Techgeist

The Story

Congress is telling the FCC to investigate how Google Voice may be violating government telecom policies. This comes after AT&T’s publicly-voiced concern that Google, in running its voice service, is not completely neutral with the calls it allows users to make. Google Voice will not allow users to call some rural areas because the connection fees are too high for Google to allow all calls and to maintain the service as free.

Someone Doesn’t Know What Google Voice Is

This is just further proof that Congress is in bed with far too many lobbyists.

The only way one could argue that Google has to abide by policies designed for telecoms would be to very foolishly think that Google Voice is a telecom. Google Voice does not even work without an existing phone line. Users do not pay Google to make calls using the Voice service.

As it does not make any sense for Congress to waist its time doing something so inane, the most likely course events is that AT&T sent lobbyists to Congress to get the government on its side. If any sector of business has enough money, it can convince the …

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The Story

Aardvark, a startup which runs a pretty awesome question and answer service, will be opening up its database of compiled question and answers to the public. According to Max Ventilla, CEO of Vark,

Next Wednesday, October 14, Aardvark is going to make Social Search available on the Web at www. vark.com. The new website will be open to the public, so for the first time, anyone in the world will be able to tap into the wisdom of their social networks just by visiting www. vark.com.

Aardvark is a service which allows users to ask questions and answers via instant message, email, and forms on the vark.com website. When a user signs up, he fills out topics about which he wants to answer questions. So if you go to the site and register yourself as someone who knows stuff about cooking, you’ll receive questions about cooking, among other things. When you in turn ask a question, Aardvark will direct it to a user who’s knowledgeable on the topic, who will then respond to your inquiry.

The Questions War Has Begun

As many people who punch questions into Google are …

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The Story

In the ongoing case of Viacom Vs. YouTube, Google, some new and potentially very deadly evidence has just come to light. According to internal emails from YouTube, not only did the company know about the plethora of copyrighted material on the site, but some of its employees may have been the uploaders.

If YouTube did have knowledge of the copyrighted material and did not act promptly to remove it, then it may be liable under the DMCA. Last month, Veoh won a case against Universal Music Group when a judge ruled that despite the large amounts of illegal material on the Veoh site, the company acted as it was supposed to and removed material that was prohibitively copyrighted. Thus Veoh was ruled to be protected by safe harbor.

Damning For YouTube

My legal opinion: YouTube is in a whole lot of trouble. Unless the judge decides something really strange and off-kilter, Google is going to have to pay out a hefty fine or reach some sort of settlement. Viacom could easily argue that YouTube used its content without permission to attract users to the early versions of the site.

There are …

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The Story

The European Union has decided to do a trial run of Microsoft’s browser ballot system. As we previously reported, the EU said that Microsoft could not include Internet Explorer with Windows 7 as this would constitute bundling and violate antitrust regulations. Microsoft then proposed a menu upon the initial boot of Windows 7 where users would select which browser they wanted. Well, the EU had doubts that this would solve any problems, so presumably this test is to find out whether or not the system works.

The browser ballot is in lieu of Microsoft’s far cattier solution, which was to not include any browser with Windows 7.

Why So Serious?

The EU is far more worried about Microsoft than makes any real sense. Despite the fact that Internet Explorer came with every Windows machine, Firefox is the most popular browser in Europe. So while what Microsoft did was arguably bundling, the company’s actions did nothing to save market share. The only reason IE 6 is still the most popular browser in the world is because a lot of big companies which run Windows use ancient sites which only work with …

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The Story

AT&T announced that it has “taken the steps necessary so that Apple can enable VoIP applications on iPhone to run on AT&T’s wireless network.” This came after the release of a Vonage iPhone application, which allows users to make VoIP calls over 3G if they have a Vonage account. This means that Apple has approved an application which, unlike Apple’s previous claims, actually replaces the iPhone’s basic phone functionality (which is what Apple said was the reason behind their blocking of the Google Voice application).

Remember, this new decision doesn’t just apply to Vonage but to every VoIP application. The Skype blog had some happy remarks as we can probably expect to be Skyping on the go in the very near future.

AT&T’s Beefed Up Network

I know a lot of people are going to say that AT&T should have done this from the start, but really they needed to do a whole lot of network maintenance first. Given the state of the company’s networks for the past few years, it would have been a huge mistake to allow users to Skype all over the place. In New York, the AT&T …

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The Story

According to Reuters, some regulators in the US government expect that broadband stimulus could cost as much as $350 billion. This dwarfs the previously allocated funding of $7.2 billion. This new prediction is the result of several workshops the government held with people inside the broadband industry.

