Pinboard

“I don’t want a back door,” Rogers, the director of the nation’s top electronic spy agency, said during a speech at Princeton University, using a tech industry term for covert measures to bypass device security. “I want a front door. And I want the front door to have multiple locks. Big locks.”

Among the security issues patched in OS X 10.10.3 is a security vulnerability in its administration framework. The issue, identified as CVE-2015-1130, was reported by security researcher Emile Kvarnhammar, CEO at TrueSec. "The admin framework in Apple OS X contains a hidden backdoor API to root privileges," Kvarnhammar wrote in a blog post. "It's been there for several years (at least since 2011), I found it in October 2014, and it can be exploited to escalate privileges to root from any user account in the system." While Apple has now fixed the CVE-2015-1130 in the 10.10.3 update for users of Apple's Yosemite OS 10.10 operating system, older OS X systems are also at risk. Kvarnhammar noted that Apple told him the fix required a substantial amount of changes and a patch would not likely be back-ported for OS X 10.9 and older.

Google is phasing out NPAPI because it says that it's a big cause of "hangs, crashes, security incidents, and code complexity." The company suggests that developers who were using NPAPI either use Web standards instead—the once Silverlight-dependent Netflix, for example, now uses Encrypted Media Extensions in conjunction with HTML5 video—or Google's own proprietary extension systems, such as the NaCl Native client.

The European Commission has officially published their "statement of objections" on Google's alleged anti-competitive nature around (a) shopping service and (b) Android platform. Google has responded to both, on (a) shopping comparison and (b) Android within an hour of the EU statement.

At the time of the ITA acquisition, several online travel companies—Expedia, Kayak, and Travelocity--unsuccessfully lobbied regulators in the US and the European Union to block the deal, arguing that our ability to show flight options directly would siphon off their traffic and harm competition online. Four years later it’s clear their allegations of harm turned out to be untrue. As the Washington Post recently pointed out (in an article headed “Google Flight Search, four years in: not the competition-killer critics feared”) Expedia, Orbitz, Priceline and Travelocity account for 95% of the US online travel market today. It’s a similar situation in Europe too, as this graph for Germany neatly shows:

Whether Google has illegally hindered the development and market access of rival mobile applications or services by requiring or incentivising smartphone and tablet manufacturers to exclusively pre-install Google's own applications or services; Whether Google has prevented smartphone and tablet manufacturers who wish to install Google's applications and services on some of their Android devices from developing and marketing modified and potentially competing versions of Android (so-called "Android forks") on other devices, thereby illegally hindering the development and market access of rival mobile operating systems and mobile applications or services; Whether Google has illegally hindered the development and market access of rival applications and services by tying or bundling certain Google applications and services distributed on Android devices with other Google applications, services and/or application programming interfaces of Google.

I know this is a different experience for our customers, and a change for you as well. Are we going to launch every product this way from now on? No. We all love those blockbuster Apple product launch days—and there will be many more to come. They’re the moments where you, our teams, shine. And our customers love them as well!

Does the name Bryan Seely ring a bell? He’s the guy last year who managed to create fake listings for the US Secret Service and the FBI in Google Maps that some people fell for. Seely did it to demonstrate a weakness with Google Maps, one that still exists and allowed him to recently make another fake listing — this time putting Edward Snowden in the White House.

Most Android apps have more than 100 ms of audio output latency, and more than 200 ms of round-trip (audio input to audio output) latency. To give you a quick example from the Oscar winning film Whiplash, it’s like the drummer is dragging by a half beat behind the band!

Today, Google is taking the lid off of a new certification program that will unify these disparate headsets under a single badge: “Works With Google Cardboard.” By following a few guidelines and giving Google a look at your headset, Google will certify a manufacturer’s headset design will work with all Cardboard software. It’ll also give certified manufacturers a tool for generating headset profiles, which will be placed on the headset itself as a QR code and scanned by the user in the Cardboard app. The Cardboard app will then adjust apps built on the SDK for parameters set by the manufacturer, like focal length, inputs available, and the distance between each lens.

