Dutch judges: Decryption orders could violate human rights

A Dutch draft law that aims to introduce a decryption order that forces suspects to decrypt data on their computers could violate the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), said the Dutch Council for the Judiciary on Wednesday.

Several E.U. countries such as France, Belgium and the U.K. already have laws that compel individuals or companies to decrypt data requested by law enforcement authorities for investigations.

In the U.K for instance, failure to comply could mean a prison sentence of up to two years for cases not involving national security or five years for those that do. Refusing to give access to encrypted material if requested by a judge or another person with appropriate permission can be punished with a maximum jail sentence of one year and a fine in Belgium.

In France, punishment can be as high as three years in jail and a fine of €45,000 (US$59,000) if someone refuses to hand over the key to encrypted files that may have been used to prepare, aid or commit a crime. If it turns out the disclosure of the keys could have prevented a crime or diminish the effects of a crime, the punishment can go up to five years in jail and a €75,000 fine.

In the Netherlands, a similar law is being readied. Deliberately refusing to comply with a decryption order would be punishable by a maximum prison sentence of three years or a fine with a maximum of €19,500 should the law enter into force, according to the draft law’s explanatory statement.

The Dutch government wants to introduce the decryption order because detection of computer crime is hampered by the use of encryption, especially in cases of child pornography, according to the document.
However, introducing a law that forces suspects to decrypt information could violate Article 6 of the ECHR, which states that a person doesn’t have to incriminate oneself, said the Council for the Judiciary in a letter sent to the Minister of Safety and Justice dated July 4 and published on Wednesday.

While it is part of the Dutch Judiciary, the Council itself does not actually adjudicate legal matters. Instead, the Council is dedicated to ensuring that the courts of law can perform their duties effectively. It also represents the interests of the courts in the political arena as well as in administration and government, notably to the Minister of Security and Justice.

While the ministry maintains that the proposed law can operate within the boundaries of Article 6, the council is not sure that is possible.

A judge could conclude that the decryption order does violate Article 6 of the ECHR, which may have consequences for the usefulness of the evidence of the results of such an order, the Council said. The Council recommended reconsidering the relationship between the proposed decryption order and Article 6 of the ECHR and when doing so, to take a close look at a recent case, Chambaz v. Switzerland.


In that case, the European Court of Human Rights ruled last year that the right not to incriminate oneself and the right of access to evidence held by the prosecuting authorities were not respected when Yves Chambaz was fined several hundred thousand euros for refusing to produce all the documents requested in relation to his business dealings with a company and banks in a tax evasion case.

Microsoft reorg could fix some problems, create others

Steve Ballmer’s grand plan to reinvent Microsoft has garnered mixed reviews from industry analysts, ranging from enthusiastic endorsements to frowning skepticism.

Some predict the reorganization will accomplish its goal of making Microsoft more efficient and innovative, and thus better able to compete against rivals like Apple, Oracle, IBM and Google. Others are concerned that internal accountability will drop and the company will become less responsive to customer needs and market inflections.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer

At the heart of the restructuring, announced Thursday, is the dissolution of the company’s five business units—the Business Division, which housed Office; Server & Tools, which included SQL Server and System Center; the Windows Division; Online Services, which included Bing; and Entertainment and Devices, whose main product was the Xbox console.

They’re being replaced by four engineering groups organized by function, around operating systems, applications, cloud computing and devices, and by centralized groups for marketing, business development, strategy and research, finance, human resources, legal and operations.

Ballmer wants the company to operate more cohesively, so it can build blockbuster products that cater to the needs of people both at home and at work in a variety of ways.

“The form of delivery of our value will shift to really thinking about devices and services versus packaged software,” Ballmer said during a press conference Thursday.

“We need to move forward as one Microsoft, with one strategy and one set of goals,” he added.

Teams will work in an interdisciplinary fashion on all major projects to make sure efforts are in sync with the overall goals of the company, according to Ballmer.

Tom Austin, a Gartner analyst, is skeptical of this shift from business units to functional groups.

“The business of business is business. Companies should be organized by major business units, not by functional units,” he said.

With this new setup, it may become harder for outsiders such as customers, partners, investors and analysts to decipher Microsoft’s strategy and evaluate its performance, he said. In short, he fears there will be less transparency and visibility into the company.

“I would have preferred that there was a clear message they were going to continue to manage and report by business. Whether they structure [the company] that way or not is less material,” Austin said.

“The value of transparency is that it lets customers and investors make more informed decisions as to the level of accuracy or spin that are in Microsoft’s executive statements,” he added.

IDC analyst Al Gillen views the plan with more optimism, saying Microsoft is making necessary, bold changes.

“Microsoft’s core business is being undermined by changes in the market and the company needs to be more responsive and think about things differently than it has in the past,” he said.

Among the main challenges Microsoft faces are the weak position of Windows in smartphones and tablets, where it lags far behind Android and iOS, and the increased competition against Office from rivals like Google that offer less expensive, cloud-hosted alternatives.

Microsoft has responded to those threats with Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, and with Office 365, a suite that includes cloud-delivered versions of its productivity apps like Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and Web-hosted versions of its server products like SharePoint, Lync and Exchange.

However, Windows 8 and its version for ARM devices, Windows RT, launched in October, weren’t well-received, prompting Microsoft to prep an update called Windows 8.1 that will be released this year. Meanwhile, Office 365 continues to battle Google Apps and other competing communication and collaboration suites. For example, Microsoft spent US$1.2 billion a year ago to buy Yammer and boost SharePoint’s enterprise social networking capabilities.

The four new engineering teams are the Operating Systems Engineering Group, led by Terry Myerson; the Devices and Studios Engineering Group, led by Julie Larson-Green; the Applications and Services Engineering Group, led by Qi Lu; and the Cloud and Enterprise Engineering Group, led by Satya Nadella.

