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Anonymous Intercepts FBI and Scotland Yard Conference Call

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:42:21 +0000

An element of hacker group Anonymous announced today that it has intercepted a conference call between the FBI and UK law enforcement wherein they discuss tracking down Anonymous. The 16 minute call was recorded and has been posted on various sites, including YouTube. The FBI and Scotland Yard have confirmed their call was illegally intercepted.

The first few minutes are idle banter between the early arrivals, but from there the conversation moves on to the efforts to identify members of Anonymous and LulzSec. Anonymous beeped out names of suspects and contacts not yet apprehended, but left in the names of those already arrested, including Ryan Cleary and Jake Davis. The call is from January 17th, and the investigators can be heard discussing the case against Cleary and Davis.

It is suspected that Anonymous gained access to law enforcement email where an invitation to the conference all was available. It should be noted that the phone number and password for the call was listed in plain text. This is certainly embarrassing for the FBI and Scotland Yard, and one has to wonder if more releases from that hacked email account will be incoming. 

Head to Head: Amazon Kindle Fire vs. Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:24:06 +0000

If you can’t beat Apple’s iPad, change the rules of the game. Amazon and Barnes & Noble are taking a bath on sales of the $199 Kindle Fire and the $249 Nook Tablet, respectively, and making up for it with profits on sales of electronic merchandise (e-books, videos, music, and apps). The strategy has succeeded in moving a lot of hardware, with each company on track to sell millions of units (although the ratio of Kindle Fire to Nook Tablet sales is greatly in Amazon’s favor so far). Both tablets feature nearly identical 7-inch, 1024x600 LCDs and rely on Wi-Fi for connectivity. Which should tempt you away from the high-end tablets? Only a bloody-knuckled deathmatch will tell.

Round 1: Design

If a plain black slab with a screen is your cup of tea, then drink in the Kindle Fire. Its headphone output and power button (its lone hardware control) are uncomfortably close to its Micro USB port (used for charging and file transfers) across the bottom of the tablet.

No doubt the prettier option, the Nook Tablet sports a raised silver-gray bezel and coated backplate that, in concert with the hollowed-out corner for the microSD slot, give the Nook a visual flare and render it the grippier tablet. The Nook’s hardware volume controls and menu button also score it points. The Kindle Fire offers two speakers to the Nook’s one; but the difference is negligible, and only the Nook offers a built-in microphone.

Winner: Nook Tablet

Round 2: User Interface

Both tablets break a sweat obliterating the UI confines of the Android 2.3 OS they’re built on. The Kindle Fire’s bookshelf-themed homepage displays your favorite and most recently visited web pages, apps, documents, and more, with menu tabs labeled Books, Music, Video, Apps, Web, and so on. It’s a departure from the stock Android UI, but it’s more user friendly than the Nook Tablet’s storefront-feeling UI, which also insists on using “shelves” to display your various media, apps, and files.

The Nook Tablet, on the other hand, preserves more Android functionality, including customizable home screens that help you bypass its convoluted Library shelves. The Nook Tablet’s browser displays more web-page content per screen; and we like its hard menu button, which calls up a shortcut menu for apps, URLs, settings, and more.

Winner: Nook Tablet

Round 3: Storage

You might think that the Nook Tablet’s 16GB of onboard memory combined with its microSD slot means game over for the 8GB, nonexpandable Kindle Fire. But the Nook Tablet reserves most of its onboard memory for content purchased from Barnes & Noble, leaving you just 1GB for everything else. The playing field levels further when you take into account Amazon’s free cloud storage for all Amazon media purchases, plus the 5GB of free cloud storage the company provides for storing your files.

The Nook Tablet can accommodate a microSD card with up to 32GB of capacity, but no card of any capacity is included in the purchase price. What’s more, you must use a computer to transfer files from a memory card to its internal memory. Such lameness defies description, leaving this round a push.

Winner: Tie

Round 4: Performance

While both contestants enter the ring armed with 1GHz dual-core CPUs, the Nook Tablet packs 1GB RAM while the Fire has just 512MB. The Nook Tablet’s additional memory resulted in smoother screen refreshes while reading, web browsing, playing games, streaming video, and so on. Netflix video streams looked much better on the Nook Tablet, and it delivered slightly longer battery life: We streamed Netflix videos on it for more than six hours. B&N’s device delivered better touchscreen responsiveness, too; there were far too many times when we had to repeatedly tap the Fire’s screen before it would register.

Amazon’s much-hyped Silk browser put a hurt on the Nook Tablet’s browser in terms of the SunSpider and BrowserMark benchmarks, consistently outperforming the Nook by 25 to 40 percent. In real-world use, however, the Nook Tablet loaded websites as fast or faster than the Fire.

