Archive for: July 1, 2009
July 1, 2009
The revampled Pirate Bay will pay users to share files, Global Gaming Factory chief executive Hans Pandeya told the BBC on Thursday. "We are going to set up a system where the file-sharer actually makes money," he said. "More than half of all internet traffic is file sharing and P2P [peer-to-peer] traffic and buying Pirate Bay gives us one of the biggest sources of traffic.
"We can then use this massive network of file-sharers to help [internet service providers] reduce overload," the BBC quoted Pandeya as saying. Color me cynical, but I'm not sure that this is going to fly. Use The Pirate Bay to distribute copyrighted video? Are you nuts? First off, there is no way any large commercial entity is going to use a distribution mechanism branded as "The Pirate Bay". Second, I'd bet that the payments, if any, would amount to just a few dollars per user, perhaps per week. If, and this is a big if, those payments amounted to the amount that user was charged by his ISP for Internet access, than this might work. Otherwise, however, I have to imagine that the average pirate will simply thumb his nose at The Man. I'll be interested to see how this turns out.
    
Facebook kicked off a security upgrade to its site Wednesday that is intended to streamline users' control over their privacy settings.
"When we add new features to Facebook, we usually include a corresponding privacy setting," Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly wrote in a blog post. "While this has helped give some people more individualized controls over particular features, [it] has made controlling privacy on Facebook too complicated."
To simplify, Facebook launched a test with a limited group of U.S.-based users, who will try out a system that allows them to adjust their privacy settings all on one page.
Right now, when users access their privacy settings, they can click on profile, search, news feed and wall, or applications and adjust their settings separately. Once the upgrade is complete, all four categories will be listed and adjustable from one page.
Facebook will also incorporate several changes they've announced over the past several weeks: allowing users to select privacy preferences for the publisher; the end of regional networks; and allowing people to select "everyone" when designating who can see their profile.
When the formal switch happens, users will be presented with a "transition tool" that outlines their privacy settings, and gives the option to make a profile more open, limited, or the same.
"We've designed the transition tool to respect previous decisions to limit access to information," Kelly wrote. "If you have selected settings that restrict who has access to information, those choices are carried over to the new privacy settings."
At the outset, a test group of 40,000 users in the U.S. will have access to the simpler privacy settings and receive one ...
Microsoft, bless its heart, really wants a successful ad campaign. The company has been tearing through taglines and spokespeople at a breakneck pace, attempting in part to hit back at Apple's highly successful "Get a Mac" campaign, which more or less exists to take Redmond down a peg. As a result, we've seen "I'm a PC"; some lady named Lauren, who was actually an actress named Lauren; and Jerry Seinfeld chatting up former CEO Bill Gates about cake.
Now, for a new series of new ads promoting Internet Explorer 8, the company has toiled deep within the quirk mines, going so far as to recruit "Police Academy" vet and star of the talking-horse vehicle "Hot to Trot," Bobcat Goldthwait. The result is a series of tiny Dadaist movies like the one above, which features a woman repeatedly vomiting on her husband after discover what's in his search history. Lesson learned: Get IE 8, and your wife will puke on you less--unless, you know, that's what you're into.
Also, there's Dean Cain, who pops up at the end of each ad wearing a suit; he's like a cross between Rod Serling and William Shatner's second career as a self-satirist. They're weird, uncomfortable, and, at the very least, they've got a lot of people talking. Reactions at this point includes strong dislike and a general sense of disbelief that Microsoft would stick its stamp of approval on these spots. By that token, the campaign has done its job.
Still, it's hard to imagine these spots existing beyond their current state as a weird anomaly made even stranger by the fact that companies don't really tend to throw a ton of money behind browser advertisements. Of course, increased competition from Firefox and Google's own ...
The recording industry was handed a victory Tuesday when a federal court found the company overseeing the Usenet user group guilty of copyright infringement.