Apple had initially framed April 24 as the official launch date for the watch. Although some customers who were quick to place pre-orders will receive the gadget April 24, Apple has removed the date from its website, advising simply: "The Watch is coming." An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

Comcast said Friday that it will bring its 2-gigabit symmetrical Gigabit Pro service to San Francisco Bay Area consumers in May, sidestepping Google and its own fiber plans. The company also said it will boost the speeds of some of its more premium tiers and add a new Extreme 250 tier.

Leo's tool

In a particularly spectacular display of corporate delusion, John Deere—the world’s largest agricultural machinery maker —told the Copyright Office that farmers don’t own their tractors. Because computer code snakes through the DNA of modern tractors, farmers receive “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”

“Google wants people going mobile friendly,” said Danny Sullivan, founding editor of Search Engine Land. He said the April 21 deadline had created a “panic and frenzy” among Web developers to make the changes. There’s potential benefit for Google in the move, too. Users are conducting more searches on mobile devices. A Google executive said at a conference last year that smartphone searches could soon outnumber searches from personal computers.

Google Inc. is set to unveil its new U.S. wireless service as early as Wednesday, pushing the Internet giant further into telecom and injecting fresh uncertainty into a wireless industry already locked in a price war.

Using Audi's in-car communications system, Connect, DHL delivery drivers would track a customer's vehicle over a specified period of time and then use a digital access code to unlock the boot, the car maker said. This code would then expire as soon as the boot was shut.

Apple sold 61.2 million iPhones in the quarter, up 40 percent from the year-ago quarter, but down from the record-breaking holiday quarter. It sold 12.6 million iPads, down 23 percent from a year ago.

"We've done this because it's clear we didn't understand exactly what we were doing," Valve said in a post on Steam. "We've been shipping many features over the years aimed at allowing community creators to receive a share of the rewards, and in the past, they've been received well. It's obvious now that this case is different."

The display on the Apple Watch rises to the challenge with an excellent state-of-the-art Flexible OLED display covered by a sapphire crystal, or by an Ion-X strengthened cover glass for the Sport model. Also very significant, it is Apple’s first OLED display, which are often more challenging to engineer than using long established LCDs. We will examine, lab test, and analyze the Apple Watch display with a sapphire crystal below…

Later this year, however, at the Defcon convention in Las Vegas, Tesla plans to open one of Elon Musk’s sleek electric cars to the hacker attendees, allowing them to tinker with any piece of the vehicle they like, according to sources, who wished to remain anonymous. The benefits for Tesla will be twofold: they will be made aware of any bugs in the vehicle and of any hackers who are worth hiring. At Defcon last year, Tesla scouts were on the prowl, finding plenty of talent whilst meandering the halls of the Rio Hotel & Casino.

“The pilot came on and said that his first mate’s iPad powered down unexpectedly, and his had too, and that the entire 737 fleet on American had experienced the same behavior,” said passenger Philip McRell, who was also on flight #1654. “It seemed unprecedented and very unfamiliar to the pilots.”

The Motion Picture Assn. of America cheered the ruling. “As stated in the written judgment, Popcorn Time has no legitimate purpose and it only serves to infringe copyright,” the MPAA said in a statement. “Court orders are a proportionate and effective measure to tackle sites dedicated to facilitating and promoting online copyright infringement.”

Analysts estimate Samsung sold more smartphones than Apple during the quarter. But the Korean firm lost ground in the more profitable high-end market to Apple after the maker of the iPhone began offering models with bigger screens last fall. Before that, large screens were a feature that set Samsung phones apart.

Specifically taking just mobile sales into account, Samsung reports an operating profit of $2.5 billion on revenues of $24.1 billion. Samsung claims that smartphone sales have increased thanks a heightened interest in the mid-range Galaxy A series. Revenues, however, fell because of lowered tablet and feature phone sales.