Thursday, October 9, 2008

Byte Into It - 08 Oct 08

Mozilla CEO John Lilly: Firefox Mobile Alphas coming “in a few weeks” » Unwired View
Mozilla CEO John Lilly: Firefox Mobile Alphas coming “in a few weeks”

In an interview that started with Mozilla CEO John Lilly explaining how he runs the company to San Jose Mercury News reporter Pete Carey, it was revealed that the first Firefox Mobile alphas could be released in “a few weeks.”
Pictured: The amazing bendy TV screen that folds up to fit in your pocket | Mail Online

Bendy screen

In operation: A snapshot of the running all-organic 2D-display

Traditional flat-screen televisions could soon become a thing of the past, as scientists have revealed an ultra-thin, flexible screen that could fold up and fit in your pocket.

The bendy screens - less than a millimetre thick - could be used for televisions, computers and phones, and may pave the way for easy-to-carry digital newspaper displays, which readers could upload their news on to daily.

Some speculate that the technology could even lead to wearable TV jackets, flexible laptop screens, and TV blankets.
Google contributes more code to WINE
With the recent release of Picasa 3 Beta for Linux, Google has contributed more code to the WINE project.

WINE is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of Linux (and other Unix-like operating systems). It can be thought of as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs on Linux. WINE does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code. With WINE you can run such programs as Microsoft Office and games like Counter Strike on your Linux machine.

Another popular application is Adobe’s Photoshop CS2 and here Google has been very active.

In January 2006, Google (working with CodeWeavers the commerical arm of the WINE project) improved WINE so Picasa 2.2 would run. This effort resulted in 225 patches committed to the WINE project.

Their work continued in 2007, committing a few dozen patches and they also worked again with CodeWeavers to improve Wine so it could run Photoshop CS2 properly. As a result, about 200 patches were committed to the WINE project.
Torvalds talks about his brand new blog | NetworkWorld.com Community
We tend to think that everybody who's anybody in the tech world has a blog, right? Well, Linus Torvalds didn't have a blog, at least not until dipping his toe into the waters with this one -- "Linus' Blog" -- which launched last Thursday.

Linus TorvaldsThere's not a lot there yet -- three posts -- and Torvalds tells me that he sees the undertaking as an experimental outlet for personal thoughts and family expressions. However, with the Torvalds name being practically synonymous with Linux, people are already beginning to take notice.
Australian ISPs offer US advice, smugness, on net neutrality
For years, US Internet service providers have been offering their users unlimited access to the web, creating high expectations among customers who have never had to think before accessing content. As that content has shifted from text to music to video, however, ISPs have found that living up to the promise of "all-you-can-eat" broadband can be expensive in a nation of gluttons.

One symptom of this problem is the industry's opposition to net neutrality, which would prevent ISPs from profiting on specific services or content, or degrading and blocking others. In the midst of this fight, the executives of several ISPs in Australia have weighed in, suggesting that they've solved this problem already and that their US counterparts should pay attention to their model.
Wal*Mart shutting down DRM server, nuking your music collection -- only people who pay for music risk losing it to DRM shenanigans - Boing Boing
Hey suckers! Did you buy DRM music from Wal*Mart instead of downloading MP3s for free from the P2P networks? Well, they're repaying your honesty by taking away your music. Unless you go through a bunch of hoops (that you may never find out about, if you've changed email addresses or if you're not a very technical person), your music will no longer be playable after October 9th.

But don't worry, this will never ever happen to all those other DRM companies -- unlike little fly-by-night mom-and-pop operations like Wal*Mart, the DRM companies are rock-ribbed veterans of commerce and industry, sure to be here for a thousand years. So go on buying your Audible books, your iTunes DRM songs, your Zune media, your EA games... None of these companies will ever disappear, nor will the third-party DRM suppliers they use. They are as solid and permanent as Commodore, Atari, the Soviet Union, the American credit system and the Roman Empire.

Boy, the entertainment industry sure makes a good case for ripping them off, huh? Buy your media and risk having it confiscated by a DRM-server shutdown. Take it for free and keep it forever.
MPAA spokeslawyers insist that they not be identified by name in reports from press-conference - Boing Boing
The MPAA is suing RealNetworks for making a product that will rip a DVD, crap it up with DRM, and store it on your hard-drive. The MPAA says that only their stupid DRM, and not RealNetworks' stupid DRM, can be used to cripple DVDs. My take? A pox on both their houses.

Except this:

Lawyers for the MPAA, in a teleconference with reporters, said Kaleidesape and RealDVD are circumventing "technology designed to prevent copying."

The lawyers, who asked that their names not be published, said they were concerned "Consumers will think this is a legal product...when in fact it is totally illegal."
US Customs: Sketching an SUV makes you a copyright infringer - Boing Boing
"A woman stopped by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers at the border, over a drawing of an SUV in her notebook. They thought the artist and college professor was an industrial spy and copyright infringer."
IFPI Loses Another P2P ‘Wireless Defense’ Case | TorrentFreak
A man accused of being a music pirate has been cleared by a Danish court. The man denied the claims of the IFPI, based on his assertion that someone else must have accessed his wireless router to commit the infringements. This is the second major defeat for the IFPI in Denmark over the so-called ‘wireless defense’.

