ports 139 and 445, Wallace wrote.

Microsoft could not be immediately reached for comment.


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RadioShack presses ahead plan for sale of customer data

RadioShack will press on with its plan to sell its customer data, despite opposition from a number of U.S. states.

The company has asked a bankruptcy court for approval for a second auction of its assets, which includes the consumer data.

The state of Texas, which is leading the action by the states, has opposed the sale of personally identifiable information (PII), citing the online and in-store privacy policies of the bankrupt consumer electronics retailer.

The state claimed that it found from a RadioShack deposition that PII of 117 million customers could be involved. But it learned later from testimony in court that the number of customer files offered for sale might be reduced to around 67 million.

In the first round of sale, RadioShack sold about 1,700 stores to hedge fund Standard General, which entered into an agreement to set up 1,435 of these as co-branded stores with wireless operator Sprint. Some other assets were also sold in the auction.

The sale of customer data, including PII, was withdrawn from the previous auction, though RadioShack did not rule out that it could be put up for sale at a later date.

The case could have privacy implications for the tech industry as it could set a precedent, for example, for large Internet companies holding consumer data, if they happen to go bankrupt.

Texas has asked the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware for a case management order to ensure that in any motion for sale of the PII, RadioShack should be required to provide information on the kind of personal data that is up for sale and the number of customers that will be affected.

The state's Attorney General Ken Paxton asked the court in a filing to rule that any motion seeking the sale of the PII should specify whether the information is limited to only contact information, such as name, address, phone number, and email address, or whether it also includes other information such as credit card numbers or account history.

On Monday, Texas asked the court that its motion be heard ahead of RadioShack's motion for approval to auction more assets.

The court had ordered in March the appointment of a consumer privacy ombudsman in connection with the potential sale of the consumer data including PII. RadioShack said in a filing Friday that it intends to continue working with the ombudsman and the states with regard to any potential sale of PII, but did not provide details.


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Sharp develops 4K smartphone display, undecided on manufacturing plan

Sharp has developed a 5.5-inch display with 3860 x 2160 pixel resolution, which is equivalent to "ultra high definition," also known as 4K.

The prototype LCD display, which could be used in smartphones in the future, has a pixel density of 806 pixels per inch (ppi) and was shown off last week at the China Information Technology Expo in Shenzhen, China. It was part of a larger, 12.5-inch IGZO panel.

Sharp hasn't decided on a schedule for mass production yet. "Currently there are no driver ICs for small 4K panels, so the panel is not ready for mass production at this point," Sharp spokeswoman Miyuki Nakayama said via email.

The company wants to develop and mass-produce 4K screens for clients' phones but it's too early to say whether they will be used in Sharp's own Aquos line of smartphones, she added.

By comparison, Apple's iPhone 6 Plus has a 5.5-inch screen with 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution and a density of 401 ppi.

Sharp regularly exhibits cutting-edge display technology, and first brought its high-definition IGZO displays to smartphones in 2013, introducing pixels that were smaller than those in conventional LCD screens. IGZO is named for the indium gallium zinc oxide semiconductor technology developed by Sharp.

The company, however, has been trying to reform its struggling LCD business amid fierce competition from rival manufacturers in China and South Korea. It is expected to announce the results of a review of its medium-term management plan next month.

Japanese news media reported last week that the company is considering spinning off its small and mid-size LCD panels, used in smartphones and other mobile devices.

Over the past year, Sharp has turned out thin-bezel, high-def displays for its Aquos Crystal smartphone, as well as prototype 70-inch capacitive LCD panels that are sensitive enough to respond to brushstrokes.


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Pivotal sets the stage for open-source in-memory computing

Written By Unknown on Senin, 13 April 2015 | 16.00

Following through on a promise to open-source its data analysis software, Pivotal has released the source code that powers its GemFire in-memory database.

Opening up the code could give enterprise customers more input into what new features are added into future versions. For Pivotal, the move provides an entry to those corporate clients that have adopted policies of using open-source software whenever possible, said Roman Shaposhnik, Pivotal's director of open source.

The company also hopes the software, released under the name Project Geode, will find a wider user base, one looking for big data analysis technologies speedier than Hadoop or Spark, Shaposhnik said.

Releasing the code is the first step in Pivotal's plan, formulated earlier this year, to open-source components of the company's Big Data Suite, which includes GemFire. Later this year, the company plans to release the code for its Pivotal Hawq SQL engine for Hadoop and the Pivotal Greenplum Database .

Not all of GemFire is being open-sourced. The company is holding back some advanced features for its commercial edition, such as the ability to stage continuous queries and establish wide-area network connectivity between clusters. Those who pay for the commercial edition will also receive enterprise-level support.

GemFire is distributed in-memory software, which provides a way to hold large amounts of data in the working memory of multiple servers, or nodes. GemFire can balance data across hundreds of nodes, potentially managing terabytes of data.

With this design, GemFire can provide enterprise applications with low-latency access to datasets that are too large to be crammed into the memory of a single server. The software provides all the reliability properties offered by traditional relational databases, which are commonly characterized as ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability). It includes fail-over capabilities, so the system will remain responsive should one or several individual nodes fail.

Independent software vendor GemStone developed GemFire more than a decade ago, and the code base has grown to more than 1 million lines of code. VMware acquired GemStone in 2010. The technology was transferred to Pivotal, a spin-off company created in 2013 to collect and integrate the growing collection of data analysis technologies owned by VMware and its parent company EMC.

GemFire was originally developed to power mission-critical applications in the financial industry and has been used for large-scale critical operations such as stock trading, financial payments, and ticket sales. Pivotal estimates the software is used to execute more than 10 million transactions a day.

GemFire is one of a number of in-memory databases on the market, said Curt Monash, head of IT analyst firm Monash Research. Alternatives include SAP's HANA, Tibco's ActiveSpace, and AeroSpike's and MemSQL's eponymous databases. Tachyon, the open-source memory-pooling software currently under development for Spark and Hadoop, may also interest enterprises, Monash said.


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FCC net neutrality rules published to Federal Register

The new net neutrality rule of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission was published over the weekend to the Federal Register, the daily journal of U.S. government actions, raising the possibility of a spate of lawsuits from broadband companies that oppose the rule.

The FCC decided in a 3-2 vote in February to reclassify broadband as a regulated public utility, by invoking Title II of the Communications Act, thus prohibiting providers from selectively blocking or throttling or offering paid prioritization of Internet traffic.

The new rules apply to both fixed and mobile broadband Internet access services. They aim to regulate both services on the lines of traditional telephone companies, which are required to deliver service at "just and reasonable" rates and interconnect with each other.

Before the regulation can go into effect, a final rule must first be published in the Federal Register. The new rule, referred to as the Open Internet Order, has Monday as the effective publication date and comes into effect on June 12. The FCC said in March, when it released the order, that it would become effective 60 days after its publication in the Federal Register.

Broadband providers have said they stand for net neutrality principles but oppose the reclassification. Some of the providers are expected to challenge the order in court.

USTelecom (United States Telecom Association) and Internet provider Alamo Broadband filed in March lawsuits against the order, ahead of its publication in the Federal Register.

The association of broadband providers said it was filing the review petition "out of an abundance of caution" to meet the 10-day period provided for an appeal, just in case the FCC order or its declaratory ruling part was treated as final after it was released on March 12, the organization said in a filing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. If the court instead decides that the "trigger date" is 10 days after publication in the Federal Register, USTelecom said it would file an appeal at that time.

