Could a concerted cyber attack by hackers and bloggers bring the government to its knees? A mock array of cyber catastrophes suggests that it could. That’s the official, if heavily censored, word.
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The FCC’s 700MHz spectrum auction hit an important milestone today as bidding on a nationwide license with open access requirements passed the reserve price of $4.638 billion. So far, total bids have exceeded the FCC’s $10.3 billion minimum.
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Stony Stevenson writes “Dirk Hohndel, Intel’s chief technologist for open source, believes the install base of Linux-based desktops could potentially double this year, based just on Eee PC sales. Speaking at open source conference Linux.conf.au in Melbourne, Hohndel said commercial pressure will be the incentive for traditionally Windows-centric hardware vendors to begin offering open source drivers and Linux-based systems to their customers. ‘Open source has made the most inroads in the server market, where Linux-based servers represent roughly a quarter of the total market. But in other segments, such as mobile phones and desktops where open source hasn’t had as much of an impact, vendors were less interested, Hohndel said. Linux penetration of the desktop environment is currently at around 0.8 percent, but Hondel said consumer behavior is changing this.’”
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Ardvark writes “Google promised some time ago to bid at least the reserve price for the C block of 700Mhz spectrum if the FCC accepted its demand for an open access rule for devices using the band, which the FCC did over Verizon’s objections. If the reserve price is not met the rule will be dropped and the block re-auctioned. It appears now that bidding has stalled just short of the reserve price. It’s assumed that Google has no interest in becoming a cell phone company and with a recession looming the 700MHz spectrum now seems worth a whole lot less. If Google’s strategy was to force the bidding above the reserve but still lose the auction, Verizon could be calling their bluff, threatening them to live up to their word and buy what to Google could be the equivalent of a $4.6 billion ‘doohickey.’” Update: 01/31 16:01 GMT by Z : And just like that, the plot thickens: the C block has hit the reserve price during bidding.
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paulraps writes “Suddenly the founders of the Pirate Bay are not so hearty. The four men behind the popular file-sharing site were indicted in Sweden on Thursday on charges of being accessories to breaking copyright law. And this is more than just a shot across the bows. The prosecutor reckons that they can be hooked for ‘promoting other people’s copyright breaches’ but there will be no walking the plank: instead, they face fines of up to $200,000 and the confiscation of all their hardware. ‘The Swedish prosecutor listed dozens of works that had been downloaded through The Pirate Bay site, including The Beatles’ Let It Be, Robbie Williams’ Intensive Care and the movie Harry Potter & The Goblet of Fire. Plaintiffs in the case include Warner, MGM, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox Films, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI.’”
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With the entertainment industry’s new push to force ISPs to somehow filter or block the transfer of any kind of copyrighted material, Charles Arthur is wondering why other industries facing massive business model challenges can’t do the same thing? Newspapers, as has been well documented, are facing challenges from the likes of Craigslist and Google — so why not have ISPs block those sites? And plenty of people are discussing news articles, even to the point of copying-and-pasting articles. Clearly, ISPs should be protecting the newspaper industry. But that’s not all. Arthur points to some other industries that ISPs should help protect, such as auto mechanics and needlepoint pattern makers — both of whom have faced market changes thanks to the internet. If only ISPs would block the sharing of information on how to fix your own car or how to create needlepoints — both of those important industries could be protected. Or, as Arthur concludes, perhaps all of these industries could adapt to the changing market. But what are the chances of that happening?
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Jack Spine writes “A robotics researcher at Accenture has given a demonstration of a ‘Pocket Supercomputer’ — a phone behaving like a thin client. It can be used to send images and video of objects in real time to a server where they can be identified and linked to relevant information, which can then be sent back to the user. ‘The camera on the phone is used to take a video of an object — such as a book … By offloading the processing from a mobile device onto a server, there are few limits on the size and processing power available to be used for the storage and search of images.’ To pinpoint the features necessary to identify an object, the image is run through an algorithm called Scale-Invariant Feature Transform, or SIFT, a technology developed by academic David Lowe. The software extracts feature points from a jpeg and makes a match against images in the database. If a match exists then the software on the server retrieves information and sends it back to the user’s phone. A ‘three-dimensional’ image of an object can also be uploaded onto the phone, to look at the virtual object from different angles. The motion-tracking technology Accenture uses for this is a free library of algorithms called Open Computer Vision.”
