Peter Sayer
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Top EU court hedges on question of hyperlinking legality in Playboy case
To the old legal presumption of innocence until proven guilty, the European Union's highest court has added another: innocence until proven profitable.It's OK for websites to hyperlink to an image published elsewhere without the rights holder's permission -- as long as they don't know that, and don't make a profit from it, the Court of Justice of the EU ruled on Thursday.The ruling concerned Dutch website GeenStijl, accused by Playboy of linking to an Australian website that published, without the magazine's permission, a photoshoot it had commissioned with Dutch TV personality Britt Dekker.Playboy's lawyers wrote to GeenStijl asking it to remove the link, but it refused -- and published a new link to another website hosting the photos without permission when they were removed from the Australian site. When the pictures disappeared from that site too, GeenStijl allowed its forum users to link to the photos on other sites.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Top EU court hedges on question of hyperlinking legality in Playboy case
To the old legal presumption of innocence until proven guilty, the European Union's highest court has added another: innocence until proven profitable.It's OK for websites to hyperlink to an image published elsewhere without the rights holder's permission -- as long as they don't know that, and don't make a profit from it, the Court of Justice of the EU ruled on Thursday.The ruling concerned Dutch website GeenStijl, accused by Playboy of linking to an Australian website that published, without the magazine's permission, a photoshoot it had commissioned with Dutch TV personality Britt Dekker.Playboy's lawyers wrote to GeenStijl asking it to remove the link, but it refused -- and published a new link to another website hosting the photos without permission when they were removed from the Australian site. When the pictures disappeared from that site too, GeenStijl allowed its forum users to link to the photos on other sites.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Consumers have no right to buy a PC without an OS, European court rules
Bare metal buyers beware: PC makers have no obligation to offer you a machine without an OS, the European Union's highest court has ruled.The case dates back to PC prehistory, a time when Vaio was still a Sony brand and Vista was the latest version of Windows.It all began on Dec. 27, 2008, when Frenchman Vincent Deroo-Blanquart bought a Sony Vaio laptop with Windows Vista Home Premium and various software applications installed. Deroo-Blanquart refused to accept the Vista end-user license agreement (EULA) when he first turned the PC on, and on Dec. 30, asked Sony to refund the part of the computer's €549 (then US$740) purchase price corresponding to the cost of the software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Intel buys chip maker Movidius to help bring computer vision to drones
Intel's RealSense computer vision platform has been lacking a low-powered way of recognizing what its depth-sensing cameras are seeing -- until now.The chip giant is buying Movidius, the designer of a range of system-on-chip products for accelerating computer vision processing.Movidius supplies chips to drone makers such as DJI and to thermal imaging company FLIR Systems, itself a supplier of DJI.Its chips help computers figure out what they are seeing through cameras like Intel's RealSense by breaking down the processing into a set of smaller tasks that they can execute in parallel.There are systems that already do this using GPUs, but those are relatively power-hungry, often consuming tens of watts. That's not a problem in fixed applications with access to mains electricity, or in cars, which have huge batteries and a way to recharge them. But in drones or other lightweight IoT devices, power consumption needs to be much lower.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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OpenOffice coders debate retiring the project
Concerns at the Apache Software Foundation that the Apache OpenOffice project it hosts might be failing have prompted a debate about retiring the project, and triggered the resignation of at least one member of the project's management committee. The office productivity suite was once a key element of efforts to build an open source alternative to Microsoft's dominance of the desktop.Now its remaining developers struggle to keep on top of security issues in the code, and the ASF Board has asked the project's management committee to explain itself and propose a remedy, committee chair Dennis E. Hamilton said in an email to project contributors last week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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OpenOffice coders debate retiring the project
Concerns at the Apache Software Foundation that the Apache OpenOffice project it hosts might be failing have prompted a debate about retiring the project, and triggered the resignation of at least one member of the project's management committee. The office productivity suite was once a key element of efforts to build an open source alternative to Microsoft's dominance of the desktop.Now its remaining developers struggle to keep on top of security issues in the code, and the ASF Board has asked the project's management committee to explain itself and propose a remedy, committee chair Dennis E. Hamilton said in an email to project contributors last week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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IBM’s Watson looks for a role in the home
Not content with helping cure cancers and winning Jeopardy, Watson wants to get inside our heads and our homes, whispering instructions into our wireless headsets and helping us do our laundry.That's the message from IBM's global head of Watson IoT, Harriet Green, in a keynote speech here at IFA in Berlin.IBM will work with appliance maker Whirlpool, TV and camera company Panasonic, wireless headphone designer Bragi and Withings owner Nokia to add Watson's cognitive computing capabilities to their products, the company said.Those cognitive capabilities could help devices talk with one another, or with us.For example, a washing machine could tell a dryer what program to use for the clothes it has just washed, or tell its owner when to order more detergent. Computer vision techniques could help security cameras distinguish between friends and strangers or identify suspicious activity. And natural language processing and text-to-speech capabilities could let wireless headphones translate for us or read us instruction manuals when our hands are full.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Sam Labs shows off a new educational electronics kit — with no wires
Perhaps you're old enough to remember when building interactive electronic devices involved breadboards, soldering irons and assembly code.Tell young people today that, though, and they won't believe you -- especially if they've used one of the educational electronics sets Sam Labs is showing at IFA in Berlin.The components in these sets are the same as you would find in beginners' electronics kits of the 1970s and 80s: lamps, photo sensors, pushbuttons, potentiometers, tilt switches and DC motors.The big difference is, there are no wires.Instead, the components are mounted on small plastic blocks each containing a USB-rechargeable battery and a Bluetooth module. This lets them talk to one another and to a host PC, phone or tablet running Sam Labs' visual programming app.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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A series of tubes: What’s next for home automation
"A series of tubes" is one of the most famous explanations of what makes the internet work, but it's also what many Europeans use to heat their homes. That's made room-by-room heating automation difficult -- until now.Heating systems in Europe typically circulate hot water from a boiler to radiators around the home, with the pump and boiler controlled by a central thermostat. Programmable timers can boost the temperature on winter evenings or lower it at night.Generally, though, such control is an all-or-nothing, whole-home affair, making it impossible to heat the living room only in the evening but warm the bathroom for a morning shower. Smart controllers like Nest and its European competitors Tado and Netatmo can't change that, as the series of tubes in most homes doesn't allow for independent control of different heating zones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Peanuts with a purpose: Sen.se unveils new smart sensors at IFA
Expecting people to figure out what its Cookie multipurpose smart sensors could be used for didn't work out so well for Sen.se. It's trying a different approach with its new Peanut sensors: application-specific packaging that sells the purpose, not the product.The first Peanut, launched Thursday, is a thermometer presented as a way to get alerts if a child's room gets too cold or a refrigerator too hot.Future Peanuts, all in the same 7.5-gram, 45 x 25 x 5 millimeter case, will contain different sensors and be packaged as an alarm clock/sleep monitor (SleepPeanut), a medication reminder (MedPeanut), or a remote control (PeanutButton). Sen.se plans to release a new reason to connect things to the internet every six weeks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Keezel’s wireless device protects hotel Wi-Fi , home IoT connections
In cryptography, the "man in the middle" is usually an attacker -- but when Keezel wants to get between you and the Wi-Fi connection in your hotel or your home, it's for your own good.After a long crowdfunding campaign, the company is getting ready to ship its Wi-Fi security device, also called Keezel, in October. Any orders it picks up at the IFA trade show in Berlin this week will be fulfilled from a second production run in November, said Keezel CEO Aike Muller.One problem Keezel aims to solve is that hotel and other public Wi-Fi services are often unencrypted, leaving your data wide open to eavesdropping by others in the area. If there is authentication, it's often only for billing purposes, and performed by a captive portal after the traffic has gone over the air in the clear.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Keezel’s wireless device protects hotel Wi-Fi , home IoT connections
In cryptography, the "man in the middle" is usually an attacker -- but when Keezel wants to get between you and the Wi-Fi connection in your hotel or your home, it's for your own good.After a long crowdfunding campaign, the company is getting ready to ship its Wi-Fi security device, also called Keezel, in October. Any orders it picks up at the IFA trade show in Berlin this week will be fulfilled from a second production run in November, said Keezel CEO Aike Muller.One problem Keezel aims to solve is that hotel and other public Wi-Fi services are often unencrypted, leaving your data wide open to eavesdropping by others in the area. If there is authentication, it's often only for billing purposes, and performed by a captive portal after the traffic has gone over the air in the clear.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Toshiba hopes cloudless smartphone backup will have a bright future
What will back up all the data on your smartphone, but doesn't physically exist? No, it's not another cloud backup service, it's the centerpiece of Toshiba Storage Peripherals' booth at IFA.The as-yet-unnamed (and unfinished) product will be about the size of a small plate, to judge by the prototype in a glass case on the booth. It will have a USB connection to charge your smartphone and back up its contents to an included 500 GB hard disk. There will be no cloud servers involved, and no internet connection needed: Everything will stay inside the device, said Toshiba's product manager for hard disks, Eun-Kyung Hong."This is for home backup where you know all your data is in your home, not in the cloud where you don't know whether it's secure or not," she said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Toshiba hopes cloudless smartphone backup will have a bright future
What will back up all the data on your smartphone, but doesn't physically exist? No, it's not another cloud backup service, it's the centerpiece of Toshiba Storage Peripherals' booth at IFA.The as-yet-unnamed (and unfinished) product will be about the size of a small plate, to judge by the prototype in a glass case on the booth. It will have a USB connection to charge your smartphone and back up its contents to an included 500 GB hard disk. There will be no cloud servers involved, and no internet connection needed: Everything will stay inside the device, said Toshiba's product manager for hard disks, Eun-Kyung Hong."This is for home backup where you know all your data is in your home, not in the cloud where you don't know whether it's secure or not," she said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Huawei picks new name, but no new technology, for ‘Nova’ phones
Practical and reliable is the image Huawei Technologies is trying to project with two new smartphones unveiled at the IFA tradeshow on Thursday. The two phones are aimed squarely at the mid-market, and feature tried and trusted technologies, according to Kevin Ho, president of Huawei's handsets product line. So it's strange that, for phones with so little novelty, Huawei has decided on the name Nova. The Nova and Nova Plus are solid phones with rigid, confidence-inspiring aluminum cases. They run Android Marshmallow on eight-core Qualcomm processors with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of flash storage, expandable via a microSD slot. There's a fingerprint sensor on the back of the case.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Bang & Olufsen puts a new spin on the portable Bluetooth speaker
Audiophiles may roll their eyes at the very idea of portable Bluetooth speakers, but high-design hi-fi firm Bang & Olufsen just unveiled two of them in Berlin.The BeoSound 1 and 2 are certainly not pocket-sized and at €1295 (US$1495) and €1695 (US$1895) respectively they won't fit many pocketbooks either, but then that's never been the company's goal.The smaller of the two speakers, the BeoSound 1 is 327 millimeters high and weighs 3.5 kilograms. It's a sturdy truncated cone of smooth, polished aluminium, surmounted by a disk that appears to float above it. The internal battery will power it for four to 16 hours, depending on how loud you like to listen, and it can be plugged directly into an outlet to recharge: no wall wart or power brick is necessary.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Apple must repay $14.5 billion in underpaid taxes in Ireland
Apple's tax benefits in Ireland are illegal, and the company will have to pay up to €13 billion (US$14.5 billion) in back taxes, plus interest.That's the verdict European Commissioner Margrethe Vestager delivered Tuesday, wrapping up a two-year investigation of the company's tax affairs stretching back to 2003.The investigation found that Apple's effective tax rate on profit reported in Ireland was just €500 per million euros in profit, falling to €50 per million in 2014."I would have a feeling if my effective tax rate were 0.05 percent, falling to 0.005 percent. I would feel that maybe I should have another look at my tax bill," she said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Nutanix gets hyperconverged with PernixData and Calm.io
Nutanix has snapped up a couple of companies, PernixData and Calm.io, to extend its enterprise cloud platform.The company competes with the likes of Simplivity, Cisco Systems, EMC, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise on the delivery of hyperconverged infrastructure, a term it is credited with coining.The Calm.io acquisition will take Nutanix a step closer to its goal of delivering application and service orchestration, runtime lifecycle management, and policy-based governance across all application environments. The company plans to lean on Calm.io's devops automation capabilities to add new cloud automation and management capabilities to its existing software stack.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Privacy Shield data transfer agreement now shelters 200 companies
There are now 200 companies standing behind Privacy Shield, the framework agreement allowing businesses to process the personal information of European Union citizens on servers in the U.S.Companies must register with the International Trade Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce to be covered. It's a self-certification process, so the ITA is only checking that the forms are filled in correctly, not that companies are necessarily complying with all 13,894 words of the rules. The Privacy Shield rules are needed to ensure that EU citizens' personal information is afforded the same legal protection in the U.S. as required under EU law.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Privacy Shield data transfer agreement now shelters 200 companies
There are now 200 companies standing behind Privacy Shield, the framework agreement allowing businesses to process the personal information of European Union citizens on servers in the U.S.Companies must register with the International Trade Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce to be covered. It's a self-certification process, so the ITA is only checking that the forms are filled in correctly, not that companies are necessarily complying with all 13,894 words of the rules. The Privacy Shield rules are needed to ensure that EU citizens' personal information is afforded the same legal protection in the U.S. as required under EU law.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here