The decade-old OS has slowly been losing more users to Windows 7, but January marked a small resurgence in its grip on the market, according to stats out today from NetApplications. For the month, Windows XP grabbed 47.19 percent of all OS users, inching up from 46.5 percent in December. At the same time, Windows 7 saw its […]
Intel-owned McAfee has released Mobile Security 2.0, which allows users of Android-based smartphones and tablets to keep better track of what applications are up to, the company said on Monday. Today, many of Android’s perceived security weaknesses stem from the openness of Android Market, and the availability of rogue applications. McAfee has taken that to […]
Has a slow Web been getting you down lately? Just imagine if your multibillion-dollar business depended on it, as Google’s does. Then imagine the glee in Google’s corridors at a significant new victory in the company’s attempt to build a Web-accelerating technology it calls SPDY into the Internet. Earlier today, Mark Nottingham, chairman of the […]
The FBI has busted the alleged operators of Internet locker service Megaupload, which had become one of the most popular video destinations on the Web, according to a statement from the U.S. Justice Department and FBI. Seven people have been named in an indictment and four suspects have been taken into custody, according to the […]
Hackers have targeted the US government and copyright organisations following the shutdown of the Megaupload file-sharing website. The Department of Justice (DoJ), FBI and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) among others have been bombarded with internet traffic. Web links have been been distributed which, when clicked, make the user’s computer […]
Three of the Internet’s most popular destinations–Google, Wikipedia, and Craigslist--launched an audacious experiment in political activism this evening by urging their users to protest a pair of Hollywood-backed copyright laws. Wikipedia’s English-language pages went completely black at 9 p.m. PT, with a splash page saying “the U.S. Congress is considering […]
The Consumer Electronics Show kicks off in Las Vegas next Tuesday, and gadget makers are getting ready to show off their latest tech products for the coming year. Every year, a few big product trends emerge. In 2011, it was all about Android tablets; in 2010, 3D televisions and e-readers dominated the show; and in […]
Next year is one of those years that can’t come soon enough for Microsoft. It’s not that 2011 was a particularly difficult year. The company posted record revenue for the fiscal year that ended June 30. And its 2-year-old PC operating system, Windows 7, hit 500 million copies sold, further embedding it as the most […]
Here’s a New Year’s resolution that you’ll want to keep: pay less for nearly everything you buy for your business. I’m talking computers, printers, tablets, hard drives, software–the works! Easier said than done, right? Wrong. There’s actually a ridiculously simple, but little known, way to save money on most online purchases: start them at a […]
Claiming that the timing of the event meshes poorly with the company’s product launches, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Corporate Communications Frank X. Shaw announced on Tuesday that after CES 2012, Microsoft would no longer deliver a keynote address or have a large booth at the annual trade fair. CES’s organizers, the Consumer Electronics Associati […]
MIT‘s Computer Science and Artificial Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which I toured Friday, is piled high with all kinds of hardware, including laptops, unmanned submarines, and mechanical limbs. But when it comes to equipping robots with artificial eyes and ears, robotics hackers are clearly enamored with the Kinect motion-sensing controller and sensors like it.
The Kinect motion-sensing controller is attached to the head of the humanoid PR2 robot as it tries to bake cookies. It’s also attached to a robotic wheelchair, as well as unmanned vehicles for exploring the ocean and the air. For robot builders, Kinect’s depth camera provides a relatively cheap set of eyes–crucial to giving them more autonomy–that plug in nicely to onboard computers.
“Kinect costs $150 and replaces $7,000 in sensors,” said mechanical engineering student Mario Bollini. And plugging the control into a robot–Bollini is working with Willow Garage’s PR2 robot–and writing software for it is straight-forward, he said.
In another effort, the Kinect motion-sensing controller is attached to a wheelchair to improve automated navigation. Researchers are writing algorithms that would allow a person to teach the wheelchair the ins and outs of a nursing home by following a person around or taking voice commands.
The depth camera of Kinect can also be used to navigate environments where robots can’t take advantage of GPS. The Robust Robotics Group at MIT and a team at the University of Washington have equipped a quadrotor, which is a four-propeller helicopter, with a Kinect motion-sensing controller to create a three-dimensional map of a location, which could be a building post-earthquake.
As the system flies around, the Kinect sensor sends out an infrared beam and, based on the reflections, can start to build, point by point, a colored map of an indoor or outdoor space in software. The cameras also allow the quadrotor to avoid colliding into other objects.
