16856720
submission
nickull writes:
Several news sites have reported a developing story of the Libyan government seizing *.ly domain names such as vb.ly for violating Sharia law. The Washington Post reports that "Bit.ly, Owl.ly, Vb.ly: adorably named URL shortening services have skyrocketed in popularity thanks to microblogging sites such as Twitter, where every character counts. But the owner of one URL shortener thinks the .ly party is coming to an end." IANA, the authority regulating country code top level domains (ccTLD) assigns a trustee for each sovereign state which makes the Libyan trustee perfectly within their legal rights to sieze such domains.
14902516
submission
nickull writes:
Several industry giants (60 as of July 20) have joined together to form a consortium and build out additional functionality for the consumer digital experience. The core goal is to allow more consumer freedom, recognizing that consumers of the future may want to render their digital streams on more than one device, such as smartphones, laptops, TV's and tablets. The technology, called Ultraviolet, is claimed to make CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs all work the same way on a vast array of devices of every size, shape and price range. Despite RIAA involvement, on the surface the consortium seem to be relaxing constraints against copying. The quote from the website "Buying an UltraViolet title will mean a consumer can make multiple copies to their family’s registered UltraViolet devices" probably indicates that some form of hardware locked DRM will be employed to prevent unauthorized use while consumers are free to make backup copies. Notable is that Apple is absent.
11264672
submission
nickull writes:
As reported via Apple Insider, Apple has allegedly updated its iPhone 4.0 SDK developer program license agreement to specifically prohibit developers form using any dev framework that is not born of Apple. The specific text is rumored to be "3.3.1 Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).". Of course I cannot attest to this because Apple also has an agreement banning developers who get their SDK from publicly commenting on the terms within the SDK so I am just guessing.
If true, this could affect many development frameworks and systems including many open source alternatives like PhoneGap.
