Microsoft opening New York store close to Apple’s iconic cube

Microsoft opening New York store close to Apple’s iconic cube

Tom Warren

The Verge 

Microsoft is opening a retail store in the heart of New York City. The software maker has confirmed to the Wall Street Journalthat it plans to open a store just a few blocks away from Apple’s iconic cube on Fifth Avenue, following rumors from last month. Microsoft’s new retail location will replace an existing Fendi store and serve as the company’s first full retail store in Manhattan. "As our first flagship store, it will serve as the centerpiece of our Microsoft Stores experience," says David Porter, corporate vice president for Microsoft retail stores, in a statement to the WSJ. "This is a goal we've had since day one — we were only waiting for the right location. And now we have it."
A true retail presence in NYC

The location is close to Apple’s flagship New York City store, and it allows Microsoft to finally have a presence in the upscale shopping district of New York City. Microsoft has used pop-up stores previously, including a temporary retail store in Times Square for the original Surface launch, and a speciality store in Staten Island. Despite less of a focus on “devices and services” and more on cloud and mobile under CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft continues to open stores regularly.

The latest New York City location will join more than 100 Microsoft retail stores in the US, and Microsoft is planning to create an "experiential space" within its new Fifth Avenue store to turn the shop into more than just the average Microsoft Store. It’s not clear exactly what that will entail, but the new location will serve as a flagship to demonstrate upcoming Lumia devices and the company’s Surface Pro 3 tablets. Microsoft has not yet confirmed when its New York City store will launch, but the company is also opening new retail locations in Toronto, Tulsa, Bethesda, and Cerritos before the end of the year.

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Ello Users Experience Further Downtime After DDoS Attack

Ello Users Experience Further Downtime After DDoS Attack

Kyle Russell

TechCrunch

The suddenly hip social networking site Ello experienced its first major outage today, suffering a Distributed Denial of Service attack that brought it down for approximately 45 minutes. The company says that it was able to fix the issue by blocking the IP addresses responsible for the attack.
However, it seems that the site is still going through some instability, as users are still occasionally taking to Twitter to say that it has gone down or that posts refuse to upload. Anecdotally, I occasionally get the above image on attempting to load the site. We’ll update this post if Ello confirms whether these are aftershocks from the attack or simply growing pains from the site’s rapid user acquisition in recent days. 

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iPhone 6 and 6 Plus bending fears 'seem overblown'

iPhone 6 and 6 Plus bending fears 'seem overblown'

Samuel Gibbs

The Guardian 

User reports and fears that the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus phones are bending in trouser pockets are overblown, according to independent testing by the US non-profit Consumer Reports.
In fact, its tests found that HTC’s One M8 phone bent under the same force as the iPhone 6 - and that the “phablet-size” iPhone 6 Plus was stronger than both. The tests showed, though, that the new phones are substantially less strong than 2012’s iPhone 5, whose body is also used in 2013’s iPhone 5S.

Consumer Reports tested the iPhone 6, 6 Plus and iPhone 5 against the LG G3, Samsung Galaxy Note 3, and HTC One M8 using a compression testing machine to apply a “three-point flexural test”, where a metered force is applied to the centre of the phone while it is supported at each end.
It concluded that “while nothing is (evidently) indestructible, we expect that any of these phones should stand up to typical use.”

It found that the 4.7in iPhone 6, which is 7.1mm thick, would show permanent bending with the equivalent of a 70lb (31.8kg) weight placed on the centre of its back. The 5.5in iPhone 6 Plus deformed at 90lbs, and the 4in iPhone 5 - which is 7.6mm thick - at 130lbs.
The 5in HTC One M8 also bend under a 70lbs weight, and its case separated at 90lb, while the iPhone 6 resisted to 100lb.

The 5.5in LG G3 resisted bending up to 130lbs, the same as the iPhone 5, and the 5.7in Samsung Galaxy Note 3 150lbs.

