Internet Kill Switch

Senator Joseph Lieberman has proposed the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act (PCNAA), a bill that would give the president the power to control or even shut down the Internet in emergency situations. Citing the need for cybersecurity, Lieberman said in a press release that the U.S.’s “economic security, national security and public safety are now all at risk from new kinds of enemies — cyber-warriors, cyber-spies, cyber-terrorists and cyber-criminals.”

So here's the story. Apparently there's still a massive audience that wants to control the internet. Or perhaps, a bunch of executives that are a bit out of touch with reality. How likely is your everyday joe to support this bill? I'm curious. A large part of me says not very likely. Why does the president need a global internet kill switch when he can already do the same thing to the single offending web site by sending a squad of trained professionals (See: Police) to deal with criminal offenders? And what about foreign countries? Why would any sane foreign country give the American president power over their internet?

The bill requires that U.S.-based companies such as Google and Yahoo, as well as broadband providers and software firms, comply with any and all measures that the government sees fit in an emergency.

Now, why does it need the individual web hosts to comply when the purpose of a kill switch meant to kill the internet should only, in theory, need to turn off the providers. If nobody provides the internet, it's down, right? I don't like the vague feeling I'm getting from this short summary of the bill. It seems like they're taking more control than they need in the first place. To host a website, will I have to fill out government paperwork in the future? Will I have to submit to big brother watching over my shoulder? Will free web hosting such as http://webs.com or http://www.piczo.com be a thing of the past due to it being too easy for violators of this new bill to use them for illegal purposes?

It kind of seems like it, from what I'm seeing. I oppose this bill, seeing as it seems rather shady and wanting more than it needs or deserves in terms of power.

iPhone 4 has a "Retina Display"?

Let's skip straight to the section we'll be discussing with a quote from the original article.

The math discussed in media stories and blog posts about the iPhone 4 was enough to give many of us brain cramps. Nonetheless, others were inspired to jump right in and wrestle with the numbers to extrapolate real-world usage data. Among them was Phil Plaits, a scientist who spent a few years calibrating a camera on board the Hubble Telescope and who now blogs for Discover Magazine.

“My first reaction to the announcement and the ensuing coverage was interest and curiosity. I figured [Jobs] wouldn't lie outright, so what really is the limit of human vision as far as pixel size? The math is simple, if you know it, so I did the calculations, and found that while his claim wasn't perfect, I thought in context it was fine,” said Plaits, who helpfully provides charts and graphs illustrating the central concepts in his blog post about the iPhone 4’s display.

But as usual, the devil is in the details.

“It's easy to make assumptions about pixel size and distance, but then you have to take into account human vision--which is complicated--how the pixels are laid out, whether there is space between them, how they're refreshed, and so on,” said Plaits, who adds that he opted not to worry about slicing the data that finely.

“I just wanted to see if, given some simple assumptions, you could make a smooth, continuous-looking display. The answer is yes, and the new iPhone display will be pretty close to that ideal.“

Some experts, however, say more accuracy is warranted. Dr. Raymond Soneira, president of DisplayMate Technologies Corporation, which produces video calibration, evaluation, and diagnostic products, said that exaggeration over display specifications has been “building for many years and has now become outlandishly unreliable, with many of the consumer specs being exaggerated by 1000 percent or more.”

Blame it on the snowball effect: Once one manufacturer exaggerates its exacting specs a tiny bit, all the competing companies do the same. The stakes are raised again and again, and pretty soon that little innocent snowball has morphed into an out-of-control abominable snowman.

Basically, what I'm getting from tihs article is that Steve did in fact lie... However, we're being told it's forgivable. While I appreciate the opinion of such a renowned mathmatician, shouldn't it be for the consumer to decide when the truth is stretched too much? I don't see any reason there needs to be conclusive, factual decission over whether Steve lied. After all, I find that to be an opinion. Who can say for sure how far the truth has been stretched? If it's stretched bad enough, the backlash will be great enough to warrent the assumption that it was a lie. The offenders will be open to be sued, and it's really just that simple.

