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Saturday, June 21, 2014
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England Eliminated From World Cup 2014: The ‘Years of Hurt’ Continue
With Costa Rica’s shock 1-0 victory over Italy, England has been eliminated from the World Cup. The gloomy postmortem has begun, but team manager Roy Hodgson is not resigning.
Laszlo Balogh/Reuters
The English way to lose at football is with drama, and as much delirious hubris as a 90-minute game, plus extra time and penalties—in short, a total national nervous breakdown—can encompass. Add dark irony, or tears, or should-have-beens. The nation, as one, typically cannot believe the referee didn’t award that free kick at that key moment. Oh no, descend millions of heads in hands…it’s gone to penalty shootout.
We do not—national pride and all that—crash out of the World Cup meekly, having lost two matches, and wind up humiliatingly eliminated not as a result of those two matches but because of the shock success of another team.
But that is football-mad England’s sad, dispiriting tale of World Cup 2014: We leave the competition not with a bang but a whimper, after Costa Rica’s surprise 1-0 victory over Italy in Group D on Friday. We are still down to play Costa Rica on Tuesday, but the result is inconsequential. At least the Costa Ricans’ place in the last 16 is thoroughly, hearteningly deserved: Their games against Uruguay and Italy have shown how seriously they should be taken as giant-slayers, and contenders. England could learn a lot from them.
“The World Cup for me would have been a better place with England in it, but you have to earn the right to stay in a tournament. Unfortunately for us, we have not done that, former captain Rio Ferdinand told the BBC.
The fact that the United States remains in the competition is especially galling: Football is our game. The national refrain Friday night is an all-round “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
An anti-climactic end is not the World Cup storyline that English fans anticipated. It’s not that, as a country, England is bullish enough to expect victory. Part of the football bug in England is the tantalizing, almost-alien prospect of winning big, burnished by years of failure and if-onlys. The notion of winning has a typically English mordancy attached to it. The willing masochism of being an England supporter is innate.
Observe the lyrics of "Three Lions," the laddishly-chanted song originally released in 1996 for that year’s European Championship: “Thirty years of hurt / Never stopped me dreaming.” Everything in England’s football culture is still wired to the elation around our victory in the 1966 World Cup. The yearning of the song is in the gap it evokes between belief and reality, hope against hope: the pain and glory of the national game.
Given the length of time elapsed between 1966 and now, the English football fan’s relationship with the national team is best encapsulated as a long, crisis-strewn marriage, without the benefit of couples counseling and with the certainty that crisis follows crisis. But it is impossible to walk away.
England, especially at moments like the World Cup, is football-obsessed; town and city centers during major competitions are a blurry mass of beer-drinkers draped in St. George’s flags. If a goal is scored, the streets reverberate with cheers and honking horns. And when we lose, well…then we express the depth of our misery with either the sober English way of looking down and being gloomy, or—fueled by furious glugging of lager—fighting in the street.
Now, with World Cup failure, the country can unite for another favorite sport: looking for suitable heads to be placed, sacrificially, on platters.
After England’s 2-1 defeat against Uruguay on Thursday, the team’s manager, Roy Hodgson, said he wouldn’t quit the job. “I don’t have any intention to resign. I’ve been really happy with the way the players have responded to the work we’ve tried to do. I’m bitterly disappointed, of course, but I don’t feel I need to resign, no. On the other hand, and if the Football Association think I’m not the right man to do the job, that will be their decision and not mine.”
The FA’s chairman, Greg Dyke, strongly signaled the organization’s support of Hodgson, who is contracted to stay in the post through the Euro 2016 championships in France. “We’re supportive of Roy Hodgson, we’ve asked him to stay as manager,” Dyke said. “We do not see any value in changing. We think Roy has done a good job and it is an approach over four years and we hope to do better in the European Championships.”
Dyke has also said his eyes are on the prize of the 2022 World Cup, which he believes England can win, “but I think it means lots of changes in English football. I think there is a real chance that we can develop and win in 2022—that is the aim.”
Former England winger Chris Waddle attributed England’s exit to the professional league at home. “The Premier League is different to any league the world and that is our big problem,” he said. “It’s frustrating, because we have everything we need—money, facilities—but it comes down to coaching, and we have to get something right about producing players. The Premier League is a great advert for our football but it does our national team no good whatsoever.”
The one perhaps-positive upshot of such a quiet, sad exit is that the hand-wringing may not be as hysterical as before, although if the manager escapes blame for the team’s failure at the World Cup, the scalping spotlight may fall instead on the team’s captain, the popular Steven Gerrard, and squad.
Apparently, last Sunday, Gerrard warned the team “of the long, miserable summer facing the entire England entourage should they end up watching the World Cup knockout phase from the safe distance of a belated summer holiday,” according to BBC Sport. Now that has come to pass, and both team and fans are forced to watch the competition play out without England’s participation. They can also listen ruefully to “Three Lions”: The “thirty years of hurt” will become 50 before the vista of Euro 2016—because, as any England supporter knows, there’s always next time.
Researchers reveal massive security hole in Google app store that puts millions at risk: 'secret keys' discovered that can reveal user's private information...
- Bug put millions of users at risk
- Team worked with Google, Facebook and others to fix before revealing their work
A major security flaw in Google's Play Store that could expose user's private data has been revealed by researchers.
The bug, which the team has worked with Google, Facebook and other app makers to fix before revealing it, put millions of users at risk, the researchers said.
The bug would allow hackers to steal user data from Facebook, Amazon and others using 'secret' keys the team uncovered.
