If Shubham Banerjee cannot lay claim to being the world's youngest venture capital-backed entrepreneur, he comes very close.
Banerjee was 12 years old when he closed an early-stage funding round with Intel Capital, the company's venture capital arm, last month for his prototype for a low-cost Braille printer. Since then, the San Jose, California middle-schooler has turned 13.
That's young, even by the standards of Silicon Valley, where many venture capitalists unapologetically prefer to fund youth over experience.
Young entrepreneurs usually have reached at least their mid-teens when they hit it big. Nick D'Aloisio, founder of online news aggregator Summly, was 17 when Yahoo bought his company last year for $30 million.
Brothers John and Patrick Collison, behind payments service Stripe, were 16 and 19 when they sold an earlier business to a Canadian company for $5 million.
After reading a fundraising flyer about the blind, Banerjee felt inspired to turn a high-tech version of Legos, the toy building blocks, into a device that could print in Braille. One day, he wants to mass-produce the printers and sell them for about $350, far less than Braille printers cost now.
This past summer, he worked on incorporating an Intel Edison chip, a processor aimed at hobbyists, into the printer. In September, Intel invited him to a conference in India to highlight uses for Edison. There, he got a big surprise.
Intel executive Mike Bell announced from the conference stage that the giant chipmaker would invest in his company, Braigo Labs. Until then, his funding consisted of the $35,000 his parents gave him.
"I turned back to my dad, and said, 'What did he just say?'" Banerjee recalled. "I was all over the place."
Banerjee and a spokesman for Intel Capital declined to disclose the size of the investment. A person familiar with the matter said it was a few hundred thousand dollars. He plans to use it to build a better prototype of the printer and test it with more groups for the blind.
After the announcement, Banerjee had to bone up on unfamiliar terms such as "venture capital."
He also needed to convince adults to co-sign his funding and patent documents. Among the company officials he turned to: Braigo's president, his mom, Malini.
Banerjee says he gets mostly As and Bs as a student at the Champion School in San Jose, California. Teachers have given him time off to attend events like the conference in India and the Intel Global Capital summit this week in Huntington Beach, California. He catches up on school work on weekends, he says.
This is the second Intel investment connected to the Banerjee family. His dad, Neil, works for Kno, an education start-up that Intel bought last year.
While many young entrepreneurs who win venture-capital cash end up ditching their education to focus on their businesses full time, Banerjee says he won't take that path.
"It's an after-school thing," he says.
(Story corrects Nov 4,2014 copy to delete words "in India" and replaces with "in San Francisco" in paragraph 7).
Many manufacturers are at an early stage of discovering the benefits of 3D printing, but one of the clearest strengths is customization.
At Normal, consumers can use a mobile app to photograph their ear, transmit the shots to the New York startup's 3D printing facility and then receive customized earphones within 48 hours.
The process marries today's click-and-go speed with a made-to-order ethos that recalls the days of visiting the tailor or the cobbler.
The company's motto: "Normal: one size fits none."
After three decades in relative obscurity, 3D printing, which employs lasers to "print" objects from metals or plastics according to a digital design, has suddenly become one of the hottest areas of technology.
Computer giant Hewlett-Packard is plunging into the business, recently announcing it would put its own ultra-fast 3D printer on the market by 2016, "empowering people to create, interact and inspire like never before".
General Electric chief executive Jeff Immelt has said 3D printing can help make manufacturing "sexy again", and President Barack Obama has praised it for having "the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything".
"It's a little bit confusing and the excitement is very big," said David Reis, chief executive at Israeli-US 3D printer manufacturer Stratasys (Xetra: A1J5UR - news) .
"There's a lot of venture capital money coming into the market."
But while enthusiasm for the technology is widespread, some companies see it as more of a long-term prospect than a current game changer.
Boeing (NYSE: BA - news) does not expect to make major metal parts with 3D printing for at least 20 years, though company officials say that time frame could be accelerated.
3D printing "is definitely on the radar screen," said Dave Dietrich, technical leader for additive metals at the aerospace giant.
"The systems need to become larger, more repeatable, that sort of thing," he said. "We want to make sure we have an appropriate amount of testing and confidence in that process".
- Weighing the hype -
3D printing has its roots in the 1980s when inventor Chuck Hull began experimenting with liquid plastics that would harden when they were exposed to ultraviolet light.
Hull ultimately discovered that thousands of these plastic sheets could be layered, or "printed," on top of each other and shaped into a three-dimensional object.
