Google now activating 300,000 Android phones daily

Andy Rubin, Android's co-founder and now vice president of engineering at Google, has revealed a new milestone for the operating system. "There are over 300,000 Android phones activated each day," Rubin said via his Twitter account.

That's over 2.1 million phones every week and over 9 million phones every month. Four months ago, in August 2010, Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced that Android activations passed the 200,000 per day mark. Apple then countered by revealing in September 2010 that it was seeing over 230,000 new iOS activations every day.

The devil is in the details though: Rubin specifically says that the number is 300,000 phones activated each day, which means tablets and other devices running Android are not being counted. Back in September though, Apple's number referred to iOS activations, which means it includes other iOS devices like iPads and iPod touches.

In sheer activation numbers, Google is thus clearly winning. The company is soon going to be activating over 10 million Android phones per month, and the growth doesn't seem to be slowing.

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Smart Phones Help Fight Bank Fraud

A simple phone call or text message could have saved Mark Patterson nearly $350,000. The money was stolen from his company's bank account last year by cybercriminals based in Eastern Europe. Patterson discovered the fraud six days after it had begun, when the bank sent notice that a fraudulent $9,000 transfer to an account in California had failed to complete.

A startup security firm, DUO Security, hopes to offer a better way to secure banking transactions, by routing the information used to confirm a transaction through to a second device: a smart phone. The company has developed apps for a variety of smart phone platforms to create a separate channel between a bank and its customer to verify a transaction. Customers receive the details on their phone and approve transactions with a single touch.

"You push a button on your computer, you receive a notification, and you push a button on your phone, and that is it," says company cofounder Jon Oberheide. "We don't really want to overwhelm the user with options."

Patterson's company was a victim of the Zeus banking Trojan, a money-stealing software program used by cybercriminals to hijack victims' online banking sessions and pay out large amounts of money to intermediaries known as "money mules," who transfer the funds overseas. "It's been a very stressful year and a half," Patterson told attendees at the CyberCrime 2010 Symposium in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, last month.

Defenses against Zeus and other programs like it are few. Criminals routinely test the latest version of their code against antivirus software. Capturing a username and password during an online banking session is simple, which is why banking regulations no longer allow only a single factor (a password) to secure online transactions.

Because the criminals have control over the banking customer's computer, even a second factor--such as another temporary passcode--often fails. Zeus and other Trojans modify bank transactions in real time, sending funds on to money mules but displaying a page that makes it appear that the money is going to a legitimate payee. In fact, any security measure that uses the same communications channel between the PC and the bank can be corrupted by attackers who have compromised the device. DUO Security uses encryption to verify that the communication is going to and from a device that the user has registered.

Allowing the user to actually see the transaction before confirming it is key, says Avivah Litan, a fraud analyst at Gartner. "We have been advocating transaction verification for a long time," she says. "We call it 'sign what you see.'"

DUO Security is not the first to focus on the phone. Firms such as RSA, Entrust, and PhoneFactor use similar techniques for verifying transactions via a mobile phone. However, many products merely issue a passcode, an approach that is still vulnerable to Trojans. Zeus's developers are known to have circumvented the issuing of a text message passcode on Symbian and BlackBerry devices by using the Trojan to ask victims to install an app on those devices; the malicious app forwards the SMS code to the attackers, who can then complete the transaction.

DUO Security has focused on making the technology simple to integrate with banking websites, requiring the addition of only a few lines of code. Customers don't have to enter in codes, and banks don't have to run specialized hardware in their network or significantly modify their site. The company's hope is that by making it simple enough, a wider audience will adopt the technology.

"We think we can really expand where multifactor [authentication] is offered, where multifactor could be offered [to secure] your Facebook account, your Twitter account," Oberheide says. "These things might seem trivial to you, but you could have that extra protection without the headaches that traditionally go along with multifactor authentication."

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Stretchable Silicon Could Make Sports Apparel Smarter

Stretchable silicon electronics that offer the computing power of rigid chips could make their way into Reebok's athletic apparel in the coming years. The company will work with MC10, a startup maker of flexible electronics, to develop sportswear that incorporates electronics to monitor athletes' health and performance during training and rehabilitation.

