Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs talks up the 800 series chips at the company's CES keynote. Andrew Cunningham At this point, almost every high-end Android phone we've seen this year has arrived sporting Qualcomm's Snapdragon 600 SoC, which combines four of the company's Krait 300 CPU cores with the Adreno 320 GPU used in last year's Snapdragon S4 Pro. But there's another chip that Qualcomm mentioned at its big, strange CES press conference in January: the Snapdragon 800. This chip combines four Krait 400 CPU cores (basically identical to Krait 300 save for faster L2 cache and higher clock speeds) with a faster Adreno 330 GPU—Qualcomm has allowed some journalists to benchmark its reference platform for the chip, and the initial numbers are quite impressive. Of the primary sources we have for these numbers, AnandTech is probably the most thorough—they've got plenty of numbers comparing the Snapdragon 800's CPU and GPU to chips like the Snapdragon 600, Apple's A6 and A6X, and the Exynos 5 Dual and Octa. The chip's CPU represents a modest upgrade over the 600, while the GPU is a massive step up that trades blows with the powerful Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX554MP4 in Apple's fourth-generation iPad. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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On Tuesday Nvidia announced that it would make its GPU technology widely available to device manufacturers looking to license it, starting with the company's current Kepler architecture. This build is found in Nvidia's GeForce 600-series GPUs and now may end up in graphics cores from other manufacturers, too. Nvidia said Kepler's improved performance and efficiency, as well as its Direct3D 11, OpenGL 4.3, and GPGPU capabilities would endear device makers to its licensees. In turn, licensees will receive designs, collateral, and support from the company. Citing a slowing PC market, Nividia's post suggested that it wants to take advantage of the mobile boom. “[I]t’s not practical to build silicon or systems to address every part of the expanding market. Adopting a new business approach will allow us to address the universe of devices,” the company wrote. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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In testimony before a congressional intelligence committee on Tuesday, the head of the National Security Agency (NSA) and other government officials staunchly defended the government’s secret surveillance program, noting that the agency has "been able to connect the dots and prevent another terrorist attack.” General Keith Alexander, director of the NSA, also told the House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that his agency’s massive telecommunications surveillance program has helped to stop a “little over 10” plots with a “domestic nexus” and a total of 50 such plots in more than 20 countries throughout the last several years of the program's existence. Alexander re-iterated that under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, the NSA has the authority to access telephony metadata—the who, when, and where of a call. James Cole, the deputy attorney general, also testified on Tuesday, acknowledging that other law enforcement agencies interpret Section 215 to mean that they can collect other material, including business records. There is also a purge of such data every five years, confirmed John Chris Inglis, the NSA’s deputy director. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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The Belle detector at Japan's KEK facility. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology Two different accelerators have found evidence for a particle that appears to contains four quarks, according to papers published in Physical Review Letters. Although particles with two and three quarks are common, this would be the first time that something containing four quarks has been spotted. Depending on the precise nature of the interactions among the quarks, this could be a discovery that keeps the theoreticians very busy. With the discovery of the Higgs boson, the predicted collection of fundamental particles was complete. But one family of these fundamental particles—the quarks—combine with gluons to make more complex particles called hadrons and mesons. Hadrons include the proton and neutron, and they are formed by combinations of three quarks. Mesons, which are unstable, are comprised of pairs of quarks. Having only two quarks would seem to make mesons fairly simple, when actually they're anything but. There are three families of quarks, each with a particle and antiparticle, and mesons can consist of any combination of these. They also create some of the more amusing nomenclature in physics, with mesons involving a strange quark being referred to as strangeonium, and those with a bottom quark as bottomonium. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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This photo used in a Buzzfeed collection has a Creative Commons license which allows some sharing. A different photo in the collection, however, led to a lawsuit. Zach Stern / flickr An Idaho photographer has sued the social media site Buzzfeed for $3.6 million. The lawsuit says the site is liable for damages, not just for publishing the photographer's photo of a female soccer player heading a ball back in 2010 but for every one of the dozens of sites that ran the photo after Buzzfeed. Buzzfeed took the photo down in May 2011 right after the plaintiff, Kai Eiselein, sent a takedown notice. Instead of being satisfied, Eiselein apparently spent time scouring the Web for every copy he could find. Ultimately Eiselein found 41 copies of his photo, many at foreign blogs like mudrila.ru. He also registered the photo's copyright, perhaps in preparation for his lawsuit. Eiselein's claim that Buzzfeed is "unequivocally responsible both directly and indirectly for all subsequent infringements" is shaky to say the least. Damages for the 23 "contributory infringements" occurring after June 25, 2011 (when Eiselein registered the photo's copyright) add up to $3,450,000, according to Eiselein's math. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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The newly appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said today that he wants to end the ban on consumers unlocking their cell phones in order to switch wireless carriers. Tom Wheeler, a former lobbyist for the cable and wireless industries, was nominated by President Obama to become the head of the FCC and today is appearing in front of the Senate Commerce Committee for a nomination hearing. Phone unlocking came up during the hearing because the Library of Congress recently made it illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for consumers to unlock their phones. Carriers can still help consumers unlock their phones if they wish to, but the White House and members of Congress have called for the ban to be overturned so that consumers can unlock themselves without fear of legal trouble. "Who knew the Library of Congress had this far of a reach?" Wheeler said when lawmakers asked his opinion on phone unlocking. "I am a strong supporter of intellectual property rights. At the same point in time, I believe that when I as a consumer or you as a consumer, or anyone have fulfilled our commitment and we've paid off our contract, that we ought to have the right to use that device and move it across carriers as we see fit. I look forward to working on this issue and resolving this issue to give consumers flexibility." Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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The US and Russia are patching a direct line between their mutual cyber-security czars. Fastmind As leaked details of ongoing network surveillance and espionage programs by the National Security Agency (NSA) continue to stir up international concern about how deep US intelligence is reaching into IT operations worldwide, Russia and the US have taken steps to cooperate on cyber-security—or at least prevent an accidental cyber-war. During talks at the G-8 Summit in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, the US and Russia agreed to cooperate more fully on a number of security measures. In addition to agreeing to continue to work together in preventing nuclear proliferation, the two governments are taking steps to improve communications about the proliferation of information weaponry. "We recognize that threats to or in the use of ICT (information and computer technologies) include political, military, and criminal threats, as well as threats of a terrorist nature, and are some of the most serious national and international security challenges we face in the 21st century,” the governments said in a joint statement issued by Presidents Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin today. Hotline to the Kremlin In response to those threats, officials said that the US and Russian governments were taking steps "to increase transparency and reduce the possibility that a misunderstood cyber incident could create instability or a crisis in our bilateral relationship," a White House spokesperson wrote in a "fact sheet" on the agreements published today. Those steps include direct communications between the Department of Homeland Security's US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) and the Russian equivalent organization. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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In response to the ongoing PRISM scandal, Google filed a motion (PDF) on Tuesday with the notoriously secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), saying that the company’s “business has been harmed by the false or misleading reports in the media, and Google’s users are concerned by the allegations.” “In particular, Google seeks a declaratory judgment that Google has a right under the First Amendment to publish, and that no applicable law or regulation prohibits Google from publishing, two aggregate unclassified numbers: (1) the total number of [Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act] requests it receives, if any; and (2) the total number of users or accounts encompassed within such reports,” the six-page filing states. As the Washington Post noted, the filing likely will have little impact on the public’s broader understanding of the National Security Agency spying program, but it could help Google to show that it has been more resistant against the government than other companies. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Until now, if you wanted to play 17-bit Studios' excellent turn-based strategy title Skulls of the Shogun on PC, you had to play on Windows 8. This put it in a rather exclusive set of only a few dozen games that were part of the confusing "Xbox on Windows 8" branding and also closed off the game to the more than 95 percent of computer users that don't use Windows 8. Thankfully, the game has finally broken free of its initial operating system prison now that 17-bit has announced a bone-a fide edition that will be available on Steam and through the Humble Store on July 15. In an e-mail to Ars Technica, 17-bit's Billy Berghammer noted that while Microsoft published the original Windows 8 version of the game that launched earlier this year, the studio retained the rights to all future titles, allowing them to open up the new edition to a wider audience. Berghammer refused to comment further on the terms of the initial Windows 8 exclusivity or how the game had performed on the struggling operating system. He also wouldn't address whether the game might be coming to consoles besides the Xbox 360 or mobile platforms besides Windows Phone in the future. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Adafruit The do-it-yourselfers at Adafruit have provided step-by-step instructions for turning a Raspberry Pi into a Tor proxy and wireless access point. A good project for users looking to anonymize their Internet traffic, "Onion Pi" requires just a Raspberry Pi, a few standard peripherals, and some work in the command line. You'll need a Pi (of course), an Ethernet cable, a Wi-Fi adapter with an antenna, an SD card loaded with the Raspbian operating system, and a power supply. You can buy all these from Adafruit in the company's Onion Pi Pack, but the components are pretty standard and could be obtained from many other sources. A portion of sales through Adafruit will go to the Tor Foundation. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is excited about the project, saying it could let users "Foil the NSA and Prism with a Tor proxy." Using Tor routes your Internet traffic through several relays in an attempt to hide your location and identity. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Ray Kurzweil, a director of engineering at Google, addressing the crowd at the GF 2045 conference. Casey Johnston Rich people get all the cool stuff first—or so we in the middle class grumble and gripe to one another. Cell phones, laptops, smartphones, and now Google Glass (if applicants managed to both present a convincing case and pony up $1,500) all end up in the hands of the wealthy first. But Google Director of Engineering Ray Kurzweil made a salient point while addressing the Global Future 2045 conference this past weekend: “Only the rich have these technologies when they don’t work.” Kurzweil, a futurist and author of the book The Singularity is Near, did a presentation at the GF 2045 conference entitled “Immortality by 2045” in which he discussed the evolution of humans and technology and how the two will one day merge. During a Q&A at the end of the presentation, one attendant expressed concern that when people have the possibility of fixing their bodies up with memory implants and bionic limbs and then eventually transferring their consciousness to a nice new android when their current body dies, it will only be the richest people in the world who will be able to afford those luxuries. The attendant called these pursuits “a privilege of the rich and powerful.” Kurzweil came back with a description of the earliest cell phones: massive contraptions that required people to carry around some of the components in a bag. For instance, the earliest Motorola Dynatac phone released in 1984 cost $3,995, had only 30 minutes of talk time, and stored 30 phone numbers. Nearly 20 years later, smartphones replace several single-purpose gadgets, connect us socially to countries’ worth of people, and store large amounts of apps, photos, and video—all while costing just $200 on a contract. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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T-Mobile announced today that it will be offering the Sony Xperia Z Android handset as an exclusive later this summer. Not to be confused with the Xperia ZL we reviewed a while back, the Xperia Z features a 1.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro—the same processor featured in LG’s Nexus 4—2GB of RAM, a 13MP camera, and a 5-inch 1080p display. It also supports LTE, though that feature will only be available in T-Mobile’s seven 4G LTE markets. As an added bonus, the phone is also water-resistant. The phone first showed up at CES back in January; last month, Sony CEO Kaz Hirai announced at the D11 conference that the Xperia Z would be making its way over to the US sometime soon. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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A simulation of an electron/positron collision producing a Higgs and Z boson. Norman Graf The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is currently undergoing upgrades that will allow it to finally reach its intended top energy of 14TeV. When it comes back online, researchers will use it to probe the properties of the Higgs boson it discovered and to continue the search for particles beyond those described by the Standard Model. But no matter how many Higgs particles pop out of the machine, there's a limit to how much we can discover there. That's because the hadrons it uses create messy collisions that are hard to characterize. The solution to this is to switch to leptons, a class of particles that includes the familiar electron. Leptons present their own challenges but allow for clean collisions at precise energies, allowing the machine to produce little beyond the intended particles. So now, the international physics community is putting agreements in place that will see a new lepton collider start construction before the decade is out, most likely in Japan. Hadrons vs. leptons Hadrons like the proton are composed of a mixture of quarks, gluons, and virtual particles. Their heavy mass makes them easy to accelerate. When fast-moving particles move around curves, some of their energy is lost as radiation; the proportion of lost energy goes down as the particle's mass goes up. So when lightweight electrons were sent through the curved tunnels that now house the LHC, the maximum energy they could reach was just over 100GeV. In contrast, protons can go through those same curves at 7TeV, meaning the collisions have hundreds of times the energy. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Contrary to what Sam Waterston would have you believe, robots aren't horrible, and they're most certainly not lurking outside your window waiting to get you. In fact, robots are friendly and good! Here at Dealmaster Central, we rely on robots for all kinds of things, and under the guiding influence of our benevolent metal masters, I have come to realize that everyone should have a robot in their home—and as soon as possible! To that end, dear Arsians, we've got a great top deal this week. It's a Groupon for a Roomba 581 robot vacuum cleaner! This little guy is small, lovable, and he wants to help you keep your floors clean. He absolutely will not shoot mind-control rays into your tender organic meat brain, and you definitely will not feel the irrepressible urge to hail the coming of our new robo-overlords. All glory to the Machine. All glory to the Machine. All glory to the Machine. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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EA At last week's Electronic Entertainment Expo, EA was eager to show off how the power of its new Ignite Engine can create new, more realistic sports experiences titles. But while that engine will power EA's sports games on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the company says the PC edition of FIFA 14 will not take advantage of it, owing to practical hardware considerations. FIFA 14 is the only sports title EA still annually releases on the PC, and it remains popular worldwide even in countries that don't have a vibrant console market. The downside? A large contingent of FIFA PC players don't have the recent hardware needed to power the Ignite Engine, as EA Sports Executive Vice President Andrew Wilson explained to Polygon. EA ran into a similar problem with FIFA games on the current generation of consoles; the console versions used a more advanced engine than their PC counterparts from 2005 through 2009. It wasn't until 2010's FIFA 11 that the company's console-level engine technology finally came to the PC edition of the game. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Canonical has formed a "Carrier Advisory Group" of eight mobile operators who will collaborate to influence the development of Ubuntu for smartphones. Canonical said the first members of the group are Deutsche Telekom, Everything Everywhere, Korea Telecom, Telecom Italia, LG UPlus, Portugal Telecom, SK Telecom, and "the leading Spanish international carrier." We've asked Canonical to identify the Spanish carrier, although based on the description it may be Telefónica (also known as O2). With the exception of Deutsche Telekom, the owner of T-Mobile, the list doesn't include any major US carriers. Canonical said that "any national or multinational carrier" may join. The carriers in this group will be the only ones to get "access to early information about Ubuntu and device manufacturer plans to support the OS, as well as the opportunity to be a launch partner for Ubuntu on smartphones," Canonical said. While Canonical remains the developer of Ubuntu phone software, the carriers will be able to influence the roadmap. The group will hold meetings to discuss topics including "differentiation for OEMs and operators; developer ecosystems and application portability from Android and Blackberry; HTML5 standards, performance and compatibility; marketplaces for apps, content and services; revenue share models for publishers, operators and OEMs; payment mechanisms and standards; platform fragmentation; [and] consumer and enterprise market segments and positioning." Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Sure, selling $2.4 million in development kits through a successful Kickstarter campaign is a good way to get started, but Oculus needs more funding than that to get its revolutionary virtual reality headset into shape for consumers. Today the company announced that it has been able to secure $16 million in Series A venture funding led by Spark Capital and Matrix Partners. In a note on the Matrix Partners blog, funding lead Antonio Rodriguez said it was "inspiring and motivating to see how well the gaming community is reacting to the first dev kit" and said his first experience with the headset led to a "sense of wonder about just how much of science fiction is possible today." Rodriguez added that Oculus' use of low-cost cell phone components and exploitation of PC GPU power could lead to "hardware that can be sourced (and sold) by the millions." In a follow-up interview with PandoDaily, Rodriguez said the nausea many players experience when using the Rift would diminish as the hardware gets upgraded to higher resolution screens. Indeed, the hi-res prototype Rift we tried at E3 was one of the biggest surprises of the show and seems to remedy the biggest problem with the initial developer units. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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AMD's server roadmap for the rest of 2013 and early 2014. AMD Late last year, AMD announced that it would no longer rely exclusively on the x86 architecture for its server processors, with its first ARM-based Opteron chips to begin shipping in 2014. AMD appears to be keeping to that schedule—today it announced the first major details for the new ARM-based chips, which begin sampling in the first quarter of 2014 and shipping later that year. The new SoC, codenamed "Seattle," is based on ARM's upcoming Cortex-A57 architecture, meaning that it will be fully 64-bit, just like AMD's x86 processors. Seattle will support up to 128GB of RAM, integrated ten gigabit Ethernet, and AMD's "Freedom Fabric" tech, which groups low-power CPU cores together into clusters to feed them with data from the network more efficiently. AMD expects the eight- and 16-core SoCs to run at speeds of at least 2GHz. AMD says that the ARM SoCs will offer two to four times the performance of the just-announced x86-based low-power Opteron CPUs, though this performance figure would appear to come from the boosted core count (eight or 16 compared to four). Given that they have similar clock speeds, then, it would appear that AMD is expecting the Cortex-A57 architecture to perform as well as its "Jaguar" CPU architecture while using less power overall. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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The standing solar charger AT&T is touring around New York. AT&T is sponsoring 25 solar-powered charging stations across the five boroughs of New York City, the New York Times reported Tuesday. The stations, which look like fan blades mounted atop a 12.5-foot-pole, will be installed in outdoor locations like parks and beaches and will rotate to new places through October. The solar-paneled structures can charge up to six devices at a time, with three USB accommodations and one microUSB, Apple 30-pin dock connector, and MagSafe connector each. Hence, the charging stations can only take care of one iPhone 5, one older-gen iPhone, and one Android/Windows Phone/Blackberry apiece; if one of your own kind is already there, you're out of luck unless you bring your own charging cable to make one of the generic USB ports work for your phone. The NY Times cites Hurricane Sandy as the inspiration for the project. During the aftermath, AT&T rolled out diesel generators and cell towers to provide supplementary power and services to areas that had both knocked out. Outside AT&T’s involvement, the hurricane was also a time of generous communal power-strip-sharing. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Stew Dean With the development of DNA sequencing centers that are capable of churning out multiple genomes in a week, many scientists saw a resource that they could turn against cancer. By sequencing a person's healthy cells and comparing those results to the sequence of their cancer cells, it would be possible to map all the genetic changes that drive cancers. Within the list of genes, there might also be hints for future therapies. As the cancer genomes have rolled in, however, reality hasn't kept pace with the promise. As the number of cancer genomes sequenced has risen, the number of genes identified has continued to grow. And, as noted by the authors of a paper released by Nature over the weekend, some of the genes are overwhelmingly unlikely to have anything to do with cancer. So, a huge team of researchers set out to find out why and, when they did, use that knowledge to fix the problem. Although some cancers are caused by viruses, the majority of cases are caused by mutations that alter or disable the genes that normally control a cell's growth. Many of these have been identified over the years: some that are common to many cancers, others that are specific to just a few. Until recently, there was no way to be sure we had a complete catalog of the genes involved, or knew which ones were important in which cancers. Genome sequencing gave us the chance to develop a complete catalog. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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What if you could privately use an application and manage its permissions to keep ill intending apps from accessing your data? That’s exactly what Steve Kondik at CyanogenMod—the aftermarket, community-based firmware for Android devices—hopes to bring to the operating system. It’s called Incognito Mode, and it’s designed to help keep your personal data under control. Kondik, a lead developer with the CyanogenMod team, published a post on his Google Plus profile last week about Incognito Mode. He offered more details on the feature: I've added a per-application flag which is exposed via a simple API. This flag can be used by content providers to decide if they should return a full or limited dataset. In the implementation I'm working on, I am using the flag to provide these privacy features in the base system: Return empty lists for contacts, calendar, browser history, and messages. GPS will appear to always be disabled to the running application. When an app is running incognito, a quick panel item is displayed in order to turn it off easily. No fine-grained