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Boot up: reddit hypocrisy, Microsoft resists, iPhone owners await(Guardian Web Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) A burst of 10 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team Tell creepy men on the internet how you really feel >> The Verge T.C. Sottek: If you're not familiar with Reddit, this is the best way I know how to describe it: it's an "anything goes" online message board where the loudest voices belong to misogynistic trolls who value anonymity over decency. In reality, "anything goes" is a bit of hyperbole, since the site does have two major rules: no child porn, and no posting "personal information." And because Reddit is a special place, its ban on posting personal information will protect you unless you happen to be an attractive woman that lots of people want to see naked. At ground zero of Reddit's celebrity nude leak, where, as you are reading this, an orgy of men are sharing and ogling and re-sharing and re-ogling, lies this placard: DO NOT POST ANY INFORMATION, TRUE OR FALSE, ABOUT THE IDENTITY OF THE PERSON(S) LEAKING THESE PHOTOGRAPHS AND VIDEOS. IF YOU DO THAT YOU WILL BE BANNED FROM THIS SUBREDDIT. If the hypocrisy of this dim herd is not bare enough for you, consider this: these people want to protect someone who stole and exposed the private nude photos of women because logically their actions are roughly equivalent to someone who leaks state secrets like illegal mass spying on American citizens. Q3 2014 smartphone sales - calm before the iPhone 6 storm >> Kantar Carolina Milanesi: The average lifecycle of smartphones in the US is 20 months. BlackBerry holds the longest cycle at 26.3 months, while Apple is only slightly above average at 21.1. More than 43% of the iPhones in use are older than 24 months, while another 24% are between 18 and 24 months old. The iPhone 4S is the most popular model with a 26% share of all iPhones in circulation in the US. The iPhone 5 is the second most owned model at 22%, while 19% of iPhones in use are the iPhone 4 model. When it comes to upgrading their devices, 18% of current iPhone owners intend to upgrade in the next six months and another 48% plan to upgrade in the next 12. Ninety-three percent of owners in both groups are considering upgrading to another iPhone. Microsoft will not hand over overseas email, despite order | Reuters A judge on Friday lifted a suspension on her order directing Microsoft to turn over a customer's emails stored overseas to US prosecutors, but the software company said it would not release any emails while it appeals the ruling. Chief Judge Loretta Preska of the US District Court in Manhattan had on 31 July upheld a magistrate judge's ruling on the emails, which have been held in a data center in Ireland. That prospect had drawn concern from technology companies - fearful of losing revenue from foreign customers worried that US law enforcement might win broad power to seize their data. Microsoft isn't (yet) in contempt, so this could go all the way to the Supreme Court if the appeals carry on. How your #naked pictures ended up on the internet >> Toolbox.com While information security has come a long way in the last 20 years, one key fact remains the same: the weakest link in the chain is the human. Humans aren't good at securing their stuff - and they certainly aren't good at picking passwords or security questions. The incident that I'm about to share with you below is just an example - an important example. Share this posting please. From September 2012, but it's just as true now: social engineering, in its manifold forms, is what happens again and again. Tagged your cat on Facebook? Maybe that's how your Yahoo account was hacked, which led to the next, and the next... Either privacy or security is broken, but we seem reluctant to embrace privacy again. Security needs to catch up. And, as this article points out, there are sites where people buy and sell iCloud logins. Ferguson police are using body cameras >> St Louis Post-Dispatch Police officers here began wearing body cameras on Saturday as marchers took to the streets in the most recent protest of a shooting three weeks earlier by a city officer that left an unarmed teenager dead. Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson said his department was given about 50 body cameras by two companies, Safety Visions and Digital Ally, about a week ago. The companies donated the body cameras after the fatal shooting on Aug. 9 of Michael Brown Jr. by Ferguson officer Darren Wilson. Company representatives were at the police department on Saturday training officers to use the devices, which attach to uniforms and record video and audio. Let's see how this works out over the next couple of years. Taken a long time. Share your whiteboard >> Rocketboard Looks like a good idea if you do lots of work on whiteboards and have dispersed teams. It's over: the rise & fall of Google Authorship for search results >> Search Engine Land Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting on how those little photos of people beside search results are going away: We all like to think that Google has infinite processing power. It doesn't. If it did have such power, it would use optical character recognition to read text in images, image processing techniques to recognize pictures, speech to text technology to transcribe every video it encounters online, and it would crawl every page on the web every day, and so forth. But it doesn't. What this tells us is that Google has to make conscious decisions on how it spends its processing power — it must be budgeted wisely. As of this moment, the Authorship initiative as we have known it has not been deemed worthy of the budget it was consuming. The rise of mobile may have played a role in this outcome as well. When John Mueller says staffers don't see a significant difference in click behavior in the SERPs as a result of Authorship rich snippets, remember that about half of Google's traffic comes from mobile devices now. Chewing up valuable screen real estate for this type of markup on a mobile device may simply be a bad idea. So is authorship gone forever? Our guess is that probably is not. The concept is a good one. Bye, Google Maps >> Medium Zach Hamed: Every so often, an app comes along that just completely understands the way you think. I don't normally write long posts about an app I've used. But Citymapper is so incredibly well-made that I decided to put together a list of common use cases of a maps app, and how both Google Maps and Citymapper handle them. Apple's Maps would trail a poor third on this comparison. Should Apple buy Citmapper? The Road Ahead >> AnandTech Anand Lai Shimpi, founder of the site: after 17.5 years of digging, testing, analyzing and writing about the most interesting stuff in tech, it's time for a change. This will be the last thing I write on AnandTech as I am officially retiring from the tech publishing world. Ryan Smith (@RyanSmithAT) is taking over as Editor in Chief of AnandTech. Ryan has been working with us for nearly 10 years, he has a strong background in Computer Science and he's been shadowing me quite closely for the past couple of years. I am fully confident in Ryan's ability to carry the torch and pick up where I left off. We've grown the staff over the course of this year in anticipation of the move. With a bunch of new faces around AnandTech, all eager to uphold the high standards and unique approach to covering tech, I firmly believe the site can continue to thrive for years to come. He's going to Apple to do an unspecified job. Also: 9to5mac reports that Brian Klug, also formerly at Anandtech, is now working at Apple on mobile processors. Quick thoughts: on iPhone sizes >> Beyond Devices Jan Dawson: It's particularly dangerous to extrapolate demand for iPhones at different screen sizes from Android purchasing behavior, for two main reasons: • iPhone and Android users behave very differently, in a whole variety of ways: Android users spend less on devices and apps, spend less time in apps, download fewer apps, are more likely to live in emerging markets and in Asia, and so on and so forth. They're simply very different user bases, and there's no particular reason to believe they'll behave the same way when it comes to screen sizes when their behavior is so different in every other way. • Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it's very easy to reverse cause and effect with screen sizes in the Android world. Many people seem to assume that, because most premium Android devices are larger than 4.5 inches, that must be what people want. But the reality is that it's almost impossible to buy a premium Android device with a screen smaller than 4.5 inches. So, the question becomes, are premium Android devices only made in sizes above 4.5 inches because that's all anyone wants, or is that all anyone wants because that's all that Android OEMs make? I'd argue that Android device makers have very deliberately targeted the larger size as a way to set themselves apart from the iPhone, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was demand-driven. You can follow Guardian Technology's linkbucket on Pinboard To suggest a link, either add it below or tag it with @gdntech on the free Delicious service. (c) 2014 Guardian Newspapers Limited. |