Blog Currents - 27-June-2012

We regularly hear about the current TV ratings and thus what people are watching but how accurate can such a figure really be?

 No really, how accurate can any claims be in the modern digital world. Take me for example I watch regular TV for about an hour and a half on a Sunday and for the rest of the week, well let’s just say that I watch TV shows but without the advertising. It is not so much the advertising itself but  that delay between t TV show being airs in say the US and the intervening days, months and years before it finally appears on my local free TV channels. Then there is paid TV, steaming video, DVDs, Blu-rays, “take a look at this” from a friend, YouTube and the list goes on. For the technically minded not only do they no longer watch regular television, even if they do they have probably TVIO’d it without the ads.  So where does that leave companies like Nielsen?

 They would have you believe that TV viewing is growing. I suggest that the number of people sitting in front of the TV is growing but they are not watching free to air TV as much. Since Nielsen has essentially a monopoly on counting who watched what in TV it is certainly in their interest to promote this view, or idea or concept but I suspect they would have a hard time proving it if pressed. If their data collection methodologies had remained the same over the past few years then it would be easy but they haven’t and they don’t, instead the change slightly from period to period. So how do we count? 

 One solution is to go out to the WWW and see what people are doing and saying there. There are a number of groups that do this and they use screen scraping and text analysis techniques to see how many comments there are bout TV programs, good or bad. This gets added to Nielsen data to determine how many people watched a given program. Without out this extra measurement it would be difficult to convince advertising agencies that the right numbers of people are watching for advertising investment and charging purposes. So if you have watched a TV program and are telling all your friends about it this might inflate the numbers as they start talking about a TV program they have not watched themselves. If you are doing this as the TV show is on then you may be spending your online time during the ads or it may be distracting you from the show itself so does that still count as watching the show? Then there is the language itself. My son tells me how “sick” a show is which a language analyser might take to mean bad but in the language of youth it means quite good. One advantage for say Facebook is that they can and do peek inside all of your messages to collect info for these marketing and counting organisations.

 If you have a TV meter from Nielsen then what happens when you leave the room and the TV is still on. This occurs a lot more often than people like to admit. This is particularly common with the younger people. What if two TVs are on and a person wanders back and forwards between the two rooms “watching” both programs. What of you watch a program but switch to your tablet device when the ads are on so that you could not answer any questions about them, does this count?

 How do you then compare the different methodologies of the online data collectors and the in front of TV types? Even within groups they are different and the metrics may be (and are) calculated in different ways. In the end the comparisons are invalid but are used and the results advertised. This kind of meaningless data is starting to become more common in the modern age. Precision is sacrificed for output. When it comes to the social media side the demographics tend to become lost. Older people present themselves as younger, and younger as older. The distinction and division between male and female becomes very flexible.

 So what is the solution? Partnerships. Facebook or Google with Nielsen or someone else. Add a bit a Twitter and a dash of Piratebay and the data may start to become more coherent and even better accurate. Add Spotify and you get some music input and so on. For the time being the current situation is a minefield for advertisers and it is not likely to get better in the short term.

 So it appears that the new iPhone 5, whenever it may come out, will have a new connector. The old 30 pin connector may even be replaced by a gasp, Micro-USB. No wait, that rumour was very short lived, turns out it will probably be a new proprietary Apple port of some kind. So the adapter market will get a big boost. The older devices that have 30 pins will soon vanish from the shelves and into the bargain bins.  The Apple fanbois of course are going wild since to a certain extent every iPhone accessory you know own is kind of obsolete. The new format will have 19 pins, will allow for a thinner unit, will be waterproof, and will contain a magnetic capability to hold in a bit better.

It will also have a new watchdog chip at both ends of the connector so that Apple can ctorl the manufacturers more closely so that replacement devices not Apple approved will be “all but impossible to make.” No we get to the real reason for the change, even greater control over iPhone owners. Of course this is all speculation at the moment based on some alleged insider leaks and a photo of a blank for a smaller port.

Terry Gou suggests that people skip the Samsung S3 and wait for the IPhone 5. He claims that Samsung cannot be trusted due to them whistleblowing on four companies in Taiwan involved in flat panel price fixing, oh and because they are Korean. Unsurprisingly Gou is chairman of Hon Hai, the parent company of iPhone and iPad maker Foxconn and has a stated lifelong goal of defeating Samsung. He is also Taiwanese. He is also living in a fantasy world, by the time the iPhone 5 is out there will be a new version of Android that will probably make the latest iOS look pedestrian.

