Tech News
Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts resigns to take position with Apple
Luxury fashion group Burberry on Tuesday said its long-serving chief executive oOfficer Angela Ahrendts will step down next year to take up a position with Apple.
She is to be replaced by Burberry's chief creative officer Christopher Bailey, who will retain his existing title alongside becoming the company's CEO.
"Burberry today announces that Angela Ahrendts will step down as chief executive officer by mid-2014 to take up a new position with Apple," said a statement to the London Stock Exchange ahead of the market open.
"Christopher Bailey is to be appointed to the position of chief creative and chief executive officer. This follows nearly a decade during which Angela, Christopher and the senior executive team have transformed Burberry into a world leading digital luxury brand," it added.
Revealed: NSA 'gathering millions of email address books'
The National Security Agency is gathering email and instant messenger contact lists from hundreds of millions of ordinary citizens worldwide, many of them Americans, The Washington Post reported late Monday.
The US agency's data collection program harvests the data from address books and "buddy lists", the newspaper said, citing senior intelligence officials and top secret documents provided by the fugitive NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
During a single day last year, the NSA's Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, the Post said, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation.
The figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million a year, according to the report, which was published on the newspaper's website.
The NSA declined to confirm the specific allegations in the Post report but defended its surveillance activities as legal and respectful of privacy rights.
The agency has come under fire following revelations about vast efforts to collect data on Americans, but it has mostly acknowledged the accuracy of leaks from Snowden while seeking to play down their significance.
The Snowden affair has not only complicated diplomacy but embarrassed the Internet and telecom sector, with some companies accused of betraying their customers by cooperating with government spying.
Russia has granted Edward Snowden one year's asylum but the United States wants him to be extradited to face espionage charges over his leaking of sensational details of US surveillance programmes at home and abroad.
Chilean man announces suicide via programmed tweet
Injecting suicide into social media, a Chilean chemist left his country stunned Monday after programming a Twitter message to announce his own darkly choreographed death.
Pablo Ramdohr, 33, in effect tweeted his own suicide note, telling family around noon on Sunday "I love you," on the microblogging service, which included a link to a web page where he outlined how he had killed himself.
"The tweet was programmed. This happened a while ago. Sure it's bad form to let you know on Twitter but it was the only way to program the message for much later," said the message filed on Saturday.
Ramdohr said he "did not want to keep living like this," outlining that he suffered from mental illness and that he had taken a lethal mix of alcohol and prescription medications.
After seeing the tweet, the victim's father rushed to his apartment in downtown Santiago, hoping it wasn't too late.
Inside was the chemist's body. Coroners on Monday were working on an autopsy.
The tragic Ramdohr case has stunned Twitter users in Chile, prompting an outpouring of coverage in local media about social media use and mental health care.
[Image via Agence France-Presse]
Universities embracing role as 'incubators' for tech start-ups
Just before graduating from the University of Michigan, Calvin Schemanski began his start-up.
With two classmates, he got free office space on campus and $7,500 in funding from the university's student startup accelerator, TechArb.
The project, a restaurant recommendation app called MyFab5 using a "favorites" formula, is now preparing a national launch.
The project is among dozens at Michigan and thousands across the United States getting help from "incubators" at US colleges and universities, often with a dream of launching the new Facebook or Google.
"There's a real spark of entrepreneurship on campus," said Schemanski, who graduated in 2012 with a business degree.
"There are a lot of entrepreneur clubs and programs and events every couple of weeks," he told AFP.
The 23-year-old, who had begun his own pedicab service as a freshman, acknowledged that "it's definitely a sacrifice" to work nights and weekends on these projects while other students attend parties and football games.
But he said "there is a good support network" of professors and mentors to help students and new graduates get their startups going.
Hundreds of US colleges and universities have created incubators, aiming to provide a different kind of educational experience, and a chance for a successful company.
"I see this as an extension of education which provides practical training," says Vivek Wadhwa, a technology entrepreneur with affiliations at Stanford, Emory and Duke universities.
