The tweet disappeared a few minutes later. But not before thousands—if not hundreds of thousands—of Justin’s followers retweeted it with expressions of multi-exclamated astonishment. Was that actually Justin’s number!?
Two hours, and over 10,000 text messages later….
http://gizmodo.com/5613807/justin-bieber-tweets-enemys-phone-number-to-45-million-followers
The WiMax 2 high-speed wireless technology, which is expected to boost download speeds for mobile devices, is set to become a standard by early next year, according to an industry group. The 802.16m update should help WiMax 2 deliver download speeds of up to 120Mbps.
Yes, it’s being released online before it’s released in the theaters. This isn’t exactly the first time this has been tried. Magnolia Films, who produced the Freakonomics film is trying something similar right now with the film Centurion, which was released via On Demand cable systems a few weeks back, and is about to come to theaters. Still, this is pretty big news. In mentioning this reversed window, Freakonomics author Stephen Dubner mentions that there’s also another“wrinkle to the release schedule,” but he’s not revealing what it is just yet.
Radio stations are willing to fork over $100 million a year to music labels, but in return they want Congress to make FM receivers mandatory in portable devices. The labels think having an FM radio in every Droid and iPhone is a great idea, and both sides hope to go to Congress soon.
Disney, Ustream, SodaHead, Warner Bros., and a number of other websites are spying on kids’ Internet use, according to a lawsuit filed recently by a group of parents and their children. The suit accuses ad widget company Clearspring Technologies of enabling these sites to track kids all over the Internet, and not just on Clearspring partner sites, leaving them in violation of numerous federal and California state privacy laws.
The complaint is very similar to one filed against Clearspring competitor Quantcast in July, whose Flash cookies are used by MTV, ESPN, Hulu, MySpace, NBC, ABC, and Scribd. That suit also cited the UC Berkeley study, accusing Quantcast of following a “pattern of covert online surveillance.”
Verizon has managed to push 925Mbps across its fiber network from one lucky business in Taunton, Mass.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/08/verizon-hits-1gbps-in-real-world-fios-test.ars
An eBookstick is pretty much a USB stick with a number of e-Books on it, in ePub format (DRM-free). It provides for easy copying to a plethora of devices.
A publisher started an experiment by offering one containing 5 DRM-free e-Books as a second hand item on an auction site.
Although the publisher first received a request from the auction site operator to remove this offering and although the official (re)seller of the eBooksticks noted that selling the stick is an exclusive right of retailers, the auction site later approved of the sale after the publisher explained that the e-Books had not been downloaded nor were they tied to a specific user account and that he should be able to sell the stick, having deleted the e-Books which he had previously transferred to his PC using the eBookstick.
The sale was therefore compared to the sales of second hand CD’s and DVD’s on auction sites.
Dutch language article (paywall):
http://www.boekblad.nl/articles/ds/art/16577
Worldwide security software revenue is forecast to surpass $16.5 billion in 2010, an 11.3 percent increase from 2009 revenue of $14.8 billion, according to Gartner, Inc. Although the economic downturn slowed security revenue to 7 percent growth in 2009, organizations have indicated an intention to give priority to security budgets.
Team Xecuter have been working closely with Team Jungle & C4E for several weeks now on the new Xbox 360 250GB Model (some call it 360 S or 360 Slim). We are pleased to officially announce that the team has successfully patched the DVD Rom to be able to play backups.
This is the latest in a long line of source releases from id, who has so far shared the source code for all its engines from Wolfenstein 3D up to Quake 3: Arena. Carmack teased that id would start looking into releasing the Doom 3 source after Rage ships.
A barrage of NFC-related Apple patent applications have been published over the last few months. They cover a wide range of potential NFC application areas and include:
Have you ever wished that your iPod Touch was an iPhone? Now it can be, thanks to a new device called the “Apple Peel 520″ and created by a Chinese company.
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/mobile/08/16/china.apple.peel/index.html
Previously:
The organizations below have written an open letter, calling on the Dutch government to ensure that there will be more transparency in relation to the ACTA discussions. They also want to limit the reach of ACTA to measures to address counterfeiting and they want to prevent any inclusion of issues related to intellectual property rights in digital environments.
The Ministry of Economic Affairs has announced that it shares the concerns of these organizations especially in relation to the transparency element and communication about the ACTA negotiations. The Ministry emphasizes that The Netherlands do not want the negotiations to go beyond current legislation already in place on a European level. The Netherlands will also be on guard to prevent negotiations from moving into the realm of disconnecting end users or mandatory filtering.
