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 the discovery process, those providers will send defendants a notice informing them that their information may be disclosed to Cable. Cable suggested the text of a notice that would be sent to each of the 39 “John Doe” defendants. In addition to explaining the subpoena process and offering advice on finding a lawyer, Cable’s proposed letter included the following paragraph:

The movie studio may be willing to discuss the possible settlement of its claims against you. The parties may be able to reach a settlement agreement without your name appearing on the public record. You may be asked to disclose your identity to the movie studio if you seek to pursue settlement. If a settlement is reached, the case against you will be dismissed. It is possible that defendants who seek to settle at the beginning of the case will be offered more favorable settlement terms by the movie studio. You may contact the movie studio’s representatives by phone at (xxx) xxx-6500, by fax at (xxx) xxx-6500, or by e-mail at [name removed]@marvincable.com.

The implied threat is clear: if a defendant doesn’t call now and pay up, his name could “appear on the public record” in connection with the film “Big Butt Oil Orgy 2″ and he would be forced to fight an expensive legal battle.

Sending this paragraph to all the defendants would have made Cable’s life easier, since his goal appears to be getting as many defendants as possible to settle without a fight. But Judge William Young nixed Cable’s scheme, crossing out this particular paragraph before signing off on the proposed notice.

While defendants could still track down Cable’s office and offer to settle with him, the letter doesn’t suggest the possibility, nor does it provide recipients with Cable’s contact information. Cable can still contact Does directly once he receives the subpoena information, however; he just has to wait longer and do a bit more work.

Judge Young’s action is not as forceful as a New York judge’s recent scathing denunciation of copyright trolls. But Judge Young’s actions are another sign of growing skepticism in the federal judiciary about the litigation strategy of copyright trolls.

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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 Engineering Council (JEDEC) is expected to sign off on a final DDR4 standard this summer. But a draft of the spec and its key attributes were issued last August. Those preliminary specs call for DDR4 memory to draw a maximum of 1.2 volts (20 percent less than current DDR3 memory) and achieve data transfer rates of 3.2 billion transfers per second (double that of the top-end speed of DDR3′s memory bus).

Micron’s initial memory DDR4 units will handle transfer speeds of 2.4 billion memory transfers per second, with later versions ramping up to the 3.2 gigatransfers per second top-end rate defined by JEDEC. Theoretically, since Micron’s initial memory units are “x8″ (having 8-bit storage areas), the memory will have a throughput of 2.4 gigabits per second. Samsung has advertised a throughput of 2.113 gigabits per second for its DDR4. Micron announced that it is also developing x16 and x32 DDR4 memory components, which would result in even higher memory throughput rates.

The “DDR” in DDR4 is an acronym for “double data rate”—all DDR memory moves data across the memory bus twice for each cycle of the bus’ timing clock. That’s the most significant bit of architecture that DDR4 shares with its predecessor. Instead of using multiple shared channels to link memory units with the CPU’s memory controller, each DDR4 memory module has its own dedicated point-to-point connection.

To get the reduction in power requirements, DDR4 uses an improved version of the pseudo-open drain interface (POD) logic, a technology used in graphics DDR 3. POD logic interfaces draw no current except when they’re flipped to their low state—when they connect to ground.

DDR4′s technical advances come at a price. The first is accomodating all of those additional memory connections. While the point-to-point architecture gives DDR4 the ability to read and write more data per cycle, it becomes a challenge to handle large amounts of memory. Servers built for DDR4 memory may use high-speed digital switches in order to reduce the number of direct memory channels connecting to the CPU’s memory controller.

The other challenge is the density of the memory itself. With all those point-to-point connections, the memory chips themselves need to be very densely designed to fit in the same space. Micron’s and Samsung’s DDR4 memory is fabricated with 30 nanometer technology—a die density on par with the fabrication process than current CPUs use. That will make DDR4 memory, at least initially, fairly expensive to produce.

Double-teaming

Micron is a little late to the DDR4 party. Korean memory manufacturers have had the run of it for over a year: Samsung announced it had completed development of its first 4Gb DDR4 DRAM module in January of 2011, and started shipping 2Gb DDR4 samples in December of 2010; Hynix demoed its own DDR4 technology in February of 2011.

There’s a lot riding on Micron’s efforts to catch up and pass Samsung in DDR4 performance because of the potential gains in market share from the growing data center and cloud server market. In that area, energy efficiency and large in-memory applications are major requirements. IHS iSuppli projects that DDR4 memory will make up more than half the memory market by 2015.

