Byte Into It blog

Vale Robert Morris, Dropbox WTF, Swipe iOS Conference, Twitter Superinjunction

2011-07-06T22:42:00.002+10:00

This week's hosts were Georgia, Ben, and Vanessa

The podcast is available here - listen back at your leisure.

Here's what we discussed on this week's show, aired Wed 6 July on Triple R:

The passing of computer scientist and cryptographer Robert Morris
Dropbox changing its terms of service and related backlash
Echoprint - new open source music fingerprinting technology
Songkick app, as recommended by Triple R's Incoming music show, which offers tour info for your music collection
The Australia and New Zealand Internet Awards are now open for entries. Businesses, organisations and individuals are encouraged to enter.
Why it's useful if your robot vacuum has a personality
Aesthetically and environmentally pleasing cable ties in the shape of leaves, for organising your computer cables

Guest: Sean Woodhouse talking about the Swipe iOS conference: http://swipeconference.com.au

Our regular social media correspondent Warren Davies, joined by Kate Hughes, talked about the superinjunctions on media in the UK and the suing of Twitter.

We also talked about News Ltd sale of MySpace (to Justin Timberlake!), and we chatted about Google+ again. Have you got your own circle of trust....?

WWDC, E3, blog evolutions and IPv6 Day

2011-06-10T10:45:00.000+10:00

With Georgia, Paul and first-timer Dave (usually heard on To And Fro, Sunday nights on 3RRR)

On this week's show we were suffering keynote-dazzle-itis. So many evangelical WWDC and E3 sales pitches, phew.

Here's what we talked about:

Apple announcements: iOS 5, Lion OS X, iCloud and iMatch (Paul even had a dev version of iOS 5 on his iPad)
E3 reflections: where it's at for Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft right now. Check out the podcast for Paul's expanded thoughts on how Sony & Microsoft are interested in putting you inside the games whereas Nintendo are interested in bringing the games out into the real world...
Happy world IPv6 Day! What it means, how the IPv6 testing is going
Hilarious app update description from Aus ‘Pocket Weather’ app: screen cap on Georgia’s tumblr here

Our regular social media dude Warren (@nottheword) dropped by, to reflect a bit on blogging and where it's at right now. He also filled us in on publishing books via facebook and some cool stuff that's going on there.

Festivals, Facebook and Firefox updates

2011-05-26T15:24:00.000+10:00

With Rose, Paul and Mike

Gaming Discussion

Mike Reviews LA Noir
We talk about Portal 2
"Wii 2" news
Flipping R18+ (when will it end?) - also this from New Matilda.
COD:MW3 first look

Interview: Twitterfest and The Emerging Writers festival with Lisa Dempster.

Social Media with Warren Davies and Stanley Johnson

We don our tin foil hats and have a chat about facebook.

Also:

Twitter acquires tweet-deck
Celebrity product-placement tweets - should we put up with them? And do these ads even work?
Facebook quashing activism?

Bitcoin, NBN update, iMacs & Thunderbolts and a software comp to make the world a better place

2011-05-19T12:41:00.000+10:00

With Georgia, Byron, Ryan and Ben

Not into reading? Here's the podcast from the May 18 episode.

Here's what we covered this week

This BitCoin thing looks interesting. We're going to keep our eyes on it.
NBN launches in Armidale with the PM and other dignitaries present. Also, the CEO of NBN Co. has been a bit naughty.
New iMacs on the market from Apple, specs here. We discussed the new features, talking through the further lock-downs in place on replacement hard-drives etc.
Apple and Google are before a US tribunal this week for capturing data quietly. We're interested to see how this plays out. Background here.
Some users of Nintendo 3DS are outraged by the terms of service attached to the device. There's a protest underway: more at http://www.defectivebydesign.org/nintendo3ds

Also, Professor Patrick Griffin from the University of Melbourne's Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S) project was our guest on the show this week. He talked to Byte's Rose Paton about a global crowdsourcing challenge to create a software module for the assessment of collaborative problem solving skills in schools. Keen to win $20,000 prize money? Check out the competition here.

When you can't see technology....

2011-05-12T12:56:00.000+10:00

With Rose and Paul

Newsy stuff:

NBN Interim satellite service
Greenpeace: how dirty is your data report
Google to Unveil Service to Let Users Stream Their Music
Microsoft buy Skype for 8.5 billion

Feature: Technology for the vision impaired with...

Glen Morrow: Glen is a regular tripleR host and works for Vision Australia

Michael Curran: Michael is the founder of Non Visual Desktop Access: an open-source initiative for the visually impaired.

Social Media with Warren Davies and Kate Kendall

Warren talked about social media use amongst visually impaired communities.

Kate had some more general news to talk on including

Zynga and Lady Gaga
Six degrees of separation couch surfing
EA acquisition of local indie Firemint
Instagram Melbourne meetup

Digital Music, Digital Philosophy and Digital Security Breaches

2011-04-27T10:38:00.013+10:00

With Rose Paton, Ed Borland and Ben Finney

News of the week:

Playstation network outage, and the security breach that caused it

Sony wrote an interesting Q&A response
How will this impactthe PS3 v XBOX 360 battle?
One of the first articles this one from Tech Crunch

YouTube has launched a campaign to educate users on copyright infringement. It's pretty Naff!
CFO Patrick Pichette was asked about the importance of Chrome on the company’s earnings conference call and his answer bonks was a little alarming, and a little against their "do no evil" mantra.
Last week, the freshly appointed U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell gave copyright holders carte blanche to continue their profitable settlement schemes.

Interview: Frank Rodi from APRA | AMCOS on the state of the digital music industry

Rose had an extensive chat with Frank about all things digital music... From the dominance of iTunes, to combating piracy, to the changing role of record companies.

Warren Davies: Social Media

We talked extensively, and with differing opinions, about this:

Portal 2, iphonography and Byron's Faceb0rk defection

2011-04-21T10:20:00.000+10:00

...with Georgia, Paul and Byron

This week's podcast is up - wrap your ears around this.

The show's main feature this week was Byron's "Why I've Abandoned Facebook" discussion. We talked through the various trade-offs that users have to deal with when signing up for Facebook's service. Byron has decided that the cons outweigh the pros - what do you think? Feel free to drop us a line, as always: byteintoit (at) rrr.org.au

We also talked about:
- iPhone 4's imminent take-over as the #1 Flickr device

- Apple has changed its ranking system for their App Store, to stop paid reviews and downloads rorting the system - more here from Ars Tecnica

-Meanwhile, Melbourne-made Skitch has been tearing up the Mac App store (without paying people to rate it up, we presume) - link

- Paul talked us through the Portal 2 release early after an ARG (more on there over at Wired); though there are a few disgruntled gamers - link

- Train Conductor was free on iPhone today - cute game, made in Oz

- Raskulls - Georgia talked us through this platformer, which has a lot of the hallmarks of Super Mario World (and in multi-player mode rivals Mario Kart for super funness).

- Byron's been playing Sword and Sworcery on the iPad - he reckons it's a beautiful little game.

- Established print journalist Jim Schembri's internet faux pas this week - Crikey talks about it here. We just feel a bit sorry for him, poor dear.

operating lists, learning online and socially media

2011-04-13T18:45:00.002+10:00

... with Mike, Rose and Ed

The podcast of the April 13 show is here.

General Tech News

NBN announceds isps for mainland australia
Dell and their data breach
New Final Cut pro - where are they heading with this?
Cisco to stop making Flip cameras
Nintendo combats slowings sales of the Wii with mega price cut
Gears of war 3 multiplayer beta

We had a couple of guests:

The List Operators - Melbourne International Comedy festival
Leni Mayo - Director of Site Point, talking about Learnable.com

Social media chat with Warren and Caz.

Google Goggles and seeing the world without eyes.
Social Television, Twelevision for Australia
Gen Y and their connection obsession.
Facebooks move into Chi

more on radiohead; music and social media

2011-04-04T22:04:00.000+10:00

Some more info on our discussion on social media...

Radiohead's newspaper project

Oasis take it to the streets in 2009

The (amazing) Johnny Cash Project (started last year):

Play Live With Iggy Pop campaign (2010)

Color, the new photo sharing application

Cloud Girlfriend as explained by PC Mag.

open sourced stuff, v21 and radiohead

2011-03-30T21:54:00.003+11:00

...with Rose, Byron and Ben Finney

General news:

ipad 2 release in Australia
NBN

bill passes in the Senate. What does this change?
NBN marketing fail. Shouldn’t this be an easy sell?
The Labor governments mixed messages

The Freedom Box Foundation

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net
Eben Moglen Is Reshaping Internet With a Freedom Box
Freedom Box Foundation

R18+ Video game rating federal review

Warren Davies and Kate Kendal for Social Media (see separate post)

Interview: Brad Giblin from the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AIMIA). They're organising the V21 conference, happening in Melb on 12th April.

Other News

Mozilla Launches Firefox 4

LibreOffice 3.3.2 continues improving, with €100 000 community funding
Free Software Awards 2010 announced: Gnash, Tor projects
GNU Telephony project … announces new GNU Free Call … which receives community award of NKR 100 000 (~ AUD$17 000)
Google Holds Honeycomb Tight

SXSW, UI, and other important acronyms

2011-03-24T11:23:00.000+11:00

On this week's show with Georgia, Keren and Byte n00b Kent Humphries (we reckon he did ok!) we discussed the following bits and pieces...

- Could Australia’s NBN be blacked out like Egypt and Libya? Unlikely, says the Internet Society of Australia

- iPad 2 out soon in Australia (Apple confirms availability in spite of US shortages), and ViewPad10 Android tablet in-stores in Harvey Norman in Oz

- Amazon launches its ‘Amazon Appstore for Android’ (US only). Apple sues them for using ‘app store’ trademark

- Firefox 4 Released - even more tab manipulations (video overview) with panorama, app tabs! Using download statistics tool we watched it click over 5,000,000 downloads during the show

- Vimeo launched the Vimeo Video School recently, adding an education/training service to its platform. It’s been up for 2-3 months, so it’s now got a bit of momentum and some great tutorials and almost 1000 user-contributed tutorial videos

- Twitter turned five this week. Gizmodo says: Twitter, you are incredible and horrendous

- Facebook is booting 20,000 under-age users OFF every day

- Homophobic Exodus International iPhone app has been removed from the App Store

Check out the podcast for the full experience, including Keren's report on SXSW and a chat with Guy Walshe, a local user interface designer working on awesome games in Melbourne.

As always, we welcome your emails to byteintoit (at) rrr.org.au - get in touch anytime.

On this week's show...

2011-03-18T11:03:00.001+11:00

...with Rose, Georgia and Paul

General News

Townsville deemed a ‘smarter city’ and wins $400k grant
"Linked in Today" launched
ipad 2

sales - pretty hefty.
3rd party covers already out and about
ipad2 sells in Hong Kong for $1000

Internet Explorer 9 launched on Monday, Microsoft says it’s better. Microsoft has also said bye bye to the Zune, says the rumour mill.
Facebook party hoax has lead to arrest of NSW teen.
Zynga games (farmville) raises cash for Tsunami & US Military switches off YouTube etc to conserve bandwidth for relief effort.
E-book loan times reduced from libraries in the US

Interview

Dr Steffen P Walz Director, GEElab (Games & Experimental Entertainment Laboratory)
RMIT University

The GEElab will invent new game and entertainment visions, products, services, narratives and business models, whilst critically reflecting the role of games and entertainment in culture and how play, games, and game mechanics can be used to innovate.

