US State Department Yet to Clear Its Computer Network of Hackers: Report

Three months after the U.S. State Department confirmed hackers breached its unclassified email system, the government has still not been able to evict them from the network, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing three people familiar with the investigation.

Government officials, assisted by outside contractors and the National Security Agency, have repeatedly scanned the network and taken some systems offline, the Journal reported. But investigators still see signs of the hackers on State Department computers, the people familiar with the matter told the paper.

Each time investigators find a hacker tool and block it, the intruders tweak it slightly to attempt to sneak past defenses, the Journal reported. It is not clear how much data the hackers have taken. No official determination has been made about who is behind the breach, which was disclosed in November, the paper said. The Journal reported that five people familiar with the original intrusion said they had seen or been told of links suggesting involvement by the Russian government.

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Pebble Could Soon Launch a Slimmer Smartwatch With Colour Screen

Pebble's CEO Eric Migicovsky earlier this month revealed plans to introduce new products and it seems the company is set to launch at least one on Tuesday. Additionally, new details about the upcoming Pebble watch have surfaced on the Internet. The smartwatch maker has updated the company's official website with a countdown to an announcement scheduled on Tuesday. The homepage on the official Pebble site includes an animated image of a watch tipping imminent launch of a new Pebble watch; though no official confirmation has been made.

The company even took to social media to create a buzz about the forthcoming announcement. Pebble in a tweet on Thursday said, "We're counting down our fave Pebbler moments" accompanied by an image of the countdown page.

9to5mac in a report citing multiple sources has claimed that Pebble has been working on new hardware and software features that might be revealed on Tuesday's launch. According to report, the new Pebble watch will include a wider, colour, and e-paper like display that will be enclosed in a thinner design. The screen however is said to not support touch, unlike other smartwatches available in the market. The screen is sad to pack an improved backlight.

Other details tip that the new watch will include a battery in-line with current versions of Pebble watches. The new hardware packs a microphone, which could expand possibilities of new series of apps created by third-party developers, as per the report. Nuance voice recognition software is also said to be included in the new watch.

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Yahoo Woos App Makers With Mobile Developer Suite

Yahoo on Thursday hosted its first conference for mobile application makers, adopting a strategy used by rivals in a push to be at the heart of mobile Internet lifestyles.

More than 1,000 people attended a Yahoo Mobile Developer Conference where the Internet pioneer unveiled a new suite of services designed to help developers improve and profit from applications tailored for smartphones or tablet computers.

"Mobile went from a hobby, to becoming a core part of our business," Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer said during a keynote kicking off the one-day gathering in San Francisco.

Since taking the Yahoo helm in 2012, Mayer has made a priority of adapting the Silicon Valley company's products and services to mobile devices. Internet titans including Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter, and Microsoft have made a practice of hosting conferences for outside developers whose creations are considered vital to staying relevant and hip on fickle technology terrain.

Yahoo Mobile Developer Suite combined technology from Flurry and digital ad firm BrightRoll, which the company bought last year, according to senior vice president of advertising products Prashant Fuloria. The analytics firm Flurry "has a deep understanding of the mobile developer's needs and the mobile ecosystem, and Yahoo is a place with an enormous audience across devices and sophisticated technology," Fuloria said.

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Sony Launches 64GB Memory Card With 'Premium Sound' for Audiophiles

Its not been even a week since we saw reports about Sony's imminent exit from smartphone and television business, and the Japanese tech giant has gone ahead and announced the SR-64HXA - a 64GB Class 10 microSDXC card with a 'Premium Sound' tag that costs five times as much as a regular microSDXC card.

The Verge reports that the SR-64HXA costs JPY 18,500 (roughly $155 or Rs. 9,600). It could be a great accessory for those who intend to pick up the Sony Walkman ZX2, which the company announced at CES 2015 and has an astronomical price tag of $1,200 (approximately Rs. 74,700).

This card is currently available only in Japan. Audiophiles might find it worth the price but for majority of the folks, who listen to music prefer streaming or use only bundled earphones, will find it too expensive. As the tag suggests, the memory card is engineered for sound quality. What this effectively means is that SR-64HXA produces less electrical noise when reading data. We are unsure if that actually makes much of a difference considering how flash drives are already pretty quiet.

Interestingly, when questioned about the market for such a product, a fairly clueless Sony spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal, "We aren't that sure about the product's potential demand, but we thought some, among people who are committed to great sound quality, would want it."

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New App Can Help Diagnose Obesity, Depression: Study

Researchers have found that a mobile app equipped with evidence-based guidelines can help nurses better identify people with problems of obesity and depression, leading to higher diagnosis rates. "Our app focused specifically on the work that nurse practitioners do to identify health problems, counsel patients, and coordinate care plans, resulting in higher diagnosis rates and more opportunities for intervention,"said lead study author Suzanne Bakken from the Columbia University School of Nursing.

The study evaluated diagnosis rates for tobacco use, adult and paediatric depression, and obesity during 34,349 patient exams conducted by 363 registered nurses enrolled in nurse practitioner programs at Columbia Nursing.For each of the health issues studied, mobile apps with decision support features resulted in significantly higher diagnosis rates than apps with only bare-bones tools for recording results from a patient exam.

The app may have worked because it prompted nurse practitioners to follow evidence-based clinical guidelines to screen, diagnose, and manage specific conditions and encouraged detailed conversations with patients about their health, Bakken noted.For tobacco screening, for example, the app prompted nurses to ask not just about cigarettes but also about other products such as chewing tobacco.

To diagnose patients who are overweight or obese, the app calculated body-mass-index to quickly pinpoint people who might benefit from weight-loss counselling and other interventions.

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IFTTT Rebrands App; Launches 3 New Do Apps for Android and iOS

IFTTT or If This Then That, the web automation service, has launched three new apps alongside rebranding its main app. The new apps - Do Button, Do Camera, and Do Note - are now available for download for Android and iOS users. Meanwhile, the IFTTT app has been rebranded as IF, and is also now available to download via Google Play and the App Store.

The company announced the launch on Thursday in a blog titled "Introducing Do - a new class of apps by IFTTT" and said, "Take action with the tap of a button. Do empower you to create your own personalized button, camera, and notepad. Run Recipes right when you want to."

For those unaware, IFTTT is a web-based service which allows users to create chains of conditional statements, dubbed 'recipes' that are triggered based upon changes to other connected Web services such as Gmail, Facebook, and Instagram among others.

The three new Do apps will allow users to trigger respective predefined actions with just a tap of a button. The Do Button by IFTTT allows users to create a personalised button with just a tap and carry out up to 3 Recipes at a time. The app allows Recipes which can are connected to devices and services such as Philips Hue, Google Drive, and Nest Thermostat among others. The Do Camera app enables users to create a personalised camera with just a tap and also allows up to three Recipes at a time. The app allows Recipes which can be connected to popular social networking services such as Facebook, Dropbox, Evernote, and Instagram.

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New Mineral Evidence Hints at Ancient Microbial Martian Life: Researchers

mineral that breaks down organic compounds when it is flash-heated has key implications for the Mars Curiosity Mission, scientists reported.

Jarosite is an iron sulphate and it is one of several minerals that Nasa's Curiosity Mission is searching for as its presence could indicate ancient habitable environments which may have once hosted life on the red planet.

On Earth, iron sulphate minerals like jarosite form in the harsh acidic waters flowing out of sulphur rich rocks. Despite the adverse conditions, these waters are a habitat for bacteria that use these dissolved sulphate ions.

Their presence on the red planet provides evidence that acidic liquid water was present at the same time the minerals formed. This could have provided an environment favourable for harbouring ancient microbial Martian life.To reach this conclusion, researchers from Imperial College London and the Natural History Museum replicated a technique that one of Curiosity Rover's on-board instruments is using to analyse soil samples. They tested a combination of jarosite and organic compounds.

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Microsoft OneNote for iPad Gets Handwriting and OCR Features

Microsoft on Thursday updated its OneNote for iPad note-taking app with handwriting ability and optical character recognition (OCR) for images.

