Posts by pigor 28 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jul 2012
As soon as ad networks are mede liable for the quality of what they deliver and its damages, these problems eill go away.
A few crippling fines or payouts will clean up the ecosystem from the bad players.
Little by little only those that really screen ads for malware will remain.
I agree with David: active objects, clean-up stack, and many other systems within Symbian had a great value to build fast and responsive applications for lacklustre hardware
Symbian forced programmers to write very optimised code, this meant it was hard to port from other platforms.
It also forced a specific architecture in your application which was good programming but again would make porting and exercise in full rewriting of apps.
This didn't stop thousands of developers to create wonderful programs and enabled technologies that we still use today.
Errors: millions... I still remember when Nokia was telling that nobody will ever want touch screen phones (little before iPhone came to light). :)
Anyway, I look forward to read this book, cheers David!
"Pliss is likely in possession of usernames and passwords gleaned from sources other than Apple and has attacked users who use the same identifier for multiple services including iCloud"
Maybe not in this case.
It seems several users have changed their password and got "captured" again by Pliss.
This may indicate that the breach is more interesting than just re-used password... maybe even a DNS poisoning at ISP level
at the time being in both iOS and Android there is no mechanism for the developers to deal with partially accepted permissions.
The OS should allow the user to accept only a subset of the permissions requested, and the SDK should provide APIs for the developers to know which of the requested permissions are granted and which denied.
At the time being both mechanisms are missing. :(
ICO should go in each appstore (GooglePlay and iTube) and check every single application: read what permissions are asked and read the description.
If the description doesn't satisfy the guidelines, they will have to ask Google (or Apple) to remove the application from their UK store.
Failure to comply will mean a good fine for each violation.
Pretty much what is done for DCMA takedown... in this way Google and Apple will be vigilant and the developers will start caring about what permissions they ask.
As soon as Google launches a new application/service, the equivalent system app in AOSP becomes orphaned, falling behind in features and bug fixes.
Cyanogenmod will have to invest a large portion of that vc money into real development not just tweaks... I hope they will do and contribute back into AOSP.
arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/
"I visited Hiroshima recently, I went round the peace park and the museum. It's horrific, far worse than you imagine"
I did visit the same places some years ago, and the impact was terrifying.
The museum leads the visitor in a painful path from the big picture into the details.
The first rooms show the international status before the launch of the bomb, how they reached there, and so on... a view very distant from the day to day events, like in a school book.
The more you walk into the museum the following rooms bring you closer and closer to the human tragedy.
Until you reach the last rooms where you see the scarce remains of some of the victims.
They do the possible to bring the tragedy to a human level that everybody can understand and relate too... like the name and background story of a school boy just next to a partially melted lunch box and a "shadow" on a wall: that's all it remains of him.
People talk inside the museum ... at the beginning.
By the time you get out nobody is talking anymore and the faces of all visitors are extremely serious and tense.
Even when finally you get out in the sun the silence and the feeling of sad uneasiness remain... you look around at the Peace Memorial Park and you realise that you at "ground zero": all that open space was created by the bomb.
An experience that make you seriously think
The misunderstanding, was created by the idiotic marketing team of Samsung.
The way they write on the sticker and their so called explanation make you think about a real region lock.
If it is a misunderstanding, I give 10 points to Samsung for the intention of informing the user, but -1 trillion points for sloppy execution!
It's "funny" that I asked information on Samsung's Norway facebook page and my post was duly deleted.
A reseller, once called, had no clue about it: they didn't get any explanation from Samsung
I can confirm the first and deny the second :)
I notice that once I switched SIM (from Norwegian's Chess to Italian's TIM) my Samsung S4 deleted the old APN (Chess).
Automatically it created a new one (TIM) .... which did not work with my phone (even if correct, it was a TIM misconfiguration).
However I was able to edit existing APN as well as creating new ones.
In the past one of the big barriers to data adoption was incapacity for users to correctly insert APN. :(
Samsung in this case it trying to help to reduce the issue of having the user manage multiple APN.
I was surprised by the behaviour, but not too concerned because I was able to manually create/edit APNs
actually the Samsung clarification doesn't say that the phone is not region locked.
If you read clearly it says that it is region locked but you can continue using via roaming: nowhere Samsung says that when you change your EU SIM with a non-EU SIM it will work.
More revealing Samsung says that you can unlock the phone in authorised shops (in determinates conditions).
"Really? What makes you think that. Do you think the drilling company should simply pay out even if they were not responsible?"
In this case they are responsible.
Even if the earthquake had an influence, there wouldn't be a mud volcano without the drilling.
Quake apart maybe their risk assessment wasn't deep enough.
More to the point it looks like the drilling company did something wrong.
After investigations by independent experts, police had concluded the mud flow was an "underground blow out", triggered by the drilling activity. It is further noted that steel encasing lining had not been used which could have prevented the disaster. Thirteen Lapindo Brantas' executives and engineers face twelve charges of violating Indonesian laws
The company also did try to PT Lapindo Brantas to an offshore company for only $2, but Indonesia's Capital Markets Supervisory Agency blocked the sale
"this is made worse in that legitimate applications that don't need these permissions often ask for them 'just in case' (Facebook, I'm looking at you here"
Unfortunately Facebook app is not the only one.
I see more and more legitimate apps asking for more and more permissions that not really needed.
More annoying is that they rarely, if ever, explain why they do explain why they are requesting such permissions.
The average user have no clue about permissions and just select yes.
Ideally the users should be able to choose which of the requested permissions to grant, with "gentle degradation" of the app's features for it.
