Tomorrow's Newspapers Online. 09-14-2013 | P

Unmanned drones have become an almost ubiquitous presence on the battlefield for U.S. and other high-tech forces.

But the market for remote controlled vehicles is evolving from the sometimes multi-tonne craft that patrol the skies over Afghanistan or Yemen, carrying out reconnaissance and targeted strikes, to tiny robots that police and even film companies can use.

The top end of the market continues to be dominated by U.S. companies such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and General Atomics, formerly a division of General Dynamics and creator of the Predator and Reaper drones. Other major defense firms such as BAE Systems are pushing forward with next-generation drones with stealth and other features.

Smaller companies are increasingly redefining the industry, however.

Drones on display at this week's DSEI defense fair at London's Excel exhibition center include undersea robots that can act as mini submarines or simply drive along the surface of the seabed to clear mines or conduct reconnaissance.

Remote control "quadrocopters" with four or more rotors can be launched from backpacks.

Even conventional military vehicles are becoming increasingly robotized. The stand of U.S. truck manufacturer Oshkosh Corp showcases a picture of a convoy of military trucks it says are being entirely remote-controlled.

Critics of the use of drones controlled remotely argue that they make warfare too clinical and easy, and too often end up killing innocent people. Advocates say the reality is that a drone removes the three "D"s - "difficult, dull and dangerous" - making it increasingly difficult to justify deploying human beings in certain situations.

THE THROWBOT

U.S.-based firm ReconRobotics say their products, robots designed to help soldiers or police look inside a building before they storm it or under a vehicle to detect a bomb, are already saving lives.

"It gives you eyes inside a room before you go there," said Langdon, a former Marine Corps sergeant and now director of U.S. and international military programs for the company.

"Maybe that means you see there are children in a room so you don't throw a grenade. Maybe it means you find an IED (improvised explosive device)."

The impending IPO of the microblogging phenomenon ignited a competition among Wall Street's biggest names for the prestige of managing its coming-out party. Goldman Sachs is lead underwriter, a source familiar with the matter said on Thursday, which is a major coup for the Wall Street bank.

Twitter filed for an IPO confidentially under a 2012 law intended to help emerging corporations with less than $1 billion in revenue go public.

Seven-year old Twitter, which allows users to send out streams of 140-character messages, has become an indispensable tool to governments, corporations and celebrities seeking to communicate with their audience, and for individuals seeking both news and entertainment.

Chief Executive Dick Costolo has for years waved off suggestions it intended to go public, saying the company remained flush with cash. Facebook's mismanaged 2012 debut and subsequent share-price plunge also chilled the consumer-dotcom IPO market.

Facebook, however, has clawed its way back to its $38 IPO price in July, and the stock is at a record high after touching $45 this week.

Twitter, which has been valued by private investors at more than $10 billion, should break even this year and is on track for 40 percent annual growth at a $1 billion annual revenue run rate, Max Wolff of Greencrest Capital estimated.

"It's completely conquered mobile. It has an enormous social network. It's becoming a key utility as a second screen to TV and it's literally the first draft of history," Wolff said.

"Normally a company like Twitter would have been public for some time," he said.

Since Jack Dorsey, Twitter's inventor, dispatched the first tweet from a downtown San Francisco office in March 2006, the service has grown into a worldwide phenomenon with more than 200 million regular users contributing more than 400 million posts a day.

The company makes money by inserting paid, targeted ads that resemble ordinary, user-generated content. Twitter's success with its advertising model created a new paradigm for mobile advertising and prompted Facebook last year to adopt a similar ad product, called Sponsored Stories.

But Twitter was one of the first to prove that in-stream ads could be a viable way to make money in the mobile era.

But scientists now have strong evidence that NASA's Voyager 1 probe has crossed this important border, making history as the first human-made object to leave the heliosphere, the magnetic boundary separating the solar system's sun, planets and solar wind from the rest of the galaxy.

"In leaving the heliosphere and setting sail on the cosmic seas between the stars, Voyager has joined other historic journeys of exploration: The first circumnavigation of the Earth, the first steps on the Moon," said Ed Stone, chief scientist on the Voyager mission. "That's the kind of event this is, as we leave behind our solar bubble."

