Google Buzz falls from grace

A leading privacy group has urged US regulators to investigate Google’s new social networking service Buzz, one week after its launch.

The Electronic Privacy Information Centre (Epic) has made its complaint to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC). It says that Buzz – which is part of Google’s Gmail service – is “deceptive” and breaks consumer protection law.

The search giant has twice made changes to the service to placate an outcry from users about privacy concerns. Canadian officials are also looking at whether Buzz violates privacy laws.

“Google still hasn’t gone far enough,” Epic’s consumer privacy counsel Kim Nguyen told BBC News.

“Twitter is a social networking site and people know what they are signing up for. With Gmail, users signed up for an e-mail service not a social networking service,” said Ms Nguyen.

“Despite all the changes, they still do not give users a meaningful way to opt into it.” Buzz was automatically rolled out to Gmail’s 176 million users.

The FTC has been asked to “require Google to provide Gmail users with opt-in consent to the Google Buzz service”.

(more…)

Filed under: google, social networking by alex
No Comments »

The world’s biggest social network has revealed details of a stripped-down, text-only version of its mobile site called Facebook Zero.

The low-bandwidth site is aimed at people viewing Facebook on their mobile and will launch “in the coming weeks”.

The social network recently said that more than 100 million people now access Facebook from their phone.

Analysts at CCS Insight said that the new site could help operators free-up critical bandwidth on their networks.

Data from industry body the GSM Association recently revealed that Facebook accounts for nearly half of all the time people in the UK spend going online using their phones.

The data showed that people in the UK spent around 2.2bn minutes browsing the social network during December alone.

(more…)

Filed under: facebook, technology by alex
No Comments »

Source: bbc.co.uk

Barbie, the toy doll that is a perennial favourite among girls, has been assigned a new career – computer engineer.But how accurate is the glam-looking tech support Barbie compared to real life?

She’s got an impressive CV that includes everything from astronaut to racing car driver. But Barbie, the doll best known for her tiny waist and inexplicably high arches, has added another job to the list: computer engineer.

Her new occupation is the result of an online vote hosted by Barbie’s makers, Mattel – and the doll itself was unveiled last week at the New York Toy Fair.

The new doll is decked out in black spangled leggings and a lime-green fitted tunic patterned with binary code, worn under a slinky waistcoat, with saddle-stitching detail. The ensemble is topped off with the requisite hot-pink accessories: glasses, watch and shoes. To emphasise her innate “techiness” she carries a pink laptop and sports a Bluetooth headset.

And then there’s the trademark lustrous Barbie hair – seemingly untouched by working days spent facing a computer terminal in a stuffy and dry working environment.

So would tech support Barbie fit in among the IT crowd in your office?

(more…)

Filed under: other by alex
No Comments »

Source: bbc.co.uk/news

Hand-held devices could soon have pressure-sensitive touch-screens and keys, thanks to a UK firm’s material that exploits a quantum physics trick.

The technology allows, for example, scrolling down a long list or webpage faster as more pressure is applied.

A division of Samsung that distributes mobile phone components to several handset manufacturers has now licensed the “Quantum Tunnelling Composite”.

The approach could find use in devices from phones to games to GPS handsets.

In January, Japanese touch-screen maker Nissha also licensed the approach from Yorkshire-based Peratech, who make the composite material QTC.

However, as part of the licensing agreements, Peratech could not reveal the phone, gaming, and device makers that could soon be using the technology to bring pressure sensitivity to a raft of new devices.

Besides control for scrolling, the pressure-sensitivity could lead to a “third dimension” in touchscreens.

(more…)

Filed under: news, technology by alex
No Comments »

Source: Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC News

Today is Safer Internet Day and in the UK, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop) is promoting two ideas to make the web more secure for children.

The first is an animated film aimed at helping children aged five to seven to stay safe – Ceop says eight in 10 of them now use the internet. The second is a joint initiative with Microsoft.
The software giant has produced a special Ceop-flavoured version of its web browser Internet Explorer 8 which will give parents and children easy access to advice and information. Microsoft came to the government body with the idea and the browser will be promoted on the Ceop site and as an option when you download IE8 in the UK.

Once the browser is installed, users will have a Ceop button on their toolbar, enabling them to seek help or even report abuse. A spokeswoman for Ceop explained that the browser didn’t include any filtering system – she said they weren’t very effective – so a child would still be able to visit any sites if parents hadn’t used another blocking method.

This may well be a useful tool for parents, but it also looks like great marketing for a browser which has had some bad publicity lately and has lost some of its dominance to the likes of Firefox and Google’s Chrome. Ceop insists that as a public-sector body, it can’t direct people to one commercial product – but is warm in its endorsement of Microsoft’s efforts. “We work very closely with Microsoft,” the spokeswoman told me.”They have been ahead of thinking in this area.”

