Angry Birds HD gets gaming award nod; top paid iPhone apps are games
The best portable gaming device is arguably the one you carry the most often, and in that regard the iPhone excels. The hardware is powerful enough to run Unreal Engine 3, iOS developers are creating experiences that are becoming cultural forces, and sales of the hardware remain strong. The power of iPhone gaming is coming into focus, as Angry Birds HD has been nominated for Game of the Year in this year's Interactive Achievement Awards by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences.We shouldn't be surprised. Apple has finally become a gaming powerhouse, but it didn't happen in the way we imagined. It doesn't matter that the iPhone isn't designed specifically for games; what matters is that people buy games for it, and they're doing so in huge numbers.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
No bluff: Far Cry P2P lawsuits revived, refiled cross-country
The US Copyright Group—also known as the Virginia law firm of Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver—wasn't bluffing. Stymied by a federal judge overseeing several of its massive lawsuits against file-swappers, the law firm has teamed up with local lawyers around the country to refile its copyright infringement cases in courts closer to each accused defendant. Bottom line: if you were accused of sharing the films Far Cry or The Steam Experiment on BitTorrent, and you were rejoicing last year at eventually having your case dismissed from the Washington, DC federal district court, it's time to don the sackcloth and ashes. You may well be sued again.The infringement cases for both films were first filed in March 2010. The Far Cry case started with the IP addresses of 4,577 anonymous defendants, while The Steam Experiment targeted a mere 2,000. (Far Cry is based on a violent first-person shooter of the same name, while The Steam Experiment features Val Kilmer as a crazed scientist who "locks 6 people in a steam room and threatens to turn up the heat if the local paper doesn't publish his story about global warming," according to the Internet Movie Database.)
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Appcelerator buys Aptana, strengthens Titanium mobile dev solution
A growing number of application developers are using Web technologies to build client-side software. With the help of sophisticated frameworks and library standardization efforts, JavaScript has evolved beyond its humble roots as a tool for form validation and is seeing adoption in a wide range of environments.A strong sign that this trend is gaining momentum is this week's news that Appcelerator has acquired Aptana. The acquisition is a compelling move that makes sense on several different levels. Appcelerator's flagship product is the open source Titanium development framework, which allows developers to build desktop and mobile applications with Web technologies. Aptana is a tooling company that offers a popular Eclipse-based Web development IDE. By bringing their products together, Appcelerator can offer a complete platform.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Fake keyboard: PCs hacked with custom Android USB drivers
A pair of researchers presenting at the Black Hat DC conference are showing off an amusing new attack against laptops and smartphones that is initiated simply by plugging the phone into the PC.In a way, it's an obvious attack. Instead of making a USB-connected smartphone appear to a host computer as a phone, make it appear to be a mouse or a keyboard—and then use that mouse or keyboard to take control of the computer. The computer can't tell a real keyboard with real user input apart from a fake one, so is powerless to prevent exploitation. The researchers also described how such an attack could propagate; the phone could install malware to the PC that would in turn install malware to any new phones.
They also devised a mechanism to allow one smartphone to directly attack another, using a specially modified USB cable.
Attacking computers via USB is nothing new—the first PlayStation 3 hacks exploited flaws in the console's USB drivers, for example—but this approach is novel in that the attackers aren't exploiting coding errors in the computer's USB software; they're simply pretending to be a different kind of hardware, one that can do things to the PC that a phone can't.
The researchers used Android hardware to perform their attack, but in principle it could use pretty much any smartphone. Android's open nature makes it the easiest to work with, but a jailbroken iPhone would work just as well. To work, the hardware merely has to have a programmable USB controller that can be made to masquerade as an input device.
To combat such attacks, the researchers say that operating systems must offer the ability to filter USB packets and alert users more effectively to attempts to connect input devices. Current operating systems automatically enable any USB input devices plugged in, with little (Windows, Mac OS X) or no (Linux) obvious indication that new hardware has been added. Better notifications, along with an ability to refuse to allow the device to connect, would prevent the attacks from succeeding. Though whether operating system authors bother is another question: as physical access is required, and a similar attack could be made by just typing directly on the computer's keyboard, the real risk in practice is likely to be negligible.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
AMD goes after Atom with embedded system on a chip
Wednesday, AMD launched its G-series platform, codenamed eBrazos, for embedded systems. In calling the G-series an "embedded" part, AMD is using the term the same way that Intel does: to designate systems that fall outside the scope of the traditional PC market. (Examples include point-of-sale terminals, slot machines, kiosk systems, digital signs, industrial controls, and so on.)
eBrazos is fairly powerful for such applications, and given AMD's low prices it could help the company hold its own against Intel in this market.
