When Google Music launched a couple months ago, there was some criticism regarding how the service was promoted. What many saw as just another music locker and streaming service (albeit a perfectly good and free one) others saw as a great new vector for music sales and distribution. But the music locker portion seemed to hog the spotlight, and the cool Band Camp-esque new artist hubs lurked in the gloom.

Busta Rhymes seems to be a fan of the latter, and not just because he’s in an official partnership. In an interview on MTV, he was positively effusive about Google’s new platform. Check out the short clip, from MTV’s Sucka Free:

I think he’s being truthful when he says that “with that power that they have, that it was almost blasphemous for them to not have their hands in music as well.” Google, via YouTube, is the world’s foremost player in video distribution on the web (though as far as purchased content goes, Netflix is king). One almost wonders why music didn’t come first.

In case you were wondering that, the reason is that the user-focused structure of YouTube makes it a platform for viral videos and self-expression, not studio-produced content. They’ve been trying to change that, but it hasn’t been very effective (people don’t think of YouTube that way, for good reaosn). Google Music lets them start fresh and try to build something that works both from the top down and the bottom up. So whether they “sign” guys like Busta or a dude recording on an 8-track in his living room, they can provide an end-to-end buying, listening, and sharing solution.

“Google ain’t really trying to just sell music” is about as capsule-sized a summary as you can get, and it’s true. Google hates selling things, in fact. And in the music world, it might be that in a few years, selling things like music tracks just won’t be something you do, and Google will have positioned itself well to be a non-purchase solution.

They say when it rains, it pours. That’s not usually a good thing, but when it’s raining money, things are a little different. That was the case at Kickstarter yesterday, where they had their biggest day of funding ever, beating the record set… the day before yesterday.

It was also the day that marked the first Kickstarter project to break $1,000,000 in funding. And the day that marked the second project to hit that number. And New York’s city council endorsed the site as a way to highlight community projects that need funding. Oh, and they’re on Portlandia.

Definitely the biggest day in the site’s history, then. They’ve commemorated it with a great blog post that might just make your Friday a little better. It also brings up a few new and interesting questions regarding how the site should or will be used. But first, watch the Portlandia clip:

Double Fine, whose adventure game drove much of the funding sum (and is up to nearly $1.5M alone as of this writing), is different from many projects we’ve seen. Often Kickstarter is thought of as a venue for people with very limited means but a good idea to execute that idea. The Elevate Dock is a good example of this.

But Double Fine is an established game studio with office space, employees, and many products under its belt? Why should it go to Kickstarter? Well, Tim Schafer explains that in the video, at least for this project: no publisher would go near a point and click adventure game, but they knew at least some people wanted it. Reasonable enough.

The question, really, is why we even question it. If people want to make something, and people want to fund it, why shouldn’t it be on Kickstarter? The easy stuff — cool accessories or small devices that need a little capital to get started — are just the first wave. Why not pothole repair on a neighborhood street? Why not a new coffee shop? Why not a feature film? Some of these have been tried, no doubt, and perhaps failed — but the principle is sound. If you want to make it, and others want you to make it, this is a way for you to connect.

Congratulations to the Kickstarter, Elevation Dock, and Double Fine teams. Great way to end the week.

The Air Force’s Air Mobility Command will be putting in a request for the purchase of a number of tablets soon in an effort to lighten their pilots’ loads. Many commercial airlines are already taking this step, and American Airlines has already gotten FAA approval. The Air Force is feeling the sting of jealousy, and in consequence may be requesting as many as 18,000 devices.

The number could also be as low as 63; the Command was not forthcoming on this point. The lower number would probably indicate a pilot program, so to speak, for a few devices, to determine which should get the big order.

Which tablet would actually be ordered is also not specified. Bloomberg cannily plays up the iPad angle in its report (U.S. Air Force May Buy 18,000 Apple IPad 2s), but the spokesperson they talked to, Captain Ferrero, said the request might also be for Playbooks, Galaxy Tabs, Xooms, or Nooks.

If these were to be general-purpose tablets, this little menagerie would be hard to winnow down. But the fact is they are going to be used as virtual flight bags, and the iPad is the only one that has the thousands of hours in the air that the Air Force will require. In a year, maybe, Android tablets will have a little more experience under their belts, but for now it’s probably safe to say that any tablets purchased by the government for the purpose of being electronic flight bags are going to be iPads.

Eventually, these platform issues will have to be settled, though: if part of the military is going with Android for security purposes, and others are going with iOS for EFB and, say, general communication, there’s going to be a reckoning sooner or later.

Ever since Steve Ballmer made that surprise announcement at CES 2011, there has been a lot of speculation about just how Microsoft would be bringing Windows to the ARM architecture. Would it be a whole separate line? Would it be compatible with old applications? Would it be cheaper?

Many of these questions have been answered in a long and technical post on the Building Windows 8 blog today, as Steven Sinofsky explains how they developed (re-developed, really) Windows On ARM, or WOA, and why they made the choices they made.

Some major points, for those unwilling to read: WOA will be totally incompatible with x86/x64-based applications; it will include a desktop only for Office apps and file management; it will be focused on portability, battery life, and “integrated quality,” by which they mean it ships with, in a way, everything you need. On that note, it won’t be available separately as a software purchase; it will only be available pre-installed on devices.

The process of transferring Windows to ARM was not an easy or short one. They’ve been working on it for years; for an indicator of how long, consider that when they started, there was no such thing as an ARM-based tablet. They had to run the OS on ARM phones like the one pictured here from Asus.

As ARM systems are built on a completely different principle from the Intel, AMD, and IBM-led PC-compatible spec, some serious changes had to be made. Device and hardware management would have to be completely rethought. Back compatibility was a fairy tale. And there was no way to stress-test builds on debug rigs the way they’d been doing for 20 years on racks of x86 PCs. At least, there was no way until they built a way, and by next month they plan to have 3200 machines running WOA in stacks (also pictured) to troubleshoot, stress test, and so on.

Yet some things had to stay the same, as well: every ARM device would have to be outfitted with UEFI, ACPI, and the Windows Hardware Abstraction Layer in order to create a basic platform on which Windows would be comfortable. After that, things like DirectX, discrete device inclusion (printers, GPS units, and the like) could be added. And higher-level apps were a piece of cake, apparently, Microsoft having built them in a forward-looking way with allowances for multiple architectures.

