Off with their heads: Yahoo issues list of nixed projects

Off with their heads: Yahoo issues list of nixed projects

(Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Summer cleaning starts today at Yahoo which revealed a dozen projects that are shutting down. In a note announcing the list, Jay Rossiter, the vice president in charge of platforms, said the moves will free Yahoo to sharpen its focus and thus "continue to focus on creating beautiful products that are essential to you every day." (Did you know Alta Vista was still kicking around? Well, no longer.)

From Rossiter's memo:

Yahoo! Axis (June 28, 2013)

If you installed the browser plug-in, it will no longer work. If you downloaded the app, it will continue to work, but won't be actively maintained. We encourage you to use the Yahoo! Search app for iOS and Android.

Yahoo! Browser Plus (June 28, 2013)

To see all of our current developer offerings, please go here.

Citizen Sports (June 28, 2013)

You can still get all the latest sports news on Yahoo! Sports, play fantasy sports like Fantasy Football, and stay up-to-date when you're on the go with our new Yahoo! Sports app for iOS and Android.

Yahoo! WebPlayer (June 30, 2013)

If you're a publisher and currently using Yahoo! WebPlayer on your site, after June 30 the Yahoo! WebPlayer won't load. Your users will continue to be able to play media files using native browser support. You may wish to locate and remove the following line in your code:

script type="text/javascript" src="http://webplayer.yahooapis.com/player.js"/script

FoxyTunes (July 1, 2013)

To see the latest in the music world, please visit Yahoo! Music.

Yahoo! RSS Alerts (July 1, 2013)

To continue to get the latest content that you care about, you can subscribe to Keyword News alerts at our Yahoo! Alerts and receive them via email.

Yahoo! Neighbors Beta (July 8, 2013)

You can visit Yahoo! Local Search to find out what's going on in your neighborhood.

AltaVista (July 8, 2013)

Please visit Yahoo! Search for all of your searching needs.

Yahoo! Stars India (July 25, 2013)

To stay up on all your favorite celebrity news, check out Yahoo! India OMG!.

Yahoo! Downloads Beta (July 31, 2013)

Yahoo! Downloads will no longer support 3rd party downloads. It will continue to offer downloads of Yahoo! products like Yahoo! Toolbar or Yahoo! Messenger.

Yahoo! Local API (September 28, 2013)

As part of this shutdown, all Yahoo! Local API documentation will also be removed from the Yahoo! Developer Network portal.

Yahoo! Term Extraction API (September 28, 2013)

We are eliminating direct access to the Yahoo! Term Extraction API and as of September 28, will require developers to go through YQL. We encourage all existing users of the Term Extraction Legacy API to migrate to YQL requests by September 28. You can use the YQL forums for any questions you might have about migrating to YQL. If you are already using the Term Extraction API via YQL, you don’t need to take any action.

New Samsung Tablets Mimic Galaxy Phones

New Samsung Tablets Mimic Galaxy Phones

Samsung is expanding its lineup of tablet computers and making them look more like its Galaxy smartphones, as it hopes to translate its success in phones to the tablet market, where Apple is dominant.

Samsung Electronics Co., the second-largest maker of tablets after Apple, on Monday said it is putting three new tablets in the Galaxy Tab 3 series on sale in the U.S. on July 7. The cheapest, a $199 device, will have a screen that measures 7 inches diagonally. An 8-inch model will go for $299 and a 10-inch one for $399.

"Our goal is to attract Galaxy smartphone users, and to make it the ultimate smartphone accessory," said Shoneel Kolhatkar, director of product planning at Samsung Mobile.

The "Tab" line is Samsung's value brand, undercutting the price of similar Apple models. Samsung's premium tablets are in the "Note" line, which include styluses. The 7-inch and 10-inch tablets had "Tab 2" equivalents, but the 8-inch model is new, and coincides closely in size with Apple's iPad Mini, which came out late last year.

The new tablets have the same three buttons on the front as the Galaxy smartphones. Last year's Tab 2 had no physical buttons on the front, as encouraged by Google, which supplies the Android software.

The 7-inch Galaxy Tab 3 has 8 gigabytes of storage memory, while the larger models have 16 gigabytes. All of them have card slots for memory expansion.

Samsung and Apple are in a heated tussle when it comes to smartphones and tablets. Each company would like to dominate both markets. Samsung had 18 percent of the global tablet market in the first quarter this year, according to research firm IDC. Apple had 40 percent. In smartphones, the figures are reversed, with Samsung dominating, largely because of its Galaxy line. Apple came in second with a 17 percent market share for the iPhone. In the U.S., however, Samsung is outsold by Amazon.com Inc., with its Kindles.

Forrester Research analyst J.P. Gownder said a hit smartphone traditionally hasn't led buyers to get a tablet from the same manufacturer. He believes Samsung will get a bigger boost from its new mini-stores inside U.S. Best Buy locations. Having a retail environment it can control bridges some of the gap with Apple, which has its own stores.

"Whether you buy it online or in person, people want to touch and feel these products," Gownder said.

Samsung has declined to challenge the iPad on screen resolution. The new tablets have the same resolution as older models, leaving them well behind the iPad and even Samsung's flagship Galaxy S4 smartphone. The 10-inch tablet has a resolution of 1280 by 800 pixels, compared with 1920 by 1080 for the phone. The smartphone packs in three times more detail in a square inch than the tablet does. (The 8-inch Tab 3 does, however, have a slightly higher screen resolution than the iPad Mini, the closest Apple equivalent.)

