Google Fights NSL Over Data Privacy

Google is fighting a National Security Letter (NSL) issued by the US government, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) acknowledging it is one of the first firms to do so.

Google took the unusual step last month of revealing, albeit in vague terms, the number of NSLs it received from the US government. At the time the company said it was working with the authorities to improve transparency around the subject, but according to court filings it is also fighting against handing over users’ data.

In March, Google filed a petition to set aside a legal process. Kevan Fornasero, a lawyer for Google said in the filing that petitions “filed under Section 3511 of Title 18 to set aside legal process issued under Section 2709 of Title 18 must be filed under seal because Section 2709 prohibits disclosure of the legal process”.

Fornasero’s reference to Section 2709 refers to the ability of the FBI to issue NSLs and force the handover of user data. According to the EFF, Google is one of the first communications companies to fight an NSL, but because Section 2709 doesn’t allow firms to disclose the legal process, few people can be certain that others haven’t tried to stand up to the US government.

Matt Zimmerman, a lawyer for the EFF said, “The people who are in the best position to challenge the practice are people like Google. So far no one has really stood up for their users’ among large Internet service providers.”

Google has tried in recent years to provide users with some information on how it deals with government agencies’ requests for user data. If the firm can succeed in its fight against NSLs then it could open the floodgates for others to stand up against a law that some see to be nothing more than a snooper’s charter.

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AMC Goes To The Clouds

Applied Micro Circuits has released its cloud chip which takes networking and computing and crams it all onto one SoC.

The X-Gene server on a chip, is being billed as the first 64-bit-capable ARM-based server in existence. According to the company it is the first chip to contain a software-defined network (SDN) controller on the die that will offer network services such as load balancing and ensuring service-level agreements on the chip.

Paramesh Gopi, president and CEO of Applied Micro, said that these new chips have now made it past the prototype stage and are being used by Dell and Red Hat. Gopi expects physical servers containing the X-Gene to hit the market by the end of this year.

The chip is manufactured at 40 nanometers and has eight 2.4 GHz ARM cores, four smaller ARM Cortex A5 cores running the SDN controller software, four 10-gigabit ethernet ports, and various ports that can support more Ethernet, SSDs, accelerator cards such as those from Fusion-io or SATA drives.

The cost of ownership, which includes power requirements are about half of that of a comparable x86 product, but wouldn’t discuss actual power consumption, the company claims.

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Windows RT Devices To Drop In Price

Prices of Windows RT devices have started to decline, signaling an attempt by PC makers to quickly clear out stock after poor adoption of tablets and convertibles with the operating system.

Microsoft released Windows RT for ARM-based devices and Windows 8 for Intel-based devices in October last year. The price drop is an acknowledgement that Windows RT has failed, analysts said.

Prices of popular products usually don’t fall, but Windows RT devices were not in demand, and prices fell, analysts said.

The starting price for Dell’s XPS 10 is now US$449 for a 32GB model, scalping $50 off the original launch price. The 64GB model is $499, which is a drop from the original $599 price. By comparison, the price of the Latitude 10 tablet with Intel processors and Microsoft’s Windows 8 OS remained stable at $499.

Asus’ VivoTab RT, which is largely sold through retailers, is being offered by Amazon.com for $382 with 32GB of storage, which is a heavy discount from the $599 launch price. Retailers like Best Buy, Staples and Office Depot have also dropped the price of the tablet by $50, now selling it for $549.

Newegg is listing VivoTab RT as having been discontinued. Asus did not respond to a request to comment on whether the company was still offering the tablet.

Lenovo is offering the IdeaPad Yoga 11 for $599 as part of a seven-day deal, which is a drop from the original $799 price. However, TigerDirect is offering an IdeaPad Yoga 11 model for $599 on its website, while Amazon is selling a model for $499.99.

Samsung did not ship its Windows RT tablet, Ativ Tab, to the U.S. market.

However, the starting price of Microsoft’s Surface RT remained consistent at $499 on its online store. Microsoft also offers Lenovo’s IdeaPad Yoga 11 through its store, but has stopped offering tablets like the VivoTab RT on its website. The company last month said it stocks its store with RT devices based on availability and demand.

