As more newspapers move to paywalls, it comes clearer to me that publishers are attempting to use a Band-Aid to cover a bullet hole. I share an anecdote:

I asked my class of 20-year-old Elon University students how many were on Facebook. All 33 raised their hands. Many of them suggested they were addicted to the social network. (It was all I could do to keep them off Facebook during class.) I asked how many would pay $1 a month for Facebook membership. All raised their hands.

“Five dollars?” I asked. A few dropped out.

“Ten dollars a month?” I asked. Nearly every hand stayed down.

“No one?” I said. “I thought you guys were addicted?”

A student piped up with an explanation: “Someone will invent something else to take its place that is free.”

I shared this anecdote with a newspaper executive when we were talking about newspaper paywalls. I said that if people wouldn’t pay for Facebook, they wouldn’t pay to get through a newspaper paywall. His response was dismissive. “They aren’t our readers anyway.”

No, they’re not, even though they should be: college-educated, inquisitive, relatively well-to-do and can afford the price of a paper or paywall. They won’t be newspaper readers in five or 10 years, either, when newspapers traditionally have expected them to subscribe to the newsprint edition and, presumably, the paywall. They will have been trained not to go to the newspaper website.

I can understand paywalls as a leaky short-term strategy, catching some newspaper readers who are addicted to their local papers. But without significant “value-added” content, that won’t last. Paywalls can’t be a long-term strategy; the audience will not be there.

What is the long-term strategy? Looks like it’s paywalls . And more paywalls .

Or, they could listen to what their prospective customers are saying and doing , and try something else.

Before World War 2, the middle-class in the developed world struggled to afford basic needs. In the post-war boom, standards of living rose dramatically, and people consumed far beyond what they needed. It was the age of conspicuous consumption: a race to own bigger cars and houses, and accumulate more stuff. The mean income in the developed world became sufficient to provide for a comfortable life.

Today, people increasingly realize they own more than enough stuff, and don’t want to pay for feature-rich versions of that stuff. Four blades in your razors are enough. In the language of Clay Christensen’s disruptive innovation framework, the product economy overshot the mass market’s needs.

An economy of experiences is emerging in its place. Experiences make people happier than products (a fact that scientific studies support). The popularity of experiences like music concerts has skyrocketed compared to corresponding products like music recordings. Apple, the most valuable company in the world, maniacally focuses on product experiences, down to minute details like the experience of unboxing an iPhone. Customers want to know where their food and clothes come from, so they can understand the experiences surrounding them. The emphasis on experiences also helps explain other large trends like the migration to cities. Cities have always offered the trade-off of fewer goods and less space in exchange for better experiences.

The trend toward experiences is important for technology startups. The era of competing over technical specifications is over. Users want better experiences from devices, applications, websites, and the offline services they enable. It is no coincidence that interaction design is replacing technical prowess as the primary competency at startups. People who create great experiences will be the most valuable to startups, and startups that create great experiences will be the most valuable to users.

Comcast says it is planning to make sweeping changes to its data usage plans and will start by boosting the data cap from 250 GB/month to 300 GB/month. The change is in response to changing consumer usage behavior and shift to more cloud-oriented computing. Comcast, which is the largest broadband provider with around 20 millon customers, in the US, points to emergence of devices such as iPad and Roku as a reason behind this change.

Apple had previously set the sandboxing deadline for March 1st. By that time, developers that wished to continue selling their apps in the Mac App Store would need to abide by new rules that severely limited the areas of a computer that an app had access to. It later extended it out to June 1st.

Many developers, like Manton Reece and Daniel Jalkut, have recently expressed their dissatisfaction with the limited entitlements offered by sandboxing on the Mac.

Both Reece and Jalkut expressed their feelings that the current freedoms that developers have to access OS X are too limited and its not enough to have faith that Apple will make changes. “We can only make decisions based on what entitlements and APIs are there today,” said Reece “And today it’s not enough.”

Apple clearly wants the Mac App Store to be the primary way that people download apps on their Mac, but it also wants sandboxing to be the foundation of a more secure OS X.

An interesting side note is that in 2007, the world average was 9.4 million Internet users per root server site. In 2012 it is, as you can see in the chart above, 7.6 million. That is definitely an improvement.

Asia on the other hand has gone from 16.7 million Internet users per root server site in 2007 to 20.3 million in 2012.

In other words, the world as whole is getting a better ratio between the number of Internet users and root servers, while Asia is getting a worse ratio.

In the past 5 years the world Internet population has doubled, and more than half of the new Internet users have come from Asia. It’s clearly a region that is becoming increasingly underserved in terms of DNS infrastructure.

As it stands, the iPad is amazing. I use it every single day for writing, browsing the news, sketching ideas, and reading though email or tech riders and I love every minute of it. It f complements my daily life and on days when I don’t need to get any real work done, I leave my laptop at home. But when it comes to honest creative work I can not help but find the iPad as little more than a sidekick. I can say with certainty though, that this is far from the last word on this. I can clearly see a future where touch screen devices such as the iPad become more and more viable for the kind of things I have discussed here today. It is still new territory being explored and I for one can not wait to see where it takes us.

AirPlay, a software tool included with Apple’s iPads and iPhones, is widely viewed as being potentially disruptive to the cable industry, because it makes it easy for people to view a broad variety of Internet content on a television. Time Warner Cable’s leader, however, hasn’t heard of it.

Glenn A. Britt, the company’s chief executive, said in a group interview on Friday that the challenge for digital video was that there was no simple way to get Internet-based video onto the television screen. He wasn’t familiar with AirPlay.

“I’m not sure I know what AirPlay is,” he said, though he noted that he was an enthusiastic Apple customer. “Today we want to be on every screen. Today it’s a little bit clunky to get programming from the Internet onto the TV — not so hard to get it on your iPad. What’s hard is the plumbing, what wires do you connect, what device do you use. So the current Apple TV, the little thing, the hockey puck, really doesn’t do anything to help enable you to get Internet material on your TV.”

Apple pitches AirPlay as a way to make it easy to get Internet video from an iPad or iPhone onto a television, among other uses. A user can press a button while watching video to stream it wirelessly to an Apple TV box connected to a TV set.

At least for now, we use the law as our guide. We don’t give anyone the boot based on the nature of their business unless they make it clear that they plan to use the CRM to facilitate illegal activities.

We hate patent trolls because they’re enemies of the “free as in speech” nature of technology. We strongly believe tech should be open, free, and unbiased—and since we tell our users that they own their data, that means we can’t legitimately inject our own personal opinions into the matter without being hypocritical. The law become the only logical limit, since it is the point at which these issues cease to be a matter of opinion.

Of course, if you’re an asshole, you’ll still get the boot—that policy remains firmly in place.

I gave the patent troll a demo of our system, complete with genuine recommendations about how he could best track his entire process from start to end. I was definitely a little relieved that he had a few hang-ups about Less Annoying CRM’s feature set. While we did set up customization for him, ultimately he abandoned his account. Probably the best ending we could have hoped for.

“I really don’t want this guy’s money,” Tyler said at one point. We’re glad not to have it.

In contrast, when a new iPhone model is released Apple doesn’t shut down the line and liquidate inventory. Rather, Apple keeps some percentage of manufacturing capacity devoted to this legacy model. Manufacturing the old device is easy by the point; it’s a fully debugged process with increasingly cheaper components. I remember when the implications of this completely sunk in: Apple is doing market segmentation off of a single product line!

Let’s drill down into the full implications of this: in the Apple org chart, the iPhone is a single product. This single product is built by a single product team, a single software team, and a single marketing team. They put all of their energy into building the single greatest product they can. Without expending any effort, they simply let Moore’s law transform today’s great product into tomorrow’s entry-level device. No need to re-tool, no need to pollute your own channel, no duplicative corporate ass-hattery.

To demonstrate how powerful price and market segmentation can be, lets take a moment to recall the great Palm WebOS tablet liquidation of 2011. One day, out of nowhere, all tablets in the channel were unceremoniously liquidated after HP announced WebOS was going away. Lo and behold, the product that they couldn’t sell to save their lives flew off the shelves at the $99 price point.

Getting back to Apple, right now you can go out and “buy” the flagship iPhone that was originally released 3 years ago for $0 (or the one released 2 years ago for $99) -OR- you can get an entry-level Phantek Astroglide which inexplicably runs Android 2.2, looks like a Hummer, & has 3 hours of battery life.

Why hasn’t Dell or Samsung or HP implemented their own version of the “Moore’s law market segmentation” strategy? Nothing about this strategy would seem to require it to happen at only Apple (or is specific to mobile devices). I am sure there are a lot of reasons, and there is a very good chance I simply don’t understand the hardware supply chain complexity.

Microsoft has drastically overhauled the network running its Skype voice-over-IP service, replacing peer-to-peer client machines with more than 10,000 Linux boxes that have been hardened against the most common types of hack attacks, a security researcher said.

The change, which Immunity Security’s Kostya Kortchinsky said occurred two or three weeks ago, represents a major departure from the design that has powered Skype for the past decade. Since its introduction in 2003, the network has consisted of “supernodes” made up of regular users who had sufficient bandwidth, processing power, and other system requirements to qualify. These supernodes then transferred data and voice traffic with other supernodes in a peer-to-peer fashion. At any given time, there were typically a little more than 48,000 clients that operated this way.

