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SOPA defeated, Megaupload taken down
It was big week on the Internet. Many popular sites spent an entire day protesting SOPA, which resulted in both it and PIPA being put on life support. Good job, Internet! Megaupload was also taken down by the feds, leaving us wondering why we really need a law like SOPA. Read on for the biggest stories of the week.
PIPA support collapses, with 13 new Senators opposed: Wednesday’s unprecedented online protest has Senators racing for the exits on the Protect IP Act. A total of 13 Senators announced their opposition to the legislation, including 11 Republicans and two Democrats.
Why the feds smashed Megaupload: After a two-year investigation that moved from Hong Kong to the US to New Zealand, the US government has arrested Megaupload employees, shuttered the site, and gone after $175,000,000 in cash and prizes. Here’s why.
Maniac Tentacle Mindbenders: How ScummVM’s unpaid coders kept adventure gaming alive: For 10 years, the ScummVM project has made beloved adventure games playable on modern systems and mobile devices, even as it dealt with legal problems and internal dissension. Here’s how it happened.
SOPA lives—and MPAA calls protests an “abuse of power” : The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) will move forward in the House this February, its top backer announced. As for the anti-SOPA protests tomorrow, Hollywood calls them a “stunt” and a “dangerous and troubling development.”
SOPA Resistance Day begins at Ars: Why Ars Technica opposes the Stop Online Piracy Act.
Windows 8′s locked bootloaders: much ado about nothing, or the end of the world as we know it?: Microsoft’s secure boot policy for Windows 8 has some Linux advocates up in arms, as it will be all but impossible to install Linux on any ARM machine designed for Windows 8. Is Microsoft tipping the balance too far towards security and too far away from freedom? And given the abundance of Linux tablets already on the market, does it even matter?
Anonymous takes down DoJ, UMG websites—attack on Whitehouse.gov underway: In a pair of actions, the hacktivist group has taken down the websites of the Justice Department and Universal Music in response to the Megaupload shutdown, and is targeting the websites of Democratic members of Congress who support SOPA.
Before shutdown, Megaupload ate up more corporate bandwidth than Dropbox: Before being shut down by the feds today over copyright infringement allegations, Megaupload was accounting for more corporate bandwidth usage than Dropbox and numerous other file-sharing services.
Megaupload shut down by feds, seven charged, four arrested: Megaupload’s co-founders and other staff are charged with crimes including conspiracy and money laundering, in an investigation that included law enforcement and government agencies from nine countries.
Hard to compete with Free: €20 for unlimited voice, text, and 3G data: French broadband provider Free.fr wants to shake up mobile service. After all, it’s just bits.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/week-in-tech-sopa-defeated-megaupload-taken-down.ars
Google claims 90 million Google+ users, 60% “active” daily
In today’s earnings call, Google CEO Larry Page said Google Plus now has 90 million users, and that the vast majority are active on Google either daily or weekly.
“There are over 90 million Google+ users, well over double what I announced just a quarter ago,” Page said. “Plus users are very engaged with our products. Over 60 percent of them engaged daily and 80 percent engaged weekly.” (UPDATE: We’ve confirmed what some readers suspected: the 60 and 80 percent figures refer to users accessing any Google service—whether it be search, Gmail or something else—while logged in to their Google account, and do not necessarily indicate actual usage of Google+ each day or week. The 90 million figure refers not to active users, but to the total number of people who have created Google+ accounts.)
The increase in overall numbers, no doubt, is due in large part to Google making Plus links a prominent part ofsearch results, and integrating the social network into Google Apps, Gmail, Picasa, and, well, just about everything Google makes. Google+ is apparently growing fast, but still lagging behind Facebook’s 800 million active users and Twitter’s 100 million active users.
Page also touted growth of Android, Chrome and Gmail while announcing that Google hit more than $10 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time. Revenue for the full fiscal year ending Dec. 31, 2011 was up 29 percent and quarterly revenues were up 25 percent year over year. Net income for the quarter was $2.71 billion on overall revenue of $10.58 billion, up 6.7 percent over the previous year’s $2.54 billion. Full-year net income was $9.74 billion on revenue of $37.91 billion. The quarterly numbers fell short of financial analysts’ expectations.
