Two men arrested after a woman whose computer they’re accused of stealing managed to log onto the laptop and photograph them with it are scheduled to appear in City Court next week to face felony charges. Edmon Shahikian, 23, and Ian Frias, 20, are charged with second-degree burglary and fourth-degree criminal possession of stolen property in the April 27 burglary of a Ridgeview Avenue apartment in which $5,000 worth of electronics were stolen. They were arrested Wednesday, after one of the three roommates who live in the apartment used her stolen laptop’s “Back to My Mac” software to determine that it was signed onto the Internet, police said.

The 19-year-old victim, who works in the Apple Store in The Westchester mall, then used the laptop’s camera to photograph Shahikian, police said. She also found photos of Frias using the computer after it had been stolen, police said. The computer-savvy victim did not recognize either man, but one of her roommates did, remembering they had attended a recent party at the apartment. The information was turned over to police, who nabbed both men at their homes a short time later. did not return calls. Shahikian, of 13 Cobbling Rock Road, Katonah, is free on $3,500 bail. Frias, a Bronx resident, is being held at the Westchester County jail on $7,500 bail. Both are due in City Court on May 15.

Source: NY Times, Lohud

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Advanced Micro Devices plans to release processors with 12 cores, which changes its product road map and kills earlier plans to release 8-core chips. The 12-core processor, code-named Magny-Cours, will be targeted at servers and is due for release in the first half of 2010, according to the company’s updated road map announced Wednesday. The chip will include 12M bytes of L3 cache and support DDR3 RAM, according to the road map. AMD is jumping from a 6-core chip code-named Istanbul, due for release in the second half of 2009, straight to a 12-core chip the following year, an AMD spokesman said. Until last month, AMD officials repeated plans to ship the 8-core server chip, code-named Barcelona, in 2009.

Montreal has now been replaced by Istanbul, followed by a 12-core product in 2010, the spokesman said. AMD is also planning to release a 6-core chip code-named Sao Paulo in 2010. The chip will include 6M bytes of L3 cache and support for DDR3 RAM. Sao Paulo chips could meet the need of systems that don’t require 12 cores, Allen said. The new chips will be more power efficient as they will be manufactured using the 45-nanometer process, an upgrade from the 65-nm process currently used to manufacture Barcelona. Even with AMD’s altered road map, Intel will remain formidable. Intel shipped 78.5 percent of chips in the first quarter of 2008, while AMD held a 20.6 percent market share, a slight gain from the 18.7 percent market share it held in the first quarter of 2007.

Source: NY Times 

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MySpace has launched a data-sharing project in which the social networking site will open up its code to partner sites Photobucket, Twitter, eBay and Yahoo. The MySpace Data Availability Initiative will involve the creation of a new section of the site which will manage the data sharing. Users will access the system and share data on an ‘opt-in’ basis, meaning that only information which the user has chosen to share will be viewable by others. The information will then be available for use on other sites, allowing users to display MySpace profile information along with photos and video files on other participating sites.

All user data will remain hosted on MySpace, allowing the information to be updated as users change their profile information. “The walls around the garden are coming down, and the implementation of Data Availability injects a new layer of social activity and creates a more dynamic internet,” said Chris DeWolfe, chief executive and co-founder of MySpace. The move is designed to complement Yahoo’s open strategy initiative, in which the company offered to open its own applications to outside developers. The two sites are also working together as part of the OpenSocial project. “Yahoo believes in an open internet that gives users the flexibility to make their web experiences as relevant, social and personalised as they can,” said Ash Patel, executive vice president of platforms at Yahoo. I’m looking forward to first lawsuits where people complain about their personal data being shared all over the internet…

Source: Vnunet 

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If you like to download the latest episodes of “Heroes” or other NBC shows from BitTorrent, maybe you shouldn’t buy a Microsoft Zune to watch them on. A future update of the software for Microsoft’s portable media player may well include a feature that will block unauthorized copies of copyrighted videos from being played on it. Tuesday, Microsoft announced that it would start selling video programming for the Zune, mainly TV shows. These include programs from NBC Universal, which has pulled its shows off Apple’s iTunes Store. Late Tuesday afternoon I reached J. B. Perrette, the president of digital distribution for NBC Universal, to ask why NBC found Microsoft’s video store more appealing than Apple’s.

He explained that NBC, like most studios, would like the broadest distribution possible for its programming. But it has two disputes with Apple. First, Apple insists that all TV shows have an identical wholesale price so that it can sell all of them at $1.99. NBC wants to sell its programs for whatever price it chooses. Second, Apple refused to cooperate with NBC on building filters into its iPod player to remove pirated movies and videos. Microsoft, by contrast, will accept NBC’s pricing scheme and will work with it to try to develop a copyright “cop” to be installed on its devices. More info at NY Times - and official reply from Microsoft.

