WordPress posted an alert today that some plugins had been modified with suspicious backdoors – check this article if you use either AddThis, WPtouch, or W3 Total Cache
Apple’s Mobile-Me-too?
There really wasn’t anything revolutionary about this weeks iCloud announcement from Apple, and left me feeling that this was a ‘me-too’ catch up from Apple to give it’s devote iOS users some equivalent features to what Android and Google users have been enjoying for the past few years already.
Android is clearly still ahead of the game with it’s cloud-based solution which seamlessly syncs your Android device address book and calendar with Google’s online web-based address book and calendar both which already have a great online web-based interface too – something which was not included in this version of Apple’s iCloud, and both cleanly integrated with Google’s killer web-based email, GMail. Cnet gave the nod to Google and Android in this regard, but listed many other features that said put iCloud ahead of the competition, but I still don’t see it. Other than the ability to sync music to the cloud without actually performing an upload (put only songs’ you’ve already purchased via iTunes, which for some users will be less than useful), this was very much a catch-up release just to keep Apple in the game. It’s interesting really since MobileMe could have been everything that Google’s cloud based services already is, but maybe the timing wasn’t right, and at the time the $99 price definitely was not right – Apple acknowledged this and dropped the price for iCloud.
So is there anything compelling that would make me move from using Google’s cloud-based services with Android to using iOS with iCloud? In summary, no.
Will Apple offer a cloud based offering better than $99 Mobile Me?
Given that you can get other cloud based offerings elsewhere FOR FREE including syncing of contacts, email, and file storage like Dropbox, online music lockers like Google and Amazon, it’s always surprised me that Apple’s Mobileme still exists. It also still surprises me that Apple’s service still costs anything at all, let alone 99 bucks.
Will be interesting to see what Apple announces today re. their cloud offering.
Competing music cloud offerings
Everyone has (or is about to announce) their own cloud based music offering right now. I’ve got almost all my mp3s of every CD I own uploaded to Google Music, the new albums I buy from Amazon mp3 are stored in their cloud offering, and now Apple is expected to launch their offering.
The film industry apparently has a cloud based offering cooking, called Ultraviolet, which is expected to layout the standards for offering cloud based movies. Pretty soon, all music and video physical formats will disappear, or at least become niche like vinyl.
Now we just need to get bigger pipes to our houses, oh, and remove the ridiculous capping on monthly bandwidth usage. AT&T – if you implement the 150GB bandwidth cap for my neighborhood then we’re switching to Comcast cable.