While, in meat space, two countries divided only by naming conventions dance to the dogs of war tune and another country known for its cherishing of freedom of speech hunts down a single man who, with alleged help from a homosexual military officer, enforced his right to exert freedom of press, in the cyber world people are replacing their facebook profile pics with cartoon characters to raise awareness against child abuse, and myspace lives up (or rather, succumbs ) to the “if you can´t beat em join em ” motto.
In the mean time Europe does a flamboyant demonstration of what it means to be tech savvy by launching an investigation to determine if Google is a search engine.
Groupon to Google: no discount for you, mister
“6 billion isn’t cool, you know what’s cool?, a media inflated IPO “. Ok so I had to abuse the meme phrase from the Facebook origins movie, thing is, I don’t do well with just chatter and rumors, but this one is worth mentioning.
Groupon had a swel idea: let local business publish exclusive great deals targeted locally at user who would then print a deal voucher to get the deal, it’s all about the location based services fad. well fad or not the idea was great enough for it to be rumored to be about to report a 2 billion earning year , supposedly. That is what has apparently driven the groupon board to turn down a Google offer that some say was as high as 5.3 billion plus 700 million buyout options.
See why I don’t do well with hearsay?.
Angry about angry birds
Amid the 90 thousand Microsoft employees that are getting windows 7 phones, some may feel chagrin over having to use a phone that doesn’t run a crucial app, angry birds.
At least for the rest of the populace in the market, this issue has caused quite some dissent up to the point of being a deal breaker, that’s right, some people won’t buy a phone if it can’t run their favorite game, feels like we’re talking about consoles.
Mysterious ways to move
While Microsoft has been pushing about 100k units of its kinect device giving and uprise in YouTube fail videos of kinect related injuries and amassing a considerable 2.5 million units sold so far, the most appealing bit has got to be what hackers around the world have done with it. A C library named grinder allows them to turn the gadgets sensory data into 3D representations of, themselves,.. erm, starring at their computers and ,.. um,.. showing off their cats. Well yeah keep in mind its all about the implications.
Netflix now playing at a phone near you, just not yours
That is if you happen to be an Android phone user, Netflix services are already up and running for iPhone and Windows 7 phones, here the issue is far from technological, Android phones are as capable of streaming content as any sibling, it isn’t about Netflix either, which has proven itself apt for the task on the other two handset OS platforms.
It’s about what Netflix needs to do in order to keep their content providers happy, you have to remember that techie and webie as their system may be, Netflix still feeds from the content generating behemoth of yore who aren’t impressed at all by Androids openness, indeed the whole think flutters around DRMs or lack thereof.
Wikileaks:
For those of you that like pinning bullet points to your fingers while you state a summary of facts, here’ s a list of the run down from the latest Wikileaks installment so that you don’t get stuck in awkward finger positions:
-Cablegate
On Sunday November 28th, 251287 Documents generated by the offices of the US diplomatic attaches worldwide got matter of factly posted for the general public to view browse and download as a whole.
Various major news agencies ran on a par with the disclosure, each has since started to bring narrowed, higher relevance tidbits according to their regions.
-Tango Down
The uproar on the documents was massive on the receiving end, well, for those that could download them anyway; hours prior to the release the site fell victim to the first of a series of Ddos attack (can you say “preemptive strike”?).
A hacker by the alias of the jester (th3j35t3r) took responsibility for the attack, his mo includes a twitter declaration for each achievement saying “tango down” along with the victimized url.
-The rubber law
Even earlier and still prior to the mist of the launch of the cablegate, Wikileaks founder went and had sex with two Swedish women, unprotected.
According to Swedish law and what apparently are overzealous Interpol officers, it was decided that Julian Assange had committed (in a way that still baffles yours truly) rape, which resulted in issuing an apprehension order on November 30th alongside an EAW (European Arrest Warrant).
The case had been brought up and dismissed months earlier, when the plaintive both said the sex was actually consensual, and the whole re introduction reeks of convenience.
-Welcome to the jungle
In an attempt to overpower the Ddos attacks by using more computing might than they can thwart, Wikileaks reached out to one of the most powerful commercially available hosting infrastructures, located at Amazon, on December 1st.
However the company that stubbornly protects pedophiles rights to publish digital self help books on how to gain control over their underage victims and how to act when they get caught didn’t seem to be in line with Wikileaks materials.
Although denying any influence, Amazon crew got to chitchat with the chairman of the House Security Committee; U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman. That same day the Senator’ s staff received confirmation from Amazon of the removal of Wikileak’ s contents from their server base, which granted them praise from the Sen. himself through a statement.
Wikileaks had to be re hosted back on its previous host, and learn to ride the Ddos blows, the whole round trip took them about a day and change.
-EveryDNS but mine
Apparently a single very skilled hacker can setup what EveryDNS considers attacks that “threatened the stability of its infrastructure”. The domain name service provider went on to pull the plug on the service which allowed the website to be a name in your browser address bar instead of a series of numbers, on December 2nd.
Wikileaks responded with a contingency plan that meant spawning various additional domains across its (by then) distributed hosting solutions. During this time, staff at the library of congress, and China, were severed from access to the site or its contents, and the Ddos attacks escalated from an original 2to 4 Gigabit/second strength to a 6 to 10 Gigabit / second (for scale, that’s like cramming a fully packed dual layer DVD down their pipes, every second).
-Paypal; not your buddy
All is fine while the money keeps rolling in, right? Well yes, except when it doesn’t. Paypal, the Ebay owned online currency transfer service clinged to its own version of the terms of service rant to freeze the account accredited to Wikileaks on December 4th.
It is still unclear if they got to be petted by Sen. Lieberman.
-The key to safety
Amid all the starch feelings Wikileaks publications may have aroused, one would be exceptionally careless not to take any measures, to this end Julian Assange published another set of documents in the form of an encrypted file, to the public.
Since encryption works basically with a key that helps the crypto programs undo the data scrambling, the whole method relies on said key to be released, and consequently the safeguard documents made public, were anything to happen to him.
Talking about leaks, one such coup meant the dismissal of the GM at Blizzard China, after someone let the cat out of the bag on their product lineup and internal finance, on a less inflammatory venue, the Sony Ericsson Playstation phone has been leaking videos of itself for some time now, looks like it’s been a rather leaky week.
