Last week, I was contacted by a small company that I'll call Unlocko. Unlocko sells software that "unlocks" mobile phones so owners can select different cellular providers on the same handset. The company had received a cease-and-desist letter from a large mobile phone provider, which I'll call CellPhoneCo.Like most U.S. cellular providers, CellPhoneCo electronically locks the handsets it sells so the phones can only be used with CellPhoneCo's service. CellPhoneCo claims that the sale of unlocking software is illegal.
The financial motive behind this claim is obvious. Companies have been using the razor blade business model to guarantee a steady stream of revenue ever since, well, the razor blade. Cell phone companies sell you a phone at a discount, and then make up the difference by requiring you to sign a multi-year contract promising to pay monthly fees for mobile phone service or to fork over a hefty termination penalty if you break the deal.
An application for our 2006 Next Generation Design Competition, which closes December 15. The competition offers $10,000 in seed money to an emerging designer with a “big idea” that will make our environment better, safer, and more sustainable.
Kodak announces (but doesn't ship) the camera a few days early: The camera, delayed by months, was scooped by two models from Nikon which have Wi-Fi but relatively poor network options. The EasyShare-One takes its place as the third camera shipped (second by brand), but has a much larger scope to its network purview.
The press release says it's the first consumer Wi-Fi camera to ship to retailers, but that's so clearly not the case. Checking the Nikon P1, announced Sept. 1, I see that it's not in stock at any major retailer; the Nikon P2 (the less-expensive, lower megapixel version) is readily available. Kodak says their camera will be available in days to consumers.
The $599 camera includes Kodak's 802.11b Wi-Fi SDIO card; you can see it protruding from the top of the camera in the publicity photo. The first release of this card includes just WEP support. WPA and 802.1X support are due "later," so good luck all you folks with appropriate WPA security enabled in using this camera on your network. On public networks, there's no mention of security, and I'll be curious whether there are FTP or other transfer options involving encryption, and whether the EasyShare Gallery access encrypts your username and password.
The camera is designed to transfer images and video to Kodak's photo service, to view images stored on a PC (over the Internet or a local network, it's unclear), and to view photos and galleries at EasyShare Gallery.
Without the 802.1X module and other authentication support, this camera won't be able to use authentication pages that allow access even to networks that just require one to click Accept for free network policies. Kodak says in the press release that they're working with outdoor venues to support the camera.
Update: The fine folks at Engadget are experiencing the heartbreak of figuring out whether Wi-Fi is included. Their post (with its crossed-out lines and comments) is a pretty good record of how Kodak has mishandled this detail. In Jan. 2005, when this camera was announced, the price was set at $599 plus $99 for an optional (but essential) Wi-Fi card. I heard no more about pricing until yesterday, when Kodak's press release (linked above) noted that the Wi-Fi module was included.
However, as you visit the EasyShare-One pages at Kodak.com, you'll find a variety of statements like "requires optional Wi-Fi card" or "additional options" including Wi-Fi. I'll rely on the press release until I hear otherwise: "EASYSHARE-ONE model (US$599 MSRP, including the KODAK WI-FI® Card)."
Update: Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal finds the camera's Wi-Fi reliability low, and the computer-based software for transferring images required handholding and tweaks that he felt were beyond a reasonable expectation for a normal user. Battery life he rates as poor: one hour when using Wi-Fi, four when viewing stored photos, and 200 shots while taking pictures. Two batteries are included, which is unusual for a digital camera--probably in recognition of this short battery life.
Well, you didn't really think that the U.S. would actually hand control of the Internet over to the U.N. did you? Sheesh, which is the lesser of two evils there? It's like deciding if tweedle-dee or tweedle-dum should safegaurd the web...
"We will not agree to the U.N. taking over the management of the Internet," said Ambassador David Gross, the U.S. coordinator for international communications and information policy at the State Department. "Some countries want that. We think that's unacceptable."
Yeah, i'll just BET you find that unacceptable...
Later this week Skype for Windows version 1.4 will come out of beta. Largely it's about two key features. The first is Skype Forward while the second is the ability to personalize Skype while the last two are better Skype buttons for web sites and Skype Toolbars for Outlook and Internet Explorer.
Now what the first two mean are obvious. $$$$. Skype needs to start selling minutes in greater frequency and volume. Skype Forward eats up Skype Out minutes. The Personalization options are also for sale in the Skype store.
