Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Give the Canadian Parliament credit for at least attempting to drag its copyright laws into the 21st century. But one gets the feeling that a digital hornets’ nest has been stirred up by new legislation introduced by Industry Minister Jim Prentice.

Canada’s government tried to find the right balance between personal freedom and protection of artists’ rights with its amendments to the Copyright Act. Yet judging from the coverage, critics will no doubt point to similarities to the U.S.‘s Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which digital rights advocates accuse of favoring Big Media, Inc. More personal use is authorized with the pending Canadian legislation; consumers can download legally-acquired music for use on iPods, and fines for illegally downloading that music for personal use have been drastically reduced. Anyone caught selling those illegally-acquired copies on the open market, however, is still subject to large monetary penalties, as is anyone trying to break digital rights management (DRM) locks on music or movies.

As with any effort to apply 20th century copyright concepts to the digital world, enforcement remains a big question mark. It’s almost as if the Canadian Parliament is throwing in the maple-leaf-emblazoned towel on this issue: for example, ISP’s don’t face any sanctions for illegally-copied materials going over their networks. Also, the new bill allows time-shifting of TV programs on digital video recorders, but bans keeping those programs forever in a personal library. Yet there’s no mention of how the government plans to check each and every DVR in the Great White North to make sure no one is illegally stashing away final-season episodes of “Royal Canadian Air Farce.”

Read [Reuters]

• Wii games proving useful for stroke patient rehabilitation
• Bell adds Internet tethering mention to smartphone plans
• Boozle free for iPhone, iPod Touch during Olympics

I’ll admit it: every Christmas will probably be a Disney Christmas in my house for the next few years, thanks to a four-year-old daughter who knows why Ariel has daddy issues and a two-year-old son who wants to be Lightning McQueen when he grows up.

As an unrepentant tech enthusiast who also wants to keep his kids happy ever after, you can imagine my curiosity about the announcement from Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment about the company’s plans to maximize Blu-ray technology for its DVD releases, beginning with “Sleeping Beauty” in October. Disney is promising live chat rooms as the story of Princess Aurora unfolds on your flat-screen HDTV. Division president Bob Chapek pictures grandparents in one part of the country chatting with grandkids in another part as they all watch the movie together. He also previewed video messaging and an onscreen DVD menu reflecting the weather conditions where you are, all thanks to Blu-ray’s Internet capabilities:

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You say you first thought that the plot of “Live Free or Die Hard” was simply the product of a screenwriter’s overheated imagination? That the idea of cyberterrorists taking over electric utility/natural gas/traffic/financial market computer systems was just too far-fetched to be believed, even though it was uber-cool to see Bruce Willis take down a fighter jet with his bare hands?

O ye of little faith in Hollywood. Remember, the 9/11 Commission faulted U.S. intelligence agencies for having “a failure of imagination.” And “Live Free or Die Hard’s” script was partially based on a non-fiction article in Wired Magazine that described the scenario for a so-called “fire sale” attack on America’s infrastructure.

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Several bullet points in the news coming out of the New York Attorney General’s office regarding the “unprecedented” decision by Time Warner, Verizon and Sprint to block child porn from their servers and keep it off them:

• New York AG Andrew Cuomo credited the three ISP’s with setting a voluntary “standard of responsibility…that should serve as a model for the entire industry.” but he had to have been aware of previous failed attempts to persuade ISP’s to do something about child porn. Pennsylvania tried the legislative route in 2004 when the state tried to force providers to block child porn images from servers. A district court agreed with privacy/First Amendment advocates who argued that “overblocking” of legal, legitimate sites that resulted from the law was unconstitutional.
• Advances in software technology are allowing law enforcement to zero in on the offenders. Cuomo’s statement mentions investigators’ ability to cull more than 11,000 images “using software that identifies child pornography by tracking patterns in the pixels of the images.”
• In case you were wondering about who would continue to use newsgroups in these Web 2.0 days, the AG office says 88 newsgroups devoted to child porn were found over a six-month period. The National Association of Missing and Exploited Children (NAMEC) helped to identify the newsgroups.

Cuomo says the state’s investigation of child porn newsgroups and ISP’s continues. It will be interesting to see if any other ISP’s will make their own announcements joining Verizon, Time Warner and Sprint in what Cuomo is calling the “new standard of responsibility.”

Read [Associated Press via Yahoo!] Read [Center for Democracy and Technology] Read [NY Attorney Generals Office]

• Sprint takes a shot at AT&T to advertise 4G
• BlackBerry slider gets a codename of Talladega, and rumors of an April release
• Verizon Droid update: all according to plan or aborted?

