Tonight, there's gonna be a (legal) jailbreak!

Overheard at a session of Dungeons and Dragons in the past week:
Guy 1: "Ok, can I take the voluptuous tavern maid to bed?"
Guy 2: "Wait, check for traps!"
(Guy 1 rolls a 17 on a trap check)
DM: "You find a chastity belt."
Guy 1: "Dammit!"
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It was announced yesterday that jailbreaking an iPhone is legal under federal copyright law.

And I bet Apple's pretty pissed.

If you aren't familiar with the term, jailbreaking is the act of hacking an iPhone to gain access to apps that aren't approved by Apple, through the underground appstore Cydia.  A similar practice can be used on video game consoles, or the iPhone, to play pirated games

Apple's discouraged the practice ever since someone thought of doing it, since the practice can undermine the closed system that Apple has laid down in the same format since 2007.  Of course, it hasn't been the best system:

Not Invented Here is property of Bill Barnes and Paul Southworth

Of course, if someone were to pirate apps using their jailbroken iPhones, authorities could take action against the perpetrators.  But, the act of jailbreaking is not considered a crime, and neither is the use of Cydia, as long as all developers get credit and/or money for their work.  The system is similar to the system in Canada with respect to BitTorrent: The act of torrenting isn't illegal, since it can be used for freeware.  Pirating is illegal, however.

While Apple can still take action against jailbreakers available to them with their business rights, such as denial of service or refusing warranties, people who jailbreak their iPhones cannot be legally charged.

Of course, Apple doesn't like this one bit.  They think that they're entitled to the regulation of their own system.  However, with all the attention Apple's getting now, you have to wonder how long it might take for them to seriously mess up.

Urghhh

Insomnia sucks.  True story.  Especially when you're looking for a job the next day.

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It's been a week since Apple announced their "fix" for the iPhone 4, in the latest development in what Apple has dubbed "antennagate" - a pretty appropriate name.  The reception for Apple's fix, as with the rest of the debacle, has been generally cool - at best.

Ever since the iPhone 4 came out, there have been complaints about the reception it gets.  Apple claims that only 0.55% of people phoned in complaining about this - some snarky critics shot back that the other 99.45% couldn't get reception.  What really tore it for Apple was when Consumer Reports magazine said that they couldn't recommend the iPhone 4 because of this problem.  So Stevie announced that they were giving everybody with an iPhone 4 free cases - or a full refund for people who still aren't happy.

Apple did what it had to do, true.  Consumer Reports did mention that you could get a reception fix through an iPhone case.  While some people praise the fix, many people comment that it isn't permanent.  Jobs didn't mention any work on getting a fix, and I can only assume that the phones being shipped up here to Canada are going to have the same problem.  There are some theories that phones are getting delayed to fix the problem, but I somewhat doubt it.  Apple is pretty notorious for being slow with updating their products.

At this point, I'm wondering if Apple would have even bothered with the cases if Consumer Reports didn't say anything.

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iGoogle

If you're a regular reader - *insert disbelief here* - you might have noticed the changes to the site.  Among these changes is the new subheading: A (hopefully) daily tech news blog.

Yeah.  I haven't been keeping up well on that, have I?

So, I thought that I would try out iGoogle last week.  For those of you who don't know what iGoogle is, it's Google's alternate homepage.  Of course, you all know about the clean-cut homepage that Google usually sports, designed to load really fast.  iGoogle is an optional build-up of that.

What?  I'm not gonna let you look at my Facebook.  Creeper.

The Twitter and Facebook gadget alone is reason enough to go to the site.  In my opinion, it's much better than those sites that make their whole business off of putting Twitter and Facebook together.  The only downside is that you don't get FB chat on iGoogle.  Another really nice feature is the weather centre.  As you can see, it's matching the extension I have next to the address bar (although I don't know why I have two weather centers now.)  It also has news feeds in there, which you can customize. Other features that I don't have on my page include comics, games, and a TV guide.

The best feature, though, would have to be the Google Calendar feature.  I started my own calendar up recently so that I can keep track of what I'm doing next year when I'm attending university.  Having the gadget there really helps.  I can get my Twitter and Facebook feeds, as well as my schedule, on one site.  I highly recommend iGoogle for anyone who doesn't already have something like this.

Is there anything Dan Brown won't do?

Wow.  Dan Brown.  What a guy.