Kortchinsky’s analysis, which has not yet been confirmed by Microsoft, shows that Skype is now being powered by a little more than 10,000 supernodes that are all hosted by the company. It’s currently not possible for regular users to be promoted to supernode status. What’s more, the boxes are running a version of Linux using grsecurity, a collection of patches and configurations designed to make servers more resistant to attacks. In addition to hardening them to hacks, the Microsoft-hosted boxes are able to accommodate significantly more users. Supernodes under the old system typically handled about 800 end users, Kortchinsky said, whereas the newer ones host about 4,100 users and have a theoretical limit of as many as 100,000 users.

My Mac setup used to consist of a Mac Pro and a MacBook Pro. When I realized that the laptop was plenty powerful to serve as my only computer I sold the Mac Pro on Craigslist, shedding a tear as I said goodbye to her jaw-dropping speeds, and have been a one-machine Mac user since.

That is, until recently.

I once again find myself using two computers. Except this time it’s my MacBook Air that serves as my “desktop” while my iPad is now my “laptop.”

As Captain King points out, a belief in automation and the elegantly simple side sticks in particular, is integral to the Airbus design philosophy: “You would have to build in artificial feedback – that would be a huge modification.”
A defender of Airbus puts it thus: “When you drive you don’t look at the pedals to judge your speed, you look at the speedometer. It’s the same when flying: you don’t look at the stick, you look at the instruments.”
There is a problem with that analogy. Drivers manoeuvre by looking out of the window, physically steering and sensing pressure on the pedals. The speedometer is usually the only instrument a motorist needs to monitor. An airline pilot flying in zero visibility depends upon instruments for direction, pitch, altitude, angle of climb or descent, turn, yaw and thrust; and has to keep an eye on several dozen settings and lights. Flying a big airliner manually is a demanding task, especially if warnings are blaring and anxiety is growing.
Multimillion-euro lawsuits could follow any admission of liability and it is certainly preferable from Airbus’s point of view that Air France should shoulder the blame for the night when AF447 plunged into the void.
However, no one would suggest that, when it comes to the aircraft we all rely on every day, commercial considerations should come anything but a distant second to safety.

In the US, the loss of landscape and wildlife to hydropower has made the installation of major new dams very unlikely; in fact, the government is seriously considering removing a number of existing ones, and has recently dismantled some smaller ones. But two reports by the Department of the Interior suggest that this doesn’t mean the end of new hydropower in the states. The DOI has gone through its catalog and identified existing dams and canals that could be fitted with generators, and found the potential for up to 1.5 Gigawatt-hours annually.

The Obama administration has decided to take what has been termed a portfolio approach to reducing the country’s reliance on fossil fuels (the DOI calls it “all-of-the-above”), expanding nuclear and hydropower while fostering the wider use of wind, solar, and geothermal power. Hydropower would seem to be the most difficult to expand, given the problems seen with dams on the West Coast (loss of local fisheries) and the rapidly dropping water levels at the dams based in the western interior.

But a 2011 report identified large numbers of dams that are already in place, but not generating their full potential, or aren’t producing electricity at all. Now, the Bureau of Reclamation has gone through its full catalog of canals, drainage sites, and water tunnels. Anything that had a drop of five feet, could generate 50kW or more, and had water for at least four months of the year was considered. These total up to about 350,000 megawatt-hours annually. Add that to the figure from the dams, and you get the 1.5 million megawatt-hours figure. All of that without disrupting the environment any more than it already has been.

Overall, the figure isn’t overwhelming—Glen Canyon dam alone produces more than this, and it’s actually one of the smaller dams in the region. But that’s the advantage of a portfolio approach: every little bit helps.

It’s easy to root for Kickstarter. The company has made it possible to bring new, innovative products to market and finance projects that would never get off the ground before the popularization of crowdfunding. It’s created an entirely new class of entrepreneur, and the way it turns the investment business on its head is a textbook example of disruptive technological innovation. But mostly, we’re all still just amazed at how money much the company has managed to help independent entrepreneurs raise.

Last year, to celebrate the company’s second anniversary, Kickstarter posted some metrics to the company blog. Among the most impressive figures was $40M pledged to 7,496 successfully funded campaigns, or 85% of the total amount pledged on the site.

As Kickstarter’s third year comes to a close, The Next Web wanted to know: How much did the company help raise? Since we know the company takes 5% of funds raised, this also gives us insight into its revenues.

Today, an American electronics company can only be exempt from China’s rare earth export quotas by manufacturing within China. So that’s what most companies, including Apple, are doing. The only other solution is for us to stop consuming so much—an option that people rarely find appealing. Not as appealing as a retina display, at least.

Yesterday, President Obama was in Boulder. The guys at Orbotix showed up and got him to play around with a Sphero. Watch the video (it’s pretty awesome) and then I’ll tell you the story of how they made it happen. The short answer – always be ready to demo your product – you never know when the President (or a key customer) is nearby.

Our main characters for this story are Ross Ingram and Damon Arniotes. Ross is the one demoing Sphero to the President. Ross is Mr. Everywhere for Orbotix – his job is to handle every hack event, be at every party, and show up everywhere that might be interesting with a bunch of Spheros. Damion is the guy filming everything on his iPhone. His full time job is to video Sphero in the wild and tell the story all the time.

On Monday night after Ross and Damon found out the President would be at CU Boulder they starting talking about how awesome it would be to get a Sphero into Obama’s hands. No one knew Obama’s route around CU and Boulder, but Ross and Damon drove around the Campus and the Hill (next to CU) to scope things out. I’m betting at least one beer was consumed.

On Tuesday, they drove to CU with Spheros in hand but still didn’t know where Obama was going to be. They had to leave Damon’s camera gear behind because of security and the fact that Damon isn’t press (apparently only press is allowed cameras).

While they were driving to campus they saw a bunch of yellow police tape and took a guess that this was a spot that might see some action. If you are a fly fisherman, you know this drill. Go where you think the fish are going to be and wait. They found a parking spot near the Sink (one of the venerable old college hangouts on the Hill) and parked.

Ross called Paul Berberian, Orbotix’s CEO around 6pm and asked Paul if they should drive Sphero past the yellow tape towards Obama. Paul, who went to the Air Force Academy, responded with “No fucking way – you’ll end up in jail – remote control ball rolling to the president – bad idea.”

Around 6:45 Secret Service starts cherry picking folks from the crowd to be in the receiving line for the President. Magically Ross and Damon get picked – they get screened with metal detectors and are allowed in with Sphero. A girl with a Slurpie had to throw it away – apparently Slurpies are more dangerous than robotic balls. I bet she had one of those neon blue ones.

The President rolls up minutes later and starts shaking hands. Damon starts filming on his iPhone. Ross greets the President and asks him to see his iPhone to drive the robot ball. The President immediately gets it; Ross asks him if he wants to drive it - and the rest is what you saw on the video. While this is happening, the Secret Service rushed in around Ross and Damon as soon as the President engaged, but the President kept going with Sphero so they hung back.

Someone in the crowd took the Sphero while Ross and Damon frantically played back to video to see if they got it. They did and the rest is memorialized for history – this is the first time we are aware of that a President of the United States has played with a robotic ball controlled with an iPhone.

There are two big lessons here. First, always be ready. Second, hire amazing guys like Ross and Damon and let the loose on the world. Guys – incredible!

There is still no evidence mobile phones harm human health, says a major safety review for the UK’s Health Protection Agency (HPA).

Scientists looked at hundreds of studies of mobile exposure and found no conclusive links to cancer risk, brain function or infertility.

However, they said monitoring should continue because little was known about long-term effects.

The HPA said children should still avoid excessive use of mobiles.

It is the biggest ever review of the evidence surrounding the safety of mobile phones.

There are now an estimated 80 million mobiles in the UK, and because of TV and radio broadcasting, Wi-Fi, and other technological developments, the study said exposure to low-level radio frequency fields was almost universal and continuous.

A group of experts working for the HPA looked at all significant research into the effects of low-level radio frequency.

This isn’t limited to Android — I saw this “plan to buy”/”might buy sometime” sentiment all the time with Instapaper Free for iPhone. 1

These users almost never upgraded.

It’s a very common user mindset: they tolerate a lot of limitations, ads, and nags to avoid paying. It’s not that they’re cheap, per se: they just really don’t believe that apps are worth paying for, and they feel cheated or defeated if they end up needing to pay for one. 2

It’s not worth trying to appeal to them with a paid app. In most cases, the conversion rate will be so poor that it’s not worth the cost of maintaining two apps and supporting the free users.

App developers can either ignore them as a market — and it’s a big market — or find other ways to pay for their use.

Mobile ads pay very poorly. In my case, ads didn’t even come close to delivering similar value as the $4.99 paid-app sale — I was lucky to get even $1 of value out of an Instapaper Free user. What I’ve heard from other developers and other ad networks suggests that this is pretty close to the industry average.

I decided to yield the free market to my competitors and discontinue Instapaper Free over a year ago, and my sales have remained healthy. (In fact, they’ve increased, but it’s difficult to know whether that was the cause.)

While I’m losing a tiny fraction of sales from people who really would have upgraded from Free to the paid app, I’m also gaining sales from people who would have chosen Free but instead just grumble and accept that they need to pay because there’s no other choice. So far, it appears that I’m coming out ahead financially while reaping huge rewards in simplicity, development, customer satisfaction, and server costs.

This definitely isn’t an Android problem: it’s a user problem. Maybe a significantly larger percentage of Android users insist on free apps than iOS users (it certainly seems that way). But both platforms have much larger demand for free apps than paid apps.

There’s nothing anyone can do about it. Developers just need to decide whether, and how, to address the demand for free software and services without going out of business.

Yesterday, technical architect Cameron Byrne announced that T-Mobile has completed the deployment of IPv6 services across its entire network. This isn’t the first IPv6 network, but it is the largest wireless IPv6 deployment in the world.

