New US Asteroid Mining Law Could Violate International Space Treaty

President Obama last week signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which governs ownership of asteroid resources, possibly triggering a new battle in the commercial space race. Section 5103 of the Act gives U.S. companies the right to resources mined from asteroids, although it does not give them rights to the asteroids themselves. News of the president's signing drew applause from Planetary Resources, a 5-year-old asteroid mining company.

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Massive Hack Attack on Educational Toy Company Exposes Parents, Kids

Officials of several U.S. states on Monday have opened investigations into a massive data breach that occurred last month at VTech. The award-winning Hong Kong-based maker of electronic learning toys for kids on Friday announced that its Learning Lodge database was breached in a hack attack on Nov. 14. Learning Lodge lets customers download apps, learning games, e-books, and other educational content to VTech products. The personal information of nearly 5 million adults and more than 200,000 children was exposed.

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Gadget Ogling: Zippy 3D Printing, Custom-Molded Earphones, and Fast-Food Buttons

One of the current issues with 3D printing is that it can take some time to create physical versions of large or complex designs. Nexa3D's NX1 prints objects as much as 100 times faster than competitors, with printing speeds of about a centimeter in height every minute. It uses light on a certain type of resin to speed up the process. Topping up the resin seems a simpler task than with many other printers, as the NX1 uses a cartridge system instead of a manual refill process, which should help make owners' lives a little less messy.

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How Technology Could Prevent Another Paris-Like Attack

What I find fascinating is that with all of the focus members of the intelligence community place on violating our privacy, they still aren't able to stop attacks like the one in Paris. Currently they are complaining that it is our fault for implementing encryption that blocks their often-illegal views into citizens' personal lives. I think that even if encryption didn't exist, they still would be ineffective. Looking back at 911, there was no lack of intelligence indicating an attack was imminent.

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Blue Origin Rocket Sticks Landing

Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket this week made history when it landed intact in Texas. The unmanned crew capsule returned safely from a test flight that took it 330,000 feet into the air. The New Shepard could become the first reusable booster -- it's scheduled to return to space in a few months. It's now tucked into a storage facility at a launch site in West Texas. Blue Origin, founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, aims to lay the foundation for an enduring human presence in space -- a goal that reusing rocket boosters could help to achieve.

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UHD TV - What's the Damage?

TV manufacturers could have a very good holiday season, and the good times likely will continue through 2019. Sales of 4K or Ultra High Definition TV sets will exceed 330 million units by the end of 2019 -- a sharp increase from the 2 million sold in 2013, according to data released by Parks Associates. However, while the price of those sets has fallen sharply, a report released this month by the Natural Resources Defense Council contended that new UHD models use on average 30 percent more energy than their HD predecessors.

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Facebook Tests Tools to Make Breakups More Bearable

Facebook last week announced it was testing tools that will let people manage their post-breakup life on its pages. "Today social media means that you are guaranteed to run into your ex, and he or she might very well be wrapped around a new partner," relationship expert Wendy Walsh said. "Research has shown that those who don't disconnect electronically have a harder time getting over a breakup," she told TechNewsWorld. The tools, available only on mobile devices, are being tested with some users in the United States.

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Is This VR's Mainstream Moment?

Samsung last week began fulfilling orders for its Oculus-power Gear VR headset, giving U.S. consumers their first taste of Oculus VR's brand of virtual reality. International preorders have opened and have been expanding. It won't be until early next year that Oculus VR begins shipping its full-featured Oculus Rift headset, but as a Gear VR collaborator, it has been touting Samsung's mobile-driven headset. Like Google's Project Cardboard, the $99 Gear VR relies on the processing power of a smartphone.

