Gadget Ogling: Scooting Around, Scratching Wood, Knocking on Doors

Even for someone endlessly in awe of our ability to traverse continents in just a few hours, traveling is increasingly a chore. Anything I can add to trips to make them even a touch more enjoyable is nothing to sniff at. Coolpeds' briefcase e-scooter -- a suitcase with a built-in, motorized scooter -- may be just what I need to freshen up journeys. It's just as well there's a built-in transport system on this, given the suitcase alone weighs a whopping 17.4 pounds. It might be carry-on size, but it's far beyond typical carry-on luggage weight.



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The Apple Watch Mystery Won't Be Solved March 9

The fog shrouding the Apple Watch won't be lifted on March 9 when Apple is widely expected to tell us more about its forthcoming release. Apple's invite to its media event is characteristically coy, with its vague "Spring Forward," tease, which likely refers to the shift in daylight savings time -- and time itself. The Apple Watch event likely will fill in some knowledge gaps around functionality, as well as pricing, but the mystery is whether most of us new buyers suddenly will turn into watch wearers for longer than a few months.



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DeepMind AI Exterminates Space Invaders, Pac-Man

Researchers at Google's DeepMind subsidiary in England have developed an artificial agent they call a "deep Q-network" that learned to play 49 classic Atari 2600 arcade games by just diving in. The DQN algorithm performed at more than 75 percent of the level of a professional player in more than half the games, and came up with far-sighted strategies that let it achieve the maximum attainable scores in certain games, such as Breakout. IT outperformed previous machine learning methods in 43 of the games.



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Malicious Emailers Find Healthcare Firms Juicy Prey

Healthcare providers have garnered growing interest from hackers in recent months. More evidence of that trend appeared last week in a report on email trust. An email that appeared to come from a healthcare company was four times more likely to be fraudulent than an email purportedly from a social media company like Facebook, one of the largest creators of email on the Internet, Agari found. The report gives industries a TrustScore -- that is, a number that reflects the trustworthiness of email from companies within that industry group.



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Pearl OS Could Be a Gem in the Making

If you favor the OS X environment, Pearl OS might be a Linux distro to feed your fancy. Pearl OS is a revival of the discontinued Pear OS distro. It picks up where Pear left off in early 2014. Pearl OS has two desktop versions: XFCE and MATE. Both are based on Ubuntu Linux distro version 14.04 Mini release. The two flavors of Pearl OS are customized to look and act like the OS X operating system. But Pearl is Linux and not OS X. This distro runs Debian-based Linux applications. It does not run OS X software or have actual OS X functions.



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Volvo Talks Up Its Self-Driving Cars

Volvo last week revealed the latest developments in its Drive Me project, showing off a complete system that could make it possible to integrate self-driving cars into regular traffic with drivers behind the wheel. Volvo is making progress toward its goal of releasing 100 self-driving vehicles to consumers on selected roads around Gothenburg -- Sweden's second largest city -- by 2017, the company said. Volvo is working with legislators, transport authorities and city officials to help ensure a crash-free future on the roads.



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Valve To Put Steam Behind VR Efforts With New Headset

Valve on Monday announced that it's getting into the virtual reality hardware business. In a terse tease posted to the Web, the company trumpeted its intentions to reveal its SteamVR hardware system next week at the 2015 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Valve also announced that it is looking for developers and publishers to create content for its new VR hardware system. Also to be demonstrated at next week's GDC will be a refined version of the Steam Controller and a number of living room devices, Valve said.



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Open Source vs. Proprietary Firms on the IoT Battleground

Technology wars are predictable. Every new wave of gadgetry brings a fight over who will be the next king of the software hill. The next big battle is brewing over control of the Internet of Things marketplace. Consumers see only convenience and extensions to their always-on mobile devices. Product makers see a pathway to streaming data that can be monetized from buyers' connections. Will history repeat itself, as open source begins to take on the current, yet unsustainable, walled-garden core of the IoT?



