Monthly Archive:: March 2012

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.

Notorious competition law offender Microsoft has asked the EU's competition department to look into Motorola's behavior regarding patent licences vital for h.264 video. Microsoft complains that Motorola doesn't play by the usual rules and wants to decide by itself how much they want to charge for patents it owns. According to Microsoft, acceptable behavior for patent owners is to licence patens vital for industry standards at rates of single-digits-cents per device and ask for double-digits-cent amounts only for patents not necessary for implementing such standards. Since according to Microsoft's complaints at least some of the patents abused that way are related to h.264 video encoding/decoding, one has to wonder how much MPEG LA's ensurance of patent safety is now worth.

This past week and this weekend I've finally found the time to enter into the colorful world of custom Android ROMs. After figuring out just how insanely great and awesome ClockWorkMod Recovery is, I set about to figure out what the best Ice Cream Sandwich ROM is for the Galaxy SII. While the answer to that question became clear quite quickly, this answer also gave rise to a whole bunch of other questions.

"Some of my recent time has been devoted to making our boot media more Mac friendly, which has entailed rather a lot of rebooting. This would have been fine, if tedious, except that some number of boots would fall over with either a clearly impossible kernel panic or userspace segfaulting in places that made no sense. Something was clearly wrong. Crashes that shouldn't happen are generally an indication of memory corruption. The question is how that corruption is being triggered. Hunting that down wasn't terribly easy." Very interesting - and, unlike what the title suggest, not particularly related to the secure boot stuff.

"In an unexpected turn of events, one of the key committees in the European Parliament voted recently to weaken a reform of the copyright monopoly for allowing re-publication and access to orphan works, pieces of our cultural heritage where no copyright monopoly holder can be located. There's a problem with this. There are 24 seats in the committee, and one group (non-inscrits) was absent, lacking deputies to fill that person's vote. So, there should have been 23 votes at the most. But we just counted 12 votes for reform and 14 against. That's 26." Sometimes, people complain that the EU has a democratic deficit. It looks like we had a democratic surplus this time.

"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."

"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.

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.

Netflix talks about what it's like developing and testing their Android application. Biggest surprise? They pay specific attention to making sure the applications runs well on popular custom ROMs such as CyaogenMod. Pretty awesome. Now, if only Samsung, HTC, and so on, could do so as well.

"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."

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.

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.

"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.

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.