As developers for tablets and smartphones we like to keep abreast of the latest mobile technology developments . This is a daily digest of mobile development and related technology news gathered from the BBC, the New York Times, New Scientist and the Globe and Mail to name a few. We scour the web for articles concerning, iPhone, iPad and android development, iOS and android operating systems as well as general articles on advances in mobile technology. We hope you find this useful and that it helps to keep you up to date with the latest technology developments.
Gaza social media war stepped up
Hamas and Israel engage in online battle for hearts and minds
Facebook parking revenge praised
A council praises a parking campaigner who is posting images on Facebook to embarrass drivers.
Apple expands iDevice trade-in program to Australia
Australians can now trade-in their older iOS devices for up to A$250 ($235 US) towards the purchase of a new device, Apple announced on Monday. The higher reward is available to for iPhones, while buyers can get up to $202 (A$215) in credit for iPad trade-ins at Apple Stores across the country. The new program arrives just shy of a year after the US debut, which offers up to $225. Since then, the initiative has expanded to Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the UK.
The Comcast Call From Hell: Cable Company Rep Tortures Customers Who Want To Cancel
We all know that fortitude is required when calling a utility or telecom. But the patience of two customers was sorely tested recently when they had the audacity to contact Comcast and make a simple request.
Writer Veronica Belmont and her husband, Ryan Block, a product manager at AOL (parent company of The Huffington Post), called Comcast last week to disconnect their service. The couple planned to switch to another cable and Internet provider, but the customer service representative who was handling their call had no intention of letting them do so.
According to Belmont:
He began asking me why we switched and that he would get us a better deal. I said, again “No, thank you, we’ve already switched, I just need to turn off the service in the old place.” It went back and forth like that for another five minutes. At one point I actually pleaded with him, “Please, I don’t want to get into a back-and-forth, our minds are made up and we just need to cancel.” He wouldn’t relent.
So Belmont handed the phone to Block.
“Overhearing the conversation, I knew this would not be very fun,” Block wrote on SoundCloud. “What I did not know is how oppressive this conversation would be. Within just a few minutes the representative had gotten so condescending and unhelpful I felt compelled to record the speakerphone conversation on my other phone.”
(Warning: This conversation may cause anger, teeth grinding and an all-consuming sense of frustration.)
After the recording went public, a Comcast representative told Mashable that they were investigating the situation. “This isn’t how our customer service representatives are trained to operate.”
Apple's iOS 7 officially hits 90 percent adoption ahead of iOS 8 debut
Ahead of the forthcoming iOS 8 update, expected in the fall, Apple has told developers that iOS 7 is now running on 90 percent of iOS devices using the App Store, indicating a growth rate of about one percent per month. The penetration level of iOS 7 is consequently, like most other iOS versions before it, the most quickly-adopted operating system update ever, on any major platform. The result was garnered from visits to the App Store over a seven-day period that ended on July 13.
University Of Phoenix Facing Federal Review
NEW YORK (AP) — Apollo Education Group said the U.S. Department of Education will review the administration of federal student financial aid programs by its University of Phoenix subsidiary.
The for-profit education company said Monday that the government review, which is scheduled to start Aug. 4, will initially cover the 2012-13 and 2013-14 years. The review will also cover the University of Phoenix’s compliance with laws governing campus security and crime statistics and drug policy. The university has about 241,900 students.
The Department of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Enrollments at for-profit education companies boomed during the recession, but demand is sliding and government scrutiny of the industry has intensified.
Another for-profit education company, Corinthian Colleges Inc., this month agreed to close or sell more than 100 campuses in the U.S. and Canada after the Department of Education had stepped up its financial monitoring of the company. The Education Department said Corinthian failed to provide adequate paperwork and didn’t comply with requests to address concerns about the company’s practices. The department said the concerns included allegations of falsifying job placement data used in marketing claims to prospective students, and allegations of altered grades and attendance.
Shares of Phoenix-based Apollo Education Group Inc. dropped $1.72, or 5.8 percent, to $27.85 in aftermarket trading Monday.
2014: The Year of <i>The Truman Show</i>
When The Truman Show debuted to great acclaim 16 years ago this summer, film critics were, initially, slightly baffled. Audiences were intrigued, though, by the story of a man whose life was being secretly broadcast to the world and had billions of viewers.
