Tech News
Boston University accuses Apple of stealing professor's idea for iPhone
Patent wars are all the rage in the tech community, and Apple is often viewed as the most aggressive patent warrior in Silicon Valley. Now, in an odd turn around, Boston University has decided to take Apple to court. On Tuesday, the university filed…
[Image via Agence France-Presse]
Security flaw affects 99 percent of Android phones: report
A security research firm discovered a flaw in Android phone operating system that would allow hackers to modify a regular application into a malicious one completely undetected by smart phone users, the app seller, or the service provider. According…
[Image: "Young Child Using Smartphone At Park" via Shutterstock]
European watchdogs order Google to rewrite privacy policy or face legal action
European watchdogs threaten tech company with legal action over 2012 policy which 'violates commitment to transparency'
Privacy watchdogs in the UK, Germany and Italy have told Google to rewrite its privacy policy in Europe or face legal sanctions, 15 months after the search giant unilaterally altered them to unify data collection.
The move follows similar complaints to the US company last month from the equivalent organisations in France and Spain, and ratchets up the attention over its handling of the huge amounts of personal data that it collects from users every day.
Google has already been censured in Europe over its collection of Wi-Fi data, including usernames, passwords and web page viewing while collecting photos for its Street View system. Both European privacy authorities and US legislators have demanded clarification from the company about the data protection implications of its Google Glass head-mounted system, which can take pictures and video without onlookers knowing. It has also been implicated in a data-sharing row over the NSA's Prism program, which has collected information from a number of US companies including Google, Microsoft and Apple.
Now the Information Commissioner's Office in the UK says that the new privacy policy, introduced in March 2012, raises "serious questions" about compliance with the UK Data Protection Act, and has given Google until 20 September to recast it.
Meanwhile, the head of the powerful equivalent in Hamburg, Professor Johannes Caspar, announced that he will call Google into a legal hearing because the new policy "violates the company's commitment to full transparency about the use and handling of the data".
France and Spain wrote similar letters to the company in June, with France's CNIL threatening fines if it did not comply.
Google said in a statement: "Our privacy policy respects European law and allows us to create simpler, more effective services. We have engaged fully with the authorities involved throughout this process, and we'll continue to do so going forward."
But a spokesperson did not explain how its policy could simultaneously respect European law and be the target of censure from five European privacy authorities.
Nick Pickles, director of privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: "This is the latest confirmation that consumers are being kept in the dark about what data on us Google collects and how that data is used.
"Google ignored concerns its policy broke the law and put its profit before the legal rights of British citizens.
"The main issue is that sanctions must be strong enough to make Google take real action, rather than the previous meagre penalties that are seen as a cost of doing business. Regulators around the world must act to ensure concrete steps are taken to uphold peoples rights and stop Google routinely trampling on our privacy."
Google said in January 2012 that it would rewrite its privacy policies to unite them across its disparate sites such as YouTube, Maps, Shopping, Mail and Search so that people's data use would be unified. Despite warnings from the CNIL and others that the change might not be lawful, it implemented the change in March 2012.
On Thursday, the ICO said: "we believe that the updated policy does not provide sufficient information to enable UK users of Google's services to understand how their data will be used across all of the company's products. Google must now amend their privacy policy to make it more informative for individual service users."
If Google fails to comply, the ICO says it will be considered in contempt of court. It could then issue an enforcement notice through the courts. In an extreme case it could issue a £500,000 fine – though a spokesperson said it would need to show individuals had been harmed by the policy.
The ICO defended the 15 months it had taken to determine that Google's policy does not comply with privacy laws: "It's not just about examining what is and isn't in the privacy policy itself. It's also about examining what the products and services actually do with the data."
Internet sites join July 4 protest against surveillance
(Reuters) - The online community rallied on Thursday in support of live protests against the U.S. government's surveillance of internet activity, a practice recently exposed by a former contractor for the National Security Agency.
Websites such as Reddit and Mozilla supported a campaign in cities across the United States to "Restore the Fourth" - a reference to the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment, which protects citizens against unlawful search and seizure.
The home page of the website Boing Boing, for example, displayed the following message to the NSA: "Happy 4th of July! Immediately stop your unconstitutional spying on the world's internet users -- The People."
The protest comes as the United States celebrates its Independence Day holiday.
