Tuesday, May 28, 2013

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EU watchdog snuffles around Apple distribution deals

Posted: 28 May 2013 02:28 AM PDT

EU watchdogs are snuffling around Apple's iPhone distribution deals.

Anti-trust regulators are concerned about allegations that Apple may not have won such a sizable chunk of smartphone market with its rounded rectangle design after all.

iPhone distribution deals with mobile telecoms operators were aimed at shutting out rival smartphones makers, it is alleged.

A nine-page questionnaire sent to mobile telecoms companies last week and obtained by Reuters suggests a stiff reaction from the European Commission, which says such behaviour may breach EU antitrust rules.

The questionnaire asked about handset subsidies and marketing for outfits which carried Apple's smartphones and tablets.

Such surveys are a typical procedure in antitrust cases which helps the Commission determine whether to open a case against companies or reject complaints.

It is not clear what these agreements actually were, but the Commission thinks that they might have resulted in other smartphone manufacturers being shut out from the market.

The questionnaire asks if Apple obliged its partners to buy a minimum volume of iPhones, provide preferential treatment for marketing iPhones, set a certain level of subsidies and ensure Apple receives the same or better terms given to rivals.

Regulators were particularly interested to find out if Apple restricted the companies from using the iPhone 5 in their 4G/LTE networks. 

Big Content demands the right to use rootkits

Posted: 28 May 2013 02:17 AM PDT

In case you ever feel sympathetic to the poor movie and music studios in the losing battle against technology, you might want to consider the latest missive from the "Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property".

The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property claims to be an independent and bipartisan initiative of "leading Americans from the private sector, public service in national security and foreign affairs, academe, and politics". These leading Americans just happen to be very interested in P2P piracy.

The outfit released an 84 page report on what it expects Big Content's sock puppets in Congress to do. The best bit about it is that that it is not quite, but almost entirely, insane.

What it wants to do is legalise the use of malware in order to punish people believed to be copying illegally.

It wants to develop software which would be loaded on computers that somehow figures out if you are a pirate, and if you are, it could lock up your computer until you confess your crime to the police and write a huge cheque to Big Content.

What could possibly go wrong? There is already a working model, used by Russian organised crime, when it deploys ransomware.

According to Geekosystem, it appears that having run out of ideas, to fix their business model, Big Content is looking to dictators and criminals.

More details on the DRM make amusing reading. Software can be written that will allow only authorised users to open files containing valuable information. If an unauthorised person accesses the information, the file could be rendered inaccessible and the unauthorised user's computer could be locked down. Instructions would appear about how to contact the cops to get the password needed to unlock the account.

What is interesting is that Big Content is asking for the US government, which is currently unable to cope with malware on its infrastructure, for the right to use the same sort of techniques to protect its failing business model.

While we doubt that even the US government is that dumb, the fact that such ideas are being put forward by Big Content indicates how little its representatives really care, or know about internet security. 

Computers help researchers find literary odd socks

Posted: 28 May 2013 02:13 AM PDT

Researchers are using the latest computer technology to reassemble more than 100,000 document fragments collected across 1,000 years.

According to the New York Times, the manuscripts, which reveal details of Jewish life along the Mediterranean, including marriage, medicine and mysticism in bits. They are a bit like hundreds of jigsaw puzzles which have been thrown in a single bag with no corner pieces. Another similar situation is found in the common sock drawer.

Dubbed the Cairo genizah, the papers include works by the rabbinical scholar Maimonides who wrote the "Guide for the Perplexed" classic, Torah scrolls and prayer books, reams of poetry and letters, contracts, and court documents, and recipes.

Now Israeli scholars are using a sophisticated artificial intelligence program running on a powerful computer network, which is conducting 4.5 trillion calculations per second, to piece together the papers.

Roni Shweka said that in an hour the computer can compare 10 million pairs - which is more than a human being can do in a lifetime.

Recovered in 1896 from a storeroom of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo,  the 320,000 pages and parts of pages in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Judeo-Arabic were not in a good state.   After they were found they were scattered in 67 libraries and private collections around the world.

So far only 4,000 fragments have been pieced together through a painstaking, expensive, exclusive process that relied a lot on luck.

