Nokia begins work on graphene, world's strongest material

The mobile-phone maker receives a $1.35 billion grant to work on development of the 2D wonder-material that is stronger, lighter, and thinner than anything else on earth.

Forget diamonds, graphene is now the world's hardest material. And all sorts of developers most likely want to get their hands on it.

Nokia looks to be ahead of the game in this graphene race. The Finnish mobile-phone maker announced today that it was one of the recipients of a $1.35 billion grant from the European Union to do research and development on the supermaterial over the next 10 years.

"Nokia is proud to be involved with this project, and we have deep roots in the field -- we first started working with graphene already in 2006," Nokia's CTO Henry Tirri said in a statement. "Since then, we have come to identify multiple areas where this material can be applied in modern computing environments. We've done some very promising work so far, but I believe the greatest innovations have yet to be discovered."

Besides being the hardest substance in the world -- 300 times stronger than steel -- graphene has all sorts of other noteworthy qualities. It is also the thinnest object ever obtained by man -- measuring just one atom thick -- and the lightest. It is made of a 2D crystal and looks a bit like scotch tape, only infinitely thinner. Graphene is also transparent, bendable, and a far better conductor than copper.

If Nokia is successful in its development of the material, it will be able to build cell phones that are extremely light, durable, and less susceptible to overheating.

"When we talk about graphene, we've reached a tipping point. We're now looking at the beginning of a graphene revolution," Jani Kivioja, a research leader at Nokia Research Center, said in the statement. "Before this point in time, we figured out a way to manufacture cheap iron that led to the Industrial Revolution. Then there was silicon. Now it's time for graphene."

Here is a video by Cambridge University about the properties of graphene:

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iPhone users pay highest phone bills

New data shows that 59 percent of iPhone users spend more than $100 per month on their carrier bill, while 56 percent of Windows phone users and 53 percent of Android users pay that much.

Rumors of a cheaper iPhone on the horizon may come as welcome news for fans of the device -- especially because iPhone users reportedly pay the highest monthly phone bills, no matter the carrier, according to AllThingsD.

Android, Windows, and BlackBerry users spend less per month to use their smartphones, according to data by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners that was acquired by AllThingsD. It seems that the higher costs come from carriers charging more for iPhone data plans and additional wireless fees.

"We think it has to do with their data plans and carriers, rather than their usage habits," CIRP co-founder Michael Levin told AllThingsD. "They are all on expensive data plans, unlike Android users, some of which are on prepaid or unsubsidized plans with regional carriers."

The data collected is from October to December 2012 and shows that 59 percent of the iPhone users surveyed spent more than $100 per month on their plan with 10 percent of those users spending $200 or more. Only 6 percent spent $50 or less. Conversely, 13 percent of Android users spent $50 or less and 53 percent spent more than $100. Both Windows and BlackBerry users spent even less overall.

Although the monthly cost difference between the four types of devices is slight, the highest costs are still skewed toward iPhone users. This may be because iPhones are more expensive devices and carriers have to shoulder that burden.

"Given the subsidies on iPhones, the carriers are working hard to make their money back during the course of the contract," CIRP's Josh Levitz told AllThingsD. "With the exception of perhaps the hottest Android phones, we think the subsidies on Android phones are lower, so the carriers make more money even with slightly lower per-subscriber revenue."

If Apple does indeed release a cheaper iPhone, it'll be interesting to see if carriers will also lower monthly charges for the device.

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10 ways PowerPoint 2013 gets more polish

Love it or hate it, PowerPoint isn't going away any time soon; it remains the professional tool of choice for presentations. Features that were already in PowerPoint just became easier to discover and use with the 2013 release. For example, task panes and other elements now suggest options for tweaking your deck, rather than leaving you to find them yourself. You’ll see fewer but more relevant choices, thanks to the new Themes and Variants—and you’ll find tools that were previously hidden, such as Shape Merge. Here are 10 ways your workflow, from design to presentation, can be more efficient in the new PowerPoint.

To learn more about the new Office suite, find our full review of Office 2013, as well 10 killer features in the new Word 2013 and 10 awesome additions in Excel 2013. Read on for 10 reasons to consider an upgrade to PowerPoint 2013.

