Technology News and IT Business Intelligence

HTC sues Apple to block sales of the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch in U.S.

Thu, 13 May 2010 11:35:35 +0000

In March, Apple sued smartphone maker HTC for 20 counts of patent infringement, alleging the company had “stolen [its] patented inventions” for the iPhone.
Today, HTC fired back at Apple in the same fashion, filing a complaint with the United States International Trade Commission (ITC) to stop the sale of the iPhone, iPad and iPod in the United States. The complaint accuses Apple of five counts of infringement.

“As the innovator of the original Windows Mobile PocketPC Phone Edition in 2002 and the first Android smartphone in 2008, HTC believes the industry should be driven by healthy competition and innovation that offer consumers the best, most accessible mobile experiences possible,” said a statement from Jason Mackenzie, HTC’s vice president of North America today. “We are taking this action against Apple to protect our intellectual property, our industry partners, and most importantly our customers that use HTC phones.”

Emergency LTE broadband networks approved for construction in 21 markets

Thu, 13 May 2010 11:35:05 +0000

Part of the national broadband plan includes the construction of a nationwide 700MHz broadband network specifically for emergency first responders. Until now, there are no broadband connection services specifically for public safety, and they have been limited to commercial services.
Today, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted conditional approval of 21 petitions filed by cities, counties and states looking for waivers to move forward with the construction of regional interoperable wireless broadband networks. The Commission requires these broadband networks to be deployed under a common interoperability framework in coordination with the FCC’s Emergency Response Interoperability Center (ERIC). Under this framework, all networks will be technologically compatible and interoperable.

They require use of the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard, they must support certain applications, including access to the Internet, to an incident command system, and to field-based server applications; and include a certain level of security.
The petitions approved today included entire states, some single cities, and some regional areas.
States: Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Hawaii, Oregon, and the District of Columbia Counties: Adams County, CO; Los Angeles County, CA Cities: Boston, MA; Charlotte, NC; Chesapeake, VA; New York, NY; Pembroke Pines, FL; San Antonio, TX; Seattle, WA; Mesa, AZ Regions: Northern California Consortium (Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose,) Wisconsin Consortium (Calumet, Outagamie and Winnebago Counties,) and TOPAZ Regional Wireless Cooperative (Arizona.)
“Today’s action brings America significantly closer to creating a nationwide public safety broadband network that will enable first responders to quickly communicate and share critical, time-sensitive information with each other during emergencies,” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said. “We stand ready to assist public safety in their efforts to maximize the federal resources available to them to deploy these mobile broadband networks across the nation.”

LimeWire loses everything in infringement battle with RIAA

Thu, 13 May 2010 11:34:24 +0000

In a decision handed down in US District Court in New York this afternoon, representatives of the recording industry won summary judgment against P2P file-sharing software maker LimeWire, in a patent infringement suit first filed in 2006.
Though the case took almost four years to resolve, as Judge Kimba Wood wrote in her decision today, LimeWire may very well have sealed its fate in July 2008. At that time, Greg Bildson, the company’s CTO/COO met with plaintiffs’ attorneys to discuss a potential case settlement.

