How Chromecast Makes Shared Viewing Easier: Bat Squeaks

Using the Chromecast with friends is about to get better, thanks to this handy update: Google announced at its Google I/O developer conference that users will no longer have to join the same network, just to cast videos and music to Chromecast-connected TVs.
What Google didn’t announce, at least on stage, was how that was going to work. But the company's engineers clued me in: Later this year, smartphones and tablets will be able to link to Chromecast over ultrasonic signals, which are undetectable to the naked human ear—not too different from the high-pitched signals bats use for echolocation.
The idea is to enhance the Chromecast experience when shared among several users in a room, Chromecast Product Manager Jagit Singh Chawla explained to me. He said that the engineers asked themselves how they could eliminate the need for friends to type in passwords, just to join the host's Wi-Fi network. Bluetooth

How Google's Early Release Of Android L Breaks With The Past To Fix Its Future

Google took major steps last week to boost adoption of Android L, the latest version of its mobile operating system. In fact, the company did something it has never done before: It released a developer preview.
Since the beginning, Google's approach to major Android releases followed roughly the same format. The announcement typically involved a partner making a Nexus flagship reference device, with the newest version of the platform shipping to developers and other manufacturers so they could build apps and devices for it.
This process actually slowed adoption by consumers, manufacturers and developers. After Google announced a new version, it often took companies such as HTC and Samsung as long as three to six months to build new devices for it, or ship software updates for older phones and tablets. Meanwhile, developers hesitated to build apps optimized for it because so few consumers had the latest version.

Microsoft Smartwatch Will Reportedly Have 11 Sensors

Details of an upcoming Microsoft smartwatch were uncovered in May, hinting at a summer release. However, a new source claims that the device will actually debut in October.
In addition to the update regarding the launch of the device, the source also offers a few more details about the device itself.
Previous reports have already mentioned that the wearable will monitor the wearer's heart rate, but a source in contact with Tom's Hardware claims that it will use 11 internal sensors to achieve this function.
The report further claims that the device will contain chips from Texas Instruments and Atmel.
And while we've already heard that the device will be cross platform — compatible with Windows, Android and iOS — the latest report also claims that the company will include an open API upon the device's release.

NASA's Human-like Space Robot Pays Dividends on Earth

A humanoid robot aboard the International Space Station is inspiring technology that could be useful to both astronauts and people on Earth.
NASA's Robonaut 2, which arrived at the orbiting lab in 2011, has human-like arms and hands capable of performing simple tasks such as flipping switches and grasping objects. The robot was originally designed to do work outside the station, potentially reducing the number of time-consuming and strenuous spacewalks required of astronauts.
However, the technology developed during the Robonaut program has inspired other ideas and is being adapted into several spinoffs that have applications both in space and on Earth, NASA officials said.

Songza CEO on Google Acquisition: 'This Is Just the Beginning'

What music do you listen to when Google acquires your startup? If you're Songza CEO Elias Roman, you blast some Hillbilly Bodybuilding.
Songza is a music service that offers users expertly curated playlists around mood, time of day and general theme. It offers a nice blend between human curation and algorithmic determination. The end result is a service that can offer up some truly fantastic music to perfectly encapsulate a feeling, an event or a routine.
Google bought Songza to help flesh out its Play Music offering, though the company also said it hoped to infuse some of Songza's work into other parts of the company, including YouTube.
I spoke with Roman earlier this evening after news of the acquisition — which was first rumored in early June — became public. According to Roman, all 40 members of Songza's team are now employed by Google.
The company is currently based in Long Island City, New York, but Roman says the company will move to Google's New York offices later this summer.

Researchers Create Walking, Muscle-Powered Biobots

In today’s mildly squiggy but kind of cool news, we learn that researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have created tiny robots that walk when current is applied to their bio-based muscular engines. The tiny robots can twitch their way across a surface or through a liquid.

“Biological actuation driven by cells is a fundamental need for any kind of biological machine you want to build,” said study leader Rashid Bashir in a release. “We’re trying to integrate these principles of engineering with biology in a way that can be used to design and develop biological machines and systems for environmental and medical applications. Biology is tremendously powerful, and if we can somehow learn to harness its advantages for useful applications, it could bring about a lot of great things.”

These machines use muscle cells to move. In 2012 researchers used rat heart cells to create a primitive version of this system but the cells kept firing, allowing little control. Now they are attempting to use real muscle cells that can be fired at will and they are also planning to at neurons that can control the rate of firing and direction of the robot. The centimeter-sized bots are made of soft hydrogels onto which the muscle has been stretched.

The researchers see many uses for the robots – besides the obvious one of scaring your friends with a weird muscular roboslug – including toxin neutralization and the improvement of biological control systems.

“Our goal is for these devices to be used as autonomous sensors. We want it to sense a specific chemical and move towards it, then release agents to neutralize the toxin, for example. Being in control of the actuation is a big step forward toward that goal,” said Bashir.

