Joren writes "In Japan, in a case that has been five years running, the Osaka High Court on Thursday overturned a lower court ruling that had convicted and fined the developer of controversial file-sharing software Winny of assisting violations of the Copyright Law. Originally charged in 2004, Isamu Kaneko, 39, a former research assistant at the University of Tokyo, was declared not guilty, and will not be required to pay a 1.5 million yen fine levied by a December 2006 Kyoto District Court ruling. 'Merely being aware of the possibility that the software could be abused does not constitute a crime of aiding violations of the law, and the court cannot accept that the defendant supplied the software solely to be used for copyright violations,' presiding judge Masazo Ogura said. Furthermore, in siding with the defense, the appeal ruling stated that 'Anonymity is not something to be looked on as illegal, and it is not something that applies specifically to copyright violations. The technical value of the software is neutral.'"

Intel announced a major breakthrough in microprocessor design Friday that will allow it to keep on the curve of Moore's Law a while longer. IBM, working with AMD, rushed out a press release announcing essentially equivalent advances. Both companies said they will be using alloys of hafnium as insulating layers, replacing the silicon dioxide that has been used for more than 40 years. The New York Times story (and coverage from the AP and others) features he-said, she-said commentary from dueling analysts. If there is a consensus, it's that Intel is 6 or more months ahead for the next generation. IBM vigorously disputes this, saying that they and AMD are simply working in a different part of the processor market — concentrating on the high-end server space, as opposed to the portable, low-power end.

Reader trparky recommends an article on Technet (which, be warned, is rather chaotically formatted). Mark Russinovich, whose company Winternals Software was recently bought by Microsoft, has published the first of a series of articles on what's new in the Vista kernel. Russinovich writes: "In this issue, I'll look at changes in the areas of processes and threads, and in I/O. Future installments will cover memory management, startup and shutdown, reliability and recovery, and security. The scope of this article comprises changes to the Windows Vista kernel only, specifically Ntoskrnl.exe and its closely associated components. Please remember that there are many other significant changes in Windows Vista that fall outside the kernel proper and therefore won't be covered."

An anonymous reader writes "Speaking at the World Economic Forum, YouTube CEO Chad Hurley has revealed that the company plans to financially compensate users who produce and upload their content. With Google's purchase of YouTube last year, followed by more aggressive attempts to monetize the site (such as the deal struck with Verizon Wireless), it was inevitable that YouTube would come under pressure to share some of those fruits with ordinary users. But why didn't YouTube pay its users from the start? Hurley said: 'We didn't want to build a system that was motivated by monetary reward. We wanted to really build a true community around video. When you start out with giving money to people from day one, the people you do attract will just switch to the next provider who's paying more. We're at a scale now that we feel we can do that and still have a true community around video.'"

The official GenCon website is hosting the official press release with the news: the West coast GenCon is no more. Citing 'competing shows' in the Southern California area, the RPG convention is closing up shop so that staff can focus on the Midwestern/East Coast Flagship event GenCon Indy. In an open letter from Peter Adkinson, he states how much he regrets this decision, and describes the four years of the event as well as the decision-making that led to this state of affairs. In his long discussion of the event, he downplays the attempt to merge with the IDG event and the inclusion of videogames into the GenCon formula. Though it's not listed as a root cause, the death of E3 would seem to be having a ripple effect here as well. He makes sure to point out that GenCon Indy isn't going anywhere, and that this year's 40th anniversary should be an interesting one.

Nom du Keyboard asks: "Is it possible to use The GIMP (or Photoshop) to improve my digital photos? I have a mid-range 7.1MP Olympus camera capable of shooting in Raw mode. When I inspected a section of clear blue sky on a bright, sunny day (which I've long believed to be relatively good reference of uniform color and brightness) I was surprised (disappointed, since I expect digital perfection) at the variance in adjacent pixels. It's also a quick way to identify any bad pixels. Surprisingly, actual photos from this camera look pretty good despite this variance so far. Moving on from that point it led me to wonder that, if you shot a uniform white surface, perhaps blurred as much as possible to avoid any imperfections in the surface itself, could a correction (adjustment) layer be created in GIMP or Photoshop exactly tuned to your camera that fixed the variations in your CCD sensor and improved the image quality in the process. Any thoughts?"

NinjaKicks writes "Intel has decided to make public details of their new 45nm manufacturing process and also has broken news that next-gen Penryn core processors are running various versions of Windows and Vista successfully. Penryn will offer a host of core tweaks over Conroe, larger cache sizes, and SSE4 support. Also, although clock speeds will be increased, processors based on Penryn should fall within the same thermal power range as Conroe. Word is Penryn will also be compatible with some of the existing motherboards on the market while others will need either a BIOS update or perhaps other board-level changes."

Cache22x writes "Scientists at the University of Alberta have published the first draft of the Human Metabolome Project, the chemical equivalent of the human genome. In the same spirit as the human genome project, the information has been made freely available to the scientific community and the general public through the project's website. Knowing the makeup of the metabolome will lead to potentially enormous medical advances as clinicians now have a comparative base for analyzing the metabolite levels found in our bodies."