henrypijames writes "For months, users of Adobe Creative Suite 3 have been wondering why some of the applications regularly connect to what looks like a private IP address but is actually a public domain address belonging to the web analytics company Omniture. Now allegations of user spying are getting louder, prompting Adobe Photoshop product manager John Nack to respond, though many remain unsatisfied with his explanation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Filed under: Portable Audio

Sure, we've heard RIAA-admiring lawyers affirm that ripping your own CDs is in fact "stealing," but it seems the aforementioned entity is putting its money where its mouth is in a case against Jeffrey Howell. Reportedly, the Scottsdale, Arizona resident is being sued by the RIAA, and rather than Mr. Howell just writing a check and calling it a day, he's fighting back in court. Interestingly, it seems that the industry is maintaining that "it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into their computer." Ira Schwartz, the industry's lawyer in the case, is arguing that MP3 files created on his computer from legally purchased CDs are indeed "unauthorized copies," and while we've no idea what will become of all this, we suppose you should go on and wipe those personal copies before you too end up in handcuffs.



Update: We got some more info on the case -- it looks like Jeffrey's actually being sued for illegal downloading, not ripping, but this whole "ripping is illegal" tactic is still pretty distasteful. Check out this post for the full story.



[Via BlogRunner]

 

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

---

In one of the few places on Earth where people can rarely be found, the human race has well and truly made its mark. In the middle of the Pacific Ocean lies a floating garbage patch twice the size of Britain. A place where the water is filled with six times as much plastic as plankton, a plastic-plankton soup that is entering the food chain.

Time Slows Down writes "Scottish born musician and former record label owner David Byrne says the future of music as a career is wide open and identifies six different distribution models now available to musicians in an article in this month's Wired magazine. At one end of the scale is the 360, or equity deal, where every aspect of the artist's career is handled by producers, promoters, marketing people, and managers. At the other end of the scale is the self-distribution model, where the music is self-produced, self-written, self-played, and self-marketed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The great fall of China  —  Revised GDP calculations show that Beijing isn't the giant we thought it was.  —  The most important story to come out of Washington recently had nothing to do with the endless presidential campaign.  And although the media largely ignored it, the story changes the world.

Source:   Los Angeles Times

Author:   Walter Russell Mead

Link:   http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary…

memeorandum permalink

Filed under: Ports, Switches, Others

A shiny new 1080p DLP projector isn't the only thing Marantz is rolling out to the HD crowd this week, as the firm's newest HDMI switch is sure to garner attention from those drowning in components. The VS3002 video selector boasts that totally simple, albeit incredibly sexy motif that we've come to expect from the outfit, and it also features a 6-in, 2-out design that enables owners to pipe high-definition content in from a whole heap of sources and out to two separate displays. We're also led to believe that this thing supports v1.3 considering its understanding of Deep Color, and there's also an RS-232 port 'round back should you need it. Unfortunately, the VS3002 won't be coming sans a premium, as it will purportedly demand a stiff ¥35,000 ($306) when it lands in February.



[Via SlashGear]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Sure, we've seen monolithic solar farms before, but the 14-megawatt Nellis solar energy system is a beast that stands alone -- for now, at least. As of today, this farm is hailed as America's "largest solar photovoltaic system," but if all goes to plan, Cleantech America will grab those honors when it completes a massive 80-megawatt project in neighboring California. Nevertheless, this system -- which is housed at the Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada -- will reportedly generate "30 million kilowatt-hours of clean electricity annually and supply approximately 25-percent of the total power used at the base, where 12,000 people live and work." Of course, some 140 acres of land have been covered with 72,000 solar panels in order to make it happen, but it's not like anything else is going out there (CES and rabid gambling notwithstanding).



[Via MetaEfficient, image courtesy of CleanTech]

 

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

---

France to suspend diplomatic contacts with Syria until progress is made on choosing a new Lebanese president.

Read full story for latest details.

