Archive for December, 2009
If you are as optimistic as we were about Twitter’s location features, you should be downright giddy now. Twitter has acquired the company–and staff–behind one of the most innovative mapping-related APIs. Mixer Labs’ GeoAPI , previously known as TownMe, hosts your geographic data and allows spatial queries such as “find the closest location” (for more see our earlier TownMe news coverage and our TownMe API profile).
Twitter founder Evan Williams announced the acquisition:
The Mixer Labs crew has been working on harnessing the power of local information for a couple years and just recently launched GeoAPI, a comprehensive service for helping developers build geolocation-aware applications. As of today, they’re part of Twitter and will be working to combine the contextual relevance of location to tweets. We want to know What’s happening?, and more precisely, Where is it happening? As a dramatic example, twittering “Earthquake!” alone is not as informative as “Earthquake!” coupled with your current location.
The acquisition, besides the promising technology, is also a talent grab. Business Insider points to at least four former Googlers. Their past includes experience with Google’s Mobile team and Gears, the platform which included a geolocation API (our Google Gears API profile). Twitter already employs Ryan Sarver, who previously worked on another geolocation product at Skyhook Wireless (our Skyhook Wireless API profile).
Though the team is bound to be busy with Twitter’s geolocation features, we hope this doesn’t mean the end for the GeoAPI platform. It’s a young service, but it still has a lot of promise.
At the very least, hopefully a more geo-enabled Twitter will provide the location-sharing platform that can reach mass adoption. Brady Forrest at O’Reilly Radar points out the possibilities:
Twitter has the opportunity to become a major location broker. Twitter currently has a very simple on/off switch for location. To become a full-fledged consumer location service (like Latitude or Fire Eagle) they will need to build in more controls.
Twitter’s Williams points to a more “location-aware future,” especially through apps using its API. We’re looking forward to following along.
Google Voice is great for voicemail and text transcription, call forwarding, and a bunch of other useful phone-related services, but it’s not a full VoIP solution like Skype. That could change in 2010, though, especially since Google acquired Gizmo5, a company that develops technology for web-to-web and web-to-phone calls. Owning Gizmo5 doesn’t necessarily mean Google’s going to compete with Skype, but some recent quotes from a VP at Google suggest things may be headed in that direction.
According to eWeek, a Google VP of Product Development, Bradley Horowitz, told the media that “voicemail transcription, inbox integration and threaded SMS are fantastic features, but we’re really just scratching the surface. Gizmo5 gives us talent and talent technology. … We want to make sure your communication is available to you irrespective of where you are at, what device you have in your pocket, etc.” With Gizmo5′s technology, Google’s brand name and huge userbase, will we be saying “Google Voice me” instead of “Skype me” by this time next year?
I’m not willing to call it one way or the other just yet. What do you think, oh wise DLS readers?
Is Google Voice going to be the next Skype? originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 30 Dec 2009 19:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Google – Skype – GoogleVoice – Gizmo5 – Voice over Internet Protocol
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Assuming the Gizmodo report published by C|Net is accurate, Google plans to police the open source Android ecosystem by delivering its own phone starting in January.
The Nexus One is not designed to beat other Android phones, but to deliver the base technology at what Google considers a fair price, $180 with a two-year contract and $530 unlocked.
Other manufacturers will be free to innovate on top of the Nexus, creating their own user interfaces, applications, and price plans, but if they fall short or even sit on level terms with the Nexus One, buyers will go Google.
Note the contrast with Apple, which rigidly controls its entire ecosystem and fights both technically and legally to make certain no one goes outside the lines it draws.
Note also the contrast with Microsoft, which controls its software but avoids competing with hardware OEMs.
Note too the fears of many that by delivering an open source design Google might lose complete control of its own market. The Nexus One is its answer to that.
Google will freely let you do better, or go cheaper, and it will let you buy an unlocked handset built entirely on open source. But its market will be highly competitive, with the Nexus One guaranteeing other companies deliver value for money.
It’s an interesting approach. Does it meet with your approval?
Filed under: Fun, Text, Utilities, Linux, Office, Productivity, Freeware, Open Source, Education
For new users, I recommend the openSUSE-Edu Li-f-e(Linux for Education) Live DVD. You can get it at http://en.opensuse.org/Education/Live#Download. There are some screen shots here.
This is a Live DVD – you simply place the DVD in the computer’s DVD drive and reboot the machine from it. When the machine comes up, you will be running Linux. Normally, the software won’t write to your computer’s hard drive unless you specifically ask it to. So
- You’ll want to plug in a USB disk drive / memory stick for documents you want to save or share with other users or machines.
- When you shut the computer down and remove the DVD, it will come back up just as it was before.
What’s on the DVD:
- Dozens of educational, scientific and mathematical software packages ranging from pre-school to graduate school. A partial list is here.
- The Sugar desktop from the One Laptop Per Child project.
