"The biggest fear is that you’ll have governments around the world legislating technical standards. And then everything comes crashing down."
— Jeff Moss, via Vanity Fair
Ordinarily, I’m impressed by the insight and eloquence of John Gruber, one of the most famous technology journalists on the scene, a man who gets his predictions right more often than anybody.
His new blog piece, “Teardrop Skepticism,” discusses the likelihood that Apple’s next iPhone (one of them at least) will be completely redesigned. He doesn’t seem to think that’s going to happen because the device would feel a bit awkward when held in landscape mode. A good point, sure, except that he admits — as he should — that, based on the rumors, the teardrop shape is nearly undetectable, so slight that you wouldn’t notice it unless some one told you. This non-point is not, however, my primary grievance with his latest post. It’s this bit:
A new form factor would by definition bring more “new-ness” to the announcement, but why should an iPhone 4-lookalike “iPhone 4S” be considered disappointing if it contains significantly improved components?
How could anyone — especially someone with as much experience reporting on Apple and its products as John Gruber — even ask this question? The next iPhone has nothing to do with components. It has everything to do with how it looks, and the functionality of iOS 5. (But mostly how it looks.)
Yes, updated components are necessary to deliver superior functionality, but that’s not what sells iPhones. It’s sex that sells iPhones — and sex is superficial, at least when you’re trying to market it to hundreds of millions of people.
An evolution as small as iPhone 3G to 3G S just isn’t going to cut it — not 16 months after the iPhone 4 announcement. Not when Steve Jobs is no longer CEO. No, Apple needs something bigger and better than ever to keep consumer (and investor) confidence high.
I’ve placed at public bet on the iPhone 5 “teardrop” design, and I stand by that wager. If I’m wrong, well, so what? A nobody tech journalist is wrong — surprise, surprise. But I’m not the one who’s going to suffer if Apple just releases an iPhone 4 with some nifty new components.
"As I was watching my social media streams froth with praise for the man in the black turtleneck, it occurred to me that, as lovely as I find Apple’s gizmos, Mr Jobs’s wealth, like that of other billionaire barons of the information age, was built in no small part upon an intellectual-property regime that I and many others believe to retard progress while concentrating massive rewards upon a privileged few, generating unfair and unproductive inequality."
The PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) is a threatening sequel to last year’s COICA Internet censorship bill that would—like its predecessor—invite Internet security risks, threaten online speech, and hamper Internet innovation. Urge your members of Congress to reject this dangerous bill!
Big media and its allies in Congress are billing the PROTECT IP Act as a new way to prevent online infringement. But innovation and free speech advocates know that PIPA is nothing more than a dangerous wish list that will compromise Internet security while doing little or nothing to encourage creative expression.
PROTECT IP = Private Rightsholders Opposed To Emerging Consumer Technologies, Innovation, and Progress
As drafted, the bill seeks to stop websites believed to be “dedicated” to “infringing activities” by granting the government the unprecedented power to attack the Internet’s domain name system (DNS). The government would be able to force ISPs and search engines to redirect or dump users’ attempts to reach certain websites’ URLs. In response, third parties will woo average users to alternative servers that offer access to the entire Internet (not just the newly censored U.S. version), which will create new computer security vulnerabilities as the reliability and universality of the DNS evaporates.
It gets worse: the bill uses the following dangerously expansive definition of DNS server: “a server or other mechanism used to provide the Internet protocol address associated with a domain name.” This loose, uncabined definition could lead to the targeting of other technologies—like operating systems, email clients, web clients, routers, and more—that are capable of providing IP addresses when given domain names like a traditional DNS server.
In his opening speech at the inaugural eG8 forum in Paris on Tuesday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy called for greater regulation of the Internet.
Fucking Sarkozy is constantly calling for tighter Internet regulation. He wants the Internet to be “clean” and “civilized,” as though both of those qualifications don’t throw a 2-ton wrench into the gears of the entire system. Not that the Internet has to, or even should, be raunchy. Just that is should have the possibility of being raunchy, anytime it wants. We in the US call it freedom of speech. It’s being trampled on, every day, by countless dirty feet. We don’t need the French president putting on his clod hoppers and having a go.
Facebook, as I’m sure you know, is blocked in China.
And being banned in a country that boasts roughly 500,000,000 Internet users is, of course, not exactly an ideal situation for a company aggressively looking for growth worldwide.
Now Facebook is rumored to have signed off on a partnership with a Chinese Internet giant in a move to enter the country (which, as some have pointed out, won’t be a walk in the park any way you look at it).
The high-tech job “gold rush” has all but saturated many metropolitan and micropolitan markets. However, as the Midwest continues to transform its historic strengths in manufacturing and build the high-tech job opportunities needed to compete in a 21st century global economy, Ohio’s high-tech workers are seeing a business boom in the Buckeye State.
As evidence of the Midwest region’s impact on the resurging economy, Ohio has claimed more of the nation’s “fastest growing tech cities” than any other state according to Dice.com, the leading career website for technology and engineering professionals. The fastest-growing metro areas for technology job openings in terms of year-over-year growth since February 2010 include Cincinnati with 75 percent growth, Cleveland with 62 percent growth and Columbus with 57 percent growth.
(Source: thesmithian)
I got a new job! I am now a staff news writer for Digital Trends. So get ready for a whole hell of a lot more tech stuff.
Zero Day blogger and malware researcher Dancho Danchev (right) has gone missing since August last year and we have some troubling information that suggests he may have been harmed in his native Bulgaria.
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Last month, we finally got a mysterious message from a local source in Bulgaria that “Dancho’s alive but he’s in a lot of trouble.” We were told that he’s in the kind of trouble to keep him away from a computer and telephone, so it would be impossible to make contact with him.
