Judge affirms takedown notice recipients' right to sue
A two-year-old California boy may today be the hero of the digital age, as a Federal Judge ruled that the holder of the copyright to the song he was dancing to in a YouTube video, should have thought twice before suing his mommy.
When a copyright holder believes that a person uploading a file to a public site has infringed his rights, he must take into consideration whether that upload followed US law's definition of "fair use." And if that person is sent a takedown notice by the copyright holder, she has the right to challenge its assertions in court. That's the ruling of a US District Judge in San Jose yesterday.
Intel, Yahoo, Comcast to partner on widgets for live TV
Are you ready for 3D, overlaid, interactive widgets to move off of the PC desktop onto your television set? An initiative announced yesterday by a powerhouse team of developers will probably make it happen, whether you're ready or not.
In one of the many intriguing developments to come out of this year's Intel Developers' Forum in San Francisco, both Yahoo and Comcast stated yesterday they will partner with Intel in the creation of a system that will conceivably deliver interactive, overlaid widgets -- the kind you see on the Mac OS X Dashboard or the Windows Vista Sidebar -- directly through live, digital TV.
Sony to add 160 GB option for PS3, new high-color screen for PSP
In a series of announcements this afternoon, Sony says its preparing to distribute a wide array of new gaming system features well for the holiday season, including a new hard disk capacity for its upper-tier PlayStation 3.
As of last February, Sony was bundling its $499, upper-tier PlayStation 3 as an 80 GB console with Metal Gear Solid 4 and a DualShock 3 controller. Then last month, the new CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America announced an 80 GB Core package for $399 in lieu of an actual price cut.
Yahoo's search share plunges in July; MSN, AOL follow
In what could be dire news for the world's #2 search provider, as Nielsen Online reports, Yahoo in July lost a full 11% of the US-based search traffic it had the previous year, down to only 17.4% of the nation's searches, or about 1.4 billion.
If you're thinking all the rhetoric against Yahoo since Microsoft's public takeover bid in February may be the cause, the problem is that Microsoft isn't the beneficiary. The number three US search provider on Nielsen's list this morning lost 10% from July 2007 to July 2008, down to under 1 billion searches. Google literally grabbed all of that traffic, with share of US searches rising 16% for the period to 4.8 billion, eclipsing the 60% mark. At about this time last year, Google was just rising past 55%.
The economy's loss appears to be HP's gain
Typically a "recession" is defined by two successive periods of negative growth. But wherever that recession may be taking place must be another planet, from HP's perspective, as it has yet to see even one such period in the Mark Hurd era.
It's the type of quarterly report that makes one ask the increasingly pertinent question, "Carly who?" In an unequivocal validation of its re-invention strategy under CEO Mark Hurd, Hewlett-Packard last night posted fabulous numbers, earning way more than it has before on seasonally weaker, though still very strong, revenue.
Has Firefox 3 certificate handling become too 'scary?'
In a scenario reminiscent of the fairy tale about the fellow who cries "wolf" too often, security engineers are actively wondering whether Firefox' "blowing of the whistle" on self-signed certificates is a) frightening, and b) fair to developers.
One of the oft-touted improvements in Mozilla's Firefox 3.0 Web browser has been its improved handling for sites that authenticate their own identities using SSL certificates -- the kind used to initiate encrypted transactions with HTTPS protocol. For instance, a site whose authentication is verified will be indicated in Firefox's address bar by having its icon expanded to a full name, printed on a green background. Supposedly, this is to reassure the user that everything's copacetic.
Users to Microsoft: 'Just make Windows faster'
Continuing an unprecedented public dialog on the future of Windows begun last week, a Microsoft senior vice president admits that the request he's hearing most often from users is pretty simple: Speed it up.
Though we won't make it a point to post a story every time a Microsoft Senior Vice President, such as Steven Sinofsky or Jon DeVaan, issues an utterance about the next edition of Windows on its newly launched corporate blog, one statement from Sinofsky this morning will raise eyebrows: In response to the blog's inaugural call for ideas from the general public about what features they'd like to see in "Windows 7," he surprisingly acknowledged that many were more interested not so much in features but in behavior.
Microsoft alters server app licensing for virtualization
It's been a slow, painful separation that's taken decades: divorcing Microsoft from its reliance upon per-processor licensing of its software. Today, the company took another hard step toward turning its back on an obsolete practice.
