Sony Xperia sales slump 33% in final quarter of 2016

Despite slumping sales, Sony says they’re still on target for an operating profit.

2016 was not a good year for Sony’s smartphone division.

The company closed out the third quarter of its financial year by shipping 5.1 million Xperia smartphones — down from 7.6 million in 2015 over the same quarter. Sony CFO Kenichiro Yoshida explained this 35% decrease in year-on-year sales was due to weaker sales in Europe, which is typically one of the more popular markets for Sony smartphones. In response, the company has downwardly revised its annual smartphone unit sales forecast by 2 million units.

Image credit: Xperiablog

Sony ended the quarter generating 249 billion yen (US$2.1 billion) in sales — down from 385 billion (US$3.4 billion) in 2015. But while sales and revenue income were down, the impact was partially offset by cost reductions in unprofitable markets such as Latin America and the Middle East, along with a positive impact from foreign exchange rates. As such, Yoshida says the company is still on target to maintain an operating profit by the end of the fiscal year.

You can grab an unlocked Sony Xperia X Compact on Amazon for a smooth $350 right now, or wait to see what Sony has in store for us at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona at the end of the month.

If you’re interested, you can read more about Sony’s latest financial results.

FCC drops all inquiries into Binge On and other zero-rating programs

The FCC has dropped all inquiries into one of the most contested parts of net neutrality.

As the FCC moves into a new era that, under new Chairman Ajit Pai, looks to cut down on regulations that purportedly impede innovation, it has reported that all inquires into sponsored data programs will be stopped.

Under Tom Wheeler, who former President Barack Obama appointed Chairman in 2013, the FCC began sending letters to the top U.S. network providers, including T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon, on their use of “sponsored data programs” that either allowed companies to pay for the right to forgive the cost of certain blocks of traffic, or “zero-rate” traffic from an entire website or app.

T-Mobile has made this the most consumer-facing with its Binge On promotion, which under its new T-Mobile One plan doesn’t count any video from most sources, including YouTube, towards one’s monthly allotment. That video, however, is streamed at a lower bitrate than it otherwise would be, and preferences large media companies that have the power to negotiate deals with T-Mobile and its competition.

In a letter sent to the companies above, and a statement posted on its website, the FCC makes its intentions under this administration very clear:

Today, the Commission finally puts an end to the past Commission’s zero-rating inquiries and recommits to permissionless innovation. While this is just a first step, these companies, and others, can now safely invest in and introduce highly popular products and services without fear of Commission intervention based on newly invented legal theories.

That it “recommits to permissionless innovation” is a good thing for consumers in its eye, but the language around “just a first step” implies that under Pai, the FCC will dismantle Title II and the net neutrality clauses that are held within it.

Researchers discover a better way to make ammonia

For the past century or so, we’ve been making ammonia the same way that Nobel-prize winning chemist Fritz Haber did: by smashing hydrogen and nitrogen gas together at 250 atmospheres and heating them to nearly 1000 degrees F. But a new method developed at the University of Utah turns that process on its head.

Rather than brute force the gas’ ionic bonds apart to reform ammonia (NH3), the Utah method breaks them apart with nitrogen-fixing enzymes called nitrogenases. These are the only known enzymes that naturally convert nitrogen to ammonia and are used by a number of anaerobic bacterial species. These enzymes not only create ammonia at room temperature, they also generate a small amount of electricity.

The team hopes to use these enzymes, as well as another hydrogen-fixing variety known as hydrogenase, to create fuel cells. These devices would strip electrons from hydrogen gas and feed them into a the nitrogen-reducing reaction to create ammonia and power. However, before the team can scale up the technology to a viable level, they’ve first got to figure out how to deal with nitrogenases’ sensitivity to oxygen and how to keep the process going without relying on ATP to drive the enzymic action. Those are both daunting challenges. Still, at least we now have an easier means of making ammonia.

