Penelope Cruz named Sexiest Woman Alive 2014 by 'Esquire'

Why Penelope Cruz, 40?

Here's what we glean from reading the lengthy interview (which is as much about bullfighting as it is about Cruz):

SHE'S GORGEOUS

"She is impossibly beautiful. When she walks into a room, men start walking into furniture."

SHE'S TALENTED

"She speaks four languages and dreams in many more. (Sometimes her husband, Javier Bardem, speaks to her in the language he spoke in No Country for Old Men, and she has to run out of the house.)"

SHE'S MAGICAL

"Over the course of a long lunch, Cruz looks like a thousand different women. She flips her hair, or she shifts in her chair, or she creases her forehead or widens her eyes, and these alone are enough to transform her. It feels like watching close-up magic, an actress playing every possible part and well enough to be confounding."

SHE'S MYSTERIOUS (IN OTHER WORDS SHE WON'T TALK ABOUT JAVIER BARDEM) "She will not discuss the evolution of her relationship with Bardem, for instance, whom she first met filming Jamón Jamón, at age seventeen, but didn't marry until four years ago. 'That is for us,' she says. She declines to talk about her recent motherhood (a three-year-old son and a daughter who just turned one) except to say that family is everything to her and the reason we have not seen much of her lately."

OR THAT LETTER SHE WROTE IN JULY:

"She has asked not to be asked about … her controversial signing of an open group letter in the Spanish media condemning the Israeli bombing of Gaza, referring instead—at the table, in person— to a statement released by her publicist as her final word on the subject. ('My only wish and intention in signing that group letter is the hope that there will be peace,' it reads in part.)"

SHE'S MODEST

"She doesn't feel like the sexiest woman alive, she says—she feels like a mother who doesn't get enough sleep…"

Dead battery gets charged in two minutes

Singapore: Imagine a dead smartphone battery getting charged up to 70 percent in flat two minutes?

By using a common ingredient found in sunscreen, researchers from the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have developed a smart battery that uses a gel-based material to speed up the charging process.

To do so, researchers replaced graphite in the battery's anode with a gel made from titanium dioxide - a cheap ingredient found in sunscreen.

The substance speeds up the chemical reactions in the battery, the Huffington Post reported.

The battery can be recharged 10,000 times. It can last nearly 20 years before it needs to be replaced.

The new batteries could enter the market within two years, researchers added.

iPhone Users Sue AT&T For 'Aiding and Abetting' Smartphone Thieves

On Monday, the FCC, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile announced a stunningly-obvious plan to combat smartphone theft: the creation of a national database to keep track of stolen phones and to deny service on any network to a phone that’s been reported stolen by its original owner. The hope is that thieves will be discouraged from stealing if inappropriately-acquired smartphones are rendered dumb. (Details on how it would work here.)

A class action lawsuit filed in California on Tuesday, though, alleges that AT&T is liable for not doing this within its own network earlier. Hilary White, Jeff Pello and Natalie Warren have all had their iPhones stolen, and they think AT&T didn’t do enough to get them back.

AT&T has “[made] millions of dollars in improper profits, by forcing legitimate customers, such as these Plaintiffs, to buy new cell phones, and buy new cell phone plans, while the criminals who stole the phone are able to simply walk into AT&T stories and ‘re-activate’ the devices, using different, cheap, readily-available ‘SIM’ cards,” states their complaint (PDF via Courthouse News Service) which alleges violations of California consumer and business laws, including conspiracy, fraud, breach of contract, accessory to theft, and unfair trade.

The plaintiffs claim that AT&T has willfully aided and abetted the thieves because the company knows that the deprived owners will simply buy new devices. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this complaint. When I was reporting on software to track and shame electronics-stealing thieves, I spoke with a San Francisco police officer, Marc Hinch, who runs Stolen911, a database for stolen goods. He made the point that many stolen devices, from phones to your Sony Playstation, by virtue of being connected to networks are trackable by the companies that provide them. “There’s no corporate incentive to track them or to ensure they’re returned to their owners, though,” said Hinch. “Because that person is just going to buy a new device, resulting in more sales.”

