After buying its own client, Twitter toys with sending ads to clients
In the history of anything whatsoever, timing is rarely, if ever, coincidental. More often these days, however, the strategy behind it looks confusing. Just days before it's scheduled to hold its developers conference in San Francisco (tomorrow and Thursday), Twitter revealed that it is in the process of either acquiring or building applications that will compete directly with the Twitter clients these developers will be taught how to build.
On Friday, Twitter revealed it was in the midst of purchasing Tweetie, believed to be the most popular Twitter client for Apple's iPhone. That product will become "Twitter for iPhone." That same day, the service released a Twitter client for BlackBerry; and it's that second event that let developers know, as Arlo Guthrie once put it, that there's a movement.
Mono's de Icaza: Novell MonoTouch to forge ahead on iPhone OS despite 3.3.1
An amendment to the terms of Apple's iPhone OS Developers' Agreement, called Section 3.3.1, uncovered last week, would expressly prohibit developers from building apps for iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad that were not created exclusively for that platform, using Apple's tools, and linking to no other APIs except Apple's. That "clarification" threatens the existence of cross-platform support for the iPhone platform, not only from Adobe Flash (whose apps can be devised to run on iPhone), and Oracle Java (same story), but also from development tools whose apps don't have to be jerry-rigged to run on iPhone.
Those include Unity3D, the 3D gaming platform originally for Mac OS that dropped Java in 2008 for Novell's Mono; and MonoTouch, Novell's extension of its .NET Framework-compatible platform for iPhone OS. In a notice on MonoTouch's home page, the development team expressed optimism that Apple would find MonoTouch to be in compliance with the company's new terms.
Crossing swords over cross-platform: Apple vs. Adobe Flash, C#, and Mono
It should come as no surprise to anyone that Apple is not a cross-platform tools company, nor a supporter of cross-platform technologies that would threaten to nullify Apple's baked-in advantages -- only during the years Steve Jobs was not in charge had the company even considered opening up its platforms. So the strategy behind the company's reinforcement of its iPhone OS 4.0 licensing terms, first discovered by Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber last Thursday, is both obvious and unchanged: to direct the course of iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad development traffic directly, exclusively, and entirely through Apple's channel.
States the newly added paragraph: "3.3.1 -- Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited)."
The big change coming to Safari 5: Kernel-level multi-processing
Apple has been challenging Google on many fronts this week -- first with its mobile platform, then with its advertising platform. Earlier today, its developers launched the first volley in the battle's third front, releasing the first public code for the next WebKit rendering and processing kernel that will likely drive the Safari 5 browser.
With Google Chrome using a reworked form of WebKit, the Apple team did something that perhaps any other free and open source developer would be publicly stoned for doing, but which Apple might just have the savvy to get away with: It openly one-upped another developer's open contribution.
Unfazed, FCC plods ahead with Broadband Plan, starts a flame war with Verizon
In a pair of blog posts since the DC Circuit Court of Appeals' finding Tuesday that the Federal Communications Commission lacked the statutory authority to tell Comcast how to manage traffic on its broadband network, the FCC demonstrated it had officially joined the Internet era by making the dispute into a flame war.
No, the Court did not revoke the FCC's natural authority to regulate the Internet industry, the Commission stated yesterday. However, it may have removed the FCC's epaulets and badge, along with its right to serve as what General Counsel Austin Schlick called "the cop-on-the-beat for 21st Century communications networks."
The net neutrality roadblock: Now only Congress can act
Where do the new media of the Internet stop, and the government regulatory bodies created for old media begin? A decision in favor of Comcast on Tuesday by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals does not answer that question; on the contrary, it actually asks the question all over again, this time under closer scrutiny from both the courts and the general public.
Tuesday's overturning of a Federal Communications Commission order that Comcast stop throttling certain applications of its Internet traffic, is a blow to proponents of the net neutrality provisions recently outlined as official principles by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. "Official principles" are not laws, and thus cannot be regulated -- that's what the DC Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled.
End of the road in sight for Windows on Itanium
It was perhaps one of the most drawn-out, painful launches in Intel's long history: the introduction last February of Tukwila, the latest generation of its Itanium 64-bit processor architecture. Not everyone in the Itanium Solutions Alliance hung on for the five-year ride, with Unisys having been its most prominent drop-out last year, citing competitor HP's dominance in the field. Microsoft held on for the entire stretch; but last week, the company announced it would not lend its support to whatever the generation after Tukwila might become.
In a blog post last Friday, Windows Server Senior Technical Product Manager Dan Reger said that his company will continue to support existing Itanium architecture, including Tukwila, for another eight years. But Windows Server 2008 R2 will be the last version of the operating system to support IA-64.
Obama vs. Congress on radio's royalties exemption
Perhaps the word that best describes the atmosphere in Washington this year is "showdown," with respect to every political issue imaginable -- even those around which there's technically no disagreement. The debate continues over whether terrestrial radio broadcasters (the ones with the big transmitters and the public airwaves) should begin paying the same performers' royalties as Internet broadcasters like Last.fm and Pandora, even though it often seems drowned out by the noise over the just-passed health care reform act, and ongoing legislation on jobs protection and banking reform.