“We’ll pull together into fewer core engineering groups, and we’ll pull together all the other functions and disciplines under leaders that work for me directly,” Ballmer said.

The Operating Systems Engineering Group will focus on Windows development for gaming consoles, mobile devices, PCs and back-end server systems, including OS cloud services. With this realignment, Microsoft is seeking a unified, common Windows presence and experience across those devices and systems, which it doesn’t have today and which enterprise customers especially could find compelling.

“It’s important and a positive move to integrate all operating system development into a single team,” Gillen said.

At the Devices and Studios Engineering Group, Larson-Green, until now one of the two Windows OS chiefs, will focus on all hardware development and their supply chain strategy. This group will also be in charge of “studios experiences” including games, music, video and other entertainment. Microsoft seems interested in boosting its efforts to build its own hardware, building on its experience developing the Xbox console and the Surface tablets, thus mimicking to an extent Apple’s successful model.

The Applications and Services Engineering Group will be in charge of applications and services technologies in productivity, communication, search and other information categories. It will be interesting to see how the realignment works in this group, since the Office stack and the consumer online services had traditionally belonged to separate groups.

However, with Office 365, those lines are blurring, in particular with the recent decision to mesh Skype, which is primarily a consumer IM and VoIP service, with its enterprise equivalent, Lync. In the press conference, Qi Lu said that whether it’s Bing, Office or Skype, Microsoft applications are all about helping people complete tasks and get work done.

Meanwhile, the Cloud and Enterprise Engineering Group will be in charge of back-end technologies, including technologies for data centers, databases and enterprise IT systems and development tools. Its leader, Nadella, had been in charge of the Servers and Tools group, which had been performing well financially. A focus for this group will continue to be the company’s Azure cloud platform.

The Dynamics enterprise software products will continue to operate separately under Kirill Tatarinov, but report to Lu, Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner and Tami Reller, the other former Windows chief who will now head the Marketing Group. As part of the plan, Craig Mundie will work on a “special project” until the end of this calendar year, and assume a consultant role starting in 2014. Office chief Kurt Del Bene resigned from the company Wednesday, though his official last day will be Dec. 31.

Michael Osterman, from Osterman Research, views as positive the shift away from product-centric, siloed teams to a more unified approach that is focused on what customers need from devices and services.

“This is a good thing,” he said. “They need to realign the company to be more responsive to customers.”

The reorganization may yield a sharper marketing focus and strategy, an area where Microsoft has at times been weak, Osterman said.

Frank Gillett, a Forrester Research analyst, concurs. “This demonstrates a commitment to build an integrated, coherent Microsoft experience. It wasn’t incoherent before, but it also wasn’t well-coordinated,” Gillett said.

What’s not clear to Gillett is how exactly this will be carried out, and he foresees it being a major endeavor. “I’m not seeing an overall head of products. That concerns me,” he said.

Others view the “One Microsoft” effort with skepticism, especially if it results in a doubling-down on what critics call the “Microsoft first” strategy, which they blame for Microsoft’s reluctance, for example, to fully port Office to other operating systems like iOS and Android despite massive demand, in order to give Windows a competitive advantage.

“[One Microsoft] should do wonders for CIOs who are all in for Microsoft, but it should strike fear in the heart of CIOs who were hoping that Microsoft would decouple Office from Windows,” Austin said.

Over the years, Microsoft critics have suggested the company’s product lines are too diverse, and that certain businesses should be spun off as autonomous subsidiaries or even independent companies. Clearly, Ballmer has taken the opposite tack.

The implementation of the plan should take at least three months, maybe more, said Gillen, who considers this the company’s biggest reorganization ever. Microsoft will need to continue tweaking the plan in the coming years based on market changes.

“Is this the only and last thing they’ll have to do? No. They’ll have to continue responding to changes in the industry, and they’ll have to continue adjusting the organizational structure,” he said.

Or as Gillett put it: “They needed to do something and they’re making big changes that make sense. Now we’ll have to wait and see how it plays out.”

This is not a toy: Oculus Rift's virtual talents could transform real lives

Nonny de la Peña is a journalist, but she doesn’t report tragedies. She helps you experience them. She mixes virtual reality with real-world audio clips to drop you into the role of an observer as chaos unfolds in a food bank line in Los Angeles, or into the virtual shoes of a detainee bound for Gitmo. More than mere words, her works are a punch in the gut.

Annette Mossel is a Ph.D. candidate and lecturer at the Interactive Media Systems Group at Vienna University of Technology, but her interest in virtual worlds delivers tangible benefits. One IMSG project trains amputees to use their new muscle-sensing myoelectric prostheses—months before the complex device is actually manufactured. More than mere theory, her VR work helps people regain control of their physical capabilities much faster than was previously possible.

There’s no doubt about it: Virtual reality has the potential to profoundly alter our lives. So far, though, its reach has rarely extended beyond well-funded institutes and government agencies.

That could soon change, however—thanks in large measure to PC gaming accessories like the Oculus Rift, a gaming-focused VR headset “designed for immersive games” but capable of so, so much more. Mere toys? Ha. These devices could be the keys that unlock the future.

The author exploring the Oculus Rift's virtual movie theater at E3.
My eyes were opened to the potential of the Oculus Rift at this year’s E3 gaming convention, where I tried the VR headset for the first time. While the game-related portion of the demo was impressive, the VR Cinema 3D trial truly blew my mind.

VR Cinema 3D, an Oculus-compatible app created by Joo-Hyung Ahn using the popular Unity game engine, dropped me into a movie theater, complete with rows of seats and a flickering projector behind me. After a moment, a theatrical trailer for The Hangover Part III sprang to life on the big screen.