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Malcolm Gladwell is famous for his influential theory of, well, influentials, but a Columbia sociologist says he’s got it all wrong.
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DigitalDame2 writes “”There’s nothing wrong with Vista,” PC Mag editor-in-chief Lance Ulanoff tells a Microsoft rep at this year’s CES. “but you guys have a big problem on your hands. Perception is reality, and the perception is that Vista is a dud.” He goes on to confess that the operating system is too complex and burdened by things people don’t need. Plus, Vista sometimes seems so slow. Ulanoff gives four suggestions for a complete Vista makeover, like starting with new code and creating a universal interface table. But will Microsoft really listen?”
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In the biggest standards battle most people couldn’t care less about, most folks are assuming that Blu-ray has finally won the battle. However, the HD DVD folks aren’t totally giving up yet. After hanging their heads and canceling a party and press conference at CES, it appears that Toshiba believes the way to revive interest in the HD DVD standard is… to spend $2.7 million on a Superbowl ad. As if that’s going to make a difference. It brings to mind various dot com startups from the last bubble who put their entire marketing budget into a Super Bowl ad. In the meantime, it may be time to start watching HD DVD’s other backers. Microsoft still insists it’s strongly behind HD DVD but have opened the door to finally giving it up. Meanwhile, Intel has a long history of jumping ship after it realizes it backed the wrong horse in various standards battles. The company seems to have learned when to cash out and move on. Last year it moved closer to that position by supporting both standards (while still officially backing HD DVD). If the trend keeps moving towards Blu-ray, then expect to see Intel jump more fully to the other camp. Now, if only this had been worked out four years ago, before people had moved on to online video. Blu-ray can still do well, but it missed its biggest opportunity to take over the market a few years ago.
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Shipwack writes “Tens of millions of internet users across the Middle East and Asia have been left without access to the web after a technical fault cut millions of connections. The outage, which is being blamed on a fault in a single undersea cable, has severely restricted internet access in countries including India, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and left huge numbers of people struggling to get online. Observers say that the digital blackout first struck yesterday morning, with the Egypt’s communications ministry suggesting it was caused by a cut in a major internet pipeline linking it to Europe.”
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We’ve written many times in the past about how courts have protected anonymous speech in the US, but that doesn’t mean that some won’t go to ridiculous lengths to reveal anonymous commenters they don’t like. Last summer, we wrote about the ridiculous lawsuit over some anonymous “mean” postings on a forum for law school students. The case involved students claiming that they were unable to get jobs due to mean comments on the boards. It seems like quite a stretch to think law firms would judge their hiring decisions on such a thing, but the law students in question apparently needed someone to blame for their inability to get jobs.
Of course, revealing who those anonymous posters are isn’t easy, thanks to that previously mentioned respect for the right to be anonymous. So, it appears that lawyers for the plaintiffs are taking a rather indirect route to reveal the anonymous posters. Since the posters had linked to web pages that mention the plaintiffs, the lawyers are now seeking a subpoena on the log files of the sites that had those articles. Yes, this is a huge stretch, as they’re basically searching for a needle in a haystack, trying to pick out of the logfiles exactly who visited a particular news story. Even though some of the companies in question have pointed out that it’s impossible to provide this data, the lawyers are still seeking a subpoena from the court demanding it. If the law students in question put half the effort they’re putting into this lawsuit into finding a job, rather than worrying about what people said about them, perhaps this wouldn’t be an issue at all.
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The NetBSD community released version 4.0 of the Unix-like open-source operating system last month. To give you greater insight into the development process and new features, we have commentary from 21 NetBSD developers.
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Four administrators of the most popular BitTorrent site face criminal charges in Sweden.
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The internet service disruption plaguing the Middle East following damage to an undersea cable spreads to India.
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DJMajah writes “News.com.au reports that Australian Federal Police chief Mick Keelty has called for a media blackout on reporting of terrorism investigations and cases before trial in a speech to the Sydney Institute last night. Although he doesn’t believe public institutions be immune from public accountability, he goes on to say that public discussion should be delayed until information is made available by the courts or legal proceedings are complete. This all comes after last years widely reported case of Dr. Mohammed Haneef who was detained then later deported from Australia on evidence described as weak — and seen by some including Haneef as a conspiracy.”
