Week in Microsoft: multicore OS rewrites, WinPhone 7 casualties, IE security
A Microsoft engineer last week said that to properly handle multicore processors, future operating systems should discard the multitasking systems of today, in favor of dedicating cores to specific tasks. This seems more than a little surprising.
The lack of native code development on Windows Phone 7 Series was always likely to discourage developers with large, preexisting codebases. Mozilla has confirmed that it is suspending development of its version of Firefox for Windows Mobile due to the inability to migrate to Windows Phone.
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Fasting from technology: Saturday is No Tech Day
Saturday, March 27th, is "No Tech Day." Sponsored by UK charity Practical Action, No Tech Day is a time to set aside the luxury gadgets for 24 hours "to raise awareness of how much we all rely on and use gadgets in our everyday life, and think what life is like for people in the developing world who do not have the same access to technology and energy."
Practical Action brings practical technology to developing countries, and has undertaken 141 projects since 2007. Going without your computer and mobile phone for a day is supposed to ease stress but also give "a taste of what life might be like without [tech], and get an insight into why the work that Practical Action does is so important."
Why would anyone want to give up something voluntarily? Practical Action's David Grimshaw explains his own thinking:
In our so called modern, progressive, advanced, western society technology enables us to “get through the day”. The very thought of giving up “all” technology…or even just information and communications technologies… for a whole day makes me enter a state of mind that is near to panic. How will I get things done at work without email or a mobile phone or access to Google (not to mention the more mundane flushing toilet or running tap drinking water - both of which are technologies)? On the other hand… maybe it could be refreshing, re-energising, or a bit like a holiday!
Reflecting on this got me thinking about how my day was exactly a year ago today when I was living and working in Kathmandu, Nepal. I had no access to electricity for 20 hours in the day. Although you might think my mobile phone would work because it has battery power, in fact it often wouldn’t connect because some part of the network was without power or was overloaded with traffic. At night it was too dark to walk around without a torch (oops that’s another technology). In practice I learnt to depend less on technology and more on my own resources. I learnt that face to face meetings and conversations with people often produced better results than protracted email exchanges.
Where each person draws the line is up to them (no electronics? no stove? no toilet?); the point is to encourage reflection on those things we have given up and on what they do to and for our lives.
It's appropriate that such a day, then, would take place near the end of Lent, when many Christians abstain from good things for the same reason.
Given our technology-saturated world, a regular tech fast isn't a bad idea—though it is a bit strange that Practical Action is offering up an iPad to one lucky participant.
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Sprint: no plans to shut down Haiti text messaging campaign
Everybody's in a dither over charges that Sprint-Nextel tried to terminate a short code Haiti earthquake relief campaign run by Catholic Relief Services and the Mobile Commons group. The appeal allows mobile texters to send a short code to CRS and get a call back setting up their donation to the fund.
But in a declaration to the Federal Communications Commission, Mobile Commons cofounder Jed Alpert says that in mid-January Sprint contacted a company working with the service and warned that it intended to turn off the code "unless the text to call program was terminated." The carrier was upset, the intermediary explained, that Mobile Commons "had not filed a program brief with the CRS program." After much back and forth, Sprint "formally rejected the CRS text to call program," Alpert's complaint continues.
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Harvard profs trash ACTA, demand oversight, threaten lawsuit
Harvard Law School professors Lawrence Lessig and Jack Goldsmith took to the op-ed page of the Washington Post today to slam the Obama administration's approach to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)—and to threaten a lawsuit if ACTA is signed without Congressional oversight.
The US has positioned ACTA as an executive agreement rather than a treaty. Such a move means that ACTA doesn't need Senate approval, but it also means that the agreement should not alter US law, either. If you want to change the law, you go to Congress.
Lessig and Goldmsith argue that ACTA, at least it its current leaked form, does involve "ideas and principles not reflected in US law."
