Common Paradox Tech Blog

If there’s anything we at PreCentral like rooting for, it’s the underdog. We’re a website dedicated to Palm and webOS news and discussion, what else would we root for? While Palm (and everybody else not named after fruit) may be the underdog in the smartphone game, there’s one unique underdog player in the media player market: Boxee. The upstart little open-source media platform is gaining steam and cred amongst the tech crowd, and with the upcoming Boxee Box threatens to break into the mainstream. But how to control it?

With a remote on your phone, of course. That’s where Boxee Remote comes in. The work-in-progress app by PreCentral forum member richaoj (otherwise known as Alexander) recently found its way onto the Palm beta web distribution feeds and is now making the rounds. Boxee Remote is Alexander’s first webOS app and is already working nicely as an interface between your phone, Boxee, and the media already on your computer (or other Boxee-running device).

The app has already come a long way from the first Homebrew Gallery iteration. Users can now browse their Boxee media library, control playback and volume, view album art, and search for music and videos to play – all over Wi-Fi from their webOS device.

Set-up for Boxee Remote is a cinch. No desktop-side special controller software is needed (with the exception of Boxee itself). All you need is your computer’s IP address, which is easy enough to find – everything else you need to know (which amounts to a single port number and a checkbox) is located on Boxee’s network settings page.

If you’ve been hesitant or skeptical about trying out Boxee, now you’ve got no excuse. Of course, we should note that Boxee Remote is still in beta (v0.9.0 as of this writing) and you might encounter some unexpected bugs or glitches during use (for example, Boxee sometimes hangs when quitting if the app is connected), but nothing that will completely ruin the Boxee experience.

Ah, the humble End User License Agreement. You tear through them, you click “I agree,” but what exactly are you agreeing to? I don’t actually know, because like you, I never read them.

Claiming to read all your software licenses is the reverse of masturbation—90 percent admit they don’t do it, and the other 10 percent are liars. It’s hard to get through a whole day without agreeing to the occasional complex contract, we definitely couldn’t get through the day if we read them.

These days, companies claim to sell us their EULA in lieu of just selling us their software, to give themselves powers over their software the law doesn’t give them. How much power? No one exactly knows. This last-mile legislation by companies has met with mixed response when it goes to court.

Where companies use EULAs to obviously subvert state or federal law, judges don’t like them much. Take First Sale, the legal principle that lets you resell a copyrighted item you bought, like a book or CD. Many courts have held that if it looks like a sale, that’s what it is, and your first-sale rights stand, whatever the EULA says—especially if you never agreed to it. When Autodesk kept sending DMCA notices to eBay regarding seller Timothy Vernor’s re-sales of their software, he (and nonprofit consumer advocacy group Public Citizen) sought to get the court to declare what he was doing legal. Since he never so much as installed the software, the court has been pretty sympathetic, ruling against Autodesk.

But in other cases, where the seller did the clicking on an agreement, the courts have sometimes held that they lost first sale by contract law, sometimes by copyright law, and sometimes not at all. The pre–software age precedent is pretty clear about a strong first-sale right, but software makers over the last 25 years have had a lot of opportunity to get judges used to the idea that they can sell their product yet write their own conditions on it. With software companies writing the law, what do we need Congress for, anyway?

Quinn Norton writes about copyright for Wired News and other publications. Her work has ranged from legal journalism to the inner life of pirate organizations.

An anonymous reader writes “The Open Video Alliance is launching a campaign today called Let’s Get Video on Wikipedia asking people to create and post videos to Wikipedia articles (good, encyclopedia style videos only!). Because all video must be in patent-free codecs (theora for now), this will make Wikipedia by far the most likely site for an average internet user to have a truly free and open video experience. The campaign seeks to ’strike a blow for freedom’ against a wave of h.264 adoption in otherwise open HTML5 video implementations.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It’s been anticipated for a while now; Verizon just officially released information on the specifics of what Verizon Droid owners will have to look forward to in the upcoming Android 2.1 update.

The update will be performed over-the-air and will bump up the Droid to the more current version of the Android mobile operating system. New features will include pinch-to-zoom multitouch support in the browser, Gallery, and Google Maps, the Weather and News widgets made popular on the Nexus One, voice-to-text entry, a new 3D Gallery layout for photos, and even a nice surprise that most people thought wouldn’t make it to the Droid: Live Wallpapers.

You can download the full informational PDF here.

Engadget reports that leaked internal documentation reveals the Android 2.1 update will begin rolling out tomorrow, Thursday March 18, in batches of 250,000 customers at a time. In other words, Droid owners should not have long to wait to start enjoying some of the niceties their Nexus One counterparts have made them jealous over in the past few months.

If you’re a Droid owner, what are you most excited about in Android 2.1?

Tags: android, android 2.1, droid, Google, live wallpaper, nexus one, verizon

One year ago today Apple held their iPhone 3.0 SDK Sneak Peak event and released iPhone 3.0 Beta 1, giving all of us our first look at cut, copy, and paste, MMS, tethering, Spotlight search, Voice Memo, in-app purchases, turn-by-turn navigation, stereo Bluetooth, pervasive landscape keyboard, P2P gaming, and whole bunch more.

Now, a year later, [...]

Happy Birthday iPhone 3.0! (Tell iPhone 4.0 We Said Hurry!) is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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marklyon writes “HB 872, recently signed into law by Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, makes Caller ID spoofing illegal. The law covers alterations to the caller’s name, telephone number, or name and telephone number that is shown to a recipient of a call or otherwise presented to the network. The law applies to PSTN, wireless and VoIP calls. Penalties for each violation can be up to $1,000 and one year in jail. Blocking of caller identification information is still permitted.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Alex ereader is out and I got to look at it today for a few minutes. The top part is a real epaper screen and the bottom part is essentially a small Android MID. The device has Wi-Fi and is available now for $399, shipping in May.

The company had a few interesting points about their sales strategy. Their goal isn’t to sell and ship devices, although their ereader will play epub, PDF, HTML, and TXT files out of the box. They are currently partnering with international publishing houses and periodicals and will work with those partners to create an web store as well as a unique UI for each device. In this way a newspaper could offer a branded version of its reader and offer it at a subsidized rate to online subscribers or a publishing house or book store could offer their own branded experience.

An anonymous reader writes “IEEE Spectrum reports that Tokyo University researchers have developed a superfast book scanner that uses lasers and a high-speed camera to achieve a capture rate of 200 pages per minute. You just quickly flip the book pages in front of the system and it digitizes the pages, building a 3D model of each and reconstructing it as a normal flat page. The prototype is large and bulky, but if this thing could be made smaller, one day we could scan a book or magazine in seconds using a smartphone.” The article mentions Google’s similar dewarping system; the difference here is speed.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Research firm Crowd Science says that almost 40% of Blackberry owners they polled are willing to ditch their device for an iPhone when next they need new hardware, and 32% said they would jump ship to a Nexus One. That leaves a dismal 28% willing to rough it with their Blackberry.

“These results show that the [...]

Blackberry Users Ready to Bail on RIM for iPhone and Android is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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