Tag: olympics

DigitalOutbox Episode 131

DigitalOutbox Episode 131
DigitalOutbox Episode 131 – Twitter API, John Browett and OnLive

Playback
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Shownotes
3:01 – Once a Dixons employee
– John Browett joined as head of retail at Apple late last year – he used to head up Dixons. We joked at the time that it didn’t seem the best hire and fit for Apple
– There were reports at the start of the week that Apple stores were reducing staff numbers
– In a communication with store leadership teams, senior vice president of retail, John Browett, who took the reins of Apple’s retail stores in April, said that the company had been trying a new staffing formula for its retail stores, leading some employees to see their hourly shifts cut and retail locations to be understaffed. This happened for a few weeks before the company decided to revert to its older system, hoping to rectify the problem.
– He instructed leadership teams to tell employees, “We messed up,” according to two people who were aware of the communication, which also stressed that while shift schedules were affected, no one was laid off. He also wanted employees to know that it was hiring new staff, these people said.
– Apple acknowledged the retail staffing changes. “Making these changes was a mistake and the changes are being reversed,” said Kristin Huguet, an Apple spokeswoman. “Our employees are our most important asset and the ones who provide the world-class service our customers deserve.”
– Despite Apple’s claims that “no one was laid off”, we have indeed heard from several Apple employees who have been laid off in recent weeks, with several of them independently claiming that there have been others, although some have called the moves “isolated” while others have characterized them as “many”. ifoAppleStore reported yesterday that the cutbacks were made by Browett in an effort to meet profit goals and encourage the “bloated” store staffs to run “leaner”, despite the objections of retail veterans within the company.
– Idiot.
6:11 – Amazon to deliver parcels to UK cornershops
– Amazon is to step up its assault on the UK’s retail market by delivering parcels to nearly 5,000 corner shops and newsagents around the country.
– The online shopping giant has quietly started trialling the scheme on a small scale with items such as books and clothes, and plans to roll it out nationwide.
– Amazon has already built itself into a $109bn business by offering customers a highly convenient way to shop and this move will give it even more muscle with which to take on high street stores.
– Consumers will be able to collect their orders from local shops that are often open until late into the night, instead of having to wait in for orders or coming home to find a delivery note telling them to collect their parcel from the nearest Royal Mail depot.
– They will also be able to use the “Collect+” scheme to send unwanted items back to the retailer, making it easier, for example, to order clothes in several sizes and return those that do not fit.
– The scheme is likely to prove particularly popular with employees of the many UK companies which ban staff from having personal goods delivered to their work address.
– However, it is also expected to ignite fresh concerns amongst traditional retailers, who already fear that the Seattle-based shopping giant is driving them off the high street.
9:11 – Twitter announces API changes
– Three main changes:
– In version 1.1, we will require every request to the API to be authenticated. For developers who are already using OAuth when making API requests, all of your authentication tokens will transition seamlessly from v1.0 to v1.1. If your application is currently using the Twitter API without using OAuth, you will need to update your application before March 2013.
– Right now, in version 1.0 of the Twitter API we limit the number of authenticated requests applications can make to 350 calls per hour, regardless of the type of information the application was requesting. This “one size fits all” approach has limited our ability to provide developers more access to endpoints that are frequently requested by applications, while continuing to prevent abuse of Twitter’s resources. In version 1.1, we will provide per-endpoint rate limiting on the API. While an application that only accesses one endpoint may be more restricted, applications that use multiple endpoints will run into rate limiting issues less frequently. Most individual API endpoints will be rate limited at 60 calls per hour per-endpoint. Based on analysis of current use of our API, this rate limit will be well above the needs of most applications built against the Twitter API, while protecting our systems from abusive applications.
– To ensure that Twitter users have a consistent experience wherever they see and interact with Tweets, in v1.1 of the Twitter API we will shift from providing Display Guidelines to Display Requirements, which we will also introduce for mobile applications. We will require all applications that display Tweets to adhere to these. Among them: linking @usernames to the appropriate Twitter profile, displaying appropriate Tweet actions (e.g. Retweet, reply and favorite) and scaling display of Tweets appropriately based on the device. If your application displays Tweets to users, and it doesn’t adhere to our Display Requirements, we reserve the right to revoke your application key. we will require you to work with us directly if you believe your application will need more than one million individual user tokens. Additionally, if you are building a Twitter client application that is accessing the home timeline, account settings or direct messages API endpoints (typically used by traditional client applications) or are using our User Streams product, you will need our permission if your application will require more than 100,000 individual user tokens.
– Caused lot’s of consternation, especially the user cap (100,000) – The maximum limit is 100,000 users, unless special permission is given by Twitter. If a client has more than 100k users currently, it can only ever grow to 200% of that. If users of the apps de-authorize their tokens for those apps, then they’re added back to that pool. That means that no third-party client can ever have more than 100k users, unless given special permission by Twitter or it already has over 100k right now, in which case it can have double the amount it has today. This move puts a life span on most for-pay clients, as they’ll reach a point where there is no longer any reason for them to continue offering these apps for sale.
– Display of tweets is confusing – no other social or 3rd party actions may be attached to a Tweet – so send to instapaper no more? Pocket developer says he has spoken to Twitter and pocket, instapaper etc are fine.
– Also, display guidelines and now ‘requirements’
– Marco Arment (Instapaper) has a very -ve post on the changes – http://www.marco.org/2012/08/16/twitter-api-changes
– I sure as hell wouldn’t build a business on Twitter, and I don’t think I’ll even build any nontrivial features on it anymore.
– And if I were in the Twitter-client business, I’d start working on another product.
– Paul Haddad (Tweetbot) has a more +ve post – http://tapbots.com/blog/news/dont-panic
– API – The changes to the v1.1 API requiring authentication won’t affect Tweetbot, all current API calls are already made using authentication.
– User caps – I can’t say that I’m thrilled with the idea of caps on the number of users, I feel that part of what makes the Twitter ecosystem interesting is the wide ranging apps available to it. I think we and others fill an important niche in that system not served by the current Twitter apps and would’ve much preferred to see some some other approach. Regardless the decision has been made, so let’s look at what this actually means to Tweetbot.
* Our user cap for Tweetbot for iOS is pretty huge (which is 2* our current users, not 100k)
* At the current rate our user base is growing we won’t hit that cap for a few years
* Our user cap for Tweetbot for Mac is also large and we don’t expect any problems given the smaller market
* Even if we were to run out of room all our current users will be fine
* User tokens are shared, so if you have a single account on both Tweetbot for iPad and Tweetbot for iPhone that’s only a single token
– Display req’s – We’ll be working with Twitter over the next 6 months to make sure we comply with these new requirements as much as possible. I don’t expect the changes to be huge, but we’ll keep everyone up to date as we know more.
– Meanwhile app.net got funded (nearly 800k) and has an amazing amount of app’s in development already.
– Does twitter care about it’s users? Or is it chasing business, advertisers, investors now rather than users? The people that launched the company are really no longer involved…
17:26 – Medium
– Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone are at it again. Having launched two new publishing platforms — Blogger in 1999 and, more recently, Twitter – the duo unveiled a new platform Tuesday that wants to make an “evolutionary leap,” based on what the pair has learned over the past 13 years.
– Called Medium, the new collaborative publishing tool lets different people contribute as much or as little as they want to themed “collections” of content. The idea, the founders said in a blog post Tuesday, is that people should be able to publish without “the burden of becoming a blogger” and worrying about developing an audience. The layout looks a lot like Pinterest, but contributions include both pictures and text.
– Does the world need another publishing site/tool?
19:06 – Branch
– Pick a topic, write a short comment and then invite others to comment – only if your invited can you comment
– The comment, or debate, is public – like Quora perhaps?
– Uses twitter as authentication a bit like Medium
– Advisers include Ev Williams and Biz Stone
20:51 – Is the UK heavy handed with Internet Trolls
– Police and prosecutors in the UK are accused of being “incredibly heavy-handed” when dealing with online trolls and abusive messages.