The music industry anti-piracy lobby IFPI has taken a severe beating in Denmark recently. In September the major Danish ISPs issued a joint statement rejecting the IFPI’s demands for a ‘3 strikes’ agreement aimed at ultimately disconnecting alleged pirates from the Internet, labeling it as a “contravention of the law”. However, the defeats don’t end there.

The IFPI also accused two Danish women of being Internet pirates, after they claimed to have monitored illicit file-sharing activities on an IP address registered to one of them. The IFPI demanded $62,000 in compensation from the pair, stating that even if their Wi-Fi had been used without their knowledge, they are ultimately responsible for what happens on their Internet connection. Eventually a court ruled in favor of the women and acquitted them of all charges, much to the displeasure of the IFPI.
Data-mining sucks: official report - Boing Boing
A multi-year National Research Council review of data-mining as a means of discovering terrorists has concluded that this just doesn't work very well, and that it ends up harming and harassing -- and terrorizing -- innocents whose only crime is to have a profile that some database-designer thinks is hinky.

The report was written by a committee whose members include William Perry, a professor at Stanford University; Charles Vest, the former president of MIT; W. Earl Boebert, a retired senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories; Cynthia Dwork of Microsoft Research; R. Gil Kerlikowske, Seattle's police chief; and Daryl Pregibon, a research scientist at Google.

They admit that far more Americans live their lives online, using everything from VoIP phones to Facebook to RFID tags in automobiles, than a decade ago, and the databases created by those activities are tempting targets for federal agencies. And they draw a distinction between subject-based data mining (starting with one individual and looking for connections) compared with pattern-based data mining (looking for anomalous activities that could show illegal activities).

But the authors conclude the type of data mining that government bureaucrats would like to do--perhaps inspired by watching too many episodes of the Fox series 24--can't work. "If it were possible to automatically find the digital tracks of terrorists and automatically monitor only the communications of terrorists, public policy choices in this domain would be much simpler. But it is not possible to do so."
Michael Moore on Slacker Uprising’s Piracy ‘Problem’ | TorrentFreak
Michael Moore decided to give away his latest film ‘Slacker Uprising’ for free, but only to people in the US and Canada. However, since he chose to use BitTorrent, and open trackers such as The Pirate Bay, it was fairly easy for the rest of the world to download it as well. Was this done on purpose? Moore respond
Ballmer denies involvement in Vista Capable - Software - iTnews Australia
n a written deposition to court Steve Ballmer has denied all knowledge of the Vista Capable marketing program that resulted in a class action suit against his company.

The prosecution had been hoping to get Ballmer on the stand to justify the program but this now seems unlikely in light of his written statement.

In his deposition Ballmer said he was kept informed on the campaign by Jim Allchin, Microsoft's retired co-president for platforms, products and services, and Will Poole, the former senior vice president for Windows client business, who has since left the company.

“I was not involved in establishing the requirements computers must satisfy to qualify for the Windows Vista Capable program,” the deposition reads.
BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | Computer game boosts maths scores
A daily dose of computer games can boost maths attainment, according to a study carried out in Scottish schools.

Learning and Teaching Scotland - the main organisation for the development of the curriculum - analysed the effect of a "brain training" game.

It also found improvements in pupils' concentration and behaviour.

The study involved more than 600 pupils in 32 schools across Scotland using the Brain Training from Dr Kawashima game on the Nintendo DS every day.
BBC NEWS | UK | Education | Oxbridge lectures play on iTunes
Oxford and Cambridge University are to make lectures by leading academics available through iTunes.

Cambridge says it will bring the work of its Nobel prize-winning academics in reach of a much wider public.

Oxford University says it will publish 150 hours of video and audio material of lectures and ideas from "world-leading thinkers".

These are the latest UK universities to provide free education content through the online downloading software.
YouTube intros links to buy music featured in videos
The next time you see a video on Google and wonder to yourself, "What is that awesome song they're using in the soundtrack?" you may be able to find out, and even buy it directly from the page. Google has begun adding links to some of its video pages that point users to where they can purchase the media found in the videos they're watching, starting with partner videos (those uploaded directly by companies and content owners who have an agreement with YouTube). Now, when you watch music videos from EMI, for example, you'll see links to buy the featured song on Amazon or iTunes.
Motorola's Linux strategy evolves with Android
Motorola was one of the first major handset makers to embrace the Linux platform. Its earliest Linux-based phones were popular in China, enabling the company to sell over 5 million of the penguin-powered devices by 2006. Following that initial victory, Motorola brought its Linux phones to the US with its global launch of the Razr2 in 2007. Motorola's current Linux lineup features eight LiMo-compatible handsets and the company boasts that its total sales of Linux-based phones has exceeded 14 million as of this year.
Plunging costs show there's plenty of backbone bandwidth
Prices for data transit continue to plunge, according to new research out from TeleGeography, and they're falling by almost 40 percent a year. Despite all the doom-and-gloom from ISPs, who claim they need to impose bandwidth caps and throttling in order to keep the bits flowing, the news is a reminder that the world's backbone providers actually have huge surpluses of capacity and that transit costs are plummeting faster than the US stock market.

Not all ISPs pay for transit, of course; the larger ones are able to "peer" freely with other large ISPs. "Transit" applies between ISPs who don't agree to freely swap data from each other's networks, and it's a major expense for local ISPs that need to purchase all of their bandwidth. (See our in-depth guide to peering and transit for a detailed discussion of the pricing and politics of the process.)
MySpace, Facebook holding mobile social networking back
Social networking made the leap from desktops to mobile phones a long time ago, and a new report suggests that MySpace and Facebook still dominate even on the small screen. Too bad the two market leaders may be doing more harm than good to mobile social networking.

The report, published by ABI Research, says that nearly half (46 percent) of social networking users have visited one such network on a mobile phone. Among these mobile socializers, almost 70 percent of them visited MySpace, while another 67 percent hit Facebook. Even though the mobile social networking landscape is rich with competitors, especially those innovating with location-based services, no other network garnered even 15 percent of mobile adoption.

It should come as no surprise that the most important activities to mobile socializers are checking on new messages and comments from friends (50 percent of users), and posting status updates (45 percent) to let others know what they are doing.

“The social network is increasingly becoming a central hub for communication across online and mobile domains for many consumers,” said research director Michael Wolf. “To a degree, it allows them to centralize messaging, communication and even digital media consumption through a centralized property on various screens. We believe this centralization of a consumer’s digital lifestyle through social networks will only increase adoption of mobile social networking in coming years.”
750,000 lost jobs? The dodgy digits behind the war on P2P: Page 1
If you pay any attention to the endless debates over intellectual property policy in the United States, you'll hear two numbers invoked over and over again, like the stuttering chorus of some Philip Glass opera: 750,000 and $200 to $250 billion. The first is the number of U.S. jobs supposedly lost to intellectual property theft; the second is the annual dollar cost of IP infringement to the U.S. economy. These statistics are brandished like a talisman each time Congress is asked to step up enforcement to protect the ever-beleaguered U.S. content industry. And both, as far as an extended investigation by Ars Technica has been able to determine, are utterly bogus.
Apple finally drops NDA, iPhone developers rejoice
Apple has announced via its Apple Developer Connection website that it has dropped the NDA that has left iPhone developers frustrated since the release of iPhone OS 2.0 this past July. In a note addressed "To Our Developers," Apple finally admitted that the NDA had "created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success."
Apple snoozes, researcher discloses risky iPhone UI flaws
Apple is arguably getting more proactive about iPhone security exploits. The iPhone OS 2.0 release fixed quite a few bugs, and last month's 2.1 update was no security slouch either. Still, in the face of Apple recruiting full-time iPhone hackers, an Israeli researcher has released details on two potentially dangerous—though seemingly innocuous—design flaws that he says the company has ignored for too long.

Ex
Infinite reboots plague some early Apple TV 2.2 adopters (Updated)
Remember that Apple TV 2.2 update that we were all fawning over this morning? The one with all the awesome new features, like buying HD TV episodes straight from the device and the ability to play music video playlists? It turns out that once again, not all that glitters is gold in the Apple world, because this update is breaking many users' Apple TVs.
iPhone gives Pandora twice as many new users daily
The Pandora personalized radio streaming service was already a popular destination before Apple's App Store launched over the summer, but the launch of the Pandora iPhone application has apparently caused the site to really take off. Founder Tim Westergren spoke about the iPhone's effect on Pandora and a variety of other topics during his keynote at the Digital Music Forum West conference and, according to paidContent, revealed that the device has caused a substantial increase in the amount of new Pandora users.
Apple Brick rumours building - Business - iTnews Australia
The web has been buzzing with rumours that a new Apple product, code-named Brick, would be announced in an industry keynote on October 14th.

Some commentators have guessed that the announcement, which is likely to become one of Steve Jobs' infamous 'just one more thing' teasers, would be a new notebook design, or even a refresh of the Mac Mini.

One wag even suggested that Brick would be a new OS and that it was so named because it would 'smash Windows'.

But the latest mumblings from the rumour mill point to something altogether more substantial.

The 'brick' in question is a block of aircraft-grade aluminium and, rather than a new product, we're looking at a new manufacturing process according to some sources within Apple.

The new manufacturing process, which apparently will allow Apple to carve cases and components from a single block of lightweight metal using high pressure water jets and three-dimensional lasers, could be a game changer for the laptop industry.

It means that chassis and cases will no longer have to be folded or joined, adding huge strength and making the next generation of Mac laptops seamless and virtually screwless.

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