The Author’s Guild is Wrong About the Kindle. And That’s Okay. They’re the Authors.

When it comes to thorny matters of intellectual property, my instinct is often to follow a philosophy which, as far as I can tell, almost nobody else shares. It’s a sort of creators’-rights libertarianism which you might call Let the People Who Create Stuff Make Their Own Damn Mistakes. (Possible alternative moniker: Reverse Lessigism.) The recording industry may have made almost every wrongheaded decision imaginable during the first decade 0f digital music, but hey–they’re entitled to drive their business into the ground if they so choose. And who the hell is is anyone else to angrily tell someone who created something what he can or can’t do with it?

Ultimately, I think most owners of intellectual property will eventually come to decisions that serve the people who watch, listen to, or read their works, since behaving too stupidly for too long will leave you without any customers. But it’s OK by me if creators find their own comfort level, even if it’s different from what I’d choose.

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Street Fighter IV: Appeasing the Old-School

While relaxing at a friend’s house last weekend, an ad for Street Fighter IV aired during a commercial break from SportsCenter. I recognized it right away — Chun Li and Zangief battling amidst a layer of artistic flourishes —and a lull soon filled the room as my friends followed suit. Finally, when Ken and Ryu made an appearance, one of my buddies, who hasn’t owned a game console since we met in college, spoke up.

“Is that Street Fighter?”

That, I imagine, is the response Capcom was going for. Yes, Street Fighter is back, just as you remember it, but stuffed with polygons instead of pixilated 16-bit sprites.

Actually, Street Fighter never went away. Dedicated fans kept the series alive in Japanese arcades and the few left here in the states. Each incremental release after the iconic Street Fighter II was more obscure than the last, tailor-made for players with twitch reflexes and a rock-solid memory of combos. For the average gamer, challenging any of these veterans would constitute a wasted quarter.

So in reinventing the series, Capcom had the unenviable challenge of appeasing its base while bringing lost fans — myself included — back into the fold. The result is actually quite admirable.

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Malware is Messing with Facebook Users

A rogue application has struck Facebook for the second time within a week, reports Trend Micro’s Malware Blog. The malware uses social engineering to hoodwink Facebook users into installing it, and then proceeds to harvest their personal information. But don’t panic yet – it’s not that easy to do.

When a user installs the application, it propagates itself by spamming their friends profiles with fake but official sounding notices that they have violated the Facebook terms of service. In order to avoid “penalties,” the user is instructed to install the application. If the would-be victim falls for it, the cycle repeats.

Trend Micro has pointed out the obvious: Facebook should review its application hosting policy. The firm also recommended that users take responsibility for what they are installing, and to do some research beforehand.

One possible solution is a verification process for applications, but the problem would have to be more prevalent to justify its costs, said Caleb Sima, an HP executive that is the former co-founder and CTO of SPI Dynamics.

“Really, I don’t have much to say about this as I have been expecting it for a while. Its no different then email. I send you a link to a program you allow it to install it takes your contacts list and spams it out. There is nothing new here. Its just applied as a Facebook app or message.”

He also predicted that malware could start arising with any type of ‘app stores.’

The silver lining is that Faceobok applications are much harder to write and distribute than e-mails are, so it won’t be as big of a problem, Sima explained. Vigilance is the best course of action, he added. “Ultimately I don’t think there is much that Facebook can do about it besides act quickly to remove rogue apps when they are reported.”

The Diggbar is Just Not a Good Idea

A Flickr photo has set off a firestorm of speculation across the web as to the social news sites future plans, which apparently involve the launch of a application-free browser toolbar. It would appear that the toolbar would work much like application StumbleUpon debuted last year.

SU originally started as a browser add-on, however it ditched that model to use HTML frames instead in September. Users start their experience from the SU homepage, and their browsing afterward appears in the framed user interface.

A user would be able to digg stories without actually going to the site, as well as submit content. Like SU’s app, they would also be able to randomly surf to another digged site from the toolbar itself.

It would also allow for the easy sharing of digged sites through Facebook messages, e-mail, Digg “shouts,” or through Twitter.

Now this sounds all well and good, and interesting, so how is it a bad thing for Digg? Simply put, its going to add a significant amount of noise to the site. Digg’s submission process acts somewhat as a filter of sorts, discouraging people from digging everything and anything.

Using a toolbar would simplify this process dramatically. It would also probably have the effect of muddying the site with a lot of submissions that are of little value. This would also cheapen Digg’s brand in my opinion.

While yes I understand the sites desire to increase traffic, I am not so sure going to a toolbar may be a good idea.

5Words for February 27th, 2009

Me, I’m mournin’ Computer Shopper:

Asus preps ultra-thin netebook.

