Man convicted of stealing 120,000 iPad user IDs

Posted on November 21, 2012 by admin

50 min.

Jonathan Stempel
, Reuters

Washington County (Ark.) Sheriff’s Office

Undated police booking photo of Andrew Auernheimer

(Reuters) – A federal jury convicted a New York man on Tuesday of hacking into ATT Inc servers and stealing the email addresses and other personal data of about 120,000 Apple Inc iPad users, a U.S. attorney in New Jersey said.

Andrew Auernheimer, 27, was convicted by a Newark, New Jersey, jury of one count of conspiracy to access the servers without permission, as well as one count of identity theft, said U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman.

The defendant faces a maximum five years in prison and $250,000 fine on each count. A co-defendant, Daniel Spitler, pleaded guilty to the same charges in June 2011 and is awaiting sentencing.

Prosecutors said Auernheimer and Spitler were affiliated with Goatse Security, a group of Internet “trolls” that tries to disrupt online content and services.

According to the government, the men used an “account slurper” that was designed to match email addresses with “integrated circuit card identifiers” for iPad users, and which conducted a “brute force” attack to extract data about those users, who accessed the Internet through ATT’s network.

The authors of the slurper then provided stolen information to the website Gawker, which published an article naming well-known people whose emails had been compromised, including ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, prosecutors said.

Tor Ekeland, a lawyer for Auernheimer, said his client was free on bail, and planned to appeal the verdict to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia.

“We disagree with the prosecutors’ interpretation of what constitutes unauthorized access to a computer under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,” Ekeland said in a phone interview. He called the prosecutors’ interpretation of that federal law “extremely expansive.”

The trial lasted about one week, excluding a disruption related to Hurricane Sandy, and jurors deliberated for a couple of hours, Ekeland added.

ATT has partnered with Apple in the United States to provide wireless service on the iPad. After the hacking, it shut off the feature that allowed email addresses to be obtained.

The case is U.S. v. Auernheimer, U.S. District Court, District of New Jersey, No. 11-00470.

(Editing by Peter Cooney)

(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2012. Check for restrictions at: http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp

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Avoid early bird remorse: 10 Black Friday gadget do’s and don’ts

Posted on November 21, 2012 by admin

3 hrs.

Avram Piltch
, Laptop

AP file

Lucia Valenuela uses a bullhorn to give instructions to crowds of shoppers lined up in the early hours of the Black Friday shopping day, Nov. 26, 2010, at Best Buy in Tacoma, Wash.

With many stores opening Thanksgiving evening, this year you won’t even have to digest your turkey before you put on your elbow pads and line up outside your favorite big box store. But to make body checking your fellow shoppers worthwhile, you’ll need a plan. You don’t want to spend 12 hours wearing adult diapers to avoid losing a place in line, only to find out that the camera you snatched takes terrible pictures and costs $20 less on the Web. 

Don’t get early birds remorse! Use these tips make sure you really are getting a good deal on Black Friday gadgets. 

1. Do research online prices before you go out
On a normal day, retail stores charge a lot more for electronics than their online competitors. On Black Friday, you may find something that looks like a fantastic sale in the store, but is hardly less than the regular price you would have paid online. 

For example, Best Buy is selling a Windows 8 Professional upgrade disc for $54.99, but before you smash through the plate glass door, you should check and see that Microsoft has been selling the  same version of Windows 8 as online download for $40 for several weeks now. Target has a 6-foot HDMI cable on sale for $9.99, even though Newegg sells similar cables for $2.99 at any time of year.

More: Top 8 Black Friday Apps

2. Don’t leave the house for less than $200 in total savings
Let’s do some math to guestimate the cost of standing in line for the possibility, but not the certainty, of a bargain. Assume you will be spending a minimum of 5 hours on travel and waiting in lines for a single store, though for the good deals, you may need to wait in front of the store much longer. If you value your free time at even a low rate of $10 per hour, that’s $50 plus the cost of transportation to and from the store, which we’ll estimate at $4, the cost of one gallon of gas.

The worst part of this equation is that the $54 cost buys you a raffle ticket, where bargains are the prize, because even after spending that money, you could walk away empty handed. With stores often stocking less than a dozen units of their featured deals, there’s a very good chance that you won’t run fast enough or have good enough line position to get what you came for.

If you’re young and bored, maybe it’s worth gambling 5 hours of your life on the possibility that you’ll get a $400 TV for $180, but don’t do it if you’re going to save less than $200 in total on all purchases. When you have a family around, even that amount of savings might be too small and you might value your time at a higher rate. With my luck, I’d wait in line for 12 hours, the store would be out of TVs and my infant son would have taken his first steps while I was standing outside Best Buy.  

3. Do use bargain aggregrators to find deals online
Shopping online is a much more civilized and time-efficient way to buy gifts and fill out your gadget collection this Black Friday. With dozens of sites, including those for the major brick and mortar retailers, offering sales and coupon codes, it’s easy to miss the best sales. Fortunately, there are a number of deal blogs that do nothing but find and report on the best prices.

My favorite deal aggregators include LogicBuy, Tech Bargains, Ben’s Bargains and Fat Wallet. I usually check all four several times a day during the holiday season, just to see what’s for sale before it sells out.

4. Don’t buy an outdated phone
Many retailers use Black Friday as an excuse to dump outdated products from their inventories. When it comes to phones, just say no, because last year’s mobile devices have slower CPUs, lower-res screens and, in the case of Android devices, often have old versions of the operating system. 