“While not the strongest smartphones on the market, fears of a serious structural design flaw in the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus seem overblown,” explained Glenn Derene, electronics editor for Consumer Reports in a video of the tests.

Most of the phones continued to work after deforming, and required an extra 20 to 30lbs to bend enough to separate the screen from the phone’s case.
Consumer Reports bend testing the iPhone 6, 6 Plus and iPhone 5 with their Android competitors. Apple tests its smartphones using a similar method to Consumer Reports by applying 55lbs of weight to the back of the phones to test resilience to bending, or approximately the weight required to break three ordinary pencils.

Apple said that it only received nine complaints about iPhone 6 Plus phones bending and that it tested 15,000 smartphones during its own investigations.

Previous smartphone tests, which showed the iPhone 6 Plus bending, have used a a less scientific method, with a reviewer applying pressure manually with thumbs pushed into the back of phones.

‘I have a bent iPhone 6 Plus’

Initial reports by users of bending iPhone 6 Plus phones were followed up by video tests displaying a bent 6 Plus. Some reviewers of the smartphone have also found that their iPhone 6 Plus phones were either bent initially or bent during the course of their testing. The Guardian has not seen bending during testing of the iPhone 6 Plus, though it was not carried in trouser pockets.

“Like a lot of people, I have a bent iPhone 6 Plus. It’s almost imperceptible, but it’s there: a slight warp right at the buttons on the side. Put the phone screen down on a table, and it wobbles,” said Mat Hohan in a review of the iPhone 6 Plus for Wired. “I haven’t purposefully bent it and I don’t recall sitting on it (but I probably have).”

How many iPhone 6 Plus phones have been bent in users’ pockets is still unknown. Apple claims that it is not an issue for normal use, but phones from other manufactures have suffered similar bending issues.

As smartphones become thinner and longer with bigger screens, their relative strength decreases while the force applied to them inside pockets can increase due to a lever effect. 

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Artificial Atoms Talk ... and Scientists Listen

Artificial Atoms Talk ... and Scientists Listen

By Kelly Dickerson

LiveScience

For the first time, physicists have figured out how to communicate with an artificial atom using sound instead of light.
Scientists already know a lot about how atoms and light interact. When atoms get charged up with energy, they often emit subatomic particles of light called photons. The photons belong to the wacky world of quantum mechanics where they behave as both particles and waves, and scientists have been studying their bizarre behavior for decades. But now researchers at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have designed an artificial atom that can emit sound particles (called phonons) instead of photons after it's charged up.
"We have opened a new door into the quantum world by talking and listening to atoms," Per Delsing, a professor of microtechnology and nanoscience at Chalmers, said in a statement. [Wacky Physics: The Coolest Little Particles in Nature]

Making phonons
To create the stream of sound particles, the researchers used a superconducting circuit, which represented an "artificial atom." Artificial atoms can be charged up across multiple energy levels just like a real atom, and scientists can study the quantum behavior of the particles they emit.
For the experiment, the researchers cooled the artificial atom to near absolute zero so that heat would not disturb the delicate quantum system. The artificial atom the team used is only 0.0004 inches (0.01 millimeters) long. The setup also included a speaker and microphone to record the sound emitted.
Artificial atoms are usually coupled to light but for this experiment the researchers linked the artificial atom to sound. They put the superconducting circuit between two electrodes covered with piezoelectric fibers. The piezoelectric surfaces convert vibrations into an electric charge and then convert that electricity into a sound wave.
The researchers then fired the sound wave at the artificial atom. The artificial atom absorbed the sound wave and its energy level increased, reaching what scientists call an "excited state." As the atom relaxed back into a "ground state," it released phonons. The researchers measured and recorded the behavior of the phonons, and discovered the bond between an artificial atom and sound is much stronger than the bond created between an artificial atom and light. The stronger bond makes it easier to manipulate the phonons.