Plaintiffs White and co. say that AT&T should have used their phones’ unique International Mobile Equipment Identity numbers to thwart the thieves who tried to reuse them. The complaint is short on technological details, likely because the lawyers who filed the complaint, R. Parker White and Steven McHugh, are personal injury lawyers. Which may raise some questions about the legitimacy of this suit, depending on how you feel about personal injury attorneys.

“Plaintiffs have been told by AT&T representatives that they will not, and ‘cannot,’ block and effectively kill usage of such stolen cell phones by thieves and criminal organization, however, such representations are false and fraudulent,” states the complaint. It’s unclear whether that statement is based on the FCC’s announcement Monday.


AT&T doesn’t think much of the lawsuit. “The suit itself is without merit, but criminals stealing smartphones is a serious issue, which is why earlier this week we joined with law enforcement, the FCC and other wireless carriers to announce additional steps to provide a comprehensive industry and government response to the problem of wireless device theft,” says a spokesperson for the company.

iPhone Thefts Drop, Microsoft And Google To Introduce Smartphone Kill Switch

Microsoft and Google will introduce “kill switches” to their respective smartphone operating systems, the New York Attorney General announced today.

As part of the Attorney General’s “Secure Our Smartphones” initiative, Eric Schneiderman announced in a report today that an agreement had been reached with the tech giants. The kill switch will render a smartphone useless once it has been activated remotely, making less appealing to thieves.

Apple introduced the kill switch – or “Activation Lock” as it’s known – to iOS 7 in September last year and, according the report, iPhone thefts have radically dropped as a result. “In the first five months of 2014, robberies and grand larcenies involving Apple products dropped 19% and 29%, respectively, compared to the same time period from 2013. The decrease in Apple thefts far surpassed the citywide decrease in all robberies (-10%) and all grand larcenies (-18%).”

Conversely, the report explained how smartphones without a kill switch saw a rise in thefts: “Perhaps most tellingly, robberies and grand larcenies from a person involving a Samsung smartphone, which did not have a kill switch during much of this time, increased by over 40%.

“Statistics from San Francisco and London show similar outcomes. In San Francisco, iPhone robberies declined 38% while robberies of Samsung devices increased by 12%. In London, Apple thefts declined by 24% while Samsung thefts increased by 3%.”


Carriers and trade association CITA, which represents the wireless telecommunications industry, had previously opposed the idea of a kill switch, claiming that “it isn’t the answer”. CITA argued that hackers could use the feature to activate the switch when it isn’t needed and cause mischief for millions of smartphone owners. Its opposition slowed down the possibly of the idea becoming a reality, but it thawed its opinion and came around to the idea earlier this year.

With Android and Microsoft’s now on-board, practically all smartphones will have the feature embedded in them. There’s no information yet on when the update 

How Apple Made Your iPhone 6 Much Less Likely To Be Stolen

To you, your new iPhone 6 looks like a gleaming sheet of technological magic — but to a thief, it looks like a shiny, worthless brick.

That’s because every iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus comes with Activation Lock — Apple's AAPL +1.46% “kill switch” — on by default. Every phone, if stolen, can be wiped remotely and “bricked,” which makes it worth almost nothing to thieves, who usually want to re-sell stolen phones quickly for profit.

Apple introduced Activation Lock with the iOS 7 release a year ago, so many current phones already have it. But the feature is opt-in, and too many iPhone users still haven’t turned it on. Even today, thieves still have a good chance of striking gold — except with the newest models.

“The iPhone 6 is going to be a less attractive device for thieves,” said Max Szabo, spokesman for the San Francisco District Attorney’s office, which has been  pushing for universal kill switch for the past year.

When Activation Lock is on, an AppleID and password are required to turn off Find My iPhone, sign out of iCloud, or erase and reactivate a stolen phone.

The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus are the first new smartphones to have the kill switch on by default. Because iPhones are the most commonly stolen smartphone — law enforcement have dubbed iPhone robberies “apple picking” — any reason for thieves to believe their targets are likely to have phones with kill switches should lead to a drop in crime.

Smartphone crime rates have already dropped since Activation Lock debuted. Thieves, wary of robbing someone but ending up with a dud phone, stopped trying as often. In the first five months of 2014, smartphone robberies and thefts dropped significantly in San Francisco, New York City and London, a June study found.


