Artist Gets Secret Service Visit Over Apple Store Webcam Spying (PC Magazine)

A Brooklyn-based artist has caught the attention of the Secret Service after installing software on Apple Store computers that takes Webcam photos every two minutes, and posting those images on the Internet.

The "@secretservice just stopped by to investigate ... and took my laptop. please assume they're reading any emails you send me," Kyle McDonald tweeted on Thursday.

McDonald took the photos and posted them on a Tumblr blog called "People Staring at Computers." He told Mashable that he got permission from Apple security guards to take photos in the store, but it's unclear if they were aware that McDonald also meant installing software and snapping Webcam shots. Given that it attracted Secret Service attention, it's safe to say that not everyone was excited by the project.

When asked on Twitter if he got permission from every person whose photo appeared on his blog, McDonald said no because "as i understand, photography in open spaces is legal unless explicitly prohibited." He will, however, remove any photos if asked, he said.

It appears McDonald was committed, however; Apple wipes its computers every night, so he had to reinstall the program every day he took photos, Mashable reports. That program focused only on photos; "keylogging public machines would make me uncomfortable," he tweeted.

McDonald said the warrant he received from the Secret Service said his actions violated 18 USC section 1030. That deals with "fraud and related activity in connection with computers," and covers, among other things, accessing a computer without authorization.

McDonald said he contacted the Electronic Frontier Foundation for help with the case, and "they've encouraged me to stay quiet for now," he tweeted.

In a video (below) describing the project, McDonald said he was "thinking about how we stare at computers" and thought, "maybe if we could see what our computer sees we would stare differently?" As a result, he took 1,000 photos over three days at computers in New York Apple Stores. The video shows McDonald at the 14th Street store for what he called a "public exhibition." As shoppers are perusing Macs, the screen flashes and takes a photo; sometimes it displays photos of other people. Most shoppers look confused and try to get their images off the screen. "Most people just hit 'escape,'" when their photos popped up, the video said.

McDonald's fascination with faces continues. He just released a face-tracking app, FaceOSC.

People Staring at Computers from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo.

Google's Offline Maps Undercuts Its Connected Vision (PC Magazine)

Somewhat ironically, one portion of Google has announced limited offline maps for its Android operating system, while another pushes netbooks that assume a persistent data connection.

So which is it, Google?

On Thursday, Google added a "download map area" option to its Labs feature within Google Maps for Android 5.7. Using the new feature, a user can select a Google Place and then download a map of the neighboring 10 miles, down to street level.

"When you're visiting an unfamiliar location, Google Maps for mobile is great for getting an idea of how close you are to your destination, where streets and landmarks are in relation to each other, or just for getting 'un-lost,'" Chikai Ohazama, director of product management, Google Maps for mobile, wrote in a blog post. "But what if you don't have a data signal, or you're abroad and don't have a data plan? We say that if you use Google Maps for mobile, you'll never need to carry a paper map again. The 'Download map area' lab in Google Maps 5.7 for Android is a step in making that statement true even when you're offline."

Google's solution is maddeningly close to a true offline map, which a user could store on a phone or tablet and then use without a data connection. But there are several drawbacks: the map expires in 30 days, and users need a data connection to see satellite view and 3D buildings, search for Places and - most importantly - get directions. It's unclear whether Google will tell users how much storage space each map requires.

Ohazama's stance toward data, however, seems to directly contradict Google's Chrome OS and Chromebook engineers, who have maintained that Web apps will become pervasive in a world of persistent connectivity. Chromebooks offer both Wi-Fi and 3G connections - which the vast majority of smartphones do as well.

As Google's mobile OS developers, however, the Android team seems to be more in touch with the real world, with users who commute, fly internationally, and occasionally dive down into tunnels and basements. Google's Chrome OS team may have to learn this lesson as well.

Dell Sets Stage to Take On Apple's iCloud (PC Magazine)

With a new release of its Stage software, Dell has quietly created a cloud-based service offering that could offer consumers a compelling reason to keep investing in Dell devices.

The new release, which began shipping last week, allows users who snap a picture with a Dell Streak or other Dell mobile device to automatically upload it to a pool of free, shared cloud storage. The new software also allows devices to remotely control and play back shared audio and video, plus other services.

For consumers, Dell's Stage release is probably more important than the new "More You" ads that began playing this week. One of the results that emerged as Dell began the market research behind the "More You" campaign is that customers, unsurprisingly, have begun to use PCs and mobile devices to store their digital memories.

"We asked them, what is so important about that computer... and whether [the respondent] was Chinese, Japanese, or Indian, ultimately it was because 'my life is on that thing,'" said Paul-Henri Ferrand, the chief marketing officer of Dell's global consumer business and SMB, and also president of Dell's Asia-Pacific/Japan business.

