Techgeist

A Luxembourg court has handed out a ruling against a Danish newspaper clipping company stating that its practice of printing “11-word snippets of news articles” is reproduction in part under European IP law. The ruling stated the court’s opinion on how actually printing the article segments is different from publishing them online. According to the court, actually publishing something makes it more permanent than having it online does.

That ruling seems sort of backwards to me. News archives online, especially those for very short stories (it’s not even fair to call these stories), are way better than physical ones. I doubt that people are going to save hard copies of eleven word snippets when they can just access the same data online. I’m at a loss for understanding the logic behind the decision. Rather than making sense, this ruling just seems to reaffirm the European trend of coming down against the internet just because the old guys who run the legal system don’t understand technology.

Still, this story is nowhere near as outrageous as a lot of other recent news. The company in question was printing partial copies of someone …

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A spokesperson for O2, the company which has the exclusive contract for the iPhone over in the UK, claimed that a fix for the iPhone SMS bug will be released to users this Saturday as an update via iTunes. This is the first news (to my knowledge) that a patch would be coming to fix this bug.

Still, I’m disappointed in Apple. The fact that they make the iPhone and yet cannot come out and say to their users “Yes, this is busted, and we’re working to fix it,” does not exactly inspire confidence. I shouldn’t have to wait for an Apple partner to tell me that my phone is going to be fixed. As I said yesterday, Apple has to ditch the denial and start admitting that they write code with bugs, just like everybody else does.

Oh, if you used that trick we posted a while back on how to enable tethering on your iPhone, be forewarned that if an update to the iPhone is indeed released on Saturday, it’ll probably try to disable tethering. I’m guessing that’ll be the case just because it makes sense as AT&T does not want users to tether their iPhones. Well, …

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The Netherlands be crazy. A judge there handed out a ruling stating that The Pirate Bay had to block any traffic from the Netherlands. The Pirate Bay did so immediately, as for every day they ignored the ruling, they’d be fined 30,000 euros. On top of that, the judge ordered the Pirate Bay to pay 2.72 million euros in damages to the movie and recording industries. Of course, the Pirate Bay appealed, presumably on the grounds that this is a heaping pile of bullshit.

First off, special interest groups in general should not be allowed to collect fines on behalf of anyone. Have you ever heard about the RIAA’s actually paying the artists it claims to fight for? No. Likewise, the people who’d be collecting the imposed fines on the Pirate Bay are not actual movie makers who were arguably hard by filesharing, but a cabal of fatcat lawyers who’re profiting off absurd copyright laws.

Second, why should the Pirate Bay be held responsible for the actions of everyone in an entire country? If I’m hosting a website which is illegal to access if you’re based in Iran, it’s not my job to babysit my traffic on behalf of the Iranian government. Let …

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There’s a report out saying that Cisco Systems, the guys consumers probably know best as the makers of Linksys networking products, are considering stepping into the productivity software fray. They wouldn’t start selling discs (who does that anymore?), but would instead make their software available online a la Google Docs and Adobe Buzzword.

Corporations, the biggest entities which consume software, fork over a lot of money each year to Microsoft for its Office suite of applications, so all these companies who’re getting into the fray are hoping to steal some of that $60 billion pie. Of course, that requires two things. The first is that Cisco needs to get companies to trust that, not only would their servers not go down ever so that businesses could have access to their time-sensitive materials when they need it, but that the servers would be well protected. Google Docs had a bug earlier this year that marked 0.05% of documents saved on its servers public, which is just not an acceptable error for businesses.

The other thing that Cisco would have to do is make sure to build good applications. One of the reasons why people fork over money to Microsoft is …

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If you’re a computerless kid in Maine, an education proponent, or an Apple shareholder (or some hideous, deformed combination of the three), good news! Maine’s Department of Education has “ordered more than 64,000 MacBooks for students and faculty, with an additional 7,000 that will be ordered in the coming weeks.” This is part of a program to give every minor in the state’s public school system a Macbook. For education, the benefits are pretty obvious: students who have good resources at their fingertips do better, and laptops are a great way to help kids learn. But what’s more important is now that the Macs are going home with the kids, we can expect the state of Maine to raise a whole generation of Apple faithfuls.

