Bill Gates: Prioritizing Internet access before malaria research is 'a joke'

When Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft nearly 40 years ago, he had the idea to put a computer on every desk, and in the '90s he evangelized the concept of "information at your fingertips." Since he stepped down as CEO of Microsoft in 2008, he has turned his full attention to saving lives and eliminating poverty through the work and financial donations of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is a 21st century version of Bill Gates, a brash and determined captain of industry pioneering a new era of computing. He co-founded the social network to connect college students, and now the company's mission has expanded to "give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." The 29-year-old billionaire views himself as an Internet missionary, spearheading internet.org, with a goal of removing obstacles to Internet access for the two-thirds of the world's population that isn't online.

"I think there are some things in life that if you believe that it's such a big problem, you just stick your neck out and try to do it," Zuckerberg said. "A lot of people think it's going to be really challenging to connect 5 billion people, too. It is, but I think it's one of the big problems of my generation."

"They're going to use it to decide what kind of government they want, get access to health care for the first time ever, connect with family hundreds of miles away that they haven't seen in decades," he added. "Getting access to the Internet is a really big deal, and I think we really are going to be able to do it."

While Gates appreciates what the technology can bring to developing countries, he views Zuckerberg's mission as far less vital than the mission of the Gates Foundation. In an interview with the Financial Times published Friday, Gates was asked whether providing Internet connectivity for the planet as Internet.org proposes is more important than coming up with vaccine for malaria.

"As a priority, it's a joke," he said. "Take this malaria vaccine, [this] weird thing that I'm thinking of. Hmm, which is more important, connectivity or malaria vaccine? If you think connectivity is the key thing, that's great. I don't."

Gates was similarly unimpressed with Google's Project Loon, an effort to use giant balloons to bring the Internet to developing countries.

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Kids' No. 1 holiday wish? The iPhone, says a survey

It may well be that they're fleeing Facebook for sexier climes.

But please don't think that today's American teens are talking about a revolution. Unless you have in mind a magical one.

For a survey of their deepest holiday season needs reveals a certain stasis in their hearts.

Performed on behalf of online cash-back shopping site Ebates, the survey probed deeply into the desires of 12- to 17-year-olds.

88 percent of them said they most wanted to get some sort of gadget, come family gifting time. The most desired item among them was the iPhone.

You might think that the survey somehow equated "iPhone" with "cell phone." But, no. These kids know their brands, and only 12 percent of them were most desperate for a Samsung Galaxy phone, as opposed to 32 percent for Apple's offering.

Indeed, the second most desired gadget was another Apple product: the iPad.

Should you wonder whether there might be some glimmer of light for a gadget maker not named after a fruit, there is one.

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Microsoft looks to sell 16M Windows tablets over holidays

One of Microsoft's biggest retail goals for holiday 2014 is to sell 16 million Windows tablets, according to alleged Microsoft strategy documents obtained by Paul Thurrott, editor of the Windows SuperSite.

To achieve this goal, the Softies are going to be increasing retail spending, according to Thurrott's report. Last fiscal year (ending June 30, 2013), Microsoft spent $241 million on its retail Windows efforts. This year, that amount will jump to $405 million, according to Thurrott's information. Of that $405 million, $131 million will be spent on incentives and offers, with the remaining $274 million going toward direct marketing and operating expenses.

Microsoft also is going to try to move the public perception meter about Windows devices. The idea is to make the Windows experience a "loved part of people's lives," not just something functional and utilitarian. Yes, this is all part of Microsoft's push to increase its appeal to consumers, since they've already got many business users sewn up.

I'm assuming Windows tablets here means not only Surfaces but also Windows tablets from other vendors. I'm not sure what Microsoft's desired mix might look like.

Microsoft has not released publicly the number of Surface sales it has made to date. Surface revenues (which are reported into Windows client) for Microsoft's most recent quarter were $400 million. Microsoft officials said they sold double the number of Surfaces this quarter that they did in the previous calendar quarter. (Note: We don't know what either of those numbers are.) Surface RT sales were better than anticipated, officials said, while some potential Surface Pro customers held off, waiting for the Surface Pro 2.

So is 16 million a lot of tablets? A very modest goal? Again, I'm not entirely sure. Gartner recently estimated that 184 million tablets will be sold worldwide by all vendors in calendar 2013.

One way Microsoft can sell more Windows tablets is to hurry up and get those promised Microsoft stores inside Best Buy up and running. I stopped by a couple of New York City's biggest Best Buy retail stores this week. The situation is not pretty. There's still nowhere for those interested in Windows PCs and tablets and the new Surfaces to go to do side-by-side comparisons.

The only Microsoft brick-and-mortar store in Manhattan remains a very small kiosk in the Time Warner Center mall. Here's hoping for some new/more Microsoft holiday pop-ups and/or specialty stores in the not-too-distant future.

This story originally appeared as "Microsoft's holiday goal: Sell 16 million Windows tablets" on ZDNet.

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Hacking is NSA's 'growth area,' Times says in agency profile

Hacking has become the US National Security Agency's "growth area."

That's the word from The New York Times, which pulled from thousands of documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden to publish on Saturday a lengthy article it described as "a rich sampling of the agency's global operations and culture."

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The Times was joined by the UK's Guardian newspaper, which published its own versionof the piece.

Discussing how an agency with 35,000 employees and an official annual budget of $10.8 billion has "an almost unlimited agenda," the Times reports that the NSA "spies routinely on friends as well as foes" not only to fight terrorism but also to "achieve 'diplomatic advantage' over such allies as France and Germany and 'economic advantage' over Japan and Brazil, among other countries."

(The Guardian adds several items to the agenda, with "support for US military in the field; gathering information about military technology; anticipating state instability; monitoring regional tensions; countering drug trafficking;...[and] ensuring a reliable energy supply for the US," and it cites a quote from the NSA itself in noting that the agency can scoop up info from "virtually every country.")

Both pieces also offer a selection of specific examples of the agency's spying prowess, from real-time eavesdropping of terrorist communications during an attack on a hotel to the pinpointing of a sniper who was targeting American personnel inside the US "Green Zone" in Baghdad.

Both, too, note that despite such seemingly impressive accomplishments, the agency has its problems, from failing, as the Times puts it, "to produce a clear victory over a low-tech enemy" -- the Taliban in Afghanistan -- to the much-reported shortcomings in regard to ensuring the privacy of Americans' communications.

The 'digital battlefield'
Not surprisingly -- given an agency that, as the Guardian reports, describes our new world of high-tech activities as the "digital battlefield" -- both articles discuss the NSA's technological chops.

The "growth area" remark about hacking comes in a section of the Times piece that discusses NSA divisions known as Tailored Access Operations and the Transgression Branch.

TAO, the Times reports, is the NSA unit "that breaks into computers around the world to steal the data inside, and sometimes to leave spy software behind. TAO is increasingly important in part because it allows the agency to bypass encryption by capturing messages as they are written or read, when they are not encoded."

As for the Transgression Branch, it apparently lets other hackers do the work and goes along for the ride:

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Apple and Microsoft go to war against Google and Samsung

I wonder at what point Android becomes more trouble than it is worth to Google. Google itself doesn't make much money on Android, so why bother with it when they have Chrome OS waiting in the wings? Perhaps the day is coming when Google will walk away from Android.

That won't help with the other parts of this new lawsuit, but it would remove one major distraction from Google's primary advertising and search businesses.

As far as Samsung goes, it's hard to have any pity for them. At least Google can say they created Android, Samsung hasn't really done anything but ride on Google's back the entire time.

Where to Trade In Your Old iPad
With the release of the iPad Air, many iPad owners might want to trade-in their old iPads. Apple Insider has details on the best places to exchange your old iPad for cash or store credit.

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Researchers See Through Walls With 'Wi-Vi'

Want X­ray vision like the man of steel? A technology that lets you see behind walls could soon be built in to your cell phone.

MIT professor Dina Katabi and graduate student Fadel Adib have announced Wi­Vi, a demonstration of a technology that uses Wi­Fi to allow a viewer to "see" a person moving behind a wall. (Wi­Vi stands for "Wi­Fi" and "vision.")

Previous work demonstrated that the subtle reflections of wireless inter signals bouncing off a human could be used to track that person's movements, but those previous experiments either required that awireless router was already in the room of the person being tracked, or "a whole truck just to carry the radio," said Katabi.

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