Monday, March 31, 2014

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Aussies clamp down on Google Glass

Posted: 31 Mar 2014 03:19 AM PDT

The former British penal colony  of Australia is considering banning the filming of private conversations or activities using Google's Glass eyewear.

Australians often come up with strange laws involving technology, there was one which banned websites which showed women with small breasts a while back. But this one is part of a push to overhaul state and federal privacy laws.

The Australian Law Reform Commission discussion paper, released on Monday morning, recommended 47 legislative changes aimed at updating existing privacy laws for the digital age.

Under the proposed laws, the government will introduce a statutory cause of action for a serious invasion of one's privacy.

Taking cues from surveillance laws in New South Wales, the ALRC proposed a new national offence for those recording private conversations or activities without consent. Journalists uncovering criminal activities will be exempt.

Courts would be able to compensate victims, but the ALRC said it would not propose penalties for offenders.

Google Glass is the tech which is causing a lot of the problems. Apparently, there is a fear that they could be used to record others without their knowing.

Any law changes would also include the use of mobile phones for recording.

What this suggests is that you should be allowed to speak freely without someone keeping a record of it without your knowledge.

The downside of this is that technically if you record a politician coming home from his mistress's place bladdered and flog it to the tabloids you could be breaking the law. 

Intel upgrades Edison

Posted: 31 Mar 2014 03:17 AM PDT

Chipzilla has upgraded to its yet-to-launch Edison embedded computing platform in what appears to have involved going back to the drawing board.

Intel has ditched the company's flagship Quark processor for tried-and-tested Atom and dumped the tiny SD card form factor.

When Chipzilla told the world about Edison in January it was being touted as part of its renewed focus on embedded and particularly wearable computing technologies.

At the time, Intel claimed that the prototype worked ad it was ready to be a real product. Edison was to be the second appearance of the low-power Pentium-based Quark processor which had only been seen in the Galileo development board.

It had two unique features – an SD card form factor and its Quark processor. Now Intel thinks these are pointless.

The Quark chip has been shafted in favour of a 22nm Atom processor based on Silvermont. It is a better design. It will be a dual-core design running at 500MHz, but requires a separate microcontroller unit.

Using Atom does away with the SD card size of Edison and makes it 'slightly larger.'

Bit-Tech said that the Atom-based Edison will not replace the planned Quark version, Intel claims, but instead augment it as part of a new Edison-branded range of products

Intel has not yet confirmed availability or pricing for the Atom or Quark variants of the Edison. 

Mozilla faces mass board resignations

Posted: 31 Mar 2014 03:15 AM PDT

Big cheeses in the Mozzarella Foundation appear to be exiting the building at an alarming rate following the appointment of former Chief Technology Officer Brendan Eich to the chief executive job.

Eich is facing a staff and developer revolt from those who feel that his stance on gay marriage is homophobic and now three members of Mozilla's board resigned over a his appointment.

Eich took the new job last week and already John Lilly, a former Mozilla CEO who is now working at venture capital firm Greylock Partners; and Ellen Siminoff, CEO of online education company Schmoop have cleared off. Mozilla's most recent CEO, Gary Kovacs has cleaned out his desk.

Mozilla insisted that the three board members ended their terms last week for a variety of reasons.

Two had been planning to leave for some time, one since January and one explicitly at the end of the CEO search, the outfit said in a statement.

Word on the strasse is that the board members left because they wanted an outside executive with mobile experience.

Mozilla's mobile version of Firefox has vanishingly small usage, and its mobile operating system, Firefox OS, is a new arrival in a market dominated by Google's Android and Apple's iOS.

Mozilla employees took to Twitter to protest. "Have waited too long to say this. I'm an employee of @mozilla and I'm asking @brendaneich to step down as CEO," tweeted designer Jess Klein.

Eich replied in his bog that he was committed to ensuring that Mozilla is, and will remain, a place that includes and supports everyone, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, age, race, ethnicity, economic status, or religion.

"I know some will be skeptical about this, and that words alone will not change anything. I can only ask for your support to have the time to 'show, not tell'; and in the meantime express my sorrow at having caused pain." 

Oculus Rift staff get death threats

Posted: 31 Mar 2014 03:14 AM PDT

Oculus Rift creator Palmer Luckey has written on Reddit that his employees have received death threats in the wake of the company's sale to Facebook.

Luckey said that he expected a negative reaction from people in the short term; he did not expect the Spanish Inquistion. Then again, no one expects the Spanish Inquistion.

He said that he was surprised to be getting so many death threats and harassing phone calls that extended to our families.

"We know we will prove ourselves with actions and not words, but that kind of shit is unwarranted, especially since it is impacting people who have nothing to do with Oculus," Luckey said.

Last week Facebook had announced it had purchased Oculus VR for $2 billion, positive and negative comments flowed forth from social media.

Oculus VR vice president Nate Mitchell said he expected to get some heat from its core fans over the deal, but said he was surprised by the outpouring of negativity from the community at large.

Since then Mitchell claimed je's already starting to see the conversation on Twitter and Reddit "swinging back the opposite direction." He stressed that it is up to Oculus VR to educate people on why the deal makes sense and should be considered a good thing.

This is what Luckey was trying to do. He answered dozens of questions on Reddit about privacy concerns and what the deal means for the future of Oculus.

One of the reasons that the deal is so unpopular is that Oculus’s success was based on getting a dedicated band of followers using kickstarter. There were concerns that Facebook would be fast and footloose with user data from the company.

Many Oculus users were proud of the fact that Facebook did not have its paws on their personal data, until the buy out.

Demonoid summoned back from hell

Posted: 31 Mar 2014 03:08 AM PDT

After being offline for more than 20 months, the Demonoid BitTorrent tracker and website is back from the dead,

The tracker returned a few weeks ago, but the now the website is accessible again too. Former users can use their login details, and most of the old torrents are still listed.

The news should give Big Content a major aneurism, the site was the largest semi-private BitTorrent tracker that ever existed, Demonoid offered a home to millions of file-sharers.

Last August it suffered from some major technical problems which forced it off  and when it never returned most users gave up hope.

It has a different address, Demonoid.ph, which the .com and .me domains are also linked to.

Apparently, it is all still in pre-launch and the site could go offline again for a while if something breaks.

A message posted on the site's homepage explains that Demonoid made some changes to the backend, and that there may be some glitches.

The site is now cloud based and there have been many changes to the code.

"As a result, you might see some weird glitches here and there. We'll do our best to have everything working smoothly as soon as possible so please bear with us," the Demonoid team wrote on the site.

Several of the former staffers are still involved according to the announcement, but for now it's unclear whether the site's management is still in the same hands as before.

There had been some fears that the user database may have been "compromised" or sold off and there is still some head scratching about what the Demonoid team have been doing for the last two years. Still, it looks like everything is back until Big Content can work out way to take it down. 
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