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Vinux Enhances Productivity for Visually Impaired Users

Vinux 5.0 is a striking example of the flexibility and usability of the Linux OS. Vinux is a fully functional Linux distro that caters to blind and partially sighted users. It's based on Ubuntu Trusty Tahr 14.04.3 LTS and gives users support through 2019. The latest version was released earlier this month. It greatly improves on the usability features of other Linux distributions. By default, it provides two screen readers and Braille display support plus a community keenly tuned into the needs of sight-challenged users.

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Fitbit Amps Up Tracking Features

Fitbit on Monday announced the addition of PurePulse heart rate tracking and SmartTrack automatic exercise recognition to its Charge HR and Surge devices. The PurePulse monitoring will be activated whenever the devices are used in Exercise Mode, providing users with continuous, automatic tracking of heart rate trends over time without the need for a chest strap. SmartTrack will recognize select exercises automatically and record results to the Fitbit app to inform users about their overall activity.

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New Tech Targets Enterprise Ransomware

SentinelOne last week introduced an addition to its behavioral solution designed to address the problem of ransomware scrambling files on a computer. Ransomware has been a scourge not only for consumers, but for the enterprise, too. The malicious software can be particularly nettlesome for enterprises because they have to protect so many endpoints -- phones, tablets, laptops, desktops and servers. The company has a security scheme that uses a client app on each endpoint device that watches for malicious behavior and counters it.

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Escape From Silicon Valley

I started planning to escape the Valley a long time ago, due to very high taxes, a crumbling infrastructure, worsening crime, a massive increase in traffic, and a rather nasty water shortage problem. My wife and I originally planned to escape to Belize but found the unreliable infrastructure, lack of good medical care, and massive crime problem there were not conducive to our continued survival. Instead of Paradise, Belize looked a lot like hell once we got a chance to spend some quality time there.

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Gadget Ogling: A Dumb Watch Dock, a Smart VR Phone Case, and a Fantastic Fireball Thrower

No longer leaving it up to third-party companies to create charging docks for its Apple Watch, Apple has released its own official dock. It allows Watch owners to rest the smartwatch in nightstand mode -- a feature introduced in the latest version of the operating system that essentially turns the Watch into a bedside clock -- without tangling it up with the standard magnetic charger. The dock is a flat puck, almost like a circle bed on which to rest your precious Watch as you sleep.

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Microsoft HoloLens, Volvo to Pioneer Augmented Car Showroom Experience

Microsoft HoloLens on Thursday announced a partnership with Volvo Cars to develop a new holographic technology that could change the way consumers experience auto showrooms. The tech would let potential buyers experience an automobile in an entirely new way, suggested Scott Erickson, senior director of Microsoft HoloLens. Using Microsoft's HoloLens goggles, consumers could view safety feature demonstrations, see car customization options, and even take part in virtual test drives without leaving the showroom.

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Dojo Stands Cybersecurity Guard for Smart Homes

Dojo-Labs on Thursday introduced Dojo, a device that plugs into the router of a home network and acts as a watchdog to ensure that everything connected to the network is operating on its best behavior. The device brings some of the advanced technologies used to protect corporate networks to the home. It can prevent attacks and detect intrusions by observing how a device behaves on the network. Moreover, the longer it's connected to a network, the smarter it gets about how that network works, the company said.

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NASA Awards Space Robot R&D Projects to MIT, Northeastern

NASA on Tuesday announced it has awarded one R5 humanoid robot each to MIT and Northeastern University to conduct research on adapting them for use in space. The universities were selected from U.S. entries in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Robotics Challenge held in June. NASA seeks to engage engineers and scientists to develop and test unique solutions that will "have the potential to significantly enhance, or potentially enable, missions that we can only dream of today," said NASA's Ryan Stephan.

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Nvidia Updates Shield Tablet, Shaves $100 Off Price

Nvidia this week revealed a refreshed Shield Tablet K1 and indicated that it isn't done updating the gaming slate. One of the biggest parts of the refresh is a cut of $100 off the price of the 16-GB tablet. The original Shield Tablet was available in a $299 16-GB version and a $399 32-GB variant. There's also a new battery, replacing the fire-prone cells that caused Nvidia to recall the original Shield Tablets back in July. The refreshed Shield Tablet has picked up silicon grips, but it dropped LTE and the 32-GB variant.

