News from the front

A Minnesota court says each downloaded song is worth 80000USD. That’s a lot of money for a song, but how does it relate to real world things ? Say, body parts.
Luckily, the state of Connecticut puts a value on lost body parts to help us make sense of the court’s decision. According to SimplyHired the average salary in Connecticut is 884 USD/week. Let’s round it down to 800USD/week cause high salary lawyers seldom lose a thumb and figure out what’s worth 100 weeks compensation.
One good candidate is loss of hearing in both ears for 104 weeks. Losing a penis, uterus or vagina can also go up to 104 weeks. The 4 finger menu is worth 103 weeks. But in my opinion the 2 fingers and one nose menu is the winner at exactly 100 weeks.

So, in summary, illegally downloading a song inflicts the same damage as the loss of two fingers and one nose.

• Android week. The HTC Hero is out and about and seems all nice. And there’s a new UI for Android HTC called Sense. I’m not sure I like it and it won’t be making its way to Google branded phones for licensing issues. So it’s present on the Hero and looks a lot like the stuff HTC did for their WinMo phones.

• And cause Java is yucky there’s a native SDK for Android now. Of course, using the native stuff is even yuckier than going through the java APIs so we’ll only see desperate game programmers using it.

• Intel and Nokia are getting cozy and will do stuff together. And it will be cool. Or innovative. Something like that. Meanwhile Nvidia goes for WinCE on Tegra netbooks in a bold move to try and kill the platform right on the blocks. Seriously guy. wince ??

• On pathetic news the RIAA sued someone who doesn’t even own a computer. Keep in mind this are the people who want to automatically disconnect people from the Internet forever, make people pay “compensation” and eventually power of law to put people in jail. On more evil news, the Irish RIAA is suing ISPs instead of users. Won’t nobody set these guys straight ?

• myTouch 3G (or G2, or HTC Magic) is happening in T-Mobile. If you’re wondering, it’s an Android phone minus the G1 hideous hardware. Against most odds, it’s also coming to TMN in Portugal

• Comcast seems set on making IPv6 happen by enabling its 30million something customer base.

• On monopoly news, Microsoft seems to have [strongarmed linux out of the netbook market] just like they did in the past in the laptop market. Or at least that’s what I understand from the Taiwan Trade Authority director broken english.

• On ditactorship news Germany passed an internet censorhip law this week. The censorship will be DNS based and the censored sites list will be maintained by the police. The objective, as usual, is protecting the children. There’s a number of things plain Wrong with this. First, the mechanism is pathetically easy to defeat so it’s not protecting anyone. Second, fully expect the people maintaining the list to be as incompetent as the people passing the law. And last and foremost, while it won’t protect any children it will make blacklisting any forum, such as the ones that allow anonymous whistleblowing, dead easy by posting illegal material. So in the end, this will a political censorship law and never be able to protect anyone.

• The week was full of Pre goodies. Typing in the Contra cheat code gets you into dev mode. And right after that came out a clever fella figured out the webOS image was right there in the restoration tool. And that’s not all, there’s a sure and easy way of getting the Pre to run unsigned images. My word! It’s almost as if Palm went out of its way.

• On net unneutrality a small ISP group on the US is against being gouged by media providers. Looks like media guys want to levy a blanket fee on ISPs for access to its content. Cause you know, actually charging people who want to see it is too much work. And on reverse net unneutrality (uh??) BT wants more money from the BBC. See, that’s just like the first case, but the other way around.

• The first major splint in the iPhoneOS platform happened with the 3GS supporting OpenGL ES 2.0 and the older hardware only supporting OpenGL ES 1.1. It was bound to happen.

• Microsoft announced a free antivirus package. It will either naturally flop like a flounder or naturually annihilate all competition. If it’s the later I bet the rest of the AV crowd will give a good run for its money.

• Asus put out a truly inspired mission statement this week. Asus wants to do products that are better than Apple’s. It’s nice to see vendors shooting for gold once in a while instead of just trying to be slight less crappy than the next guy. I just wonder if they have a plan for Microsoft …

• Without much surprise the Hadopi law was ruled inconstitutional on grounds of both object and process being illegal. Sometimes the French do remind us sometimes they put the guillotine to use.

• On cool tech news of the week Nokia is working on sucking in the RF for energy. Basically they want to convert all the background radiation floating around. So if you want to quick charge your phone move near a FM radio station or pop it into the microwave.

• On pirate news, the PB judge served on the board of a media lobby group to learn about copyright so he ain’t biased. Oh well.

• Busy week eh ? that’s all folks!

The Nokia store experience is pretty crappy and the bad news is it isn’t caused by technical issues on the platform.

Right of the bat i’m confused about what i’m buying. Is it linked to my account ? To my mobile ? Can i download it again ? Are the media files drm encumbered ? What are the formats ? Nokia needs to make a much better job at telling me why i should spend my money, the apps don’t even have a proper list of features and compatibility or screenshots.

Nokia allows off store payments, this sounds like flexibility for the publisher right ? Wrong, it means shareware apps get listed as free which doesn’t work to strengthen the trust in the store. And while we’re on pricing, what happened to the bread and butter of an app store, the 0.99 price point ? Nokia traded it for direct billing deals with the carriers. Nokia does the usual 70/30 revenue split but has a small hitch, if the billing goes through a mobile carrier they can apply a transaction fee that comes out of the developer’s cut so 70 cents can easilly go down to nothing. That and the fact Nokia goes to great lenghts to beat away independent developers fill the store with 2Eur pieces of crap and there’s even some utterly pointless apps in the 20+ price range. The irony in all this is after all the trouble Nokia went through setting up the direct billing stuff both the US carriers and Vodafone rejected it.

