Shiny gadgets and clever computers
With Steve Jobs on a leave of absence, Tim Cook is running the show. I’ve written a profile of him over at Techradar:
He wears blue jeans and trainers. He’s a workaholic. He’s incredibly intelligent, doesn’t miss a detail, and can destroy you with a single question.
He’s had a brush with mortality. He’s intensely private. He eats, sleeps and breathes Apple.
Does Tim Cook remind you of anybody?
I’m also writing a column about the Jobs-related press coverage. I’ll post a link when it’s done.
A few months ago, I wrote a column for PC Plus suggesting that bandwidth was a utility that should be available to everybody.
If unrestricted, fast internet access is something we need – and from where we’re sitting, it is – then perhaps the solution is to expand the USO, the Europe-wide Universal Service Obligation that means every EU citizen must be able to get a landline if they want one. It doesn’t cover broadband, but it could – and if it offered financial sweeteners to providers while mandating net neutrality, it could deliver unfettered high-speed access to everyone.
Today, The Guardian reports:
[Lord] Carter is understood to be considering replacing the universal service obligation under which BT must provide all with a phone line, brought in when BT was privatised, with a new industry-wide obligation to provide broadband for everybody.
In other columns I’ve suggested making the Internet nicer by automatically emailing every post, email and comment to your mum for approval. I’ll let you know if the government goes for that one too.
It boots in less than a fortnight. It doesn’t make our laptop shoot up to 100% CPU usage for no good reason, generating enough heat to cook a moose. It goes like lightning on machines that struggled with Vista. It’s very good. In fact, it’s great. Which is why Microsoft should give it away.
Who cares? It looks nice though.
Full details here. Summary? Fast 3G, slide-out QWERTY keyboard, touch screen, 3 megapixel camera, GPS, integrated IM, SMS and MMS, accelerometer, Wi-Fi, 8GB on-board storage and Webkit-based web applications. It’s almost certainly going to cost a fair whack of cash, though.
It’s Friday, which means time for another Techradar opinion column. Today’s offering: why Apple and Microsoft’s keynotes sucked.
I love my job.
The nice people at Techradar.com have kindly given me a regular blab slot to talk about tech, and the first one is up: it’s about the powers that will enable the police to install keyloggers and other spyware on people’s PCs without a warrant.
Imagine if the Home Office decided that the best way to fight terrorism was to ban curtains.
“Hang on!” we’d say. “That means Creepy Dave across the road will be able to see me in my underpants!”
The Home Office would nod sagely. “That’s true, but you know who else has curtains? Terrorists! Terrorists and gangsters! So it’s curtains for curtains!”
The Home Office hasn’t banned curtains just yet, but it’s getting closer.
I’ve been playing with WordPress 2.7 for a wee while now, and my first impressions are up on Techradar:
Moving from 2.6 to 2.7 is no mere point upgrade: it’s more like moving from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. For beginners, it’s easier than before; for existing WordPress users it’s more flexible and considerably less annoying.
Flickr has updated the excellent m.flickr.com, and you can now view video on your iPhone or iPod Touch. The quality’s superb – the clips play as stand-alone videos, presumably via Quicktime – but for now the changes only apply to videos uploaded in the last day or so. Previously uploaded videos will be “supported at a later date”, Flickr says.
Another old MacFormat one – this one predates not just Leopard, but Vista too – but I’m amused by the intro, which is a load of old bollocks. Fun bollocks, I hope.
Mac ownership is often described in religious terms, but the link between Macs and the heavens goes back further than you might think. In the Garden of Eden, Eve took an Apple from the Tree of Knowledge (pedants say it was an Apricot, but what do they know? They’d probably argue that the serpent was a Dragon 32) – and of course her partner was the proud owner of Adam’s Apple. The links continue to this very day: every time you buy a Mac an angel gets its wings – but whenever a Mac runs Windows, an angel is twanged into a tree.
[Originally published in PC Plus. Some of the privacy options mentioned in this article, particularly for Facebook, have changed since this piece was originally published – Gary]
Never mind ID cards: social networking sites are creating a data mine governments would kill for. As Gary Marshall discovers, the devil’s in the details.
In July, US security services’ plans to harvest massive amounts of information about air travellers caused an outcry. “That’s terrible,” everybody cried, before handing over their most sensitive personal data to a plastic frog.
The frog was on Facebook, the social networking site where more than 30 million people share all kinds of information from their educational and career histories to their sexual orientation. As security firm Sophos discovered, while many of us worry about ID cards, government databases and anti-terror watch lists, 41% of Facebook users will happily share their secrets with Freddi the Frog – and thanks to social search engines and database diggers, privacy is increasingly looking like a thing of the past. (more…)