– It follows several cases where young people have been arrested, fined or jailed after posting insulting comments on their Twitter and Facebook accounts.
– Campaign groups and experts from Oxford University say the punishments are heavier than in other countries. But police insist if a law is broken they will take action.
– Bernie Hogan from the Oxford Internet Institute monitors what happens in other countries. He said that although the UK was “leading the way” in cracking down on this type of online abuse, by comparison “we are incredibly heavy-handed”.
– The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) disagrees. In a statement is says: “People have a right to publish their views but when these views become indecent, threatening or offensive then the individuals they affect also have the right to report them. “The police will assist with any prosecution.”
23:05 – First truly digital Olympics
– BBC celebrated Olympics by releasing some amazing data behind their online effort
– Record breaking browsers to BBC Sport online – with 55m (global) and 37m (UK) browsers to the BBC Sport site in total across the Games, and an average of 9.5m (global) and 7.1m (UK) browsers per day, easily breaking all previous records (previous record for a single day was 7.4m global and 5.7m UK)
– Video drives viewing across all online platforms – with 106m requests for BBC Olympic video content across all online platforms, more than double seen for any previous events
– First truly mobile games – with 9.2m UK mobile browsers to the BBC’s Olympics coverage, making up 34% of all daily browsers to BBC’s Olympic coverage, and 12m requests from mobiles for video throughout the Games
– Opening up the breadth of the Games via BBC Red Button – with 23.7m viewers to the 24 SD, HD and Freeview streams throughout the Games, and every single stream seeing at least 100,000 viewers
– Over a 24 hour period on the busiest Olympic days, total traffic to bbc.co.uk exceeded that for the entire BBC coverage of the FIFA World Cup 2010 (matches) – on the busiest day, the BBC delivered 2.8 petabytes, with the peak traffic moment occurring when Bradley Wiggins won Gold with over 700 Gb/s
– The London 2012 Olympics were the first truly mobile Games. Audiences accessed BBC’s content in ground-breaking numbers on mobile devices, continuing the trend to watch video on-the-go with:
– 1.9m download of BBC’s Olympics mobile app for iOS and Android smartphones
– 40% of browsers accessing BBC’s Olympics coverage were from a mobile at weekends (30% during the week) – averaging 34% per day
– 9.2m UK mobile browsers throughout the Games, with 2.8m UK mobile browsers on the peak day
– On TV, the BBC’s Red-Button service opened up the breadth of Olympic content to audiences with the simple press of a button.
– 23.7m people viewed the 24 live SD, HD & Freeview streams throughout the Games for at least 15 minutes
– Audiences viewed specialist sports such as Judo and Weightlifting in considerable numbers
– Every single Red Button stream received 100,000 viewers at some point during the Games
– this has really been the multi-platform Games, where audiences have consumed our content across PC, mobile, tablet and connected TV at different times of the day.
Our data below splits out the four screens across 24 hours, to reveal some key insights:
PC usage maxes out during the week at lunchtime and during mid-afternoon peak Team GB moments
Mobile takes over around 6pm as people leave the office but still want to keep up to date with the latest action
Tablet usage reaches a peak at around 9pm: people using them as a second screen experience as they watch the Games on their TVs, and also as they continue to watch in bed
28:21 – Jeremy Hunt pledges fastest broadband network in Europe by 2015
– The UK will have the fastest broadband network of any major European country by 2015, the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has pledged.
– The commitment marks a firming up of the government’s original target to create the “best” superfast broadband network in Europe by the end of this parliament, and follows a critical House of Lords’ report into the national broadband strategy published last month.
– “To really be the best you need to be the fastest,” Hunt told broadband experts at “Silicon Roundabout”, the area around Old Street on the fringes of the City of Londonwhere many technology firms and start-ups are based. “I am today announcing an ambition to be not just the best overall, but specifically the fastest broadband of any major European country. Indeed we may already be there.”
– Garbage – from Akamai – UK average measured connection speed according to Akamai is 5.6 Mbps, an improvement of 20% on last years result, but still only places us at 15th position across Europe, (21st in the global table).
30:27 – Netflix reaches 1,000,000 subscribers on the UK
– Netflix has said it has hit the 1 million subscriber mark in the UK and Ireland, just over seven months after the US subscription video on demand service launched in the countries.
– The company, which launched in the UK and Ireland on 9 January, is aiming to take on rivals including Amazon-owned LoveFilm and BSkyB.
– Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, said that the milestone proved that there is a significant appetite for a new rival to offer cut-price subscription packages of on-demand films and TV shows.
– Netflix claims that hitting 1 million registered users in the UK and Ireland in seven months was four times faster than Twitter managed on a global basis, and nearly twice as fast as Facebook and location-based service Foursquare.
– Hastings said the US company intends to pry premium Hollywood movie rights away from BSkyB, promising to be “really aggressive in our bidding.”
31:41 – Onlive sold to another company
– OnLive confirmed today that its assets have been sold to a new, still unnamed company. OnLive will continue to operate its services during the transition and the new company is backed “by substantial funding,” said a spokeswoman for Steve Perlman, the chief executive of OnLive.
“We can now confirm that the assets of OnLive, Inc. have been acquired into a newly formed company and is backed by substantial funding, and which will continue to operate the OnLive Game and Desktop services, as well as support all of OnLive’s apps and devices, as well as game, productivity and enterprise partnerships,” the company said in a statement. “The new company is hiring a large percentage of OnLive, Inc.’s staff across all departments and plans to continue to hire substantially more people, including additional OnLive employees. All previously announced products and services, including those in the works, will continue and there is no expected interruption of any OnLive services. We apologize that we were unable to comment on this transaction until it completed and were limited to reporting on news related to OnLive’s businesses. Now that the transaction is complete, we are able to make this statement.”
– Employees at the Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters of OnLive walked in and out during the afternoon, declining to comment. Some of them left with boxes full of their belongings.
– Earlier in the day, Perlman held an all-hands meeting where he told the staff that the company was being dissolved. Later on, everybody received a packet. Some of those packets were invitations to join the new company. We have heard that the number might be about 70 people. We hear that many employees are very upset, particularly those with exercised stock.
– Joystiq is reporting that the company has been sold to a third-party and that at least 50 percent of the staff was laid off. A former employee told Joystiq that employees were not getting severance and that OnLive was dealing with operating costs of $5 million a month.
– Despite its claim of two million users, our source says that the average peak amount of concurrent users was around 1,800. The two million number accounts for anyone who has signed up for the service; actual usage was remarkably lower.
35:25 – Call of Duty Black Ops 2
– Significant changes to the multiplayer game
– Calling eSports “a major, major initiative for us,” game design director David Vonderhaar says that Call of Duty is already a sport, but it needs the production, the personality, and the means to broadcast that sport to a wider audience. To help make that happen, Treyarch is building new tech for Black Ops 2 to more easily reach the masses, through in-game livestreaming and color commentary tools branded CODcasting.
– Black Ops 2’s broadcasting tools are simple to use. CODcasters simply join a multiplayer game as a spectator and are given the ability to see all the action in a multiplayer game from different views for play-by-play coverage. (To prevent cheating, live streams of multiplayer matches are delayed a few seconds.)
– During CODcasting matches, viewers will see a score panel at the top of the screen. “Score panel is our way of linking this to sports,” says Mike Rufail, Treyarch’s in-house eSports advisor. “Essentially, when you flick the channel over to a sports broadcast, you immediately will find out what the score is, how much time is left in the game, who’s in the lead. It’s very necessary information.”
– With League Play, Vonderhaar says he wants Black Ops 2 multiplayer to be fun at every level, not just for the hardcore Call of Duty player who spends hours each night honing his headshots. To address that, Treyarch is introducing skill-based matchmaking for Black Ops 2 multiplayer, an attempt to ensure that players are competing with others of a similar skill level.
– Treyarch is proposing seven seasonal brackets, in which players will be placed based on their performance as time goes on. Black Ops 2 will find an initial bracket for you somewhere after a few games, but players are expected to move up and down in their ranking as they win and lose in their division. They won’t be competing against the entirety of the Call of Duty-playing masses, but a smaller pool of about 500 to 1000 players near their skill level, Vonderhaar says.
37:45 – Simcity for the Mac
– Will launch in Feb, same time as PC
– Origin also coming to Mac later this year