Wadhwa is also vice president for innovation at Silicon Valley-based Singularity University, which focuses on new technologies and entrepreneurship.
"The likelihood of another Google or Facebook is one in 10,000, but it doesn't matter. Students gain lots of good experience. They come out much smarter," he said.
Big payouts
According to the National Business Incubation Association, a third of the 1,195 incubation programs in North America had a college or university as their primary sponsor in 2012, compared with 20 percent in 2006.
In some cases, this can mean hefty payouts for the schools from patents and copyrights.
According to the Association of University Technology Managers, higher educational institutions earned $2.6 billion in license income, and helped launch 705 startups in 2012, bringing the total number of companies in operation to 4,002.
A lot of that money has filtered to Stanford, which helped launch Google, its most financially successful investment.
A 2010 Stanford report said its Office of Technology Licensing had helped lead to 8,000 inventions and earned about $1.3 billion in royalties over 40 years.
At Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, students make pitches for $60,000 awards as part of an "entrepreneurial boot camp."
The school has launched some 300 companies and created more than 9,000 jobs in the region.
The University of Michigan reported venture licensing revenues increased from $13.8 million to $14.4 million last year on 98 new companies launched in the last 10 years.
Even outside the large, prestigious schools, incubators are taking their place on campus alongside the football team and fraternity parties.
Community colleges, often getting funds from foundations, have launched dozens of incubators, as have schools around the country from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to the University of Southern California.
'A giant tech incubator with a football team'
Stanford stands out, however, because of its location in Silicon Valley and its association with some of the region's most prominent tech firms.
The school recently announced a grant of $3.6 million for a business accelerator called StartX, which will step up efforts to fund new ventures.
New Yorker journalist Nicholas Thompson wrote that Stanford's close ties to Silicon Valley industry have changed the dynamics of the university, quipping that "the school now looks like a giant tech incubator with a football team."
Wadhwa, unfazed by the comment, counters: "What's wrong with that?"
He adds that in Silicon Valley, students are focused on entrepreneurship and that "learning has to adapt to new times."
Fred Wilson of the venture capital firm Union Square Ventures also supports the idea, saying it can help ease financial pressures at colleges.
"In an era when the cost of a university education has gone up way faster than the value of it, we need new business models to sustain universities other than tuition increases, federally funded research, and the generosity of the alumni," Wilson wrote on his blog.
"I am glad to see Stanford and some other schools trying it out. If universities are the farms, I think students might be the farmers, not the cows."
But Dennis Basulto, a consultant who is writing a book on innovation, argues that the focus on venture capital is destroying the college experience.
"The hallmark of a liberal arts education, for example, has always been the idea that college teaches you how to think and meet diverse types of people you might never again meet in your life," he wrote on his blog.
"The focus was on building life-long skills, not just learning how to write a few lines of code."
Basulto says that "our greatest fear should be that Silicon Valley venture capitalists -- and the vast technology ecosystem that they've established of incubators, angels and start-ups -- are about to forever change the college experience."
[Image: "Young Business Couple Using Laptop On The Steps" via Shutterstock]
Elon Musk's futuristic Grasshopper space rocket makes its highest jump
SPACE TRAVEL BUSINESSMAN Elon Musk has sent a Falcon 9 Grasshopper rocket up to its highest altitude so far of 744 metres. This is the highest that one of his rockets has flown, and according to the Spacex organisation marks significant progress. A…
Your D-Link router may have a backdoor
NSA-inspired paranoia within the hacker community about the pervasiveness of the government's power to compromise equipment may be bearing real fruit.
A curious computer security professional published findings Saturday that deconstructed the firmware code for some D-Link router devices and discovered a backdoor built directly into the code. By changing the user-agent in a web browser to "xmlset_roodkcableoj28840ybtide," a user could bypass the security on the device and get online or control the higher functions of the router.
The hackers at devtts0.com say models DIR-100, DI-524, DI-524UP, DI-604S, DI-604UP, DI-604+, and TM-G5240 use the compromised firmware.