What does an atom sound like?
The stream of particles that came from the artificial atom is the weakest sound that can be detected, though the researchers didn't measure the actual decibels. It's much too high-pitched for the human ear to detect. The researchers measured the frequency at 4.8 gigahertz, not far from microwave frequencies used in wireless networks. On a musical scale, that's a D28 note, or about 20 octaves above the highest note on a grand piano.
Studying phonons instead of photons could provide new insights into the quantum world that scientists still don't fully understand.
"Due to the slow speed of sound, we will have time to control the quantum particles while they travel," lead study author Martin Gustafsson, a researcher at Columbia University, said in the statement. "This is difficult to achieve with light, which moves 100,000 times more quickly."
It's difficult to study the behavior of quantum particles, because their quantum state collapses as soon as researchers start poking around and measuring the particles. Artificial atoms already give scientists more control over quantum systems, but slow-moving sound waves will make it even easier to manipulate the particles. Learning more about quantum particles could help scientists get closer to developing technology like superfast quantum computers and quantum cryptography for secure communication.

Details of the experiment were published Sept. 11 in the journal Science Express.

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Members of Congress agree on this: No cellphone calls on planes

Members of Congress agree on this: No cellphone calls on planes

Hugo Martin

Los Angeles Times 

If passengers can divert a commercial plane by feuding over reclining seats, imagine the squabbles that will erupt if fliers are allowed to make loud telephone calls while crammed together in an airline cabin.

That was one of the arguments more than 75 members of Congress made in a letter to the Federal Communications Commission and other federal regulators, urging the government to continue to ban voice calls on commercial flights.

The FCC took the first step toward allowing cellphone calls on planes in December when it began to consider adopting a rule to reverse its long-held ban on inflight calls. The FCC finished accepting public comments on the proposed new rule in February but has yet to schedule further hearings.
Even if the FCC adopts the proposed rule, each airline would have the choice to install the technology needed to allow cellphone calls that do not interrupt cellphone communications on the ground.

The members of Congress who signed the letter last week said the FCC needs to consider how cellphone calls might cause disruptions in a crowded cabin.

"Arguments in an aircraft cabin already start over mundane issues, like seat selection, reclining seats and overhead bin space, and the volume and pervasiveness of voice communications would only serve to exacerbate and escalate these disputes," according to the letter signed by dozens of Republicans and Democrats, including David B. McKinley (R-W.Va.) and Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.).
The feuds over reclining seats mentioned in the letter refers to three incidents in late August and early September when onboard squabbles among passengers over intrusions into their seat space forced the pilots to divert the flights.

To read more about travel, tourism and the airline industry, follow me on Twitter at @hugomartin.

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Facebook launches new tools to grow advertising

Facebook launches new tools to grow advertising

Julia Boorstin

CNBC

Facebook (FB)is making its big and long-anticipated move to grow its reach and take on Google's (GOOGL) DoubleClick. Its new Atlas advertiser tools, which it unveiled this morning, will allow advertisers to track and measure the impact of their campaigns—not just on Facebook, but across browsers and devices.

The social giant is taking on Google, and particularly in mobile ads, where Facebook has a huge advantage. The company knows who you are and what ads you've seen on other platforms—even when you're on mobile devices, which are usually limited by the fact that "cookies," or traditional tracking technology doesn't work on mobile devices.


Omnicom (OMC) is signing an agency-wide ad serving and measurement partnership with Facebook—the first ad conglomerate to do so.

"This idea of "people-based marketing" that Facebook is premiering with the launch of Atlas is really getting us closer to the one to one marketing solutions we've been talking about for so long," said Omnicom Digital CEO Jonathan Nelson. "It allows us to put the right message in front of the right person at the right time on the right device. Facebook's giving us a little more insight into who the customer is on the other side of the media transaction."

For Omnicom and other ad agencies, this should translate into far more efficient buying—and fewer redundant ad purchases reaching the same people on multiple devices. As for the question of whether this better positions Facebook to compete with Google's DoubleClick, Nelson says: "It better positions Facebook in all of advertising overall."
In a blog announcing the news, Facebook says the changes are designed to "make your media budget more effective."