Take for example, the Samsung Galaxy S II that Radio Shack is giving away for free with a two-year contract on Sprint. Yes, free sounds like a good price, but this 2011-era phone feels ancient in comparison to the Galaxy S III which will be available for $50 on Sprint at the same store.  Not only does the newer model have a sharp 720p screen and a faster processor, it also provides an NFC chip and custom software that lets you transfer files justby tapping phones.

Since you’ll own this phone for at least 20 months before you’re eligible to upgrade, you want a device that’s as current as possible.  How dumb will you or your giftee feel in 2014 when everyone else is running Android 6 on 1080p screens while you’re stuck with a remnant from 2011?

More:Top Smartphone Gifts for 2012

5. Do buy hard drives, SSDs and other storage / memory upgrades
Whether you’re buying SD memory cards, more RAM, an external hard drive or an SSD upgrade, you can find some incredible deals online this Black Friday. We expect to see 128GB SSDs selling for $50 or less and 256GB models approaching the $100 mark. What better way to say “I love you”than with an upgrade that doubles or triples the speed of your most important tasks?

You should also be able to find external USB back up drives hovering around $50 for 500GB and $85 for 1TB, maybe less. SD cards and microSD cards make great stocking stuffers and you’ll find 16GB versions of each for under $10 with 32GB capacities for well under $20. RAM is getting a lot cheaper these days so expect to pay $60 for 16GB of laptop memory and around $25 for 8GB.  

6. Don’t buy a cheap notebook for people you like

LAPTOP

Want to punish your teenager for posting inappropriate things to Facebook? Still have a grudge against mom for recycling your comic books? Get revenge by purchasing them low-end Black Friday notebooks that will ruin their computing experiences. 

For under $300, you can find such clunkers as this $179 Compaq door buster from Walmart  that comes with a sluggish 1.3-GHz AMD C-60 processor, just 2GB of RAM and a low-res 15.6-inch screen. Put away your door busting pepper spray, because a computer like this will be bulky, slow and annoying, even though it can connect to the Internet and run basic apps.

If you’re shopping for a notebook for yourself or someone you actually like, accept nothing less than an Intel Core i3 CPU, 4GB of RAM and a speedy 7,200 rpm hard drive or SSD. Go for a 13 to 14-inch screen for maximum portability or, if you want a larger computer, look for one with a high-res screen (1600 x 900 and above) and good audio playback.

More: 5 Reasons to Spend More Than $500 on Your Next Laptop

7. Do use coupon codes to configure your ideal laptop for less
Rather than buying the cheapest piece of junk notebook you see advertised, look for coupon codes for vendors that let you configure a notebook to your liking such as Dell, Lenovo, Toshiba and HP. With the appropriate price reduction, you can build just the ThinkPad or Inspiron you need and get a hefty chunk off the list price. Find the coupon codes on deal aggregation sites like Logicbuy and Techbargains. 

For example, with the right coupon codes, you can buy the awesome Lenovo ThinkPad T430s with a 1600 x 900 screen and discrete graphics for just $806.

8. Don’t even consider buying a cheap, low-end tablet 
What’s the point of buying a tablet if it can’t run your apps and the picture is such a low resolution that all the pixels are so big that they look like Ben-Day dots. So please for the love of Jobs or the admiration of Android avoid low-cost craplets like the Ematic eGlide EGL25BL that Walmart sells. With its 7-inch resistive touch screen and 1-GHz processor, this sad slate is likely to send you screaming back to your PC.

LAPTOP

Ematic eGlide EGL25BL tablet

Even some Black Friday tablets from reputable brands are a rip-off, because they’re way out of date. Take, for example, the $179 Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7-inch that Best Buy is advertising. Yes, we gave the Galaxy Tab 2 7-inch a rating of 4 stars when we reviewed in back in April, but back then a 1024 x 600 display, a 1-GHz dual core CPU and Android 4.0 were fine specs.

Today, you can get the Google Nexus 7 with a quad-core CPU, an HD screen and the latest Android 4.2 OS for $199, well worth the $20 splurge. 

If you can possibly afford it, go for a 7-inch tablet with at least a 720p screen (1280 x 720) or a 9- to 10-inch tablet slate with a resolution higher than 1080p (1920 x 1080).

More: Hottest Holiday Tablets

9. Do buy accessories and peripherals, especially monitors
On Black Friday, we often see better deals on gadgets you attach to your computer than on the computer itself. So, if you’re planning to purchase a mouse, keyboard, Wi-Fi router or all-in-one printer, Black Friday could be a good time to act. 

Because you can never be too rich, too thin or have too many pixels, an external HD monitor makes a great gift or splurge for yourself. You can grab a 23-inch, 1080p screen for well under $150. This $110 23-inch Dell LED monitor is a great example.

10. Don’t make a major purchase you didn’t plan for
That $279 10-inch tablet at Best Buy seems like a steal, but you didn’t plan to buy a tablet for yourself this year. Stay away. The easiest way to blow your budget is to buy something you don’t really need, just because it seems like a good deal. Make a list of major items you need before you look at the sales listings. Remember, the cheapest gadget is the one you didn’t buy.

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NTT cuts fiber internet prices in Japan, may be reacting to an LTE generation

Posted on November 21, 2012 by admin

Samsung Galaxy S III at NTT DoCoMo

As manic as LTE adoption has been in the US, it could be triggering a full-fledged generational rift in Japan. NTT is cutting prices for fiber-to-the-home internet access by as much as 34 percent in the midst of falling landline subscriptions, and Australia’s Delimiter hears from unofficial sources at the provider that the cuts may be in response to youth being enamored with 4G on their phones. The tipsters believe that many of the younger set are picking one expensive LTE plan, even with data caps, instead of paying for two services; a price drop would be an attempt to keep at least a few of these wireless rebels onboard. Take the assertions with a grain of salt when there’s no official statements to match, but there’s no doubt that 4G demand is booming when NTT’s own DoCoMo just landed its 7 millionth Xi contract. We only wish American wired and wireless carriers would be so accommodating of our temptation to cut the cord.

