CyberNet News » General

Should We Be Worried about Apple’s Increasing Power?

Pieter — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 10:31:09 +0000

Apple is a fascinating company. Ever since Steve Jobs returned as the company’s leader, Apple has shown that like no other they can get millions excited about new technology. They successfully branched out from selling computers to selling music players and phones. In 2010, they came out with a tablet computer. After people forgot that the iPad reminded them of sanitary napkins, it turned out to be a successful product despite Microsoft’s numerous attempts to make tablet PCs a thing.

But all this success gave Apple increasing power over software developers, people’s privacy and even their competitors. Are there reasons to be concerned?

Apple has filed a patent to kill jailbroken iPhones

Last week a patent application was published where Apple details methods to detect when someone is hacking into your device by snapping pictures, making recordings, analyzing heartbeats and “noting particular activities that can indicate suspicious behavior”. When unauthorized use has been detected, several actions can be taken including going as far as to brick the device.

As long as it’s an opt-in feature, I don’t see any reason to be concerned. In fact, the enterprise world and government organizations would welcome such features.

But here’s the catch. The patent application doesn’t merely cover hacking. It also suggests using the aforementioned techniques to kill jailbroken devices. And yet, a month ago a ruling from the Copyright Office legalized jailbreaking although it will void your warranty.

The verdict: should the jailbreakers among us get be nervous? Yes, but we have to put this into perspective. The patent application was filed way back in February 2009, at a time when the Copyright Office hadn’t declared jailbreaking legal yet. It’s possible that Apple changed their mind because of the ruling. But if they start enforcing this, legal battles and protests will ensue… and Apple’s newly added layer of security will get hacked two days later.

Apple collects your current location and interests to serve you targeted ads

When Apple launched the iAd advertising network in July 2010, the company started using location data from their iOS and OS X users to enable location-based advertising. Responding to a query from two concerned Congressmen, Apple put things into perspective.

The iAd network will collect your ZIP code to serve up location-based ads. This is done when an ad is requested. In the case of the iPhone, this will be when you open an iAd-supported app. Latitude and longitude will not be saved or associated with you. The iAd server will associate the ZIP code with your device’s ID to serve you ads based on your location. Location data about individual users will not be shared with advertisers. You can opt out of location-based advertising only by disabling location services entirely in your system settings.

Secondly, iAd may serve ads based on your interests. You can opt out of this on a per-device basis. To do this, go to https://oo.apple.com/ on the device.

The verdict: while iAd’s practices are wide-spread across established ad networks (including limited location-based advertising based on your IP address), iAd could be considered sneaky since it is integrated into iOS, it doesn’t have to ask permission to use your location. Opting out of interest-based advertising is relatively easy, but to opt out of location-based advertising you have to give up location services altogether.

Apple keeps tight control over its App Store and engages in anti-competitive behavior

Developing for iOS can be stressful. Even if you manage to get the money together to start an app development business and manage to write an app that has huge potential, Apple has the final decision over your fate. The company can refuse your app or even remove it from the App Store whenever it wants. To be fair, Apple has tried to make the decision process more transparent. But they have at several occasions faced accusations of maintaining double standard when they rejected some apps, some of which were later approved. Still, whether their review process is fair or not, isn’t it a little ironic that the App Store’s director sells his own fart apps?

There is an argument to be made that justifies Apple’s right to do with the App Store whatever they want. But this has lead to monopolistic behavior at times. When Google tried to release Google Voice for the iPhone, the app was rejected. There’s no denying the conflict of interest: iPhone carrier AT&T is not keen on letting you send free texts and making cheap international calls through Google over AT&T’s data network. An FCC inquiry followed.

Here’s another example of anti-competitive behavior: when iOS 4 was announced, Apple changed their Terms of Service to ban rivaling ad networks from gathering crucial analytic data, such as the number of ad clicks. This could bar app developers from partnering with iAd competitors such as AdMob, a Google-owned company. According to AdMob CEO Omar Hamoui, “advertisers won’t buy ads when they can’t even tell how many people had clicked on that ad”, which seems fair. Apple hasn’t enforced this new rule, but if they will regulators are likely to respond.

