Nokia N900: The future of the 'MID' form factor?
There have been a couple of form factors in recent years that have completely failed to capture the public's imagination, despite their promising capabilities: Tablets and Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs).
However, with the dramatic level of rumor circulating about Steve Jobs and Apple's pet tablet project, there may be hope for that form factor after all. And with Nokia's announcement of the N900 today, the MID concept looks like it might stick around too.
FCC launches investigation of wireless industry
This afternoon, the Federal Communications Commission gingerly passed measures that will result in the publication of three "Notices of Inquiry," seeking public input not only on the status of wireless broadband communications in this country, but what measures it should take to better judge just what "good" or "bad" means for that industry. While all those positive words were being spoken on the industry's behalf, however -- references to "the spirit of American innovation" abounded from both sides of the bench today -- from the other end of the building this afternoon, the FCC formally announced it will be launching an inquiry to "identify concrete steps the Commission can take to support and encourage further innovation and investment in the wireless marketplace."
"Wireless mobility has become central to the economic, civic, and social lives of over 270 million Americans," a statement from the FCC said this afternoon. "We are now in the midst of a transition from reliance on mobile voice services to increasing use of and reliance on mobile broadband services, which promise to connect American citizens in new and profound ways. A robustly competitive mobile wireless market will be essential to realizing the full benefits to American consumers and channeling investment into vitally important national infrastructure. The FCC is seeking to ensure that competition in the mobile wireless market continues to bring substantial benefits to American consumers."
Mozilla: Privacy concerns initially prevented some upgrades to Firefox 3
One of the benefits of working in an organization whose founding premise is based on openness is that mistakes can be openly admitted, and thus more quickly rectified. An example of this principle in action comes from the blog for Mozilla's own analytics team, which earlier this week presented a very telling discovery from a survey of Firefox 2 users who continually declined making the upgrade to version 3.0 (we're not even dealing with 3.5 yet).
The most oft-cited reason users declined to make the upgrade -- from one declining user in four, or about 1,250 users, according to survey results -- was the apparent fact that a user's history of previously viewed Web sites could not be deleted from the address bar. As a result, when typing in an HTTP, any user could discover the addresses of similarly-named Web sites that any other user of that same browser (under the same logon name) had previously viewed.
Verizon calls Comcast's bet with Web-based FiOS TV beta
Two months ago, Comcast announced a limited beta trial of an online TV service involving networks of Time Warner's Turner Broadcasting division, where Comcast subscribers may be treated to earliest availability of post-airdate programming from networks including TBS and TNT. This morning, Verizon announced the launch of an almost identical trial, involving exactly the same networks, in a deal that makes one wonder whether it's Turner that's in the driver's seat here.
As part of Turner's "TV Everywhere" initiative, select FiOS fiberoptic service subscribers will be offered first crack (perhaps at the same time as Comcast customers) at online availability of shows like Raising the Bar, Saving Grace, and The Closer. Rather than seeing those shows first through online portals such as TNT.tv, logged on users to Verizon Online will receive invitations to join the carrier's limited trial.
Google News caught in Italian antitrust probe
Following complaints from the Italian Newspaper Publisher's Federation (FIEG), Italian authorities have launched a probe to find out whether Google abuses its position of the world's most popular search engine to deprive others of advertising revenue.
At the heart of FEIG's complaint is Google News and its mystery algorithms for listing top stories. FEIG complained that since it is unknown how Google News decides which stories are listed at the top, content providers don't know how their stories should be written so as to gain top billing in Google News listings. Conversely, sites also have no say if they do not want their content listed on Google News.
Mac OS X Snow Leopard is coming: Yes, do upgrade!
If nothing else, the operating system market these days is infinitely entertaining. Consider the humble upgrade.
Some OS upgrades, like XP-to-Vista on a marginally capable machine, demand more up-front planning than the end result is often worth. You end up spending money and time on a machine that, while it may look prettier, runs slower and gives you more headaches than it solves. Other upgrade scenarios, like Vista-to-Windows 7, are a lot more straightforward and easier for most folks to justify.
Home video game console prices reach equilibrium with Xbox 360 drop
Court upholds pro-Verizon ruling in 'largest cybersquatting case ever'
A federal court in the Northern District of California has upheld the December 2008 ruling which awarded Verizon $33.15 million in a cybersquatting case against domain registry company OnlineNIC.
The 2008 ruling gave Verizon $50,000 for each of the 663 domain names OnlineNIC registered that were "confusingly similar" or in some cases identical to Verizon trademarks with the intention of attracting users who were looking to access legitimate Verizon sites.
