Japan to start 4K TV broadcast in July 2014: report

• 

  Reuters/Reuters – Panasonic chief Kazuhiro Tsuga introduces the company’s new 4K OLED 56″ television during the Panasonic opening day keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas January 8, 2013. …more 

TOKYO (Reuters) – The Japanese government is set to launch the world’s first 4K TV broadcast in July 2014, roughly two years ahead of schedule, to help stir demand for ultra high-definition televisions, the Asahi newspaper reported on Sunday without citing sources.

The service will begin from communications satellites, followed by satellite broadcasting and ground digital broadcasting, the report said.

The 4K TVs, which boast four times the resolution of current high-definition TVs, are now on sale by Japanese makers including Sony Corp , Panasonic and Sharp Corp . Other manufacturers include South Korea’s LG Electronics .

Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications had aimed to kick-start the 4K TV service in 2016. That has been brought forward to July 2014, when the final match of the 2014 football World Cup is set to take place in Brazil, the Asahi report said.

In Japan, the development of super high-definition 8K TVs is in progress, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications plans to launch the test 8K TV broadcast in 2016, two years ahead of schedule, it said.

by : khafagates

 

 

Hackers claim attack on Justice Department website

• 

  Reuters/Reuters – The Justice Department building is seen in Washington on March 4, 2012. REUTERS/Gary Cameron

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Hackers sympathetic to the late computer prodigy Aaron Swartz claimed on Saturday to have infiltrated the website of the U.S. Justice Department’s Sentencing Commission, and said they planned to release government data.

The Sentencing Commission site, http://www.ussc.gov , was shut down early Saturday.

Identifying themselves as Anonymous, a loosely organized group of unknown provenance associated with a range of recent online actions, the hackers voiced outrage over Swartz’ suicide on January 11.

In a video posted online, the hackers criticized the government’s prosecution of Swartz, who had been facing trial on charges that he used the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s computer networks to steal more than 4 million articles from JSTOR, an online archive and journal distribution service.

Swartz had faced a maximum sentence of 31 years in prison and fines of up to $1 million.

The FBI is investigating the attack, according to Richard McFeely, of the bureau’s Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch.

“We were aware as soon as it happened and are handling it as a criminal investigation,” McFeely said in an emailed statement. “We are always concerned when someone illegally accesses another person’s or government agency’s network.”

by : khafagates

Scientists See Big Rewards (and Risk) in Private Spaceflight

by : khafagates

Private spaceflight should create many opportunities for scientific progress, though risk will have to be minimized for the field to really take off, a panel of experts stressed earlier this month.

The burgeoning commercial spaceflight industry should help develop new technologies and bring launch costs down, allowing more people and more scientific experiments to go up into space, panelists said Jan. 11 during an event at Caltech in Pasadena called “Science and the New Space Race: Opportunities and Obstacles.”

Space policy expert John Logsdon, for example, noted that current launch vehicles are still based on intercontinental ballistic missiles — which is 1950s-era technology.

“Private industry can be the driving force in creating new capabilities,” said Logsdon, a professor emeritus at George Washington University. [NASA’s Private Space Taxi Plan (Video)]

A growing industry

Steve Isakowitz, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Virgin Galactic, observed that developing new technologies is not the highest priority for his company.

“We’re being as conservative as possible,” he said, noting that the company is seeking to build on existing technology. Virgin Galactic aims to develop space tourism, and has already taken more than 500 deposits for suborbital flights.

Pioneering companies such as Virgin likely won’t have the private spaceflight field to themselves for long.

“Once the frontier opens up, we hope other people will join us,” Isakowitz said.

Along with carrying passengers on suborbital flights, Virgin Galactic also intends to carry satellites into space aboard its LauncherOne rocket, for $10 million per ride.

Virgin Galactic isn’t the only company looking to enter the market. Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, is one of the top contenders to take over the role of the space shuttle in ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

SpaceX is already carrying cargo into space for NASA with its Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket, having completed its first contracted resupply mission for the space agency late last year.

“We are looking to expand Dragon beyond cargo and crew,” SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said, discussing the possibility of attaching scientific payloads to the craft.

