Oracle Pulls Plug on Java Browser Plug-In

Oracle earlier this week announced its decision to scrap its Java browser plug-in. The plug-in, which has been a frequent target of hackers, won't be included in the next version of the kit for Java developers, JDK 9, which is expected to ship in September. Oracle's action was motivated by browser makers' withdrawal of support for the plug-in. As browser vendors restrict and reduce support for plug-ins in their products, developers of applications that depend on the Java plug-in need to consider alternatives, the company said.

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Google, Movidius to Bring Deep Learning to Mobile Devices

Movidius on Wednesday announced that it's working with Google to put deep learning on mobile devices. Google will source Movidius' latest flagship chip -- the MA2450 -- and software development environment, and will contribute to Movidius' neural network technology road map in return. That could result in smartphones and other mobile devices that will be able to understand images and audio swiftly and accurately. The MA2450 is the most powerful iteration of Movidius' Myriad 2 vision processor unit.

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Google's AlphaGo Defeats Human Master of Ancient Game

Research at Google on Wednesday announced that AlphaGo has become the first computer software system to beat a human at the ancient game of Go. There are more possible positions in Go than there are the number of atoms in the universe, and it has a googol more positions than chess, Google pointed out. That complexity makes it difficult for computers to play Go. Traditional artificial intelligence methods can't handle Go, so Google researchers combined an advanced tree search with two deep neural networks to create AlphaGo.

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Your Facebook Friends Are Really Not That Into You

Most of your friends on Facebook may not care much about you at all, suggests an Oxford University study published last week. Friendships involving interactions over social networks are not that different from traditional real-world friendships, found Robin Dunbar, the professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford who conducted the research. In other words, people in your social network are no more your friends online than they would be in real life.

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Starry Eyes Speedy Internet Access

Project Decibel on Wednesday announced Starry, a company that promises easy broadband Internet access at speeds of up to 1 GB with no caps. Starry will deploy what it says is the world's first millimeter wave band for consumer Internet communications. Initial deployment will be a beta in Boston in the summer. Starry has an FCC license to run pilots in Boston and 14 other cities: New York, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Houston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Seattle, Denver and Chicago.

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Walmart Opens OneOps Cloud Management to the Masses

Walmart on Tuesday announced that it has posted the code for its OneOps cloud application life cycle management platform on GitHub. The company developed the OneOps platform for building and launching cloud-based applications across varied storage environments that change frequently. It lets e-commerce vendors deploy apps on platforms from Microsoft Azure, Rackspace and CenturyLink public clouds to private or hybrid environments built with OpenStack.

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FDA Guidelines Target IoT Medical Device Security

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration last week took a step toward addressing the threat the Internet of Things poses to patients and their data by releasing some proposed guidelines for managing cybersecurity in medical devices. "A growing number of medical devices are designed to be networked to facilitate patient care. Networked medical devices, like other networked computer systems, incorporate software that may be vulnerable to cybersecurity threats," the FDA says in its proposal.

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Suggestion Glitch Crashes Safari Browser

Apple's Safari browser has been crashing on Macs and iOS devices when users launch a search through its address bar, according to reports that surfaced Wednesday. OS X and iOS users worldwide have been affected, according to The Verge, which confirmed the problem on several iOS devices and at least one OS X machine. One of the first mentions of the glitch was a tweet by app developer Phillip Caudell, who asked if anyone else's Safari browser on the Mac mysteriously stopped working.

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GoPro Shooters Can Send Live Streams Up Periscope

GoPro on Monday announced an integration with Twitter's Periscope app that allows live streaming from a GoPro Hero4 camera. Periscope users can switch between broadcasting from their iPhone's camera to their GoPro directly from the phone screen with the touch of a button, GoPro said. The feature allows GoPro shooters to use the Periscope interface like a production switchboard, GoPro said. They can toggle between their iPhone and GoPro cameras on the fly, adding variety to video of a live event.

