salient

$50 Android smartphones are coming this year. They've actually existed for quite some time, but this year they will be more "mainstream", and you'll see a lot more models (in poor countries). The combination of the Cortex A7 CPU plus KitKat which is optimized for low-end will ensure they work pretty well, too, relative to other phones in that range with much fewer features and less functionality.

So I doubt Microsoft will have any chance at that market either. Android pours 1.5 million new units into the market every day, or about 500 million per year, and that's before these mainstream "good enough" $50 smartphones arrive, which I think will help Android double its unit grow rate within 12-18 months. Everything else will get drowned out.

It's amazing how many "full operating systems" want to support something as weak as Raspberry Pi, and how many things can be done with it. I can't wait for Raspberry Pi to come to a more powerful architecture like ARMv8 (at relatively the same price-point) and see what comes out of that.

Yet another reason for why electric cars have so much potential in the long run compared to gasoline-powered cars, and that's besides the fact that batteries themselves can double the storage capacity every 10 years or so, and therefore the range (or same range for lower price), or that electric cars can be charged for free with energy from solar panels.

This should hit home with those that read the Innovator's Dilemma and Innovator's Solution. IBM sold their PC business years ago to Lenovo because of "low margins", and they moved "up-market" to the server market. But now the PC guys are eating into their profits in the server market, too, and once again IBM is forced to sell this business due to "low margins".

It's interesting that while it's "low margins" for IBM because IBM has higher cost structures, Lenovo thinks it's actually a very profitable business:

“Lenovo has been trying to break into servers for a while as a new growth engine,” Moel said. “It could be good for Lenovo based on the right price.”

This is why Intel will never be safe in the server market, either, if ARM chip makers eat up the PC market (and they will do that), while also dominating the mobile market.

I get 1 Gbps for less than $20 where I live (Europe), and unlimited bandwidth, but I'm not bothering with the extra speed yet because I'm going to need a good 802.11ac router and an SSD-enabled laptop to take full advantage of it.

So I'll wait a year longer or so until 1+ Gbps Wi-Fi arrives in laptops and also in routers (second wave of 802.11ac routers will do that, first wave isn't quite there yet). By then SSD prices should be a little lower, too.

They wouldn't be doing this if they didn't think more people are interested in Windows 7 than Windows 8. That would be a pretty silly reason to "get their name in the news", otherwise.

Looks cool, but I don't think it should be using MtGox values as the default.

I don't think that's been their motto since Otellini took over. Look where they are now in the mobile market. Otellini put the profitability of their Core chips above improving Atom in the first few years, even when it came to netbook performance, which was already terrible. Combined with the fact that they forced OEMs to not buy AMD alternatives during the same time, Otellini just didn't think it's necessary to improve the performance of Atom too much.

They only started caring about power consumption when it was already obvious to everyone that ARM is going to pose a threat to them eventually. I think if everyone sees something that's by definition not "paranoia". To be paranoid, you have to see and believe something before others see it.

Intel is one of the least ethical tech companies around. Have they even paid their 1 billion euro fine to the EU Commission yet for trying to force OEMs to not use AMD chips in their products?

http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/13/intel-fined-1-45-billion-...

I agree it's very obnoxious, and it's actually why I stopped watching Parks & Rec.

They did with SOPA. Because there were millions of them. But how do millions of phones calls get sent? By having each and everyone of us calling.

I'm pretty sure EFF, DemandProgress and the like are doing exactly that.

Or are you saying they should form a Super PAC? But in that case, it won't exactly be "traditional lobbying", would it? It would be just paying politicians to do what they're asking them. I don't know whether that would be good or bad given the current corrupt lobbying system that the government has gotten accustomed to, but at least we should call it what it is before we dive in.

I hope you guys won't stop at pushing just for the USA Freedom Act, which sounds pretty decent, but not like it's going far enough. To me Rush Holt's Surveillance State Repeal Act sounded close to ideal, but he's going to need some co-sponsors for it.

Ron Wyden, Mark Udall and Rand Paul's bill also I think sounded better than the USA Freedom Act. I always forget its name because they chose a pretty bad and long one ("intelligence oversight something"). So I hope you keep working on passing those (or others like it), too, and don't stop at the USA Freedom Act (or try getting some amendments to that pushed, too).

Relevant news: NSA and GCHQ activities appear illegal, says EU parliamentary inquiry

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/09/nsa-gchq-illega...