The verdict: Apple’s apparent unwillingness to tolerate competition in their own App Store is worrisome. Apple’s inconsistency in their App Store approval process is bad for developers – especially the small independent ones – although they have taken steps to eliminate any double standards.

Photovisi: Standout Photo Collage Creating Service

Ashley — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 12:35:58 +0000

Sharing content, particularly photos, has exploded in popularity over the last decade. It’s easy, it’s fun, and as a result, many websites offer services that help you create photo collages. One standout in this area is called Photovisi.

We like Photovisi for several reasons; ease of use, it looks good (nice templates), it’s free, and it’s available as a Facebook app in addition to the Photovisi website. We’ve tested out both methods (Facebook, and their website) for creating collages, and both prove to be outstanding.

There are basically three steps involved in the creation process – first you choose a template (shown below are some examples), add your photos (you browse for photos already saved on your computer), crop photos if you’d like, and then you can save, download, and or print your collage. As you are creating your collage, you can select a background color or choose an image to be displayed as your background.

When you’re ready to save your collage, choose the resolution you’d like for your download – 800×600, 1024×768, or 1600×1200. Additionally, Photovisi has partnered with Zazzle so that you can print your collage as magnets, postcards, mugs and more.

If you’re using the Facebook app, you choose an album of photos you’ve already uploaded to Facebook to work with. When you save your collage to Facebook, you can post it to your profile and save it to an album. Below is an actual collage that I created using photos from an album I had already uploaded to Facebook.

You’ll see one ad at the top of the page (I saw ads for Google’s Picasa and Intuit), but good services have to make money somehow, and it’s really the only ad you’ll come across, so it’s not bad.

One feature we would like to see would be integration with online photo services. Instead of browsing for photos on the computer, it would be great to be able to access collections from sites like Flickr, Smug Mug, etc. Other than that, we’re impressed with Photovisi. It produces great results for the amount of effort required to create a collage and will be fun to share with family and friends.

Relisir Helps You Keep Up with your Favorite Music

Ashley — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 12:35:30 +0000

Die-hard music fans are going to love what Relisir has to offer. Relisir is a fairly new start-up that offers users the chance to keep up with their favorite bands whether it’s when they announce a new album is on the way, or if a new album has been released.

What we like about Relisir:

It could initially take some time to manually enter all of your favorite artists which would make using this service a bit of a chore. However, if you use Last.fm, you can import your favorite artists which will simplify the whole process. Nice touch.
As you type in your favorite artists, a drop down list appears which again, helps speed up the process of getting started with Relisir.
Once you add your favorite artists, it’s like you’re on auto-pilate and Relisir goes to work for you, keeping you informed with no additional effort on your end. You don’t even need to return to the website (unless you want to), because all of the important info will be sent to your email inbox.

What we don’t like about Relisir:

Email is the main method of communication – Relisir relies heavily on email to let you know when your favorite artists have released anything new. Other communication options would be nice – perhaps an iPhone or Facebook app?
One one hand, it’s nice that Relisir focuses simply on helping you keep up with your favorite artists. However, it might be nice to see a “music discovery” feature as well. If it knows you like OneRepublic, for example, it could suggest other artists similar to it with new releases and give you the opportunity to listen to it
Someone who loves their music probably likes to see these artists live and in concert. It would great if they incorporated a tool to help you track when one of your favorite artists will be performing in your area and provide a link to purchase tickets.

MySpace used to be one of the key ways that music fans kept up with their favorite artists. These artists may still have pages, however, many people have moved away from MySpace and no longer use the service. If you’ve been hanging on to MySpace, simply for the purpose of keeping up with your favorite artists, Relisir might just be what you’re looking for.

Apple in Talks to Acquire Intel

Ryan — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 09:01:54 +0000

Several sources are reporting this morning that Apple is in discussions with Intel to acquire the chip manufacturer for upwards of $12 billion. Over the last 22 years Apple has acquired 25 different companies, but this single transaction will likely beat the sum of all the others combined.