Promising a 'light-touch' regulatory framework, the FCC said it would "forbear" from a number of the provisions of Title II, rendering over 700 codified rules inapplicable. Referring to the agency's lack of "similar depth of background in the Internet traffic exchange context," as it has in last-mile broadband practices, the FCC said the order does not apply to back-end interconnection agreements among ISPs, backbone providers and Web services, but did not rule out regulating them in future.


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Sprint offers home delivery and setup of smartphones, tablets

Faced with a highly competitive market, U.S. wireless operator Sprint is now offering to deliver and set up phones, tablets and other connected devices for free at homes, offices and other locations chosen by the customer.

The offer is currently limited to eligible upgrade customers, but starting September, new customers in selected markets will be able to choose the new Direct 2 You option, when buying online or through call centers.

Launching in Kansas City metropolitan area on Monday, the program will be expanded across the country using about 5,000 branded cars and employing 5,000 staff by year end. A rollout in Miami and Chicago is scheduled for April 20.

Deliveries will however be confined to specific zones in the cities.

The bid by the carrier to bring "in-store experience" to homes and offices includes besides delivery of the phone, the set up the device by a Sprint-trained expert. The representative will transfer content from the earlier phone, and provide a tutorial and offer tips on the use of the new device.

The operator's representative will use the visit to also give a quote for the existing phone under the Sprint Buyback offer.

Sprint said it developed the service based on customer research and insights that indicated "the need for a revolutionary service like this one." Customers will be alerted to the offer to upgrade their phone by text or email.

The move by Sprint comes even as the company planned to set up 1,435 co-branded stores at RadioShack outlets over the weekend. The company said its aim is to help consumers get phones in the most convenient way. "If it's a personalized delivery—we can do that now. If it's about a great in-store service, we can provide that as well," according to a company FAQ. A Delaware bankruptcy judge approved a plan earlier this month to sell about 1,700 stores of the electronics retailer to hedge fund Standard General.


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Dead Synchronicity review: This surprisingly disturbing point-and-click adventure lacks catharsis

Written By Unknown on Minggu, 12 April 2015 | 16.01

"Dead Synchronicity is one of the most disturbing games I've ever played." I took a break from reviewing Dead Synchronicity to tweet that sentiment out the other day, and it's still the easiest way I've found to summarize the game. It's upsetting. It's psychological horror on a very real, unsettling level.

It's...a point-and-click adventure game. Yeah, not exactly the genre I expected to be deeply unsettled by. But it's true—Dead Synchronicity is horrifying.

Warning: Disturbing content follows.

You play the part of Michael—or at the very least, you think your name is Michael. You don't really know. You wake up in a trailer with amnesia, a condition that's become so normal you're referred to by your caretaker as a "blankhead," with sympathy rather than derision.

Dead Synchronicity

The world ended—not by way of nuclear weapons, or aliens, or epidemics, or any of the other means humanity tried to predict. Instead, an enormous gash opened up in the sky and entire cities were destroyed by what survivors are calling "The Great Wave." In the aftermath of the Great Wave, the military's moved in to re-establish order and prevent looting.

There's martial law. There are curfews. There are men with guns in the streets. Anyone caught outside after dark is shipped off to a prison "refugee" camp on the outskirts of town. This is where you, a man without a name, come in.

It's a bleak, albeit not wholly original, set-up. What makes Dead Synchronicity stand out is the fact that the game doesn't immediately scrap this intro tone and make you a freedom-fighter, hero for the oppressed. Instead, you're just a normal guy trying to survive and figure out what the hell happened to you—by whatever means necessary.

Dead Synchronicity

People tend to make a furor over games like Mortal Kombat or Postal 2 because they're violence-as-display. They're graphic. You can't help but wince as a muscle-bound dude takes two sharp knives to his eyeballs, for instance.

Taken in another light though, something like Mortal Kombat is absurd. It's watching cartoon characters fight—like watching an anvil fall on Wile E. Coyote and crush him flat. "Oof, that's gotta hurt," you say, but you know the character's coming back for the next sketch. It's silly!

Dead Synchronicity, by contrast, is understated in its violence. That's not to say it's never graphic. The art is often a glimpse into hell, such as the aptly-named "Suicide Park."

Dead Synchronicity

It reminds me a lot of Gerald Scarfe's animations for The Wall, to be honest:

But the art is surface-level horror. There's a deeper, more existential dismay to be found in Dead Synchronicity—a level of "Wait, you want me to do what to solve this puzzle?" Then you do whatever unspeakable thing the game wants you to do, and your character immediately starts scrutinizing his own actions. "Is a good deed is still good if done for the right reasons, regardless of if others are harmed in the fallout?" or to put it another way, "Do the ends justify the means?"

It's beginner's philosophy, for sure, but the bar is so low in video games that even something like Dead Synchronicity feels like an interesting exploration, especially since it's often your own actions that come under scrutiny. It's the same "Do you enjoy violence?" themes explored in Hotline Miami and Spec Ops: The Line without being quite as hamfisted about it.

Dead Synchronicity

Which makes it a shame I can't unabashedly recommend the game. I'm torn over Dead Synchronicity. I've spent the last week alternatively being awed by its story ambitions and hating playing it.

Key to my ire is the fact that this is a point-and-click adventure. Now, if you've read my reviews in the past you know I tend to fall on the side of "point-and-clicks are great because they have a lot of story flexibility, but the puzzles tend to be ridiculous."

In Dead Synchronicity, the puzzles are as apt to give you nightmares as the story. It's not that the puzzles are particularly unfair. In fact, Dead Synchronicity is better than most at sticking to logical, real-life uses for objects—pry open a door with a crowbar, or tie a rope around a tree to get down a steep hill.

Dead Synchronicity

That makes some of the failures in logic even more noticeable, though. For instance, midway through the game you'll remove a manhole grate from a sewer. Your character will only climb down partway though before saying something like, "I can't go down there without a light."

There's an oil lamp in the first room of the game. You cannot take this oil lamp. Your character flat-out refuses, and not because it's theft but because it would "make the room too dark." A room you have no intention of coming back to. A room with a door to the outside world, which light could shine through.

Or we can discuss prying open the door with the crowbar. The door in question is attached to an abandoned car with (as far as I can tell) no windows. Why do I need to pry the door open to get at the two items inside when I could just crawl through the window? Or, if there are windows, break them with a rock?

Dead Synchronicity

Dead Synchronicity also has a tendency to give you tunnel vision, whether on purpose or not. You'll find a camera, for instance. You know exactly where the camera needs to be used. You'll walk across six maps to get there and then..."There's no film in this camera." Are you kidding me? Okay. So you start looking for film.

The problem? You can't find film yet. You need to solve some other, less pressing puzzles first before you'll magically find the room that has the film in it. There's no indication of this though, so you're likely to start wandering in circles, convinced there must be film. It has to be here somewhere. I'm just not looking hard enough!

And all this—everything—would be sort of forgivable in the "Well, it's a point and click adventure" way, except that the game just ends partway through. This is the biggest sin of Dead Synchronicity, and it turned me from loving the game to feeling cheated by it.

Dead Synchronicity feels like it's all Act One. Your character (remember: he has amnesia) finally learns one tiny piece of what's going on in this world and...credits. There's no big climactic moment or catharsis. It's an enormous cliffhanger, and for me it only took about five hours to get there. I never knock a game's length, as long as it accomplishes what it's trying to accomplish. I don't think Dead Synchronicity does. It's just arbitrarily over.

Dead Synchronicity

The ending came so suddenly I literally emailed the developers asking if perhaps our review build was broken. Had they given us an extended demo build by accident? Nope, that was the ending. It's a real shame, because the game up to that point is extremely interesting. I just felt burned, like I'd invested a portion of myself into something only to have it yanked away.

