Technology and Mobile Gadgets to Crave Blog
At Hackthepress in Paris yesterday, local design and data group Rue89 came up with this nifty little crowdsource: ask people what’s the deepest they’ve been – underground or underwater – and then show the answers. Here’s the result
UK’s fourth largest broadband provider says it will no longer cooperate with controversial law firm
BSkyB, one of the UK’s largest broadband providers, has said it will no longer cooperate with the requests of controversial solicitors’ firm ACS:Law and that it will challenge them in court, after around 8,000 of its customers had their personal information leaked online.
The details – including credit card details and addresses – of thousands of broadband users became accessible via the firm’s website in the aftermath of a series of “denial of service” attacks, orchestrated by members of internet forums protesting about the methods of tracking and notification employed by the company.
The Information Commissioner has said a fine of £500,000 could be levied upon ACS:Law, which also faces a disciplinary tribunal by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, legal action by pressure group Privacy International and legal action from people it apparently wrongly-identified as downloading illegal material.
The company appears to compile lists of alleged infringers tracked by IP addresses, then appeals for a court order to the relevant internet service provider to hand over more information about the customer before taking the accused to court.
Sky now says it will challenge these court orders until ACS:Law can prove it stores customer informtion in a secure way. A Sky spokesman said:
“Following recent events, we have suspended all cooperation with ACS:Law with immediate effect. This suspension will remain in place until ACS:Law demonstrates adequate measures to protect the security of personal information.
“We continue to be very concerned at the apparent loss of data held by ACS:Law and by the actions of those who have sought to publicise the identities of individual customers. Like other broadband providers, Sky can be required to disclose information about customers whose accounts are alleged to have been used for illegal downloading. We support the principle that copyright material should be protected and we cooperate with court orders requiring disclosure.
“Because the security of customer information is also a high priority, we only ever disclose such data in encrypted form. In addition, we have an agreement with ACS:Law that requires data to be stored and used safely and securely.”
• Update 29/09: Separately, broadband provider Plusnet – which had around 400 of its customers’ information exposed during the security breach of ACS:Law’s website – today appeared to throw its weight behind increased transparency in the way companies collect information about those it suspects of downloading copyrighted content. The ISP, which was bought by BT in 2007, also suspended cooperation with ACS:Law. It said: “Due to serious concerns about the integrity of the processes used to obtain and store private customer information we are suspending with immediate effect the supply of any further customer data to ACS:Law until we are satisfied that weaknesses in these procedures have been addressed.”
A spokewoman told the Guardian: “Our first concern is with our customers but we have been obliged to respond to court orders requiring that we disclose customer data. However, there is increasing evidence that there are deep concerns regarding the integrity of the process being used by rights holders to obtain customer data from ISPs for pursuing alleged copyright infringements.“We need to have further confidence that the initial information gathered by rights holders is robust and that our customers will not be treated unfairly. We are urgently exploring how this can be assured, including through the assistance of the courts.”
The investigation by the Information Commissioner will try to determine whether the data exposure was a result of ACS:Law’s method of storing information about people it suspects of sharing copyrighted material, or whether it was a direct result of the denial of service attacks against the website. The 365MB of information – which has since been distributed around the internet – containts the details of around 8,000 Sky broadband subscribers, 400 Plusnet customers, 5,000 Britons accused of illicit filesharing and emails between ACS:Law and its clients.
Alex Hanff, of Privacy International, said the data breach was “one of the worst ever in the UK”, while online advocacy organisation Open Rights Group today warned that the “unwarranted private surveillance” of people accused of downloading is a direct outcome of the Digital Economy Act [DEA]. Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, told the Guardian: “ACS:Law appears to be preparing to use DEA processes to target filesharers and Ofcom’s code is wide open for them using that process, so that’s a massive concern. This is all pretty terrible because, to be frank, Ofcom’s system is going to throw up these situations as they’re allowing private companies to exploit them.”
ACS:Law had no comment when contacted by the Guardian.
