This Week in Technology (May 9th 2011): Facebook Caught Smearing Google; Apple Talks to Congress; Sony PlayStation Network Still Down

At the beginning of this week we saw the opening of EMC World, which SiliconANGLE got people at—namely SA’s editor and chief Mark Hopkins—as a result we got some news about Hadoop, and a video of Tom Roloff, Senior VP of EMC Consulting, speaking about Big Data. For video games, a Czech computer scientist designed an error-correcting algorithm for video cameras and Happy Cloud is looking to leverage the cloud to aid quicker click-to-play. Apple got called to the principal’s office (aka Congress subcommittee) over their Location tracking snafus which they fixed last week in patch 4.3.3. The Pirate Bay thought they were being blocked by Comcast in the United States; and Facebook got caught hiring a PR company to smear Google.

FREE-TO-PLAY MMOS

Only one MMO game review to speak of, but it’s a game really worth playing because it’s quite fun. That game would happen to be World of Tanks. Published by Wargaming.net this game has actually had be somewhat entranced for a while. I don’t know how long I’ll keep playing it—it has a rather limited playability as it’s the same thing over and over—but they did an excellent job.

• World of Tanks First Impressions—a team-based tank combat simulation that presents itself with authentic historical tank designs and equipment. It’s also full of WWI and WWII trivia about tanks, tank commanders, and crews. The simulation space has excellent graphics, quick exhilarating battles, and an excellent experience.

PlayStation Network Looks to Make Up With Suffering Fans

• PlayStation Network Still Down, Ups the Ante for Users with Identity Theft Insurance—in an attempt to win back the adoration of their users, instead of giving them their games back, Sony PlayStation Network announced that they’d give everyone affected 1 year of free identity theft insurance… I’m not sure that’s going to help anyone.

EMC World 2011

• Hadoop Seeing a Surge of New Products at EMC World 2011 from Greenplum to Brisk—the workhorse of cloud computing technology, Hadoop, has seen a lot of new software designed to make use of it. This article lists eight new software technologies that either hybrid Hadoop or make direct use of it for Big Data analysis, storage, or other cloud-computing functions.
• Tom Roloff Talks About Big Data and Cloud Enterprise Solutions—as the VP of EMC Consulting, Tom Roloff is in the perfect position to speak about how the business work is adopting technologies that simplify Big Data problems. The takeaway from the conversation is about how Big Data solutions can give companies the know-how to better interact with their customers.
• QLogic’s Competitive Edge: the Business of Data Infrastructure—in an interview with Dave Vellante and John Furrier, Satish Lakshmanan, Senior Director of Product Marketing & Management for QLogic, outlined his company’s future expectations about the cloud-computing market and how they expect to fit into it. QLogic is a well known provider of Fiber Channel over Ethernet technology for data centers to more rapidly transfer data, but they’re looking to reach out with as many bandwidth solutions as possible to capture the new wave of data processing.

Video Games See Some Sunlight

• Happy Cloud Brings the Power of the Cloud to Video Game Downloads—leveraging cloud-computing and peer-to-peer download techniques, Happy Cloud would provide users with a core engine to play a video game whilst the rest downloads in the background (as they play.) Allowing players to get multigigabyte video games and start playing in a matter of minutes rather than hours.
• TLD, aka Predator, Kinect-like Open Source Tracking Algorithms—this cool software concept comes out of  Zdenek Kalal’s PhD thesis work into giving computers the gift of “sight.” It comes with a video!

For the random newsweek

The cloud is a big deal, and cloud data in government is even more interesting. During his term, President Obama signed legislation into play that requires that the government be more open about their data. In order to help, Microsoft put on their superhero cape and tried to come to the rescue—Microsoft Tapped to Enable the US Government Open Cloud—of course, others such as Google have already been working hard on this.

In an attempt to address privacy concerns cropping up out of smartphones, Congress called upon both Google and Apple to explain themselves. Apple Faces Congress over Location Tracking Concerns—no doubt they felt a little squeamish when trying to explain why the phone didn’t stop recording customer locations when they turned Location Services off. Of course, the Google Android also records this sort of information; but the difference that makes a difference in people’s minds seems to be that Apple’s iPhone did so without consent.

