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Bluetooth 3.0 coming next week

Publié: avril 13, 2009, 11:10pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
One week from tomorrow, Bluetooth 3.0 will be unleashed upon the wireless world.
The Bluetooth Special Interest Group confirmed to Phone Scoop late last week that next week's All Hands Meeting in Tokyo will be official unveiling of the updated Bluetooth spec.
Bluetooth technology is as convenient as it is ubiquitous, that is to say, it's quite common (installed base: more than 1.5 billion devices) and moderately useful (it has five different categories of use: headset, printing, transfer, music, human input devices). The 3.0 update to the 11-year-old short-range wireless standard, however, will improve upon one of the critical shortcomings of prior versions: its transfer speeds.
Since the Bluetooth 2.1 standard, the Bluetooth SIG has touted the upcoming availability of a technology called Alternate MAC/PHY (AMP). Simply put, it lets Bluetooth piggyback on Wi-Fi. AMP architecture uses Bluetooth to discover a compatible Wi-Fi peer device, authenticate it, then initiate a Wi-Fi connection on 802.11 radios if high throughput is needed. The trick is that it will allow an on-demand Wi-Fi connection while maintaining the low power consumption of Bluetooth, establishing a dynamic, high-speed, personal area network.
This feature will be a cornerstone in the Bluetooth 3.0 specification, and the a big question that will be answered at the AHM in Tokyo next week will be whether devices already equipped with both Bluetooth and 802.11 will be able to perform a firmware upgrade to incorporate the AMP architecture.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Rather than submit to new Korean law, YouTube turns off user uploads

Publié: avril 13, 2009, 10:39pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
In the midst of a Draconian new South Korean law passed April 1 that could force some ISPs to enable lawmakers to suspend their customers' Internet accounts or face fines, Google's YouTube division has turned off some features that could, if misused under the new law, land its customers in prison.
The South Korean National Assembly narrowly passed a sweeping new law whose purpose was to create a system of accountability for the nation's Internet users. While ostensibly the new law is designed to discourage piracy, Korean journalists such as Korea Times' Kim Tong-hyung provide evidence that the law's true purpose may be to enable government authorities to keep tabs on all kinds of online behavior, including political and social networking.
The new law, whose translated bill title was the Orwellian sounding "Comprehensive Measures for Information Protection on the Internet," literally makes it a crime for someone to post defamatory information against another person, should that person register a complaint. In order to make the law workable, the country is instituting a "real-names" login system for all its ISPs, in an attempt to create some kind of audit trail leading every kind of transaction back to a traceable source. All this, ostensibly, in the name of protecting piracy.
The English-language Korean news provider The Hankyoreh quotes the Internet division chief for the Korea Communications Commission, Lim Cha-shik, as heralding the law's passage as a way to calm citizens' fears "about an increase in the disadvantages associated with Internet use, such as personal information leaks and the spread of harmful information."
Rather than find itself in the middle of a future political and civil rights debacle with another Southeast Asian nation, Google yesterday decided it would suspend the ability for its Korean users to upload any videos, or post any kind of commentary whatsoever alongside videos. The changes were announced last Thursday on the YouTube Korea blog.
Also that day, the company's VP for global communications, Rachel Whetstone, posted a lengthy explanation, which also amounted to something of an apology. Translated into English, it loses a lot of its grace, although it quite clearly says that Google does not wish to be used as an instrument for governments' dissemination of information about its users.
Whetstone also called into question the need for governments to monitor certain categories of communications, noting that while Germany has banned the practice of Nazism, it encourages communication about Nazism in order for citizens to be conscientious of how evil the practice actually is.
This afternoon, Google sent Betanews an English-language human translation of the company's blog post, which includes this: "We have a bias in favor of people's right to free expression in everything we do. We are driven by a belief that more information generally means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual. We believe that it is important for free expression that people have the right to remain anonymous if they choose."
The Hankyoreh also did a much better job of translating Whetstone's Korean statement than Google's automated service, citing her as having written, "Google thinks the freedom of expression is most important value to uphold on the Internet. We concluded in the end that it is impossible to provide benefits to internet users while observing this country's law because the law does not fall in line with Google's principles."
Users may still be able to overcome YouTube's roadblocks -- if they want to take the risk -- by changing their country of origin in their profiles to any other country. A YouTube blog page actually explains this. However, users may still be taking a risk, especially if the new real-names login system takes account of uploads at the ISP level. It doesn't seem likely that such a bypass would completely absolve YouTube, under the new law, from conspiracy to commit an insult.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Amazon, where being gay makes you invisible

