Month: June 2016

(credit: Dennis Skley)

A federal appeals court is reviving a lawsuit targeting a website for models because the site did not warn users that there were rapists reading the site in search of their next victim. The Communications Decency Act (CDA), the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday, did not immunize the website Modelmayhem.com from a suit brought by an aspiring model who said she was drugged, raped, and filmed by two men during a phony 2011 audition.

Craigslist, eBay, Facebook, and other online companies had told the court (PDF) that such a ruling would have a chilling effect on the Web. In a court filing, they said that the CDA shields website operators "from the risks, burdens, and uncertainty of lawsuits that would hold them liable for hosting or facilitating online exchanges of third-party information that may result in harm."

But the federal appeals court, which issued a similar ruling in 2014 but set it aside to rehear the case again, wasn't buying the argument. The CDA, one of the foundational laws that has allowed the Internet to flourish, protects online outlets from legal liability for the content that third parties publish on it, the court noted. But here, the owner of the website, Internet Brands, had obtained knowledge that there were rapists who trolled the site for women, pretended they were agents, and raped and filmed the women who thought they were going for a job interview, the court ruled.

Microsoft's HoloLens holographic headset runs a special version of Windows 10, Windows Holographic. At Computex today, the company announced that Windows Holographic is coming to more than just the HoloLens: Microsoft wants it to be available for all virtual reality and augmented reality/mixed reality systems, from the tethered, fully immersive virtual reality headsets already on the market, to a new generation of untethered HoloLens-like devices.

Windows Holographic builds on the common Windows platform—the NT kernel, the Windows Store, the Edge browser, and the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) APIs—that is collectively called OneCore. To this, it adds a range of components designed for mixed-reality computing—things like a custom shell; human-interaction systems that integrate voice, gaze, and hand gestures; and spatial mapping to build models of the world around you—along with specific APIs to use these capabilities in software, extending the core UWP platform.

Today's announcement shows Microsoft's intent to develop Windows Holographic into a broader platform still, running not just on Microsoft's own hardware, but also that of third parties. With PC-based virtual reality currently split awkwardly between the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets—a split that's enforced by DRM—an attempt to bridge the gap and unify the hardware can only be a good thing. Bringing AR into the mix is also sensible; AR and VR have areas of significant overlap (such as spatial mapping and gestural control), such that it doesn't seem sensible to reinvent the wheel for each approach.

The Xiaomi Mi 5.

Xiaomi and Microsoft have announced a deal that will move the companies a little closer together, while giving Xiaomi a slightly less treacherous path for expansion into Western markets. Xiaomi is buying some Microsoft patents, and the two companies have inked a cross-licensing deal for patents, and, like many vendors, Xiaomi is committing to bundle Microsoft apps on its Android phones. Wang Xiang, senior vice president at Xiaomi, describes the deal as "a very big collaboration agreement between the two companies."

The most surprising part of the announcement is that Xiaomi is buying (not licensing) 1,500 patents from Microsoft. Reuters notes that the patents include "voice communications, multimedia and cloud computing." Microsoft licenses its computing patents to most Android OEMs, and the deal often includes bundling Microsoft apps with future devices. Outright sales of some of the patents has not happened previously, however.

The app bundling part of the deal seems pretty standard for these agreements. The press release notes that, starting in September, "Xiaomi Android devices, including Mi 5, Mi Max, Mi 4s, Redmi Note 3 and Redmi 3, will come pre-installed with Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Skype applications."