I’m not even sure how this is news anymore; people don’t care about how strong their passwords are online. According to Trustwave's SpiderLabs after looking at 1.5 million dumped passwords half a per cent include a special character, 41 per cent are all letters and 57 per cent a combination of letters and digits. 89 per cent were between 6 and 10 characters in length. Case insensitive passwords are more common that you would like to think. One group claimed to have cracked 1.2 million passwords in 72 hours using three NVIDIA GPUs, oclHashcat and John the Ripper cracking tools. For sensitive password like for banks I recommend a mix of upper and lowercase letters, include one of two digits and if possible on special character. My bank does not support special characters in passwords so not all the blame can be dumped on the users themselves.

Blog Currents – 2012, 20 June

I had fun this week. I got home on Friday to find my computer under attack. Two things had happened that day a Windows update and a Firefox update. It of was a betting man it would be on the Windows update but it could have been anything and that date was payload day. The same virus attacked my mother’s and brother’s computers. The first sign was the browser slowing down and then not responding. Ctrl-Alt-Delete did not bring up the menu to access the task manager and even trying to get to the CMD line to do this manually didn’t work.

Figuring it was a Windows problem I rebooted. Not long after that had finished the symptoms repeated. Reboot into Safe Mode and disabled some of the boot processes and tried again. Another boot and my anti-virus program told me that something had turned off the active protection, I turned it back on, did a full scan of C: then my main download drive where it found a couple of Trojans and all has been quiet ever since. Still not sure exactly what it was and if it has gone back to sleep and will reappear in the future.   

So ‘scientists’ claiming to represent the world’s scientists have issued their demands before the "Rio+20" summit. Distilled down they say that old people have to work longer, people should stop procreating and we should stop the growth of modern technology, including I suppose computers. Those from the richer nations need to scale back and the poorer? Well it looks like they are not going to get any better. The organisation making all these demands? That would be the IAP found in Italy and implying that they represent 105 science academies around the world which would include Britain's Royal Society and a lot of others. The ‘science’ behind all of this is dubious at best and when you dig down it turns out the IAP is yet another of those Greenie like organisations that want to dictate policy to the rest of humanity based on the evils of one molecule of carbon and two of oxygen in a close relationship. They are anti-nuclear, ignore the benefits of technology and make a great case for getting rid of scientists, well of their ilk at least. They will have to pry my computer from my cold dead hands.

So why is it that after Nokia fired a bunch of their employees their stock price still went down? I think I’ve already answered that one but to summarise, Nokia made a number of bad business decisions, bad directions in mobile phone design and development. In other words they misread the market and got it wrong. Then they didn’t fix it. Then they lost their market dominance and Apple and Google (via Android) have stepped into the vacuum created.

If you think about it none of the old tier one player like Motorola, Sony and others are in the hunt for first place in the mobile phone marketplace. Sony has made so many bad decisions over the past decade it is a mystery how they are even still in the electronics market. Nokia is now at the mercy of Microsoft and others for their success, a scary proposition for anyone I’d say.

As for Microsoft well they are glowing over the announcement of their new Surface, which would be a 10.8 tablet running Windows 8 on both the ARM and Intel platforms. That means at least two versions a 676 gram Windows RT tablet running on the Arm and a larger 909 gram Intel based device running Windows 8 Pro. They come in 32 and 64 GB versions in a 16:9 display format with a USB 2.0 port and a MicroSD slot, i.e. already better specs than an Apple iPad.

The units will come in a variety of colours, well the covers will at least. No you won’t see them for a while and there are no prices yet but expect them to be close to an ultrabook. There is the usual Microsoft hype but nothing like the six months before we get from the Apple loving crowd.

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has a solution to the downward spiral of the world economy. Invest in a nice big serve of broadband infrastructure. Yes another group that has a solution for the G20 in Rio. In a latter they urge the world’s leaders to “support the development of the broadband infrastructure and broadband-enabled applications and services which enable digital economies to grow and provide benefits to societies across the globe.” The letter goes on to suggest that it must also provide “for advanced online services, locally relevant content and services, and support for media and information literacy development to address inequity and deliver broadband inclusion for all.”