That meeting left Bildson without a job, and left LimeWire fighting for nearly two more years about the admissibility of evidence obtained by plaintiffs through those discussions. Today’s summary judgment order was coupled with denials of LimeWire’s motions to exclude that evidence, and then to dismiss the case on lack of evidence.
At issue there was whether Bildson met with plantiffs’ attorneys on advice of counsel. Judge Wood found he did, and that he was advised on more than one occasion by his attorneys not to reveal privileged information that Bildson was apparently willing to reveal.
What attorneys did discover, apparently through this settlement negotiation, included the contents of e-mail conversations between LimeWire executives during the company’s startup stage, from 2000 to 2002. At that time, the e-mail messages reveal, LimeWire execs had planned their business around building a massive audience around the sharing of unauthorized media files, and then at some set date in the future, convert that audience somehow into fully authorized users of that media. Though unspecified, LimeWire called this the “Conversion Plan.”
In internal communications, LW [LimeWire LLC] regularly discussed the fact that LimeWire users downloaded copyrighted digital recordings through the program. For example, a draft of a LW Offering Memorandum, created in 2001, states that LimeWire “allows people to exchange copyrighted mp3 files.” A September 2002 statement of LW’s goals acknowledges that: “Currently, the most common use of the Gnutella Network is the sharing of music files, many of them copyrighted.” Other LW documents state that “the only information being shared on peer networks are media files,” a category composed primarily of copyrighted digital recordings, and that the “[s]haring [of] media files is bringing the initial user base” to LimeWire.
In 2006, LW developed a strategic plan to “convert” LimeWire users who were sharing unauthorized digital recordings into customers of LW’s online music store, which would sell authorized music (the “Conversion Plan”). In the Conversion Plan, LW openly acknowledged that the majority of LimeWire’s users were infringers. The Plan stated that (1) 25% of LimeWire’s users were “hardcore pirates;” (2) 25% of users were “morally persuadable;” (3) 20% of users were legally aware; and (4) 30% of users were “samplers and convenience users.” The Plan provided that over time LW would introduce features to LimeWire to block users from downloading infringing recordings, and to direct them to LW’s online store.
In what may have been a procedure to prepare the company for probable legal action, Judge Wood went on, LimeWire employees maintained copies of e-mails and third-party Web articles about the company, in a file that was actually labeled “Knowledge of Infringement.”
Plaintiffs’ expert testified that nearly 99% of content traded over the Gnutella network using LimeWire was unauthorized, much of it MP3s ripped from CDs. Judge Wood maintained that LimeWire demonstrated it had the technical capability to block such content, having already implemented a filtering agent on its site to block pornography from users’ download feeds. With not only the knowledge of infringing activity but the intent to build its business plan around it, coupled with having overlooked the technical ability to have gone a different direction, LimeWire’s defeat in this court was only a matter of time.
Just what LimeWire may owe at this point is for the judge to yet determine, though the recording industry originally sought $150,000 per infringed title.

Qik shows impressive low latency two-way video chat on HTC EVO 4G

Thu, 13 May 2010 11:31:41 +0000

Streaming video service Qik first debuted just over two years ago, letting users turn their smartphones into live webcams with just a simple app and a strong connection. Users can stream video from their phones live to Qik’s site, but with considerable buffering.

However, with the growth of faster 4G connections, Qik has been able to put together a new two-way video chat app that lets users communicate in streaming video with very little latency.
The company showed off this new app tonight at Sprint’s launch event for the HTC EVO 4G. The new two-way chat app won’t ship with the device when it goes available on June 4th (for $199.99 + contract.) Instead, the device ships with the current Qik app for Android, and the new chat feature will come later as an upgrade.

AMD to combat ‘Intel Inside’ with ‘Who cares?’

Thu, 13 May 2010 11:30:58 +0000

Ever since it stopped billing itself as a producer of “replacements” for Intel CPUs, AMD has struggled with the platform question: the need for OEMs to produce PCs based on pre-determined patterns. Manufacturers can achieve price breaks when they buy parts in bulk, and platforms can help them do that; likewise, they can reap even more benefits down the road from selling popular platforms to the public.
It was Intel that figured out the platform formula first, ironically through the help of a brand it no longer uses: Centrino. Up until last year, although individual AMD processors have been successful in the consumer marketplace, and Opteron as a brand has reclaimed its respect among server makers, it’s never been able to crack the nut for consumer-grade platforms. Last September, AMD announced it would try yet another spin on the platform approach, unveiling a new “Vision” brand for classes of PCs based on AMD processors. OEMs such as HP, Acer, and Dell would use these classes not to denote the processor in their PCs, but rather what those PCs are capable of doing.