“It’s a simple game of odds on the streets,” Szabo said. “We’ve already seen a change in street behavior.”


In New York City, iPhone thefts and robberies dropped 29 and 19 percent in early 2014, while Samsung phones became attractive new targets. San Francisco and London also saw double-digit percent drops in iPhone thefts after an opt-in kill switch was offered.

Secure Our Smartphones, a coalition between the San Francisco District Attorney and New York Attorney General, has been pushing to stop smartphone crime along several different branches, but Apple’s Activation Lock is the first success. Microsoft MSFT +2.08% and Google GOOGL -2.44% said in June they would add kill switches to phones running their operating systems, and a new California law that goes into effect in July 2015 will require all phones sold in California to have a kill switch.

Carriers have been accused of dragging their feet in adopting broad policies that would make re-selling stolen phones harder. A group of users sued AT&T in 2012 for making “millions of dollars in improper profits” selling new phones and new phone plans to users whose phones had been stolen while thieves could easily re-set and re-sell phones.

Deterrence won’t stop all smartphone crime, Szabo said. But he believes sucking the value out of a stolen smartphone might keep it from being stolen in the first place.


“Am I going to go rob someone at gunpoint to sell their phone as a paperweight?” Szabo said. “Probably not.”

Android Lollipop's New 'Kill Switch' Could Discourage Smartphone Theft But It Still Needs Work

Smartphone thieves may now think twice about snatching your Android phone, but they won’t be completely deterred yet.

Google GOOGL -2.44% released Android 5.0 Lollipop Wednesday, and for the first time, it lets users to enable a “kill switch” on their phones. The feature, dubbed “factory reset protection,” requires a Google ID and password before a phone can be reset, and only works when a phone passcode is enabled.

The kill switch is a great step toward making smartphone theft less enticing — when a stolen phone can’t be wiped clean and resold, it becomes a useless brick. But it’s missing one important component: the kill switch is still opt-in.

Kill switches work on two levels: damage control and loss prevention. If your phone’s already been stolen, a kill switch can prevent your data from falling into the wrong hands by letting you remotely wipe your phone — but that’s kind of a last resort. The far better outcome they produce is a deterrent to theft: if enough of the phones are likely to be useless to thieves, they won’t be stolen in the first place.

An opt-in kill switch, like the one Google rolled out Wednesday, is great for damage control (though many of the features were already available to savvy users through Android Device Manager). But opt-in does nothing for deterrence. Not enough users enable the optional feature, so thieves still think they have a good chance of nabbing a vulnerable phone — and yours, even if it’s safe, might be targeted anyway. Google’s kill switch is also weakened because it’s only in effect when the screen is locked, meaning it can be disabled by a thief who snatches a phone from someone who’s using it and knows to keep it from locking.

Apple's AAPL +1.46% been way ahead of the pack when it comes to kill switches. Its version, Activation Lock, was introduced in 2013 as opt-in and was made opt-out for all iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus models. Even when Activation Lock was optional, it had a huge effect on iPhone thefts. They plummeted, while Samsung phone thefts shot up. (Samsung has since introduced its own kill switch.)


All this talk of opt-in and opt-out should be moot by July 2015, when California bill SB 962 goes into effect. The law requires that all smartphones sold in California (so, basically, all smartphones, since the companies likely won’t distinguish California phones from the rest) have a kill switch set to default “on.” Apple’s already there, and Google will presumably get there in the next year. Microsoft MSFT +2.08% also has promised to add a kill switch to its Windows phones.

Law enforcement officials also felt Google’s kill switch was a good step forward, but not far enough.

“In order for these theft-deterrents to effectively end the epidemic, they must be enabled by default so violent criminals lack the incentive to steal any smartphone,” said San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in a joint statement. “We will continue to encourage every actor in the smartphone industry – including Google – to take the necessary, additional step of ensuring this technology is opt-out on all devices.”

Apple takes the tablets

Apple's subtle changes to its iPad and iMac lines have been made with the intent of world domination, says Matt Warman

It was hardly a month ago that Tim Cook took to the stage to announce the iPhone 6, a device that has already become the fastest-selling iPhone ever. This week the Apple chief executive was back again, announcing upgrades to the world’s most successful tablet, the iPad - it’s become an annual routine that asserts Apple’s dominance of consumer electronics just as users are wondering what to buy for Christmas. Now millions have the answer they were after.

