loopholes

Hoping to keep your Verizon unlimited plan? Here's how

Verizon Wireless is closing the door on its unlimited plans later this month, but fortunately, some loopholes remain.

Unfortunately, the options aren't that attractive.

Verizon will officially kill off the unlimited plan for many people looking for a new phone after June 28, when the carrier makes its shared data plans available.

The carrier already stopped offering unlimited data as an option last summer, when it switched to tiered pricing. The equivalent $30 of unlimited data all of a sudden got only 2 gigabytes of data, although Verizon has held the occasional promotion for 3GB of data to spur … Read more

Photo theft security loophole found in Android too

A security loophole on Apple's iOS platform that gives applications access to a user's photo library without explicit permission has been found to exist on Google's Android platform as well.

The New York Times' Bits blog today notes that Android applications are able to read pictures off a phone as long as that user has given the app permission to use the device's Internet connection.

According to Google, the mobile OS has long been set up to allow this kind of access due to the way it stores data on external memory cards that expand on … Read more

Telcos and satellite get closer to local TV sports

Cable companies' fight to keep local sports broadcasts out of the hands of some competitors is heating up as satellite and phone companies pressure regulators to take action.

On Friday, satellite TV provider Dish Network said it would file a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission against Comcast for withholding the rights to broadcast regional sports in Philadelphia. Comcast's SportsNet channel owns the rights to broadcast live games for Philadelphia's major sports teams, including the Phillies, Flyers, Sixers, and Eagles.

Dish Network has been in talks with Comcast over the past several weeks to hammer out a deal. … Read more

FCC closes cable programming loophole

The Federal Communications Commission Wednesday voted to close a "loophole" that allowed cable operators to withhold local sports programming from competitors.

In a 4-1 vote, the commissioners ended the "terrestrial loophole," which prevents satellite TV providers and new TV providers, such as AT&T and Verizon Communications, from offering some live sports channels in certain areas of the country. These companies say they have had a competitive disadvantage, because they have not been able to offer this content.

Cable companies are required by federal law to offer access to channels that they own to competitors … Read more

GPL in the cloud: The market doesn't care

If the market's response to the Affero GPL is any indication, I was 100 percent wrong to suggest that open source would suffer without closing the so-called "ASP loophole."

That, at least, is the feeling I'm getting reading Stephen O'Grady's excellent summary of open-source licensing, and particularly the GPL, and how it works (or doesn't) in SaaS, cloud, and other instantiations of network-based computing. Despite the fact that the Open Source Initiative approved the Affero GPL--which explicitly shuts the door on free-riding on open source in network-based computing without contributing back--few have adopted … Read more

Richard Stallman is warning *us* about cloud computing?!?

I read Richard Stallman's commentary on cloud computing in the UK's Guardian. Stallman is full of warnings about cloud computing:

One reason you should not use Web applications to do your computing is that you lose control. It's just as bad as using a proprietary program.

But he completely neglects to mention that he had a chance to seed the cloud, which is largely built using open-source software, with an upgraded GNU General Public License (Version 3), and he demurred. Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation failed to protect the cloud when they had the chance, … Read more

Would closing the ASP loophole create more problems than it solves?

I and others have argued that it's critical to open source's future that licenses like the Affero GPL close the "ASP loophole" by requiring companies like Google to contribute back derivative works of open-source software that they distribute as a service, rather than as packaged software. Now Gordon Haff is suggesting that requiring Web 2.0 to Contribute 1.0 may cause more problems than it solves, and he could well be right.

The problem has nothing to do with whether Web 2.0 vendors like Google are required to contribute back. The problem is all the so-called Web 2.0 users:

Distribution in the GPLv2 and GPLv3 licenses draws (mostly) a hard-edged line. If you're an enterprise using software internally, anything goes. If you're using GPL code in software you're selling to the public--whether downloaded, on a CD, or in embedded firmware--you must make the relevant sources available. However, as more and more companies of every stripe make parts of their computing infrastructure available to their customers--think online banking, for example--where does it end? The boundaries become very fuzzy--which would inject lots of uncertainty into just about any use of open source in an enterprise environment.

This is a very, very good point. I'm not sure how to answer it.… Read more