Apple has revised their App Store terms, now these apps cannot contain any links, like to send users to a web page to then make a purchase outside the i-app. All sales from within the i-app mean 30% to Apple.

Companies like Kobo and the Wall Street Journal have refused to accept the new terms, they now no longer sell content via their i-app. Also, Google has removed their book selling app, they have now put it back in the app-store but without the "buy" function, same for Amazon.

Apple's marketing techniques are just like those of crack dealers... .. . Now that so many people/companies have become captive of the i-App-store it's time to see how much they can squeeze out of it.

Today's paper (The Sun of course) was very interesting, they changed it when they finally could but you can still see it here. Good guess, Lulzsec has not really retired it seems and has pulled a nice one today.

This was probably timed with the Murdoch's having to face a parliamentary committee.

Today Avaaz among others where there to greet him and express concerns. I went down to Westminster Abbey to join these fine people.

Last night I received a "google+ link", something about a conversation etc etc.. I was assuming that even though I don't have a google account I could probably read and maybe even participate in the conversation. Not. I was obnoxiously invited to create a gaccount.

This morning I followed a friend's link to an article on google+, it says that google+ will force facebook to be more open to other platforms. Of course the previous experience showed me that I will absolutely need a gaccount before touching anything.

First reaction to the article is, IF and really IF google does anything to "open" other online social networks then we must note that they are very far from being the first to help. Just the fact that it is not by default designed from ground up on that basis is already a problem. Actually, I don't see any mention of their platform even remotely wanting to be capable of interacting with other servers (Alert: could be wrong).

For me the projects that will have had anything to do with opening anything up are:

• GNUSocial and StatusNet
• Friendika (used to be Mistpark)
• CrabGrass
• Diaspora

Recently Microsoft bought Skype and then Skype started to break down and have many little issues here and there. Of course the expected result has been confirmed in the FSF's latest mail.

Read more about these Skype replacement projects at the FSF website.

Black & Berg, a security company, has exposed the truth behind TeaMp0isoN and Lulzsec.. . it's all made up. .. ... . Or is it ? ... . ..... . Or, which part is actually made up ?

They seem to have two domain names/websites, blackandberg.com and blackbergsecurity.us but they are currently down (they redirect to google.com). you can see what their site used to look like via google.cache.

After reading a bit of their "Genuine" twitter account and some of Jo Black's twitter (and replies, those are the best), it' seems like this is a Ligattalike company. Their website is owned and they are tweeting about how they want to declare war on Anonymous, (something about an itchy finger). One word: Losers.

A couple of days ago Lulz Security decided to retire after 50 days of fun and games. Some condemn their acts and say that even if there is a point to be made it is still illegal/bad to attack someone's computer. Others are glad to see that such institutions that many trust are getting exposed for not securing information people trust them with.. . And there is anything in between.

In all this there are some that actually go out of their way to illegally attack what they claim to be, LulZ Security's computers, and expose them to the authorities and anyone who has Internet. You can read their pastebin log here.

I read through this and so far, it looks like these guys are mainly upset because they consider themselves to be the real "hackers" and they should be getting all the glory points. I sense bitterness as they call LulzSec "kiddies" all the time etc etc, yet the A-Team seems to still have difficulties with spelling...

Anyway, they're probably all kids and there's nothing wrong with being a kid IMHO, it happens to most people at some point.

Speaking of kids, another group called TeaMp0isoN_ is also angry with Lulz Security, looks like some rivalry issue as they have just exposed Tony Blair's private info obtained from his webmail that is running outdated software.

So just when you thought that your summer newstainement (for geeks) was over... . .

Update: It seems that TeaMp0isoN_ and Sabu have been sending each other many friendly tweets. TeaMp0isoN_ kept asking Sabu to delete his/her account, that actually made me LOL. The conversation has halted so far when TeaMp0isoN_ said: im not going to tweet until iv hacked AnonOPs Source tweet

I am guessing that it is Google that introduced the idea of changing their site's presentation according to various events (I can be wrong of course). Today, Father's Day (if it weren't for search engines I wouldn't know this kind of thing) is no exception and I just noticed something funny.

