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A cultural event this weekend makes the case for geek culture

Publié: mai 22, 2009, 11:53pm CEST par Angela Gunn

By Angela Gunn, Betanews
Memorial Day weekend starts off summer in Geek America, when the human impulse to be out and about runs headlong into the common refrain of THE YELLOW FACE! IT BURNS! IT BURNS, MY PRECIOUS! Here in Seattle, where the geeks roam freely and the Yellow Face more or less leaves us alone most of the time, many of our kind will make for Folklife, a four-day arts festival held downtown.
The relationship in the geek (nerd, dweeb) community between gearheadedness and a love of Ye Olden Tymes is tenuous in the 21st century. Years ago, Ren Fayre attendance, a fondness for filk, and a tolerance for girls wearing twirly dresses and flower garlands was more or less required for admittance to the computer lab. Cyberpunk, thankfully, drove a wedge into that relationship; steampunk attempts to re-knit it somewhat, but these days a working knowledge of morris dancing or ownership of a 20-sided die is strictly optional.
Normally I'd avoid Folklife completely, having deep antipathies to crowds, the Yellow Face, and much of the patchouli-stink cosplay that events like Folklife seem to encourage. You say you're doing a showcase with your jug band? Great -- in that case, you are allowed to wear the stovepipe hat and britches and braces, strictly to get in the mood for your performance. But you, lady in bellydancing garb -- you're not performing? You just thought it would be reasonable to bring that powder-pale gut outside and jingle at me while I'm trying to overpay for a lemonade? HOURI FAIL.
But I may go this year, because this year we've got a chiptune showcase scheduled. Chiptune, if you're not yet in tune, is music written for synthesis by sound chips -- think old-school videogames. Very squared-off sound waves. Very chirpy. Very danceable, if you're into that sort of thing. 8bitcollective is your first stop for self-education.
The 8 Bit Showcase isn't apt to look like anything else happening at Folklife. (When they say "dance music" at Folklife they usually mean something that was handed down from the foothill villages of North Obscuristan and authentically performed only by left-handed men in pantaloons.) Chiptune hasn't got some venerable history of survival and emigration, though most of us who survived the '80s get a little nostalgic for the bright and sunny home country when the blipping and beeping begins.
Protip: Like most homelands one leaves, the 80s wasn't really that bright and sunny. (Where I grew up, the 80s looked a lot like 2009 does in most of the country. I digress.) But the current artists working in chiptune, like the jug bands and morris dancers and céilidh musicians elsewhere at the festival, extract the good stuff and make it fun to identify with the subculture you're from, or to drink in the vibe of one you find you like. At which point, I guess, I've even got to give Miss Pale Belly Lady some respect, and space on the dance floor.
For the rest of the weekend? I haven't got any specific suggestions this week; Memorial Day is the traditional beginning of a seasonal lull in tech, and though that's not as true as it used to be, we all need a little breather right about now. As for myself, I've got a list of necessary work to be done on all four of the major computers lurking in my home office, plus a hospice-care plan for a long-suffering Maxtor external HDD that deserves to end its days with dignity. Naturally I'll also be spending a certain amount of time ignoring Terminator Salvation; after all, more Americans these days play videogames than watch movies anyway. An iced latte may become integral to my plans at some point.
And (if I understand next week's schedule correctly) I'll be enjoying my last weekend of sleep and sanity before we here at Betanews launch a project that'll pretty much redefine my work weeks for quite a while to come -- hence the scramble to get right with the computers. I'd tell you more but then they'd have to kill me, and that'll only further postpone the launch. Let your geek flag fly and have an excellent long weekend.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
The future of Real DVD Jukebox hangs on one judge's decision

