Homebrew Computer Club reunion lights up Silicon Valley

Thirty-eight years after the famous club had its first meetings, spawning Apple and many other companies, many of its members got together to share stories of the beginnings of the PC era.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (right) talks to fellow original Homebrew Computer Club member Len Shustek at the club reunion in Mountain View, Calif. Monday night.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- In this corner, it's Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. In that corner, it's phone phreaking pioneer Captain Crunch.

Over there, it's Apple employee No. 1 Bill Fernandez, and across the room, there's Lee Felsenstein, the creator of the world's first mass-produced portable computer, the Osborne.

Welcome to the Homebrew Computer Club reunion, an extremely rare gathering at the Computer History Museum tonight of dozens of the earliest home computer makers. Thirty-eight years after the first meeting of one of the most famous groups in the world of technology, nearly 100 of its original members got together to celebrate the club, themselves, and perhaps most important, the dawning of the personal computer revolution.

"Everybody here is [among] the founding fathers of the home computer industry, the people who started the home computer industry," said John Draper, aka Captain Crunch. "This is amazing. Never have I seen so many prominent [technology] people together in my life."

Draper should know. After all, said Homebrew member Roy Nordblom, Draper "is a wizard."

For those that didn't attend one of the original meetings, which began in the garage of computer engineer Gordon French in March 1975, it's hard to know what the dynamic was like in those days. But walking among the giants of the computer world that came out for the gathering tonight, what seems evident is that what mattered most to these people is their shared interest in what at that time was an extremely nascent pastime.

Though Wozniak was predictably mobbed, many of those waiting to talk to him were young people well aware of his legacy. Among the Homebrew members that came out, though, there was a much less deferential attitude. That is to say, these were contemporaries, people who have passed 38 years watching the industry they helped create grow into one of the world's most important. And for them, it seemed much more like a family reunion than a place to gawk at all-star talent.

Then again, it was also a place to recount famous stories. Woz, for example, told how he had drafted the drawings for the Apple II himself, by hand, but original Apple CEO Mike Scott "prettied them up." Or how, once when he went to an auction and found himself holding documents that were created by famous computer scientist Alan Turing, his reaction was "Whoa, I was just shaking to touch them."

Later, Woz recalled of hearing about the first Homebrew meetings, he thought, "I'll go down and I'll be a hero. [But] they're all talking about this thing called a microprocessor. They're talking 8080, and 8008 [chips] I thought, 'Oh, my gosh, I got so scared, I'm not one of these people that knows what's going on. This is not for me.'"

'Still vertical'
How important was it for living Homebrew members to make it to the reunion? Judging by the fact that original member Marty Spergel couldn't get himself physically to Silicon Valley but made sure he was still there via a telepresence robot, it was pretty important.

With the virtual Spergel rolling through the meeting, members would walk up and greet him almost as if it was actually him. As the robot came up to three members, Spergel asked how they were doing. One, Harry Saal, joked, "We're still vertical, so that's good."

Homebrew Computer Club member Marty Spergel greets fellow club members via telepresence robot at the reunion.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

Indeed, there was a lot of white hair in the room tonight. And not surprisingly. It has been 38 years since the club began. Attending the reunion, said Terry Winograd, a famous computer science professor at Stanford who taught, among others, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, was a "chance to see a lot of them, how grey and old they've gotten, like me."

Winograd actually wasn't a Homebrew member himself. Because he was at Stanford, in the heart of Silicon Valley, at the time the club was founded, he had his own access to "big computers" and didn't need to join. But he was friends with many of the members. These days, he said, he's been seeing a resurgence of the do-it-yourself culture on which the Homebrew Computer Club was founded. It's the "notion that [if] you get a few of the right tools, you can build something interesting."

Unfortunately, Winograd added, though that DIY culture was in evidence in the 1970s, and is again today, there was a long period in the interim when the maker energy was beaten back by the giant companies that came along to dominate the computer industry. "You couldn't compete with Intel," he said.

But perhaps that's exactly why the people who founded the Homebrew Computer Club are such heroes to those for whom computers and technology are as important as breathing.

Though a reunion, tonight's event was open to the public -- via a Kickstarter campaign -- and there were dozens of people far too young to have known the club except as the basis of an origin story. Others, though, simply had a geographic disadvantage.

