Microsoft says patent-infringing Android isn't really free
Google's open source Android operating system is not as free as it seems, Microsoft argues, because it infringes a number of patents. When asked whether open source models created problems for vendors with licensed software, the software giant went on the offensive. "It does infringe on a bunch of patents, and there's a cost associated with that," Tivanka Ellawala, Microsoft financial officer told MarketWatch. "So there's a... cost associated with Android that doesn't make it free."
Android may be free to manufacturers—a fact that no doubt makes it attractive—but Microsoft's point is that adoption is not without its own risks. The Apple versus HTC case is a good example. Apple claims that HTC's Android (and Windows Mobile) handsets violate a number of Apple patents—claims that could potentially put HTC and other Android OEMs at risk. So far, Google has only given HTC moral—not legal—support. Keen to avoid a similar fight with Redmond, HTC has paid Microsoft for patent licenses. Regardless of the outcome of the case with Apple, Android has clearly incurred costs for HTC, in spite of its free licensing.
Microsoft's controversial comments come just weeks before the software giant launches Windows Phone 7. As we wait for its official launch, Android-based smartphones are quickly starting to dominate, with Google set to pass both Apple and Research in Motion worldwide by year end.
Android has already eclipsed Windows Mobile, which OEMs have to purchase licenses for. Microsoft is planning on selling Windows Phone 7 in the same manner, betting that OEMs will find that Windows Phone brings more to the table than Android, making it worth the price. Microsoft's strategy is a long-term one, though. With Android expected to dominate over the next couple of years (at least), why not plant doubts about possible legal costs in the minds of Android-enamored manufacturers?
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RCN P2P settlement: ISP can throttle away starting November 1
Starting November 1, Internet service provider RCN can resume its discriminatory traffic management policies against peer-to-peer protocols—so long as it offers advance notice to customers.Many of those involved in the debate over network neutrality appear to believe that ISPs simply don't engage in widespread traffic discrimination, and that the only possible example net neutrality supporters can dredge up involve Comcast and Madison River. Judging by their filings to the FCC, many DC lobbyists subscribe to this view. Take Charter, for instance, which told the FCC:
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Verizon LTE in 30 cities by year end, AT&T aims for mid-2011
Both AT&T and Verizon are moving forward with their 4G/LTE networks in the US, with one launching by the end of the year and the other going commercial by mid-2011. And, with the recent approval of the first LTE phone by the FCC, the door is opening for a trickle, then flood, of new LTE devices to hop on those networks. AT&T Operations CEO John Stankey announced at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch 2010 Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference this week that the company expects to give its LTE network a good kick by the middle of 2011, and cover between 70 million and 75 million users by the end of the year. Stankey did not specify which cities would get LTE first, but the company is already carrying out trials in Baltimore and Dallas, so those cities are surely on the list.
Why is AT&T waiting so long to roll out LTE when Verizon has already said that it plans to hit a number of major US markets by the end of 2010? The company apparently wants to milk its HSPA network as long as possible while it waits for the LTE market to "mature" (read: let someone else work out the kinks). In the meantime, AT&T is working on upgrading to HSPA+ this year with theoretical max data speeds at 56Mbps.
Speaking of Verizon, the company recently solidified its plans to launch its own LTE network in 30 "NFL cities" by the end of 2010. Verizon has been carrying out LTE tests in Boston for some time—as well as other major metro areas like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, and then some.
Meanwhile, Sprint announced this week that Nashville was the next city to get its 4G WiMAX coverage, bumping the number of markets covered by Sprint 4G to 52. That list already includes Honolulu, Chicago, Portland, Las Vegas, Boston, and Salt Lake City, among others. (Granted, many of the cities already covered by Sprint are not exactly huge ones like Verizon's planned rollout, but we'll take what we can get.) The carrier and its partner Clearwire hope to cover 120 million customers with WiMAX goodness by the end of 2010.
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Move, dodge, kill: Time Crisis Razing Storm on the PS3 gets pirates
Motion controls such as those found on the PlayStation Move and the Nintendo Wii give you the option of bringing a very specific arcade genre into your home: the light gun game. We've seen these games on Nintendo's system, but with Time Crisis: Razing Storm Namco, Bandai has the chance to further prove the PlayStation 3 can be a good home for the "kill everything on screen" games.This isn't the first time Time Crisis has come to the PlayStation, and its last outing brought a new version of the GunCon 3 controller to Sony's hardware. Razing Storm gives you the choice of playing with the Move, the GunCon 3, or a standard controller. Since we were sent some early code to give a whirl with the PlayStation Move, that's where we're going to focus our attention. Let's kill a few waves of bad guys, shall we?
