DigitalOutbox Podcast

DigitalOutbox Episode 119

DigitalOutbox — Fri, 25 May 2012 16:40:07 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 119 DigitalOutbox Episode 119 - Twitter privacy issues, Facebook IPO and the Google Knowledge Graph Playback Listen via iTunes Listen via M4A Listen via MP3 Shownotes 1:08 - Twitter Updates - Will support Do Not Track - Twitter says it will honour requests from users who do not want their online behaviour tracked, the company said on Thursday, in contrast with web companies such Google and Facebook whose business models rely heavily on collecting user data. - Twitter announced that it will officially support "Do Not Track," a standardised privacy initiative that has been heavily promoted by the US Federal Trade Commission, online privacy advocates and Mozilla, the non-profit developer of the Firefox web browser. - Thats GOOD however - Micro-blogging site Twitter is to start recommending users for you to follow, based on your recent web browsing history. The site calls these " tailored suggestions," and it will track your footsteps across the web by using integrated Twitter buttons and widgets as surveillance outposts. So, every website with a "Tweet this" button will log your visit. - Then, the social network can recognise which accounts are frequently followed by people who visit popular websites, and recommend those accounts to others who have visited those sites within the last ten days. It's specifically targeted at new Twitter hatchlings, as it hopes to provide them with a relevant list of accounts to follow as soon as they've made an account. Right now, Twitter has a default handful of popular users -- including Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian -- that it shows to all new sign-ups. - There's an obvious privacy worry, but Twitter's Othman Laraki writes, "we are committed to providing you with simple and meaningful choices about the information we collect to improve your Twitter experience." - Thats NOT SO GOOD however - Twitter now sends weekly e-mail digest - Twitter just added a new feature that sends you a weekly email with the most popular tweets and links from people you follow. - Sadly, Twitter signs you up without asking you, so you'll have to take some action to get rid of them. You could wait until it comes and unsubscribe directly from the email, but if you want to stop them before they start, just head to Twitter's Settings > Notifications > and uncheck the "Weekly digest of Stories & Tweets from my network" box at the bottom. Save your changes and you should never have to see one of those buggers make its way into your email. - Thats POOR 5:12 - Facebook IPO - Finally hits the stock market for $38 - Banks keep the price at just over $38 on day one but shares in Zynga drop 13% and they are suspended - Monday sees Facebook drop - It’ s a bubble! - Facebook gets suited because some information only given to institutional investors...http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/23/us-facebook-lawsuit-idUSBRE84M0RK20120523 12:21 - Facebook Camera - Facebook on Thursday announced a new application for the iPhone and iPod Touch called Facebook Camera, which is intended to make it easier to take pictures and share them on Facebook. - Dirk Stoop, a Facebook product manager for photos, said that the application was much faster than the current Facebook app for Apple’s iOS, and that it puts photos at the center of the experience. - “We can basically show you more photos on the app, so we can make a more immersive experience around your photos,” Mr. Stoop said. “On the side of publishing these photos, Facebook Camera lets you upload much higher resolution photos at up to 2,048 by 2,048 pixels wide.” The standard Facebook application uploads lower-resolution pictures. The application will also finally bring photo filters to Facebook. - Facebook Camera will offer 15 filters, and will also include tools for cropping and straightening photos, much like the photo editing tools within Apple’s photo app. The filters will include cool, light, bright, golden, cream and neon. “They are stylistic in nature, they are not just enhancements,” Mr. Stoop said. - It might seem strange for Facebook to release a camera application with built-in filters just weeks after announcing plans to buy Instagram, the social photo app. But Facebook Camera is aimed at a different audience. Instagram has 40 million users, while Facebook has 900 million. This leaves a large swath of people who are not on Instagram but are actively taking photos and uploading them to Facebook. The filters in Facebook Camera were developed by Facebook and are not borrowed from Instagram. 14:20 - HP to lose 27000 employees - Restructuring - 27,000 employees to go worldwide - The company said the cuts - about 8% of its workforce - will reduce costs by up to $3.5bn (£2.2bn) a year. - HP employs about 350,000 people worldwide and about 20,000 in the UK. 18:22 - Yahoo Axis - Yahoo introduced its new Axis browser tonight, with versions for the Apple iPad and iPhone, as well as plugins for the top desktop browsers. - The company briefed a media army on the product and the consensus is that it’s very good. My favorite headline from Gizmodo: “Yahoo Came Out With Its Own Web Browser and It Actually Doesn’t Suck.” - It’s a slick offering, which essentially eliminates the texty link-filled search page for one of pretty visual tiles and pull-downs and more. Think Pinterest of search and you have the general idea. - iPad app is nice but US only for the moment - won’t replace my browser but something different. It’s more than handsome enough, it runs very smoothly (thanks mostly to its WebKit underpinnings), and your bookmarks sync between devices quickly once you make sure you’re logged in. - Not sure if it’s a browser as such 21:43 - Google finally gets Motorola - Google has today announced that it has closed its acquisition of Motorola Mobility, buying the Illinois-based device maker for $40 per share in cash for a total of $12.5 billion. - As widely expected, Sanjay Jha is stepping down as CEO and Dennis Woodside, Google’s former Americas head, will take the helm at Motorola Mobility, which will be operated as a standalone company. The company says the acquisition will help Google “supercharge” the Android ecosystem: while Motorola will be making devices using the platform, it will also remain open. - “It’s a great time to be in the mobile business…I’m confident Dennis [Woodhouse] and the team at Motorola will be creating the next generation of mobile devices that will improve lives for years to come,” Page writes. 26:06 - Google launches the Knowledge Graph - The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more—and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do. - Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. It’s also augmented at a much larger scale—because we’re focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web. - Helps you get a good summary of the search topic and go deeper if you wish to 28:26 - Waterstones teams up with...Amazon - Waterstones will sell Kindles in their own stores and also the best Kindle experience - The thinking seems to be that since we all like browsing in bookshops, and we all like reading on digital devices, combining the "singular pleasures of browsing a curated bookshop" with the "best digital readers" will make for the best of both worlds. But that seems to fundamentally misunderstand the appeal of the digital reading experience. Full disclosure: I don't use a Kindle, but price aside, the attraction of the Kindle experience seems to be that you can have lots of books, straight away – neither of which is usually much of a problem when you're standing in a bookshop. And the risk that Waterstones runs is that by welcoming its greatest rival onto the high street it puts Amazon's device into the hands of its most committed customers. - The terms of the deal won't be announced until the autumn, but the success or failure of this deal will be determined by what people think digital reading is - Basically says Kindle is the device/platform for reading books. Amazon wins. 30:36 - O2 rolling out 42Mbps 3G to major UK cities - UK mobile network operator O2 has confirmed it is currently rolling out a variant of DC-HSPA which will support connections of up to 42Mbps. Although the dual-cell HSPA technology can support impressive speeds, the technology will still operate as 3G ahead of the 4G spectrum that is being planned for the UK. British owners of the latest iPad or Nokia Lumia 900 (devices that support DC-HSPA) will be able to take advantage of the speeds providing their local mast has been upgraded. O2 says it's rolling out to "major UK cities," but there's no word on exact locations. - Three is also planning to rollout a 42Mbps version of DC-HSPA over the summer and T-Mobile / Orange are planning to support the technology later this year. Vodafone, the fourth major UK network operator, started to rollout a variant of DC-HSPA last year, but with support for up to 28.8Mbps — the company says it has no plans to support the 42Mbps variant. Picks Henry Swordigo - £1.49 - Nice platform/adventure. - Quite easy but nicely done. Ian Habit List - £1.49 - Helps create good habits and break bad ones - Add a habit, pick frequency, track how often you keep or break habits - Looks great - finding it very handy

DigitalOutbox Episode 118

DigitalOutbox — Tue, 15 May 2012 19:09:13 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 118 DigitalOutbox Episode 118 - Yahoo, Internet Porn and the Samsung Galaxy SIII Playback Listen via iTunes Listen via M4A Listen via MP3 Shownotes 1:05 - Yahoo CEO Steps Down - Scott Thompson hired from PayPal to reinvigorate the business, has been forced out over an error in his CV – which wrongly claimed he has a computer science degree. - Lied about computing degree on his CV - Apologised to staff, not for lying, but that this was a distraction - He has seemingly been diagnosed with thyroid cancer which contributed to his decision to step down - Thompson, who started in January, was initially praised by Wall Street for his first round of cuts – removing 2,000 jobs (from a headcount of around 14,000) in order to save $375m per year, saying that it was "an important next step toward a bold, new Yahoo – smaller, nimbler, more profitable and better equipped to innovate." - He will be succeeded — at least for now — by Ross B. Levinsohn, the company’s head of global media. - Mr. Levinsohn, who is most likely auditioning to keep the role on a permanent basis, has been with Yahoo since late 2010, when the chief executive at that time, Carol Bartz, brought him in to lead its Americas operations. He is now the company’s global head of media, overseeing Yahoo’s core multibillion dollar advertising business. - I don’t really know what Yahoo is or does anymore! 6:36 - Internet Porn - Government to consult on tough new measures - The government is to consult on tough measures to protect children from internet pornography. Under plans being draw up by Downing Street, it would be up to customers to "opt in" to receive adult content online when they take out a broadband contract. - Campaigners have argued it is too easy for children to access explicit adult content on their phones and computers. Parents who want to ensure their children currently do not have access to internet pornography must opt out of services. - But under the proposals, internet service providers (ISPs) will be forced to ask customers if they wish to access sites when they sign up for broadband. David Cameron is due to meet large ISPs to discuss the measures but he is understood to be against tougher controls on internet porn. - Tory backbencher Claire Perry has accused internet companies of being "complicit" in exposing children to pornography. She said ISPs had been "dragging their feet" on reforming the way explicit material is accessed online. - A report by MPs found 77% of women would sign up to having a default filter barring pornographic content. - Nick Pickles, director of the privacy and civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, welcomed the consultation as a "positive step", but said ministers needed to focus on giving parents the ability to restrict their children's access rather than trying to censor the internet. - is it not better to educate children and parents 10:46 - Apple rejecting apps that use Dropbox SDK - Last year Apple caused a bit of a stir by forcing developers to remove links in iOS apps that allowed for external subscriptions or purchases to be made — unless the same transaction was also available as one of Apple's in-app purchases. A new wrinkle in the policy has developed, with Dropbox confirming that third-party developers incorporating its service are now being rejected under the same rule "because we allow users to create accounts." PandoDaily first reported on a support thread in Dropbox's user support forums, with developers complaining that their apps are being kicked back by the App Store review team. The issue is the way Dropbox's new SDK handles the authorization of third-party apps: it sends users to a page in Safari where they can grant access. However, that same page also allows new users to create accounts, after which they could drill down through Dropbox's site and upgrade to a paid account. - Dropbox initially tried removing a link to the desktop version of the site as a possible workaround, but the review team continued to reject apps. Earlier this evening, the company posted a version of its SDK that removed the ability to create a new account altogether. While Dropbox believes this should resolve the issue, it's hardly a convenient solution for iOS users looking to add functionality, and should only further stoke the flames of controversy over some of Apple's review guidelines. - Protecting iCloud, punishing DropBox or staying true to it’s word that you can’t offer paid options from links in the app without offering in app purchase as well? - Dropbox have now worked around problem - still pretty stinky 13:18 - Apple barred from using 4G when advertising iPad in the UK - Apple has been selling the device billed “4G”, even though the 4G chip inside will work only on 700MHz and 2100MHz spectra in the U.S. and Canada. - In the UK, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), which regulates advertising, will on Wednesday publish an informal adjudication after receiving complaints from disgruntled customers, who said Apple’s claims wrongly suggested lightning-speed browsing. - But the authority could open a new investigation in to whether Apple is mis-leading customers. - Apple no longer using 4G in the UK store 14:29 - Facebook launches App Centre - Instead of selling apps that integrate with Facebook, the new App Center will refer users to other app stores where they can buy them. - What Facebook has announced is more of an app showcase. In addition to apps built on Facebook, it includes apps that use Facebook Login, regardless of whether they’re iOS, Android or web apps. - Though you will find iOS and Android apps in the App Center, you will be directed to Apple’s App Store orGoogle Play to actually download the apps. Facebook announced on Wednesday that it will allow developers to charge for “apps built on Facebook” for the first time, but is not clear whether users will purchase apps directly from the App Center. - Facebook’s App Center will launch on the web as well as within the iOS and Android Facebook apps. 16:58 - Facebook testing pay to promote - Facebook is testing a new feature called Highlight that allows users to pay a nominal fee to promote their posts, making them more prominent in others’ news feeds. Last year Facebook raked in $1.14 billion in revenue, about 85 percent of which is from ads, but this would be the first time the site attempts to monetize ordinary posts. - In a converation with Stuff, Facebook spokeswoman Mia Garlick confirmed the tests: "We’re constantly testing new features across the site. This particular test is simply to gauge people’s interest in this method of sharing with their friends." She also added that the company is testing the service at a number of price points, including free. The feature is similar to a new addition from Tumblr that lets users pay to promote their blog posts. 20:16 - Rdio launches in UK - Similar to Spotify, listen to music on the web or devices - No fanfare, just available with 7 day free trial - Looks ot be more US centric with some new additions for UK market 22:14 - Samsung Galaxy SIII - Major specs include a 4.8-inch PenTile Super AMOLED display at 720p resolution, 8-megapixel primary and 1.9-megapixel front-facing cameras with 990ms start-up time, 3.3fps burst mode, and best-shot selection (similar to the HTC One series), 16 or 32GB of storage (a 64GB version is coming later) with microSD expansion, Bluetooth 4.0 support, GPS with GLONASS reception, high-throughput 40MHz 802.11n Wi-Fi, NFC, and a relatively large 2,100mAh battery. - The global version of the device will be using the recently-announced Exynos 4 Quad quad-core system-on-chip — regional variants could be using alternatives, just as the Galaxy S II did. The phone measures 8.6mm thick (136.6 x 70.6 x 8.6mm, to be exact) which is actually a bit thicker than the S II's 8.5mm. The global version will support 21Mbps HSPA+, though Samsung is quick to point out that certain local models will have 4G. - Flipboard is exclusive to Samsung SIII owners on Android for a limted time - 50GB of Dropbox space - double HTC - Samsung says that Europeans can look for the Galaxy S III to launch on May 29th with the 32GB model as a Vodafone exclusive for the first month 28:13 - Games Update - Diablo III launches at midnight tonight - Max Payne 3 - some great early reviews, out friday - Ghost Recon Future Soldier next week - Trials Evolution and Fez - great arcade games, not forgetting Minecraft too Picks Ian Bartender - Free while in beta, - Tidies menu bar icons - Hide icons in bartenders own bar - Can display an app if it updates for 5 seconds - Really cleans up my messy menu bar

DigitalOutbox Episode 117

DigitalOutbox — Tue, 01 May 2012 19:25:46 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 117 DigitalOutbox Episode 117 - Pirate Bay, John Lewis Broadband and Google Drive Playback Listen via iTunes Listen via M4A Listen via MP3 Shownotes 0:49 - Pirate Bay blocked in the UK - File-sharing site The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK internet service providers, the High Court has ruled. - The Swedish website hosts links to download mostly-pirated free music and video. - Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media must all prevent their users from accessing the site. A sixth ISP, BT, has asked for more time to consider its position. - "Sites like The Pirate Bay destroy jobs in the UK and undermine investment in new British artists," the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) said. - The BPI's chief executive Geoff Taylor said: "The High Court has confirmed that The Pirate Bay infringes copyright on a massive scale. "Its operators line their pockets by commercially exploiting music and other creative works without paying a penny to the people who created them. "This is wrong - musicians, sound engineers and video editors deserve to be paid for their work just like everyone else." - In November 2011, the BPI asked the group of ISPs to voluntarily block access to the site. The request followed a court order to block Newzbin 2, a site also offering links to download pirated material. - The ISPs said they would not block the site unless a court order was made, as is now the case. - Virgin Media told the BBC they will now comply with the request, but warned such measures are, in the long term, only part of the solution. "As a responsible ISP, Virgin Media complies with court orders addressed to the company but strongly believes that changing consumer behaviour to tackle copyright infringement also needs compelling legal alternatives, such as our agreement with Spotify, to give consumers access to great content at the right price." - http://torrentfreak.com/how-to-unblock-the-pirate-bay-111004/ - The UK Pirate Party is also prepared for the block and is offering a reverse proxy which allows blocked Internet users to access The Pirate Bay. - http://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk/ - With censorship and plans to monitor traffic, is it time to configure a VPN? 3:25 - John Lewis Broadband - John Lewis Broadband offers no activation fees, freephone support and a free wireless router. There are three packages, all on 12-month "no hidden catches" contracts. Standard - up to 16Mbps, 20GB cap, £24.50 a month Unlimited - up to 16Mbps, No limit, £31.50 Fibre - up to 38Mbps, 100GB cap, £38.50 - In the any questions section of its website John Lewis Broadband says it uses traffic management. Also the service will "let you know if you're approaching your package's limit. Once you've reached it you can buy more gigabytes for £5 per 5GB". - This is not the budget end of the market, where Tesco Broadband plays, for instance. - Never knowingly...? 4:46 - Facebook buys Patents from Microsoft - Facebook announced today that it will pay $550 million to Microsoft for the right to 650 patents and patent applications. Microsoft acquired those patents and hundreds of others in a deal with AOL earlier this month. - The move comes as Facebook wades deeper into the waters of patent litigation while it readies for an IPO expected in May. The social network is in a major patent lawsuit with Yahoo and is also wrestling with dozens of smaller patent suits. - The Facebook purchase is especially intriguing, however, as it suggests a deepening strategic alliance between Facebook and Microsoft . The latter was an early investor in the social network and both companies have common rivals in Google and Apple. - Microsoft acquired 925 AOL patents and patent applications in an auction for $1 billion. Shortly after, reports stated that Facebook had been an unsuccessful bidder in the auction. 6:16 - Skydrive Improves - Today, we’re excited to take another big step towards our vision by making SkyDrive far more powerful. There are new storage options, apps that connect your devices to SkyDrive, and a more powerful device cloud that lets you “fetch” any file from a Windows PC. Taken together with access from popular mobile phones and a browser, you can now take your SkyDrive with you anywhere, connect it to any app that works with files and folders, and get all the storage you need—making SkyDrive the most powerful personal cloud storage service available. - Here’s what’s available for use, starting now: SkyDrive for the Windows desktop (preview available now). View and manage your personal SkyDrive directly from Windows Explorer on Windows 8, Windows 7, and Windows Vista with this new preview app available in 106 languages worldwide. Fetching files through SkyDrive.com. Easily access, browse, and stream files from a remote PC running the preview app to just about anywhere by simply fetching them via SkyDrive.com. SkyDrive storage updates. A new, more flexible approach to personal cloud storage that allows power users to get additional paid storage as their needs grow. SkyDrive for other devices. We’ve updated the SkyDrive apps on Windows Phone and iOS devices, bringing better management features and sharing options to those devices. We’re also releasing a new preview client for Mac OS X Lion, letting you manage your SkyDrive right from the Finder. - So to claim your free 25gb, you need to upgrade to that option on the skydrive site 9:17 - Dropbox Improves - We’re super excited to announce a whole new way to share: now you can send a link to the files or folders in your Dropbox! - Sharing with friends and family is easy! Once you’ve saved that video of your niece’s birthday party to Dropbox, just make a link to send to grandma and she can simply watch online — no download required! This saves you the hassle of having to re-upload or attach it to an email. - Dropbox for Windows and Mac Updated with Auto Photo Uploading and Up to 3 GB of Additional Free Space - Windows/Mac: The desktop Dropbox client has been updated with the ability to automatically upload photos from SD cards and smartphones directly to Dropbox. When you do so, you'll get a free 500 MB of space and if you continue to upload pictures you can get up to 3GB of additional space. 11:51 - Google Drive - Just like the Loch Ness Monster, you may have heard the rumors about Google Drive. It turns out, one of the two actually does exist. - Today, we’re introducing Google Drive Create and collaborate. Google Docs is built right into Google Drive, so you can work with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Once you choose to share content with others, you can add and reply to comments on anything (PDF, image, video file, etc.) and receive notifications when other people comment on shared items. Store everything safely and access it anywhere (especially while on the go). All your stuff is just... there. You can access your stuff from anywhere—on the web, in your home, at the office, while running errands and from all of your devices. You can install Drive on your Mac or PC and can download the Drive app to your Android phone or tablet. We’re also working hard on a Drive app for your iOS devices. And regardless of platform, blind users can access Drive with a screen reader. Search everything. Search by keyword and filter by file type, owner and more. Drive can even recognize text in scanned documents using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. Let’s say you upload a scanned image of an old newspaper clipping. You can search for a word from the text of the actual article. We also use image recognition so that if you drag and drop photos from your Grand Canyon trip into Drive, you can later search for [grand canyon] and photos of its gorges should pop up. This technology is still in its early stages, and we expect it to get better over time. - You can get started with 5GB of storage for free—that’s enough to store the high-res photos of your trip to the Mt. Everest, scanned copies of your grandparents’ love letters or a career’s worth of business proposals, and still have space for the novel you’re working on. You can choose to upgrade to 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or even 1TB for $49.99/month. When you upgrade to a paid account, your Gmail account storage will also expand to 25GB. - So more free than dropbox but less user friendly? Privacy issues? PC Mag 17:54 - Apple - they’ve got loads of cash ($110 billion). Nothing more to say, is there? Well, - Looks like Tim Cook doesn’t quite want to go as “thermonuclear” on rival phone makers as Apple founder Steve Jobs did. Cook didn’t sound so eager to pursue patent infringement suits against Samsung, Motorola and HTC on today’s quarterly earnings call. “I’d highly prefer to settle versus battle,” Cook said on Apple’s earnings call today. “But you know the key thing that’s very important is that Apple doesn’t become the developer to the world.” He added very pointedly, “I’ve always hated litigation. We need people to invent their own stuff.” - WWDC - June 11th - 15th - nothing more to say. iOS 6? Mountain Lion? - could buy Amazon and Nokia and RIM http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/04/24/apple-could-theoretically-buy-amazon-nokia-and-rim-with-its-pile-of-cash/ 22:19 - O2 Mobile Wallet - Mobile network O2 has launched a smartphone app that allows users to transfer up to £500 via text message. - It also allows customers to "digitise" their debit and credit cards to speed up purchases from online stores. - The firm also intends to allow users of phones with near-field communication (NFC) chips to make contactless payments in high street shops. It is the latest of several firms to charge retailers a transaction fee for making it easier to shop. - The service will be free to consumers at first, but O2 said that it would charge 15p for each money message sent by text at a later date. - The network provider said that more than 100 retailers had agreed to accept payments from the service. They include Debenhams, Comet, Sainsbury's Direct and Tesco Direct. - Users can also benefit from a search facility that compares how much goods cost, the ability to load money onto the app from their debit cards and a "transaction history" that keeps track of what they have spent. - The firm said it had held off introducing contactless payments as only a handful of retailers had installed the necessary systems. - O2 and its rivals Vodafone and EverythingEverywhere are working on a national mobile payments service - dubbed Project Oscar. They had hoped to have it up and running in time for the London Olympics. But the project is held up in Brussels, subject to an anti-competitive investigation. 24:45 - Visa launches v.me - European digital wallet - Launching this Autumn - Combine bank accounts, credit cards into a payment service accessed via username and password - It’s PayPal! - Web only - mobile app’s and NFC...soon 25:32 - Spectrum is 30 - Released on April 23rd in 1982, the machine typified the British approach to industrial design – utilitarian but also idiosyncratic and characterful. It should have been buried by its more powerful contemporary, the Commodore 64, but somehow this strange little slab of plastic and rubber earned itself a considerable slice of the nascent home computingmarket, especially in Britain. - Partly its success was about price. Since the launch of the ZX80 computer two years earlier, restless British inventor Clive Sinclair had been interested in computing for the masses. Using cheap components and a minimalistic approach to design, he was able to manufacture machines at a lower cost than rivals such as Acorn, Apple and Tandy. The computer's rubber keys, for example, were created from a single sheet, with a metal overlay to separate them – much less expensive than producing a conventional keyboard. - So while the BBC Micro started at £235 for the Model A option and the C64 hit the shelves at around £350, the Spectrum launched at just £125 for the 16k version or £175 for the mighty 48k. - Fond memories anyone? Picks Henry TunnelBear - easy to use VPN - free for 500mb per month - $4.99 pm for (unlimited) or $49.99 for a year Ian ScoTutor for Mac - for Mac or iOs - Free for a limited time - Great tutorial app for those new to Mac’s - 150 minutes all about the Mac - great if you’ve just picked up a Mac, or you parents for example have just started on a Mac. - ScoTutor for iPad also now free, on Mac and iPad