Owning a big piece of that market is a gain that Micron and Nanya could use in the increasingly competitive memory space. To put itself in better position to compete with Samsung and Hynix, Micron made another announcement on May 8—it had the exclusive right to acquire bankrupt Japanese memory manufacturer Elpida Memory.

That competition could be a good thing for pushing DDR4 forward on desktops and laptops, as it pushes the manufacturers to drive down the cost of manufacturing the technology. But the gating factor for DDR adoption will be how quickly CPU manufacturers adopt the technology and integrate it into CPU memory controllers. Intel’s latest statements indicate the company doesn’t have DDR4 on the roadmap for its processors until the Xeon Haswell-EX processor—in 2014. Desktop and notebook users may have a bit longer to wait. And the timeframe for a low-power version of DDR4 for mobile devices hasn’t even been set.

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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 amazing job,” Leinwand said. But eventually, Zynga “realized we could actually do it on our own and we could scale it in a way that worked better for our business.”

The private cloud Zynga would build is in some ways better and more efficient because it’s entirely under Zynga’s control. Moving nearly all of its own servers away from retail, co-location data centers, Zynga started building its own data centers on both US coasts. By early 2011, about 20 percent of Zynga game users at any given time were logged onto servers in Zynga’s own data centers, while the other 80 percent were playing in the Amazon cloud.

By the end of 2011, the number flipped. Now, 80 percent of Zynga usage is accommodated by Zynga-built data centers, and the other 20 percent is fueled by Amazon. Zynga doesn’t plan to ditch Amazon entirely, as it’s still a great “shock absorber” for sudden increases in interest—like when Alec Baldwin was kicked off a plane for refusing to stop playing Words With Friends last year.

Building a better Amazon

But in key respects, Amazon’s cloud can’t match what Zynga can achieve on its own, because unlike Amazon, Zynga doesn’t have to meet the needs of millions of businesses. It just has to build what’s best for Zynga. Leinwand discussed the basics of Zynga’s infrastructure in a keynote address Tuesday at the Interop Las Vegas conference, and then met with Ars to describe the project in a bit more detail. Lovingly called “zCloud,” Zynga’s internal infrastructure is managed by CloudStack software and was designed with the company RightScale, which specializes in managing cloud deployments on Amazon and in private data centers.

One result is that both Zynga’s internal infrastructure and the resources deployed on Amazon can be managed from a single console.

“When you go to provision virtual machines on Zynga infrastructure there’s a little drag-down box that says ‘is this going to be Amazon or is this going to be zCloud?’ and then you hit the apply button,” Leinwand said.

Leinwand said Zynga doesn’t reveal exactly what types of servers it uses, or even how many data centers it has built—except that it runs “multiple” facilities on both the East and West coasts. But generally speaking, not being tied to the instance types offered by Amazon lets Zynga customize its hardware and software to meet the specific needs of FarmVille, Words With Friends, and all of its other games.

Zynga’s infrastructure is big. Leinwand reports having 24.5 trillion rows of data in Zynga’s database system, for 1.4 petabytes in total. Zynga has to push massive amounts of data in and out of memory as players make changes to their in-game worlds. Load balancers distribute the traffic across Web servers, while data moves from servers to an in-memory cache and on to a high-capacity, highly available system for longer-term storage. In addition to serving millions of casual gamers, Zynga also provides a platform to help third-party developers build social games.

While Zynga doesn’t build its own servers the way Facebook and Google do, it does buy servers from hardware vendors who can customize them for Zynga’s infrastructure, with a configuration that’s similar to Facebook’s Open Compute technology.

Leinwand says a Zynga workload that runs on three servers on Amazon can run on just one server in-house. The solution isn’t running a giant server—they’re about the same size as what Zynga gets from Amazon. The secret is making dozens of tweaks that add up to huge gains in efficiency. Deep analysis into server performance, network traffic trends, and how applications use resources is a time-consuming but crucial process.

“We dug into our applications. We wrote tools that got into the memory heap. We wrote tools that look at profiling certain processes. We got into the Linux kernel. We use CentOS, and we got into the CentOS kernel and figured out where those bottlenecks are.”

For all Amazon’s scalability, the offerings can be a bit rigid. For example, you can rent an Amazon instance with a certain amount of storage and compute power, but adding a few gigabytes of memory or another processor might require buying a whole separate instance, which may have more resources than you really need.