By early afternoon, crowds of more than 400 had gathered in New York City and Washington, D.C., the organizers said. They estimate the total turnout will be more than 10,000 nationwide.
The NSA, on its own website, said: "NSA does not object to any lawful, peaceful protest. NSA and its employees work diligently and lawfully every day, around the clock, to protect the nation and its people."
Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has been charged with espionage after disclosing the agency's surveillance programs. He has spent more than a week in a Moscow airport seeking a country that would grant him asylum.
The online protest was launched by the Internet Defense League, a network of more than 30,000 websites and internet users whose goal is to protest attempts to curtail the freedom of the Web.
Evan Greer, a spokesman for the IDL, said nearly 13,500 Twitter users had taken part in a so-called thunderclap, in which they all tweeted the same or similar message at the same time to their more than 9 million followers.
(Reporting by Toni Clarke in Washington; Editing by Eric Beech)
Estonia tells European Union to rely less on U.S.-based 'cloud' storage
IT hub Estonia on Wednesday urged the European Union to rely less on US firms for "cloud" data storage, amid tensions over claims of US spying and data surveillance.
"Recent months have proven once again that it's very important for Europe to have its own data clouds that operate strictly under European legislation," Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves said in a statement.
Cloud computing refers to the process of getting software, storage and other services via the Internet from remote data centres rather than the memory in one's own computer.
For some it triggers concerns about giving up physical control over their data and potentially having it lost or accessed by others.
"Right now 95 percent of the cloud services used in the European Union belong to US companies," Ilves said after meeting with Europe's Digital Agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes in Tallinn.
"EU data protection legislation also needs to be modernised and we should understand that big private firms are able to gather more info than any state."
EU-US relations have been strained since weekend allegations that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had bugged EU diplomatic missions.
German weekly Der Spiegel said its report was based on confidential documents, some of which it had been able to consult via fugitive leaker Edward Snowden.
On Wednesday Estonia's foreign ministry summoned the US ambassador in Tallinn to provide answers over the snooping scandal.
Dubbed E-stonia, the tiny state of just 1.3 million people is known for being a trailblazer in technology and is one of the most connected countries in the world.
Tallinn is also home to the NATO cyber-defence centre, where data experts from across Europe and the United States work to protect the information networks of the alliance's 28 member states.
Douglas Engelbart, inventor of computer mouse, dies at 88
By Gerry Shih
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Douglas Engelbart, a technologist who conceived of the computer mouse and laid out a vision of an Internet decades before others brought those ideas to the mass market, died on Tuesday night. He was 88.
His eldest daughter, Gerda, said by telephone that her father died of kidney failure.
Engelbart arrived at his crowning moment relatively early in his career, on a winter afternoon in 1968, when he delivered an hour-long presentation containing so many far-reaching ideas that it would be referred to decades later as the "mother of all demos."
Speaking before an audience of 1,000 leading technologists in San Francisco, Engelbart, a computer scientist at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), showed off a cubic device with two rolling discs called an "X-Y position indicator for a display system." It was the mouse's public debut.
Engelbart then summoned, in real-time, the image and voice of a colleague 30 miles away. That was the first videoconference. And he explained a theory of how pages of information could be tied together using text-based links, an idea that would later form the bedrock of the Web's architecture.
At a time when computing was largely pursued by government researchers or hobbyists with a countercultural bent, Engelbart never sought or enjoyed the explosive wealth that would later become synonymous with Silicon Valley success. For instance, he never received any royalties for the mouse, which SRI patented and later licensed to Apple.
He was intensely driven instead by a belief that computers could be used to augment human intellect. In talks and papers, he described with zeal and bravado a vision of a society in which groups of highly productive workers would spend many hours a day collectively manipulating information on shared computers.
"The possibilities we are pursuing involve an integrated man-machine working relationship, where close, continuous interaction with a computer avails the human of radically changed information-handling and -portrayal skills," he wrote in a 1961 research proposal at SRI.
His work, he argued with typical conviction, "competes in social significance with research toward harnessing thermonuclear power, exploring outer space, or conquering cancer."
A proud visionary, Engelbart found himself intellectually isolated at various points in his life. But over time he was proved correct more often than not.
"To see the Internet and the World Wide Web become the dominant paradigms in computing is an enormous vindication of his vision," Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corporation, said in an interview on Wednesday. "It's almost like Leonardo da Vinci envisioning the helicopter hundreds of years before they could actually be built."
