...nearly 1.3 million Android devices were activated daily,
If you operate solely in the world of proprietary software, it’s easy to think that Microsoft‘s Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) emerged as the preeminent remote-access solution a long time ago. But in a sign that the battle for this niche is hardly over–and that cross-platform compatibility is key to winning it–Splashtop, an alternative to RDP, recently announced support for Ubuntu Linux in its desktop streaming platform, making it easier to access Ubuntu PCs from anywhere.
Dell announced its Project Sputnik earlier this year to a warm if not ecstatic reception. The firm had preloaded Linux onto its consumer machines before but they were hard to find and on forgettable machines. However with the XPS 13 the firm is not only loading Linux on its most high profile laptop but showing that Microsoft's operating system isn't the only choice in town for OEMs and consumers alike.
From a Linux community perspective, Dell's XPS 13 comes with Intel's ultrabook branding, which might mean little to those who actually read and understand specifications but means a lot to the customer in the street who is bombarded with Intel's ultrabook marketing message. Dell might be pitching its Ubuntu XPS 13 laptop as a developer's machine rather than one for Facebook and Youtube users, but that isn't a bad idea in the long run either.
The Chromebooks have landed. They cannot be considered a toy or an experimental fad by Google, any longer. Now they are here to stay as the new and revolutionary intelligent terminals of the Cloud Centric Age. In the past, we used to installed all apps in our computers, and run them locally. For that we needed faster and faster PCs with more and more memory, both ram and hard disk.
FlashFire is a buffer-based write reordering layer for SSDs on Linux, which can lead to greater disk performance for flash-based storage devices.
Shortly after improving the HyperZ support in R300g, Marek Olšák has now enabled HyperZ support by default for ATI R500 (Radeon X1000 series) GPUs.
The R300/R400 GPUs don't yet have HyperZ support enabled by default until sufficient testing has been completed, but the HyperZ support can be toggled via the RADEON_HYPERZ environment variable. The newer Radeon GPUs with the R600g Gallium3D driver also don't yet have usable HyperZ support enabled by default. HyperZ is the ATI/AMD technology that's been around going back to the R100 GPU days for boosting the GPU performance and efficiency. HyperZ consists of Z compression for minimizing the Z-Buffer bandwidth, fast Z clear, and a hierarchical Z-Buffer.
Unvanquished, one of the few open-source games that actually has good art assets, saw its tenth alpha release this weekend. The first person shooter derived from the ioquake3/XReaL engine has improvements to its OpenGL 3.x renderer, initial x32 architecture support, and other enhancements.
AMD has released yet another beta Linux beta driver for the Catalyst 12.11 series.
While there isn't any official change-log for Catalyst 12.11 Beta 11 compared to the earlier 12.11 Linux betas, it's now available for download from AMD.com.
The Linux Kernel A-synchronous I/O support has been receiving some performance improvements and clean-ups that should soon be merged to mainline.
Splice, a unique and very interesting puzzle game created by Cipher Prime Studios, will be arriving on Linux in the near future.
Guild Wars 2, the MMORPG, recently came out on the PC and everyone, including us, loved it. It’s also making its way over to Mac.
We recently had a chance to sit down and sit with the MMO’s game director, Colin Johanson. We asked him if we’ll be seeing a Linux port anytime soon, and he said that while the team has “talked about it”, they “won’t be working on it in the near future”.
Global warming has even forced worms to make adjustments.
A group of French earthworms have migrated to Ireland owing to the rise in global temperatures, according to a new study published in the RoyalSociety Journal Biology Letters.
But it's not just Microsoft. GNOME, once the leading Linux desktop, is rapidly fading into the background because of bad design choices in GNOME 3.x. What's going on?
I think the problem is that far too many people have forgotten UI 101 -- make it easy -- despite the availability of the handy acronym KISS (keep it simple, stupid).
