Category: Technology

How do you like it, technohipsters? WaPo: DOJ preparing antitrust probe for Apple, among others:

Apple, Google, Yahoo! and Genentech are subjects of a fresh antitrust investigation surrounding hiring and recruiting practices among companies in the tech industry, according to Washington Post staff writer Cecilia Kang.

“By agreeing not to hire away top talent, the companies could be stifling competition and trying to maintain their market power unfairly,” antitrust experts said in the article. Hiring and recruiting can sometimes be a touchy affair, as Apple found out late last year when trying to hire Mark Papermaster. The investigation may suggest some kind of written agreement among large tech firms to not hire away each other’s top talent.

Your cherished icons are businesses, and your cherished administration has determined they are evil.

Class lectures? There’s an app for that: Journalism school to require iPod use:

Kayla Miller isn’t sure why she would need an iPhone or an iPod Touch in her courses at the University of Missouri, but she likes the idea of the school requiring students to have them.

“I don’t really see a need for them, but I think it’s cool,” she said.

After all, Miller, 19, said, if the devices are required — as they will be for all incoming journalism majors starting in the fall — many parents will feel like they have to buy them for their teens. Even though she’ll be a sophomore next year and won’t be required to have one, Miller said she might urge her parents to buy her one for her journalism courses, anyway.

The MU School of Journalism is requiring that all incoming freshmen have iPhones or iPod Touch devices to “help students adjust to freshmen year,” Associate Dean Brian Brooks said. “It also would allow them to record lectures and review it. Many schools are doing it now, and it seemed like a great idea to us.”

See, while you’re looking at Halliburton and Blackwater, the corporations favored by the cool and the hep are becoming mandatory.

And the worst part is the well-conditioned student who is in favor of compulsory iPods even though she doesn’t see the need for it. She just accepts that the authorities are compelling students for the better.

I’m not saying I fear for the future of this country, because that might imply I think this country has a future. Instead, here are real estate listings for Sandpoint, Idaho. Good luck.

(Hat tip to gimlet.)

ComputerWorld runs two stories this week which illustrate a point/counterpoint, albeit unintentionally.

First, an editorial shrieking about how not having electronic medical records is dangerous:

The medical data that might have saved me several hours of terror sat unused. It was unavailable to doctors outside of Dartmouth-Hitchcock’s Keene clinic, except by mail or fax. And even if the clinic could transmit my records, Charlotte Regional Medical Center’s systems were incapable of receiving them. According to its records department, the hospital still uses paper-based processes for its medical records.

On the other hand, here’s a frightening story about online medical records:

University of Miami officials last week acknowledged that six backup tapes from its medical school that contained more than 2 million medical records was stolen in March from a van that was transporting the data to an off-site facility.

Perhaps someone in the know weighs the chances of a faulty diagnosis against the chances of the data being stolen and determined the risk of theft is greater. Perhaps not.

But that’s a consideration to make, ainna?

I suppose that Web 2.0 will change everything in this instance:

Time may be running out for lawmakers hoping to pass a controversial civil union bill this year, but supporters are getting some untraditional help to boost interest: a “Facebook” army of more than 8,000 supporters.

This is meaningful because it supports the narrative and preferred mindset of the journalist. I mean, it’s 8,000 names on an Internet bulletin board or Internet petition.

Municipal Wi-Fi – wherein the city pays to have wireless infrastructure installed because the hipsters love it and because city coffers are overflowing and all existing infrastructure is shining and schools are accredited, amen.

But there’s trouble in hipsta paradise in:

• Houston: EarthLink pays $5 million to delay Houston Wi-Fi buildout:
  

  A day after EarthLink said it would lay off nearly half its workforce, the company has agreed to pay the city of Houston a $5 million penalty fee for missing its first deadline in building the city’s municipal Wi-Fi network.

  First of many happy returns, I bet.

• San Francisco: S.F. citywide Wi-Fi plan fizzles as provider backs off:
  

  Mayor Gavin Newsom’s high-profile effort to blanket San Francisco with a free wireless Internet network died Wednesday when provider EarthLink backed out of a proposed contract with the city.