1. Start at the new Start screen

As with the other key Office 2013 applications, PowerPoint 2013 shares the new Modern-style interface and a revamped Start screen. Instead of the blank presentation you started with in PowerPoint 2010, this screen is packed with options including a range of templates. Also on the Start screen is a link to your current online SharePoint or SkyDrive account, a list of recently accessed PowerPoint files, and an Open Other Presentations link which you use to access files on disk or stored in the cloud.

You can also search online for templates and themes from the Start screen; a list of suggested searches helps here.

Now you can preview layouts before selecting a Theme to use.

2. Themes are sleeker, and Variants more varied

PowerPoint Themes are predesigned slide designs that spare you from doing the design work yourself. In PowerPoint 2010 there was a plethora of Themes, Color Schemes, Font Schemes and Effects to choose from. PowerPoint 2013 simplifies everything. The new Themes default to a 16:9 aspect ratio and each has a small subset of Variants, which provide variations in color and some design elements for that Theme.

You’ll find Themes from both the Start screen and the new Design tab. On the Start screen you can click a Theme, preview its variant,s and scroll through previews of the Theme Title, Title and Content, Smart Chart and Photo layouts before committing to one to use.

The old Merge Shape tools are now easier to find.

3. Shape tools get improvements

Although some of the Merge Shapes features that are touted as being new in PowerPoint 2013 were in PowerPoint 2010, they weren’t accessible from the Ribbon toolbar. In PowerPoint 2013, though, the Join, Combine, Fragment, Intersect and Subtract tools are accessible by selecting the Drawing Tools, Format tab and clicking the Merge Shapesbutton. You’ll use these to create your own custom shapes by combining and merging simple shapes to make more complex ones. These tools have a handy live preview as well.

In addition, new alignment guides show when shapes are lined up to each other, to slide elements, and to borders and they make it easier to line up and space objects evenly on your slides.

Formatting options have become more visible.

4. Find new formatting tools

In PowerPoint 2013, you’ll find many formatting features from task docked to the right of the screen as you work. In earlier versions of PowerPoint, these options appeared in dialogs over the slide, which you had to move or close to continue working.

To access these new task panes, right-click a shape, for example, and choose Format Shape to see the available options for a shape in the task pane. Click a picture and the task pane changes to show picture formatting options. While most of the formatting options are not new, this makes them easier to find.

New is the Eyedropper tool, available when you are making a color choice. Use this to match colors by sampling a color to use from a shape or photo.

Lok online for videos to include in presentations from within PowerPoint.

5. Video input and output improve

PowerPoint 2013 supports additional video formats so it's more likely videos will play in your presentation without you needing to install additional codecs.  For example, PowerPoint 2013 supports the MP4 and MOV formats for playing video, and you can export a PowerPoint presentation to video in MP4 or WMV formats.

The new Video button on the Insert tab includes options that let you search for a video from an online source and drop it into your deck without first downloading it to your computer.

At long last, there's a button to play audio tracks in the background and across slides.

6. Audio playback options expand

PowerPoint 2013 supports a wide range of audio formats without requiring you to download and install additional codecs. Supported formats now include AIFF, AU, MID, MIDI, MP3, M4A, MP4, WAV, and WMA.

You can click a button in PowerPoint 2013 to play audio tracks across the entire slideshow or across slides. While this has always been possible, it was ridiculously annoying to set up.  Now all you need do is to insert the audio file, select it, and choose Audio Tools, Playback tab and click the Play In Backgroundoption.

Only have one monitor? You can finally take advantage of Presentation View.

7. Presentation View becomes rosier

While the PowerPoint Presenter View was available in earlier versions of PowerPoint most users didn’t know it existed. Plus, if your computer only had one monitor you couldn't access it —even to rehearse your presentation!

Now you can access Presenter View even on a single monitor by pressing Alt + F5. In Presenter View you can swap monitors for Presenter View and Slide Show View if desired. You can also view a thumbnail view of your slides, and click to view a slide out of sequence.

The new Zoom option lets you look close-up into an area on a slide to draw attention to it. There’s a new laser pointer tool here, too.

The new Comments task pane makes it easier to converse when working with others.

8. Work better with your team

When you’re designing a presentation with others, the new Comments feature will make it easier to discuss your slideshow with collaborators. When you add a comment, it appears in a Comments task pane down the right of the screen and stays visible while you work.

