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Cold-War Missile Launches Cutting-Edge Military Satellite

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 14:14:47 -0400

Bombs, away!

A 30-year-old intercontinental missile designed to hurl nuclear bombs at Russia was used instead Tuesday morning to blast military communications into the future.

At 11:49 a.m. EDT, a joint military team used a Minotaur IV+ rocket -- essentially a decommissioned Peacekeeper missile built decades ago during the Cold War -- to launch the TacSat-4 satellite into orbit. The microsatellite will enable "on the move" communication, relaying calls and data directly to the handheld radios currently in use by nearly every branch of the military.

"It's an ICBM that we no longer need -- a way to get some use out of one of those old MX missiles. But rather than a warhead, it's got a satellite in the tip," Dr. Larry Schuette, director of innovation for the Navy's Office of Naval Research (ONR), told FoxNews.com.

The tiny satellite -- it weighs 990 pounds versus the industry average of about 4,300 -- blasted off from the Alaska Aerospace Corp.'s Kodiak Launch Complex, under the guidance of the Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Center. And it took military communication far forward.

Most troops today carry PRC-117 radios for communication, devices that rely on UHF transmissions. They relay calls and data back to a base station that's brought in and fixed in place, either set up on a hillside locally or carried overhead in a nearby plane.

The TacSat-4 (or tactical microsatellite) lets the hundreds of thousands of military handheld radios currently in use communicate directly with an antenna orbiting in the most convenient spot imaginable: all that space overhead.

"If you're a mobile force, that requires a mobile infrastructure, the best place to put that infrastructure is in space," Schuette told FoxNews.com.

In Afghanistan and other spots, mountainous terrain makes communications with hillside base stations challenging. In recent years, one special ops solider was killed trying to radio for support, his handheld unable to communicate with an nearby antenna.

TacSat-4 might have been the difference between life and death.

"We believe a TacSat-4 constellation (4 to 5 satellites) had it been flying …. potentially could have saved his life," Lt Col Timothy Henderson, the chief of Operational Capabilities Transition for the Air Force's Operationally Responsive Space office, told FoxNews.com.

The satellite launch was dedicated to the memory of the 30 troops killed in August when insurgents shot down a U.S. military helicopter during fighting in eastern Afghanistan -- the deadliest single loss for American forces in the decade-old war against the Taliban.

"The TacSat-4 launch is dedicated to these heroes. Their sacrifice will not be forgotten," Henderson said.

TacSat-4 sounds a lot like an "ordinary" satellite phones, and it should. It's basically the same concept, although the few commercial systems that exist have never met the military's needs for security.

Satellite phones have never succeeded in the public eye either, largely due to the cost of the phones. Iridium made the biggest push for satellite communication to date, building and launching a network of 66 satellites in Nov. 1998; the company filed for bankrupt protection in 1999, defaulting on $1.5 billion in debt.

TacSat-4 will operate in a highly elliptical orbit, bringing it as close as 400 miles at points before it goes "screaming off into space," Shuette said. If TacSat-4 proves successful, a fleet of 6 to 12 of the cheap, small satellites would be required to cover anticipated areas of operation, he said.

Video Game's 'Capture the Babe' Mode Has Players Slapping Women

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 07:17:45 -0400

A new videogame that requires you to abduct women and give them a "reassuring slap" if they freak out has gamers and women's rights-groups crying foul.

Brace yourself for the awfully sexist world of Duke Nukem Forever.

The game's 1996 precursor Duke Nukem 3D -- which sold 3.5 million copies, made millions for its developers and transformed the entire world of video games -- depicted women as strippers and prostitutes. The new iteration of the game, set for release this spring, takes sexism to a new level -- starting with Duke receiving implied oral sex from twins in school uniforms.

"It was offensive then and it's even more offensive now," Jamia Wilson, vice president of the Women's Media Center, told FoxNews.com. "These depictions of women are extremely harmful, especially to young women," she added.

Duke Ferris, editor-in-chief at gamehelper.com, said sexism is an intentional part of Duke Nukem Forever. “The game is meant to objectify women -- that's the point,” he said.

Gearbox Studios bought the rights to the game last year, following 15 years of delays and disappointments that made the Duke a running joke among gamers. They described an especially controversial multiplayer mode called "Capture the Babe" in an interview with the Official Xbox Magazine.

The magazine described it as "more goofy than offensive."

"The 'Babe' will sometimes freak out while you're carrying her (somewhat understandably we'd say), at which point you have to hit a button to gently give her a reassuring slap," the magazine wrote.

The Entertainment Software Rating Board labels all video games as a guide for parents (E for Everyone, T for Teen). It described some of the sequences gamers will encounter: "A couple of missions within this level require players to recover sex toys and pictures of topless women. A few sequences strongly imply sexual acts: Two women appear to perform fellatio on the central character," reads one passage.

“Our job is to provide consumers with information and guidance that helps them choose games they deem suitable for themselves and their families," Eliot Mizrachi, a spokesman for the group, told FoxNews.com.

The game will be available in stores and online, where customers must click a button stating they are 17 years of age or older -- the only barrier to children buying such a game.

The ESRB argues that its ratings effectively allow consumers to self-police: If you find that sort of thing offensive, simply don't let your kids buy the game.

"This game carries a Mature rating indicating that it’s intended for ages 17 and up, and retailers overwhelmingly enforce their store policies requiring that M-rated games not be sold to a customer under that age without a parent’s consent,” Mizrachi said.

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford defended the Capture the Babe mode in an interview published in Xbox Magazine.

"Our goal isn't to shock people, but I think there's some stuff that'll be just a bit uncomfortable," he said. "We try to get right up to that edge and then relax enough so people don't reject it."

They may have crossed the line this time.

Following the what-were-they-thinking response shared across the gaming community, Gearbox announced Thursday yet another delay to the overdue game's release. Duke Nukem Forever, which had been slated for release May 3, is now scheduled for June 14.

The company did not say whether the delay was related to the controversy.

Killing Bigfoot OK in Texas – if he's Texan

Tue, 08 May 2012 13:38:47 -0400

Texas has no position on the existence of bigfoot -- but go on, hunt it anyway.

John Lloyd Scharf, a bigfoot fan from Oregon, emailed the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department last week about hunting unknown creatures.

Chief of staff Lt. David. Sinclair told FoxNews.com he responded with a straight description of the law -- which hinges not on whether the mythical beast exists, but on precisely how the government would label it.

“The statute that you cite (Section 61.021) refers only to game birds, game animals, fish, marine animals or other aquatic life. Generally speaking, other nongame wildlife is listed in Chapter 67 (nongame and threatened species) and Chapter 68 (nongame endangered species),” Sinclair wrote back to Scharf.

“An exotic animal is an animal that is non-indigenous to Texas. Unless the exotic is an endangered species, then exotics may be hunted on private property with landowner consent.”

The law boils down to provenance, Scharf decided. If bigfoot is indigenous to Texas, it can be killed.

But Sinclair told FoxNews.com his response has been taken wildly out of context.

“This guy never really alluded to bigfoot, though it seems maybe he said something about Sasquatch,” Sinclair told FoxNews.com. “He took my statement and said that it was safe to hunt an ‘indigenous cryptid,’ whatever that is. He misquoted me.”

Scharf did not respond to several FoxNews.com requests for more information. But the rules Sinclair cites are clear: It would be legal to shoot Sasquatch.

“Nongame” means wildlife indigenous to Texas that aren’t deer, sheep, geese, alligators, or any other animal hunted for food. If the Commission doesn’t specifically list a beast -- and needless to say, bigfoot doesn’t make the list -- it isn’t protected.

So is bigfoot a Longhorn? Absolutely, said Brian Brown, media coordinator for the Texas Bigfoot Research Conservancy.

“We’ve got hundreds of sightings going back decades. I don’t think we’d have any problem proving it’s indigenous. We think they’re all over the region,” Brown told FoxNews.com.

Oregon resident Scharf worried that the policy could be interpreted as “kill it first, ID it after.” He thinks it could even lead to premature extinction of the Bigfoot species.

“Individuals of an unknown species, and therefore not be listed as ‘endangered’ under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, could be exterminated without criminal or civil repercussions – essentially causing extinction?” he asked on an enthusiast bulletin board.

Brown argued that killing a bigfoot is a necessary way to prove its existence.

“Our primary mission is to conserve these animals. They cannot be conserved until they are accepted as fact. They will not be accepted as fact until a type specimen is produced. It's as simple as that,” he wrote on the group’s website, texasbigfoot.com.

Laws prevent hunters from killing people, of course. Such regulations wouldn’t govern bigfoot, Brown told FoxNews.com.

“It’s not murder, it’s an animal,” he said. “They don’t do anything that makes you think that they’re humans or some lost tribe. They don’t really have attributes or do anything that one typically associates with humans.”

Open-minded Sasquatch seekers in the Lone Star State all seem positive that the numerous regional sightings mean something is out there.

"I have been immersed in Sasquatch research for a number of years, and I can tell you in my mind a mountain of evidence supports the existence of these creatures," Ken Gerhard, a San Antonio cryptozoologist who co-wrote "Monsters of Texas," recently told the Houston Chronicle.

Gerhard, who also heads up the Gulf Coast Bigfoot Research Organization, said Texas has one of the nation’s highest incidents of bigfoot reports, outranked only by Washington, California, Oregon, Ohio and Florida.

That doesn’t mean the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department is tracking them, of course.

“Here at Parks and Wildlife, we don’t have any evidence that bigfoot exists,” Sinclair told FoxNews.com.

“We don’t want to get drawn into the debate about it.”

Apple iOS 7 is sickening users, doctor confirms

Fri, 27 Sep 2013 13:30:57 -0400

Now that’s what you’d call a rotten Apple!

The latest software powering Apple’s popular iPhones and iPads overhauls the look and feel of the interface, and features a variety of new digital animations and effects. But many users claim the new effects are more nauseating than nice.

“The zoom animations everywhere on the new iOS 7 are literally making me nauseous and giving me a headache. It's exactly how I used to get car sick if I tried to read in the car,” wrote one iPhone user on Apple’s support forums. That thread has been viewed over 15,000 times and features dozens of similar reports of carsickness and nausea.

“+1 here. Have headaches and nausea for past 3 days. Can't stand to look at my phone screen anymore while opening/closing apps. I just close my eyes or look away,” another user wrote.

Dr. George Kikano, division chief of family medicine at UH Case Medical Center in Ohio, told FoxNews.com those users are likely correct: the iPhone is making them carsick.

"There’s some validity to this, for people who are susceptible," he told FoxNews.com. But it's not the zoom animations that are responsible. It's a new "parallax" function that causes the background of the phone to subtly move back and forth, a feature that leads to an effect not unlike car sickness.