Analyst Jeff Orr at ABI Research said that the new Samsung tablets aren't "groundbreaking in any particular direction," it shows the South Korean company is honing a strategy that's been successful in smartphones: producing a wide variety of devices for different customer segments.

"Samsung has certainly shown how that can be accomplished with handsets, and I see more of that occurring now with the Galaxy Tab 3 announcement," Orr said.

With the new models, Samsung will have five tablets on sale in the U.S., compared to two at Apple. In addition, Samsung sells the Galaxy Note II, a phone-tablet crossover device.

The 10-inch model is the first Android-powered Samsung tablet to use an Intel processor. That's a significant win for the Santa Clara, Calif., chipmaker, which has been trying to break into the market for cellphone and tablet chips now that PC sales are slumping. Other smartphones and tablets run chips made by a variety of companies, all based on designs from ARM Holdings PLC, a British company.

Android Comes to Samsung Cameras,...

Android Comes to Samsung Cameras,...

Samsung's Galaxy S line of Android phones, including the recent Galaxy S4, has been a hit for the company. But now the company is hoping to bring that Android success and familiarity to other products. Or at least allow Android users the ability to get to their Android apps across a number of devices, even if they run on a Windows PC or a camera.

At a press conference in London today, the company unveiled two new products that incorporate the Android operating system: the ATIV Q Windows 8 tablet and the Galaxy NX camera.

Samsung's ATIV line of tablets have all run Windows 8 (unlike its Galaxy Tab or Galaxy Note line, which are powered by Google's Android software). With the announcement of the ATIV Q, users can own a tablet that switches between Windows 8 and Android on the fly. Patrick Pavel, the VP of European ATIV Marketing for Samsung, added that Android apps can be pinned to the Windows task bar, as well as opened directly in Windows 8.

The idea of Android running on a Windows 8 PC isn't entirely new -- Lenovo and Asus have done similar things with allowing Android to run separately. However, Samsung's new features make the apps and the Google operating system more integrated than other products.

While converting between Android and Windows is a big draw for the ATIV Q, the tablet itself can also convert. Flipping the screen up reveals a keyboard hiding underneath. The display can also be oriented completely parallel or perpendicular to the keyboard, depending on whatever configuration is best for the user.

The display itself is impressive too. Samsung calls it QHD+, cramming 275 pixels per inch on a 13.3 inch display. The tablet itself is only 13.9 mm thick, weighs in at 1.29 kg (approximately 3 pounds), and claims to have nine hours of battery life.

The Android love doesn't end there. Similiar to the Galaxy Camera released last year, Samsung unveiled the Galaxy NX camera. The camera is also outfitted with Android and allows photographers to download apps like Instagram or Facebook and instantly share their photos over the camera's 4G LTE connection.

"You will always be connected so you can share photos and HD video anywhere and anytime," Jean-Daniel Ayme, the VP of European Telecom Operations, said at the event. He also said it is the world's first interchangeable lens camera with 4G LTE.

As for the hardware itself, the camera includes a 20.3-megapixel sensor and a large 4.8 inch display. The camera also houses a 1.6GHz quad-core processor and a separate image signaling processor that gives it more speed and power compared with other digital cameras. No U.S. pricing or availability was released, but expect it to cost more than the $500 Galaxy Camera, which was released last year.

Report: Microsoft and Nokia talked acquisition

Report: Microsoft and Nokia talked acquisition

Microsoft and cellphone maker Nokia were in advanced talks about an acquisition of the Finnish company's device business, but the discussions have broken down, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Such a deal might have improved both companies' ability to compete in a world dominated by smartphones offered by Apple, which makes both hardware and software, and by Google, which relies largely on third parties for devices that run its Android OS.

But the talks, which took place as recently as this month, have faltered and aren't likely to be revived, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. The discussions were held in London and the companies were close to an oral agreement about a combination, the report said.

The deal hit snags regarding price and the market position of Nokia, which trails far behind both Apple and Samsung, the Journal said.

Microsoft declined to comment on the report. Nokia could not immediately be reached for comment.

An acquisition of Nokia by Microsoft is an idea that has seen some discussion in recent years. Two years ago, the companies formed a partnership in which Nokia would use exclusively Microsoft software to power its smartphones.

One idea behind the partnership was that by adopting Microsoft's Windows Phone as its primary smartphone platform, Nokia could make a better product on par with smartphone hardware powered by Google's Android operating system. Other hardware makers, including HTC, also make Windows Phone handsets.

When Nokia announced last year that it would be cutting 10,000 jobs, industry speculation grew over whether the time was right for Microsoft to make a move.

Were Microsoft to buy Nokia's device business, it would help the software company better compete against Apple and also bolster the company's broader position in a diverse market, industry analyst Jeff Kagan said in an email message.

"This is the kind of deal I have been thinking about ever since Microsoft and Nokia got together on the Lumia wireless phones," he said. "This is the perfect time for Microsoft to extend beyond their traditional business, and acquiring Nokia could be their ticket to do just that."

Microsoft already makes its own Surface tablets, as well as the Xbox gaming and entertainment consoles.

HTC Butterfly s revealed : 1.9 GHz Snapdragon 600 processor , UltraPixel ...

HTC Butterfly s revealed : 1.9 GHz Snapdragon 600 processor , UltraPixel ...

