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Why Apple wants to bring back the pencil
MOBILE START-UPS WORTH $800 BILLION Number of mobile Internet start-ups with valuations crossing $1 billion has jumped by a third in just eight months and that is spelling trouble for some venture capitalists looking to cash in on their investments. The ratio of mobile Internet exits — start-ups that are either sold or go public — to investments has plunged over the past six quarters, excluding one outlier deal, according to consulting firm Digi-Capital. — Washington Post-Bloomberg News
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Microsoft to pay $250 million for security vendor Adallom Microsoft acquired security software maker Adallom for $250 million to add products to protect its cloud and Office programmes, said a person familiar with the agreement. The Redmond, Washington-based software giant announced the deal in a blog posting on Tuesday. The person asked not to be named because the acquisition price wasn’t disclosed. The Wall Street Journal reported in July that the purchase price would be about $320 million. Microsoft is trying to boost its cloud and productivity offerings and wants Adallom’s programs to buttress existing security software included in products such as Office 365 and the Enterprise Mobility Suite. Adallom, founded in 2012, works with products from Salesforce.com, Box and Dropbox, among others. Adallom’s headquarters are in Palo Alto, California, with its research and development operations based in Tel Aviv. Adallom is the third company to be acquired in the past year by Microsoft, which purchased text-analysis startup Equivio in January and enterprise security firm Aorato in November 2014. The company’s name is an abbreviation of the phrase “ad halom,” which translates to “up to here” and means “the last line of defense” in game theory, the company said on its website. Adallom’s founders will join Microsoft as part of the deal, the companies said. — Washington Post-Bloomberg News
Now secretly take photos of those who try to hack you
Analysts say the Apple Pencil is part of a wider move by the tech industry to convince consumers that computing does not have to be limited
By returning to more physical forms of interaction, Apple is not only conceding that tablet users need more flexibility — it’s making an argument that even the most mundaneseeming items can become part of a sophisticated computing environment. That’s perfectly fine — and it’s consistent with Apple’s goal of bringing other, heretofore undigitised routines into the modern age
to computers and smartphones. Instead, Apple is focused on giving new, digital capabilities to more traditional platforms
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pple’s latest accessory is a return to the written word — not so much a stylus as a digital pen that harks back to the way that humans captured language for centuries before the keyboard made cursive an obsolete art. Analysts say the $99 Apple Pencil, announced last Wednesday as an add-on to the new supercharged iPad Pro, is part of a wider move by the tech industry to convince consumers that computing doesn’t have to be limited to, well, computers and smartphones. Instead, Apple is focused on giving new, digital capabilities to more traditional platforms. But it’s also a return to an early era of computing history. While Apple has turned the touchscreen into the center of so many of its mobile devices, the stylus was key to some of the earliest digital “tab-
let” incarnations. One of the early version was built by the RAND Corporation in the 1960s. Dubbed the “RAND Tablet,” it didn’t look very much like an iPad or even a Star Trek Data PADD. Instead, this “tablet” was longer than a man’s forearm with a primitive electronic touch pad in the middle that users could write on using the pen-like stylus attached to the device via a wire — all hooked up to tube-television style monitor. But this type of manual interface didn’t take off. Instead, it lost out to the mouse-and-keyboard pairing that’s been a hallmark of the personal computer industry for decades. It wasn’t until the mid-90s that the stylus saw a popular resurgence, this time in the digital assistant market. Remember Palm Pilots? The styluses that accompanied those handheld devices were little more than plastic toothpicks, with no particular special abilities. Soon, the stylus was thrown back into the shadows again — this time by BlackBerry’s physical keyboards. They represented a major advance in technology at a time when the most sophisticated cellphones were still reliant on numpads for text messaging. But even the physical keyboard was quickly overtaken by the simplicity of the iPhone’s finger-based
