Your life will some day end; ACTA will live on

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) isn't just another secret treaty—it's a way of life. If ACTA passes in anything like its current form, it will create an entirely new international secretariat to administer and extend the agreement.

Knowledge Ecology International got its hands on more of the leaked ACTA text this week, including a chapter on "Institutional Arrangements" that has not leaked before. The chapter makes clear that ACTA will be far more than a standard trade agreement; it appears to be nothing less than an attempt to make a new international institution that will handle some of the duties of groups like the WTO and WIPO.

Why bother? Well, from the perspective of countries like the US, the existing institutions have problems. For one, they feature a huge number of nations, some of whom have blocked some of the anti-counterfeiting provisions desired by the US and others. Call this the UN problem—getting much done with so many people in attendance can be tricky, and ACTA has become a "coalition of the willing" who have decided to go form their own club instead.

But WIPO, especially, has also opened up over the last decade, and now has robust rules for the participation of consumer groups and other non-governmental organizations. It also requires far more transparency, with the publication of proposals and draft texts throughout a negotiating process. As we have seen too clearly, ACTA has none of this.

Jamie Love of KEI claims that the US Trade Representative has already "told members of Congress it is their intention to marginalize the participation by consumer interest organizations in the new forum."

The new ACTA secretariat won't be a mere administrator. The leaked chapter makes clear that the new governing body will "make recommendations regarding the implementation of ACTA" and will itself "identify and monitor techniques of piracy and counterfeiting."

In other ACTA news, a separate chapter has also leaked, and in it the EU wants to make sure that criminal penalties exist for "cases of willful trademark counterfeiting and copyright or related rights piracy on a commercial scale." On a "commercial scale" doesn't mean that such infringement must be done for financial gain, however; it also includes "significant willful copyright or related rights infringements that have no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain."

Despite the public support of President Obama, ACTA is running into bad press throughout the world. The European Parliament last week even managed to pass a strong resolution of displeasure with the ACTA process, which passed 633-13.

Source: Arstechnica.com

Mozilla Labs builds add-on to bring address book to Firefox

Firefox's flexible XUL framework and sophisticated add-on system offer a rich platform for enhancing browser functionality. Mozilla Labs takes advantage of this capability as it experiments with new concepts for augmenting Web interaction. Some of the latest experiments to emerge from Mozilla Labs aim to make contacts and identity a core part of the browser.

Mozilla has announced the availability of an experimental new add-on for Firefox that is designed to import information about the user's contacts from a variety of Web services and other sources. The add-on makes contact details easily accessible to the user and can also selectively supply it to remote Web applications. The initial implementation can import data from Gmail, Twitter, and the local system address book on OS X. It can optionally use the Gravatar service to find contact avatars.

After the add-on has imported and indexed the user's contact data, it becomes available to the user through an integrated contact management tool that functions like an address book. There are a number of ways that the contact information could potentially be useful in the browser itself. One of Mozilla's first experiments is an autocompletion feature that allows users to select a contact when they are typing an e-mail address into a Web form.

A number of more compelling usage scenarios involve making the user's contact information available to remote Web services. Consider, for example, the popular social networking website Foursquare, which requests access to your Gmail account so that it can connect you with your friends. Instead of giving it access to your Gmail account and all of your contacts, you could use the contacts add-on to selectively provide limited details about specific groups of contacts.

The add-on is designed in a manner which ensures that contact information is only made accessible to Web services with the user's explicit permission. In many ways, it could potentially be more secure and respectful of privacy than the existing mechanisms that are already widely used today by many social networks to automatically establish friend relationships for new users.

To make the browser's contact database accessible to Web applications, the add-on uses the W3C Contacts API specification. It's an emerging standard developed by Nokia that defines JavaScript methods for interacting with contact data. The functionality described by the standard is intended to allow Web applications to seamlessly integrate with the user's browser-integrated address book.

The API is still in the editing stage, but appears to be relatively comprehensive. It supports adding, removing, and updating items in the browser's contact database and also provides methods for searching and iterating over contacts.

The add-on also supports Plaxo's Portable Contacts standard, which is associated with the OpenSocial initiative. Mozilla says that its new contacts add-on is using the Portable Contacts format to store data internally.

Mozilla is enthusiastic about opportunities for making the new contacts add-on integrate with Raindrop, the experimental communication platform that is being developed by Mozilla Messaging. There is also a chance that we could eventually see contact synchronization support integrated in Weave. As the browser increasingly becomes the central hub of Internet communication, native support for managing and accessing contacts could be a valuable enhancement.

Source: Arstechnica.com

Google reportedly to part ways with China on April 10

April 10: General Robert E. Lee's last address to Confederate troops, the Titanic's departure from Southampton, England, my friend Jake's birthday, and now, Google's rumored pull-out date in China. The company is preparing to announce its decision as soon as March 22, according to an anonymous source speaking to the China Business News, though it likely won't be the end of the company's operations in the region.

The newspaper's source, quoted by Bloomberg, said that Google's Chinese staff will find out what their options are on March 22 as well. Previously, Google had told them that they could either move to the US to work at Google's headquarters or that they could work for Google's Asia-Pacific business.

Chinese officials have been warning Google's partners to continue censoring search results in the event that the company decides to either open the floodgates on taboo topics or pull out altogether. Though some believe Google has already begun to let some results leak through, it seems as if the official decision has not yet been made.

Google will continue its Asia-Pacific operations, even if Google.cn ends up going away.

Source: Arstechnica.com

Apple to iPad devs: on your mark, get set, submit!

Apple is alerting developers that they have just over a week to prepare iPad apps and get them submitted for review if they want them to be in the App Store on April 3.

Developers must build their apps using beta 5 of the iPhone OS 3.2 SDK and submit them by 5pm PDT on March 27 to get an initial review by Apple, according to an e-mail sent to developers this afternoon. Reviewers will run the apps on iPad hardware and e-mail developers with notes on the "readiness" of the app, and information necessary to submit the app for final review for inclusion in the App Store by April 3. Only apps that are submitted for the initial review process will have a chance to go on sale at the "grand opening of the iPad App Store."

The crux of the problem is that most developers won't have access to actual iPad hardware to test and debug their apps before they go on sale. Beyond a select few developers given early access under reportedly rigid security provisions, this is the only chance most will have for their app to run outside of the iPad Simulator unless they wait until after April 3 to test on hardware themselves. Unfortunately, that could mean giving competitors a big jumpstart.

The good news, though, is that iPad owners will have more than just Apple's apps to choose from on day one. Also, developers have observed especially quick review times of late. This suggests that even in the worst case that some apps require an early fix, developers should be able to get it out to users with little delay.

Source: Arstechnica.com