Linked List: December 7, 2010

Tuesday, 7 December 2010

U.S. Department of Homeland Security Taps New Partner in ‘War on Terror’: Walmart ★

Terry Gilliam’s Brazil is starting to look like a documentary.

RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis at Dive Into Mobile ★

Mike Lazaridis:

We’re all using Flash on our PCs. We’re all using Flash on our Macs. Why wouldn’t we expect Flash to run our tablet.

So by that logic, Flash will be around forever.

Whole interview seems like a train wreck:

Kara: So you’re saying that the strategy of Google and Apple — making the phone with video and audio, that’s not the right direction?

Mike: We’re going to see different categories. You’re going to see smartphones taking on multicore processing, you’re going to see powerful tablets…

He isn’t making any sense at all. Quite literally, we don’t know what Mike is talking about right now.

‘You’re Either With Us, or You’re With WikiLeaks’ ★

(That’s the actual headline in The Washington Post, by the way). Marc Thiessen:

Some say attacking WikiLeaks would be fruitless. Really? In the past year, the Iranian nuclear system has been crippled by a computer worm called “Stuxnet,” which has attacked Iran’s industrial systems and the personal computers of Iranian nuclear scientists. To this day, no one has traced the origin of the worm. Imagine the impact on WikiLeaks’s ability to distribute additional classified information if its systems were suddenly and mysteriously infected by a worm that would fry the computer of anyone who downloaded the documents. WikiLeaks would probably have very few future visitors to its Web site.

Maybe we could have a curse or magic spell put on them, too. (Via Mat Honan.)

Tumblr Backup App for Mac ★

Probably some renewed interest in this today.

Crankshaft ★

Another big performance improvement to V8, Chrome’s JavaScript engine.

‘The Easiest Way to Download Android Games’ ★

Lewis Dorigo on Gameloft’s Android games:

Not only do you need to provide them with the make and model of your device, but you also need to provide them with your phone number so they can send you an SMS with a link to download the game. They’re claiming that this is the easiest way to download their games?

Engadget’s Live Coverage of Google’s Chrome Event ★

The Chrome App Store has a very original design: the best-selling lists are on the left instead of the right.

As Chrome evolves from a browser for Mac and Windows to its own OS, and Android expands from phones to tablets, Chrome OS and Android seem like competing platforms from rival companies.

Update: Seems like a big deal. Google really sees Chrome OS as a major play — and I can see how it might eat up a big chunk of the low-end PC notebook market. Maybe Chrome OS will do to Windows what Firefox (and, later, Chrome) did to IE? But why announce this so early? Actually shipping products based on Chrome OS are now pushed back to “mid 2011”. Seven, eight months from now? With no idea of actual pricing or performance, who knows whether it’ll actually be any good?

Update 2: The obvious answer occurred to me over dinner. Chrome OS was supposed to ship in 2010. They’re obviously way behind schedule. They wanted to show something.

This Is Where It Leads ★

Senator Joe Lieberman to Fox News:

“To me the New York Times has committed at least an act of bad citizenship, but whether they have committed a crime is a matter of discussion for the justice department.”

Instagraphy ★

Speaking of Instagram, Tuhin Kumar has a nice piece about its appeal:

For any app, the first and most important question to ask is “what problem does it solve”. The how comes later. Instagram solves the problem of sharing our moments effortlessly with the world and in a way that makes us look creative.

In short, what Twitter is to text, Instagram is to photography. I love it. And it’s rather amazing that it’s grown so fast with nothing other than an iOS client. Not only are there no clients for any other devices (yet), but you can’t even use it via the web.

Not a Joke ★

The U.S. State Department:

The United States is pleased to announce that it will host UNESCO’s World Press Freedom Day event in 2011, from May 1 - May 3 in Washington, D.C. UNESCO is the only UN agency with the mandate to promote freedom of expression and its corollary, freedom of the press.

Senator Dianne Feinstein Calls for Julian Assange to Be Prosecuted Under the Espionage Act ★

The argument against Assange and WikiLeaks seems to be coalescing around the notion that the more horrendous the truth, the more essential it is for the public to remain unaware of it. Like many others, I’m unconvinced of the merits of WikiLeaks’s diplomatic cable dump, but on the whole, I support WikiLeaks.

The bottom line is that I think we’re better off knowing too much of the truth than too little.

Tumblr Scaling ★

Network-wide, they’re now serving 3 billion page views a month, and growing fast.

Julian Assange’s Op-Ed in The Australian ★

Julian Assange:

In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said “only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government”. The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.

Information Wants to Be Expensive ★

The lesser-quoted flip side of Stewart Brand’s observation:

Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine — too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property’, the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.

Andy Rubin Demos Prototype Motorola Android 3.0 Tablet ★

Note, per yesterday’s discussion of the varying layouts of the hardware buttons on current Android handsets, that this tablet has no buttons on the front face. Even the home button is on-screen.

Intriguing demo overall, though.

Niall Harbison: ‘Why Google Should Buy Instagram’ ★

Niall Harbison has a terrible idea:

Instagram is growing at a furious rate. It’s not just the numbers below which show how fast it is growing but all the key early adopters are on there. For want of a better word it is the “cool” place to share photos online now. It feels like something that has legs and will continue growing and not disappear as a fad because the product is so good and people just love using it.

His last section heading is “Even Google Couldn’t Mess This One Up”. I beg to differ. You can’t buy cool.

Google’s Ad for the Nexus S ★

Good catch by Jay Yarow:

As part of the hoopla for the new phone, Google produced a new ad which is slightly disorienting to watch. It’s someone looking at their phone walking around.

Funny enough, this is almost the exact opposite pitch that Microsoft is making with Windows Phone 7.

It really is the opposite message.

Information Wants to Be Free ★

Nelson Minar:

The phrase is a simple observation, like saying “a compass wants to point north”. Information intrinsically has a tendency to spread. Controlling information, bottling it up and keeping it limited, is difficult. There’s a bit of a poetic turn in saying “wants”, since of course information has no agency. The underlying truth is really a statement about human nature; people tend to share information.