DigitalOutbox Episode 116

DigitalOutbox — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 17:02:15 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 116 DigitalOutbox Episode 116 - Twitters IPA, Nokia Woes and Windows 8 Playback Listen via iTunes Listen via M4A Listen via MP3 Shownotes 1:07 - Twitter introduces the Innovators Patent Agreement - Like many companies, we apply for patents on a bunch of these inventions. However, we also think a lot about how those patents may be used in the future; we sometimes worry that they may be used to impede the innovation of others. For that reason, we are publishing a draft of the Innovator’s Patent Agreement, which we informally call the “IPA”. - The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes. We will not use the patents from employees’ inventions in offensive litigation without their permission. What’s more, this control flows with the patents, so if we sold them to others, they could only use them as the inventor intended. - This is a significant departure from the current state of affairs in the industry. Typically, engineers and designers sign an agreement with their company that irrevocably gives that company any patents filed related to the employee’s work. The company then has control over the patents and can use them however they want, which may include selling them to others who can also use them however they want. With the IPA, employees can be assured that their patents will be used only as a shield rather than as a weapon. - We will implement the IPA later this year, and it will apply to all patents issued to our engineers, both past and present. We are still in early stages, and have just started to reach out to other companies to discuss the IPA and whether it might make sense for them too. In the meantime, we’ve posted the IPA on GitHub with the hope that you will take a look, share your feedback and discuss with your companies. And, of course, you can #jointheflock and have the IPA apply to you. 6:38 - Nokia in Trouble - In its latest quarterly results, the Finnish handset maker said things were “mixed” in the face of “greater than expected competitive challenges”, as it posted a loss of €1.3 billion ($1.8 billion). - The problem stems in large part from dramatic falls in mobile sales. Despite the recent launch of the lower-priced Lumia 900, net sales for the first quarter were €7.4 billion — down 29 percent on the same period last year — and Nokia witnessed falls from top to bottom. There was a 52 percent drop in smartphone sales revenue on the same time last year, and a 32 percent reduction in revenue from featurephones. 10:37 - Apple make flashback removal tool available - Apple has released an update for Java on Macintosh computers running Mac OSX 10.6 and 10.7 ("Snow Leopard" and "Lion") which it says gets rid of the Flashback malware that has affected as many as 600,000 Macs worldwide. The tool is available through the company's built-in Software Update system. - Symantec published research on Thursday night as the tool was released which suggests that the number of infected Macs has dropped precipitously since the existence of the infection was publicised. It says that the number of infections fell from 600,000 on 6 April to 380,000 on 10 April, to around 270,000 on 11 April - suggesting a dramatic cleanup rate among Mac owners. 13:27 - Windows 8 will come in three flavours - Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro and Windows RT - Windows 8 will be the mainstream consumer edition. The Pro version will bring a number of features that most mainstream consumers don’t necessarily need to Microsoft’s next operating system. These include encryption, virtualization, PC management and domain connectivity. Both Windows 8 Pro and the mainstream consumer edition will be available in 32 bit and 64 bit versions. Microsoft will also offer an enterprise version of Windows 8. Microsoft has not shared any details about the pricing of these editions yet. - Windows 8 Pro, according to Microsoft, was designed “to help tech enthusiasts and business/technical professionals obtain a broader set of Windows 8 technologies.” - The RT edition – which is meant for machines that run on ARM chips – will come with touch-optimized editions of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. While there will likely be desktops that will run Windows on ARM, this edition is mostly geared towards tablets (though the other Windows 8 versions can obviously also run on x86-powered tablets). - Until now, it also wasn’t quite clear if Microsoft also planned to include its Media Center in Windows 8. Judging from today’s announcement, Media Center will only be an option for Windows 8 Pro users and will be “available as an economical ‘media pack’ add-on.” - Microsoft will also offer an enterprise version of Windows 8 that will include all of the features of Windows 8 Pro. This version will also feature a number of tools “for IT organization that enable PC management and deployment, advanced security, virtualization, new mobility scenarios, and much more.” - So that's six editions really :-) 16:23 - Ikea to sell TVs - Ikea to sell TV’s, blu ray players and sound systems - However they will be integrated into Ikea furniture - "We've had very clear signals from customers that there is a need to be able to buy and integrate home electronics with the furniture in a simple way," said Tolga Öncu, sales chief at IKEA Sweden, told Reuters. - Ikea's electronics come from Chinese CE giant TCL. - The product range - called Uppleva: it means 'Experience' - will go on sale in Sweden in June, before being rolled out to other countries in the autummn. The UK won't get a look-in until 2013 18:21 - Pocket - Now called pocket - Updated look and feel on iOS and Android - much better image and video support - Now free - looks to be a great update 20:01 - Game selling EA titles - Mass Effect 3 and Fifa Street now in stores and online - Nintendo also back in stores - Good to see Game back in business it seems 21:25 - Halo 4 - 6th Nov - Microsoft said it marked a "new beginning" for the series, which it confirmed would now continue for the next decade. The new game will be set four years after Halo 3 and see the game's hero, Master Chief, "confront his destiny and face an ancient evil". - First game since 343 Industries took over the reigns from Bungie Picks Henry Myscript Memo - universal app iOS. - Free to download but exporting OCR’d txt is an in app purchase. - Only works in portrait mode. OCR happens once you’re finished rather than as you type. Works well - multiple language support and you can add your own vocabulary. Nice palm rest feature so you don’t write with your palm and finger.

DigitalOutbox Episode 115

DigitalOutbox — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 16:57:41 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 115 In this episode - Facebook buys Instagram. Microsoft buys some patents and BT doubles speeds. Playback Listen via iTunes Listen via M4A Listen via MP3 Shownotes 2:09 - Facebook buys Instagram Facebook has just finished a deal to acquire mobile photo sharing app Instagram for approximately $1 billion in cash and stock. Instagram will remain an independently branded standalone app that’s separate from Facebook, but the services will increase their ties to each other. The transaction should go through this quarter pending some standard closing procedures - Both Google and Facebook had approached Instagram several times over the past 18 months, but the talks clearly didn’t result in a deal. So Facebook was going to have to offer a huge premium over the last valuation - Will still allow sharing to other platforms and services, not just Facebook - Have they bought access to all old photos and their geo information? - Gowalla? Beluga? Friendfeed? - 27 milllion iOS users, 1 million on Androids debut - hit 50 million soon - Competing with Facebooks mobile photo sharing service - it’s only true competitor? - Facebook’s mobile offering still poor in comparison - Tech communitys reaction pretty funny - instantly people deleting accounts, bemoaning the loss of Instagram especially in the snobby Apple community - Guides popped up on how to back up your photo’s and then delete your account - http://mashable.com/2012/04/09/deleting-instagram-account-save-pics/ 7:26 - Microsoft buys AOL Patents - AOL is selling 800 patents to Microsoft for just north of $1 billion: $1.056 billion in cash to be exact. - Tim Armstrong, the CEO of AOL (which owns TechCrunch), says that the company will continue to hold on to about 300 patents and patent applications after the sale. These span “core and strategic technologies” around advertising, search and content generation, he noted in a memo to employees. [Full memo below the break.] - The sale to Microsoft came after a “competitive auction process” the company noted in a statement. - The sale is expected to be completed by the end of 2012. - The patent sale marks the end to a lot of speculation around what AOL would do with its patent trove. There had been pressure from shareholders, led by Starboard Value, to realize some of the value from those patents, starting last year, when investors began to grumble that the company was not focused enough on what it could be doing to make more money, and not monetizing fast enough on its growing media portfolio - AOL stock soars by 43% on this news - thats not right is it? 9:00 - Jack Tramiel dies - Jack Tramiel, the founder of Commodore International, has passed away at the age of 83. - In 1981, they released the VIC-20, which at the time became the biggest-selling computer of all time. Its success was based on its versatility: it could play games, yes, but it could also be used for more practical purposes like family budgets. At USD$300, it was also "affordable", at least by the standards of the day for such equipment - In 1982, though, they went one better, and released the Commodore 64. It was, for the time, the perfect machine, striking a balance between performance and affordability that would see it sell over 20 million units. To this day it remains the single biggest-selling personal computer system of all time. - What made the C64 so impressive was the way it blew away the competition in terms of both graphics and, more importantly, sound (indeed, the C64's unique architecture means its still a favourite of chiptune artists today). This led to some of the most memorable games of the 1980s appearing on the platform, from Last Ninja to GI Joe, Elite to Little Computer People, Summer Games to Way of the Exploding Fist. - Left in 84 and bought up remains of Atari - Tramiel's son Sam oversaw the development of the Atari Jaguar, the company's last important contribution to the home video game market. 11:02 - Apple respond as the Mac trojan is verified - Apple has said it is developing a tool to "detect and remove" a Trojan that is said to have infected more than half a million Mac computers. - It said it is working with internet service providers (ISPs) to disrupt the command network being used by hackers to exploit the malware. - Trojans are infections that can expose computers to control by hackers. - It is Apple's first statement on the threat. It issued patches to prevent the malware's installation last week. - The two security updates were released eight weeks after Java's developer Oracle issued a fix for other computer systems. - What doe sthe trojan do - Although the Trojan is now only conducting click fraud scam by hijacking people’s search engine results inside their web browsers, it has the potential to do greater damage, such as stealing banking or login credential. If the botnet remains connected to computers, cybercriminals could send new malware to their systems that cause bigger problems. - To understand the power of the Flashback, it’s important to note that it’s actually a family of Mac OS X malware that was first created in September 2011. It was designed to disguise itself as an Adobe Flash Player installer, using Flash player logos. After installing Flashback, the malware originally sought user names and passwords that are stored on Macs. 13:36 - DOJ sues Apple and book publishers over price fixing - The US has filed an antitrust suit against Apple, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Penguin - The DOJ's actions come after a year-long investigation into Apple and publishers, after Apple switched to an "agency" model that is said to have resulted in an industry-wide price increase — with only a few sellers in the market setting prices. Last month it seemed that publishers were ready to settle with the DOJ, and it appears that some are still prepared to do so: Bloomberg reports that Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, and HarperCollins want to avoid a legal battle and could settle with the government today. Others, like Penguin Group, are reportedly ready to fight in court. - Three of the publishers settled with the Justice Department, agreeing to let Amazon and other retailers resume discounting of e-books. Settlement of a separate suit filed by 16 states and U.S. territories could lead to tens of millions of dollars in restitution to consumers who bought e-books at the higher prices. - Amazon called the settlement a victory for consumers and users of its Kindle e-reading device. It promised to renew discounting, which could put pressure on such rivals as Barnes & Noble Inc. BKS -1.59% "We look forward to being allowed to lower prices on more Kindle books," Amazon said. - Apple and two publishers didn't settle and are on track to face the government in court. Apple declined to comment but earlier denied acting in concert with the publishers. 18:04 - Google+ Refresh - Now more beautiful? - The new interface drops the static icons at the top and moves all the navigation off to the side, allowing users to reorder the icons as they wish. The list includes access to all of Google+’s features, including Hangouts, Photos, Circles, Games, your Profile page, an Explore option for browsing the site, and an icon called “More” which will hold all the icons you don’t care to see. - Applications mentioned in nav bar - is this the start of app’s coming to Google+? - Photos and Videos now bigger - much better display - Facebook esque profile/timeline layout - Hangouts - easier to manage/join with others - Whats Hot is now called Explore - Anyone still using it? 22:13 - BBC Launch Sport App for connected TVs - True on-demand video from your TV via red buttin and this app - Built around F1 initially but will be extended to support Wimbledon, Euro 2012 and the Olympics - Launched on Tivo now - others to come soon 24:51 - BT doubling Infinity speeds - BT broadband customers who subscribe to the company's Infinity 2 package will see their fibre download speeds nearly double from tomorrow, the national telco has promised from 38Mbit/s to "up to" 76Mbps on 12 April - upstream speeds of "up to" 19Mbit/s - This will not lead to cost hikes for its customers. - Those subscribers on BT's Infinity 1 package will also see their broadband download speeds swell to "up to" 38Mbps and with upload speeds that could reach 9.5Mbit/s, it said. - Here's the rub, though: Existing customers already signed up to Infinity will be required to agree a new contract – at no extra cost – with BT before being able to access the new speeds. - A BT spokesman confirmed that such a customer would first need to order a "regrade" from the company before "extending" their contract to another 12 or another 18 months. Picks Ian Pebble - E-Paper Watch for iPhone and Android Caines Arcade - If you’ve got 11 minutes, watch this

