All Things Digital

If they were to be sacked tomorrow, a staggering 88 percent of IT administrators would steal sensitive company information. This according to a new survey from Cyber-Ark, which found that IT security professionals aren’t above indulging in a bit of vindictive corporate espionage, given the right circumstances.

Or at least they’d like to give that impression.

Said Udi Mokady, co-founder and CEO of Cyber-Ark: “You can install the best security systems in the world, but if your staff do not respect the information they are entrusted with, then the information will definitely go astray–just as the findings of this survey have illustrated.”

Apple legal has some interesting weekend reading ahead of it. Mac clone maker Psystar filed its 54-page countersuit against Apple late Thursday, and as expected, it accuses the company of restraint of trade, unfair competition, and other violations of antitrust law. “[Apple has] engaged in copyright misuse through the use of an illicit tying provision in its end-user license agreement for the Mac OS X with respect to only utilizing the Mac OS X software on Apple-Labeled Computer Hardware Systems and as is further detailed in PSYSTAR’s counterclaims for violations of the Sherman Act, Clayton Act, and Cartwright Act, which are incorporated herein by reference,” the suit claims. “By attempting to enforce this illicit tying provision, [Apple] is attempting to obtain, maintain, and/or enjoy rights not granted by the Copyright Act including, but not limited to, destroying competition in the Mac OS Capable Computer Hardware Systems market, which is wholly unrelated to any valid copyright.”

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, seeks unspecified, triple damages and, more importantly, an order voiding Apple’s end-user license agreements (EULA). If successful, it will allow OS X to be installed on hardware it was never intended to run on, opening the door for the first legitimate Mac clones in more than a decade. Hard to see Apple (AAPL) allowing that to happen, though. My guess is the company would sooner kill retail sales of OS X and manage upgrades through iTunes, than allow it to be run on inferior machines over whose quality it has no control.

QOTD

When Google and Yahoo announced their advertising partnership back in June, the companies said they would give the Justice Department three and one half months to review it. Which is more than enough time for such a review, according to Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt, who said the companies will proceed with the deal in October, even if federal regulators haven’t yet approved it. “We are going to move forward,” Schmidt told Bloomberg Television. “We are in the process of talking to the government. They’ve not indicated one way or the other how they’re dealing with us. We always worry a little bit, but we think our arguments are pretty strong. … Yahoo has made it very, very clear they’re going to take the best parts of their network and ours and combine them.”

That’s no cause for regulatory concern, apparently. And for those, like Sen. Herb Kohl, who recently wondered if this deal might reduce Yahoo (YHOO) to “nothing more than the newest satellite in the Google orbit?” Well, c’mon. Yahoo is already a satellite in the Google orbit, isn’t it? Google accounted for 77.4 percent of all search engine spending in the second quarter of 2008, according to Efficient Frontier. For crying out loud, the company claims $1.10 of every new search dollar.

Amazon’s next-generation Kindle e-book reader may be significantly thinner than its predecessor. It may boast an improved screen and a more intuitive interface. It might be a little less ugly. It could even be “the device Amazon wanted to release in the first place,” as some reports have claimed. But it will not arrive at market in October as rumored. Nor will it arrive before Christmas. In fact, Kindle 2.0 won’t debut in 2008 at all, according to Amazon (AMZN) spokesman Craig Berman. “Don’t believe everything you read,†Berman told the New York Times. “There’s a lot of rumor and speculation about the Kindle. One thing I can tell you for sure is that there will be no new version of the Kindle this year. A new version is possible sometime next year at the earliest.â€

In the future, “heavy users” of Comcast’s broadband service may face not just a periodic slowing–sorry, deprioritizing–of their service, but a capping of that service as well. Broadband Reports brings word today that Comcast plans to implement a 250GB broadband cap come October. “The intent appears to be to go after the people who consistently download far more than the typical user, without hurting those who may have a really big month infrequently,” a source familiar with the plan told BroadBand Reports. Indeed it does. Certainly, 250GB is quite a bit higher than the 5-40 GB caps being considered by some other providers. Still, it’s not exactly the “unlimited” service Comcast has sometimes touted in its marketing materials.

