During July 2009, a company called NSS Labs performed two separate browser security tests, which Amy Barzdukas, General Manager of Internet Explorer, told Ars that Microsoft had sponsored. Right off the bat, your suspicions have probably been raised, and rightly so. Internet Explorer 8 performed very well in all the tests and, while Microsoft insists that it had no impact on the results, we must still be cautious when examining the reports.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica – News

As expected, Redbox filed a lawsuit against 20th Century Fox this week after the movie studio tried to keep its new releases out of Redbox’s DVD rental kiosks. Redbox says that the lawsuit aims to protect consumers’ rights to have access to new release DVDs, and that it plans to continue offering all major new releases—including 20th Century Fox’s—at its 15,000 rental locations.

Redbox took legal action less than a week after Fox ordered wholesalers to stop supplying Redbox with Fox DVDs until 30 days after release. The Redbox kiosks, which each house more than 600 DVDs, rent out movies for $1 per day and sell used movies for $7. The company has more kiosks than Blockbuster has stores, and each kiosk rents out an average of 50 movies per day. 

Fox believes that outlets like Redbox are ruining its business. “Having our [movies] rented at $1 in the rental window is grossly undervaluing our products,” News Corp COO Chase Carey said at the time.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica – News

How much are the aesthetics of a controller worth to you? Today Sony sent us a Satin Silver Dual Shock 3 to check out, and after taking the peripheral in question out of its packaging and using it for an hour or two—which gave me a wonderful excuse to play games on the clock—I have to say… it’s a Dual Shock 3, but silver.

The coloring is actually rather sparkly, and even adds a smoother feel to the controller than the standard black models. You’ll also notice that the text on the controller “pops” much more than the standard black Dual Shock 3s. Right now the controllers are exclusive to GameStop, but starting in October the silver controller (as well as the “Deep Red” and “Metallic Blue” colors) will be widely available.

If you need an extra controller, why not give it some flair? The Satin Silver Dual Shock 3 is available now for $54.99.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica – News

Microsoft has announced some big news concerning the next major revision of Office for Mac: it is currently on track to ship late next year, and it will replace the much-maligned Entourage with a bona fide version of Outlook for Mac. 

In the meantime, Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit has a final version of Entourage Web Services Edition ready for those who need better Exchange support now, and they will be packaging it in a new “Business Edition” of Office for Mac 2008 starting next month.

Seriously, it’s Outlook. For real.

You read the news right: Microsoft is finally making a real, actual, official, true, and correct version of Outlook for Mac OS X. This new application, which Mac BU general manager Eric Wilfrid told us he has been using for nearly a year, is built from the ground up to fully support Exchange’s latest protocols. Written in Cocoa to take advantage of the latest OS X technologies, Outlook for Mac will also have a completely redesigned database that will be compatible with Spotlight and Time Machine.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica – News

In an effort to get players to not pirate or buy a used copy of Dragon Age: Origins, Electronic Arts and BioWare have revealed that they plan to give $15 of downloadable content and exclusive in-game items to those who buy new copies of the game. The coolest part is that this content won’t just be available with the collector’s edition of the game, but the regular version, too.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica – News

A group of security researchers has published a fascinating study that demonstrates how to hack a Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machine. We have already seen several electronic voting machines hacked by experts in controlled environments, but this study goes a step further and shows that it can be done in the wild without privileged access to source code or other specialized materials.

The study was conducted by a group of voting machine security experts led by Ed Felten, the director of Princeton’s Center for Information and Technology Policy. They used a technique called return-oriented programming to circumvent the built-in security mechanisms in an AVC Advantage voting machine and cause it to divert votes from one candidate to another in a simulated election.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica – News

Even the greatest gadgets have flaws, and the iPhone is certainly no exception. Fortunately, technology is all about workarounds to common problems.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from msnbc.com: Wireless

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Broadband Wireless Access

Originally Syndicated via RSS from msnbc.com: Wireless

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Broadband Wireless Access

An interesting article in I4U, wondering what many have been wondering, is the original Iphone3g on it’s way to meet it’s maker?

There are plenty of rumors about the Apple4G, including one wild story about a chinese dude jumping out of a window because he lost one of the prototypes. The Iphone 3GS certainly has taken over much of the market, with the 3G being relegated to low cost alternative. Considering that it wasn’t all that long ago that people were lining up around the block to get these things, it is pretty shocking to see them in the discount bin.