I suspect the lack of a true resolution has to do with the fact this was a Kickstarter project—I could see a small studio running out of time/money and saying "We need to wrap this up." Regardless, it cheats what could've been one of my favorite point-and-clicks this year.

As I said, I'm mixed on Dead Synchronicity. I'd love to see more games take this sort of "adult" approach to point-and-clicks. The '90s had quite a few, a la I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, and it's amazing how dark you can make what's typically seen as a family-friendly genre these days.

But those puzzles. But that ending. Those are the phrases that keep running through my brain, even as I mull over the positives. Knowing my own frustration, it makes it hard to recommend that experience to anyone else (let alone tack a score on the game).

My only hope is if you do pick up the game, you're suitably warned about its pitfalls. Maybe that will help you better appreciate what's there, without being blindsided by its failings.


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Hands on: Windows 10 Build 10051 brings impressive new features to phones, but slowly

Trying Microsoft's new Windows 10 Technical Preview Build 10051 on a Windows Phone is like drizzling honey over granola: It can be an excruciatingly slow experience that rewards you with a sweet, yet nutritious update.

Let's say that again: Some aspects of the new build are slow. Even after a botched rollout earlier on Friday, Microsoft's new software took seemingly forever to download and install. Now that the initial rush has been exhausted, your mileage may vary. But sometimes using the new OS build is literally a labor of love.

The new update adds support for the Project Spartan browser, plus new versions of several apps: Outlook Mail, Outlook Calendar, Phone, Messaging, People, and Maps. You'll also find an improved basic Camera app, which pulls in some of the functions from the recent Lumia Camera update. Most are slow to load and use, especially Spartan and even parts of the core OS, at least on my Lumia 830.

Why this matters: The slow performance of the new build, and the delays preceding the rollout, raise questions about the state of the software. We all understand this is alpha code. At a time when Microsoft's struggling for viability in the phone space, however, it's taking a risk in drawing attention to subpar performance rather than Windows 10's new functionality.

A surprisingly sluggish Spartan

windows 10 for phones 2 Mark Hachman

Spartan, especially, is agonizing to use. It can take seconds before a page appears to load, and seconds more until the page actually becomes responsive.  Part of that has to be due to how the browser handles all of the processes and code attached to modern Web pages, which is disconcerting given that Spartan was built from the ground up to handle such content. Reading a page in the the browser's built-in reading mode speeds up the process, but there doesn't seem to be a way to open a link directly in the reading mode—you can only reload an existing page.

Still, using Spartan feels natural and intuitive. About the only element that feels out of place is burying the additional tabs behind a menu at the bottom of the screen, although Windows Phone 8.1 also does this. I still like Android's choice of placing the tabs icon at the top of the screen. 

Microsoft has said it will replace Internet Explorer with Project Spartan in Windows 10 phones. At this point, that news seems daunting. But if Microsoft can give Spartan a kick in the pants, I think users will be happy.

Outlook Mail and Calendar: Excellent

From the ridiculous to the sublime: The new Outlook Mail and Calendar apps, meanwhile, are superb. Microsoft seemingly has dozens of variations on its core mail apps: there's the basic Mail app in Windows 8.1, the Mail app on Windows, Outlook 2013, Outlook.com—the list goes on. On Windows 10 for phones, Outlook Mail ties your various inboxes into one nice package, and then integrates it with the Outlook Calendar app. (You can launch each app separately, but you don't need to.) 

Windows 10 for phones outlook mail Mark Hachman

Email is minimally presented. Your inbox is presented as a list of tiles: Swipe left to delete, swipe right to flag. By default, your emails are saved in conversation view, which you can expand by tapping on a tile.  Once you open an email, all the options you'd want are listed in a row of icons at the top.   

Windows 10 for Phones Outlook Calendar Mark Hachman

You can quickly jump to the calendar by digging through the menu at the upper left. Once in calendar mode, Outlook presents a rather nifty weekly view at the top, and an endless column of your appointments at the bottom. Hardly any tapping's needed to navigate through your calendar; instead, it's largely predicated on swiping right and left and down and up.

Phone and Messaging apps: Simple, uncomplicated 

We spent just a few minutes with the Phone and Messaging apps, which look quite like what Microsoft showed off in Redmond in January. The user interface is almost too minimal, with a gray-on-black motif that's a bit dull and difficult to read. Ditto for the Messaging interface as well.

Maps: Vibrant and useful

I'm also a fan of the new Maps app, one of the "universal" apps that bridge Windows 10 devices. At its core, the Maps app favors the simple look of Bing Maps. But start searching for nearby places of interest, and Bing suddenly shows you local restaurants with large illustrations and even a "streetsider" view.  

windows 10 for phones Mark Hachman

Even with all this, Maps is fairly responsive, and a feature I'd like to see in my current Windows Phones, now. 

People: Awfully drab

windows 10 for phones 3 Mark Hachman

Microsoft crafted the new People app using the same look and feel as the Phone and Messaging app, and it's an awfully somber backdrop for the most important people in your life. There's also no apparent way to change the monochromatic background color. I think Microsoft could at least offer a setting to change the theme. 

Camera: Well, that was unexpected

Nokia and Microsoft seemingly have dozens of camera and camera-related apps. Windows 10 Build 10051 takes a small subset of the recent Lumia Camera update and imports them into the generic Camera app. (Note that if you're upgrading from a previous build, you'll have to manually launch the Camera app, not the Nokia Camera app. And yes, Nokia Camera is different than Lumia Camera, which is also different than the Camera app.)

But if you've used the Lumia Camera app, you'll notice that the new Camera app uses the same interface, complete with the "wand" icon that normally launches the Rich Capture feature. Now, however, the wand icon simply turns on the HDR function.

In all, I came away from the new build with three impressions: First, some of Microsoft's universal apps, including Maps and the new Outlook apps, are outstanding and should be considered among the selling points of the new Windows 10 for phones. Second, some of the color schemes need to be rethought. Microsoft may be quietly designing the UI for a Surface phone; if so, that needs to be better communicated. Finally, Microsoft needs to do some tweaking to improve performance—but its engineers undoubtedly know this.

As third fiddle in the OS space, however, I just wished for Microsoft's sake that the company had pushed out the build earlier. Some elements need work, and some features are terrific, but they have yet to reach a mainstream audience. 


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Microsoft Office Remote comes to Android, lets you control presentations from your phone

If you own an Android phone and use Office 2013, you no longer need to hover over your laptop or buy a Bluetooth remote to advance slides in PowerPoint. On Thursday, Microsoft released Office Remote for Android, a free app that lets you quickly access key Office 2013 features from the palm of your hand.

The most obvious use for Office Remote is the PowerPoint remote feature: Using it, you can control your presentation, view your slide notes, and "laser-point" at objects onscreen from the app, to name a few highlights. 

Office Remote provides quick access to select Word and PowerPoint features as well. For example, you can switch between Excel worksheets with a swipe and use pivot tables from the app. You can also navigate around Word documents with just a tap.

The app is a free download from Google Play, and works on Android 4.0.3 or later. There's no word on whether Office Remote will come to iOS as well.

Office Remote was formerly a Windows Phone 8-only app, but the jump to Android is in line with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's "mobile first, cloud first" strategy. For traditionalists, the idea of Microsoft embracing other platforms seems strange. But  Nadella's Microsoft goes where the users are, regardless of which platform they use, and goes from there. 