By 2000, Engelbart had won prestigious accolades including the National Medal of Technology and the Turing Award. He lived in comfort in Atherton, a leafy suburb near Stanford University.
But he wrestled with his fade into obscurity even as entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates became celebrity billionaires by realizing some of his early ideas.
In 2005, he told Tom Foremski, a technology journalist, that he felt the last two decades of his life had been a "failure" because he could not receive funding for his research or "engage anybody in a dialogue."
Douglas Carl Engelbart was born on January 30, 1925 in Portland to a radio repairman father who was often absent and a homemaker mother.
He enrolled at Oregon State University, but was drafted into the U.S. Navy and shipped to the Pacific before he could graduate.
He resolved to change the world as a computer scientist after coming across a 1945 article by Vannevar Bush, the head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research, while scouring a Red Cross library in a native hut in the Philippines, he told an interviewer years later.
After returning to the United States to complete his degree, Engelbart took a teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley, after Stanford declined to hire him because his research seemed too removed from practical applications. It would not be the first time his ideas were rejected.
Engelbart also worked at the Ames Laboratory, and the precursor to NASA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. He obtained a doctorate in electrical engineering from Berkeley in 1955.
He took a job at SRI in 1957, and by the early-1960s Engelbart led a team that began to seriously investigate tools for interactive computing.
After coming back from a computer graphics conference in 1961, Engelbart sketched a design of what would become the mouse and tasked Bill English, an engineering colleague, to carve a prototype out of wood. Engelbart's team considered other designs, including a device that would be affixed to the underside of a table and controlled by the knee, but the desktop mouse won out.
SRI would later license the technology for $40,000 to Apple, which released its first commercial mouse with the Lisa computer in 1983.
By the late 1970s, Engelbart's research group was acquired by a company called Tymshare. In the final decades of his career, Engelbart struggled to secure funding for his work, much less return to the same heights of influence.
"I don't think he was at peace with himself, partly because many, many things that he forecast all came to pass, but many of the things that he saw in his vision still hadn't," said Kapor, who helped fund Engelbart's work in the 1990s. "He was frustrated by his inability to move the field forward."
In 1986, Engelbart told interviewers from Stanford that his mind had always roamed in a way that set him apart or even alienated him.
"Growing up without a father, through the teenage years and such, I was always sort of different," Engelbart said. "Other people knew what they were doing, and had good guidance, and had enough money to do it. I was getting by, and trying. I never expected, ever, to be the same as anyone else."
He is survived by Karen O'Leary Engelbart, his second wife, and four children: Gerda, Diana, Christina and Norman. His first wife, Ballard, died in 1997.
(This story refiles to remove an extraneous word in the second paragraph)
(Reporting by Gerry Shih; Editing by Tim Dobbyn and Sandra Maler)
Will electric cars ever enter the mainstream?
Pardon my metaphor, but is the tank half-empty or half-full when it comes to electric cars?
The bad news: start-up electric-car makers Aptera, Better Place, Coda and Fisker are out of business, or close to it. Of the 14.4m cars sold last year in the US, only 52,835 – one out of every 270 cars sold – were plug-in hybrids, like the Chevy Volt, or pure electric cars like the Nissan Leaf. Even with generous government subsidies, including a $7,500 (£5,000) tax credit for electric-car buyers, there is no hope of getting a million electric vehicles on the road by 2015, a goal set by president Obama in his 2011 State of the Union address.
And yet, virtually all the big auto-makers are charging ahead, with GM, Ford, Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen and BMW expanding their electrified offerings. So far this year, sales of electric cars are up by 123% over 2012, the Electric Drive Transportation Association (EDTA) reports. Influential publications such as Consumer Reports and Motor Trend rave about electric cars – in particular the new Tesla S. And all indications are that electric car owners are pleased with their vehicles.
"There is no buyer's remorse," says Arun Baskota, owner of a pure electric car and, more importantly, the president of eVgo, a startup company owned by utility NRG Energy that is building out electric-car charging infrastucture.
To get a sense of where the market is going, I sat down with Baskota after EDTA's annual convention in Washington, and spoke by phone with Siddiq Khan, the co-author of a new report called Plug-In Electric Vehicles: Challenges and Opportunities, from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEE). Both are optimistic about the future for electric cars, but they caution that mass adoption will take longer than most people (including, evidently, the president) expected.
That's because electric cars are not iPhones or Facebook – a car is the second biggest purchase most Americans will make. Buying electric is a radical departure. "Going back for generations, the basic process of buying and owning and fueling your vehicle has remained pretty much the same," Banskota says. "We've learned how hard it is to change consumer behaviour."
Consumers need a compelling reason to try something new – a reason which, for all the buzz surrounding electric cars, the industry has yet to articulate. Is it the "cool" quotient? The fact that electric cars are fun to drive? Or quiet? Or low polluting? Will drivers be excited by the opportunity to plug in and refuel at home, at the expense of Big Oil?
Likely, it's none of the above. Not surprisingly, economics will be key. Other issues – the limited range of electric cars, and the absence of a fast and convenient public charging systems – will be solved by companies like eVgo and its competitors. But until the costs of batteries come down, and their performance improves, electric cars will remain a niche business.
The ACEE study compared not merely the sticker prices but the fuel costs over five years of driving comparable cars – a Ford Focus with gasoline engine, a Ford Focus electric, a Toyota Prius hybrid, an all-electric Nissan LEAF and a Chevrolet Volt, which runs primarily on electricity but has a gasoline engine to extend its range.
The conventional Ford Focus, the Prius and the LEAF all came in at about $23,500 (£15,500) (assuming a $3.60 (£2.40) gasoline price and 12,000 miles of driving per year). But the two other electrics, the Ford Focus electric and Chevy Volt, came in with costs that are more than $10,000 (£6,600) higher, meaning that the fuel savings resulting from using electricity instead of gasoline don't come close to paying back the much higher up-front price. That's a huge problem.
"Looking at the environmental benefits as well as the economic, there's a pretty good case for the LEAF," Khan told me. But for the Volt and Focus, he said: "The big challenge is reducing the battery price. It constitutes almost a third of the cost of an electric vehicle."
Battery costs have come down from $1,300 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) in 2007 to $500 (£330) per kWh in 2012, the ACEE report says. The US Department of Energy, which is financing battery research, has set cost targets of $300 (£200) per kWh in 2015 and $125 (£82) per kWh by 2022. Some analysts say those are realistic targets, but others are skeptical.
Evidence that price matters surfaced recently when Nissan, Honda and General Motors dropped prices on the electric cars, and shoppers poured into dealerships. Honda apologised when it couldn't supply FIT electrics to its California dealers. Drivers can now purchase an electric car for under $20,000 (£13,200), or lease one for as little as $260 (£171), after factoring in dealer incentives and federal tax credits. That will surely spur the market, although it's unlikely that the car companies can make money at those prices.
Meanwhile, eVgo and its rivals, including ECOtality's Blink network and Chargepoint, are building networks of public charging spots at malls, drugstores and supermarkets. Tesla, unveiled a revolutionary battery-swapping system to make long-distance driving easier.
Although most electric cars are now charged overnight at home while their owners sleep, an increase in public charging stations is important to help allay what's called "range anxiety" – the worry that an electric car's battery charge won't be sufficient to get drivers where they want to go. One issue has been that for the fastest charging stations (known as DC or Level 3) auto-makers have been unable to agree on a single standard – another that no single business model has emerged to recoup the capital costs of building out charging stations.
Despite the slower-than-anticipated rollout of electric cars, people who pay close attention to the industry – from the CEO of General Motors to industry analysts and satisfied Tesla drivers – remain steadfast in their belief that electric cars will eventually win over consumers, driven by better technology, lower battery cost and rising gasoline prices. Navigant Research recently predicted that worldwide sales of electric cars will reach 3m annually by 2020.
Electric cars "make too much sense not to happen", Banskota told me. "It's a matter of time."
When I asked him how much time, he smiled: "There's a lot of projections out there, and every projection has been wrong."
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Chinese court hears claim Apple's 'Siri' is a copycat
A case against US technology giant Apple brought by a Chinese firm for alleged patent infringement in its digital personal assistant "Siri" has begun in a Shanghai court, state media said Wednesday.
Lawyers representing Apple and Zhizhen Network Technology Co. on Tuesday argued over the technical specifications of Siri and the Chinese company's "Xiao i Robot" product, reports said.