Risky business

Both Virgin Galactic and SpaceX acknowledge the risks inherent in the spaceflight industry. Failure comes in two types — the loss of scientific opportunities and the loss of human life.

The riskiness of unmanned scientific missions is a simpler challenge to grapple with. John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for science and a former space shuttle astronaut, referred to the switch in paradigms the agency made in the 1990s.

After several costly failures, NASA switched to a “better, faster, cheaper” strategy of sending several smaller, less expensive scientific missions every few years, rather than large costly ones once or twice a decade. The new scheme helped mitigate the financial and scientific costs of failure.

Such a strategy will likely be continued as space travel became more privatized. NASA could continue to schedule larger missions as necessary, but major undertakings will probably be interspersed with smaller projects.

The trick is balancing cost and risk, experts say.

“The private sector is free to take those risks,” Grunsfeld said, pointing out that it doesn’t have to deal with government bureaucracy.

A work in progress

Because private industry doesn’t spend taxpayers’ money, it also faces less public scrutiny. Grunsfeld pointed to Felix Baumgartner’s recent supersonic jump, which was privately funded, noting that the public accepted the risk taken by Baumgartner and his mission team, known as Red Bull Stratos.

But that doesn’t mean that outrageous risks will be taken when it comes to astronauts.

“No one ever wants to lose a life,” Shotwell said.

NASA has mandated that spacecraft carrying people contain an astronaut escape system to be used in the event of an emergency. At the same time, the Dragon spacecraft is outfitted with redundancies in its propulsion system, since loss of propulsion is the primary cause of failure in a launch.

“If you fail, it should be because you pushed to the frontier,” Grunsfeld said. “Failure due to poor craftsmanship is not an option.”

Still, space travel is inherently risky. How might the public respond if one of the first private flights results in a tragic loss of life?

“It would be really difficult for the industry to pick up after that,” Shotwell said. “It would pick up after that, but it would be hard.”

“Science and the New Space Race: Opportunities and Obstacles” was supported by the Keck Institute for Space Studies and the Caltech Y, a nonprofit organization that seeks to broaden the perspectives of the university’s students.

by : khafagates

In Asia’s trend-setting cities, iPhone fatigue sets in

• 

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Apple Inc’s iconic iPhone is losing some of its luster among Asia’s well-heeled consumers in Singapore and Hong Kong, a victim of changing mobile habits and its own runaway success.

Driven by a combination of iPhone fatigue, a desire to be different and a plethora of competing devices, users are turning to other brands, notably those from Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, eating into Apple’s market share.

In Singapore, Apple’s products were so dominant in 2010 that more devices here ran its iOS operating system per capita than anywhere else in the world.

But StatCounter http://gs.statcounter.com, which measures traffic collected across a network of 3 million websites, calculates that Apple’s share of mobile devices in Singapore – iPad and iPhone – declined sharply last year. From a peak of 72 percent in January 2012, its share fell to 50 percent this month, while Android devices now account for 43 percent of the market, up from 20 percent in the same month last year.

In Hong Kong, devices running Apple’s iOS now account for about 30 percent of the total, down from about 45 percent a year ago. Android accounts for nearly two-thirds.

“Apple is still viewed as a prestigious brand, but there are just so many other cool smartphones out there now that the competition is just much stiffer,” said Tom Clayton, chief executive of Singapore-based Bubble Motion http://www.bubblemotion.com, which develops a popular regional social media app called Bubbly.

Where Hong Kong and Singapore lead, other key markets across fast-growing Asia usually follow.

“Singapore and Hong Kong tend to be, from an electronics perspective, leading indicators on what is going to be hot in Western Europe and North America, as well as what is going to take off in the region,” said Jim Wagstaff, who runs a Singapore-based company called Jam Factory http://www.jamfactoryonline.com developing mobile apps for enterprises.

Southeast Asia is adopting smartphones fast – consumers spent 78 percent more on smartphones in the 12 months up to September 2012 than they did the year before, according to research company GfK http://www.gfkrt.com.

