Archive for November, 2009
One of the least remarked-upon scams of the last decade has been the rise of what I call racket ware.
As in protection racket.
Expert users don’t seem bothered by this. Expert users can avoid the racket. They fix their own registries and change their own oil. To the extent they have contempt for the user on the street, I say they’re in on the racket.
We all know how it works. Windows slows down for no reason. You go online to check it out. You’re told, “try this free, it will fix you up right” and you download it. You load it. It runs, and then it says “you have hundreds of problems here that must be fixed right now. But it’s going to cost you.”
Nice bits you got there. Shame if something happened to them.
The user then faces a choice. Buy the software — buy it now — or lose control of their machine to malware.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
There’s always a new kind of scam coming along. There’s always something that the products you own don’t pick up, but this new piece of junk will. Or will claim to.
Malware locks into Windows like barnacles on a ship. If you’ve ever watched Windows load you know why. It’s messy. There are a ton of .dll files and hot key entries where malware can hide.
I’m not just talking here about viruses. I’m also talking about ad-ware and the messes legitimate programs make in registries and on hard drives, all the software dust bunnies Windows lets developers toss into systems.
The developers of Chrome OS talk a good game about fixing this. Our own Ryan Naraine at Zero Day has been on this like white on rice. Too lazy to read? Watch the video.
Google’s work will be conducted against a solid wall of skepticism. Bruce Schneier has already condemned it, calling it 2+2=3 impossible. Others, more cynical, insist this is all just a plot to impose Google adlware on us.
Maybe. But starting with a clean sheet of paper, and limiting access to the operating system, is not where Windows started. Windows started with the idea of enabling, not preventing. And Google starts with a Linux kernel — all the Linux geeks here love to talk about how secure that is.
So we’ll see. And I’ll have my fingers crossed.
Filed under: Games, Time-Wasters
Hammertime in 60 Seconds is a bizarre collection of mini-games starring the most legit of all 1990s pop culture icons, MC Hammer. In one frantic minute, you try to guide Hammer through a few different screens, battling various opponents and racking up a high score. If you’ve ever wanted to play as MC Hammer in a golf cart, stomping on Hummers, now’s your chance.
Level one involves collecting hammers that drift around the screen, and only takes up 14 seconds of the game. Level two is the aforementioned Hummer stomp, which is generally pretty easy, except that – unlike the real Hammer – the Hammer in the game isn’t the smoothest mover. In fact, his jumps are a bit clunky. Getting hit by the SUVs wastes your precious seconds and deducts points.
The third level is where you can really rack up your score: Hammer flies a plane and engages enemy ships in dogfight. You can shoot unlimited hammers at very high speed, so this where you want keep shooting constantly. Hammer’s hot minute finishes up with a surprise boss who attacks with a laser beam from the mouth. It’s not the best-made game ever, but it’s worth at least minute of your time.
Hammertime in 60 Seconds: MC Hammer stars in this Time Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Download Squad – Video game – game – Score – Browser Based
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I recently spoke with Drupal founder and Acquia CTO and cofounder Dries Buytaert. Dries gave me an update on Acquia’s success to date and plans for the future. Many readers know Acquia as one of the key vendors behind the White House’s recent move to open source.
Your local newspaper probably uses maps on its site. If it doesn’t, it will soon. As newspapers look online for readership (and thus, revenue), they look for new ways to show information related to the places they cover.
The Online Journalism Blog has an excellent overview of maps on news sites, which is part of a book about online journalism. It argues maps offer a number of advantages including telling a story at a glance and updating with real-time information.
The most publicized way news sites have used maps is to show public data. The best example of that is EveryBlock, with a lineage going back to the award-winning Chicago Crime mashup (that site is now gone but details at our Chicago Crime profile). The EveryBlock founders like Adrian Holovaty were journalists and newspaper technologists looking to change how local news is reported.
If you want more examples of how this is happening, take a look at our mashup directory where we have 84 mashups combining maps + news.
Public data can also give a view of aggregated data, as well. The overview provides this example:
“In the UK the most significant mapping of public data has been around elections. The Telegraph election maps, for example, pull from a database to provide links to specific statistics and reports. The BBC, meanwhile, have provided maps that you could change based on your own prediction of the ’swing’ a political party might experience.”
