Silk Road Defense Makes Its Final Pitch: Don’t Trust Internet Evidence

In this courtroom drawing, defendant Ross William Ulbricht, left, listens while his defense attorney speaks during Ulbricht’s criminal trial in New York, Jan. 13, 2015. Elizabeth Williams/AP

For the last three weeks in the trial of Ross Ulbricht, the Department of Justice has laid out a bright trail of detailed digital evidence that led to one conclusion: that Ulbricht ran the massive online narcotics empire known as the Silk Road. Now Ulbricht’s lead defense attorney has been given a final, one-hour chance to dismantle it. And he used that hour to point the finger at a shadowy alternative suspect and to cast doubt on any evidence that had touched what he described as the fundamentally untrustworthy Internet.

In his closing argument in a Manhattan courtroom Tuesday, Ulbricht’s attorney Joshua Dratel reiterated to the jury a theory he’s pursued in his questioning throughout the trial: that Ulbricht did in fact create the Silk Road as a harmless “economic experiment,” but gave it up after a few months, handing it over to its real operators, who later framed him as the site’s pseudonymous mastermind, the Dread Pirate Roberts. “There’s so much to question in this case,” Dratel said. “There are a lot of blinking neon signs in this case that were created to incriminate Mr. Ulbricht, and I submit to you that DPR was doing it.”

This time Dratel added some new details to the theory intended to explain reams of Silk Road-related evidence found on Ulbricht’s laptop at the time of his arrest. For one, he argued that the Bittorrent client downloading a Colbert Report episode on Ulbricht’s machine at the time was connected to nine other computers, any of which might have planted incriminating logs and messages throughout his computer. These incriminating bits would have been “sprinkled” with personal facts gleaned from social media to make them more believable, he added. Dratel suggested that the “real” Dread Pirate Roberts might have somehow installed malware on Ulbricht’s machine designed to frame him. And Dratel pointed to a flub in the FBI’s analysis of the laptop, in which a forensic program crashed the computer, preventing an agent from copying its memory. (Its hard drive’s stored data was still recovered.) “We’ll never know what processes were running on the laptop at the time,” Dratel said.

But the broader theme that Dratel returned to repeatedly was the argument that evidence from Internet interactions “can be distorted, edited, moved and manipulated.” He advised the jury to instead rely on evidence from real life. “There’s a distinction between the Internet and IRL for a reason. We are here in IRL, and we have to make judgements in IRL,” he said.

The defense’s argument never added up to a single, coherent alternative story about who might be responsible for the Silk Road’s high-volume narcotics sales. And it will have to overcome weeks of the prosecution hammering Ulbricht with a highly convincing line of incriminating breadcrumbs that extends well into the offline world.

“There’s a distinction between the Internet and IRL for a reason. We are here in IRL, and we have to make judgements in IRL.”

In its own closing argument, the prosecution reviewed what it described as that “mountain” of “incredibly damning” evidence with the jury: a journal, logbook, and accounting spreadsheet found on Ulbricht’s laptop at the time of his arrest, detailing his Silk Road activities for years; screenshots from his computer at the time of his arrest showing that he was logged into the Silk Road’s “mastermind” account; testimony from a friend to whom he confessed running the site; a crumpled piece of paper in his bedroom trashcan with formulas later included in Silk Road code; and a forensic analysis of the bitcoins found on his laptop, showing that they were transferred from the Silk Road’s servers.

Prosecutor Serrin Turner told the jury not to be swayed by the defense’s frame-job theory. “There were no little elves that put that evidence on [Ulbricht’s] computer,” he said.

Given that the defense has already conceded that Ulbricht created the Silk Road, prosecutors’ arguments focused instead on the duration of his ownership, trying to show that only one Dread Pirate Roberts ever controlled the site. Turner pointed to chat logs in which Ulbricht privately discussed using his Dread Pirate Roberts pseudonym to create the illusion of a “rotating command,” and suggested that the defense’s story that Ulbricht had given up the site was a similar trick. “The defendant is dusting off the Dread Pirate Roberts play and trying it one last time–on you, ladies and gentlemen,” Turner said.

Turner ended his review of evidence by dramatically highlighting the messages found on the Silk Road’s servers in which the Dread Pirate Roberts commissioned five murder-for-hires through a contact he believed was a Hell’s Angel. Turner acknowledged that those conversations were likely a “con job” played against Ulbricht, and that no one was killed—Ulbricht faces no murder charges in the New York case. But he argued they showed Ulbricht’s willingness to use violence to protect his business. “Thank goodness that this man’s power trip was stopped before he managed to connect with a true hitman,” Turner said, raising his voice for the only time in his closing argument. “For him, it was trivial, a click of a mouse…and wait for a picture of a dead body.”

The defense responded to those references to violence by citing a series of character witnesses it called to the stand to testify to Ulbricht’s “peaceful and nonviolent” personality. “DPR would resort to violence,” Dratel said, echoing the prosecution. “That’s how we know he’s not Ross Ulbricht.”

And just who is the Dread Pirate Roberts? Dratel didn’t state his own prime suspect outright. But he reminded the jury that former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles had been a Department of Homeland Security suspect just months before Ulbricht’s name came to the agency’s attention. Dratel also pointed to Anand Athavale, another suspect who the DHS had believed might be the Dread Pirate Roberts based on linguistic analysis of his posts to the libertarian website Mises.org. But ultimately, he told the jury, proving the identity of the Dread Pirate Roberts is the burden of the prosecution, not the defense.

“There were no little elves that put that evidence on [Ulbricht’s] computer.”

Dratel explained the Silk Road notes found in Ulbricht’s bedroom trashcan as having been dictated to him over the phone, perhaps by whoever was framing him. And as for the college friend to whom Ulbricht confessed his Silk Road ownership, Dratel pointed to a November 2011 conversation in which Ulbricht told the same friend he had sold the site. (A chat log from Ulbricht’s computer dated one month later in which Ulbricht describes lying to the same friend about selling the site, Dratel argued, was just a portion of the fake evidence planted by the real Silk Road mastermind.)

To raise more doubts in the jury’s minds, Dratel brought up a few mysteries that hadn’t been mentioned before in the case. Where, he asked, did the majority of the Silk Road’s money end up? A former FBI agent, after all, had traced more than 700,000 bitcoins to Ulbricht’s laptop, but only 144,000 bitcoins were found on the machine. In another mystery, two files that contained PHP code and a to-do list both showed up on Ulbricht’s computer with dates marked as the evening of October 1, 2013—hours after his arrest. “These are metadata anomalies the government doesn’t even try to explain,” he said.

In its rebuttal, the prosecution responded by reminding the jury one last time that Ulbricht was caught—IRL, not online—in a San Francisco public library, with his laptop logged into the Dread Pirate Roberts’ account on the Silk Road. “The defendant cannot escape the fact that he was caught with his fingers on the keyboard. He was caught redhanded,” said prosecutor Timothy Howard, who delivered the rebuttal. He called Dratel’s defense a “desperate attempt to create a smoke screen.”

“Don’t let the defendant insult your intelligence,” Howard added in his final address to the jury. Look at the evidence, he said, “and you’ll see the defendant’s wild conspiracy theories don’t hold water.”

New White House Rules on Surveillance Fall Short, Privacy Group Says

An aerial view of the NSA’s Utah Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah. Rick Bowmer/AP

More than a year after leaks from Edward Snowden exposed a government program collecting bulk phone records, the Obama administration has failed to halt the practice that even its own advisers want to end.

Today the White House revealed new rules it has implemented in the last year governing how the NSA and other agencies can collect and store data on U.S. citizens and foreign nationals. But rather than address the fundamental problems intrinsic to the phone records collection program, the changes focus on other ancillary policies. For instance, one new rule requires intelligence agencies to scrub any private information about Americans that gets vacuumed up in bulk collections of data, as in when spy agencies target a foreign national and collect the content of communications belonging to an American in the process. When that information has no intelligence purpose, agencies are now required to purge it. The new rules also indicate that private information collected about foreigners must be scrubbed after five years if it holds no intelligence purpose.

Foreigners will now also be able to petition U.S. courts to block the misuse of their private information if that information was passed to U.S. law enforcement agencies by a foreign government.

The new rules also address the government’s use of so-called National Security Letters—secret letters that the FBI can serve to internet service providers and other businesses to get them to hand over records about users. National Security Letters can be issued without the involvement of a judge or court and come with an indefinite gag order preventing businesses from disclosing to anyone that they received such an order. They were ruled unconstitutional in 2013 by a federal judge in California. The government is currently appealing that ruling. In the meantime, the White House has refused to halt their use, but the new rules at least place a deadline on the gag orders. Going forward, gag orders accompanying an NSL will terminate either when an investigation involving an NSL is closed or three years after an investigation is opened—whichever comes first. The White House has included an exception, however, allowing any midlevel FBI official to extend the secrecy of an NSL if they can justify in writing why it’s needed.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which first brought the NSL case against the government, says the new rules don’t address the main problem: namely that agents can simply issue them to a business without any court oversight and the fact that a gag order exists in the first place, for any duration.

“It doesn’t change the essential problem,” says Kurt Opsahl, deputy general counsel for the EFF. “It is still a gag issued without court authority and can be continued indefinitely (simply on the say of an FBI agent) without court involvement.”

He also says the government needs to clarify what the three-year deadline means for NSLs that have already been issued to businesses.

“I would like some clarification if everybody who received an NSL more than three years ago and doesn’t get a note gets to talk about it now,” he says.

Opsahl also says the new rule on purging bulk-collected data that belongs to Americans is problematic, because of the qualifier that it not serve an intelligence purpose.

“It gives a tremendous amount of discretion keeping in mind that foreign intelligence information is a very broad term,” he says.

The biggest change privacy groups were hoping for from the White House but didn’t get? To halt its phone records collection program. Despite recommendations last year that the government halt its bulk collection of phone records metadata—which it collects from telecoms about all calls made to or from the U.S.—the White House has kept it going.

“[The Administration has not implemented the Board’s recommendation to halt the NSA’s bulk telephone records program, which it could do at any time without congressional involvement,” the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board said in a statement about the new rules.

The board recommended that telecoms maintain the records, rather than letting the government collect and retain them, and make them available to the government only for targeted searches upon court order. The White House indicated that the government will continue to collect and store the data because telecoms have not yet devised a system to store the records and make them available to government when appropriate.

“The companies are saying ‘if you want us to do it, you must compel us to do it,’” a U.S. intelligence official told the New York Times . “So we need to compel them.” As the Times points out, that is a process that would require congressional action.

The section of the Patriot Act that the government has used to authorize the bulk collection of phone records will expire in June. Congress will either need to renew the law by then or pass a new law that authorizes phone companies to retain the data for government.

For now, the government has established new rules for using the collected metadata. A report released today by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence indicates that since February 2014, the intelligence community has been required to seek advance approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for each query term it intends to use to search the collected data and must limit the results of queries to two “hops” away from the queried phone number. This means that the government cannot search an extended string of phone data involving people who called people who called people who might be associated with a terrorist organization. That would be three hops. Instead, analysts can only search data within a two-hop radius from a phone number associated with a terrorist organization.

Is It Ethical to Create Babies From Three DNA Sources? Absolutely

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The House of Commons in the U.K. has now voted to permit mitochondrial DNA replacement, which enables babies to be born who have DNA from three people.

Mitochondria are the batteries of our cells that provide energy for cell division and growth. We get ours from our mother’s genes. If there is a defect in a mother’s mitochondria, it can have devastating consequences for her children, resulting in almost certain death. But, by extracting a mitochondrion from a healthy donor egg, scientists are now able to conduct a miniature organ transplant on the cellular level to create a healthy baby through in vitro fertilization. Such a baby has its parents’ genes, except for one small but crucial portion obtained from a donor.

Arthur Caplan

Arthur Caplan is the Drs. William F and Virginia Connolly Mitty Professor and founding head of the Division of Bioethics at New York University Langone Medical Center in NYC. He is one of the nation’s top medical ethicists.

If the House of Lords also approves, Britain will be the first nation to authorize the procedure. The United States is studying mitochondrial transplants. A series of meetings began last week at the Institute of Medicine at the request by the Food and Drug Administration.

The need for the procedure is real. Somewhere around 4,000 children per year in the United States are born with a type of mitochondrial disease. Many do not survive more than a few months. Mitochondrial transplants would help prevent these diseases. So why not use them?

Critics give three main reasons; safety; creating babies with three parents; and the danger of opening the door to more genetic engineering. None of these objections provides a convincing reason against trying to treat what are often lethal diseases.

Is the procedure safe? When it was first tried by my NYULMC colleague, Jamie Grifo, at NYULMC in 2003 he was widely denounced as doing something unsafe with an embryo. The FDA brought his work to a halt. Grifo said he had plenty of data in rodents to show the technique was safe but decided not to push against the FDA’s opposition. So what is different now that makes safety less of an issue?

Now we have data from monkeys. Convincing data. The creation of healthy primates was shown in 2009. And we have data from the creation of human embryos. A team of scientists at the Oregon National Primate Research Center and the Oregon Health & Science University proved in 2012 that the transplanted mitochondria made viable embryos. Safety is always an issue but the case for moving forward in the UK and the USA is strong.

Some say three parent babies are weird. It is true that a mitochondrion is taken from a donor but why this makes the donor in any way a parent is beyond me. If I give the battery from my car to a friend whose battery has died does that make me an owner of her car? And even if logic were stretched to say yes, it is not as if this is the first time we have seen babies with three parents. Sperm, egg, and embryo donation and surrogacy—not to mention adoption—have been around a long time without fracturing the nature of the family. This objection gets no traction.

Lastly some say mitochondrial transplants cross a bright ethical line. Changing genes in the lungs of people with immune disease or in the eyes of people with macular degeneration may fix the broken body part but, critics point out, the change is not passed on to future generations. When you change the mitochondria in an egg with a transplant, you make a change that is inherited by every single offspring of any child created from that egg. That is called germline engineering. Germline engineering of mitochondria moves beyond using genetic engineering to fix our body parts into directly engineering the traits of our children. It is a road that could lead, the critics warn, to eugenics.

Well, that’s where they are wrong. Transplanting mitochondria is not going to be the method used to create enhanced babies. Traits like height, intelligence, strength, balance, and vision don’t reside in the battery part of our cells.

We may well want to draw the line at genetic engineering aimed at making superbabies but all that is involved with mitochondria transplants is trying to prevent dead or very disabled ones. The latter goal is noble, laudable and ought to be praised not condemned.

There are some reasons to worry about mitochondrial transplants. Mainly that they might not work. Other concerns are not persuasive. Britain should lead the way and the USA and other countries should follow in giving this technique a green light.

Robot Cars Won’t Rescue Uber From Its Clash With Drivers

Uber

Sometimes, judges can be vague and hard to read. But this was not one of those times.

“The idea that Uber is simply a software platform, I don’t find that a very persuasive argument,” US District Judge Edward Chen said during a court hearing Friday, according to Bloomberg. The case pits Uber drivers (who seek to be officially recognized as employees) against the hugely popular on-demand rides company (which argues it is a software company that doesn’t employee people).

