Firefox 5 review: Tab perfection

Yes, there is a new Firefox. In fact, if Mozilla keeps to the schedule they’re proposing, we should see a new version of Firefox every 6 weeks. Theoretically, three months from now — somewhere around September — we should be looking at Firefox 7…or at least what they call Firefox 7. I guess it depends on what they consider a major build; after all, Firefox 4 just came out.

If you have sites you always have open you can now pin a tab as an App Tab (left). An App Tab is basically a much smaller tab (using the sites favicon instead of the sites name for the tab name) that is ever-present. This is perfect for sites like Twitter, Facebook, your blog site, or a work-related site. When you open up Firefox 5, those App Tabs will automatically open and be ready for your use.

The screenshot illustrates App Tabs in action. As you can see, in the far left of the tab bar there are four App Tabs (Twitter, Facebook, my Goodreads profile, and my blog). To create an App Tab, simply right-click on a tab and then select Pin as App Tab. To unpin a tab from an App Tab, right-click the App Tab and select Unpin Tab. Read more…

I am a fickle user. I admit it. I will use something until it either pisses me off, or changes its functionality so much that I no longer like it. I first , like most people no doubt, used Internet Explorer. Netscape Navigator I tried but it was soooo slooooow. When Firefox first came out it was a breath of fresh, wonderfully temperate air with just the right amount of humidity. Awesome. Unfortunately, Firefox’s later iterations began to suffer from strange maladies namely slow down and excessive resource usage…most likely the former being caused by the latter. I tried Safari but since I didn’t have a Mac, it was a little too foreign for my taste. Opera was interesting but at the time didn’t render everything I needed properly so I stuck with Firefox. The resource hogging wasn’t totally unacceptable since to relieve the problem I had to remember to restart it every now and then, and not leave it running when I walked away from the computer. Then Chrome came out. WHEEEEEEEE!!!

So far, Chrome does what I want. That App Tab on Firefox has me wondering, though. It sounds like I may want to play with it for a bit. I really don’t think I would give up the speed of Chrome as I now realize that I can actually feel a difference of less than half a second. It didn’t mean anything to me ten years ago, but it means something now. I’ll stay with Chrome for now…but just in case, I do maintain a fully updated Firefox waiting in the wings should Chrome piss me off…

AT&T/ T-Mobile merger: What the players say

I am worried about this. AT&T is not known as the company that cares very much for its existing customers; but it does care very much about acquiring new ones. Unfortunately, it is highly likely that T-Mobile will simply be swallowed — as was Cingular — and most of their infrastructure will be dismantled leaving only the network itself. I believe that that is the only thing AT&T actually wants and over a short time will excise the service like a bad taste is excised with mouthwash.

After wading through all of the official paperwork, it’s clear AT&T and T-Mobile are hanging their hats on the spectrum crisis angle. The argument is that smartphone data usage is skyrocketing and existing networks are being tapped out at an alarming rate. The merged networks will be the best way to tackle the spectrum crunch, according to the two companies involved.

Sprint is arguing that this is not the case, and that if AT&T would invest in its existing network as have other carriers then the crunch would be better dealt with. The argument is put forth that AT&T is using the spectrum crisis as an excuse to justify creating the largest carrier in the U. S., and to avoid investing in increased network capacity with the acquisition of T-Mobile. Read more…

IMHO, Sprint does have a point. Those anti-Verizon commercials always spoke about “97% coverage” of the country. If that’s true then it seems to me that all they needed to do was upgrade the network. If simply purchasing T-Mobile will alleviate network congestion, then there is something very odd going on in the board.

At best, simply increasing the bandwidth of their spectrum is a stopgap method; the fact that they say they are facing congestion now means that the technology they’re using is approaching its limits. They will need to overhaul the entire system at some point soon, and the T-Mobile network is either the standard or the guinea pig. Adding the T-Mobile network also means all the sim cards are going to have to be changed, but they’ll probably do that when the phone inevitably breaks or wears out and you need a new one. That’s also the time when they’ll get you with a new contract; as a T-Mobile veteran customer, you’ll be a newbie AT&T customer. They won’t say it that way, but that’s the way it’ll be. I will be very, very surprised if it isn’t.

