Tits and Apps – About most of the 'sexy' iPhone apps being pulled last weekend: "What developers see is that the App Store is a shaky foundation upon which to build a business. One day you’re prospering, the next day your app is gone. There are awesome iPhone OS apps that aren’t being built because developers don’t trust Apple not to yank the carpet out from underneath them."
Infer.NET – Seen at the BCS/IET Turing Lecture by Chris Bishop. Looks interesting.
Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes? – "Used to be you could argue that Flash, whatever its merits, delivered content to the entire audience you cared about. That’s no longer true, and Adobe’s Flash penetration is shrinking with each iPhone OS device Apple sells."
Penguins, Peaks and Penny-Farthings: Nat Geo Covers 1959-2000 – "The National Geographic Society celebrates its 122nd anniversary on Jan. 27 … Though the early issues had rather drab academic looking covers, by 1959 they were consistently adorned with eye-cathing art and photos."
Verified by Visa bitchslapped by Cambridge researchers – "Secondary credit card security systems for online transactions such as Verified by Visa are all about shifting blame rather then curtailing fraud, Cambridge University security researchers argue." Or put another way: those annoying screens you get when you buy something online are not for your benefit.
Googlephone No Match for Kafkaesque Carriers – Steven Levy finds that mobile (cell) carriers are all evil… I wish this was an isolated problem but it seems to happen everywhere. Does anyone actually like their provider?
Britain to Levy a One-Time Tax on Banker Bonuses – "To a large extent the levy underpins a quite broad understanding here — even among those generally sympathetic to the industry — that bank profits this year were largely subsidized by the government due to historically low interest rates." The best discussion I've seen of today's pre-Budget speech is, bizarrely, in a US paper.
The blue and the green – "Your eyes are not cameras faithfully taking pictures of absolute truth of all that surrounds you. They have filters, and your brain has to interpret the jangled mess it gets fed." A very neat optical illusion.
Photography, opinions and other random ramblings by Stephen Darlington