Note the name of the user-agent needed to bypass the router security, spelled backward: edit by 04882 joel backdoor.
D-Link's international headquarters are located in Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China.
Brazil creating secure email system to beat U.S. surveillance
AFP - Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff announced Sunday that her government was creating a secure email system to try and shield official communications from spying by the United States and other countries.
"We need more security on our messages to prevent possible espionage," Rousseff said on Twitter, ordering the Federal Data Processing Service, or SERPRO, to implement a safe email system throughout the federal government.
The agency, which falls under Brazil's Finance Ministry, develops secure systems for online tax returns and also creates new passports.
The move came after Rousseff publicly condemned spying against Brazilian government agencies attributed to the United States and Canada.
"This is the first step toward extending the privacy and inviolability of official posts," Rousseff said.
After bringing her complaints against US intelligence agencies to the United Nations General Assembly last month and canceling a state visit to Washington, Rousseff announced that the country will host an international conference on Internet governance in April.
In recent months, Brazilian media outlets have published documents showing that the US National Security Agency's spied on Rousseff's official communications, her close associates and state-controlled oil giant Petrobras.
The information was revealed by Edward Snowden, a 30-year-old former NSA contractor who has sought refuge in Russia and is wanted by the United States after revealing details of the agency's massive snooping activities.
Surveillance drives international Internet group to take control from U.S.
The United States nominally controls the Internet, through the sponsorship of the Department of Commerce of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, an international standards-setting body.
Well, ICANN is about through with them.
Earlier this week, leaders of organizations responsible for coordination of the global Internet technical infrastructure met in Montevideo, Uruguay and decided to hasten their planned withdrawal from the Commerce Department's nominal oversight. In a statement, the group "expressed strong concern over the undermining of the trust and confidence of Internet users globally due to recent revelations of pervasive monitoring and surveillance."
ICANNs members called for accelerating the globalization of its functions "towards an environment in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an equal footing."
Among its other duties, ICANN sets standards for how Internet traffic flows through international networks, how top-level domains like ".com" and ".org" work and how servers translate numerical designations for IP addresses into recognizable URLs like Google.com or RawStory.com. ICANN is ultimately responsible for keeping the international Internet from fracturing into smaller networks that cannot be reached outside each network.
Broadcast television networks ask Supreme Court to stop Aereo
The four major broadcast television networks are taking their case against cord-cutting startup Aereo to the U.S. Supreme Court after failing to win a preliminary injunction Friday against the firm facing their copyright infringement suit.
Federal Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts ruled in favor of Aereo Friday, denying the Hearst-owned local ABC affiliate's motion for a preliminary injunction to keep Aereo from retransmitting content gained from its signal to Aereo subscribers.
“Hearst has not demonstrated a sufficient likelihood of success on the merits nor the requisite irreparable harm and therefore it is not entitled to that ‘extraordinary and drastic remedy,'" Gorton wrote. "After a careful review and analysis of the claims advanced by plaintiff, the Court stated that, “Hearst fails to make a sufficient showing that it is likely to prevail on any of [its] claims and therefore this factor weighs against a preliminary injunction in its favor.”
Aereo places an array of antennas to capture the signals of broadcasters from the air, then streams those signals to its subscribers for about $8 a month. While Aereo remains the subject of several lawsuits, none have yet managed to shut the company down.
“Today’s victory belongs to the consumer and today’s decision, makes clear that that there is no reason that consumers should be limited to 1950s technology to access over-the-air broadcast television," Aereo said in a statement following the ruling. "Using Aereo, a consumer can simply and easily use an individual remote antenna and cloud DVR via the Internet to record and watch-over-the air programs.”
Broadcasters see Aereo's business model a bit differently. They view Aereo as a pirate, re-broadcasting their content without paying for it. ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC all fear that cable and satellite companies may view Aereo's legal successes as a green light to reengineering their own delivery systems and cut the broadcasters out of being paid cable retransmission fees.
