The popularity of the mobile device market (smartphones and tablets) has opened up an allied opportunity for companies - augmenting the limited storage available in those devices with portable wireless devices while adding extra functionality to make them compelling offerings. Under the 'wireless storage' category, we have already looked at various offerings such as the Kingston Wi-Drive, Seagate GoFlex Satellite, Patriot Gauntlet Node, Buffalo MiniStation Air Wireless Hard Drive and the Seagate Wireless Plus. All these units have a hard drive or flash drive, a Wi-Fi radio and a battery. In conjunction with various mobile apps, they enable a host of interesting use-cases. Given the popularity of this market category, it is surprising that Western Digital has not had any play in it. Things are changing today with the launch of the My Passport Wireless Wi-Fi Mobile Storage lineup.

Even though the device is a late entry into this market, it brings along some interesting features that are not common in other competing devices. These include:

• Presence of a SD card slot with one-touch / automatic backup capabilities from the SD card to the internal storage
• Usage of a 2x2 802.11n MIMO-capable Wi-Fi chipset
• Reuse of Western Digital's excellent My Cloud app (which has traditionally been used in conjunction with Western Digital's NAS units) with a redesigned user interface to support the functionalities offered by the My Passport Wireless.

Western Digital claims that the device allows up to 8 different devices at the same time (with a maximum of four simultaneous HD video streams). The rechargeable battery is rated for 6 hours of video streaming and 20 hours of standby. The USB 3.0 device port allows it to be used as a DAS. Western Digital has also added a Wi-Fi hub feature to the device so that moble devices connecting to it can still access the Internet through the My Passport Wireless while also enjoying access to the huge storage capacity. In addition to access through the mobile apps, there is also a web dashboard for configuration through any standard web browser.

In addition to targeting users with multiple mobile devices in the family, the My Passport Wireless also presents a valid use-case for a team of photographers or videographers on the go. Thanks to the SD card slot, users can quickly upload photographs and share it with the rest of the team easily. The unit also has FTP functionality to allow Wi-Fi enabled cameras to directly upload content to the My Passport Wireless.

The My Passport Wireless comes in three capacities, 500 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB. They are priced at $130, $180 and $220 respectively.

Today, Broadcom is announcing a new WiFi/BT combo chip that succeeds the BCM4354. According to Broadcom, the key features of this new chipset are enhanced WiFi/BT coexistence performance, integrated PA/LNA/TR switch, transmit beamforming and low density parity check codes, and angle of arrival direction finding technology. According to Dino Bekis, VP of mobile wireless connectivity, the biggest difference between this chipset and BCM4354 would be the improved coexistence performance.

This chipset is now in production and should make its way into mobile devices in Q3 2014.

Traditionally Samsung's enterprise SSDs have only been available to large server OEMs (e.g. Dell, EMC, and IBM). In other words, unless you were buying tens of thousands of drives, Samsung would not sell you any. However, back in June Samsung made a change in its strategy and released the 845DC EVO, Samsung's first enterprise SSD for the channel. The 845DC EVO was accompanied by the 845DC PRO a month later and today we have a performance preview of both SSDs, along with a glimpse of our new enterprise test suite.

Toshiba's Chromebook 2 will get you a very nice screen, provided you spring for the more expensive model. Toshiba

Most Chromebook hardware can be described as "only OK." The need to compete with others requires OEMs to cut costs, and this leads to laptops with only OK processors, or only OK keyboards, or only OK screens. The aging Chromebook Pixel hit most of the right notes, but had a price tag that was hard to swallow (and at this point, it doesn't look like Google has a Haswell update planned to improve its mediocre battery life). The quest continues for a Chromebook that does better than OK in multiple areas without being compromised in other areas.

Toshiba's Chromebook 2 may come close. The entry-level $249.99 model falls more into the "only OK" camp, with a 13.3-inch 1366×768 display and 2GB of RAM—it's mostly a streamlined version of the Haswell Chromebook Toshiba released earlier this year, processor aside. The $329.99 model is the interesting one: it bumps your RAM to 4GB and uses a good-looking 1080p IPS display, increasing your pixel density and your panel quality drastically. Chromebooks have offered 13.3-inch, 1080p screens before, but those display panels have been non-IPS versions with inferior colors, contrast, and viewing angles.