I had a chance to talk to the new CMO @ Skype Saul Klein. He revealed some very interesting facts during our Skype call this morning:
Global IM survey
Conducted by:Lightspeed Research
Sample Size:4,704 from US, Brazil, China, Poland and UK
Collected from: Aug 26th to Sept 6th
>> Skype is used by 25% of users primarily for business, compared to 16% for MSN
>> Skype users are more international than others, 85% have contacts living abroad compared to 51% for AOL users
>> Skype is used once or several times a day by 76% of users, compared to 65% by Yahoo! and 63% by MSN users
>> The usage gap is even larger for making calls, with 35% of Skype users doing this once or several times a day, compared to 29% for Yahoo! and 24% for MSN
>> 72% of Skype users consider call quality to be good to excellent, compared to 68% with Yahoo! and AOL and 63% with MSN
>> Skype’s users are keen to adopt new features, with 73% interested or very interested in adopting call forwarding compared to 59% from Yahoo! and MSN and 49% from AOL
>> Skype’s users are keen to adopt new features, with 79% interested or very interested in receiving calls from landlines compared to 64% from Yahoo!, 65% from MSN and 51% from AOL
Each day Skype is behaving more and more like a consumer brand. Yesterday they began using a PR firm, SparkPR which has very good credentials and a track record of professionalism.
Klein too has an impressive background, and word is he was a Niklas hire, not brought in by Meg @ Ebay.
Another example of why you can’t really trust software to tell you whether a website is dangerous or not. The Register reports that a Trusted search software labels fraud site as 'safe':
Digital certificate firm GeoTrust's launch of a search engine with built in trust features this week has been marred by the classification of a phishing site as genuine. Powered by Ask Jeeves, GeoTrust TrustWatch search aims to protect users against fraudulent behaviour and phishing attacks by giving web sites a verification rating. It's a laudable aim, but the classification of a recently created phishing site as "verified as safe" raises serious doubts about the effectiveness of the technology. Such incorrect classifications create a false sense of security that can only play into the hands of would-be fraudsters.
As I’ve explained elsewhere, it’s more dangerous to offer a service that claims to warn you about phishing–related and other dodgy websites if you can’t guarantee 100% success, as it merely lulls a user into a false sense of security. Another reason why these things won’t work is the false positive, which EarthLink found to its (temporary) cost.
With Rollyo, you create search engines that search only the sites you specify. Say, for example, you've got a a favorite group of sites like Lifehacker.com, 43folders, ask.metafilter.com and so forth. Build a new "search roll" by listing up to 25 sites. You can then use that search roll to limit search terms to just those sites.
After building a search roll, you can "publish" it to share it with other users or choose Explore to see what kinds of custom search engines other people have built. Already the most popular search rolls include Media Buzz, Digital Cameras, and Parenthood.
There were some curious movements in the eBay stock just before the Skype deal was announced. Hitchhiker’s Guide to 650 points out
When the rumors came out last thursday on the Skype acquisition, eBay stock dropped 3.8%. With 1.35B shares outstanding and each share losing $1.53, eBay lost about 2.07B in market cap. With the overall market being flat that day, the 2.07B lost in market cap can probably be attributed to the Skype rumours.However, a post over on Skype forums says that the leak might have come from a cabbie in New York who overheard the eBay Executives. And you thought they didn’t understand english….
It means that the traders on Wall Street knew way before the “tech crowd” (as we debated the merits of the acquisition) that the acquisition was a foregone conclusion by Thursday closing. With little downward movement in the eBay stock price today (except at opening) the traders essentially covered their shorts/puts early in the morning, taking profits before Meg talks up the acquisition (and the eBay stock goes up)…..
The question I have is who leaked the rumors? Someone at Merrill (eBay advisor), Morgan Stanley (Skype advisor), Skype, and maybe eBay must have really lose lips for traders to be so certain that this transaction would happen.
I kid you not — the week before the announcement, we received a comment in our Customer Support from some NYC taxi driver about eBay acquiring Skype, and we downplayed this as a rumor, which is what it still was for us at that time. The taxi driver replied “look gentlemen, you may disregard it all you want, but I know the facts since I just gave a ride to some eBay execs who discussed exactly what would be happening”. Can’t validate if the story is really true, but looking back, it turned out to be true and funny nevertheless.