In the announcement, he stated that IPv6 is now available over the main APN for T-Mobile. While there are still a few issues that need to be resolved, the IPv6 service works fairly well for most services. As a result, it will no longer be required to manually request access to IPv6 services. Instead, only a new APN needs to be added to the smartphone’s configuration to make it work. Additionally, T-Mobile is having success getting manufacturers to provide devices that support IPv6 over UMTS networks.

After years of speculation, Google Drive was released today, giving users 5GB of free storage to sync across computers, and finally giving Google a viable competitor to Dropbox, Microsoft’s SkyDrive, Apple’s iCloud, and the like.

Google announced the new service today and it’s available at drive.google.com . Like Dropbox, it makes a special folder in your computer’s file system, and any file put in the folder will sync across devices. It’s available for Windows, Macs, and Android. Google said it’s “working hard” on a Drive app for iOS devices.

On the Web, numerous third-party vendors have already integrated Chrome apps with Google Drive, and Drive has a browser-based file manager as well as integration with Google Docs to display any documents that Docs is compatible with.

As mentioned, each user gets 5GB of free storage, compared to Dropbox’s 2GB, SkyDrive’s 7GB, and iCloud’s 5GB. An upgrade to 25GB is $2.49 per month, 100GB is $4.99 per month, and a full terabyte is available for $49.99 a month. The options actually go all the way to 16TB for $799.99 a month. Any paid account also upgrades Gmail storage to 25GB.

Last week’s blog entry on Amazon’s ebook strategy went around the net like a dose of rotavirus. And, as we can now see from Tor’s ground-breaking announcement I was only just ahead of the curve: people at executive level inside Macmillan were already asking whether dropping DRM would be a good move. Last week they asked me to explain, in detail, just why I thought abandoning DRM on ebooks was a sensible strategy for a publisher. Turns out my blog entry on Amazon’s business strategy didn’t actually explain my full reasoning on DRM, so here it is.

Note that I am not responsible for Macmillan’s change of policy . An internal debate was already in progress; this move was already on the cards. I caught their attention and was given a chance to offer some input: that’s all. The final decision to drop DRM on ebooks from Tor/Forge was taken by John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, who ultimately has to account for his actions to the shareholders.

Also note that when trying to argue for a strategy, you need to frame it in terms of the concerns of the people you’re addressing. Therefore what’s below the fold is my response to the question of why I thought abandoning DRM would be good for Macmillan’s business, framed to address the concerns of publishing executives. I thought I’d post it here as an historical footnote to the end of blanket DRM restrictions in the book trade, and because it features a line of reasoning about DRM which may be of interest to other publishers who are, as yet, undecided.

Remember over-the-air broadcast television? The kind that you can receive on a variety of devices, without scrambling or monthly fees? For decades, the principle that the public airwaves are just that – public property – has been an obstacle to TV studios’ efforts to control when, where, and how we watch their programs – and at what price-point. But that hasn’t stopped them from trying. The latest target is Aereo, a New York City startup that lets users stream local broadcast TV from a dime-sized antenna on a Brooklyn rooftop to their personal devices.

Supported by some of the same organizations that supported the SOPA and PIPA Internet blacklist bills, the TV networks complain that Aereo is “retransmitting” New York TV stations without a license. They insist that while Joe Citizen can put an antenna on his roof and run a wire to his TV, he can’t rent an antenna from Aereo and replace the wire with (oh, no!) the Internet. We’ve seen this before: a new user-empowering television technology emerges, and, almost on auto-pilot, the studios send their lawyers to try to shut it down. Their basic theory? If a new technology creates a new way to access the TV programming that we already have a legal right to view, the studios are entitled to control and profit from that technology.

But as the courts have said time and time again, that’s just not how the law works. A quintessential example: the VCR. Movie studios sued to keep home video recorders off the market, arguing that the ability to tape TV programs to watch later would destroy their industry. (Former Motion Picture Association of America head Jack Valenti famously compared the VCR to the Boston Strangler.) The Supreme Court rejected the studios’ arguments, saying that people have a right to tape from the public airwaves, and VCR manufacturers didn’t need to pay royalties to the studios.

Fast forward to 2008, when a group of TV networks tried to shut down Cablevision’s “remote DVR” service. That service allowed cable subscribers to record shows to which they had already bought access and save them to a hard drive at the cable company’s facility, instead of on a DVR in the subscriber’s living room. Again, the TV networks insisted they should have a right to profit from and control – or stop – this new technology. Again, the court said no, because a customer’s personal recording and viewing of the cable shows she had already paid for doesn’t trespass on any of the rights that the law gives to copyright owners.

The familiar arguments are re-surfacing in the Aereo dispute. Just as they once claimed the right to charge a toll for recording a TV show to watch later, the studios claim that they, and no one else, should control the ability to receive free broadcasts and stream them to Internet-connected devices. Essentially, the networks are saying that simply because Aereo’s technology is valuable to TV watchers, copyright owners have a right to capture that value. The Institute for Policy Innovation repeated that argument in an e-mail blast denouncing Aereo this week, insisting that Aereo is not a “legal business” because “one must pay for the raw materials that go into a product.” – meaning, the television shows being broadcast on the public airwaves.

I guess no one told that to TV manufacturers like Samsung and LG. They don’t pay for the shows that go into their TVs. Radio Shack doesn’t pay ABC for the right to sell TV antennas, even though ABC’s shows make those antennas valuable. Movie theaters that sell popcorn don’t owe a cut of those sales to the studios, even though popcorn enhances the movie-going experience. We understand, intuitively, that just because a product or service adds to the experience of watching TV and movies, or makes it possible in more places and times, doesn’t mean that copyright owners should have control, or charge a toll.

The TV networks are hoping to squash Aereo before it can expand beyond New York City. Hopefully, the court hearing the suits against Aereo will focus on what the law says, not what the networks wish it to be.

WASHINGTON — President Obama, seeking to expand his administration’s response to oppression in the Middle East, announced new sanctions on Monday against those who provide Syria and Iran with cutting-edge technology to track down dissidents for abuse, torture or death.

The measures underscored the role that computers, social media and cellphones have played not just in organizing resistance to authoritarian governments but also in helping security services crack down on those dissidents. The new sanctions are meant to put technology providers on notice that they will be held responsible for enabling human rights abuses.

The announcement came as Mr. Obama continues to search for a more effective response to the killings in Syria, where more than 9,000 people have died over the last year as the government of President Bashar al-Assad has tried to suppress a popular uprising. Critics have described Mr. Obama’s response as too passive and have called for more robust action to halt the violence. Mr. Obama argued on Monday that the focus on technology reflected an ever-widening set of actions that would eventually stop Mr. Assad.

“These technologies should be in place to empower citizens, not to repress them,” Mr. Obama said in a speech at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “It’s one more step toward the day that we know will come, the end of the Assad regime that has brutalized the Syrian people.”

The president, who toured the museum alongside Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, presented himself as a champion of Israel in the face of Republican complaints that he has not been supportive enough of America’s closest ally in the Middle East.

He noted that his administration had voted against United Nations resolutions condemning Israel and had worked to counter any threat from Iran. “The United States will do everything in our power to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon,” he said.

The executive orders, which Mr. Obama signed on Sunday and were first reported by The Washington Post, authorize restrictions on financial assets and bar those who provide technology to Iran and Syria from entering the United States. The restrictions primarily target those based inside the two countries.

The next day I was at breakfast with a good friend of mine, sharing my story of this seeming disconnect, when he recounted his conversation with a Senior VP he knows at one of the largest media companies on the planet.

“I know that I am not going to make the transition,” his friend was lamenting, a tacit acknowledgement that he was a bit of a dinosaur, simultaneously beholden to legacy technologies, rapidly sunsetting organizational structures, and an economic model that paid him richly, but which was withering away.

But then, with a sly grin, the VP added, “But, I am sure as hell not going to do anything that accelerates my demise.”

This was the AHA moment that I was struggling to find.

Never underestimate the ability of people to convince themselves of anything, even inaction, when their self-preservation depends upon it.

The last year has been a stressful period for online locker sites. Hotfile is currently defending itself from a lawsuit by the Motion Picture Association of America. In January, the federal government shut down Megaupload and indicted its officers. While the courts have yet to decide whether either company is legally responsible for the infringing activities of their users, there’s no serious dispute that copyright infringement accounted for a significant fraction of their business.

RapidShare argues that its service is fundamentally different. The company promotes non-infringing uses of its service and actively polices its site for illegal content. On Wednesday, at an event at the National Press Club, RapidShare formalized its anti-piracy stance with a new document. Its “Responsible Practices for Cloud Storage Services” outlines the steps the company takes to fight infringement on its site.

As we’ll see, these steps go well beyond the minimum enforcement efforts required to qualify for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s safe harbor. Yet even RapidShare’s aggressive anti-piracy approach has not satisfied piracy hawks like the Recording Industry Association of America. Ars talked to RapidShare General Counsel Daniel Raimer following Wednesday’s event.

WASHINGTON — The nation’s spies and its military commanders are at odds over the future of America’s spy satellites, a divide that could determine whether the United States government will increasingly rely on its own eyes in the sky or on less costly commercial technology.

The fight is shaping up into the intelligence world’s version of the United States Postal Service versus FedEx — a traditional government institution that must provide comprehensive services versus a more nimble private sector that is cherry-picking the most lucrative business opportunities.

In recent years, advances in commercially available technology have allowed private companies to develop satellites carrying high-resolution sensors and perform many of the surveillance tasks that were once the sole preserve of classified satellites owned and operated by the intelligence community. Two private companies already provide some of America’s spy satellite imagery, at far lower costs than government-owned satellites, according to current and former government and industry officials and outside analysts.