The Columbia Engineering Team found thousands of secret keys in android apps (shown by red arrows) that could be used to steal user data
HOW THEY DID IT
The researchers created an app called PlayDrone, which used various hacking techniques to circumvent Google security to successfully download Google Play apps and recover their sources.
They were then able to decompile the apps to see their code.
They then found developers often store their secret keys in their apps software, similar to usernames/passwords info, and these can be then used by anyone to maliciously steal user data or resources from service providers such as Amazon and Facebook.
The research was revealed in a a paper presented—and awarded the prestigious Ken Sevcik Outstanding Student Paper Award—at the ACM SIGMETRICS conference.
Jason Nieh, professor of computer science at Columbia Engineering, and PhD candidate Nicolas Viennot said they were stunned by the scale of their find.
'Google Play has more than one million apps and over 50 billion app downloads, but no one reviews what gets put into Google Play—anyone can get a $25 account and upload whatever they want. Very little is known about what’s there at an aggregate level,' says Nieh
'Given the huge popularity of Google Play and the potential risks to millions of users, we thought it was important to take a close look at Google Play content.'
Nieh and Viennot’s paper is the first to make a large-scale measurement of the huge Google Play marketplace.
The researchers created an app called PlayDrone, which used various hacking techniques to circumvent Google security to successfully download Google Play apps and recover their sources.
PlayDrone scales by simply adding more servers and is fast enough to crawl Google Play on a daily basis, downloading more than 1.1 million Android apps and decompiling over 880,000 free applications.
Google Play, the Android app store, has more than one million apps and over 50 billion app downloads
Nieh and Viennot discovered all kinds of new information about the content in Google Play, including a critical security problem: developers often store their secret keys in their apps software, similar to usernames/passwords info, and these can be then used by anyone to maliciously steal user data or resources from service providers such as Amazon and Facebook.
These vulnerabilities can affect users even if they are not actively running the Android apps.
Nieh claims that even “Top Developers,” designated by the Google Play team as the best developers on Google Play, included these vulnerabilities in their apps.
'We’ve been working closely with Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other service providers to identify and notify customers at risk, and make the Google Play store a safer place,' says Viennot.
'Google is now using our techniques to proactively scan apps for these problems to prevent this from happening again in the future.'
In fact, Nieh adds, developers are already receiving notifications from Google to fix their apps and remove the secret keys.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2664100/Researchers-reveal-massive-security-hole-Google-s-app-store-puts-millions-risk-secret-keys-discovered.html#ixzz35F1ciLc0
A hugely important new Android feature has been confirmed
By
Google has yet to release its next-gen Android OS version, but it looks like one major feature of the new operating system has been confirmed. Xda-developers has discoveredthat commits made to the AOSP master branch on Wednesday night show that Dalvik will be replaced with ART as default. None of that will make sense to many readers, but more experienced Android fans already know what Dalvik and ART are, and why it’s good news that Android will replace the former with the latter.
Dalvik and ART are the old and new runtimes that execute app instructions inside Android. While Dalvik is a Just-in-Time (JIT) runtime that executes code only when it’s needed, ART – which was introduced in Android 4.4 KitKat and is already available to users – is an Ahead-of-Time (AOT) runtime that executes code before it’s actually needed.
Comparisons between Dalvik and ART on Android 4.4 have shown that the latter brings enhanced performance and battery efficiency, although ART wasn’t ready for prime time when KitKat was launched, so Google choose to make it available as an alternative to developers interested in trying it out. However, it appears that Google has further worked on the code, and will make it available as the default runtime to devices running a future version of Android.
Google is expected to unveil more details about its upcoming Android OS in the near future, quite possibly at I/O 2014 next week.
Google Reveals How the Android Wear UI Will Work
When Google announced Android Wear back in March, it illustrated the company’s seriousness about the wearable game. Since then, Google has dropped bread crumbs, slowly painting us a bigger picture of what’s to come with its mobile OS. A new video from the company, released just days before its big I/O conference, outlines some of the main interaction considerations for developers who will be building apps for the inevitable wave of new wrist worn gadgets.
The big takeaway? Interacting with our gadgets is about to get a whole lot simpler. Android Wear’s banner claim is that its interface will free us from the time sucking grid of icons on our smartphones. Instead, the interface will be glanceable; requiring users to engage far less time and attention to get the information they’re looking for.
ANDROID WEAR’S BANNER CLAIM IS THAT ITS INTERFACE WILL FREE US FROM THE TIME SUCKING GRID OF ICONS ON OUR SMARTPHONES. INSTEAD, THE INTERFACE WILL BE GLANCEABLE.
Here’s a quick look at how they’re doing it: The first thing you notice about theAndroid Wear interface is how little there is to notice. In the video’s example of the home screen, you see the time, weather and a “G” icon that will help you navigate to voice or text search. Users simply have to hit the button and say “Ok Google” to make any voice command available.
But it’s not a one-way conversation. Google’s depth of data makes it easy for Android Wear to build a smart context around each user, allowing wearables to know what’s important to a person and when it’s important. For example, based on your calendar or inbox your smartwatch could notify you a few hours before your flight and prompt you to check in.
Another important feature is device-to-device communication. Any notification you get on your phone, you’ll get on your wearable, too. Where a smartwatch diverges from the phone is how it presents that information. Android Wear relies on stacks, which allows developers to bundle multiple notifications together like an inbox, while pages allow more than one glanceable screen of information at a time for one notification. Think of this like flipping through a tiny ebook of notifications. You can combine stacks and pages and reply to any notification through voice activation.
The video covers pretty high-level stuff, but with LG and Motorola already building their own Android Wear smartwatches, you can bet it won’t be long before we get a proper look at what this OS is capable of.
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