IN WITH THE YOUNG CROWD

Anecdotal evidence of iPhone fatigue isn’t hard to find: Where a year ago iPhones swamped other devices on the subways of Hong Kong and Singapore they are now outnumbered by Samsung and HTC Corp smartphones.

While this is partly explained by the proliferation of Android devices, from the cheap to the fancy, there are other signs that Apple has lost followers.

Singapore entrepreneur Aileen Sim, recently launched an app for splitting bills called BillPin http://www.billpin.com, settling on an iOS version because that was the dominant platform in the three countries she was targeting – Singapore, India and the United States.

“But what surprised us was how strong the call for Android was when we launched our app,” she said.

Indeed, 70 percent of their target users – 20-something college students and fresh graduates – said they were either already on Android or planned to switch over.

“Android is becoming really hard to ignore, around the region and in the U.S. for sure, but surprisingly even in Singapore,” she said. “Even my younger early-20s cousins are mostly on Android now.”

BillPin launched an Android version this month.

Napoleon Biggs, chief strategy officer at Gravitas Group http://www.gravitas.com.hk, a Hong Kong-based mobile marketing company, said that while Apple and the iPhone remained premium brands there, Samsung’s promotional efforts were playing to an increasingly receptive audience.

For some, it is a matter of wanting to stand out from the iPhone-carrying crowd. Others find the higher-powered, bigger-screened Android devices better suited to their changing habits – watching video, writing Chinese characters – while the cost of switching devices is lower than they expected, given that most popular social and gaming apps are available for both platforms.

“Hong Kong is a very fickle place,” Biggs said.

Janet Chan, a 25-year-old Hong Kong advertising executive, has an iPhone 5 but its fast-draining battery and the appeal of a bigger screen for watching movies is prodding her to switch to a Samsung Galaxy Note II.

“After Steve Jobs died, it seems the element of surprise in product launches isn’t that great anymore,” she said.

To be sure, there are still plenty of people buying Apple devices. Stores selling their products in places such as Indonesia were full over the Christmas holidays, and the company’s new official store in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay has queues snaking out of the door most days.

But the iPhone’s drop in popularity in trendy Hong Kong and Singapore is mirrored in the upmarket malls of the region.

“IPhones are like Louis Vuitton handbags,” said marketing manager Narisara Konglua in Bangkok, who uses a Galaxy SIII. “It’s become so commonplace to see people with iPads and iPhones so you lose your cool edge having one.”

In the Indonesian capital Jakarta, an assistant manager at Coca Cola’s local venture, Gatot Hadipratomo, agrees. The iPhone “used to be a cool gadget but now more and more people use it.”

There is another influence at play: hip Korea. Korean pop music, movies and TV are hugely popular around the region and Samsung is riding that wave. And while the impact is more visible in Hong Kong and Singapore, it also translates directly to places like Thailand.

“Thais are not very brand-loyal,” says Akkaradert Bumrungmuang, 24, a student at Mahidol University in Bangkok. “That’s why whatever is hot or the in-thing to have is adopted quickly here. We follow Korea so whatever is fashionable in Korea will be a big hit.”

by : khafagates

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer talks mobile strategy and more

In her first TV interview since taking over as Yahoo CEO, Mayer shares her thoughts about the company and the future of technology.

Marissa Mayer talks tech at the World Economic Forum’s meeting in Switzerland.

(Credit: Bloomberg/Screenshot by CNET)

Yahoo may not be known as a mobile player, but CEO Marissa Mayer sees partnerships as the key to mobile success.

In her first TV interview since becoming Yahoo CEO, Mayer spoke with Bloomberg TV earlier today at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Over the course of 30 minutes, she talked about Yahoo’s mobile strategy, the company’s culture, and the future of technology.

A transcript released by Bloomberg to Business Insider caught some of the highlights of the interview, which reportedly attracted a huge crowd in Switzerland.

One of the questions focused on Yahoo’s mobile business. How does the company compete in a technology industry where mobile is king?

“Given that we do not have mobile hardware, a mobile OS, a browser, or a social network, how are we going to compete? I think that the big piece here is that it really allows us to partner,” Mayer said. “It means there is an opportunity for strong partnerships. That is what we will be focused on.”

