Bruce66423 writes: In its latest filing, the FBI implies that, if the burden on Apple programmers of their alternative approach is too great, then Apple should release the whole source code to the FBI to allow them to do the work, quoting the precedent of the Lavabit confrontation. Clearly it is time for Apple to move offshore!? To recall, Lavabit abruptly shut down in 2013 when the FBI attempted to get the company to hand over the encryption keys for its secure email service. While the current situation seems to put Apple in the same ballpark as Lavabit, what gives the Cupertino-giant company an advantage is the immense support it is receiving from other Silicon Valley companies and personnel. Many believe that the FBI doesn't really need Apple's help in unlocking the iPhone. Reports claim that the iPhone in question already has a "backdoor" which could allow the government-backed institution to access the data on the smartphone. Other widely reported theories include cracking the iPhone and manipulating the innards to trick the system into spilling out all the information. One proposed method, which requires the phone's NAND flash chip to be taken out, may not work, though. Daniel Kahn Gillmor, a technology fellow with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, pointed out the risks in playing with flash memory. He said that an error in removing the memory could make the data unreadable forever.

AmiMoJo writes: Today is five years since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was damaged by an earthquake and tsunami, leading to a series of meltdowns. Nearly half a million people were evacuated at the time, with 100,000 still unable to return to their homes. The government has set a goal of 20mSv/year before people are allowed to live in affected areas again, and while progress is being made hotspots are still a problem in many areas. Reconstruction has been largely waiting for decontamination to be completed, allowing homes and businesses to fall into ruin. Those who do wish to return find their communities gutted, with essential services and jobs gone. Meanwhile, engineers are still unable to determine exactly what happened at Daiichi, particularly what saved reactor 2's pressure vessel from exploding. The initial reports were scary even before the nuclear plant problems were evident. Engadget notes that even now, the worst part of the cleanup remains a grueling work in progress, tough even for robots. Reader the_newsbeagle writes, too, with a link to the New York Times' take on the 5-year mark, and notes that The state and location of the melted fuel inside the reactors is still a mystery. The meltdown zone is too dangerous for human workers to enter, and robots have had limited success navigating in the wreckage. So Japan is recruiting subatomic particles called muons to map the reactors' insides. These particles, born of cosmic rays, constantly stream down from the atmosphere, passing through most matter unimpeded. But their occasional interactions with the subatomic components of uranium allow physicists to locate the blobs of the deadly stuff.

An anonymous reader writes: The official Apple Events page has been updated in advance of the newly announced media event. Invitations were sent out earlier Thursday inviting members of the press to "let us loop you in." The event will be streamed using Apple's HTTP Live Streaming technology and will require an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch running iOS 7.0 or later. The company is expected to announce a new, smaller iPhone SE, that will be the same size as the iPhone 5 but with improved specs like a A9 processor and 8-megapixel rear camera. In addition, Apple is expected to announce a new, smaller iPad Pro. It is rumored to feature a 9.7" display and a Smart Connector to support Smart Keyboard -- it may even be compatible with the Apple Pencil. We can expect some kind of update for the Apple Watch, most likely new Apple Watch bands. A black version of the Milanese Loop may be in the works to match the Space Black Apple Watch. Of course, Apple will talk encryption as the event is scheduled one day before the next hearing between Apple and the FBI on March 22. Apple may surprise us with new MacBooks or OS X updates but we will most likely have to wait until Apple's developer conference in June.

An anonymous reader writes: The way you move your mouse is unique, like fingerprints, and can be used by dark forces to track you on supposedly anonymous and secure networks like Tor, according to a Barcelona researcher. Because the Tor Project has failed to address a ten-month-old issue regarding "time measurement via JavaScript," there are a series of user fingerprinting techniques that are quite accurate at identifying users based on their mouse movements, scrolling speed, and how their browser and hardware reacts to certain JavaScript code. If a user visits a "fingerprinting" website via Tor and then via a normal browser, an attacker can have a general idea about their identity and can even pinpoint them to real IPs. The data that is usually logged in fingerprinting schemes is not 100% reliable or accurate for that matter, but it provides a starting point for future investigations.

