Storm’s favourite web stories from the week…
Liam:
“This week I’ve been induced into a Video Game coma with the launch of Gears of War 3 and OnLive, and the EuroGamer expo yesterday in London.
It’s not all play though – The OnLive service (http://www.onlive.co.uk) is a technical masterpiece.We’re huge fans of the technical challenges faced on the Internet, and that spans more than just our websites and apps. Streaming High Definition video is always a challenge, but pushing back control button data in as near realtime as possible to allow responsive gameplay – and have it actually work – is a game changer for Video Games. I don’t see it replacing your consoles for a while, but for younger kids, the price and cost of entry (basically free, but you can buy a standalone OnLive console if you don’t want to use your PC) make OnLive’s outlook very positive.”
Adam:
“Facebook Music to be Last.fm killer… Facebook is announcing a new deep integration with Spotify which will ‘revolutionize’ the way we listen to music. Songs users listen to will be scrobbled to Facebook who will then use that data to populate your new Timeline (link somewhere) and produce recommendations from your social graph.
This all sounds very similar to Last.fm – which scrobbles tracks and then produces recommendations based on friends – so not terribly revolutionary. I don’t actually see the new UI for this yet so it’ll be interesting to see how Facebook have implemented this, but given the large user base I’m pretty excited to see the recommendations it produces. I’m also really pleased for Spotify who should get a shed-load more paying customers on the back of this.”
Paul:
“It’s been a bad week for online security in general and SSL specifically.
Dignotar, the disgraced Certificate Authority thoroughly hacked some months ago and was the source of fraudulent certificates thought to have been used to snoop on Iranian dissidents has been closed down. The whole mess has graphically demonstrated the fundamental flaw in the SSL certificate system: that it’s based on us trusting CAs not only to be honest, but also to be competent. Apple also got a lot of flack for taking a very long time to remove Dignotar’s certificate from OS X, and a bug prevented users from doing it themselves.
Moxie Marlinspike has a good writeup on the fundamental problems with our current model of trust on the internet, and why a DNSSEC based alternative being proposed won’t work
In other news, researchers Duong and Juliano Rizzo gave details of a vulnerability at the heart of the TLS 1.0 protocol. While TLS 1.1 and 1.2 are not susceptible, upgrading browsers, applications, and servers is proving to be rather more complex than expected.”
“This week I’ve almost solely been working on branding projects- it’s certainly my favourite discipline as a designer and the thrill of exploring and experimenting with a logo until it finally clicks is so enjoyable I often leave work with a sense of confused guilt about having had so much fun during a work day.
All this branding at Storm conveniently coincides with the ‘Brand New Conference’ which took place on the 16th- a conference held by Brand New, a popular blog chronicling corporate and brand identity work amongst high profile companies and corporations. Brand New have just released videos from the conference, the previews of which I have been enjoying this morning. It is a unique insight into the practises of the most prolific branding agencies today and at $5 each they’re very reasonable. Now where’s the Storm credit card…?”
Dave:
The internet is more important than food, according to a worldwide survey carried our by Cisco this week. I’m currently in two minds as to whether this is a sad reflection on humanity as a whole, or simply a nod towards the social revolution of the past decade.
The points made by the survey are compelling: Facebook is where people ‘start’ dating, more of the worlds business in conducted online than ever before and even physical activities are today augmented by the ‘internet in my pocket’ delivered by smartphones.
This was less ‘breaking news’ to me than it was a quick pinch in the arm to take 20 seconds from my day to consider how royally buggered we’d all be without internet. Scary huh!
Mike:
“I’m slightly obsessed with the trajectory that social networking is taking, what with the public opening of Google+, Facebook F8, and also a reminder email midweek from those chaps at Diaspora that they’re still going. The Diaspora email struck a chord with me – even though they’ve been an age in producing anything solid, they talk about the authenticity of connections made via good social tools. At the opposite end of the spectrum for me is the Facebook direction – and no-one summed it up more coherently than this post from Slate entitled Not Sharing Is Caring. To me, this all goes back to the classic Kevin Kelly post – we need better curation, not more sharing.”
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The Failing To Do A Post For The Storm Blog Cake StickCarrot Publicly Name And Shame Fine (TM) goes to….Felix…who not only failed to write a news piece but also failed to turn up at all this morning…
He With The Hair gets to buy cake next week :-)