- Graphics and desktop publishing. A partial list is here.
- The OpenOffice.org productivity suite, the Gobby collaborative editor, the Okular PDF viewer, PdfMod PDF editor and the Evolution e-mail / calendaring package.
- The Ekiga Softphone voice over IP and video conferencing package.
- The Firefox browser, XChat IRC client, Pidgin and Kopete Instant Messaging clients, Chokoq and Gwibber Twitter clients and many more Internet tools.
- Both the Gnome and KDE desktops.
If you’re a more advanced user, or work with a school system that’s building an educational computer system, there are many more tools on this DVD, described here, here and here.
Now let’s take a closer look at some of the packages. For photographers and graphic artists, there’s the GNU Image Manipulation Program, known as The GIMP. Typically, you would use GIMP for retouching photos, editing images, making logos and other sophisticated image manipulation tasks. There’s an excellent collection of tutorials here.
If you’re interested in mind mapping, there’s View Your Mind (vym). You can do 3D modeling and animation with Blender. For vector graphics drawing, there’s Dia, Inkscape and Xara. Desktop publishing is easily done using Scribus. For musicians, there are a number of multimedia players, CD/DVD burning packages, the GNU Solfege ear training package, the Hydrogen advanced drum machine, and two score editors, Canorus and NoteEdit.. There’s also the Gnome sound recorder.
Finally, for developers and other power users, there are four major integrated development environments (IDEs): Anjuta, Eclipse, Mono and NetBeans. There are two web page editors, Bluefish and KompoZer.
In short, just about everything you need to get started with Linux is on this DVD. I highly recommend downloading it and trying it out!
Best Linux software for new users originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 30 Dec 2009 12:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Linux – opensource – OpenOffice.org – OpenSUSE – Operating system
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Filed under: Open Source, Mobile, Android
With 2009 coming to a close, everyone is beginning to look towards the future and what will happen to all the great technology around. Ever since it was introduced, the iPhone has been critiqued for being such a “closed platform”, making developers vet their applications through the App Store.
When Android was introduced, its open source approach allowed developers to get their applications out there more easily. But is this totally safe? Sure, the app store approval process has left a lot to be desired, but could hackers be setting their sights on Android?
According to the 2010 Cyberthreat Forecast by Kaspersky Lab, “The increasing popularity of mobile phones running the Android OS combined with a lack of effective checks to ensure third-party software applications are secure, will lead to a number of high-profile malware outbreaks.”
While users with unlocked and modified iPhones have been subjected to a few attacks already, because of the way the Android OS works, in theory every owner is at risk. We’ll have to see what preventative measures Google takes and how clever hackers become!
Android malware in 2010? originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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iPhone – Android – Google – App Store – Open source
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Filed under: Text, Windows, Open Source
When you ask about a free alternative to Windows Notepad, chances are good that Notepad ++ will be recommended to you. Another alternative which doesn’t get mentioned as often is Notepad GNU.
It occupies the space in between Notepad and Notepad ++. Notepad GNU does offer loads of features, though not quite as many as Notepad ++. Which is fine, because plenty of people just want Notepad with a few tweaks like line numbers, bookmarks, and syntax highlighting. Notepad GNU does all that and more!
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the foreign language install menus – not a surprise, since the developer’s site is in Russian. Click through, and you’ll wind up with an English language interface when you launch the app.
Notepad GNU is Windows Notepad on steroids originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 17:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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opensource – Download Squad – Microsoft Windows – Windows – English language
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Do you want Windows XP, can’t afford it, but don’t want to pirate it?
Then you want Ylmf, a version of Ubuntu Linux with the XP interface tacked-on, and Wine added so you can run Windows programs.
Google translates the name Ylmf as Rain Forest Wind, which may be the most creative piece of today’s story. This is a bit like a gust of wind in a rain forest — ephemeral, strange, but of little real moment.
So what are we to make of Rain Forest Wind?
You can see this as good news. Geek.com says it’s getting harder to run a pirated Windows in China.
You can see this as bad news. Softpedia calls the new software willful infringement of Microsoft’s user interface copyrights.
Or you can see this as no news at all. Linux Insider notes that Ylmf emerged just a few weeks after Phrank Waldorf posted a similar hack. It’s very possible some Cantonese entrepreneur just translated some commands on the software Waldorf himself said he didn’t recommend, calling it a script written as a programming exercise.
What this story tells me is that the entrepreneurial search for a quick buck remains alive on the Chinese mainland.
There were many Americans back in the 1980s anxious to clone a user interface, stick their name on it and try to download a few bucks from the wallets of the unsuspecting. If this “author” can scam just one small manufacturer with an “OEM deal,” he’s going to be a happy bunny.
But this story also illustrates something important about the Internet that gave birth to open source. Things like this are easy to do, they’re easily discovered, and (assuming there is a legal violation here) easy to close down.
