By Chief Gadgeteer, Gizmos for Geeks
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews.

In another example of greed and fear among huge corporations, 4 Hollywood studios and the big 3 television networks sued Cablevision over their plan to launch an on-demand service that could replace the consumer’s TiVo/DVR. So instead of recording stuff to your own home DVR, you would record it to a DVR run by Cablevision on their servers. The studios and networks are crying copyright foul, because Cablevision is copying and retransmitting material that they didn’t license. Hmm… the consumer didn’t ‘license’ it either, did they? To me, this seems like a value-add for Cablevision customers and that’s it. I don’t really see how this particular issue as being one of competition, but isn’t it ironic that in our competiton-driven economy how afraid companies are of just that?

Source: Gizmos for Geeks.

By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Because I am known as … er, frugal, friends often ask me where to find the best buy for a particular item. They also use me as a source for troubleshooting their PCs, recommending software, etc. etc. Next month privately held Tacit Software plans to introduce a service that will simplify such brain picking of friends and associates, called Illumio.

However, Illumio is not a search engine, like Google or Yahoo. The system works by transparently distributing a request for information on questions like “Who knows John Smith?” and “Are Nikon digital cameras better than Olympus?” to the computers in a network of users. The questions can then be answered locally based on a novel reverse auction system that Illumio uses to determine who the experts are.

Tacit’s top achievement in its software for connecting people and expertise may be in a design that keeps personal information private.

Because the information used to determine if someone is an expert on a particular question stays on local computers, Tacit’s executives said Illumio would avoid potentially troubling privacy questions. The Illumio software is installed on users’ PC’s, where it is connected through a software interface to either Microsoft or Google’s desktop search programs that index local user content, including documents and electronic mail. Source: The New York Times via News.com

We Say: The collaboration space is big and growing. Privacy is a big issue, however, and despite the assurances regarding the privacy aspects of Illumio, however, I’ll probably wait to see some real-life reviews before I even consider opting-in to such a service.

By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Only 48 hours after eEye Digital Security reported a “gaping hole” in Symantec’s enterprise products, Symantec has patched the flaw. The flaw was described as a stack overflow affecting the Symantec Client Security and Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition, two enterprise level products.

“Exploiting this overflow successfully could potentially cause a system crash, or allow a remote or local attacker to execute arbitrary code with system-level rights on the affected system,” it added.

The company’s advisory is a confirmation of eEye’s earlier warning that the flaw could lead to a self-propagating worm without any user action. Source: eWeek

We Say: Interestingly, it appears Symantec fixed the flaw before it even officially acknowledged it.

By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

In what is clearly a win for online journalists, particularly large blog sites, a California Appeals court ruled on Friday that Apple did not have the right to access the records of AppleInsider in relation to a leak that occurred on an unreleased product.

The court sided with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), who had filed the appeal. The three-judge panel said that online news sites and blogs are no different than newspapers, television and radio broadcasters and that, as such, they are protected by, among other things, California’s shield law. Within the context of the shield law, the judges stated:

“The open and deliberate publication on a news-oriented Web site of news gathered for that purpose by the site’s operators … appears conceptually indistinguishable from publishing a newspaper, and we see no theoretical basis for treating it differently. Beyond casting aspersions on the legitimacy of petitioners’ enterprise, Apple offers no cogent reason to conclude that they fall outside the shield law’s protection.”

Additionally, with regards to protection under freedom of the press, the judges wrote:

“We can see no sustainable basis to distinguish petitioners from the reporters, editors, and publishers who provide news to the public through traditional print and broadcast media. It is established without contradiction that they gather, select, and prepare, for purposes of publication to a mass audience, information about current events of interest and concern to that audience.”

Sources for the above: Ars Technica, SFGate, News.com

We Say: Kurt Opsahl, one of the attorneys for the EFF stated it well when he said “”Does Walter Cronkite stop being a journalist if he blogs for the Huffington Post? What makes a journalist a journalist is not the format. If you’re engaged in journalism, you’re a journalist. You have to look beyond the medium selected.” I would wholeheartedly agree.

