Mac OS X Snow Leopard is coming: Yes, do upgrade!
If nothing else, the operating system market these days is infinitely entertaining. Consider the humble upgrade.
Some OS upgrades, like XP-to-Vista on a marginally capable machine, demand more up-front planning than the end result is often worth. You end up spending money and time on a machine that, while it may look prettier, runs slower and gives you more headaches than it solves. Other upgrade scenarios, like Vista-to-Windows 7, are a lot more straightforward and easier for most folks to justify.
Home video game console prices reach equilibrium with Xbox 360 drop
Court upholds pro-Verizon ruling in 'largest cybersquatting case ever'
A federal court in the Northern District of California has upheld the December 2008 ruling which awarded Verizon $33.15 million in a cybersquatting case against domain registry company OnlineNIC.
The 2008 ruling gave Verizon $50,000 for each of the 663 domain names OnlineNIC registered that were "confusingly similar" or in some cases identical to Verizon trademarks with the intention of attracting users who were looking to access legitimate Verizon sites.
TiVo brings the time-shifting fight to AT&T, Verizon
TiVo has been in a legal battle with Dish Network and its former parent company EchoStar for more than four years over the design of their digital video recorders (DVR), which TiVo claims are patent-infringing. Now, the company has challenged Verizon and AT&T for the designs of their FiOS and U-verse DVRs.
Yesterday, TiVo filed complaints in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas for infringement of the same three patents that Dish Network allegedly infringed upon back in 2005. The complaints seek damages for past infringement and permanent injunctions on the infringing hardware.
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.
Third party mobile browser Skyfire releases version 1.1
It's been about three months since Skyfire officially launched on Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 3rd Edition, and this week the popular mobile browser has been given a general performance upgrade.
Skyfire's Senior Director of Product Management Robert Oberhofer said in his team blog that Version 1.1 has an upgraded algorithm to shorten load times, improved reconnect (the browser disconnects from pages to save battery), support for WML markup language, and upgrades to its support for Flash, Quicktime, and Silverlight. This final upgrade is central to Skyfire, as it is one of the best mobile browsers for watching streaming video.
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.
New FCC chief draws a line in the sand on net neutrality
On the eve of easily the most important Federal Communications Commission open hearing since being sworn in as its chairman, Julius Genachowski is taking the strong personal stand he was expected to take, in favor of equal and open access to Internet services. Returning to the heart of the original debate from which the term "net neutrality" was coined, Genachowski told the Capitol Hill daily The Hill yesterday that he remains committed to enforcing net neutrality principles, assuming they actually become law.
"One thing I would say so that there is no confusion out there is that this FCC will support net neutrality and will enforce any violation of net neutrality principles," the FCC Chairman told The Hill.
Rumor: Motorola Android devices go international Sept. 15
For the last few months, there's been a steady stream of rumors about Motorola's forthcoming Android handsets; speculating on form factor, carrier and OS version. Earlier this week, the Schaumburg, Illinois telecommunications company sent out invitations to a San Francisco press event on Thursday, September 10 adorned with the lime green Android logo.
Since the invitations didn't contain many details, the rumors have thusly picked up steam. It is widely expected that the two devices shown on September 10 will be the "Morrison" on T-Mobile, and the "Sholes" on Verizon.
Paramount defies Fox, Warner, tries out $1 Redbox rentals
Like Sony Pictures and Lionsgate Entertainment before it, Paramount Pictures has agreed to supply its films to Redbox DVD rental kiosks. The $1 per night rentals that Redbox offers have caused a good deal of controversy among motion picture studios and has resulted in legal actions on the part of 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros., both of whose opinions are clearly on record: Cheap rentals devalue their DVDs.
Paramount's availability on Redbox will only be a trial, where the studio receives detailed rental metrics from the kiosks until the end of 2009. The studio will then evaluate the impact and viability of Redbox, to decide if it wants to stick with the program. At the end of the four-month trial, Paramount will have the option to extend it to 2014, with an "out clause" after two years.
Windows 7: Don't upgrade, says FSF, your civil rights are in jeopardy
If you're collecting reasons people have given for avoiding Windows 7 purchases and upgrades, add this one in a little shelf all to itself: It is a threat to your civil liberties, according to the Free Software Foundation.
Today is the official launch day of an FSF fundraising campaign whose stated goal is to bombard employees of 499 of the world's Fortune 500 companies (the one they left out probably wouldn't make any difference) with letters claiming, among other assertions, that Microsoft is engaging in a clandestine spy operation, masquerading under euphemistic names such as "Windows Genuine Advantage" (one example the FSF lists), invading homes, offices, and even schools.
With e-readers becoming a real market, battle lines are drawn over DRM
The e-reader market is hot, and everyone loves the competition. Thanks to the heightened activity in the sector, market research group NPD's DisplaySearch this morning forecasts an astonishing growth in e-paper displays.
This year, 22 million units were shipped, resulting in $431 million in revenue. E-paper displays aren't limited to the Kindle/Reader set either, they're being used in cell phones, watches and clocks, advertisements, and more. Because of this, NPD forecasts a 64% compound annual growth rate in unit sales and a 41% growth rate in revenues. By that formula, the market will be worth $9.6 billion by 2018, with 1.8 billion e-paper displays shipped out for use.
Without the fastest JavaScript, can Opera 10 RC still lay claim to speed?
Download Opera 10 for Windows Release Candidate Build 1733 from Fileforum now.
"At Opera, we love speed," reads the beginning of a March 2009 blog post from Opera Software Product Analyst Roberto Mateu. "We work hard to make our browser faster with features that speeds you up."
Mininova is next to get takedown orders from Netherlands court
The world's largest torrent indexing site Mininova is the next site to fall to anti-piracy group Stichting BREIN, Dutch news services are reporting today.
A civil court order handed down today has given Mininova three months to remove all copyrighted works from its servers or face a €5 million fine. Stichting BREIN (lit: "The Brain Foundation"), which represents copyright holders, took action against The Pirate Bay earlier in the summer and won on similar grounds. However, that particular case is in appeal and awaiting its retrial on October 5.
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