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Catching up to other African nations, Zambia plans mobile infrastructure initiative

Written By Unknown on Sabtu, 11 April 2015 | 16.00

As an increasing number of people use mobile phones to access the Internet in Africa, Zambia is playing catch-up. To spur Internet and mobile phone connectivity throughout the country, the Zambian government has announced an initiative to build telecom infrastructure.

The Zambian government says it will spend $65 million to erect new telecom towers across the country to be used by the country's three mobile operators in the Southern African country.

There's little doubt than in many African countries, people depend on mobile phones for Internet access. The Mobile Africa 2015 study conducted by survey company GeoPoll and World Wide Worx, a technology analysis organization in South Africa, reports that Internet browsing via mobile phone is on the rise in the countries studied—South Africa, Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana.

Nigeria is Africa's largest telecom market by subscription and investment, followed by South Africa and Kenya. Due to poor landline infrastructure, Africans use mobile phones for online activities that people in other regions normally perform on laptops and desktop.

The Mobile Africa report, released this week, finds that many Africans access social media, including Facebook and Twitter, using their mobile phones. Declining prices of data-enabled handsets along with faster Internet connection speed have fueled use of mobile phones.

Lower-specification "feature" phones that can access the Internet are now selling for less than $20 in some areas.

Nigeria has well over 140 million mobile phone subscribers and close to 82 million mobile Internet users, according to monthly subscriber data that has just been released by the Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC).  Kenya has close to 34 million mobile phone subscribers, according to a report released this week by Kenya's Communications Authority, while Uganda has about 19 million subscribers.

Zambia, however, has just over 10 million mobile phone subscribers and about 6 million people using mobile phones to access the Internet. The government hopes that the infrastructure initiative announced this week will go a long way to fueling an increase in subscribers and connectivity.

"Once implemented, the project will reduce the problems of telephone and Internet connectivity in the country," said Zambian President Edgar Lungu, in a statement.

China's Huawei Technologies has won the bid to construct the towers. The towers will be constructed under the supervision of the Zambia Information and Communication Technology Authority (ZICTA), the country's telecom sector regulator.


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Health IT vendors slammed for hampering the exchange of patient data

Electronic health records vendors make the process of sharing patient information too expensive and complicated for hospitals and doctors, a problem that affects the quality and cost of care.

That's the conclusion reached by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), the U.S. government agency that oversees the country's health IT efforts.

In a report released Friday, the ONC outlined challenges that health care providers face as they attempt to exchange patient data.

Among the issues identified: Health IT vendors charge high fees to set up interfaces for hospitals and labs to share patient data. They also force customers to use proprietary technology and refuse to publish APIs (application programming interfaces).

Sharing health data electronically is essential if technology is going to be used to deliver better and more affordable care, the ONC said in a blog post. "Information blocking" by IT vendors hinders this process, the ONC said. The agency didn't call out specific companies.

It's unclear how widespread this problem is, the ONC said. It's difficult to get a more accurate assessment of the problem because vendors contractually forbid customers from discussing topics related to costs and restrictions.

Still, from the information that the ONC has collected, "it is readily apparent that some providers and developers are engaging in information blocking."

Last year the ONC received 60 complaints about information blocking and reviewed anecdotal evidence from news reports and public testimony. The ONC also conducted interviews with health care providers, IT vendors and other stakeholders.

"We are becoming increasingly concerned about these practices, which devalue taxpayer investments in health IT and are fundamentally incompatible with efforts to transform the nation's health system," the ONC post said, adding that data blocking may become more pervasive as technology plays a greater role in health care.

Health care providers were also taken to task for not sharing patient data with each other. Hospitals may block information in an effort "to control referrals and enhance their market dominance," the ONC said.

Some hospitals cite privacy and security regulations to explain why they can't share information "in circumstances in which they do not in fact impose restrictions," the ONC said.

The ONC heard about cases where health care organizations and vendors allegedly joined forces to complicate the sharing of information with third-party care providers.

The U.S. Congress requested the report last December over fears that health IT vendors were profiting from keeping data locked up. The U.S. government has offered financial incentives for care providers to store patient medical information in EHRs instead of using paper files.

Resolving the problem of health information blocking may involve a multi-pronged approach, including new federal legislation, requiring more vendor transparency about software costs and restrictions, assisting law enforcement investigations of information blocking and encouraging interoperability and data sharing via incentives.


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The mobile-enabled enterprise: Are we there yet?

Modern mobile technology may have been born with the first iPhone, a quintessential consumer device, but it wasn't long before the business possibilities began to emerge. Fast forward to today, and it's difficult to find a company that hasn't embraced phones and tablets for its employees to some degree.

It's not difficult to see why. After all, the potential is nothing if not compelling: an untethered workforce equipped with easy-to-use tools for workers to be productive no matter where they are and at any time of day.

That allure, indeed, is surely part of the reason IT organizations will dedicate at least 25 percent of their software budgets to mobile application development, deployment and management by 2017, according to IDC. By that same year, in fact, the vast majority of line-of-business apps will be built for mobile-first consumption, IDC predicts—and for competitive necessity at least as often as for efficiency or productivity.

The "bring your own device" trend—in which employees bring their own devices into the workplace—is one key factor contributing to this massive shift in enterprise computing. It's an extension of the consumerization trend seen in enterprise technology more broadly: People want to have the same mobile tools at work that they've become accustomed to in their personal lives.

"This is a revolution," said Eldad Eilam, CEO of mobile productivity vendor HopTo. "Everyone is looking into BYOD."

A veritable "tsunami of devices" has entered companies as a result, said Rana Kanaan, vice president of products at workspace-as-a-service provider Workspot. Also playing a role, however, is what Kanaan calls "the rise of the corporate citizen": independent-minded employees who place a high value on the ability to work wherever and whenever they want.

Put those two trends together, and IT is left with a very different landscape than what it faced years ago.

"Originally, we all worked on desktop computers in the office," Kanaan said. "Then, in the first generation of the mobile enterprise, we started working from somewhere else, but still on computers; we tried to solve that through desktop virtualization."

When mobile technology first began to enter the corporate world, employers tried to limit it to specific, locked-down devices and applications. But users rejected that.

"The problem is, computing happens everywhere," Kanaan said. "That kind of control doesn't work—it made users revolt."

Today's workers simply expect to be able to use the technologies they want and to be able to use them any time, said Michael Luu, IS director for the city of Milpitas, California, which uses Workspot's technology for mobile access. "The expectation is that even if you're on vacation, you respond to email," he said. "It's just part of normalcy now."

Vendors of enterprise software are racing to address these new expectations in numerous ways. With its workspace-as-a-service offering, for example, Workspot lets users securely access apps and data from any device, it says.

Enterprise-software heavyweight Salesforce has committed to a "mobile first" philosophy with its own applications, said Anna Rosenman, senior director of product marketing for the Salesforce Analytics Cloud.

"If you look at the consumer space, people spend at least 50 percent of their time on mobile devices," Rosenman said. "We're seeing our users closely mirroring that behavior."

Even Facebook is working on an offering focused on the mobile enterprise: Facebook at Work, which is now in beta.

"The cornerstone of the experience is mobile," said Elisabeth Diana, Facebook's director of corporate communications. "It's a similar look and feel to Facebook; the primary difference is that information shared through Facebook at Work stays within the company."

A handful of companies are currently testing out the technology, and Facebook hopes to expand that number soon, Diana said.

HopTo focuses on enabling mobility while allowing companies to leverage their existing Windows-based infrastructure, including Windows Remote Desktop Services, Active Directory, SharePoint sites and cloud storage services.

