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The Reg's review of 2014: Naked JLaw selfies, Uber and monkey madness

Put it on a stick and 'cheesie'

Docker, simians and a dead operating system

Fourteen years after it was released, Microsoft finally stopped fixing and updating Windows XP on April 8. From April 9, anybody with a PC still running Windows XP was on their own against hackers and any new viruses. UK.gov was one of those, woefully unprepared for the date and a Reg investigation found tens of thousands of PCs across Whitehall and the NHS would miss the April cut off to migrate. That meant everything with a network or internet connection was vulnerable to hacking or infection: patient systems, government records - the lot.

In financials services, The Reg found two thirds of the UK’s 60,000 cash machines would also miss the date. Banks are stuck between realizing their return on ATMs, which can cost tens of thousands of pounds, and not wanting to put Windows 8 on the machines. In the meantime, the fall back is: ATMs are safe because they don’t connect to the internet.

Things weren’t so tidy in the UK government and nobody at the top was taking a lead: Whitehall left it to the departments and to the NHS. The NHS passed the buck further - down to local organisations - hospitals and trusts to upgrade. Finally, our investigation revealed how Number 10 cut a lifeline deal with Microsoft: Redmond providing custom support and fixes for civil service laggards, but it came at extra cost to the tax payer.

Microsoft’s standard price was $200 per PC doubling in year two; UK.gov reckoned on an overall price of £5.6m for a 12-month contract. The problem was that with so much legacy and so little co-ordination and leadership, could UK.gov be shot of Windows XP by April 2015?

Next up in 2015: end-of-life for Windows Server 2003 - on an estimated eight million UK servers.

Animals have rights, just not on IP

The internet is stuffed with pictures of animals, but animals taking pictures? Now, that’s different. A 2011 photo of a black macaque on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi was picked up by print news titles and circulated the web during the summer. This wasn’t just any photo, however, the cheeky primate took it himself - grabbing the lens from professional photographer David Slater in a moment of human-simian interaction when Slater was on assignment shooting the monkey and his mates.

Monkey Selfie

One monkey not making a fool of you

Once it hit the web Wikipedia nationalized the photo, making it free to World+Dog thereby ensuring Slater didn’t receive a penny in royalties while the Wikimedia Foundation rejected Slater’s unsurprising request to take down the photo. The open-rights crowd sprung to Wikipedia’s defense, arguing the rights of “public domain” and heaping scorn on the selfish Slater. The story followed the photo in sending the internet into meltdown.

Months later the episode is dust but it highlighted an important issue: Yes, the animal took the photo but the shot was clearly part of Slater’s work.

Web firms like Wikipedia rely completely on free content to trade - in this case a photo. It’s the model of Google and all social networks. Wikimedia Foundation couldn’t afford to back down, but there was something distasteful about the sight of a global organization with $60m in cash rolling over the smaller business.<

Developers, developers, developers

Developer event of the year? Completion of HTML 5 done after eight years, landing at a tickle over 1,300 pages. Possibly.

The next chapter of the W3C’s ubiquitous mark-up language was actually finished ages ago - it’s just last few were spent nailing down developing tests to ensure conformity.

What helped it seem done was Steve Jobs: he deployed HTML5 as a weapon in his war against Adobe’s Player in 2010. His war uncorked an outpouring of hype as others exploited the HTML5 angle in everything from web to smart client. Meantime, Apple, Microsoft, Adobe had already been feeding into products.

But HMTL5 wasn’t what all wanted, and had produced a pronounced split between idealists and realists: yes, HTML5 brings integrated video freeing us from proprietary players and arcane coding techniques and yes it embraces SVG, but HTML5 also wraps in a framework for DRM - anathema to some, reality to others.

Web libertarians said a standard for DRM would harm interoperability, a claim that cut W3C to its quick and dragged in web daddy Tim Berners Lee who in 2013 defended the addition saying fragmentation of the web would happen if a DRM spec hadn’t been included.

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