● 08.15.10

● Links 15/8/2010: Dell Streak Catchup and Misc. News

Posted in News Roundup at 4:33 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Older versions of Android OS used to have voice actions but not as powerful as this one this applications is totally awesome.

• In contrast, because Android phones are available on dozens of devices, from four different carriers, with relatively permissive app store policies, its platform is much more resilient. It’s not a big deal if one hardware vendor produces a dud because there are lots of other phones to choose from. Google doesn’t care which wireless carriers do well since they’re all selling Android phones.

• BEANCOUNTERS and spreadsheet jockeys at Isuppli are predicting that Google’s Android OS will take the lion’s share of the mobile market by 2012.

• The Dell Streak launches Friday, priced at $550 without a contract and $300 with a voice and data plan from AT&T. Depending on whether you opt for voice coverage, the 5-inch device is either a massive smartphone or a tiny tablet.

• Android users lucky enough to get a Froyo upgrade have been busy talking to their telephones, as Google adds voice commands to its platform.

• Users downloading the latest update to Android, version 2.2 codenamed Froyo (following Google’s alphabetically-ordered-snacks naming system), are finding that if they’re all alone then they can always speak to their phones.

• Android has sported search by voice for a while now. Just tap the screen and say something, your handset will spend a moment thinking and then perform an internet search for something that sounds similar, which might even be the thing you were looking for.

• OK let’s shake off the gloom and get on to the good news. First, Dell is finally releasing the Streak in the US. I really mean it this time! Dell says it’ll be on sale tomorrow. $299 with a two year contract, Android 1.6 and 5″ display.

• Tesltra and HTC have partnered to offer the first pre-paid Android-based mobile handset, the HTC Wildfire, to the local market at a street price of $349.

Free Software/Open Source

SaaS

Project Releases

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

Leftovers

• Late next year, you’ll be able to buy your own flying car — er, “roadable aircraft” — thanks to a thumbs-up from the Federal Aviation Administration. As long as you have $194,000 and a sport pilot license.

Security/Aggression

• Sealtiel Chacon Zepeda was standing at a Fred Meyer sales register spending a gift card when curiosity struck.

• He wondered how gift cards worked, how the little magnetic strip on the back of them turned cash into store credit and how easily he could reproduce the information stored on the card.

• Russia and the US exchanged 14 agents at Vienna Airport in the biggest spy exchange since the end of the Cold War.

• The woman created a fraudulent Gmail account to fool school authorities at the “outstanding” Coleridge primary school in Crouch End, London.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Alex has similarly argued that geo-engineering is a form of greenwashing in this post.

• Ever wish you had all the top climate information at your fingertips? If you’re the owner of a smart phone, then your wish has been fulfilled: the “Skeptical Science” app for iphones, Android phones, and Nokia phones is available now (for free!).

• We have a full crew and a pretty big campaign team on board with people from all over the globe including Argentina, Panama, India, Australia, Sweden, Germany, UK, Netherlands, Finland, Italy, Ukraine, the Cook Islands and Bermuda. I’ll introduce you to various members of the crew throughout our journey and there will be opportunities for you to talk directly with them via twitter and maybe even live video if our satellite system is up for it. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

• An Iranian official said Thursday that the country is ready to launch its first Bushehr nuclear power plant, the official IRNA news agency reported. Chief of Bushehr nuclear power plant workshop, Mahmoud Jafari, said in Bushehr that the main tests and inspections of the power plant have been successfully carried out during the last six months, the report said. Double-checks, “installations and montage stage is completed and we are about to launch the power plant,” Jafari was quoted as saying without referring to the specific time. In July, Sergei Kiriyenko, head of Russia’s state-run atomic energy corporation Rosatom, said that preparations for the launch of Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant are proceeding as scheduled and the plant’s first stage will be finished late August. Iran handed over the Bushehr project, started by German firm Siemens in the 1970s, to Russia in 1995. The launch of project has been postponed repeatedly in recent years.’