"The challenge we're seeing is that many companies have a massive amount of legacy software that's used to run the business," Eilam said. "Converting that for mobile is extremely challenging."

Indeed, even as new solutions continue to emerge, there is no shortage of challenges remaining for today's newly mobile organizations—and the vendors that serve them.

Security, for example, remains a big one: By the end of this year, only 15 percent of large companies will have adequate mobile security governance, according to IDC.

"Mobile devices tend to store things locally," Eilam said. "That creates a really serious challenge: document sprawl." HopTo's answer to that problem is to keep storage at the back end, he said. Files can be edited remotely but are saved back to the place in which they were opened, such as SharePoint or cloud storage.

Workspot's Kanaan points to a need for what she calls contextual security. The idea is to build security technology that can recognize when a user is trying to get to sensitive data on a mobile device and respond by requiring extra authentication.

"That's a huge industry challenge for us to figure out, especially when you look at regulated industries like health care and finance," she said.

There's also a need for common ground on mobile app development, Kanaan said.

"It's slow and costly to make enterprise apps work on mobile," she said. "We don't have standardization there, and enterprises are still struggling with that."

In short, there's no doubt the process of mobilizing the enterprise world is happening quickly, but there's still plenty to be addressed. Said HopTo's Eilam, "I think we'll continue to see a mix of legacy and mobile technologies for a couple of decades still."


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ICANN seeks opinion on legality of '.sucks' registration process

Written By Unknown on Jumat, 10 April 2015 | 16.00

The body that manages the Internet domain name system has asked regulators in the U.S. and Canada to comment on the legality of the high prices and procedures used by Vox Populi Registry for registrations of '.sucks' domain names by trademark owners.

The move Thursday by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) follows a recent letter from its Intellectual Property Constituency, which asked that the rollout of the new .sucks gTLD (generic top-level domain) should be halted.

The IPC, which represents the holders of trademarks and related intellectual property, described the registration scheme for the domain as predatory and designed to exploit trademark owners. It said Vox Populi had announced it would charge trademark owners US$2,499 and above to register domain names during the early 'sunrise' period.

The high fees will prevent many trademark owners from being able to take advantage of the preliminary sunrise registration period, intended to protect the rights of trademark owners, making it more likely that marks will be registered by cybersquatters for much lower, and potentially subsidized, fees at the launch of the general availability of the domain names, IPC President Gregory S. Shatan wrote in a letter to Akram Atallah, president of ICANN's global domains division.

Under the new gTLD program, ICANN had added 583 new TLDs at the end of last week, with plans to add hundreds more. The proliferation of domains like .porn and .adult have led celebrities and trademark owners to buy websites with their names in some of these new domains to prevent future misuse.

In letters to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and Canada's Office of Consumer Affairs, ICANN's General Counsel John O. Jeffrey has referred to the letter from the IPC, and asked the agencies to probe whether Vox Populi is violating any laws or regulations that are enforced by the two offices.

Vox Populi in Canada could not be immediately reached for comment.

ICANN said it can enforce contracts with registries but not police illegal activity.

But if Vox Populi is not complying with all applicable laws, it may also be in breach of its registry agreement, wrote Allen Grogan, ICANN's chief contract compliance officer in a blog post. "ICANN could then act consistently with its public interest goals and consumer and business protections to change these practices through our contractual relationship with the registry," he added. Registrations in the sunrise period have already begun and will end on May 29.


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US blocks Intel from selling Xeon chips to Chinese supercomputer projects

U.S. government agencies have stopped Intel from selling microprocessors for China's supercomputers, apparently reflecting concern about their use in nuclear tests.

In February, four supercomputing institutions in China were placed on a U.S. government list that effectively bans them from receiving certain U.S. exports.

The four institutions, which include China's National University of Defense Technology, have been involved in building Tianhe-2, the world's fastest supercomputer, and Tianhe-1A.

The two supercomputers have been allegedly used for "nuclear explosive activities," according to a notice posted by the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Back in August, the U.S. Department of Commerce notified Intel that it would need an export license to ship its Xeon and Xeon Phi parts, the company said on Friday. These chips were to be used in supercomputing projects with Intel customer Inspur, a Chinese server and supercomputing provider.

"Intel complied with the notification and applied for the license which was denied. We are in compliance with the U.S. law," the company added.

The four Chinese institutions had been placed on the list by a government committee made up of representatives from the U.S. departments of Commerce, Defense, State and others. Inspur was not among the entities named.

The U.S. government had found the four Chinese institutions to be "acting contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States," the Department of Commerce's notice said.

On Friday, the National Supercomputing Center of Guangzhou, which was named on the list and operates the Tianhe-2, declined to comment.

"We are not very clear on this situation," said an employee at the center.

Intel has been selling its Xeon chips to Chinese supercomputers for years, so the ban represents a blow to its business. China increasingly wants to build more supercomputers that are faster, and Intel has been a major partner.

But the country has also been developing its own homegrown processors, and the U.S. ban could accelerate those efforts.

Both China and the U.S. have at times collided on trade issues relating to technology. In 2012, a U.S. congressional committee said that Chinese tech firms Huawei and ZTE were a national security threat because of their alleged ties to the Chinese government.

China, on the other hand, has been stepping up efforts to protect its IT infrastructure from electronic spying. This could potentially create hurdles for U.S. businesses wanting to sell hardware and services to the country.


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Transforming robot probes Fukushima reactor vessel

Tokyo Electric Power on Friday sent a robot where no machine has gone before—inside the highly radioactive heart of a reactor at the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant.

The robot, developed by Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy and the International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning (IRID), was inserted into the primary containment vessel (PCV) of reactor No. 1 at the plant, which was heavily damaged by the 2011 earthquake and subsequent tsunami that devastated northern Japan.

Tokyo Electric is taking the unprecedented step to better determine the state of melted-down fuel in the reactor as part of plans to dismantle the plant, a spokesman said. The No. 2 and No. 3 reactors also suffered meltdowns.

The PCV is a 48-meter-tall steel container that houses another steel vessel that normally holds the uranium fuel that powers the station, as well as water. The exact state of the fuel is unclear, but determining it is key to removing the fuel for dismantling of the plant, a process expected to take decades.

The cylindrical robot is about 60 centimeters long and can change its shape from a form resembling the letter I to one resembling the numeral 3. The former is for movement through a pipe that runs into the PCV, while the latter is for moving around inside the vessel.

It is remote-controlled via a cable tether and runs on two crawler assemblies. The machine is equipped with a thermometer, a tilting camera to capture video, a dosimeter to gauge radiation and a laser scanner to measure distance.

The robot will stop and probe various spots in the vessel and record obstacles barring its way. It will explore the vessel in two stages—first the ground-level grating and then the basement, where the melted fuel is thought to be.

"The radiation level is very high inside the PCV and we assume that the maximum time for investigation is five to six hours each time, though the robot can investigate for 10 hours," Tomohisa Ito, a spokesman for IRID, said via email.

Tokyo Electric has deployed a number of robots around the PCV so far, but never inside it. For instance, Rosemary, developed by Chiba Institute of Technology and Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy, is a robot that rolls around on treads and images the surrounding area with cameras mounted on a mast and was used to explore the surrounding area.

Last month, the utility said it confirmed that the fuel in the No. 1 reactor had melted, complicating the extraction process. The confirmation was done via a tomography imaging scan that used elementary particles called muons.

Tens of thousands of people are still displaced due to radiation in the area around the Fukushima plant, which is expected to cost at least ¥2.1 trillion (US$17.4 billion) to decommission.


