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(credit: RevMedX)

As mass shootings continue to make headlines and gun sales surge nationwide, a sponge-injecting device designed to patch life-threatening bullet wounds in war is making a domestic debut.

The device, called XSTAT 30, acts like a syringe that squirts out 92 tiny, compressed cellulose sponges coated with a blood-sopping absorbent. Together, the sponges can take in about a pint of blood and swell enough to completely fill-in a wound, creating a physical barrier for blood flow. That plugging-power may be enough to prevent life-threatening blood loss as a patient is rushed to an emergency medical facility, according to the Food and Drug Administration.

On Tuesday, the agency approved the use of XSTAT in civilian adults and adolescents.

Pharrell Williams, Robin Thicke, and T.I. in the video for "Blurred Lines."

The copyright dispute between “Blurred Lines” song creators Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke, and the family of Marvin Gaye, will continue on to a higher court.

Earlier this year, Gaye’s family said in court that Williams and Thicke stole critical elements from Gaye's 1977 song “Got To Give It Up” for their 2013 hit “Blurred Lines." A jury agreed with Gaye’s family and awarded them $7.4 million, which was later reduced to $5.3 million. Now, Williams and Thicke are looking to appeal (PDF) that decision in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The case was unusual because in a pre-trial hearing, the judge ruled that the applicable 1909 copyright law only covered sheet music, not the song’s actual sound. The judge later reversed his decision, ordering Williams and Thicke’s lawyers to produce an audio recording of “Got To Give It Up” that only included a bass line and keyboard chords underneath some vocals from Gaye. This was the only version of “Got To Give It Up” that the jury was permitted to hear to compare with “Blurred Lines."

Microsoft promised to bring its Cortana digital personal assistant to iOS and Android in May this year, and public beta for Android came out in July, with a private iOS beta following a few months later. Now both versions have been released, with Cortana available in the App Store and in the Google Play Store, at least for US users.

Cortana's appointment and flight tracking.

We looked at the Android preview when it first came out. The version shipping today isn't hugely different from what we saw in July. The Cortana app looks essentially the same whether on Windows 10, Windows 10 Mobile, iOS, and Android; search box at the bottom, hamburger menu on the top left, and information cards. Those cards can show appointments, track packages, give you weather information or the latest sports scores, and so on. Cortana requires a Microsoft Account to use, and will sync your various interests and settings between all Cortana-enabled devices.

There are some differences in capabilities due to the API availability of the respective platforms. Neither iOS nor Android supports opening apps or changing settings from within Cortana. On Android, "Hey Cortana" voice activation is supported on the Android home screen, but not system-wide. On iOS there's no hands-free voice activation at all. Missed call notifications are similarly Android- and Windows 10 Mobile-specific: miss a call on your Cortana phone, and your Cortana Windows 10 PC will tell you. You can write an SMS to reply to the caller on your PC, and through the power of Internet syncing, the SMS will get sent to the caller from your phone.

FBI Director James Comey. (credit: C-SPAN)

Leaders in both major political parties have increasingly been calling on tech companies to give law enforcement encryption backdoors in the wake of recent terror attacks in Paris and California.

Today, FBI director James Comey has suggested that Silicon Valley isn't faced with a serious technical problem, but rather a "business model problem," according to a report on his comments in The Intercept, based on C-SPAN video of the hearing.

On the face of it, Comey's statement would seem to back away from earlier suggestions that tech companies can and should find a way to allow access to data when law enforcement wanted it, but provide otherwise secure services. Critics have pointed out that any encryption backdoors that can be used by the "good guys" also lead to widespread insecurity, since they can also be exploited by not-so-good guys.