DOJ asks Court to keep secret any partnership between Google and NSA, not that one exists, definitely not

Mike Scarcella in The Legal Times writes about The Justice Department defending the government's refusal to discuss, or acknowledge the existence of, "any cooperative research and development agreement between Google and the National Security Agency."

The Washington based advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center sued in federal district court here to obtain documents about any such agreement between the Internet search giant and the security agency. The NSA responded to the suit with a so-called “Glomar” response in which the agency said it could neither confirm nor deny whether any responsive records exist. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington sided with the government last July. via Boing Boing. I think Google has changed their motto. They've removed the "don't" from the rest of the "be evil" phrase.

Rick Santorum's Housing Hypocracy

Andy Kroll & Tim Murphy, writing for Mother Jones:

Rick Santorum wants the government out of every aspect of Americans' lives—especially the housing market. He pledges to eliminate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the twin government housing giants that help guarantee 90 percent of all new mortgages in America. He wants to "let capitalism work" and allow the housing market to "find its bottom." Only then, he says, will the recovery begin. It's a plan that would make Adam Smith proud. Yet Santorum wasn't always so opposed to government intervention in housing. In a deal that's gone unreported during his presidential run, Santorum bought his first house in 1983 with a cut-rate government-backed mortgage, according to records compiled by the campaign of Sen. Harris Wofford (D-Penn.), who Santorum defeated in 1994. He received his loan through a state program to boost homeownership among low- and middle-income families. Santorum, in other words, benefited from a program whose mission mirrored that of Fannie and Freddie, the companies he now rails against and wants to dissolve. (Santorum spokesman Hogan Gidley did not respond to a request for comment.) I'm pleased that Rick Santorum was able to take advantage of the benefits that so many other families have been able to take advantage of as well to help in home ownership. Advantages that he wants to strip away now that he no longer needs them himself.

The New iPad's Greatest Feature: The Battery

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, writing for ZDNet's Hardware 2.0 blog:

While Apple has undoubted put more power efficient technology into its next-generation iPad — for example, dropping the processor architecture down from 40nm to 28 nm would have resulted in quite a significant power saving — the more dramatic improvement has been the battery itself. Between the release of the iPad 2 last year and the announcement of the new iPad yesterday, Apple has nearly doubled the capacity of the battery, taking it from 25Wh to a massive 42Wh. Measured in milliamps this boosts the battery from 6944 mAh to a monstrous 11,666 mAh. Kingsley-Hughes covers much more in this article that I would like to quote here, but when I was trying to decide exactly what to quote, I found that I wanted to quote entirely too much. Just go read his entire article. Done? Good. I've only seen a couple of sites write anything about this and yet, this is one of the major accomplishments that Apple has made with the 3rd generation iPad. Had Apple not been able to make these battery advances, the new Retina display, 4G networking, faster processor…all together would have greatly reduced battery performance. The tech press would have been howling that the new iPad was doomed to failure. And yet, Apple has miraculously increased the battery by so much, without adding a significant amount of weight or altering the case design, that most seemed to not even notice this great improvement. Most wrote it off as am insignificant accomplishment on Apple's part. A shame, I think.

The iPad Is Unbeatable

Farhad Manjoo, writing for Slate:

Imagine you run a large technology company not named Apple. Let’s say you’re Steve Ballmer, Michael Dell, Meg Whitman, Larry Page, or Intel’s Paul Otellini. How are you feeling today, a day after Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled the new iPad? Are you discounting the device as just an incremental improvement, the same shiny tablet with a better screen and faster cellular access? Or is it possible you had trouble sleeping last night? Did you toss and turn, worrying that Apple’s new device represents a potential knockout punch, a move that will cement its place as the undisputed leader of the biggest, most disruptive new tech market since the advent of the Web browser? Maybe your last few hours have been even worse than that. Perhaps you’re now paralyzed with confusion, fearful that you might be completely boxed in by the iPad—that there seems no good way to beat it. For your sake, my hypothetical CEO friend, I hope you’re frightened. He hopes, but I doubt it. If they were, they would be restructuring their entire companies in order to compete with this new market. As far as I can tell, they're still in finger-in-their-ears-saying-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you mode.

Why The iPad Has And Will Continue To Dominate The Tablet Market

Matthew Panzarino, writing for The Next Web:

In a Neilsen survey from earlier this year it was shown that almost no respondents stopped using their smartphones after purchasing a tablet, while 3% completely stopped using their desktop computers and 32% reported that they were using their desktops much less. Consumers treat phones and tablets as separate entities, they look at them as different tools for different purposes. He goes on to discuss many other points, in a well written piece that does a very good job of laying it all out.

Google Forcing Android Developers To Use Google Wallet

Allstair Barr, writing for Reuters:

Google warned several developers in recent months that if they continued to use other payment methods - such as PayPal, Zong and Boku - their apps would be removed from Android Market, now known as Google Play… Google’s payment service charges a higher cut per transaction than some rivals’. But the move also suggests Google is using its powerful position in the mobile apps market to promote an in-house offering. Marco Arment aptly sums it up: "Open".

The Information Diet: You Are What You Read

J. A. Ginsburg, writing on TrackerNews:

It is not a pretty picture. And, yes, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the insidious practice of using keywords to game search results, is driving this race to the inane. The only metric that counts is popularity. “The problem is no one is searching for the Pentagon Papers,” notes Johnson, “No one is searching for high quality investigative reporting.” The next time someone asks me why I dislike SEO, I'm going to direct them to this piece.

Additional iPad Haptic Feedback Details

Update: Completely false rumor.

My colleague, Jacquelyn Erdman, writing on her website, Technolust & Loathing:

In Oct 2010, at the ACM SIGCHI conference in NYC, grad students presented on this technology and allowed people to demo it. See my conference notes at: http://technolustandloathing.wordpress.com/2010/10/15/acm-uist-notes-4-next-generation-touch-screens. They students mentioned that “someone” bought the rights to the technology, but wouldn’t say who. I then saw a very tiny blurb about Apple having the technology in the ACM Communications magazine several months back. I actually thought they would have this up and running for the iPad 3, (see prediction here), but I wasn’t sure how quickly it would roll out as I thought the iPad 3 was going to be out for last holiday season. So, enough of my rolling of the eyes on the release and self-congratulations and let’s talk about the technology! Jacquelyn goes on to describe what it was like to use it, and speculates on how Apple has probably improved it since then (if this all turns out to be true). She wrote this piece shortly after I shared the news from Apple Insider this morning about Apple using technology in the new iPad to be announced today from a company called Senseg. This could be huge.

Update: Apple patented this tech in 2010.

Jacquelyn dug up this 21 month old article on Apple Insider.