Today Opera Software finally got its Opera Mini browser approved by Apple and therefor will be able to join the thousands of apps on the App Store.

This is of course a huge victory for Opera. As Opera Mini and Opera Mobile are already the leading browsers on the mobile market with the iPhone browser coming on second place mostly because until now it was the only alternative that iPhone users where allowed to use. Now that Opera has access to that market as well, things might change pretty drastically in the coming weeks.

But consumers are also winners in this round as this approval sets a precedence where Apple is willing to accept a software that competes directly with one of its core apps on the iPhone. Of course they are only following the footsteps of another popular Scandinavian app, Spotify, which not even a year ago was feared to be rejected from the App Store as it was in direct competition with iTunes.

Although all of this is good news for a more open and consumer friendly market with Apple, this might end up being yet another “two step forward, one step back” situation as just last week, Apple decided to edit the user agreement for app developers effectively limiting the tools allowed to build an app. Although Apple arguments that this clause has been edited in order to maintain the quality and stability of the apps on the iPhone and iPad, a lot of critics see it as a new means for Apple to tighten its control over the app market in general: if cross platform developer tools are not permitted anymore for the iPhone, hopefully (for Apple) developers will decide to focus more on the Apple apps and less on the competition and therefore make Apple’s mobile platform even more competitive.

Only time will tell if this is a good move on Apple’s side or not. And in the meantime, users of other smartphone platforms like Google Android or Nokia’s Symbian will just have to hope that developers are willing and are able to invest enough time to develop their apps to multiple platforms at the same time.

(this is a DoubleTwist commercial; yet another software developed by a Norwegian trying to challenge Apple.)

It is maybe not the revolution that a lot of Open source and Digital Freedom supporters are hoping for, but the Norwegian software corporation Opera is trying to shake things up at Apple.

Opera is known for its popular web browser which, although doesn’t have a big market share, has managed to build a good reputation in the software industry, especially on mobile devises where it is probably the most used mobile browser in the world with more 25% of the market as of this date.

Looking at the statistics presented by statcounter.com, the iPhone browser comes in a second place with almost 21.5% of the market. But Apple has a strong advantage over the other smartphones  and it only allows the use of its own internal web browser to surf the web on iPhones.

So if Opera would be allowed to access the Apple App market,  and with that all the iPhone, iPod Touch and future iPad consumers, they would hit a huge potential market when it comes to mobile OS. And this exactly what they intend to do. But it is unfortunately not so easy. As every other app, the have to go trough the Apple App Store approval process, something that isn’t that easy to get.

After completing their newest mobile browser versions, Opera Mini 5 and Opera Mobile 10, they are now trying to get Opera Mini 5 out on the Apple App market. They submitted the application 4 days ago hoping to finally get trough their approval process, and finally break the browser monopoly Apple holds on its iPhone OS?

Thanks to the EU, we have seen it done on Microsoft Windows, where before their operative system came exclusively installed with Internet Explorer, now are forced to inform the consumers about alternatives like, among other web browsers, Opera. Why should Apple avoid having to do the same thing as Microsoft?

Since we have entered day 4 of the waiting, we cannot yet see Opera as the Grand Revolution in the Apple Apps market we where hoping. But still, hope is still in the air, and if Opera does succeed, it will probably manage to change to Mobile OS market and bring it to a new direction.  Maybe not a revolution, but definitely a good step towards an open digital society, away from closed architectures and Corporate control.

This article will talk about:

- Protecting your coumputer
- Password protection and storage
- Email protection
- Disk protection

Digital technology is awesome, it is so awesome that you usually want to take it with you everywhere, even when travelling abroad on business or holiday. But,  as everybody knows, when travelling things can easily disappear, usually because of some malignant character that was in the area, as in stealing. And it is always irritating when you suddenly find out that someone nicked your bag with the digital music player, laptop and camera in it! Not only that, but then you realise all the precious info you had in it. Your 30GB music collection, all those priceless pictures or even worse, all your private data on the laptop! Not to talk about the value you’ll have to claim from your insurance company (because you were insured).

