What's Now: Angry day around the Net includes Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Mono

Microsoft has known about 0-day vulnerability for months

Since spring 2008 • Really, Microsoft? All the work you've put into getting right with the security community, and this is the result? Computerworld's mighty Gregg Keizer leads the charge on the news that Redmond has known about the recently publicized DirectX vulnerability for years. Years.

Keizer gets some great quotes about wanting to "give customers a complete solution" and lets the facts -- years? -- speak for themselves. Elinor Mills at Cnet has follow-up and the official non-information from a Microsoft "spokesperson" (actually their PR firm, operating as usual several gears below the in-house blogs). Meanwhile, CNET's Ina Fried reports that Microsoft thinks it would be cute to resurrect, of all things, the loathsome Clippy in ads for Office 2010. Way to walk away from that history of fail, Redmond.

iPhone still making some users cranky

Afternoon of June 9, 2009 • As new iPhone 3G S users settle in with their devices, there are have scattered reports of trouble, but Thursday was a banner day for beefing about problems and disappointments. PC World's Bill Snyder, apparently dealing with a nasty case of Chrome Envy, led the charge with a spritied rant about "Why I Should Not Have Bought the iPhone 3G S."

CNET's David Martin covers the uproar over those discoloring white-case 3G Ss and Apple's handling thereof, and Jason Mick at DailyTech asks what the heck is up with battery life (one of Snyder's many concerns, by the way.) Elsewhere in the Apple cart, pressure from Korea has convinced Apple to recall its first-gen (that is, 2005-vintage) Nano MP3 players, which appear to have gotten into the habit of occasionally exploding.

Kindle catches a nice niche (and some complaints)

June 9, 2009 • Seriously, is the entire industry in need of fiber or something? Though The Wall Street Journal had some happy news for the Kindle -- the Practising Law Institute, a continuing-education nonprofit for lawyers, will make its materials available on the flat plastic platform -- not even Amazon's cult-fave gadget escaped the general crankiness online.

Nicholas Deleon at CrunchGear agrees: "We're starting to see more and more 'hate' being thrown Amazon's way," looking at the rising unease many book publishers have at the prospect of Amazon locking up the digital-book market. And ZDNet's ever-amusing Jason Perlow lobs the grenade many would-be buyers would like to land in Jeff Bezos' lap: Surely $299 is enough to buy PDF capability, for pete's sake.

Jack White forges a digital path

July 9 Techdirt looks at the announcement that Jack White (The White Stripes, The Raconteurs, The Dead Weather, the restart of Loretta Lynn's career) is launching a digital subscription service for fans of his work. For subscribers, The Wall Street Journal's John Jurgensen has a nice piece on Mr. White's burgeoning media empire; frankly, Mr. White (who turned 34 on Thursday) has a better handle on the business than anyone we're heard from at the RIAA or the big labels.

Software developers learn Mono is not a danger to humankind

Fall 2009 > Could Java be displaced as the principal runtime package distributed with Linux? And by a product whose origins are the dreaded "M" word?

Certainly Microsoft has given the open source community cause for skepticism about any market move it makes, searching for rugs that can be pulled out from under them and secret trap doors that could be sprung at any moment. But ever since Microsoft's move last Tuesday to open up the C# language and its underlying .NET CLI to community licensing, even the best journalists have been unable to find real evidence of a trap this time around.

In LinuxPlanet yesterday, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols speaks to Ubuntu's technical board, which is comparing Sun Microsystems' Java to Mono, the independent implementation of .NET funded by Novell. Ubuntu is telling Steven that it plans to distribute the best software it can, and that it finds Mono to qualify in that category. Some very popular Linux apps, including the Banshee music player, are built on the Mono platform. This despite the warnings of GNU leader Richard Stallman, who has perennially warned open source advocates of the dangers, dangers I tell you, of trafficking in any code which has been touched by the unclean hands of C#.

On the other side of the argument, some guy named David Worthington (gee, that name has a familiar ring to it!) writes for SD Times that it's far too soon to write off Java as a major player, citing its well-established development community around Eclipse. But developers whom David spoke to appear to agree that it's been Mono, not Java, that in recent months has attracted the most developers.

Friday's tech headlines

Los Angeles Times

• Dave Carroll trusted United Airlines to ship his guitar without destroying it, and not only did they fail to complete the task, they gave the Sons of Maxwell guitarist the runaround for months about it. So he made a video about it, and... well, the story has an ending. Check it out, especially if you've ever flown that nasty ORD-OMA leg:

• Alex Pham interviews Sun co-founder Andreas Bechtolsheim, who explains that most of us are already operating in the cloud whether we realize it or not.

• If this journalism thing doesn't pan out, thinks your reporter, maybe the thing to do is go join KGB's merry band of fact-finders. Matt Milian finds out what the workday is like at the human-powered 99-cents-per-query service. (Though he doesn't answer my biggest question about KGB: Isn't this a service for people who don't know their local library is probably set up to do this sort of thing free?)

TechCrunch

• Slapfight! Bing Travel has recovered from last Friday's data-center fire, and they Twittered Thursday that they'd appreciate it if Google would freshen their data to reflect current events, kthx.

• Data portability among the social networks makes the news again, as Jason Kincaid reports that Power.com has counter-sued Facebook for restricting users from moving their info around. Facebook continues to press its suit against Power.com for scraping the site and storing user credentials, both of which are forbidden by the Terms of Service.

Adweek

• Rupert Murdoch doesn't want to buy Twitter and doesn't want to sell MySpace. And he thinks Facebook is "like a directory." Zillionaires: They are not just like us.

• Ever wondered how Bob Geldof might have done the Live Aid charity project differently if he'd had the Web at his disposal back then? Keep an eye on his new endeavor, tck tck tck.

• Elena Malykhina recaps that #moonbat Twitter deluge last week, which some called a marketing blitz and others found more akin to 140-character spam.

New York Times

• Riva Richmond covers claims by Danah Boyd, a social-media researcher who claims that preferring Facebook to MySpace is equivalent to "white flight" and other class divisions. Your reporter seems to recalling rolling her eyes about this theory when she first heard it floated years ago.

• European newspaper and magazine publishers have once again demanded that the EU expand copyright regulations, saying that it's the way to get said publishers to innovate their business models. Hmm.

All Things D

• Megastores Unclear On The Concept: Twitter messages are generally under 140 characters long. Wal-Mart has taking to tweeting... and their "terms of use" for the compiled set of micro-messages is 23,105 characters long. Charming.

• Kara Swisher likes the ubiquitous, super-simple Flip digital videocamera, but as she notes, seeing news producers using them at Michael Jackson's funeral to get footage of those poor shell-shocked kids was just... eww.