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Google Puts Blogger Porn Under Wraps

Google will place a privacy curtain around sexually explicit images and video on its Blogger platform if users fail to remove the content of their own volition. Google has begun notifying Blogger subscribers about the policy change affecting adult content. The ban targets images and video that are sexually explicit or show graphic nudity. The measure falls short of outright censoring the content or terminating users. However, it does restrict access to the owner or admins of the blog and the people with whom the owner has shared it.



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Pebble Makes Big Ripples on Kickstarter

The money is pouring into Pebble's Kickstarter campaign, launched Tuesday, for its new smartwatch, Pebble Time. Within hours, upwards of 27,000 supporters had pledged more than $5.6 million. The project's goal was to raise a mere $500,000. The strength of the response highlights the enthusiastic fan base Pebble has built over the years. "Pebble's no stranger when it comes to wildly successful Kickstarter campaigns, with its first-gen watch currently seated second among the sites most-funded projects," said 451 Research analyst Ryan Martin.



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How Apple Will Sell a Watch That No One Really Needs

There has been a lot of discussion lately of where and how Apple will sell the Apple Watch -- through high-end luxury department stores in Paris, for example, or through special new displays inside of Apple Stores. Finding new ways to present the watch is important, but how will Apple actually trigger a buy decision? Sure, it's easy enough for some rich dude to add a few new watches to his collection, and easy enough to convince the true Apple fans to give it a whirl...but how will Apple convince millions of regular humans to strap on a watch and wear it every day?



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Citizenfour's Oscar Highlights National Divide Over Snowden

Citizenfour, a film documenting interviews director Laura Poitras conducted with whistle-blower Edward Snowden, won the Oscar for best documentary Sunday. The talks took place as Snowden blew the lid off the United States National Security Agency's surveillance activities. The award highlights the divisions in the U.S. over Snowden's actions and the question of national security. "The disclosures that Edward Snowden reveals don't only expose a threat to our privacy but to our democracy itself," Poitras said in her acceptance speech.



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Government Spies Steal SIM Card Cryptokeys

The United States' National Security Agency and British spy agency GCHQ have hacked into the internal computer network of Gemalto, the world's largest maker of SIM cards, and stolen the cards' encryption keys, according to information in files leaked by whistle-blower Edward Snowden. Gemalto makes about 2 billion SIM cards a year, and sells them to 450 major wireless network carriers worldwide, including AT&T, Verizon and Sprint. Gemalto said it was unaware of the hack and expressed concern.



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The Apple/Tesla Dream Team

We've seen a lot of speculation this week on the Apple car -- everything from Apple building its own car from scratch to its buying or merging with Tesla. Like many, I think the best path would be an Apple/Tesla combination, but since I doubt Tim would want to work for Musk or Musk for Tim, the only real option would be an office of the CEO for both firms. Elon would be the visionary, taking Jobs' old spot, and Cook would be in charge of execution. That's something he has done exceptionally well at Apple, and Tesla could use some help with it.



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Gadget Ogling: Jewelry Gets Inky, Toys Get Brilliant, Remotes Get Beautiful

L!ber8's Tago Arc is aimed at the fashion conscious or those who like to use their jewelry to tell the world a little more about themselves. It has an e-ink screen, which is controlled using an NFC-enabled smartphone -- sorry, iPhone owners -- to let wearers switch up the design on the fly. Ordinary users can purchase a variety of looks, while budding Stella McCartneys can create their own. It's a modern henna tattoo for people who are smart enough to not let some stranger on a street corner etch a doodle on their arm.



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Google Rails Against Proposal to Give Feds Remote Hacking Authority

Google is fighting a proposed amendment to Rule 41 of the U.S. Criminal Code that might allow authorities to hack into computers abroad. The amendment seeks to empower a magistrate in a district where activities related to a crime may have occurred to issue a warrant for remote search of computers, as well as seizure or copying of their files, when a target computer's physical location is unknown, or when multiple computers in several districts are used simultaneously to carry out complex criminal schemes.