At the heart of eBrazos are two of AMD's "Bobcat" cores, paired with a DirectX11-class GPU on the same die. Bobcat is an out-of-order design, which makes it higher performance and higher power than Intel's Atom. But for many of the applications at which AMD is aiming the design, Atom's low-power advantage may not matter as much, especially if an AMD solution can keep the total bill of materials cost lower. The eBrazos GPU has a video decoder that can do hardware-accelerated decoding of H.264, VC1, and DivX/Xvid formats, and the chip also comes with a pair of digital display outputs that can be externally configured as either HDMI, DVI, or DisplayPort.
The G-series is already in use in the new Surface product that Microsoft showed off at this past CES. This is a pretty important design win for AMD, not because Surface has volume, but because it's a relatively performance-intensive, high-profile application for the company's Fusion technology. AMD is also touting design wins from a list of companies that includes Fujitsu, Wyse, and a number of less familiar names.
Incidentally, given that there are 9W and 18W versions of the chipset (CPU/GPU plus controller hub chip) available, the G-series would probably be a much better fit for the MacBook Air than the ancient Intel hardware that's currently in there. It would certainly be better than what's in the current Mac mini. Don't hold your breath for Apple to go AMD, though—not with the prospect of Sandy Bridge upgrades coming later this year.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Feature: HiRe-definition: the Ars A/V Club weighs in on the future of TV
2010 saw two major developments in the TV market: 3D, and the Web. TV makers are still hoping that consumers will upgrade their plain old 2D and Web-less panels with models that will let them bring the Internet into their living rooms without requiring them to add another box to their entertainment center. In this five-part series on the Future of TV, Ars takes an in-depth look at the major transition that TV is currently undergoing.In our quest to get a picture of the near-term future of TV, we asked our forum community of early adopters to give us a look at the composition of their current home theater systems. The Ars A/V crowd is about as wired as it gets, and whatever they're using can give some insight about the real state-of-the-art in TV—not the marketing-driven state-of-the-hype, but where things are at in the real world, and where they might go shortly.
Before we dig into the details of the replies, it's worth noting a few aspects of the responses as a whole. The first thing that leaps out at me as I read through the forum thread is that TV has definitely been redefined. I touched on this redefinition in my portion of our recent CES wrap-up, but it's worth revisiting here.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Microsoft blames Windows Phone 7 data usage issue on unnamed 3rd party
Microsoft has issued a vague response to say that the company has determined the cause of excessive Windows Phone 7 data use issues. In a statement given to SeattlePI, the company says that the configuration of a "third-party solution" is causing the operating system to transfer many tens of megabytes of data each day.As for a fix, Microsoft says that it is contact with the third party to assist them in making changes to their systems to resolve the problem, and is also pursuing "workarounds" in case they are necessary. The statement did not offer any particular timeline for when these changes would be made.
All very peculiar. The main culprit fingered by the Windows Phone 7 community over this issue (though not named in the statement) is Yahoo! Mail. Windows Phone 7 has special support for Yahoo! Mail allowing it to treat Yahoo! accounts as something more than regular POP or IMAP mailboxes (similar special support also exists for GMail and Hotmail accounts). The special support typically enables non-mail features such as contact and calendar syncing. Given this level of integration, one might have expected any configuration issues on Yahoo!'s end to be detected and resolved prior to launch.
The other part of the data usage problem is that the data usage is occuring primarily over 3G—which for most users, subject to restrictive network contracts, is a scarce resource—rather than WiFi. The likely reason for such behavior is that Windows Phone 7—in common with the iPhone and typical Android phones—disables WiFi when the screen is off, as a battery-saving measure. Turning on the screen resumes the WiFi connection, but this can take a few moments, especially if the WiFi signal is weak.
