A bipartisan group of eight U.S. senators has introduced legislation that would require the nation’s attorney general to declassify opinions issued by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in an effort to shed light on the government surveillance programs the surveillance court approves. The bill, co-sponsored by Senators Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, and Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, would require that the substantive legal interpretations of U.S. surveillance law issued by FISC be made public. The legislation would allow the attorney general to keep court information classified if he determined that making it public would undermine national security interests, but would then require him to declassify a summary of that opinion. The lawmakers introduced the legislation just days after a series of news reports by the alleged that the U.S. National Security Agency is collecting massive amounts of U.S. residents’ data from telephone carriers and Internet companies, potentially violating U.S. law. “Americans deserve to know how much information about their private communications the government believes it’s allowed to take under the law,” Merkley . “There is plenty of room to have this debate without compromising our surveillance sources or methods or tipping our hand to our enemies. We can’t have a serious debate about how much surveillance of Americans’ communications should be permitted without ending secret law.”
Microsoft said Tuesday that it had increased the amount of “bird's-eye” data inside Bing Maps by almost half, as the company tries to keep up with the 3D mapping capabilities offered by its competitors. Microsoft also added to its roster of “venue maps” of stadiums and conference halls. Microsoft’s Bing said that it had added about 270 terabytes of bird's-eye data to its Bing Maps database, versus the 500 terabytes of data that it had already stored. The existing data covered 1,452,958 sq kilometers, the company said. Bing’s “bird's-eye” view captures data at a 45-degree angle, providing a sense of perspective that flat, top-down satellite imagery doesn’t provide. And in places like the suburbs, the bird's-eye perspective offers a better view of houses, which is why real-estate Web sites like Zillow used Bing’s bird's-eye perspective to provide an alternative viewpoint from a traditional maps view. Now, however, Zillow and Trulia, among others, have added Google’s Street View into their perspectives. , providing its own 3D imagery to Apple Maps.
Hewlett-Packard wants to help organizations get rid of their useless data, all the information that is no longer needed yet still takes up expensive space on storage servers. The company’s Autonomy unit has released a new module, called Autonomy Legacy Data Cleanup, that can delete data automatically based on the material’s age and other factors, according to Joe Garber, who is the Autonomy vice president of information governance. Hewlett-Packard announced the new software, along with a number of other updates and new services, at its HP Discover conference, being held this week in Las Vegas, For this year’s conference, HP will focus on “products, strategies and solutions that allow our customers to take command of their data that has value, and monetize that information,” said Saar Gillai, HP’s senior vice president and general manager for the converged cloud.
Privacy advocates are pushing the U.S. Congress to rein in the U.S. National Security Agency’s efforts to collect massive amounts of data from U.S. residents, as alleged in recent news reports. More than 80 organizations have signed a letter calling on Congress to take “take immediate action to halt this surveillance and provide a full public accounting of the NSA’s and the FBI’s data collection programs.” Recent news reports from the . “As a result, the contents of communications of people both abroad and in the U.S. can be swept in without any suspicion of crime or association with a terrorist organization.” The U.S. intelligence agencies have been collecting business-record metadata from Verizon, several Internet companies and possibly from other telecom carriers and credit-card companies, according to the recent news reports. The source of the information about the data collection was Edward Snowden, a contractor at the NSA.
Hewlett-Packard will extend its 3Par enterprise storage line into flash-only territory this week, promising to combine higher speed with familiar software. The HP 3Par StoreServ 7450 Storage system, being introduced on Tuesday at the HP Discover conference in Las Vegas, was designed from the ground up just for SSDs (solid-state drives). It includes enhancements to 3Par software and the 3Par ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) to better take advantage of the speed of SSDs, according to Craig Nunes, vice president of marketing for storage at HP. SSDs retrieve data faster than spinning HDDs (hard disk drives) and can improve speed and latency even in storage arrays that have not been built around this type of drive. But systems that were designed for HDDs can become bottlenecks if enterprises fill them with SSDs and expect the full benefit of the faster media, according to Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Mark Peters. “It’s not about supporting it, because anything can support it. It’s whether you can make good use of it,” Peters said.