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Court Sides With Aereo

Streaming television service Aereo does not infringe the copyrights of over-the-air TV stations, and a request from several stations to shutter the New York-based service isn’t warranted, an appeals court has ruled.

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York was right to deny a request for a preliminary injunction from Fox, ABC, WNET and other TV stations, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled Monday.

The TV stations had argued Aereo, a service that allows subscribers to record and play over-the-air TV programs on Internet-connected devices, violated their so-called public performance right, their exclusive right in U.S. copyright law to “to perform the copyrighted work publicly.”

But Judge Christopher Droney, writing for the appeals court majority, noted that Aereo makes use of technology already found by courts to be legal. The service combines Aereo-designed mini TV antennas, DVRs, and a Slingbox-like streaming service, he noted.

Aereo users, by making personal copies of TV programs for their own use, were not creating public performances, Droney added.

The TV stations “have not demonstrated that they are likely to prevail on the merits on this claim in their copyright infringement action,” Droney wrote in rejecting the request for an injunction against the service. “Nor have they demonstrated serious questions as to the merits and a balance of hardships that tips decidedly in their favor.”

Aereo praised the decision. The decision “again validates that Aereo’s technology falls squarely within the law, and that’s a great thing for consumers who want more choice and flexibility in how, when and where they can watch television,” Chet Kanojia, Aereo’s CEO and founder, said in a statement.

Lawyers for the TV stations weren’t immediately available for comment.

Digital rights group Public Knowledge cheered the ruling, saying it is a “victory for consumer choice and video innovation.”

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Blackberry Plans New Tablet

BlackBerry plans to roll out a larger tablet and two phone-tablet combos, or phablets, over the next year, according to a leaked road map presentation slide.

The three devices will run the BlackBerry 10 mobile operating system, which powers the Z10 smartphone and the upcoming Q10, which features a physical qwerty keyboard, according to the slide, which first appeared over the weekend on Twitter as @BB10Leaks.

BlackBerry officials didn’t comment on the road map. However, in comments to analysts last Thursday, CEO Thorstein Heins said repeatedly that the company will introduce more BlackBerry 10 devices this year, though he didn’t indicate what form factors the products would feature.

The three new devices shown in the slide include a BlackBerry 10 tablet with a widescreen aspect ratio, as well as a “U10″ phone-tablet, which some call a phablet, and an “R10″ phablet with a physical qwerty keyboard.

The slide indicates that the B10 tablet will ship in the third or fourth quarter, while the two phablets will be released later, with the U10 shipping at the end of the year and the R10 in spring of 2014.

There are no specifications on the slide, but the devices appear to be shown roughly in proportion to one another, with the phablets appearing to be wider than the existing Z10 and Q10 smartphones.

BlackBerry already has a 7-in. tablet called the PlayBook that is more square in shape than the widescreen look of the B10 in the slide. Some analysts and bloggers said it’s possible that BlackBerry is developing a competitor to the various 9-to-11-in. tablets already on the market, including many Android tablets, as well as the 9.7-in. iPad.

“BlackBerry wants to be a full-line competitor, particularly for business users, so they have to have a full line of products to compete head-on with Apple and Android, primarily Samsung,” said Jack Gold, an analyst at J.Gold Associates. “I would expect any viable competitor to establish a full line of products touching on all the various preferences of the marketplace, which includes smartphones, phablets and tablets.”

Gold couldn’t confirm whether any of the details in the leaked slide were accurate, but he noted that it doesn’t appear to include the mid-priced smartphones that Heins and other executives have hinted that BlackBerry may launch over the next few quarters.

The PlayBook tablet first went on sale in April 2011, running on what BlackBerry then called the BlackBerry Tablet OS, based on QNX. BlackBerry later said it would merge that tablet operating system into BlackBerry 10. The company also released a major update to the PlayBook tablet operating system in February 2012.

The first release of the PlayBook was criticized for not having native email.

Analysts are not sure that BlackBerry can keep up with production demand for so many new devices that depend on a relatively constrained supply chain for displays and other components. But to boost its global smartphone market share, currently at less than 10%, BlackBerry will need a product lineup with a variety of options.

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Lenovo To Buy NEC’s Mobile Phone Unit

Japan’s NEC Corp is in negotiations to sell its struggling mobile phone unit to its PC venture partner Lenovo Group Ltd, a source familiar with the discussions said, confirming media reports of the negotiations.

