- Is throttling smartphones pointless? Study suggests so
Brian X. Chen’s write up at NYT’s Bits blog of research by Validas based on a sampling of wireless bills doesn’t point to anything particularly conclusive. Still the questions raised by such small differences between the top users on tiered, limited vs. unlimited plans call heavily into question the motivations of carriers when deploying throttling. A five percent gap hardly seems like a smoking gun for the network congestion argument. - Transparency launches as Linux of drug development
Slashdot linked to this piece on Xconomy that explains how a founder’s frustration with the competitive secrecy during drug trials spurred an interest in the radical openness used for Linux development. Using a distributed, open model is tantalizing in a space that has been dominated by motivations and practices that seem pretty impenetrable to the outsider. I’ll be curious to see how this works out, if the company is able to achieve comparable financial success to existing models in addition to sparking the sort of creativity the founder is after. - BitTorrent for live video
Technology Review has the details of a system Bram Cohen has actually been running since last year. I am curious how BitTorrent live differs from Tribler, another BitTorrent-based system that I am pretty sure is aiming at the very same target, of using peer-to-peer to scale live streaming better than traditional approaches. A little competition can’t hurt, especially if it results in more genuine choice for both content creators and their audiences. - 3D processor-memory mashups take center stage, The Register
- Vending machine sells books for whatever price you want, Techdirt
- Mozilla partners up with LG to combat Apple and Google, Slashdot
- Proposal to add DRM to HTML5 meets resistence, The H Open Source: News and Features
- Reddit writes a law: First draft of the Free Internet Act emerges, Techdirt
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