Author: Brad Reed

Google reports that government censorship requests have surged

Depressing but true: Google’s decision to publish details on government takedown requests hasn’t slowed governments’ zeal for removing content from the Internet. As a matter of fact, it seems that just the opposite has happened over the past three years. Google this week reported that government content removal requests surged from 1,811 in the first half of 2012 to 2,285 in the second half of 2012. 39% of all takedown requests were related to cases of alleged defamation, Google said, while only 18% of requests were related to privacy and security concerns. Among other things, Google said it received “a request to remove a YouTube video that allegedly defames the President” of Argentina “by depicting her in a compromising position”; a “request from legal representatives of a member of the executive branch” of Israel’s government “to remove two YouTube videos for alleged defamation”; and a “request to remove a YouTube video that allegedly defamed a presidential candidate” in South Korea.

April 25, 2013
Next-gen Xbox will reportedly run on ‘core’ Windows 8, start at $299

Even if PC sales continue tanking, Windows 8 could get a significant boost in adoption later this year just from eager gamers picking up the next-generation Xbox. Paul Thurrott of WindowsITPro reports that the next-generation Xbox will release in early November and will run on the “core” version of Windows 8 that “suggests a common apps platform or at least one that is similar to that used by Windows 8.” Thurrott speculates that Microsoft could use the common app development platform as a way to “open up this platform to enthusiast developers” and encourage more development of native Xbox apps.

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April 25, 2013
Why are Apple’s margins shrinking? It’s all about the iPhone

One big reason Apple’s share prices have crashed over the past few months has been the perception that the company’s period of remarkable growth has ended and that it has now become a typical slow-growing tech behemoth. The best evidence of this has been the significant decline of Apple’s gross margins, which peaked at close to 50% in late 2011 but have now shrunk to 37.5% in the company’s most recent quarter. The big questions, of course, are why have Apple’s gross margins been shrinking and does the company have any hope of returning to its 2011 glory days?

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April 25, 2013
After solid debut, Facebook Home has been rapidly sinking in Google Play charts

Facebook Home may have been downloaded more than 500,000 times in its first week but new research from BTIG suggests that it could take significantly longer to get its next 500,000 downloads. Using data from AppAnnie, BTIG found that Facebook Home’s ranking in the Google Play charts peaked at No. 50 on April 19th before quickly declining to No. 130 less than a week later. While Facebook debuted its Home application to great fanfare earlier this month, the app has been poorly received by many Android users who have been bombarding it with one-star reviews that account for more than half of all its total reviews on Google Play. BTIG says that because Facebook plans monthly updates to Home, it stands a chance to rebound if it can improve the user experience.

April 25, 2013
Activist group demands that next FCC chairman investigate ISP bandwidth caps

Data caps for home broadband services have been one of the less popular innovations ISPs have rolled out over the past couple of years and now one activist group is demanding that the next chairman of the Federal Communications Commission conduct a formal investigation into ISPs’ practice of capping how much data their customers can consume per month. The group, which is sponsored by Public Knowledge and includes representatives from the National Film Society and several online content creators, has launched a new website called “Don’t Cap That” that urges lawmakers to “insist that the next FCC Chair commit to making a detailed examination of data caps a priority during his or her tenure.” The group says that it opposes broadband data caps because they are “an easy way for existing pay television providers to make their online video competitors less attractive to viewers” and that it wants the next FCC chairman to “recognize the threat that data caps pose to the future growth of the internet, and to the growth of online video specifically.”

April 24, 2013
Australian cops nab self-proclaimed LulzSec leader

The lulz have been few and far between for hacker collective LulzSec lately since several of its members are facing prison terms, and now Australia’s ABC News reports that Australian police have arrested an unnamed 24-year-old man who is purportedly the self-proclaimed leader of LulzSec. Police said that the alleged LulzSec hacker, who is known as “Aush0k” online, is “a senior Australian IT professional who works for the local arm of an international IT company.” The Australian Federal Police arrested the man for allegedly accessing a restricted computer system and for altering data with intent to cause harm. If convicted he could face a maximum of 12 years in prison.

April 24, 2013
Samsung’s enterprise ambitions put on hold as KNOX security software delayed

BlackBerry executives will be pleased to know that Samsung’s plan to challenge them in the enterprise space has been dealt a setback. The New York Times reports that Samsung has delayed releasing its KNOX security software for business customers until at least this summer because the company “needed more time to test the software internally and with carriers.” Samsung’s KNOX security suite, which it first unveiled at Mobile World Congress this year, has several key enterprise features including an application container that works similarly to BlackBerry’s Balance feature that separates work application data from personal application data; the ability to implement separate VPNs to individual applications rather than relying on one VPN for the entire device; and a security-enhanced version of Android that’s been customized to help IT departments enforce more than 300 IT policies and have access to more than 700 mobile device management APIs.