Page boasted that Google is signing up many new enterprise customers for its Google Apps suite, including 110,000 employees at BBVA, Google’s largest business productivity deal that has been publicly disclosed. But advertising, as usual, is still Google’s biggest cash cow, accounting for 96 percent of quarterly revenue, compared to 97 percent in the previous year’s fourth quarter. Google said mobile advertising is a growing part of total revenue, but didn’t specify how much it accounts for.
Why Apple’s products are ‘Designed in California’ but ‘Assembled in China’
Look at the back of your iPhone, or your iPad, or on the bottom of your Mac. You’ll see the following words embossed somewhere: “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.” Many Americans, all the way up to the President himself, have wondered why Apple has outsourced virtually all of its manufacturing overseas. At a dinner with several top US technology executives last year, President Obama asked Steve Jobs flat out what it would take to bring those jobs back to the US. According to Jobs, there’s simply no way for it to happen.
Why not? Why can’t iPhones, iPads, and all the rest of Apple’s magic gadgets be built in the States? More generally, why can’t more US-based consumer electronics and computer companies do their manufacturing work domestically, helping to create American jobs and boost the struggling economy?
The New York Times asked that question, and after an extremely well-researched report involving interviews with both former and current executives at Apple, the answer the Times found is both simple and chilling: iPhones aren’t made in America because they just can’t be. The infrastructure and labor force doesn’t exist at the levels necessary to support Apple’s operations — it’s not even close.
The Chinese factory where most iPhones reach final assembly employs 230,000 workers. I just asked Siri how many cities in the US have a population higher than that, and the answer was a mere 83 cities — and that’s total population, not workforce. With an average labor force of around 65 percent of the population, only 50 US cities are large enough to provide that kind of labor pool… and even in the biggest US city of them all, New York, 230,000 people still amounts to almost three percent of the city’s entire population. Can you imagine three out of every hundred New Yorkers on an assembly line, cranking out iPhones every day?
Over the past couple of years, we have heard a great deal concerning working conditions at factories owned by Foxconn. The Chinese manufacturing company is responsible for assembling consumer electronics for most of the major vendors out there, including Apple. Around a fourth of those 230,000 people live in company-owned dorms or barracks right on factory property; that’s almost 60,000 people living and working at the factory. Many of the people at “Foxconn City” work six days a week, twelve hours a day, and they earn less than US$17 per day. It may sound inhumane by American standards, but these jobs are in high demand in China — so much so that Jennifer Rigoni, former worldwide supply demand manager for Apple, told the New York Times that Foxconn “could hire 3,000 people overnight.”
Those are just a couple examples of how the scale, speed, and efficiency of Chinese manufacturing outstrips anything the US is currently capable of. But the Times’ report is full of more evidence, and it’s damning. Even though the 200,000 assembly-line workers putting part A into slot B could potentially be classified as unskilled labor, the 8700 industrial engineers overseeing the process can’t be — and according to the Times, finding that many qualified engineers in the States would take nine months. Chinese manufacturers found them all in 15 days.
With the notable exception of the A5 processor, most of the components used to make the iPhone are also manufactured overseas, many of them within a relatively short distance of the final assembly plant. Shipping those components to any potential US-based factories would incur greater costs, and even worse from Apple’s perspective, manufacturing delays.
Traditional defenses of outsourcing of manufacturing jobs have revolved around cost. “It costs more money to build in America,” the reasoning goes; “You have to pay your workers more, you have to pay benefits, insurance, higher taxes. Everything costs more.” Since companies want to make a profit, that added cost inevitably gets passed on to the consumer in inflated prices for goods.
To exaggerate the point, many have claimed that an American-manufactured iPhone would cost thousands of dollars. It turns out that’s hyperbole; according to the New York Times, the increased cost of paying American wages to workers would add $65 to the cost of an iPhone. The other costs, added together, probably wouldn’t drive the unsubsidized price of a 16 GB iPhone 4S over US$1000. But the dollar cost of manufacturing in America isn’t the biggest issue that’s driving Apple’s decision to outsource manufacturing to China. Instead, it’s about who can build the greatest number of iPhones within the shortest period of time, all while remaining flexible and instantaneously adaptable to Apple’s needs. According to one current Apple executive, “The US has stopped producing people with the skills we need.”