How long before the 4G comes along, and wipes the 3G off the market entirely?

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Broadband Wireless Access

An Ohio bus driver who had been fired and reinstated after an earlier accident was on her cell phone when her bus struck and killed a pedestrian in March, according to investigators.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from msnbc.com: Wireless

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Broadband Wireless Access

Originally Syndicated via RSS from msnbc.com: Wireless

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Broadband Wireless Access

While a recent report from the National Academies of the Sciences concluded that conservation is the short-term key to many energy issues, work continues on alternative energy production techniques like wind, solar, biomass, and fuel cells. For mobile applications, fuel cells have quickly become the technological leader because they offer high energy density (relative to other green technologies), low weight, and generally high mechanical durability. In this month’s Biosensors and Bioelectronics, a research team from University of Massachusetts Amherst describes their work on microbial fuel cells enhanced by directed evolution.

A wide array of fuel cell technologies exist, but most fall into two catagories: solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) or polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs). SOFCs conduct O^2- across ceramic membranes and produce high current densities with little degradation over time. Unfortunately, the ionic conduction mechanism requires high operating temperatures—usually several hundred degrees centigrade. PEMFCs conduct either protons or hydroxyls, but suffer from low current densities and significant degredation over time. While these systems show substantial promise, there is no clear leader for most mobile applications and there is room in several niche markets for other types of fuel cells.

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Who owns The Pirate Bay? It sounds like a simple question, but it turns out to have a surprisingly complicated answer. As Swedish company Global Gaming Factory X tries to round up the money to purchase the site’s domain name by the end of August, we were curious to figure out exactly who GGF will be paying if the deal goes through. When the answer involves “a mysterious company registered in the Seychelles,” it’s clear that “transparency” won’t be the deal’s hallmark.

The three young men who were sued in Sweden this spring might run The Pirate Bay, but they have long said that they no longer own the site. A whois search on thepiratebay.org shows that the domain is registered to a firm called Reservella, though the contact information points to Pirate Bay defendant Fredrik Neij and lists a Stockholm address.

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20th Century Fox has followed in Universal’s footsteps by yanking its DVDs out of Redbox, the bargain-basement-priced DVD rental kiosks. Ars was tipped off by a reader that the studio, which has never entered into an agreement directly with Redbox, has ordered its wholesalers not to sell its DVDs to Redbox until 30 days after release. The move reflects the movie industry’s fear and loathing of this new DVD rental market, reducing people’s visits to places like Blockbuster and reducing the studios’ ability to try and sell DVDs to customers.

Redbox is jointly owned by Coinstar and a subsidiary of McDonald’s and acts as a self-service DVD distributor that operates kiosks at over 10,000 retail locations in the US (including McDonald’s, Walmarts, Walgreens, and grocery stores). The kiosks, which each house more than 600 DVDs, rent out movies for $1 per day and sell used movies for $7. The company’s Web-based inventory system makes it possible for consumers to select their movies over the Internet and reserve them in advance at a specified Redbox kiosk. The company has more kiosks than Blockbuster has stores, and each kiosk rents out an average of 50 movies per day.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

The people who build and run the hardware we send into space probably experience a lot of sleepless nights. It’s possible to design multiple redundant systems and test everything on the ground, but that’s no guarantee that things will operate as you expect them to once they get sent into space (witness the originally distorted optics of the Hubble). For the people running the Kepler observatory, which is designed to detect planets that have orbits and sizes which approximate Earth’s, it’s apparently time to breathe easily. Scientists have now calibrated its camera against a known planet, and found that its sensitivity is up to its intended task.

The Kepler was launched in early March and went operational in the middle of May, so these results have come very quickly. That’s partly the result of the planet it has observed, HAT-P-7b. The planet is what’s called a “hot Jupiter” that orbits close to its host star, and completes one orbit (a HAT year?) in a brisk 2.2 days. As a result, the folks running Kepler were able to observe multiple orbits in just 10 days of work that took place during the commissioning period. The results are published in today’s issue of Science, and NASA has hosted a press conference to describe them.

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In the six months between September 2008 and April 2009, long-form streaming video exploded in popularity—the percentage of US Internet users watching online TV shows and movies doubled in that timeframe alone.

