December 2011

HTC to remove feature that infringes Apple patent

HTC, Asia's second-biggest maker of smart phones, can tweak the technology in its handsets to avoid a U.S. trade agency ban.

Dealing with the threat from Apple's and Samsung Electronics' new devices may prove tougher. The U.S. International Trade Commission said that, beginning in April, it would ban the sale of HTC phones that infringed an Apple patent on so-called data detection, such as touching a phone number or an address in an e-mail to dial or find the address on a map. HTC responded by saying it will remove the offending features from its phones. Keeping the handsets on the market solves HTC's immediate challenge after becoming the top selling vendor in the United States. Samsung's Galaxy Nexus and Apple's faster, Siri-enabled iPhone hit the market within the past quarter, posing a new threat to HTC's place in the $262 billion global mobile-phone market. The Taiwanese company is forecast to post its slowest annual sales growth and first profit decline since the 2009 economic crisis.

Apple Unlikely to Win Ban on Samsung Galaxy 10.1N, Court Says

Apple isn’t likely to succeed with a bid to ban sales of the amended Samsung Electronics Co.’s Galaxy 10.1N tablet computer, a German court said. The Dusseldorf court, which issued a sales ban on Sept. 9 against the Galaxy 10.1, is unlikely to grant Apple another one against the follower model Galaxy 10.1N, Presiding Judge Johanna Brueckner-Hofmann said. Samsung changed the device in a way that the court may now find as holding enough distance to the iPad.

Scribd protests SOPA with disappearing act

Scribd, which has aimed to do for document sharing what Spotify has done for music, is protesting two bills in Congress, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, by making some of the words in documents posted to its site disappear.

The site allows its members to post documents they’re reading or discussing, and the company is worried that the two bills — if broadly interpreted — could result in its site being pulled from the Web completely. “Congress is pushing through legislation that threatens the future of the Internet,” said Jared Friedman, CTO and co-founder of Scribd, in a statement. “With this legislation in place, entire domains like Scribd could simply vanish from the web. That’s why we’re showing our users just what SOPA and PIPA could do to Scribd and other sites. These bills aren’t just dry acronyms; they’re a direct attack on the underpinnings of the web.”

Many fliers refuse to turn off electronic gadgets

Gadget-dependent fliers are turning a deaf ear to flight attendants' instructions to turn off their devices during takeoff and landing, despite decades of government warnings, a USA TODAY investigation shows.

The investigation, which reviewed thousands of pages of technical documents and surveyed hundreds of frequent fliers, also confirms that the worry about electronics on planes is not baseless: The devices emit radio signals that can interfere with cockpit instruments and flight systems. "We really need to get the technical findings out to the public and tell them it's dangerous to use their portable electronic devices in-flight," says Bill Strauss, an electrical engineer whose doctoral thesis at Carnegie Mellon University studied use of electronic devices in-flight. Documents reviewed by USA TODAY include: more than 25 papers by electronics experts; presentations, papers and advisories by government aviation officials in the USA, Canada, the United Kingdom and Europe; congressional testimony; and Boeing research and information for airlines. The investigation also included: a review of government accident reports and airline pilots' incident reports; a survey of more than 900 frequent fliers; and interviews with Boeing, NASA and independent electromagnetic interference (EMI) experts, flight attendants and pilots unions, and college electrical engineering professors. Fortunately for air travelers, the probability of EMI is small, the technical papers say.

Small TV Stations to FCC: We Need Shared Services Agreements

Small-market television station representatives met with Federal Communications Commission staffers Dec. 19 to make their case for shared service agreements and other similar arrangements, pointing out they can be a local programming lifeline for stations whose pre-tax profit average plummeted by 95% between 1999 and 2009.

The FCC is preparing to vote, as part of a combined rulemaking proposal and inquiry, to look into whether those joint station arrangements, which can include joint operations, sales and news, violate the FCC's local ownership caps, which it plans to retain as part of the rulemaking portion of the item.

In their pitch to staffers with FCC Commissioners Robert McDowell and Mignon Clyburn, representatives of the Coalition of Smaller-Market Television Stations, the markets where FCC rules limit joint ownership, said that such agreements allow stations to preserve local -programming. They also tried to put in context the financial pressures on smaller stations that make such arrangements necessary. According to data submitted to the FCC and based on NAB TV financial Surveys, the pre-tax profit average for markets 50-210 went from $908,462 in 1999 to only $42,003 in 2009, the last year for which figures were shown. That is a drop of 95.4%. The figures were only slightly better for Big Four network affiliates, dropping from a $1,096,054 average pre-tax profit in 1999 to only $131,863 in 2009, down 88%. The coalition cited what it said were "real-world" examples of where SSA's has "saved and expanded local public service and diversity in news operations."

House Commerce Committee Urges ICANN to Delay Expansion of Generic Top-Level Domain Program

Members of the House Commerce Committee urged the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to delay expansion of the generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) program.

The members wrote:
“Last week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee Subcommittee on Communications and Technology held a hearing to examine the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) pending expansion of the generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) program. Although we believe expanding gTLDs is a worthy goal that may lead to increased competition on the Internet, we are very concerned that there is significant uncertainty in this process for businesses, non-profit organizations, and consumers. To that end, we urge you to delay the planned January 12, 2012, date for the acceptance of applications for new gTLDs. “Many stakeholders are not convinced that ICANN’s process has resulted in an acceptable level of protection. A wide coalition of interested groups, including top U.S. and multinational companies and large non-profit organizations, support the call for a delay. “Given these widespread concerns, a short delay will allow interested parties to work with ICANN and offer changes to alleviate many of them, specifically concerns over law enforcement, cost and transparency that were discussed in recent Congressional hearings."

Reps Walden, Stearns Request Update on FCC’s Backlog

As part of an ongoing effort by the House Commerce Committee to review and improve how the Federal Communications Commission operates, Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR) and Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns (R-FL) are requesting an update on the Commission’s backlog of petitions, complaints, and license applications. The committee last month released a report on the Workload of the FCC, which outlined the number of pending at items at the Commission based on July data.

The chairmen wrote:
“There is growing consensus that Federal Communications Commission (FCC) processes need to be reformed. Under both Democratic and Republican chairmen, the FCC has fallen into practices that weaken decision-making and jeopardize public confidence. The data reported to the Committee on Energy and Commerce (Committee) in July 2011 demonstrated that there have been substantial improvements in the handling of the Commission’s workload since Chairman Genachowski joined the Commission. Nevertheless, the Commission still faces significant challenges in its work, including a significant backlog of unanswered petitions and unheard consumer complaints. For example, the Commission had 5,328 petitions, more than a million consumer complaints, and 4,185 license applications that had been sitting for more than two years as of July 2011. This letter seeks updated data regarding the FCC’s current workflow.”

Hold those caps: The average web page is now almost 1MB

Mobile broadband caps might not be putting the hurt on most mobile subscribers yet, but data usage is going to keep creeping up. And that’s without people doing any more actual browsing. The HTTP Archive charted the growth of the average web page and found that average web pages have grown from 726 KB a year ago to 965 KB now. The 33 percent jump is due in large part to more images and third-party scripts like ads and analytics. Javascript content, spurred on by the rise of HTML5, has grown over the last year by 44.7 percent, according to analysis by Royal Pingdom.

Companies Should Communicate Via Social Media

Got social? You’d better, according to new research conducted by an assistant professor of communications at New York University on behalf of customer-relationship manager Conversocial. Among social media users, a slight majority -- 50.7% -- now report using related services to communicate with corporations, the study of some 500 consumers found. With the average age of 38, 78% of respondents agreed that either social media platforms would soon replace other means of customer service altogether, or become the dominant way for consumers to communicate with corporations. The nationwide study was conducted during the last two weeks of November by Liel Leibovitz, an assistant professor of communications at NYU.

Petition Aims to Digitize U.S. History

The Center for American Progress think tank and the transparency group Public.Resources.Org want to turn the vast holdings of the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, the Government Printing Office and other government agencies into the core of a national digital public library.

"We are not necessarily suggesting that the federal government immediately undertake an ambitious effort to scan [all government] holdings," CAP Chairman John Podesta and Public Resources President Carl Malamud wrote in an online petition titled "Yes we Scan." "We believe it would require a decade-long commitment to digitization to make our nation's cultural, scientific, educational, and historical resources available, but we can't even begin that discussion unless we know how big the problem is," they wrote. The authors suggest President Obama appoint a commission to investigate the government's full archival holdings and what it would take to bring it online.

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