This is a rather interesting move after Apple purchased microprocessor design company PA Semi just a few years ago for $278 million, and then went on to design a custom processor for the iPad. With Intel onboard we could begin seeing some serious computing power in the next generation iPhone that is expected to come out this summer… after all Intel did make a custom low-power processor for Apple that was then used in the MacBook Air.

The sources are also saying that Apple has been in talks with Intel since the middle of last year, and coincidentally place the talks around the time the Nehalem architecture processors were announced. There is some thought that Intel named those processors – Core i3, i5, and i7 – inline with Apple’s “i” naming convention as a precursor to the acquisition.

Intel has really been honing in on the mobile market with their Atom processor, which has found its way onto netbooks across the globe. One thing is for sure… ARM could be seeing some stiff competition if Intel processors are used in the iPad, iPhone, and iPods. If you look hard enough you’ll see that almost any mobile phone made in the last 5 years has some form of an ARM processor in it, but with Apple’s mobile-driven ambitions we could see Intel pushing for that praise-worthy crown.

We will be keeping an eye on the news outlets and letting you know as updates become available. Most sources say an official announcement will likely be made by the end of today, April 1st.

How to Adjust Your Computer Environment to Prevent Eye Strain and RSI

Pieter — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:55:16 +0000

Windows Linux Mac
Let’s face it: being a computer geek isn’t the healthiest hobby in the world. Staring at that bright screen for hours at a time will affect our health in many ways. But there are many things you can do to improve your health without having to stop using your computer altogether.

Time your breaks with Workrave (Windows/Linux) or AntiRSI (Mac)
Workrave is a useful tool to keep track of how much time you spend on your computer. It nests itself in the taskbar and displays a countdown clock for your micro break, another one for your rest break and a third one for your daily time limit. I’ve configured my clocks as follows: a 20-second break every 15 minutes, a 3-minute break every 30 minutes and a daily limit of three hours.

Rather than using the daily limit timer as an actual maximum, I use it as a “guilt-free” time limit. I try not to go over it too much when possible. There are no scientifically recommended settings that work for everyone, but it is worth noting that it’s better to take smaller breaks more often than longer breaks less often. Workrave will also look at your mouse and keyboard activity to detect if you’re taking a break before Workrave even asked you to. Mac users might want to check out the Lifehacker article on a related program, AntiRSI.

When on a break, do Workrave exercises
Aside from being an I-nag-because-I-care mom that urges you to take breaks regularly, Workrave also displays illustrated exercises during your rest breaks. They’re not that intensive, but they will help prevent repetitive strain injury.

Don’t forget to blink
Research has shown that when we’re focusing on our computer screens, we blink a lot less than usual. To avoid eye strain and dry eye, make sure you don’t forget to blink.

Adjust the refresh rate of your monitor
Wikipedia defines the refresh rate as the number of times in a second that display hardware draws the data. Simply put, the image on your screen needs to be refreshed at least 50 times per second or your monitor would flicker all the time. The higher the refresh rate of your screen is, the easier it gets for you to read a long paragraph. If you’re using a CRT monitor, the difference should be clear over the course of a few hours. Some people say that upping the refresh rate on an LCD monitor has little effect, but it’s certainly worth a shot if your monitor supports it.
Get OS-specific advice on changing the refresh rate for Windows, Mac and GNOME on Linux (scroll down to ‘Xorg 7.3′).

Mind the lighting
It can sure be interesting to be able to look out the window while you’re typing, but it’s a no-no in ergonomics. Too much bright light can cause eye strain, but on the other hand having too little light isn’t that comfortable either. On a related note, you might want to play around with your monitor’s brightness and contrast to find settings that feel good.

Impose an absolute limit of 8 hours a day
Our eyes and brains can only take so much. So unless your job makes this impossible you should limit your computer, game console and television usage to 8 hours a day.

Give e-ink technology a try
Unlike with conventional monitors, the image on electronic paper does not need to be refreshed constantly. There have been reports from people saying it reads more comfortably compared to the Steve Ballmer e-reader.