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The RIAA’s Cary Sherman says that marketplace filtering solutions should be good enough; government regulation isn’t needed. But Verizon has no plans to implement filters without a legal mandate.
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Never mind your profile. Social networking sites are tracking what you do and buy, and the you they see may not be the you you really want everyone else to see. From Wired magazine.
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Life isn’t what it used to be. Just look at 10 of the weirdest beasts that ever roamed the Earth. From Wired magazine.
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Environmentalist and author Mark Lynas paints a gloomy picture of Earth’s future in Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. But in an interview with Wired News he says it’s not time to despair just yet.
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If you’re looking to bolster an intelligent-design argument, the Answers Research Journal features “creationist researchers, scientists and theologians” tackling non-evolutionary, young-earth theories. It’s joining the internet age, jumping online with downloadable articles, branching out from its old-fashioned, print-only format.
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With the entertainment industry actively pushing for ISPs to filter unauthorized content, it seems that the discussion is getting wider and wider attention. Rep. Mary Bono (now Mary Bono Mack), who is rather infamous for the last copyright extension efforts, and who believes that fair use is theft, has now stated that it should be the ISP’s responsibility to filter out unauthorized content. Thankfully, she hasn’t reached the point of making it mandatory, but it’s not surprising to hear her say that she supports the concept of ISP filtering. Not to be left out, Cary Sherman of the RIAA chimed in to note that he doesn’t think we need new legislation, but that ISPs should voluntarily start filtering content.
While AT&T agrees (for reasons that still don’t make any sense), it’s nice to see Verizon feels otherwise. Verizon’s Tom Tauke says that the company is not interested in becoming copyright police, noting the inevitable privacy questions this would raise: “We don’t want to get into the business of inspecting the bits and figuring out what is and is not appropriate traffic.” As much as we tend to disagree with Verizon’s position on many policy issues, the company has at least a decent (though, certainly not wonderful) record in protecting privacy. Remember, it was Verizon who initially stood up to the RIAA on trying to get information on customers without filing lawsuits.
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A new study on the “connectivity” of countries goes beyond just measuring infrastructure to look at how people and businesses actually use technology. Among developed countries, the US comes out on top, but it could do better.
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Malcolm Gladwell is famous for his influential theory of, well, influentials, but a Columbia sociologist says he’s got it all wrong.
Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica
I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “The US Department of Justice has extended its anti-trust oversight of Microsoft by two years. This only applies to the requirement that Microsoft make protocol documentation available to competitors, though. All of the other requirements have expired, and Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly did not give the states complaining the full five years of oversight they requested. Still, this should prove useful given that one of Microsoft’s new tricks is to use OOXML extensions to tie businesses to Sharepoint.”
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Part of the conventional wisdom in having tech companies apply for lots of patents is that they’re helpful as a “defensive” mechanism against other companies filing patent lawsuits against you. It’s the nuclear stockpiling argument that suggests (without much proof) that the more patents everyone holds, the less likely actual patent litigation will result. That doesn’t seem to be happening, though, as we see more and more patent “nuclear wars” happening. For example, Alcatel-Lucent went after Microsoft on a questionable patent concerning MP3 technology. While Alcatel-Lucent initially won that battle to the tune of $1.5 billion, everything’s gone down hill since then. First, Microsoft hit back at Alcatel-Lucent, dredging up a bunch of patents it claimed the company was violating. Then, a judge overturned the $1.5 billion ruling. Now, Microsoft’s patent attack on Alcatel-Lucent has succeeded, as a judge at the US International Trade Commission (yes, Microsoft is also using the popular loophole in patent law here) has determined that Alcatel-Lucent has infringed, suggesting that its products be barred from the US. While this seems like a silly ruling, it does show how if you’re going to play the game of accusing companies of patent infringement, you might get burned yourself.
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Reacting swiftly to the Soviet success with Sputnik I, the United States makes its first foray into space a highly successful one.
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The results of a new survey suggests that men think they know a lot more about online security than women, but it turns out that they are equally subject to attacks. More importantly, the company funding the report wants you to use its software.
