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”.

The complaint has also asked the FTC to “require Google to provide notice to and request consent from Gmail users before making material changes to their privacy policy in future, and seek appropriate injunctive and compensatory relief”.

Since launching Google Buzz as part of Gmail last week, the search giant has faced a torrent of criticism regarding privacy.

The feature that attracted the biggest outcry was one which automatically gave users a ready-made circle of friends to follow based on the people they emailed the most.

Privacy advocates said that meant the list of contacts was open for all to see and could have had serious implications for journalists, businesses or even those conducting illicit affairs.

Engineers have now replaced the auto-follow feature with one that suggests who to follow but EPIC said that still leaves the “user with the burden to block those unwanted followers”.

The organisation also wants the company barred from using Gmail address book contacts to make up social networking lists.

Google has apologised and said it acted quickly to address concerns including introducing a new option to disable the service.

“If it becomes clear that people don’t think we’ve done enough, we’ll make more changes,” Todd Jackson, product manager for Google Buzz told BBC News.

He acknowledged that many of Gmail’s “tens of millions” of users were “rightfully upset” and that the firm was “very, very sorry”.

The botched launch of Buzz has led many to ponder how and why it happened.

In an interview with BBC News, Mr Jackson admitted that testing of the service had been inadequate and that it was not opened up to a big enough group of people to try out.

“We’ve been testing Buzz internally at Google for a while. Of course, getting feedback from 20,000 Googlers isn’t quite the same as letting Gmail users play with Buzz in the wild.”

The Consumer Watchdog, an advocacy group, said it was not surprised by this stumble.

“This case illustrates a lot about Google’s corporate culture where a company is run by computer scientists whose operating method is don’t ask for permission when you can always ask for forgiveness,” said the organisation’s John Simpson.

The move by EPIC to ask the FTC to investigate Buzz mirrors one it made in December against the world’s biggest social networking platform Facebook.

Then, the privacy watchdog was not happy about changes the company made to its privacy settings.

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.

Facebook said the new site “omits data intensive applications like photos”.

“We are discussing it… as an option to make Facebook on the mobile web available to everyone, anywhere and allow operators to encourage more mobile internet usage,” said a spokesperson for the firm.

Facebook already offers a slimmed down version of the version of its site – called Facebook Lite – for people with slow or poor internet connections. It is aimed at users in the developing world.

The site was announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which runs from 15-18 February.

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?

It’s certainly a catwalk away from the slouchy jeans, T-shirt and trainers look sported by many of the men who dominate the information technology sector.

Web developer and former dotcom employee Rachel Andrew says, in style terms, computing is still a man’s, man’s, man’s world.

“It’s very much a young man’s industry,” says Ms Andrew, now director of Edgeofmyseat.com. “Women find the need to become quite laddish. You try and become very geeky and not particularly feminine.”

In her former jobs, she consciously opted for non-descript clothing of jeans and jumper, so as not to draw unwanted attention or pointed comments.

In a seemingly unglamorous profession, Barbie’s bouffant might also raise an eyebrow or two. While she appears to be taming her locks with a ponytail caught up in a hot-pink bobble, she still sports a long, glossy fringe swept to one side.

As anyone who works maintaining computers could tell you, Barbie would do well to invest in a hair band. It would keep her signature blonde mane from flowing into her eyes.

“It would be really impractical,” Louise Collis, a quality assurance lead engineer, says of the Barbie coiffure. “You [would] spend half the time pulling it back from your face.”

Even the shoes are unlikely to be seen on the feet of people who spend half their day crawling under desks or feeding cables through walls. While many of her real-life counterparts would be happy with a pair of comfy trainers, Barbie appears to be strutting about in a pair of pink wedges.

While Barbie’s look may be somewhat off the mark, its significance is being lauded by some women in the IT sector.

The doll’s message?

“You can still be trendy and work in a geeky environment,” says Ms Collis, who describes herself as a Barbie-esque 5′10″ blonde.

Women make up less than a quarter of all IT professionals in the UK, and “computer engineer” isn’t even a real job title in the industry. “It’s a generic title for when we fill out insurance forms,” Ms Collis says.

The broader occupation incorporates everyone from help desk worker to software developer – jobs that don’t generally seem to appeal to young girls.

