Like LG, Sony's smartphone division is now also doing quite well:

The common parlance that only Samsung is profiting off Android is, as I've said before, simply no longer true. All it took for companies like LG and Sony to become profitable with Android is to, you know, stop making crap phones, and start producing good ones.

Shocker.

From The Guardian:

This is not PRISM - but a different system. The slides are damning, as always.

It validates claims made by Edward Snowden, and makes it clear that US government officials have been lying all along. There's no court order required for any of this - in a supposedly modern democracy. Crazy.

"In the net neutrality vision of the world, broadband providers simply deliver packets as they are paid to do. When it was just a set of online services, Google happened to fall on the side of citizens and used to advocate against broadband companies controlling the pipes. Now that it’s an ISP itself, Google is becoming a net neutrality hypocrite." This is why trusting companies - any company - is simply a bad idea. Companies don't care about you, and those that say they do are liars.

Other than reports that the Android 4.3 update has improved performance on the Nexus 7, Google seems to have addressed the performance degradation issue as well. "It appears that Google has fixed the performance degradation problem with the Nexus 7 by finally adding TRIM support in Android 4.3 (which also applies to all devices that have been upgraded, though I never had any performance issues with my Nexus 4), as noticed by Brian Klug at Anandtech. This means, in theory, that performance on the device should remain usable, even as time goes on and I continue to use my tablet to do all of the things it was designed for. I'll be watching it closely (and probably be very vocal about it if performance drops off a cliff as it did before), but I actually have a usable tablet once again, and I didn't have to shell out upwards of $200 again to get there." My Nexus 7 feels like new now that I've wiped my custom ROM and installed stock 4.3. I'm skeptical about whether or not Google has managed to solve the performance loss over time though, since it seems to be caused by low-quality NAND, and not by software.

Nokia's vice president Bryan Biniak: "We are trying to evolve the cultural thinking to say 'time is of the essence'. Waiting until the end of your fiscal year when you need to close your targets, doesn't do us any good when I have phones to sell today." Later Biniak adds: "As a company we don't want to rely on somebody else and sit and wait for them to get it right." There was a simple solution to this problem.

"In the longer term, most Razor-qt components will fully be integrated into the LXDE-Qt and both teams will focus on the same project. Looking further ahead, the GTK version of LXDE will be dropped and all efforts will be focused on the Qt port. We, the main developers and administrators of the projects, will try to figure out where we align and where we have differences to grind out."

"The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Infrastructure and Communications today released its report on IT pricing in Australia, making 10 recommendations and concluding that the long-discussed 'Australia tax' is real." One of the recommendations is to make geo-blocking circumvention legal - and as a last resort, the committee recommends the government to make geo-blocking illegal altogether. Pretty strong language.

"The Super Game Boy is probably the coolest piece of video game hardware in existence. It's also probably the biggest wasted opportunity in video games. It's been pretty much entirely forgotten about now, because - as is pretty common with neat hardware made by Nintendo - very, VERY few games ever really took advantage of it at all. And it's a shame, because the unique visual style of Super Game Boy-compatible games, in addition to just looking really neat, can teach a lot about effectively using colour in games. The ones that do work exist in a really bizarre stylistic place."

Windows NT turned 20 years old today. From a 1998 story about NT, written by Mark Russinovich, "I'll take you on a short tour of NT's lineage, which leads back to Digital and its VMS OS. Most of NT's lead developers, including VMS's chief architect, came from Digital, and their background heavily influenced NT's development. After I talk about NT's roots, I'll discuss the more-than-coincidental similarities between NT and VMS, and how Digital reacted to NT's release."

"StatCounter's latest Internet Wars Report found that, in the month of June, Samsung devices accounted for 25.43 percent of smartphone Internet usage, compared to 25.09 for Apple's iPhone devices. Samsung has moved into the leadership position in smartphone web use over the course of the last year, which has seen the South Korean tech giant's share grow from 19.46 percent just 12 months ago." Android sales outpacing everything else is starting to show up in usage statistics.

"In smartphones, it's not all about Apple and Samsung anymore. For several years, these two companies have dominated the mobile phone-making business, successively one-upping each other with ever sleeker, more technologically sophisticated iPhones and Galaxy handsets that left would-be rivals grasping. But now the competition is stirring, and consumers are giving another look to brands they once ignored." Not only is Samsung now more profitable in mobile than Apple (next goalpost please), smaller Android manufacturers, such as LG, ZTE, and Lenovo, are making huge inroads, and are raking in growing profits - in fact, these three now belong to the top 5 mobile device makers. The common parlance that only Samsung is making a profit off Android is simply no longer true.

"The pornography filtering system praised by David Cameron is controlled by the controversial Chinese company Huawei, the BBC has learned. UK-based employees at the firm are able to decide which sites TalkTalk's net filtering service blocks." The irony. It hurts.

"Forth is a simple, natural computer language. It has achieved remarkable acceptance where efficiency is valued. It evolved in the 1960s on a journey from university through business to laboratory. This is the story of how a simple interpreter expanded its abilities to become a complete programming language/operating system."

"The U.S. government has attempted to obtain the master encryption keys that Internet companies use to shield millions of users' private Web communications from eavesdropping. These demands for master encryption keys, which have not been disclosed previously, represent a technological escalation in the clandestine methods that the FBI and the National Security Agency employ when conducting electronic surveillance against Internet users." Well. "And where once you had the freedom to object, think, and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillence coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission." When quoting a work of fiction befits the state of reality better than reality itself, shit has officially hit the fan.