Slashdot Mirror

Andorin writes "The UK's Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has released a report (PDF) related to the new Digital Economy Act. The debate between copyright holders and ISPs about who should front the costs for the enforcement of the Act's anti-piracy provisions has come to a close: Rights holders will pay 75% of the copyright enforcement costs, with the remaining 25% of the bill going to ISPs (and therefore their customers). Says the Minister for Communications, Ed Vaizey: 'Protecting our valuable creative industries, which have already suffered significant losses as a result of people sharing digital content without paying for it, is at the heart of these measures... We expect the measures will benefit our creative economy by some £200m per year and as rights holders are the main beneficiaries of the system, we believe our decision on costs is proportionate to everyone involved.' Not surprisingly, some ISPs and consumer groups are up in arms about the decision, with one ISP calling it a government subsidy of the entertainment industries."

eldavojohn writes "Google's Buzz service will cost the company $8.5 million in settling a class action lawsuit related to the privacy debacle from the days after its release. Ars reports: 'In the proposed settlement submitted to the court this week, Google agreed to make efforts to better educate Buzz users on issues of privacy and the particular privacy features that Buzz offers. Additionally, Google also agreed to pay out $8.5 million to a fund which will be disbursed as cy pres awards for organizations that focus on Internet privacy policy or education.' In other words, the victims (Buzz users) won't see any of that money, but it will be used to promote healthy Internet privacy policies." Several readers have also noted that Google has simplified its privacy policy, condensing a number of product-specific policies into one and adding a privacy tools page in an effort to make everything more easily understood.

Jake writes with this excerpt from Ars: "Microsoft is warning about a new piece of malware, Rogue:MSIL/Zeven, that auto-detects a user's browser and then imitates the relevant malware warning pages from Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Chrome. The fake warning pages are very similar to the real thing; you have to look closely to realize they aren't the real thing. The ploy is a basic social engineering scheme, but in this case the malware authors are relying on the user's trust in their browser, a tactic that hasn't been seen before. Beyond the warning pages, the actual malware looks like the real deal: it allows you to scan files, tells you when you're behind on your updates, and enables you to change your security and privacy settings. Performing a scan results in the product finding malicious files, but of course it cannot delete them unless you update, which requires paying for the full version. Attempting to buy the product will open an HTML window that provides a useless 'Safe Browsing Mode' with high-strength encryption. To top it all off, the rogue antivirus webpage looks awfully similar to the Microsoft Security Essentials webpage; even the awards received by MSE and a link to the Microsoft Malware Protection Center have been copied."

sk8pmp writes with news that iFixit, a website known for Apple gadget teardowns and repair guides, is expanding into the game console market, launching a series of troubleshooting and repair guides to help gamers fix their own machines. They're also starting to sell replacement parts and the tools necessary to work on them. "Right now there are repair guides for 24 gaming consoles, including 206 repairs and upgrades. Some of these fixes deal with major issues, such as the infamous Red Ring of Death from the Xbox 360, but others are simpler. For instance, right now there is no easy way to clean out the fans inside your console. 'I think this is probably the number one cause of overheating these days now that manufacturers have mostly gotten their act together,' Wiens said. 'This is routine maintenance, and it's mind-boggling that the manufacturers don't provide people with an easy way to open the case up and blow it out.' You'll also learn how to replace broken LCD screens on your portables, replace the motherboard on your PlayStation 3, and do just about anything else you might want to do to these systems, from the simple to the harrowing."

eldavojohn writes "Some light is being shone on comic book history today as the Library of Congress opens up the 222 boxes of a German psychiatrist's evidence and papers against comic books. Dr. Fredric Wertham is well known by comic book fans as the author of Seduction of the Innocent, a bestselling book linking comic books and juvenile delinquency — leading to a full blown congressional investigation (some say witch hunt) of the comic book industry. Wertham was long involved with criminal trials before campaigning against comic books and promoting industry and government censorship for children. Ars adds a little more context for the younger crowd and notes that he later tried to move against television violence but couldn't find the publisher backing he had against comic books."

vistapwns writes "MPEG LA has announced that free h264 content (vs. paid h264 content which will still have royalties) will be royalty free forever. With ubiquitous h264 support on mobile devices, personal computers and all other types of media devices, this assures that h264 will remain the de facto standard for video playback for the foreseeable future."