All that sensor data requires some hefty onboard processing. The Robust Robotics Group’s machine, which is about as wide as a pizza box, has two computers, including one that’s about as powerful as a laptop processor, according to a researcher.
Giving robots a better way to understand their environment with off-the-shelf products is helping lead to more capable robots. iRobot CEO Colin Angle said because of its low cost and capabilities, the sensor in the Kinect controller is “incredibly disruptive” because of its consumer electronics price.
For its part, Microsoft is trying to attract more developers to use Kinect for robotic applications and is upgrading the hardware so that it can better “see” very close objects rather than have to rely on a separate sensor.
“Microsoft will continue researching even better Kinect hardware. This means that 3D depth data is now here to stay, so sharpen up your 3D geometry skills and get cracking on applications that take full advantage of these new devices,” said Trevor Taylor, program manager for Microsoft Robotics in a recent blog.
Congratulations to Allegiance Bank Texas’, Scott Lester, WINNER of the Percento Technologies drawing at the 2011 IBAT’s 37th Annual Convention, this week at the Westin La Cantera Resort in San Antonio, Texas. Mr. Lester won $100 Cash Gift Certificate.
LAS VEGAS–Facebook‘s online privacy woes are well-known. But here’s an offline one: its massive database of profile photos can be used to identify you as you’re walking down the street.
A Carnegie Mellon University researcher today described how he assembled a database of about 25,000 photographs taken from students’ Facebook profiles. Then he set up a desk in one of the campus buildings and asked willing volunteers to peer into Webcams.
The results: facial recognition software put a name to the face of 31 percent of the students after, on average, less than three seconds of rapid-fire comparisons.
In a few years, “facial visual searches may become as common as today’s text-based searches,” says Alessandro Acquisti, who presented his work in collaboration with Ralph Gross and Fred Stutzman at the Black Hat computer security conference here.
As a proof of concept, the Carnegie Mellon researchers also developed an iPhone app that can take a photograph of someone, pipe it through facial recognition software, and then display on-screen that person’s name and vital statistics.
This has “ominous risks for privacy” says Acquisti, an associate professor of information technology and public policy at the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University. Widespread facial recognition tied to databases with real names will erode the sense of anonymity that we expect in public, he said.
Another test compared 277,978 Facebook profiles (the software found unique faces in about 40 percent) against nearly 6,000 profiles extracted from an unnamed dating Web site.
About 1 in 10 of the dating site’s members–nearly all of whom used pseudonyms–turned out to be identifiable.
Facebook isn’t the only source of profile data, of course. LinkedIn or Google+ might work. But because of its vast database and its wide-open profile photos, Facebook was the obvious choice. (Facebook’s privacy policy says: “Your name and profile picture do not have privacy settings.”)
Facial recognition technology, which has been developing in labs for decades, is finally going mainstream. Face.com opened its doors to developers last year; the technology is built into Apple’s Aperture software and Flickr. Google bought a face-recognition technology in the last few weeks, and Facebook’s automated photo-tagging has drawn privacy scrutiny.
In the hands of law enforcement, however, face recognition can raise novel civil liberties concerns. If university researchers can assemble such an extensive database with just Facebook, police agencies or their contractors could do far more with DMV or passport photographs–something that the FBI has been doing for years. (The U.S. Army partially funded the Carnegie Mellon research.)
Acquisti is the first to admit that the technology isn’t perfect. It works best with frontal face photos, not ones taken at an angle. The larger the database becomes, the more time comparisons take, and the more false-positive errors arise.
On the other hand, face recognition technology is advancing quickly, especially for nonfrontal photos. “What we did on the street with mobile devices today will be accomplished in less intrusive ways tomorrow,” he says. “A stranger could know your last tweet just by looking at you.”
Google’s Street View cars collected the locations of millions of laptops, cell phones, and other Wi-Fi devices around the world, a practice that raises novel privacy concerns, CNET has confirmed.
The cars were supposed to collect the locations of Wi-Fi access points. But Google also recorded the street addresses and unique identifiers of computers and other devices using those wireless networks and then made the data publicly available through Google.com until a few weeks ago.
The French data protection authority, known as the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) recently contacted CNET and said its investigation confirmed that Street View cars collected these unique hardware IDs. In March, CNIL’s probe resulted in a fine of 100,000 euros, about $143,000.
The confirmation comes as concerns about location privacy appear to be growing. Apple came under fire in April for recording logs of approximate location data on iPhones, and eventually released a fix. That controversy sparked a series of disclosures about other companies’ location privacy practices, questions and complaints from congressmen, a pair of U.S. Senate hearings, and the now-inevitable lawsuits seeking class action status.
