New Kindles

Black Graphite is the New White Plastic

The coolest thing to happen last week is probably the one thing I shouldn't talk terribly much about: the new Kindles. I'm just going to go on record that I work no where near anyone on the Kindle team and I have no knowledge of how that business operates or its strategy. Independent of being an Amazonian, I'm finally really excited about the Kindle now. I was definitely very skeptical when it first came out and was concerned when the iPad came out at its competitive price point. Though it's a totally different device, the comparisons are inevitable because of the form factor. Anyone who says reading a book is better on the iPad than the Kindle is definitely an Apple fanboy - it's technologically superior for reading plain text. At $139 for the entry WiFi model, it's finally at a price point fitting of a standalone book reader, and features better battery life (up to a month now), faster page turns, and better contrast ratio than the previous generation. I believe the reason for the switch to black graphite is probably because that makes it easier to read in sunlight, but you can still get it in white for the 3G model at $189.

I'm really curious now to see how Barnes and Noble will respond. Now that the Kindle has a model at $60 less and also available in-person at Target stores, the Nook is quickly losing what competitive advantage it had. Still, with e-Book sales outpacing physical book sales, there's gotta be enough to go around, but how big a piece of the pie will Apple and Barnes and Noble get compared to Amazon?

Ballmer is an Idiot

Steve Ballmer is really pissing me off nowadays. Ever since he's taken over, he's made many terrible decisions, including killing the Courier. This was the super creative tablet that Microsoft was working on that Ballmer decided to cut. Now he admits that the iPad is their number one threat and they need to compete with it. It's frustrating that he had a product that stood a chance against the iPad and threw it away, and now they have little hope of taking on the iPad. Microsoft has gone from being known for innovation to being way behind on market trends. Instead of trying to create another iPad now, why don't they either resurrect the Courier or invest in something totally different?

Windows Phone 7 and Free Bumpers

A lot of interesting stuff has been going on in cell phones. Ars Technica has a really good preview of Windows Phone 7 going in great depth into some nice UI touches and little nuggets of their impressions, like the keyboard being on par with the iPhone keyboard. Still, it's clear that there are a lot of question marks to be filled in. How well will the Xbox Live integration work? Will developers give the platform a shot? Given that someone leaked Microsoft's internal announcement to give all employees a Windows Phone 7 device, it's clear that Microsoft is definitely serious about the platform, so we just have to hope that it will all come together in the end.

I'm a little late on this since I missed last week's post, but Apple finally decided to respond to all the negative coverage of its iPhone antenna woes by giving away the bumpers that pretty much solve the issue. I have to bring up something that Molly Wood and others were predicting at CNet before this event happened: Apple never owned up to a problem and instead spoke at great length about how the problem had been overblown. It's definitely a smart strategy because it makes them look like they've been bullied into having to do this free bumper thing even though it's clear they had to know about the issue to create this case, which they hadn't done for any previous iPhone. In any case, it's great that they're doing the right thing now, but if they're only doing so until September 30 I wonder if they've figured out a hardware fix for the issue so that future batches won't have the issue?

Google has finally killed the Nexus One. Google has proved that people don't want a phone they can't play with at a store, even if it is a somewhat compelling product. It will still be sold abroad, but no more for US consumers.

Ars Technica has a ridiculously detailed review of the Droid X, and it seems like probably the best phone Motorola has put out in a while. Still, the UI seems to fall short of the Droid Incredible in visual flare. Plus, at a screen size rivaling the Dell Streak you have to wonder if anyone wants something that big in their pocket. There is such a thing as too big for a smartphone.

WPA2 Hole Discovered

WPA2 has finally been cracked - kinda. It was only a matter of time before a hole was discovered, and it doesn't render the standard useless but does damage it for enterprise use. It turns out that the standard's language allows for an authorized user on the network to send malicious packets to others on the network as well as sniff the packets of others. For most people, this probably isn't such a big deal, but could be worse for business use. The problem with fixing it is that all implementers would have to fix it, and it's unlikely to organize something like that. The next best bet would be a revision to WPA2, but there doesn't appear to be language in the standard to support something like that. It's a rather interesting conundrum.

Also in security news recently, Apple was deemed the company with the most security vulnerabilities in its software. So much for their claims of having the safest platform. The issues weren't in OS X, but rather in other ancillary products. Still, it helps debunk the claim that you can ignore security just because you have a Mac.

Funny Videos

I missed this a while back, but the guy who posted his customer service cartoon ranting about iPhone fanboys also posted one sticking it to Android fanboys. It's almost as hilarious.

In an example of social media marketing gone right, the Old Spice marketing guys decided to create a bunch of videos with Isaiah Mustafa responding to people on Twitter with short videos, including Alyssa Milano. They did a pretty awesome job.

Final Notes

I'm out of time, but here are a few other stories I found worthwhile.

Gawker has a funny post on the stupidest things caught on video that people said about the Internet, including the infamous Al Gore quote on his greatest invention. You may recognize certain terminology sourced from some of the videos.

I've seen reports off and on recently about issues with cell phone manufacturers and building screens, and it looks like HTC has had enough issues with AMOLED that they've decided to move to Super LCD for these devices. AMOLED hit the market a few years back and was quite impressive, but apparently still not easy to make.

If you're wondering what to load on your Android phone, PC Mag has you covered. Makes me a little envious on a few of those, I have to admit.

YouTube has increased their upload limit to 15 minutes, so now you can post longer useless videos.

If you want to see a real ninja badge, you have to check this out.

iPhone jailbreaking is now legal!

Hope everyone has an excellent start to their August.

Iron Man 2

Let the Summer Blockbuster Season Begin

Since I saw Iron Man 2 on Friday I figure I might as well share my thoughts before we get into the normal stuff.

The original Iron Man is without equivocation considered one of the best comic book superhero movies ever by any comic book geek. Definitely top 5 if not top 3. Given that Iron Man was never a blockbuster franchise like Batman or Superman, I thought it was definitely special what Jon Favreau was able to accomplish with Robert Downey, Jr. and the Iron Man universe. It was a better origin story than Batman Begins in terms of pacing and probably a few other things and just a fun all-around summer movie. That's really huge shoes for a sequel to fill. Did it get it right? That's hard to say, to be honest. I think when people's expectations are high like they were for this movie you've gotta be perfect to really blow them away, and this movie didn't do that. Nonetheless, I thought it was a more than acceptable sequel and definitely well worth seeing.

Plot-wise, this movie takes over literally right where the first one left off and shows how the ending (which I don't want to spoil) gave rise to physicist Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke) as a villain using Stark's own arc reactor technology. Meanwhile, Tony Stark is dealing with the adverse health effects of the arc reactor in his chest while being watched closely by Nick Fury (Sam Jackson). I don't want to spoil anything by revealing any more than that, but suffice to say it's an interesting, though comic book far-fetched, storyline that diverts somewhat from the Iron Man comic book storyline to tell its own story. I thought it was actually a pretty well-written story. You have to really forgive the hand-waving with regard to the technological expertise of some of the main characters, but I personally watch 24 and am already well-seasoned in that.

I thought the acting was superb across the board. Robert Downing, Jr was possibly even better in this movie, Scarlett Johansson was the perfect casting for Black Widow (so glad that they didn't go with Emily Blunt), and Gwenyth Paltrow was still as sexy and sophisticated as ever. Johansson's role was a pretty decent female empowerment character (sans a couple of her outfits) and I was glad to see that they didn't really overdo it. I think some hardcore fans will be a little disappointed with her portrayal, but I thought it worked in the context of the movie. I think the re-casting of Rhodes was noticeably weird. I think Don Cheadle would've been fine if he was in the original as well, but whenever I saw him I just kept picturing Terrence Howard. I was happy overall with Mickey Rourke, he did his hokey Russian accent well.

