Month: March 2016

A report from The Verge claims that Google is working on a third-party keyboard for iOS. The site says the keyboard would include "a variety of search options," a description that suggests it will be more than a copy of Google's Android keyboard.

According to the report, the keyboard has "been in development for months," and is "visually distinct" from Google's Android keyboard. The usual Android Google Keyboard features are here, like gesture typing, but on iOS you'll be able to "tap the Google logo" to jump to traditional web search. The report says there are "distinct buttons for pictures and GIF searches," all apparently designed to push users to do more Google Searches.

Apple added support for third-party keyboards in iOS 8, and since then we've seen the usual Android keyboard developers bring over their work. Companies like Swype, Swiftkey, and Fleksy made the jump, and now Google is following suit.

The Idaho mother who sued President Barack Obama over alleged unconstitutional telephone metadata collection has lost again in court. Anna Smith had her initial case dismissed in 2014, and this week her appeal met a similar fate.

On Tuesday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Smith, finding that her case was now moot in light of the new changes to the now-expired Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

Within the past year, Congress voted to end Section 215 but then substituted it with a similar law (called the USA Freedom Act) that leaves the phone metadata surveillance apparatus largely in place. The government no longer collects the data directly, but even former NSA Director Michael Hayden admitted in June 2015 that this legal change was pretty minor.

NEW YORK—Buick is so excited about its new Encore that it couldn't wait for the New York International Auto Show, choosing instead to unveil the new small SUV/crossover the day before the show opens to the media. It's an important car for the company—last year it sold more than 66,000 Encores in the US, accounting for a third of all new Buicks sold here.

"The Buick Encore created the premium small SUV segment and remains the top choice for customers seeking premium features and dependability coupled with timeless design," said Duncan Aldred, vice president of Buick Sales, Service and Marketing. "In a rapidly evolving segment, the Encore continues to lead with smart, purposeful updates and a new level of technology-infused elegance and refinement."

As befits the current trend of small-capacity forced induction power units, the Encore gets a pair of turbocharged 1.4L 4-cylinder engines. The cheaper option is capable of 25mpg in town and 33mpg on the highway, and there's a more advanced unit with direct injection that not only produces more power but also does so with more efficiency—28mpg in town and 34mpg on the highway. (Exact power and torque outputs were not available at press time.) Those figures are for the front-wheel drive versions; all-wheel drive will be an option, with an electronic clutch controlling just how much torque gets redirected to the rear wheels depending upon driving conditions.

Millions of Android phones, including the entire line of Nexus models, are vulnerable to attacks that can execute malicious code and take control of core functions almost permanently, Google officials have warned.

The officials have already uncovered one unidentified Google Play app that attempted to exploit the vulnerability, although they said they didn't consider the app to be doing so for malicious purposes. They are in the process of releasing a fix, but at the moment any phone that hasn't received a security patch level of March 18 or later is vulnerable. The flaw, which allows apps to gain nearly unfettered "root" access that bypasses the entire Android security model, has its origins in an elevation of privileges vulnerability in the Linux kernel. Linux developers fixed it in April 2014 but never identified it as a security threat. For reasons that aren't clear, Android developers failed to patch it even after the flaw received the vulnerability identifier CVE-2015-1805 in February 2015.

"An elevation of privilege vulnerability in the kernel could enable a local malicious application to execute arbitrary code in the kernel," an Android security advisory published Friday stated. "This issue is rated as a critical severity due to the possibility of a local permanent device compromise and the device would possibly need to be repaired by re-flashing the operating system."

Apple has started distributing both the iPhone SE and the 9.7-inch iPad Pro to journalists, and one of the first things to come to light has been the amount of RAM in each device. Memory in iDevices has a big impact on performance and general usability, but Apple almost never actually talks about it so we need to have hardware in hand before we can get the full story.

The good news is that the iPhone SE has the same 2GB of RAM as the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus despite its smaller size and lower price. The not as good news is that the 9.7-inch iPad Pro has the same 2GB of RAM as the iPad Air 2, not the 4GB of RAM on offer in the 12.7-inch version.

RAM doesn't have quite the same effect in an iOS device as it does in laptops and desktops—iOS was originally designed for low RAM devices and even though current iPhones and iPads have much more RAM than the 128MB in the first iPhone, the OS is still aggressive about ejecting apps from memory. Giving an iPhone or iPad more RAM doesn't necessarily speed up general performance, but it does mean that apps and browser tabs need to be ejected from memory less often. Today this is particularly beneficial in Safari, which needs to reload tabs when they're ejected from RAM—at best this process adds a couple of extra seconds to what ought to be a simple tab switch, and at worst you don't have connectivity and so can't see the tab you're trying to open.