He co-founded 3D Systems, with the company developing software to do 3D printing from computer images and building 3D printers.
Even so, Hull in May told the Quartz website that some of the talk about 3D printing "is definitely hype and won't happen".
The recent surge in interest follows the embrace of 3D printing technology by the "maker" community -- the new technology do-it-yourself creative movement -- said Pete Basiliere, research vice president at Gartner (NYSE: IT - news) .
People can now buy their own 3D printers for less than $1,000, and enterprise-sized machines begin at an inexpensive $2,500.
Market researcher Gartner forecasts that worldwide spending on 3D printing will rise from $1.6 billion in 2015 to around $13.4 billion in 2018.
Basiliere is especially bullish on applications for medical devices like hearing aids and prosthetics, where the technology "has life-altering potential".
The impetus for Normal came from founder Nikki Kaufman's frustration about poorly fitting earphones and learning that a custom-made set through conventional manufacturing could cost $2,000 and take weeks to be made.
Kaufman raised $5 million from investors and opened her combined factory/store in New York City in August. The space has 10 3D printers but room for as many as 30.
GE is among the large manufacturers active in 3D printing. It has been using the technology to make fuel nozzles for its LEAP jet engines, which will go into service in 2015.
GE uses a 200-watt laser to melt together ultra-thin layers made from metal powders to make the fuel nozzle. 3D printing allows it to add cooling pathways to prevent the build-up of carbon deposits that mar conventionally made nozzles, making the 3D pieces up to five times more durable.
3D printing works especially well for "highly sophisticated parts that are very difficult to make in a conventional way," said GE Aviation spokesman Rick Kennedy.
GE is testing 3D printing for other engine parts, with an eye toward reducing material and energy costs. But Kennedy said adding more components to the engine will be "very gradual" after extensive testing.
"You tread very carefully because you're dealing with parts that absolutely have to work," he said.
Facebook founder and chief executive says film embellished elements of his life because reality was not glamorous enough
The Facebook founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has said his feelings were hurt by Hollywood’s portrayal of him in The Social Network.
In hisfirst public Q&A session at Facebook’s Californian headquarters, the 30-year-old billionaire said the 2010 film, which told the story of how he created the social network while studying at Harvard, had “made up a bunch of stuff that I found kind of hurtful”.
The Social Network suggested that Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg, only created Facebook to attract women following a breakup. However, the tech mogul said that contrary to the film’s plot he was not single at the time and had been dating his now-wife, Priscilla Chan.
“I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about that movie in a while. I kind of blocked that one out,” he said.
Zuckerberg said that David Fincher’s film had embellished elements of the nascent Facebook because the reality of writing code was not glamorous.
“I think the reality is that writing code and then building a product and building a company is not a glamorous enough thing to make a movie about, so you can imagine that a lot of this stuff they had to embellish or make up,” he said.
“They went out of their way in the movie to try to get some interesting details correct like the design of the office, but on the overarching plot … they just kind of made up a bunch of stuff that I found kind of hurtful.”
Zuckerberg said that he met Eisenberg and tried to be nice. “There were pretty glaring things that were just made up about the movie that made it pretty hard to take seriously.”
One aspect of his life that the film makers did get right was Zuckerberg’s wardrobe, including the famous grey T-shirt that Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer, confirmed he wore every day.
Zuckerberg said he had many versions of the same shirt because he did not want to waste time making “silly or frivolous” decisions such as what to wear, or what to have for breakfast.
“I really want to clear my life so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything, except how to best serve this community [of Facebook users],” he said.
The Facebook boss said the company was trying to increase the number of women working in the technology sector. Its workforce is 69% male, while the figure for Apple was 70%.
There was a vicious circle to blame for the small proportion of women in technology, Zuckerberg said.
“You need to start earlier in the funnel so that girls don’t self-select out of doing computer science education, but at the same time one of the big reasons why today we have this issue is that there aren’t a lot of women in the field today.
“I heard one person put it: ‘The reason why girls don’t go into computer science is because there are no girls in computer science.’ You need to break the cycle. Companies that are more diverse do better.”
Facebook and Apple made headlines last month after it was revealed that both companies offer up to $20,000 (£13,000) for egg freezing for female employees. The social network also provides adoption and surrogacy assistance for both male and female workers.
Zuckerberg was also asked why Facebook users have been forced to install the Messenger app on their mobile devices. He laughed and conceded that requiring users to install another app was “a big ask” but added: “We really believe this is a better experience.”
