The Gartner chart (via ArsTechnica) says it all. The Smartphone market is growing like crazy, and Apple’s share of it is rapidly increasing. Soon it will have overtaken the Crackberry (RIM). Next stop Nokia?
Microsoft to fund ACAP development?
The search by newspaper publishers for DRM-for-papers continues. ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol) is currently their Great White Hope. This report from TechCrunch suggests that Microsoft might be getting in on the act.
Our sources say Microsoft has pledged to help fund research and engineering into ACAP to the tune of about will put £100,000. This is the more granular version of the robots.txt protocol which has been proposed by publishers to enable them to have a more sophisticated response to search engine crawlers. However, we understand that Microsoft won’t be involved in developing the protocol, just the financial funding.
For years, Google has characterised the debate about search engines as “you are either in our index or not in it, there is no half-way house.” But the Automated Content Access Protocol ”ACAP” proposes a far more layered response, allowing full access or just access to some content of a site. Unsurprisingly, it’s been developed by a consortium of the World Association of Newspapers, European Publishers Council and International Publishers Association. Proposed in 2006, it has been criticised as being biased towards publishers rather than search engines, specifically Google, and few non-ACAP members have adopted the protocol. Some call it the “DRM of newspaper web sites”. That said some 1,600 traditional publishers have signed up to using ACAP.
But if Bing starts to play ball with ACAP, this could change the game. Suddenly newspapers will have a stick, and a heavyweight enforcer in the shape of Bing, with which to beat Google. Google would have a choice – either recognise the ACAP protocol in order to get some level of access to newspaper sites, or just ignore it…
Google’s Go
Google’s developed its own systems programming language — and released it under an Open Source licence. Nice clear introduction by Rob Pike in this video.
We are where we are with Afghanistan. And where is that, exactly?
Terrific blog post by Andrew Sullivan. Excerpt:
So how are we where are we now? In Afghanistan, the Taliban has been empowered by the long occupation and the government is as corrupt as ever and fast losing its own people. Al Qaeda have simply moved to Pakistan where they remain safely as long as they duck drone attacks. In Iraq, we actually gave al Qaeda a new opening and had to spend billions and lose thousands of lives to push them back. Even now, we have no guarantee they will not re-emerge in a still deeply divided country when far fewer American troops will soon remain. And through all this, we threw away one core advantage: our moral high ground. Through torture and the mass killings of civilians, through allowing sectarian genocide in Iraq and giving the world Abu Ghraib and Gitmo as symbols of the new America, we even managed to blur the lines between civilization and barbarism. And in this struggle, our political leaders failed to keep the country united, or the alliance intact.
The awful truth is: what 9/11 revealed, and what it was designed to reveal, is that there is nothing we can really do definitively to stop another one. They had no weapons but our own technology. The training they had was not that sophisticated and the costs of the operation were relatively tiny. There were 19 of them. None of the key perpetrators has been brought to justice. Bin Laden remains at large. If you calculate the costs of that evil attack against the financial, moral and human costs of the fight back, 9/11 was a fantastic demonstration of the power of asymmetry to destroy the West.
Everything that has subsequently transpired has merely deepened that lesson. The US is now bankrupt, trapped in Iraq and Afghanistan for the rest of our lives, unable even to prevent the two most potentially dangerous Islamist states, Pakistan and Iran, from getting nukes, morally compromised and hanging on to global support only because of a new president who is even now being assaulted viciously at home for such grievous crimes as trying to get more people access to health insurance…
Apple declares war…
… on unauthorised ingenuity, to wit this:
According to Wired,
the latest update to Snow Leopard, version 10.6.2, drops support for the Intel Atom processor. This means that anyone with a “hackintosh” who tries to update to the latest operating system version will see their computer die, going no further than the gray Apple logo on startup.
The reports are lighting up various hackintosh forums, and OSx86-co-author wizard Stellarolla sums it up thusly:
“Well, looks like I was right, again. The netbook forums are now blowing up with problems of 10.6.2 instant rebooting their Atom-based netbooks. My sources tell me that every time a netbook user installs 10.6.2 an Apple employee gets their wings.”
It shouldn’t be long before some clever hacker figures out a workaround and releases a patched kernel to the world, re-enabling the OS on Atom-based computers. But that’s not the story. The bigger message is that Apple has finally stopped ignoring the incessant buzz of the hobby-hacking, Mac netbook scene and instead pulled out a fly-swatter and dealt it a whack. The war is officially on.
Hee, hee! Thanks to a warning from Quentin, I shan’t be ungrading for the time being. And my lovely little Dell/Apple hybrid will continue to be a delightful workhorse.
The thing that gave me most pleasure when I hacked the Dell in the first place was that I was simultaneously annoying two of the world’s great control freaks! Apple’s latest gambit only increases the pleasure.
Hardwired news
We are, as George Steiner used to say, “language animals”. Noam Chomsky argued that we are born with, somehow, a natural capacity for language. Now comes some indications of the genetic mechanisms that could be responsible for our great gift.
The first concrete evidence of a genetic link to the evolution of language in humans was published today in the journal Nature. Researchers led by UCLA neurogeneticist Daniel Geschwind have shown that two small differences between the human and chimpanzee versions of a protein called FOXP2 result in significant differences in the behavior of dozens of genes in human neurons.