At the GEElab, games will be understood as a cross-disciplinary function as well as the engine of entertainment media and Internet innovation. Practice oriented game and entertainment media research will be carried out by the way of cross-medial experimentation and an understanding of science as fiction, and not being afraid to think and design differently and speculatively. GEElab members will investigate how to “gamify“ traditionally non-linear media such as TV, film, radio, developing design strategies, narratives and service prototypes.

The Cyborgs:

Warren Davies and Kate Kendall

Crowd-sourcing ad content as shown by Poptent.net Should we participate or is it just unpaid work? Poptent
Path verse Instagram? The case for and against mobile photo sharing.
Twitter has just told its third party client devs they’re no longer needed.

Light News

.com.au reaches 2 million
pwn to own results
Pokemon black and white
Early in week the Mortal Kombat RC on appeal, but today permanently refused. Government ‘threatened’ to shake-up classifications system.
PEGI respond to misleading We Dare advertising in Europe
angry birds doin pretty well for itself!

On this week's show - March 9, 2011

2011-03-10T12:13:00.000+11:00

With Georgia, Mike and Jay

The podcast is up here if you'd like to listen back.

During this week's show, we talked about this stuff:

Skype's new video conferencing service
Quanp for sending big files
Adobe releases Flash to HTML5 converter, codenamed Wallaby
1000 Charlie Sheen related domain names registered
iPad 2 - hits, misses and the Australian pricing that we should expect
iOS 4.3
Game Developers Conference in the US (Mike recommends the wrap-up at Gamasutra)

The twitter iphone app update and the “quickbar uprising”

The Million Song Dataset which just been released

2011-03-04T10:35:00.000+11:00

Here are some links from the social media segment. There are lots of interesting ideas going on here. Let us know what you think!

Are we all Cyborgs?

Technology is evolving us, says Amber Case, as we become a screen-staring, button-clicking new version of homo sapiens. We now rely on "external brains" (cell phones and computers) to communicate, remember, even live out secondary lives. But will these machines ultimately connect or conquer us? Case offers surprising insight into our cyborg selves.

Social media and Slacktivism.

Matthew Ingram

As Facebook and Twitter have come to play a larger role in getting the word out about issues such as unrest in Egypt, much of what is done using these social tools — particularly by younger users — has been criticized as “slacktivism.” In other words, it is seen as just empty gestures such as changing an avatar or posting a status update, rather than real activism around social issues. But a new study from the University of California has found that younger Internet users become more socially engaged in the real world, not just online

Egypt and the utilization of social media

Sam Taute

Here are some of their thoughts on what makes social media such a powerful, unpredictable force in global politics:

It replaces the need for a charismatic leader. A cause no longer needs a champion to attract followers. Certainly, there were a number of noble and courageous protesters (and some not so noble, unfortunately), but there was no single face attached to this revolution. Social media has created the possibility of what Ben Scott calls an “aggregate leader,” where the responsibility of advancing a movement can be dispersed.

The cyborg nature of videogaming.

Jim Rossignol:

Videogames are the reason I could be considered a cyborg. Not in the sense that I have had parts of my physical body taken over by electronic or mechanical systems, but in the sense that I often have had my imagination taken over by electronic and mechanical systems. Gaming, particularly electronic gaming, often imbues me with some of the most essential properties of a cyborg.

2011-03-02T22:14:00.000+11:00

With Rose, Andrew, Georgia and Paul

General News:

R18+ issue highlighted with Mortal Kombat and Wii Dare
Linked-In blocked in China
Myer opens china based store.
3DS launched in Japan. Sells lots.
Playstation home revamp announced

Legal discussion:

iinet wins legal appeal (Andrew)
wikileaks appeal extradition

Are we Cyborgs? Social Media discussion with Ryan Egan and Warren Davies

Gaming and Lighter news

google, twitter and grammar
Disney acquires social media for kids site
sex.com the most expensive domain name on record
stalk your crushes on facebook
china vs google: china pull out of race and launch own search engine
Steve Jobs denied knighthood

2011-02-23T21:21:00.000+11:00

With Byron and Rose

General News:

NBN news:

labor shortage could delay roll out
Brisbane scrapped talks with UK contract company i3 to roll out fibre in Sewer system
nbn recieves support from Google chair Eric Schmidt

Ninentendo announces $40 games with 3ds release
Sony music unlimited has a $12.99 price tag and they’re not going to pull out of itunes
Web-communication proves vital in yet another disaster: christchurch earthquake
Sydney public transport WIFI

Interview:

Nick, John and Andy from Bluetongue entertainment about deBlob2.

2011-02-16T09:36:00.001+11:00

With Mike, Keren and Rose

General News:

Telstra; their 4g announcement; and its effect on the NBN debate
apple unveils subscriptions for ios app store
sony pulling music from itunes?
iphone nano rumours prolific this week
nokia teaming up with microsoft

Interview: Heather Murphy from Nintendo. 3DS Launch

Keren Open Source News

Games and Light News

duke nucome forever
Rose has been playing double fines new game: stacking

2011-02-09T09:47:00.003+11:00

With Georgia, Rose and Paul

General Tech News:

Australian Family Lobby in support of R18+ games rating
Yesterday was Safer Internet Day: “It’s more than a game, it’s your life”
Egypt forcing Vodaphone to send out propaganda texts
Chrome intending to prove they’re again invincible against hackers
FBI vs Anonymous heats up
Facebook privacy (again) Date site imports 250k photos without permission
shareholders pressuring apple to release their “shareholder plan”
Wikileaks alternative Openleaks goes live

Discussion:

Digital Newspapers

AOL buy the Huffington post for $315 million
Study finds crowdsourced articles are better than single-author efforts
News Ltd launch the Daily
New Look, same old Age

Other News

Frank Gibeau from EA Games said in an interview this week “single player is dead”
Wikileaks nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize
Latest stats: mobile phone subscriptions: 5 bil, internet use 2 bil, land line phones; 1.2 bil
Googleganger is the word of the year
Call of Duty Spoof nets 1.25 million dowloads
Tech Etymology: how to pronounce GIF
Why old (paper) books smell good. A challenge for ebooks to replicate that smell?
ps2 keeps on selling
catholic church approves confession app

2011-01-19T22:03:00.003+11:00

Queensland floods still utilizng tech

facebook and twitter coordinate disaster relief centres
telcos battle to maintain services in qld
hunt for missing persons goes online
retro gamers collection among the wreckage

steve jobs takes leave of absence from apple and shareprice falls
social network wins golden globes
after rumours to the contrary; the pentagon won’t ban social media for troups
many rumous fleeting about regarding specs for iphone 5 and ipad 2
vodaphone workers feel the brunt of their falling popularity.
meanwhile; LG underwhelmed by windows ph 7 performance
beatles doing well on itunes
cheezburger (meme website) raises lots of money

2011-01-12T22:17:00.000+11:00

Emergency Floods and Use of Tech

vodaphone in brisbane goes ‘underwater’
ISPs update - most operating as at midday Wednesday

skype news (acquiring qik, moves into loungeroom)
vodaphone security breach and lawsuit (vodafail)
not for australia; but worth mentioning: verizon and iphone
OMG playstation phone rumor looking like reality
bump raised $16 million
december sales stats finalized - xbox outsells ps3 2 to 1
Myspace slashes staff worldwide

MSE 2.0 arrives with heuristic scanning, network traffic inspection

2010-12-22T17:56:00.001+11:00

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/12/mse-20-arrives-with-heuristic-scanning-network-traffic-inspection.ars

Wave Technology Lives On In Google's New Shared Spaces

2010-12-22T17:55:00.001+11:00

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wave_technology_lives_on_in_googles_new_shared_spa.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29

Steve Wozniak to the FCC: Keep the Internet Free - Steve Wozniak - Technology - The Atlantic

2010-12-22T17:40:00.001+11:00

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/steve-wozniak-to-the-fcc-keep-the-internet-free/68294/#disqus_thread

Password Doesn't Shear Firesheep

2010-12-22T00:46:00.001+11:00

Published on Boing Boing | shared via feedly

Firesheep sniffs unsecured connections with major Web sites over local networks and lets a user with the Firefox plug-in installed sidejack those sessions. A trope has spread that the way to solve this problem is to password protect open Wi-Fi networks, such as those run by AT&T at Starbucks and McDonald's. The technical argument is that on a WPA/WPA2 (Wi-Fi Protected Access) network in which a common shared password is used, the access point nonetheless generates a unique key for each client when it connects. You can't just know the network password and decode all the traffic, as with the broken WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) encryption that first shipped with 802.11b back in the late 1990s.

Steve Gibson, a veteran computer-security writer and developer, suggested this the moment Firesheep was announced. A blog post at security consultant Sophos makes the same suggestion. But it won't work for long.

Gibson notes the key problem to this approach in the comments to his post: every user with the shared key can sniff the transaction in which another client is assigned its unique key, and duplicate it. Further, if you join a network with many clients already connected, you can use the aircrack-ng suite to force a deauthentication. That doesn't drop a client off the network; rather, it forces its Wi-Fi drivers to perform a new handshake in which all the details are exposed to derive the key.

Thus, you could defeat Firesheep today by assigning a shared key to a Wi-Fi network until the point at which some clever person simply grafts aircrack-ng into Firesheep to create an automated way to deauth clients, snatch their keys, and then perform the normal sheepshearing operations to grab tokens. I would suspect this might be dubbed Firecracker

The way around this is to use 802.1X, port-based access control, which uses a complicated system of allowing a client to connect to a network through a single port with just enough access to provide credentials. The Wi-Fi flavor of choice is WPA/WPA2 Enterprise, and the secured method of choice is PEAP. Even if every 802.1X user logs in using PEAP with the same user name and password, the keying process is protected from other users and outside crackers. Update: Reader Elmae suggests "Little Bo PEAP" instead of Firecracker.

Even though 802.1X is built into Mac OS X since about 2004, Windows starting in XP SP2, and available at no cost for GNU/Linux, BSD, Unix, and other variants (as well as for older Mac/Win flavors), it's got just enough overhead that hotspots haven't wanted to use it.

While hotspots aren't liable for people sidejacking with Firesheep or simply sucking down and analyze traffic on their networks (disclosure: IANAL), 802.1X is cheap and easy to implement when there's a single user account and password. It's possible we'll see some uptake. The long-term solution is for all Web sites that handle any data to encrypt the entirety of all user sessions.

Update: Commenter foobar pokes a hole, pun intended, in my suggestion for using 802.1X with a single user name/password: Hole196. This vulnerability, documented by AirTight, afflicts 802.1X networks. It allows a malicious party to spoof the access point for sending broadcast messages, and allows ARP and DNS poisoning. Thus Firecracker could become fARPcracker, and, once again, Firesheep emerges victorious. (I wrote about Hole196 for Ars Technica; it's not that big a deal for the enterprise, but it's perfectly easy to use in a hotspot.) Thus, sites securing all their connections with SSL/TLS becomes the only practical method to ensure privacy and prevent sidejacking.

Photo by Magic Foundry, used via Creative Commons.

FBI accused of planting backdoor in OpenBSD IPSEC stack

2010-12-22T00:45:00.001+11:00

Published on Ars Technica - Law & Disorder | shared via feedly

In an e-mail sent to BSD project leader Theo de Raadt, former NETSEC CTO Gregory Perry has claimed that NETSEC developers helped the FBI plant "a number of backdoors" in the OpenBSD cryptographic framework approximately a decade ago.

Perry says that his nondisclosure agreement with the FBI has expired, allowing him to finally bring the issue to the attention of OpenBSD developers. Perry also suggests that knowledge of the FBI's backdoors played a role in DARPA's decision to withdraw millions of dollars of grant funding from OpenBSD in 2003.