An anonymous reader writes "Apple yesterday applied for a patent to allow remotely disabling electronic devices when 'unauthorized usage' is detected. The patent application covers using the camera to take pictures of the unauthorized user and using GPS to determine location, and it involves ascertaining whether the phone has been hacked or jailbroken, using those as criteria for detecting 'suspicious behavior.' The patent would allow the carrier or any other 'authorized' party to disable or restrict the functionality of the device. Is this Apple's latest tool to thwart jailbreaking?"

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The RIAA is now worried about the FCC's rulemaking concerning Net Neutrality. Specifically, they're worried that the rules might make it difficult for ISPs to filter out copyright infringement and child pornography, so they want to make sure that spying on and filtering internet traffic is okay, so long as it's being done for a good reason, even if it doesn't work correctly and blocks non-infringing content. Incidentally, the RIAA has some justification to lump child pornography and copyright infringement: after all, people might infringe upon the original cover art for the album 'Virgin Killer,' which featured a naked under-aged girl in a way that some consider pornographic. The copyright on it belongs to RCA Records."

Haffner writes "Ars Technica has an article detailing the difference between ISP advertised 'up to x Mbps' speeds and the actual speeds, in addition to some possible solutions. They find that on average, the advertised speeds were 'up to 6.7 Mbps' while the real median was 3 Mbps and the mean was 4 Mbps. This implies that ISPs were falsely advertising by at least 50%."

Trintech writes with this quote from an article at Ars Technica: "Music labels and radio broadcasters can't agree on much, including whether radio should be forced to turn over hundreds of millions of dollars a year to pay for the music it plays. But the two sides can agree on this: Congress should mandate that FM radio receivers be built into cell phones, PDAs, and other portable electronics. The Consumer Electronics Association, whose members build the devices that would be affected by such a directive, is incandescent with rage. 'The backroom scheme of the [National Association of Broadcasters] and RIAA to have Congress mandate broadcast radios in portable devices, including mobile phones, is the height of absurdity,' thundered CEA president Gary Shapiro. Such a move is 'not in our national interest.' 'Rather than adapt to the digital marketplace, NAB and RIAA act like buggy-whip industries that refuse to innovate and seek to impose penalties on those that do.' But the music and radio industries say it's a consumer-focused proposition, one that would provide 'more music choices.'"

Bruce Perens writes "Oracle has brought a lawsuit against Google claiming that Google has infringed patents on the Java platform in Android. Scribd has a copy of the complaint. But there's a patent grant that should allow Google to use Java royalty-free. Has Google failed to meet the terms of the grant?"

MorderVonAllem submitted an incredibly cool article about the computers and set design of Star Trek. If you are into that sort of thing, you're going to really like this one. It says "There are a lot of similarities between Apple's iPad and the mobile computing devices—known as PADDs—used in the Star Trek universe. Ars spoke to designers Michael Okuda, Denise Okuda, and Doug Drexler to find out the thinking and inspiration behind the PADD and how closely the iPad represents a real-life incarnation of that dream."

bonch writes "Independent game Machinarium, released without DRM by developer Amanita Design, has only been paid for by 5-10% of its users according to developer Jakub Dvorsky. To drive legitimate sales, they are now offering a 'Pirate Amnesty' sale until August 12, bundling both the cross-platform game and its soundtrack for $5. Ron Carmel, designer of DRM-free puzzle game World of Goo, stated that his game also had about an 80-90% piracy rate, claiming that the percentage of those pirating first and purchasing later was 'very small.' He said, 'We're getting good sales through WiiWare, Steam, and our website. Not going bankrupt just yet!'"

jamie writes "Researchers have turned the biochemical challenge of figuring out protein folding structures into a computer game. The best players can beat a computerized algorithm by rapidly recognizing problems that the computer can't fix. From the article: 'By tracing the actions of the best players, the authors were able to figure out how the humans' excellent pattern recognition abilities gave them an edge over the computer. For example, people were very good about detecting a hydrophobic amino acid when it stuck out from the protein's surface, instead of being buried internally, and they were willing to rearrange the structure's internals in order to tuck the offending amino acid back inside. Those sorts of extensive rearrangements were beyond Rosetta's abilities, since the energy changes involved in the transitions are so large.'"