Even if you can’t protect your stuff from getting stolen the moment you take it out of your house (and even there it isn’t safe); you can protect your information from being abused.  Especially with netbooks becoming so popular lately, and public wifi blooming all over the place, it  is very tempting to take your laptop everywhere in order to always have access to your information, either online or offline.

Fortunately only a few simple, free and easy to use tools are required to assure once privacy is maintained no matter where we are.

Of course basic security is mandatory, especially if you are going to surf those open wifi networks, an updated internet browser, a good anti virus program and a firewall are a must!  Simple things like a  log-in password and good passwords on all Internet services are aslo equally as important. Just following those basic guidelines should be enough for most people. But you can take it one step further as well:

Don’t write down your passwords, click them! You are sitting in a coffee shop, with your laptop and a latté on the table, you open you browser and log on your web mail. Meanwhile some guy is sitting next to you and looks at your computer. He might see you email address on the screen and could even find out your password is by looking at the keys your typing.

That is where Keepass comes in. Not only it helps you remember all your passwords for the 50+ social sites you have to check in while traveling, but it also works as a automatic log-on by just clicking on their respective links so that no key logger or snooper can see what the password really is.

Using an email client on your computer will also help avoiding having to log on every time you have to check your mail. Plus with imap becoming pretty common for most mail services nowadays, it is a lot easier to just download just the headers of the new mails and check the ones you really need to read here and now. Thunderbird is of course the one I recommend as it is open source and versatile. And for added security it is even possible to encrypt all emails!

PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy is a very powerful instrument to guaranty one’s privacy. You can get it for Thunderbird by installing the Enigmail add-on.

It is important to understand that sending a regular email is like sending a regular postcard, anyone can read its content as it is not protected at all. PGP is based on trust. You create an encryption that contains two keys. One is your private key, that is password protected and stays on your computer. The other one is a public key, that you can publish anywhere on the net. When you want to send an email to a friend, you need to have his public key and he needs yours. You must both trust that you have the right public key and not a fraud, then you just need to encrypt your mail with your private key and his public key, and your friend can decrypt it with his private key and your public key.

This a highly powerful  tool is actually the only safe and efficient way to keep your email 99% private! (Pretty Good as in not Complete Privacy). And yet it is so little used. There is a small learning curve, but with some dedication it can be learned in a very short time. And Enigmail has also a pretty good tutorial if you need to learn it by yourself to convince your friends that no one is safe from Big Borther.

But this only protects the computer from digital intrusions, not from physical ones. That is where Truecrypt comes in. As with most things on this blog, it is a free and open source program, and quite a powerful one at that! Its latest version can encrypt a whole disk drive with Windows on it. I tried this on my netbook while I was testing Windows7 on it, and it worked perfectly on my drive that was partitioned in two. It created an extra log-in while booting up (which can be easily camouflaged as a system error for example) and it encrypts the whole disk so that even if someone pulls out the disk from the computer and access’s it through other systems, it is still encrypted and inaccessible. This extra layer, which only makes the PC a tiny (if noticeable) bit slower, can guaranty that no one can access the disk if the computer is lost or stolen.

Well, that is…

Almost.

This is a small update on freewares for Windows.

Last year I wrote about good freewares that covered the basic needs of any Windows users. It was a small list of free and practical software out there. But now something even better has come out: Ninite.

This website is especially useful after a clean install of Windows. It offers a list of software you might need on your computer. You choose which programs you wish to install by just hooking the little square next to the program’s icon, and then press “Get Installer”.

This makes you download an installer that is named after all the programs you chose, then you just double click it and it installs all the programs on your computer in one go. It is free, safe and fast and couldn’t be simpler!  I strongly advise it to anyone who is looking for good freeware for their computers and a quick setup after a fresh install of Windows.

People are, and for good reasons, always sceptical about sequels. With good reasons. Not that many movies manage to pump up a worthy sequel (although Transformers 2 was actually nominated for an Oscar)

But, there is one film I am truly looking forward this year, and that is Tron Legacy!