The restrictions imposed by this new environment, and some design decisions made along the way, have produced something of a different product from the Windows we all know and some of us love.

For one thing, back-compatibility has been essentially abandoned. A clean break sounds good on the face of it, but consider that part of Microsoft’s success has been its ability to accommodate legacy hardware and software from ridiculously far back. Remember that video about installing every version of Windows on top of the last?

Doom II, installed on Windows 1.0, still ran without problems in Windows 7. That’s amazing. WOA breaks from this tradition with a purpose, though.

Sinofsky describes WOA as “a new member of the Windows family, much like Windows Server, Windows Embedded, or Windows Phone.” It’s not meant to play games installed on operating systems from a quarter of a century ago. It’s meant to be a point of access for the current, and only the current, Windows ecosystem. It is similar to the “full” version of Windows 8 only in those parts that have been developed specifically for Windows 8.

Think of it this way. Windows 8 for x86/x64, in a way, includes Windows 7, Vista, XP, 98, 95, and so on. It is built with compatibility in mind, as part of a venerable line of operating systems. Windows On ARM includes only Windows 8. It’s as if the last ten versions of the OS never happened — though there are echoes.

This breaks the OS for some people — me, for example — but it could be a breath of fresh air for many. This OS is at once bare-bones and all-inclusive: it comes with a familiar version of Office, it will almost certainly be cheap and easy to deploy by the hundred or thousand, and it’s absolutely a known quantity.

Apps for WOA will all come from the Windows Store, and will all be Metro — except for Office (and a few other trusted programs), which will be able to run in the traditional desktop environment for productivity purposes. It’s a bit puzzling, this admission (in a way) that the traditional desktop is superior for productivity, but it’s also the truth: an all-Metro productivity suite would be unfamiliar to Microsoft’s base. They’ll make it optional for now, and drop the other shoe later.

The focus on tablets is made plain: “you don’t turn off a WOA PC.” You don’t have sleep and hibernate modes. Like a phone or tablet, you just hit the button and it goes into a newly-developed low-power mode in which the battery will reportedly last weeks. These tablets, while they won’t run the “real” Windows 8, will be totally functional (it runs “super well”) access points to the Windows ecosystem. And with the increasing focus on cloud storage, web-based apps, and mobility, that limited access may start looking less like a bug and more like feature as time goes on.

There’s still lots to be done, says Sinofsky, but they hope to launch Windows On ARM at the same time as the commercial launch of Windows 8. It’s a real change for Microsoft, which is heartening to those of us who have been disappointed with their willingness to honestly self-evaluate lately. Devices are being tested from NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments; whether a worthy product will be available at launch time is still a mystery, but it’s obvious that everyone involved is deeply invested.

And lastly, here’s the video that accompanies the blog post. It explains some things but generally just shows that WOA will act more or less like x86/x64 Windows 8:

If you played PC games in the 90s, chances are you played some of Tim Schafer’s work. He worked on the Monkey Island Series and Day of the Tentacle, later going on to create such classics as Grim Fandango and Psychonauts. He recently took to Kickstarter to try and score some funding for a new point-and-click adventure game, as most publishers would consider the genre more or less untouchable these days.

He figured there were enough people out there who wanted a new adventure game that they could scrape together $400,000. That was last night. They hit their goal in 8 hours, and are likely to break a million dollars before the end of the day. In fact, just since I started this post, I’ve had to adjust the headline to reflect an additional $50,000 $70,000 $100,000 that has been pledged.

Kickstarter confirmed to Joystiq that “there’s not been a project that has raised as much as this one in such a short timeframe.” Not even the Elevation Dock, which has made something of a splash. It’s easy to understand, considering the deal Double Fine is offering.

In addition to the game, for which $300,000 of the money was to be earmarked, they are partnering with 2 Player Productions to make a video documentary about the development of the game. A $15 donation gets you both the game and the documentary, which accounts partially for the massive uptake, but thousands more opted to give $30 or $100. It’s really quite a festival — over 23,000 backers as of this writing.

That’s understandable: Tim Schafer is something of a cult figure in gaming, and is really an optimal rallying point for a Kickstarter project. Thousands upon thousands have enjoyed his games and have been itching for a way to get involved and make another happen — but petitioning publishers and complaining on forums doesn’t do much. Pledging a few bucks does.

There are a number of these crowd-sourced games in the works, and some smaller sites catering to that audience, like 8 Bit Funding, have popped up. The age of the independent developer is upon us; there’s enough money going around and enough methods for funding that soon, no one will have to go hungry, least of all legendary developers with quiet but fervent global fan bases.

(Update: fixed video embed and changed headline to reflect that mil)

Let’s try to parse this.

Pirate Bay (.se) user allisfine just recently uploaded a torrent to the site that is a collection of all the magnet identifiers for the entire site (actually, only about a quarter of the site, but all the publicly visible ones). That is to say, it is a list of the unique identifiers, cryptographic hashes, of every .torrent file on the site.

In a way, this torrent file, or indeed its magnet identifier (938802790a385c49307f34cca4c30f80b03df59c), contains millions or billions of dollars worth of pirated content. Or does it?

It’s more a philosophical question than a technical one, which is why folks like the MPAA and RIAA will always be able to stay on one side of it. Yes, linking to copyrighted content is a crime. And linking to a link is a crime (as we’ve seen in Twitter DMCA takedowns). That’s a link to a link to a file that lets you download the file. What about a link to a link to a link? You can’t fool me, young man, it’s copyright violations all the way down.

That’s absurd, of course, yet like many absurd things, it makes a certain amount of sense. It doesn’t matter how many steps you take, if your destination is copyrighted, then you’re in trouble. But there’s just as much absurd ammo on the other side as well.

Consider the magnet identifier for this meta-torrent (or the DeCSS code, or a secure piece of electronics’ “master key,” or the like). Encode it as a series of integers. Is that series of integers a copyright violation?

