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Google announces experimental superfast Internet service to be installed in Austin, Texas
Google announced Tuesday that its experimental superfast Internet service will spread to Austin, the Texas home of a South By Southwest festival beloved by technology trendsetters.
Google Fiber should start connecting its so-called gigabit Internet to homes in Austin, the Texas state capital and a hotbed for Internet entrepreneurs, by the middle of next year, said vice president of access services Milo Medin.
"It's a mecca for creativity and entrepreneurialism, with thriving artistic and tech communities, as well as the University of Texas and its new medical research hospital," Medin said of Austin.
"We're sure these folks will do amazing things with gigabit access."
Google Fiber debuted in Kansas City and in November began providing users there with Internet service that moves data at a blazing gigabyte per second, about 100 times faster than the speed provided by typical broadband connections.
"When the startup community hears about Google Fiber coming to Austin there may be celebration in the streets," said Eugene Sepulveda, chief executive of the Entrepreneurs Foundation in that city.
Google said pricing details for the service were being worked out but were expected to be on par with those in Kansas City, where gigabyte-speed service is available for a monthly fee of $70.
Slower Google Fiber connection to the Internet is made available free, after a one-time "construction fee" of $300.
Consumers also will have an option to pay $120 monthly for superfast Internet combined with Google TV service that syncs with notebooks, smartphones or tablets powered by Android software backed by the California technology titan.
Google will hook schools, hospitals, community centers and other public facilities to Fiber for free, according to Medin.
"I don't think, probably, any Austinite can tell you what Google Fiber will mean to Austin a year from now, and that is really the cool part," Texas state Senator Kirk Watson said in a video posted at Google's blog.
"We are ready to see what it will do," he continued. "And I promise you it is going to be fun by the end."
Aspiring tech tycoons, their potential financiers, plus indie film-makers and musicians of all generations and genres flock by the thousands to Austin each year for a pop culture jamboree known as SXSW.
"In the world of start-ups, SXSW is pretty crucial to attend. It's like if you're not there, you're not on the map," Lori Cheek said while at SXSW last month to launch a smartphone app for her online flirting service Cheekd.com.
Microsoft and Oracle ask European Union to 'protect competition' against Google Android
Google was in the firing line again on Tuesday after a group of major companies, including Microsoft and Oracle, complained to the European Commission over Google's offerings for Android-powered mobile phones.
"We are asking the Commission to move quickly and decisively to protect competition and innovation in this critical market," said Thomas Vinje, Brussels-based counsel for FairSearch, which groups 17 high-tech companies, including also Nokia, Expedia and TripAdvisor.
"Failure to act will only embolden Google to repeat its desktop abuses of dominance as consumers increasingly turn to a mobile platform dominated by Google's Android operating system," Vinje said in a statement.
FairSearch said it had filed a complaint with the Commission, charging that the Internet giant wanted Android operators to use its leading applications such as Maps or YouTube.
It said Google's Android is the dominant smartphone operating system, accounting for 70 percent at end-2012, while it had 96 percent of mobile phone search advertising.
The companies grouped in FairSearch have also complained about Google in the Commission's 2010 anti-trust probe of the firm which has focused on its dominance of the Internet search market.
Last week, six European countries, including France and Britain, launched joint action against Google to try to get it to scale back new monitoring powers that watchdogs believe violate EU privacy protection rules.
Google last year rolled out a common user privacy policy for its services that grouped some 60 previous sets of rules into one and allowed the company to track users more closely to develop targeted advertising.
The action came after the European Union's 27 member states warned Google in October not to apply the new policy and gave it four months to make changes or face legal action.
When that deadline expired in February, several European data protection agencies set up a task force to pursue coordinated action against the US giant.
Google has repeatedly maintained that its privacy policy respects European law.
[Image via Agence France-Presse]
Rep. Mike Rogers: 'Significant improvements' to CISPA over privacy concerns
Backers of a cybersecurity bill which stalled in Congress last year offered changes in an effort to ease concerns of privacy and civil liberties activists.
The two top lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee said the panel would meet Wednesday to vote on the Cyber Intelligence and Sharing Protection Act, a measure which passed the House last year but died in the Senate.
The lawmakers said they would propose several amendments to the bill, under which internet companies can give the government information about what they see as potential security threats and they are protected from liability for providing the information.
Last year, the measure provoked a storm of protests from Internet and civil liberties activists, and the White House threatened a veto.
Civil libertarians claim such laws could allow too much government snooping and conservatives say they would create new bureaucracy.
House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers and ranking Democrat Dutch Ruppersberger said lawmakers were listening to those concerns, but that the issue has become more pressing in the past year with revelations about new cyber threats.
"We've made some significant improvements," Rogers told a conference call Monday, saying that he and Ruppersberger were backing amendments addressing key fears.
Ruppersberger said the White House "is still not behind our bill, but we are working with them and with the privacy groups."
The lawmakers said they would insert a more narrow definition of national security in the bill.
The amendments would also seek to clarify that Internet firms could only use data about threats for cybersecurity purposes, not for marketing or other commercial uses, and would give more oversight to privacy officers at federal agencies.