April 24, 2013
Cook: Phablet vendors make ‘tradeoffs’ that sacrifice quality for size

While some fans of larger screens may be clamoring for Apple to launch its own 5-inch “iPhablet,” Apple CEO Tim Cook doesn’t see his company releasing such a device unless it’s a significant improvement from the current selections being offered by the likes of Samsung and LG. MacRumors has spotted an interesting tidbit from Cook’s earnings call on Tuesday in which Cook criticizes phablet manufacturers for allegedly sacrificing quality for size in their quest to make the largest screens possible.

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April 24, 2013
McAfee working on software that finds and blocks all pirated content

McAfee may be about to become the best friend of copyright holders all over the world. TorrentFreak reports that McAfee “has patented a new technology that aims to prevent the public from accessing pirated movies and music online.” The content-blocking technology could be integrated with McAfee’s SiteAdvisor toolbar and would essentially create a blacklist that compiles reported pirated content from across the web and offer users alternative suggestions for how to legally buy the content they’re looking for. In its patent filing, McAfee writes that “by informing a user of illegal sources and possible alternatives, a user can obtain the desired electronic distribution without violating an author’s intellectual property rights.”

April 24, 2013
Activist investor starts whipping Microsoft into shape, demands Office for iOS, Android

When hedge fund ValueAct announced it had taken a $2 billion stake in Microsoft earlier this week, questions arose about what changes the activist investor would try to make to improve the company’s value for shareholders. ZDNet reports that ValueAct’s first declared goal for Microsoft is to get it to release its Office suite of enterprise software for rival mobile platforms iOS and Android. This is particularly important because a report from earlier this month indicated that Microsoft wouldn’t have Office for iOS and Android ready until 2014 at the earliest. If ValueAct is using its newfound clout within the company to get Microsoft to focus its efforts more on developing Office for other platforms, then we could see Office release on iOS and Android sooner than we’d expected.

April 24, 2013
Study: The MacBook Pro with Boot Camp is the world’s most reliable Windows PC

Here’s something that should embarrass Microsoft’s OEM partners: The most reliable Windows PC in the world wasn’t even designed to run on Windows. ZDNet reports that a new study from PC efficiency software vendor Soluto has used “data from its massive online database of PC crashes, hangs, and performance metrics to identify the 10 most reliable Windows PCs you can buy today.” The study found that the 13-inch Retina-equipped MacBook Pro with Boot Camp installed is “at the top of the list.” Other reliable PCs include the Acer Aspire E1-571, the Dell XPS 13, the Dell Vostro 3560, the Acer Aspire V3-771 and Apple’s 15-inch Retina-equipped MacBook Pro. Taken all together, then, Apple computers account for 33% of the six most reliable Windows PCs in the world while no PCs produced by the world’s leading vendor HP even crack the top 10.

April 24, 2013
Amazon is reportedly developing an Apple TV rival

Amazon is getting ready to make its biggest push yet into consumers’ living rooms. Unnamed sources have told Bloomberg Businessweek that Amazon is planning to release a set-top box that “will plug into TVs and give users access to Amazon’s expanding video offerings” including “its a la carte Video on Demand store, which features newer films and TV shows, and its Instant Video service, which is free for subscribers to the Amazon Prime two-day shipping package.” Businessweek’s sources say that Amazon is building its own dedicated set-top box to draw more traffic to its own content offerings since Amazon is just one of many video streaming apps available on consoles such as the Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation. However, Businessweek’s sources say that the set-top box will “likely” offer access to competing streaming apps such as Netflix and Hulu even though it will be primarily centered around Amazon’s video services.

April 24, 2013
Nintendo Wii U sales in dire straits, being outsold by original Wii

Nintendo is running out of time to sell the Wii U before it gets heavy competition from both the PlayStation 4 and the next Xbox. As Engadget points out, Nintendo has reported selling just 390,000 Wii U consoles over the past quarter, which puts its total number of consoles sold at just 3.45 million. This means that Nintendo didn’t even hit its sales target of 4 million consoles sold by the end of March, despite the fact that it was a downward revision from an earlier sales target of 5.5 million. But this isn’t even the most humiliating aspect of Nintendo’s anemic Wii U sales record, since T3 notes that Nintendo has actually sold around 4 million of its original Wii consoles since the launch of the Wii U, meaning that gamers are still much more interested in its years-old model than the current version.

