TechCrunch reports that Google Voice has now added the ability to have SMS messages received at your Google Voice number forwarded to your e-mail address.
While voicemail had already been transcribed and e-mailed, there was previously feature to have SMS messages e-mailed. While there were some services that could do this, they required that you give them your Google Voice login information.
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– September 9, 2009
This past weekend Apple approved a Commodore 64, a computer made in 1982, emulator app for the iPhone. Now Apple has removed the app. The app’s developer, Manomio, believes that the app was removed because users found a way to access the Commodore BASIC interpreter, which allows the entry of code. While Manomio maintains that the app runs in a sandboxed environment, making it harmless, Apple will not approve the app if it includes the feature due to potential security risks.
The exploit used to access the BASIC interpreter has been patched and a new version has now been submitted to Apple for review. Users that have already downloaded the app can continue to use it with the BASIC interpreter.
[via CNET]
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– September 8, 2009
Facebook has released an official app for Google’s Android operating system. Facebook released its iPhone app over a year ago, but this is the first version for Android. Previously, Android users had to use Facebook’s mobile webpage or an unofficial Facebook app.
Like its iPhone counterpart, the Android Facebook app allows you to make posts, see your news feed and view your friends’ profiles. In addition to this, the Android version combines phone contacts into the app and features a widget that can be placed on the home screen.
[via DigitalBeat and Android and Me]
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– September 8, 2009
The Free Software Foundation has filed an objection to the settlement in The Authors Guild, Inc., et al. v. Google Inc. because it believes that the settlement fails to address the needs of authors that release books under the GNU Free Documentation License and other free licenses.
While the purpose of copyright is usually to disallow people to distribute works, these free licenses instead encourage people to redistribute the work, asking only that redistributed versions of the work are also released under the same license. The settlement reached in the case would put works under the GFDL in the same group as works under full copyright restrictions. Under the settlement, Google will be given the right to display these works without being bound by the GFDL.
Brett Smith, license compliance engineer at FSF, states that:
“The Google Book Search settlement assumes that authors are only interested in being paid for publication rights of their works…However, authors using free licenses, like the GFDL and the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, have made it clear that they want to ensure that everyone can share and change their work. These licenses already give Google permission to display and publish the works. This settlement offers the company an escape clause to take works that have been permanently dedicated to a commons out of that commons, undermining both the purpose of these licenses and the wishes of the authors who use them.”
The objection states that:
“The settlement attempts to balance the various commercial interests in the publication and distribution of books but in doing so it ignores those concerned more with freedom than with the ability to earn profits through Google’s commercial ventures. When freely licensed books are distributed without regard for their terms, authors, publishers and readers are all harmed and the community’s unifying values are undermined. This harm cannot be adequately quantified or compensated or otherwise addressed in a royalty arrangement.”
The complete objection is available at fsf.org/licensing/google-book-search-objection.pdf.
[Image from gnu.org]
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– September 8, 2009
Flickr, which previously only had an iPhone-optimized webpage, has now released an official iPhone app.
The app allows you to search Flickr and view the photos and videos of your contacts. The app also allows you to login to your Flickr account and authorize the app, after which you can upload photos and videos to your account directly from the iPhone.
According to The Next Web, some people are currently unable to authorize the app, so they cannot login to their Flickr account using it. Also, Stenstrøm Consulting reports that when someone adds a contact, he is then able to view that person’s private pictures before the person adds him as a contact.
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– September 8, 2009
WordPress.com has announced that all of the blogs hosted on their service now have support for RSS Cloud. RSS Cloud allows for push notification on RSS feeds, so that when a new post goes up, it is immediately pushed to the RSS client, rather than the client periodically asking the server if there is anything new to download. The result is that subscribers will now get the latest post on a blog only a minute after it has been posted, rather than the next time their RSS client checks for new posts.
At the moment, this does not mean much for most users because the major RSS readers, such as Google Reader, have yet to support RSS Cloud. The only client available at the moment with support for it is River2.
As of late, there has been a debate over whether RSS is dead. More people are now looking to Twitter and other social networks for their news because it is often faster and provides a filtered stream of news. RSS Cloud could help RSS become more appealing because it allows news to be delivered much faster than before.
[Image from flickr.com/photos/kky]
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– September 8, 2009
Times Online reports that Asus will be releasing an ebook reader by the end of the year.
The ebook reader will have a dual-screen display in full color with a spine, like a print book. It may also be possible to use the second screen to display a webpage or to have one of the screens act as a virtual keyboard. It is also possible that a microphone, webcam and speakers may be included for Skype.
A major selling point of the ebook reader, which will have both a premium and budget version, is that it will be cheaper than other ebook readers on the market today. While the Sony Reader Pocket Edition costs $199 and the Amazon Kindle costs $299, Asus’s ebook reader will only cost around $163 (£100).
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– September 7, 2009
You may have noticed that Google has a rather mysterious logo today, with the second “o” in “Google” being abducted by a UFO. Google has been producing Google Doodles, the name given to custom Google logos, since 1998, when the Google employees went to the Burning Man Festival and put up a custom logo to let people know where they were. Usually these Doodles are put up during a holiday or to commemorate the birthday of a scientist or artist.
Clicking on the logo takes you to the search results for “unexplained phenomenon” on Google. TechCrunch also notes that Google has posted a coded tweet on its Twitter account:
“1.12.12 25.15.21.18 15 1.18.5 2.5.12.15.14.7 20.15 21.19”
In the message, “1” corresponds to “a”, “2” corresponds to “b”, “3” corresponds to “c”, and so on. When decrypted, the message reads “All your o are belong to us”. The message refers to “All your base are belong to us”, a phrase from the European version of the Japanese video game Zero Wing, which was poorly translated into English and became a web meme.
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– September 5, 2009
Mashable reports that old versions of WordPress are being targeted by a worm using a vulnerability in the system. Matt Mullenweg writes on the official WordPress blog that
“This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts.”
Once your system is compromised, the worm inserts links to malware and spam into old posts, which could get you removed from Google if they are not removed.
Update: lorelle.wordpress.com has a post detailing how to find out if you have been attacked and what to do in that case.
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– September 5, 2009
When some members of the PreCentral forums used webOS Doctor, a tool to restore a Palm Pre to default factory settings, their Pres were updated to webOS 1.2, an unreleased version of Palm’s webOS, the operating system the Pre runs on.
Palm has since released an update to webOS Doctor to fix the bug, but some users were able to grab a copy of the version that updates the Pre to 1.2. The use of this program could, however, potentially brick the Pre. As the software was not supposed to be released yet, an official list of new features is not available, but the members of the PreCentral forum are posting new features as they find them. The new update includes improvements to the browser, support for paid apps, improved copy and paste and search in e-mail.
[via Gizmodo and PreCentral]
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– September 4, 2009
