Slashdot Mirror

Schiphol writes "A new study by the World Health Organization (WHO) concludes that mobile phone radiation presents a carcinogenic hazard. Are cell phones going to be the new tobacco, then?" This seems to be a new interpretation of a long-tern WHO study of possible cellphone health risks that had "inconclusive results" last May.

iONiUM writes "Through a press release ahead of WWDC, Apple has revealed that it will be releasing its own cloud service to rival Google and Amazon's. In addition, they will unveil the new iOS, and the latest desktop OS." Apple also announced the release of the iWork suite for iOS devices.

destinyland writes "Amazon just doubled the reported battery life for their Kindle digital readers — but they did it by cutting the estimated daily usage in half. Monday Amazon's competitor Barnes and Noble released a new touch-screen version of their Nook reader, and C|Net notes that apparently Amazon 'took issue with how its competitor was calculating and presenting its battery life numbers.' When Barnes and Noble claimed that the Nook's charge lasted twice as long based on a half hour a day of usage, Amazon simply recalculated the Kindle's battery life using the same formula. By Wednesday, Barnes and Noble was insisting that the Nook's charge still lasted twice as long as the Kindle's. 'If that's true, then Barnes and Noble mangled the launch of their touch-screen Nook,' reports one Kindle blog, 'by botching their description of one of its main selling points.'"

theodp writes "If you could change the way wireless companies did things, what would you do?' asked Sprint CEO Dan Hesse. How about stopping the use of Sprint's firmware updates to download apps that aren't wanted and can't be removed, Dan? Sprint confirmed to CNET's Elinor Mills that those strange apps she was shocked to find on her Android phone — sci-fi shooter N.O.V.A. and Blockbuster — with a long list of permissions that couldn't be uninstalled had been sneakily downloaded onto her phone during a firmware update. 'Sprint does offer a variety of partner applications that are optimized for use on our wireless phones,' a Sprint representative explained in an e-mail. 'From time to time, we will provide new apps to our customers in conjunction with a software maintenance release. Also, Sprint, in conjunction with Google, is taking steps to develop a technical solution that would allow customers to remove any unwanted applications that have been preloaded or pushed in an over-the-air software update.'" Asking first would be a nice non-technical solution.

Oldcynic writes "As Sony struggles to restore the Playstation Network we receive news today of another breach, this time at Sony Ericsson in Canada. 'Sony Corp. spokesman Atsuo Omagari said Wednesday that names, email and encrypted passwords may have been stolen from the Sony Ericsson Canada website, but no credit card information was taken.' Another group managed to penetrate Sony Entertainment Japan yesterday as well. I almost feel bad for them.

ravrore writes "Miro 4 was released today, a major update to the popular multi-platform FOSS video player. The new version adds music support, local network stream and transfer, music purchasing, and Android syncing. Miro is positioning itself as the open iTunes for Android users. 'We believe the open media world can be just as integrated and usable as the closed, top-down, DRM'ed systems of companies like Apple. And we want to prove it,' says Nicholas Reville, Executive Director of Participatory Culture Foundation, which creates Miro." It looks like the project still has a few rough edges, but is definitely getting there.

schwit1 submitted a story from CNet. From the article: "Cisco Systems designed a surveillance system to help the Chinese government track and ultimately suppress members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, according to a lawsuit the group filed against the network equipment maker. The lawsuit, which was filed Thursday in Federal District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose, alleges Cisco supplied and helped maintain a surveillance system known as the 'Golden Shield' that allowed the Chinese government to track and censor the group's Internet activities. As a result of Cisco's technology, Falun Gong members suffered false imprisonment, torture, and wrongful death, according the lawsuit, which was filed on behalf of the religious group by the Washington, D.C.-based Human Rights Law Foundation."

A mere few days after the EFF called upon Apple to Indemnify developers against alleged infringement of Lodsys patents on in-app purchases, Apple has sent Lodsys a letter defending developers. Apple argues that it has a license to the Lodsys patents that extends to individual developers making the Lodsys claims invalid. Hopefully the baring of legal teeth will put this matter to rest.

Here's frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton who writes "Facebook apparently hired a PR firm that tried to seduce some pundits into writing negative editorials about Google. The 'attack angle' would have been that Google was endangering users' privacy by scraping information about users from Facebook and making such information easier to find with a Google search." Hit the link below to read the rest of Bennett's story.