The problem is that Iron Man 2 didn't bring to the table what Iron Man did because it didn't break the formula of superhero movies like that one did. It felt more like a continuation of the previous movie instead of something totally new. So less like The Dark Knight, which was a huge breath of fresh air, and more like X-men 2. The action scenes were great and the movie was so much fun to watch - especially the well-timed humor. However, it felt like a comic book movie. There's nothing wrong with that, it just means that it can't be extraordinary. I still give it an A- and strongly recommend seeing it yourself while it's on the big screen. Just don't bolt after the credits - they snuck in an extra scene like in the first one. It's not life-changing or anything, but it's something that will give you goosebumps if you're a comic book geek.

Kin Available this week

I know you've been waiting with bated breath so here it is: the new Kin will be available in Verizon stores on May 13 and is already available online. The creatively named Kin One and Kin Two are priced at $50 and $100, respectively, but apparently will have interesting data plan like the Sidekick.

However, Pre Central aggregated some of the reviews and they don't seem to be very positive. It seems like the phone was pretty half-baked overall and an uneven experience. The ideas from the original presentation that I originally raved about were apparently poorly executed. It looks like Kin Studio, the online timeline of your phone, is pretty decent, but the Kin Spot and a number of other features are disastrous user experiences. Despite the pricing being good, I'd be surprised if these flew off the shelves and insulted if people chose them over the Palm Pre or Palm Pixi, which are usually easy to find at those price points and have a lot more features, like pretty good call quality.

Treasury Site and Google Chat Hacks

There were a few security breaches last week, the most flagrant of which I felt was the U.S. Treasury websites being compromised and giving malware to its visitors. Well, technically they redirected to a Ukrainian site that gave out the malware, but what an embarrassment to that IT department that these guys injected HTML code. I'm guessing it was some sort of XSS variant, but they're being hush on the details. They already look bad - hiding the truth from the people who pay these idiots' salaries isn't going to make them look any better.

I thought I'd throw in this AP story about a vulnerability in how your web site requests are routed that could be disastrous if exploited. The bottom line is that TCP/IP, the protocol that the Internet operates on, was not built with security in mind because it was not designed for massive public use. I think this is something the U.S. government should step into to motivate a fix. The private companies apparently don't have a strong interest in fixing things but an attack on how Internet packets are routed could be really bad for our infrastructure.

Techcrunch was tipped off on a pretty big vulnerability last week regarding Facebook. It turns out that in where in your Privacy Settings you can see how other people view your profile, you can also see who they're chatting with. Rather than applying their restriction to how you view your profile, they basically gave you a window into their Facebook, more or less. You could even mess with their friend requests. Who knows how many people have exploited this without reporting it. It really calls into question Facebook's quality assurance principles. It's fixed now, but disturbing that it was out there for an indeterminate amount of time.

Facebook Under Fire

Riding off the coattails of that story, let's talk about the rabble growing against Facebook. It used to be that Facebook's changes were an annoyance that people just got used to. Now though, multiple people are being very vocal about their problems with Facebook and these editorials are getting a lot of eyeballs.

One blogger gave his ten reasons why you should quit Facebook while Wired calls for an open alternative where things make sense instead of following the whims of Facebook. This was mostly prompted by how Facebook is now sharing a lot of information about you to developers taking advantage of its new APIs and how the fact that Facebook encourages you to turn your text in your profile to "Pages" means that you're exposed through these "Pages" as being a fan of that thing to the world. Of course, there have been plenty of offenses leading up to this (how you can never really remove yourself, how your information is being passed along to third-party application developers, etc.), but ultimately their misleading policies have really become cause for some concern.

If you're stubborn like me and are hesitant to quit Facebook cold turkey, at least consider abating the amount of information you feed to it.

Final Notes

Ok, I'm running way behind on what I wanted to get done tonight because of a nap I took earlier. I'm going to have to cut out sooner on this post than originally planned. Here's what else I had for you:

Apple is now in the middle of an antitrust suit for anti-competitive practices. It's not clear if this is because of their ban on Flash or their patent lawsuits against HTC, but it'll be interested to see what happens. Some of their practices are unconscionable, but I'm not sure that they're illegal.

The FCC is still pushing forward on net neutrality trying to find a way around the court decision ruling that they can't regulate the ISPs.

The U.S. ranks 30th in the world in Internet speed. Even Andorra is beating us. Ouch.

Netflix is moving more of its computational power into Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Smart move. Much more efficient than buying and maintaining your own hardware for solving those big problems.

This is a pretty eye-opening breakdown of the cell phone providers in America by customer satisfaction and dropped calls.

Check out all the new features coming in the forthcoming Kindle firmware upgrade including password protection and better sharing capabilities.

It looks like Amazon has one of the biggest databases in the world, and it's pretty exciting that I help process some of that data every day. Anyway, check out who has the other enormous databases.

If you want to know what's on TV the Interweb, check out Clicker.

If you're on Windows and didn't know about Microsoft's Fix It tool, then go check it out now.

Last but not least, Google made a really awesome video advertising how fast Chrome is compared to things like sound and a potato gun. It's a lot of fun to watch.

Kin: Microsoft's Side Pot

The Phone Born from a Buzz Word

Yesterday had a few pretty big story, but the biggest one (and I thought most unexpected) was Microsoft's announcement of the Kin phone. Up until last week, it looked like Microsoft was putting all its mobile eggs in one basket with Windows Phone 7 Series (they direly need to shorten that), due out this winter. However, it appears that they have a side pot going on with a social networking phone known simply as "Kin" (a much better name). The handsets are made by Sharp (kind of an odd choice, but ok) and are due out this fall. Given that Palm announced the Pre last year so far in advance to less-than-stellar sales, I'm a little surprised by their early announcement. My guess is that they're trying to preempt the possibility of new iPhone hardware this summer.

Despite the skepticism I've already given you here, I think this phone really does have a lot going for it. The videos I've seen for it are wonderful. I really hope they go with that format of marketing moving forward. It seems to share a number of ideas from Windows Phone 7 Series, like Kin Loop, which is a live stream of all your social networking sites. The camera software also feels familiar from our impressions of Windows Phone 7 Series demos. What is new, and somewhat of a game changer, is Kin Studio. I think this is a pretty exciting feature and so obvious that it seems silly to not already exist. It's basically cloud storage for everything on your device (including pictures and other media, unlike Palm webOS) that you can access yourself from any web browser and do things you'd normally do on your phone, like share photos with friends and stuff. It even has a time line of snapshots of your phone. It reminds me a bit of when TiVo first came out with online scheduling and blew everyone away who had been chained to their living room. I don't think it'll be as revolutionary as that, but still very neat.

There's another added feature that's much more interesting to me called Kin Spot. If you remember seeing leaked videos of Microsoft Courier concepts you'll recall that it was like a booklet tablet where the middle of the two sides was an area for clipping items temporarily. The fact that the Kin features something almost identical but calls it "Kin Spot" provides a rather strong case for the reliability of the Courier leaks. It's basically copy/paste but really souped up and dynamic and it supports holding on to multiple items at a time.

There are some hurdles for Kin though. As I mentioned earlier, the time line for its release is a big concern. Putting your cards on the table like this in an industry that is now producing pretty big phones on a regular basis is a fairly big risk. The fact that they're marketing it totally independent of Windows Phone 7 and as a "feature phone" instead of a smartphone is really odd. What does this mean? Well, no app store for one thing. Think more like the Sidekick instead or the Motorola phones from way back when like the Razr. Putting Kin Studio only on these two phones and not on Windows Phone 7 just makes the confusion worse.

I want to be excited for Kin because it has so much going for it, but it definitely has a few big drawbacks and so we'll have to wait and see how things shake out.

Opera Mini Hits the App Store

This isn't a story I've talked about at all because I wrote it off like a lot of other people did. Apple has a pretty strict policy against allowing apps on the iPhone that duplicate existing functionality, hence there not being a Google Voice application available (which was a big fuss last year). So when Opera made an announcement about Opera Mini being submitted to the app store and was vocally confident about getting accepted, there was a collective snicker from the tech media. In the end though, they had the last laugh since it's now available to download from the app store. Not only that, but it was the number one free app download worldwide.

It looks like Apple was willing to forgive the fact that it kind of duplicates Safari's functionality in that it's another web browser. However, it supports tabbing, which may play into their strategy of muti-tasking in iPhone OS 4. It looks to be a pretty nice application with creative technologies at place for making web browsing faster and snappier than the already slick Safari browser that comes standard.

Stop the Madness, Steve

It wasn't all positive press for Apple last week (someone should graphically compare the balance of good and bad press for Apple now versus Microsoft like 10-20 years ago). An extremely controversial change was made last week to the iPhone OS Terms of Service to require applications to be written in Objective C, C++, C, or Javascript. This was such a huge blow to developers, especially those holding out hope for Flash on the iPhone, that a pretty big petition was started up urging Steve Jobs to reconsider. Jobs even responded to it.

When you dissect the decision, as John Gruber has, it actually seems pretty consistent with Apple's policies from the inception of the iPhone. Their competitive advantage isn't an open sandbox for everyone to play in like Android, but rather a carefully controlled environment where they believe they can guarantee a rich experience for all users and they completely own all technical aspects of that experience. Allowing middleware on top of the libraries they provide hurts their control and could allow a third party software company to have a frightening amount of control over the app ecosystem. Whether or not these concerns are valid or not, it's something that you have to accept with the iPhone platform. If you don't like it, go to Android of Palm webOS.

Please DO Change Your Password

I have to take a moment to respond to this article because it pissed me off a little bit. It's irresponsible for such a big news site to recommend that people not change your password because a stupid study says it's probably not going to help them. It warns of one particular type of attack, a replay attack (which is not viable for sites with SSL), and claims that changing your password doesn't protect you from this type of attack. News flash: you can never be 100% secure and so you have to employ a number of techniques to achieve the highest level of security. The article at least encourages people to come up with strong passwords that aren't derived from dictionary words, but I think they key is to understand that changing your password can help for your most important sites (like financial sites), but only if you pick good alternatives.

Closing Stories

I'm pretty drained so let's wrap things up.

Palm is officially up for sale. This is no surprise to most people, but I'm sad to see this since Palm effectively invented the smartphone and made a really good effort with the Palm Pre.

A really shocking report came out last week from the National Labor Committee going into detail about factory conditions in China for a factory used by Microsoft, HP, Logitech, LG, Acer, and others. Hopefully it will motivate more and more people to fight for the rights of these workers.

Twitter is trying to make money with promoted tweets.

Intel reported its best Q1 results ever despite seeing a drop in sales from Q4 (it was just a much lower one than usual).

Amazon has launched a shortened URL service, powered by bit.ly, to help people link to products.

This is a great list of open source programs for Windows from Test Freaks. I highly recommend reading over it.

If you're a Google fiend then you'll want to be sure to take stock of these tips.

Have a great week everyone!

Perking it Up

Be Wary of Tech Firm Perks
There wasn't a whole lot of news last week, which is good because I have a really full plate this week and need to get into the office early tomorrow. I thought I'd kick off things with this article about tech firms trying to outperk one another in the face of a job market where there's a limited supply of talented software engineers. There is a big difference between a software development engineer and someone who learns how to write code from a book. Even with some industry experience, depending on the company/companies they've worked for they're not necessarily going to be so talented and for these companies it's cheaper to beef up the perks to attract top talent than risk cheaper talent that may end up being harder to maintain in the end. It may seem exuberant in a down economy, but that's the way capitalism works. It's all about supply and demand. There is real value to these perks, too, in how people perceive going to the office. A lot of people seem to drudge through their weekdays whereas at a company where getting a quarterly award means a weekend with a Lamborghini is quite a difference.

However, I'm here to warn you about these jobs. I don't want to name names, but there were companies that were offering awesome perks (tempting to me, for sure) that laid off employees last year. Having perks doesn't indicate job security. The sexy jobs aren't necessarily the best horses to bet on. I don't want to discourage folks to take calculated risks in joining startups, but I think it can be misleading to be pitched on all these great benefits only to have them later taken away when the economy goes into another recession. It's important to ask yourself this question: if the only compensation I received at my job was my base salary (with any cash and stock bonuses) and health benefits (I'm including medical, dental, and vision here), would I be happy with what I do? Let's assume that the culture for the most part stayed the same also, you just didn't have free yoga twice a week. Do you do your job for the perks or for the work you actually do? I think if you pick with your heart what you'd really like to do then you're on more solid ground. I think it makes sense to also consider a workplace with job stability if you have a mortgage or a family, too, but I don't think all the recruiter-speak should be what sells you on a job. Now that the CS job market is heating up, caveat emptor is more or less in full effect for those of you looking for a job or looking to switch jobs.

The iPad is Out

The iPad has now been officially released. A few reviews came out last week with one of the most glowing ones coming from PC Magazine. Their review was so positive that it almost seemed like the reviewer was already really positively inclined for the iPad and was willing to belittle some of the big drawbacks. And, granted I'm biased for the Kindle, I thought they were a bit dismissive of the Kindle in the wake of the iPad when the two are completely different devices. I'm sure that it's a great device for what it is, but I think value should be a consideration in a review, as well as the lack of major things like Flash. Still, the mixed reception may indicate that it's not going to be the flop it was predicted to be.

Gizmodo has also been doing its best to review as many apps as it can and it looks like there's some really good stuff out there.

Google Blocked in China

Google's saga with China may have finally met its end. Google stopped censored off and on for the past couple of months in the wake of an attack from a Chinese computer that was at a university but the US government believes was a cover for an implicitly sanctioned cyber attack. Now, the Chinese government has blocked Google's Chinese site and damned Google in the media as being co-conspirators with the US government against China. This was in the wake of Google's announcement to move the site offshore and Google has said that they may have to close their sales offices in China. This is pretty serious for Google employees there who could be considered enemies of the state as a result of their relationship with Google. I wonder if the people there wonder that their government's sudden response to this seems odd like maybe Google isn't the one in the wrong, especially since it was such a strong brand in China. Google is giving up a lot of money and potential business if they don't fight back on this, and they may morally decide that it's not worth the money to get back into China. If they do decide this, then kudos to them for having the moral courage to do that.

4G is About Congestion

Ars Technica has a really great article about 4G being a response not to speeds being super slow on mobile devices, but rather the fact that congestion is killing data availability in areas with perfectly good coverage. It's an important point to be made because I've heard people dismiss 4G because they don't think the speed boost is necessary and may hurt battery life on current generation cell phone technology, but we're outgrowing our 3G networks. AT&T is a prime example of that in some of nation's bigger cities. I may be one of the few people who believe in the future of 4G, but I think there's good reason to hope for the best there. Depending on the implementation, 4G is usually more scalable than today's 3G networks, and that's ultimately what we need to sustain growth in our consumption of data. We shouldn't let infrastructure hold back innovation, especially if there's a need for it. It's hard to consider that when 20 years ago we didn't "need" e-mail on-the-go, but the world is ever-evolving. I'd like to think we're mostly evolving for the better.

Windows 7 Market Share Strong

Windows 7's numbers are out for March and it looks like the young OS already has more than 10% of the market. Though XP is still the biggest piece of the pie, Windows 7 is gaining share much more quickly than Vista did and there may not be an end to this growth for a while.

As great as 7 is for most people, it's not without its flaws. According to data compiled from Microsoft's security bulletins last year, 90% of known vulnerabilities in Windows 7 can be fixed by removing admin rights. Though, to be fair, I don't think any OS has admin rights down quite perfectly yet. It's a tough nut to crack in compromising convenience for security.

Windows 7 being the first solid OS release from Microsoft in quite a while may show a change in the times for Microsoft. They're even experimenting with putting Office Starter on new PCs where Microsoft would make money off of people then upgrading to a paid version. I'm not sure what's gained in the paid version from the Starter, but I think it'll be great for lower income families.

Final Notes

Ok, I dragged on a bit longer than I meant to tonight, so time to wrap up.

CNN has a great article explaining why Internet is faster in South Korea than here. It's partially because of their land being less spread out but it's also a result of intense competition, which doesn't exist so much here since we have so many local monopolies (or small oligopolies).

If you're not concerned about your passwords, then read this explanation from LifeHacker on common cracking techniques and maybe you'll re-think your passwords. The key is to seed them all in a way you can remember them but then add things to them to make them unique in a way that wouldn't be too easy to guess.

Google Chat may soon get file transfer!

PC Mag has a really nice roundup of free software in several categories - it's worth taking a quick look for any needs you don't have met.

Last week, I saw John Mayer and Michael Buble in concert. John Mayer was good, but Michael Buble was incredible and well worth the price of admission. I thought I'd close off by sharing one of my favorite parts of the show: his cover of Billie Jean in homage to one of his main inspirations, Michael Jackson:

Hot Tub Time Machine

Since I was unable to post last week I stuffed in a few articles from the week before last. So if a couple of the things seem old, that's because they are. You can scroll through them if you're past them, but I marked them because I still wanted to talk about them. Even though CTIA was last week, I'd like to kick things off with a bit of a nice digression...

Hot Tub Time Machine Review

I haven't reviewed a movie in a while because I haven't seen a movie on/before opening weekend in quite a while. Today I did spend my afternoon cooking and subsequently watching Hot Tub Time Machine. I walked into this movie knowing nothing other than what was in the trailers and commercials, which never really enticed me. The movie looked like it would just be bad rather than hilariously bad, but my friends wanted to go and I wasn't actually opposed to see it and make fun of it if nothing else. To my great surprise, this film actually worked.

I don't think I have to say anything about the plot that the title doesn't tell you already. It's three guy friends and the nephew of one of them who go to a run down ski resort for a weekend and end their first night in a hot tub that turns out to also be a time machine. Up to this point in the movie, I was a bit worried because there were only a couple of decent jokes and and a few lame ones, but I'm glad it wasn't long into the movie until they got in that hot tub. To put it concisely, the casting for this movie was absolutely perfect. I don't know if any other cast could've possible pulled this off. It's almost like these parts were written for these guys. I'll admit that at times I was little thrown off by John Cusack's character because it didn't seem like John Cusack, but other than that the dialogue worked. Rob Corddry definitely stole the show. I hope this movie ends up really igniting a good career in comedy movies for him because it shows that he can really nail the delivery.

The movie ends in a rather predictable way and you can see a lot of the lessons to be learned and such coming a mile away. It's a pretty formulaic comedy. Still, the movie never takes itself too seriously and I think that's what's important. It doesn't try to tug at your heart strings because it's not that kind of comedy - it accepts that it's a down and dirty comedy and holds its chin high in the face of some jokes that you have to just shake your head at. The delivery of the dialogue in this film overall makes it hilarious and makes up for shortcomings in plot and other areas. Though it's probably a C movie, I easily give it a B+ purely for how much I enjoyed the ride. If you can get past a couple of gross jokes and a couple of really raunchy jokes, I highly recommend that you go check this movie out. Go see it in a theater for the experience of laughing it out with a lot of strangers. It's worth it.

HTC Supersonic


If you don't think that's extremely sexy, then you're not as dorky as me. Don't worry, you'll get there. It takes practice. Anyway, that is the HTC Supersonic, which is being marketed in America as the HTC EVO 4G. It got a lot of buzz last week as being the Android phone to have, like the Droid has been up til now (you can argue for the Nexus One but let's face it, few people who aren't tech savvy are buying their cell phone from Google sight unseen). This phone may have the best specs I've ever seen on a smartphone - the internals of this thing are truly a work of art. Keep in mind that for all the speed of the iPhone 3GS, it's actually not super beefed up on hardware like the EVO 4G is. I'm almost positive this phone is more powerful than the computer we had in my household about 11 years ago, and we only bought computers that were pretty advanced since my brother and I are such huge nerds. Aside from a 1GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM, it has an 8 MP camera (that's probably going a little far on the MPs there) capable of 720p video, HDMI out, and may be the first CDMA phone to support simultaneous voice and data.

The videos of this thing are really impressive. It looks to have pretty advanced camera controls and it looks like it's very capable of processing HD video, which is quite a feat in and of itself. Supporting 4G not only means having the hardware to process 4G signal, but having the processing bandwidth to handle the added network bandwidth, and it looks like they're hoping this phone can do that.

Of course, not everyone is as impressed with 4G as I am. In the context of the HTC EVO 4G and my own personal experiences with 4G, I'm referring only to the Sprint 4G network, by the way. There are several other protocols vying to be the de facto 4G protocol and that article rightfully is frustrated with this. Additionally, power consumption may be an issue for 4G. My knowledge of the underlying technology is limited but it could definitely kill its usefulness in cell phones if it ends up being much worse than for 3G signal. Still, I don't think 4G is dead in the water. 3G clearly has its limits and we're not too far off from a point where we need a wireless data network that scales better for our increased data consumption rates.

If you want to see more phones from CTIA, PC Mag has a great round up of the most prominent devices that were shown off. I don't have time to talk about all of them, but I found the Docomo phone with the removable keyboard to be the most curious. Didn't we learn from the days of the stylus pen that easily removable parts are also easily losable?

Palm Survival Guide

In the wake of the news of yet another exciting Android handset, Palm is clearly getting left in the dust. It really is sad because I love my Pre. It has some shortcomings, but I'm so used to it now that I'd honestly prefer to stay on it than switch gears to Android because it's still an enjoyable user experience overall. At this point though, it's hard to see Palm coming out of this without another webOS device. With another iPhone speculated to be coming out this summer (the timeline just fits, not sure if anything was leaked to suggest what a new iPhone would have), Palm almost has to come out with another phone this summer to survive another year, and Palm is a fighter so I wouldn't be surprised if they pulled it off. Hopefully, they're learning from the Pre and announcing their next device closer to its release date instead of 6 months in advance.

There are other lessons to be learned though and Engadget put together a handy survival guide for Palm. Ultimately, Palm had a great platform and a hotly anticipated device and just executed things all wrong. It was almost amateurish when you look back on it - surprising for a company that invented what a smartphone should truly be back in 2004 with the Treo 650. The biggest mistake they made was with their marketing campaign. I'm not sure if it's too late to fix this or not, but none of their ads gives you any indication of how simple and intuitive the UI is, or all the great apps available on it now. I saw an ad at the gym the other day that cut more to that, but they essentially need to reboot their marketing. Of course, they also had several timing problems including the release date, when the SDK was available, and the gap between launching on Sprint and launching on Verizon, which should've happened way before the Droid instead of in the wake of Droid's strong marketing campaign. The only gripe I disagree with is cutting the Pixi. I actually know a few people with a Pixi who really love it. The Centro was not a silly device and neither is the Pixi: it's a nice lightweight smartphone for people who only need a couple of of core smartphone features and like the candy bar form factor.

I'm really impressed by what some developers have been able to do with webOS, including the traditional port of Duke Nukem. So while a lot of people have already counted Palm out, my heart is still rooting for them. As Pre Central has shown on numerous occasions, there's a pretty strong community of users and developers who really like webOS and don't want to see it die.

Windows Phone 7 Will Be Locked Down

This is kind of old news now, but it's important enough that it bears repeating in case you already did hear about it: Microsoft is following in the footsteps of Apple and fostering an app store for Windows Phone 7 that is controlled and moderated by Microsoft. What's interesting about their business model here is that they're 2 years late to the party. They basically want to right the wrongs of Apple, and I just don't know if it's going to work. They're going to charge $100 a year for developers to be in their "Marketplace" and they will have set guidelines for what is allowed in and what isn't. I can see the argument that they want to maintain a nice clean platform like Apple has, but it's too late to launch a mobile platform that isn't open, in my opinion. Any developers paying an annual fee to use a platform is going to give their money to Apple. Of course, the big guys (like EA) will pay, but not the little guys, in my opinion.

There is some good news though: Netflix was prototyped for Windows Phone 7. All you need is a device with HDMI out and some popcorn and you have a mobile party.

8 Layers of Security

I have two quick pieces of hacking news for you. The first thing is that a Russian hacker has been accused of manipulating the price of several Nasdaq stocks using several hacked Scottrade accounts. I'm not quite clear on the details, but definitely one of the more interesting evils of this age of electronic stock trading.

The other piece of news is that a Frenchman was arrested by French police for breaking into several Twitter and Google accounts, include tat of the official Obama twitter feed. He got into the accounts with a technique that is more popular nowadays: using the "forgot password" prompt and correctly guessing the answer to the security question. Though he didn't profit from it, the act of hacking a database is a two-year jail sentence in France.

Aside from picking a good security question though for your online accounts, you should also build up these 8 layers of security for your computer and data. I agree with all the tips and would even suggest adding an additional, more human-based, layer of Firefox extensions like WOT and NoScript that kill the entry point for a lot of attacks triggered from clicking a wrong link.

Quickies

Ok, this post has gone on long enough and I'm now pretty exhausted. Time for the lightning round.

Google has integrated Flickr and Picasa photos in Google Maps Street View.

As a response to the recession, Verizon is pausing its FiOS expansion. Their delivery of fiber to the home has really put a damper on a lot of cable companies and this may actually improve the balance sheets of folks like Comcast that no longer have to compete with Verizon in more and more markets.

I was impressed by this list of YouTube tips and hacks, like how to download videos and linking to the middle of videos. It's a really comprehensive list that probably covers everything you've ever wanted with YouTube.

If I'm not mistaken, Samsung is the first company to officially launch a series of 3-D television sets with release dates and pricing (which start at $2,599 for a 46-inch panel). Of course, the jury is still out on the viability of 3-D taking off in the home.

These are some great Firefox add-ons for saving money, and here's one more add-on for good measure to kill those pesky memory leaks.

Have a great Holy Week, everyone!

Apple Patent Lawyers vs. the World

Apple Sues HTC

It's unfortunate that all these big negatives stories keep coming out about Apple because I'd much rather talk about other stuff. The news is what it is though.

In a way, this was bound to happen, but I guess it's been so long since Apple threatened to enforce its patents that everyone had forgotten. Apple has filed a lawsuit against HTC for 20 patent infringements. The list of patents include things like swiping on a touch screen to unlock, turning off the phone screen when held near your face, and the idea that a foreground app can send off a background process to do work while the foreground remains responsive to user input. These patents would kill a lot of modern touchscreen phones, if upheld, but some of them are OS-level ideas that I'm pretty sure had prior art before being filed. Even though the lawsuit is against HTC, Google is verbally supporting HTC and some are speculating that legal advice is being provided behind closed doors. Apparently, lawsuits aren't so uncommon in the mobile phone space where it ends up in patent trading so that people can build on each other's ideas, but I think it's kind of sleazy either way.

Apple is not hard up for money and is not by any means getting killed competitively by HTC. HTC has surely cut into Apple's market share, but probably not by enough to warrant a lawsuit. Apple makes plenty of money, so they're not hard up for money. I see 3 possible motivations here (and they're not necessarily mutually exclusive): Apple wants to bankrupt HTC to eliminate them from the market, HTC has patents that Apple wants to take advantage of, or Apple wants to scare off other competitors from building on concepts that Apple has pioneered. Except for blatant ripoffs, most other big companies in tech, like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, don't file lawsuits like this. Most patents filed are for purely defensive purposes. It's a little crazy to say that you can't act on an idea you have just because Apple had the same idea before you did. Not all of these patents are like that, but I think several are. If you have a touchscreen phone, it only makes sense that you need to gesture to unlock it because you have no physical buttons to do it with - why should everyone pay royalties to Apple for that? I'm all for Apple protecting themselves against people making exact iPhone copies, but I don't think HTC has done that at all. I think they've been doing their best to innovate, and lawsuits like this only hurt innovation and competition.

TiVo Premiere Announced

It's been well over two years since the TiVo HD came out and TiVo hasn't financially been doing all that hot. As I've said before, I have a TiVo HD and think that the user experience is unparalleled. My brother has AT&T Uverse and his DVR setup is the closest I've seen in quality compared to the TiVo, but it doesn't have the connectivity with external services (like Amazon VOD and Netflix) that TiVo does.

TiVo has finally revealed to the world the TiVo Premiere, which is a 320 GB HD TiVo with an all new, improved interface. What's really cool, and I was hoping would be included but will actually be extra, is the qwerty peanut remote:



I've always wanted a keyboard on my TV remote for searching, so that's a pretty killer feature. Still, there's not a lot of reason to upgrade for existing TiVo users. It's only $300 so it makes sense for new buyers to pounce on it, but it doesn't sound like the guts have changed much. I wish it would support Tru2way, but at least it supports Verizon FiOS. The new Flash interface (which will finally include a storage capacity meter) is getting rave reviews from reporters who saw it at the announcement, and it's probably the TiVo search beta currently available. Hopefully it's snappier than on the current hardware though.

Of course, I say it's not worth upgrading and I really want one. It hits a sweet spot, in my opinion, with storage capacity (at least for a single person) and I really want that new remote. It'll be interesting to see how the market responds to it.

Windows Phone 7 Game Demo

Microsoft showed off something at TechEd that has created a lot of positive buzz since about Windows Phone 7. They demoed Indiana Jones being played on the PC, then on a Windows Phone 7 device, and finally on the Xbox 360. What's unique here is that the game state is being shared between all 3 to provide a seamless gaming experience. Well, seamless except for that the graphics are drastically worse on your phone than on your Xbox 360, of course. Still, I'd be impressed with your phone having a mini-game that ties into your game progress instead of tying into exactly where you are in the main game. It's exciting that for the first time in God only knows how long, Microsoft is trying to innovate with their mobile platform instead of just replicating stuff that's already out on the market. The question now is whether or not December can come soon enough in a market as hot as the mobile OS market even with as unique a feature as this gaming experience.

Lifelock on Lockdown

You have probably by now seen an ad for Lifelock at some point. They claim that they proactively guarantee the safety of your identity for a monthly fee and even challenged that you'd get a million bucks if you could steal the identity of their CEO, given his social security number. Of course, someone did eventually withdraw money in his name but not sure if he ended up getting that reward money. Well, the FTC is investigating them for deceptive business practices and being too forceful in trying to gain new customers. Lifelock was unable to deliver on its promises because it didn't protect customers from the most common forms of identity theft, and they had almost no security for customer's private information on Lifelock's corporate network. It's ironic that their slogan is that no one else guarantees your good name because no one else can. It looks like Lifelock couldn't either.

Less interesting but more importantly, the US government has declassified part of its
cybersecurity plan, which excludes monitoring private traffic but does include deploying intrusion detection systems on federal networks, which I'm pretty happy about because that was my short-lived research interest in college. The basis of an IDS is that it tries to detect behavior that's uncharacteristic for a system and raise an alert for such behavior - it's preemptive rather than reactionary like most mainstream security software is. The plan also calls for improving the security of private critical infrastructures. With China threatening the likes of Google, we can use all the precautionary network security measures we can get.

AT&T Claims Tiered Pricing Inevitable

In the world of cell phones, we've always had tiered pricing on voice but almost always have had unlimited plans for data usage (not including text messaging, of course). Well, AT&T has already started rhetoric preparing people for tiered pricing, and it's a bunch of bologna. It shouldn't be possible for a mobile phone to use enough data to really put a heavy dent in AT&T's network, so I'm really skeptical that 3% of smartphone users could be using 40% of AT&T's network capacity. Maybe they should work on a better network - they have plenty of cash from all their iPhone users. The claim that they're in no rush to push out a 4G network, which means they want to charge people more to stay on a slower network than competitors like Sprint. It just doesn't make sense. To their credit, they claim no short-term plans of tiered pricing, but it's clear that they're not dealing well with the burden of so many iPhone users. It's just astounding that they don't believe the bigger bandwidth and reduced latency offered by 4G isn't going to help them out as much as sticking with their current infrastructure.

Hulu Loses Heavy Hitters

In the world of media conglomerates, Viacom is a pretty thirsty beast. Unfortunately, Hulu's revenues couldn't quench Viacom's thirst and so Hulu has lost their two biggest shows: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. It's odd that Viacom thinks that they can do better with these two properties than Hulu, which is a fairly established brand nowadays. It's well known in the mainstream, especially because of the recession as people cut out their cable providers. Contrary to the Christian Science Monitor, I don't think Hulu is in quite as deep of a hole as it may seem. Hulu still needs more time to grow revenues, and as other offerings gain success, I think Hulu will show that not only is having your shows available online is approaching a point of becoming vital, but no one does it more efficiently or effectively than Hulu. Of course, YouTube is probably Hulu's biggest competitor, but YouTube is definitely not as browsable for this kind of content compared to Hulu.

More Competitors to the iPad

I don't have much to say about either of these devices, but I definitely think they're worth knowing about. The HP Slate is starting to materialize by way of official video footage, and it's clearly proud of running Windows 7 and supporting Flash, which Steve Jobs is still trying to woefully will out of existence. While I can see the argument for HTML 5 being better in the long run and Flash maybe not being so vital on a small device, I think it's absolutely important on a tablet in the short term and it's definitely one of the things HP should capitalize on. More importantly though, the Slate will give you more freedom to run the applications you're used to if you're already on Windows 7 on your desktop/laptop. Whether or not people want that experience is yet to be seen though.

Meanwhile, a fresh leak has been dropped regarding the Microsoft Courier, which is a tablet that looks like a foldable booklet. The video footage revealed is similar to what we saw months ago, but still very exciting. Who knows if it'll ever become a reality - it seems more like a concept bred from a set of requirements than anything else.

Closing Stories

Ok, as much as I love my new laptop and how much easier blogging is on it, I have other things to do so I'm going to wrap this up with some quick stories I still think are worth taking notice of.

I have too much App1e negativity in this post already, so I'm not going to really talk to the heinous secret agreement Apple has its iPhone developers sign. It's so detrimental to the developer that I'm almost surprised that it's legal.

Real Networks gave up their fight for Real DVD, which aimed to legitimize DVD copying by replacing the DRM already on DVDs with their own DRM. I don't know if it kills the future of copy protection, but it could've created a major precedent so it's definitely a disappointing ending.

Gizmodo has an excellent article detailing the sordid history of Sony. I have a love-hate relationship with Sony - I love some of their products, but their vision is often misguided.

Props to YouTube for launching auto-captioning. That's an insanely awesome technology.

The Core i7 6-core Gulftown processor is finally out and I actually enjoyed reading this review. It's a fairly technical review, but it sounds like a great architecture.

The FCC has released a very capable tool for measuring your Internet speed with the added bonus that they can use your data point to help understand the status of broadband Internet speeds across the country. In addition to just down and up speeds, it even gives you latency! The URL is easy to memorize: braodband.gov.

Torrents are now legally available of free music from SXSW 2010. Check them out!

Popular Science has opened up the entirety of its 137-year archive for free!

I'm a big fan of these free, troubleshooting tools for Windows. If you only download one, definitely get the Blue Screen View one. My next vote is for WinDirStat, which is an application I've needed for years.

Last, but certainly not least, College Humor has a great video on the true use case of Google Wave: cyber sex.

Apple Becomes Your Mom

Apple Removes "Sexy" Apps

Apple has finally done it: they've become like a concerned mother wagging their finger at you. Last week, they took down hundreds of apps that satisfy more prurient interests. Yes, unfortunately, this was the biggest story last week. Call it a post-MWC funk.

Anyway, I really hate to harp on Apple about the iPhone app store, but every once in a while I think they need an "I told you so". I don't mean an "I told you so" that the app store would be unsuccessful - it's obviously doing gangbusters. Rather, a lot of tech journalists pointed out that censorship is a very slippery slope. Once you start policing what can be done on the devices you sell, you open a Padora's box of customer concerns and developer frustration. This latest app store bust is pretty crazy - even the biggest iPhone lovers have to agree. When you're literally kicking apps out because they have pictures of figure skaters in them, you're taking it too far. What's worse is when you kick out the little guys, like Suicide Girls, and instead preserve Playboy and Sports Illustrated. Now, Apple is not taking a stand for morality or against objectifying women, they're instead making a token concession while implicitly supporting Playboy. Yes, that seems crazy, but it's basically what they're doing. When you establish hard rules of what you're going to throw out of the store and then let someone off the hook who clearly breaks those rules it's a big contradiction.

Why did Apple do this? Apparently, they were getting too many customer complaints from concerned parents and women, in general. Apple already ceded a while ago by allowing you to restrict a phone to not be able to download mature apps, but you can still see them when you browse the app store. I think that was a valid concession (albeit, somewhat silly since it's not like there's already half-naked women all over TV and the Internet for curious teenagers). This censorship is just another reminder that Apple literally holds the incomes of more than a few mobile development shops in their hands. It's a lot of power when you consider how popular the app store has become. It's really unfortunate that they're being so irresponsible with it. If they had removed Playboy and Sports Illustrated then that would be more understandable, but Apple is basically showing that there are no rules in the app store other than the rules they make up depending on who you are and how much money you bring them. They can do this as long as Android, Palm, and Blackberry stay in the backseat, but I really hope that competition from Android helps them come to their senses. Between that story and the one on child labor at some of their factories, I feel really bad for Apple PR.

The Other Smartphones

I do have some news on your other favorite smartphone competitors.

Microsoft is actually putting some effort into courting developers with Windows Phone 7, which is something they've done a terrible job of with previous versions of Windows Mobile. Right now, they're working with hardware manufacturers to get some unity across different Windows Phone 7 devices (a big issue with previous Windows Mobile devices), but there's still no details yet on the development kit. Surely, Microsoft understands that this platform is dead in the water if they can't attract mobile developers, so we'll see what they do in the months to come. At the Engadget Show last week, an LG Windows Phone 7 device was actually spotted, but it doesn't seem all that exciting. Just another smartphone until we see more of it.



For the two of you out there interested in webOS: version 1.4 came out over the weekend bringing a number of welcome improvements including video recording (and editing), huge compatibility improvements in the browser, a much improved way to start apps to promote multi-tasking, and blinking light notification on the gesture area. Now that webOS 1.4 is out, Flash 10.1 beta is just around the corner as 1.4 has changes necessary to support it, which will make the Pre and Pixi (and, of course, their Verizon counterparts) among the first phones to support Flash. This has been one of the biggest updates to webOS since the Pre's launch, but it doesn't matter unless Palm starts pimping out these features in their ads.

If you think that the iPhone leads the smartphone market, then think again. I believe that graph reflects worldwide revenues, which is why Nokia is so big even though it's a struggle to spot a Nokia phone when you walk down the street. I know Nokias are big in India because I remember wondering when I was there how people could tolerate such terrible UIs. Nokia has even had better sales growth that Apple, who was actually 3rd behind RIM. I wish the graphic would've included webOS and Android, even if their combined market share is smaller than HTC (I hope that it isn't).

Google Hacker Discovered

The source of the attacks on Google from January has been discovered to be a Chinese security consultant. The attacks were cleverly disguised as coming from the IP addresses of a trade school, which doesn't prove anything given that they could easily have been part of a botnet. The government is believe to have leveraged this consultant's code to conduct the attack, but China still denies involvement.

This same guy may have been part of an attack on Intel that occurred around the same time. This theory hasn't been proved yet, but given the nature of the circumstances, it's likely that the attacks were related. Apparently, Intel and Google were two of 34 companies that were attacked around the same time, so this thing was a pretty big deal. Intel is remaining pretty mum on what damage the attack did, which could mean that serious secrets were leaked.

Unrelated to the January attacks, a major phishing exploit hit Twitter last week by way of direct messages. It asks if a given link is you, and when you click through it uses your account to send a similar message to 10 other people. It's not clear whether or not your login credentials are leaked in the process to send out future spam, but given that people are being advised to change their password if they've clicked through I'd bet that whatever else happens on click-through is not good.

Quickies

I'm almost falling asleep here while typing so it's time to wrap up.

Ars Technica did a really great investigation of why most of the US doesn't have 100 Mbps internet connections. I wish I had more time to talk about it, but it's definitely worth a read.

3 Google executives were convicted for failing to comply with Italian privacy laws in a case where Google Video allowed a video to be uploaded of an autistic kid being bullied. This case has definitely gone too far and Google feels pretty sore about it.

Sony, Samsung, LG, Hitachi, and Toshiba have been accused by a small electronics store of price fixing on optical disc drives. Apparently, this sort of stuff isn't that uncommon in the East so these charges may have some merit behind them.

Amazon was the most trusted brand of 2009 (according to market research company Millward Brown)! Amazon actually sells about half the other brands on that list and ships merchandise through two of them.

UT Austin made Network World's list of the nation's 10 hottest computer science schools! Hook 'em!

The winners of the Engadget Awards have been announced with the PS3 and Droid aimpressively going home with two awards apiece. It was kind of interesting that the editors thought the Nuvifone was the worst device of the year whereas everyone else was more let down by the 3G Shuffle.

Have a great first week of March, everyone!

The Buzz About Google Buzz

Google's Social Foray

Be forewarned: I have to talk about a lot of Google news today. They just dominated the media last week - there's no getting around it.

At the center of it all is Google Buzz, which has clearly attracted at least the amount of attention as the iPad from the tech community. Compared to most other Google launches, except for Wave, the amount of buzz it has gotten is kind of uncharacteristic of a new Google product. I don't think it's quite the buzz that Google wanted though.

So what is Google Buzz? Simply put, it's Google's take on social networking. It's a tab in your Gmail account that lets you connect with your friends as they interact on a number of services including Twitter, Picasa, YouTube, Blogspot, Google talk, Google Reader, and Flickr. It basically gives you a feed of the people you follow ala Facebook and lets you update also kind of like on Facebook where you can say stuff or post a link or photo. You also get some finer controls on privacy. Their vision for this is a little bigger than what you see in your web browser though since you can have a Buzz layer on Google Maps to see where your friends are (I guess like Latitude but on speed?), and the mobile apps do voice recognition. If you're on webOS though you're out of luck - Google didn't show any love for Palm.

Why would you want this thing? Well, Google is selling it on the premise that it hooks into your Gmail so if you're on Gmail then you get it for free and it just gives you the stuff you care about, but I don't know how it figures out what you care about unless it strictly bases that off when you click to "like" stuff. In my opinion, it's kind of silly and unnecessary. And I'm definitely not alone in that camp. For one thing, it doesn't really add any value except for the Google Maps layer, which I can't vouch for and is something you can kind of already do with Latitude and Foursquare. I can understand that Google doesn't want to get left in the dust with social networking (as they've already shown with domestic failures Orkut and Dodgeball), but this isn't really great timing for it. My running opinion of technology is that it should solve a problem or fill a need, but I don't think this does either.

To make matters worse, there have been serious privacy concerns called to attention. For example, the default when it launched was that the people you followed was public and you were auto-following a bunch of people from your Gmail contact list, so this was basically revealing part of your address book to the world. They've fixed that, but as CNet aptly puts it, using Buzz is still kind of awkward and not compelling.

The most insightful thoughts on Buzz though, in my opinion, have come from Digg co-founder and Internet celebrity Kevin Rose. In a nutshell, he believes part of the intent of Google Buzz is to hook directly into Google Search and provide real-time relevancy for up-and-coming sites and news articles. While Digg already does a great job of people-driven news promotion, Google Buzz is a wider base, is intended to be as easy to interact with as Twitter, and provides data that other sites can farm to improve what they do, assuming your feed on Buzz is public. This theory is actually further supported but Google's acquisition of social search service Aardvark, which lets you pose natural questions to real people in your social network so you can get real answers instead of having to search for information yourself. In the end, it all ends in beefing up Google Search. Of course, that's just one theory though.

I don't think it's fair to write off Google Buzz already. It's not that exciting right now, but this is Google we're talking about. They tend to not settle for developing mediocre products. Plus, sometimes these things just take a while to catch on. Facebook and Twitter didn't get so big overnight.

Google Broadband

While we're talking about Google let's move on to something that's actually much cooler than Buzz. They're planning on building an ultra high speed broadband network with speeds up to 1Gbps (which is probably 150x faster than what you have right now) at competitive prices. I'm totally salivating at this idea. They're only going to test it out in a few markets to start out with for 50,000 to 500,000 people. Google claims that their interest in doing this is to test out applications that would need lots of bandwidth to perform well. Still no idea what markets they're looking into, but this is the kind of competition we really need in the broadband market. Verizon is the only company out there really pushing the envelope on a large scale and it's all kinds of exciting that Google is taking an interest simply because they have enough resources to actually compete. Even if they end up canning the program, if they get Comcast and Time Warner to wake up and try to provide better products then it'll be a success in and of itself.

Is Google Killing Startups?

This is a really interesting story that I'm really at odds with. Business Insider has an editorial up claiming that every engineer Google snatches up is a missed opportunity for a startup. They would probably include a couple of other companies hypothetically, but the most obvious example is Google. Ultimately, the security blanket of these larger companies is bringing in top talent rather than a market where people have to be entrepreneurs and create their own jobs.

The thing is, most startups don't succeed. It's an extremely risky venture and I vehemently protest that idea that any developer has the chops to start their own company. It's like when the government said that anyone is entitled to a house even if they can't afford it. Starting a company is hard work and requires a certain type of person, and not every developer that goes to Google has that even though they're really smart and work great as a cog in a much larger machine. I love that the US is a place that encourages entrepreneurial spirit and I'm not disputing the value of startups at all, but I don't think Google is killing them. I've heard plenty of stories of people leaving places like Google and Microsoft to start their own company. The experience they got in a larger company ends up being invaluable to their venture. Not everyone can come out of school and go straight into creating a startup because not everyone is Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, but more people definitely can after being in the industry for a while and learning from the brilliant people out there, who have tremendous influence on the industry by impacting these individuals at places like Google.

If you want to blame anyone blame our country's educational system for its failings in properly promoting science and technology, and cutting back on scholarships. I don't know who this guy has been talking to, but the talent pool is definitely limited out there compared to the positions available within computer science. I do think it makes sense, however, having entrepreneurs go to schools and teach them about starting a company so that they have that option, but I don't think it's productive to call Google the bad guy in this situation.

Google Stands Up to Australian Censorship

See? I told you it was a ton of Google news. It happens sometimes.

Let me sneak in an only slightly related piece of YouTube news: they've created a safety mode to help filter out objectionable content, presumably so YouTube can be whitelisted for educational uses and even children's use at home (or adults' use in the office).

The real provocative story is that Google is refusing requests for censorship on YouTube from the Australian government. This may be part of the motivation behind their threat to pull out of China: their censorship cessions have opened a Pandora's box of requests for them to censor elsewhere. What you really have to consider is what an impact Google can make in these countries. I'm not a Google fanboy, mind you, but I think they could have the power to change things in some of these countries. Right now, the requests that the Australian government are making are due to their self-interest rather than law, and Google has pledged to abide by the laws in the countries it's in. If Australia decides to change their law and Google refuses, what happens? If Google pulls out, will people get really upset and question their government's censorship? I'd hope so, but it's a hard thing to measure.

The Last Bits

What a terrible pun. Wow. Anyway, just a few quick stories before I sign off and get back to playing some guitar - my V-day treat to me.

A new Russian crimeware called Spy Eye has an option to remove competitor Zeus software from the users machine, along with stealing banking credentials. The intent of the program is to create Trojan horses so the person who installed it had it coming, but just a funny way to try to kill off a rival.

AOL has integrated Facebook Chat with AIM. Do people really use Facebook Chat on a regular basis?

Google Maps has added 9 new experimental features including rotatable maps and aerial imagery. Very nifty stuff!

The founder of 4chan, the least well-known gigantic cultural influence in the world, spoke at TED. Very interesting talk about privacy.

Google Street View did Whistler! Check out this sucker:



Have a great week everyone!

Gone Phishing on the iPhone

Cybersecurity Shmybersecurity

There was a pretty good amount of security news last week but not much of anything else. Given that I'm kind of tired from yesterday (worked all day and night), I'm going to keep this kind of short since it was a slow news week anyway.

Network World kind of informally posted what they think the 10 best IT jobs will be in 2010. I don't know that they had hard evidence to back their list, but it's actually a pretty good list. Guess what's at the top of that list? No, not a shmybersecurity expert but a security specialist. The list has some other cool choices, like open source evangelist and service assurance manager (super important), but let's stick with security specialist.

Almost every week for the past several months I've had at least one security issue a week to talk about. Sometimes I don't cover them just because they get repetitive. Last week alone there were two biggies. Google was at the center of a corporate espionage attack a couple of weeks ago and so last week they teamed up with the NSA to get to the bottom of the attack, which is believed to have originated in China. It was so serious that Google decided that they're not going to filter search results in China anymore. I'm not sure if they've stuck with this policy or not since then, but they were clearly frazzled by this. Given that the accounts violated were active human rights supporters in China, it's very likely that the attacks originated within the Chinese government.

More recent than that was that a security flaw was discovered in the iPhone opening the door to phishing attacks. I wonder if this will make security on the iPhone a big deal like it is for Internet Explorer on PCs? It basically allows someone to easily modify your mobile configuration files over the air and make it look like it came from Apple. Someone who didn't know about this exploit could do something like connect to a malicious server instead of a VPN and have all their transmissions compromised.

With all these stories cropping up, it's not surprising that a security specialist would be in demand. Coming full circle back to this section header, a lot of people don't understand cybersecurity at all. However, it's not easy to understand if you want to be safe from every kind of attack you're likely to come across. Even the tech savvy get tricked. It's an arms race because the bad guys get more and more clever as we figure them out - like a polymorphic virus. I don't know if it will pan out since often things don't in a government as complicated as ours, but the House has approved legislation to authorize the NIST to develop a cybersecurity education program. This would be not only for the government but also for businesses and consumers to make our economy stronger against security scares. I hope that it ends up leading to real results, because it's something that we've needed for a long time now.

Superbowl Ads

Internet video has gotten really big. It's exciting. I remember blogging about IP TV a few years back and looking forward to a future where people control what they watch and have a much larger platform of content in the Internet. We're not quite there yet, but it's promising that 178 million US Internet users watched 33 billion online videos in December. It's crazy that 40% of those videos were on YouTube and 3% was on Hulu, which was the next highest percentage. The times have really changed from a world where the Internet wasn't a big deal and no one was using much of their bandwidth unless they were pirating stuff.

Anyway, it's cool that I could turn to Hulu for Superbowl ads since I missed the game. A couple of my friends had planned on doing that since they don't like football (I know, blasphemy). Hulu did this last year, too, but I think they improved this year with showing you how much people liked each video (at least I think that's new). I had the game on in the background and actually managed to catch the really good ads live because they happened to catch my attention. My favorites were definitely the eTrade one, the Doritos House Rules one, and the Megan Fox one. Honorable mentions though to Snickers and the Doritos Underdog one. Jeers to Prince of Persia (stop embarrassing good video game franchises, please) and The Backup Plan. Am I crazy or were the movie trailers last Superbowl much better? This year also saw Google's first Superbowl ad, and it was creative.

Let eBooks Grow

I don't want to talk to this too much since I have a vested interest in Amazon (I assure you that I have 0 insider knowledge on this thing), but I have something to say.

A part of me is stupefied by how book publishers are dealing with eBooks, but a part of me is glad because it's exposing them for the inane people they are. Amazon is selling eBooks from HarperCollins, for example, for less they pay HarperCollins and now Rupert Murdoch is bemoaning the death of paper books and wants to force prices of eBooks up like Macmillan does. When is this guy going to retire? He's so out-of-date he probably etches his notes on stone tablets. This is the same guy who didn't want Google indexing his news articles, mind you, because he can't see the writing on the wall. Book publishers have gotten away with over-charging people for books and under-paying authors for too long and these arguments with Amazon are only surfacing how shady they can be. I don't understand what's so wrong with trying to sell eBooks for less money than a physical version. It's all profit as a digital copy! First they didn't want a computerized voice reading their books on the Kindle, and now Amazon is offering them a better revenue split at the $10 price point but they're still recalcitrant! Whether they like it or not, paper books as we know them aren't going to last forever. I know you're clutching your copy of Catcher in the Rye and staring blankly at the screen but it's true! We don't even live in a world anymore where everyone reads newspapers on paper.

Ok, stepping off my soapbox. Thanks for indulging me.

Last Notes

Just a couple of items before I sign off here.

This is a really fun article about 18 gadgets that used to be high-tech. It's so enlightening sometimes to think about the past and how far we've come and how we got here.

The CEO of Sun resigned following the heels of their acquisition by Oracle. Kind of sad that Sun has fallen so far from grace, but it happens. At least he resigned in style via haiku.

Are relational databases dying? Very interesting thoughts from Computer World.

Enjoy the sunny weather outside while you can! I'll see you next week. Same bat time, same bat channel.