Court Sides With Aereo

Streaming television service Aereo does not infringe the copyrights of over-the-air TV stations, and a request from several stations to shutter the New York-based service isn’t warranted, an appeals court has ruled.

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York was right to deny a request for a preliminary injunction from Fox, ABC, WNET and other TV stations, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled Monday.

The TV stations had argued Aereo, a service that allows subscribers to record and play over-the-air TV programs on Internet-connected devices, violated their so-called public performance right, their exclusive right in U.S. copyright law to “to perform the copyrighted work publicly.”

But Judge Christopher Droney, writing for the appeals court majority, noted that Aereo makes use of technology already found by courts to be legal. The service combines Aereo-designed mini TV antennas, DVRs, and a Slingbox-like streaming service, he noted.

Aereo users, by making personal copies of TV programs for their own use, were not creating public performances, Droney added.

The TV stations “have not demonstrated that they are likely to prevail on the merits on this claim in their copyright infringement action,” Droney wrote in rejecting the request for an injunction against the service. “Nor have they demonstrated serious questions as to the merits and a balance of hardships that tips decidedly in their favor.”

Aereo praised the decision. The decision “again validates that Aereo’s technology falls squarely within the law, and that’s a great thing for consumers who want more choice and flexibility in how, when and where they can watch television,” Chet Kanojia, Aereo’s CEO and founder, said in a statement.

Lawyers for the TV stations weren’t immediately available for comment.

Digital rights group Public Knowledge cheered the ruling, saying it is a “victory for consumer choice and video innovation.”

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Blackberry Plans New Tablet

BlackBerry plans to roll out a larger tablet and two phone-tablet combos, or phablets, over the next year, according to a leaked road map presentation slide.

The three devices will run the BlackBerry 10 mobile operating system, which powers the Z10 smartphone and the upcoming Q10, which features a physical qwerty keyboard, according to the slide, which first appeared over the weekend on Twitter as @BB10Leaks.

BlackBerry officials didn’t comment on the road map. However, in comments to analysts last Thursday, CEO Thorstein Heins said repeatedly that the company will introduce more BlackBerry 10 devices this year, though he didn’t indicate what form factors the products would feature.

The three new devices shown in the slide include a BlackBerry 10 tablet with a widescreen aspect ratio, as well as a “U10″ phone-tablet, which some call a phablet, and an “R10″ phablet with a physical qwerty keyboard.

The slide indicates that the B10 tablet will ship in the third or fourth quarter, while the two phablets will be released later, with the U10 shipping at the end of the year and the R10 in spring of 2014.

There are no specifications on the slide, but the devices appear to be shown roughly in proportion to one another, with the phablets appearing to be wider than the existing Z10 and Q10 smartphones.

BlackBerry already has a 7-in. tablet called the PlayBook that is more square in shape than the widescreen look of the B10 in the slide. Some analysts and bloggers said it’s possible that BlackBerry is developing a competitor to the various 9-to-11-in. tablets already on the market, including many Android tablets, as well as the 9.7-in. iPad.

“BlackBerry wants to be a full-line competitor, particularly for business users, so they have to have a full line of products to compete head-on with Apple and Android, primarily Samsung,” said Jack Gold, an analyst at J.Gold Associates. “I would expect any viable competitor to establish a full line of products touching on all the various preferences of the marketplace, which includes smartphones, phablets and tablets.”

Gold couldn’t confirm whether any of the details in the leaked slide were accurate, but he noted that it doesn’t appear to include the mid-priced smartphones that Heins and other executives have hinted that BlackBerry may launch over the next few quarters.

The PlayBook tablet first went on sale in April 2011, running on what BlackBerry then called the BlackBerry Tablet OS, based on QNX. BlackBerry later said it would merge that tablet operating system into BlackBerry 10. The company also released a major update to the PlayBook tablet operating system in February 2012.

The first release of the PlayBook was criticized for not having native email.

Analysts are not sure that BlackBerry can keep up with production demand for so many new devices that depend on a relatively constrained supply chain for displays and other components. But to boost its global smartphone market share, currently at less than 10%, BlackBerry will need a product lineup with a variety of options.

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TSMC And Imagination Team Up

TSMC and Imagination Technologies announced the next step in their tech collaboration in an effort to develop Imagination’s next generation PowerVR 6-series GPUs.

The new GPUs are still not ready for prime time, but they should be used in future SoC designs, including those stamped out using TSMC’s 16nm FinFET process. The two companies will work to create new reference system designs, utilizing high bandwidth memory standards and TSMC’s 3D IC technology.

As GPU muscle becomes more important for next generation SoCs, designers need more advanced and more complex processes, such as TSMC’s 16FinFET.

“Through advanced projects initiated under this partnership, Imagination and TSMC are working together to showcase how SoCs will transform the future of mobile and embedded products,” said Hossein Yassaie, CEO of Imagination.

TSMC VP Cliff Hou argued that the need for high performance mobile GPUs will drive silicon processes in the future, much in the same way CPU development pushed new processes in the nineties.

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LinkedIn Beefs Up

LinkedIn has re-tooled its search engine with changes designed to make it easier for members to find information on the business networking site, whose volume of content has increased and grown more diverse in recent years.

Launched in 2003, LinkedIn initially focused on giving professionals a place to feature their resumes and career bios, as well as connect with peers and colleagues, but the site has progressively become more interactive and houses a much larger repository of data beyond individual profiles.

For example, almost 3 million companies have set up corporate pages, more than 1.5 million groups have been created, the site features a jobs section, and individuals and publishers are able to post and share comments and links to articles.

So it’s not surprising for LinkedIn to focus on improving its search engine, which fielded 5.7 billion queries last year.

LinkedIn members have until now had to run separate queries for groups, companies, jobs and other professionals, but that’s changing with the upgraded search engine.

“Now, all you need to do is type what you’re looking for into the search box and you’ll see a comprehensive page of results that pulls content from all across LinkedIn including people, jobs, groups and companies,” Johnathan Podemsky, a LinkedIn product manager, wrote in a blog post on Monday.

Users can still segment results, so as to see only job results, for example.

The LinkedIn search engine is also gaining auto-complete and suggested-searches functionalities to help people fine-tune query terms. In addition, the search engine will log members’ search queries and “learn” from them in order to deliver more relevant results.

It will also be possible for users to save search queries and be alerted about new or changed search results. The advanced search option has also gained more search filters, including location, company and school.

However, the search engine still doesn’t include content from the company’s SlideShare site, which about 60 million monthly visitors use to upload, share, rate and comment on primarily slide presentations, but also documents, videos and webinars.

Also, the search improvements are being applied to the main site, not to the mobile apps, although doing so is something the company is looking into, according to a spokeswoman.

LinkedIn started to roll out the new search features on Monday, and expects to finish delivering them to every member worldwide in the coming weeks.

As of the end of 2012, LinkedIn had topped 200 million registered members located in more than 200 countries.

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Are CUDA Applications Limited?

Acceleware said at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) today that most algorithms that run on GPGPUs are bound by GPU memory size.

Acceleware is partly funded by Nvidia to provide developer training for CUDA to help sell the language to those that are used to traditional C and C++ programming. The firm said that most CUDA algorithms are now limited by GPU local memory size rather than GPU computational performance.

Both AMD and Nvidia provide general purpose GPU (GPGPU) accelerator parts that provide significantly faster computational processing than traditional CPUs, however they have only between 6GB and 8GB of local memory that constrains the size of the dataset the GPU can process. While developers can push more data from system main memory, the latency cost negates the raw performance benefit of the GPU.

Kelly Goss, training program manager at Acceleware, said that “most algorithms are memory bound rather than GPU bound” and “maximising memory usage is key” to optimising GPGPU performance.

She further said that developers need to understand and take advantage of the memory hierarchy of Nvidia’s Kepler GPU and look at ways of reducing the number of memory accesses for every line of GPU computing.

The point Goss was making is that GPU computing is relatively cheap in terms of clock cycles relative to the time it takes to fetch data from local memory, let alone loading GPU memory from system main memory.

Goss, talking to a room full of developers, proceeded to outline some of the performance characteristics of the memory hierarchy in Nvidia’s Kepler GPU architecture, showing the level of detail that CUDA programmers need to pay attention to if they want to extract the full performance potential from Nvidia’s GPGPU computing architecture.

Given Goss’s observation that algorithms running on Nvidia’s GPGPUs are often constrained by local memory size rather than by the GPU itself, the firm might want to look at simplifying the tiers of memory involved and increasing the amount of GPU local memory so that CUDA software developers can process larger datasets.

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Will Tegra 4 Help nVidia’s Financials?

Trefis analysts believe Nvidia’s Tegra business is likely to grow over the next few years, although Nvidia won’t become a mobile chip company anytime soon.

In a note published a couple of days ago, Trefis concluded that Nvidia has managed to offset the impact of the PC slump thanks to mobile revenue. The PC market took a massive hit in 2012, and although things are looking up, Tegra could still come in handy.

Nvidia currently earns about 18 percent of its revenue from Tegra processors, which is not bad for a product that was on the drawing board just a few years ago.

“We estimate Tegra sales to grow at a CAGR of 17% until 2016. While we believe that Nvidia will manage to expand its footprint in mobile computing, we think that the increasing competition will keep its growth rate lower than the industry average,” said Trefis.

However, Trefis went on to conclude that Nvidia had more lack with tablets than smartphones. Last year it scored several big tablet design wins, but relatively few phone wins. The Tegra 4i, with integrated LTE, should lend a helping hand, but it won’t be ready for much of 2013. In addition, Nvidia is facing more pressure from Qualcomm and Samsung, while at the same time it was forced to push back the introduction of Tegra 4 due to technical issues.

Trefis believes Tegra’s contribution to Nvidia’s overall revenue could reach over 25 percent by 2019, which means the Tegra business won’t expand much in a mature smartphone market.

Nvidia has Tegra, AMD has consoles, so both outfits have something to fall back on in a slow PC market, at least for the time being.

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Is Apple Really Security Conscious?

Is Apple proving how clueless it is about security by backing a method of replacing passwords with fingerprint readers?

Just days after a scandal where a South American hospital was staffed by phantom doctors who used silicon fingers of their colleagues to convince administrators’ finger print readers that they were working, Apple has decided that they are the perfect form of security.

Word on the street is that Apple is said to be planning to introduce an iPhone that can be unlocked by the owner’s fingerprint. Speculation about Apple’s plans for fingerprint recognition began last summer when the iPhone maker bought bio-metric security firm AuthenTec for $335 million.

It is believed that the iPhone 5S will have a fingerprint chip under the Home button, to “improve security and usability.” Meanwhile in an engineering journal, two Google security experts outlined plans for an ID ring or smartphone chip that could replace online passwords, which is a lot sexier than fingerprint scanning.

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AMD’s Richland Coming In June

Richland is set to replace AMD’s Virgo platform, powered by Trinity processors, and this change will happen in June 2013, most likely coinciding with Computex 2013.

AMD has just launched the first batch of Richland mobile APUs and we still have to see some notebook designs hitting the market. We wrote about mobile Richland APUs.

As of late last year Desktop Richland was always set to launch in June 2013 and the fastest of them is the A10 6800K, clocked at 4.1GHz and 4.4 with Turbo. It also features Radeon HD 8670D graphics that run at 844 MHz. This is the fastest Richland part and it comes unlocked, ready to replace the current AMD A10 5800K. In Europe, the A10 5800K currently sells for 112, while in US the same CPU sells for $129.00 (boxed).

The alpha dog A10 6800K is followed by A10 6700, A8 6600K (Unlocked) and A8 6500. AMD has a mix of 100W and 65W quad-core Richland desktop SKUs. There will be a single A6 6400K (Unlocked) SKU and the A4 6300, both dual-cores with 65W TDP.

Production ready samples were churned out in late January, while volume production is scheduled for late March 2013. The announcement was always scheduled for June 2013 and Richland last through most of 2013, until Kaveri with 28nm Steamroller comes on line.

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Intel’s Pentium Getting Updated

Intel is going to update its desktop Pentium family with several slightly faster Ivy Bridge-based processors.

According to CPU World the chips should hit the shops in the second quarter of 2013 which is a quarter after January’s refresh of budget desktop families, and one quarter before the launch of Haswell. The new chips have the original titles of Pentium G2030, G2030T, G2120T and G2140. They will have two cores, but lack Hyper-Threading technology, and can run two threads before getting all confused.

Both the G2000 and G2100 series CPUs support only basic features, like Intel 64 and Virtualization. They do integrate HD graphics which are clocked at 650 MHz and dual-channel memory controller, that supports DDR3-1333 on the G2030 and the G2030T, and up to DDR3-1600 on the G2120T and the G2140.

Pentium G2030T and G2120T are low-power models, replacing G2020T and G2100T but are clocked 100 MHz higher, that is at 2.6GHz and 2.7GHz respectively. However they still fit into 35 Watt thermal envelope. Pentium G2030 and G2140 mainstream microprocessors will be faster than “T” SKUs, and they will have 57 per cent higher TDP. Intel expects these to replace the G2020 and G2130 SKUs. The G2030 will run at 3 GHz. The G2140 will operate at 3.3 GHz. No word on prices yet.

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Is Android Safer Than iOS?

The general consensus is that iOS apps tend to be somewhat safer than their Android counterparts. Apple goes to great lengths to have apps vetted and as a result far fewer iOS apps end up with malware or security issues.

However, a new report fresh out of Appthority claims iOS apps have their fair share of issues and in some respects then can pose an even greater security risk than Android apps. The report covered the top 50 apps from the Apple App Store and Google Play and found that iOS apps exhibited riskier behaviour.

“The majority of iOS apps track for location (60%), share data with advertising or analytics networks (60%) and have access to the user’s contact list (54%). A small percentage of iOS apps also had access to the user’s calendar (14%),” the report found.

However, Android fans shouldn’t be too happy since their platform is not far behind. Half of them share data with ad networks or analytics companies, while 42 percent tracked location. Slightly better, but nothing to be proud about.
One of the most worrying findings is that both Android and iOS apps don’t do much to prevent personal data from leaking from our devices. Not a single iOS app analyzed in the study used encryption to send and receive data, and neither did 92 percent of Android apps.

So while it might seem that Android is a somewhat better platform for users with privacy concerns, both Google and Apple are pants at that sort of thing.

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