For everything from family to computers…
Following rumors over the weekend, Global Payments—a massive international credit-card processor—has confirmed that it suffered a massive security breach. Hackers managed to acquire customer information from up to 1.5 million accounts across North America. As far as we know, every major credit card provider is affected. More »
from Gizmodo
France’s three-strikes anti-piracy law is one of the strictest in the world. It employs private companies to scan file-sharing networks for copyright infringement and sends warnings to pirates if they’re caught red-handed. The law, enforced by a French authority called Hadopi, was instated 17 months ago to the applause of music copyright holders and their representatives. Although an early study originally showed piracy had actually increased after the anti-P2P law passed, Hadopi released a report this March saying French ISP users had significantly decreased their illegal file sharing. Despite that announcement, the French music industry still saw a decline in revenue.
Hadopi used the reports of two different companies to ascertain the decrease in pirated traffic. One metric said illegal data sharing on peer-to-peer networks decreased by 43 percent; another survey used a different methodology and saw a 66 percent decrease in illegal P2P traffic. While Hadopi only monitors peer-to-peer networks, its recent study noted there’s “no indication that there has been a massive transfer in forms of use to streaming technologies or direct downloads.”
For all the fanfare in Hadopi’s 14-page report celebrating the crackdown on music and video piracy, the music and video industries in France did not see increased profit in 2011 compared to the year before. The overall recorded music industry saw a 3.9 percent loss, and France’s video market dropped 2.7 percent overall.
The depressed sales likely won’t take copyright holders off the warpath. In fact, both music and video industries saw significant increases in purchases of digital media. In music, download revenues increased by 18.4 percent. Streaming and subscriptions revenue grew by 73 percent, largely due to the rising popularity of Spotify and Deezer. According to a domestic video publisher’s group, video-on-demand sales increased 50 percent.
An article on the French website Numerama also noted that streaming music played a large part in increasing sales of digital music downloads, and surprisingly, concert tickets. Streaming music did not, however, influence a user’s impetus to buy CDs.
These numbers show that despite the hemming and hawing about piracy eating up entertainment industry revenue, the transition from physical discs to digital files is a huge factor in negative growth. No matter what, music industry officials are unlikely to let up on piracy. More than likely, they will adopt the argument that media sales would be even lower without ISP monitoring.
from Ars Technica
In a final vote of 236 to 184, the amendment was put to rest
Confused over Apple’s liberal use of the 4G moniker? The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission reckons you have a point and took those concerns to Apple Australia. The company has now responded to the country’s federal court, offering to contact — by email — everyone who bought the retina-screened slab and promise a refund if they felt misled over its connectivity capabilities. Apple will also amend its point of sale details to explain that while it can connect to 4G (LTE) networks in the US and Canada, it won’t connect to Australia’s own next-generation network offered by Telstra. Apple also thinks that the existence of HPSA capability — and its nebulous definition as either a third-generation or fourth generation network — in the Land Down Under meant it could still hold onto those 4G credentials.
from Engadget
Red Hat today announced that it has crossed the billion-dollar mark in revenue, with $1.13 billion in the fiscal year that ended February 29.
Red Hat is unique in becoming the first vendor of its size to make all or nearly all of its money from building, maintaining, and selling open source software. We examined the company’s long journey in the recent article, “How Red Hat killed its core product—and became a billion-dollar business.” Red Hat’s quarterly earnings announcement today shows that the company did cross a billion, as expected, with $297 million in fourth quarter revenue, up 21 percent over the previous year’s fourth quarter.
For the entire 12 months ending Feb. 29, Red Hat pulled in $965.6 million in subscription revenue, and $167.5 million in training and services, for a 25 percent year-over-year improvement. Net income was $35.97 million for the quarter and $146.6 million for the full 12 months. Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin praised Red Hat in a blog post today, saying “This achievement will finally put to bed the argument that ‘nobody can make money with open source.'”
Red Hat is most famous for Red Hat Enterprise Linux along with its contributions to the Linux kernel, but the company builds and sells many enterprise software products in addition to its flagship distribution. As we noted in our previous story, the only Red Hat technology that hasn’t been completely released under open source licenses is the OpenShift platform-as-a-service software, which is based largely on the 2010 acquisition of Makara. Red Hat has good news on that front too—the source code for the core technology behind OpenShift will be released on April 30.
from Ars Technica
When Sprint announced that they had formed some sort of partnership with Google to allow easy Google Voice setup on their phones, I was jealous. Google Voice is easily one of my favorite apps, something I have mentioned a handful of times now. But with Sprint’s partnership, Google has given their customers an MMS option that normal GV users do not have access to. As most GV users know, the only real downside to the service is the fact that picture and video messages (MMS) cannot be sent or received. Sprint users can though, in a round about way through their email.
So when we heard today’s news that Google is in talks with other carriers to offer a similar partnership, we couldn’t help but get a little excited. Well, not too excited. As you may recall, Google said that they were in talks with other carriers back in October to allow for MMS-to-email forwarding, only we have yet to see the service work on any other device besides one that is connected to Sprint.
The SMS and MMS game is nothing but pure profit for carriers, and Google Voice is something that could serve to cut those down dramatically. I’m not saying that I don’t believe that we will have GV on a variety of other carriers with MMS support in the near future, but it would surprise me a bit. So cross some toes and hope that Google and others can come to agreement. In the mean time, thank Buddha that carriers haven’t chosen to block the service like they have done with Google Wallet.
from Droid Life
Last week we reported that Nokia, Motorola and RIM were squaring up to Apple over a disagreement about the future of nano-SIM cards. Now, Apple is proposing that its patented design could be used for free, by anyone—dependent on one, rather large, condition. More »
from Gizmodo