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1sockchuck writes “Google is pitting foreign governments against one another in a battle for a major new data center in Asia. In the past week, both the prime minister of Malaysia and economic minister of Taiwan have said their countries are leading candidates for the Google project, with Japan, South Korea, India and Vietnam also mentioned as contenders in an 18-nation site selection process. Google typically invests $600 million in each new data center. Tech companies often use multi-site searches as a tool to coax incentives out of local governments, which sweeten their offers to outbid rivals from other regions. Google’s Asian initiative appears to be taking this strategy to a new level, coaxing heads of state to invest political capital in their lust for one of Google’s mega-datacenters.”
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Arbitration rulings over domain name disputes sometimes have hard to understand results. Take, for example, the fact that MySpace has now won the right to the MySpace.co.uk domain. The arbitrator found that the domain name was an “abusive registration,” despite the fact that the owner had registered it in 1997, six years before MySpace existed. However, by setting up a parked page and putting ads on it, the arbitrator found that the registration was apparently retroactively abusive. This seems open to rather widespread abuse. If you want to own someone else’s domain name, all you have to do is build a bigger company based on that name and then point to their parked page and demand they hand it over?
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You only need two wheels for that bike, but we review three models to choose from: the Mavic R-SYS, the Lew Racing Pro VT-1 and the Reynolds DV46C. Got bucks?
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electricbern writes “Scientists have accidentally discovered how to reverse memory loss by stimulating a specific part of the hypothalamus. Good news for people with Alzheimer’s and those that just forgot where he left his car’s key.”
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inghamb87 writes “Scientists have studied flocks of starlings and cracked the mystery behind the birds’ ability to fly in large formations, and regroup quickly after attacks, without getting confused and ramming into each other. While the information is cool, some scientists seem to think that the best use of this knowledge is not to aid our appreciation of nature, but to make more effective robot swarms. We’ve talked about swarming robots many times before, but usually researchers look to insects for inspiration.”
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Back in December, many people were surprised that Congress had put forth the PRO IP bill that would increase the fines that could be assessed to people found violating copyrights — especially coming so soon after the outrage over the huge amount allowed under existing law. As Congress is trying to figure this issue out, the US Copyright Office held a roundtable discussion to examine the issue, where it asked the RIAA to explain why larger fines would be a good thing, and even the RIAA couldn’t come up with a decent answer. Specifically, RIAA supporters were asked to name a single case where the damages were seen as too low under existing laws, and there was little response. While there was some discussion of cases where the RIAA didn’t like the outcome, that wasn’t because the fines were limited to too low a number based on the law.
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EBay isn’t winning a whole lot of fans with its controversial new fee structure. Sellers say the new system equates to a rate hike. The company, by contrast, estimates that 60 percent of sellers will pay less in fees, so long as they provide quality customer service.
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Jeremiah Cornelius writes “Techdirt columnist, Timothy Lee, hit the metaphoric nail on the head, claiming that e-Voting undermines the public perception of election fairness – even when there is no evidence of wrongdoing. ‘In a well-designed voting system, voters shouldn’t have to take anyone’s actions on faith. The entire process should be simple and transparent, so that anyone can observe it and verify that it was carried out correctly. The complexity and opacity of e-voting machines makes effective public scrutiny impossible, and so it’s a bad idea even in the absence of specific evidence of wrongdoing.’ Add to this the possibility technical faults, conflicts of interest and evidence of tampering, how long before the US vote is viewed as an electronic pantomime?”
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NASA’s Messenger probe sends scientists a treasure-trove of data, and with two more flybys and an orbital mission to follow, these images are just the beginning.
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If the ecstatic attention techblogs showered on the nascent Smart Party system last week is any indication, there are thousands of geeks out there who, like me, got their first peek at an iPhone and immediately began fantasizing about a spontaneous, democratic, distributed jukebox that would emerge anywhere friends with shiny gadgets gathered. Smart Party polls all WiFi-enabled music players in the vicinity to figure out what’s on user playlists, and then plays music off a central system (even pulling tunes directly from each user’s device) tailored to the taste of the group. It’s like a DJ who automatically knows what will most please the crowd. But as far as UCLA computer science grad student and Smart Party co-creator Kevin Eustice is concerned, plebiscitary soundtrack software is just a tiny part of a broader project, aimed at crafting an open architecture that will enable a whole range of mobile, location-sensitive social networking applications. Below the fold, my interview with Eustice on music, math, and the future of ubiquitous computing. If you’re reading via RSS or from the front page, click on “Read More” to get the full interview.