To me, this more approximates the way I read a print newspaper, actually it's the way I wish I could read a print newspaper -- instead of having to go to the stories, they come to me. This makes it easier for me to use my brain's powerful scanning mechanism.So I use Bloglines in "river of news" mode, which is invoked by the doLoadAll function that's attached to the n Updated Feeds link. You can make this the default using a simple Greasemonkey script from Mark Pilgrim, by the way. But note that if you do, an instance of Bloglines left running in one browser will consume all unread items, and leave none for another instance running elsewhere. ...
Via Siva Vaidhyanathan, Andrew Raff's round-up of weblog commentary on the Google Print library lawsuit, highlighting the sharp differences of opinion among people who typically agree. To wit:
It is 1976 all over again. Then, like now, content owners turned to the courts to stop an extraordinary new technology. Then, like now, copyright is the weapon of choice. But then, like now, the content owners of course don’t really want the court to stop the new technology. Then, like now, they simply want to be paid for the innovations of someone else. Then, like now, the content owners ought to lose.
gle’s use is fair use. It would be in any case, but the total disaster of a property system that the Copyright Office has produced reinforces the conclusion that Google’s use is fair use. And for all those people who devoted years of their life to defend the right to p2p file-sharing — here’s your chance to show what this battle is really about:
Google wants to do nothing more to 20,000,000 books than it does to the Internet: it wants to index them, and it offers anyone in the index the right to opt out. If it is illegal to do that with 20,000,000 books, then why is it legal to do it with the Internet? The “authors’” claims, if true, mean Google itself is illegal. Common sense, or better, commons sense, revolts at the idea. And so too should you.
...and Siva himself:
...[This] whole thing looks like a dark, gathering storm. It's not just Google betting the company. It's Google gambling with all of our rights under copyright -- both as copyright producers and users. Many good things could be washed away. This case strikes at the heart of both Google and copyright. It's not some clever fair use algorithm. It's not just one in a string of cases that will slightly expand or slightly constrict users' rights (and, please remember, users are not a party to this suit). It's about the very defining essense of copyright and about corporate copying on a massive and unprecedented scale.
We agree on the stakes; we disagree on the tactics. How do we protect users’ rights and the public domain?
at the public domain cannot sue to protect itself. (Note the echo of environmental law.) Individual users can sue to protect their interests in the public domain, but we’ve seen first-hand the limits of that strategy. Regardless of your view of the merits of Eldred v. Ashcroft, it was pretty difficult for Eldred’s legal team to get more than 2 members of the Supreme Court to see why any of this mattered.
The next best strategy is to enable proxies to stand for the public domain. Proxies are imperfect in lots of ways, but one thing they have — especially if they happen to be large corporate entities — is a business model that depends on access to information.
...[If] we recognize Google as a proxy, then I continue to believe that sometimes you fight the fights that need fighting, not just the fights you can win.
[...]
I haven’t been an academic so long that I’ve lost the litigator’s sense that sometimes, a case deserves to be litigated and maybe even tried. I think that this is one.
I was speaking with some folks in our Washington D.C. office and they gave me scoop on the latest installment of Oracle's Dirty Tricks Tour 2005, an effort by Larry and Company to derail SAP's dominance in Federal government and Department of Defense business. This rather pathetic effort is based on the fact that SAP is a German headquartered company (who knew, if you walked through our Palo Alto campus you might think we were an Indian or Chinese company) and the second well worn observation that German Chancellor Shroeder opposed the Coalition's war in Iraq. Their conclusion is that a German company is therefore no longer fit to provide software to the DoD, go figure.
Now it's one thing to switch from Bordeaux to some domestic wine, but another thing altogether to stop using the software that the military runs their operations on (and I shouldn't have to remind anyone that U.S. military logistics is hands down the best in the world, in no small part because of the technology they have deployed). More to the point, SAP is a global company with almost 6,000 employees right here in the U.S.A., and many of those SAP employees don't have time to consider German politics because they are too damn busy working hard every day building and delivering software applications for the U.S. military, Homeland Security, DLA, and a myriad of other agencies and acronyms.
More troubling about these insinuations is that they obscure the fact that Oracle itself has been selling software to Syria and Iran, 2/3 of the Axis of Evil, through third parties. Oracle has a strong presence in the Middle East through a partnership with Global Technology Services. Oracle maintains a listed sales contact for Syria, where it closed a major deal with Syria Telecom in 2004. In Iran, Oracle serves the market through a local partner, Basa; it is estimated that Oracle has approximately 5 Iranian customers, with the most publicized implementation being at Esfahan Zobe Ahan, a steel production company. Oracle is a visible brand presence in Iranian newspapers. So if anyone wants to have hearings in Congress to evaluate the patriotic inclinations of software vendors, bring it on.