What about π, an irrational number calculable by anybody that contains that series of integers if you look long enough? What about an image file that has three pixels of black, then five pixels of white, then two pixels of red, and so on? Is that pattern a violation? What if I think it’s beautiful and I put it on the wall, and have no idea it’s actually a visual representation of a hash of a hash of a torrent containing a compressed file containing the hashes of files that act as pointers to copyrighted information?

Naturally, there must be cap put on such hijinx. It will likely be clear when someone intended information to be a distributive mechanism for copyrighted or sensitive content. The nature of the container is to some extent irrelevant. But some of these issues need to be hashed out, so to speak, so that it’s not just a logical but a legal reality that no one can be charged with a billion in statutory damages for writing a short series of numbers on a napkin. It sounds silly until it’s being decided by the Supreme Court.

The nature and legal status of data in its many strange forms is a process we likely will never be done with. But small quandaries like this are worth savoring, before their solutions are etched in stone and gradually become the status quo. People talk about the web as if its “Wild West” days are behind it. These people lack imagination.

[hat tip to the fun Hacker News discussion, ongoing]

It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything about Lytro (other than nearly grabbing a Crunchie (I voted for them)), the camera where you shoot now and focus later. And the latest news comes not from the company itself, but from the FCC, which just today published the internal photos from its investigation of the device.

There’s nothing fabulously surprising, but Wireless Goodness points out that the chip pictured, a Marvell Avastar 88W8787, has Bluetooth and wi-fi capabilities. Companies don’t generally include capabilities in hardware they don’t expect to use; it drives up the cost of the device and feeds speculation like this article. Lytro hasn’t announced wireless syncing or updating, and the user manual makes no mention of it, so there’s no way to be sure. Lytro has not returned an email on the subject.

(Update: Lytro says: “The initial Lytro camera is not Wi-Fi enabled. Connectivity is important to us, and we’re working on it.” Could mean anything.)

Also pictured is the sensor, which is rather small; I estimate it to be about 6.5×4.5 millimeters. That’s a little larger than an iPhone sensor (1/3.2″) and a little smaller than most point and shoots (1/2.3″). Here’s a little diagram I whipped up to give you an idea:

So: small, but in good company. Note that sensor size isn’t everything, and at any rate the Lytro isn’t a traditional sensor at all. Traditional spatial resolution, all-important in a normal camera, apparently isn’t quite as necessary here. The assembly is orientated around capturing megarays, not megapixels. And the size and true dimensions of the final image are still not quite clear, so we’ll leave that alone for now.

Lastly, worth noting is the interesting style of construction; the non-traditional form factor of the Lytro makes for a fun engineering challenge, no doubt: the compact square prism shape prevents anything but the tiniest of PCBs and makes wiring difficult. Kudos to their hardware engineering team for taking on the challenge and (presumably) making it work.

You can read the rest of the Lytro FCC inspection info here (the internal photos are the only new information since November).

It’s a sign of the times, though not a particularly surprising one: Nokia has finally eliminated its European phone assembly infrastructure and will be moving those 4000 jobs to Asia, according to a Reuters report. The factories are not being shuttered altogether, and localizing and finishing work will still be done there, but the primary assembly work is being relocated.

The news and layoffs were expected, as the company has slashed many more thousands of jobs over the last year, but this particular cut is symbolic: the intensely European company has been battered into submission, and will join the others in the now-standard configuration of “design here, build there.”

The job losses are 2300 in Hungary, 1000 in Finland, and 700 in Mexico. They don’t represent all of Nokia’s employees in those countries, just those involved with basic assembly. Nokia did not say where or to what contractor the jobs would be sent, but considering their need to cut costs, the majors in China, Taiwan, Thailand, and others in the area are the natural choice.

Naturally, the countries losing the jobs expressed disappointment, but Nokia’s got to do what Nokia’s got to do, and these job losses have been telegraphed for some time. It’s likely that they were announced today only after extensive negotiations with unions and local contractors.

Whether this approach will prove effective at lowering costs without damaging the company or brand is yet to be seen; it may be that saving money on manufacturing might not be enough to counter the enormous drop in sales Nokia has seen over the last two years.

Some people might say that there’s no way Google could be more aware of your browsing habits. Not true! There is much they don’t know. But it’s not because they don’t want to know.

Last night Google rolled out two programs aimed at increasing their awareness of how people use their browsers — what sites they visit, for how long, for what purpose, etc. They’ll pay you for the privilege, a bit like being a Nielsen family. They even give you a little box!

The “lightweight” option (first noted at Search Engine Land) is simply a Chrome browser extension that “will share with Google the sites you visit and how you use them.” You’ll be given a $5 Amazon gift card when you sign up, and then another one every three months. Not exactly frontier gold but some people will no doubt find it enticing. There’s a maximum of $25 stated, but they’ll evaluate later how to compensate people in the program for more than a year.

The other option, not publicly accessible, was pointed out by a tipster to Ars Technica. Knowledge Networks, with whom Google is partnering in this endeavor, is a company that organizes surveys and such for companies that want to know about their visitors or customers. “Fill out this quick survey and you’ll be entered to win an iPad!” — that sort of thing. Some Knowledge Networks users have received offers to be part of the first 2500 households in the study, which would pay $100 up front and $20 per month.

Interestingly, the latter study involves sending out a “high-end router” from Cisco that will need to be installed. It presumably has firmware on it that records relevant data traffic from the household’s “web access,” though that term is not defined. Does it include Netflix? Torrents? Game traffic? Most likely it just means data you would normally send and receive via the browser, though for many that is still maddeningly vague. Obviously they are not likely to volunteer for this service.

All data will be recorded, including what goes on in those Incognito mode tabs, though that data “will not be tied to or associated with any personally identifiable information”. Reassuring to some, terrifying to others. And anonymized individual data will be shared with “academic institutions, advertisers, publishers, and programming networks.”

It’s fairly standard data-collection stuff, but it’s fun to see them taking the route of in-home hardware to monitor on a bit level. While many would consider this level of recording a monumental invasion of privacy, just as many (likely far more) don’t see much of a difference between this and how much they’re tracked already. The extra cash would certainly be welcome in many homes.