Read the comments on this post

DDoS versus human rights organizations

2010-12-22T00:42:00.001+11:00

Published on Boing Boing | shared via feedly

Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet Law and Society has released a new report on the use of Distributed Denial of Service attacks by censors and oppressive governments against human rights organizations. It's pretty grim.

Our research suggests that:
• DDoS attacks against independent media and human rights sites have been common in the past year, even outside of elections, protests, and military operations. With recent highly publicized DDoS attacks on Wikileaks, and "Operation Payback" attacks by "Anonymous" on sites perceived to oppose Wikileaks, we expect these attacks to become more common.
• Independent media and human rights sites suffer from a variety of different types of cyber attacks, including filtering, intrusions, and defacements in addition to DDoS attacks, and those attacks interact with each other in complex ways.
• Independent media and human rights sites suffer from both application DDoS attacks, which exhaust local server resources and can usually be mitigated by a skilled system administrator; and network DDoS attacks, which exhaust network bandwidth and can usually only be mitigated with the help of a hosting provider at considerable expense.
• Mitigating DDoS attacks against independent media and human rights sites will likely require moving those sites closer to the core of the Internet: inside the small number of major ISPs, websites, and content distribution networks* (CDNs) that have the experience and resources to defend against these attacks, particularly network DDoS attack

2010 Report on Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks

Facebook vs. Twitter: An Infographic

2010-12-22T00:36:00.001+11:00

Published on GigaOM | shared via feedly

How does Twitter stack up against Facebook when it comes to demographics and online activity? Digital Surgeons, an online marketing agency, has put together an infographic comparing the Facebook population to the Twitter population, and it shows that while the two are similar in many respects in terms of age, income and so on, there are also some crucial differences of interest to marketers and others looking to mine the data and pick a favorite platform. Among the biggest differences are that Twitter users seem to be more active, but less interested in following brands.

Here are a few of the key findings represented in the infographic, which was based on data from a Barracuda Networks survey as well as an analysis from Razorfish and other demographic breakdowns from a number of sources (although the data on Twitter in particular is a little old — the service now has 190 million users).

88 percent of people are aware of Facebook, while 87 percent are aware of Twitter
12 percent of Facebook users update their status every day vs. 52 percent for Twitter
males make up 46 percent of Facebook users, and 48 percent of Twitter
30 percent access Facebook via mobile vs. 37 percent for Twitter
40 percent follow a brand on Facebook vs. 25 percent on Twitter
70 percent of Facebook users are outside the U.S. vs. 60 percent for Twitter

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req'd):

Gmail Users to Get Free Phone Calls Through 2011

2010-12-22T00:19:00.001+11:00

Published on Mashable! | shared via feedly

Google has announced that Gmail users will be able to make free phone calls to the U.S. and Canada through 2011. When calling was added to Gmail back in August, the company said that it'd be making such calls free "for at least the rest of the year," with per minute rates starting at $0.02 per minute for international dialing.

The service made a major splash initially, with 1 million calls placed in the first 24 hours and pundits predictably calling the service a potential Skype killer. That said, we haven't heard many updates about the traction the service is getting since then, though free calling for all of 2011 certainly stands to lure more users.

We've reached out to Google for some updated numbers and will post here if we hear back. In the meantime, let us know in the comments if you're making phone calls from Gmail.

Reviews: Google, Skype, gmail

More About: gmail, Google, Google Voice, voip

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Stuxnet: It's the real thing, baby | The Best Defense

2010-12-22T00:08:00.001+11:00

http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/12/07/stuxnet_its_the_real_thing_baby

MPAA: ACTA's censoring firewalls will help governments avoid Wikileaks embarrassments - Boing Boing

2010-12-07T18:54:00.001+11:00

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/09/21/mpaa-actas-censoring.html

Wikileaks and the Long Haul

2010-12-07T10:06:00.001+11:00

Published on Clay Shirky | shared via feedly

Like a lot of people, I am conflicted about Wikileaks.

Citizens of a functioning democracy must be able to know what the state is saying and doing in our name, to engage in what Pierre Rosanvallon calls "counter-democracy"*, the democracy of citizens distrusting rather than legitimizing the actions of the state. Wikileaks plainly improves those abilities.

On the other hand, human systems can't stand pure transparency. For negotiation to work, people's stated positions have to change, but change is seen, almost universally, as weakness. People trying to come to consensus must be able to privately voice opinions they would publicly abjure, and may later abandon. Wikileaks plainly damages those abilities. (If Aaron Bady's analysis is correct, it is the damage and not the oversight that Wikileaks is designed to create.*)

And so we have a tension between two requirements for democratic statecraft, one that can't be resolved, but can be brought to an acceptable equilibrium. Indeed, like the virtues of equality vs. liberty, or popular will vs. fundamental rights, it has to be brought into such an equilibrium for democratic statecraft not to be wrecked either by too much secrecy or too much transparency.

As Tom Slee puts it, "Your answer to 'what data should the government make public?' depends not so much on what you think about data, but what you think about the government."* My personal view is that there is too much secrecy in the current system, and that a corrective towards transparency is a good idea. I don't, however, believe in total transparency, and even more importantly, I don't think that independent actors who are subject to no checks or balances is a good idea in the long haul.

If the long haul were all there was, Wikileaks would be an obviously bad thing. The practical history of politics, however, suggests that the periodic appearance of such unconstrained actors in the short haul is essential to increased democratization, not just of politics but of thought.

We celebrate the printers of 16th century Amsterdam for making it impossible for the Catholic Church to constrain the output of the printing press to Church-approved books*, a challenge that helped usher in, among other things, the decentralization of scientific inquiry and the spread of politically seditious writings advocating democracy.

This intellectual and political victory didn't, however, mean that the printing press was then free of all constraints. Over time, a set of legal limitations around printing rose up, including restrictions on libel, the publication of trade secrets, and sedition. I don't agree with all of these laws, but they were at least produced by some legal process.

Unlike the United States' current pursuit of Wikileaks.

I am conflicted about the right balance between the visibility required for counter-democracy and the need for private speech among international actors. Here's what I'm not conflicted about: When authorities can't get what they want by working within the law, the right answer is not to work outside the law. The right answer is that they can't get what they want.

The Unites States is — or should be — subject to the rule of law, which makes the extra-judicial pursuit of Wikileaks especially nauseating. (Calls for Julian's assassination are even more nauseating.) It may be that what Julian has done is a crime. (I know him casually, but not well enough to vouch for his motivations, nor am I a lawyer.) In that case, the right answer is to bring the case to a trial.

IIn the US, however, the government has a "heavy burden" for engaging in prior restraint of even secret documents, an established principle since New York Times Co. vs. The United States*, when the Times published the Pentagon Papers. If we want a different answer for Wikileaks, we need a different legal framework first.

Though I don't like Senator Joseph Lieberman's proposed SHIELD law (Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination*), I do like the fact that it is a law, and not an extra-legal avenue (of which Senator Lieberman is also guilty.*) I also like the fact that the SHIELD Law makes it clear what's at stake: the law proposes new restraints on publishers, and would apply to the New York Times and The Guardian as it well as to Wikileaks. (As Matthew Ingram points out, "Like it or not, Wikileaks is a media entity."*) SHIELD amounts to an attempt to reverse parts of New York Times Co. vs. The United States.

I don't think such a law should pass. I think the current laws, which criminalize the leaking of secrets but not the publishing of leaks, strike the right balance. However, as a citizen of a democracy, I'm willing to be voted down, and I'm willing to see other democratically proposed restrictions on Wikileaks put in place. It may even be that whatever checks and balances do get put in place by the democratic process make anything like Wikileaks impossible to sustain in the future.

The key, though, is that democracies have a process for creating such restrictions, and as a citizen it sickens me to see the US trying to take shortcuts. The leaders of Myanmar and Belarus, or Thailand and Russia, can now rightly say to us "You went after Wikileaks' domain name, their hosting provider, and even denied your citizens the ability to register protest through donations, all without a warrant and all targeting overseas entities, simply because you decided you don't like the site. If that's the way governments get to behave, we can live with that."

Over the long haul, we will need new checks and balances for newly increased transparency — Wikileaks shouldn't be able to operate as a law unto itself anymore than the US should be able to. In the short haul, though, Wikileaks is our Amsterdam. Whatever restrictions we eventually end up enacting, we need to keep Wikileaks alive today, while we work through the process democracies always go through to react to change. If it's OK for a democracy to just decide to run someone off the internet for doing something they wouldn't prosecute a newspaper for doing, the idea of an internet that further democratizes the public sphere will have taken a mortal blow.

Google launches eBookstore with choice of sellers and devices

2010-12-07T10:03:00.001+11:00

Published on Ars Technica - Front page content | shared via feedly

We expected Google to launch its upcoming e-book store before the end of the year, and the company announced Monday that the new Google eBookstore is now open for business in the US. Google is touting the "open" nature of its e-books by making them accessible to the widest array of popular e-reader devices, including the iPad, Nook, and Sony Reader.

Google's new eBookstore works a little differently than other stores—at least when it comes to reading via computer. All purchased titles are kept in Google's cloud-based storage and accessed via a browser. When reading via an iOS or Android-based device, a dedicated app can download and cache titles for reading offline. And for devices compatible with Adobe's DRM-protected e-book formats—including Sony Reader and Barnes & Noble Nook—PDF or EPUB files can be downloaded and transferred to your device using Adobe Editions software.

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Gingerbread Released, Here's What's New

2010-12-07T10:01:00.001+11:00

Published on ReadWriteWeb | shared via feedly

Today Google launched its newest flagship phone, the Nexus S, and with it, the next version of the Android operating system, code-named Gingerbread (Android 2.3). The new platform introduces a number of new features for end users and developers alike, most notably several user interface changes including a new keyboard and text selection tool, support for NFC technology, better power management, Internet (VoIP/SIP calling, better copy and paste, gyroscope support and more.

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For Users

The new features for users in Gingerbread are detailed here on the Android Developers website. To summarize, those are as follows:

UI Refinements: the new UI has been redesigned to be easier, faster and more power-efficient. The theme's background has been changed to black in areas like the notification bar, menus and other parts of the UI. Changes in menus and settings have also been introduced for simplified use and navigation.
New Keyboard: The keyboard has been updated for faster input and editing. The keys have been reshaped so presses are more accurate, and an idea stolen from add-in applications like SwiftKey, the new keyboard now displays word suggestions based on what you're typing. You can switch to voice mode from the keyboard to replace selections, too. Multi-touch key-chording lets you enter numbers and symbols with keyboard shortcut combos, instead of having to change to the numeric keyboard mode.
Word Selection Improved: Now you can select a word via press-hold, a similar gesture to what's used on iPhone for the same task. On Gingerbread, this takes you to a free-selection mode where you can adjust the area needed to select by dragging two bounding areas together.
Copy/Paste Improved: The press-hold gesture mentioned above also starts the copy/paste process. After selecting content, press anywhere in the selection mode to copy the text.
Improved Power Management: Android now is more active in managing apps that keep the device awake, even going so far as to close apps when appropriate. In the Application Settings, users can now see how the battery is being used by various apps.
Application Control: A shortcut to Manage Applications is now in the Options menu from the Home Screen. A new Running tab displays a list of active apps and the storage/memory being used. From here, apps can be stopped, ending the need for add-on "task killer" type applications to do this.
Internet Calling: Internet Calling (SIP) addresses can be added to Contacts and calls can be placed from the Quick Contact or Dialer. A SIP account is needed for this feature to work. This feature will be available depending on manufacturer and carrier support.
NFC: Near-field communications support is now included in the OS. With NFC, you can "touch" or "swipe" an NFC tag embedded in a poster, sticker, ad, or anywhere else and then be directed to a website associated with the URL included in the tag's data. NFC support will be determined by the phone's hardware.
Downloads Management: Downloads can now be access and manager from the browser, email or within an app. A new Download Manager is introduced for this.
Camera: The camera app now provides access to multiple cameras on the device, if the phone includes more than one (such as a front-facing camera, for example).

