Judge reverses himself, finds placing MP3s in a public folder isn't 'sharing'
An August 2007 ruling from an Arizona district court says that placing files in a folder shared over a P2P network constitutes "dissemination." Today, the same judge, in the same trial, reversed his own reasoning.
In a complete 180-degree backtrack from his own decision last August, and a clear victory for the defendants in the near term, an Arizona district court judge today dismissed record labels' motion for summary judgment against a man who claims certain music tracks were shared with others through the KaZaA network by accident.
Future Cray supercomputers will have Intel Xeon processors
An Intel spokesperson confirmed to BetaNews this morning that an alliance between the manufacturer and Cray Inc. will lead to future Cray supercomputers being endowed with Intel Xeon processors.
Itanium processors -- which are designed with explicit parallelism from the outset will not be involved in this partnership, according to Intel spokesperson Nick Knupffer. Instead, the partnership will center around what Knupffer described as "Cray's interconnect to Intel's future generations of processor technology."
Windows XP SP3 official release delayed, but download still available
Download Windows XP Service Pack 3 from FileForum now (316 MB).
1:20 pm EDT April 29, 2008 - As expected, the self-extracting .EXE version of Windows XP Service Pack 3 was made available to the general public by Microsoft this morning. However, due to a last minute problem, the official release to Windows Update and the Microsoft Download Center was delayed.
Record labels take aim at a clever playlist 'sharing' operation
In what could be a precedent-setting case, recording companies are alleging that the Project Playlist Web site is guilty of infringement by enabling its own members to give other users access to unlicensed music files hosted by other sites.
Ostensibly, Project Playlist purports to be a site where users can share lists of their favorite music. But lists alone do not a business model make, as indicated by the fact that songs chosen by members can be made to play in sequence, in Windows Media, RealPlayer, or Flash.
FCC: D Block bidders driven away by prospects of high lease fees, penalties
It should have been a fairy tale come true for an entrepreneurial wireless provider with top-notch leadership. But the FCC's D Block option kept Frontline Wireless out of the picture; and today, an FCC report points the blame at no one.
Last year, the US Congress granted the Federal Communications Commission the authority to conduct an auction of portions of the public airwaves currently devoted to UHF television, with the condition that it devise the means for some of that spectrum to be used by public safety officials and first responders. Without federal funding available to secure the project, though, the FCC came up with a unique plan that would involve entrepreneurial corporations cooperating with a non-profit public safety organization, enabling the corporations to establish profitable services while at the same time helping the public firm maintain the public safety network, presumably at reduced costs.
Microsoft denies a link between IIS and SQL injection attacks
An apparent rash of SQL injection attacks on Web sites was reported by a Finnish security firm late last week, though a case of "guilt by implication" led to speculation that a privilege escalation vulnerability was the cause.
Last Friday, the Web site of security engineering firm F-Secure noted what appears to be another outbreak of successful SQL injection attacks on database-driven Web sites that use Active Server Pages to generate results. In what appears to the firm to be a twist on a classic attack scheme, an uncleansed SQL query into a database reformulates the contents of every record in its tables so that certain text fields contain hidden, malicious JavaScript code.
Dell promises to protect business customers' right not to use Vista
If you're a business customer of Dell, you might have to purchase Vista with your PC, but that doesn't mean you have to use it. Today, Dell is trying a new way to satisfy both business users' wants and Microsoft's licensing requirements.
A recent revision to Dell's policy for business PC customers lets them take full and open advantage of an apparent loophole in Microsoft's operating system licensing, though they'll pay full price for it: Assuming Microsoft goes forth with its plan to discontinue sale of all versions of Windows XP after June 30, Dell will still enable its business customers who purchase Windows Vista Business or Vista Professional to exercise certain "downgrade rights" and have Windows XP Professional installed instead.
Yahoo's open platform now has a name and a mascot
If the software industry truly is to transcend the PC level and start an entirely new economy on a Web platform, then it doesn't appear any one player will have an automatic, native advantage. Yahoo is gambling it will be one of those players.
There are four centers of gravity emerging in the complex and semi-defined social Web services field, where the application platform is moved from the local or company network to the Web. The proprietors at these four points include Microsoft, whose Live Mesh concept was given more definition just two days ago. Then there's Adobe, which is constructing a Web services platform around Flash using AIR. Also there is Google, whose tenacity alone is testament to its formidability.
The cost of losing the format war: Toshiba falls on its sword
Few American companies would write off the assets from a losing product as a one-time charge; the result might be disastrous, even suicidal. But in Asian business, defeat can be treated honorably when it's taken as a whole.
History will record, perhaps honorably but not without a note of astonishment, that Toshiba was willing to absorb the full blow of its huge gamble in HD DVD, as a one-time charge for its 2007 fiscal year, ending in March.
Toshiba president: 25% of notebooks will have SSDs by 2011
The solid state disk industry may never be ready for prime time, according to data last week from the president of Toshiba, a supporter of the technology. SSD's rate of growth may never catch up, he projected, to the rest of the storage industry.
While the overall market for solid-state disk drives is expanding at triple-digit annual rates, according to an account of a speech on Monday by Toshiba President Shozo Saito from the Nikkei press agency, analysts today are noting that just as twice nothing is still nothing, thrice not very much is a small percentage indeed.
Google boosts its mobile outreach with smaller image ads
In a move designed to change the texture of mobile Web content, Google is integrating smaller display ads designed for mobile browsers, into its AdWords service starting today. But it won't fool many into thinking it's not playing catch-up.
The leader in online display image advertising right now is actually DoubleClick, which is now a Google division but is still allowed to do its own thing. In the meantime, Google's increasing emphasis on mobile device platforms -- including its own Android -- is pushing it to become a display ad leader for that segment.
Yahoo says it's cooperating with DOJ in Google antitrust concern
Whether US federal officials have serious concerns over the Yahoo/Google beta test remains unclear this morning, though explanations given to the press last night may actually raise more questions than they answer.
The US Department of Justice has yet to issue a comment on, or confirm, a story that first appeared on Reuters wires late yesterday. Initially, it was reported and widely repeated that the DOJ is investigating Yahoo and Google over a test of integrating AdSense ads on Yahoo search pages.
Vista SP1 goes live on Automatic Updates, but gradually
It's apparently safe to try this now: Microsoft stated this afternoon it's going forward with plans to deploy Windows Vista Service Pack 1 via Automatic Updates.
But today's go-ahead won't mean that users will wake up one morning and suddenly find themselves upgraded (or not), or even that SP1 will find itself deployed all in the same morning.
Rambus victory upends an FTC unfair monopoly practices finding
A long-standing claim was that Rambus behaved unfairly by withholding secrets from competitors in standards committees. But an appeals court today erased an FTC decision, on the grounds that those committees may have been useless anyway.
An August 2006 US Federal Trade Commission decision finding Rambus illegally garnered monopoly power in the memory market by manipulating standards agencies, was voided yesterday by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, on the grounds that the standards agency in question -- JEDEC -- did not provide its members with enough guidelines for properly sharing information the FTC said Rambus withheld.
Appeals court lets 'Vista Capable' class action proceed
In a big blow to the case against Microsoft's allegedly confusing "Vista Capable" labeling program for PCs, the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday denied Microsoft's petition to overturn a decision granting the case class action status.
It may be exactly what Microsoft doesn't want right now, even if it ends up winning the case in the end: the symbolism of a mass of consumers taking up arms against the company, in dispute over the very heart of its value proposition for Windows Vista. Yesterday the Ninth Circuit ended the company's hopes of being able to face the plaintiff on the company's terms.
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