Right Science Technology and Health

As predicted, Apple’s market capitalization passed Microsoft at the end of trading today, and it is now the second largest in the US market cap list just behind Exxon. With a capitalization of over $222 billion USD, Apple has quickly exceeded Microsoft’s $219.53 billion, in part due to losses from Microsoft.

Great news for Apple, even amongst new reports that they might be facing more investigation into antitrust practices, this time involving the iTunes music store. Apple had allegedly been halting marketing support after labels made exclusivity deals for Amazon’s “Daily Deal” specials.

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Bad news for anyone who is looking to get out of their AT&T contract in the future. According to reports today, the phone provider is looking to increase the fees a customer gets when they cancel their contract early.

These fees are currently $175 for customers who want out. Now AT&T is looking to raise early termination fees for smartphones to $325 for any new contracts after June 1. AT&T’s Mark Siegel confirmed the new changes in the following response.

“The idea is, and we think that it’s fair approach, that if you spend less on a device, your early termination fee should be less,” he said. “If you spend more, your early termination fee should be more.”

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Google facial recognition is the next frontier in the company’s assault on privacy, critics say. But Google insists facial recognition technology will be used carefully, if at all. Get the details here, and see photos and video below.

Okay, let’s not freak out or anything. They’re not hijacking your webcam to capture identifiable images of you just yet. In fact, there doesn’t appear to be any plans to use the technology on the actual computer user.

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Today HTC fired back at Apple by filing a complaint with the International Trade Commission claiming that they are infringing on five of HTC’s patents. If you don’t remember, Apple filed a similar complaint earlier this year against HTC for infringing on patents. This seems to be a direct response to Apple, starting the patent war between the two companies.

The lawsuit against Apple is asking for all imports and sales of the iPhone, iPod, and iPad to halt due to patent infringement. Seems on par with most patent infringement claims. Just like the Apple lawsuit there is no timeline for when or if this will go to court. There is not enough details about the five patents that HTC claims Apple is infringing, but it will be interesting to see how many of the claims are valid.

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Some recent changes in the iPhone SDK developer policies has restricted third-party compilers to be used to create iPhone and iPad applications. This change made many developers upset, especially at Adobe, where they had just finished their Flash-to-iPhone compiler that allows native iPhone apps to be built using Adobe’s Creative Suite 5. Now the change might have sparked an inquiry by the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice, according to the New York Post.

The new report says the antitrust inquiry is beginning to emerge over Apple’s developer policy. It is apparently “days away” from deciding which agency will manage the inquiry. The argument over the new policy has even caused Steve Jobs to write an open letter on the reasons why Flash has been absent on their devices.

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It appears that the continuing saga of the iPhone prototype that was “lost” in a bar and then found it’s way to tech blog Gizmodo is still continuing. The latest in what is rapidly becoming a very strange story is that the police have raided Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s house. A warrant was issued and his computers and several other items were seized.

There is obviously a lot of missing information at this point but here are a few thoughts. First, in California it is illegal to buy goods from a seller when the seller does not have the authority to sell that item. Whether this prototype iPhone was stolen or found, the person who had it did not have the right to sell the phone to Gizmodo for $5,000. Second, you do not want to screw over Apple. They are notoriously protective of their R&D and I’m not surprised at all that they are going after anyone involved in this story. There are numerous stories of the crazy security that Apple employs in their headquarters and development area and you know Jobs is going to love going after Chen and Gizmodo.

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Today Apple brought charges against device maker HTC for 20 patent infringements, all relating to the iPhone. HTC is one of Apple’s competitors in the smartphone market. They currently make a large number of Android phones which are targeted in the suit, including the Nexus One. The complaint was filed along with a large exhibit of evidence with the District Court in Delaware. Steve Jobs has commented on the lawsuit in a statement to the press.

“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”

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Many moons ago I came across this strange thing called bit-torrents. I quickly found that bit-torrents allowed anyone to find anything on the Internet (not that I ever used it for nefarious purposes ). One of the best sites that ever came along was The Pirate Bay. It quickly became won of the largest bittorrent sites on the Internet with a reported 25 million peers in it’s hay day.

As many know the rise and fall of The Pirate Bay has been a long one, including many legal battles that finally caught up to the folks in Sweden who ran the site. However, The Pirate Bay is not dead just yet. While it is true that the bittorrent will no longer be active that is because they are switching to a new trackerless solution called DHT. The crew recently posted the following:

“Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well.”

The DHT system is much more decentralized and harder to track who is downloading what. It also means that when a tracker goes down the entire site won’t get hit.

The future of TPB is unclear. They have appealed their copyright infringement case and the appeal has been postponed until next summer. So, at least for the mean time, TPB is still around. Smoke em if you got’em.

Uh oh, here comes the judge. It looks like the US Department of Justice has decided to take a look at the Microsoft/Yahoo deal, requesting that both companies give more information about their partnership. The worry seems to be that there might be some kind of anti-trust problems, or at least some perceived problems.

The main concern revolves around how their new partnership might impact ad pricing online. This is something of a silly question considering that Google owns about 70% of that entire market, and that combined Yahoo and Microsoft maybe owns about 20% of the market. It is somewhat bewildering to me that the Justice Department would question this deal and worry about anti-competitive pricing when essentially the entire industry of search engine driven ads is entirely uncompetitive.

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