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Myanmar Internet Shut Down, But We Can Still Watch From Space
As previously reported, the pro-democracy rallies in Myanmar have been closely covered by regular reports coming out of the embattled nation via cellphone, email and even YouTube. The government's attempts to try and pollute the web with their own propaganda must not have worked, since on Friday morning, the government shut off Internet access, cut phone lines and confiscated mobile phones in an attempt to control the outflow of information about the rallies. Though this may have slowed reports, it's very difficult for the government to completely clamp down, so some news reports are still getting out through mobile phones and a few satellite uplinks to the Internet. Even if the junta is able to completely shut things down, events can still be monitored from satellites, which are providing evidence of potential human rights abuses conducted by the government. Now that its next actions are being played out under a vigilant global eye, hopefully Myanmar officials will make...

Forget Google Supporting Newspapers; Now Some Think The Gov't Should Prop Up Newspapers
It's no secret that many folks in the newspaper industry are freaked out by the market changes impacting what they do. However, we keep hearing increasingly bizarre suggestions for solutions. My personal favorite is still the idea that Google somehow has a moral obligation to just give money to journalists. The latest such suggestion may be even more far-fetched, with a long article at the Columbia Journalism Review suggesting it's time to start thinking about having the government prop up newspapers (via Romenesko). The good news is that many people asked about this suggestion respond with reasonable distaste (or outright horror) to the idea. The author of the piece brings up examples of government support for news operations, but in almost every case the scenario is quite different. Often, the gov't support is for getting something going in an areas where there's nothing, rather than propping up an industry that has had trouble adapting to a changing marketplace. The...

USPTO Panel Says Amazon's One-Click Patent Isn't Obvious
Due to the diligent work of a few determined individuals, the US Patent Office (once again) began to look into Amazon's infamous "one-click" patent. New prior art was demonstrated, and in an initial re-examination, the examiner rejected some of the claims in the patents, noting that they appeared to be obvious. Of course, patent appeals processes are long and involved, and after Amazon presented their side to a 3-judge panel, that panel has now ruled that the examiner did not do enough to show why the patent claims were obvious, suggesting that what many of us (including those who are skilled practitioners in the space) think of as obvious, won't be considered obvious. It sort of makes you wonder what it takes for the Patent Office to consider something obvious. Obviously, "obvious" has a different meaning to the US Patent Office than to most of us.

Revisiting The Muni-WiFi Debate
Over the past few years there's been an ongoing debate over the question of muni-wireless offerings, with most people falling into one of two camps: either totally against muni-broadband (to the extreme point of proposing laws against allowing it) or completely for it (to the extreme point of suggesting it's a natural right to have free WiFi). I don't fall into either camp, but tend to fall into the middle. I have no problem with municipal broadband offerings when there's a clear market failure. That is, when (for whatever reasons) incumbent providers are not doing enough to provide the service -- which may exist in quite a few places. Then, if the people want it, it seems perfectly reasonable, depending on how it's implemented. However, I do have a problem with the idea that every city needs to have municipally supported broadband.Tim Wu's latest article for Slate discusses why he believes muni-WiFi offerings have been such a flop lately and it includes a few problematic...

Report Suggests RIAA's Lawsuit-Happy Strategy Still Not Working
Marginal Revolution links to a new paper by economist Stan Liebowitz on the economic effects of file sharing on the recording industry. It's a response to an earlier paper that argued peer-to-peer file sharing has had little impact on CD sales. Leibowitz digs into the arguments and finds a number of problems. For example, one of the arguments in the original paper depends on the assumption that college kids use peer-to-peer networks less during the summer than during the school year. Unfortunately, Liebowitz presents data suggesting that's not true: in two of the three years they studied, file-sharing activity was actually slightly higher in the summer than the rest of the year. Liebowitz also faults the authors for failing to release their full datasets; he says he was unable to replicate several of their results using publicly available data. In the end, Liebowitz makes a pretty convincing case that file-sharing technologies are hurting the recording industry: industry...