Today, in a press event held at its Austin, Texas headquarters the site of the Cannes Film Festival, the company celebrated the final stage of the Vision brand rollout. Now, all consumer-grade desktop and notebook PCs containing AMD CPUs will be eligible for co-branding based on four tiers of functionality, with each tier designating the everyday, real-world tasks that its PCs may perform.
AMD is now quite literally and specifically suggesting that OEMs provide this information instead of explicit specifications; and today on stage with AMD officials, representatives of the world’s top three consumer PC producers said they basically agree.
“There’s no single component, branded or unbranded, that’s inside that PC that matters more to that end user than whether it’s a Dell, an Acer, or an HP. That’s the brand that matters,” stated AMD Vice President of Product Marketing Leslie Sobon this afternoon. “Vision technology from AMD lets that brand be the hero. It lets our customer be the hero.
“What matters most is what the end consumer wants to buy. No one knows what processor is in their TV. They don’t have to know, and they don’t care,” Sobon continued. “No one knows what processor is in their camera, and they don’t have to know, and they don’t care. And no one knows what processor is in their MP3 player — you kinda get the story here — they don’t know and they don’t care. And guess what, with PCs, they don’t know and they don’t care.”
It’s a compelling argument: Since there is no clear formula for mapping an everyday function, such as burning a homemade movie to DVD, to a number of cores or a set frequency or a cache latency figure, consumers are forced to trust salespersons’ breakdowns of their respective retailers’ good/better/best price/performance scale. Online reviewers have sometimes made honest efforts at presenting objective performance ratings, but nearly all of them have failed to do so consistently. And since the performance of all classes of PC tend to improve, the difficulty only increases for customers trying to understand why the lowest classes of PC aren’t just as adequate as higher classes.
“What Vision is enabling HP to do for our customers is two things,” stated Hewlett-Packard VP for worldwide marketing John Dayan. The first is to deliver a specific customer experience. For the second, he added, “The branding in the channel makes it so much simpler [for the customer] to walk in and say, ‘Here’s what I want to do with my computer, what should I buy?’ Instead of trying to calculate speeds and feeds and all these different things, it’s really more about, each of these different levels delivers different kinds of experiences depending upon what you want to do.”

From an AMD presentation, the four task-oriented tiers in the Vision platform for notebook and desktop PCs.
Historically, AMD has implemented and perfected a product implementation process where new production techniques and new CPU capabilities are rolled out at the top of the line, whose OEM customers would produce PCs for enthusiasts and early adopters. Over time, those upper-crust parts work their way down into the mainstream segment, and then eventually the value segment — and in recent years, that amount of time has been compressed in some cases to less than one year.
With that in mind, assuming this pattern stays in place, CPUs that qualify today for the Vision Black logo — whose specific tasks include creating and editing Blu-ray quality movies — would be marketed in the value segment by 2012. How will AMD respond to this inevitable course of evolution?
In response to this question, an AMD spokesperson told Betanews today that the company plans to make incremental adjustments to the Vision task scale, letting those Black-level tasks filter down to the Vision basic tier over time. And AMD plans to keep the consumer apprised as to when this happens and why. “Vision will evolve as the hardware advances,” the spokesperson told Betanews. “What are our most advanced features currently reserved for Vision Black will filter down to Vision Ultimate, Vision Premium, and Vision Basic over time. We will also be including generational modifiers for Vision that will indicate the latest technology.”
So as Vision evolves over the next few years, expect to see “plus” signs and refreshes that indicate that this year’s Vision, for example, is far ahead of last year’s Vision.
In 2007, when AMD unveiled a new and separate metric from Intel’s Thermal Design Point (TDP) for evaluating CPU power consumption, critics argued the move would make AMD chips more difficult to evaluate against Intel. To which the company answered the critics, yes, you’re probably right. Today, AMD’s Leslie Sobon was asked whether she thought the Vision scheme would make it more difficult for consumers to evaluate AMD-based PCs against their Intel-based counterparts. Her answer was, basically, yes.
“It’d be difficult to make the translation,” Sobon responded, “but certainly I assume in the retail sales associate training, there is some combination to make people better understand. At the end of the day, it’s who speaks usages, in our opinion, who wins. So Vision talks to what you want to do. It doesn’t talk to a component that’s inside that actually people don’t buy. People buy a Dell, an Acer, a Hewlett-Packard. That’s what matters most.”

