Yves's planet

Slashdot: Finding Lost Recording From the 1880s

2012-02-05T07:26:00+00:00

An anonymous reader writes "The NY Times recently ran a story on the discovery of a cache of wax cylinder records, recorded in Europe in the 1880s, of Otto von Bismarck, Helmuth von Moltke, and various musicians. 'In June 1889, Edison sent Wangemann to Europe, initially to ensure that the phonograph at the Paris World’s Fair remained in working order. After Paris, Wangemann toured his native Germany, recording musical artists and often visiting the homes of prominent members of society who were fascinated with the talking machine. Until now, the only available recording from Wangemann’s European trip has been a well-known and well-worn cylinder of Brahms playing an excerpt from his first Hungarian Dance. That recording is so damaged "that many listeners can scarcely discern the sound of a piano, which has in turn tarnished the reputations of both Wangemann and the Edison phonograph of the late 1880s," Dr. Feaster said. "These newly unearthed examples vindicate both."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: India Turns Down American Fighter Jets, Buys From France

2012-02-05T04:27:00+00:00

An anonymous reader writes "While America had offered the F-16, F-18 and now the stealth F-35 fighter, India picked for its new multi-role attack jet a low cost, older French plane. Why? For one, it's cheaper, and two, if American/Indian relations go bad, can they get the parts and equipment to keep the planes in the air? It seems prudence beat out the latest in technology."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: New Hampshire Passes 'Open Source Bill'

2012-02-05T01:25:00+00:00

Plugh writes "In a victory for transparency and openness in government, and saving tax dollars, New Hampshire has passed HB418. State agencies are now required by law to consider open source software when acquiring software, and to promote the use of open data formats."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Text Message Brands Quebec Man a Terror Suspect

2012-02-05T00:21:00+00:00

An anonymous reader writes "Saad Allami likely never expected that a simple text message of encouragement would have turned his life upside down. But as seen in a similar case of absurd overreaction by authorities, a simple text message is all it takes to have yourself branded as a terrorist. From the article: 'The Quebec man says he was arrested by provincial police while picking up his seven-year-old son at school. A team of police officers stormed into his home, telling his wife she was married to a terrorist. And his work colleagues were detained for hours at the U.S. border because of their connection to him.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Apple Overturns Motorola's German iPad and iPhone Sales Bans

2012-02-04T23:10:00+00:00

SpuriousLogic sends this excerpt from a BBC article detailing the suspension of a sales ban on certain Apple products in Germany: "Motorola Mobility had forced Apple to remove several iPad and iPhone models from its online store [yesterday] after enforcing a patent infringement court ruling delivered in December. An appeals court lifted the ban after Apple made a new license payment offer. However, Germany-based users may still face the loss of their push email iCloud service after a separate ruling. 'A suspension like this is available only against a bond, but Apple is almost drowning in cash and obviously won't have had a problem with obtaining and posting a bond.' ... A statement from Apple said: 'All iPad and iPhone models will be back on sale through Apple's online store in Germany shortly.'" Reader DJRumpy points out that Motorola is seeking royalties of 2.25% for Apple's wireless devices in exchange for a license to use Motorola's patents.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthony Volodkin is fascinated: Skrillex was a lot of fun last night at Roseland (RS/Fluxblog)....

2012-02-04T22:43:00+00:00

Skrillex was a lot of fun last night at Roseland (RS/Fluxblog).

As the room lit up with projections of Call of Duty footage, Nyan Cat animations and sample-heavy bass, I couldn’t stop thinking that this show was among the signs that “Internet culture” is now just culture.

Slashdot: LibreOffice Developer Community Increasingly Robust

2012-02-04T22:09:00+00:00

New submitter someWebGeek writes "LibreOffice, the community-driven fork of OpenOffice, appears to have a very healthy and growing group of code contributors. The Document Foundation has published new stats that portray the climbing rates of developer involvement both in terms of numbers of people and numbers of code commits. One of the most encouraging aspects, as noted by Ryan Paul in an article at Ars, is that non-corporate code contributions by independent volunteers constitute the largest slice of the latest commit-pie."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Canada's Massive Public Traffic Surveillance System

2012-02-04T21:01:00+00:00

New submitter cqwww writes "A small magazine in Victoria, BC just uncovered a massive public traffic surveillance system deployed in Canada. Here's a quote from the article: 'Normally, area police manually key in plate numbers to check suspicious cars in the databases of the Canadian Police Information Center and ICBC. With [Automatic License Plate Recognition], for $27,000, a police cruiser is mounted with two cameras and software that can read license plates on both passing and stationary cars. According to the vendors, thousands of plates can be read hourly with 95-98 percent accuracy. ... In August 2011, VicPD Information and Privacy Manager Debra Taylor called me to explain that, even though VicPD had the ALPR system in one of their cruisers, the [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] ran the system, and I should contact them for any information. "We actually don’t have a program," Taylor said. "We don’t have any documents per se." ... A month later, Taylor handed over 600 pages. ... [The claim they kept no documents] was apparently only in reference to digital information. VicPD had kept 500 pages of written, hard-copy logs of every ALPR hit they’d ever seen.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TorrentFreak: Busted By The FBI: The Life Of An Elite Teen BitTorrent Uploader

2012-02-04T20:43:31+00:00

In the early part of the last decade when they were still the innocent side of 15-years-old, one schoolfriend showed another an Iomega ZIP drive (right) full of ‘warez’ – games and software with a big fat zero written on their price tag.

Having never seen anything like it before, James (as we shall call him for now) became hooked, and quickly began to display a trait inherent in many addicted file-sharers.

“I simply couldn’t get enough,” he told TorrentFreak. “It was more fun downloading and sharing the stuff with all my friends then actually using it or playing the actual games.”

Having become inspired by these simple beginnings, James began chatting with other like-minded people on warez sites and ICQ, going on to share warez via PUBS, FTP-enabled servers conveniently left open by companies with more bandwidth than security sense.

Sharing files wasn’t a simple process back then and James took exception when Napster began dumbing down the process.

“We hated it, simply despised it because it made a mockery of the hard work we put in to obtain all these different warez,” he recalls.

But despite these early bad feelings towards Napster, the future would eventually see James become a facilitator of even easier ways of downloading. Not for just his friends, but for more than a hundred thousand people.

After working his way up to become one of the top members on the GraveyardFXP warez board, James says he became a moderator of DelusionalFXP. It was there, on their IRC channel, that he would meet people whose new project would suck him in and change his life forever. At some point along the line, ‘James’ became better known to his peers as StonyVision, and he was invited to join a new project being set up by, among others, a fellow pirate known as Sk0t.

Under Sk0t’s leadership, a torrent site called Elite Torrents was taking shape and preparing itself for an eventual membership of some 130,000 active users. It would also become the only US-based BitTorrent tracker ever to be busted by the FBI and ICE.

After he’d installed BitComet and began sharing content in February 2004, staff on Elite noticed something very appealing about StonyVision – his impressive upload capability. StonyVision told us he’d “followed instructions” on how to use two instead of the regular one modem his cable connection usually allowed, which gave him business-standard upload speeds. When you’re delivering content on BitTorrent, upload bandwidth is king, and Elite wanted some of Stony’s.

But as file-sharers are often heard to complain, you can never have enough bandwidth, so Stony acquired a 100mbit server at The Planet in Texas and began seeding his files from there. Once around 150 of Elite’s users had grabbed his latest release he’d begin releasing his next torrent, usually the very latest movies. His performance eventually meant that he became a member of staff, later going on to organize other Elite Torrents uploaders.

Of course, StonyVision needed content to share and he wasted no time in getting it directly from source – The Scene. He’d gained access to this elite network through his contacts at DelusionalFXP and ended up adding his own server to something called T.O.P. or “Tower of Power” – 53 dedicated 100mbit servers acting as a single giant RAID FTP piracy site. But still Stony needed more.

“At that point I was on four or five top sites, and my main interest was always movies. I loved movies and still do,” Stony explained. “Since my server was tied up I ended up renting two more, one to race with and another for seeding content on Elite Torrents.”

In common with his more old-school peers, Stony saw himself as something of a Robin Hood, “taking from the rich and giving to Average Joe”, and reveled in the positive feedback left by up to 130,000 Elite Torrents users.

But the environment in the United States had become increasingly unfriendly towards The Scene. The FBI and DoJ’s Operation Fastlink was underway and there was a growing fear that torrent sites would be targeted next. Stony sensed the tension and stepped down from the site’s staff around April 2005. He was 19-years-old – and too late.

Elite Torrents and its operators were already being watched and no amount of IP-address obfuscation would prove effective in hiding Stony or his fellow staffers on the site.

“Truth be told I did hide my IP and was the hardest one to find but [the FBI] used the Patriot Act and came up with an asinine amount of money lost to these companies and the movie industry and labeled me as a possible domestic terrorist who was conspiring to commit copyright infringement,” Stony explains.

“I woke up to banging on the door over and over, the dogs started barking. I got up thinking who’s the asshole banging on my door at 6am? Next thing I know there’s 10+ FBI agents in my house. I started laughing at first – I thought it was a joke – until the reality sunk in.”

It was 25th May 2005 and Operation D-Elite, which was to claim several admins and staff members at Elite Torrents, was underway.

“That was the day of days, I was in total and utter dismay and couldn’t even wrap my head around what had happened. I had no clue what was happening to the others. I lawyered up immediately which in itself is a funny story. I opened up the Yellow Pages, looked under ‘lawyer’ and there it was – an ad with a firm that had dealt with computer crime.

“I think I need a lawyer,” Stony told the gentleman on the other end who inquired “Why?”

“Well, the FBI had just raided my house along with a group they called ICE,” Stony responded.

A few awkward seconds of silence was followed by: “How fast can you get here?”

What came next was mountains of litigation and Stony being told to expect the worst – 5 years in prison. The pressure proved too much and Stony went off the rails, turning to alcohol.

In December 2006 he would learn his fate for the uploading of 53 movies, 6 pieces of software and 10 video games. The government demanded a prison sentence in order to deter others from infringement. To Stony’s huge relief, they didn’t get their way.

“Luckily for me I had the most liberal federal judge there was at the time. I was given a fine of $3,500, 6 months house arrest, community service and 3 years probation in which I was not allowed to touch a computer. I had somehow escaped doing time and the U.S attorney was furious.”

But despite avoiding prison, Stony says that he’s still paid a price.

“It’s been the bane of my existence and yet made me who I am. I continued on a self destructive path for quite some time doing crazy things, still working out, getting in bar fights. Truth be told I’ve been to hell and back, stared the devil in the face with its trillions of dollars of influence (RIAA, MPAA) and laughed and walked away.”

Stony says that confessing to a double felony on job applications hinders him, but the support of a new woman in his life has helped tremendously. So how are things today?

“I of course no longer pirate anything anymore as I’m sure I’m still on numerous watch lists. Its simply fun to look every now and again,” says Stony.

“My story isn’t one of inspiration but one of caution. It could happen to anyone out there. I know people are thinking ‘nah, not me’, but that’s what I thought too and now here we are.”

Stony told us that he recently got back online again with his own computer and was inspired by the huge anti-SOPA and PIPA campaigns.

“Thanks to everyone who spoke out on Internet blackout day. It really did give me goosebumps to see people finally stand up and be heard,” he concludes.

Sk0t’s story and those of his fellow operators and uploaders can be found here and here.

Source: Busted By The FBI: The Life Of An Elite Teen BitTorrent Uploader

Slashdot: German Government Endorses Chrome As Most Secure Browser

2012-02-04T19:54:00+00:00

New submitter beta2 writes "Several articles are noting that the German IT security agency BSI is endorsing Google Chrome browser: 'BSI ticked off Chrome's anti-exploit sandbox technology, which isolates the browser from the operating system and the rest of the computer; its silent update mechanism and Chrome's habit of bundling Adobe Flash, as its reasons for the recommendation. ... BSI also recommended Adobe Reader X — the version of the popular PDF reader that, like Chrome, relies on a sandbox to protect users from exploits — and urged citizens to use Windows' Auto Update feature to keep their PCs abreast of all OS security fixes. To update applications, BSI gave a nod to Secunia's Personal Software Inspector, a free utility that scan a computer for outdated software and point users to appropriate downloads.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: Weekly Wrap-up: Great User Experience, Pinterest, and Corporate Blogs

2012-02-04T19:30:04+00:00

Richard MacManus explores the characteristics of great user experience design. Alicia Eler explains what Pinterest is doing that Facebook should emulate. David Strom notes the decline of corporate blogging. All of this and more in the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up.

After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

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5 Signs of a Great User Experience

Great user experience is the result of thoughtful design. Richard explores 5 signs of great user experience, including examples from Path, Pinterest, Rdio and Fitbit. While he explains that great user experience isn't the deciding factor for success, it plays an important role and just may help a company gain initial attention and widespread adoption.

What Pinterest is Doing That Facebook Isn't

News of Facebook's IPO had many tongues wagging this week, but Alicia Eler focused on something Pinterest is doing that Facebook isn't: impacting purchases. While Facebook has tried to make social commerce work, Pinterest is delivering traffic that results in sales. Facebook conflates the social graph with the interest graph, and Alicia says that's a mistake.

Blogging Declines Across the Inc. 500

A new study indicates the number of corporate blogs amongst the Inc. 500 has significantly dropped in the past year. Conversely, the number has stayed virtually the same for the Fortune 500. Instead, of blogging, the Inc. 500 seems to be focusing on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

From the comments:

Lorne Pike - "I can't help but feel that any conclusions being drawn about blogging having peaked because of one year's change are very premature. We know the Inc. 500 is a volatile and ever-changing group of companies. Many of the names on the list will change from one year to the next. How many of the companies that at first glance seem to have "stopped" blogging simply weren't on the list last year?
The chart also shows that just a year ago we saw a considerable rise. Should we have concluded from that that the best days for blogging were still ahead? Blogging has many benefits, as do the other channels shown. To me, while it may be an early sign of things to come, the numbers shown here are hardly a sign that blogging is dead or dying or even has a slight cold. It's just changing, like marketing always has and always will."

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Slashdot: Milky Way Magnetic Fields Charted

2012-02-04T18:50:00+00:00

eldavojohn writes "Using radio telescope data, scientists from around the world have plotted the Milky Way Galaxy's magnetic field in the form of Faraday Depth. From the article, 'For 150 years, scientists have measured cosmic magnetic field by observing the Faraday effect. They know that when polarized light passes though a magnetized medium, the plane of polarization turns. This concept is called Faraday rotation. The strength and direction of the magnetic field governs the amount of rotation that occurs. So scientists observe the rotation to investigate the magnetic fields' properties. Radio astronomers study the polarized light from distant radio source, passing through the Milky Way on the way to Earth, in order to measure our Galaxy's magnetic field. By measuring the polarization of the light sources at different frequencies, researchers can determine the amount of Faraday rotation.' In the future, radio telescope technologies like LOFAR, eVLA, ASKAP, MeerKAT and the SKA hope to provide enhanced Faraday rotation data so scientists can better understand turbulence in galactic gas and these galactic magnetic field structures."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthony Volodkin is fascinated: The Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, sort of.

2012-02-04T18:24:14+00:00

The Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, sort of.

Anthony Volodkin is fascinated: This is Igor Sysoev, the creator of the nginx web server. He...

2012-02-04T18:22:11+00:00

This is Igor Sysoev, the creator of the nginx web server. He enjoys skiing and has just 2 friends on the Russian Facebook-like social network VKontakte: the founder Pavel and his brother. He looks like a badass.

ReadWriteWeb: Cartoon: Firestorm!

2012-02-04T18:00:00+00:00

A while ago, I posted about one of the classic blunders in response to online criticism: deleting negative comments.

Let's add another mistake to that list: silence.

I'm not sure there's a force on earth that could have saved Susan G. Komen for the Cure from the social media firestorm that engulfed the organization this week. But lord knows their communications strategy didn't do them a lot of favors - starting with their initial silence.

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Whether the rationale is "Let's hope it blows over" or "We can't get internal consensus on a message, so let's not say anything" or "Legal suggests we shut up", silence does nothing to stop an online juggernaut from building. All it does is reinforce the impression of an organization's critics that it's out of touch with their concerns.

Back when the main communication vehicles were things like ads and news media, you could often take a good long time before pushing out a news release or sending a spokesperson out for a scrum. Not any more.

Two things can help if you find yourself in the Komen situation - especially if you need some time to gather the facts, reflect on your position and decide on your next move.

First, a crisis communication plan. Thinking about possible scenarios and developing a strategy for each one - including who responds, how and in what channel - means you don't have to do that thinking when your fight-or-flight mechanism is competing with your higher reasoning functions for attention.

And second, an honest temporizing response. Replying to people that you understand how important the issue is to them, and promising them a more complete response within a few hours or days, and then delivering on that promise with a sincere and direct reply, can give you and your colleagues the time to move beyond a reactive, defensive response to a more effective one.

What won't work is wishful thinking. Planning based on the assumption that nobody will notice what you've done - or that when they do, they'll give you the benefit of the doubt - is some of the best fuel a firestorm could ask for.

Find more fuel for your next social media firestorm at the complete Noise to Signal cartoon archive.