But at the urging of senior intelligence officials, the Obama administration has proposed cutting the contracts for commercial satellite imagery in half next year — to about $250 million from $540 million — to help meet deficit reduction requirements, while bringing back more of the work inside the government, according to administration and Congressional officials and industry experts.

Both Republican and Democratic leaders on the Congressional intelligence committees are resisting the budget cuts and siding with the private companies and the military, which argues that it could not get as much imagery as it needs for combat operations without turning to the less expensive commercial technology.

“The debate is really between the military, which needs a lot of imagery but doesn’t need the highly classified imagery, and the intelligence community, which wants to keep the capability to produce its own imagery,” said Bill Wilt, a senior official with GeoEye, one of the private satellite companies.

The good news is that there’s at least one thing that Facebook, Apple, Twitter and (to a lesser extent so far) Google seem to agree on. The bad news is that it’s that RSS, one of the beacons of openness on the internet, is the enemy.

Even if all “Defensive Purposes” were restricted to patent litigation, what if it’s your perfectly valid, innovative patent that Twitter has willfully infringed upon, you sue them, and they countersue you with other patents that you didn’t even know about that seem obvious and invalid?

The Innovator’s Patent Agreement is a nice sentiment, but the loophole potential is simply too great, and it doesn’t (and can’t) address the fundamental problems and dysfunction in the patent system.

A patented “invention”, even when patented under these terms, is still patented. It’s not free for anyone to use, and willfully infringing upon it is still dangerous and unwise.

That’s according to an analysis done by DeepField Networks, a start-up that number-crunched several weeks’ worth of anonymous network traffic provided by internet service providers, mainly in North America.

They found that one-third of the several million users in the study visited a website that uses Amazon’s infrastructure each day.

Most people still think of Amazon as the internet’s giant shopping mall — a purveyor of gadgets, books and movies — but it’s quietly become “a massive utility” that is either on the sending or receiving end of 1 percent of all of the internet traffic in North America, says Craig Labovitz, a well-known internet researcher and co-founder of DeepField.

“My mother, for example, has heard of Facebook. She’s heard of Google. She buys stuff from Amazon. But I don’t think most people realize just how pervasive Amazon is becoming,” he says. “The number of websites that would now break if Amazon were to go down, and the growing pervasiveness of Amazon behind the scenes, is really quite impressive.”

Amazon introduced its first cloud service, the Elastic Compute Cloud, in 2006, basing it on the technology it had developed in-house while building up Amazon.com. It’s now caught on as a quick way for companies to spin up servers without actually having to set up their own computers. Amazon now sells even more data center resources — storage, databases and search-indexing, for example — as cloud services.

It’s popular with companies that see big spikes and drops in computing demand. Netflix uses it to handle the back-end of its streaming service, which is in hot demand on Sunday nights and then gets quiet a few hours later. And Amazon even managed to build one of the world’s 50 most powerful supercomputers on its cloud.

Twitter’s momentous announcement yesterday that it would only use its patent portfolio defensively was received with wide acclaim by the tech world. With two small changes, Twitter’s Innovator’s Patent Agreement (IPA) could actually completely change the landscape of software patents.

A cool new concept being tested in the Abu Dhabi desert uses a wind turbine to condense water from the air and pump it into storage tanks for filtration and purification. The technology was created by Eole Water after its founder, Marc Parent, was inspired by the water he could collect from his air conditioner unit while living in the Caribbean. He began thinking of ways that water could be condensed from air in areas without access to grid power and the wind turbine concept was born.

The 30-kW wind turbine houses and powers the whole system. Air is taken in through vents in the nose cone of the turbine and then heated by a generator to make steam. The steam goes through a cooling compressor that creates moisture which is then condensed and collected. The water produced is sent through pipes down to stainless steel storage tanks where it’s filtered and purified.

Yahoo’s chief executive has confirmed plans to shut down dozens of products that are not seen as core to the firm.

Scott Thompson announced the move to analysts following the firm’s latest financial report.

He said he had asked: “How would we build Yahoo from the ground up if we were building it from scratch today?”

As a result he said it would be “shutting down or transitioning roughly 50 properties that don’t contribute meaningfully to engagement of revenue”.

Mr Thompson did not identify which units would be abandoned, but noted that news, finance, sports, entertainment and mail were safe.

“Each of our products and services may individually generate more engagement than most start-ups or even mid-sized companies in certain markets, but that does not mean that we should continue to do everything we currently do,” he was quoted as saying in a transcript of the conference call by Seeking Alpha .

On Friday, EFF went to court to argue that innocent Megaupload customers like Kyle Goodwin should be able to get their lost files back. We were particularly concerned because the government, which had originally seized the files and still apparently holds all of Megaupload’s financial assets, had argued that it had no obligation to make sure the files of innocent Megaupload users were returned and, in fact, believed that they could be destroyed .

The good news is that the court ordered all the parties – Megaupload, EFF, Carpathia (the service provider), the MPAA, and the government – to work together to devise a plan that protects everyone’s interests. The court plainly did not adopt the government’s troubling view and ultimately everyone else in the hearing, including the MPAA, seemed to agree that destruction of the files would be problematic (you can read more about the hearing here and here ).

Of course, the situation poses some big logistical hurdles. First, there is a huge amount of data here – more than 25 petabytes. Second, the parties have diverging views on what should be done even if they agree on preserving the data. Who should store the data? Where should it be stored? And of course, who will pay for that storage and any plan to allow users to retrieve their files?

But we are encouraged by the seeming consensus that it’s only right that innocent users like Mr. Goodwin get their property back. We’ll continue to do our best to make sure that happens.

The chiefs of Apple and Samsung have agreed to meet in a bid to resolve a patent case between the two in a California court.

This was after a US judge ordered the firms to participate in a settlement conference led by a magistrate judge.

The two companies have sued each other over technology used in smartphones and tablet PCs.

The two firms are fighting patent cases in various other countries as well.

Repeat after me: “There’s nothing to fix!” If you have a problem with email, fork a client or build your own! Nobody’s stopping you from “fixing” email. Many people have made a lot of cash by “fixing” email.

We don’t have to sit in fluorescent-lit, university buildings deliberating for hours on end about how to change the spec to fit everyone’s new needs. We don’t need 100 stupid startups “disrupting” the “broken” email system with their new protocols, that will inevitably end up being a proprietary, non-distributed, “ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of” the current email system.

Please don’t try to fix email, you’re just going to fuck it up!! Trust me, you can’t do any better. Instead, let’s build all of our awesome new features on top of an already beautifully-working system by making smarter clients.

The Stuxnet computer worm used to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program was planted by a double agent working for Israel. The agent used a booby-trapped memory stick to infect machines deep inside the Natanz nuclear facility, according to a report published on Wednesday.

Once the memory stick was infected, Stuxnet was able to infiltrate the Natanz network when a user did nothing more than click on an icon in Windows, ISSSource reported . They cited former and serving US intelligence officials who requested anonymity because of their proximity to the investigations. Covert operators from Israel and the US wanted to use a saboteur on the ground to spread the infection to insure the worm burrowed into the most vulnerable machines in the system, reporter Richard Sale added.

The double agent was probably a member of an Iranian dissident group, possibly from the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq group. This group is believed to be behind the assassinations of key Iranian nuclear scientists. In October, a huge blast destroyed an underground site near the town of Khorramabad in western Iran that housed most of Iran’s Shehab-3 medium-range missiles capable of reaching Israel and Iraq. Former and current US officials told ISSSource that the MEK was behind the attack, and one of the officials said “computer manipulations” caused the blast. “Given the seriousness of the impact on Iran’s (nuclear) program, we believe it took a human agent to spread the virus,” the source told the publication.

Hot on the heels of the antivirus firms targeting Flashback, Apple has now released another Java update meant to identify and remove any infections of the malware. The company posted the update on Thursday afternoon both to its website and Software Update, making it the third Java update released by the company in just over a week.

“This Java security update removes the most common variants of the Flashback malware,” Apple wrote in the support document for the update. “This update also configures the Java web plug-in to disable the automatic execution of Java applets. Users may re-enable automatic execution of Java applets using the Java Preferences application. If the Java web plug-in detects that no applets have been run for an extended period of time it will again disable Java applets.”

Thursday’s update is essentially the same version of Java released by Apple last week, but with a Flashback removal tool and a preference to control whether Java applets can run automatically or not. At this point in the game, it seems that most Mac users reading Ars probably already identified any infections and removed them, but Apple’s latest update will undoubtedly cover users who are either still unaware of the infection or unsure of what to do about it.

If you love reading and are looking to invest a chunk of money into a device as a dedicated e-reader, then the iPad is not your best bet. The value you can get from devices like the Kindle (or several other competitors like the Sony Reader or Kobo), will allow you to save money to spend on what is presumably your main passion: books. The iPad’s retina display is sharp and bright, but the display is unlikely to be the sole deciding factor for spending more time with the books you love.

The trouble comes when you start to think of your e-reader as more than an e-reader. E-ink Kindles are abysmal at Web browsing, for example, and they don’t run popular apps and games like the iPad and other tablets on the market today.

Things won’t always be this way, though, because color e-ink and other technologies are still on the horizon. There are other types of reading, like webpages and magazines, that matter just as much as books to many readers, too. For those needs, an iPad’s retina display will display images and text like a champ. But if your focus is on reading many books for many hours, e-ink still provides readers with the best support.

Few things in New York are as iconic as its fleets of yellow and black taxis. But while the color scheme will stay the same, the shape is about to change with the introduction of the next-generation cab at the New York International Auto Show.