More than 10bn messages were sent every day on Facebook and that messaging apps that offered users “dedicated, focused experiences” were most popular.
“My goal was never to make Facebook cool. I’m not a cool person, and I’ve never really tried to be cool. Our goal isn’t necessarily to make it particularly exciting to use; we want to make it useful.”
Zuckerberg spent an hour answering pre-submitted questions from users from around the world as well as from those who attended the event.
People have a mental model of shopping that is based on experiences from brick-and-mortar stores. We intuitively understand how this process works: all available products are displayed around the store and the prices are clearly marked. Many stores offer deals via coupons, membership cards, or to special classes of people such as students or AARP members. Typically, everyone is aware of these discounts and has an equal opportunity to use them.
Many people assume this same mental model of shopping applies just as well to e-commerce websites. However, as we are discovering, this is not the case.
In 2010, shoppers realized that Amazon was charging different users different prices for the same DVD, a practice known as price discrimination or price differentiation. In 2012, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Staples was charging users different prices based on their geographic location. The paper also reported that travel retailer Orbitz was showing more expensive hotels to users browsing from Mac computers, a practice known as price steering.
These reports of price discrimination and steering provoked a great deal of negative publicity for the companies involved. The lack of transparency also raises many disturbing questions. How widespread are the e-commerce practices of manipulating search results and customizing prices? What customer information do companies use to do it? When e-commerce sites personalize prices or search results, by how much do prices change?
Price discrimination and steering in the wild
My colleagues and I at Northeastern University have taken an initial stab at answering these questions in a new study. We examined ten major e-retailers – including Walmart and Home Depot – along with six hotel/rental car sites – including Orbitz and Expedia – to determine if they implement price discrimination or steering, and if so, what user attributes trigger the personalization.
We recruited 300 people from the crowdsourcing site Mechanical Turk to run product searches on the 16 sites. We paired each of these real users, who each had their own real, idiosyncratic browser history, with an automated browser that ran the same searches at the same time as the real users, but did not store any cookies.
By comparing the search results shown to these automated controls and to the real users, we identified several cases of personalization. We saw price steering from Sears, with the order of search results varying from user to user. We saw price discrimination from Home Depot, Sears, Cheaptickets, Orbitz, Priceline, Expedia, and Travelocity, with product prices varying from user to user.
So what user attributes trigger personalization? The problem is that real users have a long history of browsed sites, searches, clicks, and online purchases that we as researchers don’t know. Thus, when we observe personalized results in our experiments, we can’t tease out the underlying cause.
What is your browser history telling that shopping site about how much to charge you?
To figure out what user attributes drive e-commerce personalization, we conducted another round of testing using fake accounts that we created. All the accounts were identical except for one specific attribute that we changed. In particular, we tested for personalization based on browser (e.g. Chrome, Firefox, IE), platform (e.g. Windows, OSX, iOS, Android), logging-in to a user account, and purchase history (we had one account book cheap hotels and rental cars for a week, while another account booked expensive hotel rooms and rental cars).
Our fake accounts uncovered many different personalization strategies employed by e-commerce sites. For example, Travelocity reduced the prices on 5% of hotel rooms shown in search results by around US$15 per night for smartphone users. Interestingly, Cheaptickets and Orbitz gave unadvertised “Members Only” discounts of about US$12 per night on 5% of hotels rooms to users who were logged-in to their accounts on the site.
Price discrimination on Cheaptickets: users who log into the site receive ‘Members Only’ discounts of about $12/night on 5% of hotels.
Aniko Hannak et al.
Expedia and Hotels.com conduct what marketers and engineers call A/B tests to steer a subset of their users toward more expensive hotels. By dividing visitors into different groups, companies are able to use A/B tests to see how users respond to new website features and algorithms. In this case, visitors to Expedia and Hotels.com were randomly assigned to groups A, B, or C based on the cookies stored on their computers. Users in groups A and B were shown hotels with an average price of US$187/night, while users in group C were shown hotels with an average price of US$170/night.
Home Depot served almost completely different products to users on desktops versus mobile devices. A desktop user searching Home Depot typically received 24 search results, with an average price per item of US$120. In contrast, mobile users receive 48 search results, with an average price per item of US$230. Bizarrely, products are also US$0.41 more expensive on average for Android users.
Why do sites do this?
Initially, we assumed that the sites would not personalize content, given the extremely negative PR that Amazon, Staples, and Orbitz received when earlier cases were revealed. To our surprise, this was not the case!
