12:44 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

This post is slightly off-topic; but considering that MobileRead runs a community forum, I thought it in our best interest to tell you of the following story that is currently happening in Germany.

Q: Can a private forum operator be sued if one of his members is offending existing laws by selecting a particular user name?

A: The private operator of a German bodybuilding forum received a cease-and-desist letter last Friday for one his forum members using a registered trademark as a user name. The trademark was registered in Germany in 1999 and apparently has never been in use nor is it related in any way to bodybuilding. Nevertheless, the lawyer specified the amount in dispute at 100,000 Euro (~120,000 USD) based on the number of registered forum members (~30,000) and number of posts (~385,000). At no time did the operator commercially benefit from someone displaying the trademark on his forum; his site has been financed solely by Online ads and commissions from an Online store. He received three days (of which two are non-business) time to reconsider, to remove all traces of the trademark on his board, and to end the dispute by paying an agreement and consulting fee of 5,206.31 Euro. Otherwise he would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The operator is currently obtaining legal counsel and evaluating his options.

If the case goes to court and the trademark holder receives a favorable judgment, the consequences would be disastrous for all forum operators. While the MobileRead community is still relatively small with around 3,700 members, imagine a community such as IGN Boards which has over 1,250,000 registered members! It would be virtually impossible for a forum operator to evaluate each user name and to guarantee that the name is not violating any trademarks or copyrights.

Another unfortunate example of the systematic misuse of a trademark ;(

09:38 AM by doctorow in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

The guys from SK Tools are working on a new utility called SKTracker that makes snapshots (from registry, files, etc.) of your Pocket PC. This is useful for instance when you want to inspect changes on your system after installing and running a new program. I attached a screenshot to this thread.

You can download the most current beta by clicking here. Without registration you won't be able save your settings.

If you are looking for a freeware snapshot tool, you can try ssnap which is also developed by SK Tools. It is less convenient to use, however, and probably won't be as actively supported.

A little sidenote: any product from SK Tools will be 50% off on June 17th 2005.

06:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

If you missed our frontpage news at any point this week, here is the best way to catch up:

E-Book Webstores
Amazon to open an audio book download store

General Chat
"Perpendicular recording" technology advances! Hard drives still yet to hit market
Debian 3.1 Released
Grassroots works! MS IE to do "tabbed browsing"
Happy Birthday to Shaun McGill
Reminder: MobileRead Newsfeeds
Store 30gig on a Credit Card - Coming in 2006

iSilo/X
iSilo 4.27 and iSiloX/C 4.27 enter beta1

New Links
Skweezer with better Web optimization for mobile devices

Other E-Book Resources
PDA Fiction - great blog on e-books
Summer Reading resources

Other Gadgets
Apple Switching to Intel Processors
BlackBerry-only store to open in NYC on June 16
myPower ALL MP3300 universal rechargeable battery

Palm
AeroPlayer for Palm OS 6 is most likely not alone
EasyConvert for FontSmoother 1.0 beta
EasyConvert for FontSmoother 1.00 release
Mike Rohde's final day at PalmSource DevCon
PalmOne replaces dead m1xx handhelds
palmOne Tungsten T5 for $280 deal
SharkCache reduces startup times on PalmOne LifeDrive
Why PalmOS? (According to PalmSource)

Plucker
EasyConvert for FontSmoother and Plucker alpha
Plucker ported to 800x480 Nokia 770

Pocket PC
Card Export II for PPC emulates USB Mass Storage
HP iPAQ hw6515 review
Microsoft's push e-mail isn't really push?
Microsoft announces Push Technology for Windows Mobile 5.0
SafeMode for Pocket PC V0.5

Portable Audio/Video
Archos AV 700 Mobile DVR widescreen player announced
DVD Decrypter is Dead
FlashTrax Digital Multimedia Storage and Player
Refurbished iPods deals

WiFi / Bluetooth Technologies
How to crack WEP - 3rd part secures your WLAN
Top 10 WiFi connected U.S. cities
United to offer in-flight WiFi service in 2006

01:13 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

This is our periodic reminder to inform you that you can subscribe to individual sections of MobileRead via RSS 0.92 and 2.0 feeds.

For instance if you are mainly interested in our frontpage postings you can subscribe to this feed. Perhaps you want to include all postings on e-books as well? In this case you can add this feed to your feed aggregator.

Click here for a full overview of our newsfeeds.

09:38 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Softick's Card Export II allows Pocket PC owners to mount their storage cards or file stores as logical disks under Windows/Mac/Linux desktops. At least for transfering large files, it is reported to be faster than using ActiveSync - plus you can use any file manager of your choice!

Download a free evaluation version by clicking here. Currently supported are Intel PXA25x and Intel PXA 27x based handhelds with WM 2003 and WM 2003 SE.

Not sure if Softick is a bit late with this tool since Microsoft's forthcoming WM 5.0 adds a USB Mass Storage driver that enables any Windows CE-based device to expose a native storage device to a USB host.

Update: V2.01 is available which fixes a couple of small bugs.

08:43 AM by pruss in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

I've extended my EasyConvert to generate antialiased Plucker font packages in addition to FontSmoother ones. The alpha test version is at http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...group_id=83582

Editor's Note: We are delighted to highlight this new version of software related to FontSmoother as it is an excellent software contribution to ebook reading, and I happen to think the author's a great guy also.

You may wonder why we put some announcements from software authors and companies and not others, so I want to just briefly share my own thinking on this topic. I'm sure it seems a bit random, and that's because in a way it is a bit random. But there are some obvious factors that influence what we post or move to the front page. Certainly participating members of our site tend to get a lot more attention from us because they are a part of us and we know him or her. Products or programs should be useful and "on target" for our audience, because we are always trying to present items that will be interesting to our readers. And then there's the truly random factors like whether or not the item got our attention and what kind of mood we're in that day, how busy we are, etc!

It's also certainly the case that something written up in a form that's ready to publish is most likely to get posted. It takes time to rewrite or repackage something, for example a standard press release or a blatant ad, so that sort of thing has to really get our attention, or catch us when we're hunting for news and have time to write it up. So, hopefully, the items that we find interesting will also be interesting to many of you, our readers. [BobR]

12:08 PM by Bob Russell in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Engadget is reporting that there is a holographic storage drive coming soon from Optware that will store 30gig on credit card size storage media. And the storage cards will cost less than $1 each. Now that's pretty exciting technology.

Of course the main unit will cost about $2000 when released, but we're heading in the right direction!

12:02 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

It seems that legal threats were enough to end the development of DVD Decrypter. That has long been a tool for archiving DVDs, and which strips protection (DRM) much better than other all-in-one tools such as DVD Shrink and others. The tool is also helpful at times for getting content onto a mobile device for reading.

Looks like the process of making personal backup copies has just gotten that much harder for anything you buy in the future with DRM that existing copies of DVD Decrypter can't already handle.

Publisher's control of content is likely to become even harsher than the wireless carrers' stranglehold on how you use and pay for their data network. The bottom line is that they are going to force you to live with expensive and hard to use content that is controlled even to the point of how often and how long you are able use it. Until the inevitable alternatives arrive, that is!

(via Engadget)