Month: June 2016

Tango's algorithms run on the DSP, ISP, and Sensor hub, and mostly leave the GPU and CPU alone. (credit: Qualcomm)

Google's Project Tango, an augmented reality project that packs a smartphone with 3D vision sensors, is finally on its way to consumers in the form of the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro. When the Phab 2 Pro was unveiled, the internals were a bit of a surprise. Previously, a lot was made of the Movidius computer vision chip inside the Project Tango prototype, but when the consumer version was announced, there was no extra vision processing chip to be found. All of Tango's augmented reality processing runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 SoC.

Qualcomm calls this the "Snapdragon Heterogeneous Processing Architecture," which in English means typically non-compute-heavy chips in an SoC—the DSP, sensor hub, and Image Signal Processor (ISP)—all get recruited for compute duties in a Tango phone. The DSP, or digital signal processor, usually handles the multimedia duties of a phone, but Qualcomm has been expanding the Snapdragon DSP (called the "Hexagon DSP") for general-purpose computing for some time. As a result, Qualcomm claims you'll be able to run all of Tango's algorithms and sensors with a "less than 10%" CPU overhead compared to a normal app. Qualcomm also touts all of this as being low-power, but that's something we'll have to investigate when we get ahold of final hardware.

Qualcomm revealed it has been "working closely" with the Google Tango team for the last year and a half to get Tango up and running on Snapdragon. With no extra co-processors to add, the difference between a Tango and non-Tango phone is just the extra depth sensor and motion tracking camera. Qualcomm hopes this reduction in components will lead to Tango technology becoming commonplace in smartphones. "We are committed to Tango and we believe in this technology." Seshu Madhavapeddy, VP, Product Management for Qualcomm, told Ars. "We see broad adoption of this technology as forthcoming and we would like to support that."

(credit: Getty Images)

For years now, a porn studio called Malibu Media has filed more copyright lawsuits than any other company. Each month, Malibu, which produces adult content under the brand name X-Art, sues hundreds of "John Doe" Internet users, accusing particular IP addresses of illegally downloading their movies using BitTorrent networks.

Malibu's owners, Brigham Field and Collette Pelissier Field, have said the flood of lawsuits is necessary to deter piracy. Now, though, they're targeting the very lawyer who headed up their giant copyright enforcement campaign, Florida-based Keith Lipscomb.

Earlier today, Malibu filed suit against Lipscomb and his firm, Lipscomb, Eisenberg & Baker, in federal court. The lawsuit claims Lipscomb didn't provide them the proper paperwork for their cases and related finances, and that he was negligent in his representation. The complaint (PDF) discloses that Lipscomb sued Malibu in Florida state court on June 10 and alleges that confidential information was revealed in the lawsuit.

(credit: LPS.1)

Much of the product line from security firm Symantec contains a raft of vulnerabilities that expose millions of consumers, small businesses, and large organizations to self-replicating attacks that take complete control of their computers, a researcher warned Tuesday.

"These vulnerabilities are as bad as it gets," Tavis Ormandy, a researcher with Google's Project Zero, wrote in a blog post. "They don’t require any user interaction, they affect the default configuration, and the software runs at the highest privilege levels possible. In certain cases on Windows, vulnerable code is even loaded into the kernel, resulting in remote kernel memory corruption."

The post was published shortly after Symantec issued its own advisory, which listed 17 Symantec enterprise products and eight Norton consumer and small business products being affected. Ormandy warned that the vulnerability is unusually easy to exploit, allowing the exploits to spread virally from machine to machine over a targeted network, or potentially over the Internet at large. Ormandy continued:

(credit: Mark Hillary)

Having health insurance can be a comfort, putting your mind at ease that you’ll be covered if you get sick or injured—until you actually have to use it, that is.

Insured Americans are having to shell out more and more to for healthcare, particularly, hospital visits, researchers report this week in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. From 2009 and 2013—before the biggest provisions of the Affordable Care Act took effect in 2014—people with individual or employer-sponsored health insurances saw a 37 percent rise in out-of-pockets costs for a hospital stay. Average bills jumped from $738 to $1,013. That’s about a 6.5 percent increase each year. However, overall healthcare spending rose just 2.9 percent each year during that time-frame and premiums—the cost to buy insurance—rose by around 5.1 percent annually.

“Every year, people freak out about how high premiums have gotten and how they continue to grow exponentially, but [out-of-pocket costs are] actually growing even faster,” Emily Adrion, first author of the study and a researcher at the Center for Healthcare Outcomes and Policy at the University of Michigan, told Bloomberg.

A Google Phone? Maybe someday?

Over the weekend, The Telegraph reported that Google has plans to release a Google-branded phone that will "see Google take more control over design, manufacturing, and software." Google is apparently sick and tired of the iPhone "dominating" the high end of the smartphone market, and the company appears to believe a Google-built smartphone can solve this problem in a way that a Nexus device cannot.

The report further says that the Google Phone will appear "by the end of the year" and that it will exist in addition to the Nexus program, which the report says is "expected to continue this year with handsets made by Taiwanese company HTC."

I'm skeptical.

(credit: VictionaryHD)

Jim Brown, an NFL legend who played for the Cleveland Browns, scored big Monday despite his retirement from the gridiron in 1965. That's because Electronic Arts, the maker of one of the world's most popular video game series—Madden NFL—has given up its lengthy court battle with the former eight-time Pro Bowl player. The publisher is giving Brown $600,000 to settle a lawsuit that accuses EA of misappropriating his likeness.

Brown said he expected his case to set precedent for other players involved in similar litigation against EA concerning the right of publicity. The legal claim was first recognized in 1953 in a federal appeals court case about professional baseball cards. The claim is most often invoked by celebrities and professional athletes. For the most part, the right of publicity gives people an economic right to their names and likenesses so that they can profit from the commercial value of their identities.

“I took a stand for all athletes and laid a framework for future plaintiffs with my great legal team. Hopefully, this is a step forward in getting companies like Electronic Arts to recognize the value that athletes have in selling their products," Brown said in a statement.

The next stop for net neutrality? (credit: Joe Ravi (CC-BY-SA 3.0))

The US appeals court decision upholding the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules wasn't quite the final word on the matter, as ISPs immediately vowed to appeal the ruling, with AT&T saying it "expect[s] this issue to be decided by the Supreme Court."

But while ISPs will give it their best shot, there are reasons to think that the Supreme Court won't take up the case. The appeal probably won't even make it to a rehearing by the full appeals court, a potential intermediate step before a Supreme Court case, legal expert Andrew Jay Schwartzman wrote last week in a Benton Foundation article titled, "Network Neutrality: Now What?" Schwartzman is a Georgetown Law lecturer, an attorney who specializes in media and telecommunications policy, and a longtime consumer advocate who previously led the Media Access Project.

The broadband industry lost a 2-1 decision (full text) by a three-judge panel at the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which rejected challenges to the FCC's reclassification of broadband as a Title II common carrier service and imposition of net neutrality rules. The next step for ISPs and their lobby groups could be a petition for an "en banc" review in front of all of the court's judges instead of just a three-judge panel. They could also appeal to the Supreme Court after losing an en banc review or appeal directly to the Supreme Court without taking that intermediate step.