Technology News and IT Business Intelligence

As promised, the world’s trade negotiators have finally released a public and, to a limited extent, redacted version of the current draft document for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Releasing a draft of a global trade agreement is actually unprecedented, say many diplomats.
Though the authors of certain passages under consideration — many of them marked by [square brackets] — have been redacted from public view, it’s clear that new legal limitations on an Internet service provider’s ability to claim “safe harbor,” excusing it from secondary liability for copyright (or patent) infringement, are being considered. That option is believed to have been proposed by the United States delegation, as indicated by a leaked document from the European Union (PDF available here from Wired). However, another option that would not limit ISP safe harbor provisions, is listed in the draft document under equal consideration.
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At its f8 developers’ conference in San Francisco this morning, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg presented his vision of a cross-site social platform whose developmental state may already be quite far along. Essentially, he sees a kind of online social sphere wherein anything one communicates that he likes, gets channeled to Facebook, where that like becomes a public fact.
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Chipmaker Marvell today debuted a new processor in its Armada family, designed for plug computing, for home, small business and industrial automation, and applications demanding ultra low power consumption.
The Armada 310 system-on-a-chip is built with an ARMv5 processor between 500 MHz and 1 GHz that consumes less than 1 watt of power. Fixed on a 15 x 15mm FCBGA (Flip Chip Ball Grid Array), the Armada 310 offers tons of I/O options, such as two Gigabit Ethernet MACs, two SATA 2.0 ports, two PCIe ports, USB 2.0, and DDR2/3.
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The strategy being employed by the Federal Communications Commission, as put forth yesterday, is to treat its loss to Comcast in DC Circuit Court two weeks ago not as a defeat of its ability to implement the entire Broadband Plan…and then hope that no one puts up any new roadblocks toward deploying at least most of it.
The priorities the FCC put forth during yesterday’s open hearing are perhaps the ones that would generate the least friction from possible opponents. One of these priorities is reflected in a major rule change yesterday with respect to what regulators originally thought should be an oxymoron: home roaming.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made some amazing announcements yesterday, during the f8 conference. Docs.com wasn’t one of them.
“You can discover, create, and share Microsoft Office documents with your Facebook friends,” according to the service’s Website. What Docs.com really does more is provide Microsoft a lifeline, as the company seeks to maintain the relevance of its Office-Windows-Windows Server applications stack before the rising mobile device-to-cloud applications/services stack. Docs.com is a futile, short-sighted enterprise that acknowledges Microsoft has already lost the new century’s platform wars.
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Yesterday’s introduction by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg of a vastly expanded form of the Facebook Platform — enabling Web sites to gather information on users’ “likes,” share them with Facebook, and get traffic as a result — did not slip past the office of Canada’s Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart.
In a statement to Betanews this afternoon, Comm. Stoddart acknowledged this expansion will be of special concern to her office, especially in light of existing concerns raised by the service’s latest round of privacy policy adjustments. Some say those adjustments actually exposed more information to potential data miners than it was exposing before, leading them to question the company’s motives for attaining that data in the first place.
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Recovering IT spending, robust worldwide PC shipments and strong Windows 7 adoption helped Microsoft to beat the Street. The software giant announced fiscal 2010 third quarter earnings, ended March 31, after the Bell, today.
Microsoft revenue rose 6 percent to $14.5 billion, up from $13.65 billion a year earlier. Operating income: $5.17 billion, up 17 percent. Net income: $4.01 billion, or 45 cents a share. Net income rose by 35 percent and earnings per share by 36 percent year over year. If not for a $305 million deferral related to Office 2010, Microsoft would have reported $14.81 billion revenue.
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If you’re like me, and you’re among the dozen or so who still watch the nightly half-hour of American commercial broadcast TV news, you’ve probably noticed that about a quarter of that time is devoted to ads. Two-thirds of those ads are devoted to drugs, and half of those drug ads are devoted to warnings about the many gruesome, horrid ways in which you might unexpectedly die. The unspoken reason why these ads appear there in the first place is because advertisers reason that if you’re still watching the Evening News, you must be afraid to touch your computer or your smartphone to read the real news from TMZ, which makes you (wait for it…) old. (Meaning, above 29.)
Samsung’s Australian unit doesn’t want the drug companies to have all the fun. Barely a month after releasing its 3D television offerings on an unsuspecting world, the company has published a warning on its Web site down under that outlines a list of risks so serious that those network news drug spots seem tame by comparison.
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Many instances of malware on Windows-based systems masquerade themselves as system services — the various independent processes that respond to requests from both the operating system and applications with functions that users typically need. Network connectivity and printing are among the more common Windows services; and if you’ve ever perused the processes list of Task Manager (or, better yet, Process Explorer), you’ll find these processes are represented by the single .EXE file that hosts them, svchost.exe.
Any anti-virus database looking for a rogue system service will probably have to refer to svchost.exe as the process that launches it, even though that process is clearly part of Windows itself. On Wednesday, McAfee distributed a .DAT file to many of its enterprise customers that may have had a single faulty character. As a result, their anti-virus systems successfully quarantined not the service launched by svchost.exe, but svchost.exe itself.
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What a difference 12 months and an accounting change make. As I briefly noted yesterday, only about $1 billion separated Apple from Microsoft results in the first calendar quarter. With so many blogs obsessed about when Apple’s market capitalization might exceed Microsoft’s, perhaps the focus should be on earnings.
Some people might not understand the significance. The comparisons here are real, because they’re not fudgy market share or market capitalization comparisons. Apple has closed a huge revenue gap on Microsoft and lessened the lead in net income. This year promises the most visceral competition between Apple and Microsoft ever.
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