Mark Zuckerberg extends personal 'privacy settings' to neighboring houses
Facebook founder buys four homes surrounding his own and leases them back to families, in effort to stop developer's plans
He made his fortune by persuading over a billion people to share their lives online, but when it comes to protecting his own privacy Mark Zuckerberg appears to spare no expense: the Facebook founder has reportedly spent $30m (£18.8m) buying four houses that surround his own home in California.
Zuckerberg acted after hearing that a developer planned to buy an adjoining property and market it as an opportunity to become neighbours with him. "The developer was going to build a huge house and market the property as being next door to Mark Zuckerberg," a source told the San Jose Mercury News.
The buying spree began in December, several months after Facebook's flotation elevated Zuckerberg into the ranks of America's super-rich, and culminated this week with the sale of a property immediately next to the home he shares with his wife, Priscilla Chan.
The transactions suggest the multi-billionaire has spent many times the $7m cost of his own home, bought two years ago in a leafy neighbourhood of Palo Alto in the heart of California's Silicon Valley.
In an effort to keep the purchases under the radar, the party named on the deeds is not Zuckerberg himself, but companies affiliated to Iconiq Capital, a wealth management firm that represents the Facebook chief executive and a number of other tycoons.
Rather than being knocked down to extend the digital entrepreneur's own estate, the homes are apparently being leased back to the families that live there – with the interested parties required to sign non-disclosure agreements.
Despite a fortune estimated at $19bn, the 29-year old is known for living modestly, having rented for years before taking the plunge into northern California's overheated property market. But the size of Zuckerberg's reported land grab brings him into line with Silicon Valley's flashier inhabitants.
"It's 10 times more than a typical house," local estate agent Alex Comsa told the Silicon Valley Business Journal. "It's unheard of."
Zuckerberg's neighbours in Palo Alto include Yahoo's chief executive, Marissa Mayer, and Google co-founder Larry Page, who drew attention to his own real estate ambitions a few years ago after buying up adjoining properties, and who has been building a 6,000 square foot eco-friendly dwelling on the land, which is right next to his original home.
Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg has invested her takings from Facebook's $100bn stockmarket debut in a purpose-built mansion minutes from the firm's headquarters, spending £11m on a modernist structure with a living roof, solar panels, a waterfall and a cinema in the basement.
Records show late last year $4.8m was paid for a 3,200 square foot home near Zuckerberg's. After that, prices began to escalate. In September a second adjoining home of a similar size sold for $10.5m. On 1 October a third went under the hammer for $14.5m, and this week a fourth property was sold.
According to a spokeswoman for the local authority, no building permits have been filed for any of the properties in question in recent years. Zuckerberg's intention appears to be to prevent them falling into the wrong hands or being used as a perch for the long lenses of the paparazzi, rather than initiating a major building project. A spokesperson for Facebook declined to comment.
U.S. Army building high-tech 'Iron Man' armor that would give soldiers 'superhuman strength'
US Army researchers are working on building hi-tech body armor that would give soldiers "superhuman strength" in a real-life version of the suit featured in "Iron Man" films.
The blueprint for the "revolutionary" Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit (TALOS) would include an exoskeleton to allow a soldier to carry heavy equipment, built-in computing power, beefed up protection to stop bullets and a system to monitor vital signs, officials said.
"Some of the potential technologies planned for TALOS research and development include advanced armor, situational awareness, command and control computers, power management systems, and enhanced mobility exoskeletons," according to a US Army statement issued last month.
US Special Operations Command, which oversees elite Navy SEAL and Army Ranger commandos, put out the call last month for research papers on potential technologies that a "smart" combat suit could incorporate.
The request for "white papers" will extend through September 2014, and then commanders and defense officials will weigh how to proceed while taking into account growing pressures on the Pentagon budget, said spokesman Roger Teel of the Army's Research, Development and Engineering Command, or RDECOM.
