Google pays those who find Android security glitches

Those who pinpoint vulnerabilities in Google's mobile operating system can earn cash rewards, similar to those paid out for identifying bugs in Chrome.

 

 

Google has expanded its bug-bounty program to cover vulnerabilities uncovered in Android.
The program began with Chrome and expanded to Google Web sites and other open-source software projects. Under the program, people who find security holes get paid bounties. That often equates to a few hundred dollars, but particularly skilled attacks can mean big money -- $50,000 last week for one expert who goes by the name Pinkie Pie, for example.
The broader expansion, called the Patch Reward Program, now includes Android, Google security team member Michal Zalewski said in a blog post Monday.
The program also includes three widely used Web server packages: Apache's http, Nginx, and Lighttpd, Zalewski said.

Chrome, Opera pass Epic Citadel demo's Web graphics test

Two new browsers have followed Firefox with support for the Web-based 3D gaming engine. But Chrome and Opera don't use Firefox's asm.js technology approach.

The Epic Citadel demo of Unreal Engine 3 running in a browser using high-speed JavaScript and WebGL.

Chrome and Opera have become the first browsers to match Mozilla Firefox's support for Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3 and the Web-based Epic Citadel demo that's built on the 3D graphics technology. The demo's computing challenges include 3D graphics covered with 2D textures, rustling leaves, flowing water, reflective stone floors, lens flare, and shadows and other lighting effects.
Mozilla and Epic Games demonstrated the advanced Web programming in March using a combination of Mozilla technologies: Emscripten that converts C or C++ software into JavaScript, and asm.js that can run a specialized subset of JavaScript much faster.
Mozilla has been trying to drum up support for asm.js, but Chrome and Opera used their own JavaScript technology. (Opera Software, earlier this year, shifted away from its browser engine, adopting Chrome's and benefiting from Google's investment in the software.) The Epic Games demo also uses the WebGL standard for 3D graphics, which Chrome, Mozilla, and Opera all support.

Epic Games added Chrome 31 and Opera 18 to its Unreal Engine 3 supported browsers list. Martin Best, the product manager of games at Mozilla, noted the rival browsers' achievement in a blog post Tuesday.
The new browser support is notable, given the push toward Web programs that run on any machine with a browser -- cross-platform flexibility that has big advantages over writing native code that only works on iOS, Windows, or some other specific operating system. But the maturity and consistency of Web programming still leave a lot to be desired, especially for complicated, performance-intensive Web apps.
Mozilla and Google got their Unreal performance with significantly different approaches. Asm.js uses a technology called ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation for its performance boost, with the Web app sending a "use asm" hint to the browser to trigger the technology. Compilation is the process of converting human-written source code into machine language that a computer can execute. AOT compilation means the browser can build an optimized version of the software in advance.

The Epic Citadel demo of Unreal Engine 3 running in a browser using high-speed JavaScript and WebGL.

But Chrome uses a different approach with its V8 JavaScript engine called just-in-time (JIT) compilation that's standard nowadays for most Web sites and Web apps. The JIT approach means the browser compiles the JavaScript, monitors how it runs, and optimizes with new compilation as it goes.
Google likes its approach because improvements to the JIT can mean all JavaScript across the Web gets faster, not just what's specifically created to take advantage of asm.js.
Google's "V8 people seem to want to JIT-optimize harder, not process 'use asm,'" said Mozilla Chief Technology Officer Brendan Eich, but he's not convinced the performance will catch up to AOT compilation. In his experience, Unreal Engine 3 on Chrome shows more "jank" from pauses triggered by recompilation and Firefox is faster to start running the software.
"Yet they do well," Eich said, praising Chrome's virtual machine that runs the JavaScript programs. "V8 is a formidable JIT'ing virtual machine."
In my tests of the two, Chrome showed a higher frame rate on a 2012 Retina-equipped MacBook Pro. Firefox Nightly version 28.0a1 (2013-11-26) showed 52.4fps, but Chrome 33.0.1712.4-dev ran at 59.8fps.
Both versions sent the CPU fan whirring, though, so there's still work to be done.

Update, 11:24 a.m. PT: Adds comment from Google.

The Epic Citadel demo of Unreal Engine 3 running in a browser using high-speed JavaScript and WebGL.

Reports of Comet ISON's death may be greatly exaggerated

The sun-grazing comet spent Thanksgiving visiting our neighborhood star, and seems to have emerged from its shadow to tell the tale.\

ISON (or fragments thereof) emerges from behind the sun on its path back out of the solar system and past Earth.

(Credit: ESA/NASA/SOHO/GSFC)

It made for perhaps the nerdiest Thanksgiving moment ever when I plugged a Google Chromecast into my mother's TV on Thursday and proceeded to put a live NASA Google+ Hangout on Comet ISON's sun-grazing journey on the screen in the living room.
By the time all the pumpkin pie had been knocked back and the turkey set to work lulling me into a coma, ISON had failed to emerge from the sun's shadow after reaching perihelion, leading many observers to conclude that the comet had been destroyed by its close encounter with the massive nuclear furnace at the center of our galactic cul-de-sac.

ISON is a breed of comet fresh in from the Oort Cloud, the likes of which have not been observed from Earth in many years. If it were to survive perihelion, it would be flung back out to deep space, perhaps giving off a spectacular light show for us on planet No. 3 in the process.
That's the best-case scenario. Worst-case scenario is that ISON is basically swallowed by the sun, and for most of Thursday that seemed to be the actual-case scenario as well.
Then NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory satellite sent back an image that seemed to show...something. Here's how NASA's Karen Fox described it in a blog post:

The question remains whether it is merely debris from the comet, or if some portion of the comet's nucleus survived, but late-night analysis from scientists with NASA's Comet ISON Observing Campaign suggest that there is at least a small nucleus intact.

In other words, Comet ISON seems to have survived in some form, but it's not yet clear if what remains of it will put on the spectacular light show in the coming weeks that we've been hearing about for months now.
Fox says ISON has been behaving in unexpected ways, so the way its long-anticipated Thanksgiving perihelion went down seems true to form. Now it's time to sit back and await the big show...or the big disappointment.

Google Nexus phones reportedly susceptible to SMS attacks

 

 

Google's latest Nexus smartphones are vulnerable to an attack in which someone could force the phones to reboot or lose their network connection by sending them a large number of a certain kind of SMS message, according to PC World. Bogdan Alecu, a system administrator at Dutch IT services company Levi9, reportedly found that the vulnerability can occur when an attacker sends about 30 so-called Flash SMS messages -- messages that appear immediately on the phone's screen on arrival -- to the Galaxy Nexus, the Nexus 4, or the Nexus 5. If the messages aren't promptly dismissed, it opens the phones up for attack. Alecu plans to present his findings Friday at the DefCamp security conference in Bucharest, Romania.

One of the problems Nexus users face is that they won't be automatically alerted with an audio tone when a Flash SMS message is received, which could allow an attacker to send a lot of them quickly before they're noticed or dismissed, PC World reports.
According to Alecu, the SMS overload can result in several issues, including the phone rebooting, which is the most likely outcome. In that case, if a PIN is required to unlock the SIM card, the phone won't connect to the network after rebooting. Another problem that can occur is that the messaging app crashes, but the system then automatically restarts it.
Alecu told PC World that while the issue appears to affect the latest Nexus smartphones running Android versions Ice Cream Sandwich through KitKat, it hasn't worked on other phones he's tested.
We've reached out to Google for comment on how the company plans to address the issue and will update this post when we learn more. Alecu told PC World that he reported the issue to Google, but that it hasn't yet been addressed.

Wave fingers, make faces: The future of computing at Intel

The chip giant is working on "perceptual computing" technology that will sense your emotions and your body language. Here's an inside look.