An anonymous reader writes: A U.S. judge has just admitted the existence of the NSA's infamous PRISM program by name, apparently the first time any federal judge has done so. PRISM has been an open secret since June 2013, when documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden were first made public. An ominous NSA PowerPoint training slide claimed that PRISM allowed "collection [of user data] directly from the servers" of major American tech companies like Yahoo, Google, and Apple, though those tech companies immediately and fiercely protested that no, to their knowledge, they didn't give the NSA such access. It's since been generally accepted that the NSA wasn't physically accessing those companies' servers with PRISM, but instead creating a streamlined legal process to compel those companies, via orders processed in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, to turn over users' data. Since the program's disclosure, most government reports and redacted FISA court orders have referred to PRISM by the legal authority the NSA claims authorizes it, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But that's confusing, because 702 also authorizes what's called Upstream collection, which gives the NSA access to raw internet data -- not the same thing as PRISM, which is more specifically targeted.

Zothecula writes: Drones are being utilized in everything from parcel delivery to search and rescue, but their limited flight times are restricting their ability to travel great distances or stay for extended periods of time in the field. Simply adding more batteries, however, affects flight characteristics and reduces the load the drone can carry. To help solve this problem, researchers at the Pohang University of Science and Technology (Postech) have created a miniature fuel cell they claim not only provides enough energy to keep a drone in the sky for over an hour, but may well find applications in powering everything from smartphones to cars in the not-too-distant future. Developed by Professor Gyeong Man Choi and his Ph.D. student Kun Joong Kim at Postech, the new solid oxide fuel cell is claimed by the researchers to be the first to use porous stainless steel in combination with thin-film electrolyte, all brought together using a technique known as tape casting-lamination-cofiring. Allied with electrodes of low heat capacity, this amalgamation not only results in increased performance, but also in higher long-term durability. The Postech device generates power by converting hydrogen (in this case, "Wet" H2 gas comprising 97 percent H2 and 3 percent H2O mixture) supplied as fuel gas to the anode to create electricity. It does this through the use of a solid oxide material acting as the electrolyte that allows the conduction of negative oxygen ions from the cathode to the anode. These ions diffuse through the solid oxide electrolyte to the anode where they oxidize the fuel. This reaction produces electrons, which then flow through an external circuit to provide power.

An anonymous reader writes: Apple software engineering VP Craig Federighi recently dispelled one of the more long-standing myths about iPhone battery life. In short, if you spend a few minutes every day double clicking the iPhone home button and manually closing up applications in an effort to maintain battery life, you're wasting your time. The reality is that the applications you see upon opening up the multitasking pane are actually nothing more than static images intended to represent a list of your most recently used applications. Apple support documents have indicated, "generally, there's no need to force an app to close unless it's unresponsive." Apple support docs further explain: "After you switch to a different app, some apps run for a short period of time before they're set to a suspended state. Apps that are in a suspended state aren't actively in use, open, or taking up system resources."

itwbennett writes: Cisco Systems has patched high-impact vulnerabilities in several of its cable modem and residential gateway devices that are distributed by some ISPs to their customers, and said in an advisory that customers should contact their service providers to ensure they have the patches. The embedded Web server in the Cisco Cable Modem with Digital Voice models DPC2203 and EPC2203 contains a buffer overflow vulnerability that can be exploited remotely without authentication. And the Web-based administration interfaces of the Cisco DPC3941 Wireless Residential Gateway with Digital Voice and Cisco DPC3939B Wireless Residential Voice Gateway are affected by a vulnerability that could lead to information disclosure. In addition, the Cisco Model DPQ3925 8x4 DOCSIS 3.0 Wireless Residential Gateway with EDVA is affected by a separate vulnerability, also triggered by malicious HTTP requests, that could lead to a denial-of-service condition.