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Intel confirms HDCP key is real, can now be broken at will
Earlier this week a key claiming to be the HDCP master key was posted to the Internet. If real, the key would allow anyone to construct hardware to decrypt HDCP-protected content. Intel, inventors of HDCP, has confirmed that the key is indeed real, and can be used in just this way.HDCP is used to protect the digital outputs of set-top boxes, Blu-ray players, and similar devices, to ensure that bit-perfect digital dumps of the audio and video streams cannot be made; these source devices should only send the data to sink devices (TVs and monitors) that can properly negotiate the HDCP encryption. Prior to the key being leaked, the encryption keys that source and sink devices used could only be obtained by paying for an HDCP license; in this way, HDCP can be restricted to "approved" uses.
The key leak means that approval is no longer needed. The most interesting possible use is not for decrypting optical discs—their output can be decrypted through more direct means already—but for making perfect digital copies of digital cable feeds, including pay-per-view content. A few HDCP strippers have been marketed before; however, they typically have analog outputs. With the master key leaked, full fidelity digital HDCP strippers are a practical reality.
The question of who leaked the key or how they obtained it remains unanswered. It has been known since 2001 that the key can be recovered mathematically given the encryption keys of 40-50 HDCP devices; it's also possible that someone obtained access to the master key directly, and leaked that.
Intel, unsurprisingly, said that it expected HDCP to remain effective. The spokesman told CNET, "There's a large install base of licensed devices including several hundred licensees that will continue to use it and in any case, were a [circumvention] device to appear that attempts to take advantage of this particular hack there are legal remedies, particularly under the DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act]."
In other words, Intel and the media companies don't care that their encryption systems offer only token protection and consumer inconvenience; all that matters is that the encryption systems are sufficient to meet the DMCA threshold for a content protection system: the threat of legal action, rather than cryptography, is their real tool against unapproved uses of digital content.
While sink devices would be susceptible to DMCA claims, it's not obvious that the same would be true of source devices. Until now, manufacturers of source devices had to purchase keys in order to enable HDCP protection of their outputs. Now it looks like they could save some money and just generate their own.
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Windows Phone 7 SDK here; YouTube, Netflix demoed; no CDMA yet
Two weeks after the operating system itself was finalized, Microsoft has released the Windows Phone 7 SDK to developers. Applications developed with the new SDK will be submittable to the Windows Phone Marketplace when that opens for submissions next month.The new SDK brings many welcome improvements; it (finally) includes built-in support to allow developers to offer many of the same interface concepts as the built-in phone software uses. Specifically, Panoramas, used in the various hubs such as People and Office, and Pivots, used in the e-mail client, are now available for all to use. The sideways-scrolling panoramas in particular are a striking part of the Windows Phone 7 experience, and their absence led many to attempt to develop their own versions. Having a standard control to use will ease development and provide greater uniformity in third-party applications.
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For crows, a little tool use goes a long way
Evolutionarily, animals that use tools have an leg up on their competition: they can access hard-to-get food items, learn more about their environment, and better protect and defend themselves. But exactly how much of an evolutionary edge does tool use provide? In a new article in Science, a group of researchers set out to answer this question, and were surprised at how much of an advantage tool use can provide.The scientists studied New Caledonian crows, a bird species that is particularly well known for its tool use. These crows often use sticks to find and extract beetle larvae from holes, much like chimpanzees use sticks to “fish†for termites. This is a very specialized task, because the crows fish for just one beetle species (the wood boring longhorn beetle) in the trunk of a single species of tree (the candlenut tree).
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Feature: The history of Civilization: 20 years of Wonders
The Civilization series spans nearly 20 years, several consoles, and innumerable hours of gameplay by its devoted fans who have fought wars, built the Wonders of the World, and watched entire empires rise and fall. As the fifth iteration of the award-winning, turn-based strategy game closes in on its release date, Ars takes a look back at the evolution of Civilization, and how it captured our hearts, brains, and unblinking stares time and again.
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HTC moves beyond the phone, marginalizes Google in the process
At HTC's London event on Wednesday, they company showed off two things. As expected, there were a couple of handsets: the Desire HD and Desire Z. But what HTC opened with was not handsets, but a new website—htcsense.com—and its accompanying phone front-end.The phones were nice enough. The Desire HD is a GSM/UMTS/HSPA equivalent to the EVO 4G available in the US exclusively on Sprint; the Desire Z is slightly lower-specced than the HD, but will likely gain wide appeal as it has a hardware keyboard. The Desire Z will form the basis of the forthcoming T-Mobile G2 in the US, the spiritual successor to the G1 (which was, back in 2008, the first Android handset to ship). T-Mobile's version will include a different radio (to support T-Mobile's awkward 1700 MHz frequency allocation), and more excitingly, will support HSPA+, the next generation HSPA technology that ultimately provides data rates up to 56Mbps downstream, 22 Mbps upstream.