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Anil Nanduri, an Intel executive working on perceptual computing, demos technology that senses users' individual fingers. 

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- If the next big wave in devices turns out to be gestures and eye tracking, Intel wants to be ready. Intel is the king of PCs, but it hasn't always been ahead of evolving innovations. Its processors power more than 80 percent of the world's computers and the vast majority of its servers, but Intel has made little headway in smartphones and tablets. To spur interest in PCs again, as well as persuade more mobile device makers to use its chips, Intel has devoted significant resources and efforts to something it calls "perceptual computing."
Perceptual computing may sound like a jargony, marketing term, but it does just what it says -- it uses the senses to help technology interpret what's going on around it. Those features, such as gestures, facial recognition, and voice recognition, should all make devices more "natural, intuitive, and immersive," says Anil Nanduri, one of the Intel executives in charge of the company's efforts in perceptual computing.

 

 

The goal is getting "sensory inputs that make [computers] more human like," Nanduri said. "Once you give computers the ability to assess depth, a lot of wonderful things can happen."
Devices will be able to sense emotion and detect a person's biometric data simply using a camera. They'll be able to carry on conversations with users and understand context -- or what "play me some jazz" means -- instead of simply following commands. Computers will be able to pick out individual fingers instead of simply recognizing an entire hand or the fact that a person is present. And they'll create more immersive augmented reality, such as digital versions of children's pop-up books.
In the case of Intel, the company is placing particular emphasis on vision and teaching devices to recognize depth. That's made possible through 3D cameras. The company has partnered with Creative on 3D cameras, which should show up integrated into devices such as PCs and tablets in the second half of 2014.
A big pitfall for companies like Intel is the hyper focus on speeds and feeds, making technology that's the most powerful without necessarily considering all the ways it might be used. For perceptual computing, Intel says it's starting with software and users first and then moving to the hardware.
To do that, Intel released a software development kit last year to get developers interested in the technology. Since that time, the SDK has been downloaded more than 26,000 times. Intel is so serious about perceptual computing that it has even sponsored contests -- with $100 million in prizes -- to get app developers interested in the technology. Intel will announce the latest crop of winners soon.
"For the users, what am I getting for it?" Nanduri said. "That's why we started a year early, focusing on the ecosystem more so than talking about bringing this into hardware or a device."

Yuriy Kozachuk, an application engineer in Intel's perceptual computing lab, demos technology that tracks facial expressions and translates them to characters in a game. 

But now Intel believes the ecosystem has advanced enough that it's time to talk hardware. Devices will show up next year that contain elements of Intel's perceptual computing efforts. And it hopes all of those will use its chips. Technically, some features could be possible using chips such as those from Qualcomm. However, Intel says the amount of horsepower needed to run the features smoothly will require its higher-end chips. Initially, the perceptual computing features will only work with Intel's Core line traditionally used in PCs and some tablets, not its lower-power Atom line used in mobile devices. However, the company plans to eventually make the features run on its more energy efficient processors, and it's also adding accelerators, tools, and graphics to its chips to take advantage of the perceptual computing capabilities.

"We're already thinking ahead and looking at the use cases people need two to three years out from now and putting them into our silicon," Nanduri said.
Some elements of perceptual computing have already shown up in products. The Kinect for Microsoft's Xbox is one example, as are Siri and Google Now for voice recognition. However, Intel says it's taking those a step further by focusing on short-range interaction of less than a meter. That means the technology needs a very fine level of recognition, with the ability to pick out specific fingers instead of just noticing an arm or if entire person is present.
But it still will be a challenge for Intel to make features that are truly useful and not just gimmicky. Intel acknowledges that gesturse and other features won't be ideal for all instances. Computer users, for instance, won't be making slideshows by waving their hands in the air. But they might use gestures when showing the slideshow to friends.
Gaming, in particular, is one area where perceptual computing could really take off, Nanduri said, as well as education and related fields. And it's not just about PCs. This technology will show up in a wide range of devices in the coming years, he said.
The company is sure to provide more details and demos in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
"Perceptual computing is about everything and is device agnostic in many ways," Nanduri said. "It's going to be everywhere."

'Fast & Furious' actor Paul Walker dies in car crash: Publicist

SANTA CLARITA, California: Paul Walker, the star of the "Fast & Furious" movie series, died on Saturday in a car crash that killed two people north of Los Angeles, his publicist said. He was 40.

Walker died on Saturday afternoon, Ame Van Iden told the Associated Press.

A statement on the actor's Facebook page said he was a passenger in a friend's car, and that Walker was in the area to attend a charity event for his organization Reach Out Worldwide.     

 A statement on the actor's Facebook page said he was a passenger in a friend's car, and that Walker was in the area to attend a charity event for his organization Reach Out Worldwide.
   "We... are stunned and saddened beyond belief by this news," the statement said.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's department said that deputies found a car engulfed in flames when they responded to a report of a collision in the community of Valencia. Two people who were found in the car were pronounced dead at the scene.

The Santa Clarita Signal reports a red Porsche crashed into a light pole and tree and burst into flames.

Walker was working on "Fast & Furious 7" at the time of his death. He also starred in the suspense drama, "Hours," which is set for release this month.

Pop music finally put to good use tracking space junk

The dipole antennas of the Murchison Widefield Array radio telescope can pick up reflections from up to 620 miles away. 

Australian broadcaster Triple J plays a mix of pop and alternative tunes that are being recruited to serve science -- by helping track space junk orbiting above us.
The station is among FM broadcasters whose signals are bouncing off decaying satellites and other debris and into the giant "ear" that is the Murchison Widefield Array in Western Australia.
The high sensitivity of the radio telescope launched earlier this year allows it to detect objects smaller than 1 meter (3.2 feet), according to its director Steven Tingay of Curtin University. Tingay wants to use the array to improve knowledge of the thousands of bits of scrap that may threaten working satellites.
FM radio transmitters send waves over the Earth but also into space, where they bounce off satellites and space junk. Some of those waves get reflected back to Earth.

The array, which consists of 2,048 dual-polarization dipole antennas arranged in 128 formations of four-by-four tiles, is a precursor to the international Square Kilometer Array radio telescope. It can pick up reflected waves from objects up to 620 miles away.
In 2009, an Iridium communications satellite collided with a defunct Russian satellite, creating an unprecedented cloud of more than 2,000 bits of debris, which worried operators of other satellites as well as the International Space Station.
Earlier this month, the European Space Agency's 1-ton Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer fell back to Earth, mostly burning up in the atmosphere with bits hitting the southern Atlantic.
In a study in The Astronomical Journal, Tingay and collaborators showed how they used the Murchison Widefield Array to track the ISS based on how it reflected FM radio broadcast signals originating in southwestern Australia.
"Because the telescope has such a large field of view, monitoring vast patches of the sky at any given time, we can simultaneously image hundreds of these objects every day and track them for long enough to determine their orbits," Tingay says in a recent video.
"We can do all this at the same time as our primary mission. That is, to look way back into cosmic time."

Microsoft, bored of bashing Apple, bashes Samsung

It's been established that Microsoft believes the i Pad has many, many flaws. Now Redmond would like you to know that the Samsung Galaxy Tab isn't all that either.

Look how substandard the Galaxy Tab is.

