In the News Archive

"Over half of PC users worldwide have admitted to using pirate software last year, according to a study by the trade group Business Software Alliance. BSA's ninth annual Global Software Piracy Study has shown a sharp increase in software piracy, especially among emerging economies. In the UK, more than one in four programs users installed in 2011 were unlicensed." If people decide en masse not to adhere to a law, said law is worth about as much as the paper it's written on. Laws become functional not because of the Queen's signature, but because the people decide to adhere to it. It's becoming ever clearer that as far as digital goods go, the law is not functional - for better or worse.

"The FBI is asking Internet companies not to oppose a controversial proposal that would require firms, including Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, to build in backdoors for government surveillance. In meetings with industry representatives, the White House, and U.S. senators, senior FBI officials argue the dramatic shift in communication from the telephone system to the Internet has made it far more difficult for agents to wiretap Americans suspected of illegal activities, CNET has learned. The FBI general counsel's office has drafted a proposed law that the bureau claims is the best solution: requiring that social-networking Web sites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and Web e-mail alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly." I no longer know what to say. You will be monitored by The State. If you oppose such monitoring, you're a terrorist.

"Sir Jonathan Ive has been crowned British Visionary Innovator in a competition, run by the Intellectual Property Office. Ive won by a large margin with almost fifty per cent of the vote (46.6%). In second place was Sir Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the world wide web) with 18.8 per cent of the vote. James Goodfellow OBE (the inventor of PIN technology and the cash machine) was in third place with 15.2 per cent of the vote." Alan Turing was also nominated. If you ever needed an illustration of everything that's wrong with the technology industry today, it's this. Guy who designs the exterior of mass-market gadgets wins over guys who actually really contributed to technology. Telling.

"A newly unveiled company with some high-profile backers - including filmmaker James Cameron and Google co-founder Larry Page - is set to announce plans to mine near-Earth asteroids for resources such as precious metals and water." Amazingly cool. Even if it never makes a dime of money, at least these people are contributing to space exploration now that the US has pretty much cut NASA to death. Come to think of it, it's pretty sad we've been relying on a single government for much of our space exploration.

"Florian Mueller has confessed - in the interests of being 'transparent', he says - that Oracle has hired him, for his analysis of FRAND issues. I know. You are shocked, shocked. Who'd have ever guessed? We did. Groklaw did. We get suspicious when someone's 'analysis' is uniformly that Google is doomed. It's my Spidey sense. And it's usually on the money, as they say." We've had a no-link policy in place for Mueller from back when everybody else was still citing him as a trustworthy, independent analyst. My own senses told me otherwise, and I was right. Paint me red, girl scout, etc. etc.

"The pitch is as simple as it is universal: you only need one account (with us!) and you'll have all your digital needs taken care of. That's the goal Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Sony - to varying degrees and using strikingly divergent strategies - are all trying to accomplish. As a group, they're just a selection of the vast hordes of service providers looking to expand their ecosystems and monopolize your time (see the efforts of Evernote, Spotify, and Zynga), but they're also the only ones big and influential enough to actually fulfill that aspiration. My aim today will be to compare, in terms of features and approach, the 'access-everything' accounts on offer from those six biggest companies. Does Google+ let you do more than Facebook? Can the Sony Entertainment Network match wits with Microsoft's Live services? Let's find out."

"Modern science relies upon researchers sharing their work so that their peers can check and verify success or failure. But most scientists still don't share one crucial piece of information - the source codes of the computer programs driving much of today's scientific progress." Pretty crazy this isn't the norm yet.

Six-month-old web site Codecademy claims you can learn programming through its online tutorials. The free modules on JavaScript are now available. The site also allows anyone to post their own programming courses. The site has good funding, but question is: can you really learn programming this way? One blogger enthuses that Codecademy's approach "looks like the future of learning to me," while another slams it saying "Seriously? Wow, bull**** badging and sh**ty pedagogy wins the day in ed-tech investing." What do you think?

"Sony forecast a record $6.4 billion net loss for the business year just ended, double earlier forecasts and a fourth straight year of losses, inflated by writing off deferred tax assets in the United States." Cry me river, Sony. You wasted my favourite format of all time (MiniDisc), so I consider this proof there might actually be a god after all - and she really likes doling out karma.

"Ferdinand A. Porsche, who designed the original Porsche 911, the snazzy, powerful sports car that became the lasting signature of the German automobile company founded by his grandfather and later run by his father, died on Thursday in Salzburg, Austria. He was 76." I believe only Italians can design beautiful cars (I mean, game over, kids), but there's no denying that the 911 is a true icon. Cars technically don't have a place on OSNews, but Ferdinand Porsche's passing cannot go by unmentioned.

A few months ago, I wrote an article about comments, in which I said, among others things, that Twitter can never replace comments because not only is it effectively a one-to-one communication channel, Twitter messages are also far too short to foster any form of coherent conversation. Over the weekend, a silly link-bait story illustrated my point perfectly.

Rob Schmitz, the Marketplace reporter who uncovered Daisey's lies, stated: "What makes this a little complicated is that the things Daisey lied about seeing are things that have actually happened in China: Workers making Apple products have been poisoned by Hexane. Apple's own audits show that the company has caught underage workers at a handful of its suppliers. These things are rare, but together, they form an easy-to-understand narrative about Apple." It's what I'm already seeing in the Apple-verse (and beyond): the actual issues that have truly and honestly happened are being shuffled under the carpet because some no-name dude I'd never heard of lied, as yet another way to soothe people's conscience. The west is exploiting workers in the east for a few percentages of profit margins. This is a reality, whether some dude lied about it or not.

While there are some upsides to closed application stores like the App Store, they're not a universally good thing. The story of Bryan Lunduke is an example of what happens when you depend on a company, but a company does not depend on you.

I ran across a business news story about Yahoo's impending layoffs today, and if you're a deep-into-the-internet person like me, it certainly comes as no surprise to read yet again that Yahoo is on the skids. In fact, you're more likely to be surprised to learn that Yahoo has more than 14,000 employees and made something like $6 billion in revenue last year. Yahoo ceased to be relevant a long time ago, and even the Yahoo services that still get some love, like Flickr, seem to be tainted by association. But the question I asked myself when I read the article was, "why didn't Yahoo become a technology leader?"