With the holiday season fast approaching, it looks like Nokia is eager to bump up sales in the UK lest it get trounced by the competition. For Vodafone customers shopping around for a new Windows Phone, that means getting a free year-long Netflix subscription with the purchase of a Lumia 1020. ...Around my town, it’s not uncommon at all these days to see teenagers downtown stop in mid stride, arms extended, to snap a “selfie” (or self portrait) with their smart phone. If you didn’t know better, you might think this was a case of mass hysteria—a narcissistic twist on the Salem Witch Trials. If you’re of a certain age, however, you know the compulsive “selfie snapping” is a telltale sign of a snap-chatter.
SnapChat, of course, is that massively popular messaging and picture sharing service that you’ve never heard of and have absolutely no use for if you’re under the age of, say, 17. The two-year-old photo messaging service is the brainchild of Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, who are described as “two Stanford guys who love building cool things.”
Using it, you can send photos or videos of yourself with witty captions to friends who “follow you” (Twitter style) as well as post “Stories” or series of photos or videos to your SnapChat profile.
When you take a “snap,” you can decide how long you want it to be viewable—up to ten seconds. When you send that photo or video to a friend, they can open it and view it for the length of time you specified, after which it is deleted from SnapChat’s servers and from the receiving mobile device.
In short, SnapChat is publicity ... with privacy. And that’s a killer feature for today’s tween-agers and teenagers, who are desperate to “be famous,” even in a small way, and even if that means shining the light of social media into every nook and cranny of their personal lives and personal space.
Here’s the problem, though: SnapChat isn’t really ephemeral—and the likelihood that SnapChat photos will get captured and stored permanently is growing each day.
In a blog post last week, Miccah Schaffer, Snap Chat’s head of Trust & Safety clarified the company’s position on retaining data that its users share. Specifically, Schaffer revealed that SnapChat does occasionally manually retain and review unopened Snaps under certain circumstances. What are those? For one, when the company is ordered by law enforcement to do so pursuant to a search warrant for the contents of Snaps. Schaffer acknowledged that SnapChat has received “about a dozen “ such warrants in the last five months that have resulted in unopened Snaps being turned over to law enforcement.
Beyond that, SnapChat may also retain opened Snaps for a time, contrary to its stated policy of deleting them once they have been opened. Again—this is only under special circumstances “like when law enforcement is determining whether to issue a search warrant for Snaps.”
That kind of legal small print on SnapChat’s terms of service shouldn’t really surprise anyone. The company has always acknowledged that it can’t prevent your SnapChat correspondents from taking a screen shot of the image you send—or pointing a camera at their phone. And the company has tried to compensate for those limitations. Screenshots, for example, are noted by the SnapChat application and reported to the sender.
The bigger threat to SnapChat and its users, though, may come from third-party platforms and applications, which can easily undermine the privacy protections that are seemingly built into the platform. Early releases of Apple’s iOS operating system changed the way in which screen shots could be taken, making it impossible for the SnapChat application to detect when screenshots of SnapChat images were captured.
Also this week came news of a new application, SnapHack Pro, for sale on the iOS App Store. It allows users to log in using their SnapChat credentials and send and receive Snaps. The difference: all images opened and viewed in SnapHack are permanent.
SnapHack, developed by a UK programmer named Darren Jones, was the top-selling mobile application on the UK edition of Apple’s AppStore, though—an indication of the appetite for ways to circumvent the implied “privacy” of SnapChat’s service.
What does this mean for all of us? As the recent revelations about the NSA’s PRISM Program have shown, claims to online anonymity and privacy are falling left and right.
The only way to win, then, is “not to play” (to quote WOPR, the infamous super computer from the movie War Games). Alas, the trend lines point the other way. Data released by Microsoft this week finds that parents are keeping only loose reigns—at best—on their children when it comes to social media.
According to Redmond’s numbers, almost one in five parents with children under the age of 7 allow their children to have unsupervised access to smart phones. Forty percent of parents with children that age allow unsupervised access to computers.
While that's great for their computer literacy, the dark clouds over SnapChat suggest that it probably isn't going to be good news for their privacy in the years ahead!
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Philadelphia schools learned Wednesday they will get an extra $45 million from the state as the district struggles with its worst financial crisis in memory and questions about a student's death after an apparent asthma attack at a school without a nurse on site.
Gov. Tom Corbett announced the state aid to Pennsylvania's largest school district at an unrelated news conference in his Capitol offices and did not take questions afterward. However, he said his decision came a day after a letter from the Philadelphia school superintendent, William Hite, convinced him that district officials had made enough progress toward the governor's educational and financial goals for improvements in the 134,000-student district.
