26. January 2012 by admin.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/were-just-like-youtube-megaupload-lawyer-tells-ars.ars

“We’re just like YouTube,” Megaupload lawyer tells Ars

By Nate Anderson | Published about 22 hours ago

Megaupload’s US attorney, Ira Rothken, has a succinct description of the US government case against his client: “wrong on the facts and wrong on the law.”

The week has been a busy one for Rothken, a San Francisco Internet law attorney who has previously represented sites like isoHunt and video game studios like Pandemic. When I call, he’s eating crab cakes and waiting for yet another meeting to start, but he has plenty of time to attack the government’s handling of the Megaupload case.

In Rothken’s words, the government is acting like a “copyright extremist” by taking down one of the world’s largest cloud storage services “without any notice or chance for Megaupload to be heard in a court of law.” The result is both “offensive to the rights of Megaupload but also to the rights of millions of consumers worldwide” who stored personal data with the service.

(more at the link above …)

Why the feds smashed Megaupload

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/why-the-feds-smashed-megaupload.ars

The US government dropped a nuclear bomb on “cyberlocker” site Megaupload today, seizing its domain names, grabbing $50 million in assets, and getting New Zealand police to arrest four of the site’s key employees, including enigmatic founder Kim Dotcom. In a 72-page indictment unsealed in a Virginia federal court, prosecutors charged that the site earned more than $175 million since its founding in 2005, most of it based on copyright infringement.
 
As for the site’s employees, they were paid lavishly and they spent lavishly. Even the graphic designer, 35-year-old Slovakian resident Julius Bencko, made more than $1 million in 2010 alone.

The indictment goes after six individuals, who between them owned 14 Mercedes-Benz automobiles with license plates such as “POLICE,” “MAFIA,” “V,” “STONED,” “CEO,” “HACKER,” GOOD,” “EVIL,” and—perhaps presciently—”GUILTY.” The group also had a 2010 Maserati, a 2008 Rolls-Royce, and a 1989 Lamborghini. They had not one but three Samsung 83″ TVs, and two Sharp 108″ TVs. Someone owned a “Predator statue.” Motor bikes, jet skis, artwork, and even 60 Dell servers could all be forfeit to the government if it can prove its case against the members of the “Mega Conspiracy.”

The case is a major one, involving international cooperation between the US, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, the UK, Germany, Canada, and the Philippines. In addition to the arrests, 20 search warrants were executed today in multiple countries.

No safe harbor for you

Going after Megaupload, one of the most popular sites in the world and one that uses a surprising amount of corporate bandwidth, might seem a strange choice. (As an example of its scale, Megaupload controlled 525 servers in Virginia alone and had another 630 in the Netherlands—and many more around the world.) For years, the site has claimed to take down unauthorized content when notified by rightsholders. It has registered a DMCA agent with the US government. It has created an “abuse tool” and given rightsholders access. It has negotiated with companies like Universal Music Group about licensing content. And CEO Kim Dotcom sent this curious e-mail to PayPal in late 2011:
Our legal team in the US is currently preparing to sue some of our competitors and expose their criminal activity. We like to give you a heads up and advice [sic] you not to work with sites that are known to pay up loaders for pirated content. They are damaging the image and the existence of the file hosting industry (see what’s happening with the Protect IP Act). Look at Fileserve.com, Videobb.com, Filesonic.com, Wupload.com, Uploadstation.com. These sites pay everyone (no matter if the files are pirated or not) and have NO repeat infringer policy. And they are using PayPal to pay infringers.
 
But the government asserts that Megaupload merely wanted the veneer of legitimacy, while its employees knew full well that the site’s main use was to distribute infringing content. Indeed, the government points to numerous internal e-mails and chat logs from employees showing that they were aware of copyrighted material on the site and even shared it with each other. Because of this, the government says that the site does not qualify for a “safe harbor” of the kind that protected YouTube from Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit.

(more at the 2nd link above …)

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Alan Spicer

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26. January 2012 by admin.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/01/apple-q1-results-show-why-the-iphone-doesnt-have-lteyet.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

Apple Q1 results show why the iPhone doesn’t have LTE—yet

By Chris Foresman | Published about 4 hours ago

Apple released its iPhone 4S without high-speed LTE capabilities amidst a sea of high-profile LTE Android handsets. While technophiles complained about lack of support for the next-generation wireless standard, there are multiple reasons Apple has so far shied away from the technology. Poor battery life and lack of a suitable baseband processor to fit the iPhone’s form factor are two reasons that have been cited by Apple in the past. But the company’s most recent financial results offer another clear reason: the majority of iPhones sold today are in areas without 4G networks of any kind.

The US has one of the only significant LTE rollouts in the world. A few major cities in Canada, Sweden, and Saudi Arabia account for most of the rest of the global LTE network availability. Nearly all of Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, and Australia lack any LTE service outside of tiny test markets.

After looking at Apple’s results for its fiscal first quarter of 2012, there’s no question that the iPhone continues to be a success. The company sold a record 37 million handsets—as much as the two previous quarters combined, including the record 20 million sold in fiscal third quarter 2011. A large majority of those iPhones were sold outside the US.

(more at the link above …)

* So Apple did the numbers and enough of the market for iPhone 4S didn’t have LTE available … Or so they say. And it would have been a little difficult to squeeze LTE in there. * It would have been nice … LTE … with fallback to 3G(+) and such for those that don’t have it yet. The ownership time of an iPhone 4S has got to be a year or two, right? By the time owners have had it for awhile … the excuse that LTE isn’t available everywhere fades pretty quickly.

I use my iPhone mostly on WiFi anyway … to cut down on the Cellular Data usage. Some things in the phone bitch when I turn off the Cellular Data … For example I can’t use Visual Voice Mail - I would have to call voicemail the old fashioned way.

* It begs the question - How are they handling users being able to download at 50 Megabits/Second or faster? If users can reach their 5 Gigabyte per month limit at 3G on a regular basis … How much is it going to cost the users when they can easily use 10 x or 50 x that amount of data from the 4G Cellular network in a month? Also how are CPU and Storage Space keeping up with that capability? You would also think you would start seeing the bottlenecks in the rest of the Internet when you reach those speeds. The whole infrastructure from your phone (or computer when you are on a computer) would have to handle that speed. It’s not hard to max the file storage space on even a 32 Gigabyte iPhone 4S - I’m already down to around 3.5 Gigabytes on /dev/disk0s1s2 mounted on /private/var out of a total of around 28.8 Gigabytes - according to an app called SysInfoPlus. I might have to dump some music to make room for other things I might need storage space for on the phone. Also some pictures and video need to be take off and archived on my desktop.

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Alan Spicer

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26. January 2012 by admin.

TechCrunch tweeted about this … Like OMG!!!!




Shit Silicon Valley Says

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Alan Spicer

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