Reebok and MC10, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, would not provide specifics about what products are under development. Representatives say the goal of the project is to make the interface between people and their electronics disappear. "We want to bring more information to the athlete, using the [conformable electronics] technology in a way that makes the electronics invisible to the user," says Paul Litchfield, head of Reebok Advanced Concepts.

Textiles incorporating electronics are already available today, for example in sports bras that use conductive textiles to register a woman's heart rate. But today's devices connect to a box containing the heart of the electronics, which are built on rigid chips. In the bra, a removable plastic box beams a signal to a watch.

Clothing incorporating high-performance conformable electronics could have many advantages over these systems, says MC10 CEO David Icke. First, the electronics could be totally incorporated into the inside of a shirt, or into a decal placed directly on the skin, without the need for a casing. They could conform to the body, and their increased level of contact with the skin could lead to higher-quality measurements. And by incorporating transistors that can amplify and process signals for better sensitivity, the flexible electronics would deliver more-valuable information. "It's not like wearing a device with hard segments attached to the body," says Litchfield.

The athletic-apparel devices might incorporate sensors and a microprocessor to monitor many indicators of an athlete's health, such as impacts on the body, electrical information from the heart and nervous system, sweat pH, blood pressure, gait, and strain on joints. Such devices could process the data to generate information about metabolism and athletic performance and broadcast it to another device. MC10 says the products could be out within a year or two.

The researcher who cofounded MC10, University of Illinois materials science professor John Rogers, has prototyped sensors, processors, and light-emitting diodes based on silicon and built on thin, lightweight, flexible, and even stretchy materials. Like conventional silicon chips, these flexible electronics are fast and power-efficient. Other flexible electronics, based on organic semiconductors rather than silicon, tend to be slower and more power-hungry. Working with organic materials, researchers at Xerox's PARC have made printed sensor tape for the U.S. military that's mounted inside helmets to record blast strength, temperature, and other data, and includes transistors to process the data.

MC10's devices are made by etching out very thin strips of silicon and printing them onto flexible substrates. This lets them conform to uneven surfaces such as human skin. Rogers notes that other products under development by MC10 include electronics for interfacing between the body's delicate inner tissues and surgical instruments such as balloon catheters. "From the standpoint of mechanics and materials design, there are many foundational issues common to use inside and outside the body," he says.

As the performance gap between rigid chips and conformable electronics begins to close, the idea of a wearable computer begins to seem less speculative, says Juan Hinestroza, who heads the Textiles Nanotechnology Laboratory at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. "Those were impossible dreams, but now we can produce high-performance electronics on flexible substrates," says Hinestroza, who is not affiliated with Reebok or MC10. "The interface between electronics and garments will disappear," he predicts.

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Everything You Need to Know About Wikileaks

What is Wikileaks?

Wikileaks is a self-described "not-for-profit media organization," launched in 2006 for the purposes of disseminating original documents from anonymous sources and leakers. Its website says: "Wikileaks will accept restricted or censored material of political, ethical, diplomatic or historical significance. We do not accept rumor, opinion, other kinds of first hand accounts or material that is publicly available elsewhere."

More-detailed information about the history of the organization can be found on Wikipedia (with all the caveats that apply to a rapidly changing Wiki topic). Wikipedia incidentally has nothing to do with Wikileaks?both share the word "Wiki" in the title, but they're not affiliated.

Who is Julian Assange, and what is his role in the Wikileaks organization?

Julian Assange is an Australian citizen who is said to have served as the editor-in-chief and spokesperson for Wikileaks since its founding in 2006. Before that, he was described as an advisor. Sometimes he is cited as its founder. The media and popular imagination currently equate him with Wikileaks itself, with uncertain accuracy.

In 2006, Assange wrote a series of essays that have recently been tapped as an explanation of his political philosophy. A close reading of these essays shows that Assange's personal philosophy is in opposition to what he calls secrecy-based, authoritarian conspiracy governments, in which category he includes the US government and many others not conventionally thought of as authoritarian. Thus, as opposed to espousing a philosophy of radical transparency, Assange is not "about letting sunlight into the room so much as about throwing grit in the machine." For further analysis, check out Aaron Bady's original blog post.

Why is Wikileaks so much in the public eye right now?

