OSNews

Well, this is good news. "Germany will not sign an international anti-piracy treaty, despite having already agreed to it in principal, government sources in Berlin said Friday, February 10." with Germany on the side of reason - for now - we're a huge step closer to stopping ACTA.

"Like any space opera, the story of information technology is a very simple one. It is played out in a myriad of different ways by a revolving cast of characters, but it always has its loveable heroes, its predictably nefarious villains, innocent civilians to be saved, and bumbling bureaucrats that aren't inherently evil, but begin every story aiding the forces of darkness out of a misplaced belief they are preserving law and order in their corner of the galaxy." He might use Star Wars as an analogy (I strongly dislike Star Wars - Trekkie here), but it sums up very well how I feel about computing today.

"Microsoft revealed today that it plans to launch the highly anticipated 'Consumer Preview' version of Windows 8 on February 29th. The company will hold an event at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on February 29th to launch the Windows 8 Consumer Preview between 3PM and 5PM (CET)." Still haven't seen any indication they've addressed the core issues with Metro (no window management, no real applications). If they don't, this release will be entirely useless to anyone who uses computers beyond Facebook, weather applications, and Twitter.

"People who have the latest Symbian Nokia smartphones can now update them to Nokia Belle - bringing a fresh look to their screens thanks to the latest user interface. Once you have installed Nokia Belle you will still have the same phone, but it will feel like new, with improved performance." Love the version name.

Let this be a lesson. After posts by John Gruber and Shawn King, this happened to Violet Blue. "The misinformation gave a significant number of people fuel to stalk me, attack me for hours at a time, malign, insult me in disgusting ways, threaten me with weapon-specific violent death (an axe), and lead social media attempts to force me to lose my job over the matter. Many referenced John Gruber, and/or his post as they did this. Plans were openly made to make media to attack me - another Angry Mac Bastards podcast." Disgusting story, and sadly enough, this isn't the first time this has happened, as Blue notes in her article. I don't like talking about these matters (you don't want to know the kind of crap that gets thrown my way at times), but I can assure you my inbox has seen its share of pure vitriol after Gruber links to an OSNews piece. It ain't pretty.

"As an industry trend, advancement in heterogeneous hardware has progressed at a rapid pace. This in turn has fueled developer desire to target such hardware for accelerated computation, necessitating a significant step forward in programming models to enable such practices. C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (C++ AMP) is a new technology implemented in Visual Studio 11 that helps C++ developers use accelerators such as the GPU for parallel programming."

It would seem that freedom of speech and the open web are in better hands in Eastern Europe than they are in Western Europe. After Poland, the Czech Republic is the second country to suspend the process of ratifying ACTA. "A wave of protests against the international agreement, including hackers' attacks, has swollen in the world as well as in the Czech Republic. 'By no means would the government admit a situation where civic freedoms and free access to information would be threatened,' [Czech PM] Necas said." Anyone from either Poland or the Czech Republic care to comment on how serious we have to take their politicians? If a Dutch or an American politician said something like this, I'd be weary and mistrusting.

"A group of European regulators has written to Google calling on it to halt the introduction of its new privacy policy, saying it needs to investigate whether the proposals sufficiently protect users' personal data." I'd rather regulators are on top of this now than when it's too late and we're all plugged into the Google Hivemind Overlord.

"Google has added an automated scanning process that is designed to keep malicious apps out of the Android Market , the company announced today. The new service, code-named 'Bouncer', scans apps for known malware, spyware, and Trojans, and looks for suspicious behaviors and compares them against previously analyzed apps. Every app is then run on Google's cloud infrastructure to simulate how the software would operate on an Android device, he said. Existing apps are continuously analyzed, too."

So, this is apparently a big thing, but because of my perpetual state of total boredom with regards to social networking, I really don't have the will to turn this into a proper item. So, here you go: Facebook is doing its IPO thing. Eh. In any case, lots of new rich people. Maybe the wealth will trickle down this time.