touch interface. Touchscreens promised a new era of interactivity that, for many consumers, rendered the stylus obsolete (if they could remember them at all). Why carry around an extra tool when you’ve got five of them attached to one hand? Some diehard loyalists still swore by the stylus even as touchscreens proliferated around the globe. But these were a specialised few, limited to professional designers and digital artists. For most of us, fingers were good enough. That was then. But now, as consumers have witnessed digital technology spreading into seemingly every part of their lives, they’ve also become more sophisticated. They may not be making Pixar-level animated films in their basements, but we’ve certainly seen the rise of the “prosumer” class that blurs the line between novice and advanced users of technology. In short, now is the perfect time for the stylus to make a comeback. There have been signs of hope for stylus fans: Nintendo’s DS mobile consoles and then the Wii U gave styluses a new life in the gaming world; other manufacturers have attempted to bring the stylus into the smartphone market — particularly Samsung, with the tablet-like Galaxy Note series. There remains a healthy market
for third-party styluses. And Microsoft already offers a “Surface Pen” that is much like the Apple Pencil — a digitally sophisticated, pressure-sensitive piece of hardware. But the Apple Pencil isn’t some play for a mass market return to writing things by hand: It’s an addon for iPad’s aimed at enterprise customers and graphics professionals with a relatively hefty price tag. This may still seem like a surprisingly retro-step for Apple, especially considering Steve Jobs’s scorn for styluses. (He once said that a stylus with an iPad would be a sign that the company “blew it.”) But in a lot of ways, what Apple is doing is being already being done across the tech industry. Our most mundane devices — refrigerators, cars, TVs — are being updated for a world in which connectivity and communication offer superpowers. So it’s no surprise to see Apple look back in time toward some of our most venerable productivity tools. Apple’s efforts go beyond the pencil, whose origins date back to 16th-century Italy. The company’s new Smart Keyboard for the iPad also represents a departure of sorts — a recognition that newfangled touch interfaces have their limits. By returning to more physical forms of interaction, Apple is not only conceding that tablet users need more flexibility — it’s making an argument that even the most mundane-seeming items can become part of a sophisticated computing environment. That’s perfectly fine — and it’s consistent with Apple’s goal of bringing other, heretofore undigitised routines into the modern age. “If you think about the Apple Watch in particular,” said Dan Cryan, an analyst at IHS, “and the iPad Pro demo, they were both squarely geared around almost traditional computing tasks as a way of illustrating what that future looks like — traditional computing tasks being taken onto the watch or the tablet.” — Washington Post-Bloomberg News
Have you ever gotten an email warning that someone is trying to hack into your account and wondered: Who is doing this to me? A password manager called LogMeOnce now gives you the option to take a picture of whomever is trying to access the accounts you’ve registered with its service. It does this by hacking the hacker’s camera, whether on a computer or a mobile device, and secretly taking a photo. The feature, which is called Mugshot and launched on Tuesday, also provides information about your attacker’s location and IP address — the unique set of numbers that identify each computer on a network. And it offers to take a photo with the rear-facing camera of a mobile device, so you can get a look at the hacker’s surroundings. LogMeOnce, a Fairfax, Va., company incorporated in 2011, has a patent pending on the proprietary technology, which essentially tries to protect consumers by exposing the identities, or at least the locations, of hackers. Chief executive Kevin Shahbazi phrased it another way, calling it a digital burglar alarm. It is “identical to an alarm system that everyone uses to protect their home, business or property,” only for the digital age, he said. — Washington Post-Bloomberg News
Hacker group exploits satellites to steal data and hide tracks A group of sophisticated Russian-speaking hackers is exploiting commercial satellites to siphon sensitive data from diplomatic and military agencies in the US and in Europe as well as to mask their location, a security firm said in a new report. The group, which some researchers refer to as Turla, after the name of the malicious software it uses, also has targeted government organisations, embassies and companies in Russia, China and dozens of other countries, as well as research groups and pharmaceutical firms, said Stefan Tanase, senior security researcher at Kaspersky Lab, a Moscow-based cybersecurity firm with analysts around the world. Turla has used this technique for at least eight years, which reflects a degree of sophistication and creativity generally not seen among advanced hacker groups, Tanase said. “For us, it was very surprising,” he said in a phone interview. “We’ve never seen a malicious operation that hijacked satellite” connections to obtain data and to cover its tracks. “This is the first group that we believe has done it. It allows you to achieve a much greater level of anonymity.” Although Kaspersky has not linked Turla to the Russian government, other security firms have done so. The Turla malware originated from a “sophisticated Russian-government-affiliated” hacker group that “we call Venomous Bear,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and chief technology officer of CrowdStrike, an Irvine, Calif.-based cybersecurity technology firm. — Washington Post-Bloomberg News