What's New For Developers: See Next Page

Gingerbread For Developers

Developers need to be aware of the following features:

Concurrent garbage collector: The Dalivik VM introduces a new, concurrent garbage collector that minimizes application pauses, helping to ensure smoother animation and increased responsiveness in games and similar applications.
Faster event distribution: The plaform now handles touch and keyboard events faster and more efficiently, minimizing CPU utilization during event distribution. The changes improve responsiveness for all applications, but especially benefit games that use touch events in combination with 3D graphics or other CPU-intensive operations.
Updated video drivers: The platform uses updated third-party video drivers that improve the efficiency of OpenGL ES operations, for faster overall 3D graphics performance.
Event Handling: Applications that use native code can now receive and process input and sensor events directly in their native code, which dramatically improves efficiency and responsiveness. Native libraries exposed by the platform let applications handle the same types of input events as those available through the framework. Applications can receive events from all supported sensor types and can enable/disable specific sensors and manage event delivery rate and queueing.
New Sensor Types: Android 2.3 adds API support for several new sensor types, including gyroscope, rotation vector, linear acceleration, gravity, and barometer sensors. Applications can use the new sensors in combination with any other sensors available on the device, to track three-dimensional device motion and orientation change with high precision and accuracy. For example, a game application could use readings from a gyroscope and accelerometer on the device to recognize complex user gestures and motions, such as tilt, spin, thrust, and slice.
Open API for Native Audio: The platform provides a software implementation of Khronos OpenSL ES, a standard API that gives applications access to audio controls and effects from native code. Applications can use the API to manage audio devices and control audio input, output, and processing directly from native code
Native graphics management: The platform provides an interface to its Khronos EGL library, which lets applications manage graphics contexts and create and manage OpenGL ES textures and surfaces from native code.
Native access to Activity lifecycle, window management: Native applications can declare a new type of Activity class, NativeActivity whose lifecycle callbacks are implemented directly in native code. The NativeActivity and its underlying native code run in the system just as do other Activities -- they run in the application's system process and execute on the application's main UI thread, and they receive the same lifecycle callbacks as do other Activities. The platform also exposes native APIs for managing windows, including the ability to lock/unlock the pixel buffer to draw directly into it..
Native access to assets, storage: Applications can now access a native Asset Manager API to retrieve application assets directly from native code without needing to go through JNI. If the assets are compressed, the platform does streaming decompression as the application reads the asset data. There is no longer a limit on the size of compressed .apk assets that can be read. Additionally, applications can access a native Storage Manager API to work directly with OBB files downloaded and managed by the system. (Dev tools for creating and managing OBB files will not be available until early 2011.)
Robust native development environment: The Android NDK (r5 or higher) provides a complete set of tools, toolchains, and libraries for developing applications that use the rich native environment offered by the Android 2.3 platform.
Internet telephony: Developers can now add SIP-based internet telephony features to their apps. Android 2.3 includes a full SIP protocol stack and integrated call management services that let applications easily set up outgoing and incoming voice calls, without having to manage sessions, transport-level communication, or audio record or playback directly.
Near Field Communications (NFC): The platform's support for Near Field Communications (NFC) lets developers get started creating a whole new class of applications for Android. Developers can create new applications that offer proximity-based information and services to users, organizations, merchants, and advertisers. Using the NFC API, applications can respond to NFC tags "discovered" as the user "touches" an NFC-enabled device to elements embedded in stickers, smart posters, and even other devices. When a tag of interest is collected, applications can respond to the tag, read messages from it, and then store the messages, prompting the user as needed.
Mixable audio effects: A new audio effects API lets developers easily create rich audio environments by adding equalization, bass boost, headphone virtualization (widened soundstage), and reverb to audio tracks and sounds. Developers can mix multiple audio effects in a local track or apply effects globally, across multiple tracks.
Support for new media formats: The platform now offers built-in support for the VP8 open video compression format and the WebM open container format. The platform also adds support for AAC encoding and AMR wideband encoding (in software), so that applications can capture higher quality audio than narrowband.
Access to multiple cameras: The Camera API now lets developers access any cameras that are available on a device, including a front-facing camera. Applications can query the platform for the number of cameras on the device and their types and characteristics, then open the camera needed. For example, a video chat application might want to access a front-facing camera that offers lower-resolution, while a photo application might prefer a back-facing camera that offers higher-resolution.

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On the Heels of Recent Domain Seizures, ICANN Insists "We Don't Take Down Websites"

2010-12-07T09:59:00.001+11:00

Published on ReadWriteWeb | shared via feedly

Following the recent government seizure of over 80 websites, there was a certain amount of finger-pointing aimed at ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - the nonprofit organization tasked with managing IP address spaces and managing top-level domains.

ICANN has just issued a statement, saying that it was not responsible for any part of the government actions. "As we have said many times, ICANN was not a party to those actions" by the U.S. Immigation and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), "nor was it a target of them."

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According to Domain Incite, the requests to take down websites went through VeriSign, the company that operates the .com domain.

"ICANN does not take down domain names," the ICANN statement says, "we have no technical or legal authority to do that. We have no involvement in the takedown of any website, which is an issue of national authority. ICANN knew nothing about this enforcement action until after the fact. And with good reason, since we are not a law enforcement entity or an agent of the U.S. or any other government. ICANN is the non-profit coordinator of the Internet's global domain name system and is not involved in website content in any way."

While not an official agency, ICANN was created in part by a mandate from the U.S. government. As a result - and due to questions about transparency and accountability - some have viewed the organization's "neutrality" with skepticism.

ICANN's announcement comes the same day as an Obama Administration has promised more crackdowns on websites that violate copyright laws.

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Google’s Chrome OS: What to Expect at Launch

2010-12-07T09:57:00.001+11:00

Published on GigaOM | shared via feedly

Tomorrow, Google is holding a Chrome event, where it's likely we'll see the official launch of the first Google Chrome OS device, and a supporting web app store. Chrome OS was first introduced as a browser-based platform for netbooks in November of 2009, with a target launch by the end of 2010. The mobile market has changed much since then, but Google seems unwavering in its plans to tackle the computer market with an operating system of its own.

Google isn't blind to the current situation though: it knows that tablets, handsets and smartphones are hotter now than netbooks were when Chrome OS was announced. More than 340 million mobile phones were sold globally in just the third quarter of this year, for example. Compare that to Gartner's recent estimate of 352.4 million computers sold around the globe in all of 2010, and it's not surprising that potential demand for a small Chrome OS computer, or any netbook, for that matter, is lower now than it was a year ago. As a result, I suspect we'll hear that Google has been using Chrome OS devices in-house and that Chrome OS consumer devices may launch early next year from a number of hardware partners. Here's a recap of what to expect from these devices:

A netbook without Windows — You won't find Microsoft Windows on a Chrome OS computer. Instead, it's a Linux kernel under the hood with a customized version of Google's Chrome browser as the entire interface.
Google Apps at the core — Google's web-based applications are prominent throughout, even at the time of sign-in, which requires a Google account. Docs, Calendar, Gmail, Search, Google Talk and more are all integrated into the platform.
Web App Store — Likely to launch with Chrome OS devices is an online store for web apps, so you can add third-party software based on web standards such as HTML5 and JavaScript.
A mobile processor — Just like the majority of netbooks available on the market today, Chrome OS computers can run on Intel's Atom chipset, although they can also run on low-p0wered chips built from the ARM architecture, currently used in many smartphones and tablets.
No hard drive — In lieu of a spinning hard drive, Google is looking to use solid state disks, or flash memory for all local storage, much like Apple's new Mac Book Air. That configuration, combined with a light operating system should allow for Chrome OS to boot in roughly five seconds or less.
Connectivity will be key — While I expect some offline functionality in Chrome OS, the device's primary use case is being connected, most likely to a Wi-Fi network, although support for mobile broadband is a safe bet for future iterations.

Since Google set the stage for Chrome OS more than a year ago, it may actually be more interesting tomorrow to hear about the target audience for the devices. With more alternatives to netbooks today than at this time last year — including a solid smartphone and tablet platform in Android, which just improved with the release of its Gingerbread version today — Chrome OS could be aimed less at consumers (at least initially) and more towards the mobile enterprise.

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Live with the WikiLeakable world or shut down the net. It's your choice | John Naughton | Comment is free | The Guardian

2010-12-07T09:51:00.001+11:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/dec/06/western-democracies-must-live-with-leaks

Ge.tt Is A Real-Time File-Sharing Pipe, No Add-ons Required

2010-11-30T22:45:00.001+11:00

Published on Lifehacker Australia | shared via feedly

Ge.tt is a clever, instant file-sharing webapp that makes sharing files simple and fast. You can share a link to your file(s) immediately, without waiting for the upload to complete, and it doesn't use Flash, Java applets or any other plug-ins. (more…)

Flickr Hack Makes 3D Model of Any City in a Day

2010-11-30T18:21:00.000+11:00

Published on ReadWriteWeb | shared via feedly

Scholars at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have developed a method for creating 3D models of pretty much anything in pretty much no time.

Using a sexy algorithm and the millions of photographs available from Flickr, the team can create a sophisticated three-dimensional model on a single personal computer in under a day.

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The process was created by a team made of specialists from UNC and colleagues at Swiss university, ETH-Zurich, led by Jan-Michael Frahm. Their proof-of-concept was Rome, which was constructed out of 3 million images in under a day using over-the-counter graphics software, according to UNC.

"Our technique would be the equivalent of processing a stack of photos as high as the 828-meter Dubai Towers, using a single PC, versus the next best technique, which is the equivalent of processing a stack of photos 42 meters tall - as high as the ceiling of Notre Dame - using 62 PCs. This efficiency is essential if one is to fully utilize the billions of user-provided images continuously being uploaded to the Internet."

They follow-up Rome with the same process on Berlin.

The implications are interesting. Such a process could be, Frahm said, folded into consumer tools like Google Earth and Bing Maps. It could also help both disaster responders, who need a full picture of where they're headed, and tourists, who want to find out all they can about a location with a click.

Other sources: Futurity

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Flock Social Browser Declares War on RockMelt with Version 3.5

2010-11-30T18:19:00.001+11:00

Published on Mashable! | shared via feedly

Flock, the self-described "social web browser," is responding to the launch of RockMelt with the release of Flock 3.5, which boasts greater speed and added functionality.

The browser touts social integration, primarily through a sidebar that lets users update their Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn statuses. It also has a multitude of link-sharing features, the ability to group friends across multiple services and a "Social Search" feature that displays what a user's friends are saying about a specific query.

The major change from version 3.0 to 3.5 though is that Flock is now based off of Chromium 7, an upgrade from Flock 3.0's Chromium 5 roots. Flock's Mac version is also now based on Chromium; the previous version ran off of Gecko.

In addition to the version 3.5 release, Flock also announced that it now has 9.5 million users based on installs.

Flock vs. RockMelt

Flock, first released in 2005, has been known for its social networking elements. For years, the browser was based off of the Gecko rendering engine, the same one used in Firefox. In June though, the company abandoned Gecko in favor of Google's open source Chromium engine in an attempt to completely reinvent itself.

