Month: October 2014

The latest version of the Android operating system, Lollipop, adds encryption by default, along with a variety of easy-to-use ways to lock and unlock the phone and a more secure foundation to help protect devices against current threats.

In a blog post published on Tuesday, Google described the features, which will begin shipping with the Lollipop operating system in new Android devices in the coming weeks. While some of the capabilities, such as encryption, are already included in the current Android OS, the new version will turn them on by default.

Many of the security features were born of Android’s open-source foundations and the fact that other researchers and companies can create and test new security features for the operating system, Adrian Ludwig, lead security engineer for Android at Google, said during a briefing on the security features.

Today was the third day of Ars UNITE, our virtual conference, and the topic of the day was the advent of the self-driving car.

Our self-driving car feature this morning looked at the technological solutions that will soon allow our cars to drive themselves under certain circumstances, assuming the regulations and other policy issues are in place. That piece has seen a lively discussion covering a number of different areas. Ars reader mexaly suggested that “[t]o succeed, robots need only drive better than average humans. That’s not a high bar.”

Some were skeptical that self-driving cars would be safer. caldron writes, “I think it is a big leap to assume a self-drive is better than a human at driving. Sure in certain conditions and in terms of reaction time, but no computers have been able to reach our level of decision making and ability to react in abstract and unpredictable situations, and there is none in the foreseeable future. We make constant micro-decisions all the time. When there is a grey-area situation that requires deduction I am not so sure a computer will be able to react properly.”

With another 3,000 positions cut today, Microsoft’s protracted series of layoffs is now at an end, according to GeekWire. A few more jobs may still be cut in early 2015, but the largescale redundancies are over.

Starting in July, the company eliminated close to 18,000 positions in total. After an initial wave of almost 13,000 layoffs, a further 2,100 people were cut in September and 3,000 more were cut today.

About 12,500 of the job losses are in the recently acquired Nokia Devices and Services business. Of the remaining cuts, some 2,700 were in and around the company’s main campus in Redmond.