Microsoft says that the issues affect only a few percent of Windows Phone 7 customers. Nonetheless, it would behoove the company to be more forthcoming about the nature of this problem, as well as any timeline for a fix. Excessive data usage can land users with nasty bills: if there is a problem with Yahoo! Mail, customers should be explicitly warned so that they can take remedial action such as switching accounts to sync manually or disabling them altogether.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Big content to ICANN: make it easier for us to challenge domain suffixes
A small battalion of music copyright trade associations have written to the global agency in charge of domains to express their displeasure with the group's latest Draft Application Guidebook for generic Top-Level Domains (gLTDs). Those are the domain suffixes that we've all come to know and possibly love, such as .com, .org, and .info."Our overriding concern is to ensure that any music themed gTLD is used productively and responsibly, and not as a means to facilitate copyright or trademark infringement," wrote Victoria Scheckler, Deputy General Council of the Recording Industry of America, to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) on January 5.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Regulating Google's results? Law prof calls "search neutrality" incoherent
"Neutrality"—if it's good enough for the core of the Internet, isn't it good enough for the edge? The biggest Internet providers say it is, and they would love to have the government slap a few neutrality rules on Google, just to see how the advertising giant likes the taste of the regulatory bridle.In 2010, while the FCC was debating net neutrality rules, ISPs like Time Warner Cable settled on a "they're gatekeepers, too!" strategy.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
iDOS emulator back on App Store, requires hack to load games
iDOS, a repackaged version of the open source DOSBox emulator, is back on the App Store after getting rid of the ability to load games and other software using iTunes file syncing. While that might make the emulator seem far less useful, users have discovered a simple, no-jailbreak-required hack to load any old DOS software they want to run.Last year, Apple relaxed several restrictions it had placed on iOS app development, including limitations on running certain interpreted code. This change made it possible to sell hardware emulators like C64 and iDOS via the App Store, "as long as the resulting apps do not download any code," according to Apple.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Microsoft-HP appliance collaboration yields first fruit
Microsoft and HP announced last year a $250 million, three-year alliance between the two companies to collaborate on a range of IT infrastructure projects. The first deliverables from this project were announced today: a range of appliances for running Microsoft enterprise software.Each appliance combines hardware, software, support, and management into a single, easy-to-deploy unit. Four were announced today: two available immediately and two later in the year. The promise for each is the same: turnkey, ready-to-run access to a range of Microsoft's enterprise software. Each appliance is tailored to its chosen workload and applications, and so it offers only limited configuration customization.
The two available today are the HP Business Decision Appliance, and the HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance. The first of these is a SharePoint system: SharePoint 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2, and Windows Server 2008 R2 preinstalled onto an HP server. The companies say that it should take less than an hour to get installed and running. Pricing starts at around $28,000 with three years of support, with the SharePoint and SQL Server licenses purchased separately (so that they can use existing volume licenses).
The second appliance with immediate availability, the Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance, is built around Microsoft's high-end SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse edition. It contains multiple servers—up to 40 in total—and storage modules, with database capacities ranging from 38TB up to 500TB. Pricing starts at around $2 million.
Available later in the year are the HP E5000 Messaging System, and the HP Business Data Warehouse Appliance. The E5000 Messaging System is an Exchange Server 2010 system, with pricing starting at $36,000. The appliance provides fully redundant hardware, and is preconfigured to use Exchange's Database Availability Groups replication feature. It should be available in March.
The Business Data Warehouse Appliance is a smaller counterpart to the Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance, with availability starting in June. No pricing has been announced yet.
The companies also announced the HP Database Consolidation Appliance. This appliance, not expected until the second half of this year, will provide a single virtual environment providing access to multiple disparate databases. Microsoft is describing it as a "private cloud database," providing easily provisioned scalable database services for on-premises deployments.
