Hollywood isn’t suing RealNetworks over piracy–that’s just a smokescreen, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“It has nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with controlling innovation.”
–Fred von Lohmann, senior attorney for EFF

“Hollywood can’t possibly believe that the $30, DRM-hobbled RealDVD software represents a piracy threat,” von Lohmann wrote. The studios are [...]

Meanwhile, tech CEOs gathering this week at the Gartner Symposium ITXpo conclave in Orlando are moping around as they regale each other with ever more depressing tales from the trenches. The Gartner graphic I’ve embedded here explains why they’re uneasy about the near-term:
The recent financial crisis affecting the banking system and financial markets [...]

I bet that if Google’s search engineers took a stab at indexing Twitter posts they’d quickly realize that on some topics, popularity matters. On some, it doesn’t. On others, authority comes from elsewhere: Being first, being linked to, being different. Like I said, search is complicated. Twitority is a cool little experiment, and a [...]

Whereas Yahoo is looking to bolster its advertising inventory by allowing Google to post its ads on its search page, Google is going in the opposite direction by scaling back on the number of irrelevant ads it has on its search results page–adopting the view that less is more. The search giant on Wednesday also [...]

There are advantages to this. Since the data is stored on an off-site server, the service becomes a passable backup and remote data access application. Also, the server-based architecture means your PCs don’t have to be online at the same time to sync up. The downside, though, is that the storage costs the company [...]

At their core, they’re nearly identical, using the phone’s camera to auto-focus on a barcode. That barcode is then matched to a product using an open source decoding library, ZXing, that was developed by Google engineers last year. (You can also search by product name.)
ShopSavvy, Barcode Scanner (by the ZXing team), and CompareEverywhere (an Android [...]

The MVBD2510 is a new model (and new-in-box, not a refurb). CNET has a brief overview of it, but, alas, no hands-on review. Hardcore home-theater types will bemoan its lack of Profile 2.0 support, but on the audio front it’s all good: Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, and DTS-HD. Also: analog 5.1-channel audio output. (I [...]

This is the first time the SIIA has filed suits against users on Amazon and iOffer, though it has brought charges against eBay users in the past and even considered suing eBay itself. The option of suing eBay is not off the table, Kupferschmid said in an interview.

The Software and Information Industry Association announced Tuesday [...]