Dan Seifert from The Verge shows us how the upcoming Photos App for OS X Yosemite will work:

I was looking for a good Photo management app in the last few months, but I was quite disappointed by the solutions available. I wanted something easy to use and with a good UI, but I didn’t wanted to pay an hefty price on cloud storage if it was only used for pictures (like Picturelife). The sweet spot would have been an app using my Dropbox or OneDrive storage, but I didn’t found what I wanted. So I ended up using my OneDrive account to save my collection of digital pictures, because of the unlimited storage that I’ve got with my purchase of Office 365. But the UI of the iOS app is quite… bad.

That’s why I’m totally sold on the upcoming Photos app. I don’t mind paying for iCloud storage, and the UI/UX looks beautiful and powerful. The editing features looks amazing for people like me who fells completely lost with software like Lightroom. And the integration wit iOS is an huge benefit.

With my dad recent purchase of a DSLR, this should be a must-have app for me, even more when I realized that CD backups that my mother made 10 years ago was lost. This should never happen again, and I hope that iCloud and Photos.app will help me with it.

Now, all I need is to buy a Mac (😠 Intel).

Cory Doctorow, for BoingBoing.net, about United Kingdom Prime Minister David Cameron’s proposal of banning all “‘means of communication’ which ‘we cannot read’” :

This, then, is what David Cameron is proposing:

All Britons’ communications must be easy for criminals, voyeurs and foreign spies to intercept

Any firms within reach of the UK government must be banned from producing secure software

All major code repositories, such as Github and Sourceforge, must be blocked

Search engines must not answer queries about web-pages that carry secure software

Virtually all academic security work in the UK must cease – security research must only take place in proprietary research environments where there is no onus to publish one’s findings, such as industry R&D and the security services

All packets in and out of the country, and within the country, must be subject to Chinese-style deep-packet inspection and any packets that appear to originate from secure software must be dropped

Existing walled gardens (like iOS and games consoles) must be ordered to ban their users from installing secure software

Anyone visiting the country from abroad must have their smartphones held at the border until they leave

Proprietary operating system vendors (Microsoft and Apple) must be ordered to redesign their operating systems as walled gardens that only allow users to run software from an app store, which will not sell or give secure software to Britons

Free/open source operating systems – that power the energy, banking, ecommerce, and infrastructure sectors – must be banned outright

David Cameron will say that he doesn’t want to do any of this. He’ll say that he can implement weaker versions of it – say, only blocking some “notorious” sites that carry secure software. But anything less than the programme above will have no material effect on the ability of criminals to carry on perfectly secret conversations that “we cannot read”.

This is a great article about David Cameron’s demagogic proposal of making all the conversations -and by extension, every software- easy to read and to intercept. But his reflection, in the wake of Charlie Hebdo’s terrorist attack, applies to all countries who want to take similar steps.

Making encrypted software unlawful jeopardize freedom of speech, the essence of a democracy. Also, and even if Cameron will defend himself that he is pursuing it, encryption today is deeply needed to keep the web safe from hackers. And if you’re more worried for your money than you are for your liberties, try to think about purchasing something with your credit card on an unencrypted connection. You’ll make quite a lot of people happy (but not you).

Thanks to Next Draft.

***Note:***I didn’t planed to publish this article. I wrote it only for myself on Day One. But I couldn’t repress the need to publish it.

Shocked.

Yesterday morning, Charlie Hebdo was attacked by two heavily armed people. They killed 12 persons, including 2 policemen and a lot of cartoonists, including Charb,…. I loved these guys and their work. Charb’s cartoons, mostly those on Sarkozy, were hilarious. We’re gonna fucking miss them.

I learned the event by my brother, who told it to me when he got back from high school. A couple of hours ago, I received a notification from the Twitter app about @Maitre_Eolas and some people tweeting about #CharlieHebdo. After seeing a picture of a Police Car riddled with bullets, I thought that someone tried to attack the newspaper, since it wasn’t the first time it happened, but with little consequences. The picture was pretty explicit, though. The bullet impacts were extremely well targeted, and would have killed the passenger if there was one. But I had a lot to catch up on my RSS feed, so I moved on quickly.

The reaction on my Twitter feed was unanimous. There was a lot of sadness, because we were losing talented people; and incomprehension (Why were they killed? They were only people who drew things on paper, not assassins; and it’s not like they hated Islam in particular, they were satirical about anything, included every other religions.) But, after the sadness comes the anger, and all those people made me remember that this was the work of a handful of people, not the work of Muslims. And it made me realize that this act, which was supposed to avenge all the Muslims who were offended by the Mahomet’s caricature, put them in danger of a (unfounded and stupid) retaliation for something that they didn’t do and don’t approve.

What I can’t understand is the motive behind those killings. If those morons can’t grasp or handle that a society can be made with people with opposite ideas who can freely and openly discuss about them; and that disturbs them so much that they have to kill those people, well they have a long way to go, and I don’t think that all the ammunition in the world would be enough to eradicate the free world (who greatly outnumbers them). The most effective way of killing this liberty is to prove to us that this liberty is useless, or that it can greatly harm us. If you want to win us over, you have to make your ideas attractive. If you are offended by the publication of Mahomet’s caricatures instead of crying foul about them, just make the publisher irrelevant to the society by proving that you seriously don’t give a shit about it. Magazines like Charlie Hebdo lives from the public debate that they create. If there’s none, there is no interest in publishing them. If you make their work pointless, what they could do doesn’t matter at all, because no one cares.

Seriously, if someone who is writing all of this on a little Field Notes during his job as a cashier, while waiting for his next customer on a very calm evening; you would think that an entire organization could have thought about it. Because, to quote the West Wing¹: “Terrorism is 100% failure rate. Not only terrorist always fail at what they’re after, they pretty much always succeed in strengthening whatever it is they’re against”. Today, France and the French just come out more united than ever, just because of this.

Also, this proves that making ultra-repressive laws² in Parliament is useless. Because if today, with all the legal (and illegal -see the NSA) means that the Secret Services possess, you can’t track people who are carrying automatic weapons to kill people who are under constant protection from the Police, passing harsher laws doesn’t gonna improve the situation. They’re just gonna put civil rights, the one who are put in danger by those terrorist you are fighting against, under more and more pressure.

David Chartier, for Finer Things in Tech:

As interesting as iOS keyboards can be, their initial implementation at the OS level is severely flawed. They’re cumbersome to setup, switching between them is needlessly tedious, and limitations make it difficult to teach users about keyboard features. As far as I can tell, all these problems require solutions and improvements from Apple at the OS level.

You should read the full article : David Chartier sum up quite well the quirks of using multiple keyboards on iOS 8. They are painful to use, and don’t let me start talking about switching between them. Every time that I want to use David Smith’s Emoji++, I drop a tear.

But what’s interesting here too, is the propositions that he makes to improve it. Implementing them in iOS 9 could make what many people saw as the best example of Apple opening up, a feature that works even better than on Android.