Then it starts to get a bit, well you can read it for yourself. “For global broadband roll-out to contribute most to development, human activity must transform information into knowledge that can support individual empowerment and sustainable social and economic development, including institutional and political transformation and the development of knowledge societies that rest on four pillars: freedom of expression; quality education for all; universal access to information and knowledge; and respect for cultural and linguistic diversity. Broadband development cannot be limited to technical infrastructure; the availability of relevant broadband-enabled content, applications and services in multiple languages should also be ensured.”

I agree with most of it, well just about all of it. Broadband should be universal and available to all; it should be priced so that people can afford it (at < 5% of monthly income); it should be available to connect to across the widest possible audience. I do have one small, well huge quibble with the letter they use Australia as the example to follow. The problem with that is so far the rollout has been poor, the take-up rate almost non-existent and the base prices close to double the current costs of high speed broadband is now. In other words the Australian example seems to be the opposite of what the ITU ideal appears to be.

So if we take a look at the marketplace who is making money from smartphones at the moment?  According to ABI Research Apple and Samsung are pulling in more than 90 per cent of the market's profits for about 55 per cent of the unit sales during the period. The figures break down as 144.6m units sold, with Samsung shipping 43m and Apple behind with 35m. Next came Nokia and RIM with 11.9m and 11.1m smartphones. After that Sony, Huawei and ZTE sold 7m, 6.8m and 4.9m. The last two are Chinese and are moving up with Sony likely to be behind them in the near future. That being said only Sony and Samsung saw any strong growth. Nokia saw a 40 per cent decline in shipments quarter on quarter and the outlook is not good. ABI estimated it will need to increase its Windows Phone business by a whopping 5000 per cent this year just to offset its slump in Symbian based shipments.

Blog Currents – 2012, 12, June

 Nothing really clever or interesting to write about today. Well other to reinforce a point I have probably made in the past about how important it is to get information from the user as early in whatever process you are involved in. I don’t mean once but as often as you can. This is true for getting a TV, a new computer, a small application and of course a larger one. The earlier you can get the user involved the more likely you are to end up with something close to what they are after. Note I wrote “close” not “exactly” I’m convinced after a long time doing this that goal is impossible. Something that is also very useful and rarely done is to go through the motions with the user in the field, in the way they do things. This could be a simple as taking notes or doing the actual job. Without this level of appreciation it is hard to understand what is really required.

Industry News

Apple’s iOS6 has been announced, released? Mac lovers everywhere are quick to point out that iOS5 was released about the same time Android 4 came out. What they conveniently forget is that iOS has been around a lot longer than Android so comparing version numbers is just plain, well it ain’t that smart. Add a pretty graph about how most people have iOS5 installed while people using Android are spread between older versions and 4 and they close the book. Of course the way Apple manages upgrades is to all but ban access to applications that run on any older versions ramrodding mandatory upgrades so I’m not sure how showing a graph that proves that draconian policy is hardly positive.

Apple also announced recently that they were leaving Google Maps behind and surprise, surprise adding their own mapping application. They added navigation and traffic updates, whoopee break out the champagne. They did add vector based graphics that makes the scrolling, zooming and rotation a lot smoother. Oops forgot to mention that some of the new features like flyovers and real time rendering are not available for those that dare to hold onto the older iOS units.  FO course according to the fanbois Apple devoices are always up to date while Android devices aren’t. Like the iPhone 5 the iOS6 features are an announcement. The new OS may be out in the fall, US time a bit before the new iPhone I guess. The first target will be the 3Gs version then iPads and the 4^th generation touch.

Siri is getting an upgrade. Facebook integration is next, hmm given the latest stock prices, well they couldn’t pick G+ Shock, horror Apple is releasing the Facebook APIs to streamline integration. There will be two buttons when someone calls with an automated reminder if you ignored the call. There is new silent mode that will record that someone tried to call, how 80’s. Video calls have been added through FaceTime but no idea on how bad the signal will look over 3G wireless. Friend based photo sharing, wow! Two new e-mail mailboxes and flagged messages, be still my beating heart. All in all by the time this new and revolutionary OS upgrade is out Android will probably have so really new things and not just warmed over catch ups.