Facebook isn't announcing all its partners in this endeavor. It did however mention Instagram, which is, no surprise, enabled with Atlas to measure and verify ad impressions. Atlas works with any publisher that accepts third-party tags, which now is 60,000 publishers—Atlas-seved ads can be seen on Yahoo and CNBC.com among others. 

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Why We Don't Have A Cure For The Common Cold

Why We Don't Have A Cure For The Common Cold

Lauren F Friedman

Business Insider 

BI Answers: Why don't we have a cure for the common cold?

Modern science has eradicated smallpox, extended life expectancy, and made huge gains in battling some of the world's deadliest diseases. So why can't we knock out the humble cold?
The short answer is twofold. First, what we think of as a cold is actually caused by many different viruses. Even the most common among those, rhinovirus, has more than a hundred different strains. "Curing" a cold would actually mean eradicating a long list of respiratory viruses that happen to cause similar symptoms. Those symptoms, incidentally, are mostly just your immune system kicking into high gear to fight off an infection, something that can manifest as inflammation in the throat and congestion in the nose.
Second, while sniffling and coughing is no fun, a cold is pretty low down on the list of ailments that need curing. It can be a concern for infants, the elderly, or those with pre-existing respiratory conditions, but "for the majority of us, a common cold is more annoyance than threat," says Ian Mackay, a virologist at the University of Queensland.
Still, in 2002, researchers calculated that the annual cost of lost productivity because of colds is $25 billion. The National Institutes of Health estimates that people in the United States experience about one billion colds every year. What if we could make those all go away? We talked to a number of experts to get the full story on why we haven't cured the common cold — and whether we ever will.

Why isn't there a cold vaccine?

Each year, multiple strains of the flu are circulating. If we can vaccinate against the most common strains of the flu, it seems as if we should be able to do the same thing for colds. But it doesn't quite work that way.
There are only about three strains of flu each season, while "there are usually 20-30 different types of rhinovirus circulating each season in one geographic area," explains Yury A. Bochkov, an associate scientist in the department of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. Only about 10% of those will show up again the next year. That means, Bochkov says, that public health officials "cannot predict the spectrum of rhinovirus types for an upcoming cold season."
Plus, even if you could, Thomas Smith of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston says, "somehow stuff 100 different strains into one shot," that would take care of only the most common cold-causing virus.
More than 200 viruses can cause what a sick person would recognize as a cold, including "some strains of influenza virus, adenoviruses, coronaviruses, enteroviruses, [and] respiratory syncytial virus," Bochkov says. A rhinovirus vaccine would do nothing to protect against those.

Why isn't there a cold cure, or even a highly effective treatment?

The main reason, Mackay says, is that the common cold is usually "a short-lived and relatively mild illness."
But trying to develop drugs to treat rhinovirus also has some particular challenges. Smith, who worked on such research in his lab at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, tells us that some of the approaches they were testing "really did work," at least in the lab. Still, "while these compounds were pretty good at hitting a number of different strains at once, there were still a few outlier strains."
That's the tricky thing about rhinoviruses, Bochkov says: "It is difficult to find an antiviral equally efficient against 160 rhinoviruses."
Furthermore, colds are not usually life-threatening, so the Food and Drug Administration would have a very low threshold for the kind of side effects that would be considered worth it. "It really had to be nearly as safe as water for approval for the general public," Smith says. Few drugs are.
The challenges did not stop there. "Only humans show symptoms of [rhinovirus] infection," Smith says, making it nearly impossible to do any testing between petri dishes and human trials. Even then, researchers would first have to find a rhinovirus that test subjects had not already been exposed to — a difficult task with so many strains circulating every year.
If anyone is able to find an effective treatment, however, those efforts might pay off. "There would be a huge market among wealthy nations who have overcome some of the more serious infectious diseases and now have moved their attention to removing the annoyance of the common cold," Mackay says.

Is any progress being made?

