ArticleSnatch Blog

You are browsing the search results.

Google has reached an agreement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which represented a broad class of authors and publishers to expand online access to in-copyright books and other written materials in the U.S. The publications will come from the library collections participating in Google Book Search.

The agreement was reached after two years of negotiations. The deal includes Google dishing out $125 million to establish the Book Rights Registry, which would resolve an existing class action lawsuit brought by the groups.

If the court approves, the agreement allows:

• More Access to Out-of-Print Books — Generating greater
  exposure for millions of in-copyright works, including hard-to-find
  out-of-print books, by enabling readers in the U.S. to search these
  works and preview them online
• Additional Ways to Purchase Copyrighted Books — Building off publishers’ and authors’ current efforts and further expanding the
  electronic market for copyrighted books in the U.S., by offering users the ability to purchase online access to many in-copyright books
• Institutional Subscriptions to Millions of Books Online –Offering a means for U.S. colleges, universities and other organizations to obtain subscriptions for online access to collections from some of
  the world’s most renowned libraries
• Free Access From U.S. Libraries — Providing free, full-text, online viewing of millions of out-of-print books at designated computers
  in U.S. public and university libraries
• Compensation to Authors and Publishers and Control Over Access to Their Works — Distributing payments earned from online access provided by Google and, prospectively, from similar programs that may be established by other providers, through a newly created independent, not-for-profit Book Rights Registry that will also locate rightsholders, collect and maintain accurate rightsholder information, and provide a way for rightsholders to request inclusion in or exclusion from the project.

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Today, together with the authors, publishers, and libraries, we have been able to make a great leap in this endeavor,” said Sergey Brin, co-founder & president of technology at Google. “While this agreement is a real win-win for all of us, the real victors are all the readers. The tremendous wealth of knowledge that lies within the books of the world will now be at their
fingertips.”

What do you think about the agreement? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Related Reading:
Google SERPs Promoting Google Book Links
Google Courts Book Publishers, Librarians

Google Translate is going live. The world’s most comprehensive set of translation technologies will now be aided by human beings translating documents upon request.

Google employees won’t be in the business of translating documents. Rather, Google will offer volunteer and professional translators the opportunity to use Google tools and technologies to translate. In previous columns, we’ve discussed the need for localization in translation. It looks as if Google will take the lead on using local translators to aid machine translation.

Google Translation Center will enable users to upload a document, choose a translation language, and select from Google’s registry of professional and volunteer translators. If a translator accepts, users will receive the translated content back as soon as it’s ready.

The potential for use by SEOs and Internet marketing managers is huge. The service may offer affordable ways to translate not only URLs but entire Web sites.

Google’s translation search feature matches a current translation with previous translations, so it won’t be necessary to translate a document more than once.
In short, Google could create the world’s largest repository of completed homework assignments for students taking a foreign language.

We’ll keep you posted as Google’s human-assisted translation service officially launches.

Once the most popular reasons for reinstalling your operating system is that it is often the easiest way to deal with a preponderance of viruses, spyware and other collected nasties that find their way onto your computer. So when reinstalling, it make sense to secure your like-new PC as best as possible. Here are five programs that make that possible.

AntiVirus – AVG Free
The most important security measure you can take on a new computer is protecting against viruses and Trojans. That’s where anti-virus software comes in. AV software, usually, runs in the background of your computer, analyzes new files received via email, downloaded or elsewhere to make sure they are safe. You can also schedule it to check your computer for viruses it may have missed, or manually check whenever you want.
For AV software to be good, it needs to stay up-to-date. For it to be tolerable to the user, it needs to run lightly in the background, and it needs to easily offer the user options to override it when it’s too aggressive, as nearly all anti-virus programs have been reporting too many false positives lately. AVG’s Free version accomplishes all that—and does it for free. Runner ups include NOD32, Kaspersky and BitDefender.

Anti-Spam – SpamBayes
Viruses may be the most dangerous problem possible affecting your computer, but Spam is probably the annoying. According to Akismet, nearly 90% of all email received is Spam. That comes out to 1,000 spam messages per day for an average user. While most of that Spam is trapped on your mail server, more than enough makes it through to your email reader, clogging up your folders, slowing down your email downloads and generally making finding real emails that much more annoying and tedious.