Corbett also said he and his wife sent their sympathies to the family of 12-year-old Laporshia Massey, although a spokesman for Corbett later said the release of the money and the girl's death were not connected.
Still, Corbett's acting education secretary, Carolyn Dumaresq, said Wednesday her department will review the circumstances of Massey's death and will try to determine whether she had an inhaler with her the day she died and whether she was able to self-administer it. Dumaresq also said her department would review the district's emergency plans and staffing, and correct any problems it finds.
Dumaresq said it is not unusual for a smaller public school to be without a nurse on site each day because the state requires that the caseload of school nurses must not exceed 1,500 students per nurse. Sometimes one nurse covers two buildings, Dumaresq said.
Because of the funding problems, the district cut its nursing staff district-wide two years ago; the smaller school that Massey attended had a nurse on duty two days a week.
Hite said Wednesday the money would allow the state-controlled district to restore sports and music for the full year and rehire about 400 people, including guidance counselors, assistant principals and teachers. However, he said he did not plan to rehire any nurses, as union officials and a parent's organization urged, because the district has met the state's caseload standard.
Holding six weeks of classes without the money has been "detrimental," he said.
The district approved a budget of nearly $2.4 billion, and the extra money helps close the gap from the prior year's nearly $2.7 billion budget.
The state Legislature had approved the money in July, although it gave the secretary of education the power to first demand improvements to fiscal stability, educational improvement and operational control.
Initially, Corbett, a Republican, had sought significant concessions from the teachers union, but Corbett's budget secretary, Charles Zogby, said Hite's letter summarizing steps taken, such as managing teacher assignments and closing schools, were satisfactory, even though negotiations with the teachers' union continue without a contract.
Layoff notices that went out in June to nearly 4,000 employees wiped out 20 percent of the district's employees. A pledge by Mayor Michael Nutter to borrow $50 million against future sales tax receipts prompted the rehiring of some laid-off staff and encouraged Hite to back off a threat not to open the schools Sept. 9.
Philadelphia officials had been harshly critical of the administration's decision to withhold the money, and the death of Massey, a sixth-grader at Bryant Elementary, renewed an outcry over conditions in the district. A parents' group, Parents United for Public Education, said the district's lack of money is "dangerous and it is unsustainable. It has put children and families directly in harm's way."
Massey died Sept. 25 after initially reporting that she was unable to breathe at school, her father's lawyer, Ronald S. Pollack, said. Some details remain unclear, but she did not come home from school with her inhaler, Pollack said. She died later at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, he said.
School nurse Eileen Duffey, who was helping to organize a Thursday vigil in Laporshia's honor, said there's no guarantee that Laporshia would be alive had there been a nurse in the building
"But I do know that school nurses, such as myself, we are trained to assess children," Duffey said.
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Associated Press writer Maryclaire Dale in Philadelphia contributed to this report. Matheson reported from Philadelphia.
We're just a year away from the start of production on the second in James Cameron's Avatar movie series, according to its lead actor, with the director currently hard at work "building the ship to Pandora." Hopefully, he means that in the metaphorical sense.
Talking during an interview with Australian radio station Nova 96.9, Sam Worthington said that he expected photography to begin on Avatar 2 in October 2014, with shooting for the second, third and fourth movies in the series to be completed within a year ahead of each new installment's annual release, from December 2016 through December 2018.
STORY: James Cameron Brings in Writer Josh Friedman for 'Avatar 2' Script
It's almost been four years since the release of the first Avatar, and just two months since it was revealed that Cameron would create three sequels instead of the originally planned two, with Josh Friedman, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver and Shane Salerno writing the screenplays. Additionally, novelist Steven Gould has been signed to write four original novels to support the new series.
Congress set a limit on how much debt the U.S. Treasury could accrue back in 1917.
Congress set a limit on how much debt the U.S. Treasury could accrue back in 1917.
Political battles over the debt limit have been around nearly as long as the law passed by Congress in 1917 that set a statutory limit for how much debt the Treasury could accrue.
Since then, Congress has had to increase that limit on more than 100 occasions — and 40 of those times, lawmakers have tried to tie strings to raising the debt ceiling. In the last few years, though, there's been a marked escalation in those demands.
When Treasury Secretary Jack Lew went before the Senate Finance Committee late last week, he put President Obama's Republican adversaries on notice: "We cannot have the debt limit be something that's a threat to the economy unless policy concessions are made — that's not how our democratic system works. A minority can't do that."
Oh, yes, it can, countered Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Senate's GOP minority. On the Senate floor, McConnell said Obama's refusal to make concessions in this standoff breaks with tradition.