The reliably cynical Seth Finkelstein commented that the attempted editorial-planting was just "often implicit dealing made explicit", (i.e. that pundits are drafted as fronts for corporate publicity campaigns like this all the time, and that the PR firm in this case spoiled the game by rudely blurting out the terms of the deal, like a guy offering to buy a girl dinner if she'll sleep with him). Steven Levy of Wired opined that with regard to the privacy issues, Facebook was the real villain for exposing information in the first place that many users would rather keep private.

Some perspective here: In 2008, I was corresponding with a high school student (using one of the Circumventor sites to get around their local school Internet blocker, naturally) who mentioned that he was able to see all the personal information of other students in his Facebook high school network -- including email address, phone number, and home address, if the user had uploaded that information to Facebook -- even if those users had not confirmed him as a friend. (Facebook allows users to join one or more "networks" indicating their school affiliation, workplace, city of residence, etc. -- such networks are distinct from Facebook groups and fan pages.) Double-checking with a few more users in the same network and in other high school networks, we found that it really was possible for any member of a high school network to view the profiles of any other member of that high school network and see all of their personal information.

Unlike other types of "networks" on Facebook, it is not possible to join a high school network simply by specifying it in your preferences. However, all of the students that I corresponded with said that in order to join their high school networks, they simply had to request to join the network, and then get a friend request confirmed by an existing member of that high school network. Which means that conning your way into the network would be easy: either (1) create a profile with the name and photo of a real student at that school, and send out friend requests to that student's friends, hoping that one of them would confirm you (not remembering that they had already friended that person under their real account), or (2) create a profile with a hot girl's picture and send out random friend requests to a bunch of guys in the network. Once you got confirmed, you'd have access to all the personal information that any student in that high school had posted on their profile. (I hasten to add that we did not actually try either of these things, but it stands to reason that it would work, since it wasn't functionally any different from what all of those students actually had to do in order to join their networks in the first place!)

I sent a message to Facebook's security team about this, and got a non-form-letter response from a real person -- their reply, however, was that this behavior was by design:

We believe this allows for greater sharing and helps make the site more useful for people, though we also recognize the potential for misuse. That's why we've built a peer verification system around the joining of high school networks. We also use automated systems to detect and flag anomalous behavior, like lots of messages sent to non-friends or a high percentage of ignored friend requests.

Smart, but probably not secure enough. For one thing, if someone is creating disposable accounts to send out friend requests in hopes of getting into a high school network, it only has to work once, so even if most of their accounts get flagged for "anomalous behavior," they only need one that doesn't get flagged. And even if that account does get flagged and cancelled later, by that time it might be too late, if they've already grabbed enough users' information. In any case, some time between 2008 and 2011, Facebook did change the behavior of high school networks so that members can no longer see the personal information of other members without a confirmed friend request. But this loophole was not that difficult to find, and it's likely that at least a few other users had discovered the same issue.

Now, imagine what would have happened if Facebook had announced that, for a fee of a few hundred dollars, they were offering CDs for sale containing the names, addresses, mobile phone numbers, and instant messenger names of all the high school students on their site (along with, of course, all the photos those students had posted of themselves). It goes without saying that after the class action lawsuits had finished, there'd be nothing left of the company but a smoldering crater. Now, I'm not suggesting that Facebook's security policy for high school networks was anywhere near as bad as selling CDs with all the personal information of their high school users, but it's worth thinking about why it should not be considered as bad. In either case, anybody willing to spend a few hundred dollars (or, equivalently, a few hundred dollars' worth of effort -- the effort to discover the loophole, and then to crank out the friend requests) could obtain the personal information of as many high school students as they wanted. What's the difference?

Well, obviously, there's the message that it would send if a company like Facebook offered to sell CDs full of users' personal information. It would lower the bar for future behavior by similar companies, it would make users extremely cynical about trusting the motivations of social networking sites, and in the long run it might even cause courts to decide that users had no reasonable expectation of privacy when joining those sites, because it was "common knowledge" and "common practice" that those sites offered up people's personal information for sale! On the other hand, if Facebook makes that information available indirectly through "benign neglect" -- by, for example, forcing you to create a fake high school profile and send out a bunch of friend requests and create a new profile from scratch if your first one gets canned -- that's far less likely to cause the side effects I just listed. MySpace is not going to get the idea that it's OK to start selling CDs of users' personal information because, hey, Facebook let people pry out the same information if they jumped through enough hoops.

