Microsoft Invites Devs to Tinker With HoloLens

Microsoft on Monday announced that its HoloLens Development Edition was available for preorder, with units set to ship to developers beginning March 30. The company early last year introduced the holographic computer technology as a feature for Windows 10. It later announced a partnership with Volvo that would allow the application to be applied to the automobile sales floor. Over the past year, Microsoft has unveiled partnerships with Autodesk Fusion 360, NASA, Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Clinic.

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Apple Motion Seeks to Block Feds From Acquiring 'Dangerous Power'

Apple last week filed a motion to vacate a federal order requiring the company to create a tool or code to unlock the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino, California, shooters. The order would set a dangerous precedent and release a powerful means to breach security on potentially millions of phones around the world, Apple argued. It transcends one phone and would empower government to make private companies compromise the security of all their users whenever it sees fit, the company said.

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Google Killed the Laptop Star

Anyone who went to business school recognizes the basic tenet that you use marketing to build demand in order to sell products. Through the 1990s, there was impressive marketing surrounding laptops. Apple aggressively marketed this class, as did Microsoft, and it seemed every other brand on TV was trying to convince us we needed a new PC. PC marketing dropped off a cliff in the last decade, and when the iPad launched with a powerful Apple campaign it nearly took out the PC at the knees. What happened in the 1990s that killed PC marketing?

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RebeccaBlackOS Is a Class Act

RebeccaBlackOS is a Debian Testing-based live distribution that offers a developmental view of Wayland-based Linux desktop sessions. A few other distro makers such as Fedora have prototypes of Wayland running, but the options for different desktop environments available all from one live-session DVD caught my attention. Anyone curious about where Wayland development and Linux distros in general are headed can get a first look from the fan-based RBOS distro.

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Superhot Warps Time

Three years of thought went into the think-between-steps shooter game Superhot, which was released Thursday. Born of a week-long first-person-shooter game jam, Superhot's concept caught the attention of the Kickstarter crowd, raising $250,000. It's a novel approach to the FPS genre, reminiscent of the movies Crank and Speed. In Superhot, stopping doesn't come with a consequence such as a bomb detonating on a speeding bus or a lethal dose of crank killing the protagonist.

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Chicago School Board Elevates Computer Science to Graduation Requirement

The Chicago Board of Education on Wednesday voted unanimously to make computer science a graduation requirement for all high school students beginning with next year's freshmen. Chicago Public Schools has become a national leader in computer science education since Mayor Rahm Emanuel launched the Computer Science for All initiative for grades K-12 in 2013, the board said. The five-year plan aims to make computer science a core subject taught in schools. It includes a partnership with Code.org to provide the curriculum and prepare teachers.

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Google Brings Project Shield to DDoS Battlefield

Google has announced that it was expanding its Project Shield program, offering to protect news and human rights websites from distributed denial of service attacks for free. Project Shield uses Google's security infrastructure to detect and filter DDoS attacks, which flood websites with Internet traffic or service requests in order to impair their functioning or take them down. "A simple, inexpensive distributed denial of service attack can be carried out by almost anyone with access to a computer," noted Jared Cohen, president of Jigsaw.

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The Downside of Linux Popularity

Popularity is becoming a two-edged sword for Linux. The open source operating system has become a key component of the Internet's infrastructure, and it's also the foundation for the world's largest mobile OS, Google's Android. Widespread use of the OS, though, has attracted the attention of hackers looking to transfer the dirty tricks previously aimed at Windows to Linux. Last year, for example, ransomware purveyors targeted Linux. Granted, it wasn't a very virulent strain of ransomware, but more potent versions likely will be on the way.

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Atlas Robot Turns the Other Cheek

Google-owned Boston Dynamics on Tuesday gave the world a look at the latest version of Atlas, a bipedal robot that someday could threaten manual laborers' livelihoods. Boston Dynamics certainly didn't say or imply that the fast-progressing Atlas robot would force humans out of their jobs. The clandestine group merely demonstrated the latest build of the bot, and gave it a cringeworthy battering to show how it responded to abuse. The current Atlas version is 5 foot 9 inches tall and weighs in at 180 pounds.

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Security Pros to Users: Do as We Say, Not as We Do

IT pros -- the gatekeepers of company security policies -- are willing to bend the rules to get things done, according to Absolute Software, based on survey findings it released last week. Forty-five percent of IT pros confessed they knowingly worked around their own security policies, according to the survey. Moreover, 33 percent admitted to hacking their own or another organization's systems. In addition, 46 percent said employees represent the greatest security risk to their organizations.

