Episode 177

An internal email leaked last month that pointed to a new MacBook Pro update with the notebooks getting an Intel Core i5 processor update.

Apple has blocked the technology at every turn. But with growing consumer pressure on Apple to support Flash – and Apple needing to make a case for its upcoming iPad – Adobe this week has expressed confidence Apple will cave eventually.

“Our goal is to provide a consistent runtime that spans devices, inclusive of [mobile and] desktop operating systems,” Flash marketing director Adrian Ludwig said

is being blocked by Apple from getting low-level access to the iPhone that’s necessary to properly implement Flash. As a workaround, Adobe has offered developers tools that encapsulate Flash applications in an iPhone-friendly application wrapper, allowing them to be delivered to customers through Apple’s App Store.

Apple’s motivations for blocking Flash have frequently been attributed to more commercial realities: because it provides an alternative and unmanaged way to get applications running on the phone, Flash could easily break Apple’s tightly controlled App Store, which features over 140,000 titles and recently marked its 3 billionth download.

The feature could be a boon for consumers, who could use it to “walk” through the door and into a store while in Street View mode – sort of a more realistic version of Second Life. Applied to larger retail environments such as shopping malls, the service could be a massive timesaver – and have significant e-commerce implications. Walk through a virtual representation of a mall, and Google could not only let you stroll through participating stores, but could let you pick items off of shelves and order them with a single click.

GPS doesn’t work indoors, which would force Google to figure out a better way of tracking customers through its virtual retail environments – possibly through mobile phone base station triangulation

The YouTube Video Speed History tool is hidden in the Help menus at the bottom of the main YouTube page or available here,    www.youtube.com/my_speed and provides a pair of charts showing current and historical video transfer speeds. The tool also offers a test video that shows current performance as it streams a sample video.

Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson and Qualcomm all exhibited different flavours of internet-connected cars at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona

Audi and Qualcomm focused on the consumer benfits that can come from connected cars and used a 3G-enabled Audi A5 to show off navigation applications and streaming entertainment services. A SIM card slot positioned below the in-car display allows users to insert a conventional 3G SIM card and turn the car into a mobile wi-fi hotspot allowing passengers to plug into the internet, where from the comfort of their seat they can make simultaneous voice and data connections.

COMMUNICATIONS Minister Stephen Conroy has demanded social networking giant Facebook detail how it will prevent cyber-vandalism in the wake of the defacing of an online memorial site for 12-year-old school stabbing victim Elliott Fletcher.

Senator Conroy said. “The sorts of images that were put up on the site were truly horrific.

“I think there is a situation where people take Facebook with an enormous amount of trust and they’ve got to clearly explain what went wrong with their security systems, how this was able to happen (and) importantly, how they’re going to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.”

Ms Frost said Facebook employed a team to “take quick action to respond to reports (of inappropriate content), remove the content and either warn or disable the accounts of those responsible”.

$250 million NBN Regional Backbone Blackspot Program that will eventually see 6,000 km of fibre snaking across five routes. Mt Isa is the midpoint of the 3835 km route from Darwin to Toowoomba that will take 18 months to complete, is the longest of the five routes and is expected to cost about $125 million.

http://chatroulette.com/

On Chatroulette, a new and controversial Web site, every click lands you in a face-to-face video conversation with a random stranger.

The setup is simple: Activate your webcam and click “play.” Then, as people from all over the world pop up one at a time in a box on your screen, you decide whether or not to chat with them. If you don’t like the looks of things, click “next” and the site shuffles you to someone new.

The people you meet could be friendly or could just as easily be naked — or even masturbating in front of the camera, which is the case rather frequently.

Two of the first four video chatters randomly selected for CNN by Chatroulette were naked when their pictures appeared. The fifth person simply held a sign up to the screen that read: “Please show me your boobs.”

you need to be 16 or over – load the site and click play

Microsoft Australia is likely to set quotas or shape traffic on its 150 Mbps Tech Ed 2010 conference internet link, in an effort to stop users killing the network by torrenting large files.

We quickly built a list of all of the top torrent trackers around and got the nod from Jorke [Odolphi – a local evangelist] to add them all to the local DNS resolver and point them at a local web server containing some RickRoll scripts,” Codify software engineer David Connors said.

Microsoft later created a script that could automatically generate a list of offending MAC addresses that was “dropped into a block list in the core switches.”

The culprits were “fingered and booted off the network.

