Posts Tagged ‘united-states’

At a press event in Tokyo today, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey announced the long-awaited Japanese debut of Square. It’s a big deal for the company — its first expansion outside of North America, and in the third-largest economy in the world. But Japan also presents some unique challenges. The country is still overwhelmingly cash-based, and Square competitor PayPal launched its own PayPal Here payment system last year without much fanfare. But Dorsey thinks his company can take off where others have failed to

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Square arrives in Japan, its first market outside North America

Seecrypt costs $3 a month and allows subscribers to make encrypted phone calls to each other. It promises a “100% protected network through encryption between two callers anywhere in the world.” Sounds interesting and useful for keeping government snoops away. However, the press release issued today tells a somewhat different story: “Seecrypt will pro-actively assist        

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Curious press release from phone encryption service

Yahoo’s bid for a controlling stake in video portal Dailymotion has ended after the French government raised objections to the deal, according to reports. The collapse of the talks is a blow to Yahoo, which has been fighting the perception it is irrelevant by acquiring up-and-coming talent and releasing well-regarded new apps . It also deprives them of a new distribution channel for original programming and the advertising that will run alongside it. Dailymotion is owned by France Telecom-Orange, in which France holds a minority stake. TechCrunch , building on an earlier report from Le Monde , reports that France’s minister of industrial renewal did not want to see one of France’s marquee Internet companies sold off to a U.S

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France reportedly scuttles Yahoo’s bid for Dailymotion video portal

AT&T customers may be the first to get their hands on the Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone in the United States, but T-Mobile buyers may suffer a wait. While the “uncarrier” originally planned to begin online sales of the Galaxy S4 smartphone on April 24th, T-Mobile now says that online availability has been delayed five days to April 29th as a result of an unexpected inventory delay. Amusingly, it was also an unexpected inventory allotment which allowed AT&T to begin its early pre-order deliveries, but perhaps it’s just a coincidence. As far as we know, T-Mobile will still begin selling the Galaxy S4 at physical retail locations on May 1st. Sprint will sell the Galaxy S4 on April 27th, and Verizon has yet to commit to a date

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T-Mobile’s Samsung Galaxy S4 gets delayed, online sales now begin April 29th

Protests outside a court in Guatemala where judges will soon rule on whether the trial of a former dictator accused of genocide can continue.        

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Guatemala: Montt Genocide Trial fate rests with Constitutional Court; remains in limbo (photos, video)

Bruce Schneier’s terrific Atlantic essay on the Boston Marathon bombings is a must-read. As he points out, the terrorists win only if we let this sort of thing scare us. By being empathic toward the victims and indomitable and fearless toward the criminals, we can create a climate where politicians can get away with telling        

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Don’t let the Boston Marathon bombing terrorize you, or the bombers win

Cyber threats are the number one type of danger facing the United States , according to US national intelligence director James Clapper, the man in charge of coordinating the CIA and the NSA, among many other agencies . “As more and more state and nonstate actors gain cyber expertise, its importance and reach as a global threat cannot be overstated,” Clapper said in testimony he gave to the House Intelligence Committee last week, as part of his office’s annual global threat assessment report. Continue reading…

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Cyber threats at the top of US intelligence report for the first time

Tim Wu has written an admirably economical and restrained review of Evgeny Morozov’s new book, “To Save Everything, Click Here.” I wrote a long critique of Morozov’s first book in 2011, and back then, I found myself unable to restrain myself from enumerating the many, many flaws in the book and its fundamental dishonesty, pandering        

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Blowing up Morozov’s "To Save Everything, Click Here"

Last month, Congress signed into law an appropriations bill that requires four federal agencies to conduct an FBI-assisted security assessment when purchasing computers and other IT gear manufactured in China. Predictably, China came out in strong opposition to the provision — meant to shield the Justice Department, Department of Commerce, NASA, and the NSF against cyber espionage — and now Silicon Valley is taking issue with the restrictions. A number of industry trade associations have banded together and authored a letter to leaders on Capitol Hill voicing their concern. “Fundamentally, product security is a function of how a product is made, used, and maintained, not by whom or where it is made,” the document reads. Among those…

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Silicon Valley voices opposition to China cyber-espionage provision

Several Democrats in the US House of Representatives sent a letter to the White House on Monday demanding answers about the administration’s domestic drone policy, writing that “vague legal boundaries” authorizing the deaths of Americans “appear to effectively vitiate due process of law without meaningful oversight or accountability.” While only a small group of lawmakers signed onto the letter — including Representatives Barbara Lee (D-CA), John Conyers (D-MI), Keith Ellison (D-MN), Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), Donna Edwards (D-MD), Mike Honda (D-CA), Rush Holt (D-NJ), and James McGovern (D-MA) — it’s a show of some bipartisan support for transparency in drone policy. The White House’s domestic drone policy gained national attention last… Continue reading…