“You can’t go to the public cloud and say I want another 64GB of memory here. They look at you and say ‘buy another instance of this type,’” Leinwand said.

Leinwand said the Amazon instance model leads to over-subscription, meaning you end up buying more storage than necessary. Internally, Zynga uses direct-attached storage striped across multiple servers, providing a big I/O performance boost and more efficient utilization, he said.

Every performance and efficiency improvement is important when you’re growing as fast as Zynga. Leinwand says that for every server the company had two years ago, it now has 100. For the foreseeable future, a percentage of those servers will remain on the Amazon cloud, even as Zynga’s own data centers ramp up. Besides providing always-available capacity, Amazon is still good for certain workloads that aren’t memory-intensive or have smaller needs for CPU cores and storage, Leinwand said.

“People ask me a lot, ‘will you ever get off that public cloud?’” Leinwand notes. “I don’t think that’s where we want to go. We want to have the public cloud there to be that shock absorber. We spend a lot of time looking at workloads and deciding which is best for which service. That’s the science of what we do.”

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“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 of hybrid cars, missiles, and smartphones. And it doesn’t help that China, the world’s largest producer, announced in 2010 that it was cutting export of its domestic supply. This has since led to newfound attention on mines and processing in California, Estonia, Malaysia, and Australia.

Not surprisingly, the rest of the world isn’t very happy at China. The country produces 97 percent of the world’s rare earth minerals—according to the United States Geological Survey, that translated to $3.4 billion of the stuff in 2011.

The Chinese government has said that it is merely imposing these limits as a way to manage its domestic supply. Foreign analysts argue that it may be a way to profiteer off of international demand, in addition to enticing manufacturing to move directly to China (where companies could take advantage of domestic rare earth pricing).

“For example, according to Lynas Corporation Ltd., an Australian rare earth mining company, average prices for eight types of rare earth oxides in the 4th quarter of 2011 were between 70.5 percent and 557 percent higher than those for domestic users,” the CRS report adds, noting that developing an American rare earth supply chain “could take up to 15 years.”

That said, Molycorp, a Colorado corporation, which owns a rare earth mining and refinery facility in Mountain Pass, California, has 1.3 million metric tons of ore in reserve. The company acquired one of two rare earth processing facilities in Europe late last year. By comparison, China’s largest areas at Baiyun Obo, the CRS reports, maintains a reserve of about 36 million metric tons.

Still, there are some rare earth experts that believe that non-Chinese mines can ramp up production much sooner than the Congressional Research Service thinks.

“Molycorp has put out 6,000 [metric tons], and this year they’re going to get to 10,000 by end of the year, and 40,000 by next year, and that’s one-third of the world’s supply” [PDF], said Karl A. Gschneidner, a professor of materials science at Iowa State University (and an expert on rare earths).

If Molycorp can achieve it, 40,000 metric tons would exceed China’s annual foreign export quota, set near 30,000 metric tons from 2010 to 2012. But, Gschneidner adds, the ramp-up in ore production and refinement is merely a temporary fix.

“Basically [China wants to] use the rare earths for internal consumption and export for high-end products,” he told Ars on Tuesday. “The Chinese are not dumb. Down the road, between 2018 and 2020, we’ll have some price wars not on the original ore materials, but on products that are made with the ore.”

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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 year detailing the ways the company has increased its energy savings. Both Facebook and Apple have also touted their own clean energy efforts, unveiling new, efficient data centers in the past year.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has been documenting its sustainable energy efforts on its Software Enabled Earth blog since 2009, which is run by the company’s environmental sustainability team. In March of that year, company CEO Steve Ballmer made a commitment that by 2012, Microsoft would reduce its carbon emissions by at least 30 percent of its 2007 baseline. Last month, Robert Bernard, Microsoft’s chief environmental strategist, revealed on Earth Day that the company had met this goal.

Bernard listed a number of Microsoft strategies at offices worldwide that have contributed to reductions in carbon emissions. At the company’s Puget Sound offices, for example, employees have eliminated “approximately 9.9 million miles of auto travel” each year by taking free busses to and from work.

And earlier this year, Microsoft opted to use CarbonSystems, a cloud-based Enterprise Sustainability Platform, to manage energy and environmental performance across “more than 600 facilities in more than 100 countries.”

“During that time we have also accelerated the shift in our business strategy to cloud computing and invested more than $3 billion USD to build facilities and networks globally to support this strategy,” according to the company’s latest carbon neutral (PDF) white paper.