Naturally the habits observed among the “people who don’t care too much about privacy and are willing to sell their browsing habits for not a lot of money” group will be different from those at large, but it’s still valuable.

Right now there isn’t much more info than this on the programs, but you can sign up for updates and registration at Google’s Screenwise page.

Olympus is building on its significant micro four-thirds IP (i.e. mirrorless cameras with the M4/3 sensor size) with a premium offering with a stylized, retro look. The OM-D EM-5, digital successor to the long-running OM series of film cameras, has a look straight out of the 70s but specs that should satisfy enthusiast photographers looking for a compact but powerful system.

Their PEN series of M4/3 cameras is popular and well-reviewed, and the EM-5 builds on that tech. The difference is in some pro-like features Olympus has added in: a weather-resistant magnesium body, high-FPS EVF, and high-speed autofocus and shooting.

Here are the basic specs:

• New 16-megapixel Live MOS sensor
• ISO up to 25600
• Tilting 3″ OLED touch screen (~610k dots, I can’t determine the resolution)
• 120Hz 800×600 electronic viewfinder
• Magnesium alloy body, as “dustproof and splashproof” as the E-5
• New fast autofocus system
• 9fps burst shooting

I’m thinking that people who bought into Olympus’s M/43 line early and were thinking about upgrading are going to have a lot of trouble picking between these and the next PEN series.

It also comes in a handsome black finish. I really can’t say which I prefer.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t use the old OM mount, which would have been pretty cool but ultimately alienating to modern shooters. But it is looking like a solid camera. At $999 for the body only or a bit more with kit lenses, it’s right at the top of the line for M4/3 cameras, though — more than the capable GX1 I reviewed last week and many similar and very good cameras. Will the EM-5 be able to prove itself?

Only real hands-on testing will be able to show one way or the other. It’s a new sensor, a new form factor, and there’s a lot to be evaluated. It ships in April, so expect a review around then. Until that time rolls around, entertain yourself by hanging around the official Olympus page. There are some accessories and a couple new lenses worth checking out as well.

Update: there are hands-ons appearing around the web. Here’s DPReview’s thorough-as-usual take. Worth taking a stroll through the pages to see some of the size comparisons (the camera is quite small).

When we think about the distribution industry being disrupted, we tend to think about music and movies, whose physical media and vast shipment infrastructure have been rendered mostly obsolete over the last decade. To a lesser extent, we hear about print, and the effect of e-readers and web consumption on books and magazines. No one is making the change particularly gracefully, and the same can be said of the textbook business, which does millions of dollars of business every year selling incredibly expensive items to students — who likely consider them anachronisms.

Rice University, which has been pushing alternative distribution mechanisms for scholarly publications for years, has announced a new initiative, by which they hope to publish free, high-quality textbooks in core subjects like physics and biology via a non-profit publisher called OpenStax College. It’s the polar opposite of Apple’s iBooks textbooks, which, while they too help drag this dusty industry into the present, amount more to a new sales vector for the publishers than competition.

Rice and OpenStax aren’t the first people to propose open-source or free textbooks. There are collections here and there, like Flat World Knowledge and Apple’s iTunes U — but they’re decidedly short on the type of books a freshman might have to buy for their year of survey courses: Biology 1, Physics 1, Sociology 1, Psychology 1. And 11 Learning has a similar idea of collaboration producing a book, but their creation model may not be economically feasible.

And of course there are the many companies that want to remove textbooks from the equation entirely. Setting up textbook platforms on new devices like Kno and Inkling, making an environment for meta-curricular activities and non-traditional learning like Khan Academy, or virtualizing the whole education experience, something with which many universities are tinkering.

But textbooks are still big business, and their utility in the education system is difficult to argue with right now. So OpenStax splits the difference: fueled by grant money from a number of private foundations (i.e. not government grants), they’re putting together full-on textbooks, peer-reviewed, professionally laid out, and all that. These textbooks will be provided for free in file form. But supplementary materials — quizzes, videos, presentations, and the like, presumably — cost money.

It would be petty to call this a bait and switch, since the bulk of the material is being provided for free. And a savvy professor or TA can scrape quite a few supplementary materials from the web already, thanks to those post-textbook services already mentioned. Providing the meat for free and the potatoes for a price is perfectly reasonable.

What remains to be seen is the quality of the textbooks. So far OpenStax has signed up “in the low tens” of colleged and universities to use the books. Institutions probably are waiting to see how the next year or so plays out: everything is in flux and to commit to one platform over another when the true costs and benefits are still unclear would be a bad move.

OpenStax’s first textbooks, for physics and sociology, will be coming in March, with others following later in the year. A strange time to make a debut, in a way, as the school year is well underway and many intro courses won’t be offered. But it will give time for the creaking machinery of academia to notice, acknowledge, examine, and judge the OpenStax offering. It may be that they can demonstrate their agility in fixing, improving, and expanding the content on the fly, which could either impress or terrify nodding faculty members who use the same text for a decade at a time.

26 models of Trendnet webcams have been identified as vulnerable to a bug that lets anyone tap into the video stream with just an IP address. The flaw was noted a month ago and the company has been working to alert people and patch the devices. Unfortunately, the company has no way of contacting non-registered webcam owners, and so the devices may remain accessible if the users never suspect anything.

It’s a bit scary, but certainly not unprecedented. Although it’s not quite the same thing, two years ago a school was accused of spying on its students via the webcams in school-owned laptops (the district later settled). This time, it’s hackers who found their way in, and randoms on the internet who spent long hours watching the feeds.

The security flaw was posted by Console Cowboys on January 10th; the susceptible devices were easily found, as they identify themselves in such a way that their IP can simply be scraped for. The result: hundreds of feeds being watched, some mundane things like cameras watching the front door, but others were trained on, say, a young mother in some state of undress watching over her baby.

Screenshots were taken and video recorded, naturally, and while some of the people on message boards, Reddit, 4chan, and other communities may have thought it creepy and inappropriate, many more must have considered it the opportunity of a creepy lifetime. Of the hundreds of devices known to have been watched, and perhaps thousands more worldwide (Trendnet estimates the total vulnerable, not to say breached, at “most likely less than 50,000″), how many had kids playing, or someone walking out of the shower, or anything you can imagine.

