wired – Page 30 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Google Glass isn’t dead; Intel-powered hardware reportedly due in 2015

It’s been easy to believe Google Glass is dead given all the problems that have popped up lately. The device was introduced to the world more than two years ago, but it never came close to the original concept . The project’s founder left Google to work at Amazon, and monthly updates from Google have slowed from important feature releases to sometimes single-sentence changelogs . App developers are giving up on the platform, and Twitter recently pulled support for its Glass app. The official forums , once a bustling hive of optimism, now mostly discuss declining usage or low morale among remaining Glass users. And unless something happens in the next 30 days, Google will miss its original plans for a consumer release. Glass is not dead, though. A report from The Wall Street Journal claims that a new version of Google Glass is on the way, and unlike the minor revision that Google released last year, it has totally overhauled internals. According to the report, Glass will switch from its dead Texas Instruments SoC to a processor built by Intel and will get a full hardware refresh. Google Glass has had a rough life thanks to its choice of SoC. The original unit (and the revision) used a Texas Instruments chip, but shortly after the launch of Glass, TI quit the smartphone business and ended support for many of its products. That was a big problem for Glass since, as early as this year, the device was still based on Android 4.0—an OS originally released in 2011. Glass was missing out on some big wearable-specific enhancements in later versions of Android like notification APIs, Bluetooth LE, and lower memory usage. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google Glass isn’t dead; Intel-powered hardware reportedly due in 2015

T-Mobile forced to stop hiding slow speeds from throttled customers

When T-Mobile US customers exceed their monthly data caps, they aren’t cut off from the Internet entirely. Instead, T-Mobile throttles their connections to 128Kbps or 64Kbps, depending on which plan they have, for the rest of the month. But T-Mobile has made it difficult for those customers to figure out just how slow their connections are, with a system that exempts speed test applications from the throttling. After complaints from consumer advocates , the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) investigated the issue and has forced T-Mobile to be more honest about its network’s throttled speeds. Announced today , an agreement between T-Mobile and the FCC ensures that customers will be able to accurately gauge their throttled speeds. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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T-Mobile forced to stop hiding slow speeds from throttled customers

New battery composed of lots of nanobatteries

Shalini Saxena We’re increasingly dependent upon our batteries, so finding ways of building ones with enhanced lifetimes would make a lot of people happy. Research on batteries has ranged from trying new materials to changing the configuration of key components. Now, researchers have managed to restructure the materials in a nano-battery, then bundle lots of these individual batteries into a larger device. Batteries rely on two electrodes to create separate currents of electrons and ions, generating electricity. Nanostructured electrodes have useful properties, such as large surface area and short ion transport time, which enables a high storage capacity and enhanced lifetimes—these batteries hold charge longer and can undergo more charge-discharge cycles. 3-D connectivity and organization of nanostructured electrodes could further improve these devices. Previously, researchers had developed 3-D nanostructured batteries by placing two electrodes within a nanopore (made of anodic aluminum oxide) and using ultrathin electrical insulating material to separate them. While this system had improved power and energy density, use of such thin electrical insulators limits charge retention and requires complex circuits to shift current between them—it’s difficult to retain the benefits of the 3-D nano-architecture due to spatial constraints of the material. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New battery composed of lots of nanobatteries

Local judge unseals hundreds of highly secret cell tracking court records

Scott A judge in Charlotte, North Carolina, has unsealed a set of 529 court documents in hundreds of criminal cases detailing the use of a stingray, or cell-site simulator, by local police. This move, which took place earlier this week, marks a rare example of a court opening up a vast trove of applications made by police to a judge, who authorized each use of the powerful and potentially invasive device. According to the Charlotte Observer , the records seem to suggest that judges likely did not fully understand what they were authorizing. Law enforcement agencies nationwide have taken extraordinary steps to preserve stingray secrecy. As recently as this week, prosecutors in a Baltimore robbery case dropped key evidence that stemmed from stingray use rather than fully disclose how the device was used. The newspaper also reported on Friday that the Mecklenburg County District Attorney’s office, which astonishingly had also never previously seen the applications filed by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD), will now review them and determine which records also need to be shared with defense attorneys. Criminals could potentially file new claims challenging their convictions on the grounds that not all evidence was disclosed to them at the time. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Local judge unseals hundreds of highly secret cell tracking court records

Netflix takes up 9.5% of upstream traffic on the North American Internet

Netflix We’ve written a lot about how Netflix takes up a gigantic share of Internet traffic. During peak viewing hours, Netflix accounts for about a third of all bits sent to Internet users in North America on “fixed” connections—that is, cable, DSL, fiber, or satellite, but not cellular. But Netflix users also send a ton of data upstream, so much so that Sandvine’s latest Internet Phenomena Report puts Netflix at 9.48 percent of all peak upstream traffic on North American fixed Internet services, second only to BitTorrent’s 25.49 percent. Sandvine, a maker of equipment that helps consumer broadband providers manage network congestion, defines “peak” hours as those when network usage is within 95 percent of its daily maximum, typically from 7 to 11 p.m. It isn’t new that Netflix is both an upload and download monster. But for some reason, its share of uploads went up substantially in the latest measurement while downloads remained level. The twice-annual report had Netflix accounting for 6.44 of peak upstream traffic and 34.21 percent of downstream traffic in the first half of this year , while the newest report has Netflix at 9.48 percent of upstream and 34.89 percent of downstream: Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Netflix takes up 9.5% of upstream traffic on the North American Internet