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Video Game Preservation: An Impossible Dream?

Fuel Industries last year sought to find the long-rumored cache of buried E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial video games, made for the Atari 2600 in the early 1980s. Surplus copies of E.T. -- a notoriously bad gaming experience -- were dumped in a landfill after failing to sell. By burying its shame, Atari hoped to wipe the title from the gaming community's collective consciousness. Ironically, it's now enshrined in the Smithsonian. Many other games have been forgotten, though, with a lot less effort.



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Lenovo Rapped for Preinstalling Spyware

Lenovo on Thursday came under fire for preinstalling spyware on some of its laptops. The software, Superfish, uses the same techniques cybercriminals often employ to crack encrypted traffic from computers to the Internet. "Superfish is purposely designed to bypass the security of HTTPS websites in a manner that would allow malware and attackers to also bypass the security provided by HTTPS," said Adam Ely, cofounder of Bluebox. "Users are inherently at risk of being directed to malicious sites that appear valid," he said.



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Azure Machine Learning Aims to Convert Data to Information

Microsoft on Wednesday announced new data services running on its Azure cloud in what it has positioned as a bid to bring big data to the mainstream. Those services include the HDInsight Apache Hadoop-based service; Storm on HDInsight, which lets users use Hadoop and Storm to create distributed, real-time data processing solutions in Azure; and Azure Machine Learning, a managed cloud service for advanced analytics. Azure Machine Learning lets users build and deploy apps and conduct predictive analyses, among other things.



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Korora Comes Bursting With Extras

Korora, a Linux distro based on Fedora, the community version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, just keeps getting better. When I reviewed Korora 19, released in July 2013, I said it had the potential to grow in popularity among users looking for a better, more user-friendly Linux distro that reaches beyond Fedora's enterprise appeal. The latest release, Korora 21, provides even more assurance of that statement's accuracy. Korora is packed with lots of additional packages besides those provided by the Fedora community.



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Apple Awarded Patent for Hybrid VR Headset

Apple has been awarded a patent for a virtual reality headset that can use an iPhone or iPod as a display. The abstract describes a device similar to the Gear VR, which weds a Samsung Note smartphone to a headpiece designed by Oculus. In its description of the patent, Apple explains that the head-mounted display system would allow users to couple and decouple a portable electronic device with a head-mounted device so the two devices would temporarily act as a single unit.



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Gadget Ogling: An On-the-Go Digital Safe, a Portable Power Plant and a Gimmicky Ghost Buster

Welcome to a new edition of Gadget Dreams and Nightmares, your weekly guide to the best and worst of gadgets that have just rolled off the production line for the first time or have the proverbial ink still drying on their press releases. On our conveyor belt this week are a gas-powered portable charger, a clever key fob, a flash drive for secret keepers and a pocket ghost detector. Please note that these are not reviews. The rating scores reflect only my interest in trying each item, and matter about as much as, well...you decide.



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NSA Suspected of Spreading Super-Resistant Malware

Kaspersky Lab on Tuesday announced the discovery of what may be the most sophisticated malware ever. The malware's creators, whom Kaspersky has dubbed "The Equation Group," use a never-seen-before tactic to infect hard drives' firmware. The technique "makes traditional antivirus and antimalware software practically useless," said Protegrity VP of Products Yigal Rozenberg. Most of the attacks hit Windows PCs, although Mac OS X users in China also have been hit, and iOS is vulnerable as well.



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Sony Gets Glassy-Eyed

Sony's SmartEyeglass Developer Edition SED-E1 will be available generally next month in the United States, the UK, Germany and Japan. The smart glasses -- Sony's first -- also will be released in March to business customers in France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden. Sony's SmartEyeglass, priced at $840, resembles a regular pair of eyeglasses with a sporty black frame design. It features a transparent 8-bit display screen that allows the wearer to read emails and other notifications pushed from a compatible device.