DigitalOutbox Episode 114

DigitalOutbox — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 14:01:53 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 114 In this episode the team discuss Project Glass, Privacy and Apple woes Playback Listen via iTunes Listen via M4A Listen via MP3 Shownotes 0:58 - Girls Around Me - When you load it up, the first thing Girls Around Me does is figure out where you are and load up a Google Map centered around your location. - It’s when you push the radar button that Girls Around Me does what it says on the tin. I pressed the button for my friends. Immediately, Girls Around Me went into radar mode, and after just a few seconds, the map around us was filled with pictures of girls who were in the neighborhood. Since I was showing off the app on a Saturday night, there were dozens of girls out on the town in our local area. - These are all girls with publicly visible Facebook profiles who have checked into these locations recently using Foursquare. Girls Around Me then shows you a map where all the girls in your area trackable by Foursquare area. If there’s more than one girl at a location, you see the number of girls there in a red bubble. Click on that, and you can see pictures of all the girls who are at that location at any given time. The pictures you are seeing are their social network profile pictures.” - Tap on a girl - Girls Around Me quickly loaded up a fullscreen render of her Facebook profile picture. The app then told me where Zoe had last been seen (The Independent) and when (15 minutes ago). A big green button at the bottom reading “Photos & Messaging” just begged to be tapped, and when I did, I was whisked away to Zoe’s Facebook profile. “Okay, so here’s Zoe. Most of her information is visible, so I now know her full name. I can see at a glance that she’s single, that she is 24, that she went to Stoneham High School and Bunker Hill Community College, that she likes to travel, that her favorite book is Gone With The Wind and her favorite musician is Tori Amos, and that she’s a liberal. I can see the names of her family and friends. I can see her birthday.” - While the app is bad, this is a wake up call for privacy on social sites - Data was publicly shared by these girls - du to Foursquare and Facebook allowing friends to sign them in, they might not realise that their friends are sharing their location - Lot’s of fallout - Foursquare suspended the app’s API access - Apple then withdrew the app from the app store - actually the app developers did, not because of the -ve publicity but due to the API restrictions. The app no longer worked. - Developer defends app - it was about venue discovery, not girl discovery - http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/03/31/girls-around-me-developer-defends-app-after-foursquare-dismissal/ 4:02 - Govt plans increased email and social media surveillance - Ministers are to introduce a new law allowing police and security services to extend their monitoring of the public's email and social media communications, the Home Office has confirmed. - It is expected that the new system will allow security officials to scrutinise who is talking to whom and exactly when the conversations are taking plac, but not the content of messages. - Labour tried to introduce a similar system using a central database tracking all phone, text, email and internet use but that was ditched in 2009. It followed concerns raised by internet service providers and mobile phone operators over the project's feasibility, and anxieties over who would foot the bill. - The coalition's proposals are likely to be introduced in the Queen's speech on 9 May and will centre on internet service providers gathering the information and allowing government intelligence operatives to scrutinise it. - "It is vital that police and security services are able to obtain communications data in certain circumstances to investigate serious crime and terrorism and to protect the public," said a Home Office spokesman, who said the plans would be brought forward "as soon as parliamentary time allows". - Internet service providers are obliged to keep details of users' web access, email and internet phone calls for 12 months, under an EU directive from 2009. - Although the content of the calls is not kept, the sender, recipient, time of communication and geographical location does have to be recorded. - The proposed new law - which the Home Office says will be brought in "as soon as parliamentary time allows" - would extend those requirements to social networking sites and internet phone services such as Skype. - It would also reportedly allow intelligence officers to access emails, calls and texts as they happen, without a warrant, rather than retrospectively. - Overzealous civil servants driving policy? - Lib dem briefing doc - https://docs.google.com/file/d/1_wMtlFHrktpyOEFSkRSmBnOBPYDkPF6y-gL7Es_h0tu58aPVeHq9p45ulRcX/view?sle=true&pli=1 - Also, Gove fought to keep his e-mails private in early March - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17235168 - *** How would this work in practice? What about data that is held on servers overseas? Surely that can’t be part of this? 10:02 - Twitter suing spammers - Twitter is officially putting its foot down and enlisting the help of the federal courts, filing a suit in San Francisco today against its five most aggressive spammers. In pursuing legal action, Twittersaid in a statement on its blog, it believes it’s going “straight to the source”. - By shutting down tool providers, we will prevent other spammers from having these services at their disposal. Further, we hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter … While this is an important step, our efforts to combat spam don’t stop here. Our engineering team continues to implement robust technical solutions that help us proactively reduce spam. - Finally doing something about spam? - Annoying thing is a spammer is so obvious - why is it down to users to report? 13:29 - Game rescued - The administrators of Game Group have announced that the 333 of its UK shops that are still open have been sold to OpCapita. - The agreement will safeguard the jobs of nearly 3,200 Game Group employees. A small number from head office who were previously made redundant may also be re-employed. - OpCapita is a private investment firm specialising in retail. It has set up a company called Baker Acquisitions to buy the shops. - Former Halfords Group chief executive David Hamid, now a partner at OpCapita, has been appointed chairman of Game. A chief executive is expected to be named shortly. Ian Shepherd held the role until last week, when he resigned with immediate effect after a two-year battle to turn the company around. - OpCapita acquired electrical retailer Comet from its owner Kesa Electricals last year for a nominal sum of £2. The financial terms of its Game acquisition have not been disclosed, but it is thought to have paid a nominal sum and taken on the company's debts. 15:07 - Foxconn audit - A report into working conditions at Chinese factories operated by anApple supplier has revealed "serious" labour violations, including excessive hours, unpaid wages and major health and safety risks. - The Fair Labor Association (FLA) said employees at Foxconn, which produces products including iPhones and iPads, typically worked more than 60 hours a week during peak periods but were paid unfair compensation for overtime. - Around two-thirds of workers told investigators that their take-home pay was insufficient to meet basic needs. - In addition, 43% said they had witnessed an accident at work, leading to fears of poor safety provisions at the plants. - The (FLA) was asked by Apple to investigate working conditions at Foxconn after reports of long hours and poor safety. - The FLA says it has now secured agreements to reduce hours, protect pay, and improve staff representation. - Apple said it "fully accepted" the report's recommendations. "We share the FLA's goal of improving lives and raising the bar for manufacturing companies everywhere," it said in a statement. - Of course, some employees aren’t happy with the reduction in money: -“We are here to work and not to play, so our income is very important,” said Chen Yamei, 25, a Foxconn worker from Hunan who said she had worked at the factory for four years. “We have just been told that we can only work a maximum of 36 hours a month of overtime. I tell you, a lot of us are unhappy with this. We think that 60 hours of overtime a month would be reasonable and that 36 hours would be too little,” she added. Chen said she now earned a bit over 4,000 yuan a month ($634). 17:58 - iPad Wifi Issues - Besides the supposed third-generation iPad charging and overheating issues, the iPad WiFi issues were noted by the media during the past couple of weeks. Apple has taken notice and has admitted internally to some new iPad models having the WiFi issues described in numerous reports and on forum threads. The company says “symptoms can include, but are not limited to: intermittent connectivity, slow WiFi speeds, and WiFi network not seen.” - Apple tells AppleCare employees to ensure that devices they test are not facing these issues due to normal software bugs, but instead because of the actual hardware components. WiFi-only third-generation iPads are the only devices affected by these issues, according to Apple. The 4G LTE models are presumably safe from these issues due to the extra network power allowed by the black rubber cut on the top of the unit. 19:44 - Mac trojan affects 600000 - Apple released a Java 1.6.0_31 update for OS X on Tuesday that claims to deliver "improved compatibility, security, and reliability." The patch closes multiple vulnerabilities found in Java 1.6.0_29, the most serious of which allows malicious code to be executed just by visiting a compromised website. The update is available from Software Update on any Mac running Mac OS X v10.6.8, Mac OS X Server v10.6.8, OS X Lion v10.7.3, or Lion Server v10.7.3. - Russian security firm Doctor Web claims that attackers began to exploit the Java vulnerability on March 16th which Apple closed with the release of the Java update on April 3rd. Dr. Web now estimates that about 600,000 Macs, most of which reside in the US (55 percent) and Canada (19.8 percent), are now infected members of the Flashbackbotnet. The company also notes that some four million compromised web-pages could be found in Google search results at the end of March with some users claiming infection by visiting sites as mainstream as dlink.com. - Security company F-Secure has instructions for detecting and deleting the Flashback botnet on infected computers. 22:47 - Project Glass - Glasses not for sale but Google has begun public testing of it’s augmented reality glasses - The prototype version Google showed off on Wednesday looked like a very polished and well-designed pair of wrap-around glasses with a clear display that sits above the eye. The glasses can stream information to the lenses and allow the wearer to send and receive messages through voice commands. There is also a built-in camera to record video and take pictures. - This is the future...or is it? - On sale this year - Google says unlikely 28:06 - HTC One X and S Launched - O2, Vodafone, Three, Orange, and T-Mobile are all taking orders for the brand new One X and One S Android 4.0 smartphones from HTC. As usual, Three will give you the most for your money, though O2's new On & On tariff — which the company describes as its best ever — is also worth a look, costing you £36 per month over a two-year contract, but also giving you unlimited minutes and the One X for no upfront cost. Should you be more inclined to buy the handset by itself, Amazon will sell you an unlocked and SIM-free One X for £489.99 - The One X got some great reviews - best phone you can buy today - http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/2/2919202/htc-one-x-review 29:35 - Instagram launches for Android - The app adds creative, nostalgic filters to your pictures and makes sharing them easy (almost addictive). - You can add effects to a picture you take with your front or back camera or choose a picture from your gallery. There are a number of custom filters and borders to choose from, including several '70s effects and a black and white effect. Instantly upload the photo to your Instagram account and share it if you please to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Foursquare; Flickr is in the works. - 1 million downloads in a day - Hated the snobs on twitter - oh no - now I need to see android users photos on instagram - Now I need to see photos from poor people 31:13 - Olympics Overload - The BBC will make 24-HD quality live Olympic streams available to cable and satellite providers for the duration of the Olympics Games - Viewers will be able to watch every Olympic sport, live from every venue, via tools such as Sky EPG and BBC Red Button. Virgin Media and Freesat customers will also have access. This complements previously confirmed plans for 24 simultaneous streams live online on the BBC Sport website. - 48 new channels will be added to the Sports section of Sky's EPG from July 24. The channels are free-to-air and available to any Sky home. The HD channels are available on any Sky+HD box and do not require a subscription, but do require an HD ready TV. - Freesat viewers and Freesat standard definition viewers will also have access to the streams. 33:39 - Virgin throttles all users - Virgin Media has introduced new throttling "trigger levels" for customers who make heavy use of its network. - The telco updated its subscriber traffic management (STM) policy yesterday to "ensure the vast majority of customers get the high quality of service they expect from Virgin Media's fibre optic broadband without being negatively affected by extremely heavy users" at peak times. - It classified a so-called "bandwidth hog" as a 60Mbit/s customer, for example, who can download 5,000MB of data between 4pm and 9pm on a weekday before having their broadband connection throttled. - A company spokesman told The Register that around 5 per cent of users would be affected by the STM policy. Those punters can expect to see their speed usage of the network temporarily throttled by 50 per cent. 36:03 - 0x10c - Next game from Minecraft creator Notch - Space game Picks Ian Hero Academy - RPG’ish battle between friends - Like mini chess - Seems simple but has real depth due to different factions, characters, powers and upgrades - Multiplayer - play quickly or over a few days like words with friends - Now universal - lovely lovely graphics - Free, but in app purchases to unlock other classes

DigitalOutbox Episode 113

DigitalOutbox — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:35:42 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 113 In this episode the team discuss Game, Racists, Kindle Touch and Paper. Playback Listen via iTunes Listen via M4A Listen via MP3 Shownotes 1:42 - Game Enters Administration - Enters administration - Immediate closure of 277 stores in the UK and Ireland. - Administrators PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) said 2,104 employees would be made redundant this week. - The remaining 333 stores will stay open as the administrators search for a buyer for the business. - PwC said that the retailer had suffered from high fixed costs and an ambitious international expansion. "Our priority is to continue trading the business as normal while we continue to pursue a sale," said one of the administrators, Mike Jervis. "The recent job losses are regrettable, but will place the company in a stronger position while we explore opportunities to conclude a sale. - PwC also said that all gift cards for Game and Gamestation had been suspended, meaning that customers would not be able to use them to buy merchandise and no cash exchange would be offered. - http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/game-to-exit-administration-tomorrow-rbs-consortium-wins-race/093563 - Sources close to the negotiations are certain that a deal to save the retailer is incredibly close, with a likely exit from administration as early as tomorrow (Friday March 30th). - Furthermore, multiple sources have told us that it will be the RBS-led bank consortium – and not GameStop or OpCapita – that will seal the deal. 6:10 - Racist twitter user jailed for 56 days - A student who admitted posting racially offensive comments on Twitter about footballer Fabrice Muamba has been jailed for 56 days. - Swansea University student Liam Stacey, 21, from Pontypridd, admitted inciting racial hatred over remarks about the Bolton Wanderers player, who collapsed during a FA Cup tie at Tottenham. - Stacey broke down in tears as he was led away to begin his jail term. - A second year biology student at Swansea, Stacey was arrested after his comments on the social networking site were reported by other users. - A number of people challenged Stacey on Twitter following his first comment, and he responded with a number of offensive posts aimed at other Twitter users. - Last week the court heard how Stacey posted the offensive comments shortly after the former England Under-21 star collapsed during the FA Cup quarter-final at White Hart Lane on 17 March. - Magistrates were told police forces across Britain received complaints following the comments. - Stacey tried to "distance himself" from the tweets by claiming his account had been hacked, the court was told. He later tried to delete his page but was arrested the following day at his student house in Swansea. - When interviewed by police, Stacey said he had been drinking since lunchtime on Saturday and was drunk when he made the comments. - Stacey was initially released on bail pending sentence and was ordered not to use Twitter and other social networking sites. 11:06 - Kindle Touch hits the UK - The Kindle Touch will be available for delivery from 27 April, five months after it went on sale in the US. Unlike in America, there will not be a discounted version with adverts. - The Touch is being sold for £109 with wi-fi, and £169 with both wi-fi and 3G connectivity, with no monthly fee. - In the States, the units cost $99 and $149 for the Wi-Fi and 3G editions with adverts, $139 and $189 without adverts - Still no Kindle Fire! - What does Bezos do with his billions? Finds Apollo 11 F1 engines and plans to raise then from the Atlantic ocean - they are only 14,000 feet below the surface - http://www.bezosexpeditions.com/engine-recovery.html 15:40 - Harry Potter ebooks finally available - All seven of JK Rowling's Harry Potter books are now available to download in e-book format from Pottermore, having been initially scheduled for last October. - The first three can be bought for £4.99 (compared with their paper price of £6.99) and the last four can be bought for £6.99 (compared with their £8.99 printed price). Alternatively the whole lot can be bought as a bundle for £38.65. The titles can be read on e-book devices and platforms including Amazon's Kindle, Sony's Reader, Barnes & Noble's Nook and Google Play -- although iBooks is conspicuously not listed. The audiobooks are more pricey, at £17.99 and £32.99 respectively or £167.34 for the bundle. - landmark move because you can only buy the books on Pottermore, but can fulfil the orders of those books through the Kindle platform. So although you find a shop front for the books atwww.amazon.co.uk/pottermore, the user is directed through to Pottermore to purchase the e-books, which will then be seamlessly pushed to their Kindle Library. Otherwise the books are available in ePub format, which is compatible with a wide range of readers, including Apple devices. 17:49 - Dot scot on the way - The UK government has reportedly granted Dot Scot Registry, a not-for-profit company, with approval to apply for .scot, a new internet top-level domain. - The wannabe registry can now apply to domain name policy oversee ICANN for .scot, paying a $185,000 (£116,970) application fee for the privilege. - Under ICANN rules, any proposed new gTLD that purports to represent a geographic region needs to get a letter of approval or non-objection from the relevant local government. Dot Scot Registry now has that letter, according to The Scotsman. 19:19 - Friends Reunited Relaunches - Early social networking pioneer Friends Reunited has been relaunched. The UK-based network, which began in 2000, now invites users to sign up for its new "memories"-based service. - The original site was bought by ITV for £175m in 2005, only to be sold for £25.6m four years later to online publishing group Brightsolid - The site's owner, Brightsolid, believes a host of professional archive content coupled with users' own material will help make Friends Reunited the choice of social network for people keen to partake in online nostalgia. - The site has teamed up with the Press Association and the British Library to allow users to attach old material - including newspaper clippings - to their own "memory box". - These boxes can be shared on various other networks online - including Facebook, where users can add a Friends Reunited app to their profile. - The service is currently free to use - although Mr Kuyl said revenue-generating options were being considered further down the line, including inviting brands to offer their own nostalgic material, such as old cars, to be added to users' memories. 22:02 - Shitter - New startup will deliver your tweets on toilet rolls Picks Ian Paper - a blank slate of paper devoid of settings panels, menus, and adjustable line widths. - team behind it had an interesting history: a handful of them spent several years at Microsoft, with a good chunk of that time focused on the Courier - Fountain pen is only tool at startup - Free app but £6 for 4 tools - Write (ballpoint), Sketch (pencil), Outline (marker), and Color (watercolor paintbrush) - Simplicity and clear toolbar free UI is really nice. Great for sketching, but here’s the funny. A stylus really helps. - Undo is really nice - hold two fingers on iPad and rotate anti clockwise - step through additions removing one at a time - Share - twitter, facebook, tumblr and e-mail Wind Map - Lovely visualisation of current wind flows in the US - Team hope to expand ot other countries if they can find the data feeds they need

DigitalOutbox Episode 112

DigitalOutbox — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 20:09:38 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 112 In this episode the team discuss Apple and it's money. Mike Daisey, Game and iPlayer hits the 360. Playback Listen via iTunes Listen via M4A Listen via MP3 Shownotes 1:29 - BBC Boss coad Service - wowzers. launched 6 years ago in 21st March. - known as twttr back then! 1:29 - BBC Boss coad Service - Buy Twitter? - Buy a carrier? - Buy Samsung? - Increase Foxconn salaries? - Invest in cloud? - Philanthropic? - Reduce prices? - No, Apple plans to pay shareholders a quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share sometime in Q4 2012, which for Apple begins this July. In case you were wondering, the last time Apple paid dividends was in 1995 – a move that netted shareholders $0.12 per share. - On top of that, Apple’s Board of Directors gave their blessing for the company to buy back $10 billion of stock over the next three years. The repurchase program is slated to begin in September 2012, and is meant to help neutralize “the impact of dilution from future employee equity grants and employee stock purchase programs.” - Overall cost is $45 billion, but they made almost $15 million last quarter alone 1:29 - BBC Boss coad Service - US public-radio show This American Life has retracted a story it aired in January – the most listened-to show in its history – in which monologist Mike Daisey detailed what he claimed were his personal experiences when investigating heinous working conditions in plants operated by Apple's Chinese contract manufacturers. - A new episode of This American Life detailing the issues and what happened airs later today, with an MP3 of the broadcast available Sunday. Host Ira Glass is taking full responsibility for the error, saying that he's "horrified to have let something like this onto public radio." - Daisey lied to me and to This American Life producer Brian Reed during the fact checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast. That doesn't excuse the fact that we never should've put this on the air. In the end, this was our mistake. - For his part, Daisey does not seem to be contrite at all, with a statement on his blog saying that his work is "not journalism" and "operates under a different set of rules and expectations" from a show like This American Life. - What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue. THIS AMERICAN LIFE is essentially a journalistic - not a theatrical - enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations. - The bit that pisses me off about Daisey - he lies to justify his show: - To my audiences: It’s you that I owe the most to. I want you all to know that I will not go silent—I will be making a full accounting of this work, shining a light through this monologue and telling the story of its origins, construction, and details. - I believe the truth is vitally important. I continue to believe that. I believe that I will answer for the things I have done. I told Ira that story should always be subordinate to the truth, and I still believe that. Sometimes I fall short of that goal, but I will never stop trying to achieve it. - Ironic - http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xnb2hi_mike-daisey-on-technology-journalists_tech - video of Mike Daisey lamenting tech journalists and the lack of journalism in the industry 1:29 - BBC Boss coad Service - Three million sold - "The new iPad is a blockbuster with three million sold-the strongest iPad launch yet," said Philip Schiller - Strongest launch as it’s on sale in the most countries? 1:29 - BBC Boss coad Service - broadcaster is branching out into internet TV, launching a completely new brand called Now TV. - it will be pay-as-you-go and "over-the-top" [i.e. IPTV that won't require having a Sky contract or Sky hardware installed]. - service will launch with films, then sports before adding the broadcaster's entertainment content. 1:29 - BBC Boss coad Service - free for all Xbox Live users, making it the first UK entertainment app on the system that doesn't require an Xbox Live Gold subscription. - No login support, but can favourite, search - HD available as well as subtitles - Worked well in my tests - easy to use and good clear picture 1:29 - BBC Boss coad Service - shares were suspended and it admitted the business has no value. - The company, which operates 1,300 stores worldwide and employs 10,000 staff, was reported to be trying to raise £180m this week or face administration after several suppliers refused to provide it with new products. - In a statement on Wednesday morning, Game said discussions were taking place with a potential third-party funder but it was unable to assess its financial position and was "of the opinion that there is no equity value left in the group". - Its shares were suspended on the London Stock Exchange "pending clarification of the company's financial position". - Some 600 of Game's stores are in the UK, employing 6,000 staff. All the group's stores, which also include the Gamestation brand, are still open for business. - It has been reported that Game faces a £21m rent payment on Sunday and a £12m wage bill at the end of the month. It also owes more than £10m in VAT and £40m to suppliers. A new investor would have to pay up to £100m to Game's banks. 1:29 - BBC Boss coad Service - Chancellor George Osborne has heeded calls from the videogame industry and agreed to provide it with tax breaks. - Announced in today's Budget, the scheme will commence in April 2013, giving time for civil servants and stakeholders to thrash out the details - "subject to State Aid approval and following consultation", as Mandarin-speak puts it. - That said, the Treasury estimates the relief, which will also apply to animation companies, will cost the Exchequer £15m in the 2013-2014 tax year, rising to £35m in 2014-2015. - Videogame industry organisations such as Tiga, which represents developers, believe that cost will be more than balanced by extra tax revenue generated by UK publishers who would otherwise send development work overseas to countries already offering generous tax breaks to games coders. 1:29 - BBC Boss coad Service - Chancellor George Osborne has heeded calls from the videogame industry and agreed to provide it with tax breaks. - Announced in today's Budget, the scheme will commence in April 2013, giving time for civil servants and stakeholders to thrash out the details - "subject to State Aid approval and following consultation", as Mandarin-speak puts it. - That said, the Treasury estimates the relief, which will also apply to animation companies, will cost the Exchequer £15m in the 2013-2014 tax year, rising to £35m in 2014-2015. - Videogame industry organisations such as Tiga, which represents developers, believe that cost will be more than balanced by extra tax revenue generated by UK publishers who would otherwise send development work overseas to countries already offering generous tax breaks to games coders. 1:29 - BBC Boss coad Service - Zynga has acquired OMGPOP, addingDraw Something to its list of popular social and mobile gaming titles. Zynga paid OMGPOP $178.5 million, plus another $30 million in employee retention - For OMGPOP the deal is a culmination of six years of blood, sweat and tears, as it started primarily as a maker of Flash-based games for the desktop. But mobile and social changes everything: Putting Draw Something on a mobile device, making it accessible wherever and whenever and harnessing the power of Facebook to connect players and their friends has made OMGPOP an overnight powerhouse. 1:29 - BBC Boss coad Service - will now display photos in high resolution by default, and will allow you to enter a full screen gallery mode by clicking arrows in the top right corner of a photo. On a big display, the company claims, photos will display up to four times larger than before (assuming they were taken using a half-decent camera). The maximum resolution the photo viewer can handle is 2048 x 2048, we're told. - While the social networking site has allowed high definition photo uploads since late 2010, only now will the site default to displaying the biggest image at hand. With these new features Facebook is placing an even bigger bet on high quality photo content going forward, which will have a huge impact on its server farms; six billion high definition photo uploads per month will take up a lot of space (and bandwidth, for that matter) 1:29 - BBC Boss coad Service - Suffered some downtime at the weekend - they then posted this... - With the development of GPS controlled drones, far-reaching cheap radio equipment and tiny new computers like the Raspberry Pi, we're going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air. This way our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system. A real act of war. - We're just starting so we haven't figured everything out yet. But we can't limit ourselves to hosting things just on land anymore. These Low Orbit Server Stations (LOSS) are just the first attempt. With modern radio transmitters we can get over 100Mbps per node up to 50km away. For the proxy system we're building, that's more than enough. Picks Henry CloudOn - free office on ipad. - Now accepting signups Cloak - Zero config vpn app for Mac and iOS