NEC is also in talks with potential domestic buyers, the source said on condition that he wasn’t identified.

NEC has until now said its mobile business is an important part of its overall operations. But after two years of losses the company is shedding assets to bolster profitability.

“Amid the rapidly changing market we are considering a number of ways to bolster the competitiveness of our mobile phone business, but nothing has been decided,” NEC said in a statement through the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Friday in response to the media reports.

Lenovo officials could not be immediately reached for comment.

Japanese phone makers have struggled to gain traction overseas inmarkets dominated by Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Apple Inc where they are also being challenged by upcoming Chinese makers. In Japan, the two foreign giants are whittling down their share of cell phone sales.

Last October, NEC cut its mobile phone sales target for the year ending March to 4.3 million from a previous estimate of 5 million units. Lenovo, the world’s No.2 maker of PCs, is cranking up overseas expansion in smartphones after solid growth in China.

Japan’s biggest cell phone maker, Sony Corp, is vying with China’s Huawei Technology Co and ZTE Corp to be No.3 in the global smartphone market.

NEC also plans to sell its mobile services subsidiary NEC Mobiling Ltd for as much as $850 million, separate sources told Reuters this month.

Marubeni Corp’s telecommunications unit and TD Mobile, a joint venture between Toyota Tsusho Corp and Denso Corp, are vying for the 51 percent stake, the sources said.

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Shark Bay 1 Chipset Goes Pentium

In the universe where Haswell comes as two-chip platform, formally referred to as Shark Bay 2-chip platform by Intel, there will be three mobile chipsets. The HM86 is targeting at mainstream consumers, HM87 targets Premium consumers and SMBs, while the top one QM87 targets the hard working corporate market.

Things get a bit simpler with the Shark Bay 1-chip platform. The value consumer chipset is simply called Baseline, while the next one is simply called Premium. It can’t get any simpler than that. The Shark Bay 1-chip Platform has same I/O, or what we call a chipset, integrated on either Haswell U or Haswell Y processors line.

The Premium chipset supports Windows 8 connected stand by, Intel Active Management Technology 9.0, Intel Small Business Advantage, ACHI and Raid Rapid storage technology, Intel Insider, Intel Anti-Theft Technology, wireless display and three independent displays.

The list goes on with 8 USB ports where two to four can be USB 3.0 ports, up to 6 devices with PCI express 2.0 5GT/s, four SATA ports capable of 6Gbps. The chipset doesn’t have VGA or LVDS as the CPU has the graphics on it, but the Premium chipset has two sensors interface with I2C and UART, 1.5 to 5MB firmware support, Anchor Cover, Platform trust technology and Platform Flash Armoring technology.

Getting away from numbers and naming the chipset simply Premium means that U and Y line of CPUs are meant for tablet and Ultrabook markets, where manufacturers want you to love the product as a whole, not specifics. Premium and Baseline chpisets for Y and U line Haswell processors capable of TDPs as low as 13W are coming in Q3 2013.

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Is Ubuntu Linux Spyware?

Richard Stallman has asked a South American free software association not to promote Ubuntu Linux at its events because it “spies on its users” by collecting its users’ desktop search activity and selling the data to Amazon.

Canonical released Ubuntu 12.10 last October with Amazon search integrated into its Dash desktop search function.

Although Ubuntu users can opt out and Canonical claims it anonymises users’ search information before sending it to Amazon, the change resulted in Ubuntu users being shown Amazon ads in response to desktop search queries.

The ‘feature’ has attracted a lot of criticism and might have led some users to defect to other Linux distributions.

When Stallman’s request was denied by the FLISOL event organiser with the excuse that it would limit user freedom of choice, Stallman fired off a response to the organisation’s entire mailing list on Sunday. Parts of his email are quoted below, as translated by Groklaw.

“The issue I raise is about what should happen at FLISOL events. Give away copies of Ubuntu or not? Promote Ubuntu or no? I asked the organisers of the event that they, as a policy, not distribute or promote Ubuntu.

“Freedom of users is something else, and there isn’t a conflict between a user’s freedom and my request. If someone decides to install Ubuntu, I would consider it a mistake, but it’s his own choice to do it. What I ask is that you don’t participate, help or suggest that he do it. I didn’t request that you block him from doing so.