A new study in the journal Science suggests that the probe entered the interstellar medium around August 25, 2012. You may have heard other reports that Voyager 1 has made the historic crossing before, but Thursday was the first time NASA announced it.

The twin spacecraft Voyager 1 and 2 were launched in 1977, 16 days apart. As of Thursday, according to NASA's real-time odometer, Voyager 1 is 18.8 billion kilometers (11.7 billion miles) from Earth. Its sibling, Voyager 2, is 15.3 billion (9.5 billion) kilometers from our planet.

Voyager 1 is being hailed as the first probe to leave the solar system. But under a stricter definition of "solar system," which includes the distant comets that orbit the sun, we'd have to wait another 30,000 years for it to get that far, Stone said. Another milestone for long after we're gone: The probe will fly near a star in about 40,000 years, Stone said.

How do we know?

Voyager, currently traveling at more than 38,000 miles per hour, never sent a postcard saying "Greetings from interstellar space!" So whether it has made the historic crossing or not is a matter of controversy.

"The spacecraft itself really doesn't know," Stone said. "It's only instruments that can tell us whether we're inside or outside." Further complicating matters, the device aboard Voyager 1 that measures plasma -- a state of matter with charged particles -- broke in 1980.

To get around that, scientists detected waves in the plasma around the spacecraft and used that information to calculate density. Vibrations in the plasma came from a large coronal mass ejection from the sun in 2012, resulting in what Stone called a "solar wind tsunami." These vibrations reached the area around Voyager this spring.

Dell, who won a battle with activist Carl Icahn to win control of the computer company, also said he will shift from a quarterly focus to a "five-year, ten-year focus."

The Renewable Wave Power generator seeks to overcome the limitations of some current tidal power technologies.

These work best when struck by waves travelling in one direction and are less efficient in more turbulent seas.

The generator uses loosely coupled pistons to reap power from tidal waters that flow unpredictably.

British sea power

The win means that Sam Etherington, who created the generator, gets £2,000 to create a bigger prototype that will undergo tests in water tanks to prove its efficacy.

The engineering graduate studied mechanical design at Brunel University in London, and now lives in the Lake District.

Mr Etherington said some of the inspiration for the design came when he was kite surfing off the coast of Cumbria in seas where waves rarely travelled in a predictable fashion.

To harness the energy that abounds in such restless waters, Mr Etherington came up with a design that uses a long chain of loosely linked enclosed pistons. Energy is generated as the chain of generators flexes in the peaks and troughs of each wave. "The ocean is a harsh and unpredictable environment," said Mr Etherington. "It is better to work with the forces than to repel them."

He added that the hard part of the development work was finding ways to replicate the chaotic seas that the generator can make best use of. Data taken from buoys moored in the Orkney Islands was used to make waves in a water tank at Lancaster University and prove the prototypes could generate power in such conditions.

Dr David Forehand from the Institute for Energy Systems at Edinburgh said existing tidal and wave power systems used different methods to cope with the ways water can move.

Systems sited in shallow waters benefitted from the fact that waves "refract" as they approached the shore, he said. This meant the wave crests tended to line up parallel to the shore before they break, making it straightforward to harvest some of their energy.

Expensive

By contrast deeper water systems, such as the Pelamis pipe generators, tended to be "loosely moored" so they can swing into the direction of dominant waves.

He added that seas can sometimes have a number of dominant wave directions and Mr Etherington's multi-axis device might be good for such situations.

After a further meeting Geneva to discuss Moscow's plan for securing poison gas stocks in order to avert U.S. air strikes, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said they would work together to end a conflict that has divided the Middle East and the world's major powers.

They would meet again in about two weeks, around September 28 during the United Nations General Assembly in New York, and hoped progress in Geneva in the coming day on a chemical weapons disarmament deal would help set a date for a peace conference.

"We are committed to trying to work together, beginning with this initiative on the chemical weapons, in hopes that those efforts could pay off and bring peace and stability to a war-torn part of the world," Kerry told a joint news briefing.

Washington and Moscow still had work to do find common ground, Kerry said of a dispute that has raised echoes of the Cold War and to reach an agreement on scheduling peace talks.

"Much ... will depend on the capacity to have success here in the next hours, days, on the subject of the chemical weapons," the secretary of state added.