An Australian distributor has been ordered to pay Nintendo over half a million dollars for selling  video game piracy tool, the R4 mod chip.

The Federal Court ordered that RSJ IT Solutions cease to sell the chip through its gadgetgear.com.au site and any other sites it controlled, as well as paying Nintendo $520,000 in damages.

Oz Mod Chips advises consumers to use their modification devices for legal reasons only, such as playing legal copies of games from different regions, using homebrew software, and playing backups of games that UPDATbeen legally purchased.

A woman has been stabbed in the back following a dispute on Facebook.

The 24-year-old was attacked at Loganlea, south of Brisbane, about 12.30am (AEST) on Monday, police said.

She was taken to Logan Hospital for treatment. Police said her injuries were not life-threatening.

The stabbing followed a dispute on the social networking site Facebook, The Courier-Mail reported.

It said two women had engaged in a dispute and agreed to meet up in person to ‘sort it out’.

They met outside one of their homes at Loganlea, where one is alleged to have stabbed the other, the paper said.

A person was helping officers with inquiries, police said.

Those in the market for a new television are reportedly either grabbing big bargains or holding off as the market prepares for the introduction of the next big thing – 3D.

The Courier Mail reports recent research shows LED screen prices have dropped more than 19-hundred dollars over the past year.

Comparison website GetPrice has told the paper searches for 3D TVs have soared ahead of their introduction in about two months.

Never Been Done Before In The History Of The World

In a never been done before in the history of the world film-making adventure, 6,000 difference makers from around the world are gathering together to collaborate on making an extraordinary film – The Difference™, the most influential film of our time, destined to shift humanity’s consciousness, open people’s minds and hearts and make a significant, positive difference in our world.

Teachers, parents and academics from across Queensland have pledged to work together to find the best ways to tackle schoolyard violence and cyber bullying.

Premier Anna Bligh said the new Queensland Schools Alliance Against Violence was an initiative recommended in the Rigby report commissioned by the state government last year.

The report found schools were not properly checking whether their anti-bullying programs worked and a well-coordinated effort was needed to cut bullying rates.

The report said covert forms of bullying, such as deliberate exclusion and cyber bullying, were seen as the most damaging of all to the mental health of children.

Ms Bligh said the alliance would investigate which schools had the most successful anti-bullying programs so they could be applied in other schools.

It will involve representatives from a number of organisations from the state and independent school systems, as well as teachers and parents.

‘Where there is a school doing something that’s working, we don’t want to just congratulate them, we want to take that experience and spread it to other schools,’ Ms Bligh said.

UK comedy show The Mighty Boosh has entered the world of technology by releasing a new mobile application which helps you make a decision.

Featuring the voices of the characters from the TV show, the tongue-in-cheek application, entitled The Mighty Decider, is a life management tool.

Those who download the it will be able to turn to the quirky and surreal Boosh universe when they want assistance in their life choices.

The show’s cast including Noel Fielding, Julian Barratt, Rich Fulcher and Dave Brown have all contributed their voices for the project.

The Mighty Boosh was created by comedians Barratt and Fielding and evolved from live theatre to a BBC TV series.

It has since started to make waves over in the US market.

The Mighty Decider is now available worldwide from the App store for the iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad.

Climate change scientists and journalists are becoming targets of cyber-bullying, academic Dr Clive Hamilton says.

The former Greens candidate in the 2009 by-election for the federal Melbourne-based seat of Higgins is concerned about a recent rise in ‘very nasty’ emails that he says go way beyond normal political discourse.

He says some scientists have even withdrawn from public participation in debate because the personal cost has become too great.

‘Others respond to cyber-bullying by becoming more resolved to keep putting the facts into the public domain.’

Dr Hamilton said the anonymous attacks – which range from insults to threats of physical violence – had grown a great deal in frequency and virulence in recent months.

‘The presence of someone like (climate change sceptic) Christopher Monckton tends to make the cyber bullies’ actions more justified,’ he said.

While some attacks amounted to ‘spontaneous rage’, others were more organised.

Some journalists, who did not want to go on the record, have considered taking police action due to the seriousness of the threats, Dr Hamilton said.

‘There have been threats of physical violence,’ Dr Hamilton said.

Although he is yet to identify the individuals or organisations behind the cyber attacks, Dr Hamilton says anyone who is involved in arguing for climate change appears to be a recipient of the bullying.

‘I’ve got some ideas but I don’t have any evidence,’ he said.

Dr Hamilton is this week writing a five-part series on ABC website The Drum on climate change cyber-bullying.

