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RT @Techmeme: Next iPhones will include Force Touch tech from Apple Watch and may include pink color option

RT @Techmeme: Next iPhones will include Force Touch tech from Apple Watch and may include pink color option

RT @Techmeme: Microsoft Patches Old Stuxnet Bug, FREAK Vulnerability (@mike_mimoso / Threatpost)

RT @Techmeme: Microsoft Patches Old Stuxnet Bug, FREAK Vulnerability (@mike_mimoso / Threatpost)

Immersion ultrasonic inspection is typically reserved for highly stressed medical implants and rotating components inside of aircraft engines; not only does this step take time, it also is typically performed by custom built machines of tremendous expense

There’s a sort of barbell effect: If you are super small and super focused and super niche you can succeed, arguably. And if you’re super huge and mass and gigantic and growing quickly, you can succeed. But in the middle, is death. The valley of death. So arguably we got caught in that valley of death.

Type-C will appear on Android phones too!

Google Now will one day be able to work with information from all of the apps you use. Expanding on the current pilot program that works with 40 third-party services, the plan is to offer an open API in the future, that anyone can build into their apps.

Microsoft earlier this week said that search-and-destroy work by it, Lenovo and other software makers has reduced the daily number of Lenovo PCs found infected with the Superfish adware to below 1,000.

Leo's tool: Following up on its successful Earth View experiment, Google's latest Chrome add-on is the Google Art Project extension. Like Earth View, the new addition turns your boring blank tabs into canvases for gorgeous imagery. Rather than highlighting satellite imagery, though, this extension pulls from the Google Art Project to display famous artworks from museums and galleries around the world.

Fixing the vulnerability at an ecosystem level is surprisingly difficult. No single company can change the way USB works, so the only real fix is to move away from the standard at large. In the past, Apple has built authentication chips into connectors like Lightning — primarily to protect Apple’s lucrative licensing business, but with stronger hardware security as a nice side effect. That's not possible on an open standard like USB. Even if Apple somehow required all power cables to have an authentication chip tied to tamper-proof firmware, the port would still be vulnerable to older devices. A bad actor could simply masquerade as a last-generation USB device like a wireless keyboard for long enough to pass along the virus.

Pause and resume functionality for HDMI-CEC was added to Chromecast with the latest 27946 firmware update. Your mileage may vary based on whether your TV actually supports CEC, but I’ve successfully tested it with YouTube. Folks on Reddit are reporting that it also works with apps like WatchESPN, HBO Go, Allcast, iPlayer, TuneIn, Plex and others.

The technology giant is in talks with programmers to offer a slimmed-down bundle of TV networks this fall, according to people familiar with the matter. The service would have about 25 channels, anchored by broadcasters such as ABC, CBS and Fox and would be available on Apple devices such as the Apple TV, they said.

Some big names backing the new standard include AMD, Qualcomm, ARM, Imagination Technologies, MediaTek and Samsung. AMD is designing its chips to be compatible with HSA standards by breaking the stranglehold on CPUs—which have typically played a big role in scheduling execution of programs—and providing direct access to memory and other processing cores. Through the HSA chip design, AMD in particular wants CPUs and GPUs to be equal players in program execution, particularly with more importance being placed on graphics in PCs, mobile devices and supercomputers. But key companies like Intel and Nvidia are not participants in HSA, which could hobble the specification’s adoption. Nvidia’s proprietary CUDA standard is designed for its Tesla supercomputing graphics chips and Tegra mobile chips, and Intel is providing its own parallel programming suite for use with its chips. The companies have a lot running on their proprietary programming standards, which could help improve chip sales.

Controversy or not, .sucks is almost here. A company called Momentous won ICANN’s auction last November via its subsidiary, Vox Populi, giving it the right to operate the .sucks gTLD. The early registration period — “sunrise” is the official term — starts on March 30th and general availability begins on June 1st.

As promised at launch the service is now available on the Xbox One, marking the first game console with a Sling TV app and the third big-screen platform, after Amazon Fire TV and Roku. Sling TV is also available on iOS and Android devices, as well as Mac and Windows computers. Sling also once again expanded the selection of channels in its "Best of Live TV" core package, which costs $20 per month. History, H2 and Lifetime are now included in the price. They'll be live by the end of March along with A&E, just in time for the premiere of Mad Men April 5.

