As expected, Apple took the wraps off its upcoming Apple Watch on March 9, showing off the smartwatches that will start at $349 for a Sport version. Apple also finally released pricing details on its luxury Watch Edition, which begin at a cool $10,000 for a Watch in 18-karat gold.
There was more at the Apple event, including the unveiling of the all-new, re-engineered MacBook, which is thinner, lighter and has longer battery life than previous versions. Prices for the latest MacBooks start at $1,299. Both the Watch and MacBook details came at Apple’s “Spring Forward” event.
Apple recently filed a U.S. patent application for a special, ultra-thin hydrophobic coating that when applied to electronic components would protect them from water damage if sprayed or submerged. Apple may be experimenting with such a process to use in its iPhones, iPads and other devices to help protect them from spills and accidental drops into puddles, sinks and other water hazards. But, at this point, it’s not certain how Apple plans to apply the research.
Hackers from Vietnam and Canada have been arrested for their parts in what the U.S. Department of Justice is calling one of the worst data breaches in U.S. history. The indictments, which were unsealed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Atlanta on March 6, charge Viet Quoc Nguyen and Giang Hoang Vu from Vietnam and Canadian David-Manuel Santos Da Silva with having broken into eight email service providers and using the stolen data to earn millions of dollars.
Mozilla will include a new Secure Sockets Layer certificate checking mechanism in the upcoming Firefox 37 browser release, which is scheduled to become generally available on March 31. With the new certificate checking technology, called OneCRL, Mozilla is pushing a list of revoked certificates into the Firefox browser in an effort to help protect users from bad certificates and potentially malicious Websites. An SSL/TLS certificate is intended to provide both encryption and a measure of authenticity for a given domain.