Did you know that Microsoft thought about buying Nokia but has backed off? The cause is mostly the sinking share price, I mean why buy now when it could be so much cheaper in a few months. The share price recently hit a 15 year low with a large drop in the past few months. IF Nokia has wanted to sell a while back then it would probably be owned by Microsoft today. Without any alternative buyer Microsoft can afford to sit back and wait. Microsoft is hell bent on moving into the tablet and phone market which is why Windows 8 is really a ship generation of OS as far as the normal computer user is concerned. Redmond really, really wants to create a new Metro platform. They are finally making some money from the Xbox after a few years of not so good returns. Unlike the Xbox the Windows 8/Metro/Apollo roadmap is a bit clearer.

By moving to Windows Nokia has managed to speed up their release cycle and it is too soon to work out if there will be any success with the move. There will be a Tango version next, then Apollo later. The problem at the moment is that the smartphone market is a two horse race between Google and Apple. Perhaps the answer is an easy one, make Nokia a subsidiary of Microsoft, semi-independent like the Xbox division then stand back and wait to see what happens.

What company can sell a base model notebook for $2,199? Yes, lots of Apple news this week. The new Macbook Pro with “retina display”, the latest update to the MacBook Air and Pro lines, start with a 15 inch 2880 by 1800 pixel monitor. It has a SSD instead of a regular hard drive and the models top out at 768 GB of storage. It comes with upgraded versions of Mac OS X Lion, Safari, iMovie, iPhoto, Aperture, and Final Cut Pro X. The unit comes with, and I’m not making this up, an SD slot, HDMI port, two USB 3 ports and two of the proprietary Thunderbolt ports to plug in Firewire 800 and Gigabit Ethernet dongles. Wireless but not 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4 and a few other bits and pieces. I’m sure the usual suspects are drooling.

While Apple is bragging about things that are to come Android is not so quietly activating close to a million devices every 24 hours or so. There is an Apple developer’s conference starting soon and the growth from 180000 a couple of years ago to the current level must be having a few Apple developers asking themselves if it isn’t time to change platforms.

It is that time again, every couple of weeks or so, when I pick out a story about how hackers have managed to break into something and steal stuff. In this instance it is passwords, e-mail addresses, dates of birth and other personal stuff. The source is the online fantasy game League of Legends. This is yet another reason why I do not play online games any more, well that and suffering under the painful burden that is Evony for far too long. Financial info was about the only thing not grabbed in the hacking process.

Finally for this week I decided to take a look at what Gateway gives me these days for my money. The site has changed and they distribute through dealers. There is little customisation anymore so I was stuck with the most expensive desktop mode at $1200. Quad core, i7 3.40 GHz 64 bit CPU with 8 GB cache. 12 Gb of DDR3 RAM, memory card reader, 2TB HDD, 2GB Graphics card, HDMI out, 10 USB ports but no USB 3 with Windows Home Premium. I little below the spec I was looking for but quite a machine for the low price. Gone are the $3000 days of old.

Blog Currents – 2012, June 6

Not quite so rushed this week. I’ve settled into my new job and am busy coding in Excel VBA. I have finished the Delphi project for my father with just a few fixes and reports to build. My new media player from A.C. Ryan was setup about 2 minutes after I received it, the networking auto configured before I even went to that part of the Setup screen. Verdict, almost infinitely better than the DVICO Android based box. My guitar pedal setup is almost complete with one final TC Electronics Toneprint based pedal, a Chinese sustain/compress and the TC Polytune coming in the mail to complete my setup. Basically all is right with my world J giving me a lot more time to focus on the IT news world.

A recent story I read on Microsoft pricing in the UK has broader implications that will make global pricing at the very least interesting over the next year or two. The world is on the edge of a global financial crisis that will be worse than the last one. We are seeing the beginnings of this in Europe where disposable incomes have dropped in a number of locations over the past few months. In response Microsoft recently announced that the expected price rises on volume licensing will not be as high as they originally said, due to “the weakening of the Euro currency in recent weeks.” The average rise was supposed to be about 29% from July 1. The minimum level has dropped from 7.5% to 1.7% and from 33.4% (yes it was really that high) down to 25.9% depending on the licensing program selected.