Numerous researchers are working on something called broad-spectrum antivirals, which would target a wide variety of viruses. While much of this research is still in very early phases, it may offer the best hope for an eventual cold cure.
Todd Rider, formerly a senior staff scientist at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and now at Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, developed one such compound, called DRACO. It generated a lot of media buzz when it was first announced in 2011.
DRACO, Rider tells us, "is designed to treat or prevent infections by a broad spectrum of viruses, just as existing antibiotics can treat or prevent infections by a broad spectrum of bacteria."
The compound has so far been effective against 15 different viruses in cells and in mice. It works by entering all cells and then destroying those in which it detects a viral infection. "For the common cold in particular, DRACO was shown in human cells to be effective against all four rhinovirus strains tested," Rider says, "and to completely eliminate rhinoviruses without harming uninfected cells."
While DRACO and other related research, like that led by Leo James at Cambridge University's Laboratory of Molecular Biology, seem very promising, much more testing is needed to see whether this approach will be effective and safe in humans. If DRACO lives up to its initial promise and continued testing goes well — neither of which is a certainty — Rider expects that it could be used in humans "within a decade or perhaps sooner."

What can you do in the meantime?

Wash your hands. Get plenty of sleep. Avoid sick people whenever possible. Try your luck with over-the-counter remedies.
Or, Smith notes, there's always the extreme option: "Hermits who never see fellow human beings never get the common cold."

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Inside hackers seen as $40 billion threat for U.S. employers

Inside hackers seen as $40 billion threat for U.S. employers

Chris Strohm and Jordan Robertson

Bloomberg

Fired from a job as a technology contractor for a Toyota Motor Corp. factory in Kentucky, Ibrahimshah Shahulhameed went home, logged into the company’s computer network and attacked it with programming commands.

It took the automaker months to fix the damage and landed Shahulhameed in prison. He is appealing the conviction.

While attention has been drawn recently to outsiders suspected of attacking companies such as Home Depot Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co., Shahulhameed’s case illustrates the growing threat from within. U.S. companies and organizations suffered $40 billion in losses from unauthorized use of computers by employees last year, according to SpectorSoft Corp. based in Vero Beach, Florida, which develops software that companies can use to monitor Internet activity of their workers.

“The most costly data breaches are usually those that are created by a malicious insider,” said Larry Ponemon, chairman of the Ponemon Institute, an information security research center based in Traverse City, Michigan. “These people normally have access to things external hackers generally don’t have access to.”

The FBI this week issued a warning to companies about a rise in hacking by current and former employees. Insider threats, both intentional and accidental, were cited by more than 70 percent of information security managers as their biggest concern in an April survey.

The workers often use cloud-storage services as well as personal e-mail accounts to transfer data, according to the Sept. 23 public notice by the FBI and Homeland Security Department. Sometimes they remotely access computers, the warning said.

Employee Access

Companies have to balance giving employees access to information while monitoring for suspicious or abnormal behavior, said Nimmy Reichenberg, vice president of marketing and strategy for Boston-based consulting company AlgoSec, which conducted the survey of IT managers.

“A lot of times it’s a matter of misconfiguration,” he said. “Should you be able to access your e-mail remotely? Absolutely. Should you be able to remote desktop into an e-mail service and get full control of an e-mail server? Probably not. That’s when bad things begin to happen.”

Jonathan Wolberg of Tucson, Arizona, sought revenge on his former employer, a cloud-computing company, according to prosecutors who didn’t name the employer. Wolberg was found to have secretly logged into the Virginia-based company’s networks following his resignation as a systems administrator in 2012 and shut down a server, according to the FBI.

The attack left hospitals responsible for surgery and urgent care without access to key information and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to repair, according to the agency.

‘Devastating Effect’

Wolberg pleaded guilty and was sentenced in April to 33 months in prison for intentionally causing damage to a protected computer, according to the FBI. He remains in prison, said his attorney, Jeff Zimmerman, a partner at the law firm Smith & Zimmerman Pllc in Alexandria, Virginia.

Shahulhameed “sabotaged various internal programs” and ``improperly accessed proprietary trade secrets and information such as pricing information, quality testing data, and parts- testing data,’’ Toyota said in an August 2012 complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.