Mayer said that Yahoo already works with Apple and Google in terms of the operating system, presumably meaning that Yahoo has mobile apps for both iOS and Android. She also played up Yahoo’s offerings to mobile phone users.

“So the nice thing at Yahoo is that we have all of the content that people want on their phone, we have these daily habits,” Mayer said. “And I think that whenever you’re dealing with a daily habit and providing a lot of value around it there is an opportunity not only to provide a lot of value to the end user but to also create a great business.”

She also pointed to a “strong partnership” between Yahoo and Facebook. Rumors surfaced last November that the two might team up on search, but Facebook later dismissed those reports, according to AllThingsD.

The two did settle a patent skirmish last year, which triggered new cross-licensing agreements, an advertising partnership, and plans to collaborate on other projects.

Focusing on Yahoo itself, Mayer touted the company’s strong culture.

[Yahoo] has a strong culture…I wanted to find a way to amplify it,” she said. “That is how you find the energy. You can harness that into innovation and say if we have people and they are excited about what they’re working on every day…you can take that energy around culture and find fun ways to apply it to engage users.”

Mayer has also tried to clean house at Yahoo by shaking up some of the management staff, a move she sees as important for the company as a whole.

“I got very focused on people, building the right team, particularly the executive portion, but all throughout the business, and also the overall environment,” she said”. “I wanted to make sure that Yahoo is the best place to work and that people really want to come and work there. That will help the talent piece.”

And what does Mayer see in her crystal ball for the future of technology?

Personalization is one area that excites her, particularly such items as image recognition, voice recognition, and translation. Technology evolving to better understand context is something she thinks will happen in the next three to five years.

“Now it is a matter of being able to take personalized notions, things like likes on Facebook, tweets, articles you click on, taking all those signals and mapping those to understand, for example, I like clean energy on Facebook and I tweet out something about green energy, that is in fact the same interest as mine,” she said.

Mayer grabbed the reigns as Yahoo CEO last July and has since had a busy several months. In addition to learning the ropes at Yahoo and striving to revive the company, she gave birth to a baby boy in October.

by : khafagates

Swartz didn’t face prison until feds took over case, report says

State prosecutors who investigated the late Aaron Swartz had planned to let him off with a stern warning, but federal prosecutor Carmen Ortiz took over and chose to make an example of the Internet activist, according to a report in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly.

Middlesex County’s district attorney had planned no jail time, “with Swartz duly admonished and then returned to civil society to continue his pioneering electronic work in a less legally questionable manner,” the report (alternate link) said. “Tragedy intervened when Ortiz’s office took over the case to send ‘a message.'”

The report is likely to fuel an online campaign against Ortiz, who has been criticized for threatening the 26-year-old with decades in prison for allegedly downloading a large quantity of academic papers. An online petition asking President Obama to remove from office Ortiz — a politically ambitious prosecutor who was talked about as Massachusetts’ next governor as recently as last month.

Ortiz, 57, also came under fire this week for her attempt to seize a family-owned motel in Tewksbury, Mass., for allegedly facilitating drug crimes, despite ample evidence that the owners worked closely with local police. In a stinging rebuke, U.S. Magistrate Judge Judith Dein tossed out the case yesterday, siding with the motel owners — represented by the public-interest law firm Institute for Justice — and noting (PDF) that prosecutors had alleged a mere “15 specific drug-related incidents” over a 14-year period during which “the Motel Caswell rented out approximately 196,000 rooms.”

“I don’t think she should have the power she has to pull this stuff on people,” Russ Caswell, owner of the Motel Caswell, told the Boston Herald last night. One reason prosecutors file forfeiture cases is that proceeds from the sale of seized property can be used to fund the budgets of law enforcement agencies. (Other nearby businesses that also experienced infrequent drug-related activity were not, however, targeted by Ortiz.)

The Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly report was written by Harvey Silverglate, a prominent Cambridge criminal defense lawyer whose clients have included Michael Milken and Leona Helmsley. Silverglate, the author of Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, is of counsel to the firm that initially represented Swartz in his attempts to defend himself against 13 felony charges brought by Ortiz’s office. Those charges carried a maximum penalty of 50 years in prison.

Silverglate told CNET today that:

“Continuance without a finding” was the anticipated disposition of the case were the charge to remain in state court, with the Middlesex County District Attorney to prosecute it. Under such a disposition, the charge is held in abeyance (“continued”) without any verdict (“without a finding”). The defendant is on probation for a period of a few months up to maybe a couple of years at the most; if the defendant does not get into further legal trouble, the charge is dismissed, and the defendant has no criminal record. This is what the lawyers expected to happen when Swartz was arrested for “trespassing at MIT.” But then the feds took over the case, and the rest is tragic history.

Ortiz has defended her actions as appropriate. A representative for Ortiz’s office did not respond to a request this afternoon for comment on this story. A representative for Gerard Leone Jr., Middlesex County’s district attorney, said she did not have an immediate response to questions about Swartz’s prosecution.

‘Aaron’s Law’

• Neelie Kroes, the vice president of the European Commission, wrote in a blog post that: “If our laws, frameworks, and practices stand in the way of us getting all those benefits, then maybe they need to be changed.”

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation posted additional suggestions for “Aaron’s Law,” an effort to rewrite the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in response to Swartz’s prosecution.

• Harvard professor Larry Lessig said he would give the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership lecture on Feburary 19 on “Aaron’s Law.”

• Michael Eisen, a biologist at UC Berkeley, wrote that academia “betrayed and continues to betray Aaron Swartz.”

• Open-records pioneer Carl Malamud spoke about “Aaron’s Army” at a memorial service at the Internet Archive yesterday.

Ortiz compared Swartz to a common criminal in a 2011 press release. “Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar,” Ortiz said at the time. Earlier this month, less than three months before the criminal trial was set to begin, Ortiz’s office formally rejected a deal that would have kept Swartz out of prison. Two days later, Swartz committed suicide.

“He was killed by the government,” Swartz’s father, Robert, said last week at the funeral in Highland Park, Ill., according to a report in the Chicago Sun Times.

Swartz was accused of 13 felony counts relating to connecting a computer to MIT’s network without authorization and retrieving over 4 million academic journal articles from the JSTOR database (he was permitted to access JSTOR because of his Harvard affiliation, but not to perform a bulk download). The advocacy group Demand Progress, which Swartz had helped to create and which helped to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act a year ago, likened it to “trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.”

If Swartz had stolen a $100 hard drive with the JSTOR articles, it would have been a misdemeanor offense that would have yielded probation or community service.

But the sweeping nature of federal computer crime laws allowed Ortiz and Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann, who wanted a high-profile computer crime conviction, to pursue felony charges. Heymann threatened the free-culture activist with over 30 years in prison as recently as the week before he killed himself. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat whose district includes the heart of Silicon Valley, has proposed rewriting those laws.

The Boston U.S. Attorney’s office was looking for “some juicy looking computer crime cases and Aaron’s case, sadly for Aaron, fit the bill,” Elliot Peters, Swartz’s attorney at the Keker & Van Nest law firm, told the Huffington Post. Heymann, Peters says, thought the Swartz case “was going to receive press and he was going to be a tough guy and read his name in the newspaper.”

by : khafagates

Apple, Samsung get knocked down a peg

by : khafagates

The two consumer electronics giants provided evidence in their quarterly financial reports that growth is slowing in the handset market and competition is picking up.

Could a successor to Samsung’s Galaxy S3 (pictured) be in the works?

(Credit: Josh Miller/CNET)

Apple isn’t the only one feeling the heat despite a blow-out quarter; Samsung is seemingly getting punished for its success too.

Both companies have been posting explosive growth in recent quarters and generating the bulk of the mobile industry’s profits. While Apple’s net income was relatively flat in its fiscal first quarter, its sales still grew 18 percent. And Samsung last night said its fourth-quarter profit soared 76 percent as its sales jumped 19 percent.

For any other company, those sorts of results would be cheered. But for Apple and Samsung, record-breaking quarters just aren’t enough. There needs to be proof that these trends will continue in the coming quarters, and neither company was particularly reassuring.

