U2 manager finds what he’s looking for: French 3-strikes law Ars Technica

Hey, file-swappers—who’s going to ride your wild horses? Paul McGuinness, long-time manager of Irish rock band U2, says that it’s going to be the French government. And that’s a magnificent thing. McGuinness has been a wanderer these last few years, going where the streets have no name in his quest to get one step closer to a miracle drug that might help the vertiginous music business walk on despite rampant P2P file-sharing. (One wishes he had also found the time to convince Bono that lines like “Force quit and move to trash!” and “Restart and reboot yourself!” have no place on a U2 album. Ah, well; some lyrics are better than others.) But, for the first time, McGuiness has found what he’s looking for in the new French Création et Internet “graduated response” rule. Writing in a lengthy Guardian op-ed http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/apr/07/france-solution-online-piracy, McGuinness said that U2 wasn’t the issue: he’s concerned about “the future of a new generation of artists who aspire to be the next U2—and about the whole environment in which that aspiration can be made possible.”

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Dungeons & Dragons slays its digital distribution The Register

Wizards of the Coast, publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, has pulled all digital editions of its products from online stores today in response to finding that its new D&D Player’s Handbook is being illegally distributed over P2P and file-sharing websites. The Washington-state-based gaming company also filed three lawsuits today against eight individuals in the US, Poland, and the Philippines for allegedly uploading the handbook, which they claim resulted in “a substantial number of lost sales and revenue.” A Wizards spokeswoman told El Reg online companies that were legally selling D&D handbooks in PDF format were given 24 hours yesterday to remove the content. She said those retailers aren’t being accused of any wrongdoing, but it’s Wizards’ priority now to “take care of all the crazy action going out there” until it finds a safer way to distribute digital copies.

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Facebook Blocks All Pirate Bay Links TorrentFreak

At the end of March The Pirate Bay added new functionality to reach out to millions of Facebook users. Just over a week later and the world’s largest social networking site has blocked all links to torrents on the world’s largest and most infamous BitTorrent tracker. It was less than two weeks ago when The Pirate Bay implemented a new feature making it easier for site users to post links to torrents on their Facebook profile, so their friends can download those torrents with just a single click. The entertainment industries were not happy with the new feature, but since The Pirate Bay is not exclusively used to spread copyrighted material, there wasn’t much they could do about it. Facebook users responded positively and many began posting torrent links in their profile. This integration of the world’s largest tracker and the world’s largest social networking site generated hundreds of news articles and excitement. But it wasn’t to last. This morning Facebook decided to put an end to the sharing and blocked not only the feature, but all links to Pirate Bay’s torrents. The ‘Share on Facebook’ button on the TPB torrent download pages doesn’t work anymore, and neither does the Facebook bookmarklet. Manually adding a link to your Facebook messages isn’t allowed either, regardless of the “legality” of the content it’s linking to. Facebook has basically launched a site-wide ban of Pirate Bay torrent URLs.

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MySpace rant was not private, rules US Court of Appeal OUT-LAW News

A student who wrote an unflattering diatribe about her hometown on MySpace has lost a claim that its republication by a local paper invaded her privacy. She might yet prove that its wider dissemination was an intentional infliction of emotional distress. University student Cynthia Moreno published a rant on her MySpace page detailing the failings of her home town, Coalinga in California. Calling it an ‘Ode to Coalinga’, she wrote: “the older I get, the more I realize how much I despise Coalinga,”, before going on to criticise the town. She removed the post six days later, but the principal of the school she had attended handed a copy of the post to the editor of the local newspaper, who printed it under her full name. Only her first name had been used to sign the post. The letter was printed in the Coalinga Record by its editor, Pamela Pond. Moreno’s sister and mother and father still lived in the town, where her father had a business. The family were threatened and a shot was fired at their house. They closed the family business and moved away. Moreno tried to sue the newspaper, but the court upheld its claims that it was exempt from the suit under California laws designed to stop people intimidating news organisations and stifling free speech. Moreno’s suit was then targeted against the school district and the principal of the school who had handed the blog posting to the newspaper editor. The Court of Appeal for the state of California said that Moreno had no right to take a privacy case because MySpace is public, not private.

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Google addresses newspaper woes BBC

Some say it is time to ‘reboot’ the system and redistribute the wealth The majority of newspapers should be online, says Google boss Eric Schmidt, amid criticism it should share some of the millions it makes from newslinks. Media owner Rupert Murdoch has questioned if aggregators like Google should pay to use content. The Associated Press is to sue to protect its content at a time when the industry is losing readers to the web. “I would encourage everybody to think in terms of what your reader wants,” Mr Schmidt told newspaper bosses. “These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you [annoy] enough of them, you will not have any more,” he warned the Newspaper Association of America’s (NAA) annual conference in San Diego. While he praised the way newspapers initially embraced the internet, Mr Schmidt said they had since dropped the ball allowing the likes of Google to take over content distribution.

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Military sonar blamed for mass dolphin strandings Times Online

Mass strandings of dolphins and whales could be caused because the animals are rendered temporarily deaf by military sonar, experiments have shown. Tests on a captive dolphin have demonstrated that hearing can be lost for up to 40 minutes on exposure to sonar. Hearing is the most important sense for dolphins and other cetaeceans, and losing it is likely to cause them to become disorientated and alarmed. The finding by the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology may explain several strandings of dolphins and whales in the past decade. Most strandings are still thought to be natural events, but the tests strengthen fears that exercises by naval vessels equipped with sonar are responsible for at least some of them. The study also suggested, however, that dolphins and whales would usually be able to swim away fast enough and far enough to escape any ill effects from sonar.

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Shocker: Aussies to build own open-access fiber backbone Ars Technica

In a surprising announcement today, Australia kicked off its AUS$43 billion “National Broadband Network,” which it calls the “single largest national-building infrastructure project in Australian history.” Not only will the fiber network reach all the way to 90 percent of Australia’s homes, but it will also be open access and available for use by any ISP. The National Broadband Network (NBN) scheme has been progressing for some time, but when we last looked in on it in 2008, it was a fiber-to-the-node plan that would offer Australians 12Mbps minimum connections. It was also going to be built by a private company, but incumbent telcos like Telstra (which was government-owned into the 1990s) quickly began to make noise about the open access rules—such conditions might not offer enough of a return on investment.

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Group protests Kindle e-reader’s read-aloud limits Associated Press

A group representing the blind and other people with disabilities protested limitations to the new read-aloud feature on Amazon.com’s latest Kindle electronic reader Tuesday, arguing that the restrictions unfairly limit their access to e-books. The feature, which reads text in a stiff-sounding electronic voice, is still available for all books on the new Kindle, which was unveiled in February. But the Authors Guild has expressed concern that the feature will hurt sales of audio books, so Amazon plans to give publishers and authors the ability to silence the text-to-speech function for their books. That is what prompted the newly formed Reading Rights Coalition, whose supporters include the National Federation of the Blind and the American Association of People with Disabilities, to stage what it called an “informational protest” outside the office of the Authors Guild in New York.

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Spam overwhelms e-mail messages BBC

More than 97% of all e-mails sent over the net are unwanted, according to a Microsoft security report. The e-mails are dominated by spam adverts for drugs, and general product pitches and often have malicious attachments. The report found that the global ratio of infected machines was 8.6 for every 1,000 uninfected machines. It also found that Office document attachments and PDF files were increasingly being targeted by hackers.

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Apple Sued Over Touch-Screen Rights New York Times

The Taiwanese company Elan Microelectronics has sued Apple, alleging infringement of two of its touch screen patents, an Elan spokesman said Wednesday. The suit was filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, Dennis Liu, an Elan spokesman, said by telephone from the headquarters of the chip design company in Hsinchu, Taiwan. “We couldn’t find a common viewpoint with Apple, so we decided we had to take action,” he said, adding that the companies had been in licensing talks for about two years.

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40 Years Of RFCs Heise Online

40 years ago on the 7. April 1969, the first Request For Comments was released. In RFC 1, Steve Crocker described the software architecture of the emerging ARPANET. The original RFCs were actual contributions to discussions within a “Network Working Group” of manageable size (RFC 2 is a direct answer to RFC 1). As the group was still working on the ARPANET setup, the first RFCs were exchanged on paper by post. Over time, the RFCs became the standard documents of the ARPANET and of its later successor, the internet. The network’s growth was reflected in the number of RFCs released. After a phase of intensive discussion during the development of the ARPANET, there was a period of calm in which the network itself required less attention. In the late 1970s, however, there was a technological surge, and since the introduction of TCP/IP, the network and RFCs have developed at the same rate. The 2,555th RFC, for instance, discussed the first 30 years of RFC history. Almost 3,000 texts have been added in the ten years since.

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Apple near saturation point for iPod, iTunes use by teens Apple Insider

The results of Piper Jaffray’s 17th bi-annual teen survey are in, showing Apple to have broadened its lead in the areas of iPod consumption and iTunes usage — both of which are nearing their saturation point — as the company moves to translate these successes to its iPhone business. “We believe that the teen demographic is a critical component of long-term growth in the digital music and mobile markets, and Apple is taking its leading position in music and moving aggressively into the mobile market,” analyst Gene Munster wrote in a summary of his firm’s findings.

April, 2009

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