The silent issue here is that the EU and the UK pay far higher prices than customers in the US do and this is the case for just about every product when comparing the US to Europe and then the UK. There is no doubt in this case that Microsoft is gouging both Europe and the UK. They do the same thing in poorer Asian nations. Those that used to read my Bangkok Post column will remember that I would regularly raise this issue and its impact on piracy in Asia.

So my point here is that as the world’s markets start to collapse, and there is a good change this will be not long after I write this, Microsoft will have to reduce licensing levels and prices everywhere and not just in Europe. I do mean everywhere because the next crash will not be limited to just Europe or the US, it will hit everyone including China, Australia and the rest of Asia.

Some may wonder why I am not commenting on the Facebook float. It’s because I remember the last time there were problems with the IT bubble in Silicon Valley, this is not so much different.

Hands up if you remember Stuxnet? I posited at the time that it had to have been written by a government and probably Israel. Beyond that it was not that relevant who had written it, just that they had, it was impressive and it did what it was designed to do, mess with the Iranian nuclear processing.

Enter Obama who has realised that he is probably not going to be re-elected for a second term. We now have confirmation that it was a joint US-Israeli operation, code named Operation Olympic Games, that was unenthusiastically (on the US side) started in 2006 under the Bush administration and continued by Obama. If you want the whole story then read the upcoming Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power by David Sanger.

The whole history is an interesting story. It began with General James E Cartwright, head of a small cyberoperation inside the United States Strategic Command. The first stage was only an attempt to map the “air-gapped” computer networks supporting nuclear labs and reprocessing plants in Iran. Next with help of Unit 8200, the Israeli Defence Force's Intelligence Corps unit, came the development of the payload that would attack the P1 high-speed centrifuges. The team carried out tests on some they had captured from General Gaddafi. Iran bought the same kind on the black market. The worm was carried in by unwitting workers at the plant. Obama allowed the process to keep going after the discovery in 2010 with the development of a new version of Stuxnet. After the recent admission by the US that they have programs to develop offensive cyberweapons the book is the first admission that they have ever deployed them. The latest exposure of the Flame worm has not been linked to Olympic Games and no one is admitting anything at the moment. According to a source at F-Secure “Obama wanted to get credit for Stuxnet, as that makes him look tough against Iran.”

Industry News

Today (tomorrow) June 6^th is the world launch of IPv6. So far about one percent of people are using it, so lots of room for growth and adoption. So who decided it was time? Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Comcast, Akamai, AT&T, Cisco, the Internet Society, Bing, and some others that’s who. The plan is to to motivate organizations across the industry – including Internet service providers (ISPs), hardware makers, and web companies – to prepare for and permanently enable Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) on their products and services as Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) address space runs out.” There are some kits available to make the switch. There was an IPv6 day last year but not much came from it. You probably won’t notice it and for the most part don’t care but there it is anyway.

Microsoft has annoye4d the advertising industry by announcing that “do not track” will be the default setting when Internet Explorer 10 is released. The privacy people are happy of course but the marketers aren’t. Just goes to show “some of the people, some of the time . . “ Not sure quite how to take this by according to Microsoft customers should have more control over what happens to their data and should be able to decide if they get personal advertising for not.

For those who just joined I’m just back from a parallel universe where Microsoft has the user’s best interests at heart. In our universe the Digital Advertising Alliance scoffs at such a suggestion. They claim to have been working worked with Microsoft and the government for over three years on proposals to ensure privacy and still allow tracking without "Do not track" being turned on by default. Or translated, we want to send you ads and want that horrible feature turned off. According to them Microsoft’s setting "threatens to undermine that balance, limiting the availability and diversity of Internet content and services for consumers." ROTFLMHO.

Firefox 13 is now ready for your update or download. There are new home and tab pages. If you about:home as an address you get access to settings and content options like downloads, bookmarks, history and so on. The new Tab page is drawn from the Safari Top Sites concept (or not). When you Windows-T, File-New Tab or click on the plus you now get a thumbnail set of your most viewed or favourites. With updates every month and a half there will be no more big feature upgrades but a continual chain of them like we find in the latest version.  Google started it with Chrome, and then Mozilla followed. Microsoft didn’t, not really a surprise.