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3D Printing: Innovation's New Lifeblood

To many, 3D printing is little more than a toy. A toy that mostly prints toys. To others, it's a prototyping tool good for a hands-on feel of a manifested idea but not much more. Yet for a select few, 3D printing is the heart of innovation, and each new iteration is pumping the future's lifeblood. Known in the manufacturing sector as "additive manufacturing," or AM, 3D printing is used heavily in prototyping already. There is also some use of it in producing machine parts.

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Fast Times With Nelum OS

Nelum OS is a light and fast live-installable Linux distribution family offering three separate releases. The distro is a brand-new entry to the land of Linux, with its initial release posted earlier this month. It is an unusual twist on what you usually see with a Linux release. For example, the virtual desktops can be changed simply by scrolling the mouse wheel or finger scrolling the touchpad. All three flavors of Nelum Linux rely on Openbox as the window manager. Each version is based on a different Ubuntu version.

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New Little iPhone May Sprout This Spring

An iPhone with a 4-inch display and some features found in Apple's latest models will launch in March or April, according to a rumor that surfaced last week. The model reportedly will be called the "iPhone 5se" -- for "special edition" -- and will be offered at the same price point as the iPhone 5s. The iPhone 5se will have design features similar to the 5s, which was released in 2013, but it will have internal, hardware and software features gleaned from more recent models, according to the report, which cites unnamed Apple sources.

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Gadget Ogling: Super Strollers, Posture Prodders, and Portable Projectors

Regular readers will know that I am not a parent, so you might wonder why I'm including a self-propelling stroller in this week's cavalcade of riches. The answer is elementary: It's a smashing idea. Granted, it's maybe because I don't have a child that I think as much. Aside from pushing itself along the sidewalk, the Smartbe Intelligent Stroller can warm bottles, charge devices and play music. It apparently can propel itself uphill and keep pace with you if you're running. At $399 for early crowdfunding backers, it seems decent value.

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DARPA Challenges Researchers to Link Human Brains With Computers

The United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, last week announced a new program that aims to build a connection between the human brain and the digital world. To achieve the goals of the Neural Engineering System Design program, DARPA has invited proposals to design, build, demonstrate and validate a human-computer interface that can record from more than 1 million neurons and stimulate more than 100 thousand neurons in the brain in real time.

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Samsung Rolls Out Stylish Gear S2 Classic Smartwatches

Samsung on Monday began a global rollout of the latest versions of its Gear S2 Classic smartwatch, hitting China first. There are two models in the Gear S2 Classic New Edition line -- one with 18K rose gold plating and the other with a platinum finish. They have ivory and black genuine leather bands, respectively. The watches' new faces feature characters from the Peanuts comic strip, as well as designs created by artists including Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Twisting the bezel changes the face.

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Panel: Time Is Running Out to Address Killer Robot Threat

The rise of autonomous war machines is outpacing policies and technological countermeasures, weapons and robotics experts warned last week at the World Economic Forum. Autonomous weaponry potentially is a $20 billion industry that has taken root in 40 countries, said BAE Systems Chairman Roger Carr. He was one of four panelists at the session titled "What If: Robots Go to War?" The others were Angela Kane of the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, robot ethics expert Alan Winfield, and UC Berkeley professor Stuart Russell.

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How Trump Wins: Master Manipulator, Meet Analytics

Given President Obama's success in the last two elections -- particularly how he out-executed Romney with analytics -- I was convinced that we would see a major emphasis on its use in this election season. It seemed that Clinton, in particular, would have been drawn to it after Obama used it to defeat her in the 2008 primaries. Although some of the PACs have embraced analytics, I haven't seen a similar effort on the part of any candidate in either party. However, when it comes to the money each candidate has spent, Trump stands out.

