A burst of 8 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
Ryan Tate:
It was only two summers ago that Page vowed in a Wall Street conference call to "put more wood behind fewer arrows" at Google. "Focus and prioritization are crucial, given our amazing opportunities," he said. This commitment to focus is invoked whenever Google wants to kill off a product it has tired of, like Google Labs, Google Reader, or Calico's predecessor Google Health.
Yes, Google has done health before. And failed.
The fewer-arrows thing makes sense. Google was blindsided by Facebook, and its ad rates, priced by demand, have been declining for nearly two years as it struggles to figure out the mobile market. The vast majority of its profit comes from AdWords, launched in 2000, and AdSense, launched in 2003.
Yet Google's wild experiments continue. The company is pumping money into self-driving cars, flying power-plants, wireless internet blimps, $1,500 robot glasses, and, now, a fight against death itself. By Google's own admission, it's not clear that any of these ideas will ever make money for the company.
We've never found out how much Android (2008) generates. Though that isn't the point of it.
Danny Sullivan:
In the past month, Google quietly made a change aimed at encrypting all search activity - except for clicks on ads. Google says this has been done to provide "extra protection" for searchers, and the company may be aiming to block NSA spying activity. Possibly, it's a move to increase ad sales. Or both. Welcome to the confusing world of Google secure search.
...I suspect the increased encryption is related to Google's NSA-pushback. It may also help ease pressure Google's feeling from tiny players like Duck Duck Go making a "secure search" growth pitch to the media. Duck Duck Go and StartPage.com have seen large gains in traffic, though relatively speaking, what's large is nothing for Google. The PR loss is far, far greater than the user loss, if any. But Google doesn't like PR losses of any type.
But as he points out it could be about ad sales too.
Microsoft is sticking to the same basic form factors and concepts that it first demonstrated last summer. Both tablets are iterations of the design we've already seen with the first generation Surface products. They both retain the trademark kickstand, angular design, and metallic finish. The kickstand has been updated, however, and now supports two positions.
As before, there are two variants: a lower-price ARM machine, running Windows RT 8.1, and a higher-price x86 machine, running full Windows Pro 8.1. The ARM version has lost its RT moniker, now being named simply "Surface 2."
Surface Pro 2 improves the internals, picking up a Haswell processor, which replaces the Ivy Bridge in the older unit. Microsoft is touting a 75% improvement in battery life. Beyond that, it looks essentially identical to its predecessor.
The Covers still aren't part of the price ($449 for Surface 2, $899 - yes! - for Surface Pro 2), so add on another $119 at least just for the Touch Cover. Odd how the Covers seem to be essential for what should just work as a tablet.
October 1991:
Personal computers are just too hard to use, and it isn't your fault.
The computer industry boasts that its products can help everyone become more productive. Maybe so. But many people can't afford the time and money needed to get the most out of PCs.
Plus ca change.
Speaking at Microsoft's financial analysts meeting [on 19 September], CEO Steve Ballmer was refreshingly realistic about the company's struggles in smartphones and tablets. "Mobile devices. We have almost no share," he admitted on stage, before noting he didn't know whether to be enthusiastic over his admission or uncomfortably tense. "But I'm an optimistic guy, any time we have low market share sounds like upside opportunity to me." That upside opportunity is the key reason Microsoft moved to secure Nokia's phone business.
"The Nokia deal is a lot of things," said Ballmer. "One of the things it is, is a way to make sure we can capture the gross margin upside because we're making most of the investment today, that we need to make even owning Nokia." It's clear Microsoft wants to take some of the smartphone profits away from giants like Apple and Samsung, and Nokia is a key part of that plan.
It's fascinating how Google has destroyed Microsoft's business rationale in mobile by making Android free, and in effect forced it to buy Nokia. Next question: is Google making money from mobile?
Through those sites, the developers gained entrance into "an underground market that connects Internet miscreants with parties selling a range of specialized products and services." Over the course of 10 months, the researchers did business with 27 merchants. They later calculated that these merchants were responsible for registering 10% to 20% of all accounts later flagged by Twitter as spam. Charging just pennies per account but selling thousands of profiles at once, the merchants generated between $127,000 and $459,000 collectively during the course of the study.
The sheer volume of the operation was astounding.
Ed Bott:
If your data is valuable enough for an attacker to go to the trouble of stealing a super-high-resolution photo of your fingerprint and molding a fake finger, you probably should be using multi-factor authentication. And in fact the iPhone already does that. Your fingerprint enrollment information is stored in a secure area in the A7 processor that powers the iPhone 5s. If someone manages to steal your fingerprint, they also need to steal your phone. That fake finger by itself won't work with another iPhone unless you also have your Apple account credentials.
Windows 8.1, which was released to manufacturing a month before iOS 7 but won't hit shelves until October, has similar technology. A fingerprint identification framework designed for use with the same type of reader as is found in the new iPhone (a big improvement over older swipe-based fingerprint readers) is built into Windows 8.1. It can be combined with the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) in a Windows 8.1 device to create a virtual smartcard that makes spoofing of enterprise network credentials very difficult.
The Chaos Computer Club's hack is probably going to make zero difference to the number of people who actually use the fingerprint unlock system on the iPhone 5s.
Agawi tested the responsiveness of touchscreens:
As you can see, the results are remarkable. At a MART [Minimum App Response Time] of 55ms, The iPhone 5 is twice as responsive as any Android or WP8 phone tested. All the Android devices' MARTs fell in the same 110 - 120ms range, with the WP8-based Lumia 928 falling into that bucket as well. (Incidentally, the ranges all span about 16ms, which is expected given the 60 Hz refresh rate of these smartphones. 1/60s = 16.6ms)
There are several possible reasons for this. Since touchscreen hardware has significant latency itself ( check out this video from Microsoft Research for a visual demonstration), our best guess at Agawi is that Apple's touchscreen hardware is better optimised or more sensitively calibrated for capturing and processing touch. Another possibility is that while the Android and WP8 code are running on runtimes (Dalvik and CLR respectively), the iPhone code is written in closer-to-the-metal Objective-C, which may reduce some latency.
In the comments, an Android developer says "Yes, that matches what we see." Android and WPhone owners, meanwhile, respond by saying "U R BIAS".
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news by September 24, 2013 at 05:16PM
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