It will be interesting to see if Moore can bring the same psychotic intensity to the role as Piper Laurie, who was nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal, some of which can be seen in the best-of video below.
No doubt many will have reservations about this casting – great actress that Moore is, this would be a departure from her normal roles and there will be uncertainty that she can pull it off, just as there is doubt that Anne Hathaway will do justice to Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises.
Still, at least Hathaway and Moore are experienced actresses. What’s probably more disconcerting to films of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy is that the scriptwriter is Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa of Glee. For those fortunate enough to have never seen Glee, here’s a preview:
It seems that Google has again forgotten its own mantra of “Don’t be Evil”, as the search giant has once again found itself in hot water, this time after using unprotected Wi-Fi networks to collect such private data as text messages, emails and names.
A Federal Communications Commission (FCC) report shows that Google knew Street View cars were collecting myriad personal information over two years, despite Google’s claims that it was an accident. The FCC report shows that Street View’s coding engineer not only knew the software could collect “payload data”, but told two colleagues – one of whom was a senior manager – that he had deliberately designed it to do so. However, despite the admission from the engineer, the FCC is still debating whether or not other Street View engineers knew of the collection – although the coding engineer produced a report to the team in 2006 in which he explained payload data would be collected, the team’s defence is that they didn’t read it and thus were entirely ignorant of what was going on, and Google has staunchly stuck to its line that the data collection was “inadvertent”.
The FCC report explains that: “For more than two years, Google’s Street View cars collected names, addresses, telephone numbers, URLs, passwords, email, text messages, medical records, video and audio files, and other information from internet users in the United States.” The FCC is also claiming that Google deliberately withheld the email in which the coding engineer discussed data collection with a senior manager, and has ordered Google to pay a $25,000 fine for obstructing the investigation by not releasing such information.
The report goes on to say that “Google’s supervision of the Wi-Fi data collection project was minimal … indeed, it appears that no one at the company carefully reviewed the substance of Engineer Doe’s software code or the design document.”
Aside from censoring the names of Google employees, the search giant has released the report in full, with a spokesman saying that: “We decided to voluntarily make the entire document available except for the names of individuals. While we disagree with some of the statements made in the document, we agree with the FCC’s conclusion that we did not break the law. We hope that we can now put this matter behind us.”
While the FCC has said Google didn’t break any laws, and Google wants to move on, such privacy advocacy groups as Electronic Privacy Information Center are demanding further investigation. EPIC’s executive director Marc Rotenberg has said that “Google’s rogue engineer scenario collapses in light of the fact that others were aware of the project and did not object.”
It cannot be proven conclusively one way or the other that Google as an entity did or didn’t know about the data collection, but it doesn’t bode well either way for the company – can users trust a company that either collects their personal data willingly, or one that doesn’t know what its own products and services are doing?
With RIM in dire straits but insisting on forging ahead with its own operating system, BlackBerry 10 has been anticipated for some time, and has now had its first public showing.
So what’s new? From a design perspective, it seems that RIM has pretty much had a look at what’s on the market and made a conglomeration of other operating systems. The grid of widgets (seen below) looks remarkably like Nokia’s MeeGo on the N9 and also Windows Phone, while the notification bar and icons along the bottom look intriguingly like Nokia Belle, its latest update to the Symbian platform (both MeeGo and Belle are also shown below for comparison).
The grid looks strikingly similar to MeeGo, while the notification and shortcut bars look very similar to Nokia Belle
Nokia N9 running MeeGoNokia Belle
While mentioning comparisons with Nokia, it also has to be noted that the hardware showcased for BB10 had no front-facing buttons, much like the N900 and N9. The PlayBook also lacked buttons on the screen, and it’s good to see this approach to phones continuing.
One of the things shown off at BlackBerry World was BB 10’s “flow”. Unlike the approach of Apple, Microsoft and Google, BB 10 does not pause apps or hang them in a suspended state, but rather leaves them running in real time just as they were on the PlayBook. Without a physical button to bring up the multitasking panel (which is used in iOS, Windows Phone, Symbian and Android), BB 10 implements it by having the user hold their finger down and then slide to the right to see the last few apps that were used.