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Snap-Happy Trojan Targets Linux Servers

Security researchers at Dr.Web on Tuesday revealed details of the Trojan Linux.Ekoms.1, which takes screen shots and records audio to acquire sensitive and personal information, mostly from Linux servers. Malware for Linux is becoming more diverse and includes spyware programs, ransomware and Trojans designed to carry out distributed denial-of-service attacks, according to Dr.Web. Researchers did not assess the severity of the threat once the malware infects computers.

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Facebook Opens Sports Stadium

Facebook on Thursday announced its new Sports Stadium -- built with no taxpayer dollars or city leases required. About 650 million sports fans already make Facebook the world's largest stadium, the company reasoned. The new hub will compile and chronologize game-related content in real time so that "you can get the feeling you're watching the game with your friends even when you aren't together," said Steve Kafka, a product manager at Facebook. The hub itself is organized by tabs labeled "Matchup," "Friends," "Experts" and "Stats."

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Brave Browser Promises to Defend Users' Privacy

Brave Software, helmed by Brendan Eich, who cofounded Mozilla and created the JavaScript programming language, on Tuesday released the 0.7 developer version of its Brave browser. Brave is an open source project that promises to block Internet greed and ugliness, while improving speed and protecting privacy. Basically, it blocks ads containing pixels and cookies that track users and load stuff onto their devices without their knowledge. Malvertising won't get onto users' devices because the EFF's HTTPS Everywhere is integrated into the browser.

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Chrome Browser to Blaze With Brotli

Google Chrome users will get faster Web access soon through the Brotli open source compression algorithm, which has been rolled out to the M49 release of Chrome. That's in Canary -- which is designed for devs -- so it's not clear when Brotli will surface in the Chrome browser. Brotli, which was introduced in September, gives 20 to 26 percent higher compression ratios over Google's 2-year-old Zopfli algorithm and provides faster page loads, the company said.

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Zero-Day Flaw Puts Millions of Linux Machines, Android Devices at Risk

Tens of millions of Linux PCs and servers, as well as 66 percent of all Android mobile devices, are vulnerable to a zero-day flaw that could allow users with lower-level privileges to gain root access, according to Perception Point, which announced its discovery last week. The local privilege escalation vulnerability, which affects Linux Kernel v3.8 and higher, has existed since 2012, the firm said. However, SMEP and SMAP will make it difficult to exploit Linux boxes, and Android devices are protected by SELinux, Perception Point noted.

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GM Bug Program Gets Mixed Notices

Two white-hat hackers, Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, made headlines last year when they demonstrated how they could hijack the control systems of a moving motor vehicle over the Internet. The move got the attention of the auto industry, and last week General Motors put in place a program to encourage more digital dabblers to alert the company when they find bugs in GM vehicles. Working with HackerOne, GM published a set of guidelines for submitting flaws to the company.

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Child Laborers Mine for Cobalt Used in Tech Gadgets

Amnesty International and African Resources Watch have issued a report alleging that the supply chains of major electronics companies -- including Apple, Sony and Samsung -- included cobalt mined by child laborers in Africa. The companies have failed to make basic checks to halt the practice, the report claims. The report traces the harvesting and sale of cobalt in the poverty-stricken Democratic Republic of Congo -- where children as young as seven work the mines -- for use in lithium-ion batteries that power smartphones and electric cars.

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SpaceX Finds Silver Lining in Failed Sea Landing

SpaceX this week failed in its third attempt to land a rocket on an ocean platform. The company has landed a reusable rocket on land successfully, but it has stepped up its efforts to land at sea. The latest attempt, though not successful, was a step forward, SpaceX said. It began at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The Falcon 9 rocket was supposed to deliver its payload, its primary objective, and then land on a drone ship out in the Pacific Ocean. The rocket stuck the landing, but it touched down too hard and broke a leg.