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House Democrats demand answers from President Obama about domestic drone killing policy

Internet celebrity, file-sharing mogul, and top-ranked Modern Warfare 3 player Kim Dotcom is back in the news. He and his cofounders were indicted in the US for copyright infringement and racketeering related to the piracy hub Megaupload in early 2012, but managed to fight extradition to the US. The group then launched a new company, Mega, which is based in New Zealand and billed as a personal cloud storage solution and offered users a whopping 50 GB of space to start. Dotcom says Mega is a legitimate competitor to Dropbox and Google Drive, but critics call it a front for piracy.

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Mega and the return of Kim Dotcom

Selling PCs ( and even Macs ) these days may seem like fighting a losing battle, but Chinese manufacturer Lenovo is managing to swim upstream by continuing to expand both its market share and shipment numbers. In the company’s third fiscal quarter for 2012/13, sales reached a new high of $9.4 billion, on the back of 14.1 million PCs shipped, resulting in a 15.9 percent share of the global marketplace. The resulting $205 million quarterly profit is a third higher than the company achieved this time last year and a new record quarter. Traditionally strong in its native China, Lenovo is also managing to export its success to the all-important United States, where the company saw 11 percent growth year-on-year, in a market that fell 7 percent… Continue reading…

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Lenovo defies PC market trends with record profits and shipments

Photographer Justin Barton has photographed the instruments and storehouses of nuclear death in the United States and the former Soviet Union, in a series titled “Atomic War in Details.” In a profile of the project from Wired , Barton says that he wants to “force people to look at the detail of these things they dismiss as history and irrelevant to our age.” As Wired points out, Barton’s work — which focuses on hardware like control panels and telephones — highlights the strange monotony of terror; something even Major Kong is familiar with. Continue reading…

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Exploring the buttons, blast doors, and bunkers on both sides of the Cold War

jOBS, the biopic of late Apple founder Steve Jobs, will be arriving in theaters on April 19th, says The Hollywood Reporter . If you don’t want to wait four months to see how Ashton Kutcher fares with the lead role, or whether Josh Gad can pull off a convincing Woz, you can always check it out at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday . Can’t make it to Utah, you say?

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Ashton Kutcher’s ‘jOBS’ biopic premiering nationwide on April 19th

North Korea has announced plans for its third nuclear weapon test. In comments carried by the state-run KCNA and reported by Reuters , the country’s National Defence Commission said “We are not disguising the fact that the various satellites and long-range rockets that we will fire and the high-level nuclear test we will carry out are targeted at the United States.” No time frame was given for the test. On Tuesday, the United Nations agreed to expand sanctions against North Korea for its unauthorized satellite launch in December; in response, the country announced plans to send further rockets into space and bolster its nuclear program. There have been two North Korean nuclear tests before, in 2006 and 2009 — the first produced a small..

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North Korea to conduct nuclear test ‘targeted at the United States’

Families across the United States each have their special way of cooking a turkey just right, but why rely on instinct when there’s science to be done? Gizmodo asked scientists and engineers at NASA about their own secret recipes, then illustrated the results for good measure. You may need some specialized equipment to pull off NASA’s techniques — a Thermal Vac Chamber or a rocket, for instance — but you can be sure that the end results will be nothing short of spectacular.

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Turkey recipes for NASA engineers

Satellites provide important data about potentially dangerous storms , but as many of these satellites reach the end of their lifespan, the United States could be facing a significant gap in weather coverage, reports the New York Times . A new polar satellite called the JPSS-1 is slated to launch in 2017, but several independent reviews suggest that this won’t be in time to prevent a gap in coverage that could last a year or more. The reasons for the delayed launch include everything from reported mismanagement to a lack of adequate funding. And despite “urgent restructuring” at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, it doesn’t look like the satellite will be launching in time to avoid the impending coverage gap, which could…

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America could be facing a year of lacking weather coverage due to aging satellites

There was a considerable backlash when Apple announced earlier this year that it would be removing its products from EPEAT , a widely-used product registry which grades electronics based on their compliance with environmental standards — enough to warrant a swift backpeddling from then-hardware boss Bob Mansfield. Now the program’s awarding of its ‘Gold’ standard to five ultra-thin laptops, including the infamously ” unrepairable ” Macbook Pro with Retina display, has raised serious concerns that EPEAT is bending to intense lobbying pressure from manufacturers who want the certification without meeting the standards. In an editorial for Wired , iFixit founder Kyle Wiens cites huge discrepancies between EPEAT’s product standards and the…

