Apple Inc on Monday unveiled a smaller, cheaper iPhone aimed at new buyers, especially in emerging markets and China, as the technology company looks to reverse a decline in worldwide sales of its most important product.
The new device, called the iPhone SE, has a 4-inch (10-cm) screen and starts at $399. It represents Apple's second bid for the crowded mid-tier market after an unsuccessful foray three years ago. Orders start on Thursday, and the phone will be available next week.
The $399 starting price is well below the $649 for the current top iPhone model without a contract, which is beyond the reach of many. The new phone, with Apple's vaunted A9 chip, is much faster than Apple's previous attempt at an entry-level phone, launched in 2013. It also runs Apple Pay and comes in the wildly popular rose gold color.
Analysts had said before the event that a phone priced below $450 could be competitive with other mid-tier rivals, mostly running Google's Android system, and make an impact in emerging markets and China, the world's biggest buyer of smartphones.
Apple is hoping the cheaper model will stimulate overall iPhone sales, which it expects to decline this quarter for the first time since it essentially created the smartphone market nine years ago.
"There are people who want that smaller screen size," said Bob O'Donnell of TECHnalysis Research, but he warned that it may not be a sure-fire hit.
"It's a more attractive price point, but I don't think it moves the needle in emerging markets," he said. "You do a price cut when you need to drive the market a bit more."
Apple shares fell in the afternoon and were down about $0.15 at $105.77. The stock is down 20 percent from its all-time high closing price of $133 in February 2015, as Wall Street worries that the company does not have any blockbuster products in the pipeline.
The company showed off new wristbands for the Apple Watch and a new iPad Pro tablet at Monday's event, but it generated little excitement among investors.
“Apple is so big now that nothing seems to be earth-shaking anymore, and the strategy seems to be turning to offering complementary products like watch bands so they can maintain their sales momentum,” said Skip Aylesworth, portfolio manager of the Hennessy Technology Fund.
The more compact phone design comes after it expanded the size of the screens in its high-end iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus phones in 2014 to as large as 5.5 inches. That was broadly seen as an attempt to match rival Samsung Electronics <005930.KS> with its large-screen Galaxy phones.
Before the launch at Apple's leafy Cupertino, California headquarters, Chief Executive Tim Cook defended the company's refusal to comply with a U.S. court order to unlock an iPhone belonging to one of the shooters in a December attack in San Bernardino, California.
Apple has a responsibility to protect customers' data and privacy, Cook said, adding that Apple "will not shrink from that responsibility." His statement was greeted by applause from the audience.
The tech company's dispute with the U.S. government has become a lightning rod for a broader debate on data privacy in the United States. The company is set to square off against the U.S. government at a court hearing on Tuesday, likely the first round in a long legal fight to avoid being forced to decrypt the iPhone.
Apple also announced a new scheme it called 'Liam' to take apart old iPhones and reuse the materials.
(Reporting by Julia Love, Mari Saito and David Randall; Writing by Bill Rigby; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
When the FBI branded Martin Luther King Jr a “dangerous” threat to national security and began tapping his phones, it was part of a long history of spying on black activists in the United States. But the government surveillance of black bodies has never been limited to activists – in fact, according to the FBI; you only had to be black .
In the current fight between Apple and the FBI, black perspectives are largely invisible, yet black communities stand to lose big if the FBI wins. A federal judge in California is set to rule on Tuesday whether the FBI will be granted a request compelling Apple to unlock the iPhone of a San Bernardino shooter.
While seemingly about protecting national security – the same rationale used to justify 20th century surveillance of MLK, the Black Panther Party and others – this case is about much more. It could establish a legal precedent used to suppress the growing movement for black lives that is deposing public officials and disrupting the daily assault on black people in cities across the country.
Building off the civil rights and black power movements of the 1960s, a 21st century movement for black lives is coming of age, mobilizing the same courageous methods of non-violent direct action, using the same local-to-local strategy, and making many of the same demands. An intersectional approach is replacing old identity politics, and a newfound digital landscape is making communication possible in more directions and at previously unimaginable speeds. The movement for black lives is attracting the brightest minds and bravest bodies. Black activists are developing new ways of grassroots organizing in an information economy.
Like its predecessors, the democratic movement for black lives has been met by anti-democratic state surveillance and anti-black police violence. New “smart” policing methods are being used by modern-day gumshoes who, fueled by the false rhetoric of black criminality, experiment with high-tech tools to the detriment of black democratic engagement.
In the 20th century, the FBI admitted to overreaching and violating the constitution when it used its counter intelligence program, COINTELPRO, for domestic surveillance that spied on black activists. Last year, FBI director James Comey admitted in a congressional committee hearing to flying spy planes that monitored protests in the wake of police killings of black people in Ferguson and Baltimore with the agency working in tandem with local police. In Chicago, home of the infamous “red squad”, police collected “ First Amendment Worksheets ” on black organizations such as We Charge Genocide, and Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Push Coalition.
