IT-Code-News: IT News HeadLines (Ars Technica) 25/03/2010

Complete ACTA text finally leaked

Last April, the US Trade Representative explained to us that the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement had to stay secret in order to provide room for negotiating. In fact, ACTA was so inchoate that "a comprehensive set of proposals for the text of the agreement does not yet exist." In other words: there's nothing to release.

That was true in early 2009, but by 2010, there was such a comprehensive set of proposals—and still we got nothing from the ACTA negotiating nations, except a long series of piecemeal leaks that appear to have emanated from Europe. This week, those leaks became a flood as French digital rights group La Quadrature du Net released a complete copy of ACTA's consolidated text, filled with various textual proposals from the different negotiating countries.

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Did Hulu steal from Hula? Lawsuit aims to find out

When Hulu was first launched in 2007, many of us wondered aloud, "Where the heck did they think up the name 'Hulu'?" The answer may be hidden in a new lawsuit brought by Canadian media company Hulavision, which alleges that Hulu and parent company NBC Universal not only stole its trade secrets before launching Hulu, but stole its trademark as well.

Hulavision, created by Errol Hula, allegedly developed technology that is strikingly similar to that used by Hulu as a way to bring TV shows to Internet surfers, according to the complaint seen by the Hollywood Reporter. Hula says he met with NBC Universal's Raymond Vergel de Dios in Las Vegas—years before Hulu was developed. NBC must have been interested, because Vergel de Dios signed a nondisclosure agreement with Hula in 2006, at which time Hula revealed the company's business model and other trade secrets.

NBC ended up walking away from that potential partnership and, according to Hula, went ahead and stole every aspect of Hulavision's business ideas—including the name. When NBC eventually announced the name of its own venture, Hula was shocked at the "nearly identical" moniker. "At no time did Mr. Vergel de Dios inform Hula of any potential plans NBC had of its own for the development of any project similar to Hula's or that it had any interest other than possibly to form a business relationship with Hula if the Confidential Information to be disclosed was of interest to NBC," reads the complaint.

Unsurprisingly, NBC says that it will "vigorously defend" against the suit. In a situation where one company has seen success while another has not, it's not uncommon for the underdog to accuse the other of stealing. However, this suit might be harder to settle than a previous trademark claim brought by a publisher named Lulu. Unlike Lulu, Hulavision's entire business fell into the same space as Hulu's—the name similarity only pours salt on the wound and makes the other claims seem worse. This, coupled with Hulu's trouble lately in keeping its ad bin full of high-paying offers, may point to a rocky road ahead for the company.

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Lawmakers backing off harsh punishments for sexting teens

"Sexting" became a household word last year after four Pennsylvania teens were charged with disseminating and possessing child pornography after it was discovered that several students had exchanged nude pictures of themselves via cell phone. A federal court ruled last week that felony child pornography charges could not be pursued in this particular case, but state lawmakers around the country are looking to address the issue by making penalties better fit the "crime" for minors caught sexting.

The Illinois State Senate last week passed a bill that would limit penalties for minors that share nude or sexually explicit photos via cell phone or computer. Doing so would be classified as a misdemeanor, and minors would be sent to juvenile court for counseling and possible community service. "Sometimes these kids don't understand what they're doing, make a mistake, and it follows them for life," state senator Ira Silverstein, who sponsored the bill, told the Chicago Tribune. "So we don't want that in their record."

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Which is more "doomed": cable TV or Internet video?

There's an interesting post over at CableTechTalk, Big Cable's blog, about the future of cable television. It's a response by Paul Rodriguez to an Atlantic Monthly article titled "Cable TV is Doomed," penned by Max Fisher. Rodriguez calls it "one of the most uninformed articles [he's] ever seen on the cable industry" in his pushback piece titled "Cable TV - Doomed Like Dinosaurs."

We wouldn't go that far, but Rodriguez makes some smart points. The fight centers around which economic model works better for consumers: cable or Internet TV. But the titles suggest that the real debate is over how long cable television is going to last. The answer to that question involves looking at markets and consumer preferences, but it also has a lot to do with government.

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How 1Gbps fiber came to Cleveland's poorest, free of charge

In the middle of one of America's poorer cities, residents are about to get an unexpected gift: one gigabit per second Internet access over fiber optic cables courtesy of Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University.

According to the school's vice president for Information Technology Services, Lev Gonick, 72 percent of the homes around campus have no Internet access of any kind; 60 percent are on food stamps. "On a national scale, neighbors of the University have as much Internet access as Panamanians or Vietnamese," he wrote last year in a blog entry announcing the school's new project.

