Everything Tech: December 2013

Tuesday, 31 December 2013

That's it Folks, Happy New Year! Let's have a Look at The Top Tech Stories of 2013

That is it for this year everyone! Everything Tech wishes it's readers a prosperous 2014. It has been a busy 2013 though, let's sneak a peek back at some of the top tech stories of 2013, including the NSA's snooping, cybersecurity, Bitcoin.

For the first half of 2013, the planet was hooked on the story of the former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, and the documents he leaked to the Guardian and the Washington Post. The classified documents contained confidential information regarding government programs that collect massive amounts of data on Americans and foreigners.
The release of the documents also reignited the debate of privacy vs. security, with lots of the top technology companies now pushing to supply more details publicly on government requests for data.

A sequence of high-profile attacks by hackers in 2013 kept cybersecurity in the news headlines. In April, the Twitter account for the Associated Press was hacked with a fake tweet stating “Two Explosions in the White House” It sent the stock market into a tizzy for about 5 minutes.

More recently Target announced that 40 million bank card numbers and pins compromised during the Christmas shopping season.

The internet virtual currency called Bitcoin has just finished its best year to date. It had been started in 2009 but its value didn't break the $1,000 mark until this year. It's settled to around $800 today. Bitcoin is a secure currency with no central banking system, just like the United States Federal Reserve Bank. It's popular on black-market sites for drugs.
Another big tech failure of 2013 is the deployment of the U.S. Healthcare gov website. Since October the website welcomed users with error messages or the inability to open. Because of the launch, the White House and supporters have already been working in high gear to enhance the site's functionality and security; it has hit a milestone of 1 million signups.

Wearable technology has made tremendous strides in 2010 with Google Glass, Samsung Gear and a wide array of fitness accessories. However, not one of them has yet to get that magic key and bring wearable technology into widespread acceptance.

Apple, Amazon and Netflix have continued to challenge the traditional television market in 2013 with original series and faster streaming. The streaming television market is growing but this content providers will continue the fight in order to maintain their dominance.
Among the more controversial uses of technology is available in the field of 3-D printing advances. With the capability to build a 3D Printed Gun coming nearer to reality is likely to make this an appealing story to follow in 2014.

What technology are you most excited for in 2014? Tell us in the comments below!

Hear the sound of the Earth moving from the deepest hole on the planet

Dec 31st 2013, 17:30, by Jacob Kastrenakes

For billions of years, the Earth has silently traveled through space, spinning around the sun without making a sound. Even here on the planet, there's been little to hear. But now with the right recording equipment and processing, we can get a sense of what it sounds like for the planet to spin and spin while looping around the sun. Artist Lotte Geeven has ventured into what she says is the deepest open hole in the world — a location on the border of the Czech Republic that drops down over 5.5 miles, according to Designboom — and recorded what she calls "The Sound of the Earth."

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Sony may release a Windows Phone in 2014, according to The Information

Dec 31st 2013, 17:44, by Chris Welch

Sony is considering launching a Windows Phone sometime next year, according to a new report from The Information. If true, such a move would break Sony's current loyalty to Android and give Nokia some fresh competition in the Windows Phone segment. Both sides have reportedly held numerous discussions, with Sony going so far as to draw up designs for a prototype device. Any future product could be branded under Sony's Vaio line, according to The Information.
Microsoft's takeover of Nokia's devices unit seemingly hasn't given Sony any second thoughts; talks have continued even after the acquisition was first announced. But the report notes that a deal hasn't yet been finalized and plans could come undone if Microsoft and Sony disagree...
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Moto G for Verizon coming to Best Buy for $99.99 off-contract

Dec 31st 2013, 17:52, by Nathan Ingraham

Last night, a leak showed that Verizon was getting ready to sell the Moto G off-contract for $100, even less than the already-low $179 price that Motorola's currently asking for the GSM version. Now, we're getting more details on this new Moto G varient — according to The Los Angeles Times, Best Buy will sell a no-contract Moto G for Verizon very soon at the rumored $99.99 price point. "The phone is currently landing in stores and is available for sale as soon as it arrives," Best Buy spokesman Jonathan Sandler told The LA Times. Verizon didn't have any comment, so it's not clear yet if this will be a Best Buy exclusive or if cheaper Moto G will end up in the carrier's stores eventually. Either way, this is the cheapest we've seen the...
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The Most Monstrous Machines of the Year

Dec 31st 2013, 16:31, by Andrew Tarantola

The future is all around us. From medical miracles that could cure our most deadly diseases to transportation revolutions that will change how we travel around the planet, these are the ten most impressive cutting-edge machines we've covered this year.
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The Ten Most Anticipated New Cars Of 2014

Dec 31st 2013, 16:00, by Máté Petrány on Jalopnik, shared by Eric Limer to Gizmodo

2013 was a great year for car nuts, and we already know what's going to keep you excited in 2014. Here are the ten we're all most anxiously awaiting. Happy new year!
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I Wouldn't Pay for 2013's Most Pirated Movie Either

Dec 31st 2013, 17:30, by Michael Hession

On the heels of Torrentfreak's most-pirated TV shows of 2013 is their list of most-pirated movies. Not surprisingly, the list doesn't exactly represent the refined cultural taste you might hope.
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Radioactive Mystery Steam Over Fukushima Could Mean Another Meltdown

