Techno-News Blog

October 24, 2011

New Google Smart Phone Recognizes Your Face

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By Danyll Wills, Technology Review

Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus, which will go on sale next month, will be the most advanced smart phone from the Korean giant. It will also be the first phone to run Google’s latest operating system, Android 4.0, also known as “Ice Cream Sandwich,” following alphabetically from the earlier Gingerbread and Honeycomb. One of the most talked about features of Apple’s iPhone 4S is the voice-operated personal assistant, Siri. At the Hong Kong event, Duarte demonstrated text-to-type by talking into the Galaxy Nexus to send a text message: “Hey, man. I’d love to talk right now, but I’m a little bit busy. I’ll catch up with you later period, smiley-face,” with which the sentence ended with just that: a period and then a smiley face. His attempt to show that Face Unlock, which is supposed to unlock the phone when it recognizes the user’s face, did not fare quite so well. When Duarte then put his face up to the camera, it did not recognize him. He put that down to the “bright makeup” he needed for the event.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/38934/?p1=A2

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HP and Condé Nast team up in a curious throwback–digitally distributing content to your printer.

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by David Zax, Technology Review

Sometimes, in order to take a step forward, you need to take a step back. That sounds really deep, even though it may be completely nonsensical. At any rate, it’s the koan-like thinking behind a new partnership between HP and Condé Nast, the magazine publisher behind titles like Allure, Details, Gold Digest, and Wired, among others. Even as Condé has soldiered on bravely into the digital world, putting out some seriously pretty iPad apps, they’ve entered into a partnership with HP that relies on that decidedly old-school medium: the dead tree. The unlikely twosome is piloting a program in which consumers receive Condé content digitally, only–wait for the twist–via their web-connected printer. This turns all the conventional logic on its head. Digital distribution supposedly has freed us from the shackles of print and paper, right? Wrong.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/helloworld/27275/?p1=blogs

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Shoot Now, Focus Later

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by Tom Simonite, Technology Review

Looking over a haul of digital photos can involve as much regret over fudged shots as reminiscing over golden moments. A camera from Silicon Valley startup Lytro promises to change that by allowing a user to focus a photo after it has been taken. The camera also has a novel “lightfield” sensor that enables photos to be viewed in 3-D. It is available to order today and will start shipping next year. The camera has a novel design reminiscent of a telescope. It features only two buttons: one to turn the device on or off, and one to take a photo. Only after a photo is taken does the user need to worry about focusing the resulting image.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/38930/?p1=A1

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October 23, 2011

Service Blackouts Threaten Cloud Users

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by Cyndi Waxer, Technology Review

Major cloud providers such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft, and Google have all experienced outages. During a 30-day period in August and September, for instance, Google’s cloud-based apps experienced six service disruptions, according to the company’s Apps Status Dashboard, including one hour-long outage on September 7 that shut out several million users of Google Docs. Some outages have been caused by unpredictable events like lightning strikes, but software updates are frequently the culprit. Google said changes to its software caused Google Docs to go down, and an attempt to run updated code was also blamed for a massive e-mail outage affecting users of BlackBerry phones in Europe this month. (RIM, like Google, operates its own servers instead of relying on public cloud providers.)

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/38722/?p1=BI

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Reorganize Your Past, Online

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By Nic Fleming, Technology Review

A Web service developed by Microsoft Research lets people curate their own personal history. Greenwich, a website that helps users assemble and chronologically organize content about a person, event, or any other subject. The site, to launch in beta on October 31, allows users to archive uploaded items, such as photos and scans of objects, alongside links to existing Web content around a horizontal timeline marked with dates. Different timelines can be combined and displayed on the same page or merged. Project Greenwich users attach images, maps, and other visual content, plus accompanying text, to relevant dates on their timelines.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/38931/?p1=A2

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Ball Camera Takes Spherical Panoramas: How many other cameras require you to throw them?

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by David Zax, Technology Review

Panoramic images–typically stitched together by software, based on multiple exposures from a single camera–have grown quite popular in the age of the digital camera. Sites featuring 360-degree images abound online, and some even feature interactive panoramas in which you can pan up, down, and around. There’s something inherent in the idea of a panorama–the sweeping, comprehensive view–that impels the photographer to seek higher ground: even Eadweard Muybridge’s iconic 1878 panorama of San Francisco was taken from the top of Nob Hill. You can almost draw a line from Muybridge’s yearning to a new device created by Jonas Pfeil, a computer engineer who studied at the Technical University of Berlin. Pfeil’s concept is remarkable: instead of manually twirling your single camera around and then stitching the pieces together, his “Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera” has 36 cameras embedded in it for simultaneous exposure.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/helloworld/27272/?p1=blogs

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October 22, 2011

Google’s Android Market surpasses 500,000 successful submissions

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by Matt Brian, The Next Web

In September, Google’s smartphone and tablet application store, the Android Market, surpassed 500,000 total published applications, according to a new report from research firm Research2guidance. With Apple’s App Store seeing more than 600,000 successful submissions, around 20% more than its rival app marketplace, the Android Market has seen more than 37% of the applications published be removed later, either by developers themselves or by Google, whereas Apple has seen less than a quarter of its apps (24%) removed in comparison, at the end of September. Research2guidance puts the increased number removals on Google’s platform down to the open nature of the Android Market, which allows developers to publish test applications, trials and low-quality applications, compared with Apple’s strict approval system, which prevents developers from submitting a number of trial applications and non-tested apps.