That's slowly changing as the university embarks on an ambitious research project to roll out 1Gbps Internet access to the immediate neighborhood, possibly extending this testbed network to 25,000 total Cleveland residents in total.

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feature: How to do pro-quality video post-production at home

So you've shot some great footage with your camera, and you have experience editing with one or two of the popular professional tools like Premiere, Vegas and Final Cut. And you've probably dabbled in some audio editing tools like Audition, Forge or Soundtrack. But you're really just experimenting, and you're not sure what all the filters and options are for. You can spend hours fiddling and not be any closer to making the footage look better or the audio sound better. This article walks through the post-production process in a home studio setting, and it shows you how to effectively use the tools you have on-hand.

Note: This should be read after Cheap shots: How to shoot pro-quality video on a budget, as it makes reference to ideas and concepts covered in that article.

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Bad luck, funding issues shutter Indie station WOXY.com

WOXY.com, the hugely popular independent radio station that has been known for showcasing new and notable musicians, is being shut down by its current ownership. The station's website began displaying a message on Tuesday telling listeners that "current economic realities" have forced the station to stop its live broadcasts, though not everyone on the staff feels the same way about the situation.

WOXY, originally based out of Cincinnati, has been around in some incarnation or another for decades, though it has gained a reputation in recent years as a "zombie" radio station. The station has always had some issues with funding and has gone on- and offline several times in its long history. After eventually going online-only in 2004, the site still struggled to make ends meet with fundraising efforts, advertising, and investors, and was eventually purchased by the (now Apple-owned) Lala in 2006. Then, in 2009, Lala sold the still-money-bleeding WOXY to Future Sounds, Inc., which eventually moved the whole staff to Austin, Texas.

According to WOXY General Manager Bryan Jay Miller, there were numerous elements that pushed WOXY over the edge this time around. In an e-mail to Ars, Miller said that the station had a "bit of bad luck" resulting in some major advertising deals falling through over the last 12 months.

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Razer fires back: why DPI in a gaming mouse does matter

SteelSeries made the case that DPI is a worthless measurement for the quality of a high-performance gaming mouse. Some of you agreed, others didn't. One person with a strong opinion was Robert “Razerguy” Krakoff, the President of Razer. His company makes some very nice gaming mice, and he has some thoughts on the DPI debate.

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Accused prerelease P2P mastermind acquitted by federal jury

The US government hauled two members of the "most notorious Internet 'release' group of the last decade" into court this month for a trial—but when it ended on Friday, both men walked away free.

The two men were Adil Cassim of California and Matthew Chow of Texas. According to the government, both had been active members of a prelease ripping groups called "Rabid Neurosis" (RNS). RNS existed from 1997 through 2007, at which point members hastily dissolved after European police snatched one of their servers. In the decade of its existence, RNS released nearly 18,000 copyrighted sound recordings onto the Internet, many of them before their official release.

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Blockbuster gets deal that Netflix, Redbox couldn't

Warner Bros., the same movie studio that has recently announced "deals" with Netflix and Redbox to delay the DVD release of its titles for 28 days, has announced a new agreement with movie rental company Blockbuster. Unlike to its previous deals, however, the new agreement makes Warner's titles available immediately in Blockbuster's dying brick-and-mortar stores, by mail, and on-demand.

"Warner Bros. and Blockbuster have enjoyed a cooperative and successful relationship for more than 25 years," Warner Home Video president Ron Sanders said in a statement. "The updated agreement will continue to provide Blockbuster customers with access to Warner Bros. titles the same day they are released."

At the risk of abusing an already overused phrase: Wow. Just wow. In its announcement, Warner reaffirmed its commitment to assuring that Blockbuster remains the "only multichannel provider that has every hot new movie on the day of its release." Indeed, with the agreements it struck with more innovative and competitive movie rental services like Netflix and Redbox, Blockbuster really is the only mainstream way for people to get movies on release day without buying them.

Blockbuster, of course, has been bleeding money for some time now. The company has been entertaining the idea of bankruptcy for close to a year now and has closed nearly a thousand stores in recent years. In fact, my peers and I have long wondered how the Blockbuster near my place has remained open, but the telltale "store closing" signs finally popped up in the windows this week. So what in the world is Warner Bros. thinking?

It's hard to see how Blockbuster could be paying more per rental than companies that are actually in the black, but the good relationship Blockbuster has fostered with the movie studios in the past has undoubtedly helped. The stores are also known for selling DVDs, so perhaps Warner enjoys this extra sales boost, no matter how tiny.

From this vantage point, this looks like a case of old media propping up old retail. The deal may buy Blockbuster a few extra months of life, but it's not going to win Warner Bros. any fans.

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Does high-fructose corn syrup make you fatter?

The use of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) has boomed in recent years, driven primarily by its low cost and ease of use in beverages. The increased levels in the US diet have roughly corresponded to the timing of the obesity epidemic, which as led many to suspect there's a causal relationship. But definitive evidence that the body responds to HFCS in a manner that's distinct from any other caloric intake has been difficult to come by. A group of researchers from Princeton now claim to have provided a conclusive demonstration that HFCS triggers obesity in rats, but there are enough oddities in the data that it would be wise to reserve judgement until the work is replicated.

Chemically, HFCS is a mix of fructose and glucose, the two components of table sugar. Unlike in table sugar (sucrose), however, the two are not chemically linked, and there's a slight excess of fructose instead of the 50:50 mix present in sucrose. These differences are relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, but there has been a consistent flow of studies that suggest the body responds quite differently to sucrose and HFCS, including indications of different fat metabolism and insulin responses. One idea that that's been proposed is that fructose doesn't induce the same sense of satiation that glucose does, meaning that we're less likely to stop eating after we've ingested sufficient calories.

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feature: Can Microsoft really build a better browser?

At last year's PDC, held in November, Microsoft showed a graph showing scores of a variety of Web browsers in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, to show off the progress that the company was making with Internet Explorer 9. Another such graph was shown off at the recent MIX event. What was most interesting about the graph was not IE9's progress, but Opera's.

Opera 10.10, released at about the same time as Microsoft held its PDC event, fared pretty badly. Faster than IE8, but slower than everything else, including the (private) PDC IE9 build. Opera 10.50, released a few weeks ago? It's the fastest browser on the chart. It's faster even than prerelease versions of Firefox and Chrome, not to mention faster than the public IE9 Platform Preview build. SunSpider isn't the be-all/end-all of JavaScript performance, and it fails to represent real-world scenarios in a number of ways. However, it's clear that Opera's JavaScript performance has improved substantially over the period of about six months.

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Apple a force to be reckoned with in portable gaming

Mobile analytics firm Flurry has attempted to measure Apple's influence on the portable gaming market, and its analysis concludes that iPhone games now account for about one-fifth of all revenue for portable game software in the US.

Using sales figures compiled from market research firm NPD, Flurry estimates that the slice of revenue pie going to iPhone games has increased from 5 percent in 2008 to 19 percent in 2009. In that same time period, revenue for Sony PSP games dropped from 20 to 11 percent, while market leader Nintendo dropped slightly, from 75 to 70 percent.

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Firefox becomes WinPhone 7's first big native code casualty

With the confirmation that Windows Phone 7 Series will not support native code development—only C# with Silverlight or XNA—the first major casualty has emerged: Firefox for Windows Mobile. Citing the inability to migrate the existing development effort to the new platform, Fennec (the mobile version of Firefox currently in development for Android and Maemo) for Windows Mobile is now on hold permanently.

Though this is not surprising, it does show the risk of Microsoft's strategy. Rewriting large, native code applications to meet the requirements of the new platform will be an undesirable task for many developers. Both Google and Palm eventually relented, and permitted native development for Android and webOS. Microsoft, for its part, says that the lack of native code is a technology issue rather than an immutable design philosophy—the inability to safely sandbox native code is the problem. This certainly leaves the door open to a future native code SDK. There are even claims that Microsoft will make an exception and allow Adobe to develop a (native) Flash for Windows Phone.

Third-party browsers are an important part of the Windows Mobile software ecosystem. In particular, Opera Mobile is excellent in all the ways that Pocket Internet Explorer is terrible; it is fast, accurate, finger-friendly, and standards compliant. Though Windows Phone 7 Series will include an improved Internet Explorer (one that should at least be finger-friendly), the browser experience is still set to lag behind its desktop counterpart for the forseeable future. The lack of native code is likely to be as unpalatable for Opera as it was for Mozilla, and if this turns out to be the case, it will mean that Windows Phone has no third-party browsers.

In turn, this puts even greater pressure on Microsoft to ensure that Internet Explorer in Windows Phone 7 Series delivers an acceptable browsing experience. While the current (old) platform could depend on third parties to provide browsing salvation, this will not be an option for the new platform. With a high quality Web browser as an essential feature of competing smartphone platforms, this could leave Windows Phone at quite a disadvantage.

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Thursday, March 25, 2010

IT News HeadLines (Ars Technica) 25/03/2010

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