suraj.sun tips news that Connecticut's Attorney General has demanded a meeting with Apple and Amazon to discuss anti-competitive pricing methods in the e-book market. From Ars: "Richard Blumenthal says that he wants representatives from both on-line giants in his office ASAP to discuss what Blumenthal calls their 'most favored nation' arrangements with big book companies like Macmillan and Simon & Schuster. The crux of the MFN concept is that a given product maker must offer a given distributor the lowest price it's offering anyone. If a competing distributor gets a price break, they get it too. 'The net effect is fairly obvious,' Blumenthal warned in his letter to Amazon (PDF), 'in that MFNs will reduce the publisher's incentive to offer a discount to Amazon if it would have to offer the same discount to Apple, leading to the establishment of a price floor for e-books offered by the publisher.'"

eldavojohn writes "As we strive closer and closer to quantum computing, physics may need to be improved. A paper released in Nature Physics suggests that the limit defined by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle can be beaten with quantum memory. From the article, 'The cadre of scientists behind the current paper realized that, by using the process of entanglement, it would be possible to essentially use two particles to figure out the complete state of one. They might even be able to measure incompatible variables like position and momentum. The measurements might not be perfectly precise, but the process could allow them to beat the limit of the uncertainty principle.' Will we find out that Heisenberg was shortsighted in limiting the power of quantum physics or will the scientists be surprised to find that such a theoretical scenario — once conducted — performs unexpectedly in Heisenberg's favor?"

eagledck tips news that the FCC has "finally approved the first 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) phone for sale in the US." The Samsung device will use MetroPCS as a carrier, but tech specs, software details and a launch timetable are still uncertain. Meanwhile, Verizon is ramping up testing of their own LTE infrastructure, hoping to launch in 25 to 30 markets by the end of the year. An anonymous reader notes that LTE rollouts could be hampered by a confused and conflicted patent situation. "It is impossible to know where all the patents are but we have identified more than 60 companies holding essential patents. It is a very large landscape and fragmented. If there was one major patent pool and a handful of individual companies to deal with, that would be possible. But signing license deals with 40 plus [entities] is not. A unified patent pool is best," said a representative for one of three patent pool organizations trying to accomplish that.

suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: "If you need a reminder of just how big China is—and just how important the Internet has become there—consider this stat: between them, two Chinese ISPs serve 20 percent of all broadband subscribers in the entire world and both companies continue to grow, even as growth slows significantly in more developed markets. Every other ISP trails dramatically. Japan's NTT comes in third with 17 million subscribers, and all US providers are smaller still. 'The gap between the top two operators and the world's remaining broadband service providers will continue to grow rapidly,' said TeleGeography Research Director Tania Harvey. 'Aside from the two Chinese companies, all of the top ten broadband ISPs operate in mature markets, with high levels of broadband penetration and rapidly slowing subscriber growth.'"

suraj.sun writes "Microsoft has a long and illustrious history of operating system sales. The model has served the company well on the PC, but if it wants to make money in the phone market, it needs to start thinking like a consumer electronics company and start making its own phones."

WesternActor writes "The Khronos Group has announced full details for the OpenGL 4.1 specification. Among the new features of the spec, which comes just five months after the release of the 4.0 specification, is full support for OpenGL ES, which simplifies porting between mobile and desktop platforms. It'll be interesting to see what effect, if any, this new spec has on the graphics industry — more compatibility could change the way many embedded systems are designed. There are lots of other changes and additions in the spec, as well." Reader suraj.sun contributes insight from Ars, which brings OpenGL's competition into focus: "OpenGL 4.0 brought feature parity with Direct3D 11's new features — in particular, compute shaders and tessellation — and with 4.1, the Khronos Group claims that it is surpassing the functionality offered in Microsoft's 3D API. ... Whether this truly constitutes a leapfrogging of Direct3D 11 is not obvious."