And the worst part is that many of these devices will never be updated. The users can’t be alerted directly, as the webcam runs independently as a networked device on some normal webcam broadcast software. Even a “call home” automatic check for updates, if it’s enabled, would probably be dismissed by most users. “The camera is working fine, why bother? Probably just have to configure it again.”

The company that created the webcams will likely be sued, and rightly so. They are absolutely liable for software they marketed as secure and private, and which appears to have been breached by one guy, who did it on his own for kicks. A security researcher would probably conclude that the protections on the cameras were totally inadequate. After all, the breach was done after updating the camera to the most recent firmware (from 2010, as it turns out). And while they issued an update on January 30th and knew about the flaw weeks before, there was no real announcement until yesterday.

And with all this comes the question of whether in a case like this a company should be able to force-update a device. It’s the “light side” version of Amazon sucking books off your Kindle, but it’s essentially the same action.

One also begins to wonder how many cameras are being accessed by people who don’t publicize their results or share on web communities. I’ve tipped my own webcam up in what I feel is justified paranoia, and things like hard disconnects or shutters will likely become popular features once the security risks (always extant) become more well-known.

The company has put up a warning and list of affected models here. Worth checking and perhaps sharing.

[additional info from BBC and The Verge]

At CES, the AOL booth where we worked, did interviews, and ate lunch was just a few short feet from Samsung’s huge Galaxy Note booth, where they were giving out free shirts printed with your caricature, drawn, of course, on a Galaxy Note. There was a line around this thing the entire time we were there, scores of people waiting for hours for their free t-shirt.

Outside CES there were enormous banners in the most prominent and expensive ad spots on the convention center. Phone? Tablet? It’s Galaxy Note™!

And just yesterday, in a grandiose ad rather out of keeping with their well-done “next big thing” campaign, the Note was made out to be the end of all our troubles, ending the tyranny of using our fingers and letting us circle and cross out and all those things you wish you could do on your obviously-now-obsolete iPhone.

But I saw the Note at CES and formed my opinion in about five or six seconds: it’s weak. And that’s why this advertising blitz makes so much sense.

First, let me just justify my judgment. At CES, I was handed a Note at some trade event. I felt it, hefted it: weird size, not big enough to make shows and movies and games pop, not small enough to be considered compact in any way. I was handed the pen, and made a few squiggles and letters. It was, like almost all active stylus LCDs, slightly laggy, accurate up to a point, and generally unsatisfying. And I’m in favor of using a stylus. The rest of the details will be in our full review when we get one for that purpose (I won’t be writing it), but as far as I’m concerned, it’s a pointless device. But that’s not what this article is about.

The thing is all this advertising. It reminded me very much of movies recently where they don’t allow advance reviews, gag people who go to screenings, and saturate the airwaves with promotional material. In the case of the movie, it’s so people will form a resolution to see the movie before the critics start beating on it. And even then, that earlier drive to see it will often overcome bad reviews. Who among us hasn’t gone to a blockbuster regardless of reviews?

Samsung is doing the same thing with the Galaxy Note. Although of course the European version has already been reviewed, consumers at large are not aware of that and likely think it’s a different product. Samsung is carpet bombing the world with Galaxy Note advertising so that people will decide they want it before they find out that it’s not, in fact, a killer product. Sure, it might be great for a few people who were looking for this kind of thing. But like the Flyer, HTC’s stylus-enabled tablet of old, it fails to deliver on its own promise. The screen and stylus aren’t new or interesting technology, nor is the OS. And as for the size, well, Dell tried it. But again, the point is not the device itself, which I obviously don’t like, it’s the launch strategy.

Sure, other companies have big launches all the time. But this is the biggest delta that I’ve seen, I think, between the effort to promote and the real confidence in the device. I think they put all this weight behind the Note because if they didn’t, the thing would sink without a trace. This way they might sell a few. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But treating the consumer electronics world like the movie world and selling on hype alone isn’t likely going to be a winning proposition. Devices can’t succeed on spectacle, and the economics are totally different.

Samsung makes a lot of great things, but the Note is not one of those things. It’s an awkward experiment that they felt could only break even on if they promoted it so relentlessly that people would have to believe it was a big-deal device. It’s a troubling trend and marks another point on the trend of CE companies competing awkwardly on either personality or spec. Few CE companies have any personality, unfortunately, and spec-sells are at best misleading and at worst a pack of lies. Samsung has no personality, and the Galaxy Note’s specs aren’t really salable. So they’re in the awkward position of selling by sheer visibility.

There have been whispers in the past of augmented reality goggles or glasses, but generally we have been able to dismiss them as exaggerations or concepts. The technology, while it isn’t unrealistic, simply isn’t quite there yet.

Apparently that hasn’t stopped Google: a new report is appearing corroborating earlier ones that they are working on a pair of augmented reality glasses. They’d piggyback on your phone’s connection and overlay information like directions, news, and so on.

Whether you think it’s a good idea or not, this kind of thing is going to come eventually, so it’s natural that Google would want to start girding itself for the approaching augmented glasses wars of 20XX.

The 9 to 5 Google report says they look something like a pair of athletic glasses, with a forward-facing camera and flash. The augmented reality bit is actually not a transparent display over one or both eyes, but a single opaque display on the side of one eyepiece (which eyepiece, and which side, were not specified). You operate it with voice or by moving your head around to navigate or select menu options.

Yes, not exactly the future we were expecting. I guarantee these things don’t look cool, either. But like I said, the technology isn’t there yet: cameras and processors aren’t small or fast enough, batteries can’t provide enough power, displays aren’t built for them, and computer vision isn’t good enough. Some of these things Google can work on, some they can’t. But the best way to have a product ready when the tech is there is to try to build one when the tech isn’t.

The glasses are apparently nowhere near done, unsurprisingly, and Google isn’t sure how to make anything out of them. A pilot program could be in the works, or it could continue to be an underground project, metamorphosing again and again until the market is ready. As it is, these things would be weird, expensive, and not particularly useful. In a couple years, though, who knows?

Deep in the skunk works of its Research and Labs divisions, secreted around the Seattle area, Microsoft is working on totally reinventing the way people interact with their computers. Very little is out in the open or in more than a prototype form, but the work is unquestionably being done.

