Microsoft is offering users of Oracle's database management system a free license for Microsoft SQL Server if they migrate their databases. There’s a catch though: they have to purchase a Software Assurance subscription.
In a court filing responding to the FBI’s brief in the iPhone case, Apple basically said the FBI’s technical experts didn’t know what they were talking about, and proceeded to explain why!
Nike announced that it has created a version of the self-lacing shoes made popular in the movie Back to the Future, called the HyperAdapt 1.0.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has submitted a plan to the U.S. Government, theoretically developed by the international Internet community, that would transfer control of central root zone of the domain name system and other core databases to ICANN from the United States Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).
I have mixed feelings about this move. The Internet is a global network, and up to now its name system has been under the exclusive control of the U.S. Government. As a long-time member of ICANN@Large before it was captured by corporate Internet interests, I understand the desire of other countries around the world to have a say in Internet governance. However, we need to remember that the Internet is a U.S. invention, created through a cooperative effort between the US government, US corporations, and US academia; and before we give up control, we need to ensure that our US interests are fairly represented. We also need to remember that the US has done a good job of keeping the Internet open and free for everyone to use, without any political, religeous or any other manipulation or censorship. If we are to transfer DNS root authority, we should only do so if we can assure that interests foreign and domestic can't change the free, open nature of the Internet.
Another nice quote from Apple CEO Tim Cook to its customers that describes Apple’s role in the message encryption process:
I’m the FedEx guy. I’m taking your package and I’m delivering it. I just do it like this. My job isn’t to open it up, make a copy of it, put it over in my cabinet in case somebody later wants to come say, I’d like to see your messages. That’s not a role that I play. It’s not a role that I think I should play. And it’s certainly not a role I think you want me to play.
Lest you think that Net Neutrality remains an intellectual argument, T-Mobile has been offering a Binge On feature that allows users to stream content from selected content services without effecting their data usage . . . as long as the content provider is paying T-Mobile for the privilege! So what is the chance that a T-Mobile user is going to visit a non-payer’s site to stream content if they know it’s going to use up their data? And how long will small sites that can’t afford T-Mobil’s danegeld stay in business if this becomes a practice industry-wide?
Another example of why we need Net Neutrality: Netflix has admitted it has been throttling its streaming video for AT&T and Verizon mobile users for five years. Netflix claims the action is intended protect mobile users from going over their monthly data usage limit. More likely, it’s an under-the-table deal with the mobile providers, who for years have been relentlessly trying to avoid the costs associated with deploying new technologies to increase their data throughput. But thse so-called "zero rating" practices are leading towards a multi-tiered Internet that provides content based on the content providers’ ability to pay.
San Jose Mercury News columnist Troy Wolverton, in an article titled Battle for net neutrality isn't over , warns that Internet and wireless providers’ "zero rating" practices are a threat to net neutrality, saying:
On their face, the zero-rating plans sound consumer-friendly and broadband providers tout them as such. Who doesn't want to get something for free or be able to access the Internet without having to tap into any of your precious data bits? But they actually have the potential to be pretty pernicious.
That's because zero-rating programs can also profoundly influence consumer behavior. Think about it: Which site are you more likely to visit — the one that's free or the one that costs you money or taps into your data allotment?
Because of those incentives, zero-rating programs put broadband providers in the position of picking winners and losers on the Internet.
The US government has been using civil cases and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) rulings to obtain software source code, looking for security flaws it can use for surveillance!
The latest thinking is that solid state drives (SSDs) are going to eventually replace hard drives, the only question is when. I don’t disagree, but I think it will only happen when the gigabytes-per-dollar and mean time between failure rates for SSDs exceeds that of hard drives, and we’re not even close yet in either department.
The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear the Samsung v. Apple patent case. This should be fun!
In an interesting change of course in the Apple v. FBI encryption case, the FBI asked the court for a continuance to put the cort action on hold, saying they had found a third party to break into the phone! I’m thinking they had already been following this path, but were trying to use the Apple case as a test case to set a precedent, but backed away after Apple refused to budge, and the technology industry, and civil rights and privacy advocacy groups came out backing Apple!
One of the cofounders of chip maker Intel, Andy Grove died at age 79.
Woodrow Hartzog, in an MIT Technology Reviw article titled The Feds Are Wrong to Warn of “Warrant-Proof” Phones, debunks the FBI's arguments, saying:
For most of mankind’s history, the overwhelming majority of our communications were warrant-proof in the sense that they just disappeared. They were ephemeral conversations. Even wiretapping was limited to intercepting phone transmissions, not retrieving past conversations. For law enforcement purposes, encrypted phones are equally inaccessible: no one can recover information from them. But Comey’s description of warrant-proof technologies is vague enough to apply to many different things. We should use a different term if we care about the preserving the ephemerality of some communications. Otherwise we might end up with a requirement to store everything.
Wired posted some deleted scenes from Star Trek: the Force Awakens. Just sayin’!
TechRepublic posted an article titled Here's how to see just how addicted to mobile you are! So, how adicted are you?!
Caroline Craig, in an InfoWorld article titled Apple vs. FBI is over, but the encryption battle rages on , points out the duplicity of the FBI, claiming Apple was the only one that could break into the terrorist’s iPhone, while all the while working with another company to break into it:
"This case was never about a phone. It was a grab for power, " said Evan Greer, campaign director of Fight for the Future. "The FBI already had the capability to hack this phone using forensic tools, but they thought this case would be a slam-dunk — a way for them to set a dangerous precedent that they've wanted for years."
The FBI and DOJ publicly claimed at least 19 times that there was no way to open the iPhone without Apple's help — a core tenet of their case using the All Writs Act. But it turns out the DOJ was already in talks in February with Israeli security firm Cellebrite about hacking an iPhone 6 for a drug case. The DOJ never mentioned Cellebrite as an alternative possibility in its filings with the court. In this case, that omission essentially amounts to lying.
Here’s one of the reasons I like to do business with Amazon: after a Google engineer complained about poorly-made USB-C cables being sold through Amazon, the online retail giant banned the vendor selling the defective cables, and updated their policy to require that USB cables sold through their site have to comply with the standard specifications published by the USB Implementers Forum Inc. (USB-IF), the non-profit corporation that developed the Universal Serial Bus specification.
