August 2, 2011 archive

Aug 02

Facebook Acquires eBook Maker Push Pop Press – See The TED Video To Understand

PushpoppressIs Facebook going to get into eBook publishing? That was the first question I had when I saw the news that Facebook has acquired Push Pop Press, developers of a very cool eBook technology that was used mainly by Al Gore for his latest "Our Choice" book. The announcement on Push Pop Press' site said this:
Now we're taking our publishing technology and everything we've learned and are setting off to help design the world's largest book, Facebook.

Although Facebook isn't planning to start publishing digital books, the ideas and technology behind Push Pop Press will be integrated with Facebook, giving people even richer ways to share their stories. With millions of people publishing to Facebook each day, we think it's going to be a great home for Push Pop Press.

Which was similarly confirmed in a statement from Facebook that was published on All Things D (and other sites):

Facebook isn’t planning to get into the digital book business, but some of the ideas and technology behind Push Pop Press will be integrated with Facebook

I'd not seen their book myself prior to this news, but to understand how cool Push Pop Press' "publishing technology" is, check out the video of co-founder Mike Matas' demoing the technology at TED:

It will be fascinating to see how Facebook adds Push Pop Press' technology into the Facebook user experience... could be fun!

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

Aug 02

New Android Malware/Trojan Records Your Phone Calls

AndroidtrojanNews out of the CA Security Advisor Blog today is that there is a new piece of Android malware that records phone calls that you make on an Android phone. The post author, Dinesh Venkatesan, goes into some detail about what they found – and how they found it – in testing this malware.

While this is not a “VoIP” issue, per se, as the trojan seems to record calls over the “regular” phone connection it is a general communications security issue and something we all have to watch out for. Over on the ReadWriteWeb, Dan Rowinski published a good piece putting this malware in context with other recent Android malware.

The net of both posts is that ultimately you need to be extremely careful about the source of applications you are installing on your Android phone – and what permissions you are granting them.

Meanwhile, I expect that we’ll continue to more creativity coming out of the attacker community..

Image credit: CA Security Advisor Blog

Aug 02

Dulwich – a native python way to access Git repositories

Ever wanted to manipulate Git repositories directly in python? Well, okay… I haven’t really myself, but in writing about Google Code’s support for git yesterday, I noticed that they are using Dulwich, a native python implementation of git. Rather than wrapping command-line git with python scripts, Dulwich is a python module giving you direct access to a git repository. As shown in the Dulwich tutorial, creating a new repo is simply this:

>>> from dulwich.repo import Repo
>>> from os import mkdir
>>> mkdir("myrepo")
>>> repo = Repo.init("myrepo")
>>> repo
<Repo at 'myrepo'>

Once a repo is created (or you connect to an existing repo), you can do what you would do with git at the command line: adding files to the repo, committing files, and changing files.

While I don’t know that I personally will use this… it’s very cool that Dulwich is out there for python programmers who want to interact with git repos. Very cool to see!