Apple Siri Swears At Young Child

14 Jan

The mother to a 10-year-old boy in Coventry has been expressing her shock after having a display model of Apple’s iPhone 4S swear at her child.

Kim Le Quesne told the Coventry Telegraph that her child Charlie had been out shopping along with his dad within a local department of Tesco, discovered the phone in a showcase and asked the Siri personal helper software what number of people there are worldwide. The product responded by means of telling the lad that it wasn’t sure what he has been saying, and telling him to “Shut the f*** up, you ugly t***.”

“It’s verbal abuse,” Mrs Le Quesne stated. “We can’t believe the filth it came out with. He showed my husband what the phone had said to him and my husband found the store manager and said “it shouldn’t be saying that.”

Tesco stated the gadget will be shipped away to Apple for diagnostics, but it looks likely that some merry prankster had altered the login name on the gadget to the offending 7 words, so the mobile phone would default to the sentence no matter what the question. Apple is unavailable for remark during the festive period.

Mrs Le Quesne informed the newspaper the woman’s son returned to the shop the next day and noticed the exact same mobile phone was still on the display case. The paper doesn’t note whether the unfortunate lad felt abused, or rather tried it once more and dissolved straight into fits of giggles.

The Future Of Television Using Ubuntu

12 Jan

Canonical is actually pitching a TV-of-the-future idea maximising its touch-based Linux distro and Ubuntu cloud.

The Ubuntu company utilised the spotlight of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) during Mon in which to preview Ubuntu Television, a project percolating within Canonical that got a burst of publicity late not too long ago via Mark Shuttleworth.

The notion driving Ubuntu Television, Canonical claims, will be to supply Television as it had been intended: simply no wires, boxes or problems.

Canonical director of communications Gerry Car blogged this: “The goal is to uncomplicate television for the average viewer while delivering to him or her all the services and options that they are becoming used to.”

Ubuntu had been closely linked with Computer systems and servers – although Canonical recently shifted into cloud services because of the unveiling of their Ubuntu One service.

Canonical’s historical rallying cry was initially “Linux for human beings”. The slogan for Ubuntu TV is “TV for human beings”.

The Ubuntu TV concept shadows and expands improvements within the combination of Television, computing and internet. It also creates the Ubuntu media cloud – using Ubuntu 1 for the “web hub” of everything.

We’re told Ubuntu TV will give users a chance to pause as well as view programs on several Television sets along with other products, such as smartphones.

The enabler for this appears to be Ubuntu One, Canonical’s cloud storage and also data-synching service, which presently means that you can stream music and gain access to content on various devices. You are able to currently stream tracks in Ubuntu One to iPhone, iPad and Android gadgets.

Numerous IBM Patents Sold To Google

7 Jan

Google today revealed that they’ve already obtained about 200 additional US patents from IBM in an effort to safeguard itself from possible legal cases with regards its present-day and coming products and services.

The patents deal with several aspects and technologies, including:

  • databases
  • cell phones
  • server infrastructure
  • wireless telephony
  • near-field communications (NFC)

These patents come in addition to the pre-existing 2,053 bought via IBM by Google in the past 12 months. IBM aren’t the sole benefactors of Google’s increasing patents acquisitions, seeing that Motorola Mobility also have traded around 17,000 patents and 7000 patents pending, adding up to $12.5 billion US (£7.7 billion). The acquisitions are currently being evaluated by competition regulators. Google has additionally attempted to acquire an additional 6000 telecommunications relevant patents from Nortel, but was unsuccessful in their bid.

Amongst one of the newest patents is one exclusively dealing with “identifying common interests between users of the communication network”, which is believed may play a future role in Google+. Google’s ever-increasing patents purchases came about in an attempt to safeguard itself against its competition, which in turn Google accuses of buying up what it has called “bogus patents” to try to slow up the progression of Google’s mobile operating-system, Android.

Google currently have numerous legal disputes open with the likes of Oracle, Microsoft and Apple concerning a number of the technologies used inside Android. Oracle are presently in dispute with Google for possible Andriod patent infringements.p>

Right now there is currently massive competition out there with regards various os’s, particularly mobile variants. In an additional technology patents associated lawsuit early on recently AT&T were required to compensate TiVo US$215 million, plus an additional undisclosed monthly licensing fee. Currently its expected that we now will witness a lot more of these patents, software purchases and legal cases from the big players within the technology industry over the coming months. No conditions were presented from both Google or IBM with regards to these most recent patents exchanges.

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