Unfortunately, the business logic underlying much of this personalization remains a mystery. None of the discounts we located in our experiments were advertised on sites' homepages, so the deals do not appear to be part of marketing campaigns. When we spoke to representatives from Orbitz and Expedia, they confirmed our findings, but did not elaborate on the rationale for the design of their websites. Representatives from Travelocity confirmed that they do offer deals for mobile users, with the goal being to motivate them to use the site more and install the Travelocity app.
What’s a bargain-hunting shopper to do?
What is clear from our study is that price discrimination and steering on e-commerce sites is becoming more prevalent, and more sophisticated. As a user, it’s almost impossible to know if the prices you are being shown have been altered, or if cheaper products have been hidden from search results.
If you are looking for the best deals and are willing to work for it, we recommend searching for products in your normal desktop browser, an incognito or private browser window, and your mobile device. Of course, e-commerce companies are constantly experimenting with new personalization techniques, so in the future, an entirely different attribute may trigger personalization.
Ultimately, we hope that our study will encourage companies to be more transparent about how they personalize prices and search results. Rather than using opaque and creepy algorithms to secretly alter content, companies could stick to the kinds of real-world incentives that shoppers already know and love, like coupons and sales.
Christo Wilson receives funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grants CNS-1054233 and CHS-1408345. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
BMW has developed street lights equipped with sockets to charge electric cars, it said on Friday, and will run a pilot project in Munich next year that uses existing local authority lighting networks.
BMW said it has made two prototype "Light and Charge" street lights which combine efficient Light Emitting Diodes (LED) with the company's ChargeNow recharging stations for electric cars.
"Seamless charging infrastructure is essential if we want to see more electric vehicles on the road in our cities in the future," Peter Schwarzenbauer, Member of the Board of Management of BMW AG, said.
The Munich pilot will install the first charging lights, which can be grafted straight onto the existing local authority street lighting infrastructure, BMW said.
These additional charging stations can be used by as many drivers as possible, regardless of vehicle model and electricity provider, BMW said.
Two street lights are already installed in front of the BMW headquarters. Drivers will be able to pay to charge their cars via a mobile phone app.
BMW has developed some of the most advanced electric cars, including the i3 city vehicle and i8 hybrid. But electric cars as a product category have struggled to gain widespread popularity due to their limited operating range, the scarcity of charging stations and the time it takes to recharge them.
BMW and other car makers are increasingly expanding their know-how of electric cars and related technology that could broaden their appeal.
In addition to developing street lighting, BMW has already invested into software and applications that help drivers of electric cars find a parking space and charging stations, including investments into Justpark.com and the SLAM charging network.
BMW executives recently met with rival Tesla Motors to discuss the availability of electric vehicle charging stations.
In September, Daimler said it had bought mytaxi and RideScout, two smartphone applications that will help the maker of Mercedes-Benz limousines provide services to people who do not own cars.
(Reporting by Edward Taylor. Editing by Jane Merriman)
U.S. and European authorities have arrested 16 suspected members of underground drugs and weapons cybermarkets this week, in addition to the alleged operator of the website known as Silk Road 2.0, Europe's police agency Europol said on Friday.
U.S. authorities said on Thursday they had shut down Silk Road 2.0, the successor website to Silk Road, an underground online drugs marketplace, and charged its alleged operator, Blake Benthall, with conspiracy to commit drug trafficking, computer hacking, money laundering and other crimes.
Europol, in a statement, said U.S. and European cyber crime units, in a sweep across 18 countries, had netted $1 million worth of Bitcoin, the digital currency, 180,000 euros in cash, silver, gold and narcotics.
Troels Oerting, the head of Europol's cybercrime center, said the operation had knocked out a significant part of the infrastructure for illegal online drugs and weapons trade in the countries involved but black market websites have mushroomed and are created easily.
Raids were carried out in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and the United States, in an operation code-named "Onymous". Sixteen people operating illegal sites were arrested, Europol said, without specifying the charges.
Around 400 Internet sites and domains, which had been used to sell child pornography, guns and murder-for-hire, were taken down on Thursday, it said.
"They had set up complete business models, just like any web shop. They display what they sell; drugs, weapons, stolen credit cards. People paid and they delivered by the mailman," Oerting said. "There was even a ranking system for reliable suppliers."
The illegal organizations used the so-called tor computer network, which allows users to communicate anonymously by masking their IP address, to run so-called "dark" markets.
