Court awards TiVo $200 million, not $1 billion, in Dish/EchoStar damages
It is no secret that Dish Network and partner EchoStar lost to TiVo in a ruling concerning whether the satellite companies' video recorders infringed on TiVo's patents. What was amazing was the possibility of an unprecedented $1 billion in legal sanctions that TiVo sought against the former sister companies. Today, a US District Court Judge in Eastern Texas did award TiVo a sizable contempt sanction sum of $200 million, which by most rational measures is still huge.
TiVo had requested treble damages -- three times the estimated base value of the infringement -- under the theory that EchoStar and its then-subsidiary Dish willfully infringed upon TiVo's technology. That much was apparently rejected today.
Google makes a quick U-turn on Books privacy amid FTC inquiry
A mere three days after explaining to the Federal Trade Commission in an open letter (PDF available here) that it could not draft a complete privacy policy for its Google Books site since the services such a policy would protect have yet to be invented, Google issued its first privacy policy update specifically for Google books.
But the policy addendum itself actually questions its own need to exist. "Google Books operates a lot like Web Search and other basic Google web services, so there are relatively few privacy practices that are unique to the Google Books product," reads the actual text of the policy statement.
Kindle users get Amazon offer for returned deleted books, gift certificates
While the distributor of several e-books was wrong to assume that the "classic" nature of certain titles allowed them to be sold under the public domain license, there's been considerable concern over Amazon's right to "undo" the sale of those titles through its electronic Kindle Store. Last July, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos issued a mea culpa, saying the unannounced deletion of various titles including George Orwell's 1984 was "stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles."
This morning, as first noted by Gizmodo's Rosa Golijan, individuals affected by Amazon's unannounced deletions are now receiving e-mails that appear to be from Amazon, offering customers the opportunity to the company to deliver legitimate copies of their books free of charge, or alternately to receive $30 gift certificates or refund checks from Amazon.
Appeals court stays Microsoft Word injunction
Late yesterday afternoon, as first reported by the Seattle P-I, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, DC issued a stay of last month's Texas District Court injunction against the sale of Microsoft Word in the US, about one month before that injunction might have taken effect.
The stay will give Microsoft time to formally appeal its case, after having filed papers there two weeks ago. In what some are calling a clear display of brinksmanship, the company is pulling out all the stops, demonstrating it may be willing to forego the usual settlement if it can set precedent. Since the founding of this country, inventors have been granted legally protected monopolies in the markets generated by their inventions; and the US, unlike almost any other country in the world, considers the first inventor -- not the first to patent an invention -- as the proper title-holder of a patent.
Here come AMD's six-core, ultra-low-power Opteron EEs
There are three "rails" of wattage in AMD's architectural plan for its CPUs: its higher-performance SE line, its lowest-power EE line, and its hybrid HE line that trades some performance for power savings. Two months ago, AMD introduced its first six-core Opterons in the SE flavor first, setting the general trend for future rollouts; last month, it trotted out the HE hybrid line in that same series.
Today, as expected, the company is announcing stage 3 of its plan: the rollout of its first ultra-low-power six-core Opteron series, including the model 2419 EE, with 40 watts of average power consumption (ACP) clocked at 1.8 GHz. This time, AMD's value proposition is this: Server centers that already have quad-core 75W Opteron-based units can replace them for dropped in 40W six-core units, and see better performance per watt while gaining two cores per socket in the process.
DHS: Expect your computer to be seized without suspicion
In what was presented to the public this week as a clarification of its privacy policy, the US Dept. of Homeland Security published a paper referring to new guidelines for its immigration and customs agents regarding how they may conduct border searches of travelers' computers and electronic media. Clarifying the existing law, both sets of guidelines reiterated the department's policy created during the previous administration: Agents may seize, detain, and/or retain individuals' PCs and media without having reason to suspect that those people or those machines and devices are connected with a crime.
"ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] Special Agents acting under border search authority may search, detain, seize, retain, and share electronic devices, or information contained therein, with or without individualized suspicion, consistent with the guidelines and applicable laws set forth herein," states the new policy for immigration authorities published last August 18 (PDF available here). "Assistance to complete a border search may be sought from other Federal agencies and non-Federal entities, on a case by case basis, as appropriate."
A reluctance to Bing: UK Yahoo portal partner makes first switch to Google
When Microsoft made its deal last month with Yahoo to provide the search infrastructure for its home page, using technology from Bing, it left open and non-exclusive the fate of several deals the one-time #2 search provider had already made, especially with carriers. Specifically, does Bing become the default search provider for services that had previously made a deal with Yahoo? The answer appeared to be no.
Today, that suspicion was roundly confirmed, as one of the world's largest cooperative portals with Yahoo -- one which still bears the Yahoo brand -- quietly but obviously switched its search box to one that was "powered by Google." In a move first discovered by the UK-based blog Connected Internet, BT's Web portal BT Yahoo became a carrier of Google search rather than Bing.
Apple: If an iPhone cracks or overheats, that's your problem
In the latest indication that Apple tends not to show as much love toward its customers as its customers do toward it, the company made a statement to AFP press this morning effectively saying that fewer than 10 reports from its customers of overheating iPhone batteries are to be believed. Further, it added that anyone who finds herself with a cracked iPhone needs to look into the mirror for the cause.
"To date, there are no confirmed battery overheating incidents for iPhone 3GS and the number of reports we are investigating is in the single digits," an Apple spokesperson told the AFP. The report goes on to say that cracking in iPhone glass cases is due to a phenomenon it has termed "external force."
The Dell surprise: A turnaround suggests the warnings were unnecessary
Just last month, Dell issued an out-of-cycle earnings warning telling investors the underpinnings of its business didn't look as solid as it thought, and gross margins could be headed for a freefall rather than the anticipated steep decline. If Dell had to make another financial reporting error, perhaps this one was the one to make: The company's $4 billion cost-cutting initiatives kicked in when it needed them most, resulting in an operating income improvement of 62% over the first quarter of the year, and a quarter-to-quarter gross margin increase by 10%.
Not that 18.7% gross margin is anywhere that Dell, or any other company, would want to be for any sustained length of time. But rather than the dire straits the company's July warnings were foretelling, Dell ended up with a better second quarter than its first in several departments -- this while its biggest competitor, HP, took a bigger hit that it expected.
Confirmed: China Unicom in three-year deal for iPhone 3G
In its quarterly report to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange yesterday, the Chinese telephone carrier China Unicom announced it had reached a three-year deal with Apple to sell an iPhone model in China. This in a section of the report dedicated to 3G technology progress, so although the precise iPhone model was not stated, we can assume Unicom will be getting a 3G-capable unit.
The timeframe for the launch will be calendar Q4 this year, in keeping with a new 3G marketing campaign that Unicom is simply calling "WO" (as in "whoa!"). "'WO' carries the Company's brand-new service philosophy and reflects the Company's corporate image of 'being innovative,'" reads the report, quotation marks included. "With the continued improvement of the Company's network quality, the further upgrade of the service standard and the official launch of 3G services, 'WO' will offer a brand new experience for users."
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.
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.
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.
© 1998-2025 BetaNews, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy.