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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]