"There can be no dispute that defendants' services were being used overwhelmingly for copyright infringement," Judge Harold Baer, Jr. of the District Court for the Southern District of New York, wrote in his opinion.
Fourteen record labels, under the auspices of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), sued Usenet in late 2007 for distributing copyrighted music on its site.
The Usenet discussion forums date back to 1979, and allowed users to post and reply to messages on a host of topics. Sierra Corporate Design purchased the usenet.com URL in 1998, and the formal Usenet.com, Inc. was formed in 2004 under the direction of director and sole shareholder, Gerald Reynolds.
Users can purchase subscriptions to access Usenet content, which vary in price from $4.95 to $18.95 a month. Customers who pay $18.95 get unlimited downloads.
In mounting its defense, Usenet cited the Sony-Betamax case, which held that Sony was not responsible for copyright infringement perpetrated by consumers who bought its Betamax machines, as well as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This act includes a safe harbor provision that does not hold the owners of Internet services responsible for the illegal acts of its users.
Usenet appears to have shot itself in the foot, however, by destroying evidence.
Get the rest of this story on pcmag.com.
 
 The thousands of apps in the iTunes App Store can help you do a huge variety of tasks, and now you can add one more: learning etiquette. Designed for businesspeople who need a little help in social situations, Etiquette Avenue tells you far more than which fork to use. The app was created by the Protocol Center in Coral Gables, Florida, which holds seminars on business and dining etiquette. That experience has taught them what businesspeople most need to know. The variety of topics in the app are written in a friendly, helpful style, giving you the exact info you need before tackling a work dinner or other event. I like that sections are introduced with cartoons, and that the dinning section includes several photos explaining tableware placement to the readers. The real benefit of the app isn't that it tells you how to make small talk or dine with international guests, but that it gives you confidence that you're handling yourself correctly. That frees you to get more out of your business interactions. You can purchase the app for $2.99 from the iTunes Store.
 
 Ryan Block and Peter Rojas are the closest to rock stars the tech journalism world has. Between the two of them, they started both Gizmodo and Engadget and became the mainstream media's top example of hip tech-journalism moguls. Rojas then started a record label, RCRD LBL, and Block has been named to lists like Fortune's "Web Celebs" and Paper Magazine's "Beautiful People." Further enhancing their mystique, both are members of Web 2.0 power couples: Block's longtime girlfriend is geek heartthrob Veronica Belmont, while Rojas' wife Jill Fehrenbacher is a respected design blogger. All this goes to explain why the launch of their new site, gdgt.com, is important. Block and Rojas have been incubating gdgt.com since Block left Engadget in 2008, posting weekly podcasts and the occasional liveblog. But they launched the real site today, and it's really interesting. Rather than a news-driven blog or reviews-driven Web site, gdgt is entirely community driven--it's a collection of lists of gadgets people want, gadgets people have, and places for people to ask each other questions about their gadgets. Third-party reviews, news links to other sites, product finders and user-editable spec sheets fill out the mix. It's like Wikipedia for gadget fans. A community site is only as good as its community, and Ryan and Peter have managed to get many of the top tech journalists to take a peek in. (When I logged in this morning, I saw that Lance Ulanoff had just signed up.) Belmont does the site's introductory video. It's definitely worth a look, especially if you like to chat about gadgets.
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I am among the Gmail faithful, but its folder system, or lack thereof, has always been somewhat of a drawback. Google took steps to fix this problem Wednesday with the release of several new drag, drop, and hide features intended to make it easier to organize your Gmail inbox.
First up is a new location for labels. They are currently listed as a separate section underneath Chat, but will now be grouped together with the inbox, drafts, chats, and other labels. If you don't want to clutter your inbox, the upgrade also lets you hide those labels you don't use very often. Clicking the down arrow next to a label will allow you to show, hide, or delete it.
Need a bulk edit? Go to the labels tab under "settings" and re-arrange en masse.
