By Angela Gunn, Betanews
Yesterday's WN|WN was singing the refrains of "Why Can't We Be Friends?" from the classic group "War." Apparently, we've got more readers in Australia these days (g'day mates!). Yesterday, the crew at Sydney-based digital advertising firm Amnesia Razorfish spent Wednesday trying to get Coke and Pepsi to friend each other on Twitter, and both companies did within 24 hours. "As long as we can live in ha-a-ar-mo-ny!" (We could have used these guys for Norm Coleman and Al Franken.)
Recording industry wins one against Usenet supplier
Afternoon of Wednesday, July 1, 2009 • One of the P2P proprietors' most successful self-defense arguments, when confronted in court by copyright holders, is what the legal profession now calls safe harbor. It's the idea that a P2P service only provides users with the technology to share files, and its up to the users to determine which files are shared -- at any one time, the service can't know what's shared, because it doesn't have a centralized index.
But that argument has now failed when transferred to another, older, more conventional style of file sharing: via Usenet. In a ruling yesterday that may set some legal precedent (at least prior to any appeal), a New York district court judge has granted summary judgment in favor of Recording Industry Association of America members against the owners of Usenet.com, a subscription service giving users access to files shared over the Internet's historical NNTP protocol (Usenet). Judge Harold Baer ruled that Usenet.com kept a service, knew what was on it, knew that its users knew what was on it, and knew that the purpose of that service was evidently to trade in unauthorized and copyrighted material.
Citing a phrase from the second Supreme Court ruling against P2P trader Grokster, Baer referred to Usenet.com's "staggering scale of infringement makes it more likely that [Defendants] condoned illegal use." The evidence of this was an independent study commissioned by the court that determined that some 94% of files available on Usenet.com were probably illicit.
The guilt-by-association factor didn't help the defendants' case much either. "Moreover, also similarly to Grokster, the undisputed facts in this case indicate that Defendants openly and affirmatively sought to attract former users of other notorious file-sharing services such as Napster and Kazaa," Judge Baer wrote.
One of the standards being tested here was whether Usenet.com simply contributed to the ongoing acts of copyright infringement made feasible through the Usenet system, or whether Usenet.com specifically used Usenet as a vehicle for profiting from illicit file-trading -- what the law calls vicarious infringement. The judge granted the RIAA the grand slam on this issue, writing, "Because the undisputed facts illustrate that Defendants garnered a direct financial benefit from copyright infringement and failed to exercise their right and ability to control or limit infringement on their servers, Plaintiffs' motion for summary judgment on their claim for vicarious copyright infringement is granted."
In keeping with its very public stance, the RIAA issued a statement late yesterday stating it hopes this ruling will set an example for all the others: "This decision is another example of courts recognizing the value of copyrighted music and taking action against companies and individuals who are engaging in wide scale infringement," stated Executive Vice President Stephen Marks. "We hope that other bad actors who are engaging in similar activity will take note of this decisive opinion."
Apple, NVIDIA rumored to be at loggerheads
Afternoon of July 1, 2009 • Sounds like contract negotiations between Apple and NVIDIA aren't going so well as rumors swirled yesterday that things had gotten nasty. The two companies have been known to be at odds for some time over Apple's need for Nehalem-based chipsets, not to mention the raft of problems users reported with the GeForce 8600 GT graphics chips in some MacBook Pros.
The news was originally reported by SemiAccurate and has been refracted around the blogosphere over the past few days. But since Apple is notoriously close-mouthed with the tech press, it's hard to say what's happening. Would Cupertino turn its back on the gains NVIDIA has made available for lower-end systems? Do the embarrassments of making good on those busted MacBooks outweigh the potential embarrassment of crawling back to Intel for the relevant chipsets? And what of Snow Leopard and its support for CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture)? These questions and many more will probably not be answered on the next episode of As The Chip Turns...
Facebook attempts to clarify new privacy thinking
Afternoon of July 1 • On a conference call yesterday, Facebook indicated that they're working toward a more granular view of privacy -- one that allows their users to share some pieces of information with the world, others with all one's Facebook-friends (including your boss and those people who vaguely remember meeting on vacation a few years back), and still others with just the people who know you really well. After all, says Facebook's Chief Privacy Officer & Head of Global Public Policy Chris Kelly, when people have better control over their information, they're more inclined to share it. New controls have been rolling out to selected users for several weeks; the call yesterday confirmed that a broader rollout is at hand. ReadWriteWeb liveblogged the call -- but didn't get any firm commitment to rollout dates, alas.
