Are electric bikes the wheels of the future, or just the new Segways?

The founders of Riide see electric bicycles, rather than Metro or cars, as the future of urban transportation. (Erin Patrick O'Connor/The Washington Post)

The Segway tour was gawking.
Alongside the group rolling in the bike lane on Pennsylvania Avenue were Lia Seremetis, the founder of D.C. Bike Party, and her boyfriend, Zach Goodwin, banging around on borrowed black bikes that looked standard-issue in almost every way.
Seremetis’s high-heeled, bootie-clad feet, however, never moved as the couple flew past.
“How fast can the Segways go?” a reporter asked the tour leader. “Ten miles per hour,” he responded.
Seremetis and Goodwin, if they wanted to, could hit 20 mph, the reporter informed the leader. Behind him, the Segway tourists murmured their approval.

Hackers accessed global banking with phony pet stores, lies

Criminals hoodwinked banks, credit-card networks and a payment-security firm while moving hundreds of millions of dollars, according to the U.S. government. It won’t be easy to stop it from happening again.

As U.S. prosecutors announced indictments Tuesday against a hacking ring linked to stock manipulation, gambling and fake pharmaceuticals, details emerged that made payments specialists wince. To move money through the global banking system, conspirators allegedly disguised recipients as pet-supply and dress stores. When financial firms raised alarms, the group feigned shock, paid fines and opened new accounts. And in a twist that turned heads, it even hacked a security company that was supposed to detect its ruse.

"Wow," said Julie Conroy, a security specialist at payments researcher Aite Group. "Shame on this firm for being a victim, because if you’re in that position you know the bad guys are coming after you."

T-Mobile snuck in a huge price hike to unlimited data without telling anyone

During its lavish Uncarrier event yesterday, T-Mobile drew headlines with its Binge On initiative that will exempt Netflix, HBO, and other video streaming services from customers' data plans. But the company also took the opportunity to raise prices while the world kept its eyes elsewhere. T-Mobile will now charge $45 for unlimited data, up from $30. That means the total cost of the carrier’s "Simple Choice" plan including unlimited data will be $95 for a single line.
In exchange, T-Mobile says it's doubling the amount of data customers can use when turning their smartphone into a mobile hotspot, from 7GB to 14GB, and will give away a free movie rental from Vudu once a month starting next year. The change takes effect on November 15th, but current unlimited data plan owners are exempt.
A 50 percent hike for unlimited data

Critics are slamming Apple's $170 iPad keyboard

The first reviews are in for the iPad Pro, Apple's giant tablet that launches this week.
Critics love the iPad Pro as a tablet but are skeptical the device can actually replace their laptops anytime soon. But there was one aspect of the iPad Pro almost every critic agreed with: The $170 Smart Keyboard for iPad Pro is overpriced and underwhelming.
TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino praised the keyboard’s sealed design that prevents spills and splashing from affecting any circuitry, but he said “the feel of the keys are a bit musky for my tastes and isn’t nearly as good on the rapid fly as a MacBook keyboard.”
Bloomberg’s Sam Grobart calls the Smart Keyboard “clever, but a little clumsy.” He notes “you can’t really use it on your lap, much less perched on your legs while sitting in bed.”
Lauren Goode from The Verge was much less forgiving of the keyboard in her iPad Pro review:
“Due to the taut layer of laser-cut fabric covering it, the keys felt comparatively shallow and rough,” Goode said. “It’s not backlit. It can only prop the iPad up at one angle (unlike Microsoft’s Surface). And while most common shortcuts work, depending on the app — Command + Tab tabs through open apps, Command + Z erases your last entry — the entire top row of the Mac keyboard is missing on the Smart Cover keyboard. This doesn’t seem like a big deal at first until you consider that a) you’re missing things like volume and brightness keys and b) those keys are present on accessory keyboards that cost much, much less than $169.”

Scientists think they just found the most important planet outside our solar system

A small planet, just a bit bigger than Earth, has been spotted in our stellar neighborhood, just 39 light-years away.
Known as GJ 1132b, it is the closest rocky exoplanet to have ever been found, and astronomers say it could provide our most in-depth look yet at an alien world not so different than our own.
Drake Deming, an astronomer at the University of Maryland, was so excited about the findings, published this week in Nature, that he described the new world as "arguably the most important planet ever found outside the solar system" in an accompanying News and Views article.
The newly discovered planet is just 16 percent larger than Earth, and it is made of rock and metal like our own planet. However, scientists say it is not likely to host life as we know it.
Its small, dim, sun is just one-fifth the size of our own sun, but GJ 1132b circles it at a distance of just 1.4 million miles, completing a full orbit once every 1.6 Earth days. (For perspective, Mercury orbits the sun from a distance of 36 million miles.)
The exoplanet's close proximity to its host star keeps its temperature at a broiling 500 degrees Fahrenheit — or about as hot as the highest setting on your home oven, said Zachory Berta-Thompson, a post-doc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

Real-Life Tricorder Could Find Land Mines, Tumors

In the Star Trek universe, tricorders are used for applications ranging from disease diagnosis to analyzing the atmosphere on an alien planet. Now a team of scientists might have created a tricorder for our own universe. The device would use electromagnetic waves to detect explosives in the ground, and it might even help diagnose cancer. The researchers from Stanford University published a study about the device in Applied Physics Letters.
The researchers were presented with a challenge from DARPA to create a device that can detect non-metal explosives buried underground, but it can’t touch the object for fear of detonating it. Using microwaves to detect the objects seemed like a great strategy. All materials heat up when they absorb the waves, but different molecules do so at different rates, causing them to vibrate and emit characteristic ultrasound waves. If the researchers could detect the specific ultrasound waves, they could find the buried plastic explosive.

Google makes it easy to control your personal data and privacy

You can now control many of your Google settings from one single page.
Josh Miller/CNET Worried about the personal information Google is sharing about you online? A new page gives you the ability to better control that information.
Rollout out earlier this week, the new "About me" page shows your social media pages, personal details such as your birthday and a link to access your Google privacy settings. You can directly jump into each section and delete or change the information to control what people see about you.
Google has come under fire in the past for its loose privacy settings and the lack of an easy way for users to control them. The company has so many services and such a wide reach online that Google users don't know what data is visible about them and to whom.
Though it may not cover every single facet of your Google data online, the "About me" page seems fairly comprehensive. As the page says, any change you make will show up across Google services like Drive, Photos, Google+ and others. So tweaking your settings here spares you from having to hop from one Google service to another to control your personal data.
The most useful part of the page is the link to Google's Privacy Checkup where you can zero in on specific settings.

Google finally pulling the plug on Chrome for Windows XP

Another nail in the coffin for Windows XP: Google will finally stop supporting Chrome on older operating systems.
In a post on the official Chrome blog, Google announced the end of Chrome's support for Windows XP and Windows Vista, as well Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, 10.7 Lion and 10.8 Mountain Lion for Apple computers. If you're running any of those platforms, you've got until April 2016 to upgrade to a newer version of Windows or OS X if you want Chrome to remain secure from malware.
If you are stubbornly clinging to XP, Chrome will continue to work, but will no longer be updated with security patches. That means you will be at risk from viruses and malware as you miss out on important security updates.