There are reports from activists on the front lines of protests about police employing “kill switch” technology to cut off live-streaming, using Stingrays to intercept phone calls, or flying drones overhead for crowd control, but such claims are unconfirmed as police refuse to reveal their techniques and are not compelled by law to do so.
Twentieth century surveillance is alive and well in the 21st century, and is one powerful reason why, in a digital age and era of big data, the fight for racial justice must also include a fight for the equal and fair application of first and fourth amendment rights.
A letter was sent by some of us in the Black Lives Matter movement to California federal magistrate judge Sheri Pym, who is overseeing the Apple case, warning of the dangerous implications of siding with the FBI. It was signed by Beats, Rhymes & Relief, the Gathering for Justice, Justice League NYC, writer Shaun King, Black Lives Matter co-founder and Black Alliance for Just Immigration executive director Opal Tometi, as well as the organization I work for, the Center for Media Justice.
I signed because, as the child of a Black Panther, I grew up with the persistent threat of police spying. The police “watched” my family in the name of “safety” and “national security”, but I knew that we became targets of government surveillance because my mother advocated for black bodies abandoned and abused by state violence.
That is why the FBI case is not only against Apple, but is also against communities of color and communities of resistance. It is against democracy. It is against the black immigrant worker who has fled political persecution, the black and Latino youth putting themselves on the line to catalyze deep change, the gender non-conforming bodies subjected to daily assaults, the Muslim communities regularly targeted by bias and hate crimes. We don’t have the same protections others take for granted, we are instead treated as perpetually guilty.
Reports have surfaced that the Department of Homeland Security has been monitoring the movement for black lives since the initial uprisings in Ferguson. We know that police are watching the tweets we write, the Facebook event pages we set up, and the demonstrations we organize in the streets. If we are arrested, our phones will be confiscated. Whether or not police can look into our phones, whether or not they need a warrant, is being tested in court. This is not a vision of some distant dystopic future, this is happening right now. This is why the FBI case against Apple, is also against us.
For black communities and others pushed to the margins of political and economic power – democratic engagement and the exercise of our human and civil rights in a digital age demands the ability to encrypt our communications.
It isn’t just Black activists either – Latino activists are raising a similar rallying cry . Consider the prospect of a President Trump, who has notoriously expressed his anti-immigrant views, and sided with the FBI in its fight against Apple. With record numbers of deportations already at hand – could undocumented immigrants be rounded up using the information transmitted from their cellphones?
A newly developed open source app for iPhones called Signal , which encrypts phone calls and text messages, has become a favorite among organizers as well as Edward Snowden . It allows for free and instant encryption of messages that cannot be cracked by anybody wanting to eavesdrop. Activists across the world have adopted the app as one way to protect their right to organize.
Yet encryption technology is for more than just activists. Whether protecting from identity theft or government surveillance – all communities need to protect their data in the digital age. We cannot have a healthy democracy without everyone’s voice.
Black voices, and other voices of color, have long been missing from the debates on government surveillance – but not anymore. We’re here, and we are calling on companies to protect the rights of consumers, and on legislators to protect the rights of residents. One way to do both is to pass the Encrypt Act 2016 , which would, if passed, prevent the government, or a contracted company, from altering the security functions of computers and cellphones, or decoding encrypted information, in order to conduct a search. Even now, members of congress are bizarrely moving to ban encryption at the state level using the rhetoric of terrorism and black criminality.
Encryption is necessary for black civil and human rights to prosper, but isn’t enough. While it protects our democratic right to organize for change, we must fight for a world in which those rights are not under persistent threat. The Apple v the FBI case is a test case for democracy. It will determine, for this and the next generation, who has the right to communicate, and therefore the power to define reality.
In the encryption debate, the stakes are high for black people. Indeed, we are in a fight for our lives. I believe that we will win.
Apple Inc is expected to launch a smaller, cheaper iPhone on Monday aimed at emerging markets and possibly China, the world's biggest buyer of smartphones, as it looks to reverse a decline in worldwide sales of its most important product.
The launch of such a phone - expected to be called the iPhone SE - would represent Apple's second bid for the crowded mid-tier market after an unsuccessful foray three years ago.
It might give the world's best-known technology company a boost in the fast-growing Indian, Middle East and African markets, but also risks cutting its average phone prices and profit margins.
"The iPhone SE provides a new incentive to upgrade for iPhone holdouts who don't want a large-screen phone," said analyst Bob O'Donnell of TECHnalysis Research.
A less expensive iPhone could appeal to emerging markets customers, said O'Donnell, but is not a sure-fire hit, as it may still be pricier than competitors running Google's Android system, and many in emerging markets have already developed a taste for larger screens.
Apple has invited reporters to an auditorium at its Cupertino, California headquarters in Silicon Valley on Monday, a cozy venue compared with the massive San Francisco stages where it typically unveils new iPhones and major products.
As is its tradition, Apple has been silent about what is on offer, but technology and financial analysts predict a cheaper, entry-level phone with a screen around 4 inches (10 cm) that still runs some of the latest features such as Apple Pay.