Trademark and patent infringement are rife in China but the legal challenge to Apple comes after it paid Chinese computer maker Shenzhen Proview Technology $60 million last year to settle a long-running dispute over the "iPad" name, whose ownership was claimed by both companies.
Zhizhen is demanding Apple stop making and selling products in China which carry Siri, an "intelligent" personal assistant which responds to a user's commands through voice recognition software.
The firm claims it filed a patent for the "Xiao i Robot" software in 2004, which was approved two years later.
Apple's Siri, which made its debut with the release of the iPhone 4S in 2011, was first developed in 2007.
In Tuesday's court session, Apple's lawyers argued that the two function in a similar way but use different technology.
"One can achieve the same results through various means," a lawyer for Apple was quoted by the Global Times newspaper as saying.
"Apple has its own technology for Siri, which is totally different from the plaintiff's," said the lawyer, whose name was not given.
Yuan Yang, a lawyer representing Zhizhen, told AFP: "Our main goal at the current stage is to let the court validate our claim regarding the infringement.
"We are not ruling out the possibility of mediation or compensation, but they are to be considered in the future," he said.
A statement by the Shanghai Number One Intermediate People's Court confirmed the session, which followed a pre-trial hearing in March. The court made no ruling on Tuesday.
Apple products are hugely popular in China, and chief executive Tim Cook said in January he expects the country to surpass the United States as its largest market.
Apple could not immediately be reached for comment on the case.
[Image via Agence France-Presse]
French competition watchdog raids Apple stores
French competition authorities last week raided several stores of US tech giant Apple following a complaint by failed local firm eBizcuss of unfair trade practices, officials said Tuesday.
Officials from the Autorite de la Concurrance confirmed the raids but did not say where they took place and how many outlets were affected. Apple did not comment.
The Les Echos financial daily said the the investigators wanted to probe Apple's relations with its distributors. The firm has been accused of favouring its own stores with the supply of new devices.
Les Echos said the distributors were "totally in the clutches of Apple which imposed drastic conditions, especially on the selling price of the goods."
eBizcuss filed a suit in April against Apple for limiting phone supplies. It was the biggest reseller of Apple goods in France with 15 stores and was formally declared liquidated in May.
Kim Dotcom and New Zealand PM to face off at public hearing
Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and New Zealand Prime Minister John Key are set to come face to face for the first time Wednesday as lawmakers examine a controversial proposal allowing intelligence agencies to spy on local residents.
Dotcom will appear in parliament to argue against the move at a select committee hearing chaired by Key, whose government signed off on Dotcom's arrest last year for alleged online piracy.
The pair have never met and Dotcom appears to be relishing the prospect of eyeballing Key, who issued a public apology to the Internet mogul last year after it was revealed authorities illegally spied upon him.
"It's ON," he tweeted Monday, adding: "If you want to witness John Key and the #GCSB (spy agency) getting exposed join me in Parliament this Wednesday. It's a public hearing!!!"
Key played down the prospect of a showdown with the flamboyant businessman, saying he did not expect any fireworks at the hearing.
"I can't see any particular reason why," he told TV3 on Tuesday.
"He gets 15 minutes (before the committee) like anybody else and he's free to use that time however he wants."
Existing legislation says the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) is supposed to focus on foreign intelligence and cyber-security, explicitly forbidding it from spying on New Zealand citizens or residents.
But it was revealed last year that it spied on Dotcom, a German national with New Zealand residency, before armed police raided his Auckland mansion in January 2012 and arrested him for online piracy.
As a result, Dotcom is suing the spy agency and the government has moved to close what it described as a technical loophole that limited the operations of its main spy agency.
Dotcom, who was arrested as part of a massive US investigation that closed down his Megaupload empire, said in a submission to the inquiry that the spy agency could not be trusted to respect the privacy of New Zealanders.
"Our own story shows that it is not just terrorists and extremists that can be targeted," he said.
Opposition parties and organisations such the Law Society and InternetNZ have raised privacy concerns about the proposals.
Key denies it gives spies greater powers, saying it allows the GCSB to cooperate more closely with agencies such as the police and military in an increasingly complex cyber-security environment.
"It's my view that they're not expanding, they're codifying in law with absolute clarity what has been the historical position for a long period of time," he said.
[Image via Agence France-Presse]
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