Individual Eleven – The World's Cyberbrain

I should have written this weeks and weeks ago, but life spiralled into the pit of busy and I haven’t been able to escape. On launch day, the number of downloads per second when Firefox 4 jumped on the scene was astounding. At the time of writing, it has been downloaded over 189 million times. How do I know this? Head on over to glow.mozilla.org to see the stats scroll through in real-time at a rate of knots.

I was lucky enough to attend the London launch party that the Mozilla crew organised (thanks Dees “Mr Firefox” for the heads up!). It was a pretty awesome night, and I recorded some video footage of it. The first part is a thumb wars contest… with everyone in the room. The whole thing got whittled down to a handful of people; thumb wars can be quite violent.

Afterwards, everyone headed down to the pub for some drinks… with one of the guys dressed up as a Firefox. We got some jibes in the street on the way “Bah Firefox, I use Chrome!” but that will not deter us from going to get our pints. Our mascot even did a little dance for us…




I use the browser across so many different platforms, and it works pretty nicely on all of them. It was also great to see demos of HTML5 and CSS3; I can tell you now that having everything rendered in the browser itself is a massive step and it looks very very cool.




Here is said video of the thumb wars and Firefox jive ^_^

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So Apple is in the hot seat again, this time from the infamous “jailbreak” method employed to unlocked iPhones. Of course, Apple opposes this and like a reflex action, they filed a case. On the other side of the coin, third party developers Mozilla and Skype have done a tag team clothesline against Apple and made a separate filing individually. They essentially want to loosen the monopoly to allow third party applications available on the iPhone. This is reminiscent of the anti-competitive case against Microsoft when Internet Explorer was bundled with Windows, it was claimed this would give them an unfair advantage in the web browser market. I can only assume in a similar scenario Apple and co are going to the courts over this somewhere down the line.

Another potential lawsuit was winging it’s way to Facebook, since they changed their Terms and Conditions which gave them absolute right to sell or share the data held about their users on closed accounts. After much protest, they rescinded the change and re-instated the original T&C. Not to blow my own trumpet or anything, but as I said in my previous post, you need to be careful about what information you are putting online. Ages ago, I mentioned to friends about how an account held on their servers is persistent. Whether you choose to close the account or not is beside the point, the choice to eradicate the data held about you is not your decision to make… their current T&C isn’t exactly pro Data Protection Act. Of course, users being users, they just shrug and think nothing of it. This is nothing new at all, and has only come to light because of the media. Well it maybe too little too late for the millions of users out there, once the information is in the public domain it cannot be retracted. In liking to one of my sayings, you cannot unread something even if you wish it so.

You can perhaps hire a cat to bypass things like EULA acceptance. Maybe we can look to the animal kingdom for further help, such as using a hamster to do a key press sequence on an iPhone, which activates the jailbreak. However, animal rights activists may knock on your door proclaiming cruelty to furry things with paws. Another lawsuit, you just can’t avoid them these days.

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