1. Bits of Freedom
https://www.bof.nl/home/english-bits-of-freedom/
2. Consumentenbond
http://www.consumentenbond.nl/
3. FOBID (association of Dutch Libraries)
http://sitegenerator.bibliotheek.nl/fobid/home/
4. Free Knowledge Institute
http://freeknowledge.eu/
5. HCC (Computer Club)
http://www.hcc.nl/
6. Health Action International Europa
http://www.haiweb.org/
7. Internet Society Nederland
http://isoc.nl/
8. Kennisland
http://www.kennisland.nl/
9. Nederlands Juristen Comité voor de Mensenrechten
http://www.njcm.nl/site/english/list_news
10. Open Domein
http://www.opendomein.nl/
11. Platform Burgerrechten
http://www.platformburgerrechten.nl/
12. Privacy First
http://www.privacyfirst.nl/
13. VrijBit
http://www.vrijbit.nl/
14. VrijSchrift
http://wiki.vrijschrift.org/
Dutch language article:
http://www.nu.nl/internet/2313192/ernstige-zorgen-anti-piraterijverdrag.html
Open letter in Dutch:
https://www.bof.nl/live/wp-content/uploads/brief-def.pdf
TalkTalk’s technical bods also claimed that the ISP had no visibility of the website addresses. However any comfort this may have given was soon eroded after it revealed that the data would instead be held remotely in a device managed solely by commercial Chinese firm Huawei.
Can Hulu really go public?
Yes, say sources talking to The New York Times, who imagine the video site launching an IPO “as soon as this fall.”
While Bitsnoop may not have the profile of The Pirate Bay, make no mistake, this site is a major BitTorrent player. The site indexes more than 8 million torrents linking to roughly 9 petabytes of data. In the last few days Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN began threatening the site with the clear aim of bringing its activities to an end.
http://torrentfreak.com/hollywood-targets-8-2-million-torrents-at-bitsnoop-100816/
“It’s an incredibly consistent effect,” [psychologist Dacher] Keltner says. “When you give people power, they basically start acting like fools. They flirt inappropriately, tease in a hostile fashion, and become totally impulsive.” Mr. Keltner compares the feeling of power to brain damage, noting that people with lots of authority tend to behave like neurological patients with a damaged orbito-frontal lobe, a brain area that’s crucial for empathy and decision-making. Even the most virtuous people can be undone by the corner office.
Why does power lead people to flirt with interns and solicit bribes and fudge financial documents? According to psychologists, one of the main problems with authority is that it makes us less sympathetic to the concerns and emotions of others. For instance, several studies have found that people in positions of authority are more likely to rely on stereotypes and generalizations when judging other people. They also spend much less time making eye contact, at least when a person without power is talking.
Much more:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100816/02295010631.shtml
Thousands of smartphone games and applications are being sold or distributed in Australia without going through a classification check, says The Australian.
Apple, the largest distributor, “is bypassing millions of dollars in fees, as classification fees range from $470 to $2040 for computer games, costing the government revenue”, it says, going on:
“More than 220,000 applications are available in Australia for download. At a conservative estimate, one-third of them are games, suggesting compliance costs would be in the millions.”
Virgin Media subscribers whose computers are part of a botnet can expect a letter warning them to tighten up their security, under a new initiative based on data collected by independent malware trackers.
The UK’s third-largest ISP will match lists of compromised IP addresses collected by the Shadowserver Foundation, among others, to its customer records.
Increasingly bonkers Google governor Eric Schmidt has seen the future, and you might have to change your name to be a part of it
indiscriminately publishing 92,000 classified reports reflects a real problem of methodology and, therefore, of credibility. Journalistic work involves the selection of information. The argument with which you defend yourself, namely that Wikileaks is not made up of journalists, is not convincing. Wikileaks is an information outlet and, as such, is subject to the same rules of publishing responsibility as any other media
you cannot claim to enjoy the protection of sources while at the same time, when it suits you, denying that you are a news media
Jean-François Julliard
Reporters Without Borders secretary-general
Clothilde Le Coz
Reporters Without Borders representative in Washington DC
Full letter:
http://en.rsf.org/united-states-open-letter-to-wikileaks-founder-12-08-2010,38130.html
Previously:
http://contentprotection.wordpress.com/?s=wikileaks