BARBIE BASICS
Debuted in 1959
Named after creator’s daughter, Barbara
Held 124 previous professions, including pilot and rock star
Has represented 50 nationalities and is sold around the world
Is the #1 worldwide toy

“We want girls to consider [IT] as a career, and not be turned off by the image… of a spotty boy sitting in the corner, unable to hold a conversation,” says Karen Petrie, a computing lecturer at the University of Dundee. “[Barbie] is someone they aspire to.”

Despite Mattel’s claims that Barbie “can help inspire a new generation of girls to hone in on their computer skills and become a part of this growing profession”, not everyone is convinced.

“As a career, IT probably sounds a bit dull and boring,” says Katherine Coombs, a chief information officer. “I don’t think the doll’s going to change the world. It’s when other women are working in IT, not a doll.”

But computer professionals do think tech support Barbie could help change the perception of women in the industry, and make girls realise you don’t have to eschew makeup and styled hair to work in the computing sector.

Barbie’s newest look is a far cry from the original

Ms Petrie says the the idea of Barbie being a cheerleader for the IT profession has been embraced by women who had never before owned a Barbie in their lives – herself included. And Ms Collis thinks the doll’s appeal won’t be limited to the pre-teen market – it could become a workplace mascot for female tech support staff.

But while the doll’s main objective is busting computer nerd stereotypes, there is one that seems to have slipped through the cracks: those spectacles. An off-the-shelf geek association if ever there was one.

Eileen Brown, who blogs about women and technology, says she has received some “wry” comments about Barbie’s new eyewear, along the lines of “of course she’s wearing glasses.”

“The only bit Mattel got wrong were the pink glasses,” says Ms Brown, a former Microsoft employee and chief executive of Amastra.com.

And for all the accolades surrounding the new doll, there’s one constant in the Barbie wardrobe that still rankles – all these years and jobs later, Barbie still wears quite a lot of pink.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?

It’s certainly a catwalk away from the slouchy jeans, T-shirt and trainers look sported by many of the men who dominate the information technology sector.

Web developer and former dotcom employee Rachel Andrew says, in style terms, computing is still a man’s, man’s, man’s world.

“It’s very much a young man’s industry,” says Ms Andrew, now director of Edgeofmyseat.com. “Women find the need to become quite laddish. You try and become very geeky and not particularly feminine.”

In her former jobs, she consciously opted for non-descript clothing of jeans and jumper, so as not to draw unwanted attention or pointed comments.

In a seemingly unglamorous profession, Barbie’s bouffant might also raise an eyebrow or two. While she appears to be taming her locks with a ponytail caught up in a hot-pink bobble, she still sports a long, glossy fringe swept to one side.

As anyone who works maintaining computers could tell you, Barbie would do well to invest in a hair band. It would keep her signature blonde mane from flowing into her eyes.

“It would be really impractical,” Louise Collis, a quality assurance lead engineer, says of the Barbie coiffure. “You [would] spend half the time pulling it back from your face.”

Even the shoes are unlikely to be seen on the feet of people who spend half their day crawling under desks or feeding cables through walls. While many of her real-life counterparts would be happy with a pair of comfy trainers, Barbie appears to be strutting about in a pair of pink wedges.

While Barbie’s look may be somewhat off the mark, its significance is being lauded by some women in the IT sector.

The doll’s message?

“You can still be trendy and work in a geeky environment,” says Ms Collis, who describes herself as a Barbie-esque 5′10″ blonde.

Women make up less than a quarter of all IT professionals in the UK, and “computer engineer” isn’t even a real job title in the industry. “It’s a generic title for when we fill out insurance forms,” Ms Collis says.

The broader occupation incorporates everyone from help desk worker to software developer – jobs that don’t generally seem to appeal to young girls.

BARBIE BASICS

Debuted in 1959
Named after creator’s daughter, Barbara
Held 124 previous professions, including pilot and rock star
Has represented 50 nationalities and is sold around the world
Is the #1 worldwide toy

“We want girls to consider [IT] as a career, and not be turned off by the image… of a spotty boy sitting in the corner, unable to hold a conversation,” says Karen Petrie, a computing lecturer at the University of Dundee. “[Barbie] is someone they aspire to.”

Despite Mattel’s claims that Barbie “can help inspire a new generation of girls to hone in on their computer skills and become a part of this growing profession”, not everyone is convinced.

“As a career, IT probably sounds a bit dull and boring,” says Katherine Coombs, a chief information officer. “I don’t think the doll’s going to change the world. It’s when other women are working in IT, not a doll.”

