Boot up: Samsung + Google, Google - MMI, China OS woes, and more

The launch of the Moto X will be the culmination of two years' work following Google's purchase of Motorola in 2011. Now Google has sold it.

A burst of 7 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Heavy users of streaming video love Roku, which makes puck-size boxes used to view Internet-streamed video on television sets. Since it began piping Netflix from broadband connections into viewers' living rooms in 2008, Roku has become the favorite device among 37% of U.S. households with streaming players, compared with 24% for Apple TV, according to researcher Park Associates. On Sept. 25, Roku released new versions of its devices, making minor improvements to its cheaper models and adding content from M-Go, a video rental and purchase service owned by MediaNaviCo.

With hundreds of channel-like apps, the company already has much more content than Apple TV, although the absence of iTunes and YouTube are big gaps. Despite its early-mover advantage and coterie of hard-core users, Roku is struggling to expand beyond its niche and has been forced to find other sources of revenue besides hardware sales.

Chromecast is in the picture too, though the other 39% of so of streaming is more likely PlayStations and Xboxes.

Naoki Hiroshima says that PayPal gave out credit card data about him to a faked call (PayPal denies this) and was extorted, at the risk of losing his websites, into handing over control of @N on Twitter. Twitter said it was "investigating"; the account went from being out of use to "gone" overnight. Watch this space..

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Terrific reporting by Liz Gannes:

This week, Samsung and Google announced a wide-ranging deal to cross-license patents that cover mobile devices and other undisclosed categories. But there's more.

Although the exact details of those meetings could not yet be learned, sources familiar with the discussions say not only will Samsung consider dumping or altering the Magazine UX interface in future devices, but, more importantly, new Samsung devices will spotlight Google's suite of apps to get movies, music and other content at the expense of its in-house-developed software, which was once a proud showcase of Samsung's evolution as a mobile industry leader.

It's unclear what concessions Google may have made on its part. The company could have, for example, agreed to work with Samsung on a Nexus device or offered other cooperation.

Her piece appeared hours before Google announced it was selling the Motorola handset division (but not its patents) to Lenovo.

From August 2011, after Google said it would buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5bn, Motorola published an SEC filing with the "background to the merger":

In early July 2011, Andrew Rubin, Senior Vice President of Mobile at Google, contacted Dr. Jha, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Motorola Mobility, to request a meeting to discuss the purchase by some of Google's competitors of the patent portfolio of Nortel Networks Corporation and its subsidiaries (which we refer to in this proxy statement as "Nortel") in an auction conducted by Nortel in June 2011, and the possible impact of and potential responses to the purchase.

Buying Motorola was never about the hardware.

As China believes it can manufacture a global pop star to challenge the likes of Rihanna and Beyonce, it should come as no surprise that it has also developed a device operating system that, it hopes, can challenge Android and iOS.

But the release of the government-backed COS (China Operating System) hasn't exactly gone to plan.

The cross-platform OS has come in for such a public mauling that the state press has had to come to its defence.

Newspapers and social media have queried the similarities between COS and an implementation of Android by HTC, as well as the number of apps available and the level of government support.

Official Communist Party mouthpiece, People's Daily, has published a Q&A article answering what it called "seven major suspicions" concerning the COS.

Ari Juels, an independent researcher who was previously chief scientist at computer security company RSA, thinks something important is missing from the cryptography protecting our sensitive data: trickery.

"Decoys and deception are really underexploited tools in fundamental computer security," Juels says. Together with Thomas Ristenpart of the University of Wisconsin, he has developed a new encryption system with a devious streak. It gives encrypted data an additional layer of protection by serving up fake data in response to every incorrect guess of the password or encryption key.

Wouldn't it be smart to fill stores' credit card databases with fake entries too? That would cause real problems if they were stolen. (Problem is how you avoid using them for marketing.)

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