The Telegraph
The next generation of children born in Britain “will not know what money is”, the boss of Apple has predicted.
Tim Cook, the chief executive of technology giant, forecast the death of cash by the time current university students have a family.
Cash is still used for more than half of payments by consumers, according to Payments UK, the industry body, but its popularity is falling as people switch to cards and smartphone apps such as Apple Pay and Google Wallet.
Answering questions from students at Trinity College Dublin, Mr Cook said: “Your kids will not know what money is.”
In an outspoken address, he also vowed to deepen his fight against the so-called snooper’s charter. Mr Cook reiterated comments made to The Telegraph this week, stating that his company was commitment to full protection of customers’ data from hackers.
The Intercept
The United Kingdom’s top surveillance agency has acted unlawfully by keeping details about the scope of its Internet spying operations secret, a British court ruled in an unprecedented judgment issued on Friday.
Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, was found to have breached human rights laws by concealing information about how it accesses surveillance data collected by its American counterpart, the National Security Agency.
The ruling was handed down by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, a special court that handles complaints related to covert surveillance operations conducted by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. In its 15-year history, the tribunal has never before upheld a complaint against any intelligence agencies.
The legal challenge was brought by human rights groups, including Privacy International and Liberty, following disclosures from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The groups alleged that GCHQ was unlawfully obtaining data through the NSA’s online spying program PRISM, which collects data stored by Internet giants such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo. The groups also focused on GCHQ’s role in obtaining private communications swept up by the NSA directly from internet cables, known as so-called “upstream” collection.
The court ruling against GCHQ found that by keeping the rules underpinning the surveillance secret, the agency had “contravened” the privacy and free expression provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights. The secret policies were released for the first time in December, meaning that until then GCHQ had been operating unlawfully, likely for several years. (GCHQ has had access to PRISM since at least 2010, according to reports based on Snowden documents.)
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Susan Posel
Karl Steinbuch, computer scientist from 1966 predicted : “In a few decades’ time, computers will be interwoven into almost every industrial product.”
In the near future, all devices will be connected to the internet through software that allows exchanges of data. This is called the Internet of Things (IoT).
Fifteen years ago, Kevin Ashton, former head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Auto-ID Center, coined the phrase the “Internet of Things” while working on designs for RFID infrastructures that would facilitate standard protocol for connections and communications from computer to computer – the World Wide Web.
Although this ideal is still a ways off, the foundation for it is being laid right now.
Apple made an announcement at the 2014 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) that their corporation is developing Homekit (HK), standardized security communications that various tech manufacturers can all use to ensure that their products allow devices, appliances, cars and other interconnected electronics can “speak” to each other.
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MIT Technology Review
Over the last few years, Google executives have had plenty to say
about patents. According to Google, patents, particularly software
patents, are mostly bogus, largely low-quality, and used in court by companies that can’t innovate to hurt consumers and stifle true innovators.
But data from the U.S. Patent & Trademark office shows that
Google has been working very, very hard to win more patents on its own
ideas. It has accelerated its activity to such a degree that Google
inventors—among them founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page—are now winning
10 patents every day the patent office is open, covering everything
from automated cars to balloon-based data networks. For comparison,
consider that in all of 2003, Google was awarded four patents.
The recent deluge of patent documents offers fascinating insights into Google’s latest ideas (see “Is This Why Google Doesn’t Want You to Drive?”).
It also demonstrates that Google is committed to having one of the
world’s largest patent portfolios. The company is on pace to be awarded
around 1,800 patents this year. That could be enough to vault Google,
for the first time, onto the year’s list of top 10 patent recipients,
ahead of industrial giants like General Electric and Intel.
Google urgently needs more patents to defend Android, its free
operating system for mobile phones. Android is the most popular
smartphone software; about 1.5 million Android phones are activated each
day. But Google and handset makers like Samsung face increasing legal
challenges. Just last month, they were sued in Texas for patent
infringement by a company that represents Apple, Microsoft, and BlackBerry. One of the patents covered in the lawsuit was filed even before the search company was founded.
Publicly, Google continues to disparage patent claims, which it says
amount to a tax on smartphones that raises prices for consumers. The
company’s top lawyer, David Drummond, said in August
that a typical smartphone could be covered by as many as 250,000
patents, but that, like most patents, they are “largely questionable”
and for the most part “dubious.”
Nonetheless, filings show that Google started to realize as early as
2007 that it needed to play the patent game, and in a big way. That was
the year Apple launched the iPhone, which came to market defended by a
thicket of patents and trademarks on everything from the “home button”
to the design of its rounded corners. Steve Jobs, stung by a $100
million loss in an intellectual property fight over the iPod a year
before, had apparently made good on his vow “to patent it all.”
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