Prosecutor in Aaron Swartz 'hacking' case comes under fire

Carmen Ortiz was being talked about last month as the next Massachusetts governor. Now she's being investigated for threatening the late Aaron Swartz with decades in prison.

A politically ambitious Justice Department official who oversaw the criminal case against Aaron Swartz has come under fire for alleged prosecutorial abuses that led the 26-year-old online activist to take his own life.

Carmen Ortiz, 57, the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts who was selected by President Obama, compared the online activist -- accused of downloading a large number of academic papers -- to a common criminal in a 2011 press release. "Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar," Ortiz said at the time. Last fall, her office slapped Swartz with 10 additional charges that carried a maximum penalty of 50 years in prison.

"He was killed by the government," Swartz's father, Robert, said at his son's funeral in Highland Park, Ill., today, according to a report in the Chicago Sun Times.

Last Wednesday, less than three months before the criminal trial was set to begin, Ortiz's office formally rejected a deal that would have kept Swartz out of prison. Two days later, Swartz killed himself.

"He was being made into a highly visible lesson," says Harvey Silverglate, a Cambridge, Mass., attorney who first met Swartz in 2001 and spoke with him after his arrest. "He was enhancing the careers of a group of career prosecutors and a very ambitious -- politically-ambitious -- U.S. attorney who loves to have her name in lights."

Feds: MegaUpload was not entrapped

Entrapment is one of MegaUpload's claims in its legal battle against the U.S. government. The feds are now saying this claim is "baseless."

"Megaupload's allegations are baseless, as even a cursory review of Megaupload's pleading and the search warrant materials at issue disproves the allegation that the government misled the court as part of a conspiracy to entrap Megaupload," the government wrote in a Friday filing (PDF).

MegaUpload, which was founded by Kim DotCom, is the highest-profile service to be accused of criminal copyright violations by the U.S. government -- and the case is being watched closely around the globe.

DotCom's saga has played out over the past year after he was arrested on allegations of criminal copyright violation, conspiracy, money laundering, and wire fraud. U.S. federal officials accused DotCom of pocketing millions of dollars in illegal profits from criminal file sharing and downloading that has reportedly cost the film industry more than $600 million in damages.

Apple is done, say teens

Future adults allegedly believe, according to research, that Apple isn't cool any more. They're more impressed by Samsung's Galaxy and Microsoft's Surface.

When you want to know what's cool, you ask a teenager.

You have to ask her nicely or she will scowl you into oblivion or patronize you into a painful purgatory.

So I'd like to prepare you for some of this difficulty.

Teens have decided that Apple is, like, so over. If you want to be a veritable cooleratus, you want to be seen with a Samsung Galaxy phone in your hand or a Microsoft Surface laptoppy tabletstuck under your arm.

This definitive information comes to me courtesy of research performed by Buzz Marketing, as well as three 14-year-olds who tried to rob me of my orange Puma sneakers.

When they saw I had an iPhone, they couldn't even be bothered to take the sneakers. (I exaggerate slightly about this last element.)

White House shoots down petition to build Death Star

The White House has rejected a proposal to build a Death Star, saying that in addition to its prohibitive construction costs, the current administration does not advocate destroying other planets.

Today's official statement came in response to a petition posted in November to the White House's We The People platform that called for the administration to begin construction of a moon-size military battlestation armed with a planet-destroying superlaser by 2016. The petition, which attracted well more than the minimum 25,000 signatures necessary for a response from the White House, suggested such a project could give the nation's economy a much-needed boost:

 By focusing our defense resources into a space-superiority platform and weapon system such as a Death Star, the government can spur job creation in the fields of construction, engineering, space exploration, and more, and strengthen our national defense.

Chrome 24 brings math formatting, better offline abilities

Alongside the perpetual effort to speed up JavaScript, Google's newest browser gets MathML support, offline data storage with IndexedDB, and security fixes.

Google released the stable version of Chrome 24today, adding support for IndexedDB for apps that work better offline, mathematics formulas formatted with MathML, and faster JavaScript.

