Blog Currents – 2012, 25 July

Starting next week I will be back in the Bangkok Post. Since the word count there will be less than here I plan to ppost my article the following day here in the blog with some extra content. This means the blog will also shift to late Wednesday or Thursday morning before I post here.

Anonymous have attacked Queensland in Australia as a protest against the latest wacky Labor government policy of data retention. The new policy will allow for the storage of two years of data. Big deal you say well the data will cover people and organisations and will be held without consent all in the name of socialism, err make that national security. Anonymous timed the attacks to coincide with the appearance of the Prime Minister in a Google+ Hangout. The true irony here is that it is unknown if the acts were carried out by Anonymous or followers of the group.

Australia has been steadily progressing away from basic freedoms like freedom of speech and expression for some time now and short of a national election this trend is likely to continue with names like Gillard, Swan and Conroy going down in infamy. It started with an Internet filter that was officially aimed at child pornography but had a much wider net. With that stopped a series of other poor decisions have led to the current data retention policy.

When was the last time you installed a software update that was not automatically done for you or ignored the process when asked to do so? According to YouGov via Skype the number is four in ten adults ignore such update requests. One in four doesn’t even believe they are necessary or will do any good.  One in four doesn’t even understand what the benefits of a software update might be. The same proportion doesn’t know how to check for them and another similar set need to be asked twice to do it. Reason include the possible introduction of new bugs and problems along with the possibility of the system slowing down. I must admit that when it comes to that last one they could be right to be concerned as for some applications software bloat continues to get worse from release to release. Others, probably Microsoft users, don’t like how long it takes. A whopping 45 percent didn’t do it because they had security concerns about the safety of their computers. While the occasional piece of malware does indeed piggy back on the upgrade stream it is not all that common.

Sometimes of course an update makes it worse and there have been a number of instances of that over the years including more recently one from Firefox, one from Microsoft and another from Symantec that caused a number of different problems. About half of the people surveyed updated their software because quite simply it was free. Staring Monday will officially be Technology Upgrade Week (ITUW), a global effort to raise consumer awareness about the importance of software updates.

As expected Apple is desperate to bring the iPhone 5 out as soon as possible and the rumour is now that the date has been moved up from November to September 21. The supposed demand has been "unprecedented." This rumour comes from China via France and has confirmed the new 19 pin connector that has been the standard since 2003. This is sure to annoy all those car manufacturers that have it as part of their marketing blurb. The new screen size will be 3.75 inches compared to Samsung’s much larger one and the headphone placement is going to change. Apple users will prefer the smaller screen for no other reason that it comes from Apple. Also according to Apple there are 80 million people just gagging to get their hands on one.

In related news Samsung has sold more than 10 million of its flagship Galaxy S III phones worldwide in seven weeks. It took Samsung five months to sell the same number of S2’s. Apple of course scoffs at such figures waving their 80 million figure around and point out that they sold 4 million 4S’ in four days. Overall however Samsung sells more smartphones than Apple a figure Apple does not comment on.

Building on the success of their Kindle Fire Amazon is preparing a new range of tablets, six of them including one ten inch model that would indicate they are moving beyond the simple eReader category. Amazon has not been doing so well in recent weeks because their offerings were a bit too expensive. The announcement is partially because of the new Windows 8 RT that will also include a nice new book reader. More as details become available.

According to Gartner Windows 8 will not be all that good for desktop users. Gartner found that Win 8 is good for the touch based environment but there seemed to be a lack of focus for the traditional computer user. The tablet version is fast, easy to install and use and even looks good. It is also good enough so that you can get rid of your iPad and the notebook. Organisations are still in the Windows 7 adoption period so any swift move to Windows 8 is also out of the question there. One big problem for the PC users is the menus. In the world of touch you swipe and there they are for the PC, well you have to ask someone how to get to them there is nothing obvious. Remote access sucks, the Windows key on your keyboard doesn’t seem to do anything (ironic) and you have to have the finger spread of a Vulcan to get things to appear and work in some cases. It appears that Windows forgot about the keyboard and mouse when building Windows 8 and as a result business users will probably give it the finger and not the kind Microsoft was expecting.

