The Winds of WikiLeaks&apos

WikiLeaks' Cablegate release has instigated a Web battle. On one side, high-profile organizations like credit card companies have refused to do business with the site; on the other, WikiLeaks supporters have carried out a series of reprisal DDoS attacks. In the meantime, Apple makes new rules for the Mac App Store, a new study makes AT&T look bad, and Google makes plans for its various OSes.

The fallout from WikiLeaks' late-November release of hundreds of thousands of private U.S. State Department messages continues to spread, and it's grown then beyond the spewing of outraged rhetoric. Feeling pressure from the public and possibly the U.S. government itself, businesses are attempting to lay siege to WikiLeaks, cutting it off financially and technologically. Those who support what WikiLeaks has done have begun to fight back in their own way.

Despite that threat, WikiLeaks has seen some outfits turn their backs on it. To illustrate, it came to light recently that Amazon was hosting WikiLeaks for a period of time, and its cloud services were as a matter of fact giving the site a good amount of protection from DDoS attacks. Soon afterwards that news spread, even though, Amazon kicked WikiLeaks off its cloud and washed its hands of the whole thing. That didn't seem to leave WikiLeaks vulnerable, although -- as much as its adversaries have tried, wiping the site off the Web completely may be damn nearly impossible as late as this. It's been mirrored and spread so far and wide throughout the Internet that if anyone manages to shut down one instance, there are many more places all in all providing access.

The group reportedly as well tried to knock out Amazon's home page, which would have had much more severe implications for that company, since that's in effect where most of its business is to tell the truth done. Nevertheless that blow to all appearances failed to connect.

For but, the war continues. High-profile companies are doing everything they can to distance themselves from WikiLeaks -- refusing support, declining to do business, pulling the plug on pro-WikiLeaks groups, so on. The site's supporters just keep pushing back, flooding those companies' servers to the point of collapse. That kind of attack likely won't kill off an entire business, however it can be costly, and the more famous the target, the more publicity the reprisal campaign receives. So who's then?

I guess it turns out that App Store that Apple built for the iPhone was kind of a good idea. But that it's hosting hundreds of thousands of apps and doing millions in sales -- not to mention being a driving force for iPhone and iPad sales and serving as a template for other platforms to emulate -- Apple's decided that Macs can have an App Store of their very own. Actually, it might just arrive any day but, and when it does, Mac users will be able to buy, download and install full-sized software packages for notebooks and desktops just like with iOS.

But there's one catch, and it applies to developers. With the iOS App Store, developers can, and many do, release trials, demos, betas -- that is, pared-down or not-quite-done versions of the software that are supposed to perhaps whet the buyer's appetite for the full version, or anyway test the consumer waters previously finalizing the product. That's not going to be an option with the Mac App Store -- the only way Apple will let devs sell there is if their products are fully baked.

That's bad news for some developers. Putting out a so-called lite version is standard operating procedure for a lot of vendors in the iOS App Store, and the try-earlier-you-buy approach has no doubt played a big role in all that money Apple's raked in with it. Not having a bunch of different trials and betas lying around might help reduce clutter and improve the user experience somewhat, now it's not like it's that hard for the buyer to tell the difference between a demo and a full version. It's as a rule right there on the name. And the icon. And the fact that it's free. We can read words.

So eventually, like as not this rule isn't necessarily based on a presumption that users are idiots. It's about control. That's Apple's way -- it wants a vise grip on its platform, now it doesn't want to choke it to death. So with iOS, you get a locked-down OS balanced with an App Store that isn't 100 percent liberated yet does carry half-pint versions of software. With Mac, the OS is less restricted, so Apple has seen fit to clamp down on the store.

In its defense, AT&T whipped out the science, saying that independent drive tests confirmed that its mobile broadband network is the fastest in the country, beating the then best competitor by 20 percent. And it said the difference between its dropped call rate and the industry leaders is downright negligible -- one tenth of one percent.

Those claims may have merit, however users are evidently unsatisfied, and waving studies and subscriber numbers in their faces isn't going to fix that. So what's making them so unsatisfied to begin with? What's the big difference between AT&T and other carriers? It might have to do with AT&T's frequency band. It uses a chunk of bandwidth that's relatively high in frequency, which makes it harder to penetrate buildings. Verizon uses a lower band. There could as well be a difference in the strategy these two use to build out their networks -- quantity of covered areas vs. quality of signal.