If our Chinese friend’s mark has Internet access, and I’m assuming he does, and if he has more than two brain cells to rub together, and I’m assuming he does, then he won’t be taken in by this scam.
I like to imagine a day when you can download or stream any TV show, movie, or other video before or at about the same time as it’s available for viewing on TV. Oh right, the pirates have pretty much already made that possible. But I mean legally, where you either pay for a video or watch ad-supported media.
While we’re not quite living in my utopian world where cable and satellite boxes are obsolete, the Wall Street Journal reports that we’re getting a little closer. Sony Pictures and Showtime are starting to move up the digital delivery of select content so that you can get it online before you can walk into a store and purchase the DVD.
For instance the film Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs comes out on DVD next week, but it’s also ready available for digitla rental if you have a Sony TV or other device. Lionsgate is making the latest season of its Showtime TV series Weeds available online a week before it’s available on DVD.
Of course, web sites like Hulu have been offering free, ad-supported episodes of broadcast TV shows within 24 hours of the air-date for a while now. And some cable shows are available for download from services such as iTunes shortly after broadcast. But premium content like Hollywood movies has usually been available either at the same time as the DVD release or later.
Up until recently, content producers have been reluctant to do anything that would jeopardize more traditional revenue streams such as DVD sales or you know, the money generated by showing TV programs on a TV. But as broadband becomes more common and consumers continue to purchase portable media players and smartphones for watching TV on the go and set-top boxes (or computers) for watching digital content on a TV set, physical media such as DVDs and Blu-Ray discs could be on the way out. If movie and TV producers don’t want to cede the new territory to the pirates, they’re going to need to step up and offer convenient and reasonably priced alternatives.
Movie studios starting to push online releases before DVDs originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 12:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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DVD – Television – Sony Pictures Entertainment – Meatballs – Blu-ray Disc
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In today’s globalised world most products you see on the store shelf were probably made from parts sourced from all over the world. As we become more aware of the environmental impact of transporting these parts, it is important to have easily accessible information on how a final product comes together. Sourcemap is a project of the Media Lab at MIT, and it allows users to easily visualise what components go into a product, how they are shipped, and what the environmental impacts are. The Sourcemap about page gives an overview of the service:
Sourcemap is a tool for producers, business owners and consumers to understand the impact of supply chains. Our site is a social network where anyone can contribute to a shared understanding of the story behind products. You can simulate the impact of manufacturing, transporting, using and throwing away products using our Life-Cycle Assessment calculator. This web-based tool uses linked data from geological and geographic resources. Each ‘Sourcemap’ can be used to help market socially- and environmentally- conscious products and to buy carbon offsets.
This coverage at TreeHugger.com foresees an interesting future for the Sourcemap project:
Imagine a future in which pointing a PDA at a product bar code returns an instant readout of product source and environmental footprint to inform the buyer’s decision. This future could be reality with SourceMap. Designed as a “collective tool for transparency and sustainability,” SourceMap aims to be the Wiki of visualizing supply chains.
The web site uses a mashup of the Sourcemap data and Google Maps to display a product supply chain. With a bit of digging you can find some examples of just how complicated these supply chains can be.
Sourcemap also gives developers access to their service via a JSON REST API (our Sourcemap API profile). Documentation is a little bare, with developers having to work backwards from documentation that is generated automatically from Sourcemap deployments. However, since the project is only a beta at this point, hopefully the documentation will improve. KML files are also available, allowing the information to be displayed on Earth browsers such as Google Earth.
Related ProgrammableWeb Resources
Filed under: Internet, Security
In a case of a good-defence-is-a-good-offence, a team of nerds led by a researcher from security company FireEye has just brought down the Mega-D botnet. This particular botnet accounted for some 12 percent of all spam email and was controlled by servers in Israel, Turkey, and the U.S.
A botnet, if you’re not down with script-kiddie hax0r lingo, is a ‘bot network’. A bot is a robot — though ‘zombie’ or ‘compromised machine’ is more accurate. In the olden days these networks usually took the form of unpatched Windows machines, but today they rely on user error.
It’s all about those files you download, or email attachments that you open. Even web-based Javascript injection can do it — you really should try to surf safely! Once you run the executable or get infected some other way, it turns your computer into a spam robot. The rest, as they say, is history.
The Mega-D botnet consisted of some 250,000 computers. Consider how many computers it takes to account for the remaining 88% of worldwide spam: well over two million computers, always on, unwittingly generating the trash that fills our inboxes.
The attack, organised by Atif Mushtaq, involved going after the master controllers — the machines that control those 250,000 zombie robots. You can read the full story of the take-down over on PC World, but in essence it was quite simple: a quick, coordinated shutdown of all their servers, by collaborating with the ISPs hosting the servers… behind Mega-D’s back!
Security geeks bring down a network responsible for 12% of worldwide spam originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 06:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Botnet – Internet service provider – Spam – FireEye – E-mail
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