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Encryption Can Create Stormy Weather in the Cloud

Encryption has received a lot of attention lately as a solution to the growing data-breach problem, but one of the hang-ups dogging the technology has been its ability to play nice in the cloud. That's especially true if an organization wants to control the keys by which its data is scrambled and use cloud services beyond simple storage. For example, if a cloud provider can't decrypt a client's data, it could break the provider's antivirus, data loss prevention, file preview function and text indexing, as well as pose performance challenges.



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Encryption Can Create Stormy Weather in the Cloud

Encryption has received a lot of attention lately as a solution to the growing data-breach problem, but one of the hang-ups dogging the technology has been its ability to play nice in the cloud. That's especially true if an organization wants to control the keys by which its data is scrambled and use cloud services beyond simple storage. For example, if a cloud provider can't decrypt a client's data, it could break the provider's antivirus, data loss prevention, file preview function and text indexing, as well as pose performance challenges.



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Is Paltrow More Qualified Than Mayer to Run Yahoo?

I recently revisited Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's decision not to hire Academy Award winner and successful lifestyle author and blogger Gwyneth Paltrow for a lifestyle editing position...because she didn't have a college degree. In doing so, I ran into a comment by Martha Stewart, the 'queen of lifestyle' who clearly is acting like Paltrow is a threat. Since there is no doubt that Stewart has been very successful as a CEO, this got me thinking that if Martha Stewart is scared of how well Paltrow is doing, and Stewart is a better CEO than Mayer, would Paltrow be a better CEO than Mayer?



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'Digital Dark Age' Imminent Warns 'Father of the Internet'

Vint Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google, this week issued a stern warning at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference, held in San Jose. "Old formats that contain documents, photos and other data may not be readable with the latest version of the software," Cerf said, adding that backwards compatibility is not guaranteed, and over time there could be vast archives of digital content that simply can't be accessed.



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Revived View-Master Is a Virtual Reality

Google and Mattel now are teaming up to revive and modernize the View-Master. Mattel on Friday announced a new version that works with Google Cardboard and Android smartphones. Mattel will offer the new View-Master and a sample experience reel this fall, for US$30. Additional experience reel packs, each featuring four themed experience reels, will be offered at $15. These reel packs will have themes such as nature, adventure destinations, and science.



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Why Tim Cook Would Build an Apple Car

The wildest tech rumor this week comes from little substance, but somehow manages to ignite the imagination: According to Business Insider, an unsolicited Apple employee emailed to say that a group at Apple is working on a project that would "give Tesla a run for its money." For this to be true, it means that an Apple employee either broke Apple's strict rules for secrecy in some obvious way that makes Business Insider believe the email actually came from an Apple employee, or that it was some sort of vague and intentional leak from Apple, sent straight to Business Insider.



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Facebook Launches ThreatExchange to Stymie Cybercrime

Facebook this week announced ThreatExchange, an API-based platform for technology companies to share information on security threats. It had been working on the platform for about a year in a joint project with other prominent Internet firms. Facebook layered APIs on top of its existing platform infrastructure, so participants can query the available information and control which other participants they publish their information to, using a predefined set of data fields. ThreatExchange is based on Facebook's ThreatData threat analysis framework.



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Facebook Lets Members Prepare for the Digital Beyond

Facebook on Thursday announced a new feature for members who want to plan for their passing into the digital beyond. Initially rolled out in the United States, the feature allows Facebook members to appoint a "legacy contact" to administer their account when they die. Legacy contacts will, among other powers, have the authority to download an archive of the deceased member's public information, including photos, posts and profile information.



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Obama's Cyberthreat Intel Aggregator Plan Divides Security Experts

The Obama Administration on Tuesday announced plans to set up a national Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center to integrate all data from government agencies and the private sector, and disseminate it appropriately. Lisa Monaco, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, made the announcement following months of research by White House cybersecurity coordinator Michael Daniel's staff. Reactions from cybersecurity experts were mixed.