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Economix Blog: Jobless Benefits as an Antipoverty Program

Posted on November 21, 2012 by admin

CATHERINE RAMPELL

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

In addition to the tax increases and broad federal spending cuts (known as “sequestration”) scheduled to take effect at the end of this year, the emergency unemployment benefits system is also expected to come to an end.

It doesn’t get as much attention as the defense cuts or the tax increases, but the end of these extended unemployment benefits is expected to affect millions of Americans. More than two million workers now collecting federal unemployment benefits will lose the lifeline after the week ending Dec. 29. By the end of the first quarter of 2013, another one million will run out of state benefits without ever benefiting from Emergency Unemployment Compensation, according to the National Employment Law Project, a liberal advocacy group.

There seems to be a widely held view — at least judging from the e-mail I get on the day of each month’s unemployment report — that idle workers don’t have jobs because they’ve gotten used to being paid not to work and would prefer to continue collecting unemployment rather than go out and earn an honest living. But given that so many unemployed workers will have exhausted their benefits or were never eligible for benefits in the first place, more than two out of every three unemployed workers will enter 2013 without receiving any form of unemployment insurance (for example, those whose benefits lapsed or who didn’t qualify, because of self-employment or insufficient hours).

These extended unemployment benefits serve as a powerful stimulus measure, economists say, because the money dispensed in the form of jobless benefits gets spent very quickly and so moves through the economy quickly (compared with, say, tax cuts for wealthier Americans, who are likely to save at least some of the money they pocket).

But the other key reason for extending unemployment benefits is, of course, compassion.

Last year 46.2 million Americans lived in poverty, according to the Census Bureau. A recent report from the Congressional Research Service finds that unemployment insurance kept another 2.3 million people above the official poverty line, including 620,000 who were children living with a family member who received benefits.

And bear in mind that the average worker collecting benefits through the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program receives just $291 per week.

By way of background, the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program was signed into law in June 2008 by George W. Bush, when the unemployment rate was 5.6 percent.

Today the unemployment rate, at 7.9 percent, is sliding, but is still much higher than it was when these extended benefits were first deemed necessary by Congress and President Bush.

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DealBook: H.P. Claim Highlights a Gray Area in Software Sales

Posted on November 21, 2012 by admin

Catherine Lesjak, Hewlett-Packard's finance chief, said Autonomy's profitability was less than it seemed. Mike Lynch, its former chief, denied any improprieties.Ryan Anson/Bloomberg News, via Getty ImagesCatherine Lesjak, Hewlett-Packard’s finance chief, said Autonomy’s profitability was less than it seemed. Mike Lynch, its former chief, denied any improprieties.

Hewlett-Packard’s accusations of “serious accounting improprieties” at Autonomy are eerily reminiscent of accounting missteps uncovered over a decade ago at software firms like MicroStrategy, Computer Associates and Lernout Hauspie.

“It looks like a throwback to the bubble era,” said Jack T. Ciesielski, publisher of The Analyst’s Accounting Observer.

Indeed, the claims made on Tuesday suggest that there is something about the nature of the software business that makes it easier for executives to indulge in questionable accounting.

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Hewlett-Packard contends that Autonomy, the British software firm that it acquired for $10 billion last year, misclassified revenue, including sales of hardware with sales of software licenses. Investors care far more about software sales, and this purported strategy made it look as if software was doing better than it was.

The hardware sales were unprofitable, Hewlett says, and accounted for 10 to 15 percent of Autonomy’s revenue before the purchase. In addition, Hewlett contends that this practice made a measure of profitability called gross margin look stronger than it really was.

Revenue was inflated by other means, Hewlett said. Autonomy also booked revenue too early and when a proper sale hadn’t taken place, the company said.

Catherine A. Lesjak, Hewlett’s chief financial officer, said that without the help from such aggressive accounting, Autonomy most likely had operating margins of 28 to 30 percent, rather than 40 to 45 percent.

Mike Lynch, the former chief executive of Autonomy, denies that the company’s financial statements were misleading or contained improprieties.

“We were shocked and very surprised because no one had actually been in touch with us,” he said.

How companies recognize revenue is critical to analysts who track the performance of software companies. They have learned to watch the process very closely. Both Computer Associates and MicroStrategy had booked revenue prematurely, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission cases at the time.

Analysts focus on a balance-sheet liability called deferred revenue. This is unearned revenue that represents software services that are still owed to clients. When this doesn’t keep up with investors’ expectations, a software company’s shares can fall. As a result, there may be a temptation to make this item look bigger than it was.

“Revenue recognition has always been difficult with these kinds of companies,” Mr. Ciesielski said. The problem, he says, is that software contracts bundle different types of sales. That can make it easier to conceal expenses, inflate certain types of revenue and tweak the timing of when revenue is recognized.

“There are different ways to tug and stretch the numbers,” he said.

The claims by Hewlett surprised investors, who sent the company’s shares down sharply, off 12 percent on the day.

Even so, some hedge fund investors have been skeptical about Autonomy for a several years, and questions about its numbers have bubbled in the marketplace.