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A clear message to all torrent websites hosted on the US soil was sent all over the world today: A federal judge is hitting the shuttered TorrentSpy service with a $111 million penalty for facilitating the infringement of thousands of copyrighted works. U.S. District Judge Florence -Marie Cooper in Los Angeles, ruling in a case brought by the Motion Picture Association of America, said site operator Justin Bunnell and associates must pay the maximum $30,000 for “each of the 3,699 infringements shown.” The case, producing what is among the largest fines in copyright history, was bolstered after the MPAA allegedly paid a hacker $15,000 for internal TorrentSpy e-mails and correspondence.

“This substantial money judgment sends a strong message about the illegality of these sites,” MPAA Chairman Dan Glickman said in a statement. TorrentSpy, a U.S.-based torrent tacking service, shuttered in March after it lost its case against the MPAA. TorrentSpy did not lose on the merits, but defaulted after it failed to produce internal records. No U.S. case has squarely addressed the legalities of BitTorrent tracking services, although one case is nearing a resolution. Judge Cooper ordered TorrentSpy permanently shuttered. TorrentSpy attorney Ira Rothken was not immediately available for comment. He has appealed the default order to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

Source: Wired

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McAfee has unveiled a secure search service and a security certification programme for retail sites in an attempt to make web surfing safer. McAfee Secure Search will be accessible through a toolbar in the firm’s Site Adviser offering, and will filter sites that use browser exploits or push suspicious downloads. Search results will be displayed with a red, yellow or green icon to indicate the level of risk. The service is due for launch later this summer. “The rise of malicious sites has caused internet users to be wary of searching and shopping online, especially when those activities require personal information,” said Tim Dowling, vice president of McAfee’s web security group.

“Bad sites strive to look harmless to users, so it is very difficult to identify which results are safe to visit. Sites that are safe today may turn bad tomorrow.” The second release is a security certification service for retailers known as McAfee Secure for Web Sites. Among the features is a Trust Mark image which is hosted on McAfee’s site. The image will be displayed only if a site can pass a daily security scan. The company will also offer a compliance-management service and a vulnerability scanning service as part of the Secure for Web Sites package.

Source: Vnunet 

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High Tech Computer on Tuesday launched a more powerful version of its popular Touch smartphone, hoping to lure consumers from better-known rivals such as Apple’s iPhone. The Touch Diamond, which supports carriers’ 3G broadband-like networks, includes features that focus on Web browsing and checking e-mail. The device, which runs on Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional, includes a 2.8-inch VGA touch screen that the company claims provides near-print-quality viewing. The smartphone’s Web browser can zoom and pan Web sites. In addition, turning the device sideways automatically rotates the page view from portrait to landscape.

HTC has also developed its own YouTube application to watch video from the popular site. The software also optimizes the use of Google’s mobile mapping service for accessing street maps and getting traffic data. The Touch Diamond weighs less than 4 ounces and includes a 3.2-megapixel camera. The device comes with 4 GB of storage, and supports Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless technologies. Talk time is up to four hours on a fully charged battery, according to HTC. Its size is roughly 4 by 2 by 0.4 inches. HTC plans to offer the Touch Diamond through all major European carriers in June, and later this quarter in Asia and the Middle East. The device is scheduled to ship in North America and Latin America in the second half of the year.

Source: ComputerWeek

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Microsoft Corp., trailing Apple Inc. badly in the market for portable music and video players, is introducing a new technology that will let users of its Zune portable devices legally share portions of their song libraries with other Zune users. The Redmond, Wash., company on Tuesday also plans to announce it has started selling downloads of television shows that will play on Zunes, including “South Park” and “Heroes,” through relationships with Comedy Central, NBC, MTV and other broadcasters. The company says it will have about 800 episodes available for purchase at $1.99 each on its Zune online store, compared with thousands of episodes from 600 different shows on Apple’s iTunes Store.

The music-sharing function for Zunes underscores how Microsoft is seeking to set itself apart from Apple, which dominates the portable-music and movie-player market. Microsoft has failed to take any meaningful share from Apple since it entered the business with Zune in late 2006. According to market-research firm NPD Group Inc., Apple had 71% of the U.S. portable-music-player market in the first quarter, compared with 4% for Microsoft. Microsoft has for some time allowed users to view the titles of the latest songs that friends are listening to and to hear clips through the Zune Web site. A new feature will allow users access their friends nine most recently played songs, as well as nine other songs flagged as favorites, and copy them onto their own Zunes. To play back the tracks, users will need a $14.99-a-month subscription to Microsoft’s Zune Pass service, which offers unlimited access to a library of millions of tracks.