He was convicted in February for intentionally damaging computers at the plant in Georgetown, Kentucky, after he was fired by a Toyota contractor, according to an FBI statement. He maintains his innocence and is appealing his conviction, said Derek Gordon, a partner with the law firm Anggelis & Gordon Pllc in Lexington, who filed the appeal.

A spokesman for Toyota couldn’t be immediately reached for comment.

Gray Area

Employees who illegally access company networks can find themselves in violation of the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. That’s what happened to Robert Steele of Alexandria, Virginia, who the FBI says used a secret administrative account to download proprietary documents from a government contractor where he previously worked.

Steele illegally sifted through thousands of documents belonging to his former company while working for another contractor that competed for government work, according to the FBI. He was convicted in May 2013 of unauthorized access to a protected computer. He is appealing his conviction, said his lawyer, Christopher Amolsch.

A gray area can complicate prosecutions under the 1986 law, however, because it must be proven that workers acted in excess of their authority or without proper authorization, Peter Toren, a partner in the Washington law firm Weisbrod, Matteis & Copley, said.

Proving Intent

“Did you have the right to get inside the computer?” said Toren, who served as an attorney for the Department of Justice’s computer crime and intellectual property section from 1992 to 1999. “Most employees can say they had the right to access and gain entry into the computer.”

To convict an employee for causing damage to a computer, prosecutors must prove the worker acted with intent rather than negligence, Toren said. “It can be difficult to prove but it’s all done circumstantially,” he said.

The number of information security managers who cited insider threats as their biggest concern increased to 73 percent in 2014 from 62 percent in 2013, according to an April 2014 survey by AlgoSec. The concern about insider threats, which includes accidental breaches as well as intentional attacks, surpasses that of outside hackers trying to steal financial data, the survey found.

Part of the increase might be attributed to awareness of such threats driven by Edward Snowden, the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor who took and made public secret documents about American spy programs.

Malicious Insider

Companies rely on system administrators who have privileged access to data and networks. Those employees can also do the most damage and their malice can be difficult to detect, Ponemon said.

In one case the Ponemon Institute helped investigate, a disgruntled worker at a banking and investment management company planted source code that appeared to be an attack coming from the outside to knock servers offline.

That was just a diversion. The true intent was to destroy information from within and cause physical damage to servers, costing the company millions of dollars, Ponemon said. He declined to name the company.

The institute also has seen cases where unhappy employees work as part of a conspiracy with outside hackers to attack a company. “The proportion of malicious inside cases that potentially involved a cyber syndicate seems to be on an increase,” Ponemon said.

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Instagram reportedly blocked in China amid Hong Kong protests

Instagram reportedly blocked in China amid Hong Kong protests

Ryan Vlastelica

Reuters

Instagram, the popular photo-sharing service owned by Facebook Inc, has been blocked in China, according to numerous reports, including from Hong Kong-based reporters with the New York Times.

The company did not immediately return requests for confirmation.

The reports came amid pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, where many have posted photos and videos, including of Hong Kong police firing tear gas at demonstrators.

Many of the photos were labelled with the hash tag "Occupy Central," a phrase that was blocked on Sunday on Weibo, China's version of Twitter. It had been allowed earlier in the day.

The website www.blockedinchina.net also indicated that Instagram was blocked across China, including in Beijing and Shenzhen.

If the site was blocked in China, that would not prevent users in Hong Kong from posting on social media, nor users in other countries viewing the images.

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A Wearable Drone That Launches Off Your Wrist To Take Your Selfie

A Wearable Drone That Launches Off Your Wrist To Take Your Selfie

Greg Kumparak

TechCrunch

“Oh man, this would make a great picture. I wish there was someone else here to take our picture for us so we didn’t have to take a selfie!”

Has this ever happened to you?
Of course it has. You’re a human being in the 21st century who reads tech blogs.

