Apple co-founder and Fusion-io chief scientist Steve Wozniak recently spoke out against cloud storage, suggesting that dependence on outside storage will lead to significant problems.
“I really worry about everything going to the cloud,” he said during an interview. “I think it’s going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years.”
Wozniak argues that by agreeing to cloud terms of service, users sign away their ownership of content. When content is on a personal computer, the user owns the information. But by storing data in the cloud, the consumer signs away control, according to Wozniak.
“I want to feel that I own things,” he explained. “A lot of people feel, ‘Oh, everything is really on my computer,’ but I say the more we transfer everything onto the Web, onto the cloud, the less we’re going to have control over it.”
“A major irony of Wozniak’s remarks is that he works for Fusion-io, which is working to improve cloud computing with flash storage and specialized applications,” notes VentureBeat.
New computer software is now outsourcing menial tasks to people across the world, creating jobs in areas with dramatic unemployment.
“That software, developed by a start-up called MobileWorks, represents the latest trend in crowdsourcing: organizing foreign workers on a mass scale to do routine jobs that computers aren’t yet good at, like checking spreadsheets or reading receipts,” writes Technology Review.
MobileWorks assigns tasks using an algorithm, having multiple workers do the same jobs to ensure accuracy. While workers only get paid cents for each task (maybe a few dollars an hour), “overseas crowds have become essential to legitimate businesses,” the article states.
“The price of having MobileWorks have five people look over a receipt is cheaper than the cost of hiring a high-school student at minimum wage to do the task once,” says Jessica Mah, CEO of Web start-up inDinero.
Unfortunately, some jobs posted to MobileWorks and other crowdsourcing sites were for more nefarious purposes, like influencing search results, generating clicks on ads or proliferating spam.
MobileWorks co-founder Anand Kulkarni expressed his frustration about “spammy jobs.”
Despite setbacks, his goal is to have crowdsourcing “behave much more like an automatic resource than like individual and unreliable human beings.”
The UK Ministry of Defense recruited a group of academics to develop over-arching estimates of the financial cost of Internet crime.
The numbers are high — to no surprise — but our “extremely inefficient” efforts to control cyber crime are misplaced, according to the researchers.
“Our figures suggest that we should spend less in anticipation of cyber crime (on antivirus, firewalls, etc.) and more in response — that is, on the prosaic business of hunting down cyber criminals and throwing them in jail,” the team wrote in their report.
The full findings, linked on the Businessweek article, break down the costs in various categories. Some interesting numbers:
The money stolen via cyber crime amounts to roughly $1.997 billion, with conservative estimates. By comparison, the money spent on defense comes in at around $25.84 billion.
The most money was spent for user cleanup (when antivirus programs fail) and business security, each amounting to $10 billion.
The most successful cyber crime was the Advanced Fee Fraud, which takes about $1 billion from consumers who pay a small amount upfront or a larger fortune to be released.
Ever gotten an email from your contact, saying they’re stranded traveling abroad and need your money? That scam has accrued over $10 million.
Other defense costs include $400 million for law enforcement, $1 billion each for patching vulnerabilities and bank countermeasures, $3.4 billion on antivirus protection and $40 million on ISP cleanup.
“People renting DVDs and Blu-ray Discs through retail stores, kiosks, and Netflix’s mail service totaled more than 62 percent of all movie rentals in the first half of the year, according to NPD Group,” CNET reports. “In contrast, those renting digital movies via subscription streaming, pay TV video on demand, and Internet VOD added up to only 38 percent.”
However, the popularity of discs is waning, with rentals dropping 17 percent in the last year. Kiosks now represent 45 percent of physical rentals after video stores have faded away.
Digital movie rentals, on the other hand, have increased 5 percent so far this year.
Netflix’s Watch Instantly service played an important part in this jump, accounting for 66 percent of all digital movie rentals. “The company recently announced that it had added 530,000 U.S. streaming subscribers in the second quarter while losing 850,000 customers of its DVD service,” notes CNET.
While Netflix maintains popularity on connected devices (tablets, smart TVs), much of its content is still only available as physical rentals. Also, the streaming content lacks special features like commentary or bonus material.
So it’s not over for discs just yet. “Video streaming needs to catch up with physical rentals in both availability and options for it to truly take off in the market,” the article suggests.
Hungarian 3D display company Holografika is demonstrating its HoloVizio C80 glasses-free 3D system this week in SIGGRAPH’s Emerging Technologies section at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
“It uses a silver screen that is as shiny as tin foil,” notes ETCentric staffer Phil Lelyveld. “As you move off-axis, the image on the far side fades out. But it is an effective, multi-view 3D experience seemingly devoid of sweet-spot transitions.”
