Microsoft cracks down on WP7 homebrew updates

A Windows Phone homebrew coder has axed a utility that attempted to install unreleased updates to WP7 devices.
"The tool successfully passed my own tests involving multiple update scenarios," Chris Walsh confirmed in a blog post.
"I was later informed by Microsoft that there were several problems with my tool and the manner in which it changes phones. Despite the fact that all outward signs indicate the phone has been updated to build 7390, Microsoft tells me otherwise."


According to Walsh, Redmond insisted an undocumented API was "incorrectly" deployed to deliver updates.
"Most problematic, MS tells me updating in this manner will place devices in a 'non-serviceable state,' [claiming] devices updated in this manner 'may' no longer receive updates.
"Because the tool is, in Microsoft's words, 'breaking phones,' I have taken it offline at their request."


Unsurprisingly, Microsoft has also issued a warning about installing homebrew updates on its official Windows Phone Blog. 
"I've noticed that some of you are turning to homebrew solutions to update your phone immediately. As an engineer and a gadget lover, I totally understand the impulse to tinker. You want the latest technology and you're tired of waiting. Believe me, I get it," wrote Microsoft rep Eric Hautala.
"But my strong advice is: wait. If you attempt one of these workarounds, we can't say for sure what might happen to your phone because we haven't fully tested these homebrew techniques. You might not be getting the important device-specific software we would typically deliver in the official update. Or your phone might get misconfigured and not receive future updates."


Hautala also warned that homebrew updates could even cause some phones to stop working.


"Bottom line: unsupported workarounds put you in uncharted territory that may void your phone warranty. 

"We've made a lot of progress in recent weeks, so I urge you to please be patient for just a bit longer and wait for your official update notification to arrive," he added.
My take on Microsoft's attitude towards homebrew update installers? Redmond is totally justified - at least for now - in adopting a cautionary approach. 


Think about it. 

The Windows Phone 7 platform is relatively nascent and rapidly evolving, especially with Nokia on board to help push the OS forward.
As such, Microsoft is totally within its rights to express concern over unauthorized, third-party software which could potentially interfere with future updates.
That being said, Microsoft shouldn't forget: talented modders and hackers can be leveraged to help push a platform forward.
So, yes, I do think Microsoft remains on track, despite its opposition to the (first) ChevronWP7 jailbreak and the above-mentioned homebrew updater.
Remember, Microsoft recently offered famed PS3 hacker GeoHot a free Windows Phone 7 device, vowing to let "dev creativity flourish."
And let's not forget Redmond's recent embrace of the Kinect hacker community. Clearly, Microsoft is far (and I mean far) from perfect, but at least the corporation is light-years ahead of Apple when it comes to understanding the advatanges of modding and jailbreaking.

DHS wants hackers to protect cyber perimeter

Former DHS Secretary Tom Ridge has blamed outdated federal policies for preventing the US government from recruiting friendly hackers and other security experts to help protect the national cyber perimeter. 


"With the regulations associated with bringing in private citizens - to sit side by side by with the government in order to advance a broader interest of security and safety - it is very, very difficult," said Ridge. 


"The [regulations] are written to the extent where, we're not really going to trust people in the private sector because, heaven forbid, they might be financially advantaged either with a contract or just general information. 


“These regs are written to take care of an aberrant behavior, somebody who might be misguided and we ought to just trust the Americans who want to work with government and make it a lot easier to partner with us particularly in the area of cybersecurity."

Meanwhile, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano said another problem with recruiting digitally savvy individuals is "people who are really good, they have not thought about working for the government." 
Still, Napolitano emphasized that the DHS has managed to snag a number of prominent hackers as consultants.
"We have recruited some very nationally known hackers to be on our homeland security advisory committee... There are actually hacker conventions, and we are there."