The more compact design comes after its move to expand the size of the screens in its high-end iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus phones in 2014, featuring a screen as large as 5.5 inches. That was broadly seen as an attempt to match rival Samsung Electronics with its large-screen Galaxy phones.
The iPhone is sold around the world, but with a price starting at $649 for the current top model without a contract, it is beyond the reach of many. A mid-range or entry-level phone could broaden Apple's appeal, although it is not clear what price range it will aim at.
Apple still believes the mid-size market is worth pursuing, analysts have said, as it looks to counter the global spread of phones running Android, made by Alphabet Inc's Google.
Technology research firm IDC is expecting an uptick in sales of devices running Android this year, to account for almost 83 percent of smartphones sold worldwide. It expects iPhone sales to fall slightly, making up 15 percent of the market.
Apple said in January it expects a decline in iPhone sales overall this quarter compared to the same period a year ago, the first such dip since Apple essentially created the smartphone market nine years ago. The product drives about two-thirds of Apple’s sales and no other gadgets in its lineup are close in popularity.
Wall Street analysts worry the company does not have another blockbuster product to replace the iPhone. Apple is also expected to announce a new iPad on Monday in an attempt to buoy flagging tablet sales, and new bands for Apple Watch, the wearable gadget it released last year to mixed reviews.
If the iPhone SE is unveiled on Monday, it will be Apple's second run at the entry-level or mid-tier market following the iPhone 5c, a lower-end phone with a colorful plastic body that was launched in 2013. After initial excitement, it did not prove to be a big seller and has since been dropped from Apple's lineup.
The anticipated iPhone SE could give Apple a short-term boost without running into the low end of the smartphone market dominated by Android devices, said analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy, especially if it has the company's high-powered A9 chip and supports a feature that makes phones work better on wireless networks, called "carrier aggregation."
But even with that, he warned the new phone will face tough competition from Android.
"The new phones from Huawei, LG, Samsung and Xiaomi are the best I have seen from them in years," said Moorhead.
(Reporting by Julia Love; Editing by Peter Henderson and Bill Rigby)
Embattled pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli celebrated what he called his 33rd birthday on Thursday with his apparent online friends, Queerty reported.
Shkreli, who became known as "Pharma Bro" for his price-gouging involving the drug Daraprim last September, marked the occasion via a webcast on the website Blab.
"Come have cake and stuff," he wrote on Twitter as he posted a link to the livestream.
He also posted a picture of what he called a cake brought to him by friends, with his face baked on as part of a depiction of a $100 bill:
"Thanks for all the birthday love," he wrote later. "33 today, feels like a life trimester is complete."
However, that statement runs counter to a Vanity Fair profile in which he claimed that the arrogant persona seen online and in a congressional hearing did not reflect his authentic personality, calling it "an extremely weird form of sarcasm."
"Anyone who knows me knows I am not that guy," Shkreli is quoted as saying. Vanity Fair reported as part of the same story that Shkreli was born on April 1, 1983.
Microsoft Corp apologized for hiring dancers dressed as skimpily-clad schoolgirls for its Game Developer Conference (GDC) afterparty in San Francisco on Thursday night, responding to media reports citing attendees' pictures on Twitter and Instagram.
"It has come to my attention that at Xbox-hosted events at GDC this past week, we represented Xbox and Microsoft in a way that was absolutely not consistent or aligned to our values," Microsoft's head of Xbox Phil Spencer said in a statement. (https://bit.ly/1RpW21b)
"That was unequivocally wrong and will not be tolerated," Spencer said.
Photos purportedly from the party surfaced on Twitter and Instagram, with many users expressing their anger at Microsoft's actions.
"I like dancing, I like talking to devs. But not at this #GDC16 party. Thanks for pushing me out of this party, Microsoft," Tin Man Games editor Kamina Vincent tweeted.
Microsoft had hosted a "Women in Gaming" luncheon at the GDC earlier that day.
Spencer added that the matter would be dealt with internally.
Technology companies been facing intense scrutiny over diversity and compensation equity issues.
Many big firms say there is a dearth of qualified women to hire, but many critics say the firms are not doing enough to attract and retain women.
(Reporting by Anya George Tharakan in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta)
Twitter Inc's 140-character tweets are here to stay, Chief Executive Jack Dorsey said on Friday, ending speculation that the microblogging site might abandon one of its trademark features for a 10,000-character limit.
"It's staying. It's a good constraint for us and it allows for of-the-moment brevity," Dorsey said on NBC's Today Show.
A Twitter spokesman declined to elaborate.
In January, technology news website Re/code reported that Twitter was building a new feature that would allow tweets as long as 10,000 characters.
Twitter has declined to comment on the feature directly. But Dorsey tweeted the day of the report that the company had seen more screenshots of text posted as a way to get around the 140-character limit.
"We're not going to be shy about building more utility and power into Twitter for people," Dorsey wrote at the time, also in a screenshot of text that was longer than 140 characters.
Dorsey has changed some of Twitter's core features since he returned to run Twitter permanently in October. Twitter has added "Moments," which allows users to easily find tweets about the day's biggest news stories, and changed the shape of its "favorite" icon from a star to a heart.