Stage is an attempt to take that digital content and allow users to control and manage it effortlessly, said Tim Peters, a vice president responsible for platform strategy within Dell. Within the PC, it cuts across Dell's XPS, Inspiron, and Alienware brands, and can be controlled from Dell's mobile devices. "It's a critical part of the Dell experience," Peters said.

What's new: remote cloud storage, photo uploads, and more

The Stage software, which Dell began shipping last year, appears as a set of square tiles on a user's PC, with various categories like "Books," "Photos," and "Apps". The new release makes each tile 3D, versus the two-dimensional images that appeared in the older version of Stage.

Any time a user snaps a digital photo with a Stage-enabled device, the new Stage software automatically uploads it to a free 2-Gbyte pool of storage. (Any content can be stored there, according to a Dell spokesman, including movies, pictures, and music.) Users can purchase additional capacity, including 5 Gbytes for $19.99/year, 25 Gbytes for $49.99/yr, and 100 Gbytes for $149.99/yr.

Automatic photo uploads is a feature reserved for just a few services at this point, among them Google's Google's latest Google+ . Storing music in the cloud has also been the domain of other services, most notably Apple's iCloud.

Audio and video can be remotely controlled via Stage devices, Dell executives said. Dell has also added support for podcasts; an integrated Noisey application, which showcases music from all over the world; and an enhanced Napster home page.

Dell began life as a hyper-efficient box builder, known for its "just in time" strategy of managing inventory efficiently than anything else. If buyers wanted the latest Intel microprocessor, they bought it from Dell. Years later, however, leadership in the PC space has evolved into a competition whose products are differentiated using design, services, and price as metrics. Ferrand described his business as a "brand war," where Dell is aspiring to become something like an Audi of the PC world, where the quality of its fit and finish is complemented by a faith in its superior engineering.

"With Stage, we're building to the experiences of people, rather than building to specs," Ferrand said.

CrashPlan Pro Brings Big Backup to Small Businesses (PC Magazine)

Code 42 Software, the creators of the award-winning CrashPlan backup software for home and enterprise users, has announced a cloud-based Pro backup service for small- and medium-sized businesses.

According to Code 42, CrashPlan Pro is specifically designed to address the unique backup needs of SMBs. The software works in the background, delivering automatic continuous backup. Backed-up data can be sent to the cloud or physical external drives. CrashPlan Pro also features a simplified, Web-based management dashboard that lets managers monitor all user backups, conduct real-time management, and control company-wide backup settings.

Code 42 Software offers two pricing plans based on two criteria: Unlimited storage per computer, or an unlimited number of computers for a chosen amount of storage. The former is billed at a rate of $7.49 per month; the latter has plans ranging from 50GB to 4TB, which equates to less than $5 per computer per month. A 30-day free trial is also available.

"We didn't want to simply rebrand our consumer product and call it 'business', nor did we strip down our enterprise product and rename it. Instead, we started with a blank slate and asked, 'What do businesses really need?'" said Matthew Dornquast, founder and CEO, Code 42 Software. "What every business needs is the security and reliability of an enterprise product combined with the ease of use of a consumer product. And of course they'd like to have support from people who really know backup, available via phone, email, and live chat. That's exactly what we're delivering today."

CrashPlan Pro protects all backed up data with 448-bit encryption before it leaves the computer, upping the security factor as the information is transmitted. Code 42 Software has given CrashPlan Pro cross-platform Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris (both client and server) compatibility. It also carries multiple destination support, de-duplication, and reporting features.

CrashPlan Pro is available immediately to customers in the United States and Canada. Code 42 Software will expand its offering to other countries in the fourth quarter.

Open Letter to RIM Management Calls for Massive Change (PC Magazine)

An anonymous letter posted to the Web on Thursday, allegedly penned by a senior RIM employee, took Research in Motion to task for a lack of management accountability, poor software tools, and even being too nice.

Although the letter was penned anonymously and submitted to BGR, RIM chose - anonymously - to acknowledge it, and confirmed that its management was "fully aware of and aggressively addressing both the company's challenges and its opportunities".

The author of the letter addressed "Mike and Jim" - Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, the co-chief executives of RIM - and opened with the statement, "I have lost confidence".

BGR said that it had confirmed the letter's author as a "high-level RIM employee".

"We are in the middle of major 'transition' and things have never been more chaotic," the letter's author wrote. "Almost every project is falling further and further behind schedule at a time when we absolutely must deliver great, solid products on time. We urge you to make bold decisions about our organisational structure, about our culture and most importantly our products."

The letter's author identified eight problems to address: focus on the end-user experience, recruit senior software leaders, pare projects to their essentials, prioritize developers, improve marketing, improve accountability ("Canadians are too nice") and treat the press and customers with humility and paranoia. Finally, the author wrote, it was time to stand up and energize the troops.

The author also suggested renaming the company "BlackBerry" to signify the company's focus on its new QNX superphones.

RIM's missteps have been heavily scrutinized, including the lack of email in the BlackBerry PlayBook, a botched interview with CNBC, and then product delays and poor sales. PCMag.com wireless analyst Sascha Segan went so far as to put the company on a death watch

.

All of those problems can be addressed, the letter said.

RIM's first priority, according to the letter, was identifying and focusing on the end-user experience, almost exactly the same thing Apple chief executive Steve Jobs said upon his return to the company in 2007.

"We often make product decisions based on strategic alignment, partner requests or even legal advice — the end user doesn't care," the letter says. "We simply have to admit that Apple is nailing this and it is one of the reasons they have people lining up overnight at stores around the world, and products sold out for months."

But the letter-writer also suggested that RIM hire some heavy hitters to manage its software programs, including improving its developer SDKs beyond "a rundown 1990's Ford Explorer" quality to Apple's "shiny new BMW M3". Excess programs should be cut, and RIM should respond to customers, not carriers, he wrote. Finally, the letter's author recommended demoting both co-CEOs.

"To avoid this death, perhaps it is time to seriously consider a new, fresh thinking, experienced CEO," the letter's author wrote. "There is no shame in no longer being a CEO. Mike, you could focus on innovation. Jim, you could focus on our carriers/customers? They are our lifeblood."

For its part, an anonymous blog post on RIM's BlackBerry blog confirmed that the senior management team at RIM is "fully aware of and aggressively addressing both the company's challenges and its opportunities".

"RIM recently confirmed that it is nearing the end of a major business and technology transition.," the company wrote. "Although this transition has taken longer than anticipated, there is much excitement and optimism within the company about the new products that are lined up for the coming months."

CyberLink Releases PhotoDirector Image Workflow App (PC Magazine)

The market for pro and prosumer photo workflow apps seems pretty tied up by Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom, Apple's Aperture, and ACDSee Pro. Despite that, CyberLink, the Taiwan-based maker of our Editors' Choice consumer video-editng app, PowerDirector, thinks there's still some opportunity in the space, and has today launched a new $99 photo app, PhotoDirector.

PhotoDirector has already been out in the wild in beta form, and in return for the valuable feedback users provided so that Cyberlink could improve the released product, the beta testers will get a free copy.

PC Magazine was briefed under NDA last week by CyberLink's senior vice president of global marketing, Richard Carriere, and senior marketing manager Tim Estes. "We decided we were missing a product on the photography side that's the equivalent of PowerDirector's video editing," Carriere said. "The idea was to bring Cyberlink's knowledge of how to develop good workflow, a good user interface, and powerful functionality."

Carriere also alluded to the entrenched competition and its higher price point: "Because we are not well established in the market, we are very aggressive in the pricing."

Compared with PhotoDirector's $99 price tag, Adobe's Lightroom sells for $299, though Apple recently dropped the price of Aperture to $79.99 when purchased through the Mac App Store. But of course, you'll need an expensive Mac or MacBook to run that. The CyberLink software is PC only.

And while PhotoDirector does include most of the basic tasks you find in Lightroom or Aperture, it still has quite a bit of catching up to do. PhotoDirector supports popular camera raw file formats natively, including those from Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, and more. And indeed, adjustment brushes, multiple undo history, noise reduction, smart collections, and side-by-side views did mirror capabilities found in the competition from Adobe, Apple, and ACD.

PhotoDirector, however, lacks several of the sophisticated tools found in those more veteran apps. You don't get Lightroom's lens-specific corrections, which rectify things like the exact chromatic aberration and geometric distortion introduced by specific lens models. PhotoDirector also lacks Aperture's face recognition, which, though it sounds like a consumer feature, can be of great value to a portrait or wedding photographer wanting to show a client all photos of a particular person. And tone curve manipulation, found in any of the competition, wasn't available, though histogram manipulation was.

But the CyberLink execs reassured me that the new photo workflow software would be updated in 6 to 8 months with a second version, for which existing owners would not be charged. And as with PowerDirector's online DirectorZone user exchange for effects and templates, PhotoDirector users will have access to an online section for sharing adjustment presets.

In a quick trial run with PhotoDirector with a set of DSLR raw photos, the import, quick corrections, tagging, and export options got the job done simply, effectively, and quickly. Built-in support for Flickr and Facebook uploading eased the sharing process at the end of the workflow.

For more information or to buy PhotoDirector online, head to www.cyberlink.com.

Report: Nokia CEO Will Kill MeeGo Even if N9 Succeeds (PC Magazine)

Not long after "leaking" Nokia's first Windows smartphone, codenamed "Sea Ray," CEO Stephen Elop told a Finnish newspaper that even if the new MeeGo-based N9, launched the day before, succeeds, it will be Nokia's last device on the Meego operating system.

