Computers

Google has asked a secret Washington court to declare that it has a right under the First Amendment to disclose the number of security letters it receives under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Such letters, which the government uses to obtain phone and internet data about foreign nationals, are currently subject to an automatic gag order that forbids companies from disclosing their very existence. On Tuesday, Google said it is filing a petition to the secret court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The petition, embedded below, notes that the search giant has already received information from the FBI to publish the number of so-called National Security Letters it receives — these are similar to FISA letters but cover US citizens. The Google petition comes as a brouhaha continues to rage over the revelation of secret government programs, such as PRISM, that collect meta-data on phone and internet users. The controversy has not only let to questions about the expansion of government surveillance under the Patriot Act, but has also led the various tech companies ensnared in the dragnet to claim vociferously that they are standing up for their users. The nature of this advocacy has led to tension between some of the companies — Google and Twitter, for example, have suggested that alleged victories claimed by Microsoft and Facebook against the government are misleading. In its filing, Google also repeated its criticism of the Guardian and Washington Post for misleading reporting — and says that the disclosure of the FISA requests are necessary to help it refute false accusation leveled by the media. “Google reputation and business has been harmed by the false or misleading requests in the media, and Google’s users are concerned by the allegations,” the company wrote, several times singling out the Guardian and the Post. If Google’s petition is successful, the company’s semi-annual Transparency Report will include two new categories that reveal: the number of FISA requests received; the number of accounts each request covers. Here’s the filing: Google 1st Amendment FISA Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Content monetization: News licensing and syndication still need marketplaces and infrastructureHow the mega data center is changing the hardware and data center marketsWhere the next-generation console fits in today’s video game market

We’ve written about Snapdragon 800 (MSM8974) before, for those unfamiliar, this is Qualcomm’s new flagship SoC with four Krait 400 CPUs at up to 2.3 GHz, Adreno 330 graphics, and the latest modem IP block with Category 4 LTE. Qualcomm is finally ready to show off MSM8974 performance on final silicon and board support software, and invited us and a few other publications out to San Francisco for a day of benchmarking and poking around. We looked at MSM8974 on both the familiar MSM8974 MDP/T, a development tablet used both by Qualcomm and 3rd parties to develop drivers and platform support, and the MSM8974 MDP phone, both of which have been publicly announced for some time now. The tablet MDP is what you’d expect, an engineering platform designed for Qualcomm and other third parties to use while developing software support for features. Subjectively it’s thinner and more svelte than the APQ8064 MDP/T we saw last year, but as always OEMs will have the final control over industrial design and what features they choose to expose. Display is 1080p on the tablet and 720p on the phone, a bit low considering the resolutions handset and tablet markers are going for (at least 1080p on phone and WQXGA on tablets) so keep that in mind when looking at on-screen results from benchmarks. Read on for our full Snapdragon 800 performance preview.

DISH Network has published a statement indicating that it has elected not to submit a revised offer for a merger deal with Sprint and will instead focus its efforts on an acquisition of Clearwire. The full statement is as follows: “While DISH continues to see strategic value in a merger with Sprint, the decisions made by Sprint to prematurely terminate our due diligence process and accept extreme deal protections in its revised agreement with SoftBank, among other things, have made it impracticable for DISH to submit a revised offer by the June 18th deadline imposed by Sprint. We will consider our options with respect to Sprint, and focus our efforts and resources on completing the Clearwire tender offer.” Japanese telecom Softbank made an offer to buy Sprint last year, but DISH submitted its own $25.5 billion bid that was higher than Softbank’s $20.1 billion deal. Last week, Softbank upped its offer to $21.6 billion and the board accepted, while giving DISH until today (June 18) to submit a “best and final proposal.” Softbank and Sprint managed to get federal clearance for the deal in part by acquiescing to national security concerns over Chinese networking technology. After Sprint sued DISH earlier this week in hopes of blocking the Clearwire deal, DISH called the move a “transparent attempt to divert attention from its failure to deal fairly with Clearwire’s shareholders.” Shortly after Sprint entered into a definitive agreement last December to increase its stake in Clearwire to 100 percent stake for $2.2 billion, DISH swooped in with a $2.4 billion offer. As recently as last month, Clearwire was working to convince its minority shareholders to go with the Sprint deal. The end is in sight when it comes to Sprint, but DISH could be looking to cause some issues when it comes to Clearwire, potentially disrupting things for SoftBank/Sprint. Image credit: iStockphoto