Source: Rackspace Wants To Take Itself Private

Rackspace — the publicly-listed enterprise cloud services company that competes against the likes of Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft and Google — has been in the spotlight after announcing in May that it has hired bankers to help consider offers to parter with or be acquired by another company. However, it could choose a third option: taking itself private.
Following the likes of Dell in turning away from public market accountability while it focuses on developing its business in a fast-changing tech world, we have heard from a source that Rackspace has been negotiating with a private equity firm to borrow capital for the deal, with a plan to make an official announcement as soon as this week (keep in mind that we’re hurtling to a public holiday in the U.S.).
“The pressures of being a public company are too much,” another source within the company noted.
A Rackspace spokesperson says the company does not comment on rumor or speculation. In other words, we have not been able to confirm what the source has told us.

NSA Was Authorised to Carry Out Surveillance on BJP in 2010: Report

America's top spy agency was authorised by a US court in 2010 to carry out surveillance on the BJP along with five other political organisations across the globe, including Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Pakistan Peoples Party, according to a classified document.
BJP figures in the list of foreign political parties along with Lebanon's Amal, the Bolivarian Continental Coordinator of Venezuela, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, Egyptian National Salvation Front and the Pakistan Peoples Party for whom the National Security Agency (NSA) had sought permission to carry out surveillance, says the document made public by The Washington Post on Monday.
The document lists the 193 foreign governments as well as foreign factions and other entities that were part of a 2010 certification approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The list includes India.

Apple Reportedly Upgrading Siri In-House to Smarter Neural Network Design

Apple might be looking ahead to upgrade its Siri, the voice-based virtual-assistant, to a completely new level with its own home-brewed search engine based on the neural network architecture.
The Cupertino firm over the past few years is said to have hired a number of engineers and executives from Nuance, the speech recognition technology-developing firm that is confirmed to have developed Siri for Apple.
According to Wired, Larry Gillick, former VP of Research at Nuance, and Gunnar Evermann, former Chief Mobile Technology at Nuance have been hired by Apple, indicating that the firm might be planning something big for Siri.
Also, Alex Acero, who was previously associated with Microsoft's Cortana voice-based virtual-assistant, now also works for Apple.

HP Settles Shareholder Suit on Autonomy Takeover

Computer giant Hewlett-Packard said it has reached a settlement in a shareholder lawsuit over its 2011 acquisition of British software firm Autonomy.
The $10-billion deal led to the ouster of Leo Apotheker as chief executive of the US tech giant, and HP subsequently said it had discovered massive accounting irregularities which overvalued the British firm.
HP said in a statement late Monday it had settled the case with law firms representing shareholders, without disclosing any amounts to be paid. The settlement is subject to court approval.
Under the terms of the deal, HP said the plaintiffs "will assist HP in bringing claims" against Michael Lynch, Autonomy's former chief executive officer, and other former executives at the British company.
HP in 2012 asked US and British authorities to probe accounting issues at Autonomy as it reported a $5.5 billion writeoff in the value of the unit.

Twitter Replaces CFO Mike Gupta With Former Goldman Executive

Twitter Inc said Chief Financial Officer Mike Gupta will become senior vice president of strategic investments and named Anthony Noto as his replacement.
Noto, 46, was a managing director in Goldman Sachs' technology, media and telecom investment banking group, Twitter said in a regulatory statement.
Gupta and Noto will take up their new roles within the next 30 days, the company said.
The move by Twitter is one of several recent adjustments in the company, after it reported slower than expected user growth figures in April. In June, the company announced the resignation of Ali Rowghani, the Chief Operating Officer of the company. The micro-blogging website said it did not intend to hire a replacement for Rowghani, whose operating responsibilities would be assumed by others in the management.

Twitter's Revolving Door Spins Again

Twitter's chief executive, Dick Costolo, has replaced virtually every crucial executive at the company in the last few months as he has struggled to figure out how to get more people using the service.
The chief operating officer? Gone. The head of product? Out. The top engineer? Fired.
On Tuesday, Costolo again spun the revolving door, bringing in Anthony J. Noto, the star Goldman Sachs banker who helped Twitter sell its initial stock offering last fall, as the chief financial officer of the microblogging company.
While Noto is respected on Wall Street, he probably will not be much help with Twitter's fundamental problem: How to make a niche service, with its quirky abbreviations like RT and MT and endless flow of 140-character text messages, into something that appeals to the masses.
Twitter had 255 million monthly users globally in March, up 5.8 percent from the end of December. Analysts had hoped to see more than 260 million. Growth at the end of last year was even slower.