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Slashdot: New Book Helps You Start Contributing To Open Source

2012-02-04T17:45:00+00:00

jrepin writes "This new book Open Advice is the answer to: 'What would you have liked to know when you started contributing?' 42 prominent free and open source software contributors give insights into the many different talents it takes to make a successful software project; coding, of course, but also design, translation, marketing and other skills. They are here to give you a head start if you are new. And if you have been contributing for a while already, they are here to give you some insight into other areas and projects."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Planète Web Sémantique: Le potiron de Kandinsky

2012-02-04T16:40:00+00:00

Montréal, Canada, 3 février 2012

It was an experience such as one might hear in the mysterious kitchens of the arcane alchemists.

How often this first paintbox maliciously jeered and laughed at me. Sometimes the paint would trickle off the canvas; sometimes, within a short space of time, it would reveal cracks; sometimes it would turn paler, sometimes darker; sometimes it would appear to jump off the canvas and swim in mid-air; sometimes it would go dull and increasingly murky, resembling a dead bird as it starts to decompose—I don't know how all it happened.

Wassily Kandinsky, Reminiscences/Three pictures, 1994.

Une soupe de potiron.
Des éclats de Kandinsky.
Le goût de la pintade et du poivron.
La neige en flocons entre le fer noir de l'escalier.

Aujourd'hui, je travaille dans la cuisine.

Cercles dans un cercle, Kandinsky, 1923

Slashdot: $100,000 Prize: Prove Quantum Computers Impossible

2012-02-04T16:38:00+00:00

mikejuk writes "Quantum computing is currently a major area of research — but is this all a waste of effort? Now Scott Aaronson, a well-known MIT computer scientist, has offered a prize of $100,000 for any proof that quantum computers are impossible: 'I'm now offering a US$100,000 award for a demonstration, convincing to me, that scalable quantum computing is impossible in the physical world.' Notice the two important conditions — 'physical world' and 'scalable.' The proof doesn't have to rule out tiny 'toy' quantum computers, only those that could do any useful work."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: President By Day, High-Tech Headhunter By Night

2012-02-04T15:31:00+00:00

theodp writes "The White House is following up on an offer made by President Barack Obama this week to help find a job for an unemployed semiconductor engineer in Texas. The offer was made during a live online town hall after the ex-TI engineer's wife questioned the government's policy concerning H-1B visa workers. Obama asked for EE Darin Wedel's resume and said he would 'forward it to some of these companies that are telling me they can't find enough engineers in this field.' While grateful, patent-holder Wedel said the president's view on the job prospects for engineers in his field 'is definitely not what's happening in the real world.' Duke adjunct professor Vivek Wadhwa offered his frank take on 40-year-old Wedel's predicament: 'The No. 1 issue in the tech world is as people get older, they generally become more expensive. So if you're an employer who can hire a worker fresh out of college who is making $60,000 versus an older worker who is making $150,000, and the younger worker has skills that are fresher, who would you hire?' Coincidentally, Texas Instruments sought President Obama's help in reducing restrictions on the hiring of younger foreign workers in 2009, the same year it laid off Wedel."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: You Will Never Kill Piracy

2012-02-04T14:25:00+00:00

scottbomb writes "This is perhaps the best op-ed I've read about the whole SOPA/PIPA controversy. The author challenges Hollywood to re-think their entire business model. It will undoubtedly fall on deaf ears, for now. But sooner or later, they will have no choice but to adapt. From the article: 'Now that the SOPA and PIPA fights have died down, and Hollywood prepares their next salvo against internet freedom with ACTA and PCIP, it's worth pausing to consider how the war on piracy could actually be won. It can't, is the short answer, and one these companies do not want to hear as they put their fingers in their ears and start yelling.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: New Mobile Plan Pools Data On Unlimited Devices

2012-02-04T13:21:00+00:00

Hugh Pickens writes "PC Magazine reports that Ting, a new reseller of Sprint's voice, 3G and WiMax services, has a new approach to mobile pricing that lets customers buy minutes, messages, and data separately, and allows households to pool them to an unlimited number of phones and data devices on one account. 'Household data plans are the next step for consumers, mainly because people are adding more connected screens and devices to their lifestyle,' writes Kevin Tofel. 'And different household members have different data needs; some use a little while others consume gobs of gigabytes. Why not average out the usage across multiple devices?' Both AT&T and Verizon have hinted at offering shared data plans in the future, but the devil's in the details, says Tofel. 'My hope is that family data plans come soon, to all carriers, just like we have for family voice and messaging plans.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: [STUDY] Jonesing For A Retweet: Twitter Harder To Resist Than Cigarettes And Booze

2012-02-04T13:15:21+00:00

Sleep, sex and...Twitter?

A new study suggests that people are more likely to give into the urge to check email and their Twitter account than they are to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol. While the study headed by Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University's Booth Business School was limited in size, covering just 205 people between the ages of 18 and 85, it seems to confirm what many of us have suspected for years.

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"Desires for media may be comparatively harder to resist because of their high availability and also because it feels like it does not 'cost much' to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist," Hofmann told the Guardian.

The study was primarily focused on willpower as opposed to addiction, and the moments when people were forced to resist urges to partake in an activity or deal with conflicting urges, such as the urge to sleep and the urge to stay out socializing. Sleep and sex generally trumped other urges, but checking media and work were generally put ahead of socializing and shopping urges.

"Modern life is a welter of assorted desires marked by frequent conflict and resistance, the latter with uneven success," Hofmann said.

The study found that resistance to all urges declined as the day wore on, and that people seem to do a better job of resisting the urge to smoke or drink than many may have thought, given the addictive nature of both.

"With cigarettes and alcohol there are more costs - long-term as well as monetary - and the opportunity may not always be the right one," Hofmann said. "So, even though giving in to media desires is certainly less consequential, the frequent use may still 'steal' a lot of people's time."

Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.

Discuss

Semantic Web Interest Group Scratchpad: Web First, Hybrid Second, Native Third

2012-02-04T12:18:12+00:00

(2012-02-04 11:22)

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from klamma] Home - SocialCom-12

2012-02-04T10:31:51+00:00

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from klamma] SIGMAP 2012 - International Conference on Signal Processing and Multimedia Applications

2012-02-04T10:28:46+00:00

RadSpam: Services/Notifications/Push/API - MozillaWiki

2012-02-04T10:25:40+00:00

Push notifications are a way for websites to send small messages to users when the user is not on the site. iOS and Android devices already support their own push notification services, but we want to make notifications available to the whole web.

Slashdot: The Destruction of Iraq's Once-Great Universities

2012-02-04T10:12:00+00:00

Harperdog writes "Hugh Gusterson has written a devastating article about what has happened to Iraq's once great university system, and puts most of the blame for its total collapse on the U.S. Quoting: 'While American troops guarded the Ministries of Oil and the Interior but ignored cultural heritage sites, looters ransacked the universities. For example, the entire library collections at the University of Baghdad's College of Arts and at the University of Basra were destroyed. The Washington Post's Rajiv Chandresekara described the scene at Mustansiriya University in 2003: "By April 12, the campus of yellow-brick buildings and grassy courtyards was stripped of its books, computers, lab equipment and desks. Even electrical wiring was pulled from the walls. What was not stolen was set ablaze, sending dark smoke billowing over the capital that day."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TorrentFreak: We Need Copyright Reform, Not ACTA!

2012-02-04T09:49:05+00:00

The internet is a great tool to alert politicians to all the dangers of this treaty, just as the internet was a tool to mobilize people against the SOPA and PIPA bills in the US. For any lobby to be effective, however, it must be fact based. Misinformed criticism helps those supporting ACTA.

The dangers and threats of the ACTA treaty are shared by free-speech advocates and access to medicine groups alike. ACTA is seeking to deal with a number of widely differing issues, and hence does not do a good job at any of them. Additionally, there are serious concerns about the collateral damage that ACTA would cause.

Regrettably, concerns by businesses, NGO’s and politicians have not led to a better result. This is partly due to the intransparant way in which ACTA has been established and negotiated. As a democratically elected representative, I believe it is not the role of government to protect outdated business models, and I do believe it is our job to ensure democratic oversight.

Besides zooming in on the details of what ACTA will and will not do, taking a step back and looking at the broader picture is also important. As someone who advocates copyright reform, notably the harmonization of copyright laws in Europe, I do not believe stricter enforcement of outdated systems is helpful or relevant. Enforcement is not even possible in many cases, and not without violating people’s fundamental rights.

Yet there is a big push towards enforcing outdated legal structures of copyright by the entertainment industry. ACTA will lock any signatory country into a system of copyright enforcement, leaving the democratic process disadvantaged to enact necessary reform of our laws to suit the digital age.

The fast development of the information society and all the innovations we have seen in the last 15 or so years have changed the way we live. People can enforce their fundamental rights of access to information, and free speech with the help of the internet. Human rights violations are documented and shared across the world, and the way we access and share information and culture such as news, music and films has changed forever. Most copyright rules were developed for the printing press and codified internationally before radio had even been invented.

Some of the most important EU laws regulating the internet were established before social media and peer-to-peer sharing took off. The E-commerce Directive of 2000 and the Copyright Directive of 2001 were enacted without foresight of the new services which were developed over the last 10 years. Time and time again, it has been proven that the Directives and their national implementations do not suit the digital age that followed directly afterwards. The fragmentation of European copyright puts the EU, which is widely known for its wealth in culture, at a competitive disadvantage in comparison to the United States.

Copyright and E-Commerce need to suit the needs of the advanced information society we now live in. To enable a flourishing Digital Single Market in Europe, we need to analyse case-law of the last 12 years regarding the internet, hear from creators, innovators and consumers. If we want to serve consumers, artists and businesses well, we need to find a new balance in copyright. Every aspect of copyright needs to be discussed: the exclusive rights, limitations and exceptions, collective management, enforcement, etc. Only then should we discuss how to enforce the new found balance on the international arena, such as with ACTA.

ACTA must not be passed. Let’s focus on reform to allow for the opportunities of the internet to bloom, instead of allowing outdated business models to limit the free market, and to criminalize audiences. Additionally, health threats as a result of counterfeit medicine deserve a better solution than ACTA. Join me in voicing your concern with this treaty, so we can establish flexible copyright rules which are fit for the 21st century.

About The Author

Marietje Schaake is a Member of European Parliament (D66/ALDE Group). She is a member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs (AFET), as well as the Committee on Culture, Media and Education (CULT).

Follow @marietjed66

Source: We Need Copyright Reform, Not ACTA!

Slashdot: World's Largest Virtual Optical Telescope Created

2012-02-04T08:26:00+00:00

erice writes "Astronomers in Chile linked four telescopes together to form a single virtual mirror 130 meters in diameter. Previous efforts had linked two telescopes but this is the first time that all four had been linked. 'The process that links separate telescopes together is known as interferometry. In this mode, the VLT becomes the biggest ground-based optical telescope on earth. Besides creating a gigantic virtual mirror, interferometry also greatly improves the telescope's spatial resolution and zooming capabilities.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Facebook On Collision Course With New EU Privacy Laws

2012-02-04T07:14:00+00:00

An anonymous reader writes "Facebook and other U.S. internet companies are faced with a new EU data protection regime, the Christian Science Monitor reports. U.S. concepts of free expression and commerce will battle European support for privacy and state legislation. 'Companies must understand that if they want access to 500 million consumers in the EU, then they have to comply. This is not an option,' said a spokesman for the EU Justice Commissioner."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BBC Internet blog: What's On BBC Red Button 4th - 12th February

2012-02-04T06:00:00+00:00

Folk Awards

Mike Harding

Presented by Mike Harding and Julie Fowlis, the awards show takes place at The Lowry Theatre, Salford on Wednesday 8 February and will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 2 and the Red Button.

The ceremony, which includes performances by The Dubliners, Christy Moore, Don McLean and Seth Lakeman, will celebrate the folk highlights of the last 12 months, including awards for Best album, group, musician, live act and Folk singer of the year. There will also be lifetime achievement presentations plus the announcement of the BBC Radio 2 Young Folk award winner.

June Tabor & Oysterband are jointly leading the way with four nominations, following the release last year of their album Ragged Kingdom. They are nominated in the categories Best Group, Best Album, Best Traditional Track for Bonny Bunch of Roses and June Tabor is also nominated in the Folk Singer of the Year category.

Also winning four nominations are critics' favourites The Unthanks in a year which has seen the release of their fourth album Last and an acclaimed tour with the Brighouse & Rastrick Band.

Available on all platforms

Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media:
Wed 8th February, 7:30pm-10:00pm
Thu 9th February, 8:55pm-6:00am
Fri 10th February, 6:00am-6:00am

Freeview:
Wed 8th February, 7:30pm-10:00pm
Thu 9th February, 8:55pm-3:15am
Fri 10th February, 4:10am-10:35am, 1:00pm-2:50pm, 6:10pm-7:35pm, 9:10pm-6:00am

Masterclass

This is the second BBC Introducing Masterclass for music makers, from the most famous recording studios in the world - Abbey Road and BBC Maida Vale studios.

The Masterclass focuses on inspiring bands and musicians about the music industry. Music producers, promoters, publishers, record label execs, managers, agents, musicians, remixers, DJs, and BBC talent worked together with two hundred bands and musicians.

Available on all platforms

Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media:
Sat 4th February, 6:00am-4:00am

Freeview:
Sat 4th February, 6:00am-6:50am, 10:10am-1:50pm

Being Human

Comedy-drama series about three twenty-something housemates trying to live normal lives, despite struggling with unusual afflictions - one is a werewolf, one is a vampire and the other is a ghost. Meanwhile, The Old Ones are coming! View an extra episode of Being Human on the BBC Red Button straight after the TV episode.

Available on all platforms

Freesat/Sky:
Sun 5th February, 9:55pm-4:00am
Mon 6th February, 9:00pm-4:00am
Tue 7th February, 9:00pm-4:00am
Wed 8th February, 11:00pm-4:00am
Thu 9th February, 9:30pm-4:00am
Fri 10th February, 10:00pm-4:00am

Virgin Media:
Sun 5th February, 9:55pm-4:00am
Mon 6th February, 9:00pm-4:00am
Tue 7th February, 9:00pm-4:00am
Wed 8th February, 11:00pm-4:00am
Thu 9th February, 10:30pm-4:00am
Fri 10th February, 10:00pm-4:00am

Freeview:
Sun 5th February, 9:55pm-10:45pm
Mon 6th February, 10:10pm-4:00am
Tue 7th February, 10:10pm-4:00am
Wed 8th February, 11:00pm-4:00am
Fri 10th February, 3:25am-4:00am

Dickens in London

Dickens in London presents five short plays based on Charles Dickens' journalism about walking in London to tell the story of the writer's life.

Adapted by Michael Eaton, the cast stars Samuel Barnett, Alex Jennings and Antony Sher each taking their turn to play Dickens. Following Dickens' changing relationship with the city that fired his imagination, each stand-alone play takes its title from one of Dickens's own appellations: A Not Over-Particularly-Taken-Care-Of-Boy; Boz; the Sparkler of Albion; the Uncommercial Traveller; and The Inimitable.

Available on all platforms

Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media:
Mon 6th February, 10:45am-2:50pm, 7:45pm-10:00pm
Tue 7th February, 10:45am-2:50pm, 7:45pm-10:00pm
Wed 8th February, 10:45am-2:50pm, 7:45pm-10:00pm
Thu 9th February, 10:45am-2:50pm, 7:45pm-10:00pm
Fri 10th February, 10:45am-12:00pm, 7:45pm-9:00pm

Freeview:
Mon 6th February, 10:45am-2:50pm, 7:45pm-10:00pm
Tue 7th February, 10:45am-2:50pm, 7:45pm-10:00pm
Wed 8th February, 10:45am-2:50pm
Thu 9th February, 10:45am-2:50pm, 7:45pm-8:45pm
Fri 10th February, 10:45am-12:00pm, 7:45pm-9:00pm

CBBC Extra

CBBC Extra is the home of exclusives. Watch funny clips, out-takes, star interviews, pop music, backstage previews and episodes from Children's BBC.

CBBC Extra website

Available on all platforms

Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media/Freeview:
Sat 4th February, 7:00am-10:00am
Mon 6th February, 7:00am-10:00am, 3:00pm-6:00pm
Tue 7th February, 7:00am-10:00am, 3:00pm-6:00pm
Wed 8th February, 7:00am-10:00am, 3:00pm-6:00pm
Thu 9th February, 7:00am-10:00am, 3:00pm-6:00pm
Fri 10th February, 7:00am-10:00am, 3:00pm-6:00pm

News Multiscreen: Video Choice

Each weekday BBC News' On Demand team will be rounding-up the day's strongest news pictures to bring viewers a two-minute package of highlights. On weekends the tone becomes more conversational when Red Button viewers can watch a topical interview in 'Five Minutes with...' or a round-up of the week's weird and wonderful videos in OddBox.

Video Choice: Weekdays (available around the clock)
Five Minutes With... / OddBox: Weekends (around the clock)

BBC News website

Available on Sky and Virgin only

CBeebies Red Button

BBC Red Button welcomes younger viewers and grown-ups with a sense of adventure to the big, bright and fun world of CBeebies interactive!

Now your children's favourite characters are at the heart of the interactive TV experience. Satellite and digital terrestrial viewers will have slightly different offerings from one another. This has enabled us to offer the best games tailored to each system.

CBeebies Red Button is available now on the CBeebies channel, and via page 5900 on other channels.

Cbeebies website

Available on Freeview and Sky only

BBC Sport Multiscreen**

Catch up on all the latest Sport via the BBC Sport multiscreen. Headlines are available around the clock with up to five additional streams available to cover the best that BBC Sport has to offer.

Please note that Red Button sport timings are subject to change at short notice.

For the latest information refer to the BBC Sport website.

Highlights

Rugby Union - Six Nations Forum. Analysis of all todays Six Nations matches.
World Cup Skiing - Live coverage of the Men's Slalom from Chamonix.
American Football - Live coverage of Super Bowl 45 from Indianpolis with commentary options.

**Note all Red Button times are subject to change at short notice

Slashdot: Researchers Feel Pressure To Cite Superfluous Papers

2012-02-04T05:08:00+00:00

ananyo writes "One in five academics in a variety of social science and business fields say they have been asked to pad their papers with superfluous references in order to get published. The figures, from a survey published in the journal Science (abstract), also suggest that journal editors strategically target junior faculty, who in turn were more willing to acquiesce. The controversial practice is not new: those studying publication ethics have for many years noted that some editors encourage extra references in order to boost a journal's impact factor (a measure of the average number of citations an article in the journal receives over two years). But the survey is the first to try to quantify what it calls 'coercive citation,' and shows that this is 'uncomfortably common.' Perhaps the most striking finding of the survey was that although 86% of the respondents said that coercion was inappropriate, and 81% thought it damaged a journal's prestige, 57% said they would add superfluous citations to a paper before submitting it to a journal known to coerce. However, figures from Thomson Reuters suggest that social-science journals tend to have more self-citations than basic-science journals."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Planète Web Sémantique: Le potiron de Kandinsky

2012-02-04T05:06:36+00:00

Montréal, Canada, 3 février 2012

It was an experience such as one might hear in the mysterious kitchens of the arcane alchemists.

How often this first paintbox maliciously jeered and laughed at me. Sometimes the paint would trickle off the canvas; sometimes, within a short space of time, it would reveal cracks; sometimes it would turn paler, sometimes darker; sometimes it would appear to jump off the canvas and swim in mid-air; sometimes it would go dull and increasingly murky, resembling a dead bird as it starts to decompose—I don't know how all it happened.

Wassily Kandinsky, Reminiscences/Three pictures, 1994.

Une soupe de potiron.
Des éclats de Kandinsky.
Le goût de la pintade et du poivron.
La neige en flocons entre le fer noir de l'escalier.

Aujourd'hui, je travaille dans la cuisine.

Cercles dans un cercle, Kandinsky, 1923

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from tomkeays] Handlebars.js: Minimal Templating on Steroids

2012-02-04T03:12:25+00:00

Handlebars provides the power necessary to let you build semantic templates effectively with no frustration. Mustache templates are compatible with Handlebars, so you can take a Mustache template, import it into Handlebars, and start taking advantage of the extra Handlebars features.

Slashdot: Ask Slashdot: Are Daily Stand-Up Meetings More Productive?

2012-02-04T03:06:00+00:00

__roo writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that an increasing number of companies are replacing traditional meetings with daily stand-ups. The article points out that stand-up meetings date back to at least World War I, and that in some place, late employees 'sometimes must sing a song like "I'm a Little Teapot," do a lap around the office building or pay a small fine.' Do Slashdot readers feel that stand-up meetings are useful? Do they make a difference? Are they a gimmick?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from tomkeays] Backbone.js

2012-02-04T03:04:47+00:00

When working on a web application that involves a lot of JavaScript, one of the first things you learn is to stop tying your data to the DOM. It's all too easy to create JavaScript applications that end up as tangled piles of jQuery selectors and callbacks, all trying frantically to keep data in sync between the HTML UI, your JavaScript logic, and the database on your server. With Backbone, you represent your data as Models, which can be created, validated, destroyed, and saved to the server. Whenever a UI action causes an attribute of a model to change, the model triggers a "change" event; all the Views that display the model's state can be notified of the change, so that they are able to respond accordingly, re-rendering themselves with the new information. In a finished Backbone app, you don't have to write the glue code that looks into the DOM to find an element with a specific id, and update the HTML manually — when the model changes, the views simply update themselves.

Slashdot: Doctors 'Cheating' On Board Certifications

2012-02-04T01:04:00+00:00

Maximum Prophet writes "After taking board exams, doctors have been routinely getting together to remember and reproduce as much of the exam as they can. These notes are then bound and reproduced. According to the American Board of Dermatology, the exams are protected by copyright laws, and any reproduction not approved by the board is illegal. While I have no doubt that the Board believes this, and pays lawyers to believe it as well, I don't think they understand copyright. Perhaps they should invest in better testing methods."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: Why the "S&%t X Says to Y" Version of This Meme Exploded

2012-02-04T00:30:00+00:00

"The thing about memes is that through repetition, they create a shared language," says Professor Julie Levin Russo, an adjunct assistant professor at Brown's Modern Culture & Media Program. "If you understand the premise of the meme, you can communicate a lot very easily, with whatever twist you're putting on the meme structure."

On Jan 4, the "Shit Girls Say" meme was radically transformed. New York-based graphic designer & video blogger Franchesca Ramsey a.k.a. Chescaleigh unleashed "Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls", and it blew up the Internet. In the video, Ramsey plays her blonde-haired white friend who she portrays as curiously confused, and innocently ignorant. "Why isn't there a white entertainment television? The Jews were slaves too, and you don't hear us complaining all the time," Chescaleigh as-white-girl asks the camera. She portrays her friend as at times confused ("Is this racist?") other times annoyed. Overall, her white friend is completely unaware of fundamental cultural and racial differences between her and her black friend. It's these awkward moments that fuel the humor of this viral video.

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When Franchesca appeared on Anderson Cooper a few days after the video blew up, Cooper asked *the question* that mainstream media was dying to know: Is the video racist?

"I don't think that talking about ignorance is racist," Franchesca tells Cooper. "And like I said, I'm not labeling anyone racist because that would infer that the statements were saying someone was better than another race - and that's not what any of the statements are doing." Shortly after her Anderson Cooper appearance, Franchesca produced a sequel, "Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls Part 2."

Soon, more "Shit X Says to Y" versions of the meme began to appear. "Shit White Girls Say to Brown (Desi/Indian) Girls" features an Indian woman portraying her white girlfriend, who asks questions like "Do you want to go to 7-11? Oh oops, is that racist?" It is cutting, and points to some of the underlying racism that Indian-Americans experience regularly.

In "Shit White Guys Say to Asian Girls," actor/comedian Cindy Fang dresses in drag, playing a white dude and points out some of the obnoxious, arrogant statements that some white guys say to Asian women. "Sorry, I have a hard time telling Asians apart," she says, with a tone that conveys how the white guy she is portraying doesn't feel like trying to educate himself. He is blissful in his ignorance. And then, a blatantly racist statement: "Why do they call it Bangkok? They should call it Bang Pussy!!!" This video speaks to the painful sexism and racism that Asian women experience.

Of course, it's just comedy - and the talented Fang masterfully exaggerates these statements to hammer home the crass, yet serious joke. Moreso than "Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls," "Shit White Guys Say to Asian Girls" is doubly as biting, taking swipes at sex and race relations. It's almost as upsetting as "Shit Asian Girls Say", another version of the original "Shit Girls Say" meme.

In Latoya Peterson's blog post "Exploring the Problematic and Subversive Shit People Say [Meme-ology]" on Racialicious, she notes that it isn't until "Shit Black Gays Say" (and part 2) and "Shit Southern Gay Guys Say" that the viewer starts to see the performer's subjective interpretation of themselves.

"It's notable that these videos are the principals representing themselves (as opposed to someone else's interpretation of them), perhaps since these groups are still so invisible in the public eye that no one else but them could speak to their experience," writes Peterson.

How "Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls" Shifted the Conversation

"There's a way in which the meme format allows for a more granular renditions of identity than you often see in mass culture," says Professor Russo.

Chescaleigh's video shifted the focus from the narrator as subject to the narrator as a vehicle for social critique. Now X is saying something to Y. Previously, X was either speaking for themselves, or portraying the stereotypical subject, usually in drag.

"Do you know the guy at the liquor store? I mean, I assume you guys all know each other," says the Arab girl portraying her white friend in "Shit White Girls Say...to Arab Girls". "I've never met one of you before! I mean, I've seen Arabs on TV...on the news. Was 9/11 your fault?"

"Friendly Prejuidice"

Writing for The Guardian, Thea Lim points out that the statements in all of these videos imply a sort of "friendly prejudice":

What's friendly prejudice? The most common defence of racism is: "But I didn't intend to be racist." This response relies on the idea that if we didn't intend to offend someone, then their feelings can't possibly be hurt. The Shit X Says to Y videos are delightfully validating because they show that those with the genuinely lovely intentions of being your friend and seeking commonality with you can still be rude and hurtful.

A commenter on the NPR story that questioned if Franchesca's video was "racist" tried the good ol' "role reversal" trick (that always fails), which attempts to deny the existence of white privilege. "If the roles were reversed...Jesse [Jackson] & [Al] Sharpton, would be involved, lawsuits filed, perhaps riots...". Says Lim:

The reason why relationships between white and non-white people, or straight people and gay people are fraught, is because of our history - long gone, recent or ongoing. Racist, homophobic or simply thoughtless comments are insulting not just in and of themselves, but because they are a bilious reminder of the times when straight, white people have dehumanised and denied other groups their human rights. Of course, non-white and gay people can say nasty or even prejudicial things to white and straight people, but those things don't deliver the sting that comes from decades of being on the wrong end of an unequal relationship.

Where Do We Go From Here?

I have watched my friends react to these videos with anger and sadness. I have seen others shout "That's me! That totally happened to me." Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. The most important aspect of these videos, however, is that people are actually reacting to them. They're easy conversation starters, a segway into sharing experiences past and present.

Looking at our own biased perspectives and cultural baggage is not easy, but it is necessary. The "Shit X Says to Y" iteration of the "Shit People Say" meme forces viewers to actually think about what they've said to their friends, and what their friends say to them. Humor helps us in those strange, uncomfortable moments.

But are we ready to deal with this?

In her post on Racialicous, Peterson points out that, still, "Shit Girls Say" and "Shit Black Girls Say" received a lot more views than their "Shit X Says to Y" social commentary videos. "Maybe that's because, as a culture, we are accustomed to laughing at stereotypes," writes Peterson, "but we aren't prepared to unpack how we perpetuate them."

After a few weeks of Internet madness, the noise died down. By the end of January, conversations about this meme were starting to feel stale. So the Internet chilled out and went back to its usual, easy humor. I started seeing these videos on my Facebook news feed: "Shit New Yorkers Say," "Shit Chicagoans Say." But it's only a matter of time until the currents shift again.

Image via Chescaleigh's Facebook page.

Discuss

Slashdot: Yes We Can (Profile You): a Brief Primer On Campaigns and Political Data

2012-02-04T00:20:00+00:00

An anonymous reader writes "In the Stanford Law Review Online, Professor Daniel Kreiss discusses 'the history of political data, focusing on the recent proliferation in voter data and development of new voter-modeling techniques,' and how 'these data practices undermine privacy and democratic practice, even as they increase participation and voter turnout.' He writes: 'Underlying all of this is a vast data infrastructure that has made targeted online advertising and marketing possible, and has contributed to a revival of field campaigning over the last decade. Online advertising and field campaigning rely on voter modeling based on hundreds of data points culled from surveys, public records, and commercial information sources such as credit histories. This data details the location, demographics, political affiliations, social networks, behavior, and interests of citizens.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: How Social Media & Social TV Will Change Super Bowl 2012

2012-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

This year's Super Bowl will be more social than ever before.

With the rise of social TV and the first-ever 2,800-square-foot social media command center, fans who have trekked down to Indianapolis and people at Super Bowl parties across the country can now opt to have a super-connected experience.

This marks the first time that the NFL has partnered with a Super Bowl host city. Like a Midwestern truck stop that's got a restaurant, convenience store, bathrooms, random coin-operated claw games (that you can't ever win) and gas, the Super Bowl social media command center seeks to be all things to all football fans. Receive mobile updates about navigating the city. The Super Bowl Social Media Command center will answer your Twitter (@superbowl2012) and Facebook questions. Follow the blog here. It's the customer service center of your Friday Night Lights dreams.

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Tons of fans are already busy on social media. According to research from Nielsen and NM Incite, a Nielsen/McKinsey company, the Patriots' website is beating the Giants' website in terms of unique visitors. Giants fans, however, tend to spend more time on their team's site - and they also view more pages. Giants fans are also talking more on social media about their quarterback, Tom Brady.

The Super Bowl is a Social TV Event

Various social TV apps are already available for Facebook. Entertainment social network GetGlue gives users an opportunity to check-in to sports events. ConnecTV is another free social platform that serves as a "second screen," which means users can talk to friends while watching the Super Bowl. Users can sync shows, and then watch them with their friends while chatting in real-time.

The Super Bowl seems to be making up for the lack of social media at the London 2012 Olympics. In fact, not one of the Olympic volunteers can make a comment about the games without permission, according to Sysomos. At Super Bowl 2012, expect the exact opposite.

Discuss

Slashdot: Apple Clarifies iBooks Author Licensing

2012-02-03T23:59:00+00:00

bonch writes "After drawing criticism over iBooks Author's licensing language, Apple has modified it in a software update to make clear that Apple is claiming rights to the .ibook format itself and not the content therein: '[The license restriction] does not apply to the content of such works when distributed in a form that does not include files in the .ibooks format.' In other words, the content may be sold on competing book stores as long as it is not packaged using iBooks Author."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Satellite Phone Encryption Cracked

2012-02-03T23:38:00+00:00

New submitter The Mister Purple writes "A team of German researchers appears to have cracked the GMR-1 and GMR-2 encryption algorithms used by many (though not all) satellite phones. Anyone fancy putting a cluster together for a listening party? 'Mr. Driessen told The Telegraph that the equipment and software needed to intercept and decrypt satellite phone calls from hundreds of thousands of users would cost as little as $2,000. His demonstration system takes up to half an hour to decipher a call, but a more powerful computer would allow eavesdropping in real time, he said.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: Top Tech Video of the Day: My 2 Year Old Discovered Flickr Today

2012-02-03T23:01:41+00:00

This is old (as in 2007 old). The kid in the video is now seven years old and undoubtably jailbreaks his iPhone and programs Arduino boards. But five years ago he was just a toddler with a bottle, and this was the first time he was on the Web and Fleek-ler!, as he called it, on his own. It was "the moment" - the moment when you first realize that moving the cursor and clicking the trackpad leads to discovery, and that discovery is a whole lot of fun.

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My son discovered Flickr today from Paul Mayne on Vimeo.

Discuss

Slashdot: Canada's Internet Among Best, Report Says

2012-02-03T22:56:00+00:00

silentbrad writes "Canadians enjoy among the fastest, most widely available and least expensive broadband Internet in the developed world, says a report released Thursday. The report, based on the results of 52 million speed tests of broadband users across the G7 countries and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) membership, was produced by Montreal-based consulting firm Lemay Yates Associates Inc. on behalf of Rogers Communications Inc., the country's largest broadband service provider. It disputes the OECD's own report, published in July, that ranked Canada's high-speed Internet offerings significantly below those of other countries. The report comes days after the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission revealed a sharp jump in the number of complaints it has received regarding Internet traffic-management practices, or 'throttling' in recent months." And it's about to get a little better — reader ForgedArtificer points out that Rogers has promised to end all throttling over their network by the end of the year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: It's Time to Ditch StumbleUpon for Pinterest

2012-02-03T22:48:00+00:00

StumbleUpon is one of those sites we've had on our radar for quite sometime. We covered the company's redesign last year, which re-focused the site on topic features. So when StumbleUpon snuck in a strange change the other day without telling anyone, we were shocked. This update made it impossible to get direct links for the pages one is stumbling unless they choose to not sign-in to the service.

The entire point of StumbleUpon, for the user, is to build up a taste graph that will better deliver stories that the user would like. But many sites depend on referral traffic from StumbleUpon, which is something outside of the StumbleUpon user's direct stumbling experience.

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"As part of redesign that spawns user experience that you write about, we look a lot at how users are using our service," said StumbleUpon's VP of Business Development and Marketing Marc Leibowitz. "We have some things in mind to address this concern."

StumbleUpon's response is that, well, they were "just trying to improve the user experience." And besides, they told us, two-thirds of users use the Web bar.

What a great solution. Truly. Not only will StumbleUpon not be able to get an idea of that user's taste graph, that user will miss out on the entire community aspect of the site.

"Signed-in users, when they're encountering the Web bar it is about their stumbling," Leibowitz said. "Visitors can easily close the Web bar."

In other words, if you do want to see direct links, just don't sign in.

What a great solution. Truly. Not only will StumbleUpon not be able to get an idea of that user's taste graph, that user will miss out on the entire community aspect of the site.

Leibowitz cited accidental clicks on the "X" button of the Web bar as StumbleUpon's main reason for getting rid of the Web bar entirely.

"People would accidentally click the button - they don't have an extension such as Chrome or Firefox extensions, so they can't go back to their Stumbling unless they go directly to StumbleUpon.com."

This sounds like a complicated solution for a pretty easy problem. It would it have been pretty easy for StumbleUpon to just add a box that pops up when the user clicks "X." It could say something simple like: "Are you sure you want to close this page and leave StumbleUpon?" Instead, StumbleUpon says, it is thinking only of the users - not the people who receive tons of referral traffic from the StumbleUpon discovery engine.

"The trade off is that we have to make some concessions around the way we show the URL," Leibowitz tells us. "There's no way we can change the way the URL is displayed in the address bar, but there are some ways we can make it easier to copy and paste the source code."