The social browser space gained renewed attention when RockMelt made its debut earlier this month. Based on the premise that current browsers are designed for an antiquated web and that the modern browser needs to live in the cloud, the Chromium-based browser was able gain a lot of traction for its limited beta launch. It also doesn't hurt that one of its financial backers is Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape.

Flock is clearly aware of the threat that RockMelt poses to its browser and to its business. In fact, it's so acutely aware of RockMelt that it created a 24 point comparison chart where it slams its upstart competitor for being cumbersome and new to the social browser game.

Here are just a few of Flock's counterpoints to RockMelt:

- "We think RockMelt will be difficult for average users to use, given the configuration and clicking required. Three years of user testing and input has told us that they don't want to go to all this work in their social browser and they don't want to open up multiple windows to see what's going on. They want to see what's important to them in a glance."

- "RockMelt's search experience is cumbersome and it doesn't give you all the goodness of Google. RockMelt has added a Firefox era-like features of two search boxes — you put something in search box, a panel pops up that just gives you Google results in a panel without taking you to Google. This introduces a pop up window on top of Google and duplicates functionality already available from Google."

- "Sharing is multi-click and cumbersome. You have to click the Share button — pick what you want from a drop down box. Several clicks are involved — up to three clicks."

Today's release makes it clear that Flock isn't about to roll over and play dead to the competition presented by RockMelt. This is just the opening salvo of the social browser wars.

More About: Browsers, chrome, Chromium, Firefox, flock, RockMelt, Social Browsers

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Forget Net Neutrality, Comcast Might Break the Web

2010-11-30T18:17:00.001+11:00

Published on GigaOM | shared via feedly

The fight that erupted today between Level 3 and Comcast involves an esoteric agreement between two of the Internet's big players providers colliding with a series of equally arcane policy arguments, but at its core this fight is about money. Yet what has begun as commercial dispute may end up fundamentally changing how the web works and who pays for it.

So what's the issue? Level 3 told the world that Comcast had hit it up for more money in order to deliver traffic from Level 3′s customers (such as Netflix) to Comcast's 17 million broadband subscribers. Level 3 said that Comcast's demand for more dough violated the principles of the Open Internet, which is shorthand for network net neutrality. On the other side, Comcast, said Level 3 was trying to sell itself as a CDN while not having to pay fees to Comcast as other CDNs do. In short Level 3 was calling itself a CDN to its customers and a backbone provider to Comcast. This (plus the fact that it owns one of the largest Internet backbones networks) enabled it to undercut its competitors in the CDN business because it didn't have to pay the fees that Akamai or Limelight did to get content onto Comcast's network.

For example, Level 3 even told people back in 2007 that it can deliver CDN services for the same price as Internet access– a feat made possible because it owned its own networks. So when Comcast pointed out that Level 3′s traffic was increasing by more than double to reach a 5:1 ratio when compared to the Comcast traffic sent over Level 3′s network, it was justifying its decision to act, something that is covered in Comcast's peering agreement. (For detailed analysis of Comcast's peering agreement check out this post from Vijay Gill.)

Peering is the face of this issue — the idea that Internet Service Provider A allow traffic from similarly sized and loaded networks to traverse its own at no cost because its traffic gets a pass when it's on networks owned by ISP B or ISP C. However, the soul of this issue is how it exposes how uncompetitive the nation's broadband networks really are. The very threat that Level 3 alleges Comcast made — essentially that Level 3 could accept the proposed fee or Comcast wouldn't deliver Level 3′s content — should lead to concern.

This is a problem the Congress and regulators cannot ignore. Just as in the recent retransmission fights in the pay TV world, these rumblings between giant companies leaves consumers in the lurch, even though they actually have paid for access to the Internet — that is the whole Internet, not one that is approved by Comcast or some other company. The problem of course is lack of competition in the broadband markets.

For the consumers who aren't confused by their inability to access certain content and decide to switch to a provider that is working with Level 3, there aren't a lot of choices. Typically areas have only two ISPs– a cable company and a telco, and many ISPs are now offering service with annual contracts which could lock a consumer in. Plus, what happens if AT&T or Verizon decide to address this imbalance of traffic with Level 3? It is after all not uncommon for there to be an imbalance of traffic given that consumers tend to request data from Level 3 and backbone providers far more often than they upload contant to Level 3′s end customers.

It's not far-fetched, given that by getting Level 3 to pay more for delivering a CDN service that essentially is the same as its interent access, but does send more Level 3-specific traffic onto Comcast's network, Comcast is getting Level 3 to pay for the increase in traffic on its network. One can wonder if Akamai's CDN fees are calculated on the traffic it sends to an ISP or how much space its servers take up in the ISP's data center, but with Level 3 and Comcast there's no need to wonder. It's about the traffic. This idea of content providers paying ISPs to deliver the traffic to consumers, while consumers pay ISPs for access to the pipe isn't a new one.

If that flies, then companies such as Google or Hulu may find themselves paying more for peering. That's great for the ISPs, but again it's not like there are myriad opportunities for a company like Google to exert its market power short of building its own networks. For example if a large content provider wants its services to reach folks in Rochester, New York, it has to work with either Frontier or Time Warner Cable. So while Comcast and Level 3 fight their commercial disagreement over peering in the press and possibly in front of regulators, the real people to suffer will be those who depend on the web. Not because Comcast has decided to call Level 3 on it being a CDN, but because of the lack of real competition in our broadband networks.

Yup, we have a problem!

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Kinect is Selling 2X as Fast as the iPad

2010-11-30T18:14:00.001+11:00

Published on ReadWriteWeb | shared via feedly

The iPad was crowned the fastest-adopted consumer electronic device ever last month, stealing the title from the once-coveted DVD player. Records are made to be broken, though, and the Microsoft Kinect has already come out of the gate twice as fast.

25 days after its launch, Microsoft said today that it has sold 2.5 million motion-detecting Kinect devices. Granted, that includes sales over the Black Friday shopping holiday, but reviews of the device have been positive. Apple took twice as long to sell its 2 millionth iPad. These seem to be the days of the radically new interface.

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Kinect Sales

2.5m in 25 days = 100k per day
$150-$399 each

iPad Sales

2m in 60 days
3m in 80 days
4.5m every 90 days = 50k per day
$500-$830 each

In May of 2010, Apple announced that it sold 2 million iPads after two months of availability. At a base price of $500 each, that meant that Yankee Group analyst Carl Howe's prediction that the iPad would become the fastest consumer product to hit $1 billion in sales in history was proven correct.

ReadWriteWeb's Audrey Watters reported in October that the iPad kept up a torrid pace for months. "The iPad sold 3 million units in the first 80 days after its release in April, and its current sales rate is about 4.5 million units per quarter," she wrote. That pace of sales, according to analysts at Bernstein Research, made it the fastest growing consumer electronics device of all time.

Now this. The Kinect sells for substantially less than the iPad ($150-$399 at Best Buy vs. $500-$830 for the iPad) but more have been sold in the product's first 25 days than were sold in the first 60 days after the iPad launched.

Can the Kinect sustain that rate of sales? Only time will tell, but early adopters appear likely to spread positive word of mouth about the product - as will Microsoft's massive advertising machine. For context (and to put a grain of salt in play here), the Wii has sold 75 million units in 4 years. That's a little bit more than 50k per day, on average.

For now the Kinect is focused on game play, but some people believe it's only a matter of time until it becomes the interface for many other tasks, from browsing the web to controlling various devices around the home. If Microsoft learns as well from the nascent Kinect jailbreaking community as Apple has from the iPhone jailbreakers, the Kinect could soon gain official support for all kinds of different uses.

Above: The MIT Media Lab hacks the Kinect to browse the web with it.

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Apple Bans Android Magazine App From App Store

2010-11-30T18:12:00.001+11:00

Published on Slashdot | shared via feedly

recoiledsnake writes "Apple dialed its battle with Android up a notch today by banning an Android magazine app from its App Store, leaving no way for users to install the app on iPads, iPhones and iPod Touches without jailbreaking. The reason for rejection, as given by an Apple rep, was: 'You know... your magazine...It's just about Android.... we can't have that in our App Store.' The bi-monthly publication — the Android counterpart to an iPhone magazine Dixon began putting out earlier this year — launched Nov. 11. 'It's funny really because I don't think we would sell many magazines on Android through Apple App Store,' Dixon told Media Watch. 'But the question is where this is going.' This comes on the heels of Jobs lashing out at Android, calling it fragmented, and its patent attacks on Android."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How To Turn Google Translate Into Google Beatbox

2010-11-30T18:10:00.001+11:00

Published on TechCrunch | shared via feedly

For reasons inexplicable, a "Today I Learned" thread on Reddit has turned into a treatise on how to make Google Translate beatbox for you, among other things. It must have taken some intense experimentation for Redditor Harrichr to get here but he somehow stumbled upon the following combination of steps.

1) Go to Google Translate
2) Set the translator to translate German to German
3) Copy + paste the following into the translate box: pv zk pv pv zk pv zk kz zk pv pv pv zk pv zk zk pzk pzk pvzkpkzvpvzk kkkkkk bsch
4) Click "listen"
5) Be amazed :)

Since the original post both the thread and meme have expanded into slight tweaks and variations, including Technocopter, Helicopter and Dubstep. YCombinator user iamdave actually posted a guide to making your own beats:

zk = suspended cymbal
bschk = snare
pv = brush
bk = bass
tk = flam1
vk = roll tap
kt = flam2
kttp = flam tap
krp = hi hat tap
pv = short roll
th = better hi hat
thp, ds = instant rimshot.

While I'm not 100% sure how exactly this is working, it seems like a peculiarity of the German translation setup in Google Translate is allowing for playing consonants in a way that sounds like drums. Or, more specifically, a delightful way that sounds like drums.

Image: Datz.ro

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Apple accused of iPhone ban on 'all single-station radio apps' • The Register

2010-11-30T18:01:00.001+11:00

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/24/apple_rejects_single_station_iphone_radio_apps/

HTTPS Everywhere Updates with More Protection Against Firesheep

2010-11-29T23:31:00.001+11:00

Published on Lifehacker: Firefox | shared via feedly

Firefox: To better protect users from falling victim to Firesheep, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has released an updated version of their previously mentioned Firefox extension HTTPS Everywhere. The extension now provides added HTTPS protection by default when you browse Bit.ly, Cisco, Dropbox, Evernote, and GitHub (in addition to all the services it was already redirecting). [HTTPS Everywhere via EFF] More »

Firesheep, enterprise software and other broken models

2010-11-29T23:29:00.001+11:00

Published on Epeus' epigone | shared via feedly

There has been a lot of fuss about FireSheep, a browser plugin that show how easy it is to intercept packets on the internet, and masquerade as someone else. The idea is nothing new: EtherPeg—which intercepts wifi traffic and shows the JPEGs and other images passing by—is over 10 years old. Annalee Newitz wrote a Wired story on people packet sniffing in coffee shops back in 2004.

The underlying design of the internet means that you don't know who will be able to see any packets you send. If you care about not being snooped on, you need an encrypted connection from your computer to the one serving you at the other end. The best way to do this on the web is to use HTTPS, which all browsers support, and most servers support with configuration changes. It's not perfect, but it's good enough.

However, much of the advice following on from FireSheep was misleading or outright wrong. I saw several articles saying:

Avoid Open WiFi
Turn on WPA encryption
Use a VPN to tunnel the traffic into a server elsewhere

These techniques may protect for a while against those nearby you in the Café, but by not securing the whole connection, they just change who is able to intercept your communications.