There are also options to add a comment from the Insert tab or the Comments task pane. The Comments task pane lets you navigate through comments, and see if there are comments on other slides. You can view your presentation with or without comments by selecting the Show Comments from the Review tab, and deselecting Show Comments.

The new Office Presentation Service expands features for Presentation View and video in online presentations.

9. Bring your presentation online

Now you can present a deck stored in the cloud or on your PC to the Web in real time. To use the new Office Presentation Service, choose File, Share, Present Online. You can also allow attendees to download the presentation to their own PC.

You'll also see Presenter View while making your presentation. Plus, you can play video at presentation time, and viewers get their own set of video controls. In addition, viewers can navigate back to previous slides if they need to check or follow up on something.

PowerPoint WebApps let you work with the familiar PowerPoint interface, all within a Web browser.

10. Work with the cloud

PowerPoint integrates closely with your online data and services. The free, browser-based PowerPoint WebApp lets you view and edit presentations. In addition, PowerPoint presentation files by default are saved either to your SkyDrive account or, for business users, to SharePoint.

Other cloud options allow you to import pictures direct from Office.com, Flickr, Facebook, and elsewhere for use inside your presentations; there's no need to save them to your PC first.

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New iPad 4 reportedly in the works -- perhaps a 128GB model

Are you ready for an iPad with beefier memory?

A new fourth-generation iPad with Retina display -- and perhaps as much as 128 gigabytes of memory -- is being readied for release, sources tell 9to5Mac. The upcoming slate would not be a new design but rather an addition to the current fourth-generation line, with the same color and wireless combinations as the iPad 4, these unnamed sources say.

Pricing is unknown, but the new model is described as a "premium SKU" (stock keeping unity) that would join the current lineup of 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB iPads. A source at a large U.S. retailer provided 9to5Mac with what is purportedly a new SKU listing for iPads that includes a fourth model labeled as "Ultimate" to join its current lineup

CNET has contacted Apple for comment and will update this report when we learn more.

9to5Mac suspects the new model will have 128GB thanks to code found in the iOS 6.1 beta 5 that references a compatibility with 128GB iOS devices. The discovery was first notedyesterday by @iNeal on Twitter.

That tweet led Jeff Benjamin at iDownloadBlog to extract the iOS 6.1 and compare the System Partition Padding values found in old iOS 6.x firmware. What he found was an additional field for 128:

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In Swartz protest, Anon hacks U.S. site, threatens leaks

In response to the death of tech activist Aaron Swartz, hacktivist collective Anonymous hacked a U.S. government Web site related to the justice system and posted a screed saying it would begin leaking a cache of government documents if the justice system is not reformed.

The group hacked the Web site for the United States Sentencing Commission late Friday, posting a message about what it's calling "Operation Last Resort," along with a set of downloadable encrypted files it said contain sensitive information. The sentencing commission is the caretaker of the guidelines for sentencing in U.S. federal courts.

"Two weeks ago today, a line was crossed," the group's statement reads. "Two weeks ago today, Aaron Swartz was killed. Killed because he faced an impossible choice. Killed because he was forced into playing a game he could not win -- a twisted and distorted perversion of justice -- a game where the only winning move was not to play."

Anonymous encouraged its followers to download the files on the hacked site, a set of nine downloads named after the U.S. Supreme Court's nine justices and collectively referred to by the hacking collective as a "warhead."The recent suicide of Swartz, a proponent of freely accessible information, has been blamed by some on what they say were outrageously aggressive efforts on the part of the U.S. Attorney in Massachusetts to punish Swartz for his alleged theft of millions of articles from a database of academic journals. The 26-year-old Swartz, who struggled with bouts of depression, had been charged with 13 felonies and threatened with decades in prison and fines exceeding $1 million. U.S. Attorney Carmin Ortiz says Swartz' lawyers were also offered a plea bargain in which he'd plead guilty and serve perhaps 6 months.

"Warhead-US-DOJ-LEA-2013.AEE256 is primed and armed. It has been quietly distributed to numerous mirrors over the last few days and is available for download from this website now. We encourage all Anonymous to syndicate this file as widely as possible."

The group wouldn't specify what, exactly, is in the files, saying only that "the contents are various and we won't ruin the speculation by revealing them. Suffice it to say, everyone has secrets, and some things are not meant to be public. At a regular interval commencing today, we will choose one media outlet and supply them with heavily redacted partial contents of the file."

