L.A. School District iPad Program Ends Amid FBI Suspicions
L.A. school district officials have turned over twenty boxes of documents pertaining to its troubled iPad project in response to a federal grand jury’s subpoena, the LA Times reports.
What was intended to be a $1.3 billion project to equip every student in the district with an iPad running Pearson education software has been plagued with issues since the beginning. The Feds are investigating ties between then-superintendent John Deasy and Pearson and Apple executives at the time of the deal.
On top of that, the project suffered from technical difficulties, including students who deleted the security filter so they could play games and browse the Internet freely, and teachers who said they were ill-prepared regarding the devices. Already, some teachers in the district have willingly opted out of the program.
See also: Latest Bad Sign For Tablets: Chromebooks Outship iPads In Schools
The FBI has seized 20 boxes of documents from the district related to the project, and is looking into records from before and after the bidding process to discover if the odds were stacked in favor of Deasy’s connections, Pearson and Apple, winning the bidding war over competitors like Microsoft. Deasy told the LA Times Tuesday that he didn't know anything about the subpoena and that law enforcement had not contacted him.
If the FBI discovers the kind of corruption it suspects, everyone will lose. The school district had put aside $800 million for new personnel related to the project, and these people will no longer be hired. Apple will lose the $500 million it was set to earn from the iPad revenue (not that it will notice). Most importantly, there’s the students and teachers that were set to gain a new technology curriculum from the project. Fortunately, the remaining 27 schools in the project that have not received iPads can opt for Chromebooks instead.
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SmartThings Wants To Make Samsung Work Harder In Your Home
Home automation platform SmartThings unveiled Wednesday new modules for support for Samsung devices. This in itself is not surprising, given that Samsung acquired SmartThings in August. What’s new is the extended functionality it lends to your home appliances.
See also: Samsung Buys Smart-Home Outfit SmartThings, Reportedly For $200 Million
With SmartThings integration, your fridge isn’t just a fridge.
It’s a central hub that takes the features a refrigerator usually uses for keeping your food cold, and utilizes them for the additional tasks of monitoring the humidity and temperature in your home. If there’s a leak in the basement, your fridge will know—and alert you on your phone.
Neither is your vacuum simply a vacuum. Thanks to the Roomba boom just about everyone is familiar with the convenience of a tiny robot that cleans your floor, but SmartThings takes it a step further. It utilizes the robot’s ambulatory abilities as a security guard. When SmartThings detects unexpected movement around your home, it can deploy the vacuum to investigate, and use the vacuum’s camera to monitor what’s going on.
Additional modules include support for a Samsung air conditioner and laundry machine, which will be utilized to monitor and conserve energy use. Aside from remote controls and alerts for using the appliances for their original purpose, you will also be able to track energy usage and control the temperature in the house when you’re not there.
See also: Why Samsung Buying SmartThings Should Have Us Worried
Our appliances contain sophisticated computer mechanisms, and may already be smarter than they seem—we’re just not using them to their full potential. SmartThings’ goal seems to be to make each Samsung appliance a multitasker, utilizing them in unexpected ways.
SmartThings devices are currently on sale in North America, but expected to make their way to the global marketplace sometime in 2015.
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FCC May Reject The White House's Stance On Net Neutrality
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler may be a Democrat like Barack Obama, but political ties won’t keep him from considering a flat-out rejection of the President’s position on net neutrality.
Hours after the President urged the Federal Communications Commission to declare the Internet as a utility, Wheeler told representatives from Google, Yahoo and other giants of the Web that he wouldn’t simply go along with it.
See also: President Obama Supports Net Neutrality, For All The Good It Will Do
“I am an independent agency,” he reportedly said repeatedly, the Washington Post reports.
The White House has fallen firmly on the side of net neutrality ever since an FCC document leaked this spring indicated the FCC was considering allowing ISPs like AT&T and Verizon to continue offering preferential treatment to some Internet users over others.
See also: Why Net Neutrality Became A Thing For The Internet Generation
Both Democrats, Wheeler and Obama have been longtime allies. Before Obama was elected, Wheeler raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote his campaign. Now, however, the FCC’s Democratic member majority may do little to sway it toward the White House’s stance. For now, Wheeler is hoping to placate everyone—Internet users and ISPs alike.
“What you want is what everyone wants: an open Internet that doesn’t affect your business,” Wheeler told officials from major Web companies, according to the Post. “What I’ve got to figure out is how to split the baby.”
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Mozilla Is Working On A Firefox Browser Just For Developers
Mozilla has a new Firefox browser in the works that isn’t just for anyone. According to the company’s announcement Monday, this upcoming project will be “the first browser dedicated to developers.”
The new browser will integrate some of Mozilla’s most popular developer tools, WebIDE and the Firefox Tools Adapter. These tools are currently available for download to anyone on up-to-date versions of the Firefox browser, but the average user never touches them. This developer-specific browser will put them front and center.
“When building for the Web, developers tend to use a myriad of different tools which often don’t work well together,” the announcement on Mozilla’s blog reads. “This means you end up switching between different tools, platforms and browsers which can slow you down and make you less productive. So we decided to unleash our developer tools team on the entire browser to see how we could make your lives easier.”