The goal is to improve key metrics such as power, carbon, and water usage effectiveness. One strategy Microsoft has employed at new and existing data centers is to run servers at higher temperatures, “within the range specified by the manufacturer but higher than is typical—so that we can use free air cooling instead of extensive air conditioning,” according to the white paper. This is in addition to using more efficient LED lighting, HVAC, and airflow systems.

The three pillars of Microsoft’s new carbon neutral initiative.

Embedding the cost of carbon

Perhaps the biggest change in Microsoft’s strategy is establishing an internal “price for carbon.” In other words, electricity or travel costs will now include the price of carbon offsets purchased by the company to balance carbon emissions incurred by such activities. “By embedding the cost of carbon in our financial systems,” says the white paper, ”we have a direct way to measure and drive behavior change in a company-wide, systems-based way.

The price will be based on market pricing for renewable energy and carbon offsets, and it will be applied to business operations in over 100 countries. The hope is that by exposing the cost of energy offsets to individual departments and teams directly, Microsoft employees will have more of an incentive to reduce energy usage.

This internal carbon fee will go into a central fund that Microsoft says it will use to transition the company away from non-renewable energy sources. For example, it is considering investments in wind farms and methane-capture projects to reduce the amount of so-called dirty energy it must purchase from the existing commercial electrical grid.

After all, carbon offsets alone aren’t enough to reduce the environmental impact of Microsoft’s vast data centers and business operations. The environmental group Greenpeace criticized various cloud providers last month—including Microsoft, Apple and Amazon—for not using more sources of renewable energy to power their operations. 

But Microsoft is making a clear effort to change that. “The part I’m most excited about is our plan to infuse carbon awareness into every part of our business around the world,” wrote Turner, “creating incentives for greater efficiency, increased purchases of renewable energy, better data collection and reporting, and an overall reduction of our environmental impact.”

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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 2009, researchers at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and AT&T Labs noticed that Myspace was handing the Friend IDs associated with visited pages to advertisers. Advertisers could then associate the browsing data with the users’ full names, and associate broader browsing activity with that personal profile. The FTC found this behavior in violation of federal law, and found that as a result of this data sharing, Myspace had lied about its compliance with the US-EU Safe Harbor Framework.

Myspace’s settlement is not an admission of guilt, but the company must now establish a “comprehensive privacy program” and submit to third-party audits for the next 20 years. It seems that this won’t do much good, as Myspace is already on a significant decline—in short, we’ll be surprised if the site lasts that long.

Facebook and Digg were implicated for similar activity at the same time as Myspace, almost exactly two years ago in May 2010. Facebook settled with the FTC on the matter in December 2011, also committing to the 20-year third-party evaluation plan.

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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, which outlaws similar “card combination” lotteries in the real world. Consumers are taking note of the games’ addictive nature as well; the Consumer Affairs Agency reportedly received 58 complaints about the practice in the last fiscal year, and some players have reportedly spent tens of thousands of dollars in a single month trying to complete their sets.

In response to growing public concerns, major Japanese social game makers GREE and DeNA voluntarily agreed last month to set maximum spending caps for how much children could spend on compugacha games, but it seems such efforts didn’t go far enough for regulators.

Though the CAA hasn’t yet formally issued a ruling, a broad-based decision against the practice could decimate the country’s social gaming industry, which brings in anywhere from 18 to 50 percent of its income from compugacha sales, depending on who you talk to. GREE and DeNA both saw their stock plummet nearly 25 percent yesterday after the news broke, and traditional publishers like Konami, Namco Bandai, and Capcom also saw smaller stock dips thanks to their more limited social gaming efforts in Japan.

US tilting toward more wagering

While compugacha systems aren’t nearly as prevalent in the kinds of social games popular outside of Japan, that doesn’t mean Western social games don’t have their own elements that resemble gambling. These include everything from slot machine spins for in-game currency in Popcap’s Bejeweled Blitz to an outright casino simulation in Zynga’s Texas Hold’em Poker. In fact, casino-themed games are now the most popular category of social games, even though none of them currently pay out real money (unless you want to sell your in-game currency through a shady third-party, that is).

But the legal environment in the United States seems to be tilting slowly towards more acceptance for real-money wagering in online games, rather than less. That’s thanks in large part to a US Justice Department ruling issued late last year which said that the 1961 Wire Act doesn’t bar states from allowing online games of chance within their own borders. California, Nevada, and New Jersey—eager to find a new source of taxable revenue to help close budget gaps—are already considering legislation to allow various types of online wagering.