The jury took five hours to deliver its verdict on Core Wireless' claim for $100m in damages. The publication noted that while the jury cleared Apple of infringement, it also rejected Apple's claim that Core Wireless breached its obligation to license the standards essential patents.

The company dropped its long-standing aversion to mobile gaming, saying Tuesday that it would develop videogames for smartphones based on its classic characters. In a surprising about-face, Nintendo struck a partnership with DeNA Co., a Japanese game provider, under which the companies will exchange ownership stakes and set up a new mobile game platform.

That’s about to change. Aparna Chennapragada, director of product management for Google Now, announced at SXSW that the service eventually will open its API to all app developers. The news, first reported by The Next Web, means the most valuable information within the apps on your phone could one day feed into a single, streamlined Google Now experience. We’ve already gotten a glimpse of what this deep integration could mean. Google has 40 apps in a pilot program that’s produced integrations like location-based rewards and ticket codes from Walgreens and Fandango, flight and lodging deals based on recent Kayak and Airbnb activity, and more.

Speaking at Microsoft Convergence yesterday, Microsoft's marketing chief Chris Capossela revealed that the company is currently working on a new name and brand. "We’re now researching what the new brand, or the new name, for our browser should be in Windows 10," said Capossela. "We’ll continue to have Internet Explorer, but we’ll also have a new browser called Project Spartan, which is codenamed Project Spartan. We have to name the thing."

We continue to make great development progress and shared today that Windows 10 will be available this summer in 190 countries and 111 languages. Windows has always been global with more than 1.5 billion users around the world and here in China hundreds of millions of PCs operate Windows today.

Security researchers from FireEye recently examined the most popular apps on Google Play and the Apple App Store and found 1,999 titles that left users wide open to the encryption downgrade attack. Specifically, 1,228 Android apps with one million or more downloads were vulnerable, while 771 out of the top 14,079 iOS apps were susceptible. Vulnerable apps were those that used—or in the case of iOS, could use—an affected crypto library and connected to servers that offered weak, 512-bit encryption keys. The number of vulnerable apps would no doubt mushroom when analyzing slightly less popular titles.

And whatever else may be true, few things are more inimical to, or threatening of, Internet freedom than allowing functionaries inside governments to unilaterally block websites from functioning on the ground that the ideas those sites advocate are objectionable or “dangerous.” That’s every bit as true when the censors are in Paris, London, and Ottawa, and Washington as when they are in Tehran, Moscow or Beijing.

“The headlines said that relatively few people were concerned about government surveillance, but when you consider that it’s close to 50 percent, that’s millions of people who want to feel safe,” he said. “The people in this room can make us feel safe. … If you can provide that safety in a way that will not work against the interests of the user, you will have a competitive service, and you will have the moral standing to compete in the domain of policy to make it a standard not just at home, but to people around the world who are truly vulnerable.”

“This needs to be independent of the legacy business,” he said. “It’s really difficult to just break ranks and threaten your existing revenue stream.”

“So that I can continue to use computers without dishonor,” he wrote, “I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free. I have resigned from the AI Lab to deny MIT any legal excuse to prevent me from giving GNU away.” The nearly forty-five-hundred-word text called for collaborators to help build a freely shareable Unix-like operating system, and set forth an innovative method to insure its legal protection.

On Thursday, South Korean security researcher and serial browser hacker JungHoon Lee, known online as lokihardt, single-handedly popped Internet Explorer 11 and Google Chrome on Microsoft Windows, as well as Apple Safari on Mac OS X. He walked away with US$225,000 in prize money, not including the value of the brand new laptops on which the exploits are demonstrated and which the winners get to take home.

sources familiar with the company’s plans tell BuzzFeed News that a successor to its dusty and recently discounted Apple TV set top box is headed to market as well. Apple intends to show the device off at its annual World Wide Developers Conference in June along with a long-awaited App Store and a software development kit to help developers populate it.