"We have also hit services on the Darknet using Tor where, for a long time, criminals have considered themselves beyond reach. We can now show that they are neither invisible nor untouchable."
The operation involved Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre, the FBI and U.S. immigration and Homeland Security officials.
Tor, short for the onion router, is also used by activists in countries where the web is censored.
(Reporting By Anthony Deutsch; Editing by Susan Fenton)
A newly discovered family of malware has the capacity to infect iPhones via Apple computers, posing a security threat to devices that have been largely resistant to cybercriminals, researchers said.
The researchers at Palo Alto Networks, a cybersecurity firm, said the malware shows "characteristics unseen in any previously documented threats targeting Apple platforms."
It represents "a potential threat to businesses, governments and Apple customers worldwide," they said.
The malware, dubbed WireLurker, "is capable of stealing a variety of information from the mobile devices it infects and regularly requests updates from the attackers command and control server," according to a report by the security firm, which added that "its creator's ultimate goal is not yet clear."
Apple said it had taken steps to block the malicious software.
Although hackers have been able to target "jailbroken" iPhones, which have been modified to accept unauthorized software, this new threat appears to pose a threat to devices that have not been modified, the security researchers said.
"WireLurker is unlike anything we’ve ever seen in terms of Apple iOS and OS X malware," said Palo Alto's Ryan Olson.
"The techniques in use suggest that bad actors are getting more sophisticated when it comes to exploiting some of the world's best-known desktop and mobile platforms."
According to the researchers, WireLurker malware first infects a Mac computer, which uses the OS X operating system, and then installs itself on iOS devices -- iPads or iPhones -- when they are connected to the computers via USB ports.
The malware was traced back to a third-party Chinese app store, which had 467 infected applications downloaded over 356,104 times, potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of users.
"WireLurker monitors any iOS device connected via USB with an infected OS X computer and installs downloaded third-party applications or automatically generated malicious applications onto the device, regardless of whether it is jailbroken," a report by the security firm said.
"This is the reason we call it 'wire lurker.' Researchers have demonstrated similar methods to attack non-jailbroken devices before; however, this malware combines a number of techniques to successfully realize a new breed of threat to all iOS devices."
Apple, in a statement to AFP, said it had acted to block the malware.
"We are aware of malicious software available from a download site aimed at users in China, and we've blocked the identified apps to prevent them from launching," the company said.
"As always, we recommend that users download and install software from trusted sources."
Another security researcher, Jonathan Zdziarski, said the new malware suggests a potentially large security issue for Apple devices.
"The bigger issue here is not WireLurker itself," Zdziarski said in a blog post.
"The real issue is that the design of iOS' pairing mechanism allows for more sophisticated variants of this approach to easily be weaponized," he said.
"While WireLurker appears fairly amateur, an NSA or a GCHQ, or any other sophisticated attacker could easily incorporate a much more effective (and dangerous) attack like this."
A Texas man who operated Bitcoin Savings and Trust was charged on Thursday with bilking his investors, in what prosecutors called the first federal criminal securities fraud case arising from a bitcoin-related Ponzi scheme.
Trendon Shavers, 32, of McKinney, Texas, was charged with misappropriating about 146,000 of the 764,000 bitcoin, then worth more than $4.5 million, that he raised from September 2011 to September 2012, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in Manhattan said.
Bitcoin is a virtual currency that trades on the Internet, without the backing of any government or central bank.
The criminal case follows a Sept. 18 order by a federal judge in Texas that Shavers and his company pay a total of $40.7 million comprising illegal profit, interest and fines in a related U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission civil lawsuit.
Known online as "pirateat40," Shavers allegedly gained control of as much as 7 percent of the bitcoin market by promising investors up to 7 percent weekly interest, or 3,641 percent annualized, based on his ability to trade the currency.
Instead, Shavers allegedly used new bitcoin to repay old investors, add to his account at the now-bankrupt Mt. Gox exchange, and fund expenses such a used BMW M5, casino visits and a $1,000 dinner at Gallagher's Steakhouse in Las Vegas.
About half the investors in Bitcoin Savings and Trust lost some or all of their investments, prosecutors said.
"Trendon Shavers managed to combine financial and cyber fraud into a bitcoin Ponzi scheme that offered absurdly high interest payments, and ultimately cheated his investors out of their bitcoin investments," Bharara said in a statement. "This case, the first of its kind, should serve as a warning to those looking to make a quick buck with unsecured currency."