(more…)

Filed under: browsers, news, technology by alex
No Comments »

A “paint by numbers” dress has been announced today by fashion designer Berber Soepboer and graphic designer Michiel Schuurman.

Being hailed as a way for women to co-ordinate their party wear, the sixties style scalloped dress comes with a varity of different coloured pens to match your moods.

Berber, who lives in the Netherlands, said: ‘I especially design clothing which can be worn in different ways, so the owner can make choices in how to wear the cloth.

‘The concept of the dresses make it possible that the cloth is partly designed by the person who wears it, which hopefully makes them more valuable to the wearer.

Michiel, who designed the fabric, said: ‘I think it’s a party dress. It’s a huge conversation piece.’

You can buy the dress for 250 euros and they come in four different sizes.

Read the full Daily Mail article here.

Buy them at www.michielschuurman.nl.

Filed under: other by alex
No Comments »

We’ve been busy over the past few weeks doing pitches and writing documents, doing design work and forming partnerships with Industry partners. We even had our first Running in the Halls birthday celebration and curry night, and that late night we ordered in Pizza of course!

In our spare time we also managed to do a fun little addictive Facebook game called Tractor Factor. Tractor factor is a button mashing game mixing retro aesthetics and vector graphics. It follows the adventures of Farmer Jakob in an attempt to relive his tractor racing days. Its an alternative to the addictive game which has more virtual farmers than there are real farmers in the world.

Alison is nearly finished doing all the levels for Brian, and she recently finished a special enterprise issue of  Foldups for the University of Huddersfield and Manchester Metropolitan University in collaboration with Andy Wilson. Iman has kick started the development on his moon mining game in his spare evenings. He’s currently got the most detailed crater database going for both the near side and far side of the moon, based on USGS data.

Filed under: How we work, game development by iman
No Comments »

We’ve just set up a new rendering machine in the studio. I did a trial test render.
Staggered at the speed difference an i7 processor makes.

Apparently vista 64 says its running at a perfect score of 5.9!

Filed under: other by iman
No Comments »

Or something similar. We’re messing with making a facebook game, just for fun.
It has tractors!

Filed under: game development by alison
No Comments »

If you already use some kind of online versioning software this article is not for you. though if you’re not, this might prove useful.

I’ve been using Subversion since 2007 on a couple of personal projects, mainly because I used to hop from one laptop to the other and found the dilemma of updating and syncing files manually and potentially overwriting things  in the process to be quite tedious and annoying. Not to mention my desire to avoid the distress of putting everything on a disk and somehow mangling it.

I wanted a solution and Subversion thankfully, proved to be it. It took all the guesswork and pain out of managing project files. I basically set up Subversion in five minutes on my dreamhost account (using their one click installer).Then I install Tortoise SVN on any windows based machine I want and hey presto, I’m all set up to have a copy of my work stored online efficiently and be able to sync the work and update this master copy with revisions of any new work directly from windows explorer. You can obviously use mac to do this as well, but I’ve yet to find a decent free to use client side app for it.

I dont use all the fancy features of subversion, I mainly work with binary files, and I only use Checkout once, then  Commit, and Update, this has served me quite well.

A few days ago we decided to roll it out in the Running in the Halls office and use it for syncing and storing all our client files. above is a screenshot of what it does to a folder that is under version control those green ticks are good. It basically means you haven’t made any changes to the folders or there are no files in the there than need committing.

This has so far been a great success and it has become a repository for us. Every time I do new bit of work which I want to be versioned I send a copy to the server using commit.

What I update is then available whenever that folder is updated anywhere. Above is a screenshot of what happens when you press update.   Because we tell each other what we’re working on in the office, there haven’t been any issues really.

But in the past I have worked on things and updated them when another copy existed that was newer. I was alerted to the conflict, but this has only happened twice so I know how to avoid it.

The best bit of all of this is:

1. Theres a backup of everything on several machines and somewhere remote
2. you can roll back to any previous revision if need be
3. You can access your repository from anywhere even without clientsoftware installed, using any web browser.

This has been so valuable in the past when I’ve wanted to show someone a PNG of a mockup or idea at an impromptu meeting, at a party or wherever I have my phone on me. I can access the repository, download an individual file via the web interface and I’m done!

Downsides:

It wont solve any of your folder and file naming problems. A good directory structure and good file naming conventions are useful.

I’ve yet to find a decent OSX client.

SVN is a complicated bit of kit with a lot of functionality which I don’t use, Im not entirely sure what it would do if it totally malfunctioned on me, or my fingers had a twitch and I decided to tinker with its advanced settings. So far its good, I’ve used it for a few years and I hope we can carry on enjoying it in the office.

I’m not sure how portable or easy to configure it is should I decide to switch hosts.

Although I hear its quite good at storing binaries, I’m certainly not convinced thats what it was made for. But so far so good.

Filed under: Tips by iman
1 Comment »