Laurent’s blog

Around the web this week

Although it has been a long week, very few subjects were discussed intensely. As a result, you may have missed one of these interesting stories:

New blackberry takes aim at the iPhone. I’m puzzled at what Research In Motion is trying to do. The new blackberry 9000 seems to be such a pale merge of the design of both the previous blackberry and the iphone that I doubt any designer or creative have been involved. As a RIM fan, I would expect better from the Waterloo based company. See what Fortune or Silicon Alley Insider are saying about it.

For the privacy conscious friends, know that GSM conversations will be able to be cracked in near real-time. We have known for a while that the encryption used for the GSM signals was weaker than expected, but now a group from the GSM Software Project is making it accessible to (almost) anyone. Read it at O’Reilley Radar.

In the twitter caterogy this week, Twitlinks has launched on Monday and tried to make meaningful the pleatora of links flying back and fourth on twitter. They follow 97 key tech people (as of today) and extract the links from their tweets transforming them in a blog like page. It seems not to be enough, hopefully they will add some brain to it soon.

It seems that TF1 has launched an action against YouTube seeking damages of 100 million euros for distribution of copyrighted material. They did the same thing a while back with Dailymotion, the european counterpart to YouTube. Read the source at 20minutes (in french), or on lesechos.fr (also in french). Yahoo has the story too.

Reporting a follow-up about last week story about the twitter account being sold on ebay. The owner, Rocketboom founder, removed the auction listing. In the meantime the account had reached the price of 1500$. About 1$ per follower. The reasons he gave are noble as he came to his senses. Quoting him from Mashable’s article: “[Bidders could] all (be) spam marketers, people who will do anything just to get their name out there, people who don’t understand Web 2.0 and blogging.”

MySQL is close sourcing part of its code! Quoting Slashdot: “From the MySQL User’s Conference, Sun has announced, and former CEO Marten Mickos has confirmed, that Sun will be close sourcing sections of the MySQL code base. Sun will begin with close sourcing the backup solutions to MySQL, and will continue with more advanced features. With Oracle owning Innodb, and it being GPL, does this mean that MySQL will be removing it to introduce these features? Sun has had a very poor history of actually open sourcing anything.”

When the FAA denies using cell phone during a flight, Europe begins testing in-flight use. Quoting: “But a number of hurdles must be overcome before more airlines offer the service. The technology, which allows cellphone users to make and receive calls through an onboard base station linked to a satellite, delivers a still-patchy quality that keeps most in-flight calls short and tinny. And then there are the eye-popping roaming charges of up to 3 euros ($4.72) a minute.” Now, I really just want a wifi connection.

Encyclopedia Britannica (tries to) embrasse web 2.0. Its called WebShare and wants to please the ones that finds Wikipedia a bit too open. They have started a blog, are twittering @EBWebShare and have widgets. You can also embed what they call “assets” into your own content. Its not perfect but is better than having seeing this emblem disappear. We still have no idea were this will bring us as they only have 4 posts on their blogs and 3 updates on twitter. See what Techcrunch is saying: “Encyclopedia Britannica Now Free For Bloggers“.

Update 20080421: I had to remove the Britannica widget from this page as its preventing the rest of the blog to load properly. I guess they did not plan for the web 2.0/blog effect, funny. To see them in action click here.