I feel this is obligatory:

https://www.aclu.org/meet-jack-or-what-government-could-do-a...

Also, if you think them knowing your location like this is scary, wait until we have self-driving cars, that will have built-in kill switches in them or some kind of remote control, you know, for "updates". Getting rid of people (journalists especially - Michael Hastings anyone?) in "accidents" will never be easier.

This is the Virtuix Omni, if others haven't seen it yet (second version):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5UTkLIh76U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H75BT43uT0

I hope that while they're putting the finishing touches on the current product, and work on deploying it soon, they will also keep in mind what the guys at Avegant are doing, and either do their own R&D with this type of technology for future products, to completely eliminate the screen and the need to use UHD or higher resolutions in the future (or at least not for sometime), while making it easier for the eyes, or they buy them out.

The technology does have some major disadvantages like a smaller field of view compared to Oculus, but perhaps they can fix that. After all, VR headsets like Oculus also had very small field of views before, too.

To me, having the image projected onto your retina seems like a technology that has greater potential for virtual reality, even if it starts with a slightly bigger handicap than Oculus did.

http://reviews.cnet.com/wearable-tech/avegant-glyph/4505-349...

Here's the video I saw:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0VCj7VKvFk&feature=youtu.be...

Carmack has been talking about OLED for VR headsets for quite some time, and I'm sure Palmer and the rest were considering it, too. But I think it wasn't very accessible to them until recently. They're a start-up so they can't exactly go an order a few thousand 1080p OLED panels. This may have been possible now due to Samsung making the Galaxy S4 with a 1080p panel last year, and perhaps other launched some, too, and it pushed the prices down for such a panel, enough to make it viable for Oculus Rift.

I saw a video of some of the Verge guys trying it out at CES, and pretty much all of them were like "I don't want to take this off" at the end. It sounds like Oculus Rift will change gaming forever, and not just gaming.

There could also be done a lot of revolutionary new things with movies, like seeing through a character's eyes, etc (cameras mounted to the main character Google Glass style?). Even watching a normal movie on Oculus Rift is probably going to be a better experience than going to the cinema, because you could virtualize the cinema in front of you, and recreate that atmosphere.

Snowden docs make it official: The NSA can crack 30-year-old A5/1 crypto

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/archaic-but-widel...

Does anyone know if LTE security is that much better? I imagine that even if the ciphers are good, there are probably a ton of ways for agencies like NSA or even FBI to intercept the calls before being encrypted, even without warrants.

No worries, once the Google-backed EME passes through the MPAA-infested W3C [1], thousands of sites will begin utilizing the OS-level DRM Google and Microsoft have been baking into ChromeOS and Windows 8, and then Google Images will fast become outdated, because the DRM won't allow even Google to get those images. I hope Google will be really proud of themselves when that day will come.

[1] http://ces.cnet.com/8301-35296_1-57616860/mpaa-joins-web-sta...

The paranoid view is that Google is an NSA frontend.

The sad thing is that they don't even have to be that on purpose. They collect so much data on every person, that NSA is going to use them as a frontend anyway, which is exactly what they did, until they discovered what NSA was doing recently, and made some changes, by encrypting data in transit within their network. However, I still don't think they are encrypting data at rest. So if NSA breaks their transit encryption again, they will be free to collect all the data again.

The day when Google can naturally be seen as an enemy of the Internet and human privacy has come. Up until SOPA/ITU they could still be seen as a net ally, because they did help with some pretty big issues against the Internet. But from now on, I don't think they will be doing anything as major in favor of the users, while they are doing major actions against users of the Internet, such as trying to kill the privacy law in EU. So they are a net enemy to the Internet already.

While they've created that "campaign" with some other big companies against the NSA, the goal of the campaign itself sounds very weak to me. They're just trying to be more transparent with what they can tell people about what the government is requesting of them. I think they could do so much more, such as joining Mozilla's "StopWatching.us" movement. The reason they aren't doing that? Because Google is "watching us", and they probably believe joining such a campaign would be detrimental to their business, even if fighting for user privacy is the right thing to do.

So whether they have a clear stated goal of "killing privacy worldwide" the way NSA does, or not, it doesn't matter. Because the incentives to do just that are too strong for them, and they are pushing them in that direction anyway. For them to stop doing that would require rethinking their business model that's based on "tracking everything" (which I think should happen), and align themselves with the users.

