Fun with WikiScanner, Scientology edition
Masters of procrastination are familiar with the snoopy pleasures of WikiScanner, which lets you input an organization name or domain and get back a list of what folks using their network have been up to on Wikipedia. Some edits are pretty obvious -- for instance, the edits from users at aig.com on "The Fate Of Achilles' Armor," "Lists of Past Disneyland Attractions," and "1975 in Country Music" are obviously attempts to earn their bonuses. But what was the Church of Scientology up back in 2006 to with Kurt Cobain?
Over at Culture kills... wait, I mean Cutlery, Matthew Caverhill searched on a whim for "Scientology" and noticed that in addition to the sort of edits one might expect from a large organization with concerns about their public image, the CoS domains also showed a number of edits to pages done on a single January day in 2006, concerning celebrities who had killed themselves or been murdered by someone believed to be mentally ill.
Egress debuts fresh data-security model
Operating on the theory that data at rest isn't a problem until it becomes restless, Egress Software Technologies on Monday debuted a security system designed to protect data in motion -- over the net, on a thumbdrive, in the cloud, or what you will.
Bob Egner, US president of the UK-based Egress, notes that practically speaking you can't not share data these days; the ways we all work with partner firms and third-party vendors dictate it. The problem is that as your data gets further from you, its primary keeper, it can become increasingly hard to make sure that only the right people can access it. The ubiquity of cheap, capacious data containers (DVD-Rs, thumb drives, even MP3 players) adds another layer of complexity, making it even easier for large masses of data to go on walkabout.
Microsoft: If Vista buyers knew so much, why would they sue?
In all the confusion that arose in 2006 over whether lesser-grade editions of Windows Vista was "real Vista" and whether existing PCs were ready or capable of running it, consumers probably downloaded a lot of information about different ways they could get their hands on the new product. In a motion filed last week by Microsoft in the "Vista Capable" suit in US District Court in Seattle, and first reported on by our friend Todd Bishop at Seattle's TechFlash, the company argues that the wealth of such information that former plaintiffs unearthed during their purchasing research should have been enough to tell them that Vista Home Basic wasn't the same as Vista Home Premium.
For that reason, the company claims, prospective plaintiffs can't exactly say they were harmed in the same way, so they don't deserve to be re-enlisted as class action plaintiffs. The judge in that case threw out the class action distinction last month.
No more Hitachi monitors after July's restructuring
After suffering the shame of pleading guilty in the US Justice Dept.'s ongoing investigation of price fixing in the TFT-LCD monitor industry, Hitachi announced this afternoon, Tokyo time, that it had gone about as far as it could in the present economy, in its current structure. Beginning this July, the division responsible for engineering and building those monitors probably won't even be known as Hitachi.
Spinoffs of the Consumer Business Group and the Automotive Systems Division are now fully underway, with the current executive vice president slated to take charge of the new consumer products manufacturer. That group will still downsize -- or, as Hitachi's statement to the Tokyo Stock Exchange calls it, "rightsize" -- to about 750 employees, and will outsource some of its development to Panasonic, so the new company will start out small.
SHOUTcast founding father to leave AOL
Steven "Tag" Loomis, who wrote the server software for Internet radio service SHOUTcast (with Nullsoft founders Tom Pepper and Justin Frankel) will be leaving AOL. With Loomis' departure, and the large-scale structural changes taking place at Time Warner's AOL, the future of SHOUTcast becomes uncertain.
Sources at Nullsoft suggest that SHOUTcast will simply go into maintenance mode as daily responsibilities are turned over to Shoutcast developers Faisal Sultan and Neil Radisch.
Cisco unveils Unified Computing System, with lots of big partners
Hand-in-hand with a long list of influential partners -- ranging from Microsoft and Red Hat to Accenture and EMC -- Cisco is extending upon its legacy networking heritage by jumping into server, storage, cloud and virtualization markets already occupied by major OEMs such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Dell.
While corporate IT spending is strapped, analysts predict future growth across these markets such as blade computing, cloud storage, and virtualization. Although Cisco is largely new to these areas, the networking giant plans to leverage relationships across its large ecosystem of technology, systems integration, and channel partners to gain customers and contracts.
The Korean iPod, now 30% more expensive!
The Korea Times reports that the price of Apple's iPods will be increased in Korea due to the diminished value of the Korean won.
The international exchange of currency has had a varied impact on the tech industry recently. In January, for example, Nintendo had to tune down its 2009 revenue projections because the Yen increased in value, thereby devaluing exports by a fraction when weighed against the softening dollar and euro. Korea's currency has slid down from about 1,100 on the dollar to the neighborhood of 1,500 on the dollar.
Intel fires a warning shot across AMD's bow on Global Foundries
When AMD spun off a huge chunk of its manufacturing operations two weeks ago, creating a new and instantly major chip making firm called Global Foundries, it was with the idea of enabling the new entity to manufacture CPUs using AMD's designs. But a good portion of the intellectual property for those designs comes to AMD by way of a cross-licensing agreement between the two companies, that Intel fears AMD may be breaching.
