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How many more Amazon Books locations should we expect in the future? According to a mall development company's CEO, up to 400. (credit: Amazon)

A Tuesday earnings call from a mall operator included its CEO's analysis on the kinds of brick-and-mortar stores the company expected to see in the marketplace, and it included a staggering guess for one upstart brick-and-mortar retailer: up to 400 Amazon Books locations.

The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the earnings call, during which General Growth Properties, Inc. CEO Sandeep Mathrani made the estimate while fielding a question about his properties' foot traffic in an online-shopping world. Mathrani pointed out high return rates at physical stores for online-ordered products, which he estimated at 38 percent, and that fed into his follow-up estimate: "You go to Amazon opening brick-and-mortar book stores, and their goal is to open, as I understand, 300 to 400 bookstores." (Currently, Amazon only operates a single shop at Seattle's University Village shopping center.)

He added that "the last mile is all important" in terms of engaging with customers, noting that other major online retailers like Bonobos, Birchbox, and Warby Parker have plans for their own brick-and-mortar expansions throughout the United States. "It’s a very interesting evolution, because the cost of the last mile is that important," Mathrani said to investors. "The mall business, if you appreciate that it's more focused on fashion, is very different than a staple business where you’re buying commodity. In the mall business, the impact of eCommerce is a lot less—it’s actually your friend, not your enemy."

Mega-City One is the land of opportunity. (credit: Lionsgate)

Imagine a high-density city, and you probably think of something like Mega-City One, full of pollution, poverty, and huge, ugly housing projects. But the reality, according to new research in urban studies, is that high-density city plans offer residents more economic opportunities. Especially for people who want to give their children better lives, high-density cities are the most likely to deliver on the American Dream.

Measuring sprawl and economic mobility

Upward mobility is on the decline in the US. Once billed as a land of opportunity for the poor and hardworking, the country now offers little hope to people born in poverty. Writing in the latest issue of Landscape and Urban Planning, the researchers note that the "chance of upward mobility for Americans is just half that of the citizens of Denmark and many other European countries." A study from the Brookings Institution found that "39 percent of children born to parents in the top fifth of the income distribution will remain in the top fifth for life, while 42 percent of children born to parents in the bottom fifth income distribution will stay in that bottom fifth."

But some parts of the country are better off than others. As the researchers explain:

Female Aedes aegypti mosquito as she was in the process of obtaining a "blood meal" (credit: US Department of Health and Human Services)

Zika, the mosquito-spread virus sparking outbreaks across the Western Hemisphere and suspected of causing birth defects and neurological problems, has been transmitted through sexual contact in the United States, the Dallas County Health and Human Services (DCHHS) reported Tuesday.

A patient was infected via sexual contact with a person who had recently traveled to Venezuela, a country currently experiencing a Zika outbreak, the health department said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the sexual transmission. There is still no evidence that Zika is spreading in US mosquito populations.

“Now that we know Zika virus can be transmitted through sex, this increases our awareness campaign in educating the public about protecting themselves and others,” Zachary Thompson, DCHHS director, said in a press release.

(credit: T-Mobile)

T-Mobile USA has matched Verizon Wireless in a series of crowdsourced speed tests but still trails both Verizon and AT&T in overall network coverage.

The findings come from the company OpenSignal and are based on 377 million data samples from 182,000 users of the OpenSignal Android and iOS apps during the last three months of 2015.

"Verizon is still the operator to beat when it comes to network reliability, but T-Mobile is squaring off against the super-carrier in download speed," OpenSignal wrote. "Nationally both operators are averaging 4G [LTE] connections of 12Mbps, and in a speed comparison in the 11 largest US cities, T-Mobile just barely edged out Verizon. AT&T and Sprint hardly even factored in the contest."

A Maryland judge who ordered a deputy to remotely shock a defendant with a 50,000-volt charge pleaded guilty (PDF) to a misdemeanor civil rights violation in federal court Monday, and he faces a maximum of 1 year in prison when sentenced later this year.

The incident happened in July 2014 during jury selection of case concerning a man accused of carrying a loaded handgun during a police stop the year before, according to a plea agreement with former Charles County Circuit Court Judge Robert Nalley.

Robert Nalley.

Before jurors were brought in, the judge was asking the defendant if he had questions to submit to prospective jurors, who were not yet in the courtroom. Delvon King, the 25-year-old defendant acting as his own attorney, refused to answer several times.

The Electron, an Arduino-compatible controller that just happens to have a GSM cellular connection built in. (credit: Particle)

Particle, a company that makes development kits for wireless Internet of Things applications—formerly known as Spark Devices—is preparing to ship a new board-based computer that will allow developers to use Arduino code to build mobile wireless devices based on GSM cellular connections. The Electron will allow developers to build Internet of Things devices that can connect nearly anywhere in the world where there's a 2G or 3G mobile wireless network.

Electron is the followup to Particle's Photon, a Wi-Fi based device with similar capabilities. Both Photon and Electron can use Arduino "sketch" code or code written in Particle's own development tool. And Particle offers a cloud service that allows developers to scale up their devices to full-production deployments of more than 100,000 devices.

Part of the appeal (and the business model) for Electron is that it comes with its own global data plan. Using an IoT SIM that works on cellular networks in over 100 countries, the Electron's basic data plan starts at $2.99 per month for 1 megabyte of data and 99 cents for each additional megabyte. That's not a lot of data, but Electron is intended mostly for "machine to machine" (M2M) applications, where relatively small messages are sent between the device and the cloud—not for things like streaming video or more consumer-type broadband cellular applications.

With about six months left on Microsoft's free Windows 10 upgrade promotion, Redmond is stepping up its efforts to get Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users to upgrade to its newest operating system.

Windows Update has three classes of update: important, recommended, and optional. The first category is always downloaded and (if preferred) installed automatically. The last category always requires manual downloading and installation. The middle, "recommended," is by default treated the same as "important," but users can also opt to treat it as equivalent to "optional."

As announced last October, the free Windows 10 update has been promoted from an "optional" update to being a "recommended" one. This means that with the default Windows Update settings, the new operating system will be downloaded automatically, and its installer will be started.

(credit: Jeremy Brooks )

An open source network utility used by administrators and security professionals contains a cryptographic weakness so severe that it may have been intentionally created to give attackers a surreptitious way to eavesdrop on protected communications, its developer warned Monday.

Socat is a more feature-rich variant of the once widely used Netcat networking service for fixing bugs in network applications and for finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities. One of its features allows data to be transmitted through an encrypted channel to prevent it from being intercepted by people monitoring the traffic. Amazingly, when using the Diffie-Hellman method to establish a cryptographic key, Socat used a non-prime parameter to negotiate the key, an omission that violates one of the most basic cryptographic principles.

The Diffie-Hellman key exchange requires that the value be a prime number, meaning it's only divisible by itself and the number one. Because this crucial and most basic of rules was violated, attackers could calculate the secret key used to encrypt and decrypt the protected communications. What's more, the non-prime value was only 1,024 bits long, a length that researchers recently showed is susceptible to cracking by state-sponsored attackers even when prime numbers are used.