Should We Prefer Metered Bandwidth Over “Unlimited”?

Pieter — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:47:18 +0000

We love unlimited. Everything is better when it’s not limited, right? Then what’s not to love about unlimited bandwidth? Actually it’s bad for us consumers. Here’s why.

ISPs currently give you unlimited internet access… as long as you don’t use it too much
Did you look into your contract when you signed up for your ISP? If you’re on an unlimited plan, in most cases you’ll find the term ‘fair use policy’ buried somewhere between five hundred paragraphs of Legalese. This term generally has two possible definitions.

There’s a hidden limit. If you want to know much you can use, beg our customer service representatives to tell you what it is.
We can cut off your connection or throttle it whenever we feel like it.

In my book, ‘unlimited’ doesn’t mean ‘limited in a secretive way’.

With metered bandwidth, you know what you’re gonna get
You know what you’ve paid for when you’re on a metered bandwidth plan. Consumers with metered plans have a legally binding agreement with their ISP where they have to let them send and receive a set amount of data through their pipes. This is more transparent than vague fair use policies that impose a hidden limit. With a little collaboration between ISPs and tools such as ISP Monitor (pictured above), the customer always knows what he’s up against.

There’s only so much traffic our pipes can handle anyway
The only reason why ISPs lie about the bandwidth limit of their plans, is marketing. You could compare the internet to a highway: you can only fit so much cars on a highway at the same time. Similarly, internet resources are limited too so it is only fair that we have to pay for what we use. Otherwise, your grandparents are overpaying for their internet connection because some kid is constantly torrenting movies.

In conclusion

ISPs need to be upfront about their limits and provide an easy way for their users to check their bandwidth usage. As long as these limits are fair compared to what you pay for it, I for one think we’re better off banning unlimited plans.

Thoughts? Rebuttals? Let us know what you think in the comments section.

Remove “Accessory Connected” Screen from Jailbroken iPhone or iPod Touch

Ryan — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:57:33 +0000

Last week I purchased a car interface kit that gives me the ability to hook my iPhone up to the audio system that I have installed in my car. The install went fairly smooth, but I was rather disappointed with the level of control I had over my iPhone using the audio controls on my car. I thought to myself “hey, no biggie… I’ll just control the audio through my iPhone.” Apple, however, didn’t agree with that idea.

When I went to pull up the iPod portion of my phone I received the pretty little icon that you see to the right. It told me that I had an “accessory connected,” and there was basically no way for me to control the audio using the native iPod app. If I used a third party app, such as something that provided streaming Internet radio, there were no issues. So I knew it was possible to control the audio using my iPhone, and then I started to see how many other people had the same complaint.

Apparently there were quite a few users that were just as upset by this, and that’s when I happily came across a Cydia package for my jailbroken iPhone. Just do a search for “NoAccessorySplash” on the ModMyi repository and you’ll be ready to roll. Once installed it will bypass this screen so that you can control your audio through the device connected to the dock port or on the iPhone or iPod Touch itself.

I had found other hacks out there that did something similar, but they require you to SSH into your device, modify a file using a hex editor, and pray that it will actually work. This, however, is a quick 10-second solution (assuming you’ve already jailbroken your device). I’m currently using it on the 3.1.2 firmware, and it works flawlessly. It’s little things like this that make me happy I’ve jailbroken my device.

Welcome to the CyberNet Redesign

Ryan — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 19:55:08 +0000

I told you earlier in the week that a redesign was coming today, and I wasn’t lying. Hopefully when you see it for the first time you recognize how much we were pushing for simplicity. We moved common navigation-bar items like “about us” into the footer since a majority of users will never need them, and at the same time we made subscribing to our site via RSS, Twitter, and email much more prominent in the header area.

My goal was to give you a design that flows easily with your eyes, and minimizes distractions as much as possible. This is a tough thing to balance because I need to make things convenient, but at the same time weigh what features I think people will use. And then I have to try and present those features in a way that won’t annoy the people who don’t want to use them.

