Google's Sinister(?) Plans

puppetman writes

"This week, Robert X. Cringely makes some interesting observations as to what Google's up to next. He theorizes that Google is looking to create a bandwidth shortage that will drive ISP/cable/telephone customers into it's open arms (often with the blessing of the ISP/cable/telephone company). The evidence: leasing massive amounts of network capacity, and huge data centers in rural areas (close to power-generation facilities). The shortage will only occur if the average bandwidth consumption by individual consumers skyrockets; think mainstream BitTorrent, streaming moves from NetFlix, tv episodes from iTunes, video games on demand, etc, etc. Spooky and sinister, or sublime and smart?"

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Thumb-Print Banking Takes India

CHENNAI, India -- Banks and ATM machines are an unfamiliar sight in the rural countryside here, but the government hopes to change that with new technology that could ease the transition from cash to computers.

A pilot program will put 15 biometric ATMs at village kiosks in five districts across southern India. The machines are expected to serve about 100,000 workers who will use fingerprint scanners, rather than ATM cards and PINs, to obtain their funds.

Biometric ATMs are already in use in Colombia and a few locations in Japan, but haven't caught on in much of the rest of the world. As a result, biometrics companies are watching the experiment closely as a potential watershed for the industry.

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MuleSource Hits Milestone, Sets Roadmap for Mule

MuleSource, maker of open-source infrastructure and integration software, announced that its Mule project has reached 500,000 downloads and is poised to continue to gain users and market share in the face of competing offerings from proprietary competitors.

In an interview with eWEEK, MuleSource CEO Dave Rosenberg and Mule creator and company co-founder Ross Mason spoke about the history of the Mule platform and shared some insights about the roadmap for the product, including support for virtualization, a new IDE (integrated development environment) and partnerships with OEM partners and others.

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802.11n Standard Makes Progress in London Meeting

The long-anticipated 1.10 version of the IEEE 802.11n draft standard was approved unanimously in an IEEE task group meeting held in London in mid-January.

According to Atheros CTO Bill McFarland, who attended the meeting, all of the 3,000-plus technical comments to the 11n draft 1.0 were resolved, and that in turn resulted in the successful agreement to draft 1.10.

According to McFarland's written statement, provided to eWEEK, this is a significant step forward in achieving the next stage of the approval process to an accepted 802.11n draft standard.

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MacFUSE Release Opens Up File Systems on Mac OS X

Macintosh developers gained a new Mac OS X software programming tool with the release of MacFUSE, an open-source Mac version of the FUSE file system module for Linux.

Amit Singh, engineering manager of the Macintosh Group at Google and author of "Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach," developed MacFUSE and released it at the recent Macworld Expo in San Francisco early in January 2007.

MacFUSE, Singh said, makes it easy for even casual programmers to write their own file systems, which they can build into Mac OS X user programs. With MacFUSE, users will be able to treat remote computer drives and even Web-based services as mountable drives on a local computer, he said.

FUSE, which stands for "Filesystem in Userspace," is an open-source software module that operates at the kernel level of Unix-based operating systems. It has also become officially part of Linux.

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MPs investigate school fingerprinting

Opposition MPs have begun investigating the use of biometric scanners in UK schools and the use of funds that might otherwise be spent buying books and learning materials to buy the systems.

Foremost in written parliamentary questions tabled by Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs was the question of fingerprint scanners being bought with e-Learning credits, which are a mechanism used by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) to provide schools with direct funding to buy educational software.

Sarah Teather, shadow education secretary and MP for Brent East, asked the government whether it had given schools permission to use e-Learning credits to buy biometric scanners that took children's fingerprints.

"I believe that the collection of biometric data from young pupils without parental consent is illegal and must cease," she told The Register in a written statement.

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Indies unite to challenge Big Four digital deals

The world's biggest record label, albeit a "virtual" one, emerged today at the Midemnet conference in Cannes.

