New job posting suggests Nokia may still be considering Android after all

Nokia (NOK) may finally be crying “uncle!” on its decision to go solely with Windows Phone. Per Gizmodo, Nokia has posted a new job listing on its LinkedIn page for a principle software engineer whose job will be to oversee the development of “embedded Linux device software and hardware drivers for our exciting new products.” As Gizmodo notes, Android is based on a Linux kernel so it’s possible that whatever the new software engineer does, it might involve Google’s (GOOG) hugely popular open-source mobile operating system. Nokia chairman Risto Siilasmaa said this past summer that his company has a backup plan in place in case Windows Phone doesn’t catch on, so it’s within the realm of possibility that Nokia could be giving Android a second look.

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Nokia debunks rumor that it may be considering shift to Android

A recent job listing on Nokia’s (NOK) LinkedIn page led to a great deal of speculation that the Finnish vendor was still considering Android as a potential smartphone platform in the event its efforts with Windows Phone continued to flounder. The listing sought a principle software engineer to lead the development of “embedded Linux device software and hardware drivers for our exciting new products.” Nokia spokesman Doug Dawson on Sunday confirmed that the job listing does not relate to the development of Android phones, but rather to the company’s mobile mapping solutions. “Our recently posted job is linked to our HERE Maps support for other platforms, including iOS and Android,” Dawson wrote on his Twitter account. Nokia recently launched HERE Maps for the iPhone and iPad, and the company now has to launch a similar solution for Android devices.

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$120 tablet that runs both Android and Linux to launch in early 2013

For anyone who has ever used his or her Android tablet and wished that it could double as a desktop-style device, PengPod has a product just for you. Ars Technica reports that the new PengPod tablet, which runs both Android and Linux, has met its crowd-sourced fundraising goals and will so on sale in January for $120 a 7-inch model and $185 for a 10-inch model. According to Ars, the tablet will be able to “dual-boot Android 4.0 and a version of Linux with the touch-friendly KDE Plasma Active interface.” Overall, the tablet received funding of nearly $73,000, or around 49% more than the $49,000 that the company had been seeking.

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Habla el hombre que definió qué significa ser un hacker

Soy un hacker." La frase la pronuncia, sin titubeos, Pekka Himanen, un finlandés de 39 años que publicó, en 2001, La ética del hacker y el espíritu de la era de la información , un libro fundacional en su análisis de lo que significa la tecnología moderna en nuestra sociedad, y la influencia que tendrán los hackers en la sociedad futura. El hombre no acuñó el término, por supuesto (que ya estaba en uso desde los '70), pero su libro modificó la comprensión que se tiene de la filosofía detrás de un hacker.
La entrevista está por comenzar. El punto de encuentro es un hotel céntrico de la ciudad de Buenos Aires, pero en lugar de recibirnos en el salón exclusivo reservado con este fin, el filósofo Himanen (recibido en la universidad de Helsinki a los 20 años) prefiere reunirse en el café del hotel, rodeado de gente y atento a su entorno.
Este hombre, que hoy es profesor en la Universidad de Arte y Diseño de Helsinki, y profesor visitante de la Universidad de Oxford y el Instituto IN3 de Barcelona, y miembro del Instituto Helsinki para la Tecnología de la Información (HIIT) es autor, también, de El Estado del bienestar y la sociedad de la información: el modelo finlandés , que realizó junto con el sociólogo español Manuel Castells.
Himanen llegó a nuestro país invitado por la Universidad Nacional de San Martín, la Universidad Diego Portales y por la Fundación OSDE, pero además de esta convocatoria también lo trajo una de sus grandes pasiones: la investigación. "Estamos estudiando, junto con Manuel Castells, qué tipo de modelo de desarrollo nuevo se necesita después de la crisis mundial. Me refiero a un modelo de desarrollo económico combinado con desarrollo humano. Creo que es fundamental combinar una economía sustentable con el bienestar sustentable", sostiene al comenzar la entrevista. Según cuenta el filósofo, Argentina es parte de un gran estudio que está llevando a cabo en distintos países de América latina, Asia, África, Estados Unidos y Europa.
¿Usted se considera un hacker?
Sí, claro que sí. Para mí un hacker es alguien creativamente apasionado por lo que hace y quiere hacerlo con otros. No necesariamente tiene que tener que ver con las computadoras, se puede ser hacker del conocimiento o de cualquier otro campo. Es importante decir que utilizo el término hacker en el sentido original del término, que no quiere decir delincuente informático.
¿Y usted es hacker en qué área o con qué especialización?
Yo diría en la filosofía, investigación y quizás en la vida.
¿Cómo es eso?
La etica del hacker es un libro que también habla sobre la filosofía de vida, es decir, uno tiene que preguntarse a sí mismo: ¿cuál es mi pasión creativa? ¿Qué es lo que le da significado a mi vida? Esas son grandes preguntas que todos deberíamos considerar.
Popularmente el término hacker tiene una mala connotación pero según usted explica, es un error. En su libro menciona otro término: cracker ¿Cuál es la diferencia entre ambos?
Hacker quiere decir que la persona es creativamente apasionada por lo que hace, y lo quiere realizar con lo que yo denomino "interacción enriquecedora", es decir con otras personas. Cracker, en cambio, es el delincuente informático, la persona que ingresa en los sistemas informáticos y esparce virus, entre otros delitos.
¿Por qué, entonces, los hackers son considerados delincuentes?
Todo comenzó en los medios de comunicación, en los inicios del software. Por aquel entonces los medios tomaron la palabra hacker y comenzaron a utilizarla como sinónimo de delincuente informático para hacerlo más atractivo y dar impacto en sus noticias, pero la palabra hacker no tiene nada que ver con la delincuencia informática.
Según su libro los hackers informáticos ponen a disposición gratuita de los demás su creación para que la utilicen, pongan a prueba y la desarrollen. ¿Cómo un hacker se transforma en Bill Gates? En otras palabras, ¿cómo se transforma un hacker en un hombre de negocios?
La ética hacker es una ética de trabajo creativa en la era informática que reemplaza lo que Max Weber describió como "ética de trabajo industrial" pero después depende de cuán abierto es uno en el desarrollo de otras cosas. No necesita ser cerrado para ser un éxito, por ejemplo Linus Torvalds está a favor de la apertura total y también ha tenido mucho éxito. Internet corre en Linux, tres de cada cuatro smartphones en el mundo corren en Linux, porque Android está basado en Linux. Pero más allá de eso no hay contradicciones, porque uno puede tener pasión creativa como empresario. Lo importante es dar suficiente nivel de apertura.
¿Cómo ayudan a la sociedad los hackers y las redes sociales en situaciones de conflicto, injusticia social o cuando no hay libertad de expresión?
En situaciones como la guerra de Kosovo o en la Primavera Árabe -levantamientos populares de países árabes realizados entre 2010 y 2012- la difusión de lo que estaba pasando fue a través de las redes sociales. Y es muy importante tener en cuenta que las redes sociales tienen un impacto en la vida real. Si pensamos en la Primavera Árabe, por ejemplo, algunos de los peores dictadores que nosotros pensamos que nunca dejarían el poder, colapsaron. Y las redes sociales colaboraron mucho en la caída de estos dictadores porque la Primavera Árabe estuvo organizada a través de Internet. También en Europa se produjeron hechos similares. Las redes sociales tuvieron gran protagonismo en el movimiento de "Los Indignados", que produjeron cambios políticos en España y en Grecia.
¿Le parece que lo que escribió hace más de una década sigue vigente?
Sí. El libro es más actual ahora. Si uno toma, por ejemplo, el capítulo de open source o de código abierto, su utilización ha crecido exponencialmente si tenemos en cuenta que Internet corre en software en código abierto y se diseminan en varios equipos como teléfono, grabadores digitales y televisores. Probablemente uno no se de cuenta que está utilizando código abierto, pero todos lo estamos utilizando. En cuanto al trabajo empresarial, la nueva ética de pasión creativa enriquecedora está impulsando al Silicon Valley.
¿Cómo ve a la sociedad futura?
Creo que la gran pregunta es lo que hoy estamos investigando en el proyecto que estoy realizando, donde nos damos cuenta que el viejo modelo de desarrollo ha llegado a su fin y ahora tenemos que replantear las prácticas grandes en la economía, la sustentabilidad ecológica. Creo que vamos a necesitar del potencial completo de la cultura de la creatividad y hemos de desarrollar esa nueva forma de bienestar sustentable, especialmente la sustentabilidad ecológica. Debemos tener en cuenta que el planeta no tiene problema en cuanto al cambio climático, puede continuar sin nosotros, pero nosotros no podemos continuar sin el planeta.
Por último, ¿qué trata de decirnos con su libro?
Para mí la clave es que todos debemos preguntarnos: ¿cuál es mi pasión creativa, cuál es mi propósito significativo en esta vida?

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How Google Stole Christmas (And is Bringing it Back)

Google's Nexus smartphones and tablets have a unique feature that's also a curse. They come with the latest version of Android (which is actually unusual among Android devices), and they're basically guaranteed to get updates throughout their lifespan (which is also unusual). But on the downside, Nexus owners are also the first to discover new "features" in each version of Android ... like Google's new 11-month calendar.
​'Tis (not) the season
​ You may not have noticed, if none of your friends or family members were born in December. But if you tried to enter in somebody's birthday in Android's "People" app, you may have noticed that the spin-dials for selecting a date don't include the last month of the year, in one of the oddest bugs to hit Android.
Other bugs found in the Android 4.2 update include random reboots, unstable apps, and overall slow and sluggish performance. David Ruddock of the Android Police blog has written up an extensive list of these bugs, and of which Nexus devices have been affected.
​Appy holidays
Most of these bugs are tied to specific apps not working correctly with the 4.2 update. The HD Widgets app, for instance, seems to cause the random reboots. Even first-party apps, like the Google Currents web magazine reader, are apparently responsible for some of the issues.
Some developers have fixed their apps. Mozilla quickly corrected a bug in the Android version of its Firefox web browser which caused it to randomly (and frequently) force close. But for now, the only real solution is to stop using certain apps, or features of apps like Currents' background sync.
Need a little Christmas?
Fortunately for Nexus device owners, a fix for at least one of the issues (the missing month of December) has already been written, and is on its way if you haven't gotten it already. A new version of Android is being sent over the air to Nexus devices, and Android developer Al Sutton reports that "Santa is back."
It remains to be seen, however, whether or not Google can "save Christmas" for people who've ordered (or tried to order) an unlocked Nexus 4 smartphone from its Google Play store. Right now, the 8 GB model "Ships in 8- 9 weeks," while the 16 GB model won't ship until around New Years'. And that's if you can even place an order; many Google customers are reporting that the ordering system simply won't work, although Google+ user Syko Pompos has discovered a way around the faulty website.
Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.

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Asia stocks fall as US budget negotiations stall

