Movie Producers Get Open Search Warrant For All Of New Delhi?

This is so outrageous that I just had to put this up. This is what TechDirt has to say:

This story is bizarre, if true, but apparently the MPA in India (the equivalent to the MPAA in the US) has been granted an open search warrant for the entire city of New Delhi to look for unauthorized copies of movies. The police are needed to execute the search and seizure warrant, but it was given to the MPA, who can now make use of the police force as if it were their own, by pointing them to suspected counterfeiters. No matter how you look at it, this move seems a bit extreme -- though perfectly in line with how the entertainment industry seems to view things.

From Blake Murdoch's article,

"The order is expected to be especially useful in facilitating raids on the (city's) notorious Palika Bazaar, where information about imminent raids often leaks before police can effect arrests and seizures."

Links

• TechDirt's Article
• Original News Thread

Nokia: Cell Phones' Future

Thomas Jonsson, director of communications for Nokia Networks, had this to say in a recent interview:

This (in case you missed it) is the year of music -- the cell phone as a sort of iPod, capable of downloading, saving and playing thousands of songs. 2006 will be the year of television on your mobile telephone. 2007 will be the year for games on the phone and the capability to play them against other phone users. 2008 will be the year of "my connected life," when the years-old dream of cell phones that are Internet terminals will finally become a widespread reality.

The phone as camera -- that was 2004's theme -- is well established, though big technical improvements are still being made.

Keeping in with the year's musical trend, Nokia will soon release the Nokia N91, also known as Steve Jobs' wet dream. The N91 has a 4 GB hard drive, 2MP camera, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth and GSM/GPRS/EDGE/3G.

Links

• Hoping to Dial Into Cell Phones' Future - Nokia
• Nokia N91 Specs
  

Maxthon: Power Browsing

I've been using the Maxthon browser for quite some time now. It was called MyIE2 in the days before and was essentially just another IE based tabbed browser. A couple of years and 32 million downloads later, it is now known for it's power browsing experience.

Out of the box, Maxthon comes with an impressive set of features including:

• Tabbed browsing
• Mouse gestures (can't live without these now)
• Super drag & drop (a feature I miss in every other browser)
• Ad & popup blocker (works very well)
• Multiple proxy support
• URL hotkeys and aliases
• Groups support (or sessions in Opera and Firefox - Maxthon did this first!)
• Amazing customizability (an enormous but well managed amount of preference options)
• RSS reader (including podcast support!)
• Plenty of skins (applied without restarting)
• 400+ plugins (it supports most IE extensions as well)
• Automatic Updates

If you don't care for the rendering engine provided by IE then Maxthon gives you the option to switch to the Gecko engine (the same rendering engine that Firefox & Mozilla use)!! Gecko support is built-in but you still need the ActiveX version of the rendering engine. Just download the "Mozilla x.x.x ActiveX Control Installer" from this site and install it. After that launch Maxthon, and in the main menu choose File->New Tab->Use Gecko Engine. Now restart Maxthon and voila, every tab now uses Mozilla's browser engine!

Maxthon downloads come in two flavours - Standard (1.9 MB) and Combo (4.3 MB). The Combo version include multiple skins, plugins and the AI Roboform form filler. One of the plugins you should download is the Easy Finder plugin. This enhances the default Find window in Maxthon which is the same as the one in IE (and which sucks). This plugin makes it as good or better than the find functionality in Firefox or Opera.

Links

• Maxthon Home Page
• Maxthon Plugins Page
• Easy Finder plugin for Maxthon
• Maxthon Quick Start Guide