Since back when Microsoft was still calling its brand-new interface Metro, I saw Windows 8 as a disaster in the making. My biggest complaint was with the cartoonish and annoying tiles. Made for touchscreens, they're fairly usable when you're holding a small device at, say, a 45-degree angle. But when the touchscreen is a monitor sitting on a desktop at something closer to 90 degrees? That results in a phenomenon called gorilla arm, a situation blamed for the failure of touchscreens on the desktop as long ago as the 1980s.
After reading Andrew’s excellent Roundup on alternative desktops (p30), I’m not sure how I feel about the way desktops are going. I’m still surprised, for example, that both Gnome and KDE developers made such massive changes to their desktops, when for many years the old versions had worked brilliantly. KDE 4.9 is stable, but it still takes a lot of effort to make the environment your own.
Sometimes, you notice that writing an OS is like playing chase: sometimes you open the latest MS system, and go "Uhm... Where did I see that before?", and sometimes you proudly show the results of hours of work, and what you get is "Heh, everyone else did that ages ago!"
Anybody who's talked with me about running Linux on the desktop within the past year has almost certainly gotten an earful about Cinnamon. If you haven't heard of it, here's the basic description: clean, beautiful, fast, and traditional desktop environment.
As 2012 nears its cold, wet conclusion*, we're asking you to look back over the past year and let us know which distro you think deserves the award "Best distro 2012". If you're nominating a distro that's had more than one release, let us know which one.
Raspbian and Android Jelly Bean are a couple of less-conventional ones that have caught our eye. Security-focused distros such as Tails and Qubes are becoming increasingly important in a digitally-hostile world. Mint continues its relentless march towards world domination. Mageia has had a great year while Ubuntu has had it's ups and downs. System Rescue CD protects you from Zombies (honest). Fedora and OpenSuse have continued to deliver. Zorin seems to be attracting interest, as does Rosa. Arch continues to be perfect (if you believe Graham). Gentoo earned a perfect 10 in an LXF review ... the list goes on.
It's out! Slacko is one of our flagship puppies, built with the latest Woof from Slackware 14.0 binary packages. It is all-puppy right through, with the advantage of binary compatibility with Slackware 14.0 and access to the Slackware package repositories.
Electronic hardware buyers may soon get access to a variety of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) products already embedded.
The world's top Linux software developer and services provider is looking to expand the reach of its Linux and JBoss products through a distribution agreement with global hardware distributor Avnet.
Financial terms of the agreement, which was announced Monday, were not disclosed.
Red Hat will work with Avnet Embedded, which is part of Avnet (Nyse: AVT).
The Raleigh-based firm hopes the Avnet deal will better connect it with original equipment manufacturers and independent software vendors who work with Avenet across the Americas.
On December 4th, Red Hat announced the release of the next beta for its flagship operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.4 is now available. According to the company, the release includes a broad set of updates to the existing feature set and provides rich new functionality in the areas of identity management, file system, virtualization, and storage as well as productivity tools.
In the beginning, the Installer was all. If you wanted to upgrade a Red Hat / Fedora system you downloaded the CD images, burned them all to CDs, and sat around swapping disks in and out until your system was upgraded. What fun!
If your ear has fallen within the radius of a supermarket or shopping mall’s sound system anytime since October then you’ll know that the festive feel-good season of Christmas is all but upon us.
There may be a lot of users who would want to use the light-weight Cinnamon desktop instead of Unity on Ubuntu systems, without switching to Linux Mint. Developer Robert Bennett has spinned a Linux distro for such users.
I have been playing around with the Raspberry Pi (Pi) for two months now. I started by installing Raspbian on a spare 4 GB memory card. I also had a wireless Wifi dongle and a wireless keyboard-mouse lying around. I plugged the WiFi dongle and the dongle for the wireless keyboard-mouse in the two USB ports of the Pi and when I plugged in my spare mobile charger into the Pi’s power input, the Pi booted. I felt lucky to see the display on the TV without any hassles. So far all in all, out of the box experience and all I had bought was the Pi. I already had the other stuff lying around. It was fun to see something on TV that I am used to seeing on a computer monitor.. The next thing I did was fire up the Python interpreter and tweeting the output of os.uname( ).
