Charles Arthur, Friday 13th July 2012 06:30
A quick burst of 12 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
The OEM price (in multi-unit quantity) of the SSD 320 300 GB is slated to go down from US $499 to $444, a 11% cut. The retail package (off-shelf) of the drive is expected to go down from $519 to $464. The SSD 320 600 GB, on the other hand, will see its OEM price drop from $1,039 to $859; and retail price from $1,059 down to $879.
Is good news.
Regulators will be asked to turn up the heat on national telecoms companies that they feel are not giving open network access to rival providers.
"I am planning a recommendation on non-discrimination," said Neelie Kroes, head of the EU's Digital Agenda programme. "This would underline that equivalence of inputs is the best guarantee of non-discrimination, to ensure equivalence of access."
Idle observation: Nokia's share was sliding 2 years before the Burning Platform memo: at that point it had already lost half its market share.
Market share can be obscured if you're in a growing market.
CNET's Declan McCullagh wrote a program to analyze the most frequently used passwords and e-mail domains that surfaced in the breach. The following tidbits are culled from his effort:
o 2,295: The number of times a sequential list of numbers was used, with "123456" by far being the most popular password. There were several other instances where the numbers were reversed, or a few letters were added in a token effort to mix things up.
o 160: The number of times "111111" is used as a password, which is only marginally better than a sequential list of numbers. The similarly creative "000000" is used 71 times.
But in a month's time they were going to change it to 000001, right?
A couple of quick examples of how to respond to angry customers on social media.
On Monday, Paradigm Mall patron Su Yuen Hsiang posted on the mall's Facebook page that the lifts were problematic.
Paradigm Mall responded six hours later, saying that its staff were looking into the matter. In a swipe at the mall's services, another Facebook user Freddie Toh said: "Again Looking..."
This comment presumably irked Paradigm Mall, who sarcastically replied: "Yes, Freddie, Paradigm Mall does not know magic. Cannot snap fingers and make changes. You can? Then we want to hire you!!"
Note: this is the wrong way to do customer service on social media.
If we are to believe the analyst community reflects consensus, the industry, in the aggregate, continues to treat the potential for disruption from devices as unlikely. There always seems to be a wrinkle, a quirk, or an exceptional circumstance that is to blame. I won't get into all the excuses given by analysts for the slowing of PC sales but will point out that there's been a series of initiatives put forward by the industry to act as "catalysts" for growth.
The graphs that go with this are amazing.
A security advisory issued by Microsoft's security team advises that vulnerabilities exist that could allow malicious code to be executed via the Windows Sidebar when running insecure Gadgets.
The warning comes ahead of a talk scheduled for Black Hat later this month by Mickey Shkatov and Toby Kohlenberg. Shkatov and Kohlenberg's talk, entitled "We have you by the gadgets", threatens to expose various attack vectors against gadgets, how malicious gadgets can be created, and the flaws they have found in published gadgets.
Android updates, especially major releases like the recently announced Android 4.1 Jelly Bean are sought after in the mobile world, particularly from power users, those who want the latest and greatest as soon as possible, but the latest update for the US Samsung Galaxy S3 might not be one worth downloading.
It looks as though this latest OTA boobytrap, which for Sprint S3 owners will remove the device's local search functionality and for AT&T S3 owners, also dumbs down the search bar accuracy. Why, you ask? In the pursuit of avoiding Apple's big legal stick.
Minor point, but don't you either pursue something, or avoid it?
Oliver has dark hair. Mark smiles often. The pair often finish each others' sentences - both claim backgrounds in the internet sector and joke that Mark used to be a firefighter. Those are not their real names and, by their accents, they're not originally from Berlin.
Without revealing much more than that, Mark and Oliver want to find someone - or several people - to invest one million in a mystery startup project.
And their backer, if they find him or her, has very much more money than sense.
See, got you with the title. Some ethics for those doing data visualisations. Also includes the confession:
"my first ever paid job was as a cloth-cutter in a skirt factory for BHS, and I suspect some of the vagueness in women's clothes sizes also comes from having untrained idiots like me measuring the fabric".
Yesterday I was informed by our sever/developer team that the server hosting androidforums.com was compromised and the website's database was accessed.
Change your password, and if you use the same one elsewhere, change that too.
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http://gu.com/p/3924b
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