Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

• Apple removes Java from all OS X Web browsers | Ars Technica

  • Apple stopped including pre-installed versions of Java in OS X and instead gives users the option to install the framework. More recently, Apple issued an update that turns off Java in the browser when users haven't used it recently.

• Summary of MGT CAPITAL INVESTMENTS INC - Yahoo! Finance

  • The Company has agreed to register all shares of Common Stock underlying the Preferred Shares and the Warrant under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act") pursuant to the registration right agreement attached hereto as Exhibit 10.4 (the "Registration Rights Agreement"). On October 26, 2012, the transaction was approval by the NYSE MKT

• The Markets Are Open: Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) to remove Java from the Macintosh operating systems

  • Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) to remove Java from the Macintosh operating systems 

     

     

     

     

     

     
     

     The newest updates of the Macintosh operating system will make sure that all the versions of Java be removed from the system. Apple Inc.(NASDAQ:AAPL) made this announcement on Friday. Apple, on the official support site revealed that Java script will be removed from their native operating systems, since experts have recently discovered that the Java bugs help attackers infiltrate the security of the system and get information. This discovery was made in August, when the experts had conducted the experiment by launching attacks through the bugs found in Java. They were successful.

• Apple removing Java from users' Web browsers on security concerns - San Jose Mercury News

  • Apple (AAPL) is removing old versions of Oracle's (ORCL) Java software from Internet browsers on the computers of its customers when they install the latest update to its Mac operating system.

  • Apple is implementing that change in the wake of a Java

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    security scare that prompted some security experts to caution computer users to only use Java on an as-needed basis.

    Security experts in Europe discovered Java bugs in late August that hackers had exploited to launch attacks. It took Oracle several days to release an update to Java to correct those flaws.

    Adam Gowdiak, a researcher with Polish security firm Security Explorations, said on Friday that he has since found two new security bugs in Java that continue to make computers vulnerable to attack.

• DRM on 3D Printers is a Big Deal. Nathan Myhrvold's Patent is Not. | Public Knowledge

  • DRM is a generic term for a suite of technologies that, in theory, allow people to control how others use digital information.  DRM is usually applied to things protected by copyright (like movies on DVD) in the hopes of preventing unauthorized copying.
    
    DRM is problematic for many reasons, but two are particularly relevant to this discussion.  First, almost by definition, DRM cripples the functionality of devices or programs, making them defective by design.  As applied to 3D printing, DRM could transform a general purpose tool capable of making anything into a specialized tool that can only be used to create a handful of pre-approved items.  Such a transition at this point could cripple the growth of consumer 3D printing

• A Bandwidth Breakthrough - Technology Review

  • Academic researchers have improved wireless bandwidth by an order of magnitude—not by adding base stations, tapping more spectrum, or cranking up transmitter wattage, but by using algebra to banish the network-clogging task of resending dropped packets
  • If the technology works in large-scale deployments as expected, it could help forestall a spectrum crunch

• TransTech Systems to Demo Groundbreaking Visualant ChromaID(TM) Technology at ISC East Exhibition - Financial and Business News - MENAFN

  • The new Cyclops 6 demonstrates the power of the Visualant ChromaID(TM) technology, which reads, records and analyzes invisible chromatic identifiers in gases, liquids, solids and surfaces. The technology promises to spawn a new wave of consumer and industrial applications replacing old spectral analysis techniques found in expensive science labs and making them more accessible to people in the field

• TransTech Systems to Demo Groundbreaking Visualant ChromaID(TM) Technology at ISC East Exhibition - Yahoo! Finance

  • technology, which reads, records and analyzes invisible chromatic identifiers in gases, liquids, solids and surfaces. The technology promises to spawn a new wave of consumer and industrial applications replacing old spectral analysis techniques found in expensive science labs and making them more accessible to people in the field

• Jeff Bezos: The Smart People Change Their Minds | TechCrunch

  • The people who are right a lot often change their minds. Bezos said he doesn’t think consistency of thought as a particularly positive trait. It’s better, even healthier in fact, to have an idea that contradicts one you had before.

     

    The smart people constantly revise their understandings of a matter. They reconsider problems they thought they had solved. They are open to new points of view, new information, and challenges to their own ways of thinking.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

• Instagram Grows 850% and Tops Twitter in Mobile Users - Techvibes.com

  • Mobile video should continue to prove its worth for platforms like Instagram that won’t have to include any existing company’s video player. There won’t have to be a Vimeo, YouTube, QuickTime, or Windows Media Player for starters

  • Another technology called Clipstream, Destiny’s streaming media technology, enables a single video file to play on all devices. It comes at a 90% lower bandwidth cost and there is no need for a player.

