Google Street View brings you 1,000 feet up the Eiffel Tower, no tickets required

Once you're done couch-surfing that spectacular Google Street View of the Burj Khalifa, you can now head on over a few thousand miles with a click of the mouse to the Eiffel Tower, where the views are no less impressive. The fine folks over at Mountain View used a special Street View Trolley to capture marvelous 360-degree shots from every floor of the historical monument as part of a collaboration with the Eiffel Tower Operating Company. Google's Cultural Institute then collated all those images and presented them in three online exhibits along with historical documents that tell the story of the landmark's birth and cultural impact. You can head over to the Cultural Institute link below to get a slice of Parisian history, or just take a peek after the break to see a video of how those panoramic shots were taken. Unfortunately, you'll have to supply your own croissants.

SOURCE: Google Cultural Institute, Google Blog, Google Street View

Paramount picks DTS-HD codec to deliver surround sound for UltraViolet common file format digital movies

Early this year, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros. movie studios chose Dolby Digital Plus as their preferred means to deliver surround sound for their UltraVioletcommon file format (CFF) downloads. Paramount Pictures, however, has decided to go with Dolby's competitor, DTS, announcing today that the DTS-HD codec will be used in its UltraViolet CCF offerings. Like Dolby, the DTS codec delivers up to 7.1 channels of surround sound for Paramount's UV catalog -- though your cloud-based audio/visual bliss will have to wait, UltraViolet CFF isn't slated for release until sometime in the latter half of 2013.

Vidzone music video streaming app comes to PlayStation 3 users in the US

Music Unlimited has long been Sony's preferred musical portal on the PlayStation 3, but for those who enjoy video to accompany their music, there's a new option available to folks in the US: Vidzone. It's an ad-supported music video streaming service -- not unlike the Vevo app Xbox 360 users enjoy -- that's been available to PS3 owners in Europe for years. Now, their US counterparts can enjoy the 55,000 videos in its library and can view them via genre-based channels or build their own custom playlists. Should you prefer content that's a little less produced, the service also delivers artist interviews and plenty of live events, too. And, whenever you find a new favorite video, you can share it on Facebook. Sound good? You can grab the app yourself from the PlayStation Store or install it directly from the XMB's TV/Video Services option.

HTC One Mini shows up as 601e in Chinese certification database

Why hello again, One Mini! While HTC has yet to make this metallic 4.3-inch phone official, the closest thing we have right now is this certification in China's TENAA database. What's new is the "601e" model name, which positions it in a similar tier as the other slightly bigger 600 series devices destined for China, namely the Desire 606w (aka Desire 600 Dual SIM globally), Desire 608t and Desire 609d. But unlike these models nor the Chinese variants of the larger One, it appears that this 601e with WCDMA radio is just a single-SIM device. With the appearance of this filing, it shouldn't be long before the One Mini finally hits the shelves around the world.

VIA: ePrice
SOURCE: TENAA

Panasonic launches $100 SC-NT10 rugged wireless speaker

Panasonic is no stranger to the rugged gadget game, so it doesn't come as a surprise that the company's newest wireless speaker is another toughie. Called the SC-NT10, the 4W compact device houses two teensy full-range speakers and a passive radiator. The company claims its "quad proof" design can take on dust, splashes of water, intense heat or freezing cold and drops from as high as 30 inches. Other features include NFC for quick Bluetooth pairing, a 3.5mm jack, and up to eight hours of battery life. It won't ship until this fall (estimated date is sometime in August), but it's currently available for preorder for $100 each. If you find that price too steep for a hockey puck-sized speaker, you can check out SC-NT10's less edgy but cheaper cousin.

HP Android smartphone returns with “Brave” specifications

It’s time to get serious about HP releasing another smartphone, in this case code-named HP Brave and ready for Android excellence. This device is being teased as rolling with GSM/WCDMA/LTE abilities right out of the box paired with a 4.5-inch 900 x 1600 pixel display and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 quad-core processor. You know what that means? It means that HP somehow made a mistake and put a display from 2012 on a device that’s got enough power under the hood to work with a panel from 2014.

This device has appeared in the benchmarking system known as AnTuTu, meaning there’s always the possibility that it’s not entirely legitimate. AnTuTu doesn’t often have falsified results, but the ability to do so does still exist – keep that in mind when you read through the rest of this article on a device that has, on the other hand, been rumored more than once.

Above: The HP Slate 7 running Android 4.2 Jelly Bean.

