And pigs flew too: DRM-free songs from iTunes soon?
Over a year after iTunes began offering music without copy protection from EMI titles, Apple is in discussions with the other three top recording companies about acquiring DRM-free songs, according to two music industry sources. This would be a huge victory for opponents of the restrictive DRM for iTunes (the reason many of my friends don’t use it). Rhapsody is now offering many MP3 downloads without DRM protection, and has been for several months now, so iTunes had to respond.
The talks are still preliminary and no deals have been finalized, but one source said one of the major labels is “very close to an agreement”. Rumors have been gathering on the Internet for a week that Sony would soon be offering music without the controversial digital rights management software, but for now, that’s just talk.
Spokespeople for Apple and the major labels declined to comment, citing still ongoing talks. My assumption is that it will get done, and the landscape of downloadable songs will be changed forever.
Should the deals get done, the songs offered by Apple’s iTunes would no longer be restricted to playing on Apple devices, such as the iPhone or iPod. This has been one of the main criticisms of iTunes music for a long time (Apple blames the labels for insisting on DRM, which sounds like blame-slinging to me, but…we digress).
More details here about this story.
Seven years for a patch? Say it isn’t so, Microsoft
Microsoft has (finally and tentatively) offered an explanation as to why it took the company seven years to release a patch for a known vulnerability and security issue.
The flaw, which lies in the Microsoft Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, was finally addressed Tuesday in Microsoft security bulletin MS08-068. The issue could enable an SMB Relay attack, which would allow an attacker to install programs; view, change or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights remotely, and it wouldn’t be used to see what cool songs you have in your iTunes.
Christopher Budd, a security manager in the Microsoft Response Center, said in a blog post last week that while Microsoft had been aware of the vulnerability, fixing it would have broken customer network applications, which is sort of understandable, but considering the resources of MS, no excuse for this really, in this writer’s humble opinion.
More about this here.
PC Makers, the Economy, and who will survive (and thrive)
Commercial (and consumer) spending on technology is expected to drop in the next year, and the PC industry is bracing for a big impact, perhaps even more than many sectors.
Already beginning to feel the effects of sagging prices, thinning margins, and oversaturated markets in North America and Europe, there’s clearly going to be a shakeout among the biggest players as the economy enters a full-blown recession. Most believe a recession is already here.
Intel’s ominous warning this week that the company sees dropping demans for its chips signaled that the worst is still to come for PC makers as they navigate the current economic storm. So how will the five biggest producers of PCs, which account for about 54 percent of all PCs sold, fare as demand wanes and prices drop?
Will Dell be the king of the crop? Not likely. They’ll weather the storm, but be badly bruised for the ordeal. Their recent cost cutting and expansion of sales around the world and into different markets will save it from long-term damage most likely.
According to several industry pundits, it’s Hewlett-Packard that will fare the best. Being the top PC vendor in the world for the last two years, they appear best positioned to weather a recession, should it officially arrive.
This article discusses why this may be the case.
iPhone 2.2 Firmware Update may be out on the 21st of November?
It appears an important update for the iPhone is nearing release, much sooner than many had predicted.
While the iPhone OS 2.1 software update is still settling in among a few users, and had made significant improvements for many users, there’s a rumor flying around now that the next firmware version update might be coming a little quicker than most thought. Testing is going well, and according to an inside tester, the iPhone OS v2.2 will be released into the market on Nov. 21st, 2008.
That’s about 10 days from now. But though it brings quite a number of new features (full support for Google Maps, downloadable podcasts among the big ones), it still lacks copy/paste and a number of other things iPhone people have been clamoring for since the beginning. There’s always time later on, but I can guess a number of iPhone users may be growing impatient already.
This date is really just a rumor, so take it with a grain of salt.
Wi-Fi landscape to change: AT&T acquires Wayport
A huge shake-up in the world of Wi-Fi (which in turn impacts phones that use it, like the iPhone) today: AT&T announced that it will acquire Wayport, a Wi-Fi services provider for dozens of companies, for $275 million in cash. It’s one of the best deals of the year in the industry, in this writer’s humble opinion.
And this means what? The addition of a ton of new hotspots across the US, which increase the total number of US based AT&T Wi-Fi hotspots to almost 20,000 (and over 80,000 worldwide). This is not only majorly convenient, but a huge selling point to buy Wi-Fi enabled phones from AT&T.
As mentioned, Wayport’s hotspots are in lots of locations, such as: hotels (Four Seasons, Wyndham, Marriott Vacation Club), McDonald’s, HealthSouth and Sun Healthcare locations, hospitals and more. The price they paid was cheap, when you honestly consider the ramifications of the deal overall.
The deal is expected to be fully implemented by the end of the year or so.
You knew it would happen: YouTube to offer feature length films
Hollywood has discovered YouTube. Some would say “It’s about time!”, and some would say, “Long movie clips and copyrighted stuff are already on YouTube, so what’s the big deal?”
YouTube will begin offering feature films produced by at least one of the biggest Hollywood movie studios, probably starting in December, according to an inside executive with an entertainment company.
For months, Google, YouTube’s parent company, has been talking to the major film companies about launching a strreaming movie service that would be ad-supported, according to reports on a number of websites. It’s expected to launch (assuming things go well) in the next “30-90 days” according to insider statements.
The usual concerns are springing up: why bring ads to the site, will the site start charging at some point for services that are already free, etc. but this could be a boom for the small indie films to help them get an audience without the expense typically associated with getting one.