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Feature: BodyMedia FIT review: data, data, and more data for exercisers
Exactly how many calories do you burn in a day? For the health-conscious (or just data-obsessed), this isn't as easy a question to answer as it seems. There are millions of calorie burn calculators out there, but they are all estimations. Do you work entirely seated during the day, or semi-seated? Are your walks to and from lunch fast enough to count as "brisk," or are they really just strolls? How hard are you really working when you run? The estimates might come close, but they vary so wildly that it's hard to really know what to believe. Do I really burn 1,750 calories just by my body existing for a day, and 2,500 calories by actually being awake and doing stuff? These are the types of questions that sparked the development of a new type of fitness gadget—the kind that latches onto your body in an attempt to measure your real calorie burn. These devices do this by measuring your body temperature, the rate at which heat is leaving your body, sweat levels, pulse, and body motion, among other things.
The most famous of these is the BodyBugg, used on the popular weight loss show The Biggest Loser, but there are others just like it—in particular, the BodyMedia FIT, which is essentially the same product as the BodyBugg but under different branding. (In fact, a BodyMedia spokesperson confirmed to us that BodyBugg is actually owned and developed by BodyMedia.) We were given the opportunity to try out a BodyMedia unit, and found that it gave us all the data we ever wanted to know, and then some.
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Lawsuit targets advertiser over sneaky HTML5 pseudo-cookies
A New York-based mobile-web advertising company was hit Wednesday with a proposed class action lawsuit over its use of an HTML5 trick to track iPhone and iPad users across a number of websites, in what is believed to be the first privacy lawsuit of its kind in the mobile space.The company, Ringleader Digital, uses HTML5's client-side database storage capability as a substitute for the traditional cookie tracking employed by all major online ad companies. Mobile Safari users visiting sites with Ringleader ads are assigned a globally unique ID number which is stored by the browser, and recalled by Ringleader whenever they revisit.
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Galaxy Tab coming to all US carriers; no pricing yet, no 4G
iPad watch out: Samsung is gunning to take over the tablet market. The company announced during a press conference late Thursday that the recently announced Galaxy Tab would be launching on all four major US cellular networks—Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile—and a WiFi-only option will be available soon. There won't be any 4G-capable devices at launch, however (only 3G), and Samsung is remaining mum on pricing. As the company announced earlier this month, the device will run Android 2.2 (aka, Froyo) and will be able to play Adobe Flash content in the browser. Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch demoed Flash on the Galaxy Tab during the press conference, pointing out that users will be able to view embedded video and games just like they would on a personal computer. The Tab will also come with both front- and rear-facing cameras—a 3MP autofocus camera on the back with LED flash that can do still photos and "DVD quality videos," and a 1.3MP fixed focus camera on the front for video chatting. And, of course, the Tab comes with support for up to 32GB MicroSD cards in addition to its 16GB of internal storage. These are all features that the iPad currently lacks.
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Apple TV definitely running iOS, could be jailbreak target
The next-generation Apple TV slated for release in late September was widely rumored to be based around an ARM architecture and the same iOS that powers Apple's mobile devices. However, the interface that Steve Jobs demoed looked identical to the one on the previous Apple TV, leaving some question about the underlying software. Configuration files in the iOS 4.2 beta released this week confirm that the new Apple TV is indeed an iOS device.Apple stores configuration information about how various iOS devices can communicate with other devices over its dock connector in a file called
USBDeviceConfiguration.plist. Entries in this file have revealed early evidence of new iPhone and iPod models, and an entry labelled "iProd" later turned out to be the first iPad.An entry in iOS 3.2 was referred to as
iProd2,1, and we suspected that it was likely an early prototype of a next-gen iPad. However, an updated configuration file in iOS 4.2b1 reveals the same numeric product ID is attached to an entry for AppleTV2,1, referring to the second major hardware revision of the Apple TV. This presents solid evidence that the new Apple TV is running iOS proper, instead of the other customized version of Mac OS X used for the previous one—that should save Apple from duplicated development effort.Given what little information we have about the device so far, it doesn't appear that it will natively support running current iOS apps when launched. However, it seems as though it should be possible for Apple to enable apps to be made for the device if it chooses to, assuming there is enough on-board storage. As TUAW notes, the original Apple TV attracted plenty of effort from hackers to expand its capabilities. So we shouldn't be surprised if Apple TV hackers and iPhone jailbreakers get together and find a way to run custom apps on the new device.
