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Friday, September 10, 2010
Panasonic adds Netflix streaming to 2010 TVs
Viera Cast-equipped tech gets streamed movies
By Matthew Bolton
Panasonic extends its Viera Cast service
US owners of this year's range of Panasonic's Viera Cast TVs and Blu-ray players will find that they can now stream video from Netflix, thanks to a software update.
The new service sits alongside what was already on offer, including Amazon video on demand, Skype, Pandora and YouTube.
While UK
Switzerland, a longtime haven for all kinds of financial shenanigans, has just expanded its reputation for "discretion" to cover file-sharing as well. That's the conclusion of Logistep AG, anyway, as a Swiss court has just gutted its P2P surveillance business with a ruling that says gathering even publicly available information is illegal.
Logistep has operated in Switzerland since 2004, doing what all of these firms do: trolling BitTorrent sites for movies, music, or software, then connecting to swarms and logging the information of everyone offering the file. Bits of the file are downloaded as proof that these aren't simply "mistitled" files, and information like IP address, file hash value, and time of day are recorded in a giant spreadsheet. Content providers who rely on Logistep can take this information and submit it to local courts, seeking to identify and then sue individual file-swappers.
Microsoft's Windows Phone team staged a mock funeral for the iPhone and BlackBerry on Friday, a sign of both Redmond
Microsoft jokingly buried the competition with a mock funeral on Friday, but the question is whether Windows Phone 7 will really be able to take on Android, the iPhone and others when it hits the market next month.
Two hearses were among a dozen floats that were part of a parade that took place on campus on Friday to celebrate the completion of a total overhaul of Microsoft's cell phone strategy.
Photos of the event turned up on Flickr, but Microsoft was less than eager to talk about the goings-on.
"The Microsoft event on campus was an internal event to celebrate the finalization of Windows Phone 7 software," a company representative said in a statement.
No, you don't own it: Court upholds EULAs, threatens digital resale
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit todayruled (PDF) on a long-standing case involving used software on eBay, and it came to an important decision: if a company says you don't have the right to resell a program, you don't have that right. Could this mean the end of the resale market for all digital content? Yup. But the court says it had no choice.
The case is Vernor v. Autodesk, in which Timothy Vernor made his living from selling items (including software) on eBay. Vernor had picked up some old copies of AutoCAD from an architect's office sale, complete with their serial numbers, and he put them up on eBay noting that they were not currently installed on any computer. Sounds legal, right?
Google Instant 'invented by Yahoo! in 2005'
Ex-Yahooligan rues death of LiveSearch
In a blog post, former Yahoo! search product manager Steven Hood points out that in 2005, the company rolled out to tool known as Live Search, an AJAX-based online application remarkably similar to Google Instant.
"[Google Instant] is a fundamental change to a user interaction model that’s been largely unchallenged for years," Hood writes. "By all accounts this is a bold and brave innovation. Which is why it may surprise you to learn that Google Instant is actually five years old. Yahoo built it back in 2005."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/10/google_instant_v_yahoo_live_search/