Lenovo Expects IBM and Motorola Deals to Be Completed by Year-End

Proposed purchases by China's Lenovo Group Ltd of IBM's low-end server unit and Google's Motorola Mobility business should be completed by year-end, Lenovo Chief Executive Officer Yang Yuanqing said on Wednesday.
The deals are currently undergoing approval by U.S. and Chinese regulators.
"Both deals are under the approval process in the two countries and they are progressing," Yang said at Lenovo's annual general meeting in Hong Kong.
"We hope to complete the two deals by year-end," he said. "The U.S. government...and U.S. Army are all our clients. There has been no issue and we will keep this tradition."
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the $2.3 billion IBM deal was in limbo while the U.S. government investigated national security issues.
The January announcement for the acquisition came nearly a decade after Lenovo bought IBM's money-losing ThinkPad business for $1.75 billion, which had also faced scrutiny.
Tensions between the United States and China over cybersecurity issues have reached new highs since the U.S. Department of Justice charged five Chinese military officials with hacking the systems of U.S. companies to steal trade secrets in May. China denies the charges and has in turn accused Washington of massive cyberspying.

US Marshals Silk Road Auction Sees One Bidder Claim All 30,000 Bitcoins

The U.S. Marshals Service had one winner in its auction of nearly 30,000 Bitcoin, a spokeswoman said on Tuesday, without revealing the name of the successful bidder.
The U.S. Marshals Service held an auction on Friday for 29,655 Bitcoin seized during a raid on Silk Road, an Internet black-market bazaar where authorities say illegal drugs and other goods could be obtained. The winner was notified on Monday evening and the transfer of Bitcoin took place Tuesday, according to Lynzey Donahue, spokeswoman for the USMS.
The auction drew 63 bids from 45 registered bidders on Friday. The price of Bitcoin rose on Tuesday, adding to Monday's gains. It was last priced at $652.02, up 2 percent on the session, and has gained more than 15 percent since June 25, according to digital currency exchange Coindesk.

Facebook Being Probed Over Emotion Experiment by UK Regulator: Report

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) in the UK is investigating whether Facebook Inc broke data protection laws when it allowed researchers to conduct a psychological experiment on users of the social network, the Financial Times reported.
The data regulator is probing the experiment and plans to ask Facebook questions, the newspaper reported. It was too early to tell exactly what part of the law Facebook may have infringed, the FT quoted a spokesperson for the ICO as saying.
Facebook's psychological experiment on nearly 700,000 unwitting users in 2012 has caused a social-media furor. The experiment was to find if Facebook could alter the emotional state of its users and prompt them to post either more positive or negative content.
Representatives for ICO and Facebook did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment.

Microsoft Joins Qualcomm-Backed Alliance in Bid for Connected Homes

Microsoft Corp has joined Qualcomm Inc and other technology companies in a bid to establish standard ways for household devices like light bulbs and thermostats to talk to each other.
The Qualcomm-backed AllSeen Alliance is among a growing number of efforts for companies working alone or in groups to promote protocols for how smart devices should work together in a trend increasingly referred to as the Internet of Things.
Microsoft on Tuesday joined 50 other members in the AllSeen Alliance, including major consumer electronics players Panasonic Corp, LG Electronics Inc and Sharp Corp, the group said.
But chipmakers that compete with Qualcomm plan to launch a rival standards consortium as early as next week, an industry source who was familiar with the plans but not authorized to discuss them, also told Reuters on Tuesday.

Android L Preview Source Code Now Available for Nexus Devices

After releasing the Android L developer preview images for some Nexus devices, Google has now posted the source code on the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) for an even wider range of devices.
Notably, Google's Android Git repo page lists the source code for the following Nexus devices - Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 7 (2012), Nexus 7 (2013) and Nexus 10.
9to5Google points out that the source code does miss out few things such as binary packages and kernel source.
Google, at its I/O 2014 Keynote, announced the "L" release of Android and called it the most ambitious Android release yet. Currently known only as Android L, there's no codename or even a formal version number yet. Android L is expected to release later this year, though an exact date isn't known.

Nasa to Attempt Launch of Carbon Dioxide Tracking Satellite on Wednesday

The US space agency will try again on Wednesday to launch a satellite designed to track carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas that is responsible for global warming.
The first bid to send the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 to space was aborted at the last minute on Tuesday, after engineers discovered a problem with water flow to the launch pad.
The next attempt is now set for Wednesday at 2:56 am Pacific time (0956 GMT) from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
Nasa's two previous bids to send a carbon-tracking spacecraft into orbit failed due to rocket malfunctions in 2009 and 2011.
This time, Nasa switched to a different type of rocket, the Delta 2, but an issue with the water suppression system to the launch pad caused engineers to halt the process at 46 seconds before liftoff early Tuesday.

NSA Internet Surveillance is Legal: US Privacy Oversight Board

The National Security Agency programs that collect huge volumes of Internet data within the United States pass are constitutional and employ "reasonable" safeguards designed to protect the rights of Americans, an independent privacy and civil liberties board has found.
In a report released Tuesday night, the bipartisan, five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, appointed by President Barack Obama, largely endorsed a set of NSA surveillance programs that have provoked worldwide controversy since they were disclosed last year by former NSA systems administrator Edward Snowden.
However, the board urged new internal intelligence agency safeguards designed to further guard against misuse.
Under a provision known as Section 702, added in 2008 to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, the NSA uses court orders and taps on fiber optic lines to target the data of foreigners living abroad when their emails, web chats, text messages and other communications traverse the U.S.