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FBI, Carnegie Mellon Deny $1M Contract to Crack Tor

The FBI has denied allegations that it paid Carnegie Mellon University security researchers $1 million to crack a network designed to protect the anonymity of its users. The Tor Project, which operates the network, last week accused the FBI of cutting the CMU deal. The attack occurred from January to July 2014. The attackers discovered a way to strip the anonymity of Tor users by tracking their traffic on the network. Tor attributed the attack to CMU after a pair of researchers from that university abruptly canceled a scheduled presentation.

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Docker, Yubico Team Up to Secure App Development

Docker this week announced new security enhancements at DockerCon EU in Barcelona, Spain, including hardware signing of container images -- an industry first -- through a partnership with Yubico. Docker Content Trust offers hardware signing through support for Yubico's YubiKey. The YubiKey 4 lets Docker users digitally sign code during initial development and through subsequent updates, ensuring the integrity of Dockerized apps throughout the application pipeline, Yubico said.

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Huawei's Fast-Charging Batteries Could Solve Power Users' Problems

Huawei Technologies last week unveiled lithium-ion batteries that recharge in minutes rather than hours. The batteries, developed by Huawei's Watt Lab, recharge 10 times faster than their competitors and can reach 50 percent capacity in two to five minutes, the company said. Huawei demonstrated two models at the 56th Battery Symposium in Japan last week: a 600-mAh unit that reached 68 percent capacity in two minutes and a 3,000-mAh model that reached 48 percent capacity in five minutes.

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Google+ Tries On New Social Media Identity

Google on Tuesday reintroduced its Google+ social network with major revisions to its look and feel, as part of a last ditch effort to make the struggling site a player in a much deeper and more crowded landscape. The site has undergone a major redesign that takes away some of the bloat that slowed down the navigation process, the company said. Its new focus is to serve as a virtual gathering place for people with common interests. Google+ now puts Communities and Collections front and center, said Eddie Kessler, director of streams at Google.

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Minecraft Retools Minecraft to Teach Kids to Code

Microsoft on Monday announced that its Mojang unit's Minecraft will star in Code.org's third annual Hour of Code event in December. A 2-D tutorial version of Minecraft will introduce players ages 6 and older to simple coding, encouraging them to mine and craft by using visual programming, Microsoft said. After completing the tutorial, players will have the opportunity to engage in a bundle of 14 challenges to reinforce what they've learned.

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ISIS Mocks Anonymous' War Declaration

ISIS has rebuffed the declaration of cyberwar Anonymous issued on Sunday. "The #Anonymous hackers threatened in new video release that they will carry out a major hack operation on the Islamic state (idiots)," reads a message posted Monday in a Telegram channel believed to be affiliated with ISIS hackers, according to media reports. "What they gonna hack," it continues. "All what they can do is hacking Alansar twitter accounts, emails etc." The message includes a list of tips to counteract Anonymous' hacking attempts.

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Uber Launches 'Going My Way' Feature

Uber this week announced a feature that lets drivers set their destinations twice a day for when they only want to pick up riders traveling their way. The feature is rolling out this week in the Bay Area, reportedly in the company's hometown of San Francisco first. "We haven't announced when and where we will offer this feature next, but we are focused on rolling it out to additional markets," said Uber spokesperson Molly Spaeth. Drivers can set a destination by tapping the clipboard icon in the top corner of the Uber app.

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Paris Attacks Deepen Encryption Debate

Encryption once again has come under fire in the wake of last week's terrorist attacks in Paris. Western intelligence agencies reportedly blamed the technology for enabling communications among the attackers, and some officials renewed their calls for technology companies to give them decryption keys. However, the terrorists may have communicated through private messages on the PlayStation 4, or even during game play, camouflaging relevant statements as routine gaming chatter, according to reports.

