Early word on EU 'choice screen:' May not be random, may not be obvious
As IE6 and IE7 users throughout Europe turn on their Windows Vista- and XP-based computers to notice, for the first time, the opportunity to switch Web browsers from Microsoft Internet Explorer to something they may have never heard of, their manufacturers are preparing for an influx of new customers.
But they may also be preparing to lower expectations just in case the market share numbers for Firefox or Chrome or Opera or Safari fail to swing wildly positive overnight. Last week, Mozilla launched its opentochoice.org blog, ostensibly to help spread the word about the impact the choice screen may make on European computing habits. On Friday, however, the blog posted the results of a six-country, 6,000 respondent consumer poll conducted by advertising research firm Ipsos MORI.
The mad rush to release Opera 10.5: Two months' work in one weekend?
Download Opera 10.5 Release Candidate 4 for Windows from Fileforum now.
Just a handful of weeks ago, the developers of Opera 10.5 were calling their "pre-alpha" build dangerous if used to run a nuclear reactor facility. Over the weekend, in what appears to have been a round-the-clock effort to compress a few months' work into a few days' time, Opera Software ticked through four release candidates of its latest Windows-based Web browser.
Microsoft's antitrust retort: Just what is it accusing Google of doing?
There may not be a real investigation of Google's business practices from the European Commission, at least not yet. But judging from the waves of hyperbole emanating from the usual suspects, along with a few new entrants, in the wake of the EC's admission that it forwarded Google some negative mail earlier this month, there may as well have been one. It appears that if enough people on the Internet share a topic with one another, it must be true.
The complaint among three of Google's competitors is that it leverages its hugely popular, all-purpose search engine as a platform for promoting its own exclusive shopping services. In a way, there's almost no contesting the complaint -- that's exactly what Google does. The question is whether that's wrong. As Betanews noted yesterday, the answers may differ depending on the continent they apply to. Depending on the country, the legal standards (and the suppositions behind them) vary.
Is Opera 10.5 ready for the March 1 'choice screen?'
Download Opera 10.5 Beta 2 for Windows from Fileforum now.
One of the more brilliant coups in the history of Web browsers, were it feasible, would be for Opera Software to seize Google's key argument -- that the best Web browser that European Windows users should switch to next month, is the fastest one -- and make it its own. Those users will get that opportunity starting March 1, when Microsoft's rollout of its browser "choice screen" through Windows Update, begins in earnest.
Baidu: Register.com replaced its DNS credentials for some guy in a chat room
Last month, Baidu, the leading search engine in China, filed suit against US-based Internet registrar Register.com, in a legal event that took place at the height of the debate over Google's continued business dealings with China. Baidu accused the registrar of changing its DNS records, so that customers were redirected to a completely different site purporting to represent the "Iranian Cyber Army."
But that original suit was heavily redacted, so we didn't know the specifics of the alleged defacement. This week, US District Court in New York released the unredacted version of Baidu's complaint, and now, as the man once said, we know the rest of the story.
The basis for Baidu's allegation that Register.com knowingly and willfully damaged Baidu's property, and thereby its reputation, is that one of its customer support agents changed Baidu's DNS records literally on the request of a guy who showed up in Register.com's support chat room. Supposedly, he pretended to be Baidu ("Mr. Baidu," perhaps?). And although records show the support personnel asked him to verify his identity by sending back the security code that was just sent to the e-mail address on record as Baidu's authoritative address, the fellow instead responded with a made-up bunch of numbers...which the agent then accepted as valid.
Define 'monopoly:' Foundem's argument against Google linking to Google
Yesterday, after the European Commission announced it had sent Google earlier in the month copies of complaints it had received from three search providers that Google refused to rank their search results highly in its index, the company Google had the least to say about was Foundem. That's a British shopping site that aggregates the results from UK online retailers' catalogs. As the EC said yesterday, the inquiry has not yet triggered an investigation.
Although the EC keeps private the contents of complaints it forwards on to the subjects of inquiries, there's a very good chance that Foundem's complaint may echo the public comment it filed with the US Federal Communications Commission, ostensibly with respect to its request for ideas for "Preserving the Open Internet." In that document (PDF available here), Foundem alleges that Google threatens the desired state of the Internet -- something commissioners have referred to as "search neutrality" -- by giving prominent placement to Google services in search results, under the label, "Universal Search."
Google's bad news deluge: Execs held responsible for posting of hate video
There's precedent throughout the European Union protecting the rights of ISPs when Web sites they host end up streaming defamatory, libelous, or injurious content. Despite that, a Milan judge today sentenced three of four Google executives convicted last November of violating the privacy of a boy victimized in a briefly-posted YouTube video, to six months' suspension.
The sentencing came even though the original plaintiff in the lawsuit -- representatives of a boy with Down's Syndrome, who unwillingly appeared in a YouTube video showing classmates tormenting him -- reportedly withdrew from the case last week, as first reported by IDG's Philip Willan last Sunday. In an American court, this would normally lead to a dismissal; but Judge Oscar Magi took the not-unprecedented step of assuming the role of the plaintiff, effectively trying the case on behalf of state prosecutors.
Google's bad news deluge: Xerox sues, claims it borrowed query methods
For any other company besides Google, a week like this would be interpreted by some in the press as the beginning of the end, and it's only Wednesday. However, an individual breakdown of every bad story, element by element, reveals the company may not be deluged so much by a hailstorm of controversy as a cavalcade of unfortunately simultaneous snowballs, none of which may end up leaving any lasting damage.