HTC's just pulled back the proverbial curtains on the Butterfly s at its Taiwan launch event. It'll arrive boasting a familiar-sounding 5-inch 1080p display, front-facing BoomSound stereo speakers and Sense 5 as expected. When it comes to internals, the Butterfly s runs Android Jelly Bean on a quad-core 1.9GHz Snapdragon 600 (faster than the HTC One), an impressive 3,200mAh battery, quad-band HSPA/WCDMA radio, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of built-in storage, expandable once again through microSD. As for imaging, alongside that primary UltraPixel camera and Zoe software features, there's a 2.1-megapixel wide-angle shooter on the front. It's currently scheduled for a release in July in Taiwan, accompanied by a NT $22,900 (roughly $766) pric e tag, but no word when (or even if) it'll reach foreign shores.

Update: Our Chinese sister site just spent some hands-on time with the device. Check out their first impressions right here. We've also added an official video right after the break.

Microsoft's Xbox One, Sony's PS4: Why So Expensive In Australia?

Microsoft's Xbox One, Sony's PS4: Why So Expensive In Australia?

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That’s the question being asked in The Guardian today. They’ve just launched on online edition for Oz so obviously they’re majoring on stories of crucial importance to the Lucky Country. Why is it that Microsoft Microsoft‘s Xbox One and Sony Sony‘s PS4 will be so much more expensive in Australia than in other countries? There’s a very simple answer it’s just not one that people are going to like very much.

All that, and it cost $100 USD less, too, coming in at $399. It seemed like Sony could do no wrong. But for all this fanfare and literal standing ovation, there’s a problem for Australian gamers. The PS4 is set to retail at a tooth-grindingly expensive $549 because of… reasons? That’s too much. I’ve checked. You can too. Sony haven’t explained their unique pricing structure yet, but it seems like a fairly arbitrary dollop of Australian tax.

And with this, the excitement behind their “win” starts to fade. The Xbox One is projected to retail at $599 with a Kinect unit â€" you won’t be able to buy it without one â€" which means there’s only a $50 difference between the two consoles, and that’s dramatically reduced if you want to shell out for Sony’s equivalent of the Kinect, the Eye. With that, both consoles come in at around the $600 mark, with the PS4 at the higher end of the scale.

Why the higher prices for Australia? Simply because the companies can.

There are some complexities, this is true. The exchange rate today is US$ 1 to AUS $ 1.06 so we’d expect a difference in prices. Australian prices are traditionally quoted inclusive of the 10% GST while US prices are traditionally quoted exclusive of sales tax (the reason being that sales taxes are wildly different around the country, not just from State to State but even between towns and counties in the same State at times).

But this doesn’t explain all of the price differences. Indeed, there were Parliamentary hearings earlier in the year trying to look at why tech products of all kinds were significantly more expensive in Oz than they are in other countries. Unfortunately, none of those in said hearings provided the correct answer: companies price higher in Australia simply because they think they can.

Companies are, after all, supposed to be capitalist enterprises. They’re out to get as much money for their products as they can. If they think they can charge one group of consumers more and thus make greater profit (ie, they’ll lose fewer sales from a higher price with one group than another) then they will do so. This is what market segmentation is all about. There are those who will pay more money for a brand, or a choice, or a small extra service, and the game of business is to work out who those people are and how to get their money off them. Without losing sales from the people who don’t wish to pay that extra.

As an example, consider the VW line up of cars. There are a number of brands there and each brand has minor differences in level of trim, engine choice and so on. But a VW Touareg, a Porsche Cayenne and and the Audi Audi SUV are essentially the same car. Built on the same platforms using much the same technology and usually in the same factory. Yet there are significant price differences between them: this is VW’s way of taking more money off those who are willing to pay more for the brand or cachet of Porsche for example. Similarly, several of the VW brands offer an SUV based upon the Golf platform: certainly VW does and so does Skoda. Again, it’s an attempt to slice and dice the market so as to be able to take cash off the customers willing to pay more while still capturing the business of the price sensitive.

The console companies aren’t doing quite this in Australia. Rather, they’re looking at the whole market and concluding that as a geographical entity they can charge more there than they can in other markets. The calculation is that if the PS4 were $50 higher in the US it would lose more profit through smaller sales than the higher price would bring in. But not in Oz: thus the higher price.

These higher prices really are simply because the companies think they can get away with it. That’s capitalism folks.

As to why they think this that’s all rather more murky. My assumption is that it’s rather to do with the income levels in Australia. While Oz has a GDP per capita very similar to other advanced nation states, one of the oddities of the place is that the income distribution is very different. The minimum wage is much higher and this compresses said income distribution. There isn’t, in the way that the US or UK has, a large and badly paid end of the labour market. Thus leading, I imagine, those selling goods meant for the broad consumer market to think that they can charge more: as they do. But please do note that this last is speculation on my part. That they charge higher prices just because they can isn’t speculation.

A Standing O for Apple's New Mac Pro

A Standing O for Apple's New Mac Pro

Ever wonder why there has been a massive slowdown in PC growth? Don't blame Windows 8, blame Apple!

Apple has been the leader in tech and there is no indication that anything has changed. Dell is no leader, nor is Microsoft, Lenovo, or IBM. It's Apple. And Apple went too long without showing something new, thus the desktop market slowed down.

So it finally rolls out what appears to be a spectacular desktop machine capable of delivering a whopping seven teraflops of processing power. This is obviously the future king of all multimedia work, especially video editing, which needs all the help it can get. I would also assume that sort of power would make any Adobe application pop. No waiting!

The machine maxes out with 12 cores of Xeon E5 power and a souped-up RAM subsystem that will peak at 60 gigabytes per second bandwidth. It's a total butt-kicker that has no peer today.

