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.