Social game makers have noticed the shifting tide too. At a February conference, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said overt wagering was “a natural fit” for his company’s social games, and that the prospects for such gambling were “going to be mind-blowing.” Attendees at San Francisco’s recent Global Gaming Expo were reportedly “overwhelmingly positive” about the prospects for legalized real-money wagers in social games as well, though most think it will be 2014 before such betting will be legal across the country.

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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’ rights by moving to quash these subpoenas itself—even though Twitter will often know little or nothing about the underlying facts necessary to support their users’ argument that the subpoenas may be improper,” Twitter’s attorneys argued.

Rather than get a warrant based on probable cause, the New York City prosecutors cited the Stored Communications Act, which requires only that investigators show the requested information is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation. After receiving the demand, Twitter provided notification to Harris, who challenged the demand on the grounds that the information prosecutors were seeking fell outside the limitations of the statute. Last month, New York Criminal Court Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino, Jr. denied Harris’s motion (PDF), arguing he had no legal standing to challenge the subpoena because he had no proprietary interest in the data investigators sought.

Twitter’s brief argued that Sciarrino’s order contradicts the terms of service provisions guaranteeing users “retain rights to any content [they] submit, post, or display” on the site.

“To hold otherwise imposes a new and overwhelming burden on Twitter to fight for its users’ rights, since the order deprives its users of the ability to fight for their own rights when faced with a subpoena from New York State.”

Monday’s brief also argued that Sciarrino’s order would force Twitter to violate federal law because the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment requires service providers to disclose user communications only when presented with a valid search warrant. As support, the attorneys cited a 2010 ruling from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals that said government prosecutors couldn’t rely on the Stored Communications Act to get the e-mail of a man they were investigating for fraud. They also said the statute doesn’t cover communications that are less than 180 days old. Prosecutors investigating Harris are seeking tweets sent from September 15 to December 31 of last year, meaning some of the requested information won’t be 180 days old until the end of June.

The Twitter attorneys also cited a unanimous US Supreme Court ruling from last year holding that FBI investigators had to obtain a search warrant before using a GPS device attached to a suspect’s vehicle to track his whereabouts for four weeks.

“If the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement applies merely to surveillance of one’s location in public areas for 28 days, it also applies to the District Attorney’s effort to force Twitter to produce over three months worth of a citizen’s substantive communications, regardless of whether the government alleges those communications are public or private,” the brief argued.

Twitter has frequently stood up to government demands that it turn over user information. In late 2010 or early 2011, site representatives informed users who were targeted by what’s known as national security letters that secretly sought Tweets and other data associated with WikiLeaks and several of its supporters. By comparison, Google, Facebook, and Skype (which was then owned by eBay) received similar demands and never disclosed how they responded.

“There’s this issue of confidence in third-party service providers and how much they’re going to make the government fight for user information,” Venkat Balasubramani, a legal blogger and technology lawyer in Seattle, told Ars. “Twitter is one of the companies that’s building a reputation of a company that will fight the battle. From that standpoint Twitter is notable.”

Indeed, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a side-by-side comparison dubbed Who Has Your Back, last year gave Twitter props for regularly warning users of data demands and fighting for user privacy. Other companies, including Comcast, MySpace, and Skype, didn’t fare as well in the analysis.

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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 is only offering two low-end Vostro models with Ubuntu to consumers in the US. Dell’s Ubuntu machines have reportedly fared better in China, where Dell has made an effort to give the Linux platform a retail presence.

Dell has also previously dabbled with Ubuntu developer machines. When it offered a Mini 10v with an incomplete build of the Ubuntu Moblin Remix in 2009, the company characterized it as an offering for developers and early adopters. And so it was: the touchpad didn’t work properly and the software was missing key features.

Through all of this, our position has been that Linux users would be better served if Dell would focus on improving Linux hardware compatibility across its line instead of trying to offer individual systems with Linux preinstalled. There are a lot of major areas where hardware support needs to be improved, especially on laptops, where power management and dual-mode graphics hardware are still not supported as well as they should be.

The preinstallation offerings in the past have been little more than a gimmick, especially given the small number of Dell systems for which it has historically been offered. The average Linux enthusiast is probably looking for a higher-end rig than the kind of ultra-budget systems that Dell has typically offered with Ubuntu. History has also shown that trying to sell Ubuntu on low-end systems to cost-conscious people who have never heard of Linux is not a winning formula.

