An anonymous reader writes from a ZDNet story: Microsoft is softening its stance on how long and how completely it will continue to support Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users running Skylake-based devices. Instead of cutting off full, extended support for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 on Skylake on July 17, 2017, Microsoft will now guarantee full extended support to July 17, 2018. Microsoft also tightened up the wording as to what kinds of security updates Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users will get once that date comes. "After July 2018, all critical Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 security updates will be addressed for Skylake systems until extended support ends for Windows 7, January 14, 2020 and Windows 8.1 on January 10, 2023," it said. Many users weren't pleased with Microsoft's initial decision. And it appears OEMs weren't thrilled about it, either. Adrienne Mueller, Product Manager at Lenovo said earlier this month, "The thought here is that Microsoft is really just pushing customers to move to Windows 10. A lot of reactions from our customers...is can we influence Microsoft and tell them they're not ready to transition and try to get them to prolong support on that? We've tried, and Microsoft's not really willing to do that."

wiredmikey writes from an article on SecurityWeek: Pwn2Own 2016 has come to an end, with researchers earning a total of $460,000 in cash for disclosing 21 new vulnerabilities in Windows, OS X, Flash, Safari, Edge and Chrome. On the first day of the well-known hacking competition, contestants earned $282,500 for vulnerabilities in Safari, Flash Player, Chrome, Windows and OS X. On the second day, Tencent Security Team Sniper took the lead after demonstrating a successful root-level code execution exploit in Safari via a use-after-free flaw in Safari and an out-of-bounds issue in Mac OS X. The exploit earned them $40,000 and 10 Master of Pwn points. This year's contestants earned nearly $100,000 less for their exploits compared to Pwn2Own 2015, when researchers walked away with more than $550,000 for their exploits.

An anonymous reader writes: The CEO of Carl's Jr., Andy Puzder, has been inspired by the 100-percent automated restaurant, Eatsa, as he looks for ways to deal with rising minimum wages. "With government driving up the cost of labor, it's driving down the number of jobs," he says. "You're going to see automation not just in airports and grocery stores, but in restaurants." Puzder doesn't believe in [the progressive idea of] raising the minimum wage. "Does it really help if Sally makes $3 more an hour if Suzie has no job? If you're making labor more expensive, and automation less expensive -- this is not rocket science," says Puzder. What comes as a challenge is automating employee tasks. This is where he draws the line and doesn't think that it's likely any machine could perform such work. But for more rote tasks like grilling a burger or taking an order, technology may be even more precise than human employees. "They're always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case," says Puzder in regard to replacing employees with machines.

An anonymous reader writes from an article on CBSNews: Newly released emails show a 2009 request to issue a secure government smartphone to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was denied by the National Security Agency. Clinton's desire for a secure "BlackBerry-like" device, like the one provided to President Barack Obama, is recounted in a series of February 2009 exchanges between high-level officials at the State Department and NSA. Clinton was sworn in as secretary the prior month, and had become "hooked" on reading and answering emails on a BlackBerry she used during the 2008 presidential race. "We began examining options for (Secretary Clinton) with respect to secure 'BlackBerry-like' communications," wrote Donald R. Reid, the department's assistant director for security infrastructure. "The current state of the art is not too user friendly, has no infrastructure, and is very expensive." Reid wrote that each time they asked the NSA what solution they had worked up to provide a mobile device to Obama, "we were politely told to shut up and color."