(Reporting by Yasmeen Abutaleb in San Francisco and Kshitiz Goliya in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty and Richard Chang)
The hacking collective Anonymous has vowed once again to “dismantle” Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and to “expose what he doesn’t want the public to know”.
The group announced its re-engagement of “OpTrump” through its traditional propaganda video, aiming to take down one of Trump’s property websites for Chicago on 1 April.
Anonymous said: “We have been watching you for a long time and what we’ve seen is deeply disturbing. You don’t stand for anything but your personal greed and power.
“This is a call to arms. Shut down his websites, research and expose what he doesn’t want the public to know. We need you to dismantle his campaign and sabotage his brand.”
Anonymous last declared war on Trump at the end of 2015 in response to Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the US. At the time the group took down the website of New York’s Trump Tower using a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) that overwhelms a site’s servers using bogus traffic.
Whether this renewed effort by Anonymous will have a greater impact on Trump and his campaign for the US presidential elections is unclear. But the collective is urging everyone to support their campaign saying “you do not need to know how to hack to support this operation”.
“This is a declaration of total war. OperationTrump engaged.”
Trump has been the target of several hacking groups, allegedly leaking personal information, voicemail messages and attacking his various sites, all of which have had little effect on his popularity.
The latest filing in the legal war between the planet’s most powerful government and its most valuable company gave one indication of how the high-stakes confrontation could escalate even further.
In what observers of the case called a carefully calibrated threat, the U.S. Justice Department last week suggested that it would be willing to demand that Apple turn over the "source code" that underlies its products as well as the so-called "signing key" that validates software as coming from Apple.
Together, those two things would give the government the power to develop its own spying software and trick any iPhone into installing it. Eventually, anyone using an Apple device would be unable to tell whether they were using the real thing or a version that had been altered by officials to be used as a spy tool.
Technology and security experts said that if the U.S. government was able to obtain Apple's source code with a conventional court order, other governments would demand equal rights to do the same thing.
"We think that would be pretty terrible," said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the nonprofit Center for Democracy & Technology.
The battle between Apple and the U.S Justice Department has been raging since the government in February obtained a court order demanding that Apple write new software to help law enforcement officials unlock an iPhone associated with one of the shooters in the December attack in San Bernardino, California that killed 14 people.
Apple is fighting the order, arguing that complying with the request would weaken the security of all iPhones and create an open-ended precedent for judges to make demands of private companies.
The Justice Department's comments about source code and signing keys came in a footnote to a filing last week in which it rejected Apple's arguments. Apple's response to the DOJ brief is expected on Tuesday.
Justice Department lawyers said in the brief that they had refrained from pursuing the iOS source code and signing key because they thought “such a request would be less palatable to Apple. If Apple would prefer that course, however, that may provide an alternative that requires less labor by Apple.”
The footnote evoked what some lawyers familiar with the case call a "nuclear option," seeking the power to demand and use the most prized assets of lucrative technology companies.
A person close to the government’s side told Reuters that the Justice Department does not intend to press the argument that it could seize the company’s code, and someone on Apple’s side said the company isn’t worried enough to counter the veiled threat in its brief due Tuesday.
But many people expect the iPhone matter to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, and thus even fallback legal strategies are drawing close scrutiny.
ODDS OF SUCCESS UNCLEAR
There is little clarity on whether a government demand for source code would succeed.
Perhaps the closest parallel was in a case filed by federal prosecutors against Lavabit LLC, a privacy-oriented email service used by Edward Snowden. In trying to recover Snowden’s unencrypted mail from the company, which did not keep Snowden’s cryptographic key, the Justice Department got a court order forcing the company to turn over another key instead, one that would allow officials to impersonate the company’s website and intercept all interactions with its users.
“Lavabit must provide any and all information necessary to decrypt the content, including, but not limited to public and private keys and algorithms,” the lower court ruled.
Lavabit shut down rather than comply. But company lawyer Jesse Binnall said the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the lower ruling, did so on procedural grounds, so that the Justice Department’s win would not influence much elsewhere.
In any case, full source code would be even more valuable than the traffic key in the Lavabit case, and the industry would go to extreme lengths to fight for it, Binnall said.
“That really is the keys to the kingdom,” Binnall said.
Source code is sometimes inspected during lawsuits over intellectual property, and the Justice Department noted that Apple won permission to review some of rival Samsung's code in one such case. In that case and similar battles, the code is produced with strict rules to prevent copying.
No cases brought by the government have led to that sort of code production, or at least none that have come to light.
But intelligence agencies operate under different rules and have wide latitude overseas. Some advanced espionage programs attributed to the United States used digital certificates that were stolen from Taiwanese companies, though not full programs.
U.S. software code may have been sought in other cases, such as investigations relying on the Patriot Act or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which applies within American borders.
Several people who have argued before the special FISA court or are familiar with some of its cases say they know of no time that the government has sought source code.
(Reporting by Joseph Menn; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Cynthia Osterman)
Last week, SpaceX held another successful launch of its Falcon 9 rocket. Unfortunately, its landing was not quite as successful as the one in December (it crashed into the ocean).
