Hasta La Gadget!

Don’t worry — that “drag it out” bit belongs to Google, not us. If you’ll recall, the suits in Mountain View threw an underground party back in June when the federal court ruled that YouTube fell under the “safe harbor” provision of the DMCA which protects service providers from liability for user content. In essence, this ensured that Google couldn’t be sued or held liable for damages caused by some prankster uploading a ripped episode of 30 Rock to the site, being that Google has promised to yank it post-haste if notified by the copyright owner. That essentially puts the burden of policing on the content creator, but (sensibly) frees Google from the impossible feat of looking at every single clip that gets uploaded before making it live to the world. Just to give you a little perspective, 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and that’s expected to become even greater as time passes. Despite the logic (and the ruling of the court), Viacom has today filed a 72-page appeal in a likely futile attempt to fight back.

All Things D highlights a killer quote from Viacom in the report — apparently it thinks that if the ruling stands, it’ll “radically transform the functioning of the copyright system and severely impair, if not completely destroy, the value of many copyrighted creations.” As for Google’s response? “We regret that Viacom continues to drag out this case. The court here, like every other court to have considered the issue, correctly ruled that the law protects online services like YouTube, which remove content when notified by the copyright holder that it is unauthorized. We will strongly defend the court’s decision on appeal.” We doubt anything will turn out differently the next go ’round, but obviously we’ll be watching with great interest. Now, back to that clip of 30 Rock we were enjoying quite legally on Hulu…

Viacom files appeal in YouTube copyright case, continues to ‘drag it out’ originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Dec 2010 17:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well, it looks like our sources were right: Google just announced an event in San Francisco for December 7th, which promises “exciting news about Chrome.” Naturally, we’re expecting that to be the announcement of a Google-branded netbook that runs the Chrome OS, in addition to the launch of the Chrome Web / App Store. Interestingly, it’s pretty short notice for this sort of announcement, and it’s also conflicting with the D: Dive into Mobile conference which is happening a few miles north on the same day. We don’t know if that’s poor planning on Google’s part, a sign of last minute adjustments in the product, both, or neither, but either way it’s going to be a pretty exciting week!

Chrome event confirmed by Google for December 7th originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Dec 2010 17:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on May 26, 2008 by CyberNet.

Several months ago the highly-respected AV-Test.org ran a test to rank various antivirus applications. In that test they had 30 rootkits that were tested on both Windows XP and Vista. On Windows XP none of the seven antivirus suites could detect all of the rootkits, and only four of the 14 anti-rootkit tools proved to be 100% successful. Those aren’t very good odds.

On Vista the story was a little bit different. Only six of the 30 rootkits could actually run on the operating system, and that was after the testers turned off the User Account Control (UAC). The UAC stopped the rootkits cold in their tracks, provided that the user actually acknowledges the prompt and reacts accordingly.

I know that many of you are not big fans of UAC in Vista, but it does look like it does the job that Microsoft intended. Without Vista’s UAC the rootkits would be able to silently embed themselves onto your computer, and the protection UAC provides is especially important when the antivirus suites fail to do their job. That’s one of the reasons that I, to the amazement of many, have always left UAC enabled on my Vista machines.

P.S. Vista SP1 has made the User Account Control slightly less annoying, and here is a video demonstrating the differences.

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With the precedent the Galaxy Tab has set, it was an open question whether carriers would embrace the WiFi version of RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook — after all, it’s a little harder to fully monetize a data plan on a device that lacks its own cellular modem. Thing is, the WiFi version is the first one that’s going to be available; RIM hasn’t given much guidance yet on when the cellular version will follow on — and RIM doesn’t have much of a distribution channel outside its carrier partners. Well, Rogers has thrown its hat in the ring today at its TabLife event in Toronto, where it has been chatting up the success of the tablets it’s sold so far (the Tabs apparently won’t stay on shelves) and noting that it will be carrying both versions of the PlayBook as they become available.

How’s that going to work from a data perspective? Well, a concurrent announcement out of Rogers seems to hold the answer. A pair of new so-called “data sharing plans” can be tacked onto your existing smartphone plan, effectively opening up your data bucket to other devices — so it’s basically like the tethering plans we’ve started to see sprout up on American networks under a different name. One oddity, though, is the CAD $20 (roughly $20) data sharing plan that allows unlimited social networking on “popular sites” above and beyond your normal bucket of gigabytes — sounds silly, but when we think about what percentage of our mobile time is spent on Twitter and Facebook, it might just be crazy enough to work. Follow the break for Rogers’ press release and a quick clip of Rogers exec John Boynton with the PlayBook mention.

Continue reading Rogers adds ‘data sharing’ plans, will carry both WiFi and cellular versions of BlackBerry PlayBook

Rogers adds ‘data sharing’ plans, will carry both WiFi and cellular versions of BlackBerry PlayBook originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Dec 2010 16:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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