Example number one is a pretty poor choice, in our view; the professors say that "ACTA could, for example, pressure Internet service providers—such as Comcast and Verizon—to kick users offline when they (or their children) have been accused of repeated copyright infringement because of content uploaded to sites such as YouTube."
As we've noted before, though, the language here comes from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act—already US law. The leaked drafts show that ISPs need policies in place to deter repeat infringement; a footnote suggests that "three strikes" Internet disconnections might be one appropriate way to do this, but would not be required.
The more fundamental complaint is that the president simply doesn't have the power to negotiate executive agreements on IP law and communications policy.
"The administration has suggested that a sole executive agreement in this instance would not trample Congress's prerogatives because the pact would not affect US domestic law," write the professors. "Binding the United States to international obligations of this sort without congressional approval would raise serious constitutional questions even if domestic law were not affected."
They recommend that Congress stand up for its rights and insist on being consulted—something that (now Vice President) Joe Biden did to the Bush administration when he was a senator. If ACTA is signed without such oversight, Lessig and Goldsmith say it will "be challenged in court."
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Controlling Mars rovers: there's an app for that
What if, instead of pocket-dialing, you could pocket-send-a-Mars-rover-over-a-cliff? That was the goal of two programmers at EclipseCon 2010 (via Slashdot). A competition at the conference asked developers to either create an e4-Rover client or use one to move a demo robot over a model Mars landscape. Two participants, Peter Friese and Heiko Behrens, built the robot-controlling client into an iPhone application.
Entrants could win the rover challenge at EclipseCon in one of two ways. The goal of the first competition was to create the most "attractive, usable, and effective" robotic command-and-control system based on e4, as judged by a panel. The second competition involved using the client to maneuver the provided robot over a landscape, earning points for completed tasks and getting the highest score.
Friese and Behrens built an iPhone application to control the robot using the phone's accelerometer, tilting it around to guide the rover in various directions. They won neither of the two categories, which awarded prizes including a tour of a NASA robotics lab, Lego robotics sets, and credits for Amazon Web Services. Until we all get personal Mars rovers, the realistic implications of the app are small; however, these developers certainly have a jump start on a Mars rover game.
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Piracy up in France after tough three-strikes law passed
France's toughest-in-the-world Internet disconnection law has yet to start cutting off P2P pirates, but the "Hadopi" law has been on the books long enough to see how its provisions are altering behavior. According to a team of French researchers, online copyright infringement is down on P2P networks—but it's up in areas that the law doesn't cover, such as online streaming and one-click download services like Rapidshare.
In fact, since the law was passed, total infringing behavior has actually increased by three percent.
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Big telecom Qwest wants broadband stimulus bucks
The dominant carrier of the western and southwestern United States has announced that it will apply for a $350 million broadband stimulus grant from the Department of Agriculture's Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP). Qwest says it wants to build infrastructure to link over half a million households, hospitals, businesses, and schools that currently have no access to broadband. We're talking download speeds of 12 to 40 Mbps, according to the telcos' press statement.
"Much like the water and electric programs the government established to encourage rural development, federal grants are needed to enable the deployment of broadband to high-cost, unserved areas," Qwest Vice President Steve Davis says in the release.
The news triggered a wry commentary from Karl Bode over at DSL Reports, who notes Qwest's history of trying to block smaller providers access to utility poles, opposing Seattles' fiber development projects, and missing BIP's first stimulus application round, all the while dressing itself up for a possible sale.
"It seems a little counterproductive to give Qwest taxpayer money for network builds they were unwilling to do," Bode notes. "Consider this again: we'd be giving taxpayer money to a company that spent millions of dollars fighting towns and cities from using taxpayer money to wire themselves when Qwest wouldn't."
Qwest covers most of the western US, save Nevada and California. The company's statement doesn't explain where exactly the telco plans to roll out these broadband lines, and the application isn't up on BIP's application database yet. But whatever the carrier is planning on doing, it'd better hurry up. BIP says the deadline for infrastructure project applications is this Monday, March 29, at 5 PM EDT.
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