Publié: mai 22, 2009, 8:21pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
In 2007, RealNetworks began to develop a set-top DVD archiver/player similar to Kaleidescape under the project name "Facet." It was this idea that spawned the creation of RealDVD, a piece of software that allows copy-protected DVDs to be copied, compressed, and saved on a user's hard drive. However, that software was temporarily pulled off the market thanks to a copyright infringement suit from the DVD Copy Control Association and six major Hollywood studios (Disney, Paramount/Viacom, Sony, 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Bros.).
The suit began last October and has involved relentless mudslinging between the parties. In the beginning, the studios claimed the product should have been called "StealDVD," and that it "clearly violate[s] the law." Most recently, RealNetworks called the six Hollywood studios "an illegal cartel," and charged them with antitrust violations.
RealNetworks did acknowledge the DVD Copy Control Association's initial concern, and has said that its products could be exploited by those who "rent, rip, and return" movies; that is, those who rent DVDs and copy the rental for their own collections. In the company's written testimony, it said, "RealNetworks discourages such conduct and warns consumers that the product is not to be used to copy DVDs that the user does not own." The company suggested that it should be the studios' responsibility to mark discs sold to the rental channel, and without studio cooperation, there is no way a piece of software can tell if existing discs have been purchased or simply rented, and that CSS is so broken that there are literally hundreds of different programs that circumvent it to facilitate copying.
The company maintains, though, that there's really no reason why a DVD owner should not be able to copy their movies for their own use, and that in the company's set-top box, those copies are locked and safe from illegal trade.
Yesterday, at the most recent hearing for the case, the MPAA argued a single copy, no matter what the purpose, is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The only backup copy Congress imagined, MPAA attorney Bart Williams said, is a pure archival backup copy that goes unplayed until the first copy is defunct.
Williams also pointed out that Real will be violating the same DMCA rules that helped it win its 1999 suit against Streambox, a set of devices which allowed users to bypass the copy protection on Real's streaming RealAudio files.
Upon closure of that case, RealNetworks' then-Vice President Alex Alban said "[The Court] upheld the basic principle that it is illegal to circumvent copy protection mechanisms in order to record streams against the wishes of copyright holders."
For now, the case between RealNetworks and the six Hollywood studios is adjourned. It is now up to District Court Judge Marylin Patel to decide who is right.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Will consumers be able to afford the bandwidth they're craving?

Publié: mai 22, 2009, 5:53pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
The pocketable Internet has created an insatiable need for bandwidth. 18% of total Internet traffic in 2008 came from mobile devices, and it's only increasing. In fact, a national tier one mobile network operator (MNO) (that preferred to remain nameless) participated in Yankee Group research that recently projected its data consumption would grow by a factor of six in the next three years.
Here is what that means: In 1995, there were about 9,000 cell sites in the United States. Today, there are more than 228,000, or an average of 80 thousand new sites every five years. Each one of these sites serves about a thousand users, and the backhaul is provided mostly T1 and E1 lease lines, with an average of 3 T1's per site and an average bandwidth capacity of 4.62 megabits per second. The maximum speed is generally around 10 Mbps, and Yankee Group research showed that it cost MNOs about $6.1 billion to provide that much bandwidth in 2008.
But because Internet traffic is increasingly coming from mobile devices, and a larger base of users demands higher performance, the anonymous MNO expects that sites will have to provide more than 50 Mbps each going into 2011. If the current backhaul methods were to continue, in 2012, the total cost of mobile Internet backhaul could grow to more than $82 billion dollars.
"Linear growth is not an option." Said Yankee Group's Vice President of Enabling Technologies, Jennifer Pigg. "God Forbid you want 100 Mbps, you're talking about an equivalent of five thousand dollars per month per mile. GigE? Forget it, it'll cost you almost twenty times that much."
So as this demand is only increasing, mobile network operators are scrambling to implement a variety of strategies on the radio side to handle this flood of data. They need to increase their cell site density, and as we enter the 4G era, the traditional T1 infrastructure is just not going to be able to fulfill our demands.
"Backhaul is extremely problematic in the overall network, not RAN (radio access network), not radios, not the core network...it's the backhaul," said Pigg.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
The Sidekick LX 2009: smart phone or smarter netbook?