In fact, there’s an increasing worry that Apple and Samsung’s best days are behind them, and that the top two players in the industry are finally succumbing to the competitive pressures and harsh business environment that have punished the rest of the field. Yes, today’s results are fantastic, but many are coming to the realization that tomorrow’s results may not be so rosy.

Already, growth rates aren’t quite as high as they had been, and in the case of Apple, its iPhone sales fell short of analysts’ expectations. During Samsung’s fourth-quarter earnings conference call last night, the company warned that market conditions would be a little tougher this year.

Here’s how Samsung characterized its expectations for its mobile business this quarter and year:

• First-quarter smartphone and tablet demand should decline sequentially due to weak seasonality.
• Overall for the year, the handset business should see more competition amid a slowdown in smartphone growth.
• Demand should be solid in emerging markets for mid- and low-end smartphones.
• Tablets also should see more competition, but growth should be strong amid emerging markets expansion.

And here’s the full rundown for the year, via a slide from Samsung’s fourth-quarter earnings conference call.

Samsung is expecting strong results from some businesses this year.

(Credit: Screenshot by Shara Tibken/CNET)

“For set businesses, especially in handsets and TV, we expect competition to intensify further due to slowing down of demand growth, new product launches, as well as expansion of mid- to low-end markets,” Robert M. Yi, Samsung senior vice president of investor relations, said yesterday during a conference call.

Samsung and Apple still dominate the mobile industry, and no one really expects that to change. Reports from several tech research firms over the past couple of days pegged their combined smartphone market share in the fourth quarter at about 50 percent, and both are expected to see a boost from new products coming later this year.

However, with seemingly everyone in developed markets such as the U.S. and Europe already using a smartphone, much of the growth will come from emerging countries. But those regions require lower cost — and less profitable — products and a different strategy. Samsung’s take is creating many different phones at different price points, while Apple pushes the older models of its devices.

Both are seeing strong demand from places like China. Samsung said that emerging-market demand for mid- and low-end smartphones should be solid this year, while Apple has said that China is its fastest-growing region. But Samsung, Apple, and other established vendors are now going up against cheap device makers like Huawei and ZTE that are quickly gaining ground.

IDC noted during its quarterly mobile market share report that Huawei is now the world’s third-largest smartphone maker, a first for the Chinese company. While its market share is still fairly low compared to Samsung and Apple, it’s making steady progress, as are other Chinese vendors. These companies are expected to move up the stack instead of only providing inexpensive phones.

Samsung and Apple dominate about half of the world’s smartphone shipments, while Huawei ranks No. 3.

(Credit: IDC)

“These guys originally came in because of mass market, lower-tier smartphones, but they’re pushing up the tiers and challenging Samsung [and others],” Forrester analyst Tony Costa said. “That will continue to escalate.”

Of course, Samsung’s business isn’t just mobile devices. The company has a broad portfolio of products, including processors and displays, and those operations are expected to keep its overall growth rate high this year.

And even if the mobile market slows, it’s still growing. Samsung plans to maintain its smartphone market share as it continues its strategy of supporting all major operating systems and offering a broad portfolio of products.

“There’s a difference between the market slowing down and the market going down,” IDC analyst Ramon Llamos said. “Clearly it’s not going down. The sky’s not falling.”

Perhaps not, but there’s a lot more negativity surrounding both Apple and Samsung than there has been in a long time, and those concerns may be legit.

by : khafagates

Unauthorized unlocking of smartphones becomes illegal Saturday

by : khafagates

The feds mandate fidelity between carriers and users: New rule under DMCA outlaws unlocking new handsets without carrier permission.

The U.S. federal government says that starting Saturday, new carrier-locked smartphones need to stay that way until the carrier says otherwise.

(Credit: Lockitron)

For all you polyamorous types out there who don’t like the long-term monogamy demanded by most American wireless carriers when it comes to smartphones, I have bad news.

Starting this Saturday, it becomes illegal in this great land to unlock a new smartphone without the permission of the carrier that locked it in the first place.