A previous CNET article, published June 15 and triggered by the research of security consultant Ashkan Soltani, was the first to report that Google made these unique hardware IDs–called MAC addresses–publicly available through a Web interface. Google curbed the practice about a week later.
But it was unclear at the time whether Google’s location database included the hardware IDs of only access points and wireless routers or client devices, such as computers and mobile phones, as well.
Anecdotal evidence suggested they had been swept up. Alissa Cooper, chief computer scientist at the Center for Democracy and Technology and co-chair of an Internet Engineering Task Force on geolocation, said her 2009 home address was listed in Google’s location database. Nick Doty, a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley who co-teaches the Technology and Policy Lab, found that Google listed his former home in the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle.
“It would be helpful to have some clarity about why and how (a hardware address) got in there so people can act accordingly,” says Soltani, the security researcher.
Google declined repeated requests for comment for this article over a period of more than a week. In a statement last month, the search company said only that “we collect the publicly broadcast MAC addresses of Wi-Fi access points,” which addressed only current and not past practices.
Google does not provide any method, sometimes called an opt-out mechanism, that would allow people who don’t want their unique hardware IDs in the database to remove them. Instead of using Street View cars, Google new “crowdsources” its location database by using Android phones.
The most likely explanation of how the Wi-Fi devices were included is the simplest: Just as an accident of programming led to Street View cars collecting (in relatively few cases) the contents of unencrypted wireless communications, client hardware addresses were also vacuumed up. Then they were added to Google’s geolocation database, which was publicly available without access restrictions until late June.
Wi-Fi-enabled devices, including PCs, iPhones, iPads, and Android phones, transmit a unique hardware identifier to anyone within a radius of approximately 100 to 200 feet. If someone captured or already knew that unique address because they had access to the device, Google’s application programming interface, or API, revealed where that device was located, a practice that can reveal personal information including home or work addresses or even the addresses of restaurants frequented.
To be sure, it’s not always easy to learn a target’s MAC address. It’s generally not transmitted over the Internet. But anyone within Wi-Fi range can record it, and it’s easy to narrow down which MAC addresses correspond to which manufacturer. Someone, such as a suspicious spouse, who can navigate to the About screen on an iPhone can obtain it that way too.
Kim Cameron, Microsoft’s chief identity architect until earlier this year, had long suspected that Street View cars vacuumed up the hardware addresses of devices using a Wi-Fi connection. In a June 2010 essay that analyzed an independent report (PDF) of Street View data collection, Cameron said he believed that Google recorded the locations and MAC addresses of far more than just fixed Wi-Fi access points.
Marc Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., said he has concerns about the legality of intercepting the hardware addresses of devices using Wi-Fi connections.
“The fact that other companies such as Skyhook may have engaged in this behavior, which seems to be Google’s best defense, doesn’t make it lawful,” Rotenberg said. “What it does suggest is that there’s more to the investigation of Street View.”
In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission ended its investigation of Street View’s accidentally-broad data collection last October without levying a fine.
Congratulations to Integrity Bank’s Hazem A. Ahmed, WINNER of the Percento Technologies drawing at the 2011 IBAT Leadership Conference last week at the Hyatt Hill Country Resort in San Antonio, Texas. Mr. Ahmed won the Kodak PlaySport Zx5 Video Camera.
The Internet’s overseers today approved a plan to dramatically expand the number “generic top-level domains,” or GTLDs, as soon as the end of 2012. There are only 22 such GTLDs today–others include .edu, .mil, and .biz–but the expansion could add dozens or potentially even hundreds more.
Among other implications, that means new opportunities and new complications for trademark holders.
“It opens up [what's] the right of the dot,” said Rod Beckstrom, chief executive of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, speaking at a press conference in Singapore after the ICANN board‘s vote. “When you think .com, .net, think .open to new ideas.”
The move will give a completely new look to Internet addresses. Domains can range from broad terms such as .auto to specific ones such as .canon.
Thus, the blessing and the curse that are new GLTDs: companies get new opportunities to reinforce their brand names, but at the same time it means trademark holders could face expensive new challenges in defending their trademarks.
ICANN has worked to mitigate these issues, for example with a trademark clearinghouse to track registered names. And there are consequences that extend as far as ICANN canceling a contract with a registrar that cooperates with a “bad actor,” said outgoing ICANN Chairman Peter Dengate Thrush.