The contents of the encrypted files can apparently be accessed only with a decryption key, and Anonymous said it didn't necessarily want to provide that key to its followers -- it mentioned "collateral damage" as a result of any leaks and said "It is our hope that this warhead need never be detonated." But the group said the U.S. government must begin acting on reforms to the justice system suggested by the system's critics, and in spelling out its demands more specifically, it mentioned plea bargaining and suggested the overhaul of legislation such as the mid-1980s antihacking law entitled the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

 ...in order for there to be a peaceful resolution to this crisis, certain things need to happen. There must be reform of outdated and poorly-envisioned legislation, written to be so broadly applied as to make a felony crime out of violation of terms of service, creating in effect vast swathes of crimes, and allowing for selective punishment. There must be reform of mandatory minimum sentencing. There must be a return to proportionality of punishment with respect to actual harm caused, and consideration of motive and mens rea [criminal intent]. The inalienable right to a presumption of innocence and the recourse to trial and possibility of exoneration must be returned to its sacred status, and not gambled away by pre-trial bargaining in the face of overwhelming sentences, unaffordable justice, and disfavourable odds. Laws must be upheld unselectively, and not used as a weapon of government to make examples of those it deems threatening to its power.

The group said it had acquired the files by compromising various government Web sites and installing "leakware," which it has since removed to cover its tracks.

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Swartz didn't face prison until feds took over case, report says

State prosecutors who investigated the late Aaron Swartz had planned to let him off with a stern warning, but federal prosecutor Carmen Ortiz took over and chose to make an example of the Internet activist, according to a report in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly.

Middlesex County's district attorney had planned no jail time, "with Swartz duly admonished and then returned to civil society to continue his pioneering electronic work in a less legally questionable manner," the report (alternate link) said. "Tragedy intervened when Ortiz's office took over the case to send 'a message.'"

The report is likely to fuel an online campaign against Ortiz, who has been criticized for threatening the 26-year-old with decades in prison for allegedly downloading a large quantity of academic papers. An online petition asking President Obama to remove from office Ortiz -- a politically ambitious prosecutor who was talked about as Massachusetts' next governor as recently as last month.

Ortiz, 57, also came under fire this week for her attempt to seize a family-owned motel in Tewksbury, Mass., for allegedly facilitating drug crimes, despite ample evidence that the owners worked closely with local police. In a stinging rebuke, U.S. Magistrate Judge Judith Dein tossed out the case yesterday, siding with the motel owners -- represented by the public-interest law firm Institute for Justice -- and noting (PDF) that prosecutors had alleged a mere "15 specific drug-related incidents" over a 14-year period during which "the Motel Caswell rented out approximately 196,000 rooms."

"I don't think she should have the power she has to pull this stuff on people," Russ Caswell, owner of the Motel Caswell, told the Boston Herald last night. One reason prosecutors file forfeiture cases is that proceeds from the sale of seized property can be used to fund the budgets of law enforcement agencies. (Other nearby businesses that also experienced infrequent drug-related activity were not, however, targeted by Ortiz.)

The Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly report was written by Harvey Silverglate, a prominent Cambridge criminal defense lawyer whose clients have included Michael Milken and Leona Helmsley. Silverglate, the author of Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, is of counsel to the firm that initially represented Swartz in his attempts to defend himself against 13 felony charges brought by Ortiz's office. Those charges carried a maximum penalty of 50 years in prison.

Silverglate told CNET today that:

 "Continuance without a finding" was the anticipated disposition of the case were the charge to remain in state court, with the Middlesex County District Attorney to prosecute it. Under such a disposition, the charge is held in abeyance ("continued") without any verdict ("without a finding"). The defendant is on probation for a period of a few months up to maybe a couple of years at the most; if the defendant does not get into further legal trouble, the charge is dismissed, and the defendant has no criminal record. This is what the lawyers expected to happen when Swartz was arrested for "trespassing at MIT." But then the feds took over the case, and the rest is tragic history.

Ortiz has defended her actions as appropriate. A representative for Ortiz's office did not respond to a request this afternoon for comment on this story. A representative for Gerard Leone Jr., Middlesex County's district attorney, said she did not have an immediate response to questions about Swartz's prosecution.

