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(credit: AK Rockefeller)

Two former employees of the National Security Agency—including exiled whistleblower Edward Snowden—are speculating that Monday's leak of what are now confirmed to be advanced hacking tools belonging to the US government is connected to the separate high-profile hacks and subsequent leaks of two Democratic groups.

Private security firms brought in to investigate the breach of the Democratic National Committee and a separate hack of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee have said that the software left behind implicates hackers tied to the Russian government. US intelligence officials have privately said they, too, have high confidence of Russian government involvement.

In the weeks following the reports, WikiLeaks and an unknown person using the moniker Guccifer 2.0 have published a steady stream of documents. One batch released just ahead of last month's Democratic National Convention contained embarrassing private conversations that led to the resignation of DNC Chair Debra Wasserman Schultz. A more recent installment included a spreadsheet detailing the cell phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and other personal information of every Democratic member of the House of Representatives. The Obama administration has signaled that it may impose new economic sanctions on Russia in response to what critics claim is Russian attempts to disrupt or influence the US presidential election.

On Tuesday, the Ford Motor Company became the latest car maker committed to putting a fully autonomous car into production in the next five years. "The world is changing, and it's changing very quickly," Ford CEO Mark Fields said. The company intends to build a high-volume car capable of SAE's level 4 autonomy, but the target customer is not regular consumers—it's ride-sharing services. "Starting in 2021, if you want to get around the city without the hassle of driving or parking, Ford's new fully autonomous vehicle will be there for you," Fields said.

The announcement took place in Palo Alto, outside Ford's Silicon Valley Research and Innovation Center. As part of Ford's future plans, that research center will double in size over the next 16 months. Although Fields cited the safety implications of autonomous cars—90 percent of traffic crashes are attributable to human error, after all—he was also enthusiastic about the possibility of making transportation more accessible to the elderly, disabled, and people too young (or too disinterested) to drive themselves.

Ford has designs on being more than an automaker, too; the company's Smart Mobility pilot programs have been showing the way here. "We know there's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all transportation solution," Fields said, adding that ride-sharing would make more efficient use of vehicles, with less time wasted for people and less pollution.

(credit: Getty Images | Yuri_Arcurs)

The cable industry's majority share of US broadband subscribers rose again last quarter, as Comcast and Charter gained nearly 500,000 subscribers, combined, while phone companies AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, and Frontier all lost Internet customers.

The 14 largest ISPs, accounting for 95 percent of the US market, gained 192,510 Internet customers in Q2 2016, bringing the total to 91.9 million, Leichtman Research Group reported today. Cable companies accounted for all of the gains, adding 553,293 subscribers for a new total of 57 million. The phone companies lost 360,783 subscribers, bringing them down to 34.9 million. Phone companies' losses more than doubled since Q2 2015, when they lost about 150,000 subscribers.

"Over the past year, cable companies have added about 3.5 million broadband subscribers, while telcos have had net losses of about 500,000 broadband subscribers," the group's president, Bruce Leichtman, said in the press release.

In June, Microsoft announced its plans to build a single platform suitable for virtual reality, augmented reality, and any other system that mixes computer-generated and real-world content.

At IDF in San Francisco today, Microsoft's Terry Myerson said that the Windows Holographic experience, including the shell used on the HoloLens hardware, will be made available as an update to the standard Windows 10 desktop operating system some time next year.

Currently, the HoloLens runs a specialized variant of Windows. Desktop Windows offers many of the same APIs as the HoloLens, but the 3D user interface that mixes existing 2D apps with new 3D ones is only available on the augmented reality headset. Next year's update will make it available to all, opening it up not just to Microsoft's standalone device but also to hardware such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive that provide tethered virtual reality.

(credit: Intel)

The still-young virtual reality headset wars have a new competitor, though it's being sold as more of a "mixed reality" solution than purely VR. At the Intel Developer Forum today, the company announced Project Alloy, an untethered headset that packs everything into a single head-mounted display without the need for a PC or a mobile phone.

In addition to the battery, display, and computing resources needed to run the headset, Project Alloy will also include Intel's Real Sense motion tracking system, which will use cameras and sensors to map the world around you and track your hands without the need for gloves or handheld controllers. The system can also see real-world objects and integrate them into the virtual world, as shown in a demo where the user opened a real door and saw his boss' face appear in the virtual world (hence the "mixed reality" moniker Intel stressed in its presentation).

Alloy will be integrated with Microsoft's Windows Holographic platform, which will itself be available on all Windows 10 PCs next year. Intel also said it plans to release the Alloy hardware specs under an open source license at some point, letting others essentially use it as a reference design for their own hardware.