How many online accounts do you have? How many plus the social media sites, your work logins, banking, credit unions, PayPal, eBay, online games, store accounts and the local library? According to Experian in Britain the average is about 26 online accounts and for all of these they average about 5 passwords. For one in 25 they use the same password for all of them. I admit to using complex passwords only for my banking style accounts and my home WiFi. The rest tend to be simpler and for non-essential stuff the password tends to be at the very least similar.

Unlike many I rarely put very much personal information in my online accounts and tend to provide the bare minimum personal info required. This is because personal info is used for fraud and identity theft and the incidents of these are both rising rapidly in the digital era. One estimate has that about 90 percent of information traded online involves personal information of some kind. Some very large organisations and online services have been hacked in the past year and millions upon millions of personal details stolen including logins and passwords.  

Blog Currents – 2012, July 18

 In two weeks I’ll be back in the expanded Life section of the Bangkok Post with Currents. It should be similar to the old Currents, a little shorter and a little less technical. I will however try to keep it as close to the way this blog has been and how the column used to be.

I’ve mentioned this subject before but I am sick and tired of reading about court cases based on how something on a screen looks or if it has rounded corners or not. In one recent case a UK judge found that Samsung’s tablets were not as cool as Apple’s. The decision also showed how woefully uninformed the judiciary are in places like the US, UK and Australia.

Take a window for example and if you can try to bring up a screen shot of Windows 2 and one of the early Mac versions. You will notice they both have a border, a way to close it, a top panel with a heading. One may have lines and the other a black background but they are essentially the same. They both have square corners, icons on the backgrounds, text in the screen, shadow borders. The simple truth is that for the most part everything on the computer world will be derivative. There is a difference when we get to plagiarism but that is normally reserved for characters from books not the shape of an icon or a menu item.

The tablets of today are not all that much different from what was around a decade or two ago. Apple’s current state of gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands is more about Samsung having an impact on the market than if they have similarities in their design. For the user it comes down to what Android is providing over what the iOS is and Apple doesn’t like that part at all. 

For those still on an Enterprise version of Windows XP and you also use Symantec anti-virus products then my condolences. On the 11^th of this month a new version was pushed out that caused all kinds of issues until it was withdrawn and a revised update sent out. The problem was caused by a three-way, no not the kind you might be thinking of but in this case a disagreement between encryption drivers, Symantec and Windows own XP cache manager. The result was the now infamous blue screen of death we have all grown to know and hate. For most readers that do not use Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition I imagine that this was not an issue but it does provide a nice cautionary tale. More and more application developers are seemingly rushing out new versions of their products and Symantec is apologetic, promises to take more care and so on. This of course nothing new in the malware community and while there continues to be a regular and rapid turnout of new versions, signature files, updates etc. there will be mistakes in the rush. This will not be the last time this kind of story occurs.

In a completely unrelated story Microsoft has announced that the next version of Office will be out on Monday, well details about it at least. It is apparently the “most transformational release ever.” The next version has a serial number of 15 but will be known as Office 2013 not Office 15. The public beta will be out in a little while but based on the name I’m guessing it will be next year before the real thing hits the shelves. The content of the product is still hidden under a shroud of secrecy except that there will be a Windows ARM version that can run under Windows 8 RT. How this will differ from the regular PC version is anyone’s guess at the moment. You can bet it will involve the cloud in some way via Office 365. It will also have to have a consistent interface with whatever Windows 8 Metro ends up looking like so that Microsoft and others can get all of those training dollars. So March for the real version, and probably October for the Windows 8 ARM version, and there may be a few surprises given how some are gushing about how different it all looks. For me Office 2010 will be fine for quite a while yet.

I understand the fascination of Christians with tablets because of the whole Moses thing but the Edifi seven inch device may be taking that to the religious extreme. It is marketed as the first tablet device for Christians, so they don’t seem to know their history, that comes with 27 streaming versions of the Bible, connectivity to radio stations, and a specially designed browser to dissuade the user from visiting those sites not religiously approved. It comes with Android 2.3 so lame, 512 MB of RAM, lame and 8GB of storage, lame. It does only cost $149 so that probably explains the specs and is made by the South Koreans for the retailer Family Christian. The Google Nexus 7 is about the same price with better specs so Google must be supported by the devil.  