Such huge gains might seem at first to be chalked up to the fact that doubling from one percent to two percent is much simpler than doubling from 25 percent to 50 percent. Isn’t watching TV shows online still a niche activity? But that’s exactly what makes the new numbers so compelling; the percentages involved are significant, showing that online streaming has quickly become the on-demand method of choice for half of all young Americans.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

Cell phones don’t annoy people, you do … with your cell phone. Here are 10 tips to let you know when phoning is dissing.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from msnbc.com: Wireless

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Broadband Wireless Access

Wii Sports Resort has been a major focal point of Nintendo’s strategy for the past couple of years, and the game carries the not insubstantial responsibility of selling the MotionPlus peripheral to the gaming public. The $20 hardware has succeeded where Nintendo has so far failed with the Vitality Sensor: it ships with its own killer app in the sequel to the original Wii Sports. The strategy has paid off; Nintendo has shared the numbers for the game’s first week of availability, and the $50 game and peripheral package has sold over 500,000 units.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

Originally Syndicated via RSS from msnbc.com: Wireless

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Broadband Wireless Access

The SCO Group attempted to stave off liquidation in June by signing a last minute deal with Gulf Capital Partners and a tech firm called unXis. The terms of the agreement, which were finalized only moments before a court hearing, stipulated that SCO would sell its remaining UNIX assets for $2.4 million—a maneuver that could have potentially made it possible for SCO to continue pursuing its bogus litigation against the open source Linux operating system.

In a decision this week, a bankruptcy Judge Kevin Gross blocked the asset sale and suggested that SCO should not be permitted to continue burning money to the detriment of its creditors while the litigation goes on forever. He notes that the proposed sale would leave SCO without any tenable reorganization strategy and would make the company’s sustainability entirely dependent on the pending litigation. Expressing frustration with SCO’s stalling tactics, the Judge astutely suggests that SCO’s hopes for successful litigation are looking increasingly like a bad remix of Waiting for Godot.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

Google has announced the availability of a new beta release of its Chrome Web browser. This version introduces several new features and user interface improvements, including support for a theming system that allows users to customize the browser’s look.

Chrome was first released last year and hit 1.0 on Windows in December. Although the product was somewhat feature-anemic at launch, Google has been fleshing it out and adding a lot of useful features. The browser is attracting a growing number of users and is said to have overtaken Opera based on marketshare statistics published by several analytics firms. Google is building an entire operating system around the browser and is planning to thrust it into the fragmented netbook market later next year.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

AMD has announced the release of the first OpenCL SDK for x86 CPUs, and it will enable developers to target x86 processors with the kind of OpenCL code that’s normally written for GPUs. In a way, this is a reverse of the normal “GPGPU” trend, in which programs that run on a CPU are modified to run in whole or in part on a GPU.

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The KDE community announced yesterday the official release of version 4.3, a significant new version that brings a number of compelling improvements to the popular open source desktop environment. According to the developers, over 10,000 bug reports have been resolved since the last version, and over 63,000 changes were committed to the project’s version control system. These statistics reflect the enormous amount of refinement that is visible in the 4.3 release.

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Sony had quite a bit of bad PR on its hands when an update added advertising to WipeOut HD on the PS3, with both the gaming press and those playing the game complaining bitterly about the addition.

Sony quickly yanked the offending advertisement. “The ads have been removed to further investigate the situation and ensure that any in-game advertising does not affect the gameplay experience,” the company said in a statement. Why were these ads so offensive, and is this something we’re going to be seeing more of?

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DNS redirection (or DNS hijacking, depending on who you ask) is now officially “Comcastic!” after the cable company yesterday began a nationwide deployment of its “Domain Helper” service. The new product, which has been tested in trial markets since July 9, redirects nonexistent URLs like www.clinteckergoatbonedbyhisnewbicycle.com to a search page slathered in advertising instead of returning the proper DNS error to the browser. Readers began reporting the change to us yesterday.

Comcast says that the new service is “here to help you,” but critics have made their own feelings clear—”this is a piece of CRAP,” wrote one. While purists object to Comcast messing with “proper” DNS behaviors, others don’t appreciate what feels like nothing more than an attempt to make money off users misspelling domains. 