Julian Sanchez is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Julian Sanchez and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.
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I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “Not content with current statutory damages, the RIAA is pushing for higher damages for infringement, damages that would total $1.5 million for copying a CD with ten songs. It’s all part of debate over the proposed PRO-IP Act. William Patry, a lawyer who wrote the seminal seven-volume reference on US copyright law, called it the most ‘outrageously gluttonous IP bill ever introduced in the US.’”
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Come talk politics in the Ars OpenForum’s Soap Box. Through the primaries and beyond we’ve opened it up to all registered posters to give everyone a chance to engage in some intelligent political debate.
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Mitchell’s Boy Toy writes “Firefox’s market share has hit 28.0% in Europe as of December 2007, according to a French web metrics firm. That’s a 20.7% increase from the beginning of 2007. ‘Finland currently has the highest Firefox market share in Europe with 45.4 percent, followed by Slovenia with 44.6 percent and Poland with 42.4 percent.’ IE share fell to just 66.1% in December, a 0.9 point loss in just a month. It should also be noted that Firefox’s success could spell trouble for Opera’s antitrust complaint: ‘Firefox’s continued success in Europe may undermine some of the arguments made by Norwegian browser maker Opera in an antitrust complaint filed against Microsoft in December of last year. Opera accused Microsoft of abusing its dominant position in the web browser market by tying Internet Explorer to Windows.’”
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Frustrated users pledge to abandon the social networking site on International Delete Your MySpace Account Day.
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A new device that lets you log on, anytime, anywhere, through anyone could transform the nature of Wi-Fi. It might even transform you.
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mahuyar writes ” Microsoft executives have accused IBM of leading the campaign against their initiative to have Office Open XML approved by the International Organization for Standardization. ‘Nicos Tsilas, senior director of interoperability and IP policy at Microsoft, said that IBM and the likes of the Free Software Foundation have been lobbying governments to mandate the rival OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard to the exclusion of any other format. “They have made this a religious and highly political debate,” Tsilas said. “They are doing this because it is advancing their business model. Over 50 percent of IBM’s revenues come from consulting services.”‘”
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Years ago, before the RIAA’s decision to sue individual file sharers, the group used to send subpoenas to ISPs asking for IP addresses of users even though no lawsuit had actually been filed. Verizon actually stood up and fought the RIAA on this, eventually winning. In response, the RIAA started filing mass lawsuits, suing multiple “John Does” and then using those lawsuits to get subpoenas to the ISPs. Soon afterwards, a judge noticed that this seemed odd, and told the RIAA it needed to start filing individual lawsuits rather than bundling them all together. Unfortunately, other judges have allowed the “bundled” lawsuits, so the RIAA still files them. However, a magistrate judge in Maine is suggesting that the district court judge fine the RIAA lawyers for the practice, noting that the RIAA shows little explanation for why the lawsuits should be bundled.
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High from its Eee success, Asus is planning a new line of products to leverage the brand. The manufacturer plans to release new desktop, all-in-one, and Linux-powered LCD TVs in 2008, with pricetags to match the Eee’s emphasis on affordability.
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whitehartstag writes “TCP/IP is 25 years old this year. Vint Cerf says there was a long development cycle for both TCP/IP and for X.25, and we’d have been using TCP/IP much sooner if TCP/IP had been more marketable. ‘Over the years, we can come up with many examples both of where the best technology did (or did not) win and of how marketing has defined a service. For example, many of the “best” features of frame relay, such as the ability to use Switched Virtual Circuits (SVC) in addition to Permanent Virtual Circuits (PVC) were never widely marketed because the pricing was too complex. Rather, the PVC was a simple replacement for a leased line at a fraction of the cost with better performance.’”
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Browse this week’s Wired News gadget reviews for a $1,100 cellphone, a slick sheet-fed scanner, an iPod shuffle killer and more of the latest tech.
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ICANN wants to stop the deliciously-named practice of “domain tasting” by making the sure it costs the tasters something. The move follows Google’s decision to stop offering AdSense revenue until a site has been registered for five days.
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NASA researchers share the “goldmine of exciting data” sent by the Messenger probe from its flyby of Mercury.
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