'Aaron's Law'

• Neelie Kroes, the vice president of the European Commission, wrote in a blog post that: "If our laws, frameworks, and practices stand in the way of us getting all those benefits, then maybe they need to be changed."

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation posted additional suggestions for "Aaron's Law," an effort to rewrite the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in response to Swartz's prosecution.

• Harvard professor Larry Lessigsaid he would give the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership lecture on Feburary 19 on "Aaron's Law."

• Michael Eisen, a biologist at UC Berkeley, wrote that academia "betrayed and continues to betray Aaron Swartz."

• Open-records pioneer Carl Malamud spoke about "Aaron's Army" at a memorial service at the Internet Archive yesterday.

Ortiz compared Swartz to a common criminal in a 2011 press release. "Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar," Ortiz said at the time. Earlier this month, less than three months before the criminal trial was set to begin, Ortiz's office formally rejecteda deal that would have kept Swartz out of prison. Two days later, Swartz committed suicide.

"He was killed by the government," Swartz's father, Robert, said last week at the funeral in Highland Park, Ill., according to a report in the Chicago Sun Times.

Swartz was accused of 13 felony counts relating to connecting a computer to MIT's network without authorization and retrieving over 4 million academic journal articles from the JSTOR database (he was permitted to access JSTOR because of his Harvard affiliation, but not to perform a bulk download). The advocacy group Demand Progress, which Swartz had helped to create and which helped to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act a year ago, likened it to "trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library."

If Swartz had stolen a $100 hard drive with the JSTOR articles, it would have been a misdemeanor offense that would have yielded probation or community service.

But the sweeping nature of federal computer crime laws allowed Ortiz and Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann, who wanted a high-profile computer crime conviction, to pursue felony charges. Heymann threatenedthe free-culture activist with over 30 years in prison as recently as the week before he killed himself. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat whose district includes the heart of Silicon Valley, has proposed rewriting those laws.

The Boston U.S. Attorney's office was looking for "some juicy looking computer crime cases and Aaron's case, sadly for Aaron, fit the bill," Elliot Peters, Swartz's attorney at the Keker & Van Nest law firm, told the Huffington Post. Heymann, Peters says, thought the Swartz case "was going to receive press and he was going to be a tough guy and read his name in the newspaper."

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Samsung quarterly profit jumps 76 percent on Galaxy sales

Samsung Electronics, the world's largest consumer electronics maker, said its fourth-quarter profit rose 76 percent to another record high on strong sales of Galaxy smartphones and tablets.

The South Korean electronics giant today reported a net profit of 7.04 trillion won ($6.6 billion), up from 4.01 trillion won in the same period a year earlier.

It was the fifth consecutive record quarterly profit for Samsung, which reported fourth-quarter sales of 56 trillion won ($52.6 billion), a 19 percent increase. Nearly half of that revenue came from its mobile communications division, particularly strong sales of its Galaxy S3 smartphone and Galaxy Note 2 phablet.

The results were slightly better than earnings guidance issued by the company earlier this month.

Samsung announced early this month that it had sold more than 100 million smartphones in the Galaxy series since its launch in May 2010, calling it "the driving force" behind the electronics maker's "rise to the top" in the global smartphone market.

"Despite uncertainties in Europe and concerns over the U.S. fiscal cliff creating a difficult business environment, we did our best this quarter to achieve strong earnings based on a strategic focus on differentiated and high value-added products as well as our technological competitiveness," Investor Relations chief Robert Yi said in a statement.

Samsung said demand was weak for PC DRAM during the quarter, while the semiconductor unit posted $8.97 billion in sales, a 10 percent increase quarter over quarter.While its sales of LED TVs also helped boost earnings, Samsung said demand for home appliances declined due to what the company called the "tepid global economy." However, sales of high-end refrigerators and washers increased in the U.S. and Europe.

The company's memory chip business contributed $1.3 billion in operating profits, a 39 percent quarterly increase. However, the company also warned that demand for memory chips in the first quarter would be tempered by seasonably poor sales of PCs and mobile devices.

"Heading into this year, we are expecting a slow recovery in the component business due to reduced capital expenditures, while competition in the set business will intensify further as demand slows and the mid- to low-end market expands," Yi said.