Eventually, he becomes aware that secret cameras follow his every move and that his entire existence in a seaside Florida town is a series of observed and orchestrated events. The film began to earn praise as a fantastical masterpiece, and, ultimately as prophecy.
Because we are all now living in The Truman Show.
“I don’t think there’s much difference between Truman Burbank’s situation and all of us in the Internet era,” said Jason Wesbecher, CEO of Docket. “Facebook has just admitted to secretly manipulating emotions of 700,000 of its users right about the same time that the Washington Post reports 90 percent of the NSA’s Snowden documents aren’t about surveillance targets at all; they are about us and our lives: medical records, school transcripts, photos of toddlers on swing sets, and, yes, bikini selfies.”
Political, social, and technological forces have come together to make 2014 the year of The Truman Show. We might have seen this coming. A year after the film became a box-office smash, CBS broadcast a wildly successful concept reality show that involved a diverse group of people living under one roof and constantly on camera. Given the Orwellian name of Big Brother, the production was the first mass, public indication that people are willing to surrender their privacy in exchange for money, convenience, and fame.
Which sounds a bit like the business model of Facebook.
When the social network’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, argued in 2010 that “the age of privacy is over,” he was suggesting the web was creating a radical new set of norms. He insisted that Facebook’s privacy settings were being changed because people were not concerned about being public, and, in fact, indicated that if he were starting his social media business today that “public” would be the default setting for users of the free service.
Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a principal researcher at Microsoft, argued that Zuckerberg’s assertions were bunk, and the surrender of privacy was about a kind of invisible transaction.
“There isn’t some radical shift in norms taking place,” she wrote. “What’s changing is the opportunity to be public and the potential gain from doing so. Reality TV anyone? People are willing to put themselves out there when they can gain from it. But this doesn’t mean that everyone suddenly wants to be always in public. And it doesn’t mean that folks who live their lives in public don’t value privacy. The best way to maintain privacy as a public figure is to give folks the impression that everything about you is in public.”
She is mostly correct.
But if you read Google’s Terms and Conditions page for Gmail, which, of course, no one does, you learn that the service reads your emails and cross-references them with search history, sites visited, and Google+ data. What is there for the Gmail user to gain from that loss of privacy? Rules of engagement only have meaning when both parties are aware they are being engaged.
Maybe, though, we are willing to give up even eternity for a little free web distraction. In 2010, the British retailer Gamestation got 7,500 customers to “grant us a nontransferable option to claim, now and for ever more, your immortal soul.”
Wesbecher of Docket insists we need to utilize the circumstances created by the web for the benefit of our businesses and personal lives. His startup has created a “sales enablement” software that allows email users to know, not just when an email they sent has been opened, but how much time was spent reading attached documents, and even where they were forwarded and who else is reading.
“We, obviously, still have choices,” Wesbecher said. “We can go off the grid, dump our social networks, and replace Google with the privacy-friendly DuckDuckGo search engine. But our obsessions with social media and the web means we are creating enough data every day to fill up 57.5 billion 32 GB iPads. I don’t think turning away from it all is realistic, however. We just need tools to make the web work better for us, instead of against us.”
We are, in a sense, still traveling toward something on the Internet that we cannot yet see, and Truman Burbank, unsurprisingly, had the metaphor to describe our journey back in 1998 when he was explaining to Marlon about a place called Fiji.
Marlon: “Where the hell’s Fiji? Near Florida?”
Truman: (Pointing to golf ball) “See here?”
Marlon: “Yeah.”
Truman: “This is us.” (Guides finger halfway around ball.) “And all the way around here is Fiji. You can’t get any further away before you start coming back.”
The web and us? We are all still a very long ways from Fiji.
Also at: Texas to the World
Study: iPhone, iPad continue to dominate online mobile shopping
Mobile devices are increasingly supplanting traditional desktop or notebook PCs as devices for online shopping, a new study finds, and iOS devices continue to be dominant in yet another real-world usage study despite claims of higher Android-based marketshare, at least in the US. Mobile sales analysis firm Custora looked at $10 billion in mobile transaction revenue covering 100 retailers and 70 million consumers in its latest study, and found that 54 percent of mobile phone sales and 80 percent of tablet sales came from iOS devices.