Most of us will be aware of the story behind Jolla by now. The company has been founded, and is mostly staffed by, former Nokia employees, from the Maemo and MeeGo teams. While the company is not a subsidiary in any form and doesn't have any of the rights to any Nokia products, it's easiest to think of Jolla as a continuation of the team behind open source Maemo products like the N900.
If you've been waiting to get your hands on XBMC for Android but weren't thrilled at the idea of compiling it yourself or suffering through a nightly, the team behind XBMC have taken the wraps off of an official beta release that you can try.
It was not that long ago that a leading-edge tablet device was a fairly big deal. Family members would ask where the tablet was; the house clearly wouldn't contain more than one of them. What followed, inevitably, was an argument over who got to use the household tablet. But tablets are quickly becoming both more powerful and less expensive — a pattern that a few of us have seen in this industry before. We are quickly heading toward a world where tablet devices litter the house like notepads, cheap pens, or the teenager's dirty socks. Tablets are not really special anymore.
Not satisfied with the current crop of Android tablets and the restrictions Google often places on its mobile OS? Finally, the Linux army has its own portable, touch-screen option.
As of this morning, PengPod, a spin-off of a Florida-based importing company, officially closed its crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo for its line of open Linux and Android-based tablets and mini-PCs on a stick.
This Thanksgiving break was a fun and relaxing one, but as usual, Mira (my 7-year old daughter) had her "I'm bored!" spells one day. After trying to get her to draw, color, paint, read, etc. I tried something new. We went outside and looked at interesting things. The Moon was pretty that evening. Then came the question:
If you're looking for a great Android tablet, there are plenty on the market to choose from—many more than there used to be, and they're only getting better. That doesn't mean all of them are worth your money, or worth buying for someone else who wants a new tablet. This week we asked you which Android tablets you thought were the best of the best, and here are the top five based on those nominations.
We took the fourth-generation iPad, the Google Nexus 10 and the Microsoft Surface and put them through the paces to determine which tablet is the best for everyday tasks.
Google turned heads this summer when it released its Nexus 7 tablet. Together with Asus, the company produced a solid Android tablet that offered an affordable price tag, nice design and smooth performance to rival the Amazon Kindle Fire HD. But can the company do it again with a 10-inch version to take on the reigning leader, the Apple iPad?
Last month, Jos Poortvliet's job as openSUSE community manager brought his career full-circle.
Logging is a critical thing for all system administrators, if you log too much and you don’t manage the files you could fill up a partition or even worst stop some service, if you don’t log enough you’ll lose information when something goes wrong, in general a good solution for this is to send all the logs to a central server that will store for the time you need them, and keep just 1,2 days of log into the local machine.
After a long, quiet period of Microsoft dominance, the PC browser market has been broken wide-open again in recent years, with Firefox and Chrome challenging Internet Explorer, and Opera sniffing at the margins.
Earlier this year, in fact, Chrome overtook Internet Explorer in one major measurement of browser market share, in what was hailed as a watershed moment for the new browser wars.
Quick, which major Internet browser does the best job of weeding out attempts from phishers to take control of your personal information? The answer is Google Chrome, according to a new report from NSS Labs. In addition to finding that Chrome stood out at foiling phishers, the report also found that the number of malicious, phishing-connected links online is growing very rapidly.
Mozilla has presented a demonstration of what it hopes to achieve with future social features in Firefox that make use of the new WebRTC capabilities in the browser. The Social API and its sidebar interface were integrated into Firefox 17 and the latest beta version of the browser adds WebRTC functionality which gives the browser the ability to transmit voice, video and data. Mozilla's demonstration shows how the Social API, working with WebRTC, allows for richer video-, audio- and image-based social networking and collaboration.
Top officials from both Google and Mozilla are loudly objecting to proposed changes to international telecommunication rules, slated to be discussed this week in Dubai as part of an International Telecommunications Union (ITU) conference. In a piece published on CNN.com, Vint Cerf, Google's Internet freedom guru and considered by some to be a "father of the Internet," writes: "Some 42 countries filter and censor content out of the 72 studied by the Open Net Initiative. This doesn't even count serial offenders such as North Korea and Cuba...Some of these governments are trying to use a closed-door meeting of The International Telecommunication Union that opens on December 3 in Dubai to further their repressive agendas."