Tomorrow is another story because within 30 days, the PC competition will roll out all sorts of machines that will attempt to match the Mac and undercut the price. Then again, maybe the competition won't do anything.

And even if they do something, it will pale in comparison to the Mac Pro's radical design. It's a 6.6-by-9.9-inch tube. It's not a box and it's not the old Apple cheese grater. Its unique design will surely win a lot of awards.

More importantly, you now have to wonder how the competition will counter this. Will someone else make a tubular computer? I doubt it since the competition can barely manage a cube, let alone a tube like this.

Apple left the PC designers in the dust with the old cheese grater and then blew up the market for laptops with the MacBooks and their unique solid aluminum cases. Now this. All the while, the PC desktoppers were still making big funky boxes filled with mostly air (and still overheating). Even the iMac was hard to copy. A few makers tried but got zero traction.

Apple's New Mac Pro: What You Need to Know

In this column, I've chided the PC makers for being duds for years. Most recently, I said that these folks should be promoting high-performance and three-monitor setups.

Of course nothing came of the idea. Now Apple rolls this gem out bragging about teraflops and multiple monitorsâ€"and not just three monitors but three 4K monitors!

The brain-dead PC folks are flat-footed once more. I can hear the counter argument already: "Well, this is all well and good but at the end of the day, people will be buying our cheap junk anyway because, well, it's cheap."

The PC makers should be ever so proud.

Apple's new Mac Pro: Is this the workstation we've all been waiting for?

Apple's new Mac Pro: Is this the workstation we've all been waiting for?

In 2010, Apple released a new Mac Pro built on Intel’s then-new quad-core Gulftown CPU. In 2012, it bumped that system up one grade, offering hexa-core processors. Both systems were based on Intel’s 32nm Westmere architecture, which means they lacked all the features introduced since Sandy Bridge, including AES-NI, AVX, and PCIe 3.0. Mac users were rather unhappy with this non-update a year ago, prompting Tim Cook to reassure everyone that a new system was coming in 2013.

Now we’ve seen that system and it’s dramatically different than anything Apple â€" or anyone â€" has done before in this space.

Hardware Specifications

Apple is playing coy with exact specifications, but we can infer quite a bit from the figures the company has announced to date. The current top-end chip in the Mac Pro is the X5675. According to Intel, the new Mac Pro offers “up to 2x” the FLOPs performance of its predecessor. The Westmere chips currently used in the Mac Pro are capable of eight single-precision and four double-precision FLOPs per cycle. Sandy and Ivy Bridge, in contrast, can perform 16 SP and eight DP. Haswell doubled that again, up to 32 SP and 16 DP per cycle. If the new Mac Pro was using Haswell, in other words, Apple could claim a 4x increase rather than a 2x jump.

The other clue is in the chipset identification. Apple’s website states that the system uses “the new-generation Xeon E5 chipset.” There’s no such thing as the “E5 chipset,” but there is a C600 chipset that supports the E5 family. It’s not a perfect match, given that Apple is advertising PCI-Express 3.0, while the C600 only officially offers 2.0, but Intel’s messaging is unclear on this point. Diagrams for the C222 â€" C226 chipsets point to PCIe 3.0 capability, even though the official Intel database shows those products as limited to PCIe 3.0.

Based on what we know right now, however, it looks as though the new MP is Ivy Bridge, not Haswell.

Other features are more current. The move to PCIe-based Flash storage will boost storage performance well above what even SATA 6G offers and memory bandwidth is up to 60GB/s across four channels. Twin graphics cards from AMD anchor the GPU side of the equation. Based on the quoted specs (7TFLOP total GPU power, 6GB of VRAM), it’s not clear which cards these are. If that 6GB of VRAM is per-GPU, AMD’s top-end W9000 is the best candidate, though it would normally offer 8TFLOP of performance, rather than six. If the VRAM is being quoted in total, it implies AMD has done a custom design for Apple. None of AMD’s current FirePro’s offer 3.5TFLOP of single-precision floating point and just 3GB of RAM per card. Regardless, that’s more than enough GPU power to handle heavy rendering tasks.

System Design

The case’s exterior is, in a word, interesting. It’s by far the smallest workstation we’ve ever seen. It’s 9.9 inches tall, 6.6 inches wide and, as Apple notes, is more than small enough to sit on your desk. The entire system is cooled by a single impeller and each of the major components makes direct contact with a large, triangular heatsink Apple calls the “thermal core.” It’s an interesting design and I don’t doubt the company’s claims that it’s quie t and easy to cool.

The Mac Pro’s thermal core interior

It also looks like a trashcan.

I don’t mean that as a nasty dig at Apple. From the diagrams and discussion of the product, it’s clear that they’ve poured a great deal of time and effort into building a sophisticated cooling system and taken a new approach to system integration. It’s absolutely possible that the new Mac Pro will be a mind-blowing experience with great thermals and a ton of horsepower.

But it still looks like a trashcan.

Next page: Expansion, form over functi on

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Tech Companies Concede to Surveillance Program

Tech Companies Concede to Surveillance Program

The negotiations have continued in recent months, as Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, traveled to Silicon Valley to meet with executives including those at Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Intel. Though the official purpose of those meetings was to discuss the future of the Internet, the conversations also touched on how the companies would collaborate with the government in its intelligence-gathering efforts, said a person who attended.

