CV, interview… Facebook? Why social snooping does job hunters – and you – no favours
Bosses have been warned against using social networks to check up on potential employees in a report published by employment relations body Acas.
The report said managers who use social networks to vet candidates could find themselves facing charges of discrimination if they are considered to have rejected a candidate because of information they found about their age, sexuality or religion.
But it also conceded that it is unlikely rejected applicants will be able to find evidence of discrimination - so it will be up to employers to regulate themselves.
Your Facebook account may help you connect with more people than you think, including your employerPhoto: Pixelbully Read more...
Back to the future with a joystick for the iPad
A few weeks ago, I wrote a column pointing out how innovation in games is a different beast to innovation in hardware. New mobile hardware is released on a yearly basis, but you rarely see the sort of leap in hardware tech that you see from a home console. Clearly, it’s a good thing peripheral developers don’t listen to me, because a couple of joystick adapters made specifically for the iPad could cause a sea change in mobile gaming.
It’s funny to think of a joystick as a game-changing device, seeing as it’s such an essential part of console gaming, but for a largely touch-based game platform, going back to the future with some old-school tech from Logitech, complete with construction so the joystick snaps back into place like the real deal, might open up a whole new gaming avenue for app developers. Read more...
Will tablets soon be free?
The price of touch tablets used to make sense. Apple's iPad has cost between $499 and $829 since it first shipped a year and a half ago. And for a while, competitors all hovered around that price.
The Motorola Xoom and RIM's BlackBerry Playbook both start at $499 and go up from there with added connectivity and storage.
Hewlett-Packard's TouchPad used to cost about the same.
This $499-and-up range was considered a reasonable price for these powerful and useful little computers. It's a price point that works, right?
Well, no. It's a price point that lets Apple run away with the market. So in the last month or so, we've seen touch tablet pricing go nuts. Read more...
Amazon reworks website before offering new tablet
Amazon.com Inc is rolling out a major redesign of its familiar website as it prepares to offer a new $250 tablet device to rival Apple Inc's iPad.
The changes in Amazon's online store "practically scream 'tablet-optimized'," TechCrunch blogger Sarah Perez wrote over the weekend after her site reported seeing a prototype of the company's new device.
The new web pages show a bigger search bar and less clutter to better highlight music, e-books, digital games and applications from the Amazon Appstore using Google's Android operating system, the blog said.
Amazon started rolling out the new design in the last days of August, spokeswoman Sally Fouts said in an email on Sunday. Read more...
Anti-Piracy Outfit Recruits Microsoft Director To Work On Mission Impossible
Music Industry Piracy Investigations has recruited a prominent figure to become the next General Manager of their organization. MIPI will be hoping that when ex-Microsoft director of intellectual property Vanessa Hutley starts work in a few days time, she’ll be more optimistic of winning the piracy fight than she was in 2008. Back then Hutley declared that it would “never” be possible to stop people obtaining pirated media from file-sharing sites.
Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI) was established in 1995 with a brief to fight physical piracy but it was the changing nature of their enemy 9 years later that thrust the anti-piracy group into center stage. Read more...
Europe’s Odd Anti-Piracy Stance: Send Money to the US!
The European Strategy: Send Money to the US
Most of the time, the international politics of intellectual property law are pretty easy to follow: countries that are large exporters of intellectual property usually favor stronger international IP agreements that help exploit international markets. Countries that are large importers of IP, in contrast, generally favor lower levels of IP protection that minimize the outflow of royalties, licensing fees, and other payments for foreign-owned products and technologies–whether computers, drugs, movies, or books. Whatever other rhetorics are in play, from the rights of authors to the right to development, political positions usually line up with those underlying incentives.
The turn toward the use of trade agreements to set IP obligations–from the early bilateral agreements of the 1980s to the WTO’s TRIPS agreement in the early 1990s–more or less formalized this instrumental approach to IP law. Trade agreements, at the end of the day, are about economic deals–not morality or even fairness. For anyone clinging to a moral interpretation of these arrangements, it’s worth revisiting at the US and EU positions in the South African AIDS drug controversy from the late 1990s or more recent opposition to the proposed WIPO treaty for the visually impaired. Read more...
German court bans sales of Samsung’s new 7.7-inch tablet
Samsung Electronics Co has stopped promoting its new tablet computer at Europe's biggest consumer electronics fair after a court-ordered sales injunction in Germany, the latest setback in its global patent battle with Apple Inc.
A Dusseldorf court ordered the South Korean company to stop selling Galaxy Tab 7.7 on Friday when the annual IFA electronics show started in Berlin. The move follows an earlier ban on German sales of Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 by the court in late August until its final ruling on September 9.
The Galaxy Tab 7.7 is the latest addition to Samsung's range of Galaxy products. It was first unveiled at the show along with 5.3-inch Galaxy Note, which Samsung hopes to create a new product category with and fill the gap between smartphones and tablets. Read more...
Baidu produces cloned Android, web apps etc
Baidu has forked Android, launching a mobile OS at its annual shindig which also saw the Chinese search outfit slotting web apps into its home page to go with its Chrome-alike browser.
Baidu has taken a leaf out of Google's book before, and "Baidu Yi" (as the new mobile OS is called) is at least based on Android code, unlike Baidu's desktop web browser, which is simply a shell wrapped around Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Android is open source, so Baidu has forked it to create its own version with its own bundle of applications on top. Read more...
IT employment grows, but barely
The U.S. Labor Department reported Friday that no new net jobs across all industries were added in August, but IT hiring may have fared a little better.
The government said the information industry saw an employment decline in August of 48,000 workers, but most of that decline, 45,000 workers, was the result of a strike by Verizon workers last month.
That prompted the TechServe Alliance, an industry group that represents IT services companies, to offer two versions of its monthly analysis of IT hiring. If the 45,000 striking telecommunications workers are calculated back into the government's IT employment total, then IT employment overall increased from the prior month by .05 percent or 2,100. Read more...
Hackers steal SSL certificates for CIA, MI6, Mossad
The tally of digital certificates stolen from a Dutch company in July has exploded to more than 500, including ones for intelligence services like the CIA, the U.K.'s MI6 and Israel's Mossad, a Mozilla developer said Sunday.
The confirmed count of fraudulently-issued SSL (secure socket layer) certificates now stands at 531, said Gervase Markham, a Mozilla developer who is part of the team that has been working to modify Firefox to blocks all sites signed with the purloined certificates.
Among the affected domains, said Markham, are those for the CIA, MI6, Mossad, Microsoft, Yahoo, Skype, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft's Windows Update service. Read more...