privacy-rights – Page 54 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Bigger than Google Fiber: LA plans citywide gigabit for homes and businesses

Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. Diliff Los Angeles is about to unleash one of the most ambitious city-led broadband projects to date, with the goal of bringing fiber to all of its 3.5 million residents and all businesses. Next month, the city plans to issue an RFP (request for proposals) “that would require fiber to be run to every residence, every business, and every government entity within the city limits of Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Information Technology Agency GM Steve Reneker told Ars today. The City Council this morning unanimously voted to move forward with drafting the RFP and will vote again in a few weeks to determine whether it’s ready for release, he said. LA expects the fiber buildout to cost $3 billion to $5 billion, but the cost would be borne by the vendor. “The city is going into it and writing the agreement, basically saying, ‘we have no additional funding for this effort.’ We’re requiring the vendors that respond to pay for the city resources needed to expedite any permitting and inspection associated with laying their fiber,” Reneker said. “If they’re not willing to do that, our City Council may consider a general fund transfer to reimburse those departments, but we’re going in with the assumption that the vendor is going to absorb those up-front costs to make sure they can do their buildout in a timely fashion.” Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bigger than Google Fiber: LA plans citywide gigabit for homes and businesses

Acer CEO resigns on the back of $446 million quarterly loss

Soon-to-not-be CEO J.T. Wang. Acer Acer has issued a statement this morning reporting that Acer CEO J.T. Wang has resigned following news of the company’s significant $446 million loss during the third quarter of 2013. Wang will continue in his role as Acer’s chairman for another seven months, but he will be handing over the CEO reins to Acer President Jim Wong at the start of 2014. Acer’s financial beatdown was announced last Tuesday along with the rest of its Q3 results. It’s the second quarter in a row of losses for the PC OEM; Q2 in August ended with a $11.4 million loss where many analysts had expected at least some profit. According to GigaOm , an additional (Chinese) statement issued by Acer blames “the gross margin impact of gearing up for the Windows 8.1 sell-in and the related management of inventory.” As Microsoft Editor Peter Bright showed yesterday , though, Windows 8.1 hasn’t necessarily exploded out of the gate, and tying significant amounts of money up around the operating system’s launch doesn’t appear to have served Acer very well. Most OEMs see sales dips in Q2 and Q3 before the holiday-saddled Q4 pushes sales back up, but Acer’s numbers paint a particularly dismal picture: the company saw a 35 percent drop in sales from the same quarter last year. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Acer CEO resigns on the back of $446 million quarterly loss

New Kepler analysis finds many Earth-like planets; total 3,500 exoplanets

Sun-like stars are bright enough that their habitable zones are pushed close to the edge of where Kepler is able to detect planets. NASA Although NASA’s Kepler probe has entered a semi-retirement , discoveries from the data it collected continue. Scientists are currently gathered to discuss these results, and they held a press conference today to announce the latest haul. As of today, the Kepler team is adding 833 new exoplanet candidates to its existing haul, bringing the total up to over 3,500. So far, 90 percent of the candidates that have been checked have turned out to be real. The number of planets in the habitable zone has gone up to over 100. In conjunction with the press conference, PNAS is releasing a paper that performs an independent analysis of Sun-like stars. This finds that over 20 percent of these host a planet less than two times the size of Earth’s radius. Within Kepler’s field of view, 10 of them receive an amount of light similar to that reaching Earth. A status update Kepler spots planets by watching them transit in front of their host star. This creates a characteristically square-shaped dip in the amount of light reaching Earth. This method of detection, however, isn’t considered definitive. The sightings are considered candidates and need to be confirmed by another method. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New Kepler analysis finds many Earth-like planets; total 3,500 exoplanets

WaPo to gov’t: Our story on NSA Google spying was true, here’s proof

National Security Agency via Washington Post The Washington Post reported the latest revelations about NSA surveillance last week, writing that the spy agency intercepted data from Google and Yahoo’s private “clouds” by tapping into fiber optic cables overseas. And despite NSA pushback stating otherwise, t he Post is standing by its story . In light of the data tapping piece, the government’s response took a different tack than what’s been seen over the past several months. It didn’t say the disclosures were damaging to national security or irresponsible; they just flat-out said the stories were wrong. Asked about reports that the NSA “broke into Google and Yahoo databases worldwide,” Gen. Keith Alexander said flatly “that’s never happened.” He continued, “I can tell you factually we do not have access to Google servers, Yahoo servers.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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WaPo to gov’t: Our story on NSA Google spying was true, here’s proof

Just six people got insurance through HealthCare.gov on day one

HealthCare.gov, as it looked to the few who saw it on the first day of operation. We now know how many people were able to get through the bugs in HealthCare.gov the first day and register for insurance: six. That’s according to meeting notes from a “war room” meeting on the afternoon of October 2 at the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance (CCII), the organization inside the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) responsible for oversight of the Affordable Care Act insurance program. The notes, which were released October 31 by Republican members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee , detail the woes the site experienced on its first day. The six lucky people who scored insurance on day one managed to succeed because their unique circumstances didn’t run into a fine sieve of feature problems that blocked most who tried from getting through the front door and derailed others quickly afterward. The litany of woes detailed in the meeting: Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Just six people got insurance through HealthCare.gov on day one

