Judge allows evidence against man in GPS case

A federal judge is allowing prosecutors to use evidence in a drug conspiracy conviction that had been overturned because police used a global positioning system without a warrant.
U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle in Washington said in a ruling Thursday that Antoine Jones had not established that police would not have discovered the house in Fort Washington, Md., allegedly used to stash money and drugs but for the GPS. She ruled that, "to the contrary," police had identified the property as a likely "stash house" before the GPS was attached to his car.
In 2010, an appeals court reversed Jones' conviction because police used the GPS to track him. The Supreme Court affirmed, agreeing to bar police from installing GPS technology to track suspects without getting a judge's approval.

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Groups urge probe of $12 million mystery donation

Two election watchdog organizations on Thursday urged the Justice Department and Federal Election Commission to investigate more than $12 million in campaign contributions that were mysteriously funneled through two little-known companies in Tennessee to a prominent tea party group. The origin of the money, the largest anonymous political donations in a campaign year filled with them, remains a secret.
The watchdog groups said routing the $12 million through the Tennessee companies appeared to violate a U.S. law prohibiting the practice of laundering campaign contributions in the name of another person. They also said the lawyer in Tennessee who registered the companies, William S. Rose Jr. of Knoxville, may have violated three other laws by failing to organize each company as a political committee, register them as political committees and file financial statements for them with the government.
Rose did not return a telephone message, text message and email from The Associated Press and could not otherwise be reached immediately for comment. He previously told AP that his business was a "family secret" and he was not obligated to disclose the origin of the $12 million routed through Specialty Investments Group Inc. and Kingston Pike Development Corp. Business records indicate that Rose registered Kingston Pike one day after he created Specialty Group, in the final weeks before Election Day. Rose previously complained that phone calls and emails from reporters were irritating.
The watchdog organizations, the Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21, said a criminal investigation by the Justice Department was necessary "because the integrity of U.S. elections depends on the effective enforcement of the nation's campaign finance laws." They noted that, although the FEC traditionally enforces campaign finance laws and imposes civil fines for violations, the Justice Department can conduct criminal investigations of "knowing and willful" violations under the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act. Violations could carry up to five years in prison. The groups separately urged the FEC to investigate.
The contributions "raise serious questions about whether this was an illegal scheme to launder money into the 2012 elections and hide from the public the true identity of the sources of the money," said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21. He said no one should be permitted to "launder huge, secret contributions through corporate shells into federal elections."
The money went to the tea party's most prominent "super" political committee, FreedomWorks for America, which spent it on high-profile congressional races. The $12 million accounted for most of the $20 million the group raised this year. A spokeswoman for the FreedomWorks organization, Jackie Bodnar, did not return a telephone message left with her. FreedomWorks has previously declined to identify who was behind the donations to its super PAC or discuss them further.
The contributions represent a glaring example of the murkiness surrounding who is giving money to politicians in modern elections, shaped by new federal rules allowing unlimited and anonymous donations. The law has allowed wealthy executives, corporations and other organizations to establish shell companies and mail drops to disguise the source of the money they give to political groups and politicians. But the mysterious donations linked to Rose by far eclipse any suspicious money sent to support the campaigns of President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney.
More than half the $12 million in contributions was routed through Rose's companies in the final days before the election even as the AP and Knoxville News Sentinel were jointly investigating $5.2 million in suspicious donations traced to one of the companies during October. That company, Specialty Group Inc., filed incorporation papers in September less than one week before it gave FreedomWorks several contributions worth between $125,000 and $1.5 million each. Specialty Group appeared to have no website describing its products or services. It was registered to a suburban Knoxville home.
Rose subsequently renamed the company Specialty Investments Group Inc. That firm and Kingston Pike Development Corp. — which Rose also registered and owns — were used to steer $6.8 million more in contributions to FreedomWorks. Among other amounts, FreedomWorks spent more than $1.8 million of the money on Connie Mack's unsuccessful Senate campaign in Florida and a similar amount opposing Tammy Duckworth, who was elected to Congress in Illinois.
Under U.S. law, corporations can give unlimited sums of money to outside groups supporting candidates, but not if their sole purpose is to make campaign contributions.
"These companies appear to have been created to hide the identities of one or more donors that pumped millions of dollars into a super PAC anonymously in the final weeks before an election," said the senior counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, Paul S. Ryan. He said such contributions could allow foreign governments, companies or citizens — all of whom are prohibited from donating to U.S. politicians — to launder money into American elections using similar practices.
Rose said in a statement last month that he formed Specialty Group to buy, sell, develop and invest in a variety of real estate ventures and investments. He declined interview requests from the AP over three weeks and complained in his statement that reporters had contacted his ex-wife and business colleagues. He also disputed any characterization that his company was "shadowy."
"The business of Specialty Group is my family secret, a secret that will be kept — as allowed by applicable law — for at least another 50 years," Rose said in his statement.

