Obama administration joins the ranks of SOPA skeptics
The Obama administration has joined the ranks of skeptics of the Stop Online Piracy Act. In an online statement released Saturday, three senior White House officials wrote that the administration "will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet."
The statement was made in response to a petition on the White House's "we the people" site asking the president to veto SOPA if it reached his desk. The officials—IP enforcement coordinator Victoria Espinel, CTO Aneesh Chopra, and cybersecurity coordinator Howard Schmidt—did not commit the president to vetoing SOPA. However, they laid out criteria for an anti-piracy bill that seems to clearly rule out SOPA and the Senate's Protect IP Act in their current form.
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Week in Apple: Apple's education event, Anobit, data hogs, and more
This last week was CES 2012, meaning that Apple news largely took a backseat to what went on in Las Vegas. That doesn't mean nothing happened in the world of Apple, though. We discussed why quad-core iOS devices could launch soon, how iPhone 4S users are apparently data hogs, what might be announced during Apple's education event in NYC next week, and more. Read on for the roundup!
Why quad-core iOS devices could launch within the next year: Code within the latest iOS 5.1 betas appear to show support for quad-core processors. Along with other evidence in Apple's development tools, we may see quad-core powered iOS devices sooner rather than later.
iPhone 4S users are big data hogs compared to iPhone 4 users: iPhone 4S users are consuming data at higher volumes than ever.
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Week in gaming: the Wii U is mysterious, Diablo 3 on consoles, and MLG controllers
Readers were asking about the existence of triggers on Razer's Project Fiona, so here is a picture of the back of the hardware. See? Triggers!
We were at CES this week, and here are some of the stories we brought back. If Nintendo is going to launch the Wii U in 2012, the company doesn't have much time to give us some actual details about the hardware and the games we can expect. On the other hand, that's probably what E3 is for. Come inside and check out the biggest gaming stories of the week, and to see what we thought of the Fiona itself.
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Week in review: things other than CES happened
Top German cop uses spyware on daughter, gets hacked in retaliation: What happens when you install a trojan on your daughter's computer to keep track of her online activities? If you're a certain German security official, nothing good.
Intel's dream of x86 CPUs inside smartphones closer to reality: Intel finally has a credible smartphone processor, and has scored two design wins with both Lenovo and Motorola bringing Atom-powered Android phones to market this year.
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The week in science, with helpful hints on finding beachfront properties on Titan
This week's science news steadfastly refused to be encapsulated by a single theme. We had evolution and a revolution (in genome sequencing) in the biosciences, along with a new carnivorous plant and a member of the National Academies of Science who refused to recognize scientific evidence. Out in space, Kepler spotted more planets, researchers modeled Titan's weather, and quasicrystals formed, only to be brought to earth in a meteorite. And in physics, those faster-than-light neutrinos were still causing headaches.
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Google caught pilfering Kenyan business directory in sting operation
Google's "don't be evil" motto has already come under scrutiny once this week after the company was found to be profiting from advertisements placed by fraudulent retailers. The search company is under fire again, amid claims that it has been harvesting data from a Kenyan business directory, contacting the businesses, and telling them that the directory plans to charge them a listing fee, while also claiming to be working in partnership with the directory's operators.
Mocality Kenya operates the largest business directory in Kenya. The directory uses an innovative crowdsourced business model to ensure that its contents are comprehensive and accurate: any Kenyan with a mobile phone can submit entries to the database, and when these entries have been validated, rewards are paid using M-Pesa, a mobile payment system used in a number of developing nations.
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Trial delayed in Oracle's Android lawsuit against Google
A pretrial order issued earlier this month indicated that Oracle's lawsuit against Google would likely head to a jury trial in March. In a new filing, Judge William Alsup decided to delay the trial until Oracle can propose a reasonable methodology for measuring the damages.
The bitter intellectual property dispute relates to Google's Android mobile operating system. Oracle claims that the patents it holds on the Java programming language and related technologies are infringed by Android's custom Java runtime environment and compiler.
Android is also under siege from rival smartphone vendors that have issued their own patent claims against the operating system. Google has spent a considerable amount of money over the past year assembling a formidable defensive patent portfolio that will help insulate its mobile operating system from patent litigation.
One of the most contentious issues that has arisen in Oracle's litigation against Google is the methodology for computing damages. Judge Alsup has been vocal about his dissatisfaction with the proposals issued by both parties in the dispute. In the latest order, he complains that Oracle has twice "advanced improper methodologies obviously calculated to reach stratospheric numbers."
Judge Alsup believes that the trial will take approximately two months when it finally occurs.
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Under voter pressure, members of Congress backpedal (hard) on SOPA
The public outcry over the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act seems to have gotten so loud that even members of Congress can hear it. On Thursday we covered the news that Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) was expressing second thoughts about SOPA's DNS provisions. He said he changed his mind after he "heard from a number of Vermonters" on the issue.
On Friday, several Republicans started backpedaling as well.
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Lenovo's IdeaPad Yoga can do downward dog
Lenovo trotted out a slew of new computers and computer-like items at the Consumer Electronics Show this year, including two ultrabooks and a tablet with keyboard dock. One of the ultrabooks, the IdeaPad Yoga, has a display that can fold all the way back into a tablet-like form factor.
IdeaPad Yoga
The Yoga wasn’t so much announced as teased at the beginning of CES, with a set of photos showing it bent into poses like downward dog. During our meeting with Lenovo, many more details emerged—the notebook has a 1600x900 13.3-inch screen, weight 3.1 pounds, is 0.67 inches thick, and will have a Core i7 processor.
