Obama picks RIAA's favorite lawyer for a top Justice post
As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama won applause from legal adversaries of the recording industry. Stanford law professor Larry Lessig, the doyen of the "free culture" movement, endorsed the Illinois senator, as did Google CEO Eric Schmidt and even the Pirate Party. That was then. As president-elect, one of Obama's first tech-related decisions has been to select the Recording Industry Association of America's favorite lawyer to be the third in command at the Justice Department. And Obama's pick as deputy attorney general, the second most senior position, is the lawyer who oversaw the defense of the Copyright Term Extension Act--the same law that Lessig and his allies unsuccessfully sued to overturn.
Windows 7 could be one of Microsoft's greatest operating systems, if it fulfills the promise shown by the unofficial beta version (build 7000) we have been testing for the past couple of days. I have been pleased to discover over the past several days that Microsoft appears to have built on Vista's strengths and addressed most of its weaknesses with the beta release of Windows 7.
In yet another indicator as to the progress of Windows 7, the Tech ARP site reported that Microsoft plans to allow PC makers to offer customers who buy Windows Vista machines as of July 1 free upgrades to Windows 7 once it ships. Windows 7 may be closer than anyone realizes.
Apple announced today that effective immediately 8 million songs on iTunes would be DRM free, and that by the end of the quarter all 10 million songs on the popular music site would be DRM free. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, otherwise known as copy protection. DRM-free music can be shared between all your devices without complicated registration and proprietary software.
For the second year in a row, PC Magazine has done an informal survey across the PCMag editorial staff to find out which sites our colleagues and coworkers have their RSS readers pointed to. What follows are our Top 100 Blogs. They're not necessarily the best, or even the most informative, but they are what we're reading. The blogs contained herein range from the newsy to the absurd—all in all, we think they represent a fairly comprehensive cross-section of what's out there. Sadly, neither of my two blogs made the list. Oh well.
This is a preview of what may be the hot technologies of next week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Will have many stories and videos next week from CES
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