| U.S. Judge Orders Hundreds of Domains Seized, De-Listed from Search Posted: 29 Nov 2011 02:57 PM PST  A U.S. federal judge in Nevada has ruled on a series of requests from luxury goods maker Chanel allowing the company to seize several hundred domain names thought to be selling counterfeit goods. For good measure, the ruling also forces all search engines and social media websites to censor mentions of the offending domains. The court specifically called out Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Bing, Yahoo, and Google.
The troubling thing about the ruling is the apparent slapdash way the investigation was done. When Chanel added 228 sites to the nearly now 700-large pile in the case, it ordered merchandise from just three of them to verify it was fake. The remainder were deemed counterfeiters based on online investigations only. Oh, and all this was done by Chanel's own private contractors. None of the owners of these domains were permitted to have a say before the decision. Many have expressed concern that the judge in the case appears to have no awareness that the Internet is a global entity. Forcing sites like Facebook and Google to remove content affects everyone, not just those in his jurisdiction. Not to mention that some of the sites are hosted in other countries, and the registrars are under no obligation to hand over the keys to Chanel. Legal experts have also been skeptical that a court should even have the power to force de-indexing of websites. Looking forward to SOPA? What could go wrong? |
| Microsoft SkyDrive Is Officially No Longer Terrible Posted: 29 Nov 2011 02:39 PM PST  Microsoft always seemed a little embarrassed by SkyDrive, its online file storage and sharing tool. It was shoved off in the corner, not integrated with other products where it might be useful. Then today Redmond dropped a huge HTML5-centric update on us that makes SkyDrive more than usable. It's actually kind of good.
The first thing that users will notice is that SkyDrive now behaves much more like a local file manager. There are right-click options that actually support file operations like delete and copy. There is finally support for dragging and dropping files into the browser to upload them. Better yet, SkyDrive is still usable while content is uploading. Microsoft has also added easier sharing with Office Web Apps. Microsoft has really just taken a service that no one used and made it a compelling option for storing files. We tested it with Chrome on Windows and it worked perfectly. Anyone with a Live or Hotmail account can get access to 25GB of cloud storage for free. Not a bad deal. |
| Consumers Are Over Windows on Tablets, Says Report Posted: 29 Nov 2011 02:25 PM PST  Whenever someone in recent months questioned Microsoft's intention to make Windows 8 its tablet OS, the company would emphatically point to surveys showing that users actually wanted Windows-based tablets. A new Forester Research report however, claims that consumer interest in Windows tablets has declined sharply in the last six months. According to the report, Microsoft may have missed the boat on the tablet market.
Back in the first quarter of 2011, a Forester survey found that 46% of consumers wanted a tablet device running Windows. That certainly buoyed Redmond's spirits. The new numbers show that only 25% of consumers are interested in what Microsoft is selling. if Microsoft has really passed the peak of interest in its tablet products, its sluggishness may have just ceded the market to Apple, Google, and others. In general, Forester is confident that Windows 8 will do well, but that says nothing about the tablet market. If Microsoft is unable to get Windows 8 on tablets until mid-2012, there might be no one left to notice that doesn't have their nose buried in an iPad or Android tablet. |
| Electronics For The Everyman: 25 Kick Ass Arduino-Powered Projects Posted: 29 Nov 2011 01:14 PM PST  Once you've conquered your fear of static electricity and successfully built a kick ass custom PC from the ground up, making the jump to custom electronics isn't all that intimidating. The open-source Arduino microcontroller breaks down the entry barrier even further. Flexible, powerful, easy-to-use and licensed-to-alter (under Creative Commons Share-Alike), the Arduino is the linchpin behind scads and scads of nifty DIY electronics projects. And hey! It just so happens that we've gathered 25 of the coolest, craziest, and most useful Arduino-powered projects in this gallery for your viewing – and building – pleasure. Mind-controlled Nerf guns, anybody? No, it's not black magic. It's the magic of Arduino!