Russian hacker group attacks CNET
A Russian hacker group attacks technology news website CNET and steals usernames, encrypted passwords and emails for more than one million users.
All aboard: China's railway dream
Is China’s revolutionising high-speed rail travel?
Dot Scot: New web domain name starts
A new internet domain for Scotland is being launched, allowing people to choose a .scot web or email address for the first time.
The $20m budget fighter jet
The budget fighter jet in search of a customer
Record number of data complaints
The UK’s information commissioner has called for better funding for the country’s data regulator amid a record number of cases.
Joining up Ghana's healthcare to save lives
Using tech to save mothers and babies in Ghana
VIDEO: Riding Copenhagen's 'smart' bikes
Copenhagen unleashes tablet-equipped bicycles
Soccer Commentator Turned Government Critic Silenced In China
User Generated, Censor Chosen Keywords on Weibo is a monthly feature produced by China Digital Times for The WorldPost.
Li Chengpeng is a political and social commentator whose Sina Weibo account had over 7.4 million followers, and his Sina blog over 342 million visits, as of this March. On July 8, both accounts were suspended.
The scrubbing of his digital presence is yet another blow to “Big Vs,” popular public intellectuals who have used their Weibo clout to discuss China’s problems and prospects for political reform. A crackdown on Big Vs last fall has had a chilling effect on Weibo, and may have contributed to the social media service’s declining userbase.
“Big Eyes” Li was a well-known soccer commentator who was so moved by the 2008 Sichuan earthquake that he gave up his career to focus on politics. After volunteering in earthquake relief efforts, he wrote passionately about how mismanagement and corruption were to blame for the deaths of thousands of schoolchildren. Since then he has written a series of probing essays on a range of topics including the brutal tactics of city parapolice (chengguan), official corruption, and the death penalty. In 2011, he ran for local office as part of a grassroots movement by independent candidates, an effort that was quickly banned from public discussion by China’s censors.
It isn’t clear what exactly cost Li his online accounts, but he has long tread a fine line between official censorship and tolerance. Netizens speculated that it could be belated retribution for Li’s 2012 speech at Peking University, in which he said China has become “the Kingdom of Lies.” The text of that speech has recently been banned online by China’s censors. Following the release of his book in 2013, Li was banned from speaking at book signing events. Also counting against Li: a visit to Taiwan’s parliament in February.
An editorial in the official Global Times headlined “@LiChengpeng’s Deletion Was Bound to Happen” [Chinese] says that Li’s writing is “caustic” and “curses the government.” It goes on, “But the ‘Li Chengpeng style’ cannot continue unbounded in China. When it crosses the bottom line, it will be restricted.” It seems the censors want to stave off the cumulative effect of the “Li Chengpeng style.” It is nothing Li has done, and everything, for which he is now being punished.
Comments in support of Li Chengpeng still linger on Weibo, including snarky ripostes to official media linking to the Global Times article. Sociologist and activist Yu Jianrong wrote: “When reporting incidents like a writer’s personal media accounts being blocked, the national-level media doesn’t question whether a citizen’s basic rights are being infringed on. Rather, it evaluates the ‘pros and cons of Weibo.’ What kind of a mentality is that?!”
But more cutting commentary that puts Li’s online ouster into broader perspective has been blocked or deleted. FreeWeibo has archived many of these Weibo posts:
张雪忠：The containment of expression and the censorship of ideas are the most ridiculous things in the world: a small group of people has absolutely and infinitely no confidence in society, yet they require society to devote absolute and infinite trust in their judgement and impartiality! Those who express their thoughts openly and publicly have to be monitored with secret standards by those who hide in the dark. This is the major reason that a society is intellectually dim and morally low.
莫鸣 : In the literary circle, Li Chengpeng is known for his outspokenness, which has set him against many hypocritical “moralists.” This is a country where, though freedom of speech is guaranteed by the constitution, various means are regularly used to deprive people of those rights. People are even sentenced and locked up for speaking out. Telling the truth is risky, only lies may survive.
