Facebook Reportedly Developing Tech to ‘Friend’ Kids Under 13

Facebook is developing technology to allow children under the age of 13 to access its globe-spanning social network, says a recent story in The Wall Street Journal. Photo: AlohaMamma/Flickr

Citing unnamed sources that have spoken with Facebook executives, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that the social networking giant is building mechanisms that would connect children’s accounts to their parents’, letting parents decide who their kids can “friend” and what applications they can use. Facebook executives couldn’t immediately be reached for comment on the story.

Though Facebook currently boasts about 900 million users across the planet, today it does not grant accounts to anyone under the age of 13. However, the company has no way to verify whether someone is lying about their age.

Facebook earns a huge portion of its revenue from the games that companies like Zynga build atop its platform. Expanding its user base to younger children would widen that potential market.

Not everyone likes that idea.

“What Facebook is proposing is similar to the strategies used by Big Tobacco in appealing to young people – try to hook kids early, build your brand, and you have a customer for life,” said a statement from James Steyer, the CEO of Common Sense Media, an organization known for taking a protective view of children on the internet.

Since Facebook members often enter a great deal of personal information into their profiles, the social network comes under regular fire for its use of the data in targeting advertisements and peeking into what users are up to in their daily lives.

Judging from the Journal’s report, however, the move to allow younger Facebook users is hardly a done deal. Known for its “hacker culture,” Facebook often builds tools and features that aren’t implemented.

Tags: , ,
Back to top

How Larry Ellison’s Jury Box Email Could Cost HP Billions

With Larry Ellison, it's business. But it's also personal. Photo: Oracle

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison had a 15-minute break with nothing else to do, so he typed up a few sentences that would end up costing HP billions of dollars.

Never one to shy away from from the courts, Ellison was on jury duty in March of last year, hearing a case about a woman who slipped on a patch of diesel fuel at a car dealership in Half Moon Bay, California. One afternoon, during a break in the trial, he drafted a press release announcing that Oracle would pull the plug on all software it offered for HP servers based on the Itanium chip, a big, beefy microprocessor that HP had nurtured alongside Intel for more than a decade.

The decision was a long time coming, and there were certainly good business reasons for pulling the plug. Though Itanium was once billed as a chip that would dominate the computer world, it never really took off, and by March 2011, HP was the only major server marker still selling Itanium machines. But judging from thousands of pages of court records detailing the situation, Ellison also drafted that press release out of spite, hitting back at a company that had fired one of his close friends before hiring a man he deeply despised.

The result of that spite is that HP and Oracle are now embroiled in a billion-dollar court case, and this week, the case comes to trial in the Santa Clara County courtroom of Superior Court Judge James Kleinberg. The case has it all: billions of dollars at stake, a sex scandal, powerful Silicon Valley friendships, criminal charges, dark animosity, and darker fears of retribution. In other words, it’s business. But it’s also very personal — as business always seems to be with Larry Ellison.

Continue Reading “How Larry Ellison’s Jury Box Email Could Cost HP Billions” »

Tags: , , ,
Back to top

Dear Oracle: The Java APIs Are Not a Work of Art

Judge William Alsup says an API is kinda like this. Image: twechy/Flickr

Oracle said the Java APIs were like a beautiful painting. Google said they were more like a file cabinet. And in the end, Judge William Alsup came closest to agreeing with Google, comparing an API to a library that organizes the Java programming language.

“Each package is like a bookshelf in the library,” Alsup wrote with last week’s much-anticipated ruling in the epic legal battle between Google and Oracle. “Each class is like a book on the shelf. Each method is like a how-to-do-it chapter in a book. Go to the right shelf, select the right book, and open it to the chapter that covers the work you need.”

His ultimate point was that the organization of a library is not subject to copyright. Yes, he said, the books are copyrightable, but not the way the books are organized.

In other words, Google did not infringe on Oracle’s copyright when it cloned 37 Java APIs in building its Android mobile operating system. Though Google copied the organization of the APIs, it built the code behind them on its own — or at least mostly on its own. “The Java and Android libraries are organized in the same basic way but all of the chapters in Android have been written with implementations different from Java but solving the same problems and providing the same functions.”