Cade Metz has an interesting historical look back at how Amazon evolved from online bookseller to dominant player in the cloud. Meanwhile, many analysts note that Amazon's lead in the cloud is as substantial as Microsoft's lead in PC software was in the 1990s. The AWS re:Invent conference drove home the fact that while we're hearing a lot about OpenStack, CloudStack and Eucalyptus, open source cloud platforms don't have the adoption yet that Amazon has.
A recently published security vulnerability in the MySQL open source database has been met with fixes by the developers of the open source MariaDB fork. The updates take care of the CVE 2012-5579 buffer overflow problem, which an attacker could use to crash the database server or execute arbitrary shell code with the same privileges as the database process. The MariaDB developers say that another vulnerability (CVE 2012-5611), despite being reported separately, is just a duplicate of CVE 2012-5579.
MariaDB, an open-source database management system (DBMS) and MySQL fork has been gaining inroads in enterprise software and its founders formed a foundation, the MariaDB Foundation, to promote its software.
Specifically, "the MariaDB Foundation exists to improve database technology, including standards implementation, interoperability with other databases, and building bridges to other types of database such as transactional and NoSQL. To deliver this the Foundation provides technical work in reviewing, merging, testing, and releasing the MariaDB product suite. The Foundation also provides infrastructure for the MariaDB project and the user and developer communities."
The Obama administration has recently announced that it is developing a legal framework for drone warfare. It is now technically possible for a "pilot" sitting behind a computer terminal in Nevada or Virginia, with a few keystrokes, to eliminate virtually any person on the planet. But simply because it is technically possible does not make it a good idea, or a legal one. What legal principles should govern the use of drones to kill people?
t...arget rescuers in follow-up strikes. The latter has been described by UN legal experts as a war crime.
Commercial open source software company Acquia may soon have to describe itself with a capitalised and bolded COMMERICIAL given the firm's ascendancy from initial start up phase to its current financial status.
The firm, which provides products, services, and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system has raised over €£18 million (US $30 million) in what is described as "Investor Growth Capital" as well as venture capitalism funds in order to finance its expansion.
The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that version 5.2 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 5.2 is the second feature update of the NetBSD 5.0 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Users running NetBSD 5.0.3 or earlier are encouraged to upgrade to either NetBSD 5.2 or NetBSD 6.0, depending upon their specific requirements.
One month after Git 1.8.0 was released, Git 1.8.1 is now being prepared with several new features as well as fixes.
The City is also releasing the app’s underlying source code as part of an open source project in order to encourage others to build on it. The new app is the latest way L&I is striving to be a more transparent, accountable, and customer friendly agency.
Meanwhile, the folks at Renesys look into just how difficult it is to cut a country off from the internet, and whether other countries are at risk of the same sort of thing. Basically, it comes down to how decentralized the internet is in various countries -- and in many countries there isn't much decentralization. As Renesys notes, some countries have just one or two telcos who handle all internet traffic to and from the world. Those countries are easy to cut off. Renesys helpfully provides a map:
Two years ago, I met some open data advocates from Brazil and Ottawa, and we schemed of doing an international open data hackathon. A few weeks later, this blog post launched International Open Data Day with the hope that supporters would emerge in 5-6 cities to host local events.
My evangelism brings about positive change, but as much of it is done despite the community as is done with their cooperation. It's emotionally difficult, it leaves me in a bad mood, and it uses up what would otherwise be paid time. Why am I doing this to myself? I care deeply about Open Source. But I am increasingly unconvinced that my involvement in it is good for me.
In its continuing mission to build a “Wiki Weapon,” Defense Distributed has 3D printed the lower receiver of an AR-15 assault rifle and tested it to failure — on video (embedded below). The printed part only survives the firing of six shots, but for a first attempt that’s quite impressive. And hey, it’s a plastic gun.