With the Microsoft OneNote for iPad version 2.9 (can be downloaded via App Store), users can now write and draw directly into notes. According to MicrosoftOffice blog, this was the top requested feature by users.

"To get started on iPad, just tap the new Draw tab on the ribbon. Select a pen, marker, or highlighter and write, sketch or doodle until your heart's content," said OneNote team.

The OneNote for iPad app also includes 'Palm Rejection', which on enabling doesn't detect your palm touching the screen while writing or drawing. Users can set it up from the 'Palm Rejection' on the ribbon and then tap the image that most closely resembles how you normally hold a pen (see above).

The major feature brought to the OneNote for iPad app is OCR (optical character recognition), which enables text search within all images that are added to notebooks saved on OneDrive, including scanned images. Users can further copy and paste text to notes from images. With the rollout of the same feature for OneNote for Mac earlier this week, Microsoft now says users can now use OCR from any client, even OneNote online, to search for text within OneDrive images or notebooks.

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Italian Privacy Watchdog Says to Conduct Inspections at Google US Offices

Italy's data privacy watchdog said Google Inc had agreed to it conducting inspections at its Californian headquarters, the first time a European Union regulator will make checks on the company inside U.S. territory.

Friday's announcement represents the latest privacy challenge for the company in the EU and underscores the willingness of the 28-member bloc to ensure its citizens' data are treated according to EU law, even when held in foreign jurisdictions.

Google has been under investigation by several EU data protection authorities (DPAs) since it consolidated some 70 existing privacy policies into one in March 2012, combining data collected on individual users across its services, including YouTube, Gmail and social network Google+ It gave users no means to opt out.

On Friday the Italian data protection authority said Google had agreed to put in place all the privacy protections required of it and to submit to regular checks. It said Google had until Jan. 15, 2016 to implement changes in how it treats and stores users' data.

"For the first time in Europe, it (Google) will be the subject of regular checks to monitor progress ... of the actions to bring its platform into line with domestic legislation," the DPA said.

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Tapan Misra Named New Head of Isro Application Centre

Scientist Tapan Misra Friday took over as director of the Indian space agency's application centre at Ahmedabad in Gujarat.

Misra, deputy director of microwave remote sensing area at the same centre, succeeded A.S. Kiran Kumar, who was made chairman of the state-run Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) on January 14 in Bengaluru.

An engineering graduate from Jadavpur University in Kolkata, Misra was the lead designer for the development of C-band synthetic aperture radar of the country's radar imaging satellite-1 (Risat-1).

"Under Misra's leadership, critical technology elements for Risat were developed in partnership with the industry," the space agency said in a statement.

Misra contributed to the system design, simulation, integration and ground calibration of multi-frequency scanning microwave radiometer instrument, which is onboard the country's Oceansat-1 satellite.

"Misra was associated with the development of a special airborne radar system for disaster management during 2005-2006 Scatterometer payload of Oceansat-2, launched in 2009 for providing wind data to global meteorological community," the statement recalled. Misra also led a team to develop futuristic remote sensing systems, including advanced radars, millimetre wave sounders and an advanced Scatterometer.

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Nasa Announces Winners of First Mars Challenge

 

Nasa has announced the winners of its first Mars Balance Mass Challenge that asked for design ideas for small science and technology payloads that could provide dual purpose as ejectable balance masses on spacecraft entering the Martian atmosphere.

Texas-based Ted Ground was awarded $20,000 for his idea to study the Martian atmosphere by releasing material that could be seen and studied by other Martian spacecraft in orbit and on the ground.

A team of engineers from Grand Rapids, Michigan, received an honourable mention and $5,000 for their idea to study Martian weather by looking at wind patterns near the planet's surface.

"The 219 submissions from 43 countries to the Mars Balance Mass Challenge show the interest the public has in directly engaging with Nasa," said Nasa chief technologist David Miller. "The two winning ideas highlight how effective these activities can be at helping Nasa bring innovative ideas into our missions," he added.The Mars Balance Mass Challenge was announced in September 2014.

The payloads would serve two roles: perform scientific or technology functions that help us learn more about the Red Planet and provide the necessary weight to balance planetary landers.

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