Link: The Center for Security Policy.
At the very least, the Marines could use help from the Air Force if it comes to blows with Iran. That may only be possible, however, if someone decides our airmen - unlike their Army and Navy counterparts -- should be supported by software that doesn't give Germany a veto.
You know, sometimes we lose things here and there — a key, the toll slip on the interstate (damn!), our wallet
(double damn!). But the U.S. military — they’ve one-upped us by losing some armed attack dolphins. Apparently 36 of the
U.S. Navy’s trained cetaceans have gone missing in the Gulf of Mexico, could be wearing special harnesses carrying
“toxic dart” guns (can’t be good), and have been trained to shoot at divers in wetsuits simulating terrorists in
exercises. Their coastal compound was breached during Hurricane Katrina, sweeping many of the mammals out to sea, and
though the Navy isn’t confirming it, sources close to naval intelligence confirm that perhaps now is not the time to
take that underwater pleasure diving excursion in the Gulf — not that it’s exactly the place to be, anyhow.
[Via Futurismic]
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There was an interesting presentation by Bryan Lewis, chief chip analyst at Gartner Dataquest, at the recent Infineon media and analyst conference. His presentation and discussion with Robert LeFort, president of Infineon North America, indicates a trend against fabless chipmakers. [Infineon is a founding sponsor of Silicon Valley Watcher.]
For more than 20 years the rise of the fabless chipmaker has been a seemingly unstoppable trend. Fabs these days cost $2bn or more and are difficult to operate and you have to run them at near full capacity otherwise you lose lots of money.
It makes perfect sense to outsource the manufacture to foundries, which focus on perfecting the many manufacturing processes during the three month long production process required to create today's advanced chips.
But many chipmakers were reluctant to go fabless. In the early 1990s, T.J. Rodgers, head of Cypress Semiconductor, said "Real men have fabs," and this phrase was taken up by others, including Motorola, Advanced Micro Devices and Intel. It represented a catchy backlash against the fabless trend.
However, it is is difficult to argue against the economics of the fabless business model. A catchy phrase doesn't change the fact that fabs are extremely expensive and difficult to run effectively.
Why outlay more than $2bn in capital costs to build your own fab when you can email your chip design to a foundry in Taiwan or Singapore and collect your chips 90 days later?
Fabless and fabulous
That's why fabless chipmakers have done very well. For example, Qualcomm and Broadcom are fabless and are among the top ten chipmakers worldwide by revenue. And there are hundreds of other fabless chipmakers.
Owning your own fabs is something that Infineon has continued to do despite the strong argument for a fabless business model. Intel, AMD, IBM and others also build and operate their own fabs. And many of the chipmakers partner on fabs, or jointly work on research projects developing new manufacturing processes.
Now, as we push Moore's Law ever onwards, the pendulum seems to be swinging towards fab owners. What has changed is that there is a strong link developing between the design of the chip and the manufacturing process.
Each fab makes its chips slightly different from other facilities. It is all partly black magic in that the settings on the many machines make a big difference in how many good chips can be cut out of a silicon wafer.
This connection between design and the manufacturing process is much tighter these days than ever before. And optimizing chip designs to fit your fab is becoming a competitive advantage.
However, fabless chip companies mostly use design tools that do not take into account the many subtleties of the manufacturing process at their foundry. Yet the atomic scale geometries of today's chips are affected by tiny variations in the production process.
This means that those chipmakers that own and operate fabs will be at a competitive advantage over those that don't. They will get much better yields of good chips to bad chips. T.J. Rodgers was right [eventually:-) ].
I've run across many a speculation on what levers and dials the folks at Google are pulling behind the AdWords curtain. This is another one, and begs the question: can we have a bit more transparency?
One of my readers makes his living selling goods over the Internet, and his sole means of obtaining customers is through Google AdWords. His business is robust for a one-man operation and he makes a good living. Knowing the actual numbers, I would say he makes a VERY good living, which shows the effectiveness of Google and AdWords as an advertising medium.
can never make enough money, it seems, so this reader decided to do some research to see if he could improve his results by modifying this and that. He decided that the best way to conduct this research was not by altering variables on his existing, very profitable web site, but by creating a separate site purely to be used for these tests.
