A ROUNDUP of a few notables from the world of tech the past week.
Broadband prices regulation and the breaking up of big ISPs
A report from Ars Technica:
"Presidential candidate and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders yesterday released a plan to overhaul the US broadband market by breaking up giant providers, outlawing data caps, regulating broadband prices, and providing $150 billion to build publicly owned networks."
If Bernie gets his way by being elected in the coming US Presidential elections and he actually delivers on this promise, I think this will have a rippling effect on the entire industry worldwide. I mean, what’s stopping our own president from doing the same thing? If this happens on our side of the planet that means the current two big telcos are going be broken up. How would things be if or when it happens? Could there be significant improvements on the current state of service from the two big telcos?
It’s a wait-and-see game for now.
Mega-high pixel phone cameras are here
Over the last several days or so, we’ve seen mobile phones being introduced and reported to be equipped with phone cameras boasting more than a hundred megapixels in resolution. As of this writing, I’ve seen two major brands with such -- Samsung (reportedly) and Xiaomi.
Samsung, according to a report from Bloomberg, will be releasing the Galaxy S11 that "will sport a 108-megapixel sensor for the main camera -- versus the iPhone 11’s 12 -- flanked by three more on the back of the device including an ultrawide-angle lens and 5x optical zoom."
Overkill? I’ll reserve my judgment until I’m able to get my hands on one to review.
Also, there’s the one from Xiaomi. It’s the CC9 Pro and it’s already available. The Verge’s report on it says that it has the: "flagship 108-megapixel wide angle lens, a 5-megapixel telephoto with 5x optical zoom (and 10x hybrid zoom), a 12-megapixel telephoto camera designed for portrait mode shots, a 20-megapixel ultra-wide with a 117-degree field of view, and a 2-megapixel macro lens for close-up shots."
Data Transfer Project
According to the opening statement on the official website:
"The Data Transfer Project was launched in 2018 to create an open-source, service-to-service data portability platform so that all individuals across the web could easily move their data between online service providers whenever they want."
It’s a collaborative effort among the tech giants of today -- Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter. And if you look at that list, that’s pretty much all the companies that hold most of our data. What is this project anyway? It’s basically a way for anyone on any of those company’s social networks to move around with all their data and just as easily upload that data to where they want to go. This means that if you want to leave Facebook, you can download all of your data from Facebook and that data can be uploaded to wherever social network you want to go and that new network will know how to read and handle your data from there.
Work on the project has been at it for the last year or so. Facebook has launched a tool recently, albeit only for photos, and exclusively testing it in Ireland that uses the Data Transfer Project codes. If this is successful and everything works as advertised, this could be a new fork on the road towards having more control over one’s personal data on today’s social media networks.