For those of you who don't know Dan Brown, he's another YouTuber.  One that I haven't been following so much, but respected nonetheless.  From his early days as a Rubik's Cube expert, Dan has come to the forefront of the YouTube community, currently either forming giant collaboration projects or discussing user-generated questions in his basement, which looks like it could be a war room in WWII-era Britain.

Dan Brown in one of his better moments

Just now, Dan officially announced his new project, Dan 3.0, at VidCon.  Earlier this week, he posted a video leading up to the announcement.

Today, he announced the content of this project.  Starting August 1st, Dan is going to give control of his live into the hands of his viewers.  Wow.  I have to admire Dan's ambition here.  There are, of course, going to have to be limits on what people can do here.  In a world that can have 4chan, there are bound to be people that are going to try their best to make him buy a house or something equally lucrative.  Although I have yet to hear the full details on Dan's project, I really hope he can pull this off.  I'm going to be sure to pay more attention to his videos in the future.  To anybody reading this, what are your thoughts on Dan 3.0?

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YouTube makes jobs!

YouTube made a couple of big announcements at VidCon today that I wanted to address. First of all, there was the announcement that YouTube will soon offer 4k-resolution videos, which is actually better than Imax.

Holy shit.

YouTube kind of jumped the gun on this one, didn't they? Never mind that the necessary network speed to quickly download this is not available outside of South Korea, one big factor is that pretty much 99% of all monitors don't go above 1080p. You would need to get a projector that is "typically the size of a small refrigerator" (YouTube's words, not mine) just to watch the video to its full capacity. Although it's nice to see that we can take it that far, it just isn't really worth it to add on to the site, in my opinion.

The second announcement is the announcement of the YouTube Partner Grant Program. I've long been a fan of Internet commerce, and I really approve of the YouTube Partner program. I've seen many people who make their living off of YouTube (a person I mentioned in this blog before, Wheezy Waiter, just started vlogging full-time), and I personally have wanted to get into the business. Although I likely wouldn't qualify for this grant (I don't really have that many views), it's really nice to know that many young videographers are getting what they need to start making videos, especially in this economic downturn. I have to give YouTube a thumbs-up for that grant.

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The National Administration of Self-Esteem and Assimilation

E3 was boring.

Well, that's a bit harsh, but it was pretty forgetful, in any case. The main show was the Nintendo 3DS, the 3D portable console. It was really funny to see both Sony and Microsoft so obviously upstaged by Nintendo, when both of them are pretty much trying to emulate the Wii in the next year.

But enough about that.

I read an article about NASA last week. It would appear that Obama is trying to change NASA's goals. Instead of "going where no man has gone before", NASA now has goals that are a bit closer to Earth: To inspire children and young adults to pursue scientific careers, and to reach out to the Muslim community.

Now, like many people, I scoffed. I scoffed hard. I scoffed like Steve Jobs at a Microsoft convention. 40 years ago, NASA was the only agency to land on the Moon. Today, NASA is still the only agency to land on the Moon. The difference between this is that now, nobody is landing on the moon. Nobody has gone beyond low earth orbit since 1972, when Gene Cernan stepped on the moon for the last time (and yes, I do believe the Moon landings were real. I might do a post later on why I think that). Now Obama's trying to get them out of even going into LEO. It's a bit crazy.

But then I thought on it. Last summer, I was big on space. Of course, last summer was the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11. I really wanted to go into space. In fact, I'm sure everyone has really wanted to go into space at some time. So, NASA actually can inspire people to pursue scientific careers. But it was able to do that before. It was able to inspire by undertaking grand projects, like the moon landings and the ISS. So why take the US out of orbit?

I took a good look at the second of NASA's new goals. Obama wants the American scientific community to partner with the Muslim scientific community, to get space programs in the Middle East. This is instead of partnering with Russia, the EU, and Japan, with whom the US could achieve more great projects. This has more of a political goal. One of the main reasons that the Middle East is so violent, no matter what anyone tells you, is jealousy. One way to get the Middle East to co-exist peacefully is to get them on an even footing with the rest of the world, and with each other. One way to do that is to get them their own space program. Or so Obama hopes. It's still up in the air if the Middle East will accept this help. It certainly would be nice to see more independent space programs out there, and it is also nice to see Obama trying to win back the American reputation of multilateral leadership. It could turn out that

In conclusion, this could turn out to be an important part of Obama's presidency. But only time will tell if this would make him one of the "great negotiators", or if his presidency was a waste of time.

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