"It's not the way presidents of both parties have dealt with this problem in the past," he said. "Reagan negotiated. Clinton negotiated. And if President Obama wants America to increase the credit limit, he'll negotiate, too."
In fact, Obama tried to negotiate with House Speaker John Boehner in the summer of 2011 to raise the debt ceiling. The president's lingering exasperation with that episode in many ways echoes one of his Republican predecessors.
In a 1987 White House radio address, President Ronald Reagan complained about a debt-ceiling deal that congressional Democrats had just muscled through.
"Congress consistently brings the government to the edge of default before facing its responsibility," Reagan said. "This brinkmanship threatens the holders of government bonds and those who rely on Social Security and veteran benefits."
But economist Alice Rivlin, a veteran of some of those earlier debt-ceiling battles, says they were tame compared to what's going on now.
"The mood is very different, the depth of the antagonism is very different and the risk-taking is different," she says.
Rivlin was White House budget director during the Clinton administration, a time she says when there was no talk of defaulting on the debt.
"Nobody thought in the '90s that we would breach the debt ceiling," she said. "There were attempts to attach things, but it was really much more symbolic than real."
Early in 2006, as the Iraq War raged, a Republican-led Senate voted on raising the debt ceiling, and along with every other Democrat, then-Sen. Barack Obama voted no. The only thing attached to that measure was the Democrats' disapproval.
Five years later, as president, Obama told ABC that no vote was a mistake.
"As president, you start realizing, 'You know what? We can't play around with this stuff. This is the full faith and credit of the United States,' " he said. "And so that was just a example of a new senator, you know, making what is a political vote as opposed to doing what was important for the country. And I'm the first one to acknowledge it."
Obama recently told reporters that by raising the debt ceiling Congress is simply allowing financing for spending it has already approved. But it's still a tough vote.
Allen Schick, a congressional budget expert at the University of Maryland, says it has always been a challenge for either party to round up enough votes to boost the debt limit — which is why Congress found various ways in the past quarter century to avoid holding actual votes on raising the debt ceiling.
"The issue then was really different than it is now," he says. "Then it was an issue — 'We're short of votes' — now there's an issue of demands made by the two parties which are not acceptable to one another."
Rep. Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat, says the debt ceiling has simply become an opportunity for Congress to make mischief.
"It's a nuclear-tipped leverage point," he says. "And this year, of course, the Tea Party folks are using it. But if this becomes a legitimate tactic, you might find a Democratic faction three or four years from now saying they want to use it. My view: We should disarm."
Welch co-sponsored a bill this year to abolish the debt ceiling. So far it's gone nowhere.
The Apache Software Foundation unveiled its latest release of its open source data processing program, Hadoop 2. It runs multiple applications simultaneously to enable users to quickly and efficiently leverage data in multiple ways at supercomputing speed, Apache said Wednesday.
Apache Hadoop is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using simple programming models. It enables organizations to more efficiently and cost-effectively store, process, manage and analyze the growing volumes of data being created and collected every day.
[ Also on InfoWorld: Get ready for a flood of new Hadoop apps. | Harness the power of Hadoop with InfoWorld's 7 top tools for taming big data. | Discover what's new in business applications with InfoWorld's Technology: Applications newsletter. ]
Hadoop is deployed at enterprise organizations around the globe, including Amazon Web Services, AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Netflix, and Hewlett-Packard.
The latest version of the platform, released Wednesday, has been more than four years in the making and has a number of new components. Most notable is the addition of YARN, (Yet Another Resource Negotiator), which is a successor to Hadoop's MapReduce. The new version splits major functions into two separate daemons, with resource management in one, and job scheduling and monitoring in the other.
YARN sits on top of the HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) and serves as a large-scale, distributed operating system for big data applications, enabling multiple applications to run simultaneously for more efficient support of data throughout its entire lifecycle, Apache said in a news release. Hadoop 2 and YARN gives users the ability to mix batch, interactive and real-time workloads within a stable foundational part of the Hadoop ecosystem, it said.
Apache also refers to YARN as MapReduce Version 2. It retains API compatibility with the previous version, and applications written for MapReduce will run on YARN if recompiled, the foundation said.
More than a dozen Apache projects integrate with Hadoop, and 10 more are about to follow, Apache said.
The General Availability (GA) release of Hadoop 2 follows a preview distribution that was released in June, that also included YARN. Apache Hadoop 2 will be released under the Apache License v2.0.
Loek is Amsterdam Correspondent and covers online privacy, intellectual property, open-source and online payment issues for the IDG News Service. Follow him on Twitter at @loekessers or email tips and comments to loek_essers@idg.com.