So what happens should one hit Comcast’s cap or exceed it? Comcast (CMCSA) says first-time transgressions will be addressed with an “excessive use” call from Comcast’s Customer Security Assurance group. But hit the cap twice in six months and you’ll be looking for a new ISP. “If a customer surpasses 250 GBs and is one of the top users of the service for a second time within a six-month time frame, his or her service will be subject to termination for one year,” Comcast explains in its Excessive Use FAQ. “After the one-year period expires, the customer may resume service by subscribing to a service plan appropriate to his or her needs.”

Assuming he or she is still willing to give Comcast his or her business.

If you’re the owner of an iPhone 3G and you haven’t already updated to the iPhone 2.0.2 firmware, do so today–for your sake and that of all iPhone 3G owners.

Why?

Well, according to sources at AT&T (T), the reception problems that have plagued the device won’t be resolved until you do. iPhone’s running 2.0 or 2.0.1 firmware mistakenly demand too much power from 3G networks. And when they do this en masse, they can cause the network to refuse new requests for 3G bandwidth. That in turn causes the reception issues we’ve been hearing about since the device first arrived at market in July. And those issues will persist as long as handsets running iPhone 2.0 and 2.0.1 continue to strain the 3G networks.

That’s the story, anyway. And it does sound plausible. Although, you’ve got to wonder why this issue is specific to the iPhone. Presumably, there’s a multitude of other 3G devices out in the world requesting a 3G signal from the same networks the Apple (AAPL) iPhone is overwhelming. Why aren’t they suffering similar problems?

Looks like Google has a new club with which to smite Viacom and the $1 billion lawsuit it’s brought against YouTube. A federal judge has ruled that online video-hosting site Veoh is not guilty of copyright infringement for material uploaded by users in a case that has marked similarities to Viacom’s against Google and YouTube. IO Group, whose videos had been uploaded without permission to Veoh, claimed that the company was liable for those infringing videos. Specifically, it argued that Veoh, because it transcodes those videos to Flash before hosting them, does not qualify for the safe harbor provisions of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which would otherwise have shielded it from liability as long it removed infringing material when alerted by a copyright holder.

The judge disagreed. And his reasons for doing so will undoubtedly come into play in the Viacom case and others as well. “Veoh has simply established a system whereby software automatically processes user-submitted content and recasts it in a format that is readily accessible to its users,” the judge wrote. “Veoh preselects the software parameters for the process from a range of default values set by the third-party software. … But Veoh does not itself actively participate or supervise the uploading of files. Nor does it preview or select the files before the upload is completed. Instead, video files are uploaded through an automated process which is initiated entirely at the volition of Veoh’s users.”

Google (GOOG) was understandably quite pleased with the ruling: “It is great to see the Court confirm that the DMCA protects services like YouTube that follow the law and respect copyrights,” Zahavah Levine, YouTube’s chief counsel,” said in a statement.

Viacom (VIA) was equally displeased, understandably. “Even if the Veoh decision were to be considered by other courts, that case does nothing to change the fact that YouTube is a business built on infringement that has failed to take reasonable measures to respect the rights of creators and content owners,” the company said in a statement. “Google and YouTube have engaged in massive copyright infringement–conduct that is not protected by any law, including the DMCA.â€

Given the option to pull copyrighted material posted to YouTube without their permission or to monetize it with YouTube’s new Content ID system, some 90 percent of copyright owners are choosing the latter. Since it was first announced, Content ID–which allows rights owners to block an infringing clip, leave it be or grant YouTube permission to sell ads against it–has won some impressive partners, including such media companies as CBS, Universal Music and Electronic Arts. (Obviously, there are some very notable exceptions).

