January 2010
6 posts
6 tags
Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes? →
Robert Scoble has a good analogy:
Let’s go back a few years to when Firefox was just coming on the scene. Remember that? I remember that it didn’t work with a ton of websites. Things like banks, e-commerce sites, and others. Why not? Because those sites were coded specifically for the dominant Internet Explorer back then.
Some people thought Firefox was going to fail because of these broken...
7 tags
Apple reinventing file access, wireless sharing... →
Apple is dramatically rethinking how applications organize their documents on iPad, leaving behind the jumbled file system and making file access between the iPad and desktop computers seamless.
In a move foreshadowed by the Newton Message Pad fifteen years ago, Apple’s new iPad jettisons the conventional shared file system and introduces a new, streamlined convention for working with document...
8 tags
Video, Freedom And Mozilla →
The basic problem is simple: H.264 is encumbered by patents whose licensing is actively pursued by the MPEG-LA. If you distribute H.264 codecs in a jurisdiction where software patents are enforceable, and you haven’t paid the MPEG-LA for a patent license, you are at risk of being sued.
So why doesn’t Mozilla just license H.264 (like everybody else)? One big reason is that that would...
5 tags
Google, Citing Attack, Threatens to Exit China →
Google said Tuesday that it would stop cooperating with Chinese Internet censorship and consider shutting down its operations in the country altogether, citing assaults from hackers on its computer systems and China’s attempts to “limit free speech on the Web.”
The move, if followed through, would be a highly unusual rebuke of China by one of the largest and most admired technology companies,...
3 tags
Google Stops Hosting AP News →
Peter Friedman points us to the news that Google has apparently quietly stopped hosting AP content on its site. You may recall that a little over two years ago (after much back and forth), Google began hosting AP content. This was licensed content that Google had paid for — but that deal came about after the AP made some noise suggesting that Google’s linking to content (with headlines...
2 tags
Slashdot: The Copyright Bubble →
A Private War
I used to read stuff like this and get upset. But then I realized that my entire generation knows it’s baloney. They can’t explain it intellectually. They have no real understanding of the subtleties of the law, or arguments about artists’ rights or any of that. All they really understand is there is are large corporations charging private citizens tens, if not...