Microsoft, AOL close $1.056 billion patent deal

Summary: AOL is now in the clear and looking forward to what it can do with the badly-needed extra cash.

AOL has announced that it has closed its mega patent deal with Microsoft, which paid $1.056 billion for a portfolio filled with more than 800 patents.

The two tech giants first announced the deal back in early April — only for Microsoft to then pull a switcheroo and sell more than 600 of the acquired patents to Facebook for $550 million.

Regardless of the Facebook matter, AOL is now in the clear and looking forward to what it can do with the badly-needed extra cash.

But AOL didn’t give away all of the patents in its repertoire. The beleaguered Internet provider still owns over 300 patents and patent applications covering advertising, search, content generation/management, social networking, mapping, multimedia/streaming, and security. Not to mention AOL also received a license to the patents being sold to Microsoft.

AOL chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong remarked in a statement that “you should expect us to continue our momentum of creating and unlocking shareholder value through continued operational improvements and executing on our strategy.”

Specifically AOL has promised to return 100 percent of the patent proceeds to shareholders. A plan on how to do this is still being hammered out, and AOL is expected to reveal a roadmap by the end of June.

Dude, why must you put that MacBook Pro laptop on your lap?

Almost all reviews of the new new MacBook Pro have a section on heat and noise. The new model may run “too hot,” depending upon what program it’s crunching. Still, here’s a tip: even though a certain class of computers are called “laptops” it’s not advisable to actually work with them on your lap.

In the reviews, heat and noise observations are often being combined, since the fans are there to cool the logic board. Still, noise and heat are very different user elements and subjective in nature. After all, what might be warm to me, could way hot to someone else. Same difference with fan noise.

Apple says it went to some length to mitigate noise in the new MacBook Pro using asymetrically-spaced fan blades and new venting slots that work together to move more air inside the enclosure, reducing heat while at the same time, reducing what Apple calls “tonal impact.” Noise.

For most of its history, the MacBook Pro models have run hot, sometimes very hot. Burning hot. From what I can see, most reviewers say the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display runs a bit cooler. The new lower-power processor and the fans appear to make some difference. Or not, depending.

At The Verge, reviewer Ross Miller says after a stress test running CPUTest for 12 minutes straight, the keyboard gets hot.

There’s good news and bad news: while the fan was surprisingly quiet — even in an apartment with closed windows and some light traffic and rain outside, I could barely hear it — the heat was in the ballpark of what we’d expect from our personal 2011 MacBook Pro. Which is to say, hot — particularly the metal rim around the ‘U’ key, which is about where the processor rests internally. It’s hard to touch for more than a few seconds.

Um, why wouldn’t it get hot?

Roman Loyola at Macworld said running a demanding game was where push came to shove off his lap in “subjective observations/”

Front Vents: The Retina MacBook Pro has vents that sit in front on the display, something you don’t see on the regular MacBook Pro. After Diablo III finished its installation, I ran the game. I was able to select 2880-by-1800 in the game’s settings, and during gameplay, the fans are definitely running and noticeable. The laptop heated up immediately, in the forward part of the bottom, underneath the keyboard where the GPU and CPU are located, and it heated up enough for me to move the laptop to a desk.

I watched several YouTube videos and iTunes movie trailers, all streaming 1080p or 720p over the Internet. The laptop got a bit warmer than when I installed Diablo III, but not hot enough for me to need to move the laptop off my lap. I wasn’t able to trigger the fans while doing this, and the videos ran smoothly.

The MacBook Pro is a desktop-replacement computer, it’s a “laptop” because of Apple’s excellent engineering and the industry-wide trend towards miniaturization and mobility. But is it reasonable to demand that a powerful, mobile computer should be able to sit comfortably on your lap instead of a desk? Really! I wrote about the trade-offs of performance and mobility in a post following the initial release of the MacBook Air. Of course, it’s easy for me to ignore the lap issue, since I don’t have much of a lap. I use a nice wooden tray when computing in bed.

My Apple Core colleague Jason O’Grady wrote the other day about the hard choice between buying a MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro. It’s useful reading.

However, for a number of users, the deciding element for the MacBook Pro with Retina Display will be the difficulty installing third-party options. There are no slots for DIMMs — customers should spend the extra $200 to max out the memory at 16GB at purchase time (like the MacBook Air). Same deal with its proprietary flash memory storage modules. And of course, there’s no removable battery (but that has been true since the MBP generation).

Sure, upgrades will be offered, but the difficulty is over the top. In its teardown analysis, iFixit gave the MBP Retina a 1 out of 10 rating for upgradability and user repairs.