In its suit, the plaintiffs presented internal emails from Uber management to drivers that, distilled to their essence, sounded a lot like “You’re fired!” But Uber argued that drivers are in fact customers who pay the company money to use its app. “We make our money from licensing our software,” Uber attorney Robert Hendricks told the court. And in that context, drivers are not Uber’s employees. They’re its customers.

The judge didn’t buy that argument, and it seems unlikely Uber will escape from this conflict unscathed. That is, unless it turns out Uber doesn’t need drivers at all. It so happens that Uber took a big step yesterday toward a driverless future. But the dream of perfectly automated transportation won’t come true soon enough to save it from having to reckon with the demands of its human workforce.

Not a Taxi Company

For Uber, the stakes are high (as they are for Uber’s chief rival, Lyft, which is facing a similar suit). Since the start, Uber has always faced down regulators claiming it was running an illegal taxi service by claiming it wasn’t a transportation company at all. It was a tech company that was facilitating an online marketplace to connect drivers with riders. As such, it wasn’t anything like a taxi company that owned a fleet of cars and hired drivers to drive them. It was a new thing, and the law needed to catch up.

Some states and cities have worked to accommodate Uber and similar services. But with a federal judge now casting a doubtful eye on a basic premise of its business, Uber is facing a potentially serious setback. What to do? Well, this is Silicon Valley. When you have a problem, the answer is always obvious: You fix it with technology.

By last evening, Uber’s struggles in court were a distant memory after the company announced it was partnering with Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to open a research center focused on self-driving cars. That news was quickly followed by the scoop (later disputed) that leading self-driving car developer Google was seeking to launch a ride service in competition with Uber. But Uber’s autonomous vehicle Manhattan Project doesn’t just set up a juicy corporate rivalry. It also offers a way out of its pesky driver problem.

More Uncertainty

Unlike Lyft, Uber never engaged in much pretense that it was building some kind of community around its product. Uber was in business, its drivers were in business, and passengers didn’t want to make new friends. They wanted a ride. In that light, it’s kind of hard to accuse Uber of betraying anyone’s trust by seeking to replace human drivers with cars that don’t need time off or benefits or wages. It’s an unabashedly capitalist enterprise with billions of dollars in capital from investors who expect serious returns.

That said, Uber has taken some steps following a streak of bad publicity to present a kinder, gentler image. In a blog post announcing $1.2 billion in new funding, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said the company would generate more than 1 million jobs globally in 2015—a promise that could help open doors in cities otherwise reluctant to embrace Uber as it aggressively expands around the world.

While that promise might starts to look a little thin next to a major push for self-driving cars, an all-robot four-wheeled fleet is still years away—at best. In the meantime, the number of people working jobs providing app-based on-demand services—Uber driver, Instacart shopper, Postmates courier—is only likely to grow. And that will mean more conflict and uncertainty as workers, companies, governments, and consumers all stumble through the process of figuring out what exactly is new about these new marketplaces and what just looks different because it’s happening on a smartphone.

A More Creative Safety Net

One possible solution is to take the anxiety out of both sides, workers and companies, by having the government take on more of the burden of providing the kinds of benefits that, in the US at least, are more typically shouldered by employers.

“The broader context here is for us to start thinking about a safety net that is creative, that is not contingent on employment by a large company,” says Arun Sundarajaran, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

That might be a good idea not just for the so-called “sharing economy” but the broader US economy as well. But if I had to bet on which would come first, widespread use of self-driving cars or a broad new entitlement program passed by Congress, I’d pick the cars hands-down. Uber released a survey recently that found most of its drivers were happy, but enough of them are unhappy enough to sue. At least until robot cars hit the roads en masse, Uber will have to figure out a way to keep the drivers on which its business depends. Or else the courts will.

Animators Create a Lego Movie of 9 Super Bowl Ads—In 36 Hours

Sunday’s Super Bowl was the rare instance in the game’s 49 editions when the game was actually better than the ads. (“So we’re all in agreement: The ads sucked this year,” said someone I was watching the game with.) Not that we didn’t enjoy Walter White cameos and horrifically sad death-of-a-child spots, but something was certainly missing.

As it turned out, that thing was Legos.

Starting with the live broadcast on Sunday, animators at the UK-based A+C Studios embarked on a mad dash to re-create nine of this year’s Super Bowl ads entirely out of Lego bricks—and the result, “Brick Bowl,” has just gone live. In it, a regular Lego Joe leaps into his TV and travels through some of this year’s craziest commercial realms, where interspecies friendships are real (Budweiser), Kim Kardashian is self-aware (T-Mobile), and Jurassic Park is finally open (Jurassic World trailer).

The team at A+C Studios watched the game (which began at 11:30 pm local time) from inside a 5,000-square-foot design studio. They began storyboarding during the half, and the model makers got working not long after. With the help of stop-motion animators and post-production wizards, the short was ready in 36 hours.

In other words: everything is cool when you’re part of a team.

Silk Road Defense Makes Its Final Pitch: Don’t Trust Internet Evidence

For the last three weeks in the trial of Ross Ulbricht, the Department of Justice has laid out a bright trail of detailed digital evidence that led to one conclusion: that Ulbricht ran the massive online narcotics empire known as the Silk Road. Now Ulbricht’s lead defense attorney has been given a final, one-hour chance to dismantle it. And he used that hour to point the finger at a shadowy alternative suspect and to cast doubt on any evidence that had touched what he described as the fundamentally untrustworthy Internet.

In his closing argument in a Manhattan courtroom Tuesday, Ulbricht’s attorney Joshua Dratel reiterated to the jury a theory he’s pursued in his questioning throughout the trial: that Ulbricht did in fact create the Silk Road as a harmless “economic experiment,” but gave it up after a few months, handing it over to its real operators, who later framed him as the site’s pseudonymous mastermind, the Dread Pirate Roberts. “There’s so much to question in this case,” Dratel said. “There are a lot of blinking neon signs in this case that were created to incriminate Mr. Ulbricht, and I submit to you that DPR was doing it.”

This time Dratel added some new details to the theory intended to explain reams of Silk-Road-related evidence found on Ulbricht’s laptop at the time of his arrest. For one, he argued that the Bittorrent client downloading a Colbert Report episode on Ulbricht’s machine at the time was connected to nine other computers, any of which might have planted incriminating logs and messages throughout his computer. These incriminating bits would have been “sprinkled” with personal facts gleaned from social media to make them more believable, he added. Dratel suggested that the “real” Dread Pirate Roberts might have somehow installed malware on Ulbricht’s machine designed to frame him. And Dratel pointed to a flub in the FBI’s analysis of the laptop, in which a forensic program crashed the computer, preventing an agent from copying its memory. (Its hard drive’s stored data was still recovered.) “We’ll never know what processes were running on the laptop at the time,” Dratel said.

But the broader theme that Dratel returned to repeatedly was the argument that evidence from Internet interactions “can be distorted, edited, moved and manipulated.” He advised the jury to instead rely on evidence from real life. “There’s a distinction between the Internet and IRL for a reason. We are here in IRL, and we have to make judgements in IRL,” he said.

The defense’s argument never added up to a single, coherent alternative story about who might be responsible for the Silk Road’s high-volume narcotics sales. And it will have to overcome weeks of the prosecution hammering Ulbricht with a highly convincing line of incriminating breadcrumbs that extends well into the offline world.

“There’s a distinction between the Internet and IRL for a reason. We are here in IRL, and we have to make judgements in IRL.”