If you're starting a new open source project, or open sourcing some existing code, you'll need a publicly accessible location for the version control system holding your code (if you're not planning on setting up a publicly accessible VCS, reconsider; no public source control is a red flag to potential contributors). You could set up your own repository hosting, but with so many companies and groups offering existing setups and services, why not use one of those and save yourself some time? Here's an overview of some of the more popular options.
US judge says tobacco firms must spend their own money on a public campaign admitting deception about the risks of smoking
Monsanto's marketing efforts pull imagery of an idyllic world of cooperation, support…downright hippy-esque harmony between the largest seed and pesticide company in the world and millions of struggling farmers. But the controversial manufacturer known for the toxic glyphosate-based Roundup and widespread genetically modified and hybrid seeds, paints a much different picture than what's really going on in the fields.
He rejects this, and both activist groups and the Tibetan government-in-exile say the self-immolations are protests against tight Chinese control of the region and religious repression.
State officials confirm Israel started to ease restrictions on civilians; sailing limit for fishermen extended. Farmers allowed to visit land near security fence. Hamas' Marzook says group won't stop smuggling weaons into Strip
Alameda County Sheriff Greg Ahern promised Tuesday to prohibit the use of a remote-controlled aerial drone...
“The real reason for most of these strikes has been to protect a regime in Pakistan or Yemen,” Zenko said.
“Legal, ethical, and wise” is how the Obama administration chooses to describe drone warfare...
Sindh High Court Bar Association (SHCBA) here Monday condemned US drone attacks in Pakistani territories...
A mortar slammed into a school in the Damascus suburbs on Tuesday, killing 29 students and a teacher, according to state media, as the civil war closed in on President Bashar Assad’s seat of power.
An open letter to the president to end his lethal -- and ever-expanding -- drone wars
Rarely does the release of a data-driven report on energy trends trigger front-page headlines around the world. That, however, is exactly what happened on November 12th when the prestigious Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) released this year’s edition of its World Energy Outlook. In the process, just about everyone missed its real news, which should have set off alarm bells across the planet.
The United Nations sounded a stark warning on the threat to the climate from methane in the thawing permafrost as governments met for the second day of climate change negotiations in Doha, Qatar.
Satellite measurements show flooding from storms like Sandy will put low-lying population centres at risk sooner than projected
The recent UK flooding caused terrible damage and waste, yet many insurers insist that things must be put back as they were
An effort by three U.S. senators to add an Internet sales tax amendment to a military spending bill has failed, at least for now.
Corporations are doing well. Workers, not so much. That could be the opening of just about any discussion of the American economy at least over the past couple years since corporations recovered from the great recession while workers didn't. But that's because there are always new specifics coming out to illustrate the point. Like this: after-tax corporate profits were a record share of the gross domestic product in the third quarter of 2012. Wages were the smallest share of GDP they've ever been.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, shocking images of dead bodies floating in the flood waters of New Orleans appeared on national TV against a sound track of desperate cries for help by thousands of poor, black, brown, elderly and sick people. These disturbing pictures revealed a vulnerable and destitute segment of the nation's citizenry that conservatives not only refused to see as such, but had spent the better part of three decades demonizing. But the haunting images of the abandoned, desperate and vulnerable would not go away and for a moment imposed themselves on the collective conscience of Americans, demanding answers to questions that were never asked about the existence of those populations excluded from the American dream and abandoned to their own limited resources in the midst of a major natural disaster. But that moment soon passed as the United States faced another disaster: The country plunged into an economic turmoil ushered in by finance capital and the apostles of Wall Street in 2008.1 Consequently, an additional instance of widespread hardship and suffering soon bore down on lower-middle and working-class people who would lose their jobs, homes, health care and their dignity.
The "fiscal cliff" plan Republicans offered today could hit the middle class to preserve tax breaks for the rich
Coffee chain sparks fresh concern over business practices amid fears low-paid staff will bear cost of potentially increased tax bill
Trustees for creditors left unpaid after the biggest banking failure in U.S. history say they suspect Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) of targeting Washington Mutual Inc., in a naked short-selling scheme.