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Samsung Smart TV Owners Fume Over Sneaky Pop-Up Ads

Samsung Smart TV owners, already shaken by news earlier this week that their TVs can transmit voice commands and other private data to third parties, have been hit by another revelation -- that the devices sneak ads into movies they're watching without the owner's knowledge or consent. A user on the Plex forum complained that a Pepsi ad popped up every 10-15 minutes while he was watching content on his Samsung TV. This followed upgrading his Plex Media Server to version 0.9.1101.



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Box to Let Enterprises Bring Their Own Keys to the Cloud

Box is working with Amazon Web Services and Gemalto to bring to market the solution, called "Box Enterprise Key Management," and give its most security-minded customers total control over the keys used to encrypt data they store on Box. "Industries like finance, government, legal and healthcare are facing a new set of challenges when it comes to establishing control over their content -- and who can access it -- without hindering collaboration and productivity," Aaron Levie, Box co-founder and CEO, said in a statement.



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Bug Bounties Entice Researchers to Don White Hats

Bug bounty programs are used by individual software makers to improve the quality of their products, but they can have incidental benefits for all software makers, too. One of those is to encourage bug hunters to wear a white hat instead of a black one. That's particularly true for researchers attracted to bounty programs, observed Eduardo Vela Nava, a security engineer with Google, which has a large and successful bug bounty program. "The target audience of bug bounty programs are researchers who want to keep users safe," he told TechNewsWorld.



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Report: Connected Vehicles Vulnerable to Hack Attacks

Motorists in the United States are increasingly at risk of cyberattacks and violations of privacy, as more and more technology is added to their cars. A report released on Sunday by the office of Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) listed a number of key findings that are based on responses from 16 auto makers to a letter sent to them by Markey's office. While the Markey report praised some voluntary privacy principles adopted by two industry groups, it also raised some questions about them.



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Concerns Emerge About Samsung Smart TVs 'Bugging' Owners

Owners of Samsung smart TVs need to watch what they say if they've activated the voice recognition feature on these devices. The feature may transmit some voice commands, together with information about the device, to a third-party service that converts speech to text, Samsung's global privacy policy warns. If voice recognition is going to be on all the time, "that seems like really poor design, and certainly represents a privacy risk," said Justin Brookman, director of the consumer privacy project at the Center for Democracy & Technology.



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Dish Network Slings New TV Service

Dish Network on Monday officially launched Sling TV, its widely anticipated US$20 per month streaming service, and further announced that customers could sign up for a "Sports Extra" add-on pack for $5 per month. The service, which is available now via a one-week free trial, can be accessed via Roku devices, and through Android, iOS, Mac and PC devices -- with support for Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick coming soon. Dish also announced that the basic package will have AMC added in the coming weeks.



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IT Job Seekers Back in the Driver's Seat

Fast-paced growth in the IT industry and low unemployment rates for tech workers are making it difficult for corporate executives to find qualified hires. Add to that a bullish frenzy of investor support and corporate acquisitions as key factors driving the continued growth of the technology industry. The global IT market totaled more than US$3.7 trillion in 2014 -- and the U.S. market accounts for approximately 28 percent of that total, according to research firm IDC.



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In Search of the Perfect Windows 10 Hardware

I'm well into the user testing of the next generation of Microsoft's operating system and things are really looking up. Windows 10 is becoming a blend of the many things we liked about Windows 7, and the things that most folks don't know about that are great about Windows 8. Windows 10 is like a breath of fresh air, or for those truly annoyed with Windows 8, like the feeling you get when you stop hitting your head against the wall. Ironically, it's likely that the folks who hate Windows 8 will likely love Windows 10 the most.



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3D-Printed 'Urban Concept' Car Assembled by Singapore Students

Students at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University have built the island republic's first 3D-printed concept car. The NTU Venture 8 (NV8) is built on a carbon fiber single-shell chassis. Its 150 3D parts were made out of lightweight plastic that were created on printers at the university, 3D printer manufacturer Stratasys, and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology. The vehicle has a honeycomb structure and is partially powered by solar cells designed to flow with the shape of the chassis.