DigitalOutbox Episode 111

DigitalOutbox — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 14:53:57 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 111 In this episode the team discuss Encyclopedia Britannica, BBC, Yahoo Sues Facebook and homeless wi-fi transmitters Playback Listen via iTunes Listen via M4A Listen via MP3 Shownotes 1:29 - BBC Boss confirms Pay Download Service - BBC director general Mark Thompson has confirmed plans for aniTunes-style download service that will allow viewers to buy programmes minutes after they have finished on TV. - Thompson said the proposal, called Project Barcelona, would allow viewers to "purchase a digital copy of a programme to own and keep [for] a relatively modest charge". - Thompson was not specific about the timescale or pricing, but sources said it was hoped that programmes would be available to buy at the same time as they go on the iPlayer. Early speculation put the price at £1.89 a show. - Anticipating criticism that viewers were being made to pay twice for the same content, Thompson said: "This is not a second licence-fee by stealth or any reduction in the current public service offering from the BBC – it's the exact analogy of going into a high-street shop to buy a DVD or, before that, a VHS cassette. 3:47 - DrawSomething is a hit - In just five weeks, the pictionary-like game has been downloaded 20 million times. - That's more users than 3-year-old Foursquare has. That's almost as many users as 1.5-year-old Instagram. - Draw Something is one of the fastest growing mobile apps of all time. - CEO Dan Porter tells us the game is generating 6-figures per day. His company has generated more revenue from the game in five weeks than the entire company generated last year. He hasn't spent a dime on marketing since the app's first week. - Of the 20 million downloads, Porter says 12 million are active users. 5:46 - Game warns investors - officially warned investors that it is on the brink of collapse. - The company said it had put itself up for sale but warned that "it is uncertain whether any of the solutions currently being explored by the board will be successful or will result in any value being attributed to the shares of the company." - Game desperately needs cash before the end of the month to pay its quarterly rent bill. If it fails to pay up it could be pushed into administration, putting 10,000 jobs at risk and wiping out any shareholder value. The warning sent the shares, which have already lost more than 95% of their value over the past year, crashing a further 65% to 1.2p, valuing the company at just £4.3m. - At a conference in New York this weekend John Riccitiello, EA's chief executive, said: "It was a risk a month ago. Now it looks like a fact, although we're still praying for the lenders to get rational and keep them in business. You probably know who I'm talking about." - Diablo III Finally Dated - http://www.joystiq.com/2012/03/15/diablo-3-emerges-from-hell-may-15/ - Diable III launches May 15th - PC & Mac - Blizzard also took a moment to remind everyone that you can still snag a free copy of Diablo 3 by signing up for a World of Warcraft annual pass. The deal expires on May 1. - Diablo II came out in.....2000! 9:38 - Everything Everywhere should be allowed to offer 4G - The UK's largest mobile phone company, Everything Everywhere, should be allowed to offer its 27 million customers a 4G superfast broadband connection this year, Ofcom said on Monday. - The telecoms watchdog said it was inclined to approve an application from EE, which owns the Orange and T-Mobile networks, to launch a 4G network ahead of its rivals. - "Ofcom has considered whether allowing Everything Everywhere to use this spectrum in this way would distort competition, and provisionally concluded that it would not. And given the benefits this would bring to consumers, Ofcom is minded to allow this change of use." - There will be a consultation, which closes on 17 April. Ofcom could grant approval during the second quarter, allowing EE to have its 4G service running by autumn. The company has not said where it intends to make 4G available, although it will be trialling the technology and is likely to target major cities including London. - This will give EE a significant first-mover advantage over rivals. The UK's other operators, Vodafone, O2 and Three, are unlikely to be able to create their own 4G networks until they buy more spectrum from the government, and the auction is not due to conclude before the summer of 2013. 11:16 - Virgin Media chosen to bring wi-fi to London Underground - Virgin Media has been selected to deliver Wi-Fi to 80 tube stations on the London Underground in time for the Olympics, with 120 locations to be live by the end of the year - Free during Olympics - Pay as you go post Olympics 12:30 - Yahoo sues Facebook - Yahoo is filing a lawsuit against Facebook claiming infringement of patents covering advertising, privacy controls and social networking, following through on a threat it made last month. - In a court filing , the former web giant - which has been reduced to a shadow of its former self as internal strife and the rise of Facebook have eaten away at its position - said that Facebook, founded in 2004, infringes 10 of its patents. - Not just that - "Facebook's entire social network model, which allows users to create profiles for and connect with, among other things, persons and businesses, is based on Yahoo!'s patented social networking technology," Yahoo says in its complaint. - Time to abolish software patents? Stifling innovation? 15:00 - Twitter buy Posterous - Twitter just announced that it has acquired Posterous, the Y Combinator-backed blogging and sharing platform that competed early on with Tumblr. - Posterous says its service Spaces will stay up and running and that the company will give plenty of notice to users if they start to change the service. 16:36 - Encyclopaedia Britannica goes online only - For 244 years, the thick volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica have stood on the shelves of homes, libraries, and businesses everywhere, a source of enlightenment as well as comfort to their owners and users around the world. - Today we’ve announced that we will discontinue the 32-volume printed edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica when our current inventory is gone. - Free access to website for a week - Then switches to paid access 20:41 - South by Southwest breakout product - A marketing agency touched off a wave of criticism and debate when it hired members of the local homeless population to walk around carrying mobile Wi-Fi devices, offering conferencegoers Internet access in exchange for donations. BBH Labs, the innovation unit of the international marketing agency BBH, outfitted 13 volunteers from a homeless shelter with the devices, business cards and T-shirts bearing their names: “I’m Clarence, a 4G Hotspot.” They were told to go to the most densely packed areas of the conference, which has become a magnet for those who want to chase the latest in technology trends. - Clever? - Exploitative? - SXSW outgrown itself 23:54 - Employers asking for facebook logins Picks Henry Bryce 7 pro - Free until end of march - Mac and PC - doesn’t work well with Lion Ian MacUpdate Bundle - VMware Fusion 4 ($49.99) – Run Windows and more on your Mac without rebooting - Drive Genius 3 ($99.00) – Optimize, repair, test, resize and clean up your Mac - PDFpen 5 ($59.95) – Edit and annotate PDFs - ForkLift 2.5 ($29.95) – File manager: FTP, WebDAV, S3, Bluetooth, and more - Typinator 5 ($33.00) – Text expansion solution - DesktopShelves 2 ($14.99) – Display folders as desktop shelves - Snapheal ($14.99) – Professional-quality image enhancement utility - Boom ($10.99) – Boost audio output for your entire system - Phone to Mac ($24.95) – Copy media from an iOS device to your Mac - Star Wars: The Force Unleashed ($29.99) – High-energy action set in the Star Wars universe - Worms Special Edition ($9.99) – Classic turn-based strategy game - $378 of app’s for $49.99 - 13 days and 8 hours - so a couple of weeks to bag a bargain

DigitalOutbox Episode 110

DigitalOutbox — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 15:16:11 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 110 In this episode the team discuss the new iPad, Google Play and Halo 4. Playback Listen via iTunes Listen via M4A Listen via MP3 Shownotes 0:59 - Apple Keynote - We’re in post pc world - 1080p movies and tv shows on iTunes and via iCloud - New Apple TV - same price, 1080p, new UI - out March 16th - iPad - Retina display - Ryan Block’s first impressions of the new iPad: It’s the best display I’ve ever seen. Anywhere, period. And it makes a meaningful difference to the experience — it’s not just a spec. - 4G LTE support - not great for UK- Everything Everywhere, Three (3) and O2 have plans to roll out 21Mbit/s HSPA+ nationwide by Q3 2012 - 5mp camera - Voice dictation - No siri - Prices the same - New name - iPad :-) - Out March 16th - iPad 2 price reduced - iPhoto for iOS software announced - very nice UI - Switched to using Open Street Maps for maps - http://blog.osmfoundation.org/2012/03/08/welcome-apple/ - The OSM data that Apple is using is rather old (start of April 2010) so don’t expect to see your latest and greatest updates on there. It’s also missing the necessary credit to OpenStreetMap’s contributors; we look forward to working with Apple to get that on there. - iOS 5.1 out - Jap siri, can now delete photos from photo stream plus a few minorish updates - Sad face - too many people saying Steve wouldn’t have done this, Apple are failing, they’ve made a mistake - from successful business folk or tech commentators that are link baiting. Work it out. 15:08 - Google Play - Google shutter Android Market, Google Music and the Google eBookstore and launch Google Play - Google Play - apps, movies, music and books - all in one place - Not just a store front - it’s a digital destination - With Google Play you can: - Store up to 20,000 songs for free and buy millions of new tracks - Download more than 450,000 Android apps and games - Browse the world’s largest selection of eBooks - Rent thousands of your favorite movies, including new releases and HD titles - Android 2.2 or higher getting OTA updates over the next week - One more thing - rented movies from Google play won’t work on rooted devices - So.....is this not iCloud and iTunes? 16:43 - Raspberry Pi - Shipped tail end of Feb - Available from RS Components and Farnell - both suffered melt down - Demand at end of last week was running at 700.......per second - Farnell - Besides interest in the UK, here had also been interest from a Middle East government which wanted to give one to every schoolgirl in order to enhance their job prospects. She declined to name the country, but said "the inclusion of girls is very important. 20:47 - BT and Talk Talk lose challenge over Digital Economy Act - The government has been given the green light to implement the Digital Economy Act after the final legal challenge by two internet service providers was thrown out at the court of appeal. - BT and TalkTalk on Tuesday lost their appeal against last year's judicial review of the government's controversial anti-piracy legislation on all but one ground. - Three senior judges at the court of appeal ruled that the government could not make ISPs pay a proportion of the case fees attached to the act. - They confirmed that the ISPs should pay 25% of relevant costs, which are operating fees incurred when identifying which subscribers are accused of illegal downloading. - The judges overturned a previous high court ruling which said that the ISPs have to pay 25% of case fees that are charged by the proposed appeals body. - Rights holders have agreed to foot 75% of the costs in each of the three fees. - The court of appeal also ruled that BT and TalkTalk must pay 93% of the costs of the legal challenge, a figure understood to have run into six figures. - So ISP’s will start writing letters to ‘pirates’ 22:44 - Lulzsec leader was working for the FBI - Hector Xavier Monsegur, known as Sabu, was charged with 12 criminal counts of conspiracy to engage in computer hacking and other crimes in court papers in Manhattan federal court, after secretly pleading guilty on August 15 to 12 counts of computer hacking conspiracies. - Monsegur, an unemployed 28-year-old Puerto Rican living in New York, pleaded guilty to carrying out online attacks against PayPal and Mastercard, documents unsealed in a Manhattan court on Tuesday shows. The charges were filed via a "criminal information" form, which means the suspect has been cooperating with the government. - Five other people – two in the UK, two in Ireland and one in Chicago – were either arrested or charged by the FBI on Tuesday, details of which were set out in an indictment brought by the US Attorney General's office in New York. - One of the people named in the indictment, Jake Davis, already faces a number of charges in the UK relating to alleged hacking by LulzSec. Also known by his hacker name of "Topiary", Davis, 19, of Lerwick, Shetland, was on Tuesday charged in the US with two counts of computer hacking conspiracy. - But the explosive revelation that LulzSec's leader was cooperating with the FBI, even while he was claiming to hate the government, could lead to the arrest of other hackers within the broader Anonymous group. It will also heighten distrust among the more powerful members of the collective – where paranoia about security always runs high anyway. - An FBI official was quoted by Fox News, which broke the story, as saying: "This is devastating to the organisation … we're chopping off the head of LulzSec." 24:39 - Game and Capcom issues - Capcom's Street Fighter X Tekken and Asura's Wrath will not be available from GAME or Gamestation. - Both were scheduled for release this Friday on March 9th. - It is the latest in a string of blockbusters not stocked by the High Street chain, including Mass Effect 3, Mario Party 9, The Last Story and FIFA Street. 27:49 - Halo 4 Preview - How do we really support different play styles in Halo 4? There's always been a lot of choice in Halo, but it's about pushing that even further. It gets back to how do we allow players to choose the thing that supports the play style that makes them the most successful." The move toward a full character progression system will no doubt be controversial with Halo fans, and will be viewed as a shift in style toward first-person shooter rivals such as Call of Duty and Battlefield. - "The community should have some confidence that it's been thought through as a Halo game," said franchise development director Frank O'Connor. "The balance system has been considered as an intrinsic part the Halo feel. I'd like to tell people to be happy and confident and look forward to it, but I can't control that. We'll explain our decisions at a later date. It's been carefully considered." - During a press briefing, Holmes also hinted that the infrastructure of the multiplayer mode is likely to evolve too, with changes to the lobby and matchmaking systems that suggest a more socially connected title. "We're really changing the experience surrounding multiplayer," he said. "We're providing a brand new experience for you and your friends to play, in a way you've never played Halo before." - The worry over this not being a Bungie game hasn’t gone - Battle rifle returns...but unlockable abilities sound like COD or Battlefield - Forza Horizon - http://forzamotorsport.net/en-us/en-us/forza_horizon_announce/ - Forza Horizon is being developed by Playground Games in collaboration with Turn 10 Studios. Playground Games is an independent UK game development studio formed in 2009. It was founded by the leadership team responsible for award-winning racing franchises like TOCA, Colin McRae Rally, GRID, and DiRT. - Forza outrun as Gavin described it - Fall 2012 - Forza Porsche pack coming May Picks Chris DrawSomething - OMGPOP game. - Cross device app (Android, iOS) - Turn based pictionary in essence. You get to chose the word you want to try and draw. More coins earned for harder words. - Other person then gets to see a recording of you drawing. - Hangman style letters at bottom of the screen to chose from and make a word. - Once correct/pass, the recording of the other person guessing is then played back to the original drawer - followed by watching the other player draw their word... etc - Idea is to get the longest winning streaks. - Coins earn you unlocks - eg you start with a limited pallet, so coins unlock more colour options. High coin prices on colours etc mean you need to play lots to unlock OR (of course) you can in-app purchase more coins. - Yes, it’s easy to cheat and just write the word on screen - but MOST people don’t do this and I just stop playing with anyone who does that. - Currently on sale 69p.

DigitalOutbox Episode 109

DigitalOutbox — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 15:33:11 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 109 In this episode the team discuss Mobile World Congress, Windows 8 and trouble for Game. Playback Listen via iTunes Listen via M4A Listen via MP3 Shownotes 3:00 - Mobile World Congress - Android Stats - http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/27/2827545/andy-rubin-850k-android-activations-a-day-300m-total-devices-12m - 850,000 activations per day bringing total to some 300 million total devices — including 12 million tablets. - That's according to Andy Rubin, who clarified the numbers in a meeting with reporters earlier today: he said that Google only counts activations once per device ID and doesn't "chop things up" when users reset or sell their phones. - Devices like the Kindle Fire that don't include Google services aren't included in the numbers — Rubin said that Samsung's larger Galaxy Tabs are the most popular tablets counted. - As far as apps, Rubin noted that there are now some 450 thousand apps in Android Market, up from 160 thousand a year ago. - Rubin also said that Nexus devices aren't huge sellers, but rather Google's attempt to "set the bar for what's possible" - Tablets - 2012 is going to be the year that we double down and make sure we're winning in that space." - Rubin said he was "painfully aware" of Motorola concerns, but stressed that Google has "literally built a firewall" between the Android team and Motorola. "I don't even know anything about their products, I haven't seen anything," he said. "They're going to continue building Motorola branded devices and it's going to be the same team doing it." - Asked if other OEMs would be disfavored once Motorola's team comes in-house, Rubin also said that the open source nature of the platform makes it "physically difficult for me to advantage somebody," - Jelly Bean, Android 5.0, hinted at for fall 2012 - Sony Xperia P - http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/26/2826025/sony-xperia-p-announced - unibody aluminum handset has a 4-inch display - first to use Sony's White Magic display technology, which makes the phone much more readable in sunlight - 1GHz dual-core processor, and is running Gingerbread — though Sony says an Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade is coming in Q2. - It also has an 8-megapixel camera that will shoot 1080p video, and connects to Sony's Xperia Smart Dock to mirror your display onto your HDTV, or connect it to a mouse and keyboard - NFC too - 2nd quarter 2012 - HTC One X - http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/26/2825303/htc-one-x-pictures-video-hands-on-preview - a 4.7-inch 720p "Super LCD 2" panel that is simply better than anything we've seen on the market. It's bright and crisp, of course, but as we turned and twisted the phone we were literally unable to come up with a viewing angle that contained any distortion or discoloration. - Quad core Tegra, 1Gb RAM - 8 megapixel camera - Ice Cream Sandwich and Sense 4 - Next couple of months for release - HTC One S - http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/26/2824758/htc-one-s-pictures-video-hands-on - Smaller screen (only 4.3 inch) and pentile - Design is better - aluminium unibody - Seemingly feels great in the hand - Ice Cream Sandwich and Sense 4 - Next couple of months for release - Nokia 808 Pureview - http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/27/nokia-announces-808-pureview-belle-os-4-inch-display-41-megap/ - - reach Europe in the next quarter for a price of 450 Euros - OS is Symbian Belle; Why not Windows???????????? - the engine is a 1.3GHz single-core chip; - the display is 4-inches corner to corner but its resolution is a Nokia-style 360 x 640 (nHD). - There's 512MB of RAM and 16GB of on-board storage that is thankfully expandable via microSD. - Now that Carl Zeiss-lensed camera: it handles continuous-focus 1080p, but is claimed to have an incredible sensor resolution of over 41-megapixels when shooting stills -- or 34-megapixels for 16:9 images. - The 808 camera doesn’t take 41-megapixel photos; it collects 41 megapixels of data and uses all that data to create a very nice photo of a much smaller size. - It uses some clever interpolation jiggery-pokery that condenses four or five pixels into one pixel, to produce a smaller file size for the output image - Galaxy Tab and Galaxy Note 10.1 - Note comes with a stylus - Samsung Galaxy S III - http://www.bgr.com/2012/02/27/samsung-galaxy-s-iii-full-specs-1-5ghz-quad-core-1080p-display-ceramic-case/ - Did an Apple by stealing the show without being revealed? - 1.5GHz quad-core Samsung Exynos processor - 4.8-inch “full HD” 1080p resolution with 16:9 aspect ratio display - A 2-megapixel front-facing camera and an 8-megapixel rear camera - Ceramic case - 4G LTE - Android 4.0 - ASUS Pad Phone - http://techinstyle.tv/20122723801/post-types/news/the-asus-padfone-one-device-to-rule-them-all/ - Dual core, 4.3inch high density display phone - 8mpix camera - That then docks into a tablet - 1280x800 res - That can then have a keyboard attached to turn into portable. 16:40 - EU votes to cut roaming charges - a proposal has been outlined suggesting that by July 2014, operators will not be able to charge roaming customers any more than €0.15 a minute for calls, €0.04 to text, or (perhaps most importantly) €0.20 a megabyte for data. It could soon be the law. - The legislature will now have to try to convince the European Commission -- the EU's executive arm -- and 27 EU governments to approve the lower caps before June, when current roaming regulation expires. - The parliament's decision paved the way for a lowering of charges on calls made while abroad to 0.25 euro ($0.33) per minute by June from a maximum 0.35 euro now. That cap would fall to 0.15 euro in 2014 if the parliament's proposals win the support of EU governments. - Vodafone boss, Vittoria Colao, not happy - “Does Europe need employment, or does Europe need rate cuts?” he asked. “We should stop having this continuous intervention on prices and let the industry reinvest the money.” - He then went on to describe what he saw as “hell”: a worst-case scenario in which profits fall, reinvestment is impossible, development ceases, jobs are cut, and a whole range of related industries — media, software, entertainment. - Nonsense - Vodafone made nearly $12 billion in profit over the last six months. 19:48 - Windows 8 Consumer Preview - Start Screen - From the Start screen you can launch apps, switch between tasks, share content, and check notifications. The tiles show real-time updates—news, sports, and what your friends are up to. You can check your schedule or get the latest weather forecast without searching for information—no need to open an app to see your next appointment or find out if you have any new email. - Cloud is key - link to skydrive, get contacts etc - Touch built in - first Windows designed for tablet - If you’re using touch, just swipe in from the left edge to go back to your last app, or keep swiping to go back through several apps. If you’re using a mouse, just move it to the upper-left corner to see your last app. You can also move your mouse down from the corner to see more recently used apps. Or you can try one of my favorite features: swipe in from the left, and then slide your last app out to the left or right side of the screen to snap it in place. - Charms - Swipe in from the right edge of the screen or move your mouse to the upper-right corner, and the charms bar appears (you can also use the Windows key + C). The charms are the quickest way to navigate to key tasks in Windows 8. You can go to the Start screen, or use the charms for quick shortcuts to common tasks. - Share - The Share charm makes it incredibly easy. And just like with Search, apps can hook into Share easily, so you don’t have to jump in and out of an app to share great content. You can quickly send wise words with the Mail app or share a great photo on SkyDrive. The apps you use most often are listed first for quick access, and you can choose whether to share with just one person, or with all of your contacts at once. - App Store - pretty huge - market so much bigger than Apple, but are consumers used to paying? Still, huge! - Better cleansing/rebuild options - Desktop still exists - Great use of hotcorners - easily navigate around the system - Consumer preview out now 28:42 - Twitter figure out revenue streams - DataSift, one of Twitter’s data partners which currently provides developers and third parties with access to the full Twitter firehose in realtime, is about to unlock a whole new set of Twitter data to the ecosystem. The social data platform has launched Historics, a cloud-computing platform that enables entrepreneurs and enterprises to extract business insights from Twitter’s public Tweets dating back to January 2010 (we originally reported on the pending launch here). - Developers, businesses and organizations can essentially use DataSift to mine the Twitter firehose of social data. But what makes DataSift special (besides the premier access to Twitter data) is that it can then filter this social media data for demographic information, online influence and sentiment, either positive or negative. As we’ve reported in the past, DataSift does not limit searches based on keywords and allows companies of any size to define extremely complex filters, including location, gender, sentiment, language, and even influence based on Klout score, to provide quick and very specific insight and analysis. - Currently, DataSift is the only company to offer historical Tweets from as far back as two years ago. As AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes reported recently, Gnip was the first authorized reseller of historical data from Twitter, Tweets only went past 30 days (previously developers generally had access to 7 days worth of data). - With DataSift, companies can now tap into both real-time and over two years of historical Tweets to filter and extract insights and trends that relate to brands, businesses, financial markets, news and public opinion. - So instead of making their search tool less shit, they have made a business model out of searching greater than seven days worth of tweets - http://allthingsd.com/20120228/twitter-ads-head-to-your-phone/ - Twitter promoted ad’s and tweets now on your phone client - Official twitter app’s only - Yet another reason to install Tweetbot 30:18 - Game will not stock future EA games - The latest sign of significant trouble for UK retailer Game: it won't have Mass Effect 3 to sell for next week's launch. An internal memo obtained by Eurogamer also reveals the retailer is canceling pre-orders on upcoming EA titles FIFA Street, Tiger Woods 13 and Sims 3 Showtime. - "Last week we held an event for our publishers in the industry and explained the challenges we are facing in the short term - and we asked for their support," Game channel director Tom Devine wrote. "We will not stock products if the terms are not right for our business - a position we believe is critical to our long term health as a business - we have taken the very difficult decision to not stock EA's March releases, including Mass Effect 3." - Game tried to spin its missing Ubisoft Vita launch titles last week, but no amount of voodoo is going to get folks to ignore that Mass Effect 3 isn't available at the retailer. - Game blamed a dispute with the publisher of Mass Effect 3. The company will refund deposits to customers who have pre-ordered as well as giving customers a £5 voucher or reward points. Refund though is for spending at Game, not a cash refund. - EA said: "Game's challenges with several of its suppliers is regrettable, however given the incredibly high demand for Mass Effect 3 we want our consumers to know that the game is available at a wide variety of retailers across the UK and Europe. Picks Ian Moom - $5 - Application/window sizer - Size an app to half, quarter screen with ease - Size to a grid - great for spcaing out apps easily - Create window layouts - handy for common task involving a few app’s....like podcasting, graphic editing, coding - A tool OS X should really have built in Chris Do Not Track + - Essentially a browser plugin that blocks tracking data from reporting back about your visits. - Chrome, FF, IE, Safari / Mac, PC - Stops an awful lot of ‘chatter’ that goes between advertising and tracking companies and social visit tracking through like/+1 buttons. - Stops analytics tracking. - Doesn’t stop some tracking - especially where logged in and interacting with social buttons so not fool proof by any means

DigitalOutbox Episode 108

DigitalOutbox — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 19:32:25 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 108 In this episode the team discuss Privacy, Piracy, 4G in the UK and the Sony Vita. Playback Listen via iTunes Listen via M4A Listen via MP3 Shownotes 1:15 - New Privacy Rights - Six of the world's top consumer technology companies – including Apple, Google and Microsoft – have agreed that apps will provide greaterprivacy disclosures before users download them so as to protect consumers' personal data, California's attorney general said on Wednesday. - The move comes amid increasing criticism over "data grabs" by a number of third-party applications which don't offer clear disclosure about how much of a user's personal data such as their address book they will store on their servers. - The new agreement binds Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion (RIM), and Hewlett-Packard – and developers on their platforms – to disclose how they use private data before an app may be downloaded, Attorney General Kamala Harris said. - The Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights will give Internet users the right to: control what data is collected, how their personal data is used and shared; avoid having information collected in one context and then used for another purpose; have data held securely; and to know who is accountable for the misuse of the data. It applies to personal data, which means any data--including aggregations of data--that is linkable to a specific individual. - Google also came under renewed scrutiny over its announcement earlier in February that it would streamline its privacy policy, and still faces separate scrutiny from the US Congress over its circumvention of security settings in browsers to track millions of users of its services on Apple's iPhone and iPad, and users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. - The policy change would give Google access to user information across its products, such as GMail and Google Plus, without the proper ability for consumers to opt out, said the 36 US attorneys general in their letter. EU authorities have asked Google to halt the policy change until regulators can investigate the matter. - Meanwhile the US's Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has put up a page explaining how people can wipe clean their Google Search History before the changes take effect on 1 March. But it noted that this will not prevent some tracking. - Google mobile safari issue - on iOS, by default, safari disables third party cookies - google invisibly posting a form in an iframe in the background without telling you - google by doing above got round the above setting - once revealed google have stopped doing this - before stopping this if this was set, google could set cookies and track as they usually do - who’s at fault - Apple for breaking an accepted web practice by default? - Google for clearly working around a browser setting that you have set 8:02 - Real world Google Goggles - According to several Google employees familiar with the project who asked not to be named, the glasses will go on sale to the public by the end of the year. These people said they are expected “to cost around the price of current smartphones,” or $250 to $600. - The people familiar with the Google glasses said they would be Android-based, and will include a small screen that will sit a few inches from someone’s eye. They will also have a 3G or 4G data connection and a number of sensors including motion and GPS. - A Google spokesman declined to comment on the project. - They will also have a unique navigation system. “The navigation system currently used is a head tilting to scroll and click,” Mr. Weintraub wrote this month. “We are told it is very quick to learn and once the user is adept at navigation, it becomes second nature and almost indistinguishable to outside users.” - The glasses will have a low-resolution built-in camera that will be able to monitor the world in real time and overlay information about locations, surrounding buildings and friends who might be nearby, according to the Google employees. The glasses are not designed to be worn constantly — although Google expects some of the nerdiest users will wear them a lot — but will be more like smartphones, used when needed. 13:24 - Pirate Bay could be blocked in UK - Major music groups want British internet service providers (ISPs), such as BT and BSkyB, to prevent their millions of customers from accessing The Pirate Bay in the UK. In a judgment handed down at the high court in London on Monday, Mr Justice Arnold ruled that The Pirate Bay and its users unlawfully share copyrighted music. - The Pirate Bay is one of the world's longest-running and biggest filesharing sites. According to record labels, it generated up to $3m in advertising revenue in October last year by making 4m copies of music and films available to its 30 million worldwide users. The site has 3.7 million users in the UK, according to comScore. - The high court is expected to rule in June whether the ISPs should prevent their customers from accessing The Pirate Bay. Mr Justice Arnold said in a written judgment: "In my judgment, the operators of [The Pirate Bay] do authorise its users' infringing acts of copying and communication to the public. They go far beyond merely enabling or assisting. - "I conclude that both users and the operators of [The Pirate Bay] infringe the copyrights of the claimants … in the UK." 15:27 - The Oatmeal on Piracy - Great comic on the problem with piracy - So many agreed but Andy Ihnatko had an interesting take... - The single least-attractive attribute of many of the people who download content illegally is their smug sense of entitlement. - The world does not OWE you Season 1 of “Game Of Thrones” in the form you want it at the moment you want it at the price you want to pay for it. If it’s not available under 100% your terms, you have the free-and-clear option of not having it. - I sometimes wonder if this simple, grown-up fact gets ignored during all of these discussions about digital distribution. 18:21 - Nightline visits Foxconn - It takes 141 steps to make an iPhone, and the devices are essentially all handmade - It takes five days and 325 hands to make a single iPad - Foxconn produces 300k iPad camera modules per day - Foxconn workers pay for their own food — about $.70 per meal, and work 12 hour shifts - Workers who live in the dorms sleep six to eight a room, and pay $17.50 a month to do so - Workers make $1.78 an hour - New employees at Foxconn undergo three days of training and "team building" exercises before they begin - The FLA (Fair Labor Association - which Apple brought in to audit Foxconn) is interested in whether or not workers will look up at visitors in a factory — if they'll be "willing to look at curiosities" - Apple paid $250,000 to join the FLA, and is paying for its audit - Louis Woo, when asked if he would accept Apple demanding double pay for employees replied "Why not?" 21:11 - 4G Rollout - up to 1 million will need TV filters - Almost a million UK homes will need to have filters installed to prevent TV interference from 4G mobile signals - at a cost of £108m. The filter, which is fitted to a digital TV box, blocks out unwanted noise from the 4G signal. It can be fitted without the help of an engineer - but over-75s and disabled people will be given assistance if needed. - A smaller number of homes - about 10,000 - will need to switch to satellite or cable TV services in order to avoid degraded picture quality. - Homes that cannot receive these alternative platforms (around 500) will receive up to £10,000 each to "find a solution". - Costs will be met by the winner of a spectrum auction later this year. In these cases, expected to be in rural areas, up to £10,000 per household will be provided to fund alternative solutions to receiving television - such as having fibre cabling installed. 24:47 - 4G Broadband could hit the UK this year - Customers of phone company Everything Everywhere, the largest UK network with 27 million subscribers, will have access to super-fast 4G mobile broadband before the end of the year if regulators grant permission. EE says it wants to put 4G into the hands of its Orange and T-Mobile customers, as well as those of Three, Virgin Media and other brands that use its network, a year ahead of schedule. - The UK has slipped behind other nations, including the US, Germany and Sweden, in the mobile broadband speed stakes, and those wanting to access the internet on the go using smartphones and laptops can find the experience frustratingly slow. - The British auction, the largest ever sale of national airwaves, has been delayed by legal wrangling between the operators and will not conclude until early next year. A full national rollout is now not scheduled until the end of 2013. - EE has asked telecoms watchdog Ofcom for permission to convert some of its existing 1800MHz (megahertz) spectrum, already used to carry voice calls, texts, and slower 3G internet connections, to 4G. - Created through the merger of two mobile networks and with a mast sharing agreement with Three, EE has enough spare capacity to offer a limited commercial service without having to buy new spectrum. With few 4G phones available, EE's service will at first work only on dongles – gadgets which plug into laptops to provide an internet connection via the mobile phone networks. - EE's service, which will be on trial in Bristol from April, could launch by the end of 2012 if Ofcom grants approval by April or May. - A spokesman for the regulator said: "Ofcom has received an application from EE to vary its licence for 4G use. Ofcom is considering that application and once it arrives at a view it will consult with stakeholders." The process could take between eight and 12 weeks, and will involve soundings with rival mobile phone networks and any other interested parties. 27:34 - Sky Go hits Android - BSkyB has launched its Sky Go app for Android, following its debut on iOS in 2011. It provides live access of up to 22 Sky channels depending on the user's home subscription status. Up to two devices can be registered, but it appears to be smartphone-only at the moment: supported at launch are the HTC Desire, HTC Desire S, HTC Desire HD, HTC Incredible, HTC Sensation, Samsung Galaxy S and Samsung Galaxy S II - Sky did say it would be ‘the year of the app’ - Also confirmed at the weekend a dedicated Formula 1 app will launch 30:06 - Sony Vita - No doubting quality of the new Sony handheld - Pricey for what it is. - Will it be last dedicated handheld platform? Picks Ian Matter - MATTER will focus on doing one thing, and doing it exceptionally well. Every week, we will publish a single piece of top-tier long-form journalism about big issues in technology and science. That means no cheap reviews, no snarky opinion pieces, no top ten lists. Just one unmissable story. - MATTER is about brilliant ideas from all around the world, whether they come from professors at MIT or the minds of mad people. But most of all, it’s about getting amazing investigative reporters to tell compelling stories. - Long form journalism is becoming a lost art and it deserves your support

DigitalOutbox Episode 107

DigitalOutbox — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 21:42:02 +0000

Shownotes 1:36 - Mountain Lion - http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion - Moving to a yearly release schedule like iOS - Mac OS X is no more...it’s just OS X - Inspired by iPad - 10 features revealed - Full iCloud support - third party apps can save to iCloud, only if they feature in MAS. Mac App Store apps effectively have two modes for opening/saving documents: iCloud or the traditional local hierarchical file system. The traditional way is mostly unchanged from Lion (and, really, from all previous versions of Mac OS X). The iCloud way is visually distinctive: it looks like the iPad springboard — linen background, iOS-style one-level-only drag-one-on-top-of-another-to-create-one “folders”. It’s not a replacement of traditional Mac file management and organization. It’s a radically simplified alternative. - Messages does everything iChat does, and so much more. For starters, it comes with iMessage. And just like iMessage in iOS, it lets you send unlimited messages to anyone on a Mac or an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running iOS 5. Send photos, videos, documents, and contacts — even send messages to a group. Beta available now - Reminders - Notes - Notification centre - Notification Center makes it easy to stay up to speed, because there’s one place to see everything. Notification banners appear on your desktop and disappear quickly so they don’t interrupt what you’re doing. - Share sheets - You’ll find the Share button in many OS X Mountain Lion apps. It’s the new, easy way to spread the word — links, photos, and videos, too. Send links from Safari. Send your notes via Mail and Messages. Post photos to Flickr. Send videos to Vimeo. And tweet just about anything. - Twitter - baked into OS X - Sign in once and you’re all set to start tweeting — and you don’t have to leave the app you’re in. Tweet links and photos directly from Safari, iPhoto, or Photo Booth with the new Tweet Sheet. - Game centre - Airplay mirroring - YEEHAH - except it’s mirroring from desktop to Apple TV, not iPad to desktop - Gatekeeper - a system whereby developers can sign up for free-of-charge Apple developer IDs which they can then use to cryptographically sign their applications. If an app is found to be malware, Apple can revoke that developer’s certificate, rendering the app (along with any others from the same developer) inert on any Mac where it’s been installed. In effect, it offers all the security benefits of the App Store, except for the process of approving apps by Apple. Users have three choices which type of apps can run on Mountain Lion: Only those from the App Store Only those from the App Store or which are signed by a developer ID Any app, whether signed or unsigned The default for this setting is, I say, exactly right: the one in the middle, disallowing only unsigned apps. This default setting benefits users by increasing practical security, and also benefits developers, preserving the freedom to ship whatever software they want for the Mac, with no approval process. - A unified search/URL bar in Safari. Yes. YES!!!! (And yes, like Chrome.) A “VIPs” area of Mail to mark your favorite contacts. (Yes, sort of like Priority Inbox for Gmail.) A search box in Launchpad (to see for apps if you have a ton). Better date editing in Calendar (a calendar drop-down finally). A much better way to add/remove widgets in Dashboard (more app-like). - Dev preview available now, Mountain Lion out this summer 13:26 - App access to contact data will require explicit user permission - The path fallout continued over the last week - Lots of blogger in fighting that while amusing was ultimately no more than dick waving - The Verge showed just how many app’s were accessing your contact book - http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/14/2798008/ios-apps-and-the-address-book-what-you-need-to-know - Foursquare bad - one of the best was...Facebook - Foursquare released very quick update - Finally Apple commented: - “Apps that collect or transmit a user’s contact data without their prior permission are in violation of our guidelines,” Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr told AllThingsD. “We’re working to make this even better for our customers, and as we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release.” - Will rumble on I think - Twitter downloads and stores data for 18 months - http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-twitter-contacts-20120214,0,5579919.story - Twitter Inc. has acknowledged that after mobile users tap the "Find friends" feature on its smartphone app, the company downloads users' entire address book, including names, email addresses and phone numbers, and keeps the data on its servers for 18 months. The company also said it plans to update its apps to clarify that user contacts are being transmitted and stored. - The company's current privacy policy does not explicitly disclose that Twitter downloads and stores user address books. 17:17 - Chinese authorities start seizing iPads - Chinese authorities are grabbing Apple iPads off the shelves in Northern China stores because the domestic Shenzhen Proview Technology company claims ownership of the name “iPad.” - Apple will face a $38 million fine for using the “iPad” name in China, according to a Proview rep. As Mashablepreviously reported, Apple bought the rights from Proview Electronics’ parent company Taiwan-based Proview International Holdings in 2010, but rights have not extended to China. - Proview has registered trademarks for the name “IPAD” in Europe, Mexico, China and other parts of Asia, according to the L.A. Times. - Proview successfully sued Apple last December for $1.6 billion. Apple is appealing the decision. Tablets started coming off the shelves on Thursday. There are no reports of how many devices or number of stores affected. Local news reports state that some Apple stores are holding them in back rooms to avoid products being confiscated. 18:27 - Google Wallet Hacked - Google wallet ‘hacked’ twice in two days. - First required a rooted phone. - http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/02/google-wallet-hack/ - If you think this might spell the end of NFC and mobile payments, this guy says think again - people are already buying apps and music with mobiles on android and itunes and we need to: “Forget the NFC argument - look at payments behavior” - http://www.finextra.com/community/fullblog.aspx?blogid=6232 19:58 - Pingit - Barclays bank has launched Europe's first money-sending service that allows UK current account customers to send and receive cash through their mobile phones. Barclays' 11.9 million current account customers can download the bank's Pingit app to their smartphone and start making instant money transfers to anyone with a UK-based mobile phone and a current account with any UK bank. - The app, which will be extended to all UK banking customers by early March, is free to use. It is aimed at an increasingly mobile-orientated public who use their phone to manage many aspects of their lives. Barclays says the service will enable users to make quick payments to each other – such as splitting a bill in a restaurant. It could also help some small traders, such as window cleaners, who need to collect payments from regular customers. - To send money via Pingit you need a smartphone handset – an iPhone, Blackberry and those using Android software; to receive payments you can use any handset. Users call the recipient's mobile number via the Pingit app, key in an amount between £1 and £300 and hit send. The money is moved between the two current accounts using the Faster Payments service, and takes as little as 30 seconds. - Easy to register on Barclays website for paying 23:30 - Sony Music - On Monday, reporters fell over themselves to reveal that the price of Houston's Ultimate Collection had gone from £4.99 to £7.99 in the UK's Apple iTunes store and her Whitney: The Greatest Hits had mysteriously increased from £7.99 to £9.99. - Apple and Sony copped a lot of bad press - Whitney Houston product was mistakenly mis-priced on the UK iTunes store on Sunday. When discovered, the mistake was immediately corrected. We apologise for any offence caused. - Quite how the albums accidentally jumped up in cost only on the UK iTunes store and immediately after Houston's death was not explained 25:07 - Most successful kickstarter so far - Tim Schafer has just put his Double Fine studio to work on a Kickstarter project. - It raised over $1 million in....24 hours - Why? - Schafer - whose adventure gaming credits include Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango and Full Throttle - will be involved, but so too would Ron Gilbert, the creator of Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion. - Fanboys rejoice! 27:42 - Minecraft Lego preo-order - £34.99, 480 pieces, this summer - Bargain 28:09 - MIT launches completely free Electronics course - we mentioned the success of itunesU on previous podcast - but this new course offers a certificate to students completing the course. - Completely free - Runs from March to June 2012 - Need to sign up to an “honour code” at enrollment. - Online assessment. Picks Chris Fancy for iPad - Free - Don’t know whether we’ve discussed this on pod before - but essentially an app that highlights awesome products / design / concepts and, if available, will also offer a link for you to buy said item! - All sorts covered from gadgets, food, fashion, architecture, locations, photography, design - Love it to scroll through in quiet moments! Ian Clear for iPhone - Easy to use todo manager - Fantastic new UI concept - No buttons - very visual - No dates, categories etc - just lists and a visual way to sort and clear todos - Audio great to - £0.69, well worth trying if you are at all interested in design and UI

DigitalOutbox Episode 106

DigitalOutbox — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:21:15 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 106 In this episode the team discuss Apple legal woes, Path choose the wrong way and rumours. Playback Listen via iTunes Listen via M4A Listen via MP3 Shownotes 1:05 - Apple lose lawsuit in Germany - Lose lawsuit against Motorola - Motorola won a court ruling in December relating to an alleged infringement of wireless patents for 3G connections by Apple handsets including the iPhone 4 and the 3G version of the iPad 2. - MMI won a separate court injunction against Apple on Friday that could force the US electronics giant to block a key function of its iCloud email system for users in Germany. That would require MMI first to post a €100m (£83m) bond to cover potential outcomes. - Forced to pull iPhone and iPad from sale online in Germany - still on sale in stores - They appeal and the products are back for sale by the end of the day - We said it months ago when this kicked off - it’s going to get ugly and it’s the customer that will lose - Pretty funny though that Apple lost 6:46 - Apple faces $38m fine in China trademark case - The future of Apple's iPad is under threat in China after local firm Proview Technology Shenzhen claimed ownership of the trademark and demanded sales of the device be halted, reports the China Daily. - Apple could also be slapped with a $38 million fine as authorities in Beijing weigh up the case. - The lawsuit is the latest twist in a saga that began in October 2010, when Proview Technology's parent company Proview International sued Apple for 10 billion yuan ($1.6 billion), claiming it had rights over the iPad trademark. - The controversy stems from the fact that two of its subsidiaries, Proview Taipei and the aforementioned Proview Technology Shenzhen, both registered the iPad trademark in different territories and at different times more than 10 years ago. Proview Taipei later sold its rights to the trademark to U.K.-based IP Application Development Ltd, which in turn sold it to Apple for a mere £10. 9:57 - FBI releases Steve Jobs file - Some of the titbits revealed in the 191 pages of documents include that that he was a negligent father who would "twist the truth and distort reality in order to achieve his goals," according to documents released by the FBI. - The FBI interviewed Jobs and at least 29 people who knew him as part of a background check. Their investigations took place in the 1990s, after Jobs had been fired from Apple and before his triumphant return to the company. - "Several individuals questioned Mr Jobs' honesty stating that Mr Jobs will twist the truth and distort reality in order to achieve his goals. They also commented that, in the past, Mr Jobs was not supportive of [redacted] and their daughter; however, recently has become supportive," according to the documents. - Another source characterised Jobs as "a deceptive individual who who is not completely forthright and honest". The files paint a picture of a complicated man, full of contradictions. 11:30 - Path choose the wrong way - http://mclov.in/2012/02/08/path-uploads-your-entire-address-book-to-their-servers.html - Arun Thampi found that Path uploads your entire iOS address book to their servers without asking or telling you that it’s done so - used http://mitmproxy.org/ - provides a console interface that allows traffic flows to be inspected and edited on the fly. - Issue for me is the downloading and retaining on server rather than accessing the address book - if I leave service is my address book deleted? - path apologises - deletes all data from servers and releases new app askin gyou to opt in - good blog post from Dave Morin - http://blog.path.com/post/17274932484/we-are-sorry?c8f39750 - but problem is much more widespread says ins tapper dev - iOS Address Book access should prompt the user for permission - http://www.marco.org/2012/02/09/ios-address-book-should-prompt-users 17:36 - Googles Bouncer for Android - Bouncer scanning software, developed by Google, is designed to search the Android market for software that could be malicious - Bouncer will scan current and new applications, plus developer accounts. The blog post explained how the service will function. - “Here’s how it works: once an application is uploaded, the service immediately starts analyzing it for known malware, spyware and trojans. It also looks for behaviors that indicate an application might be misbehaving, and compares it against previously analyzed apps to detect possible red flags. We actually run every application on Google’s cloud infrastructure and simulate how it will run on an Android device to look for hidden, malicious behavior. We also analyze new developer accounts to help prevent malicious and repeat-offending developers from coming back.” - Bouncer was tested in 2011 and comparing the first half of the year to the second, Google Mobile reported a 40% decrease in malicious downloads. 19:32 - Chrome beta for Android - Only for Ice Cream Sandwich - No flash support - Fast, but Android browser is faster - Big draw though, is how it ties into your desktop experience. When you first launch Chrome it'll ask you to sign into your Google account. After doing that, all of your bookmarks, Omnibar results and open tabs are automatically synced. Opening a new tab not only offers you quick access to your most frequently visited sites, recently closed tabs and bookmarks (just like the desktop version), but also any tabs you might still have open on another machine. - Will we see Chrome browser for Windows mobile and iOS? 23:58 - Rumours - iPad 3 to be unveiled first week of March - What do you expect? - What do you want? - http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970204369404577211961645711988-lMyQjAxMTAyMDAwODEwNDgyWj.html - Google cloud drive service to launch soon called Drive - Rival to Dropbox - The Google service, which is expected to launch in the coming weeks or months, will be free for most consumers and businesses. Google will charge a fee to those who want to store a large amount of files, the people familiar with the matter said. Picks Ian Tweetbot for iPad - £1.99 - Fast, clear, great UI, mute options, tweetmarker support - So much better than Twitter official client on iPad and iPhone - Hope twitter don’t buy these guys... Chris FontSquirrel - As free web fonts ramp up - this site offers another selection of free (including commercial use) font packages that allow you to give your sites a little something different. - Another great feature of the site is the ability to upload a font you already own (and have the web licence for!) and use their online tool to deliver back down a full browser pack that will mean your fonts display cross browser/operating system. - TrueType Fonts for Firefox 3.5+ , Opera 10+, Safari 3.1+, Chrome 4.0.249.4+ - EOT fonts for Internet Explorer 4+ - WOFF fonts for Firefox 3.6+, Internet Explorer 9+, Chrome 5+ - SVG fonts for iPad and iPhone - Cufón fonts in case you want them

DigitalOutbox Episode 105

DigitalOutbox — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:04:32 +0000

Shownotes 0:57 - Facebook IPO - Finally, Facebook files for $5 billion IPO (Initial Public Offering) - Values company at around $100 billion - Zuck owns just over %28% - He still has full control - pretty impressive - Zuckerberg compares Facebook to transformative technologies like the printing press and the television, stating “Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.” - Zuckerberg also describes Facebook’s internal mantra, known as “The Hacker Way”. The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation…hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration…We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls. - The letter concludes with Facebook’s 5 core principles: Focus on Impact, Move Fast, Be Bold, Be Open, Build Social Value. - Going to make a lot of people very rich - Will Facebook change now that it is answerable to shareholders? - For example, the graffiti artist who has a shareholding worth around $200 million - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/02/technology/for-founders-to-decorators-facebook-riches.html 6:46 - UK Court says you can copyright the basic idea of a photograph - a judge has ruled that a photograph using a similar idea, but totally different compositionis infringement. You can see the two photographs here: - As you can tell, the expression is totally different. Obviously, the idea is quite similar, but ideas aren't supposed to be protected. You can read the full ruling here, in which the court seems persuaded by the fact that the original photographer had to do some Photoshopping to the image. Now, it's true that European copyright laws are much more open to "sweat of the brow" arguments for copyright (which is not the case in the US), but even so, this ruling is ridiculous and troubling. - Court said: I have not found this to be an easy question but I have decided that the defendants' work does reproduce a substantial part of the claimant's artistic work. In the end the issue turns on a qualitative assessment of the reproduced elements. The elements which have been reproduced are a substantial part of the claimant's work because, despite the absence of some important compositional elements, they still include the key combination of what I have called the visual contrast features with the basic composition of the scene itself. It is that combination which makes Mr Fielder's image visually interesting. It is not just another photograph of cliched London icons. - Bonkers! World gone mad. 10:09 - gov.uk enters beta - a single domain for central government. - As Mike Bracken, HMG Executive Director for Digital said, our aim is to deliver simpler, clearer, faster services for users and savings and innovation for Government. - We have re-written, re-designed and re-thought 667 of the needs people have of Government (broadly, those currently catered for by Directgov) - making them asfindable, understandable and actionable as we can. - We’ve built a scalable, modular open source technology platform to support them, we’ve designed the user experience around them and we’ve worked with colleagues across many departments to fact-check them. Source is on github - https://github.com/alphagov/ - Through designing and iterating these we’ve got the templates and techniques we need to support a whole host more needs – either written by ourselves or others. - Now want feedback via getsatisfaction - http://getsatisfaction.com/govuk or twitter and facebook - Very impressive 13:50 - BBC iPlayer and ITV Player to launch on Sky Anytime+ - Sky will extend Anytime+ to be open to all customers irrespective of broadband provider by Easter 2012 - ITV Player available today on Anytime+ - BBC iPlayer available later this year - Sky building their VOD capability - Virgin have had iPlayer for years - Is this to fight off Netflix and the upcoming Google TV? - BBC and Sky deal unusual as they are hardly the most complementary of each other - Didn’t know but the BBC still pays £10m per annum to gain access to the Sky network. Most figures show that the most viewed channels on the Sky network are from the BBC 15:41 - Skys New Web TV Service - Sky has today announced a new service which will allow customers to watch its content over the internet, aimed at people who have so far resisted taking a pay-TV subscription. - The as-yet-unnamed web-TV service will launch in the first half of 2012 and provide instant access to a range of Sky content, including hundreds of films from Sky Movies. - It will be available to anyone in the UK on any connected devices, regardless of whether they take the Sky Broadband service. - Sky said that the new service "will be an additional choice for people who don't currently subscribe to a pay TV service". 18:16 - Virgin Up Broadband Prices - Those free upgrades later this year? - Well there’s a price increase from April 1st -Broadband S will increase by £2.00. This increases the product price of Broadband S to £20.95. -Broadband M, L & XL will increase by £1.50. -This increases the product price of Broadband M to £23.00, Broadband L to £27.50. and Broadband XL to £38.50 -Broadband XXL will increase by £2.25. The new product price will be £47.25. 20:18 - Twitter announces they have ability to censor a tweet by country - As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content. - Until now, the only way we could take account of those countries’ limits was to remove content globally. Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why. - We haven’t yet used this ability, but if and when we are required to withhold a Tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld. - As part of being more open Twitter have published all takedown notices they have received - http://chillingeffects.org/twitter - Generally a good step but people aren’t happy and called for a twitter boycott last Saturday - I noticed no difference! - Great post on the realities of being a global internet business - http://tum.hitherto.net/post/16596051373/what-you-need-to-know-about-twitters-new-filters - Summation - Internet companies will have very little influence over the laws of various countries - Regimes have whole Internet kill switches, not just ability to censor one network or indeed one tweet - Google announce the same for Blogger - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16852920 - Blogger sites can now be blocked on a "per country" basis after a change to its web address system. - Google will now be able to block access in individual countries following a legal removal request. - The new system means blocking will not require restricting world-wide access to a blog. The changes apply in Australia, New Zealand and India, but the BBC understands Google plans to roll it out globally. 25:06 - British tourists banned after making Twitter jokes - Leigh-Van Bryan, a 26-year-old Irish national, just wanted to have a few beers while soaking up America’s freedom-y goodness. But his trip to the United States came to a halt when one of his tweets caught the attention of the Department of Homeland Security: “Free this week, for a quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America.” - While real terrorists aren’t known to relay their plans via Twitter ahead of time, the Daily Mail reported that armed guards at Los Angeles International Airport took the threat seriously enough to apprehend Bryan and his travel-buddy, Emily Bunting, and bar them from entering the United States. - “They asked why we wanted to destroy America and we tried to explain it meant to get trashed and party,” said Bunting, according to the outlet. - Despite explaining they meant no ill will either toward the United States or to its deceased starlets, the Daily Mail reports that Bryan and Bunting were held for another 12 hours in separate cells alongside suspected drug traffickers. - To really drive home the ridiculousness of the situation, the Daily Mail also posted a photograph of Leigh’s charge sheet that reads: “Mr. Bryan confirmed that he had posted on his Tweeter [sic] website account that he was coming to the United States to dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe. Also on his tweeter [sic] account Mr. Bryan posted that he was coming to destroy America.” 26:55 - John Browett is Apples new Senior VP of Retail - Browett replaces Ron Johnson, the inventor of Apple's "Genius Bar" in-store customer service centres, who left the iPhone and iPad maker last year to become CEO of US clothing chain JC Penney. - So whats Browetts background? - Apple, the all-conquering maker of iPhones and iPads, has poached the boss of Dixons to head its network of stores across the world. - John Browett, who has been chief executive of the struggling high street electronics firm since 2007, was named Apple's senior vice president of retail, reporting directly to chief executive Tim Cook. - Analysts said Apple's board was attracted by Browett's many years of experience in the retail sector and his performance in successfully turning around Dixons's reputation for poor customer service. Robert Gregory, analyst at Planet Retail, said: "He is a very dynamic character and not afraid to take risks. - "One of the things he has brought to Dixons is really improving their customer service. It had a reputation for many years of having poor service. That fits in well with Apple's philosophy of making the stores a destination where people can go and really get great service." 31:28 - Minecraft and Lego get married - Rejoice - Lego will be bringing out official Minecraft sets - Lego is now readying a concept that "celebrates the best aspects of building with the Lego system and in Minecraft." Picks Ian ShowYou - Great video discovery app - Version 3 just launched - Find videos from your friends easily via Twitter or Facebook integration - Really nice scrolling grid views of video - technically very impressive - Free on iOS or Kindle Fire

DigitalOutbox Episode 104

DigitalOutbox — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:06:17 +0000

Shownotes 1:12 - MegaUpload Shutdown The FBI has indicted MegaUpload on racketeering and criminal copyright infringement charges, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. The FBI apparently got help from law enforcement authorities around the world, as MegaUpload’s servers have been taken down. The WSJ is also reporting that four people have been arrested in New Zealand. - Kim Schmitz, who has recently been calling himself Kim Dotcom, is amongst those arrested. Schmitz used to live in Germany, but relocated to New Zealand a few years ago. The FBI has said in a press release that it and other law enforcement agencies have executed 20 search warrants in eight countries, seizing $50 million in assets and taking down MegaUpload’s servers. - Never used it, but always assumed it was 99% illegal content - News on Radio 1 - 5 or 6 people furious as they used it to share legit files? - Anonymous not happy - http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/19/anonymous-megaupload-department-of-justice/ - the group claimed responsibility for taking down the Universal Music, RIAA (the record industry’s lobbying arm), MPAA (the movie industry’s lobbying arm), and Department of Justice websites, among others. The group also claimed that the current attacks were “the largest attack ever by Anonymous,” with 5,635 participants. And it looks like the campaign is ongoing — Anonymous says it’s going after the FBI’s website next...which they did - Sends jitters through industry - http://torrentfreak.com/cyberlocker-ecosystem-shocked-as-big-players-take-drastic-action-120123/ - Over the past 48 to 72 hours, the operators of many prominent cyberlocker services have been taking unprecedented actions that can not simply be explained away by mere coincidence. The details in the Megaupload indictment clearly have some players in the file-hosting world spooked. - Filesonic, a top 10 player in the file-sharing world with a billion pageviews a month, not only withdrew its affiliate rewards program, but also banned any third parties downloading files. Simply put, users can now only download files from the service that they uploaded themselves. - But according to reports, there’s no guarantee of that. Account owners report that their files are being mass deleted, that’s if their entire account has been banned already. - Fileserve, another leading player, also ended its affiliate program this weekend. Additionally, this morning TorrentFreak received news that Fileserve has now joined Filesonic in banning all 3rd party downloads. - Uploaded.to banned all US IP addresses in what appears to be an effort to distance itself from US jurisdiction. Its affiliate program is still listed as operational but the same cannot be said about those run by some of its competitors. - VideoBB and VideoZer have both reportedly closed their rewards program and according to reports have also been mass deleting accounts and huge numbers of files. - Other sites closing their affiliate programs and/or deleting accounts/files includeFileJungle, UploadStation and FilePost. - Smaller host UploadBox calls it quits. “All files will be deleted on January 30th. Feel free to download the files you store with UploadBox until this date.” - Another host, x7.to, shuts down. - FileJungle and UploadStation have disabled all 3rd party downloads. - 4shared cancels affiilate program. 6:29 - Google user data to be merged across all sites under contentious plan - Google is getting rid of over 60 different privacy policies across Google and replacing them with one that’s a lot shorter and easier to read. Our new policy covers multiple products and features, reflecting our desire to create one beautifully simple and intuitive experience across Google. - Contentious with privacy campaigners - "If you're signed in, we may combine information you've provided from one service with information from other services," Google's director of privacy, product and engineering, Alma Whitten, wrote in a blogpost. - After the new policy comes into effect, user information from most Google products – such as YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, Google+ and Android mobile – will be treated as a single trove of data, which the company could use for targeted advertising or other revenue-raising purposes. - An article in the Washington Post raised concerns about details of people's private meetings, health, politics and finances becoming part of their digital dossier kept by Google. Confidential discussions via Gmail of a meeting location might be transferred to Google Maps without the user's consent, for example. - "There is no way anyone expected this," Jeffrey Chester, executive director of privacy advocacy group the Centre for Digital Democracy, told the Washington Post. "There is no way a user can comprehend the implication of Google collecting across platforms for information about your health, political opinions and financial concerns."[see update] Google said it expected to roll out the revised guidelines on 1 March, consolidating more than 70 privacy policies covering all of its products. - I think this is great to be honest - shorter, clearer and to be honest I expected data to be shared amongst my Google profile - One issue - if you say no you can’t access your gmail or documents - people are forced to accept this really 9:54 - Focus on the user Google search changes rumble on - This proof of concept was built by some engineers at Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, in consultation with several other social networking companies. We are open-sourcing the code so that anyone may use it or make it even better. - How much better would social search be if Google surfaced results from all across the web? The results speak for themselves. We created a tool that uses Google’s own relevance measure—the ranking of their organic search results—to determine what social content should appear in the areas where Google+ results are currently hardcoded. - All of the information in this demo comes from Google itself, and all of the ranking decisions are made by Google's own algorithms. No other services or APIs are accessed. - When engaged, this “Don’t be evil” bookmarklet does one simple thing: It turns back the hands of time, and made Google work the way it did before the integration of Google+ earlier this month. - Its a very elegant hack, using a number of Google’s own tools – including its “rich snippet” webmaster tool and its own organic search listings, to re-order not only the search engine results, but also the results of the promotional Google+ boxes on the right side of the results, as well as the “typeahead” results that now feature only Google+ accounts (see example below, the first a search on my name using “normal Google” and then one using the bookmarklet). - Video is well worth watching - https://www.focusontheuser.org/video.php - Extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari available 15:37 - Apples Record Quarter - Apple more than doubled its profits: to $13.06bn (£8.35bn), compared with $6bn for the same quarter in 2010. The result easily beat analysts' forecasts, taking pressure off the chief executive, Tim Cook, handpicked by Jobs as his successor. Last October Apple shares recorded their biggest single-day dollar drop after iPhone sales missed their forecast. - Cook said he was thrilled the company sold a record 37.04m iPhones in the final quarter of 2011, a 128% rise on a year ago. "We could have sold more if we'd had more supply," he said. The recently launched iPhone 4S proved to be the company's best seller in the quarter. "We could not be happier," said Cook. - In record sales across nearly all product categories, Apple sold a record 15.43m iPads over the quarter, more than double a year ago. It sold 5.2m Macs during the quarter, a 26% unit increase. - 2nd largest quarterly earning of all time - http://parislemon.com/post/16436735313/this-is-actually-the-craziest-chart-about-apple - Other 20 are all oil companies - Sitting on $97 billion - isn’t that a bit obscene? - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1 - Why the iPhone is made in China 22:08 - RIMs CEOs step down - BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) has said its co-chief executives, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, have bowed to investor pressure and resigned. - The pair, who together built Lazaridis's 1985 startup into a global business with $20bn in sales last year, have weathered a storm of criticism in recent years as Apple's iPhone and the army of devices powered by Google's innovative Android system eclipsed their email-focused BlackBerry. - "There comes a time in the growth of every successful company when the founders recognise the need to pass the baton to new leadership," Lazaridis said in an interview at RIM's Waterloo headquarters in Ontario. - "Jim and I went to the board and told them that we thought that time was now." They have been replaced by Thorsten Heins, a former Siemens executive who has risen steadily through RIM's upper management ranks since joining the Canadian company in late 2007. - Too little too late - company is in a mess. Should jump on Windows or Android - http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/23/2727096/rim-open-to-licensing-BB10-blackberry-ceo - But they are open to licensing BB10 23:48 - UK signs ACTA - The UK and 21 other European Union member states have signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, better known as ACTA - also known as right to be forgotten law - The countries signed the treaty, which aims to harmonise copyright enforcement across much of the world, in Tokyo on Thursday. However, the signatures of the EU member states and the EU itself will count for nothing unless the European Parliament gives its approval to ACTA in June, and digital activists have urged citizens to lobby their MEPs against voting yes. - However, five EU countries did not sign, namely Germany, the Netherlands, Estonia, Cyprus and Slovakia. Many other countries, such as the US, Japan and Australia,signed the document in September. - Although ACTA is primarily concerned with the enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR), its designation as a trade treaty meant it could be negotiated behind closed doors. This lengthy process, led by the US and Japan, was exposed in a series of leaks — some via Wikileaks — that revealed what was going on. - The final version of ACTA is very different to earlier drafts, which would have forced countries to disconnect internet users if they were found to be repeatedly sharing copyrighted content. The EU rejected this proposal, and other ideas, such as criminalising the use of a mobile phone camera in a cinema, also fell by the wayside. - Problem is understanding what it actually means which will hopefully come out over the next few weeks and months - http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120126/11014317553/european-parliament-official-charge-acta-quits-denounces-masquerade-behind-acta.shtml - European parliamentary official asked to investigate ACTA resigned over it today - I want to denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that led to the signature of this agreement: no inclusion of civil society organisations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, exclusion of the EU Parliament's demands that were expressed on several occasions in our assembly. As rapporteur of this text, I have faced never-before-seen manoeuvres from the right wing of this Parliament to impose a rushed calendar before public opinion could be alerted, thus depriving the Parliament of its right to expression and of the tools at its disposal to convey citizens' legitimate demands.” Everyone knows the ACTA agreement is problematic, whether it is its impact on civil liberties, the way it makes Internet access providers liable, its consequences on generic drugs manufacturing, or how little protection it gives to our geographical indications. This agreement might have major consequences on citizens' lives, and still, everything is being done to prevent the European Parliament from having its say in this matter. That is why today, as I release this report for which I was in charge, I want to send a strong signal and alert the public opinion about this unacceptable situation. I will not take part in this masquerade. 29:06 - Use pcAnywhere - disable it - Symantec has confirmed that the hacker group Anonymous stole source code from the 2006 versions of several Norton security products and the pcAnywhere remote access tool. Although Symantec says the theft actually occurred in 2006, the issue did not come to light until this month when hackers related to Anonymous said they had the source code and would release it publicly. Users of the Norton products in question are not at any increased risk of attack because of the age of the source code and security improvements made in the years since the breach, but the vendor acknowledged on Tuesday night that "Customers of Symantec's pcAnywhere have increased risk as a result of this incident." - Symantec pointed customers to a white paper that recommends disabling pcAnywhere, unless it is needed for business-critical use, because malicious users with access to the source code could identify vulnerabilities and launch new exploits. "At this time, Symantec recommends disabling the product until Symantec releases a final set of software updates that resolve currently known vulnerability risks," the company said. 30:37 - O2 Share your mobile number - O2 has apologised for an error that shared users' mobile phone numbers with the websites they visited. - An experiment set up by Lewis Peckover, a 28-year-old web systems administrator, called attention to the problem last night. - Peckover showed that O2 was providing websites with the mobile number of users who visited. The numbers were included as plain text in the header information sent by the phone to the website. - As well as being a potential breach of the Data Protection Act, this raised the prospect that unscrupulous website owners could collect the phone numbers and send spam SMS or marketing calls. - O2 admitted that the problem began on January 10th and said it was the "unintended effect" of some routine maintenance that the network carried out earlier this month. They said the issue was fixed this afternoon. - In a statement, the company said: "We investigated, identified and fixed it this afternoon. We would like to apologise for the concern we have caused." - The company added: "The only information websites had access to is your mobile number, which could not have been linked to any other identifying information we have about customers." Picks Ian Snapseed - Easy way t enhance photo’s - Great effects can be added - New for Mac’s, coming soon for Android - iOS - £2.99, Mac - £13.99 Henry Muvizu for PC - 3d animation software - free for non-commercial use - based on unreal 3d engine - from Digimania in Glasgow

DigitalOutbox Episode 103

DigitalOutbox — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 13:50:59 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 103 In this episode the team discuss SOPA Protests, Extradition Worry, Google dabbles with Evil, Facebook spreads outside its domain and Apple solves all problems everywhere. Playback Listen via iTunes Listen via M4A Listen via MP3 Shownotes 1:05 - SOPA protests - The Stop Online Piracy Act is an act currently wending it’s way through american government. Key legislators have backed away from it, one of its central provisions was shelved and the Obama administration has denounced the more controversial aspects of the bill and hinted at a possible veto should something resembling SOPA land on his desk. - However SOPA, despite being an American law, affects everyone! - Order internet service providers to alter their DNS servers from resolving the domain names of websites in foreign countries that host illegal copies of videos, songs, and photos. Order search engines like Google to modify search results to exclude foreign websites that host illegally copied material. Order payment providers like PayPal to shut down the payment accounts of foreign websites that host illegally copied material. Order ad services like Google's AdSense to refuse any ads or payment from foreign sites that host illegally copied content. (These rules don't apply to domains that end in .com, .net, and .org, which fall under US law — the government has been seizing US domains used for piracy since 2010, and just seized 150 domains last month.) - Large disapproval in the tech industry, wikipeida goes dark as do many sites on Jan 18th to highlight protest - Many senators start to backtrack and withdraw their support - A freshman senator, Marco Rubio of Florida, a rising Republican star, was first out of the starting gate Wednesday morning with his announcement that he would no longer back anti-Internet piracy legislation he had co-sponsored. Senator John Cornyn, the Texas Republican who heads the campaign operation for his party, quickly followed suit and urged Congress take more time to study the measure that had been set for a test vote next week. By Wednesday afternoon, Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah and one of the Senate bill’s original co-sponsors, called it “simply not ready for prime time” and withdrew his support. - Hopefully this will be the beginning of the end of SOPA 7:27 - Piracy student loses US extradition battle over copyright infringement - A judge ruled on Friday that a 23-year-old student can be extradited to the United States for running a website posting links to pirated TV shows and films, despite significant doubts over whether such sites break any UK laws. - The ruling threw Britain's contentious extradition treaty with the US, which critics allege is greatly biased against UK nationals fighting their removal to America, under further scrutiny. It came just hours after a businessman from Kent lost an appeal against the decision that he should be sent for trial in Texas for allegedly plotting to send missile components to Iran. Richard O'Dwyer, a computing student at Sheffield Hallam University, faces a potential 10-year term in a US jail despite never having been to America or using web servers based in the country. When still a teenager O'Dwyer set up a website, TVShack, which posted links to pirated material. It did not directly host any files, which meant, according to the student's lawyers, that it acted as little more than a Google-type search engine and did not breach copyright. - The defence team pointed out that the only UK prosecution of a similar site, TV-Links, ended last year with the case being thrown out. - But the district judge, Quentin Purdy, ruled that O'Dwyer should nonetheless face trial in the US. "There are said to be direct consequences of criminal activity by Richard O'Dwyer in the USA, albeit by him never leaving the north of England," Purdy said. "Such a state of affairs does not demand a trial here if the competent UK authorities decline to act, and does, in my judgment, permit one in the USA." - O'Dwyer said he planned to appeal. 11:10 - Google - What Were You Thinking - In September, Google launched Getting Kenyan Businesses Online (GKBO). Whilst we saw aspects of their program that were competitive, we welcomed the initiative, as Kenya still has enough growth in it that every new entrant helps the overall market. We are also confident enough in our product, our local team, and our deep local commitment that we believe we can hold our own against any competition, playing fair. - Shortly after that launch, we started receiving some odd calls. One or two business owners were clearly getting confused because they wanted help with their website, and we don’t currently offer websites, only a listing. Initially, we didn’t think much of it, but the confusing calls continued through November. - Since October, Google’s GKBO appears to have been systematically accessing Mocality’s database and attempting to sell their competing product to our business owners. They have been telling untruths about their relationship with us, and about our business practices, in order to do so. As of January 11th, nearly 30% of our database has apparently been contacted. - Furthermore, they now seem to have outsourced this operation from Kenya to India. When we started this investigation, I thought that we’d catch a rogue call-centre employee, point out to Google that they were violating our Terms and conditions (sections 9.12 and 9.17, amongst others), someone would get a slap on the wrist, and life would continue. - I did not expect to find a human-powered, systematic, months-long, fraudulent (falsely claiming to be collaborating with us, and worse) attempt to undermine our business, being perpetrated from call centres on 2 continents. - Someone, somewhere, has some questions to answer. These are my personal top 3: If Google wanted to work with our data, why didn’t they just ask? In discussions with various Google Kenya/Africa folks in the past, I’d raised the idea of working together more closely in Kenya. Getting Kenyan businesses online is precisely what we do. Who authorised this? Until we uncovered the ‘India by way of Mountain View’ angle, I could have believed that this was a local team that somehow forgot the corporate motto, but not now. Who knew, and who SHOULD have known, even if they didn’t know? - Update - Google mortified - - “We were mortified to learn that a team of people working on a Google project improperly used Mocality’s data and misrepresented our relationship with Mocality to encourage customers to create new websites. “We’ve already unreservedly apologised to Mocality. We’re still investigating exactly how this happened, and as soon as we have all the facts, we’ll be taking the appropriate action with the people involved.” - Also, vandalising OpenStreetMap - - Alleged to make thousands of wrong edits - Google sacked the contractors involved, but said it detected only 20 changes 15:55 - Jerry Yang quits Yahoo - Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo!, has resigned from its board. - Mr Yang founded the online company in 1995 with David Filo and was its chief executive from June 2007 until January 2009. - His resignation comes two weeks after the company hired former PayPal executive Scott Thomson to be its new chief executive. - Mr Yang annoyed some shareholders by turning down a $47.5bn (£31bn) takeover offer from Microsoft in 2008. - The company's current market value is about $20bn. - Mr Yang has also resigned from the boards of Yahoo Japan and Alibaba Group and said in a statement: "The time has come for me to pursue other interests outside of Yahoo!" 16:22 - A big year...for Flickr? - Once the darling of photographers other sites like Shutterbug and 500px (and Google+ and Facebook) have taken much of the mindshare when it comes to photo’s - Unloved, very little innovation and some big behind the scenes names leave the company - No Flickr have started 2012...by removing some features - They say it’s a big year so to start off, they are removing features that don’t meet their core vision - Doing so will clear the decks for their upcoming announcements - They are also hiring which is a good sign. Here’s hoping for some improvements. 17:29 - Kodak files for bankruptcy - Kodak has filed for bankruptcy in a bid to survive a liquidity crisis after years of falling sales related to the decline of its namesake film business as digital cameras have taken over the market. - Eastman Kodak Co, the photographic film pioneer, which had tried to restructure to become a seller of consumer products like cameras, said it had also obtained a $950m, 18-month credit facility from Citigroup to keep it going. 17:59 - Listen to music with Friends - Today, with music services on Facebook, there's a new way to listen with friends. This feature lets you listen along with any of your friends who are currently listening to music. You can also listen together in a group while one of your friends plays DJ. - You can listen to the same song, at the exact same time—so when your favorite vocal part comes in you can experience it together, just like when you're jamming out at a performance or dance club. - Look for the music note in the chat sidebar to see which of your friends are listening to music. To listen with a friend, hover over their name, and click the Listen With button. The music will play through the service your friend is using. When a new song plays, you'll come along for the ride, discovering new music while your friend DJs for you. 19:19 - Facebook Apps - Facebook’s Open Graph app launch event is underway here in San Francisco, where over 60 new Open Graph websites and apps are either demo-ing or launching remotely. The apps can publish user activity back to Timeline and Ticker, even from offsite. Launch partners include Pinterest, Ticketmaster, Gogobot, Rotten Tomatoes, and many others. Carl Sjogreen, Facebook project manager, also announced that Facebook will now begin approving apps from third-party developers who aren’t partners. The Open Graph platform was first announced at f8 in September. There, music, news reader, and video apps debuted showing how users could share what they listened to, read, or watched. With today’s launch, a wider variety of activity will begin to appear on Tickers, Timelines, and the Facebook news feed. This includes what users have pinned, tickets they’ve bought, trips they’ve planned, and movies they’ve reviewed. 22:07 - Facebook Verbs - Already apps like Fab.com, Foodspotting, Foodily, Ticketmaster, Pinterest, Rotten Tomatoes, Pose, Kobo, Gogobot, and TripAdvisor have signed on to share these stories — which go beyond what we’re used to on Facebook. “When we say anything we really mean anything,” Facebook Director of Product Management Carl Sjogreen said as he took the stage and announced that verbs like “knitting,” “shared” are now a part of Timeline story options. - The new app actions are basically a conceptual expansion of actions posted by apps like Spotify and the Washington Post, and use verbs and nouns that go beyond the non custom actions like “listen” “watch” and “read” to “bought,”"spot,”"pose,”"want,”"love” and “become an expert.” 23:55 - Apple Education Event - Apple® today announced iBooks® 2 for iPad®, featuring iBooks textbooks, an entirely new kind of textbook that’s dynamic, engaging and truly interactive. iBooks textbooks offer iPad users gorgeous, fullscreen textbooks with interactive animations, diagrams, photos, videos, unrivaled navigation and much more. iBooks textbooks can be kept up to date, don't weigh down a backpack and never have to be returned. Leading education services companies including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill and Pearson will deliver educational titles on the iBookstore℠ with most priced at $14.99 or less, and with the new iBooks Author, a free authoring tool available today, anyone with a Mac® can create stunning iBooks textbooks. - The new iBooks 2 app is available today as a free download from the App Store™. With support for great new features including gorgeous, fullscreen books, interactive 3D objects, diagrams, videos and photos, the iBooks 2 app will let students learn about the solar system or the physics of a skyscraper with amazing new interactive textbooks that come to life with just a tap or swipe of the finger. With its fast, fluid navigation, easy highlighting and note-taking, searching and definitions, plus lesson reviews and study cards, the new iBooks 2 app lets students study and learn in more efficient and effective ways than ever before. - iBooks Author is also available today as a free download from the Mac App Store and lets anyone with a Mac create stunning iBooks textbooks, cookbooks, history books, picture books and more, and publish them to Apple’s iBookstore. Authors and publishers of any size can start creating with Apple-designed templates that feature a wide variety of page layouts. iBooks Author lets you add your own text and images by simply dragging and dropping, and with the Multi-Touch™ widgets you can easily add interactive photo galleries, movies, Keynote® presentations and 3D objects. - Apple today also announced an all-new iTunes® U app giving educators and students everything they need on their iPad, iPhone® and iPod touch® to teach and take entire courses. With the new iTunes U app, students using iPads have access to the world’s largest catalog of free educational content, along with over 20,000 education apps at their fingertips and hundreds of thousands of books in the iBookstore that can be used in their school curriculum, such as novels for English or Social Studies.* The iTunes U app is available today as a free download from the App Store. Over 500,000 lectures, videos and books - Some of these books are massive - 2.7GB for example? A 16GB iPad isn’t going to be an option really - While impressive, they remind me of Encarta! - Love the look of notes and study cards though - they look great - Seemingly the new iBook format is wrapped epub - not another format war? - Create a book in iBooks Author - must be sold via Apple or given away for free - iBooks and iTunes U content updates - always fresh. Pretty impressive - the book is finally an app? - A whole 8 textbooks available today 33:20 - Worlds first self healing iPhone case....from Nissan - Nissan on Monday announced the company’s new Scratch Shield case for the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S. The case is made of ABS plastic that is designed to create a rigid, robust and tighter-fitting case. Perhaps the most exciting news is the case’s unique ability to heal itself. Nissan’s Scratch Shield paint is the world’s first paint technology that allows fine scratches to quickly mend themselves. The paint is the same that is featured on numerous Nissan and Infiniti automobiles throughout the world. When damage occurs to the coating, the chemical structure is able to react to change back to its original shape and fill the gap, thus “healing” the blemish. The healing process takes between an hour and a week depending on the damage. - Released...later this year 34:25 - Lucas calls it quits - George Lucas has announced his retirement from the movie business. The director blurted the news to the New York Times in an extensive interview centred on Lucasfilm's upcoming flick, Red Tails. - "I’m retiring," Lucas told the paper. "I’m moving away from the business, from the company, from all this kind of stuff." - While reports suggest a fifth Indiana Jones movie is in the pipeline - a rumour Lucas was hesitant to quash - Red Tails is apparently the last blockbuster in the man's plans. - Long-time Lucas producer Rick McCallum fuelled the claim saying: “Once this is finished… He will have completed his task as a man and a filmmaker." Picks Henry Blue Icicle - USB converter and mic preamp combo that allows you to connect any XLR microphone directly into your computer via USB - Good quality - Easy to setup

DigitalOutbox Episode 102

DigitalOutbox — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 18:48:06 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 102
Join Chris, Henry and Ian as they discuss Google+, Netflix launching in the UK, Virgin Doubling Up and CES

Playback
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Shownotes
0:57 - Google Search plus your World
- Big search engine update - personal results appear alongside web results in Google
- Basically, Google+ is everywhere
- Twitter annoyed
- Google surprised - it was Twitter that pulled out of their search deal
4:19 - Netflix launches in the UK
- Netflix is available now and anyone can get a one month free trial: click-to-watch TV programmes and films streamed instantly over the Internet to your smart TV, game console, computer, tablet or mobile device. After the free trial, it costs just £5.99 or €6.99 per month
- PS3, Xbox, Wii, iOS and PC/Mac - limited Android and Smart TV support
- Quite a good range of content both American and British though nothing much from last year or two. Price seems not bad. Speed and quality good.
- Get recommendations via Facebook friends
6:32 - Roku to launch in the UK
- Launched by end of Jan
- The entry-level Roku LT will sell for £49.99 (about $77) and the top of the line Roku 2 XS, which comes with a motion-aware remote control for online gaming, will sell for £99.99. That’s a bit of a premium over U.S. pricing, where both models sell for $49 and $99, respectively. Sales will be online and through Amazon.co.uk only for the time being, but the company said that it is going to add additional retailers in the coming months.
7:50 - Zeebox and Sky tie up
- Sky has bought a 10% equity stake in Zeebox, in a deal reportedly worth upwards of $15m, which was founded by BBC iPlayer developer Anthony Rose and former EMI board director Ernesto Schmitt.
- Will appear in Sky's apps this summer
12:25 - CES
- Lots of tablets
- Lot of Ultrabooks
- Lots of TV’s
- Kinect for Windows
- Anything catch the eye - Samsung Smart TV’s and the 55” OLED
- The rest is all meh...
14:03 - iTunes Match
- False start on Thursday 15th, but launches on Friday 16th
- £20.99 yearly subscription
- Overwhelmed at first
- Ian - 11,500 library - uploaded 11GB of music (1500 tracks), but matched the others. 6,500 were of better quality than I had already - downloading was fast
16:08 - Virgin Doubling Speeds
- Virgin Media is to invest more than £100m on a programme that will more than double the broadband speed for most of its 4m internetcustomers.
- Virgin Media, which has tested speeds of up to 1.5Gb a second in a trial of tech businesses at the so-called Silicon Roundabout in London, is to spend £110m on the 18-month upgrade programme.
- The company says that those who subscribe to its up to 10Mb service – 74% of its 4.1m internet subscribers – will see their speed double to 20Mb.
- Those on its up to 20Mb tier, 12% of the total subscriber base, will see their speed tripled to 60Mb.
- The 9% who take 30Mb broadband will rise to 60Mb.
- And the 5% who take services from 50Mb to 100Mb will rise to a speed of between 100Mb and 120Mb.
- The top-tier speed – at 120Mb it will be the quickest offered in the UK – will enable customers to download a high-definition movie in about five minutes.
- BT’s response - "It is no surprise to see that Virgin are following our lead by doubling speeds. We announced we would do this for our fibre products last autumn and so they are trying to catch up with us." Cocks :-)
18:03 - Microsoft taking pirates to court
- Microsoft has accused high-street retailer Comet of pirating 94,000 Windows Vista and Windows XP recovery CDs and selling them to consumers.
- The software giant announced this morning that it had filed a suit against Comet Group PLC, accusing the group of manufacturing counterfeit discs at a factory in Hampshire and selling them through its UK retail outlets. Comet has 248 stores across the UK. A spokesperson for Microsoft was unable to say where the suit has been filed.
- The allegedly counterfeit recovery discs were then sold to customers who had bought desktops and laptops running Windows, Microsoft said. Microsoft's associate general counsel for worldwide anti-piracy and anti-counterfeiting David Finn called Comet's actions "unfair to customers" in this morning's statement.
- "We expect better from retailers of Microsoft products - and our customers deserve better, too," he said.
- In an official statement, Comet told The Reg it had sought legal advice from "leading counsel" to "support its view that the production of recovery discs did not infringe Microsoft’s intellectual property."
21:41 - School ICT to be replaced by computer science programme
- The current information and communications technology (ICT) curriculum in England's schools is a "mess" and must be radically revamped, the education secretary has announced.
- From September it will be replaced by a flexible curriculum in computer science and programming, designed with the help of universities and industry.
Michael Gove called the current ICT curriculum "demotivating and dull".
He will begin a consultation next week on the new computing curriculum.
- "Instead of children bored out of their minds being taught how to use Word or Excel by bored teachers, we could have 11-year-olds able to write simple 2D computer animations," he said.
Computer games entrepreneur Ian Livingstone, an adviser to Mr Gove, envisages a new curriculum that could have 16-year-olds creating their own apps for smartphones and 18-year-olds able to write their own simple programming language.
27:25 - rFactor 2 and Skyrim
- rFactor 2 Beta released! Whoop. £29.99 - “Pre-purchase” basically, buy the game now and you get access to the Beta (planned to run for around 6 months.)
- initial impressions - still not at the bleeding edge of graphics... but the underlying simulation appears stronger than ever!
- Skyrim - addicted. Enought said. Too many hours.

Picks
Ian
F.Lux
- Makes the color of your computer's display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.
- Mac only
- Free
Chris
3D Laser Mapping
- Next gen Street View?
Henry
Action Movie FX
- Free app for iOS that allows you to add effects to your movies
- Great for blowing up your colleagues

DigitalOutbox Episode 101

DigitalOutbox — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 14:40:51 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 101 - Bloopers

DigitalOutbox Episode 100

DigitalOutbox — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:26:00 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 100 - New New Twitter, Spotify App's, new iOS apps and some predictions.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 99

DigitalOutbox — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 19:17:11 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 99 - Say Goodbye to Flash Mobile and Best Buy UK and a little bit of Fenton.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 98

DigitalOutbox — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 19:51:01 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 98 - Nokia Windows Phones, iOS battery woes and Britain loves it's data

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DigitalOutbox Episode 97

DigitalOutbox — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 14:03:47 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 97 - Apple, Android 4 and poor old RIM

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DigitalOutbox Episode 96

DigitalOutbox — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 20:08:32 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 96 - Facebook Timeline, Amazons on Fire and Apple iPhone 4S

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DigitalOutbox Episode 95

DigitalOutbox — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 19:28:40 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 95 - Windows 8, Facebook and Google+ War and that man Hunt

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DigitalOutbox Episode 94

DigitalOutbox — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 19:43:41 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 94 - Steve Jobs, Google, Touchpad and Windows 8

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DigitalOutbox Episode 93

DigitalOutbox — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 17:26:00 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 93 - England Riots, Google buys Motorola and future games roundup

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DigitalOutbox Episode 92

DigitalOutbox — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 10:39:10 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 92 - Newsbin Blocked, UK Copyright Laws Updated, Google Patent Issues, trouble for Nintendo and Sony handhelds and don't mess with Duncan Bannatyne

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DigitalOutbox Episode 91

DigitalOutbox — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 09:28:25 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 91 - Lion, Quarterly Numbers and new Air and Mac Mini's

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DigitalOutbox Episode 90

DigitalOutbox — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 20:26:24 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 090 - Google, Google, Google

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DigitalOutbox Episode 89

DigitalOutbox — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 20:44:29 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 89 - Lulzsec, Google Search

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DigitalOutbox Episode 88

DigitalOutbox — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 21:02:47 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 88 - WWDC and E3

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DigitalOutbox Episode 87

DigitalOutbox — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 20:04:58 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 87 - Twitter, Eric Schmidt and Activision

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DigitalOutbox Episode 86

DigitalOutbox — Sat, 28 May 2011 11:04:50 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 86 - Ryan Giggs sues Twitter, sleazy Facebook, Apple Malware and Sony woes continue

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DigitalOutbox Episode 85

DigitalOutbox — Thu, 12 May 2011 19:03:12 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 85 - Microsoft buys Skype, Google IO and Apple wins over Publishers

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DigitalOutbox Episode 84

DigitalOutbox — Fri, 06 May 2011 19:09:24 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 84 - Sony Fail, Apple Fail, Tom Tom Fail and Amazon Fail.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 83

DigitalOutbox — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 21:41:32 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 83 - Rural Fibre Network, Adobe updates and Spotify Caps

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DigitalOutbox Episode 82

DigitalOutbox — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 19:13:23 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 82 - Amazon Cloud Player, Google +1 and an expensive fail for Rupert Murdoch

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DigitalOutbox Episode 81

DigitalOutbox — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 10:44:58 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 81 - iPad 2 Launch, Samsung and RIM Tablets and the Amazon Appstore

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DigitalOutbox Episode 80

DigitalOutbox — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 21:45:43 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 80 - Twitter threatens dev's, IE9, iPad 2 and bye bye to the Zune

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DigitalOutbox Episode 79

DigitalOutbox — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 19:53:06 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 079 - iPad 2

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DigitalOutbox Episode 78

DigitalOutbox — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 19:20:31 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 078 - Apple and Google Subscription battle, HTC Flyer and Plex for Windows

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DigitalOutbox Episode 77

DigitalOutbox — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 20:09:22 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 77 - Microsoft pwns Nokia, HP, Sony and Motorola devices and Guitar Hero goes bye bye

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DigitalOutbox Episode 76

DigitalOutbox — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 14:55:02 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 76 - Bing copies Google, Honeycomb news, Apple gets greedy and The Daily is launched

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DigitalOutbox Episode 75

DigitalOutbox — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 19:13:13 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 75 - Egypt blocks the internet, Sony NGP and O2 rolls out free wifi

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DigitalOutbox Episode 74

DigitalOutbox — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 19:27:27 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 74 - Apple and Steve Jobs, Google and Eric Schmidt, UK Gaming news and Rim.Jobs

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DigitalOutbox Episode 73

DigitalOutbox — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 22:00:39 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 73 - First of 2011 - CES, Mac App Store and Evil Google

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DigitalOutbox Episode 72

DigitalOutbox — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 09:09:49 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 72 - Gawker, Delicious and our review of 2010

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DigitalOutbox Episode 71

DigitalOutbox — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 19:53:23 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 71 - Google, Google, Google and that man Jeremy Hunt

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DigitalOutbox Episode 70

DigitalOutbox — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 18:44:54 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 70 - iOS 4.2, Cheaper iPads, Amazon Woes and the Jolibook

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DigitalOutbox Episode 69

DigitalOutbox — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 14:58:45 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 69 - Net Neutrality Threat, Don't Joke on Twitter, Facebook Messaging and Kinect

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DigitalOutbox Episode 68

DigitalOutbox — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 19:24:49 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 68 - Virgin, Digital Britain, RockMelt and Sheep Wars

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DigitalOutbox Episode 67

DigitalOutbox — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 19:34:13 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 67 - Firesheep, Adobe, Samsung Tab and Cloud Backups

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DigitalOutbox Episode 66

DigitalOutbox — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 11:59:02 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 66 - Back to the Mac, Google and Apple quarters, Amazon Kindle and those pesky Canadians

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DigitalOutbox Episode 65

DigitalOutbox — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 17:07:06 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 65 - Google, Facebook and its Back to the Mac

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DigitalOutbox Episode 64

DigitalOutbox — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 22:49:04 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 64 - 3D and Google TV

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DigitalOutbox Episode 63

DigitalOutbox — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 09:38:06 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 63 - Facebook Outages, ACS:Law, Xmarks and sex with goats.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 62

DigitalOutbox — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 21:25:23 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 62 - Twitter and the Tokyo Game Show

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DigitalOutbox Episode 61

DigitalOutbox — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 22:00:07 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 61- Google Instant, Apple U Turn, iOS 4.1, Boxee Box and Halo. Woot.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 60

DigitalOutbox — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 20:31:23 +0100

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DigitalOutbox Episode 59

DigitalOutbox — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 21:19:40 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 59 - Gamescon Roundup, Facebook Places and naughty BT

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DigitalOutbox Episode 58

DigitalOutbox — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 18:30:19 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 58 - Net Neutrality and Chris buys a Mac

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DigitalOutbox Episode 57

DigitalOutbox — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 11:52:07 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 57 - Phones, Phones, Phones

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DigitalOutbox Episode 56

DigitalOutbox — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 20:13:55 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 56 - Wikileaks, Apple and Microsoft Quarters and Flipboard

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DigitalOutbox Episode 55

DigitalOutbox — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 22:15:02 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 55 - Antennagate, Windows Phone 7, Times Paywall and Xbox Kinect

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DigitalOutbox Episode 54

DigitalOutbox — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 19:45:52 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 54 - Broadband news, Apple are shocked and Facebook panics.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 53

DigitalOutbox — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 20:34:44 +0100

Episode 53 - don't hold it that way

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DigitalOutbox Episode 52

DigitalOutbox — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 20:00:11 +0100

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DigitalOutbox Episode 51

DigitalOutbox — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 22:20:45 +0100

Episode 51 - iPhone 4

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DigitalOutbox Episode 50

DigitalOutbox — Mon, 31 May 2010 20:43:09 +0100

Episode 50 - iPad arrives

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DigitalOutbox Episode 49

DigitalOutbox — Mon, 24 May 2010 18:55:02 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 49 - Google I/O

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DigitalOutbox Episode 48

DigitalOutbox — Tue, 18 May 2010 19:45:45 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 48 - Human or Dancer

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DigitalOutbox Episode 47

DigitalOutbox — Sun, 09 May 2010 19:28:02 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 47 - Facebook, iPad and HTML5

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DigitalOutbox Episode 46

DigitalOutbox — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 19:36:43 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 46 - Facebook privacy, Spotify, and Apple vs Adobe again!

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DigitalOutbox Episode 45

DigitalOutbox — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 22:07:38 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 45 - Twitter Chirps, iPhone revealed and the Droid Incredible

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DigitalOutbox Episode 44

DigitalOutbox — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 20:50:40 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 44 - Politics and the Regime

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DigitalOutbox Episode 43

DigitalOutbox — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 18:57:18 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 43 - iPad, iPad, iPad

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DigitalOutbox Episode 42

DigitalOutbox — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 20:15:19 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 41 - iPad, politics, paywalls and the 3DS

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DigitalOutbox Episode 41

DigitalOutbox — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 21:45:58 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 41 - Digital Economy Bill, IE9, CashGordon and the iPad cometh

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DigitalOutbox Episode 40

DigitalOutbox — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:13:17 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 40 - Steam on Mac, Facebook vs Daily Mail, MIX10 and more Google news.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 39

DigitalOutbox — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:28:43 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 39 - The Legal Edition...plus our best pick ever!

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DigitalOutbox Episode 38

DigitalOutbox — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 19:57:30 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 38 - Windows Phone 7 Series, Google Buzz and ChatRoulette. Plumbing the depths.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 37

DigitalOutbox — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 21:18:02 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 37 - Google and your friends, sitting in a tree, b-u-z-z-i-n-g. Plus, Chris and his jowls

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DigitalOutbox Episode 36

DigitalOutbox — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:38:51 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 36 - iPad fallout

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DigitalOutbox Episode 35

DigitalOutbox — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 22:28:18 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 35 - Apple iPad with Chris, Ian and Shakeel

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DigitalOutbox Episode 34

DigitalOutbox — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 17:34:02 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 34 - Apple Tablet predictions, Google, Youtube and Open Data

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DigitalOutbox Episode 33

DigitalOutbox — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 11:26:11 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 33 - Google vs China, MS Word Banned and Apple Rumours

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DigitalOutbox Episode 32

DigitalOutbox — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 17:51:40 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 32 - First episode for 2010 - Nexus, Apple Tablet and some CES discussion.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 31

DigitalOutbox — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 15:56:40 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 31 - Tech Review of the Year Part 2 with Chris, Henry, Ian and Shakeel

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DigitalOutbox Episode 30

DigitalOutbox — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 18:40:08 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 30 - Tech Review of the Year Part 1 with Chris, Henry, Ian and Shakeel

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DigitalOutbox Episode 29

DigitalOutbox — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:41:49 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 29 - Snow and Swine Flu - must be winter!

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DigitalOutbox Episode 28

DigitalOutbox — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 16:33:29 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 28 - Join Chris, Ian and Shakeel as they discuss Google, JooJoo, Boxee and Tweeting during sex.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 27

DigitalOutbox — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 11:03:25 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 27 - Apple Lala, Google gaga.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 26

DigitalOutbox — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:33:19 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 26 - Pirates of Westminster

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DigitalOutbox Episode 25

DigitalOutbox — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:15:48 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 25 with Henry, Ian and Chris. The one with no Apple news.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 24

DigitalOutbox — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:04:15 +0000

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DigitalOutbox Episode 23

DigitalOutbox — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 20:09:38 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 23. Not much news although we spin it out over an hour as usual. However, new title music is fabby and our first listener review!

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DigitalOutbox Episode 22

DigitalOutbox — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 11:01:06 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 22 - Droid, Google Navigator, Shakeel gets struck off and not much Apple news.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 21

DigitalOutbox — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:51:23 +0000

DigitalOutbox Episode 21 - Windows 7 and new Apple hardware. Game on.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 20

DigitalOutbox — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 18:42:29 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 20 - Windows 7, people power on Twitter, Apple bugs and some great picks.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 19

DigitalOutbox — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:13:59 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 19 - Web security, backups and Broadband news for the UK with lot's of edits. Cheers Skype!

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DigitalOutbox Episode 18

DigitalOutbox — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 20:47:08 +0100

Episode 18 for Sunday 4th October. We've grown to 4 people on the show now, although it's really only 3 and a third. We're so bad, the newbie didn't even make the half way point.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 17

DigitalOutbox — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 11:03:42 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 17 - Pay for your broadband and music, Google innovates and PS3 news from the Tokyo Game Show.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 16

DigitalOutbox — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:52:48 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 16. Eid Mubarak and some tech news too.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 15

DigitalOutbox — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 21:10:47 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 15. Extra long, Apple keynote edition. We're more awake this week - if you get to the end though you deserve a medal. And a kip!

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DigitalOutbox Episode 14

DigitalOutbox — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 19:55:56 +0100

DigitalOutbox Episode 14 - The Tired Edition. Chris is hungover, Shakeel is tired and emotional and Ian - who knows! Enjoy.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 13 - Snow Leopard

DigitalOutbox — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:12:50 +0100

Welcome to Episode 13 of DigitalOutbox - a Snow Leopard Special. Ian and Shakeel talk through their thoughts on Snow Leopard and whats good and bad in the latest Apple OS.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 12

DigitalOutbox — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 22:13:16 +0100

Welcome to Episode 12 of DigitalOutbox. Join Shakeel, Ian and Chris as they discuss this weeks tech news. Hopefully the audio has slightly improved this week too.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 11

DigitalOutbox — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 22:50:45 +0100

Welcome to Episode 11 of DigitalOutbox. This week it's mostly about Sony as they launch the PS3 Slim and improve their software. Again. Ian, Shakeel and Chris take you through that and some more tech news.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 10

DigitalOutbox — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 22:20:45 +0100

Welcome to episode ten of DigitalOutbox. Ian, Shakeel and Chris discuss the latest tech news. Visit us at http://www.digitaloutbox.com.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 9

DigitalOutbox — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 12:05:46 +0100

Welcome to episode nine of DigitalOutbox. Shakeel and Ian are joined by special guest Chris who will balance out the Apple fanboy'ism that can infect our podcasts. No one main topic this week - a smorgasbord of tech news.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 8

DigitalOutbox — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 19:46:53 +0100

Welcome to episode eight of DigitalOutbox. Microsoft loves Yahoo, Twitter and some Apple hate. Honest.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 7

DigitalOutbox — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 22:00:23 +0100

Welcome to episode seven of DigitalOutbox. Windows 7, Virgin Media, naughty Amazon, Apple news and app's and Console streaming. Blimey.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 6

DigitalOutbox — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:48:42 +0100

Welcome to Episode 6 of DigitalOutbox. We discuss Google Chrome OS, O2 and Twitter sitting in a tree, Prowl and push notifications and a special look at Plex, a media centre for the Mac.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 5

DigitalOutbox — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 21:04:24 +0100

Welcome to Episode 5 of DigitalOutbox. We discuss Pirate Bay, iPhone app's, game news and a bit more on Mobileme.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 4

DigitalOutbox — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 19:48:30 +0100

Welcome to Episode 4 of DigitalOutbox. We discuss iPhone 3GS again, Michael Jackson, some other phone news and a little bit on games. A digital smorgasbord. Listen out for the Fighting Talk homage!

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DigitalOutbox Special Edition - iPhone 3GS

DigitalOutbox — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:33:07 +0100

Welcome to a special edition of DigitalOutbox. Shakeel and Ian walk through the iPhone 3.0 release and also discuss the iPhone 3GS.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 2

DigitalOutbox — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 21:44:50 +0100

Welcome to Episode 2 of DigitalOutbox. This week Ian and Shakeel discuss Digital Britain, Virgin Media, Windows 7, Project Natal and Steve Jobs all without mentioning the iPhone. Almost.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 1

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:15:18 +0100

Welcome to Episode 1 of DigitalOutbox. This week Ian and Shakeel discuss E3, Windows 7, the Palm Pre and WWDC.

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