Apple faces antitrust investigation by Canada

Posted on December 12, 2014 by - News

watchdogCanadian antitrust watchdogs are about to sink their teeth into the ample rump of the fruity cargo cult Apple.

Canada’s Competition Bureau is investigating allegations that Apple Canadian unit used anti-competitive clauses in contracts with domestic wireless carriers.

The CCB has insisted that it has found no wrongdoing by Apple’s Canadian arm so far, and is not naming the person who laid a complaint. The Tame Apple Press is claiming that the watchdog has no evidence that Apple has contravened any rules and that it has not filed any application with the Competition Tribunal or any other court to seek remedies for any alleged anti-competitive conduct.

However, it is early days yet. The bureau sought a court order to compel Apple to turn over records relating to the ongoing investigation.

Canada’s antitrust watchdog has also been carrying out a similar probe into the country’s top grocer, Loblaw, ordering some of the chain’s major suppliers to hand over records relating to their dealings with the company.

“Should evidence indicate that the Competition Act has been contravened, the Commissioner will take appropriate action,” said Greg Scott, a spokesman for the bureau, in an email.

The bureau did not state whether it has also approached Canada’s largest telecom players for records related to its probe.

Apple has been doing badly out of anti-trust investigations. This year it lost a case where it ran a cartel with several book publishers with the aim of killing off Amazon.

 

Assange lobbies for a giant statue of himself

Posted on December 12, 2014 by - News

Julian AssangeNo-one can say that being locked up in the Ecuadorean embassy on the run from sex charges has damaged Julian Assange’s ego much.

The founder of Wikileaks wants people to invest their hard-earned dollars into the creation of a life-size bronze public artwork featuring himself, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.

“A monument to courage” is a proposed statue by Italian sculptor Davide Dormino, entitled Anything to Say?, will depict the trio standing on chairs, with another empty seat beside them onto which members of the public will be encouraged to climb – allowing them to stand shoulder to shoulder with the whistleblowers.

We would have thought “oh for goodness sake” would have been a better title. Putting Assange in the same league as Manning and Snowden who actually paid the price for actually leaking documents is a bit unfair.  They are either in jail or in exile, for leaking documents. He is banged up in the embassy because he does not want to face questions about two women who laid complaints about sexual assault about  him.  He denies the charges but refuses to go court to face his accusers.

Organisers need £100,000 to complete the project, a sum they hope to raise by 1 January through the crowd-funding website Kickstarter. With just 21 days to go, only £19,360 has been pledged – perhaps explaining why Assange chose to alert WikiLeaks’ 2.4 million Twitter followers to the campaign.

According to the Kickstarter page, the statue “is not a simple homage to individuals, but to courage and to the importance of freedom of speech and information”. The reason for the empty chair is that each of us can climb onto it to change our point of view.

“The work of art will travel from country to country and offer the opportunity for us to hear each other out and think.”

The idea for the statue came from Dormino and Charles Glass, an American author, journalist and broadcaster. British journalist Vaughan Smith, with whom Assange stayed while he was on bail in 2010, is organising the Kickstarter campaign. This is surprisingly forgiving of Smith, because when Assange skipped bail he left those who posted bail for him in the embarrassing position where they had to pay up.

“I got excited by it because I thought it was some art that suggested, rather appropriately, that these whistleblowers were our true friends rather than the politicians who pretend to be,” Smith told The Independent.

He added that most of the £100,000 for the project would go towards transporting the artwork around the world and that nobody was being paid for taking part. The rest of the money will go towards the statue’s creation at a foundry in Pietrasanta, Tuscany.

Oddly,Wikileaks will not get any cash out of the project and the sculpture has not worked out a way of getting a good image of Chelsea Manning, whose appearance has changed and there are not enough pictures of her.  There are shedloads of snaps of Assange.

Facebook stops you posting pics drunk

Posted on December 12, 2014 by - News

zuckerberg-drinkSocial notworking site Facebook is creating an artificial intelligence tool that will warn people when they are about to do something they might regret.

Apparently the tool can detect if you are about to upload an embarrassing photo of yourself or other people.

Yann LeCun, who heads the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab, and his team are laying the basic groundwork for the tool.