The Nixie aims to solve that. It’s, as crazy as it feels to type this, a wearable selfie drone. A flying wristband, with a camera built in. When you’re ready for your close-up, it launches off your wrist, reorients to frame you in the shot, and then hovers back over for you to catch it.

The bad news? It’s… still pretty conceptual. It looks like they've got a prototype that can launch off your wrist and float away — but it’s still early days. They have a long way to go (this thing looks about as fragile as can be right now) — but even as a concept, it’s damned cool.

The good news? It’s a finalist in Intel’s Make It Wearable competition — meaning they’ve just scored themselves $50,000 and all of the mentorship, design help, and technical support a company like Intel can throw at them in order to make it real.

The project is the brainchild of Christoph Kohstall (a physics researcher at Stanford), and is built in collaboration with team members Jelena Jovanovic and Michael Niedermayr.

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iPhone 6 Bendgate: Apple's Instructions Say Not to Keep Your Phone in Your Pocket Anyway

iPhone 6 Bendgate: Apple's Instructions Say Not to Keep Your Phone in Your Pocket Anyway

Zoë Schlanger

Newsweek 

As the Internet lights up with images of the iPhone 6 plus emerging from people’s pockets bent like a used paperclip, it may be useful to consider this: Apple explicitly tells you not to carry your phone in your pocket, due to the radiation exposure threat it poses.

In the little handbook that comes with every iPhone (the one that gets discarded almost immediately because, it’s a cell phone, we all know what to do with those, right?) Apple also explicitly states that the phone is not supposed to touch your body much, if at all.

In fact, in the manual for the iPhone 5, Apple says users should carry their iPhones a full 10 millimeters (or .39 inches) away from their bodies at all times. That means, if the device is in the pocket of your jeans, it’s much too close.

Previous manuals were more explicit. The iPhone 3G safety manual warns that radiation exposure may exceed government standards during “body-worn operation” if the phone is “positioned less than 15 millimeters (5/8 inch) from the body (e.g., when carrying iPhone in your pocket).” The iPhone, Apple says, should always be worn in a belt clip or holster.

Cell phone radiation, measured in radio-frequency exposure, is regulated in the U.S. by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). All phones must be tested to ensure that they emit a specific absorption rate of not more than 1.6 watts of radio-frequency energy per kilogram of body tissue, a rule designed to prevent harm from the heat generated by radio-frequency waves.

But while cell phones are tested against a simulated human head in the “talking” position, they are not tested against the body (or in a pocket) in the “carrying” position. Instead, the tests assume the user is carrying the phone in a holster, away from the body, whenever the phone is broadcasting at full power. And since radio-frequency energy exposure increases sharply the closer the phone gets to your body, some worry that FCC testing is missing a lot of actual exposure.

In addition, the FCC tests do not consider biological effects caused by anything other than the heat generated from radio-frequency energy, like altered protein expression or DNA damage. Experts and organizations like the Environmental Working Group have expressed concern over the testing rules for cell phones, citing studies that show links between cancers and cell phone radiation exposure. In 2011, a World Health Organization report classified radiation from cell phones as “possibly carcinogenic to humans,” particularly as cell phone use relates to an increased risk for glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer.

Then there are the gaps in cell phone radiation testing. The American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, recently urged the FCC to begin taking child users of cellphones into account. “Children are not little adults and are disproportionately impacted by all environmental exposures, including cell phone radiation,” their letter to the FCC reads.

Yet the science is inconclusive. The National Cancer Institute points to several studies that have been unable to establish a relationship between cell phone use and cancer.

The FCC is currently conducting an ongoing reassessment of its policies.
"The U.S. has among the most conservative standards in the world. As part of our routine review of these standards, which we began last year, we will solicit input from multiple stakeholder experts, including federal health agencies and others, to guide our assessment,” a spokesman for the FCC tells Newsweek.

Radiation from cell phones is not an Apple-only problem, of course. Blackberry’s user manual advises .59 inches of separation between the body and the phone. Earlier manuals pushed for nearly a full inch (.98 inch) of separation, and told users to "use hands-free operation if it is available and keep the BlackBerry device at least 0.98 inch (25 millimeters) from your body (including the lower abdomen of pregnant women and teenagers)."