     

    Videos will “just play” in browsers, mobile and Internet alike with no need for player plug-ins. Firefox recently came out with a mobile browser that thus far represents 1% of the marke

• Together, HTML5 and DRM can take out native apps | VentureBeat

  • • For Consumers (all of us): (a) Hope there’s an app for your mobile platform (b) If you have devices operating on different platforms, you need to purchase the app for each platform (c) Hope the app is specifically designed for your phone and tablet.
     

  • The only thing holding back HTML5 from killing native apps is DRM
  • but the ironic thing is that every video delivered through native apps is not Flash-based
  • but you know what’s missing from its current form? Video.
  • few sites outside of YouTube have worked some back-end magic to ensure you can watch what you want when you want it. Ever visit your favorite site on an iPad only to see a black box where you could swear there should be a video? It sucks.
  • • Native Apps fill the Void: Nobody supports Flash on mobile. Not Apple or Microsoft or Android … and soon not even Adobe. Flash on mobile is a dying technology. If you want to watch videos from your favorite places like Hulu, HBO, or even TMZ, then don’t go into the web browser, visit the app store and download the native app.
     

  • And therein lies the rub: if you want to watch videos on your mobile, download the app. The reason? Within native apps, the video content can be protected. Of course, if you get the app, you’re tied to your device (iPhone, iPad, Android, etc.). This is where DRM comes in handy for the ecosystem

  • Yes, there are some who believe DRM in any form goes against the very idea of HTML5. This ideal forces them to make a decision: Either believe that a video-less mobile web world can win or understand that consumers want the good stuff and to get it, it needs to be protected.

     

• MasterCard Selling Your Data Just in Time for the Holidays | Wired Business | Wired.com

  • MasterCard is packaging its transaction data — your transaction data — and selling it to advertisers.
  • When a consumer swipes a credit card in a store, she says MasterCard’s data-packaging division receives information about the date, time, amount and merchant. By aggregating that data and comparing it to its deep well of historical data on spending patterns, Grossman says MasterCard can then divide up consumers into millions of audience “segments

• Amazon's Next Big Business Is Selling You | Wired Business | Wired.com

  • In a digital economy where some of the internet’s biggest companies and the country’s richest people have built their fortunes on the ability to more precisely target ads, one company sits on a trove of data it has barely started to exploit. In internet advertising-speak, visitors to Amazon.com are further down the purchasing funnel than visitors to Google or Facebook. “
  • I think Amazon is just starting to scale the use of shopper data in its advertiser offerings,”

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

• The Triathlon Execution Magic of Riding Steady, Part I: What is Steady? | Endurance Nation

  • Remember that the metabolic cost of watts increases exponentially, not linearly. There is a BIG price to pay, later in the day, for stepping on the gas like this.
  • Also, resistance increases exponentially with wind speed.

• Visualant(TM) and Sumitomo Precision Products Co., Ltd. Unveils Highly-Disruptive Prototypes at JIMA in Japan - Yahoo! Finance

  • expected to spawn a new wave of consumer and industrial applications bringing the benefits of Visualant Spectral Pattern Matching(TM) (SPM) techniques found in expensive science labs to people in the field
  • Visualant's ChromaID(TM) technology, which reads, records and analyzes invisible chromatic identifiers in gases, liquids, solids and surfaces
  • Our vision is to bring the power of science into the hands of people when and where they need them most," said Ron Erickson, Chief Executive Officer of Visualant

• Five Mental Steps to Achieving a Breakthrough Triathlon Performance | Endurance Nation

  • Race day is about how you drive that vehicle the race distance and across the finishline. All the fitness in the world can’t help you if you don’t know how to drive it properly!
  • as race distance increases, the chance of failure on the run increases dramatically
  • the last quarter to third of the distance, as this is when early pacing and other mistakes will begin to express themselves

• Your right to resell your own stuff is in peril - Jennifer Waters's Consumer Confidential - MarketWatch

  • At issue in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons is the first-sale doctrine in copyright law, which allows you to buy and then sell things like electronics, books, artwork and furniture, as well as CDs and DVDs, without getting permission from the copyright holder of those products.

  • Under the doctrine, which the Supreme Court has recognized since 1908, you can resell your stuff without worry because the copyright holder only had control over the first sale.   