Publié: mai 22, 2009, 2:10pm CEST par Angela Gunn

By Angela Gunn, Betanews
Decades from now, when our descendants' implanted heads-up displays are implanted in their heads, and their instant messages and points-of-presence (phone service? what's that?) are controlled directly by their brainwaves, they'll look back on all of us who painstakingly suffered through the smartphone era, wondering how we managed to get so worked up over hunks of silicon and plastic. And I, very old by then and loudly eccentric, will shake my bony fists and yell at the whippersnappers:
"BECAUSE SOME OF THEM WERE FUN, DAMMIT! NOW GET OFF MY LAWN!"
And I will be thinking of the Sidekick LX 2009. Also, inexplicably, popcorn.
Disclaimer Of Unusual Size: I've been a Sidekick owner since the II, and I've reviewed every model since the monochrome original. (I will not be thinking back on that one in my dotty dotage; it was as big as a bar of soap and nearly as hard to hold. And I loved it dearly, then.) I was there for the slick-key misfire that was the III, and the cheaply made downmarket ID; I cheered when the LX brought the sexy back, and I sighed when it became clear that the fickle finger of fabulousness had moved along to iPhones and multitouch screens, which I still loathe with all my smudgy heart.
And when in February 2008, Microsoft bought Danger, the company behind the Sidekick, I held my breath, because for the life of me I couldn't figure out what Redmond wanted with my indispensable everything-but-a-phone. (That's right; I have another phone for simply phoning and a Sidekick for Web, alarm clocks, addresses, notes, calendars, IM, and a hundred other little tasks throughout the day. Those who are familiar with T-Mobile's voice coverage outside of major metropolitan areas will need no further explanation.)
I still have no idea why Microsoft bought Danger. The Sidekick interface has been refined, but not substantially changed since the last iteration. Live Search is nicely integrated into the handset after its rollout to earlier handsets a few months back, and T-Mobile says that Exchange Active Sync support is right around the corner. But this delicious, full-QWERTY handset, with its unmistakable swivel screen, isn't some adopted stepchild to Windows Mobile. Instead, it's the spiritual heir to the Zaurus, arguably Sharp's finest hour and certainly its finest mobile device.
The hardware
T-Mobile sells the Sidekick and Microsoft/Danger develops it, but this is Sharp's baby. The keypad, which is built to be touch-typable by thumbs when the gadget is cradled in both hands, is by virtue of the handset's unusual configuration the biggest and best around. The handset itself is 5.1" x 2.4" x 0.6", a sliver smaller than the previous LX; the keyboard constrains further shrinkage, but the device has slimmed down another sliver and feels more svelte thanks to new curves along the edges. The LX 2009 weighs in at 5.7 ounces, also a sliver smaller than previous models.
Sharp makes, arguably, the best mobile displays on the market, and their work is showcased well here. The 3.2", F-WVGA, high-definition LCD screen, which boasts 854x480 resolution, is simply stunning. Colors and lines were rich and crisp, and gradients looked downright creamy; if e-book readers had displays this beautiful you'd be reading this article on one now.
The camera is 3.2 Mpx, with an LED flash and autofocus. It has five resolution settings (640x480, 800x600, 1280x960, 1600x1200, and 2048x15360) and three levels of JPEG quality for still images, and high or low quality for video. There's geotagging capability for stills -- GPS capability is built in -- but not for video. I was pleased with the camera's output, though autofocus gave me a certain amount of trouble until I realized that I could click through to a macro or a landscape mode. The device ships with a 1 GB microSD card, but if you're serious about video or music you might want to upgrade that at some point.
First, though, buy an extra charger. T-Mobile's been working on the Sidekick's battery life, which is of the charge-daily-or-else type. The company now reports improvements on both 3G (3 hours talk, 6 days standby) and 2G (5.5 hours talk, 8 days standby) fronts, but though the battery life seems to have improved from that of my own LX I was nowhere near those numbers -- especially when certain new features were enabled. (More on that in a minute.)
Leslie Grandy, T-Mobile vice president of product development, talked with me recently about the refinements to the latest Sidekick and how some of them come to pass. T-Mobile has the interesting policy of sending all its people -- even vice-presidents of product development -- out to work in their retail stores periodically, to keep an ear to the ground.
A few of the changes thus suggested are big ones, such as new hinge technology that can withstand (on average) 200 serious falls to the floor. (The previous average, she says, was around 50 -- klutzes beware.) As a side effect, the handset at last loses the bar-of-soap styling that's plagued it since inception. Rethinking how the strength of the swivel hinge could be improved led the designers to a design that from the side looks a bit like the screen is floating in a cradle made up of the rest of the handset. It takes some getting used to, since it looks a bit fragile, but comparisons between the LX 2009 and my own LX showed that it was if anything more stable. It may even feel a bit more like a curvy pebble -- are you listening, Palm Pre people?
