Fifo Soft Blog

Microsoft has announced that it will finish work on Windows 8 by the end of this summer and will most likely launch the operating system in October.

According to media reports, Microsoft is expected to have both the x86 and the ARM editions ready simultaneously. Earlier, the reports were that Windows 8 would be ready by the end of July 2012. It seems that the marketeers want their paws on it in the run up to the launch.

So, there’ll be only 5 ARM devices in the release, compared with over forty Intel machines. However, taking into consideration the fact that the industry wasn’t expecting to see ARM hardware until much later, that wasn’t very surprising. In other words, Microsoft is going to target Christmas shoppers with the new software able to work with touch-screen electronic devices.

The industry experts pointed out that if Microsoft misses the fall time frame, the software giant is going to be stuck without having ability to ship anything in the current year. Indeed, the company needs a Windows tablet out there, able to compete with the Apple’s new iPad. Microsoft is planning to host an event for its industry partners early next month, where it will spell out its release strategy for the new operating system, providing more details on both timing and marketing.

Meanwhile, the industry experts have noticed that the developers seem to have less difficulty getting Windows 8 ready for x86, but it appeared harder to make it run on ARM. Meanwhile, Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows business, continues saying that the company is going to have both ARM and Intel-based systems available when the new operating system is released this fall.

Indian authorities have started an investigation into Internet giants Google and Yahoo over accusations that the American companies have been fiddling the books on funds heading out of the country.

The investigation in question will cover foreign exchange transactions, which was confirmed by a senior official in the finance ministry. It became known that the offices of both companies were set to have their books probed for infringements.

According to the official, a number of notices have been sent out to the local offices of the two Internet giants, but further grounds for peering through the piles of tax returns haven’t been provided yet. However, it is believed that Google has been in breach of rules on foreign transactions over sending money to its Irish banks, to name a few.

According to the local media reports, the company hasn’t officially had a word to say on the impending investigation. During the interview, Google said that that they were compliant with tax rules in all the regions of the world in which they operate. As for Yahoo, they refused to comment.

Meanwhile, the news of a tax-probe is piling on problems for both of the companies, who would be forgiven for believing the authorities have it in for them right now. Yahoo and Google, among others, have come under fire from the country’s courts over publishing what has been described as “controversial material”. A lot of Internet giants, including Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and others had refused to delete online material that was deemed to be offensive from the local legal eagles. The company has since agreed to remove the material, which has riled a number of members of the public, from its local services.

One more court case would also go ahead, which would decide whether the host of companies can be held liable for offensive material located on the Internet. Meanwhile, an appeal against curbing Internet freedoms will go ahead in the coming days. Filtering concerns were also raised in Iran last weekend, after Google and Yahoo’s email services were taken down. It turned out that logins to popular email services like Hotmail and Gmail were for unknown reason cut off last week thanks to what was believed to be more interference by government authorities.

Another research has proved that the entertainment industry falsely claims that it’s suffering from the piracy caused by BitTorrent networks. The research is titled “Reel Piracy: The Effect of Online Film Piracy on International Box Office Sales”, and was conducted by economics researchers from the University of Minnesota and Wellesley College.

It turned out that the politicians shouldn’t be in such a rush to surrender their people’s freedoms in order to prop up the film industry. According to the results of the research, the United States box office returns aren’t correlated to BitTorrent sharing. In addition, it turned out that shorter delays between the United States exhibition and overseas releases cause less file-sharing.

The study proved once again that the film industry still fails to realize that an effective marketing campaign for new releases in the United States would only stimulate demand in other countries. Meanwhile, if there is no legal way to satisfy this demand, significant part of the viewers would choose illegal methods, according to the report.

In addition, the results of the study showed that movie studios has been wasting fortunes policing copyrights, though they could save it by releasing the movies at the same time as the United States. Currently, film studios believe they are saving money by releasing films at what they think is “the right time”, while their timing is still ignored by online pirates who prefer to take the movies from BitTorrent instead of waiting.

Consumers in the United States, according to the report, would mostly choose the box office over piracy. In other words, if piracy displaced box office sales in the country, the researchers would have expected the slope of the returns profile to shift more considerably as peer-to-peer networks became more widely adopted.

At the same time, the scientists who carried out the study couldn’t see an irregular drop in returns of the local box office sales that could fault BitTorrent. All in all, the report indicated that the entertainment industry wouldn’t lose so much money if the studios decided to release its flicks internationally simultaneously. The same position, however, has been voiced many times before, but the movie industry for some reason refuses to consider this option.

Following recent events, when dozens of online services were taken offline, started with MegaUpload’s shutdown, Filesonic and BTjunkie decided to stop their support for file-sharing. This made the entertainment industry think they can already celebrate their victory.

However, the reviews made by the industry members over file-sharing in the post-MegaUpload era proved that such celebration is a bit premature. If you want to find out the role of MegaUpload in the file-sharing community, you can take a look at the figures. For instance, the service accounted for 30% to 40% of all the file-sharing traffic, but right after it was shut down in the middle of January, the overall traffic dropped between 2% and 3%. The same study pointed out that only a handful of file-sharing portals constituted the majority of the overall file-sharing traffic.

For example, MegaVideo accounted for an astounding 34% of all file-sharing traffic last month, just before the government raid. At the same time, Filesonic had 19% of the market share. The research revealed that former MegaUpload users focused on similar portals, like Putlocker or Mediafire. However, the migration only had insignificant impact, taking into account that MegaUpload’s servers mostly relied on the US server provider called Carpathia Hosting.

In spite of the efforts of the content industry to fight online piracy, coupled with those of the American government, the facts are that the file-sharing community is not going to fall at all. The news emerged that the world’s largest torrent tracker The Pirate Bay is currently adopting magnet links instead of .torrent files, at the same time introducing another new feature – downloading physical objects. Both of the features were announced before the authorities’ raid, but now their development became of the primary importance for The Pirate Bay. The site operators are doing everything very fast, so the downloaders won’t be waiting for long.

Bottom line is that act of MegaUpload’s disappearance wasn’t unnoticed, though the BitTorrent community is still moving further, with the community finding new ways of keeping the sharing culture alive.