Microsoft has taken the first step in its integration roadmap for SharePoint and Yammer, allowing Office 365 customers to replace SharePoint Online’s activity stream with Yammer’s. This first, modest integration point will let SharePoint Online users click on the Yammer link and launch a separate browser window where they’re asked to sign in. Later this year, Microsoft will deepen the integration with a single sign-on and the addition of Yammer to the main Office 365 interface, which will begin to merge the two products’ user experience. Next month, Microsoft will release a Yammer application for SharePoint that will let users embed a Yammer group feed into a SharePoint site. The application will work both with SharePoint Online and with the on-premises version of the server SharePoint 2013.
Bromium’s small virtual machines have been updated to protect users who send documents or connect to public wireless hotspots when on the move. The core of Bromium’s vSentry software uses Intel CPU hardware features to isolate untrustworthy tasks on Windows in a micro-VM on the fly, and guarantees that any malware the users come across will be defeated and discarded without the user noticing, according to the company. “Our goal is that the user should have absolutely no idea that we are there,” said Simon Crosby, co-founder and CTO at Bromium. With vSentry 2.0, which became generally available on Tuesday, Bromium protects users that access enterprise applications via wireless hotspots or other untrusted networks. Whether the apps are hosted or run in the enterprise’s own data center, the technology provides end-to-end security, according to Crosby.
electronics show. The annual event exhibits and honors a range popular electronics in Taipei, Taiwan, the home of many international manufacturers including HTC. processor and an Adreno 320 GPU, all making for a powerful multimedia experience. , their closest competitor, sparking a brief and public back-and-forth between the two brands. . Expected to be available in August, the HTC One Mini will have a marginally smaller screen and scaled back specs. Once again, it will be in direct competition with Samsung, who unveiled the Galaxy S4 Mini in April.
On Tuesday, Advanced Micro Devices announced the AMD FX-9590, the first 5GHz microprocessor for the PC—at a time, unfortunately, when even PC enthusiasts care little about the processor’s clock speed. The new eight-core 5GHz FX-9590 and 4.7GHz FX-9370 feature AMD’s latest “Piledriver” architecture, which was designed to allow higher clock speeds. They also come “unlocked,” which means that end users are free to push their clock speeds and voltage levels even higher. but with the risk that the chips may overheat. AMD did not say what the new chips would cost, although the company has tended to charge several hundred dollars for its premium processors. Consumers won’t be able to buy the chips directly— at least not at launch, as AMD will supply them to system integrators like Maingear, which will build them into high-end boutique gaming PCs. AMD made the announcement at E3, one of the premier gaming conferences. In recent years, the to bridge consoles and PCs by writing games with a common code base.
There's nary a media type that some edition of Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery 6 won't handle: hard drives, memory cards, optical discs...all covered.
A NAS box—the acronym stands for network attached storage—is one of the most cost-effective centralized storage solutions for home and small-office networks. But since most NAS box manufacturers don't also manufacture hard drives, end users must find, identify, and purchase appropriate drives as separate transactions. Seagate stepped into that wide-open opportunity today, announcing the Seagate NAS HDD. The NAS HDD will be offered in capacities up to 4TB. Seagate claims the drive is optimized to operate in NAS boxes with one to five bays, with a design that dampens vibration, consumes less power, and operates in near silience. The drive also features Seagate's NASWorks technology, which includes error-correction technology customized error recovery controls. Check below for all the nitty-gritty specifications and information.