At the end of November 2010, Wikileaks began to slowly release a trove of what it says are 251,287 diplomatic cables acquired from an anonymous source. These documents came on the heels of the release of the "Collateral Murder" video in April 2010, and Afghan and Iraq War logs in July 2010 and October 2010, which totaled 466,743 documents. The combined 718,030 are said to originate from a single source, thought to be U.S. Army intelligence analyst Pfc. Bradley Manning, who was arrested in May 2010, but that's not confirmed.

Has Wikileaks released classified material in the past?

Yes, under an evolving set of models.

Berkman Fellow Ethan Zuckerman has some interesting thoughts on the development of Wikileaks and its practices over the years, which will be explained in greater detail when the Berkman Center podcast about Wikileaks is released later this week. In the meantime, here's a capsule version.

Wikileaks has moved through three phases since its founding in 2006. In its first phase, during which it released several substantial troves of documents related to Kenya in 2008, Wikileaks operated very much with a standard wiki model: the public readership could actively post and edit materials, and it had a say in the types of materials that were accepted and how such materials were vetted. The documents released in that first phase were more or less a straight dump to the Web: very little organized redacting occurred on the part of Wikileaks.

Wikileaks's second phase was exemplified with the release of the "Collateral Murder" video in April 2010. The video was a highly curated, produced and packaged political statement. It was meant to illustrate a political point of view, not merely to inform.

The third phase is the one we currently see with the release of the diplomatic cables: Wikileaks working in close conjunction with a select group of news organizations to analyze, redact and release the cables in a curated manner, rather than dumping them on the Internet or using them to illustrate a singular political point of view.

What news organizations have access to the diplomatic cables and how did they get them?

According to the Associated Press, Wikileaks gave four news organizations (Le Monde, El Pais, The Guardian and Der Spiegel) all 251,287 classified documents before anything was released to the public. The Guardian subsequently shared its trove with The New York Times.

So have all 251,287 documents been released to the public?

No. Each of the five news organizations is hosting the text of at least some of the documents in various forms with or without the relevant metadata (country of origin, classification level, reference ID). The Guardian and Der Spiegel have performed analyses of the metadata of the entire trove, excluding the body text. The Guardian's analysis is available for download from its website.

Wikileaks itself has released (as of December 7, 2010) 960 documents out of the total 251,287. The Associated Press has reported that Wikileaks is only releasing cables in coordination with the actions of the five selected news organizations. Julian Assange made similar statements in an interview with Guardian readers on December 3, 2010. Cables are being released daily as the five news organizations publish articles related to the content.

Is each of the five news organizations hosting all the documents that Wikileaks has released?

No. Each of the five news organizations hosts a different selection of the released documents, in different forms, which may or may not overlap. It's not clear how much they're coordinating on releasing new documents, since each appears to have a full set and normally newspapers would be eager to scoop one another.

How are the five news organizations releasing the cables?

Le Monde has created an application, developed in conjunction with Linkfluence, that hosts the searchable text of several hundred cables. The text can be searched by the sender (country of origin, office or official), date range, persons of interest cited in the docs, classification status, or any combination of the above. Only the untranslated, English text of the cables can be accessed and cut-and-paste is not available.

El Pais offers access to more than 200 cables, available in the original English or in Spanish translation, searchable by country of origin and key terms and subjects (such as "Google and China"). These searches also return El Pais articles written on a given subject, often placed ahead of the cables in the search listings. The paper also offers a "How to read a diplomatic cable" feature, explaining what all the abbreviations and technical verbiage mean in plain speak, posted on November 28, 2010.

The Guardian offers the cable data in several forms: It has performed an analysis of metadata of the entire 251,287-document trove, and made it available in several forms (spreadsheets hosted on Google Docs and in downloadable form) as well as infographics.

The Guardian also hosts at least 422 cables on its website, searchable by subject, originating country, and countries referenced.

The New York Times hosts what it calls a "selection of the documents from a cache of a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks intends to make public starting on November 28. The webpage goes on to say "A small number of names and passages in some of the cables have been removed by The New York Times to protect diplomats' confidential sources, to keep from compromising American intelligence efforts or to protect the privacy of ordinary citizens."

The documents are not searchable and are organized by general subject.

