Onlineblog - our technology weblog from the team that produces the Online section every Thursday - has become a firm favourite with readers, who nominated for best technology weblog in the 2004 Bloggies. Check in for the latest internet and technology news - including live posting from the industry's biggest shows and conferences - and knowledgeable discussion about the latest trends.
Legal LOLs as the LJ and QC turn MCs, plus three-year-old turns Dave Grohl in our rundown of the top online clips
It's been a dramatic few weeks at the Leveson inquiry into press standards, with evidence from Rupert Murdoch, Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson. The Poke website has mashed those appearances into a hip-hop extravaganza that also stars Sienna Miller, Kelvin MacKenzie, Steve Coogan and more. Most have their voices auto-tuned almost beyond recognition – although James Murdoch sounds surprisingly unchanged. Let's hope Leveson himself doesn't watch it and decide it's time to clamp down on the intermet.
Finally, there's a couple on a car journey playing what looks at first like a cruel trick on their three-year-old by whacking on Nirvana at full volume. The kid's reaction is a surprise. But is it all a setup? You decide...
Guardian Viral Video Chart. Compiled by Unruly Media and chopped around by Dugald.
1Leveson: the Musical Cameron should watch this on his mobile – or is he too busy texting?
Source: Viral Video Chart. Compiled from data gathered at 1000 on 18 May 2012. The Viral Video Chart is currently based on a count of the embedded videos and links on approximately 2m blogs, as well as Facebook and Twitter.
Tom Midlane is covering the north's huge festival of ideas for the Guardian Northerner. He's halfway through - and reeling with mind-expanding notions, new technology and a Buddhist urban meditation app
A mecca for creatives, media professionals and tech-geeks, FutureEverything has ballooned from modest origins into an internationally-acclaimed festival of ideas to rank alongside the likes of TEDx and SXSW. This year's conference focuses on mass experience and participatory culture, celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Mass Observation movement.
The twitterati are out in force at Manchester's Museum of Science and Industry, and it's nice to be at a conference where you don't feel self-conscious tapping on your laptop, since at least half the audience is swiping away on their iPads or feverishly tweeting their thoughts.
The breakfast session begins with a presentation by Rohan Gunatillake, creator of the urban meditation app Buddhify. Having first explored Buddhist practice when working in Manchester, Gunatillake is a firm believer in the idea that Buddhism is compatible with city living. This is Buddhism as filtered through modern marketing, with the jargon to boot – there's lots of talk of Buddhism as an "industry of awakening" and an "innovation tradition", as well as a desire to tackle Buddhism's "pathological" attitude to money.
Gunatillake is an engaging performer though, casting Buddhism as "a punk movement of spiritual practitioners", with Buddha as a proto-scientist using "inner technologies" to explore the nature of human experience and the mechanics of suffering. He's particularly interesting in charting the migration of Buddhist practice, from austere and scholarly south-Asian Buddhism, moving east through China, Korea and Japan (zen), and on to Tibet. The hippies then brought Buddhism to the baby-boomers and creating a "western meditative tradition".
He brings the timeline up-to-date with the birth of the "hipster meditator", a postmodern Buddhist influenced by all three Buddhist traditions, as well as the science on the neurological effect of meditation and consumerism. As Gunatillake puts it:
It's not about looking to the East, to the mountaintop in India or the zen garden in Japan or a monastery in Burma, it's about making it work here.
And there's plenty of evidence to show there are people doing exactly that, with groups like buddhistgeeks, an online community dedicated to modern Buddhist practitioners, and the #OMCru (that's Online Meditation Crew for the uninitiated, a group who encourage meditation through Twitter) and Gunatillake's own Buddhify app (tagline: "Modern meditation. To go.") It's even spreading to the corporate sector, with Google encouraging their employees to read Search Inside Yourself in a bid to improve their wellbeing and productivity.
There's an interesting panel discussion on the relevance and future of Mass Observation, hosted by Fiona Courage, Special Collections Librarian & Mass Observation Archive Curator at University of Sussex. There's a flurry of debate over the worth of social media as a historical archive – technology writer Bill Thompson claims Twitter and Facebook are self-aggrandising mediums, whereas the original Mass Observation came from a sense of public-spiritedness.
Nevertheless, Campbell tells us that he has saved his texts of the late 1990s into a database, goading us:
When the history of the text message is written, it'll be me, because you've all deleted them!
Pauline McAdam, senior broadcast journalist for BBC Radio Merseyside, raises gasps of horror from the technophile audience when she describes social media as "cave painting but digital", lacking the magic of archives, before suggesting: "Just shut up and have a cup of tea!"
Next up is Moritz Stefaner, a data visualisation expert with a very Keatsian focus (he styles himself as a "Truth and beauty operator"). Entitled Weltbilder (German for "world views"), Stefaner's talk looks at how data visualisation helps us live in a complex world, giving us a birds-eye perspective on all kinds of worlds: finance, knowledge, relationships.
Some of his data works are stunning – beautiful tendrils sculpted from the data in Wikipedia page deletion discussions (including one on "Biscuits and human sexuality"). Stefaner talks of "the tension between order and chaos" and cites a natural correlation between the elegant solution in mathematics and beauty, quoting inventor Buckminster Fuller approvingly:
When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. But when I'm finished, if it's not beautiful, I know it's wrong.
As well as discussing his work on the OECD Better Life Index, the Max Planck institute and a mail-order museli company, he gives us a peek of Emoto – an attempt to visualise in real-time the global emotional response as medals are lost and won at the London 2012 Olympics using all the social media data.