The Division knocked everyone on their butt during Ubisoft's E3 2013 press conference. How had Ubisoft managed to keep such a large-scale project secret for so long? In terms of graphical prowess The Division stood amongst The Witcher 3 and only a handful of others. Somehow The Division also managed to capitalize on many of the buzzworthy features headlining the next-generation of consoles -- expansive multiplayer, realtime data display, mobile integration and huge living worlds. That first demo presentation was without a doubt stunning. However with further consideration I can't help but feel like the entire demo, both during the Ubisoft conference and our show-floor demo , was a bit too smoke and mirrors. The more I thought about what I had watched the more questions I had to ask and the less confidence I held in the game itself. That's not to take anything away from the demo itself, which we can all agree was fantastic. Perhaps it was just a bit too over-produced -- a bit too E3, if you will We learn in the demo that the world of The Division has come unto graves times. A disease, spread via money on Black Friday, has ended society in the United States as we know it. The player takes on a role as a member of a special force to save what remains -- The Division, naturally. Starting the demo, the player take on the role of a grizzled soldier in the middle of a city that's obviously gone to hell. Trash is stacked everywhere, broken down cars line the streets, and you almost expect a zombie to leap out from the shadows. Pulling up a menu involved the character looking at a wrist, where a semi-VR scrolling menu lets the player adjust skills or open the map. The map creates another VR experience, where the city is displayed in hologram form on the ground around the player -- straight up city growing out of the street. It's all very immersive and futuristic. On the map the player is able to see that a police station is under some form of attack, basically an opt-in mission of sorts. However, it's unclear if at this point the game is open-world or we've pre-selected the mission we're on before loading in, that is, just how instanced and customized the experience is. As we progress down the street two players join us, pointing out a potential side-quest in a tunnel, but decide to continue to the station instead. At the station a firefight begins. Several very impressive features are shown off here, including an x-ray vision to see enemies, the ability to swap skills in real-time, and about a billion really cool graphics and animation touches. For instance, bulletholes actually appear to break glass as opposed to pasting a texture over the top of a window, the character closed an open police door nonchalantly as it passed by, shooting out a tired on a cop car deflated it, and shooting a wooden sign allowed dynamic lighting to shine through. With a combination of MMO level tactical coordination the group "pulled" the enemies out of the police station and DPSed them down. Heals were used, rolling targeted grenades were used, and the co-op team proved victorious! It was a straight up dungeon battle if I've ever seen one. The team entered the police station, released some police officers who had been caged in their own cells, dynamically scanned some maps on the wall and other evidence spread around the department, and claimed their look from the armory in the back. Interestingly, the loot can potentially be lost if the team dies before "extraction". As such, they light a flare for extraction and a 90-second PvP battle begins. Again, it's not clear if this is just the natural structure of an instanced mission, if it's possible to go back and do the side-quest they didn't do earlier, or how players are paired up for PvP in the first place What happens to the loot if they die? Is it gone or does the enemy lose it? I'll admit, most of my questions are simple and readily answered by a d