Andorin writes "It's common knowledge that the majority of files distributed over BitTorrent violate copyright, though the exact percentage is unclear. The Internet Commerce Security Laboratory of the University of Ballarat in Australia has conducted a study and found that 89% of files examined were in fact infringing, while most of the remaining 11% were ambiguous but likely to be infringing. Ars Technica summarizes the study: 'The total sample consisted of 1,000 torrent files—a random selection from the most active seeded files on the trackers they used. Each file was manually checked to see whether it was being legally distributed. Only three cases—0.3 percent of the files—were determined to be definitely not infringing, while 890 files were confirmed to be illegal. ' The study brings with it some other interesting statistics; out of the 1,000 files, 91 were pornographic, and approximately 4% of torrents were responsible for 80% of seeders. Music, movies and TV shows constituted the three largest categories of shared materials, and among those, zero legal files were found."

Remember the Communications Decency Act? Enacted 1996, found unconstitutional 1997. Or its successor attempt to reduce discourse on the Internet to what is suitable for 8-year-olds, the Child Online Protection Act? Invalidated 2003. Seven state laws attempting to restrict Internet content on grounds of decency have been struck down. Despite all this, Massachusetts has now added a couple of paragraphs to its (traditionally bricks-and-mortar) indecency law that applies a "harmful to minors" test to Internet content. The ACLU of Massachusetts and others have brought suit to block the law, which went into effect on July 11. Coincidentally, today a US appeals court tossed out the FCC's indecency policy.

simrook writes, "Many people filed privacy complaints with the ESRB over Blizzard's recent (and afterward recanted) move to require the display of users' real life names on Blizzard's official forums. 961 of those complainants had their email addresses exposed in the ESRB's response." The response itself didn't go into the organization's thoughts on Blizzard's plan, but they explained to the Opposable Thumbs blog that anonymity isn't a huge concern to them, as long as users are given the opportunity to opt out. "The role of the ESRB Privacy Online program is to make sure that member websites—those that display our seal on their pages — are compliant with an increasingly complex series of privacy protection laws and are offering a secure space for users to interact and do business online. ... But online privacy protection doesn't necessarily mean the same thing as anonymity. It's about making sure that websites collecting personal information from users are doing so not only in accordance with federal regulations but also with best practices for protecting individuals' personal information online."

Ars covers a series of questions that US senators put to the FCC chairman following up on his appearance before the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee in April. The headline question was a blunt one asked by octogenarian Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI): "The National Broadband Plan (NBP) proposes a goal of having 100 million homes subscribed at 100Mbps by 2020, while the leading nations already have 100Mbps fiber-based services at costs of $30 to $40 per month and beginning rollout of 1Gbps residential services, which the FCC suggests is required only for a single anchor institution in each community by 2020. This appears to suggest that the US should accept a 10- to 12-year lag behind the leading nations. What is the FCC's rationale for a vision that appears to be firmly rooted in the second tier of countries?" In the FCC's formal response (PDF), Chairman Genachowski doesn't rise to the "second tier" bait, and in fact talks about "ensuring that America remains a broadband world leader," as if he believes we currently are. A blogger over at Balloon Juice is a little more forthright on the "What is the FCC's rationale" question: "The rationale is that this is the best they can do with a legislative branch in the pocket of telecom providers."

Ars has an update on the potential helium shortage we discussed a couple of years back. A Nobel laureate, Robert Richardson, argues for ending market distortions that are resulting in an artificially low price for helium, which is accelerating the projected exhaustion of the supply. "Richardson's solution is to rework the management of the Bush Dome [so named for reasons that have nothing to do with the politician] stockpile once again, this time with the aim of ensuring that helium's price rises to reflect its scarcity. In practical terms, he said that it would be better to deal with a 20-fold increase in price now than to deal with it increasing by a factor of thousands in a few decades when supply issues start to become critical. But he also made an emotional appeal, stating, 'One generation doesn't have the right to determine the availability forever.'"

e9th writes "Ars Technica reports that IBM has adopted Firefox as its company-wide browser. Firefox will be installed on all new employee computers, and all 400,000 employees will be encouraged to use it. Speaking of encouraging Firefox use, IBM VP Bob Sutor blogs: 'We will continue to strongly encourage our vendors who have browser-based software to fully support Firefox.' I hope this means that if IBM can't navigate a vendor's site with Firefox, they'll just look elsewhere."