“Holografika is pushing proprietary light-field technology to produce natural 3D view,” explains the press release. “The C80 glasses-free 3D cinema system has a 3,2m x 1,8m reflective holographic screen to create stunning 3D scenes, videos, that appear behind or in front of the screen, with continuous parallax in the entire field-of-view, where viewers can even look behind the objects.”
“The 3D projection engine is based on compact LED modules optimized for the purpose, delivering an exceptional 1800 Cd/m2 on-screen brightness, which is unique for LED projection systems as of today,” adds the release. “The HoloVizio C80 is a front projection optical arrangement that can fit various cinema rooms and easy to upscale. The 60 Megapixel system is controlled by Holografika’s Cinema PC Cluster.”
Holografika is demonstrating the system’s capabilities with 3D images/video, animation, CG and interactive 3D applications. For those attending the conference, the company is located in the Concourse Foyer, ET-21.
According to media consultancy Attentional, 113,000 people in the UK donned their 3D glasses for the London Olympics 2012 opening ceremony. Pocket-lint takes a closer look at the number to determine whether it is good or bad news for 3D adoption.
By comparison, 27 million people watched the opening ceremony on BBC. Another way to look at it is comparing the number of 3D-enabled TVs.
Taking into account the number of people who have 3D TV sets and access to 3D content from BBC, “…just 1 in 10 people who own a 3D-ready TV watched the opening ceremony in 3D. Not great,” the article suggests.
However, there are caveats. For one, the opening ceremony could be considered a more social, group viewing experience — one inhibited by limited numbers of 3D glasses and dark viewing.
The technology does show some sign of growth: Wimbledon 2011 saw a 3D audience of 18,000, which grew to 30,000 in 2012. While it still only accounted for 0.18 percent share of overall 2012 Wimbledon viewing, the London 2012 ceremony had 0.4 percent 3D viewing.
“So the verdict?” Pocket-lint asks. “It seems 3D TV numbers are growing, but at a very slow pace, especially when you consider just how many people still prefer to watch television without glasses.”
The NBC Olympics website “has served up over 744 million page views, up from a mere 160 million during the Beijing games four years ago,” reports Wired. “The site has also streamed over 75 million video feeds to viewers around the globe, according to NBC.”
The network has faced criticism of its delayed TV coverage of the 2012 Olympic Games, but Wired suggests online coverage is now a viable alternative. “If you don’t like NBC’s TV coverage, just stick with your browser,” the article says.
NBC reports that five of the events it has live-streamed were watched by over a million online viewers.
“Hundreds of millions of users doesn’t necessarily qualify NBC for a medal in traffic management,” notes the article. “But it still deserves some praise.”
In a related post from Mashable, the popular #NBCFail trend may actually be overstated, according to a new report from Pew Research.
“According to the survey of just over a thousand adults, 76 percent of Olympic fans say say the NBC is doing an excellent (29 percent) or good (47 percent) job covering the Summer Games. Just 18 percent rate the coverage as fair (13 percent) or poor (5 percent),” notes the post.
Of the people surveyed who were following the Olympics online or via social media, 70 percent said the coverage was excellent or good. TV viewers were even more generous with 77 percent giving positive reviews.
“The Pew survey, though — coupled with strong ratings for NBC’s primetime coverage — indicates that Twitter carpers may simply be a peanut gallery the network can afford to ignore,” Mashable concludes.
Microsoft’s Justin Rao and Google’s David Reiley worked together to determine the societal cost of spam compared with the benefits spammers receive. Their findings: Spam brings in $200 million and society pays $20 billion.
Even though spammers are earning relatively small amounts compared to the societal cost, it still proliferates because the cost to send spam is so small. Rao and Reiley’s report found that for spam to be worthwhile, it only needs 1 in 25,000 people to buy something through its advertising.
Rao and Reiley also offer a solution: raise the cost of business for spammers.
“We advocate supplementing current technological anti-spam efforts with lower-level economic interventions at key choke points in the spam supply chain, such as legal intervention in payment processing or even spam-the-spammers tactics,” the report states.
“By raising spam merchants’ operating costs,” adds the report, “such countermeasures could cause many campaigns no longer to be profitable at the current marginal price of $20-50 per million emails.”
“Thinking we safeguard our phones by physically keeping close tabs on them is way off, according to researchers, because millions of us already provide mobile data to marketers, business analysts, and law enforcement every day,” reports Mobiledia.
