It’s my party and I’ll talk if I wanna!
Download.com, owned by CNET, has this week been quite rightly called out for forcing excessive amounts of junkware (i.e. unwanted, intrusive and hard to remove software programs) onto anyone who uses the service to download and install free programs. It’s true, easily verifiable, and very unpleasant.
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been playing a game called Ingress, developed by Google and currently being played in closed invite-only beta across the world. The game, which draws heavily on a kind of Matrix meets StarCraft science fiction styling, melds augmented reality with smartphones, computers and the kind of backstory that only a Hollywood scriptwriter could dream up.
Now here’s a bizarre thing. Apparently, according to the cancellation terms and conditions posted on the Yahoo! site, if you delete your account, not only do you lose ALL of your Yahoo! content, including your Flickr photos and paid accounts, but the company also reserves the right to re-issue your Yahoo! ID and profile names to any else who comes along later. “Additionally, due to the limited number of names available, we may allow other users to sign up for…
The Institute of Making had its grand opening last week in central London, and we went along to get an idea of what this new venture could signal. The ‘maker movement’, as it’s called, offers a glimpse of a potential future where we don’t just passively buy and consume products, but in fact contribute in different ways to the whole product process…either by local production or hacking, repairing and recycling existing products to improve them.
Like many other media outlets we too were struck by recent front page reports of tiny camera drones which were under trial for combat zones and surveillance duties. The 16 gram PD-100 Black Hornet for example, made by Norwegian company Prox Dynamics, is state of the art, can operate for 25 minutes up to 1000 feet away and in winds of up to 15 knots. This is not science fiction, but today’s reality, and as the BBC reported last week,…
UK telecom giant BT has just announced a massive upgrade of their broadband services to unlimited bandwidth. Following closely on from the recent disclosure by the US cable companies that bandwidth caps are designed to make more money, not ease congestion, this latest move is both an indication of improving technology and also a recognition that increased competition and price pressures are forcing the major Internet suppliers to come up with creative ways of locking their customers in for the…
What happens when the people making your products decide they’re going to start doing it for themselves? And what happens when those factories and manufacturers start producing products which are not only equal to your fancy brand name devices, but actually better? One word. Market decimation. No wait…two words.
It may be a sign of the times, but it looks as though there are people who are really considering making the switch from the mighty iPhone to the Android mobile phone platform. That’s not to say there aren’t a lot of people doing the opposite too, it’s just that prior to the rather lacklustre iPhone 5 launch, people wouldn’t openly discuss such a move, at least not with a straight face. Over the past weeks, I’ve had a couple…
Game giant Valve recently released its sophisticated new free animated movie making program called Source Filmmaker and judging by the first results coming from the tool, it could massively impact the entertainment space over the coming years. Machinima, the art of making short (or long) movies using animated game engines, has been around for a good few years, but this is the first system which offers everything a budding movie maker needs, including motion capture and sound editing tools, to…
Despite the massive advances in medical science, the hunt still goes on for the source of our individual consciousness. The boffins have made huge strides in mapping the brain with their growing array of neuroimaging equipment, but it’s clear that the goal of finding out where the ‘we’ resides in our mind is not going to be that easy.
A new move has started to draft a global Declaration of Internet Freedom which aims to protect the Internet from attack by governments, commercial and industrial interests and anyone else who would try to twist and pervert it to their ends. It may sound very fluffy bunny but at its core the message is seriously important. The Internet is turning out to be one of the most significant developments in human civilisation since Gutenberg’s printing press, and we are at a…
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has set up an online petition to stop the extradition of British student Richard O’Dwyer to the US, and it’s something all Internet users really should be aware of. Richard was the founder of the web search engine TVShack.net, which let people search for their favourite television programmes and movies online. He did not directly host any copyrighted material at all. So in this regard his site was doing nothing more than Google does every day! However, a…
The whole diet business, and boy is it a business, has become a huge money pot for everyone involved. From the fashionable fad diets of the day, to the long established ‘wisdom’ of the experts, everyone has an opinion and everyone is trying to sell you something. It’s hardly surprising then to find countless different views as to the best diet to undertake to lose weight and maintain a healthy lifestyle.
Way back in Feb 2010 we reported on an intrepid geek investigation into the manufacture of fake microSD cards, and it seems the problem hasn’t gone away. In fact it’s probably got worse. So bad has the situation become there’s even a blog about it, called Fake Flash News, which reports on all the dodgy products that arrive on eBay and other retail sites. The problem is the copies are so good that they’re fooling lots of people, who then suffer from…
Six months ago I published a provocatively titled post called 10 Reasons Why I’m Done With Windows which outlined how and why I converted my wife’s ancient laptop to Ubuntu Linux from Windows XP, when the latter crashed spectacularly. The piece attracted a LOT of comments from both Linux fans and detractors, ranging from ‘Your post reads like any Linux Fanboy rubbish. ‘ to ‘I had the exact same experience, and all my family members (wife and kids) use Linux without…