Last week it transpired that Microsoft is working on building Kinect into the bezels of laptops, and after that, presumably, tablets and eventually mobile phones. But it’s not just about building out the install base for Dance Central 3. It’s enabling the next generation of awareness in our electronics. The iPhone ushered in an era where our devices know when we touch them. Microsoft is working on the next one, in which our devices will simply know us.

How do you, as a person, experience the world around you? You mostly see and hear, and to a lesser extent you touch, taste, smell. Our devices, however, are largely restricted to an extremely limited sense of touch. Why shouldn’t they be more like us?

There’s a good reason, actually: computers don’t need to be like people because computers aren’t people. For years this has held true: the computer’s primary purpose for decades was to sit still and perform calculations humans couldn’t do. Interaction with a computer was strictly input, output. You didn’t interact so much as instruct, and wait for the result.

But mobile phones and touchscreens and laptops began changing the idea of a computer into something more personal, more interactive, more two-way. And technology exists to let our devices become more human. Why not let them?

Microsoft wants to. Despite their reputation among tech enthusiasts as a sort of stodgy blue-chip still coasting on the PC explosion of the late 90s and early 2000s, their R&D sections are world-class and put out actually innovative ideas and devices all the time. The trouble, briefly stated, is that implementing these ideas as products that fit into the Microsoft ecosystem isn’t easy, and even if it were, Microsoft has no talent for it.

But this work on “Natural User Interaction,” or NUI, is more promising. People have embraced the idea in gaming: the Wii led the way and the Kinect brought the future into your living room, though the future is a little laggy and the voice controls spotty. People are simply interested in new ways of interacting with their content and devices. For years the promise of a different kind of interaction has been dangling, in the form of sci-fi shows and movies usually, and people have always been intrigued by it.

So people want it — and Microsoft wants to make it — and they have the technology. Purchasing the IP behind the Kinect was an extremely smart move, maybe smarter than they know. What started out as a way to cash in on the market the Wii had created has snowballed into an entirely new form of interacting with computers, and a way for Microsoft to differentiate itself meaningfully for years to come.

It was reported to me that one of the things the new Kinect/depth/IR sensors will do is read lips. At first it sounds silly. Why? Maybe so it can better interpret your words from across the room, or in a loud environment. You won’t have to turn the music down to search and navigate the web on your TV or tablet.

And then it becomes clear that it’s just part of a larger suite of “senses” the device would have. The new devices are to have face recognition and voice recognition, so your password will be you saying your password in your own voice, not someone else, and not a print-out of you. They’ll be able to pick you out of a crowd, say a small party, and will be able to tell when you’re giving it a command — because you make eye contact and move your lips. Again, it sounds perfectly ridiculous until it starts sounding perfectly natural.

Another feature described was a sort of 3D desktop on which you could actually grab files and place them here and there. This has been tried before, of course, and Windows 8 is looking decided two-dimensional, so it’s probably more of a research project than anything. But it’s still interesting. Think of the basic gestures you might be able to make. One was described as pulling out a drawer. In the surprisingly resilient desktop metaphor of files and folders, what could be more natural? Or perhaps raising your hand palm up to show the task bar or dock? Trace your finger in a counter-clockwise circle to undo, clockwise to redo?

User experience reflects both the needs of the user and the capabilities of the device. For a few years now we’ve been satisfied with running our fingers along a slab of glass, producing an electrical signal interpreted as a point or blob — mainly because capacitive screens got good and cheap, and nobody wants to plug a mouse into their phone. But there are many other ways of interacting with our new mobile objects and information. Soon the glass touchscreen will seem as quaint as the command-line interface.

And yet, some are no doubt thinking, we still have some command-line interfaces in use. Sure. And mice and keyboards are still better for productivity, and a pen and paper is better for sketching out ideas, and headphones are better for listening to music in public. There are countless use cases and potential applications of technology, but it’s good to recognize when one should give way or simply isn’t applicable.

Microsoft is working hard at this, and you’d better believe that Apple is too, though they aren’t nearly as open about their research. And for once, they seem to actually be missing a piece of the technology pie: Microsoft has a head start on them in the world of NUI, having purchased and developed depth and personal sensors for at least two years now. Apple can always throw money at the problem, but it’s pretty clear that Microsoft has perceived this rare advantage and will be using it as a wedge wherever possible.

This shouldn’t be taken as an indication that Windows 8 is going to be anything other than advertised, but I think it will be a test bed for some major changes coming down the line. Microsoft wants to change the way people interact with computers because it sees, hopefully not too late, that the old way, the PC way, treating a computer like a box that computes things, is on its way out in a hurry. So if computers are going to be a part of the real world, they need to be able to live in that world. Eyes, ears, and who knows what else. It’s only creepy until you can’t live without it.

[images: Matthew Fisher/Stanford, Wolfgang Herfuntner]

In interesting but ultimately not very shocking news, Google has signed on as a major sponsor of the Conservative Political Action Conference, which is more or less what it sounds like. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just a little odd seeing Google, which is becoming increasingly political, listed next to such organizations as the Koch Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the NRA.

But this isn’t the moment Google comes out as a closet Republican. It’s actually quite in keeping with Google’s position of aggressive neutrality.

Google says that it’s there because it’s a great place to promote their election-tracking site, push Google+ as a platform for sharing and collaborating, and because the conference is fairly young and tech-savvy. Hard to accuse them of pandering, or of partisan pandering anyway.

And that’s sort of the point. Google will no doubt be sponsoring similar events on the left side of the political spectrum as well (they say as much, but haven’t announced anything specific). The message is: hey, we just provide a service. No agenda here.

Not that Google is totally apolitical, but their fierce opposition to SOPA was more like a mother bear defending its cubs than a deliberate political decision. On the other hand, they did go out of their way to take an official stance against Proposition 8. By and large, though, they have avoided taking a stance on hot-button issues.

Can Google actually remain neutral? SOPA was the product of bipartisan ignorance and greed, not just left or right, but what if the next bill threatening a Google territory were to be led by one party or the other? Or what if Google refuses to support, say, a communications embargo with a terrorist-harboring country, or such like? The dance they’re doing will become increasingly difficult if they insist on putting their neutrality on a pedestal for much longer.

