Christopher "moot" Poole is founder of 4chan, an online imageboard whose anonymous denizens have spawned the web's most bewildering -- and influential -- subculture. The founder of 4chan, a controversial, uncensored online imageboard, describes its subculture, some of the Internet "memes" it has launched, and the incident in which its users managed a very public, precision hack of a mainstream media website. The talk raises questions about the power -- and price -- of anonymity. Wall Street has called the end of an era and the beginning of the next one: The most important technology product no longer sits on your desk but rather fits in your hand. The moment came Wednesday when Apple, the maker of iPods, iPhones and iPads, shot past Microsoft, the computer software giant, to become the world’s most valuable technology company. This changing of the guard caps one of the most stunning turnarounds in business history for Apple, which had been given up for dead only a decade earlier, and its co-founder and visionary chief executive, Steven P. Jobs. The rapidly rising value attached to Apple by investors also heralds an important cultural shift: Consumer tastes have overtaken the needs of business as the leading force shaping technology. Find and read more on nytimes.com During the first day of the Google I/O 2010 event, a certain piece of news would have made web-designers jump out of their seats with joy. Google announced its new Google Fonts API, a tool for adding non-standard web fonts on any web page.
Typography is a big part of the print industry, but nowadays people tend to think more of it as the problem in modern web design. This is mainly because browsers have been lagging behind other desktop applications when it comes to font support. The new API from Google will enable developers to embed a series of open-source high-quality fonts on their page through simple lines of code. To do so, Google set up a new service called the Google Font Directory (still in beta) to host those fonts. Arow over Facebook's casual attitude towards the privacy of its 400 million users is threatening to snowball into a full-blown crisis as high-profile members start closing their accounts. Facebook seems to deem the situation serious enough to have called an 'all hands' meeting of its staff yesterday to address concerns over data protection. The situation was inflamed when Silicon Alley Insider posted an old instant messaging conversation between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a friend in which the then 19-year-old Harvard student called users of his newly founded website 'dumb fucks'. During the conversation, Zuckerberg writes: Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Zuck: Just ask. Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS Friend: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks. Facebook responded to the publication of the 'dumb fucks' message, saying: "The privacy and security of our users' information is of paramount importance to us. We're not going to debate claims from anonymous sources or dated allegations that attempt to characterise Mark's and Facebook's views towards privacy." About Google: (as if you needed this) Google Inc. is an American public corporation specializing in Internet search. It also generates profits from advertising bought on its similarly free-to-user e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking and video-sharing services. Advert-free versions are available via paid subscription. Google has more recently developed an open source web browser and a mobile phone operating system. Its headquarters, often referred to as the Googleplex, is located in Mountain View, California. As of March 31, 2009 the company had 19,786 full-time employees. It runs thousands of servers across the world, processing millions of search requests each day and about one petabyte of user-generated data each hour. Facebook, Inc. is a company that operates and privately owns social networking website, Facebook. Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region. The website’s name stems from the colloquial name of books given at the start of the academic year by university administrations with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better. Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes while he was a student at Harvard University. The website’s membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 350 million active users worldwide. Twitter reports of an impressive Apple tech demo have turned into blog rumors that Steve Jobs and Co. might be developing their own Flash alternative. When Apple introduced something called "Gianduia" at the WOWODC (World of WebObjects Developer Conference) last June, nobody was viewing it as a Flash killer. In the wake of Apple's war on Flash, though, bloggers at AppleInsider have revisited some of the tweets coming out that conference, and decided that Gianduia is a Flash-killer. Gianduia "essentially is browser-side Cocoa (including CoreData) + WebObjects, written in JavaScript by non-js-haters," tweeted developer Wolf Rentzsch, who added that his "jaw dropped" at the demo. Rentzsch's tweets have become the main source material for today's reports about Guanduia, but nobody's mentioned that he's one of the developers of ClickToFlash, a very useful Safari add-on that keeps Flash objects from loading until you click them. Rentzsch never said Apple was trying to replace Flash, he just said that webapp tools like SproutCore and Cappuccino would have some serious competition. However, Apple has been using Gianduia for its own web apps lately, especially the ones that plug into Apple's WebObjects. That