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Facebook TIPs the Scales Toward Better Networking

Facebook on Sunday at the 2016 Mobile World Congress announced its Telecom Infra Project, an engineering initiative aimed at developing new technologies and approaches to building and deploying telecom network infrastructure. TIP will bring together telecommunications companies, infrastructure providers, system integrators and other technology companies, according to Jay Parikh, Facebook's global head of engineering and infrastructure. In essence, Facebook wants to become a provider hub of globally shared content.

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Facebook Gives Us More Ways to Push Each Other's Buttons

Facebook on Wednesday rolled out a new set of options for its 1.5 billion monthly users to use when responding to posts in their News Feeds. The six "Reactions," as Facebook has termed them, allow users to make more nuanced responses to posts rather than simply clicking on Like. "We've been listening to people and know that there should be more ways to easily and quickly express how something you see in News Feed makes you feel," explained Sammi Krug, product manager at Facebook.

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Greenwave Brings Unity to IoT Networks

Greenwave Systems on Monday announced the expansion of its AXON Platform to unite mobile machine-to-machine and residential IoT networks into one fully manageable network service. Mobile carriers, telecommunications operators and service providers can use AXON for Mobile IoT to integrate a variety of communications protocols into the same standard IP-based language. The unified service allows telecom operators to handle billions of devices via Greenwave's implementation of Docker, the company said.

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Dell's Embedded PCs Take the IoT to the Mainstream

Dell on Tuesday announced the release of its first purpose-built industrial PC products for the mainstream market: the Embedded Box PC 3000 Series and 5000 Series. The products are a response to the growing embedded computing market and the lack of reliable devices, Dell said. The embedded systems market was valued at more than $11 billion in 2014 and is expected to reach $23.1 billion in 2019, growing at a compound annual rate of almost 15 percent, according to a Technavio study that Dell cited.

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Samsung Raises Curtain on Galaxy S7 Models

Samsung on Sunday introduced two new models of its flagship Galaxy smartphone line at the annual gala for the mobile world, the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, Spain. Both phones have similar features, but one, the Galaxy S7 Edge, has a 5.5-inch display, the same size as the iPhone 6s Plus. The units have curved screens that support quad HD resolution, as well as a slight curve on the back, making them easier to hold. To soothe complaints about the battery life of the previous Galaxy generation, the units have received power boosts.

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Apple FBI Standoff Stretches Into Week Two

Apple on Monday called for the creation of a government panel to help resolve a standoff between the company and the Federal Bureau of Investigation over the issue of national security vs. data privacy. The proposal for a commission followed FBI Director James Comey's Sunday post on Lawfare -- an apparent effort to quell the controversy. Comey emphasized that the bureau was not seeking a master key that would allow it to snoop into American citizens' devices at will.

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Gadget Ogling: Gaming Revivals, Clever Cameras, and Smartphones for All

Sir Clive Sinclair helped popularize video games as a viable home entertainment option with the ZX Spectrum. After reviving the brand a little over a year ago with the introduction of the Vega microcontroller, which plugs into televisions, Sinclair and Retro Computers now have launched a handheld version, the Vega+. The Vega+ design is aligned with other current handheld consoles, with a directional pad on the left and a quartet of action buttons on the right. Three secondary action buttons are positioned below them.

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Google Gives iOS Devs Open Source EarlGrey Testing Tool

Google last week introduced EarlGrey, a functional user interface testing framework for Apple iOS apps. YouTube, Google Calendar, Google Photos, Google Translate and Google Play Music have successfully adopted the framework, the company said. EarlGrey has been open sourced under the Apache license, according to Google's Siddartha Janga. The company has provided app developers with a start guide and the ability to add EarlGrey to their projects using CocoaPods or to add it manually to Xcode project files.

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The FBI's iPhone Problem: Tactical vs. Strategic Thinking

I'm an ex-sheriff, I've been in and out of security jobs for much of my life, so I've got some familiarity with the issues underlying the drama between the FBI and Apple. Law enforcement officials would like an easier way to do their jobs. Wouldn't we all? If they could put cameras in every home and business on the planet, they'd find a way to do it. That would solve a lot of the tactical challenges of being able to catch people who commit crimes. What gets missed is that strategically, it also would open the door to far more crimes.

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Neverware Brings Windows Into Its Anti-Aging Fold

Neverware on Thursday announced the addition of dual-boot support, allowing its CloudReady operating system and Microsoft Windows to run on the same computer. The dual-boot feature preserves existing data on computers. Adding it to CloudReady -- which lets PCs and Apple computers function like Google Chromebooks -- will let users keep their existing computer configuration or boot into Neverware's cloud-based OS to access Google's Web app environment.