"Because the threat is so real I think everyone realizes we have to do everything we can to come together to pass a bill to protect our citizens," Ruppersberger said.
It was not immediately clear if the proposed changes would blunt criticism from the broad coalition of groups that unveiled plans last week to oppose CISPA.
Greg Nojeim of the Center for Democracy and Technology said the changes failed to address one key concern -- that information could be accessed by the top-secret National Security Agency, a branch of the military.
"This endangers civil liberties, undermines transparency and therefore public trust, and drew a veto threat from the White House last year," said Nojeim.
"While some of the amendments described today could be helpful, civilian control is the elephant in the room that CISPA co-sponsors refuse to address."
Michelle Richardson of the American Civil Liberties Union told a Reddit forum Monday that "a lot of politicians are under the mistaken belief that CISPA is a narrowly targeted bill."
"They are not aware of the sweeping implications of the bill -- empowering the military on our Internet, sharing personally identifying info, use for non-cyber purposes," she said.
President Barack Obama in February issued an executive order aimed at ramping up protection from cyberattacks, but said legislation is still needed.
US administration officials and lawmakers acknowledge that his order creates no new authority and that legislation is needed to better safeguard networks for key systems such as power grids, banks and air traffic control.
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[Digital surveillance image via Shutterstock]
HP launches 'Moonshot' energy- and space-efficient servers
Hewlett-Packard on Monday launched a Moonshot system that uses smartphone-style chips to power compact, efficient data center servers.
The California-based computer maker said Moonshot systems take up a fifth of the space of traditional computer servers and can cut energy use by as much as 89 percent while costing about 77 percent less to buy.
"With nearly 10 billion devices connected to the Internet and predictions for exponential growth, we've reached a point where the space, power and cost demands of traditional technology are no longer sustainable," HP chief Meg Whitman said in a release.
"HP Moonshot marks the beginning of a new style of IT that will change the infrastructure economics and lay the foundation for the next 20 billion devices."
The new class of computer server is billed as being able to handle the challenges created by social networking, cloud computing, and gathering and analyzing massive amounts of data.
Moonshot servers are powered by Intel Atom chips more commonly found in smartphones and tablets. The servers were made available Monday in the United States and Canada and will be released elsewhere in May.
HP is in the middle of a massive shift in strategy as consumers gravitate from traditional PCs to mobile devices, including tablets.
Whitman, who is spearheading the move, has said the company -- still the world's biggest PC maker -- is making progress but that more work is needed.
["Stock Photo: Happy Woman Holding Server Wires In Data Center" on Shutterstock]
WikiLeaks launches searchable U.S. historical archive
WikiLeaks on Monday launched a searchable archive containing 1.7 million US State Department documents from 1973-76 that had been officially declassified but were not easily accessible to the public.
The "Public Library of US Diplomacy" brings together the archived memos -- referred to as the "Kissinger Cables" after then secretary of state Henry Kissinger -- and the 250,000 cables leaked by the anti-secrecy website in 2010.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said that even though the 1973-1976 cables were declassified, they previously could only be accessed through the US National Archives in a non-searchable PDF format.
The cables were "hidden in the borderline between secrecy and complexity," Assange told reporters in Washington via video link from the Ecuadoran embassy in London, where he has been holed up since last summer.
He also said the documents were at risk of being made secret again, citing a 2006 report by a research institute at George Washington University that found some 55,000 government documents had been secretly reclassified.
"Orwell once said that he who controls the present controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future," Assange said. "Our analysis shows that the US administration cannot be trusted with its control of the past."
Assange later added, with characteristic understatement, that "this material we have published today is the single most significant geopolitical publication that has ever existed."
Although the documents have long been in the public domain, their release in a searchable archive has generated headlines internationally, mainly because the release was coordinated with more than a dozen media outlets.
One such outlet, India's Hindu newspaper, cited the cables in a report saying that Rajiv Gandhi, whose family still dominates India's ruling party, may have been a middleman for an arms deal in the 1970s.
Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in 1991. His Italian-born widow Sonia is now head of the ruling Congress party and their son Rahul is positioned as a prime ministerial candidate before elections scheduled for next year.
"The corruption in the Gandhi political dynasty is well-known all over the world... and it's about time that the Congress Party of India took its sandals off before entering the corridors of power," Assange said.
Another cable has the Vatican in the 1970s dismissing reports of massacres by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as "Communist propaganda."
Assange said other cables point to the US recruitment of informants in opposition parties and labor unions in several countries and the creation of a "torture exemption" for Brazil in order to allow Washington to provide aid to its rightwing military dictatorship.
The archive can be viewed at wikileaks.org/plusd/
The National Archives and Records Administration could not immediately be reached for comment.
WikiLeaks rose to fame in recent years by releasing hundreds of thousands of secret military logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the trove of classified US diplomatic cables, all leaked by US Army private Bradley Manning.
Manning admitted to leaking the documents in a statement to a military tribunal in February, pleading guilty to charges that could see him jailed for 20 years in hope of avoiding the more serious allegation of "aiding the enemy."