SpaceX isn’t alone in trying to develop reusable launch vehicles. Other private companies such as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are also in the race to achieve the dream of consistently landing a rocket after hurtling it into the heavens. Each success – and failure – gets us a little closer.
But how significant is the creation of reusable rockets? And where will we go from here? Are we finally close to the future once promised by the Jetson’s FX-Atmos “flying car” or Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon: a world of personal, space-bound transports that can leave your garage, reach orbit and beyond, and return home in time for dinner?
What else stands in the way?
The final frontier
The “democratization of space exploration,” spurred by NASA encouraging private companies to develop and manage complete launch systems, is igniting a new age of space development and awakening a spirit of exploration and technology innovation that’s been absent from our culture for far too long.
This resurgence of interest is reflected in NASA’s latest call for astronaut applications: 18,300 hopefuls applied for just 14 positions.
And in the private sector, venture capitalists are showing the same enthusiasm by investing US$1.8 billion in space startups in 2015, compared with an average of $193 million a year over the previous 15 years. The increased demand for space access is further spurring on private companies to develop more efficient reusable rocket launch systems.
Today’s space companies aren’t the first to set their sights on such a rocket. This great feat of engineering was originally achieved in 1993, when McDonald Douglass tested the Delta Clipper Experimental (DC-X), a prototype single-stage launch vehicle. NASA later canceled the project.
Now, it seems, the conditions are ripe once again to pick up where the DC-X left off. The private sector has started to take up this challenge, and the race is on to enhance all our lives with cheap space travel.
This future begins with the reusable rocket.
What does a reusable launch vehicle get us?
Imagine what life would be like if, after each trip to Grandma’s, we had to throw away the car. Even with the benefits of mass production, the cost to an individual would be prohibitive, especially if there exist reasonable alternatives like horses or walking. Such automobiles could be employed only by governments, extremely wealthy enthusiasts or perhaps by a few skilled specialists who lived for the challenge.
This is pretty much the situation with current spacecraft technology. Not even the Space Shuttle program achieved the lofty goal of reliable reusability, although it tried very hard. The shuttle was such a complicated system that every time it returned to Earth, intense maintenance had to be performed and systems rebuilt or overhauled, making it three times as expensive as that of an expendable rocket. For example, a shuttle launch cost $450 million to $1.5 billion, compared with $110 million for a Russian Proton rocket with about the same lift capacity.
Truly reusable launch vehicles would significantly reduce the cost of getting material and people into orbit and enable new uses of space with far-reaching socioeconomic consequences that will ultimately reduce our impact on Earth’s environment, such as space-based energy collection, mining and manufacturing.
In order to get an idea of the savings, the retail price of a Falcon 9 rocket is around $60 million to build and launch (including fuel). Given its total lift capacity of 13,150 kilograms to low-Earth orbit, this translates into a price tag of about $400,000 to ferry a 90-kilogram (198-pound) person into space. But if you had to pay only for fuel, about $300,000 a launch, the price tag drops drastically to just $2,000 for the same person. That’s not far from the cost of flying from New York to Sydney, which makes a future family vacation to a Bigelow B330 Space Habitat a viable alternative to Disney World.
At the pace things are going, we project that within 10 years the space industry will achieve the goal of a fully reusable launch vehicle. Companies and municipalities, small and big, are all starting to look into ways of taking advantage of this complete disruption in, or better yet creation of, the commercial space market.
So our next question is this: what do we need to make the Millennium Falcon – that is, a single-stage-to-orbit completely reusable spacecraft – a reality?
A little physics can help us see exactly what needs to happen and exactly how far we are from this goal.
Rocket Science 101
Space travel is all about speed. The old adage, “What goes up must come down,” is true only to a point. If you throw something up fast enough, it won’t come back down; it will have escaped Earth’s gravity. The question is, exactly how fast is fast enough?
A simple application of Newtonian gravity theory tells us that if we achieve a speed of 11 kilometers per second – the equivalent of a plane flying 25,000 mph straight up – we are not going to fall back to Earth. Scientists and engineers refer to this speed, which depends on the physical properties of the Earth, as our planet’s escape velocity.
A rocket tries to achieve that speed by taking mass and throwing it out the back as fast as possible. Thanks to Newton’s third law – which states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction – this propels the rocket forward.
The ratio between the change in velocity needed to escape the Earth’s pull (known as delta-v) and the speed at which the rocket sends stuff out the back (exhaust velocity) is the most important number in rocket science. It determines how much mass needs to be expelled and how much energy is necessary to get to space. The smaller we can make the ratio, the better.
In addition, the propellants and fuels are themselves massive, and the rocket needs to carry these things with itself, making it heaver and harder to accelerate.
So we need propellants and fuels with a high energy content and low mass.
Now we can begin to appreciate the enormous feat of engineering that private companies and governments have achieved by not only launching a rocket but learning to land it as well.
The maximum achievable exhaust velocities for the rockets we’ve been using since the dawn of space travel are much less than the Earth’s escape velocity (about 4 km/s or 9,000 mph), forcing us to come up with ingenious and costly multistage launch techniques to get even a modest payload into space.