Dec 31st 2013, 18:00, by Ashley Feinberg

The newest update in the ~~comedy of errors~~ highly disconcerting series of devastating failures that is the Fukushima cleanup effort is troubling to say the least. Tepco has confirmed that "unexplained plumes of radioactive steam" have been rising from the mangled remains of Reactor Building 3. In other words, Fukushima could be in the middle of another meltdown.
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Inside the Design of the New Times Square New Year's Eve Ball

Dec 31st 2013, 17:00, by Adam Clark Estes

The bright ball that hovers over Times Square on New Year's Eve is special this year. Sure, it's iconic and colorful and mesmerizing as it always is. This year, however, the ball will captivate us all with a brand new crystal coating. And, boy, is it pretty.
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Pirate Bay Uploads Up by 50 Percent in 2013 Despite Raids and Blockades

Dec 31st 2013, 16:40, by Mario Aguilar

Authorities and copyright holders all over the world tried their damnedest to kill the Pirate Bay, but as data reported by TorrentFreak proves, the file sharing hub is a rogue ship that won't sink.
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Snapdragon 805's desktop-class mobile graphics chops in action

Dec 31st 2013, 18:00, by Sarah Silbert

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800 chip is still pretty dang new, but the company's already churned out a follow-up: the Snapdragon 805, a so-called Ultra HD processor. Like the 800, this version is a Krait-based, quad-core chip, and its biggest selling point ...

Insert Coin: 2013's top 10 crowdfunding projects

Dec 31st 2013, 17:02, by Mat Smith

An underwater drone that you can control with your tablet or smartphone from up to 300 feet away. Reckon that's worth a pledge of around $200? Plenty of you did, because Ziphius is now a very real thing, thanks to its passionate everyman backers. ...

The Denver Post launches marijuana culture site The Cannabist

Dec 31st 2013, 16:48, by Kwame Opam

Only days before Denver's recreational weed shops open for the first time, The Denver Post this week launched its new marijuana-centric vertical, The Cannabist. Led by the Post's marijuana editor Ricardo Baca, the site will include product and strain reviews, recipes and food, politics, and news of interest for smokers in the Denver area. It even has a map of dispensaries in the city.
Baca's appointment last month signaled the Post taking a vested interest in weed culture as marijuana inches toward broad legalization. The site now joins publications like the long-running High Times in its devotion to cannabis, but has the backing of mainstream press to support it.

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Why don’t economists like Bitcoin?

Dec 31st 2013, 15:54, by Adrianne Jeffries

Nobel prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote a blog post this weekend with a tantalizing title, "Bitcoin Is Evil," that has provoked the expected backlash from proponents of the virtual currency.
The headline over-promises, unfortunately — while you could make an argument that Bitcoin nefariously wastes computer power, enables crime, and encourages anarchy, that’s not what Krugman’s saying. (Science fiction writer Charlie Stross’ "Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire" is more satisfying.) Instead, Krugman attacks Bitcoin’s economic fundamentals for the zillionth time.
Almost any time you see someone from a university praising Bitcoin, that person is from the computer science department. And if...
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Makers Of Oscar-Shortlisted Documentary “The Act Of Killing” Turn To BitTorrent For Promotion

Dec 31st 2013, 16:00, by Anthony Ha

BitTorrent has been pitching itself as a legitimate way for content creators to promote their works, and now the company is announcing what may be its most noteworthy partnership yet — Drafthouse Films and the co-directors of the documentary The Act Of Killing are using a BitTorrent Bundle to promote the iTunes release of the director’s cut.
Noteworthiness is relative, and there’s a decent chance that you haven’t seen or even heard of The Act of Killing. But even though its box office numbers aren’t all that impressive, its reviews are. And the film, in which Indonesian death squad leaders are asked to reenact their killings, made it onto the Academy Award short list for documentaries. (The short list is the last step before the actual nominees are announced in January.)
As for the BitTorrent Bundles, they’re basically packages of free content, usually meant to promote something that people will actually pay for, like a movie or an album or a book. (The content can also be “gated”, requiring users to provide something — say, an email address — before they get access.) Other movies that have been promoted include a project that Madonna co-directed, calledsecretprojectrevolution.
According to BitTorrent, the Act of Killing bundle will include:

VICE Presents: Werner Herzog and Errol Morris on The Act of Killing [Video]
Democracy Now! Joshua Oppenheimer Interview [Video]
Essay: Errol Morris on The Act of Killing [PDF]
Essay: Indonesia on the impact of The Act of Killing, TEMPO Magazine [PDF]
The Act of Killing Stills [Photographs]
The Act of Killing Trailer [Video]

“The Act of Killing has an important message,” said Drafthouse Films Creative Director Evan Husney in an email. “Our goal is to reach as many people as possible — to preserve this film as a documentary, and as a testament to what happened in Indonesia. BitTorrent Bundle allows us to address a global audience of more than 170 million: to ensure that awareness of the film’s message reaches beyond the Internet’s censors and firewalls.”
Christian Averill, BitTorrent’s director of communications, confirmed that this is the first time the company has worked with Drafthouse, and the first time a BitTorrent Bundle has been used to promote an Oscar shortlisted film. The company has been trying to disassociate itself from piracy in the public consciousness, and Averill added that there are 2 million pieces of licensed and legal content on BitTorrent. He said the promotion shows that “the industry is recognizing the potential of BitTorrent Bundle as a transmedia format to reach massive audiences without limits on size, access or file type.”