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FBI Paid Carnegie Mellon $1M to Crack User IDs, Claims Tor

The Tor Project last week claimed the FBI paid Carnegie Mellon University $1 million to crack the anonymity of Tor users. Tor's claim appears to have been triggered by a report last week that said the FBI's arrest of an alleged member of the Silk Road 2.0 drug ring was based on "information obtained by a 'university-based research institute' that operated its own computers on the anonymous network used by Silk Road 2.0." That network was Tor, and the research institute was Carnegie Mellon, Tor said.

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Drone, Ferris Wheel Altercation a Worrying Sign of the Times

A drone crashed into the 175-foot-tall Seattle Great Wheel last week, triggering a police investigation. The Great Wheel is a ferris wheel near the downtown Seattle waterfront. No damage or injuries were reported in the crash. "I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often," commented Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. Drones have become a problem in America's skies, causing damage and personal injury and interfering with firefighters' efforts and commercial flights.

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Ubuntu Studio Is a Treasure Trove for Creative Types

Ubuntu Studio 15.10 is a one-stop Linux OS shop for most creative people. It bundles a nearly full range of multimedia content-creation applications for workflows involving audio, graphics, video, photography and publishing. The developers describe this distro as a multimedia content-creation hub for all five creative workflows. The last element -- publishing -- is the weakest link. The publishing category in terms of the traditional wordsmithing genre is missing.

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Facebook to Broaden Use of Safety Check in Disasters

Facebook faced a social media firestorm this weekend for deploying its safety check tool during Friday's terrorist attacks in Paris. The decision prompted users to ask why the technology was not deployed during similar incidents in other regions. During the rapidly unfolding Mumbai-style attacks that killed at least 129 people in Paris, large numbers of residents and visitors to the city used social media to let loved ones and officials know they were hiding from the ISIS gunmen, injured, or safe and out of harm's way.

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Microsoft Gives Gamers a New Xbox One Experience

Microsoft on Thursday began rolling out the New Xbox One Experience, delivering backward compatibility for Xbox 360 games and updating the user interface to a Windows 10 foundation. Support for legacy Xbox games is the headliner, but the roughly 1.15-GB update includes new social elements baked into a reworked interface. Microsoft could have coordinated the recent launch of a more robust version of the Xbox One with the delivery of the NXOE to sell the package as a new console bundle. Instead, it released the NXOE for free.

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Will Apple Beat the Enterprise Curse?

Given that it is basically a big iPad with a better keyboard option and stylus support, the iPad Pro has been getting decent reviews. It can be classified as a first-generation product -- and as such, it does far better than most. However, there have been a huge number of companies in Apple's space that have gone under or stalled when they switched from focusing exclusively on the consumer and tried to do IT. In fact, I can't really point to any firm that has done that well.

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Gadget Ogling: Comfy Earbuds, Barking Bots, and USB Killers

If you're a human being who listens to music using earbuds, chances are you've run into some issues along the way in keeping the infernal things nestled into your ear canal. Manufacturers have tried to find solutions, such as offering different-sized rubber molds, but we're still hewing to a few-sizes-fit-all model. Enter Revols, a company that might have the answer. Fully recognizing that we all have a unique ears, Revols has equipped its earbuds with gel-filled ends.

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Apple Faces Twitter Storm Over Mac App Security Glitch

Apple faced the wrath of legions of Mac users after it reportedly allowed a security certificate to expire, leaving customers unable to use some apps. The expiration appeared to impact a number of apps, including Acorn, Byword, Daisy Disk, Tweetbot and 1Password. It's likely that the incident occurred due to problems with the security certificate management system. "The big firms, providers of applications and services, want to maintain control of the services and software they are selling," noted Ian Trump, security lead at Logic Now.

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Ford to Test Autonomous Vehicles at Mcity

Ford on Friday announced that it will be the first automaker to test its autonomous vehicles at Mcity, a full-scale simulated urban environment that was developed as part of the University of Michigan's Mobility Transformation Center. The site will allow Ford to take advantage of the diverse roads and neighborhoods Mcity offers. "The key element in testing at Mcity is the fact that you can create situations that our engineers would rarely encounter through public road testing," said Ford spokesperson Alan Hall.

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Valve's Steam Gaming Hardware Hits Home

Valve this week rolled out the hardware phase of its road map from bedrooms and basements to living rooms and lounge areas with its long-awaited video game controller, PC link box and Steam boxes. Valve's road map to the living room began with Big Picture mode in 2011, continued with in-home streaming in 2014, and now includes the new Steam hardware. The Linux-based Big Picture mode formatted the Steam digital distribution platform for living room TVs, offering an experience similar to Xbox Live.

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Purism's Librem 13 Linux Laptop Is Sleek, Private and Secure

The combination of custom-made hardware and a tweaked Linux OS makes the Librem laptop lineup a unique offering with several innovative security features not offered in any other computer. The Librem line is a work in progress. The OS just reached version 2.0 and comes preinstalled on the hardware built with the modified Linux kernel in mind. LinuxInsider received one of the first available Librem 13-inch units for review. Our hands-on testing shows the hardware/software combo is an impressive display of the power and finesse of Linux.

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iPad Pro: The Thrill Is Gone

Apple this week began selling its iPad Pro, but the newly introduced device is failing to evoke the enthusiasm the company's line of tablets traditionally has seen. Reviewers gave the device high marks for its battery life, screen, speakers, light weight and Pen, but panned the keyboard, the lack of a touchpad and 3D Touch, its long charging times and its price. They compared it less than favorably to Microsoft's offerings and to the MacBook Air.

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Users Balk at Mobile App Permission Requests

The Pew Research Center on Tuesday released a report on permissions and mobile applications found in the Google Play store. The number of permissions requested by a mobile app can be a deal breaker for six out of 10 smartphone users, Pew found. Applications request permission from users to access a variety of functions on a smartphone -- accessing the Internet, for example, or using the device's camera. Most apps can't function without permissions, but a good number of them also personal gather data about users, Pew said.

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Google Makes Maps Useful in the Boonies

Google on Tuesday began rolling out an offline mode for Google Maps. Users can download a regional map -- say, a city, county or country -- either by tapping "download" on a search result or by going to "Offline Areas" in the Google Maps menu and tapping on the "+" button. The downloaded map will function in offline mode automatically when the user enters an area with poor or no connectivity, and it will switch back online when a connection becomes available.

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Decryption Tool Foils Linux Server Ransomware Attacks

Bitdefender on Monday released a free decryption tool designed to wrest data from the grip of a rare type of ransomware that's been plaguing Linux servers. Details for performing the decryption are available on the company's website. Essentially, the solution takes advantage of a flaw in the ransomware, which Bitdefender discovered through reverse-engineering. The ransomware attacks came to light last week, when Dr.Web reported that extortionists have been exploiting vulnerabilities in software running on Linux servers.

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Deep Learning App Targets Malware

Here's the problem with most programs aimed at killing malicious software: They need someone to tell them something's malicious. What if, however, the programs had the smarts to identify bad code on their own? That's what a company called Deep Instinct says its security solution, launched last week, can do. The offering works its magic with a technology called "deep learning." "Deep learning draws its inspiration from the human mind. It organizes itself into a structure of synthetic neurons," explained analyst Bruce Daley.

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Google Opens Floodgates for TensorFlow Development

Google on Monday announced the release of TensorFlow, its second-generation machine learning system, to the open source community. It's offering TensorFlow as a standalone library with associated tools, tutorials and examples under the Apache 2.0 license. Google uses TensorFlow in deep learning, Google Search and other applications. Apps built with TensorFlow can move seamlessly from desktops to mobile phones, and the system is ready for production.