“It was dead easy to spot that Autonomy’s statements weren’t right,” said John Hempton, the manager of Bronte Capital, a hedge fund based in Sydney, Australia. “The extent of it I didn’t know.” Mr. Hempton voiced his suspicions about Autonomy last month in a presentation to an investment forum in New York.

Some were raising questions even earlier. In July 2009, Kynikos Associates, the firm founded by the investor James S. Chanos, wrote a detailed report that criticized Autonomy’s accounting in ways that now appear prescient.

In its 2009 note, Kynikos said that Autonomy’s deferred revenue appeared lackluster. It added that the company might have masked the underperformance with acquisitions.

Hewlett said a whistle-blower came forward in May, prompting it to conduct an internal investigation, which it says turned up the accounting missteps at Autonomy. Its disclosure raises another uncomfortable question: Why Hewlett — and its auditors — could not spot what it now says it has uncovered. Hewlett says two accounting firms failed to catch what it now says were ruses.

On a conference call on Tuesday, John F. Schultz, H.P.’s general counsel, said Autonomy kept opaque books. “Critical documents were missing from the obvious places and it required that we look in every nook and cranny,” he said.

It’s possible that the company was looking at Autonomy through somewhat rose-colored glasses at the time of the acquisition, putting its desire for growth above the need for thorough due diligence. Autonomy cost $11.1 billion. Hewlett said Tuesday that it took a charge of more than $5 billion related to the accounting trouble, though it’s not clear exactly how the company arrived at that amount.

Despite everything, Hewlett’s chief executive, Meg Whitman, said that Autonomy would still play an important role at her company.

“This will be a growth engine for H.P.,” she said, then added, “Perhaps not as big a growth engine as we originally anticipated.”

A version of this article appeared in print on 11/21/2012, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: H.P. Claim Highlights a Gray Area in Software Sales.
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Gamer plays ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops 2′ for 135 hours, sets world record

Posted on November 21, 2012 by admin

16 hrs.

Winda Benedetti
, NBC News

4Cabling

Okan Kaya doesn’t look so good after playing “Call of Duty: Black Ops 2″ for hours on end.

What does playing “Call of Duty: Black Ops 2″ for 135 hours looks like? As you can see from the photo above it looks … not so good.

But hey, that’s the price for setting a world record … right? Right?

Okan Kaya of Sydney, Australia, spent the last seven days setting a new record for the longest marathon first-person shooter gaming session. He spent 135 hours and 50 minutes playing the new ”Call of Duty: Black Ops 2″ game.

His employer — computer cable company 4Cabling — has been documenting his progress on its website and its Facebook page. On Tuesday, his co-workers announced that Kaya, a sales manager, had not only set the record but had finished with a “Black Ops 2″ career ranking of 29th among some 5 million players.

“It took 7 DAYS of mental physical stamina he crushed it!” his co-workers wrote on Facebook.

I checked in with the Guinness World Records office, which confirmed that Kaya did register his plans to make a run for the record. ”While no Guinness World Records adjudicator was on site to verify, we await for Okan to send across all the necessary and required evidence across to in order for our records team to properly authenticate,” a Guinness spokesperson said.

If everything looks good to the folks at Guinness, Kaya will have beaten the record previously held by Canadians Chris Gloyd and Timothy Bell, who played “Resistance” and “Resistance 2″ for 120 hours and 7 minutes in March 2012.

Meanwhile, let’s be thankful that Kaya is still alive to enjoy his new title. After all, other gamers haven’t been so lucky after marathon play sessions. A 20-year-old gamer from England died from a pulmonary embolism after a lengthy gaming session. And a teen gamer in Taiwan died after a “Diablo 3″ binge.

But it seems Kaya tackled at least some of the risks to his circulatory system by occasionally using a Stair Master while he was playing.

It seems that difficult task should warrant some kind of a world record of its own: World record for longest time spent gaming while walking in place perhaps? 

- Via Wired

Winda Benedetti writes about video games for NBC News. You can follow her tweets about games and other things on Twitter here @WindaBenedetti and you can follow her on Google+. Meanwhile, be sure to check out the IN-GAME FACEBOOK PAGE to discuss the day’s gaming news and reviews.


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Creatorverse brings physics sandbox to Android

Posted on November 21, 2012 by admin

Android Central

Linden Lab, the folks behind the Second Life virtual world, have released their first creation for Android. Creatorverse isn’t so much a game as it is a toy. Though there are simple, intuitive controls for placing virtual objects into a space, resizing, connecting, and coloring them, the breadth of mechanics that can be applied to them are truly boggling. Virtual magnetic fields, alterations in gravity and friction, levers, pivots, triggers, and many more tools are likely to keep tinkerers busy for a long time. Best of all, any creations, be they cute pieces of interactive art, explorations in physics, or even simple games, can all be shared online to other creators on all platforms. They can then download, experience, and tweak creations as they see fit. 

As Android fans, I think we all have a bit of a tinkerer’s mindset. That said, an open, creative sandbox like this is well-suited to us. I can definitely see the use of Creatorverse for getting kids interested in engineering; the rules and interface are accessible, but deep and potentially inspiring. I’ve only been playing around with Creatorverse for a little while, but I can already tell that it’s going to be keeping a permanent spot on my Android device. 

What do you guys think? Any Little Big Planet fans in the house? How about Second Life? 

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Gadgetwise Blog: Sending Tweets by E-Mail

Posted on November 21, 2012 by admin

Soon you will be able to share your tweets easily, even with people who aren’t on Twitter.

Twitter, the social microblogging service, is introducing a new sharing feature that will let people pass along Twitter posts by e-mail directly from its site.

