Dell kills off its last Android tablet in the US
Dell has taken its 7-inch Streak Android tablet out of commission, according to its website. While some retail sites still have stock, the company no longer offers the Streak for sale from its own website and will no longer produce it. The Dell Android tablet species is officially extinct in the US.
The fadeout of the 7-inch Streak follows the disappearance of the 5-inch Streak in August, when it failed to corner (read: create) the 5-inch tablet market. The 7-inch Streak went on sale in January and was priced at $200 with a T-Mobile contract, but has failed to generate any significant interest in the last year. The only Dell tablet still in production is the 10-inch Streak, sold in China.
From here, Dell will move on to making Windows 8 tablets when the operating system launches next year. Speaking at the Dell World 2011 conference, Michael Dell, the company's CEO, said that "the Android market has not developed the expectations [Dell] would have had."
In the meantime, there are similarly priced devices like the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet that offer many of the same features at roughly similar prices, without contracts. Dell will need to rethink its tablet game, particularly the use of contracts with mobile carriers, to stay competitive. Still, we hope to see a Windows 8 device that is more well-rounded and tablet-like than the super-e-readers above when CES rolls around in January.
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Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 2 streamlines cloud migrations
Microsoft today released Service Pack 2 for its Exchange mail, calendaring, and contacts server. In addition to the usual bug fixes and stability improvements, the service pack introduces new support for "hybrid deployments": Exchange 2010 installations that are partially on-premises, partially in the cloud.
Hybrid deployments were first introduced with the RTM release of Exchange 2010. They allow companies to migrate from on-premises Exchange installations to cloud-based ones in a piecemeal fashion. In a hybrid deployment, mailboxes, calendars, and contacts can reside locally or in the cloud; Exchange will ensure that messages are routed appropriately and shared data is available to users of both systems.
Service Pack 2 introduces a new configuration wizard to ease the configuration and creation of these hybrid deployments. The wizard enables the relevant hybrid features, such as mailbox migration between cloud and on-premises installation, and performs the necessary configuration to connect the local Exchange to the cloud one.
Such features are all part of a broader Microsoft strategy to get customers migrated into the cloud. As ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley reported last month, Microsoft is building the tools to help customers both build private clouds, with improved virtualization and management facilities, and migrate from private installations to public clouds.
These developments are in turn making sense of Steve Ballmer's oft-repeated claim that Microsoft is "all-in" on the cloud. Cloud offerings such as Office 365 and Azure are not some mere afterthought: they're central parts of Microsoft's platform offering, and it wants to make it as easy as possible for customers to migrate to them.
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Mendeley API Battle: open genetics-sharing tool declared victorious
In March, the platform-agnostic research management tool, Mendeley, announced an API Battle, held in conjunction with the Public Library of Science. The goal was to spur the community into developing neat apps that use the database that powers Mendeley. Apps were judged by a panel that included Tim O'Reilly (of O'Reilly Media) and Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, based on the following criteria: API key usage, whether or not it goes viral, how much the app contributes to collaboration and transparency, and general coolness.
Late last week (December 1st) the winners were announced, and 1st place went to openSNP, a community-driven project for publicly sharing personal genetic data (such as an individual's 23andMe results). You can read an interview with the winners over at Mendeley's blog. PaperCritic and rOpenSci were the runners-up.
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Sword fights and sex abuse: only 1% of minors send explicit nude photos
In 2008, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy said that 20 percent of teens had distributed nude or semi-nude pictures of themselves. Cue the moral panic about sexting!
Certainly, examples of sexting—both ridiculous and unnerving—weren't hard to find. A new paper in Pediatrics on teen sexting arrests contains a wealth of examples. Consider three that span the spectrum. Here's the ridiculous:
At a party where there was heavy drinking, 3 boys in the shallow end of a pool pulled down their swim trunks and had a “sword fight.” A girl, 17, filmed this and sent the video via cell phone to 6 other people. The 3 boys did not know she had taken the video or sent it. The girl was charged in juvenile court.