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While handing over data in response to a legitimate FISA request is a legal requirement, making it easier for the government to get the information is not, which is why Twitter could decline to do so.

Details on the discussions help explain the disparity between initial descriptions of the government program and the companies' responses.

Each of the nine companies said it had no knowledge of a government program providing officials with access to its servers, and drew a bright line between giving the government wholesale access to its servers to collect user data and giving them specific data in response to individual court orders. Each said it did not provide the government with full, indiscriminate access to its servers.

(Read More: US Says It Gathers Online Data Abroad)

The companies said they do, however, comply with individual court orders, including under FISA. The negotiations, and the technical systems for sharing data with the government, fit in that category because they involve access to data under individual FISA requests. And in some cases, the data is transmitted to the government electronically, using a company's servers.

"The U.S. government does not have direct access or a 'back door' to the information stored in our data centers," Google's chief executive, Larry Page, and its chief legal officer, David Drummond, said in a statement on Friday. "We provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law."

Statements from Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, AOL and Paltalk made the same distinction.

But instead of adding a back door to their servers, the companies were essentially asked to erect a locked mailbox and give the government the key, people briefed on the negotiations said. Facebook, for instance, built such a system for requesting and sharing the information, they said.

The data shared in these ways, the people said, is shared after company lawyers have reviewed the FISA request according to company practice. It is not sent automatically or in bulk, and the government does not have full access to company servers. Instead, they said, it is a more secure and efficient way to hand over the data.

Tech companies might have also denied knowledge of the full scope of cooperation with national security officials because employees whose job it is to comply with FISA requests are not allowed to discuss the details even with others at the company, and in some cases have national security clearance, according to both a former senior government offici al and a lawyer representing a technology company.

FISA orders can range from inquiries about specific people to a broad sweep for intelligence, like logs of certain search terms, lawyers who work with the orders said. There were 1,856 such requests last year, an increase of 6 percent from the year before.

In one recent instance, the National Security Agency sent an agent to a tech company's headquarters to monitor a suspect in a cyberattack, a lawyer representing the company said. The agent installed government-developed software on the company's server and remained at the site for several weeks to download data to an agency laptop.

In other instances, the lawyer said, the agency seeks real-time transmission of data, which companies send digitally.

Twitter spokesmen did not respond to questions about the government requests, but said in general of the company's philosophy toward information requests: Users "have a right to fight invalid g overnment requests, and we stand with them in that fight."

Twitter, Google and other companies have typically fought aggressively against requests they believe reach too far. Google, Microsoft and Twitter publish transparency reports detailing government requests for information, but these reports do not include FISA requests because they are not allowed to acknowledge them.

Yet since tech companies' cooperation with the government was revealed Thursday, tech executives have been performing a familiar dance, expressing outrage at the extent of the government's power to access personal data and calling for more transparency, while at the same time heaping praise upon the president as he visited Silicon Valley.

Even as the White House scrambled to defend its online surveillance, President Obama was mingling with donors at the Silicon Valley home of Mike McCue, Flipboard's chief, eating dinner at the opulent home of Vinod Khosla, the venture capitalis t, and cracking jokes about Mr. Khosla's big, shaggy dogs.

On Friday, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, posted on Facebook a call for more government transparency. "It's the only way to protect everyone's civil liberties and create the safe and free society we all want over the long term," he wrote.

Government likely to open criminal probe into NSA leaks: officials

Government likely to open criminal probe into NSA leaks: officials

By Mark Hosenball

WASHINGTON | Fri Jun 7, 2013 8:37pm EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's administration is likely to open a criminal investigation into the leaking of highly classified documents that revealed the secret surveillance of Americans' telephone and email traffic, U.S. officials said on Friday.

The law enforcement and security officials, who were not authorized to speak publicly, said the agencies that normally conduct such investigations, including the FBI and Justice Department, were expecting a probe into the leaks to a British and an American newspaper.

Such investigations typically begin after an agency that believes its secrets have been leaked without authorization files a complaint with the Justice Department.

It was unclear on Friday whether a complaint had been submitted by the publicity-shy National Security Agency, which was most directly involved in the collection of trillions of telephone and email communications.

However, one U.S. official with knowledge of the situation said that given the extent and sensitivity of the recent leaks, federal law may compel officials to open an investigation.

A criminal probe would represent another turn in the Obama admi nistration's battle against national security leaks. This effort has been under scrutiny lately because of a Justice Department investigation that has involved searches of the phone records of Associated Press journalists and a Fox News reporter.

Leaks to media outlets this week have revealed a government campaign of domestic surveillance going far beyond anything that had been acknowledged previously.

Late on Wednesday, Britain's Guardian newspaper published what U.S. officials later acknowledged was an order, approved by the secretive U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, requiring a subsidiary of Verizon Communications to give the NSA raw data showing phone calls made from numbers within the United States and from U.S. numbers to those overseas.

The data did not include the identities of people who made the calls or the contents of the calls.

On Thursday, the Guardian and the Washington Po st published slides from a secret NSA powerpoint presentation that described how the agency gathered masses of email data from prominent Internet firms, including Google, Facebook and Apple under a Top-Secret program called PRISM.

Some of the companies denied that the NSA and FBI had "direct access" to their central servers, as the Post reported.

On Friday, for example, Facebook founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said his company "is not and has never been part of any program to give the U.S. or any other government direct access to our servers."

"We have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information or metadata in bulk, like the one Verizon reportedly received," Zuckerberg said. "And if we did, we would fight it aggressively. We hadn't even heard of PRISM" before Thursday, he said.

