North Korea Trumps China On Sensorship And PC Usage Spying

According to the BBC a Russian student studying in North Korea, of all places, has revealed a government created operating system (OS) sold to residents known as Red Star. The OS, according to researchers in South Korea, is aimed at monitoring user activity, though very few North Koreans have computers or Internet access.

It is designed "to control [North Korea's] own information security", a report by South Korea's Science and Technology Policy Institute (STPI) said.

"Due to few applicable programmes available, Red Star will not even by easily distributed in North Korea," it added.

Red Star is Linux-based and is influenced by Microsoft with versions Office embedded and an e-mail system called Pigeon as well as a Mozilla Firefox browser - which opens to the North Korean government website as the home page.

I'm not surprised by this, just that it's made the news! Would we expect anything less of this dictatorship? Perhaps the BBC is simply looking for anything to report other than iPad...

How To: Upgrade To Snow Leopard

Wired's How-To Wiki has a step by step guide for upgrading your Mac to, OS X 10.6, otherwise known as Snow Leopard. In the article Wired promises to "walk you through the things you should do before you make the leap to Snow Leopard, and how to go about the actual installation, including how to install it even if you aren't using its predecessor, OS X 10.5 Leopard." Don't expect major new features however, Snow Leopard is said to be "more about incremental upgrades, refinements and speed boosts."

Top 10 Smartphones in US for Q2

IDC Research has released its' list of the top ten smartphones in the U.S. for the second quarter of '09. The list includess 4 BlackBerry devices and 2 iPhones:

1. BlackBerry Curve (83xx series and 8900)
2. Apple iPhone 3GS (both 16GB and 32GB versions)
3. BlackBerry Pearl (81xx series not including the Pearl Flip)
4. Apple iPhone 3G (8GB and 16GB versions)
5. BlackBerry Bold
6. BlackBerry Storm
7. T-Mobile G1
8. Palm Pre
9. HTC Touch Pro
10. HTC Touch Diamond

The top ten list broken down by smartphone platform:

1. BlackBerry- 4
2. Windows Mobile- 2
3. iPhone- 2
4. WebOS (Pre)- 1
5. Android- 1

I expect the Androids to come on strong for Q4 with dozens of new phones promised.

Google Announces Google Chrome OS

A post on the Official Google Blog introduces Google's latest shot across the bow of Microsoft. "Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google."

Google Chrome OS is said to be able to run on both x86 and ARM chips, and the company is working with OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year saying "... netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010."

It sounds as though this is a cloud computing initiative to rival the efforts of Microsoft and Windows 7. The Chrome OS is said to have a minimal user interface and is made up of "Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel." Applications for the OS will be developed as web apps and therefore will run on any standards-based browser.

iPhone 3.0 Upgrade Causing Some Owners Issues

The reports seem to be mixed over the newest version of the iPhone Operating System. Some users are excited and have reported no issues while others are frustrated after many failed attempts, dubbing the upgrade "iFail". According to the NYTimes Bit Blog "Reports are flooding Twitter and the Web that attempts to upgrade their devices to the latest version of the iPhone operating system are being hit with an error message stating that the “iPhone activation server is unavailable.”" Sounds to me like an indication of just how many iPhones are in the wild, Apple likely didn't expect all of you iPhone users to upgrade at once...

Azure - Microsoft's Operating System For The Cloud

Microsoft unveiled plans on Monday for a new cloud computing operating system dubbed Azure. Microsoft's Ray Ozzie made the announcement in front of 6500 software developers attending the annual Microsoft Developers Conference in Los Angeles. “Every time there is a major platform shift in our industry, it has turned into new opportunities for my apps and my business.” said Ozzie. Not everyone was as optimistic as Mr. Ozzie however, “Today’s announcement of Azure is the same Microsoft, keeping developers locked into their proprietary solutions, and failing to grasp the true power of cloud computing,“ said Mark Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce.com. Whatever your take on the OS is, it will be interesting to see who follows. NY Times story.

Is Windows Collapsing?

Gartner analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald told attendees of a Gartner-sponsored conference in Las Vegas that "Most users do not understand the benefits of Windows Vista or do not see Vista as being better enough than Windows XP to make incurring the cost and pain of migration worthwhile.", during their presentation titled "Windows is Collapsing". The trend amongst developers is not to develop for operating systems but rather develop for the web. There is much speculation that this revelation is driving Microsoft's attempts to merge with Yahoo! as the OS market holds little promise for them. The CBC has more here.