Sure, it sounds simple, and it was. But the sense of just plain being there was palpable: I felt as though I were truly sitting in a cinema seat, giggling at Zach Galifianakis. The Oculus Rift’s wide field of view completely blocked out the real world and immersed me in the digital, while the responsive sensor package built into the Rift tracked my head movements flawlessly. I was in that theater. The only thing missing was the popcorn.

Oculus VRThe VRCinema3D app in action.
“With this technology,” says Brendan Iribe, CEO of Oculus VR, “the field of view (FOV) is so wide that a switch in your brain flips, and within a few seconds your brain feels like that is reality. It feels that what it’s looking at is actually where you are. If you have a small FOV, like many of the previous devices out there, your brain knows it’s looking at a screen.”

Visions of a virtual Jurassic Park danced through my head. That 3-minute demo convinced me that the Rift’s potential extends far beyond games—and apparently, I was late to the realization.

UndercurrentSomething similar to the Undercurrent exploration game could easily be used as a "virtual field trip" tool.
“In the first 30 days on Kickstarter, we started getting almost inundated with emails from people in [nongaming] markets,” says Iribe. “A lot of them came from medical fields, the military, architecture, automobile design, even fitness. There were just so many people reaching out to us.”

With a little imagination, it’s easy to envision scads of nongaming uses for an affordable VR device like the Oculus Rift.

Fenix FireThe Oculus Rift demo's Tuscan villa.
An early tech demo for the Rift, dubbed “Tuscany,” let users explore a virtual villa in the Italian countryside. Imagine the technology being used to explore foreign locales or historical events as part of an educational curriculum, or a Total Recall–esque tourism service. Something like Undercurrent could be converted to allow students to explore the Titanic shipwreck. Already, Titans of Space offers a jaunt through a built-to-scale solar system.

“You can immerse [yourself] in places which are virtual or even real, but remote,” says Mossel. “Imagine watching through a robot’s eyes that is exploring a cave, or another environment that is too dangerous for humans to go. Turning your head…could also trigger the robot to turn its head.”

But the Oculus Rift could be used for more than simple exploration.

Interactive Media Systems Group/Vienna University of TechnologyMossel's IMSG uses VR headsets with armband-style sensors to help amputees become accustomed to their prosthetics—before the prosthetics are attached. (Images show a nonamputee for reference.)
Tours of exotic locations could entice would-be exercisers to use treadmills and stationary bikes. Teens could learn to drive in virtual cars before hitting the real road. VR replicas of the entire Library of Congress— complete with a full selection of readable books—could replace e-readers. Much of Mossel’s IMSG work, such as the aforementioned prosthesis training and Playmancer, focuses on physical therapy and rehabilitation. Others are using VR for mental therapy, helping veterans to overcome post-traumatic stress disorder. Immersive journalism can virtually embed us at important events, shattering the fishbowl-gazing vibe of watching the news on the flatscreen.

Nonny de la PeÑaNonny de la Peña's "Hunger in Los Angeles" puts you in the role of an observer at a food bank line marred by tragedy. It re-creates an actual event and uses audio captured at the scene.
Both Iribe and Mossel are excited about potential social VR applications. Mossel notes that speedier Internet technology, together with improvements to CPU and GPU processing power, “make it possible to build shared collaborative VR systems where users can interact remotely in real-time.”

Iribe takes a more personal tack. “What happens when you look not just a video game bot or monster in the eyes, but when you’re in a social multiplayer experience when you look your friend in the eye in this virtual environment?” he ponders. “You’ll really feel connected to them because you’re looking them in the eyes, and your mouth is moving to your lips using the audio in the game. That’s going to spark a lot of emotion that has never been sparked before.”

Second Life never sounded so potentially awesome.

“Can you imagine the educational possibilities?” asks de la Peña, who feels that VR is on the verge of mainstream adoption. “They’re limitless, just limitless. But they’ve taken a few things to come together.”

Indeed they have—and a lot of those things were designed first and foremost for PC gaming.

Design engineers use Canon's "Mixed Reality" augmented VR headset, which costs $125,000 up front, with additional annual maintenance charges of $25,000—not exactly consumer-friendly pricing.
Virtual reality is nothing new, of course.

Specialized VR tools have been around for a while now, training soldiers to shoot, pilots to fly, and disabled people to conquer their handicaps. But up until now, the high cost of virtual reality setups has severely limited their adoption. The jankiest VR headsets out there cost north of $1000; many rigs run in the tens or (gulp!) hundreds of thousands.

Could 'Kingdom Hearts III' Include 'Star Wars' Characters?

On a basic level, it's an idea that seems like simple math: The Kingdom Hearts video game franchise is based around the idea of Final Fantasy characters facing off against familiar Disney characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. However, these days, Disney owns a couple of other companies with fan-favorite characters some may want to see join in the fun. So is the notion of Sephiroth facing off against Darth Vader or Iron Man a possibility now that Disney controls Star Wars and The Avengers?

Apparently, that very question was one of the first things Tetsuya Nomura, director of the upcoming Kingdom Hearts III, was asked. During an interview with French Final Fantasy website Finaland, Nomura revealed that those involved with the Kingdom Hearts series have "been talking about Star Wars itself since it became Disney’s content recently," adding: "When I heard the news I was like 'Wow! Wow!.' "

"Of course it would be great if we could add those licenses as well," Nomura said when asked about the possibility of seeing either Star Wars or Marvel characters in future editions of the game. However, he went on, "there are lots of rules and restrictions by Disney, so we can’t actually put everything people want."

You don't have to lose all hope if your heart was set on seeing Sora and Darth Maul go head to head for a Keyblade/Lightsaber clash, however. Nomura teased that his team is "gonna prepare some surprises for you, so just wait for the information."