Presaging his own ouster, this April Li blogged a retort to the “Fifty Cent Party” of paid online commentators, who would sycophantically defend China whenever Li criticized domestic issues:
…Our conversation goes like this: I say gas is too expensive, you say it’s it’s worse in Sweden. I say they don’t collect highway tolls in Sweden, you say they do in Japan. I say wages are high in Japan, you say they aren’t in Russia. I say Russia has universal health care, you say India doesn’t. I say India doesn’t have forced demolitions, you say bombs go off in Iraq. I say Iraq has freedom, you say North Korea is far more miserable. I say North Korea has cheap rental housing, you say they still live in caves in Afghanistan. I say Afghans have the vote. You say, “Open your trap again, and I’ll crush you to death!”
The title of this blog post, ”Saintly Slaves“ (圣奴隶), was blocked from Weibo search in April.
The Myo Armband Wants To Kill Your Computer Mouse
The Internet is falling hard for a new hands-free gadget that lets you control your computer without having to use a mouse.
Tech development startup Thalmic Labs is on the verge of releasing the Myo, a wearable armband that allows users to interact with technology through motion commands. Sensors in the device measure the electrical activity in and motion of the user’s muscles, allowing the device to tell when the wearer makes a specific control gesture.
(Story continues below.)
The device will come with a few handy preprogrammed commands, such as a mouse click, a double click and scroll, according to MIT Technology Review.
The one-size-fits-all armband connects to Windows, Mac, iOS or Android devices via Bluetooth 4.0. It is currently available for pre-order ($149) and will ship to consumers in September.
While motion-tracking technology isn’t anything new, it’s worth noting that the Myo armband differs from, say, the Microsoft Kinect, because it does not require a camera to constantly monitor movement in the room.
The Myo arm band comes in both black and white.
In a review of the technology, Digital Trends said that the Myo “makes using Kinect look like drunk charades.” The outlet later noted, “Myo is hands down the most sophisticated gesture control device in the biz, and is far superior to any camera-based system we’ve ever encountered.”
Excited? You’re not the only one.
Post by George Takei.
Thalmic Labs’ website says a comprehensive list of compatible apps and programs will be released to the public soon.
“We’re building the future of human-computer interaction and we’re excited about how new computer interfaces will shape our lives,” a Thalmic spokesperson told The Huffington Post in an email. “For us, the Myo armband is a first step down a long path in that direction.”
Check out the Myo in action in this concept video from Thalmic:
h/t Unilad
'Sex Tape' Director Jake Kasdan Explains How YouPorn Helped His Film
When “Sex Tape” director Jake Kasdan needed a little help understanding the ins and outs of amateur pornography, he called in the big guns — the staff of YouPorn.
The film, which hits theaters July 18, stars Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel as a couple whose private sex tape accidentally makes it into the hands of all their friends. When Kasdan dropped by HuffPost Live to discuss the film, he talked with host Ricky Camilleri about the sex tape research he had to do. Part of that research came with the help of one of the Internet’s most popular porn sites.
“There’s a sequence in the movie having to do with YouPorn and the threat of YouPorn, which is a huge, huge porn company website,” Kasdan said. “They play prominently in the movie, and we were actually working with YouPorn on one sequence — we needed their cooperation — working with them to the extent that we were hoping they would help us out a little bit, and they did.”
As it turns out, the machinery behind the world of user-submitted porn is much more sophisticated than Kasdan expected.
“[YouPorn] had a lot to tell us about how technically it all works, in terms of how this all works on the Internet, and that was really interesting actually,” he said. “It turns out [people upload videos] so frequently and in such volume that those websites are just some of the biggest on Earth, and the technology to keep them running is worldwide. It was much more like a tech company than like a porn company.”
Catch the full HuffPost Live conversation with “Sex Tape” director Jake Kasdan below.
Bill Gates' Guru: 'I'm Not Impressed With Silicon Valley.' 'I Don't Have a Cell Phone.' 'I Never Blog.'
Bill Gates often invokes Vaclav Smil as his “favorite thinker.” Indeed, Smil is one of the deeper, more original and independent big minds out there today. His book titles range from “The Bad Earth” and “The Cycles of Life” to “Harvesting the Biosphere.”
Recently, I talked with Smil, professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba, about his newest book: “Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization.”