‘Free’ and ‘open’ Web video may be impossible after Microsoft backs H.264 only

Sun, 02 May 2010 09:45:48 +0000

The good news should be, everyone with a major stake in the outcome of the Web video standards debate has now publicly expressed support for something called “open” or “openness.” But that’s where the similarities, and even the niceness, end. Yesterday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs personally weighed in on the subject by making it an “us against them” battle, with Adobe and Flash the villains.
Late yesterday, the head of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 project, Dean Hachamovitch, followed suit, representing the company whose decisions about what standards to support — or not support — have historically steered the course of Web development, for better or worse. Assuming a far more civil tone than Jobs, but with a message no less significant, Hachamovitch solidified Microsoft’s stance on high-definition Web video standards by announcing that IE9 would support H.264 for HTML 5 built-in video…and only H.264.

“H.264 is an industry standard, with broad and strong hardware support,” Hachamovitch wrote. “Because of this standardization, you can easily take what you record on a typical consumer video camera, put it on the Web, and have it play in a Web browser on any operating system or device with H.264 support (e.g., a PC with Windows 7). Recently, we publicly showed IE9 playing H.264-encoded video from YouTube…For all these reasons, we’re focusing our HTML 5 video support on H.264.”
The original reason for the creation of the tag in HTML 5 was to enable browsers to implement built-in codecs that would play back “free video.” Soon, stakeholders in HTML 5 realized there may not be such a thing: While patent holders such as MPEG LA do extend royalty-free licenses to folks who view Web video, that’s because those royalties are considered paid by those who produce the video using encoder tools and codecs. And while open source developers have been actively creating encoding tools such as x264 that don’t incur royalties, the question of whether their underlying technologies may still be claimed by patent holders somewhere in the world, is thought to be a brutal battle just waiting to play itself out.
Hachamovitch referred to this very point yesterday, in praising MPEG LA for its management of a licensing program that does not charge developers “additional royalty” for the use of the technology in H.264. Skillfully avoiding the use of the term “open,” he acknowledged that a critical difference exists between availability and ownership, and advised that perhaps the best course to follow is one where the owners are most reasonable and the availability is highest.
But then he could not help but crash head-first into the issue of Adobe Flash. In his message yesterday morning, Steve Jobs thrashed Flash (which he also has a grudge against for also being a middleware platform) for being proprietary, insecure, and dictatorial — all of which he then went on to characterize Apple as not being. The fervor over Jobs’ message, coupled with the fact that Flash is the most prominent video format on today’s Web, made the issue unavoidable for Hachamovitch.
“Today, video on the Web is predominantly Flash-based,” the IE9 team leader wrote. “While video may be available in other formats, the ease of accessing video using just a browser on a particular Web site without using Flash is a challenge for typical consumers. Flash does have some issues, particularly around reliability, security, and performance. We work closely with engineers at Adobe, sharing information about the issues we know of in ongoing technical discussions. Despite these issues, Flash remains an important part of delivering a good consumer experience on today’s Web.”
And that’s where the message ended, leaving it for readers to infer from it that IE9 will continue to make it easy for Adobe to plug itself directly into the browser. Supporters of the original principles of HTML 5 had come out against the use of video plug-ins — the problem that the tag was created to solve — but have recently acknowledged that if browsers seek to remain “open,” then they must remain accepting of the Web’s most prevalent video format — and the plug-in vehicle that comes with it, security risks and all.
Yesterday afternoon, in a video interview with The Wall Street Journal, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen answered Steve Jobs’ attack by saying that it is iPhone that is the proprietary platform, and Flash that is the open one, as evidenced by the huge wealth of quality Flash video on the Web. Narayen’s implication was that, simply because Adobe owns the methodologies behind Flash, doesn’t make Flash any less open or more proprietary than H.264 — the format which Jobs says Apple supports.
Though it was Apple that stirred the pot yesterday, in recent months, it has been Google that turned up the heat from “simmer” to “boiling.” Its role in the Web video issue has been to catalyze debate and keep everyone else guessing, as its own stance on the subject has been all over the map.
The one thing we do know for certain is that Google supports the tag in HTML 5. But last year, Google threw a monkey wrench into the adoption process by setting itself squarely against the use of Theora, the open source video codec that was Mozilla’s preference, as the one HTML 5 codec. Google engineers literally predicted that if Theora were adopted, the resulting traffic from the sheer bulk of poorly encoded video would stall the entire Web.
Within weeks of breaking that iceberg and setting it adrift, Google purchased On2 Technologies, the company actually responsible for creating the underlying principles of VP3, on which Theora was based. That led to speculation that Google would produce VP8, the current version of that codec, under an open source license — something that Betanews was told Google may not have the authority to do even though it now owns the company behind VP8.
Google could, however, issue a royalty-free license for VP8, perhaps with little or no dispute. That would make VP8 appear to be the HTML 5 codec of choice for its Chrome Web browser, which is growing in popularity.
But then, having yet to exhaust its supply of monkey wrenches, Google began testing building Flash directly into Chrome, helping to cement the position of its YouTube division as the world’s principal supplier of Flash video for the foreseeable future. Just yesterday, Adobe followed up by announcing direct support for Flash Player 10.1 in smartphones with Android, Google’s open-source small device operating system, starting in June. Which makes things murky enough had Google, not three weeks earlier, announced it was openly funding the continued development of a version of Theora — the very codec its engineers threatened would cripple the Web, and which now stands in opposition to VP8 — as an ARM component that could be built into the firmware of smartphones everywhere, including both Android and iPhone, bypassing whatever it is that their browsers may choose to build in or plug in.
The headline for that April 9 announcement was, “Interesting times for Video on the Web.” You think?

