Google faces new EU, US privacy probes

"Regulators in the US and European Union are investigating Google for bypassing the privacy settings of millions of users of Apple's Safari Web browser, according to people familiar with the investigations. Google stopped the practice last month after being contacted by The Wall Street Journal. The investigations - which span U.S. federal and state agencies, as well as a pan - European effort led by France - could embroil Google in years of legal battles and result in hefty fines for privacy violations."

‘This American Life’ retracts episode about Foxconn’s factories

"This American Life has retracted an episode that focused on working conditions inside a Foxconn iPad factory, calling the source material 'partially fabricated'. The episode - the most popular in TAL history with nearly a million streams - was partially based on the work of artist Mike Daisey, who apparently lied to fact-checkers about his experiences visiting Foxconn's facility. Some of the lies were discovered during an interview with Daisey's Chinese translator, who disputed the facts presented in his show and on the air."

US ISPs to launch massive copyright spying scheme July 12

"If you download potentially copyrighted software, videos or music, your Internet service provider has been watching, and they're coming for you. Specifically, they're coming for you on Thursday, July 12. That's the date when the nation's largest ISPs will all voluntarily implement a new anti-piracy plan that will engage network operators in the largest digital spying scheme in history, and see some users' bandwidth completely cut off until they sign an agreement saying they will not download copyrighted materials." One day, years from now, historians are going to debate whether this was the point of no return.

Syllable gets Red/System bindings with C, cURL, SDL, SQLite

Version 0.2.5 of the new Red/System programming language has been released, after it celebrated its first birthday at the third Red Developers Conference. Bindings with the standard C library, cURL, SDL and SQLite that were developed over the past year are now properly supported on Syllable Desktop. Conference videos introduce Red/System and the bindings. Earlier, new floating point support was released (Mandelbrot screenshot; demo source, see the .reds file).

Developing for Windows 8: Photobucket app creators talk Metro

"With Windows 8 and its radically redesigned Metro interface, Microsoft is offering software developers a new set of challenges and opportunities. Rather than reusing tactics from building for previous versions of desktop Windows, developers are creating applications in the style introduced on Windows Phone, and making them work across the larger screens of multitouch tablets and keyboard-and-mouse-driven PCs. With the Windows 8 Consumer Preview out, many developers have already built preview versions of the apps they plan to offer Windows 8 tablet and PC users. We spoke with the creators of Photobucket's Windows 8 application to get their take on the Metro development process."

Arch Linux turns 10

"If you follow Arch Planet, you may have already heard the news that we are celebrating a decade of existence, with the release of 0.1 Homer on March 11, 2002. If you haven't already, grab some birthday cake and head over to Arch Planet to read several developers chronologies and wonderful words of praise for Arch Linux. There is also a brief article from The H Open Source as well as discussion on Reddit. With good fortune and a little luck, hopefully we'll be around to celebrate another 10 years!" Happy decade, Arch! My water cooker just pinged, so I'll drink the next cup of tea in Arch' honour.

Mozilla forced to consider supporting H.264

Ever since it became clear that Google was not going to push WebM as hard as they should have, the day would come that Mozilla would be forced to abandon its ideals because the large technology companies don't care about an open, unencumbered web. No decision has been made just yet, but Mozilla is taking its first strides to adding support for the native H.264 codecs installed on users' mobile systems. See it as a thank you to Mozilla for all they've done for the web.

United, a tech conglomerate can take over Hollywood

By reading various media news in the last year or so, a very disturbing pattern appeared. When media providers like Amazon, Apple, Google, Netfix, Microsoft tried to license content off of Hollywood, they were either given extremely high prices, or they were being rejected altogether. Microsoft even canceled a finished XBoX360-related video product recently because they couldn't license content easily, Netflix is given harder and harder time as time goes by (notice how only a few good movies were added to their streaming service in the last few months), and even the almighty Apple had the door shut on its face numerous times.

“Why I left Google”

"The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus. Technically I suppose Google has always been an advertising company, but for the better part of the last three years, it didn't feel like one. Google was an ad company only in the sense that a good TV show is an ad company: having great content attracts advertisers." Note we're looking at a Microsoft employee. His points still carry some validity, though.

Samsung begins ICS rollout to Galaxy SII

A big day today for 20 million Android users out there: Samsung has started the process of updating the Galaxy SII to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Sadly, only a few European countries and South Korea will get it this week, although you can flash the official ROM yourself if you so desire (like I did today). Sadlier sadly, its TouchWiz is virtually identical to that of Gingerbread. Update: This is what HTC is doing to Ice Cream Sandwich. And I thought TouchWiz was bad. Please... Just - stop. Stop it. Stop doing this. Go away.

ARM announces 32bit 1mm x 1mm CPU

The Cortex -M0+ architecture is designed to provide chip-makers with the means to build microcontrollers that require "ultra low power" but are capable of 32-bit processing. Arm says it went back to the drawing board to create the new processor cores which measure 1mm by 1mm in size. It says the microcontrollers should draw around a third less energy than their predecessors, which only offered 8 and 16-bit capabilities.

How patent monopolies work in reality

"Patent monopolies prevent innovation. It is a system that works against innovations, to protect the current corporations against competition from aggressive, innovative, and competitive upstarts. It allows the big corporations to crush competitive upstarts in the courtroom, rather than having to compete with their products and services." ...which happens to be exactly why the old boys' club of computer technology (Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM) wants to keep it this way. This is not a system for the people, it's a system for huge corporations.

Duqu trojan contains unknown programming language

"And just when you thought the whole Stuxnet/Duqu trojan saga couldn't get any crazier, a security firm who has been analyzing Duqu writes that it employs a programming language that they've never seen before." Pretty crazy, especially when you consider what some think the mystery language looks like "The unknown c++ looks like the older IBM compilers found in OS400 SYS38 and the oldest sys36.The C++ code was used to write the tcp/ip stack for the operating system and all of the communications."

Microsoft creates special application class for Windows 8 browsers

And thus, Microsoft bites itself in its behind with Metro. As you all surely know by now, the Metro environment in Windows 8, and its accompanying applications, need to follow a relatively strict set of rules and regulations, much like, say, applications on iOS. For one type of application, Metro has already proven to be too restrictive and limited: web browsers. Microsoft has had to define a separate application class - aside from Metro and desktop applications - just to make third party web browsers possible for Windows 8.

Linux gets bigger shield against patent attacks

The open source community should feel a little safer from software patent attacks, writes InfoWorld's Simon Phipps. "The Open Invention Network, a consortium of Linux contributors formed as a self-defense against software patents, has extended the definition of Linux so that a whopping 700 new software packages are covered, including many developer favorites. Just one hitch: The new definition also includes carve-outs that put all Linux developers on notice that Phillips and Sony reserve the right to sue over virtualization, search, user interfaces, and more."