Yesterday, Tapbots‘ Paul Haddad shared on Twitter that there were already more Tweetbot users on iOS 7 than still on iOS 5. We confirmed the tweet’s contents with Haddad, then went on to poll a few more developers who corroborated the findings both on and off the record. The statistics here are pretty powerful, and demonstrate the shifting landscape of rapid updates on iOS and exhibit how far ahead Apple still is when compared to Android in this area. Pioneering Twitter app Twitterrific, by The Iconfactory, is also seeing big usage numbers on iOS 7. The company confirmed that they’re seeing roughly 3x as many users on iOS 7 as there are still using 5.x versions. The time shifting app Pocket is also seeing big adoption numbers, with 4.8% of weekly iPhone actives last week on iOS 7, 3.9% on iOS 5. All of these stats are even more impressive when you think about the fact that iOS 7 is theoretically still limited to ‘developers and test devices only’. Obviously there are tons of caveats here, including the fact that despite us reaching out to a spectrum of developers, they could very well represent a cross-section of the early adopter crowd. Twitterrific, for instance, was widely praised (rightfully I believe) for being almost prescient about the look and feel of iOS 7. This means that it ‘fits in’ very well and iOS 7 users might be more inclined to install it than another Twitter client. But given that Tweetbot was seeing similar adoption rates, the issue might be more along the lines of popularity among the ‘early adopter’ crowd. We spoke to a developer of a hugely popular game whose market is solidly in the ‘median’ (non-techy) user crowd and their results spoke differently about the adoption of iOS 7. While there was still a significant amount of iOS 7 users, they were still around 1/3 of the numbers being seen for iOS 5 versions. So definitely not there yet among ‘normal’ folk. Still, for the numbers to be anything but a blip on the radar speaks very highly of Apple’s ability to move users from old versions of iOS to new versions. Right now the ‘new’ version is iOS 6, which is seeing massive 93% adoption among users. The mobile web and native app analytics company Localytics shared some interesting stats with us recently that drive home the power of a rapidly upgrading user base. Localytics found that 64% of qualifying iPads are already on 6.1.3, which is a pretty crazy number. iPod touches came in at 58% and iPhones are at 37%. Roughly 74% of users had upgraded from 5.0 to 5.1 within 14 days, and 6.0-6.1 took even less time at 11 days. Obviously, this allows developers to more rapidly support new features in new versions of the OS, but with iOS 7 it will also allow them to adopt the radically new design language without fear of alienating tons of customers. Another interesting tidbit they found was that users who had updated to the latest version of the OS were far more likely to update to the latest versions of apps as well. Yes, this might be circumstantial, but other stats corroborate that ‘early adopter’ activity spreading outwards. For instance, users using the current version of an app have 40% more sessions per user and 63% longer session lengths than those on older versions. I don’t want to harp on the troubles that Google has had with getting Android developers to update, but the latest stats still put the largest percentage of users on a three year old OS. There have definitely been inroads as Jelly Bean is now clocking in at 33%, but the confidence that developers can move to support only the latest versions of the OS just isn’t there yet. But for iOS developers, the conclusions are simple: developers can be more aggressive about adopting the latest versions of iOS, including their features and feel. Doing so not only frees them up to use the latest APIs and tools, but also brings higher app engagement numbers. It’s a win-win scenario and iOS 7 is already shaping up to be a boon for those who are quick to adapt.

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The Internet of Things could become the next big entertainment platform, said a media exec at a conference with Silicon Valley techies at Stanford.View the full article HERE.

Offerings include the current Kepler GPU product family as well as the modem technology Nvidia acquired from Icera a few years back. View the full article HERE.

Strong early sales of the keyboard-packing Q10 give BlackBerry's resurrection a chance.View the full article HERE.

Internet tools are just starting to be applied to industrial tasks such as maintaining equipment and optimizing operations, but the wealth of data being produced by industrial systems could make this a major focus of development in the coming years.On Tuesday, General Electric increased its bet on this proposition by introducing a cloud platform for data management and recruiting partners to help it serve industrial customers. At an event in San Francisco, GE and its partners, including Pivotal, Accenture and Amazon Web Services, laid out what they see as the opportunities and challenges.The cutting edge of innovation in using data has shifted from the financial services sector to the consumer realm, and it's about to move again to the industrial sector, said Paul Maritz, CEO of Pivotal."It's the industrial space that really has to take the usage of data to a whole new level," Maritz said. Pivotal, a PaaS (platform as a service) company formed by VMware and EMC with an investment by GE, will develop cloud-agnostic industrial offerings in conjunction with GE. Also on Tuesday, GE announced an expanded relationship with Accenture to develop technology and analytics applications, plus a partnership with Amazon Web Services, which will be able to host GE's services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here