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12
JUL 2011 maximumpc.com
MAXIMUMPC
Quinn
Norton
Byte
Rights
THERE ARE SO MANY PLACES where the law
doesn’t get the net, but few are as extreme
as the Streisand Effect. Named for the
singer/actress, it’s really about how the
net responds to censorship. It is insuf-
ficient to say the net routes around cen-
sorship. The net wedgies censorship and
hangs it on the school fence.
In 2003 Barbara Streisand sued a photog-
rapher to keep an incidental picture of her
house taken during a survey of the Cali-
fornia coast off the Internet. The publicity
of the suit, along with the net’s fascina-
tion and ridicule, made the obscure photo
ubiquitous. Now if you Google “Streisand,”
the incident is the third result.
There have been many, often hilarious,
Streisand Effect moments: the MPAA/
AACS takedown notices for the DVD cryp-
to key that catapulted the key from 9,000
Google results to 300,000 overnight; the
takedowns on Diebold documents and
Wikileaks.com that lead to massive mir-
roring; the ruling against linking to DeCSS
that resulted in .sig files, T-shirts, tattoos,
and, of course, more linking. Most pro-
foundly, Scientology’s attempts to censor
a leaked internal video created the some-
times lunatic anticensorship community of
Anonymous, which has taken the law en-
forcement headache to a new level.
But the culture of law has doubled
down instead of backing off. Recently, the
British have become fond of the super-
injunction—journalists are ordered by
the courts to not report on the injuncted
news item, and they’re not allowed to say
they’ve been gagged. It’s been used by oil
companies under investigation, by a bank
CEO to gag the media from being mean
to him, and celebs and soccer players to
protect their sexual proclivities. This only
punishes traditional publications, because
all these stories are easily Googleable. Le-
gal methods of getting information off the
net resemble a guy trying to kill bacteria
with a hammer, and I don’t see them get-
ting better.
Quinn Norton writes about copy-
right for Wired News and other
publications.
STREISAND'S
HOUSE [PICS!]
AMD Boards to Get SLI
Come this summer, AMD fans will no longer be prevented from running multi-
GPU Nvidia cards. Nvidia said it has cut deals with motherboard makers Asus,
Gigabyte, ASRock, and MSI to add SLI support to new AMD motherboards.
The support will only be featured on new chipsets for the Bulldozer and Zam-
bezi processors, though. Those chipsets will include the 990FX, 990X, and 970
chipsets. Older 980FX chipsets that are currently available will not be included,
Nvidia said. Nvidia said it will even enable three-way and four-way SLI on certain
motherboards.
The decision by Nvidia officially ends the multi-GPU cold war, where Nvidia
and AMD would not enable multi-GPU support on each other’s chipsets.
GU
Z68 for Sandy Bridge
Can’t afford a fat SSD? Intel’s new Z68 chipset
for Sandy Bridge CPUs promises “SSD-like”
responsiveness without the high cost of a
large solid-state drive.
Using Intel’s Smart Response Technol-
ogy (SRT), the Z68 lets you combine a small
SSD with a traditional hard drive. The drivers
cache often-used files on the SSD, so instead
of the system having to grab a file from the
HDD, it can grab it from the SSD. This will out-
perform a hard drive by 4x, Intel claims.
In addition, the Z68 allows you to overclock
the integrated graphics core in all Sandy
Bridge CPUs; and in some motherboards, it
lets you use either the integrated or discrete
graphics.
GU
Nook Color
Gets Better
Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color
ereader is beginning to look
like the best deal going in
Android tablets. The $250
7-inch touch screen device
recently got a free soft-
ware update that not only
upgrades the OS to Android
2.2 (Froyo), but also adds
Adobe Flash support, a full-
featured email app, and an
app store, which currently
features more than 125 ap-
plications in the dedicated
Nook shop. These additions,
along with the Nook Color’s
expansive selection of digital
books and magazines, make
the device a feature-packed
ereader, to be sure, but also
a product worth the consid-
eration of tablet buyers. –
KS
The upcoming Z68 will let you run
discrete and integrated graphics.