It’s no different than being in an IMAX theater," Kikano said. "The inner ear is responsible for balance, the eyes for vision. When things are out of sync you feel dizzy, nauseous. Some people get it, some people don’t, and some people get used to it."

Other experts said the effect is somewhat different. Charles Oman, a former director at NASA who has studied motion sickness for over 15 years, told ABC News that he's hesitant to call it motion sickness.

"It takes a couple minutes of sustained stimulation to activate motion sickness," he said. "If it were an immersive environment, like a headset or an IMAX screen, then I can believe it, but it's a little harder to believe on the small screens."

Kikano has an iPhone 5S himself with the new software on it. His son is in medical school and works at Apple. Kikano noted that when Apple introduced the new parallax feature, the company added a new setting to turn it off.

By digging into the settings menu, a user can “reduce motion” of the new operating system, turning down the parallax effect on icons and alerts (the setting exists under the accessibility section of the general settings area).

For users suffering under iOS 7, there's another solution however, noted by one user on Apple’s forums.

“I went to the AT&T store near me and traded in my iOS 7-infected iPhone 5 for a new iPhone 5 with old iOS 6 on it.”

Bargain Shopping? Visit Uncle Sam's Really Odd Online Warehouse

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 10:32:14 -0500

If you missed out on Cyber Monday, there's still lots of time to get a great discount at Crazy Uncle Sam's Online Retail Outlet, where the discounts are as big as the tax code is complicated.

Thanks to several websites sponsored or sanctioned directly by the U.S. government, consumers can help drive down the debt by taking advantage of great prices on government surplus -- including everything from old NASA tape recorders to an aircraft service truck to a 4,000-square-foot office complex in Burma.

That's right, it's a fire sale -- and everything in the U.S. government's warehouses must go, go, go!

Crazy Uncle Sam's Online Retail Outlet offers a plethora of government-run auctions of old items, including cars, boats, computers, machinery and even clothing. And all you have to do is point and click at GovSales.gov, the official retail arm of the White House, part of the Federal Asset Sales Presidential e-Government initiative.

The goal of the site is to make available surplus, seized and forfeited items -- meaning you'll find a great deal on that vehicle of your dreams, if you've been dreaming of an International Harvester people mover (just $2,000!) or a 1990 refueling truck by the Osh Kosh corporation.

Sure, there are plenty of normal cars, such as this Dodge Ram pickup selling for just under $9,000. Or even this 2006 Buick Lacrosse -- no body damage or bullet holes! But when you're shopping with Uncle Sam, why buy normal? Get a golf cart, if it makes you feel good. The site has tons of them. Or better yet, something unique: an aircraft service truck, perhaps? Not only will the Joneses have to keep up with you for a change . . . we promise you'll never have a hard time finding it in the parking lot.

Buying goods from the government is more or less as easy as buying them on eBay, since most items are standard auctions with bidding histories, minimum bids and reserve prices. But you won't find a "Buy It Now" option, and free shipping and overnight delivery are out of the question. If you buy, say, a used a NASA shredder from Cape Canaveral, you'll most likely have to travel to Florida to pick it up.

GovSales.gov also hosts a variety of bizarre seized goods -- medical equipment from Iowa and Tennessee, for example. Looking for a used examination table? We have what you're looking for! How about an X-ray machine? It's a steal at $275. Hopefully, it wasn't stolen in the first place, although you never know …

And if you're all about location, location, location, it's the international real estate section where the assortment of stuff really shines. Why not use the buying power of the American dollar and the long reach of Uncle Sam to buy yourself a nice looking house in Bulgaria? Uncle Sam's sold out in South and Central Asia, meaning there are no Uzbekistan bungalows on the market today. But if you act quickly, there's a 4,000-square-foot office complex in Burma that can be all yours.

Why would the government own such a place? At these prices, who cares?

Want the perfect little getaway? Somewhere warm, on the ocean perhaps? The government has some beautiful property in Bolivia, not to mention what it terms an "executive residence" for sale in Kingston, Jamaica, on four acres of well manicured lawn. Sounds lovely, no? Just don't pry into the former owner's affairs. He may have shot the sheriff.

Other sites have plenty of government-owned excess to unload as well. GovLiquidation.com is one of the biggest, with the tech gadgets and goodies you've been wasting time looking for on Best Buy, NewEgg.com and others. There don't appear to be any new computers available, but Uncle Sam does have 10 pallets of office supplies from Oklahoma City for sale, including Xerox ink, HP toner, and an embossing machine -- of course.

Need a new Digital camera? GovLiquidation has a wealth of those, including zoom lenses and Polaroid and Fuji digital cameras. Get 'em while they're hot . . . and hope they're not too hot; no one likes buying stolen goods.

Keep in mind that Uncle Sam has been tightening his belt -- and you'll find it for sale in the Textiles and Clothing category. And we'll be thinking of you while you shop . . . from the open seas, that is. This seized cigarette boat won't drive itself.

California May Ban TVs that Draw Too Much Power

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 10:49:35 -0400

California residents are widely regarded as some of the most eco-friendly citizens in the nation. Now state lawmakers aim to make local consumer electronics extra green as well. A rule before the California Energy Commission would impose the nation's first energy-efficiency requirements for flat-screen TVs, a mandatory standard that is expected to be copied by other states.

"The goal here is a simple one," Noah Horowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told commissioners at a hearing Tuesday. "We want to ensure that every TV sold in California is an efficient one."

While there has been tremendous effort among consumer electronics and PC manufacturers to eliminate hazardous toxics and to reduce the overall power consumption of our gadgets and devices, progress comes in dribs and drabs without official oversight, some argue.

To that end, a vote on the standard could come as early as next month.

Some manufacturers argue a mandatory power standard would hamper innovation, limit consumer choice and hurt California electronics retailers. For example, the LA Times spoke with Doug Johnson, the Consumer Electronics Association's senior director for technology policy. He argued that "voluntary efforts are succeeding without regulations," warning that too much government interference could hamstring industry innovation and prove expensive to manufacturers and consumers.

At January's consumer electronics show in Las Vegas, I noticed that pretty much every manufacturer of televisions was already touting innovations to reduce power consumption. But did that message get through to consumers? When you bought your new high-definition flat screen TV, did energy consumption factor into the decision?

FBI probe of defense tech allegedly leaked from NASA stonewalled, sources say

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 08:15:29 -0500

A four-year FBI investigation into the transfer of classified weapons technology to China and other countries from NASA’s Ames Research Center is being stonewalled by government officials, sources tell FoxNews.com.

Documents obtained by FoxNews.com, which summarize these and other allegations and were given to congressional sources last week by a whistle-blower, described how a “secret grand jury” was to be convened in February 2011 to hear testimony from informants in the case, including a senior NASA engineer. But federal prosecutor Gary Fry was removed from the case, which was then transferred from one office in the Northern District of California to another where, according to the documents, “this case now appears to be stalled.”

“The information is staggering,” the whistle-blower told FoxNews.com.

A Justice Department spokesman on Thursday told FoxNews.com it “does not comment on grand jury proceedings,” as a matter of longstanding policy. Fry, reached for comment late Thursday, also would not confirm or deny the claim.

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The claims originate with several past and current NASA employees concerned with the systemic leak of highly sensitive information relating to missile defense systems, as well as what they call a troubled investigation into the leak.

The documents claim the FBI has been working with other agencies since 2009 on an investigation into foreign nationals working at Ames. This follows allegations by two Republican lawmakers earlier this month that the U.S. attorney’s office in the Northern California district was ultimately denied by the Justice Department when it tried to proceed with indictments.

Melinda Haag, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California, denied claims her office was blocked in trying to proceed with the case.

“I am aware of allegations our office sought authority from DOJ in Washington, D.C. to bring charges in a particular matter and that our request was denied,” she said in a written statement. “Those allegations are untrue. No such request was made and no such denial was received.”

Yet two members of Congress, Reps. Frank Wolf, R-Va., and Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said in a statement to FoxNews.com that Haag’s denial “conflicts with information we have received from federal law enforcement sources,” and added “we hope that the DOJ Inspector General will take our request seriously.” The lawmakers had requested, via letter, an IG investigation.

Rob Storch, a spokesman for the DOJ inspector general’s office, confirmed to FoxNews.com the office received the letter from Wolf and Smith. “We’re evaluating (the letter),” he said.

Located in the heart of Silicon Valley, the Ames Research Center has been a center of high tech innovation for more than 60 years. As the space agency’s mission has changed over the years since it was built, NASA has turned it into a commercial research facility, leasing out space to a number of companies including rocket firm SpaceX and tech giant Google, which leases 42 acres there through a holding company called Planetary Ventures.

The accusations stem from a reported violation of the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), which governs the export of defense weaponry. In 2006, Ames adapted specialized rocket engines -- originally developed for the Pentagon missile defense “Kinetic Kill Vehicle” program -- for a moon lander prototype that ultimately became NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE). The robotic moon orbiter is set to launch on Aug. 12, 2013.

Information on guidance and terrain-mapping systems from the Tomahawk cruise missile and a radar from the F-35 were also shared, according to one report in Aviation Week.

"When I mentioned the tech that was compromised to the Armed Services Committee, their jaws just dropped," a congressional source told FoxNews.com.

The sources allege that Ames Center Director Simon P. “Pete” Worden and Will Marshall, a British citizen, shared that moon lander project - and the missile defense technology – with individuals from foreign countries including China, South Korea and Saudi Arabia.

“Will Marshall in particular had demonstrated far too great an interest in locating U.S. spy satellites, giving interviews to Chinese and American newspapers on curtailing U.S. space security,” reads a document that was purportedly given to the FBI. Marshall could not be reached for comment by FoxNews.com.

The document claims foreign nationals, under the direction of Worden, were since 2006 brought in to work on space flight projects, without the proper export control licenses. Further, the document claims they were planning to share technology with the Chinese and other countries through the International Space University.

The document also charges the Department of Homeland Security “intercepted” Marshall at the San Francisco airport, and “confiscated” his NASA-issued computer, suggesting it contained sensitive information.

“Foreign nationals had access to technology and even brought foreign visitors in to see it. Three left the country and talked about the technology,” congressional sources told FoxNews.com. “The case was referred to the U.S. attorney – it’s a clear violation of ITAR.”

A NASA engineer was subpoenaed to testify before a secret grand jury in February 2011 in San Jose, according to the documents. But the attorney assigned to the case – Gary Fry -- was removed at the last minute, before the case was transferred to another office within Haag’s district. Fry still works out of the San Jose office.

NASA headquarters deferred questions to the Department of Justice. The Justice Department headquarters also declined to comment to FoxNews.com.