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DigitalOutbox Episode 129

DigitalOutbox Episode 129
DigitalOutbox Episode 129 – Dropbox, Twitter and Outlook

Playback
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Shownotes
0:59 – Google Updates
– Update – 16gb Nexus now available, 3-5 day wait – https://play.google.com/store?hl=en
– Q – suspended while Google make it even better…and send out free dev units to those that have pre-ordered. Wow.
2:29 – Dropbox Security Breach
– Users a few weeks ago said they were being spammed with their dropbox only e-mail address
– Ian received e-mail overnight – Recently, passwords have been stolen from some Internet services. This is a problem because many people use the same password on multiple services, which is unsafe. As a precaution, we’ve reset your password and you can create a new one here. We haven’t detected any suspicious activity in your Dropbox, but we’re proactively taking steps to keep users safe.
– A bit odd as I do use separate passwords for sites – another friend reported same mail and he uses unique passwords too
– Blog post states: Our investigation found that usernames and passwords recently stolen from other websites were used to sign in to a small number of Dropbox accounts. We’ve contacted these users and have helped them protect their accounts. A stolen password was also used to access an employee Dropbox account containing a project document with user email addresses. We believe this improper access is what led to the spam. We’re sorry about this, and have put additional controls in place to help make sure it doesn’t happen again.
– Keeping Dropbox secure is at the heart of what we do, and we’re taking steps to improve the safety of your Dropbox even if your password is stolen, including:
– Two-factor authentication, a way to optionally require two proofs of identity (such as your password and a temporary code sent to your phone) when signing in. (Coming in a few weeks)
– New automated mechanisms to help identify suspicious activity. We’ll continue to add more of these over time.
– A new page that lets you examine all active logins to your account.
– In some cases, we may require you to change your password. (For example, if it’s commonly used or hasn’t been changed in a long time)
– At the same time, we strongly recommend you improve your online safety by setting a unique password for each website you use.
– So – Dropbox gets hacked but I’ve to change my unique and secure password?
6:32 – Robin Hood Airport tweet bomb joke man wins case
– A man found guilty of sending a menacing tweet threatening to blow up an airport has won a challenge against his conviction.
– Paul Chambers, 28, of Northern Ireland, was found guilty in May 2010 of sending a “menacing electronic communication”.
– He was living in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, when he tweeted that he would blow up nearby Robin Hood Airport when it closed after heavy snow. After a hearing at the High Court in London his conviction was quashed.
– Mr Chambers said later: “I am relieved, vindicated – it is ridiculous it ever got this far. “I want to thank everyone who has helped, including everyone on Twitter.”
– Mr Chambers said he had sent the tweet, which contained swear words, to his 600 followers in a moment of frustration after Robin Hood Airport, near Doncaster, was closed by snow in January 2010.
– He said he had never thought anyone would take his “silly joke” seriously.
– The message Mr Chambers tweeted stated: “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”
– In their judgement, the Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge, Mr Justice Owen and Mr Justice Griffith Williams, said: “If the person or persons who receive or read it, (the message) or may reasonably be expected to receive, or read it, would brush it aside as a silly joke, or a joke in bad taste, or empty bombastic or ridiculous banter, then it would be a contradiction in terms to describe it as a message of a menacing character.”
7:32 – While others need to watch what they say on Twitter
– The media is fuming over Twitter’s decision to suspend the account of a British journalist who used the micro-blogging site to toss barbs at NBC’s decision to time-delay its Olympic coverage over the weekend. The episode raises questions about free speech and corporate control of social media platforms.
– For anyone who missed it, the brouhaha began this morning when sports site Deadspin reported that Twitter had cut off Guy Adams, an LA-based reporter for The Independent. Adams has been a standard bearer for the new #nbcfail hashtag and used his account to rattle off a series of British-inflected tirades about NBC’s time delay: “‘Sneak peak’ my arse”; ”tosspot”; “Matt Lauer would do well to shut up, wouldn’t he?” and so on.
– Adams apparently crossed a line when he published the email address of NBC executive Gary Zenkel and told followers to “Tell him what u think.” NBC complained to Twitter and shortly after the micro-blog site suspended Adams’ account.
– Critics have since called attention to the fact that Twitter has partnered with NBC’s parent company to promote the games, and suggested that the companies decided to shut down Adams’ account as an act of reprisal.
– In an email message to Adams, Twitter explained the account had been suspended because he had violated terms of service that forbid disclosing private information like a person’s telephone number or private email address. Deadspin and others have noted that gary.zenkel@nbcuni.com is a corporate address.
– So who is right? Did Adams overstep a boundary or are Twitter and NBC wrongfully censoring a journalist? Well, from a legal point of view, Twitter is in the clear. The company’s terms of service make it plain that it can boot users off the site anytime and for any reason.
– Twitter’s moral position is a lot more shaky. Its reason for tossing Adams is flimsy (the email he printed was not private) and, worse, they simply caused him to disappear altogether. If you search @guyadams on Twitter, the company will suggest users with similar handles but the original Guy Adams has simply vanished in the same way that disgraced communists would vanish from Kremlin photographs.
– 2 days later twitter reinstate account
– NBC removed complaint
– Twitter post about guidelines – http://blog.twitter.com/2012/07/our-approach-to-trust-safety-and.html
– As of earlier today, the account has been unsuspended, and we will actively work to ensure this does not happen again. Twitter while working with NBC on Olympic portal had encouraged NBC to raise complaint which was passed to Trust and Safety team who then acted….unaware that others in Twitter had encouraged the intial complaint
– http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/jul/31/teenager-arrested-tweets-tom-daley
– Police have arrested a 17-year-old boy as part of an investigation into malicious Twitter messages sent to the Team GB diver Tom Daley after he and his team-mate, Pete Waterfield, missed out on a medal at the Olympics.
– The boy was held at a guesthouse in Weymouth, Dorset, hours after Daley, 18, retweeted messages he had been sent soon after finishing fourth in the 10m men’s synchronised platform diving event.
– A spokeswoman for Dorset police said: “A 17-year-old man was arrested by Dorset police officers in the early hours this morning at a guesthouse in the Weymouth area on suspicion of malicious communications. He is currently helping police with their inquiries.”
– Daley retweeted a message that said: “You let your dad down i hope you know that.” – There was much worse though – http://imgur.com/a/aHDr0
13:16 – Twitter users blamed for disrupting BBCs cycling coverage
– Olympic organisers have blamed spectators using Twitter for disrupting television coverage of the cycling road races. Viewers were left in the dark about timing and positions after electronic updates failed to reach commentators during both the men’s and women’s events.
– The BBC blamed the Olympic Broadcasting Service (OBS) for the lack of information which left commentator Chris Boardman using his own watch to estimate timings. But the International Olympic Committee said fans sending updates to Twitter while watching the race had in effect jammed transmissions of race information.
– Communications director Mark Adams said: “From my understanding, One network was oversubscribed, and OBS are trying to spread the load to other providers. We don’t want to stop people engaging in this by social media but perhaps they might consider only sending urgent updates.”
– The timings are sent to organisers via tiny GPS transmitters in competitors’ bikes but the messages were not being received during the races.
– Reality – O2 network couldn’t cope – “There was a capacity issue with Box Hill at the weekend,” an O2 spokesperson told The Register. “You can imagine that all of the people around that area were frantically using their phones so that was the reason for the over subscription.”
16:09 – Microsoft launch outlook.com
– The software giant is unveiling a brand new preview version of Hotmail today — Outlook.com. Although the old version of Hotmail will remain active, Outlook.com brings together all of its best features and more, accessible via the web, Exchange ActiveSync compatible clients, and POP3. Existing Hotmail users can upgrade to the preview version today — with options to rename an existing @hotmail.com address to @outlook.com or to add an additional alias to an account — and new Outlook.com users can pick an @outlook.com email address.
– Hotmail was much maligned so Microsoft had to go with a more trusted brand name – JOKER!!!!!
– Like Office 2013, Microsoft is describing its new email service as a “modern” one. Built with the same Metro design as Windows 8, Outlook.com brings together cloud connected accounts, data, and a familiar email service with a new look. Microsoft is also enabling threaded messaging by default and introducing Skype video web calling.
– Clean and fresh design
– Contact management has been greatly improved with an interface that’s nearly identical in looks and functionality to Windows 8. Outlook.com will import Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, LinkedIn, and CSV contacts and attempt to merge them into single contact cards. This works well for the most part, but there’s also an option to clean up any rogue contacts and merge information easily.
– Is this just a reskin of hotmail, windows live?
– Between now and Christmas Microsoft are refreshing and launching so much. Will it work?
21:19 – Digg Relaunched
– Simpler, cleaner and more visual
– No comments
– Based on facebook likes and tweets
– Still aims to bring you the best of the web
– Fresh start as old site cost about 15-20 times what the new one does
22:24 – Apple buys AuthenTec
– Amid fierce smartphone competition between Samsung and Apple that has spilled into a multinational patent battle, it looks like Apple may have opened yet another front on the M&A side: it is buying mobile security company AuthenTec — which had only just signed a deal with Samsung for Android devices — for $356 million.
– AuthenTec, among other things, makes fingerprint sensor chips that are used for security and identification purposes; these are embedded in computing devices. The news was first reported by Reuters; the full announcement was filed with the SEC.
– Just earlier this month AuthenTec had inked a deal with Samsung to cover security and device management services to cater to the “BYOD” trend — that is, workers taking their own handsets into their enterprise environment. The AuthenTec service would let IT managers quickly secure and authenticate those devices.
– Reuters reported the deal as $356 million — $8 per share of the company. But that’s actually a pretty cheap price, considering that before the company went public it had raised some $600 million (yes, million) in funding.
24:03 – The Lords look forward
– Broadband for all – an alternative vision is the result of a six month inquiry by the Lords communications committee which took in evidence from regulators, technicians and companies ranging from BT to tiny community projects such as Great Asby Broadband in Cumbria.
– And the conclusion is that the government is not being bold enough. The current target of getting speeds of 24Mbps to 90% of the country by 2015 or 2017 – the deadline date is unclear – may assure more bandwidth than most households need today.
– But the rate at which the internet has evolved in the past, with demand doubling every year or two, suggests the average home will need two or three times that speed come 2020.
– To deliver ever faster connections, the Lords committee has concluded that different technologies will be needed than the ones currently being paid for by the government and installed by BT. And it is worried about the final 10% of homes, the hardest to reach in the UK.
– It is far from certain that the government will achieve its target of giving these rural locations a minimum of 2Mbps. And that minimum only just meets the needs of the average household today.
– It will not be enough by 2015 for home workers, or for families raising teenagers doing their homework, watching video and calling friends on Skype.
– The 2Mbps figure was chosen because it is the minimum needed to deliver internet TV, but that is already changing. TalkTalk’s budget YouView internet TV service, launched towards the end of July, will require a minimum 3Mbps connection.
– http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jul/31/digital-television-internet-revolution
– The government should draw up plans to have every channel, including those from the BBC, broadcast over the internet, freeing up the spectrum for other uses such as mobile phones, the House of Lords suggested on Tuesday.
– “Eventually the case for transferring the carriage of broadcast content, including public service broadcasting, from spectrum to the internet altogether will become overwhelming,” the Lords communications committee said in its report on internet infrastructure.