Tron is one of my favourite Disney film of all time, although it must be classified in the “Fun Action” category like Pirates of the Carribean, and not the Disney Classics category. So when last year, rumours started appearing about a sequel to that wonderful early 80′s fiction (yeah it is that old!).

Tron Legacy, or TR2N manages to pick up the story where it left off almost 30 years ago, although it is rather uncertain what it is other than Flynn’s son (FLynn being the hero in Tron) is trying to find out what happened with his dad, and has to revisit some old but familiar places to do that.  Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner reprises their role as Flynn and the evil Tron respectively, so the continuity gets maintained, but other than that the cast comprises of the new actors, Garrett Hedlund being this film’s protagonist and Flynn’s son, and of course, Olivia Wilde, which is a good thing as seen in the trailer that came out yesterday, March 8th, which you can watch here:

The film seems to have everything a Tron fan needs, from the awesome universe, light cycle wars and hopefully a good story, and in 3D! The release date is set to December 17th of this year, so most likely Disney is planning to have their big winter holiday blockbuster with this film.

The grasp of Google on the Web.

Google Latitude is yet another service Google is offering especially aimed for mobile users. You get to update your position live on a map for your friends to see. As a gadget freak I say sweet, yet another cool thing that just shows the power of cellular devices, but on another side, it just adds to the wealth of info Google gets to amass with its apps.

Google is still in a gray area, where we are not yet sure if we can see them as the true good, open source friendly, revolutionizing software company that it claims to be, or if it has crossed the line to the Mega-corp side with Microsoft and Apple, the formerly dreaded AOL or some other sort of evil corporation. Now, Google is not in a state of monopoly. Most of its products have competition on the net, whether it is its map services, text editing, image storing, widget, search, OS (either mobile or its future desktop version), so one can easily avoid its grasp if so needed. Yet, here we have a company that not only does all of that at once, but if not better or smarter, at least together. Why join 15 different services when there is one service that does it all and can interweave all the information at the same time.

And it is not stopping there. With Google Waves on the way, things are getting even more centralized. Although they do still try to keep it friendly by being open source and can be run from any server, 100% Google free (with the exception of its original coding). So again we are facing yet another consolidation of Google’s web of dependencies over the web, and in today’s society we can see how they are become even more central to computing than what Microsoft was in the 90′s. And so we end up with an age old dilemma: the eggs and the basket.

Is it a good idea to centralize everything and be more productive, or is it risking to much gathering all the information under one umbrella when identity fraud, governmental oversight, corporate control and all of that seems to only become more and more imposing? We have already seen Google bow for Chinese policies in order to not loose a market of a billion potential costumers, let’s just hope that that will remain the exception and not the rule.

I for one am too addicted to Google to move out just yet, but it is still important just to keep an open eye and see what is happening, because one never knows when a giant my fall, and they usually fall the hardest.

“The promotion of democracy is a cornerstone of EU foreign and security policy.” 

 Yep, in June EU citizens will have to fulfil their duty and vote for the new EU parliament. As any good citizen should know, it is not a privilege, but a duty to vote. Apparently EU citizens aren’t good citizens since fewer than 50% of the European population eligible to vote actually does.

Well fortunately Brussels hasn’t forgotten that and is therefore investing in a big campaign to get people to vote. And of course they decided to focus on a particularly important group, the European youth (aka young adults or 18-25 groups). And who is the best in reaching those groups? Well none other than Music Television, or MTV. The office of this MTV\EU partnership is none other than “Can EU Here Me?” And it is a nice initiative, using popular artist to spread the word and get the interest of our future generations. Of course this website is not political in any way.

Since the elections differ from one country to the other (the parliament has 700 seats spread over its 23 members), its sole purpose is to make the youth to want to vote. But to be able to vote you need to know what you are voting for. And that is where the famous artists get in the picture. You have some big European names on this website like Depeche Mode and Tiziano Ferro, and some other… not so European names, Lenny Cravitz to be more precise.