But Worden told FoxNews.com the accusations are “rubbish.”

“I take very seriously our responsibility to safeguard sensitive information. I say this unambiguously — I have not, would not, and could not impede a law enforcement investigation. To the best of my knowledge I am not the subject of a current investigation,” he said in a statement.

On Feb. 8, Reps. Wolf and Smith sent letters to the Justice Department inspector general and the director of the FBI regarding the allegedly illegal movement of this crucial technology. Wolf chairs the House Appropriations Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies subcommittee. Smith heads the House Science, Space and Technology Committee.

The letters allege the FBI had uncovered the ITAR violations, and the U.S. attorney was prepared to issue indictments. But it says the case has been stalled for more than a year, agents in the case were reassigned, and the statute of limitations on the violations is already beginning to expire.

“It is our understanding that this illegal technology transfer may have involved classified Defense Department weapons system technology to foreign countries, including China, potentially with the tacit or direct approval of the center’s leadership,” the letters read.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, also wrote to NASA as early as April 2012 asking about allegations that Worden “allowed foreign nationals” to access Ames – along with “NASA secrets and cutting edge technology” in violation of ITAR.

Welcome to Hell: Photographer documents Africa’s e-waste nightmare

Thu, 06 Mar 2014 11:00:13 -0500

It used to be wetlands, a recreation zone. Today the locals call it Sodom and Gomorrah.

Slag heaps of rusting electronics, old refrigerators and monitors are scattered everywhere in Agbogbloshie, a dumping ground in Ghana for electronic waste from the rest of the world. On the banks of a polluted river, smoking heaps of burning junk spew bilious, black fumes into the sky. To breathe is to cede years of your life.

The residents of Agbogbloshie are well aware of the poisons in the used electronics they scavenge. But for them, scavenging is the only way to make a buck.

“What you do to get money is what kills you,” one resident said recently. A translator went on to explain, “He knows that, yeah, I’m going to die from this someday. What can I do?”

Another explained the problem in broken English: “We are crying for work, suffering for work. How to eat is hard. There is no job enough, that’s why we come to south. And there is no job to the south. Only this.”

Kevin McElvaney, a 26-year-old business administrator from Germany, recently went to Agbogbloshie to document its ecotech disaster. His portraits show the people working there, mainly kids between 7 and 25, struggling to make a living.

“Before you enter the burning fields of Agbogbloshie, you will recognize a huge market. On one side you can buy cheap local fruits and vegetables and on the other side you will see loads of manufacturers and scrap dealers. Go to these scrap dealers and you will see men sitting on broken TVs smashing their hammers and simple tools against any kind of car parts, machines and electronic devices,” he wrote recently on his blog.

Whose trash is it, anyway?
Over the course of four days, McElvaney met hundreds of young boys and girls, most from the northern part of the country, who came south to burn cables and extract the copper from them. It can be sold on the market for pennies. Monitors can be disassembled to extract bits of precious metals; electronic parts can be removed from gadgets and sold – but at a terrible cost to the human body.

“Injuries like sears, untreated wounds, lung problems, eye and back damages go side by side with chronic nausea, anorexia, heavy headaches,” he wrote.

And where does the trash come from? Despite efforts to police itself, the U.S. contributes as much to the problem as anyone, experts say.

“Much of the incoming material comes from the U.K., but a lot comes from the U.S.,” Jim Puckett, an activist with the non-profit watchdog group Basel Action Network and former toxics director for Greenpeace International, told FoxNews.com by email.

“Last time I was in (nearby) Accra there was a lot of used electronic equipment from the U.S. government arriving there.… When after some time the computers do not sell in the shops, young boys with carts come by and pick them up and take them to the Agbogbloshie wetland/slum area to burn.”

The Basel Convention, organized by the U.N. and adopted in 1989 in Basel, Switzerland, aims to prevent the trade and movement of hazardous electronic wastes. To date, 180 countries and the European Union have signed on to the treaty.

The U.S. signed the treaty in 1990, but Congress never ratified it.

According to State Department policy, shipping electronics for repair, refurbishment or remanufacturing “does not constitute movement of waste, and thus is not impacted by the Convention or its procedures.” In addition, it says, the Convention lacks authority to enforce its own policy.

A number of U.S. businesses have sprung up that export e-waste to other countries -- the repair and remanufacturing the State Department mentions. Good Point Recycling, for example, processes 13 million pounds of electronics annually. Robin Ingenthron, the founder of the company, told FoxNews.com the Basel Convention and overeager activists have led to short-sighted policy. California recently shredded $100 million worth of reusable gear, rather than export it as “e-waste,” he said.

How to recycle safely

Consumers and companies looking to safely e-cycle used electronics can turn to the e-Stewards program from the Basel Action Network, which certifies programs that responsibly recycle and reuse used electronics. Learn more

“As someone who lived in Africa for two and a half years,” Ingenthron said, “if you just go to World Bank statistics, Lagos (in Nigeria) had 6.9 million households with televisions in 2007. So what do you expect to see in Lagos dumps?”

And the photos from Agbogbloshie?

“The photos show stuff that’s been there for 15 years,” he said.

Quantifying the problem
Rather than the Basel Convention, the U.S. relies upon the electronics industry to police itself, through guidelines such as the National Strategy for Electronics Stewardship, a 2011 policy document from the EPA. (The EPA did not respond to FoxNews.com questions in time for this article.) It offers recommendations, not regulations.

As a result, activists say, the U.S. is essentially blind to the problem. We have no way to quantify the e-waste we export.

“When a nation ratifies the Basel Convention, they are required to monitor their export of hazardous waste,” said Sarah Westervelt, stewardship policy director with Basel Action Network. “We are not monitoring our export of this particular hazardous waste. We literally are not quantifying it.

“If we were to ratify the convention, we would be required to measure so we could quantify.”

The U.S. recently set out to do that. In December, the National Center for Electronics Recycling, working with researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and funded by the EPA, released a report titled “Quantitative Characterization of Domestic and Transboundary Flows of Used Electronics,” which sought to measure the flow of waste from the U.S.

“We really don’t have a good handle on what exactly … is getting exported every year,” Jason Linnell, executive director of NCER and the report’s author, told FoxNews.com. “We needed to find a good way to get more data about what is actually going out of the country and set up a way to measure things going forward.”

The report found that 66 percent of e-waste in the U.S. is collected, but just 8.5 percent of it is exported as whole products. This represents the low end of what’s being exported, Linnell acknowledged, since the analysis relied on self-reports from the industry. Still, he thinks there has been progress.

Over the last 15 years, he said, “I tend to think the industry has come a long way. Blatant exporting … that’s harder to do now than it ever was.”

But Westervelt blasted the report and its methodology, saying it’s pointless to rely on the industry to report its own exports.

“Unfortunately the report is incredibly flawed,” she said. “When they have this voluntary survey that asks, ‘are you exporting to Africa,’ you’re not going to be getting reliable response.”

No end in sight
Meanwhile the volume of e-waste remains incredibly high. According to EPA estimates, 1.79 million tons were trashed in 2010 -- not including “TV peripherals” like VCRs, DVD players and so on.

And that number has likely soared, thanks to the explosion in mobile phones. But because the U.S. is the only developed country that hasn’t ratified the Basel Convention, it is in a unique position: It’s perfectly legal to load up a container ship with hazardous junk and sell it to the highest bidder. Once the container ship enters international water, though, it falls under the umbrella of international law -- where it’s illegal for about 143 developing countries to accept it. Many do anyway: e-waste is a lucrative business, after all.

“Companies are making money off this on both ends. But they’re causing these irreparable long-term impacts,” Westervelt said.

Ingenthron pointed out that Basel Action Network is one of those companies making money -- its e-Stewards program certifies recyclers and exporters, and charges them a hefty fee to be listed in its database, he alleged.

“They’re charging hundreds of thousands to certify companies for export,” he said. “None of that money goes to Africa.

“And that’s our objection to these photos. Its poverty porn.”

Beyond MP3: New push for high-resolution music so clear you can hear a pin drop

Thu, 09 Jan 2014 09:51:13 -0500

The iPod marked a huge leap forward for the music industry -- and a step backward, too.

To make music conveniently portable, digital music players rely on compressed songs, which strip out parts of what otherwise would be very large music files.

It’s the only way to fit 10,000 files on that iPod, and in theory your ears don’t notice what’s missing.

But theory isn’t reality, experts say, and a growing number of musicians, composers and sound engineers aim to fix that by putting the fidelity back into your digital hi-fi, and getting the output -- the song you listen to -- to match the input that went into it at a mixing board. Your ears won’t believe the detail and clarity, they say.

“It’s like cleaning off a dirty windshield,” said Mike Mettler, former editor in chief of Sound and Vision magazine. “You can’t quite see what’s there, and then all of a sudden…”

Mettler spoke Tuesday as part of a panel at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show that delved into high-resolution digital music, a term the panel of top names in the music business struggled to define. At its most basic, it refers to a file’s bit rate (the number of bits stuffed into each second of music) and its sampling rate (the number of slices of sound taken per second). The higher, the better.

Where to get the music

CD-quality music is 16 bit / 44.1 kHz -- a standard defined in 1980, when Jimmy Carter was president. A rate of 24/48 is generally regarded as the baseline for high res. Here's where to get it:

hdtracks.com -- Founded by David and Norman Chesky, HDtracks is one of the top sites for high res music.

aixrecords.com -- High-res music straight from one of the best sound studios in Los Angeles

bluecoastrecords.com -- Free downloads of DSD files to get you started, from this acoustic recordings site

channelclassics.com -- Award-winning classical music, available as high-res, multichannel DSDs

But to these men and women, the term “high resolution” speaks to the poetry of music and engineering: That intake of breath before a trumpet solo, a mic stuffed in a drum and wrapped in blankets to perfectly capture each sharp thump, an echo bouncing around a room until it can reverberate no more.

“When you’re learning to taste wine, you don’t learn how to taste it. You learn how to describe it. It’s the same thing with music,” said C. Jared Sacks, head of Channel Classics Records, a classical music label. “At the end of the day, it’s emotion.”

Put simply, the higher the resolution -- the more bits of data stuffed in a second and the more samples of audio taken -- the more sharpness, the more detail, the more breaths, the more echoes. It makes the music more realistic.

CD-quality music is 16 bit / 44.1 kHz -- a standard that was defined in 1980, when Jimmy Carter was president and “The Police” had just started recording. But even that doesn’t cut it. A rate of 24/48 is generally regarded as the baseline for high res, experts say.

“Past 24/48 the door opens to the discotheque of the high-res world,” said Cookie Marenco, founder of Blue Coast Records. Tracks run up from there. A popular recording of the Pretenders’ 1979 debut album can be had at 24/192, for example.

