Older blog entries for chbm (starting at number 186)

• HTC keeps raking in the dough. Becoming a prime android handset maker clearly is working out for them, Microsoft racketeering and all.

• Another freakin earthquake in Japan. Don’t those guys get a break ?

• SSL trust chain is broken. Not the technology, but as people are involved in issuing certificates

• Dire week in EU. While there were some good news from the Czechs regarding data retention Berlusconi’s Italy says search engines are liable for linked content, not to be outdone by the US a music industry lawyer is now out copyright chief and we’re stuck with a Microsoft upgrade cause the people in charge of EU IT are incompetent, corrupt or both. And cause that’s not enough the unelected EU Commission wants ISPs to snoop and censor internet traffic.

• And France managed to outlaw all unrecoverable passwords. They didn’t do it on purpose, it’s just they’re clueless and got carried away in their grab for personal info.

• Amazon is said to have released a music streaming service. Like the Android AppStore it’s also US only.

• You still can’t git clone android-3 which should be discouraging Android is Open talk but also crapy cheap honeycomb crapplets. Meanwhile SE scores a few points with unlock Xperia bootloaders.

• Google is on privacy watch after Buzz. Twitter is still fighting for us. Censorship vendors will only sell to democratic western govts.

• The Amazon Android Appstore is apparently online but it’s only enabled in one country so nobody really knows. What everybody knows is you can’t git pull honeycomb.

• Samsung promises Tab with unicorns. Nobody’s really convinced. Meanwhile ITC says Apple is cool and Motorola is doing a new HTML based mobile OS. No, really, it’s true.

• While Google is spending money on detecting censorship China is working hard at censoring phone calls. And cause you can’t trust anyone anymore there’s phony Google, Yahoo and Skype certs out there. And for some reason Microsoft disabled HTTPS in Hotmail for countries who actually need it.

• Limewire is being sued for five US national debts (which stands at 14T). Yes, RIAA is claiming in court Limewire damaged them one thousand Iraq invasions. And cause douchebagery runs in the family the Belgian RIAA wants truck drivers to pay royalties fees. You know, for playing music in a work place. Makes sense!

• Oh noes! The Amazon Android Appstore (or AAA) sneak preview. New stuff, exclusive stuff and low low prices. Will it work without the unknown sources bit set ? Who knows!

• A study came to the shocking conclusion piracy doesn’t fund terrorism. That was a good waste of money!

• On liberty watch this week, Hollywood wants extra judicial powers to do whatever they like and USA breaks the SWIFT agreement which feels extra nice after my govt signed a treaty to give all my personal data to USA for no good reason.

• Japan was stricken by a 8.9 quake, followed by a huge tsunami followed by at least one nuclear plant going critical and several others damaged. That’s as bad news as it gets.

• WiFi can actually interfere with plane displays. One would expect stuff made by Boeing, seeing as it’s much more expensive than my home system, would be much better than my home stuff which doesn’t have problems with WiFi.

• A lot of the week was about banksters, secret laws, memory holes, waterboarding and popular uprisings

• The big story this week was obiously the iPad2. The even bigger story is the fact the iPad2 cover is a bigger story than the iPad2. The iPad2 cover made Samsung rethink their tablet stuff but not too hard.

• One week after launch Nintendo announced the 3DS will have Netflix. Which is interesting for the requirements of Netflix :)

• Malware in Android Market!. Google yielded Apple like power and people rejoiced.

• IPv6 Home Network stuff is broken as anyone who’s trying to deploy IPv6 at ISP scale knows. Want IPv6 ? Stick to OpenWRT or DD-WRT as basically anything you pay money for is broken one way or another.