Here’s how it will work: When you see a tweet you want to send to a friend, place the cursor over the tweet. A list of links will appear below it in blue, just as it does now, but there will be an additional link, titled “More.”

Click on it and you will see a button that says “Share this Tweet via e-mail.” All you have to do is fill out the address, hit send, and off it goes.

The feature is being rolled out now — some people may find that they already have it. The rest will get it “over the coming weeks,” according to a Twitter representative.

There are some advantages to e-mailing tweets. For one, you can now more quickly ridicule someone’s post before an audience of select friends without going public. It also means you can expose people who have avoided Twitter to its siren call. Don’t count on them thanking you.

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Fighting Continues as U.S. Seeks Truce in Gaza

Posted on November 21, 2012 by admin

Mrs. Clinton, who rushed to the Middle East late Tuesday in an intensified diplomatic push, conferred with Israeli leaders in Jerusalem and then visited Palestinian leaders in the West Bank before heading to Cairo for talks with the Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi, whose good relationship with the Hamas government in Gaza has emerged as pivotal to the negotiations. Mrs. Clinton was engaged in intense talks with Mr. Morsi and his aides at Cairo’s presidential offices, officials there said.

The Tel Aviv bus bombing, which wounded at least 21 Israelis in an act that at least two Palestinian militant factions took responsibility for, resurrected fears in Israel of past Palestinian uprisings. It followed Israeli airstrikes overnight and into Wednesday on government buildings in Gaza and suspected smuggling tunnels under Gaza’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt, among other targets.

The back-and-forth attacks emphasized the underlying problems in finding any lasting solution to a conflict rooted in deep-seated hostilities and mistrust between Israelis and Palestinians.

Egyptian and American officials in Cairo said negotiations over a cease-fire, which the Egyptian media and Hamas officials had said was on the verge of completion Tuesday, had been hung up on a number of issues, including Hamas’s demands for unfettered access to Gaza via the Rafah crossing and other steps that would ease Israel’s economic and border control over other aspects of life for the more than one million Palestinian residents of Gaza, which Israel vacated in 2005 after 38 years of occupation.

The Hamas Health Ministry in Gaza said the Palestinian death toll after a week of fighting stood at 140 at noon. At least a third of those killed are believed to have been militants. On the Israeli side, five Israelis have been killed, including one soldier.

Around noon on Wednesday in the Gaza Strip, according to the Hamas government media office, a bomb hit the house of Issam Da’alis, an adviser to Ismail Haniya, the Hamas prime minister. The house had been evacuated. Earlier, a predawn airstrike near a mosque in the Jabaliya refugee camp killed a 30-year-old militant, a spokesman said, and F-16 bombs destroyed two houses in the central Gaza Strip.

There were 23 punishing strikes against the southern tunnels that are used to bring weapons as well as construction material, cars and other commercial goods into Gaza from the Sinai Peninsula.

Within Gaza City, Abu Khadra, the largest government office complex, was obliterated overnight. Businesses were also damaged, including two banks and a tourism office, and electricity cables fell on the ground and were covered in dust.

Separately, a bomb dropped from an F-16 created a 20-foot crater in an open area in a stretch of hotels occupied by foreign journalists. Several of the hotels had windows blown out by the strike around 2 a.m., but no one was reported injured. By morning, the hole in the ground had filled with sludgy water, apparently from a burst pipe, appearing almost like a forgotten swimming hole with walls made of sand and cracked cinder block.

Surveying damage near a government complex, Raji Sourani of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights said Gaza civilians were “in the eye of the storm,” and accused Israel of “inflicting pain and terror” on them. Israeli officials accuse Hamas of locating military sites in or close to civilian areas.

Overnight, as the conflict entered its eighth day, the Israeli military said in Twitter posts that “more than 100 terror sites were targeted, of which approximately 50 were underground rocket launchers.” The targets included the Ministry of Internal Security in Gaza, described as “one of Hamas’s main command and control centers.”

While there was no immediate or formal claim of responsibility for the bus bombing in Tel Aviv, a message on a Twitter account in the name of Al Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Hamas authorities in the Gaza Strip, declared: “We told you IDF that our blessed hands will reach your leaders and soldiers wherever they are, ‘You opened the Gates of hell on Yourselves.’ ” The letters I.D.F. refer to the Israel Defense Forces.

On several occasions since the latest conflagration seized Gaza last week, militants have aimed rockets at Tel Aviv, but they have either fallen short, landed in the sea or been intercepted. Hundreds of rockets fired by militants in Gaza have struck other targets.

But the bombing seemed to be the first time in the current fighting that violence had spread directly onto the streets of Tel Aviv.

On Tuesday — the deadliest day of fighting in the conflict — Mrs. Clinton arrived hurriedly in Jerusalem and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to push for a truce.

Her visit to Cairo on Wednesday to consult with Egyptian officials in contact with Hamas placed her and the Obama administration at the center of a fraught process with multiple parties, interests and demands.

Before leaving for Cairo, Mrs. Clinton visited the West Bank to meet Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, which is estranged from the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip and has increasingly strained ties with Israel over a contentious effort to upgrade the Palestinian status at the United Nations to that of a nonmember state. Mrs. Clinton is to meet again with Mr. Netanyahu before heading for Egypt, the reports said.

Mr. Abbas’s faction is favored by the United States, but it is not directly involved in either the fighting in Gaza or the effort in Cairo to end it. Like Israel and much of the West, the United States regards Hamas as a terrorist organization.