An anonymous reader writes from an opinionated article on TechCrunch by Tom Hadfield: If Facebook announces the "Messenger Bot Store" at F8, as many predict, it would be arguably the most consequential event for the tech industry since Apple announced the App Store and iPhone SDK in March 2008. Today, Facebook Messenger has 800 million monthly active users -- more than 100 times the number of iPhone owners when Apple launched the App Store. In January, TechCrunch first reported rumors of Facebook's secret Chat SDK for building Messenger bots. If and when Facebook announces a Bot Store, it will mark the "end of the beginning" of a new era: messaging as a platform. Over the summer, The Information broke the news that AI-powered Facebook M would enable Messenger users to make purchases, restaurant reservations, and travel bookings within the messaging interface. A Messenger Bot Store would have far-reaching consequences not only for entrepreneurs and investors, but also developers and designers. Sam Lessin, the CEO of Fin, says the rise of chat-based user interfaces will mark "a fundamental shift that is going to change the types of applications that get developed and the style of service development." For a time, bots were perceived to be plain-text exchanges and as such were often described as "invisible apps." As Jonathan Libov at USV points out, "just because the container is a messenger doesn't mean that all the apps inside are text-based." Tomaz Stolfa says there is "unexplored potential in blending conversational interfaces with rich graphical UI elements." If 800 million Facebook users start discovering bots in Messenger after F8, it will vindicate those who have been saying bots are the new apps.

An anonymous reader writes: The Nike HyperAdapt 1.0 self-lacing shoes have been officially unveiled. We know they will go on sale later this year, but we do not know the price. "When you step in, your heel will hit a sensor and the system will automatically tighten," explained Tiffany Beers, the project's technical lead. There are two buttons on the side of the shoe that allow you to tweak how loose or tight the laces are. The concept behind the HyperAdapt shoes bring to mind Marty McFly's Nike Mags from Back to the Future, even if they do not look very similar. Nike hasn't yet revealed how the shoes work from a technical point of view but they do lineup with the US patent filed by the company in 2009. The HyperAdapt 1.0 shoes will be exclusively available to users of the Nike+ app later this year in three color combinations -- white, grey and black.

An anonymous reader writes: One year after Windows 10 Mobile was announced, Microsoft is finally rolling out their new OS to older mobile devices, specifically devices running Windows Phone 8.1. Here's the complete list of supported phones: Lumia 1520, 930, 640, 640XL, 730, 735, 830, 532, 535, 540, 635 1GB, 636 1GB, 638 1GB, 430, 435, BLU Win HD w510u, BLU Win HD LTE x150q, and the MCJ Madosma Q501. Depending on where you live and which carrier you have, the update will be handled differently. Microsoft has said "many older devices are not able to successfully upgrade without an impact on the customer experience." For an OS that continues to lose market share [to] iOS and Android, it makes sense for Microsoft to be so concerned about the user experience as it is crucial for the success of Windows 10 Mobile.

An anonymous reader writes from an article on Bloomberg: Executives at Google parent Alphabet Inc., absorbed with making sure all the various companies under its corporate umbrella have plans to generate real revenue, concluded that Boston Dynamics isn't likely to produce a marketable product in the next few years and have put the unit up for sale, according to two people familiar with the company's plans. Possible acquirers include the Toyota Research Institute, a division of Toyota Motor Corp., and Amazon.com Inc., which makes robots for its fulfillment centers, according to one person. Google acquired Boston Dynamics in late 2013 as part of a spree of acquisitions in the field of robotics. Over the following year, the robot initiative, dubbed Replicant, was plagued by leadership changes, failures to collaborate between companies and an unsuccessful effort to recruit a new leader. Jonathan Rosenberg, an adviser to Alphabet Chief Executive Officer Larry Page and former Google senior vice president, said, "we as a startup of our size cannot spend 30-plus percent of our resources on things that take ten years," and that "there's some time frame that we need to be generating an amount of revenue that covers expenses and (that) needs to be a few years." In December, Google announced that Replicant had been folded into Google's advanced research group, Google X. In a private all-hands meeting around that time, Astro Teller, the head of Google X, told Replicant employees that if robotics aren't the practical solution to problems that Google was trying to solve, they would be reassigned to work on other things, according to a person who was at that meeting. Boston Dynamics, though, was never folded into Google X and was instead put up for sale.