Source: PhysOrg

‘Fallout Shelter’ arrives on Windows 10 and Xbox One next week

Mobile games have been making their way to consoles at a semi-regular clip lately. Most recently it was Square Enix Montreal’s series of Go titles moving to PlayStation 4, and now Fallout Shelter is making its way to Xbox One and Windows 10. Now, it was already available on Steam, but this version offers Play Anywhere features like cloud-sync and shared achievements between the platforms. So, it’s a little different.

Overall, the game might feel a little bit backwards considering Fallout 4’s “Vault-Tec” add-on pack tasked players with creating their own vaults. But unlike that, Fallout Shelter — out February 7th — will be available for free and its load speeds will almost assuredly be faster than booting Fallout 4 proper. Best of luck guarding against super mutants, Overseer.

Source: Xbox Wire

‘Psychonauts’ in VR is a story Tim Schafer never planned to tell

Tim Schafer’s Psychonauts is the definition of a modern cult classic. Despite winning multiple awards and the adoration of critics, Double Fine’s first game sold poorly. Good games, however, don’t go unplayed. Over the course of a decade, Psychonauts sold over a million copies in digital redistribution, and left fans clamoring for a sequel to wrap up the game’s loose ends. Now a satisfying conclusion to the original game’s story is finally here, but it’s not Psychonauts 2 — it’s Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin, a virtual reality spin-off heading exclusively to PlayStation VR on February 21st.

It’s almost poetic. Just as Psychonauts was Double Fine’s first game as a new development studio, Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin is the company’s first game made exclusively for virtual reality — and it picks up the story exactly where the original game left it. Rasputin (or “Raz” for short) has officially been inducted into a group of psychic secret agents and is heading out on his first mission: to rescue Truman Zannotto, the leader of the Psychonauts. For anyone who played the original game, it seems like an obvious place to resume the narrative. Schafer, on the other hand, says it’s a story he never planned to tell.

“We weren’t going to tell the story about you running off to save the head of the Psychonauts,” he told me in an interview this week at the company’s San Francisco office. Schafer always imagined the rescue operation happening off screen, with any prospective sequels picking up after the team had returned to headquarters. “We thought it would just be referred to,” he said. “Oh, remember that time we went and saved the president of the Psychonauts?” That’s still the plan for the game’s crowdfunded sequel, but the company’s VR project gave Schafer a new platform for storytelling. “It seemed like a natural fit. “We could actually tell this story, this secret mission you go in-between these two games and still make it a standalone, fun spy adventure.”

Adventure is the key word, too. Unlike the original game, a 3D platformer, Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin is a first-person take on the point-and-click adventure akin to Broken Age or the SCUMM games Shafer used to make at LucasArts. The player wears the PlayStation VR headset to settle behind the eyes of Raz, and uses his psychic powers to interact with the world. You can use telekinesis to open doors, flip switches and interact with items, distract enemies with PSI-blasts and light things on fire with pyrokinesis. It works surprisingly well, locking the power to the center of your vision. As I watched a book I was intently staring at lift-off of the ground, I almost felt like I actually had psychic powers.

The psychic make-believe works great, but as a player you don’t move much. The game is played entirely from a seated position, a restriction imposed by Schafer himself. “I get really uncomfortable and have simulation sickness,” he said. “We wanted to know our game would be playable to everybody, including people susceptible to that.”

Rhombus gets around Schafer’s movement constraint by using Raz’s power of clairvoyance to let the player see through the eyes of any character in their vision. It’s a twist on the “teleportation” gimmick common to seated VR experiences, backing up the warp-based travel mechanic with the game’s lore. “It’s not just a random teleportation,” Schafer said. “You’re using clairvoyance to see the world from someone else’s point of view.”

It’s more than just an excuse to let the seated player see more of the world, though — it’s an empathic experience. Some characters in the game perceive the world differently than Raz, and while using clairvoyance, the player can see those discrepancies first-hand. “Everyone doesn’t just see the world from a different 3D space,” Schafer said. “They see it from a different emotional place, too. We try to show that with the gameplay.”