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

For anyone with a little bit of technical know-how, modifying video game systems for various purposes is easy… and can even make you a little bit of money. The problem? Modifying the firmware in video game systems to play pirated games or even your own backups is illegal. Twenty-seven-year-old Matthew Lloyd Crippen learned the hard way that Immigration and Customs Enforcement doesn’t have a sense of humor about modding systems for profit: the student was arrested after being indicted on two charges of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for selling modded systems. The question some gamers are now asking themselves: am I breaking the law? The answer is not comforting.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

The saga over Internet radio royalties may be behind us (for now), but the royalty debate is far from over. During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday, the record labels and radio stations made their case over the issue of terrestrial radio stations paying royalties to artists, hoping to influence Senators’ decisions over the recently proposed Performance Rights Act.

Under the current setup, commercial radio stations don’t actually pay the performers anything for the use of their songs. Radio stations pay only songwriters for the music they play, while recording artists get nothing (except publicity). When music is delivered via webcasting, cable networks, and satellite radio, however, station owners need to pay both songwriters and recording artists. If this seems inconsistent to you, that’s because it is.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

Today, Sony officially launched the latest salvos in the increasingly intense e-book wars. Depending on your perspective, this was either a big deal, or a collection of incremental changes: new models, new supported formats, and cheaper e-books, but little that significantly differentiates these products from their predecessors. Still, the effort reveals that, despite the company’s extensive cost-cutting measures, it’s not giving up on the e-book market.

On the hardware front, Sony will be offering two new reader models by the end of August. The larger model, the Reader Touch Edition, aka the PRS-600, will retail for $299. This 6.9 x 4.8 inch device will keep the touchscreen of the PRS-700, but ditch its backlighting. The software will apparently be updated, allowing freehand note taking with the included stylus. It handles both Memory Stick and SD cards for expansion and file transfer.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

Google and On2 Technologies have announced today that they have signed a deal for Google to acquire On2 in an all-stock deal valued at $106.5 million. On the surface, it’s a match made in heaven. On2 is one of the leading providers of video codec software and hardware, and Google is one of the leading providers of Web-based video. The deal also has the potential to move the future of Web video codecs in the direction of open standards.

Video codecs are a big deal. They fuel the technology behind Video CDs (MPEG-1), DVDs (MPEG-2), and Blu-ray (MPEG-4), and are linked with the history of the Web, as various codecs and formats—QuickTime, Windows Media Video, Theora, H.264, DiVX, Flash, Silverlight, etc.—all compete to deliver video over networks. On2 supplies the codec (VP6) used in Flash video, the current reigning delivery system for online video.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

The talk of a slimmed down version of the PlayStation has been around for a long time, with our favorite inside source laying down the timeline for the system as well as what would happen before the hardware’s launch. It looks as if more and more of the prophecy is coming true, with a new mountain of evidence pointing towards the upcoming release of new PS3 hardware.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

MIPS Technologies says that it will soon publish the source code of its port of Android for the MIPS architecture. This could boost adoption of Google’s open source mobile platform on MIPS-based devices.

Android, which is built on top of the Linux kernel, is attracting interest in many segments of the mobile and embedded space. Although it was originally designed for cell phones and is only supported officially by Google on the ARM architecture, it is being ported by third parties to work on other kinds of chips and form factors.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

Some books beg to be read; others beg you to stop reading them. Mark Helprin’s new book, Digital Barbarism, could have been an example of the former—how many popular works set out to defend the idea of copyright, argue that life plus 70 years isn’t quite long enough, and attack Creative Commons as a wicked Commie invention? For sheer audacious ballsacity alone, Helprin’s screed should have been a wonderful read, a well-argued polemic from an excellent novelist.

Instead, we get… this.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe, may have cleared the North Woods, but Bunyan’s tremendous axe and prodigious appetite for pancakes vanished from the scene before the gentle giant had the chance to do something really useful for Minnesota—provide fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) connections to rural residents. That task would be left to his namesake, the Paul Bunyan Telephone cooperative, which has been stringing fiber to homes in northern Minnesota since 2004.