Now, the US Commerce Dept. has come down squarely on the side of the recording industry and rights holders. In a letter sent April 1 to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D - Vt.), Commerce Dept. General Counsel Cameron F. Kerry urged Congress to pass legislation that would apply Pandora's royalties to radio stations.
Security researcher: 'Trivially easy' to buy SSL certificate for domain you don't own
Last week, Betanews reported on the discovery by two university researchers, made at a recent security conference, that security companies often deal with governments that can compel certificate authorities to produce SSL security keys for them. Those keys can then be used to sign certificates as any other Web site, enabling a law enforcement authority -- hypothetically speaking, of course -- to spoof virtually any other site.
Today, Betanews heard from world-renowned security expert Kurt Seifried, author of numerous books on Linux system administration, network security, and cryptography. In the May 2010 issue of Linux Magazine, Seifried reports on his own discovery, which goes one very critical step further: You don't need to be a government, he found, to compel a certificate authority (CA) to issue an SSL certificate for a major Web mail service of your choice. You just need a valid credit card.
One more try to modernize US surveillance laws for the Internet age
You may think that your communications with other individuals over the Internet may be protected from unreasonable use by US law enforcement without subpoena and due process. The truth is, judges have been loosening the interpretation of a 1986 wiretapping law, almost pretending that it did apply to present circumstances. But perhaps the greatest problem with the current Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) lay with its definitions, which at one point appear to be applicable (after several stretches of logic) to the Internet...and then, upon further review, does not.
"Electronic communication" means any transfer of signs, signals, writing, images, sounds, data, or intelligence of any nature transmitted in whole or in part by a wire, radio, electromagnetic, photoelectronic or photooptical system that affects interstate or foreign commerce," paragraph 12 of section 2510 begins. Sounds fair enough, until you go on: "...but does not include (A) the radio portion of a cordless telephone communication that is transmitted between the cordless telephone handset and the base unit; (B) any wire or oral communication..."
The end, finally, at last, hopefully? Jury finds Novell retained UNIX copyrights
As first reported this afternoon by Groklaw, the publication that made its name covering the ugliest chapter in the history of computing, a jury in Utah district court has found that the copyrights to UNIX were never transferred to the original Santa Cruz Operation by way of a 1995 asset purchase agreement.
The decision may finally put to rest a 15-year-old argument over who, or what, has the rights to UNIX.
Chrome 5 becomes the Flash browser, integrates plug-in with dev build
Download Google Chrome 5 Dev build 360.4 for Windows from Fileforum now.
With Google owning YouTube, the Internet's principal delivery system for Flash-based video, it was perhaps inevitable that the company would bundle the Flash plug-in with its Chrome browser. The announcement came today from both Google and the team developing the open source Chromium component on which Chrome is based.
Test of China Internet connections reveals heavy filtering
Using a Firefox 3.0 add-on created by developers in Hong Kong, Betanews was able to briefly establish a connection with the Internet via a proxy based in mainland China. With that proxy, we were able to confirm that searches performed using Google's Hong Kong-based page were effectively blocked.
Firefox 3.0 reported the blockage with this message: "The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading" -- a message from the browser, not from an ISP. We used version 3.0.16 of Firefox (an older edition) because it is the only version compatible with China Channel, a tool made for the express purpose of testing China's filtering ability. It has not been upgraded for version 3.6.
It's not dead yet: Microsoft's out-of-band IE6 fix impacts IE8
Last month, Microsoft sent flowers to a mock funeral for Internet Explorer 6, in a show of support for the ideal that the old browser should be declared defunct worldwide. But for a few years yet, the company is still bound to support the product for those users (generally businesses) who refuse to upgrade it. That's why new exploits that continue to target old browsers, such as IE6 and IE7, continue to get attention even a full year after the proper security fix -- IE8 -- has been deployed.
One of the libraries that, among other functions, helps IE to print is the target of an exploit released to the wild earlier this month. The exploit creatively overloads the system with JavaScript variables, then places function calls to IEPEERS.DLL. Once the library is effectively crashed, its used memory isn't cleaned up, enabling binary code seeded into that memory to be executed -- a classic use-after-free scenario.
MPEG LA wins major MPEG-2 settlement from Alcatel-Lucent
Could the manufacturers of DVD players (no, not just Blu-ray, but the original DVDs) owe back royalties to Alcatel-Lucent for the use of patented technology by way of the MPEG-2 codec? The MPEG Licensing Authority had asserted that Alcatel may have structured its 2006 merger with Lucent in such a way that it could hide up to five patents in a special trust, and spring their overdue royalties on the video industry long after DVDs already began the march to obsolescence.
That assertion was being made in a Delaware courtroom earlier this month, in a trial pertaining to a lawsuit filed by the MPEG Licensing Authority back in 2007. Today, MPEG LA -- which also collects royalties for the use of MPEG-2 -- announced a settlement in the case, essentially amounting to a complete defeat for Alcatel-Lucent.
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