Tech Today w/ Ken May

The federal judge hearing a Massachusetts file-sharing case has struck down a proposal to send all defendants a notice urging them to contact the plaintiff to work out a settlement. The move is yet another sign that federal judges are growing skeptical of the mass copyright litigation strategy. The case involves the film Big Butt Oil Orgy 2 and a group of 39 Massachusetts residents who allegedly shared it with one another via BitTorrent. Critics of these lawsuits have long argued that even innocent defendants may be forced to settle simply to avoid the legal expense of a trial and the public embarrassment of having one’s name publicly identified with a pornographic film, regardless of the case’s merit. Read the comments on this post

In the physical world, when you share a record or a book with a friend, it’s still technically yours. But in the digital world, where documents aren’t so much shared as they are copied, it’s difficult for content creators to maintain control. Sharing a Word document chock-full of sensitive information isn’t like lending out your beloved old copy of Paul’s Boutique , after all. You can forward that document to multiple people, edit its contents, and print out as many copies as you want. And in most cases, the content creator is likely none the wiser. Clement Cazalot believed there had to be a better way to keep such crucial documents in check. Described as “a tool made for paranoid people by paranoid people,” DocTrackr  was created by Cazalot and his cofounder Alex Negrea. The service tracks how and where documents are being viewed and shared—and offers a handy kill switch to revoke access altogether if needed. Read the comments on this post

Google has been caught hosting more than a dozen malicious titles in its official Android app market. Some had been downloaded tens of thousands of times and turn smartphones into zombies that await commands from their attacker overlords, security researchers said. A stash of 17 malicious apps remained freely available in the Google Play store, according to a blog post published Thursday by researchers from antivirus provider Trend Micro. Six of those titles contained a highly stealthy code dubbed Plankton, which causes Android-based phones to connect to command and control servers and wait for commands. At least 10 Plankton-based apps found last year in the Android market collected users’ browsing history, bookmarks, and device information and sent them to servers under the control of the attackers. Read the comments on this post

Google announced a slew of new features this afternoon for its Google Docs suite, hailing the addition of 450 new fonts for creating pamphlets and invitations in Docs, but also mentioning some new features for its application scripting language that will allow developers to build some interesting programs on top of the cloud service. Google introduced a scripting language for Google Docs, Google Apps Script, in early 2010 so users could automate certain tasks in spreadsheets. Apps Scripts also permitted users to mesh certain third-party services with Google products to make sending e-mails and posting dates on a Google calendar automatic. Scripting is something that few other cloud services offer, and it puts Google ahead of the game in that respect. Google’s latest edition to Apps Script, called ScriptService , allows scripts to be published as a service program and provides control over when scripts run via timers and other “trigger” events—permitting Docs to perform automated functions. Another new feature of Apps Script integrates with Google Drive, allowing your script to find the root folder of someone else’s Google Drive account so that published scripts can create and manipulate files in them. Finally, the revamped scripts now permit e-mail attachments of 25 MB (up from 5 MB), and can create docs up to 50 MB (up from a 2 MB limit). Google has been aggressive in building out Apps Script’s functionality—in early April, the company announced the ability to add HTML to a script’s dialogue, and to program sheet protection in spreadsheets so a manager could control which collaborators see what. Along with the font and scripting announcements, Google also said its service will allow importing photos into docs from Google Drive, and show bidirectional controls for people typing in right-to-left languages. Google Docs also has 60 new document templates in the template gallery. Read the comments on this post

Data published by comScore shows that Amazon’s Kindle Fire has emerged as the dominant Android-based tablet. At the end of February, the Kindle Fire accounted for 54 percent of all Android tablets. The next most popular Android tablet product line is Samsung’s Galaxy Tab family, which dropped from 23 percent of Android tablets in December to 15 percent in February. The success of the Fire is no surprise to those paying attention to the tablet market—as we wrote last year, there is healthy demand for a low-cost iPad alternative. Amazon can afford to offer the hardware at a lower price than its rivals because it can make up the difference in content sales. The key factors driving sales of the Fire are likely its low price point, the strength of the Kindle brand, and the breadth of the Amazon content ecosystem. Read the comments on this post

If you’ve ever wondered how some website that looks like it was an early draft from the proverbial infinite number of monkeys on infinite keyboards managed to get to the top of a search result page instead of something you actually want to read (or something you’ve written), you’ve been victimized by the dark art of search engine optimization (SEO). In the never-ending battle for the top of the Google search results page, and for advertising click-throughs, marketers and bloggers enlist an ever-changing bag of tricks to game search engine algorithms, often with the help of SEO consultants and a collection of tools that track the best tactics of the moment. I recently got an advance look at the latest version of a tool that helps bring SEO to the masses. InboundWriter , a web-based software-as-a-service offering, coaches bloggers and other writers for the web on how to tweak their content based on best practices tuned to the user’s site strategy. The latest version, due out next week, adds a feature that tracks topics on Twitter to find similar material—giving bloggers potential new sources, and marketers an eye on their competition. Whether giving the masses the power of SEO is a good thing or not is another question entirely—while InboundWriter can optimize pages for search, following its advice to the letter doesn’t make you a better writer (though the new Twitter research tool certainly can make you a better-informed one). But like the honey badger, Google doesn’t care if you’re no Raymond Carver. To get a feel for what SEO experts think determines a “high-quality” page from the standpoint of a search engine, I used InboundWriter to search-optimize this story. I’ll let you be the judge of the outcome; InboundWriter gave it a score of 99 out of a possible 100. Read the comments on this post

This week the University of Oxford and the Vatican announced a plan to collaborate in digitizing 1.5 million pages of rare and ancient texts, most dating from the 16th century or earlier. The project is expected to span about 4 years and was made possible by a donation of £2 million (approximately $3.1 million) from the Polonsky Foundation—a charitable organization that supports higher education, medical research, and other general matters in the arts and sciences. Specifically, the texts will include pages from Oxford’s Bodelian Libraries and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV). The digitized pages will include early printed books—called incunabula—from Rome and the surrounding area; Greek manuscripts including early church texts and works by Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Hippocrates; and Hebrew manuscripts from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. “With approximately two-thirds of the material coming from the BAV and the remainder from the Bodleian, the digitization effort will also benefit scholars by uniting virtually materials that have been dispersed between the two collections over the centuries,” a statement from Oxford read. The aim of the project, as envisioned by the Polonsky Foundation is “to democratize access to information, [seeing] increasing digital access to these two library collections, among the greatest in the world, as a significant step in sharing the wealth of resources on a global scale.” This is not the Polonsky Foundation’s first gift to digitize rare and ancient texts, either. An earlier gift to the Bodelian Libraries from the Foundation allowed the Oxford libraries to upload images of 280,000 fragments of Hebrew manuscripts, called the Cairo Genizah Collection , which are now available to search and view for free online. Read the comments on this post