On the other hand, this may be overthinking it. Why can’t a company spend a little cash to have a ring in the political circus, and not choose sides overtly? No reason. But, as has been observed in other contexts, sometimes the only winning move is not to play.

The Occupy movement, or rallying cry, or whatever you want to call it, is by its nature decentralized. By refusing to come together under one banner other than the word “Occupy,” they’ve both diluted their message and allowed it to spread more quickly. You don’t need an Occupy license to occupy a bank’s lobby in Kansas City, but at the same time there’s a natural question of whether one occupation is related to another.

Political considerations aside, the point is that Occupy might benefit from a recognizable face. On this front, some faction of the movement has decided to do a little branding, but in keeping with the democratic, bottom-up nature of the organization (or rather disorganization), they’ve opted to run a contest and let the “official” logo be selected by popular vote. It’s a great application of web technology to an interesting problem, and will probably prove to be a memorable case study in an increasingly common phenomenon: the necessity of branding an emergent movement or pattern on the internet.

It’s something that has already been faced by, for example, Anonymous. Like Occupy, Anonymous is necessarily decentralized and in a way leaderless — but there are obviously leaders and centers, like @anonops and a few other “official” sources. But then there’s the Guy Fawkes mask and the empty suit, both certainly symbols of Anonymous by common consent, though whether they emerged naturally or were simply in the right place at the right time (and whether there’s any difference between those two) isn’t clear.

Or think about the SOPA/PIPA protests. While everyone seemed to figure out a good way to express the concept of censorship on their site or avatar, the lack of a single unifying phrase, graphic, or general “brand” (loosely speaking) was conspicuous, considering the extraordinary cross-cultural and cross-community agreement on the issue.

Which brings us to Occupy. The logos being submitted are the usual mix of free fonts, corporate-looking nonsense, and the occasional good idea. For the record, I like the one at top left, and these:

But I’m suspicious of the whole concept. The problem to me is not Occupy-specific. It’s simply that emergent phenomena don’t respond well to efforts to define them. The reason no single visual metaphor appeared for SOPA was because there was no naturally propagating icon around which people could gather. There was no burning monk, no Kent State photograph, no graphic or sketch or person that naturally expressed and associated itself with the movement. The closest thing was the censor bar or redacted text, which was sort of good enough but didn’t adequately encompass the ideas behind the opposition.

With Occupy as well, I think that efforts to create an identity for it will fail, because identity only emerges from collective action. It happens naturally or it doesn’t happen at all. I think this will be demonstrated more frequently over the next few years as activism, social change, and more everyday things as well become memetic and emergent. A logo will be picked for @occupy and for use on “official” communiques, whatever that might mean to them. But what Occupy and Anonymous and STOP SOPA and all the rest need isn’t a logo, it’s a symbol. Those aren’t quite as easy to come by.

[hat tip to GigaOm for setting me thinking]

You may remember the Peek, a device that showed up back in 2008 (so long ago, now!) offering nothing but email. That’s right, nothing but email in an age when smartphones were already becoming popular, and the iPhone was changing the way people thought about interacting with their data.

In a way, it was genius: limiting the service and the device made it easy to explain and simple to use. It does email, period. An interesting tack, and one that kept them rolling for a few years, but alas, Peek is finally going to take the big sleep.

Despite revising the hardware and switching up the pricing, the Peek couldn’t maintain relevance in the face of smartphones and tablets. There was always the question of whether it was a legitimate market at all, but I object to that objection. I think it’s a brilliant proposition, and one many people found useful. But you just can’t fight progress, and while phones and tablets got more capable, they also got easier to use.

Ironically, it might have been trying to compete that made the Peek at last irrelevant. The people who liked it didn’t think of it as a less-capable smartphone, but as a single-purpose device, like a fork or a measuring tape. That value proposition, focus, is something we’re seeing in practice in single-purpose sites like Imgur and so on. But the philosophy of the mobile phone as Swiss army knife has taken over in the hardware field, so devices like the Peek got left behind.

The Verge talked to the CEO, and he said that there are a few thousand devices lying around in warehouses, and he’d like to put them into the hands of interested hackers. The Peek 9 was a perfectly workable piece of hardware, though not particularly powerful, but perhaps it could be made into something interesting or useful by a little creative coding. Head over there for more info.

Update: It should be noted that this isn’t the end for Peek the company, only Peek the service and line of devices. Peek Inc actually just closed a big funding round to fuel its work bringing smartphone-type software to low-cost mobile devices. We’ll report more on that as the story develops.

Back in November, there was a run on PlayBooks when the price was briefly reduced to $199. For a tablet that started out with a premium price, the deal proved enticing to many buyers. And again at the beginning of January, with a slightly odd promotion pricing all models at $299. Well, they’re at it again: until the 11th, the PlayBook is priced to move: $199 for the 16GB version, $249 for 32GB, and $299 for 64GB.

Unfortunately, the device won’t be shipping with the 2.0 version of the PlayBook software that we played with at CES. They will be rolling out the update soon, though.

Now, despite the protracted beating that this poor half-baked tablet has received, I have to say that at $200, with the new OS, this is a really good deal. For the price of a Nook or Fire, you get a device with much better specs and some big-boy productivity software. If you want games and apps, it’s obviously not a good choice. But if you use a BlackBerry and are interested in time management, email, contacts, syncing, and all that lovely stuff, the PlayBook is now a fairly practical buy. For $200, that is.

I sincerely doubt this is the last time the device will be on sale, though, and there are of course plans to obsolete it later in the year, at which time it will be going for peanuts. So there’s no pressure to buy, though if you’ve got a pair of Benjamins burning a hole in your pocket, I can think of worse ways to spend them.

Short version:

A return to form for Panasonic, and a M4/3 camera that photographers won’t be suspicious of. Its weaknesses are largely the weaknesses of its class of camera, but beyond those it’s solid, comfortable, and fairly powerful. Not recommended for fidgety and manual focusers, but most shooters will be able to have a lot of fun with it.