There’s more and more public data being made available now, such as the United States’ Data.gov. And, as O’Reilly Radar noted when EveryBlock was acquired by MSNBC, data is journalism. And if journalism is local, maps are the best way to show location-based data.
Filed under: iPhone, Microblogging
The much-anticipated Twitter client Tweetie 2.1 has finally arrived on the iPhone. It’s the first major update to Tweetie 2, and it features support for Lists, Geotagging and native retweets.
One of the most-anticipated changes is the way the app displays retweets, with a small version of the retweeter’s icon inset on the original poster’s. The “quote tweet” option is still available, so if you’re a fan of the old-style retweets, you can still use them just as easily.
Tweetie 2.1’s support for the list feature includes the ability to create, edit and view lists. To access it, just go to your profile and scroll down. Other people’s lists, of course, are found on their own profile pages.
In terms of geolocation, tweets sent using Twitter’s new geotag support will show up with a red pin icon in the corner. Clicking the pin will display the city the tweet was sent from, and allow you to zoom in to the precise location of the tweet on a Google Map. You can also geotag your own tweets, of course.
If you want to give Tweetie 2.1 a spin, it’s $2.99 in the app store, or a free update for current Tweetie 2 users.
Tweetie 2.1 hits App Store, supports Twitter’s new features originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 29 Nov 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Twitter – App Store – IPhone – Tweetie – Google
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Filed under: Video, Microsoft, Humor
Remember when Microsoft thought it was a good idea to enlist characters from Family Guy as their new Windows 7 spokespeople? It was a funny idea, but somewhere between the beginning of production and the scheduled air-date, Microsoft executives realized two things: a) the target audience for a Windows 7 commercial is probably not getting high and watching cartoons right now, and b) the ads just weren’t very good.
After seeing clips of the Family Guy ads, I’m not convinced they’re better than Microsoft’s previous big-budget ad failure, those Seinfeld and Bill Gates spots. At least the Seinfeld ads were totally weird, instead of taking a show you know and love and painfully shoehorning some product placement where it doesn’t belong. A mention of Windows 7 in an actual episode of Family Guy could at least have been played for big laughs, but these clips fall flat.
Don’t believe me? See for yourself after the jump.
[via Gizmodo]
Continue reading Microsoft releases Windows 7 Family Guy clips, horrifies world
Microsoft releases Windows 7 Family Guy clips, horrifies world originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 29 Nov 2009 12:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Microsoft – FamilyGuy – Bill Gates – Windows 7 – Product placement
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This past week 20 new mashups were add to our mashup directory and 24 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include Goodreads, Norway Weather, Playme, Rezgo, Tweetmeme, and the USGS Elevation Query Service. The most often used APIs this week are Amazon eCommerce, Google Maps, and Twitter. And the most frequently used types of APIs were Mapping (6 APIs, 14 mashups), and Social (3 APIs, 7 mashups), Internet (3 APIs, 3 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
Bing used in Trendy!Bing
Box.net used in Loop for Box.net
Evri used in The Attack Machine
GeoNames used in SvD weather
Google AJAX Libraries used in That Big Shop
Google App Engine used in Trendy!Bing
Google Maps used in 3D Map for Hong Kong, Darwin Bus Map, FriendLocator, Jewforme, Photo Map, SvD weather, TweetUrMusic, USPS Tracking
Google Maps Data used in Jewforme
Norway Weather used in SvD weather
Playme used in TweetUrMusic
Twitter used in Darwin Bus Map, Jewforme, Photo Map, SourceCow, TweetUrMusic
US Postal Service used in USPS Tracking
USGS Elevation Query Service used in SvD weather
WatchMouse used in Just DNS lookup
Yahoo Geocoding used in U.S. of Ajax
Yahoo Maps used in CitySlick, U.S. of Ajax
YouTube used in The Attack Machine, TweetzTV
Mashups of the day:
And each day there is one mashup selected to be Mashup of the Day. Here are last week’s winners:
Filed under: Developer, Video, Microsoft, iPhone
The ongoing on saga of Flash on the iPhone (or, more to the point, the lack thereof) has been frustrating to users and developers alike. Adobe’s even gone as far as creating Flash-to-iPhone app technology to bridge the gap. Meanwhile, Microsoft just scored a big coup by announcing that Silverlight video will work on the iPhone. In fact, you can already view a demonstration.
