ENTRIES TAGGED "google android"
Android Chaos, Open Source Briefings, Scripting nmap, Russian Cybercrime
- The Dirty Little Secret About Google Android (ZD Net) — By some reports, the Open Handset Alliance is in now shambles. Members such as HTC have gone off and added lots of their own software and customizations to their Android devices without contributing any code back to the Alliance. Motorola and Samsung have begun taking the same approach. The collaborative spirit is gone — if it ever existed at all. And, Google is proving to be a poor shepherd for the wolves-in-sheep’s-clothing that make up the telecoms and the handset makers in the Alliance. The mobile phone industry is as messed up as enterprise Unix was in the 80s. (via Hacker News)
- MilOSS Working Group 2 Wrap Up — A challenge was issued at the barcamp lunch in response to the need for a canonical set of briefing charts detailing the value of open source software for the military, from security to basic definitions to legal issues. All-in-all, about 100 briefing charts were created and will soon be made available to the community to use/modify/tweak as needed. (via johnmscott on Twitter)
- nmap Scripting Engine — Lua embedded in nmap lets you automate a lot of network-related tasks. (via Slashdot)
- Russian Cybercrime: Geeks not Gangsters — “Basically, from what we’ve seen on the forums much of what goes on with the sales of services is much more petty criminal activity, or crimes of opportunity,” Grugq said. “Often poor students who like to hack for fun will sell access to a server they’ve owned. Many don’t even realise that this is an illegal activity. This sale will be for $20 or $30 (£!3 or £19), which is a lot of money for a poor student in Russia, but for a hardened criminal mastermind bent on destroying Western civilization — not so much.” We need to launch a distributed denial of students attack on Russia. (via jasonwryan on Twitter)
Place Context, iPod Hardware, Mobile Cognitive Surplus, and Music Hacking APIs
- BBC Dimensions — brilliant work, a fun site that lets you overlay familiar plcaes with famous and notable things so you can get a better sense of how large they are. Example: the Colossus of Rhodes straddling O’Reilly HQ, the Library of Alexandria vs the Google campus, and New Orleans Mardi Gras began at the headquarters of Fred Phelps’s Westboro Baptist Church. (via this piece about its background)
- Podapter — simple plug that takes mini-USB and goes into an iPod or iPhone. (via Tuesday product awesomeness)
- New NexusOne Radio Firmware — a glimpse of the world that’s sprung up sharing the latest goodies between countries, carriers, and developers. For everyone for whose products the street has found a new use, the challenge is to harness this energy, enthusiasm, knowledge, and devotion. In terms of cognitive surplus, this far exceeds the 1 LOLCAT minimum standard unit. (via YuweiWang on Twitter)
- Echoes Nest Remix API — access to database of song characteristics and tools to manipulate tunes. See the Technology Review article for examples of what it’s capable of. (via aaronsw on Twitter)
Network Neutrality, Open Data, Science Policy, and the Android Army
- A Review of Verizon and Google’s Net Neutrality Proposal (EFF) — a mixture of good and bad, is the verdict. I am ready to give Google credit for getting Network Neutrality back on the regulatory agenda, whether or not this proposal was a strawman.
- Ten Principles for Opening Up Government Information (Sunlight Foundation) — We have updated and expanded upon the Sebastopol list and identified ten principles that provide a lens to evaluate the extent to which government data is open and accessible to the public. The list is not exhaustive, and each principle exists along a continuum of openness. The principles are completeness, primacy, timeliness, ease of physical and electronic access, machine readability, non-discrimination, use of commonly owned standards, licensing, permanence and usage costs.
- What If the Web Really Worked for Science? Reimagining Data Policy and Intellectual Property (video) — a talk by James Boyle on IP and science policy.
- Winners of the Apps for Army Challenge — more Android apps than iPhone in the winners. (via Alex)
Life Games, Tablets, Image Processing at Scale, and Open Source Currency
- Super Me — a game structure to give you happiness in life. Brilliant idea, and nice execution from a team that includes British tech stars Alice Taylor and Phil Gyford. (via crystaltips on Twitter)
- Android Tablet — the PanDigital Novel is a wifi-enabled book-reader that’s easily modded to run Android and thus a pile of other software. Not available for sale yet, but “coming soon”. A hint of the delights to come as low-cost Android tablets hit the market.
- Batch Processing Millions of Images (Etsy) — 180 resizes/second, done locally (not on EC2), with much fine-tuning. This is how engineering battles are won.
- BitCoin — open source digital currency project.
JS UI, Teeny Open Source Notebook, On The End of a Mobile Age, and Modern Education
- UKI: Simple UI Kit for Complex Web Apps — Uki is a fast and simple JavaScript user interface toolkit for desktop-like web applications. It comes with a rich view-component library ranging from Slider to List and SplitPane. Includes the now-ubiquitous Mail.app mockup, which has become to UI library webpages what the bucket of grease and dirt is to household cleaner commercials. (via Hacker News)
- NanoNote — USD100 minute sub-notebook computer (320×240 screen, 126g including battery, 2G storage, qwerty keyboard) with Creative Commons (attribution, sharealike) licenses on the schematics.
- On Android Compatibility (Dan Morril) — Rewind to about 5 years ago. [...] Back then as today, it was practically unheard of for a feature phone to ever get a software update.[...] The reason was that the smartphone platform vendors controlled the software. It was exceedingly difficult for OEMs to differentiate on software because they had little control over the software. It was difficult for them to differentiate on features because they could only ship features supported by the OS they were using. But it was still a fiercely competitive market and they still innovated as hard as they could. So they innovated on the only dimension they had control over: hardware and industrial design. [...] Think about that. Easier to rev hardware than software! A fantastically lucid explanation of the messed-up age of carrier-controlled mobile platforms that we’re just leaving (and yes, we probably do have Steve Jobs to thank for that). (via Kevin Marks)
- Living and Learning in the Cloud (EdTalks) — talk by the deputy-principal of a New Zealand high-school that’s running all open source, and has extended the “available to be improved” mindset to rooms and curriculum. (via br3nda)
Barcodes, Python's Innards, Informed Elections, and Data Literacy
- zxing — barcode library for iPhone, Android, Java, and more.
- Guido’s Python — how the compiler and interpreter see your Python programs. It wasn’t until I had this level of knowledge of Perl that I really know what the hell I was doing. (via Hacker News)
- UK Election Data — this was posted on the eve of the UK election and talks about the new data they had this election. There’s been a lot of talk about Internet use by candidates to whip up votes, and by government to boost citizens, but this is data that helps citizens decide who to vote for. Very cool.
- Why We Should Learn the Language of Data (Wired) — We often say, rightly, that literacy is crucial to public life: If you can’t write, you can’t think. The same is now true in math. Statistics is the new grammar. (via imran on Twitter)
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