Missing Spaces? TotalSpaces could be the cure

Tips, tricks and solutions for your Mac problems

Reader Greg Zambo longs for a feature he once enjoyed in Snow Leopard. He writes:

I am generally happy with Mountain Lion but I remember that there was a feature in an earlier version of OS X that seems to have been dropped. In Spaces, there was a number in the menu bar to tell you which “space” you were in. This is missing in Mission Control. Is there any third party utility that will bring it back?

Yes. But, unlike with some other OS tweaks, it’s not the kind of thing that Apple has simply hidden that you can reawaken with a clever Terminal command. Instead, you must turn to a tool that essentially recreates the Spaces experience of old, and adds a few tricks of its own. That tool is BinaryAge’s $18 TotalSpaces.
Like Spaces, Total Spaces will display a menu bar icon that indicates the desktop you’re currently viewing. From this icon you can select the desktop you’d like to view or choose an overview, which shows you large thumbnails of each desktop (see the image above). You can click on a desktop within this view to choose a different desktop. You can also switch to other desktops using swipe gestures on a trackpad, keyboard shortcuts, or user configurable hot corners. Or, if you like, you can assign a hotkey to a particular desktop and move to it with the press of a couple of keys.

TotalSpaces lets you configure many, many desktops. You can additionally change the transition used when switching desktops, drag windows between desktops within the overview, and assign applications to specific desktops. TotalSpaces supports full screen applications as well as multiple monitors.
I’ve used it for a few days and it’s stable and helpful. If Mission Control isn’t giving you the Spaces you need, TotalSpaces is worth a look. Give the 14-day trial a whirl and see what you think.

Disruptions: How Driverless Cars Could Reshape Cities

Jeff Swensen for The New York Times A self-driving car at Carnegie Mellon. Researchers have been contemplating how cities could change if our cars start driving for us, including having narrower streets because parking spots might not be necessary.
SAN FRANCISCO — By now, seeing one of Google’s experimental, driverless cars zipping down Silicon Valley’s Highway 101, or parking itself on a San Francisco street, is not all that unusual. Indeed, as automakers like Audi, Toyota and Mercedes-Benz make plans for self-driving vehicles, it is only a matter of time before such cars become a big part of the great American traffic jam.

While driverless cars might still seem like science fiction outside the Valley, the people working and thinking about these technologies are starting to ask what these autos could mean for the city of the future. The short answer is “a lot.”

Imagine a city where you don’t drive in loops looking for a parking spot because your car drops you off and scoots off to some location to wait, sort of like taxi holding pens at airports. Or maybe it is picked up by a robotic minder and carted off with other vehicles, like a row of shopping carts.

A test of Google’s self-driving car.
Inner-city parking lots could become parks. Traffic lights could be less common because hidden sensors in cars and streets coordinate traffic. And, yes, parking tickets could become a rarity since cars would be smart enough to know where they are not supposed to be.

As scientists and car companies forge ahead — many expect self-driving cars to become commonplace in the next decade — researchers, city planners and engineers are contemplating how city spaces could change if our cars start doing the driving for us. There are risks, of course: People might be more open to a longer daily commute, leading to even more urban sprawl.

That city of the future could have narrower streets because parking spots would no longer be necessary. And the air would be cleaner because people would drive less. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 30 percent of driving in business districts is spent in a hunt for a parking spot, and the agency estimates that almost one billion miles of driving is wasted that way every year.

“What automation is going to allow is repurposing, both of spaces in cities, and of the car itself,” said Ryan Calo, an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law, who specializes in robotics and drones.

Harvard University researchers note that as much as one-third of the land in some cities is devoted to parking spots. Some city planners expect that the cost of homes will fall as more space will become available in cities. If parking on city streets is reduced and other vehicles on roadways become smaller, homes and offices will take up that space. Today’s big-box stores and shopping malls require immense areas for parking, but without those needs, they could move further into cities.

The Autonomous Intersection Management project, created by the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, imagines cities where traffic lights no longer exist but sensors direct the flow of traffic. Although a video showing off the automated traffic intersection looks like total chaos, the researchers insist that such intersections will reduce congestion and fuel costs and can allow cars to drive through cities without stopping.

Of course, getting to a utopian city will take a little longer than circling the block looking for a spot. A spokesman for Audi said a fully automated car would not be available until the end of the decade. And the regulatory issues to be addressed before much of this could come true are, to put it mildly, forbidding.

But the pieces are starting to fall into place, at least enough to excite future-minded thinkers. Last year, Jerry Brown, the governor of California, signed legislation paving the way for driverless cars in California, making it the third state to explicitly allow the cars on the road. And federal agencies are starting to consider their impact. In May the Transportation Department made its first formal policy statement on autonomous vehicles, encouraging cities to allow testing of driverless cars.

But to some, this promise — or overpromise as the case may be — sounds familiar.

“The future city is not going to be a congestion-free environment. That same prediction was made that cars would free cities from the congestion of horses on the street,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School and a member of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford. “You have to build the sewer system to accommodate the breaks during the Super Bowl; it won’t be as pretty as we’re envisioning.”

Mr. Smith has an alternative vision of the impact of automated cars, which he believes are inevitable. Never mind that nice city center. He says that driverless cars will allow people to live farther from their offices and that the car could become an extension of home.

“I could sleep in my driverless car, or have an exercise bike in the back of the car to work out on the way to work,” he said. “My time spent in my car will essentially be very different.”

“Driverless cars won’t appear in a vacuum,” Mr. Smith said. Other predictions for the future city imagine fewer traditional-looking cars. Taking their place will be drones and robots that deliver goods.

Oh, and that food-delivery car double-parked outside? That, Mr. Calo said, will be replaced by a delivery drone.

