When was the first time you heard about biometric sensors like fingerprint readers and iris scanners? It has been a long time but note that we still use passwords. In 2011 IBM predicted that in five years devices will replace passwords. This was one of a number of predictions including that the digital divide will vanish and that mind reading would become a reality, I guess they mean through technology. Enter Microsoft's Cormac Herley and computer science professor Paul van Oorschot. They claim that the password technology itself has not really changed much in the past 20 years and the succession of technology solutions have not done very well. This leaves us stuck with memorizing strings of characters and numbers or as most people do writing them down.
Most of us have seen movies where people put DNA under fake skin for testing, hands and eyes removed to fool the scanners. The top end devices look for blood flow, temperature, signs of stress and other indicators to stop being fooled. The other problem according to the two mentioned earlier is that the PKI (public key systems) and biometric solutions are not performing as well as expected so people revert to passwords. If you have to carry a digital key then someone could steal it or hack it. People are as yet unable to hack your memory and so a strong password is generally safe. Bad passwords like password, god, dog, not so much.
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There’s a honour code in the hacking community. You don’t take credit for someone else’s hack and you don’t accuse another group of doing something that they didn’t. AnonyUpload, the supposed Anonymous alternative to MegaUpload is one such example. AnonyUpload appeared a few days after Mega was taken down due to anti-piracy actions in New Zealand. Yes there was activity against the government the and entertainment industry websites linked to the take down and this was organized by Anonymous, but AnonyUpload comes from elsewhere.
The new service promises 100% free and 100% anonymous hosting and file sharing services. The site asks for donations to provide Russian based servers. It even warns people about safety of any files they might put there. The smart money says that this is a con of some kind to get money out of people.
According to Juniper Research, an organization that watches the IT marketplace in the UK, Ultrabooks will not outsell tablets for at least five years. The research company iSuppli thinks that tablets will outsell regular notebooks by then as well. The theory is that Windows 8 will help with the Ultrabooks but that the cost of licensing the trademark and meeting what Intel wants will keep prices high. Windows 8 will also support tablets.
Here is why I think iSuppli is wrong. Tablets cannot do as much as a notebook. Since they don’t have the power and the storage for any application types they cannot replace any kind of business notebook and that is the primary market. The biggest problem is input technologies. Keyboards and a mouse are still the best options and until something new comes along that is it.
According to research firm Ovum Android will pass Apple as the mobile development platform of choice sometime in the next 12 months. In the past twelve months it jumped from 5th place to second place behind Apple's iOS. As Android's market share grows so will developer interest it is after all mostly about how many units can be sold for what price. Developers will therefore target the largest market so once Android has the numbers it will attract the developers. The outright winner will be the one that provides the best integrated development experience for the most devices.
It is that time of year (or is it just all the time) when the music industry is blaming pirated downloads for dropping sales. CD sales are down three percent, digital music sales up by eight percent which is mostly good news for the iTunes store. The IFPI said that sales fell from $16.7 B to $16.2 B overall. I don’t know about you but most people would be happy with anything over $16B I would have thought. Of this figure $5.2 B is digital music sales which when you think about it isn’t too bad given that the current model in general just plain sucks. Subscribers rose by 65 percent in 2011
They then went on to suggest that 28 percent of all Internet users access unauthorized services on a monthly basis, half of them through P2P networks. Not sure what the word "access" means here but that number seems a little high. You might visit a P2P site but download nothing, or download something that you never listen to, or listen to once, decide it is rubbish and delete it. Others will download, listen and then purchase using the "hear before buying model." Most of the latter options are not factored into the statistics and some surveys suggest that more buy after listening than organizations like the IFPI and BSA are willing to admit.
France has a three strike rule when it comes to downloading media and the IFPI loves it. If they get three warming letters in a single year they can have their connectivity suspended for a month and there are also fines. In the first year 736,000 people received the first letter, 62,000 their second letter, and 165 their third. So it must be working right? P2P transactions have fallen, by 26 percent according to the IFPI, the numbers have also been creeping back up. Normal torrent usage was never designed to avoid copyright detection. There are better forms and the real situation is that more people are shifting to options like cyberlockers that are much harder to detect. Given that the real market has not improved then the results hardly suggest that anything is "working."
The new Samsung NX200 compact system camera comes with a 20.3 Mp APS-C CMOS sensor, a boosted ISO range of 100-12800 and high-speed performance including 7fps continuous shooting. Aluminium frame, very fast auto focus, 1080p HD recording and a nice range of interchangeable lenses and that is quite a camera in a small package. This model has a fixed LCD panel probably so that they can bring out a moveable one with the NX300 model sometime in the future. This middle of the format range is starting to grow quite well. Shutter range is 30 seconds to 1/4000, there is a built in flash and you can save to RAW format. I looked at some of the demo shots on the review sites and even at 6400 the resolution is quite nice. All for under $1000. Oh, there are about 9 lenses in the range so far.
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