Editorials

In the soap-opera that has been the case against Kim Dotcom and Mega Upload we now has another chapter. It seems that the copyright groups responsible for the original claims against Dotcom want to have a look at this financial state. If you remember when the case and raid first happened we mentioned that the move was most likely done to remove competition from the playing field. The actions and claims that followed certainly seemed to support our hypothesis.

DEF CON 22, Las Vegas, NV 2014 - Yesterday at DEF CON we had the chance to listen to Christopher Soghoian, Principal Technologist, American Civil Liberties Union talk about the state of the surveillance state and how we can help fight against it. Of course you might think that his talk would be about the use of spy proof technologies, but oddly enough very little of that was talked about except to make it clear that talk of spy-proof technology makes people in Washington nervous.

Well, with all of the news about Apple’s next round of products we thought we would chime in with our take on this. Warning Apple fans the following article is not based on analyst WAGs (wild ass guesses), but on information that is available publicly and, well through other means. Right now far too many analyst firms are looking to bolster their portfolios by talking up products from Apple that do not even have firm or realistic specifications attached to them. We are talking about Apple’s rumored iWatch, 12.9-inch iPad and large screen iPhone. All three of these are rumored to hit the market in September as Apple tried to catch up to the rest of the world and offer the same style of product that is already out there.

In development it has always been a given that if you can code for a specific build of materials or specific hardware platform you can usually get more out of the application you are developing. Nowhere was this more evident than when RISC CPUS were on the market. At the time that DEC Alpha was king we saw a 667MHz CPU slamming 1GHz processors from both AMD and Intel. The reason for this was that the software was specifically coded to take advantage of that platform.