Others changes are subtle; I made a blithering ass of myself in a recent demo when I realized they'd finally moved the dreadfully situated on/off switch that made previous models prone to occasional surprise shutdowns. And some changes are all but unnoticeable to all but the biggest Skick nerds. (If you have no previous Sidekick, please skip to the next paragraph; this one's for the faithful.) The textured back panel on the previous LX is history, supplanted by a smooth and slightly rubbery finish, but along that back there's a small area with twelve tiny bumps at exactly the spot where your right middle finger braces the gadget. I can only image how many man-hours that took to work out. And when you're typing, the pads of your index fingers are now pressed not against the pointy corners at the top corners of the screen, but against curved, very slightly flattened corners. You'll never notice the change; you'll just know it feels inexplicably more comfortable to type your little heart out.
The LX 2009 adds a few blinkenlights to the usual trackball and other indicators -- one deep-blue bar along the top edge of the screen and two along the top and bottom of the keyboard. They're pretty, but the heavy lifting of indicating status changes is still done by the trackball, which can be configured to flash and shift as desired.
The Sidekick is exclusively a T-Mobile phone in the US, but it travels elsewhere well. It's a quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE handset and has dual-band UMTS/HSDPA. There's 3G support for Web browsing, and we noticed quite a bit of improvement in page-load times, network permitting.
Next: A little Sidekick war: software vs. batteries...
The software T-Mobile knows its Sidekick tribe, and not just because the browser, which operates through T-Mobile's servers, emits a breathtaking amount of information on what users look at. (As Grandy points out, you can also learn a lot just from browsing the gallery of Shells users have made to customize their handsets. Shells have proven quite popular since introduction and will continue to be offered for the LX 2009.)
The Sidekick has a young audience, skewing female, and T-Mobile has been working for years to integrate social networking into its core feature set. With this launch, there's an entire "Communities" section with Facebook, MySpace and Twitter support; all are free to use. (The MySpace software previously incurred a recurring charge.) Building support for those services directly into the OS, rather than requiring users to fire up a browser, means that alerts and functions are far better integrated. I consistently got Facebook and Twitter notifications along the status bar just as one does SMS or e-mail alerts. The interfaces were well thought out and met my expectations for using those services.
They did, however, wreak havoc with battery life. This isn't a new problem, or even a Sidekick problem; services such as Gmail notification cause similar trouble for other handsets. Still, I was caught flat-footed a couple of times when I forgot to log out of Twitter and found my Sidekick dead to the world a few hours later.
YouTube is also available if you'd like other fun ways to drain your battery. (It's listed in the browser bookmarks under "Community," but it doesn't appear in the Communities section of the main interface. Odd.) We found load times quite acceptable, and though we couldn't switch to HD for videos that had a version available on the site, that was small potatoes compared to being able to whip a gadget out of our backpack and fire up Keyboard Cat. (Pointing the video directly at someone who's earned a "Play him off, Keyboard Cat" is optional and may in fact endanger the Sidekick. And you.) You can also watch videos on MySpace, or upload videos from the handset directly to the Net.
E-mail now supports multiple e-mail accounts; the interface hasn't changed much from the traditional folders model, but you can now add up to three accounts (AOL, Windows Live, Yahoo Mail, or POP/IMAP). Likewise, the music player's interface hasn't changed much, but the functionality expands to include RTSP video. More updating is apparent in the browser, which does a better job of translating pages into attractive layouts than previous iterations have; for instance, the "screen size" layout that previously passed Google News back as a long single-column page now understands how to deliver a good-looking two-column layout.
Another tiny tweak for the faithful doesn't go far enough. The buttons along the sides of the body haven't changed since the first Sidekick twirled out of the primordial ooze in 2003. Throughout that time, the "Jump" button has been programmable when used with other buttons (e.g., Jump-A for the address book), but by itself always takes you to the Phone app, no exceptions. The LX 2009 opens that up... but only to Phone or My Faves. One would like to see the company expand its sense of the possible with that button, especially since it added an entire section for "T-Mobile Sidekick Help," which includes a link to account information and such.
The conclusion
Forget Microsoft for a moment; forget the multitouch madness; forget even that the LX 2009 has a perfectly decent phone built in. They say that voice calls and voicemail are fading out of the communications picture, and maybe our descendants are right about that. To that end, I suggest grabbing the $200 Sidekick and one of T-Mobile's unlimited data-only plans, and making this your everything-else, ultra-portable-computing, fun-on-the-run device -- the first gadget you lay hands on in the morning, the last one you set down at night, and the one you whip out of a pocket when it's time to Google a random fact or snap a video or get driving directions on your way to the movies. Or even write a quick article, as I have done with mine. We can call it a not-book. (And then we can get some popcorn.)
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
French Socialists mount constitutional challenge to 'three strikes' net access bill

