IFPI site hacked amid Pirate Bay trial
The Swedish language Web site belonging to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry -- which is leading the legal charge against file sharing site The Pirate Bay -- was hacked this afternoon and has been pulled offline.
At around 7:50 pm Central European Time, the Web site for the IFPI -- the international recording industry's representative body -- was replaced with a bulletin, or rather a declaration of war, which read (translated):
A veritable absence of panic after some TV stations throw the switch
The US Federal Communications Commission reports that, after 421 of the nation's analog television stations ceased transmission on February 17 as originally planned, its call centers received a grand total of 28,000 calls from viewers, with a great many of those apparently concerning the proper use of converter boxes already received.
This afternoon, the National Association of Broadcasters reported that stations opting to make the switch yesterday also received phone calls, but nothing beyond what they were already equipped to handle. For instance, in Madison, Wisconsin -- whose major affiliate stations were first denied the option of switching on 2/17, and then granted nearly at the last minute -- three of the city's stations reported a combined viewer call count of 400. Some of those calls were from folks who hadn't installed their converter boxes properly.
CBS to move 'March Madness' to Silverlight
If Microsoft's Silverlight is indeed fizzling, someone didn't get the message out to the NCAA. For its annual endeavor in covering all the NCAA basketball playoff games online, CBS has opted to triple the NCAA's bandwidth over last year by switching from a Flash-based player -- which already received rave reviews -- to a Silverlight player produced in conjunction with Microsoft.
Like last year, the NCAA March Madness player will deliver every game in the NCAA Championship series to individuals who sign up for free. Online telecasts will be ad-supported, in the wake of poor reception to a subscription-based model in 2007 and earlier years, produced at the time in conjunction with YouTube. The 2008 move to an ad-supported player, the network says, led to 4.8 million total unique visitors downloading the player throughout the Championship series -- a 164% annual jump -- watching a total of 81% more hours of video.
At last, a miniature USB cable for handsets is at hand
Two years ago, the Micro USB spec was standardized, and shortly thereafter, the Open Mobile Terminal Platform (OMTP) announced approved it as the universal standard phone cable.
This week, the OMTP -- sponsored by Ericsson and Nokia, and 35 hardware and software manufacturers across the telecommunications industry -- announced the publication (PDF available here) of the "Common Charging and Local Data Connectivity" (CLD) document -- a sort of industry agreement upon what these Micro USB cables need to provide.
Court dismisses claim Google Street View invades folks' privacy
A privacy invasion case against Google that was given extra attention after the company asserted in court that getting your picture taken is just part of life in the 21st century, was dismissed yesterday by a judge who apparently agrees.
Last April, the Borings of Allegheny, Pennsylvania argued that their private space was interfered with by the roving camera of Google's Street View. In filing their lawsuit against the search giant, they may have brought more attention to themselves than Google's cameras might have merited. But the fact that few others among the millions who have had their front porches snapshot by Google's panoramic camera, convinced a district court judge in Pennsylvania yesterday to toss the Borings' case.
Microsoft tells its security story (in pictures)
It's been a long strange trip toward better security for Microsoft, but they've made enough progress to have both improvements to their technique and some highly interesting war stories. The company's got a new site explaining the past decade's advances, and you have a reason to read comics at work today.
The process of "baking security in" -- getting developers to think about security less as "those people who yell at us" and more as an integral part of any software-construction effort -- lends its name to Baking Security In, which details Microsoft's progress on the Security Development Lifecycle, a process involving 14 stages and checkpoints over the six stages of the software-dev cycle (requirements, design, implementation, verification, release, support/service).
Courtroom webcast fight may delay RIAA trial
In an attempt to block the Courtroom View Network (CVN) from broadcasting the RIAA v. Tenenbaum trial, the counsel representing the record labels escalated the affair to the US Court of Appeals.
The legal counsel for the defendant in the copyright infringement suit -- a Harvard Law School class led by Charles Nesson of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society -- moved to have the case broadcast online in January. Developments in this aspect of the case today may lead to the hearing's ultimate delay.
Something to woot about
In an age of breakdown, a small but cheerful -- not to mention colorful -- bit of news reaches us from Texas, where woot.com's t-shirt site recently sold its 1,000,000th printed piece of geek culture. Since site launch, shirt.woot.com has sold a garment every 48.24 seconds since July 22, 2007.