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Universities reject trade body request to back patent reform bill

Written By Unknown on Kamis, 09 April 2015 | 16.00

U.S. universities have rejected a request from trade body Consumer Electronics Association to withdraw their objection to U.S. patent reform legislation that aims to curb so-called patent trolls.

The Innovation Act, reintroduced in the House of Representatives in February, targets businesses that use patent licensing and lawsuits as their main source of revenue. These patent firms are largely seen as responsible for the proliferation of patent infringement lawsuits and settlement demand letters that usually target small business users of technology.

In a letter Thursday to the CEA, the Association of American Universities and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities said that legislation to curb troll abuses "should be narrowly tailored to address the abuses of this small minority of patent holders without substantially weakening the U.S. patent system as a whole."

But the legislation in its current form would increase the overall risks and costs of legitimate patent enforcement for universities, startup companies, licensees of university research, and all other patent holders, the organizations added.

Universities have frequently sued companies for patent infringement, and are concerned about provisions in the bill such as fee-shifting, which would require the losing party to pay the winning side's fees.

A district court in Pennsylvania ordered last year that Marvell Technology should pay Carnegie Mellon University US$1.54 billion for infringing on two hard-drive chip patents. The company has appealed the decision.

The universities agree that fee-shifting will deter and punish frivolous litigation by patent trolls, but they are concerned that this provision and another referred to as joinder, which allows a defendant to bring in a patent trolls' parent organization into the suit for fee recovery, will work against legitimate patent holders as well.

"The presumptions in favor of fee-shifting and joinder would increase the risk of expensive litigation to the point that such patent holders would in many cases be unable to assume the risk of enforcing intellectual property rights," the academics wrote. The result could be that universities' capacity to transfer their research discoveries from campus to the private sector would be undermined.

In a letter last week asking 145 universities to remove their institution's name from a Feb. 24 opposition letter, CEA President and CEO Gary Shapiro wrote that litigation fees would be shifted in patent disputes only if "the position and conduct of the non-prevailing party or parties" were not "reasonably justified in law and fact." The fee-shifting provision has existed in patent law since 1946 and the joinder provision is unlikely to be used against universities as they are not "entities that exist for the sole purpose of litigating a patent."

The CEA has over 2,000 members including tech heavyweights like Google and Apple.

The Innovation Act was passed by the House in December 2013 but was spiked in the Senate.


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Amazon updates the Echo for connected-home control

The day that Amazon Echo owners and curious onlookers were waiting for is finally here. In a clear message that it has strong designs on the connected-home market, Amazon has updated its cloud-enabled interactive speaker with the ability to control connected-home devices.

With Echo still being sold on an invite-only basis, there were no press releases or blog posts. The company, as it has done previously, simply sent out an email to existing customers, apprising them of the new features pushed out as part of an update.

At this time, the Echo can only be used to control a handful of products, all of which are either Belkin WeMo smart switches or Philips Hue smart luminaries. These include the Switch, Insight Switch, and Light Switch from Belkin; and the Lux, LightStrip, BR30, and Bloom from Philips.

Why this matters : Anyone with two brain cells to rub together could've seen this coming. The ability to control connected-home devices was one the the first things that came to people's minds when Amazon launched the Echo in November. While the functionality is currently limited to just a handful of devices, the floodgates are now wide open.

With the Echo always at your beck and call with its powerful seven-microphone array, there is probably no easier, more intuitive way to control your lights and appliances. Just tell Echo's onboard virtual assistant Alexa what you need done (e.g., "Alexa, turn off the living room light") and it'll have your orders dispatched to the appropriate device over Wi-Fi for prompt execution.

amazon echo specs

Amazon's Echo is a triple threat: Bluetooth speaker, personal digital assitant, and connected home controller. 

Here's what the speaker's official page suggests you do in order to get the Echo to recognize your smart lights and switches: "First, connect and register your devices to your Wi-Fi and set individual names in their respective WeMo or Hue app. Then add them to the Amazon Echo app by saying 'Alexa [or your custom wake word], discover my appliances.' Newly discovered devices will be shown with the assigned name in the Amazon Echo app under 'Settings > Connected Home,' where you can also create groups which can be activated via voice control."


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Indian outsourcer Satyam's founder guilty of accounting fraud, court rules

The founder of Satyam Computer Services has been found guilty of a financial scam that brought the Hyderabad-based outsourcer to the verge of collapse before its rescue by a rival.

A special court in south India found B. Ramalinga Raju and nine others, including former executives of the company, guilty of several crimes for which they will be sentenced on Friday, according to local reports. Raju and some other key accused had previously spent about a year in judicial custody.

The company went into crisis in January 2009, when Raju disclosed that the company's revenue and profit had been inflated for several years.

The Indian government replaced the existing board with its own nominees charged with steering the company through the scandal. The government thus hoped to reassure customers, but a large number drifted away all the same, analysts said at the time.

Satyam also had to settle litigation and fraud charges, including with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

In an auction in April 2009 another Indian outsourcer, Tech Mahindra, acquired a dominant stake in the company through its subsidiary Venturbay Consultants. Satyam was eventually merged with Tech Mahindra in 2013, in a quest for operational efficiency and economies of scale. The turnaround has been profitable for Tech Mahindra: In the fourth quarter last year, it had profit of $129 million on revenue of US$924 million.

Raju was one of the poster boys of the Indian IT industry before the scandal, and much of the damage control after the financial crisis was focused on ensuring that other Indian outsourcers such as Infosys and Wipro were not affected by the scandal. The other firms were, however, not impacted and may have benefited for a while from business shifting to them from Satyam.


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Intel shrinks RealSense camera, targets smartphones

Written By Unknown on Rabu, 08 April 2015 | 16.00

Intel plans to cut the fat from its RealSense 3D camera so that it can fit the device on a smartphone.

The company's CEO Brian Krzanich showed off Wednesday in Shenzhen, China a 6-inch prototype phone built with the new camera, which is about half the size of the older version. The company plans to start deploying the technology this year.

The U.S. chipmaker has been wanting to bring RealSense to PCs and tablets, but with the smaller size it can also deliver it to smartphones, Krzanich said. Devices built with the 3D camera could offer gesture control like Microsoft's Kinect device.

"So you can imagine the efficiencies and the opportunities and the options for innovation we have moving together," he added.

Intel talked up the technology in Shenzhen, which is a major manufacturing base in the country, and home to tablet and smartphone vendors with lesser-known brand names.

On Wednesday, Intel also said it would also expand in the Internet of Things sector, with its upcoming Atom X3 processor, codenamed "SoFIA".

The Atom X3 had been designed for tablets and smartphones, but Intel said its scope has widened to include connected devices in the IoT space. These 3G and LTE chips will be built for Android and Linux, and developer kits will arrive in this year's second half.

Intel wants to tap into Shenzhen's hardware eco-system, but it faces an uphill battle. Many Chinese vendors have long been using ARM-based chips from Intel's rivals Qualcomm and MediaTek. These chips are generally more power-efficient and cost less than Intel processors.

To try and reverse the trend, Intel has been signing up Chinese partners to popularize its chips. Last year, it made a deal with local chipmaker Rockchip to use its Atom X3 processor.

The first devices from that partnership are expected to arrive later this quarter, Intel said. Over 45 tablet and smartphone designs are in development using the Atom X3 processor.


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Tablo OTA DVR gets slick new apps, but new hardware gets pushed to May

Tablo is one of the more unique tools for those who've ditched cable TV, extending over-the-air antenna broadcasts to phones, tablets, computers, and set-top boxes. But until now, a subpar software situation has held Tablo's hardware back.

