With a proper tax system, publishers like the L.A. Times or scientific journals may maintain a copyright for only a year or so before letting the content revert to public domain and letting Google and everyone else utilize the material for its small, but socially significant, remaining value.
via Copyright this – latimes.com.
I like this. It could probably work with patents as well.
A dizzying story that involves falsified medical research, plagiarism, and legal threats came to light via a DMCA takedown notice today. Retraction Watch, a site that followed (among many other issues) the implosion of a Duke cancer researcher’s career, found all of its articles on the topic pulled by WordPress, its host. The reason? A small site based in India apparently copied all of the posts, claimed them as their own, and then filed a DMCA takedown notice to get the originals pulled from their source. As of now, the originals are still missing as their actual owners seek to have them restored.
via Site plagiarizes blog posts, then files DMCA takedown on originals | Ars Technica.
What could possibly go wrong with SOPA? 🙂
This provision would effectively legalize spyware in Canada on behalf of these industry groups. The potential scope of coverage is breathtaking: a software program secretly installed by an entertainment software company designed to detect or investigate alleged copyright infringement would be covered by this exception.
Hopefully something like this never sees the light of day in the US and if it does, it helps raise awareness of copyright abuse. The Sony rootkit was a pretty nasty piece of malware that was rather difficult to remove properly. Bad things will happen to the unsuspecting and the more novice computer user should the ability of anyone to install spyware at the root level become legal. If I recall correctly, the Sony rootkit installed before the user accepted the End User License Agreement. Thus, even if you read the EULA and decided not to install or have anything to do with Sony, Sony already parked itself on your computer.
This updated functionality completely removes the source website from the display, encouraging the user to download the image directly from the search results. To add fuel to the fire, a prominent button “Show original image” (read as “Download now”) is also being displayed alongside the enhanced preview. The percentage of visits to the website that actually has the rights to display and offer the subject images drops at a staggering rate as people are able to and, in fact, are implicitly encouraged to begin downloading the image directly from Google Images rather than visiting the subject site.
via Google Images New Layout How This Impacts Photographers And Webmasters – Stock Photography Blog.
I still don’t see how simply downloading an image which mean possibly seeing once and then into the bit bucket really matters. The photo is not being used in a commercial manner except for perhaps by google. There has to be some kind of compromise that doesn’t impact usability.
An untethered jailbreak means users can install it on their device once and for all. They don’t have to worry about a dead battery or restart requiring them to hook up to a computer and jailbreak the device again.
via Untethered iOS 6.1 evasi0n jailbreak arrives for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices – The Next Web.
If you ever need to do this this article would be a good place to start your journey.
We’ve written about White Spaces on numerous occasions. The FCC gave its thumbs up in 2008. We wrote about test networks in 2010, and by December 2011 the FCC had approved the first White Spaces broadband device.
via No, free Wi-Fi isn’t coming to every US city | Ars Technica.
LOL. I read the free Wifi story in the Chicago Tribune and even on slashdot.
The SDN controller, more properly called the Cisco Open Network Environment (ONE) Software Controller, would talk to routers and switches through a protocol such as OpenFlow.
WebRTC is a free, open project that enables web browsers with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple Javascript APIs. The WebRTC components have been optimized to best serve this purpose.
Our mission: To enable rich, high quality, RTC applications to be developed in the browser via simple Javascript APIs and HTML5.
The WebRTC initiative is a project supported by Google, Mozilla and Opera. This page is maintained by the Google Chrome team.
via WebRTC.
And the latest current events surrounding WebRTC is this:
From: Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling!
For the first time, Chrome and Firefox can “talk” to each other via WebRTC. WebRTC is a new set of technologies that brings clear crisp voice, sharp high-definition (HD) video and low-delay communication to the web browser.
According to a market report from research firm IHS iSuppli, HDD revenue is set to drop to about $32.7 billion this year, down 11.8% from $37.1 billion last year.
via SSD onslaught: Hard drives poised for double-digit revenue drop – Computerworld.
Much of this has to do with newer devices sold being those that do not use standard hard drives like smartphones and tablets. Perhaps we’re seeing the start of another computing technology headed for the museum.
A research group based at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) in Seoul, South Korea, has developed a circuit that may get around these problems. The device, described in a paper published on Nature’s website on 30 January, uses magnetism to control the flow of electrons across a minuscule bridge of the semiconducting material indium antimonide (S. Joo et al. Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature11817; 2013). It is “a new and interesting twist on how to implement a logic gate”, says Gian Salis, a physicist at IBM’s Zurich Research Laboratory in Switzerland.
via Magnetic logic makes for mutable chips : Nature News & Comment.
This seems like a revolutionary discovery if it can be manufactured relatively easily. And then there’s this:
But Johnson notes that magnetism is already catching on in circuit design: some advanced devices are beginning to use a magnetic version of random access memory, a type of memory that has historically been built only with conventional transistors. “I think a shift is already under way,” he says.