• While the Senate, the White House, and delegates in Bonn at the international climate negotiations dither, Mother Nature keeps the hits coming. Russia is of course baking in record heat and now the Petermann Glacier in northern Greenland has lost an iceberg of 87 square kilometers in size. For scale, the ice sheet is said to be 4 times the size of Manhattan.

• A security contractor who was once responsible for keeping reporters away from cleanup workers is now coming forward to blow the whistle on BP.

• Adam Dillon claims he was fired by the oil company after he took pictures showing how dispersants were being used in the Gulf.

• BP agreed to pay a record 50.6 million dollar fine for safety violations at its troubled Texas City refinery, officials said in a settlement which could deepen the energy giant’s legal woes.

• With just two phone calls, entrant Josh Michaels managed to dupe a computer support employee at BP into spilling details that could have proved crucial in launching a network attack against the global oil company. The information included what model laptops BP used and the specific operating system, browser, anti-virus and virtual private network software the company used.

• Michaels was also able to trick the employee into visiting Social-Engineer.org, a feat that won the contestant extra points.

• Temperatures warmer than average spread throughout the globe in recent months, most prominently in Peru, in the central and eastern United States and in eastern and western Asia, according to NOAA.

• An EU Climate Exchange website was hacked as part of a political protest against carbon credits by a green-hat defacement crew.

• We’ve known for a while that we are poisoning the oceans and that human emissions of carbon dioxide, left unchecked, would likely have devastating consequences. A 2010 study found that oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred.

Finance

• This time around I learned something even more interesting from Liar’s Poker: the most important thing for a young Wall Street trader to learn (from the perspective of the firm’s ‘mentors’) was how to take advantage of the firm’s customers. You see the greatest market inefficiency turns out to be trust. Anyone who went to a large Wall Street firm like Salomon Brothers in 1985 seeking financial advice was pretty much like an African wildebeest without the ability to smell lions.

• If you happen to have a copy of Liar’s Poker on your Kindle I would direct you to location 2954 – 3060 (about 65% of the way through the book). This is where Lewis describes his first experience “helping” a customer. He was set up by people within Salomon Brothers to push bonds that were likely to devalue, which caused his first (and very trusting) customer to lose so much money that he was soon fired from his nice job. Why would some trader at Solomon Brothers push bonds on a customer that were likely to devalue? Because Solomon Brothers owned the bonds and needed to get rid of them before they devalued more than they had already.

• Do you sense a conflict of interest? Yes, and so did Lewis (only because he was a newbie). When Lewis found out he had been used he confronted the trader who had set him up. Instead of being sheepish, the trader responded harshly to Lewis: “‘Look,’ he said losing his patience,’who do you work for, this guy, or Solomon Brothers?’” In other words, internally, the traders and managers didn’t even pretend that they were supposed to serving their customers.

• The number of jobs advertised in the public sector has fallen 21 per cent since the last survey in March. But contracting jobs for local and central government IT departments is still a strong sector and places more adverts than any others except for finance.

• Geithner defends tax policy; Argues extending cuts for rich would be ‘deeply irresponsible’

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Customer review sites are a useful way to find out about products and services, and for the businesses themselves they can be a valuable source of publicity. But a number of spam reviews sweeping the web are damaging local firms who depend on them to help make or break their reputation.

• Ricky Bess spends eight hours a day in front of a computer near Orlando, Fla., viewing some of the worst depravities harbored on the Internet. He has seen photographs of graphic gang killings, animal abuse and twisted forms of pornography. One recent sighting was a photo of two teenage boys gleefully pointing guns at another boy, who is crying.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Research In Motion has promised India a technical solution for decoding encrypted BlackBerry data, a senior official said on Friday, a step that could allay Indian security concerns about the smartphone and avert a shutdown.

• Google said Tuesday it would allow Germans to opt out of its disputed Street View navigation service ahead of its launch in the country this year but privacy watchdogs were still not happy.

• The move is part of an effort to placate German authorities, who have serious concerns about the service that allows users to view online panoramic still photos at street level taken using specially equipped vehicles.

• A lawsuit filed in federal court last week alleges that a group of well-known Web sites, including those owned by Disney, Warner Bros. Records, and Demand Media, broke the law by secretly tracking the Web movements of their users, including children.

