12 |MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCC|SEP 08 |www.maximumpc.com
QUICKSTART^
THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALLNokia recently agreed to
purchase British mobile
OS maker Symbian. The
handset maker previously
owned 48 percent of
the company and will
purchase the remaining 52 percent in
a deal that’s expected to be finalized
in the next few months.
Symbian is used on hundreds of
cell-phone models and is noted for
its scalability, running everything
from basic handsets to high-end,feature-rich models. As
part of the deal, Nokia
will create the Symbian
Foundation, a nonprofit
entity that will make the
OS available for free to
any interested party by early 2009.
The move could undermine
Google’s Android open-source OS, as
handsets using it have been delayed.
Microsoft may also stand to suffer
since handset makers must pay a
licensing fee to use its mobile OS. –T ENokia Buys
Symbian
Purchase expected
to spur innovation
as the OS goes
open sourceThree short decades ago,
Intel launched the 8086
processor to compete in the fledg-
ling 16-bit general-purpose processor market.
Little did the company know that this modest proc was des-
tined to father the most popular CPU architecture of our time.
Since 1978, Intel and its competition have extended the basic
architecture multiple times, shipped literally billions of processors,
and changed the world. Happy birthday! –W Sx86 Turns 30!
Nokia will donate its
proprietary user in-
terface to the Symbian
Foundation.A
fter coming under intense fire and scrutiny last year for throttling
P2P traffic during peak times, broadband provider Comcast is
testing a new approach to network management: protocol-agnostic
bandwidth throttling. Rather than limiting the bandwidth available to, say,
all BitTorrent users when network traffic is heavy, the company will target
the individuals hogging the pipes. By measuring aggregate bandwidth
consumption, Comcast can identify the heaviest users. During times of
network congestion, these folks will experience a delay in their data
requests until overall traffic has lessened.
Comcast began testing its new system in June in the Chambersburg, PA,
and Warrenton, VA, markets. If all goes well, the company plans to fully roll
out its new bandwidth-management scheme by the end of the year. –K SQUICKSTART^
THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALLN
ot very long ago, in a land not at all far
away, there was a little company called
Blueport. It held the copyright on a piece
of software that the US Air Force liked using for
logistics. Blueport protected its software with a
time bomb—a bit of code that made the software
self-destruct when the license expired. That
date was approaching, and Blueport wanted to
negotiate a new license with the USAF—and you
know, get paid.
Instead, it got a bit of the ol’ shock and awe.
The Air Force not only didn’t pay up, it paid big
contractor SAIC ($2.5 million in lobbying in 2007)
to reverse engineer Blueport’s program and dis-
able the time bomb. The Air Force also paid SAIC
to rewrite the program, and by rewrite I mean
simply cut and paste any of the original code that
seemed useful.
Unsurprisingly, Blueport sued. The facts of
the case were never disputed—the government
not only violated copyright, it turned the DMCA
out on a street corner. But the Air Force had
an ace up its sleeve—the “Uh uh, no you don’t”
defense. It asked the judge to throw out the case
based on sovereign immunity. Sovereign im-
munity is a legal principle that states that no one
can sue the government unless the government
gives them permission. In the 18th century, when
the country was just a wee whippersnapper, we
passed the 11th amendment to create sovereign
immunity.
It doesn’t have anything to do with who’s
right, just who’s allowed to sue. The government
can waive immunity, but nothing in the DMCA
or copyright law says, “Yeah, OK, we’ll play by
these rules too.”
At the same time this was occurring, the
government was arresting people for DMCA
violations, using trade negotiations to force DMCA
laws on other nations, and generally moralizing
about the whole thing a lot.
But that was that. The government can-
not ever be sued for violating its own DMCA or
infringing on copyright. So there are your rights
when dealing with the government—a pretty grim
little fairy tale.BYTE RIGHTSIP Rights Fairy Tale
QUINN NORTONQuinn Norton writes about copyright for Wired
News and other publications. Her work has
ranged from legal journalism to the inner life
of pirate organizations.COMCAST’S NEW TACK
ISP tests protocol-agnostic traffic management