If you're in business, you have to get used to criticism.
If you're in the gadget business, however, you're nobody unless Microsoft criticizes you.
What other conclusion can one reach after Redmond's assault on its various rivals?
There's the constant poking at the iPad's foibles. Then there's the sublimely gauche Scroogled campaign, which accuses Google of being little more than a malevolent dictatorship.
Samsung, though, has been relatively free of Microsoft's barbed fire. Until now, that is.
For Microsoft has chosen the Thanksgiving weekend to give thanks that its own Surface RT is so much more intelligent and useful than the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.
I'll admit I haven't seen an enormous proliferation of Tab 10.1s adorning coffee shops, holding cells, and public transport. So it makes for a slightly odd target for Microsoft.
However, Redmond wants you to be clear, should you be vacillating between a Tab and a Surface RT, that its machine is superior.

It has a full-size USB port, which allows you to do, well, full-size USB porting. The Galaxy Tab 10.1 has one micro USB port, which means you can't power and connect to an external device at the same time.
And then there's the need for connectors that you have to buy as extras.
Microsoft is looking to find any and every possible rational reason to persuade you that the Surface is all things to all people with computing needs.
Indeed, more ads targeting the Galaxy Tab appeared last week -- including a family sharing comparison similar to one of the most recent anti-iPad ads.
Sadly, the initial launch of Surface, with its embarrassing dancing teens and business people, continues to hamper progress.
When people don't have their emotions positively disposed to your brand, it's so much harder to persuade them that you're as great as you think you are.

First iPad Mini vs. Retina: No contest

iPad Mini Retina.

(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)

The iPad Mini Retina's speed seals the deal.
A lot has been written about the Mini Retina's display. For good reason, of course. Take a display with 786,432 pixels (iPad Mini original) and put it up against one with over 3 million (iPad Retina) and you notice the difference.
But I have been more impressed with the performance of the Mini Retina. After using it for two weeks, the speed is what has sold me.
The best analogy I can think of is going from a circa 2009 MacBook Air to today's fastest Haswell-based MacBook.

It's that dramatic. Those numbers (below) don't lie.
The reason is pretty easy to understand. The iPad Mini has a very old (in computer years) A5 chip -- that's the same chip that debuted in the iPad 2 in March 2011.
The Mini Retina has Apple's latest chip, the A7, with more RAM.
What does all of this speed add up to? With a tablet as good as the Mini Retina, it's another reason to use a laptop less.
One of the greatest barriers to productivity (you know, doing actual work, not just browsing social media or watching movies) on a tablet is performance. Add a keyboard, and you're three quarters of the way to a laptop.
Which leads me to a final thought. The A7, or its successor the A8, would work just fine in a newfangled future 64-bit Apple device.
PC makers are already doing this with Intel's new "Bay Trail" chip, which is similar in performance to the A7.
Take Dell's Venue 11 Pro high-end tablet. It can be converted into a professional productivity platform via its modular design.

I have to think Apple has bigger plans for the A series chips than just the iPhone and conventional iPads.
An iPad Pro, anyone?

Geekbench scores for first-gen iPad Mini (top) and Retina Mini. Numbers are single core benchmark (left) and multicore. And, yes, it actually feels that much faster.

From Bordeaux to Warhol: Amazon goes high-brow

There's more to e-commerce than marked-down Kindles and superhero videos, and Amazon has the $200,000 artwork to prove it.

Amazon photographer Heather Shea photographs bottles of wine slated to go on sale at Amazon.com.

(Credit: Amazon) 

 

Tucked somewhere in the Amazon campus in Seattle, there is a room that has holds some very important racks of wine.
The bottles are handled carefully. With gloved hands, an Amazon photographer pulls each one off a wire rack and then photographs it so that online shoppers can see each bottle in a clean setting. An image of each bottle's label and description will be uploaded to site so shoppers can look at them in detail. This has happened thousands of times, for each type of wine Amazon sells. It is decidedly not how Amazon sells DVDs or books.
Rather, this is part of the online retail giant's push into new categories of high-brow products -- including a $700 bottle of Montrose Bordeaux and a $200,000 Andy Warhol original depicting China's Chairman Mao -- all in an effort to create a new revenue stream and meet the demands of a more elite base of clientele.
It's doing so through it's third-party marketplace. The site already dabbles in some pricey products, like $9,000 diamond rings, but its latest categories, art and wine, show a whole other level of commitment.
"Everything we do at Amazon starts with the customer and works itself backwards," said Peter Faricy, vice president of marketplace for the company. "Those are all categories customers have given us the feedback that they would love to get."

Peter Faircy, Amazon's vice president of marketplace.

(Credit: Amazon)

It's a far cry from Amazon's typical offerings, which began with discounted books and expanded to thousands of items -- all sold at bargain prices with free shipping. Still, it's a natural path of evolution for a company that strives to sell all things to all people. Although these products aren't the easiest to sell through the Internet -- Amazon knows that from past attempts -- it's worth the effort for the company.
The third-party marketplace is a good way to dive in. The platform lets Amazon open up product categories without actually managing the inventory. Third-party sellers pay a small revenue-sharing fee for each item sold on Amazon's site. Typically, sellers can even use Amazon's large network of warehouses to make its deliveries. In the case of wine and art, however, sellers manage all the shipping themselves. It frees Amazon from the responsibility of delivering such products, which can be difficult given the regulation and care needed to ship items like alcohol and artwork.
Amazon gets to show off a selection of products and its partner sellers, in theory, gets the eyes of Amazon's millions of customers.

Tapping into the wine industry
In the grand scheme of things, wine might not seem so lucrative. Amazon made $61 billion on its online sales in last year. In contrast, wineries shipped $1.46 billion worth of wine in 2012. But, that's a 10 percent increase from 2011, and a 24 percent increase from 2010, according to a report (PDF) co-produced by Ship Compliant, a software company that ensures wine shipments comply with individual state laws. The report analyzes the shipments from the 4,700 wineries from the US.
The majority of these sales come from wine subscription programs, a popular way for wineries to sell directly to consumers, but online sales are a growing portion, according to Jeff Carroll, vice president of strategy and compliance at Ship Compliant.

While there are smaller, competing third-party seller sites out there, Amazon, which launched its wine program about a year ago, has a chance to capitalize on a fledgling market.
To make the products look good for its third-party sellers and to try to garner trust from the customers browsing the pages, Amazon made its product pages uniform, ensuring the same type of information is available for each product, with high-quality visuals.
To achieve this in wine, each of the 800 wineries that sell through Amazon's site send a bottle of each type of wine listed for sale on the site. Currently, the number is at 6,500 unique wine labels, across 70 different varietals of grapes. More than a thousand of these wines come from countries outside the US, including France, Italy, and Australia. The price of the wines offered range from $10 up into hundreds of dollars.
The company photographs the bottles, scans the labels into its system, and lists more information than it ever has for any product. That includes what region the wine is from, what varietal of grape its made from, what type of blend it is, what type of barrel it's been aged in, how much alcohol is in it, and what types of food it pairs well with -- all the things a wine connoisseur would want to know when buying a bottle of wine.

Amazon Wine adds professional photography and dynamic shipping to its product pages.

Hall Wines, a winery in California's Napa Valley, sells several bottles of wine through Amazon, including a $125 Kathryn Hall Cabernet Sauvignon.
Jeff Zappelli, director of memberships for Hall Wines, said the winery sells out of the Kathryn Hall when it offers it on Amazon, but the reality is, it's a rare wine and there aren't many bottles for sale to begin with. What's more is, Hall Wines doesn't sell a large volume of the other wines it's offered on Amazon site either. But, that doesn't matter.
It's about introducing Hall Wines to millions of Amazon's existing customers, according to Zappelli. Hall Wines' owners initially had concerns about selling through Amazon, mostly because of a fear that selling it through a platform like Amazon -- a site known cheap commodity products and even cheaper shipping -- would diminish its brand. No doubt, it's still a concern for the many thousands of wineries that haven't signed up with Amazon.
But, Zappelli thinks selling Amazon has done the opposite for Hall Wines because it gives the winery access to instant customer reviews and feedback.
"How do we break down the barrier of the sales so we're really having a relationship with our customers and our members? Not selling through a wine store, where we don't have that feedback," he said.
He's also found a willing partner in Amazon to learn about his industry and incorporate new features that make selling wine online easier. That includes features like dynamic shipping. Once customers chooses a bottle of wine from Amazon, the site will let them know how many bottles of wine they would need to purchase from the winery in order to qualify for one-cent shipping.