Most of the projects listed include detailed hardware shopping lists, custom software and handy step-by-step instructions so that you can recreate them in your very own Fortress of Geeky Solitude. Unfortunately, that info is too long to recreate here, so be sure to hit the links provided with the pictures to visit the project pages and learn all the nitty gritty details for each project. And if all this microcontroller goodness piques your interest, Make Magazine's blog and the Arduino section of the Instructables website are great resources for staying up to date with the latest and greatest Arduino news and projects. Now let's get crackin'! |
| Android App of the Week: ESPN Bowl Bound Posted: 29 Nov 2011 11:28 AM PST The NCAA Football season is drawing to a close, which means bowl games are right around the corner. Keeping track of the who, when, and where during such a busy time of year can be a pain, but the folks from ESPN have you covered with the Bowl Bound app for Android devices. 
ESPN Bowl Bound provides quick access to your team's roster, schedule, statistics, and news by allowing you to toggle between your team of choice and general NCAA Football news and analysis. Users also have the ability to see all of the headlines from ESPN.com in a phone-friendly format, as well as Twitter feeds from a variety of ESPN's College Football personalities. Bowl Bound also give you video highlights and analysis, making it easy to catch up on any games you may have missed. 
ESPN has several other offerings available for Android worth mentioning. ESPN ScoreCenter gives you easy access to scoreboard for all major sports, and allows you to choose specific teams or leagues which most interest you. WatchESPN provides the ability to stream video of various ESPN channels to your Android device, though you will need to have a compatible home Internet or TV provider. Visit the Android Marketplace to download ESPN Bowl Bound. |
| Grooveshark Built Around "Asking Forgiveness" Rather Than Paying For Licenses, Emails Show Posted: 29 Nov 2011 11:22 AM PST  When we wrote a streaming music services round-up on Maximum Tech, we only briefly touched on Grooveshark, the popular service based around user uploaded tracks. "And, um, we're still not completely sure that Grooveshark is legal," was the extent of our coverage. As it turns out, newly revealed emails from Grooveshark CEO Sina Simantob prove that, well, the company's entire business plan hinges on its dubious – at best – legality.
"We bet the company on the fact that it is easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission," Simantob wrote in April 2010. According to CNET reporter Greg Sandoval, who broke the story after perusing records filed in a lawsuit between Universal Music and Grooveshark, the streaming music service claims that the DMCA's Safe Harbor provision – which protects service providers from being sued for copyrights infringed upon by the provider's user – applies to the Grooveshark service. Grooveshark's TOS requires users to absolve the company of all legal responsibility for the music they upload, but even still, in order to qualify for Safe Harbor, Grooveshark couldn't profit from or even knowingly host infringing material – facts that Simantob's emails call into question. Another email Simantob sent in 2009 shows how Grooveshark planned on using its freeloading success to eventually hold music labels over a barrel, money-wise. "The only thing that I want to add is this: we are achieving all this growth without paying a dime to any of the labels… In our case, we use the label's songs till we get a 100 (million) uniques (visitors), by which time we can tell the labels who is listening to their music, where, and then turn around and charge them for the very data we got from them, ensuring that what we pay them in total for streaming is less than what they pay us for data mining. Let's keep this (quiet) for as long as we can." So whaddaya think, Maximum PC readers: are Grooveshark's actions reprehensible, or are the big labels simply getting some karmic payback for their past actions? |
| Acer: Hold the Boat, We're Totally Committed to Netbooks Posted: 29 Nov 2011 10:51 AM PST  Any reports you may have read about the death of netbooks are greatly exaggerated, and doubly with regards to Acer ditching its netbook business. Addressing recent rumors suggesting Samsung is getting ready to cut off production of 10.1-inch netbooks, Acer vice president Scott Lin wanted to make it clear his company will not be following suit.
Lin said his company will continue to build netbooks going into 2012 and is encouraged by strong demand in several emerging markets, including China, India, and Indonesia, according to DigiTimes. The VP of Acer's China operations was also quick to point out that Acer is already the second largest brand in his home country. If Acer continues to expand its netbook business, Lin believes his company can extend its lead over Dell in the region, especially since Dell isn't put a ton of focus into low-cost netbooks. As it stands, Acer is the biggest netbook player in the world with more than 1.7 million netbook sales in the third quarter alone. Asus shipped 1.2 million units during the same quarter, and Samsung sold 840,000 units. Image Credit: Acer |
| Ruh-Roh: Wi-Fi Could Be Baking Your Sperm Posted: 29 Nov 2011 10:41 AM PST  Not to be too dramatic, but we couldn't live without our Wi-Fi connections. That could be our downfall, because as it turns out, future generations of young geeks may not be able to live with our Wi-Fi connections. While the proliferation of wireless hot spots is generally regarded as a Very Good Thing overall, a new study suggests that "a laptop connected wirelessly to the Internet on the lap near the testes may result in decreased male fertility." Basically, guys, all that YouTube browsing could be killing off your little soldiers.