The purpose of all this? Microsoft and HP believe that the data warehousing, business intelligence, and messaging market will be worth about $55 billion by 2015. These appliances allow organizations to deploy solutions quickly, easily, and most importantly, successfully: Microsoft claims only 32 percent of IT projects are regarded as "successful" by the companies implementing them, making IT infrastructure projects risky affairs. By providing preconfigured software, and hardware tailored to the needs of each application, the companies hope that these appliances will reduce that risk and make IT projects more successful.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Goatse Security trolls were after "max lols" in AT&T iPad hack
On Tuesday the FBI arrested and charged two men in their mid-20s for their involvement in last year's attack on AT&T servers that mined over 100,000 e-mail addresses from iPad 3G owners. Andrew "weev" Auernheimer and Daniel "JacksonBrown" Spitler were taken into custody and charged in federal court with one count each of fraud and conspiracy to access a computer without authorization.The criminal complaint filed in US District Court in the District of New Jersey has been released, which includes excerpts of some 150 pages of IRC chat logs between Auernheimer, Spitler, and other members of a self-professed "troll" group known as Goatse Security. Those chat logs, turned over to the FBI by an unnamed confidential source, reveal that the group (Auernheimer in particular) wanted to "embarrass" AT&T publicly over the security flaw they discovered and make the stock price go down in order to troll the company. Auernheimer also attempted to spin the story in the press and attempt to paint Goatse Security as a legitimate data security company, and later attempted to destroy evidence after it was announced that the FBI planned to investigate the matter.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Senator Al Franken: No joke, Comcast trying to whack Netflix
Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) has had it with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), who has just created "essentially two Internets" with weak net neutrality rules and who this week signed off on the mega-merger of Comcast and NBC Universal. A common thread unites the two decisions: both highlight the "growing threat of corporate control" over information.Franken's remarks came yesterday during a speech to a Netroots Nation gathering in Minnesota. The former comedian and NBC employee (during his Saturday Night Live days) has made media consolidation and network neutrality two of his signature issues, and he hammered on both of them during his talk.
Calling net neutrality the "free speech issue of our time," Franken expressed his displeasure with the FCC's recent net neutrality rules. "These rules are not strong enough," he said, pointing out that paid prioritization was not banned and that wireless networks are allowed to discriminate at will.
The rules mark the "first time the FCC has ever allowed discrimination on the Internet" and they "will create essentially two Internets."
When it comes to the Comcast merger, Franken was even more vocal. "As you probably know, I hate this merger," he told the group. Not only will it raise prices on TV subscriptions, it will give the combined entity incredible power to stifle competition from online sources like Netflix.
"I'm hearing that Comcast is already preparing to pull NBC Universal's programming from Netflix when it's next up for review," Franken said. The cable industry is worried about the threat from cheaper options like Netflix; "they aren't stupid and they want to shut it down."
Franken even referenced the current controversy over Level 3's peering arrangements with Comcast (Level 3 just won a major contract from Netflix to deliver its content). Comcast's move to charge for this interconnection is, in Franken's view, "a clear warning sign of what we can all expect if this deal goes through."
As he was giving that speech, the merger did go through yesterday, signed off on by the FCC and the Department of Justice. As for what's next, Franken just sees a new wave of mega-consolidation in which AT&T tries to buy ABC/Disney while Verizon goes after CBS.
"Now is the time to decide if we want four or five companies owning and delivering all of our information and entertainment," he said.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Slime Mold MacDonald farms its bacterial meals
Agriculture clearly revolutionized human society, but the practice seems to have occurred on a simpler scale among a broad range of species. Termites, ants, fish, and snails all practice simple forms of "farming," in which a food source is organized and encouraged to proliferate in order to ensure a steady food supply. Today's issue of Nature identifies a similar case, this one involving a very unexpected species: the slime mold, which spends a big part of its life cycle operating as a single-celled amoeba. One species of slime mold, Dictyostelium discoideum, has been used extensively for research, but no one had observed anything resembling farming within the lab populations. A team at Rice University, however, spotted it while working with samples freshly obtained from wild populations. At two sites, the farming strain was only about a third of the total population. So it's not clear whether this is a case of nobody having looked carefully or the lab strains not exhibiting any farming behavior.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
World of StarCraft modder shut down, pleads for Blizzard approval
Ryan Winzen put together an impressive video demo of a game he called World of StarCraft, using StarCraft 2's modding tools. The video was passed around the various gaming blogs yesterday, and unfortunately it caught the eye of Activision Blizzard, who sent a cease and desist notice to YouTube, causing the video's deletion.Keep in mind you can find many videos of the StarCraft 2 engine put to use to create all sorts of mods, some of them named for, or referencing, well-known properties. Unfortunately, by naming the mod in question World of StarCraft, Winzen tripped over two well-known Blizzard properties, including a product that may or may not be in production. Even if Blizzard has no plans of creating a World of StarCraft game in the near future, the company apparently feels it's important to keep the name open and unencumbered by relationships to mods and fan-made projects.
