Author Archive | Ed Oswald

McDonald’s to Offer Free Wi-Fi By January

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 16, 2009 at 2:00 pm

Soon the Golden Arches will become the spot to go if you wanna grab a bite to eat and check your e-mail for free: McDonald’s plans to drop its free for using Wi-Fi in 11,000 of its 14,000 US locations. Previously, two hours of access set the customer back $2.95.

I gotta say it: I’m loving it.

The change is part of an effort to continue drawing in a wider customer base. Part of it could have to do with its efforts in gourmet coffee — the McCafe offering has more than doubled sales of coffee and now is five percent of its overall sales.

Free Wi-Fi is something that can be found in many local coffeeshops, and certainly the two have almost become synonymous with one another. Starbucks charges a fee for access, but is one of the few that still do.

As McDonald’s remakes itself into more of a destination rather than a quick stop for a bite to eat, company officials say they don’t mind adding services that keep customers in stores longer. There will be no time limits on wireless access, the company said.

Both Starbucks and McDonald’s partner with AT&T to run their Wi-Fi offerings.

6 comments

Fake Steve Jobs Spurns Real AT&T Protest

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 16, 2009 at 12:35 pm

It started out as a joke for Dan Lyons, known to us all as “Fake Steve Jobs,” but it has now taken on a life of its own. Operation Chokehold was supposed to be a fake protest that would attempt to take down AT&T’s network by overloading it, according to a post on Lyon’s site. It was meant to look as if it was real, but Lyons apparently was saying it in jest.

His fans apparently want to make it real, however. A Facebook group has been created urging people to do what Lyons suggested — run a data intensive application on the 3G network for a full hour on Friday at Noon PST — and currently sports about 1,600-plus members. The media is having a field day with it (heck look at us, we’re even covering it), and AT&T is peeved.

Check out this statement from the company to Apple web log Cult of Mac if you think they’re just blowing this off:

“We understand that fakesteve.net is primarily a satirical forum, but there is nothing amusing about advocating that customers attempt to deliberately degrade service on a network that provides critical communications services for more than 80 million customers. We know that the vast majority of customers will see this action for what it is: an irresponsible and pointless scheme to draw attention to a blog.”

Maybe AT&T needs to take a bit of a pill — why give this publicity as I doubt this will amount to anything — but who knows with the way their 3G network runs. I guess if this does happen, we’ll find out if that report from Mr. Turner on AT&T’s network issues we blogged about in October was actually true, no?

Blogger and Technologizer contributor Dave Zatz really takes it to Lyons though (and I’m paraphrasing):

It’s a spiteful and selfish act …. spearheading a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against one of the largest US communications networks may also attract the sort of attention he’ll be less pleased with … (Dan Lyons) is a professional journalist. And this is a call to action in the real world, not the ‘fake’ one.”

Not sure that I would go to that extent. While it was stupid, I would not call it spiteful or selfish. Lyons just didn’t think this one through before releasing it to the masses. As much as we can make jokes out of AT&T’s shoddy 3G service, for some its actually enough that all they would need is a call to action to vent their frustrations through something like this. In any case, I HIGHLY DOUBT it would be able to get to the level where it would actually do any damage. It ain’t the 1960’s — we’re too lazy to protest these days.

6 comments

Facebook Allowing Status Update Replies Via E-Mail

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 16, 2009 at 10:03 am

Those Facebook status update notifications that we’ve all received at one time or another from the service just got more useful. The social networking site has apparently flipped the switch on allowing replies from e-mail rather than having to log in to the service. All that is needed to do this is replying back to the message itself.

It appears not to be live across everyone yet. I just checked the alert e-mails I’ve received recently as late as the wee hours of this morning East Coast time, and I am not seeing the functionality as its being shown by sites such as Download Squad. However it will be rolling out systemwide shortly, reports seem to indicate.

While statuses are now enabled with this feature, Facebook mails — which you’ll also receive alerts for — are not. No word from the company on when we could expect that functionality, but I’d venture to guess that’s a logical progression for where this feature is headed.

One comment

Microsoft Does The Right Thing, Juku Beta Scrapped

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 15, 2009 at 3:55 pm

Kudos to Microsoft on acting fast on the Juku-Plurk fiasco: the company said Tuesday afternoon it would be suspending the Juku beta indefinitely, and has assumed responsibility for what is now a definite case of intellectual propery theft. According to a statement, the third party developer behind Microsoft’s service has acknowledged that it had indeed stolen code from Plurk to build Juku. Ouch.