My personal opinion though, is that I'm tired of being tricked with this "forgivable" argument. Have you ever bought a hard drive advertising a certain ammount of gigabytes only to find out it has somewhat less than it led you to believe? That's the kind of dirty marketing trick we're looking at here. It's not a very trust inspiring move. They say one thing, but they lead us to believe another. I don't know about others, but I call this lying.

Updated Facebook app, broken?

It would appear there's some apparent problem with the app(s) for Facebook judging by this title. However, when I dived into the article I was continously surprised and dissapointed with what I found. So this article will unfortunately not be very positive. (Apple lovers, you've been warned.)

There was a time when Facebook was at the forefront of mobile app development. Before there was even an App Store, the web app Facebook put out that was optimized for the iPhone was brilliant. Then the App Store came and with it was a great Facebook native app. Then came version 3 of the app, which was even better. Those days, sadly, are long over.

 Huh, starts off good enough. Seems like it's on track. But then it jumps straight to this.

Everyone already knows that the Facebook Android app sucks.

 Really? I'm apparently living under a technological rock because I wasn't aware of this at all. But should I really expect anything less from an article evidently written by, what I'm going to take a wild guess, [Insert eye roll here]  Apple fanboy? Well...er...no, no I should not. I say this because the obviously biased remarks cross the border straight into what I found to be hilarity.

First of all, Facebook still has yet to release a native iPad app. This is pretty ridiculous considering that undoubtedly a high percentage of the millions of iPad owners have searched the App Store for a Facebook app, and come away with only imitations (which Facebook has demanded be taken down).

Exaggeration ignored, I find it amusing that people still think Facebook is their friend. Now, from a distant point of view I'd have to say Facebook doesn't feel like it need "us" (Because obviously I never trusted Facebook enough to use it, but the picture is clear.) anymore and therefore is not working as hard as it used to when it knew it's future depended on us. See the problem with this is that Facebook has definitely experienced a drop in users over it's attitude towards these same users. Obviously, Facebook's future still depends on it's users. But who would give up playing Farmville just because the website it's on happens to violate their privacy and give them the finger in the form of restricting mobile access to their site? Your faith in humanity might be saying, "haha nice sarcasm", but my faith in humanity took a long walk when I heard about Farmville addiction. Farmville just happens to be a ridiculously popular facebook game that is true to it's name.

Oh, and that wasn't the hilarity yet.

 Third, this update has at least one glaring UI bug. Sure, bugs are a part of the game, but how Facebook overlooked this one is dumbfounding. If you have new messages or friend requests on Facebook, load up the main screen in the app. There you’ll find certain areas badged to let you know there are updates for you to see — but these badges have a dark upper area that clashes badly with the light background of the main screen. I mean, it just looks awful. How did that get through quality control?

...Yeah, this is what all the hype is about here. This is what makes the app broken. A slight graphical glitch that does nothing but "clash". Here's a screen shot to demonstrate how insanely stupid this is.

You see those black edges on the upper half of the small red and white buttons "1" and "15"? The ones to the upper right of Inbox and Requests respectively? That's what is being complained about.

There's no loss of function. It just doesn't look nice to some. I don't even know what to say to that. It's just so... trivial.

Animated .png images? What!?

In late 2007, PHUG, an open source community had the opportunity to meet Andrew Smith one of the key developers of APNG. Eager to get involved and expand on the open source community, PHUG placed it's initiative into the contribution of the APNG open source project. Our goal is to educate both open source commercial developers and designers on the beneficial aspects of using the APNG specification. As this project evolves, we hope to expand and build on the ever growing open source community, with designers and developers devoted to producing APNGs, tutorials, workshops, and more. Our hopes are to eventually incorporate APNGs into much more than banners and ads, such as menu alternatives!

If you're anything like me, you're absolutely astounded that anyone would create an animated .png right now. Traditionally .gif files are what have been used for animations. Don't fret though. There's actually some good reasons for an animated .png! I'm going to discuss the advantages here.