After not getting the public outrage I’m sure they would like to have gotten in their very pubic encryption battle against Apple — instead of the very public outrage from the technology community and privacy advocates! — the FBI would probably like the whole thing to go away. But Apple is now upping the ante by demanding the details about how the San Bernardino iPhone was hacked!
March 15th, 2016
Netflix has been taking heat from users for blocking user access from Virtual Private Networking (VPN) sites. VPN technology was originally invented to allow corporate users to connect to their company networks through the company’s firewall via a "secure tunnel" that is almost impossible to break into. However, many users overseas have been paying for VPN services in the US so they can stream US Netflix content overseas. Netflix’s move is intended to keep Big Media happy, since they don’t want Region 1 content intended for the US market from finding itself overseas into other regions. However, many small companies in the US, who may be running a home-based business over their home networks, and are using these same US-based VPN services, are also being blocked.
In an increasingly-globalized economy, region encoding no longer makes sense. It was initially created at a time when DVD production was the newest, best way to distribute media; but films shown in movie theaters were still being distributed primarily via actual wide-format film on large, heavy metal reels several feet wide! Big Media claimed it was economically impossible to make enough copies to distribute a film worldwide at the same time. So the world was broken up into six regions, to reflect the schedule by which the films were distributed. DVDs were encoded to reflect which region or regions they were intended to play in, and only distributed for sale in that region after the film had first run in the region’s theaters. DVD players were built with technology to read the region code from the DVD and only play it if the player was designed to play DVDs from that region. Region Encoding is viewed by some legal minds as a violation of the First Sale Doctrine), and a market for region-free DVD and Blu-Ray players quickly cropped up and they are still widely available today. The VPN blocking is intended to perpetuate the same limitations for streaming media.
The New York Times reported that WhatsApp, and parent company Facebook, may be sued by the FBI, who can’t decrypt encrypted chat data. Unlike the Apple iPhone case, where the FBI just wants to break into the phone, in WhatsApp’s case, chat data is end-to-end encrypted, and there is nothing the company can do to assist the FBI in reading already encrypted messages. To comply with what the feds want, WhatsApp would have to make an engineer a change to its software security to create a new vulnerability, which they would then be forced to push onto the user's device to allow the FBI to eavesdrop on future communications!
In a case similar but unrelated to the San Bernardino case getting all the press, a federal judge in a New York drug case ruled that the U.S. government cannot force Apple to unlock an iPhone, saying:
The implications of the government’s position are so far-reaching – both in terms of what it would allow today and what it implies about Congressional intent in 1789 – as to produce impermissibly absurd results.
Microsoft President Brad Smith posted a letter online siding with Apple in its battle with the FBI over unlocking a terrorist’s iPhone, saying:
To be clear, we have the deepest respect for the work that law enforcement does to investigate crimes and keep people safe. We believe that our company and our industry have not only a role but a responsibility to help keep the public safe, in accordance with the law. We take this responsibility seriously and I’ve previously highlighted examples of how Microsoft has acted quickly to respond to legal requests from law enforcement authorities – for example, when French police were pursuing fugitives following the terrible terrorist attacks in Paris last year.
But it is also clear that people won’t use technology that they don’t trust. Modern laws that protect people’s most personal data are essential to building trust in technology.
A recent article in the San Jose Mercury News notes that, for newer iPhones with TouchID fingerprint sensor, law enforcement has been compelling owners to swipe the phone with their finger to unlock the phone without first seeking a search warrant.
AT&T recently filed a lawsuit against the city of Louisville, Kentucky after the city passed a measure allowing Google Fiber to use utility poles throughout the city, some of which belong to AT&T.
An amicus brief filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), siding with Apple, pointed out another novel reason why forcing software backdoors is a bad idea:
If the government's interpretation of the [1789 All Writs Act] law holds, not only could it force Apple to create the cryptographically signed software it seeks here, but it could force Apple to deliver similar signed software using Apple's automatic-update infrastructure. This would be devastating for cybersecurity, because it would cause individuals to legitimately fear and distrust the software update mechanisms built into their products.
Speaking at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, Microsoft's chief legal officer Brad Smith spoke in support of Apple in the encryption backdoor argument, saying:
We need to keep in mind that when it comes to security, there is no technology as important as encryption. And despite the best of intentions one thing is clear — the path to hell starts at the backdoor.
In a Wired article titled How the Feds Could Get Into iPhones Without Apple’s Help, Josh Valcarcel suggests that the FBI’s case against Apple might be flawed, saying:
. . . the [200-year-old law All Writs] Act requires the government to show that it has no other method of extracting data from the phones. And according to experts who spoke with WIRED, that’s not necessarily the case. They say there are ways the government can extract data on phones without Apple’s help, from using outside contractors to asking its friends at the NSA — ways that it has, in fact, already used in the past.
In a Wired article titled The Future Of Voting Could Be A Dystopian Nightmare, Damon Beres warns that "computers could become so adept at molding your behavior that you won’t really choose who you vote for anymore," explaining:
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Machine learning exists all around us today. Basically, the term refers to a program’s ability to study data, recognize patterns and then make predictions based on that data. Facebook, for example, uses machine learning to determine what you think is interesting and serve you similar content. You should never forget that anything you post online — be it a link, status or photograph — is really just data for an algorithm to read and learn from.
[Carnegie Mellon University’s Professor Illah] Nourbakhsh fears that this type of machine learning could soon become so advanced that politicians will be able to tap into programs that perfectly understand voters. Those programs, which Nourbakhsh said will likely be available only to the richest groups at first, could help shape how voters behave, based on what those people have done in the past.
Robert Reich, Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the Clinton administration Secretary of Labor posted An Open Letter to the Republican Establishment in which he explains why they may regret radicalizing the right-wingers backing Donald Trump, saying:
You are the captains of American industry, the titans of Wall Street, and the billionaires who for decades have been the backbone of the Republican Party. You’ve invested your millions in the GOP in order to get lower taxes, wider tax loopholes, bigger subsidies, more generous bailouts, less regulation, lengthier patents and copyrights and stronger market power allowing you to raise prices, weaken unions and bigger trade deals allowing you outsource abroad to reduce wages, easier bankruptcy for you but harder bankruptcy for homeowners and student debtors, and judges who will let you to engage in insider trading and who won’t prosecute you for white-collar crimes.
All of which have made you enormously wealthy. Congratulations.
