Tech Reviews

The federal judge hearing a Massachusetts file-sharing case has struck down a proposal to send all defendants a notice urging them to contact the plaintiff to work out a settlement. The move is yet another sign that federal judges are growing skeptical of the mass copyright litigation strategy.

The case involves the film Big Butt Oil Orgy 2 and a group of 39 Massachusetts residents who allegedly shared it with one another via BitTorrent. Critics of these lawsuits have long argued that even innocent defendants may be forced to settle simply to avoid the legal expense of a trial and the public embarrassment of having one’s name publicly identified with a pornographic film, regardless of the case’s merit.

The plaintiff’s attorney, one Marvin Cable, filed the lawsuit last month. Armed with IP addresses, he sought to subpoena Internet providers in order to learn the identity of the defendants. As part of [...] Continue Reading…

There isn’t even an official standard for DDR4, the next generation of computer memory technology. But memory manufacturers are already shipping samples of the first DDR4 memory units, and preparing to produce them en masse. On May 7, Micron joined the field, announcing it had released its first fully functioning DDR4 memory product for testing.
Micron says its product, a 4-gigabit x8 DDR4 memory unit developed in partnership with its Taiwanese partner Nanya, will ship on a variety of memory module configurations by the end of the year. Micron’s competitors in the space are also preparing to ship their own DDR4 modules in that time. That means that memory modules based on the faster, more power efficient memory technology could start shipping  on servers (where its benefits are in the greatest demand) by 2013—if there are any CPUs ready to handle them.
What is DDR4?
The Joint Electron Devices [...] Continue Reading…

Five years ago, the social gaming company Zynga was cruising along with a fairly standard IT infrastructure. Servers were racked and stacked in a retail data center where Zynga rented space. Customer demand for games like Zynga Poker, launched in 2007, was being met.
Then along came FarmVille. After the game’s 2009 release, 10 million users were hitting FarmVille servers within six weeks, and 25 million within five months. “We couldn’t get power fast enough. We couldn’t get servers fast enough. We just couldn’t scale our infrastructure to match the needs of FarmVille,” said Allan Leinwand, Zynga’s CTO of infrastructure.
Zynga upended its whole IT model, shifting most of its infrastructure to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, which lets businesses buy virtual servers and storage, scaling capacity up and down as needed. “They clearly saved us. They clearly were helping us scale throughout 2010 and 2009. They did an [...] Continue Reading…

A recent report from the Congressional Research Office (PDF) suggests that China’s restrictive policy on rare earth mineral exports isn’t going to change anytime soon. The report comes on the heels of a renewed call for a rare earth production boost in Europe and a dispute settlement filed in March by the United States, Japan, and the European Union with the World Trade Organization over alleged unfair trading practices concerning rare earth minerals. ”From 2002 to 2011, the value of US rare earth imports from China rose by 1,376 percent,” the CRS report states. “From 2010 to 2011, the value of US rare earth imports from China increased by 305 percent.”

For a few years now, there has been a lot of talk about rare earth minerals. You know, the ones that aren’t particularly rare, but are nevertheless crucial for many products. Demand for them has shot up. They’re needed in the production [...] Continue Reading…

This summer, Microsoft is launching a new green energy initiative in which all of the company’s direct operations, “including data centers, software development labs, air travel, and office buildings,” will go carbon neutral.

The program will begin in July, at the start of Microsoft’s 2013 fiscal year, and includes a company-wide carbon fee, whereby various divisions will be held accountable for their own energy usage.”We recognize that we are not the first company to commit to carbon neutrality,” said Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner in a blog post early this morning, “but we are hopeful that our decision will encourage other companies large and small to look at what they can do to address this important issue.”

Other technology companies have made similar promises to reduce energy usage and carbon emissions in recent years. Google says that it has been carbon neutral since 2007, and it launched a new website last [...] Continue Reading…

Myspace has agreed to settle charges that it misled users about sharing their personal information with advertisers, the Federal Trade Commission announced Tuesday. The FTC alleges that Myspace allowed advertisers to combine profile information with browsing information in ways that Myspace’s privacy did not cover.

