Germany Could Ding Facebook for Fake News

The frenzied 2016 election cycle mercifully is over, but Facebook's fake news problem isn't going away. The company may face steep fines in Germany if it fails to address it satisfactorily. A bill slated for consideration next year would establish fines of up to $500,000 euros per day for each day that a fake news story persisted after notification of its falsehood was provided. The legislation, which has bipartisan support, would apply to other sites as well, but Facebook clearly is its main target.

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2017: More Apple Security Flaws, Cyberattacks, Hacktivisim

More security vulnerabilities will appear in the software of Adobe and Apple than in Microsoft's, more attacks on the Internet's infrastructure will occur, and cybersecurity events will stoke international tensions. Those are a few of the predictions for 2017 that security experts have made. Users of Apple desktops and laptops for years have been relatively insulated from the kinds of malicious activity that has besieged those in the Windows world, but that's going to change next year, warned Trend Micro.

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2016: The Year That Was

2016 really was a year like no other. We had yet another election defined by the misuse of analytics -- and folks seem to be getting worse rather than better at this. We had a rush to robotics, particularly self-driving cars, and some firms even leaped ahead to self-flying, people-delivering drones -- which we called "flying cars" just a few years back. We had a wave of fake news, mostly paid for by Google, because that company, as always, has no compass. It appears to be shaming nations into regulating it, suggesting it has no sense, either.

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Fact-Checking the President-Elect's Tweets

Fact-checking President-elect Donald Trump can be a chore, even for people paid to do it. The Washington Post wants to make it less so, with add-ons to the popular Chrome and Firefox browsers. The browser extension, RealDonaldContext, is available from the Chrome Web Store or the Mozilla Foundation. After installation, any time you click on a tweet on the @realdonaldtrump account, any fact-checking the Post may have done also will be displayed. The fact-checking includes adding context.

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Gadget Ogling: Heightened Hearing, Toasty Toes, and Glass Speakers

Bose's latest earbuds are designed to help you tune in to the specific sounds you want to hear from the world around you. Hearphones are a sort of blend of noise-cancelling earbuds and hearing aids. There are several presets in the app, with names like "focused conversation," "gym," "airplane" and "television." You can opt to crank up the volume on all sound or turn it down. You can block out noise or amplify it from certain directions. For instance, you might use it to help you better hear a specific person in a crowded place.

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Samsung May Unleash a Beast

Hot off the rumor mill on Wednesday is news of a new feature Samsung may include in its upcoming Galaxy S8. It's dubbed "Beast Mode," and that's just about all that is known about it so far. Spotted in an EU trademark application, Beast Mode would apply to smartphones, mobile phones and application software for smartphones. The Galaxy S8 is expected to be the first smartphone built around Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 processor. If true, that lines up with the notion that Beast Mode could allow super high performance.

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Waymo Offers Glimpse of Autonomous Chrysler Minivans

Waymo, the standalone venture that emerged from Google's self-driving car project, on Monday unveiled a fleet of 100 Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivans with the latest high-tech sensors, telematics, and other gear designed for fully autonomous operation. Modifications were made to several parts of the Pacifica -- including its electrical, powertrain, chassis and structural systems -- to optimize it for fully autonomous driving. With the additional computer equipment, the cars will undergo more challenging tests.

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Is Peter Thiel the Most Powerful Person in Tech?

There are generally two paths for dealing with someone in power when disagreements arise. One is to confront, and the other is to understand and influence. What is interesting is the most common path taken is the former while the most successful is the latter. I think the reason is that the former path is both the natural path for disagreement and the most visible. Confrontation is always more newsworthy than influence. When done right, exerting influence has the odd result of not conveying credit while actually making far more progress.

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Uber Staff Still Stalking Customers, Claims Suit

The controversy over Uber staff using the company's tech to track people's movements was reignited this week when information in a pending lawsuit began circulating in the tech press. Uber employees can pull customer data at will, alleged Ward Spangenberg, the company's former forensic investigator, in a court declaration filed earlier this fall as part of his bid to prevent the firm from forcing his case into arbitration. Uber staffers have been able to track high-profile politicians, celebrities and ex-significant others, Spangenberg said.

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Docker Delivers Containerd to Open Source Community

Docker on Wednesday announced that it will spin out containerd, a key component of its Docker Engine, for open source use. Containerd will provide an open, stable and extensible base for building non-Docker products and container solutions, the company said. Some of the top cloud providers, including Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Google, IBM and Microsoft, have committed to making contributions to the project, according to Docker, giving it instant credibility within the community.

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Yahoo Suffers Major Data Breach Deja Vu

Yahoo on Wednesday revealed that Net bandits stole data associated with 1 billion of its user accounts -- one of the largest data breaches in Internet history. The theft, which occurred in August 2013, is distinct from the theft disclosed earlier this fall, in which 500 million accounts were compromised, Yahoo CISO Bob Lord explained. Stolen information may include names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords using MD5 encryption -- and in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers.

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Nvidia Takes Self-Driving Journey to California Roads

Nvidia last week began test-driving autonomous cars on California roads, after the state's Department of Motor Vehicles gave it the green light. The company is testing its Drive PX2 autonomous driving platform, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. Nvidia recently has made several well publicized moves in the autonomous car arena. It forged a partnership with Baidu this summer to build a cloud-to-car platform for semiautonomous cars.

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Gates Spearheads $1B Clean Tech Effort

One year after a powerhouse group of technology executives and venture capital icons met to form the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, the group, led by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, has launched a $1 billion investment fund to support clean energy startups around the world. The Breakthrough Energy Fund, chaired by Gates, is designed to jumpstart an entire new generation of entrepreneurs developing radical new approaches to providing reliable and low-cost energy, with zero carbon emissions as the end goal.

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Uber's Self-Driving Fleet Takes On San Francisco

Uber on Wednesday rolled out a fleet of self-driving cars in San Francisco, the second U.S. city to participate in its pilot project. Pittsburgh was the first. Riders who request an UberX -- the lowest-priced Uber vehicle -- will be matched with one of the self-driving Volvo XC90 SUVs if one is available and if the customers are willing, according to Anthony Levandowski, head of Uber's Advanced Technology Group. They can accommodate three passengers. San Francisco "comes with its own nuances, including more bikes on the road, high traffic density and narrow lanes," he noted.

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CrateDB Launches Machine Data Innovations

Crate.io has announced the general availability of the first non-beta release of CrateDB 1.0, an open source SQL database that enables real-time analytics for machine data applications. CrateDB is an SQL database alternative to NOSQL machine data management solutions. It gives mainstream SQL developers access to machine data applications that previously were available only using NoSQL solutions. "CrateDB is one of the few systems in the space that can enable JOIN to handle a large amount of machine data," said Christian Lutz, CEO of Crate.io.

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Apple AirPods Finally Good to Go

Apple has begun taking online orders for its wireless AirPods, and said it would start delivering the $159 earphones to customers, Apple Stores, resellers and carriers next week. At the iPhone 7 launch, Apple SVP Phil Schiller said the AirPods would be available in October. Missing the deadline for release of any hot product is bad news for a company, but what made the AirPods miss worse was that the they were supposed to offset some of the sting consumers felt over Apple's decision to omit the traditional headphone jack in the iPhone 7.

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Magic Leap Catches Flak Over Tricky Video

It turns out the awe-inspiring video Magic Leap unveiled last year is not a demo of its still-secretive mixed reality technology, but a bit of sleight of hand from special effects firm Weta Workshop, which is credited at the beginning and end of the clip. Magic Leap's accompanying post claims the video shows a game being played around the office. The true nature of the video was exposed last week. "Most of us thought that video was a demo of the technology -- not a film created by a special effects company," said tech analyst Rob Enderle.