But what this means is that fairly mild privacy issues, if they arise as a result of deliberate choice by a company like Facebook, are likely to get more press attention than far more serious privacy issues that arise as a result of benign neglect. Because when Facebook makes a deliberate choice that affects user privacy (like sharing users' preferences with Pandora), the pundits and the public are reacting to the direct privacy implications of that action, plus all the auxiliary issues, like the "message" that it sends, and the precedent that it sets for future actions by that company and other companies. Whereas if an issue arises as a result of neglect (as in the case of PlayStation Networks users' credit cards being stolen), people are reacting only to the direct privacy implications of the incident, so the issue has to be much more serious to get the equivalent amount of press.

For example, the right reason to be concerned about Facebook sharing users' personal information with Pandora, was the principle that it violated -- if users say "no" to sharing their personal information, Facebook shouldn't be allowed to switch that choice unilaterally. But as for the practical implications -- come on. Facebook and Pandora are both big faceless corporate behemoths as far as we're concerned, so why would we trust one with our personal data but not the other? Besides, what if Facebook had simply bought out Pandora? Then they could share all of our personal information with all the employees of the newly merged Facepanbookdora, and the exact same people would have had access to the exact same data, but it wouldn't have violated the agreement against sharing information with "third parties," because they wouldn't be a third party any more.

When I first found that email addresses of Ameritrade customers had been obtained by a pump-and-dump stock spammer, I was sure (as were most readers, probably) that Ameritrade was not deliberately selling its customers' email addresses; I figured that they had simply left their database inadequately secured, and some third party had broken in and stolen it. On the other hand, because the incident happened as a result of benign neglect and not deliberate choice, I figured the incident would not garner much press as a result, and that seems to have been the case -- the wholesale thievery of Ameritrade customers' personal information by financial criminals received far less press attention than, say, Facebook's decision to change their privacy policy so they could share information with Pandora.

What this means is that if you're an ardent cyber-rights hippie like me, then yes, you should care about the privacy issues that set the blogosphere afire, even if they're fairly minor privacy issues that are magnified out of proportion because they speak to the deliberate intentions of the companies involved. It matters that Facebook decided one day to share our music preferences with Pandora, even if it doesn't hurt anyone.

On the other hand, if you simply care about threats to your personal privacy, then you should heavily discount the noise being made about deliberate choices taken by companies like Facebook, and pay far more attention to dangers of benign neglect by the company guarding your privacy, when that benign neglect is exploited by malicious outsiders. If you have a stalker and you're worried about them finding your Facebook profile, it makes no sense to be worried about Google scraping the information from the public version of your Facebook profile, if it's the same information that your stalker would be able to see anyway if they were logged in to Facebook themselves. It's far more likely that your stalker would try to exploit a weakness in Facebook's privacy settings -- for example, ingratiating themselves with one of your Facebook friends and getting them to accept a friend request, so that they can then see any information on your Facebook profile that is viewable to "friends of friends." Maybe you knew about that already, but if you didn't, you wouldn't know it from reading all the punditry about the Facebook-Google kerfuffle.

An anonymous reader writes "Throughout the past few years, Google's newspaper-scanning project has digitized more than 60 million pages from newspapers spanning 250 years, including such gems as the moon landing. But according to the Boston Phoenix, this ambitious effort is slated to soon be axed in favor of Google One Pass, a platform for publishers to monetize content from their own sites."

Wesociety writes "The House Judiciary Committee, lead by Rep. Lamar Smith, is preparing a bill which would require internet service providers to retain information about their users to aid in criminal investigations. This particular bill would be a smaller part of a large measure to strengthen sanctions against acts such as child pornography. The most interesting part of this bill however is not who it targets but rather who it does not. The bill would make wireless companies exempt from the requirement to store user data." Declan McCullagh gives a fuller report at CNET. Update: 05/14 00:35 GMT by T : Note: Smith has yet to release the text of the current bill, but it seems an easy bet it will have much in common with his similar-sounding legislative push in 2007, which resulted in the unsuccessful SAFETY Act of 2009.

eldavojohn writes "LimeWire has settled its suit with the RIAA for $105 million. It's several orders of magnitude lower than the $1.5 trillion initially demanded by the RIAA, but it ends a nearly five-year legal battle. P2P networks take heed; the monster may start looking for other targets."

