Gadgets

On almost any given day, Twitter receives a handful of requests to delete tweets that link to pirated versions of copyrighted content—and quickly complies by erasing the offending tweets from its site.

That fact itself is probably unsurprising to people familiar with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown process, which gives sites like Twitter a "safe harbor" against lawsuits related to user behavior and uploads—so long as the sites don't knowingly tolerate pirated material or links to such material.

But Twitter has taken the unusual step of making DMCA takedown notices public, in partnership with Chilling Effects, a project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and several universities. The site shows 4,410 cease and desist notices dating back to November 2010. While most of 2011 shows daily or near-daily activity, there is just one notice in January 2012, suggesting either that Twitter is suddenly receiving fewer DMCA takedown notices or that the database is not quite up to date. (If we find out from Twitter or Chilling Effects, we'll update the story.)

Apple has begun alerting its Italian customers that they have a right to a two-year warranty on Apple's products as provided by Italian law. The move comes after Apple was issued a $1.2 million fine for allegedly misleading customers—the court decision documenting Apple's violation is now linked directly from the store.apple.it page.

Italy's Consumer Code provides all Italian customers with a two-year warranty that covers products that were defective at the time of sale. In December, Italy's Antitrust Authority accused Apple of obscuring this fact by pushing its own AppleCare Protection Plans, which extend coverage beyond the company-provided one year to three years.

The court decision linked from the Italian Store page details how Apple must change its marketing language for its AppleCare Protection Plans to reflect the existence of the two-year consumer code warranty. Directly linking the document, which also details the fines Apple had to pay, is an oddly transparent move by the company, but may be used to support the company's court appeal to the fine.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook has reportedly called recent reports on Apple's attitude toward its supply chain "patently false and offensive" in a new e-mail sent internally to Apple employees. Cook's remarks came the same day The New York Times published a lengthy feature about the "human cost" of our iPads, iPhones, and other gadgets. That report, based on sources and interviews conducted by the Times, made the assertion that many of Apple's executives are willing to look the other way when it comes to unsafe conditions and worker abuse because of the pressure to keep gadget costs down. Apple declined to comment for the Times story.

In Cook's e-mail, which is published in full at 9to5Mac, Cook indirectly referenced the Times report by opening with, "some people are questioning Apple’s values today, and I’d like to address this with you directly." He went on to describe any accident that happens with Apple's suppliers as "deeply troubling," and addressed Apple's employees who work at supplier sites around the world by saying they're "as outraged by this as I am." The remainder of the letter describes Apple's supplier inspection initiatives and its recent relationship with the Fair Labor Association.

"Any suggestion that we don’t care is patently false and offensive to us," Cook wrote. "As you know better than anyone, accusations like these are contrary to our values. It’s not who we are."

The Times report in question is worth reading in full; it's full of quotes sourced from former and current Apple executives about the company's view of supply chain problems in China and elsewhere. The prevailing message appears to be that Apple cares to a certain extent, but can pretend certain reports don't exist until there's a PR disaster to deal with (such as the aluminum dust explosion at a Foxconn plant that killed several workers in 2011). 

It's clear that Cook feels strongly about the new story, and he claims that Apple is committed to improving worker conditions overseas. "What we will not do—and never have done—is stand still or turn a blind eye to problems in our supply chain," he wrote. "On this you have my word."

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Despite the controversy over Google's new privacy policy, the company already has you wrapped up into a neat little demographic package, as I was reminded yesterday when looking at my Google account settings. How accurate are Google's guesses? We asked the Ars staff to take a look.

Google attempts to guess your rough age and gender, along with several top categories of interest, based on your interactions with Google products like search. You can view these guesses through your Google account, and opt out of tracking if you like. We found often accurate demographic information, with most males guessed correctly. In our not-so-scientific analysis of reports on Twitter and other sites that have posted about the page, the demographics tend to mistake women for men much more often (I'm pegged as a 25-34 year-old male, as was Jacqui Cheng before she opted out).

With regard to category interests, the demographic profiles easily pick up on things like travel searches. Our own Ryan Paul said Google captured him perfectly, with categories about computers and electronics, video games, and cats. Others are misunderstood souls: senior editor Nate Anderson, for instance, insists he is not into urban and hip hop music—despite its placement at the top of his ad categories.

If you have opted out of ad tracking as per our guide, or if you clear your cookies very often, you may not be able to see how Google envisions you. But if you haven't, feel free to check out your own profile and share its guesses about you in the comments.

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AT&T sold 9.4 million smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2011, but 7.6 million of which were iPhones, the company reported today. According to those numbers, the iPhone made up a whopping 80 percent of AT&T's smartphone sales for the quarter, and 66 percent of all postpaid phones sold through AT&T. 

These numbers place AT&T as the biggest iPhone retailer, besting Verizon's 4.2 million iPhone activations and constituting over 20 percent of Apple's 37 million sales worldwide last quarter.

The proportion of smartphone sales is surprising, given that worldwide sales of feature phones began to decline only six months ago after growing for two consecutive years. The big quarter for iPhones on AT&T can largely be attributed to the launch of the iPhone 4S, which also helped iOS even up the score with Android in its percentage of sales to recent smartphone acquirers.

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Google announced on Monday that it would be enacting a new privacy policy that, when customers agree to it, will allow the company to collect and store information across all of its services. Not only that, but Google will share information gathered across those services in order to "maintain, protect and improve" the services, but also to target search results and ads for each user. There is no way to opt out of the information-sharing aside from deleting your entire account and saying goodbye to your Gmail, YouTube videos, and Calendar, among other things. Users may feel that this is a backhanded gesture on Google's part, but the new privacy policy may also raise issues with the company's agreement with the FTC.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is building a low-cost Linux computer with a 700MHz ARM11 CPU. The board, which is roughly the size of a pack of playing cards, entered the manufacturing stage last month. There will be two models, priced at $25 and $35, with different specifications.

The board is built around the Broadcom BCM2835 chipset, which is designed to handle intensive multimedia. In a recent interview, Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton claimed that the Broadcom graphics hardware in the Raspberry Pi offers twice the performance of the iPhone 4S GPU and soundly beats NVIDIA's Tegra 2. Upton worked for Broadcom on the team that developed the hardware.

At the SCALE 10x conference this month, developers from the XBMC project demonstrated their software running on a Raspberry Pi board. XBMC is a popular open source media center application that has advanced library management features and support for playing video in numerous formats. The XBMC developers ported the media center to the Raspberry Pi using a developer hardware unit supplied by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

The demo, which can be viewed in a YouTube video, shows that XBMC runs reasonably well on the Raspberry Pi hardware and is relatively responsive. It was able to smoothly play an H.264-encoded 1080p video. Another video that was published this month shows Nokia's open source Qt toolkit running on the Raspberry Pi, demonstrating the use of OpenGL shaders in Qt's declarative QML user interface framework.

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HP has published the code of Enyo, the underlying JavaScript framework of the webOS platform. It is available from a public repository on GitHub and is distributed as open source software under the permissive Apache license. The release of Enyo is the first step in HP's plan to completely open the webOS mobile platform.

The webOS platform is built on top of Linux, but has a proprietary application stack that is made with HTML and JavaScript. HP obtained the platform in its 2010 acquisition of failing device manufacturer Palm. At the time, HP said it intended to ship the webOS software environment on a wide range of products, including tablets, printers, and desktop computers.