But I have some disturbing news for you. You’re paying a big price &mdash and about to pay far more.
Mozilla has released the first proposal of its WebVR Application Programming Interface (API), which will allow Web developers to add 3D content to their pages!
According to an article in Wired, most of the large tech companies have lined up with Apple against the FBI’s attempt to force the tech giant to write code to break iPhone encryption. Lots of good quotes in this article from numerous sources!
Toyota Motor Corporation’s Partner Robotics group is developing a wearable device worn around the shoulders that helps the blind person wearing it learn about the world around them!
Windows Secrets pointed out a disturbing problem that could crop up on Windows 7 and newer systems: the Windows Indexing Service and the Microsoft Customer Improvement program are both set to run when your PC is asleep. However, if the PC has a dead fan or any other problem to limit air flow, these services can actually drive the PC into thermal overload, which, even if caught immediately, could degrade the life of the PC’s components!
In an InfoWorld article titled Why security is really all about trust, Roger A. Grimes notes that for Apple and other tech manufacturers, compromising the security of their products would violate users’ trust, saying:
The issue [of trust] is dogging Uber and other tech companies right now: Uber wants its customers to feel safe enough to hop into a stranger's car, despite horror stories stemming from a few bad apples. Apple, and nearly every other big name in the IT industry, is fighting the feds so that customers feel they can safely store private information. Every software vendor works hard against bugs and hackers to keep the trust of their customers.
Once trust is harmed, it can be impossible to regain. Ask anyone who’s ever been cheated on.
A coalition of civil rights activists sent a letter to the court in the Apple v. FBI case, saying:
As Rev. Jesse Jackson recalled last week, one need only look to the days of J. Edgar Hoover and wiretapping of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. to recognize theFBI has not always respected the right to privacy for groups it did not agree with. Even the FBI now agrees COINTELPRO amounted to a violation of the FirstAmendment.
And many of us, as civil rights advocates, have become targets of government surveillance for no reason beyond our advocacy or provision of social services forthe underrepresented.
We urge you to consider the dire implications for free speech and civil liberties if the FBI is permitted to force Apple to create technology to serve its investigatory purposes.
The Supreme Court decided not to hear Apple’s appeal of a case brought against them by the Justice Department and numerous states, who accused the online giant of violating antitrust laws when the company entered the e-book market in 2010. The government accused Apple and five publishers of price-fixing the e-books market in an effort to cut into Amazon's share of the industry.
InfoWorld posted a nice article on new emerging technologies for hard drives and flash media that could drive storage size per dollar up. Interesting stuff.
Israeli startup Deep Optics is developing eye glasses with liquid-crystal lenses that can automatically refocus.
Be careful, High School students! Your Free Speech could get you targeted by the feds as a terrorist! The FBI has posted a controversial document titled Preventing Violent Extremism in Schools (PDF) that instructs high school officials to look out for students who criticize government policies or talk about "western corruption" and report them as potential future terrorists! Teachers are asked to pay special attention to students who are poor, immigrants or have travelled to "suspicious" countries. Although they don’t come right out and say it, the program is obviously intended to target Muslim-American students!
Shareholders approved a merger between hard disk maker Western Digital and flash memory pioneers SanDisk. With solid state drives (SSDs) slowly replacing traditional spinning-disk hard drives, the merger makes perfect sense!
February 28th 2016
And so it begins: A sixth-grader in Palo Alto, California was expelled from his school for having genetic markers for cystic fibrosis, even though he did not have the disease. His parents are suing the school district for genetic discrimination.
TechRepublic posted an interesting article titled The 21 technology tipping points that will transform our world. Interesting stuff, but I don’t know how much I’d like to see a few of them.
Bruce Fein posted a Washington Times article titled Regulatory state endangers civil liberties, that warns:
The annual economic cost of the federal regulatory state exceeds $2 trillion. But its seldom-mentioned toll on civil liberties is equally troublesome.
Heavily regulated industries ordinarily refrain from opposing unconstitutional encroachments because their financial fates pivot on a host of discretionary regulatory decisions.
Space.com posted an article titled Star Trek: History & Effect on Space Technology, that describes how the show has affected actual technology.
Physicists at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte have created a light effect transistor that is controlled by light. It is easier to create and can supposedly be made smaller than the field effect transistors currently being used.
With its traditional silicon-based designs reaching the limits of speed and power savings, Intel is looking at alternative materials to keep making faster, less power-hungry chips.
ZDNet’s Zack Whittaker reports that most of the Windows vulnerabilities experienced last year could have been prevented by removing accounts with administrative rights. This ignores the facts that many custom business applications are written to require administrative rights to work correctly!
ZDNet’s Ed Bott reports that although many consumer-level users are upgrading to Windows 10, Windows 7 still dominates on enterprise PCs, and they aren’t in a hurry to upgrade.
SiliconValley.com’s Troy Wolverton explains new business plans called "zero rating" that the Big ISPs are using to get around the Federal Communications Commission’s "Open Internet" rules:
Zero rating is the practice by broadband providers of offering customers access to particular apps, sites or services for free or without tapping into customers' limited monthly allocations of bandwidth. Examples include Facebook Zero, which offers consumers in developing countries free access to the social network; AT&T's Sponsored Data service, which the company pitches as a kind of 1-800 service for the Internet; and T-Mobile's new Binge On service, which allows users to stream video from certain providers without that data counting against their monthly caps.
A Berkeley professor and a graduate student have invented a robotic cockroach that could be used to squeeze through cracks to find victims in collapsed buildings.
A report from the Harvard University Berkman Center's Berklett Cybersecurity Project, titled Don’t Panic (PDF) questions the Federal Governments assertion that bad guys can "go dark," saying:
. . . we take the warnings of the FBI and others at face value: conducting certain types of surveillance has, to some extent, become more difficult in light of technological changes. Nevertheless, we question whether the “going dark” metaphor accurately describes the state of affairs. Are we really headed to a future in which our ability to effectively surveil criminals and bad actors is impossible? We think not.
Broadband provider ViaSat and aerospace firm Boeing are deploying three satellites for a new global Internet network. The system will be able to provide 100MB service direct to users. Talk about getting rid of the middle-man!
In the fine print of the service agreement for Amazon Web Services’ Lumberyard 3D graphics engine, intended for use in online games, is a zombie apocalypse clause. Really!