FOXP2 is a protein known as a transcription factor; its role is to turn other genes off or on. Geschwind and his collaborators deleted the native gene for FOXP2 from a lab-grown line of human neurons. They then inserted either the gene for human or chimp FOXP2 into the cells and screened the cells to see which genes were being expressed, or actively producing proteins. The researchers identified dozens of genes that were expressed at either higher or lower levels depending on whether the cells were making human or chimp FOXP2. They verified these findings by examining gene expression patterns in post-mortem brain tissue from both chimps and humans who died of natural causes…
Kindle for PC
Just noticed this. Mac version coming soon, apparently. They’re clearly rattled by the upcoming Apple Tablet.
Ofcom knocks back BBC DRM plans
Tentative sign that sanity might prevail?
BBC plans to copy protect Freeview high definition (HD) data have been dealt a blow by regulator Ofcom. It has written to the BBC asking for more information about what the benefits would be for consumers.
Initially it looked as if Ofcom would approve the plans but, during its two week consultation, it has received many responses opposing the plan.
Critics say a Digital Rights Management (DRM) system for Freeview HD would effectively lock down free BBC content.
In its submission to Ofcom, the Open Rights Group argued that such a system was DRM by the “backdoor” and that it would prevent things such as recording HD content for personal use.
“Ofcom received a large number of responses to this consultation, in particular from consumers and consumer groups, who raised a number of potentially significant consumer ‘fair use’ and competition issues that were not addressed in our original consultation,” the letter from Ofcom to the BBC read.
It asked the BBC to clarify the benefit to citizens, as well as outline how it proposes to address the “potential disadvantages” and offer alternative approaches to the issue.
Two cheers, then. But the forces of darkness aren’t routed yet.
The Digger’s logic: cut off your nose to spite your face
In that already-notorious interview, Murdoch says he’s considering blocking Google from accessing NewsCorp sites. In that context, this Hitwise chart is interesting. It shows the percentage of WSJ traffic that is driven by Google searches.
“In fact”, says Bill Tancer of Hitwise,
“on a weekly basis Google and Google news are the top traffic providers for WSJ.com account for over 25% of WSJ.com’s traffic. Even more telling. According to Experian Hitwise data, over 44% of WSJ.com visitors coming from Google are “new” users who haven’t visited the domain in the last 30 days.”
All of which makes one wonder what the Digger’s been smoking.
An open letter to the Digger
Nice Crikey post.
Now this morning, Mr Murdoch, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t misrepresenting your comments. Rather than watch your full 37-minute interview with Sky News Australia — deadlines, deadlines! — I wanted a news report.
I went to Google News and typed “murdoch block google”. The first result was this story at the UK’s Telegraph.
I went to Microsoft’s Bing and typed the same thing. Their top link was this story at the Guardian.
(I also searched the news at Yahoo!7 and their one and only result was a Crikey story from a month ago. Fail.)
I clicked through and read their stories — you don’t see full stories in search engines, Mr Murdoch, you have to click through. I saw their adverts. They got traffic.
Do you own the Telegraph or the Guardian, Mr Murdoch?
Oh dear.
C’mon Digger: bring on yer paywall! We need this experiment.
En passant:I see from his newsletter that Jason Calcanis is pushing the idea that Microsoft should pay publishers to let Bing index their content as a way of screwing Google. Stand by for an outbreak of my-enemy’s-enemy-is-my-friend syndrome. I suspect that we’re approaching the point where Murdoch & Co will discover the full power of network effects.
LATER: Cory Doctorow has a lovely column in the Guardian about Murdoch’s increasingly erratic pronouncements. Excerpt:
Rupert has got dealmaker’s flu, a bug he acquired when he bought MySpace and sold the exclusive right to index it to Google. This had the temporary effect of making Rupert look like a technology genius, as Google’s putative payout for this right made the MySpace deal instantly profitable, at least on paper; meanwhile, MySpace’s star was in decline, thanks to competition from Facebook, Twitter and a million me-too social networking tools.
It also put ideas into Rupert’s head.
You can practically see the maths on the blackboard behind his eyelids: Exclusive deals + paywalls = money.
I think that Rupert is betting that one of Google’s badly trailing competitors can be coaxed into paying for the right to index all of Newscorp’s online stuff, if that right is exclusive. Rupert is thinking that a company such as Microsoft will be willing to pay to shore up its also-ran search tool, Bing, by buying the right to index the fraction of a fraction of a sliver of a crumb of the internet that Newscorp owns.
They’ll be able to advertise: “We have Rupert’s pages and Google doesn’t, so search with us!” (Actually, they’ll have to advertise: “We have Rupert’s pages and Google doesn’t, except MySpace, which Google has.”)
Or maybe not – MySpace isn’t delivering the traffic Rupert guaranteed Google in his little deal, and Google may bail if there’s a likely sucker on the line.
Maybe the target isn’t Microsoft. Maybe it’s some gullible startup that’s even now walking up and down Sand Hill Road, the heart of Venture Capital Country in Silicon Valley, showing off a PowerPoint deck whose entire message can be summarised as: “You give us a heptillion dollars, we’ll do exclusive search deals with Rupert and the other media behemoths, and we’ll freeze Google out.”
Murdoch is a bit like a malign version of Warren Buffett, in the sense that people are so impressed/intimidated by his past record that they’re reluctant to criticise him now. Like Buffett, the Digger has made great bets in his time (e.g. buying the Sun< and turning it round, launching Sky, etc.) and some of them required stamina and courage to seem them through. So at the moment even though most people don’t believe that his paywall strategy can work in a networked ecosystem, they have a kind of superstitious reluctance to express their scepticism out loud.