Who is responsible for redacting the documents? What actions did Wikileaks take to ensure that individuals were not put in danger by publication of the documents?

According to the Associated Press and statements released by Wikileaks and Julian Assange, Wikileaks is currently relying on the expertise of the five news organizations to redact the cables as they are released, and it is following their redactions as it releases the documents on its website. (This cannot be verified without examining the original documents, which we have not done?nor are we linking to them here.) According to the BBC, Julian Assange approached the U.S. State Department for guidance on redacting the documents prior to their release. One can imagine the State Department's dilemma there: assist and risk legitimating the enterprise; don't assist and risk poor redaction. In a public letter, Harold Koh, legal adviser to the Department of State, declined to assist the organization and demanded the return of the documents.

Are the documents hosted anywhere else on the Internet? What is the "insurance" file?

In late July 2010, Wikileaks is said to have posted to its Afghan War Logs site, and to a torrent site an encrypted file with "insurance" in the name. The file, which apparently can still be found on various peer-to-peer networks, is 1.4 gigabytes and is encrypted with AES256, a very strong encryption standard which would make it virtually impossible to open without the password. What is in the insurance file is not known. It has been speculated that it contains the unredacted cables provided by the original source(s), as well as other, previously unreleased information held by Wikileaks. There is further speculation, which has been indirectly boosted by Julian Assange, that the key to the file will be distributed in the event of either the death of Assange or the destruction of Wikileaks as a functioning organization. However, none of these things is known. All that is known for sure is that it's a really big file with heavy encryption that's already in a number of people's hands and floating around for others to get.

What happens if Wikileaks gets shut down? Can it be shut down?

It depends on what's meant by "Wikileaks" and what's meant by "shut down."

Julian Assange has made statements suggesting that if Wikileaks becomes nonfunctional as an organization, the key to the encrypted "insurance" file will be released (the key itself is not a big document and could presumably fit into Twitter messages). The actual machination of how such a "dead man's switch" would release the key is not known. If the key were released, and if the encrypted insurance file contains unredacted and unreleased secret documents, then those decrypted files would be available to many people nearly instantaneously. Wikileaks claimed in August that the insurance file had been downloaded more than 100,000 times.

Wikileaks apparently maintains a small paid staff?who and where is not exactly on a "people" page, though there used to be a physical P.O. box in Australia where documents could be sent?and is additionally supported by volunteers, speculated to be at most a few thousand. So, would it be possible for a motivated organization to disrupt its real-world infrastructure? Yes, probably. However, at this point, it is not practical to recover the information the organization has already distributed (which includes the entire trove of diplomatic cables to the press as well as whatever is in the encrypted insurance file), as well as any other undistributed information the organization might seek to release. So in terms of the recovery of leaked information, the downfall of Wikileaks as an organization would matter little.

Furthermore, there appear to be currently more than 1,000 sites mirroring Wikileaks and its content. Wikileaks has made available downloadable files containing its entire archive of released materials to date.

On a more technical level, the Wikileaks website can come under attack, and its means of collecting money can be made much more difficult.

Why did wikileaks.org stop working as a way to find the site?

For a traditional website to work, it needs a domain name like "website.com" so that people can find it easily with a Web browser. The domain name system (DNS) is hierarchical?information is spread from a zone containing several top-level (root) servers down to zones containing lower-level servers?but the top-level servers don't determine everything held by servers lower down the chain.

Domain names can stop working for any number of reasons. One common assumption is that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which manages certain top-level protocol and parameter assignments for the Internet, intervened in the case of Wikileaks. It did not.

A little technical discussion to explain why: The root zone orchestrated by ICANN is a very small file?just a mapping between each top-level domain (TLD), such as .org or .ch, to the IP address(es) of servers designated to say more about that TLD. One server, not in ICANN's hands, keeps track of names under .org, another handles names under .ch, and so on. So the only thing, hypothetically, ICANN could do is to completely delete .org or .ch, which would make every domain name with that ending disappear temporarily.