Last fall, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA), which was dubbed the "internet blacklist" by opponents worried about its broad provisions for allowing the removal of websites based on vague criteria. COICA stalled in Congress, but now Leahy has proposed a new, similar piece of legislation called the PROTECT IP Act (PDF). "Like COICA, Protect IP expands the web of enforcement techniques by requiring advertising networks and financial transaction providers to cut ties to domains found to violate the law. But the new version now adds search engines and others to the list of providers who can be conscripted into complying with court orders. Protect IP would require 'information location tools' to 'take technically feasible and reasonable measures, as expeditiously as possible,' to remove or disable access to the site associated with a condemned domain, including blocking hypertext links to the site. ... Perhaps most worrisome of all, Protect IP adds a provision that allows copyright and trademark holders to sue the owner/operator of a domain directly. Again, the provision applies only to nondomestically-registered domains, but it allows the private party, like the government, to sue the domain name itself if the registrant does not have a US address. That's important because in all cases, once a suit is initiated, the plaintiff can ask the court to issue an injunction or restraining order effectively shutting the site down."

fysdt writes "A new open- and crowdsourced initiative to deploy more geiger counters all over Japan looks to be a go. Safecast, formerly RDTN.org, recently met and exceeded its $33,000 fund-raising goal on Kickstarter, which should help Safecast send between 100 and 600 geiger counters to the catastrophe-struck country. The data captured from the geiger counters will be fed into Safecast.org, which aggregates radiation readings from government, nonprofit, and other sources, as well as into Pachube, a global open-source network of sensors."

Microsoft isn't standing idly by while Appple's app store fills with software; fysdt writes "A newly-announced service called the iOS to Windows Phone 7 API mapping tool acts as an interchange for developers to take applications they've already written for Apple's platform, and figure out ways to get the code work with Microsoft's standards."

suraj.sun writes "Like clockwork, the first lawsuit resulting from the security breach of the personal data of more than 75 million Sony PlayStation Network customers has been filed. The suit was filed today on behalf of Kristopher Johns, 36, of Birmingham, Ala., in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. Johns accuses Sony of not taking 'reasonable care to protect, encrypt, and secure the private and sensitive data of its users.' He also believes Sony took too long to notify him and other customers that their personal information had been exposed. Because of that, the complaint alleges, Sony did not allow its customers 'to make an informed decision as to whether to change credit card numbers, close the exposed accounts, check their credit reports, or take other mitigating actions.'"

Several readers have sent in follow-up articles to Wednesday's news that iPhone location data was being tracked and stored. First, it seems Android shares a similar problem, though the file containing the location data is "only accessible on devices that have been rooted and opened up to installation of unsigned apps." Developer Magnus Eriksson has created an app to flush this data. Next: the iPhone tracking file is not new, just in a different place than it used to be. Reader overThruster then points out a CNet story indicating that law enforcement has been aware of this file for some time, and has used it in a forensics context. This story is a growing concern for Apple, particularly now that Senator Al Franken (PDF) and Rep. Ed Markey (PDF) have both written letters to Steve Jobs demanding details about the location tracking. Finally, PCMag explains how to view the location data present on your iPhone, should you so desire.

blair1q writes "CNet reports that Google has lost the lawsuit brought by Bedrock, for infringing on Patent 5,893,120, 'Methods and apparatus for information storage and retrieval using a hashing technique with external chaining and on-the-fly removal of expired data,' and has exposed the Linux kernel, in which the infringing code reportedly appears, to liability for patent-license fees. Red Hat also participated in the suit, arguing that the patent was invalid, but the court decided otherwise."

theweatherelectric writes "According to the YouTube blog, YouTube is now transcoding all new uploads to WebM, whereas previously the focus was on 720p and 1080p video. Google's James Zern writes, 'Transcoding all new video uploads into WebM is an important first step, and we're also working to transcode our entire video catalog to WebM. Given the massive size of our catalog — nearly 6 years of video is uploaded to YouTube every day — this is quite the undertaking. So far we've already transcoded videos that make up 99% of views on the site or nearly 30% of all videos into WebM. We're focusing first on the most viewed videos on the site, and we've made great progress here through our cloud-based video processing infrastructure that maximizes the efficiency of processing and transcoding without stopping. It works like this: at busy upload times, our processing power is dedicated to new uploads, and at less busy times, our cloud will automatically switch some of our processing to encode older videos into WebM. As we continue to transcode the remaining inventory, we'll keep you posted on our progress.'"

angry tapir writes "US Supreme Court justices on Monday questioned whether they should side with Microsoft and weaken the legal standard needed to invalidate a patent, with some justices suggesting there are alternatives to changing established law. The issue arose as part of the case involving Redmond and i4i."