Each Myspace user has an assigned persistent unique identifier, called a “Friend ID,” associated with their profile on the site. Even protected profiles contain a certain amount of personal information, such as display name, full name, age, gender, and profile picture (though users had no incentive or obligation from Myspace to make this true to life).

Myspace’s privacy policy states that personally identifiable information would not be used in a way inconsistent with the purpose for which it was submitted. The company also says that data used to customize ads would not identify users to third parties, and that it wouldn’t share non-anonymized browsing activity.

But in [...] Continue Reading…

Many in and around the video game industry have long been concerned with the way many social games seem designed to encourage compulsive spending on digital gewgaws rather than strategic gameplay decisions. Now the Japanese government looks poised to crack down on one of the more pernicious and addictive forms of virtual good sales, arguing that it runs afoul of the country’s lottery laws.Citing sources close to Japan’s Consumer Affairs Agency, Japanese newspaper The Daily Yomiuri reports that the country will soon regulate social games that make use of a popular mechanic known as “compugacha” (short for “complete gacha”). Under this system, players pay a small fee to purchase a random, mystery in-game item (similar to real-world gashapon machines), in an effort to collect complete sets of similar items that unlock a rare “grand prize” item.

Regulators say the compugacha schemes run afoul of the country’s law on unjustifiable premiums, [...] Continue Reading…

Twitter has asked a New York state judge to throw out a court order requiring it to turn over three months worth of messages posted by an Occupy Wall Street protester being prosecuted for disorderly conduct.

In a motion (PDF) filed on Monday in New York City Criminal Court, Twitter lawyers argued the city’s district attorney’s office is overstepping its authority in ordering the handing-over of tweets and other subscriber info of Malcolm Harris, whose handle on the microblogging site is @destructuremal. Prosecutors seeking the data failed to get a court warrant based on probable cause, making an order they obtained earlier a violation of federal law and the Constitution’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures, the Twitter brief argued.”If the order stands, Twitter will be put in the untenable position of either providing user communications and account information in response to all subpoenas or attempting to vindicate its users’ [...] Continue Reading…

Dell has launched an experimental project called Sputnik to produce a Linux laptop that is tailored to meet the needs of software developers. The first stage of the project is a six-month exploratory effort that will pair Dell’s XPS13 Ultrabook with Ubuntu 12.04.

Dell’s Barton George, who described the concept this week in a blog post, hinted at the potential for a more ambitious follow-up effort if the initial experiment succeeds. Dell’s previous Linux efforts have had mixed results. The company first began to offer Ubuntu on desktop and laptop computers in 2007 after open source advocates used Dell’s IdeaStorm website to campaign for Linux preinstallation options.

The availability of Ubuntu-enabled hardware models from Dell has been spotty over the years. The dell.com/ubuntu landing page on Dell’s website often indicates that no products are available with Linux preinstalled, which was the case for most of the past year. At present, Dell [...] Continue Reading…

Dajaz1, the hip hop blog whose domain was seized and then held for a year by the United States government before being returned without any charges filed, came out swinging against the government and the Recording Industry Association of America on Monday. In a blog post, Dajaz1 attorney Andrew Bridges called the government’s legal position “stunning” and compared the dajaz1.com domain’s year in legal limbo to a “digital Guantanamo.”

Bridges pointed out that Dajaz1′s alleged crime consisted of posting four links to infringing files hosted by third-party websites. “Seizing a blog for linking to four songs, even allegedly infringing ones, is equivalent to seizing the printing press of the New York Times because the newspaper, in its concert calendar, refers readers to four concerts where the promoters of those concerts have failed to pay ASCAP for the performance licenses,” he argued.

“The original seizure was unjustified,” Bridges wrote. “The delay [...] Continue Reading…