This adds a new twist to the traditional adventure-game mechanics Rhombus thrives on. Sure, you’re looking for clues for physical puzzles in the game world, but you’re also looking for clues on how to help other characters based on how they personally see that world. “You have to understand what they’re going through in order to figure out what would help them get out of it,” Schafer said. It adds a layer of empathy to the game’s puzzles. “Getting inside someone’s mind helps you see their world, feel their pain, see what scares them.” Schafer describes it as the game’s emotional core. “I think at its root, Psychonauts has always been about empathy.”

Tim Schafer adds one more thing as I pack up and leave his office. “Did I mention the game’s fun?” It is.

The Google Now launcher for Android may be discontinued soon

One of the most annoying things about Android has long been the custom skins that manufacturers would slap on top of the operating system. Things have gotten better in recent years, but plenty of users would be happier using Android as Google intended. Fortunately, Google has offered a home screen launcher based on the software it put in the Nexus series of phones for a while now. But now that the company has moved on to the Pixel smartphone line, complete with its own redesigned launcher, the old “Google Now” launcher is being put out to pasture.

According to Android Police, Google has sent emails to partners using Google Mobile Services (GMS) to let them know the Now launcher will be removed from the Play Store as well as the GMS package in Q1 of 2017. However, the company notes that those who still want the search and card feed you get when swiping right on the Android home screen can get that using the “Search Launcher” app that is found in GMS.

As for how this will affect Android users, those who might buy a phone and want to replace its launcher with Google Now are out of luck. Fortunately, almost every Android phone out there has adopted the “swipe right on the home screen for Google search” UI convention, so you can get the most important feature of the Now launcher right there. There’s also a chance that the company will open up the Pixel launcher to work with other Android phones sooner or later — that’s exactly what it did with the Google Now launcher, after all. You just might need to wait a bit before you can have an official way to re-skin your phone to match the Pixel, that’s all.

Source: Android Police

The way to a man’s heart is actually through WiFi

They say you can’t hide what’s in your heart, but the saying is doubly true for an Ohio man whose pacemaker data has been used to indict him on felony charges of aggravated arson and insurance fraud.

Police investigating a fire at Ross Compton’s house said he gave statements that were “inconsistent” with the evidence. Compton didn’t reckon on authorities obtaining a search warrant for all electronic data stored in his cardiac pacing device, and now he’s going up the river for burning his own house down.

According to court documents obtained by press, the data from Compton’s pacemaker, examined by investigators, included his heart rate, pacer demand and cardiac rhythms prior to, during and after the September 2016 fire.

A cardiologist who reviewed that data concluded it was “improbable Mr. Compton would have been able to collect, pack and remove the number of items from the house, exit his bedroom window and carry numerous large and heavy items to the front of his residence during the short period of time he has indicated, due to his medical conditions.”

Meaning, they looked at the time window of the fire and his tale of escape along with his heart rate, and decided that his story didn’t add up. That’s as far as we know, anyway. If we learned anything from the St. Jude stock debacle, it’s that implantable medical devices and their home monitors probably carry (and probably leak) data that could pin a person down more than a few heated beats at the wrong time. Like transmitting activity records, heart rate logs, and sensitive patient information.

Last September short-selling firm Muddy Waters and its business partner, security company MedSec Holdings, released a scathing and now-contested company report saying that pacemakers and heart devices made by St. Jude Medical had critical security flaws.

Effectively, it’s only thanks to hackers that the general public has learned that pacemakers have built-in functionality for wireless communication. This means a lot can be learned about our activities by what networks they connect to, and when. The interface is largely for remote monitoring purposes, where a device connects to a server at the vendor to transmit device logs and patient information.

This is the medical Internet of Things. And now it’s a tool for authorities and insurance investigators.