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Hollywood Hospital Succumbs to Hacker Shakedown

Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center on Wednesday announced that it paid approximately $17,000 to resume normal operations after digital extortionists knocked its computer systems offline. The Los Angeles hospital discovered its computer network infected with ransomware earlier this month. Ransomware is a form of malware that scrambles data and key files on a system and demands a ransom be paid for a digital key to unscramble the data. After paying the ransom, the hospital was able to bring its electronic medical record system online.

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Gadget Ogling: Tweeted Cocktails, Dimensional Doodles, and Crazy Cubes

Sometimes you'll stumble upon a delectable tweet -- a melange of words, pictures, videos or GIFs that looks good enough to eat. But is it good enough to drink? Data Cocktail is a system that hunts for the latest five tweets that include keywords related to available ingredients, and then will mix a drink based on them. The machine will print the "recipe" for the crowdsourced drink, just in case it happens to be absurdly delicious, while sending a thank you note to those Twitter users who contributed to the concoction without meaning to.

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Leap Motion Unleashes Orion

Leap Motion on Tuesday introduced Orion -- a faster, more precise, more capable and more reliable hand tracking system than its predecessor. Orion is purpose built for virtual reality, and it represents a stark shift in how Leap Motion tech tracks hands and fingers, according to the company. "Orion starts tracking faster and with lower latency," the company said. "The software will track hands when fully extended at arm's length. And Orion maintains reliable hand tracking even when the sensor can't fully see your fingers."

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DHS Ready to Share Intelligence With Private Sector

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security this month will start sharing threat information with a small number of hand-picked companies under the newly enacted Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act. DHS hopes to collect threat indicators from companies and redistribute them so everyone gets a better view of threats and can use that knowledge to bolster defenses. The CISA removed a significant obstacle to that kind of sharing: liability. Now companies don't have to sweat the risk of lawsuits for sharing information with Uncle Sam.

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Cook Takes Encryption Battle to the Streets

CEO Tim Cook on Tuesday brought Apple's dispute with the FBI to the public. Cook penned an open letter explaining the company's resistance to a federal magistrate's order to create software that would let authorities access data in an iPhone used by the shooters in last year's San Bernardino terrorist attack. Carrying out the order could undermine the security of all iPhone users, Cook argued. "The United States government has demanded that Apple take an unprecedented step which threatens the security of our customers," he wrote.

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Glitches Mar Makulu's Appeal

Makulu 10 Xfce edition continues developer Jacque Raymer's track record of pushing the limits with useful and innovative features to keep his distro line a step ahead of the crowd. He released Makulu 10 Xfce this week after more than 12 months in the making. The focus on this build is stability, speed and social integration. After spending several frustrating days chasing away glitches, I found that the Xfce edition can claim success with two of those three goals.

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Google's Virtual Reality Tinkering May Get More Real

Google reportedly is developing a standalone virtual reality headset that will be several steps removed from its Cardboard VR. Instead of relying on a user's smartphone and a lens-fitted cardboard headset, it will have all the necessary components built in. It also won't have to rely on a PC or a console for processing power as do Sony's PlayStation VR, HTC's Vive and Oculus VR's Rift headsets -- it will have integrated processors, lenses, cameras and sensors.

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Mattel's 3D Printer Will Let Kids Do More Than Play With Toys

Mattel last week announced that it is giving its ThingMaker a high-tech makeover by equipping it with 3D capabilities. Using the original 1960s iteration, children could create small toys, such as dragons and flowers, by pouring liquid plastic into molds, which were heated and cooled. The updated ThingMaker was designed in partnership with Autodesk, which created the 3D app that works in tandem with the printer. The app and printer will let children design, create and print their own toys.

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Unity and SteamVR Unite for Native Vive Support

Unity Technologies last week announced that the Unity Platform has been retooled to offer native support for SteamVR, the software foundation for HTC Vive. The move will save effort and resources, whether developers build made-for-VR titles or merely build virtual reality support into traditional games. In addition, Valve introduced an advanced rendering plug-in developed for Unity. Because Valve has been a major player in the game industry, it was clear that supporting SteamVR would be a part of Unity's strategy, a Unity spokesperson said.

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Fiorina's Presidential Road Not Taken

One of the most amazing and frustrating things about this year's U.S. presidential race is that no one learned Obama's lesson on how to make effective use of technology to win an election. It was a powerful lesson, too. Largely using a mix of analytics and social networking, a young inexperienced politician was able to roll over the anointed candidate for his party. Four years later, he was able to overcome a negative approval rating to do it again -- schooling Mitt Romney, who should have known how to use those tools better.