France has started using a full-body security scanner for US-bound passengers at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport.

The decision to try out the scanner for three months was prompted by security concerns after a man allegedly tried to ignite explosives hidden in his underwear on a Detroit-bound flight on December 25.

The scanner helps detect forbidden objects hidden under clothes.

Reactions varied among passengers who volunteered for the scan after the machine was installed on Monday. While some like 47-year-old Miami resident Michael Rammel said the scan was practical and fast, while others worried about potential harmful effects.

The director of France’s civil aviation authority, Patrick Gandil, says there is no danger in using the scanner.

Where do you find the secret to great moviemaking? The general theory has always been great story, great actors, strong action.

But now there’s a new formula.

James Cutting, a psychologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, analyzed 150 high-grossing Hollywood films released from 1935 to 2005 and discovered the shot lengths in the more recent movies followed the same mathematical pattern that describes the human attention span.

The pattern was derived by scientists at the University of Texas in Austin in the 1990s who studied the attention spans of subjects performing hundreds of trials.

The team then converted the measurements of their attention spans into wave forms using a mathematical technique known as the Fourier transform.

Cutting and his research team found that the magnitude of the waves increased as their frequency decreased, a pattern known as pink noise, or 1/f fluctuation, which means that attention spans of the same lengths recurred at regular intervals.

The same pattern has been found by Benoit Mandelbrot (the chaos theorist) in the annual flood levels of the Nile, and has been seen by others in air turbulence, and also in music.

Cutting made his discovery by measuring the length of every shot in 150 comedy, drama and action films, and then converted the measurements into waves for every movie.

He found that the more recent the films were, the more likely they were to obey the 1/f fluctuation, and this did not just apply to fast action movies.

Cutting said the significant thing is that shots of similar lengths recur in a regular pattern through the film.

Cutting believes obeying the 1/f law makes films ‘resonate with the rhythm of human attention spans,’ and this makes them more gripping.

Films edited in this way would then tend to be more successful and the style of shooting and editing more likely to be copied.

The researchers concluded that over the next few decades film makers may take more care to follow the 1/f law to try to boost audience engagement.

Cinema group Odeon has said it will boycott Disney’s new 3D film Alice In Wonderland at its cinemas in Britain, Ireland and Italy in protest at plans for an early release date on DVD.

The company took the decision on Monday after Disney said it would release the eagerly-awaited Tim Burton fantasy adventure on DVD 12 weeks after its big-screen debut, instead of the usual 17 weeks.

It is the latest rebellion against the entertainment giant’s plans to push forward the film’s DVD release. Earlier this month, the Netherlands’ four big cinema houses decided not to screen the movie in protest.

Odeon UCI Cinema Group said in a statement it had ‘invested considerable sums’ in technology to show 3D films which media giant Disney’s proposals could undermine.

Disney’s proposal ‘undermines the investment made and will inevitably set a new benchmark, leading to a 12-week window becoming rapidly standard in (Britain) for the majority of film titles’.

It could lead to a reduction in cinema attendance that would ‘threaten the continued existence of many cinemas, especially the smaller and medium sized cinemas’, said Odeon.

The cinema group said it would be showing the film in its Spanish, German, Portuguese and Austrian cinemas — ‘where Disney has indicated that it plans to observe the normal DVD release window’.

Odeon is Britain’s biggest cinema chain with more than 100 venues. Alice in Wonderland, starring Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway and Helena Bonham Carter has its world premiere in London on Thursday.

Its British release will be on March 5, and cinema chain Cineworld said it planned to show the film after reaching an agreement with Disney.

Bob Chapek, president of distribution for the Walt Disney Studios has previously said the DVD proposal was in the best interest of cinema owners.

‘We remain committed to theatrical windows, with the need for exceptions to accommodate a shortened timeframe on a case-by-case basis, such as with Disney’s Alice in Wonderland,’ he said.

Microsoft Corp said on Monday it signed a patent agreement with Amazon.com Inc that allows the two companies to share technology in several areas including Amazon’s Kindle electronic book reader and Amazon’s use of Linux-based servers.

BEIJING (Reuters) – U.S. government analysts believe a Chinese man with government links wrote the key part of a spyware programme used in hacker attacks on Google last year, the Financial Times reported on Monday.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A colleague I just met at work has invited me to be their friend on Facebook. I don’t want to offend them, but nor do I want to share my candid photos and lousy Scrabble scores with someone I hardly know.