Winzen pleaded with Blizzard to allow him to continue to develop a game called World of StarCraft. He shows some heart, but his response seems a touch naive. "I know it's hard to trust someone you've never met to piggyback on your own legacy... Let me assure you that I am in no way shape or form going to deliver anything less than complete perfection (edit: close to perfection)," he wrote on his forum.
The poor guy just wants a chance to create one of the most wished-for games in the industry, dagnabbit! "If you have a problem with what I am doing... or would like to talk about it. I'm all ears. But please don't send me some messenger with a cease and desist letter," he wrote to Blizzard. Winzen claims the mod "holds possibilities" for both himself and the developer behind World of WarCraft. "Furthermore, if you like this idea and would be willing to grant me a seal of approval to continue... that would be wonderful. I won't let you down."
We have a feeling that if Blizzard was interested in making a World of StarCraft game, the company would use its vast resources to create something it could then charge players $15 a month to play, making a rather large fortune for themselves and the shareholders.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Court: attorney-client e-mails not private if you're at work
Can your boss use your e-mails to your attorney against you? Whenever you send those e-mails from your work account, apparently. An appeals court in the Sacramento Third Appellate District has upheld a lower court's decision in a wrongful-termination case, saying that attorney-client communications can no longer be considered confidential if you have waived your rights to work e-mail privacy. The case was brought by Gina Holmes against her employer, Petrovich Development Company. Holmes had an e-mail tiff with her boss, Paul Petrovich, over whether she had misled him about her pregnancy during her interview—Petrovich expressed frustration with having hired someone who was pregnant and needed to go on an extended leave, and Holmes was quick to remind him of her rights under California law and the employee handbook.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Valve talks Portal 2 on PlayStation 3, Steam on 360
Valve announced the PlayStation 3 version of Portal 2 at least year's E3, and promised Sony would be getting the best version of the game. Launching with Steam on the PlayStation 3, giving players a copy of the game on the PC and Mac when accounts are linked, and allowing cross-platform play is certainly a good way to get the attention of gamers.We spoke with Doug Lombardi, Valve's VP of Marketing, about this news, and what it means for other consoles as well as future PlayStation 3 games.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Phoenix Lander blasts away Martian dirt, uncovers new way to dig
Scientists continue to analyze the data returned by the Phoenix mission to Mars. On May 25th, 2008, when Phoenix touched down on Mars, the lander’s thrusters blasted away as much as 18cm of Martian soil underneath the probe and exposed a layer of ice. While the discovery of the subsurface ice generated a great deal of excitement, some scientists were puzzled, because Phoenix’s relatively weak rocket engines, with 30 percent less total thrust than those of the Viking Mars Landers in the '70s, shouldn’t have excavated that much dirt.