The security model here is the firewall one - the notion that there are trusted networks and untrusted networks, and as long as you're inside a trusted one, you'll be OK. This is an obsolete worldview. When computers were large fixed physical entities with software controlled by a specialist, and networks were wires under their control too, this had some correspondence with reality, but it was always tenuous - others within the firewall could be running compromised machines; outbound connections could still leak data.

If you VPN into a company or service to mask your outbound connections, that endpoint is an attractive point of attack, as it has collected a set of people who think their data needs securing. There's a clear example of this in this NYT article about a hacker who lured his friends to use an FBI VPN to track them down and arrest them.

This worldview connects with two other themes. The US Government is trying to pass a law requiring ISPs to enable your communications to be intercepted. The UK government is also working on legislation on retaining all email and web traffic. Similarly, many companies monitor internet traffic within and leaving their secure networks for legal compliance and employee monitoring. Such mandated backdoors, like the VPN tunnel, become attractive targets for other bad actors - remember the Greek government being spied on through a legally mandated interception backdoor in the phones they used?

This week, I spent a couple of days at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, hearing how open standards like Activity Streams and OpenSocial are being used to bridge separate business information systems both within and between companies, with OAuth used to enforce corporate policy.

This seems anathema to old-line IT managers who assume that they dictate who gets to see what, but the pragmatic realisation that many business people have more powerful and connected computing devices in their pockets as phones than on their desks from corporate IT was in evidence at E2.0 at least.

This brought to mind the great conversation we had with Josh Klein on TummelVision last week, discussing his book Hacking Work - breaking stupid rules for smart results:

one of the most common hacks we found: jumping IT's firewall and working around their restrictions and tools in open computing environments, then bringing the work back over the firewall and presenting it to bosses as if the corporate tools had actually been used.

Ben Horowitz's article on enterprise sales in TechCrunch today tries to justify corporate practices, even as he recognizes the inversion of the innovation flow.

What this misses is the underlying economic justification for the existence of a corporation in the first place - the economic theories that build on Coase's work saying that firms exist because transaction costs are lower within them than external transactions mediated by the marketplaces. Pettifogging internal purchasing rules should be subject to this test: does the internal transaction cost of approving and purchasing something exceed the value of the thing being purchased?

Reading Ben's explanation of how corporate salespeople help institutions negotiate their own labyrinthine processes, I couldn't help but be reminded of John Hagel's Big Shift model, (also discussed on TummelVision), which continues to show a declining return on assets for corporations.

The challenge we have on the web is to maintain the kinds of open-to-all interoperable standards that empower us to work round these creaking bureaucracies. If we delegate our online identities to a few firms operating proprietary APIs, that they can revoke access to, or decide who can call them for reasons of corporate strategy, the lowered transaction costs suddenly get very high again.

Doc Searls's work on VRM (this week's TummelVision) is all about making sure that we can retain agency over our own information. I expect to discuss this in depth at Defrag next week.

Inevitable! Google Chrome Extension Exports Your Facebook Contacts

2010-11-29T23:00:00.001+11:00

Published on TechCrunch | shared via feedly

Well look what we have here … Last time we checked in on the Facebook/Google slapfight, Facebook had removed the option to import your contacts from Gmail and was still holding strong on the whole "denying contact info access to Google" rigamarole that started the fight in the first place. Up until now many had no other choice but to use Yahoo Mail if they wanted to mass export their Friends data from Facebook into Google. Well Happy Thanksgiving data reciprocity fans! A third party developer has decided to build "Facebook Doesn't Own My Friends," a Chrome extension that lets you easily export your Facebook Friends' contact information.

Whoever built this is pretty vehement about whose side they're playing on. Take a look at the sarcastic tone of the "About" description.

"Despite what Facebook says, if someone is your "friend" and you can see his/her email address on his/her Facebook info, they are probably OK with you emailing them.

Facebook doesn't let you export this data, so they expect you to click on each of your friends' pages, copy their email address (or other contact information), and paste it into your email client. Kind of ridiculous? Yes."

I just tried it and it works, scraping and exporting your contacts into both Gmail and CSV files even though it might take awhile and multiple tries if you've got hundreds of friends. And while the extension is not officially affiliated with Google (or Facebook), it going to be exciting to see what happens to it after this post.

Since this is a Chrome extension it might be harder for Facebook to block, as browser extensions can make scraping seem indistinguishable from actual users clicking in their browsers. It looks like the Berlin Wall of data portability has started to crumble, so hurry up and export those Friends contacts while you still can.

Update: No confirmation on whether this is an intentional block from Facebook's side but users are reporting that the extension stopped scraping about 10 minutes after this post went up. I've contacted both Facebook and Google for more information and will update the post if I hear back.

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Has Microsoft just ruined Windows Home Server?

2010-11-29T22:53:00.001+11:00

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/11/has-microsoft-just-ruined-windows-home-server.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

Telstra split bill approved

2010-11-29T22:50:00.001+11:00

Published on iTnews | shared via feedly

Conroy brands no challenge "a fail".

What Apache Wave means and does not mean | ZDNet

2010-11-29T22:43:00.001+11:00

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/what-apache-wave-means-and-does-not-mean/7881

Over 250,000 U.S. Diplomatic Documents Released by Wikileaks

2010-11-29T22:35:00.001+11:00

Published on ReadWriteWeb | shared via feedly

Wikileaks had set this afternoon as the date to release another round of secret U.S. government documents - this time, over 250,000 classified cables from various U.S. embassies.

Hours prior to the documents' publication, Wikileaks tweeted that the website was experiencing a "mass distributed denial of service attack." But whether or not the site goes down - it's functioning, albeit slowly at this time - the documents released today have already been distributed to a number of international news agencies who are publishing their findings from the trove of leaked documents.

Sponsor

Today's publication marks the latest in a string of secret government documents published by the rogue media organization. In July, Wikileaks released the Afghan War Diary, containing over 91,000 reports from the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010.

Contents of the Correspondence

As these documents capture some of the day-to-day correspondence between the U.S. State Department and some 270 embassies around the world, they reveal a mixture of political intrigue and political gossip. The New York Times reports, for example, that the documents "describe the volatile Libyan leader as rarely without the companionship of 'his senior Ukrainian nurse,' described as 'a voluptuous blonde.'"

Documents also point to the Chinese government's role in hacking Google, something that led the company to temporarily pull out of the country earlier this year.

This Wikileaks publication is likely to impact U.S. diplomatic relations, including for example, revelations about State Department personnel being urged to collect data ("spy"?) on foreign dignitaries and on UN officials. The State Department has been briefing countries over the past few days in anticipation for today's release.

Media Coverage, Government Reaction

Coverage of the documents can be found in a number of places, including the New York Times, in the British newspaper the Guardian, and in the German Der Spiegel. The raw data is also available on the Wikileaks website.

The White House has issued a statement, condemning "in the strongest terms the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents and sensitive national security information." Last spring, intelligence analyst Bradley Manning was charged with leaking many of the documents that make up today's release, as well as video footage of a 2007 airstrike in which civilians were killed. Manning faces a court martial and prison time for his role in leaking this information.

Discuss

New Linux kernel patch gives huge performance improvement

2010-11-24T13:12:00.001+11:00

Published on Radioactive IT with Mike Bantick | shared via feedly

Based on an idea from Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel developer Mike Galbraith has implemented a patch which offers a huge performance improvement for interactive tasks.

Ubuntu Dumps X For Unity On Wayland

2010-11-24T12:51:00.001+11:00

Published on Slashdot | shared via feedly

An anonymous reader writes "Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Ubuntu will move away from the traditional X.org display environment to Wayland — a more modern alternative. The move means there is now little reason for GNOME developers to recommend Ubuntu as an operating system. Shuttleworth said, 'We're confident we'll be able to retain the ability to run X applications in a compatibility mode, so this is not a transition that needs to reset the world of desktop free software. Nor is it a transition everyone needs to make at the same time: for the same reason we'll keep investing in the 2D experience on Ubuntu despite also believing that Unity, with all its GL dependencies, is the best interface for the desktop. We'll help GNOME and KDE with the transition, there's no reason for them not to be there on day one either.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SUSE safe from Novell patent sale: Linux Australia

2010-11-24T12:46:00.001+11:00

Published on iTnews | shared via feedly

Novell to sell 882 patents to Microsoft.

News Corp’s Upcoming iPad App ‘The Daily’ to Pioneer New Recurring Subscription Billing

2010-11-24T00:08:00.001+11:00

Published on Daring Fireball (Articles) | shared via feedly

So the cat — or at least part of the cat — is out of the bag on Apple's upcoming support for recurring subscription billing for content. Edward Helmore, reporting for The Guardian yesterday:

Rupert Murdoch, head of the media giant News Corp, and Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, are preparing to unveil a new digital "newspaper" called the Daily at the end of this month, according to reports in the US media.

The collaboration, which has been secretly under development in New York for several months, promises to be the world's first "newspaper" designed exclusively for new tablet-style computers such as Apple's iPad, with a launch planned for early next year.

Intended to combine "a tabloid sensibility with a broadsheet intelligence", the publication represents Murdoch's determination to push the newspaper business beyond the realm of print.

According to reports, there will be no "print edition" or "web edition"; the central innovation, developed with assistance from Apple engineers, will be to dispatch the publication automatically to an iPad or any of the growing number of similar devices.

With no printing or distribution costs, the US-focused Daily will cost 99 cents (62p) a week.

This jibes, mostly, with what I've been hearing. The Guardian's dates are slightly off, though. My understanding is that this initiative is going to launch with a press event, with Murdoch (and perhaps other newspaper and magazine executives) joining Steve Jobs on stage. This is not going to be a quiet launch, to say the least. But "this month" is effectively already over, considering that Thanksgiving is Thursday, so it won't happen until next month at the earliest.

(The date I've heard is December 9, but that's a Thursday, which would be somewhat unusual for an Apple press event. My guess is that they're telling people December 9 but it might slip back to Tuesday or Wednesday the week after. Perhaps it will coincide with the opening of the Mac App Store?)

The key, though, is that what News Corp is working on is not an iPad counterpart to an existing newspaper, nor is it an "online newspaper" in general. It's a "tablet newspaper" — and, at least for now, specifically an iPad newspaper.

Helmore writes:

The 79-year-old Murdoch is said to have had the idea for the project after studying a survey that suggested readers spent more time immersed in their iPads than they did — comparatively speaking — on the internet, where unfocused surfing is typical.

Sources say Murdoch is committed to the project in part because he believes that the Daily, properly executed, will demonstrate that consumers are willing to pay for high- quality, original content online.

Murdoch believes the iPad is going to be a "game changer" and he has seen projections that there will be 40 million iPads in circulation by the end of 2011. A source said: "He envisions a world in which every family has a iPad in the home and it becomes the device from which they get their news and information. If only 5% of those 40 million subscribe to the Daily, that's already two million customers."

Granted, Murdoch is the guy who bought MySpace for over $500 million, so his digital instincts are far from infallible, but at the very least it's an interesting initiative. It's a new, lean mean business model for daily news. Here's Murdoch in an interview earlier this month with Max Suich at AFR.com:

I'm starting a paper in six weeks. A brand new paper. It will be a bit like the New York Post . But it will be national. Have that sort of humour and attitude like the Post. It will only be seen on tablets. It will only employ journalists — and maybe eight to 10 technicians.