If those suspicions prove out, the alleged wrongs could translate into a damage award for those still looking for money from Washington Mutual's Chapter 11 case, according to papers filed Friday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del.
In 2012, the total spending of outside groups -- the Super PACs and dark money nonprofits which spend money to influence elections, but do so separately from campaigns -- amounted to about $1.3 billion.
The only thing worse than a sore loser is a sore, vindictive winner. Don't these people have anything better to do? Like creating the promised 250,000 jobs and improving Wisconsin's economy? Apparently not.
Yesterday, State Senator Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau), who will again become the State Senate Majority Leader in January, inexplicably launched a vicious attack on the under-funded and under-staffed Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (G.A.B.). Why? Because he disagreed with some of their rulings and said the non-partisan board, composed of six retired judges (two of whom were at one time Republican legislators and two others who were appointed to the board by Republican Governor Scott Walker), delegated too much authority to the professional staff whom he said issued opinions in favor of Democrats.
The small box inside Amanda Hubbard's chest beams all kinds of data about her faulty heart to the company that makes her defibrillator implant.
The telecommunications standards arm of the U.N. has quietly endorsed the standardization of technologies that could give governments and companies the ability to sift through all of an Internet user’s traffic – including emails, banking transactions, and voice calls – without adequate privacy safeguards. The move suggests that some governments hope for a world where even encrypted communications may not be safe from prying eyes.
Former member of the US Congress, Cynthia McKinney on Tuesday criticised CIA and FBI as well as other law enforcement agencies of the US for violating its constitution, national and international laws and human rights throughout the American history.
McKinney was speaking at a seminar titled, 'US Justice System: Dynamics and Practices', chaired by former secretary foreign affairs M. Akram Zaki and was also addressed by Sara Flounders, co-Director, International Action Centre and former senator Barrister Saadia Abbasi.
he International Telecommunications Union, the UN agency at the center of a firestorm over new efforts to regulate the Internet, is preparing a social media campaign to target what it expects will be fierce opposition to a revised telephone treaty being decided next month at a secret conference in Dubai.
Several BitTorrent sites including Torrentz and Fenopy have had their .EU domains put on hold by EURid, the European Registry of Internet Domain Names. The new status for the domains, forcibly applied by EURid within seconds of each other yesterday afternoon, suggests that legal action against them might be pending and prevents the owners from making changes.
[...]
Dubbed Project TransAtlantic, the seizures took place with help from European law enforcement agencies and Europol.
Many, many posts and discussions have taken place here at Techdirt about content providers and their love of windowed releases. A point frequently made is that there would likely be a lot less piracy and a lot more purchasing if these 30/60/90 day rental/PPV/premium cable windows were eliminated on new releases. Another frequent target are premium cable providers and their original offerings, which suffer from long delays between original airings and their appearance on retail shelves.
Porn trolling has never been a glamorous business. But as judges, bar associations, and others have gotten wind of just how sleazy the porn-trolling business model is, trolling law firms have faced more and more obstacles. One trolling firm hit a new low on Tuesday, when an exasperated federal judge in Tampa, FL, threw out its copyright infringement case.
In a surreal court session, Judge Mary Scriven grilled several individuals with ties to Prenda Law, a law firm that specializes in copyright trolling, and its alleged client, a porn company called Sunlust Pictures. (We say "alleged" because Prenda now claims, unconvincingly, that it was never involved in the case.) It quickly became obvious that no one in the courtroom had any significant ties to the supposed plaintiffs, or even knowledge of who they were. So Judge Scriven dismissed the case for, among other things, "attempted fraud on the Court" for sending a "representative" to court who knew next to nothing about the company he was representing.
lately about piracy and how to combat it, including some pretty radical measures. But I believe most people glance over some of the positive effects that piracy has. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not encouraging it and I’m not saying it’s good, I’m just saying that it’s not all black and white. Piracy is only a symptom of something more: whether it’s bad business models, restrictive markets, or economic problems. And I think my own story proves this point.
