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Despite being inferior to some video rental alternatives, the Apple initiative may still be successful. The seamless integration the company offers is certainly appealing, and the new service is clearly the easiest way to watch movies on both the
iPod and
iPhone. In comparison to pay-per-view the pricing is competitive, and I don’t see cable and satellite companies dropping pay-per-view anytime soon. So perhaps the new iTunes movie rental store will turn out to be successful after all.

While I don’t like the terms of the service, and while I wish that Apple had held a stronger line in negotiating a deal that was more flexible for the consumer, I will probably find myself renting the occasional movie from the iTunes store regadless. I highly doubt that Apple has another iPod on their hands, but with enough users taking advantage of the rental feature every once in a while, the new service may prove to be economically sustainable.

It’s no secret that those at the top of many corporate food chains are a bit out of touch with every day life, and studio executives are a perfect example of this phenomenon. Just as George H. W. Bush demonstrated his aristocratic naivete by expressing surprise after first seeing a check-out scanner on the 1992 campaign trail, it’s quite likely that many of Hollywood’s top guns haven’t rented a video since, well, Top Gun.

Compared to these other offerings, Apple falls flat. The fact that HD content isn’t available for most users is yet another strike against them; it’s unclear why Apple excluded the iTunes store from renting HD content, but some have speculated it is to prevent piracy.

Steve Jobs’ keynote at this year’s MacWorld included the announcement of four new products: the new MacBook Air, Time Capsule, an update to the iPhone and iPod Touch, and a revised Apple TV with movie rentals through both the Apple TV and the iTunes store. It’s clear that Jobs is excited about the new offering and the studios are also quite pleased with the terms of the new service, but what about John and Jane Consumer?

The terms and pricing of Apple’s rental service leave much to be desired. At my local supermarket there is a DVD Play kiosk offering $1.49 rentals with a $.99 fee for each additional day. Blockbuster has abandoned late fees, and Netflix provides a rotating supply of DVD rentals at prices starting at just $8.99 that also includes unlimited PC viewing.

Apple offers a service that is more expensive than DVD Play, is subject to the strict time restrictions that Blockbuster ditched months ago, and is far less flexible than Netflix. On one message board, someone suggested that Apple’s rental terms are a throwback to the 1980’s and I have to agree. In fact, as I read all the details about the program I was reminded of renting videos at the local Videozone when I was a kid: new releases were $3.99 and older videos were $2.99; it’s almost as if the deal had been struck in a business environment from another decade.

At the new iTunes rental store, visitors can check out movies from all of the major Hollywood studios. For new releases, users are charged $3.99 and catalog rentals are $2.99. HD rentals were also introduced this week at $4.99, but are only available through Apple TV. Once downloaded the movies will remain accessible for 30 days, but will only stay active for a 24 hour period after pressing play.

In 1987, the Dead Kennedy’s released an album titled “Give Me Convenience, or Give Me Death,” and for those who live by that credo, the new iTunes service delivers hands down. The Netflix streaming service is a sweeter set-up in many ways, but it only runs on Windows and installing a second operating system on your
Mac is probably not an ideal solution.

(Lead from music-business blog Coolfer.)

Digging a little deeper, it looks like the march will be a combination of outdoor party (live DJ performances) and seminar, with speeches and panels on subjects ranging from financial planning to the legal crackdown on mixtapes. I think this last point gets to the nut of the problem, and what the march is really about: the record industry quietly relies on mixtapes to publicize new hip-hop artists, at even as it’s seizing thousands of “illegal” CDs and arresting their creators on racketeering charges. The labels can’t have it both ways, and apparently the DJ community’s going to start making itself heard.

Speaking of mixtapes, last week the online mixtape service Muxtape shut down while it discusses licensing issues with the RIAA. Blogger yewknee.com has an pair of videos in which Muxtape founder Justin Ouellette discusses the legality of third-party online music sharing sites. No answers, but an interesting discussion nonetheless.