The millionth shirt, according to the company, was sold for $10 on January 30th at 8:25am CST to a man in Houston. Fittingly, the shirt was a Derby winner -- a short designed by an artist competing to have a shirt chosen (by the users) for printing. "Sun Wukong (The Monkey King)" was the first-place shirt in that week's Derby, the theme of which was "Myths and Legends." Many of Woot's shirts are designed for them for free; tomorrow (Thursday), the site will branch into celebrity-designed T's with an offering from geek icon Wil Wheaton.
Verizon names partners in LTE development
Partners in Verizon's most recently announced LTE deployment will include hardware vendors Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent, packet core vendor Starent Networks, and IMS partner Nokia Siemens.
Verizon Executive Vice President and CTO Dick Lynch has been vocally supporting the 4G standard LTE (Long Term Evolution) for two years, and only two months ago said LTE services could begin by December of this year. In Barcelona today, Lynch discussed Verizon's LTE deployment plans, which more realistically anticipate construction to begin in 2010.
MySpace expands smartphone support, embraces Symbian
Social network MySpace is now battling back against Facebook by adding more smartphone support to its mobile site, including new applications for both the Palm Pre and Symbian OS-based Nokia S60 phones.
Beyond the newly added Palm and Symbian, the MySpace mobile site already supports the iPhone, BlackBerry, Sidekick, and Google Android mobile platforms.
Nintendo DSi comes to US on April 5
Today, Nintendo announced that the next generation of its DS handheld gaming console will be released on April 5 in the Americas, just one day later than last month's predictions.
The DSi has been available in Japan since November, and within the first two days 170,779 units were sold, amounting to more than 85% of the initial shipment, according to Enterbrain. Both of Nintendo's premier game systems, the Wii and DS, have consistently dominated the video game market in sales, and more than 3.04 million DS units were sold in 2008.
Could Intel stop Nvidia from producing chips for Nehalem?
Last July, Nvidia announced it would make its chipsets and SLI multi-GPU technology interoperable with Intel's latest generation of CPUs, with their highly-advanced Nehalem architecture. Monday, Intel said no to that in court.
In a court filing Monday in Delaware which remains under seal, CPU maker Intel asked for a declaratory judgment against GPU and chipset producer Nvidia, stating that the terms of the companies' existing x86 technology license do not extend to the Nehalem generation. This according to Intel spokesperson Chuck Mulloy, who confirmed the filing with Betanews this morning.
HP joins the Ubuntu Linux bandwagon
HP's Linux support will no longer be limited to Red Hat and SuSE Linux. Through a new partnership with Canonical, HP is becoming one of the latest in a series of huge IT players to hop aboard the Ubuntu Linux bandwagon.
More specifically, HP and Linux distributor Canonical are now working toward full certification of Ubuntu on HP Proliant servers, according to Mark Murphy, Canonical's alliances manager.
The long road to a happy ending for Nokia and Qualcomm on 3G
Handset manufacturer Nokia and wireless chip maker Qualcomm were in and out of court for the better part of two years. Now, after a six-month truce, they'll be working together on UMTS devices for the North American market.
The companies have agreed upon S60 as the operating system, and Qualcomm's Mobile Station Modem (MSM7, MSM8 series) as the 3G chips. The latest Qualcomm MSM chipset -- the MSM7227 -- is a 12 x 12 HSPA solution with a 600 MHz applications processor, 320 MHz application DSP, and a 400 MHz modem processor designed for smartphones below the $150 price point.
New Sidekick, Pre spotted 'in the wild'
Sightings of both the Sidekick 2009 and the Palm Pre -- both wildly anticipated smartphones not yet available to the masses -- have been inflaming the gear-gossip blogs for days in the wake of the the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona.
The Pre, rumored in some highly optimistic circles to be hitting the stores on February 15 (hint: that didn't happen), turned up in sighting, conveniently showing a Monday date on the (apparently larger!) screen. The image shows only the front of the device with the screen flipped up, so it's hard to see much in the way of changes, though one does notice that the buttons look slightly different and the body's a bit curvier along the edges.
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