In a new study led by Manish Mehta of the University of Michigan, scientists recreated Mars-like conditions in a laboratory to understand what happened when Phoenix landed. Their study led to a discovery of a new phenomenon in which a rocket plume excavates underlying soil explosively. It was published in this month’s issue of planetary science journal Icarus.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Nintendo 3DS hits shelves March 27 for $249: more details inside
The Nintendo 3DS will be on available starting March 27 for $249, Nintendo announced at a press event today. Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo's president, described in detail the features and launch games for the glassesless 3D handheld at the event. The 3Ds will initially be available in two colors: aqua blue and black. The game card slot on the back will accept both 3DS and DS games, and the 3DS will come a 2GB SD card and charging cradle. A home button under the bottom screen will allow players to pause whatever they're doing and change applications, and a 3D slider lets them set the depth of the picture.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Deciphering the jibber jabber: getting started with your own self-hosted XMPP server
Instant messaging is typically regarded as a social tool, but it also plays an increasingly important role in the workplace as a medium for professional communication. One of the most important technologies that has helped to advance instant messaging as a business tool is the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), an XML-based open standard that fosters interoperability between real-time messaging platforms.XMPP (also known as Jabber) encourages federated infrastructure, allowing individual users or organizations to self-host their own messaging services. The protocol is also flexible enough to support a wide variety of different uses beyond mere chatting—it can be interfaced with all kinds of automated systems or used as a carrier for server-to-server communication. It's becoming common for companies that rely on instant messaging to run their own XMPP service, much as they would operate their own internal mail server.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Feature: Skynet meets the Swarm: how the Berkeley Overmind won the 2010 StarCraft AI competition
We’re gathered in a conference room on the Berkeley campus, the detritus of a LAN party scattered around us. The table is covered with computers and pizza, and there’s a game of StarCraft projected on the screen. Oriol Vinyals, a PhD student in computer science, is commanding the Terran army in a life-or-death battle against the forces of the Zerg Swarm. Oriol is very good—one-time World Cyber Games competitor, number 1 in Spain, top 16 in Europe good. But his situation now is precarious: his goliath walkers are holding off the Zerg’s flying mutalisks, but they can’t be everywhere at once. The Zerg player is crafty, retreating in the face of superior firepower but never going far, picking off targets of opportunity and applying constant pressure.
Then Oriol makes a mistake. He moves his goliaths slightly out of position, just for a few seconds. It’s enough. The mutalisks react instantly, streaming through the gap in his defenses and making straight for his vulnerable workers. By the time Oriol brings the goliaths back to drive off the mutalisks, his workers are wiped out and his resource production is crippled.
Oriol makes a desperate, last-ditch attack on the Zerg base, trying to break through before the mutalisks are reinforced, but it’s too late. One after another, his goliaths get ripped apart by the Zerg defenses. As a new wave of mutalisks emerges from the Zerg hatcheries, he has no choice but to concede—to the computerized AI that just defeated him.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Comcast: $10/month Internet—and cheap netbooks—for the poor
The union of Comcast and NBC Universal has been given the green light by the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice, but it comes with a host of detailed concessions from Comcast. Among them: cheap broadband for the poor, nondiscrimination rules that protect Internet video companies, and several limits on Comcast's newfound Hulu leverage.Here are three of the merger conditions most likely to have an impact on the 'Net.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Body and Brain Connection: Brain Age on Kinect, with uneven results
We're used to playing Brain Age games on the Nintendo DS, and video of heavily Botoxed celebrities teaching themselves basic skills on the system have been used to sell the Nintendo DS to women and older gamers with great success. Dr. Kawashima and his theories on mental age are back in Namco Bandai's Body and Brain Connection, but this time the game is coming to Microsoft's Kinect, exercising your entire body as you complete challenges in math, logic, and reflexes.The problem is that the game seems to be on the Kinect because it's a hot new thing, not because playing these games with your arms and legs adds a needed layer of complexity to the gameplay. Remember, we want motion controls to be better than the alternative, not just different.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Inclusion of Qt in Ubuntu 11.10 is a win for developers
In an announcement published today on his personal blog, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth revealed that Nokia's Qt toolkit will be included as a standard component in future versions of Ubuntu. The move will pave the way for applications built with Qt to become a part of the popular Linux distribution.Qt's numerous technical advantages, excellent cross-platform compatibility, and strong positioning in the mobile space are making it an attractive choice for third-party developers and commercial ISVs. Supporting Qt out-of-the-box on Ubuntu could help bring more software to the platform and will help to accelerate third-party application development. The move could be viewed as controversial, however—as a GNOME-based distribution, Ubuntu has historically been aligned with the competing Gtk+ toolkit.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Conservative tech policy goal: ramp up IP enforcement
Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who has already introduced a bill to gut the FCC's net neutrality rules, this morning issued a tech policy call to arms for her fellow conservatives. Atop her agenda: ramping up intellectual property rights and passing "Rogue Websites" legislation to "go after organized online criminals who steal from American creators and rights holders."A keynote speaker at today's "State of the Net" conference in Washington, DC, Blackburn laid out a conservative approach to Internet regulation that largely boiled down to the idea that we shouldn't have any.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
No comments:
Post a Comment