Nissan won the competition to supply NYC’s taxi fleet, redesigning and converting its NV200 cargo van for use in the Big Apple after researching what native New Yorkers, tourists and the men and women who shuttle them around want in a cab. The result is the first purpose-built vehicle since the Checker Taxi era ended in the early 1980s, and it’s set to replace the Ford Crown Victorias, small SUVs and Toyota Prius hybrids that have been modified for taxi duty in the past three decades.

Due to begin infiltrating city streets in 2013, the new Nissan taxi packs a range of custom-tailored features for the rough and tumble life of a New York City taxi. And while the new design might not carry the same inner-city romance as its predecessors, passenger’s noses, spines and ears are sure to appreciate the new Nissan’s details.

This morning we learned that Microsoft and AOL had signed a deal that would see MSFT pick up 800 of AOL’s patents for around $1 billion in cash. The deal is expected to close at the end of 2012, with Microsoft being able to leverage AOL’s remaining 300 patents under a non-exclusive license. As it turns out, there was an undisclosed term to the deal, and AllThingsD reports that Microsoft has picked up part of Netscape.

Books should not be celebrated. Words, ideas, and concepts should be celebrated. Books were necessary to store these things, simply because we didn’t have any other viable form to contain them. But now we do.

Imagine a set of electronics as easy to play with as Legos. TED Fellow Ayah Bdeir introduces littleBits, a set of simple, interchangeable blocks that make programming as simple and important a part of creativity as snapping blocks together.

Rumors have been floating around that Google is developing a pair of glasses with a built-in heads-up display, and Google confirmed the project’s existence today.

“Project Glass,” as shown in a Google page , outfits the wearer with a sleek pair of glasses with just one small lens worn over the right eye, and a camera. That doesn’t mean a working pair actually exists yet—Google said photos of the glasses were posted to “show what this technology could look like” and a video was created “to demonstrate what it might enable you to do.”

In the video, a guy wakes up, and sees some Android-like icons in his heads-up display. He makes coffee, sees a reminder for an appointment, looks out the window, gets the weather, then receives a text message from a friend asking him if he wants to meet. He replies to the text message by voice while he’s eating. The guy walks out the door, and heads toward the subway when his glasses tell him subway service has been suspended. Instead, he gets the walking route from his glasses.

Later, he goes into a bookstore, asks “where’s the music section?” and is given walking directions to that part of the shop—using the indoor maps technology built by Google. He sees something interesting, says “take a photo of this,” and then “share it to my circles” in order to post it on Google . Then he walks up on top of a balcony, receives a video call, and shares the view from the top of the building with a friend.

In short, the glasses will be designed to do just about everything that can be done a smartphone, but without the massive inconvenience of actually carrying a device and using your hands. Google hasn’t said how close all this is to reality, but here’s the video for your viewing pleasure:

Mr. Watt had strong feelings about it himself. He said in an interview that he had never seen an Internet provider modifying Web pages that a person visits. “Imagine the U.S.P.S., or FedEx, for that matter, opening your Amazon boxes and injecting ads into the packages,” Mr. Watt said.

A test of the Courtyard Marriott’s wireless network on Friday verified Mr. Watt’s claims. The code was embedded in the pages of several Web sites visited, including Reddit, GigaOM and TechMeme.

The lines of code include references to “rxg,” which stands for Revenue eXtraction Gateway, a service aimed at generating money from Internet access points. On its Web site, a company called RG Nets, which makes Revenue eXtraction Gateway, explains that its system rewrites every Web page on the fly so that it can include a banner ad. “As you can see, the pervasive nature of the advertising banner on all Web pages guarantees banner advertising impression,” a narrator says in the video.

An online store selling the hardware to provide this service even lists “Web experience manipulation ” as a feature. It is not clear whether the technology is in use at any other Marriott hotels.

Paul Brigner, whom the MPAA hired in January 2011 as its chief technology officer, has left the industry’s trade and lobbying organization, CNET reports. He’s now a major critic of legislation championed by the MPAA such as the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act that stalled in Congress earlier this year because of swelling opposition to bills that initially looked like sure bets. “I firmly believe that we should not be legislating technological mandates to protect copyright — including SOPA and Protect IP,” Brigner says. “Did my position on this issue evolve over the last 12 months? I am not ashamed to admit that it certainly did,” Brigner writes in a statement on CNET. “The more I became educated on the realities of these issues, the more I came to the realization that a mandated technical solution just isn’t mutually compatible with the health of the Internet.” An MPAA spokesman had no comment for CNET on Brigner’s about-face. Last month Brigner became director of the North American Regional Bureau of the Internet Society, an organization whose stated goals include “the continued evolution and growth of the Internet for everyone.”

As many of you have noticed, I’m effectively proposing that the W3C become a foundation instead of a consortium, albeit a foundation whose primary mission is to act as a consortium would. I’ve avoided using terms like “non-profit” and “not-for-profit” because they might imply specific things which I don’t fully intend in terms of tax law, or whatever, but I do think of it as a generically non-profit institution; that is, one that does not strive to create a profit, except as can be invested into the endowment.

I’ve tried to explain why I believe this is a good idea, but in the end, I think the most fundamental reason is that one I can’t explain: it just feels like the right thing to do. It’s like I can perceive a shape without grasping all its details, but the overall shape looks right, looks better.

I fully expect that some will recoil from this idea, convinced that a foundation is a poor substitute for a consortium. Obviously, I disagree. I think the W3C’s future could be made much more stable with this approach, especially in financial terms. I also believe, as I said before, that it would be no less of a force for the advancement of the web. In fact, I think it would be a much stronger force, and have a greater positive effect, over the long term.

It is not a small undertaking, but it is an important and worthwhile effort, and I hope it is one the W3C considers seriously.

So what’s the answer to the central question? Does Apple have a secret backdoor to hand over your passcode to authorities? The general consensus among our experts was “probably not.” Does Apple assist law enforcement in their attempts to crack your PIN/passcode using methods the security world is already aware of? We’d be surprised if they weren’t. And can law enforcement, with enough time and effort, brute-force their way past your passcode? The experts we spoke to gave a resounding “yes,” though the level of effort required will coincide with the complexity of your passcode and how bad they want the data.

This is a sad story of an Internet giant. Started by two guys in a garage it eventually grew to control over 80% of the Internet search market and practically owned the whole Internet. It was innovative and agile. The stock market loved it - at times the company stock doubled in price within just a month! And it was one of the very few surviving companies after the dot-com bubble burst. The company was adding more and more awesome free services: from newsgroups to image-hosting. It practically reinvented email by launching a great free web-based email app. It introduced a blogging platform and even tried entering the social networking space. It launched a free website-hosting service, introduced its own instant-messenger/voice application, social bookmarking service and many others. It published lots of open-source frameworks, tools and APIs for developers. The apps it didn’t create in-house - it acquired from the competitors, continuing to expand its range of services. The company acquired several marketing agencies and started offering “paid inclusion” - adding ADs to the search results. Some people even claim that the term “PPC” was invented inside this very company. But the company kept adding more confusing menus, bells and whistles to its homepage. The search results were getting more and more cluttered by more and more ADs. New players came to the field. And many users - first the early adopters then the rest of the crowd - chose the newcomers over the giant. Eventually, the giant collapsed. The giant’s name was “Yahoo”.

Computer scientists have released a tool that disguises communications sent through the Tor anonymity service as Skype video calls, a cloak that’s intended to prevent repressive governments from blocking the anonymous traffic.

SkypeMorph, as the application is called, is designed to remedy a fundamental limitation of Tor: While the communications are cryptographically secured, unique characteristics of their individual data packets make them easy to identify as they travel over the networks. In the past, for example, the cryptographic key exchange was different in Tor transactions and the certificates used were typically valid for only a matter of hours, compared with as long as a year or two for certificates used by most Web servers. These fingerprints made it possible for government censors in Iran, China, and elsewhere to block data traveling over Tor while leaving the rest of the country’s communications intact.

Tor developers have remedied those shortcomings, but other unique signatures still exist. The idea behind SkypeMorph is to camouflage Tor communications so they blend in as traffic that government censors are reluctant to restrict.

“The goal is to make the traffic look like some other protocol that they are not willing to block,” Ian Goldberg, a professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, told Ars. “They could just shut off the Internet, of course, like Egypt did for a few days a year or so ago, but that, of course, would be extremely unpopular to their own people that are wondering why can’t see pictures of cute cats.”

I read the piece written by the employee struggling with the decision about whether or not to sign on with Zynga after they acquired the company he wrote code for, OMGPOP. I absolutely understood his dilemma, and I could have predicted that Zynga would respond the way they did.
I spent enough years trying to be a person inside Silicon Valley companies, to see what happened there.
There’s a lot of hands-off-ness, a lot of delegation. And humanity never entered into it. So when the guy at the bottom of the chain tried to raise a human issue to the guy one level closer to the top (probably a lawyer or a clerk), he got told there is no humanity here. Sign the papers. Period.
Wasn’t much of an issue. The way the piece read, he understood who he was dealing with, and made the right call for himself. Case closed.
But then the CEO tweets something that previously would have been said at a board meeting, or maybe to a reporter. When I left Symantec, the boss of the company told Infoworld that all the programmers remained (I was a full-time programmer in addition to being CEO). They always kick your ass on the way out. But I left with a lot of money, so it didn’t really hurt much.
But I’ve seen the way this process chews up ordinary trusting people. It’s really awful and ugly, especially when the issues usually are nickels and dimes to the people who are deciding, and it’s a life savings for people who need a little consideration. The problem is that the companies depend on these people to do the right thing without supervision when the company is struggling. But they can’t get the time of day when the bet paid off and the company won.
It should be party time at OMGPOP. They just won the lottery. But the CEO is a stinker, kicks the little guy in the ass on the way out. Only these days there’s Twitter, and this stuff leaks out to users. They’re getting a little glimpse at what tech businesses are like. It’s not fun.
I think the problem is that we force creativity to flow through corporatism. The two are fairly incompatible. The people who do the creative work look like total freaks to the operational people. And the operational people look like Stepford clones to the creative types. They really shouldn’t have to work with each other, and depend on each other so much, because there’s so little understanding between them. Whatever. Not my problem these days.

