EULA and the Advantage of Free Apps

End User License Agreement – close-up (Photo credit: Brett L.)

‘…Without the public road, and utterly unencumbered access to it, a child’s lemonade stand would never turn a profit. The real business opportunity would be in privatizing other people’s roads.

‘Similarly, without an open, unified network, the whole notion of business online would have been entirely feudal from the start. Instead, it only took a feudal turn around the turn of the century. These days, instead of websites on the open internet, people are more likely to create apps in proprietary stores or profiles on proprietary social media sites…’
Here’s the EULA no one would read

EFF Endorses Twitter’s Safety
EFF: Trust Twitter — but not Apple or Verizon — to protect your privacy
This report reveals tech companies that actively protect user information from government scrutiny

‘…Verizon and MySpace scored a zero out of a possible six stars in a test of how far 18 technology service providers will go to protect user data from government data demands.Twitter and Internet service provider Sonic.net scored a perfect six in the third annual Electronic Frontier Foundation “Who Has Your Back?” report…’
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IBM’s Movie Made from Atoms
The Guinness folks have certified this as the smallest movie ever made

‘A Boy and His Atom is less than 90 seconds long. It doesn’t have much of a plot, or any big laughs. And the animation is rudimentary — it’s monochromatic, blocky and generally reminiscent of the graphics I programmed on my Radio Shack TRS-80 computer in 1978, only not quite as fancy.

‘And yet IBM’s new cartoon — yes, IBM made a cartoon — is remarkable. It was produced at IBM Research’s Almaden Research Center in Northern California, by a bunch of scientists who used a scanning tunneling microscope as their animation tool. The pixels are individual atoms, nudged into place to form a picture…’
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AT&T Is Offering $100 for Your Old Smartphone
‘Starting May 1 (and for a limited time), if you bring a smartphone that’s less than three years old and still in “good, working condition” into an AT&T store, you can get $100 or more to use toward the purchase of a new phone. You’ll have to sign up for a two-year contract with AT&T to get the deal…’
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Scope
Lets you view the formatted HTML source of any message inside Gmail. It cleans them up removing the unnecessary style tags and you can publish the message as a public web page.
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