Mozilla to enterprise customers: “Drop dead”

For those of you who don’t know, Firefox is now on version 5 which is basically 3 months after they introduced the improved version 4. For a comparison, Google Chrome was first released in 2008 and they are now up to version 12. As I see it, usually a new version means some major change to the functionality which has been deemed to be either really useful or very needed. Unfortunately, sometimes the way the new version works is incompatible with some outside functionality the browser had in the previous version. When there is an incompatibility, outside developers need time to make changes to their software or the functionality will be broken in the new version.

Fasten your seatbelts, because Mozilla plans to ship Firefox 6 in exactly six weeks, with Firefox 7 six weeks after that, and Firefox 8 … well, you get the idea. Not coincidentally, that release schedule perfectly matches up with browser archrival Google Chrome.

At that pace, in June 2014, a mere three years from now, Firefox will be on version 29.

If you’d prefer to opt out of that breakneck development cycle, Mozilla has some guidance for you: Fuggedaboutit.

Remarkably, that is Mozilla’s direct, uncensored response to its corporate partners. Read more…

Google has a system called the Google Canary which seems to be some sort of system test for the browser; if a change stops the canary, that change is deflected from the developers…most likely until it does not stop the canary. I am under the impression that Firefox does not have this kind of checks and balances system in place. Not only that, but the lack seems to be intentional…

As for John’s concern, “By the time I validate Firefox 5, what guarantee would I have that Firefox 5 won’t go EOL [end of life] when Firefox 6 is released?”

He has the opposite of guarantees that won’t happen. He has my promise that it will happen. Firefox 6 will be the EOL of Firefox 5. And Firefox 7 will be the EOL for Firefox 6.

I don’t understand this line of reasoning. Unless they’re planning on modifying third-party code themselves, Mozilla is going to alienate business users that made their browser so popular in the first place. It seems to me that extensions really became popular after Firefox was introduced. Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps there was another reason that Firefox, with its continuing memory hog creep problem, became so popular so quickly. I hope I’m wrong. Alienating developers is usually not a good idea.

Groundbreaking camera lets you shoot now, focus later

Awesome. There are so many instances where you have a great shot, but by the time you focus in on it, it’s gone. This would be great…but I wonder how much it’s going to cost?

Scientists have fantasized about light-field cameras for a century, but previous experiments in creating one required the equivalent of 100 digital cameras connected to a supercomputer.

The Lytro takes that 100-digital-cameras-plus-supercomputer capability and stuffs it into a regular-sized point-and-shoot.

The company does this with an innovative sensor called a light field sensor. The light field sensor takes in three pieces of data about each ray of light: its color, intensity and direction. Conventional camera sensors just add up all the light rays and record them as one amount of light instead of recording information about each ray. Read more…

This sounds a little like a voxel, a volumetric picture element, which serves the same purpose in 3-dimensional space that a pixel does in 2-dimensional space i.e. it represents a point. In 2-dimensional space, you need length and width; in 3-dimensional space, you add depth. I think a normal camera would take color and intensity information, 2-dimensional. If the picture is unfocused at the time it’s taken, then the intensity is definitely going to be lower and the color may be shifted as well. Adding a vector (direction) apparently does wonders. The pictures on their site are really cool. The article didn’t do them justice as they weren’t interactive there.

I really wonder about the price, though. They’re talking about pricing for the consumer market but which consumer? Another company is coming out with a different kind of “focus after” camera, the Raytrix R11, and they want $30,000 for it. It does use a different system though…

Pentagon Gets Cyberwar Guidelines

This should be interesting. In the old, old days if you controlled the sea, you controlled the battle. In the just past days, if you controlled the air, you controlled the battle. In this age of the Internet, if you control the information, you control the battle.

In a broad new strategy document, the Pentagon lays out some of the cyber capabilities the military may use during peacetime and conflict. They range from planting a computer virus to using cyberattacks to bring down an enemy’s electrical grid or defense network.

“You don’t have to bomb them anymore. That’s the new world,” said James Lewis, cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Read more…

With a proper interface, cyber security could be portrayed as a videogame…the malware would be the bad guys trying to subvert the system while the good guys would be players, trying to stop the infiltration. Eventually, they could make it into a sort of Ender’s Game but without children doing it. Chances are, games like America’s Army or the Call of Duty series could have a hidden agenda that no one realizes.