Join Aleks Krotoski, Jemima Kiss, Gia Milinovich and Charles Arthur for the latest technology news. This week, they dissect The Social Network, often referred to as The Facebook Movie, because it documents the rise and rise and rise of the most popular social networking site in the world. 500 million users can’t be wrong, right? Charles, Jemima and Gia report back from this week’s special preview screening.
Also this week, the virtual and the real worlds are under threat from hackers. An Iranian nuclear power plant has been infiltrated by a computer worm that attacks the integral systems of the plant’s workings. Charles suggests it’s a government job, and Gia gets excited about nuclear espionage.
Alexander Hanff from Privacy International gives us the implications of the 750 MB file accidentally revealed on the ACS:Law website after it was taken down by members of the 4Chan social network – and what legal recourse the 10,000 email and ISP address owners have against the firm, who have the details as part of investigations into illegal peer-to-peer filesharing.
Next week, as previously billed for this programme, the team are joined by Simon Carmichael from Torch Partners who will be answering your pressing start-up questions in the latest in our Start-Up Surgery series.
Don’t forget to …
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Plus why we can’t have nice things, tablets examined and more
Tragedy of the commons, under discussion. Photo by Chris Radcliff on Flickr. Some rights reserved
A quick burst of 6 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
This is why we can’t have nice things >> The 23x blog
“So, where did I go wrong? I offered a service for free that anyone could use to shorten URLs quickly and conveniently. You probably never heard of it and that’s OK; it wasn’t supposed to be a large success. It was a way for me to play with PHP, SQL and mod_rewrite. It was something I could just put out there for people to use if they wanted as a sort of way of giving back to the internet community. And of course, the internet pissed all over it, as is their way. This is why we can’t have nice things.”
Beware: Chinese iPhone 4 comes with a crippled Maps app >> Ogle Earth
“I soon discovered that the Chinese version of the iPhone 4 comes with an aggravating quirk, though: The built-in Maps app is crippled. My phone’s base map is hard-wired to Google Maps’ censored dataset for China, where the depiction of China’s borders complies with the official propaganda of the Chinese government. It does not, for example, show the region of Arunachal Pradesh as being disputed by China and India. On my phone, it belongs to China, even though the facts on the ground belie it — it is currently administered by India.”
HP Abandons Android | John Paczkowski >> AllThingsD
JP repeats the FT on HP: three OSs would be 1 too many, it seems.
RIM’s new BlackBerry tablet, WebWorks developer platform – but who wants small tablets? >> Tim Anderson’s ITWriting
“I doubt there will be much enthusiasm for carting around a phone, a small tablet, and a laptop, so in order to be viable as a portable device for work it has to be a laptop replacement. I do see this happening already with the iPad, though for me personally a netbook is both cheaper and more practical.
“Apps are another key factor. It is smart of RIM to support Flash and AIR, which along with HTML 5 web applications are likely the best bet for supporting something like the PlayBook without a lot of device-specific work.”
Microsoft may be turning a new page in dropping Live Spaces >> Ars Technica
“But this is a remarkable decision nonetheless. Microsoft is king of Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome. The company has historically chosen to reinvent the wheel on many occasions: creating its own audio and video codecs, its own network protocols, and its own programming languages.
“It’s not just external inventions that get ignored. Product teams within Microsoft even reinvent other Microsoft software: many of the programming tools overlap and duplicate functionality, many teams have recreated the same user interface concepts over and over. For example, there are at least four different “ribbon” implementations (Office, native Windows Ribbon Framework, MFC, WPF) which all look and behave slightly differently from each other. This is bad for users—programs that look superficially similar have different behavior depending on the which ribbon they use—and wasteful for Microsoft.”
End of the Road for Xmarks >> Xmarks blog
It’s dead, Jim. The bookmarking service has 2m users, 5m desktops, 3,000 new accounts per day, 44m bookmarks, no money. (Thanks dvdhldn for the pointer.)
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The software giant appears to have decided that hosting blogs isn’t the way to get ahead – and is passing its 7m users (and ad revenues) to the blogging company
Microsoft is closing its Windows Live Spaces blogging platform and moving all its users over to Wordpress.com. It’s a dramatic move which means that it’s giving up a potentially huge slice of advertising business – perhaps because it simply can’t make it pay.
Or as Microsoft puts it, “partnering together” – redundant word alert – “and providing an upgrade for 30 million Windows Live Spaces customers”.
Make no mistake, this is dramatic: it means that Microsoft is giving up potentially valuable turf where it could have sold ads, in the manner of Google and the Blogger platform (which generates revenues for Google), and retreating from at least one part of the online space.
As Tim Anderson puts it,
“According to Microsoft it has 7 million users and 30 million visitors; and if you accept that business on the web is all about traffic and monetizing traffic, then it strikes me as odd that Microsoft has no better idea of what to do with that traffic than to give it to someone else…. What this means is that WordPress, not Microsoft, now has the opportunity to show ads or market other services to these users. “
Dharmesh Mehta, director of Windows Live Product Management and author of the post for the Windows Live Spaces team, says:
“As we looked at customers’ blogging needs and what different companies were providing, we were particularly interested in what WordPress.com is doing. They have a host of impressive capabilities – from a scalable platform and leading spam protection, to great personalization and customization. WordPress powers over 8.5% of the web, is used on over 26 million sites, and WordPress.com is seen by over 250 million people every month. Not only that, Automattic is a company filled with great people focused on improving blogging experiences. So rather than having Windows Live invest in a competing blogging service, we decided the best thing we could do for our customers was to give them a great blogging solution through WordPress.com.”
Basically, if you’re one of those Live Space bloggers, and you’re actually still doing stuff on your blog, then Live Spaces is encouraging – nay, pushing – you over to Wordpress.
Because if you don’t want to shift over to Wordpress…
“If you’re not ready to migrate today, you can also choose to download your blog content, migrate later, or delete your Space.”
You’ve got six months before it disappears into the great Bit Bucket where Geocities has gone.
Often, of course, you can figure out who’s really won out in a deal by comparing the corporate statements. What does Wordpress say? On its blog (of course), Paul Kim, its vice-president of user growth, says:
“We’re very happy that Microsoft chose WordPress.com as their preferred new blogging service for Windows Live users. It’s a sign of how strong WordPress.com has become, and credit for that goes to every one of you who’s been creating here.”
It certainly is. And note that there’s no mention of Microsoft getting any advertising dibs there. Wordpress makes its money through premium blogs: you can get a wordpress.com site for free, but if you pay extra then you can do all sorts of other things, including host it on your own site (while leaving hassles like upgrades to Wordpress themselves.)
Following the news that Vox is closing (on 30 September), and that its parent Six Apart (which created Movable Type) is joining with VideoEgg to create a new company called Say Media, one has to think that the pool of hosted blogging platforms is shrinking rather rapidly. Atthis rate, pretty soon it’s only going to be Blogger and Wordpress.
And if that’s what it comes down to, you’d have to say that Wordpress has the edge. It’s being taken up by the British government, even for non-blogging websites, where it acts as an effective content management system.
That though may overlook the emergence of “superfast blog” systems such as Tumblr, which strip away a lot of the stuff on the outside – which can make blog upkeep complicated or tedious.
Even so, it’s not clear from here where blogging, as a separate activity, is really going. I still have the sense – as I said last year – that the long tail of blogging is dying. Microsoft’s capitulation over Live Spaces seems an acknowledgement of that (its previous post, linked in that quote above, notes how much of a problem spam blogs and comment spam have been; indeed, when I used to trawl blogs for Technology content, Live Spaces blogs were notorious for being pure splogs or copy/paste jobs).
Wordpress.com has done a better job keeping the spam out. The question now is whether it is building its business on top of an iceberg in a warming sea – or on dry land.
The Social Network is immensely unflattering for Mark Zuckerberg. Aaron ‘West Wing’ Sorkin and David ‘Fight Club’ Fincher have achieved a remarkable thing – an exhilarating, analytical and witty film about coding a website. But the drama is almost entirely spun out of Zuckerberg himself; his tactlessness and insensitivity around women, his obstinate and arrogant attitude to any authority figures, his precociousness and his curious mix of naivety and fierce ambition.
It’s a fascinating film for anyone as obsessed by the Facebook phenomenon as we all are, and a big geek thrill to see tech culture finally done some justice by Hollywood. And would it stand up as a film on its own merits? Absolutely.
If Zuckerberg is an awkward genius, few of the other characters in the film are any more complimentary. Co-founder Eduardo Saverin is loyal but rather wet and non-committal, Napster co-founder Sean Parker is opportunistic and obnoxious and the Winklevoss twins, who claimed Zuckerberg stole their idea, are a delightful Tweedledum and Tweedledee – as styled by Calvin Klein. Discussing whether to beat their revenge out of him, Tyler says: “Well I’m 6’5″, 220 and there’s two of me.”
Bar a sympathetic lawyer and a jilted girlfriend, women come off pretty badly. Two early-stage Facebook groupies are given short shrift when Zuck hands out jobs to his friends, and elsewhere women are seen on the periphery smoking bongs and offering up their chests as coke platters. The implications of Facebook’s impact on our attitudes to privacy and friendship are touched on, but fleetingly. It’s no small irony that a character with limited social skills builds a site that will redefine social relationships for half a billion people, and that’s the kernel of the film.
There’s a considerable amount of skill in putting pacey, engaging dialogue around scene after scene of legal negotiations and site coding which Sorkin does supremely well with well-crafted flashbacks and some unpredictable and eccentric behaviour from Zuckerberg, the boy genius. Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Zuck, apparently researched Asperger’s in building up his role; in the opening scene, Zuck’s inarticulate, obtuse insensitivity to his girlfriend almost seems to take that characterisation too far.
There was a moment – after a series of scenes where the ‘Winklevi’, as Zuck calls them, are becomingly increasingly angry – where the intensity of the plot seems to waver a little, as if there’s been too much shouting for too long. But the film finds more pace and scope in the nightclubs of San Francisco, student parties of Harvard and some deliciously claustrophobic camerawork at the Henley Regatta.
By the end, it’s hard not to sympathise with Zuck as the story is punctuated by scenes of him wired in and coding, seemingly isolated and overwhelmed by the phenomenon around him. He is portrayed as ruthlessly focused on creating that phenomenon, but by the end he seems less malicious – especially about the breakdown in his relationship with best friend Eduardo Saverin – and more naive. He’s perversely likeable. As his lawyer says to him towards the end: “Every creation myth needs a devil.”
Facebook investor Peter Thiel told a conference in San Francisco last night that even at $30bn, the site is still undervalued. While most of us will never know how close The Social Network is to the real deal, it will come to define Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg for a very long time to come. And as for Facebook’s bottom line – myth building this good is only going to push that up.
I give it four pokes out of five.
The Social Network opens in the UK on 15 October
• Also: 10 facts you (probably) didn’t know about Mark Zuckerberg
The social networking site vanished from the internet late on Thursday as its engineers struggled with network problems
Facebook vanished from the internet for lots of people on Thursday evening – and while it wasn’t quite as bad as the internet imploding, it did mean that Like buttons disappeared from websites all over the web.
The problem wasn’t clear at first; it seems to have been problems with the network; while a DNS lookup worked, the connection failed (in my case anyway) just short of the site itself, at tfbnw.net – Facebook’s outlying network.
Trying to reach it via its own IP address (for my search, to http://69.63.189.11) also failed, which also puts the flaw at the outlying network. In case you’re wondering, Facebook’s domain registration is all tickety-boo, safe until 2020.
Facebook put out a statement saying that
“We’re currently experiencing some site issues causing Facebook to be slow or unavailable for some users. We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.”
The downtime happened at the end of the working day in New York, and just after lunch in California. Productivity in those areas was not believed to be affected negatively.
The jokes of course came thick and fast: “Can Facebook stay down? Too much to ask?” queried Mo McRoberts on Twitter.
Also that Mark Zuckerberg was going to keep it down until everyone promises not to go and see The Social Network, the fictionalised film about how Facebook got started.
My own contribution is that Status Quo can rewrite their famous song and say it’s about Facebook: “Down down, DNS down… down down, DNS down..”
I thank you. Here all week. Try the chicken.
Think you know the king of social networking? See if you knew these facts.
*unless you read the New Yorker profile of him, or saw the film, or are very attentive to our coverage.
1) He’s only five foot eight, but looks taller because he stands up very straight.
2) He has been in a long-term relationship with Priscilla Chan, who is taking a medical degree and hopes to be a pediatrician, since meeting her at a Friday night party at the Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi where he was carrying beer glasses which said #include beer.h.
3) His father is a dentist whose website says “we cater for cowards”.
4) So that his father could be notified when there was a patient in the waiting room downstairs in the dentist practice attached to the house, he created a network. He called it ZuckNet.
5) While he was still in high school (equivalent to secondary school in the UK) he wrote a program that would recommend music based on what you liked.
6) He was approached by Microsoft, which was interested in buying it, but he declined.
7) He is not (contrary to the film’s claim) the youngest billionaire; that credit actually goes to Dustin Moskovitz, who is eight days younger than Zuckerberg and was one of his roommates – and co-founders of Facebook – at Harvard University.
Moskovitz is a billionaire (worth $1.4bn) solely by virtue of the estimated value of Facebook shares ($76 on the unofficial “aftermarket”): he owns a slew of them.
9) Zuckerberg’s favourite film director on his Facebook page is Aaron Sorkin.
10) Or was, until he found out that Sorkin had directed written The Social Network. Then Sorkin’s name went away.
Read Jemima Kiss’s review of the film The Social Network on the PDA blog
Newest rival to Apple’s iPad gets regal launch in San Francisco, but won’t be on general sale until next year
Nine months since the launch of the Apple iPad, 25 days following Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, BlackBerry-manufacturer Research In Motion (RIM) has revealed details of its tablet computer, dubbed Playbook.
The announcement of RIM’s eagerly-anticipated assault on the tablet computer market was as elegant as its enterprise-led handsets. It will not rush the Playbook out in time for the festive season and those likely to get the most from their new tablet device will be those that already own a BlackBerry, it seems.
Without further ado, the specifications:
• 7in touchscreen (same as Samsung Galaxy Tab, 2.7in smaller than Apple iPad)
• BlackBerry Tablet OS built on architecture by recently-acquired QNX
• 1 GHz dual-core processor
• 1 GB RAM
• HD video playback
• HDMI video outputJuly 7 2008:
• Bluetooth 2.1
• MicroHDMI and microUSB ports
• Support for Adobe Flash Player 10.1
• Dimensions: 5.1″x7.6″x0.4″
• Weight: 400g (Apple iPad: 680-730g; Samsung Galaxy Tab: 380g)
• Able to connect to BlackBerry Enterprise Servers
• Pairing with BlackBerry handsets
• Ability to connect to 3G network on existing BlackBerry data plan
Remarkably similar to the details leaked in previous weeks, don’t you think? (Minus the moniker, of course. Which leaves the more interesting question: what happens to the BlackPad and SurfBook domain registrations?)
Playbook will be shipped to developers and enterprise customers from October, and will go on general sale early next year. No price was announced for the device, but it is thought that it will sit towards the more-affordable end of the scale to Apple’s iPad.
Opening RIM’s annual BlackBerry Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, company president Mike Lazaridis said the curiously-titled Playbook “is the world’s first professional tablet”, adding:
“RIM set out to engineer the best professional-grade tablet in the industry with cutting-edge hardware features and one of the world’s most robust and flexible operating systems.
“The BlackBerry PlayBook solidly hits the mark with industry leading power, true multitasking, uncompromised web browsing and high performance multimedia.”
• Separately, RIM also launched a free analytics service that provides application developers with data on how, when and where customers are using their apps. Alan Brenner, senior vice president of the BlackBerry platform, said: “We are enabling developers to better monetise their services and drive deeper engagement to create richer, more interesting social apps for BlackBerry.”
Plus transport everywhere, Android everywhere and more
A quick burst of 6 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
NYT blames yet another culprit: Nokia’s Culture of Complacency >> asymco
“The challenge Nokia faces is not complacency. It’s [...]