Early tests, online discussions and even some OEMs seem to show a potential bump in the road for Intel’s latest-generation processor architecture—a bump you can see on a temperature graph. The new Haswell line of processors, at least according to early scuttlebutt from various quarters of the Internet, appears to generate more heat at a given voltage than the preceding Ivy Bridge-based designs, which creates problems for system builders. A report from UK-based that four British PC makers have complained anonymously that production-model Haswell chips have failed to reach the performance levels possible in pre-production samples, forcing them to scale back clock speeds in planned designs. One company told the publication that “40 or 50 retail chips had been impossible to overclock beyond 4.2GHz because of the high voltages and unsafe temperatures involved.” “Even at stock speeds, [retail chips] are running hotter than Ivy Bridge or Haswell samples,” said another firm. (It should be noted that Intel does not guarantee overclocking performance or cover overclocked chips under warranty.)
Marketo says it has created tools that put it far ahead of rival marketing automation software vendors by making it much easier to run targeted campaigns, and more effective ones to boot. The new capabilities go into general availability Friday in two versions, a basic version at no additional charge to existing customers and a paid edition for power users, Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez said in an interview prior to Tuesday’s announcement. Until now, marketing automation software allowed users to build a degree of sophistication into their ad campaigns by setting up a series of rules, Fernandez said. For example, a gaming company could decide to send out an emailed loyalty offer to all male customers in their early to mid-twenties who have bought at least three games in the past year, according to Fernandez. The problem has been difficulty in taking the targeting down to a more individual level. This requires increasingly complex rule sets and just doesn’t scale up well as marketers try to reach more people individually, Fernandez said.
Hewlett-Packard executives say that the coming demise of Windows XP may do what Windows 8 could not, and that’s boost PC sales significantly. Analysts have blamed Windows 8 for after users failed to embrace its interface redesign. IDC, in its most recent quarterly report, said PC shipments fell 14 percent year-over-year. The shift to mobile and increasing reliance on tablets played a role, but was faulted as well for the historic decline. At HP’s user conference in Las Vegas, Windows 8 is prominent. But what seemed to get HP officials excited, wasn’t the upcoming , but Microsoft’s planned end of support next year for Windows XP.
Civil rights groups have asked the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) for the legal justification of the U.S. government’s surveillance of Verizon’s customer records. Results of a national survey by Pew Research released Monday, however, suggest that most people in the U.S. are willing to sacrifice privacy if it will help the government investigate terrorism. The by Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper. The metadata includes communications routing information such as session-identifying information, trunk identifier, telephone calling card numbers, and time and duration of call, according to the document. It does not, however, contain the content of a communication, or the name, address, and financial information of the customer. The requirement to turn in metadata applies to calls within the U.S., and calls between the U.S. and abroad.
For the second year in a row, social media sites (including gaming and dating sites) are leading the way in consumer security and privacy protections, beating out Internet retailers and banks, according to an annual comprehensive audit by the Online Trust Alliance (OTA). Even though social sites led the pack in OTA’s audit, the general trend for consumer security and privacy protection is good, says Craig Spiezle, president and executive director of OTA. The sites that performed the best in the adoption of 14 industry accepted best practices, open standards and privacy practices, and criteria and best practices advocated by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) were named to OTA’s Online Trust Honor Roll. Thirty-two percent of the companies audited by the OTA qualified for the Honor Roll this year, up from 30 percent last year, even though Spiezle says the criteria were tightened in several areas. Nearly half (121) of the companies that achieved the Honor Roll had also been Honor Roll recipients in last year’s audit. However, 47 percent of the companies that made the Honor Roll in 2012 did not qualify for the 2013 Honor Roll. “The bar has risen significantly,” Spiezle says. “We were very pleasantly surprised that the number of audited companies making the honor roll went up from 30 percent to 32 percent. We did not anticipate that.”
Tibco Software has added streaming capabilities to its event-processing portfolio with the acquisition of StreamBase Systems. The move will strengthen Tibco’s real-time data analytics offering, particularly for financial applications, the company said Tuesday, allowing it to provide an event-based alternative to batch-centric big data architectures. StreamBase software is already used in low-latency algorithmic trading, real-time risk management, and in other capital markets applications, Tibco said. The acquired software will sit in Tibco’s event-processing portfolio alongside Tibco BusinessEvents, which can capture, model, manage event streams. Tibco has already incorporated StreamBase’s offering into the products listed on its website.