April 24, 2013
Here comes iOS 7: WWDC 2013 to kick off on June 10th, tickets go on sale Thursday

We now have a good idea when Apple’s iOS 7 will launch, as the company announced that its annual Worldwide Developers Conference will kick off on June 10th in San Francisco and will run through until June 14th. Tickets for the event will go on sale Thursday at 10 a.m. PDT and will be available through Apple’s official WWDC page. Apple is widely expected to announce its next version of the iOS platform at this year’s WWDC, which will mark the first version of iOS to be released with design guru Jonathan Ive at the helm. Earlier reports have indicated that Ive has been pushing for a “starker and simpler” design for the popular operating system. Apple’s full press release announcing the event is posted below.

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April 24, 2013
Nokia reportedly scores deal with Verizon to carry next flaghip Lumia

It’s been a long wait for Verizon subscribers who double as Nokia fans, but they’re finally going to get a flagship Lumia phone on their network. Bloomberg reports that Nokia and Verizon have finalized a deal to bring the upcoming Lumia 928 flagship smartphone to Verizon’s network sometime later this year. An unnamed source confirms with Bloomberg that the Lumia 928 features “a metal body, 4.5-inch touch screen, 8-megapixel camera and wireless charging” and will be the first flagship Lumia to be sold exclusively by Verizon. Earlier leaked images of the Lumia 928 show that the device will also feature a PureView camera, Carl Zeiss optics and a xenon flash.

April 23, 2013
Netflix has already recouped its $100 million House of Cards investment

Netflix spent around $100 million to produce the first two seasons of House of Cards, the original drama that stars Kevin Spacey as a comically oily United States congressman. But while this may sound like a big investment for the hugely popular content distributor, analysis from The Atlantic Wire shows that it may just be a drop in the bucket in the bigger scheme of things. According to The Atlantic Wire’s calculations, Netflix has already earned its $100 million back “by adding more than 2 million U.S. subscribers this quarter and another 1 million elsewhere in the world,” thus giving Netflix a strong incentive to produce more original content going forward. Netflix posted impressive earnings on Monday and announced that its subscriber base in the United States had risen to over 29 million, thus giving it more American subscribers than HBO.

April 23, 2013
iTunes still dominates market for video downloads

Apple’s iTunes has long dominated the market for online music purchases and it seems that it holds a similar stranglehold on the market for online movie and TV show purchases as well. New data from the NPD Group shows that iTunes accounts for 65% of all online movie downloads and 67% of all online TV show downloads, putting it significantly ahead of both Amazon Instant Video, which accounts for 10% of movie downloads and 8% of TV show downloads, and Xbox video, which accounts for 10% of movie downloads and 14% of TV show downloads. NPD analyst Russ Crupnick says that iTunes has stayed on top of the online video market because “Apple has successfully leveraged its first-mover advantage and of iTunes, iOS and the popularity of iPhone and iPad” to secure an enduring market advantage.

April 23, 2013
AT&T posts in-line Q1 earnings results as growth slows

AT&T on Tuesday posted first quarter earnings of $0.64 per share on revenues of $31.40 billion, thus matching Wall Street expectations of $0.64 EPS on revenues of $31.75 billion. The carrier posted a net addition of 291,000 subscribers on the quarter, bringing its total subscriber number to 107.3 million. What’s more, the company also reported that its churn rate is down year-over-year-, going from 1.46% in the first quarter of 2012 to 1.38% in Q1 2013. AT&T also reported selling 4.8 million iPhones on the quarter, thus helping the carrier maintain its spot as the top iPhone carrier in the United States. AT&T shares were down by around 1.25% in after hours trading on news of its Q1 earnings.

April 23, 2013
An illustration of just how massive Netflix has become

Netflix reported a blowout quarter on Monday as its subscribers in the United States surged to more than 29 million, thus giving it even more paid monthly subscribers than HBO. The stock jumped more than 25% on the news. But financials and subscriber numbers are only part of what makes Netflix such a success story: According to NPR, some analysts are now estimating that “Netflix alone takes up a third of U.S. bandwidth between 9:00 PM and midnight.” Given these sorts of enormous bandwidth requirements, it’s easy to see why Netflix keeps such close track of how fast ISPs’ connections deliver video streams to the home, since slower connections inhibit the company’s ability to grow its online business.

April 23, 2013
Apple reportedly ‘caught flat-footed’ by the rise of phablets

The iPhone 5 has certainly been a hit but it doesn’t seem to have been the record-breaking, world-conquering hit that previous iPhone models have been. Part of this has been because many customers are still picking up older iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S models at reduced prices. And per Barron’s, UBS analyst Steve Milunovich thinks that part of the reason iPhone 5 sales have been “disappointing” is because an iPhone with a larger 4-inch display simply isn’t enough to get people excited in an era when Samsung is releasing phablets whose displays top 6 inches.

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April 23, 2013