If you are Acer's lawyer, and this is true (which it likely is) what action, short of a public execution, could you take to appease customers?
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/08/0515200&from=rss
Acer May Be Bugging Computers
Posted by Zonk on Monday January 08, @12:43AM from the might-want-to-look-into-this dept. Privacy Security
tomjen writes "What if a well known laptop company had silently placed an ActiveX Control on their computers that allowed any webpage to execute any program? Well Acer apparently has and they have (based on the last modified-by date of the file) been doing this since 1998. 'Checking the interface of the control reveals it has a method named "Run()" as shown below. The method supports parameters "Drive", "FileName", and "CmdLine". Isn't it strange for a control that's marked "safe for scripting" to allow a method that is suggestive of possible abuse?'"
Of course not. It just takes a few minutes of thought, something not every manager is capable of...
http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2006/HPL-2006-95.pdf
DataBank: An Economics Based Privacy Preserving System for Distributing Relevant Advertising and Content
ABSTRACT
A critical feature of successful new advertising models has been their reliance on knowledge of various types of per- sonal user data in order to make advertisements relevant and useful. This has raised many concerns about privacy and control over personal data. The preservation of privacy would appear to be in direct con°ict with the successful new advertising models, which depend on knowledge of personal user data.
Here we present a system and its associated advertising model that shows this need not be the case.
Another swing of the pendulum?
http://techdirt.com/articles/20070108/002456.shtml
Court Says Keyword Advertising Isn't A Trademark Violation
from the good-answer dept
Every few months it seems like we have another lawsuit of this nature, and with different courts coming to totally different conclusions, it's likely that this is going to continue for some time. It's about whether or not it's legal for a company to buy text ads in Google when someone does a search on their competitor's name. As we've said repeatedly, there shouldn't be a trademark violation here. Trademark law is supposed to prevent consumer confusion, such as having someone think they're buying Coca-Cola, only to find out it's really Bob's Cola. [No relation Bob] Unfortunately, though, many companies seem to believe that trademark law means they have full ownership of their trademarked term, and no one else can use it for anything -- especially if it's a competitor. The courts have gone back and forth on this, with some of them seemingly confused by the real issues at stake. Eric Goldman has written an analysis of the latest such case, where it sounds like the court came to the right conclusions. They found that simply buying an ad based on a competitor's keyword doesn't constitute a trademark violation, as there's not likely to be any customer confusion (however, if the ad itself is written with the trademarked term, that might be a different story). This is the right reasoning, and it's good to see yet another court figure it out. There are still likely to be more suits along these lines, but the more reasonable decisions lawyers can point to, the better.
Are we truly early adopters, or are we unable to find/purchase older technology because it is already off the shelves? Try replacing your VCR...
http://techdirt.com/articles/20070107/230430.shtml
Can You Still Call Them Early Adopters If Almost Everyone Is Included?
from the just-wondering dept
With the kickoff of the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, a new study is being released basically saying that we're all "early adopters" now, with tech gadgets hitting the mainstream in a big way. Of course, with that being said, doesn't that mean that they're no longer early adopters? It seems like the concept of the early adopter has become so popular that gadget makers are embracing it as a marketing tactic. Even if you're one of the last people on the block to get an iPod, if you do, you'll be considered an "early adopter." If you dig a little deeper, though, the more interesting trend found in the study is not just that people are buying gadgets, but that they're willing to buy new and different gadgets, rather than simply upgrading old technology. That suggests a few different things, including that contrary to some other recent reports, people might actually want the gadgets they buy to last longer, so they can focus their disposable gadget income on something new, rather than just an upgrade.
Interesting. But I'll still flunk any student I catch...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/education/edlife/07books.html?_r=1&ref=edlife&oref=slogin
Plagiarism: Everybody Into the Pool
By CHARLES McGRATH January 7, 2007
THE club of people accused of plagiarism gets ever larger. High-profile members include Stephen Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Kaavya Viswanathan — of chick-lit notoriety — and now even Ian McEwan, whose best-selling novel “Atonement” has recently been discovered to harbor passages from a World War II memoir by Lucilla Andrews. Plagiarism is apparently so rife these days that it would be extremely satisfying to discover that “The Little Book of Plagiarism,” by Richard A. Posner, has itself been plagiarized.
The watchdogs have been caught before. The section of the University of Oregon handbook that deals with plagiarism, for example, was copied from the Stanford handbook.
Mr. Posner, moreover, is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and a law professor at the University of Chicago who turns out books and articles with annoying frequency and facility. Surely, under deadline pressure, he is tempted every now and then to resort to a little clipping and pasting, especially since he cuts members of his own profession a good deal of slack on the plagiarism issue. In the book he readily acknowledges that judges publish opinions all the time that are in fact written by their clerks, but he excuses the practice on the ground that everyone knows about it and therefore no one is harmed. What he doesn’t consider much is whether a judge who gains a reputation for particularly well-written opinions or for seldom being reversed — or, for that matter, who is freed from his legal chores to do freelance writing — doesn’t benefit in much the same way as a student who persuades one of the smart kids to do his homework for him.