He sees the AI tool as a Facebook digital assistant that recognises when you are uploading an embarrassing photo from a late-night party and tells you that this is probably not a good idea.

LeCun said this assistant would tap you on the shoulder and say: “Uh, this is being posted publicly. Are you sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?”

The tool would rely on image recognition technology that can distinguish between your drunken self and sober self. Which is interesting, because a few can’t remember their sober selves and have never met them for a long time.

The larger aim, LeCun said, is to create a tool that can self-censor stuff posted to Facebook. They are also looking at AI systems that can understand FB data in ways that are more complex.

LeCun also envisions a Facebook that instantly notifies you when someone you do not know posts your photo to the social network without your approval. Or posts adverts for Sunglasses.

The only problem with this tool is if you are off your face you think it is a good idea to  post a picture even if your AI assistant tells you it is a bad one.

 

 

 

 

Windows 10 is delayed again

Posted on December 11, 2014 by - News

Microsoft campusPeople eager to throw off the shackles of Windows 8.x look like they’ll have some time to wait before they’re free at last.

According to PC Advisor, a “consumer preview2 will be released in January so you’ll be able to see what you’re missing for quite a long time.  Windows 10 isn’t now expected until the second half of next year.

Reuters, quoting Microsoft’s chief operating officer, Kevin Turner, said the launch was likely to be the early Autumn.

Reports suggest that Windows 10 may well be free of charge to existing Windows 8.x users.  Microsoft isn’t giving any details of prices yet and so no one is clear what the upgrade paths are likely to be.

The operating system is likely to look more like Windows 7 than Windows 8.x – the latter was Microsoft’s ill fated attempt to resemble other tablet operating systems like iOS and Android.

Even Microsoft insiders wondered what the company was doing with such a hybrid.

Microsoft’s decision to skip the number nine and jump straight to Windows 10 seems to be some kind of weird marketing move – as usual, it is describing the future OS as the “best OS yet”.

AMD, Intel in tablet spat

Posted on December 11, 2014 by - News

tweedledummBitter semiconductor rivals Intel and AMD are set to up the stakes in 2015 with a fresh assault on the tablet market.

Both companies are often seen as the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of the chip market, continually foraying into battles where no one actually gets hurt.

But Digitimes, which is privy to both companies’ future roadmaps, said that they’ll foray out once more in an attempt to capture some slice of the tablet pie – estimated to represent 200 million units in 2015.

Intel has been forced to provide subsidies to companies in an attempt to bolster its rather feeble market share in the tablet and mobile markets.

It will kick off the show by releasing a system-on-a-chip (SoC) device codenamed Cherry Trail, which will be built using a 14 nanometre process and may be with the world as early as March next year.  The chip will have lower power consumption and support Windows and Android operating systems, said the wire.

But AMD is not going to stand still after receiving that SoC on the jaw.  It will introduce an X86 device dubbed Nolan, and an ARM device called Amur in the second half of next year.

Pirate Bay should stay dead claims founder

Posted on December 11, 2014 by - News

Peter-sunde-portraitPeter Sunde, who is just out of prison for setting up Pirate Bay has said that it is time that the P2P site died a death.

Earlier this week Swedish police shut down the Pirate Bay and raided a datacentre which appeared to be operating it.

Writing in his blog, Sunde eight years ago when Pirate Bay was raided people took to the streets to protest. Today few seem to care. And he is one of them. Sunde said that he was not a fan of what Pirate Bay had become.

“TPB has become an institution that people just expected to be there. No one  was willing to take the technology further. The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design. It never changed except for one thing – the ads. More and more ads was filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful they somehow ended up even worse,” Sunde said.

The original plan was to close it down on its tenth birthday. Instead, on that birthday, there was a party in it’s “honour” in Stockholm. It was sponsored by some sexist company that sent young girls, dressed in almost no clothes, to hand out freebies to potential customers. There was a ticket price to get in, automatically excluding people with no money, he moaned.

The party had a set line-up with artists, scenes and so on, instead of just asking the people coming to bring the content. Everything went against the ideals that Pirate Bay worked for at the beginning.
“The past years there was no soul left in TPB. The original team handed it over to, well, less soul-ish people to say the least,” Sunde said.