Things are looking up, however, with new Tablo apps for Android TV and Amazon Fire TV, along with an overhauled app for Roku devices. Tablo maker Nuvyyo has been talking about these apps since January, and it's finally releasing them now.

Here's how Tablo works: First, you hook up the Tablo box to your home Wi-Fi router with an Ethernet cable, then you plug in your own over-the-air antenna and an external hard drive. Using Tablo's apps, you can then stream live broadcast TV to other devices over your local Wi-Fi network. You can also set up Tablo as a DVR for broadcast channels.

Tablo costs $220 with two tuners or $240 with four tuners, though you'll have to supply your own antenna and external hard drive for the system to work. While Tablo's apps are free, certain features—such as recording by series and out-of-home streaming—require a $5 per month subscription.

Why this matters: The number of people living without cable TV is quickly growing, and many of those people are doing so with the help of over-the-air antennas that can pick up high-definition broadcast channels such as ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox. Products like Tablo are arriving at just the right time, adding modern-day features such as DVR and playback on mobile devices.

As Tablo noted in a recent blog post, the old Roku app was essentially a cookie-cutter design based on Roku's standard development console. As such, it's kind of stodgy-looking, and it doesn't allow for custom views such as a grid-like channel guide. The new app has a more modern look, with a sidebar menu for jumping between different parts of the interface.

tabloapps

Tablo's new apps combine a traditional channel grid and a handy sidebar menu.

On the downside, the app only supports DVR scheduling for 24 hours out, though an update in the coming months will add scheduling from 14 days out. (Tablo is keeping its old Roku app around until the new one reaches feature parity.)

The Android TV and Fire TV apps look similar to the new Roku app, with some minor design differences.

Unfortunately, Nuvyyo still isn't ready to release its Tablo Metro hardware, which has an integrated antenna so you don't have to clutter the space around your router with a pair of rabbit ears. Nuvyyo originally planned to release the Metro in March, but a spokeswoman told me it's looking more like late May at this point.


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Microsoft, Getty settle copyright dispute

Microsoft and Getty Images have settled a copyright dispute and agreed to work together to provide the digital media company's images for the software giant's products like Bing and Cortana.

Getty had filed a complaint in September against the Bing Image Widget, launched in the previous month, which let publishers embed collages and slideshows of images from search results on their websites.

In its copyright complaint against Microsoft in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Getty alleged that the "beautiful, configurable image galleries and slideshows" typically consist of copyrighted images, including images whose copyrights are owned or controlled by Getty.

Microsoft said it had temporarily removed the widget to talk with Getty Images and better understand its concerns, but Getty countered that the widget remained in operation across websites worldwide, to which Microsoft continues to supply images, including Getty's copyrighted images, without a license to do so.

"Rather than draw from a licensed collection of images, Defendant gathers these images by crawling as much of the Internet as it can, copying and indexing every image it finds, without regard to the copyright status of the images and without permission from copyright owners like Plaintiff," Getty said in its complaint.

The technology teams of the two companies will now work "to create beautiful, engaging applications and services for Microsoft users with licensed content and attribution for photographers and other content creators," according to a joint statement Tuesday by the two companies.

On Tuesday, Judge Denise Cote dismissed with prejudice the claims of both companies, which would bar both companies from refiling on the same claims.


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Complaint alleges YouTube Kids pushes advertising content

Written By Unknown on Selasa, 07 April 2015 | 16.01

The six-week-old YouTube Kids service is a "hyper-commercialized" environment that intermixes advertising and other programming in a way that deceives its target audience, a coalition of privacy and children's advocacy groups said in a complaint to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

Joining in giving YouTube Kids the big thumbs-down are the Center for Digital Democracy, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. They say the video app, targeted toward preschool children, blurs the lines between advertising and other programming using methods that are prohibited by federal regulations on commercial television.

In their request Tuesday for an FTC investigation, the groups say that YouTube Kids' programming amounts to an unfair business practice.

The video service, which bills itself as safe for children, is "the most hyper-commercialized media environment for children I have ever seen," said Dale Kunkel, a professor of communications at the University of Arizona.

YouTube corporate parent Google defended the service, saying it doesn't collect personal information and it includes several parental-control features. "When developing YouTube Kids we consulted with numerous partners and child advocacy and privacy groups," a Google representative said by email. "We are always open to feedback on ways to improve the app."

U.S. regulators haven't applied rules for children's television programming to the digital environment, partly because online companies have been slow to target young children with advertising, said Kunkel, a long-time children's media researcher. But YouTube Kids uses "numerous tactics that have already been ruled illegal on TV," he said by email. "It's astonishing that a major company like this would be so completely out of touch with the special protections typically afforded to children in electronic media."

Some of the practices on YouTube Kids, including program hosts pitching products to children "haven't been seen since the 1950s," Kunkel added. 

YouTube Kids often plays ads immediately before or after other video content, with no separation between channel content like Sesame Street and Thomas and Friends and the advertising, the complaint said. There's no clear separation between the ads and other content, as required on TV, the complaint said, and while the ads are labeled, many YouTube Kids viewers may not be able to read those labels.

"This blending of children's programming content with advertising material on television has long been prohibited because it is unfair and deceptive to children," the groups said in the complaint. "The fact that children are viewing the videos on a tablet or smartphone screen instead of on a television does not make it any less unfair and deceptive."

In addition, YouTube Kids features branded channels for McDonald's, Barbie, Fisher-Price and other products that are "little more than program-length commercials," and are not labeled as advertising, the groups said in a news release.

The service also distributes what it calls "user-generated" segments that feature toys, candy and other products without disclosing that the producers of the videos have business relationships with the companies selling those products, the complaint said. That failure to disclose the business relationships likely violates the FTC's endorsement guidelines, which require product reviewers to disclose business relationships with companies, the groups said.

The complaint goes beyond YouTube Kids intermingling advertising with other content, said Josh Golin, associate director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. "It's also that they are marketing their app as being a safe haven for children when, in fact, from a commercialism standpoint, it's far worse than other platforms for kids," he said by email.

YouTube Kids should be redesigned, added Jeffrey Chester, executive director at the Center for Digital Democracy, a privacy group that has criticized other Google practices.

"They are focused on transforming kids' clicks and eyeballs into much needed profits—so much so they lost sense of their corporate responsibility to young people and their families," he said by email. "The app needs to be redesigned to act as a age-appropriate channel for young children—not as just another Google ad-supported product application."


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Bitcoin Foundation said to be out of cash

The Bitcoin Foundation, an organization that promotes development of bitcoin, is "effectively bankrupt" and has shed most of its staff, a member of the foundation's board of directors has said.

Two other board members, however, said the foundation was not bankrupt, though in need of some kind of restructuring.

The outburst by Olivier Janssens, who was elected to the board last month, is the latest in a series of controversies surrounding the foundation, which was founded in the U.S. in 2012 as a nonprofit entity.

"The foundation has almost no money left, and just fired 90 percent of its people. Some will stay on as volunteers," Janssens wrote in a blog post on the foundation's forum.

"The Bitcoin Foundation hates transparency," he added. "If they would have been transparent then everyone would know there is no money left."

Janssens attributed the foundation's financial straits to two years of "ridiculous spending and poorly thought out decisions," adding that the board has tried to remedy the situation by finding a new executive director. He called for the replacement of the entire board.

Described as a bitcoin millionaire, Janssens wrote that he will donate "several 100k" to a special trust fund aimed at supporting core development of the digital currency and supplemented by crowdfunding efforts.