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Torvalds Releases Hefty Linux Kernel Update

Linus Torvalds this weekend announced Linux 4.9, which offers a number of significant upgrades to the kernel. "I'm pretty sure this is the biggest release we've ever had, at least in terms of commits," Torvalds wrote. "If you look at the number of lines changed, we've had bigger releases in the past but they've tended to be due to specific issues." A chunk of the upgrade is the new greybus staging support, and other than size, the release looks fairly normal, he noted. Staging, GPU and networking are the bulk of the drivers.

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Gadget Ogling: Rolling Records, Designing Lawns, and Placated Phones

RokBlok is a portable record player without a turntable. It's a block that dashes around the top of your records, and uses both its needle and built-in speaker to soundtrack your day. All you need to operate it are your records and a flat surface. If you'd like higher quality audio, you can connect it to your Bluetooth speaker or headphones. It's designed with protecting your records in mind, as it has rubber wheels and the center of gravity isn't on the needle itself. That should help prevent RokBlok from widening the grooves and help you enjoy your records for years to come.

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What Trump Should Do With Air Force One

I'm starting to get the idea that for the next eight or so years, a lot of what many of us are going to write will have something to do with what Donald Trump tweeted. Granted, since that has been the case for much of the last year, we have gotten comfortable with it. However, when Trump said he would kill the deal for an updated Air Force One -- which would cost billions and still be based on the now-obsolete 747 -- it hit me that we've completely lost track of what Air Force One should be.

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New Smartwatch OS Debuts on GitHub

Can a new smartwatch operating system based on Linux breathe some new life into the smart wearables market? Florent Revest hopes so. Revest, a French computer science student, on Wednesday announced the alpha release of AsteroidOS, an open source operating system that will run on several Android smartwatch models. "Many users believe that the current proprietary platforms can not guarantee a satisfactory level of control over their privacy and hardware," noted Revest, who has been working on his OS for two years.

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Microsoft and Intel's Project Evo Ups the PC Game

Microsoft and Intel have announced Project Evo, their highly anticipated collaboration to create the next generation of personal computers. The project aims to expand on new advances in AI, mixed reality, advanced security and gaming, Terry Myerson, executive vice president of the Windows and Devices Group at Microsoft, unveiled some of Project Evo's ambitious plans at the WinHEC event in China. Through the collaboration, the companies will push the boundaries of a personal computer's capabilities in the near future, he said.

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Traversing the Social Media Minefield

Mainly because of the amount of money they bring in, many people expect celebrities and other prominent figures to have thicker skins than the average Jane or Joe. However -- as evidenced by the numbers of celebrities who've forsaken social media -- fame and fortune are not effective defenses against an all-out assault by faceless trolls. Saturday Night Live cast member Leslie Jones temporarily unplugged her Twitter account after being bombarded by racist and sexist attacks. Girls star Lena Dunham quit Twitter due to abuse.

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Microsoft, Qualcomm Tuck Windows 10 Into ARM Devices

Microsoft on Wednesday announced the compatibility of Windows 10 and native Windows apps with ARM-based processors, including Qualcomm's Snapdragon, which currently powers a large percentage of Android devices. One of the highlights at this year's Windows Hardware Engineering Community event in Shenzhen, China, the new partnership will make it possible for Windows applications, peripherals and enterprise solutions to run on new mobile, power efficient and always-connected cellular PCs.

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Trick out your house with tech for the holidays

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Your data is not safe. Here's how to lock it down

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The 12 must-have tech gifts of 2016

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Android Marshmallow on PC Falls Flat

Android-x86 Project eventually may become a viable operating system alternative for your desktop and laptops computers, but it's not there yet. You will have to wait a while for the developers to fix a number of failures with the latest release upgrading Android-x86 to Marshmallow 6.0.1. Android-x86 lets you run the Android OS with the Google Chrome browser on your desktop and laptop computers, rather than buying one of the qualified Chromebooks with the Google Play Store features bolted on -- but this latest release may be stable in name only.

