Industry News

Yahoo announces its Yahoo Open Strategy (Y OS),it offeres a vision that, if realised, could give back the company the mojo it lost several years ago. [click to continue...]

Gear4 is already well know for it’s range of portable iPod speaker docks and also non-portable products. [click to continue...]

A social networking rival wants the USPTO to cancel Facebook’s trademark on its name, saying Mark Zuckerberg did not have the right to apply for that mark. [click to continue...]

Google Introduces “Gmail Custom Time” [click to continue...]

Austrian designer-jeweler Peter Aloisson has been commissioned to cover an Apple iPhone in diamonds for an unnamed Russian businessman. [click to continue...]

The European Commission has imposed a penalty payment of 899 million euros on Microsoft for non-compliance with its obligations under the Commission’s March 2004 Decision. Today’s Decision finds that, prior to October 22, 2007, Microsoft had charged unreasonable prices for access to interface documentation for work group servers. [click to continue...]

TOKYO (Reuters) - Toshiba Corp is planning to stop production of equipment compatible with the HD DVD format for high-definition video, allowing the competing Blu-Ray camp a free run, public broadcaster NHK reported on Saturday. [click to continue...]

America’s largest retailer said Friday it has decided to sell only Blu-ray DVDs and hardware in its 4,000 U.S. stores and no longer carry rival HD DVD offerings.

The announcement comes five days after Netflix Inc. said it will stop carrying rentals in Toshiba Corp.’s HD DVD format and instead go exclusively with the rival Sony Corp. technology favored by five major movie studios. [click to continue...]

Time sure does fly by. Ten years ago the phrase “open source” was coined.

I find it hard to believe that it was 10 years ago that Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens deliberately coined the phrase “open source.” To me, it seemed like only yesterday that Eric and I, who’ve known each other for—cough—30 years—cough—had talked about the need for a term for “free software” that didn’t carry all its baggage.
At the time, “free software” had—and still does have, for that matter—two problems. The first is that, no matter how often you tell people that it’s free—as in “free speech,” not free as in “free beer”—many people still don’t get it. That’s why even now people can ask, in all sincerity, how you can make money from FOSS (free and open-source software).
The other problem is that “free software,” as defined by Richard M. Stallman, aka RMS, who codified FOSS with the GPL (Gnu General Public License), carried a lot of other baggage with it besides opening up software code. Without going into the decade-long arguments between open-source and free-software advocates, the emphasis in open source is on the pragmatic use of open-source software, while free software puts the idealism of open code ahead of what some see as practical considerations.

MPs in the United Kingdom want to bring in laws to force ISPs to cut off people who download copyright music and movies

People who illegally download music or movies would be banned from using the internet under new Government proposals.According to a report seen by the Times, in order to protect copyright holders, MPs plan to legislate against illegal file-sharing.The idea under the Green Paper on the creative industries, The World’s Creative Hub, is to force internet service providers (ISPs) to impose a “three strikes and you’re out” rule on their customers.For a first offence offenders will receive a warning email, those that ignore this and warrant a second warning will have their internet connection temporarily suspended.If they persist and have to be warned a third time the punishment will be to have their internet contract terminated. How long a ban would last is not clear. ISPs that refuse to cooperate could also be prosecuted and forced to hand over suspected customers’ details to the courts.

However, although the proposals have been welcomed by the entertainment industry, which has accused ISPs of only paying lip service to the issue of copyright theft, others have criticised them as unworkable.The Internet Services Providers Association (ISPA) said the proposals do not take into account the technical practicalities and other laws ISPs have to abide by such as the Data Protection and Human Rights Acts.There is also the scale of the problem; there are 13.3 million people in the UK who have a broadband connection, according to Ofcom’s latest figures. Of this it is estimated around one in three (29 per cent) have at some point knowingly or unwittingly downloaded illegal files. Many of these downloaders are teenagers and most do not believe they are committing a crime.
The Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) told BBC it was only a conduit and it could not and should not police the internet: It said: “[The] ISPA does not support abuses of copyright and intellectual property theft.
“However, ISPs cannot monitor or record the type of information passed over their network. We are currently in talks with the Motion Picture Association of America and liaise with government on this issue.”

Photo Source:javaworld.com