There's a real diversity to the presentations at FutureEverything this year. There's the BBC on their staggering quantity of digital coverage planned for London 2012, and a presentation from Adrian Hon, the brains behind Zombies, Run – a zombie-themed running app which features stories penned by Orange prizewinning novelist Naomi Alderman. He also shares the irresistible fact that apparently zombies tend to become more popular during socioeconomic downturns. Elsewhere composer Andrea Molino discusses Three Mile Island, his multimedia opera based on the work of an Austrian meteorologist who analysed the wind data after a nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania in 1979.
There's only so much innovation you can take in one day though, which perhaps explains the surprisingly small audience for Richard Ayers, Head of Digital at Manchester City FC, who's here to talk about tribalism in football. The first shock is that he's not actually a big football fan. Ayers discusses the volley of abuse he received after an ill-advised "Bluffer's guide to being a City fan" was posted on the official City website. I also keep particularly quiet when he mentioned receiving a savaging from the Guardian's very own Scott Murray.
Ayers is persuasive in discussing modern football's need for endless expansion because the financials are so cock-eyed, with clubs spending recklessly on transfer fees and wages. I also loved his discussion of football clubs as having 'characters' – Arsenal are, apparently, a starchy gent, while City are "a mysterious beauty who ensnared many lovers". After last Sunday's antics at Eastlands, I think there's plenty of Mancunians in sky-blue who would agree.
Tom Midlane is a freelance journalist based in the north-west. He has written for Leeds Guide and DeHavilland, the parliamentary monitoring service, and is a regular contributor to Manchester-based news site Mancunian Matters. His blog is here and you can also contact him on Twitter @goldenlatrine
It's like this: The browser's doomed, beÂcause apps are the fuÂture. Wait! Apps are doomed beÂcause HTML5 is the fuÂture. I see someÂthing alÂmost every day sayÂing one or the other. Only it's mostly wrong.
Keep this in mind for a little lower down. Read Bray's post first, though.
One of the greatest strengths of the web is that the the ease of linking allows innovative new apps to succeed without asking anyone else's permission - but up until now that hasn't applied to integrations between web apps. Web Intents is an emerging W3C specification inspired by Android's Intents system that aims to solve the problems of communications.
France's data protection watchdog has set up a meeting with Google to closely examine its controversial privacy policy.
The search giant consolidated 60 privacy policies into one single agreement in March. The EU expressed concern over the legality and impact of the change.
France's information commission, the CNIL, said it was not yet "totally satisfied" with Google's explanation of the amendments.
Evans works for Enders Analysis. Here's a little bit from his latest report:
Roughly 50% of all the smartphones sold in the USA in Q1 2012 were iPhones. This is very different to the global picture:
Android is outselling iPhone by more than 2:1 on a global basis. But in the USA, Apple is massively outselling Android. That has obvious implications for where (mainly US-based) developers should be placing their efforts.
Roughly a year ago when we summarized the state of smartphones at the Appnation conference, less than 40% of mobile subscribers in the U.S. had smartphones. Today, one in two mobile subscribers has a smartphone and that figure is moving steadily upwards.
By most measures, it has been the year of the App once again, driven mostly by the rise of Android and iOS users who have more than doubled in a year and account for 88% of those who have downloaded an app in the past 30 days. In just a year, the average number of apps per smartphone has jumped 28%, from 32 apps to 41. Not only is the 2012 smartphone owner downloading more apps, they are increasingly spending more time using them vs. using the mobile web -- about 10% more than last year.
Ahonen isn't very happy about what's happening to Nokia. (He used to work there.) Also has calculations for smartphone installed base by platform, which puts Android top at 328m, then Symbian (299m) and iOS (178m) from a total of just over 1bn.
And, that leads us to the number one issue cited as a problem: developer support. Developers claim the platform is too troublesome because of device specific variations, but the reality is that it's just that developers don't think they make enough money to justify that work. This could be because of the single listing and therefore single purchase of apps [for both phones and tablets], but it's really just a vicious cycle where developers don't put enough support into the ecosystem, and so the ecosystem doesn't support developers.
Isn't it more likely that the developers evaluate the opportunity cost of each platform, and cut their cloth accordingly? If they don't find it worthwhile to test, say, Temple Run on 1,000+ devices, that's not their "fault". It's their rational judgement of investment return. If you can't make money, you won't spend money. It's the classic bootstrap challenge of every ecosystem. (Thanks @beardyweirdy666 for the link.)
We've gathered together some key and outspoken experts in the field to debate the issues.
Martha Lane Fox is the UK's Digital Champion and a leading English businesswoman and charity trustee.
She co-founded holiday retailer lastminute.com and grant-giving trust Antigone, and is NED to M&S, MyDeco.com and Cabinet Office's Efficiency and Reform Board. She is also the Chair of Go ON UK as well as the Government's Digital Advisory Board.
John Kao is an author and prominent US strategic advisor. He is currently chairman of the Institute for Large Scale Innovation and contributing editor at the Daily Beast.
The self-styled 'innovation activist' is renowned for his creativity and was an advisor to Hillary Clinton during her Senate re-election campaign in 2006.
Larry Elliott is the Guardian's economics editor and has been with the paper since 1988.
He has authored or co-authored four books, most recently The Gods that Failed: How Blind Faith in Markets has Cost us Our Future, with Dan Atkinson
The event will be moderated by
Simon Rogers, who edits the Guardian's Datablog and Datastore
What do you think our panel should discuss? What is the key data and solutions you want to see?
Just give us your questions in the comments field below.
While tens of thousands of cases had transferred from the CSCS system to the CS2 system, the correct arrears balance did not transfer with them. This was because the information had been archived and, on transfer to CS2, these balances were not picked up by the system, the NAO [National Audit Office] said. In addition, a number of cases managed off the primary IT systems, on a separate clerical case database, did not have opening arrears balances entered onto that database. In compiling the accounts the commission has estimated that this would have led to an understatement of the overall arrears balance by ÂŁ59m at 31 March 2011.