All eyes were on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One during Monday’s “Day Zero” pre-E3 event, the annual gauntlet of press conferences by gaming’s giants. And the spotlight was well deserved: The launch of a new generation of consoles only happens once or twice per decade, as opposed to the slow, constant iteration of PC hardware. Here’s the thing, though. While EA, Ubisoft, Sony, and Microsoft were busy talking up the fact that the torrent of announced games was headed for next-gen console hardware, many of the titles showed off today are actually destined to land on PCs, too. Why wouldn’t they? With the Xbox One and PS4’s shift to x86 processors , making games cross-platform should be a breeze. Without further ado, here's a list of today’s promiscuous gems slated for eventual PC deployment.
Acer's "prototype" N3-220 Android all-in-one is more than than just a trial balloon, company executives said Monday. It represents the first in a series of PCs that will use Google's free mobile OS to carve out a new niche in the ultracompetitive PC market. on Monday that the company plans more all-in-one PCs—as well as either traditional clamshell designs or convertible tablets—based around Android. Within the all-in-one category, Acer sees it as powering a central hub within the home. come to market, he said—some of the specifications will change between now and then, including the storage capacity within it. Acer also plans to bring to market "notebooks" that run Android, pushing beyond just tablets, Ackerson added. He wouldn't say whether they'll include both traditional clamshells as well as convertible tablets, but he said that "in some instances, they won't have touch." . Other manufacturers, besides Acer, are also planning to make them, Ackerson said, although he declined to name names.
European Union lawmakers have delayed a vote on what authorities can do with airline passengers’ data following the revelations about the . The European Parliament had been scheduled to vote on Monday on whether to allow authorities investigating serious crimes and terrorist offences to access E.U. airlines’ passenger name register (PNR) data, which includes personal information such as addresses or credit card details. However, members of the European Parliament (MEPs) decided to refer the matter back to the parliament’s civil liberties and justice (LIBE) committee for a further review, following a request by British MEP Tim Kirkhope. Kirkhope cited “technical reasons” for the request, but some politicians argued that the motivation was political.
The color inkjet printer market is running on optimism these days. Dell, Kodak, and Lexmark have all quit the business in the past year. Consumers are posting online more, printing less—and losing their patience with pricey ink cartridges. The $99 Epson Expression Home XP-410 Small-in-One does not solve any of these issues—and its inks are, in fact, quite pricey—but it does offer surprisingly good output quality along with basic multifunction features. Also, while it may seem counterintuitive, . (Just be honest with yourself about this, or you’ll regret it later.) So for those who truly are printing less, the XP-410 could be a good standby machine. What you get for the price is a compact, simply designed machine with a flatbed letter/A4 scanner on top and a 100-sheet rear vertical feed. Paper exits into a front output area. All these pieces use somewhat flimsy, rattly plastics, as is typical for products at this price point. The scanner lid does not telescope to accommodate thicker material, so scanning a book would be awkward. The tiltable control panel is better than what you’ll see on most low-cost printers. There’s a 2.5-inch color display and touch controls that are also context-sensitive (they light up only when needed). Other than the impulse we all have now to touch the display instead of a button, the control panel works great and is both intuitive and responsive. Connectivity is also good for the price. USB and Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n are available for connecting directly to a PC or a wireless network. Front slots take SD or MS Duo media cards. Mobile printing is covered with Apple AirPrint and Google Cloud Print compatibility, plus apps for e-mailing or printing directly from mobile devices.