“We’ve created brand-new system to allow…a very rapid takedown” of a domain found to be infringing trademarks, Dengate Thrush said. “The tradeoff is…if someone brings a case, it’s got to be argued and proved to a pretty high standard.”
Likely new domains for which ICANN expects applications include .eco, .green, .berlin, and .paris, ICANN said, and the new system accommodates names written in native scripts such as those used in China and Japan.
ICANN will accept applications from registries that want to operate new top-level domains from January 12, 2012 to April 12, 2012. It’s not for the faint of heart: There’s an application fee of $185,000, it costs $25,000 a year to operate the registry, and other fees are possible, too.
Those fees are very significant. Trademark holders wanting to protect their intellectual property might feel obliged to try to set up a registry of their own to ward off a new class of cybersquatters. And in some cases, rights to a TLD registry might be decided through an auction, which potentially could increase costs in an unpredictable way.
But it’s a big opportunity, too, for those who want their names in the public eye. Web addresses could get more of a brand-name look, and e-mails could carry more weight as being from a specific company.
Matthew Sammon, a partner at patent and trademark law firm Marks & Clerk, looks at the sunny side.
“Large companies like Coca-Cola and Google have been waiting years for this opportunity to fully brand their web addresses. We’re likely to see every brand that can applying for their own domain suffix,” Sammon said. “The lengthy and costly procedure involved in the application for the new domain suffixes should help to keep would-be cyber-squatters out of the process.”
LOS ANGELES–Nintendo got the next wave of console wars started today with the introduction of the next entry to its arsenal, the Wii U, at the company’s E3 presentation.
The new console, with an iPad-like controller, will be available next year. That was a bit of a surprise, given that many industry watchers expected it could arrive as soon as this holiday season.
The company didn’t offer the price of the console or any technical specifications. But it nevertheless wowed a partisan audience at the Nokia Theater here in Los Angeles with a video of novel new gameplay. The company never showed the device itself or any live demonstrations of the console or controller.
But in the video, Nintendo showed how gamers could use a TV screen and the screen on the controller at the same time to play games, and how they could use each on its own. Using both screens, for example, a gamer playing video golf put the new controller on the ground, where it became a sand trap with a ball in it. The player took a swing with a Wii controller and the ball flew onto the TV screen and landed on the green.
In battle games, players can flick throwing stars at opponents with their finger on the new controller. The weapon then flies onto the television screen.
Using the screen separately, gamers could play a traditional board game like Othello, where they move chips over a the board by touching the screen. And they can also use the screen for video calls and for surfing the Web. The controller features a 6.2-inch screen, has a rumble feature, a microphone, two speakers, an accelerometer, gyroscope, and a front-facing camera.
Nintendo Global President Satoru Iwata said the company expects the console can be loved by hardcore and casual gamers alike.
“Mental boundaries still exist in how game systems are defined,” Iwata said. “What we haven’t achieved yet is a game platform that is equally satisfying to both game players. That’s what we hope to provide with our new game system.”
Iwata said Nintendo plans to accomplish the goal with a console system that is both deeper and wider. At launch, it will have games for casual players such as Lego City Stories, and hardcore titles such as Assassin’s Creed and Batman: Arkham City.
“It will let everyone see games in a different way,” Iwata said. “The goal of innovation is to solve every type of play. I believe our new platform is a major step to reaching our goal.”
Game changer?
It was easily the most newsworthy and creative offering at E3 yet, surpassing the news from yesterday’s Microsoft and Sony briefings. And even though there were few specifics about the console for the public, Nintendo partners lined up to rave about it for the company’s presentation.
The chief executive of Electronic Arts, John Riccitiello, joined Nintendo executives on stage–the first time he’s done that at E3, he noted.
What brings us together today is a breakthrough in our relationship based on a stunning new breakthrough in game play,” Riccitiello said.He envisions gamers using the Wii U to call plays in football on the small controller while playing the game itself on the larger TV screen. And he expects to use the online features to let EA gamers connect to online content and extend their play to social networks.
In April, Nintendo announced plans for the new console. The company put out a three-paragraph statement, offering few details.
Money matters
Much is riding on Nintendo’s new hardware. The game company has suffered financially of late, posting a 29 percent drop in revenue to $12.3 billion in its fiscal year that ended March 31. Earnings slid 66 percent to $946.7 million.
Those problems start with the lagging performance of the Wii. Even though it’s the reigning console champ, having sold 86.7 million units worldwide compared to 54 million Xbox 360s and 50.6 million PlayStation 3s, according to independent analyst VGChartz.com, the Wii’s sales have been in decline.
