Did the United States' major record labels, as early as 2001, conspire to establish a system for the distribution and sale of digital music that would have seen subscribers paying up to $240 per year for the right to download up to two songs per artist per month, even then at a retail price indexed at the wholesale cost of $0.70 per song, with restrictive and unwanted DRM schemes attached? That was the assertion of a group of former customers of two music services that launched in 2001. Now, a US appeals court has ruled that the dismissal of their case in 2007 was in error, and that the entire recording industry can indeed be brought to court on antitrust charges.

The original case involved two of the music industry's first "legal download" services, created just months after the founding of iTunes. One was called MusicNet, the original music publishing service from RealNetworks, years before it first started Rhapsody. MusicNet was the culmination of a joint agreement between Real and three of the nation's five major music publishers: EMI Group, Warner Music (then part of AOL Time Warner), and Bertelsmann (now Sony Music). The other was Pressplay, formed by the other two publishers: Universal Music Group (formerly MCA) and the original Sony Music Entertainment.

Continue reading →

Yesterday afternoon, citing what it described as "cyber attacks" -- incursions into its own systems it said originated from China -- Google said it would review its business arrangement with the government of China that enables it to operate a search engine under the domain name google.cn. The company said it believes the alleged attackers were searching for information on Chinese human rights activists.

This morning, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged that Google had briefed the State Dept. on these attacks, prior to yesterday's announcement. Though the extent of those briefings were not divulged, they could represent a break of the unofficial embargo the company has imposed on any news of its business dealings with the Chinese government, since their initial agreement was reached in late 2005. Now, Rep. Tim Ryan (D - Ohio), one of the congressmen who had led the unsuccessful effort to compel Google -- along with other American Internet companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, and Cisco -- to explain the nature of its business arrangements with China, tells Betanews this afternoon that Google may have had this coming.

Continue reading →

Video games that are popular among kids sometimes get an unfortunate makeover into educational software, and while not all conversions result in terrible rip-offs, there have been a number of exceptionally bad action-to-educational conversions. Some examples that come to mind are Sega's zombie shooting game House of the Dead, which was mashed up into a typing tutor; and Nintendo's I am a Teacher: Super Mario Sweater, which turned a kid's Famicom into a textile design machine with the aid of the company's mustachioed mascot.

But certain types of games are instructional without being aggressively labeled as such, and have been teaching kids for the last few years. Music simulators such as Rock Band and Guitar Hero, for example, have helped many kids become proficient drummers before they're even enrolled in primary school.

Continue reading →

Silicon Alley Insider claims that Google's so-called "superphone" is a bomb, based on the first week of sales; Nexus One has no superpowers, whatsoever. I totally disagree. Nexus is the bomb. It's simply better than iPhone 3Gs or Nokia's flagship N900. Nexus One is smokin'. First week sales figures are to be expected, and Google showed real finesse by wisely taking a low-key approach to the device's launch.

Jay Yarow's headline seemingly says it all: "The Nexus One Bombs: Only 20,000 Sold In First Week." But there's more. He writes in the text that "these estimates are bad for Google. The company had plenty of hype gearing up for the launch of the phone. It put an ad on its homepage, and it sprayed its ads all over the web. Given all the hype, these sales numbers are pathetic."

Continue reading →

Download Adobe Reader 9.3 for Windows from Fileforum now.

Usually on a Patch Tuesday, the discussion turns to Microsoft; but amid a very light round of Windows fixes, it's Adobe in the spotlight today. Last month, a serious and potentially easily exploitable vulnerability was found in a JavaScript API call, DocMedia.NewPlayer -- a situation where an intentionally crafted PDF file could invoke the call, deallocate the memory allocated when the media player is generated, and then execute the code in that de-allocated memory, without need for privilege.

Continue reading →

Four years ago this month, Google controversially started censoring search queries in China at the local government's request. Microsoft and Yahoo soon followed. Today, in a stunning blog post, Google Chief Legal Officer David Drummond writes: "We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China."

Google's seemingly altruistic gesture is as much about business priorities as was the original decision to censor search results in China. Otherwise Google wouldn't have given in to Chinese government demands four years ago.

Continue reading →

Often, when a big company releases a new piece of hardware or software, smaller companies will launch their own products that ride in the bigger product's proverbial draft. But this time, One big launch has rolled another smaller launch in with it.

Today, Google announced it will be expanding the storage capacity of Google Docs to 1GB, and allow single files up to 250 MB to be uploaded, which opens up the ability to upload other file types such as raw graphics files or zipped archives. Word documents are limited to 500 KB in size, and PowerPoint presentations are limited to 10MB, but the general limit is still many multiples higher than the maximum Gmail attachment size.