If there’s one thing Dell has done right over the years, it’s been to let Alienware—the boutique gaming PC manufacturer —remain Alienware. Based on the new notebook lineup that Alienware unveiled tonight, that let-‘em-be strategy is still working. As the annual gaming/marketing orgy known as the gets underway, the company announced three brand-new notebook models based on Intel’s fourth-generation Core processors. But Alienware General Manager Frank Azor dropped by PCWorld’s offices late last month to give us a hands-on sneak peek. The lineup has undergone a significant makeover while managing to remain unmistakably Alienware. "It’ s a big departure from 2009,” said Azor. “The new models are 60 percent metal, including a 100-percent aluminum A panel [lid] and a magnesium alloy chassis.” The reduction in plastic composites is a welcome departure, but the most significant visual cues come in the form of LED light pipes gracing the lid and the front and sides of the body, and the backlit trackpad. Between those, the alien-head logo, and the backlit keyboard, each notebook has 10 distinct lighting zones that can be lit in any combination of colors from a palette of 20. Games that support the AlienFX utility can change these color combos in response to in-game events, such as taking damage, healing, or completing a mission or quest.
The number of people who visited Taiwan’s Computex exhibition this year appears to have failed to meet the expectations of organizers and was largely unchanged from last year. In a statement issued on the final day of the five-day event, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council said attendance is expected to reach “over 130,000.” Last year’s Computex attendance was 130,013 and this year organizers had been hoping for “over 140,000” visitors. Attendance was up in one important area. The number of international visitors was 38,300, a rise of 1800 on Computex 2012. Those who did attend found a slightly smaller exhibition than in previous years. A total of 1724 exhibitors occupied 5,042 booths at the event compared to 1800 exhibitors and about 5400 booths at the 2012 event. As a result, organizers cut an entire exhibition hall—Hall 2—from this year’s show.
Move over, Google: the latest version of Apple’s iOS search assistant, Siri, uses Microsoft’s Bing for searches. on Monday, inserting it into the discussion without fanfare. , although you could still order it to search via Bing or other search providers. , albeit decreasing ones. Research firm comScore reported that Microsoft’s U.S. search share is now 17.3 percent, up almost half a percentage point from a month ago.
Waze’s crowdsourced traffic and navigation app is attractive to Google, which is said to be a serious suitor for the app, because of the wealth of mapping data it offers. But Waze’s biggest draw may be social, some experts say. The eponymous mobile app is designed to offer “smarter,” real-time navigation by letting users share road reports on accidents, police check points or other hazards along any given route. The idea is to give other users in the area a “heads-up” about what’s to come on the road, says Waze, which claims to have 30 million people using its app, on its —a number that is boosted to 50 million at the Google Play store. Waze also lets users create and join groups that allow members to view each other on a map and communicate with one another while on the road.
A second lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NSA's dragnet phone surveillance program was lodged today in a New York federal court by the American Civil Liberties Union, calling the spying "one of the largest surveillance efforts ever launched by a democratic government."
A bi-partisan group of senators proposed legislation today that seeks to declassify certain rulings from a secret spy court that is at the center of a firestorm over one of its leaked rulings requiring Verizon to turn over calling records on millions of customers.
The Department of Defense is instructing its employees and contractors not seek out or download classified material from the public domain that was leaked last week to the Guardian and Washington Post that detailed a massive, covert and government-run surveillance program.
Wired asked the cast of
Pastured poultry is new old-style: Beyond cage-free, beyond free-range, it puts chickens out on grass for most of their lives, producing a bird that lives longer, looks healthier, and tastes distinctly different from standard supermarket chicken. Wired Science blogger Maryn McKenna asks some New York City chefs about bringing chicken that actually tastes like chicken to their menus.
In a letter sent to the Justice Department, Google has asked the government for permission to expand the information it publicly discloses about the national security requests it receives under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The move comes in response to pressure placed on the company from the public in the wake of NSA leaks.
The Eurocopter X3 hybrid helicopter emerged from the hangar this month to set a new speed record for helicopters. With a top speed of 255 knots (293 miles per hour), the X3 breaks the previous record held by Sikorsky's own hybrid helicopter, the coincidentally named X2.