It is nice to see that the EU managed to device such a great strategy with an organisation that has a great pool of resources to use. MTV has all the contacts, it reaches millions of viewers through its channels, and it helps with the concerts that are being sponsored all over Europe. But when the EU is actually trying to strengthen the European identity, why then the focus on non-European artists? Well, it is still a nice step.

But is it useful? the British media has been quick to put a question mark on the project, then again, they have always been sceptical to the EU and its parliament.Others, like in France, see it as a way to boost their own national parties on another level. Since the right is more or less controlling the whole country, people see this election as a way to show their dissatisfaction with the government.

But even if there is more to it behind the elections in France, signs still show a strong disinterest in the election itself. People quickly forget how powerful the EU is actually getting. It is a great asset to harmonise and strengthen the relationship between the European countries, and make Europe a super power by itself in the world. Tonight an important amendment is to be reconsidered by the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE), Amendment 138, is in the European constitution to guaranty net neutrality, that is free and open use of the net without minimal restrictions.

The international tech news media hasn’t really liked that idea, and several interest organisations against the ratification have already risen up like Black Out Europe , the Swedish Telekompaketet and the French La Quadrature. The amendment itself is to be ratified tonight at 21h00 CET, when the committee meets in Strasbourg. So by the time you are reading those words, it is probably allready to late. But this is only an example of people trying to actively participate in the European process only when things actualy get crucial. The same thing happened in Sweden during The Pirate Bay trial, where the Pirate Party became suddenly quite important in Sweden and even has representatives for the European elections this June.

The European youth has a lot of vested interest in participating in European politics. But apparently what attarcts the young voters is, not so surprisingly, when fighting “The Man” og institution. So is the idea of actually using one of the biggest media institutions in this day and age an atractive offer to get the young voters interested in European politics? Looking at how many active cases there are around the world, it is only a question of a few years if not months before we can actually feel a change in our post-modern technological society.

Usually when people mention open source, people think of Linux, Geeks and Creative Commons and gnus (yeah like the animal). Of course open source has always been the key word in Linux development, but it has also become an important factor in software development on commercial platforms as well like Windows and Mac.

One of the best examples we have nowadays is Firefox. The worlds most popular alternative to Internet Explorer is 100% open source and community driven. Who would believe that a non profit organisation that uses thousands of people from all over the world to create software, and a crucial one at that since everybody is online in our society, and actually manage to become of the most recognisable brands in the software industry.

But Firefox is only one example, if you want you can easily do most of your basic stuff on the computer with free software, most of them being open source.

A great website to start your software browsing is Open Source Windows. This website has a very clear and easy to understand list for all your basic computer needs.

I recently got a new computer, and deciding to keep Vista because of my gaming needs, I decided to try to use as many free open source programs on it, and see if it is a liveable option. And is it? Well I believe it is. And all that thanks to the amazing dedication thousands of hobby programmers from all over the world, kudos to you guys and girls!

So here is a brief list (just to partially recap what OpenSourceWindows says) that should get you started with all your basic needs for your daily computer use.

7zip: Usually, when you download something on the internet, if it isn’t an exe file, it is an archive of the type .zip, . rar, .7zip and countless other compression systems. 7zip happens to be one of the best of them and is open source as well as capable of handling most compression systems out there. So there is only need to have this one installed for all your space saving needs.

Firefox: The flagship product of the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla is an overarching organisation to help the development of open source software, like Firefox.

Thunderbird: Also part of the Mozilla Foundation, this great program has all you need in an email software (well except for Exange) and is a great replacement for OutlookWindows Mail.

Songbird: Aka the iTune killer, also a Mozilla project. This powerful (but still under development) product is trying to give an open source alternative to the most important media player out there. In other words even iPod users can free themselves from the shackles of Apple.

VLC: for all your video watching needs, all rapped in a tight and neat package. A great alternative to the standard Windows Media Player and it has codecs for practically everything.

OpenOffice.org: This is probably the biggest competition Microsoft Office with all the tools you need: either it is the equivalent for Word, Exel, Powerpoint and more. It is just as efficient as Word (although some options may not be exactly the sames) and it is free!

