Another round of AnyDVD improvements cracks more BD+ discs
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In what's becoming a monthly affair for Slysoft, the makers of the DVD and Blu-ray backup disc system AnyDVD have released another update, this time with the capability to back up even more discs with the more sophisticated BD+ protection scheme.
Live Labs will be a little less live, as Lindsay moves to RIM
Restructuring is a process that a great many companies, both big and small, are going through in recent days. But Microsoft isn't accustomed to being one of those companies that shares its pain with its users -- case in point, the 2006 announcement of Windows Vista's delay, which was announced to the public as being "on track," in an unscheduled "road map update."
The sad fact this morning is that Live Labs, the Microsoft project responsible for one of the most innovative promotions in all of software this year -- the synthesizing of hundreds of simultaneous photographs of Pres. Obama's inauguration -- is being downsized. This morning's announcement from Microsoft was an effort to say it's not painful and it doesn't mean too much and everything's fine, which in and of itself is an indicator that it's not.
EU to debate whether the Internet has outmoded public broadcasting
In what could be a long, but fundamental, rethinking of the role governments play in subsidizing the public dissemination of information throughout Europe, the EU Parliament will begin considering a possible redrafting of regulations passed in 2001 regarding the role of public broadcasters -- which in Europe means the corporations subsidized by taxes or licenses rather than advertising. At issue is a new question brought about by the evolution of the Internet: As long as private entities are spending billions to make broadband and wireless information services available, why should public broadcasters get all the breaks and be subsidized to compete on the same level?
"It must be noted that commercial broadcasters, of whom a number are subject to public service requirements, also play a significant role in achieving the objectives of the Amsterdam Protocol to the extent that they contribute to pluralism, enrich cultural and political debate and widen the choice of programmes," reads the latest draft of an EU commission report (PDF available here). That report calls for public comment on the role of public broadcasters' subsidies, during a period slated to begin in July.
New hope for US memory maker Spansion after big Samsung settlement
Bringing to a quiet end a case where one of America's brightest hopes for competing in microprocessors had vowed to go down swinging, Spansion -- the producer of flash memory born from an AMD spinoff -- settled its case brought last November against global NAND flash powerhouse Samsung. Spansion will receive a one-time payment of $70 million in cash, and the two companies have agreed to share each others' patent portfolios.
The news is exactly what Spansion needs right now to survive, having filing for bankruptcy just last month. A few weeks ago, the company reported fiscal first quarter revenue of about $400 million, which isn't small change by any means. But that's a 15% annual drop, and the flash memory business has notoriously thin margins.
Microsoft used software activation without a license, jury finds
In a unanimous and complete decision by a Rhode Island US District Court jury yesterday, Microsoft was found guilty of willfully infringing upon an inventor's 1996 patent for a continual software activation and licensing system -- effectively saying that Microsoft stole the technology for preventing users from stealing its technology. The inventor -- an Australian named Richard B. Frederickson, III, of Uniloc Private, Ltd. -- was awarded $388 million USD, or more than half a billion Australian dollars.
The records on Frederickson's suit, dating back to 2005, are too old for public online availability, otherwise we'd do our usual citation of the original suit. But the single patent that Frederickson was defending was for a system that only enables software to run at any time at all, only if the licensing mechanism lets it do so. It's the software activation scheme that has become one of Windows' and Office's trademarks -- the very system that Microsoft first introduced to Betanews in 2001. At that time, the company emphasized the discovery it claimed to have made, of a system that can detect when the underlying hardware for the software has been changed from the original point of licensing, to disable images of that software from being copied and run on multiple PCs.
An accidental alert triggers a Live Messenger uproar
If one of your friends or business contacts on Windows Live Messenger has a different handle now than he did a few days ago, the reason may be because he received a message from Microsoft telling her she needed to do so, on account of a "recent system enhancement."
A blog post on Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger site yesterday explained that an unknown number of Messenger users may have received this alert in the center of their desktops. But the blog post apologized, saying the message was sent in error. "You will be able to continue to use your current e-mail address," the post read, "and there is no reason to make any changes."
FCC's McDowell: Careful that 'national broadband' isn't just for cable
Normally, Congressional legislation regarding broadband Internet service takes the time to define its terms. Right now, for purposes of US law in a rapidly changing technology climate, the law itself defines the term rather broadly. For example, 7 USC 31 section 950bb defines the phrase this way: "The term 'broadband service' means any technology identified by the Secretary as having the capacity to transmit data to enable a subscriber to the service to originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video."
The keyword there is any, letting broadband effectively mean anything that serves the Internet at high speed and bandwidth. But appropriations bills are laws in a very different sense -- they don't amend US Code. They simply say, here's some money, and here's what it will be spent on...and maybe they give definitions, and maybe they don't.
German gov't fines Microsoft for 'influencing' Office resale prices
This morning, Germany's Bundeskartellamt -- the anti-cartel department of the country's executive branch -- has issued a €9 million fine against Microsoft for what it describes as illegally and anti-competitively influencing the retail sales value of Office Home & Student Edition 2007.