For StumbleUpon users who are still looking for a way to see the direct URL, try using a StumbleUpon Firefox add-on or Chrome extension.

What Will Happen to StumbleUpon Referral Traffic?

"My website used to get 70-80% of referral traffic from StumbleUpon," writes ReadWriteWeb commenter Jeffrey Davis. "After the redesign, that percentage dropped to 40%. I suspect now that it will drop even further...especially since SU is now hijacking the pageview."

Unfortunately for sites who depend on StumbleUpon for referral traffic, there aren't too many alternatives.

Pinterest is now Davis' number two referrer.

This is only one isolated case, but it's telling. Perhaps it's time for marketers to start shifting their strategy from StumbleUpon to Pinterest. Because it doesn't look like StumbleUpon will be backpedaling on its latest decision anytime soon.

Has referral traffic to your site suffered since the StumbleUpon redesign? Tell us about it in the comments.

Discuss

Slashdot: 83-Year-Old Woman Gets New 3D-Printed Titanium Jaw

2012-02-03T22:16:00+00:00

arnodf writes "The University of Hasselt (in Belgium) announced today (Google translation of Dutch original) that Belgian and Dutch scientists have successfully replaced an 83-year-old woman's lower jaw with a 3D-printed model. According to the researchers, 'It is the first custom-made implant in the world to replace an entire lower jaw. ... The 3D printer prints titanium powder layer by layer, while a computer controlled laser ensures that the correct particles are fused together. Using 3D printing technology, less materials are needed and the production time is much shorter than traditional manufacturing. The artificial jaw is slightly heavier than a natural jaw, but the patient can easily get used to it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: What You Missed at Monki Gras

2012-02-03T22:02:00+00:00

If you didn't make it to London for Monki Gras, the follow on conference to Monktoberfest, you missed out on quite a lot of great content and beer.

The conference is organized by RedMonk, an unusual analyst firm. Their conferences, reflecting the analysts at RedMonk, are unusual as well. The Portland, Maine event was primarily organized by RedMonk co-founder Stephen O'Grady, who resides in Maine. This time around, the event was primarily organized by RedMonk co-founder James Governor.

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Conference as a Joke

Some industry events have a very serious air about them. Things like VMworld or the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) have a very button-down feel about them, and tend to be highly skewed towards sponsor-driven content. Read: sponsors get speaking slots, and it shows. Many of the talks are little more than extended commercials, and tend to be about as interesting and informative as reading sales brochures.

James Governor paces the stage at Monki Gras

The RedMonk conferences, on the other hand, started as a joke. When the RedMonk folks joked about combining a beer and developer conference, though, they found that people weren't laughing. They were asking "when," "where" and "how much"?

The price for a two-day conference, which included catered lunch and dinner with a generous and interesting selection of beer? The tickets ranged from £99 to £140, depending on when you purchased the tickets. (Disclaimer: As a speaker, I did not pay for a ticket for the event. I did pay my own travel.)

Diversity and Expanded Agenda

Some of the speaking line-up was carried over from Monktoberfest, which is OK since few of the attendees who attended Monktoberfest were likely to attend Monki Gras. Matt LeMay reprised his talk on "kitteh vs. chikin", Greg Avola of Untappd was back (though with a different talk) and Donnie Berkholz (now a RedMonk analyst) gave his "Assholes are Ruining Your Project" talk.

But there quite a few new talks as well, especially since the agenda was expanded to two days at popular demand. I particularly enjoyed the CTO vs. vice-president of engineering talk between Jason Hoffman and Bryan Cantrill of Joyent. It was not your typical, dry and dull conference fare.

Which brings me to an important point. The RedMonk conferences are a bit more rowdy than other conferences. Nobody had a "perform like a pr0n star" moment, and none of the talks were offensive at all. However, speakers did drop some f-bombs and were generally much more casual than other shows.

One of the things I dinged Monktoberfest on was the lack of diversity. The speaking line up had no women, and there were few women in attendance as well. I spoke to Governor and O'Grady about the line-up and their response was that they were aware of the problem, but had invited a few women to speak but they were not available on the date for Monktoberfest. They did assure me that they'd make an effort to have a diverse line-up for the next event, and were good at their word.

Laura Merling of Alcatel-Lucent, UX guru Leisa Reichelt, and Bocoup's Irene Ros were all on the agenda. Was it equal time? Not quite, with two days of talks Monki Gras had a lot of speakers and most were men. However, it's notoriously difficult to recruit women to speak at tech conferences. I spotted a lot more women in attendance at Monki Gras, as well, so I think that the organizers are doing what they can to provide a solid set of talks with a diverse set of speakers.

Talk Highlights

Kohsuke Kawaguchi of CloudBees had a short slot to talk about building a community around an open source project, based on his experience with Jenkins. Stop me if you've heard this before: A lone developer starts working on something as a hobby, and ultimately creates a project that's used by a huge community. Jenkins may not be quite as ubiquitous as Linux, but for a project that started as a one-man show in 2004, it's grown impressively.

How do you get contributors to your FOSS project? Kawaguchi suggests that developers "think about the conversion funnel." Usually reserved for marketers and sales folks, Kawaguchi reminded the audience that "every developer starts as a visitor." Visitors have to be able to find the resources they need to become users, before they become developers.

Kawaguchi also asks developers to make sure their code is modularized. It's easier for people to hack small pieces than one big blob. Some developers may only care about a small part of a project. And "it's good software engineering anyway." The division of labor is greater than collaboration, says Kawaguchi.

The PhoneGap talk by Andre Charland and Dave Johnson was also interesting. Charland and Johnson went through the history of PhoneGap through its purchase by Adobe. The lesson they learned around PhoneGap? You don't need sales people, you don't need marketing. If you have a really strong FOSS project like PhoneGap "people just start calling you."

If you remember the Apache considered harmful post and O'Grady's "you won't get fired for using Apache" post, then Mike Milinkovich of Eclipse had a talk that was a must-see. Not surprisingly, Milinkovich wasn't in agreement with the anti-foundational messaging in the Apache post, or O'Grady's somewhat weak defense of foundations. He made a pretty strong case for foundations as a vendor neutral place for development that provides governance, IP management, project lifecycles, community oversight and norms, etc. Unfortunately, due to the nature of Monki Gras, a lot of talks were very short. This is good in that it's hard to have a terribly boring talk in 20 minutes. It's bad, though, when someone like Milinkovich probably could have gone longer and had more interesting things to say. All good things come to an end, though.

Day two at Monki Gras

After day one's programming came to an end, the attendees were treated to a catered dinner and a beer tasting contest led by beer expert Melissa Cole. Each table was designated a "team captain" and attendees were taught a bit about beer and then led through a practice round of tasting and trying to identify beers.

Obviously the Monki Gras attendees were enthusiastic about beer, but are they knowledgeable? Well, certainly moreso now than before. I think we found that a lot of beer fans are experts on what they like, but not necessarily at identifying types of beers.

The selection of beers during dinner was interesting, and featured six British and three Belgian beers. This includes treats like Thornbridge Jaipur, Freedom Pilsner, Oakham JHB and Trappistes Rochefort 8. Note that attendees were served amounts appropriate to tasting during dinner, not nine full pints of beer. After dinner, attendees may have consumed that or more, as the beer was flowing pretty freely and there was apparently an after-party that went until past 4 a.m. In the interests of being prepared and awake for my talk the following day, I didn't make it to that one.

Day two featured a slightly smaller crowd, slightly the worse for wear, at a different venue across town.

Day two's content was just as strong as day one. In fact, I think that Why Most UX is Shite by Reichelt was probably my favorite talk. Why does most UX suck? According to Reichelt:

Leisa Reichelt at Monki Gras

Organizations don't make decisions. Users have to make them instead. (Too much fear in deciding.)
You think your opinion counts. Reichelt makes the point that all too often designers are influenced too strongly by the people they work closely with, instead of the people they're designing for. (But don't interact with as often.)
You don't measure it. Reichelt says that "companies don't have good acquisition metrics or retention metrics or engagement metrics, let alone cohort analysis." The things they track are not ideal for actually making good products.
You don't really care. Companies talk a good game, but they're not designed around user experience.
UI is a symptom of organizational culture. "All of these things are hard and most of them start much higher up in the organization than the average UX designer ever gets to. Good UX is cultural. If you want to hire a freelancer to 'do UX' , it's like putting a plaster on gangrenous leg."

Worth the Trip?

Following the shorter agenda on the second day, the attendees adjourned to the bar next to the venue to continue talking and trying beers. It's a testament to the strength of the conference that so many folks hung around to talk to one another afterwards.

As I've said before, the most significant track for any event is the "hallway track," and the RedMonk team have generated a really strong one. Software developers and people that need to work well with developers should seriously consider attending the next event, if it's feasible. Monki Gras is easily one of the best events I've been to for actually connecting with other folks and learning about what's going on in the rest of the industry. Cap that off with good beer and food, and what else could you want from a conference?

Discuss

Slashdot: Seattle Library Lets Man Watch Porn On Computers Despite Complaints

2012-02-03T21:57:00+00:00

The Lake City library is making news for their staunch position on the First Amendment, censorship, and the right to watch porn in the library. The problem started when library patron Julie Howe found a man watching some questionable material and asked him to move to another computer. The man refused and the librarian also refused to intervene when asked saying that the library doesn't censor content. "We're a library, so we facilitate access to constitutionally protected information. We don't tell people what they can view and check out," Seattle Public Library spokeswoman Andra Addison told Seattle PI. "Filters compromise freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment. We're not in the business of censoring information."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Web Guru To the Blind

2012-02-03T21:32:00+00:00

the_newsbeagle writes "Chieko Asakawa went blind at age 14, learned to program mainframe computers by sense of touch, and has spent her 27 years at IBM-Tokyo bringing personal computing and the Internet to the blind. From the article: 'By 1997 she had developed a plug-in that worked with the Netscape browser, mapping Web navigation commands to the computer keyboard's number pad and using text-to-speech technology to read out content. Computer stores around the world sold IBM's Home Page Reader, and Asakawa says its effect on the blind community was immediate, electric, and sometimes touching. ... Other browsers for the blind followed IBM's groundbreaking efforts, and Asakawa moved on to addressing a deeper problem: the fact that designers were unintentionally creating inaccessible websites. She and her team wrote a program called aDesigner ... to allow designers to experience a site as blind users do and to suggest ways to improve navigation for audio browsers.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: Goldilocks, A Dwarf and NASA's Short Term Future

2012-02-03T21:30:00+00:00

Space sucks. Literally. The void of space is one perpetual vacuum that would suck the brain out of any exposed human through their ears. In space there is also unfiltered radiation, extreme temperatures and a multitude of other ways that humans can be harmed outside of low-Earth orbit. Learning how to mitigate radiation and improve space crews' health are two of 16 recommendations made by the National Research Council to NASA for the agency's technological focus in the next five years.

Researchers announced yesterday that they have discovered a new potential "Goldilocks" planet in a different solar system. A "Goldilocks" planet is one found within the habitable zone in orbit around a star - not too hot, not to cold - that could potentially support life. In hundreds of years, after humanity has exhausted all of Earth's natural resources, we may need to migrate to one of these planets. So, NASA should hurry up and get cracking on the NRC's recommendations. Best to be prepared in the face of an uncertain future.

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Near-Term Space Travel

The NRC's recommendations come in three objectives. See the chart below.

The study was sponsored by NASA. It states, " NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist (OCT) should establish a rigorous process to select among competing technologies at appropriate milestones in order to ensure that the most promising ones receive sufficient attention and resources."

The study focuses on the near term goals for NASA's space flight program and recommends that the foundation for the goals be implemented in the next five years. NASA works on 20-30 year windows of technological innovation. Within that window, it is hoped, that humans will return to the Moon and maybe make a venture towards Earth's irascible sister planet, Mars. Near and long terms goals in our solar system are to identify alien sources of water and determine if life ever existed outside of our little blue orb.

Goldilocks and A Dwarf

The most recent Goldilocks planet, dubbed GJ 667Cc, is found in the constellation Scorpio, 22 light years away from Earth. It orbits a dwarf star in a system with two other dwarf stars. It has a 28-day solar cycle, meaning its "years" are very quick. The planet is much closer to its star than Earth but researchers believe it receives as much energy from its star because of the weakness of the dwarf.

This is the fourth Goldilocks planet found as scientists become more proficient at finding smaller objects orbiting distant stars. Researchers did not expect to find a planet around the star because the system does not have a lot of metal-based material such as iron in comparison with our own solar system. Yet, the discovery shows that Earth-like planets can exist in a variety of conditions in the universe, greatly increasing the likelihood that another planet much like our own exists somewhere.

"This was expected to be a rather unlikely star to host planets. Yet there they are, around a very nearby, metal-poor example of the most common type of star in our galaxy," said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California Santa Cruz, in a release. "The detection of this planet, this nearby and this soon, implies that our galaxy must be teeming with billions of potentially habitable rocky planets."

Now that humanity is getting better at identifying extra-solar planets, NASA and the international space community needs to take the steps we will need to eventually reach out to them. The first steps to inter-galactic dominance start with the decisions makers in Washington, D.C.

Top image: UC Santa Cruz

Discuss

Slashdot: Steve Appleton, Micron CEO, Dies In Plane Crash

2012-02-03T21:09:00+00:00

CR0WTR0B0T writes "Micron CEO Steve Appleton was killed in a plane crash around 9AM on Friday, February 3rd. He was flying an experimental fixed-wing single engine Lancair, which crashed in between two runways at the Boise airport."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: ACTA's EU Future In Doubt As Poland Suspends Ratification

2012-02-03T20:50:00+00:00

superglaze writes "Poland has suspended its ratification process for ACTA, throwing the copyright crackdown into doubt for the whole European Union. ACTA is being handled as a 'mixed agreement' in the EU due to its criminalization clauses, so if a single EU member state (such as Poland) fails to ratify it, it is null and void across the entire union. If that were to happen, at least six of the remaining international signatories would have to ratify ACTA for it to apply anywhere in the world. Outside the EU, only eight countries — including the U.S. — have signed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Firefox's Web Push Notification System Announced

2012-02-03T20:07:00+00:00

eldavojohn writes "Describing Notifications as 'somewhere between email and IM,' Mozilla has announced this push technology as a way to receive notifications from websites without having to keep them open in your browser — as well as receiving them on your mobile device. A JavaScript API reveals early interface ideas by the team. This core concept is not new — both Google and Apple have their own push notification systems for Android and iOS respectively. However, 'It's important to note that this push notification system is distinct from the existing desktop notification mechanisms that are already defined in pending standards. The desktop notifications that websites like GMail and Seesmic Web display to Chrome users, for example, will only work when the website is left open in a tab. Mozilla's push notification system moves beyond that limitation.' Mozilla is attempting to take push notifications to the entire web for any website to use."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: Nokia Publishes Policy on Conflict Minerals

2012-02-03T20:05:00+00:00

"Conflict minerals," those mined to support groups conducting armed conflict or engaging in human rights abuses, have been an issue since long before we first wrote about it in July of 2010. The mineral equivalent of blood diamonds, they include tantalum, tungsten, tin and gold, all of which are used to manufacture our electronics.

Nokia, the world's largest manufacturers of mobile phones, today published its policy on conflict minerals.

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"Nokia Policy Against Illegal Trade of Natural Resources"

In a post on Nokia's "Conversations" blog, Ian Delaney lays out the company's public policy (PDF), which augments their supplier requirements.

Delaney boils the policy down to these four elements.

We prohibit human rights abuses associated with the extraction, transport or trade of minerals.
We also prohibit any direct or indirect support to non-state armed groups or security forces that illegally control or tax mine sites, transport routes, trade points, or any upstream actors in the supply chain.
We have no tolerance with regard to corruption, money-laundering and bribery.
We require the parties in our supply chain to agree to follow the same principles.

The policy delves at some length into Nokia's commitment to human rights "in accordance with accepted international conventions and practices, such as those of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ILO Core Conventions on Labor Standards, UN Global Compact, and OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises."

Under the sub-heading, "Implementation of the Policy with Regards to Conflict Minerals," the document reads:

"We prohibit human rights abuses associated with the extraction, transport or trade of minerals. We also prohibit any direct or indirect support to non-state armed groups or security forces that illegally control or tax mine sites, transport routes, trade points, or any upstream actors in the supply chain. Similarly, Nokia has a no tolerance policy with respect to corruption, money-laundering and bribery. We require the parties in our supply chain to agree to follow the same principles."

The document outlines some of the company's process for oversight of suppliers, including the EICC-GeSI Conflict Minerals Reporting Template. It would be interesting to know how the suppliers will be reviewed, how often and what will happen to errant suppliers who use conflict minerals. We have asked Mr. Delaney exactly that and will update should we receive a response.

Conflict Minerals

Although conflict minerals could theoretically crop up anywhere, practically, East Africa is ground zero. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is certainly the worst-affected by conflict mineral mining. There, the Congolese National Army vie against three different rebel groups to extract and refine the valuable ores.

Here is how the various minerals are used in our electronics, including mobile phones, computers and music players.

Tantalum: stores electricity in cell phones
Tungsten: creations vibrations in phones
Tin: circuit boards
Gold: used to coat wiring

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock

Discuss

O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies.: Top stories: January 30-February 3, 2012

Mac Slocum — 2012-02-03T20:00:00+00:00

Here's a look at the top stories published across O'Reilly sites this week.

What is Apache Hadoop?
Apache Hadoop has been the driving force behind the growth of the big data industry. But what does it do, and why do you need all its strangely-named friends? (Related: Hadoop creator Doug Cutting on why Hadoop caught on.)

Embracing the chaos of data
Data scientists, it's time to welcome errors and uncertainty into your data projects. In this interview, Jetpac CTO Pete Warden discusses the advantages of unstructured data.

Moneyball for software engineering, part 2
A look at the "Moneyball"-style metrics and techniques managers can employ to get the most out of their software teams.

With GOV.UK, British government redefines the online government platform
A new beta .gov website in Britain is open source, mobile friendly, platform agnostic, and open for feedback.

When will Apple mainstream mobile payments?
David Sims parses the latest iPhone / near-field-communication rumors and considers the impact of Apple's (theoretical) entrance into the mobile payment space.

Strata 2012, Feb. 28-March 1 in Santa Clara, Calif., will offer three full days of hands-on data training and information-rich sessions. Strata brings together the people, tools, and technologies you need to make data work. Save 20% on Strata registration with the code RADAR20.

O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies.: Publishing News: B&N closes doors on Amazon Publishing

Jenn Webb — 2012-02-03T20:00:00+00:00

Here are a few of the stories that caught my attention this week in the publishing space.

Barnes & Noble puts its foot down on Amazon

Last week, Amazon teamed up with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to print and distribute the Amazon Publishing East Coast's adult titles under a new imprint, New Harvest. Some speculated the move might get Amazon through the brick-and-mortar doors of B&N. This week, B&N made it clear that not only would HMH's New Harvest imprint not make it in the door, but that no Amazon Publishing title would. In a post for the New York Times, Julie Bosman quoted from a statement made by Jaime Carey, B&N's chief merchandising officer:

"Our decision is based on Amazon's continued push for exclusivity with publishers, agents and the authors they represent. These exclusives have prohibited us from offering certain e-books to our customers. Their actions have undermined the industry as a whole and have prevented millions of customers from having access to content. It's clear to us that Amazon has proven they would not be a good publishing partner to Barnes & Noble as they continue to pull content off the market for their own self interest."

O'Reilly's general manager and publisher Joe Wikert called on B&N this week to disrupt the industry — maybe this is its first move. Bosman also took a look at B&N's position in the industry and its importance to the publishing ecosystem, especially in the face of a competitor like Amazon. Jordan Weissmann at The Atlantic mulled the prospects of Amazon killing publishing and argued: "In a financial arms race, publishers simply can't beat Amazon's arsenal."

codeMantra collectionPoint 3.0 — Compose it; convert it; package it; distribute it; track it; re-price it; control your digital book workflow and metadata from one platform with collectionPoint 3.0, now available

Breaking up is hard to do

Amazon had issues with a social networking partner this week as well. As of Monday, Goodreads no longer displayed book data from the Amazon Product Advertising API, opting instead to move its data partnership to the Ingram Book Company. A Goodread's representative told Laura Hazard Owen that "the [API license agreement] terms now required by Amazon have become so restrictive that it makes better business sense to work with other data sources." Owen outlined some of the specifics on the restrictions:

"Amazon requires sites that use its API to link that content back to the Amazon site exclusively — so a book page on Goodreads would have to link only to its product page on Amazon and not to any other source or retailer ... Amazon also does not allow any content from its API to be used on mobile sites and apps."

Jon Mitchell at ReadWriteWeb took a deeper look into the situation — and explained why Goodreads will survive its breakup with Amazon.

The news caused some readers to worry about their cultivated Goodreads bookshelves. GalleyCat detailed potential data issues and offered up a Goodreads link that allows users to check on the state of their shelves to see if any tidying up is necessary.

Jonathan Franzen waxes absurd on ebooks

There's no shortage of things slated to be destroying society, and this week, author Jonathan Franzen added ebooks to the list. The Telegraph quoted Franzen speaking at a book festival in Cartagena, Colombia:

"I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn't change. Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it's going to be very hard to make the world work if there's no permanence like that."

Chenda Ngak at CBS's techt@lk took offense at Franzen's remarks, stating: "Even if I agree with him, as a book lover, his statements are too condescending to take seriously." Jonathan Segura at NPR chimed in as well, calling Franzen's comments "absurd" and pleading that we "get past the e-books versus print books thing." Segura's final comment pretty much summed up the overarching sentiment:

"We should worry less about how people get their books and — say it with me now! — just be glad that people are reading."

Photo (top): Kiftsgate Court, Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire - No Entry - sign by ell brown, on Flickr

Photo (bottom): Broken Kindle by kodomut, on Flickr

Related:

We're in the midst of a restructuring of the publishing universe (don't panic)

Hating Amazon is not a strategy

Coming soon to a location near you: The Amazon Store?

Open Question: Is it realistic for publishers to cut Amazon out of the equation?

More Publishing Week in Review coverage

ReadWriteWeb: Data Visualization for People Who Don't Visualize Data: CA ERwin 8.2

2012-02-03T20:00:00+00:00

In enterprises everywhere, including even the largest ones, the transition to cloud-based architectures has brought a new class of managers into the computing process. Suddenly, personnel managers and folks whose purview had been limited to finance and personnel, are being doubled-up with oversight roles for cloud deployments. The back office is no longer in the back (or the basement), and now these new managers are wondering: What is all this we're dealing with?

Donna Burbank - who's a senior director of product marketing for CA Technologies' long-time data visualization tool, ERwin, has a new phrase for this class of customers: business sponsors. "When I talk to our customers, they tell me it's a whole new... thing, for lack of a more technical word. They've heard of SQL Server, but what is this SQL Azure thing? They don't have the skill sets, and may be nervous about that. These business sponsors might not be moving the information, but they want to see it. And they don't want to look at those database scripts. They want to look at something they can understand."

Sponsor

So it is that CA Technologies found itself in the business of manufacturing a class of software that a new and growing chunk of its customers might not actually care about all that much: database visualization tools. ERwin has been the market share leader in this category ever since its creation in 1998. Its typical customers have been database architects (DBAs), the people whose jobs are to model the classifications and structures for the relational data that businesses rely upon every day.

Welcome to Your World

But the shift to cloud technologies has partly been fueled by the need for tremendous space for data warehousing - to house the huge data stores generated by millions of Internet customer transactions. It's that shift which is pushing data outside of the constraints of traditional SQL relational databases. That push is forcing businesses to examine, some for the very first time, the structure of their data. And what they're seeing, they don't understand.

"A lot of the move to the cloud is a business decision. The technical people doing the move are probably still the DBAs, but they're challenged," CA's Burbank tells RWW. "There will always be that core group of people who want to use a data model, that's our sweet spot right now: the data architect, the DBA. Those people and more would like to use a Web-based interface."

ERwin's new Web portal, she explains, is a browser-based interface for information that has otherwise been modeled for DBAs by ERwin Data Modeler (which itself moves to version 8.2 this week). This new portal will help both architects and Burbank's "sponsors" to analyze the relationships of data from a business impact standpoint. "If I'm building a data warehouse, I want to see how data moves from the source system to the target warehouse to the reporting tool. Maybe I'm changing a data element; what other parts of the organization are affected? You could sort of get that through ERwin's repository [in Model Manager] with some queries, but it wasn't the tool for that."

The new, more objective breakdown aims to give multiple classes of users a comprehension of the data that they may have never had before. A "sponsor" who wants to search for relationships is going to expect search to behave like Google, Burbank explains. So the Web Portal tool gives that user a text-based search query line (shown above). What that user gets in return will be something that may explain what tables or fields relate to the search criteria, but it might not directly correlate to the model as the original DBA intended.

As Burbank explains, the business user, not getting a complete overview from the initial response, may decide to export the data he's seeing into Excel, and generate some PivotTables from them. The DBA, on the other hand, may use the Portal's new graphical impact analysis tools to drill down further, or perhaps execute a "What If?" experiment. If a column is changed on a table, for instance, the DBA can see how the rest of the schema is impacted. "It's that type of drilldown over the Web that they could never do before," she remarks.

Big data vs. "lots of data"

All this said, ERwin is not quite yet a data warehousing assistance tool. While CA's Donna Burbank says it's something her company is considering, she points out that Hadoop and the restructuring of data it entails, lend themselves to very different situations.

"I've done several presentations where I've explained to people that there's 'big data,' and then there's 'lots of data,'" she relates. "And these are different use cases. Maybe I'm an energy company, and I'm trying to use a Hadoop-type structure to see uses across my different [operating units], and I need to eventually manage that in a warehouse. It's that analysis of that big data that then goes into a data model. One use case [involves] massive volume, real-time, more of a programmatic approach to data. There's a lot of messaging there around, is data modeling going away? Is data warehousing going away? Today, it's two different use cases. You're doing an analysis, and then you use the data model to make sense of that raw data. And if I'm going to use it for a BI report, that's when your data model comes in. I've done my data analysis with the big data; here's my data model to say which pieces of that I used in the warehouse."

Real-time analysis of big data, she goes on, may enable DBAs to add some elements to the relational data model that they may not have seen before.

As for the other use case, Burbank agrees that data modeling may never be appealing to 100% of the "sponsor" audience. But making it appeal to a somewhat greater audience through more intuitive graphics, along with Google-like search, could go a long way toward enabling those tasked with new responsibilities to be able to better understand what they are, and carry them out with a greater sense of confidence.

Discuss

ReadWriteWeb: iTunes Match Bug Censors the Bad Words From Songs

2012-02-03T19:45:15+00:00

iTunes Match, the cloud music-matching service that Apple launched last year, is a great way to sync one's music library across numerous devices. If your collection happens to contain songs with profane lyrics, however, you may be in for a surprise.

Apparently, iTunes Match has been inadvertently replacing certain tracks with the "clean" version of the same song, Cult of Mac reported.

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iTunes Match differs from Google's and Amazon's music cloud storage lockers in that it doesn't require users to upload their entire collection to Apple's servers. Instead, it scans one's library of music, identifies each track using its metadata and then matches it with a high-quality audio file in the cloud, even if the original was encoded at a lower bit-rate.

It looks like what's happening here is the system is misreading metadata for certain tracks and cross-referencing with radio-friendly edits of the same song. At the very least, this has happened with four hip hop tracks as reported by Cult of Mac.

To some, this may smack of the nothing-dirty-please, prim-and-proper censorship for which Apple has gained a reputation in the iTunes App Store. More likely than not, it's just a bug. The company may not want filthy porno-filled apps populating its App Store, but that's quite different from allowing people to listen to a profanity-laden Jay-Z song that they purchased (or otherwise) acquired on their own accord.

Apple has acknowledged that this is an issue and is reportedly working on a fix.

Discuss

O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies.: Visualization of the Week: Mapping Mexico's drug war

Audrey Watters — 2012-02-03T19:30:00+00:00

Diego Valle-Jones has created a powerful interactive map of the ongoing drug war in Mexico.

The interactive map lets you compare homicides and drug-related homicides, with the option to examine marijuana, opium, and drug-lab-related homicides. If you click on a bubble, you can see the number of murders over time, dating back to 2004. Important events are highlighted on that time line. You can also draw a shape on the map to look at a particular region.

Click to see the full interactive version of "Map of the Drug War in Mexico."

Valle-Jones writes:

"To unclutter the map and following the lead of the paper Trafficking Networks and the Mexican Drug War by Melissa Dell, I decided to only show the optimal highways (according to my own data and Google Directions) to reach the US border ports from the municipalities with the highest drug plant eradication between 1994 and 2003 and the highest 2d density estimate of drug labs based on newspaper reports of seizures. The map is a work in progress and is still missing the cocaine routes, but hopefully I'll be able to add them shortly."

The data can be exported to CSV, and the source code is available on Github.

Found a great visualization? Tell us about it

This post is part of an ongoing series exploring visualizations. We're always looking for leads, so please drop a line if there's a visualization you think we should know about.

Strata 2012 — The 2012 Strata Conference, being held Feb. 28-March 1 in Santa Clara, Calif., will offer three full days of hands-on data training and information-rich sessions. Strata brings together the people, tools, and technologies you need to make data work.

Save 20% on registration with the code RADAR20

More Visualizations:

Slashdot: Did North Korea Conduct Secret Nuclear Tests?

2012-02-03T19:25:00+00:00

gbrumfiel writes "In May of 2010, North Korea made the bizarre claim that it had achieved nuclear fusion. Many, many commentators (including faithful Slashdot readers) mocked the dear leader for his outlandish boast, but could there have been a kernel of truth in the claim? Apparently some odd radioactivity was spotted by detectors surrounding the North just days after the announcement. Now, a new analysis by a Swedish scientist suggests that the radiation may have leaked from covert experiments into boosting fission warheads. The evidence is tentative at best, and many are skeptical, but it does seem that something odd was up on the Korean peninsula that spring."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Semantic Web Interest Group Scratchpad: Browser push notifications

2012-02-03T19:18:18+00:00

(2012-02-03 18:41)

ReadWriteWeb: Hogwash: Top Mobile Designers Are Not Pushing Back Against HTML5

2012-02-03T19:00:00+00:00

Entrepreneur aficionado extraordinaire Robert Scoble posited a question on his Rackspace blog yesterday asking if there is push back against HTML5 by the top mobile designers in San Francisco. He cited new apps Path, Storify and Foodspotting as prominent examples of great apps with acclaimed UX that were rendered in native languages as opposed to HTML5. Are top developers really pushing back against HTML5 or is Scoble once again a little too deep in his fantasy world?

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One thing that often worries me when thinking about the San Francisco-based developer community is the fact that it is one giant echo chamber. It feeds off itself to a crescendo of memes, themes and rumors until no other reasonable arguments can be broached.

Scoble is often the mouthpiece for these developers. To be fair, Scoble and I have met and are friendly and I find him to be a fine individual but the classic argument against him is that he is the living personification of the edge case. He knows everybody, talks to everybody and does a respectable job of eating his own dog food. Companies and developers, with good reason, respect his opinion. But, the way he inundates himself with all the great innovations of the ecosystem, he sometimes misses the reality of development and utilization in the rest of the world.

With respect to Scoble, this HTML5 argument is hogwash.

Path won a Crunchie for best design. For those not in the know, a Crunchie is an award show for best startups, design and innovation in the tech community hosted by TechCrunch, VentureBeat and GigaOm. It is the yearly culmination of the San Francisco echo chamber and, while interesting, is not really followed by many outside of Silicon Valley. That is not to discount what Path has created. We have noted the splendid design of Path at ReadWriteWeb as well and it is truly a very well made app.

Path is an edge case scenario in the world of mobile app development. It integrates social messaging, location check-ins, photography and music recommendations into a sophisticated timeline (a "path") that is endlessly scrollable and visually appealing. Path is the quintessential native app.

It would also be impossible in HTML5.

The limitations of HTML5 at this point are that it does not allow device access (to objects like the camera and location services), scrolling is often limited and multi-layered sound is very difficult to implement. See our recent coverage of the "HTML5 Developers' Wish List" for a fuller understanding to the limitations of the spec. All developers agree that HTML5 is still a work in progress and there is great hope that the standard will be advanced to a degree in 2012 that many of the problems that inhibit mobile developers will be solved. The key concept to remember with HTML5 is that it takes the one true "killer" app, the browser, and enhances its functionality.

To say that the best mobile developers and designers are pushing back against HTML5 is outrageous. It is like saying that Web developers and designers (by far the most robust group of Internet coders) are turning their backs on the standard that is taking the browser to the next generation. This is simply not true.

Like Scoble, I also talk to top developers on a daily basis. Some of the most talented coders and designers I know are working on creating dynamic experiences in HTML5 for mobile devices. That includes developers from Sencha, appMobi, Zynga and other games makers, mobile cloud developers and third-party Facebook developers. All see HTML5 as a great opportunity and are fully embracing the challenge. Look at Facebook in particular. Nobody would suppose that its developers are not some of the tops in Silicon Valley. The company is working towards progressing HTML5 and the apps ecosystem around it with innovative approaches to what the mobile Web can do.

For me to believe that the "best mobile app designers" are pushing back against HTML5, I am going to need more examples than three edge case native apps that have very specific functions. There is so much more to the mobile Web than a pretty native app.

Discuss

Slashdot: Windows Phone 8 Detailed, Uses Windows 8 Kernel

2012-02-03T18:42:00+00:00

MrSeb writes "Thanks to a leaked video — a video that Microsoft made for Nokia — we now have lots of details about Windows Phone 8 (WP8). From deep Windows 8, Skype, and SkyDrive integration, through to the addition of NFC 'wallet' payments and BitLocker encryption, it sounds like Windows Phone 8 will be close to iOS and Android in terms of features. The interesting stuff is under the hood, though: WP8 will have the Windows 8 kernel instead of the Windows CE kernel of its predecessors. Through the Win 8 kernel, WP8 will support native code and multi-core processors. It will also have the same network stack, security, and multimedia support as Windows 8. While Win 8 apps won't be directly compatible with Windows Phone 8, Windows Phone manager Joe Belfiore says developers will be able to 'reuse — by far — most of their code.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies.: Makers and hackers: The Where Conference is looking for you

Brady Forrest — 2012-02-03T18:15:00+00:00

The program for Where, our geolocation and mapping conference, is almost complete. Now we're looking for makers, hackers, developers, and DIYers to bring awesomeness to the 2012 Where Conference (April 2-4 in San Francisco).

There are three ways to participate.

1. Share an amazing geo/location/data visualization video or image

Geodata is often best expressed visually. Inspired by projects like Cab Spotting, Dave Imus' The Essential Geography Of The United States Of America and Eric Fisher's Locals and Tourists, we want your data viz videos, imagery and cartography. (Be sure that you have rights to the underlying data and that you attribute it properly.)

2. Create an interactive RFID installation

Inspired by Mediamatic, each attendee will have an RFID tag that can be paired with our conference social network. If an attendee swipes his or her tag, you'll be able to:

Fetch info about the owner of a swiped badge.
Show the owner of a swiped badge where they are supposed to be next, according to their personal schedule.
Send the owner of a swiped badge a message via the attendee directory.
Make two owners of swiped badges contacts within the attendee directory.

3. Mini Maker Faire: Hardware project

The Where Mini Maker Faire will take place on Wednesday, April 4. We're interested in any hardware project that is in the geo/location/sensing space, particularly ones that feature:

Kinect/Computer Vision Arduino/Lilypad/ADK Processing for Android
Beagle Board/Panda Board
NFC/RFID
Gadgeteer Wearables
ROBOTS!!!!

Mini Maker Faire setup includes a four-inch skirted, countertop-level table, Wi-Fi and power.

Acceptances will be rolling. The deadline to get your proposal in is March 1, so apply soon. If your project is accepted for any of the above, you'll receive a pass to Where.

Where Conference 2012 — O'Reilly's Where Conference, being held April 2-4 in San Francisco, is where the people working on and using location technologies explore emerging trends in software development, tools, business strategies and marketing.

Save 20% on registration with the code RADAR20

The Echo Nest Blog: Music and the Stock Market

2012-02-03T18:09:39+00:00

Our mood can dictate the music we like. Likewise, our collective mood can swing the stock market.

Studies that have found that the weather one day can affect the stock market on the next, for instance. This might make you wonder: Can you predict anything about the stock market based on popular music trends?

Philip Z. Maymin (pictured), assistant professor of finance and risk engineering at the NYU-Polytechnic Institute and managing editor of Algorithmic Finance, attempted to answer that very question, in part, using The Echo Nest’s data. He published his findings in a paper called “Music and the Market: Song and Stock Volatility” ($31) in the January edition of the North American Journal of Economics and Finance.

First, Maymin used The Echo Nest’s APIs to analyze music from the Billboard Top 100 charts from 1958 to 2007, determining the beat volatility (a measure of rhythmic complexity) of the most popular music in the United States.

He found that there is, in fact, a correlation: “People contemplating complex future economic behavior prefer simpler music, and vice versa.” In other words, when people anticipated turbulence in the market, they preferred more rhythmically-straightforward music.

So, could you actually invest in the stock market based on the rhythmic complexity of popular music? If past performance is any indication, you apparently could — at least in terms of overall market volatility.

“The beat variance appears able to predict future market volatility,” according to the paper’s summary, “producing 2.5 volatility points of proﬁt per year on average.”

Making use of this information would require a degree of financial sophistication, and of course this does not constitute investment advice. Still, it’s fascinating that Maymin was able to prove a relationship between pop music and the stock market.

Slashdot: RIAA Wants To Scrap Anti-Piracy OPEN Act

2012-02-03T18:00:00+00:00

silentbrad writes with these selections from an article at Ars Technica: "The Recording Industry Association of America found itself in an unusual position this week: opposing an anti-piracy bill that's gaining momentum in Congress ... the RIAA argues the bill won't be effective at shutting down rogue sites. The trade group warns of 'indefinite delays' as claims of infringement are investigated. And it complains that the process envisioned by OPEN would allow for 'endless submissions by parties such as Google,' further gumming up the process. All the while, the alleged rogue site would be able to continue operating. The RIAA also warns that the need to hire an attorney to navigate the ITC's arcane legal process will 'put justice out of reach for small business American victims of IP theft.' The trade group complains that sites aren't held responsible for the infringing activities of their users, a rule the trade group says 'excuses willful blindness and outright complicity in illegal activity.' RIAA also says it's 'virtually impossible' to prove that a site infringed willfully, as OPEN requires."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: Is Twitter Ready For Some Football?

2012-02-03T18:00:00+00:00

Sunday's Super Bowl is full of betting possibilities, but one line we couldn't find in Vegas is whether or not Twitter will crash because of heavy traffic during the game.

This year's NFL playoffs have already set one record for the most tweeted sports moment in history, when a Tim Tebow pass stunned the Pittsburgh Steelers on the first play of overtime against the Denver Broncos. The 9,420 tweets per second were not enough to cripple Twitter, but on New Year's Eve in Japan 16,197 per second brought the service down. There is speculation that this year's Super Bowl will set new records for both Facebook and Twitter.

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We've asked Twitter if they've made an contingencies for Sunday's game and will update as soon as we hear back from them. Such an incident doesn't just affect users, but also loads of sports apps that let users track chatter about the game using Twitter's API.

Most recent Twitter crashes have occurred as a result of a clearly-defined moment: midnight on New Year's in a part of the world where Twitter is more popular than Facebook was a good candidate. For Twitter to crash on Sunday, we suspect there would have to be a key, game-shattering play like the Tebow pass. With even more people tuning into the game it would most certainly shatter that record, although it's unclear whether it would be enough to bring the site down.

Super Bowl commercials aren't likely to produce a Twitter-crashing moment, either, as most of the commercials have already been leaked online. So many surprises have already been given away already that today marked the first time since 1988 that USA Today did not publish a list of Super Bowl advertisers on the Friday before the game.

Predictions

A close game will produce a moment that makes it into the Top 10 list of most tweeted events: most likely it's a game-ending play or a referee's announcement after video review of a disputed call.
That moment makes the Top 10 but does not cause Twitter to crash.
That moment doesn't come close to breaking the all-time tweets-per-second record of 25,088 set in December when a popular anime film was shown on Japanese television.
And not that it has anything to do with tech or Twitter, or anything other than geographic bias, but the Patriots win a fourth Super Bowl with a 31-21 win.

Photo courtesy of ShutterStock. Discuss

ReadWriteWeb: Anonymous Shows How Easy it is to Intercept FBI Conference Calls

2012-02-03T17:40:24+00:00

"I'm not sure if we're the only two on right now or not," says a voice with an American accent. The voice belongs to a man who identifies himself as Bruce, likely an FBI agent, who had just joined a conference call with other law enforcement officials based in the UK.

The irony of hearing Bruce utter those words at the beginning of the call is that, no, they were not the only people listening in. Somehow, members of Anonymous managed to tap into the call, record it and then post it online for all to hear. The subject of the conversation? Tracking and arresting online activists and hackers, such as those who secretly associate with Anonymous.

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After some casual small talk, the call's participants share details about progress they've made tracking various known hackers, some of whose real names are bleeped out of the audio. Members of so-called hacktivist groups like LulzSec and Anonymous are discussed and updates are given about who's been arrested.

It appears that whoever gained unauthorized access to the call was able to do so because they were privy to an email invitation containing the call-in details. Whether somebody forwarded it to the infiltrator or, more likely, they directly intercepted it themselves, that message was all they needed to join the call and quietly listen to the FBI and UK law enforcement discuss sensitive matters.

Nothing too groundbreaking is revealed in the call, but the mere existence of such a breach suggests that more sensitive information could be exposed, if it hasn't already been.

Not only this is embarrassing for law enforcement, but it ought to send a wake-up call to any other organizations that conduct business via conference call. With many services, all a competitor or other third party would need to get access to the call is a copy of the original email invite.

Discuss

Slashdot: What's the Damage? Measuring fsck Under XFS and Ext4 On Big Storage

2012-02-03T17:40:00+00:00

An anonymous reader writes "Enterprise Storage Forum's long-awaited Linux file system Fsck testing is finally complete. Find out just how bad the Linux file system scaling problem really is."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: Netflix' Daniel Jacobson: Letting APIs Change Everything

2012-02-03T17:30:00+00:00

What we today call the "mobile app" could, in a very short period of time, become known as the portable app, or just the "app." It tends to use such a simple and straightforward model of interaction that people are starting to prefer using their smartphones for certain tasks, even when their PCs are right in front of them. By this time next year, portable apps originally designed for use on smartphones and tablets may be running on laptops.

The extent to which this changes everything is a topic that no one, not even ReadWriteWeb, has fully fathomed. The Web as we have come to know it will be affected significantly. What users have come to know as Web sites will be willingly and eagerly substituted with Web apps. In Part 2 of our interview with the co-author of APIs: A Strategy Guide, Netflix lead API engineer Daniel Jacobson tells us the one huge difference between an app and a site involves the extent to which they rely on an API. It is part of every app's DNA.

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The First, Painful Steps Toward Multi-Platform

In 2002, as you learned from part 1 of our RWW interview last week, when Jacobson was with NPR, he helped make a critical decision about its information infrastructure, the implications of which his team had not foreseen: "Literally the first thing that we did," he tells RWW, "is, we built the API and we put the Web site on top of it. So the Web site runs off the API. It's a little bit of a different interaction model; it doesn't have to go through the authentication and whatever else, in the same way that external apps do."

That API later gave NPR the freedom to build apps that run outside the browser, and that use that same API in different ways. So when mobile apps were invented, NPR was among the first publishers to be ready for them. When Netflix saw it needed an architecture that enabled it to reach all its users without it being dependent upon the usage model for any one device, including the Web browser, it hired Jacobson to build it.

A 2005 Netflix demo at a Microsoft convention featured one of that company's program managers at the time, Darryn Dieken, showing then-President Jim Allchin the prospects of using one underlying technology as the foundation for developing a unified product line across different devices. The technology at the time was code-named "Avalon," and evolved into what we now call Silverlight.

After showing how a Netflix product selector ran outside the browser but through the Web, in a way people had never seen before at that time, Dieken showed essentially the same selector running inside Windows Vista on a tablet PC. From there, he proceeded to show where else folks would eventually find Netflix.

The demo took the audience inside Windows Media Center, which had just been released for Windows XP and was being vastly updated for Vista. The Media Center plug-in used many of the same presentation techniques and concepts as the stand-alone version, demonstrating the benefits of code reuse.

But when the demo turned its attention to Netflix on a Windows Mobile phone, it became painfully obvious that the benefits of client-side code reuse could only go so far. Yes, there was communication taking place between all these different clients and the server. But the way these interactions were happening were based on leveraging Web site-oriented, forms-based submissions that at one level could be described as an API, but failed to be uniform - one API for many platforms.

The goal of any modern API, Dan Jacobson emphasizes, is "to treat any presentation layer the same. So if you have multiple Web sites, like NPR does (they have NPR Music as well as NPR.org), both of those sites run off of the same interaction model through the API. They're just presentation layers, the same way as mobile app or Google TV or [NPR] Infinite Radio. Users are going to consume new material in any way that they want to, wherever, whenever; and your goal as publisher is to make sure that you have a presentation layer that serves them wherever that is. And in doing so, the easiest way, the most effective way to date is to leverage APIs, and invest a little bit on having the right talent surrounding it."

"Publish Everywhere" Doesn't Have to Be Homogenous

Because presentation layers are so different from one another, he goes on, a business can and should nurture teams of developers with the exclusive skillsets that each of those layers needs - for example, Objective-C developers for iPhone apps. There's no reason why certain teams can't specialize. Having a single API that addresses each layer in a standard way, he says, provides all your teams with the flexibility they require to take advantage of the platforms on which they're focused.

This allowance for specialization tends to work itself away from the "one Web" way of thinking, the belief that everything will inevitably merge into HTML5. In professing that API design should not be centered around any one single mode of presentation, lest it eventually become obsolete (among other reasons), Jacobson advises that API designers focus on finding ways to symbolize and encode business interactions, the things that businesses do, not the things that Web sites do. Your goal is not to make the browser more efficient or the user experience more immersive. Leave that to the UX designers. As the API engineer, your goal is to enable business.

"That kind of thinking is fundamentally different than, 'How do I want to structure my content? Do I need to think about what resources can be broken up in which ways and made available in different ways?'" says Jacobson. "For NPR, for example, there are stories, there are assets, different kinds of things in that system. For Netflix, there are users, catalog items. How do you want to structure that material, both in terms of the resource level as well as items underneath it? What are the rights management concerns that go into this, legal constraints internally about what can be published? For Netflix, what can I show users in Latin America that I can't show to people in Canada? For NPR, it's, I'm publishing AP photos; whom can't I present that to, and whom can I? Those kinds of things are really business-oriented decisions that you can't just flip a switch and say, 'Make it happen.' You need to be very thoughtful about what you're exposing and to whom, and how you're going to do it so you can get the maximum effectiveness out of it."

It is this concept which may outmode, or render obsolete, the traditional notion of the Web site, the notion that something that's created once and published everywhere (COPE) must always be the same thing. Done properly, Jacobson says, it can and should be integrated with the uniqueness of each device.

"When Web APIs started out, they tended to be more about publishing on all kinds of different platforms. Now I think it's very much about aggregation, and merging others' API experiences," says the Netflix engineer. "One of the interesting things with Netflix, for example: We have branded apps on a wide range of platforms, and if you look at something like AppleTV or Roku or Xbox, or any of these other devices, we're not the only ones there. There is an aggregation of services where Netflix creates an experience on that platform. We actually integrate with their systems, we're creating an experience on that site, and then people can access our experience in the way they expect it to be presented."

Next Time: A Lesson From the Entertainment Industry, "Know Your Audience"

Discuss

Slashdot: Anonymous Posts Audio of Intercepted FBI Conference Call

2012-02-03T17:19:00+00:00

DrDevil writes "A member of the computer hacking group Anonymous has hacked into a telephone conference between the FBI and Scotland Yard (London Police) and posted it on the internet. The Daily Telegraph has a comprehensive article on the hack. The audio of the call can be heard here." Reader eldavojohn snips as well from the AP's story as carried by Google: "Those on the call talk about what legal strategy to pursue in the cases of Ryan Cleary and Jake Davis — two British suspects linked to Anonymous — and discuss details of the evidence gathered against other suspects."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Chinese Boy Claims To Have Cat-Like Night Vision

2012-02-03T17:02:00+00:00

Oswald McWeany writes "Reports swirling around the Internet are that a boy in China may have cat-like night vision. The boy with eerie blue-eyes was able to fill out a questionnaire in the dark and his eyes reflect like a cat's when a light is shined on them. No reports yet if he marks his territory or is litter box trained."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Thanks to DRM, Some Ubisoft Games Won't Work Next Week

2012-02-03T16:37:00+00:00

hypnosec writes "Several of Ubisoft's biggest titles won't be playable as of next week thanks to a server move by the publisher and the restrictive DRM that was used in their development. This isn't just multiplayer either. Because Ubisoft thought it would be a smart plan to use always on DRM for even the single player portion of games like Assassin's Creed, even the single player portion of that title won't be playable during the server move. Some of the other games affected by this move will be Tom Clancy's HAWX 2, Might & Magic: Heroes 6 and The Settlers 7. The Mac games that will be broken during this period are Assassin's Creed, Splinter Cell Conviction and The Settlers. This move was announced this week as part of a community letter, with Ubisoft describing how the data servers for many of the publisher's online services would be migrated from third party facilities to a new location starting on the 7th February. The publisher didn't reveal how long the transfer would take."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: [Poll] What Is Facebook's Best Mobile Monetization Strategy?

2012-02-03T16:30:00+00:00

You would think that a company with 423 million monthly active mobile users would find a way to squeeze some revenue out of them. Easier said than done. The biggest question to come out of Facebook's S-1 filing for its IPO was how the company could monetize its robust mobile app ecosystem. How will Facebook do it? Stitching in mobile banner ads is not likely a solution for Facebook. We explore Facebook's opportunities and ask for your opinion in this week's ReadWriteMobile poll.

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From Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's letter to shareholders:

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world's information infrastructure should resemble the social graph - a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

One of the beautiful (or creepy) things about Facebook ads on a desktop browser is that they are targeted straight to the user. Facebook knows where you are, what you are sharing, who your friends are and what they are doing. If you "Like" pages, it knows what brands you like, what books you read, what TV and movies you watch. With the Open Graph and Timeline, it also knows other verbs associated with your lifestyle, such as when and how far you run when exercising, what you eat and what music you listen to. All of this, of course, if you choose to share it.

It has been pointed out several times after Facebook filed its S-1 that the key to the company's billions has been the "Like" button. The Like button turned a mammoth but disorganized social graph into a skeletal body that permeates both the front and back end of the Internet. Facebook was then able to correlate users' interest graph and advertising against that. If you think about it, the Like button isthe most brilliant inventions of the Web 2.0 era. The Like button organized the social Web, gave it backbone, structure... and money.

One of Facebook's challenges will be to take the data it already has through the Like button and burgeoning Open Graph ecosystem and apply it to mobile. What will this look like? Will we see the same banner and targeted ads that we see on our desktop? How does Facebook do this without ruining the mobile user experience and angering its most dedicated users?

On the other hand, targeted advertising actually has larger potential when it is taken off the desktop and put into the pockets of users. Smartphones are sophisticated sensors that recognize the world around them. The capability of knowing where a person is, what they are doing and who they are with will only grow as devices evolve over the next several years. The social Web in the physical world. This is where Facebook's biggest opportunity is. Geo-fenced push notifications, proximity alerts when near something or someone on your interest graph, location-based deals. To a certain extent, you have heard it all before. Startups have been working on how to bring push advertising and messaging to mobile since smartphones became location aware. Yet, none of those startups have the user base that Facebook has.