And those who’ve decided to participate have good reason for signing on, as YouTube Product Manager David King points out in a post to the Official Google Blog. “… Our Video ID partners are seeing claimed content more than double their number of views, against which we can run ads,” King writes. “This means that if a partner has, say, 10,000 views of its content, leaving up videos claimed by our system will lead to an average additional 10,000 views of that same content. We call this “partner uplift,” and for some partners we’ve seen uplift as high as 9000 percent.”

At this point, the “partner uplift” to which King refers hasn’t generated much revenue. But it may have created something far more important: a paradigm shift. “We don’t want to condone people taking our intellectual property and using it without our permission,†Curt Marvis, the president of digital media at Lionsgate Entertainment, recently told the New York Times. “But we also don’t like the idea of keeping fans of our products from being able to engage with our content. For the most part, people who are uploading videos are fans of our movies. They’re not trying to be evil pirates, and they’re not trying to get revenue from it.â€

But ultimately, the rights owners are. And now that YouTube has more than 70 million monthly unique viewers and a parent company well-practiced in hardball negotiating tactics, it seems they have little choice but to align themselves with the site. Which is ironic, in a way. Because this is exactly the scenario that Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman has been describing since the media behemoth filed its $1 billion copyright infringement suit over video clips on YouTube. Dauman has long maintained that Google’s (GOOG) strategy has been to defy copyright owners long enough to dominate the online video space and bend the content industry to its will. And, indeed, Google seems to have done exactly that.

Entrepreneur Mark Cuban once said, “Only a moron would buy YouTube.” Who’s the moron now?

It’s taken nearly a decade but Microsoft has finally debuted the first significant overhaul of its Web browser since Internet Explorer 5. The company released IE8 Beta 2 Wednesday afternoon, and by most accounts, it’s a solid update. In fact, it might even put IE on par with competing browsers like Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari. Certainly, this latest iteration, with its new privacy and security features, adherence to Web standards, enhanced tabbed browsing and “smart address bar” (a location bar similar to Firefox 3’s “Awesome Bar”), proves that Microsoft (MSFT) has at least caught up with its rivals in the browser space. “This is a top-to-bottom makeover,” says Ed Bott. “It’s packed with usability improvements, security enhancements, and a platform for new add-ins that third-party developers are already taking advantage of.” Which is a good thing, because IE’s increasingly stale feature set has caused a bit of decline in the browser’s market share. In the last year IE lost six percentage points of market share, falling to 73 percent, while Firefox’s market share rose to 19 percent.

Holy cow. … Cattle grazing or at rest tend to align their bodies in a north-south direction–just like a compass needle. This according to European researchers who scrutinized Google Earth (GOOG) photographs of 8,510 cattle in 308 herds around the world. Plotted onto a compass, the animals’ positions were generally within five degrees of magnetic north or south. “The magnetic field is the only common and most likely factor responsible for the observed alignment,” the researchers wrote in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week. “Our analysis … clearly provides the crucial proof in favor of the Earth’s magnetic field being the responsive cue.”

An interesting observation, especially since cows’ … animal magnetism has been chalked up to wind and the angle of the sun for hundreds of years.

Google’s Android mobile platform will become commercially available before year end, just as the company promised. But with one caveat: It will lack some of the features Google (GOOG) first intended. Seems that in order to get Android out the door in time for the holiday shopping season, the company has been forced to defeature it. Google has dropped planned APIs for Bluetooth and Google’s own GTalk instant-messaging service in Android 1.0, according to the Android Developers Blog. Seems there are issues with both APIs that need to be resolved before Google is comfortable releasing them into the wild, and the company couldn’t do that before the end of the year. “… We plain ran out of time,” said Android engineer Nick Pelly. “The Android Bluetooth API was pretty far along, but needs some cleanup before we can commit to it for the SDK. Keep in mind that putting it in the 1.0 SDK would have locked us into that API for years to come.”

Unless you simply kept it in beta for a few years like some of your other products. …