At 24/48, the recordings should meet or exceed the capability of the human ear, which is generally believed to hear sounds at frequencies between 20 and 20,000 Hz, said Mark Waldrep, head of AIX Records and founder and president of iTrax.com. Music ought to fill that range and go further. But few digital files do.

“We have the technology for the first time to not only record that way, but deliver it that way -- if we so choose,” Waldrep said.

Few consumers are even aware of the esoteric details that these engineers and enthusiasts pore over. Indeed, most people are unaware that digital files can be had outside of iTunes and Amazon and Spotify. To get high-res files, you need to visit specialized websites such as HDTracks.com, iTrax.com, and Super HiRez.

To spread the word, the Consumer Electronics Association has jumped headfirst into high-def; on Tuesday it launched the website hiresaudiocentral.com, which will serve as a clearinghouse of information, expert content, gear and more for those looking to boost sound quality. Mettler currently runs a site called soundbard.com; in his spare time he will be chief content officer for the new CEA site.

Newbies to high-res audio will be struck immediately by the cost. High-res is expensive, sometimes three or four times the cost of an album from iTunes. Files are also much bigger: A 3.5 minute song can be 120MB or more, rather than 3 to 4 in a typical MP3.

Newbies will also confront unfamiliar terms: Files are distributed not as MP3s but as AIFFs or FLACs -- or DSD or PCM files, two uncompressed digital file formats. Engineers have been using both to mix songs for decades. The panel differed as to which format is better, but it doesn’t seem to matter in the end.

“The thing is, with DSD or PCM or hot dogs or bananas, the thing is how it’s implemented,” said David Chesky, founder and creative director of Chesky Records and a legend in the field.

You must choose, then. But choose wisely.

High resolution digital music is also tied into surround sound, or at least the consumer electronics industry hoped it would be. A decade and a half ago, Philips and Sony came out Super Audio CD (SACD), which was far higher resolution audio that hinged on having lots of speakers. At the same time Panasonic and a few other companies came out with DVD-Audio, a very similar type of disc.

Both were utter failures on the commercial market.

Among other factors, many consumers found the sheer number of speakers to be daunting.

“The challenge was convincing my wife to have five speakers in the room,” Sacks said, laughing. “And that’s not going to change.”

But, as with high-res music itself, the technology is addictive. “Once you’ve heard good multichannel, it’s hard to go back.”

Still, the new website alone is unlikely to convince people to buy, acknowledged John Newton, founder and president of Soundmirror, a recording studio with over 80 Grammy nominations.

“We’re fooling ourselves if we think that the person who has an iPod plugged into a desktop device while they’re cooking or cleaning is ever going to experience or care about high-res sound. They want that in the background. And that’s a different market than the people that listen more seriously to music.”

The weight of a consumer electronics giant might make a difference. Sony recently threw its weight (again) behind high resolution audio, with a new line of consumer electronics such as the HAP-Z1ES, a music player that can handle DSD files and won an innovation award at this year’s CES show.

“With a giant multinational company getting behind this and exposing it to people, we’re going to see if people take to it,” Chesky said. “The masses are now going to have an opportunity to be exposed to high res.”

And like a longtime McDonald’s eater who finally tastes foie gras, ears may be permanently changed, Chesky said.

“We’re in the fine food and fine wine business.”

The man who saved the lightbulb

Mon, 16 Dec 2013 13:30:38 -0500

A modern day Edison has a bright idea: a way to keep the incandescent bulb burning brightly, despite a government law set to go into effect New Year’s Day that effectively outlaws the most commonly used lightbulbs.

Most bulbs, that is. Not those made by lightbulb savior Larry Birnbaum.

“When the government decided to ban incandescent lightbulbs, they left a loophole in the law. An opening,” Birnbaum told FoxNews.com. “What that was was rough service.”

A “rough service” bulb is, in Birnbaum’s words, a bulb that can take a beating, one meant for industrial purposes -- imagine a lightbulb on a subway car, built to survive the jostling and vibrations of the daily commute. But despite their intended use, they work just like normal bulbs: Consumers can buy them and screw them into any ordinary lamp socket.

The 2007 law forces manufacturers to improve the energy efficiency of ordinary bulbs dramatically: 40W bulbs must draw just 10.5W, and 60W bulbs 11W, and incandescents simply can’t do that.

But there are a variety of exceptions to that law for specialty lighting, including bulbs with unusual bases, others meant for special display purposes, and rough service bulbs. In 2010 Birnbaum applied for a permit to build them under the new specifications: Per the government, his bulbs needed seven filaments rather than two, a brass base, and 1 millimeter thicker glass, and the bulbs had to be filled with a special mixture of argon and krypton to improve their lifespan.

“They made it very difficult for everybody. I had to do three different samples at three different times until we finally got the approval, they were so critical,” he said. “I don’t blame them.”

His bulbs, called Newcandescents, began shipping in 2010 -- made in America, at a plant outside of Indianapolis by around two dozen employees.

Demand has been remarkable, Birnbaum said. After a 2012 appearance on the Rush Limbaugh show, he received $100,000 worth of orders and enough traffic to crash the website.

“You’d be shocked how many people still want incandescents,” he told FoxNews.com. Many people are unsatisfied by those twisty compact fluorescent bulbs, he said, the main alternative to incandescent bulbs. “People don’t like the color, the fact that they don’t go on right away, the fact that they have mercury.”

CFLs also pose a health risk to some: A 2012 study from Stony Brook University found them much more likely to leak UV light compared to traditional fluorescent bulbs, causing damage to healthy human skin cells.

Newer LEDs are being hailed as the next great lighting tech, long life bulbs that sip power and ultimately should reduce electric bills substantially. But for now those bulbs are costly, despite dramatic price cuts over the past year. Home Depot sells -- until supplies run out -- a six pack of 60-Watt incandescents from GE for $4.67, or 78 cents apiece. A six-pack of 60-Watt LEDs from Cree sells for $77.82 -- $12.97 each.

Newcandescents are available at a retail store in South Hackensack and in a variety of supermarket chains, including King Kullen, Gristedes, Pioneer and more. They’re also online: Bright Lights Inc., a retailer that sells Newcandescent bulbs, lists a two pack for $2.88, or $1.44 apiece, CEO Paul Veen told FoxNews.com. His company caters to the south, distributing bulbs across Alabama, North Carolina, Tennessee and more.

"Over in Alabama, they need our bulbs. They blow 120 volt bulbs all the time. Their power generation is a little higher,” Veen said.

Built to be sturdier, Newcandescent bulbs run on 130 volts rather than 120, meaning they last longer on the lower voltages, he said.

“If you’ve got a ceiling fixture and you don’t want to change the bulb every 10 months, use something that’s going to last.”

Other than their strength and durability, Newcandescents are just like the old incandescents, including the higher power consumption the new rules are meant to eliminate. But many people are willing to make that trade off.

“The incandescent color is very difficult to replicate -- as far as in LEDs or CFLs, it’s virtually impossible,” Birnbaum said. “And unless you were born a few weeks ago, we’re all addicted to that color. “

Lighting run in the family for Birnbaum, a third-generation bulb man.

“My grandfather and Thomas Edison were very good friends,” he said, “He gave my grandfather an original Edison bulb -- and it still works today.”

Microsoft launches new Surface 2, Surface Pro 2 tablets

Mon, 23 Sep 2013 13:00:40 -0400

There’s a new polish on Microsoft’s Surface.

The world’s largest software company unveiled the new Surface 2 and the Surface Pro 2 -- as well as an innovative way to turn a tablet into a DJ's mixing booth -- at an event Monday in Manhattan, held at a location so far on the West Side of the city that it was practically underwater.

It's an apt metaphor for Microsoft itself, which sometimes feels a pace away from sinking beneath the waves itself as the company struggles to adapt to a world where personal computers, Microsoft’s bread and butter, have increasingly less relevance.

Today’s American is all about smartphones and tablets, areas that Microsoft has tried unsuccessfully to move into.

The latest version of the company's flagship hardware product, a tablet that converts into a laptop with a kickstand and a slick keyboard-enabled cover, is Microsoft’s answer.

“I want you to love this product,” said Panos Panay, a corporate vice president with Microsoft and the head of the Surface product division, at the product launch. “This thing is a beast.”

The new Surface Pro 2 physically looks almost identical to the earlier version of the tablet, a beautifully manufactured gadget that includes a few features to make it stick out from the crowd. A kickstand built into the back of the Surface lets the tablet prop itself up; the new version adds a second position to the stand to rest better on laps.

It also includes the new Haswell chip from Intel, which let the company increase battery life by 75 percent, a common complaint among owners of the first version. It also doubles the graphics power and improves processing power.

The other big innovation is the Touch covers, felt-like protective covers for the tablet that integrate keyboards, something that Microsoft says makes the Surface 2 stand out from the iPad. With a keyboard, the device is really a full-featured laptop -- indeed, the fastest laptop on the market, Panay said.

“It's the best selling product in its class … and the people who use it love it,” he said.

Microsoft plans to expand and amaze with additions to the Touch cover line. Called the Surface Remix Project, a new line of covers will be unveiled that add distinct features. At the Monday event, Panay showed off just one of them: a felt cover with buttons that resemble those on a mixing board.

It turns any Surface into a dedicated music creation station, letting you remix your favorite music and share it with the world.

But will these and other improvements be enough to turn around what has been a lackluster product for the software giant? Despite solid reviews, the first edition of the product failed to breakthrough in the market, due partly to a high price tag and partly due to consumer concerns surrounding Windows 8, the touch-centric new operating system from Microsoft.

The new Surface comes with Windows 8.1, which address some consumer complaints about the software, notably the lack of a Start button and the inconvenience of using the standard desktop interface.

Pre-orders for the new Surface tablets begin Sept. 24. The Surface 2 starts at $449, while the higher end Surface Pro 2 will start at $899 for a version with 64GB of RAM. The new Touch Cover 2 costs $119.99, while Type Cover 2, a version with more keyboard-like keys, will cost $129.99.

What will become of Blackberry?

Mon, 12 Aug 2013 10:41:51 -0400

Blackberry is in a sticky mess -- and like last summer’s jam, the company may be spoiling.

Facing dwindling prospects and unable to right itself, struggling smartphone maker Blackberry said Monday it has formed a committee to explore “strategic alternatives” that may ultimately lead to a sale. Could new phones have fixed things? Could rival software patch the problem? Or is this the end of the line for the once-giant mobile company?

“The hardware just isn't very exciting,” Mark Spoonauer, editor in chief of Laptopmag.com, told FoxNews.com. “And while there's a rumored big-screen Z30 on the way, it may be too late.”