In general, astronomy is reactive—we spot something unusual by chance and point as many telescopes as we can manage to try to figure out what's going on. It's rare that we have something pointing in the right direction to catch an event right as it starts.

But the Kepler observatory was designed to point at the same spot and stare for years, capturing a constant stream of images. It's how the telescope was able to catch planets as they moved in front of their host stars. But interesting things went on behind the stars, and Kepler captured that data, too. Yesterday, astronomers announced that an analysis of the Kepler data captured the moments when a supernova burst through the surface of its host star—not once, but twice.

Most people think of supernovae as explosions that destroy a star. But type II supernovae are really the collapse and explosion of the core of the star. In cases where the star is a giant, this collapse and explosion happens so quickly that the outer layers of the star are unaffected by it and continue to look normal for nearly an hour even as catastrophic events are occurring behind the star. That seeming normalcy ends when the shockwave of the explosion reaches the surface and breaks out in a brilliant flash of light. This type of explosion is called a type II-P supernova.

If you are ready to jump feet-first into triple-A virtual reality gaming as soon as humanly possible, you have three main choices: the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive, and Sony's PS VR. None of these devices is actually in the hands of the general public yet—we’ll have to wait until next week for the Oculus Rift to start its first round of shipping—but all three are available for preorder right now. The Vive is the most expensive option at $799, but it comes with 3D controllers. The Rift costs less at $599, but it doesn’t come with 3D controllers. And the PS VR is the cheapest at $399, but then you’re locked to a console and don’t get to play any computer-based VR games.

There is no way to prove yet which of the three front-runners is best. Indeed, "best" is a hard word to define in context—best based on what? Best resolution? The Rift and Vive seem to be the winners there—but they use a Pentile subpixel arrangement, and the Sony kit doesn’t, so the resolution numbers don’t tell the entire story. Best VR experience? Well, that depends on what "experience" means to you—are you primarily going to be playing cockpit-based flight or racing sims where seated play is the main point, or do you want to run around your room playing virtual golf or tennis or shooting virtual guns?

Because how and what you play is a massively subjective experience—and because there’s still so much we don’t know about the final retail versions of all of these VR solutions—it’s hard to make blanket recommendations at this point. The absolute best answer right now to the question of "Which one of these things should I buy?!" is "You should probably wait until this summer when they’ve been in everybody’s hands for a few months and then decide."

When a virus jumps from wildlife to humans, it could either cause a few infections and fizzle out—or it could spark an explosive outbreak. For instance, health experts feared that H5N1 bird flu would lead to a massive and deadly pandemic in humans in the early 2000s, but with its current limited ability to jump from human to human, it has yet to kick off such a large-scale plague. Zika, Ebola, and HIV/AIDS, on the other hand, have.

Figuring out beforehand the type of viral scenario that will unfold with a new, emerging germ would be vital to protecting public health, allowing health officials to anticipate and thwart the spread of infections before they get out of hand. But researchers have largely struggled with how to make those predictions.

To try to break down the molecular recipe for a pandemic, researchers analyzed a range of biological features from 203 human-infecting viruses—a mix of those that have and have not caused big outbreaks. The researchers aimed to find predictors of infectious potential among each virus’ characteristics, including its family tree; genome’s make-up (DNA or RNA), length, and segmentation; outer structure of its viral particle; tendency to recombine with relative viruses and create variation in its genetics; time spent in a victim; deadliness; and whether or not it spreads via a vector, such as mosquitoes and ticks. The results appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

One of our highlights at CES this year was an opportunity to get behind the wheel of Chevrolet's Bolt electric vehicle. Priced at under $30,000 after a $7,500 IRS tax credit, it's set to be the first mass-market EV on sale in the US with a battery big enough to take you 200 miles (321km) between charges.

Chevrolet promised that the Bolt would go on sale later this year, and the company looks set to meet that goal—pre-production vehicles are already working their way through the production line in Orion Township, Michigan.

"We’re at another critical and important point in the development of the Bolt EV,” said Josh Tavel, Bolt EV chief engineer. "We’ve moved from working in math and building cars by hand to building Bolt EVs on the line. We’re now testing the tooling used in the plant so that we deliver high-quality, 200-plus-mile EVs that our customers are eagerly anticipating."