One of those was Bob Roswell, the owner of a Baltimore computer store and a small vintage computing museum who flew to Silicon Valley for the chance to meet so many of the luminaries he has spent decades looking up to. "Just to meet some of these guys is kind of a dream of a lifetime for me," Roswell said. "I'm in awe to see all the people here."

But if Roswell had been in Silicon Valley in 1975, he could very easily have been part of the group. It was a regular gathering of equals, people who loved computers, and who knew what the advent of these machines could mean.

To Spergel, the club and its members was about establishing "this thing called camaraderie. Looking forward," Spergel added, speaking via the telepresence robot, "it still exists to this day."

And that makes sense. Maybe Woz put it best, speaking to the hundreds of people who came out for the reunion. He recalled the club meetings in the mid-1970s, even before Apple was getting off the ground: They were "the most important day of my life...every other Wednesday night."

(Credit; news.cnet By Daniel Terdiman)

It wasn't easy, but Camera Awesome for Android is here

SmugMug's $3 photography app has options for focus, exposure, editing, and sharing now are on Google's mobile OS -- but Android's awkwardness means that only more popular phones are supported.

Camera Awesome for Android includes a level (the green line across the center) for horizontal shots; a pop-out menu for exposure controls; and the ability to set exposure and focus by tapping on the screen.

(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

It wasn't easy, but SmugMug's Android camera app is here

SmugMug's Camera Awesome, a well-reviewed iOS app for taking and editing photos, has arrived on Android, too. But it wasn't easy getting it there.

For the SmugMug programmers behind the $3 app, it took three tries wrestling with the difficulties of Android development before Tuesday's release was possible. The company began developing the two versions at the same time, but the Android version took 20 months longer to build because its first two development efforts faltered.

Chief Executive Don MacAskill blamed early Android shortcomings -- since fixed -- and persistent fragmentation of the Android market into devices with varying screen sizes, processor capabilities, memory resources, and OS versions.

"It turned out to be so much more difficult than iOS," MacAskill said. "The plethora of devices is a real pain. Earlier versions of Android had some serious issues around memory management, so taking and editing photos was basically the thing you couldn't do without jumping through all kinds of hoops."

The result is that SmugMug supports Camera Awesome only on more recent and widely-used Android phones and tablets.

But MacAskill had plenty of favorable things to say about Android, too, besides that Google has buttoned up the memory problems. He likes its "intents" system, where a program can easily call upon another -- for example, the Twitter app invoking Camera Awesome to take a photo or Camera Awesome invoking the Facebook app to post a photo. And he likes the privileges that Android extends to third-party apps, for example letting people set Camera Awesome as the default camera app, even from a phone's lock screen."We basically drew a line in the sand and said only the most popular models are are supported," MacAskill said. Those devices are the Samsung Galaxy S3 and S4, the Galaxy Nexus, the Nexus 4, 7, and 10, the Sony Xperia Z, the Motorola Moto X and Droid Razr, and the Kindle Fire HDX. The Nexus 5 is in testing, and support with some advanced extra features is coming for devices using Nvidia's Tegra 4 processor such as upcoming HP tablets.

"Easily our No. 1 request on iOS is that our customers want to take over that default camera right on the lock screen. You can't do that on iOS," MacAskill said. "Apple loves their camera and doesn't want to let the rest of us have access on the lock screen."

Want to set your phone to take a shot every few seconds? Camera Awesome has an intervalometer.

(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

SmugMug's primary business is hosting photos on the Web, but with more than 20 million Camera Awesome users on iOS, it's found a loyal following for its mobile app, too. That's not as many users as for Instagram, which already is available for Android, but SmugMug is aiming for more of a premium, enthusiast market.

It's been a long wait for Android users. Smugmug has promised the app for months, most recentlyhinting in September that Camera Awesome for Android was "coming soon."

A better camera app?
Camera Awesome is designed to let people take photos faster than with the standard camera app and to let people apply higher-quality filters than some rival apps offer.

"It allows you to take photos faster and better than most other camera apps. I'm in love with how fast it is," MacAskill said. "It was a requirement for me. I was missing shots of my kids."