The Israelis, who have amassed tens of thousands of troops on the Gaza border and have threatened to invade for a second time in four years to end the rocket fire, never publicly backed the idea of a short break in fighting. They said they were open to a diplomatic accord but were looking for something more enduring.

“If there is a possibility of achieving a long-term solution to this problem through diplomatic means, we prefer that,” Mr. Netanyahu said before meeting with Mrs. Clinton at his office. “But if not, I’m sure you understand that Israel will have to take whatever actions necessary to defend its people.”

Ethan Bronner reported from Jerusalem, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo. Reporting was contributed by Jodi Rudoren and Fares Akram from Gaza; Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem; Alan Cowell from London; Andrea Bruce from Rafah; and Christine Hauser and Rick Gladstone from New York.

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Crisis in Church of England After Rejection of Female Bishops

Posted on November 21, 2012 by admin

The archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, was speaking after an emergency meeting of bishops called to debate Tuesday’s narrow balloting by its General Synod rejecting the ordination of women of bishops, even though female priests account for one-third of the Church of England’s clergy members. Female priests hold senior positions like canon and archdeacon, and some had been hoping to secure appointments as bishops by 2014 if the change had been approved.

The vote represented a direct rebuff to Archbishop Williams’s reformist efforts during his 10 years as head of the church and a huge setback to a campaign for change that has been debated intensely and often bitterly for the past decade.

More than 70 percent of the 446 synod votes on Tuesday were in favor of opening the church’s episcopacy to women. But the synod’s voting procedures require a two-thirds majority in each of its three “houses”: bishops, clergy and laity. The bishops approved the change by 44 to 3, and the clergy by 148 to 45. The vote among the laity, though, was 132 to 74, six votes less than the two-thirds needed.

The Church of England is the so-called established church, meaning that it is recognized by law as representing the official religion, enjoys special privileges and is supported by the civil authorities.

Some lawmakers suggested on Wednesday that the synod vote would create a crisis of church-state relations, since the rejection of female bishops contradicted national laws on gender equality. Prime Minister David Cameron, already at loggerheads with the church over the government’s plans to legalize same-sex marriage next year, urged church authorities on Wednesday to devise a way out of the impasse.

“I’m very clear the time is right for women bishops; it was right many years ago,” he told Parliament on Wednesday. “They need to get on with it, as it were, and get with the program. But you do have to respect the individual institutions and the way they work while giving them a sharp prod.”

Addressing the synod on Wednesday in unusually unambiguous language, Archbishop Williams declared, “We have, to put it very bluntly, a lot of explaining to do.”

“Whatever the motivation for voting yesterday, whatever the theological principle on which people acted and spoke, the fact remains that a great deal of this discussion is not intelligible to our wider society.

“Worse than that, it seems as if we are willfully blind to some of the trends and priorities of that wider society,” he added, acknowledging criticism from within that the church — already facing dwindling congregations — is losing or has already lost a broader relevance to modern society.

“We have, as a result of yesterday, undoubtedly lost a measure of credibility in our society,” he said.

The archbishop is to retire next month after spending much of his time as the senior bishop of the Church of England and symbolic head of the Anglican Communion devising complex compromises intended to prevent a schism between reformers and traditionalists.

The archbishop has already acknowledged failing to accomplish a lasting reconciliation, but the vote on Tuesday robbed him of a final opportunity to salvage something of a legacy.

“Very grim day,” the Most Rev. Justin Welby, the archbishop’s recently appointed successor, said in a Twitter message overnight. “Most of all for women priests and supporters, need to surround all with prayer love and cooperate with our healing God.”

Both Archbishop Williams and Bishop Welby support women as bishops. The vote on Tuesday left Bishop Welby set to preside over a church seemingly unable to resolve an issue that is one of several contentious debates relating to gender and sexuality.

Since the English church split with Rome under Henry VIII nearly 500 years ago, only men have served as bishops, and the outcome of the two-day synod was seen by both sides as a watershed in the wider struggle over the Church of England’s future.

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Mexican Agencies Clash Over Shooting of C.I.A. Employees

Posted on November 21, 2012 by admin

In the past week, top officials at the federal prosecutor’s office and the federal police force have clashed over the case in an unusual public airing of differences by rival agencies, both of which have received American training to help fight the drug war.

Mexican prosecutors this month charged 14 federal police officers with trying to kill the C.I.A. employees and a Mexican Navy captain who was riding with them as they traveled to a naval shooting range near Mexico City on Aug. 24 for an unspecified exercise.

The police officers, who were dressed in civilian clothes and riding in unmarked sport utility vehicles, fired on the vehicle. The prosecutor’s office said on Sunday that 152 bullets struck the vehicle, and that several police commanders were also under investigation for trying to cover up the officers’ role, in part by ordering them to change into their uniforms before they were interviewed by investigators.

The attack ended when navy personnel and other federal police units quickly arrived. The wounded Americans were evacuated from the country the following day.

In charging the officers, the prosecutor’s office accused them of deliberately trying to kill the vehicle’s occupants, judging by the number of shots fired, but left open the question of why. The police have offered their own version of events, which similarly leaves many questions unanswered.

In that vacuum, theories abound among Mexican and American officials, including the possibility that the gunmen targeted the vehicle by mistake and then tried to cover it up by killing the witnesses. The prosecutor’s office said on Sunday that the attack did not appear to be linked to organized crime, a possibility initially considered among American and Mexican investigators.

But almost from the start of the case, federal police officials have said it was not an ambush or an intentional attack, but a case of mistaken identity. They have said that the officers were in the area investigating a kidnapping ring and, overlooking or ignoring the diplomatic license plates, opened fire to stop the vehicle.

