Culture and Society

Japan’s Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp with the latest development: The new optic-fiber technology will increase communication speeds to one gigabyte per second, up from 100 megabytes per second now available for homes and offices, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said in its evening edition. The technology developed by NTT, Japan’s …

ReplayTV is eliminating the PVR’s abilities to skip commercials automatically and send shows through the Internet, two of its best features, sealing its own doom – good thinking: Executives at DNNA, the D&M Holdings Inc. subsidiary that bought the Replay line from Sonicblue Inc., said they made the concessions to …

Fascinating copyright debate on the NewsHour between Larry Lessig and the RIAA’s Matt Oppenheim: The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued four students on April 3 for allegedly operating music-sharing Web sites, accusing them of enabling large-scale copyright theft. Although the RIAA initially asked for $98 billion in damages, …

Are your URGENT REQUESTS FOR ASSISTANCE going unheeded no matter how many emails you send out? Learn from the Nigerians: Breakfast Kickoff Session: Your choice: A hard boiled egg, or two slices of white bread and a cricket. Keynote Address: Dr. Hamza Kalu’s adds some historical perspective in his keynote …

Kansas Republican Sen. Sam Brownback is preparing a consumer-friendly digital copyright bill that he could present as soon as this week. In what must be taken as a good sign, it has the RIAA spitting: “This draft legislation is weighted down with a variety of bad public policy judgments hostile …

Give Apple credit for taking the risk and proving the viability of a relatively user-friendly digital music store. Now will the world’s biggest butts squish Apple? Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and AOL Time Warner Inc.’s America Online unit are among the companies expected to launch services to compete …

We mentioned last week that Wal-Mart has requested that its top 100 suppliers start using wireless inventory tracking equipment by 2005. Coincidentally, Microsoft addressed the same issue today: Microsoft Corp. said on Tuesday that it would develop software and services that will help retailers, manufacturers and distributors use radio tags …

Wal-Mart has lowered DVD rental service prices: The Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer said it would offer a $15.54 monthly subscription rate for the service for customers who only want to have two DVDs rented at one time. When the company started the service in October, it had a subscription fee of …

I freely admit to having a hard time following this one: This high-technology soap opera is complex, but here is a simplified version of events so far: SCO, which bought the licensing rights to the Unix operating system and its source code in 1995, sued I.B.M. in March, contending that …

First AOL and Microsoft, now TiVo and Gemstar-TV Guide International are dismissing litigation and making nice: The two companies announced Monday that they have dismissed a lawsuit Gemstar filed against TiVo in early 2000, which alleged that TiVo’s digital video recorder service infringed on Gemstar’s patent for electronic programming guide …