Monthly Archives: September 2008

[Stories] Islands in the Northern Sea and Confidential Data

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What happened in earlier episodes

By the time one can get the feeling, our fellows from the administration of this island in the northern sea have a very – let’s say “own” – relationship to personal data than we continental europeans. To make things short, here we got a short overview about what happened before:

  • November 21st, 2007: The HM Revenue and Customs administration misplaces (or loses) a CD containing child benefit data of 7,25 million families (incl. all names, birthdays etc.pp)
  • December 18th, 2007: The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency assigns a U.S. American company (Pearson Driving Assessments) to edit and handle data of driving learners. The harddrive containing 3 million datasets however gets lost somewhere.
  • December 23rd, 2007: National Health Services lose or misplace mediums containing some 100,000 sets of patient data from hospitals
  • August 22nd, 2008: UK’s Home Office loses or misplaces an USB stick containing unencrypted data of about 120,000 criminals, including files of the inquiry.
  • August 26th, 2008: on eBay hardrives got sold – containing datasets of about a million british bank customers
  • August 27th, 2008: the Charnwood Borough Council sells a harddrive that has in fact been erased, but not been wiped. Datasets of 35,000 people can be recovered using freely available unerase software.
  • September 9th, 2008: the National Offender Management Service assigns EDS to edit and handle their employees data. A harddrive containing data of 5,000 employess gets lost or misplaced.
  • September 26th, 2008: the General Teaching Council loses or misplaces a CD containing data of 11,000 teachers (incl. names etc.)
  • September 28th, 2008: the Ministry of Defence admits having had a burglery on a military air base. Thus losing 50,000 soldier’s datasets.

The whole globe is really wondering when all this disgrace will eventually stop. Not now, that’s for sure.

No more stories

You say: you can not believe it? We neither. Again the administration from the island have had a – let’s say creeping – issue with precautions for confidential data. This time obviously an MI6 agent sold a camera on eBay for 17UK£.

You can definitely anticipate what the deal was with that specific camera, can’t you? Mr. MI6 used it for getting some nice shots of accused terrorists, fingerprints and such. And of course he forget the thing with the deletion of the SD card.

A 27 year old buyer was quite irritated when downloading his holiday photos of that camera and having to find out that there were some more pictures on it…

[e-Biz] Apple Stock Going Down 17% on Nasdaq

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Morgan Stanley and the Royal Bank of Canada yesterday downgraded Apple’s share from “overweight” to “equal-weight”, cutting down the price target from $178 to $115. They don’t expect Apple to sell as much Macs within the next three months like in the 2.5 years before. After this information the Apple share went down from 128.24US$ to 105.26US$, thus losing more than 17%.

Morgan Stanley expects a deceleration in PC unit growth in general. The only part of the market that will have (little) growth is the sub-$1,000 area. A field in which Apple is not represented well.

» Nasdaq stock quote for Apple…

[e-Biz] Wallmart also Shutting down DRM Servers

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The next DRM Server’s Shutdown to come

The transition is coming silenty, for Walmart it began in August 2007, when they began selling digital music free of DRM. Prior Walmart has been using the proprietary implementation WMA by Microsoft to protect music from copying. With the open letter by Steve Jobs (February 2007), that dealt with the DRM topic, the music marketing model began to shift from DRM protected music to pure MP3’s. In February 2008 Walmart ceased to offer digital music with DRM in favor of only offering pure MP3’s.

Now the transition seems almost over. Walmart now sent emails informing their DRM customers, that the DRM servers will be shut down soon – thus turning all legally bought WMA audio tracks worthless. Walmart strongly recommends to back up the protected music to normal audio CD’s:

“By backing up your songs, you will be able to access them from any personal computer. This change does not impact songs or albums purchased after Feb 2008, as those are DRM-free.”

The hassle-freeness of Legality?

Like the customers of Microsoft Music, who forced them to have the DRM servers running for the next three years and the customers of Yahoo Music, who will shut down their servers tomorrow, also Walmart’s digital music customers from the earliest days will most likely consider this the end of an argy-bargy story. We can’t imagine they would really feel pleased for having to manually convert all their legally bought audio tracks to tons of audio CDs and having to re-rip them with loss of quality.

Now what exactly was the advantage of buying music legally online vs. illegally downloading vs. buying the CD in the first place? The evolution of digital consciousness has obviously just begun to start in the heads of the music industry’s leaders.

[iPhone] Recommended Apps: PaklSound1

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People in the know what’s going on in the field of music innovations have already gotten to know Tenori-On by Yamaha. Tenori-On is by far the most innovative new music instruments (read article here).

Anyway a group of programmers now decided to bring at least parts of the fun that Tenori-On includes to our beloved Jesus phone. The application is called PaklSound1 and is pure fun when sitting in the train or anywhere else. Be warned it is by far not as powerful as Tenori-On and requires lots of battery power, but therefore it costs only 0.79€ (0.99US$).

» Buy and Download PaklSound1 on AppStore…
» More information on the PaklSound1 page…

On YouTube a guy has prepared this nice video, enjoy:

[iPhone] Apple Sells Unlocked 3G’s in Hong Kong (update)

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As of today Apple sells their new iPhone 3G factory unlocked in Hong Kong. The Apple Site explicitly says:

“iPhone 3G purchased at the Apple Online Store can be activated with any wireless carrier.”

Prices will vary from 5,400HK$ for the 8GB model (695US$ or 476€) and 6,200HK$ for the 16GB model (798US$ or 547€). This obviously is the end of Apple’s strategy of exclusive carrier linking of their iPhones.

We want to remind you that import taxes will apply when shipping from Hong Kong to either the US or Europe. So this would not be a bargain. You’d better wait a couple of weeks, probably Apple will apply this new selling strategy to other markets as well in the near future. Next step should be to license visual voicemail to any carrier worldwide and make it a standard in cell phone communication.

» Find more information on the Apple Hong Kong page…
» See our iPhone 3G “Factory Unlocked List” list here (update)..

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[MacOS] Using CrossOver to run UltraEdit

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I. Abstract

Many of us are nowadays using different operating systems almost at the same time. At work most of us use Windows machines, at home we use a Mac, coexisting with a Windows Laptop. Although we really like the Mac eco system, from time to time we find out we’re missing something from the Windows world very desperately. Many of us coders who recently switched to a Mac soon find out, we miss one thing for sure: UltraEdit. UltraEdit is one (if not even the) editor for the Windows environment. And once you get used to a workflow you will not want to miss it, no matter if you switched completely or not. This is were the emulators or the virtual machines come into play. As long term users of UltraEdit we’re gonna show you in the following article how to get UltraEdit (almost natively) installed on MacOS using the WINE based CrossOver by CodeWeavers. Enjoy…

II. What you need

  • Intel Mac (or a Hackintosh with EFI-X) running MacOS X 10.5 Leopard
  • CrossOver Mac 7.0.1 installed. Get a CrossOver trial version here (we recommend to get the “Professional Version” as it also includes CrossOver Games, but for running UltraEdit only, CrossOver Standard Version will be sufficient.)
  • UltraEdit 14.10 installer. Get an UltraEdit trial version here. In case the downloaded file is .zipped, please unpack before proceeding.

III. Prepping CrossOver

  1. Start CrossOver. The welcome screen will ask you what to do. Click the “CrossOver Software Installer” link:
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  2. An Installer window will pop up. Choose “Install Unsupported Software“:
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  3. Click “Continue” after having read this reminder:
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  4. Choose to “Install into... New bottle” and click “Create Bottle and Continue“:
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  5. Enter the “New bottle name:” (like UltraEdit, for example) and choose “New bottle type” as “winxp” (yes, means Windows XP compatibility mode). And hit the “Create” button:
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    The bottle is being created then. This process may take some minutes on older machines.

IV. Installing UltraEdit

  1. After bottle creation, CrossOver like to install. So “Choose Installer File...” and click “Install“…
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  2. Locate the installer file. It will be called something like “ue_english.msi“. Click “Use this installer“:
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  3. CrossOver will prepare to install (no interaction of yours required here!)
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  4. Et voilà, the well known Windows installer will be loaded. Click “Next”
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  5. We expect, you know how to install Windows software, so we’re not gonna comment the following screenies:
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  6. We did not install UltraCompare, but you may give it a try…
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  7. Uncheck the “Lauch UltraEdit” box and click “Finish“.
    picture-19.png

V. Final preparations

  1. After installation, Crossover will do a virtual reboot of its Windows XP bottle, where you installed UltraEdit into (no interaction of yours required here!)
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  2. After virtual reboot, it will create the program links. You may now double click the “UltraEdit” program link to start it.
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  3. Feeling home already?
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  4. Don’t hesitate to type some lines
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  5. Yes, you’re done…

VI. Final words

We hope you had some fun, following this tiny HowTo to get UltraEdit back to our new environment. Although the FTP feature did not work for us, as it crashs UltraEdit, by being able to run UltraEdit we can use our trained workflow for coding and editing. Anyway there are native editing solutions on a Mac, which we will have a closer view on within next time.

[Windows] Pre-Beta of Windows 7 to be disseminated on Oct, 28th

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At Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference 2008 (PDC 2008) in Los Angeles, Microsoft will distribute Windows 7 to participants of Steven Sinofsky‘s Keynote. This Pre-Beta of Windows 7 will obviously be distributed on a 160GB harddrive, which also contains conference notes. The conference will mainly demonstrate how developers can make their Windows applications compatible with Windows 7.

Windows 7 will be based on Windows Vista and will be released in January 2008. Microsoft accentuated several times the support of multitouch displays. It will also contain the well known Office 2007 ribbon technology in WordPad and in Paint.

[Windows] Google Chrome without Spyware = Iron (update)

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[Update] Feb 2nd, 2011

It seems Iron is no serious project and only follows the intention to allure people visiting the SRWare Iron website in order to make money from Google’s adsense.

More information to be found here:

http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2009/12/iron.html


What it is

The “Iron” browser is based on the “Google Chromium” source code, but “Iron” does not send any user specific data to Google anymore and it does not contain a unique user ID. Iron is a product of “SRWare” – a german software company. In Iron the following Google Chrome features have been deactivated:

  • no alternative error messages, when having entered a wrong URL
  • no sending of collected data to Google, if Iron has crashed
  • no unwanted Google updater

Iron is available for Microsoft Windows only. Download Iron here (german page!). Installing in CrossOver Mac sadly does not work out of the box…

[Update] Sep 26th, 2008 The language Thing

Although our screenshot shows Iron with german interface, it turns to english, when it’s gotten installed to an english Windows version.

[Update] Sep 27th, 2008 The Next Browser Wars (internal link)

You may find some background information about the Browser Wars in one of our recent articles here.

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[Android] First Google Android Cellphone: HTC G1 (update)

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Today T-Mobile US, HTC and Google presented the first cellphone running with the Android operating system by Google. The HTC manufactured device will be called “G1 with Google” and will be available from october 22nd, 2008 for 180US$. The phone will be net-locked to the T-Mobile US network.

T-Mobile’s tariff

T-Mobile’s plan includes a data traffic up to 1GB with UMTS, after 1GB traffic will be slowed down to the GPRS level. The monthly plan including 400 SMS’ will cost 25US$/mth (with unlimited using of Messaging: 35US$)

The HTC G1 phone

The HTC G1 phone integrates a touch screen like the iPhone, a tiny keyboard that hides behind the screen if not required, a camera (3megapixel) and an extension slot for microSDHC cards (256MB card preinstalled).

Availability of the HTC G1

Introduction in Great Britan: early november.
Introduction in Germany: early december.
Rest of Europe: Q1/2009

MobileBurn.com prepped a video, see here:

[Windows] New Features In Windows 7

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It seems the upcoming Windows 7 operating system will include some nice features for their customers. First being a feature to automatically update installed games. Manual searching for patches, bugfixes and add-ons might be finally over then. The technique seems to be similar to the update technique for Microsoft Office. The game update feature is currently included in an early developer version of Windows 7. Next being the Ribbon technology. As it has been introduced in Microsoft Office 2007, in Windows 7 even the WordPad and Paint will have the Ribbon technology.

Microsoft reps didn’t tell if these features will really be available in the final version of the upcoming operating system. Windows 7 is planned to be released in 2010 and will be based on Vista.

Pictures are courtesy of ThinkNext (see more pictures here)…

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