tripleevenfall writes "A Democratic senator is preparing to introduce legislation that aims to end the golden era of tax-free Internet shopping. The proposal — expected to be made public soon after Tax Day — would rewrite the ground rules for Internet and mail order sales by eliminating the ability of Americans to shop at Web sites like Amazon.com and Overstock.com without paying state sales taxes."

hairyfeet writes "After releasing Monotouch for iPhone which allows c# development on iOS, Novell has announced the availability of Mono for Android. Will this give us the 'one language to rule them all' that Java failed to bring, or will the bad blood between the F/OSS groups and Microsoft make this a dead end?"

suraj.sun writes with this quote from CNet: "House Republicans voted unanimously today to block controversial Net neutrality regulations from taking effect, a move that is likely to invite a confrontation with President Obama. By a vote of 241 to 178, the House of Representatives adopted a one-page resolution that says, simply, the regulations adopted by the Federal Communications Commission on December 21 'shall have no force or effect.' 'Congress did not authorize the FCC to regulate in this area,' Rep. Rob Woodall (R-Ga.), said during this morning's floor debate. 'We must reject any rules that it promulgates in this area... It is Congress' responsibility to delegate that authority.'"

suraj.sun writes "Major browser makers are beginning to revisit how they handle Web authentication after last month's breach that allowed a hacker to impersonate sites including Google, Yahoo, and Skype. Currently, everyone from the Tunisian government to a wireless carrier in the United Arab Emirates that implanted spyware on customers' BlackBerry devices and scores of German colleges are trusted to issue digital certificates for the largest and most popular sites on the Internet."

Krystalo writes "Google employees have begun testing Google Music internally. Talks with at least some of the top publishers and the four largest record labels are still ongoing. The delays are largely due to the fact that Google is negotiating for cloud music rights and not just the authorization to distribute the songs themselves. The search giant wants to be able to store users' existing music libraries on the company's servers. Labels are in similar discussions with Apple."

CheerfulMacFanboy writes "CNET quotes Lendle co-founder Jeff Croft: 'They [Amazon] shut the API access off, and without it, our site is mostly useless. So, we went ahead and pulled it down. Could we build a lending site without their API? Yes. But it wouldn't be the quality of product we expect from ourselves.' Croft also said 'at least two other Kindle lending services got the same message' yesterday.'"

An anonymous reader writes "The White House is concerned that 'illegal streaming of content' may not be covered by criminal law, saying 'questions have arisen about whether streaming constitutes the distribution of copyrighted works.' To resolve that ambiguity, it wants a new law to 'clarify that infringement by streaming, or by means of other similar new technology, is a felony in appropriate circumstances'""

cultiv8 writes "A US judge Friday ordered Twitter to hand over the data of three users in contact with the activist site WikiLeaks. 'US Magistrate Judge Theresa Buchanan rejected arguments raised by the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a host of private attorneys representing the Twitter account holders, who had asserted that their privacy was protected by federal law, the First Amendment, and the Fourth Amendment. Buchanan rejected each of the arguments in quick succession, saying that there was no First Amendment issue because activists "have already made their Twitter posts and associations publicly available." The account holders have "no Fourth Amendment privacy interest in their IP addresses," she said, and federal privacy law did not apply because prosecutors were not seeking contents of the communications.'"

Smartphone-maker HTC has invested a significant chunk of change into cloud gaming service OnLive, raising speculation that the service could be headed for mobile devices. "At the D8 conference in June 2010, one of the most impressive demonstrations was a PC game running on an Apple iPad tablet via the OnLive service. HTC has yet to announce a tablet, although a recent report by DigiTmes said that HTC will ship a tablet at about the time that the Motorola Xoom launches." The deal comes alongside HTC's acquisition of a company involved with mobile video-on-demand, pointing to a renewed interest in bringing more types of content to mobile customers

suraj.sun writes "The Obama administration is quietly seeking the power for it and other governments to veto future top-level domain names, a move that raises questions about free expression, national sovereignty, and the role of states in shaping the future of the Internet. At stake is who will have authority over the next wave of suffixes to supplement the venerable .com, .org, and .net. At least 115 proposals are expected this year, including .car, .health, .nyc, .movie, and .web, and the application process could be finalized at a meeting in San Francisco next month."