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The Case of the 2 Billion Missing Youtube Views

Youtube released its view counts earlier this week for its biggest channels, and people who watch these things noticed that some major record companies had their numbers drop by a whopping 2 billion views. So, where the heck did they all go?
RELATED: Major Record Labels Are Suing a YouTube Downloading Site
The Daily Dot reports Universal was the biggest loser in the case of the missing views. Their channel lost about about a billion views in comparison to where their numbers were before the recount. Sony/BMG lost 850 million, with RCA accounting for the rest. A lot of people were theorizing that Youtube caught them juicing their view counts -- doing something unseemly to make themselves look more popular than they are. The real answer is much more boring. And has nothing to do with Gangnam.
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Billboard's Alex Pham reports the reason the views disappeared, mostly, is because of Vevo. "The company recently decided to remove view counts for videos that are no longer live on the channel, or so-called 'dead videos,'" Pham explains. "For Universal and Sony, that meant thousands of music videos that over the past three years slowly have migrated to the VEVO channel, which is jointly owned by the two companies." Vevo is the music video-specific channel on Youtube started in conjunction with the record companies back in 2009. So, because all the music videos the companies used to host on Youtube are now under the Vevo umbrella, their views don't count anymore. They happened, sure. They just count somewhere else now.

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Developing Minds Want to Know: Q&A with Quinton Alsbury of Roambi

Roambi provides polished business analytics tools and financial expertise to a wide range of companies. Through Roambi Analytics and Roambi Flow, their unparalleled services also available on iPhone and iPad, they make it a cinch for clients to monitor important business statistics.

Quinton Alsbury, co-founder and president of Product Innovation at Roambi, shared his thoughts on inspiration, innovation, and the misconception that apps are exclusively microware. He also provided a short history of his company, the services they offer, and dishes out advice for aspiring app developers.

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Key Company Facts

Name and Title: Quinton Alsbury, co-founder and president of Product Innovation

Company: Roambi

Location: San Diego, CA

Size (Revenue and/or Employees): 150 Full-time employees

Primary Apps/Platforms: Roambi Analytics, Roambi Flow (both iOS Only)

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APPOLICIOUS: What inspired you to become an app creator?

Quinton Alsbury: When the first iPhone came out it was obvious to us that a tectonic shift in computing and software was about to occur. With a completely different screen size, and interface paradigm, along with a huge leap in hardware specs from other "smart phones" on the market, we believed that traditional software would have to be completely rethought, redesigned, and reinvented. Having come from an enterprise software background, we decided to try and reinvent the category for the new world.

APPO: How long have you been developing apps, and what is the most significant difference between now and when you began?

QA: We formed our company in November 2007, five months before Apple announced the native SDK. We felt so strongly that the path forward would be to open the platform to true native software development that we took a huge gamble at the time and started hiring hackers to open up iOS so we could experiment with bringing some of our ideas to life. The biggest difference was the evolution of the platform, in contrast to those early days when it was purely experimental.

APPO: What apps (outside of those that you develop) inspire you the most and why? Where do you see the most innovation in the app sector?

