House panel to reintroduce controversial cyber bill The leaders of the House Intelligence Committee plan to re-introduce on Wednesday a controversial cybersecurity bill that has faced pushback from the White House. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and ranking member Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) said Friday that they plan to re-introduce the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) next week during a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. The Hill
Disruptions: Where Apple and Dick Tracy may converge Dick Tracy had one. As did Inspector Gadget and James Bond. A watch that doubled as a computer, two-way radio, mapping device or television. Though such a device has been lost to science fiction comics and spy movies of the era before smartphones, the smart watch might soon become a reality, in the form of a curved glass device made by Apple. In its headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., Apple is experimenting with wristwatch-like devices made of curved glass... The NY Times
Amazon unpacked Between a sooty power station and a brown canal on the edge of a small English town, there is a building that seems as if it should be somewhere else. An enormous long blue box, it looks like a smear of summer sky on the damp industrial landscape. Inside, hundreds of people in orange vests are pushing trolleys around a space the size of nine football pitches, glancing down at the screens of their handheld satnav computers for directions on where to walk next and what to pick up when they get there. FT Magazine
Jemima Khan on Julian Assange: how the Wikileaks founder alienated his allies I passed through Los Angeles recently on my way to the Sundance Film Festival. I don’t know the place well, but it always feels to me as if it is in limbo and has never grown into a proper city: a municipal playground, populated by restless kidults. Here, people dine at seven and sleep by nine, ferried around in cars, sipping sodas, suspended in a make-believe world, poised in that fake calm between a toddler’s fall and ensuing screams. The New Statesman
Egypt court orders YouTube blocked for a month in case related to anti-Islam film A Cairo court on Saturday ordered the government to block access to the video-sharing website YouTube for 30 days for carrying an anti-Islam film that caused deadly riots across the world. Judge Hassouna Tawfiq ordered YouTube blocked for carrying the film, which he described as “offensive to Islam and the Prophet (Muhammad).” He made the ruling in the Egyptian capital where the first protests against the film erupted last September... The Washington Post
Microsoft's next Patch Tuesday to fix 57 security bugs Microsoft is deploying a larger bunch of bug fixes this month than usual. Next week's Patch Tuesday will address 57 different security vulnerabilities through 12 separate updates. The bugs stretch across a range of programs, including Windows, Internet Explorer, Windows Server, Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft's .Net Framework. Five of the 12 patches are rated critical, so they're designed to patch holes that could allow someone to execute malicious code on an unprotected PC. CNET
Distributel fights back against motion to disclose subscriber information Distributel, an independent ISP with services in Quebec, Ontario, Alberta, and B.C., has fought back in a file sharing lawsuit launched by NGN Prima Productions, opposing a motion to disclose the names of subscribers alleged to have engaged in file sharing. It appears that NGN is using Canipre to identify alleged file sharers, the same company that has supplied information to Voltage Pictures in its case involving thousands of subscribers at TekSavvy. Michael Geist
Beat By Dre: The exclusive inside story of how Monster lost the world There's never been anything like Beats By Dre. The bulky rainbow headphones are a gaudy staple of malls, planes, clubs, and sidewalks everywhere: as mammoth, beloved, and expensive as their namesake. But Dr. Dre didn't just hatch the flashy lineup from his freight train chest: The venture began as an unlikely partnership between a record-industry powerhouse and a boutique audio company best known for making overpriced HDMI cables. Gizmodo
The cyberpragmatics of bounding asterisks On Daring Fireball, John Gruber noticed something interesting about David Pogue's New York Times review of the Surface Pro: what he calls "the use of bounding asterisks for emphasis around the coughs." Pogue wrote: "For decades, Microsoft has subsisted on the milk of its two cash cows: Windows and Office. The company’s occasional ventures into hardware generally haven’t ended well: (*cough*) Zune, Kin Phone, Spot Watch (*cough*)." Language Log
Google's Schmidt to sell roughly 42 percent of stake Schmidt, 57, will sell 3.2 million shares of Class A common stock through a stock trading plan, Google said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday. The plan, which Google said would give Schmidt "individual asset diversification and liquidity," allows Schmidt to spread trades out over a period of one year to reduce the market impact. Shares of Google were down $4.11 at $781.26 in after-hours trading on Friday. Reuters
Einhorn sues Apple, marks biggest investor challenge in years The unusual move comes as the world's largest technology company grapples with a tumbling share price, mounting competition in the smartphone and tablet markets, and concerns about its ability to produce new breakthrough products. Einhorn, a well-known short-seller, said in an interview with CNBC that Apple had a "Depression-era" mentality that led it to hoard cash and invest only in the safest, lowest-yielding securities. Reuters
Researchers use facial muscle tracking to predict how addictive games will be Video games, like most other creative endeavors, require a large investment in time and money. To increase the odds of recouping costs and making a profit, game developers often use focus groups to see if the game is going in the right direction. Traditionally, that involves watching uninitiated people play the game with limited contextual information. Then, a series of questions are asked to gauge what the players liked... ExtremeTech
3DMark for Windows launches; we test it with various laptops After a two-year hiatus, Futuremark is back with a new version of 3DMark, and in many ways this is their most ambitious version to date. Instead of the usual PC graphics benchmark, with this release, dubbed simply “3DMark” (there’s no year or other designation this time), Futuremark is creating a cross-platform benchmark -- Windows, Windows RT, iOS, and Android will all be capable of running the same graphics benchmark, sort of. AnandTech
Zombie Studios unveils Unreal Engine 4 game: Daylight Zombie Studios has announced Daylight, a new horror game built on Unreal Engine 4. The announcement came from the DICE summit in Vegas tonight, as Zombie finally provided details on the project it first teased in December. Daylight is a horror game featuring a procedurally-generated environment. With only the light of a cell phone to guide them, players will navigate the halls of a dark building as a woman who’s just woken up. IGN
The inside story of Aaron Swartz’s campaign to liberate court filings Years before the JSTOR scraping project that led to Aaron Swartz's indictment on federal hacking charges—and perhaps to his suicide -- the open-data activist scraped documents from PACER, the federal judiciary's paywalled website for public access to court records. (The acronym PACER stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records, which may sound like it's straight out of 1988 because it is.) Ars Technica
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