Follow me on Twitter @sajilpl

Same-Sex Marriage Law Could Mean Wedding Bells for Straight Hollywood Couples

Wedding bells may be ringing for more than just gay Hollywood in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision to strike down Prop 8, legalizing same-sex marriage in the state of California.

Kristen Bell marked the occasion by asking her fiancé (and father of her baby girl) Dax Shepard to finally tie the knot after four years of betrothal.

STORY: Supreme Court Strikes Down Gay Marriage Ban: Hollywood Reacts

"@daxshepard1 will you marry me? Xo," wrote Bell, to which her future husband replied, "F--- yes!!!"

See, Bell and Shepard said that they wouldn't make their union official until their gay friends could do the same.

"Once it's official and everybody stops appealing it the minute before it passes, we'll get married," the House of Lies star said on Larry King Now in August 2012.

But the future Mr. and Mrs. Shepard are hardly alone. They join several other straight Hollywood couples -- and singles -- who have made similar pacts.

In 2006, longtime partners Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie made clear that they would not tie the knot until all couples could, with the actor telling Esquire that "Angie and I will consider tying the knot when everyone else in the country who wants to be married is legally able." And while Pitt did put a ring on it in 2012, the duo has yet to make it down the aisle.

Q&A: What the Supreme Court's Prop 8 Ruling Means for California

Sarah Silverman made her stance known via Twitter back in 2010, slamming those straight couples who wed prior to marriage equality.

"Just a suggestion: Boycott marriage until it's legal 4 everyone," she wrote. "If u marry in this climate u are against equal rights."

Charlize Theron has said that she opposes the institution of marriage as a whole, but expressed disdain for the government dictating that decision for others.

"It's a divine right, and when government starts to tell us who can love and what is good love… I do have a problem with that," she told Piers Morgan in 2011. "I do have a problem with the fact that our government hasn't stepped up enough to make this federal, to make [gay marriage] legal."

Jason Mraz popped the question to Tristan Prettyman in 2010, but told Us Weekly that they weren't quite ready to follow through.

"The wedding would be nice for our family, our friends, our community -- our moms especially -- and so it puts us in the fight. We can't get married until [gay] marriage is legal and equal… I think giving people the right to marry will be a huge movement in civil rights," he said. However, the duo has since called off their engagement.

But not every star in favor of marriage-for-all has stuck to their guns. Natalie Portman, Howard Stern and Jodie Sweetin have all, at one time or another, said they'd swear off the nuptials until same-sex couples had the same rights.

Their statuses: Married, married and separated (from her third husband), respectively.

Follow me on Twitter @sajilpl

Boston bombing suspect accused in four deaths, could face execution

BOSTON - Accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was indicted by a federal grand jury on Thursday on charges of killing four people in the largest mass-casualty attack on U.S. soil since September 11, 2001.

The 30-count indictment filed in Boston federal court charges the 19-year-old ethnic Chechen with setting off two homemade pressure-cooker bombs in a crowd of thousands at the race's finish line and with committing a carjacking and engaging in a gunbattle with police before his April 19 arrest.

Tsarnaev could be executed if convicted. His public defender, Miriam Conrad, declined to comment on the charges, which include use of a weapon of mass destruction, bombing a public place and carjacking during four days that traumatized the Boston area.

"Today's charges reflect the serious and violent nature of the event ... the defendant's alleged conduct forever changed lives," said Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. Attorney in Massachusetts. She said she had met with several of the people who were wounded in the attack and relatives of those who were killed.

"We will do all that we can to pursue justice, not only on their behalf but on behalf of all of us," Ortiz said.

The April 15 bombing was followed by the shooting of a campus police officer in Cambridge, a carjacking and a late-night gunbattle with police in the nearby suburb of Watertown. Dzhokhar's 26-year-old brother Tamerlan died in the gunbattle, which led to a daylong lockdown of most of the Boston area.

That evening, Dzhokhar was found hiding in a boat in a resident's backyard and arrested after police fired a hail of bullets.

The brothers started preparing for the attack more than two months earlier, when Tamerlan traveled to a New Hampshire fireworks store to buy 48 mortar shells containing about eight pounds (3.6 kg) of explosive powder, according to the charges.

Three people died in the bomb attacks: 29-year-old restaurant manager Krystle Campbell, 23-year-old graduate student Lingzi Lu and 8-year-old Martin Richard. Days later, the pair killed a campus policeman in their attempt to escape arrest, the charges said.

The younger Tsarnaev was not present at the indictment, and Ortiz declined to comment on his condition or where he was being held. He was badly injured in the April 19 gun battle and had been held in a prison hospital west of Boston. He is scheduled to be arraigned on July 10.

EXECUTION LOOMS?

Ortiz said U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder would make the final decision on whether to seek the death penalty. Legal experts said that while the large scale of the attack could motivate the government to seek the death penalty, his defense could argue that he did not fully understand his actions.

"There will be claims about his youth, about his role, the theory that it was his brother that was pulling all the strings and that this guy was a secondary mover," said Richard Broughton, an assistant professor at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law and a former federal prosecutor.

"We haven't really had a case like this," said Karen Greenberg, director of the center on national security at Fordham Law School in New York. "Because of the lethality of this attack, it really is different from other terrorism prosecutions we've seen for a long time."

Since the World Trade Center attack in 2001, most such prosecutions have focused on failed plots, such as shoe bomber Richard Reid, who tried to blow up a plane over the Atlantic in December 2001 and is now serving a life sentence. In 2006 a jury rejected the death penalty for Zacarias Moussaoui, convicted as one of the conspirators behind the September 11, 2001 attacks.