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AT&T Jumps Into the 5G Race

AT&T on Friday announced plans to start testing 5G technology, with a possible limited commercial rollout before the end of 2016. 5G offers the promise of besting the speeds of today's fastest wireless networks by a factor of 10 to 100, through the use of millimeter waves, network function virtualization, and software-defined networking. Through a collaboration with Ericsson and Intel, AT&T will be ramping up its efforts to bring 5G to market starting in the second quarter of this year.

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Zuckerberg Aims to Set Things Right With India

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday went into damage-control mode following a tweet from board member Marc Andreessen about India and colonialism. Andreessen was reacting to the Indian telecom regulator's ban on Facebook's Free Basics service. "Another in a long line of economically suicidal decisions made by the Indian government against its own citizens," he reportedly tweeted. "Denying world's poorest free partial Internet connectivity when today they have none, for ideological reasons, strikes me as morally wrong."

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Pew: More Americans Looking for Love Online

Online dating numbers are up in the United States, the Pew Research Center said Thursday, based on the results of a recent survey. Today, it's possible for singles from all walks of life to find a date who's compatible with them -- at least virtually -- the findings suggest. As the online dating world expands, adding ever more nuanced sites -- like The League, which targets affluent, ambitious go-getters who are looking for the same -- more people are signing up.

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Amazon Opens Lumberyard to Game Devs

Amazon on Tuesday announced that it has widened its footprint in the game industry, complementing its development studio with the Lumberyard 3D game engine. Based on core components of Crytek's CryEngine, Lumberyard will support development for PCs and consoles (Xbox One and PlayStation 4). Amazon plans to add support for mobile devices and virtual reality gear soon. The game engine, which is available in a beta build, is free of charge, and there is neither a subscription fee nor revenue-sharing model to bar entry to small development teams.

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New SourceForge Owners Start Trust Repair

SourceForge on Tuesday announced that it has pulled the plug on its DevShare program amid growing rebellion from software developers and a change of ownership. SourceForge Media announced the termination notice with a promise of other policy changes coming soon. DevShare was an opt-in revenue-sharing program for developers that was started in 2013. The program attempted to give open source software developers a monetizing stream by bundling selected software titles with the free downloads.

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Feds Put AI in the Driver's Seat

The artificial intelligence component of Google's Level 4 autonomous cars can be considered the driver, whether or not the cars are occupied by humans, the U.S. National Highway Transportation Safety Administration said in a letter released Tuesday. Level 4 full self-driving automation vehicles perform all safety-critical driving functions and monitor roadway conditions for an entire trip. Google's L4 vehicle design will do away with the steering wheel and the brake and gas pedals.

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Bill Aims to Keep States From Banning Smartphone Encryption

U.S. Reps. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and Blake Farenthold, R-Texas, last week introduced legislation to prevent states from passing laws banning the sale of smartphones with encryption capabilities. The ENCRYPT Act of 2016 provides that a state may not mandate or request that a manufacturer, developer, seller or provider of covered products design or modify security functions to allow the surveillance of their users or allow their physical search "by any agency or instrumentality of a state, a political subdivision of a state or the United States."

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Twitter Creates Advisory Panel on Tweet Speech

Twitter on Tuesday announced the formation of a panel to advise it on speech, abuse and safety issues. The Trust & Safety Council, which has more than 40 members, will be part of a new strategy to ensure that people can feel safe when they express themselves on Twitter, said Patricia Cartes, head of global policy outreach. "As we develop products, policies and programs, our Trust & Safety Council will help us tap into the expertise and input of organizations at the intersection of these issues more efficiently and quickly."

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Gadget Ogling: A Personal Padlock, a Grown-Up Desk, and an Informative Mirror

Tapplock is a padlock that unlocks when you press your finger against a sensor to let it read your print. There are other smart padlocks on the market you can unlock using your smartphone via Bluetooth, though there are a couple of points that help Tapplock stand out. First, the crowdfunding price is reasonable, at $29 for the basic version and $49 for the larger model. Second, what you get for that larger model is compelling, since it can charge your phone if you're in a bind. The battery on that one lasts up to three years on a single charge.

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Facebook Warned to Toe France's Privacy Line

CNIL, France's data protection authority, on Monday formally gave Facebook three months notice to comply with the French Data Protection Act. A working group of regulators from several countries recommended the action. On-site and online inspections, along with a documentary audit, disclosed that Facebook had failed to meet the requirements of the French Data Protection Act, CNIL said. The notice gave Facebook a laundry list of things to do within the next 90 days.