Stop the presses! The next iPhone will be thinner than the current one. This according to that special group of people who know what Apple is going to do. You know the ones without any names also known as Apple employees who leave unreleased phones in bars or the officially sanctioned leakers. Not sure they bother to play these games but the latest is that the iPhone 5 will come with advanced touch screen technology. Surprised? Stunned? Still awake? So apparently the thinner phone will come from trimming the display by 0.44mm, a thinner battery shaving off .46 mm changing the glass back for metal all resulting in the 9.3mm 4S dropping to a 7.9 mm version 5. Oh it will be a bit taller as well. An Apple loving colleague recently held my Samsung Galaxy S3 and declared that it was too big (compared to his 4S). I guess he will not like the iPhone 5 or perhaps like all Apple lovers the larger format will instantly become the new beloved standard in size they are somewhat accommodating after all.      

Intel has declared that they will make their SSDs cheaper and has or will drop prices on the 320, 330 and 520 SSDs. They have also added a 240Gb drive to the previously 180GB max in the 330, or less expensive for punters, line. Sorry but that is the story, no prices from Intel until the units filter down to the sales points.

Finally for this week and in the “yeah, right” category. If you cast you mind and memory back a few of years to around 2009 you might remember the problems Microsoft was having in Europe because they bundled their IE browser with Windows and did not offer any alternatives. Then the European Commission cracked down on this, fined them and Microsoft started offering options? Yeah, well funny thing. Microsoft, under the legally-binding agreement, was supposed to display a choice screen to its European Windows customers allowing them to pick between IE, Firefox, Chrome and other browsers on the market until 2014. With all of the problems Europe has been having and their attention diverted Microsoft quietly dropped this option since February 2011, yes that is a long time for anyone to notice.

Microsoft claimed it was due to a “technical error” that this choice had been removed and they had not noticed it had vanished. For any of those who actually believe this, quick show of hands, OK so no one believes this particular excuse. Don’t worry that is only about 28 million PC’s affected and 28 million people now forced to use IE. So a quick Mea Culpa from Microsoft and all is forgiven right? The EU will be investigating.

Blog Currents – 2012, 11 July

I was watching a report on Google’s image detection capabilities recently that gave examples of pixelated images dropped into the Google here: http://images.google.com/imghp?hl=e. In a few seconds the real image was displayed with information about where it was taken and of course who the picture was of. This not only worked for simple pixilation of the eyes but even for the full face.

 Think of the power this gives a reporter, a researcher, a corporation trying to find out who the whistle-blower was and even the criminal trying to work out who a witness might be. No need to wait for say the Australian ABC to publish the unedited photo you can just have Google do it for you. Not sure about that Al Gore photo of the polar bear on a tiny ice berg drop in the picture to see how it was Photoshopped from another image. Someone sends you a picture of a termite mound drop it in and find out it is really a stone pinnacle (I recently saw this happen on a popular sensible anti-global warming site). The perfect tool to distinguish a stock photo image from a real independent one, for example.

 The real purpose of the tool is to remind you where you took that photo on your whirlwind holiday trip to 30 countries in three weeks. Drop in the picture of the mountain, the waterfall, the bird, the stick insect and in a few minutes you can start sticking on the dynamo labels. There is an Android version called Google Goggles that works the same way and I think I may have mentioned it a couple of weeks back. Same principle only scaled down a little.

 Like most things like this it is a tool that can be used for good or by the forces of evil. It is not inherently bad , though I’m guessing some privacy organisations don’t like it much, but it is like taking DNA samples only the criminals are complaining about the process because it makes their job all that much harder.

 So how many atoms does it take on your hard drive to represent a bit of information, a thousand? According to one source I read about 3 million atoms. That might sound like a lot but then atoms tend to be really small. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have managed to shrink this down to a mere 51 atoms for a successful read write from a single molecule. That is one iron atom in the middle of an organic molecule of I would guess 50 atoms. The organics part forms a protective layer called a spin cross-over molecule which sounds too much to a form of exercise in my mind.