In November, 2012, a federal judge in Massachusetts sentenced Rezwan Ferdaus to 17 years, including a decade of supervised release, after he pleaded guilty to charges stemming from a plot to a plot to fly remote-controlled planes into the U.S. Capitol building and the Pentagon. He was arrested in a sting operation after undercover agents provided him with inert explosives that he told them he planned to use.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been on a U.S. government database of potential terrorism suspects and Russia has twice warned the United States that he might be an Islamic militant, according to U.S. security officials.

A congressional hearing after the bombing focused on whether the FBI paid sufficient heed to Moscow, which has been in bitter conflict with Islamic militants in Chechnya and other parts of the volatile northern Caucasus region.

The Tsarnaev brothers' ethnic homeland of Chechnya, a mainly Muslim province that saw centuries of war and repression, no longer threatens to secede from Russia. But it has become a breeding ground for a form of militant Islam whose adherents have spread violence to other parts of Russia, and may have inspired the radicalization of the Boston bombers.

Follow me on Twitter @sajilpl

Square's New Online Stores Could Make Twitter Where You Shop

Image: Square

 

 

“Synergy” is one of the most abused clichés in the corporate lexicon. But when you’re both the chairman of Twitter and the CEO of one of the most-watched commerce startups around, synergy isn’t a bad place to aim.

 

Jack Dorsey may have hit the target with the launch today of Square Market, Square’s first big foray into online shopping.

 

Since launching in 2010, Square has mainly been known for its eponymous credit card reader that plugs into the headphone jack of a smartphone or tablet. And Dorsey has often spoken of the business opportunity presented by the 95 percent of commerce that happens offline.

 

Square Market not only acknowledges the reality that small retailers can no longer afford to remain offline-only; it gives them a tool to obliterate the distinction. Now any shopkeeper using Square as a cash register can simply flip a switch in the app to create an instant online store.

 

“Our mission is to make commerce easy,” Dorsey said while demo-ing the new product for Wired at Square’s San Francisco headquarters. “That doesn’t mean ‘make offline commerce easy’ or ‘make online commerce easy.’ It’s commerce in general.”

 

Square’s register works by letting store owners input their inventory—description, price, picture—into the app. When someone comes to the counter to make an offline purchase, the cashier taps the item to add it to the total. In the latest version of the app, a switch to the input screen that lets stores choose the option of selling online. Toggling the switch to “yes” instantly (at least during the demo) posts the product to that business’ Square-hosted online storefront.

 

In keeping with Square’s insistence on design that “gets out of the way,” these storefronts are stripped down to nearly the bare minimum needed to shop online—a picture, a price, a button to buy. But this isn’t just an aesthetic preference. It’s Square making a statement that the online storefront itself isn’t what’s most important. The product for sale is. This is where Twitter enters the picture.

 

You may not know that Twitter has something called a “product card” that turns a link to a product online into what amounts to a catalog listing embedded in a tweet. The product listings on Square Market don’t look much different than these cards, which is no accident. When a store owner—or anyone—tweets a link to a Square Market listing, the product card will include a buy button that flips right back over to Square. In effect, Twitter becomes the storefront.

 

Though not just Twitter. Sharing on Pinterest or Facebook accomplishes much the same thing. Square Market in that context isn’t so much a destination—though Square does hope it will become one—but a platform-agnostic backend for social selling. A product listed in Square Market becomes what Dorsey calls an “atomic unit” of commerce. The point is to highlight what’s being sold, he says, not to emphasize that it’s Square doing the selling.

 

“We don’t have to brand it explicitly. It’s all about the people using it,” Dorsey says. “Both Twitter and Square have been really great at diminishing their brands in favor of the people using them.”

 

Whether Square will need to market itself more for Square Market to catch on is a question the next several months will answer. Though Square says it handles billions of dollars in transactions annually, it’s not a ubiquitous presence on the retail landscape—with one major exception.

 

As the processor of all Starbucks credit and debit transactions in the U.S., Square has shown it can operate on the scale of a national chain, not just a farmer’s market. Dorsey is confident that the digital infrastructure that powers those transactions can handle however many online stores open in Square’s new marketplace.

 

On the front end, meanwhile, Twitter provides a massive digital marketing infrastructure capable of driving not just awareness but also commerce straight to Square, now that Square now has an online destination for that commerce to take place. “Synergy” is a word that might seem better suited to Jack Donaghy. But for Jack Dorsey, it’s looking like an increasingly good fit.

 

 

Stocks fall 1% ... but it could have been worse

The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 140 points, or 0.9%, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq lost more than 1% each. Earlier in the day, all three indexes were down between 1.5% and 2%.

Bond yields also eased back from earlier levels. The 10-year yield finished the day at 2.56% after rising to a 22-month high of 2.65%.

The stock and bond volatility came as Fed officials tried to quell concerns about the eventual end of the central bank's bond-buying program.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Dallas Federal Reserve president Richard Fisher reiterated that the central bank would not begin pulling back until "conditions were right," as they don't want to go from "Wild Turkey to 'Cold Turkey' overnight."

Related: Sell-off is a 'taper tantrum'

He said that the committee "fully understood" that there would be a significant reaction but warned big players in the financial markets against acting like "feral hogs" and testing the Fed.

The Fed's stimulus program has been a major driver of the bull market, and worries over its longevity will likely keep generating volatility in the months ahead.

The CBOE Market Volatility Index (VIX), a measure of fear, jumped above 21 to its highest level of the year before easing back slightly. And the CNNMoney Fear & Greed Index dropped further into Extreme Fear, clocking in at its lowest level since June 2012.

Click here for more on stocks, bond, commodities and currencies

Credit crunch in China? The People's Bank of China told the country's largest banks Monday to rein in risky loans and improve their balance sheets, a warning that sent a jolt through already unsettled equity markets.