Newsday’s site wants your money.

Apple kills Emoji (er, Emoji?).

Amazon Kindle 3 Rumors. Already?

JPG Magazine will return soon.

“Vista-Capable” lawyers fight on.

Google is Tweeting. Very successfully.

Hearst plans Kindle for magazines.

Japan stops BlackBerry Bold sales.

No surprise: identity theft up.

Pirate Bay wife gets flowers.

PC makers’ Windows 7 opinions.

Finally, Windows/Android phone virtualization!

Computer Shopper: A Magazine No More

At its peak, Computer Shopper may have consumed more wood pulp each month than any other magazine of any sort, ever: It consistently ran over 1,000 pages oversized a month in the early 1990s. (I remember in part because I worked for a not-very-successful magazine that had been formed to take Shopper on head-to-head.)

The onetime behemoth will never kill another innocent tree again: SX2 Media Labs, its publisher, is discontinuing print publication to go online-only after the April issue, reports PaidContent.org. The news comes a few months after Ziff Davis folded the print version of PC Magazine, once Computer Shopper’s even more profitable stablemate. (Shopper was a Ziff publication during the fat years, though it began as an independent operation and was also owned by Cnet for a spell until SX2 bought it in 2005.)

Also recently defunct, at least as a standalone publication: the extremely venerable programming journal Dr. Dobb’s, which I remember reading in the late 1970s.

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TV.com on iPhone: Decent Enough. But I Want My Hulu!

The iPhone is really an iManyThings: iCommunicator, iMusicPlayer, iGameConsole, and iRemoteControl. I’d love it to be an iTV, too–a rich source of on-demand television shows from broadcast and cable networks that stream live over its Net connection and (unlike the stuff Apple sells via iTunes) don’t cost anything. Little by little, that’s happening. Back in November, Joost released an iPhone app, and today it was was joined by a TV.com one, featuring new and old content from CBS and sister networks–from CSI to David Letterman to Gossip Girl to The Bold and the Beautiful to MacGyver to the original Star Trek to tech stuff from Cnet.

The single most interesting thing about TV.com’s app–to me, anyhow–isn’t the content, but the fact that you can stream it over any iPhone connection you’ve got, including Wi-Fi, 3G, and 2G. Joost is limited to Wi-Fi, and while it uses that speedy connection to provide surprisingly high-quality images, the times when I’m most likely to have Wi-Fi is when I’m at home, in close proximity to my TV set. The TV.com programming I checked out didn’t look as good as Joost’s, and some of the audio was tinny. I can’t tell to what degree TV.com adjusts its quality level to match the connection you’ve got: David Letterman looked and sounded a tad better over Wi-Fi than on 3G, but Star Trek seemed about the same on 2G as Wi-Fi–it just loaded faster over Wi-Fi. On the plus side, I didn’t notice any hiccups or buffering issues with the video or audio–even over 2G, playback was smooth.

Speaking of speed, the TV.com app feels sluggish to me so far unless I’m on Wi-Fi–not just the videos, but other graphical images such as thumbnails pop into place at a leisurely pace. The search feature could use some work, too: When I searched for “Star Trek,” the results page didn’t show the episode titles, so I had to click through to see what was what.

TV.com touts that it streams full episodes of shows as well as clips, and that’s true–but all the full shows I saw had been broken up into chunks of a few minutes each. I’m not sure whether that’s for technical reasons or simply because TV.com thinks that iPhone users are more likely to want to snack on shows a bite or two at time than watch them from start to finish.

As with Joost’s iPhone incarnation, I’m pleased to see TV.com landing on the iPhone, but more than anything else, it whets my appetite for what a Hulu iPhone app could be, given that Hulu has by far the strongest content lineup of any free TV streaming site. There’s no word yet if or when Hulu might land on iPhones. But I’m also eager to see Sling’s SlingPlayer Mobile for the iPhone–and that, supposedly, may be just around the corner.

I remain confident that the iPhone is going to become a great mobile TV sooner or later, but I’m still not sure about how or when…

After the jump, a few images from TV.com for iPhone:

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Facebook’s Radical New Approach to Terms of Service

Last week, Facebook reversed some changes it had made to its terms of service after it faced an uprising of unhappy members who weren’t pacified by founder Mark Zuckberg’s initial explanation of why the amendments shouldn’t bother anyone. That was expedient. Today, the company followed up by doing something kind of extraordinary: It’s created drafts of overarching Facebook Principles and specific Facebook Rights and Responsibilities, and is soliciting member feedback on them before they’re finalized. Zuckerberg also says that members will get to vote for or against the revised versions of both documents, although I can’t tell from his post whether those votes will be binding.