MojoKid writes: Intel first hinted at their upcoming Skull Canyon NUC small form factor PC at CES 2016 in January, but the company is now ready to give this slightly bigger, badder NUC its official debut. Skull Canyon manages to cram high-end Intel silicon within an enclosure that measures just 8.5" x 4.6" x 0.9" and has a volume of just 0.69 liters. Inside, there is a sixth generation Intel Core i7-6770HQ processor with 45W TDP and integrated Iris Pro Graphics 580 with on-board eDRAM. On the memory front, up to 32GB of 2133MHz DDR4 is supported, while storage duties are covered by two M.2 slots that support the latest NVMe PCIe SSDs. Also on-board is Intel 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2, and GbE and even a consumer infrared sensor if you want to use Skull Canyon as a media box. For external ports you'll find a full-size HDMI 2.0 port, Mini DisplayPort 1.2, four USB 3.0 ports, an SD slot which can accommodate up to 512GB, and support for Thunderbolt 3 (40GBps) and USB 3.1 using a USB Type-C connector. Intel says that a barebones Skull Canyon NUC (NUC6i7KYK) has an estimated street price of $650. Preorders for the NUC6i7KYK SKU will begin next month and shipments will commence in May.

the_newsbeagle writes: We don't often get insider accounts of hacks against major institutions like hospitals because they immediately go into damage control mode. But at a SXSW talk, a couple of experts told tales out of school. The experts, [John Halamka, CIO of the Boston hospital Beth Israel Deaconness, and Kevin Fu, a University of Michigan engineering professor, recounted incidents in which hackers downloaded patient X-rays to China, took down entire networks, fooled Harvard doctors, and more.

An anonymous reader writes: CyanogenMod 13.0 Release 1 is now available as the Android community's first release based off Google's 6.0 Marshmallow. [...]
Not long after Google released the code for Android Marshmallow, CyanogenMod started rolling out nightly builds. Now, CyanogenMod has officially released its first Snapshot release for those looking for more stable development. Many of the improvements detail changes to the privacy settings. For example, CyanogenMod 13.0 has removed encrypted Whisperpush text messaging, and Privacy Guard has been altered to comply with Marshmallow's new permission model. Some other changes include a new AOSP SMS/MMS application, memory screen that shows memory usage over a selected period of time, new controls for the status bar icons, and an enhanced Snap camera app based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon camera. A Cyanogen Apps pack is not yet available, but should be coming in a week or so.

szczys writes: We are surely in the age of single-board computers as the words "Raspberry Pi" sneak into the ranks of [a] household name. Many would have thought this impossible, but for hardware enthusiasts it has wide-reaching benefits as others clamor to enter the market. The most formidable challenge made so far is by the Hardkernel Odroid C2 which bests the Pi 3 on hardware, but not everything. Odroid C2 has the same cores, running faster with more RAM. It swaps out gigabit Ethernet for the Pi 3's somewhat unimpressive Wi-Fi chip. And it includes onboard eMMC (useful for faster booting) as well as an SD card slot. Odroid C2's hardware is clearly a better offering than Pi 3 for just $5 more (as we saw from the benchmarks last week), but that's not the entire story. It's further down Linux stream for a less mature distro, and has nowhere near the community support that has opened the Pi [up] to just about everyone. But it is the hardware geek's SBC with the layman's price tag and that's a very interesting indicator of where we are with low-cost computing.

dkatana writes: There is no shortage of news about the fight between Apple and the Justice Department to unlock the iPhone of a suspect in the San Bernardino, Calif., terrorist case. Apple can take a page from the fight BlackBerry had back in 2010 with some governments in the Middle East and Asia. At that time -- afraid to lose a lucrative business -- RIM [gave] in and allowed those governments to access its secure BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) service. The rest is history. If Apple complies with the Justice Department request, according to Craig Federighi, senior VP of software engineering at Apple, "[This software -- which law enforcement has conceded it wants to apply to many iPhones --] would become a weakness that hackers and criminals could use to wreak havoc on the privacy and personal safety of us all."