Response to Jobs’ remarks about Android porn: iPad 3G porn

Sun, 02 May 2010 09:45:21 +0000

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has made numerous disparaging remarks about Google’s Android platform because of the availability of X-rated material on it, statements that obviously downplayed the ubiquity of pornography.

“You know, there’s a porn store for Android,” Jobs said. “You can download nothing but porn. You can download porn, your kids can download porn. That’s a place we don’t want to go — so we’re not going to go there.”

Later, in one of Jobs’ many emails to consumer media following the April 3 launch of the iPad, he repeated the sentiment, saying, “…we do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone…Folks who want porn can buy and [sic] Android phone.”
Today, as the 3G-equipped iPads have begun arriving, a press release hit the wires from an adult entertainment company by the name of Pink Visual, which said it was doing a “3G” iPad promotional photo campaign.
“The photo shoot was done as a lark, ['3G' in this case means 'three girls'] but it’s also a way to draw attention the serious upgrades we’ve made to our iPad-related services since the iPad was first released earlier this month,” a statement from Pink Visual Brand and Product Manager Kim Kysar said. “It’s also in keeping with our overall corporate culture, which is equal parts goofball pornographer and serious tech geek.”
The company has two sites optimized for iPad consumption, utilizing HTML 5, which Kysar says was done to “have the videos play in an overlay instead of opening in a separate player.”
Let’s consider the playing field even.

Twitter finally releases its official Android app

Sun, 02 May 2010 09:44:47 +0000

It’s been quite a week for Android apps. It started with the early release of two major browsers and has closed out with the release of the platform’s first official Twitter app.
Until now, Android has been a battleground for third-party Twitter solutions with more than 20 major competitors jockeying to be the “most official” Twitter app for the platform.
But this is undoubtedly one of the cleanest looking Twitter apps available, and certainly the one most tightly woven into the Android architecture.
In Twitter’s blog today, Leland Rechis wrote, “When apps work well with each other, sharing becomes as second nature on machines as it does in person. The Android platform is really good at that, and we’ve worked with the Android team to make it super easy to share what’s happening.”
So the team worked with Google to create the app, but unfortunately the final product is only available on devices running version 2.1 and up. Rechis reminded users of older Android versions that they can always use mobile.twitter.com.

