This article was written on July 13, 2008 by CyberNet.
Those of you who saw our post on Friday about leaving on vacation already know that CyberNotes will be a little different this week. For those that didn’t see it, here’s what you need to know. This week the daily CyberNotes articles will be a collection of our favorites from the past. Each day there will be 10 different articles that we hand-picked to include. We wrote a quick few-sentence summary about each and included a link to the article so that you can read it in its entirety.
Hopefully you’ll be able to find something that catches your eye that you may not have seen before. Our normal CyberNotes will return on Monday, July 21st.
Cooking robots aren’t exactly anything new (even if they haven’t yet been perfected), but they generally come in the form of humanoid robots or, at the very least, roboticarms in order to be more adept in the kitchen. JST’s ERATO research division has taken a decidedly different approach with these so-called Cooky robots, however, which are tiny, wheeled bots that scurry about your countertop and work as a team to make miso soup for you. As you might have guessed from the image above though, they aren’t quite entirely autonomous, and require that you both label all the necessary ingredients with special cards, and pre-program things like cooking time and temperature. They’ll take things over from there on out though and, as you can see in the video after the break, the results do at least appear to be edible.
Some AT&T customers are taking Fake Steve (who is, in reality, Newsweek’s Dan Lyons pretending to be Steve Jobs) seriously. The satirical blogger on Monday encouraged his readers to take part of Operation Chokehold — a plan to overload the AT&T network with ruthless, bandwidth-sucking activities.
On Friday, December 18, at noon Pacific time, we will attempt to overwhelm the AT&T data network and bring it to its knees. The goal is to have every iPhone user (or as many as we can) turn on a data intensive app and run that app for one solid hour. Send the message to AT&T that we are sick of their substandard network and sick of their abusive comments. The idea is we’ll create a digital flash mob. We’re calling it in Operation Chokehold. Join us and speak truth to power!
Fake Steve’s post was in response to statements made last week by AT&T executive Ralph de la Vega, who said 3 percent of smartphones were using 40 percent of the bandwidth of its network capacity. He added that the company would find ways to persuade heavy users to reduce activity and that the company could impose caps on data usage, which would put an end to our all-you-can-eat data plans.
Of course, everything on that blog should be considered a joke. However, Cult of Mac’s Leander Kahney notes that comments on Twitter, forums and Facebook suggest people are actually planning to participate in Operation Chokehold.
AT&T has provided an official response, dismissing the act an irresponsible media stunt.
“We understand that Fakesteve.net is primarily a satirical forum, but there is nothing amusing about advocating that customers attempt to deliberately degrade service on a network that provides critical communications services for more than 80 million customers,” a spokesman said in a statement. “We know that the vast majority of customers will see this action for what it is: an irresponsible and pointless scheme to draw attention to a blog.”
AT&T doubts that the protest will have much of an effect on the network, as the number of participants may be diminutive. So far the Facebook page for Operation Chokehold has about 300 members.
CNET rounds up its favorite smartphones of 2009. Check out which models made the cut. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://www.cnet.com/8301-17918_1-10416044-85.html” class=”origPostedBlog”Dialed In/a/p
CNET Car Tech collects the five oddest races around the world. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13746_7-10416043-48.html” class=”origPostedBlog”The Car Tech blog/a/p
Entelligence is a column by technology strategist and author Michael Gartenberg, a man whose desire for a delicious cup of coffee and a quality New York bagel is dwarfed only by his passion for tech. In these articles, he’ll explore where our industry is and where it’s going — on both micro and macro levels — with the unique wit and insight only he can provide.
Without a doubt, the big buzz since the weekend has been over the “Google Phone,” an HTC-built device called the Nexus One handed out to Google employees last week in what Google describes as a “mobile lab.” Confirmed to be running Android 2.1, the Nexus One has once again raised the idea of Google selling unlocked devices directly to consumers. (Google has been selling unlocked HTC Android phones for some time, but only to developers.)
It would be a strange turnabout if Mountain View made this move, directly going in the face of previous assurances that Google had no plans to compete directly with Android hardware manufacturers. What’s more, there are a lot of unanswered questions here.
Downloadable games are one of the fastest-rising trends in console and handheld gaming–here’s our list of the most notable 20 this year across all formats.
They call themselves the Worldwide Loyalty Team. Among some employees, they are known as the Apple Gestapo, a group of moles always spying in headquarters and stores, reporting directly to Jobs and Oppenheimer. Here’s how they hunt people down.
“You may want to know about their Worldwide Loyalty Team,” Tom told me recently in an email. I read what he had to say. It felt like a description of the Gestapo, without the torture and killing part.