Clearly ,this is a behavior that the big brains of Google did not expect.
I am going to race over to Pubsub as soon as I hit publish on this and take a look at a service that is supposed to be rolling out today. They are going to be releasing a tool that allows you to measure blog effectiveness by category. Pretty powerful stuff and could help some of you attract specific advertisers and really get the ad rates you deserver for your targeted audiences. [Pubsub] [ClickZ]
Kevin Werbach offers an explanation for the emerging world:
Something tells me the model of the Internet and communications world we've followed since the early 1990s may be falling appart.
at connectivity, applications, and content are distinct technical, business, and regulatory spheres. I'm one of the culprits, as an advocate of the "layered model" for Internet policy. But if you go back to Mary Meeker's seminal "Internet Report" in 1995 (written, she told me, because so many prospective investors she met on the Netscape IPO road show were completely clueless about the Internet), you'll see the same pattern: infrastructure businesses (ISPs), application businesses (search, advertising, and e-commerce), and content businesses. The only company that seriously spans all those markets today is AOL Time Warner... and look where it got them.
Soon, though, most of the major Internet players are likely to be hybrids of two or more layers. Google and eBay will be infrastructure and applications; Yahoo! and News Corp. will be applications and content; telephone, wireless, and cable operators will be infrastructure nad content; Microsoft and Time Warner will span all three levels. And that's just what we've seen announced so far. In this market, everyone is in play.
...
It does sound as though all of us excited about the "Web 2.0" vision of open standards built on top of open standards, facilitating mashups and lightweight innovations all around, might want to question our assumptions. Yes, that is where we have been heading, but it might not be where we ultimately go. If GoogleNet, SkypeBay, MSAOL, Telco Fiberia, and CableLand emerge as competing integrated fiefdoms, we'll see something more like the early 90's online services, albeit on a much bigger stage.
More heartwarming news China: China sets new rules on Internet news, is a story in the Washington Post that has these small snippets of what the "new rules" for internet news mean:
"The state bans the spreading of any news with content that is against national security and public interest," the official Xinhua news agency said in announcing the new rules, which took effect immediately.
The news agency did not detail the rules, but said Internet news sites must "be directed toward serving the people and socialism and insist on correct guidance of public opinion for maintaining national and public interests."
Lovely...
I received a mail from Rob W. - creator of Feedshot who tipped me off to his new service, FeedShot. Looks pretty cool, and thought it definitely worth a mention.
While submissions to search engines is not necessarily a new idea, I haven't seen too many for blog search engines...and hey, it's free! I'm sure he'll be adding to it, so it's certainly a nice site to watch if you do any type of blog promotion.
I've just launched a service called FeedShot that submits an RSS or Atom feed to 17 blog search engines. It covers all the major engines (DayPop, Feedster, IceRocket, and Technorati), and the list is expanding every week. The service is free, and it's set up to do the initial submission for a feed, rather than as a pinging service. The best part is a report indicating which submissions were successful, which failed, and which were duplicates.
Newsweek has an article on the eBay/Skype deal. What's interesting is that Meg Whitman used the regular phone for the interview.
I guess she heard what happened at VON.
Techdirt gives an update on the progress of reforming the 1996 Telecom Act in the USA:
Now, the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce committee introduced their own thoughts on reforming the Telco Act of 1996. Again, this bill seems to have a lot of good ideas in it. It takes the states out of the process (which the states will hate), and gives the regulatory power to the feds. This is a good thing, in that it keeps providers from having to obey fifty different sets of laws in order to offer nationwide service.
I don’t agree. One lesson from living in the European Union is that competition between regulatory dominions and tax laws is a good thing. Much as the eurocrats hate it, ideas like the flat tax would be stuck in academia if countries like Estonia hadn’t got in there first and done it before it could be ‘harmonised’ away.
Fixed connectivity is, by definition, a local issue. I don’t see why any supranational or federal rules need be made, beyond ensuring adequate ability of companies to compete across across state boundaries. You need local presence to create the local access network, and you shouldn’t be surprised if you have to adhere to the local rulebook.
Far better to have many experiments in unbundling, municipal networking, etc. and see what really works. Why create a single point of failure in advancing your communications infrastructure by allowing lobbyists to buy laws to outlaw progress nationwide?