While Verizon gets most of the US press for its FTTH FiOS rollout, small operators like Paul Bunyan have quietly been laying fiber of their own for years. According to quarterly trade journal FTTH Prism, half of all rural telcos are now deploying fiber of some kind, and many are choosing to run it all the way to customer homes.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

Consumer-level energy management has suddenly become a hot topic. The Department of Energy has made it a major part of its stimulus spending, hardware makers from GE to Cisco have announced initiatives, and both Google and Microsoft have announced Web-based energy management software. The fact that these companies can enter the market just as it appears poised to take off is the result of years of work by various companies and consortiums, which have been pushing to have open standards adopted by everything from appliance makers to utility data centers. Those standards are what allow the latecomers like Google and Microsoft to enter the market with bigger bank accounts and higher brand recognition among consumers.

To get a sense of how companies in the energy management field are adapting to rapidly growing markets and the entry of large competitors, we talked to two companies with a history in energy management software:  Fat Spaniel, which focuses on photovoltaic systems, and Tendril, which makes smart grid software for everyone from individual consumers to entire utilities. The general impression they gave is that open standards are too important for their business to avoid simply because of the threat of competition, and that they both see ways of staying out of the way of their larger competitors.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

One of the hotter areas of physics research over the last few years has been quantum computing. Newly published research may put a damper on some of the enthusiasm about the ability of adiabatic quantum computers to outperform classic computers in some algorithms.

Early research showed that if information were stored in such a way that the value of one bit was correlated to that of another bit, then several algorithms will run faster than their classical counterparts. Examples of such algorithms include finding prime factors of large numbers, simulating quantum systems, and certain types of database searches.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

Intel has announced a new partnership designed to increase the prominence of volunteer grid computing. Its new Progress Through Processors program will see the chipmaker partner with Facebook and GridRepublic to promote several of the projects that are run through BOINC, a distributed computing client that runs during idle time on volunteers’ machines. Although there are a whole host of projects that can be run through the BOINC interface, Intel has chosen to focus on three: Rosetta@home, Climateprediction.net, and Africa@home.

The technology behind the endeavor is fairly well established. BOINC, run out of the University of California, Berkeley and supported by the National Science Foundation, was developed in response to the success of several early distributed computing projects, most notably SETI@home. It’s designed to provide a single piece of client software that runs while a user’s machine is idle. Different projects can provide computational engines that are loaded and run by the BOINC client. The single client infrastructure is intended to make it easier for individual projects to roll out updated software and for users to divide their machine’s time among multiple worthy projects.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

When it came to selling music downloads, Amazon was all about openness. Apple had already locked up the market for DRMed downloads, and of course it had a license (the iPod) to print money. Amazon’s challenge to Apple took the form of openness as the giant retailer launched a DRM-free music store with support from all four major labels.

But when it came to the nascent e-book market, Amazon dropped its commitment to openness and instead followed Apple’s playbook so exactly that it looked like a case of “Seattle, start your photocopiers!” Slick hardware that used a proprietary DRM format quickly made the Kindle brand the hottest name in the (admittedly still small) e-book circles. It was that decision to link the Kindle hardware and store with a new DRM scheme that led the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to add the Kindle to its “Defective by Design” anti-DRM campaign.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

Marines who are fans of Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace will have to wait till they go home to get their social networking fix. The US Marine Corps has just instituted a ban on social networking sites (SNS) on the Marine Corps Enterprise Network (MCEN) due to malware concerns and “information exposure” to adversaries. The ban will be in effect for one year and effective immediately.

All publicly available social networks fall under the ban. According to the all-caps order (hey, let’s all be like Kanye), “THE VERY NATURE OF SNS CREATES A LARGER ATTACK AND EXPLOITATION WINDOW, EXPOSES UNNECESSARY INFORMATION TO ADVERSARIES AND PROVIDES AN EASY CONDUIT FOR INFORMATION LEAKAGE THAT PUTS OPSEC, COMSEC, PERSONNEL AND THE MCEN AT AN ELEVATED RISK OF COMPROMISE.” This includes, but is not limited to, Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. “THESE INTERNET SITES IN GENERAL ARE A PROVEN HAVEN FOR MALICIOUS ACTORS AND CONTENT AND ARE PARTICULARLY HIGH RISK DUE TO INFORMATION EXPOSURE, USER GENERATED CONTENT AND TARGETING BY ADVERSARIES,” reads the order.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

Nintendo is a company that can do little wrong in the current marketplace, but the introduction of the “Vitality Sensor,” a piece of hardware that fits onto your finger and measures certain types of biometric feedback, was one of the famously flat notes of this year’s E3. It was announced during the press conference with an image, to a tittering crowd, with no indication of how it would be used in a game. In short? Nintendo messed up: the Japanese giant can only get away with its crazy moves when it has the software to back it up.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

Tahoe is a secure distributed filesystem that is designed to conform with the principle of least authority. The developers behind the project announced this month the release of version 1.5, which includes bugfixes and improvements to portability and performance, including a 10 percent boost to file upload speed over high-latency connections.