• While in Berlin for the LinuxTag 2010 conference a couple of months ago, I took the opportunity for a 8-mile long meandering walk across the city, from Warschauer Strasse and the East Side Gallery to Wittenbergplatz and KaDeWe, taking in the various historical sites along the way. It was a great refresher course in 20th century European history. I especially enjoyed the free outdoor exhibit in Alexanderplatz, which dealt with the Revolutions of 1989 with a focus on the various dissident movements and publications in the DDR. Most were self-published, stealthily distributed samizdat newletters, copied laboriously using typewriters and carbon paper, primitive printing presses, or toward the end, some personal computers smuggled in from the West. They had on display an Amiga 500 and an NEC Pinwriter P6 used in 1989. Through “advanced” technology like this, document production could be raised from a few hundred to tens of thousands of copies.

• [...]

• I strongly believe that the capability for citizens to dissent is an essential complement to fallible leadership. And all leadership is fallible. Without such capabilities, transitions of power may be less frequent, but they also may be far bloodier.

• Life is about to become more difficult for countries trying to censor access to foreign websites. A system dubbed Collage will allow users in these countries to download stories from blocked sites while visiting seemingly uncontroversial sites such as Flickr.

• Collage relies on a well-established technique known as digital steganography, in which an image file is changed to encode the hidden message without obviously affecting the appearance of the image. A prototype version is due to be unveiled on Friday, 13 August.

• Steganography normally requires specialist software, but Collage is designed so that anti-censorship activists and readers can publish and download the hidden stories without any specialist skills. A publisher or activist can, for example, use Collage to copy news stories from a website and embed the articles into Flickr images in a process that is almost entirely automated.

• A legal challenge has been launched in the US against a number of websites amid claims that they were engaged in “covert surveillance” of users.

• The lawsuit alleges that a number of firms, including Hulu, MTV, and Myspace, used a Quantcast Flash application to restore deleted cookies.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Earlier this week, Google and Verizon brokered a compromise on the definition — or at least, their definition — of net neutrality, a set of rules that ideally, would ensure that no company could place data-access restrictions on Web content, sites, platforms, and associated equipment. The deal itself sparked controversy over whose interests Google (GOOG) and Verizon (VZ) really had at heart and whether the deal would — or more importantly, should — be used as a model by the Federal Communications Commission.

• What if Google agreed to Verizon’s stance on wireless net neutrality in order to keep Verizon from making a deal with Apple for the iPhone?

• Rumors about Verizon and the iPhone are evergreens, and now that the iPhone 4 hype is dying down, those rumors are starting up again. Coincidental timing of “Huge CDMA chipset order” rumors and this net neutrality piece shouldn’t be anything other than coincidental.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Almost 1½ years have passed since we launched CC0 v1.0, our public domain waiver that allows rights holders to place a work as nearly as possible into the public domain, worldwide, prior to the expiration of copyright. CC0 has proven a valuable tool for governments, scientists, data providers, providers of bibliographic data, and many others throughout world. At the time we published CC0, we made note of a second public domain tool under development — a tool that would make it easy for people to tag and find content already in the public domain.

• A Los Angeles journalist who was accused of leaking confidential court documents from his lawsuit against YouTube has abandoned his suit and has agreed to pay $20,000 to the video-sharing site.

• New Jersey will have to pay the legal fees for a music promoter that sued the state to stop it from enforcing its “truth-in-music” law.

• The law change was discussed on Micheal Geist’s blog at the end of last week, where Geist, who is a Canadian law professor, said that it “Establishes equivalent penalties for hindering or preventing the users from exercising their fair dealing rights. In other words, the Brazilian proposals recognise what the Supreme Court of Canada stated several years ago – over-protection is just as harmful as under-protection.”

• “Our application to register is before the Australian Electoral Commission, however a party cannot be registered once an election has been called,” the party said in a statement over the weekend. Prime Minister Julia Gillard has called the next Federal election for August 21.

Clip of the DayRichard M. Stallman Jan 07 2001 Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

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