UPDATE: HP denies this machine’s existence in an extremely brief statement:

“The photo is a fabrication and is not a photo of anything HP has in the works. Someone is making stuff up.” – HP Representative

Earlier this year, HP Senior Director of Consumer PCs and Tablets for Asia-Pacific, Yam Su Yin suggested that, with regard to an HP smartphone, “the answer is yes but I cannot give a timetable. … It would be silly if we say no,” she said, “HP has to be in the game.”

This new “Brave” device is said here to be working with a 5 megapixel camera on its front, a 14.5 megapixel camera on its back, and a single LED flash (again, on its back). This back-facing camera is tipped here as being able to film 1080p video, and we wouldn’t be surprised if the front-facing camera had the ability to film 720p video at least.

The list of specifications here suggests that this machine is working with Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, well within the realm of real possibility. With the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 we’re seeing a clock speed at 2.0 GHz per each of its four cores paired with ARM-made Adreno 300 GPU power to back it all up. And it’s definitely not running WebOS.

VIA: PhoneArena; Amoeba

Toshiba Exceria Pro SD card touted as “world’s fastest”

Toshiba is coming out with an ultra-fast series of SD cards that they’re calling Exceria Pro, and the company is claiming that the new SD cards are the fastest around, with speeds hitting as fast 240 MB/s. These cards are aimed at professionals, such as photographers who need photos saved quickly.

The card will come in 16GB and 32GB variants and will offer crazy-fast write speeds that are about as fast a typical solid state drive, thanks to the UHS-II standard that the new cards are using. They don’t have any other fancy features, though, like WiFi transferring, but many photographers and videographers should get a kick out of just the speeds alone.

Besides the Exceria Pro cards, there will also be some regular Exceria SDXC cards that will have capacities of 32GB or 64GB. These will also operate under the UHS-II standard, but they’ll have a maximum write speed of 120 MB/s, which is still pretty darn quick if you ask us, so we wouldn’t count those out just yet.

Toshiba hopes to have these bad boys out by October, with the regular Exceria SD cards releasing in November. Prices have yet to be announced, but it’s said that the 64GB Exceria SDXC card will cost around $250. That’s certainly not cheap change, and we don’t expect point-and-shoot operators to carry these cards around on their person, but if you’re in the media business and need a fast memory card, these will probably do.

VIA: PC World

NSA sued by coalition headed by EFF over US-based telephone surveillance

This week the Electronic Frontier Foundation has announced that they’re heading a coalition of groups – 19 in all – in a lawsuit targeting the NSA. The National Security Agency is under the microscope in this suit which suggests the government be obligated to inventory and make public (or at least let it be known what they’ve got) before they destroy all data collected in what’s known as the Associational Tracking Program. This program works with data collected from Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint.

You’ll remember this program from its first appearance in the public immediately preceding the rush of NSA surveillance controversy with PRISM. Back earlier this year it was Verizon who was first revealed to be taking part of metadata collection and government sharing, this report expanding quite quickly to cover AT&T and Sprint as well.

Though the White House retort suggested it was “critical” that they have these records from phone companies, this suit suggests that it’s the violation of constitutional rights that takes precedent here.

“This lawsuit challenges an illegal and unconstitutional program of dragnet electronic surveillance, specifically the bulk acquisition, collection, storage, retention, and searching of telephone communications information (the “Associational Tracking Program”) conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA) and other defendants.” – EFF Complaint for Constitutional and Statutory Violations, Seeking Declaratory and Injunctive Relief, Case No. CV 13 3287

Those involved in this case are numerous. There’s 19 total plaintiffs, they ranging from the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles to the Franklin Armory. Also on the list is the Calguns Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, Media Alliance, Students for Sensible Drug Policy, TechFreedom, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, and Greenpeace.

EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn spoke up on the matter this afternoon, suggesting that the citizens of the United States’ First Amendment rights at being violated harshly in this NSA program.

“Who we call, how often we call them, and how long we speak shows the government what groups we belong to or associate with, which political issues concern us, and our religious affiliation.

Exposing this information – especially in a massive, untargeted way over a long period of time – violates the Constitution and the basic First Amendment tests that have been in place for over 50 years.” – EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn

You’ll find more information on the lawsuit – if you’d like to go digging around in the massive amount of legal documentation and strongly worded demands from the EFF, through the “EFF Complaint” link above. We’ll be following this suit to the finish, of that you can be sure.

Tumblr iPhone app fixed after plaintext password goof spotted

Tumblr has been forced to rush out a patched version of its iPhone and iPad apps, and has advised all users to change their password, after researchers discovered the apps had been transmitting login credentials in plain text. The new version of the app, released to Apple’s App Store overnight, fixes a flaw where username and password details were transmitted without any encryption; if the user had connected over a public or compromised WiFi network, those credentials could feasibly be “sniffed” by a third-party and stolen.