More work to be done

Dell is clearly learning from its past mistakes and seems to have considered a lot of those issues in its Sputnik project. Using a desirable hardware configuration and focusing on developers as the audience is the right way to make an Ubuntu system that somebody might actually want to purchase.

Another area where Dell seems to be moving in the right direction with Sputnik is a focus on hardware enablement, which George talks about at length in his blog post. It’s not clear, however, whether Dell has fully learned what hardware enablement means with respect to the Linux desktop.

Hardware enablement that’s done solely to get a Linux system image that can be preinstalled on a specific hardware configuration is not particularly useful. It’s not enough to just make it work so that it can be shipped. If a computer requires a custom Linux build with binary drivers and a nonstandard configuration that can only be put together by the hardware manufacturer (which is exactly what Dell did with its Poulsbo-powered Mini 9 and some other previous systems) then it’s a failure before it even ships.

The drivers need to be open and upstream-friendly so that they can be maintained properly on an ongoing basis by people who actually know what they are doing. If the hardware isn’t fully compatible with a plain vanilla build of Ubuntu that has been downloaded from the Ubuntu website, then the user has no guarantee that the product will still be able to run up-to-date software for the full duration of its lifespan.

That’s the real problem that Dell needs to solve. Linux users want computers with known-good hardware configurations that they can continue to support themselves without having to rely on binary blobs from Dell that may or may not continue to work in the future. A major player like Dell has the resources and clout to start addressing that problem in a serious and meaningful way.

At the very least, the company needs to be careful to pick components that are supported well upstream. What would be ideal is if Dell started encouraging its hardware suppliers to open their drivers and merge them into the mainline kernel tree. That would be infinitely more constructive for advancing desktop Linux than any preinstallation scheme.

Of course, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. If Dell wants to use its ultrabook configuration as a starting point for working on better upstream drivers, then that’s great. What ultimately matters is for Dell to understand that the upstream work is the more important part of the equation.

It’s also critically important to understand that open drivers aren’t merely an idealogical preference. The ability to maintain driver code upstream is fundamental to the Linux development model and the only way to ensure sustainable long-term hardware support in the Linux ecosystem.

Dell’s interest in serving a Linux developer audience is commendable, and the Sputnik project seems to have a lot of great potential. But if Dell wants to make its Linux effort a success, the company has to start by understanding the upstream ecosystem and focusing on doing hardware enablement in a sustainable way.

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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 was unjustified. The secrecy in extensions of the forfeiture deadlines was unjustified.”

Indeed, Bridges doesn’t just believe the seizure of his own client’s site was illegal. He argues that the 2008 PRO-IP Act, which provided the basis for all such seizures, doesn’t authorize the seizure of link or locker sites at all. Bridges wrote that the legislation only allows “seizures of property used in connection with the making of, or trafficking in, ‘articles’ in violation of copyright law.” He argued that an intangible song download is not an “article.” If his interpretation of the statute is correct, then neither sites that host infringing files nor those that link to them are subject to seizure under the PRO-IP Act.

The government has seized dozens of allegedly infringing link and locker sites over the last two years. The legal experts we talked to didn’t rule out Bridges’s interpretation of the law, but they were unable to point to any specific court decisions establishing whether a digital download constitutes an “article” under the PRO-IP Act.

I asked Bridges about his contention. “It’s a matter of plain language,” he told me. “And I believe, based on what I’ve heard, that in the legislative history no one ever suggested the Act authorized domain seizures in this context.”

Bridges also argued that the government violated Dajaz1′s due process rights by denying his client the opportunity to defend his interests in court. Bridges said he “repeatedly asked the government attorney to inform the court that my client opposed any further extensions and asked for an opportunity to be heard.” But he said the government ignored the request, repeatedly obtaining deadline extensions without asking the judge to hear Dajaz1′s side of the story.

Bridges also responded to recent RIAA comments accusing Dajaz1 of repeated lawbreaking. In a statement sent to Ars on Sunday, the recording industry group told us that the trade group referred Dajaz1 to the government for investigation because of “its long history engaging in the unauthorized distribution of copyright content prior to its commercial release.” The RIAA says that it was “disappointed” the government chose not to seek forfeiture of the Dajaz1 domain.

“RIAA’s powers of demonization far exceed its ability to substantiate its malicious statements with specific and credible facts,” Bridges retorted in Monday’s post.

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