As regards Apple's role, my understanding, based on information from sources not at Apple, is that this is not something like iBooks — there is no central "iNews" or "Newsstand" app from Apple. Rather, it's a new subscription billing option for apps — true recurring subscriptions — paid through your iTunes account. News Corp's "Daily", then, would be just an app in the App Store, using subscription billing routines built-into iOS. My understanding is that the developers at News Corp building the app already have preliminary documentation on the new subscription billing APIs from Apple. I presume this would require a new version of iOS, but perhaps the Daily will launch as soon as it can, free of charge until the billing support ships from Apple.

It would be nice if there were also a way for content to be delivered periodically in the background, so that when you launch it in the morning, you don't have to wait for it to download today's news. That's just a "wouldn't it be nice?" idea from me, though, not something I've heard is coming from Apple. But this bit from the Guardian story makes me wonder if they're working on it:

The central innovation, developed with assistance from Apple engineers, will be to dispatch the publication automatically to an iPad or any of the growing number of similar devices.

Although I sincerely doubt Apple is offering much help with the "growing number of similar devices" aspect.

What Facebook Messages Is Really After

2010-11-24T00:07:00.001+11:00

Published on GigaOM | shared via feedly

It's not email. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said as much at last week's introduction of Facebook Messages. He called the new service "a modern messaging system," and half-jokingly said the next generation of users would gradually shift away from email. But as I detail over at GigaOM Pro, what Facebook is really trying to establish with its unified communications hub is presence management (subscription required). That's why Facebook Messages feels at least as much like IM as it does email.

Facebook Messages focuses on intimacy and immediacy at the expense of formality, flexibility and history. This approach isn't just aimed at consumer rather than professional usage. It de-emphasizes important consumer communications like billing, newsletters, one-to-many emailing, and forwarding. In other words, it's more important in the long run for Facebook to be its users' launchpad for personal communications than it is for the feature to be the management tool for all communications.

The Real Objective: Presence Management

By presence management, I mean the tools and platforms a person uses to announce his availability to other people (and, potentially, to bots and services). A powerful, unified presence manager would also enable the user to express how he'd like to communicate, and to manipulate that "how" and "when" availability to different types of contacts. If Facebook establishes Messages as a user's primary tool to manage presence across multiple communications vehicles, it would be an incredibly sticky app, with huge customer lock-in potential.

How Should Competitors React?

Email's not going away, for many reasons. Even teenagers want their online shopping receipts, and likely won't route newsletters to their Friends inbox.

Microsoft appreciates the difference between corporate and consumer email, and has integrated IM with both. It should continue to build collaboration into Outlook, bridges between Outlook and Hotmail, and make sure its Messenger presence infrastructure interoperates with Facebook's.

Gmail is an extensible apps platform, and a Gmail address is a hub domain for non-communications apps. Google's aggressiveness in voice communications might give it an advantage over Facebook in mobile presence management.

Read the full post here.

Related Content from GigaOM Pro (subscription required)

iOS 4.2 Now Available, Brings Multitasking to iPad

2010-11-24T00:00:00.001+11:00

Published on Mashable! | shared via feedly

The latest version of Apple's mobile platform, iOS 4.2, is now available for the iPad, iPhone & iPod touch.

This version is especially important for iPad owners, as it brings over 100 new features from the last three version of iOS to that device, most interesting among them being support for multitasking. The feature enables users to keep several apps open at the same time and switch between them almost instantly, while preserving iPad's battery life (which Apple refers to as "legendary").

Other new features for the iPad include app folders, unified inbox, and the gaming social network Game Center. AirPlay and AirPrint are also here, with AirPlay bringing the ability to stream music, photos and video to Apple TV, and AirPrint finally enabling users to wirelessly print out content to AirPrint-enabled printers including the HP Photosmart, HP LaserJet Pro and HP Officejet.

Apple also said that iOS has 125 million users around the world, while its App Store now has more than 300,000 apps, 40,000 of them being native iPad applications.

See the full list of improvements in iOS 4.2 here, and be sure to check out our complete hands-on:

Home Screen

iOS 4.2 for iPad features the same familiar look as iOS 4.0 for the iPhone. The big new feature is Folders -- grouping of icons by category.

Multitasking Bar

Double click the home button on the iPad and scroll to the right. Just like on the iPhone, this gives you quick access to some music and app controls.

With iOS 4.2 for iPad, the screen rotation lock button on the side of the iPad has been switched to an audio mute button. That means that to lock the rotation of the screen, you need to use the new multitasking bar. We wish that we could still use the physical button, but the software button works just fine.

A nice touch for the iPad is the ability to control your brightness and control your volume. Brightness controls come in handy when reading books or magazines or playing back video. Speaking of video playback, when you are in the vicinity of an Apple TV, you can activate AirPlay from this menu too.

Folders

You can store 20 apps per folder. Just like in iOS 4.0 for the iPhone, the folders are named automatically based on what type of apps are inside, but you can also edit the name yourself.

Multitasking

Double tapping on the home button brings up a list of other applications you can open or switch to in iOS 4.2. Apps that support fast-app switching will let you seamlessly switch back and forth without losing your place. If you are listening to music or watching a video, the audio continues to play when you open another app.

Game Center

iOS 4.2 for iPad includes Game Center. Just like iOS 4.1 for iPhone, Game Center lets you compare scores, earn badges and play games with your friends or with a random stranger across the Internet.

Game Center Games

Game Center shows you what Game Center games you have used on your iPad, iPod touch or iPhone. You can compare your scores and leaderboards with your friends.

Unified Inbox

Just like iOS 4.0 for the iPhone, the iPad now has a unified inbox. You can view all your accounts at once or view each account separately.

Unified Inbox

E-mail Printing

You can now print an e-mail message to an AirPrint compatible device.

Printing

The bookmark bar in Mobile Safari has a new option: Print!

Printing

Clicking on Print will let you select your printer (AirPrint printers are auto-discovered) and select how many copies you want.

Search in Web Page

One of the new features with iOS 4.2 is that you can search for a word or phrase within a web page. Type text into the search bar and below the search suggestions is a new option: "On this Page."

Search in Web Page Results

You can find every instance of a word or phrase within a web page. The word or phrase in question is highlighted and clicking "next" will take you to the next instance of the text on the page.

Search in Web Page Results

You can find every instance of a word or phrase within a web page. The word or phrase in question is highlighted and clicking "next" will take you to the next instance of the text on the page.

Printing on the iPhone

Just like on the iPad, clicking the bookmark button in the web browser or in supported apps will bring up a new "Print" option.

Print Options iPhone

You can then select how many pages you want to print and select or search for an AirPrint compatible device on your network.

Print Landscape

Search in Page iPhone

Search in Page Results iPhone

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Samsung sells 600K Galaxy Tabs worldwide

2010-11-23T23:55:00.001+11:00

Published on digg.com: Stories / Popular | shared via feedly

Samsung confirms it has now sold 600,000 Galaxy tab devices worldwide in the tablet's first month of sales. The tablet first debuted in mid-October in Italy and is now available in 30 countries worldwide including North America, Europe, and Asia.

The Times’ Paywall and Newsletter Economics

2010-11-23T23:52:00.001+11:00

Published on Clay Shirky | shared via feedly

It is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

In early July, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation placed its two London-based "quality" dailies, the Times and Sunday Times, behind a paywall, charging £1 for 24 hours access, or £2 a week (after an introductory £1 for the first month.*) At the same time, News Corp also forbad the UK's Audit Bureau of Circulations from reporting site traffic*, so that no meaningful measure of the paywall's effect was available.

That situation has now been partially reversed, with News reporting some of its own numbers: they claim 105,000 total transactions for digital content between July and October.* (Several people have wrongly reported this as 105,000 users. The number of users is smaller, as there can be more than one transaction per user.) News Corp notes that about half of those transactions were one-offs, meaning only about 50,000 transactions in those four months were by people with any commitment to the site longer than a single day.

Because that 50K number includes not just web site transactions, but Kindle and iPad sales as well, web subscribers are, at best, in the low tens of thousands. However, we don't know how small the digital subscriber number is, for two reasons. First, the better the Kindle and iPad numbers are, the worse the web numbers are. Second, News did not report, for example, whether a loyal reader from July to October would count as a single transaction or several consecutive transactions. (If iPad sales are good, and loyal users create multiple transactions, then monthly web subscribers could be under 10,000.)

The other figure News reported is that something like 100,000 print subscribers have requested web access. Combining digital-only and print subscribers, and comparing them with comScore's pre-paywall estimate of roughly six million unique readers worldwide*, the reduction in total web audience seems to be on the order of 97%. (Note that this reduction can't be measured by before and after traffic, as the home pages are outside the paywall, so people who refuse to pay still show up as visitors.)

Because the print subscribers outnumber digital-only users, most of the remaining 3% pay nothing for the site. Subscription to the paper is now a better draw for website use than any case News has been able to make for paid access.

Given the paucity of the data, the key question of churn remains unanswerable. After the introductory £1 a month offer, the annualized rate rises from £12 to £104. This will cause additional users to bail out, but we have no way of guessing how many.

As with every aspect of The Times' paywall, interpretation of these numbers varies widely. There are people arguing that these numbers are good news; Robert Andrews at PaidContent sees hope in the Times now having recurring user revenues.* There are people arguing that they are bad news; Mike Masnick at TechDirt believes those revenues are unlikely to offset new customer acquition costs and the loss of advertising.* What is remarkable though, what seems to need more explaining than News's strategy itself, is why anyone regards this particular paywall as news at all.

* * *

The "paywall problem" isn't particularly complex, either in economic or technological terms. General-interest papers struggle to make paywalls work because it's hard to raise prices in a commodity market. That's the problem. Everything else is a detail.

The classic description of a commodity market uses milk. If you own the only cow for 50 miles, you can charge usurious rates, because no one can undercut you. If you own only one of a hundred such cows, though, then everyone can undercut you, so you can't charge such rates. In a competitive environment like that, milk becomes a commodity, something whose price is set by the market as a whole.

Owning a newspaper used to be like owning the only cow, especially for regional papers. Even in urban markets, there was enough segmentation–the business paper, the tabloid, the alternative weekly–and high enough costs to keep competition at bay. No longer.

The internet commodifies the business of newspapers. Any given newspaper competes with a few other newspapers, but any newspaper website compete with all other websites. As Nicholas Carr pointed out during the 2009 pirate kidnapping, Google News found 11,264 different sources for the story, all equally accessible.* The web puts newspapers in competition with radio and TV stations, magazines, and new entrants, both professional and amateur. It is the war of each against all.

None of this is new. The potential disruptive effects of the internet on newspapers have been observable since ClariNet in 1989.* Nor has the business case for paywalls changed. The advantage of paywalls is that they raise revenue from users. The disadvantages are that they reduce readership, increase customer acquistion and retention costs, and eliminate ad revenue from user-forwarded content. In most cases, the disadvantages have outweighed the advantages.

So what's different about News paywall? Nothing. It's no different from other pay-for-access plans, whether the NY Times' TimesSelect* or the Harligen Texas Valley Morning Star.* News Corp has produced no innovation in content, delivery, or payment, and the idea of 90%+ loss of audience was already a rule of thumb over a decade ago. Yet something clearly feels different.

Over the last fifteen years, many newspaper people have assumed continuity with the analog business model, which is to say they assumed that readers could eventually be persuaded or forced pay for digital editions. This in turn suggested that the failure of any given paywall was no evidence of anything other than the need to try again.

What is new about the Times' paywall–what may in fact make it a watershed–isn't strategy or implementation. What's new is that it has launched as people in the news business are re-thinking assumed continuity. It's new because the people paying attention to it are now willing to regard the results as evidence of something. To the newspaper world, TimesSelect looked like an experiment. The Times and Sunday Times look like a referendum on the future.