First, let's discuss the difference between a .png and a .gif

A .gif is typically used for animations, and isn't that great compared to a .jpg for static images due to lower quality. .gif is rather low quality, and an extremely old standard for animations. Though some might say they love the .gif and I agree, it's very nice, an upgrade cannot hurt.

A .png is typically used for static images, and destroys a .jpg in terms of quality typically. From my experience, a .png will give you as near perfect quality as you can get these days out of the common file types.  It also supports transparency, unlike a .jpg. A .png's one weakness is that the file size is often significantly larger than other file type alternatives. It's not unbearable, but nobody likes loading an image with a huge file size.

Now on to why animated .png is an upgrade from animated .gif

Reason #1: Higher Quality
Rather obvious, the higher quality of a .png is a nice boost for making beautiful animations.

Reason #2: .gif actually only supports limited transparency
In a .gif, a pixel is either transparent or not. In a .png, however, a pixel can be, say, orange, and 50% transparent. This makes for far more flexible images and built in image opacity.

What about file size? I'm actually not sure what the relative file size is. I'd assume an animated .png will be larger than an equivelent animated .gif. However, it probably won't be unbearable and will still be an awesome new format for the web.

Did you know?
Firefox already supports animated .png. Unfortunately other browsers such as Chrome and IE do not. Try going to http://animatedpng.com/index.php/category/samples/ with Firefox to see animated .png in action. It will even give you some comparison's to .gif animations.

Here's a filesize of a direct comparison between the first animation comparison on the page.

.gif : 24.33 KB
.png 112.95 KB

As you can see, the png is a lot bigger. But 112.95 KB is still not that bad in today's world unless you're using dialup. This is why I say it will not be unbearable. Note that the .png version looks a LOT better. (Check the site for yourself!)

Wolfram Alpha - Diversity in the Search Engine world?

Wolfram Alpha is a search engine, the primary use of which is research. You type your question in, it analyzes it, and gives you an answer. What I think is the most impressive thing about Wolfram Alpha is that it works on older browsers, recognizes questions incredibly well, and has lots of info to give. Some of the most awesome things you can do with Wolfram Alpha are looking up dates, math of all sorts, geographic locations, and other things of the sort.

It's a source of information far more relevant in some instances than Google, Bing, or any of the older conventional search engines. That's not to say it stands a chance of  dethroning any of the other search engines from their respective thrones (or lack there-of). The new search engine doesn't really help you find websites, and it's image search capability is highly limited. It specializes in providing data, and while it does an incredibly impressive job if this it definitely doesn't have what it takes to be the search engine.

One thought however is that it could replace Google in things like schools, where Google can sometimes be abused to search for things irrelevant to the student's education. It could also earn it's own seat on the Search Engine scene, and though it will have difficulty dominating it, it can certainly hope to stand side by side with other search engines as being useful and advantageous to use regardless of whether you use other search engines.

I think that Wolfram Alpha has certainly earned it's place in fame, and that schools should take advantage of it's relevant, data-focused interface. A student can't find, say, video games on Wolfram Alpha. It can't find internet forums or chatrooms. It only handles data, and images directly relevant to the data searched for, such as graphs or maps.

Give Wolfram Alpha a try for yourself at http://www.wolframalpha.com/. Try searching your birth date, or finding a complex math formula for the site to evaluate. Even browsers as old as Internet Explorer 6 can handle the site, though just barely, and you will get a warning.

Pirate Bay still wins, again. Average citizen will probably suffer, again.

The entertainment industry has embarked in an all-out war against piracy around the globe, with the hopes of scaring would-be pirates from illegally obtaining digital media. But if the likes of the MPAA and RIAA plans on sinking the ship that millions sail throughout the Internet, they should think again.
The primary target for the entertainment industry, as it would seem, has been The Pirate Bay. It is far more than a website that enables users to acquire digital content of both legal and illegal variety. It is a symbol. It is a powerful message that the entertainment industry hates but many people, even those who don’t commit acts of piracy, agree is true: the system is broken.

