Week In Review 1W2010
Interesting things from or around CES: hydrogen cells with hydrogen converter, HDTVs with SkypeHD videocall (hear that IMS vendors ? what ? layoffs you say ?), GSM femtocells with third party service, Pixel Qi’s screens, KeyChest which being from Disney probably hides untold evil.
Apple bought Quattro Wireless for some reason. The reason being probably ad-sponsored-mobile-media-streaming.
The UK Govt figures the plan to make ISPs spy on their customers on behalf of the recording industry would cost 500 million GBP. All of which would come from the users’ pockets obviously. Aside from the obvious idiocy of the plan (which is akin to making toll booths scan cars for stolen goods) the increase in price would reduce the internet enabled households by 40 thousand (great outcome for the “Digital Economy Bill”) and the recording industry claims they’re losing 200 million GBP a year due to piracy which is less than half the cost of the useless plan.
France keeps being “interesting”. The commission for informatics and liberties found HADOPI violates human rights and privacy, you know, by creating an infra-lawfull database of would be claimed felons that’s publicly distributed. Meanwhile, the Govt wants to tax foreign Internet entities to support old media business. This is France being delusional (again) about keeping old, dead end businesses on life support at the expense of new, growing businesses. An idea, maybe you guys could tax France Telecom to support TF1 ?
UK keeps going off the deep end. It’s clearly no place for tourists this days unless your idea of holidays is getting arrested for no reason. Meanwhile, someone remembered “body scanners” show naked people and thus are in violation of child porn laws which is actually refreshing, someone using child porn laws to actually protect children. It also means, if the rhetoric is correct, terrorists will start exploding children.
Rudy Giuliani is elbowing into Leno’s spot. He claims there were no terrorists attacks in USA during the Bush administration. Glad see he bounced right back from 9/11 and now considers it a minor annoyance!