A team of Argentine scientists plopped some sperm underneath a Wi-Fi-running laptop for four full hours, Reuters reports. After that time, the Wi-Fi'd sperm showed significantly higher damage and death rates than the sperm in a control sample stored in similar atmospheric conditions – minus the Wi-Fi-rocking laptop, of course. Sperm plopped near a notebook that wasn't connected to a Wi-Fi network weren't damaged, either. The scientists say the "Electromagnetic radiation generated during wireless communication" caused the spermicide. Now, the study may be nerve-wracking, but don't rush off to build a tinfoil loincloth just yet: the test was conducted with collected sperm, and not with in-body samples. The extra shielding the human body provides could change those results entirely, one critic says. "This is not real-life biology, this is a completely artificial setting," Robert Oates, the president of the Society for Male Reproduction and Urology, told Reuters. "It is scientifically interesting, but to me it doesn't have any human biological relevance." |
| Byte Rights: Killing Off Innovation Posted: 29 Nov 2011 10:27 AM PST I'm just going to be blunt: Our patent system sucks. It's terrible to deal with, protects ridiculous things, and encourages frivolous litigation. It's about as popular as a leper in a nudist colony. For 10 years, patent reform has had the backing of major corporations who, like everyone else, are sick of patent trolls and costly defensive IP purchases. Nobody—not consumer groups, business, or inventors—believes this system works. Despite all of this, Congress managed to punt on real change. "It took 10 years to work out a deal that changed almost nothing," says Jason Schultz, director of the Samuelson Law Clinic at UC Berkeley, speaking about the America Invents Act (AIA), the reform that finally crawled its way into law this year. 
The administration claimed it to be a job creation bill, which is true, if your job is patent attorney. "[The idea] that patents create jobs is ridiculous," says Schultz. "There's growing evidence that too many patents actually hurts the economy." The AIA demonstrates how profoundly broken American legislation is. It makes small procedural changes, like awarding patents to the first to file or disclose, instead of the first to invent (which can be hard to establish legally). That won't prevent patent litigation, but it may make it go more smoothly—like treating a broken leg with Vicodin. AIA does nothing to hamper notorious patent trolls like Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures. It doesn't address the low quality of many patents, the snail's pace of the patent office, or the ultimate problem: There's just too many of them being filed. Instead, look for more patent fights putting new technologies out of business, limiting existing technologies, and diverting billions of dollars from people who actually build stuff to people who file paperwork, and then spend the next 50 years collecting interest and playing golf. Thanks, Congress! |
| Nvidia Rolls Out Special Edition GTX 560 Ti With 448 Cores Posted: 29 Nov 2011 10:16 AM PST  Just in time for the holiday season, Nvidia's rolling out a new promotional GPU in select markets (read: US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Russia and the Nordic countries). The GeForce GTX 560 Ti With 448 Cores – and yes, that's its actual name – is built around a toned-down version of the same GF110 GPU that powers the higher-end GTX 570 and GTX 580, rather than the GF114 GPU that the traditional GTX 560 Ti runs on. Its 448 CUDA cores places the promotional GPU squarely between the normal GTX 560 Ti (which has 384 cores) and the GTX 570 (which has 480 cores).
Specs? Sure. The graphics clock in at 732 MHz while the shader clock speed for all those CUDA cores is 1.464 GHz. The 1,280MB of onboard GDDR5 memory hums along at 950 MHz (3.8 GHz data rate). Since these cards are based on the GF110 GPU, the GTX 560 Ti with 448 Cores is fully capable of three-way SLI, something the standard GTX 560 Ti can't say. AnandTech has a review up that lists full specs and does a good job of comparing the GTX 560 Ti with 448 Cores against other Nvidia 5xx cards. Manufacturers are already tripping over themselves to offer up cards based around the GTX 560 Ti with 448 Cores; Asus, MSI, Zotac, Gigabyte and others have all announced that they've launched models in various configurations today, starting at $289. Grab 'em while they're hot, folks – being a promotional GPU, when they're gone, they're gone. |
