Monday, October 22, 2012
Amazon’s “phantom” 20% VAT for UK ebook salesIan Griffiths and Dan Milmo of The Guardian, quoting ” a contract seen by the Guardian,” presumably between Amazon and one of its UK publishing “partners”: If the base price exceeds the base price … provided to a similar service then … …Monday, October 22, 2012
Sloppy SSL implementation begets Android app vulnerabilitiesDan Goodin at Ars Technica explains how researchers found that 8% of apps in a 13,500-app sample were susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks. Hopefully developers will revisit their SSL implementations or, better yet, Google will update …Saturday, October 20, 2012
Online release of Boy Scouts’ ‘perversion files’ breaks decades of secrecyDespicable.Friday, October 19, 2012
Nebraska court strikes down restrictions on internet use for sex offenders on free speech groundsProfessor David Post of Temple Law served as an expert for the plaintiffs — yes, sex offenders — in this case. His focus, as he points out in his Volokh Conspiracy post, was on the overbroad nature of …Friday, October 19, 2012
Brazilian newspapers leave Google News en masseCarlos Fernando Lindenberg Neto, president of Brazil’s National Association of Newspapers, on his association’s withdraw from Google News: Google News’ presence in the Brazilian market is small. We believe (the loss of traffic) is an acceptable price …Friday, October 19, 2012
Alto: Aol’s attempt to redesign emailAustin Carr, writing at Fast Company's Co.Design blog: It’s actually proved to be a more modern and nimble alternative to many of its mainstream counterparts, and boasts many novel features that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, even with its beautiful …Thursday, October 18, 2012
Verizon Activated 3.1 Million iPhones In Q3 2012, But Only 651K Were iPhone 5sMG Siegler, commenting on the TechCrunch post by Chris Velazco, linked above: In other words, the iPhone 5 was on sale for just nine days before the quarter ended. And it was supply-constrained the whole time. Mr. …Thursday, October 18, 2012
2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals: DOMA violates Equal ProtectionLarry Neumeister, for AP: The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued its 2-to-1 ruling only weeks after hearing arguments on a lower court judge’s findings that the 1996 [“Defense of Marriage Act”] was unconstitutional. This is …Thursday, October 18, 2012
New $249 Samsung ChromebookThis is certainly interesting. And at half the price of an entry-level Microsoft Surface, it even comes with a keyboard!Thursday, October 18, 2012
Wireless attack could fatally turn pacemakers against patientsPatrick Gray, writing at The Register: Jack also warned of a worst-case scenario in which a worm could infect multiple devices, spreading from patient to patient, re-flashing the devices with malicious code as it foes. This code could be …Thursday, October 18, 2012
White House review: no active spying by HuaweiJoseph Menn, quoting an anonymous source for Reuters: We knew certain parts of government really wanted” evidence of active spying, said one of the people, who requested anonymity. “We would have found it if it were there. I don’t know enough about …Monday, October 15, 2012
The Plain Text ProblemMichael Schechter, writing at his blog A Better Mess: They want to take their backlog of DOC, DOCX and RTF files and convert them into either Markdown files or plain text files with Markdown formatting. At the moment, there’s no solution that’s viable for average computer …Monday, October 15, 2012
SoftBank buys 70% stake in Sprint Michael J. De La Merced and Neil Gough, in The New York Times: In a statement on Monday, SoftBank, a big Japanese telecommunications company, said it would pay $8 billion to buy newly issued Sprint stock worth about $5.25 a share. It will then pay $12.1 billion to …Saturday, October 13, 2012
Richard Branson on Design And if you’re building a spaceship company like Virgin Galactic, you might as well build the sexiest beast ever built—the sexiest spaceship, the sexiest mother ship, the sexiest space port. Getting every little bit of the design right is so important. Love this guy.Friday, October 12, 2012
Deli sues feds for refusing to trademark its ‘Philadelphia’s Cheesesteak’Michael Hinkelman, writing at the Philadelphia Daily News: Campo’s claims in its civil complaint that its sandwich is “so superlative” and “gloriously gluttonous” that only it could be called “Philadelphia’s …Friday, October 12, 2012