Last Friday, Xerox filed suit in US District Court in Delaware, claiming two counts of patent infringement against Google and Yahoo, and one count against Google's YouTube division. A scan of the complaint reveals an almost "boilerplate" document, making no arguments other than that its two patents cover types of functionality that the three named defendants willfully employed without negotiating with Xerox first.
EU denies Google is under investigation, early evidence appears weak
This morning, despite clearly and pointedly phrased headlines such as this one proclaiming that the European Commission had opened an antitrust investigation into Google, the Commission released a statement this morning saying no such investigation was launched.
"The Commission has not opened a formal investigation for the time being," reads this morning's EC statement. "As is usual when the Commission receives complaints, it informed Google earlier this month and asked the company to comment on the allegations." No further information is being provided to the press on this matter -- again, as per protocol, because no investigation has begun.
Google Chrome 5 loses points, wins categories, against Opera 10.5 beta
Download Opera 10.5 Beta 1 Build 3271 for Windows from Fileforum now.
Two weeks ago, we warned the new leader in the Windows Web browser, Opera 10.5 Beta 1, that it would have to paddle fast to stay ahead of the ever-improving Google Chrome 5. Apparently only one side of that battle was listening: Opera did paddle fast, pulling nicely above 26 in our latest Windows 7 relative performance index tests. The newest Chrome 5, meanwhile, took a performance hit that sent it back the other direction.
Federal cybersecurity authority awaits break in Senate logjam
One of President Obama's first priorities upon taking office was a comprehensive review, then considered urgent, of federal policies for maintaining Internet security. The report on that review, released last May, recommended further empowering the role of what was then being called the "cybersecurity czar," including the delegation of authority to lead emergency responses in case of an attack on Internet resources that threatened the national security.
Inactivity in enacting those recommendations was blamed for the resignation of Mr. Obama's first czar, Melissa Hathaway, last August. In December, a former security advisor to Pres. George W. Bush, Howard Schmidt, was confirmed to fill Hathaway's post.
What does Google gain from having purchased On2?
At the end of business last Friday, Google announced it had completed the transaction to acquire On2 Technologies, the maker of Web video encoding software and codecs, for a deal that was finally valued at $124.6 million. On2 was a small company that was, in recent quarters, losing small amounts of money. It was attempting to become lucrative at some point through the licensing of a new generation of its VPx codec platform, called VP8 announced way back in the fall of 2008. Customers were supposed to have included Move Networks and Skype.
It's the type of business model that only a small startup company could profit from to any significant degree; and it's the type of model that normally a huge company the size of Google would only purchase in order to shut down, perhaps to disable a competitor. But none of the usually suspected motives for a major player acquiring a minor provider make immediate sense when applied to Google and On2.
Technologist accused of spreading Vista, Win7 FUD wasn't a real person
Normally, Betanews doesn't like to do "inside baseball" stories, that deal with the individuals in the technology journalism business and all the insights as to "how the sausage is made." I'll try to make this one as painless as possible, but it needs to be done, because the individual involved had been cited by me in Betanews stories in the past.
Yesterday morning, ZDNet Editor-in-Chief Larry Dignan revealed the results of research showing that a blogger for IDG publications, and the CTO of a testing and research firm cited by that blogger, were actually the same person. Blogger Randall C. Kennedy, a trusted InfoWorld contributor up until yesterday, was Devil Mountain Software Chief Technology Officer "Craig Barth," the author of reports over the years claiming that Windows Vista performance was slower than Windows XP, and recently that Windows 7 performance was slower than Windows Vista.
IE6 isn't on the ballot: Will March 1 Windows update kick IE6 out for good?
One of the more obvious, but little mentioned, facts about the upcoming Windows Web browser "choice screen," to be rolled out to European users via Windows Update March 1, is the absence of one very important choice: sticking with the old version of Microsoft Internet Explorer they may currently be using.
The "choice screen," as the European Commission now refers to it, will only be displayed for users who have IE7 or IE6 as their default Web browser. While they may choose Internet Explorer from this ballot, it explicitly offers version the latest version 8. The only upgrade procrastination option the ballot gives, based on snapshots of the first public beta, is a button in the lower left corner marked, "Select Later." The next time the user boots her computer, the choice screen reappears.
Settlement in benchmark case means FOSS licenses can be enforced
There will be no further legal action in a case whose outcome was already upheld in August 2008 by a US appeals court. As a result, legal precedent has now been made permanent for the right of open source software developers to seek monetary damages for infringement of their copyrights, even if their products were being distributed freely.
Settlement documents in the case of Jacobsen v. Katzer were filed early this morning in US District Court in Northern California, as Linux Foundation attorney Andrew Updegrove informed Betanews just hours later. A pending appeal of the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruling last August is now terminated. In the judgment that was being appealed, the Circuit panel ruled that the right to declare software free, could be given monetary value: "There are substantial benefits, including economic benefits, to the creation and distribution of copyrighted works under public licenses that range far beyond traditional license royalties," that court ruled. "For example, program creators may generate market share for their programs by providing certain components free of charge. Similarly, a programmer or company may increase its national or international reputation by incubating open source projects. Improvement to a product can come rapidly and free of charge from an expert not even known to the copyright holder."
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