Shavers was arrested at his home on Thursday and charged with securities fraud and wire fraud. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison and a fine on the securities fraud count.
He is expected to appear on Thursday in U.S. District Court in Sherman, Texas, and on Nov. 14 in federal court in Manhattan after the case is transferred.
Shavers' lawyer could not immediately be identified. The federal public defender's office in Sherman had no immediate comment. Shavers did not immediately respond to an email request for comment. His ability to pay the SEC judgment is unclear.
The cases are U.S. v. Shavers, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 14-mag-02465; and SEC v. Shavers et al, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Texas, No. 13-00416.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Leslie Adler)
Protesters will gather outside the White House and in a dozen US cities on Thursday to demonstrate against a “hybrid” solution now being considered to end a stalemate over regulating the internet.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is currently redrawing its rules for regulating the internet after a series of court defeats at the hands of cable and telecoms companies that effectively hamstrung its ability to oversee the industry.
Protests are planned in San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza, on Las Vegas’s boulevard, Federal Plaza in Chicago and at the headquarters of Comcast, the largest cable company, in Philadelphia.
“What President Obama’s FCC chair is reportedly pushing is not a compromise, it’s a sham. Nearly four million internet users submitted comments to the FCC against having fast and slow lanes on the internet, but this proposal explicitly opens the door for them. Worse, it’s based in overly complicated and untested legal theories that are likely to fail in court,” said Evan Greer, campaign director for Fight for the Future which is organising the campaign alongside Popular Resistance, Free Press and Reddit.
Cable and telecoms companies are pushing for the ability to be able to create “fast lanes” for high volume customers, like Netflix, that would charge more money for the bandwidth they consume. But opponents fear such a move would effectively kill “net neutrality” – the principle that all traffic online should be treated equally.
The FCC has been inundated with comments as it has weighed its options. A record 3.7m were sent to the regulator, at one point crashing the FCC’s systems. The Sunlight Foundation analysed the first 800,000 and found that fewer than 1% were opposed to net neutrality enforcement.
The “hybrid” proposal now under consideration has not been finalised but according to media leaks and discussions with interested parties they would expand the FCC’s powers to regulate broadband while also allowing a carve out for cable providers to charge more money for fast lanes.
Net neutrality’s defenders want the internet to be regulated under Title II of the Communications Act – a move that would classify the service as a “common carrier” and give the FCC the power to stop cable companies introducing “unreasonable discrimination” and ensure they work “in the public interest”. Cable companies argue such a move would hamper innovation by tying the industry in red tape.
The FCC has also considered using Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which is less stringent in its language and enforces the regulator’s powers to “promote competition” and “remove barriers” to investment. In January Verizon successfully challenged the FCC’s power to use Section 706 to justify anti-discrimination rules in a ruling that led to the current regulatory malaise.
The hybrid solution, which may be presented to the FCC at a meeting on 11 December, is likely to use both pieces of legislation as the regulator struggles to reconcile the powerful telecom and cable industry lobby and its numerous and vociferous opponents.
The picture has become more complicated now that the Republicans have taken control of Congress after the midterm elections. Proposals for more regulation will face tougher opposition come January when the Republicans take control.
Craig Aaron, president of Free Press, a consumer advocacy group that has called for full Title II reclassification of the internet, said: “This proposal divides up the internet in a way that is highly theoretical and not based in the law.”
“We are very skeptical that it would work. It’s troubling in a lot of ways: it’s bad politics, bad policy and bad law,” he said.
A software firm is developing a program to detect whether a person's medical device was externally hacked in order to kill them, according to New Scientist.
As far-fetched as it might sound, wireless hacking of medical devices is a real risk that scientists are coming to grips with. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced in October that it is looking into security flaws in more than 20 medical devices, including implants, that that hackers could potentially exploit to take control of the device and interfere with its functioning.
Members of DHS's Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) say that a heart pump by Hospira and cardiac implants by Medtronic and St Jude Medical all have security flaws that could make them vulnerable to external hacking.
This technique was used to kill a character in the TV series Homeland, but thus far, no one has reported that a person died because of remote tampering with their medical devices.
ICS-CERT issued a warning in June that some 300 different kinds of wireless medical devices made by 40 companies all have un-changeable wireless passwords. If a malicious hacker were to obtain a device's password, physicians would be helpless to prevent them from controlling the device.
A hacker could cause an infusion pump to deliver a drugs too quickly, causing an overdose, or even force a patient's heart into arrhythmia or deliver a lethal jolt of electricity by seizing control of a pacemaker.
Cryptographer Noureddine Boudriga at the University of Carthage in Tunisia and forensic medic Mohamed Allouche at the University of Tunis El Manar are working on software that could examine a cardiac device's operational history to detect whether it was tampered with prior to a patient's death.
In a post-mortem examination, the new software could identify whether a pacemaker was remotely ordered to produce changes that led to a heart attack.
The program could be altered, said the team, to work with any other medical device.
Furthermore, the team suggested that on future devices, protections be implemented to keep the devices' service and operations data safe from external tampering.
"That would be proof against everything but a malicious pathologist," said Boudriga to New Scientist.
Kevin Fu, director of the Ann Arbor Research Center for Medical Device Security at the University of Michigan agreed with Boudriga's team that devices must have incorruptible records of their functioning.
"Medical device forensics is an important and necessary area," Fu said.
Computer engineering expert Sujeet Shenoi at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma said that the very thing that makes the devices so useful -- the ability to access, reprogram, configure them and change their settings from outside the body -- is the very thing that makes them vulnerable to hackers.
"The medical device manufacturers," said Shenoi, "are now working hard behind the scenes to stop this happening."
A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday grilled opponents of the U.S. government program that collects millions of Americans' phone records, casting doubt on whether it would uphold a lower court ruling that found the program was likely unlawful.
This case is one of a handful brought against the program run by the National Security Agency since its existence was revealed in June 2013 by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
U.S. government officials say the program sweeps up numbers dialed and length and time of calls but not the content of communications or the locations of cell phones.
They contend the program, which aims to search for connections to terrorist groups, is legal. Opponents say it violates U.S. citizens' privacy rights.
Experts expect the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the issue once several appeals courts weigh in, if they produce conflicting rulings.
A three-judge appellate panel on Tuesday appeared skeptical of the Washington-based case, brought by conservative lawyer Larry Klayman.
"It seems to be you are telescoping the process in a way that obscures the analysis," Judge Stephen Williams said.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is the second appellate court to hear arguments on whether the NSA program is lawful, after a panel in New York heard arguments in a similar case in September.
Three district courts overall have weighed in. Two courts sided with the government, but Washington federal judge Richard Leon said in December the "Orwellian" program likely violated Americans' 4th Amendment right to be free of unreasonable searches.
The three-judge panel who considered the government's appeal of Leon's ruling on Tuesday, who were all appointed by Republican presidents, pressed both Klayman and a lawyer for advocacy groups that had supported the case about whether the program was substantially different from other methods the government has used to obtain phone data.
Law enforcement officials are able to use other techniques, including trap-and-trace devices, which record outgoing or incoming calls and which require court approval but not the showing of reasonable suspicion that a warrant requires.
"Does one thousand times nothing still equal nothing?" Judge David Sentelle asked, suggesting the NSA program involved collecting more information than other methods, but not qualitatively different information.
(Reporting by Aruna Viswanatha; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
Twitter and Facebook are so important to militant groups that the technology giants should give security services greater access to their networks to allow governments to foil attacks, the head of Britain's eavesdropping agency said.
The new director of Britain's GCHQ, Robert Hannigan, said U.S. tech companies Twitter Inc, Facebook Inc and WhatsApp were in denial about their unintended role as "the command and control networks of choice for terrorists".
Islamic State militants are harnessing the power of the Internet to create a militant network with near global reach just a quarter of a century since the creation of the World Wide Web, Hannigan said.
"The challenge to governments and their intelligence agencies is huge -- and it can only be met with greater co-operation from technology companies," Hannigan wrote in the Financial Times newspaper.
"If they are to meet this challenge, it means coming up with better arrangements for facilitating lawful investigation by security and law enforcement agencies than we have now."
Twitter and Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, declined repeated requests for comment. GCHQ also declined to comment.
Data compiled by Twitter showed it had received 78 "information requests" from the British government in the first half of 2014. Facebook says organizations with a record of terrorist or violent criminal activity are not allowed to maintain a presence on its site.
Such a strong public warning from one of the West's most powerful spies indicates the gravity of the perceived threat, and a sense of frustration felt by many spies about the damage done by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
Media reports based on previously top secret documents stolen by Snowden, a U.S. citizen who now lives in Moscow, laid bare the extent of American and British surveillance, including demands spies made to telephone and technology companies.