That's ÂŁ59m owed to parents. Real people affected by real mistakes.
A great read, but important too for understanding why some parts of the internet are weak for fact-checking:
If there's a simple lesson in all of this, it's that hoaxes tend to thrive in communities which exhibit high levels of trust. But on the Internet, where identities are malleable and uncertain, we all might be well advised to err on the side of skepticism.
Fragmentation matters to the entire Android community: users, developers, OEMs, brands & networks. It's a blessing and a curse.
The Blessing. Fragmentation allows users to take their pick from thousands of devices. You can choose from phones with 3D screens, projectors, CDMA, GSM, or even CDMA & GSM. You may not care that Tag Heuer has made an Android phone but at least one person does (and they use OpenSignalMaps). It's a triumph for Android that as a single OS it can target so many markets.
The Curse. The proliferation of devices with their associated screen sizes, internal hardware and custom ROMs creates some difficulties. We spend a lot of time making the app presentable (or at less functional) on exotic devices - this is the most common request we get from app users.
Amazing graphs. The number of devices, screens and resolutions is boggling.
Take a query like [taj mahal]. For more than four decades, search has essentially been about matching keywords to queries. To a search engine the words [taj mahal] have been just that--two words.
But we all know that [taj mahal] has a much richer meaning. You might think of one of the world's most beautiful monuments, or a Grammy Award-winning musician, or possibly even a casino in Atlantic City, NJ. Or, depending on when you last ate, the nearest Indian restaurant. It's why we've been working on an intelligent model--in geek-speak, a "graph"--that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings.
Google is in effect moving to the semantic web. It's a huge move. Our take here.
Being wildly successful in tech is about anticipating change, and altering the status quo; being the 14th chief executive of a stodgy old major tech company is about extracting as much value as you can from the success it's already had. The CEOs of the Time Warners and Sonys and Yahoos and RIMs and even Microsofts of the world are experts only on their respective companies' existing businesses. They say things that sound stupid to us because they're not us, and because their goal for tech (to maximize profits at their companies) is not the same as ours (to get more awesome stuff that makes our lives better). They're not even really talking to us. They're talking to their boards.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the new strategy will accompany the launch of Android 5.0 - to be known as Jelly Bean, in keeping with Google's sweet tooth for Android code names - and involves several Android vendors. Several devices, including both tablets and unlocked smartphones, will be sold directly through Google's Web site and through some unnamed retail partners.
Retail partners could be interesting (does it just mean "Amazon"?) Selling devices through Google's own site worked so well for the original Nexus One that Google dropped it within four months. It said: "The web store.. remained a niche channel for early adopters, but it's clear that many customers like a hands-on experience before buying a phone, and they also want a wide range of service plans to chose from." Anything changed since May 2010? (Thanks @modelportfolio2003 for the link.)
[Sprint CEO Dan] Hesse pointed shareholders to other benefits of the iPhone, noting that the device helped provide protection against litigation over Google Inc.'s Android operating software and allowed it to trim a costly loyalty program put in place to prevent customers from leaving for other carriers offering the device. Sprint activated 3.3m iPhones over the past two quarters, compared with 11.9m at AT&T Inc. and 7.5m at Verizon Wireless.
"If you have any doubt go look at T-Mobile's net subscriber numbers," Hesse told shareholders. T-Mobile USA is the only major carrier without a deal to carry the iPhone and has lost contract customers in 10 straight quarters.
Sprint doesn't expect its iPhone investment to pay off before 2015. Even so it seems to think it better than T-Mobile's position. (Thanks @rquick for the link.)
Thailand reportedly also looked at some of China's largest tablet manufacturers, such as Lenovo and Huawei, but the pricing per unit was too high for its budget. Conversely, a lower bid from another company was offered but rejected by the government, perhaps due to less specs for the value.
The select device model, priced at $81 per unit, is the Scopad SP0712: An 7-inch Android device running the 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system. It's also got 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal memory, 1.5 GHz single core CPU, and comes in four color options: Red, blue, silver, and gold. Shenzhen Scope will also set 30 help centers around the Southeast Asian country to provide user support specifically for tablets received from the campaign. Not too shabby of specs for tablets for elementary school students.
Now consider what those childrens' reaction will be to a standard PC when they're older. (Thanks @undersinged for the link.)
The sale will likely generate billions, but hidden just beneath the buzz are signs that not all is well for Silicon Valley's star
On Friday, Facebook will finally become a public company. The hotly anticipated initial public offering (IPO) will be the largest tech company share sale ever and is expected to value the social network at over $100bn – more than the combined value of Nike and Goldman Sachs.
But not everyone is cheering Facebook on. Ahead of the sale of the century, here are five signals that suggest there may be choppy days ahead for Facebook's investors.
A lot of smart guys just decided to sell
Facebook's early investors are some of the most successful in Silicon Valley, and on Wednesday a lot of them decided to dump a lot more shares.
The social network giant announced Wednesday it was upping the number of shares it will offer in the IPO to 421.2m from 337.4m. The sale is now expected to value the firm at over $100bn – making it the biggest ever tech company IPO.
The company said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, would not be selling more shares. But Peter Thiel, the famed Silicon Valley investor, will now be selling 16.8m shares, up from 7.7m shares.
Goldman Sachs more than doubled its planned share sale to 28.7m from the 13.2m the investment bank had initially planned to sell.
Tiger Global, a hedge fund, will sell to 23.4m from 3.4m. Tiger's head, Charles "Chase" Coleman III, earned an estimated $500m last year and is an expert in making money out of IPOs.
GM just gave them the boot
General Motors, one of the world's biggest advertisers, said this week that it was pulling its ads off Facebook.
