Month: May 2018

Believe it or not, HTC is still around! With four months of 2018 under its belt, HTC has turned in four monthly earnings reports that rank among the worst in the company's history. After the sale of its ODM division to Google, HTC has a $1.1 billion cash infusion to play with, so it still has some runway to turn things around.

That brings us to HTC's newest flagship, the HTC U12+. I recently got to spend a few minutes with the new device, and while it has a few unforeseen tricks up its sleeve, it isn't a huge departure from past HTC devices like the HTC U11.

Enlarge (credit: Amazon)

Amazon is actively courting law-enforcement agencies to use a cloud-based facial-recognition service that can identify people in real time, the American Civil Liberties Union reported Tuesday, citing the documents obtained from two US departments.

The service, which Amazon markets under the name Rekognition, can recognize as many as 100 people in a single image and can compare images against databases containing tens of millions of faces. Company executives describe deployment by law enforcement agencies as common use case.

“Cameras all over the city”

Rekognition is already being used by the Orlando Police Department and the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Oregon, according to documents the ACLU obtained under Freedom of Information requests. Both agencies became customers last year. The entire list of returned documents is here.

Enlarge / US EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. (credit: Gage Skidmore / Flickr)

Scott Pruitt's tenure as head of the US' Environmental Protection Agency has often been bogged down in scandals involving questionable spending and the unjustifiable rollback of regulations.

But the latest controversy is one the agency's own making. This morning, Pruitt was speaking at a workshop convened to discuss the handling of specific chemical contaminants that have been found in water supplies. The EPA was already under fire for what appeared to be an attempt to stall a report that suggests these chemicals were more toxic than previously thought, so the workshop provided an opportunity to show that the agency took the risks seriously. Instead, the EPA started a brand-new controversy by specifically excluding CNN and the AP from Pruitt's speech and by having security physically escort a reporter out of the building.

Contamination

The controversy focuses on a large class of chemicals that are variations of perfluorooctanoic acid. This is a chain of eight carbon atoms, seven of which have fluorine atoms attached to them; the eighth is linked to two oxygen atoms, typical of an organic acid. There are many variations of perfluorooctanoic acid that can be made by substituting for various fluorines, and many of these variants have found uses in the production of everything from non-stick cooking to fire-fighting foams.

(credit: Getty Images | amesy)

TV watchers are far more satisfied with streaming video services than cable or satellite TV systems, a new survey has found. That isn't much of an accomplishment, as cable and satellite TV providers were already among the most-hated companies in the US and saw their customer-satisfaction scores sink even lower in the latest survey.

The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) included video streaming in its annual telecom report for the first time. Streaming video services averaged a score of 75 on the ACSI's 100-point scale, better than all other telecom sectors and well ahead of the broadband and pay-TV industry scores of 62.

"Customer satisfaction with subscription television service falls 3.1 percent to an ACSI score of 62, an 11-year low as the industry faces a seismic shift of subscribers defecting to lower-cost online video streaming services," the report said. "In response, many cable and telecom companies are offering new Internet TV streaming in addition to legacy pay TV, but cord cutting continues."

Enlarge / Lt Cmdr Chris Tabert, Air Test and Evaluation Squadron (VX) 23, pilots Navy F-35C test aircraft CF-02 on Flt 595 for an external GBU-31 flutter and Flying Qualities test flight from Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland, April 10, 2018. Congress is concerned that the F-35 doesn't have the range to attack "contested" targets without putting carriers in danger. (credit: US Navy)

The House Armed Services Committee has sent its report on the Fiscal Year 2019 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to the floor. And buried in that report are words of caution about the F-35C, the Navy's version of the F-35 Thunderbolt II, also known as the Joint Strike Fighter—and the Navy's whole carrier air capability in general. The reason for that concern is that the F-35C doesn't have the range to conduct long-range strikes without in-flight refueling—and the Navy's tanker planes are not exactly "stealth."

The F-35C suffers somewhat from the length of its development cycle. Competition for the Joint Strike Fighter program began in 1993—25 years ago—when the military threats facing the United States were significantly different. In 1993, there was no concern about Chinese "carrier killer" anti-ship ballistic missiles, for example; but in 2010, China introduced the Dongfeng (or Dong-Feng) 21D, an anti-ship ballistic missile with a range of 900 miles and a circular error probability of 20 meters. That's accurate enough, with satellite tracking and terminal guidance, to hit an aircraft carrier far offshore.

The F-35C's advertised range is 1,200 nautical miles (roughly 2,200 kilometers), roughly 10 percent longer than that of the F/A-18. But for most strikes, that would require the carriers launching F-35C sorties to be much closer to the coast than falls within the comfort zone. And with advanced air and coastal defense systems—including, for example, the sorts that are popping up on islands in the South China Sea these days—less-than-stealthy tanker planes would give up the whole game.