Tech Roundup: Sony Pictures Hack, Mozilla Firefox & More
[A recurring feature on the latest in Science & Technology.]
The Interview mints money online:
Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) surprisingly released The Interview, a political comedy film about the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, online through Google Play, YouTube, Xbox Live, iTunes (which joined the party last) and other video on demand (VOD) services (no PlayStation?) after an unprecedented hack by a group named Guardians of Peace resulted in entire movies, scripts, budgets, passwords, embarrassing (and racially insensitive) emails, development plans and Social Security numbers of more than 50,000 employees making their way to the public domain.
SPE had earlier scrapped its plans to release the movie following a 9/11-styled threat from the hacker group. Though US officials have formally linked the coordinated attacks to North Korea, the East Asian country has repeatedly denied involvement, slamming the movie's fictional plot as an act of terror. With the hack's provenance thus still unknown, focus, in the meanwhile, has shifted to disgruntled former employees of the firm.
For what it's worth (let's set aside the freedom of expression and political correctness for now!), the drama and buzz seems to have paid off. The movie made a stunning US$ 18 million in online sales, in what's being considered by many movie experts as a pilot case for simultaneous theatrical and VOD release. And as Jason Lynch mentions in his Quartz article, the biggest winner here is Google, which strategically chose to stream the movie on YouTube and Google Play Movies, when other popular players like iTunes and even Netflix chose not to carry the film for whatever reasons. As for Sony, it has a lot to clean up, not to forget that this is the second such data breach in the company's history post the 2011 PlayStation Network outage that led to the theft of more than 75 million users' credit card information.
Apple faces a new lawsuit, this time for its shrinking storage space on its 16GB iDevices:
Apple had its biggest iOS release ever last September and while it may have not been the smoothest release ever, the mobile operating system has now become the victim of a fresh lawsuit, with the tech giant being accused of deceptive and misleading practices. It's a known fact that Apple's iOS occupies a chunk of the advertised storage space, but according to the new lawsuit filed in California, this isn't explicit enough when customers purchase a new Apple product, or update their devices to a newer version of system software and that this discrepancy is "beyond any possible reasonable expectation".
It also alleges that the company exploits the space constraints by pushing its users to paid iCloud storage plans to store photos and the likes instead of supporting SD cards and other desktop file transfer utilities to offload the files. Is the lawsuit frivolous? It's notable that Microsoft not long ago faced a similar complaint with its Surface Pro tablets. But whatever be the case, I think it's high time for Apple to drop the 16GB base configuration altogether.
Infamous Android Lollipop memory leak bug finally fixed:
Android 5.0 aka Lollipop is beautiful and fun to use, but it's crippled by a weird bug that fills up the phone's memory, causing memory-intensive apps like Google Play Music and at times even the homescreen launcher to crash. Not anymore! It seems like the issue has been recently fixed and marked for a future release if the Android bug tracker is anything to go by. Android 5.0.2 may be?
In other news:
The Interview mints money online:
Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) surprisingly released The Interview, a political comedy film about the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, online through Google Play, YouTube, Xbox Live, iTunes (which joined the party last) and other video on demand (VOD) services (no PlayStation?) after an unprecedented hack by a group named Guardians of Peace resulted in entire movies, scripts, budgets, passwords, embarrassing (and racially insensitive) emails, development plans and Social Security numbers of more than 50,000 employees making their way to the public domain.
SPE had earlier scrapped its plans to release the movie following a 9/11-styled threat from the hacker group. Though US officials have formally linked the coordinated attacks to North Korea, the East Asian country has repeatedly denied involvement, slamming the movie's fictional plot as an act of terror. With the hack's provenance thus still unknown, focus, in the meanwhile, has shifted to disgruntled former employees of the firm.
For what it's worth (let's set aside the freedom of expression and political correctness for now!), the drama and buzz seems to have paid off. The movie made a stunning US$ 18 million in online sales, in what's being considered by many movie experts as a pilot case for simultaneous theatrical and VOD release. And as Jason Lynch mentions in his Quartz article, the biggest winner here is Google, which strategically chose to stream the movie on YouTube and Google Play Movies, when other popular players like iTunes and even Netflix chose not to carry the film for whatever reasons. As for Sony, it has a lot to clean up, not to forget that this is the second such data breach in the company's history post the 2011 PlayStation Network outage that led to the theft of more than 75 million users' credit card information.
Apple faces a new lawsuit, this time for its shrinking storage space on its 16GB iDevices:
Apple had its biggest iOS release ever last September and while it may have not been the smoothest release ever, the mobile operating system has now become the victim of a fresh lawsuit, with the tech giant being accused of deceptive and misleading practices. It's a known fact that Apple's iOS occupies a chunk of the advertised storage space, but according to the new lawsuit filed in California, this isn't explicit enough when customers purchase a new Apple product, or update their devices to a newer version of system software and that this discrepancy is "beyond any possible reasonable expectation".
It also alleges that the company exploits the space constraints by pushing its users to paid iCloud storage plans to store photos and the likes instead of supporting SD cards and other desktop file transfer utilities to offload the files. Is the lawsuit frivolous? It's notable that Microsoft not long ago faced a similar complaint with its Surface Pro tablets. But whatever be the case, I think it's high time for Apple to drop the 16GB base configuration altogether.
Infamous Android Lollipop memory leak bug finally fixed:
Android 5.0 aka Lollipop is beautiful and fun to use, but it's crippled by a weird bug that fills up the phone's memory, causing memory-intensive apps like Google Play Music and at times even the homescreen launcher to crash. Not anymore! It seems like the issue has been recently fixed and marked for a future release if the Android bug tracker is anything to go by. Android 5.0.2 may be?
In other news:
- Time magazine honours Ebola Fighters as 2014 Person of the Year.
- North Korea suffers from a widespread 9-hour internet outage as Google's Gmail traffic slowly trickles back in China after a sudden four-day blockage.
- Hacker group Lizard Squad takes Sony PlayStation Network and Xbox Live offline with a massive Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) on Christmas Day; 22-year-old Vinnie Omari, a member of the group, is arrested in the UK, while the collective begins to sell the service Lizard Stresser for anyone who is willing to pay (in Bitcoins).
- Mozilla makes Yahoo! its default search engine in its Firefox browser in the US as part of a new five-year strategic partnership.
- Indian telephone carrier Airtel kicks up storm after it announces outrageous plans to separately charge for VoIP calls through Skype, Viber and others; cancels it after stiff public opposition.
- Twitter's new deceptive sponsored ads encroach on your Following list; makes it appear like you are following brands even if you don't.
- Sony PlayStation is 20 years old.
- YouTube updates its view counter to a 64-bit integer (which has a maximum value of 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 or 9 quintillion) after Psy's Gangnam Style crosses 2,147,483,647 views (the last number possible with a 32-bit integer).
- Facebook-owned photo-sharing network Instagram crosses 300 million monthly active users; beats Twitter's user base, but co-founder Evan Williams says he "frankly doesn't give a s***" as long as "important stuff breaks on Twitter and world leaders have conversations on Twitter".
- Samsung to shut down its ChatON instant messenger service come February 1; to make fewer number of phones as it battles intense competition from Apple, Xiaomi, Motorola and Huawei.
- BlackBerry announces BlackBerry Classic, a throwback to what made the company famous in the first place; to partner with Boeing on a ultra-secure, self-destructing smartphone.
- Microsoft all set to announce Windows 10 at an event on January 21; said to be building a new light-weight Chromium-based web browser called Spartan.
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