BANGKOK (AP) — Heightened uncertainty about the outcome of budget negotiations in Washington among President Barack Obama, House Speaker John Boehner and other Republican lawmakers drove Asian stock markets lower Friday.
If a compromise is not in place by Jan. 1, the Bush-era tax cuts will expire and spending cuts will kick in automatically — a one-two punch to the economy that many experts fear will push the U.S. economy back into recession just as it begins to recover from the last one.
Japan's Nikkei 225 index fell nearly 0.8 percent to 9,964.53. Hong Kong's Hang Seng lost 0.8 percent to 22,483.20. South Korea's Kospi shed 0.9 percent at 1,982.49. Australia's S&P/ASX 200 fell 0.3 percent to 4,618.60. Benchmarks in Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and Taiwan also fell. Malaysia and the Philippines rose.
U.S. stock futures tumbled after rank-and-file Republican lawmakers failed to support an alternative tax plan by House Speaker John Boehner late Thursday in Washington. That plan would have allowed tax rates to rise on households earning $1 million and up. Obama wants the level to be $400,000.
"I think the Republicans will have to yield," said Francis Lun, managing director of Lyncean Holdings in Hong Kong. "Fighting for rich men does not endear you to voters. People earning more than $1 million are considered rich, so it doesn't do the Republican Party any good to really fight for the rights of rich people."
Ironically, the two leaders had significantly narrowed their differences toward a compromise. The latest setback, with Republicans bucking their leader, left precious little time for an agreement to be reached before the "fiscal cliff" of tax increases and spending cuts goes into effect.
Dow Jones industrial futures dropped 1.5 percent to 13,070 and S&P 500 futures lost 1.6 percent to 1,418.30. Analysts cautioned, however, that market swings would be exaggerated because of light trading volumes that typically accompany end-of-year holidays.
"Approaching the weekend and holiday, volumes will likely remain thin, with choppy trading sessions while the 'fiscal cliff' talks will stay in the spotlight," said Kintai Cheung of Credit Agricole CIB in Hong Kong in an email commentary.
Among individual stocks, Mitsubishi Motors Corp. fell 7 percent, days after Japan's Transport Ministry issued a warning to the carmaker over the handling of oil leaks in mini-vehicles. Troubled electronics giant Sharp Corp. dropped 6 percent. Australian surf wear maker Billabong International rose 1.3 percent a day after chief financial officer Craig White left the troubled retailer.
Benchmark crude for February delivery fell $1.01 to $89.12 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract rose 15 cents to finish at $90.13 per barrel on the Nymex on Thursday.
In currencies, the euro fell to $1.3194 from $1.3241 late Thursday in New York. The dollar fell to 83.95 yen from 84.42 yen.

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Pakistani polio workers get police protection

LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) — Under police guard, thousands of health workers pressed on with a polio immunization program Thursday after nine were killed elsewhere in Pakistan by suspected militants who oppose the vaccination campaign.
Immunizations were halted in some parts of Pakistan and the U.N. suspended its field participation everywhere until better security was arranged for its workers. The violence risks reversing recent progress fighting polio in Pakistan, one of three countries in the world where the disease is endemic.
The Taliban have denied responsibility for the shootings. Militants have accused health workers of acting as spies for the U.S., alleging the vaccine is intended to make Muslim children sterile.
Taliban commanders in Pakistan's troubled northwest tribal region also said earlier this year that vaccinations can't go forward until the U.S. stops drone strikes in the country.
Insurgent opposition to the campaign grew last year after it was revealed that a Pakistani doctor ran a fake vaccination program to help the CIA track down and kill al-Qaida founder Osama bin Laden, who was hiding in the town of Abbottabad in the country's northwest.
There were a few attacks on polio workers in July, but the current level of violence is unprecedented. A polio worker died Thursday after being shot in the head in the northwestern city of Peshawar a day earlier, said health official Janbaz Afridi.
His death raised to nine the number of Pakistanis working on the campaign who have been killed this week. Six of the workers gunned down were women, three of whom were teenagers. Two other workers were critically wounded. All the attacks occurred in northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and the southern city of Karachi.
Despite the threat, local officials in the eastern city of Lahore continued the vaccination drive Thursday under police escort, said one of the top government officials in the city, Noorul Amin Mengal. About 6,000 Pakistani health workers were escorted by 3,000 police as they fanned out across the city, he said.
"It would have been an easy thing for us to do to stop the campaign," he said. "That would have been devastating."
Saddaf Malik, one of the polio workers in Lahore, said the killings sent a shudder of fear through him and his colleagues.
"We will carry on with our job with determination, but we want the government to adopt measures to ensure the security of polio vaccinators," he said.
This week's killings occurred as the government and the U.N. began a vaccination drive Monday targeting high-risk areas in the country's four provinces and the semiautonomous tribal region, part of an effort to immunize 34 million children under age 5. The campaign was scheduled to end Wednesday in most parts of the country, except for Lahore, where it ran a day longer.
Government officials ended the drive early in parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and in Sindh province, where Karachi is the capital, said Elias Durry, the U.N. World Health Organization's senior coordinator for polio in Pakistan. The campaign ran its full course in the provinces of Baluchistan and Punjab, where Lahore is the capital, as well as in the tribal region, he said.
The government has approximately 250,000 people working on the campaign, said Durry. Most of them have other jobs, such as teaching or working as government clerks, and sign on to the vaccination drive to earn a little more money, about $2.50 per day, officials said.
The WHO and UNICEF have about 2,000 people between them who provide technical assistance to the polio teams across the country and educate locals about the program, said Durry and Michael Coleman, a UNICEF spokesman in Pakistan. The U.N. staff were pulled out of the field and asked to work from home Wednesday.
The goal for this week's drive was to immunize 18.3 million children, but workers were only able reach about 9 million during the first two days of the campaign, said Durry.
Polio usually infects children living in unsanitary conditions, attacks the nerves and can kill or paralyze. Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria remain the last battlegrounds for the fight against the disease.
There is no history of attacks on polio workers in Afghanistan, even though the country also faces a domestic Taliban insurgency. Muslim leaders in Nigeria have spoken out against polio vaccination in the country in the past, also claiming it makes children sterile. Many now support the campaign, but some Nigerians remain suspicious.
Prevention efforts have managed to reduce the number of cases in Pakistan to 56 this year, compared with 190 in 2011, a drop of about 70 percent. Most of the news cases in Pakistan are in the northwest, where the presence of militants makes it difficult to reach children. Clerics and tribal elders have been recruited to support polio vaccinations to try to open up areas previously inaccessible to health workers.
Israrullah Khan, a villager who attended the funeral of the polio worker who died Thursday, said most of the clerics and Islamic political parties in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa were in favor of the campaign.
"We don't understand why these attacks have suddenly started," Khan said. "It's very sad because they were trying to save our children's future for very low wages."

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Japan's next leader wants freer rein for military