Microsoft stressed that its contracts with its vendors expressly indicate that work provided must not infringe on the work of others (a no brainer, don’t you think?). “We are a company that respects intellectual property and it was never our intent to have a site that was not respectful of the work that others in the industry have done,” it said.

Officials with Microsoft will reach out to Plurk to explain what happened as well as update the affected paryy on what Redmond plans to do to resolve the situation. It also is launching an inquiry into its own practices surrounding code offered by third-party vendors. So far we haven’t seen anything publicly on what Plurk’s future moves, but you have to think that this might just prevent this from going to court. My guess is we’ll be hearing from Plurk real soon. But as everyone’s saying, this publicity can do nothing but help the service, don’t you think?

No comments

Older iPhones Get Video Recording With New App Store Adds

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 15, 2009 at 1:42 pm

Recording video on your iPhone is no longer a luxury of just the folks with jailbroken phones or an iPhone 3GS. Apple has approved two separate apps this week in the App Store — Camcorder and iVideoCamera — both retailing for 99 cents. Unfortunately, there are memory considerations with these older models, so don’t expect much. Regardless, its a nice addition.

Camcorder (which is only available for a limited time at the 99 cent price) allows for the recording of videos at a 320×426 resolution. But don’t think of doing anything with these videos: currently Camcorder only allows for the recording and playback of the videos from within the application itself and nothing else. You can get to the videos somehow through peering through your iTunes data backups, but that takes some knowledge and patience.

Another downside according to TUAW are meager audio recording and a frame rate that is described as “slow.” Then again, how many cell phone videos have you seen that looked like they were shot with a Mini DV cam, so I do digress.

The second app, iVideoCamera, allows for more functionality on what you can do with your videos, however it comes with the tradeoff of even poorer recording quality and time constraints (160×213 resolution, 3 frames per second, and one minute maximum recordings). The ability is there though to save videos to the camera roll or share them to Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites. The company behind the application, Laan Labs, says improvements to frame rate and longer recording times will be coming in a future update.

I haven’t seen anything on whether recorded videos in the camera roll then become available to send as MMS. If anybody has tried this, I think our readers (and myself) would want to hear about it. Occasionally, I’ve gotten the urge to send a video to somebody, but since I only have a iPhone 3G that’s not possible at the moment directly through the phone.

2 comments

Twitter Begins to Play Around With Business Accounts

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 15, 2009 at 9:33 am

Twitter has dipped its toe into the waters of business accounts on the microblogging service, saying Monday it would be allowing an account to be tweeted to buy multiple twitter accounts in the  near future. Called “Contributors,” those particpating would be given a small byline acknowledgement at the end of the tweet.

The service says the move allows businesses to make these corporate tweets more personable by letting the reader know who is behind the company. However, the new functionality is not ready for public consumption, so its release will only be limited to a select group of business users and partners. Use of Contributors after the beta period ends looks to be limited to business-centric accounts and partners, so no allowing your girlfriend to tweet for you when this is ready for prime time.

Contributors is apparently only one of several features that the company is working on, although it is not being specific on what the others may be. In any case, this seems a natural move for the company considering so many businesses are turning to the service in order to reach out to their customers.

While some may wonder why Twitter is seemingly stepping on the feet of its partners such as CoTweet, those partners are saying that’s not the case. In a blog post on Monday, CoTweet said that Twitter was committed to the success of its partner ecosystem and would not purposely do anything to disrupt those relationships.

“Businesses will continue to require functionality such as CoTweet’s advanced work flow and conversation history that allow them to engage in authentic, two-way dialogs with their customers and communities,” it argued. “There is a large area of opportunity between what Twitter will be offering and what businesses require.”

No comments

Microsoft Pulls The Plug (For Now) on Plurk Clone

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 14, 2009 at 9:35 pm

We’ve gotten a response out of Microsoft on the Plurk debacle, and it looks like the company’s been caught with its pants down. As you may remember from our post earlier this afternoon, the Canadian microblogging service accused Microsoft of outright intellectual property theft, saying as much as 80% of the Juku microblogging service it had launched in China was based off of Plurk.

Microsoft has decided to take down Juku while it performs a full investigation of the incident. The company said that when Plurk first posted its accusations, it was the middle of the night in China which made it impossible for work to begin until Microsoft China employees reported back in for work, which they would have right around suppertime here on the East Coast of the US.

The similarities are certainly there, starting with the user interface. What’s even more surprising is the whole incident was allowed to happen in the first place by the biggest software company in the world. Now it must rush to prevent what certainly could become a public relations nightmare.

“Our MSN China joint venture contracted with an independent vendor to create a feature called MSN Juku that allowed MSN users to find friends via microblogging and online games,” Microsoft said in a statement. “This MSN Juku feature was made available to MSN China users in November and is still in beta.”