That are plenty of solutions for combating Spam, including the filters built into Microsoft Outlook, but I’m a big fan of SpamBayes. I’ve been using the open-source SpamBayes filter for more than five years now, ignoring newer and flashier filters. Why? Well, for one, it just works. It catches nearly all my Spam, and I get very few false positives. The way it works is also significant; like the name suggests, SpamBayes draws its power by using Bayesian algorithms to determine what is spam and what is ham. Simply stated: SpamBayes learns from you. Every time you tag a message as spam or ham, SpamBayes analyzes the email for clues as to what makes spam and what comprises ham. The more emails you tag, the smarter it gets.
SpamBayes is easily added on to Outlook, other desktop mail applications, webmail or even to your mail server. Set up is a breeze (just tag a few emails and go) and the program is light and fast.

Anti-Spyware – Ad-Aware and SpyBot
If viruses are dangerous and spam is annoying, spyware is the unholy marriage of the two; it slows down your computer, hijacks your home page and—as its name suggests—spies on you. It certainly annoys you, and can be very dangerous, either leaving your PC susceptible to viruses or stealing private data from you. Above all, it is intrusive. And it comes from some unlikely sources: companies you know, love and trust.
But you don’t have to succumb to it. Anti-virus programs like AVG will prevent most spyware programs from lodging on your computer, but there is more you can do. Firstly, read the End User License Agreement (EULA) on every new software program you install. Don’t just blindly click ‘Next’ when installing new programs. Secondly, download the above two programs: Ad-Aware and SpyBot. Both will scan your computer for spyware, adware and malware programs, and offer you the option of removing the programs they find. The free version of Ad-Aware won’t protect your PC in real-time, but you can upgrade to get that feature. SpyBot, which is freeware, includes TeaTime, which provides free real-time protection, including registry monitoring. SpyBot can even replace spyware programs with “dummy programs” so you can still run spyware-dependant programs. Between the two, you can remain completely spyware-free.

Extra Protection – Sandboxie
Even after all that protection, sometimes you need a little bit more. That’s where Sandboxie comes in. Sandboxie is a remarkable (and free) program that protects your PC from everything and anything run on it—by providing a virtual “sandbox” for that program to run it. Within the sandbox, no registry changes can be made and nothing can be installed to your actual PC; nothing bad can happen.

Someone sent you a program they swear is virus-free—and AVG also thinks it’s clean—but you’re still unsure about? Run it in the sandbox. You teenage niece is using your computer and you don’t want her messing anything up? She can browse the internet and work in Sandboxie. Son uses P2P software? No problem when it runs in Sandboxie. Don’t trust Internet Explorer? Set it to always run sandboxed. All downloads need to be approved by you before they can run. Executables run without affecting anything else.
And Sandboxie manages to give you all this protection without slowing down your PC. It runs quietly and unobtrusively in the background, and gives you that extra measure of protection you need.

Complying with local laws, even ones that could jeopardize the liberty of Chinese bloggers, has been the mantra of tech companies doing business in China.Reporters Without Borders is already hopping mad at both Yahoo and Microsoft for acceding to Chinese government requirements on censorship, and in Yahoo’s case, its role in the prosecution of three [...]

A surprising turn of events could mean the Chinese government will not require bloggers to provide their real names to a central registry.The potential for damaging the rapidly growing Internet industry may have influenced Beijing into backing off a long-desired plan to match bloggers’ online identities with the real people behind them.
People’s Daily Online [...]

The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) board of trustees passed a resolution recommending that the Internet technical community migrate a new version of the Internet Protocol, IPv6 will be needed to allow continued growth of the Internet.

The current IP version 4 (Ipv4) has over four billion unique IP addresses, which is not enough to [...]

A resounding "DOI!" came springing out of the Utah legislature late last week as lawmakers acknowledged they should have done a little background work, or at least listened to all the squalling, before they passed the Trademark Protection Act.
(For the uninitiated, "doi" is a juvenile, circa third grade insult, usually spoken with an [...]

This won’t cause the end of the world, and it probably won’t even drive anyone out of business, but Verisign is set to raise domain prices by 7-10%.  More ominous is the possibility that the prices will, from this point on, continue to increase on a yearly basis.  Oh, well - at least the company [...]

Google users in Germany got a surprise on Tuesday morning when, for a brief period, the search engine company seemed to have lost ownership of its home page. Google is now back in charge of Google.de, though, and all is well with the search engine company’s world.
For a while, though, the natural order of [...]