Last year, I wrote about an Ars Technica article covering a new IEEE study group looking at the idea of “Digital Personal Property”. The idea is to use DRM to make electronic property act more like physical property—you can lend it to a friend, but you lose access to it while your friend has it and your friend might choose not to give it back. Yesterday, I received an e-mail from Paul Sweazy, the chair of the IEEE working group that is taking over for the study group in question, pointing me to the group’s press release (PDF),...

A few days ago, Mike Masnick at TechDirt reported on a PDF document released by the FTC containing a number of suggestions aimed at “saving” journalism. Except, by “saving journalism,” most of the suggestions seemed to mean “saving traditional newspapers.” Ars Technica has also taken a look at this document, though it notes the FTC has clarified that the document in question was never intended to be taken as official government suggestions—just conversation-starters. If that was their goal, they have certainly succeeded, as there is an awful lot of conversation going on right now about how misguided...

Kindle, the software, is marching on. Ars Technica has gotten a demo of the software at the Google I/O. It has support with synchronizing with amazon's cloud, page numbers, notes and other information that can by synched across devices. Screen readability is good and offers a solid reading experience. Users can select from several different font sizes and background colors. Options include a sepia mode and a white-on-black mode for night reading. The application user interface has a brightness adjustment slider, but it wasn't yet functional in the prototype that I tested. The application lacks a built-in bookstore, but...

As reported by our sister blog AppleTell, Valve has just released its popular Steam game distribution engine for the Macintosh, and has made the popular game Portal available for free (for both PC and Macintosh) until May 24th. One of the remarkable things about this launch is that Valve is declaring gamers will automatically have Mac versions available of any game they have already purchased for PC that is also Mac compatible. This is comparable to Baen’s policy of allowing free download of any format of e-book they offer once purchased—and quite the opposite of the...

Ars has gotten a pre-release copy of the 2.5 software and they like it a lot. They have a full review, along with a lot of pictures, here. The 2.5 firmware helps the Kindle 2 and DX stay relevant in the face of increasing competition from the likes of the Nook and the iPad. (Sorry Kindle 1 users—it looks like you won't be able to upgrade to 2.5.) None of the features are mindblowing on their own, but collectively, they make a pretty hefty update that addresses some of the complaints that Kindle users have expressed in the past. If...

Reading on the iPad is one thing, but what about writing, or spreadsheets, or giving presentations? Jeff Smykil at Ars Technica has a great, comprehensive review of iWork, the productivity suite for the iPad. I’m personally not inclined to shell out the money for these applications; I have a perfectly serviceable desktop and laptop and don’t foresee any need for heavy-duty writing, spreadsheet-using, or presentation-making on a device without a physical keyboard—and they’re only orthogonally related to e-book-reading anyway—so I doubt I’ll be reviewing them myself. Smykil finds that, while the suite is about as good as...

The Library of Congress is an important national archive, and has been for hundreds of years. It retains records for posterity—not just books, but other important things, including digital information. And soon those archives will include every public tweet ever posted to Twitter since the service’s inception in 2006. Much as with the Internet Archive’s decision to archive the web, the Library of Congress sees the move to communication on Twitter as an important sea change in the way people communicate—one that should be preserved for the study and understanding of future researchers. ...

A service called Tunecore lets musicians self-publish their music into Amazon, iTunes, and eMusic for a flat fee—after the music is published, the artist gets all proceeds (after the store takes its cut, of course). Now Ars Technica reports that the company behind Tunecore is coming out with a new service called Bibliocore, currently in beta, that will do the same thing for e-books and the iBooks store. All that’s required is an ePub 1.0.5-compliant e-book with no unmanifested files, an ISBN, and cover art that is at least 600 pixels wide or tall. Bibliocore currently does not...

Just in case you needed a further antidote than Cory Doctorow to all the iPad love going around these days, Gawker has proclaimed that “the iPad backlash is here.” Most of their criticisms seem to be fairly lame, though. The biggest one, the problems staying connected with wifi, has already been addressed by Apple. Here’s a more cogent criticism, from Tumblr and Instapaper developer Marco Arment: he finds it very frustrating that that iBooks uses many private APIs that other apps cannot: I won’t be able to offer some features that iBooks has (such...

A Pew Research Center study has some interesting conclusions about on-line advertising, says Ars Technica. On-line ad revenue declined by a total of $1 billion last year, falling for the first time since 2002. 81% of respondents said that they didn’t mind on-line advertising in return for free content. However, only 7% of consumers said they would be willing to pay for news—most said they would simply look somewhere else if their favorite site erected a paywall. Ars Technica recently experimented with blocking content to users of ad-blocking software, then posted an editorial haranguing users of ad-blockers...

Over the last few days, a number of sources have reported on Apple’s decision to remove risqué applications from the app store, including swimsuit and lingerie applications. Over 5,000 applications have been purged in this sweep. Apparently parental restrictions just aren’t restricting enough; Apple exec Phil Schiller claimed Apple had been getting complaints from women about the “degrading” nature of the content. But there are some notable exceptions: apps from Sports Illustrated, Playboy, Victoria’s Secret, and other well-known corporate concerns. (Likewise, a bikini calendar app from the Hooters sports bar currently remains available, though its developer has not heard...

According to a recent Ars Technica article, Nielsen has surveyed over 27,000 customers in 52 countries with questions about what kinds of content they would be willing to pay for on-line. The results may hold out some hope for newspapers and magazines pondering retreating behind paywalls, but some other kinds of content might have more trouble. The types of things consumers would pay for on-line seem by and large to be much the same sorts of things they pay for off-line—movies, music, and games, for instance. 50% of those polled seemed willing to pay for magazine content on-line,...