•Proprietary pentalobe screws prevent you from gaining access to anything inside.•As in the MacBook Air, the RAM is soldered to the logic board. Max out at 16GB now, or forever hold your peace—you can’t upgrade.•The proprietary SSD isn’t upgradeable either (yet), as it is similar but not identical to the one in the Air. It is a separate daughtercard, and we’re hopeful we can offer an upgrade in the near future.•The lithium-polymer battery is glued rather than screwed into the case, which increases the chances that it’ll break during disassembly. The battery also covers the trackpad cable, which tremendously increases the chance that the user will shear the cable in the battery removal process.

•The display assembly is completely fused, and there’s no glass protecting it. If anything ever fails inside the display, you will need to replace the entire extremely expensive assembly.

If upgrading is a value to you, stick with the other 15-inch model, which appears to be a refresh of the previous MacBook Pro (Late 2011) model.

Can Microsoft pull its tablet technology together?

Summary: Will Microsoft take the wraps off a new line of ARM-based tablets next week? I have no inside information, but I sure hope so, because all of the pieces are in place for a device that can elbow the Kindle Fire aside and give the iPad a run for its money.

It is mind-boggling to consider that in February 2010, just a little over two years ago, the iPad was newly announced but had not yet shipped.

Today it’s a juggernaut, seemingly unstoppable.

At the time of the iPad announcement, I predicted that it would succeed and anticipated the depth of the hole into which Apple was about to push Microsoft:

It’s clear that Apple has also been looking carefully at the technologies that Microsoft has been refining for the past decade, and I can confidently predict that Apple will do a much better job of implementing those features than any of Microsoft’s partners have done so far.

Why? Because Apple understands something that Microsoft has yet to figure out: Apps matter.

At Microsoft as at Apple, these big platform shifts take a long time. Apple was well along on theengineering work for its shift to Intel chips in 2000. The move wasn’t announced for five more years. The iPad was envisioned in 2000, before the iPhone. It took a full decade to reach market.

So I’m as curious as anyone to see how far Microsoft can come with its new, bet-the-company tablet strategy, which may or may not be unveiled on Monday at a mysterious event in an undisclosed Los Angeles location.

Back in 2010, before the iPad had appeared outside of Cupertino and Walt Mossberg’s office, I laid out what I thought Microsoft needed to do to create a worthy iPad competitor. Here’s that two-plus-year-old list, with a few updates (in italics):

If I were making a list of what should be in any new slate PC powered by Windows, it would include the following:

A touch-optimized browser. IE8 is a good start. Now get rid of the unnecessary window frames and add some navigation features that make sense for someone who doesn’t have a mouse handy. Metro IE10 fits that bill perfectly and is a centerpiece app in Windows 8 and Windows RT .

An e-reader that works with multiple book formats. That partnership with B&N Nook seems like a pretty big deal in retrospect. With a native Metro-style Kindle app, that would cover a lot of book-buying/reading scenarios

A great media player. Again, Windows Media Center already has just about everything a slate PC needs. The new Music, Videos, and Photos apps still need work, but they are greatly improved in the Release Preview and have the potential for another great leap forward in performance and usability for RTM.

A touch interface for Windows Live. Windows Live Mail and Windows Live Photo Gallery are both excellent programs. What if you could select an alternate interface, with larger buttons, less window dressing, and a pop-up toolbar for editing tasks? See the Metro style unified Mail-Calendar-People-Messaging app, which does a great job with Exchange, Hotmail, and Gmail.

An easy connector for digital cameras and Bluetooth devices. Done. USB connectors and flash drive slots are mandatory in the new tablet form factors.

A file sync utility that allows you to copy and move files (especially digital music and photos) to and from other PCs and mobile devices. SkyDrive has grown far less complex, more usable, and has excellent hooks into the Windows 8 apps. It satisfies this criteria.

In short, the current elements that have publicly demoed on ARM-based Windows RT (and Windows 8) tablets match that core feature set nearly perfectly.

In that list, two things I didn’t include are a connection to a fully stocked digital media store, which Windows tablets will have via Xbox Music and Video (R.I.P., Zune), and speech recognition (”Siri, is that feature important?”).

My colleague Mary Jo Foley thinks that Microsoft’s mysterious product announcement Monday in Los Angeles will be an ARM-based tablet, possibly Microsoft-branded. More importantly, she sees it as a competitor to the Kindle Fire.

I think she has a great idea, even if the timing is incorrect and Microsoft intros something completely different in Los Angeles on Monday.