“As a matter of principle, I don’t believe anyone has a right, morally, to distribute proprietary software, that is, software that deprives the users of freedom. When the user controls his own software, he can install what he wants and no one can stop him. But today’s issue isn’t about him, what he does, but rather what you do with him.”

As Stallman sent his email only yesterday, it’s not yet known whether FLISOL has reconsidered promoting Ubuntu at its free software events.

These points might seem like splitting hairs, but apparently Richard Stallman – the author of the GNU General Public Licence (GPL), as well as the founder and president of the Free Software Foundation – is serious about them.

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LinkedIn Beefs Up

LinkedIn has re-tooled its search engine with changes designed to make it easier for members to find information on the business networking site, whose volume of content has increased and grown more diverse in recent years.

Launched in 2003, LinkedIn initially focused on giving professionals a place to feature their resumes and career bios, as well as connect with peers and colleagues, but the site has progressively become more interactive and houses a much larger repository of data beyond individual profiles.

For example, almost 3 million companies have set up corporate pages, more than 1.5 million groups have been created, the site features a jobs section, and individuals and publishers are able to post and share comments and links to articles.

So it’s not surprising for LinkedIn to focus on improving its search engine, which fielded 5.7 billion queries last year.

LinkedIn members have until now had to run separate queries for groups, companies, jobs and other professionals, but that’s changing with the upgraded search engine.

“Now, all you need to do is type what you’re looking for into the search box and you’ll see a comprehensive page of results that pulls content from all across LinkedIn including people, jobs, groups and companies,” Johnathan Podemsky, a LinkedIn product manager, wrote in a blog post on Monday.

Users can still segment results, so as to see only job results, for example.

The LinkedIn search engine is also gaining auto-complete and suggested-searches functionalities to help people fine-tune query terms. In addition, the search engine will log members’ search queries and “learn” from them in order to deliver more relevant results.

It will also be possible for users to save search queries and be alerted about new or changed search results. The advanced search option has also gained more search filters, including location, company and school.

However, the search engine still doesn’t include content from the company’s SlideShare site, which about 60 million monthly visitors use to upload, share, rate and comment on primarily slide presentations, but also documents, videos and webinars.

Also, the search improvements are being applied to the main site, not to the mobile apps, although doing so is something the company is looking into, according to a spokeswoman.

LinkedIn started to roll out the new search features on Monday, and expects to finish delivering them to every member worldwide in the coming weeks.

As of the end of 2012, LinkedIn had topped 200 million registered members located in more than 200 countries.

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Dual Core 35w Haswell Coming In Q3

We found out peculiar fact that some members of Intel’s M Processor line, 35W dual-core products, won’t get the Haswell upgrade until Q4 2013. Haswell starts in very late Q2 2013 and is still scheduled to launch in late May or early June, but most of the parts are aimed at the very expensive quad core MX line and MQ line edition parts.

When it comes to dual-core 35W Core i7 and Core i5 Haswell parts they won’t come at least until Q4 2013, at least this is the current part. Core i7 3540 launched in this quarter, Q1 2013, and it is a 3GHz dual-core with four threads and a top turbo frequency set at 3.7 GHz. It is a 35W, 22nm Ivy Bridge part with 4MB of cache memory. A replacement part might be on the way with a slightly higher clock in Q3 2013, but the Haswell based replacement is set for Q4 2013. With an official price of $348 it is not really the cheapest kid on the block.

Core i5 3380 remains the fastest dual-core 35W Pentium part until Q4 2013 Haswell reinforcement. The 2.7GHz / 3.4GHz turbo clocked dual-core will remain the fastest in this league at least until Q3 2013, when it might get slightly faster version of the Ivy Bridge based core, but it won’t be replaced by Haswell 35W dual-cores before Q4 2013.

Intel definitely wants to prioritize the quad-core 55W i7-3940XM $1096.00 replacement called Core i7 4930MX and Core i7-3840QM replacement in $568 market segment, branded as Core i7 4800 MQ, as it can simply make more money on these pricey these parts. These quad-core Haswell parts start selling in Q2 2013, followed by 17W Ultra low voltage dual-cores in Q3 2013 and only after these two lines rolls out, Intel will introduce the rest of the Haswell line-up.

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