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Tech Giants Team to Battle Terrorism Online

Facebook has teamed up with Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft to fight the proliferation of terrorist content on the Web. The tech giants will create a shared industry database of hashes for violent terrorist imagery, terrorist recruitment videos, or images they have removed from their services. They may use these shared hashes to help identify potential terrorist content on their platforms. Hashes to be shared will apply to content that's most likely to violate all the companies' content policies.

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Ransomware Fighters Get New Free Tool

Ransomware has become a gold mine for digital criminals. In the first three months of this year, electronic extortionists squeezed $209 million from victims desperate to recover their data after it was scrambled by the malicious software, based on FBI estimates. At that rate, ransomware could funnel as much as $1 billion into criminal coffers this year. Ransomware typically will encrypt most of the files on a computer, but one form of ransomware attacks the boot sequence of a computer.

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STS.050 The History of MIT (MIT)

To study MIT is to study the modern world. In 2016, MIT celebrated the 100th anniversary of the move from Boston to Cambridge; therefore, this course examines the history of the Institute through the lens of the history of science and technology, and vice-versa. It is about discovery, exploration, adventure, learning, creative thinking, and the synthesis of big ideas. Additionally, this course is about the importance of the research university, what it has been in the past and what it will be in the future. The course includes guest lecturers and field trips to the Institute Archives and the MIT Museum. The most important prerequisite for this class is curiosity, a desire to think deeply about MIT, and a willingness to communicate your thoughts and ideas. The ultimate aim is to fascinate you as much as to help you improve your skills synthesizing information from diverse sources about science, technology, and culture.

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iPhone Envy May Have Felled Galaxy Note7

Samsung's desire to match the iPhone 7 Plus led it to implement an aggressive design and manufacturing approach that led to problems with its Galaxy Note7 -- including some instances of the smartphones bursting into flames -- and eventually its global recall, Instrumental reported last week. Instrumental engineers tore down a Galaxy Note7, and found "evidence in the design of an intellectual tension between safety and pushing the boundaries," CEO Anna Shedletsky revealed.

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AI Platforms Welcome Devs With Open Arms

Two leaders in the field of artificial intelligence have announced that they're open-sourcing their AI platforms. After investing in building rich simulated environments to serve as laboratories for AI research, Google's DeepMind Lab on Saturday said it would open the platform for the broader research community's use. DeepMind has been using its AI lab for some time, and it has "only barely scratched the surface of what is possible" in it, noted team members Charlie Beattie, Joel Leibo, Stig Petersen and Shane Legg in an online post.

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Multinational Effort Halts Malware Avalanche

The U.S. Department of Justice on Monday released new details about the multinational takedown of Avalanche, a multimillion-dollar malware and money-laundering network, following a four-year probe led by German police and prosecutors. Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell, Acting U.S. Attorney Soo C. Song and Assistant Director Scott S. Smith of the FBI's Cyber Division made the announcement in Pittsburgh. Prosecutors and investigators in 40 countries were involved in the probe, led by the Public Prosecutor's office in Verden, Germany.

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Facebook Videos Explain AI in a Nutshell

Facebook last week released six videos to educate people about artificial intelligence. AI will bring major changes to society, and will be the backbone of many of the most innovative apps and services of the future, but it remains mysterious, noted Yann LeCun, Facebook's director of AI research, and Joaquin Candela, the company's director of applied machine learning in an online post. The videos are "simple and short introductions" that will "help everyone understand how this complex field of computer science works," they said.

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Isn't Fake News Propaganda?

A few years back, when it was one company, HP made a huge mistake that cost a number of people their jobs and forced the replacement of many of its board members. The company suffered through some nasty litigation and several top executives almost landed in jail. The mistake was tied back to something the board authorized, which at the time was called "pretexting." It also went by the more common term "identity theft." It is my belief that the board wouldn't have authorized the effort if it had known what the teams planned to do.

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