Icequake swarms portend some avalanches

Forecasting glacier crack-ups may be possible by keeping an ear to the ice
 

Unless you’re eating breakfast, hearing snap, crackle, and pop may be an early warning sign of an impending avalanche. Geologists listening in on “icequakes” that rumble through glaciers have developed a model that can predict a collapse up to 15 days before it happens, the team reports in a study posted on arXiv.org.
With that kind of heads up, villages could be evacuated and roads closed in avalanche-prone areas.
Though all glaciers groan and creak under stress, glaciers on an incline are especially creaky because gravity tugs on the top of the ice more than the base. Accumulating snow causes even more stress. These forces cause the glacier to fracture, sending tiny icequakes throughout. Eventually, if a glacier can’t handle the stress, a large chunk will fall off, pummeling any unsuspecting villages below with a moving mass of snow and ice.
To find early warning signs of a break-off, scientists in Switzerland placed seismic instruments on a glacier precariously hugging the northeast face of the Weisshorn, a mountain in the Swiss Alps that looms over the 400 inhabitants of the village of Randa, 2,500 meters below. Break-offs in the winter are especially dangerous because the glacier has accumulated snow, so that ruptures trigger avalanches. Weisshorn avalanches have claimed 51 lives since the 17th century.
The team traveled via helicopter in 2003 to plant the instruments — the glacier spans 3,800 to 4,500 meters above sea level on a slope of 45 to 50 degrees. The team also planted seven light reflectors mounted on stakes to help track the glacier’s movement, and left a camera across the valley to film changes in the dynamic landscape.
Researchers froze into the ice a special microphone, called a geophone, to pick up seismic vibrations. Two weeks before the glacier split in 2005, researchers were able to detect a change in the sounds picked up by the microphone.
“As you approach rupture, you hear more sounds,” says geologist and study coauthor Jérome Faillettaz of ETH Zurich. “It’s just like if you break a pen or a cracker. You hear some small noise before it breaks.”
Along with rumbling sounds, the team also saw the reflectors-on-sticks accelerate several days before the rupture. Scientists have known that seismic activity dramatically increases five days before a break-off, but by combining the motion of the glacier with the behavior of the icequakes, the researchers’ model can detect a rupture 15 days in advance.
“It’s the first time icequakes have been used as a precursor to these break-offs,” says glaciologist Fabian Walter of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif.
Though there are similar hanging glaciers all over the world, says Walter, few are near human settlements with lots of infrastructure.
Icequakes are less complicated to study than earthquakes because waves travel through only one medium, as opposed to several layers of the Earth. But just as scientists haven’t figured out how to predict earthquakes, predicting icequakes isn’t possible either.

2nd Life for electric vehicle batteries?

Second life for electric car batteries? No, it’s not a world of electric virtual avatars - it’s a plan under development by Duke Energy and Tokyo-based cleantech ITOCHU to develop applications for spent car batteries.
Apparently, these two companies believe that after the batteries set to power the next generation of green cars end their useful life as far as autos go, they can go on to have other lives in other applications, such as supplemental home energy supply, renewable power storage and fast-charging power for electric vehicles (EVs).
According to some auto industry estimates, electric vehicle (EV) batteries that can no longer charge to approximately 80 percent of their original capacity may be candidates for replacement.
Both Duke Energy and ITOCHU were involved in a large-scale public/private EV pilot program based in Indianapolis known as Project Plug-IN, which apparently inspired the companies to study the second-life market for EV batteries.
ITOCHU and Duke Energy plan to work together to assess how such EV batteries perform in stationary applications in homes, neighborhoods and commercial buildings, validating potential business models for future commercialization.
If successful, the companies believe that this "after market" for batteries could help reduce initial battery cost (which, in turn, would lower the cost of EVs).
It should be noted as well this isn’t the only attempt to make second life use out of electric vehicle batteries. Similar projects are happening with the likes of Nissan, for example, as well

Lady Gaga trapped in an Android smartphone, we wish she'd stay there (video)

NTT DoCoMo has Darth Vader selling its Android wares, so what could KDDI au possibly counter with? Why, a force even darker and more heinous than the Sith Daddy himself: Lady Gaga. Yes, the music fiend we love to hate has remixed Poker Face just to make sure we take notice of Sharp's IS03, and the kindly Japanese carrier has taken care of inserting her into the phone for maximum promotional value. Yes, au, now that we've seen Lady Gaga strutting around inside it, we totally want to own one of these handsets! See the video promos after the break.