–The Homepage–

Let’s start by looking at the homepage. Here I tried to think about what I’d want on the homepage if I was a reader. Previously we had about 7 articles on our homepage most of which could be read in their entirety without ever clicking a link. If you’re reading a bunch of articles all at once that works out great, but it can take awhile to load if we’ve included some large images in our posts.

To get over this obstacle I tried to find a good median. What I came up with was displaying the latest article in all its glory right there for you to read, and then all subsequent articles are shortened up in a way that lets your eyes quickly skim past them looking for topics that interest you. Plus you should see that the page loads significantly faster since your browser is downloading a thumbnail that’s pulled from the article instead of the full resolution images. To help put the significance of this into perspective: the new homepage that has 10 articles is about 55% lighter in size than our old homepage displaying 7 articles.

–Article Pages–

When reading articles you may notice that the content area is significantly larger than what it previously was. This gives us an opportunity to include bigger screenshots in our articles, and will hopefully mean we have to thumbnail photos a lot less.

The main thing that I want to highlight, however, is the “share” button located at the bottom of each article (assuming you have JavaScript enabled). In there is where you’ll find options for bookmarking an article, viewing tags, and seeing a few related articles. If you’re a registered user (and are logged in) this is also where you can turn comment tracking on/off or CyberMark an article. Here’s a brief overview of those features for those of you unfamiliar with them:

Comment Tracking – This will let you follow new comments on articles and even get email notifications when a new comment is posted. You can choose to follow new comments on all articles, only articles you comment on, or only articles you explicitly select.
CyberMarks – This is our own internal bookmarking system. It lets you save your favorite articles where you can go back and sort or search through them to find what you’re looking for.

Both of these features have been completely rewritten, and perform much better than they did before.

–Commenting–

Our comment system has received a rather significant overhaul. We decided to move to a threaded comment system, which means you can reply to comments that other users leave. There’s a downfall to a system like this that I’m very much aware of. Some commenters like to take advantage of threaded comments by always replying to the first comment on the page, which ensures that their comment will show up above many others. I hate that, which is why I made sure I have the ability to “de-thread” comments that are unrelated the parent comment.

Threaded comments also posed another issue for people tracking new comments. If you get notified that there’s a new comment on an article how are you supposed to know which one is new? Sure you can go through them all looking at the dates/times, but when comments are threaded this becomes very difficult. That’s why we now “flag” all new comments so that you’re able to find them in a heartbeat.

We also managed to rewrite our custom AJAX comment system to work with the threaded comments. It was a little trickier than I had anticipated, but I feel like it works pretty well. After leaving a comment you’ll also notice that the page scrolls to where your comment was just posted on the page.

And then there is comment editing. We have migrated to a specialized WordPress plugin for editing comments (with a few custom hacks I through in), and editing comments should be much more reliable for our registered users now.

Note: For avatars we dropped support for MyBlogLog. Now you’ll either need to use Gravatar , or registered users can head to the account settings to provide a URL for an avatar you want to use.

–Searching–

I knew I had to do something about our search system because even I got frustrated trying to find an article with our search system. So now our search engine will sort results by relevance making it a lot faster at hunting down what you’re looking for.

We also tried to put some intelligence behind displaying the search box on the page you’re viewing. For example, if you’re viewing our home page or an article you’ll see the search box tucked away into the pull-down menu at the top of the page. If, however, you’re going through our archives we assume you’re looking for something specific and will therefore expand the search box to aid in your hunt. And we know what a pain it can be at times to work with those tiny search boxes, which is why we super-sized ours.

–And More–

We’ve thrown a few new elements into the sidebar, including a better summary of unread comments and recent CyberMarks for users that are logged in. A little further down the sidebar you’ll also see some of our most popular articles (by traffic) in the last 7-days.
The account management pages are the same in terms of functionality, be I rewrote all of them to make them perform better
In the footer we still have a nice list of our active All-Stars. These are registered users that actively participate in commenting and send us tips.