Another Example Of How Patents Skew Medical Research
When it comes to patents, the argument for pharmaceutical patents is a lot more compelling than for many other areas. However, as you start to dig into the details, the argument for pharma patents becomes a lot more troublesome in that it creates incentives that have little to do with improving healthcare, and quite a lot to do with what can be patented. The monopoly power granted by patents pushes all research money into only things that can be patented, ignoring other possible cures, even if they can be both profitable and quite helpful. A recent GAO study found this to be a worrisome trend, noting that fewer new innovative drugs are being created -- with pharma firms instead focusing on ways to extend the patent protection on existing products by pulling a few tricks (such as "reinventing" Claritan as Clarinex just to get more patent coverage).William Stepp points us to an example of how this focus on patents has helped to hold back one doctor's promising research on...

Websites Still Designed For People Who Don't Use Them
When the executives at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia redesigned their site this year, they replaced a clean site design with new snazzy one filled with images, flash, and video. Unfortunately, while the redesign looked really pretty, regular users found it impossible to actually find any of the content that they were actually looking for. The web has already been around for more than a decade now, so it's sad to see that companies are still failing to understand why people visit their site and designing sites that people find frustrating to use. Every day, millions of internet users still click on the "skip" to get through the ubiquitous flash introduction screen that still stands as an annoying sentry to many websites. At what point will companies stop repeating the same mistakes over and over and over again? With the "Websites that Suck" awards now entering their 12th year, we're clearly progressing at a very slow rate. At least we're taking baby steps -- it's been...

Sprint Realizes That People Hate Forced Contracts, Early Termination Fees
It's become quite clear that people absolutely hate the forced two year contracts and early termination fees from mobile operators. It appears that some of the operators are finally getting the message. In discussing how it's going to offer its eventual WiMax offering, Sprint is now saying that there will be no mandatory contracts with early termination fees -- instead, it will be voluntary, based on a sliding price scale. In other words, if you're willing to take a longer contract, it'll be much cheaper. If you don't want a contract, that's fine, but you'll pay more per month. That seems perfectly reasonable and fits with typical pricing systems that lets the customer figure out how much the flexibility is worth to them. It's about time someone started offering this. Hopefully the other operators take the hint and start offering something similar for their regular phone service.

Dutch Gov't Pulls The Plug On E-Voting (For Now)
While the US is still trying to figure out what to do about problematic e-voting machines, over in the Netherlands, they've apparently decided to ditch the machines (or, at least, ditching the regulation approving the machines), at least until they've figured out a way to make them more reliable, secure and trustworthy. Sounds like a reasonable plan, though it sounds like they may be looking to bring the machines back rather quickly, with just a paper trail -- which may not be enough. At some point people need to realize that many of these machines can't be retrofitted to fix things, but need to be rethought from the ground up.

First RIAA Lawsuit To Face A Jury
The RIAA didn't want it to come to this, but one of its lawsuits accusing someone of sharing unauthorized content is about to go to a jury trial. As Ray Beckerman notes, it's not a particularly good trial for the RIAA (which partly explains their desire to avoid the whole jury thing). There's no evidence that the defendant infringed copyrights, and the supposed expert witness the RIAA is expected to call has been thoroughly debunked as an expert. Of course, juries can be very tough to predict, and you can bet that the RIAA will appeal to the emotional angle of "stolen" music. If it's worked on politicians, perhaps they'll find a gullible jury as well.

Unlocked iPhones (Temporarily?) iBricked
As Apple warned earlier this week, the latest firmware update did, in fact, "break" unlocked iPhones and kill unofficial 3rd party iPhone apps. It's still not clear how intentional this was, but it still seems like something that Apple should have made at least a little more of an effort to avoid. The folks who unlocked their iPhones and who were installing 3rd party apps were the early adopters who were most likely to go out and evangelize the device -- especially if it was more useful thanks to alternative networks and better applications. Over at Gizmodo, they have a good post discussing what's actually happening, with two important points: the update is not doing any permanent damage to the phone (meaning that it'll probably be a short while until software hacks are developed to bring bricked iPhones back to life) and that Apple could have pretty easily avoided messing up the phones (suggesting that perhaps it was at least somewhat intentional). ...