With his ruling, Judge Alsup effectively brought an end to the six-week trial over Google’s use of Java in Android. After suing Google in 2010, claiming both copyright and patent infringement, Oracle had sought a portion of Google’s Android revenues, but in the wake of Alsup’s ruling, it’s entitled to almost nothing — though the database giant has already said it will appeal.

“This reaffirms our longstanding understanding of the law: that these APIs were free for anyone to use as we did, taking just the declarations and doing our own independent implementations. That’s the way developers use Java. You can’t say a language is free for everyone to use and then hold back the nouns and the verbs.” – Google

If Alsup had ruled otherwise, says Bret Bocchieri, an intellectual property lawyer with the international law firm Seyfarth Shaw LLP, Oracle could have potentially reaped a “mind-staggering amount” of damages. But he didn’t.

What’s more, Alsup’s ruling allows a world of software companies and individual developers to breathe a sigh of relief. In the software world, cloning APIs is a common practice. Several cloud platforms, for instance, mimic the APIs of Amazon’s massively popular Elastic Compute Cloud. An API is an application programming interface, a way for two pieces of software to talk together, and the general assumption has always been that these interfaces are not subject to copyright. When Oracle tried to argue otherwise, it caused at least a little hand-wringing among software outfits across the industry. But on Thursday, Alsup put an end to all that.

“To accept Oracle’s claim would be to allow anyone to copyright one version of code to carry out a system of commands and thereby bar all others from writing their own different versions to carry out all or part of the same commands,” read his 41-page brief. “No holding has ever endorsed such a sweeping proposition.”

Ed Walsh, an attorney with the international law firm Wolf Greenfield, isn’t surprised by the ruling. But he also says that we shouldn’t necessarily view the ruling as a decision that frees all APIs from copyright. He believes that the judge may have ruled in favor of Google at least in part because Sun, the original maker of Java, allowed Google to clone the APIs. Oracle sued Google after acquiring Sun.

“I think some element of the influence [for the ruling] was the view that Sun allowed people to use Java,” Walsh said. “So that expanded the range of things [Oracle] could not protect by copyright.”

Catherine Lacavera, Google’s director of litigation, says much the same thing. “This reaffirms our longstanding understanding of the law: that these APIs were free for anyone to use as we did, taking just the declarations and doing our own independent implementations,” she told Wired. “That’s the way developers use Java. You can’t say a language is free for everyone to use and then hold back the nouns and the verbs.”

But Alsup goes much further, using great detail in describing what the Java APIs are and how they should be treated under the law. His library metaphor is an apt one. But he doesn’t stop at metaphors. He seems to truly understand APIs. He realizes there’s a difference between copying an interface and copying the code behind an interface.

Continue Reading “Dear Oracle: The Java APIs Are Not a Work of Art” »

Tags: , , ,
Back to top

Teen Solves Quantum Entanglement Problem for Fun

World’s Most Wired

Teenager

Ari Dyckovsky

Ari Dyckovsky at his home in Leesburg, Virginia, 30 miles west of Washington, D.C. Photo: Brendan Hoffman/Wired

Ari Dyckovsky was 15 when a Bose-Einstein condensate hit him right between the eyes. It didn’t really hit him between the eyes. That’s just a metaphor. But metaphors are thoroughly appropriate when you’re discussing a trip from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., into that alternate universe known as quantum mechanics. When he was 15, Dyckovsky sat down to watch a PBS documentary that culminated with a group of physicists creating a new form of matter called the Bose-Einstein condensate, or BEC. First predicted in the 1920s by Albert Einstein and an Indian scientist named Satyendra Bose, BEC isn’t a solid or a liquid or a gas. It’s not even a plasma. Existing only at extremely low temperatures, where it exhibits the seemingly magical properties of quantum mechanics, BEC is something different — a group of atoms that act like a single super atom, particles that behave like waves.

Sitting in his home in Leesburg, Virginia, about 30 miles west of D.C., Dyckovsky was intrigued by the counter-intuitive nature of the quantum world. But he was also struck by the idea of spending a lifetime building something the world had never seen. That Bose-Einstein condensate hit him so hard, he decided that quantum physics was the life for him too. No doubt, there are countless other teenagers who decide much the same thing. But Ari Dyckovsky took the express route.

“Yes, he’s very young, but he’s the first author on that publication and rightfully so.”

Dyckovsky is now 18, and his paper on another mind-bending aspect of the quantum world — quantum entanglement — was just published by Physical Review A, one of the world’s leading physics journals. Co-authored with Steven Olmschenk — a researcher with the Joint Quantum Institute, a collaboration of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland at College Park — the paper breaks new ground in the ongoing effort to build a quantum computer, so often called the holy grail of technology research. “Yes, he’s very young, but he’s the first author on that publication and rightfully so,” Olmschenk says. “All of the brute force calculations and things like that — Ari did most of it, if not all of it.” The paper — a theoretical analysis of how two distant and very different particles can be entangled with light — is about 90 percent brute force calculation.

Continue Reading “Teen Solves Quantum Entanglement Problem for Fun” »
Tags: , , , , , ,
Back to top

Google Blockly Lets You Hack With No Keyboard

Google Blockly lets you build applications like the one on the left using graphical objects like those on the right.

Google has released a completely visual programming language that lets you build software without typing a single character.

Now available on Google Code — the company’s site for hosting open source software — the new language is called Google Blockly, and it’s reminiscent of Scratch, a platform developed at MIT that seeks to turn even young children into programmers.

Like Scratch, Blockly lets you build applications by piecing together small graphical objects in much the same way you’d piece together Legos. Each visual object is also a code object — a variable or a counter or an “if-then” statement or the like — and as you piece them to together, you create simple functions. And as you piece the functions together, you create entire applications — say, a game where you guide a tiny figurine through a maze.

“Users can drag blocks together to build an application,” reads the description on Google’s site. “No typing required.”

The project is part of a much larger effort to bring programming skills to, well, everyone. In the summer of 2010, Google announced a similar platform known as App Inventor, and this year, an outfit called Codecademy has made headlines as it seeks educate a whole new world of programmers over the web. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is among those using the service — or at least that’s what he says.

“Programming has followed a steady progression of becoming more and more accessible,” says Neil Fraser, one of the Googlers behind Blocky. “From Assembly, to Fortran, to C++, to Python, to Blockly, each generation gets to use an even higher-level interface. Eventually one will be able to instruct computers with completely natural language. At which point everyone will be able to tell a computer what to do.”

Fraser says that Blocky is designed to replace the “blocks editor” previously used by App Inventor and that unlike Scratch, it’s intended for more than just children. “Blockly is designed to be embedable into any program or website which wants to enable novice programmers to write scripts,” he says. “One of the goals for Blockly is to generate readable code — whether it be JavaScript, Dart, Python, or some other language — which the user can continue working with once they out-grow the blocks editor. We want users to be able to take their data and leave, whenever they want.”

App Inventor was the brainchild of the MIT computer science and engineering professor Hal Abelson, who was on sabbatical at Google at the time. The platform was actually an outgrowth of Scratch, which Abelson had worked on at MIT. It was billed as a tool that would allow even the greenest of techies to build applications for the company’s Android mobile operating system, but its life at Google was short. When Abelson returned to MIT the following summer, he essentially took the platform with him.

At the University of California at Berkeley, researchers are offering their own port of Scratch, known as Snap.

With the Google name behind it, Blocky has already sparked at least a temporary flurry of interest. At Hacker News — the online hangout for Silicon Valley developers — a post about the platform has received over 100 comments over the past day, and some include programs built with the platform.

From Google’s site, you can translate Blockly applications into existing languages, including Javascript; Dart, Google new take on Javascript, and Python. And there’s a “Hebrew and Arabic” programming mode where you piece together the objects from right to left, rather than left to right.

So, Google Blocky is a little like a Pixar movie. It’s for kids. But it’s also for adults. And it had a nice sense of humor.

Update: This story had been updated with comment from Google’s Neil Fraser.

Tags: , , , , ,
Back to top
« OLDER POSTS