Tiwanese PC maker Acer and 74 other hardware makers (so far) in 25 countries have signed up to preload Microsoft apps and services on their Android mobile devices, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, OneDrive and Skype.
All-electric auto maker Tesla confirmed that the new Tesla Model 3 will start at $35,000.
Trekies rejoice! A new Star Trek TV series is in production. The as-yet unnamed series will be based in the new Star Trek universe, falling after the pending Star Trek Beyond movie in time.
According to a Worldwide Survey of Encryption Products (PDF) conducted by Harvard University professors Bruce Schneier, Kathleen Seidel, and Saranya Vijayakumar argues that many encryption products are created in other countries, so mandating encryption back doors will only drive business to other countries who don’t require them, concluding:
Laws regulating product features are national, and only affect people living in the countries in which they’re enacted. It is easy to purchase products, especially software products, that are sold anywhere in the world from everywhere in the world. Encryption products come from all over the world. Any national law mandating encryption backdoors will overwhelmingly affect the innocent users of those products. Smart criminals and terrorists will easily be able to switch to more-secure alternatives.
The Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) spacecraft Dragon was the first private spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station, under a NASA contract to lift supplies to the ISS.
A ZDNet article describes how presidential campaigns use data and social media to microtarget voters.
Computer security expert Bruce Schnier, in an article titled When hacking could enable murder warns about the potential threats the Internet of Things, self-driving cars and other autonomous devices could cause, saying:
We're heading toward a world where driverless cars will automatically communicate with each other and the roads, automatically taking us where we need to go safely and efficiently. The confidentiality threats are real: Someone who can eavesdrop on those communications can learn where the cars are going and maybe who is inside them. But the integrity threats are much worse.
Someone who can feed the cars false information can potentially cause them to crash into each other or nearby walls. Someone could also disable your car so it can't start. Or worse, disable the entire system so that no one's car can start.
A man learned his wife was pregnant by examining her Fitbit data . . . with a little help from friends online!
Researchers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) were able to detect gravity waves for the first time. This is important because gravity is the "third leg" of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the other two being electricity and magnetism. Virtually all of our current technology exists by manipulating the electromagnetic spectrum, the interaction between electricity and magnetism. However, Einstein’s theory of general relativity suggests that two additional spectra exist: electrogravatic (the interaction between electricity and gravity) and magnetogravatic (the interaction between magnetism and gravity). It is theorized that being able to manipulate these two spectra could lead to SciFi staples such as artificial gravity, tractor beams, and propulsion systems.
Apple CEO Tim Cook, whose company is in the middle of the government effort to bypass encryption security posted an open letter to their customers, explaining why they refused to comply with the FBI’s request to build a custom back door for the iPhone operating system, concluding:
Opposing this order is not something we take lightly. We feel we must speak up in the face of what we see as an overreach by the U.S. government.
We are challenging the FBI’s demands with the deepest respect for American democracy and a love of our country. We believe it would be in the best interest of everyone to step back and consider the implications.
While we believe the FBI’s intentions are good, it would be wrong for the government to force us to build a backdoor into our products. And ultimately, we fear that this demand would undermine the very freedoms and liberty our government is meant to protect.
Scientists at the University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have developed a five dimensional (5D) write/read process to store up to 360TB of digital data on one-inch diameter nanostructure glass disks! Think "data crystals!"
The latest major victim of ransomware is Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles, who paid hackers $17,000 in bitcoins to get back control of their computers!
Julian Sanchez, in a Time Magazine article titled This Is the Real Reason Apple Is Fighting the FBI does a good job of describing one of the key technical reasons back doors are a bad thing:
The global market for both traditional computing devices and the new breed of networked appliances depends critically on an underlying ecosystem of trust—trust that critical security updates pushed out by developers and signed by their cryptographic keys will do what it says on the tin, functioning and interacting with other code in a predictable and uniform way. The developer keys that mark code as trusted are critical to that ecosystem, which will become ever more difficult to sustain if developers can be systematically forced to deploy those keys at the behest of governments. Users and consumers will reasonably be even more distrustful if the scope of governments’ ability to demand spyware disguised as authentic updates is determined, not by a clear framework, but a hodgepodge of public and secret court decisions.
In a USA Today article titled Apple, the FBI and free speechlawyers David B. Rivkin, Jr. and Andrew M. Grossman suggest the federal court order compelling Apple to write new software for iPhone may violate the First Amendment, saying:
Computer code can be speech: no less than video games (which the Supreme Court found to be protected), code can convey ideas and even social messages. A new encryption algorithm or mathematical technique, for example, does not lose its character as speech merely because it is expressed in a computer language instead of English prose.
That’s not to say that all code is absolutely protected. But there’s a strong case to be made where code embodies deeply held views on issues of public policy and individual rights — such as the right to be free from government surveillance. Forcing a person to write code to crack his own software is little different from demanding that he endorse the principle of doing so.
In an InfoWorld article titled Why we must defend our last shred of privacy journalist and computer security author Roger A. Grimes places the Apple v. FBI privacy issue in a larger historical context, saying:
There’s little our governments don’t already know about us. They know what you read and buy. They know where you drive, where you go on the Internet, who you communicate with.
The problem is that a society without privacy protections is not a free society. Although the government may tout extreme, individual circumstances that justify violation of privacy, once a new Rubicon is crossed, it's never uncrossed. In nearly every instance where governments have been given the legal right to invade our privacy, they exceed the given authority and exercise those privacy invasions to far more people and instances than permitted by a specific case.
How techies are losing the Apple-FBI privacy fight information security journalist Fahmida Y. Rashid
The thing is, even with all the secret documents that Snowden stole from the NSA, the average user isn't any more concerned about government surveillance today than he or she was three years ago. Sure, it's terrible, but when it comes to user privacy it's still a world of weak passwords, mobile devices with no passcode (or TouchID) enabled, and an overall lack of urgency. Skip the arguments about how if the FBI wins this round, law enforcement will keep coming back with more requests against more devices.
. . . If the FBI gets its way on bypassing this iPhone 5c's protections, what would stop other governments from coming to Apple, Dell, and other companies and asking for help modifying the devices we use to further their own purposes?