In summary, in order to leave the surface of the Earth with the grace and apparent effortlessness of the Millennium Falcon, we need to achieve speeds in excess of the escape velocity, 11 km/s. In order to do that without carrying a fuel tank that far exceeds the size of our ship, we need to achieve exhaust speeds significantly higher than the escape velocity, something not possible with the chemical fuels we use.
So where do we go from here?
So in order to make the Millennium Falcon a reality, we need a new type of fuel, as chemical-based engines are severely limiting.
Thanks to Albert Einstein, we know that there is energy stored in mass itself. Using his famous E = mc² equation, we know that exhaust speeds up to the speed of light are achievable, and way more than necessary to escape Earth’s gravity.
A sustainable exhaust speed of 1,000 km/s, less than 1 percent of the speed of light, would pretty much enable our dream ship. Its fuel-to-mass ratio would be about the same as that of your typical car.
The next question is: how do we get access to the energy stored in the mass (fuel and propellant) sufficient to achieve those speeds? The answer lies in nuclear reactions or, better yet, matter-antimatter reactions. In short, we need to put a mass reactor, nuclear or matter-antimatter, on board our ship. Think of the Enterprise’s “warp core,” for all those Star Trek fans out there.
Nuclear rockets may seem farfetched, but various versions have already been proposed and prototypes have even been built. The Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application (NERVA) project, a joint NASA-Atomic Energy Commission program, developed a flight-certified nuclear-based rocket engine that meets all the requirements for a manned mission to Mars.
What is interesting, and perhaps a little sad, is that this was done in 1968, over four decades ago! The NERVA engine achieved exhaust velocities pretty close to Earth’s escape velocity, around 10 km/s. The program was tied to NASA’s manned Mars exploration program and, since it was unable to justify the expense of going to Mars, was scrapped in 1972.
More recently, NASA has been developing electric propulsion systems that can generate large effective exhaust velocities that are limited only through the strength of the electric field. Effective exhaust velocities of 90 km/s are already achievable. But this is just the propulsion part. The solar panels, batteries or fuel cells that are currently used as power sources for these engines limit their usefulness. Electricity generated from nuclear power could solve this problem.
Back to the future
With the renewed interest in space exploration and innovation, we challenge inventors and entrepreneurs to consider looking at advanced nuclear/antimatter-powered rocket systems. This could enable us to achieve the dream of a space car in our garages in half a century.
The key to all the recent advances in space exploration technology has been combining older proven technologies with modern computing capabilities, materials and fabrication processes. NASA’s push to get technologies into private hands will accelerate this process.
Back in 1972, we were at 1 percent of the needed exhaust speed. It’s not too much of a stretch to propose that, after 40 years of advances, we need only revisit the designs with fresh and entrepreneurial eyes to make it possible for a Han Solo – or, to be more contemporary, Rey Skywalker – to jump into the Falcon and speed off to somewhere far, far away.
The FBI has quietly revised its privacy rules for searching data involving Americans’ international communications that was collected by the National Security Agency, US officials have confirmed to the Guardian.
The classified revisions were accepted by the secret US court that governs surveillance, during its annual recertification of the agencies’ broad surveillance powers. The new rules affect a set of powers colloquially known as Section 702, the portion of the law that authorizes the NSA’s sweeping “ Prism ” program to collect internet data. Section 702 falls under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa), and is a provision set to expire later this year.
A government civil liberties watchdog, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Group (PCLOB), alluded to the change in its recent overview of ongoing surveillance practices.
The watchdog confirmed in a 2014 report that the FBI is allowed direct access to the NSA’s massive collections of international emails, texts and phone calls – which often include Americans on one end of the conversation. The activists also expressed concern that the FBI’s “minimization” rules, for removing or limiting sensitive data that could identify Americans, did not reflect the bureau’s easy access to the NSA’s collected international communications.
FBI officials can search through the data, using Americans’ identifying information, for what PCLOB called “routine” queries unrelated to national security. The oversight group recommended more safeguards around “the FBI’s use and dissemination of Section 702 data in connection with non-foreign intelligence criminal matters”.
As of 2014, the FBI was not even required to make note of when it searched the metadata, which includes the “to” or “from” lines of an email. Nor does it record how many of its data searches involve Americans’ identifying details – a practice that apparently continued through 2015, based on documents released last February. The PCLOB called such searches “substantial”, since the FBI keeps NSA-collected data with the information it acquires through more traditional means, such as individualized warrants.
But the PCLOB’s new compliance report, released on Saturday, found that the administration has submitted “revised FBI minimization procedures” that addresses at least some of the group’s concerns about “many” FBI agents who use NSA-gathered data.
“Changes have been implemented based on PCLOB recommendations, but we cannot comment further due to classification,” said Christopher Allen, a spokesman for the FBI.
Sharon Bradford Franklin, a spokesperson for the PCLOB, said the classification prevented her from describing the rule changes in detail, but she said they move to enhance privacy. She could not say when the rules actually changed – that, too, is classified.