I have both a Kindle Fire and a B&N Nook. Both have some thoroughly delightful features, and some that are frustratingly close to unusable. But here’s the big difference between either of these devices and the iPad, in my opinion.

Both the Nook and the Fire are great e-readers. Having color is super important for reading magazines, how-to books (like my own Windows 8 Head Start), and any book that is primarily visual. None of those categories of content work well at all on a black-and-white e-reader.

I’ve sampled dozens of apps on the Android Kindle Fire and the Nook. Most of them feel like they came out of a clearance bin at the Dollar Store. They range from ghastly to meh in terms of usability, and so I wind up using almost none of them–even Angry Birds–on a regular basis.

I have yet to find a competent Exchange client on either platform. That makes email near worthless for me. (I can connect to Hotmail and Gmail, both of which are secondary accounts for my purposes).

In short, both of those products feel like fancy e-readers with color screens, reasonable (but not great) battery life, and the option to use the device as a tablet in a pinch. But I don’t use either one when I want access to email, Twitter, or weather forecasts. I’m far more likely to open a notebook PC or just check my smartphone.

The built-in suite of Metro style apps for Windows 8 is what both Kindle Fire and Nook wish they had. I’m certain that the new Windows RT ARM-based tablets will get great battery life, and that the included apps will just work. If the ebook-reader software is of similar quality and can sync my Kindle and Nook purchases, the Windows device will become my full-time traveling companion.

Oh, and those tablets will include a full copy of Office 2013, too, fully touch-enabled.

I expect these devices to be companions to PCs, not replacements. That’s the same role most iPads play today, and it seems to be working for Apple. Except iPads don’t really work that well with PCs, and a Windows 8/RT tablet would.

The final measure of success, of course, is that the devices have to be as reliable and smooth as the iPad. That’s a tall order for version 1 of a product as important as this one. But you can argue that Microsoft has been playing the long game (maybe the way-too-long game) with all this technology.

The touch support has been under steady development since 2000. The cloud-based services have more than a decade of often painfully won experience behind them. Microsoft has been shipping very solid speech recognition capabilities in Windows for nearly seven years.

What they seem to have now is a focus on delivering products that maximize the value of those technologies, with no hedging and few usability-crushing compromises.

I have no idea whether Microsoft will unveil a tablet that meets those criteria on Monday. I’ll be paying close attention to the announcement and will report on them as soon as I can, in as much depth as possible.

Sex Tech: Bitcoin, Louis Theroux, booth babe life, eHarmony password scandal

Summary: Louis Theroux goes anti-porn for ISP filters, Groupon self-censors over adult, eHarmony’s LinkedIn password breach, Girls Gone Wild go for Bitcoin and PETA.xxx.

At the intersection of sex and tech this week booth babes are pressured to be sexier, Louis Theroux sides with anti-porn pundits in favor of state-sponsored internet filters, eHarmony’s password leak was a dry run for LinkedIn, and much more.

Dating site eHarmony was practice for LinkedIn

This past week’s big scandal was most certainly the LinkedIn password leak.

The simultaneous, massive password leak at dating mega-site eHarmony was a bad situation as well.

On Thursday eHarmony admitted that its password database had been compromised and somewhere around 1.5 million passwords were exposed and out in the wild.

With no irony whatsoever, eHarmony characterized the 1.5 million passwords as a “small fraction” of its accounts.

According to The H security blog, the eHarmony passwords were put into a forum and users were invited to crack the hashes as a warmup to giving the forum LinkedIn’s password database.

They add,

(…) although eHarmony implores its users to use strong passwords including both upper and lower case letters, it saves the passwords in all upper case, thereby weakening its already weak security further.

• eHarmony admits to leaking 1.5 million passwords (The H Security)

Bitcoin still around: shows some people still pay for porn

The peer-to-peer cryptocurrency Bitcoin was predicted to be somewhat of a passing fad, with its instability and numerous transaction attacks making it seem - from the outside - like something too turbulent to last.

Not so: Ars Technica took a second look at Bitcoin this week and finds that innovation and entreprenurialism is furthering Bitcoin’s evolution.

Especially when it comes to amateur porn, as seen in examples such as the Reddit subforum “Girls Gone Bitcoin.”

• Porn, gambling, and malware: Bitcoin as the ‘Net’s Wild West (Ars Technica)

Booth babe life: not getting better

Lots of people have assumptions about booth babes - IT World decided to take a minute to ask women in the booth babe profession what their work is like.

Much is what you’d expect.

But along with the long hours of standing in heels for around $160 a day, the women working the Computex show in Taiwan are not liking the ways companies that hire them seem to be increasing their disrespectful sexualization of the women, and what at least one woman has noticed as a trend toward wanting the models to show ever more skin.