Tom never lived in Nazi Germany, back in the time when the Geheime Staatspolize had the power to get into any house or any office, at any time of the day or night, without any warrant or reason, to seize whatever or whoever they wanted in their never ending search to find enemies of the state. A place in which you had no right to privacy whatsoever. A place in which you were guilty until proven otherwise.
No, Tom never lived in Nazi Germany, nor in East Germany, nor in the Soviet Union, nor in Communist China. He lives in the United States. For sure, he has never been scared of losing his life nor the ones he loves, like thousands of millions in those countries. But he knows how it feels to be watched, to always be considered guilty of crimes against another kind of state. He knew how it felt to have no privacy whatsoever when he was working right here, in a little Californian town called Cupertino, in a legendary place located in One Infinite Loop.
Tom knew about all that pretty well, back when he was working at Apple Inc.
Operation Lockdown
Of course, if Tom had never sent any sensitive information to media outlets, he would have never had the fear of being caught, only to get fired and sued into oblivion by Apple Legal. But the lack of any privacy whatsoever is something that he shared with all his fellow employees.
“Apple has these moles working everywhere, especially in departments where leaks are suspected. Management is not aware of them,” he told me, “once they suspect a leak, the special forces—as we call them—will walk in the office at any hour, especially in the mornings. They will contact whoever was the most senior manager in the building, and ask them to coordinate the operation.”
The operation, as Tom calls it, is not anything special. It is not one of a kind event. It’s just a normal practice, and the process is pretty simple: The manager will instruct all employees to stay at their desks, telling them what to do and what to expect at any given time. The Apple Gestapo never handles the communication. They are there, present, supervising the supervisors, making sure everything goes as planned.
All cellphones are then taken. Usually, they collect them all at the same time, which means that the process could take a long time. If you need to contact the exterior during the time your cellphone is under examination, you will have to ask for permission, and your call will be monitored.
They don’t ask for cameras because there are no cameras at Apple: Employees are not allowed to get into the campus with them. If the cellphone is an iPhone, it gets backed up onto a laptop. “In fact, at the beginning they used to say that the iPhones were really their property, since Apple gave every employee a free iPhone,” he points out. All the employees are asked to unlock and disable any locking features in their cellphones, and then the special forces will proceed to check them for recent activity.
They back up everything and go through all the other phones’ text messages and pictures. If you have porn in your phone, they will see it. If you have text messages to your spouse, lover, or Tiger Woods, they will see them, too. Just like that. No privacy, no limits.
While all this is happening, the employees are ordered to activate the screensaver on their computers, so the special forces are sure there are no chats happening between employees or with the exterior. They are told not to speak, text or call one other when the lockdown is happening: “It is like a gag order, and if the employee does not want to participate, they are basically asked to leave and never come back.”
2009 Is Like “1984”
Of course, all this is voluntary. Management recommends that you relinquish your phones. If you don’t do it they will fire you, or they will investigate why you didn’t want to give them your cellphone. Simultaneously, everyone is asked to sign NDA’s during the investigations, even though they already signed Apple NDAs to work there.
“I was at several events. When they find what they are looking for—which they usually do—the person is asked to stay until the end of the business day. Then he is asked to leave the premises quietly, escorted by security,” Tom says. While he’s there, the special forces hang around, watching. “There is a lot that goes behind doors that I don’t really know about. I do know, however, that they really interrogate people that are serious suspects, intimidating them by threatening to sue.”
There is no way to know how often this happens, however, as everything is handled very quietly. The same Worldwide Loyalty Team does many other things to keep everyone in check, from searching out the email history of every employee—which is also a normal practice in other corporations and government agencies—to seeding fake images to catch potential leaks and diffuse the hype about some product introductions.
As Tom was describing all this, my mind was getting back to all I’ve read about Steve Jobs and Apple, back when he was El Capitán of the brave group of free pirates who created the Macintosh. The Mac was a secret project too, but there was no secret police making sure there were no leaks. After a hard day of work, all the Mac team sometimes played on the beaches of California, careless and happy, confident that this new revolutionary computer would change the world, one desktop at a time. All of them shared information, there were no seeeecrets, and that’s why they came up with an “insanely great” computer, as Steve Jobs himself used to refer to it.
And while I understand that secrecy is paramount to success in today’s extremely competitive market—hello, dear marketdrones—now I look at this story on the Worldwide Loyalty Team, and it makes me realize how much Apple has changed. From a happy hippie company, to a company that does KGB-style lockdowns and Gestapo interrogations that end in suicides.
I wonder if the special forces have ever chased anyone through the Infinite Loop campus, dressed in their full regalia:
So you’ve finally purchased a gaming console and you’ve already loaded up on some of the top games. In order to get the most out of your hardware, we recommend checking out some of our top-rated must-have accessories.
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