An anonymous reader writes "SkypeKit gives Linux developers access to core functionality, allowing Linux developers to add video, calling, and instant messaging features to desktop applications. The SDK also comes with the freshly royalty-free SILK codec for high-end audio. Skype is hoping that the inclusion of SILK will popularize the codec, extending its reach. Currently, the SkypeKit beta is only available for Linux on an invite-only basis, with Windows and Mac versions planned in coming weeks. The SDK does not cover Android or Mac, an odd choice considering the announcement of SkypeKit championed itself for extending the functionality of Skype to multiple platforms and devices. Including smartphones in the SDK seems like an obvious move." Ars Technica has a rundown, too.

AHuxley noticed the frightening little Ars story talking about a certain expectation that iOS and MacOS will merge, leading to a single DRM-locked OS on your MacBook and your iPad. Certainly Apple would love a piece of every app sold. Now I'm sure that this has been discussed over there, but I wouldn't expect it any time soon.

The Opposable Thumbs blog has an interview with Jerome McDonough of the University of Illinois, who is involved with the Preserving Virtual Worlds project. The goal of the project is to recognize video games as cultural artifacts and to make sure they're accessible by future generations. Here McDonough talks about some of the technical difficulties in doing so: "Take, for example, Star Raiders on the Atari 2600. If you're going to preserve this, you've got a couple of problems. The first is that it is on a cartridge that is designed to work on a particular system that is no longer manufactured. And as long as you've got a hardware dependency there, you're really not going to be able to preserve this material very long. What we have been looking at is how feasible is it for things that fundamentally all have some level of hardware dependency there — even Doom has dependencies on DLLs with an operating system, and on particular chipsets and architectures for playing. How do you take that and turn it into something that isn't as dependent on a particular physical piece of hardware. And to do that, you need information about that platform. You need technical specifications that allow you to basically reproduce a virtualization that may enable you to run the software in its original form in the future. So what we're trying to do is preserve not only the games, but preserve the knowledge that you would need to create a virtualization platform to play the game."

slave5tom writes "An IEEE working group is trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Its scheme will allow unlimited copying of encrypted content, which will require a playkey to activate. Trying to add a cost by making the playkey 'rivalrous' (what you take I lose) and rescuing the big content players from the brink of oblivion does seem futile, but it is entertaining to watch them fight the inevitable."

An anonymous reader writes "The Microsoft Applied Sciences Group has developed a new lens that lets you watch three-dimensional content without 3D glasses. The new lens is thinner at the bottom (about 6mm) than at the top (11mm) and steers light to a viewer's eyes via LEDs along its bottom edge. The 3D display uses a camera to track viewers so that it knows where to steer the light; the idea isn't new, but the required CPU power is now affordable and small enough to pull it off on a large scale."

E3 kicked off today, and Microsoft took advantage of its early keynote presentation to show off a ton of new games and features for the Xbox 360. The biggest news for the very near future is that they're releasing a smaller, revamped version of the console, with immediate availability. It's black, it comes with a 250GB HDD and built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi support, and it's priced at $299. Microsoft also put a release date on Kinect, the motion control scheme formerly known as Project Natal: November 4 in the US. It will launch with 15 games, mostly casual-oriented, several of which were demonstrated on-stage. Many new Kinect features were shown as well, such as the dashboard interface, video chat (with support for playing movies both parties can watch), and a partnership with ESPN to provide live and on-demand sports, all controllable with hand gestures and voice commands. (It presently includes college football and basketball, soccer, the NBA, and MLB.) Also notable is a partnership with LucasArts for a Kinect Star Wars game, a fitness game from Ubisoft, and a Forza racing game that uses Kinect and allows players to inspect the cars with an impressive level of detail. Engadget's liveblog of the event has a bunch of pictures from the demonstrations, or you can read a more detailed play-by-play at Ars.