"In Elop's words, there is no returning to MeeGo, even if the N9 turns out to be a hit," wrote the Finnish daily, the Helsingin Sanomat.

On Thursday, Elop stirred the blogosphere when he teased what he called the first Nokia Windows device, which is rumored to be launching this fall.

Unfortunately it left a sour taste in the mouths of MeeGo fans, most of whom are passionate, long-time Nokia users and developers. In February Elop, who joined Nokia from Microsoft in 2008, announced a billion-dollar agreement with Microsoft that puts the Windows Phone 7 operating system in Nokia handsets; Nokia's own Symbian and MeeGo operating systems would be relegated to "science projects."

"I have taken part in the conversations with the teleoperators and I have been part of the consumer test groups. The feedback has been extremely positive and I am sure that the Windows Phone system will be a great success", Elop says of the strategic partnership announced with microsoft in February of this year.

Elop desperately needs Nokia's recent partnership with Microsoft, which fills Nokia handsets with Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 operating system, to succeed. He faces lowered sales targets for the rest of the year, rumors of a Nokia selloff, layoffs in the thousands, and alienation by Nokia's most loyal followers.

In the same interview Elop said he was "sure" upcoming Nokia Windows phones would be a "great success."

"I understand completely that the investors want to see the results of our new strategy in their full glory. This will take some time, but once we are in a position to introduce the results of our strategy, I am sure the doubts will disperse," he said.

Will Apple Ditch Google Maps in iOS 5? (PC Magazine)

Apple could be ditching Google Maps in favor of its own navigation software in iOS 5.

MacRumors uncovered a new section in the legal disclaimers section of iOS 5 called "Map Data" that references several different third-party mapping and naviation companies such as CoreLogic, Getchee, Localeze, and TomTom, among others.

It wouldn't be much of a shock if Apple ditched Google Maps and launched its own mapping service. In recent years, Apple has snapped up a couple of mapping companies, Placebase and Poly9. Apple has also been hiring engineers with mapping and navigation experience to join the iOS team. On top of that, when Apple responded to the outpouring of media scrutiny about iPhone location tracking in April, the company revealed it was creating its own traffic database.

But Apple is still using Google Maps for now, and Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt said last month at the D9 conference that Google "just renewed [its] Map and Search agreements with Apple."

Reports of an Apple-powered mapping service have been circulating for quite some time. Last month, 9to5Google attempted to quash the rumors, claiming while "Apple is working to improve the iOS Maps application, iOS 5 will not bring an Apple developed maps service and Google Maps is still in."

MacRumors speculates that Apple is actively working on its own mapping solution, but it's possible that it's not ready for iOS 5, meaning consumers will have to wait a while to see what it would look like.

Apple showed a preview of iOS 5 earlier this month at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). It includes more than 500 new features including a notification center, over-the-air updates, a new messaging solution, and AirPlay mirroring, among other goodies. iOS 5 will be released to customers this fall.

Opera Co-Founder von Tetzchner to Leave Company (PC Magazine)

Opera co-founder Jon S. von Tetzchner is leaving Opera Software in June, the browser company said Friday.

"It has become clear that The Board, Management and I do notshare the same values and we do not have the same opinions on how to keep evolving Opera," von Tetzchner said in a memo to employees, as obtained by TechCrunch.

Opera representatives declined to comment.

Von Tetzchner co-founded Opera Software in 1995 with Geir Ivarsøy, and led the company up to 2010, when he stepped down as chief eexecutive to become a strategic adviser. His last day will be June 30.

Opera said that von Tetzchner "has ideas about new projects, but is not ready to reveal any of his ideas as of right now".

Opera has traditionally trailed behind the other browser makers; the most recent estimates from Net Applications put the combined market share of Opera and Opera Mini at 3.3 percent, well behind the various flavors of Internet Explorer (54.3 percent), Mozilla Firefox (21.7 percent), Google's Chrome (12.5 percent) and Apple's Safari (7.28 percent).

"We have had a lot of fun during these years, and to say that Jon has created a great company is an understatement", said Lars Boilesen, chief executive of Opera, in a statement. "He has taught me and everyone working here a lot. He believed in, and pushed out innovation after innovation that we see our competitors constantly struggling with copying, making Opera a first mover in the technological development of web browsers as we know them today. We are very proud of Jon, and of course of the company. We are aiming at 500 million users by 2013, and we have a very positive flow right now.

In his own statement published by the company, von Tetzchner said he was proud of what he accomplished.

"It is of course a choice that brings up a lot of emotions," von Tetzchner said. "When we first started out, we were a few guys in a really small office - now we are spread all over the world, have over 740 employees and over 200 million users. I am very proud of what we have accomplished, and look forward to following the company closely also in the future."