"For those of you who created label names like _stuff or ++todo++ to force your most-used labels to the top of the list (come on, you know who you are, I did it too...), you don't have to come up with clever tricks like that anymore," Google wrote in a blog post.
Also new is the ability to drag and drop e-mails.
"This does the exact same thing as 'Move to' -- it labels and archives in one step," Google said. "You can drag labels onto messages too. It's the same thing as using the 'Label' button."
It's also possible to drag labels into the "more" menu to hide them and vice versa.
The label changes mean that Google will discontinue right-side labels in Gmail Labs - the first Labs product to be cut.
"Now that labels aren't in their own little box and take up much ...
 An important factor to consider when deciding to make a large purchase is the warranty and any promises of support and maintenance that come along with the product. Unfortunately, once that new LCD TV has been on the wall for three years or that computer under your desk for two, it's easy to forget who to call when you have a problem with it, even if it's still under warranty. Warranty Elephant, a Web service born from one person's experience with a product under warranty but no phone number to call when it broke, wants to make sure you never have to dig through piles of paperwork to find out who to call when your stuff breaks--especially if you paid extra to make sure you were covered if it did.
Most people consider the warranty or service agreement as part of the value of what they're buying. It makes sense, since the last thing you want after paying for a $1,500 plasma TV is to have to buy a replacement or pay the manufacturer half the value in repairs if something happens to it in the first year or so of ownership. Unfortunately, when it comes time to use that warranty or service plan that you purchased with the device, most of us have misplaced the paperwork that tells us who to call and what information to provide. That's where Warranty Elephant comes in.  Warranty Elephant is a free Web service that allows you to add products that ...
Q: Operating system is Windows XP. I wanted to get a view of some parts of the Registry. I used REGEDIT to export the entirety of HKEY_CURRENT_USER. I reviewed the output in Notepad. It looked fine - nice 80 character lines broken at a backslash character if necessary. I wrote a simple REXX program to process this file and it totally failed. Every line of text had an inserted space between each character. I checked with a hex editor - it was actually 00 byte after each character.
Why does REGEDIT insert these null characters? Why would Notepad display the file as if the nulls didn't exist? It appears Notepad can't be trusted to accurately display files. This is disquieting to say the least. Are there any other problems with Notepad? - Bruce Goetz.
A: Notepad is fine, and REGEDIT is fine. What you didn't realize is that the default REGEDIT export format in XP, Vista, and Windows 7 is Unicode text. Each character occupies two bytes. Since these are actually standard ANSI characters the high byte is always 0. Your REXX program is trying to read the file as if it were standard one-byte ANSI text; naturally that doesn't work.
The best solution is to export the data from REGEDIT as ANSI text. To do so, pull down the "Save as type" list and choose "Win9x/NT4 Registration Files (*.reg)". Now when you export the file it will be in simple ANSI text format and your REXX program will have no trouble reading it. I do this all the time when I want to use the built in FC (File Compare) command to check ...
Q: I recently purchased a new Dell machine and I was told by Dell that the McAfee security software was not a good choice even though it came with a 30 day free trial version from Dell on the machine. Is there any truth to this or are they just trying to sell me another security suite? They want me to buy Norton 360 at $79 a pop. - Gene DeMarco.
A: In my own testing Norton comes out significantly ahead of McAfee (though McAfee has promised me Great New Things in the version coming later this year). I use Norton Internet Security 2009 myself. With Norton 360 you're paying $10 more for a backup system and system tune-up.
The other top suite in my estimation is Zone Alarm Extreme Security ($69.95). You'll find reviews of these and others at http://go.pcmag.com/securitysuites.
It isn't like they're encouraging you to pay $79 versus no dollars at all. You'd still have to pay for the McAfee after 30 days. This is what I'd recommend: Don't buy anything through Dell, check out the security suite reviews, and select one that looks good to you. Then install the trial version (usually 30-day) of that suite. Assuming you like it, convert the trial to a paid subscription before the trial period runs out. - Neil J. Rubenking.
 
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