In its own closing argument, the prosecution reviewed what it described as that “mountain” of “incredibly damning” evidence with the jury: a journal, logbook, and accounting spreadsheet found on Ulbricht’s laptop at the time of his arrest, detailing his Silk Road activities for years; screenshots from his computer at the time of his arrest showing that he was logged into the Silk Road’s “mastermind” account; testimony from a friend to whom he confessed running the site; a crumpled piece of paper in his bedroom trashcan with formulas later included in Silk Road code; and a forensic analysis of the bitcoins found on his laptop, showing that they were transferred from the Silk Road’s servers.

Prosecutor Serrin Turner told the jury not to be swayed by the defense’s frame-job theory. “There were no little elves that put that evidence on [Ulbricht’s] computer,” he said.

Given that the defense has already conceded that Ulbricht created the Silk Road, prosecutors’ arguments focused instead on the duration of his ownership, trying to show that only one Dread Pirate Roberts ever controlled the site. Turner pointed to chat logs in which Ulbricht privately discussed using his Dread Pirate Roberts pseudonym to create the illusion of a “rotating command,” and suggested that the defense’s story that Ulbricht had given up the site was a similar trick. “The defendant is dusting off the Dread Pirate Roberts play and trying it one last time–on you, ladies and gentlemen,” Turner said.

Turner ended his review of evidence by dramatically highlighting the messages found on the Silk Road’s servers in which the Dread Pirate Roberts commissioned five murder-for-hires through a contact he believed was a Hell’s Angel. Turner acknowledged that those conversations were likely a “con job” played against Ulbricht, and that no one was killed—Ulbricht faces no murder charges in the New York case. But he argued they showed Ulbricht’s willingness to use violence to protect his business. “Thank goodness that this man’s power trip was stopped before he managed to connect with a true hitman,” Turner said, raising his voice for the only time in his closing argument. “For him, it was trivial, a click of a mouse…and wait for a picture of a dead body.”

The defense responded to those references to violence by citing a series of character witnesses it called to the stand to testify to Ulbricht’s “peaceful and nonviolent” personality. “DPR would resort to violence,” Dratel said, echoing the prosecution. “That’s how we know he’s not Ross Ulbricht.”

And just who is the Dread Pirate Roberts? Dratel didn’t state his own prime suspect outright. But he reminded the jury that former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles had been a Department of Homeland Security suspect just months before Ulbricht’s name came to the agency’s attention. Dratel also pointed to Anand Athavale, another suspect who the DHS had believed might be the Dread Pirate Roberts based on linguistic analysis of his posts to the libertarian website Mises.org. But ultimately, he told the jury, proving the identity of the Dread Pirate Roberts is the burden of the prosecution, not the defense.

“There were no little elves that put that evidence on [Ulbricht’s] computer.”

Dratel explained the Silk Road notes found in Ulbricht’s bedroom trashcan as having been dictated to him over the phone, perhaps by whoever was framing him. And as for the college friend to whom Ulbricht confessed his Silk Road ownership, Dratel pointed to a November 2011 conversation in which Ulbricht told the same friend he had sold the site. (A chat log from Ulbricht’s computer dated one month later in which Ulbricht describes lying to the same friend about selling the site, Dratel argued, was just a portion of the fake evidence planted by the real Silk Road mastermind.)

To raise more doubts in the jury’s minds, Dratel brought up a few mysteries that hadn’t been mentioned before in the case. Where, he asked, did the majority of the Silk Road’s money end up? A former FBI agent, after all, had traced more than 700,000 bitcoins to Ulbricht’s laptop, but only 144,000 bitcoins were found on the machine. In another mystery, two files that contained PHP code of a to-do list both showed up on Ulbricht’s computer with dates marked as the evening of October 1, 2013—hours after his arrest. “These are metadata anomalies the government doesn’t even try to explain,” he said.

In its rebuttal, the prosecution responded by reminding the jury one last time that Ulbricht was caught—IRL, not online—in a San Francisco public library, with his laptop logged into the Dread Pirate Roberts’ account on the Silk Road. “The defendant cannot escape the fact that he was caught with his fingers on the keyboard. He was caught redhanded,” said prosecutor Timothy Howard, who delivered the rebuttal. He called Dratel’s defense a “desperate attempt to create a smoke screen.”

“Don’t let the defendant insult your intelligence,” Howard added in his final address to the jury. Look at the evidence, he said, “and you’ll see the defendant’s wild conspiracy theories don’t hold water.”

New White House Rules on Surveillance Fall Short, Privacy Group Says

An aerial view of the NSA’s Utah Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah. Rick Bowmer/AP

More than a year after leaks from Edward Snowden exposed a government program collecting bulk phone records, the Obama administration has failed to halt the practice that even its own advisers want to end.

Today the White House revealed new rules it has implemented in the last year governing how the NSA and other agencies can collect and store data on U.S. citizens and foreign nationals. But rather than address the fundamental problems intrinsic to the phone records collection program, the changes focus on other ancillary policies. For instance, one new rule requires intelligence agencies to scrub any private information about Americans that gets vacuumed up in bulk collections of data, as in when spy agencies target a foreign national and collect the content of communications belonging to an American in the process. When that information has no intelligence purpose, agencies are now required to purge it. The new rules also indicate that private information collected about foreigners must be scrubbed after five years if it holds no intelligence purpose.

Foreigners will now also be able to petition U.S. courts to block the misuse of their private information if that information was passed to U.S. law enforcement agencies by a foreign government.

The new rules also address the government’s use of so-called National Security Letters—secret letters that the FBI can serve to internet service providers and other businesses to get them to hand over records about users. National Security Letters can be issued without the involvement of a judge or court and come with an indefinite gag order preventing businesses from disclosing to anyone that they received such an order. They were ruled unconstitutional in 2013 by a federal judge in California. The government is currently appealing that ruling. In the meantime, the White House has refused to halt their use, but the new rules at least place a deadline on the gag orders. Going forward, gag orders accompanying an NSL will terminate either when an investigation involving an NSL is closed or three years after an investigation is opened—whichever comes first. The White House has included an exception, however, allowing any midlevel FBI official to extend the secrecy of an NSL if they can justify in writing why it’s needed.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which first brought the NSL case against the government, says the new rules don’t address the main problem: namely that agents can simply issue them to a business without any court oversight and the fact that a gag order exists in the first place, for any duration.

“It doesn’t change the essential problem,” says Kurt Opsahl, deputy general counsel for the EFF. “It is still a gag issued without court authority and can be continued indefinitely (simply on the say of an FBI agent) without court involvement.”

He also says the government needs to clarify what the three-year deadline means for NSLs that have already been issued to businesses.

“I would like some clarification if everybody who received an NSL more than three years ago and doesn’t get a note gets to talk about it now,” he says.

Opsahl also says the new rule on purging bulk-collected data that belongs to Americans is problematic, because of the qualifier that it not serve an intelligence purpose.

“It gives a tremendous amount of discretion keeping in mind that foreign intelligence information is a very broad term,” he says.

The biggest change privacy groups were hoping for from the White House but didn’t get? To halt its phone records collection program. Despite recommendations last year that the government halt its bulk collection of phone records metadata—which it collects from telecoms about all calls made to or from the U.S.—the White House has kept it going.

“[The Administration has not implemented the Board’s recommendation to halt the NSA’s bulk telephone records program, which it could do at any time without congressional involvement,” the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board said in a statement about the new rules.

The board recommended that telecoms maintain the records, rather than letting the government collect and retain them, and make them available to the government only for targeted searches upon court order. The White House indicated that the government will continue to collect and store the data because telecoms have not yet devised a system to store the records and make them available to government when appropriate.

“The companies are saying ‘if you want us to do it, you must compel us to do it,’” a U.S. intelligence official told the New York Times . “So we need to compel them.” As the Times points out, that is a process that would require congressional action.

The section of the Patriot Act that the government has used to authorize the bulk collection of phone records will expire in June. Congress will either need to renew the law by then or pass a new law that authorizes phone companies to retain the data for government.

For now, the government has established new rules for using the collected metadata. A report released today by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence indicates that since February 2014, the intelligence community has been required to seek advance approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for each query term it intends to use to search the collected data and must limit the results of queries to two “hops” away from the queried phone number. This means that the government cannot search an extended string of phone data involving people who called people who called people who might be associated with a terrorist organization. That would be three hops. Instead, analysts can only search data within a two-hop radius from a phone number associated with a terrorist organization.

Is It Ethical to Create Babies From Three DNA Sources? Absolutely

Getty Images

The House of Commons in the U.K. has now voted to permit mitochondrial DNA replacement, which enables babies to be born who have DNA from three people.

Mitochondria are the batteries of our cells that provide energy for cell division and growth. We get ours from our mother’s genes. If there is a defect in a mother’s mitochondria, it can have devastating consequences for her children, resulting in almost certain death. But, by extracting a mitochondrion from a healthy donor egg, scientists are now able to conduct a miniature organ transplant on the cellular level to create a healthy baby through in vitro fertilization. Such a baby has its parents’ genes, except for one small but crucial portion obtained from a donor.

Arthur Caplan

Arthur Caplan is the Drs. William F and Virginia Connolly Mitty Professor and founding head of the Division of Bioethics at New York University Langone Medical Center in NYC. He is one of the nation’s top medical ethicists.

If the House of Lords also approves, Britain will be the first nation to authorize the procedure. The United States is studying the mitochondrial transplants. A series of meetings began last week at the Institute of Medicine at the request by the Food and Drug Administration.

The need for the procedure is real. Somewhere around 4,000 children per year in the United States are born with a type of mitochondrial disease. Many do not survive more than a few months. Mitochondrial transplants would help prevent these diseases. So why not use them?

Critics give three main reasons; safety; creating babies with three parents; and the danger of opening the door to more genetic engineering. None of these objections provides a convincing reason against trying to treat what are often lethal diseases.

Is the procedure safe? When it was first tried by my NYULMC colleague, Jamie Grifo, at NYULMC in 2003 he was widely denounced as doing something unsafe with an embryo. The FDA brought his work to a halt. Grifo said he had plenty of data in rodents to show the technique was safe but decided not to push against the FDA’s opposition. So what is different now that makes safety less of an issue?

Now we have data from monkeys. Convincing data. The creation of healthy primates was shown in 2009. And we have data from the creation of human embryos. A team of scientists at the Oregon National Primate Research Center and the Oregon Health & Science University proved in 2012 that the transplanted mitochondria made viable embryos. Safety is always an issue but the case for moving forward in the UK and the USA is strong.

Some say three parent babies are weird. It is true that a mitochondrion is taken from a donor but why this makes the donor in any way a parent is beyond me. If I give the battery from my car to a friend whose battery has died does that make me an owner of her car? And even if logic were stretched to say yes, it is not as if this is the first time we have seen babies with three parents. Sperm, egg, and embryo donation and surrogacy—not to mention adoption—have been around a long time without fracturing the nature of the family. This objection gets no traction.

Lastly some say mitochondrial transplants cross a bright ethical line. Changing genes in the lungs of people with immune disease or in the eyes of people with macular degeneration may fix the broken body part but, critics point out, the change is not passed on to future generations. When you change the mitochondria in an egg with a transplant, you make a change that is inherited by every single offspring of any child created from that egg. That is called germline engineering. Germline engineering of mitochondria moves beyond using genetic engineering to fix our body parts into directly engineering the traits of our children. It is a road that could lead, the critics warn, to eugenics.

Well, that’s where they are wrong. Transplanting mitochondria is not going to be the method used to create enhanced babies. Traits like height, intelligence, strength, balance, and vision don’t reside in the battery part of our cells.

We may well want to draw the line at genetic engineering aimed at making superbabies but all that is involved with mitochondria transplants is trying to prevent dead or very disabled ones. The latter goal is noble, laudable and ought to be praised not condemned.

There are some reasons to worry about mitochondrial transplants. Mainly that they might not work. Other concerns are not persuasive. Britain should lead the way and the USA and other countries should follow in giving this technique a green light.

Robot Cars Won’t Rescue Uber From Its Clash With Drivers

Uber

Sometimes, judges can be vague and hard to read. But this was not one of those times.

“The idea that Uber is simply a software platform, I don’t find that a very persuasive argument,” US District Judge Edward Chen said during a court hearing Friday, according to Bloomberg. The case pits Uber drivers (who seek to be officially recognized as employees) against the hugely popular on-demand rides company (which argues it is a software company that doesn’t employee people).

In its suit, the plaintiffs presented internal emails from Uber management to drivers that, distilled to their essence, sounded a lot like “You’re fired!” But Uber argued that drivers are in fact customers who pay the company money to use its app. “We make our money from licensing our software,” Uber attorney Robert Hendricks told the court. And in that context, drivers are not Uber’s employees. They’re its customers.

The judge didn’t buy that argument, and it seems unlikely Uber will escape from this conflict unscathed. That is, unless it turns out Uber doesn’t need drivers at all. It so happens that Uber took a big step yesterday toward a driverless future. But the dream of perfectly automated transportation won’t come true soon enough to save it from having to reckon with the demands of its human workforce.

Not a Taxi Company

For Uber, the stakes are high (as they are for Uber’s chief rival, Lyft, which is facing a similar suit). Since the start, Uber has always faced down regulators claiming it was running an illegal taxi service by claiming it wasn’t a transportation company at all. It was a tech company that was facilitating an online marketplace to connect drivers with riders. As such, it wasn’t anything like a taxi company that owned a fleet of cars and hired drivers to drive them. It was a new thing, and the law needed to catch up.

Some states and cities have worked to accommodate Uber and similar services. But with a federal judge now casting a doubtful eye on a basic premise of its business, Uber is facing a potentially serious setback. What to do? Well, this is Silicon Valley. When you have a problem, the answer is always obvious: You fix it with technology.

By last evening, Uber’s struggles in court were a distant memory after the company announced it was partnering with Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to open a research center focused on self-driving cars. That news was quickly followed by the scoop (later disputed) that leading self-driving car developer Google was seeking to launch a ride service in competition with Uber. But Uber’s autonomous vehicle Manhattan Project doesn’t just set up a juicy corporate rivalry. It also offers a way out of its pesky driver problem.

More Uncertainty

Unlike Lyft, Uber never engaged in much pretense that it was building some kind of community around its product. Uber was in business, its drivers were in business, and passengers didn’t want to make new friends. They wanted a ride. In that light, it’s kind of hard to accuse Uber of betraying anyone’s trust by seeking to replace human drivers with cars that don’t need time off or benefits or wages. It’s an unabashedly capitalist enterprise with billions of dollars in capital from investors who expect serious returns.

That said, Uber has taken some steps following a streak of bad publicity to present a kinder, gentler image. In a blog post announcing $1.2 billion in new funding, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said the company would generate more than 1 million jobs globally in 2015—a promise that could help open doors in cities otherwise reluctant to embrace Uber as it aggressively expands around the world.

