Telirati

US law is especially liberal when it comes to free speech. This puts hate speech, however you define it short of a call to violent action, under the protection of the First Amendment. For the foreseeable future, the fight against hate and violence must operate in this context. This feels unsatisfactory when the killer of eleven people in a Pittsburgh synagogue vented his hate on the social network Gab leading up to the attack, even announcing his intention to act. Social networks can, in fact, be much better at containing the problem of online hate speech. You should raise your expectations of social networks to help solve the problems of fascist, antisemitic, racist, and sexist speech. Here's why: Social networks and hate speech Social networks are privately run, and have the freedom to limit any kind of speech on their platforms, for any reason. You have no right to have Facebook publish your posts. For example, selling illegal drugs or passing around copyright works ...

Here we'll take a short break from mobile telecommunications, IoT, project management and other Serious Topics to cover a little photography. I recently found some commonplace problems with my camera, and solutions to those problems: Noisy RAW files Bricked cameras when updating I set out to see if a firmware update would cure a problem with excess noise in RAW images from my Sony a6000, and on my way to find out, I discovered that Sony's Mac OS X firmware updater is a flaming bag of poop that bricked my camera. What I learned on my way to a solution is probably applicable to other similar Sony cameras. The Sony a6000 is a wonderful camera. I bought one when it first came out as an upgrade from my NEX-5. In silver, it has a classic look without pandering to hipster faux 1950s rangefinder affectations. With 24 megapixels in an APS-C sensor, it packs prosumer DSLR specs into an under $1000 compact camera body. Sony's mirrorless product line go...

Source: Wikipedia.org At Google I/O 2016, Google announced two new messaging products: Allo, for text messaging, and Duo, for video communications. These are the most recent in a series of messaging products Google has created, none of which have succeeded in attracting a really large user community the way that other messaging products have done. Google doesn't release figures for monthly active users of Hangouts, while WhatsApp has a billion users, Facebook Messenger and QQ have 850 million, and WeChat has about 700 million. The stakes in messaging are very high, and, so far, Google is an also-ran. In 2015, it looked like Google might go in a different direction, perhaps acting as a spoiler for proprietary messaging apps that don't interoperate and don't use carrier protocols like SMS and MMS. Google bought a company called Jibe that makes next-generation messaging servers for standard telecom protocols called Rich Communications Services, or RCS. If Google base...

Android is client Java Android applications are, by several orders of magnitude, the dominant form of client Java software. The only widely used interactive Java applications, other than Android apps, are integrated development environments (IDEs) which are big, complex software creation tools. Oracle is breaking the business of software creation Oracle, which now owns the leading proprietary implementation of Java, should be grateful that client Java has been revived. Instead, Oracle has decided this is an opportunity to litigate poorly established parts of intellectual property law, vexing Google, Android developers, and tool-makers in the Android ecosystem. Oracle has made various claims, one of the most destructive to software development in general is that software interface specifications, usually known as "APIs" or "application programming interfaces" can by copyright protected. This claim is deleterious to the whole software business and nonsensic...

Software projects and traditional project management tools have always been a dangerous combination. But, you can understand the attraction: Gantt and CPM chart editors can be a delightfully visual way to plan a project. Even a novice gets a thrill of insight and the feeling of control. Project management tools were originally made for creating big, expensive physical objects, like bridges, subway lines, and skyscrapers. These projects merited hiring professional project managers, and the nature of the projects left little room for ambiguity: Either 27 floors of steel are up, or not. Either the interior framing up to the 10th floor is ready for the electricians and plumbers, or not. In this world every measurement of task completion is represented by a physical object that can be directly inspected. Almost all the tasks in these physical-world projects have been done thousands, even millions of times before. Anomalies are relatively easy to spot, and few such anomalies are dangero...

You have a substantial budget. You have an army, perhaps a foreign mercenary army, of developers. You've got experience delivering big Web projects this way. But your Android project might as well be Afghanistan. Unexpected limitations, difficult bugs, poor performance, and bloat plague you for weeks and months. Android devices have become big, but Android is still for small, limited devices Some Android devices have become capacious and powerful. The processor benchmarks for flagship handsets rival processors commonly found in PCs. The RAM capacity in most phones is still less than half what you get in a typical PC, but that's still quite a lot. You have cross-trained some of your best Java experts on Android. They know how to engineer big Java projects. But you find unexpected problems. Why don't the same engineering approaches that work for your Web projects work for Android? The reason is that Android is, still, a clever little OS for clever little devices. A...