The official Million DJ March Web site has a post entitled “Why?” (no permalink; scroll to the bottom of the page) that isn’t much help either, saying that “there are very few laws protecting this art form as a craft and career” and referring ominously to “self-sufficient machines” that threaten the DJ’s career. Robots with turntables? No, probably just MP3 players plugged into the house sound system–no human required.

After reading to the end of this Boston Globe article about this weekend’s Million DJ March in Washington D.C., I was confused. What are DJs protesting?

One DJ interviewed in the article mentions that he had to fight with a club owner to get paid, and that DJs aren’t required to fill out W-2 tax forms. I’ve got news for him: unless you’re a union musician with an airtight contract, being ripped off is an unfortunately frequent part of the performing experience. It’s supply and demand–there are more musicians and DJs willing to perform than there are events, venues, and fans.

(Credit:
Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)

It was the second annual “Wiimbledon” tournament, which took over the cavernous Williamsburg bar known as Barcade–yes, it’s filled with vintage arcade machines–and pitted 128 Wiimote aficionados against one another in a tournament centered on the wildly popular Nintendo console. The idea was concocted by two members of the local tech community, Thrillist editor Steve Bryant and Morris King publicist Lane Buschel, and this year’s tournament happened to coincide conveniently with Internet Week New York.

But the crowd that Wiimbledon pulled in wasn’t particularly Internet Week-ish. Rather, the folks who showed up were a decidedly Brooklyn set, some wearing T-shirts promoting their small wacky-culture blogs and Web video shows. Costumes were encouraged, which meant that the bar was filled with people in ironic-preppy seersucker, goofy tennis outfits, and undersize gym shorts with knee socks and sweatbands.

The campiness of the tournament was reflected in the selection of winners: the Best Costume award went to Adam Samtur, who showed up dressed as the “Professor Chaos” character from South Park in a cape and an aluminum foil hat; the Most Dangerous Player award went to BushLeague.tv employee Matty Hirsch, who showed up with an entourage dressed up as Cobra Kai from The Karate Kid; runner-up Corey Craig played in a black-and-gold ensemble that looked like something off a basketball court in the late 1970s.

The winner, however, was slightly more low-key. Dylan Romero, who took home a boatload of pimped-out tennis equipment and Nintendo games, was dressed head to toe in white–which is what the average snooty tennis club mandates, anyway.

At Barcade, the Wiimbledon finals. Facing the TV in hot combat are Dylan Romero (in white) and Corey Craig (in bumblebee hues). Romero emerged the winner.

NEW YORK–This past weekend, the professional tennis world may have been focused on the antics of Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. But in the burgeoning sport of
Wii Tennis, all eyes were on Brooklyn on Saturday.

Somewhat surprisingly, MySpace representatives have confirmed to CNET News.com that the content of the press conference does not deal with anything involving the situation surrounding the death of 13-year-old Megan Meier. Last week, MySpace was reportedly issued a subpoena in the investigation. Meier hanged herself in 2006. She had been repeatedly harassed by a “boyfriend” on MySpace, whose profile turned out to be a fake persona created by an adult neighbor whose daughter had once been a friend of Meier.

MySpace has, for the record, not commented on the subpoena issued in the Meier investigation.

MySpace.com has informed media that it will be making a “major announcement in regards to Internet safety” on Monday morning at a midtown New York hotel.

This story has been updated to confirm the content of the press conference.

No other information was immediately provided except that MySpace’s chief security officer, Hemanshu Nigam, will be on hand, along with other representatives from the News Corp.-owned social-networking site.

The Associated Press, meanwhile, has reported that MySpace’s announcement relates to an agreement with 45 state attorneys general related to combating the presence of sexual predators on social-networking sites. MySpace has been working with state attorneys general since at least last year on the issue. According to the AP article, MySpace will be working to develop “age-verification and other technologies.”

As the company points out quite clearly, anyone can drive by your home and see it in all its glory without the help of Street View, so what’s the problem?

