Facebook Will Ask Permission Before Sharing Address Book
Yesterday we detailed the frightening sharing of pretty much your phone’s entire address book with any app that asked for it. Today, Apple has done the right thing and announced that it will make it so that apps will ask your permission before they download your entire address book. Which, you know, is only right.
This move might break many apps. There are a surprising number of apps that transfer your address book to third parties. And every single one will need to update to bring themselves into compliance with Apple’s new rules.
The whole debacle started with...
Google's Motorola Purchase has been approved
In the span of hours, both the European Union and the US Justice Department have given Google the green light to complete its takeover of Motorola Mobility. So as of this moment, the entire thing is officially official. Whether the move will prove to be wise in the long run, however, still remains to be seen.
Google is buying Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. While the general consensus is that Google made this deal for the patents, there have been some (mostly legitimate) fears about the merger damping the competitive market. But even Google’s hardware partners, competitors...
Google Encrypted Services Blocked in Iran Since February 10
Whelp, it’s official: Iran is trying to cut off any outside encrypted traffic. This doesn’t bode well for its citizens. Google has officially announced that all encrypted traffic to Google services, like the kind that goes into Gmail, Google Docs, Youtube (when you are logged in) and Google Videos, have been blocked.
But its not just Google services that have been blocked. Its all encrypted traffic from outside the country. And considering that Iran isn’t a hotbed of internet entrepreneurship, that means pretty much all encrypted traffic in the country has stopped. Some Iranian citizens had...
Google has a Big Announcement Tomorrow
Google pushed out a post on its official Google TV Facebook with the terse “Get ready for Monday, we have some big announcements!” Which is all we know about what the company is planning.
But, we can guess that it has something to do with the rumored Nexus TV that LG is supposedly building, and, hopefully, the rumored entertainment device that Google has supposedly been working on for months, if not years, that hopefully combines Project Tungsten (the Android@Home project) with Google TV.
All we have right now is rumours, but as the story breaks, you know that you can find...
Now Amazon is Getting in on the Custom Video Content Game
Fist Hulu, then Netflix and now Amazon. All the greats of online media have apparently decided that creating their own content is better than playing games with television studios.
News has just come down the wire that Amazon is seeking personnel for a new division dedicated to producing exclusive video content. Right now, it is seeking at least two creative executives knowledgeable in the field and willing to hash out a full team. If you happen to be one such executives, this could be the chance of the lifetime, letting you get in on the ground floor of...
Iran Cuts Off Internet Access to Sites Using Encryption
If you are in Iran and you don’t want people snooping on your traffic, you are out of luck. Sites running common security settings like HTTPS, designed to protect traffic on ebusiness sites, etc, is now blocked. As are the proxies that many people used to bypass the existing site blacklists the country levied on its citizens.
The restriction comes as the aniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution looms, and is believed to be a temporary measure to prevent uprisings like what occured in Libya, Egypt and Syria. But some reports in the counrty claim that the dropping...
US App Industry Employs Nearly 500,000 People
For an industry that pretty much didn’t exist 5 years ago, the mobile app creation market is huge. A new report puts the number of workers working on apps at ~466,000, and growing rapidly.
Oh, and mobile apps are believed to have pumped $20 billion into the economy, for those doubting the size of the market.
Growth from Nowhere
Before the iPhone came out in late 2007, there were virtually no mobile app developers. Windows Phone was really the only true smartphone platform, and Popcap was almost the only company specializing in mobile phone game development.
But the iPhone changed everything. ...
Make the World into Minecraft with HTML5 Demo
If you need any further proof that HTML5 is awesome, play around with this tech demo. Using publicly available cartographic data, a few HTML5 libraries like Three.js and some Google API’s, hacker Jaume Sánchez has made an impressive, pixelated version of our planet, or, if you give it your location, your nearby area.
Note: this isn’t Minecraft. In truth, I don’t think it is even a true voxel environment. Instead, it is a nifty graphical effect achieved by overlaying a grid over an area and sampling for the average height. Take that data, create rectangles as high...
Lowes has a License to Link
Want to link to Lowes.com? Don’t, unless you’ve faxed in your license agreement. Turns out, the company is trying to protect its brand so strenuously that, unless you get permission from the company, you’re not allowed to link to them at all.
I wonder if anyone has told Google?
The license comes in two versions: one for when you want to use Lowes’ logo and name on your page, and one for when you don’t. Lowes expects you to sign the documents and then submit them.
By fax. There is no other option. And, of course, Lowes can...
Redbox Rejects Time Warner's Deal, Won't Wait 56 Days
Time Warner has been getting increasingly desperate in trying to salvage its sinking DVD sales flagship. First it convinced Netflix, Redbox and their ilk to sign on to a 28 day delay for its new releases, to give it some time to sell DVD’s. But the company decided to push its luck, upping the delay to 56 days, or nearly 2 full months.
While Netflix has signed on with the new deal, Redbox isn’t having anything of it. They’re just going to source their DVD’s elsewhere.
The deal is required for Redbox to be able to take advantage of...
Obama Campaign Using Square Card Readers for Fundraising
Square has finally made it to the big-time. The company, who aims to bring credit card processing to anyone who wants it, thanks to a clever, square contraption that plugs in to your smartphone, is now being used by the Obama campaign for financing.
Square was started by Jack Dorsey, of Paypal fame. The company has rapidly been growing, thanks to its simple pricing for transactions and clever use of smartphones and the internet. The company makes its readers available to anyone who wants one (even I have one) and lets anyone signed up process credit cards with...
Internet Economy to reach $4.2 Trillion by 2016
If you needed further proof that the internet is huge and growing, look no further than this report by the Boston Consulting Group.
The group predicts that the internet will generate $4.2 trillion in revenue by 2016, with roughly half of all the people in the world online. And while this sounds huge, it doesn’t seem completely unreasonable.
In 2010 the internet economy is believed to have been roughly $2.3 trillion. while it might seem a big jump to go from $2.3 trillion to $4.2 trillion in only a few years, the prediction is factoring in an explosion of new...
Google Scores Contract to bring 27,000 Chromebooks to Schools
Score one for El Goog, who has managed to ink a deal with three states to bring the company’s cloud-based computers to the classroom. Soon, students in Iowa, Illinois and South Carolina will be getting brand new laptops that pretty much only run a web browser.
Google believes that Chromebooks could be a game changer in education. Because of their design, it is much harder to infect a Chromebook with a virus than it is a normal Mac or Windows PC. And the account-based system insures that it doesn’t matter what laptop the students use, they will always...
Steve Jobs Wanted Lytro's Plenoptic Camera for next iPhone
Lytro’s plenoptic camera technology might find a new home in smartphones, if the company has anything to do with it. The technology, which lets you focus a picture after the shot has already been taken (thanks to some genius optics and clever software) was at least considered by Steve Jobs for the next iPhone, and now the company has announced that it is open to licensing it.
Then head-honcho Steve apparently met several times with the company’s CEO Ren Ng, according to a new nonfiction book, “Inside Apple.”
The company's CEO, Ren Ng, a brilliant computer scientist with a PhD from...
Anonymous Has Deleted CBS.com
Anonymous has apparently decided to up its game. The disorganized hacker group didn’t just take down CBS.com, it actually deleted the entire site. For a brief period of time, if you went to CBS.com, you would get a file list, the default display of various web servers, with only one file.
CBS has pieced itself back together, likely having a backup of the site in case of emergencies that destroyed the servers. But this shows a level of aggression that Anonymous didn’t display before. Sure, they would leak some files, or deface a web site. But...
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