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Next-gen iPad expected to have quad-core processor, LTE support
The next-generation iPad won't just have a higher-resolution display—it will also come with LTE support and a quad-core processor, according to Bloomberg's sources. The publication claims to have spoken with three separate people about the upcoming device, noting that production is expected to ramp up in February in order to be available to the public in March.
One of Bloomberg's sources claims LTE support is coming to the iPad before the iPhone because "the tablet has a bigger battery and can better support the power requirements of the newer technology." As for the quad-core chip, references were recently found within the iOS 5.1 betas that indicate that Apple is planning to roll out quad-core iOS devices sooner than later. When we wrote about those discoveries last week, we said it would be plausible that the next version of the iPad could support such a thing, and now the rumors seem to be converging on that detail.
This comes only a week after we heard that the so-called "iPad 3" will get upgraded front- and rear-facing cameras in addition to a slightly thicker body. And, although there were initially some rumors that claimed Apple might make an iPad introduction as early as this month, all other signs (and reasonable people) seem to agree that a March or April launch is what's really in the cards.
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Sculpteo aims to be the Etsy of the 3D printing world
At CES, Sculpteo, a French company specializing in additive manufacturing—otherwise known as 3D printing—was showing off a new smartphone app that allows the uninitiated to create personalized, usable ceramic objects from a photo. The firm was also demonstrating a new "cloud engine" that allows designers and small businesses to create customized products they can sell through their own websites—basically aiming to become the Etsy of the 3D printing world.
The app side of Sculpteo's pitch is fairly gimmicky: snap a photo of someone in profile with an iPhone or Android device, and the app will recognize the profile. Then it exports data derived from the image so that the user can create a custom object based on it, derived from prebuilt designs. Those include a coffee cup with the profile in relief and a vase made from a rotational volume of the profile.
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Hands-on with Asus's follow-up to Transformer Prime, tablets, Padfone
Asus floated some big plans this year at the Consumer Electronics Show for merging categories of devices in a number of ways. Following in the Transformer Prime's footsteps is the tablet hybrid T700 Series, along with two 7-inch tablets and an elusive oddball of a gadget, the Padfone. We visited the company at CES to check out all these items.
T700 Series tablet hybrid
Asus's Transformer Prime has stirred the emotions of PC hybrid enthusiasts over the last couple of months, but Asus has no problem with making the tablet and keyboard dock look like old news. The 10.1-inch T700 series Android 4 model will have a Super IPS+ display at a 1920x1200 resolution, and a 1.3GHz quad-core Tegra 3 processor running Android 4—slightly faster than the Transformer Prime's 1.2GHz.
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India: obscene pics of gods require massive human censorship of Google, Facebook
It's hardly the sort of Internet policy statement one hopes to hear from judges in major democracies. "Like China, we can block all such websites [who don't comply]," Justice Suresh Cait told Facebook and Google lawyers in India yesterday. "But let us not go to that situation."
No, let's not. But it's what the government wants if Internet companies won't start screening and censoring all user-generated material on social network and user-generated content sites. And they'd better do their screening by hand, not with machines.
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Child labor violations at Apple suppliers down in 2011
Apple is beginning to reveal more information about its suppliers in China as part of its 2012 Supplier Responsibility Progress Report. Published on Friday, Apple's latest report (which comes in the form of several PDFs) reveals the names of its 156 "leading suppliers" for the first time, and discusses the results of its regular supplier audits—meant to reveal practices like juvenile worker violations, unfair hiring practices, and safety concerns. The company says it conducted more audits than ever before throughout 2011, and the numbers in the report indicate that Apple found fewer major violations than it did in 2010.
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Big Content: the frenemy of consumer electronics makers
A trip to CES is a combination of candy store window shopping and a trip to some nightmarish, dystopian future with thirteen-dollar-an-hour WiFi. Beneath all of the shiny gadgets, desperate marketing pitches, bizarre keynotes and sleep deprivation, there were a number of themes emerging at CES as the manufacturers of all these shiny toys tried to latch onto something to pull themselves out of the doldrums that hung over the last year. One was the lengths device-makers will go to for content; another was the anointment of "cloud" as a critical feature check-box.
For two industries that are so dependent on each other, the relationship between the gadget industry and content creators is an awfully strained one, bordering on domestic violence. On my last day at CES, I spoke briefly with CEA President Gary Shapiro and listened to his invective about how the content industry was trying to kill the Internet. The tension between the content and consumer technology communities has been around for decades—since the creation of the cassette tape, at least—and it doesn't seem to be getting any more amicable.
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A dozen atoms enough to store a bit—provided they're kept near absolute zero
Magnetic media has been the mainstay of computer storage for decades. Just as with processors, shrinking feature size—smaller clusters of magnetic atoms—have allowed huge gains in storage density. Just as with processors, though, these gains are starting to push up against physical limits, as it's getting harder and harder to set the magnetic state of a cluster of atoms without wiping out the information on the neighboring clusters.
Now, researchers at IBM have teamed up with collaborators in Germany and Switzerland to store information using a related phenomenon, antiferromagnetism. And they've shown that it's possible to store a bit in a feature that contains as few as six iron atoms. The downside is that the storage was only stable at extremely low temperatures. If the sample was allowed to heat up to 5K, the information on the bits vanished.
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Gravity Rush on the PS Vita is the game you didn't know you needed
The Vita is shaping up to have a strong launch lineup. At CES, I was able to play another game that should be ready for the system's US launch, or at least near it. Gravity Rush is a title that has been on the radar of the press for a little while now, and I was finally able to give it a shot at CES. Even with a very limited amount of time put into the game, I was immediately impressed with the game's graphics and play.
The main hook? You can control gravity at will, allowing you to "fall" towards almost anything you can see. In practice this is a thrilling way to explore the scenery.
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