James Clapper, the director of U.S. national intelligence, condemned the leaks and asserted that the news articles about PRISM contained "numerous inaccuracies."

WIKILEAKS

Journalists involved in The Guardian and Washington Post articles have reported in depth on WikiLeaks, the website known for publishing secret U.S. government documents.

The Post report on the PRISM program was co-written by Laura Poitras, a filmmaker who has been working on a documentary on WikiLeaks, with the cooperation of its founder Julian Assange, and who last year made a short film about Bill Binney, a former NSA employee who became a whistleblowing critic of the agency.

Last year, the web magazine Salon published a lengthy article by the author of the Guardian report, Glenn Greenwald, accusing U.S. authorities of harassing Poitras when she left and re-entered the United States. Greenwald also has written frequently about Assange.

The Guardian and Post stories ap peared in the same week that U.S. Army Private First Class Bradley Manning went on trial in Maryland accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks.

In an email to Reuters on Friday, Poitras rejected the notion that the trial had any impact on the timing of her story.

"I am fully aware we are living in a political climate where national security reporting is being targeted by the government, however, I don't think fear should stop us from reporting these stories," Poitras wrote.

"To suggest that the timing of the NSA PRISM story is linked in any way to other events or stories I'm following is simply wrong. Like any journalist, I have many contacts and follow multiple stories."

Kris Coratti, a Washington Post spokeswoman, said the timing of the paper's publication of Poitras' story had nothing to do with Manning's trial and that Assange had played no role in arranging or encouraging the story.

Greenwald did not respond to emailed requests for comment. The Guardian's editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, declined to comment.

(Editing by David Lindsey and David Brunnstrom)

Stock Jelly Bean Keyboard Now Available on Google Play

Stock Jelly Bean Keyboard Now Available on Google Play

It's part of Google's goal of commonality between Android devices.

Google is moving to provide a more consistent Android experience across multiple form factors, ODMs and wireless carriers by releasing the stock Android keyboard as a standalone app on Google Play, likely ripped out of Android 4.2 "Jelly Bean".

Google is reportedly pulling out key Android components from the core platform so that the company can update the OS across multiple form factors without having to wait on handset and tablet makers, and wireless carriers. It also provides Android customers with a choice: stick with the OEM-based version, or install a more Android-native feature baked fresh in Google's oven.

"Android is an open platform, so you can customize your device to your liking; choosing your own keyboard is just one example of what’s possible â€" and there are a lot of great keyboards to choose from on Google Play."

Google Keyboard features Gesture Typing, allowing users to glide through letters to form a word â€" lift the finger to enter a space. It also provides automatic error correction, word predictions, Voice Tapping for on-the-go messaging, dictionaries for 26 languages, and keyboard layouts for a dozen more. Currently it's only offered for "English-speaking locals", but more countries will be added soon.

After installing the "app", users are directed to the "Language Input" section in "Settings" to check "Google Keyboard" as the default input source, and then as the active text-input method. That's it. To reverse the process, head back into the same section to choose a different keyboard (it was Android keyboard AOSP on the DROID RAZR HD).

The launch of Google's stock keyboard arrives after SVP for Android and Chrome Sundar Pichai called for a more consistent experience across all Android devices while still enabling ODMs to add their own experiences as well. Google wants to see a level of commonality so that users can move from one Android device to another without having to learn an entirely new "platform".

"We want to set ourselves up to be consistent, to update across all these devices and to have a common user experience across these devices," he said, referring to tablets, smartphones, wearable devices and more that are powered by Google's mobile platform.

To get Google's keyboard, head over to Google Play here. Currently it's only compatible with Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" and higher.

BlackBerry Q10 smartphone boasts a rarity: a physical keyboard

BlackBerry Q10 smartphone boasts a rarity: a physical keyboard

The Canadian company's Q10 smartphone, the second phone running the new BlackBerry 10 operating system, began rolling out to U.S. carriers this week.

Featuring BlackBerry's much-loved Qwerty-keyboard, this is the smartphone for which many users were holding out. And struggling BlackBerry, in the midst of playing catch-up to the iPhone and Android devices, needs the phone to perform and sell well.

Physical keyboard phones are becoming more rare as touchscreen-only mobile devices take over. But BlackBerry, which built its reputation as an enterprise workhorse, has promised to remain faithful to professionals and others who prefer the speed, accuracy and tactile appeal of push buttons.

"We're convinced there is a significant segment of the market who prefers to have a physical keyboard," BlackBerry Chief Marketing Officer Frank Boulben said Wednesday in an interview with The Times in Beverly Hills. "We want to continue to serve that segment."

The Times received a Q10 this week, and I've had a few days to play around with the device. We'll have a full review later, but my initial impression is that BlackBerry has built an impressive smartphone that keyboard loyalists will love. The challenge for BlackBerry will be persuading other users to give it a chance.

Unlike the sleek touchscreen-only Z10, released in March, the Q10 boasts the familiar look and feel of a traditional BlackBerry. In a nod to the popularity of touchscreens, the Q10 is actually a hybrid that combines a physical keyboard with a 3.1-inch touchscreen.

What I first noticed out of the box was the Q10's display size. BlackBerry added real estate to the touchscreen by getting rid of the large buttons above the Qwerty keyboard. That means no more home or call buttons, making the user experience much less intuitive â€" and it means you'll have to use the touchscreen all the time, like it or not.