Google will also likely turn to more of a messaging-based mobile advertising strategy in the future. With an Android in 50% of smartphone users pockets, Google has the potential to know more about you than any other company on Earth. It probably already does.

Facebook could also set up a platform, much like AdMob for Facebook, which serves as a real-time bidding (RTB) exchange for keywords based on the social and Open Graph. By making it an ad platform, Facebook takes a lot of the work out of building its own internal ad infrastructure. Google has employed the RTB method to great success.

Or, it could be a mixture of all of these avenues.

There is also the idea of payments through the app ecosystem. Mobile Web-based games built on top of the social graph with in-app payments. This harkens to the so-called "Project Spartan" that Facebok was rumored to be working on last year. It does not have to be only games either. Brands could create Facebook Page mobile Web apps and tie incentives and payments through Facebook Credits. The ability to turn Pages into mobile advertising or payment revenue could be a huge vertical for Facebook.

As you can see, there are a lot of opportunities and avenues for Facebook to take when monetizing its mobile user base. What is the likeliest choice? What will be the best money maker for Facebook in the mobile realm? Take the poll below and let us know your thoughts in the comments.

What Is Facebook's Best Mobile Monetization Strategy?

Discuss

TorrentFreak: Seized Sports Streaming Site Makes a Blazing Comeback

2012-02-03T16:12:24+00:00

Yesterday, several sports streaming sites had their domain names seized by the Department of Justice and Homeland Security’s ICE unit.

Leading up to the Super Bowl this weekend, a total of 307 domain names were seized, 16 of which provided access to online streams of popular sporting events.

Commenting on the actions, ICE Director John Morton was quick to declare victory, but perhaps this came a little too soon. Firstrow, one of the largest sites which had several of its domains taken over by the US government, is not planning to give up the ‘battle’ anytime soon.

Quickly after its firstrow.tv, firstrowsports.tv, firstrowsports.net and firstrowsports.com domains were seized, the service was operating as normal under a new domain – Firstrowsports.eu. Talking to TorrentFreak, one of the owners said that the US has stepped out of line by simply taking away their property.

“The US has prided itself on their ‘innocent before proven guilty’ mantra, yet is clearly hypocritical when it comes to this,” the Firstrow co-owner told us. “Numerous times the US has seized domains, before the defendants have been proven guilty in a court of law.”

“What is the point of trying to approve SOPA and PIPA if they do the same without these laws,” he questioned, referring to the pending US bills that would make it even easier to seize allegedly infringing domains.

The response of Firstrow stands in sharp contrast with that of ICE Director John Morton yesterday.

“In sports, players must abide by rules of the game, and in life, individuals must follow the laws of the land. Our message is simple: abiding by intellectual property rights laws is not optional; it’s the law,” Morton said.

This comment forms the base of the dispute. What is the law of the land? The people who operate Firstrow don’t live in the US, and neither are their servers located there. In fact, Firstrow says that their site is perfectly legal where they are based, so they will continue business as usual.

“Since we don’t live in a third-world country here, the courts decide if something is illegal not the entertainment industry lobbies. We will continue until a court decides that the site is illegal, but for now we’ve seen three court decisions on this matter that say it is not.”

Firstrow’s co-owner is referring to the court cases in Spain, where sites that merely link to copyrighted works have been declared legal. Rojadirecta, a site very similar to Firstrow, won in Spanish courts twice.

In the US, however, things work differently. Two operators of streaming sites have already been arrested and await criminal trials. And if the domains are linked to foreigners, the US believes it has the authority to take them over if they are deemed to infringe copyrights.

This stance has raised eyebrows among foreign governments. A few months ago the European Parliament adopted a resolution which criticized US domain name seizures. According to the resolution these measures need to be countered as they endanger “the integrity of the global internet and freedom of communication.”

Yesterday’s actions show that the US authorities are not impressed by the international critique, just as Firstrow refuses to change course after yet another domain seizure. Firstrow says ICE is wasting its time and continues to provide access to sports fans all across the world, who are otherwise unable to see their beloved games.

“ICE must have a lot of spare time if they can waste it on these domain seizures,” Firstrow’s co-owner says. “They should invest time in the real important stuff , instead of chasing people who have no other option than to watch a sports game for free.”

Source: Seized Sports Streaming Site Makes a Blazing Comeback

ReadWriteWeb: Facebook's Incredible Growth Story In Charts

2012-02-03T16:00:00+00:00

Facebook's IPO filing, released this week, is fascinating for many reasons: We've already covered several angles.

Perhaps the most exciting, though, is the wealth of data about the company that is finally public - from its user statistics to its growth around the world to its finances. I've highlighted and visualized some of the most interesting data in this series of charts.

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One of the most powerful things about Facebook is how many of its users log on every day.

Facebook's IPO filing includes quarterly stats of its Monthly Active Users and Daily Active Users, both worldwide and broken down by region. (Also, how about some appreciation for Facebook to sticking with "active" users in its stats, not just total, all-time sign-ups?)

Worldwide, you can see that 57% of the people who use Facebook within a given month also use Facebook on an average day, up from 47% in early 2009.

This varies, of course, by region, which gives an idea of how "sticky" Facebook is in different parts of the world. In the U.S. and Canada, it's 70%. In Asia, where Facebook isn't as established - but is growing fast - it's only about 50%.

Facebook is increasingly a global story. Its user base is now almost equally concentrated in the four regions it breaks out. That's a pretty big change from 2009, when it was primarily focused in the U.S. and Canada.

In 2011, about 30% of Facebook's new users came from Asia, and about 40% in the "rest of world" category. Only about 10% of its new users came from the U.S. and Canada.

Facebook's IPO filing also brings us new access to its finances. Here, we can see one reason why Facebook's revenue growth (88% in 2011) is outpacing its user growth (39% in 2011) - because Facebook is bringing in more revenue per user than it did in the past.

How did that happen? Significant growth in both Facebook's ad business (85% of its revenue) and its payments business (part of the 15% of "other" revenue).

Facebook's future success, of course, relies on both its ability to attract new users and its ability to generate more revenue per user.

Discuss

Slashdot: Alzheimer's Transmission Pathway Discovered

2012-02-03T15:54:00+00:00

smitty777 writes "Two separate studies by the Taub Institute and Harvard have discovered the pathway used by Alzheimer's Disease to spread through the brain. The studies indicate it's not a virus, but a distorted protein called Tau which moves from cell to cell. Further, the discovery 'may now offer scientists a way to move forward and develop a way to block tau's spread in Alzheimer's patients, said Karen Duff, a researcher at Columbia's Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's disease and co-author of one study published Wednesday in the journal PLoS One. "It's enlightening for us because it now provides a whole other area for potential therapeutic impact," said Duff. "It's possible that you can identify the disease and intervene (with potential tau-blocking drugs) before the dementia actually sets in."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from bbccouk] New BBC Sport Website Makes Heavy Use of RDF

2012-02-03T15:40:18+00:00

From Slashdot

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from bbccouk] What's the verdict on the new BBC Sport skin?

2012-02-03T15:25:46+00:00

From Stockport County Supporters Message Board

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from bbccouk] BBC Sport and the dilemma of change

2012-02-03T15:15:27+00:00

From The Daily Blot

Slashdot: Credit Suisse Traders Manipulated IT Systems To Hide $500m Losses

2012-02-03T15:12:00+00:00

New submitter Qedward writes with a snippet from ComputerWorld UK: "Two traders at Credit Suisse have pleaded guilty to wire fraud and falsifying data after authorities said they had manipulated the bank's record systems, as the credit crunch approached, in order to help conceal over half a billion dollars' worth of losses. The traders admitted to circumventing a mandatory real time reporting system introduced by Credit Suisse, manually entering false profit and loss (P&L) figures as the products they handled collapsed in value. They did so, according to the accusations, under heavy pressure from their manager, who has also been charged."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Planet RDF: A Little Bit Of Query Optimization

2012-02-03T15:03:53+00:00

Every once in a while I add another piece of query optimization code to the

ReadWriteWeb: [Study] A Friend of a Friend in Real Life But Not on Facebook

2012-02-03T15:00:00+00:00

Picture this: You're at a party, and your good friend introduces you to one of their friends. You two hit it off, and boom - a new friend! You've just become friends with a friend of a friend. In real life, this is a common occurrence. On Facebook, a friend of a friend isn't necessarily an actual friend.

A new study from Pew Internet discovered this and an array of other interesting facts about peoples' Facebook friendships. The researchers found that most peoples' friend lists were not very interconnected. In a friend list with a density of 1, everyone knows everyone. On Facebook the density is quite low at .12 with a maximum density of .42, which means that your chances of knowing a friend of a friend on Facebook fall between 12% and 42%. In its its S-1 filing on Wednesday, Facebook toted 100 billion friendships. What it probably meant to say was 100 billion connections, many of which are dormant.

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To understand the friend ties idea, here's an example. Say you have 10 friends; this means that the number of possible friendship ties among everyone in network is 45. The average Facebook user has 245 friends, which means there are 29,890 possible friendship ties in the network. With an average density of .12 and a total number of 245 friends, that means there are only 12% of 29,890 friendship linkages between "friends." A 1992 study by social network scholars found that offline social ties had a density of .36, or three times the density size of Facebook's.

"We suspect that Facebook networks are of lower density because of their ability to allow ties that might otherwise have gone dormant to remain persistent over time," the study says. Those ties that should have gone dormant are the people who you've Facebook friended from grade school, middle school, high school and other pubescent times in life. These are the people whose friend requests you naïvely and curiously accepted. This is where the Facebook "drama" potentially begins. "Facebook is a giant emotional locker," writes Andy Kessler on the Wall Street Journal.

"We expect that new Facebook users typically start with a core group of close, interconnected friends," the study says."But over time their friend list becomes larger and less intertwined, particularly as they discover (and are discovered by) more distant friends from different parts and different times in their lives."

The study also reports a curious finding: People are more likely to be friends with people who have more friends than they do. They are less likely to become friends with people who have less friends than them. Hence, the popular kid syndrome: Everyone wants to be friends with the popular kid, and few willingly try to buddy up with the loner who sits alone at lunch.

Tagging friends in Facebook photos is the only activity that the study says is associated with having more close ties. These people tend to be friends who the user interacts with both online and offline. This does not account for those awkward photo taggings that happen on the fly, without a user's permission. Lifehacker's Jason Chen argues that no, you shouldn't tag someone in a photo without their permission. For if someone is truly your friend on- and offline, they'll show some rexpect by first asking if you'd like to be tagged in the photo they're about to upload. When it comes to more innocuous taggings, such as a status update or photo, permission isn't completely necessary, but it's still quite welcome.

The study reinforces findings from past research, which suggest that heavy Facebook users are more trusting than others.

Images via Nikki Lynette's Facebook page and Shutterstock.

Discuss

Paul Miller - The Cloud of Data: A conversation with Richard Wallis, an experiment, and a survey

Paul Miller — 2012-02-03T14:49:39+00:00

Our conversation is also an excuse for an experiment. I have been producing audio-only podcasts here and elsewhere for a number of years, but have always tended to avoid producing video. It’s more effort, it requires more bandwidth at both ends of the conversation, and I’ve never really been convinced that it adds very much to a conversation between two people. Anecdotal evidence would also suggest that my current podcasts are consumed in environments where video would not work; washing dishes, walking dogs, and sitting on buses.

However, rather than just continue to presume that my biases are correct, I’ve decided to give video a try. Richard kindly agreed to participate, and the result is available on YouTube and embedded here.

An audio-only version is also available for download if you prefer. The introductory remarks in this version are slightly different to those on the video, as they come straight from the original conversation.

It’s perhaps unfair to draw too many conclusions from this first attempt, but a few things are immediately apparent. The whole process takes an awful lot longer. The files are larger, so processing and uploading times increase 2-3 fold. Uploading a separate audio file also takes a bit of time. Simply dumping the Skype recording into iMovie worked just fine… but I’ve (so far) not managed to find any way to balance the audio levels. Garageband lets me do this with my audio-only podcasts, but iMovie doesn’t seem to, so Richard’s side of the conversation comes across as quite a bit louder than mine.

Having done one, I’m still not convinced that the video adds anything to the conversation. But what do you think? If you’ve listened to any of my podcasts, please take a moment to complete the short survey over at SurveyMonkey. Your responses will help me to decide where to go next.

Many thanks.

Richard Wallis left Talis (my former employer) last month, and has set up as a consultant at DataLiberate. In this short podcast, Richard shares some of his thoughts on data, semantics, and ‘the power of the link.’ Our conversation is also an excuse for an experiment. I have been producing audio-only podcasts here and elsewhere for a number of years, but have always tended to avoid producing video. It’s more effort, it requires more bandwidth at both ends of the conversation, and I’ve never really been convinced that it adds very much to a conversation between two people. Anecdotal evidence would also suggest that my current podcasts are consumed in environments where video would not work; washing dishes, walking dogs, and sitting on buses. However, rather than just continue to presume that my biases are correct, I’ve decided to give video a try. Richard kindly agreed to participate, and the result is available on YouTube and embedded here. An audio-only version is also available for download if you prefer. The introductory remarks in this version are slightly different to those on the video, as they come straight from the original conversation. It’s perhaps unfair to draw too many conclusions from this first attempt, but a few things are immediately apparent. The whole process takes an awful lot longer. The files are larger, so processing and uploading times increase 2-3 fold. Uploading a separate audio file also takes a bit of time. Simply dumping the Skype recording into iMovie worked just fine… but I’ve (so far) not managed to find any way to balance the audio levels. Garageband lets me do this with my audio-only podcasts, but iMovie doesn’t seem to, so Richard’s side of the conversation comes across as quite a bit louder than mine. Having done one, I’m still not convinced that the video adds anything to the conversation. But what do you think? If you’ve listened to any of my podcasts, please take a moment to complete the short survey over at SurveyMonkey. Your responses will help me to decide where to go next. Many thanks.

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from bbccouk] Private Peaceful: drama in surround sound

2012-02-03T14:40:27+00:00

From the Radio 4 and 4Xtra blog

Slashdot: Google Starts Scanning Android Apps

2012-02-03T14:31:00+00:00

eldavojohn writes "A recent blog post has Android developers talking about Google finally scanning third party applications for malware. Oddly enough, Google claims this service (codenamed 'Bouncer') has been active for some time: 'The service has been looking for malicious apps in Market for a while now, and between the first and second halves of 2011, we saw a 40% decrease in the number of potentially-malicious downloads from Android Market. This drop occurred at the same time that companies who market and sell anti-malware and security software have been reporting that malicious applications are on the rise.' So it appears that they allow the software to be sold even before it is scanned and it also appears that no one has been bitten by a false positive from this software. Apparently Bouncer is not as oppressive as Apple's solution although given recent news its effectiveness must be questioned. Have any readers had their apps flagged or pulled by Bouncer?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Semantic Web Interest Group Scratchpad: http://rds.posccaesar.org/2008/02/OWL/ISO-15926-2_2003

2012-02-03T14:18:53+00:00

http://rds.posccaesar.org/2008/02/OWL/ISO-15926-2_2003

Slashdot: Researchers Create Glass Just 3 Atoms Thick

2012-02-03T14:10:00+00:00

sciencehabit writes "Researchers have created the world's thinnest pane of glass. The glass, made of silicon and oxygen, formed accidentally when the scientists were making graphene, an atom-thick sheet of carbon, on copper-covered quartz. They believe an air leak caused the copper to react with the quartz, which is also made of silicon and oxygen, producing a glass layer with the graphene. The glass is a mere three atoms thick — the minimum thickness of silica glass—which makes it two-dimensional. The team notes that the structure 'strikingly resembles' a diagram drawn by a glass theorist attempting to unravel its structure back in 1932. Such ultra-thin glass could be used in semiconductor or graphene transistors." See Nano Letters for an abstract (and another picture) to the paywalled article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: Get Ready For a World of Connected Devices

2012-02-03T14:00:02+00:00

"This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it." HAL; 2001: A Space Odyssey

Editor's note: this is a longer version of ReadWriteWeb Editor-in-chief Richard MacManus' article for the SAY Media newsletter. The newsletter is delivered weekly and features SAY Media's take on media, culture, venn diagrams and the occasional Kubrick homage. You can sign up for it here.

Over half of all devices at this year's CES, the world's largest consumer electronics trade show, were Internet connected. Nearly 60% of those were non-traditional computing devices such as TVs, cars, refrigerators and washing machines. Connected devices are proliferating throughout our homes and the world around us. Which means consumers are about to become a whole lot more connected to the world.

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According to the GSMA, a worldwide association of mobile operators and related companies, there are 9 billion connected devices in the world today. By 2020, there will be 24 billion and over half of them will be non-mobile devices such as household appliances. The GSMA estimates that connected devices will be a US$1.2 trillion market by 2020. So marketers and publishers better get ready for this new world too.

Reaching Consumers in Their Connected Cars

Connected devices will be a US$1.2 trillion market by 2020. So marketers and publishers better get ready for this new world too.

Consumers now expect to have a personalized media experience wherever they go. Look at how online music services have ramped up over the past year, in particular Pandora, Spotify, Rdio and MOG. With these services consumers can personalize their music listening on their computers, smartphones, tablets - and now their cars. The implication is that you'll need to reassess how people discover and keep informed about your product or service. People will listen to the car radio less now, for example, because they can access a personalized music stream in their car via services like Spotify and Rdio.

At this year's CES, car manufacturers such as Mercedes-Benz, Ford and Audi were touting new media and communications features. Commonly referred to as a connected car, the prevailing trend is to integrate smartphone apps into the car's dashboard. This enables drivers and passengers to listen to online music, access news and other content, stream video and more.

Because media is so much more personalized now, you will be able to target your message more precisely to the audience you want to reach.

The bad news for marketers is that this narrows the range of broadcast media where you can reach consumers even more. The car radio will soon be usurped by online content, whether it be for music or news. The good news is that because media is so much more personalized now, you will be able to target your message more precisely to the audience you want to reach. That's because streaming media inside cars and throughout the home dramatically increases the amount of interest data collected about users. For example every song listened to on Spotify, no matter if it's played on a computer or inside a car, is logged by Spotify (and increasingly Facebook) into a database with the rest of that user's music preferences. It will all be anonymized, because privacy will become the biggest hot topic for users in this new era, but it'll still be very valuable demographic and interest data for marketers.

To give you an indication of how pervasive the trend of connected cars is becoming, look at the evolution of Ford.

The American firm first introduced Internet technology inside its cars with Sync, launched in 2007. Sync is voice-activated technology which connects your smartphone and MP3 player to your car's dashboard and steering wheel. There are currently 4 million Ford cars in North America that have Sync running. The latest evolution of Sync is called MyFord Touch, an in-car communications and entertainment system which makes it even easier for drivers to consume Internet content.

In short, the connected car is going mainstream. In Ford's newest hybrid car, the 2013 Fusion, one of the main features is its connection to the Internet.

Connected cars are set to ramp up rapidly in the coming years. The GSMA predicts that the automotive sector will account for 1.4 billion (nearly 6%) of the world's 24 billion connected devices by 2020. If you're a marketer or publisher, that's a platform you'll want to be on!

Internet TVs & Personalized Media

For the consumer, it's all about personalizing one's media experience. The TV is another device where this trend is playing out.

Formats will evolve. We'll see TV stars and brands creating their own YouTube channels and releasing short bursts of content to the Web.

Traditional TV networks have already been disrupted by time-shifting devices, which enable consumers to fast forward through ads. The next step is bypassing TV networks altogether, as consumers increasingly access TV content via the Web. YouTube is undergoing a transformation as we speak: from a place to watch cat videos on a PC, to a place to watch high quality professional video content on a TV set.

While popular TV network shows such as Mad Men and Breaking Bad will continue to reach a large swath of people, Internet TV opens up opportunities for new types of video content to emerge and become popular too. Formats will evolve. We'll see TV stars and brands creating their own YouTube channels and releasing short bursts of content to the Web. But also, we'll see web applications arise that mix TV content with Internet programming. This is fertile ground for publishers to innovate and for marketers to latch onto to reach niche audiences.

The rise of Internet TV was evidenced at this year's CES by Samsung's announcements.

Samsung is the world's No. 1 TV brand and it launched significant upgrades to its Smart TV product line. Samsung's 2012 model TVs will enable users to consume a mix of traditional TV programming and Web apps. The devices are ready, now it's time for new types of content and apps to bloom.

The next big thing in computing isn't a new model smartphone or laptop. It's the Internet empowering everything else around us.

Another trend to watch is the increasing interactivity of TV. A key part of Internet TVs is moving beyond the remote control and into other forms of user interface. With a new feature that Samsung calls "Smart Interaction," viewers will be able to control their TV using gesture and voice controls, as well as face recognition. This is similar to how Microsoft's Kinect works on XBox. It will be an increasingly common form of user interface, as 24 billion devices go online over the next 8 years. Publishers and marketers will need to adapt to these new forms of interaction.

The next big thing in computing isn't a new model smartphone or laptop. It's the Internet empowering everything else around us. Our cars, TVs and many other devices. Which means we all need to think about engaging digital Internet experiences for the car, TV and every device imaginable - because that's where audiences are heading.

Discuss

RadSpam: TV tuner maker intros mobile Freeview pick-up • reghardware

2012-02-03T13:54:19+00:00

TV tuner maker Hauppauge has introduced a mobile gadget that streams Freeview content to you phone, tablet or computer over its own wireless network.

Slashdot: How the GOP (and the Tea Party) Helped Kill SOPA

2012-02-03T13:50:00+00:00

Hugh Pickens writes "Strengthening intellectual property enforcement has been a bipartisan issue for the past 25 years, but Stewart Baker writes in the Hollywood Reporter that when the fight went from the committees to the floor and Wikipedia went down, the Democratic and Republican parties reacted very differently to SOPA. 'Despite widespread opposition to SOPA from bloggers on the left, Democrats in Congress (and the administration) were reluctant to oppose the bill outright,' writes Baker. 'The MPAA was not shy about reminding them that Hollywood has been a reliable source of funding for Democratic candidates, and that it would not tolerate defections.' That very public message from the MPAA also reached another audience — Tea Party conservatives. Most of them had never given a second thought to intellectual property enforcement, but many had drawn support from conservative bloggers and they began to ask why they should risk the ire of their internet supporters to rescue an industry that was happily advertising how much it hated them." (Read on, below.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Craigslist Donates $100,000 To the Perl Foundation

2012-02-03T13:08:00+00:00

mikejuk writes "The craigslist Charitable Fund has donated $100,000 to the Perl community for Perl5 maintenance and general use by the Perl Foundation. Craigslist gets more than 30 billion views per month and it is mostly written in Perl. The entire architecture of the system is open source — a proxy array based on Perl and memcache and a backend provided by Apache, memcache, MySQL and, of course, Perl. This is a successful enterprise giving something back to open source — which is how it should be."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Divisible by Zero: Badgify at MIDEM Hack Day 2012

2012-02-03T12:18:26+00:00

This past weekend I participated in a Music Hack Day-esque event. It’s not quite a regular hack day as it is not an open invitation – you have to apply and have attended a hack day before. It’s because it’s a higher pressure event and you’re expected to output a quality hack with a good demo by the end of it for the music business conference attendees. The hack day is also much smaller – 30 people instead of 100+. The result was that it was easier to meet the other hackers and the demonstrations went just amazingly well. Everyone was well spoken and gave a clean demo.

Photo by Thomas Bonte

I worked with Suzie Blackman to produce Badgify. It was an Arduino and Android hack inspired by an Internet of Things approach. There are many ways to broadcast what you are listening to: Spotify, Last.fm, Facebook, This Is My Jam, and so on. But all of those services require online connectivity for others to learn what music you are listening to. Our hack lets you share what you are listening to with others in the same physical space as you. Using Bluetooth, your Android phone can communicate with a LCD screen “badge” that you can pin on your coat or bag. It displays the artist you most recently listened to (and scrobbled to Last.fm).

Below is the video of our presentation and a video of the badge and app in action. Our presentation is about 37 minutes in.

The hacks have also picked up a little bit of press.

I’m really glad I attended. Last year’s event was the first MIDEM Hack Day and it was invite-only; there wasn’t an application process. I was vocal in my disappointment in conducting an event this way and was happy that an open application process was adopted for this year. I wholeheartedly encourage you to apply next year.

BBC Internet blog: Supporting Accessibility: Betsie, Text Only, and the Semantic Web

2012-02-03T12:00:00+00:00

On the Autumn open post, Russ asked:

When did the BBC drop the 'Text only' option for the homepage?

Whether or not to provide a Text Only version of a webpage is an interesting Accessibility question. I established the Accessibility Team for public facing BBC digital services back in 2005, and we have been discussing that question since then.

At the time the BBC had two Text Only solutions which enabled users of early screen reader technologies and mobile browsers better access to BBC content. These were necessary because they were the days when BBC content was almost exclusively published in tables based page layouts.

Times have changed and neither screen readers nor mobile technologies depend on text only versions of pages.

The beginning of the end of Text Only started in 2006 when we, in an effort to improve the user experience for screen reader users, developed a new templating system called Barlesque.

This is now used on all BBC online content and in 2006 we launched the BBC Accessibility Standards and BBC Semantic Mark-up Standards which were developed to improve navigation for screen reader users.

To ensure support of legacy assistive technologies and mobile devices, we kept a Text Only service live. However our solution, BBC Betsie, removed all plug-in content and images. This meant our users could not access the increasing amount of AV content available.

It’s worth noting that removing the layout in the browser now creates a similar linear experience to Betsie but without the loss of either images or AV content.

Lots of the other customisation features offered by our text only services can be replicated in the browser, which is a better place for customisation to happen.

When online our users do not limit themselves to just accessing bbc.co.uk, so supporting a BBC only customisation tool does not reflect that the BBC is part of the internet and not an island. Customisation in general needs to move with the user so tools built into the browser or plug-ins have the potential to provide a better user experience.

With these reasons in mind it no longer seemed reasonable to continue the provision of a Text Only tool.

Betsie was a great piece of technology and played an important role the story of bbc.co.uk and accessibility in general.

We did continue the support of Betsie up until 2010 to ensure legacy assistive technology users’ access, however richer and more immersive services meant the weight and sophistication of the average BBC webpage finally go too much for her.

She became unreliable and was therefore de-commissioned.

The customisation question itself has not gone away, but instead is evolving as we ask ourselves how connected second screen experiences could open up less accessible platforms by connecting them to accessible ones.

Gareth Ford Williams is the Accessibility Lead, Future Media

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from klamma] ANT 2012

2012-02-03T11:57:28+00:00

O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies.: Four short links: 3 February 2012

Nat Torkington — 2012-02-03T11:00:00+00:00

Page Speed (Google Code) -- an open-source project started at Google to help developers optimize their web pages by applying web performance best practices. Page Speed started as an open-source browser extension, and is now deployed in third-party products such as Webpagetest.org, Show Slow and Google Webmaster Tools.
What Commons Do We Wish For? (John Battelle) -- trying to understand what the Internet would look like if we don’t pay attention to our core shared values. Excellent piece from jbat, who is thinking and writing in preparation for another book.
The Trouble with Popularity -- this blog post on StackOverflow does a great job of explaining why moderators are necessary, and why it's not in everyone's interest to give them what they want. Sad to see this come out just as Yahoo! continues to gut and fillet Flickr, which used to be the benchmark for all things community.
The Ongoing Fight Against GPL Enforcement -- interesting! Software Freedom Conservancy, who have pursued several cases against manufacturers who ship GPLed code but do not release their source and modifications to it, have used busybox as a fulcrum for their GPL code release lever. Manufacturers may be attempting to replace busybox with non-GPLed code to take away the fulcrum. In other news, engineering metaphors are like a massless body at light speed before the bigbang: unknowable.

Slashdot: Apple Loses German Court Bid To Ban Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1N, Nexus Phone

2012-02-03T10:33:00+00:00

chrb writes "Apple has failed to get a patent ban on Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1N and the Nexus phone in Germany. Presiding Judge Andreas Mueller stated, 'Samsung has shown that it is more likely than not that the patent will be revoked because of a technology that was already on the market before the intellectual property had been filed for protection.' The patent in question covered list scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display. This news follows the recent Appeals court ruling that upheld the original Galaxy Tab 10.1 ban."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TorrentFreak: Megaupload Founder Accuses Police of Assault, Denied Bail Again

2012-02-03T08:27:37+00:00

Today, Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom appeared at New Zealand’s High Court to continue his fight against extradition to the United States on copyright infringement, racketeering and money laundering charges.

Dotcom has been held in custody since dozens of police raided his Coatesville mansion last month following a lengthy FBI investigation.

During the day-long hearing before Justice Asher, Dotcom’s lawyer, Paul Davison QC, appealed a decision by Judge McNaughton in the Auckland District Court last week which denied the 38-year-old German national bail.

Judge McNaughton had concluded that with all his resources, Dotcom posed a “significant” flight risk.

The defense said that Dotcom has several health-related conditions – one of which is thought to be diabetes – which cannot be properly dealt in prison, adding that the Megaupload founder wanted to be able to spend time with his wife who is currently carrying twins.

Just because Dotcom had access to a helicopter and private jet, Davison added, it did not follow that he would seek to use them to flee the country.

When it was Dotcom’s turn to take the stand he told the Court that during his high-profile arrest last month, police had assaulted him after finding him in a secure panic-room known as the “Red Room”.

“I was punched in the face, I was kicked down on the floor,” Dotcom said. “One guy was standing on my hand so my nail was ruptured and my hand was bleeding, it was quite aggressive.”

Dotcom also told of how that during his time in prison he had received “funny visits”, phone calls and contacts from people he had never heard of including a succession of women wanting to be his friend.

One unsolicited telephone call claimed he was a prosecutor who in return for receiving some money would help Dotcom get bail

“I immediately said ‘absolutely not’ and I gave the number to the officer,” Dotcom said.

Another, the court was told, was said to be an expert document forger.

“If people were to approach me and to offer such a service, I would tell them to go to hell,” Dotcom said. “I have no desire to run away.”

But lawyer for the United States government, Anne Toohey, said that the chances of the New Zealand resident fleeing were too high, a point on which the court eventually agreed.

Describing Dotcom as “an extreme flight risk”, Justice Asher again denied bail. Dotcom is set to appear in court again on February 22nd for an extradition hearing.

Source: Megaupload Founder Accuses Police of Assault, Denied Bail Again

Slashdot: Norway Brings DNA Sequencing To National Healthcare

2012-02-03T08:05:00+00:00

ananyo writes "Norway is set to become the first country to incorporate genome sequencing into its national health-care system. The Scandinavian nation, which has a population of 4.8 million, will use 'next-generation' DNA sequencers to trawl for mutations in tumors that might reveal which cancer treatments would be most effective. In its three-year pilot phase, the Norwegian Cancer Genomics Consortium will sequence the tumor genomes of 1,000 patients in the hope of influencing their treatments. It will also look at another 3,000 previously obtained tumor biopsies to get a better idea of the mutations in different cancers, and how they influence a patient's response to a drug. In a second phase, the project will build the laboratory, clinical and computing infrastructure needed to bring such care to the 25,000 Norwegians who are diagnosed with cancer each year. Similar projects are under way in the United Kingdom and at research hospitals in the United States, France and elsewhere. But Norway's will be among the first to look for tumor mutations using next-generation DNA sequencing rather than conventional genetic testing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Penny Arcade: Comic: Transposition

Tycho — 2012-02-03T07:01:25+00:00

New Comic: Transposition

Yves's planet

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ReadWriteWeb: [STUDY] Jonesing For A Retweet: Twitter Harder To Resist Than Cigarettes And Booze

Semantic Web Interest Group Scratchpad: Web First, Hybrid Second, Native Third

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from klamma] Home - SocialCom-12

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from klamma] SIGMAP 2012 - International Conference on Signal Processing and Multimedia Applications

RadSpam: Services/Notifications/Push/API - MozillaWiki

Slashdot: The Destruction of Iraq's Once-Great Universities

TorrentFreak: We Need Copyright Reform, Not ACTA!

About The Author

Slashdot: World's Largest Virtual Optical Telescope Created

Slashdot: Facebook On Collision Course With New EU Privacy Laws

BBC Internet blog: What's On BBC Red Button 4th - 12th February

Folk Awards

Masterclass

Being Human

Dickens in London

CBBC Extra

News Multiscreen: Video Choice

CBeebies Red Button

BBC Sport Multiscreen**

Highlights

Slashdot: Researchers Feel Pressure To Cite Superfluous Papers

Planète Web Sémantique: Le potiron de Kandinsky

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from tomkeays] Handlebars.js: Minimal Templating on Steroids

Slashdot: Ask Slashdot: Are Daily Stand-Up Meetings More Productive?

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from tomkeays] Backbone.js

Slashdot: Doctors 'Cheating' On Board Certifications

ReadWriteWeb: Why the "S&%t X Says to Y" Version of This Meme Exploded

How "Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls" Shifted the Conversation

"Friendly Prejuidice"

Where Do We Go From Here?

Slashdot: Yes We Can (Profile You): a Brief Primer On Campaigns and Political Data

ReadWriteWeb: How Social Media & Social TV Will Change Super Bowl 2012

The Super Bowl is a Social TV Event

Slashdot: Apple Clarifies iBooks Author Licensing

Slashdot: Satellite Phone Encryption Cracked

ReadWriteWeb: Top Tech Video of the Day: My 2 Year Old Discovered Flickr Today

Slashdot: Canada's Internet Among Best, Report Says

ReadWriteWeb: It's Time to Ditch StumbleUpon for Pinterest

What Will Happen to StumbleUpon Referral Traffic?

Slashdot: 83-Year-Old Woman Gets New 3D-Printed Titanium Jaw

ReadWriteWeb: What You Missed at Monki Gras

Conference as a Joke

Diversity and Expanded Agenda

Talk Highlights

Worth the Trip?

Slashdot: Seattle Library Lets Man Watch Porn On Computers Despite Complaints

Slashdot: Web Guru To the Blind

ReadWriteWeb: Goldilocks, A Dwarf and NASA's Short Term Future

Near-Term Space Travel

Goldilocks and A Dwarf

Slashdot: Steve Appleton, Micron CEO, Dies In Plane Crash

Slashdot: ACTA's EU Future In Doubt As Poland Suspends Ratification

Slashdot: Firefox's Web Push Notification System Announced

ReadWriteWeb: Nokia Publishes Policy on Conflict Minerals

"Nokia Policy Against Illegal Trade of Natural Resources"

Conflict Minerals