In the wake of the Snowden revelations, GCHQ, which stands for Government Communications Headquarters, was accused by privacy groups and some lawmakers of the widespread illegal monitoring of electronic communications.
British ministers denied any illegality and top spies dismissed any sinister intent, saying they sought only to defend the liberties of Western democracies.
The director general of the MI5 Security Service, Andrew Parker, warned last year that the revelations were a gift to terrorists because they had exposed GCHQ's ability to track, listen and watch plotters.
"Young foreign fighters have learnt and benefited from the leaks of the past two years," Hannigan said.
"ISIS IT DEPARTMENT"
GCHQ, MI5 and Britain's foreign spy service, MI6, need greater support from the private sector, said Hannigan, who singled out U.S. technology companies in particular. No British-based companies were named.
Prime Minister David Cameron's office said the premier agreed with the spy chief's comments.
"The prime minister very much shares the view that is being expressed there around the use of web-enabled, Internet access technologies by violent and extremist groups amongst others and the need to do more," a Downing Street spokesman said.
Hannigan said Islamic State militants, who have seized swathes of land in Syria and Iraq, were harnessing the power of technology in a new and dangerous way.
While al Qaeda mainly hid in the shadows of the Internet using it as a modern drop box or secret ink, Islamic State is noisily using it to advertise itself, radicalize new recruits and intimidate with grotesque videos of beheadings, he said.
"The ISIS (Islamic State) leadership understands the power this gives them with a new generation," Hannigan said, adding that militants had used World Cup and Ebola hashtags on Twitter messages to pitch their views to a wider audience.
"The extremists of ISIS use messaging and social media services such as Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp," he said.
Hannigan cast GCHQ, which fishes for intelligence in the world's cyber oceans from a futuristic building called the doughnut in the western English spa-town of Cheltenham, as hindered by technology companies and a mistaken assumption that privacy was an absolute right.
"It can seem that some technology companies are in denial about its misuse," he said. "I suspect most ordinary users of the Internet ... do not want the media platforms they use with their friends and families to facilitate murder or child abuse."
Rights activists said it was disappointing to see GCHQ attack companies rather than addressing what they said was a lack of confidence in the agency after revelations about the scope of its eavesdropping.
"’Privacy never an absolute right’ in spook, translates as ‘state shall be able to invade privacy if convenient, without particular reason’,” tweeted Caspar Bowden, a rights activist who worked as chief privacy advisor for Microsoft Corp until 2011.
Bowden has been critical of U.S. tech companies for failing to be more transparent about compromises they have made with government surveillance agencies.
(Additional reporting by Shivam Srivastava in Bangalore, Michael Holden, Kate Holton and Kylie MacLellan in London, Eric Auchard in Frankfurt; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Susan Fenton)
The US military's F-35 fighter jet made its first landing aboard an aircraft carrier on Monday, in what officials called a milestone for the new hi-tech warplane.
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is the most expensive weapons program in US history and has been plagued by technical glitches and cost overruns, but the Pentagon touted the landing at sea a crucial step forward.
The test flight had the Joint Strike Fighter successfully touching down on the USS Nimitz off the coast of San Diego, with the pilot guiding the plane so its tailhook snagged on the ship's arresting wires, the US Navy said in a statement.
There are three variants of the plane, a standard model, a second one designed for short-landing and vertical take-off and the third -- the F-35C -- outfitted to operate from aircraft carriers.
"Today is a landmark event in the development of the F-35C," said test pilot Commander Tony Wilson.
The landing is part of flight testing at sea that will last for about two weeks, and will help pave the way to deploy the aircraft in the naval fleet by 2018, officials said.
"We plan on learning a lot during this developmental test and will use that knowledge to make the naval variant of the F-35 an even more effective weapons platform," Lieutenant General Chris Bogdan, head of the F-35 program, said in a statement.
The Pentagon plans to spend $391.2 billion on a total of 2,443 F-35 aircraft, which are manufactured by defense giant Lockheed Martin.
The plane is supposed to form the backbone of the military's future fighter fleet, ensuring the US military's dominance in the skies for years to come with radar-evading technology.
But the program has faced a litany of problems, and the latest setback came in June when a mysterious engine fire led commanders to ground the fleet briefly until the problem could be resolved.
As a result, officials had to cancel plans to send the F-35 to fly at Britain's prestigious Farnborough air show in July because of safety precautions.
Repairs are under way in the test fleet that will ensure the plane's engines are sound, according to Pentagon officials.
By