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology posted a Keys Under Doormats: mandating insecurity by requiring government access to all data and communications
We have found that the damage that could be caused by law enforcement exceptional access requirements would be even greater today than it would have been 20 years ago. In the wake of the growing economic and social cost of the fundamental insecurity of today’s Internet environment, any proposals that alter the security dynamics online should be approached with caution. Exceptional access would force Internet system developers to reverse “forward secrecy” design practices that seek to minimize the impact on user privacy when systems are breached. The complexity of today’s Internet environment, with millions of apps and globally connected services, means that new law enforcement requirements are likely to introduce unanticipated, hard to detect security flaws. Beyond these and other technical vulnerabilities, the prospect of globally deployed exceptional access systems raises difficult problems about how such an environment would be governed and how to ensure that such systems would respect human rights and the rule of law.
In a 30-minute interview on ABC News, Apple CEO Tim Cook warned that, by demanding that his company write custom code to unlock an iPhone the Feds are asking them to write "the software equivalent of cancer," saying:
The only way to get information — at least currently, the only way we know — would be to write a piece of software that we view as sort of the equivalent of cancer. We think it's bad news to write. We would never write it. We have never written it — and that is what is at stake here. We believe that is a very dangerous operating system.
Apple filed a motion to vacate the court to unlock the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone, saying:
This is not a case about one isolated iPhone. Rather, this case is about the Department of Justice and the FBI seeking through the courts a dangerous power that Congress and the American people have withheld: the ability to force companies like Apple to undermine the basic security and privacy interests of hundreds of millions of individuals around the globe.
Retired New Jersey Superior Court Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, in an article titled Apple’s Involuntary Servitude, claims that the secret warrant the Department of Justice obtained against Apple was "improperly granted," and warns:
. . . the DoJ has obtained a unique search warrant I have ever seen in 40 years of examining them. Here, the DoJ has persuaded a judge to issue a search warrant for A THING THAT DOES NOT EXIST, by forcing Apple to create a key that the FBI is incapable of creating.
There is no authority for the government to compel a nonparty to its case to do its work, against the nonparty’s will, and against profound constitutional values. Essentially, the DoJ wants Apple to hack into its own computer product, thereby telling anyone who can access the key how to do the same.
If the courts conscripted Apple to work for the government and thereby destroy or diminish its own product, the decision would constitute a form of slavery, which is prohibited by our values and by the Thirteenth Amendment.
A Federal Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a lower court judgement against Samsung brought by Apple, claiming that features of the Korean electronics giant’s Android smartphones violated some of its iPhone patents. The federal court ruled that the key features of Apple's lawsuit were too obvious to count!
There has been quite a bit of speculation why Apple chose to sue phone maker Samsung, instead of Google which created the Android OS their phones run on. Best guess? Google could afford more lawyers!
Retiring Cisco CEO John Chambers says 40% of companies will be dead in 10 years if they don’t move their products into the digital world. This article discusses the concept of digital disruption: "the change that occurs when new digital technologies and business models affect the value proposition of existing goods and services." Digital music replacing CDs and records is a good, early example. So is Orbitx and Expedia replacing the "brick and mortar" travel agencies. And newer examples like Uber and Lyft challenging the taxi market; and Airbnb challenging the hotel industry. This trend is expected to continue until anything that can be done cheaper and more efficiently on the Internet will eventually move online. The point of Mr. Chambers’ article is that companies should figure out how to make the transformation themselves, before some other company does!
The Human Rights Risks of Encryption ‘Back Doors’ Carey Shenkman
One fact that has received little attention in the current encryption debate is that many categories of individuals rely on strong encryption for their own security. These include sexual and gender-based rights activists, domestic violence victims, journalists and their sources, and human rights defenders. Strong encryption is necessary to protect fundamental human rights; as one technologist puts it, encryption saves lives.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has won a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against Customers and Border Protection Agency (PDF), which failed to fully comply with a FOIA request EPIC submitted seeking information about the Analytical Framework for Intelligence, which CBP uses to assign "risk assessments" to travelers.
January 30th 2016
According to a Gallup poll, 81 percent of smartphone users keep their phone nearby during nearly every waking hour, and 51 percent check their phone at least a few times an hour! I may check my phone frequently during, but at bedtime it stays charging in my office, inaudible from my bedroom, thank you!
Computerworld’s Gregg Keizer dug up a presentation posted on the Microsoft investor's website that explains how Microsoft will account for revenue from Windows 10 sales, which raises some troubling questions about how long a free upgrade to Windows 10 will last.
InforWorld’s Paul Venezia posted a well-written article arguing against anti-encryption efforts by the Federal Government.
The fact is all this talk of the encryption boogeyman is not based on facts. This rhetoric could only succeed with people who do not understand the technology — but that might be enough to compromise the security of every person on earth and make criminals extremely happy.
Adding backdoors to new encryption methods would render them useless. Mandating their use in common communications protocols would necessarily compromise those protocols and those communications — not for the governments that wish to have this access, but to the criminal elements that would use those backdoors as soon as they were available. Those who are smart enough to use encryption to hide their criminal communications will continue to do so without any problems or interference. Strong encryption already exists — we can't erase it.
This isn’t a game, and it isn’t up for debate. It’s reality.
Government isn’t the only threat: Mr. Schnier also posted a nice article titled Can laws keep up with tech world?, that describe legal activities by governments on the part of older established systems to block the use of new Internet apps that threaten the older technologies’ profits!
In a similar vein, Mr. Schnier posted an article titled How the Internet of Things Limits Consumer Choice, that describes how companies are using the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) intended to prohibit companies from circumventing "technological protection measures" like copy protection to prevent competitors to reverse-engineer technologies to make cheaper, compatible products!
Nanomaterials chemist Peidong Yang has set up systems that use photosynthesis similar to that used in plant leaves to turn water and carbon dioxide into fuels without adding carbon compounds to the air!
PC gamers love to build custom PCs, with just the right parts: the fastest CPU, video card, etc., on the market! But the really hard core PC gamers build custom cases to assemble them in . . . like this Star Wars Star Destroyer case! The extensive detail was created by a 3D printer!
ZDNet’s Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols says Linux and open-source software took over the IT world, and that is true for large server farms and Web sites. But Windows still runs on PCs and servers throughout the business world, and still dominates on consumer PCs, particularly desktop and notebook models.
With Google Android Auto and Apple CarPlay showing up in new cars, buyers have had to decide which manufacturers’ models to purchase based on their choice of smartphone! No longer! Ford announced that its new SYNC 3 connectivity system will connect up with Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, and 4G LTE!. It also is offering AppLink technology to serve as a voice interface between the car and Android and iOS apps on your smartphone!