“They do apply additional limits” to the FBI, Franklin said.
Timothy Barrett, a spokesman for the office of the director of national intelligence, also confirmed the change to FBI minimization rules.
Barrett also suggested that the changes may not be hidden from public view permanently.
“As we have done with the 2014 702 minimization procedures, we are considering releasing the 2015 procedures. Due to other ongoing reviews, we do not have a set date that review will be completed,” he said.
Until that hypothetical release, it remains unknown whether the FBI will now make note of when and what it queries in the NSA data. The PCLOB did not recommend greater record-keeping.
Last February, a compliance audit alluded to imminent changes to the FBI’s freedom to search the data for Americans’ identifying information.
“FBI’s minimization procedures will be updated to more clearly reflect the FBI’s standard for conducting US person queries and to require additional supervisory approval to access query results in certain circumstances,” the review stated .
The reference to “supervisory approval” suggests the FBI may not require court approval for their searches – unlike the new system Congress enacted last year for NSA or FBI acquisition of US phone metadata in terrorism or espionage cases.
Privacy advocates say that this leeway for searches that NSA and FBI officials enjoy is a “backdoor” around warrants that the law should require. In 2013, documents leaked to the Guardian by Edward Snowden revealed an internal NSA rule that Senator Ron Wyden has called the “backdoor search provision”, for instance.
While the NSA performs warrantless collection, internal rules permit the FBI to nominate surveillance targets. Those targets are supposed to be non-Americans abroad, but Americans’ data is often swept up in the surveillance.
The legal underpinnings for the dragnet, a 2008 amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, are set to expire this year. A scheduled expiration of the Patriot Act last year gave critical leverage to legislators who wanted to rein in the bulk collection of domestic phone records, and intelligence officials last month implored Congress to reauthorize the measure wholesale.
“Reasonable people could and did argue about how important the telephone metadata collection was,” FBI director James Comey told the House intelligence committee last month. “This is not even a close call. This is – if we lost this tool, it would be a very bad thing for us.”
Several civil-libertarian legislators have vowed to push for an expiration of Section 702 , arguing that it represents a growing surveillance authority that has moved beyond terrorism and espionage, and into the hunt for general weaknesses in the internet. The chief lawyer for the intelligence community, Robert Litt, said in 2014 that the law provides surveillance authorities the powers are “not only about terrorism, but about a wide variety of threats to our nation”.
A representative for the Fisa court deferred comment to the administration.
Open your Twitter or Instagram account and chances are good somewhere in there you may see an unflattering photo of a stranger. It’s become increasingly common to share pictures of people we don’t know online.
And it could happen to you. Imagine, for example, rolling out of bed and heading to the store to pick up a much-needed item. Your hair is unkempt and you’re wearing last night’s pajamas, but you’re unconcerned because certainly no one will notice you. Unbeknownst to you, someone you don’t know takes your photo and posts it on social media, perhaps including cruel language or tagging an account like She Has Had It or People of Walmart which feature and mock unappealing pictures of strangers.
Hundreds of people like, share and comment on this photo of you – do you have any legal recourse against anyone? Having taught and researched Internet law, I believe the evolving online legal landscape may answer yes.
Lawsuits about these kinds of photos tend to turn on a person’s right of publicity, which limits the commercial use of one’s name, image, likeness and/or identity. The outcome of current cases could rein in this common posting practice.
An online Shaq attack
In April 2014, sports commentator and former star athlete Shaquille O’Neal posted a Photoshopped image on his Twitter and Instagram accounts of himself side-by-side with Jahmel Binion. He captioned the picture “SMILE PEOPLE.”
Binion, who was 23 years old at the time, suffers from ectodermal dysplasia, which has left him with a disfigured appearance. In the photo, O’Neal contorted his facial features in an attempt to make a face similar to Binion’s. The social media post received more than 17,000 “likes” and more than 700 comments (many of which were rude or offensive) on Twitter alone.
Based on this activity, Binion sued O’Neal in a Florida federal court for, among other things, something called “appropriation,” which is essentially a right of publicity claim. The basic idea is that you can stop others from using your name, likeness or identity for commercial gain. The Florida court recently denied O’Neal’s motion to dismiss the claim, which means that Binion can continue with the case against O’Neal.
Right of publicity, in the social media universe
So does this right of publicity protect you from having someone post a harmful image of you on social media?
Because the right of publicity is based on state law, the parameters of the right vary significantly by jurisdiction. Roughly 30 states recognize claims based on the right of publicity through statute, common law or both. Most of these states extend the right of publicity to all people, not just celebrities or other famous individuals.
Though there is a lack of uniformity regarding its application, the most common requirements include a person:
1) using another’s name, identity, likeness or persona without consent in a way that causes harm; and
2) receiving some kind of benefit or advantage based on that use.
In the social media universe, it probably won’t be hard to show that a person is harmed when their image is used without permission, especially where cruel or offensive language is used.
The question of the benefit or advantage obtained, however, will be more difficult to prove and has historically thwarted Internet suits of this kind.