Note that wikileaks.org went down not because of anything done to its DNS entry within the list kept by the registry that manages .org domains. (n.b. Jonathan Zittrain is on the board of trustees for the nonprofit Internet Society (ISOC), which is the parent to the Public Interest Registry, which keeps track of names in .org.) Instead, the name server to which its entry pointed (even lower down the DNS chain) was attacked with a flood of traffic by unknown parties, and EveryDNS, the operator of that name server, chose to stop answering queries about Wikileaks in the hopes that the attack would stop. (Apparently it did.)

A website also needs hosting, and Wikileaks has had to shift its hosting at least once after being dropped by a chosen provider: Amazon's commodity hosting service shut down the site for terms of service violations after being contacted by U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-Connecticut).

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Smart Phones Help Fight Bank Fraud

A simple phone call or text message could have saved Mark Patterson nearly $350,000. The money was stolen from his company's bank account last year by cybercriminals based in Eastern Europe. Patterson discovered the fraud six days after it had begun, when the bank sent notice that a fraudulent $9,000 transfer to an account in California had failed to complete.

A startup security firm, DUO Security, hopes to offer a better way to secure banking transactions, by routing the information used to confirm a transaction through to a second device: a smart phone. The company has developed apps for a variety of smart phone platforms to create a separate channel between a bank and its customer to verify a transaction. Customers receive the details on their phone and approve transactions with a single touch.

"You push a button on your computer, you receive a notification, and you push a button on your phone, and that is it," says company cofounder Jon Oberheide. "We don't really want to overwhelm the user with options."

Patterson's company was a victim of the Zeus banking Trojan, a money-stealing software program used by cybercriminals to hijack victims' online banking sessions and pay out large amounts of money to intermediaries known as "money mules," who transfer the funds overseas. "It's been a very stressful year and a half," Patterson told attendees at the CyberCrime 2010 Symposium in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, last month.

Defenses against Zeus and other programs like it are few. Criminals routinely test the latest version of their code against antivirus software. Capturing a username and password during an online banking session is simple, which is why banking regulations no longer allow only a single factor (a password) to secure online transactions.

Because the criminals have control over the banking customer's computer, even a second factor--such as another temporary passcode--often fails. Zeus and other Trojans modify bank transactions in real time, sending funds on to money mules but displaying a page that makes it appear that the money is going to a legitimate payee. In fact, any security measure that uses the same communications channel between the PC and the bank can be corrupted by attackers who have compromised the device. DUO Security uses encryption to verify that the communication is going to and from a device that the user has registered.

Allowing the user to actually see the transaction before confirming it is key, says Avivah Litan, a fraud analyst at Gartner. "We have been advocating transaction verification for a long time," she says. "We call it 'sign what you see.'"

DUO Security is not the first to focus on the phone. Firms such as RSA, Entrust, and PhoneFactor use similar techniques for verifying transactions via a mobile phone. However, many products merely issue a passcode, an approach that is still vulnerable to Trojans. Zeus's developers are known to have circumvented the issuing of a text message passcode on Symbian and BlackBerry devices by using the Trojan to ask victims to install an app on those devices; the malicious app forwards the SMS code to the attackers, who can then complete the transaction.

DUO Security has focused on making the technology simple to integrate with banking websites, requiring the addition of only a few lines of code. Customers don't have to enter in codes, and banks don't have to run specialized hardware in their network or significantly modify their site. The company's hope is that by making it simple enough, a wider audience will adopt the technology.

"We think we can really expand where multifactor [authentication] is offered, where multifactor could be offered [to secure] your Facebook account, your Twitter account," Oberheide says. "These things might seem trivial to you, but you could have that extra protection without the headaches that traditionally go along with multifactor authentication."

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Will Web stores be the lifesaver publishers have been looking for? [TNW Media]

Google?s Chrome Web Store is here. We covered its launch this week, detailing Google?s new marketplace for Web-based ?apps.?

The apps, which are currently free, are essentially just bookmarks to existing websites. But that wil all soon change as the keyword here is ?store.? As cool as Google?s Chrome OS is, there?s no way publishers are jumping onto yet another platform to hand out free apps. Smart publishers only want to create new apps for platforms when those apps will make them money.

The Google Chrome Webstore, and other browser app stores like Mozilla?s similarly announced endeavorer, will be a landmark opportunity for publishers to charge for content whether it?s on the Web, a smartphone, an iPad or any yet to be seen tablet.