Android Security Alert: Trojan GGTracker subscribes users to premium SMS services

Unlike the attacks presently being perpetrated by LulzSec and Anonymous, this exploit hearkens back to the days of old when AOL dial-up ruled the Internet ways. Back in the days of the old 2400-baud modem, the idea was to get you to go to a malicious site that would then change your long distance carrier from whatever it was to some very expensive carrier and have your Internet go through them instead. Very pricey. The advent of broadband eliminated that as the DSL provided by the phone company was too specific in its requirements to allow this to happen anymore and cable is locked to a single provider, period. Smartphones present a new territory since a large majority of people with them were born after broadband became the norm rather than the curiousity. It’s like a place that gets hit by a massive tsunami every 200 years or so: by the time the next one hits, all the people who lived through the last one are gone and history is ever so much more vivid when it is experienced rather than relayed.

The Trojan targets only U.S. Smartphone users when they click on a malicious in-app advertisement. The website lures users to click-through to download and install an application one of which is a fake battery optimizer called “t4t.pwower.management”, and another is a porn app called “com.space.sexypic”.

After the application has been installed, GGTracker registers the user for premium subscription services. The Trojan carries out this task by contacting another server in the background where the malicious behavior intercepts crucial confirmation data to charge users without their consent or knowledge. Read more…

You would think that in this day and age that this type of exploit wouldn’t work but there is one glaring problem: smartphones are basically palm-top computers. I think that a lot of people don’t see them as anything but phones with extended capabilities when they should be looking at them as computers that can wirelessly make phone calls. As the phones become more powerful (dual-cores are here and quad-cores are on the way) they will have more of our electronic personas on them and thus they will be even more attractive to steal. Be vigilant.

A new security architecture for the cloud

The cloud is a pretty interesting thing. IMHO, the ultimate implementation of the cloud would be your data, accessible only to you — or those to whom you specifically allow access — on any device  you wish to use that can connect to the repository and has the appropriate security capabilities. Your access will automatically add or subtract processing power as needed to complete the tasks you have set for it, and it will be available worldwide. It will connect via WiFi, NFC, or satellite…whichever has the best signal for where you are, and it will do so transparently; you will not know that your mode of communication has shifted. Mind you, this is an ideal situation.

The group’s intent is to produce “a set of whitepapers which will examine each of our architectural building blocks in greater detail through the use of business scenarios,” says Omkhar Arasaratnam, a certified senior security architect at IBM and co-chairman of the Open Group’s Cloud Work Group Steering Committee.

“The reality is that security in the cloud is not black or white, but really many shades of gray,” Arasaratnam says. “IT and security executives need to understand the impact which these shades of gray have on their overall risk posture, and take appropriate mitigating steps.” Read more…

Makes you wonder what they mean when they say “gray” security. I was under the impression that security was either there, or not there. You know, your door is either locked, or unlocked. I get the strange feeling that it’s really like how I think a timeshare works: several different people have keys that will open the same physical place, but they can not be there at the same time. In other words, the processing space in a cloud is just that: a space. It is not a specific machine so much as a reserved number of computer processor cycles for you. That way, if a computer in the cloud fails, it can simply be swapped out for a new one without causing the entire system to hiccup. Your data will be processed on an available virtual machine…any available virtual machine in the cloud. Your passwords and data must be accessible to the machine that’s working on it at that time, but not to anyone else or any other machine. So, IMHO, the security is gray because any virtual machine in your cloud of choice could be running your stuff and it has to know how to get to it so that it can tell if you have access…but then forget that information once your session has ended. And remember, several virtual machines can run concurrently on a single physical machine…only the horsepower of the physical machine will determine how many.

Haptics Adds New Dimensions to Touchscreens

Okay, yes this is totally awesome. IMHO, it can get rid of one-third the main sticking point between tablets and computers: keyboards that touch-typists find useless. The other two points are processing power and mouse actions. Processing power is growing by leaps and bounds and will probably soon not be restricted to the hand-held device alone; the mouse is a little trickier, but there is probably something awesome in the wings for that too.