US lays down the LAWs over lasers

Posted on December 11, 2014 by - News

LaWS-OverheadThe US Navy has decided that an experimental laser weapon on its Afloat Forward Staging Base (AFSB) in the Persian Gulf is allowed to destroy things for real.

US Central Command has given permission for the commander of the USS Ponce ship to defend itself with the weapon, if anyone attacks.

The 30 kilowatt Laser Weapon System (LaWS) was installed aboard USS Ponce this summer as part of a $40 million research and development effort from ONR and Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) to test the viability of directed energy weapons in an operational environment.

ONR Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder (no really) said that the captain of that ship has all of the permission necessary if there was a threat inbound to that ship to protect its sailors and Marines with the laser.

The laser will be used against drones, slow moving helicopters and fast patrol craft.

So far, the laser has been seen disabling a small Scan Eagle-sized UAV, detonated a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) and burned out the engine of a rigid hull inflatable boat (RHIB).

Humans were not a target of the weapon, under the Geneva Convention.

He did say that the Navy has tested LaWS against a simulated small boat so-called swarm attack and that the system was effective.

LaWS is tied to the ship’s navigation radar and the close-in weapon system (CIWS) and  can be targeted independently by sailors on the ship through a station in Ponce’s combat information centre (CIC).

LaWS has proved useful as a surveillance tool due to its powerful optics that can detect objects at “tactically significant ranges” like a shipboard “Hubble Telescope,” Klunder said.

US manufacturers don’t want enforced net neutrality

Posted on December 11, 2014 by - News

U.S.-ManufacturingThe US National Association of Manufacturers  (NAM) has written to congressional and Federal Communications Commission leaders to oppose stricter regulations for Internet service providers.

The FCC is hatching out new plans that would dictate internet service providers’ freedom to manage web traffic on their networks, aiming to ensure that ISPs do not discriminate against any content in ways that could harm competition or consumers.

President Barack Obama wants the FCC to have the strictest rules possible to protect net neutrality. He suggested a legal pathway that would reclassify internet service so it is regulated like a utility.

Needless to say the telecom and cable companies think this will stop them from charging their consumers twice for the same service and they say this will be a bad idea.

NAM wrote that current proposals to regulate the Internet with early 20th Century–era laws severely threaten continued growth.  It urged everyone to oppose any efforts to regulate the open Internet.

Though business groups NAM and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have both previously submitted comments to the FCC opposing utility-style Internet regulations.

Verizon and AT&T are among 14,000 members of the manufacturers’ association, so we guess we can see where the outfit is coming from.

“The internet and technology is a critical tool for manufacturers to grow their business,” NAM Technology Policy President Brian Raymond said in an interview. “(Our members) get concerned if the government is going to slow down their business in any way and they see this as one of those ways.”

Raymond pointed out that AT&T’s recent tactic of threatening to  pause investments in new high-speed internet connections unless it gets is way is proof that an enforced open internet was a bad idea. Of course you could also argue that AT&T is just trying to scare the FCC into doing what it is told and it will lose a lose a lot of money in the long term if it does not move to high-speed internet connections.

“Whenever there’s a pause in investment by any kind of company due to regulatory uncertainty, it’s going to have a trickle-down effect on the whole manufacturing community,” Raymond said.

Apple antitrust case continues

Posted on December 11, 2014 by - News

courtroom_1_lgThe Tame Apple Press is aghast after a court decided that Apple’s antitrust antics were so important that a class action against the company could continue even if all the official plaintiffs had been ruled as inadmissible.

Apple lawyers managed to prove to the court that none of the official plaintiffs had owned an iPod 10 years ago and therefore could not have suffered from its competition snuffing DRM. So far it has not had to prove that it did anything anti-competitive, and was hoping to win on a legal technicality.

But the billion-dollar class-action lawsuit against Apple is expected to continue after a 65-year-old Massachusetts business consultant read about the plaintiffs’ floundering case online and volunteered to represent consumers in the suit.

A federal judge said she was tentatively satisfied with a proposal to add Barbara Bennett, the new named plaintiff, in the lawsuit over Apple’s iTunes software and the price of its iPods.

