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Jailbreaking your iPhone now legal, as it should be

July 27, 2010 By yhurg Leave a Comment

Imagine not being able to change the spark plugs in your vehicle. Or think about the prospect of purchasing a car and not being able to put water in the radiator, or put on your spare tire. That’s essentially what Apple has done with its attempts to ensure that users don’t jailbreak their iPhone. Thanks to changes in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, however, jailbreaking the iPhone is now just as acceptable as jailbreaking your automobile.

The new rules are centered around six classes of copyrighted works.

  1. Motion pictures on DVDs
  2. Computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute software applications
  3. Computer programs, in the form of firmware or software, that enable used wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telecommunications network
  4. Video games accessible on personal computers and protected by technological protection measures that control access to lawfully obtained works
  5. Computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete
  6. Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling either of the book’s read-aloud function or of screen readers that render the text into a specialized format

For purposes related to this blog post we’re going to discuss the second class:

Computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute software applications, where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of such applications, when they have been lawfully obtained, with computer programs on the telephone handset.

Evidently, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington believes that iPhone owners should be able to use their iPhones for computer programs not specific to the iPhone. Quite frankly, I don’t know why Apple executives don’t feel the same way. I mean, you’d think they’d want to sell more iPhones.

Despite being a big Apple fan, this is the right decision, and it doesn’t just apply to Apple. It applies to all phone manufacturers. Reality is, you are buying the phone so you have the right to do with it what you please. It’s as simple as that.

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Brightcove Publishes, Distributes and Monetizes web video for iPad and other Apple devices

April 5, 2010 By yhurg Leave a Comment

iPhone Blue CubeLast month Brighcove announced Brightcove Experience for HTML5, a framework for publishing and delivering high quality, interactive and advertising-supported Web video experiences for HTML5-compatible devices.

The new solution enables you to easily expand the reach of your online video initiatives to popular consumer devices including the Apple iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

The Brightcove Experience for HTML5 provides support for intelligent device detection, playlist rendering, and playback of H.264 encoded video content. Over the course of this year, Brightcove will expand the Brightcove Experience for HTML5 to include full support for customization and branding of the player environment, advertising, analytics, social sharing, and other capabilities currently found in Brightcove experience solutions for other platforms.

The Brightcove Experience for HTML5 is provided at no charge to customers with subscriptions to Brightcove Professional, Enterprise, and Express $499 editions. An early version of the automatic device detection and HTML5 player template are available in the Brightcove Developer Center.

As Brightcove customers, we are pleased with this announcement for a couple reasons.

  1. It demonstrates Brightcove’s commitment to innovation, something which played a big part in our decision recently to Brightcove’s video hosting & streaming platform.
  2. It gives credence to the direction Apple is headed on the web by abandoning Flash and counting on web developers and software makers to adapt.

Brightcove is a Web-based platform that makes it easy to deliver professional-quality video experiences through your website. Unlike free video sharing sites, Brightcove gives you complete control over the video experience you put on your site. Organizations of all sizes choose Brightcove for its ease of use and its power to scale from the simplest project to the most complex

For more information about this and similar topics, visit our website at www.autoburstwebs.com

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Are you going to re-develop your websites for Apple's iPad?

February 8, 2010 By yhurg 7 Comment

A recent report on Marketplace by Farhad Manjoo from Salon.com throws out a compelling case as to why Apple has chosen to abandon Flash support on it’s new iPad. The decision by Apple to do this was not an idealistic one to simply “snub” Adobe as Manjoo puts it. It was a calculated choice based on where the Web is headed – a web without Flash. As you can imagine, this has sparked a bit of controversy.

But Adobe’s Flash, which was originally created by Macromedia many moons ago, has always been somewhat controversial. Many once argued that Flash ruining the web, making it clunky and cumbersome for people to experience web pages. However with the increase in bandwidth that has become available, and the improvement in web browser technology, I don’t think that argument holds much water. Flash has made our web experience far more interesting and constructive.

The debate in its simplest form goes like this: Apple’s new iPad does not support Flash because it it is banking on a Web that does not hinge on Flash for video display and interactive media such as gaming and advertising. This future is only possible because of HTML5, the next generation of HTML.

HTML is the construct on which everything you experience on the Web is founded. HTML is like the brick and mortar of a physical building. It is what makes the things you see in a web browser able to appear. Without HTML, you can not view a web page. Any web page.

HTML5 supports video on the web differently from how you watch video now, which is through plug-ins – small pieces of software that install on your computer and permit you to view things in your web browser like video. Flash is a plug-in provided by Adobe and it is the most widely used plug-in for video display. HTML5 permits websites to display video much like the way images are displayed, so essentially it eliminates the conflicts many people encounter attempting to watch video on the web, e.g. long download times, crashing browsers, etc.

HTML5 sounds ideal, eh? Well, it is. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Flash is on its way out.

As John Herrman explains on gizmodo.com, the stir is only a stir and Flash is not going away, at least not any time soon. There are numerous reasons for this and Herrman gets into them at length in his article “Why HTML is not going to save the Internet“. With Apple’s track record for anticipating the future of certain technologies, you can imagine the stigma surrounding this topic.

In the end, it’s Apple taking the big risk here. iPad users will not be able to experience websites running Flash which 85 of the top 100 most popular sites use to display content like videos or games or slide shows. If you go to those sites with the iPad, you’re likely to see an error icon instead.

With this chance, Apple is counting on web developers to make non-Flash versions of their sites using HTML5 standards for video and advertising. If the iPod is any testament to how the market could respond, it is possible we will see a lot of shuffling going on over the next few years in how websites are developed. Are you going to re-design your websites to meet HTML5 video standards that do not require Flash or other plug-ins?

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