New HIV antibodies show potential

The structure of an antibody latched on to a protein found on the surface of HIV. NIAID/National Institutes of Health The dream of an HIV vaccine has been thwarted again and again because the virus evolves so rapidly that the immune system can’t keep up. But the results from a new trial in monkeys suggest that certain antibodies have a powerful enough therapeutic effect that they may warrant clinical trials. Many researchers had given up on antibodies, which are used by the immune system to identify the signature proteins on the outside of invading cells, targeting them for destruction. The HIV virus changes so rapidly that any antibodies that target the virus only work for a little while—the virus stays one step ahead while the immune system struggles to play catch-up. But researchers discovered antibodies that target the converse part of the virus’s structure—the features that are critical to its function and don’t change much over time. These antibodies were discovered in HIV-infected people whose immune systems seemed to keep most strains of HIV in check. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New HIV antibodies show potential

Mysterious Google barge is a massive showroom, “party deck”

Google’s four-story shipping-container product marketing paradise. KPIX5 The mysterious Google barge discovered floating in San Francisco Bay will be used as a party space and showroom just for Google’s Glass and “other gadgets,” according to sources speaking to KPIX5 in San Francisco. The boat will be stationed near Google’s campus in Mountain View, CA and will host “invitation-only clients.” The existence of Google’s watercraft—one on the West Coast and one on the East Coast in Portland, ME—has been a topic of discussion over the past week. The barges are held under an LLC called By And Large, apparently a reference to Pixar’s “ Buy n Large ” of WALL·E, which is itself a reference to the phrase “by and large.” It is not uncommon for high-profile companies like Google to take cover under an LLC to prepare a secret project. Google filed a patent in 2009 for a floating data center, leading outlets like CNET and AllThingsD to believe that the structures might be Google’s first attempt at realizing this idea. The second theory was that the barges were going to be retail presences for Google Glass as the date of the product’s commercial launch nears. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Mysterious Google barge is a massive showroom, “party deck”

iPad Air’s A7 chip is identical to the iPhone’s, just faster

The iPhone 5S (shown above, in system board phone) and the iPad Air share the exact same SoC. That doesn’t mean there aren’t differences. iFixit When Apple announced its new iPad Air and Retina iPad mini in San Francisco last week, one of the most surprising revelations was that the tablets would both be powered by the same Apple A7 chip used by the iPhone 5S. Since the third-generation iPad was released in early 2012, the vastly different display resolutions of the phones and tablets (1136×640 for iPhones, 2048×1536 for iPads) meant that different chips were needed. Smaller chips like the A5 and A6 were used to meet the power requirements of the phones, while the A5X and A6X picked up more powerful GPUs and wider memory interfaces to drive the tablets’ larger displays. Early reviews of the iPad Air were posted last night, and as usual Anand Shimpi of AnandTech had the most detailed information to share about the tablet’s innards. The short version? For the first time since the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S shared the A5 SoC back in 2011, the flagship iPhones and iPads are using the same silicon. Making the numbers add up Let’s begin with Apple’s performance promises. Apple said that the A7 in the iPhone 5S could often double the CPU and GPU performance of the A6 in the iPhone 5, and our review bore these observations out. Apple also said that the A7 in new iPad Air and the Retina iPad mini could deliver roughly double the CPU and GPU performance of the A6X in the fourth-generation iPad. And yet, the A6X offers roughly twice the GPU power of the A6—our biggest question coming out of the iPad announcement last week was just how all of these statements could be true if the iPhone and iPad were using the same chip. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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iPad Air’s A7 chip is identical to the iPhone’s, just faster

Seagate introduces a new drive interface: Ethernet

It’s not time to say goodbye to the old storage network quite yet, but a new combination of cloud, networking, and storage technology might mark the beginning of the end for SANs—Seagate has introduced a new storage architecture that puts Ethernet directly on the disk drive. Called the Kinetic Open Storage Platform, the new approach turns disks themselves into servers, delivering data over the network to applications using an open application interface. The Kinetic platform is a combination of an open programming interface and intelligence and a network interface installed in the storage device itself. It’s targeted mostly at companies looking to adopt the same sort of architecture in their data centers that they use to connect to cloud storage providers such as Amazon. While the architectural approach Seagate is taking is an evolution of work already done by cloud giants such as Google and Facebook, it turns cloud-style storage into a commodity. And that could change how companies small and large think of networked storage—especially as they move toward using newer software development approaches to build their applications or move applications built on Amazon or other cloud services back within their firewalls. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Review: Tesla Motors all-electric Model S is fast—but is it a good car?

This is the first of two pieces we’re publishing on the all-electric Tesla Model S. The other is a video that documents our journey from Houston to Austin and back in the car, and it can be viewed right here . My videographer Steve uttered a single strained curse as inertia’s invisible hand pushed us back into the leather with enough force to knock the camera mount out of alignment. The Tesla’s acceleration was instant, ludicrous, neck-snapping—more appropriate for a roller-coaster than a car. The camera’s point of view was now skewed sideways from this morning’s careful alignment, but Steve didn’t reach for it because we had just gone from 70 miles per hour to north of 100, and we were still going strong. I should have slowed down, because I-10 out west of Houston is the natural habitat of humorless state troopers, but I didn’t. The breathtakingly flat torque curve of the Model S begs to be explored. The pedal under my right foot was just pure magic . No shifting of gears or howling engine here—the only sound was the ever-increasing rush of air as we hurtled toward the car’s 130 mph limiter. And as we accelerated, my prejudices about electric cars were forcibly rearranged. Read 104 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Review: Tesla Motors all-electric Model S is fast—but is it a good car?