alphadogg writes "Kenneth Olsen, the computer industry pioneer who co-founded and led minicomputer king Digital Equipment Corp. for 35 years, died at the age of 84 on Sunday in Indianapolis. As DEC's leader, Olsen oversaw the company's epic battles vs. IBM and its mainframes for the hearts and business of IT shops – a fight DEC eventually lost as the era of fast, cheap and networked PCs took hold in the 1980s and 1990s. During its heyday, DEC's PDPs, VAXes and DECnet network technology became staples in many organizations, and today's IT industry remains filled with companies whose founders once worked at DEC or with its gear. Digital was acquired in 1998 by Compaq. Dan Bricklin, co-creator of the VisiCalc spreadsheet and DEC alum, tweeted: 'Ken Olsen is in the elite club of tech founders w/Gates & Jobs, and set the stage for them. What he did we take for granted today.'"

bonch writes "Pete Walsh, technology head for the Dallas Cowboys, says he and other teams are considering iPads and other tablets as a replacement for paper playbooks, saving about 5,000 pages of printouts per game. Not only is it a huge savings in paper, but a lost iPad might also be remotely wiped to prevent a team's plays falling into the wrong hands. One concern is security and whether or not a tablet could be wirelessly hacked."

suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from CNET: "Today, Hotmail is getting a new feature aimed at 'e-mail enthusiasts,' which lets anyone create multiple e-mail accounts that can be read, replied to, and managed from their everyday e-mail inbox. These additional e-mail addresses can be had in the same manner as signing up for new accounts, but they require no extra log-ins or upkeep. ... The idea is to give users a safe way to provide third parties with an e-mail address, without giving up the address they've provided to family and friends, which, if compromised, can end the usefulness of that particular account. Each user will be able to create up to five aliases, any of which can be deleted and replaced with another at any time. Over time, Microsoft will increase that limit to 15 aliases per account, making it so that the true heavy users won't need to juggle between two or more Hotmail accounts."

AHuxley writes "Cnet.com reports that Apple has tapped security expert and author David Rice to be its director of global security. Rice is a 1994 graduate of the US Naval Academy and has a master's degree in Information Warfare and Systems Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School. He served as a Global Network Vulnerability analyst (Forbes used cryptographer) for the National Security Agency and as a Special Duty Cryptologic officer for the Navy. He is executive director of the Monterey Group, a cybersecurity consulting firm. He's also on the faculty of IANS, an information security research company and works with the US Cyber Consequences Unit. In a 2008 interview with Forbes, 'A Tax On Buggy Software,' Rice talks of a 'tax on software based on the number and severity of its security bugs. Even if that means passing those costs to consumers. ... Back in the '70s, the US had a huge problem with sulfur dioxide emissions. Now we tax those emissions, and coal power plants have responded by using better filters. Software vulnerabilities, like pollution, are inevitable — producing perfect software is impossible. So instead of saying all software must be secure, we tax insecurity and allow the market to determine the price it's willing to pay for vulnerability in software. Those who are the worst "emitters" of vulnerabilities end up paying the most, and it creates an economic incentive to manufacture more secure software.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Google has submitted an Internet Draft covering the bitstream format and decoding of VP8 video to the Internet Engineering Task Force. CNET's Stephen Shankland writes, 'Google representatives published the "VP8 Data Format and Decoding Guide" at the IETF earlier this month, but that doesn't signal standardization, the company said in a statement. The document details the VP8 bitstream — the actual sequence of bytes into which video is encoded. "We submitted the VP8 bitstream reference as an IETF Independent RFC [request for comments] to create a canonical public reference for the document," Google said. "This is independent from a standards track." The IETF document could help allay one concern VP8 critics have raised: that VP8 is defined not by documentation of the bitstream but rather by the source code of the software Google released to implement VP8. But the IETF document still plays a subordinate role to that source code.'"

matty619 writes "A CNET article is reporting on another try at low earth orbit satellites for internet access, reminiscent of Teledesic, an ill fated $9 billion Bill Gates/Paul Allen et al venture originally consisting of 840 low earth orbit satellites (LEO-SAT). From the article: 'MSCI, which stands for Microsat Systems Canada Inc., is trying to be a bit of a maverick with its project, called CommStellation. The company said today that its approach of using small, inexpensive satellites in low orbit — about 620 miles above the Earth — means better coverage of the world's population, quicker launch, and better network capacity.' Each MSCI satellite has a data-transfer capacity of 12 gigabits per second. The expected lifespan of each is 10 years, and they can be sent back into the atmosphere at the end of their lives to avoid more orbital clutter."

An anonymous reader writes "From the article: 'Apple is being sued for allegedly letting mobile apps on the iPhone and iPad send personal information to ad networks without the consent of users.' Some of the apps listed are on the Android Market as well, but there is no mention of a similar problem for Google. One wonders if Apple could be persuaded to strip access to the unique phone identifiers from apps." A followup article with an industry lawyer suggests that this lawsuit could be the first of many as users push back against privacy intrusions by app developers and ad networks.