Look, I’m the first to say that privacy is an important issue and I’ve repeatedly taken ISPs and cell phone companies to task for the way they have acted on privacy issues in the past, but this is taking it too far.

Sorry to tell you this, but if someone really wants to find you, they’re not going to need Google Street View to do it. And believe it or not, that’s probably not even the first place they’ll look.

But does it invade your privacy and somehow make it easy to be targeted by a “bad person”? Uh, no.

Some obviously believe that Street View will help burglars pick their next target and others are of the opinion that it gives the public a full view of our lives during the most intimate moments.

According to Google, the company did not invade a family’s privacy by taking pictures of their home for Google Street View.

Hogwash.

Check out Don’s Digital Home podcast, Twitter feed, and FriendFeed!

Everything Google Street View captures you can see for yourself walking down the street. Girls in bikinis on Street View? See it for yourself driving down the street. Joe Q. Public walking down the street? I see it everyday doing the same thing. Front lawns that aren’t trimmed? Look out the front window.

According to the plaintiffs, Aaron and Christine Boring, Google’s Street View pictures hurt the value of their home and due to all that awful “mental suffering”, they want $25,000.

All I ever hear from these pro-privacy dolts is that anything that involves, well, anything even close to a person’s privacy, is off-limits. I have a newsflash, folks: that’s not true.

“Today’s satellite-image technology means that…complete privacy does not exist,” Google said in its response to the complaint. “Plaintiffs live in the 21st century United States, where every step upon private property is not deemed by law to be an actionable trespass…Unless there is a clear expression such as a gate, fence, or ‘keep out’ sign indicating that the public is not permitted to enter, anyone may approach a home by a walkway, driveway, or any other route commonly used by visitors, without liability for trespass.”

Can the privacy loons please stand up? Once up, please sit down and shut up.

Enough is enough. How many times do we have to be inundated with ridiculous stories like this before someone finally says what most of us should be thinking: the pro-privacy initiative is being taken too far.

“Plaintiffs’ privacy claims fail, among other reasons, because the view of a home from the driveway that can be seen by any visitor, delivery person, or telephone repairman is not private,” the company said in response to the suit, according to a copy posted at The Smoking Gun.

Google Street View gives us the ability to see everything we can see (and less) walking down the street. But just because it’s on the Web, we’re supposed to believe that it’s an invasion of privacy?

Google has every right in the world to take 360-degree photos of a street if it’s in the community’s best interest and if you ask me, it most certainly is.

At the risk of sounding like a Google apologist (which I am blatantly not), why are all these people making such a fuss over Google Street View? Can’t they get a grip and realize that, contrary to their megalomania, no one really cares what their home looks like and few (if any) people are looking up their address to see inside their bathroom windows on Street View?

Google Street View is nothing more than a service that allows people to see what a street looks like before they go there. It aides you in finding out where to park, what a building looks like, and even helps you decide if that’s a neighborhood that you would want to live in.

While I totally understand if a family doesn’t want to have someone in their window taking pictures while they’re showering, you mean to tell me that it’s an invasion of privacy when Google takes a picture of your home?

Please.

Of course, the family Google allegedly caused “mental suffering” to disagrees.

What a crock.

Read the full review of the Toshiba Satellite Pro U400.

We focus primarily on consumer laptops at CNET Reviews, but this week I looked at two well-designed models that target small businesses: the 13-inch Toshiba Satellite Pro U400 and the 14-inch Lenovo ThinkPad SL400.

Each configuration clocks in at just north of $1,000, stripping out some enterprise features that a small-business owner buying one laptop or even a handful probably doesn’t need and definitely doesn’t want to pay for. The Toshiba offers an interesting configuration, one that I feel cries out for more memory, which is an easy add. And the Lenovo includes a couple features not seen previously on ThinkPads.

Read the full review of the Lenovo ThinkPad SL400.