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Rosa Is a Real Powerhouse

The Rosa Desktop Fresh R series optimizes desktop usage and targets advanced users and enthusiasts looking for rich functionality. Add to that mix the default KDE flavoring and you have a compelling Linux distro that challenges your first-choice OS. The typical Rosa user already is familiar with basic Linux offerings and wants a product with a wide set of customization and personalization possibilities. That is what Rosa Desktop delivers. Rosa is a Russian company with a variety of Linux-based solutions.

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India Trades Free Basics for Internet Freedom

India's Telecom Regulatory Authority on Monday ruled in favor of Net neutrality, effectively banning Facebook's Free Basics Internet access app. "This is a very important decision for the future of the Internet in India," said Barbara van Schewick, director of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, whose paper the TRA cited in its ruling. The TRA decided "ISPs should not pick winners and losers online. The Internet is a level playing field where users, not ISPs, decide what they want to do online."

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Hacker Posts Stolen Data on FBI, Homeland Security Employees Online

The U.S. departments of Justice and Homeland Security on Monday announced they were investigating reports that a hacker broke into government computer systems and stole sensitive information about employees at the agencies. The hacker posted stolen information for about 9,000 DHS employees online Sunday and made public data on 20,000 FBI employees Monday. "We are looking into the reports of purported disclosure of DHS employee contact information," DHS said in a statement provided to TechNewsWorld by spokesperson S.Y. Lee.

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Twitter Clobbered Over Timeline Algorithm Plans

Twitter plans to introduce an algorithmic timeline, possibly this week, according to a report last week. The algorithm would organize tweets based on relevancy. Twitter users criticized the idea using the hashtag #RIPTwitter, prompting CEO Jack Dorsey to respond. "Regarding #RIPTwitter: I want you all to know we're always listening. We never planned to reorder timelines next week," he tweeted over the weekend. User discontent could be the cumulative effect of rumored change.

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New Safe Harbor Pact Offers Temporary Port in Storm

Through an eleventh-hour maneuver, the United States and the European Union last week avoided action that could have choked the movement of data between the regions and caused financial harm to U.S. companies. It may be only a temporary respite, however. The problem stems from a European Court of Justice decision in October that blew up an agreement between the regions that provided more than 4,000 U.S. companies with a "safe harbor" from strict European privacy laws when handling the information of the region's citizens.

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Old-Timey Mischief on Display at the Malware Museum

The Internet Archive on Friday cut the ribbon on its online Malware Museum, an online compendium of malware programs computer users in the 1980s and 1990s sometimes encountered. Everything old is new again, so the saying goes, and apparently that retro fascination applies to computer viruses. The museum presents examples of the viruses, complete with the messages or animations they would have shown when infecting a computer, allowing visitors to download examples and experience their own malware "infection."

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Keybase Releases Encrypted File-Sharing iPhone App

Keybase last week announced the alpha release of the Keybase app for the iPhone with a cryptographically secure file mount. Users can write data in an automatically created folder in this format: /keybase/public/username. Files written in the folder are signed automatically and appear as plain text files on computers. The folder prevents server-side and man-in-the-middle attacks, according to Keybase. Files stream in on demand; there is no syncing as there is in Dropbox, Google Drive and Box.

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Smart Email and the Path to Digital Immortality

I attended IBM Connect last week, where I checked out one of the most interesting new products you've likely never heard of -- IBM Verse. While there was a lot of discussion about how it better integrated social networking, what really intrigued me was the idea of putting cognitive computing inside an email client. "Cognitive computing" is the new way of saying "artificial intelligence," because, you know, the industry likes to change terms every once in a while just to mess with our heads. Thinking email could be incredibly powerful, though.

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Vaio's Phone Biz to Test Windows 10's Reception in Asia

Vaio on Wednesday announced Phone Biz, a Windows 10 mobile phone. The device doesn't have a SIM, leaving users free to select their own carriers. It lets users easily access corporate apps, Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange, as well as the Azure cloud, according to Vaio. The OS is synced with the latest version of Windows 10. Users can manage settings from the same Microsoft account as their PCs. The Phone Biz incorporates Microsoft's Continuum feature, which lets users connect phones to TVs or monitors.

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Google to Put Self-Driving Cars Through Rainy-Day Paces

Google on Wednesday announced that it has chosen Kirkland, Washington, as the next location to test its self-driving cars. It picked Kirkland as the third test city to give the cars more experience driving in new environments, traffic patterns and road conditions, the company said. Google has conducted testing mainly at or near its campus in Mountain View, California. Last year it expanded to Austin, Texas. Its self-driving cars have racked up 1.4 million miles, the company said, adding that people in Kirkland soon may be able to catch a glimpse of the latest test vehicle, a Lexus RX450h.

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