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NSA Keeps Some Security Bugs Under Its Hat

The U.S. National Security Agency is getting a collective side-eye after posting what it characterized as proactive information: the fact that it discloses 91 percent of security vulnerabilities that pass through its internal review process. While the agency appears pleased with its newfound transparency, it's being called out en masse for the things it's not reporting -- primarily, the other 9 percent of vulnerabilities. In fact, the NSA's revelations have raised far more questions than they've answered.

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BlackBerry's Priv Puzzles the Tech World

BlackBerry on Friday released its Priv smartphone, its first Android-based device. The Android 5.1.1 Lollipop slider is driven by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 hexa-core processor and an Adreno 418 GPU. It's stocked with 3 GB of low-power RAM and 32 GB of storage. There's an 18-MP shooter on its backside and a 2-MP chat cam on its face. BlackBerry tactfully denied the existence of the device, with CEO John Chen famously saying that the company wouldn't release an Android-based device unless it found a way to secure it properly.

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Xbox Gamers Get to Replay 104 Older Titles on Xbox One

Microsoft on Monday announced that 104 catalog titles for the Xbox 360 will be fully compatible and playable on its "new" Xbox One video game system, which hit store shelves two years ago. The list of Xbox One backward-compatible games includes notable hits such as the complete Gears of Wars catalog, Assassin's Creed II, Fallout 3, Borderlands and Castle Crashers, among many others. These games will be playable on the Xbox One beginning on Nov. 12.

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Lytro's VR Camera System Promises Unprecedented Immersion

Lytro last week announced its Immerge concept, a virtual reality camera system that promises to plop people right in the center of an experience the company calls "six degrees of freedom." Lytro's Immerge harnesses the potential of light field technology, the same tech behind the clandestine Magic Leap augmented reality headset. Light field enables Immerge to capture data from all points, and viewpoints, inside any given volume of space, the company said.

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Why Tablets Are Tanking

Boy, we really have gone full circle on tablets -- and not just once. Back when the Windows tablets first came to market, a whole bunch of us predicted it wouldn't be long before they replaced all of the notebooks. I don't think they even made it to 10 percent before the tablet market collapsed, and the pre-existing forms reclaimed their shares. Then the iPad launched, and a whole bunch of new folks claimed that tablets were the future and laptops were dead. Now Apple is reporting a year-over-year decline at 20 percent. What happened?

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Gadget Ogling: An Emotional Keyboard, a Puzzling Phone, and Exquisite Headphones

To communicate online in 2015 is to have at least a passing awareness of emoji -- the colorful symbols that are endemic in social media and text messages. Inputting emoji into a post or message from a computer is often awkward, though this item might help. EmojiWorks has a physical keyboard which, at the touch of a modifier -- think ctrl, alt or command -- you can use to type emoji. A skintone changer lets you bring each icon in line with recent diversity adjustments to the various emoji images. Users can choose 47, 94 or 120 emoji to input.

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Now Facebook Users Can Tell Their Music Stories

Facebook on Thursday announced Music Stories, a feature in its iPhone app that lets users post links to music they like with comments. Clicking the link will launch a 30-second preview of the music, which is streamed from either Apple Music or Spotify. Listeners then can purchase the music from the service or save it to their account there. Facebook plans to add other streaming services to the feature. There was no word on whether it will offer Music Stories in its Android or Windows Phone apps.

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No Time to Respond to Email? Let Google Do It

Google this week unveiled Smart Reply for Gmail on iOS and Android. It uses machine intelligence and neural networks to suggest up to three possible responses for incoming email, based on the content of those emails. The system learns from users' responses to suggestions to fine-tune its offerings. It has a repository of 20,000 Smart Replies that will continue to grow with time, said Google spokesperson Emma Ogiemwanye. Smart Reply will be available in English in Google Play and Apple's App Store.

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