QA: Since we are in the enterprise world, the biggest inspiration has been to look to the world of consumer applications as a model for how a mobile business app should look, feel, perform, and engage. One of the biggest shifts in application development from the traditional PC world to mobile is the counterintuitive concept (especially to enterprise software) of simplifying functionality. We are also focusing on building highly engaging user experiences that lead to recurring usage of business-related tools on the phone, instead of just waiting to get to a desk, hotel room, office, etc.

APPO: How do you harness that innovation in your own titles?

QA: We use all of the above from the ground up. We milk every ounce of functionality we can out of the hardware and software innovations coming out of Apple. These devices are far too powerful to be considered a dumb terminal to a server. They are becoming the primary device for millions and your product needs to respect that.

APPO: In such a crowded space, explain how you generate awareness and drive downloads to your applications.

QA: In many ways I like to equate the App Store to the iTunes music store. Marketing, PR, and promotional activities are an important component of any awareness strategy, but I believe at the end of the day, the quality of the experience is the critical success factor. The habit-forming usage of mobile devices breeds a highly viral environment where people that love an app will continuously use it, show and share it with peers, friends, and family. If you build something special, and get it into people’s hands, they become the best advocates for your app.

APPO: What are the biggest technical constraints that exist today in the app sector? How do you (or will you) make money from your application?

QA: As the hardware continues to increase in processing power and other hardware specs, we’re seeing that constraints are becoming abstracted. You truly are only limited by your imagination! If you approach mobile as a checkbox for an existing PC application, or a cheap marketing utility, you will never fully realize all opportunities it presents. Every couple of decades we see a huge leap in technology that forces the development world to change: the first was the PC, then the web, and now mobile. To fully take advantage you must embrace the nuances and the opportunity of the new technology.

We monetize our application by selling a backend server that is used by companies to extract data from their major data warehouses and business intelligence tools.

APPO: What advice do you have to those working on their first applications?

QA: Design your product. That means going beyond the UI, all the way to the architecture that in the end drives how your app looks, feels, moves, and performs. The margin for adoption in mobile is razor thin. Most people don't need mobile apps, but they download, buy, and use applications that give them an amazing experience and provide an invaluable service. They'll delete it from their phones, or abandon it to the back page and never open it again, literally within minutes of using it. Apps are like singles in music, they are the equivalent of the perfect three-minute song.

APPO: Where do you see the app sector one year from now? Five years from now?

QA: It will be interesting to see how the evolution of HTML5 begins to affect how people perceive apps both from the developer side and the consumer side. Will there be backlash against a unique app for every individual task, service, or destination? It looks to me like the app concept, instead of morphing back into the traditional PC model, is actually beginning to permeate back into PCs as OSX begins to look more and more like iOS, with the same being true for Windows 8. I can see a day where developing "apps" isn’t a term that’s specific to a small piece of a microware especially made for mobile devices.

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Top 10 Twitter Pics of the Week

1. R.I.P.
A "Rest in Peace" picture dedicated to the 26 victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. on Friday, Dec. 14. - Tweets_Below Photo stats: 10,917 retweets
Click here to view this gallery.
[More from Mashable: Psy and Bieber Face Off as ‘Gangnam Style’ Hits a Billion Views]
Barack Obama, Justin Bieber and the Newtown tragedy are among the topics covered in this week's edition of top Twitter pics.
Photo-organizer Skylines sorted through 32,980,627 unique images from the past week, and compiled the most-shared and retweeted on the microblogging site. Click through the gallery, above, to see the top 10.

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Mark Zuckerberg Put Some Very Personal (and Creepy) Touches on the Poke App

Mark Zuckerberg usually leaves the coding to the plebes. He's a CEO now, b- you know the rest. Anyway, he's CEO now. But it turns out he put some very personal touches on Facebook's new Poke app, his company's answer to Snapchat.
RELATED: How Many More Banks Does Facebook Need for Its IPO?
TechCrunch reports the CEO came down from his throne to actually code some of Poke himself. "Poking," as originally included in Facebook 1.0, was a Zuckerberg original idea. Facebook tried to buy Snapchat but were rebuffed, so Zuck decided to do it himself. The app was thrown together in less than two weeks. This is what they decided on for a sound alert:
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Which is, according to TechCrunch, Zuckerberg's actual voice. He recorded it on his phone and the whole team thought it was hilarious, ran it through some filters, and put it in the app.