     

        Put simply, though Apple Inc.      /quotes/zigman/68270/quotes/nls/aapl AAPL  -2.13%        has the copyright on the iPhone and Mark Owen has it on the book “No Easy Day,” you can still sell your copies to whomever you please whenever you want without retribution.   

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

• Let's Play the Digital Music Dating Game | Wired Business | Wired.com

  • Microsoft is probably in talks to buy Rdio, the music streaming service, according to The Next Web. The deal is just a rumor at this point, but one that raises an important point about the future of media: Tech’s biggest players are now deeply interested in streaming music
  • Beyond the purported Microsoft talks, there are older reports about Apple planning an online radio service and Apple and Google talking about buying Spotify, a streaming internet jukebox. After years of ignoring digital music, and years more focused on digital downloads and lockers, it seems the big names in high technology have finally come around to caring about streaming services

• Deezer Has Reportedly Raised $130m - The Next Web

  • French newspaper Le Figaro is reporting that music streaming service Deezer has raised €100m ($130m) in funding from Access Industries, the company that owns Warner Music Group.
  • The news comes at an interesting time for music streaming services. Spotify is growing fast but struggling to make money due to a huge royalties bill, while we’ve heard word that Rdio is in talks to sell to Microsoft.

• Destiny Media Announces Japanese Watermarking Patent - Yahoo! Finance

  • This novel technique embeds an inaudible digital trace or watermark into the content and this trace survives duplication, filtering, down sampling and conversion into other formats, including non digital ones such as an over the air broadcast. Unlike competing watermarking solutions, it is faster to embed or detect and it is extremely robust without affecting audio quality.  The company is not aware of anything similar and believes this technology has strong commercial value and that this technology could be widely licensed directly outside of other Destiny products
  • Destiny also has a patented locking technology, Digital Media Distribution Method and System (7466823) that is compatible with peer to peer networks, but still locks content to only play on authorized computing devices. These patented solutions give the content owner the choice of locking content, so it can't be copied or allowing copies, but protecting those copies with a watermark to identify unauthorized duplication.
  • An advanced pre-release demo is anticipated later this month

• Obama and Romney to face real lie detector during debate | The Daily Caller

  • A spokesman for the group Americans for Limited Government told The Daily Caller on Wednesday they have contracted with a company to use new truth detecting technology to determine whether either candidate is lying during the debate.

     

    “For the first time, within a few hours of a political debate, the American people will know if the candidates are telling the truth, and better be able to judge what promises are real, and which ones are nothing more than political pandering,” Bill Wilson, president of Americans for Limited Government said.

     

    The conservative-leaning group says they hope to release the results from Voice Analysis Technology within three hours of the debate.

• The Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers: Greening Chicago's Skyline With Committed Owners, Innovative Technology and Two Very Smart Guys in the Basement | Rebecca Stanfield's Blog | Switchboard, from NRDC

  • Ryan and Jim have been working with a company called Telkonet to install motion sensing thermostats in every single one of the 1214 rooms in the hotel.  It’s a simple concept, but it is making a huge energy savings impact at the hotel.   Rather than keeping all of the rooms at a comfortable 72 degrees at all times, why not just heat and cool the rooms that are occupied?  This simple change will lower the hotel’s electric bills by more than $150,000 per year.

  • Here’s how it works.  If a room isn’t even reserved for the day, the system allows the room to go on “deep setback.”  Once a guest checks in, the thermostat automatically resets and the room is comfortable by the time the guest reaches it.  When a guest leaves the room for a meeting or sightseeing, the temperature will be allowed to drift just to the point that it could be brought back to that ideal temperature within 15 minutes.  The system is automatically notified when you check out of the room, so that it can go back into deep setback. 

     

    “It seems so simple, but it’s an enormous improvement in our ability to manage our energy use and costs,” said Egan.   

• The polls show a race that is still up for grabs - Right Turn - The Washington Post

  • So what do we really know? Obama is doing worse, much worse in some cases, in every swing state than he did in 2008. Consider that he won Colorado in 2008 by nine points, Wisconsin by almost 14 points and Nevada by 12.5 percent.. So it’s not 2008. Obama is doing worse than four years ago. Romney is doing much better than Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

     

• Rumor: Google Wants To Acquire Facial Recognition Startup Viewdle For $30M | TechCrunch

  • There is clearly a lot of interested in facial recognition startups right now.