You have to listen closely to grasp the wisdom of his views. His rapid-fire mind spews out a deluge of statistics in a heavy Slavic accent — with a crusty disregard for political correctness and conventional wisdom. And his key concept is counterintuitive: less enables more.
I start the conversation by noting that many of the more enlightened technologists in Silicon Valley and elsewhere here in California also consider themselves environmentalists. They understand that extending globalization from the perspective of America’s standard of living to emerging economies like China or India means the earth will run out of resources. But they place their faith in new resource-efficient inventions that will inevitably enable us to extend material globalization to everyone and not wreck the planet — to have our cake and eat it, too.
I ask Smil whether he shares this faith that technology is our salvation.
He digs right in.
“I wouldn’t put a big trust in what people in Silicon Valley say,” he says. “They may be good at manipulating ones and zeroes and writing software, but beyond that their contribution to human progress has been pretty dismal. I’m not impressed. Their understanding of the net use of resources has been very poor.
Lets put first things first. You can’t just yank out the jewels which power it all, that is, Edisonian electricity, something basically 130 years old.
I keep reminding people that all this electronic stuff in Silicon Valley is just a derivative of this fundamental electricity system, which runs mainly on fuels such as coal and natural gas. Microprocessors may have vastly improved the computing power of devices — going from giant mainframes to mobile devices with the same capacity. But that has also enabled their proliferation globally and vastly increased the energy intensity that goes into producing all these devices and powering them.”
Smil readily agrees the technologists are right that duplicating American levels of consumption in China or India is not sustainable. Yet things are moving in that direction, with the two countries even superseding America in the use of some materials. China, he notes, has used more cement in the building binge of the past three years than the U.S. has in the last one hundred.
He calculates that the gap between the 1.5 billion “haves” and the 5.5 billion “have-nots” is so large that if only one-third of the “deprived” achieved the average standard of living that now prevails in the affluent countries, we would continue to see the aggregate growth of material consumption for generations to come. And that aggregate growth will come not despite new technologies, but because of them.
As Smil sees it, technology has certainly enabled a “relative dematerialization” — meaning lighter, less expensive materials and more efficient use of resources in particular circumstances. But these impressive achievements have not translated into any absolute declines in materialization on the global scale.
In fact, just the opposite: because technological advances have made materials cheaper, mass produceable and more available for widespread use, and because people always want “bigger and better,” material consumption has vastly increased. Though they may be efficient in and of themselves, new technologies end up generating more demand overall, not less.
CELL PHONES, CARS, PLANES AND HOUSES
In his book, Smil puts it this way:
Progressively lower mass (and hence decreased cost) of individual products, be they common consumer items or powerful prime movers like cars or planes, has contributed to their increased use as well as to their deployment in heavier (more powerful, larger, more comfortable) machines. Inevitably, this has resulted in a very steep rise in demand for the constituent materials — even after making an adjustment for increased populations or for the greater number of businesses.
Though everyone recognizes that mobility is a leap in convenience, cell phones are the worst case in point, he notes:
Mobile phones offer the most obvious recent example of this increase. Their truly explosive diffusion has more than made up for their impressive evolution from brick-like units to slim designs and the net outcome has been a much expanded demand for energy-intensive materials. With an average mass of 600g in 1990 (when about 11 million units were in use) and 118g in 2011 (when there were nearly six million subscribers), the aggregate mass of cellphones rose from less than 7000tons in 1990 to more than 700,000 tons today.
The same, he says, goes for cars, planes and houses.
“All the materials that go into cars — bauxite, glass, aluminum — are cheaper today to extract and produce than in 1970. The result: we have made cars bigger, doubling their mass.
We made a great advance by shifting from steel to aluminum, only to wipe out the reduction in weight by using more and more of it. Since 1920, the average weight of American cars has soared 3.4 fold. The efficiency improvements of the mass/thrust ratio of turbofan engines and composite materials for jet aircraft have all but been wiped out for the commercial fleet overall by the shift to ever larger planes and the consequent explosion in travel.
We achieved a great advance with cheaper and lighter building materials and material components for everything in a house, only to wipe out those gains by doubling the size of the house. The average size of an American house in 1950 was 1000 square feet; now it is 2500 square feet.
There is no end to this. We are very inventive, very smart. But then we go forward and waste our gains all over again.”
