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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/
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Righthaven: saving the newspaper industry, one lawsuit at a time
The Trauma Intervention Program (TIP) of Southern Nevada is a nonprofit that sends trained volunteers to the site of severe accidents, suicides, fires, and violent theft. The volunteers comfort family members, witnesses, and bystanders—traumatized people who can't be helped by anything found in an ambulance.
TIP might seem an unlikely target for a federal copyright lawsuit, but it found itself hauled into court last week for posting 14 local newspaper articles about TIP and its volunteers to the group's website. In most of the articles, TIP volunteers are the main sources for the reporters, providing plenty of quotes and (sometimes jarring) anecdotes about their work.The lawsuit was filed by a company named Righthaven, an entrepreneurial venture formed by a Vegas attorney and the publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. It was filed without warning or notice, and it seeks more than just statutory damages and attorneys' fees; it asks the court to "direct GoDaddy and any successor domain name registrar for the Domain to lock the Domain and transfer control of the Domain to Righthaven."
Microsoft legal punch may change botnet battles forever
With court backing and a novel use of a civil procedure, Microsoft appears to be close to obliterating the Waledac spam botnet, changing the way online criminal operations are defeated going forward.
A magistrate judge in federal court in Virginia is expected to recommend within days that the judge hearing Microsoft's case grant a default judgment, Richard Boscovich, a senior Microsoft attorney told CNET on Wednesday.
This would mean that the 276 Web domains deployed as Waledac command-and-control servers to provide instructions to thousands of infected computers would be forfeited to Microsoft, effectively shutting down the botnet for good
Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20015912-245.html?tag=topStories2#ixzz0z2lK1DQi
Apple relaxes restrictions on iOS app code, iAd analytics
Recent revisions to the iOS developer agreements caused considerable controversy by restricting which programming languages could be used to develop iOS apps. Those changes also restricted what kind of analytics data could be collected by developers and advertisers. Now, however, Apple has backed off on its position: it will relax these rules in order to give developers more flexibility. Additionally, Apple will now actually publish a list of app review guidelines for developers—the first time the company has done so since the App Store launched more than two years ago.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Optical Speedbumps Create Illusion of Little Girl Darting Out In Front Of You
Civil authorities around the world have tried all kinds of tricks to get drivers to slow down: speed bumps, rumble strips, flashing lights, the decoy police cruiser, and of course the good old-fashioned speed trap. The British Columbia Automobile Association Traffic Safety Foundation is taking a different tack: scaring the living hell out of drivers. In an effort to brusquely remind drivers of the consequences of wanton acceleration, they’re painting an elongated image of a child chasing a ball into the street in 2D on the pavement in such a way that it appears three-dimensional.