Without a home button, BlackBerry 10 phones rely primarily on swipes to navigate around. Swipe left for applications and swipe right to access the BlackBerry Hub, a convenient central location that combines emails, text messages, phone calls and other conversations. There's no need to close out of applications to access another one, which BlackBerry officials say saves users time and differentiates BlackBerry 10 phones from rival devices.

The phone, which comes with 16 gigabytes of storage, has a number of apps pre-loaded including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare and YouTube, but a major complaint of BlackBerry 10 is that it has only a fraction of the apps found on iOS and Android devices.

Phone call quality, which often goes unmentioned these days as smartphone makers hype other features, was solid.

The 8-megapixel rear camera took acceptable shots. The phone comes with several on-board photo editing features, including Time Shift, which enables users to select the best image from a series of moments. But the photo quality lags behind the Samsung Galaxy S 4 and the HTC One.

So far, my biggest gripe is that the touchscreen on the Q10 isn't as sensitive as on other smartphones. In the setup phase, I had to touch several times on the same spot before the phone responded; the same thing happened when I tried to end a call.

It's a bit ironic, because my major problem with my BlackBerry Bold 9900 is that the screen is too sensitive â€" the majority of times when I take a call on it, the touchscreen incorrectly interprets the pressure from the side of my face and starts dialing other numbers or putting my conversation on speaker. I'm glad the Q10 seems to have corrected the problem, but I also don't want to have to constantly touch my screen over and over to get it to do what I want.

T-Mobile released the phone Wednesday. Verizon Wireless, which has the exclusive on the white version of the Q10, will have the phone online Thursday and in stores Monday. ATT began pre-orders for the phone Wednesday but hasn't provided a release date. Sprint has been more vague, saying that it will carry the phone sometime this summer.

The long-overdue BlackBerry 10 operating system has been called a make-or-break product for BlackBerry. The company has already announced three smartphones for the platform â€" the Z10, Q10 and the Q5, a more affordable Qwerty device set to be released sometime this summer â€" and Boulben said the company has plans to launch more BlackBerry 10 phones as it tries to recapture lost market share.

Already, the company is seeing former customers come back, Boulben said. About 55% of BlackBerry 10 users switched over from iPhones and Android devices, he said.

"We are appealing to customers who want something different," he said. "BlackBerry 10 allows us to completely renew our portfolio of devices."

andrea.chang@latimes.com

Will Ban On iPhone 4 US Imports Cost Apple $8 Billion?

Will Ban On iPhone 4 US Imports Cost Apple $8 Billion?

A man takes a picture with an Iphone of flowers left in remembrance to Steve Jobs, founder and former CEO of Apple Inc., outside the Apple Store on October 6, 2011 in Paris. (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)

The International Trade Commission (ITC) has ruled that Apple violated Samsung patents and banned Apple imports to the U.S. of its offending products. Will that ban slice Apple’s iPhone revenue by 11%?

The “good” news for Apple is that the ITC ban on imports â€" which matters since Apple makes the affected products in Asia â€" covers older versions of the iPhone and iPad. According to a June 4 ITC notice, the ban covers the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 3G sold for use on ATT, T-Mobile and two regional networks â€" one in Texas, the other in Alaska.

This ban does not take effect immediately â€" and it could be lifted. That’s because there is a 60- day review period for the ITC’s ruling during which President Obama could decide to overturn it on public policy grounds, reports Bloomberg.

The ITC found that Apple had infringed a patent on a way for phones to transmit data. Apple argued that Samsung should have licensed its patent for this data transmission method because it was an industry standard but was only willing to give Apple access to that technology on “unreasonable” terms â€" 2.4% of the iPhone and iPad average selling price â€" according to Bloomberg.

At stake are portions of two huge Apple product lines. For the fiscal year ending September 2012, the iPhone generated $78.7 billion in sales and the iPad brought in another $30.9 billion, according to Bloomberg.

But how much revenue would the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 3G bans cost Apple? My crude estimate is at least $8.1 billion in revenue. That includes the loss of iPhone 4 sales in America â€" I could not find figures to estimate the loss of U.S. iPad 2 3G revenues.

To reach this conclusion, I used estimates of how much of Apple’s iPhone revenue came from the iPhone 4 (about 33%) and how much of those revenues were in the U.S. (roughly 30%).

My conclusion about the proportion of iPhone 4 revenues extrapolated from its fourth quarter 2012 revenue. According to DigiTimes, of Apple’s 47.8 million iPhone shipments in the quarter, 20 million were iPhone 4 and 27.8 million were iPhone 5.

According to Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty, the iPhone 4 sells for $450 while the iPhone 5 16 GB version goes for $649. Multiplying those prices by the unit volumes yields $9 billion in iPhone 4 revenues and $18 billion for the iPhone 5 in that quarter. 

Applying this 33% to Apple’s latest annual iPhone revenues means that Apple would lose a portion of $26 billion in revenue if the ITC ban went into effect.

I assumed that 30% of iPhone 4 sales are in the U.S. â€" based on a Wall Street Journal estimate that “less than a third” of overall iPhone sales are in America. Multiplying 30% by the $26 billion in estimated 2012 iPhone 4 revenue yields $8.1 billion in possible lost revenue to Apple from the ITC ban on iPhone 4 imports to the U.S.

But that figure could be low if iPhone 4 sales rise in 2013 and beyond. Since many of my students have said that the iPhone 5 does not offer enough additional features to make it worth the price premium, I could see iPhone 4 sales rising.