This all goes back to a final rule issued in late October by the Librarian of Congress (PDF) — the Library of Congress handles the rulemaking for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is the specific law we’re talking about here. The rule says this, among other things:

…with respect to new wireless handsets, there are ample alternatives to circumvention. That is, the marketplace has evolved such that there is now a wide array of unlocked phone options available to consumers. While it is true that not every wireless device is available unlocked, and wireless carriers’ unlocking polices are not free from all restrictions, the record clearly demonstrates that there is a wide range of alternatives from which consumers may choose in order to obtain an unlocked wireless phone.

In other words, the world’s most powerful librarian finds that nobody is forcing us to buy locked phones, no matter how awesome the discounted price of a handset when you shackle yourself to a carrier for a few years. So if you want an unlocked phone, you’ve got to buy it that way, starting Saturday — that’s when a 90-day transition period to the new rule runs out.

So far, much of the response to the new rule taking effect has been confusion, with a number of people tweeting about the potential implications for the sales of unlocked phones on places like Amazon. Obviously, that will still continue, and international travelers will still be able to bring their unlocked phones into the U.S. without issue. The new no-no is buying a locked phone with a hefty carrier discount and then unlocking it on your own and without the carrier’s permission.

This brought up another question for @worthoftheworld on Twitter:

So, how are they going to enforce this “unlocking phones is illegal” thing? Are they gonna track you down if you’re using an unlocked device?

Well, probably, yes. Except that “they” will probably be your carrier, if they detect you’ve unlocked your phone. Before this point, they could just send you stern e-mails, but now they’ll be able to send even more stern e-mails with the weight of federal regulations behind them.

The good news is that “legacy” phones, which the Library of Congress describes as “used (or perhaps unused) phones previously purchased or otherwise acquired by a consumer,” are okay to unlock.

So if you really want a device that’s as free-spirited as you are, best get moving. Only a few hours are left to use those digital picks without the prospect of facing the consequences.

by : khafagates

Documentary throws the book at Google scanning project

“Google and the World Brain” asks whether a universal library belongs in the hands of a corporation, no matter how well-intentioned.

 

Google senior vice president Amit Singhal, interviewed in “Google and the World Brain”

(Credit: Polar Star Films)

PARK CITY, UTAH–The most arresting moment in “Google and the World Brain,” Ben Lewis’ thoughtful new documentary about the search giant’s effort to scan all the world’s books, takes place not in Mountain View or a courtroom but rather a monastery high above Catalonia in Spain.

The film’s globetrotting crew is interviewing Father Damiá Roure, who runs the library at the Benedictine abbey of Montserrat, about what happened when Google came to digitize the library’s collection. Roure speaks happily of the Googlers’ visit, explaining that their efforts allowed the monks to bring their collection — which dates to the library’s founding in the 11th century — to the wider world.

As he finishes speaking, a filmmaker just out of the frame asks about what else Google might do with the information found in those books. What if, she asks, Google wanted to sell the information they had scanned in those books? Should the monks get a cut of the sale? Is Google’s project fair to the library? The monk’s face goes blank, and for several agonizing seconds we watch as he works through the implications of the filmmaker’s question. A flash of doubt crosses his face — has the search giant put one over on him? Eventually Roure says he can speak only to the book-scanning effort, and not to its fairness. The documentary cuts away.

The monk’s mixed feelings about the book-scanning project are mirrored by many interviewees in the 89-minute documentary, which premiered this week at the Sundance Film Festival. And while the film contains much hand-wringing about whether a corporation should be able to own the world’s knowledge, it also offers a relatively straightforward account of the Google Books project and the legal case against it. At the end it credits Google with galvanizing public libraries into putting more of their collections online.

“I also think you can watch this film and side with Google,” Lewis said during a question-and-answer period following a screening today.

Lewis’ documentary starts in 1937, when H.G. Wells predicted the creation of a “world brain” — a giant global library containing the sum of human knowledge. Once built, Wells believed, the library would give rise to a higher form of intelligence. Google began scanning books in 2002, relatively early in its history, working with major university libraries around the globe. By 2005 the company had scanned more than 10 million books, with more than half of them still protected by copyright. In the autumn of that year, the Author’s Guild filed a class action lawsuit against Google, seeking damages for its writers and new protections for digital copies of copyrighted works.