Apple Says It Has Never Worked With NSA To Create iPhone Backdoors, Is Unaware Of Alleged DROPOUTJEEP Snooping Program

Dec 31st 2013, 16:50, by Matthew Panzarino

Apple has contacted TechCrunch with a statement about the DROPOUTJEEP NSA program that detailed a system by which the organization claimed it could snoop on iPhone users. Apple says that it has never worked with the NSA to create any ‘backdoors’ that would allow that kind of monitoring, and that it was unaware of any programs to do so.
Here is the full statement from Apple:

Apple has never worked with the NSA to create a backdoor in any of our products, including iPhone. Additionally, we have been unaware of this alleged NSA program targeting our products. We care deeply about our customers’ privacy and security. Our team is continuously working to make our products even more secure, and we make it easy for customers to keep their software up to date with the latest advancements. Whenever we hear about attempts to undermine Apple’s industry-leading security, we thoroughly investigate and take appropriate steps to protect our customers. We will continue to use our resources to stay ahead of malicious hackers and defend our customers from security attacks, regardless of who’s behind them.

The statement is a response to a report in Der Spiegel yesterday that detailed a Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit within the NSA that is tasked with gaining access to foreign computer systems in order to retrieve data to protect national security. The report also pointed out a division called ANT that was set up to compile information about hacking consumer electronics, networking systems and more.
The story detailed dozens of devices and methods, including prices for deployment, in a catalogue that could be used by the NSA to pick and choose the tools it needed for snooping. The 50-page catalog included a variety of hacking tools that targeted laptops and mobile phones and other consumer devices. Der Spiegel said that these programs were evidence that the NSA had ‘backdoors’ into computing devices that many consumers use.
Among these options was a program called DROPOUTJEEP — a program by which the NSA could theoretically snoop on ‘any’ Apple iPhone with ’100% success’. The documents were dated 2008, implying that these methods were for older devices — and there was no reference on any of them to iOS versions newer than iOS 5. Still, the program’s detail was worrisome.
Researcher and hacker Jacob Applebaum — the co-author of the articles, coinciding with a speech he gave at a conference about the programs — pointed out that the ’100% success rate’ claimed by the NSA was worrisome as it implied cooperation by Apple. The statement from the company appears to preclude that cooperation.
dropoutjeep

The program detail indicated that the NSA needed physical access to the devices at the time that the documents were published. It does note that they were working on ‘remote installation capability’ but there’s no indication whether that was actually successful. The program’s other options included physical interdiction of devices like laptops to install snooping devices, but there have been security advances like hardware encryption in recent iPhone models that make such installation of devices much more difficult.
More to follow…

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’ Salary To Get 50% Bump To $3M In 2014

Dec 31st 2013, 15:00, by Matt Burns

Remember Qwikster? Wall Street doesn’t.
The AP is reporting this morning that the Netflix CEO will get a healthy pay raise in 2014. According to a regulatory filing, Reed Hastings’ annual salary will jump to $3 million, up from the $2 million he earned this year. His annual stock option allowance also improves to $3 million from the current level of $1 million.
It’s hard to argue against the pay increase. Netflix had a great 2013. The stock price is up 296% on the year. It’s trading around an all time high of $365. The stock was the top performer in the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 this year.
The company isn’t raking in the profits, though. In its most recent quarterly report, Netflix only made $32 million. But Wall Street doesn’t seem to mind and so the company should stay the course raking in the subscribers and producing award-winning original content. Netflix just needs to remember to listen to their subscribers.

Samsung Got A Bigger Tablet Boost For Christmas Than Apple, According To Onswipe

Dec 31st 2013, 15:00, by Anthony Ha

Touchscreen publishing company Onswipe has good news for Samsung. As Onswipe’s Chief Marketing Officer Jason Baptiste put it in an email, “Samsung clearly won Christmas when it comes to tablets.”
Specifically, the company looked at visitors to Onswipe-optimized sites for the period of Dec. 26 to Dec. 29 in comparison to Dec. 19-22, as a way to measure the growth that different tablet platforms saw over Christmas. The results? Samsung’s Galaxy tablets grew 50.4 percent, Nexus 6 tablets grew 33.8 percent, iPads grew 20.4 percent, and Kindle Fires grew 19.5 percent.
Now, the fact that Onswipe focused on percentage growth is an important caveat here. After all, Samsung was presumably starting from (much) less, so it didn’t need to sell as many tablets to see significant growth.
It’s also interesting to see the line about Samsung’s victory coming from Baptiste, who recently wrote a blog post telling people to “stop believing the fairy tales about the iPad’s demise.” I asked him if the data made him reconsider the post, and he said no: “Though they enjoyed more growth post Holidays, Samsung is still very tiny compared to the iPad and the same goes for the rest of Android. What will be interesting is seeing whether people still use Android tablets 90 days out from now.”
Baptiste also provided some numbers about usage. He said the average session time from Samsung users was 3 minutes and 9 seconds after Christmas, down from 3:32 before. On iPad, the average session was 4:03, compared to 4:12 before. And the Kindle Fire had the longest session time on average, 4:51.
As for how many people this data represents, Baptiste said Onswipe (which recently upgraded its platform) reaches 31 million unique visitors each month on the mobile web.