Reproducing a gallery experience
This attention to detail is something Amazon needs to apply to its art category, which the company launched in August.
The online art sales business is also a small piece of the pie when it comes to art sales. Like wine, it's a nuanced industry. Amazon is currently working with more than 200 art galleries to sell 45,000 pieces of art on sale on its site.
While Amazon won't disclose what pieces it's sold so far, previously listed items include a $1.5 million Andy Warhol original called "Flowers" and a $975,000 painting from Helen Frankenthaler, titled "Adirondacks." Both are now marked "unavailable," a possible indication that someone actually bought them through Amazon. Norman Rockwell's "Willie Gillis: Package from Home," however, did not sell through the site. The painting -- which brought attention to Amazon Art during the section's launch due to its $4.85 million listing price -- sold at a Chicago auction house for $2.8 million. This listing has since been removed.
Beyond the issue of price, Amazon wants to convince customers that buying online is just as good as walking into a gallery. For each piece, Amazon asks merchants to provide details like measurements, materials used, it's condition, and a biography of the artist. It has yet to set up a way to photograph every piece of art, but it does make sure to have high-resolution images available so customers can zoom in and see brush stroke details.
Although Amazon can't altogether replace the experience of physically standing in an art gallery to look at pieces, it's tried to emulate the experience. This includes one feature Faricy is particularly proud of, "view in room." The feature generates an image of the selected art piece in a room with furniture. It's already developed a bit since Amazon Art launched, adding more pieces of furniture to the image, but Faricy says this is an area Amazon wants to develop more.

Amazon Art's "view in room" feature.

"View in room" has potentially broader applications. Faricy said he could see the same techniques applied to large flat-screen TVs. Dynamic shipping, which has been very popular among wine customers, could also be applied elsewhere on the Amazon site, he said.
Of course, these are just possibilities. It's still early days for both the art and wine categories, but if Amazon can tackle this, they can continue to move up the chain in the luxury markets. This includes the secondary market that resells used lux items, such jewelry or handbags, according to Marshal Cohen a retail analyst at NPD Group.
It's what eBay already does successfully, and a model Amazon wants to emulate since it's yet another way to sell everything.
"It's not only about having a product -- they want to be the first place you go," he said, no matter if you're selling or buying.

Snapchat's Evan Spiegel: Saying no to $3B, and feeling lucky

The son of successful lawyers, Spiegel grew up in a world of wealth, power, and privilege. Now the 23-year-old entrepreneur will be remembered for saying no to Mark Zuckerberg.

Snapchat CEO and co-founder Evan Spiegel at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in September 2013.

(Credit: Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch) 

 

LOS ANGELES -- Like many a young man, Evan Thomas Spiegel is enamored of expensive cars. Unlike many young men, he can afford them.
A little more than two years after leaving Stanford University three classes shy of graduation, Snapchat's co-founder sits atop a hastily established empire that is already worth billions in the eyes of would-be acquirers -- including Facebook, which reportedly offered to buy Snapshot for $3 billion in cash.
Snapchat, which was valued at $800 million just a few months ago, makes an app for sending pictures and videos, called "snaps," that disappear after a few seconds. The service now processes more than 400 million snaps per day, and is a big hit with tweens and teens, although the company has yet to say how many people use it. Either way, it's attracted the attention of sober-minded VCs eager to write big checks in hopes of getting in early on the next Facebook. So for the moment, Spiegel is under no pressure to make a choice, whether the future involves a sale or raising more cash to build a company that he believes has an even bigger future.
Whatever else he does in life, the 23-year-old entrepreneur will forever be remembered for saying no to Mark Zuckerberg. Whether that decision turns out inspired or insane -- it was a bold statement of confidence from someone so young. Surprising? Not to those who know him.
"He really believed in his ideas," said Leo Rofe, a classmate who was a grade below Spiegel at the Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica, Calif. "He was adamant about them."
Later in life, Spiegel would prove to be so unshakeable in his convictions that he would make the gamble of a lifetime
.
Born lucky
Born June 4, 1990, to a couple of successful lawyers, Spiegel grew up in a world of wealth, power, and privilege. His mother, Melissa, the youngest woman ever to graduate from Harvard Law School, resigned as a partner from Pillsbury, Madison, & Sutro to work as a stay-at-home mom when he was a baby. Spiegel's father, John, was (and still is) a partner at the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson, a job that afforded the family a very comfortable lifestyle in a $4.6 million home in Huntington Palisades, an upper class neighborhood in Pacific Palisades on the western fringes of Los Angeles.

"So if life isn't fair -- it's not about working harder, it's about working the system."
--Evan Spiegel

Along with his two sisters, Lauren and Caroline, Spiegel was treated to the finer things in life, including spring breaks in Maui, summers at La Jolla's Beach and Tennis Club, and vacations to Europe, along with frequent shopping sprees and a personal chef. But there was also plenty of extracurricular activity, and volunteer work. By most accounts, Spiegel turned out to be a well-adjusted, ambitious, and agreeable young man.
But that idyllic-sounding upbringing also had its less than picture-perfect moments. As an older teenager, Spiegel frequently overspent, a reality that led to many heated, money-related arguments with his father.
"You may condemn my love of material objects (like cars), but think about how you enjoy your Bose headphones," Spiegel wrote in a February 12, 2008, letter to his father. He was 17.
The note, accompanied by a plea for a new BMW 535i, came at the most tumultuous point in Spiegel's life, as his parents divorced after nearly 20 years of marriage.

John Spiegel's home on Toyopa Drive in Pacific Palisades.

 

 

Spiegel initially chose to live with his father, who bought a $4.25 million estate on Toyopa Drive, just four blocks away from his childhood home where his mother still lives. The senior Spiegel gave his son carte blanche to decorate the new home, a privilege that came with the professional decorating services of Greg Grande, the set designer on "Friends." Spiegel outfitted his new room with a white leather custom king-size bed, Venetian plaster, floating bookshelves, a state-of-the-art computer, two designer desk chairs, and custom closets. He also installed a movie theater with an 8-foot screen in the basement of the house, and was able to control the setup from his bedroom. His father's exceptional generosity was put to the test after 17-year-old Spiegel repeatedly overdrafted his bank account and begged for the BMW 535i, a $75,000 car. Spiegel, who was already driving a 2006 Cadillac Escalade, which his father bought new for $56,000, wanted the smaller car because he was "doing a lot more driving in the city," according to court documents filed by his parents during their lengthy and litigious divorce.

From 17-year-old Evan Spiegel, a suggested budget for monthly expenses 

 

 

At the time, Spiegel Sr. was giving Spiegel Jr. an allowance of $250 a week. Along with the new car, the younger Spiegel made a strong case for why he should get $1,992 a month for car, food, entertainment, and clothing expenses. He also wanted a $2,000 "emergency fund" because his "life is full of unforeseen expenses," as he wrote in the note to his father.
Spiegel declined repeated requests from CNET for an interview for this article.
As it turned out, Spiegel would not get what he wanted and moved back to his mother's house full-time after one particular money discussion escalated into a heated argument, which climaxed when Spiegel cut himself out of family photos. A few days after the move, his mother leased him the BMW he wanted.
But Spiegel didn't let the squabbles affect his stellar performance when away from the volatile home environment -- though he did get a speeding ticket for driving 62 miles per hour in a 35-mph zone a few weeks after getting the BMW. Mitch Kohn, Spiegel's 10th grade English teacher and his journalism adviser sophomore through senior years at Crossroads, remembers Spiegel as a prized student, one who decided to write a feature about the school's unconventional approach to teaching mathematics and interviewed the department heads.
"He decided he wasn't sure he liked the way Crossroads taught math from K through 12th grade," Kohn said. "I love the fact that...His opinions changed as he wrote the article. He came to understand the philosophy of it. He looked into whether kids were successful learning math that way. It just became this unbelievably good article...It was one of the best articles we had that year, by far."
His hard work paid off: He was admitted to Stanford. Spiegel got the news while vacationing in Prague.

The man and the myth
"The rhetoric of the entrepreneur is deeply embedded in Stanford's history. We've all heard the story -- young, white male drops out of college to follow a dream. His commitment to this dream helps him through highs and lows. He refuses to be another cog in the 'machine.' This romantic business fairytale pervades Stanford culture -- it is uniquely Silicon Valley."
"It" is Evan Spiegel, and these are his own words, as spoken to the audience at a Stanford Women in Business "Design Yourself" Conference on April 7, 2013.
"This brings me back to our fascination with the mythology of the entrepreneur," Spiegel told the audience. "An individual who is able to combine -- gracefully and authentically -- their life and their work. An individual who has identified a dream far greater than accumulation of wealth, but a dream that is achieved through participation in consumer society and the creation of a company."
The mythology of Evan Spiegel, the entrepreneur, started long before he met his frat brothers Reggie Brown and Bobby Murphy, and years before he attended Stanford.
It started with a fascination with design during his teenage years, possibly even earlier. In the summer of 2005, when Spiegel was just 15, he took two continuing-education courses at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. One, on graphic design, made a strong impression on him.
"Her graphic design class took a hands-on approach to design thinking and was transformational for me as a student," Spiegel later wrote in a LinkedIn recommendation for his professor Milka Broukhim. "I will never forget the typography experiments we completed during the course as well as the time spent in the letterpress lab."

Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica, an "elite, anti-prep mecca for entertainment-industry offspring," as described by Vanity Fair. The high-priced progressive institution, where students call teachers by their first names, cost the Spiegels around $75,000 every year in tuition fees for the three kids.

When working for the Crossfire, the Crossroads newspaper, Spiegel would walk around the neighborhood and ask local businesses to buy ads. Though part of the grade for the journalism class was to sell a certain amount of advertising, Kohn remembers Spiegel as a top earner who not only exceeded his sales goals, but helped coach the other kids on how to ask adults for money. And then, during his senior year, Spiegel decided he wanted to work for Red Bull. "I loved the brand, I loved the lifestyle, and I was obsessed with the beverage. I had to be a part of it," he said during the April 2013 keynote. "So I found a friend who knew a guy that worked there, and I begged him for a job. I called him repeatedly, we met for coffee, and I agreed to do anything at all for Red Bull."

The friend turned out to be Spiegel's priest, according to his mother, who also said during the divorce proceedings that Spiegel spent the unpaid internship "learning about marketing and assisting with various computer and graphic design projects."
Spiegel's version of his time at Red Bull is a tad different: "I learned how to throw great parties, and I had a blast."
The summer before college, he also took a class at the Arts Center College of Design in Pasadena. But once he got to Stanford, Spiegel had conflicting interests. He took a paid internship with a biomedical company. Later, convinced he wanted to be a teacher, he went to Cape Town in South Africa to teach students on how to get jobs.
Spiegel's first real taste of tech and entrepreneurship came when he crossed paths with Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, at a Stanford business school class he was sitting in on, thanks to the reference of a family friend. The story goes that Spiegel begged Cook for a job. The plea worked. Spiegel got to work with Cook and an engineer on a project called TxtWeb, which took information available online and made it accessible via SMS to people in India who didn't have broadband Internet access.
After the Intuit gig, Spiegel and his Kappa Sigma fraternity brother Bobby Murphy started FutureFreshman.com, a site with a guide for students, parents, and counselors on how to manage the college application process. No one, save for their parents, used it, Spiegel said.
Then, in the spring of 2011, Spiegel made the call that changed his life. The call was to Murphy to discuss switching from FutureFreshman to a new idea: disappearing picture messages.
Well, that's the myth anyhow.
Now you see him ...
The real creation story behind Snapchat is more complicated and involves Reggie Brown, a Kappa Sigma fraternity brother who came up with the idea of deleting picture messages.

Reggie Brown (left), Bobby Murphy, and Evan Spiegel (right) pictured celebrating Snapchat's launch in July 2011.

Brown brought the idea to Spiegel, and Spiegel recruited his FutureFreshman cohort Murphy to code the app. The threesome then worked together, spending the summer of 2011 at the Toyopa Drive residence in Pacific Palisades. Initially called Picaboo, the first version of Snapchat launched in July 2011. Brown, an English major with no coding skills, was assigned relatively menial marketing tasks and applied for a patent.
A month later, Brown was forced out of the company he helped bring to life, according to his version of events. Now he's suing Spiegel, Murphy, and Snapchat's investors for a substantial stake in the company. Brown claims to have designed the Snapchat logo and to have named the mascot "Ghostface Chillah." [The ghost recently lost its smiley face in a design tweak and currently goes by the moniker "NoFace Chillah."]
But life, as Spiegel has said, isn't fair.
Two years after the app's launch, Spiegel and Murphy have moved Snapchat, now a 28-person team, into a new office in Venice, Calif., and have turned the maker of the disappearing-picture app into one of the most talked-about Internet companies, one said to be valued in the billions. Though the company does not disclose the size of its user base, Pew Research Center's Internet Project recently estimated that 9 percent of adult cell phone users in the US use Snapchat. It's an impressive figure for a 2-year-old app, and one that doesn't account for Snapshot's popularity with teenagers.
Long ago having mended the strained relationship with his father, and obviously no longer burdened by overdraft fees, Spiegel is also back residing at the Toyopa Drive estate where just six years earlier he was pulling in $250 in weekly allowances. Despite living with his father, Spiegel may be the most envied guy around, if not for the billions he purportedly refused from Facebook, then for the fact that his girlfriend, Lucinda Aragon, is a 24-year-old model who socializes with the likes of Chrissy Teigen and Kate Upton.
Snapchat may prove to be as fleeting as the attention span of the teens who pass around disappearing picture and video messages, but if Spiegel's first 23 years of existence are any indication, the rich-kid-turned-celebrity-CEO has fortune on his side.

Evan Spiegel and his model girlfriend, Lucinda Aragon.

If not, odds are he'll be just fine. 
"I am a young, white, educated male. I got really, really lucky," Spiegel said in April. "And life isn't fair. So if life isn't fair -- it's not about working harder, it's about working the system."

3D printing looks promising for prosthetic-eye production

Batch-made plastic eyes could be much cheaper than traditional prostheses, and could benefit those in need in developing countries

Fripp Design's 3D-printed eyes come in many colors.

(Credit: Fripp Design) 

 

We've seen how 3D printing can help those who need fingers or limbs, even duck appendages.
UK-based Fripp Design has been working on 3D-printed prosthetic eyes, whose production time and cost are greatly reduced when compared with traditional manufacturing methods.
In collaboration with Manchester Metropolitan University, Fripp Design has developed batch production that turns out up to 150 artificial eyes per hour, making them far cheaper than handmade versions.
So-called glass eyes are usually made of special glass or acrylic and then meticulously hand-painted to match the user's other eye.