MojoKid writes: To look at Samsung's new Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge smartphones, on the surface, one might mistake them for only a modest uplift of bells and whistles, and perhaps a light rebuffing of the phone's design language. However, one of the primary new features of the US-targeted Samsung Galaxy S7 is its underlying power plant — Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 system-on-a-chip (SoC). The Snapdragon 820 is based on Qualcomm's new, custom ARM-based core architecture called Kyro. Kyro marks an evolution beyond Qualcomm's venerable Krait core architecture that the company claims offers 2X the performance and power efficiency of their previous-gen Snapdragon 810. In addition, the quad-core Snapdragon 820 has a beefed-up Adreno 530 graphics engine on board as well. In performance testing versus Apple's potent A9 platform in the iPhone 6S Plus, Samsung's Galaxy S7 with the Snapdragon 820 generally outpaces the iPhone in multithreaded performance as well as graphics. The Apple A9 still does a lot of work with just two cores, but overall it looks as though Qualcomm has a highly-competitive SoC and Samsung put it to good use.

An anonymous reader writes: After over a decade of ownership of the product, Google announced just a few weeks ago that it will be closing the shutters for good on Picasa, a cross-platform photo viewer and organizer with basic editing capabilities. In the official announcement, Google has set March 15 as the end of support for the desktop client, with changes to the accompanying web-album hosting service set to roll out later in the spring. On Opensource.com, Jason Baker rounded up 9 open source and Linux-compatible alternatives to the popular photo sharing service.

Hallie Siegel writes: A new paper covering 60 years of robotics in American case law shows that a growing mismatch between how judges think about robots and what contemporary robots can actually do is resulting in inconsistent treatment of how robots are dealt with in the courts. Interestingly, much of this confusion comes down to the definition of the word robot; dictionaries' definitions often contradict each other. This article presents the case that lawmakers and policy makers need to work more closely with technology experts to develop a more nuanced understanding of robotics, lest new technologies overwhelm our legal systems.

szczys writes: The RAM we use today is truly amazing in all respects: performance, reliability, price; all have been optimized to the point you can consider memory a solved problem. Equally fascinating is the meandering path that we've taken over the last half century to get here. Drums, tubes, mercury delay lines, dekatrons, and core memory. They're still as interesting as the day electrons first ran through their circuits. Perhaps most amazing is the cost and complexity, both of which make you wonder how they ever manage to be used in production machines. But here's the clincher: despite being difficult and costly to manufacture, they were all very reliable.

An anonymous reader writes: Jack McCauley was among Oculus' founding members and played a seminal role in the development of the Rift DK1 and DK2 VR headsets as the company's VP of Engineering. After departing from the VR firm sometime around the 2014 acquisition by Facebook, McCauley has continued his interest in VR, most recently demonstrating a laser tracking system that makes use of MEMS technology to actively track targets. He says the system's strengths are long range and low cost compared to camera-based tracking solutions, which Oculus currently uses.

judgecorp writes: Google has elected to open up some of its data center designs, which it has -- until now -- kept to itself. Google has joined the Open Compute Project, which was set up by Facebook to share low-cost, no-frills data center hardware specifications. Google will donate a specification for a rack that it designed for its own data centers. Google's first contribution will be "a new rack specification that includes 48V power distribution and a new form factor to allow OCP racks to fit into our data centers," the company said. "We kicked off the development of 48V rack power distribution in 2010, as we found it was at least 30 percent more energy-efficient and more cost-effective in supporting these higher-performance systems." The company said it hopes to help others "adopt this next generation power architecture, and realize the same power efficiency and cost benefits as Google." Google hasn't submitted a proposed specification to the OCP yet, but the company is working with Facebook to get that done.

Zothecula writes: Dennis Aabo Sorensen may be missing a hand, but he nonetheless recently felt rough and smooth textures using a fingertip on that arm. The fingertip was electronic, and was surgically hard-wired to nerves in his upper arm. He is reportedly the first person in the world to recognize texture using a bionic fingertip connected to electrodes that were surgically implanted above his stump. The device was created by scientists from the Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne in Switzerland, and Italy's Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna research institute. While it was wired to Sorensen, a machine moved it across rough and smooth plastic surfaces. Sensors in the fingertip generated electrical signals as they deformed in response to the topography of those surfaces, and transmitted those signals to the nerves in a series of electrical spikes -- this was reportedly an imitation of the "language of the nervous system." He was able to differentiate between the two surfaces with an accuracy of 96 percent.

