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.
Amazon and others follow iTunes' lead in hiking MP3 prices
Take it as a sign that the digital music industry is finally reaching maturity. The labels that once clamped down on digital distribution with absolute prejudice have generally loosened up, allowing DRM-free distribution to flourish. Now, the business is expanding to make room for fully variable pricing.
The cost of digital music has long been an issue of concern for me, as a fan of short, fast, and loud music. I always felt that there was a problem with the 99¢ per song across the board pricing scheme iTunes employed. While you cannot measure musical enjoyment in minutes, cents, or kilobytes per second, it just never felt fair to have to pay 99¢ for a twelve second song like "Wienerschnitzel" by The Descendents, when it could buy a nine-minute song like Dream Theater's "Metropolis, Part 1..."
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.
Amazon launches the first third-party Xbox Live store
While downloadable content has become the norm in home video gaming, a gamer who wants to purchase new games or add-in content via download has very limited options. Generally, it has been limited to the console's built-in app store, or direct from the console manufacturer. With the PlayStation 3, it's the PSN Shop, Wii it's the Wii Shop Channel, and with the 360, was the Xbox Live Marketplace or on Xbox.com.
Today, Amazon announced that it has opened the beta of the Amazon Xbox Live Store, where users can download Xbox Live Arcade games, or buy subscription cards and Microsoft Points. Transactions, however, are cash only and Microsoft Points do not yet look to be accepted.
New Pirate Bay service takes aim at EU intellectual property law
We still haven't received a verdict in Sweden's Pirate Bay trial, but the proprietors of that search service aren't twiddling their thumbs while they wait. On Wednesday, they're expected to switch on their paid iPREDator anonymizing service.
Savvy observers of the European political scene will recognize the name's genesis right away -- they're aiming at iPRED, the EU's Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive, a Swedish version of which went into effect on April 1. Pirate Party chair Rikard Falkvinge memorably described that legislation as "written by digital illiterates who behave like blindfolded, drunken elephants trumpeting about in an egg packaging facility."
Lenovo's new multimedia PCs set for April rollout
First introduced at CES 2009 in January, Lenovo's latest models will include the IdeaPad Y650/Y550/Y450 laptops, the IdeaCentre A600 all-in-one desktop PC, and an updated IdeaPad s10 netbook with Lenovo QuickStart, for rapid access to frequently used appplications.
Aside from Fry's, the PCs will be sold on Amazon.com, TigerDirect.com, Newegg.com, and Lenovo's own Web site, a Lenovo spokesperson told Betanews this week.
Beta, as explained to the masses
Slate this week is belatedly celebrating Gmail's fifth anniversary (April 1) in exactly the proper fashion, asking what the heck beta status even means when it's applied to a service with over 100,000,000 users. The Explainer column gives a safe-for-civilians overview of what "beta" has meant in the past, and dips a toe into more recent philosophical debates ("Beta bad!" "No! Beta good!"). It'll be interesting, of course, to hear the thoughts of our more techish readership: Is years-long beta a subversion of the concept? And are we all relieved that Flickr's "gamma" schtick didn't catch on?
Library of Congress posts 1891 film footage (and ancient LOLcats)
It's shorter even than most YouTube clips, and we don't see any Oscars in its future, but a 29-second snippet from the voluminous Library of Congress archive has the honor of being one of the oldest known videos still extant.
The silent clip, embedded below or downloadable from the LoC, shows a young man swinging a set of Indian clubs. The event was filmed sometime during the spring of 1891 on an Edison-Dickson-Heise experimental horizontal-feed kinetograph camera, using 3/4-inch wide film.
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.
Intel and Asus pick 'crowdsourced' design PC finalists
In October, Intel and Asus began a project called "WePC," where users could submit their own notebook designs. The project allowed users to submit suggestions for their dream design in the Gamer, Notebook, and Netbook categories with the idea that Asus would eventually build the most popular design. It is a sort of experiment in crowdsourced design.
Today, roughly half a year after the project began, Intel and Asus have selected the top 100 designs in the four most popular form factors submitted: docking units, dual-screen units, touchscreen units, and PCs for kids.
Australia's future is in broadband, says PM
The Australian government has established a new company with the express purpose of building a national fiber-to-the-home broadband network. The project is expected to take eight years, and cost 43 billion Australian dollars, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said in his announcement today.
The ambitious project seeks to connect 90% of all Australian homes to a 100 Mbps pipeline. Under the Rudd Government's national broadband network, "every house, school and business in Australia will get access to affordable, fast broadband."
Red Hat CEO sees open source as a 'model for government'
"President Obama came to office with the promise of change. His administration has pledged to create an environment of openness and participation," according to Jim Whitehurst, the CEO of the leading seller of Linux software in the US, in a blog post this week on the Red Hat company site.
"Red Hat is excited that the Obama administration recognizes the value of open source beyond software."
Whitehurst also noted that some have dubbed Obama the "open source president." Obama, whose presidential campaign relied heavily on technologies such as e-mail and social networking, first received the designation "open source president" from CNN contributor Alex Castellanos, when Castallanos lauded Obama's "bottom up" management style on national TV last fall.
Social networks get more social as spring springs
One part momentum, two parts hype, one part fascination with Rainn Wilson's random thoughts and violent ailurophobia -- stir, and you've got a remarkable 76.8% unique-visitor growth rate for Twitter in March, as noted by a Social Times blogger who had a bit of fun with Compete.com this morning. And the warming trend extends past the trendy microblogging service and its 14 million users.
Facebook's up 23.4% to over 91 million users, and even shaky MySpace, which has seen declines of about 11% over the past year, got a 4% bump to 55.6 million users, and standoffish LinkedIn is up 13.1% to 12.7 million users. And the URL-shortening services crucial to microblogging are showing great gains too; tinyurl.com, is.gd and bit.ly are all up by double digits (21.6%, 21.8% and 48.8% respectively), with wee is.gd showing 3721% growth over the last twelve months. (Rainn Wilson photo courtesy of Stacy D of Flickr, via Wikimedia Commons.)
The micro-cell era finally has a standard: Is femtocell finally a go?
Today, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) announced that it has published the first femtocell standard. Covered in the standard is network architecture, radio and interference aspects, management and provisioning, and security.
This new standard is a part of 3GPP's Release 8, and is interdependent with extensions that the Broadband Forum made to Technical Report 069 (TR-069). That document was developed to simplify the connectedness of end user equipment. It defines how hardware can automatically configure the protocols it uses in the application layer (ACS).
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