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CNET News Business Tech Intel to wind down desktop circuit board business Intel to wind down desktop circuit board business

The chipmaker says it will leave the traditional desktop PC circuit board business. As a result, the venerable tower PC will likely begin to fade.

Intel will get out of the traditional desktop motherboard business, as it focuses its resources on mobile products.

"We disclosed internally today that Intel's Desktop Motherboard Business will begin slowly ramping down over the course of the next three years," Intel said in a note to journalists today.

What does that mean exactly? Think of the PC tower systems that used to populate the Best Buys of the world. That's what Intel is winding down as it devotes more resources to ultrabooks,tablets, and phones.

"The internal talent and experience of twenty years in the boards business...is being redistributed to address emerging new form factors," Intel said.

Those designs will be mostly mobile, though Intel will also address "emerging" desktop designs. But even those -- like the tiny Intel NUC board and the all-in-one -- have their roots in the mobile world.

Of course, that doesn't mean the demise of the desktop altogether, as motherboard makers like Asus and Gigabyte are expected to continue to participate in the market.The end of development will come with Intel's upcoming "Haswell" chip generation, due to launch in the summer. "Intel will stop developing new Desktop boards once Haswell launch is completed," the company said.

"Intel expects the broad and capable [desktop] motherboard ecosystem...Asus, Gigabyte, MSI and many others...to fully support Intel's growing roadmap and large worldwide customer base," Intel said.

Those board makers cater to do-it-yourselfers, like gamers. Intel will continue to make high-performance chips for these extreme-performance systems.

"We are making significant investments in the enthusiast platform with our K SKU portfolio and new 3rd Gen Intel Core Extreme Processors," Intel told CNET, in response to query.

This official disclosure by Intel follows rumors that Intel would stop making board connectors -- the so-called Land Grid Array (LGA) socket -- for desktops when a future generation of processors arrive after Haswell, under the code name Broadwell.

Intel declined to comment on these rumors.

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WikiLeaks says Aaron Swartz may have been a 'source'

WikiLeaks said late yesterday that recently deceased Internet activist Aaron Swartz assisted the organization, was in contact with Julian Assange, and may have been one of the organization's sources.

Reached in Iceland on Saturday evening, California time, WikiLeaks representative Kristinn Hrafnsson confirmed to CNET that the tweets were authentic but declined to elaborate.

In the tweets, the organization said it was revealing the information "due to the investigation into the Secret Service involvement" with Swartz.

Here are screenshots of the tweets:

The phrasing of the last tweet ("strong reasons to believe, but cannot prove") may be related to the precautions WikiLeaks says it takes to ensure its sources' anonymity. WikiLeaks'policy says:

 ...we operate a number of servers across multiple international jurisdictions and we we do not keep logs. Hence these logs can not be seized. Anonymization occurs early in the WikiLeaks network, long before information passes to our web servers. Without specialized global internet traffic analysis, multiple parts of our organisation must conspire with each other to strip submitters of their anonymity.

The Secret Service has a legal mandate to investigate computer crime, a task it shares with the FBI and other federal agencies, which the agency describes including "unauthorized access to protected computers" -- which Swartz is alleged to have been guilty of. It also investigates forgery, identity fraud, visa fraud, money laundering, food stamp fraud, wire fraud, and a host of other federal offenses.

It would not be unusual, in other words, for the Secret Service to be involved in a criminal probe of Swartz's alleged bulk downloading from the JSTOR database. Some other examples: The Secret Service, which is now part of the Department of Homeland Security, has investigated an artist who installed photo-taking software in Apple stores, a credit card theft ring, spywareinstalled on college campuses, and a possible theft of GOP candidate Mitt Romney's income tax returns.

The ambiguous WikiLeaks tweets have prompted speculation about what the group was trying to suggest. The Verge's Tim Carmody wrote that "the aim of these tweets could be to imply that the US Attorney's Office and Secret Service targeted Swartz in order to get at WikiLeaks, and that Swartz died still defending his contacts' anonymity. Taking that implied claim at face value would be irresponsible without more evidence." And blog emptywheel wrote that if true, the tweets "strongly indicate" that "the US government used the grand jury investigation into Aaron's JSTOR downloads as a premise to investigate WikiLeaks."