The security shortcoming was spotted by an iOS app auditor, The Register reports, while in the process of checking which apps were suitable for use on a corporate network. The previous version of the Tumblr app came up clean when it came to what data on the phone it had access to, but a check of the network logs showed that the iOS software wasn’t following best practices when it came to password security.

“The Tumblr iOS app is sending the password over plain text and not over SSL” the researcher said. “This occurs when you first log into the application, although I didn’t check past the initial logon screen.”

The setup differed from Tumblr’s login process on other platforms. On the desktop, for instance, the microblogging service – which was acquired by Yahoo in a $1.1bn deal last May – passes all credentials through an SSL connection.

According to the researcher, attempts to report the flaw to Tumblr’s security team fell on deaf ears. However, since the issue has become higher-profile, Yahoo and Tumblr have finally responded.

“Please know that we take your security very seriously and are tremendously sorry for this lapse and inconvenience” the company said in a statement on the newly updated apps.

The fear is that Tumblr users accessing their accounts in public over unsecured wireless connections could have inadvertently handed over access to anybody sniffing traffic. The advice is to not only change the password on Tumblr now, but on any service where you used the same login credentials.

Apple returns to Samsung for 2015 14nm Ax chips, will pay 20% more. Deal shows Sammy’s increasing power, but for how long?

It must be really frustrating to be in Apple management shoes right now.

Samsung has been a major component supplier for iPhone for years. But ever since Sammy began blatantly copying iPhone with its Galaxy S line of smartphones, Apple has been hard at work to distance from Korean company for as much of component supply, as they can. The problem is – for some things, there’s no one else who can make iPhone parts in volumes and quality that Apple needs. Case in point – Apple’s Ax application processors that go into every iPhone and iPad.

Samsung has been the sole manufacturer of Apple’s Ax CPU’s from the very first iPhone that shipped with it. But for several years now, Apple execs have been touring chip foundries around the world to find someone else to produce iPhone brains. Without much success, until recently.

Few weeks ago, Digitimes and WSJ  broke the news that Apple has finally signed a contract with TSMC to produce the next generation iPhone chips, hopefully replacing Samsung as the main CPU supplier.

If only things were that easy.

Even those early reports pegged TSMC only as a supplier of the next generation iPhone CPUs, made with 20nm manufacturing process. Samsung will still produce all A5 and A6 CPUs made with 28-45nm process technologies, that run currently available iPhones and iPads, and is the most likely AP supplier for the upcoming iPhone 5S and new iPads to be released this fall. TSMC only gets to provide chips for the next generation of iPhones and iPads, that Apple will launch in 2014.

And who will be the supplier of the next next generation of Apple CPUs, for products of 2015 based on next nextgeneration 14nm manufacturing process, was up in the air.

Until now. It isn’t anymore.

Yesterday two Korean sites – Korea Economic Daily and Korea Herald reported that Apple had signed a contract with Samsung, for the production of 14nm Ax CPUs from 2015. The contract is said to run for 3 years, the new chips should be 30% faster than previous generation TSCM CPUs, and double the efficiency of currently available 28nm processors. Later, Mobile Review’s Eldar Murtazin chimed in, telling us that, according to his sources, under the new contract, Apple will now pay 20% more per chip to Samsung.

So what can we make from all these Apple chip supplier news?

Not much, beyond the fact that semiconductor fab owners hold the upper hand vs mobile chip designers, for now. The fact that Samsung was able to negotiate 20% price increase for the next generation Apple CPUs, is one good illustration of that. That Apple wasn’t able to boot Sammy from its CPU supplier list despite years of effort, is another.

It takes years and a lot of money to design and build advanced semiconductor fab, perfect the manufacturing process, and achieve good enough yields. Due to unprecedented smartphone growth over the last few years, the demand for ever more advanced chips is outstripping the available supply today, and fab owners are calling all the shots. Especially when it comes to the most advanced Application Processors, that go into the top of the line smartphones. But how long will this last?

From the beginning of the year, there are more and more signs that global smartphone growth is slowing down. The growth slowdown is especially pronounced at the high end, where smartphones with last year’s specs are already good enough for most of the user needs. If this is a start of a new trend, and not a momentary blip, in a few years things in the advanced mobile CPU biz might look very different from today.

The lower the demand for the latest top of the line smartphones, the lower the need for the most advanced and expensive chips. While manufacturing capacities fab owners built during the boom years will have to be utilized to the max anyway.

Samsung may have come on top in this dynamic chip supplier/buyer relationship with Apple, today. The  question is – for how long?