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Sun-like star hosts Kepler's first confirmed habitable zone planet
This week, NASA is playing host to a conference dedicated to the results pouring in from Kepler, its first dedicated planet-hunting probe. The space-based telescope spots planets as they pass in front of their host star and temporarily reduce the amount of light from the star that reaches Kepler's sensors; ground based observatories are then used to confirm these planetary candidates. Right now, that confirmation process is turning out to be the big hold-up, as Kepler has identified over 2,300 planet candidates, of which only 28 have been confirmed. But NASA has announced that one of the confirmed planets sits in the habitable zone of a sun-like star.
The initial period of planet spotting was heavily biased towards heavy, Jupiter-sized planets, which were the easiest things to spot. Kepler has completely changed that; the vast majority of the planet candidates are either Super-Earths or Neptune-sized, and just over 200 candidates are roughly the size of our own planet. Forty-eight of these candidates lie in the habitable zone of their stars, where liquid water on the surface is a possibility; 10 of those are roughly Earth-sized. That's actually a small drop from previous counts, as NASA has added consideration of atmospheric warming driven by greenhouse gasses when calculating whether liquid water is likely to be present.
Attention was then focused on the Kepler-22 system, where there was a planet candidate, Kepler-22b, that orbits on the inner edge of the habitable zone. If it were in our solar system, Kepler-22b would orbit somewhere between Venus and the Earth; its orbits take 290 days.
Follow-up observations with the Spitzer space telescope have now confirmed the presence of Kepler-22b, making it the first confirmation of a habitable zone planet by the program. Right now, all we can say about the planet is that it has a radius that's about 2.4 times that of Earth's. Since we don't know its mass, we can't calculate its density, and thus its most likely composition. And, since it's 600 light years away, it will be hard to get a much better look any time soon.
The vast backlog of planet candidates indicates that we'll probably be sorting through Kepler data for years. But the other habitable zone candidates are likely to be high priorities for follow-up observations, so there's a good chance we'll be hearing more about those sooner rather than later.
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Swiss government: file-sharing no big deal, some downloading still OK
A new report by the Swiss government argues that unauthorized file sharing is not a significant problem, and that existing Swiss law—which allows for downloading copyrighted content for personal use—is sufficient to protect copyright holders. It considers and rejects three proposed changes: a French-style "three strikes" law, Internet filtering, and a mandatory collective licensing regime that would impose a fee on all Internet users that allowed unlimited file-sharing.
The report was written at the request of the Swiss legislature, which had expressed concerned that rampant copyright infringement endangered Swiss culture. In a 13-page document, Switzerland's Federal Council—the nation's seven-member executive branch—downplayed those concerns.
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US court denies preliminary injunction against Samsung
Despite garnering a few preliminary injunctions against Samsung outside the US, Apple was not able to convince a US federal court to keep its products from store shelves. US District Judge Judy Koh denied Apple's request for a preliminary injunction barring Samsung from selling its "Galaxy" branded tablets and smartphones on late Friday. While the ruling suggests Apple could eventually prevail after a full trial, the decision allows Samsung to continue to sell its competing Android-based devices unabated while the case slowly works its way through the docket.
Apple's US lawsuit against Samsung began in April this year, and ultimately sparked a worldwide rash of 23 lawsuits between the two companies. Apple's main beef is that Samsung's Galaxy S and SII smartphones and Galaxy Tab tablets draw too heavily upon the design of the iPhone and iPad. Apple was able to win some limited preliminary injunctions based on a registered European Community Design right and a handful of functional patent claims. Its US case accused Samsung of violating a litany of US design and utility patents as well as accusing Samsung of violating Apple's trade dress, including unique packaging design and other related trademarks and intellectual property.
Unfortunately for Apple, its motion for a preliminary injunction rested on just a handful of the issues at play in the main proceeding. And on those particular points, Judge Koh did not find enough solid evidence or issue at law to satisfy the requirements for a preliminary injunction.