It’s a problem that most Web-based companies would love to have: their website servers crumple under the weight of popularity and pent-up demand (as long as denial-of-service attacks are not involved.) It usually means a lot of people have come to rely on your services, or at the very least are checking out what you have to offer.
It has happened most recently to leading e-tailer Amazon and up-and-coming short form messaging service/social network Twitter. Public relations officials at both companies have had to work overtime explaining why users were not able to access the sites. Amazon’s problems hit on June 6th and 9th and were initially chalked up to a hiccup caused by company systems that are “very complex and on rare occasions, despite our best efforts, they may experience problems.” Twitter’s problems happened a couple of weeks ago and included outages and public viewings of supposedly-private “tweets.”

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Yes, mobile security is becoming more of a million-dollar-worry for corporations, but what about the hundreds of dollars’  worth of songs on your iPod? Your son’s graduation photos on your digital camera when it gets lost or stolen?

A recent Reuters story details some of the new software and hardware that allows runaway consumer electronics to “phone” home via wireless connectivity; Eye-Fi SD memory cards and GadgetTrak software are mentioned. Both send data back to the original owners, and there are now-famous stories of thieves caught taking pictures of themselves using the Eye-Fi enabled cameras they stole.

I was curious about the relationship between these new security companies and law enforcement: how are police handling the advent of technologies that help them do their jobs?

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Here we go again: a new survey about security and devices that is brought to you by a company with a vested interest in providing companies security for their devices. Nevertheless, it’s probably true that if you’re using a Blackberry cell phone, Windows Mobile phone or other smartphone for your work, you’re not using the same kinds of password protection you have for your company laptop.

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Somewhere in BritPunk Heaven, Ian Curtis is all smiles as he awaits the June 17th release of the Joy Division 80GB Zune media player. Available for $399 from zuneoriginals.net, the limited edition player (only 500 will be made available) not only sports a design courtesy of noted graphic artist Peter Saville, who provided artwork for both Joy Division’s albums, it also serves as a handy promotional tool for the new Joy Division documentary DVD; the movie will be pre-loaded on the player.

All we need now is for Apple to come out with a New Order Special Edition iPod if Steve Jobs truly wants to stick a burr under Microsoft’s pop culture saddle. New Order, of course, is the band that Joy Division became after lead singer Curtis’ suicide in 1980. Dueling commemorative media players would prove Joy Division only half-right: love, and technology, will indeed tear us apart.

Read [Spin]

• Internet Explorer 9 embraces HTML5, ditches Windows XP
• Xbox Live Update for the week of March 14 through March 20, 2010
• Spring 2010 Xbox 360 update adds USB flash drive support

Whenever an Internet security company issues a report or study about the state of Internet security, your first reaction should focus on checking the security of your wallet. Fear became a big part of the marketing plans for security companies ever since the Melissa and I Love You viruses hit around the turn of the new century; Sept. 11th cemented the sales game plan by adding cyberterrorism concerns to the mix.

Tech journalists have to balance that cynicism with the need to pass along information that helps promote safe Internet practices for businesses and consumers. Companies who have been in this space for a long time and spend a lot of money searching for bad software usually get a long look, as McAfee should with its new report, “Mapping the Mal Web Revisited.” The headline for the associated press release says it all: “McAfee Inc. Names Most Dangerous Domains to Surf and Search On the Web.”

McAfee used its own SiteAdvisor software (of course) to investigate the security of global web domain names and found that Hong Kong (.hk) and China (.cn) websites give you the best chance of picking up unwanted spyware, browser exploits, viruses and other forms of malicious code. This casts a potential cloud on all that Western investment money now streaming to China, not to mention the flood of visitors expected this summer for the Beijing Olympics.

The safest country domain to search and surf? Finland (.fi).

McAfee says your chances of picking up malware from websurfing increased 41 percent year-over-year. Picking up a nasty dose of bad code simply by downloading ringtones or screensavers also went up from 2007. As always, kids, consider the source, whether it’s a ringtone or an Internet security study.

Read [McAfee Inc. ]

• Shields Up!:Vista Internet Security 2010
• Shields Up!: Huge wave of ransomware floods net
• Yet another virus targeting Facebook users

If certain video and computer games are proving to have better stories, characters and production design than a lot of movies and TV shows, then the Sci Fi Channel’s latest announcement subscribes to the Don Corleone theory of business: keep your friends close but your enemies closer. The channel is joining with gaming company Trion to develop something that’s both a TV show and an online game. The as-yet-untitled show is expected to premiere on your TV and PC in 2010.

There have been many movie and TV-based games but the consensus among gamers is that most of them have sucked. And movies or TV shows based on video games have generally suffered the same fate (see Boll, Uwe.) But Sci Fi Channel officials are quoted as saying that their writers will work side-by-side with gaming designers from day one in the hopes of achieving what many industry observers have hoped would be the next chapter in interactive entertainment. As Sam Howe, Sci Fi Channel president, told the L.A. Times:

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