Incredibly enough, this helicopter is not going down in flames

Dec 31st 2013, 15:57, by Jesus Diaz on Sploid, shared by Brian Barrett to Gizmodo

This incredible photo by Nir Ben-Yosef aka xnir—an Israeli photographer who specializes in aviation and air-to-air photography and production—may look really scary. But fear not, because this AH-64A Apache is not going down in flames. It's just releasing flares to show off.
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How Gravity Would Be Different If the World Were a Cube

Dec 31st 2013, 16:00, by Jesse Berezovsky

Perhaps the main difference if the earth were a cube would be that students would become much more aggravated trying to calculate the gravitational field. For a uniform cube with side length L and density rho, the gravitational force on mass m at position (x,y,z) is given by
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Safely Ring In the New Year With an LED Fireworks Extravaganza

Dec 31st 2013, 15:49, by Andrew Liszewski

It's ironic that one of the nights of the year when fireworks are the perfect way to celebrate is also the one night when you and your friends should not be messing with explosives. But with this LED fireworks kit, you can drink yourself silly and still safely put on quite a show when the clock strikes midnight.
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Google Play Music All Access subscribers now getting Glass Explorer invitations

Dec 31st 2013, 14:31, by Kwame Opam

Users who pay the $9.99 a month for Google Play Music All Access are starting to receive VIP invitations to join the Glass Explorer program. AndroidCentral reports that Mountain View is sending emails out this morning calling for subscribers to sign up for access:

With the launch of Google Play Music on Google Glass, we’ve secured VIP invitations for All Access customers to join the Glass Explorer Program. Interested in rocking out while exploring with Glass? Sign up to receive your invitation below!

Google Glass is expected to launch to the general public for $1,500 sometime next year. Google is already ramping up for the release by making hardware tweaks to support prescription lensesand unveiling an accessory store for...
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Beat-Matching Glowing Sunglasses Are Perfect For New Years Eve and Morn

Dec 31st 2013, 14:37, by Andrew Liszewski

It's New Year's Eve and unless you've got children to tend to you'll probably be partying well into 2014 this evening. And while normally sunglasses aren't required for the middle of the night, theseDropshades are, since they feature a glowing pulsing EQ that stays in sync with whatever music you're listening to. And, the next morning when you're hungover and dodging the sun, you'll be even happier you're wearing them.
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If You've Got Google Music All Access, You Can Get Glass Now

Dec 31st 2013, 14:15, by Mario Aguilar

Google Music All Access users are reporting that they've received an email inviting them to join the ranks of Glass Explorers. (Here's the sign up page you can try if you didn't get the email.) As far we can tell it's the first time Google has opened up the program to a subset of its users without demanding that they explain themselves.
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Mac Pro Teardown: An Apple Rig You Can Actually Tinker With

Dec 31st 2013, 14:01, by Jamie Condliffe

It looks like a waste paper bin, costs a fortune and is, perhaps, the best workstation you've ever owned. But what lurks beneath that shiny black shell?
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The 38 Most Interesting Designs of 2013

Dec 31st 2013, 14:00, by jordan kushins

Welcome to the end of another year, people! We made it, and not without a ton of brand new stuff to carry us into 2014 and beyond. We saw lots of beautiful, interesting, and just plain weird things, but here we've rounded up the items that stuck with us; not just because of what they are, but also because of how they were made, or the interaction they required, or—yes—the way they made us feel.
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TiVo co-founders joining forces for yet another set-top box

Dec 31st 2013, 13:08, by Jamie Rigg

How on earth are you supposed to fill your days after leaving the successful set-top box company you created? Well, if you're TiVo co-founders Mike Ramsay and Jim Barton, the answer is to start all over again. You see, after Barton resigned from TiVo ...

HP woes continue as 5,000 more employees face the axe

Dec 31st 2013, 11:25, by Mariella Moon

It certainly won't be a happy new year for thousands of HP employees -- not when the company has increased its layoff numbers yet again. Hewlett-Packard already adjusted the number of people it needed to let go from 27,000 to 29,000 a year ago, but ...