“What would you rather have, a 41-megapixel camera or a flick-typing keyboard?”

Die-hard fans on the Crackberry.com forums have enthusiastically traded updates to the 10.0 software, released in January in conjunction with new hardware meant to inject a shot of life into the company. The software is able to run apps from Google’s rival Android operating system, and the unreleased version 10.2 will better integrate Android.

That’s also unlikely to help, explained Sasha Segan, lead mobile analyst at PCMag.com.

“Unless you’re an extreme geek, it doesn’t bring any advantage to the average user,” he told FoxNews.com. “It’s not a game-changer.”

Despite recent efforts, the business world has moved on in the past five years, while Blackberry has stayed put. According to the latest stats from research firm ComScore, the company’s share of the smartphone market shrank from 5.4 percent to 4.8 percent in the last quarter.

In the face of growing consumer demand for bigger, more colorful phones that run software from Google and Apple, the company announced plans to weigh a partnership or even sale.

Possible Sale, Joint Venture

BlackBerry (BBRY) said Monday it has formed a special board committee to explore strategic alternatives that could help accelerate the deployment of BlackBerry 10. Shares jumped 7.6 percent to $10.50 in pre-market trading.

As of Friday’s close, the stock has slipped about 18 percent so far this year. Read more about the company's financial picture at FoxBusiness.

"During the past year, management and the board have been focused on launching the BlackBerry 10 platform and BES 10, establishing a strong financial position, and evaluating the best approach to delivering long-term value for customers and shareholders," said Timothy Dattels, chairman of BlackBerry's Special Committee of the Board. "Given the importance and strength of our technology, and the evolving industry and competitive landscape, we believe that now is the right time to explore strategic alternatives."

But despite those slumping sales figures, there’s still a need for a company like Blackberry, with its laser-like focus on the enterprise market, Segan said.

“Blackberry in some form still has a future, but it may not be selling physical smartphones in stores to average Americans,” Segan told FoxNews.com.

“The business world needs solutions that are secure, clear, easy and safe. And Blackberry is still the best provider of those solutions,” he told FoxNews.com.

How did the leading smartphone maker tumble so far, so fast?

“Blackberry really missed the whole transformation of the smartphone,” Segan said. While Android-powered phones from Samsung, HTC and others swelled -- growing too big for the average pants pocket -- Blackberry struggled to release any compelling new hardware.

The Z10, released to generally positive reviews in late January, looked essentially the same as every other smartphone on the market. It’s a flat black hunk of plastic and silicon about the same size and weight as every other phone on the market -- and it wasn’t sufficient to change the company’s fortunes.

“Employees want more colorful phones with mainstream apps,” Segan said.

The future for the company looks bleak, said IDC Research Director Francisco Jeronimo, whether it's selling part of the business or moving to a software licensing model.

"The only option it has is to sell the company," Jeronimo said bluntly.

"I don't think there is anyone willing to license BlackBerry 10."

Gun Geo Marker app tries to locate homes, businesses of gun owners

Thu, 11 Jul 2013 02:15:51 -0400

A new Android app asks users to expose the home addresses of gun owners they deem “potentially unsafe” -- and share that information with the world.

The Gun Geo Marker app, released to Google’s Play app store on July 7, invites users to mark the homes and businesses of “suspected unsafe gun owners … to help others in the area learn about their geography of risk from gun accidents or violence. "The app bills itself as merely a tool to collect information, but it was hit with a firestorm of negative reviews and comments from people worried that it could do more harm than good.

“This is dangerous and invasive,” wrote Levi Russell in a review of the app. “Dangerous because it allows criminals to determine where they might steal firearms….you are an accomplice to any firearm theft that will occur due to the existence of this app.”

"Major violation of privacy,” wrote Danielle Sigman in another review, one of more than 700 one-star reviews of the app. “Could cause a lot of safety issues for non-gun owners.”

Brett Stalbaum, the developer of Gun Geo Marker and a lecturer with the Visual Arts department of the University of California, San Diego, said he had received threats over the app.

"The gun rights community has been busy making personal threats (we remain unconcerned), as well as spamming the Gun Geo Marker database with false markers," he exclusively told FoxNews.com. "Though these fake markers are not useful for identifying dangerous guns and owners, they are certainly representative of the highly paranoid reaction we have come to expect from any attempt to improve gun safety in the United States.

"This kind of reaction -- automatically lining up on the wrong side of reasonable measures to improve the safe use and ownership of guns -- aids and abets the crisis of child shooting deaths," he said.

In January, a similar outcry arose after a New York newspaper published the home addresses of area residents with permits to own guns. After threats were called into their offices and the home addresses of editors posted online, The Journal News took down the data.

Whether an app or online, publishing the addresses of gun owners is a risky proposition, experts warn.

“This makes those who don't have guns an easier target for criminals. It’s a safety issue,” John Lott, gun expert and author of the book "More Guns, Less Crime," told FoxNews.com.

“I’ve debated a lot of gun control advocates over the years, and I’ve never met someone who has been willing to put up a sign in front of their house indicating that their home is a gun-free zone,” he said.

Google tells FoxNews.com they do not comment on individual apps, but said to refer to their Google Play developer program policies for apps that are not allowed.

The policy says Google Play does not allow content that contains violence or hate speech, bullying or illegal activities, among others. Gun Geo Marker is not available on the iPhone.

"As a gun owner myself, I want to see our rights preserved, and thwarting the will of 90 percent of the American people who want common sense, constitutional measures to improve gun safety is mathematically unwise," Stalbaum said.

Declassified gov’t report details decades of NSA computer spying

Wed, 26 Jun 2013 04:45:06 -0400

The clandestine National Security Agency is partly responsible for the modern PC era, a newly declassified document reveals, thanks to decades of custom computers built for one thing: espionage.

Declassified by the NSA on May 29 and posted online on Monday, the 344-page report “It Wasn’t All Magic: The Early Struggle to Automate Cryptanalysis, 1930s – 1960s,” details the unknown high-tech history of computers so secretive even their code names were kept confidential.

Until now.

It’s a never-before seen history of code-breaking, spying and its role in the birth of the computer.

“NSA has arguably been the largest single user of advanced computing machines in the world,” reads the introduction to the report, written by Colin Burke, former scholar-in-residence at the NSA and recently retired professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “[The NSA’s] computer purchases and its research and development contracts helped establish America as the world's leading computer manufacturer.”

They have names like Mercury, Rattler, Madame X, MAGIC Atlas and Abner, and some of the early machines have never been mentioned before.

This side to the spy agency is an intriguing one, explained one of the editors behind the independent clearinghouse Government Attic website that obtained the documents, who asked that his name not be used.

“Most computer histories discuss these early machines being used to calculate naval gun ballistic tables, but the truth is that most of them were developed specifically for code-breaking purposes,” he told FoxNews.com.

Government Attic placed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the document on Aug. 4, 2012; when it was posted on Monday, the surge of intrigued visitors was so great that it overwhelmed the site’s servers, knocking the site offline.

“This document … reveals the breadth and also the intensity and urgency of early computer development for code-breaking purposes in World War II and afterward by the U.S. Government and its private partners,” he told FoxNews.com.

“This is a story that has been little told until now due to the secrecy of these programs,” he said.

The document walks through pioneering work by MIT scientist Vannevar Bush to automate cryptanalysis as early as 1936, thanks to “optical scanning, high-speed data tapes, electronic computing, and microfilm in a series of increasingly complex cryptanalytic machines.”

His colleagues thought his recommendations were speculative and "liable to be very costly failures,” the document notes. Besides, a commercial company was already hard at work in the field: IBM. But after a decade of work, Bush developed a system called N/A that sounds remarkably like one of today’s spying system.

When it was first revealed that the NSA was obtaining phone data from Verizon, the agency was said to be reading metadata: not the contents of phone calls but transactional information, such as duration of calls, originating number, routing information, and so on.

A similar system was created by Naval Research Lab engineers in an effort to listen in on enemy communications during World War II.

"By 1940, [Navy cryptanalysis branch] OP-20-G's intercept crews were logging thousands of messages a month from the Pacific and the Atlantic, and the method was considered essential,” the report reads. The 70-year-old spy technique relied on metadata in which “the concern was not with the content of messages but with the easily identified callsigns of senders and receivers, the timing and numbers of messages in a network, and the shifts in patterns of transmissions.”

As the country fought the Cold War during the 50s, the demands of intelligence gathering again led the agency to push forward computer design, not always successfully. At least one project, called NOMAD, was an embarrassing failure, the report notes.

But there were successes as well, such as Pluto, a $333,000 electronic machine built by Sylvania. “Pluto used 26-foot by 20-foot frames crammed with vacuum tubes … Pluto ran through 1,000,000 settings a minute and was so precious that only a handful of the most trusted codebreakers were informed of its existence.”

And at one point, Rapid Arithmetic Machine (RAMs, or special purpose computers) built by the NSA were arguably the most powerful computers in the world.

“By the early 1960s, NSA's ‘basement’ became one of the world's great computer data processing centers,” the report says.

Apple's next Macs will be made in the USA

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 08:00:28 -0500

In 2013, Apple will start making computers in America, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced Thursday -- after a hiatus of almost twenty years.

“We’ve been working for years on doing more and more in the U.S. Next year, we’re going to do one of our existing Mac lines in the United States,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told NBC’s Brian Williams. He cited several components of the company’s products that are already manufactured in America, notably the processors and screens in the iPhones.

“This iPhone … the engine in here is made in America. And not only are the engines in here made in America, engines are made in America and exported,” Cook said. By engine, Cook was referring to the “A5” processors that power the phone, which are manufactured by Samsung in an Austin, Texas, facility.

“The glass on this phone is made in Kentucky,” he added, a reference to the Corning Gorilla Glass built in a facility in Kentucky.

“Mr. Cook is correct: Corning does produce Gorilla Glass for Apple from our Harrodsburg, Ky., manufacturing plant,” Dan Collins, vice president of communication for Corning, told FoxNews.com in May.

But Apple computers themselves haven’t been made or even assembled in the U.S.A. for nearly two decades, since the company left its Elk Grove and Fremont, Calif., facilities and switched fully to Chinese manufacturing in 1994, along with the rest of the computer industry.

Apple is clearly already well on the way: Some of the latest iMacs from the company carry a sticker labeled “Assembled in America.”

A quick tour of the Apple store in New York’s Grand Central Station Wednesday revealed one new iMac with just such a sticker, brought to the location a week ago, a store employee told FoxNews.com, and likely one of the first produced iMacs. A sticker on a second, identical iMac says “Assembled in China,” however.

Sources within the FTC told FoxNews.com they had heard that Apple was “in the process of getting approval to set up a plant in California in connection with these products,” but could not confirm the information.