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First Ubuntu Smartphone to Arrive in Europe Next Week

The first smartphone to be powered by the open source Ubuntu operating system will arrive at retail in Europe beginning on Monday, Feb. 9. The Aquaris E4.5 will be offered to early adopters via a series of "flash sales" across the continent. The unlocked phone will retail for 169.90 euros or roughly US$195, without the need for a contract. Features include a 4.5 inch screen, dual SIM support, a front facing 5 megapixel camera, and an 8 megapixel rear facing camera.



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Virtual Reality a Sports Training Game Changer

Quite a bit of buzz broke out recently in sports circles when a Stanford quarterback was caught on ESPN sporting an Oculus virtual reality (VR) face mask. Not that VR is totally new, but fans want more out of their athletes and the sight of such a souped-up technical edge on the field was a novel thrill. But that thrill won't be novel for long as VR is headed for mainstream use in all sports from pro to little league and T-ball levels -- and when transformative training shows up in a few teams -- it invariably spreads to others.



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Anthem Mega-Breach Jeopardizes 80 Million Consumers

Hackers broke into the databases of Anthem Inc., the second-largest health insurer in the U.S., and stole up to 80 million customers' personal information. The data includes current and former customers' names, birthdays, medical IDs, social security numbers, street addresses, email addresses and employment information, Anthem president and CEO Joseph Swedish wrote in a note sent to customers. There is no evidence at this time that credit card or medical information such as claims, test results or diagnostic codes were targeted or stolen.



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IoT Risky Business for Enterprise Networks

There were 9 billion Internet of Things (IoT) units installed at the end of 2013 by IDC's count, and its analysts expect the figure to hit 28 billion by 2020. That's going to make life difficult for IT security administrators. A Tripwire survey found that employed consumers who took work home had an average of 11 IoT devices on their home networks, and 24 percent of them had connected at least one of these devices to their enterprise network. The survey covered 404 IT professionals and 302 executives in the United States and the UK.



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HandBrake Video Transcoder Gets a Grip on Linux

Converting video files from a variety of media sources can be a huge chore. That task can be much more manageable with HandBrake, a GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder. It is available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows, which makes working on more than one platform a bit more convenient. The latest version for Linux, version 0.10 released Nov. 23, has many upgrades. However, the Linux version lacks a few of the features in the Windows and Mac versions.



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'Smart Spaces' Project Seeks to Light Up Networks

Dartmouth University researchers are shining a new light on using "smart spaces" in ambient room lighting to transmit both data and human gestures. The three-month-old research pushes the envelope beyond advancements already made by researchers in the UK, at the University of Edinberg. The integrated Visible Light Communication project (iVLC) marks the first time an integrated networking and sensing environment has been proposed for sending information by light, according to the researches at Dartmouth.



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Infected Android Apps From Google Play Affect Millions

Millions of Android users have been hit by malware posing as games on Google Play, according to Avast security researcher Flip Chytry. The malware harbors fake ads that pop up when users unlock their devices, to warn them about nonexistent infections, or that their devices are out of date or have porn. Victims are then asked to take action. If they agree, they are redirected to poisoned Web pages that contain a variety of hazards. Google spokesperson Elizabeth Markman did not confirm how many devices had been hit.



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Is It Time to Trash Flash?

On Monday, Adobe Flash Player users were hit by a zero-day flaw for the third time in two weeks. The company issued a security advisory for the vulnerability, which it dubbed CVE-2015-0313. The flaw exists in Flash Player 16.0.0.296 and earlier versions on Windows and Macintosh platforms. Successful exploitation could crash the desktop and potentially let hackers take control of it, Adobe warned. The vulnerability is being actively used in drive-by download attacks through Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows 8.1 and earlier, Adobe said.



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