By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

A redacted document is one that has been sanitized to remove sensitive material. In the “old days” you might photocopy a document, black out the info with ink, then re-photocopy the marked-up document (since it might be possible to read the original text via holding it up to the light … a decidely low-tech method). In this case AT&T released a PDF with text blacked out in the PDF … but unfortunately for AT&T, they forgot that all you have to do is select and copy the black-out sections, and paste it into, say Notepad … and there you go (and yes, I tried it, successfully).

The deleted portions of the legal brief seek to offer benign reasons why AT&T would allegedly have a secret room at its downtown San Francisco switching center that would be designed to monitor Internet and telephone traffic. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the class-action lawsuit in January, alleges that the room is used by an unlawful National Security Agency surveillance program. Source: News.com

We Say: Before anyone gets up in arms about my posting this, it’s got nothing to do with politics (some were upset about my earlier story on Bush and his iPod, which was a jab at the RIAA if anyone). I find this certainly humorous, and definitely ironic, since in January the NSA released a document on how to do redactions securely. As technology advances, you have to be more careful, and this shows it.

Also, let’s not forget that the EFF blundered itself earlier in the case, when it accidentally placed sealed documents on the court’s public Web site.

By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Although the codebase used to compile the different versions of IE7 are the same, the version of the browser provided in Vista will have a slightly different name, meaning “Internet Explorer 7+”. Aside from Vista-only features, provided by the OS, such as Protected Mode, Parental Controls, and improved Network Diagnostics, there are no differences between the two browsers.

There are no feature differences between IE7 and IE7+ beta 2 other than the ones I mentioned above; we have, however, fixed a bunch of bugs between the two releases. As always, I’d love to hear your feedback on this naming as well as the product. We’ll have more information on how to sign up for Windows Vista beta 2 with IE7+ shortly, but for now, you can download the IE7 beta here. Source: Microsoft’s IEBlog

We Say: Cynical types like me will wonder if the + stands for more features, more protection, or more vulnerabilities.

By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

The European Union is investigating possible taxes on emails and SMS messages as a new source of funds for the 25 member bloc. A European Parliament working group, headed by Alain Lamassoure, a prominent French MEP, is doing the investigation. Initial proposals are to add a tax of around 1.5 cents on text or SMS messages and a 0.00001 cent levy on every email sent.

“This is peanuts, but given the billions of transactions every day, this could still raise an immense income,” he said.

In Italy, the concept of a tax on texting was floated in the past, as a way to help offset the country’s huge deficit, although it was flatly rejected by the outgoing government. Source: Reuters via Yahoo! News UK

We Say: Questions still open: who pays … sender, receiver? Both? What about emails or even text messages sent from outside the EU? How will it be collected? And here’s a big one — what about spam, which constitutes more email than legitimate messages? Well, as they say, nothing is certain but death and taxes … even when messaging, it seems.

By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Yes, pun intended. Cloaking devices, like the ones in Star Trek or the cloak Harry Potter inherited from his father? Science fiction for most, but groups in the U.S. and England feel its possible.

Both John Pendry, a physicist at the Imperial College London and Nader Engheta, a professor of electrical and systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania have done work in the use of “metamaterials” for this purpose. Pendry co-wrote a study which appeared in Thursday’s online edition of the journal Science. Metamaterials can be tuned to bend electromagnetic radiation — radio waves and visible light, for example — in any direction.

A cloak made of those materials, with a structure designed down to the submicroscopic scale, would neither reflect light nor cast a shadow.

Instead, like a river streaming around a smooth boulder, light and all other forms of electromagnetic radiation would strike the cloak and simply flow around it, continuing on as if it never bumped up against an obstacle. That would give an onlooker the apparent ability to peer right through the cloak, with everything tucked inside concealed from view. Source: USA Today

We Say: What’s holding this back, according to the researchers, is the engineering technology to make it happen. Apparently the theory is solid (pun intended). OK, can we now make a starship to go with it?