E3 kicked off today, and Microsoft took advantage of its early keynote presentation to show off a ton of new games and features for the Xbox 360. The biggest news for the very near future is that they're releasing a smaller, revamped version of the console, with immediate availability. It's black, it comes with a 250GB HDD and built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi support, and it's priced at $299. Microsoft also put a release date on Kinect, the motion control scheme formerly known as Project Natal: November 4 in the US. It will launch with 15 games, mostly casual-oriented, several of which were demonstrated on-stage. Many new Kinect features were shown as well, such as the dashboard interface, video chat (with support for playing movies both parties can watch), and a partnership with ESPN to provide live and on-demand sports, all controllable with hand gestures and voice commands. (It presently includes college football and basketball, soccer, the NBA, and MLB.) Also notable is a partnership with LucasArts for a Kinect Star Wars game, a fitness game from Ubisoft, and a Forza racing game that uses Kinect and allows players to inspect the cars with an impressive level of detail. Engadget's liveblog of the event has a bunch of pictures from the demonstrations, or you can read a more detailed play-by-play at Ars.

Ricky writes with a followup to news we discussed a couple days ago that a Microsoft toolbar update was installing an IE add-on and a Firefox extension without the user's consent. Quoting Ars: "Microsoft has fixed the distribution scope of a toolbar update that, without the user's knowledge, installed an add-on in Internet Explorer and an extension in Firefox called Search Helper Extension. Microsoft told us that the new update is actually the same as the old one; the only difference is the distribution settings. In other words, the update will no longer be distributed to toolbars that it shouldn't be added to. End users won't see the tweak, Microsoft told Ars, and also offered an explanation on what the mystery add-on actually does. 'The Search Enhancement Pack is a shared component used by the Windows Live Toolbar, MSN Toolbar, and Bing Bar. This component enables toolbar search functionality, like the toolbar search suggestions drop down. It is not the toolbar. It is a component used by the toolbars.'"

An anonymous reader writes "A judge has rejected SCO's motion for a new trial in the company's dispute over UNIX intellectual property ownership. The ruling validates a verdict that was issued in April by a jury who determined that Novell, and not SCO, is the rightful owner of the UNIX SVRX copyrights. This means SCO cannot continue to pursue its litigation against IBM and other Linux users. 'There was substantial evidence that Novell made an intentional decision to retain ownership of the copyrights,' the judge wrote in his decision. 'The Court finds that the verdict is not clearly, decidedly, or overwhelmingly against the weight of the evidence. Therefore, SCO is not entitled to a new trial.'"

climenole writes 'Microsoft has vast resources, literally billions of dollars in cash, or liquid assets reserves. Microsoft is an incredibly successful empire built on the premise of market dominance with low-quality goods,' says former White House advisor Richard Clarke in a recent book. Microsoft makes the list of risks because so many people have installed its software for critical systems.

Jan writes "As part of its regular Patch Tuesday, Microsoft released an update for its various toolbars, and this update came with more than just documented fixes. The update also installs an add-on for Internet Explorer and an extension for Mozilla Firefox, both without the user's permission."

Ars has a note about New Zealand's plans for nationwide broadband access, which will induce envy in many North American readers. "New Zealand has decided not to sit around while incumbent DSL operators milk the withered dugs of their cash cow until it keels over from old age. Instead, the Kiwis have established a government-owned corporation to invest NZ$1.5 billion for open-access fiber to the home. By 2020, 75 percent of residents should have, at a bare minimum, 100Mbps down/50 Mbps up with a choice of providers. Crown Fibre Holdings Limited is the company, and it's wholly owned by the government — for now — and the company's mission couldn't be any clearer. Two of its six guiding principles include 'focusing on building new infrastructure, and not unduly preserving the "legacy assets" of the past' and 'avoiding "lining the pockets" of existing broadband network providers.'"