Samsung decides 56 smartphones a year is too many, will cut lineup by 30%

Samsung’s 2014 product lineup. GSM Arena Samsung has been in a pretty tough spot lately. After several quarters of record profits in 2012 and 2013, the company has crashed back down to Earth. The low point for Samsung came last quarter, when it reported a 49 percent drop in profits. At the high end of the market, the company currently has to fight off Apple, which just released a phablet of its own. At the low end, it’s going up against a flood of cheaper Chinese OEMs, led by Xiaomi and Huawei. To try to get out of this slump, Samsung is taking a “less is more” approach. According to The Wall Street Journal , the company said it would cut its 2015 smartphone lineup by 25-30 percent. The company will work on the internals, too, saying during its last earnings call that it will “increase the number of components shared across mid- to low-end models, so that we can further leverage economies of scale.” The belt-tightening might seem like a big change for Samsung, but the company has so fully flooded the market with smartphone models that a 30 percent cut will barely put a dent in its lineup. And thanks to GSM Arena’s phone database , we can get a pretty good estimate of just how big Samsung’s product lineup is in order to compare it to the competition. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung decides 56 smartphones a year is too many, will cut lineup by 30%

16-cent E-rate phone fee hike will fund $1.5 billion in school broadband

The head of the Federal Communications Commission is proposing an extra $1.5 billion in annual spending on broadband for schools and libraries, all to be funded by a 16-cent increase on the monthly bills of phone customers. Under Chairman Tom Wheeler’s plan , announced yesterday and scheduled for a vote on December 11, the E-rate program’s annual spending cap would rise from $2.4 billion to $3.9 billion. Wheeler tried to make the increased cost to ratepayers sound as small as possible. “If the FCC reaches the maximum cap recommended, the estimated additional cost to an individual rate payer would be approximately 16 cents a month, about a half a penny per day, or about $1.90 a year—less than a medium-sized soda at a fast food restaurant or a cup of coffee,” a fact sheet released yesterday says . Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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16-cent E-rate phone fee hike will fund $1.5 billion in school broadband

Prosecutors drop key evidence at trial to avoid explaining “stingray” use

p | m In a Baltimore trial courtroom on Monday, a local judge threatened to hold a police detective in contempt of court for refusing to disclose how police located a 16-year-old robbery suspect’s phone. Once the Baltimore Police were able to locate Shemar Taylor’s phone, they then searched his house and found a gun as well. But rather than disclose the possible use of a stingray, also known as a cell site simulator, Detective John L. Haley cited a non-disclosure agreement, likely with the Harris Corporation, since the company is one of the dominant manufacturers of such devices. Stingrays can be used to determine a phone’s location, and they can also intercept calls and text messages. Baltimore Circuit Judge Barry G. Williams retorted, “You don’t have a nondisclosure agreement with the court,” according to the Baltimore Sun . Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Prosecutors drop key evidence at trial to avoid explaining “stingray” use

High-res Rosetta pics catch little Philae lander bouncing across comet

The European Space Agency’s decade-old Rosetta mission managed to do what no mission has done before—successfully rendezvous a probe with a comet and then land on it . Even if things didn’t go entirely as planned with the landing, the lion’s share of the mission’s science was always slated to be carried out by the Rosetta probe itself rather than by the Philae lander, so plenty of experiments will still be carried out over the next year. A mosaic assembled by ESA scientists showing Philae’s first bounce across Comet 67P. ESA In fact, one of the Rosetta probe’s instruments managed to capture some remarkable imagery last week during Philae’s landing. In a blog post that went live this morning, the ESA posted pictures from the spacecraft’s OSIRIS imager (that’s Optical, Spectroscopic, and Infrared Remote Imaging System) showing Philae’s initial approach and first “bounce” off of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko on November 12. Philae was supposed to have anchored itself to Comet 67P with a pair of harpoons, but those harpoons didn’t fire on touchdown. Philae actually rebounded away from the comet (67P has a small but appreciable amount of gravity, although its escape velocity is only 0.5 meters per second). It was during the first of two “bounces” that Rosetta’s OSIRIS imager captured a series of frames showing the lander’s parabolic journey across the comet’s face. The exact location of Philae’s final resting place remains as yet undetermined. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

One of world’s largest landslide deposits discovered in Utah

The Markagrunt gravity slide in Utah includes most of the area between Beaver, Cedar City, and Panguitch. Google Earth Some things can be too big to notice, as our flat-Earth-believing ancestors can attest, having failed to work out that the surface of the Earth curves around a sphere. Or, as the saying goes, you can focus on the details of some fascinating trees and miss interesting facts about the forest as a whole. In southwest Utah, geologists had noticed some pretty cool “trees.” The area had been volcanically active between 21 and 31 million years ago, building up a host of steep, volcanic peaks. A number of huge blocks of rock from these peaks, up to 2.5 square kilometers in area and 200 meters thick, are obviously out of place—they’ve been interpreted by geologists as the result of many landslides around the volcanoes. In a recent paper in Geology , David Hacker , Robert Biek , and Peter Rowley show that rather than being the result of many individual landslides, these are actually all part of one jaw-droppingly large event. The deposit, called the Markagunt gravity slide, covers an area about 90 kilometers long and 40 kilometers wide and is hundreds of meters thick. During the event, all of this slid 30 kilometers or more. The scale puts run-of-the-mill landslides—as terrifying and deadly as they can be—to shame. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments