Unix Group Takes UK Standards Body To Court Over OOXML

Halfway through the two-month window of opportunity during which OOXML’s ISO standardization can be derailed by a formal objection from a national standards body, the UK Unix Users Group is trying to force the British Standards Institution to do just that. According to the Unix Users Group, the BSI used a flawed decision-making process when they chose to approve OOXML in the ISO vote. ‘The UKUUG is also folding in many other complaints about Office Open XML (OOXML), such as unresolved patent issues and a lack of completion in the specification’s documentation, and is calling for the High Court of Justice to force a judicial review of the BSI’s decision.’ This is not the first time a country’s ISO vote has been challenged.

Creative Sued for Base-10 Capacities On HDD MP3 Players

A class-action settlement from Creative Labs over the capacity of their HDD MP3 players. Evidently they calculated drive capacity in base-10 (1,000,000,000 bytes per GB) instead of base-2 (1,073,741,824 bytes per GB). The representative plaintiff is entitled to $5,000, and everyone else who bought one of the HDD MP3 players in the past several years gets a 50% discount on a new 1GB player[PDF]. They can also opt for a 20% discount on anything ordered from Creative’s online store. Creative has made available all of the necessary legal forms. Seagate lost a similar lawsuit late last year.

Massive Increase in RIAA Copyright Notices

According to Wired, universities in the US are experiencing a “20-fold increase” in the number of takedown notices from the RIAA in the last ten days.
Indiana University reports 80 notices a day, but they say their traffic hasn’t increased significantly over the same time period.
It will be interesting to see if the affected schools join the legal battle against the RIAA, or cave under the increased pressure.
University of California at Berkeley’s chief information officer Shel Waggener confirmed he’d heard of the spikes and suggested there was a political purpose driving them.

Public universities are in a unique position since the industry puts pressure on us through state legislatures to try to impose what are widely considered to be draconian content monitoring measures and turn us into tech police forces in support of a specific industry.

Waggener said.

The RIAA is also backing legislation in states such as Illinois and Tennessee that would require schools that get a certain number of notices to begin installing deep packet monitoring equipment on their internet and intranets, according to Luker.

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Psystar Open Computer Notes, Benchmarks and Video

Engadget has had a chance to play around with Psystar’s Open Computer and has a few things to say about the controversial machine.

“Okay, so we’ve been playing with the Psystar Open Computer for a few hours now, and we’ve formed some early impressions and put together a short video of it in action. We haven’t really tried to stress the system yet, but based on our other experiences with OSx86 machines, we’re expecting things to generally go smoothly. That said, there are some definite rough patches and issues, all mostly having to do with the fact that OS X isn’t really built for this hardware.”

Tilera Releases 64-Way Chip Dev Tools

Tilera has released a Linux-based development kit for their 64-core system on a chip.

“The Tile64 is based on a proprietary VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) architecture, on which a MIPS-like RISC architecture is implemented in microcode. A hypervisor enables each core to run its own instance of Linux, or alternatively the whole chip can run Tilera’s 64-way SMP (Symmetrical Multiprocessing) Linux implementation. An ‘iMesh’ switching interconnect, developed by Tilera’s founder, MIT professor and serial entrepreneur Dr. Anant Agarwal, is said to eliminate the centralized bus intersection that limited scalability in previous multicore designs.”

NSA Releases Historical Documents on TEMPEST

Wired’s Threat Level has a piece on a recently-declassified document detailing the history of TEMPEST.

“It was 1943, and an engineer with Bell Telephone was working on one of the U.S. government’s most sensitive and important pieces of wartime machinery, a Bell Telephone model 131-B2. It was a top secret encrypted teletype terminal used by the Army and Navy to transmit wartime communications that could defy German and Japanese cryptanalysis. Then he noticed something odd. Far across the lab, a freestanding oscilloscope had developed a habit of spiking every time the teletype encrypted a letter. Upon closer inspection, the spikes could actually be translated into the plain message the machine was processing. Though he likely didn’t know it at the time, the engineer had just discovered that all information processing machines send their secrets into the electromagnetic ether.”

KDE 4.1 Alpha 1 Released

The first alpha release for KDE 4.1 is out, and bugs aside, it looks promising.

The KDE Plasma desktop shell now has preliminary support for Mac OS X dashboard widgets and SuperKaramba, and panels can be added and removed via contextual menu items. ‘This alpha release marks the start of the 4.1 feature freeze, so virtually all of the remaining developer effort between now and the official 4.1 release in July will focus on bug-fixing, polish, and stability. Despite the current breakage, the actual feature set that has been stubbed out for this release is pretty darn good. If the developers can deliver on all of this functionality and make it stable and robust, version 4.1 will offer a much better overall user experience than 4.0, and Plasma will come close to achieving functional parity with the KDE 3.5.x panel system.’ The KDE Techbase wiki has a full list of the features planned for the 4.1 release.

AT&T Launching Mobile TV May 4th

Engadget is reporting that AT&T will be launching their Mobile TV service on May 4th. The article features a few details and a video of the tech in action.

“You’ll find Mobile TV running on LG’s new $300 (2-year, after $100 rebate) Vu, one of just two Mobile TV compatible handsets launching on AT&T May 4th ??? the other being the $200 (2-year, after $100 rebate) Samsung Access. Performance looks reasonably snappy when scrolling through the channel guide although some of the exclusive PIX and CNN Mobile Live content is not yet available. S’ok, AT&T has three more days to throw the big blue switch on the broadcast TV service which includes a $15/month unlimited Mobile TV access plan.”

Adobe Opens the FLV and SWF Formats

Adobe announced today that they are opening the SWF and FLV formats via the Open Screen Project.

“The Open Screen Project is supported by technology leaders, including Adobe, ARM, Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco, Intel, LG Electronics Inc., Marvell, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Verizon Wireless, and leading content providers, including BBC, MTV Networks, and NBC Universal, who want to deliver rich Web and video experiences, live and on-demand across a variety of devices. The Open Screen Project is working to enable a consistent runtime environment ??? taking advantage of Adobe Flash Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR ??? that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and consumer devices, including phones, mobile internet devices (MIDs), and set top boxes.”

German Firms Patent Scented Text Messaging

Two German companies have patented technology for sending scented text messages between mobile phones. The chip, which carries a range of around 100 pre-defined scents, has been developed by the Institute of Sensory Analysis and interactive services firm Convisual and will be on the market in one to two years. Naturally, the makers think that the chip will be used for sending pleasant odors to friends and family ??? vanilla, rose and Christmas cinnamon are on the list ??? but surely the claim to be able to send ‘the smell of the beach and sunshine’ is a little optimistic? SMS stink bombs cannot be far away.

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