I was born in Romania, a country that had just gone through a revolution and was re-becoming a democracy. We, as a society, were just remembering what democracy was and how a free market works. We were just seeing what major technological breakthroughs had happened in the last 30 years in the west while our own country and populace had remained uninformed and technologically inept.
Several UK Internet providers are blocking Pirate Bay’s perfectly legal promotion platform for independent artists. The Promo Bay website is currently being blocked by BT, Virgin Media, BE and possibly several other providers. A plausible explanation is that the Promo Bay domain is listed on the same blocklist that’s used to enforce the Pirate Bay blockade. However. the domain itself has never linked to infringing material, nor is it hosted on The Pirate Bay’s servers.
I've been tossing around a longish blog post about some of the controversy concerning the Internet Radio Fairness Act (IRFA) over the past month or so, but haven't had a chance to put it all down in a blog post. I did, however, wish to pick up on a small thread that got a brief spark of attention from some people who don't seem to understand legal stuff in the slightest. It started with musician David Lowery (you may remember him from past nonsensical rampages) claiming that Section 5 of the bill muzzled free speech and thus violated the First Amendment. This isn't just wrong. It's completely backwards. But the language and history here is a bit complex, so let's dig in a bit.
Popular author Tim Ferriss got some attention recently when his latest book, The 4-Hour Chef, was published by Amazon, with a big push to try to make it a best seller (the first Amazon published book to get such a push, apparently). This scared off Barnes & Noble who refused to sell the book, because, apparently, it's run by childish and petulant execs. Ferriss, who is known for his rather extreme ability to market the hell out of anything, has actually been using this to his own advantage, continually calling out the fact that Barnes & Noble is refusing to carry the book, and using non-standard promotion techniques, including having the book sold via Panera restaurants and... doing a big promotion deal with BitTorrent. To be honest, I found some of the language used to promote that deal a bit misleading, as it appeared some people thought he was distributing the book itself via BitTorrent. Instead, he teamed up with the company to distribute "an exclusive bundle" of extra, related, content. That's still cool, but having watched some of the hype behind it, you could see how some might see it as bait and switch.
The latest News Corp press release says that the Daily, its standalone daily iPad newspaper, will "cease standalone publication".
The newspaper had a high profile launch in February 2011, but had apparently struggled to pay its way — recent reports suggested the losses were looking like $30 million a year, and rumors that Rupert Murdoch would kill the publication have been around since at least early summer.
Jay-Z has since referred to it as "genius" and expressed how honored he was to see it happen. EMI, which controlled the Beatles' rights, felt differently, sending cease-and-desist letters to tons of sites that had the mp3s. In response, folks on the internet planned Grey Tuesday for February 24th, 2004 -- a day of digital civil disobedience, where lots of sites would distribute the mashup album. EMI, still not understanding what it was dealing with, sent off more cease-and-desist letters to any site that had indicated that it would participate. End result? Even more interest in the whole thing.
Of course, since then, Danger Mouse has gone on to be an in-demand guy in the recording industry (among other things, he's one-half of Gnarls Barkley, who of course had a massive hit with the song "Crazy" a few years ago). EMI later admitted that The Grey Album didn't "harm" them at all, but still defended the decision arguing, pointlessly, "it's not a question of damage, it's a question of rights."
Ah, this is what you get when you build up ideas around the idea that every bit of content must be "owned." You may have heard the somewhat heartwarming story last week of NYPD Officer Lawrence DePrimo, seeing a homeless man in NYC without any shoes on, buying the man some boots and giving them to him. Without either man being aware of it, a tourist from Arizona, Jennifer Foster, saw this happening and took a photo of the situation.
In what is by far the greatest DMCA mess we’ve ever witnessed, several major movie studios have seemingly asked Google to take down legitimate copies of their own films. Through an agent the studios further requested the search engine to remove their official Facebook pages and Wikipedia entries, as well as movie reviews in prominent newspapers. Has the world gone mad or…?
Comments
saulgoode
2012-12-05 15:08:05
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
2012-12-05 18:39:24