While that promise might starts to look a little thin next to a major push for self-driving cars, an all-robot four-wheeled fleet is still years away—at best. In the meantime, the number of people working jobs providing app-based on-demand services—Uber driver, Instacart shopper, Postmates courier—is only likely to grow. And that will mean more conflict and uncertainty as workers, companies, governments, and consumers all stumble through the process of figuring out what exactly is new about these new marketplaces and what just looks different because it’s happening on a smartphone.

A More Creative Safety Net

One possible solution is to take the anxiety out of both sides, workers and companies, by having the government take on more of the burden of providing the kinds of benefits that, in the US at least, are more typically shouldered by employers.

“The broader context here is for us to start thinking about a safety net that is creative, that is not contingent on employment by a large company,” says Arun Sundarajaran, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

That might be a good idea not just for the so-called “sharing economy” but the broader US economy as well. But if I had to bet on which would come first, widespread use of self-driving cars or a broad new entitlement program passed by Congress, I’d pick the cars hands-down. Uber released a survey recently that found most of its drivers were happy, but enough of them are unhappy enough to sue. At least until robot cars hit the roads en masse, Uber will have to figure out a way to keep the drivers on which its business depends. Or else the courts will.

Animators Create a Lego Movie of 9 Super Bowl Ads—In 36 Hours

Sunday’s Super Bowl was the rare instance in the game’s 49 editions when the game was actually better than the ads. (“So we’re all in agreement: The ads sucked this year,” said someone I was watching the game with.) Not that we didn’t enjoy Walter White cameos and horrifically sad death-of-a-child spots, but something was certainly missing.

As it turned out, that thing was Legos.

Starting with the live broadcast on Sunday, animators at the UK-based A+C Studios embarked on a mad dash to re-create nine of this year’s Super Bowl ads entirely out of Lego bricks—and the result, “Brick Bowl,” has just gone live. In it, a regular Lego Joe leaps into his TV and travels through some of this year’s craziest commercial realms, where interspecies friendships are real (Budweiser), Kim Kardashian is self-aware (T-Mobile), and Jurassic Park is finally open (Jurassic World trailer).

The team at A+C Studios watched the game (which began at 11:30 pm local time) from inside a 5,000-square-foot design studio. They began storyboarding during the half, and the model makers got working not long after. With the help of stop-motion animators and post-production wizards, the short was ready in 36 hours.

In other words: everything is cool when you’re part of a team.

3D Printing: Are You Ready for the New Decentralized Industrial Revolution?

makerbot/Flickr

The world around us has advanced so much that science fiction is no more a fiction. Moving from prototyping to tooling, additive manufacturing commonly known as 3D printing has expanded to full-scale end-part production and replacement part production. Be it a 3D printed bionic ear enabling you to hear beyond human hearing frequencies, 3D printed cake toppings taking the culinary innovation to another level, 3D printing your dream house in just a few hours — 3D printing is revolutionizing every walk of life. According to Wohlers Report 2014, the worldwide revenues from 3D printing are expected to grow from $3.07 billion in 2013 to $12.8 billion by 2018, and exceed $21 billion by 2020.

No wonder one of the biggest players in printing, HP (Hewlett-Packard), entered the field with a faster, cheaper version of 3D Printer focused on Enterprise Market. So is this the first step from a “revolutionary” Maker Movement to an Industrialized Scale that technology eventually needs to survive for the long term? To a world of taking a 3D physical product or an idea to the Digital World, which happens to be 2D and then back out to 3D physical form anywhere across the globe, where an IP address and enough bandwidth is available to be able to transmit the Digital Model. This does have significant disruption potential. How much and when this will happen will of course depend on several factors across economics, technological feasibility, policies and of course politics. So are we finally ready to go beyond the growth that the DIY enthusiasts have driven from 200% to 400% in personal 3D printers between 2007 and 2011 according to a McKinsey Study.

Before we pose those questions, let’s look at what has been already achieved or near achievement across markets beyond printing prototypes, toys and models.

In the field of medicine, 3D printing of complex living tissues, commonly known as bioprinting, is opening up new avenues for regenerative medicine. With an improved understanding of this technology, researchers are even trying to catalyze the natural healing mechanism of the body by creating porous structures that aid in bone stabilization in the field of orthopedics. This cutting edge technology in conjunction with stem cell research is likely to revolutionize the made-to-order organs, cutting across the transplant waiting lists. Even intricate human body parts like the brain can be replicated using the 3D technology to aid in complex medical surgeries through simulation.

The Aerospace industry, an early adopter of this technology, is already designing small to large 3D printed parts saving time, material and costs. 3D printing also offers the biggest advantage critical to the aerospace manufacturers – weight reduction. It also accelerates the supply chain by manufacturing non-critical parts on demand to maintain JIT (Just-in-time) inventory. The power of additive manufacturing can do away with several manufacturing steps and the tooling that goes with it.

The Automobile world is already witnessing crowd-sourced, open-source 3D printed vehicles driving off of the showroom floors. Local motors caught the audience by surprise by 3D printing its car ‘Strati’ live at the International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) in Chicago. So how can an auto part be a challenge by any means? Are we headed towards making that exhilarating smell of burnt rubber a thing of the past? Something future generation will ask, what the big deal about that was? How about robots with muscle tissue powered parts?

The 3D printed “bio-bot,” developed by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is likely to be really flexible in its movements and navigation. (So, forget about the much jibed about robotic movements.) With this breakthrough, researchers are contemplating on the possibility of designing machines enabled with sensory responding abilities to complex environmental signals.

So where does all this lead us?

The excitement growing around the 3D technology is palpable and rightly so not without a reason. 3D technology surely shifts the ownership of production to the individuals and brings to light most of the inefficiencies of mass-production. Of course, not everything can be 3D printed, but a wider use of 3D printers might reduce need for logistics as designs could be transferred digitally leading to a decentralization and customization of manufacturing. 3D scanning as an enabling technology will also help in creating an ecosystem to support users. The layer by layer manufacturing by 3D printing has the dexterity to fabricate intricate geometries efficiently and hence reduces the wastage caused by traditional manufacturing methods.

By reducing the cost and complexity of production, 3D printing will force companies to pursue alternate ways to differentiate their products. It will also help companies enhance their aftermarket services by facilitating easy on-demand manufacturing of replacement parts. As manufacturing is moving closer to the consumers, the consumer is fast transforming into a prosumer.

There are, of course, hurdles to overcome, not the least entrenched incumbency and policies, which will be governed by more short term economic and social impacts as the positive outcomes of such revolutions are often difficult to envision.

McKinsey has estimated a potential of generating an economic impact of $230 billion to $550 billion per year by 2025 with various 3D applications, the largest impact being expected from consumer uses, followed by direct manufacturing. As the breadth of application of 3D printing continues to grow, it will be interesting to observe how the industries will mix with and influence the future of additive manufacturing.

Almost every sector of the industry is riding on the 3D opportunity bringing innovations to reality and the world is ready to hop on to a decentralized industrial revolution. Are you?

Sukamal Banerjee is a leader of the Engineering Services (ERS) business line at HCL Technologies.

Groupon Founder’s New App Offers Awesome GPS Walking Tours

Detour was created by Andrew Mason, founder of Groupon. Detour

Freaky fact: The Post Office by my house used to be the Peoples Temple, where cult leader Jim Jones recruited the followers that would ultimately commit mass suicide with cyanide-laced Kool Aid at the cult’s outpost in Guyana.

I discovered this only recently, after a year and a half of living in the neighborhood, thanks to a GPS-assisted walking tour I took with my iPhone.

The app that facilitated it, Detour, was created by Andrew Mason, the founder of Groupon. A walking tour app may seem like an unlikely follow-up for a guy who made a fortune in group coupons, but Mason sees a connection. “Groupon was trying to create a catalyst for people to get out of the house and experience their city. This is kind of just a continuation of that same desire,” he says.