An anonymous reader writes: Edward Snowden, the whistleblower whose NSA revelations sparked a debate on mass surveillance, has waded into the arguments over the FBI's attempt to force Apple to help it unlock the iPhone 5C of one of the San Bernardino shooters. The FBI says that only Apple can deactivate certain passcode protections on the iPhone, which will allow law enforcement to guess the passcode by using brute-force. Talking via video link from Moscow to the Common Cause Blueprint for a Great Democracy conference, Snowden said: "The FBI says Apple has the 'exclusive technical means' to unlock the phone. Respectfully, that's bullshit." Snowden then went on to tweet his support for an American Civil Liberties Union report saying that the FBI's claims in the case are fraudulent. Apple's clash with the FBI comes to a head in California this month when the two will meet in federal court to debate whether the smartphone manufacturer should be required to weaken security settings on the iPhone of the shooter.

Google is releasing Android N Preview to developers today. The early release is meant to collect feedback sooner than usual, and even includes a new way to download the update. Instead of installing a drive image, you can participate in an Android Beta Program that installs pre-release versions over the air (as long as you have a relatively recent Nexus device or the Pixel C). The biggest attraction, by far, is a new multi-window mode, which lets you use split-screen modes on phones and tablets, and even specify minimum allowable dimensions. There's even a picture-in-picture video mode, too, so you can keep watching YouTube while you message your friends. Other improvements in the preview include direct reply notifications that let you reply to a message right from an alert, iOS-style. Also, Android N optionally bundles notifications from the same app so that they don't clutter your view. Marshmallow's Doze feature has been improved to save battery life whenever the screen turns off, and coders can take advantage of Java 8 features. Google is also working to reduce the memory needs of Android via Project Svelte, allowing the Android OS to run smoothly on lower specced devices.

Lucas123 writes: Several key technologies are coming to market in the next three years that will ensure data storage will not only keep up with but exceed demand. Heat-assisted magnetic recording and bit-patterned media promise to increase hard drive capacity initially by 40% and later by 10-fold, or as Seagate's marketing proclaims: 20TB hard drives by 2020. At the same time, resistive RAM technologies, such as Intel/Micron's 3D XPoint, promise storage-class memory that's 1,000 times faster and more resilient than today's NAND flash, but it will be expensive — at first. Meanwhile, NAND flash makers have created roadmaps for 3D NAND technology that will grow to more than 100 layers in the next two to three generations, increasing performance and capacity while ultimately lowering costs to that of hard drives."Very soon flash will be cheaper than rotating media," said Siva Sivaram, executive vice president of memory at SanDisk.

SmartAboutThings writes: We've just been given a glimpse of what the future of motoring could look like, with BMW showing off its latest concept car, and it's self-driving. The Vision Next 100 was unveiled on Monday, at a ceremony celebrating BMW's 100th birthday, at Munich's Olympic Hall. This comes just a few days after BMW made official its intentions of competing with Google to build software for Self-Driving cars.

The Vision Next 100 has two driving modes, a driver mode and an autonomous mode, or 'ease' as its known. In driver mode the car operates mostly like cars do now, except the BMW indicates the ideal driving line and speed, but when the car is set to autonomous mode the steering wheel retracts and the two front seats turn to face each other. Perfect for two people to have a chat, and if it's only you in the car, put your feet up and relax.

prisoninmate writes: OwnCloud Server 9.0 is without any doubt the biggest release of the world's leading file sharing and sync solution, which is used by over 8 million users around the globe. It promises to bring the collaboration and federation features to new levels thanks to the addition of new, innovative tools, as well as to improve the software's scalability. One of ownCloud 9.0's new features is code signing, which promises to offer users with a safer home for all their data by verifying the integrity of their ownCloud installations during upgrades or when installing apps, which also need to follow the new code signing specifications. The community edition of ownCloud Server 9.0 is available for download right now via Softpedia as a source package that you can deploy on your Linux kernal-based server, or straight from the project's website as binary packages for various GNU/Linux operating systems. OwnCloud Server 9.0 Enterprise Edition will be released in April 2016.