Tech News Roundup for April 6, 2021
After taking April Fools Day off from the internet, here are a few of the stories I’ve found interesting over the last couple days
LG Shutting Down Its Mobile Phone Business
LG has been making cell phones since well before the iPhone, but after years of financial losses, and unable to find a buyer for the business, the company is officially winding down its mobile phone business. LG phones haven’t been popular in the high end for years, but the company is actually the #3 phone manufactuer in the US still, though the vast majority of those phones are very inexpensive phones that have very little profit margin.
Seeing a large company leave the market is unfortunate, because LG was a company willing to take risks with phone design, and that will be missed.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/4/22346084/lg-exits-smartphone-business
US Supreme Court Decides Decade Long Google and Oracle Case
It was 10 years ago that Oracle sued Google, claiming that Google infringed on copyright when Google designed Android to use the java programming language. It has been going through the courts ever since, and the US Supreme Court issued the final ruling on the case, ruling 6-2 for Google.
This case can get very technical very fast, but the core was with Application Programming Interfaces, or API’s. An API is a way to allow software developers to connect their apps to the operating system in a standard way. Google and Appple, for example, build a camera API that allows developers to use a smartphone camera in their apps without having to build the entire system from scratch, for example.
Google admitted to copying some of the Java API’s for use in Android, but said that its work constituted fair use, and that the interoperability created a “transformative experience” which is one instance of fair use under US law. Google argued using those API’s in Android benefited Oracle because it increased usage of Java.
A US Federal Appeals court actually ruled for Oracle, but the US Supreme Court overturned that ruling. The ruling itself is fascinating because it is well reasoned, and actually reads like the court understand the concept of API’s and programming interfaces. This ruling is widely regarded as a positive in the technology sector, as ruling for Oracle could have completely crippled software interoperability and would have made software development much more difficult, and expensive. This is a win not for Google, but for most of the internet.
Facebook User Data Leaks Online
A few days ago very scary “533 Million Facebook Users Data Has Been Leaked” headlines made the rounds. Without downplaying what is still a big dump of data, what is worth pointing out is that most of the data in this “leak” was already publicly available on the internet for anyone to see, but it was scraped and gathered by one entity in 2019. There is some data that wasn’t publicly available in the dataset, but most of the data was already public. This looks scarier than it is, but should serve as a warning as to how much information is available on the internet on most of us.