LG Lifeband Touch fitness tracker leaks a little early

Dec 31st 2013, 11:22, by Aaron Souppouris

A new wearable device from LG has seemingly been exposed by prolific leaker Evleaks. Allegedly called LG Lifeband Touch, it appears to be a device in the same vein as LG's announced-but-never-released Smart Activity Tracker. That device, which debuted at CES in January 2013, was able to display notifications from your phone, such as text messages and calls, and also had built in GPS tracking and a heart rate monitor.
Last week, rumors circulated that LG was planning on releasing a pair of wearable devices, called the G-Arch and G-Health. The company told us it has "no products called G-Arch and G-Health in development," but it appears it is planning to announce a health-focused device soon. Little is known about the Lifeband Touch,...
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'Body Atlas' shows where emotions hit us the hardest

Dec 31st 2013, 10:56, by Rich McCormick

Finnish researchers have attempted to pinpoint the ways in which our emotions affect our bodies. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, asked 773 participants to indicate how certain emotionally charged materials made them feel. The researchers argue that human bodies feel emotions in broadly consistent ways.
The participants were first shown words, stories, movies, and expressions, and then asked to highlight on computer-modeled human silhouettes the areas of the body they felt decreasing or increasing activity. Where sensations were intense, participants would color first red, and then yellow as the feelings got stronger; where the sensations were dulled, they would color shades of blue.
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This Is London’s Floating Bike Road Dream

Dec 31st 2013, 11:45, by Gary Cutlack - Gizmodo UK

A team of architects has updated and fleshed out its SkyCycle plan—a bizarre concept that would use the empty channels above some train lines to build floating, bike-only cycle superhighways.
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Revenue-Sharing “Knowledge Community” Teckler Launches Its First Mobile App

Dec 30th 2013, 23:12, by Anthony Ha

Teckler is a site where users get a share of the revenue for the articles, photos, and other media that they post. And with the recent launch of the Teckler iPhone app, users will be able to post from their phone too.
When I discussed the platform with founder and CEO Claudio Gandelman (previously the Latin American president forMatch.com), he pitched it as a way for people who don’t have a website or blog of their own to share interesting content, particularly in areas where they have expertise. The site (and the quality of the content) seems pretty broad, covering topics like medicine, love/romance, and technology.
Probably the most attention-grabbing thing about Teckler, however, is the fact that anyone can post and start getting a share of ad revenue — users are supposed to get 70 percent of the money from the ads that running alongside their content (they can cash out after an audit period and once there’s more than 50 cents in their account).
How much money can they make? Well, this is actually popular discussion topic on Teckler itself. The company says that since its launch in June, it has paid out $20,000 total — so, not a tiny amount of money, but it probably hasn’t changed anyone’s life either … The company also says that contributors aren’t the only ones reading the site — they only account for 2 percent of Teckler’s 9 million monthly uniques.
Gandelman also told me that even though the company itself is based in Brazil, its biggest audience is in the United States.
As for the new iOS app, he said it’s really optimized around two of the big things people like to do on their phones — browsing content and taking photos. So naturally, the app allows you to read Teckler content and post photos. The company plans to add the ability to write posts from your phone as well.
“I believe that in six months mobile will be bigger than the web for us,” Gandelman added.

Microsoft Was Right To Worry That Government Snooping Constituted An ‘Advanced Persistent Threat’

Dec 30th 2013, 23:02, by Alex Wilhelm

Early this month, Microsoft declared that ”government snooping potentially now constitutes an ‘advanced persistent threat,’” a statement that became ironic this weekend, given that, early this month, Microsoft likened government surveillance to “sophisticated malware and cyber attacks.”
New NSA revelations out this weekend detailed precisely how the NSA’s methods lean on malware and employ cyber attacks in their “snooping,” to use Microsoft’s term. Thus, the NSA’s surveillance efforts are not a potentialadvanced persistent threat, as Microsoft first published.
The term “advanced persistent threat,” by the way, isn’t a casual colloquialism that Redmond invented. According to the Wall Street Journal, the phrase “carries special weight in cybersecurity circles and is often used to describe hacker teams backed by the Chinese government.” That comparison is striking.
As TechCrunch covered yesterday, Der Spiegel has reported new NSA capabilities, much of which were presented in a catalog-like format, with price points and implementation times for the various tools listed along with diagrams indicating how the tool in question works. Need to get into an iPhone? Doable. Get past Juniper and Cisco security? The NSA claims that it can do that, no sweat.
It has become interesting to learn how holistic the NSA’s spying capabilities have become. The phone metadata program in the United States is perhaps (and perhaps wrongly) the most public piece of the NSA’s efforts. Through PRISM it can force user data out of American technology companies. Through MUSCULAR it can tap data cables between foreign data centers of American companies. And through the freshly disclosed ANT team and its book of secrets, it can break the security of American technology hardware companies.
What this means is that the NSA has not only shot the privacy of individual Americans full of holes, but has also broken the spine of security claims of American companies.
Microsoft’s comments were included in a post stating that it was working to bolster its encryption to prevent government incursion. But with the NSA working to harm encryption and backdoor hardware, it’s far from clear that even a concerted effort by large American technology companies can provide peace of mind to their customers.
Now, much of what Der Spiegel unveiled would be incredibly useful for foreign surveillance that would raise no eyebrows. But the fact that the NSA has managed to so pervasively penetrate security raises a follow-up question: Who else? That’s not an indictment of the NSA but more comment on the current technology environment.
The NSA can hack and track your phone. XKeyscore allows it to read your email. And programs as broad as tapping the core fiber cables of the Internet or a toolset to crack a single server of American provenance also allow ways in. What sort of threat to security could be more persistent than that?
Top Image Credit: Flickr