DENVER (Billboard) – It’s been more than six years since then-Microsoft CEO Bill Gates admitted that Apple caught the company “flat-footed” in the digital music market and directed his team to make up for lost ground, according to recently surfaced internal e-mails.

To date, Microsoft’s effort to address the digital music market has largely focused on its Zune player and Zune Pass subscription service, which have won favorable reviews but few customers. But with the recent unveiling of its Windows Phone 7 Series operating system at the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona, Microsoft hopes to reboot its struggling digital music strategy.

Even the well-received Zune HD device, introduced last fall, hasn’t been enough to convince music fans to convert to the Zune Pass. The company says it has sold only 3.8 million players since 2006, and NPD Group estimated in November that it has a 2 percent share of the U.S. portable media player market, compared with 70 percent for Apple’s iPod.

So Microsoft has made it a priority to expand the Zune service to other platforms. In November, it added the Zune’s video service to its Xbox Live network, consisting of more than 20 million worldwide users of the Xbox 360 gaming console. Since then, Zune communications director Jose Pinero says the number of daily HD video downloads and streams has doubled. Now, Microsoft plans to use its Windows Phone 7 platform to bring Zune to mobile customers.

“Anybody who gets a Windows Phone 7 Series phone is going to get a Zune within that device,” Pinero says.

INTERNATIONAL PUSH

The most immediate impact this has is to expand the Zune service to countries outside of the United States and Canada, which are the only markets where the Zune is sold. While Microsoft will continue to sell the original Zune player in the States, Pinero says it doesn’t plan to expand it to other countries, instead relying on the mobile phone software to bring the Zune service to those markets.

For this strategy to work, Microsoft will have to turn around its equally struggling mobile phone business. According to technology research and consulting firm Gartner, Windows Mobile handsets rank fourth in worldwide smart-phone sales, at 7.9 percent, as of third-quarter 2009, down from 11 percent a year earlier and behind Nokia, BlackBerry parent Research in Motion and Apple.

But those rankings remain fluid, as analysts expect global smart-phone sales to double in the next three years.

“There’s certainly opportunity for Microsoft and other players in this market to grab share in the smart-phone space,” says Sue Kevorkian, an analyst at tech market research firm

IDC.

Early reviews of Windows Phone 7 have been positive, with its simple interface and clean design winning high marks. But handsets featuring the new technology aren’t expected to hit the market until the 2010 holiday season. By that time, Apple is expected to release an updated iPhone.

Zune will need to do more than piggyback on an innovative new mobile phone platform to generate the kind of momentum needed to elevate itself from the status of also-ran. It must compete with rival mobile music services sure to be created for handsets using Windows Phone 7, and the company hasn’t yet detailed how developers will be able to integrate Zune functionality into their applications, if at all. Answers to those questions are expected in March at Microsoft’s annual Web developer conference, Mix.

Zune will also need to increase its footprint to encompass more than mobile technology. That includes adding the music service to the Xbox Live network, as well as taking a larger stake of the subscription market and expanding that lackluster model beyond its current state.

Forrester Research analyst Sonal Gandhi estimates the entire U.S. music subscription market totals just 2.5 million users, and that includes not only Zune, Rhapsody, Napster and MOG, but also eMusic and those paying for the premium tiers of such streaming services as Pandora and Live365.

While Microsoft’s recent moves may lend an important boost to Zune, the company will have to look beyond the subscription model if it is to have much of an impact on overall digital music revenue.

LONDON (Reuters) – The best weapon against the online thieves, spies and vandals who threaten global business and security would be international regulation of cyberspace.

Luckily for them, such cooperation does not yet exist.

Better still, from a hacker’s perspective, such a goal is not a top priority for the international community, despite an outcry over hacking and censorship and disputes over cyberspace pitting China and Iran against U.S. firm Google.

Nations are thinking too parochially about their online security to collaborate on crafting global cyber regulation, an EastWest Institute security conference heard last week.

Policy statements from governments around the world are dominated by the need to heighten national cyber defenses. As a result, too many cyber criminals are getting a free ride.

“Nations are in denial,” Indian cyber law expert Pavan Duggal told Reuters, saying national legislation was of limited use in protecting users of a borderless communications tool.

“It may take a big shock of an event to wake people out of their complacency, something equal to a 9/11 in cyberspace,” he said referring to the 2001 coordinated attacks on U.S. cities.

With a quarter of humanity connected to the Internet, cyber crime poses a growing danger to the global economy.