Apple beefs up legal team for fight with Nokia

 

It's boom time for lawyers, with Apple hiring them by the truckload to help it see off Nokia in an intellectual property dispute being heard by the International Trade Commission this week.
Nokia sued Apple in October last year, claiming the iPhone - and, later, all Apple products - infringed its patents. It filed a complaint with the ITC two months later.
Apple has since countersued, calling for imports of Nokia phones into the US to be blocked.
According to Bloomberg, Apple's hired some of the top patent lawyers in the country. These include Robert Krupka of Kirkland & Ellis, who previously struck a settlement deal with Creative Technology under which Apple paid it $100 million, and William Lee of WilmerHale in Boston, who helped Broadcom win a patent battle against Qualcomm.
The company's also hired an in-house attorney, Noreen Krall, who was previously chief IP counsel for Sun Microsystems.
Apple's got similar patent battles raging with HTC and Motorola, each including a range of complaints and counter-complaints. Indeed, according to LegalMetric, it's been the most-sued company in the world for the last two years.
All these disputes are likely to end eventually in some sort of cross-licensing deal - meaning lots more lovely work to come for the lawyers.

Cosmic rebirth

Circular patterns in the universe's pervasive background radiation suggest the Big Bang was only the latest of many


 
Most cosmologists trace the birth of the universe to the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. But a new analysis of the relic radiation generated by that explosive event suggests the universe got its start eons earlier and has cycled through myriad episodes of birth and death, with the Big Bang merely the most recent in a series of starting guns.
That startling notion, proposed by theoretical physicist Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford in England and Vahe Gurzadyan of the Yerevan Physics Institute and Yerevan State University in Armenia, goes against the standard theory of cosmology known as inflation.
The researchers base their findings on circular patterns they discovered in the cosmic microwave background, the ubiquitous microwave glow left over from the Big Bang. The circular features indicate that the cosmos itself circles through epochs of endings and beginnings, Penrose and Gurzadyan assert. The researchers describe their controversial findings in an article posted at arXiv.org on November 17.
The circular features are regions where tiny temperature variations in the otherwise uniform microwave background are smaller than average. Those features, Penrose said, cannot be explained by the highly successful inflation theory, which posits that the infant cosmos underwent an enormous growth spurt, ballooning from something on the scale of an atom to the size of a grapefruit during the universe’s first tiny fraction of a second. Inflation would erase such patterns.
“The existence of large-scale coherent features in the microwave background of this form would appear to contradict the inflationary model and would be a very distinctive
signature of Penrose's model” of a cyclic universe, comments cosmologist David Spergel of Princeton University. But, he adds, “The paper does not provide enough detail about the analysis to assess the reality of these circles.”
Penrose interprets the circles as providing a look back, past the glass wall of the most recent Big Bang, into the universe’s previous episode, or “aeon,” as he calls it. The circles, he suggests, were generated by collisions between supermassive black holes that occurred during this earlier aeon. The colliding black holes would have created a cacophony of gravitational waves — ripples in spacetime due to the acceleration of the giant masses. Those waves would have been spherical and uniformly distributed.
According to the detailed mathematics worked out by Penrose, when the uniform distribution of gravitational waves from the previous aeon entered the current aeon, they were converted into a pulse of energy. The pulse provided a uniform kick to the allotment of dark matter, the invisible material that accounts for more than 80 percent of the mass of the cosmos.
“The dark matter material along the burst therefore has this uniform character,” says Penrose. “This is what is seen as a circle in our cosmic microwave background sky, and it should look like a fairly uniform circle.”
Each circle has a lower-than-average variation in temperature, which is just what he and Gurzadyan found when they analyzed data from NASA’s orbiting Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP, which scanned the entire sky for nine years, and the balloon-borne BOOMERANG experiment, which studied microwave background over a smaller fraction of the heavens.
Because the team found similar circular features with two different detectors, Penrose says it’s unlikely he and his colleagues are being fooled by instrumental noise or other artifacts.
But Spergel says he is concerned that the team has not accounted for variations in the noise level of WMAP data acquired over different parts of the sky. WMAP examined different sky regions for different amounts of time. Maps of the microwave background generated from those regions studied the longest would have lower noise and smaller recorded variations in the temperature of the microwave glow. Those lower-noise maps could artificially produce the circles that Penrose and Gurzadyan ascribe to their model of a cyclic universe, Spergel says.
A new, more detailed map of the cosmic microwave background, now being conducted by the European Space Agency’s Planck mission, could provide a more definitive test of the theory, Penrose says.