Indies have found themselves treated as second class citizens or ignored altogether in the era of digital music. The new organization Merlin will act as a global rights licensing agency, and represents the growing influence of the independent sector acting collectively. Members hope that collective action will lead to better deals with online stores such as Apple's iTunes, and music-oriented sites such as MySpace.

"Merlin came together to license the individually unlicenseable," said Beggars Group chairman Martin Mills. "It's the virtual fifth major."

No individual Merlin member label claim as much as one per cent of the world's market share, but collectively they add up to 30 per cent of the global music market - and 80 per cent of the world's new releases.

"We're the largest company in the world if we act together," said Martin Lambot of the PIAS Group, and former president of Impala, the global indie labels' association.

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Universal exec - say goodbye to the old record co.

An RIAA board member and executive from the world's biggest record company has said the old way of doing business has gone forever now.

Larry Kenswil, president of Universal Music Group's eLabs, might not speak for all of Universal Music, but he does speak for an important part of it. Kenswil today said labels could no longer "count units" but had to license rights.

The eLabs chief's comments caused a few jaws to drop here in Cannes, but it's part of a sea change in strategy at UMG. The DRM gurus have departed - Barney Wragg left Universal last summer - and Universal is striking deals with anyryone who can hold a pen and scrawl an X. Towards the end of 2006, MySpace, YouTube and Microsoft all agreed to pay Universal for rights to their catalog - material crucial to the success of their products or services.

"We can't think of it as counting unit sales anymore," said Kenswil. "We have to license ... and think like the publishers."

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Judge allows music industry to sue XM Satellite

A judge has ruled that the music industry is free to go ahead with a lawsuit against XM Satellite Radio, the company accused of allowing customers to store songs without paying for them.

The finding, made Friday by U.S. District Court Judge Diane Batts in New York, opens the door for music labels such as Atlantic Recording and Capitol Records to press their case against the satellite radio broadcaster.

The record industry alleged in a civil suit filed in May that XM allows subscribers to listen to, store and replay songs as MP3 files. Devices marketed as "XM + MP3" players help people trap the music from XM's broadcasts and then turn them into MP3s. The music labels argue that this infringes on their copyrights.

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HP CEO denies 'bullet dodging' with stock sale

Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd says he did nothing wrong when he sold HP stock shares before news of the tech giant's pretexting scandal went public.

In a December 21 letter to Congress just made public on a congressional Web site (click for PDF of the letter), Hurd said the sale was prearranged and part of an ongoing investment strategy. He wrote that the sale of 100,000 shares on August 25 represented only 5 percent of his HP holdings and noted that Wall Street had yet to punish the company's stock over the spying scandal.

"HP's stock has risen by more than $5 per share since the date of the trade," Hurd wrote in the letter. "My August trade was not a case of bullet-dodging."

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Apple's 802.11n accounting conundrum

Apple's explanation of a planned Wi-Fi upgrade fee has its roots in obscure accounting rules that tell companies how to book sales of future product upgrades.

Apple said Thursday that it plans to charge customers $1.99 for a software download that enables the 802.11n Wi-Fi technology currently present in almost all MacBooks and MacBook Pros with Intel's Core 2 Duo processor. The company says accounting rules known as generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) force it to ask for money for the download.

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Alleged Software, Movie Pirate Turns Himself In

Ten thousand discs recovered from his home after raid by police.

A 31-year-old Pennsylvania man who allegedly ran a home-based online business selling pirated copies of software, music, and movies was arrested today following an undercover operation by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Business Software Alliance (BSA) trade groups.

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Sound goes faster than light!

According to Physics Web in Sound breaks the light barrier (Free reg. required), a professor of physics in Tennessee has designed an experiment which proves that sound can move faster than light. This looks like impossible — and it is. In fact, the physicist has tweaked some scientific definitions. No sound can go faster than light. But a sound pulse, or more precisely, all the wavelengths associated to a sound, have a "group velocity" that far exceeds the real physical limits. Have I lost you? Read more for some explanations that even a lawyer couldn't have invented.

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