Read the article? They've trying to kill the EU Data Privacy law through lobbying and such PR statements. It's not just them. It's also Facebook, probably Microsoft, too, the US government itself, and others. But I think they are among the big ones.

It's also true that Google's lobbying budget has increased quite rapidly over the past few years. Initially I thought it was just to get self-driving cars allowed, and Google Fiber, which I was mostly fine with because in the case of Google Fiber I knew many states had poor laws against any competition to local monopolies, and in the case of self-driving cars, while regulation needs to be carefully weighed, I also think it should happen sooner rather than later.

But now I think they're going to use more and more of that money to either kill strong privacy laws, in US, and EU or other places, and also to try and pass new laws that allows them to do more surveillance of users [1].

[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/11/surveillance_...

I agree. I wish "a rose would still be a rose by any other name", but in reality it's nothing like that. Names are extremely important ("Patriot" Act, etc. George Orwell knew what he was talking about in his book and why politicians would use Newspeak for the same reasons, to manipulate people).

Pirate has just too many negative connotations. Would someone create a party called the "Communist Party" in a democracy today? Even if their intentions would seem much different than the "old communists", I think it would have too much trouble getting off the ground (in any democratic country, not just US, where it's impossible for any third party to get off the ground).

This is also why I dislike the names darknet or darkmail. Prosecutors in US are bad enough as they are [1] (and remember Cameron Ortiz? [2]). Imagine them having to explain what a "pirate browser" or a "dark net" is to a jury. They'd say that they clearly named it that way because their intent was evil from the beginning (even if the tool may be technologically "neutral"), and they intend it for doing bad stuff with it. And I imagine the jury, who wouldn't know any better, would tend to buy it.

And I also agree completely that normal people may try to stay away from having something called "Pirate Browser" on their desktop.

I think I understand why people usually choose such names for their projects. They want to rally their supporters faster, people who really get what it's about, but I think it would do just as well based on what it does, and not because of its name, with that early adopter crowd, since they will understand what it's about and what it does.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/opinion/sunday/rampant-pro...

[2] https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-stat...

This is about a year old I think. They're promising some big changes soon, or it may be a completely different browser, since they're saying they'll be using Webkit. They want to completely avoid domain name takedowns with it, by using something like Namecoin:

http://torrentfreak.com/how-the-pirate-bay-plans-to-beat-cen...

but we're also pouring resources into building single-purpose chips that will be useless when bitcoin migrates to a different hashing algorithm.

I don't get this argument. Why do they have to be used for something else after "you're done with them"? You've made your profit with them (since if you aren't going to make a profit with them, you aren't going to buy them in the first place), so what else would you use them for?

The ASIC's serve a purpose: mining Bitcoin and maintaining the Bitcoin network. I don't get why there has to be "something else" they need to be useful for. Bitcoin is the point.

Google’s global privacy lawyer, Peter Fleischer, said today in a personal blog post that [EU] politicians should go back to the drawing board on rules he said could set global privacy standards.

Wow. How about no, Google? I started noticing a trend about a year or two ago and I realized that there may come a time when Google will be an "active persistent threat" against the Internet, because instead of adapting to a business model that aligns with the users, they will become increasingly more aggressive with their surveillance of users, and if say Internet users eventually decided they want more end-to-end security and anonymity on the web, Google would do everything in their power to fight against that and against them.

It seems that's coming sooner, rather than later. Google is already heavily lobbying the EU and calling the data privacy bill "dead", hoping that it will become self-fulfilling prophecy.

Google is trying to kill proper privacy laws in EU because they will make "less" money otherwise in Europe. Well, tough luck, Google. As an European, I'd rather not use Google than have much weaker data and privacy laws, especially after the whole NSA thing when American companies can't be trusted anymore anyway.

In the long run, I don't think so. You could argue change is happening much faster today, and people need to adapt to new jobs and skills faster, but on the other hand, there are also many more opportunities to choose from these days.

Isn't SPDY encrypted by default? Why would you assume it should outperform the unencrypted HTTP? Is it because Google made that claim, or why?

Either way, security at the application level on the Internet seems quite broken. We need easy to implement strong security at the Transport and IP levels. Google (or IETF, rather) should be experimenting with a CurveCP-like protocols to encrypt all the packets on the Internet to replace TCP. That's what I'd really like to see.