Chad's News

Remember how Apple flat out refused to allow Adobe Flash on iPhones and iPads? Well it appears we are witnessing another legacy of Steve Jobs. Adobe Systems has decided to stop developing Flash for mobile devices. From their statement: “We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations…. We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations.” Adobe will instead focus on HTML5 technologies and Adobe AIR. The article doesn’t mention Adobe Edge, but I think that will probably play a part in this new strategy.

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/…
(via Kim Komando)

When I first joined Google+, I realized that its lack of games was a problem (my primary reason for joining Facebook was to play online Scrabble). Well that has now changed.

Link #1: http://arstechnica.com/…

Link #2: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/…
(via The Daily Caller)

Did you know there’s a new field of research called spamalytics? It’s the study of email spam. The researchers in the linked article did everything they could to receive spam, and they actually replied to and paid for some of the products. One interesting fact is that the vast majority of spam purchases went through only three financial companies worldwide. This could make it quite easy for authorities to disrupt the flow of money to the spammers. Another tidbit from the article: it takes about 12.5 million spam messages to sell $100 worth of that ED medicine whose name starts with a “V”.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/…
(via The Consumerist)

Following in the footsteps of AOL, Myspace has seriously tanked from its days of glory and has pretty much lost relevance. It had an operating loss of $230 million last year, prompting its parent company to sell it at a mere $35 million (when it was originally purchased for $580 million).

Thanks to Josh for this topic.

Link #1: http://allthingsd.com/…

Link #2: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/…

Adobe Flash is used all over the worldwide web and will continue to be popular for years to come. That being said, however, Flash will eventually be replaced by HTML5 (and its successors). This process is being hastened, in part, because Apple refuses to allow Flash on the iPhone or iPad. Even Adobe has seen the future and is embracing it—they recently released the beta version of a animation development tool that uses HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. It’s called Adobe Edge.

Link: http://www.zdnet.com/…
(via TechRepublic)

The linked article has a map of the world. It was created by tracing Facebook connections on a blank canvas—no boundaries were actually drawn, but they show up clearly nonetheless.

Link: http://www.facebook.com/…

Google+ is Google’s latest attempt at a social networking site. And it appears they’ve done a really good job of it. Unfortunately it’s still in a field test period where membership is by invitation only, but they’ll be opening it up to the rest of us sometime in the near future. The linked article has more details about Google+ and why it will succeed.

Update: I received an invite from Eric, a friend of Chad’s News. If anyone would like to be invited, please contact me.

Link: http://www.techrepublic.com/…

The Chromebook is a “nothing but the web” laptop that runs Google’s Chrome browser on top of Google Chrome OS. It has the capability to upload and download files to a thumb drive but has almost no local storage. Any programs you run on it must be web applications that can be executed within a browser. With the increasing popularity of the cloud, however, it’s not too difficult to work within these constraints. Note that Chromebooks are manufactured by several different companies, and that Google itself is not one of them.

Link: http://www.techrepublic.com/…

Google and Facebook are offering two-factor authentication to help prevent your account from being hijacked. In both cases, you give them your phone number, then when you log in using your normal username and password, they send a code to your phone. You must enter the code as part of the login process. Gmail does this for every login, while for Facebook it’s only when you log in from a device that hasn’t already been verified.

Thanks to Josh for this topic.

Link #1 (Gmail): http://googleblog.blogspot.com/…

Link #2 (Facebook): http://www.facebook.com/…
(via Slashdot)

One of the advertised benefits of cloud computing is high availability and redundancy. Back in April, however, some of Amazon’s cloud storage services suffered an outage that lasted for about three days, bringing down websites of several high-profile customers.

The initial problem was quickly fixed, but oddly enough, the extended outage was caused by the cloud management software attempting to prevent the loss of data. Amazon essentially performed a denial-of-service attack on its own storage servers which took three days to fix.

This event brings up an inherent problem with cloud computing: complexity. As a programmer, I know that error-handling code tends to go untested (or has minimal testing), just because it can be difficult to create the errors necessary to exercise the code, or because it takes too much time and money in a competitive business environment. It’s obvious that Amazon did not test for the type of situation that occurred on April 21^st. The linked article makes the argument that cloud computing systems have much more complexity than would the individual systems in a non-cloud environment. So cloud providers, to prevent these types of outages from happening in the future, will have to learn how to better deal with complexity.

Thanks to Josh for this topic.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

Web developer Mike Cardwell has created a web page that determines if you’re logged in to various sites. It does this by trying to load something (an image, script, etc.) from those sites—something that you must be logged in to access. A script is executed depending upon whether the load succeeds or fails. Quite tricky, and another reminder that online privacy doesn’t exist.

Link: https://grepular.com/…
(via Slashdot)

I went to amazon.com the other day and noticed a front-page announcement about two new services. The first is the Amazon Cloud Drive, an online storage system with 5GB of free storage and the ability to pay for additional space. There are lots of online storage sites, however, and what makes this one different is how Amazon has integrated it with their MP3 store. In addition to the Cloud Drive, there’s also the Amazon Cloud Player, an online music player that works on any Mac, PC, or Android device. It’s tightly integrated with the Cloud Drive—music files stored in your Cloud Drive are available to the Cloud Player. Music purchases from the Amazon MP3 Store can be automatically uploaded to the Cloud Drive, and they don’t count against the 5GB limit.

I like the Cloud Drive because, unlike other free file storage sites, this one probably won’t go out of business. And Amazon has hit on a good concept, allowing you to store your music in a central location that’s accessible from anywhere on the internet. I make a habit of purchasing music from the Amazon MP3 Store whenever possible, so this is pretty useful. No longer is there the possibility of losing my entire music collection because a hard drive fails.

There are, however, a couple downsides. First, the only mobile devices that are truly supported are Android devices. The Cloud player is not “optimized” for iPhones, iPads, Blackberries, and Windows 7 phones. I guess that means you could play the music via a supported browser on those devices, but that it wouldn’t work very well. Second, only MP3 and non-copy protected AAC (iTunes Store) formats are supported by the music player. For those with an older, extensive library from the iTunes Store, this may not be the best way to go (or at least consider upgrading your library to iTunes Plus).

I’m using the Cloud Player right now, and it’s working quite well. No skips or stutters. One final note, I manually uploaded my music library which was a lengthy process. Turns out there’s an MP3 uploader program that makes the initial upload much easier.