Until WikiLeaks elaborates on what it intended to say by highlighting the Secret Service's involvement, and provides supporting evidence, it will be difficult to draw any conclusions.

After confirming the authenticity of the tweets, WikiLeaks representative Hrafnsson asked that we contact him later with any further questions. We'll do that and let you know what we find out.

It seems the only thing that's now certain is that criticisms of, and speculation about, the government's handling of the Swartz-Jstor case isn't likely to die down overnight.

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SSDs vs. hard drives vs. hybrids: Which storage tech is right for you?

In times past, choosing the best PC storage option required merely selecting the highest-capacity hard drive one could afford. If only life were still so simple! The fairly recent rise of solid-state drives and hybrid drives (which mix standard hard drives with solid-state memory) have significantly altered the storage landscape, creating a cornucopia of confusing options for the everyday consumer.

Yes, selecting the best drive type for a particular need can be befuddling, but fear not: We’re here to help. Below, we explain the basic advantages and drawbacks for each of the most popular PC storage options available today. Tuck away this knowledge to make a fully informed decision the next time you're shopping for additional drive space.

Hard-disk drives

Hard-disk drives have been the default storage component in desktop and laptop PCs for decades. As a result, the term "hard drive" is now the common descriptor for all storage hardware—the digital equivalent of "Q-Tip" or "Band-Aid." Although modern hard-disk drives are far more advanced and higher-performing than their counterparts from yesteryear, on many levels their basic underlying technology remains unchanged. All hard-disk drives consist of quickly rotating magnetic platters paired with read/write heads that travel over the platters’ surfaces to retrieve or record data.

HDD interiors almost resemble a high-tech record player.

The technology is mature, reliable, and relatively inexpensive compared with other storage options; most hard-disk drives can be had for only a few cents per gigabyte. Hard-disk drives are available in relatively high capacities too, with today’s largest drives storing up to 4TB of data. Usually hard drives connect to a system via the ubiquitous SATA (Serial ATA) interface, and they don’t require any special software to work properly with current operating systems.

In other words, traditional hard drives are spacious, simple, and comparatively dirt-cheap.

Hard-disk drives don’t perform nearly as well as solid-state drives or even hybrid products do in most situations, however. Today’s fastest hard drives can read and write data at more than 200MB per second with sub-8ms access times, but those numbers are significantly worse than the speeds of even some of the most affordable solid-state drives (which I'll cover in a bit). The faster the platter rotation speed, the faster the hard drive. For example, a 7200-rpm drive outperforms a 5400-rpm drive.

Hard-disk drives are best suited to users who need vast amounts of storage and aren’t as concerned about achieving peak system performance. If you're an everyday PC user who sticks mostly to email, Web browsing, and basic document editing, a standard hard drive should suit you fine. Just don't tinker around with someone else's SSD-powered PC, because once you've gotten a taste of a solid-state drive's blazing read/write speeds, it's hard to go back to even the speediest of traditional hard drives.

Solid-state drives

Several manufacturers offer SSDs. The HDD market is much more condensed.

On many levels, solid-state drives are similar to hard drives. They usually connect to a system by way of the SATA interface (though PCI Express-based drives are also available for ultrahigh-performance applications), and they store files just as any other drive does. SSDs, however, eschew the magnetic platters and read/write heads of hard-disk drives in favor of nonvolatile NAND flash memory, so no mechanical parts or magnetic bits are involved.

By ditching the relative slothfulness of moving parts, solid-state drives deliver much better performance. They're the fastest storage option available. And not only can SSDs read and write data much faster than hard drives with most workloads, but they can also access the data much more quickly as well.

Whereas the fastest hard drives can read and write data at about 200MB per second and access data in a few milliseconds, the fastest solid-state drives can achieve 550-MBps (or higher) transfers that essentially saturate the SATA interface, and their typical access times are a fraction of a single millisecond. In a nutshell, SSDs make for a much snappier, much more responsive system, with lightning-fast boot times, application launch times, and file-transfer speeds.

Another huge SSD advantage is durability. Because they have no moving parts, solid-state drives aren’t susceptible to damage or degraded performance from vibrations or movement. Drop a system or laptop containing a traditional hard-disk drive, and you have a very real chance of corrupting your data. But a solid-state drive won’t—can't—skip a beat.