Pidgin: You may have two reasons to want to use that. The first being that you have friends that are spread of several social networks, each with their own instant messengers, forcing you to install five different software just to keep in touch with your neighbourhood friends. Or maybe the instant messenger you use isn’t that great. Well, Pidgin tries to be a universal chat client so that you only need one messenger open at all times, and does a pretty good job at that (I use it both at work and home)

µTorrent: More and more people are using P2P technology to spread their software, mostly because it is not as resource intensive as to host everything on your own server. And the most popular technology to do that nowadays is Torrents. For that you need an efficient and practical torrent client, and µTorrent is at the same time, free, light, easy and very efficient.

Gimp: Adobe Photoshop is probably the most extensive picture editing software on the market, but it is expensive (as in just under $700). Gimp is a free open source alternative, maybe not as powerful as Photoshop, but it does suffice for most of your basic photo editing needs.

Burnaware CDBurnerXP: A good and simple free CD\DVD and even Blu-Ray burning software with all your basic needs and no publicity or ad-wares. A very powerfull product.

Avast! Antivirus: not open source, but one of the most popular and best free antivirus for personal use, this great program isn’t resource intensive at all (unlike som of its more famous commercial peers) and is easy to use. Great to shield of the computer from all those pesky viruses out there.

By now you should have a fully working computer for all of your basic needs. All legal and all free.

Want more? Well there are a couple of other sites that are interesting:

First there is download.com which is a huge repository of all sorts of softwares, free, shareware and payware, the problem being that there are so many programs that it is not always that easy to find the best one.

Then we have sourceforge.net which is completely dedicated to open source. So if it’s on that site you know it is free and open source. But a lot of the programs there are ongoing projects and so just because it sounds good, it doesn’t mean that it works well…

So there you go, hopefully a first step in a new and liberating open source life

Let us start with a bang: I am no fan of Apple. I actually try to do everything I can to avoid their products. As far as I am concerned, the only thing from Apple i have installed on my PC is the Quicktime codec that VLC has. And that is enough for me.

Why?  If you think Micro$oft is an evil corporation trying to control your life, Apple actually does control your life. Everything you use with them is locked to Apple products. The Macs, their softwares, iTunes, the iPods and iPhones. It is like an evil circle where you have to buy everything expensive so they are all compatible…

What has really irritates me, and the reason why I felt like starting with bashing the Apple, is not Apple itself, but Wired… I’ve been reading this magazine, both online and in print since I was a teenager. That and William Gibson during my high school years are probably what got me so “addicted” to technology.

Now, we all now that most tech journalists are Apple fans, it has something to do with creativity and whatnots. This week end rumours started spreading that Apple had added harware DRM in their new shuffle.  (Just to be more biased I decided to quote the competition).

It proved that this was partially “wrong”. As Wired so well described it in their wonderful article, The chip itself is no big deal, you can use any ear buds, but unless they are Apple approved (with the payment of small licensing fee and a small chip in the headset itself) then you can’t skip tracks or control the volume. Basically you plug in the headset in the shuffle, the music starts, and it stops when you plug it out.

When you look at the competition, like the Creative Zen Stone Plus, you have to wonder, what is Apple exactly trying to do? Make their gadgets look cooler and be less efficient? Like the big lacks on the iPhone compared to other smartphones (this time an Apple criticizing article from Wired, they’re not that bad).

But compatibility and accessibility are only a couple of issues here, another more important aspect here is that of TrustedComputing (fun short explaining the issue). The fact of controlling what a consumer gets to use and not use on hardware is the basis of trusted computing. Sceptics say that it is a new costumerprovider relationship where the provider just doesn’t trust the consumer and therefore decides to implant a chip in the hardware to control what hardware gets to be used on it. I have a slot for such a chip in my PC, fortunately it is chip-less for the moment.

But is Apple, by promoting such a marketing scheme, paving the way to trusted computing? And is that what we really want from what is supposed to be the coolest and most innovating hardware producer in the world? It feels like Apple is going the wrong way here, to a much darker and scarier place, even if they are all white and shinny.