In the last fiscal year, the once ground-breaking console sold slightly more than 15 million units, down from 20 million sold a year earlier. By comparison, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 sales continues to grow year-over-year. Sales of Nintendo’s DS handheld slid to 17 million units, down from 27 million.
And Nintendo doesn’t expect improvement this current fiscal year. The company has said it expects to sell 13 million Wii units and 11 million DS units worldwide in the period.
Even its newest hardware, the 3DS, a handheld that offers 3D images without the need for special glasses, has underperformed. Nintendo missed its target of selling 4 million 3DS units in the last fiscal year, selling just 3.6 million devices.
Last week, Nintendo announced plans to update the software running the 3DS on June 6. The upgrade includes a new Web browser and Nintendo’s eShop content-downloading service.
At the briefing, Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime showed a handful of new titles for the 3DS including Nintendo mainstay Mario Kart.
“It’s a game you’ve enjoyed for years, but it’s a tricked-out version you haven’t seen before,” said Fils-Aime.
Nintendo will also offer Luigi’s Mansion and Kid Icarus games on the 3DS as well.
Congratulations to William R. Jenkins, III (Chip), Chief Executive Officer, Director of The First State Bank!
He is the WINNER of a new Apple iPad 2 from the Percento Technologies drawing at the 2011 Texas Bankers Association Annual Meeting – Conference in Austin, texas.
The White House today sent Congress a proposed cybersecurity law designed to force companies to do more to fend off cyberattacks, a threat that has been reinforced by recent reports about vulnerabilities in systems used in power and water utilities.
This proposal seems designed to prod the legislative branch to enact by the end of the year some variety of cybersecurity legislation, which has been stalled by concerns about privacy, Internet “kill switches,” and overreaching regulation. One proposal from Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.), for instance, would have explicitly given the government the power to “order the disconnection” of specific networks or Web sites.
Details remain hazy — the White House said the actual text won’t be released until this evening — but the proposal seems to veer in a less regulatory direction than some of its predecessors. A summary provided by the administration suggests the plan relies more on mandating disclosures of vulnerabilities, including significant data breaches, than on top-down regulation of the sort that applies to, say, the securities industry.
During a conference call with reporters this morning, administration officials who spoke on background and declined to give their names characterized their proposal as a way to provide the correct incentives for businesses.
But, said a Department of Homeland Security official, if “industry does not come forward” with an “appropriate” standard, the draft legislation would give the government the power to “pick one, to create one, to modify one and choose that one. We believe that won’t be necessary.”
The scope of the department’s regulatory powers is also unclear. While the legislation would generally track existing definitions of what businesses are “critical infrastructure” or not, using criteria such as risk and consequences of an attack, the full extent of the authority “has not been defined yet,” the official said.
Congress has been holding hearings aimed at drafting cybersecurity legislation for at least two years, and the topic has been discussed for nearly a decade. In 2002, for instance, the Bush administration unveiled a cybersecurity plan that was also aimed at influencing members of Congress as they considered related laws. (See CNET’s comparison of some of the proposals from 2003 and 2009.)
Reports of computer intrusions launched by China that purportedly targeted companies in the oil and energy industries have accelerated discussions of what new laws, if any, are necessary. Those intrusions appear to have been done with the purpose of espionage, not sabotage, in mind, akin to experiences of its own that Google disclosed early last year. Meanwhile, the Stuxnet worm illustrated how remote attacks could be performed.
A fact sheet from the White House says the proposal includes national data breach reporting to help in “standardizing” the existing state laws, increased penalties for computer crimes, a focus on “critical infrastructure cybersecurity plans,” and civil liberties protections.
MIT‘s Computer Science and Artificial Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which I toured Friday, is piled high with all kinds of hardware, including laptops, unmanned submarines, and mechanical limbs. But when it comes to equipping robots with artificial eyes and ears, robotics hackers are clearly enamored with the Kinect motion-sensing controller and sensors like it.
LAS VEGAS–
Google’s Street View cars collected the locations of millions of laptops, cell phones, and other Wi-Fi devices around the world, a practice that raises novel privacy concerns, CNET has confirmed.
Forget being limited to .com, .net, and .org.
LOS ANGELES–Nintendo got the next wave of console wars started today with the introduction of the next entry to its arsenal, the 
The White House today sent Congress a proposed cybersecurity law designed to force companies to do more to fend off cyberattacks, a threat that has been reinforced by 