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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 10 declined, 6 accepted (16 total, 37.50% accepted)

Submission + - French president Emmanuel Macron compares 5G opponents to Amish (euractiv.com)

Submitted by neutrino38
neutrino38 writes: From Euractiv

“France is the country of the Enlightenment, it is the country of innovation [] We are going to debunk all false ideas. Yes, France is going to take the 5G turning point because it is the turning point of innovation”, Macron insisted in front of a hundred French Tech entrepreneurs gathered at the Élysée.

“I hear a lot of voices saying that the complexity of contemporary problems should be addressed by returning to the oil lamp! I don’t think that the Amish model can solve the challenges of contemporary ecology,” the head of state said.

Meanwhile, AT&T 5G is tested as slower than 4G

https://mobile.slashdot.org/st...

and in China, some 5G tower are switched of during the night because of power consumption.

https://www.scmp.com/abacus/te...

Welcome to the future.

Submission + - iOS 10 deprecate crutial API for VoIP and communication apps (apple.com)

Submitted by neutrino38
neutrino38 writes: iOS 10 has been released in september 2016. It contains a technical change that has been overlooked by the general public. It deprecates an API that is crutial for VoIP and other instant messaging applications that enable to keep one socket active despite of the fact that the application would run in background. As replacement, developpers needs to use the PushKit: when an incoming call is to be forwarded to an iOS VoIP client

the VoIP infrastructure needs to :
  • withold the call
  • contact Apple push infrastructure using a proprietary protocol to wake up the client app remotely
  • wait for the application to reconnect to the infrastructure and release the call when it is ready

This "I know better than you" approach is ment to further optimize battery life on iOS devices by avoiding the use of resources by apps running in background. It has also the positive effect to force developpers to switch to push model and remove all periodic pollings that ultimately use mobile data and clog the Internet.

However, the decision to use an Apple infrastructure has many consequences for VoIP providers:

  • in order to serve iOS app, those infrastructure will need to be tied with Apple service so the reliability of serving incoming calls is directly bound to Apple service.
  • Apple may revoke the PushKit certificate. It has then life and death decision power over third party communication infrastructures.
  • organisation wanting to setup IPBX and use iOS client have no option but to open access for the push services of Apple in their firewall.
  • It is not possible to have iOS VoIP or communication client in network disconnected from the Internet.
  • Pure standard SIP client are now broken on iOS

This is the perfect walled garden. Ironically, the only VoIP "app" that is not affected is the (future ?) VoLTE client that will be added to iOS one day.May be the day of over the top communication services are numbered on iOS.

Submission + - French politician uses hologram to hold meeting in two cities at the same time. (lemonde.fr)

Submitted by neutrino38
neutrino38 writes: The French presidential election is approaching fast. One of the candidate, Jean-Luc Melanchon used an hologram to hold two public meeting at once. With a political program that is mostly socialist and very left leaning, some people pointed out that he used private innovation to stand out from the crowd.
Microsoft

Submission + - Side By Side assemblies: DLL Hell 2.0 (dotnetmonster.com)

Submitted by neutrino38
neutrino38 writes: This is an alert for all developers using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.

At the beginning of January, Microsoft issued a security fix for Visual Studio 2005 forcing the use of news dynamic libraries (DLLs) by all application compiled with this IDE. Basically, the application compiled with Visual Studio 2005 will not work anymore on ordinary (non dev) PC unless the newer DLL are to be installed. And we found out that happened on fully updated PCs. I posted a detailed article here: http://www.ives.fr/index.php/blog/post/19 for those needing more technical details.

For those who are not familiar with the Microsoft world, native microsoft applications written in C++ rely on dynamic libraries. Two of them are famous or infamous: MSVCRT.DLL and MFCxx.dll. Because of the evolution and other security fix, multiple version of these DLL were often present in the system causing application instability. Where Linux resorted to some simple suffix notation on the dynamic libraries, Microsoft created a new beast in 2001: the Side By Side assemblies http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-5032712.html. These are basically DLLs with a comanion XML files that identify them. The XML file contains a digital signature and when the system binds these DLL dynamically to an application, it checks the match and check that the signature of the DLL matches the DLL itself.

When everythings runs well, this is pretty transparent. But when issues arises, it becomes excruciatingly difficult to troubleshoot and fix. DLL hell is not over.
The Internet

Submission + - AMF specifications get public (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by
neutrino38
neutrino38 writes: "Adobe released the specification of the AMF format. This was the format used by Flash Remoting, the equivalent of AJAX for the Flash world.

The article did not refer to the AMFPHP project and the fact that some German and Canadian guys already reverse engineered the format a long time ago. This disclosure will also remove a long standing legal uncertainty that prevented to use AMFPHP for commercial projects too openly.

Secondly, we need to note that Adobe does not document its RTMP protocol used to contact Flash Media server. This later protocol is more iteresting in terms of possibilities as it provides:
  • Sessionful operation
  • Media streaming
  • Remote procedure call both client side and server side using AMF format
  • Shared objects between several sessions and server side events


Fortunately, this protocol has partially been reverse engineered by people of the red5 project. I would suggest that the W3C should take a look at the whole Flash ecosystem if they think about upgrading the HTTP protocol."
Media

Submission + - Ex HP over hyped CEO hired by Fox News (iht.com)

Submitted by neutrino38
neutrino38 writes: The International Herald Tribune reports that Fox News hired Carly Fiorina ex HP CEO. Such an interesting move will certainly bring support to those who viewed her as the over hyped CEO who killed the orginal corporate engineering culture know as the HP way.

The article, off course does not elaborate on this aspect of things. Slashdot has previously reported her demise from HP and some comments mentioned some HP employee dancing in the cubicle then.

Carly on Faux News? Must be slashdotted!

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