Tech Roundup: Feb 3, 2013
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| BlackBerry Z10 |
The moment finally arrived. Beleaguered Canadian handset manufacturer Research in Motion (RIM) took the wraps off its new QNX-based mobile operating system BlackBerry 10 OS. The company also decided it was time to unify its brand name and has hence rechristened itself as BlackBerry. While the new gesture oriented OS has met with overall positive reviews (particularly the software keyboard), lack of quality apps is proving to be a big contention for the platform. Here's wishing the company a smooth journey ahead!
Go change your Twitter password:
Twitter has revealed in a blog post that it was a victim of a massive hack attack and close to 250,000 user accounts 'may' have been compromised. This comes close on the heels of recent news that the US dailies New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post had their securities infiltrated by Chinese hackers. According to the post, it began to detect unusual access patterns and that it was able to thwart a live attack from accessing its data.
Twitter claims the hackers were able to get hold of users' email addresses, usernames, session tokens and encrypted (or salted technically) passwords and it has sent an email notification to all those affected to reset their passwords. (Make sure you check your email spam folders as well.) If you are one of those people who use the same password for multiple accounts, just go and change them. And please avoid using passwords that are easy to guess. To be better safe than sorry, do follow the advice listed here.
Vine faces the heat over pornography; 500px is back in the App Store:
Twitter unveiled Vine app weeks back as a means to share 6-second videos and the app quickly made to Apple App Store's Editor's Picks list. Then came the blow. Pornography was as easy to search in the app by just looking for the hashtag '#porn'. The videos were then a click away from a warning message that appeared if they were marked inappropriate by the users. While the app's guidelines doesn't state anything explicitly with regards to nudity or porn, to make matters worse, a 'human error' caused a video containing images of oral sex becoming an Editor's Choice!
While Twitter was quick to take down the video and apologize for the flap, Apple quietly removed the app from its Editor's Picks but stopped short of pulling the app altogether from the App Store. That itself was strange in the wake of a recent controversy over its removal of 500px's iOS app citing pornographic concerns. I wonder if its relationship with Twitter forced it to keep the app (Twitter is tightly integrated with iOS since iOS 5). Vine now censors searches involving adult content and returns no results in such cases. Amidst all this, 500px has also made its way back to the App Store after it modified its app to include a 'Report as Offensive or Adult Content' option for every image.
A scary side of Twitter:
We all know Twitter's benefits; not only is it a great social network, but also an effective means to share and spread ideas and information. That almost every brand is using the platform is ample proof of its strength. But what if the information (aka tweet in Twitter parlance) being shared is false? Does it not send a wrong signal to its followers? Such an incident happened recently when a tweet from the trading firm Muddy Waters sent the shares of the company Audience Inc down by more than 25% within minutes.
The tweet had mentioned that the company was being investigated by the US's Dept. of Justice for fraud charges. On later investigation, it was found that the twitter handle itself was dubious and had only 11 followers, while the original Muddy Waters account had more more then 7,500 of them. Thankfully, the share price quickly rebounded after the trading was halted. It is being said that an estimated 300,000 shares of Audience changed hands in this brief period.
Facebook reports an upbeat quarterly result, thanks to mobile ads:
Social-network behemoth which went public last May is facing intense investor pressure regarding its growth and if the last quarterly results are any indication, Facebook seems to be doing rather well for itself. Revenue from mobile advertisements, which were non-existent a couple of months back, is said to have bolstered the company's earnings. With users increasingly accessing the social-network on phones and tablets, Facebook started pushing ads to its various mobile apps that began to appear on users' news feed. The curious thing is that people didn't seem to mind the ads at all!
With over 1.06 billion monthly active users (including 618 million daily active users and a 680 million mobile monthly active users) as of last year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has vowed to create more opportunities to make cash and has once again put all rumours around a Facebook phone to rest. Facebook may have been successful in its first attempt at displaying ads on mobile. But given the small screen estate of mobile devices, can the company's ad mechanisms continue to remain non-intrusive and yet be effective enough to pull in revenue? Nonetheless, shares of the company have slipped to $29.73 as of Friday's close, a day after the earnings report.
