A recent article caught my eye, apparently Yahoo is suing Facebook over patent infringement, now this seems pretty major, one huge internet giant suing another but really this is a lot more common than you think. Samsung and Apple have had a notable set of lawsuits filed against each other recently, Samsung sued Apple in South Korea, Apple and Samsung sue each other in Germany but both get dismissed, and Apple trying to stop Samsung from selling their products through a lawsuit Apple and Samsung seem to constantly be in a series of lawsuits against each other over patent claims, a pretty disturbing trend if two big tech giants seem to have been infringing on each other so frequently. The patents over which the two are suing are also quite disturbing: Samsung suing Apple over issues with the 'Wideband Code Division Multiple Access' standard, battles over ownership of the 'slide-to-unlock' features found on iPhones and other devices, patent infringement of using a software keyboard with a stylus and a bizarre claim over using a reference time signal to display times in multiple cities.
Information technology patents seem to be in a very negative state, small but important elements like Amazon's '1-Click' ordering system or browser plugins are patented and held on to for years, tech giants are constantly suing one another in various regions over claims of infringement of their property, and companies are even created and run just for the sake of holding patents. This trend is quite unsettling as patents are meant to be a way to protect the creator's ability to control ideas that they have expended effort on to but in the digital world this seems to be abused by companies hoarding ideas that are crucial to the world we live in.
How is society supposed to progress when there is a system in place that prevents the use or enrichment of an idea because someone has patented it, stopping others from using it without paying a potentially impractical fee?. The even bigger danger is if another company just buys this patent for the sole purpose of hoarding it and profiting off lawsuits and preventing anyone from using this technology, while an entity that holds a patent and uses it at least puts that idea in to application an entity that hoards a patent can stop all progress from that invention just to profit off preventing that idea from being used.
However there is another viewpoint in this, those ideas which cannot be used (because of intellectual property and patents) will be replaced by other ideas that could be even better. People will not stop inventing and improving and if one path is closed another one will be taken. This viewpoint holds that patents can prevent ideas from being used but that those ideas could fall by the wayside as people circumvent them and provide new opportunities for invention.
Where I stand on this is that patents are very useful and are no doubt crucial to progress however abuse of the patent system is quite evident and needs to be stopped, there should not be some way to transfer patents as they are not out to protect whoever has the power to hold that entity but instead those who created it and any other potential holder of that patent has no claim to be the sole person to profit off of it. The current patent system just needs to be changed, so that it is restored to its original basis of protecting inventors and away from its current application fo preventing progress and allowing people to profit off of the abuse of invention.
Friday, 9 March 2012
Saturday, 3 March 2012
Google Street View and privacy
Among the odd lawsuits and tribulations going on in the world this week is one that really caught my eye, the story of a frenchman that was caught peeing in his yard by Google Street View and became the object of ridicule in his small village. This is certainly not the first issue raised about Google's popular service, some of the other incidents include a man climbing in to the trunk of his car naked and a married couple, coincidentally with the last name Boring, who had resented Google allowing anyone to see the front of their house on street view.
Inmost of these cases it is easy to see why they would like these photos taken down, in two of the incidents I mentioned, it is likely that people all over the world saw their unfortunate embarrassing side. Google already tries to keep people's identity hidden on Street View, faces are automatically detected by a computer and blurred, and although this measure does work a lot of the time it is not always foolproof as in the case of the frenchman caught peeing, who was identified because he was caught on his own property in a small village in France.
Being photographed in public is not so much of a issue as identification and recording of oneself is to be expected in public, but the prevalence of these actions in the digital age is an issue that is quite scary. Will people become so accustomed to having more and more of their public movements recorded that the more controversial privacy issues will go unnoticed? Google Street View just offers a snapshot stuck in a point in time, the only time you can be recorded by it is if you happen to be around one of their camera cars at the right moment of the right day and never else but this isn't the only way people are being recorded in public, around England the government has set up CCTV cameras in a lot of public areas under the guise of stopping crime, who knows what is to come in the future.
Privacy is an important subject, no one can ever dismiss the immense danger in people's private information becoming public without their willingness, but the line between what hurts privacy and what doesn't is becoming ever more so blurred. Google Street View is a simple idea, drive a car around in public snapping pictures as they go, but it has drawn a lot of controversy in certain cases where people have been captured doing what they didn't want anyone seeing or have had photos of their private property potentially taken from outside the public areas uploaded and publicly accessible on the site.
Is this purely Google's fault or is there some element that the public needs to get involved with? Does Street View's benefits outweigh the risks in privacy? Do you know the answer?
Inmost of these cases it is easy to see why they would like these photos taken down, in two of the incidents I mentioned, it is likely that people all over the world saw their unfortunate embarrassing side. Google already tries to keep people's identity hidden on Street View, faces are automatically detected by a computer and blurred, and although this measure does work a lot of the time it is not always foolproof as in the case of the frenchman caught peeing, who was identified because he was caught on his own property in a small village in France.
Being photographed in public is not so much of a issue as identification and recording of oneself is to be expected in public, but the prevalence of these actions in the digital age is an issue that is quite scary. Will people become so accustomed to having more and more of their public movements recorded that the more controversial privacy issues will go unnoticed? Google Street View just offers a snapshot stuck in a point in time, the only time you can be recorded by it is if you happen to be around one of their camera cars at the right moment of the right day and never else but this isn't the only way people are being recorded in public, around England the government has set up CCTV cameras in a lot of public areas under the guise of stopping crime, who knows what is to come in the future.
Privacy is an important subject, no one can ever dismiss the immense danger in people's private information becoming public without their willingness, but the line between what hurts privacy and what doesn't is becoming ever more so blurred. Google Street View is a simple idea, drive a car around in public snapping pictures as they go, but it has drawn a lot of controversy in certain cases where people have been captured doing what they didn't want anyone seeing or have had photos of their private property potentially taken from outside the public areas uploaded and publicly accessible on the site.
Is this purely Google's fault or is there some element that the public needs to get involved with? Does Street View's benefits outweigh the risks in privacy? Do you know the answer?
Friday, 24 February 2012
The Horrors of Mobile Internet
Last week was a pretty hectic week and I didn't have time to make a blogpost, so this week I am going to make two to make up for it and hopefully they'll be even better than usual.
This week I am going to concentrate on mobile data usage, sparked mostly by this article "AT&T relents on 'unlimited data' plan limits" but also because of my own frustrations in mobile technology and their service providers.
The key value of the article is that AT&T, the prominent mobile service provider in the United States, are reversing their decision to throttle clients' usage of their mobile data plans if they have exceeded 3 gigabytes of data within a billing cycle despite the plan being labelled 'unlimited'. The idea of 'unlimited' data plans not being anywhere close to unlimited is not only quite common in the United States and Canada but around the world, service providers are reluctant to let their customers use the services to the extent that they have signed on for and create hidden disincentives to use after they have hit a certain limit, usually in the method of slowing down that user's maximum transfer speed so that they cannot use the plan to download more data than the provider wants. The real clincher in this subject as I see it is that using mobile devices to access the internet is becoming increasingly common and the usage will only increase, the mobile service providers in Canada (and the United States) are rushing out to cash in on this trend by promoting as many technologies to access the internet from a mobile device as they possibly can, you may have noticed all the marketing and push for services such as 3G, 4G, LTE and whatever else they can come up with. Meanwhile the service providers in question do not seek to actually provide the service they are advertising, instead opting to prop up a facade of the service then fail to come through on the promise, sometimes by not having decent coverage for their user base, sometimes through customer support foolery, and in this case by only letting the user truly use part of the service they have signed up for.
The scrupulous methods these companies are using are quite frankly dangerous, the providers already hold a tremendous amount of power (just look at Bell and Rogers' substantial lobbying to the regulatory commissions) and while there are alternatives, Wind Mobile for cellphones, only available in parts of the country and even then the service is less than satisfactory for many customers, Teksavvy for internet which is barely able to survive under the big two's attempts to destroy their business through lobbying the CRTC, they are simply not enough to allay the fears about the future of this sector. The use of information technology and the transfer of data is ever increasingly crucial to North American's daily lives and right now the service providers hold a substantial amount of power over the consumer, it is time for everyone to stand up and show that we cannot stand for this or it will only get worse.
This week I am going to concentrate on mobile data usage, sparked mostly by this article "AT&T relents on 'unlimited data' plan limits" but also because of my own frustrations in mobile technology and their service providers.
