Bigger than it seems | Bangkok Post: tech

WORLD REVIEW

In the most exciting technology news since the introduction of the T-Rex sensing alarm, Apple announced it will allow certain people to purchase an iPad on April 3 and thereafter for between $499 and $829, or roughly 17,000 to 28,000 baht in real money; unfortunately, you are not nearly privileged enough, by about 10,000 miles, or 16,000 kilometres in real distance; you meet the high standards of Apple's class consciousness if you live in North America (not counting Mexico), Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, or the British Isles. Sony and Sony Ericsson pretended they did not leak or authorise news that they will release a new portable tablet device and a smart phone able to play PlayStation games, not that they are at all worried about the near monopoly of the markets by Apple; Sony has officially announced it is opening a download service that will so totally crush iTunes; it is called Qriocity, pronounced "curiosity" isn't that precious?

New Windows users in Europe are now automatically taken to a special Europe-only page for help in installing their default browser. It’s part of a deal between Microsoft and European regulators.

Apple decided to try to make money the old-fashioned American way; it sued phone maker HTC for just under eleventeen gazillion dollars for alleged infringement of 20 iPhone patents, ranging from the look of the screen to the user, and on down to both the hardware and software design; if Apple wins this new patent war, HTC will be barred from importing and selling any guilty devices in the United States. The judge finally barred RealNetworks from selling its ReadDVD copying software on the grounds it breaks the law against cracking movie-studio encryption; Real also will have to pay back the $4.5 million that the movie studios lavished on their lawyers during the case, just to give you an idea of why young Americans want to be lawyers.

China, said Vice Minister of Industry and Information Technology Miao Wei, is pretty much sitting around twiddling its thumbs and waiting for Google to actually do something about censorship; for all of Big Search's vows and promises, the censorship continues and Google hasn't so much as asked for a meeting to discuss the problem - if there is one; Google hasn't informed China it intends to stop censoring, or pull out of China or file charges for cyberattacks or anything else, said Mr Miao; Google vice president and deputy general counsel Nicole Wong said Google was reviewing its options which, presumably, it always does.

Microsoft has set up its Bing search engine to be more prudish than governments in the Middle East; monitors at the Open Net Initiative said that even searching for words like "lesbian" or "gay" triggers a stern Microsoft message: "Your country or region requires a strict Bing SafeSearch setting, which filters out results that might return adult content"; in fact, no Mideast country censors dictionary searches, and some countries don't filter for pr0n, either.

The US Department of Homeland Security said it could not possibly protect the country against all that terrorism that's going on unless it can monitor every private computer network, anywhere; the thing is, said the world's shortest home secretary Janet Napolitano, that she has to detect and then prevent electronic attacks, and if there are any of those coming in or going out on any of those private networks, how could she know; a system called Einstein (really) currently monitors critical government networks.

Research firm Gartner predicted that PC sales this year will be 366 million units, 20 percent higher than in 2009, with dollar sales up by 12 percent; that's pretty nice of course, but 2009 sales were really horrible except in the fourth quarter.

Former Microsoft programmers sold their startup DocVerse to Google; DocVerse is specifically an add-on to allow Microsoft Office applications work online ("in the cloud" as geeks say); short-sighted analysts said it was counter-intuitive, given that Google was trying to build its own Google Apps cloud-computing service, thus missing the vital point that what Google is actually trying to do is put everyone online all the time. Microsoft announced it will step up release of its heavily touted Microsoft Office 2010 on May 12; the release is a month earlier than previously announced and will remove the Vista-identified Office 2007 from shelves later this year; there is a deal in the meantime: Buy Office 2007 now, get Office 2010 for free after its release.

A Chinese language video on YouTube called ACup went viral, with more than 300,000 views; in it, a young woman slags off her boyfriend who dumped her for her low ranking in the alphabet; it turned out to be an advertisement for pills that will give you a CCup, but then the creators Eight Partnership of Hong Kong put out a press release that claimed the video had three million views; the video allegedly doubled traffic at the website for Perfect C Breast Enhancer where, apparently, everything is bigger than it seems; for the first video, start at tinyurl.com/ygrbt69.