 Welcome back to the piracy scene. I'm your host, nerdzilla, and we're here to examine Piratebay. Now, Piratebay is nowhere near the only site of it's kind, and quite frankly I personally have no idea why it is the only site under this much fire. Perhaps Piratebay is simply the most popular, or perhaps this is the entertainment industry's way of suppressing the people. Perhaps this is there way of threatening people, scaring people into doing what they want. However, Pirate Bay does a lot more than offer torrents that just happen to contain "ilegal" MP3s or videos.

I personally go to a less controversial site for my free, legal music.Consequently, I can't name a single popular band.

A defining issue that plagues the industry and, more importantly, consumers is draconian Digital Rights Management (DRM) techniques that everyone’s hearing about lately. This is why you can’t read that e-book you purchased on a competing device, listen to that MP3 anywhere you want to, watch that movie on your computer, or play that game without an always-on Internet connection. It’s these very techniques that drive paying customers to piracy (even yours truly has fallen victim to DRM gone horribly wrong).

 I was under the impression it was common knowledge that DRM is a torture device. (<-- satire) But since some people actually think it's an effective method of protecting things let's go over DRM. DRM is a method of security applied mainly to video games, music, and video by large companies with the intentions of making sure you don't do anything considered pirating. What it does however, is put vague limits on what you can do with what you bought with your hard earned money. Want to install your video game? Have you installed it more than 5 or so times with said CD-key? Whoops! No can do. DRM has now stepped in and you're no longer allowed to play that video game you bought, with money. Want to play the music you bought on Itunes on your Zune? on any other media player except iTunes? No sir. DRM says to take a hike.

DRM is essentially flawed to the core idea because it makes limits that it THINKS pirates are especially likely to break, but ignores completely that completely legal users can do so as well. Therefore, legal users are often victimized by the limits set by DRM.

If that wasn't bad enough, DRM is pretty weak in that it can often be removed, ilegally, pretty easily.

Yeah... right now a pirate is playing the game without hassle and you're labeled a pirate and not allowed to listen/play for no good reason.

This, is why most people hate DRM.

Beyond the technological advances that will keep illegal file sharing going for the foreseeable future, the one thing that matters more than anything else is the fact that many people actually participate in piracy and have no issue with doing so. There are surely those that feel no moral implication for their actions, and that number is probably growing.

It's disgraces like DRM that make it so that in your average private chat on MSN or even public chat on a chatroom, nobody will think poorly of you for admitting to pirate things. I've had friends I've met on forums pirate games to play with me, and not really cared. After all, I have a legal copy and am not helping them. I don't feel obligated at all to stop them. (Unless it's a game I REALLY like, in which case I may casually suggest paying for it.) Even then though. What am I supposed to do? Refuse to play with them?

The industry might sue someone like me though, simply for not being terrified of their little regime. It wouldn't be the first time they've done something horribly controversial to the little guys and quite frankly I wouldn't be able to win. It wouldn't surprise me if some of the court officials were biased. As some may know, that has already happened.

Like DRM, which victimizes the average citizen and only makes it slightly more tedious for the average pirate, the industry will probably once again do something that doesn't solve the problem in an attempt to win this hopeless war that will probably wind up offending everyone, again.

Massive drop in Facebook users, and why?

Now, some of your thoughts, if you're anything like me and secretly want to destroy Facebook wih fire, might be something along the lines of  "MUAHAHAHAHA!"...

Of course that doesn't make for a very interesting article. We're here to look at WHY Facebook users are leaving. This graph, pictured above, clearly shows that a major ammount of people are leaving. Only 31.14% of the answers were from people that were staying. 30.33% of the people were leaving due to "don't trust it with my personal information". I'd personally group the 7.12% that said "It sells my data to advertisers." with that.

Apparently 2.01% of people are leaving because of bugs! One of these bugs, which apparently just occurred recently, is something so terrible I don't think even Myspace has screwed up that badly before.

Last night, in an embarrassing glitch for Facebook that raises questions about privacy on the site, some users of the social-networking service began getting hundreds of personal messages that weren’t intended for them.

Yeah... that letter about how you like turtles just went to your boss.

In short, Facebook has really screwed up. People are leaving en masse. Now if only it was less of a civil war to delete your account.