The Shanghai Composite index was hardest hit by the announcement, registering a decline of 5.3%. The Hang Seng in Hong Kong lost nearly 3%. Japan's Nikkei index declined by 1.3%.



The sell-off comes after short-term borrowing costs skyrocketed last week in China, leading to fears about a credit crunch. The rate at which Chinese banks lend to each other overnight hit, which serves as a measure of liquidity in the financial markets, hit a record high above 13% last week before moderating. Another key measure of cash in the banking system -- the 7-day "repo rate" -- peaked at 25%.

Investors are worried that less liquidity in the world's second-largest economy could further slow the shaky global recovery.

Related: Brazilian stocks among world's worst performers

Stocks by the numbers: With the recent heavy selling, all three indexes are down about 6% from their recent highs.

But they're still holding onto healthy gains year-to-date. The Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq are up between 10% and 12% since the start of January.

Stocks on the move: Shares of Vanguard Health Systems (VHS, Fortune 500) surged almost 70% after inking a $1.8 billion acquisition deal with Tenet Healthcare Corp. (THC, Fortune 500)

Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) shares briefly fell below $400 a piece for the first time since mid-April after Jefferies' Peter Misek lowered his 12-month price target to $405 from $420.

 

Could LeBron and RGIII Help Sell The Affordable Care Act?

Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III already promotes Subway sandwiches. Will health insurance be next?

Who's going to be more successful at selling health insurance to young men this fall: NBA MVP LeBron James, NFL rookie of the year Robert Griffin III, or Mom? If officials at the Department of Health and Human Services get their way, all may be drafted.

"We're having discussions, active discussions, with a variety of sports affiliates," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius confirmed at a meeting with reporters this morning to relaunch the department's website for consumers, HealthCare.gov.

The NBA season matches the enrollment period for insurance through federal health exchanges.

"We know the Red Sox were incredibly effective in Massachusetts when they rolled out their marketplace," Sebelius said, referring to that state's successful effort to market to young men when it was implementing its insurance mandate in 2007. "So it's a logical place to go."

Last week there were unconfirmed news reports of discussions between HHS and the NBA, whose season runs pretty much concurrently with the six-month sign-up period for the health law. But it's football season that will be in full swing when open enrollment for coverage through the Affordable Care Act launches Oct. 1.

Sebelius hinted today that the National Football League may be more than willing to take on the task.

"The NFL," she said, "in the conversations I've had, has been very actively and enthusiastically engaged, because they see health promotion as one of the things that's good for them and good for the country."

Getting young people, particularly young men, to sign up for coverage under the health care law is not just something that's good for them, however. It's critical to the entire success of the new insurance exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act. If only the older and sicker sign up, premiums will quickly become unaffordable.
YouTube
If using sports stars doesn't work, maybe HHS will turn to Mom to get young men to sign up for health insurance.

Yet getting those young people to sign up is a challenge, said Sebelius, since they "may not get up every morning thinking about health insurance."

Enter Mom. It turns out that mothers, even more than sports stars or celebrities, have a profound influence on what even their grown sons do. Remember all those Campbell's Soup-NFL ads?

It turns out, says Sebelius, that those ads have something of a ring of truth. She said she was recently talking with an NFL player representative, and he told her that when it comes to the health insurance offered by the NFL, "the most influential person is the mother of the player, who can often get the player to do things that a wife, a spouse, a girlfriend, or the player himself doesn't do."

Added Sebelius, herself the mother of two sons: "It kind of confirmed my basic bias that moms still have a lotta influence."

 

Another working Apple-1 pops up, could sell for $500K

Christie’s said it hopes to sell a working Apple-1 computer for as much as half a million dollars in a special online-only auction that starts next week.

 

The computer (shown above), one of fewer than 50 known to have survived from a limited run of about 200, is even rarer in that it works, according to Christie’s, which Friday confirmed an account by the Associated Press that the Apple-1 is functional.

 

Christie’s estimated that the rare computer will sell for between $300,000 and $500,000.

 

That’s not impossible: Last month, a working Apple-1 sold at a German auction for $542,000. The total, including a 22.3% commission as well as taxes, paid by the buyer was a record $671,400.

© 2013 by Auction Team Breker Köln GermanyThis working Apple-1 sold this year at a German auction for $542,000

The May sale eclipsed the previous record of $640,000 for an Apple-1 established last November, also at an auction conducted by Auction Team Breker of Cologne, Germany.

 

Whether the Christie’s Apple-1 sets a record or comes close to earlier prices depends on whether the auction attracts the clientele that’s been willing to pay premium prices, said Mike Willegal, an Apple-1 expert whose index of existing machines is the world’s most complete.

 

“The question is how many people have that deep of pockets,” Willegal said in an email Friday. “The last couple of high-dollar Apple-1s went to Korea, so if the publicity gets to Asia, who knows?”

 

Willegal, who keeps tabs on the whereabouts of known Apple-1s, said that the Christie’s unit was news to him. “This is likely a new one that has surfaced, which is especially likely if it really has been in this man’s hands for so long,” said Willegal, referring to the AP story. It said the current owner, identified as Ted Perry, had acquired the Apple-1 in 1979 or 1980, and kept it in a cardboard box since then.

 

Christie’s declined to make Perry available for an interview Friday.

 

But Willegal wasn’t surprised that the Apple-1 appeared out of nowhere. “I’m sure the high selling prices are going to have some additional units popping out of the woodwork,” he said.

 

Apple-1 prices have climbed dramatically since the death of Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs in 2011. A working Apple-1 sold in November 2010 by Christie’s went for $213,000; less than two years later, in June 2012, rival Sotheby’s sold a different operational Apple-1 for a then-record $374,500.