Tahoe’s underlying architecture is similar to that of a peer-to-peer network. Files are distributed across multiple nodes in a manner that allows data integrity to be maintained in the event that individual nodes are compromised or fail. It uses AES encryption to protect file contents from tampering and scrutiny. Tahoe can be used to establish a relatively fault-tolerant storage pool that spans a number of conventional computers over a local network or the Internet. This approach to cloud storage might be more appropriately described as “crowd” storage.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

USB 3.0 is coming, and the hour approaches when the computer and electronics industries can sink their collective teeth into a new, faster USB interface for the first time in ten years. USB 2.0, with 480Mbps High speed, launched in April 2000, and USB 3.0, with 4.8Gbps Super Speed, will launch in the first consumer devices in early 2010. As this happy day draws closer, USB 3.0-related news has come fast and brisk, and it has been hard to follow. Let’s review the milestones of the past and take a look ahead to see what the future has in store for USB 3.0.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

Improvements to CSS3, in particular a revival of the @font-face directive for linking to server-based fonts, promise to allow designers to deliver richer and more nuanced typography on the Web. And while Firefox and Safari (via WebKit) are leading the way buy supporting standard TrueType and OpenType font files, posting commercial fonts on a publicly available Web server violates the licensing agreements from most type foundries. So, at least three services are close to launching, giving Web designers and developers access to licensed typefaces that will work with @font-face. And even while several foundries are looking to license their fonts for these services, several prominent foundries have expressed support for the .webfont format that is being proposed to the W3C.

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DigiTimes has been making the rounds of the Taiwanese OEMs, and the company claims to have the scoop on a coming wave of ARM-based netbooks, often called “smartbooks,” that will wash ashore in the US in the last quarter of this year. Smartbooks based on Qualcomm’s SnapDragon processor and NVIDIA’s Tegra line are allegedly on deck from netbook names like ASUS, Acer, and Foxconn. Lesser-known Chinese netbook maker Compal, which was showing off products at this past CES but which doesn’t yet ship to the US, is also named as an ARM netbook maker, as are Inventec and Mobinnova.

Then there’s the Touch Book, from Always Innovating, which sent out a note today to everyone who contacted them via web form (including Ars) to say that the device is is now shipping. We haven’t really covered the Touch Book, but boy have we been getting reader mail about it. A lot of folks want us to review it, and I’ve contacted the company in an effort to get a review unit. (No response so far, but I’ll keep trying.) The Touch Books’ main gimmick is that its screen can be detached and used as a standalone tablet, and the second gimmick is that it runs the TI OMAP 3 chip, which is looking like a killer PMP/tablet processor.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

Domain name investing has been around almost as long as domain names were open for purchase by the general public, and the practice has picked up since the mid-90s, as companies stake out their spot on the digital frontier. Domain names can be so valuable, in fact, that people actually steal them to sell to unsuspecting companies or other domain name investors. The legal process to combat a domain name thief is complicated at best, but there is hope, as police have arrested a man accused of stealing the domain P2P.com.

An initial investigation by Florida police, where the victims reside, was dropped for lack of evidence. The rightful owners of P2P.com then filed a civil suit as they believed it was their only recourse. However, Detective Sergeant John Gorman of the New Jersey State Police Cyber-Crimes Unit later reviewed the case, and asked the victims if they wanted to pursue the case in New Jersey, where the alleged thief lived. Based on evidence gathered for the civil suit, the NJ District Attorney approved an indictment. On July 30, Daniel Goncalves, a 25-year-old computer technician for a NJ law firm, was arrested at his home and his computers were seized.

