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Boot up: Samsung's death question, Android game monetisation, Heartbleed lessons, and more
[April 17, 2014]

Boot up: Samsung's death question, Android game monetisation, Heartbleed lessons, and more


(Guardian Web Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) A burst of 8 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team Deaths at Samsung alter South Korea's corporate-is-king mindset >> Businessweek Just inside his single-story home, built of concrete blocks and coated in turquoise paint, Hwang Sang-ki, a 58-year-old Korean taxi driver, sits on a floor mat. He's clasping a small handbag, once bright white and now dull after years on a shelf. He pulls out a snapshot of 13 smiling young women, all co-workers at Samsung Electronics, off-duty and posing in three rows, each embracing or leaning into the other. The leaves of a tree behind them are turning golden in the autumn chill.



"Here," says Hwang, pointing to two women in the center of the group. Both had the same job at the same semiconductor factory, on the same line, standing side by side at the same workstation, dipping computer chips into the same vat of chemicals. Both got a particularly aggressive form of the blood cancer known as acute myeloid leukemia. One was his daughter, Yu-mi. In South Korea, only about 3 out of every 100,000 people die of leukemia. "They worked together, and they died," says Hwang. The snapshot is among a few private memories Hwang keeps of his late daughter.

Long, detailed look at the fight of a number of families to get clear answers on the deaths of children and siblings who worked on the semiconductor lines.


300M downloads and $600M in revenue say Google is the 'loser's choice' in mobile games monetization >> VentureBeat Venturebeat surveyed a number of big-hitting games developers about how they make money: The results show not only which monetization methods are most effective at making developers money; they also show the least effective. The most-used monetization method, for instance, is the interstitial ad. But the way developers make more money is clear: freemium in-app purchases.

Developers also told us which companies make them the most money — and which make them the least.

The data clearly shows that game developers abandon Google once they hit 11 published games. While Google wins in the fat long tail of solo and small-team developers who have built fewer than 11 games, with 77% developer share there, game-makers who have made more than 20 games, have more than 20 developers, and bring in more than $50,000 every month are much more likely to not use Google.

The report is here.

The director of IT for NASA JPL explains where tech is going next in the enterprise >> CITEWorld You'll recognise them, but there were lots of other possibilities - which he effectively rules out.

Infographic: Defining mobile penetration in India: population, subscribers and connections >> GSMA In urban areas, there are an average of more than 2 SIMs per mobile subscriber - which tends to mean that the number of unique mobile subscribers is rather lower than the number of active connections.

The real wakeup call from Heartbleed >> Dark Reading Today, there are 648,740 different libraries in the Central Repository, a sort of open-source clearinghouse where developers can download software components for use in their applications. A typical web application or web service will typically use between a few dozen and a few hundred of these components. Remember, all of these components have the ability to do anything that the application can do. A component that is supposed to draw buttons is capable of accessing the database. A math library is capable of reading and writing files on the server. So, a vulnerability in any of these libraries can expose the entire enterprise.

You can think of all this code as a sort of supply chain for software. Modern applications are assembled from components, custom business logic, and a lot of "glue" code. In the real world, supply chain management is used to ensure that components used in making products actually meet certain standards. They come with material data safety sheets, test results, and other ratings. This whole process is managed to ensure that the final product will work as expected and be safe to use.

But there is no assurance in today's software supply chain.

This is Nokia's encrypted tablets in 2001 - nine years before the iPad >> Helsinki Evening Times Hard to believe that they suspended manufacture after making just a thousand of these for testing. There's more at Digit Today (in Finnish, but with more pictures).

Modular smartphones are the building blocks of a tech shambles >> Stuff Craig Grannell on Project Ara: From an industry perspective, the concept of modularity is an even bigger ask. It was hard enough for the EU to convince manufacturers to settle on a charging standard, and even then the likes of Apple wriggled out of doing so by selling adapters. Now imagine getting everyone to agree on a modular standard. And should that miracle occur, what then? Major jumps in technology around such limitations would be less likely, innovation stemmed if components all had to adhere to a strict interchangeable spec. Every phone would soon resemble every other, while economy of scale would counter-intuitively be given a beating as well; because although these devices would all be akin to Lego, everyone would be manufacturing their own bits and pieces, in a vastly fragmented ecosystem.

So what first seems like a simple, obvious idea is in reality a mess waiting to happen, and one that will offer few benefits for the end user. They won't save a great deal of money, few will care about interchangeable parts anyway, some will wonder why there are big gaps on the back of their smartphones if they can't get the various bits to line up properly, and a few geeks will proclaim it the best thing ever, before getting distracted approximately eight seconds later by some great new Google robot that gets injected directly into your hypothalamus.

Really, it's all a distraction anyway. What we should be doing is encouraging manufacturers, carriers and service providers to support gadgets for longer, and for developers to ensure apps are highly optimised to the point they'll happily run on years-old devices.

Office 365 Personal now available – and unlocks editing and document creation on iPad >> Office Blogs On 13 March, we revealed that a new consumer subscription offering, Office 365 Personal, would be coming this spring. Today we're announcing that it's available for purchase–$69.99/year or $6.99/month (ERP)1–online at Office365.com, at Microsoft Stores and through online and retail partners.

An Office 365 Personal subscription allows for one PC or Mac, and one tablet (including iPad) to be connected to the service, and is the best option for individuals interested in using Office 365.

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