TOKYO (AP) — Imagine that North Korea launched a missile at Japan. Tokyo could — and would certainly try to — shoot it down. But if the missile were flying overhead toward Hawaii or the continental United States, Japan would have to sit idly by.
Japan's military is kept on a very short leash under a war-renouncing constitution written by U.S. officials whose main concern was keeping Japan from rearming soon after World War II. But if Japan's soon-to-be prime minister Shinzo Abe has his way, the status quo may be in for some change.
Abe, set to take office for a second time after leading his conservative party to victory in elections last Sunday, has vowed a fundamental review of Japan's taboo-ridden postwar security policies and proposed ideas that range from changing the name of the military — now called the Japan Self-Defense Forces — to revising the constitution itself.
Most of all, he wants to open the door to what the Japanese call "collective defense," which would allow Japan's troops to fight alongside their allies — especially the U.S. troops who are obliged to defend Japan — if either comes under direct attack. The United States has about 50,000 troops in Japan, including its largest air base in Asia.
Right now, if Japan's current standoff with China over a group of disputed islands got physical, and U.S. Navy ships coming to Japan's assistance took enemy fire, Japan wouldn't be able to help them.
"With the U.S. defense budget facing big cuts, a collapse of the military balance of power in Asia could create instability," Abe said in the run-up to the election, promising to address the collective defense issue quickly. "We must foster an alliance with the United States that can hold up under these circumstances."
While welcome in Washington, which is looking to keep its own costs down while beefing up its Pacific alliances to counterbalance the rise of China, Abe's ideas are raising eyebrows in a region that vividly remembers Japan's brutal rampage across Asia 70 years ago.
"The issue of whether Japan can face up to and reflect upon its history of aggression is what every close neighbor in Asia and the global community at large are highly concerned about," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a news conference in Beijing this week. She said any move to bolster the military "deserves full vigilance among the Asian countries and the global community."
Even so, many Japanese strategists believe the changes are long overdue.
Japan has one of the most sophisticated military forces in the world, with a quarter million troops, a well-equipped navy and an air force that will acquire dozens of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters over the next several years, in addition to its already formidable fleet of F-15s. Japan's annual defense budget is the world's sixth largest.
"We should stand tall in the international community," said Narushige Michishita, who has advised the government on defense issues and is the director of the security and international program at Tokyo's National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies.
"These are good, well-trained conventional forces," he said. "We are second to none in Asia. So the idea is why don't we start using this. We don't have to start going to war. We can use it more effectively as a deterrent. If we get rid of legal, political and psychological restraints, we can do much more. We should start playing a larger and more responsible in international security affairs."
Outside of very constrained participation in U.N.-sanctioned peacekeeping operations and other low-intensity missions, Japan's military is tightly restricted to national defense and humanitarian assistance. Although Japan did support the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, its troops were kept well away from frontline combat.
Such restrictions, seen by conservatives as a postwar relic that has kept Japan from being a bigger player on the international stage, have long been one of Abe's pet peeves.
When he was first prime minister in 2006-2007, he was so disturbed by the kinds of crisis scenarios in which Tokyo's hands were tied that he commissioned a panel of experts to explore Japan's options. He left office before the report could be completed. His party was ousted from power two years later, and the issue was essentially dropped.
This time around, it's not clear how effectively or how soon Abe will be able to push the military issue, since stimulating the nation's economy will be his first task, and he faces strong opposition in parliament, where he has been slammed as a historical revisionist and a hawk.
But with the daily cat-and-mouse game between the Chinese and Japanese coast guards over the disputed islands not expected to end soon, polls indicate support for beefing up the military is stronger than ever.
"These are real issues, important issues," Michishita said. "And I think Abe will try to do something about it."

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Australian boy's egg collection turns into snakes

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — A 3-year-old Australian boy was lucky to escape uninjured after a collection of eggs he found in his yard hatched into a slithering tangle of deadly snakes.
Reptile specialist Trish Prendergast said Friday that young wildlife enthusiast Kyle Cummings could have been killed if he had handled the eastern brown snakes — the world's most venomous species on land after Australia's inland taipan.
Kyle found a clutch of nine eggs a few weeks ago in the grass on his family's 1.2-hectare (3-acre) property on the outskirts of the city of Townsville in Queensland state, Prendergast said. He had no idea what kind of eggs they were.
He put the eggs into a plastic takeout food container and stashed them in his bedroom closet, where his mother, Donna Sim, found them Monday. Seven had hatched, but the snakes remained trapped under the container's lid. The remaining two eggs were probably infertile and were rotten, Prendergast said.
"I was pretty shocked, particularly because I don't like snakes," Sim told the Townsville Bulletin newspaper.
Prendergast, who is the Townsville-based reptile coordinator of the volunteer group North Queensland Wildlife Care, was handed the container on Tuesday and released the snakes into the wild that night.
She was relieved that no one had handled the snakes.
"Their fangs are only a few millimeters long at that age, so they probably couldn't break the skin, but they're just as venomous as full-grown snakes," Prendergast said.
"If venom had got on Kyle's skin where there was a cut of if he put it in his mouth, it could have been fatal," she added.
Eastern brown snakes — which can grow to more than 2 meters (6 1/2 feet) long — usually stay with their eggs but sometimes leave for short periods to feed.
"He's very lucky he didn't encounter the mother while he was taking her eggs. That also could have been fatal," Prendergast said.
The snakes were 12 to 15 centimeters (5 to 6 inches) long and had probably hatched around five days before they were released, she said, adding that they were thirsty but otherwise healthy.
Australia averages around three fatal snake bites a year, and eastern browns are responsible for the majority of them.
Sim did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment Friday.

