New Technology News

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

As the co-fathers of the Internet, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn tend to be pretty protective of their digital masterpiece. Both were early Defense Department engineers of the communications architecture that underlies the modern Internet, and both tend be outspoken about threats to a free and open information superhighway. For instance, when a United Nations body, the Internet Telecommunications Union, tried to assert more control over Internet governance, Cerf was immediately dispatched to Washington D.C. to preempt the power grab.

The National Security spying scandal has, likewise, been hailed as a global threat to privacy and the Internet itself. In a wide-ranging interview with the New York Times, Cerf and Kahn had a more reserved concern for government surveillance.

Here is Cerf on the NSA:

Q. Edward Snowden’s actions have raised a new storm of controversy about the role of the Internet. Is it a significant new challenge to an open and global Internet?

A. The answer is no, I don’t think so. There are some similar analogues in history. The French historically copied every telex or every telegram that you sent, and they shared it with businesses in order to remain competitive. And when that finally became apparent, it didn’t shut down the telegraph system.

The Snowden revelations will increase interest in end-to-end cryptography for encrypting information both in transit and at rest. For many of us, including me, who believe that is an important capacity to have, this little crisis may be the trigger that induces people to spend time and energy learning how to use it.

To give a bit of background, Cerf has suggested that privacy is a relatively new concept (and, historically, he’s correct). During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln collected all telegrams, in a move that has been compared to the modern surveillance state. It appears that this type of mass surveillance, followed by new privacy laws, is typical in American history.

Khan seemed far more reserved in opining how the NSA affects privacy:

Q: Is there a solution to challenges of privacy and security?

In the 1990s when I was on the National Internet Infrastructure Advisory Committee, Al Gore showed up as vice president, and he made an impassioned pitch for Clipper chip [an early government surveillance system]. He said, “We need to be very aware of the needs of national security and law enforcement.” Even though the private sector was arguing for tight encryption, the federal government needed [to be able to conduct surveillance]. It never went, and it’s not anywhere today. I think it’s probably easier to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem than it is to solve this.

A bit of background, in the 90′s, the government proposed a hardware backdoor to cell phones, known as the “Clipper Chip”. Hackers and activists successfully fought its implementation. Privacy is a perennial problem on the Internet–one that may never be solved.

Read the full interview here.

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How the Internet’s Founders Feel About The NSA Scandal

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As the co-fathers of the Internet, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn tend to be pretty protective of their digital masterpiece. Both were early De...

According to The Information, Sony could release a Windows Phone device, diversifying its mobile device lineup, bolstering Microsoft, and perhaps demonstrating a growing wish among hardware firms to hedge against an Android-dominated future.

Sony appears to be strongly interested in the project. The Verge wrote this morning that the company has continued the project despite Microsoft’s plan to purchase Nokia’s handset business. Its willingness to consider building a Windows Phone device despite the platform having a firm home-advantage tilt towards Microsoft’s own hardware is indicative.

For Sony the move would diversify its mobile line away from Android, a platform now generally associated with Samsung hardware. The irony to that is the simple fact that Nokia is the de facto Windows Phone OEM, so Sony would be entering into a second realm where it would be a second-place player.

The winner in Sony’s potential entrance is Microsoft, even if the release of a Vaio-branded Windows Phone handset could potentially slow sales growth of its — soon to be owned — Lumia phones. Microsoft would collect a per-unit fee, perhaps enjoy faster overall platform sales growth, and, of course, there has ever been an implied connection between the Windows Phone and Xbox product lines. We have yet to see hard evidence in my estimation that one leads to greater use of the other, but the shared Xbox platform experience must have some impact on consumer activity.

Therefore, Sony building a Windows Phone would have some positive impact on Xbox. And that would, presumably, come at the cost of Playstation momentum.

According to the latest public data, Nokia’s control of usage share in the Windows Phone hardware ecosystem is now more than 92 percent. That’s dangerous for Microsoft as betting your mobile platform on a single device stack could lead to platform risks (a poor hardware update cycle could slow growth for a year, etc.), meaning that Sony’s joining the Windows Phone cadre could better moor Windows Phone.