People like things that they are used to, which is something Apple realized long ago. My elementary school and high school was a more or less PC-free zone. But I’m a PC user largely because that’s what I had at home. If my school had given me a portable Mac to use at home, there’s a pretty good chance that would be different. Apple is set to …

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In a fit of American solipsism, we tend to disregard what’s going on in the rest of the world (the current situation in Iran aside). When it comes to bailouts, the American government is not the only group throwing money at problems. For its first bailout, the Japanese government has given $1.7 billion in both public and private money to Elpida Memory, the only maker of DRAM (dynamic random access memory) in Japan. This amount is only a fraction of the $21 billion the Japanese government has set aside for more aid to private companies. While I don’t want to use this space to talk about the economics behind bailouts in general, I do want to focus in on why Elpida may not be the best way to invest such a large sum of money.

While it’s undestandable that a country may want to keep the only company it has working in a certain aspect of industry, the semiconductor sector is one that’s set to see a lot of closing of companies in the near future. An analyst prediction from back in April, which seems pretty well-founded, predicts that …

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The reasons behind the Pirate Bay’s owners’ decision to sell the site to Global Gaming Factory X, paving the way for a legal version of the famous torrent site, are certainly many, though a few obvious explanations come to mind. The founders were the target of a lot of flak, including the ridiculous trial which had each one of them ordered to pay over $1 million in fines. At the end of the day, it was a pretty annoying thing to maintain. It cost a lot of money and had tons of traffic to deal with. So selling it and creating a legal version is not only wise from a top-down founder perspective, but for a lot of the users out there.

The first problem users are going to have is that they can’t copyrighted materials for free anymore, but that’s missing the big picture of what a legal media repository can be. While TPB trackers themselves are closing, the torrents and files are not going away. Rather, they are switching to more decentralized model, where TBP files will be exchanged over third-party trackers, so the filesharing aspect isn’t going away. …

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This story has been blown out of proportion over and over again, so the first thing to get straight is that this is not a move directed to derail Scientology in any way, and Wikipedia will not be deleting any articles on Scientology. But IP addresses known to be owned by those who work in the offices of the group will no longer be allowed to edit Wikipedia. The impetus for the banning was that time and again, those who were part of the “Church” were editing the article in self-serving ways. Wikipedia, however, has a policy of not letting entities edit their own articles.

The precedent set here is that Wikipedia can and will go beyond banning individuals who violate the site’s policies. It’s not uncommon in the least for individual users to be banned after, for example, deleting the article on America and replacing it with a graphic of George W. Bush streaking. But never has an entire group with a very real presence offline been prohibited from editing articles.

In some ways, Wikipedia’s prohibiting of edits on one’s own material makes for errors in articles, but in most cases, …

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It looks like Spain has set a pretty strong legal precedent on filesharing. A Spanish man who downloaded, for starters, 3322 copyrighted movies, and then shared them, is not guilty of any crime because “there was no evidence that he profitted from downloading the movies and music, or sharing them with others.” While this precedent is pretty liberal definition of filesharing, it does right what so many laws here in the US do wrong: it keeps the law a shield, not a sword.

Too often in in the States, it seems that our legal system is set up to punish rather than to protect. The point of copyright, for example, is so that if I write up some code, Microsoft can’t just sell my code as their own. But copyright law is being abused to sue the pants of kids like Joel Tenenbaum instead of being used properly. In New York, there are street vendors who sell burned CDs all over the place, but you never hear about the RIAA trying to shut down those guys.

But the problem isn’t just confined to copyright law, though that’s where we see it most. It may be outside the realm of technology, but child …

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Here at Techgeist, we do not like it when software does stuff to other software without asking. The problems are made that much worse when it’s the operating system doing the dirty work. So we are all pretty angry at Microsoft right now. As part of a service pack for the .Net Framework, which they rolled out as a critical update via Windows Update, Microsoft also installed the “.Net Framework Assistant” add-on onto users’ Firefox installations.

First off, Microsoft, shame on you for messing with Firefox. Messing with any software is bad enough, but to do something to alter a browser, a market space in which Microsoft is constantly losing ground, seems like nothing more than a dirty move. As an outside party, I cannot say anything about Microsoft’s intentions. But what I can say is not presenting a clear option to users before installing an add-on is the way that malware makers operate.

The second big problem is that not only does the add-on give Firefox some security vulnerabilities present in Internet Explorer, but the way by which users can get rid of the the add-on is convoluted at best. You …

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