– The recommendation comes months after most of the country’s 26m television households retuned their sets from analogue to digital, with two regions – the north-east and Northern Ireland – due to complete the process by the end of October. Digital switchover increased the number of terrestrial channels from five to 50, but the internet can transmit an unlimited amount of content, at a lower cost.
– However, Britain will need a better broadband network to cope with future technologies, the committee concluded after a wide-ranging, six-month investigation. It raises the alarm over the way Britain’s network is being built, describing government strategy as “flawed” and liable to widen the digital divide between those communities with fast internet access and those living in broadband blackspots.
– “If broadcast services move to be delivered via the internet,” said committee chair Lord Inglewood, “then key moments in national life such as the Olympics could be inaccessible to communities lacking a better communications infrastructure.”
– BT, TalkTalk, Sky and Virgin Media are moving rapidly to connect more television sets to the internet, so that they can offer video on demand as well as conventional TV channels.
– TalkTalk’s YouView box, unveiled last week, offers internet access to libraries of TV series and films for viewing on demand, as well as conventional channels broadcast over the internet rather than through an aerial. BT this summer spent £738m on acquiring Premier League football rights to boost its own internet TV service, BT Vision.
– The committee says the airwaves are better suited to mobile, and their use for TV could be considered “wasteful”. It says the date for a second switchover could be some years away, but recommends that the government, regulators and the industry start planning now.
– “People will perhaps feel fed up, but going from analogue to digital may not be the whole journey,” said Inglewood. “Now we are finding we may go from digital to internet.”
– A broadband connection could become a universal right, he said, as and when all channels including public service broadcasters such as the BBC and ITV are delivered over the web.
– However, services including YouView require a connection of at least 3 megabits per second. With an estimated 14% of UK homes unable to get even 2Mbps, according to telecoms watchdog Ofcom, swaths of the population could be left out of the next phase of the TV revolution. Government targets promise only that everyone will be able to get 2Mbps by 2015, with 90% getting 24Mbps.
– Steve Jobs – “Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”
27:20 – Nokias new product launch
– Digitaloutbox was wrong – we said Nokia was dead but here we go – a new product from out of nowhere
– Nokia is promoting its flagship Lumia with nail polish to match the new pink 900 model. The “Nokia Lumia Pink” polish, designed by Duality Cosmetics, looks to be even more limited than the AT&T-exclusive pink phone itself: it’s only available at one-day pop-up salons in Dallas, Denver, and Los Angeles, where Nicki Minaj nail stylist Kandi Banks will offer pink, possibly phone-themed manicures and pedicures.

Picks
Ian
Mountain Tweaks
– Key features:
– Small app, but extremely powerfull!
– Brand new tweaks!
– Works with both Lion and Mountain Lion
– Free
– Enable Airdrop on old hardware
– Enable colours in the Finder sidebar
– Disable many animations
– Remove Spotlight icon
– Disable gatekeeper
– Highlight non-retina images
– Remove leather from Contacts (ML)
– Remove leather from Calendar (ML)

DigitalOutbox Episode 127

DigitalOutbox Episode 127
DigitalOutbox Episode 127 – Marissa Mayer, Office 13, Apple Woes and don’t criticise the Olympics

Playback
Listen via iTunes
Listen via M4A
Listen via MP3

Shownotes
1:05 – O2 Compensation
– The firm says customers who pay monthly will get back 10% of their July subscription, the equivalent of three days’ charges, applied to their September bill.
– Pay-as-you-go customers will get back 10% on their first top-up in September.
– All customers, even those who were not affected, will also be given a £10 voucher to spend in one of its stores.
2:14 – UK Texts more than Talks
– Mobile voice calls in decline for the first time ever, as more switch to text and online communications
– Newer ways of communicating led by 16-24s, with texting and social networking more frequently used than either phone calls or face to face communications
– The average Briton now sends 50 texts per week
– Two fifths of UK adults now own a smartphone, with the same proportion saying their phone is the most important device for accessing the internet
– Tablet ownership has jumped from 2% to 11% in 12 months
5:29 – Marissa Mayer is Yahoos new CEO
– Marissa Mayer, one of the top executives at Google, will be the next chief of Yahoo, making her one of the most prominent women in Silicon Valley and corporate America.
– The appointment of Ms. Mayer is consider a coup for Yahoo, which has struggled in recent years to attract top talent in its battle with competitors. One of the few public faces of Google, Ms. Mayer, 37, has been responsible for the look and feel of some of the search company’s most popular products.
– The move to Yahoo is an opportunity for Ms. Mayer to step out on her own and claim a bigger stage. Ms. Mayer, an engineer by training whose first job at Google included computer programming, was behind the famously unadorned white search home page and the way users interacted with Gmail, Google News and Google Images. She also sat on Google’s operating committee, part of a small circle of senior executives who had the ear of Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
– Marissa Mayer, the Google (GOOG) executive who today was named Yahoo’s (YHOO) new chief executive, is pregnant.
– Mayer told Fortune exclusively that her first child is due October 7. It’s a boy!
“He’s super-active,” Mayer told me in a phone call tonight, three hours after Yahoo announced her appointment. “He moves around a lot. My doctor says that he takes after his parents.”
– Great move by Yahoo – bold and looks to have put someone in place that will actually do something with the assets they have.
9:29 – Office 2013
– a “modern” version of the software that is used on a billion PCs worldwide. Cloud-connected and designed to work well on Windows 8 tablets, Office 2013 signals a shift to document collaboration and anywhere any device access. Notably, Microsoft is introducing an on-demand subscription version of Office 2013 that can be streamed from any Windows 7 or Windows 8 PC, with the ability to sync settings and documents.
– Perhaps the biggest change to Office 2013 isn’t the way it looks or its features, but rather the way documents are delivered along with some important under-the-hood changes. Microsoft is really pushing the ability to create a Word document on a Windows PC and edit it on a Windows Phone, Windows 8 tablet, or any Windows 7- or Windows 8-based PC with an internet connection. Home users can store documents in Microsoft’s SkyDrive cloud storage and businesses can use a range of the company’s SharePoint offerings. Office 2013’s big innovation is its ability to let users stream a full-featured version of Office to a PC with personal settings intact — an on-demand Office suite whenever you require it.
– Office on demand is a powerful aspect to Microsoft’s Office 2013 subscription offering, providing a way to access a full version of Office wherever you are. The service lets you stream a full-featured Office application to any internet-connected PC running Windows 7 and Windows 8, providing access to the settings and documents you use regularly. Simply put, you can sign in to a streaming version of Office at a friend’s PC and finish a document; the app will then be removed from the PC once it’s closed. This all requires an Office 365 Home Premium subscription, but its ease-of-use makes it a compelling prospect for users who are comfortable using Microsoft’s Office suite and require more document editing functionality than Google Docs or Microsoft’s own Office Web Apps provide. Despite this, you can still opt to simply buy a standalone version of the Office 2013 desktop software and utilize SkyDrive as an online storage hub for documents. You won’t get the streaming Office 2013 apps, but you’ll benefit from the cloud and avoid having to pay a subscription fee.
– Lots of different editions – Office 365, the company’s software plus services platform for Office, will power Office 2013 as a subscription service for those who want to avoid the up-front costs of a perpetual license and take advantage of some of the on-demand features. Available in Home Premium, Small Business Premium, Pro Plus, and Enterprise — Office 365 has a variety of offerings that are flexible based on needs, but like many of its other products there’s still no one size that fits all. The new Home Premium product allows a family to install Office 2013 on up to five PCs and get an additional 20GB of online SkyDrive storage to share documents online. Home Premium includes access to Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, Access, and Publisher through an Internet-connected Windows 7 or Windows 8 PC. Documents and settings, and even the actual apps will roam across whatever PC you choose to use Office 365 with. Other editions, like ProPlus and above, include additional user accounts and access to apps like InfoPath and Lync — designed for businesses. Office 365 will also include access to Office for Mac.
– Metro look and feel – A Touch Mode feature is present in each Office 2013 application, but it does very little. Although hit targets become larger, making it slightly easier to navigate with touch, and it’s easy to navigate or type data in documents, the feature feels a little gimmicky and is hidden away from immediate view.
– Word – open, edit and save pdf’s, embed web video, better layout options
– Outlook sees most improvements, but mostly back end
– OneNote look nice – could be great on a surface device
15:43 – Nokia Woes
– The woes at the Finnish mobile phone company Nokia continue to mount, with further losses in its main division in the second quarter of 2012, and a €220m (£170m) write-off on unsold stock of its smartphones.
– Nokia also admitted its high-profile attempt to break back into the US smartphone market with its new range of Lumia phones, running Microsoft’s Windows Phone software, had led to only about 600,000 sales in the US – down on the 1.5m sold in the same period a year ago when the company was only offering its outdated Symbian software.
– The mobile phone division recorded an operating loss of €474m, its second successive quarter of losses, on revenues down 26% year-on-year to €4.02bn. Overall, the company recorded a loss, including one-off restructuring costs, of €826m compared to a loss of €487m in the same period in 2011. Without the restructuring costs, losses would be €327m.
– Elop said Nokia had delivered 4m Lumia smartphones in the second quarter, and that he expected Microsoft’s launch of the new Windows Phone 8 software in the autumn would be “an important catalyst”.
– Existing Lumia phones won’t run the new Windows Phone 8 software…
18:15 – Man assaulted for wearing digital eye by McDonalds staff
– Steve Mann pioneered and wears a digital eye glass
– Think a more permanently attached Google Glass
– On the evening of 2012 July 1st, my wife and children and I went to McDonalds at 140, Avenue Champs Elysees, Paris, France, after a day of sightseeing (8 museums and other landmark sights, as part of a boat cruise package), and while we were standing in line at McDonalds, I was stopped by a person who subsequently stated that he was a McDonalds employee, and he asked about my eyeglass (digital computer vision system, i.e. EyeTap).
– Because we’d spent the day going to various museums and historical landmark sites guarded by military and police, I had brought with me the letter from my doctor regarding my computer vision eyeglass, along with documentation, etc., although I’d not needed to present any of this at any of the other places I visited (McDonald’s was the only establishement that seemed to have any problem with my eyeglass during our entire 2 week trip).
– Since I happened to have it with me, I showed this doctor’s letter and the documentation to the purported McDonalds employee who had stopped me in the McDonalds line.
– After reviewing the documentation, the purported McDonalds employee accepted me (and my family) as a customer, and left us to place our order. In what follows, I will refer to this person as “Possible Witness 1”.
– We ordered two Ranch Wraps, one burger, and one mango McFlurry, from a cashier who I will refer to as “Possible Witness 2”. My daughter handled the cash to pay Possible Witness 2, as my daughter wanted to practice her French. Possible Witness 2 complimented my daughter on her fluency in French.
Next my family and I seated ourselves in the restaurant right by the entrance, so we could watch people walking along Avenue Champs Elysees while we ate our meal.
– Subsequently another person within McDonalds physically assaulted me, while I was in McDonand’s, eating my McDonand’s Ranch Wrap that I had just purchased at this McDonald’s. He angrily grabbed my eyeglass, and tried to pull it off my head. The eyeglass is permanently attached and does not come off my skull without special tools.
– I tried to calm him down and I showed him the letter from my doctor and the documentation I had brought with me. He (who I will refer to as Perpetrator 1) then brought me to two other persons. He was standing in the middle, right in front of me, and there was another person to my left seated at a table (who I will refer to as Perpetrator 2), and a third person to my right. The third person (who I will refer to as Perpetrator 3) was holding a broom and dustpan, and wearing a shirt with a McDonald’s logo on it. The person in the center (Perpetrator 1) handed the materials I had given him to the person to my left (Perpetrator 2), while the three of them reviewed my doctor’s letter and the documentation.