* * *

One way to escape a commodity market is to offer something that isn't a commodity. This has been the preferred advice of people committed to the re-invention of newspapers. It is a truism bordering on drinking game material that anyone advising newspapers will at some point say "All you need to do is offer a product so relevant and valuable the consumer is willing to pay for it!"

This advice is well-meaning. It's just not much help. The suggestion that newspapers should, in the future, create a digital product users are willing to pay for is merely a restatement of the problem, by way of admission that the current product does not pass that test.

Most of the historical hope for paywalls assumed that through some combination of reader desire and supplier persuasiveness, the current form of the newspaper could survive the digital transition without significant alteration.

Payalls, as actually implemented, have not accomplished this. They don't expand revenue from the existing audience, they contract the audience to that subset willing to pay. Paywalls do indeed help newspapers escape commodification, but only by ejecting the readers who think of the product as a commodity. This is, invariably, most of them.

* * *

You can see this contraction at the Times and Sunday Times in the reversal of digital to print readers. Before the paywall, the two sites had roughly six times more readers than there were print sales of the paper edition. (6M web vs. 1M print for the Sunday Times* .) Post-paywall, the web audience is less than a sixth of print sales (down to <150K vs. 1M). The paying web audience is less a twentieth of print sales (<50K vs. 1M), and possibly much less.

One way to think of this transition is that online, the Times has stopped being a newspaper, in the sense of a generally available and omnibus account of the news of the day, broadly read in the community. Instead, it is becoming a newsletter, an outlet supported by, and speaking to, a specific and relatively coherent and compact audience. (In this case, the Times is becoming the online newsletter of the Tories, the UK's conservative political party, read much less widely than its paper counterpart.)

Murdoch and News Corp, committed as they have been to extracting revenues from the paywall, still cannot execute in a way that does not change the nature of the organizations behind the wall. Rather than simply shifting relative subsidy from advertisers to users for an existing product, they are instead re-engineering the Times around the newsletter model, because the paywall creates newsletter economics.

As of July, non-subscribers can no longer read Times stories forwarded by colleagues or friends, nor can they read stories linked to from Facebook or Twitter. As a result, links to Times stories now rarely circulate in those media. If you are going to produce news that can't be shared outside a particular community, you will want to recruit and retain a community that doesn't care whether any given piece of news spreads, which means tightly interconnected readerships become the ideal ones. However, tight interconnectedness correlates inversely with audience size, making for a stark choice, rather than offering a way of preserving the status quo.

This re-engineering suggests that paywalls don't and can't rescue current organizational forms. They offer instead yet another transformed alternative to it. Even if paywall economics can eventually be made to work with a dramatically reduced audience, this particular referendum on the future (read: the present) of newspapers is likely to mean the end of the belief that there is any non-disruptive way to remain a going concern.

I've bundled some replies to various questions in the comments from November 9th here and from November 10th here.

Also, nota bene: One of the problems with the various "Hey you guys, I just had a great idea for saving newpapers!" micropayment comments showing up in my moderation queue is that the proposers often exhibit no understanding that micropayments have a 20-year history of failure.

I will not post comments suggesting that micropayments will save the news industry unless those comment refer to at least some of the theoretical or practical literature on previous attempts to make them work for the news business. Start here: Why Small Payments Won't Save Publishers

Beta Version of Nevercookie Released

2010-11-23T23:47:00.001+11:00

Published on Slashdot | shared via feedly

wiredmikey writes "Anonymizer has released a beta version of Nevercookie, the recently announced Firefox plugin designed to protect against the Evercookie, a JavaScript API built and made available to prove that the more you store and the more places you store it, the harder it is for users to control a Web site's ability to uniquely identify their computer. Evercookie is a more persistent form of cookie that enables the storage of cookie data in a number of different locations, such as Flash cookies and various locations of HTML5 storage. This allows websites to track user behavior even when users have enabled private browsing. Because an Evercookie stores data in locations outside of where standard cookies are stored, an Evercookie can rebuild itself unless users go through a number of steps to completely clear and reset their local storage."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Viacom Joins the Anti-Google TV Brigade

2010-11-23T23:46:00.001+11:00

Published on Mashable! | shared via feedly

Add Viacom properties to the ever-growing list of television websites blocked on Google TV.

Google's set-top box product has already received blowback from the major broadcast networks — NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox — not to mention Hulu — but now it looks like cable is joining the party too.

GTVHub discovered that Comedy Central, VH1, MTV, and Nickelodeon have all blocked Google TV from accessing full episode streams from their websites.

Frankly, we agree with the GTVHub assessment that the only real shocker in this scenario is that it didn't happen sooner. YouTube and Viacom have a notoriously rocky past. In addition, Vevo, which syndicates content from several major music labels to YouTube, has pulled its music content from MTV properties on the web. Plus, Viacom's corporate sister CBS already banned Google TV from accessing its web content.

At this point, the list of networks that do support Google TV is getting smaller and smaller. It seems that now only TNT, TBS, USA Network, Bravo, and PBS are still supporting Google TV.

At the Web 2.0 Summit last week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt discussed the network backlash against Google TV, seemingly shocked by this development. Schmidt said the networks were afraid to embrace the future, rather than being miffed at someone selling advertising on their content without giving them a cut. But that doesn't change the fact that for IPTV solutions to really work, they need to support content users actually want to watch.

The reason that Hulu has been such a success with consumers is that it offers users the ability to get the content they want on their computer, without fuss. That's also why the barrage of Hulu Plus-enabled devices are already driving adoption.

Google TV is about more than just online video — it's really about cable and satellite content too. Still, if you have to have another set-top box, like the Boxee Box or a Roku, we can't imagine users flocking to plunk down $300 on a Google TV.

More About: boxee, Google, google tv, hulu, iptv, mtv, roku, viacom

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Is Samsung’s Reported Interest in WP7 a Sign of Android Fatigue?

2010-11-23T23:40:00.000+11:00

Published on GigaOM | shared via feedly

Samsung, which has ridden Android to success with the Galaxy S, is reportedly shifting its focus to Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 in 2011. According to a report in iMobile.cn, 63 percent of smartphones built by Samsung will be WP7 devices, followed by Android at 32 percent and its own Bada OS at 6 percent. This follows on a report last week that Samsung was internally focusing on WP7.

Just a few months ago, Samsung said it was "prioritizing" on Android, which made sense considering it was on the way to selling 5 million Galaxy S units. But with the launch of Windows Phone 7, has come out in support of Microsoft, and generally has one of the best WP7 devices available in the Focus.

So if the latest reports are true, why would Samsung prioritize its resources on Windows Phone 7? I have to wonder if there's a little Android fatigue in the ecosystem. With so many smartphone makers now in the market for Android devices, it might make sense for a company like Samsung to look for new opportunities. We know the smartphone market is expanding greatly, with a majority of phone customers expected to have a smartphone by next year. For handset makers, pinning their development plans on one platform while most every other manufacturer does the same may just be increasingly tough sledding. It doesn't mean Samsung gives up on Android; it just keeps its options open.

Looking at Windows Phone 7, one wouldn't expect it to command so much attention from Samsung right away. It has very little currently-installed base and it's unclear what the worldwide appetite is for the OS. (Gartner forecasts WP7 with just a 4 percent marketshare in 2014) Microsoft is more restrictive on handset manufacturers so they can't add the kinds of custom interfaces like TouchWiz which can differentiate one manufacturer's handset from another. And WP7 requires a licensing fee, something Android's OS doesn't have. Also, it's unclear why Samsung would so clearly favor WP7 over its own proprietary OS Bada, which actually seems to be selling well.

Samsung has gotten an intimate look at the OS and may be impressed with its prospects. Or, it may be convinced that Microsoft is going to spend big on the platform for some time, just like it willed the Xbox 360 to success. The legal uncertainty around Android could also be playing a small role. Or it just may be that Samsung sees less of a scrum of manufacturers hovering around WP7 and understands this is a chance to ride it to potential success, while still supporting Android.

I wouldn't make too much of reports that Android losing support. The platform is still taking off in a big way, and all indications seem to suggest it should be a top seller and could potentially topple Symbian in a few years. But even with that promise, it's not the only source of growth in the market. All the platforms are still growing, and faded OS makers like Microsoft have a chance to really pick up the pace again if they execute. It just reminds me again that while we like to talk about the ascendence of Android or the strength of iOS, it's still early in this smartphone race. Yes, a lot of sales trends already seem to be in place but considering the iPhone and Android devices have only been with us for the last three years, there's room for more changes in the next three years. Maybe this is what Samsung is saying with its reported interest in Windows Phone 7.

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Google revamps DocVerse as new collaboration service for Office

2010-11-23T23:39:00.001+11:00

Published on Business IT- Ars | shared via feedly

Google is taking one more step into Microsoft's territory by allowing Office users to sync and access their documents through Google—without having to leave the Office interface. The service is being called Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office, and already works with Office 2003, 2007, and 2010 (no word on the Mac versions of Office, though).

Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office used to be through DocVerse, a company that Google acquired in March of this year. DocVerse allowed Office users to edit their documents collaboratively on the Web, much like Google Docs. Office does (now) come with its own collaboration tools, but they work differently than Google and DocVerse, and some users prefer the real-time editing nature of Google's services.

Immediately following the acquisition announcement, Google rolled out a migration tool for Microsoft Exchange, showing that it was serious about going after Microsoft's customers. The reintroduction of DocVerse as Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office only furthers that goal—Google says it's meant for users who haven't yet migrated to Google Docs and prefer the Office interface.

"Once synced, documents are backed up, given a unique URL, and can be accessed from anywhere (including mobile devices) at any time through Google Docs," group product manager Shan Sinha said in a statement. "And because the files are stored in the cloud, people always have access to the current version."

Just like Google Docs, Office documents that are synced with Cloud Connect for Office can be shared and edited simultaneously among multiple users. It can be done within Office, too, so editing in a Web browser isn't necessary. Google keeps track of the revisions so that documents can be reverted if necessary.

Google says that the service is now available to "trusted testers" and for Google Apps for Business customers to preview. The company didn't give a date for when the final product will be available, but said that the product will be free to everyone (regular users included) when it launches.

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Firesheep Author Reflects On Wild Week

2010-11-03T11:23:00.001+11:00

Published on Slashdot | shared via feedly

alphadogg writes "Firesheep, the Mozilla Firefox add-on released about a week ago that lets you spot users on open networks visiting unsecured websites, has given creator Eric Butler more than his 15 minutes of fame. More than 542,000 downloads later, Firesheep has thrown Butler into the middle of heated discussions regarding everything from the ethics of releasing the code to the legality of using it to the need for website vendors to clean up their security acts. Butler, who describes himself as a freelance Web application and software developer, reflects on the past week's happenings in a new blog post that reads in part: 'I've received hundreds of messages from people who are extremely happy that the issue of website security is receiving attention. Some, however, have questioned if Firesheep is legal to use. I'd like to be clear about this: It is nobody's business telling you what software you can or cannot run on your own computer. Like any tool, Firesheep can be used for many things. In addition to raising awareness, it has already proven very useful for people who want to test their own security as well as the security of their (consenting) friends. A much more appropriate question is: "Is it legal to access someone else's accounts without their permission."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Vodafone NZ combats cyber bullies with free SMS blocking

2010-11-02T22:53:00.001+11:00

Published on Radioactive IT with Mike Bantick | shared via feedly

Vodafone New Zealand has taken steps to combat cyberbullying that Australian telcos would to well to emulate: it has launched a free service that allows its mobile customers to easily block text and multimedia messages from any mobile number they choose.