With all that said, if you’re not a game developer, fragmentation shouldn’t be an excuse for not writing Android apps.

If you’re a consumer, you should be glad that you have the ability to choose a device that tailors to your specific needs and aren’t forced onto one configuration that fits “most people”.

If you’re one of those people saying “Android sucks because it is fragmented” or “Android 4.0 runs on 0.x percent of devices” I congratulate you on reaching the end of this post and hope that you learned something today.

Google Inc., undaunted by a short-lived attempt to market and sell smartphones on its own, is now trying the approach with tablet computers in a quest to capture market share from Apple Inc.’s iPad.

The Internet search company will sell co-branded tablets directly to consumers through an online store like rivals Apple and Amazon.com Inc., according to people familiar with the matter. The move is an effort to turn around sluggish sales of tablet computers powered by Google’s Android software.

Mountain View has been leaking Google Drive details like a glacial trickle, but we still have no firm notion of how much free cloud storage it’ll bring or just how deeply it’ll be integrated with other services. There have been rumors of a Dropbox-like 2GB limit, but now a screenshot purporting to show the beta version’s main welcome page points to a healthy 5GB instead. Moreover, Google’s Support portal mentions that the Drive app for Android will have document-editing capabilities, which brings us back to the question of whether this is a whole new service, or an add-on to Google Docs or indeed a complete re-branding of Google’s documents platform. Regardless, calling it ‘Drive’ still makes it sound like sat nav.

LG, that South Korean conglomerate that has mostly spent the last few years fading into Samsung’s shadow, has just announced that it has begun mass production of the world’s first flexible, plastic e-ink display. This is opposed to the hard, heavy, prone-to-cracking glass-laminate e-ink displays found in devices such as the Kindle and Nook.

The new plastic display has a resolution of 1024×768 and is six inches across the diagonal, which is comparable to the Kindle and Nook. Because it’s made of plastic and not glass, though, the LG display is half the weight (14g) and 30% thinner (0.7mm) than a comparable, glass e-ink panel. Existing e-book readers need to be thick (and heavy) to protect the glass display, but LG is promising that its display is a lot more rugged. The press release says that the plastic display survives repeated 1.5-meter drop tests and break/scratch tests with a small hammer, and that it’s flexible up to 40 degrees from the mid point.

Blackberry manufacturer Research in Motion (RIM) has reported a quarterly loss, due in part to falling revenues on the back of weak smartphone shipments.

The Canadian company made a net loss for the three months to 3 March of $125m (£78m), compared with a profit of $934m a year earlier.

Revenues fell to $4.2bn from $5.2bn.

The firm also suggested it would refocus on the corporate market rather than on individual consumers.

It also announced the resignation of former co-chief executive Jim Balsillie.

Chief technology officer David Yacht will also be standing down.

Shipments of BlackBerry smartphones in the quarter fell to 11.1 million, down 21% from the previous three-month period.

Shipments of the company’s PlayBook tablets hit 500,000, largely due to substantial discounting.

For the full financial year, the company made a net profit of $1.2bn, down from $3.4bn in the previous year.

The results were worse than analysts had expected and RIM shares fell sharply in after-hours trading.

San Francisco, CA - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today supported a spectrum policy proposal from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and asked the FCC to acknowledge its First Amendment obligation to allocate additional spectrum for unlicensed use. Unlicensed use of spectrum would permit the expansion of wireless communication, including Wi-Fi-style technology.

A new study of data breaches has found that criminal and malicious attacks accounted for 37 percent of corporate data breaches in 2011, a six percent rise from 2010. The study, performed by Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Symantec, also found that these attacks were much more costly to companies than breaches caused by software or hardware failures or by internal negligence.

The study followed 49 organizations over the course of 2011, surveying over 400 IT, compliance and security professionals associated with them. While the research showed that the average cost to companies per compromised customer record had dropped to its lowest point since 2006—$194 per record—the cost of records lost through criminal and malicious acts was much higher, averaging $222 per record.

This is the first time since 2007 that criminal activity has accounted for more than a third of data breaches in Ponemon Institute’s survey. More than two-thirds of malicious attacks were achieved through some sort of electronic exploit—only 28 percent involved the physical theft of data storage devices. Trojans, botnets and other malware were at the root of half of criminal and malicious data breaches reported by the companies surveyed. Corporate websites were breached through SQL injection in 28 percent of the cases reported .

The study also found that 33 percent of criminal and malicious breaches involved insiders—meaning that at in at least five percent of criminal breaches, an employee or contractor either installed malware intentionally or otherwise purposely exposed corporate data. Those figures, the Institute’s researchers wrote in their report, show that companies still need to pay greater attention to addressing the insider threat.

AOL, a company that’s been struggling with shrinking sales over the last several years, may be looking for new sources of income. According to Blooomberg “three people with knowledge of the matter” said the company is hiring investment firm Evercore to find buyers or licensees for some of its more than 800 patents. The three sources also said Evercore would “explore other strategic options” for the company, without going into more detail.

Since 2009, when AOL separated from media content giant Time Warner, the web company has seen a 29 percent drop in revenue, according to Bloomberg. Part of this could be due to the ever-diminishing returns of AOL’s once ubiquitous dial-up service (subscription revenue from AOL’s dial-up dropped 18 percent from 2010 to 2011). Earlier this month, AOL cut more than 40 employees from AIM, their Instant Messenger department.

The three anonymous sources also said that several private-equity firms have recently approached AOL about privatizing the company and buying out its shareholders, but that AOL has not yet made a deal with any other company. AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong has said publicly that he would be open to going private, and was in talks with Yahoo as early as September, although no deal was initiated then, either.

The LOSS concept has several drawbacks. First among these is power consumption and payload weight constraints. The Raspberry Pi is a low power device, but still draws juice via micro-USB, at up to five watts. On top of which, TPB propose to broadcast a wifi signal from their LOSS drones. To blanket an area of a square kilometre with a strong enough signal to sustain a high data rate (they say around 100mbps) is going to take both a decent antenna and a fair amount of electricity. All of which is going to drive up the weight, complexity, and cost of the LOSS.

LOSS needs to either be self-sustaining (which implies solar propulsion, along the lines of ELHASPA or NASA’s Pathfinder aircraft) or it’s going to have to land regularly to take on fuel. (I am ruling out nuclear propulsion because I assume The Pirate Bay do not have access to a supply of fissionable materials. Otherwise, it’s Game Over for the MPAA.) This means that a cat-and-mouse game can be easily won by the authorities; there’s no need to deploy air-to-air missiles over built-up areas when you can just have the Police keep an eye out for pirates refuelling their drones after midnight.

The sad truth is, quadrotors and small UAVs have lamentably poor airborn endurance, with flight durations measured in double or triple digit seconds rather than minutes, let alone hours. And baloon-type UAVs have the slight problem of being at the mercy of the winds, or requiring an anchor cable (which again makes them trivially easy for the Police to take down).

This just gets worse and worse. After pointing out that ICANN was missing a big (and important) opportunity by not speaking out against governments seizing domain names, we were disappointed to see ICANN release a white paper that was more of a how-to manual for governments on seizing domains. Now, Paul Keating points us to the depressing news that ICANN is now publicly saying that it will work more closely with governments around the world to help them seize and censor domains. The writeup is a little vague, but it says that seizing domains for copyright infringement was a “hot topic” at ICANN’s recent meeting — including promises from ICANN that it would work more closely with law enforcement around the globe and the various registrars to help law enforcement be more effective in censoring these websites. This is really unfortunate and once again highlights ICANN’s uselessness in protecting the internet. Instead, it appears to be actively working against basic internet principles.

For better or worse, a lot of the things we humans like about the way we live now – from electric lighting and indoor plumbing to global travel, advanced medicine, flat-screen TVs, and iPhones – depend on our ability to suck, scrape and blast stuff out of the earth. And not just obvious stuff, like oil, coal, and natural gas; modern life, with all its wonders and comforts, is brought to you by a huge array of natural resources, from metals like copper (used in electrical wiring) and iron ore (steel), to minerals like lithium (batteries) and tantalum (cell phones), to so-called “rare earth elements” (lasers, fiber optics, hybrid car engines, iPads and more). Some are more important than others, of course, but if even a few of them were to run out, we’d be in bad shape.

Well, here’s the thing: These critical resources are running out. Virtually all of them.

The world is hurtling towards what author Michael Klare calls “a crisis of resource depletion.” In a new book, Klare drops the stunning news that the earth’s easily accessible supplies of oil, coal, gas, metals, minerals, rare earths and even water and food are disappearing fast, plunging governments and corporations into a balls-to-the-wall “race for what’s left.” And what’s left is, above all, hard to get at – it’s under the Arctic ice, deep below the ocean floor, in tar sands and shale, and in war zones, like Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Getting at it is becoming more and more dangerous, both environmentally – we can expect to see more Gulf-style disasters as companies breach the “final frontiers” of resource extraction – and politically, as countries clash more and more over who gets what.