The Facebook Rights and Responsibilities aren’t radically different in spirit or style from a traditional TOS document, but they’re written in something closer to plain English than most and go further to explain the rationale behind the rules. But the linkage of this document’s specific policies to the philosophical stuff in the Facebook Principles is a big deal. Most terms of service are about lawyerly ass-covering, but Facebook is trying, at least, to make its rules about fulfilling the company’s mission. And if it truly listens and rolls member feedback into the final versions, that’s cool.

For a company that’s all about conversation and communications, Facebook often comes off as mysterious and autocratic–not just with this recent flap but also with earlier dust-ups like the one over Beacon “social ads.” In the past, it’s done a decent job of listening to members–but only as the third step in a process that usually went A) institute new policy; B) get all defensive when members carp about it; C) revise new policy based on their feedback. It’ll be fascinating to see how flipping that sequence of events around goes; I hope it works wonderfully well and influences other companies to make their terms of service more realistic, idealistic, and comprehensible…and to get their customers in on the conversation early on.

Full disclosure: Technologizer has its own terms of service, which are based on the ones that govern use of WordPress.com, the platform that powers most of our site. I think they’re pretty fair, but they’re definitely traditional in tone and takeaway. According to Google Analytics, they’ve been viewed a grand total of 101 times since this site’s debut–and at least a few of those clicks came from yours truly. But if you’ve got any input on them, lemme know. And I just might come up with a set of Technologizer Principles for your input…

Apple Enthusiasts’ Urge To Flame: What Gives?

I have spent much of my professional technology writing life covering Apple, from my days at BetaNews right through my current gig here at Technologizer. My original “beat” wasn’t always Apple, though: I also covered Microsoft for a time.

Having covered both sides of the spectrum, I’ve dealt with the hyper-enthusiasts — the “fanboys” if you will — of both sides. What I’ve found is a completely different reaction to unfavorable press from either group.

Bad news is inevitable, after all.

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Christmas Isn’t Everything, EA Realizes

Good news for people who don’t like juggling a half dozen top-shelf video games at the tail end of the year: an Electronic Arts manager says the company might be backing off the holiday release strategy.

The big takeaway from last year’s success of Mario Kart and Grand Theft Auto is that AAA games don’t have to be introduced in the holiday season to perform well. NPD Group analyst Anita Frazier said as much after her company put out its annual sales figures. “Get some high profile releases out in the first and second quarters,” she suggested.

Mulling over a fairly unsuccessful year, Electronic Arts is coming around to that school of thought. Glen Schofield, General Manager for the EA branch that developed Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge, told Gamesindustry.biz that there were “far too many” games to choose from before the holidays.

“I think that we traditionally thought that people only buy games at Christmas or around holiday time, and now we’re looking back and going, ‘You know what, GTA launched in May; Resident Evil comes out in March’.”

I picked this story up from Destructoid, where one commenter posed a clever theory: Publishers previously had the mindset that video games are just kids’ toys, and children are most likely to get them on Christmas. Personally, I can relate to that. I used to always get a video game on the eighth night of Hannukah, but now I just buy them when they deserve my $60, period. I would have loved to play Left 4 Dead in the summer of 2008, when nothing was going on. It’s still on my backlog now.

Let’s hope other publishers follow suit. With Halo Wars and Resident Evil 5 coming next month, and Street Fighter IV in stores now, it seems that this strategy might already be in play.

Yahoo’s Bartz Blogs; Yahoo Connected TV Impresses

I’m generally not into following internal machinations at Yahoo very closely–corporate twists and turns mean very little unless they have an impact on the products and services we consumers get. But I did read and admire new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz’s post on the company’s corporate blog today. It’s pretty unflinching in its weighing of the company’s strengths and weaknesses, at least for a public rumination. (I can’t imagine a post at an official Google blog saying anything even slightly critical about that company’s culture–though it’s easier, of course, for Bartz to criticize given that she’s not responsible for anything that’s gone wrong at Yahoo up into this point.

Bartz’s post talks about a corporate reorg and a new Customer Advocacy Group, and promises services that will be awesome, exciting, and make you say “wow.” Fine. Like I say, the proof is in the products, and any changes there are yet to come. But here’s one upcoming Yahoo item that  I am already excited about, which Bartz alludes to in passing: I recently visited the company and checked out its Yahoo Connected TV service, which will be built into TVs from Samsung, Sony, LG, and Vizio. It’s based on Yahoo Widgets–formerly known as Konfabulator, and the technology that pretty much kicked off the trend towards Web widgets a few years ago. The TV-based widgets I saw for news, video, and more looked slick and useful–I left the demo feeling slightly sad that there’s no way I’m going to buy a new TV anytime soon. (The first sets that incorporate the Yahoo software are due next month.)

More on Yahoo Connected TV soon, in a separate post…

Windows 7: Lots of Little Tweaks

With Microsoft looking understandably anxious to wrap up major work on Windows 7 and get it out the door, there’s been lots of speculation over just how willing the company would be to make changes to the OS’s functionality based on user feedback from the beta release. A new post at Microsoft’s official Engineering Windows 7 blog shows that it’s not adverse to to tweaks: The post lists dozens of fiddly little refinements to the interface based on testers’ requests.

The post says that it doesn’t cover all the changes since the beta. I’m curious about HomeGroups networking, which isn’t mentioned in the list of revised features–I agree with my friend Scot Finnie that the implementation of the feature in the Windows 7 beta is clunky and unrefined. (Windows gives you a password for your HomeGroup that can’t be changed, and if there’s a way to move a PC from one HomeGroup to another, I haven’t figured it out.)

It does look like Microsoft has locked down Windows 7′s basic feature set: Unless it’s holding back some surprises to spring on us at the last moment, we may know about all the key features that the OS will sport. But given that Microsoft historically hasn’t been great at nailing fit-and-finish of new features from the get-go, it’s a relief to see that it’s taking the time to polish up Windows 7 before declaring it finished. A Windows 7 that was less refined than the average past Windows upgrade would have been  kinda alarming.

5Words for February 26th, 2009

Good morning–news is served:

Lots of Windows 7 tweaks.

Nokia might make Symbian laptops.

Google Street View’s user photos.

Google News gets ads. Finally.

Find iPhone vulnerability, get money.

The president isn’t Tweeting nowadays.

LG phone sports detachable keyboard.

Jeepers, more Microsoft-Yahoo speculation.

Rumors about PSP successor persist.

Is Windows Mobile 6.5 obsolete?

Vista SP2 release candidate imminent.

Dell’s 10-inch netbook arrives.

Intel: Psion doesn’t own “netbook.”

No feeware for unlocked G1s.

Reminder: Please Take Our Windows 7 Beta Survey

It’s open until noon on Friday, and we’d love to get the input of as many W7 beta testers as possible. Details here. Thanks!

One Windows. Multiple Browsers. Bundled. I Like It!

Once again, those wacky Europeans are making life difficult for Microsoft. A site called EurActive is reporting that Microsoft’s ongoing antitrust tussle with the European Commission will result in the company being forced to help European Windows users opt for a browser that isn’t Internet Explorer. The details are yet to be worked out–the OS might include some sort of mechanism for choosing among multiple browsers, or Microsoft might be forced to work with PC manufacturers to install alternative browsers on new systems. Microsoft is apparently concerned enough that it has a secret plan to delay Windows 7′s release if necessary, reports our own Dave Worthington.

When you’re forced to do something you don’t particularly want to do, there are two ways to go about it: grudgingly or whole-heartedly. Previous legally-mandated editions of Windows such as the Korea-only Windows XP K and KN are the result of the first approach, and I’m not sure if they made anyone other than the government officials who required them happy.

But what if Microsoft poured its collective energy, intellect, and resources into making the best possible multiple-browser Windows–and then made it the standard version of the OS worldwide?

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Windows 7 to Ship in October. Probably. Unless It’s January.

I’ve confirmed a report by Bloomberg news report that Microsoft plans to ship Windows 7 by October. Microsoft has also worked out a contingency plan for a secondary launch date in the event that the European Commission takes action, a well-placed source at Microsoft told me.

Ray Chen, president at Taipei-based Compal Electronics, made the disclosure at an investors’ conference at the company’s headquarters today. He also projected that Windows 7′s release could help reinvigorate sagging PCs sales amid the global economic downturn. Chen is positioned to know: Compal produces laptops for big-name brands including Acer and Hewlett-Packard.

A source at Microsoft told me that Chen is right on the money. The October timetable also meshes with the unofficial word that I have been hearing for weeks. Should the EU take action, Microsoft will push the release back to January, mirroring Windows Vista. OEMs have been asked to move forward as if October is the date regardless of what happens in the courts.

Indeed, Microsoft appears to be on track with its new operating system, and is nearly ready to begin updating its beta release to solicit more feedback from testers.

Windows 7 builds on the plumbing that was laid by Windows Vista. Application and hardware compatibility issues should not involve anywhere near the hassles that the XP-to-Vistra transition caused, because Windows 7 is not a dramatic departure from Vista. Additionally, Microsoft had already completed work for application developers in October before it even issued the first beta.

Windows Vista also got off to a rocky start in part because it was released in January–about the worst possible time for a new OS to debut. But the European Union willing, and unless there’a some sort of unanticipated problem, expect Windows 7 to be on store shelves and preinstalled on new PCs for the holidays.