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Ukraine Mounts Investigation of Kiev Airport Cyberattack

Ukrainian officials earlier this week said they had launched a probe into the source of a cyberattack that targeted a Kiev Airport. The attack may be related to the BlackEnergy malware attacks that recently targeted Ukrainian infrastructure facilities, apparently from Russia. CERT-UA on Monday warned system administrators to be on the alert for the presence of BlackEnergy malware. The evidence shows a clear link to the BlackEnergy malware that took down utility companies and other targets in recent months, said Eset.

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Reading, Writing and Minecraft?

Microsoft on Tuesday announced its acquisition of MinecraftEDU, one of the building blocks for its upcoming Minecraft: Education Edition. MinecraftEDU, developed by Teacher Gaming, launched in 2011 as a version of Minecraft enhanced for the classroom. Microsoft has used the lessons learned from MinecraftEDU to expand Minecraft: Education Edition's feature set, the company said. Minecraft: Education Edition can assist in teaching all subjects, ranging from math and physics to history and language.

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Phishing Attack Could Net LastPass Credentials

LastPass has boosted security for its users after a security researcher alerted the company of a phishing attack he devised to steal users' login and two-factor authentication credentials. Sean Cassidy, CTO of Praesidio, demonstrated the phishing attack, which he calls "LostPass," last week at ShmooCon. "We think this is a very serious problem for two main reasons," said Praesidio CEO Edgardo Nazario. "First, LastPass is a very popular password manager. Second, the phishing attack we uncovered is fairly simple to implement and execute."

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Gadget Ogling: Baring Souls, Soaking Up Sound, and Tracking Babes

As time advances, more responsibilities seep into our lives. We get wrapped up in our own worlds, and don't necessarily make enough time to spend with the friends and family members who've been important parts of our worlds for decades. Concepter's Soul time tracker seeks to make us more conscious of the time we spend with those who matter most to us. It comes as a wristband or keyfob with Bluetooth connectivity, which is simple enough. The real essence here is in the accompanying app.

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Deepin Takes Linux to New Depths

The latest release of the Linux distro now called "Depth OS" deserves serious consideration. It is fast, reliable and innovative, with an impressive homegrown desktop design dubbed "Deepin Desktop Environment." Depth OS has a bit of an identity problem. It's not well known outside Asia and Europe, but that's not the major cause of confusion. The problem is that the open source community that developed the distro seems to have a difficult time deciding what to call it.

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Microsoft Prods Skylake Users to Take the Windows 10 Plunge

Microsoft last week announced that within the next 18 months, it will end support for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 on machines equipped with Intel's 6th generation Core processors, also known as "Skylake." As of mid-July next year, Windows 10 will be the only supported Windows platform on Skylake systems, and only the most critical security fixes will be released for earlier versions of Windows -- and then only if the fixes don't cause compatibility problems for non-Skylake systems running Windows 7 and 8.1.

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Pokken Tournament to Kick Off in March

Nintendo last week announced that "Pokkén Tournament" will be available worldwide for Wii U on March 18. The Pokémon-themed fighting game, developed by Bandai Namco and published by Nintendo, will retail for $60. For the first production run of "Pokkén Tournament" copies, Nintendo is tossing in a Shadow Mewtwo amiibo card. When used with a Wii U gamepad, the amiibo card will unlock Shadow Mewtwo as a playable character. This year, the 20th anniversary of Pokémon, also will see the release of "Pokémon GO."

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What the PC Industry Could Learn From the NRA

One of the fascinating things about the NRA is that buyers of guns think the organization represents them, when in fact its mission is to represent gun sellers -- not gun buyers -- and certainly never gun buyers against gun sellers. Guns for consumers largely have been banned in most of the world, with the exception of the U.S., which uniquely has the NRA. This likely makes the NRA the most effective industry association in history. The PC industry, which is facing yet another decline, could learn a lot from the NRA.