An anonymous reader writes "The European Commission has put into effect a June 2009 agreement stating that major cellphone manufacturers should standardize their charging/data connection ports to the popular Micro-USB format. CEN-CENELEC and ETSI provided the standards by which these 14 companies will abide to make cell phone recharging and data transfer easy." Apple may even bring the next-gen iPad along for the ride.

theodp writes "If virtual desktops are so great, asks Jonathan Eunice, then why isn't everyone using them? However encouraged folks are by the progress virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has made, and however enthused they may be about extending the wins of server virtualization over into the desktop realm, you don't see analysts and developers eating the virtual desktop dog food. And even the folks you meet from Citrix, Microsoft, Quest, VMware, and Wyse — the people selling VDI — use traditional 'fat' notebooks. So, are you using virtual desktops? Why, or why not?" I wonder how long the abbreviation VDI will stick around.

Hugh Pickens writes "Believe it or not, there is still this illusion that Linux and open-source software is written by counter-culture, C++ programming cultists living in their parents' basements or huddled together in Cambridge, Mass. group-houses. Now CNet reports that the Linux Foundation has found that 'over 70% of all [Linux] kernel development is demonstrably done by developers who are being paid for their work.' That Linux is primarily developed by paid developers should come as no surprise considering that Linux enables many companies — hardware, software, and online services — to be more competitive in their markets and to find new ways to generate revenue. 'What's important about how Linux and open-source software is created isn't the side issues of politics or how its developers are perceived; it's that its fundamental methodology produces better software,' writes Stephen Vaughan-Nichols."

An anonymous reader writes "Last month, e-commerce marketplace Amazon.com launched a relatively unnoticed new feature that brings content from Wikipedia pages to its own servers in a shadowy new project that appears to be called 'Shopping Enabled Wikipedia Pages.' Hosted on the Amazon.com domain, they replicate Wikipedia's content but have added links to where a book can be purchased on Amazon. Amazon representative Anya Waring told CNET when asked via e-mail, 'As of November, we have rolled out in the books category, however [it] will be expanding to new categories in 2011.' If Average Joe scrapes Wikipedia and adds affiliate links to it, Google will remove and punish the domains with duplicate pages."

An anonymous reader writes "It looks like the gloves are really coming off; Level 3 Communications had to pony up an undisclosed amount of cash to keep Netflix streaming to Comcast customers. Perhaps now the FCC might actually do something to ensure that the internet remains open. Level 3's Chief Legal Officer, Thomas Stortz, said: 'Level 3 believes Comcast's current position violates the spirit and letter of the FCC's proposed Internet Policy principles and other regulations and statutes, as well as Comcast's previous public statements about favoring an open Internet. While the network neutrality debate in Washington has focused on what actions a broadband access provider might take to filter, prioritize or manage content requested by its subscribers, Comcast's decision goes well beyond this. With this action, Comcast is preventing competing content from ever being delivered to Comcast's subscribers at all, unless Comcast's unilaterally-determined toll is paid — even though Comcast's subscribers requested the content. With this action, Comcast demonstrates the risk of a 'closed' Internet, where a retail broadband Internet access provider decides whether and how their subscribers interact with content.'"

Pickens writes "The Xbox 360 recently turned five years old, and with no known successor on the horizon for the 360, PlayStation 3 or Wii, Cnet reports on the death of the 5-year console cycle — one of the video game industry's most longstanding truisms. For example, the Nintendo Entertainment System came out in 1985, followed by the Super NES in 1991, the Nintendo 64 in 1996, the GameCube in 2001, and the Wii in 2006. But now, why should console makers upgrade their offerings? Consumers are still buying their machines by the hundreds of thousands each month, and ramped-up online initiatives are breathing new life into the systems. A lot of it has to do with the fact that with the current generation of consoles, each company found a way to maximize either the technology behind the devices, or the utility to a wide range of new gamers."

digitaldc writes "An Apple computer purchased more than 30 years ago has sold for 425 times its original selling price. From the article: 'An Apple-1, one of only about 200 such machines built in Apple co-founder Steve Jobs' parents' garage, sold at Christie's auction house in London today for 133,250 pounds (about $210,700). The Apple-1, which didn't include a casing, power supply, keyboard, or monitor, originally retailed for $666.66 in 1976. Apple discontinued the model in 1977.'"