– After all three of them reviewed this material, and deliberated on it for some time, Perpetrator 2 angrily crumpled and ripped up the letter from my doctor. My other documentation was also destroyed by Perpetrator 1.
– I noticed that Perpetrator 1 was wearing a name tag clipped to his belt. When I looked down at it, he quickly covered it up with his hand, and pulled it off and turned it around so that it was facing inwards, so that only the blank white backside of it was then facing outwards.
– Perpetrator 1 pushed me out the door, onto the street.
– The computerized eyeglass processes imagery using Augmediated Reality, in order to help the wearer see better, and when the computer is damaged, e.g. by falling and hitting the ground (or by a physical assault), buffered pictures for processing remain in its memory, and are not overwritten with new ones by the then non-functioning computer vision system.
– As a result of Perpetrator 1’s actions, therefore images that would not have otherwise been captured were captured. Therefore by damaging the Eye Glass, Perpetrator 1 photographed himself and others within McDonalds.
21:40 – Apple ordered to run Samsung didn’t copy ad’s
– A UK judge has ordered Apple to publish announcements that Samsung did not copy the design of its iPad, according to the Bloomberg news agency.
– It said the judge said one notice should remain on Apple’s website for at least six months, while other adverts should be placed in various newspapers and magazines.
– It follows the US company’s failed attempt to block sales of the South Korean firm’s Galaxy Tab tablets.
– Apple has not commented on the news.
– The order did not feature in Judge Colin Birss’s judgement published on 9 July, but Bloomberg said the matter was discussed in the court following the verdict.
– It said the notices must make reference to the court case and should be designed to “correct the damaging impression” that Samsung’s tablets had aped the look of Apple’s products.
23:08 – Apples in-app purchasing circumvented
– a Russian developer has published a method of obtaining in-app purchases from iOS apps for free. First noticed by Russian blog i-ekb.ru, the “in-app proxy” method does not require a jailbreak, can be completed by novices in three steps using just an iOS device, and allows users to install in-app content for free. The hack also works on all devices running iOS 3.0 to 6.0. We confirmed the method works (at least temporarily), and the published instructions are starting to get attention, so we decided to publish this story as a warning to the Apple developer community.
– The hack appears to come from Russian developer ZonD80 who posted the above video demonstration. ZonD80 also appears to run a website called In-AppStore.com, where donations are being accepted to support the development of the project and help keep servers up and running. The developer explained the three steps of the hack, which include the installation of CA certificate, the installation of in-appstore.com certificate, and the changing of DNS record in Wi-Fi settings. After the quick process, users are presented with the message pictured above when installing in-app purchases, opposed to Apple’s usual purchase confirmation dialog. The fact that this hack is being used to steal in-app purchase content is perhaps just as troubling as the developer’s terms of service. Below is a list of data processed through the devs servers as part of the process (but again, we are imploring readers not to try this):
-restriction level of app
-id of app
-id of version
-guid of your idevice
-quantity of in-app purchase
-offer name of in-app purchase
-language you are using
-identifier of application
-version of application
-your locale
– Developers concerned – in app purchasing is a major source of revenue
– Apple has responded to The Loop regarding the situation with the following statement:
“The security of the App Store is incredibly important to us and the developer community,” Apple representative Natalie Harrison, told The Loop. “We take reports of fraudulent activity very seriously and we are investigating.”
– One of the suggestions for a method by which Apple could improve the security of In App Purchasing was to include a unique identifier in validation receipts, and we’ve received word that developers are now seeing something along those lines coming from receipts issued by Apple since late yesterday. The receipts carry a new field called “unique_identifer” that appears to include the Unique Device Identifier (UDID) for the device making the In App Purchase – 5 days after the above report Apple has updated the purchase process
26:08 – Apple reverses course on EPEAT environmental standard
– Apple has posted a letter from retiring senior VP of hardware engineering Bob Mansfield to its website, walking back the company’s abandonment of the EPEAT certification for its eligible products. Per the letter:
– We’ve recently heard from many loyal Apple customers who were disappointed to learn that we had removed our products from the EPEAT rating system. I recognize that this was a mistake. Starting today, all eligible Apple products are back on EPEAT.
– There’s a corresponding statement from EPEAT president Robert Frisbee on the organization’s site. It was only last week that Apple’s 39 EPEAT-eligible products were pulled from the industry registry at the company’s request.
– As recently as this Tuesday, Apple’s PR team was pointing out that the company’s environmental efforts are continuing and include many areas of progress not covered by the outdated EPEAT standards. It’s likely that the “loyal Apple customers” who raised their concerns with Mansfield and Apple management included many large institutional and government accounts, which may have purchasing rules mandating EPEAT-eligible gear when possible.
– Both Mansfield and Frisbee emphasize that this experience has strengthened the collaborative efforts of Apple and EPEAT, and that Apple’s input will be crucial in evolving the standard to deal with more modern devices.
28:32 – Betaworks Acquires Digg
– Betaworks, the company behind bit.ly, news.me, Chartbeat and a number of other successful products, has acquired the social news site Digg.com for an undisclosed amount. Betaworks’ founder John Borthwick will become the new CEO of Digg. The site’s current CEO Matt Williams will join Andreessen Horowitz as Entrepreneur in Residence after the Betaworks transition is complete. Digg’s founder Kevin Rose joined Google a few months ago after the search engine acquired his latest startup Milk.
– Betaworks promises to turn Digg “back into a startup,” with low budgets, a small team and fast update cycles. None of the remaining Digg employees, it seems, are moving to Betaworks. Instead, the News.me team will take over the management of the site. Betaworks, says Digg, will soon unveil a new “cloud-based version of Digg” that will complement News.me’s iPhone and iPad apps.
– According to Digg’s outgoing CEO Matt Williams, his team “considered many options of where Digg could go, and frankly many of them could not live up to the reason Digg was invented in the first place — to discover the best stuff on the web. We wanted to find a way to take Digg back to its startup roots.” Betaworks says it’s planning to “build Digg for 2012.”
– Update: Rumor has it that the price was just $500k, but that number doesn’t really make a lot of sense, given that the site still gets enough traffic to make more than that in a year by just selling ads. Talking to AllThingsD, Digg CEO Matt Williams confirmed that “the overall consideration is significantly larger” and includes a combination of cash and equity. Another source close to the negotiations tells us that the price was indeed not $500k. We haven’t been able to pinpoint the exact price yet.
31:56 – Now TV Launched
– BSkyB is to launch its internet service Now TV on Tuesday, with the aim of taking on rivals such as Netflix and LoveFilm, offering movies for £15 a month or up to £3.49 per view.
– The service, which will launch this week on PC, Mac and some Android smartphones, will initially only offer Sky Movies content at launch with access to 600 films and 11 channels.
– However a typically aggressive rollout plan will see Sky Sports content including Premier League, cricket, rugby and golf before the end of the year, as well as channels including Sky1, Sky Arts and Sky Atlantic.
– Now TV will be priced at £15 a month for customers who want to access Sky Movies content, with a “pay and play” option of selecting individual films from 99p to £3.49.
– Sky is aiming to break beyond its pay-TV roots and target the 13m UK households who refuse to sign up for what can be costly subscription packages.
– BSkyB has more than 10m pay-TV customers, however the number of new sign ups has dwindled to as low as 15,000 per quarter.
– The launch of Now TV is seen as potentially as important as BSkyB’s move into the broadband market in 2006, a move to protect and grow its business model to tap into shifting consumer viewing habits such as watching TV on mobile and handheld devices.
– “We are targeting the 13m non-pay TV households out there with a no commitment, no contract way of delivering Sky content they want in a dip in and dip out way,” said BSkyB managing director of sales and marketing Stephen van Rooyen. “The whole idea is to have something ‘not Sky’, it is purposely designed to attract new customers.”
– BSkyB intends to roll out the availability of Now TV rapidly to other devices including iPhone, iPad, Microsoft Xbox and Roku, while the company is also in discussions to bring it to the PlayStation 3.
36:04 – You can’t link to Olympics website if you say something mean about them
– For years, we’ve highlighted the overaggressive nature of the Olympics in over-protecting their intellectual property — even to the level of getting host countries to pass special IP laws that only apply to the Olympics. But this sense of ultimate entitlement seems to pervade everything that the Olympics does. It was recently noted that the terms of use for the London 2012 website include a restriction on how you can link to the site:
Links to the Site. You may create your own link to the Site, provided that your link is in a text-only format. You may not use any link to the Site as a method of creating an unauthorised association between an organisation, business, goods or services and London 2012, and agree that no such link shall portray us or any other official London 2012 organisations (or our or their activities, products or services) in a false, misleading, derogatory or otherwise objectionable manner. The use of our logo or any other Olympic or London 2012 Mark(s) as a link to the Site is not permitted. View our guidelines on Use of the Games’ Marks.
– Either way, this claim that you can’t link to their site in a “derogatory or otherwise objectionable manner” has inspired the creativity of the internet, it appears. Specifically, lots of folks have taken to Twitter to share their own derogatory or otherwise objectionable statements along with links to the website.