The 3D-printed prosthetic components, however, are printed in full color on a Spectrum Z-Corp 510. They then are encased in resin. Each has a slightly different hue, allowing for matching with existing eyes, as well as a network of veins.
While prosthetic eyes can cost as much as 3,000 pounds ($4,880) in the UK and take 10 weeks to receive after ordering, Fripp Design can print 150 units an hour. However, finishing them is much slower because iris customization remains a time-consuming job.
"Because each one is produced from the same system, the consistency is the same and the cost is drastically reduced to approximately 100 pounds [$163]," Fripp Design founder Tom Fripp told Dezeen.
The 3D-printed prosthetic eyes may be ready for market within a year and could be popular in developing countries, such as India.
Check out the slideshow below on how 3D-printed hands and fingers are helping kids with disabilities.

Watch Comet ISON hurtle toward the sun

NASA releases a short movie showing comet ISON's approach near the fiery grasp of the sun over the course of five days.

Comet ISON poses for a telescopic photo by the Marshall Space Flight Center.

Comet ISON is already a celebrity in the cosmos. The huge chunk of rock and primordial ice is on course to make a journey around the sun, and it's lighting up the heavens along the way. NASA released a short movie showing the comet's trajectory over the course of five days as it aims for the blazing beast that keeps us all warm down here on Earth.
The movie shows Mercury and Earth for perspective. The sun is off screen to the right. The movie was captured by the Stereo-A spacecraft's Heliospheric Imager.

As you watch the video, a second, smaller moving object comes into view. That speck is Comet Encke. Encke orbits the sun every few years. It really highlights the size of Comet ISON in comparison.
The comet's fate is still undecided, but it will spend Thanksgiving even closer to the sun as it closes in on its intended U-turn around the star. NASA will be hosting a Hangout to follow the event from 10 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. PT. Check out Crave's ISON viewing guide for how you might be able to catch a glimpse of the speeding space object.

Hunt ghosts with Snooperscope smartphone night vision lens

This magnetic device lets you act like a creepy spy, observe nocturnal wildlife, or see Kinect infrared dots.

Snooperscope can snap on to your device with its magnets. It has a night vision range of about 33 feet.

 

 

Maybe you want to check out whatever it was that just went bump in the night. Or maybe you just want to see things in the dark. Here's a handy scope that goes nearly anywhere.
Snooperscope is a wireless night vision device that uses your smartphone or other mobile device as a display.
Part of a Kickstarter campaign, it can attach to your iPhone, Android phone, or tablet, as well as anything from a tripod to a helmet, bike, or wall.
The device lets users see in total darkness, according to the London-based campaign, which is seeking to raise 40,000 pounds (about $65,000).

It can also see through opaque materials that infrared rays can pass through, such as liquids or textiles. If you turn off the lights when your Kinect is on, it will pick up the infrared tracking dots. You can also use it for caving, home security, or freaking out party guests.
Snooperscope shines infrared radiation on objects in the dark, and then converts the reflections into a visible image.
It has a fairly limited night vision range of about 33 feet, and can be actively used for up to four hours on a battery charge, which takes two to three hours.
Weighing 2.8 ounces, the device has a tripod mount, magnet mount, and runs on a Wi-Fi peer-to-peer connection.
Designed to be the "world's smallest, lightest and smartest night vision device using a smartphone," Snooperscope and may have a retail price around $99. It's available to Kickstarter backers for 43 pounds (about $70).
Check out different uses of Snooperscope in the vid below.

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  Harry Myers/Rex Features

England got a lot more of than Americans did during the group's formative years. Between 1962 and 1965, The Beatles were featured on 53 BBC radio programs, including their own series, Pop Go the Beatles. They performed originals and covers and chatted with BBC hosts. The Beatles: On Air-Live at the BBC Volume 2 has just been released. Kevin Howlett produced both that and the newly remastered reissue of the first volume, which was originally released in 1994. For reasons he explains to Fresh Air host , Howlett had to search for many of these recordings, and they weren't easy to find.
Howlett has written a new companion book called The Beatles: The BBC Archives, which includes transcriptions of the band's BBC radio and TV interviews as well as fascinating internal memos about the Beatles and their music.

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Interview Highlights

On the challenges of his project working in the BBC archive
My quest to restore the BBC archive [of the Beatles] goes way back to 1981 when I joined the national pop network in this country, BBC Radio 1, as a young rookie producer. I was 24 years old. The management knew I was a Beatles fanatic, I was a child in the '60s growing up with the Beatles, and they gave me this task. What a dream thing to be handed. They said, "Can you investigate what programs the Beatles performed music in and what songs they did?" And the BBC's written archives are a wonderful place where they kept every single piece of paper relating to the Beatles' performances, so when I wrote the book it was a magnificent source of material: memos, contracts, audience research reports — so that was fine, you could find out all of the information.
But then finding the music on the tapes? That was a completely different matter. Some of these recordings come from transcription discs, LPs that were distributed by the BBC to other countries for broadcast. Some come from producer listening copies. There were some producers at the time that thought maybe it is worth keeping this material, and in some of these cases, listeners who taped off the radio.
On The Beatles' audition for the BBC
The very first thing that Brian Epstein did when he took over the management of The Beatles was to fill out an application form for the variety department of the BBC. This, again, reminds us that there was no rock business as we know it. This was show business and they would be on with all sorts of other acts, radio ventriloquists even, that kind of thing.
So he fills out the application form. They're invited to do an audition and they turn up at the Manchester Playhouse and they perform four songs. The producer Peter Pilbeam selected them for broadcast. That was quite something because some other very popular Liverpool groups — they all failed their auditions with Peter Pilbeam, but he passed The Beatles and in the book, you can see Peter Pilbeam's comments [on the back of the application] and he says, "Not as rock-y as most, more country and western with a tendency to play music" — one of the great understatements, I think. He also makes a comment about the vocalists and he said, "John Lennon, yes. Paul McCartney, no." But Paul did sing on the first broadcast, so he must've changed his mind about that.
But, well done, Peter Pilbeam, because this is well before they were signed to Parlophone Records by and a long time before they released their first single, "Love Me Do," in the U.K. So the BBC was very quick to see the potential of this group.

The Beatles On NPR

On how The Beatles changed the tone of the BBC
I think it's important to put yourself back in that era, and this is the year [1963] before it all happens in America and internationally, this is for The Beatles, make or break time. And what they were doing was revolutionary and shocking: the choice of material, the way they were allowed to be themselves on the air and be so witty and irreverent, all in a very good-natured way, but the culture clash of the cheeky lads from Liverpool with the trained actors who might be presenting programs with them.
So [the BBC's] light-years away from The Beatles, they're not music experts and they do these wonderfully corny links and you can hear The Beatles having such a great time and giggling away at some of these links. It was just radical to hear that on the BBC. In those days if you presented a program, you had to submit your script two weeks in advance and someone would go through it with a blue pencil altering your grammar. There was no spontaneity on the BBC. But because The Beatles were recording for the Popular Music Department, which was live music, they were allowed to be more natural in what was called "The Announcements." So they are themselves [and] that was quite shocking. BBC was a very formal institution.
On reading the audience research reports from the BBC shows
Going through the written archives, I loved looking through all of the audience research reports. There would be a listening panel and a TV panel, people selected to make comments on radio and TV programs broadcasted by the BBC. And they're all kept in the written archives and you read through these reports and there are some facsimiles of them in the file of documents that comes with the book. The one from a program called From Us To You broadcast on Easter Monday in 1964 and you read through and a security guard says, "The Beatles were vastly overrated, their performance was decidedly amateur and their entertainment value — nil." Somebody else says, "Noisy, boring, waste of time."