But computer professionals do think tech support Barbie could help change the perception of women in the industry, and make girls realise you don’t have to eschew makeup and styled hair to work in the computing sector.

Barbie’s newest look is a far cry from the original

Ms Petrie says the the idea of Barbie being a cheerleader for the IT profession has been embraced by women who had never before owned a Barbie in their lives – herself included. And Ms Collis thinks the doll’s appeal won’t be limited to the pre-teen market – it could become a workplace mascot for female tech support staff.

But while the doll’s main objective is busting computer nerd stereotypes, there is one that seems to have slipped through the cracks: those spectacles. An off-the-shelf geek association if ever there was one.

Eileen Brown, who blogs about women and technology, says she has received some “wry” comments about Barbie’s new eyewear, along the lines of “of course she’s wearing glasses.”

“The only bit Mattel got wrong were the pink glasses,” says Ms Brown, a former Microsoft employee and chief executive of Amastra.com.

And for all the accolades surrounding the new doll, there’s one constant in the Barbie wardrobe that still rankles – all these years and jobs later, Barbie still wears quite a lot of pink.

Source image: bbc

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.

For instance, instead of many “2-D” pages of applications, they could be grouped by type on a single page – using the press of a finger to dive into each type and select the desired app.

Quantum mace

The composite works by using spiky conducting nanoparticles, similar to tiny medieval maces, dispersed evenly in a polymer.

None of these spiky balls actually touch, but the closer they get to each other, the more likely they are to undergo a quantum physics phenomenon known as tunnelling.

Tunnelling is one of several effects in quantum mechanics that defies explanation in terms of the “classical” physics that preceded it.

Simply put, quantum mechanics says that there is a tiny probability that a particle shot at a wall will pass through it in an effect known as tunnelling.
QTC-enabled handset
The pressure-sensitive key can already be found in an available handset

Similarly, the material that surrounds the spiky balls acts like a wall to electric current. But as the balls draw closer together, when squashed or deformed by a finger’s pressure, the probability of a charge tunnelling through increases.

The net result is that pressing harder on the material leads to a smooth increase in the current through it.

There are a number of ways to make switches or screens pressure-sensitive, such as using mechanical switches.

However, the QTC approach is particularly suited to making thin devices. Pressure-sensitive QTC switches can be made 70 micrometres thick – about the thickness of a human hair.

QTC is better than switches based on so-called “conducting polymers”, because they conduct no electricity until they are pressed, leading to better overall efficiency.

Samsung Electro-mechanics has now incorporated the QTC into the navigation switch familiar on smartphones – in addition to the up, down, left, right and centre button, the up and down functions are pressure-sensitive.

This is useful for scrolling more or less quickly through, for example, a long list of emails.

“That same model can be used in many other ways, like in games: to control how hard I want to jump or run for example,” said Peratech’s chief executive Philip Taysom.

“Electronics are being given the ability to sense something that we take for granted, which is how much we’re touching and applying force,” he told BBC News.

Further applications that Peratech is involved with include robotics. While much work has gone into giving robots sensitivity to pressure and touch in their fingers, Mr Taysom said there can now be a push to create robots whose whole surface – rather like humans themselves – is pressure-sensitive.

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.”

Last year Ceop reached a deal which saw Bebo agree to use its abuse-reporting button – and then lambasted other social networks which refused to follow suit. This time, the organisation is being more diplomatic, with its boss Jim Gamble saying: “[W]e look forward to working with other browser developers to make an even safer online environment for our children.”

Google says it has been talking to Ceop and “we’re working together to help them make a Ceop browser extension available for Google Chrome users”. Apple wasn’t clear whether there had yet been talks about a similar extension for its Safari browser – IE8 isn’t available to Mac or Linux users – but stressed that parental controls were built into its whole operating system. And since there are already hundreds of extensions for the open-source Firefox browser, built by third-party developers, it should be easy to provide a child-safety plug-in.

But open-source campaigners are concerned that Ceop has been just a little too eager to promote the Microsoft solution.

“Microsoft have scored a publicity hit for a little cost,” Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group told me. “It’s important that Ceop doesn’t persuade people to use a single browser, particularly one which has had a history of security lapses causing other threats to home users.”

Microsoft has a good record in helping to promote safe internet use in schools and homes – and Ceop is working hard to educate parents and children about internet safety. But despite government pledges to promote the use of open-source software in the public sector, it seems most official bodies still see Windows as the natural choice for any project. And that means open-source government is still a distant prospect.

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.

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.

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!

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.