Last week, a report from the internal affairs unit of the federal police, leaked to the newspaper Milenio, accused the prosecutor’s office of a “witch hunt” against the police as it is under intense pressure from the American Embassy to resolve the case. After that, the police director, Maribel Cervantes, appeared on a closely watched political talk show to defend her agency, saying again that contrary to an American Embassy statement on the day of the attack, there was no ambush.

“When I spoke to various American authorities I was very emphatic in that, in accordance with the information we had, it did not involve an ambush, nor a deliberate attack,” she said on the program, “El Asalto a la Razón,” adding that she had spoken with the American ambassador, Anthony Wayne.

An embassy spokesman confirmed the conversation and the sharing of information between the governments but declined to comment on the case because the investigation had not concluded.

Ms. Cervantes continued her news media campaign with radio and newspaper interviews this week.

On Sunday, however, the attorney general’s office took the unusual step of directly rebutting her. The prosecutor in charge of the investigation, Victoria Pacheco Jiménez, said at a news conference that while there had been a kidnapping in the area, it did not figure into the federal investigation of the attack.

The federal police force has doubled in size in recent years, and has been promoted by both American officials and President Felipe Calderón as an important tool against organized crime.

But it has come under fire lately over corruption scandals. The entire force at the Mexico City airport was replaced after two officers, believed to have been involved in the drug trade, killed three colleagues in the food court of a terminal in June.

The federal police have “been held up as a shining example of police reform over the last six years, but recent indications suggest that there are problems of integrity in its ranks,” said David A. Shirk, a scholar who studies Mexican justice at the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego.

President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto, who will take office on Dec. 1, has proposed folding the federal police agency into the Interior Ministry, as part of a government streamlining plan.

But the prosecutor’s office, known as the P.G.R., has also been criticized by experts for a relatively low rate of conviction. State Department reports indicate that just 2 percent of people arrested on drug-trafficking charges are convicted.

“One of the biggest challenges for the next government is making the P.G.R. work,” said Shannon O’Neil, an expert on Mexico at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “During the Calderón administration, this is probably the element within the state security apparatus that has fallen behind, losing resources and momentum to the federal police. But if you can’t successfully prosecute the guilty — and free the innocent — you can’t strengthen the rule of law in a real, lasting way.”

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Sewage to help Microsoft serve up Web pages

Posted on November 21, 2012 by admin

18 hrs.

John Roach
, NBC News

Microsoft

Biogas harvested from a sewage treatment plant is fed to a fuel cell to generate electricity for a data center.

Microbes feasting on raw sewage at a wastewater treatment plant will soon help power the cloud, thanks to a Microsoft project that will use biogas generated by the little bugs to run a data center.

Data centers are typically massive banks of servers that keep the Internet humming along nicely. They handle the flow of digital information when you order a song on iTunes, check your Facebook, send an instant message, or post on Twitter, for example.

Worldwide, these warehouses of servers use the equivalent output of 30 nuclear power plants, according to the New York Times. 

The Microsoft-backed project announced Monday is a test of the company’s Data Plant concept that aims to integrate energy hungry data centers with sources of fuel as a means to increase energy security by freeing itself from the electric grid and meet a company goal of carbon neutrality.

“The intriguing thing about biogas is it is sustainable,” Sean James, a senior research program manager for the Microsoft Data Center Advanced Development team, told NBC News. 

“Wherever there are people, there is demand for data, but wherever there are people there is going to be this supply of biogas, so it is a full circle when it comes to the supply and demand chain,” 

The biogas is generated by two anaerobic digesters at a wastewater treatment plant in Cheyenne, Wyo. It is currently flared off, which is a waste of useable energy. The Microsoft project will capture the gas, clean it up a bit, and feed it to a fuel cell that turns it into electricity.

Any residual power that the fuel cell generates but is not used by the data center will be routed back to the wastewater treatment facility to offset its energy costs, James explained. 

In addition, heat generated from the fuel cells will be routed back to wastewater treatment plant to keep the microbes at their optimal temperature for munching on sewage. 

The $5.5 million pilot project will provide 200 kilowatts of power for a modular data center, a fraction of the 30 billion watts of electricity experts believe are required to run the world’s data centers.

But the concept is scalable to the “literally thousands of sites” around the world where fuel resources are going to waste, Brian Janous, a data center utility architect at Microsoft, told NBC News. Data Plants can be scaled to fit those available resources, meaning less fuel is wasted.

“We may go into a region and say we need 30 megawatts of potential capacity to serve customer demand in that region,” he explained. “Well, it doesn’t have to be a single 30 megawatt data center. It could be multiple data centers that are sized uniquely to meet whatever the available fuel resources are.”

The pilot project gets underway in March 2013. If it works as envisioned, it could something to Tweet about.

John Roach is a contributing writer for NBC News Digital. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

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Get Instagram prints from … Walgreens

Posted on November 21, 2012 by admin

14 hrs.

Suzanne Choney
, NBC News

Printicular

There’s lots of ways to get prints from Instagram photos, but a sure sign that the photo-sharing app has gone mainstream is that you can now get Instagram prints from Walgreens. Yes, Walgreens.

As Instagram users know, the app’s Polaroid-like, square 4×4 photos don’t lend themselves to home printing. And many of Instagram’s photos, with fun filters, are just too cool to not print.

Now, a new app, Printicular, lets you order up Instagram 4×4 prints from Walgreens, and pick them up in an hour. It makes sense for Walgreens: Instagram now has more than 100 million users.