China, as well as India, are becoming the place for Dell to experiment, not only with products, but with different business models and with customers with no previously established sense of what to expect from Dell.

But is this the comeback that Dell has been promising, and investors have been waiting for? Not quite. However, it appears the company is at least on the right track. Though the No. 2 PC vendor in the world has fallen behind both HP and Acer in notebook sales, Dell showed improvement in the past year. Notebook revenue was up 22 percent over the past year, but just 2 percent from the previous quarter.

(Credit:
Dan Farber/CNET News.com )

This blog has been updated with Dell executive and analyst comments.

However, the company is making huge gains internationally. For the first time in the company’s history, sales outside of the U.S. reached 50 percent. Dell particularly has its eye on the booming Chinese market.

Analysts were expecting earnings of 34 cents per share and revenue of $15.4 billion to $16.2 billion. In after-hours trading Thursday, shares of Dell were up 7.5 percent.

It’s been over a year since Michael Dell hit the reset button, promising to revitalize his company that had fallen behind its main competitor, Hewlett-Packard. Dell admitted publicly at D6 Wednesday that his company had indeed missed a few very big trends, including retail and a focus on consumer products.

And it’s clear there’s still more change to come. Michael Dell said the company is still planning to introduce many more new notebook models by the end of this year. He specifically mentioned an “active back-to-school” season. Besides the already announced Latitude E series, it will be interesting to see if this is when Dell decides to introduce the mini-notebook Michael Dell was seen carrying around with him at the D6 conference in Carlsbad, Calif., Wednesday.

Cost reduction was one of the company’s main goals in the past year. Dell reduced its headcount by 3,700 people during the quarter, many in its consumer products divisions and in international sales, for a total of 7,000 in the past year, according to Carty. The company said in the same quarter a year ago it planned on removing 8,800 positions. Dell also said it has added about 2,700 employees through acquisitions, bringing the net employee reduction to 5 percent, and Carty emphasized that more thinning of company ranks is coming.

Carty specifically pointed to retail initiatives as one of the driver’s of the better-than-expected quarterly performance. Dell added 2,000 more retail locations worldwide in the past quarter, including Costco in the U.S., Best Buy in Canada, and several large Chinese outlets, to bring the total to 13,000 locations around the world.

But it’s still too early to tell if the company’s momentum in retail can be sustained.

“Are they getting a pop because they’ve just entered retail?,” asked John Spooner, analyst with Technology Business Research. “Retail didn’t get it fully in place until this January, so I wouldn’t pass judgment until Q4 this year.”

It was also a year ago that after telling his employees the company’s hallowed direct model was no longer “a religion,” Dell products first began showing up in Wal-Mart stores. Now Dell PCs and printers are available at many of the major electronics retail outlets worldwide.

“We believe China is going to become the largest retail market in the world for PCs,” Michael Dell said. Dell’s unit sales increased 140 percent in China over the last year, and the company plans to reach 3,500 retail locations in China alone by the end of the next quarter.

Unfortunately the timing isn’t great in regard to the U.S. economy. In the earnings announcement, Dell acknowledged “conservatism in IT spending in the U.S. particularly with its global and large customers as well as public, small, and medium business accounts.” The company said it expects the conservative spending trend to continue on through summer.

The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg interviews Michael Dell at the D6 conference this week.

The Round Rock, Texas, PC maker reported its first-quarter earnings Thursday, with revenue of $16 billion, a 9 percent improvement from a year ago, and earnings of 38 cents per share, a 12 percent increase.

It’s not a blow-out quarter, but Dell investors will likely be pleasantly surprised.

“I think our results demonstrate we made some progress, but still a lot more to be done,” said outgoing Chief Financial Officer Donald Carty, who is to be replaced by Brian Gladden on June 13.

Following a turbulent 2007, Thursday’s results were a more encouraging beginning for this year. “We’re beginning to see positive results in our performance,” founder and CEO Michael Dell said during a conference call with company investors Thursday afternoon. He pointed to growth in all business segments in all regions as the impetus. He said that while the industry grew 14 percent in unit shipments, Dell was able to grow 22 percent.

“In China you can blast out a run of 1 million notebooks, call them Dell ‘X,’ sell to distributors, and do pretty well,” said Spooner. It’s a great way for the company to test out products and market strategies before bringing them to their more established markets.

(Credit: Design Public)

I moved to New York about a month ago and now that the apartment hunt is over, my next project is to get all the necessary junk to fill my room. The first thing I need (read: want) is an alarm clock, and I am a CNETeer (read: nerd), so I’ve been looking into unique
iPod alarm clock radios.

(Credit: Design Public)

The radios are $200, $250, and $300, and can be purchased at Design Public.

In my search, I stumbled upon a batch of wooden radios designed by Singgih Kartono. They’re made of sustainable ebony wood and crafted by local Indonesian carpenters in areas of high unemployment. The radios come in three sizes, each with a slightly different shape but all with the same modernist innovation aesthetic, reminiscent of George Nelson or Paul McCobb.

The models feature an AM/FM radio, two shortwave bands, and a line-out port for connecting an external audio source. Kartono also includes an external radio antenna with a wooden washer on the end that helps to increase radio reception. Also, the radio can be powered by AA batteries. It would have been nice to have an analog clock over the speaker cover, but I can respect the Ramsian “Weniger, aber besser” (less, but better) approach.

We were very excited about the announcement from Windows Mobile–adoption of Flash on their devices–and the fact that we’ve shipped 0.5 billion devices now, non-PC devices. So we are also committed to bringing the Flash experience to the iPhone, and we will work with Apple.

During Apple’s shareholder meeting in March, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that full-blown Flash applications are “too slow to be useful” on the iPhone. He went on to say the mobile version of the Flash, called Flash Lite, is “not capable of being used with the Web.”

Whether and how Flash applications would run on Apple’s iPhone has been an open question since the device’s launch. Narayen’s comments indicate that Adobe will be able to create a version of Flash Lite for the iPhone by using the iPhone software developers kit (SDK) which was released earlier this month.

Well, you really believe that Flash is synonymous with the Internet, and frankly, anybody who wants to browse the Web and experience the Web’s glory really needs Flash support.

According to Seeking Alpha, here’s what Narayen had to say:

Even after Jobs’ comments about Flash and Flash Lite, Adobe touted the success of Flash Lite on other devices but still did not commit to bringing Flash applications to the iPhone.

We’ve evaluated the SDK. We can now start to develop the Flash player ourselves, and we think it benefits our joint customers. So we want to work with Apple to bring that capability to the device.

(Credit:
Adobe Systems)

Adobe Systems CEO Shantanu Narayen said the company intends to bring its Flash Player to Apple’s
iPhone.

Adobe executives have made clear their desire to have Web applications written with Flash, which run on a range of the mobile phones, to make their way to the iPhone.

But Apple has thus far not allowed it, apparently over concerns that Flash applications run too slowly.

During a conference call to announce Adobe’s first-quarter earnings on Tuesday, Narayen said Adobe “will work with Apple” to make sure that Flash applications can run on the iPhone.

Seeking Alpha has a transcript of a conference call. Narayen’s comment on the iPhone was in response to a question about getting Flash ported to other devices. (Microsoft announced earlier this week that it has licensed Flash Lite so that Flash applications can run on Windows Mobile devices.)

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen

Finally, the researchers have not said how long they plan to hang onto this data. As much as I criticize Google, at least they partially anonymize their server logs after 18 months.

While we can be asked to trust this research team not to share the data with others, there is little that they can do if presented with a government subpoena, or other lawful request. Furthermore, there is always the risk that they could accidentally lose the data, or be the victim of data theft.

An internal review by University of Colorado officials has found that a controversial research project conducted by a team of computer scientists did not constitute research misconduct. University lawyers have also stated their belief that the team probably did not violate US wiretapping laws.

Based on our assessment and understanding of the issues involved in your work, our opinion was that by any reasonable standard, the work in question was not classifiable as human subject research, nor did it involve the collection of personally identifying information. While the underlying issues are certainly interesting and complex, our opinion is that in this case, no rules were violated by your not having subjected your proposed work to prior IRG scrutiny. Our analysis was confined to this IRG (HRC) issue.

While I have strong personal objections to the methods employed by the researchers, the primary criticism in my original blog post was that the researchers had not sought a review of their project by university lawyers and the school’s human subjects review board before conducting their study. Given that the University of Colorado was able to conduct both of these within 12 hours of the publication of my blog post yesterday, it is difficult to see how seeking such reviews ahead of time would have been any significant burden.

IP addresses have been used by law enforcement to justify FBI raids on homes, by the record companies in copyright infringment suits, as well as in foreign countries, where suspects have been arrested and beaten because their IP addresses appeared in an incriminating log files.

Be Nice to Privacy

As I reported in a blog post yesterday, a team of researchers from both the University of Colorado and University of Washington recently presented a controversial study in which they recorded a limited portion of the communications of users of Tor — a popular anonymizing proxy network.

In a statement made to the Boulder Daily Camera newspaper today, spokesman Bronson Hilliard said that University attorneys described the wiretap law as “broad.” He added that “legal counsel’s opinion was that there’s no clear indication that there was any kind of criminal action on the part of the researchers.”

To be clear — my focus on this issue is not about enforcing the law, no matter how flawed it may be. There are many unjust laws that I despise, chief among them the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and I will eagerly defend researchers who violate these.

If the information was not sensitive and could be potentially used to identify Tor users, why would they need to take such care managing the data, and why could they not share it with others? If it is not personally identifying information, why don’t they put it online?

Personally Identifying Information

The researchers themselves admit that the data that they have collected is extremely sensitive. In their statement issued yesterday, they stated that “we took extreme caution in managing these traces and have not and will not plan to share them with other researchers.”

Communications privacy laws, unlike the DMCA, are (mostly) written for our protection. After spending the last several months criticizing AT&T, and later the US Congress’ complete capitulation for illegal wiretapping immunity, I do not see how I could rightfully defend these researchers. Yes, they had good intentions — but then, so might have the Bush Administration when it asked the telecoms to help it spy on millions of Americans.

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which governs
network surveillance and access to private stored communications is particularly difficult to understand, something the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals recognized when it described ECPA as “a complex, often convoluted, area of the law” (pdf). Computer scientists simply have no business making judgments about the legality of network monitoring and interception research — and should, as the EFF advises, seek legal advice before doing so.

While that may be the view of the University, there are certainly others that disagree. Back in February of this year, the European Union announced that it now considers IP addresses to be personally identifiable information.

“Safe” storage of data

The fact is that this information is extremely sensitive, and were it to fall into the wrong hands — an oppressive foreign government that does not take kindly to anonymous speech — users whose IP addresses could reveal their identity could soon find themselves subject to arrest, imprisonment or torture.

In reaching its decision, the University of Colorado review determined that the researchers did not collect any “personally identifying information” from users of the Tor network. This is in spite of the fact that for 15 days, the researchers collected the unique network addresses of each user sending data through their server.

According to a written statement posted by the research team, an internal university review conducted on the 24th of July 2008 found that:

The only safe and responsible way to handle this sensitive data is to delete it. Anything else is simply irresponsible..

In the last few weeks, there has been a significant amount of discussion of this issue, after a court ordered YouTube to hand over the IP addresses of millions of users to Viacom as part of its massive copyright infringement suit against the video sharing site. While Google (which own YouTube) has long argued that IP addresses are not personally identifying information, at least with regard to calls for the company to delete its own search log files, it rapidly changed its position once it was faced with the possibility of handing such data over to Viacom.