And while the announcements of this week were not on the scale of the iPhone 6 upgrade, they nudged the iPad further into the territory of the fully fledged computer, able to play games and manipulate the videos and photos that more and more users are now taking. Apple is eager to set them, too, in the context of its other devices: from the Watch it will release next year through to the professional-grade iMac, it has every family and business covered better than ever before. As Geoff Blaber, an analyst at CCS Insight, observed, the real opportunity for iPad growth will come from businesses increasingly adopting them in the workplace.

And there was an announcement not mentioned on stage, too, that was an attempt by Apple to leverage its global power: iPads will now be available with a SIM card that can switch networks pre-installed. For now that will simply make international roaming between the UK and America a lot cheaper, but in due course one can envisage firing up an iPad or iPhone and being presented immediately with a host of competing tariffs, allowing users to choose the best for them. Only Apple has the scale to get networks to agree to such an idea.

That scale, too, will be what means Apple will shape the first mainstream generation of smartwatches: it announced the first chances for developers to start producing their own software for its Watch, and although Google has already made strides in this area, Apple’s power with people who write great software will inevitably drive them to the iPhone maker.

With that in mind, new, only slightly upgraded iPads look like the glue holding a new era of technology together.

India's Supreme Court grants bail to Jayalalitha

India's Supreme Court has granted bail to the imprisoned former chief minister of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, Jayaram Jayalalitha.

Jayalalitha, one of India's most controversial and colourful politicians, was jailed last month for four years on corruption charges.

In a case that lasted 18 years, she was found guilty of amassing unaccounted-for wealth of more than $10m (£6.1m).

Supporters wept on the streets when a court rejected an earlier bail plea.

Granting bail on Friday, India's top court directed her to "complete all paperwork" relating to the appeal against her conviction within two months in the Karnataka high court.

Lawyers for Ms Jayalalitha, 66, had argued that she should be given bail because she is unwell and appealing against her conviction in a higher court.

But the court warned Ms Jayalalitha it would not give her "a day more" if she failed to complete the procedures.

The Supreme Court also asked the former chief minister to ensure her party workers remained peaceful.

Her supporters protests against last month's conviction meant they had to be forcibly dispersed by police.

The Karnataka court has sentenced Jayalalitha and three other accused to four years in prison each, with Jayalalitha also facing a 1bn rupee fine ($16m, £10m). The others have been ordered to pay a fine of about $1.6m each.

LIVE Assembly election results Haryana in kitty, but BJP starts hunt for Maharashtra ally

BJP is all set to form the government in Haryana, but the saffron party will have to look for an alliance partner in Maharashtra as it appears to have fallen short of the majority in the 288-seat state Assembly. But one thing that was clear from the results was the total annihilation of the ruling Congress in both the states.

As per trends available till 4 pm, BJP has won 83 of the 206 seats declared. Shiv Sena is in the second position with 45 seats, followed by Congress at 34 and NCP with 24.  Its former ally the Shiv Sena has also put up an impressive show winning 11 and leading in 42 other constituencies. To add insult to injury for the Congress.

Increasingly, it appears that the BJP is not set to get to 145 on its own. The NCP could make some noises indicating its willingness to truck with the BJP, but BJP’s chief ministerial frontrunner Devendra Fadnavis reiterated just this morning that the Congress-NCP are the party’s political rivals, not the Shiv Sena. The RSS too seems to be against any alliance with the NCP, and has termed the Shiv Sena a natural ally of the BJP. However, Sharad Pawar’s party has announced unconditional outside support to the BJP.

The Sena has anyway already softened its stand following the exit poll numbers, having called for an end to enmity in day before’s edition of Saamna. The BJP-Sena has been partners for 25 years in the state and as well as at the Centre. They also control the biggest cash cows in Maharashtra, the municipal corporations of Mumbai, Thane and the others in the region.

There was a never-filmed alternate ending.