includes a whole bunch of Apple Store features. Okay, big news, but maybe not big enough to entirely kill Flash. If Gianduia is all JavaScript-based, is this anything new? Apple has been backing JavaScript and hating on Flash for some time now, and the news that it's developing its own JS-based solution for Rich Web Apps only seems to confirm that position. I'll freak out about Gianduia when it starts to grow outside of Apple's own (admittedly, pretty cool) webapps. It could become the next big thing, but right now, I suspect it's just a bunch of pundits riding the hype of the Flash wars. This is your new blog post. Click here and start typing, or drag in elements from the top bar. Where Steve Jobs leads, Microsoft follows -- how's that for shaking up the hornet's nest? It's said in jest, of course, but we've just come across a post from the General Manager for Internet Explorer, Dean Hachamovitch, and the perspective expressed by him on the subject of web content delivery broadly agrees with the essay penned by Jobs yesterday on the very same subject. Echoing the Apple CEO's words, Hachamovitch describes HTML5 as "the future of the web," praising it for allowing content to be played without the need for plug-ins and with native hardware acceleration (in both Windows 7 and Mac OS X). He goes on to identify H.264 as the best video codec for the job -- so much so that it'll be the only one supported in IE9's HTML5 implementation -- before turning to the dreaded subject of Flash. This is where it gets good, because he literally repeats one of Jobs' six pillars of Flash hate: "reliability, security, and performance" are not as good as Microsoft would like them. Where Hachamovitch diverges from Apple's messiah, however, is in describing Flash as an important part of "a good consumer experience on today's web," primarily because it's difficult for the typical consumer to access Flash-free content. Still, it's got to be depressing for Adobe's crew when the best thing either of the two biggest players in tech has to say about your wares is that they're ubiquitous. Wonder how Shantanu Narayen is gonna try and spin this one. Source: Engadget HTML5 is the buzz word of 2010. Championed by Google and supported by Firefox and Opera, HTML5 is definitely here to stay. In itself HTML5 is still a bit of a curio -- the spec isn't even finalised -- but when strapped on to Javascript or other developing technologies like WebGL, the browser becomes a serious platform capable of impressive things -- cue Akihabara a set of libraries and tools for rapid in-the-browser '8 bit' games prototyping. Named after the famed district in Tokyo of the same name (or 'Akiba'), Akihabara uses just a small subset of HTML5. Its primary purpose is for quick game prototyping, but there's no reason you couldn't use the libraries for other purposes. Because the engine is written in Javascript the games work on just about every browser, including the mobile browsers on the iPhone/iPad and Android devices. Anyway, even if you're not a developer, you should give some of the sample games a go. Legend of Sadness, which is absolutely not based on the Zelda franchise, is probably the best example of what Akihabara is capable of. If you're more of the old school persuasion, give Pac, er, Capman a go. Note: I forgot to mention, 'A' in the games is Z on your keyboard. 'B' is X! Source: Download Squad Until now, most music Web apps have been little more than fun distractions, great for making noise, but not very good for serious music production. Audiotool changes that. While it probably won't lead you to ditch Ableton Live, Logic or even Garage Band, it does show how powerful Flash can be in the right hands. Audiotool has a surprising amount of depth for something that exists in a browser window. In fact, digital music novices will likely be intimidated by the array of inputs, outputs, mixers, effects pedals, and drum machines at their disposal. Audiotool offers very little guidance for how to assemble a track. Visitors should know that in order to use the Moog-esque virtual synth, they will either have to use the note sequencer (hidden by default), or connect it to the Tenori-On-like Tonematrix module with virtual cables. Those widgets must then be connected, via another virtual cable to a mixer, that must then be connected to the Output Master -- the only module displayed when you launch Audiotool. We spent some time getting familiar with Audiotool, and, while we weren't anywhere near composing this summer's radio anthem, we were able to compose a perfectly serviceable (if slightly cacophonous) electronic ditty. That task would have been much more difficult if we didn't have some experience with virtual synthesizers and recording equipment. All of the modules are given original names, but are clearly modeled after classic equipment such as the TB-303 bass line synth, and TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines -- staples of electronic and hip-hop studios everywhere. We love music. We love free stuff. So it stands to reason that Danny de Zaya's One Track Mind has become a daily destination around here. Every day, One Track Mind offers a free, legal MP3 download of a new track from some hot new band or artist, in styles ranging from electronic to indie. Every track is reviewed and rated, so you know what you're getting. And once a month or so, all the tracks get packaged up in an easy-to-download zip file in case you're too lazy or forgetful to visit each day. Plus, there's a monthly podcast. And as if all of this wasn't already an embarrassment of riches, the blog is also beautifully designed. |
Subscribe!Categories
All
Archives
December 2011
|