The benefit to a real-time multitasking ability of course is the opportunity to carry out tasks without missing a beat. Whether you’re composing an email or waiting for a video to load, you can do something else and then go back to it without any lag or needing to start from scratch, just like working on a computer. CEO Thorston Heins said that “Everything you have going on keeps running real time in the background. No other platform can do this.” This isn’t entirely true, however. It could be argued that BB 10 will be the only mainstream OS to offer it, but Heins can’t erase from history the fact that Maemo 5 and MeeGo both did and do offer exactly the same thing, and Symbian, one of the largest operating systems in the world, also offers it. So while it’s a very welcome feature indeed, Heins shouldn’t adopt the Steve Jobs path of claiming everything he did was invented by his company.
Another feature showed off was the new keyboard, which is a departure from BlackBerry’s signature physical QWERTY. While it doesn’t look like anything special, it is apparently a smart keyboard by customising itself to how you use it, recommending words it thinks you are most likely to want to use.
Another neat feature introduced was camera rewind, which basically lets you zoom in to a picture and rewind it in time. This means that the user can fix closed eyes or something else ruining a photo.
So how will it fare? BlackBerry 10 looks promising, bringing the software up to par in some cases, and exceeding the competition in others. While it’s a stretch to say that RIM is the only company to have software that lets users multitask in real time, and the design looks more than a little inspired by Nokia’s offerings, it’s encouraging to see a company stand up and continue that trend, acknowledging that with phones being used increasingly like computers, they should act like it too.
The chairman of The International Coalition Against Prohibition (TICAP), Bill Gibson, filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act regarding deaths from smoking and second-hand smoke (SHS) exposure.The requested information was:
a) All information on the actual number of adult smokers in Scotland for the years 2005 -2009 and the source of the information, each years total to be shown.
b) All information on the smoking cessation rates in Scotland for the years 2005-2009 and the source of the information, each years total to be shown.
c) All information on how the smoking cessation rates were calculated.
d) All information on actual deaths in Scotland attributable to Second Hand Smoke otherwise known as “Passive Smoking” , “Sidestream Smoke” or “Environmental Tobacco Smoke” from the years 2000 – 2009
e) All information held on “Third Hand Smoke”.
(For those unfamiliar with the term, third hand smoke is the smell left on a smoker or in a room that has had smoking occur in it. More information can be found here).
For years it has been asserted by those in the pro-choice movement that the deaths attributed to smoking are essentially fabricated – there are no real bodies that have been counted, but rather the estimated figures are created through a certain set of paradigms, from computer programs to dubious classifications – such as lumping any death of a smoker as a ‘smoking-related death’.
The FOI response went a long way in officially validating this, by saying that “We hold no information about actual deaths due to passive smoking. It is not possible to give precise figures on deaths resulting from tobacco use. However, it is estimated that each year more than 13,000 people in Scotland die from smoking-related diseases”.
And of course, by defining certain illnesses as smoking-related ones, there is a lot of room for manouevere to classify any of those deaths as a result of smoking. The FOI response further explained that “The numbers of deaths attributed to passive smoking are primarily estimated from studies comparing the rates of deaths due to smoking attributable diseases among similar people who have not had such exposure.” Or, in other words, using the wholly unscientific method of turning statistics and mathematical figures into real-life dead bodies. Which, of course, is not the way the world works.
This also leads to the questions: Is a full-scale war against smokers warranted when the only supporting evidence is hypothetical numbers generated from even more estimated numbers? If policy-makers are confident enough that smoking kills enough people to all but prohibit it, where are all the bodies?
With DropBox, Apple’s iCloud and Microsoft’s SkyDrive, no one really expected it to be long before Google brought out its own cloud-storage offering – after all, Google does have a history of relentlessly hopping on the bandwagon. Quite why anyone will use Google Drive over the other options is something of a mystery though, for a few reasons. Firstly, at this point, the people who are using cloud services already have an account with one of the others, and Google Drive is unlikely to offer functionality that the others can’t. Secondly, it offers 5GB free storage, which is more than DropBox’s 2GB but far less than the huge 25GB Microsoft offers with SkyDrive. With a DropBox app on Android, even Google’s own customers won’t require a subscription to Google Drive – unless, of course, Google does what it did to Twitter in its search engine and drop it in favour of Google+ for real-time search updates. It’s unlikely though, as that would mean barring the DropBox apps, which could alienate users. Storage capacity and offerings aside, what’s most worrisome about the new service is it showcases that Google still hasn’t adjusted its opinion on owning its users’ content, as PC World has also reported. Below is an image displaying the privacy policy for DropBox, SkyDrive and Google Drive:
With Google up to its usual tricks, will its claim to your data put you off its service in favour of a more established service from a company that acknowledges your content is your content?