The iPhone factor

And I'd be remiss not to mention the iPhone factor. More than half of Consumer Reports' AT&T-using respondents own iPhones. It uses a huge amount of data, it's sold incredibly then over the last three and a half years, and AT&T is to all appearances still having a hard time keeping up with user demand. And who knows, like as not it even caused the carrier to get lazy -- millions of new clients saw a shiny new iThingy and signed two-year contracts, and it all looked so good on paper that too many people at AT&T just decided to kick back and call it a day. Why bother building a better network when people are sitting in line to the letter overnight to get that phone -- and in the process sign a service agreement?

It's clear that AT&T will take some kind of blow when the iPhone expands to another U.S. carrier. The question is whether it'll be a soft blow that as a matter of fact ends up helping the company by giving its network a break from all the data demands while for all that letting it retain a good number of clients, or whether it'll be a massive, angry exodus. The timing doesn't look good -- the official report comes in the magazine's January issue, and there are nonetheless rumors that that's specifically when Verizon will make its move.

Three-strike combo move this week

Google set its mind on sorting out its plans for its operating systems with a three-strike combo move this week, focusing on netbooks, smartphones and tablets.

First, it moved another step ahead in the dessert buffet, picking up a nice plate of gingerbread, on time for Christmas. Gingerbread is the code name for Android 2.3, the straightway edition of the mobile operating system.

Gingerbread will first be served up by the at once edition in Google's Nexus line of phones, the Nexus S. For this one, Google partnered with Samsung, resulting in a sort of cross-breed between the Galaxy phone and the original Nexus One, which was made by HTC. It'll feature a refined touchscreen keyboard, a 1 GHz processor, and a front-facing camera that works with Skype video calls.

Few of the improvements Android 2

A few of the improvements Android 2.3 will offer include support for Nearly Field Communications hardware, the innovation that enables your phone to act as your wallet in certain situations. There's as well support for Internet telephony over SIP, which is important if your business is big on unified communications systems.

Google isn't sending Gingerbread updates to Android phones just but. First it's going to have to hand it off to developers so they can get a leg up on it.

The Nexus One

Back with the Nexus One, Google tried a new way of selling the phones -- it did it only through its own online channel instead of putting it in carrier stores like usual. I guess that could be called kind of a flop, because this time around, when the Nexus S comes out, it's coming to Best Buy stores for $199 with a T-Mobile contract, or $529 unlocked.

Then Google turned its attention to tablets. The company's long held that Android is in the main for smartphones and its upcoming Chrome OS would be targeted at netbook and notebook computers. That stance has relegated tablets to the role of an awkward and confused middle child, and it's affected how tablet makers can build their products if they want to use Android.

Obviously, there are Android tablets in existence -- several, to tell the truth, the most famous probably being the Samsung Galaxy Tab. It does a fine job running Android, however its screen size is 7 inches compared to the Apple iPad's 10. That's because the OS and the apps it's running were built for smaller screens -- scale them up any furthermore and resolution starts to suffer. A 7-inch screen isn't necessarily a bad thing. Some users prefer the smaller-sized device. Yet it's however a limitation.

This week, Google took the time to show the world that a 10-inch Android tablet is possible -- if you happen to have a hardware partner willing to build a prototype and a version of Android that's two steps ahead of the one the rest of the world's using. That's not Gingerbread, the one I was talking about before -- it's Honeycomb, the then next version, which will be Android's official leap to 3.0 status.

As he did the demo, Android head Andy Rubin revealed only a few choice details. The tablet doesn't even have an official name, nevertheless we do know that it has a 3D Nvidia processor. The tablet, or anyway something like the design he showed, should be out sometime then year.

It's hard to know anything for sure from surprise prototype demos like this one, now if there in effect is a 10-inch Android tablet coming before long, that could mean that the Honeycomb update will give Android the ability to scale up properly in larger-screened tablets.

The long run find its way onto computers that

Chrome OS may in the long run find its way onto computers that would have if not been running Microsoft Windows, nevertheless that doesn't mean Chrome works specifically the same way we think of a traditional PC operating system working. This is an OS that evolved out of a Web browser. It may share a common ape ancestor with Windows, OS X and most desktop Linux distros, yet it's shooting out spontaneously branch in the family tree. It's an Internet-based OS, it's built for lightweight and highly portable computers, its apps will be Web apps, and if you put its blood cells pursuant to this agreement a microscope, they may more closely resemble those of Android than Windows.