Former chief of Windows, Steven Sinofsky, departed Microsoft earlier this week in a shock announcement following the release of Windows 8 and Surface RT. While sources have claimed his departure was related to a clash of personalities, Sinofsky has started to share some insight into his role at Microsoft.
“No one ever approached me to manage them as part of Windows 7 or 8.”
In a blog post by Hal Berenson, a former Microsoft distinguished engineer, Sinofsky has replied in the comments section to dispute some facts around rumored internal battles. Berenson claimed in his post that Sinofsky had lost recent attemps to control Windows Phone and Microsoft’s developer division. “I never initiated any discussions to bring together the…
By now you probably heard of Dr. Steve Mann and his altercation in a Parisian McDonald’s. He alleges that several McDonald’s staffers forcibly tried to remove the augmented reality eyepiece that’s essentially permanently installed into his skull. Well, McDonald’s just released a statement denying Dr. Mann’s claims. While McDonald’s acknowledges staff inquired about the device, the company insists “their interaction with Dr. Mann was polite and did not involve a physical altercation.”
McDonald’s statement via KurzweilAl,
“We share the concern regarding Dr. Mann’s account of his July 1 visit to a McDonald’s in Paris. McDonald’s France was made aware of Dr. Mann’s complaints on July 16, and immediately launched a thorough investigation. The McDonald’s France team has contacted Dr. Mann and is awaiting further information from him.
In addition, several staff members involved have been interviewed individually, and all independently and consistently expressed that their interaction with Dr. Mann was polite and did not involve a physical altercation. Our crew members and restaurant security staff have informed us that they did not damage any of Mr. Mann’s personal possessions.
While we continue to learn more about the situation, we are hearing from customers who have questions about what happened. We urge everyone not to speculate or jump to conclusions before all the facts are known. Our goal is to provide a welcoming environment and stellar service to McDonald’s customers around the world.”
- McDonald’s
At this point it’s rather hard to say which party is in the wrong here. There isn’t any video of the incident. That said, Dr. Mann’s EyeTap head-mounted display happened to catch and store several telling images of staffers getting up close and personal.
This isn’t the first time a McDonald’s defended wrongdoing in a Parisian location. Last August a McD’s staffer allegedly assaulted an American traveler for taking a picture of the menu board and, incidentally, the employee as well. At the time McDonald’s denied the physical confrontation and later told CBS it was “unfortunate misunderstanding” made worse because of a language barrier.
This incident does raise concerns about the future of wearable displays, though. The rights of others is equally important as the rights of the wearer. Google Glass and its eventual clones will make video recording trivial and almost invisible. Some people simply do not want to be part of a random life blog.
Apple cannot seek an injunction against Motorola Mobility in its smartphone patents lawsuit. Microsoft has no plans to build its own smartphones. And more. Like The Byte on Facebook: on.fb.me Video Rating: 0 / 5
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The last time the Honeywell-Nest legal scuffle appeared on our radar, upstart Nest had just lawyered up (with Apple’s former Chief Patent Counsel no less) and offered up their counterclaims to the original patent infringement suit Honeywell filed this past February.
With a new filing today though, it seems as though the legal battle between the David and the Goliath of thoughtful thermostats is heating up. According to a Honeywell representative, the conglomerate has just recently submitted their official reply to Nest’s counterclaims, and it’s pretty much what you’d expect: they’re denying all of Nest’s accusations.
Let’s back up a bit here. Nest co-founder and CEO Tony Fadell pointedly referred to Honeywell as being “worse than a patent troll” when the Palo Alto startup officially responded to the industrial giant’s lawsuit. In that response, Nest alleges that Honeywell doesn’t have the legal standing to sue them because the patents they were said to have infringed weren’t valid for a number of reasons.
Not so, says Honeywell. Apparently, the company instead believes that “Nest Labs’ counterclaims are self-serving characterizations based on that company’s unfounded opinions and speculations, which are irrelevant to Honeywell’s valid claims of patent infringement.” It’s a sentiment that pops up repeatedly in the conglomerate’s nearly 20 page response, in which they repeatedly acknowledge and then deny each of Nest’s allegations.
Even though Nest has shown that they aren’t going to be bullied out of their business with their last legal maneuver, this turn of events was perhaps inevitable. Honeywell clearly thinks that Nest owes them something, Nest made it clear from the beginning that they wouldn’t be pushed around, and it’s unlikely that any amount of back-and-forth on paper would’ve hashed things out — now all that’s left is to wait until the U.S. District Court of Minnesota lays out the rest of the court schedule come June.
Microsoft's Live.com location map
Microsoft has denied claims that it collects phone location data without permission.
The software giant is the subject of a lawsuit filed last week which claims that Microsoft’s camera software in Windows Phone 7 users location data without explicit authorisation from end users. The lawsuit was filed in a Seattle federal court last week, backed by analysis from a well known security researchers. Windows Phone 7 allegedly sends user location info to Microsoft’s inference.location.live.net even if a user says “no” when prompted by the mobile operating system.
Microsoft denies the claims and insists the company is investigating the accusations. “Microsoft is investigating the claims raised in the complaint,” explained a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement issued on Monday. “We take consumer privacy issues very seriously. Our objective was — and remains — to provide consumers with control over whether and how data used to determine the location of their devices are used, and we designed the Windows Phone operating system with this in mind.”
The Microsoft spokesperson also explained that the software maker does not store unique identifiers with any data transmitted to their location services database. “The data captured and stored on our location database cannot be correlated to a specific device or user,” said a Microsoft spokesperson. “Any transmission of location data by the Windows Phone camera would not enable Microsoft to identify an individual or ‘track’ his or her movements.”
Microsoft has previously tweaked its location services in response to privacy fears. Microsoft implemented a change on July 30 to its geographic location positioning service. The change added improved filtering to validate requests so that the service would no longer return an inferred position when a single Media Access Control address is submitted. Users could previously retrace where a computer has been using its MAC address to query Microsoft’s location database.
Microsoft denies Windows Phone location tracking accusations originally appeared at WinRumors.com.
Leave it to the Senate to crush the military’s fragile dreams. All the Navy ever really wanted was a giant ship-based laser that could be used to shoot down missiles. Despite some record breaking stats, however, the latest defense authorization bill handed down from the Senate Armed Services Committee throws a giant congressional wet blanket on the free-electron laser. The project, it seems, has simply proven too expensive — among other things, the laser’s researchers haven’t found the ideal method for powering the weapon from a ship. According to the current timeline, the project was not likely to have been completed before 2020, and as such the Navy’s request for further funding was, somewhat ironically, ultimately shot down.
Senate denies Navy’s missile-destroying laser funding, puts the kibosh on annoying Dr. Evil impressions originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 19 Jun 2011 13:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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On Monday, Google expressed its belief that its email users in China were experiencing “a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail.” Now, as is par for this thorny course, the Chinese state has come out with a terse rebuttal, saying simply that “this is an unacceptable accusation.” The retort was, says the BBC, part of a regular news conference on Tuesday and it doesn’t appear that any more time was spent on the subject. Which is odd since most people would tend to act to prevent something they see as unacceptable — but then we suppose China already has a pretty long list of folks it’d like to shut up, Google’s just gonna have to get in line and wait its turn. There’s a good citizen.
China, predictably, denies Google’s accusations of Gmail tampering originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Mar 2011 10:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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China Telecom, alleged to have hijacked all that Internet traffic back in April, has denied any wrongdoing. Meanwhile, the Chinese government has not commented on the matter. Hmm…
All of this stems from a report in the recent US-China Economic and Security review that said China Telecom had routed Internet traffic away from its intended destination. The report doesn’t say whether or not the re-routing was done intentionally or not, so who knows.
From here we can go in one of at least two different directions. We can take the popular approach and say demonize China for this or that, without any real proof of whether or not the hijacking was intentional (CYBER WAR~!), or we can say, well, how about we give China the benefit of the doubt? I simply don’t understand what China would gain by so very noticeably fiddling with Internet traffic. It just seems like a waste of time with no real upside.
If you had your hopes up for a new Facebook phone, well, you can forget it. Facebook spokesperson Jaime Schopflin has come out and denied that the social networking giant is creating a “Facebook phone.” It just isn’t happening.
“Facebook is not building a phone [...] building phones is just not what we do,” he said. Oh well, I guess Facebook addicts will just have to dream on and somehow get by.
Here’s the entire statement, made today over at Mashable:
“The story, which originated in Techcrunch, is not accurate. Facebook (Facebook) is not building a phone. Our approach has always been to make phones and apps more social. Current projects include include everything from an HTML5 version of the site to apps on major platforms to full Connect support with SDKs to deeper integrations with some manufacturers. Our view is that almost all experiences would be better if they were social, so integrating deeply into existing platforms and operating systems is a good way to enable this. For an example, check out Connect for iPhone and the integration we have with contact syncing through our iPhone app. Another example is the INQ1 phone with Facebook integration (the first so-called ‘Facebook Phone’). The people mentioned in the story are working on these projects. The bottom line is that whenever we work on a deep integration, people want to call it a “Facebook Phone” because that’s such an attractive soundbite, but building phones is just not what we do.”
[Gizmodo]
Sure, Apple and Adobe aren’t the best of friends, but their disagreement goes a little further than mild distaste. Apple moved to ban iOS apps not written through its own developer framework (SDK), which more or less killed off Adobe’s iPhone Flash developer tools. Adobe in turn issued a complaint to the FTC, a complaint that Wired requested a copy of under the Freedom of Information Act. That complaint was denied on the grounds that “disclosure of that material could reasonably be expected to interfere with the conduct of the Commission’s law enforcement activities.” That is another strong indication that the FTC is currently investigating Apple and deciding whether the company is acting properly by preventing third-party access to its iOS devices. What’s next? We likely won’t hear anything until the FTC makes up its mind, and even then only if it decides Apple isn’t playing as nice as it should be.
FTC denies request for documents on Adobe complaint, confirms investigation of Apple’s SDK rules? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 05 Aug 2010 10:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Props to Engadget
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