Keane Ingram - Tech News and Views

Humble Bundle have announced the latest in their series of bundled game releases. The latest one is called The Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle.

This bundle is slightly different in that it only includes one game - Frozen Synapse - but you can still pay what you want, and you can also donate to Child's Play and the EFF as with previous bundles. However, if you pay more than the average price paid (which is currently $4.54) you'll also receive the entire Humble Frozenbyte Bundle, including Trine, Shadowgrounds, Shadowgrounds: Survivor, Splot and Jack Claw.

The bundle is only available for two weeks, so anyone interested should check out the website as soon as possible.

In a move that seems related to last week's Facebook/Spotify integration, it has now become a requirement that anyone wishing to register for a new account at Spotify must have an account with Facebook. This is obviously to allow users of Spotify to share their music tastes with their friends via Facebook.

However, the move has not been welcomed by existing users of Spotify. Articles on CNET and the BBC News website reveal a lot of unhappy users, including existing premium members who whilst not affected by the registration changes are unhappy at this change in direction by Spotify. Several people have already cancelled their premium accounts, costing Spotify some of their income. Stephen Fry has also expressed his displeasure via Twitter.

In the long run I'm sure Spotify's business plan won't suffer due to the tie-in with Facebook, assuming of course that Facebook doesn't go the same way as MySpace. But Spotify has always been seen as a 'cool' app by savvy tech users, who will now be attracted to Spotify's rivals such as Grooveshark.

The critically acclaimed puzzle/platform game Portal is currently available for free from Steam. It goes without saying that anyone who doesn't already have a copy of this should get it now! The offer expires tomorrow (20th September 2011).

The offer is part of an initiative from Valve called Learn With Portals, in which Portal and it's sequel Portal 2 are used in classrooms to help teach physics and critical-thinking skills. Here is a video showing how this can be achieved.

I recently came across an article on CNET by Geoffrey Morrison detailing the science behind HDMI cables. It has always annoyed me how companies get away with selling so-called 'high quality' cables for £20+ when a £2 cable from eBay would, in most circumstances, offer you exactly the same picture. The only time you might see a difference is if your cables are long, i.e. more than a few metres in length, and even then the cheap cables will still do the trick.

I've been using cheap cables ever since I had an HDTV (back in 2006) and have never had any problems with video or audio. I just wish there was a way that companies could be prevented from taking even more money from consumers when it isn't necessary.

Samsung have been forced to remove all traces of their new tablet, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7, from the floor of the current IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin.This follows Apple's success in German courts at having an injunction placed on the new tablet due to patent infringements.

This is fairly detrimental to Samsung's prospects in both Germany and worldwide (it's not currently known when or if the new tablets will go on sale in the US). The patent wars are beginning to get tedious in the extreme, and it's to be hoped that something is worked out soon otherwise there'll never be any new technology released.

HP have officially announced that there will be one more production run of their recently cancelled TouchPad. Sales of the TouchPad went through the roof once the prices were slashed to $99/£89, and every retailer sold out within minutes. Sadly, for non-US users the last stock will be restricted only to the US, so for anyone else still interested the only available route now is eBay and other second hand sites. Somehow the prices on eBay are £150 and higher, which seems ridiculous for something that was only available cheaply because it will no longer be available.

What all of this shows is that there is a massive market for tablet devices, and that if a reputable manufacturer can make them a usable product available for under £100 then it will have a surefire winner on its hands.

I received an email from Nokia recently, with a subject of 'Important information from the Nokia Developer website team'. It turns out that there has been a security breach of the forum, resulting in details being taken.

Thankfully, it appears as though I didn't include much information on my account (I can't even remember registering there to be honest!) so it may mean an increase in spam for me, but little else. Below is the full text of the email.

You may have seen reports or received an email from us regarding a recent security breach on our developer.nokia.com/community discussion forum.

During our ongoing investigation of the incident we have discovered that a database table containing developer forum members' email addresses has been accessed, by exploiting a vulnerability in the bulletin board software that allowed an SQL Injection attack. Initially we believed that only a small number of these forum member records had been accessed, but further investigation has identified that the number is significantly larger.

The database table records includes members’ email addresses and, for fewer than 7% who chose to include them in their public profile, either birth dates, homepage URL or usernames for AIM, ICQ, MSN, Skype or Yahoo. However, they do not contain sensitive information such as passwords or credit card details and so we do not believe the security of forum members’ accounts is at risk. Other Nokia accounts are not affected.

We are not aware of any misuse of the accessed data, but we have identified that your email address was in one of the records accessed, though it contained none of the optional information, so we believe that the only potential impact to you may be unsolicited email. Nokia apologizes for this incident.

Though the initial vulnerability was addressed immediately, we have now taken the developer community website offline as a precautionary measure, while we conduct further investigations and security assessments. We hope to get the site back online as soon as possible and will post developments there in the meantime.

If you have any questions on this, please contact Nokia.developer-discussions-support@nokia.com.

The Nokia Developer website team.

Since it was announced that HP will discontinue production of their WebOS phones and tablets, retailers in the United States have been selling them off at vastly lower prices - the basic 16GB TouchPad model selling for $99. The TouchPad is now seemingly out of stock in every US retailer, and it's rumoured that a UK price drop will be happening in the very near future. A Dixons employee tweeted that the 16GB model will be selling for £89 and the 32GB model for £115. These price cuts will also be reflected by the groups other retailers (PC World and Currys) tomorrow.

At £89 I am very tempted - even just as a basic tablet it will be useful for web surfing, reading (there's a Kindle app) etc., and there's the promise of Ubuntu and Android ports for the device. Of course, wanting one and getting one are different things - much like wanting a Glastonbury ticket!

Today sees the scheduled release of the latest stable version of Mozilla Firefox, which is version 6.0.  The update should be available through Firefox's auto-update at some point today, although if you're impatient you can get it from Mozilla's FTP server.

The release notes show the following major changes:

• The address bar now highlights the domain of the website you're visiting
• Streamlined the look of the site identity block
• Added support for the latest draft version of WebSockets with a prefixed API
• Added support for EventSource / server-sent events
• Added support for window.matchMedia
• Added Scratchpad, an interactive JavaScript prototyping environment
• Added a new Web Developer menu item and moved development-related items into it
• Improved usability of the Web Console
• Improved the discoverability of Firefox Sync
• Reduced browser startup time when using Panorama

As a web developer, the main point of interest for me is Scratchpad, which will allow easier development and testing of Javascript from within the browser. I look forward to trying it out.

A video posted on YouTube by the hacking collective Anonymous details 'Operation Facebook', which is due to start on 5th November.

It seems that privacy issues are behind Anonymous' desire to 'kill' Facebook. I'm not entirely sure that this is the best way of achieving their objectives though, as it gives Facebook ample warning to try and prevent whatever may happen on 5th November. There's no real way of knowing if this is actually Anonymous, maybe it's a hoax?