 

That kind of money may eventually prompt fraudsters to shill a forgery or an accurate reproduction as the real thing. “I think a reproduction or forgery could be made pretty compelling, but an expert should be able to tell the difference when looking at one in person,” said Willegal, who has been approached in the past to authenticate other Apple-1 computers, but has declined because he was asked to do so based only on photographs.

 

Unlike later personal computers, including the 1977 Apple II, the Apple-1 was sold as a fully-assembled circuit board, but minus a case, power supply, keyboard or monitor. Buyers had to provide those components, resulting in some interesting customizations. Christie’s Apple-1 is mounted on a wooden board, as are a modern keyboard and the power supply.

Steve Wozniak in undated photo

All Apple-1s were hand-built by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in 1976. They sold then for $666.66, equivalent to $2,724 in today’s dollars, or more than a top-of-the-line 15-inch MacBook Pro with a Retina-quality display goes for now.

 

The one to be sold by Christie’s is hand-signed by Wozniak, as are the included manual and board schematics.

 

Christie’s Apple-1 will be exhibited at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., June 24-27. The online auction runs from June 24 to July 9.

 

Christie’s will put this Apple-1 on the block in an online auction that begins June 24, and has pegged the likely sales price between $300,000 and $500,000.

 

 

Fed ;could end bond-buying in 2014&

20 June 2013 Last updated at 02:21 GMT US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on the pace of asset purchases
The US Federal Reserve has maintained the rate of its asset purchase programme at $85bn (£54bn) a month, but could start scaling it back soon.

It also kept interest rates at a record low range of between zero and 0.25%.

Fed chairman Ben Bernanke said if the central bank's forecasts were correct, it could begin slowing asset purchases by the end of 2013 and wind them down completely by the middle of 2014.

But he emphasised that the programme was tied to economic conditions.

"We have no deterministic or fixed plan," Mr Bernanke told a press conference after the Fed's latest two-day monetary policy meeting.

The Fed painted a brighter economic outlook, in which it expects the unemployment rate to continue to fall and inflation to edge closer to its longer term target of 2%.

US stocks fell sharply in afternoon trading as investors digested a possible scaling back of stimulus measures. The Dow Jones dropped 206 points, or 1.3%, to close at 15,112.

Benchmark 10-year US bond yields jumped to a 15-month high on expectations the Fed will reduce its bond buying.
'Threshold, not trigger'
The Fed's asset purchase programme, in which it has been buying $85bn of government bonds a month, aims to lower long-term interest rates to encourage borrowing, spending and investing.

Mr Bernanke said that the tapering of the programme was akin to "letting up a bit on the gas pedal" and "not beginning to apply the brakes".
Continue reading the main story Samira Hussain BBC business reporter, Washington DC
The current relationship between the Federal Reserve and the American economy is new and uncharted territory.

The central bank has been supporting this country's current recovery by steadily pumping money in to the US economy.

The key to any good relationship is clear communication.

Some say that has been lacking on the part of the architect of the stimulus, Ben Bernanke.

The mere suggestion by the Chairman of the Federal Reserve that it may ease some of its asset purchases sooner than expected, sent jitters through markets back in May.

The relationship is still trying to recover.

By Bernanke's own admission, the goal of Wednesday's press conference was to offer clarity, if and when the Fed may want to start easing its way out of the relationship.

In spending more than an hour speaking to reporters, Bernanke tried to send as clear a message as he could.

Eventually this relationship has to change but for now, the stimulus will continue.
He added that interest rates were likely to remain low for some time after asset purchases concluded, and any rate rise was likely to be "far in the future".

The Fed has previously said that it would not consider raising rates until the unemployment rate, currently 7.6%, fell to 6.5%.

But Mr Bernanke stressed that this 6.5% level was "a threshold, not a trigger", saying that if unemployment were to fall below it, it would not immediately lead to a rate rise, but merely a consideration of the broader economic outlook.

Mr Bernanke also noted that inflation had been running below the Fed's 2% longer-run objective, but said that temporary factors were partly the reason for that.
Forecasts
In its latest statement, the Fed noted further improvement in labour market conditions in recent months, and said the downside risks to the jobs market and the economy had "diminished since the Fall".

In fresh quarterly projections, the central bank said it expects the US economy to grow between 2.3% and 2.6% in 2013.

It predicts an unemployment rate of about 7.2% to 7.3% by the end of the year, slightly lower than its March prediction. It expects unemployment to have fallen to 5.8% to 6.2% by 2015.

Alec Young, global equity strategist at Standard & Poor's in New York, told the BBC: "No matter how you look at it, we're closer to the end of this unprecedented stimulus than we were yesterday.

"They have increased at the margin their outlook for the economy - and what's going to drive an end to QE (quantitative easing) and tapering of their bond purchases, and ultimately a tightening of interest rates, is a healthier economy."
Inflation concerns
The Fed said inflation could run as low as 0.8% this year, but will pick up next year to between 1.4% and 2%.
Continue reading the main story "Inflation that is too low is a problem," Mr Bernanke said. "We expect inflation to come back up. That's our forecast. But... we are concerned about it."

"We would like to get inflation up to our target. And that will be a factor in our thinking about the thresholds. It will be a factor in our thinking about asset purchases."

Fourteen of the 19 Federal Reserve board members and bank presidents, who set out the quarterly projections, said they did not think it would be appropriate to raise interest rates until 2015. One member thought a rate rise would not be seen until 2016.

Mr Bernanke has been Federal Reserve chairman since 2006 and is expected to step down when his second term ends in January 2014.

President Obama has suggested that Mr Bernanke will not continue beyond the end of his term, saying in a recent interview that he had "already stayed a lot longer than he wanted".

At the press conference, Mr Bernanke declined to comment on his personal plans.