Researchers at HRL Laboratories are demonstrating high-resolution 3D printing of objects using ceramic materials, which while lightweight, are, compared to plastic parts, extremely strong and resistant to degradation due to heat, chemicals, and friction.
Not tech-related, but as the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by armed anti-government activists drags on, journalist Eugene Robinson wonders:
What do you think the response would be if a bunch of black people, filled with rage and armed to the teeth, took over a federal government installation and defied officials to kick them out? I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be wait-and-see.
Probably more like point-and-shoot.
Or what if the occupiers were Mexican-American? They wouldn’t be described with the semi-legitimizing term "militia," harking to the days of the patriots. And if the gun-toting citizens happened to be Muslim, heaven forbid, there would be wall-to-wall cable news coverage of the "terrorist assault." I can hear Donald Trump braying for blood.
He has a point, however, as journalist Justin Raimondo reports, the saddest fact surrounding this case is that, despite their poorly thought out, over-the-top actions, the protesters had a point: the Feds have been after the Hammond family ranch for years, and used a series of despicable — and in some cases allegedly illegal! — acts to force the Hammonds and other ranchers in the area to sell their property to expand the refuge.
Microsoft’s Windows Embedded has been the operating system of choice for small devices needing a customized, read-only OS since the late 1990’s, particularly for supply chain devices hosting a scanner. But in 2017 Microsoft is ending support for Windows Embedded 6, the version running in 99 percent of current devices, so device vendors are looking at shifting to the Android OS instead!
Ever heard of "visual hacking?" This is where someone surreptitiously looks over a user’s shoulder to see what they are typing! To combat this, HP is building privacy filters into its laptop and tablet displays that block the view from 35 degrees or more on each side of the display. It can be turned on and off.
A new open-source app called Syncthing will let you sync your mobile devices with your desktop PC or any computer on your network that you choose (for a small fee).
For those who want to know, ZDNet posted a nice article on How to prevent your PC from upgrading to Windows 10 using a free third-party application.
AMD has announced its new 14nm FinFET-based Graphics Processing Unit (GPU ) architecture, dubbed Polaris, which it says can double the performance per watt over earlier-generation Radeon GPUs.
David Chaum — who did early work on security protocols that led to anonymous web browsing and digital cash — has introduced a new secure network called PrivaTegrity that cannot be hacked.
Again, no tech involved, but I liked the quote from Whoopie Goldberg on The View, when she was called an "African American":
My mother, my grandmother, my great-grand folks, we busted ass to be here. I’m sorry. I’m an American. I’m not an African-American, I’m not a chick American, I’m an American!
As a parent and grandparent of multi-racial kids and grandkids, I say "You Go, Woopie! We’re all Americans!"
VirginGalatic’s first SpaceShipTwo spacecraft, called Enterprise, was lost during its 55th test flight, i.e. it successfully returned to earth 54 times without incident! The second SpaceShipTwo rolled out of production on February 19th 2016, and has begun testing.
New startup Faraday Future is showing off a concept version of its FFZERO1 electric race car, a futuristic-designed 1,000-horsepower vehicle that is expected to eventually challenge Tesla for "coolest all-electric sports car" on the market.
If you’re interested in an absolutely no-compromise gamer PC, the Maingear Alpha 34 AIO (all-in-one) desktop is one to look at. It is built around a 3,840-by-1,440-pixel resolution, 34-inch curved display, and sports several Intel CPU options including an 8-core Extreme Edition and an 18-core Xeon CPU version (Xeons CPUs are usually only found in high-end servers!). Graphics processor options including Nvidia Titan X or 980Ti, or Radeon R9 390X. 32GB of Kingston DDR4 RAM; and a 2.5Gbps Samsung 950 Pro M.2 NVME Solid State Drive (SSD) rounds out the hardware. List price is $1999, but plan on spending $7,704 if you want the Xeon-equipped model!
Samsung is showing off its new Galaxy TabPro S, a two-way notebook/tablet PC running Windows 10 it hopes will cut into Microsoft’s Surface sales.
Smart guns — which can be personalized to shoot only if the owner is holding it — could save lives, but the gun lobby is trying its best to stop their sales in the US, and it’s getting ugly:
[Gun shop] Engage Armament announced it would start carrying the iP1 [a 22 caliber, 10-round pistol made in Germany] on May 1st. It backpedaled less than 24 hours later, after gun-rights advocates lashed out on Facebook and called the store, threatening to shoot Raymond, his girlfriend, and his dog.
Wired posed a great review of the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show, with lots of photos and videos of their favorite new products.
For you retro OS lovers out there, ZDNet posted an article that describes Perfectly legal ways you can still get Windows 7 cheap (or even free). The easiest — but likely most expensive — way is to buy a new or refurbished PC with the OS preinstalled. There are still a lot of them advertised online. Other methods include buying an OEM System Builder version, or repurposing a license from an older PC you put out to pasture.
End of an era: Chinese tech company Lenovo is planning to kill off the Motorola brand which they bought out in 2014 from Google. They’ll keep the classic stylized "M" logo and the "Moto" name for high-end mobile devices. Sad. If you’ll remember the Motorola Droid was the first commercially successful phone running the Android OS. I had one, and two other Motorola phones since, including my current phone, which is a Droid X.
Scientists working on developing artificial intelligence are discussing the concept of "singularity: " a time in the future when machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence. Ray Kurzweil, a long-time proponent of singularity predicted that computers will achieve human-level intelligence by the end of the 2020s. However, in 2011 Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen argued that a concept they dubbed the "complexity brake" will delay AI development:
As we go deeper and deeper in our understanding of natural systems, we typically find that we require more and more specialized knowledge to characterize them, and we are forced to continuously expand our scientific theories in more and more complex ways. Understanding the detailed mechanisms of human cognition is a task that is subject to this complexity brake.