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P2P defendants demand legal fees from Far Cry filmmaker
Lawyers for the US Copyright Group have sued more than 14,000 people in 2010, all of them in the federal courts of Washington, DC. Individuals have moved to quash the subpoenas that would expose their names, but these have been almost wholly rejected, in large part because they were written (sometimes by hand) by individual defendants making inappropriate arguments. But now, some defendants are fighting back in a much savvier way, with actual lawyers. And they want their pound of flesh from rightsholders.The Far Cry case targets more than 4,000 "Doe" defendants alleged to have shared that particular Uwe Boll film using BitTorrent, and it's in that case that a major "Omnibus Motion" has now been filed. A group of defendants have hired several DC lawyers to file a joint motion demanding that the subpoenas in the case be quashed, that the defendants be dismissed from the litigation, and that Boll's production company cover their legal expenses (something probably not anticipated by Boll's firm, Achte/Neunte Boll Kino Beteiligungs GmbH, when it signed on with US Copyright Group to score some cash).
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Harder for kids to buy M-rated video game than see R-rated movie
With groups like Common Sense Media making news by claiming the majority of parents want certain games controlled by law, it's useful to look at just how well the industry regulates itself. As there are currently no laws against selling M-rated content to minors, the rating system relies on retailer compliance to be effective. What special interest groups may not understand, however, is that everyone from the retailers to the publishers seem to understand that compliance is in everyone's best interest.The Entertainment Software Rating Board sent over the following information, collected by the Federal Trade Commission, showing how easily children were able to purchase entertainment that's rated either "Mature" for games or "R" for film. Music marked with a warning about explicit content was also included. How did gaming stack up?
Data source: FTC
Keep these numbers in mind when someone tells you video games are unregulated, or that retailers and publishers like it when children buy Mature-rated games.
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Open source Facebook replacement Diaspora drops first alpha
The Diaspora project—an attempt to make an open source, peer-to-peer replacement for Facebook with a focus on privacy—has reached its first major milestone. The first developer alpha is now available for download and review, and the group is now accepting code contributions from the open source community at large.Diaspora was born of the frustration with Facebook's central control over user-supplied data and an increasing propensity to play loose with users' privacy. "Diaspora aims to be a distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other directly, and will let us connect without surrendering our privacy," project co-founder Maxwell Salzberg wrote in April.
Users can set up and run a "seed" server on their home computer or a server. The seeds aggregate a user's data from services like Facebook, Twitter, and other sites via plug-ins. The seeds can then communicate with each other and share data according to a user's specific privacy settings, all over a direct encrypted connection. In other words, privacy settings and data sharing are completely at the control of the user.
"Our real social lives do not have central managers, and our virtual lives do not need them," Salzberg explained. "Decentralizing lets us reconstruct our 'social graphs' so that they belong to us."
Today's code release is just a first step in a long journey that many believed would never get off the ground. However, the project organizers are opening up the code and bug tracker to anyone interested in contributing to the project. There is a working roadmap, and the current high-priority features being worked on are data portability, internationalization, server-to-server authentication, and refining what project organizers call "aspects."
"We live our real lives in context, speaking from whatever aspect of ourselves that those around us know. Social tools should work the same way," the project leads wrote on their blog on Wednesday.
The Diaspora project has so far been funded by an overwhelming response to a Kickstarter project fund that exceeded the founders' expectations. With this initial alpha release, things look to be off to a good start, and the focus on open standards and user privacy seem quite promising. Online privacy remains a hot-button issue, but Facebook's popularity may be hard to overcome with a do-it-yourself solution as long as the company does enough with privacy issues to keep the general public content.
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Skyhook: Google made OEMs break business deals, infringed patents
Location-based WiFi service Skyhook Wireless has filed two lawsuits against Google, accusing the search giant of infringing on a number of its location patents and influencing other companies to break their contracts with Skyhook. Until very recently, Skyhook's services were used by many companies looking to provide location-based services to all manner of mobile device users. Among other things, the company was known for providing location data even for users with no GPS capabilities—by looking up the data from participating WiFi hotspots, Skyhook could get a rough estimate of where a device was at any given time. One of the most prominent companies to use Skyhook's services is Apple, in its iOS devices—the company has since moved on to using its own technologies in iOS.
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