Plaintiffs are claiming that Apple’s restrictive software froze out competitors and allowed Apple to sell iPods at inflated prices. They are seeking $350 million (£224m) in damages, which could be tripled if the jury finds Apple broke federal antitrust law.

Apple stopped using the particular software in question in 2009, which means the lawsuit only covers iPod models bought between September 2006 and March 2009.

Each time an Apple user with non-iTunes music tried to sync their devices, between 2007 and 2009, the tech firm urged them to restore the players to factory settings which the plaintiffs claimed was a deliberate move to wipe the rival files, and cause the users’ music libraries to ‘blow up.’

Bennett, who sometimes used her iPod to listen to music while ice skating, boarded a plane early flew to California at the request of lawyers who are suing Apple. She told the court she bought a special-edition iPod Nano in 2006 because she liked its striking red case.

The Tame Apple press has been doing its best to cover up this set-back for Apple’s defence team.  The Daily Mail has been waxing lyrical about how the defence dug up Steve Jobs to testify by video.

“Legendary Apple CEO Steve Jobs held an Oakland courtroom transfixed as attorneys played a video of his testimony in a class-action lawsuit that accuses Apple of inflating prices by locking music lovers into using Apple’s iPod players,” mused the Mail.

“Looking gaunt and pale, Jobs spoke softly during the deposition he gave six months before his death in October 2011. Despite this, he gave a firm defense of Apple’s software, which blocked music from services that competed with Apple’s iTunes store,” it added.

What the Daily Mail did not say was that Jobs had form for anti-trust behaviour and was not the best witness.

Fortune magazine was even more overt in its defence of Apple  under a headline “How dumb is this Apple lawsuit?” Fortune claimed that the case was proceeding for the benefit of lawyers and not consumers. Although Fortune did not say how supporting the actions of a convicted monopoly like Apple over a consumer law-suit benefits the consumer either.  It seems that Fortune no longer favours the brave.

Xiaomi banned in India

Posted on December 11, 2014 by - News

India_flagXiaomi has said it is ready to open talks with Ericsson after a patent row resulted in a temporary ban on its Indian business.

In New Delhi, the city’s high court issued an ‘ex parte’ injunction that prevents Xiaomi from importing and selling some of its smartphones in the country.

Officials have been ordered to visit Xiaomi India’s office to ensure it does not sell, advertise, manufacture or import devices that infringe the patents in question.

Xiaomi sells its Mi3, Redmi and Redmi Note phablet in India, but it is not clear which models are affected by this ruling.

Ericsson described Xiaomi’s use of its Standard, Essential Patents (SEPs) as “unfair.” It said its action is “a last resort” after Xiaomi ignored its letters for more than three years.

“Ericsson’s commitment to the global support of technology and innovation is undisputed. It is unfair for Xiaomi to benefit from our substantial R&D investment without paying a reasonable licensee fee for our technology,” a spokesEricsson said.

He said  Ericsson was looking forward to working with Xiaomi to reach a mutually fair and reasonable conclusion, just as we do with all of our licensees.

Xiaomi said that it had not received any note from the high court yet but claimed that it was willing to discuss the issue with Ericsson:

“India is a very important market for Xiaomi and we will respond promptly as needed and in full compliance with India laws. Moreover, we are open to working with Ericsson to resolve this matter amicably,” Xiaomi said.

Ericsson is said to be negotiating compensation for patents with a number of Indian smartphone makers, and it could be that its dispute with Xiaomi goes the same way.

Expect cheaper LCD monitors next year

Posted on December 11, 2014 by - News

LCDscreenWhile supplies of panels for LCD monitors failed to meet demand during this year, there will be a glut next year.

That’s because of the entry of Chinese manufacturers into the market, according to analysts at market intelligence company Trendforce.

In 2015, two Chinese companies, BOE and CEC-Panda will ramp up their generation 8.5 production lines, and in turn that will allow branded vendors to drop costs, resulting in cheaper monitors for us all.

According to analyst Anita Wang, there’s also greater demand for wide viewing angle monitors and they might represent as slightly less than a third in 2014.  Penetration in 2015 could be as much as 40 to 45 percent next year, said Wang.

