The Associated Press Threatens Legal Action against Google, Other News Aggregators

Pulkit Chandna — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 20:26:45 -0500

News spreads like wildfire on the internet. However, print publications and news agencies, which spend their precious human and financial resources on accumulation of news stories, are forgotten in this rapidity. Though many major websites do compensate news agencies, a lot of the websites don’t even bother with properly crediting them. The Associated Press has now adopted a more stringent approach towards unauthorized reproduction of its content.

Dean Singleton, the man who heads the news cooperative, delivered a stern warning to websites that unlawfully reproduce content owned by it. Singleton threatened intransigent offenders with legal action at the cooperative’s annual meeting in San Diego.

"We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories,” Singleton said, tacitly pointing to the “fair use” legal doctrine. AP executives revealed to The New York Time that they were concerned about search engines and news aggregators.

But Google doesn’t seem to share any such concerns. "We believe that both Google Web Search and Google News are fully consistent with copyright law -- we simply link users to the site at which the news story appears,” a Google spokesperson told InformationWeek. The spokesperson went on to add that it is technically possible for the news agencies to prevent their content from being indexed by Google.

The news cooperative is working on technology that will help keep a tab on the spread of its content. The only problem is that the internet is virtually nebulous and news stories spread like wildfire on the internet. So will it pursue everyone guilty of unauthorized reproduction of its content? “Everyone” may imply millions of bloggers. Will it do a RIAA and opt for mass lawsuits? No, it doesn’t appear to be the case. It is, ostensibly, keen on going after the big fish.

D-Link DAP-1522 Wireless Bridge/Access Point

Michael Brown — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 12:53:51 -0500

D-Link’s DAP-1522 demonstrates the danger of shopping for a product based on its specs. On paper, this combination bridge/access point sounds as though it could solve just about any wireless coverage problem you might have. In reality, it’s a one-trick pony

It’s a dual-band device, meaning it has one radio that operates on the 2.4GHz band and a second radio that runs on the 5GHz band. It’s outfitted with an 802.11n Draft 2.0 chipset, so it should deliver very good throughput speeds (it’s backward compatible with 802.11g networks). And it can be configured as either a wireless bridge or a wireless access point.

As a wireless bridge, the DAP-1522 is designed to connect wired Ethernet devices, such as an Xbox 360 or your cable-TV set-top box, to your wireless router. You plug your wired devices into the bridge, and the bridge establishes a wireless connection to your router. But the DAP-1522 doesn’t have any external antennas, so it delivers extremely poor range; in fact, D-Link advices against placing the device inside a cabinet or closet. But that’s exactly where many people’s gaming console and set-top boxes are going to be located.

Fans of real-world testing that we are, we decided to test the DAP-1522’s wireless bridge capabilities by putting inside our entertainment center anyway; after all, that’s where the gear we needed to connect to our network is located. Sure enough, the bridge couldn’t establish a connection with either of the radios in our dual-band 802.11n router while it was in there. And it couldn’t establish a connection until we moved the bridge into the middle of the room; even then, it managed TCP/IP throughput of just 4.5Mb/sec, which is completely inadequate for streaming video.

The DAP-1522 performed a little better as a wireless access point. In this mode, it must be hardwired to an Ethernet network using one of the device’s four gigabit Ethernet ports; the three remaining ports then act as a switch. The device delivered wireless TCP/IP throughput of 19.2 Mb/sec at close range (10 feet with no walls separating the AP and our wireless client), 14.9 Mb/sec at with the client 18 feet away and with one wall in between, and 12.7 Mb/sec with the client 30 feet away and with two walls in between.

So if you need a wireless bridge to enable wired clients to connect to your wireless network, we recommend steering clear of the DAP-1522. If, on the other hand, you’re interested in adding a wireless access point and a gigabit switch to a room that’s hardwired to your network, the DAP-1522 is worth a look.

But we also recommend that you examine Trendnet’s much cheaper TEW-637AP. It’s not a wireless bridge, and it lacks several access-point features that the DAP-1522 offers (the TEW-637AP operates only on the 2.4GHz band, and it doesn’t have an integrated switch), but Trendnet’s device is street-priced $60 lower than D-Link’s.

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The Associated Press Threatens Legal Action against Google, Other News Aggregators

D-Link DAP-1522 Wireless Bridge/Access Point