In a never-shot alternate ending, Savage’s character is looking through The Princess Bride book when he hears something outside his window. “He goes to open it only to find all four of us — myself, Robin, Mandy, Andrew — on top of four gray stallions outside his house, beckoning him to join us on our next adventure,” Elwes wrote.

Turns out, Reiner found the concept too confusing and worried that audiences wouldn’t like it if the two worlds collided. “It turned out to be the better choice,” the actor added.

The film was sealed with a kiss for Elwes.

On Nov. 21, Elwes filmed his final scene: the now-famous movie-ending kiss between Westley and Buttercup. In the book, Goldman wrote, “Since the invention of the kiss … there have been five kisses that have been rated the most passionate, the most pure. This one left them all behind.”

For Reiner, it took six takes to get the kiss right. “I could have gone on shooting that scene all day, as I don’t think I wanted the movie to end,” Elwes wrote. “It was also a very tender way to end the movie. Sealing it with a kiss, so to speak.”

Brad Pitt’s War Movie “Fury” Is A Manly Tearjeaker

The first job given to Norman Ellison, the fresh-faced new Army recruit played by Logan Lerman in the World War II drama Fury, is to clean the remains of his predecessor out of the tank to which he’s been assigned. The body’s already been carted away, but there’s splattered viscera against one of the walls to be mopped up, blood to be wiped away. And then, horribly, Ellison finds an unmistakable chunk of the dead guy’s face, a sight that causes him to clamber outside and throw up in front of his indifferent colleagues.

Fury, which is written and directed by David Ayer (End of Watch, Sabotage) and opens in theaters on Oct. 17, is peppered with merciless moments like that. Like Saving Private Ryan, it’s a World War II movie filled with urgency to get out from under the prettier images of heroism and valor conjured by the idea of American troops in that conflict. It’s set in a ravaged 1945 Germany that frequently looks like it might be hell, and the conflict it portrays is all about flesh, from the soldier who, covered in flames, shoots himself to end his pain to the smashed remnants of a corpse in the mud that the tanks roll all over like roadkill. It’s a war-in-hell story about the four veterans and one newcomer manning a Sherman tank called “Fury,” but it’s also about the depths of the relationships they’ve built with one another in the midst of combat. And in that way, it’s also another type of movie — the kind I’ve always thought of as “the male weepie.”

Weepies, as in movies that are intended to make you cry, needn’t be gendered. But they tend to be thought of as being for women — like Terms of Endearment, Titantic, The Notebook, The Fault In Our Stars, films that created instant sisterhoods of shared Kleenex packets in the dark of theaters around the world. Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr’s An Affair to Remember, one of the grand dames of the genre, was part of a running bit in Sleepless in Seattle — no female character could describe the plot without sobbing, but for the men, it was talking about war epic The Dirty Dozen that got the tears flowing.

That scene’s played as a joke, and a good one, but Sleepless in Seattle was also on to something — there is a subset of movies that are just as deliberately crytastic by way of gruff, masculine stories. Sometimes they’re about sports, or daddy issues, or both — see Field of Dreams — and other times they hide their tears behind formidable violence, like the terrific MMA sibling drama Warrior, or the matched macho historical pairing of Gladiator and Braveheart. These are Serious Topics, and so these movies don’t get described in the same way someone might dismissively talk of Beaches, but they can be just as emotionally indulgent in their depictions of bonding and sacrifice. Just because a movie has a battle scene doesn’t mean it’s not a weepie at heart, and for the record, Fury has two massive ones — the first a thrillingly tense tank fight out on a field, the second a prolonged barrage at a crossroads where Fury has stalled out.

The second battle is Fury’s big setpiece, an escalating sequence of shock and slaughter, but by the time it arrives, it’s a bit of a letdown, because the film’s true interest and impact isn’t in the combat but in the characters, and how war and trauma has bound these men together. There’s Ellison, green, unprepared, initially reluctant to kill. Then there’s Grady “Coon-Ass” Travis (Walking Dead alum Jon Bernthal), a weaselly, unpredictable guy from Arkansas; the boisterous Trini “Gordo” Garcia (Michael Peña); and the devout Boyd “Bible” Swan (Shia LaBeouf), who’s settled on an unstable balance between religion and war.