What’s in it for the poster?
With the rapid rise in ubiquity of social media platforms, attorneys have grappled with applying traditional right of publicity law to new frontiers like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and Twitter.
Everyone’s still trying to figure out the benefit received from using a stranger’s photo online. In one recent case, Fraley v. Facebook, Inc., Facebook found itself in a right of publicity lawsuit based on its use of the Sponsored Stories advertising feature.
These are paid ads featuring the names and pictures of Facebook users based on their past Facebook activities and “likes.” Though the suit against Facebook ultimately settled, the right of publicity claims survived – the plaintiffs could show a clear connection between the value of their unauthorized endorsements to their Facebook friends and the benefit Facebook gained by using their photos.
While the commercial advantage may be clear in a case like Fraley, where Facebook received money for their ads with people’s pictures and likes, the Binion scenario is more challenging. O’Neal’s post, though widely shared and liked, did not provide a direct commercial benefit to him. Most states require that the defendant received some commercial or monetary benefit.
Some legal authorities, however, state that the right of publicity is not limited to purely commercial benefits. The victim’s right of publicity claim may survive even if the offending party does not receive money or other benefit.
In fact, in Binion, the court suggested that the fact that O’Neal’s post generated significant social media interest and was widely viewed and shared could meet the benefit standard. All those “likes” and “favorites” are a currency all their own. Social media users, therefore, could be exposed to legal liability for posting pictures of strangers under such a theory.
With no uniform body of law to reference, social media users remain susceptible to right of publicity claims. Individuals and companies who use social media to connect with others must be mindful of such uncharted territory and create social media strategies that mitigate their risk of liability. Otherwise, posting photos – particularly unflattering ones – of strangers will continue to expose users to such risks.
Officials with the nonprofit Simon Wiesenthal Center praised Twitter Inc on Monday for increasing efforts to thwart Islamic State's use of its platform for recruitment and propaganda.
The center's Digital Terrorism and Hate Project gave Twitter a grade of "B" in a report card of social networking companies' efforts to fight online activity by militant groups such as IS.
"We think they are definitely heading in the right direction," the project's director, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, told Reuters in a telephone interview ahead of Monday's release of the report card at a press conference in New York.
He said the review was based on steps that Twitter has already taken and information that center staff learned in face-to-face meetings with company representatives.
Islamic State has long relied on Twitter to recruit and radicalize new adherents. The Wiesenthal Center, an international Jewish human rights organization, has been one of toughest critics of the Twitter's strategy for combating those efforts.
Some vocal Twitter critics have tempered their views since December, when the site revised its community policing policies, clearly stating that it banned "hateful conduct" that promotes violence against specific groups and would delete offending accounts.
Researchers with George Washington University’s Program on Extremism last month reported that Islamic State's English-language reach on Twitter stalled last year amid a stepped-up crackdown by the company against the extremist group's army of digital proselytizers.
The center gave Twitter grade of "C" in a report card last year, which covered efforts to fight terrorism along with hate speech. This year it gave two grades, awarding Twitter a "D" on hate speech, saying the company needed to do more to censor the accounts of groups that promote hate.
A Twitter spokesman declined comment, but pointed to a statement on the company's blog posted Feb. 5 on combating violent extremism. (bit.ly/1nSxlO7)
"We condemn the use of Twitter to promote terrorism and the Twitter Rules make it clear that this type of behavior, or any violent threat, is not permitted on our service," Twitter said in the blog.
Among other major Internet firms included in this year's survey, Facebook Inc got an "A-" for terrorism and a "B-" for hate. Alphabet Inc's YouTube got a "B-" for terrorism and a "D" for hate.
(Reporting by Jim Finkle in Boston; Editing by Peter Cooney and Jeffrey Benkoe)
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear Apple Inc's challenge to an appellate court decision that it conspired with five publishers to increase e-book prices, meaning it will have to pay $450 million as part of a settlement.
The court's decision not to hear the case leaves in place a June 2015 ruling by the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that favored the U.S. Department of Justice and found Apple liable for engaging in a conspiracy that violated federal antitrust laws.
Apple, in its petition asking the high court to hear the case, said the June decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York upholding a judge's ruling that Apple had conspired with the publishers contradicted Supreme Court precedent and would "chill innovation and risk-taking."
The 2nd Circuit's ruling followed a 2013 decision by U.S. District Judge Denise Cote after a non-jury trial that Apple played a "central role" in a conspiracy with publishers to eliminate retail price competition and raise e-book prices.
The Justice Department said the scheme caused some e-book prices to rise to $12.99 or $14.99 from the $9.99 price charged by market leader Amazon.com Inc.
Publishers that the Justice Department said conspired with Apple include Lagardere SCA's Hachette Book Group Inc, News Corp's HarperCollins Publishers LLC, Penguin Group Inc, CBS Corp's Simon & Schuster Inc and Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH's Macmillan.
On Feb. 17, the appeals court in New York upheld the proposed settlement, which had been challenged by an e-books purchaser.
The case is Apple v. United States, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 15-565.