The free app is Android only right now, available from the Google Play Store. It’s created by MEA Mobile, which told NBC News an iOS version should be ready very soon.

You can also use Printicular to order prints from your phone or Facebook account. (Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion earlier this year.)

There are other apps that can help you create Instagram prints. Among them: Prinstagram, CanvasPop and PostalPix.

Check out Technolog, Gadgetbox, Digital Life and In-Game on Facebook, and on Twitter, follow Suzanne Choney.

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Comcast Xfinity TV Player update adds downloads for offline viewing on iOS, Android

Posted on November 21, 2012 by admin

Comcast Xfinity TV Player update adds downloads for offline viewing on iOS, Android

Comcast has brought video on-demand streaming to subscriber’s mobile devices since early last year, but now an update has added the option to download (some) content for offline viewing. Arriving simultaneously on iOS and Android, the Xfinity TV Player apps support downloads from premium channels Showtime (which was also one of the first up for streaming when that launched), Starz, Encore and MoviePlex. We downloaded the app on both platforms and found it to work in similar fashion, assuming you’re already logged in (and have any of those channels in your package) the option to download is right next to the usual stream button with options available for two different levels of picture quality. The high quality option wasn’t quite HD quality to our eyes, but certainly passable for viewing on a flight or subway. We did run into a hiccup on Android however, with an “unknown error” stopping us from downloading files to our Galaxy S II running ICS. If there were more content available it would be a decent no-additional-hardware-needed matchup for solutions like TiVo’s Stream or DirecTV’s Nomad, while we wait for that you can get a taste of the apps for each platform at the source links.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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European Leaders Fail to Agree on Greek Aid

Posted on November 21, 2012 by admin

The failure to reach an agreement for the second week in a row highlighted the depth of differences among officials on how to find the money to keep the Greek economy afloat to contain contagion in the euro zone even as the country’s debt prospects worsen.

The German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble told reporters after nearly 12 hours of talks that some of “the questions are so complicated we didn’t find a conclusive solution” and he said finance ministers would meet again on Monday to resume the discussions.

Mr. Schäuble also noted that European leaders could take up the discussions during a two-day summit here that begins Thursday.

While there is little immediate threat that creditors will deny further aid to the government in Athens, finding a formula to turn the spigot back on has proved intensely difficult, particularly for Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel is seeking to avoid making new financing commitments to the most vulnerable euro area countries like Greece ahead of her re-election campaign next year.

That has left the leadership of the euro zone jawboning at a seemingly endless series of late-night meetings.

Greece is seeking to unlock a 31.5 billion euros, or $40.2 billion, installment of loans from an international bailout program. If ministers do reach a deal, Greece is likely to get a larger amount of about 44 billion euros ($56 billion) because two additional installments are due by the end of the year under the program.

The current program, worth 130 billion euros (167 billion), has been frozen since June, when creditors determined that Greece was failing to meet the conditions of the bailout.

During the closed-door discussions that began on Tuesday evening, ministers and international officials also were at loggerheads over whether to give Greece two more years, to 2016, to reach a primary budget surplus, a concession requiring nearly 33 billion euros ($42 billion) on top of existing bailouts.

Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, insisted that financing Greece to 2016 would help it to the path of making its debt manageable by the end of the decade.

But a number of member states resisted that suggestion, insisting on limiting questions of how to finance Greece thru 2014. Using a target date of 2014 would cost less, or about 15 billion euros, ($19 billion) but that would leave questions unresolved about the country’s financing.

In an effort to address the added costs, the ministers ranged over options from lowering interest rates on Greek debt, lengthening the deadlines for debt repayments, allowing Greece to buy back its bonds at a steep discount, and asking the European Central Bank to return profits made on Greek bonds.

But many analysts agree that at some point, Greece’s official lenders will have to take politically unpalatable losses, or haircuts, on their holdings of Greek debt in order to keep the country in the euro area, even if a range of other measures is taken to reduce the size of the state deficit and reform the economy.

Another critical challenge for the Eurogroup was smoothing over differences among the troika of lenders — the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund — about how quickly Greece should be obliged to bring its towering debt under control.

In a public disagreement last week at the previous Eurogroup meeting, Ms. Lagarde insisted that Greece cut its debt to the fund’s target of 120 percent of gross domestic product by 2020 while Jean-Claude Juncker, chairman of the Eurogroup, recommended giving Greece until 2022, a position shared by Germany.

Arriving at the meeting on Tuesday, Ms. Lagarde emphasized the importance of the 2020 goal to her organization, which, under its rules, cannot continue lending unless Greece’s debt is deemed sustainable. Finding a solution was “our goal, our purpose and our mission,” she said.

The difference is a highly sensitive matter for Greece’s biggest creditors in the euro zone, and for Germany in particular.

German leadership is wary of political repercussions from higher costs that would result from meeting the 2020 deadline. The Greek debt is now estimated at 175 percent of G.D.P. and the economy could shrink again next year.

“We are narrowing our positions,” Mr. Juncker told reporters early on Wednesday morning referring to gulf between him and Ms. Lagarde on Greece’s debt prospects.

“We are very close to a result” and there was “no major stumbling block,” Mr. Juncker insisted.

Prime Minister Antonis Samaras of Greece, who is struggling to hold together an increasingly fragile coalition, hopes that a final push by Athens to tie up loose ends could help speed money for the two-year extension to the country’s fiscal adjustment period.

Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras said late Sunday that Athens had done its bit. “We are fully ready for Tuesday,” he said. “There are no outstanding issues on our side.”

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