N.b.: The tables in this article are available as a single table here Welcome to the menagerie Who knew how social Google really is? Google has at least nine properties that can be considered "social." Back in our analysis #11  we took a quick inventory and found that social characteristics permeate Google's collection of tools and applications, and that Google+ missed some key opportunities in high-value areas. Here we expand our collection of specimens and apply taxonomy to Google's ecology of things with social characteristics and how well adapted they are to Web and Android habitats. We divide the analysis into two parts: content characteristics and social features. Content characteristics In addition to search, email, and office productivity, Google runs at least nine "applications" that deal in user-provided content. We can't call them "Web sites" since most of them are presented through both Android applications and a Web ...

It's hard to drag a legacy UI into a touch world As Microsoft well knows, it's hard to drag a legacy UI system onto touch devices successfully. Microsoft tried numerous times, notably in the past for the UMPC format and Windows mobile, and more recently in Windows 8.1 to evolve Windows into a touch OS. or to bifurcate it and leave the legacy UI behind. Neither approach worked. Touch and the browser Microsoft has, however, dragged OEMs into building touch laptops. Google acknowledged this trend by creating the Chomebook Pixel with a touchscreen. Google felt they needed to "own" the issue of touch and Chrome in case touchscreen PCs were successful. Chrome OS and the Chrome browser, as well as Google's Web apps would have to adapt to a world with lots of touch systems running Windows. Chromebook OEMs are following Google with their own touchscreen products in laptop form factors. But that never happened and touch in Chrome OS has become a stagnant an...

SoCs are mostly the same One of the mysteries surrounding the question of why Intel hasn't gotten inside your phone is that systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) are all quite similar. Some CPU cores, a GPU, and i/o peripherals share a bus, all on one chip. If high-level architecture is so similar, and apparent barriers to entry low enough that numerous new entrants have flourished, what's up with Intel? A combination of factors If new entrants can get in the game, and SoCs are difficult to differentiate, it is unlikely that you can find one factor, or one problem to solve, that will unlock the mobile market for Intel. Here are some of the factors cited over time as keeping Intel out of your phone: Power management:  ARM CPUs were designed for low power applications and ARM licensees have all the expertise in integrating systems that result in low power SoCs. Intel has largely overcome this barrier, though it took more product generations than it should have, and Intel may ...

Photo by Matthew Hester (CC BY-ND 2.0) Google has become something of a slumlord. While Google+ has been accused of being a "ghost town," at least it looks pretty, even now after what feels like a long period of stagnation and un-addressed bugs. But Google+ isn't the most neglected neighborhood in Googleland. Where is the Blogger blog? Various parts of Google, notably Search, use Blogger to convey news about new releases and their development road map. Blogger is key infrastructure for Google itself. But where is the Blogger blog? Like some other semi-abandoned properties, Blogger no longer has frequent updates about features. If you want a history of Blogger and it's features, you'll have to rely on Wikipedia. Evidently there are ardent Blogger users who keep track of these things. Why does this matter? There are a lot of abandoned places on the Internet. Blogger, however, is emblematic of the problems that precipitated the departure of Vic Gundotra...

The trust problem US technology and Internet services companies have a deep trust problem. They are accused of collaborating with the NSA and, on top of collaboration, being exploited by the NSA. The NSA, in turn, is seen as operating without boundaries, turning America and much of the world into a glass-walled panopticon, devoid of privacy and confidentiality. This loss of trust has already cost tens of billions, and will cost tens to hundreds of billions more in lost sales outside the US and the "Five Eyes" nations most closely collaborating in NSA surveillance. Any nation that aspires to have practical sovereignty, competitive industry, and independent decision-making finds they cannot trust US technology and services. Solving the trust problem is one of the most valuable goals in the technology and Internet services industries, and it has proved to be a sticky problem. The key may be to change the terms of the discussion. Describing the threat The NSA...

This might not be the single most interesting bug in all of Android, but out of the ones I have encountered or heard of, it definitely caught my attention. Combating fragmentation with a single code base A key set of features of Android is good forward and  back-compatibility. That is, you can write an app that uses new APIs, but runs on old systems, by testing for the API level and not calling unimplemented features. This enables developers to keep a single code-base for many versions of Android. However, old Android versions can't see their own future. That means that when new permissions are introduced, it is possible that an app created their own permissions with the same name. And therein is the basis for a vulnerability identified in this paper by Indiana University and Microsoft Labs researchers . Bad Android! The result is an app that never asked for a permission, but got one anyway. That's bad! It's not just bad implementation bad, it...