Resolved: EU 'Choice Screen' for Windows will show top 5 browsers first
European users of Windows 7, Vista, and XP who have Internet Explorer set as their default Web browser will very soon be given a choice of alternatives, and that choice will reveal itself to users by way of an important Windows update. The announcement came this morning from Brussels, where the European Commission has accepted the latest adjusted proposal from Microsoft, in response to the EC's Statement of Objections earlier this year.
The Web site which the EC is establishing for public review of the browser ballot -- now being called the Choice Screen -- was not available in Betanews tests Wednesday morning, though should soon appear at www.browserchoice.eu.
Google URL shortening not ready for prime time in Firefox
Download Google Toolbar for Firefox version 7.0.2009.1214Wb1 from Fileforum now.
You know the global domain name system is not the perfect solution for today's modern Internet when an entire cottage industry evolves around masking it, removing the dot-com and making URLs more portable. TinyURL.com helped pioneer that market years ago, but since that time, bit.ly has become the official shortening service of Twitter, where small URLs are the most precious commodity. Competitor tr.im still struggles to compete there, as its trimmed URLs are automatically replaced with substitutes from preferred partner bit.ly.
Betanews Live Poll: Would wireless carrier quality kill the iPhone?
As you may be already aware, a grass roots movement launched by blogger Dan Lyons calls upon iPhone users to...well, to congest the AT&T network for one hour, at noon Pacific Time this Friday. The cause? Recent comments made by AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega, effectively blaming network users for network congestion and poor service quality.
That may not be the best ad for the iPhone -- AT&T's star product in the US -- as the holiday season progresses. But maybe that's not for us to decide, but for you. Here's the first of what we hope will be many regular Betanews Polls, made possible by our friends at PollDaddy.com.
Do ISPs have First Amendment rights? Net neutrality vs. VoIP connectivity
As the US Federal Communications Commission continues to consider regulations that would limit an Internet service provider's ability to restrict customers' access to specific services in the name of traffic management, it is now no longer possible to foresee an outcome to the debate without someone claiming that constitutional rights are being violated somewhere.
"It should not be lost on anyone that the strongest and loudest voices for net neutrality rules often cloak their agenda as advancing the First Amendment or, just as frequently, First Amendment 'values,'" stated National Cable & Telecommunications Association President Kyle McSlarrow, in a speech last week to The Media Institute in Washington. "But urging the government to impose rules that supposedly promote First Amendment values is too often used to justify regulations that instead threaten First Amendment rights. By its plain terms and history, the First Amendment is a limitation on government power, not an empowerment of government. Making these arguments is, ironically, almost proof that First Amendment rights are being implicated."
The umpteenth Google Phone: What we can learn from what we don't know
A few years back, a tip for marketers that had been passed around with regard to search engine optimization was this: Drum up a phrase and build buzz around the phrase, so as to improve your standing in Google's search index. Later, you can then use the phrase in its branding and your path to contextual glory will be paved in advance. Apparently Google was reading that tip too, because it managed to create buzz over the weekend for a Google Phone even though -- at least from T-Mobile's perspective -- there's already more than one.
Google officially declined comment on a multitude of questions Betanews posed this morning, although one of the declined questions was significant for its having been declined. It did not specifically regard the Android phone whose existence Google confirmed in a blog post Saturday morning. It was more of an analyst question: What did Google expect the balance of its operating expenses to be, between manufacturing and R&D, going forth into 2012?
Oracle promise to chuck GPL for MySQL PSE pleases EU
This morning, the European Commission has welcomed a set of commitments made by Oracle to maintain, and even enhance, the viability of the MySQL division of Sun Microsystems, after Oracle's acquisition of Sun is complete. This even though neither Oracle nor Sun are European companies, though they both do business in Europe, and MySQL maintains one headquarters branch in its native Sweden.
The concessions may be considered a big win for outgoing Commissioner for Competition Neelie Kroes, whose job swap will see her in Viviane Reding's seat next month. The Oracle + Sun deal had already been cleared by US regulators, and had been pushed by a majority of US senators from both parties. Fifty-nine of those senators wrote Comm. Kroes last month pressing her to accept the deal and move on, which prompted her last week to make a public comment literally telling senators to shut up and go fix health care.
Google, Facebook, and our privacy: We're all in denial
What does it mean to have a "right to privacy?" We have a right to vote, and too few of us use it. I heard it explained to me once, a human right is like a vegetable garden. You have to nurture it, take care of it, and harvest it. Otherwise you have a plot of dirt.
The Internet is not like a vegetable garden. Perhaps that test is appropriate, then, for lawmakers worldwide considering whether the "right to Internet access" follows from the right to free speech -- there are places in the world where is this actively being considered. If a person is denied access to the Internet, the argument goes, her free speech rights are being violated, or at least abridged.
Betanews Podcast: Transportation security, Facebook sensitivity, and you
On our second edition of the Betanews podcast, we take a look at the ongoing effort to keep stuff that we share on the Internet from not being shared so much. The Transportation Safety Administration and the American citizen are very much in the same bucket today, as both are being faced with a new and intriguing privacy and sensitivity debacle...essentially the same one, just in two different respects.