After three years of intensive negotiations, Google and the Author’s Guild emerged with a 350-page settlement agreement. Among other things, Google agreed to give authors in the suit $60 per copyrighted work, in exchange for the right to start selling digital books online. And it’s this point that turns out, strangely, to be the real start of the film, as what the filmmakers describe as “a ragbag army of authors, helped by the occasional librarian” come together to protest the settlement and, in 2011, successfully get it rejected by a federal judge.

Along the way we hear from authors involved in the suit, including Charles Seife, Roland Reuss, and Mian Mian. We also hear from librarians who worked with Google on the project, some of whom — including Harvard’s Robert Darnton — later came to have second thoughts about the company’s methods.

Google responds
And what did Google have to say for itself? U.S. representatives for the company wouldn’t agree to an interview about the book-scanning project. But senior vice president Amit Singhal did sit down with Lewis’ crew to talk about the benefits of building a “Star Trek”-like computer that can answer any question. And Luis Collado, who manages the Google Books project for Spain and Portugal, sat down with the filmmakers to advocate for the project’s benefits — making the world’s knowledge more accessible.

The trouble, as writer William Gibson is quoted as saying in the film: “Google is not ours.” Sure, the company may make millions of books searchable today, critics say. But what would stop Google from later deciding to restrict that information in a severe way, or to charge for access? It is distrust, as much as a sense of unfairness over the company’s scanning of copyrighted works, that informs criticism of the search giant.

To its credit, “Google and the World Brain” acknowledges that the issues raised by the book-scanning project go far beyond Google. For starters, in the years since 2002 several other corporations have started book-scanning projects of their own, with Microsoft, Amazon, and Baidu among them. And beyond the world of books, companies in every industry are working to amass giant bodies of data, containing personal information about millions of people, over which those same people have little to no control.

In the Q&A, Lewis compared today’s Internet to “an alien from Mars” that just landed on Earth, fascinating but unknown in its motivations and capabilities. So far, all the alien has done is — stick with him for a moment here — passed gas.

Apple’s post-earnings stock slide continues

After opening down from yesterday’s earnings miss, shares of the company closed at the lowest level since last January.

 

Shares of Apple continued to slide today, edging toward levels the stock hasn’t touched since last January.

After opening down more than 10 percent this morning at $460.46 a share, the stock closed at $450.46, down $63.55, or 12.36 percent. It’s the largest single-day percentage drop since 2008 for the company’s shares, and follows yesterday’s earnings report that missed Wall Street’s expectations.

As mentioned in previous coverage, Wall Street is skittish about Apple’s flat profits, as well as its guidance for the next quarter, which came in between $2.5 billion to $4.5 billion short of what Wall Street was hoping for. Those expectations have since been ratcheted back by some analyst firms, many of which now say that investors should look to the company’s mid-year product announcements, as well as a longer-term view of iPhone and iPad sales for signs of the company’s health.

“To re-accelerate growth, Apple likely needs to launch new products, yet few seem likely before June,” Nomura Security’s Stuart Jeffrey wrote in a note this morning. “iOS 7 could have the greatest impact, yet recent management changes suggest a major advance is unlikely in the near-term. A China Mobile deal could also boost the stock, yet the timing of this remains uncertain … this leaves only a $300 iPhone or a premium iPhone as likely catalysts.”

Others on Wall Street remain concerned with what appears to be a deceleration of sales of the iPad, the amount of money Apple makes on its portable devices, as well as its overall margins. What looked like steadfast components of the company’s growth and profits have been hard to predict. Adding to the complexity of that were new accounting measures announced by Apple yesterday that change how the company reports some of its results by category, as well as a new forecasting method that’s expected to mean no more surprise blowouts.

“Apple was known for its conservative guidance,” Jefferies analyst Peter Misek told clients today. “We believe this (change) signifies management’s recognition that the company is unlikely to exceed expectations in the future.”