Other features in the camera part of the app include an ability to set exposure and focus points depending on where you tap on the screen; an option to turn the entire screen into a shutter-release button, which is handy for taking self-portraits when you can't see the screen; a self-timer to take a shot after a specific delay; an intervalometer to take shots periodically; overlays for a rule-of-third grid and other options; a level that shows when the phone is horizontal.

Once the shot is taken, Camera Awesome offers an "awesomize" button for automatic adjustments and editing options including a variety of color, framing, and texture filters.

"I wanted to apply extremely high-quality filters. You might have fallen in love with special effects on other apps, but on export, you discover they're really low-res. If you look on a desktop, laptop, or even Retina iPhone, you could tell the effect was smeary or jaggy -- a 1-megapixel effect slapped onto an 8-megapixel image." With Camera Awesome, filters are "suitable for display on very high pixel-density displays. You can print it big and put it on your wall," MacAskill said.

With video, the app keeps a rolling record of the most recent 10 seconds of video, appending it when you actually hit the record button. That means it's easier to catch moments you might not expect.

The right side of Camera Awesome's menu options lets you take multiple shots, start the self-timer or intervalometer, and use the whole screen as a shutter release button.

(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Tegra 4 and tablets
In addition, Camera Awesome will get some extra features on devices with the certain hardware, notably Nvidia's Tegra 4 chip. On that hardware, people can take high-speed video for slow-motion recordings; shoot HDR shots that combine three photos into one for a dynamic range that better spans dark and bright regions, and use "tap-to-track," which keeps focus on a subject, even when that subject leaves the frame and comes back in.

The "awesomize" button on iOS takes a couple seconds to generate a preview image and 10 or 20 seconds to create the finished product, but things are different on Google's mobile OS. "On Android, we have a better algorithm. It's instantaneous," he said. The company plans to bring that feature to iOS later.

Camera Awesome works on both tablets and phones. People ridicule tablet photographers, but MacAskill had a change of heart during a family vacation to Disney World when he saw just how often people were using them. He started forcing himself and SmugMug employees to use them, too.

"It's a great device to take videos and photos with, especially if you take videos of kids. Shooting on a camera or phone takes you out of the action -- you're focused on a tiny screen. Shooting on a tablet is sort of like shooting through a window so you're more engaged with the action going on."

No Windows Phone support for now
SmugMug aims itself at photography enthusiasts, so what about a version for Windows Phone, a move that would bring the software to customers who enjoy photo-first smartphones such as the Lumia 1520 and 1020, which will take not just JPEGs but also raw-format photos?

"They seem to have their heads on straight around photography," MacAskill said, but wouldn't make any promises about Camera Awesome support. "We'd love to help everyone in the world shoot and share better photos, but we don't have anything to announce for Windows Phone right now."

On iOS, Camera Awesome is free, but SmugMug charges for various in-app upgrades. In the future, though, SmugMug might move to Android's up-front payment instead, MacAskill said.

In-app purchases work well for mobile games where they are good to replenish resources that run out, but not for something like Camera Awesome. "A free-with-in-app-purchases app doesn't compare revenue-wise," MacAskill said.

There's been some halo effect in which app users convert to SmugMug's photo-sharing business, but not as much as MacAskill would like. He's reluctant to promote SmugMug beyond making it the top sharing option, though.

So how much money does the app bring in compared to hosting photos and photographers' photo sales sites? Not a huge amount.

"Currently I'd categorize it as an experiment," he said. "It is not significant compared to our Web business, which has been around for 11 years. It has billions of photos and millions of paying customers."

MacAskill said he still hasn't figured out the right balance to strike between selling Camera Awesome and hosting photos.

"We don't know where it fits in terms of our larger plan," he said. "We're still in shock that it is as popular as it is."

(Credit; news.cnet By Stephen Shankland)

New zero-day bug targets IE users in drive-by attack

Computers infected with malware after visiting a "strategically important Web site," security firm FireEye warns.

A pair of vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer are currently being exploited in the wild to install malware on computers that visit at least one malicious Web site, security researches warn.

The classic drive-by download attack targets the English versions of IE 7 and 8 in Windows XP and IE 8 on Windows 7, security firm FireEye warned in a company blog post Friday. However, the security researcher wrote that its analysis indicated that other languages and browser version could be at risk.