It seems like DuckDuckGo and Google have the same idea of a modern day father, it is someone who wears a tie, preferably brown/yellow. They are both retro 60'sish as well. Mad Men, is that you ?

Meanwhile, at Bing, things are very different. For Microsoft's search engine the paternal image is represented by...... ... a penguin !

Lulz is everywhere and suddenly. They appear to have attacked (by cyber means) half of the Internets, so far only parts of the bad half have been hit. Some say this is a fork of Anonymous, the group that isn't really a group. Others even suspect they could be an undercover group of government agents looking to attract 1337 h4x0r5 in to their net.

This article talks about the subject, paranoia, informers, denunciation, etc... note the DarkMarket incident. From a suspicious point of view, this all looks very suspicious.

From what I originally understood, this group formed partly because of the absurd idea from the U.S. government that cybercrimes should be considerable as acts of war. Maybe some people don't believe there is a difference between actual war crimes and a good old DDoS ?

So what should we make of a cyber attack where British intelligence officers attack Al Qaida's website. They replaced a recipe for a bomb with a recipe for cupcakes, the style is very Lulz by the way. Does this mean that the U.S.A. gov considers that the U.K. just declared war on Al-Quaida ? Does this legitimise any eventual response ?

This may sound a bit hippie but, can't we just DDoS each other and own each other's blogs without going all atomic bomb or navy seal ? That would be nice.

Not even one month after Microsoft killed bought Skype bugs and such have started to pour all over their status site. People can't log in, problems with software that wont install/uninstall properly, can't call numbers in certain countries (depending on the weather), issues when trying to reset a password, etc etc...

You can check Skype's status on the site heartbeat.skype.com. I checked for each month over the last year, most of the issues they have had are related to payments and such, especially around December for some reason an issue with MasterCard... strange..

The past 2 months are really bad..

• June 2011
• May 2011

According to the Huffingtonpost on June 1 2011, the IMF was expecting some heat: The International Monetary Fund is ready to be hacked. Source Huffington Post(repost?)

I just find that sentence extremely hilarious, maybe it's just me.. :]

Anyway there was so much ph34r that cables were unplugged: The concern about the attack was so significant that the World Bank, an international agency focused on economic development, whose headquarters is across the street from the I.M.F. in downtown Washington, cut the computer link that allows the two institutions to share information. Source: New York Times

From what I understand the attack took place (or started) a few months ago, way before the above cited prediction.. .

You can follow up on #IMF@twitter.

Spain has arrested 3 guys who they believe were part of the PlayStation network outage. Hackers aren't supposed to be in prison, they should be in front of a computer playing with code and publishing papers and stuff. Participating in making the collective brain smarter... . Of course most humans seem to confound "hacker" with some other negative concept. Let's not forget this all started when 2 hackers got arrested for publishing knowledge about the consoles they purchased.

Anyway, utopian ideas aside, PlayStation seems to really be doing it wrong. Sony's comeback plan consists of trying to get the millions they "lost" back by sending whoever they can find and blame to prison etc etc. Worst part is many of these "kids" are probably Sony clients... .. .

This means, bad publicity, not to mention a kick in the nest. On the upside, people living in the northern hemisphere might have a good reason to spend summer outdoors.. .

So, Mr and/or Mrs Sony, if you read this, at the least, just let it go, at best, encourage hackers to tweak/modify the console and publish whatever they find. If it were like that I might even buy one (and you would have one more Blu-ray drive infiltrated into a home).

And a few links (because these change all the time...

• Anon_central@twitter
• Spain arrests 3 hackers...
• dear-government-of-spain
• V for Spain
• #OpPolicia@twitter