Black Moon

Apple delays delivery of new iPad to market

NEW YORK: Smart phone manufacturer Apple announced Sunday it had posponed shipment of new iPads to market by three days, from March 16 to March 19.

No formal explanation was give when the company announced its decision on its website late Sunday.

It had been reported earlier that the new device, iPad's third version since 2010, would be available in stores on Friday, March 16.

Asked about the reasons for the postponement, Apple did not respond immediately.

The new iPad boasts a more powerful processor, eye-grabbing resolution on par with that of an iPhone 4S, and the ability to connect to the latest 4G LTE telecom networks that move data faster than their predecessors.

It is due to be released simultaneously in 10 countries: the United States, France, Canada, Australia, Germany, Japan, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and China.

iPad preorders sell out, demand 'off the charts'

If you are hoping to score a new iPad from Apple, you might have to wait. Apple's website shows March 19 as the earliest ship date for online orders of its popular tablet computer. And there is a limit of two per customer on the number of tablets that can preordered.

The shipping delays affect all models and price levels on preorders, according to the website.

"Customer response to the new iPad has been off the charts and the quantity available for pre-order has been purchased," Apple said in a statement. "Customers can continue to order online and receive an estimated delivery date."

Consumers hoping to snag an iPad on its March 16 launch will have to visit one of Apple's retail stores or select Apple resellers.

While the Apple site still says models will be available in stores come Friday, there are unconfirmed reports that shipments worldwide could be delayed from three days to three weeks. And if past is precedent, there could be long waits in line at some Apple Stores when sales begin at brick-and-mortar locations.

The new iPad, the successor to the iPad 2, was unveiled with much fanfare on Wednesday at an Apple event in San Francisco. The device comes with a crisper Retina display, faster processor, voice dictation and the ability to run on the speediest 4G wireless data networks. Prices start at $499 for a Wi-Fi only model with 16 gigabytes of storage; models that can run on 4G data networks start at $629.

Apple is no stranger to sellouts of its devices within hours of their unveiling. Preorders for the iPhone 4S, for example, sold out in less than a day after the 4S debut last fall. Carrier AT&T Wireless said it sold more than 200,000 of the smartphones within the first 12 hours.

The monthly data plans for the new iPad will start at $14.99 at AT&T for 250MB and $20 at Verizon Wireless for a 1 GB plan.

Nike Releases FuelBand API at SXSW Music Hackathon

Nike will unleash the application programming interface (API) for NikeFuel - the company's metric for tracking physical activity - during a music hackathon Sunday at South by Southwest.

NikeFuel is the technology behind Nike's FuelBand, a waterproof wristband introduced in January that measures a user's movement and syncs with an iPod touch or iPhone.

The API will allow third-party music developers to infuse NikeFuel features into their apps or platforms.

"Nike will be joining the Managers Hack to open up a BETA version of the NikeFuel API for the first time to developers interested in combining music with the Nike+ FuelBand," hackathon organizer and rep at startup Backplane told Mashable Friday.

Backplane, which created Lady Gaga's new Little Monsters social network, along with music-streaming service Spotify organized the hackathon to build the future of digital music distribution.

At the event, hackers have eight hours to create and plan a demo that will be judged by a panel of music industry managers, including Lady Gaga's manager Troy Carter (who co-founded Backplane), Justin Bieber's manager Scooter Braun and Roc Nation President Jay Brown. People from Spotify, Pandora, Nike and SoundHound also will help choose a winner.

Randi Zuckerberg, who left her role as marketing director at Facebook in August to launch RtoZ Media, will provide commentary throughout the event.

 

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Tech Journal India Awaits New iPad

By Amit Agarwal.

It was almost midnight here in India, and while the entire family was busy preparing for Holika (the lighting of bonfires on the eve of the main Holi festival), I was glued to the laptop screen reading live updates from Apple's event. Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive, was on stage and he was expected to present a new iPad to the world.

The curtains were soon lifted, but there were no big surprises this time. The eagle-eyed Apple watchers had more or less accurately predicted the various features that would be included in the new iPad.

I am sure you have gone through the specs, but to quickly recap the main points in simple English, the third-generation iPad sports a better HD camera, a higher-resolution screen (retina display) and a faster processor.

Pictures and videos will look stunning on the new display, while the various apps and games will exhibit better performance and reading on the iPad will get a significant boost as web pages and text will appear crisper. It feels a bit awkward to shoot pictures or videos with the iPad, but if you do, the improved camera should please you as it can now capture 1080p (or full HD) videos. The resolution of the front-facing VGA camera hasn't changed so your Skype video calls will still look the same.

The new iPad also includes support for 4G networks - which translates to faster Internet speed on your mobile device - but that feature is of little use to Indian consumers as none of the telecom companies here have rolled out 4G services yet. And by the time 4G becomes available in India, we could be just months (or weeks) away from the next iPad. At least you can use the 4G iPad on 3G networks as well.

The new iPad is running on iOS 5.1 which is compatible with the previous iPad releases. But one software related feature that is available exclusively on the new iPad is the microphone button on the virtual keyboard, which helps users write emails by voice. While the details are scarce, the voice dictation feature could internally be using the same speech-to-text rendering engine as Siri, and it therefore remains to be seen how well it works with Indian accents.

A gorgeous display, perhaps no other tablet or mobile device comes close, and a lot faster than its predecessor, but are these enhancements worth an upgrade? That depends.

I primarily use the iPad to browse the web, watch online videos and read e-books. Now the retina display of the new iPad will definitely help improve my overall experience but the other hardware enhancements aren't very convincing to me at this time. However if I was into gaming or was still using the older first-generation iPad, this would have made an exciting upgrade.

If you don't have a tablet yet and are planning to get one of those Android tablets not because they are better than the iPad but cheaper, there's some good news for you. Apple India has just dropped the price of iPad 2 models by around 17% and the starting 16GB Wi-Fi model is now available for around 24,500 rupees ($490). That is not a bad deal at all.

The new iPad will be available in some 35 countries by the end of March. India isn't mentioned in that first list but if the previous launch date is any indication, the new iPad should be available "officially" in early May. The waiting period will obviously be much shorter for people who don't mind paying a premium in the grey market.

Amateurs battle malware, hackers in UK cybergames

Amateur cybersleuths have been hunting malware, raising firewalls and fending off mock hack attacks in a series of simulations supported in part by Britain's eavesdropping agency.

The games are intended to pull badly-needed talent into the country's burgeoning cybersecurity sector, according to former security minister Pauline Neville-Jones, who spoke at a closing ceremony held Sunday at the Science Museum in the English port city of Bristol.

"The flow of people we have at the moment is wholly inadequate," she said, warning of a skills gap "which threatens the economic future of this country."

The exercises, dubbed the Cyber Security Challenge, are intended to help bridge that gap, drawing thousands of participants who spent weeks shoring up vulnerable home networks, cracking weak codes and combing through corrupted hard drives in a series of tests designed by companies such as U.K. defense contractor QinetiQ and data security firm Sophos.

The challenge was supported in part by British signals intelligence agency GCHQ and Scotland Yard's e-crimes unit - a sign of the government's concern with supporting a rapidly-developing field.

The government is spending 650 million pounds (about $1 billion) to boost its electronic defense capabilities. Britain's military recently opened a global cyber-operations center in the English market town of Corsham, and last month police announced the creation of three new regional cybercrime units.

Event organizer Judy Baker warned there weren't enough skilled people to work in the newly created jobs, complaining that cybersecurity was barely on the radar of high school guidance counselors and that too few universities offered degrees in the field.

"The front door into cybersecurity is not clear at all," she said.

The competition was closed to cybersecurity professionals, so many of the 4,000-odd participants - such as the 19-year-old winner, Cambridge University student Jonathan Millican - were aspiring computer scientists. Others were engineers or hobbyists.

Senior GCHQ official Jonathan Hoyle made a brief speech Sunday, inviting Millican and other prize-winners to come visit the secretive organization's headquarters in Chelthenham, about 95 miles (150 kilometers) northwest of London.

Millican was excited by the prospect, saying: "It's not somewhere many people just go."

 

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GCHQ-backed competition names Cyber Security Champion

By Leo Kelion.

A 19-year-old university student has been named the UK's "Cyber Security Champion" following a competition sponsored by the intelligence agency GCHQ and several leading tech firms.

Judges said Jonathan Millican had demonstrated knowledge "years beyond his time".

The award in Bristol marks the culmination of a six-month long challenge designed to attract talented people to the cyberdefence industry.

It coincides with high-profile attacks.

Last week the FBI charged six men - including two in the UK - with computer hacking crimes which it said had affected "over one million victims".

The action prompted retaliatory attacks by the Antisec-wing of the Anonymous hacktivist movement.

On Saturday, James Jeffrey, from the West Midlands, pleaded guilty to breaking into the website of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service in a separate attack. He is accused of stealing details of people who had contacted the abortion provider.

The Sunday Times also reported that Chinese spies had stolen information of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jet from BAE Systems' computers.

It said the incident had occurred three years ago and had been revealed by a BAE executive at a private dinner. The firm is not commenting. Chinese authorities denied being behind any such incident.

Sponsored degree

Mr Millican won the competition after taking part in a final series of challenges hosted by HP Labs which pitted six five-person teams against each other on Saturday.

These involved advising an online start-up company how best to protect itself against hackers during a role-playing exercise, and then reconfiguring a computer network during a 15-minute long simulated attack.

Although Mr Millican's team was beaten by a rival, judges decided he still deserved the top prize.

"He showed great leadership, strong technical abilities and also demonstrated that he understood the impact what he was doing would have on a business," said Adam Thompson, the chief judge who works for Hewlett Packard's security team.

Other judges involved were selected from sponsors, including the accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers, telecoms giant BT, defence firm Cassidian and the security technology maker Qinetiq.

Prizes were tailored towards each winner. Mr Millican - a first year computer sciences student at Jesus College, University of Cambridge - has been offered a paid follow-up masters degree at Royal Holloway, University of London.

He has also been invited to visit communications intelligence agency GCHQ's Cheltenham base.

Cyber-defenders

Jonathan Hoyle, director general for cyber security at GCHQ said: "It is through initiatives such as this that organisations, be they in the public or private sector, can continue to develop and maintain our leading edge in cyberspace by being able to recruit the right people with the right skills."

Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones, the competition's patron and the Prime Minister's special representative to business on cybersecurity, added that she hoped such events would encourage children to put their computer skills to constructive use, rather than be tempted to take part in illegal activities.

"There are people who are hacking and one of the worrying things is that they are regarded as heroes," she told the BBC.

"They are involved in the betrayal of both companies and ordinary people. We've seen cases of people's personal email addresses and passwords and bank details being posted online, opening these unfortunate individuals to crime. So they are definitely not heroes."

Mr Millican said he was most interested in the challenges posed by the more complex cyber-attacks - such as the Stuxnet worm which attacked Iran's nuclear systems or the Duqu Trojan suspected of being designed to gather intelligence from industries' control systems.

"We're going into an age of cyberwarfare," he said.

"Given all the critical systems we have in this country that are connected to the internet it's very important that there are experts out there that can keep people safe."

This was the second year the Cyber Security Challenge has been held.

Organisers said they intended to make changes next time to ensure that some of the youngest entrants, who typically did not make it through to the final stage, were offered follow-up coaching.

 

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