When Mason was running Groupon in Chicago, one of the most popular deals was an architectural tour. Every time it was offered, it would sell out thousands of tickets in a matter of hours. Mason noted that it wasn’t just tourists snatching up the tickets. It was locals. It convinced him there was a market for local history—if it was done right.

The hope is that you can keep your phone in your pocket the whole time. Detour

To keep quality high, Detour’s starting with a handful of tightly choreographed tours. Initially, it’s offering six in San Francisco. Gary Kamiya, author of Cool Gray City of Love, a recent history of the city, leads one through the North Beach neighborhood. John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, does one in the Tenderloin.

The tours are meant go beyond the obvious tourist spots. They not only point out noteworthy landmarks but occasionally invite you to go inside to get a closer look. One of the walks briefly shepherds you inside a soup kitchen. (The company has prepped these places to expect a few tentative visitors with ear buds.) With the app, you can also link two phones up and do a tour in tandem.

The app relies on elaborate geofencing and clever on-the-fly audio mixing to guide you seamlessly from site to site, accommodating brisk walkers and dawdlers alike. It took me a few minutes to get used to the voice in my ear knowing where I was, orienting me in relation to a certain tree on my left or an unusual house on my right. But generally speaking, it worked well. Aside from one hiccup where the geofencing faltered, I was able to take in most of the 90-minute tour without taking my phone out of my pocket.

As for the walk itself—it was fascinating. History is cool. But then I like history and walking and walking tours already, so I’m probably an easy sell. I also got to try the app for free, where most folks will have to pay $5 per tour, or subscribe for a little more to get all the walks. Whether or not there is in fact a market for history remains to be seen.

But even beyond the local color, Detour is a novel experience. It isn’t often you encounter audio as an interface, but here, you see its unique qualities. When you’re not holding a device or looking at a screen, you can move unencumbered through physical space. Audio leaves your eyeballs free to feast on the world around you.

Mason hopes to expand Detour to other cities in coming months. But the vision is to go beyond curated historical walking tours altogether. Mason mentions the possibility of opening the company’s custom-built authoring tours so people can make their own walks. He’s open to walks that dispense with facts altogether—one of the initial six, in fact, is a tour of gourmet bakeries guided by a fictitious German philosopher with a Werner Herzog-esque accent.

Someday, Mason says, Detour could even offer a more open-world experience, where you could pop in your ear buds and sip a little local history on any city block. Mason has a nice phrase for this; he says he wants to “annotate the city with sound.” Another way of thinking about it: aurally augmented reality.

Amazon Is in Talks to Buy RadioShack Stores, Report Says

A Radio Shack store in downtown Cincinnati, March 4, 2014. Al Behrman/AP

Amazon may soon take another leap into the world of brick-and-mortar retail.

According to Bloomberg, the company has been in talks with RadioShack about acquiring at least some stores from the ailing retail chain. The stores would become showcases for Amazon’s own products, such as the Kindle e-readers and tablets, and serve as pick-up and drop-off sites for Amazon customers.

RadioShack is on the verge of declaring bankruptcy, and according to other reports, it has also been in talks with wireless carrier Sprint about selling some of its stores. The deal with Amazon may not happen, but nonetheless, it shows where Amazon is headed.

To head off competition from Wal-Mart—one of the few retailers that could pose a legitimate threat to Amazon—and to expand its operation, the company has adopted a new hybrid business model, combining e-commerce with offline services.

Amazon has already built a small physical presence across the country with its Locker program, which enables customers to pick-up packages at 7-Eleven stores and other locations—including RadioShack stores at one time, though the chain dropped out of the program. Meanwhile, it’s moving into same-day delivery, running its own grocery delivery service and even offering one-hour delivery for certain products in Manhatten. Rumors also indicate it will soon open a flagship retail space in Manhattan.

As we’ve put it before, the point of an Amazon store isn’t really to provide a new place to shop. It would be a way for Amazon to market its own products and services, including the Kindle and Amazon Prime, and to run a distribution center for its same-day delivery services.

Acquiring some RadioShack’s locations could fit with that strategy, giving Amazon a way to quickly extend its footprint into hundreds more U.S. cities. But that doesn’t mean it’ll happen. Amazon could benefit from an existing supply chain for piping goods into and out of a series of low-rent physical locations. But given that Amazon has its own hyper-customized logistics practices, it could be hard for it to absorb another company’s processes.

But the fact that Amazon is even interested in acquiring part of a brick and mortar chain shows just how much the retail business, both online and off, has changed in recent years.

Groupon Founder’s New App Offers Awesome GPS Walking Tours

Detour was created by Andrew Mason, founder of Groupon. Detour

Freaky fact: The Post Office by my house used to be the Peoples Temple, where cult leader Jim Jones recruited the followers that would ultimately commit mass suicide with cyanide-laced Kool Aid at the cult’s outpost in Guyana.

I discovered this only recently, after a year and a half of living in the neighborhood, thanks to a GPS-assisted walking tour I took with my iPhone.

The app that facilitated it, Detour, was created by Andrew Mason, the founder of Groupon. A walking tour app may seem like an unlikely follow-up for a guy who made a fortune in group coupons, but Mason sees a connection. “Groupon was trying to create a catalyst for people to get out of the house and experience their city. This is kind of just a continuation of that same desire,” he says.

When Mason was running Groupon in Chicago, one of the most popular deals was an architectural tour. Every time it was offered, it would sell out thousands of tickets in a matter of hours. Mason noted that it wasn’t just tourists snatching up the tickets. It was locals. It convinced him there was a market for local history—if it was done right.

The hope is that you can keep your phone in your pocket the whole time. Detour

To keep quality high, Detour’s starting with a handful of tightly choreographed tours. Initially, it’s offering six in San Francisco. Gary Kamiya, author of Cool Gray City of Love, a recent history of the city, leads one through the North Beach neighborhood. John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, does one in the Tenderloin.

The tours are meant go beyond the obvious tourist spots. They not only point out noteworthy landmarks but occasionally invite you to go inside to get a closer look. One of the walks briefly shepherds you inside a soup kitchen. (The company has prepped these places to expect a few tentative visitors with ear buds.) With the app, you can also link two phones up and do a tour in tandem.

The app relies on elaborate geofencing and clever on-the-fly audio mixing to guide you seamlessly from site to site, accommodating brisk walkers and dawdlers alike. It took me a few minutes to get used to the voice in my ear knowing where I was, orienting me in relation to a certain tree on my left or an unusual house on my right. But generally speaking, it worked well. Aside from one hiccup where the geofencing faltered, I was able to take in most of the 90-minute tour without taking my phone out of my pocket.

As for the walk itself—it was fascinating. History is cool. But then I like history and walking and walking tours already, so I’m probably an easy sell. I also got to try the app for free, where most folks will have to pay $5 per tour, or subscribe for a little more to get all the walks. Whether or not there is in fact a market for history remains to be seen.

But even beyond the local color, Detour is a novel experience. It isn’t often you encounter audio as an interface, but here, you see its unique qualities. When you’re not holding a device or looking at a screen, you can move unencumbered through physical space. Audio leaves your eyeballs free to feast on the world around you.

Mason hopes to expand Detour to other cities in coming months. But the vision is to go beyond curated historical walking tours altogether. Mason mentions the possibility of opening the company’s custom-built authoring tours so people can make their own walks. He’s open to walks that dispense with facts altogether—one of the initial six, in fact, is a tour of gourmet bakeries guided by a fictitious German philosopher with a Werner Herzog-esque accent.

Someday, Mason says, Detour could even offer a more open-world experience, where you could pop in your ear buds and sip a little local history on any city block. Mason has a nice phrase for this; he says he wants to “annotate the city with sound.” Another way of thinking about it: aurally augmented reality.

Amazon In Talks to Buy Radio Shack Stores, Says Report

Amazon may soon take another leap into the world of brick-and-mortar retail.

According to Bloomberg, the company has been in talks with RadioShack about acquiring at least some stores from the ailing retail chain. The stores would become showcases for Amazon’s own products, such as the Kindle e-readers and tablets, and serve as pick-up and drop-off sites for Amazon customers.

RadioShack is on the verge of declaring bankruptcy, and according to other reports, it has also been in talks with wireless carrier Sprint about selling some of its stores. The deal with Amazon may not happen, but nonetheless, it shows where Amazon is headed.

To head off competition from Wal-Mart—one of the few retailers that could pose a legitimate threat to Amazon—and to expand its operation, the company has adopted a new hybrid business model, combining e-commerce with offline services.

Amazon has already built a small physical presence across the country with its Locker program, which enables customers to pick-up packages at 7-Eleven stores and other locations—including RadioShack stores at one time, though the chain dropped out of the program. Meanwhile, it’s moving into same-day delivery, running its own grocery delivery service and even offering one-hour delivery for certain products in Manhatten. Rumors also indicate it will soon open a flagship retail space in Manhattan.

As we’ve put it before, the point of an Amazon store isn’t really to provide a new place to shop. It would be a way for Amazon to market its own products and services, including the Kindle and Amazon Prime, and to run a distribution center for its same-day delivery services.

Acquiring some RadioShack’s locations could fit with that strategy, giving Amazon a way to quickly extend its footprint into hundreds more U.S. cities. But that doesn’t mean it’ll happen. Amazon could benefit from an existing supply chain for piping goods into and out of a series of low-rent physical locations. But given that Amazon has its own hyper-customized logistics practices, it could be hard for it to absorb another company’s processes.

But the fact that Amazon is even interested in acquiring part of a brick and mortar chain shows just how much the retail business, both online and off, has changed in recent years.

Razer’s Ultimate Gaming Laptop Gets Even More Absurdly Powerful

For the past few years, it’s been near impossible to find a Windows laptop that packs as much firepower into a body as slim and chiseled as the Razer Blade. We’re talking about a machine that’s about the same size and build quality as a MacBook Pro, but is probably “too much laptop” for anyone who isn’t a gamer or a video editor.

If you need a crazy amount of horsepower without lugging around an anvil, it’s damn near the ultimate portable. It’s only getting better, too. The 2014 Blade isn’t even a year old yet, but Razer has just released an even more capable and brawny 2015 model in the same, sleek package.

You won’t see much difference from the outside. The new 14-inch Razer Blade sticks with a tack-sharp 3200×1800 IGZO touchscreen display (262ppi), three USB 3.0 ports, very good stereo speakers, Dolby Digital Plus 7.1 with HDMI 1.4 out, and the familiar CNC-machined black aluminum body finished with ectoplasm-green accents. The size and weight haven’t changed, either: It measures 0.7 inches thick when closed and weighs a shade under 4.5 pounds, just like its predecessor.

The new configurations are available immediately, starting at $2,200 for the 128GB model.

But under the hood, the GPU and CPU get a boost. The new Blade packs the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M graphics chip, which is based on Nvidia’s new Maxwell architecture. (The 2014 Blade used a Kepler-architecture 870M for graphics.) It’s backed with 3GB of VRAM, and Razer says the newly designed GPU helps squeeze more battery life out of the Blade’s 70Wh battery, which is another holdover from the last model.

The updated Blade doesn’t get Intel’s new Broadwell chips, but the CPU does get an upgrade. The new chip is a quad-core 2.6GHz Intel Core i7-4720HQ, which can ramp up to 3.6GHz thanks to a “Turbo Boost” auto-overclocking feature. It’s a slight step up from the last version’s 2.2GHz/3.2GHz quad-core chip, but the bigger deal is that the newer laptop comes loaded with 16GB RAM—twice as much as the previous model.

It still runs Windows 8.1 out of the box, but of course, you’ll be able to upgrade that to Windows 10 at no charge for the first year. Storage configurations are all SSD, with 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB options available.

Despite the doubled-up RAM and upgraded guts, the new Blade costs the same as the previous version. That’s a bargain in context, but you’ll still pay a premium for such high-octane innards in a svelte package. The new configurations are available immediately through the Razerzone website and Microsoft’s online store, starting at $2,200 for the 128GB model.

This Battery-Laden Backpack Charges Your Gadgets as You Carry Them

AMPL

Heads up, urban mobile workers: If you already spend too many brain cycles hunting for available power outlets at coffee shops and dealing with near-dead devices on long road trips, then AMPL Lab’s latest creation is totally your bag.

The AMPL SmartBackpack is a backpack with a mobile power station stashed inside. Charge your devices large and small—phones, cameras, even your laptop—while you haul them on your back. And while you’re walking around, you can monitor and adjust the charging activity via an app on your phone without having to open the pack.

Beginning today, AMPL will start a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. Customers will be able to pre-order the bag for $225, with a planned commercial release later in 2015.

So, this is not just another battery bag for storing and charging smart devices. It is itself quite smart. Sensors inside and outside of the SmartBackpack monitor environmental conditions like temperature and push those stats (along with battery level) to an touch-capable OLED screen on the top of the pack, as well the AMPL mobile app for your smartphone. With the app, you can not only monitor conditions, but also check the charging status of your individual devices and prioritize the power allocation to each device depending on its level of importance (the batteries use Qnovo’s adaptive charging tech). Of course, if you’re charging your phone while you walk around, you can keep it plugged in and secure in a holster on the left shoulder strap.

AMPL

Every bag has an integrated 5,000mAh battery, which has enough juice to charge your smartphone two to three times over. There’s a docking system inside that allows for three more modular batteries, each of which has varying degrees of power and is sold separately: A second 5,000mAh (18.5Wh) battery, a larger 14,900mAh (55Wh) “LaptopBoost” battery, which charges most PC laptops, and a battery/power inverter combo, which you can use to charge a MacBook, or just about anything that plugs into a wall. Configured to the max, you can get up to 147Wh of charge.

When you need to recharge the internal packs themselves, you don’t need to remove them from the docking bay. A power cable pulls out of the top of the bag, so you can just plug it into the wall. And if you find yourself in need of a quick boost, the modular batteries work completely independently of the bag. Just undock them and take them along even when you’re leaving the backpack behind.

Internal storage niceties include a hanging tablet sleeve and an adjustable laptop compartment that can be accessed from the top or from the side. The laptop pouch also unzips and lays flat per TSA requirements.

Sounds like one heavy backpack, right? The answer is yes, it’s going be heavier than your standard cloth or canvas backpack. However, AMPL has taked the weight of the components into consideration and adjusted the exterior material to lighten the load significantly. The exterior fabric will also be treated with a hydrophobic, water-resistant coating.

This isn’t a pack for casual commuters. If you’re only spending an hour or two per day away from an outlet whilst in your car or on a train, the SmartBackpack probably isn’t a great fit for you. It’s also on the spendy side—it’s $225 for the Indiegogo Earlybird special, but then moves to $300 after two days.

But if you live for the long haul, or if you work out of coffee shops, or if you’re just a power user who frequently finds her phone or laptop at 19 percent before 3 pm, take note. Really the AMPL is for anyone tired of doing “battery math” and meticulously budgeting device usage instead of getting the most from gadgets meant to enhance—not complicate—the mobile lifestyle.