The key value of the article is that AT&T, the prominent mobile service provider in the United States, are reversing their decision to throttle clients' usage of their mobile data plans if they have exceeded 3 gigabytes of data within a billing cycle despite the plan being labelled 'unlimited'. The idea of 'unlimited' data plans not being anywhere close to unlimited is not only quite common in the United States and Canada but around the world, service providers are reluctant to let their customers use the services to the extent that they have signed on for and create hidden disincentives to use after they have hit a certain limit, usually in the method of slowing down that user's maximum transfer speed so that they cannot use the plan to download more data than the provider wants. The real clincher in this subject as I see it is that using mobile devices to access the internet is becoming increasingly common and the usage will only increase, the mobile service providers in Canada (and the United States) are rushing out to cash in on this trend by promoting as many technologies to access the internet from a mobile device as they possibly can, you may have noticed all the marketing and push for services such as 3G, 4G, LTE and whatever else they can come up with. Meanwhile the service providers in question do not seek to actually provide the service they are advertising, instead opting to prop up a facade of the service then fail to come through on the promise, sometimes by not having decent coverage for their user base, sometimes through customer support foolery, and in this case by only letting the user truly use part of the service they have signed up for.
The scrupulous methods these companies are using are quite frankly dangerous, the providers already hold a tremendous amount of power (just look at Bell and Rogers' substantial lobbying to the regulatory commissions) and while there are alternatives, Wind Mobile for cellphones, only available in parts of the country and even then the service is less than satisfactory for many customers, Teksavvy for internet which is barely able to survive under the big two's attempts to destroy their business through lobbying the CRTC, they are simply not enough to allay the fears about the future of this sector. The use of information technology and the transfer of data is ever increasingly crucial to North American's daily lives and right now the service providers hold a substantial amount of power over the consumer, it is time for everyone to stand up and show that we cannot stand for this or it will only get worse.
Thursday, 16 February 2012
The rise and fall of the RIM empire
A topic that has been bothering me for many months now is RIM, and more specifically, BlackBerry. RIM used to stand as an iconic front of the canadian tech scene, being the makers of the formerly incredibly popular BlackBerry line of handsets and the BlackBerry services. At some point from those glory days though the brand has hit hard times. After the recent news that the US government's procurement agency passed on BlackBerrys hit, shares of RIM closed at $14.55 on the TSX, down a startling number from it's high point of $148 as recent as 2008.
The reason that I've found RIM's decline so fascinating is that they were hailed, and still are to many people, as a major success story and the first thought when people think of technology companies in Canada. Something major must have happened for such a successful company to have fallen by so much, and it is indeed something major although a major failure to adapt to the marketplace. In 2007 the iPhone was unveiled to scores of wild buzz, people were taken by this phone and in those five years since it has come out it has shown the details that consumers wanted and the details that RIM did not practice.
RIM's inability to adapt to the times led to Apple and Android devices sweeping up and taking over their marketshare. The touchscreen incorporated in to iPhones led to openings for gaming and creative applications to be developed for the iPhone, the device that RIM launched in response to the iPhone, the BlackBerry storm, ended in widely negative reviews finding that RIM hadn't ensured that the touchscreen fit in with their OS. RIM failed to keep up with the capabilities of other devices on the market and better performing or more able phones like the iPhone swept up and took even more market share from RIM.
The most major difference between RIM and Apple that led to Apple thriving where RIM faltered in my opinion was the corporate structure in the two corporations, RIM and Apple. RIM by all accounts of employees was a mess internally, the hiring plan was to target recent graduates of universities to use for the development team and the management of these graduates was not adequate to keep the OS under control. When issues started popping up with the software for the BlackBerrys, RIM did not seem to have many answers and held to their guns with their ever increasingly outdated BlackBerry OS and the nightmare to IT staff everywhere, BlackBerry Enterprise Server, while Apple went to great lengths to build everything on a stable foundation that had worked on OS X and went to great lengths to continue improving on the software, starting from their internal tools and architecture of the mobile OS to the tools that external developers of applications for the phone used. When the lacklustre handling of RIM by the former CEOs Balsillie and Laziridis came to a head and they left the company, the new CEO, Thorsten Heins, sent a message to investors and the public, "I don't think that there is some drastic change needed. We are evolving ... but this is not a seismic change.", this remark caused the stock price to fall 9.11%.
The future is sketchy for RIM and the outlook right now is bleak but it could turn around, the new version of the OS for future BlackBerry devices is planned to come out soon and that could reverse the course of the brand, bringing back the users that departed the BB ship over their disappointment in past RIM offerings. RIM is down but not out as they could recover a share of the mobile user base, it will be hard but stranger things have happened.
The reason that I've found RIM's decline so fascinating is that they were hailed, and still are to many people, as a major success story and the first thought when people think of technology companies in Canada. Something major must have happened for such a successful company to have fallen by so much, and it is indeed something major although a major failure to adapt to the marketplace. In 2007 the iPhone was unveiled to scores of wild buzz, people were taken by this phone and in those five years since it has come out it has shown the details that consumers wanted and the details that RIM did not practice.