The only market that requires contiguous, “flat” regulation is mobile connectivity. Note I say connectivity, not telephony, which is an application. Here, the “50 sets of rules” problem becomes more of an issue; users physically move around between jurisdictions, and it’s important that network architecture is uniform. You shouldn’t, for example, need to block access to smut for just Utah customers whilst having to simultaneously support net neutrality rules for Californians standing next to them.
The applications are better off being subject to jurisdictional competition. Just as American companies like to incorporate in Delaware, and European ones in the UK and Luxembourg, we should allow application services to be governed by a jurisdiction of their choice. Regulatory rules come with costs and benefits, and it should be the end customer who gets to choose the right balance.
Posted by Martin at 10:33 PMBrilliant. Three thumbs up.
Richard Stastny @ September 25, 2005 03:46 PM:but not new. What you are basically proposing is the layers model of regulation (e.g. the MCI proposal from Whit). European regulators will like the idea to give up all powers and be reduced to LLU issues.
What is new in you proposal is to layers also the responsibility of the regulators:
L0 (ducts and right-of-way - see Brough Turners presentation at the VON) is on the village level
L1 . disctrict level
up to
L7 - applications (= regulating Google, eBay, etc) is on the UN or ITU level ;-)
please would like to come to the program and please kindly help me to know how i'm going to do,and more over pleaseif there any thing that i should do,please let me know,thank you so mcuh..
Following the Web Accelerator debacle, Google wants another crack at your entire internet traffic. This time, its through the Google Secure Access client.
Located at wifi.google.com, GSA connects you to a Google-run Virtual Private Network. Your internet traffic becomes encryptedwhen you send it out, decrypted by Google, the requested data downloaded by Google, encrypted and sent to you, and decrypted on your maching. This has the effect of protecting your traffic data from others who may want to access it. GSA's FAQ describes it as a Google engineer's 20% project.
From the FAQ:
Google Secure Access is a new product that is only available at certain locations in the San Francisco Bay Area. We are constantly working to improve this product.
A regional test deployment. Add this to the GoogleNet bids and you've got some interesting afoot at the Circle K, huh?
Homeland security folks might be based in Washington DC, but they are not doing a good job of monitoring the government-wireless networks which are open for anyone to peruse, according to Boston-based Newbury Networks. They went on a war drive and found in-securities, literally at every corner. Amongst those were Price WaterhouseCoopers, the U.S. Senate and the Department of the Interior.
On an average, wireless devices from nearby offices abandoned their own access points every 42 seconds and associated themselves with Newbury’s temporary AP. Over the course of some three hours, a total of 213 devices sought to associate themselves with Newbury’s “honey pot” access point.
This was possible because of something called the promiscuous clients. By naming their access point, “linksys,” they suddenly had a lot of networks/devices connecting to their access point.
And using a default setting in Microsoft Windows XP, an individual using an unapproved access point could bridge his wireless device to a promiscuous client device. If that promiscuous client were plugged into an office network, the outsider’s computer could gain access to the enterprise’s computer network as if it were actually the compromised device.
Force 10 Networks, the heavyweight in the 10 gigabit networks space, got some serious cash infusion today - about $40 million - which brings the total to about $300 million in five rounds of funding, with hopes to go public next year. Much of the money is going to be used to compete with Big Daddy of switches, Cisco Systems. It has a lot of traction with some heavy hitters - like CERN.
Till recently, most metro networks, you know the kinds that run in circles around big cities or underneath Manhattan, operate at 2.5 Gb/s. But the demands on these networks are only going to increase as all sorts of stuff - video, voice and data - starts cramming the pipes. Many believe that metro networks will head to 10 GB speeds soon enough. However, one thing which remains to be seen: how quickly do the prices of 10 GB gear comedown, to ignite the market.
GNOM’s latest genetic network explorer combines the oracle (circular) and landscape (nodal) interfaces to represent the structural description and functional relations of Escherichia Coli genes.
Copyright may be the 800-pound gorilla of the Internet, but there's a brand-new pseudo copyright in the works capable of swallowing massive chunks of the public domain, bones and all.
As I understand it, the new right -- or rather, set of rights -- would give companies fresh exclusive rights on top of any existing rights for anything they "webcast" (that is, transmit by web servers over the Internet and other networks). In other words, a company could take a movie that's fallen into the public domain, webcast it, and keep the general public, to whom it belongs, from recording it. It could webcast Creative Commons-licensed songs that people have specifically earmarked for easy digital distribution and remixing, then demand that no one touch the webcast. And there is no additional creative effort necessary to accrue these rights. All you have to do is feed any combination of sound or images through a web server, and you're golden.