Dive on in: Fabien Cousteau and the urge to live under the sea

Next spring, Fabien Cousteau, grandson of the legendary Jacques, will lead a 31-day mission, living in an underwater lab and exploring the mysteries of the deep. And you're invited to come along.

Fabien Cousteau (pictured) is planning an undersea living expedition similar to one his famed grandfather undertook in 1963, but going deeper and one day longer. The Aquarius lab will be home base for 31 days.

(Credit: Kip Evans/Mission Blue)

Half a dozen half-naked men are sitting around, talking, drinking, and smoking in Starfish House, 33 feet below the surface of the Red Sea. It's 1963. Among them is ocean explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau -- still clad in his silver diving suit -- commandant of the first undersea village.
That scene comes early on in "World Without Sun," the Oscar-winning documentary released in 1964. It provided moviegoers with a window into the underwater world of oceanauts living and working for a month in "inner space."
Now, 50 years later, Fabien Cousteau, grandson of the famed ocean explorer, is planning a similar expedition but going deeper and one day longer. And you won't have to wait for the movie to come out -- you can watch Mission 31 unfold in real time.
Next spring, Cousteau and five others will dive down to Aquarius Reef Base, an undersea lab 63 feet down in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. They plan to make the school-bus-size lab their home for 31 days, while exploring the deep and conducting scientific research (yes, there's a documentary in the works) -- all the while broadcasting the mission live.

Fabien Cousteau on his grandfather's shoulders in 1970.

(Credit: Mission 31)

"We're in a whole new generation," said Cousteau, 46, a filmmaker and ocean explorer like his grandfather. During the last half of the 20th century, film and TV audiences became immersed in the undersea world of Jacques Cousteau, who was 87 when he died in 1997. "The Internet was in its nascent stage at the end of his life, so he never got a chance to reach out through that medium," he said.
Though time has advanced and so has technology, one thing hasn't changed much. "The reality is that we've explored less than 5 percent of our ocean to date," Cousteau said. So there are still a lot of stories to tell, and discoveries and adventures to be had, he said. "In essence we're hoping to continue on where my grandfather left off."
But it's not just by symbolically going deeper and one day longer than the 1963 expedition, he said. "There's a human-ocean connection that hadn't really been fathomed -- or certainly not enough -- that we need to emphasize now."
During the expedition, the aquanauts will conduct scientific research on how climate change, overconsumption, and pollution are affecting the health of the ocean. The aquanauts themselves will become specimens too, participating in experiments on the physiological and psychological effects of living under the sea -- and without sun -- for a month.

Immersion program
Cousteau describes Mission 31 as "an underwater classroom," where he and his team will share their discoveries with viewers -- through daily Skype video calls with students around the world, live reports on the Weather Channel, and real-time updates on social media.
"I think there's a way to wow today's generation in a way that [my grandfather] did, maybe by engaging them in a more real-time sort of way with more alternative kind of media," he said.
The 50th anniversary of his grandfather's experiment in undersea living, known as Conshelf Two, comes at an opportune time for updating our knowledge too, he said.

Get Cousteau talking about the changes he's witnessed during his time in and around the ocean and he'll take an Aquaman-like dive into the scientific research as well. Caused "just by the actions of one species," the changes are both fascinating and scary, he said.
And he has a couple of decades' worth of firsthand knowledge to draw on. Cousteau grew up on the decks of the Calypso and Alcyone, the ships that transported his grandfather and crew on many of their expeditions.
"You go to the Florida Keys, for example, and it's a shadow of its former self," he said. But take someone, say a 12-year-old, diving in that area for the first time? "They've never seen how it was, how it was supposed to be, which is this fireworks display of life that I grew up with, when I was 12 years old."
The point of Mission 31 is more than going deeper and longer than Conshelf Two. "We're also showing the wonders of the undersea world in a way that most people will never get a chance to see," Cousteau said.

Fabien Cousteau describes Mission 31 as 'an underwater classroom,' where he and his team will share their discoveries with viewers in real time.

(Credit: Carrie Vonderhaar)

In October, an international panel of marine scientists released a report saying that increased carbon emissions have led to a "deadly trio" that threatens the world's oceans: waters are acidifying, warming, and losing oxygen. Pollution and overfishing are adding to the stress too. And things are worse than previously believed.
"The health of the ocean is spiraling downwards far more rapidly than we had thought," Alex Rogers, scientific director of the International Programme on the State of the Ocean, said in a statement. "The situation should be of the gravest concern to everyone since everyone will be affected by changes in the ability of the ocean to support life on Earth."
The findings go beyond even the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that preceded it by a week, which said that the ocean is bearing the brunt of global warming.

Daily life in the deep
In addition to the mysteries of the underwater world, viewers may find life inside Aquarius just as compelling. What happens when you pack six people who don't know each other well into a school-bus-size space for a month? Aquarius, the world's only operating undersea lab, is about 43 feet long and about 9 feet wide inside. There are six bunks, a shower and toilet, hot water, a refrigerator, a microwave, air conditioning, and an Internet connection. The longest mission Aquarius has hosted was 18 days, with a typical mission lasting about 10 days.
Cousteau has assembled a team of people with science and engineering backgrounds, three women and three men, ranging in age from 19 to 46. For most of his team, including Cousteau, it'll be a new experience living as saturation divers, enabling them to stay underwater for the length of the mission. The 1963 expedition in part was an early, successful effort in saturation diving -- a technique that allows divers to safely explore the deep for a much longer period of time compared with surface-based diving.

What will their daily life aquatic look like? The aquanauts aim to have a routine, keeping hours similar to most landlubbers. "We're just going to be doing it down at three atmospheres and beyond," Cousteau said.
Their days will be spent diving six to nine hours -- conducting scientific experiments and filming -- doing broadcasts, and receiving supplies as well as VIP guests. (Expected celebrity visitors include adventuresome billionaire Richard Branson and "Her Deepness," oceanographer Sylvia Earle.) The evenings will likely be spent filling in logs, doing stress tests and lab work, and enjoying a little downtime.
Doesn't quite sound like your ordinary workday? They'll also have cooler tech toys: underwater robots and motorcycles.
Thanks to its scientific advisory team, Mission 31 will have access to autonomous underwater vehicles that can be used to help study, among other things, the effects of ocean acidification on coral. There's also an ROV (remotely operated vehicle) that can take very high-resolution video in deep water, detailed enough to capture the bioluminescence of sea creatures.
The underwater motorcycles are basically propulsion vehicles, streamlined so aquanauts can hover or zip around more quickly and while carrying more gear. Picture the speeder-bike chase scene in "Return of the Jedi," Cousteau said.

Fabien Cousteau just inside Aquarius Reef Base.

(Credit: Mission 31) 

 

A monthlong mission takes extensive planning (though maybe not quite as much as producing a science-fiction blockbuster). That includes preparing in case something goes wrong.
"This is a very serious endeavor," Cousteau said. "Physically you have to be in very good shape. It's very much like going into outer space." In fact, many astronauts become aquanauts at Aquarius to train for space missions. Aquarius has hosted 18 NASA training missions.
Before the launch, the team will train by doing things like simulating emergencies, he said. That includes the aquanauts having to find their way back to the habitat after taking off their masks about 200 yards away and being spun around to lose their orientation. They don't expect to have to use that training, but it's necessary, Cousteau said. "We need to know that everyone's prepared because of the parameters that we're working under, which are very extreme, very difficult."
Those parameters include living in navy-style quarters. ("You're stacked like sardines in there. That doesn't bother me," Cousteau said.) Without sun. And being away from friends and family for a month, though the Internet will help the aquanauts stay connected.
"Ultimately, psychologically, I think if you really put your mind to it, anyone can stick something out for a month, but it's certainly not going to be easy," he said.
Maybe just as tough to withstand: subsisting on astronaut-type food, because of limited space at Aquarius. Starfish House -- which, to be fair, was the headquarters of an undersea village -- had a chef de cuisine, who served dishes like bifteck saute marchand de vins.

