Archive for the ‘internet’ tag
Firefox 4 (Beta 8) First Impressions
After a couple hours of playing with the latest Firefox on my Mac, I’ve come to a conclusion: Mozilla has Google on the brain. The browser is certainly quick, but I’m not sure I’m going back to it. Safari and Google have stolen my heart.
The Good: Loads pages quickly; provides me a way to render 1s and 0s as useful pictures on my computer screen.
The Bad: Slow to load; new layout doesn’t make me think of Google Chrome at all; extensions do not work (does Mozilla need to force us through this “incompatible extensions” nonsense every time there’s a browser update, big or small?); Unattractive UI layout
The Ugly: Firefox became a powerhouse against IE because it was small, fast, and customizable. Now, like all things American, it’s starting to suffer from “fat ass” syndrome.
In Defense of $5,000/MB
“AT&T is dead.”
Well, it’s not dead, but the Wall Street Journal claims that we should be making plans for the funeral. According to the WSJ, AT&T is holding onto an obsolete, monolithic business model that is neither supportive of their customer nor fostering of technological advances. The chief complaint: the extremely high cost of wireless data transmissions.
As an iPhone user, I know how much AT&T is charging. And while my service uptime is pretty good, the cost is the same as my home internet plan, which is faster and not capped.
What if, however, those costs are not too high after all. Wireless data does not fall under public utilities per se, but it does represent the fastest growing segment of both internet access and mobile communications traffic. Both the lack of competition and consolidation of the market have attracted the attention of the Congress and antitrust regulators. For regulators and consumers alike, the question becomes, “are we getting what we pay for?”
Microsoft Complies with European Comission for 2 Months
Longer than anyone thought, but still a poor showing nevertheless.
[From Microsoft kills Windows 7E, puts IE back in upcoming OS - Network World]
FCC Inquires About Google Voice App Rejection
TechCrunch is reporting that the FCC has sent letters of inquiry to Apple, AT&T and Google regarding the rejection of Google Voice related apps from Apple’s app store. In the letters, the FCC is asking both Apple and AT&T about their levels of decision making in approving/rejecting apps.
AT&T has maintained that it has no involvement in the approval process, although their loosely-written press release gives a wide latitude for interpretation.
I suspect that the FTC and DoJ may get involved next, given the administration’s strong antitrust policy.
[From FCC Takes On Apple And AT&T Over Google Voice Rejection]
Copyright, Remix Culture and a “Modicum of Creativity”
As an idle lawyer, I’ve got plenty of time to continue my study of the law. An area in which I have great interest is intellectual property law, especially copyrights and trademarks.
I recently read a Supreme Court dealing with the intersection of copyrights, facts and compilations of facts, Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., Inc., 499 U.S. 340 (1991). To answer the question, Justice O’Connor discusses the history of copyright and why facts are not copyrightable. In short, facts are not copyrightable because copyright protection, by constitutional mandate, requires originality.
Originality and novelty are not the same thing. As Justice O’Connor makes perfectly clear:
The sine qua non of copyright is originality. To qualify for copyright protection, a work must be original to the author. Orignal, as the term is used in copyright, means only that the work was independently created by the author (as opposed to copied from other works), and that it possesses at least some minimal degree of creativity. To be sure, the requisite level of creativity is extremely low; even a slight amount will suffice. (emphasis added; citations omitted).
For some reason, this paragraph makes me think about the “remix culture” and the debate over copyright that exists in today’s information society.
Pros and Cons of Asymmetric Cryptography
Quick disclaimer: I love cryptography. I don’t fully understand the math that goes into it, but I love it all the same.
Something that has baffled me for quite some time is why we don’t see more cryptography in consumer computing. Passwords, simple authentication tokens, are ubiquitous, even on single-user Windows computers. Real encryption, on the other hand, in virtually non-existant.
Why?
What Kills Old Technology?
When I was much, much younger, I was online. Every summer, I would spend a couple weeks with my grandparents. My uncle, a professor of computer science at a nearby college, secured for me a spare computer, a modem, and user account. A handshake later and I was connected to the network. A further authentication and I was online.
Looking back, the early internet didn’t really do much. I had access to a wealth of information, and I would spend hours crawling through Gopherspace, soaking up information like a sponge. Years later, and Gopher is a figment of the past, lost forever to the ever-evolving digital landscape.
What kills old technology?
The Network Really is the Computer
Sun Microsystems, one of the stalwarts of the computing industry, has a simple motto: “the network is the computer.” Yesterday, Google took that motto to an entirely new level with the announcement of it’s Chrome OS.
Details on Chrome are sparse (which has not stopped technology writers from writing ad nauseum about all the features it will have). What it appears from Google’s press release, however, is that Chrome will be an incarnation of the old “network computer” (NC) concept, where the bulk of the computing will be conducted on centralized servers. Rebranded “cloud computing”, this server-centric model is the latest fad.
NCs have a significant limitation not found in personal computers: to fully function, an NC requires a constant, reliable network connection. Chrome will likely utilize Google’s “Gears” framework. Even so, the dramatic push of an entire operating environment to the web seems both radical and unwise. When Gmail went down for several hours earlier this year, the world panicked. The harm caused by a Gmail outage will be miniscule compared to an outage of thousands of computers.
It is far too early to tell if Chrome will be a mere dumb terminal or something far more sophisticated. A number of important questions also remain to be answered, such as how open the Chrome platform will be, the willingness of people to adopt a new operating platform, and the response of the existing operating system developers.