Sadly, however, “The Little Book of Plagiarism” appears to be original. It’s a useful and remarkably concise overview of the subject, and is in almost every respect a typically Posnerian production: smart, lucid, a little self-satisfied and tilting noticeably toward the economic-analysis end of legal theory. In defining exactly what plagiarism is, for example, Mr. Posner insists on two main criteria: not just deceit but fraudulence, in the sense that the reader is tricked into behaving differently — into buying a book, say, that he would have ignored had he known it was copied. For plagiarism to be wrong in the Posner sense it has to be materially harmful, in other words, and yet bookbuyers seldom act as if originality matters much to them. Mr. Ambrose’s and Ms. Goodwin’s sales didn’t slip much when they were accused of plagiarism, and it’s hard to imagine that, in the long run, Mr. McEwan’s borrowings, which amount to only a couple of hundred words in a long and brilliant novel, will do much to change the esteem in which “Atonement” is generally held.
Most of the time, if we readers care about plagiarism, it’s because it seems cheesy and a little embarrassing. We’d rather not think that Doris Kearns Goodwin, of all people, was guilty of scholarly shoplifting. Of course, there is sometimes a moral component to plagiarism — as when a student cheats by turning in a term paper not his own — but in the public sphere it more often seems like an aesthetic offense, a crime against taste.
This is how the Romantics, supposedly the first generation to conceive of literary ownership in the modern sense, really thought about the issue, according to Tilar J. Mazzeo’s “Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period.” In style and methodology, Ms. Mazzeo’s new book is an academic wheezer, a retooled dissertation perhaps, but it’s also smart and insightful, and points out that 18th-century writers took a certain amount of borrowing for granted. What mattered was whether you were sneaky about it and, even more important, whether you improved upon what you took, by weaving it seamlessly into your own text and adding some new context or insight.
Interestingly, the Australian novelist Thomas Keneally recently defended Mr. McEwan in just this way, writing, “Fiction depends on a certain value-added quality created on top of the raw material, and that McEwan has added value beyond the original will, I believe, be richly demonstrated.” In the case of “Atonement,” the principle seems inarguable, but it’s also a slippery slope. You could argue that Kaavya Viswanathan improved upon the raw material of the Megan McCafferty novel she relied on so liberally, and yet no one is rushing to her defense.
Perhaps Ms. Viswanathan’s other great failing, besides cluelessness and the belief, surprisingly common among plagiarists, that you can get away with copying something that practically everyone has read, is that she doesn’t have tenure and friends in high places.
At the same time that he is letting judges off the hook, Mr. Posner acknowledges that in academic circles there is a double standard for plagiarism, with professors often getting off far more lightly than their students. The reason, he says, is that the left, which dominates the professoriate these days, is soft on plagiarism because the left is uncomfortable with ideas of individual creativity and ownership. (Surprisingly, he fails to take a whack at French theorists like Barthes and Foucault, who argued that in the strictest sense there is no such thing as an “author,” because all writing is collaborative and produced by a kind of cultural collective.)
In “Historians in Trouble” (published in 2005 but due out in paperback this coming spring), Jon Wiener argues the same thing in reverse, claiming that though underrepresented in academe, the right nevertheless has more power to make public fuss about academic misconduct. He points out that it was The Weekly Standard that flung the most mud in the direction of Stephen Ambrose, even though Mr. Ambrose, no lefty, was a celebrant of patriotism and the military.
No wonder young people are confused, and no wonder they continue to plagiarize in record numbers, with more than 40 percent of college students admitting to copying from the Internet in 2001. We talk to them about plagiarism in absolute terms, as if we were all agreed on what it was, and yet the literature suggests that once you’re out of school, it proves to be a crime like any other, with the punishment partly depending on whom you know and on how well you pull it off.
This is not the geek version of Citizen Caine... I'm just pointing out that more and more movies are now available on the net. Why would that be important? See the next article...
http://viralvids.web-log.nl/viralvids/2007/01/pirates_of_sili.html
Pirates of Silicon Valley
Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999) is an unauthorized made-for-television docudrama written and directed by Martyn Burke
For when those viral videos become more popular than the Sopranos...
New Device Will Send Web Videos to TV
By MAY WONG AP Technology Writer Jan 7, 2:24 PM EST
LAS VEGAS (AP) -- The maker of Slingbox, a device that lets people watch their home television on laptops away from home, now plans to reverse that flow and bring Web video to television sets.
Sling Media Inc. will unveil its upcoming SlingCatcher product at the International Consumer Electronics Show, joining a growing group of companies that aim to bring Web content into the living room.
The SlingCatcher will be available in the middle of the year. The price has not been set but will be under $200, said Blake Krikorian, co-founder and CEO of the San Mateo, Calif.-based company.
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