Irrespective of the limited device support, this is a highly useful and enjoyable app to use. It comes with large and small homescreen widgets, the Twitter contact information of your friends can be integrated into your address book, the Google Talk app, or any app that uses the QuickContact bar which debuted in “Eclair” (Android 2.0). Photos uploaded to Twitpic or yfrog are presented as thumbnails in the Twitter timeline, and tweets that share the user’s location can be immediately pulled up in the Google Maps application.

The app includes a handful of subtle animations such as the trending topics popping up as speech bubbles on the home screen, and a scrolling background of animated clouds. These can, of course, be turned off in the settings menu where the rest of the app’s parameters such as notifications and query intervals can be controlled.

The official Twitter application for Android can be obtained freely in the Android Market right now.

Sarah Palin hacker convicted

Sun, 02 May 2010 09:44:13 +0000

In late 2008, David C. Kennel obtained the Yahoo email address of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, and then used simple deduction to answer the “challenge question” that would grant access to her password and subsequently to her email inbox.
Kennel, son of Tennesse Democratic state representative Mike Kennel, got access to Palin’s Yahoo email account while the former Governor was on the Republican presidential campaign with Arizona Senator John McCain. Kennel posted some of the contents of Palin’s email account online, including both “work-related” and personal information, such as the mobile phone number of her daughter Bristol Palin.

Today, the 22 year old was convicted by a federal jury of one count of misdemeanor unauthorized access to obtain information from a computer, and one count of obstruction of justice. He was found not guilty of wire fraud, and the identity theft charge was dropped after it was declared a mistrial.
Kennel faces a maximum of one year in prison and a $100,000 fine for accessing Palin’s email account, reading the contents, taking screenshots of e-mails and personal information and posting them on the internet.
The obstruction of justice charge is a bit more serious. After Kennel learned of a possible FBI investigation into his behavior, he deleted records and documents that pointed to him. For doing this, his charge is 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
If Kennel was found guilty of all four of the charges, he would have faced up to 50 years in prison.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS gives Linux even more mainstream appeal

Sun, 02 May 2010 09:43:31 +0000

As expected, Canonical today released the latest long-term support version of Ubuntu (v. 10.04, a.k.a., “Lucid Lynx”). This release carries considerably more weight than the usual bi-annual Desktop and Server updates because long-term support (LTS) come only biennially — once every two years. They typically don’t get treated to experimental feature additions, and are meant to be more stable. They do, however, include three years of package support for Ubuntu Desktop and five years for Ubuntu server. The last LTS versions Canonical released were “Dapper Drake” (4.0) in 2005 and “Hardy Heron” (8.04) in 2008.

This version of Ubuntu comes with a new color palette that departs from the usual brown, and a couple of new features directed at the demands of the everyday user. The popular Linux distro is definitely going for widespread appeal with this release.
One of the new features is the “Me Menu,” an interface for social Web sites like Twitter and Facebook built directly into the operating system. The tool is based on Gwibber and was originally intended to be a part of the “Karmic Koala” release, but did not make it into it, and was officially shown off as a part of Lucid Lynx last December.
Another is the new Ubuntu music player which has a music store and the Ubuntu One cloud file-sharing interface built into it. With the Alpha 3 release, Lucid Lynx also got full support for iPod Touch and iPhone, adding even further to the distro’s mainstream appeal.
FileForum user jcollake summed it up quite nicely today, “As for Ubuntu, I find it a highly valuable contribution to the Linux ’sub-culture.’ It has introduced many new people to Linux and is an easy-to-use distribution. There are still areas — particularly in third-party hardware support — that aren’t quite as smooth as Windows, despite the best efforts of Ubuntu…but that’s not their fault…Bottom line is that they’ve done a good job, and it will work well for a lot of people — not everyone, but a lot.”