More of the details here: Link
Sunday’s Techie Notebook
Here we are with another techie Notebook for Sunday. Here are my short takes on a few things making news on this cloudy, cold morning (Northern CA, USA):
- Windows 7 has hit the BitTorrent download sites apparently. But it’s a pre-beta from ages ago, and people are saying it isn’t different enough from Vista to bother. When you download a really old build without all the changes made, this is what often happens. Various other publications with access to newer builds and minus the anti-Microsoft agenda are claiming it really is a step up usability (and stability) wise from Vista. We’ll see. I’m taking a wait and observe approach after the disappointment of Vista.
- An inside source has stated that electronics giant Panasonic is in talks to buy out and absorb Sanyo. This seems to be the direction of corporate survivial these days: Merge. It would cost around 6 billion USD for it to happen, so its not a done deal yet, but if completed, it would cause some major ripples in the electronics industry and make Panasonic the largest elec. corp in Japan in terms of sales.
- Remember that big Android security flaw we reported here a few days ago? Well, they patched it up according to this article. Reports are that the update went well and all is good in Android land.
New Google Chrome browser beta due out in a few days
Google will soon begin seeding a third beta version of its Chrome Web browser, a release that fixes up bugs, improves performance, and shores up security weaknesses. Chrome is Google’s foray into browsers that’s supposedly faster and more flexible than IE. Many say over time, it could supplant IE, but it still needs a good amount of polish.
Features in the new version include: better performance for plug-ins such as Flash and Silverlight; fewer crashes, support for scrolling with a touchpad, and better performance for people who browse the Web through a proxy.
More details about the new update and improvements here: Link
This product could be an essential part of Google’s strategy with Android going forward, so we’ll keep an eye on it as it develops.
Wireless paradise (and smart PR): Free Wi-Fi for AT&T iPhone users
AT&T is now offering free wi-fi for its iPhone customers. No, this isn’t like the other two times. It’s actually true this time.
Here’s the notice posted on AT&T’s Web site. There are over 17,000 hot spots around the country that can now be accessed by iPhone customers, free. This is a pretty big boost for the iPhone (at a time when it didn’t need it really). It’s been confirmed by several websites already as being accurate.
The free Wi-Fi will be available wherever AT&T offers a Wi-Fi hot spot, which includes several restaurant chains, airports, and (the many) Starbucks coffee shops.
iPhone subscribers should have received text messages on Wednesday alerting them to the new perk. But it appears that not everyone received the message. It seems (according to reports from CNET and several other sites) that some (as in, almost all) subscribers did not get the message. Difficult to believe that’s accidental, but….oops?
AT&T has already been offering free Wi-Fi to its broadband customers since the middle of last year. And in mid-January it announced it would offer its LapTop Connect subscribers, who use a 3G Aircard, free Wi-Fi access as well. Good things all the way around.
Join the Crowd: Cable Company Cox to ramp up their offerings to include wireless service
Cable company Cox Communications will add cell phone service to its service bundle starting in 2009. But will anyone pay attention or care in the crowded field of wireless providers? Maybe.
The cable operator announced Monday that it will partner with Sprint Nextel to resell its wireless service to customers in its cable territory. Cox already bundles high speed Internet, phone, and TV service, similar to other cable companies like Comcast do. And soon it will add wireless service for a quadruple play offering that could be interesting depending on the price point.
“Wireless service will be a key driver to Cox’s future growth,” Cox President Pat Esser has stated.
But Cox isn’t stopping with just reselling Sprint’s wireless service, which in itself isn’t big news. It also plans to build its very own 3G wireless network, and plans to eventually build a 4G network using LTE technology. The company will use the nearly $550 million worth of bandwidth it bought in the Federal Communication Commission’s AWS and the 700 MHz wireless auctions.
As consumers become more mobile, wireless service is quickly becoming an important consideration for cable operators. But getting into the wireless game won’t be easy for Cox, which faces an already saturated and competitive wireless market and an expensive network build-out, and it’ll take a few years to know if they can break from the pack.
This isn’t Cox’s first time in this rodeo. In 2005, Cox Communications, Comcast, Time Warner, and Advance/Newhouse Communications, joined up with Sprint to form Pivot, and that was supposed to develop wireless services that the cable operators could bundle and resell to their customers. Nearly three years later, and the Pivot brand is dead, more or less.
This time around, Cox plans to use its existing voice switching technology and fiber within its network footprint to build the wireless network. The company will be building the service from the ground up as opposed to just bolting on a service from the outside. A nice philosophy, but the plan sounds expensive and risky, and it’s less clear whether Cox’s latest strategy will work considering that more than 85 percent of Americans already subscribe to cellular phone service of some kind.
Cox will have to offer a great deal to get people to switch or start up new service. We’ll see.
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Recent Posts
- And pigs flew too: DRM-free songs from iTunes soon?
- Yahoo! CEO to step down, and leave a big mess behind
- Black Friday is coming, but are the deals what people are hoping for?
- Seven years for a patch? Say it isn’t so, Microsoft
- PC Makers, the Economy, and who will survive (and thrive)
- “Vista Capable”? Well, not quite…
- Reports: Windows 7 may not improve performance much
- iPhone 2.2 Firmware Update may be out on the 21st of November?
- Circuit City files for bankruptcy: And so the wheel turns
- MGM first to post feature-length films to YouTube
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