The only downside is that Toshiba's Chromebook 2 doesn't use one of Intel's Haswell chips, as its predecessor did. It steps sideways to a dual-core Bay Trail-based Atom chip, the Celeron N2840, which should be adequate for most basic tasks but includes a weaker GPU and can execute fewer instructions-per-clock than Haswell. Hopefully the higher 2.16GHz (2.58GHz Turbo) clock speed can close the performance gap, and in any case the laptop should feel a fair bit faster than older ARM-based systems like the original Samsung Chromebook and the HP Chromebook 11. Battery life is rated by Toshiba at about 11 hours.

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Net Market Share

After a couple of months that saw Windows 8.x stop growing and even lose some usage share, August was quite a turnaround. Both Microsoft's operating system and its browser saw usage increase. Firefox, which has been on a downward spiral for almost a year now, also had a good month, picking up a few points.

Net Market Share Net Market Share

Internet Explorer was up 0.45 points, Firefox gained 0.15 points, and Safari's presence also grew, up 0.16 points. Chrome, however, lost out, dropping a hefty 0.76 points in the month. For both Firefox and Chrome, this marked the end of a ten month run of losses and gains, respectively.

Net Market Share Net Market Share

Chrome's mobile performance is more assured, with Google's browser gaining 1.63 points in August. Chrome's sort-of predecessor, Android Browser, fell sharply, dropping 1.35 points, though overall this still represents a gain by Google's mobile browsers. Safari was up a little, growing by 0.24 points. Internet Explorer grew for the second month in a row, up 0.20 points.

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A giant Archimedes screw is lowered into place as part of Lancashire community project to generate power.

Nigeria's new national eID card. amediaagency

Last week, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan was one of the first citizens to receive a National eID card, a biometric identification card that will be rolled out to 13 million Nigerians in the near future. Although a handful of countries already use biometric identification systems, Nigeria's will be unique as its pilot program will be branded with MasterCard logos. The program will eventually be expanded to encompass the rest of the country's adult population, and the BBC says that all Nigerians will be required to have such a card by 2019 if they wish to vote in the country's upcoming elections.

As MasterCard stated in a press release, the eID cards come equipped with an EMV chip that allows card carriers to access prepaid financial services backed by Nigeria's local Access Bank and MasterCard. The justification for intertwining identity documentation with financial services from a private company like MasterCard is that many of Nigeria's citizens have never set up a bank account and therefore tend to be excluded from loan qualification.

The Nigerian government says that putting a payment platform on the ID cards will eventually let citizens receive and spend money from government institutions. As MasterCard writes, “Using the card as a payment tool, Nigerians can deposit funds, receive social benefits, save, or engage in many other financial transactions that are facilitated by electronic payments with the extra security assurance that biometric verification provides. They can also pay for goods and services and withdraw cash at millions of merchants and ATMS that accept MasterCard payment cards in Nigeria and in more than 210 countries and territories globally.” MasterCard has a number of similar partnerships with government institutions in countries like Pakistan and Turkey, as well as the city of Toronto. They all use prepaid cards from Mastercard to dole out government funds.

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US Circuit Judge Gerald Lynch was on a three-judge panel that considered an ACLU challenge to NSA spying. C-SPAN

Six days after the first Snowden leak appeared on the front pages of newspapers worldwide, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit to stop the mass surveillance by US intelligence agencies. A New York federal judge ruled against the ACLU in December. Today, ACLU lawyers made a second effort, making their case to a three-judge panel on the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. It's the first time a US Appeals Court has considered whether the "bulk telephony" database is constitutional.

Oral arguments stretched on for nearly two hours this morning, an unusually long argument for the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, which often gives just 10 or 15 minutes to each side for oral argument in an appeal case. C-SPAN was allowed to record and broadcast the full proceeding, another unusual step in an appeals court that's nearly always closed to cameras. The proceedings can be viewed on C-SPAN's website.

ACLU v. Clapper is one of three cases challenging mass surveillance that are now headed to appeals courts. Another case, Klayman v. Obama, was filed in Washington, DC federal courts just one day after the surveillance revelations. In that case, DC-based US District Judge Richard Leon ruled that the NSA's spying technology was "almost Orwellian" and likely unconstitutional.