"The exploit targets the English version of Internet Explorer, but we believe the exploit can be easily changed to leverage other languages," FireEye researchers Xiaobo Chen and Dan Caselden wrote. "Based on our analysis, the vulnerability affects IE 7, 8, 9 and 10."

The second of the two holes is an information leakage vulnerability that is used to retrieve the timestamp from the program executable's header.

"The timestamp is sent back to the attacker's server to choose the exploit with a ROP chain specific to that version of msvcrt.dll," the pair wrote. "This vulnerability affects Windows XP with IE 8 and Windows 7 with IE 9."

The exploit's "ROP chain," or return-oriented programming, is a technique for disguising executable code from security defenses.

FireEye wrote in a follow-up post that further analysis found that the exploit was part of an advanced persistent threat (APT) in which attackers inserted the exploit code directly "into a strategically important website, known to draw visitors that are likely interested in national and international security policy."

Further distinguishing this exploit from others is that the payload was delivered without first writing to disk, a technique that "will further complicate network defenders' ability to triage compromised systems, using traditional forensics methods," the researchers wrote.

"Specifically, the payload is shellcode, which is decoded and directly injected into memory after successful exploitation via a series of steps," FireEye researchers wrote in the latest post. "By utilizing strategic Web compromises along with in-memory payload delivery tactics and multiple nested methods of obfuscation, this campaign has proven to be exceptionally accomplished and elusive. APT actors are clearly learning and employing new tactics."

FireEye did not identify the affected Web but said the attacks can be mitigated by using Microsoft's Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET).

(Credit; news.cnet).

About that iPad Mini Retina availability: It's like this...

However unintentional, limited availability of the iPad Mini with Retina Display means Apple can nudge consumers to buy the potentially less-popular iPad Air.

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that the iPad Mini with Retina Display sales launch may be one of the most product-constrained to date for Apple.

The prevailing wisdom is that Apple can't get enough displays. There are enough credible analysts -- some speaking with CNET -- and reports that it's likely to be true.

Even CEO Tim Cook sounded less-than-optimistic about the new Mini when he said last month that "it's unclear whether we'll have enough for the quarter or not."

In other words, it's more than just a convenient reason for Apple to stagger the release of theiPad Air and iPad Mini Retina.

But that actually isn't a terrible strategy -- however unintentional. Launch both the iPad Air and iPad Mini Retina (the latter with hypothetical plentiful supply) at the same time, and the $399 Mini could bury the $499 Air, relegating it quickly to an also-ran.

After all, the Mini has been doing just that: killing off the iPad 4.

So, here's one possible scenario: Apple announces later this month that it will make the new Mini available for orders. But, as expected, there are too few to go around. Meanwhile, the iPad Air, by comparison, is readily available.

And that's not a bad argument. I've been using the iPad Air since last Friday, when it went on sale. Though the iPad Air moniker may be a slight misnomer (the Mini is the real "Air"), the iPad Air does narrow the wide size-weight gulf that existed between the iPad 4 and the iPad Mini.So, Apple is able to partially satisfy a long-standing hunger for an iPad Mini Retina (consumers and analysts would howl in protest if it didn't), but it can also continue to nudge consumers who can't get one because of limited supply to the potentially less-popular iPad Air: "Hey, if you want a thin, light, Retina iPad right now, there's always the Air."

Before the iPad Air, jumping from the iPad Mini to the iPad 4 was a little like jumping out of a Ford Fiesta into a Super Duty F-350 Ford pick-up (an exaggerated car analogy, but you get the idea).

So, I'll stick with my prediction about the iPad Mini Retina, but the iPad Air does make the wait a lot less painful.

iPad Mini (top) and iPad Air.

(Credit; Brooke Crothers & news.cnet)

Livestream cues up Android app for the masses.

exclusive The company in a two-way race to be the Internet's prime live-event streamer catches up with Ustream by adding an Android app to watch and broadcast live video on the go.

Fresh off powering the first live Internet video stream from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for Twitter's initial public offering, Livestream is making a public offering of its own.

The company, which is vying with Ustream to become the go-to place for live Web broadcasting and viewing, Friday launched an app for Android that lets users both broadcast live video and watch it in one program.

The new app replaces and expands the company's previous app for Android, the Google operating system that holds more than 80 percent of the world's smartphone market. The former app, called Livestream for Producers, was designed only for broadcasting and was meant mostly for professionals.