Members of the Elk Grove Chamber of Commerce did not return FoxNews.com phone calls.

Cook did not provide any additional details about where the manufacturing facility would be located, how many jobs it would create. But in an interview with Businessweek, Cook said the company would invest more than $100 million in the new project.

"We wanted to do something more substantial. So we’ll literally invest over $100 million. This doesn’t mean that Apple will do it ourselves, but we’ll be working with people, and we’ll be investing our money."

Not all of the company's plans for America will be in California, however. Eve Richter, economic development and emerging technologies coordinator for the Austin, Texas, Chamber of Commerce, told FoxNews.com the company is planning to expand a facility in that city, known for its high tech and manufacturing industries.

“Apple is building an office, an ‘Americas Operations Center,’” Richter told FoxNews.com. While that plant will create more than 3,600 jobs, she said, it is not a manufacturing facility.

“This project that I’ve talked about, where we’ll do a Mac in the United States next year, this is a really good 'nother step for us,” Cook told Williams. When asked whether manufacturing in the U.S. will add to the cost of products, Cook deferred the question, instead arguing that the real issue was about the labor pool.

It’s not so much about the price as it is about the skills, etc. Over time, there are skills associated with manufacturing that have left the U.S.,” Cook said.

“It’s not a matter of bringing it back, it’s a matter of starting it here,” Cook said.

Magazine editors helped John McAfee flee Belize

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 12:30:34 -0500

Former tech pioneer John McAfee says he has fled Belize, where he is wanted by police in connection with a murder -- and two magazine editors have helped him run.

Weekend news reports suggested the elusive McAfee was captured at the border between the small Central American country and Mexico. A Monday morning blog post by the missing tech mogul tells an even more unbelievable tale: Aided by a battery of true-believers, McAfee enlisted a body-double to fool border police while he fled the country.

“I am currently safe and in the company of two intrepid journalist from Vice Magazine, and, of course, Sam. We are not in Belize, but not quite out of the woods yet,” reads the latest from McAfee’s website, www.whoismcafee.com.

Rocco Castoro, the editor in chief of Vice Magazine, wrote on Twitter on Dec. 1 that he was heading to Belize “to get into some bad business.” He claimed to be accompanied by photographer Robert King.

Reached by email Monday morning, Castoro denied any connection to McAfee.

"No idea what you're talking about. I'm in Alaska fishing," Castoro wrote. "I'd appreciate if you respect my hard-earned time off." But a Vice spokesman told FoxNews.com that magazine staff was indeed with McAfee.

"A Vice reporter and a videographer have been traveling with John for the past three days documenting his entire journey," Alex Detrick said.

Aiding and abetting a criminal is a law in the U.S. and in Belize, but McAfee has not been charged with any crime, police department spokesman Raphael Martinez told FoxNews.com. Consequently, anyone involved in helping him is unlikely to have broken any laws at present.

“[McAfee is] not a suspect as such … he’s not a criminal, he’s just wanted for questioning,” Martinez said. “We have not really charged him with anything.”

Martinez said that his department is still hoping to discuss the murder of American expatriate Gregory Faull, a builder from Florida who was shot last month at his home in San Pedro Town on the island of Ambergris Caye.

The 52-year-old Faull was found by the housekeeper on the morning of Sunday, Nov. 11, lying face up in a pool of blood with an apparent gunshot wound on the upper rear part of his head. Police are still hoping to discuss the murder with McAfee.

“Everybody now should know that he should be coming in for questioning. He’s still out there somewhere,” Martinez told FoxNews.com.

McAfee has been hiding in plain sight for weeks, conducting numerous interviews by phone and in person, building a blog and filling it with thousands of words, and in general acting anything like a man wanted by the police.

Jeff Wise, a freelance reporter who broke the story of McAfee’s situation for Gizmodo, claims McAfee is a compulsive liar deeply connected to the drug world. McAfee replies that Wise has a bone to pick with him.

Yet McAfee’s story becomes increasingly hard to believe -- especially his reported escape from the country.

“My ‘double,’ carrying on a North Korean passport under my name, was in fact detained in Mexico for pre-planned misbehavior, but due to indifference on the part of authorities was evicted from the jail and was unable to serve his intended purpose in our exit plan. He is now safely out of Mexico,” McAfee wrote Monday.

An earlier post indicates that, in addition to the two Vice journalists, numerous female companions and the double detained in Mexico, McAfee now has an “official spokesman” (or two). In a Monday morning missive, Brian Fitzgerald introduced himself as the mouth of McAfee.

Fitzgerald did not respond to FoxNews.com requests for confirmation of the zany story, but his introductory post on the site indicated he had no idea where McAfee is.

“We are very concerned for McAfee's safety and wellbeing. All we can do is hope that we receive word from Mr. McAfee himself or a reliable source to confirm that he is okay,” he wrote.

It was unclear whether Fitzgerald had read the latest from McAfee on the same site.

In his latest post, McAfee points to a lengthy New York Times essay on the mischief he has made, and again insisted on his innocence.

“How long can the press maintain the ‘drug-crazed madman’ perspective? I think it will end with Vice Magazine’s story. They have seen, and heard everything.”

James Bond film 'Skyfall' inspired by Stuxnet virus

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 10:34:17 -0500

No smartphones. No exploding pens. No ejector seats. No rocket-powered submarines.

“It’s a brave new world,” gadget-maker Q tells James Bond in the new film “Skyfall.” The new film, released on the 50th anniversary of the storied franchise, presents a gadget-free Bond fighting with both brains and brawn against a high-tech villain with computer prowess Bill Gates would be envious of. What inspired such a villain?

"Stuxnet," producer Michael G. Wilson told FoxNews.com. The Stuxnet virus, described as the atom bomb of cyberwarfare, was released in 2010 to cripple Iran’s burgeoning nuclear ambitions. It is widely believed to be a joint project of Israel and the United States -- and rather than pocket video cameras and secret guns, this is the world today’s spies live in.

“There is a cyberwar that has been going on for some time, and we thought we’d bring that into the fore and let people see how it could be going on,” Wilson said.

The film aims to explain the relevance of MI6 and the double-O unit in today’s techno-terrorism environment. In “Skyfall,” Ex-patriot and rogue MI6 agent Silva (played by a creepy Javier Bardem) hacks the government’s computers and threatens to publicly release the cover identities of embedded agents around the world.

“Rig an election in Uganda? Just point and click. Bring down a multinational by manipulating stock prices? Done,” Bardem says in the film.

M sends 007 to take out the agent she trained, an unstable inverted reflection of Bond, while the Prime Minister’s appointed consultant Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes) is threatening her command, citing the lack of necessity for trained killers living in the shadows while terror is primarily done via point and click. (Read the full review.)

It’s a far more realistic Bond film than, say, “Moonraker.”

“I think people probably think, ‘Oh it’s Bond, it’s fantasy,” Wilson told FoxNews.com. “If anything, we were very constrained with the possibilities. When you look at what they have managed to do, it’s amazing.”

Ironically, in this high-tech world, Bond is armed not with the traditional arsenal of gadgets and gizmos. Instead Q -- played by Ben Whishaw, a 32-going-on-18 British actor-- hands him a slim briefcase filled with the most basic of spy tools.

“A gun and a radio. Hardly Christmas!” joked Barbara Broccoli, the other half of the production duo responsible for the Bond brand.

“The reality is, yes we all use technology and technology is very helpful, but ultimately it does come down to human beings out in the field doing things that require extraordinary guts and commitment,” Broccoli told FoxNews.com.

The film does make a brief nod to Bond’s gadget-filled past -- at one point, 007 threatens Judi Dench’s M with the ejector seat. But the tech know-how comes down mainly to Q, portrayed by Whishaw not as a scowling official but as the all-knowing egghead from around the corner.

Skyfall doesn’t defy expectations, of course. The film delivers the amazing stunts, actions scenes, exotic locations and beautiful bombshells the viewer expects. But it’s truly a brave new world for Bond -- one far more like the real world we live in.

Let’s hope there’s a real Bond offscreen battling for us.

China Expanding Censorship to Text Messages

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:04:36 -0500

China's already repressive regime is moving to increase censorship, ordering carriers in the world's largest cell phone market to filter the billions of messages sent in the country every day.

According to the state news agency Xinhua, if the government identifies one of 13 different types of vulgar content -- including sexual content, inappropriate pictures and provocative headlines -- cell phone companies like China Mobile and China Unicorn will disable a user's text-messaging services.

Preventing the spread of pornography is a common thread in China's censorship, explains Abbe E. Foreman, a professor with the computer and information science department at Temple University's College of Science and Tech.

"They've been doing this type of censorship for some time," she said, adding that "5,000 people in China were arrested on pornography charges last year. I'm guessing they found them all through some sort of censorship program."

But many believe the government is looking for more than pornography. Kan Kaili, a professor of telecommunications at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunication, told The New York Times that the new measures appeared broader, more intrusive and more punitive than previous limitations.

"They are doing wide-ranging checks, checking anything and everything, even if it is between a husband and wife," he told the newspaper. "I don't think people will be very happy about this."

It's unclear whether the lockdown on text messages is a new regulation, or merely the expansion of a current system that automatically monitors messages and suspends a user's account if it detects illegal content. The Wall Street Journal tried to clear up the confusion, noting that Xinhua's latest report said text messaging services would be suspended only for users who've had multiple complaints filed against them for sending pornographic mass-text messages.

China certainly has the technical ability to carry out such filtering, even on the scale of billions of text message per day, says Sal Stolfo, professor of computer science at Columbia University. With access to the network provider's infrastructure, he says, it's relatively easy to inspect messages as they flow by.

"They're undoubtedly doing keyword searches," Stolfo said, "and somebody obviously has to choose which keywords those are. But it's technically very easy to do, and scalable to billions of messages a day."

Foreman said she worries that the nature of this type of censorship makes the program easily and quickly transformable. While the government may be searching for pornographic content today, keywords are readily changed to allow the government to ferret out dissent tomorrow.

"Once you open that door, and you're looking at e-mails and text message, what's to stop someone from changing the keyword from 'sex' to 'bomb' or 'government'?" she asked. "They can use any keyword they want."

The crackdown on text messaging is just the latest attack on privacy in China, and whether the government actually implements the filters is almost irrelevant. "Just knowing it's possible reminds people who's in control, and it will have a chilling effect. People will probably avoid certain language just knowing about this," says Stolfo. "It's an intrusion of government forces into the private lives of citizens, and it's shameful."

China may be limiting texting in light of its widening spat with Google, which recently announced that it would refuse to comply with Chinese demands for censorship. Google says it is willing to leave the Chinese market entirely rather than comply.