The folks behind Steal This Film, an amazing, funny, enraging and inspiring documentary series about copyright and the Internet have just released part II of the series. I taught part one (about the PirateBay crackdown in Sweden and the founding of The Pirate Party) in my class last year, and it was one of the liveliest classes we had. Part II is even better than part one -- it covers the technological and enforcement end of the copyright wars, and on the way that using the internet makes you a copier, and how copying puts you in legal jeopardy. Starting with Mark Getty's (Chairman of Getty Images) infamous statement that "Intellectual Property is the oil of the 21st century," the filmmakers note that oil always leads to oil-wars, and that these are vicious, ill-conceived and never end well. This leads them to explore the war on copying -- which ultimately becomes a war on the Internet and those of us who use it. This installment includes punchy interviews with a lot of the US's leading copyfighters -- EFFers like Seth Schoen and Fred von Lohmann, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Eben Moglen, Aaron Swartz, Yochai Benkler, Rick Prelinger, as well as folks in the UK, Sweden and Bangalore. Interspersed with this is are smart historical perspectives, and a brief interview with MPAA chief Dan Glickman, who all but twirls his mustache in glee at the thought of punishing copiers. There's also some interesting material here from new artists who embrace copying, but I'm guessing that that's going to be the main theme of a future installment. Steal This Film II is available as a P2P download (natch) in several formats, including HD, and opens with a stern warning encouraging you to share it as widely as possible. Link (Thanks, Robbo and everyone else who suggested this!) See also: Steal This Movie: documentary on Swedish piracy movement...

Have you opened your refrigerator's crisper drawer lately? If not, chances are that the fruit and veggies you've stored in there may be moldy. Perhaps, according to the Unclutterer weblog, it's better to look for more ideal options to store your perishables. For example, you should put tomatoes in an aerated basket out of direct sunlight, but not in a refrigerator because refrigeration causes tomatoes to lose their smell and taste. Additionally, you can store corn in the freezer, but lettuce should never be frozen. Contrary to popular belief, you can refrigerate bananas too. The skin might darken but the fruit within is safe to eat. It's much better to put apples on the refrigerator shelves rather than in the crisper drawer so there is proper air circulation around the fruit. In the end, the Unclutterer blogger decided to do without the refrigerator crisper drawer altogether.

Plus: Faces in the crowd.

Today's THV

CDC: Fliers exposed to drug-resistant TB

USA Today - 3 hours ago

By Steve Sternberg, USA TODAY Federal health officials continued their 17-state search Sunday for passengers and crew who may have been infected with a rare, potentially deadly form of tuberculosis by a woman on an American Airlines flight from New ...

CDC hunts for fliers on jet with TB-stricken passenger Seattle Times

TB Patient Could Have Spread Disease in Plane 580 CFRA Radio

CBS 47

all 165 news articles

RIAA not suing over CD ripping, still kinda being jerks about it  —  Okay, so we've done some digging into the RIAA's lawsuit against Jeffery Howell, in which the industry is claiming that ripped MP3s are “unauthorized copies,” and it turns out that Jeffery isn't actually being sued for ripping CDs …

Source:   Engadget

Author:   Nilay Patel

Link:   http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/30/riaa-not-suing…

Techmeme permalink

DUBAI, Dec 29 (Reuters) - Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden said the United States wants to create a national unity government in Iraq to control oil supplies, build military bases and dominate the region. The militant leader urged Iraqis in a...

New Year celebrations in the Belgian capital Brussels are cancelled because of a terror alert.

Makefan writes -

This page provides information on how to hack your MyBook World Edition, so as you can improve performance and add new features. MyBook is powered by ARM9 microprocessor, it has 32MB of SDRAM and boots from internal hard drive. The system partition has 2.8GB (only 260 MB is occupied). This means that you have a lot of resources for various improvements.

Hacking the Western Digital MyBook World Edition - Link.

[Read this article] [Comment on this article]

Data breaches represented the most important category of IT failure during 2007. The year 2007 saw spectacular failures, ranging from improperly-paid teachers at Arizona State University (ASU) and the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), to a massive implementation problem at the UK National Health System (NHS), which one observer called the "greatest IT disaster in history." Despite the impact of these high-profile failures on victims, the number of people affected is minuscule compared to the cumulative effect of data breaches. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse conservatively estimates over 216 million privacy records were breached in the period 2005-2007, in the United States alone. According to attrition.org, which maintains a database that researchers can download to conduct their own analysis, approximately...

Oddball weather is the norm in 2007. As the year draws to a close, it's shaping up to be the hottest year on record in the Northern Hemisphere. Most alarming to climate scientists, the Arctic, which serves as the world's refrigerator, dramatically warmed in 2007, shattering records for the amount of melting ice.

An MIT initiative called "OpenCourseWare" makes virtually all the school's courses available online for free, and more than 100 universities worldwide, including Johns Hopkins, Tufts and Notre Dame, are joining MIT in a consortium of schools promoting their own open courseware.

Personalized portal Netvibes was one of the first applications that got me hooked on web apps in general. It was really useful, it had great community support, and it was always one step ahead of its competition. Pageflakes is a very similar (and also very good) application, but unfortunately being one little step behind Netvibes [...]

The Web 2.0 Marketplace is a place to list Web 2.0 and “New Media” websites for sale, job offers, consulting services, Facebook development services and more. ---Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Web 2.0 Marketplace Listings for April 8th, 2008Web 2.0 Marketplace Listings for April 14th, 2008Web 2.0 Marketplace Listings for April 4th, 2008Web [...]

It isn’t surprising to us that China is censoring something.  A quick scroll through the Mashable story archives will find more instances of censorship than you can shake a stick at. Therefore it only comes as a mild shock that the country has gone back on it’s word to bring down the great firewall of [...]

It seems BlogTV is keeping an eye on YouTube, and using their “Most Subscribed” feature as a barometer of who they need to pilfer from the leading video site. BlogTV’s new season is launching with the likes of Justine “iJustine” Ezarik, who came to Internet mega-stardom due to her 300-page iPhone bill that went viral as [...]

Remember Tamagotchi? The little video game that came on a key chain, with a digital pet that had to be fed, loved and cared for? Mind Candy, the team behind the Perplex City game, has just launched its latest creation–Moshi Monsters. It’s a lot like Tamagotchi, with a bit of social networking mixed [...]

With all this brinkmanship in the digital world, what with all this Microhoo mess, every major rivalry thinks they need to get in on the act.  No, there hasn’t been a new ‘development’ in the Microhoo case, so far as we know.  But NBCU is trying to rekindle the very public spat they had with [...]

Even though the ad:tech conference had died down and the booths had packed up, a good amount of people stuck around for the closing keynote, which was a live taping of Revision3’s Internet Superstars. Hosted by “Internet Superstar” co-hosts Martin Sargent and Gator, the live event was a good way to end the ad:tech [...]

This past weekend, I reported on Andrew Baron, founder of Rocketboom, auctioning off his Twitter account and all of the followers that went with it. Well, even after the auction reached over $1500, Mr. Baron decided it was better to pull the auction. Daniel Terdiman of WebWare is reporting that not only was [...]

Just yesterday, Sarah Perez over at ReadWriteWeb did a pretty well thought out post on the nature of involvement with social media, especially in relationship to the particularly large time-sink that it is.  A lot can be (and has been) said as to the relationship between the scale of involvement with social media and the [...]

Odnoklassniki.ru, a popular Russian social network, is reporting it grossed $3.3 million in advertising revenue in the first quarter of 2008, and it is expected to surge to $30 million by the end of the year. Yakov of Quintura is saying that Odnoklassniki, which translates to “Classmates”, sports 15 million users with a daily engagement of [...]

…and I really only say that because FriendFeed is one of those rare services that has the ability to convey a strong sense of culture that’s relevant to the user.  It doesn’t try to pollute it or dilute it or otherwise overpower it with a corporate branding effort like, say, Facebook.  When you’re logged into [...]

Download (12.7MB audio)

Farecast has just revealed the company that has acquired it: Microsoft. The deal was first rumored earlier this week. Not many more details have been given about the deal, but Microsoft did set out to make several acquisitions over the course of 2008 to grow in different verticals, ramp up its web-based services portfolio, [...]

After being acquired by Russian-based SUP, LiveJournal’s new executive team went to work bridging some of the gaps between the American and Russian blogging communities, while also setting forth to firmly establish a powerful presence with this new worldly platform, creating a new board of directors. I think SUP has done a good job [...]

Podcast aggregation tool Odeo has begun testing out an updated version of its website, which is also moving its content aggregation tool to a more inclusive collection of more video types. Downloadsquad picked up on the new version of Odeo, and I also got a chance to take a sneak peek at some of [...]

The Mashable team is from all over the planet with Pete hailing from Scotland, Stan in Croatia, and the rest of us all over the United States, but there is one thing we all seem to have in common - caffeine addiction. Coffee, as they say, is least likely to kill you out of all [...]

Editor’s Note: If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion in “The Startup Review” series, please see the details here. STARTUP DETAILS: Company Name: IndieGoGo Company Website: http://www.indiegogo.com/ CEO’s 20 word description: IndieGoGo is an online social marketplace connecting filmmakers and fans to make independent film happen. CEO’s 100 word description: [...]

Dank Apps, the company behind the Lotto application on Facebook, has rolled out a series of new applications called Social Change that give a significant portion of proceeds to charity. The initial set of apps consists of: The Clinton Global Initiative—HIV/AIDS Initiative - Earn For AIDS Breast Cancer Research Foundation - Earn For Breast [...]

We’ve never covered Amazingtunes.com on Mashable before today, but better late than never, we say. Plus, we’ve gotten word from the Amazing Media Group this week that the company, first launched in December 2007, just introduced its very own “fair trade” independent record label. So, without further adieu, let’s have a little look-see. Having been in [...]

TheBlackApp is billing itself as “the first iPhone consumer network,” and by the look of their homepage, which I’ve been linked to a few times over the past couple weeks by various iPhone fanboys, my first thought was that this was an iMarketingGimick. But, I’ve been able to track down a few, admittedly still [...]

The inimitable phenomenon known as internal combustion is responsible for many unappealing things that plague the globe. Industrial waste. War. Virtual torrents of angels’ tears. But none is more a challenge to the progress of the human race than the creeping, crawling, abhorrent thing we call roadway traffic. Yes, bumper-to- bumper is in fact the [...]

Well, we knew the day would come when Blockbuster got sued for participating in Facebook’s Beacon advertising program, and that day is here. According to MediaPost, Texas resident Cathryn Elaine Harris is pretty pissed that Blockbuster is sharing her purchase and rental activity with friends on Facebook. With allegations that Blockbuster’s use of [...]

MySpace is on another launching rampage. Days after its localized site release in Korea, MySpace reveals MySpace India, officially launching its localized site with a rock concert in Mumbai and all the other music-ridden pomp and circumstance for which MySpace has come to be known. As with the majority of other localized MySpace [...]

SezWho, the comment-tracking service, is layering in a great deal of support for a new platform approach; aside from adding support for phpBB to extend its capabilities to participating forums, SezWho is also launching a new developer toolkit for added support across more social media platforms. What’s more, SezWho now includes RSS feeds, so [...]

Buzznet has been busy the past couple of months. The company has managed to secure some $25m in fresh funding, and it has so far acquired a number of entities, including Qloud, a creator of Web-based music applications, the former Gawker Media property Idolator, and Stereogum. Today we hear of Buzznet’s new partnership with Universal [...]

TripIt has raised a round of funding, to the amount of $5.1 million, from Sabre Holdings, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and European Founders Fund. This is the company’s second round of funding, giving TripIt ample opportunity to continue to grow. With several updates to its service over the past few months, TripI