 The first-ever criminal arrest for domain name theft has been made in the great state of New Jersey.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

In our globalized, post-industrial world, a single Canadian company can shape the Internet experience for 20 percent of the world’s wireline broadband users. Sandvine makes deep packet inspection hardware that can identify and then block, shape, degrade, fold, spindle, or mutilate user traffic coming from particular applications such as Skype or BitTorrent clients. The 160 worldwide ISPs who use the company’s products love this particular capability so much that a full 90 percent of them employ it to “manage” their networks in a discriminatory way.

According to the company, these 160 ISPs serve 20 percent of the world’s wireline broadband connections. If 90 percent of the ISPs shape traffic by application, Sandvine equipment alone may be responsible for the application-specific discrimination that 18 percent of world wireline broadband users face—and that figure says nothing about all the other ISPs who use similar products from other vendors. If you thought that network neutrality was some kind of default position for the worldwide Internet, think again.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

Bing‘s initial popularity among Internet searchers seems to be sticking past launch—at least it has so far. Microsoft’s recently relaunched search engine has actually gained another percentage point in the market share wars this July, according to Web metrics firm StatCounter. The firm noted that Bing was making “slow but steady” progress, and that Microsoft’s deal with Yahoo would likely only result in good things for Bing’s share of the search market.

StatCounter says that Bing climbed to 9.41 percent of the search market last month, compared to 8.23 percent in June. Combined with Yahoo’s current share of the market (10.95 percent), the two come out with 20.36 percent—still a distant second to Google’s 77.54 percent, but a relatively large slice of the pie nonetheless.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

Add a new item to the long list of political shenanigans that backfire once discovered. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) has decided to run for Texas governor against incumbent Rick Perry, and her new campaign website contained hidden text that read “rick perry gay.” The resulting flap led to the firing of the web development firm involved, drew heated responses from Perry’s office, and (perhaps worst of all) saw Hutchison’s campaign website yanked from Google’s search index.

Texas newspapers uncovered the hidden text last week. The “rick perry gay” reference was one of only thousands of phrases tucked into the source code for Hutchison’s site, apparently to help draw search engine traffic.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

Apple and AT&T opened up a can of worms when Apple not only rejected Google’s native Google Voice iPhone app, but summarily purged the App Store of any application that worked with Google Voice. The FCC has been giving the exclusive deals between handset makers and mobile carriers a lot of scrutiny lately, and now the FCC is looking into Google Voice-gate. The FCC has informed Apple and AT&T that it is trying to determine if the exclusivity between Apple and AT&T is having adverse effects on developers and consumers.

A group of Senators asked the FCC to examine handset exclusivity agreements that have become more prevalent—and have come into the spotlight with Apple’s iPhone. FCC chairman Julius Genachowski promised to look into the issue, even before his appointment to the FCC became official. The investigation has been ongoing recently, <a href=”http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/verizon-offers-wireless-concessions-to-a-skeptical-congress.ars” title=”Ars Technica: Verizon offers wireless concessions to a skeptical Congress”>prompting hearings before the Senate Commerce and Science Committee, prompting Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) to say that there are “too many places in this country where wireless call quality is low and service is unreliable—places where wireless broadband is only a pipe dream.”

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

Google has begun a new ad campaign for its enterprise services, but it isn’t your typical Google venture—it’s going oldschool. Starting today and running for the next four weeks in August, Google will be running a series of billboards—yes, real ones—in Boston, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco in order to showcase the benefits of “going Google” for business. The hope is that more business owners will ditch managing their own e-mail, calendaring, and doc sharing solutions in favor of Google Apps—especially now that they’re out of beta.

For those who want to see the billboards for themselves, they will be placed along Highway 101 in San Francisco, the West Side Highway in New York, the Eisenhower Expressway in Chicago (and that’s why we haven’t rushed out to go see it yet), and the Mass Pike in Boston. Google says that the billboards will be changed every single weekday for the next month, but you environmentalists in the crowd should worry not—all vinyl used on the billboards will be recycled and turned into either computer bags or shopping bags.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

The war over network neutrality has been fought in the last two Congresses, and last week’s introduction of the “Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009” (PDF) means that legislators will duke it out a third time. Should the bill pass, Internet service providers will not be able to “block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade” access to any lawful content from any lawful application or device.

ISPs would also be forbidden to “impose a charge” on content providers that goes “beyond the end-user charges associated with providing the service to such a provider.” In other words, AT&T doesn’t have to let Google “use its pipes for free,” but it can only collect the money is owed through customary peering and transit arrangements.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica