Mininova’s Death of a Thousand Cuts

A Dutch court has ordered Mininova, a popular torrent search Web site, to remove all torrents linking to copyrighted content from its Web site within three months, or it will face hefty fines.

Dutch anti-piracy organization Bescherming Rechten Entertainment Industrie Nederland (BREIN) filed a lawsuit against Mininova that resulted in the judge’s ruling.

Torrents are a terrific way to distribute large files, but the technology has been abused by copyright violators. While sites such as Mininova do not host pirated content, they do host torrent files that link to tracker servers that facilitate piracy. Tracker servers coordinate communication between peers that are distributing files.

Mininova took measures to remove torrents that link to copyrighted content from its site by deploying a content recognition system in May. That was not enough to appease the judge, who ruled that Mininova had to do more to prevent piracy – even though it was not directly responsible.

That may just be a sisyphean task. Mininova is a community Web site where its users upload torrents, and there are many thousands of torrents. I do not see how it will be able to keep every “bad” torrent off of its site without reviewing each submission manually.

With BREIN examining Mininova under a microscope, and a court imposed penalty of 100 Euro per infringing torrent, it is probably just a matter of time until the site dies a death of a thousand cuts. The fines are capped at 5 million euros, but that might be too much for Mininova to swallow.

Sirius XM Meets iPhone, Chapter Two

Back in June, satellite-radio provider Sirius XM released an iPhone application. It was missing much of the service’s signature content, was difficult to sign up for, and was dauntingly pricey compared to the bevy of free Internet radio services available on the iPhone. And other than that, it was swell.

Today, the company announced another iPhone product that’s potentially cooler: XM SkyDock, an iPhone peripheral that turns an iPhone or iPod Touch into a fancy color-screen satellite radio for your car. Unlike the iPhone app on its own, the dock delivers real satellite radio, so it includes the full complement of programming–everything from Howard Stern to old-time radio–and won’t suffer from the spottiness of AT&T’s 3G network. (I canceled my XM service in July and switched to listening to stuff like Slacker and Pandora on my iPhone; I’m happy with the music, but the signal keeps conking out on the road.)

The new dock will sell for $120 when it premieres this fall, and pipes audio to your car’s stereo via a new technology called PowerConnect that uses your car’s wiring harness to improve sound quality. (If PowerConnect works well, that’s news in itself–I’ve lost countless hours of my life to trying to coax acceptable audio out of FM transmitters from a bunch of manufacturers.)

One question mark that remains: How many folks who own iPhones or iPods Touch and find the SkyDock intriguing will think that satellite radio is worth the monthly cost? The standard plan is $12.95 a month (but there’s an additional $1.98 music royalty fee which the pricing info page mysteriously doesn’t mention). In the world of iPhone economics, in which nearly everything except the phone and 3G service are cheap or free, that’s a lot of dough.

The cheapest way to get Sirius XM seems to be get rid of Sirius XM: In the weeks since I ditched the service, I’ve gotten repeated offers to renew for a year for $77, or half off the standard rate. Which is cheap enough to make it at least mildly tempting, although I still think that an iPhone equipped only with free and low-cost apps beats a satellite radio with a paid subscription when it comes to overall variety…

Technologizer Community, Thy Word is Gospel

I’ve been having fun asking you guys daily questions in the form of T-Polls, and judging from the results, you’ve been having fun answering them. For the sake of posterity, I’ve closed voting on most of ‘em to date. After the jump, your final verdict on tech topics of all sorts, from whether browsers should have ad-blockers (the majority say yes) to the state of the U.S. patent system (bad!)…

Continue reading this story…

Are You Done With Desktops?

I recently had a minor epiphany: I’m probably never going to buy another desktop PC. It shouldn’t have come as a revelation given that the last one I got (in January of 2007) sits largely unused, except when I need to grab a particular old file off its hard drive. Laptops give me everything I need from a computer, and their downsides–smaller screens, lower-capacity hard drives–are far outweighed by their multiple virtues.

Market share figures show that the world’s made the leap to laptops, too–they’re the planet’s default personal computer, and it’s desktops that are now the variant device.

Which leads to today’s two-part T-Poll..

5Words for Wednesday, August 26th 2009

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Windows 7 means cool laptops.

The golden ratio of Twitter.

RSS, your time is done.

More movies in DivX format.

Snow Leopard gets malware blocker.

Science says multitasking is bad.

Is it a MacBook? Almost!

$98 smartbook: not so smart.

Finally, burrito ordering for iPhone.

More anti-piracy for Office.

The Power Shortage Continues

Robert S. Anthony of The Paper PC has a fun post up about a new Wi-Fi reading room at the New York Public Library. It’s an “elegant” venue with seats for up to 128 laptop users–and if you don’t have a netbook, they’ll loan you one. Sounds fabulous–except there are no power outlets at the seats. If you’re using the Wi-Fi you’re draining your battery.

The NYPL is in excellent company. Wi-Fi blankets much of our public spaces these days, but power outlets are still hard to find. Many airline terminals seem to have a total of about three outlets, none of them especially convenient to the seating (which is why you’ll often find me camping out on the carpet while I wait for a plane). Some airports now have Samsung-sponsored power “trees,” which is far better than nothing–but they’re bizarrely configured in a way that makes it difficult to plug in a laptop and use it. (Don’t even get me started on most airplanes–yes, I’m looking at you, United.)

Starbucks? Everybody gets two hours of free Wi-Fi a day, but my local one has two power jacks, both at tables usually occupied by people who don’t need them. Hotels sometimes do a bit better, but the average tech-centric conference here in the Bay Area has maybe one outlet per fifty MacBook Pro-toting attendees. Almost everywhere I go, I’m keenly aware that most of our buildings date from the age before large numbers of people toted portable computers with them. (And even structures built recently usually have a shortage of alternating current.)

I know that installing outlets isn’t always cheap and easy. I still long for the day when they’re everywhere. (Literally, almost–one per seat wouldn’t be baf.) But I kinda wonder whether the point will be made moot by laptops with battery lives so long that plugging in becomes less essential. Me, I want fifty hours on a charge…

Can We Cut Out the iPhone Bashing Already?

iPhone bashing is the trend du jour among tech pundits. The phone’s flaws are being singled out as if they’re unique to Apple, and the condemnation arrives without one shred of quantitative evidence to support hyperbolic editorials that say it’s somehow ruining customers’ lives.

Initial delight over the iPhone has faded to complaints about Apple’s micromanaging behavior and propensity to create closed systems. Nothing’s changed–Apple’s been that way since day one, and no one has to buy anything from it.

In June, I wrote about an extremely hyped survey which suggested that the iPhone is more accident-prone than other smart phones–without including the damage rates for other phone models for comparison.

In a new story in Salon, author Amanda Fortini is guilty of a similar sin. She complains about how her iPhones have repeatedly failed–including the one she dropped in a parking lot–and cherry-picks comments from forums to support her feelings about its durability. Of course, the iPhone is not singularly vulnerable to someone’s carelessness. If you drive a Volvo straight into a brick wall, you will be injured, even though it’s a safe car.

My iPhones have been very resistant to damage: the screens have never scratched, and they survived being accidentally dropped onto my hardwood floors on a few occasions. I also protect my investment, and buy cases to guard the phone. When something did go wrong (my headphone jack contacts were touching, causing weird behavior), Apple replaced my phone free of charge.

An informal survey conducted by Technologizer last year found that a majority of people were happy with their iPhone purchases, and other surveys have similar findings.

The iPhone isn’t perfect, and neither is the AT&T network. But let’s be realistic–Apple is selling a great product that has forced the rest of the industry to innovate. There would be no Palm Pre without the iPhone. Can we please move on from the sensationalistic bashing?

In the Future, Video Games Play Themselves

Back in the day, video games had God Mode. You’d enter a cheat code, and suddenly your video game avatar was impervious to damage. Suddenly, the most difficult challenges were a walk in the park.

The upcoming button masher Bayonetta is bringing back this cheat in a more sophisticated way. The game’s “Automatic” mode, available to people playing on “Easy” or “Very Easy,” turns most of the controls over to the computer. Players need only tap the punch button to successfully navigate a level, while the computer targets enemies and times the protagonist’s jumps.

I wouldn’t call auto-play a trend yet, but Nintendo confirmed a similar feature in New Super Mario Bros. Wii, due out in November. By selecting “Demo Mode,” players can watch the computer coast to victory when facing a tough spot. Nintendo reportedly plans to use this feature in future games as well.

But Nintendo’s feature is intended, at least partially, for young players. Bayonetta, on the other hand, is rated M for Mature, so the “Automatic” mode is essentially a cop-out for grown-ups who are really, really bad at video games.

My problem with this — as with the God Modes of yesteryear — isn’t simply that it’s tantamount to cheating, but that it robs people of a fundamental gaming experience. No matter your skill level, everyone has moments of frustration in video games, but when the challenge is legitimate, it’s beautiful. Through repeated failure, you begin to see opportunities. Then, it’s a matter of perseverance, correcting your mistakes until you’ve mastered the challenge in its entirety.

The satisfaction that results is not the same as cruising through the game’s easier segments and leaving the tricky stuff up to an auto-pilot.

New Tech Still on Tap for 2009

[A NOTE FROM HARRY: Here's a post by Mari Silbey, one of Dave Zatz's Zatz Not Funny colleagues. We'll be borrowing some of her ZNF items along with Dave's--welcome Mari!]

We have yet to hit the holiday shopping season, so you know there will still be plenty of gadget goodness before the year ends. However, there’s also some new behind-the-scenes tech to get excited about in 2009. Here are four enabling technologies to watch out for in the next four months. This tech may not be sexy, but it’s guaranteed to make those shiny gadget toys work better, smarter, faster.

NVIDIA ION Chipset

Since my netbook is clearly not cutting it for a lot of video playback, I’m psyched about new processors making their way into netbooks and small laptops in Q4. Most likely to actually hit the commercial market this year is the NVIDIA ION chipset, which is said to boost graphics power significantly in any Intel-Atom-powered device. According to Brad Linder over at Lilliputing (also heard as afternoon anchor on my local NPR station), two major manufacturers, Lenovo and Samsung, are planning to ship ION-powered laptops in the last few months of the year. And, Brad speculates that the upcoming Nokia netbook, the Booklet 3G, may also sport NVIDIA ION graphics. More info to come at Nokia World on September 2nd.

USB 3.0

If you’re into transferring a lot of media between devices, then the launch of USB 3.0 is right up your alley. Unlike USB 2.0, which transfers data at a rate of 480 Mbps, USB 3.0 boasts a whopping transfer speed of 4.8 Gbps. That’s not just good for moving HD video around, it’s also perfect for large back-up operations to an external hard drive. According to Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOM, USB 3.0 will start shipping to device-makers this year, with consumer availability soon to follow.

WiMAX

I know, I know, it’s cool to be down on WiMAX these days, but I’m still excited for it to spread to more cities (including my own Philadelphia) this year. Partly I’m excited about the higher speeds for mobile broadband, but partly I’m excited because of the different pricing options compared to existing 3G services. For example, my employer is unlikely to subsidize mobile broadband at $60 per month, but a $10 day pass is a good bet for reimbursement. Perfect for conferences, and other places where Wi-Fi tends to be lacking. Even an unlimited mobile contract is said to be only $50 per month. (See pricing coverage from Paul Kapustka at Sidecut Reports) That’s a better price and a faster connection.

Upstream Channel Bonding

And while we’re on the subject of broadband speeds, here’s an obscure one: upstream channel bonding. Channel bonding is what’s making it possible for cable operators to offer peak DOCSIS 3.0 speedsof 50-100 Mbps in some markets. To date we’ve only seen downstream channel bonding in the US, but upstream channel bonding is on its way. Karl Bode at Broadband Reports wrote earlier this month that Comcast is exploring upstream DOCSIS 3.0 trials this year, with upstream speeds maxing out at 120 Mbps.

LazyFeed is Live

Lazyfeed, a Web service with good buzz, has opened up and is available to all today. It’s a browser-based tool for reading items from RSS feeds with an interesting premise: What if items were organized not by the originating feed (here’s Technologizer’s) but by topic–and were updated in real time? Like many brand-new services, it seems to be suffering some launch-day hiccups at the moment–it’s a bit sluggish, and is giving me some errors. But it’s still worth checking out.

Once you’ve signed up for Lazyfeed, you can tell it what you’re interested in by connecting it to blogs you like, and your accounts for Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, and/or Flickr; you can also simply enter tags for subjects that matter to you, such as firefox, microsoftoffice, iphone, or palmpre. Lazyfeed then builds a list of tags for your topics and lets you peruse blog posts and articles that relate to them, and updates it continuously. (You can also save items for later reference.)

The emphasis in Lazyfeed is very much on the newest stuff rather than the ones that are most relevant or from the biggest sources–for instance, the last time I checked the feed for “microsoftoffice,” the first item I saw was a job listing from a company seeking a secretary with Microsoft Office experience. I’d like Lazyfeed even better if the most worthwhile items on a topic were easier to find; maybe it’ll get better at filtering them for me as I use it more. I’m already finding it useful, though, especially for discovering items from sources that aren’t on my menu of feeds over at Google Reader–and which sometimes come from sites I’ve never heard of. Lazyfeed isn’t meant to replace Google Reader or other standard RSS readers, although I could easily see it adding enough browse-by-source functionality to make it a substitute for a typical RSS reader rather than a complement.

If you give the service a whirl, let us know what you think.

Long Live the Plastic MacBook

AppleInsider is reporting that Apple is working on refreshing the $999 white MacBook that’s its cheapest portable computer–and, AppleInsider, reports, still a best-seller. Makes sense to me. I’m assuming we’ll see one with new (but economical) specs, a better display, a sealed battery with longer battery life, and an SD reader. Timing? Probably early next year, whenever Apple decides to announce the products it’s not going to be rolling out at Macworld Expo.

It’s also only a matter of time until Apple ships a non-Air MacBook with no DVD drive–in part to save money, in part to make the system thinner, and hey, maybe even to encourage consumption of movies and music from the iTunes store. It wouldn’t stun me if the next-generation plastic MacBook were that machine–or if Apple knocked $100 or so off the pricetag to make it into an upscale alternative to a netbook. (No matter how cool an Apple tablet might be, some folks are going to want a traditional portable system at a relatively low price.)

One thing I hope Apple doesn’t do is to give the white MacBook’s replacement an aluminum case. As I wrote recent, I’m not so sure that plastic-clad notebooks don’t preserve their good looks better than their aluminum cousins, at least if you drop computers as often as I do. (Hey, I used to own a Saturn car, in part because of the plastic body.)

And yes, I know I illustrated this post with a photo of the black MacBook, which is already gone. Apple, which invented the idea of selling computers in different colors, doesn’t offer any model in more than one hue at the moment. But if black came back, I’ll bet Apple would once again find people who’d pay a premium for it.

The Future of iPhone App Distribution

I’m not sure if there’s an iPhone owner or developer on the planet who believes that the current situation with Apple’s App Store is absolutely flawless as is–even Apple’s Phil Schiller admits that the company makes mistakes. And everybody has an opinion on how to fix it–just today Facebook’s Joe Hewitt has said that there should be no approval process, and Engadget’s Nilar Patel has argued for a “sideloading” option.

So here’s today’s T-Poll:

The Pirate Bay Just Won’t Go Away

The Swedes are doing all they can to shut down The Pirate Bay, but it just won’t die. A Swedish court ordered the popular file sharing site’s bandwidth provider to cut it’s Internet access or face fines, which was enough to pressure Black Internet into action.

While the ruling was handed down on Friday, the ISP did not receive the order until Monday, which it immediately complied with. But that move has apparently triggered some type of backlash which appears to be related to its decision to comply with the courts.

Black Internet said within hours of its move, it was attacked by hackers, which did considerable damage to its infrastructure. Since the ISP provides bandwidth to other sites other than The Pirate Bay, several other companies were affected as a result.

Officials with the company weren’t elaborating on details but said it was working with police and engineers to understand what happened and where it may have came from.

Meanwhile The Pirate Bay has found a new ISP and was up fully within hours of the shutdown, making the Swedish court’s move essentially meaningless. For all intents and purposes, it appears as if it may be a losing battle to try to take the site down.

(Hat tip: Computerworld)

Sony’s E-Reader Finally Goes Wireless

Until now, discussions of the e-book rivalry between Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader have had to point out that Sony’s gadget lacked the wireless connectivity that was probably the Kindle’s best feature. No longer: At a press event at the New York Public Library, Sony announced the Reader Daily Edition, its first e-reader that lets you buy books via wireless broadband. The carrier in this case is AT&T (the Kindle uses Sprint) and the Daily Edition will ship in December for $399. (Two cheaper Sony e-reader models, sans wireless, are available now.)

The Daily Edition will be $100 more than the comparable Kindle; without trying it, it’s hard to gauge whether it’s worth the extra bucks. (It does have a touch-screen interface rather than the Kindle’s somewhat clunky buttons and tiny joystick.) And over the long haul, Sony’s support for the open EPub e-book standard could be a major advantage over Amazon’s use of its proprietary format.

In any event, it’s nice to see that Sony is responding to the Kindle’s dominance of a market it pioneered by redoubling its efforts. Next year should bring lots of e-book developments–such as the release of the Plastic Logic reader–but for now, it’s an Amazon-vs.-Sony war, and they’re both going great guns.

Another Take on iPhone App Approval

Joe Hewitt, the author of the excellent Facebook app for the iPhone, has a straightforward fix for all the woes of Apple’s App approval process: eliminate it.

Does that sound scary to you, imagining a world in which any developer can just publish an app to your little touch screen computer without Apple’s saintly reviewers scrubbing it of all evil first? Well, it shouldn’t, because there is this thing called the World Wide Web which already works that way, and it has served millions and millions of people quite well for a long time now.

Oh, but you say that iPhone apps are different, because they run native code and can do scary things that web pages can’t? Again, you’re wrong, because iPhone apps are sandboxed and have scarcely any more privileges than a web app. About the only scary thing they can do outside the sandbox is access your address book, but Apple can easily fix that by requiring they ask permission first, just like they must do to track your location.

Hewitt’s post is measured, not extremist, and makes multiple good points. Seems like the chances of app approval going away in the short term are virtually nil–but in the long run, it could happen, in part because it may simply not be a sustainable model for software distribution.

Parallels Aims to Help Windows-to-Mac Switchers

Parallels Desktop was the first software that let you virtualize Windows on an Intel Mac (and is current archrival of VMWare Fusion). Today, Parallels is announcing that it’s releasing a new version of the software aimed at an obvious audience: folks who are moving from a Windows PC to a Mac.

Parallels Desktop Switch to Mac Edition includes Parallels Desktop itself–which, as usual, lets you run Windows within OS X in a window, full-screen mode, or the cool Coherence view that puts Windows apps right inside the OS X interface. It bundles it with software and a USB cable for transferring your current Windows setup–OS, applications, and files–from your old, real PC into a virtual one on a Mac. I haven’t had a chance to try this utility, and system-transfer tools are one of the tougher things to do in software. (Even Apple’s own Mac-to-Mac Migration Assistant doesn’t always do the job without glitches.) But it’s a nifty idea if it works well, since it would simplify moving a licensed copy of Windows you’ve already paid for onto the Mac so you wouldn’t end up having to pay for a new copy of the OS.

The package also comes with two hours of interactive training that introduces OS X and helps Windows types make the leap:

Parallels Desktop Switch to Mac costs $99.99 (not including a copy of Windows). That’s twenty bucks more than the standard version–not unreasonable if you need the transfer software and hardware and would find the training useful.

I’ve used both Parallels and Fusion over the years and have been mostly happy with both; I’ve been running Fusion lately but plan to give this version of Parallels a whirl once I get my hands on a copy. Windows-on-Mac users: Which virtualization software do you prefer, and why? Anyone out there still using Apple’s Boot Camp?