Thursday, January 30, 2014

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Google gives up on Motorola

Posted: 30 Jan 2014 03:03 AM PST

The search engine Google has decided that it has sucked all the marrow out of Motorola Mobility and what is left is too much of a liability and it has sold it to Lenovo.

Google bought the handset maker mostly for its patent portfolio which it was planning to use to defend Android from Apple and Microsoft.

Now Larry Page claims that it has managed to create a level playing field for Android, Google was left wondering why it needs a handset maker.

There was much muttering from Google's partners when it bought the outfit in the first place. They feared that Google would give Motorola all the upgrades and favour it over other hardware partners.

Writing in his bog Larry Page said that while Google was keeping the patents it was going to get rid of Motorola Mobility for $2.91 billion.

Page said that his Motorola team have done a tremendous job reinventing the company and had built some smartphones that consumers love. Both the Moto G and the Moto X are doing really well.

But he said that the smartphone market was super competitive, and Motorola will be better served by Lenovo.

"This move will enable Google to devote our energy to driving innovation across the Android ecosystem, for the benefit of smartphone users everywhere," Page said.

This did not mean that Google was pulling out of hardware and it was not getting out of the wearable and home markets.

Page said that Lenovo has the expertise and track record to scale Motorola into a major player within the Android egosystem. It has a lot of experience in hardware, and they have global reach.

Lenovo will keep Motorola's distinct brand identity as it did when they acquired ThinkPad from IBM in 2005. 

Exorcism takes to Skype

Posted: 30 Jan 2014 01:49 AM PST

The latest craze from the Land of the Fee is to have your demons exorcised on line using a Skype Voice over-IP connection.

After all, why bother having to deal with the risk of having your soul wrenched from your body and have to spend months cleaning puke out of your vestments, when you can bind Lucifer from the comfort of your own home?

The idea of using Skype came from a Scottsdale reverend Bob Larson who claims that thanks to Skype he can take a crack at demons all over the world. So far he claims to have banished 20,000 demons to his nether regions, unless we heard him wrong.

We guess that some of those demons would have been doubling up, as demons sometimes share bodies to avoid paying council tax.

Larson said that exorcism is the process of expelling an evil spirit from an individual who has become somehow invaded and demonised by that being, and sending it back to hell and freeing the person.

It is not clear how it would work over Skype. While you don't have to worry about flying beds, it is really tricky to spray holy water in anything's face over the net. Your video can also be disturbed by puke splatter.

One of the biggest difficulties is knowing if the reason that the person's voice has gone funny is because of a demon possession or because Skype's voice quality has slipped. I once interviewed an Apple fanboy on Skype, mostly because I did not want to get too close, and his voice pitch changed so many times you could swear he was possessed. 

Missionary paedophile caught through internet

Posted: 30 Jan 2014 12:46 AM PST

A US missionary was teaching girls from an indigenous tribe in the Amazon what a friend they had in Jesus by sexually abusing them and putting pictures of him doing it on the internet.

Warren Kennell admitted to befriending and abusing the girls over several years while he was establishing a church for the New Tribes mission.

According to the Orlando Sentinel he may have gotten away with it had he not decided to put film of the crimes on a child pornography website.

This tipped off Homeland Security which searched Kennell in May after stopping him upon arrival in Orlando from Brazil, and investigators said they found several digital storage devices containing sexually explicit images involving children.

Authorities said Kennell admitted he was the man shown abusing a girl in one of the images and had photographed a second girl. Investigators eventually found 940 images of kiddie porn on Kennell's computer. A judge has sentenced him to 56 years in prison.

This has put a slight damper on the New Tribes mission in South America. This missionary project was supposed to save people from hell and damnation that they did not know they had to experience until Kennell showed up.

The New Tribes site said on its website  that "mankind's greatest need is Jesus".

"Because of Christ's love, NTM missionaries develop caring relationships with tribal people, and help meet physical needs," the site said. Of course it did not say whose physical needs they were talking about. We think it is probably a good idea to rethink that site.

A spokeswoman for the ministry said that the mission was "heartsick" by the news. "Children are to be protected, not hurt. We are grateful to the authorities for the prosecution of this individual despite international legal obstacles." 

Ellison gives blessing to government snooping

Posted: 30 Jan 2014 12:15 AM PST

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison did his best to play down concerns about NSA hacking into his business customers' private data.

At an industry conference in San Francisco, an audience member asked the Oracle co-founder what to tell potential Oracle cloud-computing clients who worry that the National Security Agency could access their information.

Ellison chose his words extremely carefully. He said that "to the best of our knowledge," an Oracle database has not been broken into for a couple of decades by anybody.

He said the databases were so secure there are people that complain they are too difficult to use.

However, Ellison implied that the only thing businesses have to worry about is the NSA cracking an Oracle database. If they managed that, Ellison is saying he had no knowledge of it. But he is also not saying what Oracle would do if an NSA spook showed up with a court order and demanded he handed over all the data on a business client, which is a scenario that many businesses are worried about.

However, David Litchfield, an established security expert and frequent speaker at top hacking conferences, disagreed with Ellison's comments and said he regularly sees Oracle systems being compromised.

In fact he told Reuters that of all of the commercial databases, Oracle is the least secure.

Ellison got his start doing work for the CIA. In 1977 the spooks asked him to design a database, codenamed Oracle. The same year, Ellison and his colleagues founded the database company that would eventually be renamed Oracle.

Ellison and Oracle have also been one of the few IT outfits in the US who has publically endorsed the NSA's spy programme. In an interview with CBS News' Charlie Rose in August, Ellison said he believed the NSA's widespread surveillance was essential to preventing terrorism. Still nothing to worry about eh? 
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