TARGET THE PERPETRATOR

The FBI tallied $264 million in losses from Internet crime reported by individuals in the United States in 2008 compared to $18 million of losses from 2001: These were probably a fraction of the losses caused to companies and government departments.

The menace extends to many sectors including control systems for manufacturing, utilities and oil refining, since many are now tied to the Internet for convenience and productivity.

A priority for regulators is to find ways of tracking down criminals across borders and ensuring they are punished, a tough task when criminals can use proxy servers to remain anonymous.

“We cannot postpone the debate until we are in the midst of a catastrophic cyber attack,” former U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the conference.

“We must formulate an international strategy and response to cyber attacks that parallels the traditional laws governing the land, sea, and air.”

Security experts say the ability to conduct disastrous mass cyber attacks is the preserve of some governments, well beyond the capacity of militant guerrilla groups like al Qaeda.

But it cannot be assumed that international organized criminal networks, long practiced at mass online fraud and theft, are not developing an interest in gaining this ability.

“Cyber crime is a very sophisticated crime with very sophisticated players and it takes a multinational effort to make sure we can enforce the law,” Dell Services President Peter Altabef told Reuters.

“Once you have identified who is at fault you really want to make sure, as a deterrent, that you can go to those jurisdictions and enforce the laws on the books.”

James Stikeleather, Dell Services Chief Technology Officer, told Reuters that tracking own criminals across borders could pose legal issues for drafters of multilateral regulation.

Giving an example, he said the more companies added the technology needed to give investigators the ability to attribute a crime, the more users’ privacy and anonymity would be reduced.

“PLAYING WITH FIRE”

“Probably the sticking point among the governments will be ‘where is the appropriate level of attribution versus anonymity or privacy for what people are doing (online)’.”

Datuk Mohammed Noor Amin, chairman of the U.N.-affiliated International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber Threats, said failure to regulate could perpetuate cyber “failed states.”

He cited impoverished countries where customers can purchase unregistered SIM cards with mobile Internet capability, giving them the ability to commit online crime such as identify theft against people in rich nations without fear of being traced.

He said it was in the interest of rich nations to help poorer countries develop the capacity to crack down on this kind of abuse, because their own citizens were being targeted.

“Governments tend to look at their self-interest. But it’s actually in their own interest to collaborate,” he said.

Altabef said the growing rate and scale of international cyber attacks threatened to undermine the trust between nations, businesses and individuals that was necessary for economies and societies to act on the basis of the common good.

Complacency was also a problem, delegates said. “Nations take for granted the Internet is going to be ‘on’ for the rest of our lives. It may not necessarily be so,” said Duggal.

“Imagine the Internet being down for two to four weeks,” he said. This would “rain disaster” on online businesses as well as transport, industry and governmental surveillance systems.

“People have realize the Internet is an integral part of every country, politically, socially and business-wise.”

“Not to focus on cybersecurity is playing with fire.”

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – A deaf South African cleaner besieged by begging relatives after a newspaper reported he had scooped a 91 million rand ($12 million) lottery jackpot was not the winner, the draw’s organizers said on Tuesday.

Oddly Enough

National Lottery spokeswoman Thembi Tulwana said the real winner of Friday’s PowerBall draw was an unnamed 43-year-old woman, and not 52-year-old Stanley Philander, a Cape Town hardware store cleaner reported to have carried off the record rollover prize.

Tulwana said Philander had bought — after the draw — a lottery ticket with the same numbers as the winning ticket, but could not explain how the mix-up had escalated into the family being moved to a secret location for their own protection.

“We are as confused as everybody else. It did not come from the National Lottery at all,” Tulwana said. “Those numbers have nothing to do with the previous draw.”

The Star newspaper said Philander, his wife of 12 years, Diana, who is also deaf, and their two children had been moved from their home in a poor Cape Town neighborhood to an undisclosed location after talk of their purported win spread.

Philander’s sister-in-law said the family was besieged by relatives asking for a share of the winnings, and implied National Lottery officials were involved in their disappearance — something Tulwana denied.

“We don’t even know where he was. All we know is that one newspaper did indicate that they have him in a safe place,” she said.

Even though apartheid officially ended 16 years ago, millions of black South Africans still live a grim existence in squalid tin-shack townships lacking electricity or running water.

South Africa’s lottery launched in October last year, and produced four multi-millionaires in its first month. Friday’s record prize money was the result of 22 previous “roll-over” draws.