As it turns out Comcast customers discovered that they couldn’t reach The Pirate Bay. Alarms went off, but it doesn’t look like Comcast had anything to do with it—Comcast Users Unable to Reach The Pirate Bay, ISP Says “It’s Not Us”—and it wasn’t…this week Comcast assisted TPB with determined where the problem existed and it’s on its way to being fixed.

Well, it looks like Facebook got caught badmouthing Google behind their backs—Facebook Hired PR Company Burson-Marsteller to Plant Negative Google Stories—in possibly one of the worst-executed-smear-campaigns-ever. USA Today broke the story after public relations experts from Burson-Marsteller tried to sell them on exaggerated concerns about Google’s Social Circle application. Now we’ll just have to see how Facebook runs damage control. Who expects them to back away and says, “Sure, we hired them, but we didn’t tell them to mudsling Google. Honest!”

This Week in Technology (May 2nd 2011): Location tracking causing burns for Apple, Google; PlayStation Network still floundering

It’s been a grim month for the cloud, Amazon EC2 crashed-and-burned in mid-April and late the month-of-Spring-flowers the PlayStation Network lost its buttered toast. While all of these companies are still scratching their heads, leaving numerous customers and websites in the dark, we wonder how this will reflect on trust in the cloud and on the Internet. Amazon’s EC2 debacle created a crash-sense (which had been handled better by Google when it happened to them) and the PSN failures include a credit-card theft of notable proportions.

PlayStation Network news brings us some weird insights into the thinking of Sony

• Data Loss from PlayStation Network (PSN) Extended to Sony Online Entertainment (SOE)—after a hacker breach of PSN, Sony temporarily took the entire set of services offline and on the eve of their apology and eventual restoration the gaming megacorporation discovered that SOE had also suffered losses to the tune of 12,700 non-U.S. customer credit cards and 10,700 debit records.
• Sony Still Under Investigation over PlayStation Network Breach—in a letter to Congress, Sony alleges that the hactivist non-organization of Anonymous must be implicated in the breaches against them due to a file left behind on their servers named “Anonymous” containing the text “We are legion.”
• What network technology does PlayStation Network run atop?—perhaps you could give us a hint?

Google and Apple and Location Tracking fears

• Memo Reveals How Important WiFi Location Services are for Google Android—a leaked memo from 2010 reveals that Google Android uses WiFi and GPS together not to track the location of consumers but to better pinpoint smartphone locations in order to provide phone services.
• Android WiFi Takes Blows in Tracking Class-Action Lawsuit and Tether-Wars—this comes on the heels of a lawsuit that spawned against Apple over the furtive iOS location tracking; the lawsuit has few angles, probably because users much opt-in to tracking.
• Google’s Location Services Trigger Raid on South Korean Offices—according to Google South Korea this is “business as usual.”
• Apple Addresses Location Tracking with iOS 4.3.3 Software Update—the patch reduces the size of the location cache (reports say it stored a year’s worth of tracking originally), the unencrypted location database is no longer synced to computers via iTunes, and causes the cache to be removed and tracking stops when Location Services is turned off.

Finally there’s a little bit about Twitter being a powerful tool for spreading the news, but it’s more or less like a vast grapevine with all of the pitfalls that come with that. As a result I posit that Twitter Doesn’t Compete with Broadcast Media, It Amplifies.

And, Nokia seems to be biding their time before they come to the market with a tablet. A lot of speculation is running rampant on what might end up on that tablet when it does appear. With Nokia Waiting for the Right Time to Enter Tablet Marketplace we hear from Stephen Elop that he wants any Nokia product to stand out in a wash of too-similar products as the iPad dominates the market.

Free-to-Play MMORPGs

Free MMORPGs have gotten a few new First Impressions to play around with,

• Realms Online First Impressions—a full-world PvP fiesta with three realms in conflict, a capture-the-flag concept that forces people to charge all the way across continents, and a golden dragon-god that grants wishes. What could go wrong?
• Prius Online First Impressions—sporting an interesting gameplay concept but otherwise mediocre graphics, the player not only gets their own character, but their own little-girl “pet” who casts support spells, and a transform that is a giant monstrosity.