When Windows Phone launched, it did so with OEM partners as diverse as Dell. There has been a winnowing. If Microsoft can flip that trend, it will have gone a ways to proving that the progress it made in 2013 was no fluke.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

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Sony Rumored To Be Considering A Windows Phone Handset In 2014

11:11 AM

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According to The Information , Sony could release a Windows Phone device, diversifying its mobile device lineup, bolstering Microsoft, and p...

After its discovery of a security hole in Snapchat was ignored for months, Gibson Security earlier this week released the API for the Snapchat application along with two exploits. One exploit lets hackers match phone numbers with Snapchat users' names en masse; the other enables hackers to create huge numbers of fake Snapchat accounts. Together, the API and the exploits will let hackers duplicate Snapchat's API and stalk the 8 million users the site is reported to have.

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Security Firm Spills the Beans on Snapchat Vulnerabilities

10:53 AM

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After its discovery of a security hole in Snapchat was ignored for months, Gibson Security earlier this week released the API for the Snap...

CES 2014 is just around the corner, along with enough new gadgetry to fill several lifetimes. Last year we saw a glut of activity trackers pop up in the wake of notable hits like the Fitbit and Jawbone’s UP, and now it looks like LG is taking yet another stab at the wearable fitness formula with its newly leaked (thanks to @evleaks) Lifeband Touch.

Wait, hold on, another stab? Let’s not forget that LG showed off an awfully familiar looking quantified self contraption at last year’s CES, a device that never found its way to store shelves. That earlier unit was capable of connecting to certain compatible LG smart TVs in addition to just tracking your movement, which has to be one of the savvier approaches to building a wearable I’ve seen yet.

After all, if you’re going to insist that people wear your wrist-worn doodad for days on end, what better way to go than to connect it to more things you’re likely to interact with often anyway. Sadly, there are precious few details to go on at this point so the Lifeband is

If we’re being honest, the Lifeband’s existence doesn’t come as much of a surprise — LG has already confirmed that it’s continuing to work on wearable devices, and some recent rumors pointed to a health-conscious angle. The real question, though, is whether or not these things will ever actually see the light of day.

The quantified self market is still a relatively young one, but it’s already got its fair share of big-name incumbents that seem to get the lion’s share of attention from the press and consumers alike. Then again, the Galaxy Gear seemed like one of those kooky vaporware projects for a while before Samsung (for better or worse) decided to push it out the door — maybe LG will throw caution to the wind and release this thing after all.

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LG May Be Taking Another Stab At The Wearable Activity Tracking Formula

10:39 AM

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CES 2014 is just around the corner, along with enough new gadgetry to fill several lifetimes. Last year we saw a glut of activity trackers p...

Remember Qwikster? Wall Street doesn’t.

The AP is reporting this morning that Netflix CEO will get a healthy pay raise in 2014. According to a regulatory filing, Reed Hastings’s annual salary jumps 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.

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

7:09 AM

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Remember Qwikster ? Wall Street doesn’t. The AP is reporting this morning that Netflix CEO will get a healthy pay raise in 2014. According ...

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.

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

7:09 AM

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Touchscreen publishing company Onswipe has good news for Samsung. As Onswipe’s Chief Marketing Officer Jason Baptiste put it in an email, “...

Choosing an obstetrician can be extremely stressful for expectant parents. Additive Analytics, a new startup, hopes to help patients find trustworthy providers with MaternityCompare, its first product. The site pulls data that is publicly available from the U.S. government and turns it into an easy-to-understand reference tool. MaternityCompare shows what percentage of newborns at different hospitals throughout the U.S. had deliveries that were scheduled one to three weeks early for no medical reason, which can negatively affect the baby’s health.

Founder Laura Hamilton’s goal is to help mothers-to-be become smarter health care consumers while at the same time giving hospitals an incentive to improve their care.