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AP PHOTOS: A photo journey through N.Korea

PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — My window on North Korea is sometimes, quite literally, a window — of a hotel room, the backseat of a car, a train. Fleeting moments of daily life present themselves suddenly, and they are opportunities to show a side of the country that is entirely at odds with the official portrait of marching troops and tightly coordinated pomp that the Pyongyang leadership presents to the world.
In April, I was part of a group of international journalists that traveled by train to the launch site for this year's first, failed rocket test. We traveled in a spotless train used by the Communist leadership, and I spent the five-hour journey inside my sleeper car looking out the large, clean window at a rural landscape seen by few foreign eyes. The tracks cut across fields where large groups of farmers were at work in clusters. Occasionally, there was a plow drawn by oxen or a brick-red tractor rolling along the gravel roads. On a rocky hilltop above the train tracks, a small boy sprinted and waved at the passing train. Every few hundred yards along the entire route, local officials in drab coats stood guard, their backs to the tracks, until its cargo of foreign reporters had safely passed.
I have made 17 trips into North Korea since 2000, including six since The Associated Press bureau in Pyongyang opened in January 2012. It is an endlessly fascinating and visually surreal place, but it is also one of the hardest countries I have ever photographed. As one of the few international photographers with regular access to the country, I consider it a huge responsibility to show life there as accurately as I can. 
That can be a big challenge. Foreigners are almost always accompanied by a government guide — a "minder" in journalistic parlance — who helps facilitate our coverage requests but also monitors nearly everything we do. Despite the official oversight, we try to see and do as much as we can, push the limits, dig as deeply as possible, give an honest view of what we are able to see. Over time, there have been more and more opportunities to leave the showplace capital, Pyongyang, and mingle with the people. But they are usually wary of foreigners and aware that they too are being watched.
This has been a historic year for North Korea, with large-scale dramatic displays to mark important milestones, struggles with food shortages, crippling floods, drought and typhoons, as well as growing evidence that people's lives are changing in small but significant ways. But in a country that carefully choreographs what it shows to the outside world, separating what is real from what is part of the show is often very difficult.
Last spring, as North Korea was preparing for the 100th birthday of its late founder, Kim Il Sung, citizens practiced for weeks, even months, for the large-scale military parade and public folk dancing that was part of the celebration.
One morning, on our way through town, we saw small groups of performers walking home from an early rehearsal. They wore their brightly colored traditional clothing, but covered over with warm winter coats. In their hands were the red bunches of artificial flowers that they shake and wave in honor of country's leaders during mass rallies.
From the van window, I saw a woman standing alone, holding her bouquet as she waited for the bus. It was, to me, a more telling moment than the actual events we would cover a week later, a simple but provocative glimpse into one person's life.
For this project, I used a Hasselblad XPAN, a panoramic-view film camera that is no longer manufactured. Throughout the year, I wore it around my neck and shot several dozen rolls of color negative film in between my normal coverage of news and daily life with my AP-issued digital cameras.
The XPAN is quiet, discrete, manual and simple. Because it has a wide panoramic format, it literally gives me a different view of North Korea. The film also reflects how I feel when I'm in North Korea, wandering among the muted or gritty colors, and the fashions and styles that often seem to come from a past generation.
In my photography, I try to maintain a personal point of view, a critical eye, and shoot with a style that I think of as sometimes-whimsical and sometimes-melancholy. My aim is to open a window for the world on a place that is widely misunderstood and that would otherwise rarely be seen by outsiders.
I hope these images help people to develop their own understanding of the country, one that goes beyond the point-counterpoint presented by Pyongyang and Washington. And maybe they can help create some sort of bridge between the people of North Korea and the rest of the world.

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