TiVo brings the time-shifting fight to AT&T, Verizon
TiVo has been in a legal battle with Dish Network and its former parent company EchoStar for more than four years over the design of their digital video recorders (DVR), which TiVo claims are patent-infringing. Now, the company has challenged Verizon and AT&T for the designs of their FiOS and U-verse DVRs.
Yesterday, TiVo filed complaints in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas for infringement of the same three patents that Dish Network allegedly infringed upon back in 2005. The complaints seek damages for past infringement and permanent injunctions on the infringing hardware.
Live coverage: FCC open hearing on national broadband plan
There are two major issues on the table with regard to the creation of a national broadband plan. The two sides of the debate want their respective issues to be the focus, including in voters' minds.
The new chairman of the FCC, Julius Genachowski, and the incoming Democratic leadership would prefer that you be interested in the issue of ensuring public access to high-speed Internet service, particularly by preventing private interests from designing the system in such a way that they can charge premiums to select customers. This is at the heart of the net neutrality issue. The Republican "opposition" -- but the side which brought the whole matter to the floor in the first place -- would prefer you be interested in enabling multiple service providers to obtain national franchise licenses to set up broadband Internet service anywhere in the country at competitive rates, without having to pay municipal fees and obtain licenses for every square yard of space in America separately. That's the heart of what's now being called the open competition issue.
Latest SQL injection attack quickly spreads malicious JavaScript
One of the more bizarre architectural elements of HTML that may still be excused with the phrase, "This behavior is by design," is the ability for a floating text frame using the <IFRAME> element to be rendered effectively invisible (or so miniature as to not be seen), and then to run JavaScript code. It's a trigger for a disaster; and pressing that trigger tens of thousands of times today is a particularly virulent SQL injection attack, the evidence of which can be detected through a simple Google search: Wednesday afternoon, Betanews discovered about 82,800 compromised pages appearing in Google's index just for one of the actual malicious triggers -- probably just a fraction of the actual number of cases. And there are multiple triggers.
The plague was first reported last Friday by security services provider ScanSafe. In an update filed today, its engineers report that as the number of infected sites grows, their geography becomes more pronounced instead of less. It's as if the source of the injection, whatever it is, is targeting Chinese sites.
Third party mobile browser Skyfire releases version 1.1
It's been about three months since Skyfire officially launched on Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 3rd Edition, and this week the popular mobile browser has been given a general performance upgrade.
Skyfire's Senior Director of Product Management Robert Oberhofer said in his team blog that Version 1.1 has an upgraded algorithm to shorten load times, improved reconnect (the browser disconnects from pages to save battery), support for WML markup language, and upgrades to its support for Flash, Quicktime, and Silverlight. This final upgrade is central to Skyfire, as it is one of the best mobile browsers for watching streaming video.
The 'partly cloudy' network: Amazon's new partial clouds via IPsec VPN
This past year, what has very clearly distinguished one company's cloud services from another has been their intended uses. Whereas Microsoft Windows Azure has been a custom applications platform, and Salesforce.com has built a business logic platform around Force.com, Amazon Web services has been about deploying entire servers in the cloud, letting customers lease the processing time and bandwidth to deploy their own Web fronts on Amazon's hardware.
Up to now, the question for AWS customers has been to deploy or not to deploy; but this morning, data center architects will be asking how much to deploy. With the rollout of what it's calling Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, the service will enable a new class of customers to deploy limited resources into the cloud, and then secure and administer those resources through the customers' own firewalls and admin software. Amazon announced the initial beta of VPC to select customers this morning.
New FCC chief draws a line in the sand on net neutrality
On the eve of easily the most important Federal Communications Commission open hearing since being sworn in as its chairman, Julius Genachowski is taking the strong personal stand he was expected to take, in favor of equal and open access to Internet services. Returning to the heart of the original debate from which the term "net neutrality" was coined, Genachowski told the Capitol Hill daily The Hill yesterday that he remains committed to enforcing net neutrality principles, assuming they actually become law.
"One thing I would say so that there is no confusion out there is that this FCC will support net neutrality and will enforce any violation of net neutrality principles," the FCC Chairman told The Hill.
Rumor: Motorola Android devices go international Sept. 15
For the last few months, there's been a steady stream of rumors about Motorola's forthcoming Android handsets; speculating on form factor, carrier and OS version. Earlier this week, the Schaumburg, Illinois telecommunications company sent out invitations to a San Francisco press event on Thursday, September 10 adorned with the lime green Android logo.
Since the invitations didn't contain many details, the rumors have thusly picked up steam. It is widely expected that the two devices shown on September 10 will be the "Morrison" on T-Mobile, and the "Sholes" on Verizon.
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