firehose

Microsoft distinguished engineer Blaise Agüera y Arcas is joining Google. Agüera y Arcas originally joined Microsoft in 2006 after the software giant acquired his Seadragon startup. He was a key software architect that helped develop and build Microsoft’s Bing Maps service and its image-stitching Photosynth software. The New York Times reports that Agüera y Arcas will work on machine learning at Google, something Microsoft’s research teams have been focusing on heavily recently.

Agüera y Arcas describes the decision to leave Microsoft as "the hardest decision of my life" in a blog post confirming his departure. Microsoft’s "lead­er­ship has been con­sis­tently good to me over these past eight years, and it has been a time filled with cre­ativ­ity and growth and good friends," Agüera y Arcas says. "It’s painful to leave behind so many won­der­ful ongo­ing projects, and even more so to leave behind such a great team."

A key engineer on Bing Maps and Photosynth image-stiching

His departure comes just days after Microsoft shipped a new Photosynth preview to the web, which includes new methods of stitching photographs and imagery to create 3D scenes. Agüera y Arcas demonstrated Microsoft’s Photosynth work in a TED talk back in 2007. The demonstration wowed audience members with the idea of linking the world’s photos with software. Agüera y Arcas’s departure will be seen as a key loss for the software giant as it continues to reorganize its employees around "devices and services."  A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed Agüera y Arcas's departure in a statement to the NYT, noting “he was a great colleague and we wish him the best in his future endeavors.”

It’s rare for senior Microsoft employees to join Google, especially distinguished engineers. Microsoft previously sued Google after the company hired former vice president Kai-Fu Lee, and court filings at the time revealed the competitiveness between the two firms. Mark Lucovsky, a former distinguished Microsoft engineer, was named in the filings and claimed that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer threw a chair across the room after Lucovsky revealed he was leaving to work for Google. Microsoft's latest battles with Google are highlighted with the company's ongoing Scroogled campaign — a series of ads designed to undermine Google's policies and products.

Architect Jürgen Mayer-Hermann was invited to Georgia's capital, Tbilisi, in 2004 after the country's recently elected president, Mikheil Saakashvili, saw his work in a book. Saakashvili had decided to embark on a program of investment in infrastructure that Mayer-Hermann, in a Dezeen profile, likens to post-war Germany. Over the next decade, Mayer-Hermann's practice — J. Mayer H. — went on to design a range of rest stops, border checkpoints, airports, and other public buildings for Saakashvili's government. Saakashvili is no longer president, but Dezeen says the buildings he commissioned will stand to show Georgia's rich history, rapid modernization, and connection to the west.

Amazon is planning to make 4K content a little bit easier to come by. This morning, Amazon Studios announced that it will shoot all of its 2014 series — both comedies and dramas — in the ultra high-resolution format, and that it will at some point make those 4K recordings available to viewers. "We think customers are going to love watching these series in the highest resolution ever available to consumers, and we can't wait to deliver it," Roy Price, director of Amazon Studios, says in a statement. The studio says that all new series and pilots filmed this year will be shot in 4K.

For now though, details on how or when you'll be able to watch Amazon's 4K content are nonexistent. While it's likely that Amazon plans to offer 4K streaming through its Instant Video service, streams of such high-resolution content haven't been widely available at this point — and are often quite expensive. But Amazon may see a need to begin delivering 4K quickly: Netflix could start streaming 4K content this year, and it may even kick things off with its hit series House of Cards.

Wikipedia

The National Security Agency can easily defeat the world's most widely used cellphone encryption, a capability that means the agency can decode most of the billions of calls and texts that travel over public airwaves each day, according to published report citing documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

The NSA "can process encrypted A5/1" calls even when agents don't have the underlying cryptographic key, The Washington Post reported Friday, citing this top-secret document provided by former NSA contractor Snowden. A5/1 is an encryption cipher developed in the 1980s that researchers have repeatedly cracked for more than a decade. It remains widely used to encrypt older, 2G cellphone calls. Newer phones can still use A5/1, even when showing they're connected to 3G or 4G networks.

In the past five years, cracking A5/1 has grown increasingly easier and less costly. In 2010 researchers unveiled a technique that cost about $650 and relied on open-source software and off-the-shelf hardware. Next-generation spy devices sold to militaries and law-enforcement groups have long marketed the ability to eavesdrop on A5/1-protected calls, too. Despite the growing susceptibility of A5/1, it remains widely used, Karsten Nohl, chief scientist at Security Research Labs in Berlin, told The Washington Post. Reporters Craig Timberg and Ashkan Soltani explained: