Monday, February 4, 2013

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Tea Party launches its own Facebook

Posted: 04 Feb 2013 03:51 AM PST

The ultraconservative Tea Party movement now has a social network of its own, free from liberal censorship and designed for people who prefer regurgitating Bronze Age mythology over unimportant matters such as science and facts.

The Tea Party Community is the brainchild of Time Selaty Sr. and Ken Crow, who say they created the conservative social network in response to "liberal censorship". The site launched over the weekend and its motto is "Connecting and Empowering We The People" - but we were unable to create an account because it's invite only. Now, how democratic is that?

In spite of the invite-only approach, guaranteed to keep those pesky progressives out, the site already has roughly 50,000 members. At least that's what Fox News Radio claims, so we are not entirely convinced.

"It's a new home for conservatives and the Tea Party movement in America. It's a social community just for them," Crow told Fox News. "Most of us are subjected to censorship on Facebook (...) I've been suspended there as have many of my friends. You also absorb a lot of abuse from liberals."

So it turns out the site caters to rugged individualists and tough right-wingers who are so offended by a little Facebook abuse that they chose to run away and start their own social network.

Fox claims as many as 100 Facebook users contacted it with complains of Facebook censorship. Bloggers Amy Jo Clark and Miriam Weaver are among those threatened by Facebook, over content published on their conservative site "Chicks on the Right". They told Fox that they were targeted by a very active trolling community, the sole purpose of which was to report conservative pages and cause trouble. Prominent Tea Party activist Jan Morgan says she was sanctioned numerous times for her pro-Second Amendment postings.

The Tea Party Community adopted a different approach. It simply does not welcome anyone who does not share Tea Party ideals. The site encourages all factions of the Tea Party to sign up and escape Facebook's censorship. However, the site's privacy policy says it can review and delete content which it doesn't find appropriate, much like all other social networks. Apparently, the Tea Party believes Second Amendment protection extends only to those who don't disagree with it. 

The site, here, has more than a passing resemblance to Facebook, even telling users on the landing page that if they 'like FB', they'll 'love the Tea Party Community'. Zuckerberg has sued for less... 

HTC profits tank

Posted: 04 Feb 2013 03:28 AM PST

Mobile phone maker HTC has seen its profit fall 91 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012.

According to the IB Times, the company posted a net profit of £22 million for the three months to the end of December. Last year it made £242 million in the same quarter last year.

It is fairly clear that the result was expected. CEO Peter Chou told the Wall Street Journal in January that the company's competition is too strong and resourceful.

Samsung and Apple had been pouring in lots of money into marketing, and HTC hadn't.

However, he did say that he thought "2013 will not be too bad".

Analysts suggest that HTC has hit its low point and unless there is a disaster, like the company's flagship M7 sales disappointing, HTC should pick itself off the ground and dust itself off.

HTC is expected to announce the M7 on 19 February. Apparently a launch venue in London has been booked.

The M7 smartphone is thought to feature a 4.7 or 5in full-HD screen, a 1.7GHz quad-core processor and a 13-megapixel camera.

If the phone is not launched on 19 February, then it will almost certainly be seen at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Launching early will give HTC the chance to steal the march on Samsung which is expected to unveil the next model in the Galaxy range this April. 

US tech outfits slammed for EU anti-privacy lobbying

Posted: 04 Feb 2013 02:11 AM PST

A number of US NGOs and a pan-European industry group are speaking out against pressure from US lobbyists to relax EU privacy laws to suit Silicon Valley.

Chairman of the Industry Coalition for Data Protection, Jacom Hohnstamm, told the Financial Times that European lawmakers were fed up with US tech outfits trying to put their corporate interests ahead of EU legislation.

"You're not going to change your fourth amendment because of a business model in Europe are you?" Mr Kohnstamm said. "If such a lobby from the European side were organised towards Congress, we would be kicked out of there."

What's more, a number of prominent US consumer and civil liberties organisations have also expressed their backing for new European privacy legislation. In a letter to US Attorney General Eric Holder, Secretary of State John Kerry and US Ambassador to the EU William Kennard, the groups voiced their support for the EU effort to strengthen privacy protection.

Representatives of US NGOs recently visited Brussels and met with MEPs from across the political spectrum. The MEPs informed them that both the US government and US industry are mounting an unprecedented lobbying campaign to limit the protections that the new law would provide.

"We also found that the Europeans were excited to head a different view from the US," NGO reps wrote. "We learned that Europeans and Americans have similar concerns about the need for privacy protection. We share a fundamental belief that Europe and the United States need to update their privacy laws."

The NGOs also argued that US President Barack Obama shares an equally strong commitment to privacy protection. Obama set out a comprehensive privacy framework in February 2012, calling for more transparency, individual control over data collection, security and accountability.

However, back in January the US Mission to the EU wrote a document about the proposed privacy legislation, urging the EU to be more flexible about questions of consent from internet users and notification timelines for potential data breaches. The mission argued that any variations in US and EU law could impede transatlantic commerce and that interoperability of EU and US privacy regimes is critical to maintaining the successful economic relationship between Europe and the US.