The new report, which admittedly says that broadband stimulus could only run the government $20 billion (still a whole lot of money), doesn’t have any suggestion for how to raise the necessary money. While the information we have is bereft actual numbers or reasoning, it does seem there is a consensus that the infrastructure for broadband is going to cost a whole lot more than $7.2 billion.

Well, Crap

It’s hard to say whether or not this report is accurate as we don’t have any of the information from it. I suspect, however, that it’s off as the people who participated in the panels, the source material for this report, probably came from members of the broadband industry. But other than that, we have no real information other than that if this report is correct, then we’re in a lot of trouble. I don’t think the …

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The Story

The UK has claimed the record for being the first industrialized nation to have its internet advertising spending eclipse all other forms. This past year, advertisers spent £1.75 billion ($2.8 billion) online, which made for 23.5% of the total market. Television, the next biggest sector for advertising, only 21.9% of total spending.

There are a lot of numbers about what’s changed in the past year, though the most notable come from ads in search and online videos. 60% of the entire budget was spent on search, meaning a whopping total of £1.05 billion ($1.68 billion). That’s up 6.8% from last year. Online video grew 300% to about £12 million.

One UK analyst suspects that the online ad market may have peaked this past year. Adam Smith at Group M said that the continued growth of social networking sites, which have yet to gain massive support from advertisers, could well cause the online advertising market to shrink in the next year. Aside from that, Mr. Smith said that television could well rebound.

It Keeps Going

Mr. Smith is dead wrong: we have not yet reached the apex of the online ad market in the UK …

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The Story

Today Microsoft released its free antivirus software for users of Windows whose installs of the operating system pass a validation test. That means it’s free to everyone with a genuine copy of Windows.

Microsoft Security Essentials is a small download that seems to provide a whole mess of features. Once you get the 5 megabyte file, the program will update the virus definitions and do a quick scan. And when Microsoft says quick, they mean quick. On a 320 gigabyte hard drive with a whole bunch of stuff on it, the scan took around fifteen minutes. Plus unlike Avast Antivirus, you can schedule scans.

Ars Technica did a fuller review of MSE, and they were fairly impressed. The most notable feature they mentioned was how MSE doesn’t just check definition files to find malware, but also monitors how programs are behaving:

MSE is the first Microsoft security product to make use of the company’s new Dynamic Signature Service (DSS); the next version of Forefront will also use DSS. When MSE detects that a file is making suspicious actions (such as unexpected network connections, attempting to …

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The “DO NOT USE INTERNET EXPLORER” notice at the bottom of that picture is not a Photoshop job, nor is it the from someone who is in the anti-Windows camp. This piece of paper is the front a syllabus distributed today to students at the University of Chicago for a Biology class.

The University of Chicago uses some software called Chalk that’s incompatible with Internet Explorer. Students use Chalk to access documents and information relevant to their academic work. Chalk, however, does not support the caching system that IE uses. As this class in particular relies on the Chalk service a lot, the professor made sure to include a note to his students that the use of IE “will mess up and make you sad.”

Bye Bye, Internet Explorer

More and more, we’re seeing that much of the internet is just done supporting IE’s backwardness. YouTube recently dropped support for Internet Explorer 6, which is unfortunately still the most popular browser in the world. A few months back, if you had visited YouTube with IE6, the site would have …

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Courtesy: Mobiletor

The Story

After getting a stern letter from the USB-IF, Palm has stopped forcing the Pre to sync with iTunes. But that doesn’t mean Palm is going to leave its users without a cool means for music.

Today Palm announced that in the recent WebOS 1.2 firmware release, users will be able to download music from the Amazon MP3 Store directly from the Pre. Yes, that means both via WiFi and cellular data network. One article points out that this is arguably better than integration with the iTunes music store as music from Amazon is generally a whole lot cheaper. Additionally, Palm’s decision to not turn syncing with iTunes back on in WebOS 1.2 seems to indicate that Palm is done playing the “Apple is the bad guy” game, and is now instead focusing on building its own network of partners.

Hit the Ground Running

As it stands now, Palm is in a lot of trouble as a company. The WebOS platform is what they’re banking on as their ticket back into the land of important tech companies. So it makes sense that Palm would …

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