In a keynote presentation today at WWDC, Steve Jobs officially unveiled the iPhone 4. It's powered by an A4 chip, has a glass front and back, and has stainless steel around the edges, which turns out to be part of the antenna system. The new iPhone uses what Jobs called a "Retina display," running at 960x640, or 326 ppi. The battery is also bigger, with a corresponding increase in battery life. The iPhone 4 supports 802.11n, has two mics for noise cancellation, and a three-axis gyroscope, which allows rotation and precision that accelerometers can't match. The iPhone 4's camera is using a 5-megapixel backside illuminated sensor, which Jobs said does better at low-light photography. It also records 720p video at 30 frames per second, with tap-to-focus. In addition to this, they've created an iMovie app, which allows users to easily edit videos on their phone. Several live blogs of the event, with pictures, are available. The device ships in the US on June 24. Apple's product page has been updated with specs and a video. Read on for more details.
Update: 06/07 18:34 GMT by S : Steve's "One More Thing" this time around: FaceTime, live video chat from one iPhone 4 to another. It is Wi-Fi only at the moment, but they're working with carriers to expand that in the future. Jobs says the iPhone 4 OS is being renamed "iOS4," since it isn't just focused on phones anymore. The release candidate will be made available to developers today. He demonstrated multitasking, a unified email inbox, and folders for apps. In the App Store, you can expect to see an iPhone version of Netflix soon, as well as Guitar Hero and FarmVille. Jobs also announced that iBooks, the ebook application for the iPad, would be getting a few upgrades. Users will soon be able to make notes, and a bookmark button is on the way. It will put bookmarked pages into the book's table of contents. iBooks is also gaining support for viewing PDF files. On top of that, it won't be just for the iPad anymore; it's coming to the iPhone and iPod Touch as well, and it will sync between devices.

eldavojohn writes "It's no secret that Google doesn't create content, but rather helps people find it. And Google News is no different. So what does the company plan to do about complaints from the news industry that profits are dropping drastically? In a lengthy and comprehensive article, The Atlantic diagnoses the problem and looks at Google's plan to 'save' the symbiotic organism it is attached to, which older generations have traditionally branded 'the news.' The answer, of course, hinges on moving news from dead tree print to the information age via Google's many projects: Living Stories, Fast Flip, and YouTube Direct. But Google is also exploring the more traditional options of displaying ads and designing a paywall so users can easily migrate back to subscriptions like the newspapers of yore. You may also recall that last week the Internet was abuzz with the idiocy of suggestions the FTC had aggregated from inside the industry. Ars brings mention of other proposed plans, both good and bad, from the FTC's report on ideas that newspaper companies are kicking around."

Nunavut writes with news that a number of hardware companies have banded together to battle the fragmentation of the mobile Linux market. ARM, Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson, and Texas Instruments are forming Linaro, a nonprofit organization that plans to focus on "low-level software around the Linux kernel that touches the silicon, key pieces of middleware that enable new markets, and tools that help the developer write and debug code." "Linaro's chief goal is to reduce the time that it takes to bring a new ARM-powered product to market with Linux. This effort is largely neutral with respect to what software environment and components individual vendors choose to run in user space. Linaro will not compete with existing platforms such as MeeGo and Android. Instead, it will attempt to improve the shared underlying software components that allow those platforms and others to run on ARM SoCs. In principle, this could actually reduce fragmentation at the lower levels of the Linux stack."

Admiral Justin writes "Ars Technica is reporting that India is attempting to gather support from other large countries that have been intentionally left out of the ACTA process to actively protest it. India fears that ACTA will eventually be used against it and other countries that were given no chance to be a part of the process of drafting it. Among the primary concerns are the possibility of medical shipments being seized if they use a port in transit that is controlled by a country with a patent on the pharmaceuticals."

Jamie points out this Ars Technica piece on a series of suits brought by the Virginia law firm of Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver against users they accuse of illegally downloading movies. The firm has an interesting business model in these suits; sue enough users in a DC Federal court to be worth splitting the sum of many small settlement offers (generally $1,500-2,500 apiece) with the filmmakers, rather than rely on winning after trial a small number of larger judgments. Most people settle, and Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver has so far named more than 14,000 "Does" — as in John Doe — including, as mentioned a few days ago, 5,000 who downloaded The Hurt Locker.

chichilalescu writes "I've had the feeling for a long time that people refuse to listen to scientists. The following is from an article on Ars Technica: 'It's hardly a secret that large segments of the population choose not to accept scientific data because it conflicts with their predefined beliefs: economic, political, religious, or otherwise. But many studies have indicated that these same people aren't happy with viewing themselves as anti-science, which can create a state of cognitive dissonance. That has left psychologists pondering the methods that these people use to rationalize the conflict. A study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology [abstract here] takes a look at one of these methods, which the authors term "scientific impotence" — the decision that science can't actually address the issue at hand properly.' The study found that 'regardless of whether the information presented confirmed or contradicted [the subjects'] existing beliefs, all of them came away from the reading with their beliefs strengthened."