Another non-tech issue, but important and timely: Chris Hedges, in a Truthdig article titled The Great Forgetting warns that by abandoning the teaching of culture in our schools, we’ve created a populous that is vulnerable to the over-the-top jingoism of politicians like Donald Trump:
The decades-long assault on the arts, the humanities, journalism and civic literacy is largely complete. All the disciplines that once helped us interpret who we were as a people and our place in the world — history, theater, the study of foreign languages, music, journalism, philosophy, literature, religion and the arts — have been corrupted or relegated to the margins. We have surrendered judgment for prejudice. We have created a binary universe of good and evil. And our colossal capacity for violence is unleashed around the globe, as well as on city streets in poor communities, with no more discernment than that of the blinded giant Polyphemus. The marriage of ignorance and force always generates unfathomable evil, an evil that is unseen by perpetrators who mistake their own stupidity and blindness for innocence.
Elon Musk says that within two years the Summon feature in new Tesla electric cars will be able to drive themselves across the country! The newer cars already have an Autopilot feature, and the current version of Summon can pull the car into or out of the garage without a driver!
From backup devices to extra drive space on the go, external hard drives are becoming more necessary all the time, and PC Magazine has posted a nice article titled The 10 Best External Hard Drives of 2016, to help you buy one that matches your need. I have a 4TB version of the Western Digital MyCloud, a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device for sharable storage on the network; and a 1TB Toshiba Canvio USB 3.0 drive attached to my main PC that Windows 10 File History points to. Both have pluses and minuses, which is why I have both, and both have been running flawlessly since I bought them!
If none of the drives listed in the article are big enough, Seagate is offering an 8 TB NAS model targeted at the home and small business market.
Effective Jan 12th 2016, Microsoft ended support for all but the latest version of Internet Explorer on each current platform: Internet Explorer 9 on Vista and Windows Server 2008, Internet Explorer 9 on Windows Server 2012, and Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, which also has Windows Edge. However Windows 7 users, stuck with Internet Explorer 8, are not going to see any further IE security updates, despite that platform still in wide use. The only choices Win7 users have is to upgrade to Windows 10, or use a third-party browser such as Firefox or Chrome.
Enterprise network gear Juniper Networks announced it will remove the NSA-developed Dual Elliptic Curve DRBG standard from its ScreenOS platform, after news emerged that the NSA had built a backdoor into it!
According to a Silicon Valley survey titled Elephant in the Valley, women working in technology are often subjected to unwanted sexual advances, are called “too aggressive” or “too quiet,” and are often overlooked at meetings.
Anyone who’s seen Google Glass smart glasses know they are just plain ugly, and call attention to the wearer. Noted lens makers Carl Zeiss have created a smart lens technology that looks like regular lenses, and can even be made into your prescription! They’re currently looking for a company to partner with to build and sell them!
In a Huffington Post article titled Wanting It Bad Enough Won't Make It Work: Why Adding Backdoors and Weakening Encryption Threatens the Internet , Meredith Whittaker and Ben Laurie from the Association for Computing Machinery, the oldest computer professional organization in the world, chimed in against the latest push by government to limit strong encryption and add in back doors, saying:
We are not here to debate whether such access is useful from a policy perspective, i.e. whether it would work to stop bad guys. While a critical discussion that raises many worthy questions, we leave it to others. We are here to review the technical realities of networked systems, and to explore the impact and potential danger of such proposals from this perspective.
To put it bluntly: the call to provide law enforcement (or, anyone) exceptional access to communications and content poses a grave threat to the future of the Internet. It is simply not possible to give the good guys the access they want without letting the bad guys in. There’s nothing new or novel in this statement. Experts have been saying the same thing for 20 years. While the message is old, with the integration of Internet technologies into nearly all aspects of life, the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been.
Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux, in an article titled The Secret Government Rulebook for Labeling You a Terrorist, note that the rules that can get you listed as a terrorist have less to do with terrorist acts and more to do with property damage, saying:
The document’s definition of "terrorist" activity includes actions that fall far short of bombing or hijacking. In addition to expected crimes, such as assassination or hostage-taking, the guidelines also define destruction of government property and damaging computers used by financial institutions as activities meriting placement on a list. They also define as terrorism any act that is "dangerous" to property and intended to influence government policy through intimidation.
Which begs the question: who are they protecting? Us or Corporate America?
A New York Assemblyman introduced a bill that would require all smartphones sold in his state to have a back door for law enforcement. Needless to say, everyone from technologists to privacy advocates urged New York citizens to log onto the state’s legislation Web page and let their legislators know their poor opinion of the idea! At last check the bill is still stuck in committee!
It had to happen: the FitBark Activity Monitor is a wearable fitness monitor . . . for dogs! Seriously! Currently on sale for $54.95. Bet teaching the dog to operate it would be a bitch!
As of the fourth quarter of 2015, worldwide PC shipment have declined for five consecutive quarters. However, now that Windows 10 appears to be stable, PC sales are expected to increase in 2016.
In an article titled Big Cable’s Sledgehammer Is Coming Down, Harvard Law Professor Susan Crawford warns:
. . . Comcast has intentionally architected the last-mile connections within its network pipe to allow for two different "lanes." Traffic is either in one lane or the other. A rough way to describe it would be one lane for digital services that Comcast controls or has a relationship with, and the other for high-speed internet access.
Please read the whole article to understand what Comcast is trying to do, and why Network Neutrality laws are necessary to keep the Internet open.
Tamara Fields, whose husband Lloyd was killed in an ISIS bombing, filed a lawsuit against the social media network Twitter, claiming that they "knowingly permitted" the Islamic State to use their network to spread extremist propaganda.
I feel her pain, but my problem with this idea is that the tool maker shouldn’t be held responsible for how someone uses their tools. Sears wouldn’t be sued if someone uses their Craftsmen hammer to brain someone, since we all understand that hammers are tools that are subject to use and misuse, and that the human wielding it is to blame, not the company who madee the hammer. The terorists, not the social media network, should be blamed if they use the network to do bad things.
Intel will be building a password security technology called Intel Authenticate into its sixth-generation processors, which will support multifactor authentication. Building it into the CPU would make security extremely hard to hack!
All next-generation processors built by Intel, AMD, and others will only support Windows 10, since drivers won't be made available for earlier versions of Windows. Yes, this includes Intel’s new Skylake series CPUs.
The FCC is concerned that, while broadband is steadily improving, 39 percent of the rural population is being left behind. This so-called "digital divide", which includes poor urban areas, has been a persistent problem as long as the Internet has existed. Smartphones have reduced this limitation somewhat, particularly among younger users. And in some cases, the Big ISPs are being bypassed by innovative local solutions, but they are by far the exception rather than the rule. In my opinion, this issue can be laid at the feet of governments unwilling to (or being bribed not to!) encourage expansion into rural and poor urban areas; and ISPs that aren’t willing to deploy into those areas because it is less profitable and, even worse, often lobby to prevent local and regional governments from deploying broadband there on their own.
The practice of Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD) to work has steadily increased as an issue for companies as employees bring their notebook PCs, smartphones and tablets to work and connect them to the corporate network. But now, employers need to worry about employees bringing in wearable devices like smartwatches, fitness bracelets, etc. Some question whether these count as BYODs. As a retired network engineer, I say “if it connects to the network it counts.” Beyond that, these devices are a greater possible threat because most of them require a connection to the device maker’s network on the cloud to be useful. So not only do they suck up company bandwidth, they can potentially act as a bridge between the company network and cloud-based networks that may or may not be secure, thus opening a security hole in the network!
Im my opinion, the BYOD best solution is to set up a separate wireless network for BYOD, not connected to the corporate network.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and six other consumer privacy organizations filed an amicus brief in support of the Federal Communications Commission (PDF) in the case ACA International v. FCC, in which the Association of Credit and Collection Professionals (ACA) — responding to FCC ruling that clamp down on unsolicited wireless calls and text messages — argue that the FCC’s interpretations of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA) are "arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act, are contrary to the text of the TCPA, and violate the constitutional guarantees of due process and the free speech." The amicus brief counters these arguments, noting:
The TCPA prohibits invasive business practices and extends consumer control over their personal information by requiring business to obtain meaningful consent from subscribers before subjecting them to automated or prerecorded calls.
The petitioners and interveners seek to engage in the very practices that Congress prohibited: making invasive and unwanted calls with "autodialers" and prerecorded messages.
EPIC also submitted a Letter to FCC on Communications Privacy (PDF), urging the agency to "move quickly on a proposal to undertake a rulemaking consistent to protect the communications privacy of consumers."
According to a Gallup poll, 81 percent of smartphone users keep their phone nearby during nearly every waking hour, and 51 percent check their phone at least a few times an hour! While I check it regularly, my smartphone stays in my home office charging when I go to bed, inaudible from my bedroom, thank you!
Computerworld’s Gregg Keizer unearthed a presentation posted on the Microsoft investor's website that explains how the software giant will account for Windows 10 sales revenues, which suggests that those free upgrades to Windows 10 will only last two to four years!
InfoWorld’s Paul Venezia posted a we’ll-written article arguing against the Federal Government’s anti-encryption efforts, noting:
The fact is all this talk of the encryption boogeyman is not based on facts. This rhetoric could only succeed with people who do not understand the technology — but that might be enough to compromise the security of every person on earth and make criminals extremely happy.
Adding backdoors to new encryption methods would render them useless. Mandating their use in common communications protocols would necessarily compromise those protocols and those communications — not for the governments that wish to have this access, but to the criminal elements that would use those backdoors as soon as they were available. Those who are smart enough to use encryption to hide their criminal communications will continue to do so without any problems or interference. Strong encryption already exists — we can't erase it.
This isn’t a game, and it isn’t up for debate. It’s reality.
ZDNet’s Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols says Linux and open-source software took over the IT world, and that is true for large server farms and Web sites. But Windows still runs on PCs and servers throughout the business world, and still dominate on consumer PCs, particularly desktop and notebook models.
With Google Android Auto and Apple CarPlay showing up in new cars, buyers have had to decide which manufacturers’ models to purchase based in part on their choice of smartphone (or maybe the other way around)! No longer! Ford announced that its new SYNC 3 connectivity system with Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, and 4G LTE!. It also is offering AppLink technology to serve as a voice interface between the car and Android and iOS apps on your smartphone!
Researchers at HRL Laboratories are demonstrating the high-resolution 3D printing of objects using ceramic materials, which while lightweight are, compared to plastic parts, extremely strong and resistant to degradation due to heat, chemicals, and friction.
Despite strong lobbying by power companies, California Public Utilities Commission ruled that homeowners with solar systems can continue to receive full credit when they provide more power to the electricity grid than they use. The regulators hope to make deploying new rooftop solar systems more attractive to consumers.
In an article titled How an Overreaction to Terrorism Can Hurt Cybersecurity, computer security expert Bruce Schneier points out the danger of building "back doors" into encryption protocols:
We can’t build an access system that works only for people with a certain citizenship or a particular morality, or in the presence of a specified legal document. If the FBI can eavesdrop on your text messages or get at your computer’s hard drive, so can other governments. So can criminals. So can terrorists. If you want to understand the details, read a 2015 paper coauthored by MIT professor Hal Abelson, called "Keys Under Doormats: Mandating Insecurity by Requiring Government Access to All Data and Communications." (PDF).
Yeah, bottom line: a hole is a hole. Anyone can come in!
In a TechRepublic article titled The future of electric cars: Why the battery race will define it and Musk is a genius, Hope Reese interviews author and researcher Steve LeVine, who offers a nice recap of battery development, and predicts future developments in the electric car market.
Marvin Minsky, considered to be the Father of AI passed away at age 88.
Fixstars, known for storage optimization software solutions, has got into the Solid State Drive (SSD) market, and is showing off 2.5-inch 10 and 13TB models. These are not cheap, however: the 13TB model retails for $19,000!
A MIT med student has designed a prototype stabilizing glove dubbed the GyroGlove for Parkinson's patients, that can reduce hand tremors by 90 percent by using gyros to dampen hand movements!
John W. Whitehead, in an article titled The Right to Tell the Government to Go to Hell, warned, "our appreciation for a robust freedom of speech has worn thin over the years," noting:
Unfortunately, in the war being waged between free speech purists who believe that free speech is an inalienable right and those who believe that free speech should be regulated, the censors are winning. Free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws and a host of other legalistic maladies dreamed up by politicians and prosecutors have conspired to corrode our core freedoms.
If we no longer have the right to tell a Census Worker to get off our property, if we no longer have the right to tell a police officer to get a search warrant before they dare to walk through our door, if we no longer have the right to stand in front of the Supreme Court wearing a protest sign or approach an elected representative to share our views, if we no longer have the right to voice our opinions in public — no matter how misogynistic, hateful, prejudiced, intolerant, misguided or politically incorrect they might be — then we do not have free speech.