While Egypt is amid protests, London is also facing another round of protests by students angry by their Government’s recent announcement of a rise in tuition fees. However, it appears modern technology will be taking a more active role, with a new mobile app designed to help them avoid trouble.
If you remember back in October, Oracle launched a huge lawsuit against Google, claiming that the Android OS was lifting code produced by them. While Google has disagreed with that fact, a little investigation by a blogger does reveal that Oracle was right after all.
Welcome to the Morning Briefing for Tuesday 28 December, where we highlight the tech stories from across the web and what we are watching here at TECHGEEK.com.au.
Here’s what we are watching:
A Dutch research facility has found a way to send organ status updates with a new wireless technology called a Body Area Network (BAN) so that they can be forwarded to doctors via a Wi-Fi or 3G connection. Yes, this means that your liver is getting its own IP address – not that IP addresses are scarce.
We sent some more questions before we published our interview with Nokia’s Purnima Kochikar, Vice President of Forum Nokia; but we didn’t get them answered before today. So, here is (what we deem) Part Two of the e-mail interview with her.
This week saw Nokia hold a developer day in Sydney; and before the event took place, TECHGEEK.com.au managed to get an e-mail interview with Purnima Kochikar, the Vice President of Forum Nokia – the developer community. We talked about Ovi and Nokia’s embrace of open source technology – as well as Symbian and Maemo/MeeGo.
Intel and Nokia have decided to announce during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that they will be merging their not-yet-finished, Linux-based mobile OSs into one – and they have called it the MeeGo. While we don’t know which parts of Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo will be dropped or present in MeeGo, expect this to be (according to the press release anyways) a variety of devices, “including pocketable mobile computers, netbooks, tablets, mediaphones, connected TVs and in-vehicle information systems”.
VMware will buy Zimbra from Yahoo for an undisclosed sum of cash. The open-source email suite provides email, contacts, calendar, search, document collaboration and authoring and VoIP tools for corporations and businesses, including Digg, H&R Block and Comcast.
Microsoft will release a Windows 7 tool under the open-source license GPL after it had violated the terms of the license by not making it open source after modifying the code. The tool in question, the ImageMaster USB/DVD, allows users to create a bootable USB version of the Windows 7 DVD, or a DVD backup, from the electronic version of Windows 7, which can be found at the Microsoft Store online.
Microsoft has announced that it will ship popular ASP and PHP open-source projects, among other components, for its Web Platform for developers – for free. Basically this installs your choice of the projects, .NET Framework 3.5, IIS7.0 and Extensions, IIS FastCGI, Visual Web Developer 2008, SQL Server 2008 Express, SQL Server Management Studio, ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight Tools.
The International Standardisation Organisation (ISO) has rejected appeals by four countries to reject Microsoft’s Office Open XML formats as an international standard, and since no further appeals can be made against the decision – the OOXML format can start to be re-worked to operate with Open XML, a file format used with OpenOffice.org.
Reddit has made a big announcement today, as of Thursday (or Wednesday in America) the site’s code is open source, under the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL).
The social news site, acquired by Conde Nast in 2006, will allow users work on the site themselves, than petitioning for changes. It now counts 4.5 unique visitors monthly, and though smaller than Digg and Yahoo’s Buzz, it has grown 1,000 percent since Conde Nast bought the site and merged it with its Wired Digitial operations.
However, not all will be released under CPAL. The codes that will remain locked away are related to preventing cheating, ‘gaming’ the system and fighting spam. However, the algorithm that chooses which stories be on the front page will be made to the public.
CPAL is also the same license that Facebook used when it open sourced its platform.
The BBC is set to release their iPlayer in the coming weeks, and their service will be compatible only on Windows. Now complaints by the Open Source Consortium, the BBC have now agreed to address the concerns.