Lavrov said work on a chemical weapons deal would go on in parallel with preparatory work for a Geneva peace conference.

Russia has resisted calls from Syrian rebels and Western leaders for President Bashar al-Assad to make way for an interim transitional government. Assad's disparate opponents and their foreign allies say they see no place for Assad after the war.

Kerry cautioned after meeting Lavrov on Thursday that the United States could still carry out a threat to attack Assad in retaliation for a poison gas attack last month if Washington was not satisfied with Syria's response.

U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who also represents the Arab League, met Kerry and Lavrov together on Friday. He said working to remove chemical weapons from Syria would form an important element in efforts to hold new peace talks, following an earlier failed attempt at Geneva last year.

FIGHTING IN DAMASCUS

"The purpose of the visit it to have an in-depth discussion with the Prime Minister on the final status negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said. "They will also focus on developments in Syria."

The newspaper, quoting unnamed sources, said in its original Japanese version that Obama was "in the final stages" and moving toward naming Summers.

The English-language version said the president "is set to" name Summers as early as late next week.

Asked about the story, a White House spokeswoman said Obama had not made his decision about the Fed job.

Debate in Washington has focused on whether Obama will pick Summers or Fed Vice Chair Janet Yellen to succeed Ben Bernanke, whose term as head of the U.S. central bank expires in January. The appointment must be approved by the Senate.

Reports in the New York Times and Washington Post earlier this month suggested Obama was strongly inclined to pick Summers.

Republican Senator Johnny Isakson on Tuesday expressed concerns about a Summers nomination but stopped short of saying he would oppose him.

A number of senators - mostly Democrats - have criticized Summers for easing banking restrictions and not regulating derivatives when he was treasury secretary in the 1990s during the presidency of Bill Clinton.

The mobile phone operator, which has around 32 million clients in Germany said on Thursday that the hacker, who had gained access to one of its servers, had not obtained any passwords, security numbers or connection data.

"It is hardly possible to use the data to get direct access to the bank accounts of those affected," the mobile phone network operator said in a statement.

But it warned customers that criminals could launch so-called "phishing" attacks, using fake e-mails, to try to trick them into revealing more details.

"This attack was only possible with the utmost criminal energy as well as insider knowledge and happened deep within the IT infrastructure of the company," Vodafone said.

A source close to the company, who declined to be named, said the investigation was looking into a person who was working for a sub-contractor for Vodafone's administration system.

Privacy and personal data are sensitive issues in Germany due partly to a history of heavy surveillance of citizens in the former communist East and under Nazi rule.

There has also been public indignation over reports of U.S. snooping based on documents leaked by fugitive former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

The scandal unleashed by Snowden, which has filled German newspapers for weeks, has become a major headache for Chancellor Angela Merkel ahead of a September 22 election.

"This may well be one of the largest cases of personal data thefts for German customers," Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at internet security company F-secure told Reuters.

In a previous major international case, which also involved Germans amongst others, data was stolen more than two years ago from almost 80 million user accounts of Sony's PlayStation Network.

And in 2009 in the United States, a hacker called Albert Gonzalez pleaded guilty to stealing tens of millions of payment card numbers by breaking into corporate computer systems at companies such as 7-Eleven Inc and Target Co.

Vodafone said it was working with police to investigate the matter and had sealed the ports the hacker had used to access its servers.

Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez said the piece made him almost want to throw up. Putin said he had written the opinion piece "to speak directly to the American people and their political leaders."

But he appeared to have raised some peoples' hackles with the last paragraph in which he disputed the idea of American exceptionalism.

It was a reference to President Barack Obama's address Tuesday night, in which he said that while America can't be a global cop, it ought to act when in certain situations. "That's what makes us exceptional," Obama said. "With humility, but with resolve, let us never lose sight of that essential truth."

Putin's answer to that?

"It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation," he wrote.

He concluded with the line, "We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord's blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal." The White House shrugged off the fuss around Putin's jabs at Obama, describing them as "irrelevant."