• Something interesting is brewing, the DoJ is looking into MPEG LA vs WebM. Most likely it will fizzle but if the DoJ finds foul play it might end up with MPEG LA being forced to license to WebM users on the same terms as they do to MPEG users. While we’re on patents, for all the things they do wrong, the UK Govt does somethings right. They decided Open Standards must be royalty free. That basically means when a vendor declares something is an “Open Standard” (like MS does Office) it must also declare the necessary intellectual property is available free of charge to 3rd party implementers. This makes things like H.264 or MSXML not Open Standards. Obviously, the BSA started lobbying against it right away.

• Ah our friends the Americans are funny. The priority copyright piracy watch list is as follows: Argentina, Canada, Chile, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, Costa Rica, the Philippines, Spain, Ukraine, and Vietnam. So things that put you on the priority watch list: being a democracy, being a dictatorship, being rich, being poor, being developing, having advanced rule of law, being lawless. Things that keep you out of the priority watch list: being USA. Meanwhile the IFPI found selling music might actually result in people buying it. It’s a sad realization for them in 2011. Meanwhile, Sony is getting a US court to sue The World.

• Remember that great thing Android is supposed to have, Flash ? Honeycomb doesn’t have it. Meanwhile, we all have our panties in a bunch for iPad2 and Nintendo 3DS launched in Japan to great success.

• This is like kicking a dead horse but a WP7 upgrade to improve the upgrade process bricked phones.

• Assange is going to Sweden. Meanwhile, internet police aka PayPal froze and later unfroze Manning’s defense fund. Dunno about you guys between USA doing nazi experiments and USA only agreeing to prosecute Gadhafi if US operatives are excluded I kind of like WikiLeaks. I wish there were some interesting leaks about Portugal.

• Shock, surprise, Gulf of Mexico is covered in oil.

• On the aftermath of the Microsoft taking over Nokia, Verizon says they don’t need it and NokNok talks about 10 booring things your Nokia WP7 phone may have and one thing they’ll won’t have, USB On The Go which WP7 doesn’t know about and was basically the only thing going for Nokia. Meanwhile, everybody’s upset and Nokia is trying buy developers with free phones, 2 of them.

• US Govt is now in the business of wholesale domain stealing. I’m in the business of moving to chbm.eu as .net goes down the can.

• Who would think an organization that is setup up to bust open and go through people’s stuff would attract criminals ??

• The Middle East is still on fire and dictators keep turning off the Internet. Think about that the next time your government talks about firewalls and black lists.

• The big news this week was Microsoft’s 7th largest individual shareholder making Nokia Microsoft’s phone hardware provider. He set the stage with the burning platform email and then the N9 is dead rumors started flying. I wrote about what Nokia should do the night before the big announcement that made it clear they’re canning Symbian. That must have been a very difficult keynote at MWC.

• Speaking of MWC, there’s plenty of phones for people with freakish large hands. And a 10.1 inch Samsung Tab which is not very unlike the Xoom. Intel, feeling pretty lonely, showed up with a MeeGo tablet. I saw a “My Tablet” in that UI so it still needs work.

• HP unveiled their iPad clone which is going to run webOS 3.0. This might actually be an interesting device, except for the poor dpi. The likeliness to iOS apps is uncanny! Meanwhile Apple plans to redo the notification system which was bad a few years ago and pathetic now.

• It was bound to happen. MPEG LA is getting ready to charge for VP8. Do you have your Google indemnification contract handy.

• Mubarak is gone. People want Berlusconi to go next.

• 2007: Symbian is great, you should all be using our awesome C++ API and our awesome IDE!
• 2008: Maemo is the future! We don’t like the Gtk+ C APIs but we don’t know what we’re gonna do. We hear Flash Lite is great!
• 2009: Maemo6 is going to be awesome! And it’s all Qt C++!
• 2010: Did we say Maemo6 ? We obviously meant Meego! Excellent news, common UI Qt API in Meego and Symbian!
• 2011: Windows Phone is totally awesome so we’re going with that! Symbian is going to die. Qt what ? No, you’re totally going Microsoft now.

This latest jump shouldn’t bother anyone as anyone with a shred of sense has given up hope 2 years ago.