Solid-state drives aren't without disadvantages, though. For one, SSDs are much more expensive than hard drives in terms of cost per gigabyte. Good, consumer-class solid-state drives run about $0.70 to $1.00 per gigabyte, whereas hard drives cost only a few cents per gigabyte. Solid-state drives don’t offer anything near the capacity of hard drives, either: The most popular SSDs have capacities of about 120GB to 256GB, with 512GB to 1TB models reserved only for those with gargantuan budgets.

OCZ's Vector SSD is one of the fastest around.

SSD performance also varies depending on how full the drive is, or if it has been purged of data. Idle garbage collection or a feature called TRIM can help restore the performance of a “dirty” SSD, but that requires driver and OS support. (Windows 7 and 8 support TRIM.) Because the capacity is relatively small and performance is affected by how full the drive may be, many SSD users find themselves regularly moving less-performance-intensive data (such as documents or media collections) off their solid-state drives and onto traditional hard drives.

Another concern: When SSDs fail, they tend to do so without warning. Hard drives, however, will usually start to show signs of failure by throwing a S.M.A.R.T. error or suffering from a few bad blocks. In our experience, SSDs simply die without waving many—if any—red flags.

Solid-state drives are best suited to savvy PC users who seek high performance. If you don’t mind managing multiple volumes and you have the budget, pairing a fast SSD with a high-capacity hard drive will result in the best of both worlds. The SSD can hold the OS and your most frequently used applications, while the hard drive can handle the bulk-storage duties. Managing multiple storage volumes can be a bit of a pain for casual PC users; if you know your way around a PC, however, combining a fast SSD and large hard-drive storage is a great, high-performance approach with minimal compromise.

If you're considering making the jump to a solid-state drive, check out PCWorld's ultimate guide to SSDs, which reviews seven of the top SSDs on the market today.

Hybrid hard drives

SEAGATE

Hybrid drives such as the Momentus XT offer the best of both worlds, but fulfill that promise only to a certain extent.

Hybrid hard drives blend HDD capacity with SSD speeds by placing traditional rotating platters and a small amount of high-speed flash memory on a single drive.

Hybrid storage products monitor the data being read from the hard drive, and cache the most frequently accessed bits to the high-speed NAND flash memory. The data stored on the NAND will change over time, but once the most frequently accessed bits of data are stored on the flash memory, they will be served from the flash, resulting in SSD-like performance for your most-used files.

Some of the advantages of hybrid storage products include cost, capacity, and manageability. Because only a relatively small solid-state volume is required to achieve significant performance gains, a large investment in a high-capacity SSD isn’t necessary. Hybrid drives tend to cost slightly more than traditional hard drives, but far less than solid-state drives. And because the cache volume is essentially hidden from the OS, users aren’t required to cherry-pick the data to store on the SSD to prevent it from filling up. The hybrid storage volume can be as big as the hard drive being used, and can serve as a standard hard drive. Boot times also see some improvement.

OCZ

The OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid.

Where hybrid products falter is with new data. When writing new data or accessing infrequently used bits, hybrid products perform just like a standard hard drive, and new hybrid drives have a "break-in period" while the software learns which data to cache. Due to the fact that hybrid products rely on caching software, they can also be somewhat more difficult to configure.

For users who don’t want the responsibility of managing multiple volumes or who don’t constantly work with new data, a hybrid drive can be a great option to improve system performance—all without having to give up any capacity or having to deal with the headaches of using separate solid-state and hard-disk drives.

DIY hybrid storage configurations

That being said, some people create DIY hybrid storage configurations by linking a standard hard drive and an SSD with specialized caching software. (This is not the same as simply plopping both an SSD and an HDD into your PC.) Solid-state cache drives often ship with proprietary caching software included, though you can also take advantage of Intel's Smart Response Technology if you want to use an SSD that isn't specifically marketed as a cache drive.

Functionally, the setup performs the same as a typical hybrid drive, though stand-alone SSD caches often come in larger capacities than the paltry flash storage you'll find on most self-contained hybrid drives—meaning more of your data will receive an SSD-powered speed boost. On the other hand, you'll have to buy both a hard-disk drive and a solid-state drive, which can get pricey. You'll also need to configure the setup manually, whereas self-contained hybrid drives are much more of a plug-and-play option.

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