“Today you can go on the internet and compare restaurants or compare sports teams or compare colleges, and there are dozens of detailed tools available to tell you which one is the best,” she told me in an email. “But if you’re 38 weeks pregnant and you’re choosing a hospital for the delivery, you don’t have the same tools. To me that is a real problem.”

According to information from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (the same organizations Hamilton sourced MaternityCompare’s data from), elective early deliveries currently make up 10% to 15% of all births in the U.S., even though groups like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and the March of Dimes encourage full-term pregnancies, or those that reach 39 weeks gestation, whenever possible.

MaternityCompare’s stats count elective early births that were scheduled one to three weeks ahead of the baby’s due date (it excludes early births that were medically necessary or occurred because of natural reasons). Her site’s data comes from Medicare and currently covers 1Q 2013. For each hospital listed, the sample size ranges from 11 to 1,073 deliveries and the dataset covers 51,314 births across 1,597 hospitals in total. Hamilton did not include hospitals with fewer than 11 deliveries in that period.

“My hope is that by providing transparency into different hospitals’ early elective delivery rates, I can give expectant mothers the data they need to find the best hospital for them. In addition, I hope that drawing attention to this metric will encourage hospitals with excessive early deliveries to take steps to improve,” Hamilton explains.

There are already several sites that help patients compare the performance of doctors in their area. Hamilton says ZocDoc, which is backed by Peter Thiel, Marc Benioff, Khosla Ventures and Jeff Bezos, as a potential competitor, but notes that her startup is different because ZocDoc focuses on patient reviews and Additive Analytics uses quantitative metrics. Hamilton encourages patients to use both tools when looking for a provider. Other competitors include the Leapfrog Group, which provides hospital comparison tools based on data from the voluntary Leapfrog Hospital Survey, and Consumer Reports’ hospital ratings.

There is still a dearth of sites with metrics aimed at expectant parents, however, which is why Hamilton decided to launch MaternityCompare as Additive Analytics’ first product.

“If a hospital has a very high rate of early elective deliveries, it means they are not following guidelines set out by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists,” says Hamilton. “To me that’s a bit of a red flag.”

She adds that she hopes MaternityCompare will help pregnant women become better advocates for their health.

“If her obstetrician suggests scheduling an early elective delivery, she can point to this tool (and to recommendations by the March of Dimes) and insist on a delivery date after 39 weeks,” she says. “I do want to stress, however, that if there is a medical reason for an early delivery, you should absolutely follow your doctor’s recommendations.”

Hospitals can also benefit from tools like MaternityCompare by using them to set performance benchmarks or identify areas where they need to improve policies or procedures. Doing so can help them increase their reimbursements, which are tied to quality measures under the Affordable Care Act, Hamilton points out.

Additive Analytics is currently being bootstrapped by Hamilton, who has a mathematics degree from the University of Chicago. She launched Canadian and Australian operations for Enova International while working as a product manager and was head of analytics at U.S.-Russia e-commerce company BayRu, where she developed a proprietary analytics engine to compare the performance of different benchmarks.

Eventually, Hamilton plans to add more “online hospital comparison tools to include dozens of quality metrics.” Like MaternityCompare, Hamilton hopes that patients will be able to use Additive Analytics’ products to find the best provider for their medical needs, while at the same time helping doctors and hospital administrators do a better job.

Additive Analytics’ hospital comparison tools will remain free, but it will earn revenue by offering paid custom analytics for hospitals. The startup is working on software that will take data from hospital electronic medical records (EMR) and help them identify areas where they can improve their performance.

“Today, companies spend a huge amount of time and money running advanced machine learning algorithms on their data to optimize their marketing spend, improve website conversions, and recommend similar products to their customers,” Hamilton says. “Which is fine—that’s what they should be doing. We think that the same cutting-edge machine learning, the same analytical horsepower, should be applied to the healthcare sector. Here lives are at stake. And lives are more important than dollars.”