The Parents Television Council says the "$#*!" in the title of the upcoming CBS show $#*! my dad says is indecent. From the article: "'CBS intentionally chose to insert an expletive into the actual name of a show, and, despite its claim that the word will be bleeped, it is just CBS's latest demonstration of its contempt for families and the public,' declared PTC President Tim Winter. 'There are an infinite number of alternatives that CBS could have chosen, but its desire to shock and offend is crystal clear in this decision.'" By this logic Qbert was the filthiest game ever made.

eldavojohn writes "Germany has ordered Google to give up hard disk drives used to store German data collected during their Street View operations in that country. This follows Google's admission last week (after prodding from the Germans) that it had collected the data from unsecured wireless area networks from around the entire world as its roving cars collected the photo archive for Street View. Google says they've offered to just destroy the data, in cooperation with national regulators, but the German government wants to know what they've collected. They do not think that destroying the drives suffices for compliance with the laws. Officials went so far as to say of the situation, 'It is not acceptable that a company operating in the EU does not respect EU rules.' Germany has certainly been keeping their eye on the search giant." The Ars coverage notes that the US FTC may be looking more closely at Google's collection as well.

medcalf writes "Ars Technica has an opinion piece by Sarah Rotman Epps on the iPad and other potential tablets as a new paradigm that they are calling 'curated computing,' where third parties make a lot of choices to simplify things for the end user, reducing user choice but improving reliability and efficiency for a defined set of tasks. The idea is that this does not replace, but supplements, general-purpose computers. It's possible — if the common denominator between iPads, Android and/or Chrome tablets, WebOS tablets, and the like is a more server-centric web experience — that they could be right, and that a more competitive computing market could be the result. But I wonder, too: would that then provide an incentive for manufacturers to try to lock down the personal computing desktop experience as well?" And even if not, an emphasis on "curated computing" could rob resources from old-skool computer development, as is already evident at Apple.

tlhIngan writes "The US Air Force, having purchased PS3s for supercomputing research, is now the latest victim of Sony's removal of the Install Other OS feature. It turns out that while their PS3s don't need the firmware update, it will be impossible to replace PS3s that fail. PS3s with the Other OS feature are no longer produced since the Slim was introduced, so replacements will have to come from the existing stock of used PS3s. However, as most gamers have probably updated their PS3s, that used stock is no longer suitable for the USAF's research. In addition, smaller educational clusters using PS3s will share the same fate — unable to replace machines that die in their clusters." In related news, Sony has been hit with two more lawsuits over this issue.

Today at the Ubuntu Developers Summit, Mark Shuttleworth presented a few upcoming Ubuntu projects, including "Light" versions of the operating system for "both netbook and desktop, that are optimized for dual-boot scenarios." Shuttleworth also took the wraps off Unity, a new lightweight interface that will be included in Ubuntu Light and eventually in Ubuntu Netbook Edition as well. "First, we want to move the bottom panel to the left of the screen, and devote that to launching and switching between applications. That frees up vertical space for web content, at the cost of horizontal space, which is cheaper in a widescreen world. ... Second, we'll expand that left-hand launcher panel so that it is touch-friendly. With relatively few applications required for instant-on environments, we can afford to be more generous with the icon size there. ... Third, we will make the top panel smarter." Ars got a chance to try out a prototype of Unity, saying, "Its unique visual style melds beautifully with Ubuntu's new default theme and its underlying interaction model seems compelling and well-suited for small screens."

PSandusky writes "A report issued by the Lower Merion School District's chosen law firm blames the district's IT department for the laptop webcam spying scandal. In particular, the report mentions lax IT policies and record-keeping as major problems that enabled the spying. Despite thousands of e-mails and images to the contrary, the report also maintains that no proof exists that anyone in IT viewed images captured by the webcams."