So will it work?

With the appropriate amount of scale, the app market has the potential to offer content providers an entirely new and unexplored avenue for distribution.  Thus, if an applications market can develop outside of the current model, and convince consumers to purchase the devices that service those ecosystems, then media companies have a chance to benefit from this exciting new addition to the app marketplace. ?Howard Mittman, Publisher of Wired

First and foremost, Google?s Chrome Web Store gives publishers a presence.

Steve Kurtz, VP of Digital Development at USA TODAY, who has already placed an app in Google?s Chrome Web Store says, ?I think it gives us the opportunity to execute our business strategy, whether that?s paid content or display advertising or a combination of both. What?s beneficial about the Web store is that it makes these applications easier to find and may attract new customers that may not be using our other applications or visiting our website.?

But beyond presence, and brand recognition, publishers need to make money. For the market to work, consumer?s buying habits have to warrant charging for content. Simply put, as buyers we can?t want or have free everything anymore. Google and publishers are banking on the fact that Apple?s iOS store, Android?s Marketplace and iTunes have changed the average user?s mentality so that they are now willing to pay for content, whether it be movies, music, books or news, if it?s easy for them to do so.

USA Today?s Kurtz agrees:

?Certainly consumers are willing to pay for the right content and experience. Everyone is in the early stages of figuring out that formula and the next year should provide some interesting case studies,? he says.

It?s been done before. Now it seems, it?s Google?s turn to do the same.

?One of the big dreams of the whole Web platform is that on the Web, you can create something once and it can be viewed across all the different browsers. Apple said if you want to play in our space you?ve got to do it this way and we had to because of Apple?s massive adoption. But since Apple charges money, it made sense,? says Mark Mangan, CEO and Publisher of Flavorpill.

The NYTimes app is free for now and available through the Chrome Web Store. But readers will be asked to pay for access to the content of the app when The Times launches its pay model next year.

?We currently enjoy a digital business dominated by advertising. The introduction of our pay model for our digital products will enable us to add another lucrative revenue stream. We expect in the future that all our products will have dual revenue streams in some measure,? says Denise Warren, Senior VP and Chief Advertising Officer for The New York Times Media Group and GM of NYTimes.com.

Publishers can potentially start making money for these ?Web apps,? where they haven?t been able to before because consumers are not used to paying for websites. Currently, the ?apps? in Google Chrome?s Web Store are HTML5 websites that have been designed to look like apps. Chrome enables certain functions that won?t work in other browsers and users also can?t buy or ?install? an app except in Chrome. One major long term benefit for publishers is that HTML5 allows for offline usage, and slicker, more app-like features with polished designs.

?As the Web continues to evolve, we are harnessing new tools ? like HTML5 ? to enhance how our readers interact with The Times and to develop a more engaging experience,? said Warren of The New York Times. ?This app is a unique opportunity for our advertisers to align their brand with The Times?s affluent and influential audience on an innovative new platform.?

With offline storage, users will be able to download a game, magazine or book to enjoy even when they?re not connected to the Internet. Google and publishers are hoping that with that a new consumer mindset and HTML5 functionality, that Webstores will be what iTunes and app stores are for mobile, but on the Web. With the Chrome Web Store, Google TV and Google eBooks are their way, it seems as if Google is thinking of becoming a much more transactional entreprise.

So how will Google profit? In a recent CNET interview, Google Engineering Director Linus Upson described what sets Chrome Web Store apart from the other Web stores. First, he says, while the Chrome Store will collect a fee when it sells an app, Google is not trying to make its store a profit center. ?We collect only enough to cover our costs,? Upson says. According to the same interview, Google will process several types of payments for developers such as up-front purchasing of an app, recurring subscription fees, and in-app add-on purchases through Google Checkout. Developers will also have the option to put Google ads into their apps?and this is where Google will likely make most of its money. When Mozilla launches their own Firefox app store, it will also benefit publishers greatly as Firefox currently has a larger audience than Chrome in the US and worldwide. And Google?s Upson implied to CNET that Google would either contribute to this effort or adopt its final spec.

In 2008, the publishing world realized it was serious trouble. Glossy magazines became emaciated. Newspapers folded into twilight. People were no longer picking up magazines and newspapers like they once were. But we still hungered for content, we just didn?t know how or where to turn. Many believe the industry has now been saved by something tangible, yet digital, a connected tablet on which we can read all of our daily news, watch all of our favorite movies, tv shows, play our favorite games, and communicate with our social networks. We?ve got a few devices with different browsers and operating systems to access content from, but how will it all come together in a seamless way?

This is exactly what Google is aiming to do. Will Google?s Chrome Web Store be a real gamechanger for publishers? The real question is, will you pay for richer Web-?app? based content?

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In Tax Deal, Many Public Employees Will Pay More

More bad news for government workers.

At a time when state and local governments across the country are imposing furloughs and layoffs, and President Obama has frozen pay for federal employees, it turns out that one of the few groups to face higher federal taxes next year may be public sector employees.

The proposal to extend the Bush-era tax breaks unveiled by Mr. Obama this week would offer a tax cut for most Americans. The deal would end the Making Work Pay credit, which gave a tax reduction of up to $400 to workers with low and middle incomes. That credit will be replaced by a 2 percent decrease in the payroll tax for Social Security for people of all incomes.

But more than six million federal, state and local government employees do not pay into Social Security at all. Instead, they pay into public pension systems. So if the agreed proposal becomes law, such employees will lose the $400 credit and would not reap any benefit from the payroll tax cut.

According to the most recent statistics by the House Ways and Means Committee, more than 174 million workers paid into Social Security in 2007, but about 5.7 million state and local government employees paid into other pension systems. While the federal government has been moving its work force into Social Security in recent decades, there were still 600,000 employees excluded from it in 2007.

Some tax experts say that it is unfair for a $900 billion tax cut package to give a quarter of its benefits to the top 1 percent of wage earners while forcing public sector workers, who are largely middle class, to have to pay more.

?It makes so little sense that you have to hope that the people who negotiated this didn?t think it through,? said Robert McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice, a public interest group aligned with unions. ?And when they do think it through, they?ll realize it?s not fair. It would be cruel not to do something about it.?

Amy Brundage, a White House spokeswoman, acknowledged that the current version of the plan could result in a higher tax bill in 2011 than 2010 for some government workers. But she stressed that the plan would nonetheless spare them, and all taxpayers, a much steeper increase that would have resulted if no deal had been struck and all the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire on Dec. 31.

While Mr. Obama had proposed an extension of the Making Work Pay credit, the $120 billion payroll tax reduction worked out is twice as large and will offer a break of up to $2,136 each to millions of middle- and high-income taxpayers.

?The payroll tax cut would reduce taxes for over 155 million workers, providing effective tax relief that will create jobs and boost the economy,? Ms. Brundage said.

While many Democrats have criticized Mr. Obama for abandoning a campaign pledge to let the cuts expire on the wealthiest 2 percent of wage earners, Ms. Brundage said that the president did so only after winning the extension of an assortment of credits for low-income Americans and a 13-month extension of unemployment benefits.

?The cumulative impact of these provisions will be good for America?s working families and our economy,? Ms. Brundage said.

Leaders of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees were muted in their reaction to the prospect of more taxes for public employees.

The union spent $90 million to help elect Democrats during the last election cycle, when Mr. Obama promoted a plan to preserve tax cuts for all but the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. But Democratic leaders in Congress declined to vote on the measure before the elections and, after Republicans won control of the House, could not win approval for it during the lame duck session of Congress.

?We are aware of it,? said Gregory King, a union spokesman, ?and we are discussing it with the appropriate leaders in Congress.?

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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=5ecf73f72385605fd98341aeac2e78ac

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Google shows off Motorola tablet prototype with Android 3.0

Andy Rubin, Android's co-founder and now vice president of engineering at Google, showed off a Motorola tablet prototype at the "D: Dive Into Mobile" event this week. The device not only featured a "dual core 3D processor" from Nvidia, but it had some interesting software on top of it.

It's the first device we've seen running Android 3.0 (codenamed Honeycomb), the next version after Android 2.3 (codenamed Gingerbread). Rubin explained that it features video chat, a new release of Google Maps, an updated Gmail app, and a redesigned desktop that takes into account the extra screen space. The tablet itself featured no buttons, and the OS seemed to compensate for this with on-screen elements to launch search and apps.

We're not even 100 percent sure that Honeycomb will be Android 3.0. Gingerbread was originally supposed to be version 3.0 but it got pushed back and dubbed version 2.3. This could happen with Gingerbread, meaning it could end up being version 2.4, but somehow given the tablet improvements we think it will indeed be version 3.0. In either case, after Honeycomb, we already know we'll be getting codename Ice Cream.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/41499-google-shows-off-motorola-tablet-prototype-with-android-30.html

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Intel, AMD, system builders to drop VGA by 2015

Intel has announced plans to cease support for the widely used VGA and LVDS display connectors in its processors and chipsets by 2015. Additionally, Chipzilla has teamed up with other industry titans, including AMD, Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, and LG to phase out the dated interfaces in favor of newer, more capable connection types, such as DisplayPort and HDMI.

In fact, AMD's plans are even hastier. The company intends to begin phasing out native VGA and LVDS output from most products by 2013, with expansion to all AMD products by 2015. It was noted that this also means DVI-I will be dropped in the same period.

In its press release today, Intel said HDMI is increasingly used in PCs for easy connection to consumer electronic devices and TVs, while DisplayPort is expected to become the single PC digital display output for embedded flat panels, monitors and projectors.


Both allow for slimmer laptops and support higher resolutions and more colors than the 20-year-old VGA connector. On top of the better visuals, Intel says DisplayPort and HDMI consume less power, so they're also better for battery life on mobile systems.

"Display standards are rapidly evolving, with new features such as multi-display support, stereoscopic 3-D, higher resolutions and increased color depth quickly moving from early adopter and niche usage to mainstream application," said AMD. "VGA, DVI and LVDS have not kept pace."

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/41487-intel-amd-system-builders-to-drop-vga-by-2015.html

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Snapstick launches private beta, brings the web to the TV with a flick of the wrist [TNW Mobile]

Today Snapstick announced the private beta for its innovative software service that brings the entire web experience to the television with a flick of the wrist.

Seriously.

We recently had the chance to sit down with two of Snapstick?s Co-Founders, Rakesh Mathur and Balaji Krishnan, and get a sneak peak of the product that they truly believe is the first true marriage of internet and TV.

Snapstick in a nutshell is a service that allows users to bring the full, unrestricted internet from any mobile device straight to the television without the need for a remote or a keyboard. Instead, just a flick of the device toward the little set top box and boom; it?s on the television in beautiful quality.

Essentially, it turns whatever device you?re using into a living and breathing remote control for your television.

All of this is accomplished using technology they call, SplitMedia:

Unlike streaming technologies that tax the processing power of your mobile device or computer, SplitMedia? technology offloads the Internet connection to the existing Wi-Fi network in your home. Once Snapstick takes over the processing and playback of the video on the big screen, it frees up processing power on your laptop or phone for other tasks, like surfing, tweeting, updating Facebook, or searching for other new content to snap to your TV.

To give you an idea, Balaji loaded up a YouTube video of a fighter jet racing a Bugati on his iPad using the Snapstick browser. He then flicked his iPad toward the box and it  appeared almost instantly on the television starting to play.

From there, he could keep browsing the web, pause the video on the television, Tweet to a friend, or just sit back and enjoy the video  from his tablet playing on the big screen.

Across the table, Rakesh, also in possession of an iPad, was able to connect to the same network that Balaji was on (he was given permission of course) and because of SplitMedia, he too was able to manipulate what was on the television screen. He could pause it or throw up something else entirely. This feature will surely go over well in households full of children or adults who root for separate sports teams.

Of course, Snapstick isn?t all about video. You can also bring up email on the television and use the keyboard in Snapstick?s browser to type or even pull up Skype and make a call to a friend. We should point out that Skype was integrated into the software and while it was obviously in the early stages, it worked quite well.

The company is currently in talks with several partners and they hope that by Q2 of next year there will several ways of getting Snapstick. For now though, they are focused on the private beta and fine tuning what appears to already be a pretty amazing product.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2010/12/09/snapstick-launches-private-beta-brings-the-web-to-the-tv-with-a-flick-of-the-wrist/

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