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EPEAT’s flip-flop on ‘unrepairable’ Macbook Pro reveals a muddied mess of green tech standards

Reddit doesn’t really dictate how its corner of the internet is run, but CEO Yishan Wong has some strong suggestions for dealing with recent controversy: “We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it,” he writes, in a leaked memo posted today and obtained by Gawker . He’s referring to the ongoing Violentacrez controversy , of course. Last week, that very same Gawker unmasked one of Reddit’s most unsavory trolls, posting his real identity for all to see. Allegedly, it cost Violentacrez his job .

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Reddit CEO addresses Violentacrez controversy: ‘we will not ban legitimate investigative journalism’

The United States Federal Trade Commission has been investigating Google as part of an ongoing antitrust probe, and it appears the conclusion is that a lawsuit may in fact be warranted. The New York Times is reporting that the FTC staff is making the final tweaks on its internal memo — which runs longer than 100 pages — which will recommend to five FTC commissioners that further legal action be taken. At issue is whether Google has tweaked its search results to its own benefit, and hurt its competitors in the process. Adding fuel to the fire, it’s also said that the FTC has begun building a legal team in case the case ends up going to court. According to the Times any changes made to the memo will be minor, and not alter the overall..

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FTC report will recommend suing Google for antitrust violations, says the New York Times

Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. and ZTE Corp., China’s two biggest makers of telecommunications equipment, are facing intense scrutiny thanks to a US House Intelligence Committee report. Speaking on 60 Minutes , Committee chairman Mike Rogers urged businesses to “find another vendor if you care about your intellectual property; if you care about your consumers’ privacy, and you care about the national security of the United States of America.” The report is the result of an 11-month fact-finding mission, and will be officially released at a Monday morning press conference, although some news organizations have managed to get an advance look. “Cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state influence” According to Reuters , which received…

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Huawei and ZTE pose national security risk according to US Congressional report

The first year-long continuous stay at the International Space Station is slated for Spring 2015, according to NASA. Until now, the hard limit on longterm spaceflight inside the ISS has been six months. That will all change when two astronauts (one representing the United States, the other Russia) board a Soyuz rocket and begin a journey set to last an entire calendar year. With the expedition, scientists hope to gain valuable information on how the human body fares in space for extended periods of time. We’ve already seen a detrimental impact on things like bone density, vision and other physical traits, but there’s still plenty more for NASA to learn before it’s comfortable sending astronauts to the far reaches of the cosmos.

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First year-long ISS mission planned for 2015, scientists hope to learn implications of long-term spaceflight

PlayStation Mobile – Sony’s cross-platform mobile gaming service that allows players to experience PlayStation Mobile games across Sony’s devices and select Android-based smartphones and tablets – is now live. PlayStation Mobile can be accessed through Sony’s PlayStation Store and purchases are tied to users’ PlayStation Network IDs. Users will only need to buy a PlayStation Mobile game once and it will be playable on any PlayStation Certified Device and PlayStation Vita. The service launches today in Japan, the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Australia, with more countries to follow. Some of the launch titles include: Super Crate Box, Wipe!, Revel, Hungry Giraffe, Samurai Beatdown, Beats..

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PlayStation Mobile goes live today with ‘Super Crate Box’, ‘Wipe!’ and ‘Samurai Beatdown’

Members of United Stated Congress have approached the Department of Homeland Security in regards to domains that have been seized by the agency. In a letter directed to Attorney General Holder and Secretary Napolitano, the members question Homeland Security’s procedures and jurisdiction when action is taken to bring down sites that may violate copyright laws. The letter specifically references one case involving hip hop website Dajaz1, which was taken down by the Department of Homeland Security after being accused of linking to copyrighted songs. Over a year later, the domain was restored, but little to no information regarding the seizure was ever provided by Homeland Security either during or after the case.

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Congress members question Homeland Security over domains seized ‘without sufficient due process and transparency’

Gogo Inflight , the major provider of airline broadband, has obtained a license to provide service over Canada. Because Gogo’s network will operate on the same frequency as its current domestic Wi-Fi in the United States, the experience will be seamless when travelling between the two countries on international flights. Gogo will begin cell tower construction in the 4th quarter of this year, and it expects to roll out the service by the end of 2013. Gogo says it will initially focus on existing commercial airline routes, but that it will also provide service to business customers moving forward.

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Gogo Inflight Wi-Fi licensed to begin service over Canada