Judge Koh suggested that prior art, in particular the Knight Ridder tablet dreamed of in a promotional video from the '90s, may invalidate some of Apple's design patent claims. However, she also noted that "Samsung appears to have created a design that is likely to deceive an ordinary observer." If Apple is able to convince the court that its design patents are valid, the fact that Samsung is viewed by the court as a copycat could still end up being a thorn in Samsung's side.
The court did agree that Apple's list-scrolling "bounce-back" patent (US Patent 7,469,381) was valid and that past Samsung devices likely infringed. Samsung devices with newer firmware have a workaround, but since Apple had previously licensed the patent to Nokia and IBM, and even offered a license to Samsung during negotiations in 2010, Judge Koh ruled that a monetary award should suffice as relief. If mere exchange of money can satisfy the resolution of a patent infringement, then a preliminary injunction isn't warranted according to US law.
With the full trial not set to begin until next year, and the pace of the mobile device market moving much faster than the courts, even a favorable ruling for Apple may not have much material affect on Samsung at that point.
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New approach to determining human impact on climate gives same answer
Although some people continue to question whether Earth's temperatures have actually warmed significantly over the last century, the focus of many has shifted to cause: while the world has clearly warmed, a lot of people have suggested that the cause of that warming is "up for debate." Many studies have looked at that question and determined that human activity is the primary driver, as the 2007 IPCC report concluded. A paper published this week in Nature Geoscience makes a novel contribution to this question, even as it comes up with the same answer.
Previous work has primarily used observations of temperature trends (from the deep ocean or the lower atmosphere) combined with computer modeling to assess the cause of warming. For example, the latest IPCC report showed climate models run with and without the effect of greenhouse gases to illustrate that temperatures would have been stable without anthropogenic warming.
The new study, published by researchers from the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science at ETH in Switzerland, directly examined Earth’s energy balance instead.
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Microsoft's bid to rule your living room with the Xbox 360 begins tomorrow
Microsoft laid out a grand plan to turn your Xbox 360 into an even stronger hub for everything from television shows and movies to music at E3 this year. That dashboard update launches tomorrow, bringing with it the ability to use your Kinect to search for content across every service you have connected to your system, as well as Microsoft's digital storefronts on Xbox Live and live television.
Unfortunately, not all of Microsoft's content partners will be ready for the service's launch tomorrow. HBO Go won't be available until early 2012, nor will Comcast's Xfinity on-demand library. Here are the services that will be available tomorrow, along with which market they will be active:
- EPIX. United States
- ESPN on Xbox LIVE (ESPN). United States
- Hulu. Japan
- Hulu Plus. United States
- LOVEFiLM. United Kingdom
- Netflix. Canada, United States
- Premium Play by (MediaSet). Italy
- Sky Go (SkyDE). Austria, Germany
- Telefónica España - Movistar Imagenio. Spain
- TODAY (MSNBC). United States
The search functionality that allows you to look for content across a variety of outlets and apps is fascinating, as is the ability to control the service by waving your arms if you own a Microsoft Kinect, but the real power of these deals is the emphasis they place on Microsoft's hardware. By bundling all our digital subscriptions and content through the Xbox 360, Microsoft wants to make sure your gaming console is at the heart of your entertainment center. Xbox Live subscribers and subscribers of these digital services won't have access to much in the way of new content, but it will all be centralized in one location.
This is different than the Apple TV's strategy of offering content such as television shows and movies as discrete items and selling or renting them directly to consumers as well as streaming your existing content. Microsoft wants to be the box you turn on when you want to watch anything, whether it's live or streaming, no matter what content delivery service you're going to be enjoying.
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Apple, Motorola, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile latest to be sued over Carrier IQ tracking
Apple, Motorola, and three major wireless carriers are the latest to face a class-action lawsuit over a smartphone privacy scandal, with Carrier IQ, HTC, and Samsung also facing allegations that they spy on users with software installed on smartphones. While Carrier IQ makes the software, it is installed on phones manufactured by hardware companies and sold by carriers, providing plenty of targets for lawsuits.