Publié: mai 22, 2009, 2:15am CEST par Angela Gunn

By Angela Gunn, Betanews
This week in As The HADOPI Turns: Socialists! Frenchmen suing France! An estimate of takedown numbers that'll make you glad Christine Albanel isn't doling our your online time! Plus, evidence that it really can get worse. Très worse.
When last we saw France's Création et Internet law, which gives ISPs there the power to block access to the Internet for anyone accused three times of illegal file-sharing, it was on its way to the Senate and onward to the desk of President Nicolas Sarkozy. On Tuesday, several Socialist members of the French Parliament took their case to the nation's Constitutional Council, raising eleven points of possible conflict with the country's laws.
Issues raised by the filing include the law's presumption of guilt, the lack of a means by which the accusations can be addressed by the accused, the lack of proportion between the punishment and the crime, and a provision (previously a topic of heated Assembly debate) forcing those who have had their access taken away to continue paying their ISPs for it. Response from the court is expected in about a month.
Meanwhile, United Press International reported earlier this week that French European Parliament member Guy Bono says that if the Constitutional Council doesn't address the problems, he'll take it to the EU. Speaking to the EU Observer, MP Bono said, "If a French constitutional judge does not react [to requests for action], I will ask the European Commission to request the European Court of Justice launch infringement proceedings against the French government for not respecting community law."
Other MPs raise other questions. One MP involved with the constitutional appeal, Martine Billard, says on her blog that it's her understanding that HADOPI also circumvents that whole equality-and-fraternity thing. According to testimony during one reading of the bill, one witness stated that some members of the professional classes -- doctors, lawyers, notaries, and so forth -- might not have their net access cut off so quickly as would accused people in other professions.
Christine Albanel, the minister of culture and driving force behind HADOPI, is alleged by Billard in the same post to have said that the goal of HADOPI was to "create fear" in the hearts of would-be downloaders. Elsewhere, Albanel has recently been quoted by the Associated Press as saying she expects a thousand net-access shutdowns per day when the system is under full steam.
Think it couldn't get worse? Don't be so sure. An article in Le Monde on Monday introduces the prospect of LOPPSI. LOPPSI is an acronym for a French phrase translating to "law and planning for the performance of Homeland Security."
LOPPSI essentially legalizes government use of spyware (cookies, trojans, keyloggers, etc.) by law enforcement with only light and occasional judicial review. The bill would also provide for a program called "Pericles" that would acquire, correlate and track data on individual citizens ranging from judicial records to information about the SIMMs in their mobile phones.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Malware infection strikes US Justice Department