His heart wasn’t in it

Mr. Compton had originally told officers that when he realized there was a fire he packed a suitcase and some bags, then broke his bedroom window and threw everything out of the house before packing up his car. He claimed to have escaped with his belongings and his life. A neighbor told press that when he saw Compton carrying a computer tower, Mr. Compton asked him for help putting it into his car.

According to a search warrant obtained by media, fire investigators said there were multiple points of origin of the fire from the outside of the residence. Compton’s statements to 911 also conflicted with what he told police, and he was arrested just two days after the fire. It’s likely he never thought that in a million years his pacemaker would rat him out. And why would he?

It was just a matter of time until we started to find out if medical device data is protected by the Fifth Amendment’s safeguards for self-incrimination. Those following the fingerprint-password debates know that a Virginia Circuit Court judge ruled in October 2014 that giving biometric data is not the same as divulging knowledge.

Compton’s heart condition was well known by investigators from the get-go: He was briefly hospitalized after the fire with a related medical issue. So it’s not too much of a leap for someone to wonder if there was a way to track his movements after a fashion with the constant record being created by his pacemaker.

Sounds like a pretty damning avenue for investigation, using pacemakers to catch criminals with an ironclad dataset for prosecution. Except as one hacker found out when she had to be kitted out with a heart device, these internal trackers don’t always give off the correct data.

Infosec professional Marie Moe got her pacemaker in an emergency procedure to save her life, but it wasn’t long before she realized the pitfalls of these deeply personal IOT devices. Soon, she was debugging her own heart, which sounds almost romantic, except it’s not. Because she was younger than the typical pacemaker user, hers required a lot of adjusting.

Moe experienced months of trial-and-error tweaking from doctors who couldn’t quite get her heart’s tuning right. She said: “This was complicated by a software bug in the programming device that they used to adjust the settings of the pacemaker. The bug caused the actual settings of my device to differ from the those displayed on the screen at the hospital that the pacemaker technician was seeing.”

The impact of this was significant, as Moe explained. “The consequence of this greatly affected my well being. If I tried to run after the bus or climb up stairs I would suddenly get out of breath. The pacemaker was detecting my pulse to be outside the upper heart rate limit, which was erroneously configured to 160 beats per minute. When I reached this heart rate, the pacemaker would suddenly cut my pulse in half to 80 beats per minute due to a safety mechanism.”

Not only could the device be performing improperly and sending incorrect information “home” to its servers, Moe discovered that she wasn’t allowed to access her own data. Along with other pacemaker users, she started fighting for her rights to get access to the data that their devices are collecting.

It feels very ominous and Big Brother-y, that authorities can just grab data from devices inside your body without your consent.

Of course, it’s not just implanted medical devices that monitor people’s heart rates, transmit device logs and bodily information — and snitch out anyone with something to hide. Fitness trackers like Fitbit, Garmin, and Jawbone are increasingly being used as admissible evidence in court cases. The difference here is, that you can’t just leave a pacemaker on the bedside table when you want.

If we were all living in a dystopian fiction novel, Mr. Compton’s crime getting foiled by Big Brother’s access to the actual inner workings of his heart would be somewhat chilling in its implications.

Good thing our current climate doesn’t feel dystopian or unreal at all right now.

iOS cracking tools reportedly used by FBI released to public

Last year, the FBI ordered Apple to help crack the iPhone 5c owned by Syed Farook, one of the shooters in the 2015 attacks in San Bernardino. Apple refused, and the FBI reportedly worked with Cellebrite, an Israeli firm that specializes in mobile security. According to a statement from Celelbrite last month, a hacker breached one of its legacy servers. Now the hacker has released some of that data as a warning to the FBI.

The data released includes code that seems to relate to Cellebrite’s Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED), and can allegedly crack older iPhones like the 5c as well as Android and Blackberry devices.

Speaking anonymously to Motherboard, the hacker explained that simply creating these tools makes their release inevitable, where they can be used by anyone with technical knowledge, including oppressive regimes around the world.

“It’s important to demonstrate that when you create these tools, they will make it out. History should make that clear,” they told Motherboard.

The ReadMe files on Pastebin.

Claiming to have taken the tools from Cellebrite’s own servers, the hacker says they were able to get into the encrypted files and post them on Pastebin, a popular code repository. Some of the code seems to have been lifted from publically accessible jailbreaking code, as well.

A spokesperson for the firm told Motherboard that the files did not include source code, only packaging information.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said at the time that creating this type of “backdoor” software would be “terrible for public safety.”

While the currently released cracking tools do not include ways to break into current device models, the warning is clear: Once made, tools like this don’t stay private for long.

Via: MacRumors

Source: Motherboard

Planet acquires Google’s Terra Bella satellite imaging division

Google’s has officially sold off it’s satellite imaging division. An announcement from rival imaging company Planet confirms it will acquire Terra Bella from Google and take over operation of its seven high-resolution SkySat satellites. Once the deal closes, Google will start purchasing images for Google Earth and other products directly from Planet.

Google purchased Terra Bella — originally called Skybox Imaging — for $500 million in 2014. Under Google’s wing, the company launched a constellation of sub-meter resolution satellites to give Google Maps a sharper focus. Although Planet did not disclose the terms of the deal, earlier reports from the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg suggested Alphabet would get an equity stake in Planet in exchange for handing over its imaging hardware. According to Planet co-founder and CEO Will Marshall, some of Terra Bella employees will be joining Planet’s team.

“We’ve long admired what the team at Terra Bella has achieved,” Marshall wrote, “and we think the SkySat constellation of 7 high resolution satellites is highly complementary to Planet’s existing medium resolution 60-satellite fleet. […] The two systems under one roof will be truly unique and will enable valuable new capabilities.”

Later this month, Planet’s constellation will grow even bigger when the company launches a record-breaking 88 new Dove satellites. With that many cameras in the sky, Planet will soon be able to photograph every corner of the globe on a daily basis.

Source: Planet

MacRumors Giveaway: Win a Headphones Prize Pack From Satechi

For this week’s giveaway, we’ve teamed up with Satechi to give MacRumors readers a chance to win a prize pack that includes wireless headphones, a headphones case, and a stand for the headphones.

Satechi’s Aluminum Wireless Headphones are designed to match Apple’s line of iPhones and are available in four complementary colors: Space Gray, Silver, Gold, and Rose Gold. Priced at $69.99, the headphones feature comfortable ear cups and connect to the iPhone using Bluetooth 4.0.

The headphones are made from aluminum, much like Apple’s own devices, and according to Satechi, they deliver high-quality sound at a range of up to 33 feet. A single battery charge powers them for 18 hours, and there’s a built-in microphone for making phone calls.

Alongside the headphones, Satechi is including its $20 Synthetic Leather Headphone Case, which has a hard outer shell to keep the headphones safe when stashed inside a bag or backpack.

When at home, the headphones can be stored on Satechi’s Slim Aluminum Headphone Stand, also included. The stand, priced at $28, is able to work with any brand of headset or headphones you own, and it comes in four colors to match Apple’s line of iPhones.

We have three Satechi prize packs to give away. To enter to win, use the Rafflecopter widget below and enter an email address. Email addresses will be used solely for contact purposes to reach the winner and send the prize. You can earn additional entries by subscribing to our weekly newsletter, subscribing to our YouTube channel, following us on Twitter, or visiting the MacRumors Facebook page.

Due to the complexities of international laws regarding giveaways, only U.S. residents who are 18 years of age or older are eligible to enter. To offer feedback or get more information on the giveaway restrictions, please refer to our Site Feedback section, as that is where discussion of the rules will be redirected.

a Rafflecopter giveaway
The contest will run from today (February 3) at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time through 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time on February 10. The winners will be chosen randomly on February 10 and will be contacted by email. The winners will have 48 hours to respond and provide a shipping address before new winners are chosen.

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