The new app is meant for anybody, and it integrates viewing of live or archived video with simple live filming and broadcasting. It introduces push alerts that let users know when one of the accounts they follow is starting to broadcast live, which will come in handy for people who have a favorite Kitten Cam they don't want to miss.

The app's "featured video" page is populated by the top picks of the Livestream editorial team, and it has a homepage based on what an individual user follows.

To broadcast an event, you press a camera icon, select either a pre-existing event or create an event right then, and tap a big red button to start streaming. The app instantly provides a URL to share your stream, and you can post a link to Facebook or Twitter while filming, which will create and insert a still frame from the video in your post. As soon as you start streaming, your followers get a notification on their devices, and people can chat with you or other watchers while it's happening.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Max Haot touted the social integrations as expanding online networks to a new place.

"There is no social network out there that has yet built that capability to show my friends what is going on right now with video," he said. "You have Skype and Google Hangouts, but that's more one-on-one."

Except that Livestream's main rival allows that kind of sharing too.

(Credit: Livestream)

Livestream is in a two-way race with Ustream to become the predominant live-streaming platform, with companies like Netflix and YouTube already dominating the market for online video on demand. (YouTube has a live division, but it allows broadcasters to stream live only if their channel meets a threshold number of subscribers.)

Live video has long been a trickier proposition than that of on-demand video, which has the benefit of lead time to prepare and polish its content and the technology behind it before video is viewed. Live-streaming must work toward the goal of getting the most popular content to the most people, while facing a more challenging technological feat: bringing high-definition video at an adaptive bit rate that won't look like a pixelated mess on 50-inch plasma.

As its technology has advanced to the point at which making live video look good is no longer the biggest hurdle, Livestream and Ustream have been the main platforms emerging for popular use.

Livestream gets more than 35 million unique visitors per month and has more than 75,000 events per month, with $18.8 million in revenue in 2012 and currently 144 workers.

Ustream powers about 40,000 streams per day, and hit 2 billion viewer hours earlier this year. It expects to have 20 million registered users by year's end, and it has 200 employees.

It also already has iPhone, iPad and Android apps that allow users to broadcast live video, with some of those social integrations Haot extolled.

Livestream, which has an app for iPhone and iPad too, noted that its new Android app is free without ads, while Ustream requires payment for an ad-free experience. Livestream also trumpeted its reliability, saying its previous Android broadcasting app was "the only one Vice reporter/citizen journalist Tim Pool has ever been able to use in fluctuating 3G/4G conditions while covering protest in Turkey, Cairo and Brazil this year."

"He has been using Ustream for years but switched to Livestream when he started working for Vice because ours was the only app that would work," the company said in an email.

Livestream is hoping other Android users will too.

(Credit; http://news.cnet.com)

Vodafone fails on 3G mobile coverage.

Mobile firm Vodafone has been rapped by regulator Ofcom for failure to meet its coverage obligations the BBC reports.

When 3G mobile spectrum licences were awarded in 2000, they included an obligation to roll services out to 80% of the population. In 2010 this was increased to 90%.

EE, Three and O2 are deemed to have successfully met this obligation.

But Vodafone falls short by 1.4%. It has promised to rectify this by the end of 2013.

It will involve rolling out 3G to more mobile masts than it had originally intended.

"Ofcom is fully aware of our plans to ensure compliance by the end of this year," the firm said in a statement.

"Our network investment stands at more than £900m this year alone and we remain on track to deliver indoor coverage across 2G, 3G and 4G to 98% of the population by 2015, two years ahead of the regulator's deadline," it added.

Ofcom will monitor its progress and reassess its 3G coverage in January 2014.

Improved services

Mobile coverage is a huge bugbear for consumers and one that Ofcom is determined to prioritise.

Recently it produced a report suggesting that mobile coverage on Britain's roads was poor. Next year it will report on the mobile coverage on the country's railways.

Matthew Howett, an analyst with research firm Ovum thinks that it will be little hardship for Vodafone to comply.

"I don't see it being very much of an issue for them to catch up and quite probably it will happen before the end of the year,"

Customers can take heart from the current 4G rollouts, he said.

"4G coverage will be better and much more likely to be complied with given the spectrum at 800MHz travels further distances and penetrates buildings well."