iDermal: The Magnetic Implant iPod HolderWelp, absolutely no potential for unfortunate consequences there.Friday, October 12, 2012
Microsoft To Make Same Privacy Change Google Was Attacked For; No One Seems To CareThis is a good piece by Danny Sullivan of Marketing Land about the lack of coverage Microsoft’s privacy policy consolidation got this week compared to what Google got on a similar move earlier this year. Mr. …Thursday, October 11, 2012
Councilman Kenney Bashes Immigration LawsPhiladelphia Councilman James Kenney made the following comment at the Restaurant Industry Summit, quoted by Randy Lobasso at Philadelphia Weekly's PhillyNow blog: After 9/11, everyone became a ‘terrorist’—including that Mexican guy on a bike going from his …Thursday, October 11, 2012
Tumblr Puts More Focus On Photos With Photoset, Its New Standalone iOS AppDrew Olanoff, at TechCrunch: By not forcing you to log into your Tumblr account, the company could attract a brand new set of users who just want to pull photos together without the hassle of creating a page, tagging things …Thursday, October 11, 2012
Lawmakers blast advertisers for ignoring ‘Do Not Track’ on Microsoft’s ExplorerThe Digital Advertising Alliance, announcing they’ll ignore “do not track” browser headers: A ‘default on’ do-not-track mechanism offers consumers and businesses inconsistencies and confusion instead of …Wednesday, October 10, 2012
US Is Bleeding High-Skilled ImmigrantsGregory Ferenstein, writing at TechCrunch about Vivek Wadhwa’s latest research: Nearly a quarter (24.3 percent) of engineering and technology companies had at least one foreign-born founder; in Silicon Valley, it’s nearly half (43.9 percent). Nationwide, …Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Twitter List CopyI just completely overhauled my Twitter lists, a few days after impulsively unfollowing everyone who didn’t follow me back. I deleted many lists and added many users to the ones I kept. I used Twitter List Copy to import all the users on other people’s lists into pre-existing lists …Saturday, October 6, 2012
Why We’ll Never Stop Talking About Steve JobsMat Honan, writing at Wired: Jobs, like the titans of industry before him, realized that when we think about how the world works, we are actually thinking about the way people have made it to work. And that means that if you don’t like the way the …Friday, October 5, 2012
HP CEO Meg Whitman calls it like it is: badMeg Whitman, as quoted by Sean Gallagher at Ars Technica: We aren’t as effective internally as we should be because of poor systems. We are not as competitive as we need to be in how we go to market because of our IT systems. We haven’t been using a …Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Talk by Steven Jobs - IDCA 1983This Steve Jobs talk from 1983 (I was less than a month old…) is a series of astoundingly accurate predictions about the future of computing. The audio was sourced from a cassette tape, cleaned up a bit, and posted to Soundcloud by Marcel Brown. Read his post about it …Monday, October 1, 2012
The Honest Design AgeAllan Grinshtein of LayerVault, design software, designed for designers: It would be crazy to call these designers lazy — there’s an awesome amount of work and detailed involved in recreating beautiful “rich corinthian leather.” Still, it is laziness to not continue to refine. …Saturday, September 29, 2012
Apple Is Heavily Promoting Alternative Map Apps In The App StoreRelatedThursday, September 27, 2012
Kindle Library Bulk DeleteI want to thank Mr. Nathaniel Robertson for pointing people in need of cleaning up their Kindle archive to this bookmarklet that allows you to bulk-delete entire pages of Kindle Library content. Many thanks to the person behind Japanese blog Net Buffalo for solving this …Thursday, September 27, 2012
The Problem With Early ReviewsJohn Biggs, writing at TechCrunch: In the end, the real reviews are the ones that percolate up out of the forums and blogosphere. That’s absolutely true in my experience. Reviews by 20-/30-/40-somethings blogging from their basement or posting on their favorite forum …Wednesday, September 26, 2012
Google Now Lets You Download All Your YouTube Videos In One ArchiveWhether you like them or not, Google still leads the way on data portability.