The car firm is keeping its Facebook pages, which are free, but decided that its ads just aren't working.
GM doesn't spend a lot of money on Facebook, but this is a big blow. Facebook's massive valuation is based on expectations of a glorious future as the pre-eminent platform for display advertising online.
The car firm is not Facebook's only critic. Nate Elliott, Forrester analyst, recently wrote in a blog post: "One global consumer goods company told us recently that Facebook was getting worse, rather than better, at helping marketers succeed."
He said the firm was great at innovating for its users but added: "Facebook just doesn't pay nearly as much attention to marketing as it does to user experience. (Not surprising, given its founder's famous loathing for advertisers.)"
Research released this week by WordStream, a search engine software and marketing firm, concluded that Google is doing a better job than Facebook on display ads. It found the average click-through rate (CTR) of an ad on the Google Display Network is 0.4% – almost 10 times as high as the typical Facebook ad.
The price ain't right
At $100bn Facebook has a price to earnings (p/e) ratio of about 100. Don't nod off – p/e ratios are a rough measure of how fast a company is expected to grow. GM has a p/e of 6.6, which means it's a slow grower. Google has a p/e of 19 these days but had also had a p/e in the 100s when it did its IPO.
But Google was growing far faster than Facebook back then. Google doubled its growth in the year after its IPO. In its most recent quarter Facebook's growth had reached 44% and had actually slowed from the previous quarter. In part that was because Facebook's advertising business is seasonal, and the previous quarter included the run-up to Christmas.
Let's say Facebook starts growing faster this year, say 40-60% growth for the year. That's impressive stuff for any normal company. But Sam Hamadeh, chief executive of PrivCo, calculates that even with a p/e of 65, Facebook's shares are worth about $24-$25 a piece. Facebook increased its price range for the IPO this week to $34 to $38 a share.
Facebook had revenue of $3.6bn last year, which is impressive. But Hamadeh calculates the company needs to take a quarter of the online ads in the entire world to justify its present price.
Mobile dilemma
Facebook mentions the word "mobile" 123 times in its prospectus. The company had 845m monthly active users (MAUs) as of December 31, 2011. Some 425m were mobile users. And they don't make Facebook any money.
"We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven," Facebook said in its prospectus. If Facebook was "unable to successfully implement monetization strategies for our mobile users," the company's revenue growth could be harmed.
Analysts have speculated that mobile is one reason that Zuckerberg was so keen to spend $1bn buying the mobile photo-sharing app Instagram. Not that it makes any money on mobile either.
Life moves quickly online. Facebook is a product of the laptop/PC age. It's not yet proven it can make it in the mobile era.
Management
Mark Zuckerberg got where he is today by doing exactly what he wanted. When Facebook goes public he will still be its biggest shareholder and will have voting control over 55.8% of the company's shares.
Zuckerberg clearly believes life will continue as normal after the IPO. As Facebook states in the prospectus the firm "prioritizes our user engagement over short-term financial results, and we frequently make product decisions that may reduce our short-term revenue or profitability."
That's fine when you are a private company but as other tech stars including the Google boys and Amazon have found, Wall Street investors soon tire of wunderkinds who don't deliver quarter after quarter after quarter. Zuckerberg was going to ring the opening bell at Nasdaq, the stock exchange that will soon be home to Facebook. Now he's decided to celebrate in Silicon Valley. It's clear where his loyalties lie. Betting on Facebook means betting that Zuckerberg has a second act in which he can learn to value his new investors as highly as he values Facebook.
Slides from a presentation by Jason Grigsby about smart TV. The key problem with Smart TV right now: you can't know whether or what you're supplying content to.
In June 2009, Microsoft issued security update MS09-027, which fixed a remote code execution vulnerability in the Mac version of Microsoft Office. Despite the availability of the bulletin (and the passage of time), not every machine is up to date yet - which is how nearly three years later, malware has emerged that exploits the issue on machines running Office on Mac OS X. Fortunately, our data indicates that this malware is not widespread, but during our investigation we found a few interesting facts we'd like to share with you.
In a conference call, Eric Hirshberg, CEO of the Activision Publishing division, made a surprisingly direct statement on the success of Skylanders, the new toy/video game hybrid for consoles and iOS devices. With 30m toys sold and $100m in revenue across toys and games in the quarter, said Hirshberg, Skylanders made more money than the entire business of Rovio's Angry Birds franchise. Rovio announced today that Angry Birds has been downloaded more than 1 billion times, across both free and paid versions.
Skylanders is huge with kids with games consoles, who swap accomplishments in school playgrounds. They haven't gone away just because games consoles have arrived.
Faster downloading speeds have helped make Google's YouTube video-viewing more popular. Young urban Africans organise YouTube parties. The company is also trying to help African governments digitise information and make it freely available to their citizens. Many rulings in the higher courts of Ghana, for instance, are going online.
Yet critics complain that Google is buying up enormous amounts of virgin digital land in Africa at virtually no cost. Within a couple of decades, without the regulatory oversight of the African Union or African governments, they say, Africa's internet life will be almost entirely in hock to the Google giant. Even the company's decision to go slow on seeking profits from Africa by offering cheap deals has been attacked by African would-be rivals, which say that such tactics are only extending Google's unfair advantage.
Today, we're happy to announce that the Lightbox team is joining Facebook, where we'll have the opportunity to build amazing products for Facebook's 500+ million mobile users.
This means we're no longer accepting new signups. If you're an existing user, you can continue to use Lightbox.com until June 15 and you can download your photos from here.
Facebook is not acquiring the company or any of the user data hosted on Lightbox.com. In the coming weeks, we will be open sourcing portions of the code we've written for Lightbox and posting them to our Github repository.
Chomp, chomp, chomp. Not buying the company, just acquiring the team.
You can call Steve Ballmer many things, but you cannot call him the "the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today" as Forbes's Adam Hartung did in a recent article. It's easy to see Microsoft as a bumbling fool of the tech world, but when you look closely at its business, the company's core competencies, and Ballmer's decisions, a coherent picture begins to form. It's a picture of a company being run from a very rational and respectable set of philosophies.
Completely agree - the Forbes article is ridiculous linkbait nonsense. Read Dustin Curtis's piece instead: it's well-argued and rational.
Bach left Microsoft abruptly in 2010. Here he looks back at what Microsoft got right (and wrong) in the launch of the original Xbox and the Zune. As you may know, one of them went better than the other.
Francesco Caio, a former chief executive of Cable & Wireless and one of the architects of the government's existing broadband strategy, will be here on Wednesday 16 May between 11.45am and 12.45pm (BST) to take part in a live Q&A. Post your questions now
Francesco Caio, a former chief executive of Cable & Wireless, shied away from recommending the break up of BT Group when he was advising the government three years ago, but now believes this may be one way to ensure Britain gets the broadband network it needs.
Caio says the only truly future proof network is a point-to-point fibre infrastructure, with fibre-optic cables running not just to a street cabinet, but from each home all the way to the telephone or internet exchange.
He says the ultimate goal of any national broadband strategy must be the permanent search for infinite bandwidth between any two points in the country, with upload speeds as fast as download speeds.
"This is not just for the fun of having videos on demand or Skype," he said.
"Bandwidth drives transaction costs down opening the field to smaller companies and individuals. This is not a technological gizmo. This is using technology for social inclusion. The destination is fibre everywhere."
The copper telephone networks Europe relies on today were built by governments. Caio, who now heads the Italian aerospace group Avio, told a House of Lords inquiry into broadband recently that no single shareholder owned company is capable of undertaking alone the massive infrastructure project of replacing every copper wire with fibre.
He recommends hiving off BT's network into a separate company in which all the major broadband resellers – including Sky, Virgin Media, TalkTalk and BT itself – could take a stake.
This company, which could also be listed on the stock exchange, would be promised a monopoly in the areas where Virgin Media, the only other UK company to have built its own broadband network, did not wish to operate. In exchange, its prices would be regulated.
Do you think the ÂŁ29bn required to build an all fibre network would be a colossal waste of money? Can copper meet our needs for many years to come? Are there ways of encouraging BT to build more fibre without breaking the company up?
Post your questions in advance, or come and join the debate between 11.45am and 12.45pm (BST) on Wednesday 16 May.
Lengthy writeup of where Nokia is at the moment. We would humbly submit that if you've read our interview with Marko Ahtisaari, and other Nokia coverage, you know most of this already. But read it and see what else you get.
[Kaspersky CTO Nikolay] Grebennikov originally stated that Apple had invited Kaspersky Lab to work with the company on improving its security, but has since issued a clarification. The company has now said that its analysis of OS X was "conducted independently" but that "Apple is open to collaborating with [Kaspersky] regarding new OS X vulnerabilities."
In Computing's original interview, Grebennikov was specifically asked three times if Apple had requested Kaspersky Lab's assistance.
That hissing noise? The deflating sound from all the sites which had written "OMG APPLE GOES TO KASPERSKY FOR VIRUS HELP" stories. Not that Apple isn't facing a problem. But it's not going to Kaspersky for the solution.
This is great. Knock yourselves out arguing over the interpretation of the pie chart, the mysterious absence of other devices (Wii, PS3?), the non-inclusion of "PC" devices... there's enough here for days of argument. (It also shows how misleading the phrase "more than" can be.)
So here I am at Dell's huge and very professional summit with founder Michael Dell, top people from Microsoft and Intel, impressive power points, expensive commercials, matching polyester ties and all that jazz, and then the - by Dell chosen - moderator starts to rejoice the lack of women in the room. "The IT business is one of the last frontiers that manages to keep women out. The quota of women to men in your business is sound and healthy" he says. "What are you actually doing here?" he adds to the few women who are actually present in the room.
This may be more complex than it looks. One commenter says that Mads Christensen, the compere, is a Danish comedian, and that his talk was actually ironic and in effect a reproach to the plethora of guys in the room. Others say that Christensen isn't - that he's just a jerk. Can anyone elucidate? (Dell later apologised, but even there commenters are saying it's overblown and he was being ironic.)
The new Google-commissioned paper, written by well-known UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh and attorney Donald Falk, argues that such regulations would be preempted by the First Amendment. Google's search engine, they write, "uses sophisticated computerized algorithms, but those algorithms themselves inherently incorporate the search engine company engineers' judgments about what material users are likely to find responsive to these queries."
The authors argue that this selection process is no different, constitutionally speaking, from a newspaper editor selecting wire stories to run, a guidebook deciding which attractions to feature, or a parade organizer choosing which floats to include. The courts have ruled that all of these editorial processes are fully protected by the First Amendment.
True, but misses the point. The FTC's beef is with Google cross-promoting products such as its Google shopping comparison, or maps, or video, in its search results. When Google doesn't have a competitor in a space, the other product appears highly in search results. As soon as Google has a product, the rival vanishes from useful search results. Using the monopoly (search) to demote others in a space is, arguably, abuse of monopoly power. Microsoft's promotion in the 1990s of Internet Explorer on Windows used its engineers' judgements about what material users would find useful in browsing the web, but that didn't stop it being an abuse of monopoly. (Thanks @modelportfolio2003 for the link.)
When playing with the assumptions, it becomes clear that the model is most sensitive to the revenue per device and total devices in use. The profitability is entirely dependent on those figures as variable costs are a percent of sales and fixed costs are limited by talent constraints.