 Send in a little electricity and that changes the state of the iron’s magnetic charge. There is stuff about the memristive effect but all in all the result is RERAM or resistive RAM. So with everything being smaller that is about 50K times more storage for the same space. Or a 4 TB drive storing about 200 Pentabytes which is of course impossible because you would need to have an address for every bit and that means a head small enough to read each bit. OK ignore all of that and think solid state memory. This has its own problems because the support circuitry would take up more space than the storage itself. So scale the memory down to about 100 times current storage sizes and that is still a lot of new space to store stuff in. Of course it might be a long time until such a thing is even practical but we can hope.

China has claimed another lead this time the most smartphone shipments, more than the big names. Remembering that these are Chinese figures. They shipped 195 million phones up to June with nearly half of those being smartphones. For the last three months this has crept up over 50 percent. Most were 3G and of course shipments do not equal actual sales. On the plus side the momentum is still building for Android with one analyst estimating that nearly 77 percent of smartphones sold in the second quarter were Android based. Even if the number estimates are only half of what China is claiming the trend is there and smartphones are gaining ground over other models.

A UK judge has handed Samsung a backhanded win over Apple by describing Samsung’s devices as not having the “same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design. They are not as cool." On this basis Apple as lost its “Wah, they copied our designs” case in the UK. I’m not sure what impact this decision will have on the design staff in Korea but it will finally free up Samsung to sell their tablet Pcs in the UK. The judge also went on to observe that both devices are part of the same family started some time ago by others. Apple of course disagrees and whines that "This kind of blatant copying is wrong and, as we've said many times before, we need to protect Apple's intellectual property." More sensible people, i.e. most of the planet, are sick of Apple claiming that they invented everything and that any prior art is superseded by them.

 In other more amusing Apple news those that run San Francisco have banned departmental purchases of Apple hardware. Why? Well it appears that Apple has dropped out of the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) green-standards scheme. Or to put it another way Apple is no longer Green enough for the city. Local education departments are also part of the same scheme so that blocks Apple from education assuming they also support the boycott. Apple says it is not all that concerned because as far as sales goes it is a tiny drop in the bucket. However there are other signatories to EPEAT including the US Department of Defense, NASA, and Homeland Security. There are also countries like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Add all of these up and perhaps they will feel the pinch.

 Windows 8 will be out in October but you will need to wait until next year before the Surface tablets come out. OEM’s will get the OS in August. If you buy a new PC now then the upgrade cost will be $14.95 and for the rest it will be $39.99. Those are US$ of course and in the US which means it could be anything elsewhere. Customers will also get access to SkyDrive cloud storage with a Windows 8 purchase. Steve Ballmer claimed that Windows 8 would be the biggest deal for Microsoft in 17 years, since the launch of Windows 95. I think it will be the next Vista and not as many people will move like they have from XP to Windows 7. Office 15 will not be too far behind and the pricing may even be a bit better than in the past. The ARM tablet version will also be out in October, the Surface note above is for Intel based tablets.

Anonymous is now officially on my heroes list. They have turned their attention not to government agencies but child abusers. The OpPedoChat initiative will follow on in a similar line to earlier campaigns that have attacked site linked to the distribution of paedophile material. This will include denial of service attacks and membership exposure. The target is 100 domains that host forums allegedly used by child abusers for chat and picture sharing. Some data dumps have already started to appear on Pastebin. Anonymous has even released a video asking for public and government support to "create political and social pressure on these pedophile sites".

Blog Currents - 4 July 2012

I have my new Samsung Galaxy S3, the S2 went to my Mum. The S3 a little bit taller, the screen is a lot sharper, it is faster, the battery lasts longer, it connects to things faster, pops up almost instantly when you plug it in, connection speeds are better, has more functionality and came out 6 months before the iPhone 5 and I have just scratched the surface. Apart from this I don’t know what all the fuss is about J. On a more serious note the S3 has sole dover 10 million units already and by the mythical iPhone 5 comes out there will be at least one new generation of Android come out.

Against all realistic indicators Android continues to make ground ahead of iOS and it will not be that much longer before the iPhone becomes the “what was” item of choice and only the Apple fanbois will keep buying new models. The rumoured change in connector will only hasten this process.

I just ordered a neat interface for the S2/S3 that allows the connection of a USB wireless mouse for example, some memory cards for data transfer and a few other features. When you think about it with 4 CPUs, 16 GB of memory and a 720p screen and the connectivity there is little to distinguish these new smartphones from a computer. If you took one back say 20 years it would be more powerful than just about anything available at the time. It shows just how far technology has changed just in the past couple of decades.

Industry News

So how much will it cost you to upgrade to Windows 8? According to Microsoft $40 will do it until January next year at least. This will be available as soon as Windows 8 is available to the general public. It should be Microsoft painless for Windows 7 users with all settings, apps and personal stuff unchanged. Vista users will miss out on the applications and XP users will lose everything but their files. Of course if you format your hard drive then there will be no issues at all, in other words upgrades as normal. You will be able to burn the installer onto a DVD or order one, for a price, from Microsoft. The OS may be ready for manufacturers as soon as, well this month. Retail will be later this year. No news on how much the retail version will be after the promotional period.

According to the latest Web stats Apple’s iOS is beating Android three to one or they are tied. It all depends on whose counter service you read. It all comes down to statistics and we know what the famous have said about those. A closer analysis reveals that iPads are beating Samsung units handily but when it comes to the really pocket sized units then not so much. One company reads web pages again something more common on an iPad. No matter how you slice it Blackberries are not doing so well these days.

In other Apple news the company is not doing so well in Italy and may be facing an imminent shutdown because of the repeated violation of the consumer-protection laws. In Italy the rule is a free two year warranty for electronic devices and must tell customers this. Apple sees this differently and sells them a customer protection plan. Apple has been fined once but being the arrogant, overbearing mega corporation they are have continued the practice. Unlike the US Europeans have a bit more backbone and have threatened to close all Apple stores down for 30 days, plus a new fine. We will know within four weeks what Apple decides to do next.

Still in the news Samsung has asked for the Galaxy Nexus ban to be lifted after Apple whined about the Koreans destroying them. The stupid judge has placed the ban until the court case starts on March 31, 2014, yes you read that right nearly two years away hence the “stupid” tag. Two years is a few technology generations and of course the Nexus will be obsolete. Since Samsung has a good chance to win on appeal it makes the judge’s decision even worse. Apple is all but a protected entity in the US.

So apparently there are more problems for the iPhone 5, this time the battery. The supplier is having problems with the large number of units that Apple expects to sell. Since the units are not due to ship until the end of the year this is somewhat surprising. Apparently Apple was trying to move the release date up to August from November and the manufacturer said it couldn’t be done. With Android 4.1 due out soon and probably version 5 by the time the original release date came around this might have made good marketing sense but not so much if your maker cannot keep up. So this will move the date back to September, October, November well pick a date, any date. SO far 70 percent of the batteries have failed to meet specs, allegedly.  Who cares the Galaxy S3 is a great phone you can te right now, it works, the battery life is great. Oops already told you that.

It is estimated that about an eighth of the Fortune 500 companies in the US are still infected with the DNS changed virus that is due to detonate in a couple of weeks or so. Not every machine just one or two but enough to have an impact. If they don’t get off their collective arses and make sure they are infection free they will not be able to access the Internet properly. This means no e-mails, no surfing and even isolation from interwebs. The problem can also be found in some US government organisations but not as many. Oh, it also deactivates security software and any updates leaving machines open to more attacks. In total about 300,000 machines are thought to be infected. Just because you are a Fortune 500 organisation does not necessarily mean that you are IT savvy I guess.

In other hacking news the Indian navy has fallen victim to Chinese hackers. They managed to get info from isolated PCs containing high security materials by using malware hiding on USB drives. If you remember this was the way that Stuxnet got around. The target was specifically the Indian Eastern Naval Command which is overseeing trials of the country’s first nuclear missile submarine. The malware grabbed info and then waited until it was connected to the Internet again and then sent the info on. The target IP addresses were traced to China a country very active in the hacking country level sites. This is not proof in itself but there is a history of this kind of thing. Other targets have included the US and of course Taiwan.

Finally for this week by the time you read this CERN will have probably announced that they have found the God particle, well almost certainly that they have. If so a great day for predictive science, the kind where the experiments actually prove the theory instead of disproving it as in the case of AGW.