Apart from a video that rehashes the words of the announcement, there isn’t a lot of information available yet on the new browser. However Mozilla promises that all will be revealed on its launch date, November 10.
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Microsoft Targets Mid 2015 For Office 16 Launch
We’ll see Microsoft Office 16 in the second half of 2015, a Microsoft official said.
During a during a session at Tech Ed Barcelona Tuesday, General Manager of Office and Office 365 Marketing Julia White said that Office 16 and the next generation of Microsoft server apps, like Exchange Server and SharePoint Server, will be released together.
This is still at least a quarter later than ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley has been hearing from trusted sources. Coupled with the vague “second half” language, it’s unclear whether Microsoft really has a good idea when Office 16 will be ready.
See also: Four Things You Need To Know About Windows 10
Office 16 and its accompanying server apps are at least complete enough for Microsoft to use, and the company has been privately testing the software internally, ZDNet reports.
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Apple's Larger iPad May Be Delayed, Sources Say
We won’t be seeing larger Apple iPads until next year, and the iPhone 6 may be to blame.
Unnamed sources told the Wall Street Journal that plans to increase production on larger iPad models have been pushed back while the company struggles to meet demand for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. Suppliers in Asia told the Journal that they’d originally been scheduled to up iPad production volumes in December.
The news broke last week that Apple would be unveiling new products at an event at its Cupertino, Calif., headquarters on October 16. Rumor has it one new product may be a larger iPad. This new device will feature a 12.9-inch liquid-crystal-display screen, according to in-the-know suppliers.
See also: Apple Sends iPad Event Invitations For October 16
It’s unclear if Apple’s allegedly delayed iPad production means that the company will not be introducing its new iPad at the event after all. But if sources close to the situation are correct, it will be a while longer until these iPads make their way to the public.
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Apple Addresses Bash Bug With New Patch
No more command line input or complicated workarounds: Apple has released a downloadable patch for fixing the bash “Shellshock” bug.
The patch is available not only for OS X Mavericks v10.9.5., but also older versions of Apple software: OS X Lion v10.7.5, OS X Lion Server v10.7.5, and OS X Mountain Lion v10.8.5. There is currently no fix for machines running test versions of Yosemite.
Last week, an Apple spokesperson said that “The vast majority of OS X users are not at risk to recently reported bash vulnerabilities.” However, the company acknowledged it was working on the bash patch released Monday.
See also: New Security Flaws Render Shellshock Patch Ineffective
Security researchers recently discovered that bash, a UNIX command shell and language included in OS X, includes a 22-year-old vulnerability that allows hackers to sneak prompts in as variable names with the computer being none the wiser. As researchers discover more and more related flaws, new reinforced patches have been released every day.
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New Security Flaws Render Shellshock Patch Ineffective
Your system is still vulnerable to the Shellshock bug, even if you’ve patched it. Security researchers have found new flaws in bash, rendering previous patches ineffective.
See also: How To Detect And Patch This Big, Bad Unix Bash Shellshock Bug
The bash shell is an omnipresent command-line interpreter used by default in Unix and Linux, and by extension, Apple’s OS X software. The shell itself is decades old, and it turns out the bug has been present for the last 22 years without detection.
Linux stewardship company Red Hat released a series of fixes to patch up the eight or so versions of bash that were vulnerable. On Friday, Red Hat released a second round of patches to resolve newly discovered security flaws, and those discoveries keep coming.
See also: The Bash Bug Makes Every Mac Vulnerable; Here's How To Patch It
Google security researcher Michal "lcamtuf" Zalewski has been tweeting as he uncovers increasingly serious vulnerabilities in the bash shell. He recommends Red Hat security researcher Florian Weimer’s still-unofficial patch.
At the moment, the only people who need to worry about patching the Shellshock bug right away are system administrators and people with who have tweaked the advanced Unix settings on machines running OS X or Linux.
“The vast majority of OS X users are not at risk to recently reported bash vulnerabilities," Apple said.
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Amazon Doubles Down On The Connected Home
Amazon is quietly staffing up its Silicon Valley-based hardware lab as it gears up to create and test new connected home gadgets.
Lab126, the Amazon division behind hardware products like the Kindle Fire, will bring its full-time payroll to at least 3,757 in the next five years, Reuters reports in an exclusive story.
With this plan, detailed in an obscure government document, CEO Jeff Bezos’ plan to focus on hardware is affirmed. This despite lagging Kindle Fire sales and investors’ criticism of Amazon’s constant spending on long term pie-in-the-sky projects.
See also: Amazon Gets Serious About Hardware With 6 New Tablets
Anonymous sources told Reuters that Amazon will be investing $55 million into Lab126’s activities in an effort to prepare smart home devices to compete against Google and Apple.
Google, Apple, and now Amazon are all racing to create the ultimate platform for the Internet of things. In an era when dishwashers, refrigerators, and security systems have the potential to become self aware, technology companies all want to get in on the next big market.
The mobile phone industry has taught us that the device that ends up on top won’t only support the company’s products, but third party applications as well. As Amazon doubles down on the Internet of Things, it will need to work out a product that not only centralizes all the connected home devices, but streamlines the process better than anyone else.
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