For example, if revenues per device drop to $4.50/yr then the operating margin drops to 38%.
Now we can calculate some of the more interesting figures. For example: o Android OEMs receive $0.76 on average per device per year o Android Operators receive $1.07 on average per device per year (including Play) o Android Developers, as a group, receive $1.94 per device per year (including Play and AdMob) o Google receives a contribution of $2.75 per device per year from Android
Again, these figures are very sensitive to the revenue per device (currently assumed to be $6.50).
Dediu points out in an earlier post that it's strange how, given the unexpected (even by Google) number of Android devices in use, that the benefit hasn't shown up clearly in Google's revenues and profits. Is the company just hiding how good a business Android is, or is it not that good compared to desktop search?
Harry McCracken digs into some of the (in some cases literally) fabulous stories emanating from Digitimes. How much should you believe it? You probably already know the answer, but it's worth seeing how it fares when he goes through a sample of 25 stories from the past two years.
US data only, presented as a heatmap, showing the most (and least) common days for a birthday. There's a strange gap in the data for July 4 and 5 which one has to assume is something to do with national holidays, since a similar one is found around Christmas. (Here's the original data.)
On Friday afternoon by local time, Judge William Alsup, the federal judge presiding over the Oracle v. Google lawsuit in the Northern District of California, entered a judgment as a matter of law (JMOL) overruling the jury (as well as Google's opposition to an Oracle motion for JMOL) with respect to eight decompiled Java files.
MĂĽller had originally said - in January 2011, 15 months ago - that 6 of those files were copied from Java into Android, and hence must be infringing. Turns out he was right (at least if you think the judge is right. And the judge is, well, a judge.)
So Oracle has now filed a motion asking for a postponement of phase three of the trial, the damages phase. It would like a new jury, too. It wants to wait to calculate damages until after the judge decides whether APIs are copyrightable, so it can add the 37 API files into the mix for damages, if they are. Maybe then it would have a prayer of getting some money.
In short, Oracle woke up and realized it's in a pickle of its own making. It was too clever by half, and now reality has struck. It clearly is worried that if they go to the damages phase now, it will gain a big fat zero in damages. It should have thought of that before it asked for infringer's profits, but there you are.
The problem with Groklaw's analyses is that it imputes motives that just don't exist, and acts as though Google's lawyers are geniuses, and Oracle's are idiots. Given that Oracle's lead attorney is David Boies, who prosecuted the Microsoft antitrust trial in 1998, you'd think its writers would be more conflicted. Apparently not.
Richard [Gringras, head of news at Google] doesn't believe the vertical model of a newspaper makes sense going forward. He compares the metropolitan newspapers' all-things to all-people product to content portals for specific communities. This strategy doesn't make sense given the possibilities. Yahoo!'s initial success was as a portal. But portals have disappeared online as consumers have learned to navigate the web on their own and found the niche sites they love.
Paywalls are not a panacea. Richard's not against experimentation with paywall models. The New York Times was smart, he says, in designing its paywall with many levers to adjust revenue vs. traffic flow. It's not there yet, but they can experiment and find what works. He appreciates those who are looking at paywalls in a more nuanced way. Some publishers say, "They bought it before, they'll buy it again," or "We need to get people back into the habit of paying for news." But consumers never did pay the true costs.
Gringras essentially goes around giving much the same talk. This doesn't make it wrong.
Dell has announced a six-month, open source pilot program aimed at creating an ultrabook suited specifically for web and mobile developers. The Macbook Air and other OSX based machines have become the development environment of choice for a lot of web and mobile developers recently most likely due to software such as iLife, iMovie and other design tools.
Sure, what developers really want is to be able to organise their photos and cut little films. Dell's efforts here are praiseworthy, but iLife and iMovie really aren't the reason why the Macbook Air has succeeded with developers. Try: lightness and SSD.
Greg Sterling, making a lot of sense about why Apple's maps product on iOS is so much worse than Google's on Android, despite having the same back-end supplier:
Here's a bit of conspiracy theory: What if Apple wanted to replace Google Maps from a very early point and the company was biding its time until it could acquire and build the core assets and expertise to do so? Maybe that early point was when former CEO Steve Jobs' attitude toward Google changed, when he began to feel that Android was "a stolen product"?
To continue with my conjecture, maybe Apple thought it would be harder to wean iPhone users off a stronger Google-powered mapping product than the comparatively weak one that exists today. I know this seems very contrary to Apple's culture and corporate ethos. Yet replacing a weaker product with a stronger one is a lot easier than taking away a strong product from users who've come to depend on it.
Also, Google could then offer its own Google Maps app. Win-win.
Between May 8 and 9, 2012, the Websense® ThreatSeeker® Network detected that the Amnesty International United Kingdom website was compromised. The website was apparently injected with malicious code for these 2 days. During that time, website users risked having sensitive data stolen and perhaps infecting other users in their network. However, the website owners rectified this issue after we advised them about the injection. In early 2009, we discovered this same site was compromised, and in 2010, we reported another injection of an Amnesty International website, this time the Hong Kong site.
Entertaining, though not as bad as in the past. One point that always resonates:
One day, maybe, an Adobe engineer will understand that, when the user has to go through a length installation process, the best approach is to let him enter all the required information (password, serial number, etc.) right away, and then -- and only then -- go through all the lengthy processes that are of no interest to him without asking for any user input, so that he can switch to something else and, you know, actually make valuable use of his time.
The chair of the Alan Turing centenary celebrations, Professor S. Barry Cooper of Leeds University, continues his guest blog for the Guardian Northerner with a look at a legendary chess match
Back in 1944, at secret MI6 establishment Hanslope Park near Bletchley Park, Turing (the world's first computer scientist) talked of "building a brain". This was four years before the first 'stored program' computer, the 'Manchester Baby', was born. The first computing revolution had hardly begun.