Lucas123 writes: GM today announced a short-term vehicle rental program exclusive to the Lyft ride-sharing service, but it also made clear a longer-term goal to create a fleet of autonomous vehicles that could be summoned by Lyft's automated ride matching mobile app. The new Express Drive rental program will make cars available to Lyft drivers starting at $99, a price that includes insurance and vehicle maintenance. The new rental program comes just two months after GM struck a strategic partnership with Lyft to develop autonomous vehicles and invested $500 million as part of Lyft's $1 billion Series F funding round. More than 400 million people will rely on robotic car sharing by 2030, according to a new report by ABI Research. "We see the future of personal mobility as connected, seamless and autonomous," GM president Dan Ammann said. "With GM and Lyft working together, we believe we can successfully implement this vision more rapidly."

An anonymous reader writes: During the past years, malware aimed at stealing game inventory items from Steam accounts and logging Steam login credentials has become extremely sophisticated, but [has] remained at a lower-tier pricing range on underground hacking forums, rarely going above $10, never over $30. Valve says that it receives 77,000 complaints a month for hacked accounts, and Steam Stealers are responsible for most of them. [The] most targeted game is Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, while Kaspersky Lab says that most of the cyber-gangs behind these malware families are of Eastern European origin, mostly Russian.

An anonymous reader writes: Google has once again upped the ante for bug hunters concentrating on Chrome, and is now offering $100,000 to anyone capable of achieving a compromise of a Chromebook or Chromebox (the desktop variant of the Chromebook laptop) with device persistence in guest mode (i.e. guest to guest persistence with interim reboot, delivered via a web page). From Google's Monday announcement: Last year we introduced a $50,000 reward for the persistent compromise of a Chromebook in guest mode. Since we introduced the $50,000 reward, we haven't had a successful submission. That said, great research deserves great awards, so we're putting up a standing six-figure sum, available all year round with no quotas and no maximum reward pool.

AmiMoJo writes: A study by Rutgers University and Microsoft has found that hard drives are more prone to failure due to high levels of humidity [PDF] than high temperature. With a view to 'free cooling' data centres (using low external air temperature for cooling to save power), the paper notes that humidity related malfunctions of the driver controller / adapter are the dominant cause of drive failure. The good news is that while the researchers found that high relative humidity was a significant factor in drive failures, "[S]oftware availability techniques can mask them and enable freecooled operation, resulting in significantly lower infrastructure and energy costs that far outweigh the cost of the extra component failures."

MojoKid writes: Remember that Radeon R9 Fury X2 graphics card that AMD CEO Lisa Su showed off months ago? We were previously lead to believe that the dual-GPU graphics card would deliver performance of around 12 TFLOPs. However, the card will actually deliver in excess of 16 TFLOPs. AMD says that this is more than enough to allow developers to "Develop content more rapidly for tomorrow's killer VR experiences while at work, and playing the latest DirectX 12 experiences at maximum fidelity while off work." And the Radeon R9 Fury X2 name? That's dead and buried — the card is now known as the Radeon Pro Duo. Not much is known about the new card at this point but the Radeon Pro Duo will apparently be available during the second quarter with an estimated street price of $1,499.

Lucas123 writes: The U.S. solar market is expected to grow 120% this year, with 16GW of new solar power, more than double the record-breaking 7.3GW installed in 2015. The total operating solar PV capacity in the U.S. is expected to reach 25.6 gigawatts (billion watts or GW) of direct current (DC) by the end of the year, according to GTM Research's U.S. Solar Market Insight Report 2015 Year in Review. When accounting for all projects (both distributed and centralized), solar accounted for 29.4% of new electric generating capacity installed in the U.S. in 2015, exceeding the total for natural gas for the first time and it will put the U.S. ahead of all other nations with regard to new solar installations for 2016.

1sockchuck writes: Facebook is building a new generation of open hardware, part of its vision for powerful data centers that will use artificial intelligence and virtual reality to deliver experiences over the Internet. At the Open Compute Summit, Facebook shared details of its work to integrate more SSDs, GPUs, NVM and a "Just a Bunch of Flash" storage sled to accelerate its infrastructure. The company's infrastructure ambitions are also powered by CEO Mark Zuckerberg's embrace of virtual reality, reflected in the $2 billion acquisition of VR pioneer Oculus. "Over the next decade, we're going to build experiences that rely more on technology like artificial intelligence and virtual reality," said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "These will require a lot more computing power."