The PDF redaction problem: TSA may have been using old software
The problem with the release of a Transportation Security Administration security screening manual was not, as many news outlets reported yesterday, the fact that it appeared "out there on the Internet." As US Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told reporters this morning, according to the Washington Post, the TSA manual was supposed to have been posted on the Internet -- it was part of a cache of documents intentionally posted to a government procurement Web site.
The real problem is that the portions of the PDF document that were supposed to have been redacted -- or removed from the file and replaced with blackouts -- were not actually removed. Sec. Napolitano said this morning that disciplinary action may be taken against the TSA employees responsible, and at one point implied that only one person may inevitably be to blame.
In a peace offering to newspapers, Google offers a new news format
Exactly what online news should be or become is a subject that consumed the "blue sky" discussions among publishers since the late 1990s. Despite every concept they've ever created, tried or untried, what publishers typically end up with is either something that looks segmented and departmentalized like CNN.com or NYTimes.com, or is basically a blog whose scroll reveals a history of news, like it was printed on a roll of paper towels.
So the concept that Google Labs began attempting yesterday with its "Living Stories" concept (whose name for some reason brings to mind a certain peacock) is absolutely not new. It's been discussed before, in some fashion or another, and even approved -- for what it's worth. But on a large scale, it's never been done until yesterday: assembling all the stories relating to a pertinent, current topic on a page devoted to the topic, not the publisher and not some permanent department of the publication like "Sports" or "Tech."
DOJ: Microsoft interop docs are now 'substantially complete'
Three years and seven months after Microsoft promised to produce full documentation for its communications protocols, so that licensees can figure out what they mean and how to use them, the US Justice Dept.'s Antitrust Division has declared that the documentation project is pretty much done. It's not completely done, but there's enough of it complete that Microsoft will now be allowed to collect royalties again.
In the Dept.'s latest Joint Status Report, now semi-annual and released today, the ATR Division writes, "As explained in prior Joint Status Reports, by 'substantially complete,' Plaintiffs mean that the documentation, when considered as a whole, appears on an initial reading to cover the information required by the templates in a reasonably thorough and comprehensible manner. The 'substantially complete' determination means that Microsoft may now end the MCPP [Microsoft Communications Protocol Program] licensee interim royalty credit and will be able to resume collecting royalties. This determination, while a significant milestone in the overall documentation rewrite project, does not mean that the documents are finished or that no additional work remains to be done. There is, in fact, much work left to do."
After telling US to mind its own business, Kroes slaps caps on Rambus royalties
The European Commission has agreed to a proposal by US-based memory parts designer Rambus, to limit its royalties that memory makers worldwide will pay for double data rate (DDR)-based memory units to 1.5% per unit, and DDR memory controllers to 2.65% per unit. This in order to put to rest an ongoing EC investigation into Rambus royalties practices -- one which continued long after the US Supreme Court upheld an April 2008 Appeals Court ruling that stated the entire global memory standards system had lost its credibility.
During a morning press conference in Brussels Wednesday, EC Commissioner for Competition Neelie Kroes told reporters Rambus made this offer in order to redress prior conduct: specifically, manipulating the memory standards process in order to claim exclusive rights to high royalties.
EC's Kroes to US senators: Mind your own business on Oracle + Sun
12:15 pm EST December 9, 2009 · European Commission spokesperson Jonathan Todd confirmed to Betanews this morning that statements attributed by the Associated Press to Commissioner Neelie Kroes were "accurate" as the AP portrayed them, although he did add that they were unprepared remarks. This means the EC is unlikely to report those remarks as official. Todd declined to add anything further.
In an extraordinary parting shot from the outgoing European Commissioner on Competition, Neelie Kroes -- who transfers to oversight of the 'Digital Society' in January -- the Associated Press quotes her as having openly responded, in a speech earlier today in Brussels, to a request by several US senators. Those senators, led by John Kerry (D - Mass.) and Orrin Hatch (R - Utah), had asked Comm. Kroes to expedite her investigation of Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
Betanews Podcast: Rupert Murdoch and the buying stuff online problem
Click here to listen to the inaugural What Are We Learning Today? Betanews podcast (MP3 format)
We inaugurate our first Betanews podcast today with a look at two serious problems -- the quandary over how publishers can make the online news business sustainable long-term, and the problem with securing the Web's transaction layer. From the top of the cliff, to borrow an Arlo Guthrie analogy, they look like two little piles; but up close, they're one big one: We haven't really solved how to pay for things online, and the TLS problem is an illustration of that.
Windows fix for TLS security bug still forthcoming, won't be Tuesday
The question over whether Secure Sockets Later, and later Transport Layer Security, was ever sufficiently impregnable never rose to such a crescendo for malicious users to become inspired to exploit it. In the end, the discovery that TLS had a weak spot was made by a security engineer, PhoneFactor engineer Marsh Ray, last month. It was when other engineers started tweeting about themselves being possibly on the verge of the same discovery, that Ray felt he had to go public to encourage everyone else to hush.
Now that the news of TLS' latent vulnerability is public, the threat of a possible exploit is real. Such an exploit, if discovered, could effectively negate the encryption system used to protect essentially every credit card transaction on the Web. And Ray and partner Steve Dispensa have been sounding the alarm with regard to other conceivable permutations of the man-in-the-middle mechanism, including forging a user's Twitter credentials.
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