http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/10/21/googles-android-market-surpasses-500000-successful-submissions/

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Motorola`s Droid Razr Smartphone, MotoActive Exercise Device Debut

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By Nicholas Kolakowski, eWeek

Motorola Mobility introduced its latest Android phone, the Droid Razr, which features a 4.3-inch screen, dual-core 1.2GHz processor, a battery capable of 12.5 hours of 3G talk time and a thin body composed of steel, Gorilla Glass, Kevlar and other materials. In terms of design aesthetics, the smartphone resembles a Droid without the bulkiness—it’s fitting that Motorola would use this device as an excuse to also revive the Razr brand, which harkens to the line of ultra-thin feature phones that proved so popular among consumers a few years ago. Motorola clearly wants the Droid Razr to appeal to both consumers and businesses. It includes heavy integration with the cloud, notably the ability to pull down everything from music to business documents. It also integrates a number of Motorola accessories, such as the “lapdock” smartphone keyboard dock. During a high-profile presentation in New York, Motorola Mobility Chairman and CEO Sanjay Jha took the opportunity at several moments to draw comparisons between the Droid Razr and the newly released iPhone 4S, saying that the former’s support for Verizon’s 4G LTE network made it a faster phone, and that its bigger screen made it a better one for watching all sorts of content. In addition, Jha introduced Motorola’s MotoActive, a combination music player and health monitor meant for use in exercising. Between that and the Droid Razr, it’s clear that the company wants to battle toe-to-toe against Apple’s iOS.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Motorolas-Droid-Razr-Smartphone-MotoActive-Exercise-Device-Debut-692547/

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One Smart Phone, Two Personalities

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By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

AT&T, the second largest wireless carrier in the U.S., and Qualcomm, which dominates the market for smart-phone processors, want to give your phone a split identity. The companies are separately adopting technology that can make a smart phone secure enough to keep IT bosses happy, but open enough to allow its owner to install apps or surf the Web. AT&T will release its version of the technology, called Toggle, for Android phones this year. Someone using a device with Toggle installed taps the home button twice to flip between personal and work modes.

http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/38865/?p1=MstRcnt

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Memory Trick Could Speed Up the Web

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By Neil Savage, Technology Review

Computer researchers at Stanford want to throw away the hard disk and store information in data centers in random access memory, the more expensive temporary storage that makes programs run faster. Today’s hard disks can hold roughly 10,000 times as much information as they did in the mid 1980s, but they can only transfer large amounts of data about 50 times as fast as they could back then. This is an increasingly significant bottleneck for data stored on a server in a data center—the kind becoming increasingly common as businesses push their data into cloud computing.

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/38896/?p1=MstRcnt

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October 21, 2011

The Criminal Cloud

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By Simson L. Garfinkel, Technology Review

The cloud opens a world of possibilities for criminal computing. Unlike the zombie computers and malware that have been the mainstay of computer crime for the past decade, cloud computing makes available a well-managed, reliable, scalable global infrastructure that is, unfortunately, almost as well suited to illicit computing needs as it is to legitimate business. The mass of information stored in the cloud—including, most likely, your credit card and Social Security numbers—makes it an attractive target for data thieves.

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/38720/?p1=BI

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Kinect Turns Any Surface Into a Touch Screen

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By Duncan Graham-Rowe, Technology Review

A new prototype can transform a notebook into a notebook computer, a wall into an interactive display, and the palm of your hand into a smart phone display. In fact, researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University say their new shoulder-mounted device, called OmniTouch, can turn any nearby surface into an ad hoc interactive touch screen. OmniTouch works by bringing together a miniature projector and an infrared depth camera, similar to the kind used in Microsoft’s Kinect game console, to create a shoulder-worn system designed to interface with mobile devices such as smart phones, says co-inventor Chris Harrison, a postgraduate researcher at Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute in Pittsburgh and a former intern at Microsoft Research.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/38933/?p1=A2

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Smart Phones Could Hear Your Password

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By Robert Lemos, Technology Review

The sensors inside modern smart phones present a range of security threats. An attacker who compromises a phone can, for example, track the owner’s location by GPS, use the camera to see the phone’s surroundings, or turn on its microphone to record conversations.At a conference in Chicago on Thursday, a group of computer researchers from Georgia Tech will report on another potential threat. The researchers have shown that the accelerometer and orientation sensor of a phone resting on a surface can be used to eavesdrop as a password is entered using a keyboard on the same surface. They were able to capture the words typed on the keyboard with as much as 80 percent accuracy.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/38913/?p1=A3