A manual for an earlier Blackberry model—the 8830 World Edition—includes a warning against carrying the phone directly on the body: “Carrying solutions, including RIM-approved carrying solutions and carrying solutions not approved by RIM, that do not come equipped with an integrated belt clip SHOULD NOT be worn or carried on the body.”

It adds that users should not try to use the phone where there is not a good signal, because radiation output grows higher and higher as the phone struggles to connect with a tower. Neither Apple nor Blackberry responded to a request for comment at the time of publishing.

Dr. David Carpenter, the director of the Institute for Health and the Environment University at Albany, New York has spent several years reading research on radio-frequency exposure and has testified to Congress on the subject. He says he is very wary of cell phones.

“My personal sense is that the evidence for increases in cancer is quite strong. It’s not one hundred percent, but most studies have shown that [people with] high exposures have elevations in leukemia, brain cancers [and] some other kinds of cancers.”

He predicts that cancer rates will go up in the coming decades.
“Latency for brain cancer is 20 to 30 years. Cell phones haven’t been around for all that long. I think it’s likely that we’ll see an increase in cases over the next years,” Carpenter says.

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Google is “tightening the screws” on Android to keep control over the web

Google is “tightening the screws” on Android to keep control over the web

Dan Frommer

Quartz

Google is in a fascinating position with its Android operating system. It dominates the world’s smartphone market—arguably the most important technology market in history—with only one serious competitor, Apple, behind it. It is also the world’s dominant online search and advertising company, where its leadership is extending to mobile.

Yet the company has no direct control over key parts of Android, such as device design, manufacturing, marketing, and distribution—tasks that are typically handled by its handset or operator partners, ranging from Samsung and Xiaomi to Verizon and Orange. But Google—which initially pitched Android as an “open” platform that anyone could customize—has been working to take more control over Android away from its partners.

The latest: Google’s recent contracts with manufacturers contain new requirements that favor Google’s mobile and web services over potential competitors, according to Amir Efrati at The Information (paywall). These include specific services that must default to Google—search, of course, and others—plus the amount and placement of pre-installed Google apps and services.
This year, the signed agreement said there must be a Google search “widget” on the “default home screen” of the device, along with an icon for the Google Play app store. It said an icon on the device home screen labeled as “Google,” when clicked, must provide access to a “collection” of 13 Google apps (Google Chrome, Google Maps, Google Drive, YouTube, Gmail, Google+, Google Play Music, Google Play Movies, Google Play Books, Google Play Newsstand, Google Play Games, Google+ Photos and Google+ Hangouts).

 The newer agreement also specified the order in which this
collection of apps must be listed, from left to right and top to bottom within the Google icon. Several other Google apps, including Google Street View, Google Voice Search and Google Calendar, must be placed “no more than one level below the Home Screen,” the agreement says. (Device owners can manually change the location of icons on their own.)

As Efrati notes, “hardware makers grumble about Google ‘tightening the screws’ on Android, which powers more than a billion active devices, but most are resigned to the fact they don’t have much choice.” To that point, another recent Efrati report (paywall) highlights a deal that HTC pursued with Amazon, which fell through:

The deal drew the attention of Google, which oversees Android. Google warned HTC that it wasn’t allowed to “fork,” or make substantial changes, to Android software or it would risk losing support from Google for its flagship devices, which include Google services such as search and maps, according to two people briefed on the matter.

While Google’s moves will always draw snickers from those who remember Android’s early pie-in-the-sky plans for an “Open Handset Alliance,” the company is smart to assert more control over its mobile ecosystem.

Android still suffers as a secondary platform for users and developers, in part because of its early fragmentation and inconsistency problems. There’s no reason Google should be pleased that its huge lead in market share is squandered with lower relative usage—especially as Google’s core search and advertising business relies on usage, engagement, and market dominance to generate profit.

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