–Conclusion–

So I hope you enjoy the new site! For the last month I’ve spent 40-50 hours a week working on the redesign (in addition to the 40-50 hours at my full-time job), which is why article posting slowed down quite a bit. I’ve got a lot of comments to catch up on, and I have a feeling you’ll be seeing some more great stuff roll out of our site in the coming weeks.

Drop us your thoughts on the new design in the comments below.

CyberNet Redesign Coming This Sunday

Ryan — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:52:19 +0000

Sunday is the big day! Over the last month or so I’ve been spending every ounce of free time I could scrounge up working on a site redesign. After all, this one has served us for two wonderful years. This time around I took a lot of things into consideration based on the feedback I’ve heard about our current theme. The most common point of criticism is that our theme doesn’t have a “geek” feel to it. I’ve got good news… the new theme screams geekery.

That’s not all I wanted to do this time around. These days a lot of companies are placing a heavy focus on performance. Apple is doing it with their next operating system, and so is Microsoft. I’ve also seen a lot of websites getting tweaked so that they perform well. Computers continue to get more powerful and the Internet is getting faster, but there is an rapidly emerging market we need to take into consideration, and that is the mobile market. Apple showed us with the iPhone that a mobile device is capable of displaying full websites, but a lot of them are so media-heavy that this isn’t always feasible. The new CyberNet will even be fast to load on the devices that you carry in your pocket thanks to its light use of media. We’ve also rewritten all of the features our registered users can take advantage of, which includes new comment tracking and our homegrown bookmarking system called CyberMarks. Faster faster faster!

Performance was important during the design process, but that wasn’t what our primary focus was on. The more I read sites on the Internet the more I find myself amazed at how hard it’s getting to find the most important things on a page, which is the article content and the comments. And I’m not just pointing fingers at other sites because I’d classify our current site in that same category. When creating our new design I placed the content and comment area on the page first, and then worked around it. We wanted to make sure these things weren’t merely an afterthought where we’re left saying “um, let’s squeeze it in here.” Instead your eyes will naturally be drawn to all of the most important aspects on the page, which is the way it should be.

I’m sure some of you were hoping that we’d post a screenshot or something of that nature for you to grab a peak. Nope. All I’ll say is that the new design actually uses the same color scheme as our current design… the orange, red, and turquoise are all carried over in one way or another. To spice things up we’re also introducing some new colors. Don’t worry, the fact that we’re using a lot of the same colors won’t likely be apparent when you first see the site.

So stay tuned. Early Sunday morning (8-9AM Central Time) is when I’m hoping to roll it out. I’ll probably need about an hour to get everything upgraded and ready to go, but be sure to stop by. If you follow me on Twitter I’ll probably be posting during the rollout process.

Pixar Grants a Wish; Gets Well-Deserved Credit

Ryan — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:29:15 +0000

So last week there was a story about a girl, Colby Curtin, that touched the hearts of thousands of readers, and Pixar played an important roll in it all. She was dying of vascular cancer, and her last wish was to see the movie Up. The only problem was that the movie is only in theaters, and she was to ill to be transported. So a friend of the family made a call to Pixar, and it touched their hearts enough to fly an employee out with a DVD to the family’s home the next day (on June 10th). Just 7-hours after watching the movie Colby passed away.

Pixar didn’t want to comment on the story, and from what I’ve read Pixar even asked the mother not to talk to the media about it. They wouldn’t even release the name of the employee who had gone out to the family’s house. They weren’t doing it for the publicity, they were doing it because they cared. They cared so much that they wasted no time getting out there, and that made all the difference. Bravo Pixar. It’s not often that you hear of a big company striving to make a difference in someone’s life.

After 24-hours the source of the article reported that it had been read by over 400,000 readers on their site. Not to mention the thousands of other people that I’m sure read the story in forums, blogs, and countless other sites. It’s safe to say that this story has traveled around the world.

I had also read that this isn’t the first time Pixar has done something like this, and it’s never the media attention they’re after. I guess they are the only ones who know how many wishes they’ve made come true, and hopefully they’ll keep doing so.