The post provides details regarding five ways smartphones are giving away personal information:
1) Carriers “generate a lot of information from consumers’ cell phone use, and make personal information anonymous, sell it to advertisers or hand it over to FBI and police officers,” notes the post, adding that tracking programs also aggregate other information.
2) Smartphones have big bulls-eyes. The big data trend targets personal data including contact lists and Google search words to provide insight into Internet-user behavior.
3) Law enforcement isn’t required to obtain a warrant to search smartphones and “in some places, if law enforcement officials can guess a password and unlock a confiscated device, they can impersonate the phone’s owner by sending texts,” explains the post.
4) Phones with apps that transmit user’s geolocation can make them vulnerable to robbers or burglars who know they aren’t home.
5) While it is known that posting on social media is public to some extent, “consuming content and ‘just browsing,’ was always assumed to be private, anonymous even, but this is also being threatened,” Mobiledia writes.
A federal appeals court has rejected a legal theory that would make it illegal to embed third-party videos on websites.
Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that video bookmarking site myVidster is not liable for embedded copies of videos shared by users on its site.
“Judge Posner’s reasoning is interesting,” notes Ars Technica. “He argues that when you view an infringing video on a site such as YouTube, no one — not you, not YouTube, and not the guy who uploaded the infringing video — is violating copyright’s reproduction or distribution rights. And since simply viewing an infringing copy of a video isn’t copyright infringement, he says, myVidster can’t be secondarily liable for that infringement.”
There may be a violation regarding copyright’s public performance right, but the current law is murky in that area. “The judge called on Congress to help clarify exactly how copyright law should apply in the age of Internet video,” notes the article.
Judge Posner ruled that embedding is not direct copyright infringement. He also ruled that viewing (without copying) is not a violation, since the Copyright Act specifically protects against reproducing and distributing copies.
“In Posner’s view, no matter how many people view a video on a video sharing site, there’s only one violation of the reproduction and distribution right: the original uploading of the video,” reports Ars Technica.
Where it becomes murky is in the legal distinction between “downloading” and “streaming” a video. Additionally, the public performance definition within the Copyright Act is ambiguous and open to interpretation.
“Legislative clarification of the public-performance provision of the Copyright Act would be most welcome,” wrote Posner.
Companies are pushing to reinvent the way viewers discover and share TV programs via new integration with social networking outlets.
“App developers are updating the traditional channel guide to show viewers programs that are uniquely relevant to them based on their social circles,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
TV viewers not only have a virtual water cooler at their disposal for discussing their favorite shows, but now mobile apps help share programs that their friends like based on their preferences.
“We can help people discover what to watch in a fundamentally new way,” says Alex Iskold, chief exec of AdaptiveBlue, maker of social TV app GetGlue. “When you sit down on the couch, you’re wondering, ‘What do I watch?’ These kinds of guides are going to become pretty ubiquitous.”
The apps hope to extend a broader shift for social TV, going beyond the original check-in approach for friends to share information (the article suggests the check-in never achieved a critical mass necessary to launch a viable social community).
“In coming weeks, GetGlue plans to relaunch its app as a social TV guide that will show a scrolling calendar with the shows, movies and sports that users’ might like,” notes WSJ. “It will show whether friends who use the app are watching the same show.”
The GetGlue guide will interact with Facebook’s Connect feature in order to “pull in data from friends, so that the guide becomes fully educated on what people like and watch.”
The companies behind the free apps “are trying to offer complimentary advertising on smartphones and tablets to make money,” explains the article. “For example, if someone is watching a pizza commercial, the app could offer a coupon for the pizza shop on the user’s smart device.”
The article also describes similar social TV apps from companies such as Peel Technologies, Dijit Media and TVGuide.com.
Intel, Cisco and Verizon are investing $3.3 million in R&D at five universities in an effort to improve video delivery over wireless networks.
“The first goal of the Video Aware Wireless Networks (VAWN) program? Find a good way to measure mobile video quality,” reports ReadWriteWeb.
Evaluating subjective video quality in quantitative terms is a challenge, one that involves perceptual issues and technical concerns.
“Because viewers perceive quality differently depending on what they’re watching — sports versus talking heads, for example — quality isn’t about throughput but experience, explained Jeff Foerster, principal engineer and wireless researcher at Intel Labs. That’s why VAWN researchers partnered with psychology departments to better understand how the brain comprehends different kinds of video on various devices,” notes the article.