Publié: avril 13, 2009, 9:33pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
What's being called a "glitch" on Amazon.com has exclusively affected books dealing with gay and lesbian themes.
On one side, Amazon's Kindle 2 is the central element in the civil rights conflict between authors and those with reading disabilities. On the other side, Amazon.com is now accused of de-ranking and re-classifying content as "adult literature" simply because it contains homosexual themes or characters. Specifically, the complaint is that listings for some books with homosexual content are not displaying comparative sales rankings.
Amazon's Director of Corporate Communications Patty Smith issued a statement yesterday that said, "There was a glitch in our systems and it's being fixed. We're working to correct the problem as quickly as possible."
Calling it a "glitch" caused immediate fallout, as bloggers discovered that titles that were removed from sales rankings did not include actual adult literature, and instead affected books with central themes of coming to terms with one's sexuality like James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and Paul Monette's Becoming a Man. Even titles such as Virginia Woolf's Orlando, which is a satire of gender roles in Victorian literature, and the biography of comedienne and talk show host Ellen Degeneres were included.
In Betanews tests this afternoon, we checked a handful of books with very mature themes, including the classic Naked Lunch by William Burroughs. Its listing contained a sales ranking. We also checked some titles which clearly passed the Justice Potter Stewart test for pornography (no, we won't provide links). Those too contained sales rankings. (Next time our spouses come near our computers, we'll have an excuse..."It's a Betanews test, dear.")
But several very legitimate, non-pornographic works of fiction with gay and lesbian themes had omitted their sales rankings. And searches of author names typed into the Search field also failed to turn up listings for non-pornographic lesbian-themed material, even though that material actually does exist in the catalog. However, when that material is located in the catalog by other means, clicking on the author's name does turn up a list of all available works from that author.
The specificity of this "glitch" has caused many to suspect it was an act of homophobic censorship.
Of course, this suspicion is not helped by the the fact that the first titles returned by a query of "homosexuality" on Amazon include A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality, and 101 Frequently Asked Questions about Homosexuality, in which a "former homosexual" uses biblical scripture to answer those questions.
While no unified action against Amazon has taken place yet, individual protests to the glitch have been wide and diverse. A petition objecting to Amazon's treatment of the situation has gained more than 13,600 signatures, with a goal of 100,000, and a number of Twitter groups such as #amazonfail, and #glitchmyass have popped up.
The nation's largest independent book retailer Powells.com reacted to the news yesterday via Twitter, saying, "That certainly is disturbing. Fortunately, Powell's will never censor this material." Similarly, leading booksellers BN.com and Borders.com have not de-ranked the titles that were affected in the Amazon glitch.
Author Craig Seymour says he has been dealing with this issue since February, when his Amazon Sales Rank disappeared, so that when a user would search for his book by name, nothing would come up. He then received a notification that said, "The sales rank was not displayed for the following reasons: The ISBN #1416542051 was classified as an Adult product." Seymour says that his book was effectively "coded out of circulation."
7:45 pm EDT April 13, 2008 - In a statement to the Seattle P-I this afternoon, Amazon spokesperson Drew Herdener acknowledged the cataloging error once again, but added that it was inaccurate to characterize the problem as being limited to gay and lesbian titles. "In fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica," Herdener wrote.
We happened to test a few book titles in some of those other categories (again, with apologies to our respective spouses), and did not notice search rankings being omitted from the non-pornographic, heterosexually themed titles we chose.
[Scott M. Fulton, III contributed some testing to this article.]
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
IE8 automatic update option likely to begin next week

Publié: avril 13, 2009, 6:13pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
In a heads-up message on the company's IE blog over the Easter weekend, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 lead program manager Eric Hebenstreit warned users that as soon as next week, some Windows users will be automatically given the option of downloading IE8. It will not be a massive land rush, and as Hebenstreit repeated, the company's new Web browser will not automatically install itself.
"IE8 will not automatically install on machines," the program manager wrote, emphasizing what will be Microsoft's general policy in this new and more careful era of interoperability. "Users must opt-in to install IE8."
So although users with Automatic Updates turned on may receive something next week, that something will not be the Web browser itself. Instead, it will be a "High Priority" (for XP and Windows Server 2003) or "Important" (for Vista and Windows Server 2008) "Welcome to Internet Explorer 8" message, giving the user the option of bothering her about the matter later, installing IE8 now, or not installing IE8 at all. Automatic Update won't bother the user about it again, Hebenstreit wrote, though she'll still be able to install IE8 manually if she changes her mind later.
Last January, Microsoft began distributing for larger enterprises an IE8 Blocker Toolkit, a policy-based mechanism enabling admins to prevent their clients' automatic updates from receiving the Welcome Message package if they elect to remain with IE7 (or earlier). However, general users need not download this toolkit if they want to block the automatic update themselves. As the instructions reveal, the policy simply creates a new Registry key, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Setup\8.0\DoNotAllowIE80. If that key exists and its value is set to 1, then automatic distribution of the IE8 Welcome package will be blocked, according to the company.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009