"The challenge that the government has is to keep control. Google, an American company, is publicly challenging them. Do they have much choice? They can whimper and walk away or they can fight back," explains Stolfo.

Following Google's announcement of plans to withdraw, other companies were quick to take positions with regard to China. Microsoft notably announced that its search engine Bing, would remain in the country and would continue to comply with censorship demands.

"Microsoft will continue to engage in the Chinese market, offering Bing and other Microsoft software and services to Chinese customers," a Microsoft spokesman told FoxNews.com.

Stolfo said that was horrifying news.

"Google's strategy is don't be evil, and Microsoft came out and said, we're still evil. "

Corning reveals astounding roll-up Willow glass for flexible displays

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 08:15:25 -0400

Could your next smartphone roll up like a tube?

Glass as thin and as flexible as a sheet of paper that can be printed on rolls just like a newspaper will be available to phone makers as soon as this month, said Dipak Chowdhury, head of Corning’s ultra-flexible thin-glass project Willow.

“It’s seriously built like paper,” Chowdhury told FoxNews.com, “and behaves just like that.”

Corning unveiled the new Willow Glass Mon., June 5; Chowdhury will deliver a presentation on the technology at the Society for Information Display’s Display Week 2012 conference in Boston.

Ordinary displays in notebooks or smartphones are made of glass sandwiches, usually three sheets of the stuff measuring a bare 0.7 or 0.5 millimeters in thickness. At 0.1 millimeters thin, Corning’s brand new Willow glass is as thin as the finest human hair -- and will makes those smartphone sandwiches as much as 7 times thinner.

Glass isn’t inherently a rigid substance, Chowdhury explained. When it gets superthin, it becomes flexible just like any substance.

“If you take glass as thick as a business card, it’s not flexible. Think about the same business card and make it seven times thinner -- it works like paper,” he said. Likewise, a phone book is solid, but the individually pages in it are easily rolled.

“Can you roll a ream of paper? And those pages aren’t even attached to each other,” explained Alfred Poor, founder of the HDTV Almanac and a long-time monitor industry insider.

“The Holy Grail has been to get to roll to roll manufacturing for displays,” he told FoxNews.com.

Willow Glass won’t immediately lead to roll-up iPhones, Poor was quick to note. The entire display industry is built for inflexible sheets of glass, made in massive, astronomically expensive plants.

“It costs billions of dollars to build an LCD plant these days,” Poor said.

But several of the layers in those smartphone sandwiches could immediately be replaced with Willow Glass, meaning your next iPhone or Galaxy or Nexus or whatever could be lighter, thinner, and potentially cheaper.

Why are there several layers? Only the top surface is protective. The interior layers are coated with electronics or other elements to make the display work.

Think of a potato chip bag, Poor explained. Such bags are made of plastic and printed with both a protective metal foil layer and a colorful logo on a roll to roll process. Likewise, several layers in a display are printed on.

“But instead of printing logos, they print a backplane, made of silicon,” Poor said.

Indeed, Chowdhury said that the company has been working with suppliers and research labs to develop new processes for printing, cutting and handling the immense wrapping-paper-like rolls of glass.

Display giant Dai Nippon Printing Co (DNP) will demonstrate touch sensors and color filters -- two essential components for modern smartphones -- printed onto Willow Glass, Chowdhury said.

“It was a technical hurdle, but we conquered this hurdle,” he told FoxNews.com.

DNP currently supports roll to roll printing on ultra thin plastic, similar to those potato chip bags. Alexia Allina with Frito-Lay told FoxNews.com the average bag is about 0.06 millimeters thin. But plastic is far from ideal for smartphones, Poor said.

“Plastic substrates are flexible but lack a lot of the qualities you need: They tend not to be smooth enough, for one thing. One of the advantages of glass is it can be microscopically smooth,” he told FoxNews.com.

Any roughness can cause defects in the display, he said. Plastic is also permeable, notably to water -- a huge problem for some types of display.

Earlier press releases from Corning suggested the company would manufacture the glass at its main Harrodsburg, Ky., plant.

“The potential is huge, enormous,” Poor said.

What Hidden Secrets Could Weiner's Hard Drive Hold?

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 13:00:26 -0400

Diamonds are forever -- and so it seems is computer data.

Tweets, digital images, chat messages and more that New York Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner's sent to college cuties and porn stars alike may prove to be his downfall. Computer forensic experts told FoxNews.com that an exhaustive hunt through his or any hard drive turns up tons of information -- even files a user has deleted or erased.

For these geeks, the ones and zeroes in a computer are like the clues at a crime scene. And there are a lot of ones and zeroes.

"It's like a murderer tracking blood around the room -- they're trying to cover things up but instead creating even more footprints," Douglas Brush, chief forensic examiner with the Digital Forensic Group, told FoxNews.com.

The basic methodology is called "file carving." Using a forensic disk image -- an exact replica of every byte of data on a computer's hard drive -- a forensic analyst can study the raw bits on the hard drive to piece together artifacts and recreate files, "carving them out" of the raw data.

If there are a lot of items in the raw, "unallocated" space, it shows that someone was possibly trying to hide things -- a bad idea, Brush explained.

"A lot of users will attempt to hide their actions. It only complicates things," he told FoxNews.com. "It can make it even worse for them." Experts can detect those guilty efforts to hide data and point to it as circumstantial evidence.

There's even a term for it.

"Spoliation," said Chris Miles, owner of computer forensics investigation company Miles Technologies, "describes the intentional destroying or spoiling of evidence."

Erasing all those zeroes and ones takes a lot of work, Brush explained. Instead the computer removes the marker or the "index entry" that tells where a file is, but not the entire file itself. And forensics firms know when a file was erased.

Deleting data doesn't hide it from these bloodhounds, in other words.

"They might cover up their tracks, but they don't do as good a job covering up the covering up of their tracks," Miles said.

In addition, there are bits of data in digital images that can be used to create a complete picture of a picture.

"Pictures have 'EXIF' data that can give info about the camera that was used to take a shot. And some have geolocating info that can say where a picture was taken," Brush said.

Using these file remnants, as well as emails, documents, pictures, and videos, gives forensic experts a complete view of a person's activities. And professional grade software tools such as EnCase by Guidance Software and Forensic Toolkit (FTK) by Access Dataa can comb through it all.

"You have some very distinct dates and times of what a particular gentleman was doing," Brush told FoxNews.com. "We can say on this date and this time precisely what a person was doing."

Miles agreed.

"We can say, for example, he emailed his mom at 11:03 and responded to some other email at 11:04 -- and then at 11:05 he surfed porn," Miles said, showing just how precisely his firm can break down a timeline from digital records.

Cell phones act like little computers, both experts agreed, and can be tracked and analyzed in precisely the same fashion.

"You really are piecing together a puzzle," Miles said.

HDTV Code Crack Is Real, Intel Confirms

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 17:45:56 -0400

Much to the chagrin of the entertainment industry, the encryption that protects most high-definition video content has officially been cracked, an Intel spokesman told FoxNews.com. But don't expect illegal hardware to flood the market anytime soon, he said.

Worries swirled about the future of high-definition devices such as TVs and Blu-ray players, following rumors Tuesday that the copy protection technology keeping all that content safe may have been cracked.

Intel confirmed Thursday to FoxNews.com that the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) -- the digital rights management software that governs every device that plays high-def content -- had in fact been compromised.

"It does appear to be a master key," said Tom Waldrop, a spokesman for Intel, which developed and oversees the HDCP technology.

"What we have confirmed through testing is that you can derive keys for devices from this published material that do work with the keys produced by our security technology," he told FoxNews.com. In other words, "this circumvention does appear to work," Waldrop said.

Found in Blu-ray players, set-top boxes, and many high-definition displays, HDCP prevents the copying of audio and video content as it travels across the cables that connect HD devices. It's required to send a video across the thin, flat HDMI cables that link most new flat-panel TVs to gaming systems, Blu-ray players, or whatever.

The hack unlocks protected content by providing a "master key," which could be used to strip that encryption from, say, the link between your cable box and your DVR. Without those restrictions, a nefarious user could make unlimited copies -- rendering the copy-protection software useless.

Or build new devices that bypass the license fees Intel charges for the content -- and ignore the content restrictions that HDCP sets in place. However, Intel doesn't think piracy will suddenly increase, Waldrop told FoxNews.com.

"For someone to use this information to unlock anything, they would have to implement it in silicon -- make a computer chip," he told FoxNews.com. And after making a chip, someone would have to build it into a device, either on an individual basis or on a production line. And Intel just doesn't see that happening.

"It would be a lot of work and a lot of expense to do that," Waldrop said. Nevertheless, the risk exists that pirates in countries less respectful of copyright law could take on that expense, releasing Blu-ray players and televisions that bypass the licensing fees and knock a chunk off retail costs.

"We will use the appropriate remedies to address the issue, where we choose to," Waldrop said.

Despite the release of the crack, he remains confident that the encryption technology is still sound, and remains the best way to keep content protected.

"HDCP remains an effective component for protecting digital entertainment. It relies on these licensing agreements to ensure that implementations are done appropriately, and there are legal enforcement methods available for cases where it is done inappropriately."

Google Partially Blocked in China Again

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 13:10:14 -0400

Despite efforts to prevent another suspension of service, Google has been "partially blocked" in China as of Wednesday, the Internet giant said.

Wednesday was the deadline for Chinese authorities to approve the renewal of Google's business license. A page maintained by Google on the status of various services in the country listed its web search service for the day as "partially blocked."

The service had previously been listed as "fully or mostly accessible."

In a post to the company's blog on Monday, Google's chief legal officer David Drummond had spelled out the challenges the company faces as it struggles to balance the demands of Chinese officials with its stated desire to end its censorship in the country.

"We currently automatically redirect everyone using Google.cn to Google.com.hk, our Hong Kong search engine. This redirect, which offers unfiltered search in simplified Chinese, has been working well for our users and for Google. However, it’s clear from conversations we have had with Chinese government officials that they find the redirect unacceptable," he wrote.

Drummond warned that irritation in Beijing over the redirect might prevent the renewal of Google's Internet Content Provider (ICP) license, a yearly process that allows the company to do business in China. Without the license, Google.cn would go dark -- and therefore the company ended the redirect on Tuesday, sending some traffic back to the Google.cn site.

A Google spokesman provided additional details on the outage to FoxNews.com, while simultaneously cautioning against connecting the ICP licensing issue with the service outage at this stage.

"It appears that search queries produced by Google Suggest are being blocked for mainland users in China," the spokesman said. "Normal searches that do not use query suggestions are unaffected. We have updated our China status page with the latest information."

Google's China status page notes that the service is often spotty in the country. Mobile access, news and web search services bounce on and off day by day, according to the service: The current outage may be merely a transient bug in the service.