Winner: Nook Tablet

Round 5: Content Ecosystem

Barnes & Noble claims to stock “thousands” of apps in the Nook store. After browsing the entire site, we’d say “hundreds” is more like it. A vast number of popular Android apps are MIA here, and many apps that are free in other marketplaces must be purchased for the Nook Tablet. Unlike the Fire, the Nook Tablet will not sideload apps, either; it refuses to even recognize .apk files. Amazon’s app store, by comparison, is a Shangri-La of software choices. While it could be argued that the Kindle and Nook e-reader systems are roughly equal in both features and inventory, Amazon’s music and video marketplace is far more robust, and Amazon has the aforementioned cloud storage plus superior tools for synching your purchases to multiple devices. And for $79 per year, Amazon Prime serves up thousands of free movies and TV shows, Kindle book borrowing, and free two-day shipping for Amazon orders.

Winner: Tie

And the Winner Is…

The Nook Tablet was ahead on points going into the final round, but the Kindle Fire unleashed a flurry of value-added blows in the form of Amazon’s cloud storage, massive music and video library (available for sale or rent), and decent app store that knocked the Nook into sweet oblivion. Superior hardware empowers the Nook Tablet to beat the Kindle Fire in some areas (particularly video streaming), but Barnes & Noble’s device is just too limited to be a full-featured tablet. Our opinion might change once we can jailbreak it and install a custom ROM, but the Kindle Fire is the better tablet right out of the box.

Facebook Estimates The Personal Information of 845 Million Users is Worth $75 Billion

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 20:37:35 +0000

The Facebook IPO is not just long awaited, but one of the most interesting public offerings of our generation. Unlike the countless tech companies that came before it, Facebook doesn’t offer anything tangible; rather it’s simply a platform to help share our private information. This week however we’ve learned ultimately what the market valued this type of service at, and it’s a staggering $75 billion right out of the gate. 

The fillings revealed that Facebook is still far behind advertising market leaders such as Google when it comes to monetizing the value of it’s users, but Wall Street as we know doesn’t only reward immediate financial performance, rather they consider what’s possible given the platform. Facebook made about $3.2 billion in advertising revenue last year, which while accounting for 85 percent of it’s total, is still only a small fraction of the $36.5 billion Google took in during the same period. 

The big take away this week is that our personal information is worth a fortune in the right hands, and now that Facebook has finally gone public, you should expect them to start exploiting that value much more aggressively going forward. From the looks of it, they’ve only just scratched the surface.

LibreOffice Attracts Over 400 Contributors, Thousands of Code Commits

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 20:10:47 +0000

Google Docs and Office Web apps have gone a long way towards offering a compelling solution for storing our documents online, but for those in need of offline access, Open Office used to be the best free alterative to Microsoft around. Fast forward to 2012 however, and Open Office hasn’t just fallen off the map, it has been lapped several times by a new community fork called LibreOffice. 

According to new statistics offered up by the community, LibreOffice monthly commits is now in the 1500-3000 range, with the vast majority of new code coming from TDF volunteers, as opposed to large corporations such has Red Hat, Oracle, or Canonical. 

The LibreOffice community is also celebrating over 10 million users, a significant milestone for a project that only launched in late 2010. With version 3.5 just around the corner promising tons of improvements sometime next week, the future of LibreOffice is looking very bright indeed. 

Seized Streaming Site Reappears with Harsh Words for U.S. Authorities

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:00:17 +0000

Well, that didn’t take long. One of the largest streaming sites taken down by U.S. authorities yesterday is already back up and running on a new domain, and boy are they upset. While the Department of Homeland Security ICE division was happy to accept a pat on the back for a job well done, one of the owners of Firstrow, a sports streaming site, says he will not give up until a court shuts the site down.

“The US has prided itself on their ‘innocent before proven guilty’ mantra, yet is clearly hypocritical when it comes to this,” said the unnamed co-owner of Firstrow. The site is back up on firstrowsports.eu after losing top level domains at .com and .tv. The anonymous owner went on to say he does not believe what Firstrow does is illegal as the site is not US-based. 

The European Union has been critical of U.S. domain seizures in the past, but that doesn’t seem to worry law enforcement very much. Yesterday’s domain raid was the largest yet, and mostly targeted sites selling counterfeit NFL merchandise. Do you think non-US sites should have to adhere to US copyright laws?

Smartphone Sales Leap Ahead of PCs for First Time Ever

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:25:20 +0000

Nobody in their right mind would dump their desktop or notebook PC for a smartphone, but plenty of people are willing to own both as they seek to stay connected and check email on the fly. Underscoring this point is fact that smartphone sales in 2011 skipped ahead of PC sales, and by a pretty wide margin, according to data released by Canalys.

Canalys says vendors shipped 158.5 million smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2011, up 57 percent on the 101.2 million units shipped in the same quarter one year prior. Ending the year on a strong note bumped total global smartphone shipments for 2011 to 487.7 million units, up a whopping 63 percent over 2010.

By comparison, the global PC market grew 15 percent in 2011 to 414.6 million units, and that includes tablet sales, which jumped 274 percent. Tablets accounted for 15 percent of all PC sales in 2011, Canalys said.