What on earth was Apple thinking when it released the 128 GB iPad!
Cupertino managed to pull a surprise last week by announcing a 128 GB version of iPad 4. Devoid of all the usual fanfare associated with their products, the additional gigs of storage is here to break your wallet. Costing $800 and $930 for the Wi-Fi only and Wi-Fi + Cellular versions respectively, they definitely seem to be overpriced. Don't they? While Apple has said that the new model caters mainly to the commercial users, is it justified in selling the tablet at such a sky-high price? Of course there is a logic behind this well-timed release. Microsoft is soon about to debut its Surface Pro tablet this month and available in 64 GB and 128 GB flavours (though the available storage is only 23 GB and 83 GB due to the rest being taken by the OS and preinstalled apps), they have expandable memory and run on a full version of Windows 8.
And as ExtremeTech points out, Apple probably didn't want storage space to be another feather in Microsoft’s cap. Such a pricing strategy could also be an attempt to boost its profit margins, which are of late being threatened by the launch of a comparatively cheaper iPad mini. If people continue to flock to the mini this quarter, a release of an expensive tablet might compensate for the money it is losing due to this sort of cannibalization. Since Apple doesn't announce the sales breakup of each version iPad, don't be surprised if it reports a healthy quarter in its next earnings call.
WhatsApp privacy scare:
Popular cross-platform instant messaging service WhatsApp is now under scrutiny for violating international data privacy laws after a collaborative investigation by Canadian and Dutch data protection authorities revealed that the California-based company requires its users to provide the entire contact list (as a permission) which could contain both users and non-users of the app. While it's quite necessary to send the whole list to identify WhatsApp users during the initial setup, the company is said to be retaining the phone numbers of 'non-users' in an unreadable format. This practice of holding personal information for eternity has been found at fault by these agencies.
Get ready for HTC's next flagship:
Taiwanese handset maker HTC is trying hard to make a strong comeback in the Android race. Though it released multiple 'flagship' smartphones like One X, One XL, One X+ and later the Butterfly and Droid DNA, they seem to be struggling to get a foothold in the market that is now captured by Samsung. The company is holding a press event on the 19th of February which is widely rumored to be the launchpad for its upcoming super-smartphones including the much rumored M7 along with a new iteration of Sense user interface.
In other news:
- Indian cellular major Airtel launches emergency hotline service.
- Facebook testing detailed emoticons for status updates; adds video recording feature in its iOS app to take on Vine.
- Image-based social network Pinterest testing a new design.
- Leaked presentation slides from Qualcomm reveal a possible spring time release for Android 5.0 aka Key Lime Pie (coinciding with Google I/O 2013).
- A job listing for Motorola confirms pure Google smartphone 'X-Phone' as reported by the Wall Street Journal; references about the phone subsequently taken down.
- HTC 5-inch smartphone Butterfly launched in India for a hefty Rs. 45,990.
- Sony to unveil its next-gen PlayStation console on February 20, confirms the WSJ.
- South Korea successfully launches Naro-1 satellite into space in its third attempt.
- 52 million tablets shipped worldwide last quarter; Apple dominance sliding, says IDC.
- Google extends Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync support till July 31.
- Microsoft Windows Phone 7.8 update rolling out to previous generation Windows Phones.
- Apple outs iOS 6.1 update for the iPhone, iPod and iPad.
- Google updates Maps with more locations and other details in North Korea following a crowdsourcing effort.
- Microsoft officially releases Office 2013 productivity suite; yours for $139.99.
- Hewlett-Packard reportedly building their first Chrome OS based personal computer.
- Apple trademarks its retail store design.
- Mozilla Firefox to disable Silverlight and Java by default for security reasons; excludes latest version of Flash.
- Yahoo! and Amazon post solid Q4 quarterly earnings.
- New H.265 video compression format approved by United nations; could drastically cut the amount of Internet bandwidth currently used by video files.
- Scientists find life under sheets of ice in Antarctica.
- New research explains how owls can turn their necks by 270 degrees.
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