Nokia Closes Out 2013 With 92% Of The Windows Phone Market

Dec 30th 2013, 23:48, by Alex Wilhelm

The fine folks at AdDuplex have provided Paul Thurrott with an early look at their final Windows Phone market data for 2013, giving us in the public a final look at the key statistics of Microsoft’s smartphone platform’s OEM and device makeup.
The figures are much as they have been all year, only more so. Nokia continues to control the lion’s share of Windows Phone hardware, ending the month up a few points at 92.1 percent (this is a calculation of usage share, tracked through AdDuplex’s network). And the Lumia 520 handset continues to dominate its brethren, with a new high of 39.3 percent share. And that Windows Phone 8 grew against the now-fading Windows 7.x system, with record relative market share of 78.3 percent.
Windows Phone’s 2013, if you had to put it into basic trends, would be that Nokia cleaned up, and its Lumia 520 was the weapon of choice.
Thurrott well describes the current low-ending of Windows Phone (bolding original):

Almost no high-end phones are popular. Worldwide, only the Lumia 920 makes the top 10 list for usage among all Windows Phone handsets, and if you look just at Windows Phone 8 handsets, only two high-end devices make the list: The Lumia 920 and the 925. In the US, there are three: The Lumia 920, 928, and 1020. All the rest are new low-end devices or old devices. The Lumia 1520 phablet doesn’t appear anywhere in this report.

What this means is that the sales momentum that Windows Phone has comes at the cost of per-unit revenue. Margin pressure increases at lower price points. The list of sacrifices that had to be made to produce the Lumia 520 is not small.
So, as we tally what could be the final month in which Nokia rules Windows Phone, it’s important to note that rising unit volume has come at a cost. The Lumia 1020 is a hit among a subset of the technology elite, but perhaps few else.
Can you build a mobile empire on predominantly low-end phones? Apple managed the opposite, so perhaps this, too, is possible.

This magic liquid is somehow also a solid

Dec 30th 2013, 21:18

It's not supposed to be that hard to figure out if something is liquid or if something is solid. If it flows like water, it's liquid. If it stays relatively still, it's solid. But what if it's a substance that breaks the laws of normal behavior and is both liquid and solid? Like non-Newtonian fluids?
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Monday, 30 December 2013

"Worlds' Oldest Diamonds" Turned Out to Be Leftover Cleaning Supplies

Dec 30th 2013, 23:00, by Ashley Feinberg

Back in 2007, scientists found evidence of our planet's first continents in the form of 4.3 billion-year-old diamonds—old as the very Earth itself. And these diamonds were finally going to give us the insight into the evolution of Earth's crust that we've been searching for. Now, six years later, there's just one little problem: Those tiny gems? Actually tiny leftover bits of polishing grit. Whoops.
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A Times reporter took three genetic tests and got three wildly different answers

Dec 30th 2013, 22:22, by Russell Brandom

If a recent New York Times piece is any guide, direct-to-consumer genetic testing may have more accuracy problems than we thought. Reporter Kira Peikoff ordered three simultaneous tests of her genome from 23andme, Genetic Testing Laboratories, and Pathway Genomics — and the results varied more widely than you might think. According to 23andme, she had an elevated risk of psoriasis, with a lifetime risk of 20.2 percent, but GTL put her lifetime risk at only two percent, well below average. Both firms showed her Type 2 diabetes risk as slightly below the general population, but described it as "decreased" and "medium" respectively, two very different interpretations. It's a reminder of how far genetic testing services still have to go on...
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Skyscraper Candles Let You Safely Set the World on Fire

Dec 30th 2013, 22:30, by Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan

"I like watching these buildings burn," says Jing Jing Naihan Li, a young Beijing architect. That would normally come off as ominous, but in this case, it's awesome: Naihan makes candles that are modeled after the tallest buildings in the world. Because, after all, aren't skyscrapers just the candles on the glitter-covered double chocolate ganache birthday cake that is the city?
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73% Of U.S. Adults Use Social Networks, Pinterest Passes Twitter In Popularity, Facebook Stays On Top

Dec 30th 2013, 21:16, by Ingrid Lunden

Facebook may be currently facing question marks over how well it’s faring with younger users, but among those over 18 in the U.S. it remains the social network king. According to figures out today from the researchers at the Pew Research Center, the percentage of adults using the social networks of Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter or Instagram to communicate with each other is now at 73%, and Facebook — the world’s largest social network with 1.19 billion users — remains the most popular in the U.S., with 71% of U.S. adults using it.
In other words, nearly all adults that responded that they are on a social network are using Facebook. That’s four percentage points up from last year’s 67%, Pew notes. It comes at a time of heightened competition: partly thanks to the rise of mobile apps — the number of people on multiple networks is now at 42%.
Among the top five networks (as charted by Pew), there is a lot more wiggle room for who comes in second after Facebook. LinkedIn — site that bills itself as the “professional” social network focused on networking, job hunting and professional information and news — is hanging on at number-two, with 22% of U.S. adults using it — up 2% on last year. Close behind it is Pinterest — which has vaulted over Twitter to number-three position with 21% usage.
Twitter — despite the different services that it has launched to increase engagement like Twitter Music other discovery services; and despite the increased attention around its IPO — has only grown by two percentage points to 18%. Hot on its heels is Instagram at 17%.
Google+ does not make it into the top-five mix — not because of its lack of popularity; but because Pew says it did not include it in its survey questions.
Indeed, Pew’s numbers reveal a bit, confirm a bit of what we might have already guessed, but also leave a few blind spots. While there is a 42% overlap of usage across multiple sites, some 36% of respondents said that they only used one social network, and Pew notes that “22% did not use any of the five specific sites we asked about.” That could mean they used services like Google+, Snapchat, something else entirely, or nothing at all.