Vendors are also seeking to push monitor sales by introducing more curved angle monitors.  However, such monitors still cost an arm and a leg and their availability is limited.

Overall, shipments are expected to fall by 1.3 percent in 2015, amounting to 148 million units.

Smart wearables will be invisible

Posted on December 11, 2014 by - News

glassesThe Gartner Group has studied the tea leaves at the bottom of its tea cup and come up with some predictions on the future of wearable devices.

The market research company predicts that by 2017, a third of so-called “smart wearables” will be practically invisible.

Gartner said smart contact lenses are already being developed, and there’s some interesting projects creating smart jewellery.  Why would you need smart jewellery?  They could deliver comms alerts and emergency alarms, according to Annette Zimmermann, research director at Gartner.

These will be in contrast to smart glasses, which are pretty easy to spot.

And we’ll also see the proliferation of head mounted displays (HMDs) for virtual reality but they’ll have to be not only smart, but smart looking.

Gartner also predicts that by 2016, 40 percent of smartphones will include biometric sensors with such features as fingerprint, facial, iris, voice and palm vein authentication.

And Gartner sees the end of Windows.  It estimates that in 2017. a third of people in emerging markets will never have owned a Windows device.

Organic sensors displace silicon

Posted on December 11, 2014 by - News

fingersPeople who pay good money for electronic fitness sensors based on silicon technology could soon be faced with a far cheaper technology based on organic electronics.

Researchers at UC Berkeley said different pulse oximeters measure pulse rate and blood oxygen saturation levels but they’re based on LEDs that send light through fingertips or earlobes and sensors that measure light that comes through the other side.

The scientists have come up with a far cheaper organic design that deposits green and red organic OLEDs on a flexible piece of plastic and uses the detection of fresh arterial blood to calculate a pulse.

Ana Arias, a professor at the UC Berkeley team, said: “We showed that if you take measurements with different wavelengths ir works, and if you use unconventional semiconductors it works. Because organic electronics are flexible they can easily conform to the body.”

Components of conventional oximeters are relatively expensive, she said, and need disinfection.

But she added that organic electronics are so cheap that they can be thrown away like a sticky plaster once they’ve been used.

Apple gets into enterprise bed with IBM

Posted on December 10, 2014 by - News

ibm_appleApple and IBM have signed a deal over the Pad and the iPhone, reflecting greater use of the devices in the corporate marketplace.

Under the deal, IBM will release what it described as the first wave of IBM MobileFirst for the iOS operating system.

The applications also support web services and big data and analytic abilities to the iPad and iPhone.  IBM said  MobileFirst for iOS is aimed at enterprise sized companies in banking, retail, insurance, financial services, telecomms, governments and airlines.

Customers who have already signed up include Citi, Air Canada and Spring.

Philip Schiller, a senior VP of Apple marketing, said: “The business world has gone mobile and Apple and IBM are bringing together the.. technology with the smartest data and analytics to help businesses define how work gets done.”

The apps are intended for secure environments, linked to core enterprise processes and analytics.

Apps include Plan Flight and Passenger for airlines, Advise and Grow for the banking sector; Retention for insurance companies; Incident Aware for law enforcement; Sales Assist for Retail and Expert Tech for the telecomms market.

5G planning starts

Posted on December 10, 2014 by - News

oldfoneWhile most people haven’t even moved to 4G phone networks yet, manufacturers are already talking about standards for the next faster generation of 5G phones.

Major vendors are engaging with the formal standards process, according to ABI Research.  Those include Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, Qualcomm, Samsung, mobile operators and academic bodies.

Research director Philip Solis sad: “These companies are all waving their 5G flags, although 5G definitions and visions remain very vague.  But this is not merely marketing. These companies are most certainly putting a stake in the ground that will leverage their, work, competitive strengths, and, most crucially, patents.”

He said that Qualcomm in particular is keeping its head low, but other vendors such as Apple and Google are getting actively involved.

Solis said that efforts by vendors to use their patents will be fiercer than for 4G.

But despite the competitive edge, Solis said that companies are working together “so the standardisation process can hit the ground running”.