• Facebook's new pitch to brand advertisers: forget about clicks | Reuters

  • Fewer than 1 percent of in-store sales tied to brand advertising campaigns on Facebook come from people who clicked on an ad

• Google Passes Microsoft’s Market Value as PC Loses to Web - Bloomberg

  • Google Inc. (GOOG) has surpassed Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) to become the world’s second-largest technology company as computing over the Internet reduces demand for software installed on desktop machines.
  • reflects the ascension of the Internet as the delivery channel for more of the software and computing tasks that were once left to the Microsoft-dominated PC industry

• Facebook wants 'Like' button to be exempt from child privacy laws | Internet & Media - CNET News

  • Facebook also argued that a "Like" on the social network is free speech and that eliminating teens' access to the button would be a violation of their constitutional rights
  • COPPA requires Web sites obtain verifiable parental consent before collecting personal information from children younger than 13.

• 3-D Printer Company Seizes Machine From Desktop Gunsmith | Danger Room | Wired.com

  • desktop-manufacturing company Stratasys pulled the lease on a printer rented out for Wiki Weapon, the internet project lead by Wilson and dedicated to sharing open-source blueprints for 3-D printed guns. Stratasys even sent a team to seize the printer from Wilson’s home.
  • Stratasys’s legal counsel wrote back: “It is the policy of Stratasys not to knowingly allow its printers to be used for illegal purposes. Therefore, please be advised that your lease of the Stratasys uPrint SE is cancelled at this time and Stratasys is making arrangements to pick up the printer,” stated the lette

• More Mobile News Consumers Choosing Web Over Apps - Forbes

  • More and more, tablet computer users are choosing browsers over apps for their digital news delivery
  • Nearly three-quarters of those who favor apps are iPad users
  • that disparity suggests that momentum will continue to swing in favor of the browser

• Internet-Media Employment Fuels Digital Job Growth | Media - Advertising Age

  • Internet media this year became the media industry's second-largest employment sector, according to Ad Age DataCenter's analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data

  • Employment at U.S. internet-media businesses in July passed staffing in broadcast TV. Internet-media employment earlier passed magazines, radio and cable TV. 

     The only U.S. media sector with more employees: newspapers

• New Tracking Frontier: Your License Plates - WSJ.com

  • The rise of license-plate tracking is a case study in how storing and studying people's everyday activities, even the seemingly mundane, has become the default rather than the exception. Cellphone-location data, online searches, credit-card purchases, social-network comments and more are gathered, mixed-and-matched, and stored in vast databases.
  • License-plate databases contain revealing information about people's locations. Police can generally obtain it without a judge's approval. By comparison, prosecutors typically get a court order to install GPS trackers on people's cars or to track people's location via cellphone
  • a professor at George Mason University, did a study in 2010 estimating that about 37% of large police departments were using plate readers. "It's one of the most rapidly diffusing technologies that I've ever seen

• Romney's Challenge: He Is Already the Incumbent

  • The nation will face a fiscal cliff on January 1, and Obama’s plan if he wins is to force tax hikes that may cover some of the gap in the short term but will hurt everyone in the long term through slow economic growth.
  • A Romney loss also means America will have accepted persistent high unemployment and slow growth as the new normal, creating a lost generation and destroying both our entitlement system and our future prosperity. It means Israel will likely be forced to go to war, and likely on its own, against Iran. It means the Supreme Court will be liberal, for at least a generation, as the far-left fulfills its wish to transform our “living Constitution.

• Drop in Ohio voter registration, especially in Dem strongholds, mirrors nationwide trend | Fox News

  • An August study by the left-leaning think tank Third Way showed that the Democratic voter registration decline in eight key swing states outnumbered the Republican decline by a 10-to-one ratio

• Facebook: Federal online privacy rules would violate free speech rights - The Hill's Hillicon Valley

  • Facebook is warning the Federal Trade Commission that its proposed update to children's online privacy rules would infringe constitutionally protected free speech rights.

     The company said that because the proposal would restrict the ability of children to "like," comment on or recommend websites, it would violate the First Amendment

  • The proposal would also ban ads on children's websites from installing tracking files, known as cookies, on users' computers. Advertisers install cookies to track users' browsing history and display targeted ads to them.

     The update would allow sites that are aimed at children and adults to create a log-in page for users to reveal whether they are older than 13. Users younger than 13 would still be able to access the sites, but the sites would face restrictions on the use of the children's information.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.