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The International Botany Congress decides that Latin will no longer be the primary language for formally describing new species of plants.

Home Depot may be the latest victim of retail hackings of customer debit and credit card information.

The suspected breach, first reported on Tuesday by journalist and security researcher Brian Krebs, may involve all 2,200 US stores and has some of the hallmarks of the group that compromised Target, Sally Beauty, and P.F. Chang's, according to Krebs. Home Depot is currently looking into the fraud anomalies and promised to notify customers as soon as it has evidence of a breach.

"At this point, I can confirm that we’re looking into some unusual activity and we are working with our banking partners and law enforcement to investigate," Home Depot spokesman Paula Drake said in a statement to Ars. "Protecting our customers’ information is something we take extremely seriously, and we are aggressively gathering facts at this point while working to protect customers."

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Cockatoos learn to make and use tools when shown by another bird, research reveals.

Helen Howard started a snail farm in her spare bedroom and allotment seven years ago - now she sells to restaurants and private chefs.

Arno Gourdol

Mario is just a video game, and rocks don’t have legs. Both of these things are true. Yet, like the Mario ghosts that advance only when your back is turned, there are rocks that we know have been moving—even though no one has ever seen them do it.

The rocks in question occupy a spot called Racetrack Playa in Death Valley. Playas are desert mudflats that sometimes host shallow lakes when enough water is around. Racetrack Playa gets its name from long furrows extending from large rocks sitting on the playa bed—tracks that make it look as if the rocks had been dragged through the mud. The tracks of the various rocks run parallel to each other, sometimes suggesting that the rocks had made sharp turns in unison, like dehydrated synchronize swimmers.

Many potential explanations have been offered up (some going back to the 1940s) for this bizarre situation, as the rocks seem to only move occasionally and had never been caught in the act. One thing everyone could agree on was that it must occur when the playa is wet and the muddy bottom is slick. At first, suggestions revolved around especially strong winds. One geologist went as far as to bring out a propeller airplane to see how much wind it would take.

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An Apple spokesperson has issued a statement on the company’s investigation of the hacking of female celebrities’ cloud accounts and the theft of photos from their accounts. And Apple is, in essence, blaming the victims. Or at least, their security questions and passwords.

“We wanted to provide an update to our investigation into the theft of photos of certain celebrities,” the statement reads. “When we learned of the theft, we were outraged and immediately mobilized Apple’s engineers to discover the source. Our customers’ privacy and security are of utmost importance to us."

Initial reports from security sources suggested that an exploit of a weakness in Apple's "Find My iPhone" API that allowed a brute force password attack. Apple has discounted those reports, and it blames the success of the attacker on what amounts to social engineering of the accounts—by trying to use personal data to guess passwords or answers to security questions for the accounts in question. "After more than 40 hours of investigation, we have discovered that certain celebrity accounts were compromised by a very targeted attack on user names, passwords, and security questions, a practice that has become all too common on the Internet. None of the cases we have investigated has resulted from any breach in any of Apple’s systems including iCloud® or Find my iPhone. We are continuing to work with law enforcement to help identify the criminals involved.”

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Columbia University

Phase change materials can switch between two forms depending on how quickly they're cooled. Cool them quickly and you get an amorphous form, which provides significant resistance to the flow of electrons. Cool them slowly and they will allow electrons to flow more readily. Once cooled, these two forms remain stable, locking the differences in conduction in place.

This difference has been exploited to create a type of storage called phase change memory that's as fast as standard RAM but retains its contents between power cycles. So far, phase change memory hasn't been a commercial success. But some researchers are now experimenting with the idea of building processors out of the technology.

The efforts started out with a simple arrangement of resistors and phase change bits that operated like a logic gate, allowing AND, OR, and NOT operations. But a new paper shows that by carefully controlling how the phase change bits are set in the first place, it's possible to have a single bit perform different logic operations, acting as a NOT, NOR, or NAND gate. Regardless of the operation's output, it's stored even if power is shut down.

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Robert Scoble

A federal judge is mulling whether to hold Microsoft in contempt of court for defying orders to give the US government e-mails stored on an overseas server.