Source: WSJ

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The publisher of the Grand Theft Auto video game franchise feels like it got ripped off in Chicago–and it’s suing. Take-Two Interactive Software sued the Chicago Transit Authority on Monday for allegedly pulling its ads promoting the latest version of the action-driving and crime game just days after the ads began appearing, thus violating its free-speech and contractual rights, according to a Reuters report. The suit, which was filed in Manhattan federal court, seeks reinstatement of the ads on buses and display spaces, as well as monetary damages of at least $300,000, the reported value of the contract, according to the report.

The suit claims that ads for the game, which has been criticized as excessively violent, were removed after a television news report questioned why the advertisements were allowed to run following a crime wave in the city, according to the report. This is not the first time the CTA has come under fire for GTA ads. In 2004, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich criticized the transit authority for agreeing to run ads for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, leading the CTA to remove the ads, according to a report in the Chicago Tribune. Take-Two hasn’t yet released the game’s first-week sales figures, but analysts are expecting sales to top last year’s record $300 million first-week sales of Halo 3. The game is expected to sell more than 9 million copies.

Source: Cnet 

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It looks that not only owners of torrent sites face with DMCA complaints. When it comes to money, there’s no real friend, not even Google: In response to a copyright complaint, Google has taken down an open-source project called CoreAVC-for-Linux it had hosted on its Web site. Google didn’t share details, but said on the project site that it removed CoreAVC-for-Linux from its Google Code site after receiving a complaint under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). CoreAVC itself is proprietary software for Windows supplied by a company called CoreCodec. The software can play video encoded with the H.264 standard.

According to a cached version of the Google Code page, CoreAVC-for-Linux provides patches to open-source media player software such as MPlayer or MythTV that enable them to use the CoreAVC software on Linux. In other words, it’s for programs that connect to the CoreAVC software but doesn’t actually include CoreAVC itself. It’s not yet clear who filed the DMCA complaint. The DMCA’s Safe Harbor provision protects a Web site from liability for users’ actions as long as the site’s operator–in this case Google–fulfills requirements such as removing infringing material once notified by rights holders. CoreCodec appears to be a company that’s got some involvement with the opens-source programming philosophy. According to the CoreCodec Web site, “Our philosophy is to (use) open source when appropriate, and when we do choose to close source a product, we strive to open as much of it as possible for third-party access.”

Source: Cnet

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Amazon.com has filed a lawsuit challenging New York State’s new law forcing online retailers to collect sales tax on shipments to state residents. On Friday, Amazon filed a complaint in State Supreme Court in Manhattan objecting to the law, which was approved as part of the $122 billion state budget that Gov. David A. Paterson signed last week. The law is expected to raise about $50 million. The issue is not whether people should pay tax when they buy goods from out-of-state sellers like Amazon. For decades, the state has required them to pay sales or use tax. The question is whether the vendors must collect that tax on behalf of the state.

Generally, only those companies that have a physical presence — like an office or store — in the state where the purchase is made are required to collect the tax. The law says that if even one of those affiliates is in New York State, Amazon must collect sales tax on everything sold in the state, even if it is not sold through the affiliate. This is an extension of an existing rule that companies employing independent agents or representatives to solicit business must collect taxes for the state. Amazon’s suit challenges the constitutionality of this interpretation and seeks a declaratory judgment that it is invalid. The company’s complaint argues that the statute is “overly broad and vague.” It is impossible, Amazon wrote, for it to determine which of its affiliates are actually in New York State.

Source: NY Times 

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Information Technology and Innovation Foundation released a major new report, showing how the US and other countries compare in terms of broadband access, speed, and price. The rankings (PDF) place the US 15th, this country having fallen every year since 2001. Here’s the full report (PDF). According to the report’s executive summary:

“The US broadband policy environment is characterized on the one hand by market fundamentalists who see little or no role for government, and see government as the problem; and on the other by digital populists who favor a vastly expanded role for government (including government ownership of networks and strict and comprehensive regulation, including mandatory unbundling of incumbent networks and strict net neutrality regulations) and who see big corporations providing broadband as a problem. Given the policy advocacy and advice they are getting, it is no wonder that Congress and the Administration have done so little.”

The executive summary and more findings are available at the website of ITIF, as well as the table with final Ranking and Full Report (both in PDF format).

Source: Neowin

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