Holy crap, right? But there’s a (somewhat) hopeful part: For some of these resources, there are substitutes (say, renewables in place of oil), and if we pick up the pace in developing them, we won’t have to plunder the planet quite so much; in other cases, we’ll just need to learn to do more with less (conservation, efficiency). The essential thing, says Klare, whose new book is called The Race for What’s Left , is to start figuring this stuff out right now .

The antitrust subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee heard a wide range of views on the merits of a plan for Verizon Wireless to buy $3.6 billion of spectrum from a consortium of cable companies. Representatives for the firms argued that the transaction would not reduce competition between them, but opponents portrayed the deal as another step in the slow death of telecommunications competition.

Because when we invest in science, when we invest in space, when we invest in exploration, we always, always get far more back in return than we put in. And not just in dollars and cents.

See that picture above? It shows a new type of rocket engine design. Usually, fuel is pumped into a chamber where the chemicals ignite and are blown out the other end, creating thrust. The design pictured above does this in a new way: as the fuel is pumped into the chamber, it’s spun up, creating a vortex. This focuses the flow, keeping it closer to the center of the chamber. In this way, when the fuel ignite, it keeps the walls of the chamber cooler.

So what, right?

Here’s what: using this technology — developed for rockets for NASA, remember — engineers designed a way to pump water more quickly and efficiently for fire suppression. The result is nothing short of astonishing :

One series of tests using empty houses at Vandenberg Air Force Base compared [this new] system with a 20-gallon-per-minute, 1,400 pound-per-square-inch (psi) discharge capability (at the pump) versus a standard 100-gallon-per-minute, 125 psi standard hand line—the kind that typically takes a few firemen to control. The standard line extinguished a set fire in a living room in 1 minute and 45 seconds using 220 gallons of water. The [new] system extinguished an identical fire in 17.3 seconds using 13.6 gallons—with a hose requiring only one person to manage.

In other words, this new system put out a fire more quickly, using less water, and — critically — with fewer firefighters needed to operate the hose. This frees up needed firefighters to do other important tasks on the job, and therefore makes fighting fires faster and safer .

There is no way you could’ve predicted beforehand that investing in NASA would have led to the creation of this specific innovation in life-saving technology. But it’s a rock-solid guarantee that investing in science always leads to innovations that have far-ranging and critical benefits to our lives.

If for no other reason that’s why we need to invest in science: in NASA, in NSF, in NOAA, and all the other agencies that explore the world around us. It’s for our own good. And it always pays off.

An alleged Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) internal mail came to light today that outlaws the purchase of Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) products with company funds. The email was reported by Mar-Jo Foley on her blog . The policy is specifically targeted at those working in Microsoft’s Sales, Marketing, Services, IT and Operations Group. That arm of the company encompasses front line customer service professionals and emplo

ys around 46,000 people worldwide. The move would see, if implemented fully, would see these staff unable to submit any Apple product as a company expense, effectively ending the use of iPads and Macs in these sectors.

The email added that the Apple products would be removed from the company’s ordering catalogue in the United States and so would not be available for purchase at all through the normal channels. The email ended by stating that current purchasing levels were low and stated that there was a record of past purchases attached. That list was not available at time of writing. Microsoft apparently declined to comment on the veracity of the email. The reasons behind the move are unclear. If the numbers of purchases in the past were available perhaps more could be said.

When it comes to the government’s ability to search your electronic devices at the border, we’ve always maintained that the border is not an “anything goes” zone, and that the Fourth Amendment doesn’t allow the government to search whatever it wants for any (or no) reason at all. And this week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to rehear a case that gave the government carte blanche to search through electronic devices at the border.

The climate change-induced retreat of Arctic ice has had one positive effect. The Arctic Ocean is now sufficiently navigable that cable-laying ships will be able to plant undersea cables directly linking London with Tokyo.

The first project to take advantage of this will be the Russian Trans-Arctic Cable System (RUTACS). This $1 billion scheme will run cable from the UK to Japan following Russia’s northern coast, with connections to Russia and China along the way. 6 pairs of fibers with a 1.6 Tbit/s capacity per pair will be laid, and minimum latency between London and Tokyo will be 76.58 milliseconds. Construction is planned to begin in the second half of this year.

Arctic Fibre’s connection will similarly join England with Japan, but this time following the North American coastline, with cable laid through the the Northwest Passage and several connections to Canada along the way. Total bandwidth between the countries will be 6.4 Tbit/s, with latencies between London and Tokyo of 168 ms.

A third cable project, the Arctic Cable Company’s Arctic Link, which would have run a similar route to Arctic Fibre’s project but with connections to Alaska rather than Canada, appears to have stalled after it failed to receive government loans that it hoped for.

Currently, Europe and Japan are connected via a mix of land and sea routes, with cables passing through a number of highly-trafficked chokepoints in the Middle East and Asia. A ship dragging its anchor in the wrong place could destroy many of the connections linking the globe.

The Arctic routes are both shorter and subject to far less shipping activity, making them faster and less prone to disruption. However, the presence of sea ice has made cable-laying impractical. Even with the retreat of the ice, the routes will still be hazardous. Normal cable ships tend to be built for warmer climates, so these projects will use ice-rated ships converted to lay cables and partnered with ice-breakers.

U.S. newspapers lost $10 in print advertising revenue last year for every $1 they gained online, a deeper loss than in 2010, as competition from Internet companies increases, a study by Pew Research Center found.

Newspaper revenues declined more sharply last year than in 2010 when publishers lost $7 in print advertising for every $1 generated from online outlets, according to Pew’s study entitled “State of the News Media,” which is published today.

“They’re continuing to lose ground to tech intermediaries,” such as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. (FB) as well as to Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Internet retailer Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) , said Tom Rosenstiel, director of Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, in a telephone interview. “The news industry has been fundamentally disadvantaged in this area,” he said.

The industry, suffering declines in print advertising, hasn’t been able to make up for those losses with digital revenue. Washington-based Pew’s study follows last week’s report from the Newspaper Association of America that revealed total newspaper ad revenue dropped 7.3 percent to $23.9 billion in 2011 from the previous year.

While online advertising among news groups increased by about $207 million, print advertising revenue declined by around $2.1 billion, Pew said.

An increasingly desperate LightSquared today accused the Federal Communications Commission of violating its constitutional property rights by rejecting its application to build a 4G network on spectrum adjacent to that used by GPS devices, and demanded that the FCC either reverse its decision or give LightSquared a new chunk of spectrum.

The bold claims follow the FCC’s decision last month to withdraw LightSquared’s conditional approval to use spectrum allocated for satellite transmissions for cell towers instead. In a long response to the FCC that was made public late Friday, LightSquared claimed the FCC’s action constitutes a “taking of LightSquared’s property without just compensation in violation of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.”

The argument seems unlikely to sway the FCC. The agency has authority over how spectrum is allocated. Moreover, the FCC made it clear to LightSquared in its conditional approval that a final waiver would not be granted unless concerns about GPS interference were eliminated.

We were down a few hours earlier today. There’s no need to worry, we haven’t been raided this time. We’re only upgrading stuff since we’re still growing.

One of the technical things we always optimize is where to put our front machines. They are the ones that re-direct your traffic to a secret location. We have now decided to try to build something extraordinary.

With the development of GPS controlled drones, far-reaching cheap radio equipment and tiny new computers like the Raspberry Pi , we’re going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air. This way our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system. A real act of war.

We’re just starting so we haven’t figured everything out yet. But we can’t limit ourselves to hosting things just on land anymore. These Low Orbit Server Stations (LOSS) are just the first attempt. With modern radio transmitters we can get over 100Mbps per node up to 50km away. For the proxy system we’re building, that’s more than enough.

But when time comes we will host in all parts of the galaxy, being true to our slogan of being the galaxy’s most resilient system. And all of the parts we’ll use to build that system on will be downloadable.

In a bid to save its 4G network after being rejected by the Federal Communications Commission, LightSquared has hired lawyer Theodore Olson, who helped President George W. Bush take office by winning the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case, and former Department of Labor Solicitor Eugene Scalia.

Olson told Politico that it’s too early to say what LightSquared’s legal strategy will be. LightSquared gained conditional FCC approval for a new 4G-LTE network using both satellites and cell towers in January 2011, but the FCC pulled the plug on the network last month after extensive testing showed it would interfere with GPS devices. In the wake of that decision, LightSquared has reportedly explored potential lawsuits against the FCC and GPS industry members.

“What happened to LightSquared is ‘an egregious example’ of the government encouraging a company to invest an enormous amount of money to meet a national objective and then ‘pulling the rug out from under them capriciously and precipitously,’” Olson said, according to Politico. “’On the face of things, it looks to me like the government has acted arbitrarily after inducing the expenditure of an enormous number of resources.’”

LightSquared argues that the GPS industry had years in which it could have modified devices to avoid interference from spectrum licensed to LightSquared, but failed to do so. The GPS industry argued in turn that modifying all existing and future devices would be impractical. Swayed by results of government testing, the FCC concluded that the GPS system was not ready to handle interference from LightSquared’s proposed network, and withdrew its conditional approval.

Squads of disposable mini-satellites able to provide reconnaissance to soldiers at the “press of a button” are being considered by the US military.

The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) says the machines could provide tactical information at times when existing satellites were not in position.

Darpa has invited manufacturers to discuss the project .

It says the satellites should cost $500,000 (£318,500) apiece.

“We envision a constellation of small satellites, at a fraction of the cost of airborne systems, that would allow deployed warfighters to hit ‘see me’ on existing handheld devices and in less than 90 minutes receive a satellite image of their precise location to aid in mission planning,” the agency says in a statement.