The new version also comes with a range of security fixes, including two $1,000 bounties and one $4,000 bounty paid to people who found high-severity vulnerabilities. Because Chrome automatically downloads updates by default in part to patch holes as fast as possible, people just need to restart the browser to update it.

IndexedDB, under development for years, is geared to store data for use even if a Web site or Web app is working with no network connection. It's used for offline Gmail and Google Docs, for example.

Math markup language makes it easier for the browser to display formulas like the quadratic equation -- not something everyone needs, but as with accents and currency symbols, something very useful to a particular subset.

Another feature, built into Chrome 24 but disabled by default, is support for CSS custom filters, a technology that makes some graphical elements programmable. Adobe developed the technology as part of its effort to build into Web standards some of the features in its Flash Player software.Faster JavaScript is hardly news these days -- all browser makers are constantly working to wring the last bit of performance out of the Web's prime programming language. There's more, though: "We recently made some server-side changes to Google Cloud Print so that Chrome's printer selection dialog loads twice as fast. We've also been working on reducing the browser's startup time and setting up automated tests to catch any code changes that would slow Chrome down," said Google programmer and compiler expert Toon Verwaest in a blog post from when Chrome 24 hit beta in November.

Adobe's CSS custom filter technology arrives in Chrome 24 -- though disabled by default. It permits programmable graphics effects, such as this swoopy transformation to a text and graphics box. The text is still selectable.

(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

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Eyes-on: Samsung's Youm flexible-display tech at CES 2013

Samsung debuted its Youm flexible-display technology at CES' closing keynote, and the tech is nothing short of eye-popping.

The screens, which were shown off here as just a concept, promise to change what kind of form factors are possible for companies that make smartphones and tablets.

Samsung brought out a handful of demo units around 5-inches in size to show press, including a phonelike device with a screen that wraps around the side edges and could therefore display information like text messages and other alerts without a user needing to view the entire screen. A similar design puts the wraparounds on the bottom, while another concept (shown off in a video) rolled out like a scroll.

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Behind the scenes, Samsung is making use of OLED to give the screens what it says are deeper blacks and a higher overall contrast ratio with better power efficiency than traditional LCD displays.

During a brief viewing of the technology following the presentation, Samsung showed a small group of reporters a close-up of the screens, which were displaying still images and videos. Touch interactions with the tech were not shown off (since the displays were not hooked up to CPUs), but Samsung was keen to demo the possible form factors, from a screen bent like a question mark to more simple designs that form a small curl on the edges.

Samsung did not provide a price or release date for Youm.

Samsung's approach (which the company teased last month) differs from competitor Nokia, which made waves in October 2011 with its "kinetic interface" technology. Nokia showed off a flexible screen that controlled aspects of the phone hardware depending on how users twisted the screen. So far, Samsung appears to be more interested in using its own technology to turn parts of the phone that would otherwise go unused to additional areas to display information and add interactivity.

This is not the first time Samsung has unveiled flexible-display technology at CES. The company demoed flexible, transparent displays at the same show in 2011, also with the intent to bring them to future devices. The newer models come in larger form factors and with higher pixel displays.

Updated at 1:05 p.m. PT with additional background.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

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Intel at CES: throwing down the gauntlet with Nvidia

LAS VEGAS—Intel swaggered into their CES press briefing like an aging gunfighter ready to take on the cocky young gun. You know, John Wayne versus Clint Eastwood style.

Pundits and analysts have wondered whether Intel can handle the new competition from ARM-based systems. The many companies building many different implementations of ARM, some suggested, would result in a “death by a thousand tiny cuts.” But Intel is showing some renewed fighting spirit here at CES 2013.

Intel VP of mobile, Mike Bell, opened up by touting the performance and battery life accomplishments of its current Medfield line of mobile processors. The chief target of Intel’s bragging was Nvdia’s Tegra 3 mobile processor, which was mentioned more than once during the briefing.

He then moved on to point out its 140-plus design wins for the company’s Ultrabook standard. It’s an impressive number on the surface, though Intel’s actual sales have beenless than stellar. After that initial stage setting, Intel dove into the meat of the matter: a bevy of new, and sort-of-new, processors.