Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Boot up: Facebook prepares music offering, and Apple 'loses (another) iPhone prototype in (another) bar'

Apple Introduces New iPhone At Worldwide Developers Conference... And it reportedly happened on Steve Jobs's watch Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

A quick burst of 10 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

"Facebook Inc. is preparing changes designed to make the site a hub for listening to music, watching movies and playing videogames, according to people familiar with the matter, in much the same way people already use the social network to share personal media like photos and videos."

Note: This isn't a music platform. It's not (really) an iTunes-rival.

"In a bizarre repeat of a high-profile incident last year, an Apple employee once again appears to have lost an unreleased iPhone in a bar, CNET has learned."

Photographer Thomas Hawk: "Flickr asked me if I wanted to apply it only to photos going forward, or also to images that I'd already geotagged. I told flickr to go ahead and apply this setting to all of my past and future photos -- which included a thumbnail of the photo I linked. So now when you go to this photo on flickr, indeed, the geotag seems to be removed from the photo page for the image.
"Except that there is one pretty major security hole.
"Although the geotag information is indeed pulled from the flickr photo page, ANYONE can potentially still get your geolocational data simply by downloading the original sized file and looking into the EXIF data.
"This only seems to apply to images that were geotaged at the file level (i.e. by you or your device/phone, etc.) and not photos geotagged using flickr -- but still, with cell phones and software that auto geotag things, you could easily be lulled into a false sense of security on Flickr when you should not be."

Truly, a website design that sticks two fingers up at you from its lair in the mid-90s.

Pointed out to us by John Dowdell of Adobe, the people who make Flash: details how baseball is being changed by the greater access to information about games. Guess how they access it.

Paul Thurrott, whom nobody would describe as an Apple fan, isn't very keen on the new Windows 8 Explorer ribbon idea: "The Microsoft post describing the new ribbon UI goes into great detail about telemetry data, which provides the company with information about what users are really using in Explorer and elsewhere in Windows. And according to that data, the top 10 commands represent over 81% of all commands used in Explorer. The bottom 18% of commands (by usage) include such things as Open, Edit (Menu), View Toggle, Organize, New Folder, Send To, and Edit.

"And yet, looking at a Microsoft screenshot of the new ribbon, what do I see in the default first tab? A bunch of commands - including Open and Edit, by the way - that are not in the 81% most-frequently used commands." Huh?"

He also described Apple's Finder as "much cleaner and less busy". That's really quite scary.

If you were wondering how Hot Spot and Snickometer worked in cricket...

Good graphic, though it obviously assumes that the software costs nothing to produce, and that the marketing and so on happen magically to give the "Apple's slice" element.

From early in August, but still relevant: "'With a large enterprise, you have to assume that people are going to get tricked into installing malware,' iSec CTO Alex Stamos told The Reg. 'You can't assume that you'll never have malware somewhere in a network. You have to focus on parts where a bad guy goes from owning Bob the HR employee to become Sally the domain admin.'
"At the heart of the Mac server's insecurity is a proprietary authentication scheme known as DHX that's trivial to override. While Mac servers can use the much more secure Kerberos algorithm for authenticating Macs on local networks, Stamos and fellow iSec researchers Paul Youn, Tom Daniels, Aaron Grattafiori, and William "BJ" Orvis found it was trivial to force OS X server to resort back to Apple's insecure protocol."

They also did a proof of concept. OSX Server is the weakest link. Then again, a similar flaw in Windows is what led to Google getting hacked in China in 2009.

"The average selling price for Double Data Rate 3 (DDR) in the 2-gigabit (Gb) density--the bellwether DRAM product--is projected to drop to $1.60 in the third quarter, down 24% from $2.10 in the second quarter. The dive would be the biggest decline for the year, following a surprisingly solid second quarter during which pricing fell only 5% from the first quarter. Moving into the fourth quarter, the price could plummet another 22% to $1.25--dangerously close to cash costs for many manufacturers. Only a year ago in the third quarter, pricing stood at $4.70."

There's been a fall in demand, while yields are about to rise. The money now is shifting towards NAND Flash.

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