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Boeing engineers use spuds to improve in-air Wi-Fi

If the wireless Internet connection during your holiday flight seems more reliable than it used to, you could have the humble potato to thank.
While major airlines offer in-flight Wi-Fi on many flights, the signal strength can be spotty. Airlines and aircraft makers have been striving to improve this with the growing use of wireless devices and the number of people who don't want to be disconnected, even 35,000 feet up.
Engineers at Chicago-based Boeing Co. used sacks of potatoes as stand-ins for passengers as they worked to eliminate weak spots in in-flight wireless signals. They needed full planes to get accurate results during signal testing, but they couldn't ask people to sit motionless for days while data was gathered.
"That's where potatoes come into the picture," Boeing spokesman Adam Tischler said.
It turns out that potatoes — because of their water content and chemistry — absorb and reflect radio wave signals much the same way as the human body does, making them suitable substitutes for airline passengers.
"It's a testament to the ingenuity of these engineers. They didn't go in with potatoes as the plan," Tischler said.
Recapping the serendipitous path that led to better onboard wireless, Tischler said a member of the research team stumbled across an article in the Journal of Food Science describing research in which 15 vegetables and fruits were evaluated for their dielectric properties, or the way they transmit electric force without conduction.
Its conclusions led the Boeing researchers to wonder if potatoes might serve just as well as humans during their own signal testing. Despite some skepticism, they ended up buying 20,000 pounds of them.
Video and photos of the work, which started in 2006, show a decommissioned airplane loaded with row upon row of potato sacks that look like large, lumpy passengers. The sacks sit eerily still in the seats as the engineers collect data on the strength of wireless signals in various spots.
The Boeing engineers added some complicated statistical analysis and the result was a proprietary system for fine tuning Internet signals so they would be strong and reliable wherever a laptop was used on a plane.
Boeing says the system also ensures Wi-Fi signals won't interfere with the plane's sensitive navigation and communications equipment.
"From a safety standpoint, you want to know what the peak signals are, what's the strongest signal one of our communications and navigation systems might see from a laptop or 150 laptops or 350 laptops," Boeing engineer Dennis Lewis explains in a video.
In a nod to the humor in using a tuber to solve a high-tech problem, researchers dubbed the project Synthetic Personnel Using Dialectic Substitution, or SPUDS.
The company says better Wi-Fi signals can be found already on three Boeing aircraft models flown by major airlines: 777, 747-8 and the 787 Dreamliner.

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Ofwat backs down on water licence changes

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's water regulator Ofwat backed down over controversial changes to make water company licences more flexible after the firms affected rejected the original proposals.
Ofwat, which oversees Britain's water and sewage operators, is trying to change licences to increase the flexibility it has over controlling water prices, but on Friday compromised on some of those changes.
Pennon Group and United Utilities Group both welcomed the move which means that any future amendments to licenses will have to go through a separate process.
"It's a compromise by Ofwat and its going to be received very positively by the markets," said Dominic Nash from Liberum Capital, who has a "buy" rating on United Utilities and Pennon.
Shares in British water companies gained and were amongst the top risers in Britain's bluechip index. Severn Trent was up 1.4 percent, United Utilities was up 1.4 percent and Pennon rose 0.6 percent in mid-morning trading.
The UK water sector has fallen 10 to 20 percent since the October announcement, according to Nash.
In a bid to increase efficiency and transparency at Britain's water companies, Ofwat gave water companies four weeks in October to accept proposals to make price-setting more flexible or be referred to competition authorities.
The majority of firms, 16 out of 25 written responses received by Ofwat, rejected the idea, saying that it created unnecessary uncertainty for investors.
Currently Ofwat sets five-year price limits by targeting how much revenue firms can make according to a formula which accounts for inflation.
The coalition government committed to opening up competition on the retail side of water companies in its draft water bill published in July.

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Pope takes anti-gay marriage stance to new level

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The pope took his opposition to gay marriage to new heights Friday, denouncing what he described as people manipulating their God-given gender to suit their sexual choices — and destroying the very "essence of the human creature" in the process.
Benedict XVI made the comments in his annual Christmas speech to the Vatican bureaucracy — one of his most important speeches of the year. He dedicated it this year to promoting family values in the face of vocal campaigns in France, the United States, Britain and elsewhere to legalize same-sex marriage.
In his remarks, Benedict quoted the chief rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, in saying the campaign for granting gays the right to marry and adopt children was an "attack" on the traditional family made up of a father, mother and children.
"People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given to them by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being," he said. "They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves."
"The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man's fundamental choice where he himself is concerned," he said.
It was the second time in a week that Benedict has taken on the question of gay marriage, which is dividing France after proponents scored big electoral wins in the United States last month. In his recently released annual peace message, Benedict said gay marriage, like abortion and euthanasia, was a threat to world peace.
After the peace message was released last week, gay activists staged a small protest in St. Peter's Square.
Church teaching holds that homosexual acts are "intrinsically disordered," though it stresses that gays should be treated with compassion and dignity. As pope and as head of the Vatican's orthodoxy watchdog before that, Benedict has been a strong enforcer of that teaching: One of the first major documents of his pontificate said men with "deep-seated" homosexual tendencies shouldn't be ordained priests.
For the Vatican, though, the gay marriage issue goes beyond questions of homosexuality, threatening what the church considers to be the bedrock of society: a family based on a man, woman and their children.
But the Vatican's opposition has been falling on deaf ears. Under then-Socialist leader Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the largely Roman Catholic Spain legalized gay marriage. Earlier this month, the British government announced it will introduce a bill next year legalizing gay marriage, though it would ban the Church of England from conducting same-sex ceremonies.
In France, President Francois Hollande has said he would enact his "marriage for everyone" plan within a year of taking office last May. The text will go to parliament next month. But the country has been divided by vocal opposition from religious leaders, prime among them Bernheim, as well as some politicians and parts of rural France.
The Socialist government's plan also envisions legalizing same-sex adoptions. Benedict quoted Bernheim as denouncing that in his view, under the plan, a child is now essentially considered an object people have a right to obtain.
"When freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God," Benedict said.

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UK High Court blocks drone intelligence challenge

LONDON (AP) — Britain's High Court on Friday blocked a legal bid for an inquiry into the possible role of the country's spy agencies in aiding covert CIA drone strikes in Pakistan's northwest tribal region.
Noor Khan, a 27-year-old whose father was killed by a drone strike in northwest Pakistan in March 2011, had asked the High Court to examine whether Britain intelligence officials assisted the action and whether they may be liable for prosecution.
High Court judges on Friday refused to allow Khan to bring a legal challenge, saying his lawyer's arguments had been an "attempt to shroud" a real goal of getting the court to publicly denounce U.S. drone strikes.
"The real aim is to persuade this court to make a public pronouncement designed to condemn the activities of the United States in North Waziristan, as a step in persuading them to halt such activity," judge Alan Moses said, adding that Khan's lawyer "knows he could not obtain permission overtly for such a purpose."
Law firm Leigh Day & Co., which is representing Khan along with legal aid charity Reprieve, said it was disappointed by the ruling and that Khan planned to appeal.
Khan's lawyers had claimed that civilian staff at Britain's electronic listening agency, GCHQ, could be "secondary parties to murder" for providing "locational intelligence" to the CIA in directing its drone attack program.
The ruling was a victory for the British government, whose lawyers had said that ties between Britain, the U.S. and Pakistan could be jeopardized if a judge granted Khan's request.
Khan's father, Malik Daud Khan, was attending a meeting of local elders in Datta Khel, in North Waziristan, when it was hit by a missile fired from an unmanned drone, killing around 40 people.
Since 2004, CIA drones have targeted suspected militants with missile strikes in the Pakistani tribal regions, killing hundreds of people. The program is controversial because of questions about its legality, the number of civilians it has killed and its impact on Pakistan's sovereignty.

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