However, if Apple replaced the iPhone 4 with a lower-priced model, as Huberty expects, American consumers would probably ditch the iPhone 4 for the cheaper model. And that would reduce the revenue lost due to the iPhone 4 import ban.

A closer look at what's new in Windows 8.1

A closer look at what's new in Windows 8.1

Earlier this week Microsoft offered a first look at what’s going to be in Windows 8.1. As I noted in my coverage yesterday, this is a significant update and not just a kneejerk reaction to criticism of the initial release.

See also:

Windows 8.1 unveiled: will it change your mind about Windows 8?
The Start button is back. But that's just one of a very long list of changes you'll find in Windows 8.1. Here's what's inside the Windows 8.1 update, which will be available as a preview in late June and will be delivered free to all Windows 8 users before the end of the year.

In this follow-up, I want to touch on some of the smaller details that got might have gotten lost in yesterday’s flurry of coverage.

At the top of the list is a new Help Tips app that will be pinned to the Start screen by default and will offer a tutorial covering five or so of the most common things a new user needs to know about Windows 8 interface. “If there’s any regret we had” about the initial launch of Windows 8, said Microsoft’s Jensen Harris, “it’s that we didn’t help orient people.” Some OEMs (Dell and HP, for example) have created their own tutorial apps to fill this gap. The official version is overdue and welcome.

Improved apps

Windows 8.1 will include significant updates  to all of the built-in Metro-style apps. With one exception, all of the Microsoft-authored apps will be updated for the preview release due at the end of June. The exception is the communications suite (Mail, Messaging, People, and Calendar), which will be updated for the final release of Windows 8.1 but will be essentially unchanged in the preview.

The Windows 8 Music app is a confusing mess, with a puzzling and frustrating interface that emphasizes the hit-driven Xbox online music service. The Windows 8.1 version looks completely different, beginning with the home page. The three main links on that home page allow you to quickly play music from your collection (local or online) or play streaming music by tapping the Radio link (similar to the current Smart DJ feature). The third link, Explore, takes you to the Xbox Store, where you can search and shop. The display of the collection is neat, crisp, and modern.

In Windows 8, the Camera app is essentially a glorified webcam control panel. In Windows 8.1, it gets a few new controls, including a real-time implementation of Microsoft’s PhotoSynth technology that allows you to create and stitch together panoramas. That feature will make more sense as smaller devices hit the market. Using a 10-inch tablet as a camera is awkward, but a 7-inch or 8-inch tablet works more naturally for photography.

Along the same lines, the Windows 8 Photos app is also slated for a huge update that adds basic (and some not so basic) photo editing features to the app.

New apps

The collection of new apps are mostly utilities:

• Calculator is an obvious addition. It includes the standard and scientific views.
• Alarms is another checklist item, with timer, stopwatch, and countdown functions.
• Reading List is a fascinating addition and one I expect to use a lot. If you’ve ever used Instapaper or Pocket or another “read it later” app, you have a rough idea of this app’s basic purpose. Unlike Instapaper, however, you aren’t restricted to web pages. You can save a link to piece of content from any app on the device, using the Windows 8 Share charm. Your personal Reading List can consist of links to web pages, email messages, snippets from the Finance and Travel apps, tweets, and so on.
• Health and Fitness aggregates information about diet and exercise with tools to help you track calories and workout schedules.
• Food and Drink covers recipes and cooking. Its key feature is a hands-free mode that lets you use a tablet in the kitchen without getting your greasy hands on the touchscreen. In this app you “turn pages” by making a swiping gesture in front of the webcam.

File Explorer changes

In Windows 8, Microsoft gave its desktop file-management utility a new name (it’s now File Explorer instead of Windows Explorer) and added an Office-style ribbon. Windows 8.1 makes a couple of significant additional changes.

The most obvious change is in the navigation bar on the left side of File Explorer. In place of the Computer node is a new link titled This PC. Under that link you’ll find shortcuts to the data folders in your user profile, as well as to local drives. SkyDrive gets its own top-level link as well.

Microsoft’s powerful but arcane Libraries feature is no longer spotlighted in the Windows 8.1 version of File Explorer. The Libraries node is gone from the navigation pane, and the default libraries aren’t created when you set up a new user profile, although you can create custom libraries if you want.

Input changes

If you use Windows 8 on a touchscreen device or a tablet PC, the Touch Keyboard will look essentially unchanged in Windows 8.1, but under the hood it has two significant improvements.

First, it’s backed by an autosuggest service that’s updated continually by an online service. In addition to suggesting words that match the one you’re typing, the new feature also tries to predict the next word you’ll type. And it’s surprisingly accurate, using a linguistic model to help narrow down the list of words you’re likely to type next. Microsoft claims the new feature is 90 percent accurate. We’ll want to put that to the test.

There’s also a new gesture for power users who want to use autosuggest but don’t want to take their fingers off the onscreen keyboard. A quick swipe of the spacebar moves through the autosuggest list so you can select and insert an item.

Internet Explorer 11

We could have spent an entire session on Internet Explorer 11, which will be included with Windows 8.1. The most notable new features are in the Metro version of IE and address some of the criticisms of IE 10 in Windows 8.

Tabs have moved to the bottom of the screen, just above the Internet Explorer address bar. And you’re no longer limited to 10 tabs. You can have an infinite number of open tabs, with the row of tabs scrolling horizontally. And your tabs roam across devices, so you can pick up on your tablet where you left off on your desktop, or vice versa.

In addition, you now have full access to your collection of Favorites, with the ability to add items to the Favorites list from the Metro-style browser.