Scroll forward 50 years - after 22-year old Kasparov had already become the youngest chess world champion ever - and we see IBM chess playing computer Deep Blue beat the best human player in the world. On the 15th anniversary of this victory in May 1997, here we are celebrating 100 years since Turing was born, with Kasparov himself (usual speaking fee $60,000) addressing the Turing Centenary Conference at Manchester Town Hall (June 22 to 26) and the Olympic flame passing by outside on Turing's actual birthday. It is a Turing-Kasparov link formed of computers, artificial intelligence, and Manchester.
We are of course a long way from building that brain that Turing dreamt of, and Kasparov talks interestingly about the difference between human and machine thinking. One of Turing's first discoveries when he was just 23 was that computers can't do everything. It was a short step from his 1936 dream of a computing future to a mathematical proof that most problems cannot be solved by any computer! And computers certainly have a hard time predicting all sorts of worldly events, from earthquakes, to weather, to economic crises.
Is there anything we can do that a computer can't? Could a computer write like Shakespeare - "to compute or not to compute, that is the Halting Problem"? Can we build an intelligent machine - and when?
Alan Turing is often dubbed 'the Father of Computer Science'. In 1950 he certainly took a paternalistic view of his 'late developer' computers. Not only did he considerthe measure of intelligence to be doing as well as a human: he only allowed humans to judge the competition. This is how he described his famous Test:
A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.
And the Turing Test is still with us, and is the basis for the famous Loebner Prize, with a reward of $100,000 for:
the first computer whose responses are indistinguishable from a human's.
This year, the Turing Centenary Loebner Prize competition is on May 15 at Turing's wartime haunt of Bletchley Park. Watch for news of the winning machine. But it's a safe bet Hugh Loebner's $100,000 is safe.
Underlying these 'X Factor for computers' competitions is a serious controversy. On one side we have Marvin Minsky, grand theorist of Artificial Intelligence, claiming:
AI has been brain-dead since the 1970s.
On the other, Rodney Brooks with his more experimental robot-centered approach admits:
Marvin may have been leveling his criticism at me.
Many computer scientists think that what the brain does does not depend on the stuff it's made of. People like Brooks belioeve that 'embodiment' is important. And he is a big fan of Turing, saying in my forthcoming book Alan Turing - His Work and Impact (due from Elsevier in July):
It is humbling to read Alan Turing's papers. He thought of it all. First.
Brooks is another of the giants of computer science converging on Manchester for the Turing Centenary Conference, speaking just after Kasparov on June 25.
So how close are we to making a brain? It depends who you ask. Computers certainly do wonderful things nowadays. A nice Turing quote, seen on T-shirts, posters and coffee mugs these days, is this:
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.
It featured in Google chair Eric Schmidt's address to the huge Turing Celebration at Princeton University on 10 May. However, today's consensus is that the brain is just that bit more surprising than any of today's computers.
But do we really want machines to think like humans? Turing thought that making mistakes was necessary for intelligent thought. What makes human intelligence work with all its fallibility is its interaction with others and with the wider world.
We rely on the fact that human brains are not manufactured on a production line, but evolve to represent a huge variety of very individual ways of 'computing', creatively yet fallibly. Can we learn to be as clever in building thinking machines as is the complex and beautiful world around us? And how will we deal with criminal computers? Future computer surprises can bring risks.
Here's a YouTube clip about the mighty match between Kasparov and Deep Blue. Follow the Alan Turing Year on Twitter at: @AlanTuringYear and for all the events happening in 2012, check out the Alan Turing Year website here.
Professor S. Barry Cooper is a mathematician at the University of Leeds. He is Chair of the Turing Centenary Advisory Committee (TCAC), which is co-ordinating the Alan Turing Year, and President of the association Computability in Europe.
You have to delve quite a long way into the simple answer that Siri gives to get to explain why it says Nokia's new Lumia 900 is the best phone. The reasons are illuminating, though
Why is it that when you ask Siri "what's the best cellphone ever?" (or "best mobile phone ever" or "best smartphone ever") that it responds with "the Nokia Lumia 900"?
Quite simple: because Siri hands the query (being non-weather-related) off to the Wolfram Alpha search engine, which pulls its data in from Best Buy, where the Nokia Lumia 900 had a total of five - count them - favourable reviews.
In each there's a link: "user rating: 5 out of 5 (based on 4 reviews)".
Unfortunately even that isn't accurate. If you look at the page that that links to, it says that it has a rating of 4.4 out of 5, from 11 reviews. So Wolfram Alpha isn't quite keeping a live feed on this.
But… if you look at it, the latest reviews date from 11 April - which is when this all blew up. Be suspicious of those reviews. The earliest ones are more trustworthy, but even those might not be as believable as you might want.
The next up? The LG Tracfone - a $19.99 phone (this comes up whether you ask for a "smartphone", "mobile phone" or "cellphone". WolframAlpha says it's 5/5 - based on 1 review.
But no, even that isn't right. There are two reviews, of which one is a 5-star (yay!) posted on 16 March and the other is a 1-star posted on… 11 May. Ah, the same day that this Siri thing came up. So that's probably not a "real" review.
Whatever - it's a nice meme, but it doesn't bear fact-checking.
After a series of never-ending clicks, I believe I was able to trace this "story" back to its roots. Dalrymple linked to AppleInsider, which links to TheNextWeb (hi Robin!), which links to ZUnited, which links to WMPoweruser.
So - a fun story, not entirely supported by the facts.
(Revel in it anyway. Here's the photo, in small form, from WMPoweruser.)
But it does tell us a couple of things.
First: some people get very worked up about what smartphone they're using. (See how people are trying to game the reviews more recently to push the rankings down.)
Second: expect to see more of this kind of thing as people probe WolframAlpha to see what answer gives for "best X ever" that doesn't offer an Apple product ("best MP3 player ever" isn't going to fit the bill, but "best computer ever" will!)
Third: savvy marketing people are going to start gaming reviews like this to push their phones up rankings. Actually, you'd expect this is happening already, wouldn't you?
Fourth: hope that WolframAlpha to have a rethink about whether trying to answer "best X ever" is much use. Or whether BestBuy's customer reviews section is actually the place to ask.
Update: in the comments, @MarcoPoloMint puts the problem that this illustrates beautifully:
What there is... is a rather worrying tendency for 'intelligent search' to default to rather silly, subjective and easily manipulable review sites (Best Buy? The US equivalent of Dixons). It shows the weakness in the chain. It's worrying because voice input + intelligent search is increasingly going to be the future of human computer interaction (smartphones, now Kinect with Internet Explorer, maybe the new Apple iTV...). So these kinks and weaknesses should be sorted out now.
That's it exactly. When you search for "best" anything - on sites such as Amazon, Yelp, Google, anywhere that offers a rating - you have to be aware of whether the results come from (a) a representative sample (how many Lumia reviews do you need for it to be robust? How many for a restaurant review?) (b) actual buyers (or is it marketing people stuffing the reviews?). Boiling questions down to one-line answers carries risks that are far more subtle than whether we get a laugh from Siri's responses. The question is whether we're aware of them.
If the contents of our brains get uploaded into a computer, then surely someone is going to have to pay to keep it all working. That'll be you. But what if you can't pay? And what about all that copyrighted content?
What if we manage to hit The Singularity - that oft-receding target by which your brain's contents can be uploaded to a computer system in the event of (or ahead of) your death?
Wouldn't that be cool? Well, maybe. But more importantly, who's going to pay for it all when we're "dead" (and so presumably not able to earn money any more)? Ah, that's it - advertising will fill the sky and "your brand preferences will be aligned with those of our sponsors".
But wait! What about all those books you remember reading? Oh dear.
For a fabulous glimpse of the afterlife, or as they call it, "The Singularity - ruined by lawyers", here's a video from Tom Scott and friends. (Or watch it here.)
Scott says:
If you liked this [and how you could not? -Ed], you may also enjoy two novels that provided inspiration for it: Jim Monroe's Everyone in Silico, where I first found the idea of a corporate-sponsored afterlife; Rudy Rucker's trippy Postsingular, which introduced me to the horrifying idea of consciousness slums.
If you want to read more about the Singularity, here you go. Just bear in mind that your brain processes might one day be scanned by slightly bored lawyers.
Moments ago, activist Yahoo shareholder Eric Jackson tweeted: "Just heard Carol Bartz's reaction to L'Affair Thompson by someone who talked to her: 'By the way, I DO have a Computer Science degree."
Zingg!! In fact, some at Yahoo now want Bartz back.
"3D printing will be the canvas of the 21st century."
That's the prediction being made by Abe Reichental, the CEO of 3D Systems and biggest cheerleader of the Cube, his company's first 3D printer built with the mass market consumer in mind. While 3D Systems more or less created the industrial side of the 3D printing business, the Cube is its foray into a more fledging, uncertain side of the industry.
Reichental, however, is certain of his goal: To democratize creativity. "My assertion is that everyone can be creative if you remove all the friction and intimidation," Reichental told VentureBeat at a press event in New York City.
As you may have heard, some security researchers recently released information outlining a long-standing vulnerability within the PHP-CGI code. The short of it is that remote attackers may be able to pass command line arguments in a query_string that will be passed directly to the PHP-CGI program.
In a conversation with Samsung's Ryan Bidan today, we learned that the company's Galaxy S II Skyrocket HD, announced at CES earlier this year, has been shelved. He explains that it simply didn't make sense in light of the Galaxy S III announcement, leaving the product "orphaned" in AT&T's lineup -- it's hard to justify an updated 720p version of the existing Skyrocket with the S III on the horizon.
How does it happen that you announce a handset at CES when you must know the bigger successor will imminently be appearing? Either Samsung US or AT&T wasn't fully informed. Not a cheap mistake to make, either.
Google is offering billion dollar checks to labels for blanket rights to their entire catalogs, according to highly placed digital music sources.
According to one source, "Google has offered at least one label over a billion dollars for all the rights in every country for every piece of music and for every platform." This means that Google could potential be writing checks for a total of well over $5 billion, if they're crazy enough to actually go through with it. By comparison, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry's (IFPI), total revenue generated by the global recorded music industry in 2011 was $16.6 billion.
Isn't going to happen, though it might sorely tempt some labels. Problem for Google is that (if the report is correct) it has a slight air of desperation, which is never a good way to look in negotiations.
Hollywood and the federal government have partnered to create updated and even more annoying anti-piracy warnings that will be included in new home-release DVDs and Blu-ray discs beginning this week, the government said Tuesday.
The new warnings now have three scary logos intended to deter those who might violate copyright law by making a back-up copy, ripping a movie to a tablet-friendly file, uploading it to a peer-to-peer network or make illegal copies to send to military service members in Iraq.
Someone should do a study of how pointlessly bad ideas promulgate. Quite possibly these are simply there for legal reasons - so that in prosecutions there is no defence that "I didn't see the warning". Still as backward as a window tax, though. (Thanks @rquick for the link.)
Though demand for Nokia's new Lumia smartphones has been spotty across the globe, the Lumia 900 continues to sell reasonably well in the U.S. Retail checks conducted by Raymond James analyst Tavis McCourt suggest that the device is the second-best-selling device at most AT&T stores, after the iPhone.
View Channel