It's no secret that Microsoft -- among many other manufacturers -- has provided rebates to resellers who sell software to verified students; this has been the case worldwide for the last few decades. But in an English-language statement this morning, the Bundeskartellamt says that when Microsoft has entered into such agreements with German resellers, the final retail price the two agree upon in advance, constitutes a form of price fixing...and that's illegal.
The news doesn't want to be free
Last week, Richard Engel, the long-time war correspondent currently with NBC News, won a much-deserved Peabody Award for his on-the-scene coverage of the war in Afghanistan. Every time I see the footage, I still get goose bumps. Here is a man crouching down in the corner of hilltop outpost, along with American soldiers from Viper Company firing in two directions into the mountains. From the camera angle peering up, you can actually see enemy ammunition passing mere inches from Engel's helmet and whispering through the flimsy camouflage. And like a weatherman covering converging air masses, Engel presents essentially a dissertation about the strategy of both the Taliban and al-Qaeda, some of which are shooting at him, at that moment.
After merely visualizing that footage for a few seconds, I find it pretty much impossible to count myself in the same column with Engel, under the title, "Journalist." There have been times when I'm covering a technology or a development conference, and a press relations specialist is rushing to validate a quote and refresh my grapefruit juice, when I would emphatically deny that Engel and I in the same business.
New Obama DOJ claims sovereign immunity in wiretap case
It is a principle that predates the founding of the United States: a kind of unwritten rule that, in an earlier era, boiled down to the common phrase, "The King can do no wrong." Since the early days of English common law, the doctrines of government have been presumed to exclude and immunize a government from liability, except when those doctrines provide the exceptions.
And while the US Constitution is often praised for empowering individuals to sue their own government, the truth is that the Constitution didn't really address that point very directly. So since 1789, it's been up to the courts to apply those certain exceptions to the unspoken rule of sovereign immunity -- a practice which, when viewed with a wide-angle lens toward all of US history, has worked out quite well in the end.
The new Nehalem-based Apple Xserves promise a price advantage
This morning's announcement of the first Apple servers to use Intel's Nehalem-series Xeon processors may be a bit more tentative at the core than it seems on the surface. What could be the best performers in Apple's new rack-mount lineup are actually not available yet, although this morning's announcement made it appear -- and some sources are actually reporting -- that the high-end models are available now.
What data centers can get now are Xserve models based on the new 2.26 GHz Intel Xeon E5520. But the performance and power-saving tests Apple cites this morning are focused on the 2.93 GHz X5570, and we don't yet have prices or availability data for those models. Betanews has contacted Apple in an effort to get further details.
Spybot Search & Destroy competitors are trying to force its removal
For years, Spybot Search & Destroy has been one of Fileforum's single most installed pieces of software, with nearly 67 million downloads since 2000 on our sister site alone. It's one of the Web's original anti-spyware packages, independently distributed by Safer Networking Ltd., based in Ireland and developed in Germany.
Despite a user base in the dozens of millions (if not more; Safer Networking doesn't track its users), Spybot S&D hasn't had an easy time establishing itself in the competitive anti-malware field. Because it is freeware (commercial users must purchase licenses), the application is seen as a thorn in the side of larger companies who sell security software with the same functionality.
Google extends search localization to the desktop
Users of Google's mobile services on handsets are familiar with how its search service can assume they're looking for something in its own general vicinity, even using GPS location. That level of detail hasn't always been available through desktop searches, though in recent months, I've noticed Google had been testing the concept off and on. I'd assumed the company was judging my approximate geography using my IP address.
This morning, the company confirmed that suspicion, making official that it will use IP addresses to approximate users' locations when it can, to make desktop searches more localized. In a blog post this morning, Google engineers Jenn Taylor and Jim Mueller wrote, "In most cases, we match your IP address to a broad geographical location. You can also specify your likely location using the 'Change location' link on the top right corner, above the map. We try to make our guesses as good as they can be so...you can just say what you want, and we'll try to find it right where you are."
Sun goes down: Was that IBM's plan?
With the takeover negotiations that neither IBM nor Sun would confirm nor deny having broken down (or not) over the weekend, over a final price that IBM may or may not have offered that could have been too low ($9.40 per share, but that's just everybody making the same guess simultaneously), Sun Microsystems is now being perceived -- and this much we do know -- as a company with less strategic direction than it appeared to have three weeks earlier.
One wonders whether that was the idea to begin with. Last year's captivating semi-negotiations between Microsoft and Yahoo used the press as liaison between the two parties, as a way of maintaining plausible deniability that either party was speaking to one another -- or at least, speaking seriously. The result of that escapade was a Yahoo that, for a time, resembled the residue of a late-night cooking knife informercial, which put Microsoft in a stronger position to build a comeback strategy for its online services.
Confirmed: Windows 7 users will have XP downgrade option
After a flurry of blog activity over the weekend, leading into today, concerning the extended availability of Windows XP, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Betanews early this evening that general Windows 7 users will be given the option of downgrading right over Vista to Windows XP.
"This is not the first time that Microsoft has offered downgrade rights to a version other than its immediate predecessor," the spokesperson told Betanews, "and our Software Assurance customers can always downgrade to any previous version of Windows."
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