20
February
2008
|
06:59 AM
America/Los_Angeles

Newswatch 2.20.08: Bill Gates has a lot to say

Gates to China: Monopoly, not censorship is way to go

[IDG] "I don't see any risk in the world at large that someone will restrict free content flow on the Internet," he said. "You cannot control the Internet." (Good thing MSFT is buying YHOO, then, to get the message across.)

Judge: RIAA suits are A-OK

[Ars] Despite a litany of wrong doing, including trying to contact Andersen's young daughter at school and her apartment building without Andersen's knowledge or permission, the judge said the plaintiff needed more specifics. Lory Lybeck, Andersen's attorney, told Ars that he plans to refile and move ahead with the lawsuit. "The judge spent about 45 minutes to an hour discussing exactly what she was looking for in an amended complaint," Lybeck said.

P2P guy doesn't like new, improved Comcast

[Ars] Sanford Snidner says that his service will often "slow to a crawl" when using file-sharing applications and that he feels "betrayed" by Comcast's actions. "I'll bet most paying customers out there have no idea that Comcast is secretly blocking and slowing down their high-speed Internet service," Sidner said in a statement. "It cuts at the heart of the service we all purchased."

Judge didn't count on Wikileaks' Swedish connection

[NYT] The records for the site’s I.P. address indicate that it is hosted by PRQ, based in Stockholm. PRQ is owned by two founders of the Pirate Bay. PRQ has gone out of its way to host sites that other companies wouldn’t touch. It is perhaps the world’s least lawyer-friendly hosting company and thus a perfect home for Wikileaks, which says it is “developing an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis.”

DVD Jon's DoubleTwist rips away DRM

[Wired] “Every time this dude releases a hack I’m not interested in using, I end up being forced to download a new patch from Apple for my iTunes/iPod if I want to buy new music.”

More wisdom from Bill: No MSFT-YHOO culture clash

[News.com] "Yahoo wants to do breakthrough software," Gates told CNET News.com. "The engineers there want to compete very effectively against Google or any other thing that comes along, so I don't think there is really a different culture. ... "Jerry Yang to his credit has kept a lot of very top engineers that have been just doing their work and improving those things. That's why we see the combination as so powerful."

YHOO embraces Google-built software for search

[TechCrunch] Hadoop is an open-source implementation of Google’s MapReduce software and file system. It takes all the links on the Web found by a search engine’s crawlers and “reduces” them to a map of the Web so that ranking algorithms can be run against them. Yahoo is replacing its own software with Hadoop and running it on a Linux server cluster with 10,000 core processors.