permissions controls as you saw in CM7. It's a single option available under application details. The API provides a simple isIncognito() call which will tell you if incognito is enabled for the process (or the calling process). Third party applications can honor the feature using this API, or they can choose to display pictures of cats instead of running normally. Every time you currently install a new application on Android, the operating system asks that you to review the permissions the app requests before it can install. This end-all, be-all approach to user data is certainly precarious because users can't deny individual permissions to pick and choose what an application has access to, even if they still want to use that app. Incognito Mode could potentially fix this conundrum, enabling users to restrict their data to certain applications. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Since The Guardian began leaking top-secret National Security Agency (NSA) documents just 11 days ago, several tech companies responded to the revelations about the PRISM program. The likes of Google, Facebook, and Apple objected to the tone of the press coverage, saying that any suggestion they've ever given a government agency direct access to their servers is false. Over the weekend, tech companies started responding with additional transparency too. Facebook and Microsoft revealed ranges of how many government information requests they're getting about how many accounts. Late Sunday, Apple joined the transparency club. The company published a blog post stating that in the past six months, it has received between 4,000 and 5,000 US law enforcement requests for information regarding 9,000 to 10,000 accounts. "The most common form of request comes from police investigating robberies and other crimes, searching for missing children, trying to locate a patient with Alzheimer’s disease, or hoping to prevent a suicide," notes the company. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Sony is getting busy trying to parlay its successful E3 into a sense of momentum for the PlayStation 4 leading up to its release this holiday season. Exhibit A for this effort is Sony Computer Entertainment International CEO and President Andrew House telling the Wall Street Journal that the company has raised its internal sales projections for the PS4. The newest estimate comes in light of "positive signs about demand for the device" and "favorable reactions to the company's presentation Monday at the Electronics Entertainment Expo." Note that House refused to state precisely how much of an increase Sony made to its internal projections—those expectations could have gone from 1,000,000 expected sales to 1,000,001 for all we know. Still, Sony Computer Entertainment America head Jack Tretton mentioned that Gamestop said it wants "every single unit" Sony can manufacture, a statement confirmed by a Gamestop representative and suggestive of strong initial pre-order demand. Amazon is no longer taking pre-orders on the "Launch Edition" of the PS4 hardware, though systems bundled with various games are still available and "gauranteed [sic] to be available on the Release Day." The "Day One Edition" of the Xbox 360 is still available for pre-order on Amazon, but it's impossible to know how Amazon's launch day supplies of both systems compare directly. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Microsoft publicly gave its opinion of used games—it's another story for game publishers. Andrew Cunningham Microsoft is taking a lot of heat for implementing an online check-in system that will allow publishers to explicitly block the resale of used game discs on the Xbox One. But it's the publishers themselves that will have to decide whether or not to take advantage of the ability Microsoft has given them. So far at least, no publisher has been willing to go on the record definitively stating that they are for or against the existence of second-hand game discs on Microsoft's next system. This might be because these publishers were seemingly caught flat-footed when Microsoft announced its policy a couple of week ago. "We have not received anything from Microsoft until today on this one," CD Project Red co-founder and Joint CEO Marcin Iwiński told Eurogamer just after Microsoft's licensing policy was announced. "Before we form any definite opinions here, we would like to have this process explained in details by the platform holder." (Later, Iwiński defended CD Project Red's decision to release on Microsoft platforms despite the system's online check-ins. "We couldn't simply not release The Witcher 3 on Xbox One. We want to make sure that every single player will have access to our game...") Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Texas Gov. Rick Perry has signed a bill giving Texans more privacy over their inboxes than anywhere else in the United States. On Friday, Perry signed HB 2268, effective immediately. The law shields residents of the Lone Star State from snooping by state and local law enforcement without a warrant. The bill was sponsored by Jonathan Stickland, a 29-year-old Republican who represents an area between Dallas and Ft. Worth. Under the much-maligned 1986-era Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), federal law enforcement agencies are only required to get a warrant to access recent e-mails before they are opened by the recipient. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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