  The contract, which was three years in the making, had run into snags with the Board of Supervisors, but ultimately it was undone when Atlanta-based EarthLink announced Tuesday that it no longer believed providing citywide Wi-Fi was economically viable for the company.

  Not economically viable? Dammit, the city will do it anyway!

• St. Louis: Light poles create delay in rollout of city’s Wi-Fi network:
  

  Still waiting for citywide Wi-Fi in St. Louis?

  It might be awhile.

  Technical delays continue to dog AT&T’s plans to blanket downtown, and eventually the whole city, with a wireless Internet network. Mostly, the problems stem from an unexpected obstacle: the humble city streetlight.

  Hey, where did all those light-up lollipops come from all of a sudden? They weren’t there yesterday!

Behind schedule, over budget, and ill-conceived: the headlong rush to municipal wi-fi whose useful shelf life will probably be less than the time taken to roll it out proves that public/private projects built around the “Wouldn’t It Be Cool” imperative (see also light rail) combine the worst of both spheres. The only thing they do efficiently is to continue to spend taxpayer money at an ever-increasing rate.

I went on a little rant here about trusting a company and its online business plan as a mechanism for storing your data. As a follow up, we have these two stories:

• Don’t Trust the Servers: The danger of putting your data at the mercy of a company’s servers was made apparent when Microsoft’s own WGA servers crashed over the weekend.
  

  The Windows Genuine Advantage plan became a genuine disadvantage over the weekend when the server that verified users went down and began to disable operating systems around the world. At least, it disabled the operating systems of computers that checked into the home base to affirm their legitimacy.

  The WGA server outage hit on Friday evening and was finally repaired on Saturday. It was down for 19 long hours.

• The Content in Google Apps Belongs to Google:
  

  An alert reader, SentryWatch, commented per my last blog that the Terms of Service posted on the Google Docs and Spreadsheets site assigns content rights of anything saved on Doc and Spreadsheets to Google. It’s almost too incredible to believe, so here’s the wording from the mighty Google maw itself:

  “… you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, modify, publish and distribute such Content on Google services for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services….”

Although to be fair to Google, kids these days are to young to remember when a similar clause appeared in the Microsoft Office EULA and caused a similar reaction, albeit one not magnified by the ease with which people discuss it on the Internet.

But both stories do highlight the dangers in trusting things in the Internet cloud with core data or core functionality. And it highlights how the “good enough” standard of quality, when multiplied hundreds of times in the number of core users, will leave a large number of users affected by “minor glitches” that will render their services useless to them. Hopefully, before they’re too invested in the online software/data storage vendor.

In the article ISPs to rural America: Live with dial-up, writer Robert Mitchell apparently wants the government to force businesses to lose money so that BOBOs who move to rural areas can have fast Internet access. The problem:

Kim Rossey is one of them. Soon after moving to Gilsum, N.H. (population 811), Rossey learned that he couldn’t get broadband to support his Web programming business, TooCoolWebs. DSL wasn’t available, and the local cable service provider wasn’t interested in extending the cabling for its broadband service the three-tenths of a mile required to reach Rossey’s house — even if he paid the full $7,000 cost.

Funny, the solution is:

Rural areas need broadband. But deregulation has freed carriers from any real obligation to offer it. The market will never provide universal broadband access without regulation or subsidies, but the U.S. lacks both a coherent policy and the political will to address the issue. Even as the telephony infrastructure itself is absorbed into the Internet, some policy-makers still fail to view broadband as the new critical infrastructure.

The U.S. (government) should compel telecommunication providers to lose money on this install. Or perhaps the government should compel taxpayers to run fiber up to rural homes. Who knows? All that’s important is that the policy is coherent, not that it’s economically viable.

Next up: Compelling Chinese places to deliver to Web design businesses in the sticks. Because third world countries, particularly China, have plans in place to get Chinese food to rural areas.