Thorfinn.au writes "Microsoft's new smartphone platform is off to what could be considered a slower start than expected in North America. That's according to The Street, which has released a report saying that the company sold some 40,000 units on its first day on the market. Early sales numbers from other phone platform launches include Apple's estimated 500,000 iPhones being snatched up during its launch weekend in 2007, and a million and a half G1 Android phones being bought up by T-Mobile subscribers in the phone's first six months." Do you know anyone with one of these phones? Me either.

This summer, we discussed news that the producers of The Hurt Locker had sued 5,000 people for sharing the movie over BitTorrent. Reader suraj.sun writes with word that a porn company is now following suit, filing a complaint targeting 7,098 people for illegally sharing one of their films. Quoting: "Axel Braun Productions filed the complaint Friday in US District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia, alleging that the defendants illegally shared the adult film Batman XXX: A Porn Parody. The film was written and directed by Axel Braun and distributed by Vivid Entertainment, one of the country's best known porn studios. ... '**** 'em all,' Braun told Xbiz. 'People don't realize that when you pirate a movie it hurts all of the people who work very hard to get it produced — from the cast to the production assistants to the makeup artists. So we are going after every one of them who pirates our content.'"

NeverVotedBush writes with this excerpt from CNet: "A security firm disclosed holes today in mobile apps from Bank of America, USAA, Chase, Wells Fargo and TD Ameritrade, prompting a scramble by most of the companies to update the apps. ... Specifically, viaForensics concluded that: the USAA's Android app stored copies of Web pages a user visited on the phone; TD Ameritrade's iPhone and Android apps were storing the user name in plain text on the phone; Wells Fargo's Android app stored user name, password, and account data in plain text on the phone; Bank of America's Android app saves a security question (used if a user was accessing the site from an unrecognized device) in plain text on the phone; and Chase's iPhone app stores the username on a phone if the user chose that option, according to the report. Meanwhile, the iPhone apps from USAA, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Vanguard and PayPal's Android app all passed the security tests and were found to be handling data securely."

ptorrone writes "Open source hardware company Adafruit Industries is offering a $2,000 bounty for the first person or group to upload driver code and examples under an open source license to GitHub for the Xbox Kinect released yesterday. The Kinect sensor outputs video at a frame rate of 30Hz, with the RGB video stream at 32-bit color VGA resolution (640×480 pixels), and the monochrome video stream used for depth sensing at 16-bit QVGA resolution (320×240 pixels with 65,536 levels of sensitivity). The open hardware group would like to see this camera used for education, robotics and fun outside the Xbox." The bounty was originally $1,000, but Microsoft's dour response induced Adafruit to double it. ("With Kinect, Microsoft built in numerous hardware and software safeguards designed to reduce the chances of product tampering. Microsoft will continue to make advances in these types of safeguards and work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant.") In addition, the Xbox 360 dashboard update that preceded Kinect's launch contains upgraded anti-piracy restrictions.

suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from CNET: "Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the Minnesota woman who has been fighting the recording industry over 24 songs she illegally downloaded and shared online four years ago, has lost another round in court as a jury in Minneapolis decided today that she was liable for $1.5 million in copyright infringement damages to Capitol Records, for songs she illegally shared in April 2006. ... The trial is the third for Thomas-Rasset, after one jury found her liable for copyright infringement in 2007 and ordered her to pay $222,000, the judge in the case later ruled that he erred in instructing the jury and called for a retrial. In the second trial, which took place in 2009, a jury found Thomas-Rasset liable for $1.92 million. Thomas-Rasset subsequently asked the federal court for a new trial or a reduction in the amount of damages in July 2009. But earlier this year, the judge found that amount to be 'monstrous and shocking' and reduced the amount to $54,000."

Pickens writes "Cnet reports that according to a graphic making the rounds online that uses Facebook status updates to chart what time of year people are splitting up, there are three big spikes on the calendar for breakups — just after Valentine's Day, just before spring break and two weeks before Christmas. British journalist and graphic designer David McCandless, who specializes in showcasing data in visual ways, compiled the chart after scraping 10,000 Facebook status updates for the phrases 'breakup' and 'broken up.' 'Might I suggest that, immediately after Valentine's, some women might be casting men from their sight, appalled that their lovers could think of nothing more romantic than roses from the supermarket and dinner at Outback Steakhouse,' writes Chris Matyszczyk. 'Continuing with this obviously accurate analysis, perhaps it's men who do more of the dumping just before spring break, as for some —however unfairly — their main concern lies in how their girl will look on the beach.'"