While a lighter design for the iPad 5 and Retina for the iPad mini 2 are dominating conversation, there are some other new features that could make an appearance in Apple's next-generation tablets, including Touch ID, the fingerprint identify sensor. Of course, Touch ID requires the new Apple A7 chipset and its secure enclave to work, but that's a likely addition anyway, at least to the full-sized iPad. And with the A7 also comes the possibility of the Apple M7 motion-coprocessor. Would that make sense for a tablet? Would any of it? Let's take a look!
The iPad 4 currently uses the Apple A6X, a quad graphics core version of the iPhone 5's A6. That makes the A7 the logical successor for the iPad 4. The Apple A7 system-on-a-chip (SoC) debuted with the iPhone 5s. Apple says the A7 is twice as fast at both general purpose and graphics processing as its predecessor, the A6, and is 64-bit with support for OpenGL ES 3.0. Codenamed Cyclone, it appears to be 28nm, still dual-core and 1.3GHz, but based on the new 64-bit ARMv8 ISA and paired with a PowerVR Series 6 (Rogue) graphics processor, potentially the G6430, and 1GB of DDR 3 RAM. The only consideration here is whether the GPU is powerful enough to handle Retina on its own, or if we'll see a quad-core A7X to make it even more powerful.
The iPad mini 2 isn't as clear. The current iPad mini uses the Apple A5 from 2011. That reflects its lower price point and secondary position in the iPad product line. The next logical step up from that is the Apple A6. Using that, however, would rule out Touch ID and likely the Apple M7 as well. How well it would perform with a 2048x1536 Retina display is also a question. The A6X could handle it, since it already handles the iPad 4, but then the question shifts to how well that bigger chipset fits the iPad mini's constraints. Going to the Apple A7 or Apple A7X would jump two processor generations, and again shifts the question, this time to costs and production capacity on what's a brand new chipset. We'll talk about iPad mini 2 pricing in a future post, but this is certainly one of the most interesting elements of the iPad mini evolution to watch.
Touch ID currently lets you unlock your iPhone 5s and make iTunes account purchases very literally with a finger. It works so well, people who try it very quickly want it everywhere, including on the new iPads. If Apple does indeed want to grow the footprint of Touch ID, and they have the capacity to produce the sensors in high enough volumes, the iPad 5 certainly seems like the next candidate in line. If it gets an Apple A7 or Apple A7X processor, it should get the secure enclave that comes with it. That means, at least on a technological level, Touch ID would be a possibility.
The iPad mini, again, is a little tougher to figure out. Whether or not Apple brings Retina to the next iPad mini, if they do it with Apple A6 or A6X then Touch ID won't be in the cards. If they go with an Apple A7 or A7X, then Touch ID is in play. The former would keep costs down and keep differentiation up - the big iPad would remain the top-of-the-line iPad - special features and all. If the latter, then, like the iPad 5, Touch ID would certainly be a possibility and low end vs. high end positioning would remain the only consideration.
The Apple M7 motion coprocessor is a sensor fusion hub. It takes in all the information from the accelerometer, magnometer, and gyroscope, and keeps it ready for when the iPhone 5s "wakes up" and an app needs it. Because it's only doing that one job, it requires far less power than the Apple A7 chipset, and so lets the A7 sleep, conserve power, and not have to worry about losing motion data while it does so. Since the M7 keeps a weeks worth of movement, it also means any new apps don't have to start from scratch each time you install them.
But does a chip designed to keep track of moving things make sense on the iPad mini, much less the iPad 5? Sure. Most obviously, for stillness. When the M7 chip detects its not moving, it can power down or slow down other systems to save even more power. For example, it can reduce the frequency of network connections to keep the radios off for longer intervals. It also means apps written to take advantage of the M7 on the iPhone 5s can do the same thing on the iPad 5 or iPad mini 2. Hey, backpackers might want to know their steps as much as runners!
Not surprisingly, just like Touch ID, M7 might be tied to A7. Meaning, if the iPad 5 gets an Apple A7, it could be a candidate for the M7 as well. Likewise the iPad mini. If, however, the mini goes to A6, it seems less likely the M7 will follow.
If it looks like there's a lot of dependencies affecting a lot of product decisions there, imagine how Apple must feel!
iMore will be providing complete coverage of Apple's October 22 iPad and Mac event, including and especially the iPad 5 and iPad mini 5.
iPad (5th gen)
Apple's full-sized tablet gets slimmed down. Rumored features include:
iPad mini (2nd gen)
Apple's most popular tablet goes next-generation. Rumored features include:
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