He returns to the cell phone phenomenon, which clearly roils his personal frugal temperament as well as thoroughly illustrates his case.
“I am probably one of the last people on the planet without a cell phone. I have the same old, black, basic phone hanging on my kitchen wall that I’ve had for 25 years. The mass is far larger than today’s cell phones, but in the end I’ve used far less material by keeping it.
Now people buy cell phones which are an accumulation of silver, copper and other metals that it takes a lot of energy to extract and mold — every six months! And most of these cell phones are not recycled. They are just thrown away. That is absolute waste.
People say, ‘oh, this cell phone is so much lighter and better for the environment and blah, blah, blah.’ But no, there has been no absolute dematerialization. We are just using more of everything. The same is true, obviously, of iPads and tablets.”
HUMANITY NEVER LEARNS
What, one wonders, then, is the remedy? What can we do to change things? What does he propose?
Smil’s let’s-face-the-facts-lack-of-illusion crust comes out loud and clear.
“I don’t propose,” he says. “I’m old fashioned. I’m not one of these young guys who think they are so smart that they can prescribe what humanity ought to do. Humanity never learns any lessons. Prescriptions don’t matter. We already know exactly what to do. We just don’t do it.”
Ok, then, what is it that we know to do that we aren’t doing?
“There is, for example, pricing,” he responds. “People pay $30 a month for a cell phone. No one is paying the actual costs — the costs of the energy that goes into forging it or the costs of pollution created in China when they are manufactured and so on.
So, if we increase the price of all these devices from cell phones to cars to iPads to houses to reflect their actual costs, then we’ll start saving like crazy. Since the cost appears so little for so many things, we just throw them all away as junk after a short while when they are out of fashion.”
The other obvious solution, Smil points out, “is to build the quality of longevity into products. There is no reason we can’t design a car to last for 35 years instead of six or seven. This is the core of the matter.
It is not an issue of quality per se — a cell phone or a particular car might get the best mileage, include the latest technology and drive most comfortably. But the issue is the quality as a whole, which includes the resources that go into making it and the life cycle of usage.”
THE COST OF SHOWING OFF
We haven’t done these things, he suggests, because human nature gets in the way.
“How much, really, has a car changed in 30 years?” he asks rhetorically. “It is aluminum and steel some glass and plastic, four wheels and an engine that drives the wheels. But the same old, apparently, is what we don’t want. We need to change the fashion and the style all the time because that is how we measure our identity. Here we run up against human nature, which is acquisitive and status conscious.”
This brings us back to the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs:
“And here is where the Silicon Valley people are brilliant,” Smil says. “They know we are social animals that want to show off with the newest shiny object. ‘You must buy this, it is better than the one you had six months ago, and your friends all have it.’ That leads directly to waste. Any emphasis on long-lasting quality or minimization of quantity or size goes directly against our social primacy of showing off to position ourselves in the cultural hierarchy.”
MORE PAPER, LESS FORESTS
One more time, I ask if he envisions any change of mentality coming soon.
He responds bluntly.
“No, I don’t. Change is always incremental and takes time. Some years ago, everyone was enthusiastic about the paperless office that would be made possible by the advent of word processing and computers. Well, it didn’t happen. The consumption of paper has tripled in the last 20 years. For all the talk of saving the forests, we haven’t saved anything.”
“All we can say,” he continues, “is that it is complex, it is difficult, we don’t know the impact of technology. No matter how brilliant a person is, we should be wary of any Elon Musk or others who say ‘I know where we should go, what we should do and what will be the result.’ Again, look at the cell phone. It can help an isolated old lady call an ambulance in an emergency, but it is also the device that has made texting a greater cause of traffic deaths among teenagers than alcohol.”
Impressed with his contrarian verve and sharp insights, I ask if he would be willing to blog for The WorldPost.
I NEVER BLOG
Without missing a beat, he unleashed his onslaught of a reply:
“I never blog. I just write my books. The world these days seems afflicted with graphomania — the obsession for self-expression through writing — telling everyone what you know or pretend to know. There are half a billion people today blogging regularly! I am happy to take 12-15 months to write my books. I just don’t have something new to say every afternoon.”
For more Vaclav Smil, watch this short video.
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