The case is the nation's first testing the Obama administration's position that any company with operations in the US must comply with valid warrants for data, even if the content is stored overseas. The US believes the e-mail on a Microsoft server in Dublin, Ireland is associated with narcotics trafficking.

Microsoft on Tuesday reiterated its position that it was talking with US District Judge Loretta Preska, the judge who sided with the Obama administration on Friday. "We will not be turning over the e-mail," Microsoft said in a statement.

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Apple

If you've ever developed an app for the iPhone or iPad, you've had to deal with Apple's App Store Review Guidelines. The lengthy list of rules encompasses many different areas, and Apple has just published a new page to explain what rules are broken the most often—and what developers can do to avoid rejection.

Apple's graph (which reports app rejections for the week leading up to August 28) shows that "incomplete information" is the most frequent reason for rejection—this includes providing demo account credentials for apps that require an account, failure to adequately explain any special settings needed for evaluation, and failure to provide an accompanying demo video for apps that only work under specific circumstances (when attached to a particular piece of hardware, for example). In short, tell Apple what it needs to know to evaluate your app, because the company isn't going to take extra time to do research if your app isn't self-explanatory.

Bugginess is another big reason for app rejections, as is failure to comply with Apple's Developer Program License Agreement. A fuzzier problem that takes down six percent of apps is a "complex or less than very good" user interface, which could mean that the interface is too cramped or not finger-friendly—Apple provides many UI explainers to developers, and failure to take them into account can get your app thrown out even if it's otherwise useful. The chart above and the page itself explains how to comply to these guidelines as well as the others on the list, though they won't help you much if your app was one of the 42 percent rejected for "other reasons."

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While Microsoft has increased the amount of free space in its OneDrive cloud storage service and made it cheaper to buy more space, filling the cloud with data has always been a little annoying, since the company's sync apps have been limited to a maximum file size of 2GB. Anything larger won't get synced, and this limitation has provoked no end of complaints and frustration from OneDrive users.

It appears that the restriction is being lifted. Over the weekend, posters on reddit noticed that their large files were being synchronized between local and cloud storage.

Not everyone appears to be able to upload large files, with a Microsoft spokesman saying the company had started rolling out large file support, and that it would have a public announcement on the OneDrive blog at a later date.

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Mike Mozart

In 20 states, legislators have protected Internet service providers from competition by passing laws that make it difficult or impossible for cities and towns to offer Internet service to residents.

AT&T wants to keep it that way. With the Federal Communications Commission considering whether these state laws should be invalidated, the company says that municipalities should simply never create their own broadband networks unless there’s virtually no chance that private ISPs will ever offer service to their residents.

“GONs [government-owned networks] should not be utilized where the private sector already is providing broadband or can be expected to do so in a reasonable timeframe,” AT&T attorneys wrote in a filing with the FCC on Friday. “Although many GONs have failed, or at least failed to live up to expectations, GONs can nonetheless discourage private sector investment because of understandable concerns by private sector entities of a non-level playing field. And any policy that risks diminishing private sector investment would be short-sighted and unwise.”

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AnandTech

In case you missed it over the long weekend, Anand Shimpi, founder and editor-in-chief of hardware site AnandTech, retired from his position on Saturday evening. His farewell post doesn't mention what his next project will be, but Re/code later reported that he had been hired by Apple, a fact that Apple confirmed without divulging more specifics.

Shimpi (along with former mobile editor Brian Klug, who has also reportedly left for Apple and hasn't been active on AnandTech since January of this year) has been the primary source of information about Apple's mobile SoC architectures for the last couple of years now. Much of what we know about the Apple A6 architecture ("Swift," not to be confused with the programming language of the same name) and the Apple A7 ("Cyclone") comes from AnandTech reporting. What Shimpi and Klug will be doing for Apple isn't clear, but it's a fair bet that it's processor-related.

Shimpi has been running AnandTech for over 17 years, but the site will continue in his absence under new Editor-in-Chief Ryan Smith—the site remains focused on in-depth architectural overviews, benchmarks, and reviews, and Smith seems intent on keeping it that way. Still, as someone who has read AnandTech for many years and even worked there for a while, Anand's presence on the site that bears his name will be missed.

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