RIM's inability to adapt to the times led to Apple and Android devices sweeping up and taking over their marketshare. The touchscreen incorporated in to iPhones led to openings for gaming and creative applications to be developed for the iPhone, the device that RIM launched in response to the iPhone, the BlackBerry storm, ended in widely negative reviews finding that RIM hadn't ensured that the touchscreen fit in with their OS. RIM failed to keep up with the capabilities of other devices on the market and better performing or more able phones like the iPhone swept up and took even more market share from RIM.
The most major difference between RIM and Apple that led to Apple thriving where RIM faltered in my opinion was the corporate structure in the two corporations, RIM and Apple. RIM by all accounts of employees was a mess internally, the hiring plan was to target recent graduates of universities to use for the development team and the management of these graduates was not adequate to keep the OS under control. When issues started popping up with the software for the BlackBerrys, RIM did not seem to have many answers and held to their guns with their ever increasingly outdated BlackBerry OS and the nightmare to IT staff everywhere, BlackBerry Enterprise Server, while Apple went to great lengths to build everything on a stable foundation that had worked on OS X and went to great lengths to continue improving on the software, starting from their internal tools and architecture of the mobile OS to the tools that external developers of applications for the phone used. When the lacklustre handling of RIM by the former CEOs Balsillie and Laziridis came to a head and they left the company, the new CEO, Thorsten Heins, sent a message to investors and the public, "I don't think that there is some drastic change needed. We are evolving ... but this is not a seismic change.", this remark caused the stock price to fall 9.11%.
The future is sketchy for RIM and the outlook right now is bleak but it could turn around, the new version of the OS for future BlackBerry devices is planned to come out soon and that could reverse the course of the brand, bringing back the users that departed the BB ship over their disappointment in past RIM offerings. RIM is down but not out as they could recover a share of the mobile user base, it will be hard but stranger things have happened.
Thursday, 9 February 2012
My Little First Post
Welcome to my blog, 'Computers, how DO they work?'. It will be about computers and how and why they work. I'm not completely sure what exact topics I'll be discussing but I'm sure we'll all learn a lot about computers, if they work and if so, how or why it is that they work. Here's a few articles I'm just going to go ahead and link and maybe in the future I'll pick one of the topics discussed in them for the focus point of this blog, or maybe not, who knows.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/09/biological-computer-can-decode-images-stored-in-dna-chips-appli/
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/02/the-health-problems-with-apples-ipad-and-other-tablet-computers/252624/
http://www.dnaindia.com/scitech/report_transparent-iron-brings-quantum-light-computer-closer-to-reality_1648167
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/2012/02/08/scots-computer-hacker-gary-mckinnon-terrified-at-thought-of-being-extradited-to-us-86908-23740843/
So there, we have some stuff about possible directions the future of technology could go (biological computers and quantum computing), we've got some stuff about possible side effects and risks involved with technology, and we've got some stuff about privacy and security with computers and how it affects people and how the government will have to interact with this premise. These are all interesting topics (maybe they aren't to you, I'm not a psychic) and they all involve computers and it will be interesting to see which ones will pop up again as this blog goes on.
If you have something interesting to add about these articles and ideas, or you just want to say something to someone, anyone who will listen, then feel free to leave a comment and hopefully they won't be too inflammatory. Hopefully by the end of this semester I'll be able to look back, be surprised at the progress I've made here and learn something, maybe not but you never know, have fun reading my ramblings as time goes on.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/09/biological-computer-can-decode-images-stored-in-dna-chips-appli/
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/02/the-health-problems-with-apples-ipad-and-other-tablet-computers/252624/
http://www.dnaindia.com/scitech/report_transparent-iron-brings-quantum-light-computer-closer-to-reality_1648167
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/2012/02/08/scots-computer-hacker-gary-mckinnon-terrified-at-thought-of-being-extradited-to-us-86908-23740843/
So there, we have some stuff about possible directions the future of technology could go (biological computers and quantum computing), we've got some stuff about possible side effects and risks involved with technology, and we've got some stuff about privacy and security with computers and how it affects people and how the government will have to interact with this premise. These are all interesting topics (maybe they aren't to you, I'm not a psychic) and they all involve computers and it will be interesting to see which ones will pop up again as this blog goes on.
If you have something interesting to add about these articles and ideas, or you just want to say something to someone, anyone who will listen, then feel free to leave a comment and hopefully they won't be too inflammatory. Hopefully by the end of this semester I'll be able to look back, be surprised at the progress I've made here and learn something, maybe not but you never know, have fun reading my ramblings as time goes on.
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