Monthly Archive:: May 2012

Google’s problem is that it now believes itself above others

  Submitted by bowkota Google 26 Comments
"It's never the offence; it's the cover-up. And if there's one thing that the last few years have taught us, it's that the suggestion of a 'rogue' worker having acted alone to do something which led to an intrusion is never correct. There has to be a failure of management oversight as well. That's why Google is in such hot water now over the revelations contained in the Federal Communications Commission report into what went wrong with its Street View Wi-Fi data collection program." What a total and utter surprise: company does bad stuff, tries to cover it up. Sometimes I think I'm the only person in the world who grasps that companies - they are not to be trusted. This really isn't rocket science, people.
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Motorola wins Xbox, Windows 7 ban in Germany over H264 patents

Legal 69 Comments
"Motorola Mobility has been granted an injunction against the distribution of key Microsoft products in Germany. The sales ban covers the Xbox 360 games console, Windows 7 system software, Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. It follows a ruling that Microsoft had infringed two patents necessary to offer H.264 video coding and playback." But... But... The MPEG-LA, Apple, and Microsoft have been lying to us all this time about the safety of using H264 over WebM, with their supporters blindly parroting the party line? This surprises me greatly and deeply, and I dare say I have not seen this coming at all. Not at all. No sir. Not at all.
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Apple rejecting applications that use Dropbox

Apple 17 Comments
Apple is rejecting applications that use Dropbox because if the user of such an application does not have the actual Dropbox application installed, he is presented with a Dropbox login form through Safari, which happens to also show a sign-up link, and after clicking on that sign-up link, users could potentially run into one of the paid Dropbox options. Application developers and users surprised by this may need to read about the frog and the scorpion.
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Android ported to C#

Mono 53 Comments
Wow. "One crazy idea that the team had at that dinner was to translate Android's source code to C#. Android would benefit from C# performance features like structures, P/Invoke, real generics and our more mature runtime. We decided it was crazy enough to try. So we started a small skunkworks project with the goal of doing a machine translation of Android from Java to C#. We called this project XobotOS." Most of Android's layouts and controls are now in C#. The small benchmark is stunning, but as much as I admire the work, I'm wondering that this like going from bad to worse - from Oracle's Java to Microsoft's C#.
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US piracy watch list: ‘stop being poor’

Legal 25 Comments
The US Trade Representative has released its Special 301 Report again, the document the US government uses to mafia poor countries (and Canada) into enacting stricter IP laws. "Perhaps the most shameful inclusion in this year's report are a series of countries whose primarily fault is being poor. Moreover, with repeated complaints against countries seeking to ensure adequate access to medicines for their citizens or access to books in schools, this year's report hits a new low. It demonstrates the failure of the enforcement agenda and stands as an embarrassment for one of the world's richest countries to prioritize its IP rights over human and economic rights in the developing world." Infuriating. And people wonder why I consider the current IP legislation and lobby entirely unethical and strictly evil.
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Tizen 1.0 Larkspur SDK, source code release

Wireless 11 Comments
"Today we are excited to announce Tizen 1.0 Larkspur, including the addition of new complimentary components, as well as source code that focuses on enhancing stability and performance. We believe that these updates and new offerings improve the experience for developers. We are also continuing to work on improvements and additions, and we will be doing frequent updates to the SDK and source code. There are a few additional components that we plan to add in the coming weeks, and we will continue to fix bugs and add additional features."
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Facebook launches organ donor feature

Internet 22 Comments
"Starting today, users in the United States and UK will be able to add that they're organ donors to their Timelines, and if they're not organ donors, they can find links to official organ donation registries and instantly enroll." A commendable effort, but for some reason, I find it quite creepy, too. What if you leave your Facebook open and someone enlists you? On a related note - if you're not registered as a donor yet, please consider doing so. It might save someone's life.
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Microsoft details improvements to Windows Phone Marketplace

Windows 14 Comments
Microsoft has detailed some of its new policies to improve the Windows Phone Marketplace, and this one, about possibly sexual content, stood out to me: "We think the right solution is (a) to be transparent about what's acceptable and (b) to show the right merchandise to the right customer in the right place. Our content policies are clearly spelled out: we don't allow apps containing 'sexually suggestive or provocative' images or content. What we do permit is the kind of content you occasionally see on prime-time TV or the pages of a magazine's swimsuit issue." This is one of my major issues with application stores: American values are archaic and puritan compared to where I'm from, but the application stores we use are still subject to them. I wonder if two kissing men are considered to be "sexually suggestive", "provocative", "racy", or "inappropriate" by American standards.
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