The new combat armor might also employ "liquid armor," reminiscent of the "Terminator" films, though the technology is still in an early stage of development, Teel told AFP.
The liquid would transform into a solid if a magnetic or electrical charge was applied.
"There is a liquid armor that they are looking at developing," said Teel, adding that scientists at MIT were studying the idea. "It could possibly be turned on with a battery switch" to deflect gunfire, he said.
TALOS "is an advanced infantry uniform that promises to provide superhuman strength with greater ballistic protection," according to an earlier statement from RDECOM.
In a crude animated demonstration video released by the army on how the combat suit might operate, a soldier in science fiction-inspired gear stands in a doorway as bullets bounce off at close range from an unidentified enemy.
While ominous music plays in the background, the words "to be continued..." flash upon the screen.
The project's acronym, TALOS, refers to the automaton of Greek mythology made of bronze that Zeus deploys to safeguard his lover Europa.
Despite previous weapons programs that came to little, officials say the technologies for the ambitious project are not out of reach, even if they sound more like the stuff of myth or movie.
The concept of providing virtual displays of battlefield forces in a soldier's helmet screen resembles similar efforts already underway for a sophisticated helmet for pilots flying the new F-35 fighter jet.
Reflecting advances in robotics and computing power, the TALOS suit is part of a trend in current research focusing on what defense industry experts call "man-machine interface," aiming to dramatically increase the capabilities of a single soldier.
Officials said the TALOS project is the brainchild of Admiral William McRaven, head of special operations command, who rose to prominence presiding over the Navy SEAL raid that killed Al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden.
“I’m very committed to this,” McRaven told an industry conference in July. “I’d like that last operator that we lost to be the last operator we lose in this fight or the fight of the future, and I think we can get there.”
As the proposed suit would draw on a range of technical disciplines, the military expects the project to be developed jointly by academia, government scientists and technology firms, officials said.
Special Operations command is "interested in receiving white papers from a wide variety of sources, not just traditional military industry but also from academia, entrepreneurs and laboratories capable of providing the design, construction and testing of TALOS related technologies,” said James Geurts, acquisition executive for the command.
And officials said it was too early to offer any cost estimate.
Although defense officials acknowledge the project evokes comparisons to Tony Stark's superhero suit from the "Iron Man" movies, they note that no one is claiming the smart armor will enable soldiers to soar like a plane over cities.
"It's not going to fly. It's not going to be all that," Teel said. "But it's going to be special."
Nowhere to hide: Facebook ends 'invisibility cloak' for users
Facebook is ending a feature that allowed users to hide from the billion-plus members of the social network.
The feature, akin to Harry Potter's invisibility cloak, will be removed, meaning that someone looking for another Facebook user can more easily find that person.
"The setting was created when Facebook was a simple directory of profiles and it was very limited," said Facebook's chief privacy officer, Michael Richter.
The setting made Facebook search "feel broken at times," Richter added in a company blog Thursday.
"For example, people told us that they found it confusing when they tried looking for someone who they knew personally and couldn't find them in search results, or when two people were in a Facebook Group and then couldn't find each other through search."
Facebook announced last year it was ending this feature for new users, but allowed a transition for a "small percentage" of users who had that feature enabled.
Richter said the change should not have an impact on overall privacy.
"Whether you've been using the setting or not, the best way to control what people can find about you on Facebook is to choose who can see the individual things you share," he said.
Facebook, which has been under scrutiny by privacy advocates, recently revamped its search functions to include so-called "graph search" that allows users to search through a wide range of posts on the world's biggest social network.
In a separate development, Google announced Friday it was following the lead of Facebook to allow users' pictures and endorsements to be used in product ads.
The change will take effect November 11, Google said in its updated terms of service.
"We want to give you -- and your friends and connections -- the most useful information," the document said.
"Recommendations from people you know can really help. So your friends, family and others may see your profile name and photo, and content like the reviews you share or the ads you (liked)."
Google said users can opt out of this feature, however, and added that it will not use endorsements from users under 18.
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