Linux kernel patch offers possible FAT workaround
Last week • The filesystem patents at the heart of Microsoft's suit against GPS maker Tom Tom are in extraordinarily wide use, especially in standalone devices and removable drives. While patent hounds scour for prior art, developers have been considering technical workarounds. One of those developers, Samba's Andrew Tridgell, has published a patch (his second addressing the problem) that may relieve the minds of anxious developers. Ars Technica's Ryan Paul has details.
WHAT'S NEXT? Lori Drew sentencing is at hand
Mom in MySpace teen-suicide case may be sentenced today
July 2, 2009, maybe > The Missouri woman convicted of charges related to a hoax that caused a former friend of her teenaged daughter to commit suicide is expected to be sentenced today on three misdemeanor counts of accessing computers without authorization. Lori Drew, who was outed as the perpetrator after an initial story in a St. Louis newspaper led to near-universal online outrage and made "cyberbullying" a cause celebre, escaped conviction on the more serious felony-level charges concerning intentional infliction of distress on 13-year-old Megan Meier. Ms. Drew could face up to three years in jail; sentencing in the case was postponed back in May when the judge agreed to consider a defense motion to overturn the verdict.
Grant process begins for broadband-deployment projects
July 14 - August 14, 2009 > Vice President Biden on Wednesday announced guidelines for $4 billion of the stimulus funding earmarked to expand broadband access across the nation. The Departments of Commerce and Agriculture will be fielding applications for this round of funding from July 14 to August 14.
Time to slough off SQL?
Real Soon Now > Eric Lai at Computerworld spotlights a growing community of database mavens who are over the relational-database model and looking for better ways of managing masses of data. They don't even like the word "database," even though some of the noSQL movement's poster children are processing as much as 20 petabytes of structured data every day. Institutional prejudices and tech-support crises are harder problems to manage.
Thursday's tech headlines
The Register
• A self-proclaimed hacker in Texas was planning a massive DDoS attack against the hospital (!) where he worked as a security guard. Dan Goodin says that he went around botnetting the building's computers, messing with the building's air-conditioning systems, and making videos of his 133t sk1llz for online posting. Jesse William McGraw, 25, of Arlington, Texas, who also calls himself "GhostExodus," allegedly belongs to a group calling themselves the "Electronik Tribulation Army" and refers to the July 4 celebrations as "Devil's Day."
• Ascentive, which has a history of conflict with both Google and StopBadware.org for making questionable claims about their antimalware services. The Reg picks up the tale from OUT-LAW.com, which says that now Ascentive's claiming that Google broke the law by removing the firm from its search results.
• Alistair Dabbs reviews the new Iomega eGo 320GB external hard drive I've had my eye on, and gives it a so-so rating for speed and the Protection Suite software with which it's bundled. Alas, he is no braver than I am about drop-testing the device's ruggedization claims.
USA Today
• The digital ad industry would like to ease your mind (and perhaps Congress') about what they do with your data, and so they're rolling out broad self-policing guidelines. The new rules were co-developed by American Association of Advertising Agencies, Association of National Advertisers, Council of Better Business Bureaus and Direct Marketing Association.
• The mighty Ed Baig compares Google and Bing in a search-off, and struggles with his habit of using "google" as a verb. (Don't we all.) And the winner is...
Washington Post
• Those online petitions people keep asking you to sign on Facebook, and turning your Twitter avatar green, and most of those "days of action" that get organized online? Are about as effective as you thought they were, sighs Monica Hesse.
• If you promise to use the information widely, Ashley Halsey III will tell you about a site that maps speed traps around the nation.
Wired
• The saga of Clear rolls on. Now Congress would like to know more about what will happen with all that personally identifiable client information. And there's a class-action suit in the works, according to a short item by Ryan Singel.
• A first from a sad last: Michael Jackson is now the first recording artist to sell one million digital downloads in the space of a week. (And a gold star to Wired for the first photo they're using to illustrate this piece -- nice background, guys.)
• Writing for the Danger Room blog, David Hambling reports that a fellow in Kansas -- oh dear -- has been awarded a restraining order against a former business partner whom he claims is harassing him with "jolts" of electromagnetic radiation.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009