Commanding them is U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Don “Wardaddy” Collier (Brad Pitt), a man deliberately shorn of identifying details from before the war. He’s seemingly unflappable and tough as nails; he speaks German and sports an undercut that’s both period-appropriate and the height of current fashion. As his name indicates, he treats his men with a paternal ease that sometimes means comforting them and other times putting a gun in their hands and forcing them to kill an unarmed German. When we see a hint of vulnerability from him, it’s one he hides from his men, a quick panic attack he gasps out when no one can see him.

How men behave under prolonged stress is an interest of Ayer’s, from his debut with the Christian Bale and Freddy Rodriguez bromance-gone-wrong Harsh Times to Jake Gyllenhaal and Peña’s intriguing, found footage-y cop drama End of Watch, a movie I like more as time goes by. The people these Fury four have already become, and the person Ellison turns into over the course of the film, have been reforged and hardened by bloodshed. They’ve surrendered to the mindset needed to see the things they see and do the things they do, but they’ve done it together. It’s a sort of mutual insanity — their sometimes ironic and sometimes absolutely sincere refrain is “Best job I ever had!” Between the barrages of gun and cannon fire, heavy enough to look like laser salvos, they indulge in arguments they’ve had before, Collier teasing Swan over whether or not Hitler is saved while Garcia goads the callow Ellison by telling him the girl he’s admiring will sleep with him for a chocolate bar.
Fury, which is Ayer’s best work to date, is a better movie for its tender, teary interior, for its unspoken affirmations of how much its soldiers actually love each other. Pitt may be the movie star, and may know how good he looks in silhouette, firing a tank gun, but it’s the very good LaBeouf, watery-eyed and sad, who’s a more accurate embodiment of the film’s sentiments. For all its ferocious combat sequences and creative carnage, the stand-out sequence involves no fighting at all. It’s a quieter interlude when Collier leads Ellison to an upscale apartment in a town they’ve just taken over, where he orders the women inside (Anamaria Marinca and Alicia von Rittberg) to make them breakfast.

Collier and Ellison coax the women into letting their guard down and settle in for a breather, a simulacrum of civilization that’s abruptly disrupted by the arrival of Garcia, Swan, and Travis, who are all pissed about being left out. The specter of violence, of rape, hangs over the interrupted meal, though their anger seems less aimed at the “playing house” with German ladies and more at the breaking of an unspoken contract — they were all supposed to be in this together, not softening, not coddling, not pretending, for even a second, that life is back to normal. Swan stares at Collier like a betrayed lover while the others unspool a disturbing story from the team’s recent past, like they’re opening a window to let the outside ugliness spill back in. The only softness allowed is, apparently, whatever they can spare for one another, and the scenes where it shows are genuinely heartrending, even in the midst of anti-tank fire. Fury may bristle with testosterone, but it’s a tearjerker nonetheless, and a good one, a story about men trudging to the end of the world together.

Top Ten Trends Of 2014 From World Economic Forum Underscore The Need For Cloud Security

Today the World Economic Forum (WEF) published their analysis of the Top Ten Trends Facing The World In 2014 based on insights gained from research completed with their Network of Global Agenda Councils.  Every year the WEF forecasts the 10 biggest trends for the coming year, specifically looking at how they will influence global and regional economic, political and social change.  Also included are new technology developments and advances the WEF has seen in their research.

The study’s methodology relies on the WEF’s selective survey tool that generated 1,500 responses.  The Outlook on the Global Agenda 2014 which includes the top 10 trends, can be downloaded in PDF form here.  The methodology is thoroughly explained and located on the last pages of the PDF.

The top 10 trends the World Economic Forum found based on their research are shown here:

The WEF also provides extensive analysis by region and also by trend.  The following is a breakout of 2014 trends by region. Please click on the graphic to expand it for easier viewing.

Each of the ten trends is explained in detail with commentary and also with an Inside the Data infographic.  The 4th trend, Intensifying Cyber Threats is supported with the following infographic shown below.  According to the WEF trend analysis, manufacturing is the most frequently attacked industry by malicious online activity, followed by finance, insurance and real estate (19%) and services (17%).


This data shows how critical the rising level of research & development (R&D) spending on cloud computing security models are, especially in manufacturing.  Please click on the graphic to expand it for easier viewing.