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The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed to help protect digital rights, but allowed the Librarian of Congress to make exceptions to the act that would otherwise not follow the act. Today (October 28), four new exemptions to the DMCA were put into effect most notably the legalizing of jailbreaking on iPhones but not iPads. The other exemptions to the DMCA are the requirement of disabled people to own multiple devices in order to access e-books, the illegalizing of unlocking a cell phone purchased after January 2013 at a new carrier without permission from your old carrier, and the legalizing of ripping some content of a DVD only for specific purposes. The new exemptions put into effect could have a serious impact on the technology market. The number of e-book reader sold to disabled customers will decrease drastically since they will have to buy other devices so they can legally read e-books. Apple and app developers would also lose a lot of revenue from the App Store since more users will be motivated to jailbreak their iPhones and get pirated apps instead of actually buying apps since they can do so legally. The new exemptions could cause some providers to lose some money though not a significant amount should the provider refuse to unlock cell phones when consumers go to other countries since in the foreign country, consumers will be paying and using service from a local provider instead of their original provider causing them to miss out on some money. Finally, the DMCA exemptions could cause a decrease in DVD sales not just because they are losing popularity already but also because if someone wants to rip a part of a DVD, they can just borrow it from someone else instead of buying and ripping the needed content. I think these new exemptions are very silly and could end up being more harmful than useful. Making disabled customers buy multiple devices just to access e-books is very discouraging to potential e-book reader customers. I also wonder th

Admit it, if you have a smartphone, you're probably glued to it. It goes everywhere with you, and you use it all the time, even in school, where it's a big distraction. In South Korea, the most wired country in the world, some schools are remotely disabling students smartphones in school via an app called iSmartKeeper. With the app, teachers can lock all the phones in the school, only allow emergency calls, only allow texts and calls, disable specific apps, and unlock the phone during breaks. The app also uses geofencing that puts the restrictions on the phones when the students enter the school premises. Parents are also provided with a management app that allows these restrictions to be put in place when their teens are doing their homework. In Seoul, the app has been trialed in 11 schools, and the results were mixed. Many students rooted their phones to avoid the restrictions, and the geofencing sometimes didn't leaving the phones to be locked after the students left school. This app is for Android only due to the popularity of local brands like Samsung, however, iOS users should beware, as an iOS version is coming next month.. I think some advantages are it minimizes distractions and encourages students to be more focused on their studies. However, it may anger many students initially. No word yet if the app will be available outside South Korea.

This article is about new apps that help disabled people. Many computer science researchers have been looking for an app that would help the disabled, and now they have created a few. One is called VizWiz. This is an app that helps the visually impaired. The user takes a picture of what he/she has a question about, asks a question, and receives an answer by a worker at Mechanical Turk. Mechanical Turk is a service, featuring many people that answer questions. Another app is Scribe. This app helps the deaf and hearing-impaired. Users send an audio stream to many of the Scribe workers who provide real time transcription. Since only highly trained transcribers with special equipment can transcribe all of the words in a live stream, Scribe coordinates a group of six or seven amateurs to transcribe the stream.

Late Friday evening, I tweeted out that, for some reason unbeknownst to me, Google's Web History tracking "feature" (the one that keeps tabs on every search you've made for sake of tailoring ads to your tastes and/or creeping you out) had seemingly been enabled on my account. This wouldn't be too strange in most cases - as an opt-out service, Web History is enabled for everyone by default. The problem? I'd manually disabled it years ago.

This article is about how Apple was hacked on Tuesday February the 19th, 2013. Basically, unknown hackers infected some Apple workers computers when they visited a website for software developers This website had been infected with malicious software that was designed to target Mac computers. Some people are saying that the malware could have originated from China, but there is no proof. Some of the malware was distributed through a site aimed at iPhone developers. It might still be infecting visitors who haven't disabled Java in their browser. F-Secure a security firm wrote that the hackers might have been trying to get access to codes for apps on smartphones which would allow them to infect millions of app users. Hackers recently found out a sophisticated way to attack Macs by exploiting a flaw in Adobe Systems Inc's Flash software. What I find very interesting is that the breaches described by Apple mark the highest-profile cyber-attacks to date on businesses running Mac computers. This shows that we should make an effort to protect our information especially since one of the largest technology companies has been breached. With cyber security attacks on the rise, we should all be aware and careful of the sites that we are visiting. Apple workers simply visited a website for software developers and became infected with the virus. The hackers are breaking many laws by hacking Apple, Apple intents to find the hackers with the help of the police.

This is just crazy. These guys have just taken hacking to the extreme level. I mean there is totally no privacy anymore. People from the U.S. government go to China or Russia with few or no electronic devices due to the fear of getting hacked. There is this guy named Kenneth Lieberthal who is an expert in travelling, takes extraordinary precautions whenever he goes to China. When he is there, he disables his bluetooth and Wi-Fi, never lets his phone out of sight, and in meetings, not only does he turn off his phone, but also takes out the battery, for fear that hacker might snoop in to their discussions by turning on his microphone remotely. Personally, I would hate to see what would happen for the next ten years of technological advancement.