How many versus how often

For these sites, which are constructed in large part around advertising-based business models, critical mass is crucial: you won’t visit a site if no one else is using it. Similarly, on the commercial side of the equation, one of the key metrics that the sites, and their advertisers, like to focus on is engagement.
It’s interesting, therefore, that when it comes to frequency of use, the rankings change. Facebook continues to remain at the top in the daily rankings, with 63% of people accessing it on a daily basis. Instagram — last in the general rankings — is not far off and in second place, with a 57% daily use. Similarly, its weekly and “less often” rates are also close, respectively at 22%/20% and 14%/22%. (This goes some way towards explaining why Facebook was keen to acquire it: their usage patterns are very close.)
Twitter may overall be seeing less usage in general than Pinterest but those who are on it appear more engaged: some 46% of Twitter users are on it daily for their quick fix of quips made and received. Pinterest, in contrast, has a fairly low rate of daily usage, with 23% of its users visiting on a daily basis.
Facebook, Instagram and Twitter also are generating a significant amount of mulitple-times-per-day use, with 40% at Facebook, 35% at Instagram and 29% at Twitter, Pew says.
LinkedIn, meanwhile, has a lot of work to do, with only 13% of its users going there daily. Are those the ones looking for work? In any case, this is another way of explaining why it is that LinkedIn has tried to overhaul its whole content operation, to create something that will attract people to visit it more frequently than just “less often.”
Pew notes that for now it looks like Facebook is partly winning because of how it has managed to appeal to a wide range of users — a pretty impressive turn for widening its reach, considering that it started out as a network restricted only to university networks.
The demographic data for other networks stands in contrast to this: Pinterest “holds particular appeal to female users”, with women four times more likely as men to be Pinterest users; LinkedIn is “especially” popular among college graduates and internet users in higher income households. Twitter and Instagram resonate with urbanites and younger adults, and non-whites. (Facebook has over 70% usage among whites, Hispanics and black users, Pew notes.) All of them, excepting LinkedIn, has its highest proportion of users in the 18-29 age bracket; LinkedIn is more popular with the 30-49 group.
Among those who say they use only one social networking site, Facebook is a clear winner with 84% selecting it as their sole site, with the others lagging behind by a very far stretch: 8% solely use LinkedIn, 4% solely use Pinterest, and Instagram and Twitter each picked up only 2% — positioning them as firmly secondary in the U.S. market today.
Screen Shot 2013-12-30 at 17.57.57

The FitBit App Now Turns The iPhone 5s Into A FitBit

Dec 30th 2013, 20:32, by Jordan Crook

Fitbit has just released a major update to its iOS app for iPhone 5s, allowing the smartphone itself to track steps, distance and burned calories.
These are basic features, and just a fraction of the metrics provided by one of Fitbit’s own hardware devices, such as the Fitbit handheld or the Fitbit Flex wristband. With a Fitbit Force, for example, you can track all the basic information as well as flights of stairs climbed and sleep. Plus, it acts as a watch feeding you the information on a digital screen.
Still, the accompanying app has always been an integral part of the Fitbit hardware experience, as it offers a dashboard for every metric as well as a log tracking nutritional intake.
In other words, the app gives a robust outlook of overall health over time, which has made Fitbit a big contender in the space against Nike and others.
With the launch of the M7 motion coprocessor in the iPhone 5s, Fitbit has decided to offer “basic” tracking from the phone itself, likely with the intention to entice an upgrade.
The update comes just in time for New Years, as the pudgy masses resolve to lose the holiday weight.

Twitter’s Recent Market Correction Doesn’t Mean Its Sky Is Falling

Dec 30th 2013, 22:11, by Alex Wilhelm

Twitter has had a rough few days in the markets, slipping from north of $74 to just over $60 at the end of trading today. That’s not even half the story, however: Twitter’s December is one for the record books.
If dropping almost 20 percent in a few days of trading is dramatic, so too is Twitter’s epic run from December’s opening price of $40.76 to its high in the month of $74.31, a rise of more than 82 percent in just 18 trading sessions. The massive rise in Twitter’s value far outstrips the ensuing minor correction.
Put another way, Twitter is still up around 50 percent in the month, a huge rise in its value that no one seems to understand. Twitter has yet to report earnings as a public company, so we have essentially no new information that we can use to vet the firm. The rise in its stock price is therefore hard to attribute to any specific thing other than exuberance.
As TechCrunch reported earlier today when Twitter’s slide was underway, investors currently do not expect the company to report positive earnings per share until 2015. Therefore, the public will likely value Twitter on its ability to grow its revenue, a financial metric that is slowing for the company.
However, Twitter itself remains, presumably, as strong as it was when it went public at $26 per share. Therefore, the saga of its stock price can be essentially discounted until we have more data on the firm.
And that investors are willing to take profits after a huge bull run is about as surprising as the sun deciding to rise tomorrow. So keep in mind that Twitter’s rise is likely mere speculative earnest. The real report comes with earnings.
But let’s have some fun. The New York Times:

Max Ganik has no doubts that Twitter’s stock — up 145 percent since it first began trading on Nov. 7 — is firmly in bubble territory.