We noted the existence of two class-action lawsuits targeting Carrier IQ, HTC, and Samsung last week. Another was filed in US District Court in Delaware Friday against a bigger roster including Carrier IQ, AT&T, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile USA, HTC, Apple, Samsung, and Motorola Mobility. Filed on behalf of four plaintiffs who are iPhone, HTC, and Samsung phone users and also customers of AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, the suit notes that "defendants Samsung, Apple, Motorola, and HTC pre-install Carrier IQ software on cell phones used by its customers on the AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint networks."
Carrier IQ and its customers say the software only collects diagnostic information to help them improve service, but the lawsuit says that "[i]n addition to collecting device and service-related data, Carrier IQ’s software can collect data about a user’s location, application use, Web browsing habits, videos watched, texts read and even the keys they press." The suit claims violations of the Federal Wiretap Act, Stored Electronic Communications Act, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, while demanding monetary compensation as well as a permanent order preventing the defendants "from installing software on cell phones that could track the users’ information in violation of federal law."
Whether the charges can be proven is unclear. Customers must assent to smartphone privacy agreements that typically allow some sort of data collection, and some security researchers have disputed the claim that Carrier IQ software collects more than is lawful. Carrier IQ has denied any invasion of users' privacy, while Apple told Ars last week that it used Carrier IQ to record diagnostic information anonymously, and "did not record keystrokes, messages or any personal information for the diagnostic data." AT&T and Sprint have also told us their use of Carrier IQ software is aimed at gathering information to improve device and network performance, and that they do not collect personal information, like text messages or photos.
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DRM-free gaming distributor GOG.com trades convenience for safety
Companies that handle the personal information of their customers are always going to be attractive targets for hackers, and consumers are becoming fed up with e-mails warning that their data may be in the hands of strangers due to security breaches. DRM-free gaming digital distribution service GOG.com is trying to fight this by keeping the minimum amount of information about its customers on the servers. This approach means that customers have to input their information every time they want to make a purchase, but a survey the company sent to its customers showed gamers are willing to put up with longer checkout times if it means their data is safe.
We caught up with Trevor Longino, the head of marketing at GOG, to ask about this approach, and why a little inconvenience is the right decision.
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Why Microsoft should, and shouldn't, support legacy Windows desktop on ARM
Ever since Microsoft first announced that Windows 8 would be compatible with certain ARM system-on-chip processors, questions about what this would mean for existing Windows applications have been abundant. ARM's strength is in low-power applications, and the decision to support the architecture was plainly motivated by the needs of the tablet market—which left observers wondering just how much of Windows would actually be supported on ARM? Just the bits relevant to tablet and consumer applications, or the whole shebang?
When Microsoft revealed and then described Windows 8's Metro-style tablet interface, the company left the ARM questions unresolved. Windows 8 has two distinct kinds of application: traditional Windows applications that run on the desktop, and new finger-friendly Metro-style applications, with the latter integrated into the new Start screen, and the former segregated off into a separate desktop. This led to speculation that ARM Windows might support only Metro-style programs, and exclude the desktop altogether.
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Suspension of Disbelief: magicians' friends targeted by new phishing scam
Last week, friends of Kyle and Kelly Peron got a disturbing email that appeared to be from the couple, a husband-and-wife magic act. It told of trouble overseas, claiming that the two had been mugged while vacationing briefly in the Phillipines. "We've been to the Embassy and the Police here but they're not helping issues at all and our flight leaves in few hours from now but we're having problems settling the hotel bills and the hotel manager won't let us leave until we settle the bills," the email pleaded. "Please, let me know if you can help us out?"
If the email had been from the Perons, it would have been some serious magic—seeing as they were at home in the Philadelphia area at the time. Like many people who use social media to promote their businesses and keep in touch with colleagues and customers, the Perons' personal information was easily converted into a bit of social engineering that could fool the less skeptical.
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