It adds that each constellation should consist of about 24 satellites able to stay in low-Earth orbit for 60-90 days before burning up on re-entry.

White House CIO Brook Colangelo has revealed some harrowing details about his first days on the job. Entering the White House along with Barack Obama on Jan. 20, 2009, Colangelo "delivered the first presidential BlackBerry" and mobile devices to other top administration officials. Yet the White House's technology was in such poor shape that for the first 40 days, e-mail was down 23 percent of the time.

On January 26, "Our e-mail servers went down for 21 hours," Colangelo told attendees of the Computerworld Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference in Arizona this week. "In my professional career, there has not been a worst day since or ever."

Three or four more outages followed in those first 40 days. The White House proceeded to replace its e-mail systems and storage area networks, and started staffing its data center 24 hours a day. Uptime improved, but there was still a nine-hour outage in February 2011, taking down e-mail and Internet access, according to Computerworld. Colangelo resorted to faxing updates to Obama while he was on the road.

The 2011 outage spurred the White House to finally open a second data center for disaster recovery. Other modernization efforts included replacing desktops, which were still using floppy disk drives at the time Colangelo came on board. About 82 percent of the White House's technology had reached end of life when Obama's administration began.

The need for IT modernization in a government agency is nothing new, but the extent of the White House's problems is surprising. Computerworld has the full story.

Half of all online pharmacy domains are registered by just two of the world’s registrars. That’s according to a report concluding the non-profit agency that governs the issuance of Internet addresses may not be doing enough to enforce its own regulations.

Internet.bs, which claims it’s headquartered in the Bahamas, registered 33 percent of the world’s “rogue” online pharmacies according to the report . The report was released Monday by a group that tracks unlicensed sellers of precription drugs online. Researchers from LegitScript said the figure was even more dramatic when considering the tiny share Internet.bs enjoys in the overall domain-name market.

“Despite only having less than 0.2 percent of the global domain name market (about 400,000 domain names out of 220 million), LegitScript’s online pharmacy database indicates that Internet.bs is the Domain Name Registrar for about 33 percent of the world’s non-spam ‘rogue’ Internet pharmacy domain names,” the report states. The domains included: “buyfemaleviagracheap.net, nonprescription-pharmacy.com and sibutraminewithoutprescription.com that are engaged in the illicit and dangerous sale of drugs unapproved for sale and/or drugs without a prescription.”

The findings are similar to the conclusions drawn from a separate report (PDF) issued by another watch dog in the online pharmacy arena. They come as the non-profit organization appointed to oversee domain name registration began a week of open meetings on Monday in Costa Rica. ICANN, or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has the authority to revoke the accreditation of domain name registrars who violate terms of a Registrar Accreditation Agreement. But so far, Internet.bs and other registrars named in the reports have remained in business despite reports of RAA violations. These reports include allowing customers to use the domains to sell prescription drugs without the necessary licenses being made more than six months ago.

Users will be able to connect Thunderbolt-equipped peripherals to remote hosts using optical cabling in 2012, Intel told IDG News Service on Monday . The company reaffirmed its commitment to get optical cabling on the market this year, which will allow much longer cable runs beyond the current three meter limit. This, in turn, will allow the technology to achieve higher transmission speeds in the future.

Thunderbolt originally began life as an optical cable interconnect dubbed “LightPeak.” By the time it reached the market in early 2011, however, optical cabling was abandoned for standard copper. Copper cabling offered the advantage of lower cost as well as the ability to send as much as 10W of power to peripherals, while still matching the originally planned 10Gbps bidirectional data rate. Still, copper cabling can only reach approximately six meters theoretical maximum, and won’t be able to scale much beyond 10Gbps.

Optical cabling will allow cabling runs as long as “tens of meters,” perhaps as long as the length of a football field. However, devices won’t be able to receive power at that distance—impedance issues would make sending up to 10W impractical, Intel spokesperson Dave Salvatore said.

Using fiber optics will also enable Thunderbolt to push beyond 10Gbps to speeds planned as high as 100Gbps by the end of this decade. Intel promised optical cabling would come sometime in 2012 last year, and it plans to stand by that promise, though solid release dates or pricing still haven’t been announced.

This led us to ask, if in the worst case users chose multi-word passphrases with a distribution identical to English speech, how secure would this be? Using the large Google n-gram corpus we can answer this question for phrases of up to 5 words. The results are discouraging: by our metrics, even 5-word phrases would be highly insecure against offline attacks, with fewer than 30 bits of work compromising over half of users. The returns appear to rapidly diminish as more words are required. This has potentially serious implications for applications like PGP private keys, which are often encrypted using a passphrase. Users are clearly more random in “passphrase English” than in actual English, but unless it’s dramatically more random the underlying natural language simply isn’t random enough. Exploring this gap is an interesting avenue for future collaboration between computer security researchers and linguists. For now we can only be comfortable that randomly-generated passphrases (using tools like Diceware ) will resist offline brute force.

Imagine you run a large technology company not named Apple. Let’s say you’re Steve Ballmer, Michael Dell, Meg Whitman, Larry Page, or Intel’s Paul Otellini. How are you feeling today, a day after Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled the new iPad? Are you discounting the device as just an incremental improvement, the same shiny tablet with a better screen and faster cellular access? Or is it possible you had trouble sleeping last night? Did you toss and turn, worrying that Apple’s new device represents a potential knockout punch, a move that will cement its place as the undisputed leader of the biggest, most disruptive new tech market since the advent of the Web browser? Maybe your last few hours have been even worse than that. Perhaps you’re now paralyzed with confusion, fearful that you might be completely boxed in by the iPad—that there seems no good way to beat it.

For your sake, my hypothetical CEO friend, I hope you’re frightened.

Bear with me; there’s a good chance I’ll run out of superlatives to describe Apple’s tremendous, astonishing, stupendous, unbelievable emerging position in the tablet market. But I think the overkill is justified, as I worry that Apple’s rivals haven’t adequately taken stock of the potential disaster that lies ahead of them. Since the middle of 2010, when it became obvious that the then-new iPad would become a blockbuster, I’ve been sketching out two possible scenarios for the tablet market. First, it could go like the smartphone business—one in which Apple commands a healthy share of sales and an even better share of the profits, but where its fortunes are nevertheless circumscribed by competitive rivals whose products have come to be seen as acceptable alternatives. If the tablet market shaped up like the smartphone market, it wouldn’t be a great outcome for Microsoft, Dell, Intel, HP, Samsung, HTC, or Google, but it wouldn’t be catastrophic, either.

The other potential scenario, though, is far less optimistic for Apple’s competitors. It’s the iPod model. In this story, Apple begins by releasing a novel, category-defining product. Then, as rivals scramble for some way to respond, Apple relentlessly puts out slightly better versions every year, each time remaining just out of reach of the competition. Meanwhile it lowers its prices and expands its product lineup, making its devices more accessible to a wider audience. Then, to finish the game, it finds a way to boost its position through network effects and customer lock-in. (In the iPod’s case, it accomplished this through the iTunes software and built-in music store.) Put it all together and you have a device that’s unbeatable. In 2011, 10 years after its release, the iPod still represented a whopping 78 percent of the market share in music players .

Cook’s remarks may be immodest, but they are not hyperbole. No other company could today produce something like this new iPad. Not at these prices, at these quantities, at a worldwide scope, with a content ecosystem and user experience of the iPad’s quality. Apple is in a league of its own, and the iPad exemplifies it.

Two years after announcing the original iPad, Apple has produced a version that simply blows that original model away in every single regard. It’s faster, it’s thinner, it feels better in hand, it supports LTE networking, and yet battery life is better. The retina display is simply astounding to behold. Eight days from today they’re shipping a product that two years ago would have been impossible at any price, and they’ve made it look easy.

Nothing is guaranteed to last. The future’s uncertain and the end is always near. Apple’s position atop the industry may prove fleeting. But right now, Apple is Secretariat at the Belmont. And the company, to a person, seems hell-bent on not letting any competitor catch up.

Here’s the big picture bottom line: If you use a lot of data, you are clearly getting some sort of value out of it. Value isn’t free. The world’s finite resources simply aren’t trending toward free. That isn’t logical. I predict most of you will be spending significantly more per month for wireless data in 5 and 10 years than you do today. You’ll be getting faster and better service, and more value out of it, but it won’t be cheaper.

Please get over your emotional battle — and extinguish any legal threats, that’s silly — and join us in reality. If you use a lot of mobile data, be happy about it, and be happy paying for it. It’s worth it. And consider trying the add-on tethering plan for the iPhone, it can be useful if you carry a laptop or iPad.

Aaaaaaaaargh! · As a com­puter pro­gram­mer, I find these num­bers painful. A river of gold for the peo­ple who build good phones. An­other river for the peo­ple who run the net­works. And for the de­vel­op­ers, crumbs. Scraps that fall off the edge of the table. Round­ing error . ¶

Mod­ern In­ter­net-con­nected phones exist mostly to run apps. I think some of the wrong peo­ple are get­ting re­warded. Feaugh.

Tablets are not there yet. In 2011, PCs outsold tablets almost six to one, estimates Canalys, a technology research company. But that is still a significant change from 2010, the iPad’s first year on the market, when PCs outsold tablets 20 to one, according to Canalys. For the last two years, PC sales were flat, while iPad sales were booming. The Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook gave the market an additional lift over the holidays. Apple is banking on the tablet market. Its iPad brought in nearly 40 percent more revenue during the holidays than Apple’s own computer business, the Macintosh, did.