It does seem like a little bit of passing the buck, but still Redmond shares some culpability in not knowing its competitors well enough to have an eye out for possible issues. No matter how this ends, as Michael Arrington put it on TechCrunch, “this is the best thing to happen to Plurk, ever.”

You got that right.

4 comments

Did Microsoft China Steal Code?

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 14, 2009 at 2:26 pm

Microsoft may soon find itself on the opposite end of an intellectual property dispute than it’s used to facing. Canada-based microblogging service Plurk is crying foul, saying Microsoft China has stolen it’s code. In a blog post on Monday, the company claims that as much as 80 percent of the code for Microsoft’s competing service Juku is actually code for Plurk.

They may be onto something too. A cursory comparison of Juku and Plurk even at face value seems to indicate some striking similarities. Take for example the user interface, shown below:

As you can see, the UI looks very similar. Plurk claims that this has caused the company some trouble: users have questioned the service wondering if the two companies had struck some type of partnership. Plurk says it isn’t bothered by clones, but Microsoft China has gone a bit too far.

“There will always be exceptional circumstances where we feel wholly wronged, both legally and more important, morally, and this one just happens to be one of those rare cases,” the company said. “That it is Microsoft doing the copying in broad daylight makes it even more incredulous.”

Plurk is exploring its options as we speak, but it certainly seems as if this is headed to some type of court standoff if Microsoft doesn’t explain itself awfully quick. It has no partnership at all with the company — and Plurk was quick to point out in its blog that it has no problem working with partners.

All we’re getting from Microsoft at this point is that “we’re looking into the matter.” Well Redmond better look quick — this is pretty darn blatant. It’s somewhat not surprising that an event like this is coming out of China, however. We all know the country’s history when it comes to electronic piracy. But to have it come out of Microsoft  certainly reflects on the management of the Chinese arm of the world’s biggest software company.

Updates to come as we find out more.

3 comments

US, Russia Begin Cyberwar Talks

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 14, 2009 at 10:57 am

In a sign that the two countries are attempting to avert some type of Cold War cyberwar-style, the US and Russia have entered into talks over military action in cyberspace according to the New York Times. With cyberweaponry becoming a reality and attacks on government computers increasing, news of such talks makes a lot of sense.

The two countries also plan to discuss Internet security, which obviously would be important to keeping government servers safer. Talks began last month, and continued publicly through a UN security conference held a few weeks ago in Geneva. There is disagreement on how it should be handled: the Russians think cybersecurity could best be dealt with through treaties, where the US says the nature of cyberspace requires a more fluid approach.

Russia says that the US is moving towards its position, however NYT sources say that is a mischaracterization. Either way, both sides acknowledge that there is movement which is a departure from the years of the Bush Administration.

Bush refused to talk to the Russians on the topic, and it probably had something to do with the fact that the US is one of the countries developing cyberweapons. The Russians have been insisting on a “cyberterrorism ban” however, which has been characterized by the US as a restriction of free speech. This could have been another reason why Bush and Co. would not talk.

While Russia is obviously nowhere near the superpower that it was in the days of the USSR, seeing the two sides sitting down on this topic is quite heartening. Cybercrime is on the rise, and its only a matter of time before our wars begin to be fought not only on the battlefield but on the Internet as well.

Those interested in waging war know that in our ever-more-connected society, attacking the Internet is a smart strategy. It is essential in my opinion that governments start working together in order to cut this off at the pass, which will have much greater benefits further down the road for sure.

4 comments

D’oh! TSA Posts Airport Screening Procedures Online

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 8, 2009 at 11:23 am

The Transportation Security Agency accidentally posted its 93-page manual on airport screening procedures online, a mistake that has since been addressed although reports indicate the document is still widely available online. Making matters worse, the agency used redaction techniques that can be easily overcome.

Former Homeland Security Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin told ABC News that the event was “an appalling and astounding breach of security that terrorists could easily exploit.” He urged the TSA to launch an investigation into how the breach had occurred.

Among the topics covered in the document are items which do not have to be screened such as wheelchairs and orthopedic shoes, and countries from whose citizens must be screeened more closely than others.

TSA officials are claiming that the document is “outdated,” however critics argue that the screening process has likely not changed that drastically that the procedures detailed here are worthless to terrorists and other interested parties.

Certainly this breach is a threat to national security, and I tend to agree with those critics who say this one is pretty serious. 9/11 was a product of terrorists understanding the loopholes in our airport security procedures, and this breach now threatens to give our enemies insight into how we’re keeping them out.

Not good at all.

2 comments