The Times provides a telling example from the early days of the iPhone, before it ever hit the market. It’s hard to believe now, but originally the iPhone’s screen was going to be made from the same scratch-prone plastic that graced the fronts of its contemporaneous iPod models. In mid-2007, just over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to hit stores for the first time ever, Jobs realized the folly of using that plastic when the screen of the iPhone prototype he was carrying in his jeans pocket had accumulated dozens of scratches. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched. I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”
Anyone who knows how Jobs worked knows that he wasn’t bluffing — if the iPhone didn’t meet his standards, it wouldn’t go on sale, period. Six months of anticipation had driven demand for the first iPhone into a frenzy, so Apple knew it was going to have to crank them out as quickly as possible. But the last-second change to what was arguably one of the iPhone’s most central components meant initiating the kind of mad scramble that simply wouldn’t be possible in US manufacturing. Apple would have been an industry laughingstock for as long as it took to overcome the manufacturing delay. Instead, what might have taken months to transpire in the US took place in six short weeks; Apple sourced a virtually scratchproof glass from Corning, and Chinese factories rapidly managed to integrate it into the existing iPhone design.
As it’s an American company reaping unprecedented financial rewards, many Americans have lamented the fact that the rewards coming back into America are so comparatively meager. Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States, less than a fifth the number of contractor employees assembling iPhones at one Chinese factory. One could argue that Apple’s success has come at the expense of the American manufacturing workforce, but if the New York Times’ report is anything to go by, it seems the workforce Apple would have needed in America never existed to begin with.
http://www.tuaw.com/2012/01/22/why-apples-products-are-designed-in-california-but-assembled/
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Poll the geeks: We’re trying out a new addition to the show where we want to know what you think! We’ll feature your answers on our next episode. Be sure to call, email or tweet your responses to us.
What is the most addictive game you’ve ever played?
Barry: Have been addicted to many games, hard to pic put two off the top of my head would be Settlers 2, Original Unreal Tournament both on PC.
Akash: Hi Guys,
Here are my 2 bit. MMO – Conquer Online (Wasted 2 years of my time) Non MMO – Battlefield 2: Bad Company (Awesome game clocked over 120 hours on multiplayer)
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Geek This Week:
Aaron: Time Machine backup drive was acting wonky. Let it cool and it was fine. Spartacus starts next week!
Gozer: uhh…Skyrim? Spartacus sneak preview on demand. TiVo update
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The Geek’s Choice: This will return on a future episode of The Geekcast
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Featured Segment: How to Auto-post from Twitter to Google+
My friend Farida on Twitter alerted me to this innovative way to get your tweets auto-posted to Google+. It all works through Google Voice and SMS forwarding.
A word of note: if you’re already using your GV account, this will require forwarding all SMS to your Gmail and all of those are going to post to Google+. This works best if you have a GV account you’re not using or a secondary account (though I haven’t tested it with a second one).
http://khanov.me/2012/01/14/how-to-autopost-from-twitter-to-google/
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Feedback & Items of Note:
Poll the geeks: We’re trying out a new addition to the show where we want to know what you think! We’ll feature your answers on our next episode. Be sure to call, email or tweet your responses to us.
This Week’s Question:
“What celebrity ( or celebrities ) do you follow on Twitter?”
Feedback:
Hi Guys
Just listened to your back Aaron loved it and cant wait for more (left feedback on
podiobooks). Out of interested did you pick who got the prize of being in your second
book?
Gozer Skyrim is awesome! Put about 110hours into it. Preferences in terms of combat -
one hand magic usually a fire a spell and a sword in the other! No real glitches apart from
the occasional dead dragon falling from the sky!
Just finished playing Dragon Age 2 its like Coke Zero by comparison of Skyrim which is
Full Fat Coke.
Love the show
All the Best
-Barry
Cork, Ireland
PS I checked but maybe I am blind is it possible to download the
audio verson of As Darkness Ends?
From Akash:
Is Gozer reconsidering his PS Vita preorder since it is really not catching up in Japan?
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