An iTunes appliance

I have over the last couple of weeks, upgraded my Apple Macbook pro from Mac OS 10.6 to 10.9. It’s been pretty easy until it came to Macports. There is/was a rumour that stopping at Version 10.8 was the best answer but this wasn’t available to me; they’ve stopped shipping it. The new version of MacOS was easy enough to install, just a download from the Apple Store which is good, although the consequent performance was shit and then we have to move Macports forward. This wasn’t so easy, and I document the steps I took at an article called Macports on my companion wiki. The fact there is so much mucking around is another proof point that Apple are not building a general purpose computer, but a desktop appliance and iTunes host.

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Google deleted five million index entries in a week

Google deleted five million index entries in a week

Earlier today, Torrent Freak published an article detailing the number of take down requests that Google receives and acts upon, in the previous week, they report

Google received DMCA notices from 5,407 copyright owners and reporting organizations requesting the removal of 5,310,080 URLs spanning a total of 37,413 domains.

Obviously, I have been exposed to the copyright maximalist’s constant propaganda at #lab13 and further with the press coverage of the Select Committee, so its great to see this reported. The Torrentfreak article ends, …

Nokia exits the mobile market

Nokia exits the mobile market

So Nokia have given up and sold their mobile handset and presumably the mobile infrastructure to Microsoft. Last year, Nokia, the World’s No. 1 mobile phone manufacturer but were struggling to meet the onslaught of Apple’s iphone and the rapidly alternative  growing of Android decided to shit-can their two Linux projects and exclusively throw in their lot with one of the then weakest phone operating-  and eco-systems, Microsoft! Coincidently they had just hired Steven Elop as CEO, whom they had poached from Microsoft. …

Backdoors

Backdoors

Earlier this week, the Guardian in conjunction with its partner publishers, New York Times and ProPublica ran an article, Revealed: how US and UK spy agencies defeat internet privacy and security. As we’ll see, the title is a bit misleading, but the agencies certainly gave it their best shot. This story builds on the initial Snowden leaks that the NSA has been using computer technology to spy on everyone using the internet in the USA. The story rapidly came to the UK where it became clear that Britain’s GCHQ was tapping the UK/USA telecom links, sharing intelligence with the USA and providing the NSA with a slightly more legal way of spying on US citizens. There is little doubt that the US & UK’s intelligence agencies have outsourced their own domestic spying which is legally restricted to each other. …

Hyperloop and Hope

Hyperloop and Hope

In California, they have been planning a San Francisco – Los Angeles bullet train. This was brought to my attention by a story by Molly Woods at CNET, which points at an alternative, the Hyperloop.

For some reason the politics of developing infrastructure in the USA is tortured and this project is no exception. It has the economic and environmental objections which we have all begun to get to grips with as the national debate about HS2 begins to take off. In California this debate is exacerbated by the US’s unhinged dislike of government and taxes. …

About the mobile operating system market

While considering the Mozilla foundation’s entry into the mobile phone market, I came across Seth Rosenblatt’s article, “Firefox OS faces brutal road ahead” at CNET News, but they have Telefonica signed up and are launching in Spain, and Latin America; they’re made by Alcatel. Will open-source and privacy be the competitive weapons it needs to succeed where Blackberry and Nokia are failing? Quartz argues that real web services will be the competitive advantage, creating the largest developer community. Actually I doubt it; the carriers will insert their spyware and closed garden stores, it’s too hard to avoid Google and despite Blackberry’s last wrong turn they competed and lost on privacy. …

Citizens not Suspects

Citizens not Suspects

The Guardian reports that Privacy International are going to court to get the UK Government banned from using the USA’s ‘intelligence’ obtained via their Prism programme, and to suspend the UK’s equivalent programme, the GCHQ’s Tempora programme.

Privacy International argue that the UK agencies’ use of NSA supplied data is illegal since there is no warrant and no notification and no appeal; which is a problem when there is no ‘probable cause’. In order for GCHQ to intercept someone, they’d need a warrant issued under RIPA. This looks to be  an example of the two agencies outsourcing the surveillance of their own citizenry, since they are prohibited from doing so. i.e. GCHQ is spying on Yanks, and the NSA returns the favour by spying on Brits. Both agencies need a warrant to spy on their own citizens, but not on foreigners. …

Have the US killed their cloud business?

As the proof that Governments are spying on social media users is found, we should all take measures to make it hard. I am sure that they’ll try and outlaw encryption next, but they might have a problem with that since it’ll kill e-commerce. Talking of killing e-commerce, a number of commentators, including David Kirkpatrick posting at linkedin are asking if this will cause Europeans and their Governments to withdraw from the US cloud providers.

The Swedish Government, for instance have already decided to abandon Google’s web services. …