Secret Windows 8 Weapon: Kinect Built Into Your Laptop

The Windows release of Kinect is coming up in a couple days, but for most people that won’t be a major event: the Kinect they have is sitting on their TV or in a drawer, waiting to be taken out for an impromptu Dance Central 2 party. Of the 10 million Kinects out there, the only ones connected to computers are the ones being fiddled with by the various hackers and students making science projects out the things.

But according to the Daily, Microsoft is hoping to remedy this particular situation by building Kinect sensors right into your laptops. TechCrunch alum Matt Hickey got to handle a pair of prototypes, which were confirmed to be official, not just one of the many experiments that hide within Microsoft’s various lairs.

Unfortunately the laptops were not ready for their debut and no pictures seem to have been permitted. But they are described as netbook-like, with a number of smaller sensors instead of a webcam, and what could be an IR LED at the bottom of the screen.

The inclusion of depth-sensing cameras on a laptop is an interesting idea, and if they can drive the price of the sensor array down, it might become a standard feature. Microsoft has clearly also been focusing on miniaturizing the Kinect hardware, as the bulky original would seem somewhat out of place on a petite netbook. Whether this smaller sensor set has the same capabilities as the larger isn’t clear and wasn’t discussed.

A smaller Kinect would also suggest that Microsoft’s next console, rumored to have Kinect built in, is nearing readiness. While many gaming industry insiders have discounted the idea that the next generation of consoles will be announced this year, the rumor mill says otherwise.

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Researchers unearth more Chinese links to defense contractor attacks

Symantec researchers have uncovered additional clues that point to Chinese hacker involvement in attacks against a large number of Western companies, including major U.S. defense contractors.

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SOPA’s big brother signed by EU nations amid widespread protests

The European Union signed up to the controversial Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) on Thursday despite widespread opposition, particularly in Poland where people took to the streets in protest.

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Apple breaks Microsoft’s ‘lock’ on enterprise workers, argues analyst

The iPhone may have opened the door for Apple in the enterprise, but it was the one-two punch of the iPad and revamped MacBook Air in 2010 that really did the trick, an analyst said today.

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Samsung smartphones, TVs help drive strong 4Q profits, even as rivals falter

A Foothold For HealthTech: Ultra-Cheap Pacemakers

I read with great interest Vinod Khosla’s column two weeks ago that discussed the role of tech in healthcare. But as much as tech has to offer the healthcare institution, its effects are perhaps more reliably trackable in the actual medical devices field. A functioning “Dr. Algorithm” would be great – but a “tricorder” device, like that being chased by this X-Prize? That would be something else.

Until these pie-in-the-sky projects come to fruition, though, more modest advances, but which nonetheless save lives, will be made. Medtronic, a major med-tech company, is hoping that the next big thing will actually be small and cheap: a pacemaker for developing countries.

It’s a little different from the “innovation” we’re used to seeing in startups and software, because improving on a medical technology requires significantly more resources and cash than, say, improving on social photography. Such big-money industries aren’t invulnerable — SuVolta is going right up against the likes of Intel — but generally there is pressure from within to keep things fresh, and that suffices to advance the industry.

Medtronic isn’t one of the little guys, but they are taking a fresh tack. They recognize that the development of cheaper versions of existing devices (hearing aids, pacemakers, dialysis machines) no longer means producing a lower-quality component. Consider a mobile phone being given away for free at a store. It’s the budget option now, but it’s ten times as powerful and versatile as phones from five years ago. That same improvement comes about in other industries, and while often the result is better, more expensive versions of the same thing (fMRI versus single-MRI, for instance), it can also mean that the original can be made for significantly less money. Medtronic is hoping ~90% less.

CEO Omar Ishrak has been touting these plans at the World Economic Forum, and with luck he is just one of many who have dedicated themselves to the spread of technology downwards as well as upwards. Siemens and GE (Ishrak’s former employer) call it “frugal innovation,” and it’s things like basic amenities like light and clean water that are created through cutting-edge techniques but made available for microscopic prices — the only prices impoverished communities in rural Somalia or India can afford.

Ishrak hopes to double sales in developing countries over the next few years, and plans to produce a new generation of cheap and modern pacemakers as the first big hardware push. It’s something that can be developed and produce now, as opposed to Dr. Algorithm, who must navigate through a morass of regulations, public distrust, and beta versions. Both will eventually be important, but the devices are definitely coming first. They may not revolutionize the industry, but bringing the industry to the rest of the world in the first place is a necessary first step.

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Intego: 2011 offered bumper crop of Mac malware

One of Apple’s chief advantages in the personal computing market has been that its Mac computers have been relatively impervious to viruses and malware, at least when compared to Windows-based PCs. But that advantage may have been more difficult to maintain in 2011—at least, according to a new report from security firm Intego.

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AT&T to launch communication services

AT&T will launch new cloud-based unified communications services on Thursday, giving businesses the ability to integrate chat, email, voice over IP calls, audio and video conferencing over desktops and many mobile devices.

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O2 UK network security blunder exposes customers’ phone numbers to websites

If you're browsing the web on your phone or tablet on O2 UK, then the network could be exposing your phone number to every website you visit. O2 customer Lewis Peckover recently discovered that when you're browsing over 3G on O2, your handset's phone number is often included in the HTTP headers sent to each website you visit, in plain text.

HTTP headers are information exchanged between your browser and the web server before a page is loaded. In theory, the way O2 includes your phone number — alongside more mundane information like your IP address, browser and OS — means that any website you visit could easily find out your number. It's worth pointing out that the header used by O2 to send phone numbers — "x-up-calling-line-id" — isn't one that's routinely logged by web servers. However, just a couple of lines of code would allow a malicious site to find your phone number just by having you visit a website on 3G.

Lewis Peckover has set up a site to allow O2 customers to see whether they're affected. We've tried this with an O2 SIM in our Galaxy Nexus, and sure enough, there our phone number was in the list of "headers received". If you're on O2, make sure you've got Wifi disabled on your device, then click here and see if you spot your phone number among the HTTP headers.

This isn't an Android-specific problem, however due to the fact that it's a network-level issue, it'll affect Android phones just the same as any other device that's browsing over O2's data network. For this reason, just about anything that connects via HTTP over O2's network could potentially access this information. For its part, O2 says it's "investigating" the issue, and while this is a big deal for O2 customers, the fact that this is a network-level problem should mean that a fix will be relatively quick and easy to deploy.

More: Lew.io; via: ThinkBroadband

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Google to combine users’ data across its services

Google will be able to combine data from several Google services when a Google Accounts user is signed in, as part of a rewritten set of privacy policies that the company announced on Tuesday.

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