The latest experiment involves more than 100 linked servers located in a basement at Tel Aviv University. The software analyses 500 visual cues for each of 157,514 fragments, to check a total of 12,405,251,341 possible pairings. The process began 16 May and should be done around 25 June. 

PETA wants to sue web opponents

Posted: 28 May 2013 02:10 AM PDT

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is so angry that it has been caught out euthanising animals in one Virginia shelter that it wants to sue the online magazine that revealed it.

According to the New York Post, the Huffington Post detailed how PETA euthanised puppies and kittens in a Virginia shelter that many had assumed is a "no kill" shelter. It could not have done anything worse, short of sticking the bodies in a fast food chain where they were sold as a vegan burger.

While the article itself has miffed PETA, according to the New York Post there was nothing that the animal rights group could do about that. The problem is that PETA can't really argue that the article is wrong. More than 90 percent of animals are killed within the first 24 hours of being placed in the shelter. That is probably faster than many abattoirs. The paper work was prepared by the Virginia Department of Agriculture inspector.

What has got PETA's goat is that it does not like being called "animal Kervorkians".   This was a reference to "Dr Death" who performed assisted suicides. PETA would like legal retribution against people who leave posts like that.

But instead it wants to sue some of the people who have left comments on the article and is attempting to discover the true identities of their critics so that it can sue them for defamation.

Obviously to lay observers, it seems that PETA really does not like a taste of its own medicine. We are talking about the outfit which does not exactly use temperate language where it comes to people who eat meat or wear fur coats.

Filing a law suit against those who calls it names on the internet is exactly the sort of thing that even the big agricultural lobby groups would not bother with.

The problem is that PETA, which does have support among those who are clawing their back down the food chain, might lose a few of those friends if they are seen as being a bully against free speech. It is that free speech that PETA needs to carry out its own stunts. 

Mozilla and Foxconn working on Firefox tablet

Posted: 28 May 2013 02:07 AM PDT

Mozilla and Foxconn are apparently gearing up to introduce a new device based on Firefox OS and early suggestions are that it will be a tablet. 

The device should be shown off to the public at Computex in a matter of days and if it is indeed a tablet, it will be a first for the fledgling operating system.

Firefox OS has yet to take off, and although there are a couple of phones out, they are practically nothing more than developer toys at the moment.

Focus Taiwan reports that Foxconn is trying to expand its list of partners and reduce its reliance on Apple. Although it is best known for churning out iPhones, Foxconn also makes tons of gear for the likes of Nokia and Hewlett Packard. 

Taking the first steps in a virgin market makes sense, although we are not sure Firefox OS can take off. Blackberry and Microsoft are struggling and even Apple is having trouble keeping up with the Android onslaught. There simply doesn’t appear to be much room for yet another mobile platform. 

AMD’s Xbox win valued at $3 billion

Posted: 28 May 2013 02:04 AM PDT

AMD has scored all three major console design wins, Microsoft’s Xbox One, Sony’s upcoming Playstation 4 and Nintendo’s gimmicky Wii U. The wins should help AMD weather the storm in the PC market, although the actual value of the deals was a source of much speculation.

However, thanks to former AMD employee Bob Feldstein we now know that the Xbox One deal is worth more than $3 billion, reports Gamespot. It is hardly pocket change for AMD, as the company’s revenue last quarter was $1.09 billion. The Xbox deal will generate cash over the course of at least a dozen quarters, probably even more. 

In any case it will help AMD’s bottom line, especially if the Wii U and PlayStation deals are on a similar scale, which they probably are. Of course, it will take a few months for the deals to kick in. The Xbox One is coming this summer, along with the PS4. Although the console wins could generate a couple of hundred million in quarterly revenue, it is worth noting that console chip margins tend to be quite low.

Feldstein is currently Nvidia’s VP of technology licensing and it is worth noting that Nvidia practically ceded the console market to AMD. The company apparently crunched some numbers and decided that it stood to gain more from the mobile market, hence it shifted its R&D efforts to Tegra. 

The fact that it is also entering the console market with the Shield means that it would probably have a hard time peddling console chips to the likes of Sony and Nintendo, who have a lot to lose in the handheld market if Nvidia’s challenge proves successful. 
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