Continue reading →

Last Sunday, former Tom's Hardware correspondent Theo Valich, now editor-in-chief of Bright Side of News, referred to sources from at least five smartphone manufacturers plus Microsoft itself as telling him that Windows Mobile 7 would not be made generally available until 2011 -- what those manufacturers would perceive as a delay. This despite indications from CEO Steve Ballmer last Wednesday at CES that an announcement of a forthcoming product would come at Mobile World Congress next month, and a preview of coming attractions given to Betanews' Tim Conneally by Windows Mobile Senior Product Manager Greg Sullivan at CES the following Friday.

Given multiple opportunities to clarify Valich's report, and to deny that any delay was in the works, Microsoft spokespersons would not provide Betanews with information that shed any light on the timeframe, or that would refute the information from vendors cited in that report. The company appears to be taking the position that, since it has never set a firm timetable on WM7's release, whatever date it announces, however far in the future that might be, is not a delay.

Continue reading →

Succinctly stated: You pay more.

Apple has a reputation for charging more for most everything, while often delivering less than competitors. Any Windows PC-to-Mac laptop pricing comparison is example enough. The Windows computer typically comes with higher-resolution display, more system memory and beefier storage than comparatively-priced Mac portable.

Continue reading →

In an effort to minimize the apparent scope of the problem faced by at least a sizable plurality of Nexus One customers this week, Google has issued a statement to the press. It essentially acknowledges what we've all seen with our eyes, that users are experiencing widespread 3G connectivity issues, but it offers no information as to what measures are being taken to address those concerns.

"We are aware of the issues that have affected a small number of users, and are working quickly to fix any problems," reads the statement from Google to Betanews this afternoon. "We hope to have more information soon. When we do, we will post it to the user forum."

Continue reading →

I only briefly touched on this point in my first article about the Apple tablet, but I'm a firm supporter of device manufacturers that install QWERTY keyboards whenever they can. In fact, it is the single reason I have avoided the iPhone, and no amount of soft key practice has made me comfortable with it as an efficient method of text entry.

Even though the HTC HD2 is a spectacular piece of hardware, I am not likely to give it much consideration because it has no keyboard. In talking with Microsoft's Greg Sullivan of Windows Phone about the HD2, he told me that getting used to soft keys requires you to reach a point of abandonment, where you just accept mistakes and roll with them.

Continue reading →

The first absolute confirmation of the existence of the "Google Phone," as no one calls the Nexus One now, came when the company admitted it had distributed a few hundred models to its employees, now exactly one month ago. It could be the single shortest beta test period in the history of Google, especially compared to the number of years Gmail bore the "beta" tag before it was quietly removed last spring.

Clearly after the first week of Nexus One's retail availability, Google has proven itself not ready for instant launches. In one sense, the problem is actually systemic: For a new product to build market momentum leading up to its launch, its manufacturer needs not only to maintain secrecy but to nurture that secrecy like a cash crop -- Apple is easily the best company at nurturing secrecy as a virtue of any company, in any industry, in history. By contrast, the whole beta test process, and the basis of Google's software development model up to this point, has been transparency -- a type of openness which, when applied to the realm of hardware, feels more like nakedness.

Continue reading →

In addition to launching the latest skirmish in the mobile platform/mobile carrier wars, Google and HTC's Nexus One smartphone also introduced the world to Android 2.1.

Before the Nexus One came out, the Motorola Droid launched in a similar fashion, where the device ran Android 2.0 exclusively before the SDK component was released to the public and other devices were upgraded.

Continue reading →

If samples from customer support threads are an accurate indicator, hundreds and perhaps thousands of early adopters of Google's Nexus One phone aren't looking for humanity from some pinstripe or tapered edges, so much as from customer support.

A spokesperson for HTC, the manufacturer of the Nexus One phone sold by Google and deployed thus far on T-Mobile's GSM network, told Betanews late Monday evening that it is aware of the magnitude of 3G connectivity problems reported by customers nationwide since last week. As of Monday evening, several hundred messages were posted to Google's support Web site, many reporting essentially the same problem: For the most part, their 3G connections are spotty and variable; and for some, 3G is non-existent.

Continue reading →

For years, RealNetworks has wanted to produce and sell a product called RealDVD that would enable the legal owners of DVD movies to copy their content onto a hard disk drive, in order that the original discs may stay protected like archival copies. Movie studios responded in September 2008 by suing Real, alleging that its technology intentionally circumvented their copy control system -- a circumvention that violated the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That led to an injunction barring any sale of RealDVD, which is still in force today.

Real then responded with a countersuit, blasting the movie studios with an allegation that they were leveraging the DMCA as a platform on which to build a kind of content cartel -- a mechanism that disables viewers and the companies that sell to viewers from using DVDs in any other way besides direct viewing, that doesn't involve a licensing agreement. Last Friday, the judge in that ongoing suit ruled that Real had not proven the basis of its argument, noting that at any time, Real was free to enter into its own individual licenses for copying DVDs, and that there's nothing to stop it from doing so.

Continue reading →