Up until this week, it has actually been a violation of Microsoft's Windows licensing terms for data center admins to do one of the quintessential tasks in their environment: moving running applications on virtual systems between physical processors. For data centers that consolidate their workloads by deploying multiple virtual servers on far fewer processors, live migration is a critical load balancing operation. In fact, it's one of VMware's key administrative features for its popular VMware Fusion.
Android SDK moves to 0.9 beta status, on track for 1.0
It may be unusual for the SDK for a platform to be finalized on or about the same time as the release of the platform itself, but news from Android's key developers today indicates they're quite comfortable with cutting it close.
In yet another indication that the first mobile phone supporting the Android platform is imminent, the Open Handset Alliance took the "preview" label off of its SDK this afternoon, officially upgrading the project to a beta which it hopes will have the look and feel of the final 1.0 release.
Dell's cloud computing effort must proceed without exclusive trademark
Key to Dell's comeback as the leading server manufacturer is the repair of its image as a fair corporate citizen. So this week's public notice that it probably can't trademark the phrase "cloud computing" won't help.
An effort initiated by Dell in March 2007 to register the phrase "cloud computing" as a United States trademark appears destined for defeat, as the US Patent and Trademark Office's database now indicates it sent Dell a non-final action notice last Tuesday refusing its request.
In the Nehalem era, it'll be AMD's HyperTransport vs. Intel's QuickPath
Just when Intel thinks it's getting ready to score one of the biggest "ticks" in its "tick-tock" cadence, designed to aggravate AMD, its competition may go beyond just leveling the playing field, with a new point-to-point interconnect scheme.
A day before the kickoff of Intel's biggest Developers' Forum since the initiation of Core Microarchitecture two years ago, a consortium led by its biggest competitor is announcing it's ready to help it catch up: The HyperTransport memory bus used in AMD processors -- at one time, AMD's ace in the hole -- could be significantly accelerated for future AMD motherboards, helping it catch up with a new goalpost set earlier this year by Intel's upcoming Nehalem architecture.
Having lost its own bid, Google advocates giving analog TV space to public
Since the 1940s, the US' TV space has been referred to as "the public airwaves." Now, Google is using a Web site to build public support for an effort to convince the FCC that it should be allowed to use that space in the public interest.
It was one of the biggest losers in the US Federal Communications Commission's auction of 700 MHz spectrum last spring, having at one time promised to bid billions for space in the high UHF television band that ended up going to Verizon and AT&T. But now, Google is trying to stake a new position for itself in the debate over what happens to the rest of the airspace -- the so-called "white spaces," in-between the blocks of spectrum that fetched billions for the federal government -- by suggesting the FCC give it away.
ComScore: Google still serves more users, as CBS enters the Top 10
Two trends continue, as evidenced by this month's comScore Top 50 report, released this afternoon: One, Google's going nowhere but up. Two, it can still go up when overall Internet use in the US is actually going down.
During Yahoo's most recent quarterly report, its executives told investors that the crown jewel of the company continues to be its portal, which serves more users than anyone else's. That's now demonstrably no longer true, as Yahoo's growth has been outpaced by Google for three consecutive comScore surveys.
Latest AOL acquisition could pair SocialThing with AIM
In a move which could end up meaning either everything or nothing, the developers of a "lifestreaming" application have agreed to be acquired by a company whose track record with acquisitions hasn't always been pretty.
Confirming news that had first been leaked to TechCrunch two weeks ago, the CEO of a startup social network service called SocialThing -- which has yet to emerge from private beta -- blogged yesterday that his company is a few days away from being fully acquired by AOL.
Yahoo names Chapple, Biondi to board, but what happens next?
New Yahoo board member Frank Biondi has a knack for being at the center of a firestorm. So the fact that Carl Icahn successfully got Biondi on board this morning, probably means a new storm is on the horizon.
There are now three of Icahn Partners' ranks serving as members of the Board of Directors of Yahoo. Carl Icahn himself will assume the seat vacated by outgoing member Robert Kotick, and former Viacom and Universal chief Frank Biondi and former Nextel founder John Chapple will add to the board's membership. Yahoo made the news official this morning.
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