10 Mind-Blowing Raspberry Pi Projects
Raspberry Pi, the $35 Linux computer that’s just a tad bigger than a business card, has been phenomenally well-accepted in its first year on the planet. First released in February, 2012, it’s makers say they will soon sell their one millionth unit.
How Consumers Are Using Their Phones, And What It Means
Mobile is no longer a communications utility, but a media distribution hub. According to http://www.emarketer.com/(S(gjrgkh45dmewndatycqrprnz))/Article.aspx?R=1009431….99 ” target=”_blank”>eMarketer, mobile now accounts for 12 percent of Americans’ media consumption time, triple its share in 2009.
Where is this consumer attention being focused?
The biggest beneficiaries have been mobile apps. Time spent on apps dwarfs time spent on the mobile Web, and smartphone owners now spend 127 minutes per day in mobile apps.
“a media distribution hub,” no, not in my opinion. That it displaces media consumption activities doesn’t make it a media distributor.
Inventor of the Web to deliver public lecture in Wellington
InternetNZ (Internet New Zealand Inc) is pleased to announce that later this month the inventor of the World Wide Web ??? Sir Tim Berners-Lee ??? will visit Wellington to deliver a public lecture exploring the benefits of an open and uncaptureable Internet.
Proudly hosted by InternetNZ as part of Berner-Lee???s ???TBL Down Under Tour??? (http://tbldownunder.org), the lecture will take place at Soundings Theatre, Te Papa at 5.30pm on Wednesday 30 January.
Registrations for the public lecture can be made at http://openinternetlecture.eventbrite.co.nz. Spaces are strictly limited and will be allocated on a first-come first-served basis.
Why Facebook Data Tends to Condemn You in Court
Facebook rebuffed the defense attorney???s subpoena seeking access to the conversation, citing the federal Stored Communications Act, which protects the privacy of electronic communications like e-mail ??? but which carves out an exemption for law enforcement, thus assisting prosecutors. ???It???s so one-sided ??? they cooperate 110 percent anytime someone in the government asks for information,??? one Oregon attorney told the Portland Oregonian, citing a separate case in which Facebook withheld conversations that could have disproved a rape charge, but turned over the same conversations when the prosecution demanded them.
Other defense attorneys voice similar complaints, and the judge in the murder case went so far as to call Facebook ???flippant??? and ???frustrating??? in its handling of the defense???s subpoenas. Facebook, for its part, has said it is inundated with judicial requests and tries to handle them uniformly within the confines of the law.
via wired.com
If you’ve done nothing wrong, you may not be able to get the evidence to show that.
Southern Cross Cable 20 percent price cut not nearly enough – Orcon boss | The National Business Review
via nbr.co.nz
“It is always great to see the price of IRU???s (Indefeasible Rights of Use) dropping, as that will filter through to the wholesale market,” he told NBR.
“However this masks the fact that bandwidth costs per user are still actually increasing.”
Some final thoughts for 2012
Fortunately, attempts by governments to reign in the power of the Net have largely beenineffective. Even the “three strikes/SkyNet” legislation here in NZ seems to have fallenat the final hurdle, with no prosecutions yet being brought against those who have usedup all their chances.
SOPA is pretty much a dead duck but the TPP remains a worrying possibility. We’ve alreadyseen that governments are more than happy to sell the rights of citizens down the river ifthey think they’ll be able to claim some kind of victory for the economic future of the nation.They forget that a nation is more than a balance sheet, more than a ledger of money in versusmoney out. They need to remember that we are a sovereign nation and that’s something whichneeds protecting, not trading away for a few promises of trade access.
I’d like to give a special “Merry Christmas” shout-out to Kim Dotcom. Although I’venever met him and don’t watch TV so have seen very little of him, I do think he’s gottena very raw deal this year. Shame on those who (like the GOM) will stop at nothing(including breaking the law) to achieve their shady ends. Let’s hope that those whowould corrupt our principles to serve a foreign master will wake up to their follyeventually.
via aardvark.co.nz
WebRTC is the new battleground for peer-to-peer vs. server-based models for communications
It would be wrong to classify Google as being purely objective here either. Despite high-profile moves like Google Voice, Gmail and Chat, I think that its dirty secret is that it doesn’t actually want to control or monetise communications per se. I suspect it sees a trillion-dollar market in telecoms services such as phone calls and SMS’s that could – eventually – be dissipated to near-zero and those sums diverted into alternate businesses in cloud infrastructure, advertising and other services.
I suspect Google believes (as do I) that a lot of communications will eventually move “into” applications and contexts. You’ll speak to a taxi driver from the taxi app, send messages inside social networks, or conclude business deals inside a collaboration service. You’ll do interviews “inside” LinkedIn, message/speak to possible partners inside a dating app etc. If your friend wants to meet you at the pub, you’ll send the message inside a mapping widget showing where it is… and so on.
I think Google wants to monetise communications context rather than communications sessions, through advertising or other enabling/exploiting capabilities.
Feature or Product (aka Service)? Perhaps like cameras they will remain both, albeit the Product version being a little more niche.
James Boyle: Public by Sufferance Alone: The Worst of 2012
In upholding the law, the Golan majority explicitly endorsed the position that the public has no rights to the public domain. None. Under U.S. law as declared by the Court in this case, copyright is now officially “asymmetric.” While those who have copyrights enjoy vested, legally protected rights, “[a]nyone has free access to the public domain, but no one, after the copyright term has expired, acquires ownership rights in the once-protected works.” The majority could not seem to imagine that the public had rights other than “ownership” over a free, collective culture. In a dissenting opinion, Justices Breyer and Alito asked “Does the [Constitution] empower Congress to enact a statute that withdraws works from the public domain, brings about higher prices and costs, and in doing so seriously restricts dissemination, particularly to those who need it for scholarly, educational, or cultural purposes – all without providing any additional incentive for the production of new material?” Their answer was “No.”
Since no body owns the public domain, except all of us, and property rights, even in the intangible, are an obsession, taking those rights from us all and giving them to a single owner, is righteous.
Way to make us hate you copyright.
NMX 2013 Keynote with Leo Laporte
These netcasts are released under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license.
via twit.tv
Excellent overview of how “new” media is different.
Hamish MacEwan 