• The life of a ‘booth babe’: high heels, long hours and leering visitors (ITworld)

Documentarian sides with anti-porn pundits in favor of UK internet filters

Louis Theroux is well-known and respected British documentarian known for his unbiased point of view and fearless exploration of dangerous and difficult subjects.

But now that the esteemed investigator is a father, he’s become a self-described Puritan.

In this new context, Theroux has now gone on record supporting the UK’s proposed “great firewall” - the controversial mandatory filter that would censor the UK’s internet by default to “protect the children.”

This, he says, is because Theroux says he can’t be bothered to work porn filters for his own kids.

• Louis Theroux supports internet porn restrictions, revealing: ‘I’m quite a puritanical person’ (Telegraph)
• See also, my reporting on the UK porn filter: Sorting the Great British Firewall (CNET)
• Further reading: UK ISP porn filter: a tragedy of transparency, privacy and security (ZDNet)

Groupon bows to pressure from Morality In Media

Groupon came under fire from “family” organization Morality In Media for running localized specials on adults-only fare, such as a San Francisco tour of a historical building that houses a porn studio.

Many hoped Groupon would stand its ground and stick to business.

However, Groupon has confirmed to Business Insider, “we aren’t currently accepting new adult merchants,” although those types of businesses are being constantly evaluated at a local level.

• CONFIRMED: Groupon No Longer Does Business With Porn Merchants (Business Insider)

Peta.xxx has obscene content - but no porn

PETA’s new website using the “.xxx” domain may have porn stars on it, but the only obscene content on offer is graphic displays of animal distress.

Yes, you can see porn star Ron Jeremy in a video, but it’s a campy but heartfelt welcome to the site, not a skin flick.

And there are lots of scantily dressed PETA babes protesting animal cruelty and the use of fur. But the site is not what most folks looking for “.xxx” sites will expect, to be sure.

BYOD: Death of the nonworking vacation?

Summary: People are increasingly doing work stuff while on vacation, a trend that’s bound to get worse as more folks bring their own device to work.

In this fast-paced world of non-stop connectivity, more of us can be spotted doing work tasks when we should be experiencing much-deserved down time. This is especially true on those rare (for some of us) vacations, when instead of sipping drinks with umbrellas on the beach, we are checking email and dealing with work issues.

This trend is bound to get worse as more companies allow workers to bring their own devices (BYOD) to work.

Many of us work long past office hours given how easy it is with smartphones always connected to the information superhighway. Responding to that “one last” email can be just the beginning of an unplanned work session, when we should be offline and having some important down time.

Vacations are intended to be enjoyed totally away from work stuff, but that’s not the case for many. The standard excuse of dealing with email to avoid being swamped when the vacation ends is just that, an excuse.

Getting away from work is vitally important to our mental health, and vacations should be the best way to do that. We only have ourselves to blame when we work on vacation, but with BYOD getting bigger care needs to be taken that the movement doesn’t make working on vacation an expectation.

Having a smartphone (or tablet, laptop) on vacation is not a bad thing, as many of us use them for entertainment. It requires discipline to stay away from the work stuff, however, something that was a bit easier when we had separate tools assigned by the job. We could use our own gadgets for entertainment but leave the work gadget at home at vacation time.

With BYOD that’s no longer possible, the personal gadget is the work gadget, too. You can’t leave it back at home when heading out to that exotic vacation, and that means your work stuff is right there with you. That’s not a bad thing if we can separate work from personal things.

What companies need to address in defining the rules for BYOD is how to deal with vacation time. While it might be good for the company to have workers dealing with work things on vacation, that’s a bad thing in the longer term. Your employees need to get away from the job, and it’s smart to make that part of the BYOD policies.

If allowed to go unchecked, BYOD can in effect put workers on the clock all the time. That will almost certainly end up causing burnout, something vacations would normally protect against. There needs to be a system in place that kicks the worker off the job when vacation time rolls around.

Many of us are not very good at leaving the job at home on vacation already, so we need help if our gadgets are also work items. Savvy folks realize how important it is to get away from work on vacation, and take drastic measures to ensure they leave the job behind. Several of my friends take vacations to get away, and a big factor in choosing a venue is to make sure they don’t work. They always pick vacation spots with no connectivity whatsoever, guaranteeing they don’t get tempted to just do that one work thing.

If companies don’t take vacation time into account when making smart BYOD policies, the nonworking vacation could become a thing of the past. That’s not good on any level, and workers need employers to let them get away from it all when vacation time rolls around.