Features:

• 16-megapixel micro four-thirds sensor
• 3″ 480×320 touchscreen
• Debuts with new 14-42mm 3.5-5.6 lens (power zoom or traditional)
• Stereo mic for HD video
• MSRP: $700 (body only) $950 (as reviewed, with 14-42mm power zoom)

Pros:

• Compact and easy to handle
• Most settings quickly accessible, some customizable
• Quick autofocus, good image quality up until ISO 6400

Cons:

• Manual focus not much fun
• Touchscreen seems slightly vestigial
• Thumb dial could be a lot meatier

Full review:

The GX1 represents Panasonic listening to its fans, who have been slightly dismayed at the continual consumerification of the M4/3 line. The original G-series set them out to be the serious, enthusiast’s M4/3 camera maker, but as the sensor and market advanced, we saw them focusing more on simplification and popularization. That trend is bucked with the GX1, the announcement of which many greeted with relief.

It’s clear from even a cursory examination that the GX1 is meant to be a “serious” camera. Its boxy but carefully designed shape, the thumb dial, the constellation of buttons. Although it will, in fact, take a picture when you press the shutter release button, it’s not the kind of camera you just hand to mom and say “take a few shots would you?”.

The design of the camera is straightforward and not very aggressive. The only real topography is found on the right side, where a fairly subtle bump on the front, highly textured, allows you to grip tightly. On the back, a thumbgrip that feels bigger than it looks (that’s a good thing) makes for easier one-handed operation, though you won’t be changing any settings while doing that.

There’s a fun little popup flash that’s elevated enough that you won’t catch the shadow of your lens in the picture. It’s not particularly powerful, but it’s there, and it’s fun to pop in and out.

I’d say my only real concern with the camera physically speaking is the thumb dial. It’s recessed just enough that rotating it is an effort. And getting to the secondary settings by pushing it in? Forget about it. I couldn’t do it reliably, and I wouldn’t want to have to rely on the push-and-turn mechanism at all. This dial could definitely stand to be bigger and have better feedback.

Touchable-ish

Its rear LCD is a touchscreen, though you wouldn’t really guess it from the look of the menus. It seemed to me that the touch capability was more of an afterthought, and while it can be handy (the little drawer of settings you can pull out from the right is nice), it’s not really useful for any kind of serious applications. For instance, you can see the image type being recorded (RAW+JPEG, for example) on the LCD, but touching it doesn’t bring up the menu for that setting. You have to go through the regular sub-menus, only some of which are touch-sensitive. And while you can, say, drag the histogram around or select a focus point, or drag through photos in playback mode, it still doesn’t really feel like it’s living up to its potential. Hopefully the GX2 will have a menu system designed around touch and d-pad from the ground up.

As for the menus and settings themselves, I found them easy and occasionally very convenient to use. In shutter priority mode, spinning the jog dial brought up a very helpful little dual ribbon showing aperture estimates for exposure length, and red zones for areas unlikely to produce a good shot. Similarly, the quick menu and d-pad buttons brought up useful settings quickly and I really felt like for the most part, I had access to almost every necessary setting within a second.

Shooting

The lens that our unit had, and one many will opt for, is a new compact 14-42mm F/3.5-5.6 with both power zoom and power focus. It’s very compact when the camera is off, but a front element protrudes about an inch when it’s powered on. The on/off process is fairly quick, so it’s no trouble to turn it off when you need the camera to be more portable, though I personally would prefer a nice pancake prime to minimize size. As a kit lens this isn’t bad at all, and it’s more compact than many of the zooms offered on other M4/3 platforms.

Autofocus is very fast and accurate; I preferred to use the “pinpoint” mode, which both speeds up focusing by reducing the points needed to poll and adds accuracy. I’m a “focus, then frame” kind of guy, and this camera worked very well with my style of shooting. Unfortunately, manual focus was… well, listless.

The actual shooting action feels and sounds good. If you’ve got your focus set, the shutter fires instantly when you push down the button, and while you have to dismiss the image preview before shooting another shot, it’s ready to fire again quite quickly — less than a second for me. Serious shooters will want to disable the image preview, or set it to one second. Starting video is just as quick via a dedicated button, great for when you’re taking shots of the kids or pet and something darling happens – no need to change modes.

Photo quality, though it is of course highly important, I don’t want to delve too deeply into. I’ll leave that to great sites like DPReview, where they can take the systematic approach warranted by a major camera like this one. But to speak anecdotally, I found that pictures were generally sharp, with very low noise up until ISO 6400. JPEGs are rendered a bit flat in the “standard” render style, and it’s definitely worthwhile to test out the other modes, which are fairly subtle. The art-style modes are a bit much, of course, and you can always do adjustments in post. Find a good JPEG style that agrees with your subject matter and do the effects later.

Here are a couple basic sample shots (be sure to open in new tab for full size). You can really see the flatness in the books and the pachinko machine. Most people would be unhappy with that, so it’s important to dig around in the settings on this thing.

And here are three pictures in relatively low light, just bright enough for handheld shots. The first is 3200, then 6400, then 12800, at a 20th, 30th, and 60th respectively to keep the aperture at just about wide open.

Not the sharpest shots, unfortunately. But they’re enough that you can really see the noise jump at 12800, and it’s certainly very present at 6400. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t feel any compunction shooting at 6400 if it was the only way to get the shot. 12800 is just too noisy, which can usually be said of any camera’s maximum ISO setting.

Video quality, from what I could tell, was comparable to other medium-size sensors, better than point and shoots of course but not as good as what you’d get on a Canon or Nikon APS-C. Perfectly all right for home videos, though I wouldn’t want to shoot a feature on it.

Conclusion

The GX1 is a powerful camera, but I sense that it still has one foot in the half-point-and-shoot territory of the GF3. This clearly wants to be a photographer’s camera; it’s not easy enough to use to be anything else. So why so many auto and art modes? Why a touchscreen and a galaxy of buttons? There’s just a hint of identity crisis here that its successor will hopefully address. But disregarding those issues, the GX1 is a powerful contender against the likes of Samsung, Sony, Olympus, and the rest, offering a sort of camera-lover’s camera without any gimmicks or weird styling. It’s practical, compact, and performs well. What more do you want?

Product page: Panasonic GX1