“But that doesn’t mean it’s going to stop going up,” said Mr. Ganik, 16, a junior at a high school in Scarsdale, N.Y., who doubled his money by lunchtime on Thursday trading Twitter stock options, and planned to dive back in on Monday. “Traders are going to drive up the price. The valuation doesn’t actually matter at this point.”

It’s all different this time!
Top Image Credit: Flickr

Netflix Says It’s Testing New $6.99 Single Screen Streaming Plan, But It May Never Roll Out To Everyone

Dec 30th 2013, 21:44, by Matthew Panzarino

Netflix has informed TechCrunch that it is indeed testing a $6.99 single-stream plan to new users as part of a test. The option appears to some new users after selecting the streaming option as a free trial.
Unfortunately for those of you excited for a dollar off discount on a standard definition stream, a Netflix spokesperson also told us that not all users may see the option and that it may never offer it generally.
The plan was first noted by Adweek this morning and we confirmed the plan as an option when we began signing up for the $7.99 streaming-only plan with a 30-day trial.
netflix-sd-plan-hed-2013

Offering a standard-def stream to one device might as well be called ‘the smartphone plan’, as that’s what it seems most suited to. Though many smartphone screens are above HD resolution, the smaller real-estate means that it can be difficult to discern a standard-def stream from a high-definition one.
Netflix analyzes a junk ton of data about user viewing habits including locations, devices and times of day that people view stuff. If that information was telling them that people view Netflix a lot on smartphones while traveling then a single stream in SD rather than HD might actually make a lot of sense for a certain subset of users. Of course, a buck off is a nice ‘sale price’ and if people get utility out of it they might feel inclined to expand the plan further down the road.
Image Credit: Taro the Shiba Inu/Flickr CC

Paul Graham Responds To Critics, Says Y Combinator Was Planning An Event For Female Founders

Dec 30th 2013, 22:26, by Anthony Ha

Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham just published a blog post about what he did and didn’t say during a widely-discussed interview with The Information (if you don’t have a subscription, you can read the relevant quotes in Valleywag). He also makes an announcement, of sorts, that the incubator is planning an event for female founders later this year.
As many of you’ve probably read, Graham attracted lots of controversy for his remarks about getting women interesting programming and hacking. (TechCrunch’s Colleen Taylor weighed in here.) However, Graham claimed in a tweet, and reiterated in the post, that his meaning had been distorted.
Specifically,while he was quoted as saying, “We can’t make women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven’t been hacking for the past 10 years,” Graham said there was a crucial word that had been edited out, and it should have read: “We can’t make these women look at the world through hacker eyes …” In other words, he said he wasn’t talking about all women, but rather the ones who “who aren’t programmers.”
To be honest, the language in the new post can still be a bit confusing to parse (for example: “I didn’t say women haven’t been programming for 10 years. I said women who aren’t programmers haven’t been programming for 10 years.”), but Graham’s position (whether or not you agree with it) becomes a little clearer you see the question he was answering, which was about whether YC should be more “proactive” about about recruiting women by “lowering standards or something like that” (I’m not sure that’s the most helpful way to frame the issue, but moving on …)
If I’m reading Graham correctly, his basic argument is that Y Combinator is happy to admit female “hackers,” but he’s resistant to the idea that it should accept women who aren’t hackers and “then somehow make up the difference ourselves during YC.”
At the end of the post, he also that YC has reached “a quorum of female founders who are doing well,” so it’s been planning to hold a Startup School-style event focused on female founders. (Startup School is a popular event with big-name speakers like Jack Dorsey talking about their experiences and offering advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.) It sounds like this new event is in the very early stages of planning, but Graham said he felt obligated to announce it now because otherwise, it might seem “that we’re only doing it for PR reasons.”
I asked YC co-founder Jessica Livingston for more details about the event, and she said she doesn’t have a firm date yet, nor has she invited any speakers:

The rough plan is to have female YC founders give quick talks (a la Startup School) sharing their stories, giving advice and talking about what they’d wish they’d known when they were getting started. I imagine it will be focused mostly on practical startup advice (and inspirational stories) for women who are interested in starting a startup or have already started one.

By the way, if you’re wondering about which female founders are part the aforementioned “quorum,” Graham’s post cites Adora Cheung of Homejoy, Elizabeth Iorns of Science Exchange, Kathryn Minshew of the Muse, Elli Sharef of HireArt, and Vanessa Torrivilla of Goldbely. (He also mentions an “Ann”, but when I asked who that was, Livingston said she’s from a startup that has yet to be announced as part of YC.)
Anyway, you should probably just read Graham’s post for yourself.

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How many versus how often