The news follows months of back and forth between the company and the country. Google made the surprise announcement in January that it intended to lift state-imposed censorship in the country following the discovery of hacking attempts that Google claimed originated in China.

China is the world's largest with nearly 400 million users, and local powerhouse Baidu has long been the leading search company. Edward Yu, chief executive of technology research firm Analysys International, told Reuters that it's possible China could block the URL of the Google.cn landing site.

"It's the worst case scenario, if users can't access Google.cn and there is no reminder page for them to click through to Google Hong Kong, there will be an impact on traffic and in turn advertisers," Yu told the news agency.

At Apple Event, Steve Jobs Unveils New iPhone

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 15:47:07 -0400

As Steve Jobs took the stage in California for the company's annual developer conference, the Apple faithful collectively held their breath -- what would the tech genius show off today?

Many details of Apple's next-generation iPhone were already widely known, but expectations were nonetheless sky-high for the fourth-generation smartphone's official unveiling Tuesday at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).

Jobs did not disappoint, unveiling a new phone operating system called iOS4, video conferencing capability, and a next-gen phone with new hardware tech fans are sure to drool over.

Calling it "beyond a doubt the most precise thing, and one of the most beautiful we've ever made," Jobs brought forth the new iPhone, which he said was 24 percent thinner than the previous 3GS model. The device, which looked like a polished version of the phone Gizmodo introduced the to the world in mid April, includes a front-facing camera and a slew of technology innovations.

The iPhone 4 comes in two colors, white and black, and will cost $199 for a 16GB version, and $299 for a 32GB model.

The new phone has a display technology that Jobs branded "the Retina Display." He described the new display as better than OLED, which many predicted would be the future of gadget display tech. Instead, it is a form of LCD that Apple has optimized with an unusual 326-dpi resolution.

He told the audience, "Your apps look even better, but if you do a little bit of work, then they will look stunning. So we suggest that you do that."

Jobs stumbled briefly connecting a phone to the network in the convention hall for a live side-by-side demo of image quality from that new screen. But the 3.5-inch, 960 x 640 pixel display was clearly quite impressive. Later he attributed the glitch to the prevalence of over 570 Wi-Fi hotspots in the room -- a testimony to the crowd's enthusiasm.

Jobs highlighted several other bits of new hardware -- including an integrated three-axis gyroscope and a 5-megapixel camera with an integrated LED flash -- before moving on to the main attraction: iPhone OS 4.0, or iOS4.

The newest version of the software that powers the iPhone includes iBooks and finally incorporates multitasking, allowing a user to run several apps simultaneously, a limit that had infuriated owners of earlier models. A nearly final version of the software was released to developers at the show; the final version will ship June 21.

And iOS4 comes with "one more thing": video conferencing, through an app called FaceTime. Despite continued networking glitches (which Jobs laughed off as due to the number of Wi-Fi devices in the audience), he demonstrated the new tech by placing a call to Jonathan Ives, the long-time Apple designer responsible for much of the company's iconic hardware.

Video chats are limited to Wi-Fi for the time being, until Apple talks pricing with the network carriers, and the software places calls only to other fourth-gen iPhones ... again, for now.

The software will be available on June 21 to current iPhone owners, a free upgrade for everyone -- even iPod Touch users will finally get free upgrades. (In the past, Touch owners were forced to pay for upgrades that were free to iPhone owners.)

The company also formally unveiled the iAd platform. Jobs explained that “Apple hosts and sells the ads, so all you have to do is tell us where you want them and make the money.”

Jobs began the day by touting the success the company has had with the iPad. The company has sold over 2 million devices so far -- "That's one every 3 seconds," Jobs crowed. Those early adopters have purchased 35 million apps, or 17 per iPad. And with 15,000 apps submitted so far, there has been no shortage to chose from.

"We get about 15 thousand apps submitted every week. They come in up to 30 different languages. And guess what: 95 percent of the apps submitted are approved within 7 days," Jobs told the assembled crowd.

The Moscone Center in California had filled up early in the morning as Apple developers, fans and journalists poured in for the annual event, and Twitter feeds overflowed all day with enthusiasm and energy, notably when Jobs announced that the popular Netflix app would be coming to the iPhone, at some point in the summer.

M4 Vs. AK-47: Is U.S. Army Outgunned in Afghanistan?

Tue, 25 May 2010 15:15:02 -0400

Despite the ages-old rifles in Taliban hands, reports suggest our soldiers may be outgunned in Afghanistan's hills. To counter, the Army plans a slew of upgrades to certain weapons -- and several entirely new guns.

Taliban fighters in Afghanistan are attacking U.S. Army soldiers with AK-47s, while the army relies upon the M4 Assault rifle. The AK-47 uses a larger bullet, which leads to more kickback upon firing. Some reports indicate that the U.S. Army is looking to upgrade the weapons being used in Afghanistan to larger caliber guns.

An AP report published over the weekend in Army Times argued that the M4 rifle's light bullets lack sufficient velocity and killing power in long-range firefights. The report states that the U.S. is considering a switch to weapons that fire a larger round, one largely discarded in the 1960s.

"What's the right caliber?" asks Jim Battaglini, executive vice president with Colt Defense and a retired major gen with the U.S. Marine Corps. "The debate has been ongoing for over 40 years, with pros and cons for all options being considered."

Factbox: The M4 and AK-47 Compared

The 7.62mm round in the AK-47 is heavier and larger than the 5.56mm caliber bullet in the M4, and can therefore fly further on average. But Battaglini dismisses reports that the Army is considering rearming soldiers in Afghanistan. "On the battlefield, there are no reported operational issues with the M4. It's the weapon of choice in Iraq, and still the desired weapon in Afghanistan," he told FoxNews.com.

Colonel Douglas Tamilio, project manager for Soldier Weapons in the Army's Program Executive Officer (PEO) Soldier division, downplayed the report too, as well as the significance of discussions about adopting larger caliber weaponry.

"You look at the fight you're in and decide, do I need to go back and do that?" But Tamilio is unswerving in his loyalty to the M4, calling it simply better than the Ak-47.

"To me there is no comparison. The M4 is inherently much more accurate than the AK-47," he told FoxNews.com. Tamilio explained that there are far more factors at play in determining the lethality of a weapon than mere caliber.

"We look at the ability of our soldier to incapacitate a target based on the weapon he's carrying, the recoil, the round the weapon is chambered for, what situation the soldier is in, how many rounds can he carry, his training, does he have optics on him ... there are so many variables that determine lethality."

"They're different system, difficult to compare," agreed Daniel Wasserbly, land forces reporter for Jane's Defence Weekly. He points out other differences, such as the shorter barrel in the M4, which makes it somewhat more geared to urban combat and the close-in battles of Iraq than the more open warfare in Afghanistan.

"But all the M4s have fairly advanced optics, which really add to their capabilities," he told FoxNews.com.

Col. Tamilio, who's PEO group is responsible for developing, fielding and sustaining new weapons, explained that the M4 has evolved substantially over the years, and that new upgrades and even new guns planned for this summer should dramatically enhance our soldiers' capabilities.

For one thing, U.S. special forces will be given a new supergun this summer, the XM25 grenade-launcher, which is capable of showering the Taliban with grenades from more than 700 meters away.

To address the issue of snipers, there's the M14EBR, a 7.62 caliber rifle designed to handle the recoil from big bullets better. That gun will be accurate to 800 meters.

"It's not the AK-47s putting a significant threat on our soldiers, it's the sniper rifles," Tamilio said, citing the Soviet era guns capable of killing from 600 to 700 meters away. "We need the ability to answer back to those."

His division took old M14s and made them like new, added new stocks, rails, bipods, and powerful optics to create a new gun.

"It's not a sniper weapon, but it's pretty damn close to it."

PEO also plans enhancements to the M4, adding to the 62 improvements the U.S. Army has made to the M4 since it was released. The Army has over 500,000 M4s in its arsenal.

Tamilio's group has improved the ammunition for the guns, upgrading the standard 855 round to the 8551a, "which strips away the dependency on yaw and made it more consistent." The new rounds should be in guns in Afghanistan this summer, along with barrels 5 oz heavier, for increased sustained fire.

He also cites plans for a new bolt and an improved adapter, called a Picatinny rail, which allows mounting of flashlights, lasers, and so on. Why upgrade a weapon that's "outgunned"? Tamilio flat-out disagrees with the characterization.

"The M4 is getting a bad rep, and it's an unfortunate thing. It's the best weapon in the world today. "

New Cybersecurity Act Eliminates Internet Kill Switch

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 08:55:47 -0400

In a rewritten version of the cybersecurity bill, President Obama no longer has a kill switch for the Internet.

When the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 was unveiled last August, a controversial passage would have allowed the president to take emergency control of the entire Internet in the event of a serious threat, giving him effectively a "kill switch" -- the power to shut down all online traffic by unilaterally seizing private networks.

During a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill Wednesday, co-sponsor Senator Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V. pitched a revised version of his legislation that strips the president of the power to turn off the Web.

The new draft, now called the Cybersecurity Act of 2010, says that after the president chooses to "declare a cybersecurity emergency," he can activate a "response and restoration plan" involving networks owned and operated by the private sector.

Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which represents the telecommunications industry, applauded the removal of the Internet off switch.

"We had been very clear in our opposition to that provision," he told FoxNews.com. "In addition to being bad policy, it was a poison pill for the bill," he said.

Collaboration between the public and private sectors will occur via a newly formed upper-level body mandated in the bill, and possibly existing organizations as well.

"Private companies and the government must work together to protect our nation, our networks and our way of life from the growing cyber threat," said Rockefeller in a statement. "The networks that American families and businesses rely on for basic day-to-day activities are being hacked and attacked every day," he added.

Co-sponsor Sen. Olympia Snow, D-Maine, agreed, calling it "imperative that the public and private sectors marshal our collective forces in a collaborative and complementary manner to confront this urgent threat."

Clinton believes that this and other changes represent a major step forward for the Cybersecurity Act, saying "the bill has transformed itself fairly significantly." He cited a removed provision mandating cybersecurity for the public sector, which has been eliminated, as well as a requirement that the government post public notices about weak spots in the infrastructure -- essentially advertising to hackers where to strike.

But he still thinks the bill is too focused on audits and compliance, pointing out that there's a real difference between regulatory compliance and actual security. "Many organizations now spend more of their security budgets on compliance than actual security -- they're fearing the auditor more than the hacker!"

Clinton thinks the bill will probably pass the Commerce Committee next Wednesday, but it still faces a number of other departments, such as Homeland Security, Commerce, Banking, and so on. But he's pleased with the latest changes.

"We're definitely moving forwards, and that's a good thing."