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Sony Builds Smart Home Hub Into Ceiling Light

Sony this week announced its Multifunctional Light, a ceiling lamp that's kitted out with sensors to talk to smart things. It includes sensors for motion, illumination, temperature and humidity. There's also the requisite WiFi radio, a memory card slot, a condenser microphone, and an infrared controller for air conditioners. The lamp form factor offers convenient placement, said Sony Electronics spokesperson John Dolak. "We gave thought to where we could install it so that it would work as well as possible."

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OpenSSH Flaw Could Leak Crypto Keys

Qualys on Thursday reported a flaw in the OpenSSH client that could let a hacker steal the client's private crypto keys. The bug is the result of an undocumented feature called "roaming" that exists in version 5.4, released March 8, 2010, and above. It's one of two vulnerabilities that a malicious SSH server or a trusted but compromised server can exploit, Qualys said. The other is a heap-based buffer overflow. OpenSSH issued a fix for the information leak Thursday.

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NASA Advances Mission to Protect Earth From Asteroids

NASA last week announced that it has established the Planetary Defense Coordination Office to formalize its efforts to detect and track near-Earth objects. The PDCO will supervise all NASA-funded projects to find and characterize asteroids and comets that pass near Earth's orbit around the sun. It will issue notices of close passes and warnings of any detected potential impacts, and will work with the Department of Defense, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and other U.S. and international agencies to respond to potential impacts.

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Dronecode Project Gets More Wind Beneath Its Wings

The Linux Foundation this week announced an expansion of the Dronecode project with investments from new members and the creation of three technical working groups. The foundation launched the open source project in 2014 in an effort to create a unified platform for commercial drone technology. Twenty-seven companies have joined Dronecode since, bringing membership to 51, officials said. New technical working groups will focus on areas of development the community views as critical to advancing the project's mission.

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Google's Self-Driving Cars Still Need Human Touch

Google's self-driving cars showed major safety improvements over the past year -- but there were dozens of incidents when test drivers had to intervene, the company said in a report recently filed with California regulators. There were 272 so-called immediate manual control disengagements due to a failure of the autonomous car technology, between September 2014 and November 2015, Google said in its report to the California Department of Motor Vehicles. However, the rate of that type of disengagement dropped significantly over the past year.

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Privacy as a Service Advocates Promise Better Data Protection

There's been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth about the Sisyphean task of protecting privacy in the Digital Age, but that hasn't stopped innovators from searching for ways to preserve it. One of the latest ideas to emerge in the field is Privacy as a Service. As with many emerging technologies, the definition of "PaaS" -- which undoubtedly will be confused with Platform as a Service -- is in flux.The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency sees PaaS as a way to share data safely while preserving privacy.

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Researchers May Have Licked Flaming Lithium-Ion Battery Problem

Incorporating a polymer switching material into lithium-ion batteries could prevent their overheating due to a process known as "thermal runaway," according to Stanford researchers. Lithium-ion batteries consist of an anode, a cathode, a separator and a flammable electrolyte. The separator melts when a large amount of heat is generated by overcharging or shorting, ultimately resulting in a thermal runaway. Pressures and temperatures can rise inside cells too fast to control using existing safety mechanisms.

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EFF Urges Revival of Human Rights Case Against Cisco

The Electronic Frontier Foundation on Monday pressed to revive a lawsuit against Cisco Systems for violating human rights in China, in a brief filed with a U.S. Court of Appeals. Members of Falun Gong, a religious group persecuted in China, originally filed the lawsuit in 2011, but a federal district court in California dismissed it in 2014. The federal appeals court now is considering a challenge to that dismissal. "We applaud the role technology companies play in spreading the benefits of the digital age around the world," the EFF wrote in an amicus brief filed with the appellate court.

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Black Duck Intros Container Scanning

Black Duck Software on Tuesday announced it has added to its Hub software container-scanning capabilities that let users map open source security flaws for applications, Linux distros, and other software in Docker and other Linux containers. Adding a containerized scanner to a Docker host enables automatic identification of known open source vulnerabilities in all layers of containers on that host. Black Duck "maps known open source vulnerabilities" and monitors software for new flaws, said Brian Carter, director of strategic communications.

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Administration, Silicon Valley Bigs Meet to Strategize on ISIS

Obama administration officials last week met with senior executives from several leading Silicon Valley firms in a summit on how to combat the proliferation of terrorist communications on social media networks. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, FBI Director James Comey, and John Carlin, assistant attorney general for national security, represented the DoJ. The meeting was part of a larger strategy the administration announced last week, geared toward cracking down on violent extremism.

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Microsoft Puts Legacy IE Browsers Out to Pasture

Microsoft on Tuesday ended technical support for the older versions of its legacy Internet Explorer browser, placing at risk millions of users who -- despite extensive warnings -- have not upgraded to the latest version of Internet Explorer or the free install of Windows 10. The support expiration means that customers using IE 8, 9 and 10 no longer will receive technical support and security updates. Users who fail to upgrade to the latest version of IE or to Edge Users who fail to upgrade to the latest version of IE or to Edge will be at risk.

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ESA Fails to Rouse Philae Lander

DLR, the German Aerospace Center, this week vainly tried to reawaken the dormant Philae robotic probe, which achieved the first-ever soft landing on a comet nucleus in 2014. DLR sent a command to Philae to spin up its flywheel, which had stabilized the lander during its descent onto the comet. DLR hoped that might give Philae some angular momentum to better align itself with the sun and possibly shake some dust from its solar panels so it could recharge its batteries, which have run down.

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ProPublica Launches News Site on Dark Web

ProPublica last week reportedly launched what's believed to be the first major news site on the dark Web. The site's purpose reportedly is to maximize the privacy of readers. The Tor hidden service goes beyond SSL in that visits to sites are hidden from eavesdroppers and Internet service providers. Anyone monitoring the various Tor nodes can track visitors who use a Tor browser to view ProPublica's regular site. Using the Tor hidden service retains visitors' anonymity.

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Ford's Self-Driving Cars Brave Ice and Snow

Ford on Monday announced that it has begun conducting the automobile industry's first autonomous vehicle tests in snow and icy conditions at Mcity. The company is using Mcity -- a full-scale, 32-acre simulated real-world urban environment that was developed as part of the University of Michigan's Mobility Transformation Center -- to test vehicles in a variety of weather conditions throughout the year. Roughly 70 percent of U.S. residents live in regions that get some snow or other inclement weather, Ford said.

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Solus Project's Virtues Begin and End With Stability

The Solus Project is much like the little engine that still can't function. Version 1.0 was released last month as the first stable release from the twice-revamped Linux distro. Solus is built from scratch for the x86_64 architecture around a rewritten Budgie homemade desktop environment. Budgie is an open source project in its own right. It offers a simplified approach to implementing the look and feel of the older-style GNOME 2 functionality. Version 1.0 does work out of the gate. It does little to impress beyond not crashing, however.

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Behind the Scenes at CES

CES surprised me again this year. For a show that comes too early in the year for most buyers and companies, it still stood out as having some truly amazing things. It will be remembered for showcasing the birth of personal flight vehicles, along with a Tesla-beating car, and Ford showing how it could do what Apple couldn't. Surprises ranged from the return of a tech icon and the return of an iconic brand to a smart blender, and to a mystery phone that everyone was talking about but no one seemed to see.

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Gadget Ogling: Fitbit's Smartwatch, Super Home Movies, and Flying Machines

Fitbit found great success this past holiday season, and it's keeping up the momentum with its first smartwatch. The Fitbit Blaze includes a continuous heart-rate monitor, a connected GPS, and a multisport mode that offers performance data for certain activities, with a feature that recognizes the type of workout or sport and tracks it appropriately. Still, the Blaze stands out almost more for what it doesn't do. It adds call management, texts, music control, and some other notifications, but you can't use most typical apps.

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