Tech Brief
On Tech Brief today: The iPad app that was famous for a few hours, a web browser that strips away adverts, and the man who bought his local police website as revenge for a speeding ticket.
• It seems that 12 hours is a very long time in the iPad App world. , yesterday morning Steve Jobs praised the developers of the iPad app, Pulse News Reader, at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco.
"But, by the afternoon, that flush of entrepreneurial success had turned sour, after Apple informed the two that Pulse was being pulled from the App Store, after it received a written notice from the New York Times Company that 'The New York Times Company believes your application named 'Pulse News Reader' infringes The New York Times Company's rights.'"
Swisher highlights that even the New York Times had been discussing the success of the Pulse News Reader on its website recently. The App is no longer available, and one of the developers was fairly philosophical about its fall from grace:
"I don't blame Apple, because they have to respond when contacted by lawyers from the Times ... but it was definitely a roller coaster of a day."
• between the apparent demise of Pulse Reader, and Apple's launch of the latest version of its web browser, Safari 5, which Steve Jobs did not get around to discussing at the WWDC. The new browser has a 'Reader' mode:
"According to Apple, 'Safari Reader removes annoying ads and other visual distractions from online articles... So you get the whole story and nothing but the story.'"
After showing a screen-grab of a New York Times story using the Safari Reader, John Lettice points out:
"The NYT branding is gone, along with the author's byline, the audio accompanying the story, an interactive graphic, social links, everything really. Looks like it could be a number of violations of the NYT's terms and conditions to us, if Apple were doing it. But Apple didn't press the button..."
• Over at The Atlantic, which argues that the freewheeling 'Wild West' days of the web, and the supremacy of the web browser, may be numbered, in part thanks to the success of ventures like Apple's App store.
"The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone, where the app and the pricing plan now hold sway, signals a radical shift from openness to a degree of closed-ness that would have been remarkable even before 1995."
Michael Hirschorn reckons that traditional media companies have contributed to their own demise:
"Ironically, only the "old" entertainment and media industries, it seems, took open and free literally, striving to prove that they were fit for the digital era's freewheeling information/entertainment bazaar by making their most expensively produced products available for free on the Internet."
• Plenty of employers have blocked their staff from using social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter whilst at the office.
But ReadWriteWeb , as a firewall company has recently activated a "Read-only" mode for Facebook.
"IT managers using Palo Alto Networks firewalls are now able to switch Facebook into a "read-only" mode, thanks to an update released today. There is no relationship between Palo Alto Networks and Facebook - the changes are all within the customer's network. Previously, managers using Palo Alto Networks firewalls have had the option to block all Facebook apps (but not individual apps) as well as Facebook's e-mail and chat features. The update adds the ability to disable posting, making Facebook effectively read-only."
The article discusses a number of potential uses of the technology, suggested by the firewall firm's marketing director:
One idea he mentions, though he's quick to point out the product isn't currently being used by the military, is limiting soldiers read-only access to social media sites in the weeks before a deployment. This would keep sensitive information from being leaked, but allow soldiers to view pictures and status updates from home.
• Finally for today, a Tennessee man called Brian McCrary apparently bought his local police department's domain name, in response to having received a speeding ticket. :
"The web hosting company, Go Daddy, had warned the Police Department that the domain was about to expire some three months in advance and several times since. Once the date was reached, the company posted a message on the site warning visitors that it was about to close, and it was this that gave McCrary his idea."
She says that Mr McCrary is now using the site to provide information on the location of speed cameras and offer fellow citizens a chance to gripe about them.
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