If you buy a regular old book, CD or DVD, you can turn around and loan it to a friend, or sell it again. The right to pass it along is called the first sale
doctrine. Digital books, music and movies are a different story though. Four students at Columbia Law School’s Science and Technology Law Review looked at the particular issue of reselling and copying e-books downloaded to Amazon’s Kindle or the Sony Reader, and came up with answers to a fundamental question: Are you buying a crippled license to intellectual property when you download, or are you buying an honest-to-God book?
Luxim has developed a tiny, full-spectrum light bulb, based on a plasma of argon gas, that gives off as much light as a streetlight while using less power. The Tic Tac-sized bulb operates at temperatures up to 6000K and produces 140 lumens/watt, almost ten times as efficient as standard incandescent lamps, and twice the efficiency of high-end LEDs. The new bulbs also have a lifetime of 20,000 hours — via Slashdot
Researchers at MIT and Texas Instruments have designed a new chip for portable electronics that could be up to 10 times more energy-efficient than present technology. Given its reduced power consumption, the new chip could lead to mobile phones, handheld computers and remote sensors that last far longer when running from a battery. Indeed, the power required could be so low that implantable medical devices such as pacemakers and health monitors could be powered indefinitely by a person’s body heat or motion — no battery needed
The Federal Constitutional Court in Germany has ruled that the identities of file-sharers must remain private and can no longer be revealed to media companies who accuse them of copyright infringement. In future, only those accused of heavy
crimes such as murder, child pornography or kidnapping will be revealed
Intel has announced plans to sell a specialised Wi-Fi platform later this year that can send data from a city to outlying rural areas tens of miles away, connecting sparsely populated villages to the Internet. The wireless technology, called the rural connectivity platform, will be helpful to computer-equipped students in poor countries, says Jeff Galinovsky, a senior platform manager at Intel. And the data rates are high enough — up to about 6.5 megabits per second — that the connection could be used for video conferencing and telemedicine
Boffins in the US have developed a microchip fan with no moving parts that operates silently and generates enough wind to cool a laptop computer. The solid-state fan, developed with support from the US National Science Foundation, is touted as the most powerful and energy efficient fan of its size. The device produces three times the flow rate of a typical small mechanical fan and is one-fourth the size
Google plans to roll out enhancements to its online spreadsheet program, including the ability to display data in new ways using lightweight gadgets
and to notify users via e-mail when data is changed. The enhancements will be extended later to the other Google Docs components — the word processor and presentation applications
Largely unnoticed by the public, botnets — compromised computers controlled by profit-minded crooks — have come to inundate the internet, spreading spam and infections, and stealing sensitive data
Notebooks with solid state drives (flash-based) cost more than traditional hard drives, are an order of magnitude
less reliable and do not perform as well when using Microsoft Outlook. A large computer manufacturer is getting around 20 percent to 30 percent of the flash-based notebooks it is shipping sent back because of failure rates and performance that simply isn’t meeting customer expectations
Google Transit is coming to an Australian city near you. It’s starting with Perth, with plans to add other Australian cities in the future. Transit is a feature of Google Maps that helps you to plan a trip using public transport options. You enter your start address, end address and departure or arrival time, and Google will tell you how to make it happen with public transport
Someone has posted a profile loaded with vicious accusations against a Brisbane teenager on a US website which wants to charge her a fee to remove the slurs. Samantha Fletcher, 15, says the cyber attack is the result of a schoolyard feud and wants the US website Dating Psychos to take down her profile
, which accuses her of racially taunting classmates and insulting an anorexic student. She said the site had refused to remove the material unless she paid it $20
Hot on the heels of a recent hack in which 10,000 sites were compromised, researchers have disclosed a new large-scale attack. Researchers at McAfee estimated that the attack has been active for roughly one week, and in that time frame has managed to place itself on roughly 200,000 web pages. Most of the infected pages are running the phpBB forum software, said McAfee. The compromised pages are embedded with a Javascript file that links to the site hosting the attack
China has blocked access to Google News and YouTube in an apparent attempt to stop the spread of video footage related the rioting going on in several cities in Tibet, including the capital Lhasa. Demonstrations in the city started on March 10, a day commemorating the anniversary of a 1959 uprising against Chinese rule after which the spiritual leader of the country, the Dalai Lama, fled to India
eBay will soon take over management of the affiliate programs for its core marketplace and for its Half.com site from ValueClick in the hopes that it can operate them more efficiently. In early April, EBay will begin to migrate the roughly 100,000 affiliates away from ValueClick’s Commission Junction to the new in-house platform
Demonoid, once one of the most popular BitTorrent trackers, has reappeared again, this time hosted in Ukraine. The web site is still down but the trackers are now fully operational again, perhaps a sign that Demonoid is crawling back up to speed?
Swedish courts will soon be able to force the country’s Internet providers to produce information on suspected file-sharers in a move to crackdown on piracy
Intel says it will ship quad-core chips designed specifically for laptops later this year. The quad-core chips, most likely for desktop replacement laptops, will be based on the Core 2 Duo microarchitecture and will ship in the third quarter. Intel declined comment on chip details, though enthusiast Web sites reported the chip is Intel’s Core 2 Extreme QX9300. The chips will be manufactured using the new 45-nanometer process
The notorious spammer authorities dubbed the King of Spam
is facing a possible 26-year jail sentence after pleading guilty in Seattle on Friday to charges of fraud and tax evasion. Robert Soloway, 28, had already been found guilty of spam charges in several civil cases — Microsoft won a US$7.8 million judgment against him in 2005 — but had avoided paying fines in those cases. The criminal charges to which he pleaded guilty on Friday followed his arrest in 2007 by the US Justice Department
Yahoo has announced its adoption of some of the key standards of the semantic web
. The technology is widely seen as the next step for the world wide web and it involves a much richer understanding of the masses of data placed online. The company said it would start to include some semantic web identifiers when indexing the web for Yahoo search. The move could mean a big boost for semantic web technologies which have struggled to win a big audience
Manufacturers of USB sticks and cards with fingerprint readers promise us that their data safes can only be opened with the right fingerprint. It turns out that an easy-to-find tool allows nosy parties to get around the protection in some products
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