Why impersonal collaborative mapping network Waze is the perfect social acquisition for Google.
Google finalized its acquisition of the crowdsourced navigation and traffic app Waze this morning. Waze is a free app that uses the input of trusted community members to update maps in real time to help other users avoid delays and congestion.For now it looks like the Waze app will remain independent, bolstered by Google?s search ...
The Musguard fender is a 35 gram strip of polypropylene plastic that has been designed to wrap snugly around a bike's tubular frame and easily transform into a rigid, backsplash blocking fender.
Titled ?Life,? the comic tells a familiar story: Two characters meet, fall in love and have a child. Only in ?Life,? there are no words, no colors and every character is represented by a simple, tactile circle.
Late last week, as revelations about the National Security Agency's telephone and internet data gathering programs splashed across the news, attorney Michael Overly heard from one of his clients, a consumer product company that had been looking at moving email systems to a cloud service provider. They'd decided to put their cloud project on hold."They ...
If you read between the lines at today's Apple event, there are some interesting political contours.
A disease called coffee rust has reached epidemic proportions in Central America, threatening the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of farmers and the morning pick-me-up of millions of coffee drinkers.
Apple is ready to take over your dash, and iOS for the Car could finally allow your ride to keep pace with the device in your pocket.
Few people are lucky enough to have had a quiet underwater encounter with a whale. For the rest of us, there are photos like these: Life-size composites of sperm, humpback and minke whales, captured from less than 6 feet away. The full-sized prints (and the smaller digital versions in this gallery) bring our enormous marine kindred into a nearly tactile reality, revealing the seemingly tiny folds around a whale's inquisitive eye, the crustaceans adhering to a whale's skin, or the color variations that make individual whales beautiful and distinct.
If Amazon gets groceries right, the implications are far greater than another convenient option for getting your daily bread. But the logistics of grocery delivery are dizzyingly complex.
In 2011 Charles Stankievech hitched a ride to the Earth's northernmost settlement, a Canadian spy facility that used to spy on the Russians during the Cold War. The time-lapse photos he made there are haunting, beautiful and a meditation on civilization's priorities.
Sony has two new wireless Bluetooth speakers, a larger $300 model and a more portable $200 model. All music sounds good through them -- from Radiohead to Mot?rhead.
Following the now infamous Red Wedding episode of
Apple teased a revamp of its desktop Mac Pro at WWDC today. According to Phil Schiller it's for users who want only the "fastest, most expensive Mac in existence." It also sports a striking new cylindrical design and a remarkable power boost, and yet is just one-eighth the size of the current Mac Pro.The all ...
The first of what likely will be many lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the NSA's dragnet phone surveillance program was lodged Sunday, calling the newly disclosed operation an "outrageous breach of privacy."
Apple's new MacBook Air laptops have Intel's brand new Haswell chips inside, and these low-power processors are responsible for many of the Air's performance gains.
The new iOS 7 is radically simplified, incredibly flat, colorful, and multi-layered. It is, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook, ?the biggest change to iOS since iPhone.? And it may be the best thing yet designed by Jony Ive, who announced iOS 7 in a short video at Apple's World Wide Developer conference.
The sequel to 2009's parkour action game will be here when it gets here. Be patient.
Does the Patriot Act really give the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court the authority to require telephone carriers supply a feed of all calling metadata? The court's legal rationale on that front is a closely guarded secret.
After raising the ire of hardcore gamers with its unveiling of the Xbox One, Microsoft attempted to regain their affections with a games-driven press briefing at the E3 Expo today.
Xbox One will show up at retailers in November with a price tag of $499 in the U.S.
What?s in NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden?s 41-slide PowerPoint deck that?s so hot that nobody dare publish it?
Apple has announced a new streaming music service. iTunes Radio. The new station-based radio player launches this fall.