US NGOs argue that privacy should not be viewed as partisan, but very few topics are non-partisan in the US nowadays. The extent of influence big business is able to exert on elected representatives in the post-Citizens United political landscape is immense, which means the NGOs and even sections of the Obama administration, are likely to face an uphill struggle. 

Mountain Lion feature means Apple fans can crash software at home

Posted: 04 Feb 2013 02:01 AM PST

Not happy with making the most insecure software in the world, the geniuses at Apple have had to come up with a way of crashing the system so simply you can do it at home.

The bug only works in the latest versions of Apple's Mountain Lion operating system and if you want to use it you will have to upgrade. However, a feature like this will make you the envy of all your fanboy friends.

According to the Next Web, all you have to do is type "File:///". It will cause your app to crash. There has to be eight characters in total and the F must be capitalised but now you can have any app you want crash for no apparent reason.

As you might expect, genius programming like this can only be found inside the creative minds of Apple, after all, they were the guys who invented the rounded rectangle.

Only apps which are totally dedicated to the Apple view of reality will crash using this method. So far Echofon, QuickTime, Safari, and Notes will crash as Apple wills it. Outsiders like Firefox will not crash on demand, but no true Apple fanboy will have installed software that does not carry Cupertino's Holy Seal. The tame Apple press expects that Microsoft will copy the feature any day now.

The feature happens because the software is built around a built in assertion.

In the programming world, assertions allow developers to mandate expected behaviour, validating input to assure its correctness.

In this case, the automated data detectors see what appears to be a malformed URL and send off an application exception reporting the internal inconsistency. The exception crashes the application because the geniuses at Apple forgot to write a built-in handler.

White House plans public-private cyber security deal

Posted: 04 Feb 2013 01:40 AM PST

The former British colony of Virginia is just so popular at home and overseas that the president of its corporate controlled junta of former revolutionaries has been coming up with plans to tighten up security.

The United States of America, which was formed by French backed terrorists against the wishes of the majority, is saying that it has been plagued by a rash of unprecedented cyber attacks and no amount of creams will budge it.

According to the Financial Times, US president Barack Obama is expected to call for information sharing and co-operation between the private sector and government and create a new set of standards for companies that operate critical US infrastructure.

Since the White House is effectively telling big business, which traditionally sends large sums of money to its politicians, what to do, Obama has made the code voluntary. This normally would make the whole exercise pointless as big business thinks it knows what it is doing and will probably tell the government where to stick its nasty communistic code of practice.

Lobbyists already quashed an effort to pass a comprehensive cybersecurity law on Capitol Hill last year.

However, the White House thinks that some of them are looking pretty stupid after some attacks on US banks caused them to wake up and smell the coffee.

Some, like the Business Roundtable and US Chamber of Commerce, are also pushing for the passing of a law to protect the private sector from litigation from shareholders and others in the event of a cyber attack.

Kiersten Todt Coon, a former senior staff member of the Senate homeland security committee and now president of Liberty Group Ventures, said that companies are now committed with a level of "diligence and intensity" that the financial sector in particular had never experienced before.

Obama wants to prevent catastrophic attacks and build more resilient systems for operators of critical infrastructure. So far, no one is clear what he means, but his plans should include the electrical grid, financial services, chemical companies, oil and gas groups, and the water supply.

He will make an executive order to companies involved in these areas calling for new procedures to be written within 120 days for companies to voluntarily participate in an "Enhanced Cybersecurity Services" initiative to address cybersecurity concerns.

Under the deal, the US government will hand over details of its cyber security concerns to big business.

Some believe that the executive order could open the door to new cyber security legislation. 

Oracle loses Itanium appeal

Posted: 04 Feb 2013 01:22 AM PST

A US court has rejected Oracle's appeal against a ruling that meant that it could walk away from Itanium.

In August, a California superior court judge had ruled that Oracle had a binding contract with HP to continue supporting Itanium, even if the outfit did not think that the chip had a future.

Oracle wanted to stop porting its software to HP's Itanium server platform, claiming that the whole thing was a waste of time. More cynical observers at the time thought that the whole court case was really about a spat about HP's firing of Larry Ellison's chum Mark Hurd, who now works for Oracle.

Oracle and HP had been the best of chums until Ellison decided to buy Sun Microsystems and enter the hardware world.

HP brought the case against Oracle and, in August, a California superior court judge ruled that Oracle had a binding contract with HP and ordered it to continue supporting Itanium.

Oracle filed its appeal of that ruling in October with California's 6th District Court of Appeal, which rejected it on Thursday.

Details of the rejection have not been provided and Oracle and HP both refused to talk about it to Computerworld.

The case is scheduled to have a second phase that will focus on damages owed to HP. That phase is scheduled to begin in April, according to an HP spokesperson. 
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