By Wright Bryan

Google took the wraps off of its Chrome OS project on Thursday when it released the unfinished code to the public with the announcement of the Chromium open source project.

When it's finished in about a year (timeline according to Google), the project will result in a computer operating system that marries the Linux kernel to Google's Chrome Web browser. The new open-source OS will only run Web applications. Data will be stored in the "cloud." Local memory will be used for caching data, not storing it permanently.

It's a focused vision from Google:

First, it's all about the web. All apps are web apps. The entire experience takes place within the browser and there are no conventional desktop applications. This means users do not have to deal with installing, managing and updating programs.

Google says this approach -- making the browser the only real application running on the computer -- will make start-up times blazingly fast, simplify the user experience by focusing on the one app people use all the time and up the level of security for your device and data.

Continue reading "Google Outlines Chrome OS Project Focused On Speed, Simplicity, Security" >

Bloggers worm their way into Apple and reveal company secrets. (iStockphoto.com)

By Katia Dunn

I was talking with my brother, Colin, the other day about what kind of news he reads. He's 20 and in his second year of design school at the Maryland Institute College of Art. He's also a real smarty-pants and, in my opinion, the arbiter of all things cool and of the future.

He pointed me to one of his favorite Web sites, Daring Fireball. It's devoted almost exclusively to Apple industry news. The site is run by John Gruber, who is, according to Colin, one of the most accomplished bloggers on the topic of Apple. I was surprised that one company could sustain a daily blog. As it happens, Daringfireball.net isn't alone. There are several Apple-devoted sites. Some of them employ whole teams of people who spend their days reporting on the company. And, when I say reporting, I mean impressive investigative journalism. More on that in my story I'm working on for All Things Considered.

At the moment, these Apple-devoted bloggers are focused largely on one product: the Apple Tablet, a device supposedly meant to compete with the Kindle. Over at the Boy Genius Report (aka BGR), a site devoted to mobile devices, the much-rumored tablet has been compared to a religious icon.

The tablet is the holy grail right now. We know everything and we know nothing. It could be anything from a six-inch device to a 10-inch device. It could be an actual computer, it could be a large iPod. The whole thing is just misunderstood at this point. And that's what Apple wants

Apple is known for being secretive, and they've no doubt been irritated by past industry leaks to blogs. On the other hand, the speculation and anticipation that these blogs generate is ultimately good press for the company.

The other thing I've been thinking about while reporting this story is how these blogs reflect the changing craft of journalism. There's been a lot of talk about journalism becoming "hyper-local," meaning mainstream media organizations will die and small, local organizations will thrive. But, as my editor Marilyn Geewax said today, "niche is the new local." News consumers of the future might spend equal amounts of time checking NYTimes.com for the latest on President Obama's trip to China and Mac Rumors to see if iTunes media synchronization is still missing its latest updates. In fact, I'm pretty sure Colin's already doing that.

By Omar L. Gallaga

We'd been speculating for a while what Microsoft retail stores might be like before they finally opened last month.

It turns out the truth was more horrifying than any fiction we could have made up (which I did). Employees in the video below are shown line dancing at a Mission Viejo, Calif., store. You can tell from the excessive visual data of their body language that some are happier to be participating than others. And you have to wonder how many copies of "Windows 7" the dancing sold.

I've said before that Microsoft's marketing often seems tone-deaf. Add dancing to the mix and you've got a lethal cocktail:

(Hat tip to Engadget for this remarkable find.)

By Eyder Peralta

Our friend Kevin Whitelaw, over at The Two-Way, just filed a piece about how the National Security Agency -- you know, the ones who caused all the controversy around warrantless surveillance -- helped Microsoft with their Windows 7 security.

Whitelaw writes:

"Working in partnership with Microsoft and (the Department of Defense), NSA leveraged our unique expertise and operational knowledge of system threats and vulnerabilities to enhance Microsoft's operating system security guide without constraining the user's ability to perform their everyday tasks," Richard Schaeffer, the NSA's Information Assurance Director, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in a statement prepared for a hearing held this morning in Washington. "All this was done in coordination with the product release, not months or years later in the product cycle."

This isn't new, Whitelaw explains, because the NSA has been collaborating with Microsoft since 2005.

By Omar L. Gallaga

Remember how amazing it was, way back in 1999, to type the name of a song or artist into Napster and have instant access to a song? Remember how un-amazing it was to wait for it to download over a poky dial-up connection?

It makes sense that music was the first chunk of traditional media to really tumble down in the face of online digital distribution. Songs, already broken down into 1s and 0s for CDs, were easy to digitize (unlike books), small enough in file size to distribute widely and quickly (unlike movies) and just expensive enough to make it worth the trouble. (Remember $18.99 CDs? Dark days.)

In 10 short years, though, we've gone from illegal, fleeting online files to robust, well-populated music services like iTunes, Amazon MP3 and Rhapsody. Even Napster, defanged, fell in line and still survives with a monthly subscription service. Along the way, hundreds of start-ups have tried to tame the online music world, either by corralling it into a social-media site, making music search easier or appealing directly to fans and artists. Most have had little success; there's a long trail of interesting ideas shut down over licensing issues, or that couldn't translate musical notes into dollar bills.

Think you've heard of them all? As part of NPR Music's retrospective on the decade, we challenge you to test your online music-business knowledge with our quiz. It features a mix of past and present digital music services and some fakes we concocted (although they may be already in development -- who knows?).

Clicker.com is a free online search engine that indexes TV and movies on the Web. (clicker.com)

By Omar L. Gallaga

On this week's All Tech Considered, we return to a subject we first discussed in January: the state of TV on the Web and watching Internet content on your HDTV.

Over the last week, there's been a string of announcements, including the launch of search engine Clicker.com, a piece of hardware due out from Boxee, YouTube's introduction of 1080p-quality Web video and Dell's new Zino HD PC, which seems squarely aimed at living room Web viewing.

A few more bits related to our piece:

• TV Guide also has a service, My DVR for keeping track of online episodes of your favorite shows. TV critic Dale Roe tipped me off to the site.
• Will sites like Hulu keep the free ride going forever? It's not likely. Also: get ready for dual revenue streams and internal turf wars over Hulu ad rates.
• Internet-enabled TVs were the talk of January's Consumer Electronics Show, but we're just starting to see them roll into showrooms.
• One of many tutorials on how to hook up your computer to a television set.
• Rumors of an iTunes all-you-can-eat TV subscription service.

Are you watching Web content on your TV? Tell us where you're surfing and how you're connected in the comments.

By Omar L. Gallaga

YouTube is rolling out a video upgrade to its users -- over the next few days, the company said on its official blog, 1080p video will be available for viewing. The site currently tops out at 720p, which is 1,280 x 720 pixels. 1080p video has a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080.

Increasingly gone are the days when we could all complain that Web video looks crummy and lives in a tiny box when viewed on a big-screen TV. Most large HDTVs sold these days have a 1080p native resolution. As we'll discuss next week on All Tech Considered, our options for viewing Web content on our TVs seem to increase by the day and this is certainly one way YouTube plans to stay in that loop.

Of course, videos shot on camera phones are still going to look like garbage, so don't expect the 1080p magic wand to improve the quality of content that already looks terrible at lower resolutions. For videos uploaded at 1080p, however, you'll be able to fill up that big screen as soon as you can figure out how to get that computer to interface with that HDTV. Good luck to you.

(My favorite response about it so far is the Christian Science Monitor's headline which reads, in part, "Um, sure.")

Below is a sample 1080p video from YouTube (much smaller than 1080p, of course, but you can click on it to get to the larger version). My computer monitor won't even display it at 1080p because mine tops out at 1,680 x 1,050.

(Specialkrb / via Flickr)

By Eyder Peralta

This screenshot comes to us from our Flickr pool. Specialkrb writes that she uses her Mac's remote desktop feature to "observe the screens of 6th graders working on their writing assignment."

Talk about classroom surveillance. But specialkrb points out that not only can you use it to make sure students are on task and not surfing TMZ, but you can use it to show off examples of good work.

By Wright Bryan

I saw this video on the Wheels blog over at the NYT. I was thrilled and saddened by turns.

First, it's a slick sports car that can drive itself. It's like the future, now. It's a Hollywood fantasy come to life. It's just amazing technology in a lovely wrapper.

It also looks like the beginning of the end of cars as objects of fun and desire. Machine-chauffeured cars may be efficient. They may have an initial "WOW" factor. But the idea of a future filled with automated cars is also a buzz kill.

The man-machine connection is broken in a world like that. Using a car that drives itself would not require skill, daring or judgment. We could no longer claim mastery over our four-wheeled beasts. The passion and excitement that cars generate today would dissipate and, then, disappear.

Suddenly a car would be more like a bus. And I don't know anyone who gets excited about buses.

Eric Dane of Grey's Anatomy and his wife Rebecca Gayheart are suing Gawker after the blog published scenes from a revealing home video. Is it a case of fair use? Or did Gawker violate the couple's copyright on the video? (Frederick M. Brown / Getty Images)

By Andy Carvin

Now I know it's not every day you see a blog post on NPR.org about celebrity sex tapes. But today's an exception because of a story we saw on the PBS(!) Web site. Being PBS, of course, they weren't exactly channeling TMZ or Perez Hilton; rather, their MediaShift blog has taken a thoughtful look at whether Gawker.com's publishing of a particular sex tape constitutes "fair use" of unlicensed media.

Given how easy it's become for anyone with Internet access to publish just about anything online, understanding fair use is now more important than ever. Codified within U.S. law in the 1976 Copyright Act, fair use attempts to define the situations in which someone can publish portions of someone else's copyrighted material without licensing it, for the sake of news reporting, criticism and the like.

In the MediaShift post, blogger and law student Rob Arcamona dissects a copyright infringement lawsuit against Gawker by Grey's Anatomy co-star Eric Dane and his wife Rebecca Gayheart, who recorded a video of themselves frolicking in their birthday suits with former beauty queen Kari Ann Peniche. Gawker got their hands on the 12-minute video and published an edited, four-minute version of it.

One might think that this is a slam-dunk case for Dane and Gayheart, but MediaShift's Arcamona isn't so sure; he gives Gawker a "three-point spread" in the case. Arcamona then goes through the various factors used to identify legitimate examples of fair use and applies them to the lawsuit.

Continue reading "What A Celebrity-Sex-Tape Lawsuit Can Teach Us About Fair Use" >