A burst of 8 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
MIIT to Implement App Pre-Installation Regulations >> Marbridge Consulting - China Wireless News
On November 1, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) will begin enforcement of regulations for pre-installed smartphone handset software. The regulations were first released in April 2013.
According to the new requirements, mobile terminal manufacturers applying for handset network access permits will be required to provide information about all preloaded handset software to the MIIT for vetting. As part of the new rules, handset manufacturers are prohibited from pre-installing any software that will collect or modify user information without the expressed permission of the user.
Wonder who this is aimed at.
Amazon plans entry into smartphone market with HTC >> FT.com
Nice scoop by Tim Bradshaw, Sarah Mishkin and Barney Jopson:
Amazon is working with HTC to develop a range of smartphones as the e-commerce company steps up efforts to compete with Apple and Google, according to people familiar with the project.
One of the three devices discussed by the two companies is at an advanced stage of development, according to one person, but another warned that the timeline for launch has been changed before and Amazon may yet decide not to release the device.
HTC started out making phones for other people to brand... though it had a calamity earlier this year with the HTC First for Facebook.
iPhone 5s vs Peppa Pig phone head-to-head review >> Tech Advisor Blog
Neil Bennett:
The iPhone 5s is still the most desirable phone on the market. It's still unavailable – order one today and you'll get it sometime later this month, which only adds to its cachet as the smartphone we all wish we owned.
We got our hands on one and you can read our in-depth review here, but in this review I look at how it stacks up against the current most popular model in our household – at least with my two-year-old daughter Alice – the Peppa Pig phone.
Multicolr Search Lab >> TinEye Labs
We extracted the colors from 10 million Creative Commons images on Flickr. Search this collection by color. Addictive and very likely the best color search engine in the world*
Totally brilliant. Need a picture to match a colour palette? This will find one you can use.
OmniVision unveils OmniGlass, lets just about anyone come out with a Google Glass clone >> Android Beat
Stefan Constantinescu:
OmniGlass is essentially a Google Glass clone, sans software. Companies give OmniVision money, and in exchange they'll get a 720p heads-up display and a 4 megapixel camera. Now again, I can't stress this enough, it's going to be up to the companies to write the software to make OmniGlass shine. You can put Windows 98 on Apple's highest end laptop, for example, but no one will want to use it. It's all about the software, and OmniGlass will be no different.
Circling back to Google, when are they actually going to let you buy Glass? Rumor has it it's a product for the second half of 2014, which is a bit funny, since there are also rumors saying Samsung will release their own Glass clone during the first half. It shouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out which one will be worth buying and which one will be mocked.
Letting anyone roll their own (Google) Glass makes this much more interesting.
Thousands of sites hacked via vBulletin hole >> Krebs on Security
Brian Krebs:
Attackers appear to have compromised tens of thousands of web sites using a security weakness in sites powered by the forum software vBulletin, security experts warn.
In a blog post in late August, vBulletin maker Internet Brands Inc. warned users that failing to remove the "/install" and "/core/install" directories on sites running 4.x and 5.x versions of the forum software could render them easily hackable. But apparently many vBulletin-based sites didn't get that memo: According to security firm Imperva, more than 35,000 sites were recently hacked via this vulnerability.
People don't change defaults - even people who are setting up websites and so might be thought of as specialist.
Interactive News Graphics Collection >> Marike Rooze
Tons of interactive news graphics from The Guardian and New York Times. (The NYT has been pretty busy.) The home page is pretty entertaining too.
Teasing out the lies in SSD benchmarking >> LSI Blog
Kent Smith:
You can see that running only a few minutes of random write tests on this SSD logs performance of over 275 MB/s. However, once garbage collection starts, performance plunges and then takes up to 3 hours before the true performance of 25 MB/s (a 90% drop) is finally evident – a phenomenon that often is not communicated clearly in reviews nor widely understood.
Good benchmarkers will discuss how their review factors in both garbage collection preparation and steady-state performance testing. Test results that purportedly achieve steady state in less time than in the example above are unlikely to reflect real-world performance. This is all part of what is called SSD preconditioning, but keep in mind that different tests require different steps for preconditioning.
Follow the link and he has a whole PDF of his presentation on how to spot SSD benchmark fibbing, if that's your sort of thing.
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