Google and YouTube argue that they are innocent in the copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom because they are protected under the DMCA Safe Harbor provisions. But Safe Harbor only protects websites that have no knowledge of infringement yet YouTube founders clearly knew of and almost entirely depended on pirated content. One YouTube co-founder even uploaded stolen content himself.

AT&T has announced an interesting “ZERO Draw” phone charger that draws no power when not charging a phone.

Settle on a talking point, please.

Often the discussion surrounding Internet usage caps also revolves around some sort of transparency. Generally speaking, no matter what ones stance on usage caps is, all can agree that being transparent about monthly bandwidth use should be apart of a subscribers user account with their ISP. Inlate 2009 Comcast answered this call by launching their Usage Meter service in Portland, Oregon.

Earlier last month, I found that YouTube’s HTML5 beta wasn’t even worthy of being beta. Three weeks after that, Jan Ozer ran some CPU performance tests between YouTube Flash and HTML5 on Mac OS X and Safari and found that CPU performance was better on HTML5.

It appears that our friends to the north are getting a little added attention on Twitter, not for the Olympics but focused rather on the telecom sector. Back in the spotlight is the infamous Berkman report describing how Canada is falling behind the rest of the world in broadband connectivity.

Working Assets/Credo Mobile, a telecommunications company, freely lists the $45,520 they gave to Free Press in 2007. At the time, according to their 990 filing, Free Press’ campaign Director Tim Karr was making $80,000 per year. So the Working Assets contribution amounted to more than half of Tim’s salary.

Tim’s claim that neither he nor Free Press have taken business money is demonstrably false.

In the last few years, to protect copyright and prevent piracy, game publishers have had to start moving toward some rather extreme forms of protection. Of course gamers today never had the experience I had growing up where I had to plug a security circuit into the I/O port to play some Sierra games on my Apple IIGS Woz Edition. Video game DRM (Digital Rights Management) used to prevent piracy and the software winding up on all the top torrent sites is a big issue these days. But some of the most egregious forms of DRM have simply been smashed by the hacking and torrenting community.

Larry Dignan at ZDNet has done some excellent investigative journalism on the Devil Mountain Software (DMS) scandal and the story gets more bizarre by the minute.  It’s an extremely complex fiasco that needs to be read to be believed, but the gist of the story goes as follows.
It all started with a dubious “Alarming” report from DMS‘ Randall C. Kennedy (AKA “Craig Barth”) claiming that Microsoft Windows 7 consumes too much memory resources on personal computers led to wide scale condemnation from various technology columnists/bloggers.   If the original report which was filled …

It took 90 minutes but Tuesday evening’s panel discussion about the future of news ultimately devolved into a predictable attack by media “reformers” on commercial media and communications companies that see the Internet as their “plaything.” Robert McChesney of Free Press whined about having to battle “King Kong and Godzilla on steroids,” and Jane Hamsher of the blog Firedoglake accused telecom and media companies of cannibalizing the Internet.