"In 2011 we saw a fall in demand for netbooks, and slowing demand for notebooks and desktops as a direct result of rising interest in pads," said Chris Jones, Canalys VP and Principal Analyst. "But pads have had negligible impact on smartphone volumes and markets across the globe have seen persistent and substantial growth through 2011. Smartphone shipments overtaking those of client PCs should be seen as a significant milestone. In the space of a few years, smartphones have grown from being a niche product segment at the high-end of the mobile phone market to becoming a truly mass-market proposition. The greater availability of smartphones at lower price points has helped tremendously, but there has been a driving trend of increasing consumer appetite for Internet browsing, content consumption and engaging with apps and services on mobile devices."

Google's Android platform was by far the most popular in the smartphone segment in 2011, capturing 48.8 percent of the market with 237.8 million units shipped. Apple's iPhone came in a distant second with 93.1 million units shipped for a 19.1 percent share of the market, according to Canalys.

Ukraine Latest to Crackdown on Illegal File Sharing

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 14:08:15 +0000

This isn’t the best time to be in charge of a file-sharing site, with authorities around the world  — everywhere from the United States to Middle-earth (or New Zealand as it’s known more popularly) to Sweden — currently on a rampage against online file repositories brimming with unauthorized content. Ukrainian authorities are the latest to crackdown on online file sharing, having taken down popular file-sharing site Ex.ua a couple of days back. But that’s not where the story ends. You know the drill: hit the jump for more.

Usually, such takedowns quickly become a cause célèbre among hacktivists, who flock to avenge their demise. This particular case is no different. Following Ex.ua’s takedown by the Ukrainian authorities, enraged Internet users attacked government sites in retaliation. These people targeted the official sites of the country’s president and interior minister using the tried-and-tested distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) technique.

In a statement on Wednesday, the Ukrainian authorities said Ex.ua had been under investigation since July last year, apparently after a number of companies complained against the site. But Microsoft Ukraine, one of the companies named as a complainant in the matter by the Ukrainian interior ministry, is said to have denied being the “immediate initiator of the EX.UA inspection” as is being claimed.

The ministry claims to have seized 200 servers containing as much as 6,000 TB worth of files in a raid on the site’s office.

Micron CEO Steve Appleton Perishes in Plane Crash

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:03:18 +0000

Micron Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Steve Appleton, passed away this morning after a small plane he was piloting crashed at an airport in Boise, Idaho. Appleton, 51, joined Micron not long after his graduation in 1983. He started out on the factory floor and worked his way up to the top when, at age 34, he became the third youngest CEO in the Fortune 500.

"Steve's passion and energy left an indelible mark on Micron, the Idaho community and the technology industry at large," Micron said in a statement on its website.

According to an AP report, Appleton was also a professional stunt plane pilot and former motocross racer. On July 8, 2004, Appleton crashed a stunt plane and sustained several injuries, including a punctured lung and broken bones.

The accident that proved fatal involved a Lancair single-engine experimental propeller plane. Appleton was the only in the plane when it crashed.

It's fair to say Appleton worked hard and played hard, right up until his untimely death.

European Regulators Ask Google to Delay Privacy Policy Changes

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:16:38 +0000

While the uproar over Google’s updated privacy policy has lessened in the U.S., European officials are taking things a step further today. The European Commission has asked Google to delay implementing its new privacy policy so the matter can be fully investigated. The search giant has apparently been taken aback by the proposal.

The Commission is in the process of updating its rules on data protection, and that might account for the new-found interest in Google’s policy. According to Google’s Brussels spokesperson, Google briefed the Commission on the proposed change before it was even announced to the public. He went on toe say Google would be happy to talk things over with regulators if there are any new concerns, but he did not say Google would delay implementation of the new policy.

Google’s new privacy policy is essentially ‘one policy to rule them all.’ Over 60 individual privacy policies from various services are being rolled into one document that spells out what information Google can share internally between services. Do you think the European Commission is justified in asking for a delay?

Microsoft Loses Head of Developer Experiences for Windows Phone To Amazon Kindle

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 21:12:43 +0000

Windows Phone has struggled to differentiate itself in the market against established rivals such as Android and iOS, but through it all Brandon Watson was the developer evangelist making sure a lack of apps was never the reason people opted for the competition. His commitment to platform has helped to inspire app development beyond Redmond’s wildest expectations, however ZDnet blogger Mary Jo Foley has just confirmed that Brandon is moving on, and being tasked with leading Amazon’s cross-platform Kindle efforts. 

So far Microsoft hasn’t named any successor for Watson, and did little more than confirm his departure. According to a Microsoft spokesperson, “We can confirm February 6th is Brandon Watson’s last day at Microsoft. Brandon did a great job helping us build a vibrant developer community and we wish him well with his next adventure.”

Watson’s departure isn’t the first, and likely won’t be the last important loss to the Windows Phone team, but its still a mighty blow to a platform that is in desperate need of passionate community leaders.