It’s not as if Microsoft brokered some secret deal with Apple that Adobe couldn’t. Instead, they made their own software stream Quicktime-compatible video to the iPhone using the HTML5 video tag. That means you don’t need a plugin to view Silverlight video, you can just watch the same H.264 stream that sites like YouTube use on the iPhone. It also doesn’t mean all Silverlight content providers will automatically stream H.264, but at least they have the option. Nice one, Microsoft!
[via Betanews]
Microsoft brings Silverlight video to the iPhone, without a plugin originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 28 Nov 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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IPhone – Microsoft – Apple – YouTube – Adobe Systems
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Want new APIs? This week saw an interesting mix of new entries in our API directory including a service for publishing and accessing location-relevant content, a simple API to get a JSON-formatted list of people you tweet most, a variety of APIs based on Clickatell’s SMS services, a video API providing search to over 300 million online videos, and a real estate listing search API for Multiple Listing Service (MLS) properties. Here are more details on each of these new API listings:
Auto Follow Friday API: Use this API to quickly produce a JSON array list of people you tweet most (during your last 100 tweets)
Clickatell FTP API: One of seven SMS APIs offered by Clickatell. Clickatell covers over 819 networks in 220 countries. All these APIs support text, Unicode, binary SMS and flash messaging. If you wish to send once-off, high volume message batches (especially from legacy systems) than FTP is best suited to your needs. With FTP you can send concatenated messages, use ringtone and logo converters, and set up sender ID, delivery acknowledgement, batch sending and two-way messaging. You will also have access to gateway escalation and queuing, which lets you specify up to 3 prioritised queues according to which your messages will be sent out.
Clickatell SMPP API: This Clickatell API uses SMPP for regular high-volume SMS users (there is a monthly minimum requirement of 5,000 SMS credits), enabling messages to be sent reliably and at high speed. Clickatell supports connections via SMPP using the global SMPP 3.4 standard, and is backward compatible. SMPP connection supports extended length messages, provides converters to turn ringtones and logos into the correct format, allows delivery acknowledgement, sender ID, and two-way messaging.
Aloqa API: The Aloqa Content Publisher API allows you to “publish location-relevant content (a business directory, social network, dating site or any other relevant content useful for people on the go) by creating a channel on Aloqa instead of building and supporting mobile applications for the many phones out there.”
Clipta API: Clipta’s API allows you to “search and display an index of over 300 million online videos, and offers web publishers and developers to bring customizable video search to their sites and use video search results in custom applications and widgets.”
GetYourIDX API: GetYourIDX is an online real estate IDX service, allowing website’s to provide IDX data searches direct from your web site (according to Wikipedia: ” Internet Data Exchange (IDX) is a real estate property search site which allows the public to conduct searches of approved Multiple Listing Service properties in a certain area.”). It is a pay-as-you go service. They guarantee to return all IDX queries within 1 second.
When Apple first started rejecting iPhone apps for strange or controversial reasons, it was newsworthy, but after a while it became impractical to write about all of these rejections, because – my gosh! – you could fill an entire site with these! AppRejections.com has done just that. It’s a new site you can check to see all the latest disputed app rejections.
AppRejections is a bit of schadenfreude for Apple-haters who enjoy reveling in what seems to be Apple’s most unpopular policy, but it’s also a place for developers to send their problems with the App Store. It lets developers commiserate and let off some steam, but it also provides some information about Apple’s seemingly-inconsistent app approval policies. Heck, maybe Apple VP Phil Schiller will even descend from on high again to fix some of the more egregious rejections.
[via TheAppleBlog]
New website covers the rejected iPhone app beat originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 27 Nov 2009 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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iPhone – AppStore – Apple – Download Squad – Philip W. Schiller
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