This morning, Intel announced it has formally informed AMD of its opinion that Global Foundries is not an AMD "subsidiary," and therefore does not qualify to make use of Intel's x86 intellectual property in building chips for AMD or anyone else.
Pandora comes to set-top boxes via Vudu
Users of the Vudu high definition video on demand service now have access to Pandora Internet radio, the company said today.
At the end of 2008, set-top box company Vudu unveiled its open source Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform for Vudu hardware, which allowed the device to access Internet services like YouTube, Picasa, and Flickr. The announcement was similar to one made by budget set top box maker Roku several months before. That company's successful Netflix streamer later got Amazon's Video on Demand, and is expected to get a YouTube upgrade in the near future. The move to bolster a discrete service with rich Internet content is one that has been taken by most set-top box competitors.
Maybe it really is over: New Broadcom suit against Qualcomm tossed out
Southern California District Court Judge William Q. Hayes last Thursday dismissed without prejudice the latest claim brought by handset chip maker Broadcom against its principal rival in that market, Qualcomm. That claim was that Qualcomm, by means of its Subscriber Unit License Agreements (SULAs) passed on to reseller customers who purchase handsets made with Qualcomm chips, charges a second time for the use of patents it already charged the manufacturer for once.
It's a serious double-dipping claim, which if true, could hurt Broadcom and other competitors in the following way: A company that would double-dip in this manner wouldn't have to set its prices too high for the first dip in order to make a big profit. That could result in such a company undercutting its competitors who may only (assuming no one else double-dips as well) be profiting from the initial patent license to manufacturers.
Sony and Comcast to jointly open retail store tomorrow
Sony and Comcast announced this morning that they will open the doors to a new co-branded retail storefront tomorrow in the Comcast Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Called "Sony Style Comcast Labs," the store will be similar to the 40 Sony Style stores in the United States, but will include Comcast's roster of products as well, with a special focus on emerging technologies from the service provider.
Berners-Lee warns of privacy threat on the Web's 20th birthday
It was twenty years ago today: Tim Berners-Lee taught the band to play wrote up his "Information Management: A Proposal" paper and hatched the idea for the "Mesh," which on further review he'd decide to call the World-Wide Web. What started as a simple tool for managing the dataflow at CERN has become the most disruptive technology of our lifetime. If you're reading this, raise a glass -- but don't get too comfortable.
If you've never taken a look at the document that set it all off, you should -- there's even a little diagram that reminds you of what flow charts looked like before Powerpoint. (Scroll down.) Terms like VAX and hypercard and uucp are used, which should make all the old guard around here feel sort of happy and nostalgic. Making us all feel rather less happy and nostalgic is Sir Tim's address to Parliament this week, in which he warned that the looming loss of privacy thanks to Internet tech would mean more than just privacy lost: "We must not snoop on the internet... What is at stake is the integrity of the internet as a communications medium."
ACTA shielded from sunlight as court rejects FOIA claim
A request filed by various public-interest groups asking that details of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Act be revealed to the public has been denied by an official of the Office of the US Trade Representative. Knowledge Ecology International made seven document requests, all of which were denied "in the interest of national security."
Nice transparency, one might snark, though Ars Technica points out that the acting US Trade Representative (Peter Allgeier) is an appointee of the previous administration. ACTA, which has been under negotiation since that administration, has been made available to an assortment of lobbyists and other corporate entities. Other organizations besides KEI calling for more transparency for ACTA negotiations include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, and the European Parliament. (Cloud-over-sun image by Simon Eugster, via Wikimedia Commons.)
It's a more solid-state Sun, embedding flash memory in servers
This week, Sun announced solid-state disk technology as an option for its x64 and chip multi-threaded (CMT) rack and blade servers, along with free trial and pricing discount offers. In addition, it rolled out the Sun Flash Analyzer, a new software tool for helping customers leverage SSD-based servers to raise application performance.
The company's overall flash effort is particularly ambitious and far reaching, even though Sun isn't the first vendor to offer SSD flash as a server option, according to some analysts. IBM, for example, beat Sun out the door with SSD-enabled servers way back in 2007, noted Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, in an interview with Betanews.
It has come to this: A claim that patent reform threatens the environment
Much of America's ability to once again play a contributing factor in the restoration of balance in Earth's natural environment depends on the continuing creation of new technologies, both for replacing other technologies that damage our planet and for simply curing the problem at hand. Some of these technologies are being created at the grass roots level, by entrepreneurs and experimenters, often with the intention of licensing or selling that technology once it receives its US patent -- its assurance of originality and viability.
But the value of that patent in the modern market is determined by its defensibility -- literally, how much it can rake in, in infringement cases. Without that market value, much of the incentive for trying to build new technologies in the first place, may be lost.
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