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October 20, 2011

Google Translate for Android Gets Multilingual Treatment

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By: Clint Boulton, eWeek

Google Translate for Android, the mobile application of the popular machine translation software, now enables users to translate speech back and forth between 14 languages, the company said. Google launched Translate for Android last year to help Android phone owners translate content into different languages via text and for spoken translation on Android handsets. The tool enables text translation among 63 languages, voice input in 17 of those languages, and text-to-speech in 24 of them. The company earlier this year added Conversation Mode, which lets users to translate chats between English and Spanish.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Google-Translate-for-Android-Gets-Multilingual-Treatment-609715/?kc=rss

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Organized Cyber-Crime Network May Be Stealing Your Child’s Identity

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By: Wayne Rash, eWeek

Organized cyber-criminals have taken what used to be a minor domestic crime and turned it into a global ID trafficking ring. In these cases, the data that’s so valuable are the Social Security numbers of young children because they can easily be matched with any name and date of birth and used to create fraudulent identities, obtain credit or even dodge residency rules for getting work in the United States. There was a time when problems with child ID theft came from family members of young children who would use their SSNs to get around poor credit or even criminal records, but that’s changed. According to testimony by the Federal Trade Commission delivered to the House Committee on Ways and Means’ subcommittee on Social Security, “Children’s SSNs are uniquely valuable because they lack a credit history and can be paired with any name and birth date.”

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Organized-CyberCrime-Network-may-be-Stealing-Your-Childs-Identity-260010/?kc=rss

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EU plan to spend billions on boosting broadband speeds

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By by David Meyer, BBC

The European Commission is set to propose investing almost €9.2bn (£8bn) in a massive rollout of super-fast broadband infrastructure and services across the European Union. The plan is partly aimed at stimulating further investment in rural broadband. It is hoped the initiative will also help to create a single market for digital public services. The Commission has already set targets for improving the speed of home internet connections across the region.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15320628

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October 19, 2011

Faster-than-Light Neutrino Puzzle Claimed Solved by Special Relativity

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by KFC, Technology Review

It’s now been three weeks since the extraordinary news that neutrinos travelling between France and Italy had been clocked moving faster than light. The experiment, known as OPERA, found that the particles produced at CERN near Geneva arrived at the Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy some 60 nanoseconds earlier than the speed of light allows. The result has sent a ripple of excitement through the physics community. Since then, more than 80 papers have appeared on the arXiv attempting to debunk or explain the effect. It’s fair to say, however, that the general feeling is that the OPERA team must have overlooked something. Ronald van Elburg at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands makes a convincing argument that he has found the error. If it stands up, this episode will be laden with irony. Far from breaking Einstein’s theory of relatively, the faster-than-light measurement will turn out to be another confirmation of it.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27260/?p1=blogs

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Could Apple TV Use Siri?

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by David Zax, Technology Review

Now here’s an interesting idea, from Cross Research’s Shannon Cross, related to Siri, the “virtual personal assistant” integrated into the upcoming iPhone 4S. As she wrote in a note to investors last week: We think it would be very compelling to own a TV or a device that could quickly answer the request, “I want to watch the Yankees/Red Sox game,” by changing the TV channel without requiring the user to look at a guide or use a remote control, or even specifying HD or standard definition feeds, since you would want the HD channel if available. Or, you could instruct the device to record all new episodes of a show, without leaving the program you are currently watching. Finally, since you are online, a Siri enabled TV could answer whether your iPhone or computer has received a new message, and let you respond accordingly.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/helloworld/27253/?p1=blogs

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The Social-Network Chip

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By Kate Greene, Technology Review

Looking at friends’ pictures on Facebook or searching résumés on LinkedIn are relatively simple computing tasks in which information is called up, retrieved, and then shipped to a user’s screen from a distant data center. Yet such tasks are handled mostly by powerful microprocessors designed for more complex jobs like number crunching and running operating systems. That means a waste of electrical power, says Ihab Bishara, director of cloud computing products at Tilera, a chip startup in San Jose, California. Microprocessors serving the cloud are too powerful, he says; in the future, he believes, many tasks carried out in data centers will be handled by cheaper, low-power chips like those his company makes.

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/38716/?p1=A3

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October 18, 2011

What are key features of iOS 5?

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 by the BBC

iOS 5 was launched at Apple headquarters two days before Steve Jobs died Many diehard fans were disappointed when Apple failed to release the much-awaited iPhone 5 at its recent launch. Instead they had to make do with new mobile operating system iOS 5 which is available for free to existing iPhone customers from October 12. Many of the changes are evolutionary rather than revolutionary and show that Apple is, for the time being, concentrating on software. The BBC has picked out a few of the more interesting changes.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15272098

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Now wash your hands – and your mobile

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by the BBC

Often not as clean as it looks… It is the sort of news story that will have left many feeling queasy over their breakfast cereal – a study which suggests one in six mobile phones is contaminated with faecal matter. Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Queen Mary, University of London took nearly 400 samples from mobile phones and hands in 12 British cities. They found 16% of phones and 16% of hands harboured E. coli (Escherichia coli), bacteria which inhabit the human intestines. The largest proportion of contaminated phones was in Birmingham (41%) while Londoners were caught with the highest proportion of E. coli present on hands (28%).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-15284501

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