Publié: mai 22, 2009, 1:12am CEST par Angela Gunn

By Angela Gunn, Betanews
A virus infection of unknown type and origin necessitated the partial shutdown of computer networks belonging to the US Marshals Service on Thursday. The FBI was also believed to have been infected, and other Justice Department agencies were taking precautions Thursday as well.
Nikki Credic, a spokesperson for the US Marshals Service, provided very little data about the nature of the problem, but she did state that no data was known to have been compromised. The agency took down its net access and shut down some parts of its e-mail service while tech folk got to the source of the problem.
Government agencies are hardly immune from infections large and small. Back in November, the Department of Defense went through considerable trouble over an infection that began with, it is believed, an infected thumb drive. In the resulting uproar, the DoD ended up banning the use of any removable media in computers attached to the NIPRNET or SIPRNet systems.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Cisco and the Free Software Foundation settle compliance suit

Publié: mai 22, 2009, 12:00am CEST par Angela Gunn

By Angela Gunn, Betanews
Once upon a time, Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation started a conversation with Cisco about playing nicely with other people's software licenses. Five years later, that conversation hadn't gotten much traction, so the FSF applied lawyers to the problem. Five months later, Cisco appears to have gotten the message.
Cisco and the FSF made official this week what had been whispered in certain circles earlier in the month: There will be peace in our time, as Cisco revamps how it works with free software licenses such as the GNU General Public License.
The excitement centers on Linksys, Cisco's home-networking subsidiary, and on how licensing arrangements have been handled (and will be in the future). Cisco is known to be generally well-disposed to the free software movement; however, when it picked up Linksys in 2003, it acquired that firm's more cavalier behavior toward compliance. (The Linksys WRT54G router, the original version of which was released late in 2002, is Linux-based and uses multiple pieces of GPL-covered code.)
The suit, filed in December in New York's Southern District Court, alleged GPL violations relating to 12 Linksys products, mostly routers. Under the terms of the LGPL (Lesser General Public License), programs that use software developed under the LGPL have to distribute a copy of the source code along with the product, so the recipient can also modify the code as s/he sees fit. Linksys did not.
Cisco will, according to the FSF, appoint a Free Software Director at Linksys, who will supervise how those software licenses are handled. That person will stay in touch with the FSF to monitor compliance. Additionally, Cisco will work to tell previous Linksys buyers about their rights under the GPL and other licenses, publish an assortment of licensing-related notices on the Linksys site and elsewhere, and put the relevant source code on its Web site for all to see and use.
Cisco will also make a donation to the FSF.
It's a David and Goliath-sized story, and some observers were hoping that it would go to court and yield a result that strengthened the GPL's hand overall. James Grimmelmann, associate professor of intellectual property and Internet law at the New York Law School, said in an interview last year in SDTimes, "As a law professor, I hope it gets litigated and yields a court opinion, but as a computer user, I hope there's a settlement."
Writing on the FSF blog, FSF compliance engineer Brett Smith explains that it was never about the money. "When [a] violator admits that there's been a mistake and demonstrates they want to fix it, we take it as a sign that we can cooperative productively, instead of an opportunity to pounce.... [W]e're not out to wreck businesses or make lots of money. We just want compliance."
Betanews has asked Cisco for a comment on the settlement, and has not received a reply.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009