Author: Jamie Welch, Senior Editor

Amazon blows the whistle against Kindle e-books from other vendors

Posted by | Mar 14, 2009 | |

[Source: CNET News]   MobileRead.com posted a letter this week that Amazon.com apparently sent regarding alleged copyright violations. This is an excerpt. When President Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act into law 11 years ago, he predicted it will “protect from digital piracy the copyright industries that comprise the leading export of the United States.” The DMCA turned out to be much broader than that. This week, an e-book Web site said Amazon.com invoked the 1998 law to prevent books from some non-Amazon sources from working on its Kindle reader. Amazon sent a legal notice to MobileRead.com complaining that information relating to a computer utility written in the Python programming language “constitutes a violation” of the DMCA, according to a copy of the warning letterthat the site posted. MobileRead.com is an e-book news and community site. MobileRead.com forum moderator Alexander Turcic said in a post on Thursday that although he did not believe the program violated the law, the site would “voluntarily follow their request and remove links and detailed instructions related to it.” Turcic said that, contrary to Amazon’s claim, his site never “hosted” the software. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment on Friday. The author of the software in question, titled Kindlepid.py, is listed as Igor Skochinsky, a hardware hacker whoperformed a remarkable analysis of the Kindle and described in December 2007 how he was able to gain access to...

Read More

Muziic Founder Reaches for YouTube

Posted by | Mar 13, 2009 | , |

[Source: CNET News] David Nelson, the 15-year-old co-founder of the free site Muziic, idealizes Napster creator Shawn Fanning. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to run his business the same way. Muziic, which launched two weeks ago, is a music service that piggybacks on YouTube. Nelson’s software rounds up YouTube’s music videos and enables users to sort and add them to playlists as if they were MP3s. There’s no messing around with YouTube’s search engine, videos, or advertisements. There’s little about Muziic that compares to Napster, the peer-to-peer service that helped demolish the traditional music business and usher in a new digital era. Yet, Napster in its original trailblazing form didn’t last long. The site, some would argue, doomed itself by defying copyright law. For Muziic, Nelson has more modest goals and higher hopes. Nelson, who lives with his parents in Bettendorf, Iowa, about 60 miles east of Iowa City, said: “We knew when we started out that the key was to develop something legal.” But the question of the site’s legality is still unanswered. Mark Nelson, David’s father and Muziic’s co-founder, acknowledged this week that Muziic was built without the consent of YouTube or any of the major recording companies. What’s unclear is whether Muziic complies with the terms of service for YouTube’s API or whether the big record companies will object on the basis of copyright. Last...

Read More

Apple announces a Special Event with iPhone Software 3.0 being the big attraction

Posted by | Mar 12, 2009 | |

[Source: CNET News] What might Apple have in store for the third release of its iPhone software? The company plans to hold one of its trademark special events Tuesday at its headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., to show off “an advance preview of what we’re building” for the iPhone 3.0 software release, according to an invitation distributed Thursday. The event will come just a little more than a year after the iPhone 2.0 software event laid out Apple’s policies for getting third-party applications onto the iPhone, as well as business-friendly features. This could explain why the company has been slow to offer renewals for current SDK licenses, as it might be requiring developers to sign a whole new agreement. While the software will be the main attraction, developers will be closely watching for details about how the new SDK will affect their businesses. So, about that software: judging by the comments on our initial post about the event, iPhone users are looking for Apple to finally bring cut-and-paste capability to the device. Of all the advancements Apple has planned for the iPhone 3.0 software, that’s probably the one users are hoping for the most.   We’ll see!  There’s just a little more to this post from CNET Networks news.  Please visit http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10195098-37.html  for the rest.   As soon as Apple has released the update, we will be ready with the latest...

Read More

How Daniel Terdiman built a RFID Device

Posted by | Mar 10, 2009 | |

[Source: CNET Networks] I’m staring at a table covered in circuitry, a solderless “breadboard,” a bunch of wire, an antenna, and some other components–all the things I’ve been given to build a rudimentary RFID reader–and I’m having serious thoughts about whether I’m in the right room. I’ve certainly used RFID before–tiny radio frequency ID tags are increasingly showing up in everything from grocery store items to hospital wristbands to lift tickets. But the sum total of electronics that I’ve made in my life is, I’m now reminding myself, zero. And yet, over the next three hours, I’ve got to take all these various bits and pieces and craft them into something that not only reads an RFID tag, but also can detect and store the serial numbers of up to 102 of them in resident memory. And do so while sitting pretty much front and center of a room full of other people who seem to me very confident in their ability to complete the same task. I’m here at ETech, the Emerging Technology conference, and I’m sitting in on a session called “Hands-on RFID for Makers.”…....

Read More

Can we get rid of that expensive cable plan.

Posted by | Mar 9, 2009 | |

[Source: CNET News] The economy is in the toilet, and I know I’m not the only person in America who is looking for ways to cut costs. Top on my list in 2009 is finding a way to eliminate my $100 a month cable TV bill. Up until very recently, the idea of cutting off subscription TV would have meant skimping on a whole lot of good quality entertainment. I must admit, I don’t watch a lot of TV. But I watch enough that I would be very sad if I had to give up HBO’s “Flight of the Conchords” or NBC’s “30 Rock.” But thanks to that wonderful communications network known as the Internet and the fact that big Hollywood studios and TV networks have finally realized that digital distribution is actually a good thing, cable cord cutters, like me, won’t have to sacrifice that much or anything at all, depending on what movies and TV programs we like to watch. Thanks to services like Netflix, iTunes, and Amazon On Demand, consumers can simply stream or download movies or previous seasons of TV shows directly from the Web anytime they want. And for those viewers looking for current seasons of TV shows, they can turn to Web sites, such as Hulu.com or TV.com, which have aggregated some of the most popular TV shows for on-demand viewing over the...

Read More

Right Now on the Forums

Latest Tweets