Picks

DigitalOutbox Episode 114

DigitalOutbox Episode 114
In this episode the team discuss Project Glass, Privacy and Apple woes

Playback
Listen via iTunes
Listen via M4A
Listen via MP3

Shownotes
0:58 – Girls Around Me
– When you load it up, the first thing Girls Around Me does is figure out where you are and load up a Google Map centered around your location.
– It’s when you push the radar button that Girls Around Me does what it says on the tin. I pressed the button for my friends. Immediately, Girls Around Me went into radar mode, and after just a few seconds, the map around us was filled with pictures of girls who were in the neighborhood. Since I was showing off the app on a Saturday night, there were dozens of girls out on the town in our local area.
– These are all girls with publicly visible Facebook profiles who have checked into these locations recently using Foursquare. Girls Around Me then shows you a map where all the girls in your area trackable by Foursquare area. If there’s more than one girl at a location, you see the number of girls there in a red bubble. Click on that, and you can see pictures of all the girls who are at that location at any given time. The pictures you are seeing are their social network profile pictures.”
– Tap on a girl – Girls Around Me quickly loaded up a fullscreen render of her Facebook profile picture. The app then told me where Zoe had last been seen (The Independent) and when (15 minutes ago). A big green button at the bottom reading “Photos & Messaging” just begged to be tapped, and when I did, I was whisked away to Zoe’s Facebook profile.
“Okay, so here’s Zoe. Most of her information is visible, so I now know her full name. I can see at a glance that she’s single, that she is 24, that she went to Stoneham High School and Bunker Hill Community College, that she likes to travel, that her favorite book is Gone With The Wind and her favorite musician is Tori Amos, and that she’s a liberal. I can see the names of her family and friends. I can see her birthday.”
– While the app is bad, this is a wake up call for privacy on social sites
– Data was publicly shared by these girls – du to Foursquare and Facebook allowing friends to sign them in, they might not realise that their friends are sharing their location
– Lot’s of fallout – Foursquare suspended the app’s API access
– Apple then withdrew the app from the app store – actually the app developers did, not because of the -ve publicity but due to the API restrictions. The app no longer worked.
– Developer defends app – it was about venue discovery, not girl discovery – http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/03/31/girls-around-me-developer-defends-app-after-foursquare-dismissal/
4:02 – Govt plans increased email and social media surveillance
– Ministers are to introduce a new law allowing police and security services to extend their monitoring of the public’s email and social media communications, the Home Office has confirmed.
– It is expected that the new system will allow security officials to scrutinise who is talking to whom and exactly when the conversations are taking plac, but not the content of messages.
– Labour tried to introduce a similar system using a central database tracking all phone, text, email and internet use but that was ditched in 2009. It followed concerns raised by internet service providers and mobile phone operators over the project’s feasibility, and anxieties over who would foot the bill.
– The coalition’s proposals are likely to be introduced in the Queen’s speech on 9 May and will centre on internet service providers gathering the information and allowing government intelligence operatives to scrutinise it.
– “It is vital that police and security services are able to obtain communications data in certain circumstances to investigate serious crime and terrorism and to protect the public,” said a Home Office spokesman, who said the plans would be brought forward “as soon as parliamentary time allows”.
– Internet service providers are obliged to keep details of users’ web access, email and internet phone calls for 12 months, under an EU directive from 2009.
– Although the content of the calls is not kept, the sender, recipient, time of communication and geographical location does have to be recorded.
– The proposed new law – which the Home Office says will be brought in “as soon as parliamentary time allows” – would extend those requirements to social networking sites and internet phone services such as Skype.
– It would also reportedly allow intelligence officers to access emails, calls and texts as they happen, without a warrant, rather than retrospectively.
– Overzealous civil servants driving policy?
– Lib dem briefing doc – https://docs.google.com/file/d/1_wMtlFHrktpyOEFSkRSmBnOBPYDkPF6y-gL7Es_h0tu58aPVeHq9p45ulRcX/view?sle=true&pli=1
– Also, Gove fought to keep his e-mails private in early March
– http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17235168
– *** How would this work in practice? What about data that is held on servers overseas? Surely that can’t be part of this?
10:02 – Twitter suing spammers
– Twitter is officially putting its foot down and enlisting the help of the federal courts, filing a suit in San Francisco today against its five most aggressive spammers. In pursuing legal action, Twittersaid in a statement on its blog, it believes it’s going “straight to the source”.
– By shutting down tool providers, we will prevent other spammers from having these services at their disposal. Further, we hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter … While this is an important step, our efforts to combat spam don’t stop here. Our engineering team continues to implement robust technical solutions that help us proactively reduce spam.
– Finally doing something about spam?
– Annoying thing is a spammer is so obvious – why is it down to users to report?
13:29 – Game rescued
– The administrators of Game Group have announced that the 333 of its UK shops that are still open have been sold to OpCapita.
– The agreement will safeguard the jobs of nearly 3,200 Game Group employees. A small number from head office who were previously made redundant may also be re-employed.
– OpCapita is a private investment firm specialising in retail. It has set up a company called Baker Acquisitions to buy the shops.
– Former Halfords Group chief executive David Hamid, now a partner at OpCapita, has been appointed chairman of Game. A chief executive is expected to be named shortly. Ian Shepherd held the role until last week, when he resigned with immediate effect after a two-year battle to turn the company around.
– OpCapita acquired electrical retailer Comet from its owner Kesa Electricals last year for a nominal sum of £2. The financial terms of its Game acquisition have not been disclosed, but it is thought to have paid a nominal sum and taken on the company’s debts.
15:07 – Foxconn audit
– A report into working conditions at Chinese factories operated by anApple supplier has revealed “serious” labour violations, including excessive hours, unpaid wages and major health and safety risks.
– The Fair Labor Association (FLA) said employees at Foxconn, which produces products including iPhones and iPads, typically worked more than 60 hours a week during peak periods but were paid unfair compensation for overtime.
– Around two-thirds of workers told investigators that their take-home pay was insufficient to meet basic needs.
– In addition, 43% said they had witnessed an accident at work, leading to fears of poor safety provisions at the plants.
– The (FLA) was asked by Apple to investigate working conditions at Foxconn after reports of long hours and poor safety.
– The FLA says it has now secured agreements to reduce hours, protect pay, and improve staff representation.
– Apple said it “fully accepted” the report’s recommendations. “We share the FLA’s goal of improving lives and raising the bar for manufacturing companies everywhere,” it said in a statement.
– Of course, some employees aren’t happy with the reduction in money:
-“We are here to work and not to play, so our income is very important,” said Chen Yamei, 25, a Foxconn worker from Hunan who said she had worked at the factory for four years.
“We have just been told that we can only work a maximum of 36 hours a month of overtime. I tell you, a lot of us are unhappy with this. We think that 60 hours of overtime a month would be reasonable and that 36 hours would be too little,” she added. Chen said she now earned a bit over 4,000 yuan a month ($634).
17:58 – iPad Wifi Issues
– Besides the supposed third-generation iPad charging and overheating issues, the iPad WiFi issues were noted by the media during the past couple of weeks. Apple has taken notice and has admitted internally to some new iPad models having the WiFi issues described in numerous reports and on forum threads. The company says “symptoms can include, but are not limited to: intermittent connectivity, slow WiFi speeds, and WiFi network not seen.”