If you've been following the goings-on at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), you won't be surprised to learn that this new right is being negotiated behind closed doors at the urging of Yahoo and a handful of other companies, without any public debate and over the repeated protests of public interest groups and webcasters who have specifically rejected this new "protection." As CPTech points out in a new letter to members of Congress, this is a prime example US trade policy completely captured by a small group of corporate lobbyists. After all, how else could a set of rights this powerful slip under the radar -- especially when there has been, as CPTech notes,
1. No analysis of how US law would have to change in the treaty passed.
2. No analysis of the unintended consequences of creating a new right of transmission for the Internet.
3. No analysis of the impact of the new right on copyright owners.
4. No analysis or concern about how the new IPR right would affect the orphan works problem.
5. No analysis of the impact of the webcasting treaty on podcasting.
6. No analysis of whether the treaty language would unwittingly create a property right to persons operating peer-to-peer networks or search engines.
Two quick recommendations before I go: When the treaty was released in draft form last year, Ernie Miller wrote an exhaustive analysis/critique that helps explain why these additional rights are "bad, bad, bad" -- check it out here. And don't miss Cory's post from last week, WIPO wants to give webcasters the right to steal from public domain, Creative Commons and GPL.
A new worm, named P2Load.A, is in the wild. Once infected, users of Google's search engine are redirected to a spoofed site in Germany that looks just like the powerhouse search engine's main page. Spoofed search results include new, top-of-list links to advertisers who are not a member of Google's desired advertiser list.
Following up on my GoogleNet piece, Google is now seeking bids for a nationwide optical network. IP Media Monitor has details here. IP Democracy reports…
The vendors who have seen Google’s fiber network RFP say that the nature of the network can really only mean that Google ultimately hopes to push massive amounts of voice, video and data close to the end user.
IEEE Spectrum has a theme issue centered on enterprise custom software. failure - the kind that bankrupt companies and cost governments and whole industries tens of billions of dollars a year. Companies and governments undertake these customized IT ventures to make themselves run more efficiently and more effectively. Some of these projects are huge and extremely complex. It's now common to see multibillion-dollar efforts that take years or even decades to complete. And when that software is good, it can transform entire organizations, as companies like Wal-Mart and Dell Computer have shown.But when it's bad, it's horrid. Nobody really knows how much is wasted. In the United States, a conservative estimate is US $60 billion to $75 billion dollars every year.Future software failures are everywhere in the making. The FBI's replacement for the Virtual Case File system is on deck. The push to automate and digitize medical records looks like another breeding ground for fatal bugs. The cases discussed include the hall of shame and Sainsbury's half - a-billion doallr failed IT investment.
atgory :Software Failures We have been covering about increasing competition being faced by RIM and the Squeeze on RIM. eWeek reports that Nokia is all set to launch a wireless e-mail access platform that could provide the first real challenge to RIM's BlackBerry Enterprise Server. The Nokia Business Center is a behind-the-firewall software platform that lets customers read and delete corporate e-mail on their wireless devices. The main difference between it and RIM's platform is that Nokia is not charging a client license for basic e-mail access. Nokia officials said the company is targeting customers that want to deploy wireless e-mail to employees "beyond the corner office." Many BlackBerry deployments go beyond that already, but licensing costs are a common complaint. I am an active Blackberry user – but the software and the handsets have significant performance & features related issues. While I certainly like using the blackberry’s pervasive connect and pushmail abilities, several times I feel that we are all being used by RIM as beta testers. Whenever I go international roaming during my frequent travels , usage of blackberry is never incident free and I can be straight – the user interface and handset features definitely SUCKS.
Nokia’s solution is also expected to be cheap – one another common grouse against RIM – Nokia says that its Business Center also differs from RIM's BES in that it does not send corporate data through a NOC (network operating center) the way BES does. Customers need complete control about data that travels with features like data transfer behind-the-firewall without a third-party NOC. Its earlier Nokia One was a Web-based solution that required customers to have Web browser access on their phones, whereas the Business Center works more like push e-mail, although not exactly like it. This time around, Nokia explains, a client establishes a GPRS session, the GPRS network assigns a dynamic IP address and then the client transmits the address to the server. If the client loses the connection, it refreshes the IP address when the connection is re-established, and then the client transmits the new address back to t