"We're really, really, really hoping that someone will have mercy on us and bring us down some decent food once in a while," Cousteau said.
Mission 31 had been set to launch this month but Cousteau decided to postpone it until spring, in part because science and film permits got held up because of the US government shutdown last month.
Funding for the expedition, projected to cost $1.8 million, is coming from corporate sponsors and private donations. There's a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo that runs through December 6 with a goal of raising a minimum of $100,000. (For $10, you get a shout-out on Twitter and Facebook. For $25,000, you get to dive down to the mission as a VIP guest.)
"People can peep in whenever they want to see what we're up to day and night," Cousteau said. From time to time though, they might shut off a few of the cameras to give the aquanauts a little privacy.
"We want everyone to be part of this adventure," he said.
During the 1963 expedition, oceanaut Pierre Vanoni kept a diary. In the companion book to "World Without Sun," one passage makes clear what he thought about his own undersea adventure.
After three weeks at Starfish House, Vanoni wrote that he became aware again that time was passing: "I fear I may rise to the surface next week without having seen and experienced absolutely everything."

Microsoft Worried About PCs Still Using Windows XP

It's time to let that tried and true OS go for good.

Microsoft has a huge challenge on its hands over the next six months: to not only sell customers on the greatness that is Windows 8.1, but to convince them that Windows XP is too old and too unsafe to use. As we've seen since the launch of Windows 8 last year, Microsoft is pushing consumers and businesses alike to ditch the old but popular OS for something a bit more spit shined like Windows 7 and Windows 8. Unfortunately, upgrading doesn't appear to be happening fast enough.
According to Microsoft's own numbers, around 377,000 PCs in New Zealand alone that are running Windows XP will be made vulnerable after April 8, 2014. Even more, those individuals and businesses could affect others who have already upgraded. Personal information could be put at risk as well as business trade secrets, customer account data and more. As reported earlier this week, hackers could reverse engineer fixes made to the newer platforms and see if the exploits work on Windows XP.
The time to upgrade, if it hasn't taken place already, is now. "We're well and truly at the stage where businesses and personal computer users need to upgrade to Windows 7 or Windows 8 – both to protect against risk, and to get the benefits of running a modern operating system," says Dean Edwards, Windows Business Group Manager at Microsoft NZ.
"For businesses, upgrading an operating system takes time," Edwards adds. "Depending on complexity, small businesses could take three to six months to upgrade, and larger businesses can take six months or more. We are really worried that some New Zealand companies are cutting it too close to the end of support date."
Earlier this week, a spokesperson for Microsoft said that the company will not guarantee updates of its anti-malware signature and engine after the Windows XP end of support date of April 8, 2014. More specifically, the rep said that running antivirus software on out of support operating systems is not an adequate solution to help protect against threats. Instead, a well-protected solution starts with using modern software and hardware designed to help protect against today's threat landscape… modern software like Windows 7 and Windows 8.
"In addition, Microsoft recommends best practices to protect your PC such as: 1) running up to date antivirus, 2) regularly applying security updates for all software installed, and 3) using modern software that has advanced security technologies and is supported with regular security updates," the rep added.
So how disruptive will it be for businesses to upgrade to Windows 7 or Windows 8? "We had 1,100 computers running XP in all our offices and branches, and migrating them to Windows 8 caused little disruption to the business," said Dave Veronese, CIO of House of Travel. "It was something we delayed doing for so long, but we've already noticed the benefit of using more up to date software and would highly recommend upgrading for the advantages of the new operating system."
In a chart recently provided by Microsoft, the number of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) mitigated by Windows XP's built-in DEP were surpassed by the CVEs that could bypass XP's baked-in protection in 2011. By 2012, that bypassing number of CVEs appears to have doubled. Now imagine that number after April 2014.

Harley Davidson India to export Street 750

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AP

Pune: Harley Davidson India will begin assembling the Street 750 at its facility in Bawal, Haryana, from the second quarter of 2014 and also plans to export it to Europe.
India is the only country outside the US to be making the new bike, which is built on the completely new ‘Street’ platform, and this will be the first HD product to be exported from the facility.
The first Harley Davidson member in the sub-Rs-5-lakh segment, the Street 750 will be unveiled at the India Bike Week in Goa in early January, following which it will be showcased at the forthcoming Delhi Auto Expo.
In Pune to inaugurate HDI’s 11th dealership in India, Anoop Prakash, Managing Director HD India, said commercial deliveries of the Street 750 will begin by April or May of 2014, adding that the Made-in-India bike will also be exported to Italy, Portugal and Spain. Total shipments of the model (US and India) are pegged between 7,000 and 10,000 units.
To enable assembly of the Street 750, Harley Davidson will increase its investment in the Indian facility by around 35 per cent. At present it assembles nine of the 11 models it sells in the country and says it expects sales at the end of 2013 to touch 4,000 units since the 2010 launch.
India is already on the global sourcing map of the American heavy bike maker, and locally assembled motorcycles already have some Indian content. The plan is to increase this with time, Prakash said.
Another revenue stream for Harley Davidson is merchandise and accessories. “Globally this accounts for around 18 per cent of total sales, including 5 per cent for riding gear alone, and this is more or less also the case in India,” he added.
HDI will inaugurate two new dealerships in Goa and Mumbai over the coming weekend, and plans to add three more next year to take the total to 16. Amongst the locations being considered are tier-2 and 3 towns including Surat, Coimbatore, Guwahati and Kozhikode.

Web giant's practice of combining user data from its different services violates data protection law, the agency says.

Google 'spins invisible web' with user data, Dutch watchdog says

Google's practice of combining user data from its different services without user consent violates Dutch data protection law, the country's privacy watchdog said Thursday.

A 2012 overhaul of Google's privacy policy gave the company the right to "combine personal information" across multiple products, including payment information and location data. However, the Dutch Data Protection Authority found that the company does not adequately inform users of the practice in advance nor seek their consent.
"Google spins an invisible web of our personal data, without our consent. And that is forbidden by law," DPA Chairman Jacob Kohnstamm said in a statement. The finding won't immediately result in any enforcement measures, but Google has been invited to a hearing to determine if such measures are necessary.
Google raised the ire of privacy advocates in January 2012 with a privacy policy rewrite that would grant it explicit rights to "combine personal information" across multiple products and services. The simplified privacy policy, which would replace 60 privacy policies for different services, would only improve the user experience, Google argued.
Opponents of the change sued, saying the move was designed to increase the company's advertising effectiveness. EU officials asked that Google delay implementing its new policy until the privacy implications can be analyzed, but the Web giant declined, saying it had it extensively pre-briefed privacy regulators on the changes and that no objections were raised at the time.

The controversial changes led to lawsuits from the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy, among others.
After a months-long inquiry into the legality of the changes, French privacy watchdog Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertes (CNIL) asked Google in October 2011 to amend the policy within four months to better inform users on how their data would be used and set more precise limits on how long data would be retained. In April, the CNIL announced "coordinated and simultaneous enforcement actions" with five other European countries because Google had not implemented any "significant compliance measures."
Google, for its part, has maintained that its privacy policy isn't illegal and that the company has consistently cooperated with investigators.
"Our privacy policy respects European law and allows us to create simpler, more effective services," Al Verney, a Brussels-based spokesman for Google, told Bloomberg. "We have engaged fully with the Dutch data protection authority throughout this process and will continue to do so going forward."