The important thing, a senior White House official said Wednesday night, is that Putin is "fully invested in Syria's (chemical weapons) disarmament." 'Hey Putin'

Not everyone shrugged it off, however. "Hey Putin, next time you wanna write a letter to convince America about something, how about you skip saying we're not exceptional? #rude," tweeted Sarah Rumpf, a political consultant in Texas. Other social media users suggested Putin's talk of equality didn't chime with his government's treatment of homosexuals.

"In his open letter Putin says 'God created us all equal' - guess he forgot about the gays & his discriminatory laws," tweeted Kristopher Wells, an assistant professor at the University of Alberta.

Earlier this year, Putin signed a law that bans the public discussion of gay rights and relationships where children might hear it. Violators can be fined and, if they are foreigners, deported.

Russia's wars

The Russian president also annoyed some people by warning against military action without U.N. Security Council approval.

Although Apple's executives said at Tuesday's launch that its Touch ID technology embedded into the iPhone 5S' home button would only provide fingerprint access to the phone and its own online stores, analysts said Apple's embrace of such technology, called biometrics, would be key to wider adoption.

"It really propels biometrics into the mainstream," said specialist Alan Goode, the UK-based managing director of research consultancy Goode Intelligence.

Jonathan Ive, Apple's senior vice president of design, hinted of its future in a video presentation at the launch.

"Touch ID defines the next step of how you use your iPhone," he said, "making something as important as security so effortless and so simple."

Passwords and personal identification numbers (PINs) have long been the mainstay of access to devices, bank accounts and online services, despite their poor record. Many passwords can easily be guessed, while others can be hacked by brute-force attacks - essentially a computer program running through all possible permutations.

They also involve one too many steps for lots of users: Apple said that half of smartphone users don't bother to password-protect their devices.

Hence the appeal of biometrics, which take something unique to the individual - a fingerprint, an iris, voice or facial features - as authentication.

COMFORT FOR COMMERCE

Apple's move may not have an immediate impact beyond improving the way users unlock their devices and interact with Apple services like iTunes and its App Store.

But that is itself a significant step. Apple has more than 500 million iTunes accounts. Anything that increases security and removes steps in the payment process is bound to boost online purchases.

It will also raise the comfort levels of companies supplying the content to a mobile commerce sector expected to reach $40 billion next year in the United States alone, according to Euromonitor estimates.

Users afraid of using their mobile device to make purchases online or in the real world because they fear it will be stolen or their password seen may feel liberated using a fingerprint, said Michael Chasen, CEO of SocialRadar, which is building location-based mobile applications for social networking.

Shareholders cast their votes at a special meeting on Thursday morning in Austin, Texas. Based on preliminary results, the buyout won their go-ahead and the deal is expected to close before the end of Dell's fiscal third quarter.

The company's pace of internal transformation should now quicken. Sealing the deal should also assuage customers who have grown wary of the company's direction during a very public battle that pit major Wall Street players Icahn, Southeastern Asset Management and T. Rowe Price against the CEO.

"Once the deal is consummated, they can move on and close some of the large infrastructure deals they've been working on. I do think there's been a bit of a pause," said Cross Research analyst Shannon Cross.

Dell, who founded the company from a college dorm-room in 1984, and partner Silver Lake fought for months to convince skeptical investors his offer was the best option. This week, he gained the upper hand after one of his staunchest opponents, activist investor Carl Icahn, bowed out of the conflict because he said it was "impossible to win.

Dell reported a 72 percent slide in quarterly earnings last month, reflecting price cuts intended to soothe nervous customers and spearhead a foray into the enterprise market.

Michael Dell has argued that revamping his company into a provider of enterprise computing services in the mold of IBM is a complex undertaking best performed outside the spotlight of public markets.

It remains to be seen if Dell can build its storage, networking and software portfolios to vie with Hewlett Packard Co and others. Some analysts think it may be too late, since a large swathe of the corporate market has been locked up by IBM and HP.

But with the PC market expected to shrink again in 2013, investors say the company has little choice.

Asoka Kodali, a stockholder from Austin who owns 3,000 shares, said he voted for the Michael Dell-Silver Lake buyout even though he would lose money.

"I don't like the offer but I voted for it this time as I don't see a future for Dell as a public company," he said before the voting began. "Instead of having my money blocked there, I would rather take the loss and use it offset other (stock) gains."

GUTTED