The foundation did not immediately respond to a request for information about Janssens' post. But Patrick Murck, its executive director, wrote in a response to Janssens' post, "The foundation is not bankrupt, but a restructuring is needed. Olivier basically jumped in front of our announcements on that and our annual report on the 2014 finances to be released next week, and he spun it very very negative."

While saying that "the money has basically run out," board member Gavin Adresen wrote in another response that "The foundation isn't bankrupt, but the board needs to decide whether the responsible thing to do is to continue the organization with a much smaller organization and vision or to dissolve it."

The Bitcoin Foundation is no stranger to controversy. Among its founding members are Charlie Shrem, who pleaded guilty to transmitting money linked to the Silk Road online drugs site, and Mark Karpeles, who presided over the collapse of MtGox, once the world's largest trading place for bitcoin.

In May 2014, a number of Bitcoin Foundation members quit in frustration over the organization's direction and issues related to a board election.


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Uber seeks to dismiss India rape lawsuit

Uber Technologies has asked a California court to dismiss a civil lawsuit brought against it by a woman who alleges she was raped by an Uber driver while taking a trip in Delhi.

In part, Uber contests that it never had a relationship with the driver in question and that the alleged crime falls outside of the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.

The lawsuit was filed in January and relates to an incident in early December in which the woman, who was not identified, took a 45-minute Uber ride home. She fell asleep in the car and says she woke up to find the car parked in a secluded area and the driver on top of her. She was raped and assaulted for more than 30 minutes, according to the lawsuit.

With a building public outcry in India against the company, Uber called the assault "an abhorrent crime" and said it was committed to working with the New Delhi police to bring the perpetrator to justice.

In a late Monday filing in San Francisco, Uber drew a distinction between Uber Technologies, the U.S.-based parent company, and Uber B.V., the Dutch-based subsidiary that operates the Uber service in India.

"This case has everything to do with India and the Netherlands, and nothing to do with the United States," it said.

"Plaintiffs counsel has chosen to sue only Uber Technologies, which never had any relationship with Yadav, the alleged assailant," it said. "Yadavs only contractual relationship with any Uber entity was with Uber B.V., a Dutch company not party to this suit."

Uber, like many companies, runs its international operations through a subsidiary in the Netherlands. The company, which often champions the so-called sharing economy, benefits from this arrangement by reducing or avoiding taxes in many countries where it operates.

Uber B.V. is one of more than 100 distinct legal entities around the world that sit under the Uber brand, it said.

The company went on to argue that a California courtroom was not the right place for justice to be served as the assault took place in India between two Indian citizens.

The original lawsuit asks the court to order Uber to take affirmative steps to remedy the alleged conduct and prevent repeated occurrences.

Uber called the demands "impermissible, unworkable, and unprecedented" and said such an injunction would "rewrite Uber's business policies worldwide."

The plaintiff also seeks damages. A court case against Uber in the Netherlands or India, if successful, would likely be much less costly to the company than one in the U.S.

Uber's lawyers have asked for a hearing in July to argue that the case be dismissed.


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Expired Google certificate temporarily disrupts Gmail service

Written By Unknown on Senin, 06 April 2015 | 16.00

Google forgot to renew one of its TLS certificates, leading to service disruption Saturday for people using Gmail through third-party email clients.

The problem was fixed in a matter of hours, but should serve as a reminder to online service operators that keeping track of digital certificate expiration dates is important and should be planned for in advance.

Some users reported Saturday on Twitter and other sites that email clients like Microsoft Outlook and OS X Mail were displaying certificate errors when trying to send email messages through smtp.gmail.com.

It seems that it wasn't the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server's certificate that expired, but one higher up in the chain that corresponded to Google Internet Certificate Authority G2—an intermediate certificate authority operated by Google.

When SSL/TLS certificates are validated by software applications, all certificates they link back to need to be valid as well. In this case the certificate for smtp.gmail.com had been issued by Google Internet Authority G2, which had in turn been issued by GeoTrust Global CA.

According to the Gmail status page, it took Google around two and a half hours to fix the problem, which affected "a majority of users." The certificate was renewed and is now set to expire on Dec. 31, 2016.

While operators of large online services typically monitor their certificates closely, similar expiration incidents have occurred before and when they do, they can have serious consequences.

In February 2013, an expired certificate issue disrupted the Microsoft Azure service worldwide for around a day. Since Azure is a cloud computing platform, many third-party services relying on it were affected as well.


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Major Roku upgrades include voice search for $100 Roku 3, new hardware for $70 Roku 2

Roku announced major upgrades to its popular media streamers on Tuesday. The flagship Roku 3 ($100) gets an all-new remote control with an integrated mic that can be used for voice searches, and the new Roku 2 ($70) is now based on the same hardware as its more-expensive sibling.

The new Roku 2's remote, however, doesn't support voice search, and it loses the headphone jack that it currently has (the Roku 3's remote retains this feature, which is useful for private listening). The Roku 1 and the Roku Streaming Stick ($50 each) remain the same, apart from new software features that will be common to the entire lineup (and all other Roku players manufactured since 2011).

Why this matters: Roku is slugging it out with Amazon, Apple, and Google to lead the media-streaming space, and consumers are reaping the benefits from this healthy competition. It's unfortunate to see a product lose a feature—I'm referring to the headphone jack on the Roku 2's remote, in this case—but the faster hardware under the hood should more than make up for that. 

Roku prioritizes hardware and search

"We focused on two key areas," Roku chief marketing office Matthew Anderson told me in a briefing last week, "the next stage of search and discovery, and hardware enhancements to the Roku 2 and the Roku 3."

To use voice search on the Roku 3's remote, you hold down the search button and speak. A circled-mic icon in the user interface pulses with each word until you release the button, to provide visual feedback that your search terms have been acknowledged.

You can search by title, actor, or director. The Roku will respond by listing all the content available on Roku that matches your criteria. After the primary search term, search results are listed in reverse order of cost, so that free content is listed first.

Roku 2 Roku

The new Roku 2 will no longer have a headphone jack in its remote control. And while the hardware can support the voice-search feature that comes with the Roku 3's remote, Roku doesn't plan to sell that remote solo.

The Roku 3's new voice-search remote is compatible with the new Roku 2 (the cheaper box is built using the same hardware as the Roku 3, after all), but Anderson said the company currently has no plans to sell the new remote separately. "We'll look at offering the remote separately if the market demands it," he said. The new remote will not work with the Roku 1 or the Roku Streaming Stick.

Across-the-board software upgrades

All four Roku models will get software updates, including the new search functionality (apart from voice recognition). Another new software feature, "Roku Feed," lets you "follow" new movies that are currently in theaters but not yet available on Roku. Movies garner the most attention while they're in theaters (and shortly before), so this feature lets you track as many films as you'd like and be notified as soon as they become available on one of Roku's channels.

Roku Movies Coming Soon Roku

"Follow" a movie and you'll receive as soon as it becomes available for streaming on a Roku channel. 

Roku will report when the movie is available for streaming, which service it's available on, and how much it costs. Each time the movie becomes available on a new channel or changes price, your feed will get an update. "It's like search that keeps on searching," said Anderson. "It does the work for you."

Anderson said the new Roku 2 and Roku 3 are available today, although it will take some time for the devices to reach all retail channels. Deployment of the new software—plus all-new Android and iOS companion apps—also starts today.

The new software that embraces all Roku models back to the 2011 vintage sounds extremely promising. Even the biggest fans lose track of some new movies they didn't get a chance to see in theaters, so the "movies coming soon" feature is also compelling. Roku says we'll get hardware to review sometime this week, so I'll be able to report soon on whether everything lives up to its promise. 


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