There’s also the thing about the content quality. There’s no adult filter and about 30% of the content seems to be racy wallpapers at 5Eur each (some of it of dubious copyright standing). On the apps side java craptastic apps are mixed with native s60 apps (and the lack of proper descriptions doesn’t help). And to top it all the selection criteria for the front page and the recommendations sections seems to be either ‘none’ or ‘paid placements’.

Another annoyance is the lack of proper app management. You can install right from the store app but sometimes it doesn’t let you chose where to install. On the oposite end you can’t uninstall from the store so it thinks you have a bunch of crap installed that you actually removed right after the first run. There also isn’t any obvious way of upgrading installed apps.

All told, until Nokia (or is it Ovi ? I’m confused!) makes the revenue model cristal clear and manages to get developers on board by dumping legacy annoyances like Carbide and moving to this century (go go magic symbian foundation!) the store will never get interesting content. And then they’ll have the opportunity to fix it up!

• On pirate news, ARRRR, the Swedish Pirate Party got into the EU parliament. This isn’t a joke, it means a considerable number of the Swedes believe their copyright law is wrong.

• The Nokia N97 is out and doing the rounds. It’s nice and all but i’m not sure i’d even consider carrying all that bulk just for a keyboard.

• E3 happened. MS announced Project Natal which is supposed to be basically a souped up eye toy but is really vapourware. Sony announced the worst kept secret ever. Nintendo announced a few not very exciting but real products (has opposed to exciting nonexisting products).

• Microsoft decided to tell Obama the way they do business is tax avoidance and they won’t stand for governments trying to force them to pay the taxes the law requires. This also means “don’t tax us, tax the poor saps that work for us”. Cause you know, they money as to come from somewhere.

• This has been a week full of douchebagging. It came to public attention it’s common practice for health insurers to wedge by holding big tobacco stocks. Everybody wins. And by everybody I mean the health insurers and big tobacco of course. The health insurer have direct interests in keeping tobacco a blooming industry and for their trouble they get to hike insurance premiums and have shorter lived customers.

• China is installing spyware/censorware on all new PCs. You know, like US public Universities do.

• Verizon is promissing a decent LTE rollout by 2012 and in the meantime is getting some of the 18+ Android based phones to appear during 2009.

• This week Ovi Store went live everywhere. After a bit of use I’m underimpressed and I’ll surelly post a rant soon.

• Ericsson announced a pretty decent 3G to WiFi router. This is interesting because it’s branded as Ericsson, not SE and because it probably has something to do with Ericssons IMS strategy.

• Clearly showing it got its priorities straight and instead of going after the Portuguese govt for watering down even more the bland, unenforced environmental laws or for not removing the blatantly illegal double taxation on some items like cars the EU is going after Sweden for not having data retention laws. Good thing the EU elections are coming up. I surely know who not to vote for.

• This clearly takes the geek award of the week. A few guys in Poland coded a method to stenograph messages in tcp retransmissions.

• SE needs 100M EUR pocket money to keep operating. That’s what you get for getting caught in a depression after 2 years worth of uninteresting products.

• Really, do we need Symbian in netbooks ? We barely need Symbian at all these days (hey, I have a S60V5 phone) so maybe the Symbian Foundation should focus on making Symbian work on mobile phones. Meanwhile, Nokia seems to be carrying on with it’s non-symbian tablets. Get the drift Symbian ?

• In censorship news, a brave kid is running a library of school banned books. Said books include The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Divine Comedy and the Qu’ran so yes you guessed it, they’re banned cause they’re unchristian. That’s the criteria used in today’s USA high schools. And France is trying to outdo itself too!

• WiMAX just keeps kicking. Cisco will build kit for Clearwire and desperately try to turn a profit on a technology they sunk a lot of money into. Good luck with that.

• Microsft put a new anti iPod ad which can be read two ways. On one hand, yes buying music is expensive so we should just steal it. On the other hand and probably in light of the PlaysForSure debacle Microsoft is pushing a subscription model which means you won’t be able to play you music when you stop paying. Or when Microsoft decides to kill the servers. Or when you change PC. Or Zune (probably!!). And on even more MS news, they borrowed an extra $3.8B. Are they trying to over high finance or just getting ready for a spending spree ?

• On antitrust news, EU fined intel 1 billion(updated, tkx) euros which does look even more impressive in USD. The thing is, EU didn’t even get to half of the potential fine amount so this is kind of a slap on the wrist.

• Joining the ranks of democratic countries such as North Korea, China, Cuba and Australia France seems hellbent on keeping its citizens away from the internet. Who needs a juri of his peers when you can have a RIAA secret trial ?

• And the ZOMG award of the week goes to the Sony Pictures CEO who thinks the Internet didn’t being anything good. I wonder if he would say if Sony’s 5 year effort to own digital media distribution didn’t tank miserably in the face of Microsoft’s comparable efforts (what’s this ? Week In Microsoft ??).

• Vodafone is putting some reclaimed analogue TV spectrum in Germany to good use by running a LTE pilot. Take that KnightRider reruns!!

• Nokia is trying to hype up the Ovi Store by announcing a launch with 20000 items. My bet is most of them will be annoying ring tones.

• On stupid news of the week, MPAA says fair use involves a camcorder. These guys crack me up.

• And the week’s police state award goes to France. A TF1 employee emailed his MP as a private citizen letting him know what he thought about the Hapodi proposal. The email made its way from the French Government to TF1. The main diference between EU and US here is in US this would result in a multimillion dollar lawsuit, in EU it just ends up with the guy fired.