But that's just never going to happen (and mainstream users will not have a clue anyway).
Google should have more strict policies about permissions refusing apps asking for unnecessary permissions. I know by direct experience that Apple Appstore does it and I have to admit that is a good thing for end-users (a bit more problematic for me that I had to do more work to fix my app)
I can see it to be (mildly) useful while doing sport (jogging, cross country skiing, biking, etc) when you want to control your phone without having to take it out of your pocket.
For example the watch can control your handset media player (tracks, volume, etc.).
You can see the caller's name when you get a call and decide to answer or not (I have been doing calls while skiing).
The above cases imply you also have headsets plugged.
It can show your position and speed (very cumbersome to do while skiing with a phone).
So there are some use cases but they are niche cases... nothing that can really appeal the real mass market.
It's probably too late for Nokia to go for Android for their top-end offer: They have a working platform for smartphones and Android will only create "internal" competition.
At the same time Nokia doesn't want to be dependant on others that Nokia perceive as competitors.
Microsoft was not perceived as a competitor but more as a partner who could provide software and services that Nokia failed to develop.
We shouldn't forget that Nokia failed horribly with their Ovi store too.
Nokia is a good example of hubris at work.
Lets remember a bit of history.
Nokia were the leader in features phone as well as smart phones (Symbian S60) and they were rightly proud of their dominant position (50% of the global shipments).
They never believed in touch screen, doing everything possible to kill them within Symbian.
When the iPhone came out they dismissed it as a failure... when it was clear they were wrong they went in panic mode.
Some says Nokia could have joined forces with UIQ to build on a platform already made for touch screen.
But Nokia did not want to collaborate with other manufacturers, that's was clear.
Nokia decided to slap some touch screen support on top of S60: the first phones were abhorrent, with the updated OS shipped too early with very little integration between the touch support and the UI.
At the time Nokia has several strategic projects going on at the same time to counterbalance iPhone and their best engineers and designers (to don't mention budget) were split between them...
several projects were axed and reborn in different ways.
When finally S60 had a decent touch support and Meego was getting mature, Elop arrived!
"My guess is that they are planning on using Tizen to compete with Nokia's Asha phones that are doing well in developing countries and actually what is making Nokia its bread and butter atm."
It looks like that in 2013 Samsung will use the REX line of phones to compete against Asha.
Tizen is much more in the Android category so far.
"If I planned on writing an app for an HTML5-only platform, it would be Firefox OS, not Tizen. The latter is bound to use proprietary extensions in an effort to lock you into their ecosystem."
Well... I wouldn't with the current hardware running FFOS: it's painfully underpowered and makes a hell in terms of usability of anything more complex than an RSS reader. :(
If you are concerned by lock-ins you should steer away from the FFOS: it's pushed directly by operators (Telefonica, Telenor) who seem quite keen on trying to revive the WAC concept.
At least Tizen is supported by Samsung and they run it on quite powerful hardware (at least looking at the developers devices that have S3's hardware to run on).
Tizen is built on top of a very clean version of linux: porting is really easy and there aren't really proprietary APis at that level.
From direct experience it has been relatively easy to port (native) our application to Tizen, get hardware acceleration working, and all without using any proprietary Tizen APIs.
Many of these handsets (not all) do have any GooglePlay on board: when shipping they rely on 3rd party appstores (yes there are a few).
These handsets are completely invisible in the Android stats.
A few, sold only in China, have an "hacked" version of GooglePlay.
Hacked in this case means illegally pre-installed: in any case this version still contribute to Google stats for Android even if often leading to false positives (several Chinese OMS tend to "recycle" IMEI numbers of other handsets).
The reason why Chinese handset vendors do without Google services have nothing to do with freedom from Google or anything of such.
The reason is to avoid the lengthy and cumbersome certification process that is mandatory to be able to get the Google stamp of quality that comes with their services.
The certification process can take longer than 3 months, often more than the life span of these manufacturers anyway.
At least they are doing something to close (decrease) a huge security hole in their browser.
"Decrease" is a better word because in every "appstore" there will be always a good number of malicious apps, and reviewers whenever they exists cannot catch them all.
Unless the developers give away their source code for full inspection, it will be never possible to prevent malicious apps 100%.
However I cannot understand why they don't implement a "revoke" mechanism to forcibly uninstall malicious apps/extensions from the users' system.
Other systems have this feature (even if never used) and I don't understand why it isn't implemented for extensions in browsers as well as on iOS and Android.
There are so many points of discussions in this thread that is really hard to condense everything in a single post.
Spotify cannot be compared to iTune or any other download service: it's more similar to radio, so revenues will be somehow very low when accounted for each song.
We can argue as much as we want about what is the right price level to be shared with the artist, but the reality is that streaming services are a result of commoditization of music content: people pay a flat fee to access a large number of songs, not for a very specific one.... and they will not pay a cent more for generic songs.
As Zoë Keating herself stated, spotify is a very good platform for content discovery where artists can promote themselves, make themselves known, and gain by selling their work (download, CDs, concerts, etc) in some other form.
One last comment about the numbers:
72,000 plays does not mean 72,000 unique users listening to the song.
It means that the song has been listened 72,000 times by a much smaller and uncounted set of people.
For a comparison with iTune or any other download, one should have the number of unique users (listeners) for the specific song and consider the lifetime of the song itself.
The very big difference is in the business model for the artist: with streaming services like spotify you play in the long run getting money everytime somebody listen to your song, over and over again.
Given enough songs and listeners a service like spotify can guaraantee a steady income to the artists.
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