November 24, 2024
Keeping tech free
Now that we got last week out of the way, let’s look at what happened this week–or at least news that came to our attention this week…
You can now actually own digital comics
Digital rights and anti-DRM activists should be a little happy to learn that a major player in the comics’ world has decided to make actual ownership of its comics possible.
We’re making up for lost time. We took last week off to celebrate the Fourth (any excuse for a party), so this week you get more bang for your buck. To paraphrase the Doublemint Twins, you get two, two, two weeks in one!
Windows 8 now used by more people than Vista
Something tells us this is a milestone Steve Ballmer wishes we’d keep quiet about, but last week we learned from CNET that Windows 8 is now on more computers than Vista. It took eight months, but as of June, the installed base of Redmond’s latest has now passed that of Vista, probably the least popular operating system in Microsoft’s history.
In the last couple of weeks I’ve received two advertising flyers from the folks at Dell. As usual, both were pretty flashy print jobs featuring high quality color photography on slick paper. One of the brochures was aimed at business customers, the other at consumers.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Texas stands up for email rights
Texas? Did you really say Texas? The state that leads the world in the number of executions–that Texas? Well, la-di-da, who would’ve ever thought the folks down there in the Lone Star State would be the first to stand up and protect our inboxes? Does this mean that the spirits of Ann Richards and Maury Maverick, Jr. are looking over the Texas legislators?
According to a story posted by Phillip Molnar at the Monterey County Herald, the U.S. Army is blocking access to parts of The Guardian, the UK based news website which broke the story about the NSA’s surreptitious data collection programs. When the Herald’s story was first posted last night, it was unknown how widespread the outage was or who was behind it, only that employees at the Presidio of Monterey, California were unable to connect with certain pages of the UK website:
We may be paranoid but they are out to get us
In week three (or is it week four?) of the Spy vs. Spy scandal, the Obama folks keep saying things like “what’s the big deal?” while trying to convince us that the secret oversight court called FISA (we prefer “the Star Chamber”) has nothing but our constitutional rights in mind when it rubber stamps requests to secretly steal our privacy. Obama likes to talk about transparency. Indeed, he becomes more transparent by the moment; we’re beginning to see right through him. The 22nd amendment should now be seen as a face saver for Mr. Obama–as we would think no self respecting liberal or progressive would vote again for this man who once represented our best hope. Pity.
Looking at life through the prism of the NSA
We thought last week was the week for leaked government secrets on government spying. Nope. Last week was just the tip of the iceberg coming over the horizon, with the helmsman going into full reverse attempting to avoid a collision. This week the slow motion ship of state made contact with the iceberg. Damage assessment is being done now as we write these words.
Friday FOSS Week in Review Apple trumps Microsoft’s product placement We had to laugh last Friday night while watching a rerun of Hawaii Five-0 on…
Google drops open Talk for closed Hangouts
There’s been a lot of back-and-forth going on now that Google has announced intentions to replace Talk, the open standards supporting instant messaging service, with proprietary Hangouts. While Talk works with the XMPP industry standard which allows cross-platform use, Hangouts will be completely closed and proprietary. In other words, if you want to talk to someone on Hangouts, that person must be using Hangouts as well.
Every school kid knows not to put all your eggs in one basket.
Up until about 1999 or so, I thought we were being cautious and smart about this newfangled Internet thing that had us under its spell. Then there was a now forgotten news story that told me exactly how completely we were being seduced by this new technology.
Microsoft was working on a new version of Windows, Whistler I think, and it got hacked. Somebody broke into the computer they had it on and downloaded it, which was big news in the tech press but hardly anywhere else. Microsoft audited the code, attempting to make sure it hadn’t been tampered with, and found it clean. There were no trojans or back doors installed. None they found anyway.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Where has Redmond’s moxy gone?
It wasn’t that many years ago that even a giant OEM like HP wouldn’t dare release a non-Windows product if the device type was Windows supported. If this were five years ago and the tablet boom was in full bloom as it is now and Windows was tablet ready, as it supposedly is now, the HP brass wouldn’t even entertain the thought of releasing a tablet running anything other than Redmond’s finest OS–apps available or no.
