Google-owned Motorola unveiled the Moto X,
its new flagship smartphone, in New York City today. The Moto X
deëmphasizes manual control, hardware buttons, and the touch screen in
favor of always-on sensors built to respond to speech, gestures, and
context. And customers will be able to customize many features of the
device when they order it.
The phone’s “touchless control”
interface is its biggest innovation. Without switching on the device,
simply saying “Okay Google Now” followed by a command can make a phone
place a call, get directions, perform a Google search, or more. The
phone’s accelerometer can also tell whether you’re in a moving car and
tailor its commands and notifications accordingly.
New research from Black Hat shows it’s possible to trick water and
energy infrastructure to cause physical damage—and securing these
systems remains painfully slow.
Three presentations scheduled to take place at the Black Hat computer security conference
in Las Vegas today will reveal vulnerabilities in control systems used
to manage energy infrastructure such as gas pipelines. These are just
the latest sign that such systems remain dangerously susceptible to
computer attacks that could have devastating consequences; and although
the researchers proposed fixes for each flaw they’ve identified, they
caution that, on the whole, industrial infrastructure remains woefully
vulnerable.
The vulnerabilities add to a growing list of problems
identified due to a recent surge in research into the security of
industrial systems. Progress to fix such security issues has been slow
going, due partly to the poor design of existing systems, and partly to a
lack of strong incentives to fix the flaws quickly.
If you use a credit card or a cell phone, chances are you get a
monthly statement detailing each purchase or call. This may soon expand
to your utility bills, too: a project in the works at electronics
company Belkin makes
it possible to see how much electricity you’re spending on everything
from the TV in your living room to the washing machine in your basement.
The National Security Agency’s collection of phone records and
Internet data from U.S. companies provides a model for other nations,
the agency’s director, General Keith Alexander, said today at a
prominent computer security conference in Las Vegas.
In his most
public appearance since leaked documents revealed the existence of such
large-scale surveillance programs, Alexander gave new details about how
access to the collected data is controlled within the NSA. Those
measures, combined with oversight from Congress and the courts, provide
strong protections against abuses, he said. “The assumption is that
people are just out there wheeling and dealing, and nothing could be
further from the truth,” said Alexander. “I think this is a standard for
other countries.” Alexander gave the opening keynote at the Black Hat computer security conference.
This week a New York Times op-ed rekindled a debate about whether switching from natural gas to coal actually reduces overall greenhouse gas emissions.
While
the Obama administration has presented natural gas as a “bridge fuel,” a
cleaner alternative to coal that can reduce emissions until we can
switch to renewables, some researchers question whether natural gas
provides any net benefit compared to coal. And they say that emphasizing
natural gas only delays a move to renewable energy. In the op-ed, a
Cornell professor argued that far from being a bridge fuel to a clean
energy future, “it’s a gangplank to more warming.” At least one expert
responded by labeling the professor and those who agree with him
“worriers.” (You can find some reasoned responses here and here).
Sometimes, cheap and simple can be brilliant. Google seems to have
figured this out with its latest attempt to bring online content to your
TV set—an ordinary looking, pack-of-gum-sized device called Chromecast.
Google introduced the new product last week (see “Google Launches a Dongle to Bring Online Video to TV”).
The $35 gadget is about two inches long and plugs into an HDMI port on
the back of newer TVs, enabling them to play online videos from sources
like Netflix and Google’s own YouTube, or simply by mirroring the screen
of another device.
New technology can blast gigabit-per-second
data speeds across age-old twisted-pair copper telephone cables—at least
at distances from a telephone pole to a house, says Alcatel-Lucent.
In
theory, such technology could be crucial to speeding up global Internet
access. Of the 580 million broadband subscribers in the world, 55
percent have copper connections—though that figure is 33 percent in the
United States, where most people get their broadband from the same
coaxial cable that delivers their TV, according to Dell’oro, a telecommunications market research firm.
A new class of medicines could give doctors the
ability to awaken underperforming genes in patients who currently have
no treatment options.
Boston-area startup RaNA Therapeutics
is developing a novel kind of medicine that can boost the activity of
genes that may be silenced or underactive and thus cause disease. The
medicine would use a small RNA-like molecule that blocks the function of
a long RNA molecule that is hampering the expression of such a gene.