Assange took refuge at the Ecuadoran embassy nine months ago to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over allegations of rape and sexual assault, which he has denied.
'My name is Mark': Facebook head's teenage website resurfaces
A website thought to be the handiwork of Mark Zuckerberg at the age of 15 resurfaced on the Internet on Thursday, providing a glimpse into the early days of the famed Facebook co-founder.
"Hi, my name is Slim Shady," the creator of the website said in a message on an "about me" page at a website hosted by Angelfire, an Internet service from the 1990s that offered free online hosting.
"Just kidding, my name is Mark (for those of you that don't know me) and I live in a small town near the massive city of New York."
Zuckerberg grew up in the town of White Plains near New York City. He turns 29 years old next month.
The website creator said he had just completed his freshman year of high school, and that he made the site to promote a program he wrote for use at Internet portal AOL.
A website page hinted at an early interest in tapping the social potential of the Internet with a project called The Web.
"This is one of the few applets that require your participation to work well," the website maker said in a message.
"If your name is already on the Web because someone else has chosen to be linked to you, then you may choose two additional people to be linked with," he continued.
"Otherwise, if you see someone who you know and would like to be linked with but your name is not already on The Web, then you can contact me and I will link that person to you and put you on The Web."
Website features included games and a page devoted to models of molecules such as ethane inspired by a high school biochemistry lecture.
Along with mini-programs that included a drawing tool and a grade point average calculator, the website had a "Best" page devoted to "my friends, and of course, bad comedy."
The laser was listed as the best achievement by a human and the quesadilla as the best food.
Facebook did not respond to a request for comment, but online reports said that the email provided on the website was an account that belonged to Zuckerberg's father.
The website was brought to light by a user of Hacker News, a website designed for hackers.
[Image via Agence France-Presse]
American drivers still talk, text as much as ever despite laws against it
Americans are using cellphones and other gadgets behind the wheel as much as ever, despite widespread awareness of the risks involved, a federal government agency said Friday.
Citing a 2011 survey, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said 660,000 Americans are talking or texting while driving at any given moment, a number unchanged from the previous year.
At the same time, 74 percent of American drivers support a ban on hand-held cellphone use on the road, and 94 percent favor a prohibition on texting while driving, it said, citing a 2012 survey.
Thirty-nine of the 50 states now ban text messaging behind the wheel, and 10 states forbid heldheld cellphone use -- although observers say those bans are frequently ignored.
In a statement Friday coinciding with National Distracted Driving Awareness Month, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood called distracted driving "a serious and deadly epidemic" on US roads.
According to NHTSA data, more than 3,300 people were killed and 387,000 injured in crashes involving a distracted driver in 2011, the most recent year for which statistics were available.
["The Business Woman Sits In The Car And Speaks By Phone" on Shutterstock]
Germany smacks down Apple's patent on 'slide to unlock' feature
Germany's patent court invalidated Friday a patent held by Apple -- and contested by rivals Motorola and Samsung -- on its "slide to unlock" function for smartphones, but the ruling can still be appealed.
The federal patent court ruled that the the horizontal swiping gesture was not a technical innovation in itself and therefore did not meet requirements of European patent law.
The aim of the function was to make it easier for users to unlock their smartphone and not solve a specific technical problem, the court argued.
Apple can still appeal the ruling.
Scientists use 3D printer to make tissue-like material
British scientists have used a custom-made 3D printer to make living tissue-like material that could one day serve medical purposes, according to findings released Thursday.
The material is made up of thousands of connected water droplets, encapsulated within lipid films, that can carry out some of the functions of human cells.
These "droplet networks" could be the building blocks of a new technology used to pass on drugs and, down the road, could even replace damaged tissue, said a statement from Oxford University, where the scientists are based. Their findings were published in Friday's issue of the US journal Science.
Since the so-called droplet networks are completely synthetic, don't have a genome and and don't replicate, they lack the problems linked with other methods of creating artificial tissues -- such as those using stem cells.
"We aren't trying to make materials that faithfully resemble tissues but rather structures that can carry out the functions of tissues," Hagan Bayley, a professor at Oxford's Chemistry Department who headed the research, said in a statement.
"The droplets can be printed with protein pores to form pathways through the network that mimic nerves and are able to transmit electrical signals from one side of a network to the other."
According to fellow Oxford scientist Gabriel Villar, "the printed structures could in principle employ much of the biological machinery that enables the sophisticated behavior of living cells and tissues."
Each droplet measures about 50 microns in diameter (0.05 millimeters), or about five times the size of living cells. However, the researchers believe "there is no reason why they could not be made smaller."
This synthetic material can be designed to take on different shapes once printed.
In this way, a flat shape can be programmed to fold itself into a "hollow ball," the statement said.
As for the 3D printer used, it was custom built at Oxford.
In February, researchers said they had engineered artificial human ears that look and act like the real thing thanks to 3D printing.
Cornell biomedical engineers and Weill Cornell Medical College physicians said the flexible ears grew cartilage over three months to replace the collagen used to mold them.
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