– Apple tells AppleCare employees to ensure that devices they test are not facing these issues due to normal software bugs, but instead because of the actual hardware components.
WiFi-only third-generation iPads are the only devices affected by these issues, according to Apple. The 4G LTE models are presumably safe from these issues due to the extra network power allowed by the black rubber cut on the top of the unit.
19:44 – Mac trojan affects 600000
– Apple released a Java 1.6.0_31 update for OS X on Tuesday that claims to deliver “improved compatibility, security, and reliability.” The patch closes multiple vulnerabilities found in Java 1.6.0_29, the most serious of which allows malicious code to be executed just by visiting a compromised website. The update is available from Software Update on any Mac running Mac OS X v10.6.8, Mac OS X Server v10.6.8, OS X Lion v10.7.3, or Lion Server v10.7.3.
– Russian security firm Doctor Web claims that attackers began to exploit the Java vulnerability on March 16th which Apple closed with the release of the Java update on April 3rd. Dr. Web now estimates that about 600,000 Macs, most of which reside in the US (55 percent) and Canada (19.8 percent), are now infected members of the Flashbackbotnet. The company also notes that some four million compromised web-pages could be found in Google search results at the end of March with some users claiming infection by visiting sites as mainstream as dlink.com.
– Security company F-Secure has instructions for detecting and deleting the Flashback botnet on infected computers.
22:47 – Project Glass
– Glasses not for sale but Google has begun public testing of it’s augmented reality glasses
– The prototype version Google showed off on Wednesday looked like a very polished and well-designed pair of wrap-around glasses with a clear display that sits above the eye. The glasses can stream information to the lenses and allow the wearer to send and receive messages through voice commands. There is also a built-in camera to record video and take pictures.
– This is the future…or is it?
– On sale this year – Google says unlikely
28:06 – HTC One X and S Launched
– O2, Vodafone, Three, Orange, and T-Mobile are all taking orders for the brand new One X and One S Android 4.0 smartphones from HTC. As usual, Three will give you the most for your money, though O2’s new On & On tariff — which the company describes as its best ever — is also worth a look, costing you £36 per month over a two-year contract, but also giving you unlimited minutes and the One X for no upfront cost. Should you be more inclined to buy the handset by itself, Amazon will sell you an unlocked and SIM-free One X for £489.99
– The One X got some great reviews – best phone you can buy today – http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/2/2919202/htc-one-x-review
29:35 – Instagram launches for Android
– The app adds creative, nostalgic filters to your pictures and makes sharing them easy (almost addictive).
– You can add effects to a picture you take with your front or back camera or choose a picture from your gallery. There are a number of custom filters and borders to choose from, including several ’70s effects and a black and white effect. Instantly upload the photo to your Instagram account and share it if you please to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Foursquare; Flickr is in the works.
– 1 million downloads in a day
– Hated the snobs on twitter – oh no – now I need to see android users photos on instagram
– Now I need to see photos from poor people
31:13 – Olympics Overload
– The BBC will make 24-HD quality live Olympic streams available to cable and satellite providers for the duration of the Olympics Games
– Viewers will be able to watch every Olympic sport, live from every venue, via tools such as Sky EPG and BBC Red Button. Virgin Media and Freesat customers will also have access. This complements previously confirmed plans for 24 simultaneous streams live online on the BBC Sport website.
– 48 new channels will be added to the Sports section of Sky’s EPG from July 24. The channels are free-to-air and available to any Sky home. The HD channels are available on any Sky+HD box and do not require a subscription, but do require an HD ready TV.
– Freesat viewers and Freesat standard definition viewers will also have access to the streams.
33:39 – Virgin throttles all users
– Virgin Media has introduced new throttling “trigger levels” for customers who make heavy use of its network.
– The telco updated its subscriber traffic management (STM) policy yesterday to “ensure the vast majority of customers get the high quality of service they expect from Virgin Media’s fibre optic broadband without being negatively affected by extremely heavy users” at peak times.
– It classified a so-called “bandwidth hog” as a 60Mbit/s customer, for example, who can download 5,000MB of data between 4pm and 9pm on a weekday before having their broadband connection throttled.
– A company spokesman told The Register that around 5 per cent of users would be affected by the STM policy. Those punters can expect to see their speed usage of the network temporarily throttled by 50 per cent.
36:03 – 0x10c
– Next game from Minecraft creator Notch
– Space game

Picks
Ian
Hero Academy
– RPG’ish battle between friends
– Like mini chess
– Seems simple but has real depth due to different factions, characters, powers and upgrades
– Multiplayer – play quickly or over a few days like words with friends
– Now universal – lovely lovely graphics
– Free, but in app purchases to unlock other classes