Video stream algorithms, data compression, caching, network management and data storage are some of the considerations in designing systems that will ideally meet the needs of the most people.
Cooperation between packets of data in a network is also a consideration. “Not all packets need to be treated the same,” says Foerster. “Some packets are more important than others to maximizing perceived video quality.”
To further complicate matters, the video measurements will vary by device. Also, different video formats have different requirements.
Increasing efficiency and quality is a pressing matter, suggests the post: “In 5 years an estimated 90 percent of Net traffic will be video, and 66 percent of mobile traffic will be video. Video traffic is expected to grow 66 times based on the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI), but carriers simply can’t afford to spend 66 times the cost to boost network capacity.”
The project is in year two of its three-year plan and includes research conducted by the University of Texas at Austin, Cornell, University of California San Diego, University of Southern California and Moscow State University.
Even with millions of global viewers, NASA successfully streamed live footage of the Curiosity rover’s landing on Mars, and not once did their servers fail. By contrast, the team’s attempt to upload a clip of the event to YouTube had less luck.
Within minutes of the “NASA Lands Car-Size Rover Beside Martian Mountain” video being posted, it was blocked by Scripps Local News on copyright grounds, highlighting some innate issues with YouTube’s automated copyright monitor, Content ID.
“The good thing about automation is that you don’t have to involve real people to make decisions. The bad thing about automation is that you don’t have to involve real people to make decisions,” said Bob Jacobs, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for communication, who added that these type of claims happen once a month.
Content ID scans the 72 hours of content uploaded each minute on YouTube, looking for videos that violate terms of service and for content that matches copyrighted material.
YouTube also enables copyright owners to submit requests for pirated video to be censored. Unfortunately, the site favors accusers, making it extremely difficult for the accused to reinstate their videos.
“YouTube’s policy requires the alleged violator to submit a signed counter-claim, under penalty of perjury, then awaits a response from the original supposed owner before possibly restoring the video,” Motherboard explains. “YouTube forwards the claim to the supposed copyright owner and waits ten days for a response. ‘If we do not receive such notification, we may reinstate the material,’ says YouTube.”
Jacobs argues there should be consequences for people who make false copyright claims.
Variety writer David S. Cohen says today’s 3D wave is not the same 18-month fad the industry experienced in the 1950s. Even so, he remains skeptical about its future based on filmmakers’ mindsets.
“Release my movie in 3D if you must — but don’t make me change one single thing I’m used to doing” is the attitude of many in the industry, Cohen writes.
The pricing also plays into 3D’s future. “I think the 3D upcharge is proving both a blessing and a curse,” he notes. “We’re getting movies with enough 3D to collect the upcharge, but not enough to deliver the premium experience the audience is paying for.”
3D has developed a bad reputation, which Cohen attributes to the “cynical content creation on the one hand and poor projection on the other,” both of which reflect a philosophy of collecting the upcharge with minimal effort.
“But if filmmakers don’t embrace 3D and make it a plus in their storytelling, and if exhibs won’t do the extra work and spend the extra money to show 3D beautifully, eventually auds might decide that aside from the work of a few people who have publicly promoted the format, Hollywood’s 3D is just a cynical cash-grab. And the sad part is, they might be right,” Cohen concludes.
Since Facebook has been striving to monetize its mobile efforts, the social giant took some heat earlier this year when big retailers such as Gamestop, Nordstrom and JC Penney shut down their Facebook stores.
Working with Ecwid, the second largest store-building application on Facebook, VentureBeat finds that Facebook store commerce is in fact working, but mostly for small- to medium-sized businesses.
“We started pulling data from the over 40,000 Ecwid accounts globally that have active stores on both a website and on Facebook,” the post explains. “For the second quarter of this year, we found that 22.1 percent of those orders came from the Facebook store. That’s up from 17.3 percent in Q1. These are impressive figures, especially when you consider they’ve grown from 15 percent in 2011 when we first started tracking this.”
Smaller businesses seem to have a better understanding of how social networks work, according to the analysis. These companies can convey a more personal tone in social conversations, be more flexible to incorporate new store-building technologies and build up their community — rather than just “product hawking.”
“[Small- to medium- businesses] more effectively integrate their stores into the flow of the conversation,” the post adds. “Dropping a store into a social news stream has to be done carefully. The purpose of social networks is to connect people, so an ill-timed sales offer can be a turnoff.”
The bigger companies could learn a thing or two from the smaller businesses. “Since the rules of this game are still being written, it’s important to pay attention to who’s figuring it out first,” suggests VentureBeat.