The most mind-blowing brand of haptics may come from a Silicon Valley startup called Tactus Technology. In a pair of patent applications, the company’s executives describe a touchscreen display capable of growing a keyboard out of its surface. Seriously. You go to type an e-mail, and a keyboard rises up slightly out of the display, allowing your fingers to feel the edges of the letters, numbers, and symbols. When you’re done, the keyboard recedes back into the surface. To play a game, controller knobs and buttons emerge. Read more…

I do wonder about the lifetime of these interfaces though. Gorilla Glass is tough, but not flexible. Flexible things tend to have fatigue issues. Yes, they can be made to be very durable, but even Teflon and diamonds will wear out after a while of heavy use. You know that any haptic surface will get used a lot…and the surface of a pad or phone will have to be a swipe as well as a haptic interface. Maybe they’ll come up with a way to replace or refurbish the surface like that stuff which makes the lenses on your car headlights clear again. I can’t wait.

Video: Machine scoops up, deposits ketchup — in same shape

The first time I saw this demonstrated, it was a pretty grainy video. I flatly refused to believe that this thing was doing what they claimed it was. This new video is much clearer, and it has imperfections in the picking up and re-depositing which make it more believable.

This Japanese robotic hand called SWITL can scoop up, say, a splotch of ketchup and then set it back down again — all without changing the ketchup’s shape.

In fact, take any semi-liquid such as mayonnaise (and probably mustard, barbecue sauce, aioli or your condiment of choice), finger paint with it as much as you like, and the SWITL looks like it will pick up and set down your artwork intact. Read more…

I’m especially impressed by the sequence where they put the splotch onto a napkin. As I’m sure you’ve had an opportunity (most likely many) to experience the drag produced by a napkin — if they didn’t have any drag then they wouldn’t allow you to wipe your mouth clean — seeing this material slide across the napkin without tearing it is telling. If they made the juice container hand bigger, they could make a robotic ambulance lift that could slide underneath a victim with less stress than the present “put this neck brace on and roll them onto this back board” method of transfer. It might even hurt less.

Top 10 PIN Codes Picked by iPhone Users

There are good people in the world, and there are bad people. Good people tend to be friendly, courteous, and feel trustworthy.  Bad people, however, tend to be friendly, courteous, and feel trustworthy. You can never judge a book by its cover because a cover — by nature — is meant to protect the contents, not represent them. Anything can be on a cover; it doesn’t actually have to have any reference to its content on it. Since you can’t always watch your tiny electronics, it’s best to have a password on it to at least make it difficult for someone to get the same use out of it as do you. Mind you, if they really want it then they’ll have the horsepower to get in…but probably via an exploit rather than a password-cracker.

Users are encouraged to set a PIN code to lock mobile devices to secure data in case it is lost or stolen. However, users aren’t picking hard-to-guess combinations, according to a recent analysis of iPhone passcodes.

The 10 most common passcodes used by iPhone users accounted for 15 percent of all the passwords analyzed, Daniel Amitay, the developer behind the iPhone app Big Brother Camera Security, said on his Website June 13. The most common values were: 1234, 0000, 2580, 1111, 5555, 5683, 0852, 2222, 1212 and 1998. Read more…

Many people consider New Yorkers to be rude and/or just plain mean. It’s not that. Things tend to happen quickly in New York, both good and bad. Too slow, and you might miss the sugar of the good thing or get caught up in the hooks of the bad thing. That is why New Yorkers tend to take advantage of opportunities when they arise. An anti-theft device on a car won’t stop someone who really wants your particular car; if they happen to want just any car, the anti-theft device on your car will make your car require more work, and thus more time, which will encourage the opportunistic thief to find easier prey. Remember, most thieves are not professionals; they are opportunistic predators.

If you forget your phone on a cafe table and someone absconds with it, well, it’s probably gone for good. If you backed up your contacts and had a password (a real one and not four numbers), then no real biggie…inconvenient, yes but not disastrous. If you didn’t back up your contacts, had 1234 as your password, and had the NFC Digital Wallet activated on your phone…oops. Well. oops for someone looking at it from the outside. For you, however, it would be more like “OH! MY!! GOD!!! WHEN DID I LOSE MY PHONE? I NEED TO REPORT IT STOLEN! WHAT NUMBER DO I DIAL? I NEED TO CALL MY FRIEND TO HAVE HER COME PICK ME UP…WHAT’S HER NUMBER? WHERE IS…?” Yeah, bad news.