Gadgetwise: With Bose, Hear What You Want and Block the Rest

When Bose decided to build a pair of in-ear headphones with a noise-canceling feature, it faced a quandary: how to stuff that technology into a tiny package.

So Bose wisely decided to add an in-line control module at the base of the cord for its QuietComfort 20, the in-ear option in the company’s line of noise-canceling headphones. With this design, the module does not weigh down the cord or tug at your ears; you can easily slip it into a pocket with your music player.

The noise-canceling feature works remarkably well. Two tiny microphones in each ear bud send signals to the control module, which responds instantly to counter unwanted sounds. Bose says the reaction time is less than a millisecond. The effect enriches your listening experience, making your music sound fuller and deeper. I tried the headphones on a variety of pop, rock and classical albums, and the music was consistently clean and free of distortion.

Even with the noise-canceling feature turned on, a small amount of sound still slips in, typically the voices of other people, but this is common with noise-canceling headphones. The noise can be reduced by readjusting the ear buds to create more of a seal in the ear. Several soft, comfortable ear tips, which include stabilizers that help secure the tips, are included.

The headphones come with a cloth carrying pouch and a mini-USB cable for charging. Bose says the battery in the control module lasts about 16 hours on a full charge. And, unlike some other noise-cancelling headphones, these still work when the control module is turned off or the battery runs out.

Another nifty feature is something Bose calls the “aware” mode, because it lets more outside sound in, allowing you to be more aware of your surroundings. This means you can chat with the barista at your favorite coffee shop without removing your headphones. It also helps when walking around the streets of New York; ignorance is bliss, but not if you get hit by a taxi.

The in-line remote control in the yoke of the cord includes a microphone for phone calls; a clip allows you to fasten the cord to a collar or lapel. A second model, the Bose QC20i, has an in-line remote intended for Apple iOS devices.

All these features don’t come cheap; the QuietComfort 20 headphones cost $300. But you would be hard-pressed to find better noise-canceling technology.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 18, 2013

An earlier version of this article described incorrectly a feature of the headphones. While the headphones still work (without noise-cancelling) when the control module is turned off or the battery runs out, that is not what Bose calls the “aware” mode. In aware mode, which is activated by pushing a button on the midcord remote, some sound is allowed to bypass the noise-cancelling circuitry.

France Rejects Plan by Internet Provider to Block Online Ads

The dispute has turned into a gauge of how France, and perhaps the rest of Europe, will mediate a struggle between telecommunications providers against Internet companies like Google, which generate billions of dollars in revenue from traffic that travels freely on their networks.

European telecommunications companies want a share of that money, saying they need it to finance investments in faster broadband networks — and, as the latest incident shows, they are willing to flex their muscles to get it.

Until now, European regulators have taken a laissez-faire approach, in contrast to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which has imposed guidelines barring operators of fixed-line broadband networks from blocking access to sites providing lawful content.

On Monday, Fleur Pellerin, the French minister for the digital economy, said she had persuaded the Internet service provider, Free, to restore full access. The company, which has long balked at carrying the huge volume of traffic from sites owned by Google without compensation, had moved last week to block online ads when it introduced a new version of its Internet access software.

“An Internet service provider cannot unilaterally implement such blocking,” Ms. Pellerin said at a news conference Monday, after meetings with online publishing and advertising groups, which had complained about a possible loss of revenue.

While she acknowledged that it could be annoying “when five ads pop up on a site,” she added that advertising should not be treated differently from other kinds of content. “This kind of blocking is inconsistent with a free and open Internet, to which I am very attached.”

While rejecting the initiative by Free, Ms. Pellerin said it was legitimate for the company to raise the question of who should pay for expensive network upgrades to handle growing volumes of Internet traffic.

French Internet analysts said advertisements appearing on Google-owned sites or distributed by Google appeared to have been the only ones affected — fueling speculation that the move was a tactic to try to get Google to share some of its advertising revenue with Internet service providers. Google’s YouTube video-sharing site is the biggest bandwidth user among Internet companies.

Google was not represented at the meetings Monday with Ms. Pellerin. In an interesting twist, its case was effectively argued by other Web publishers, including French newspapers, even though these sites, in a related dispute, are seeking their own revenue-sharing arrangement with Google. Separately, French tax collectors are also looking into the company’s fiscal practices, under which it largely avoids paying corporate taxes in France by routing its ad revenue through Ireland, which has lower rates. One proposal that has been discussed would be to use receipts from a tax on Google to support local Web sites.

In yet another dispute involving Free and Google, the French telecommunications regulator is investigating complaints that the Internet provider has been discriminating against YouTube. In that case, a French consumer organization, UFC-Que Choisir, said it suspected that Free was limiting customer access to YouTube because of the high amount of bandwidth that the site consumed.

Ms. Pellerin said these issues would be examined separately. Still, the timing of Free’s move raised questions, given that it came only days before a scheduled meeting among Ms. Pellerin, Internet companies and telecommunications operators to discuss the financing and regulation of new, higher-speed networks.

“Should users be held hostage to these commercial negotiations? That is not obvious to me,” said Jérémie Zimmermann, a spokesman for La Quadrature du Net, a group that campaigns against restrictions on the Internet.

Samsung Drops Action to Block Apple in Europe

PARIS — Samsung said Tuesday that it had dropped its request for a ban on sales of certain Apple phones and tablet computers in Europe, a sharp tactical turn in a patent war that the companies have been fighting on multiple fronts around the world.

Samsung, the South Korean electronics giant, had been seeking injunctions in a number of countries, including Britain, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, contending that Apple, Samsung’s biggest rival in the smartphone market, had infringed on Samsung patents.

The move came only a day after a ruling in a related case in San Francisco, where a U.S. District Court judge rejected a request by Apple, which is based in California, for an injunction to block sales of certain Samsung devices. The decision followed a previous jury ruling that Samsung had violated Apple patents.

After the latest twist in the European case, Samsung said it had acted “in the interest of protecting consumer choice.” Analysts said other factors might have been in play, including a possible nudge from the European Commission.

In January, the commission opened a formal antitrust investigation of Samsung’s terms for licensing patents covering wireless technologies. Under a previous agreement, Samsung had pledged to make the patents available to competitors on “fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory” terms.

“The scope of what was withdrawn precisely matches the area in which the European Commission has been investigating,” said Florian Müller, a patent consultant in Germering, Germany. “It’s not just that the plot is thickening; in my view, there can be no other plausible view than that there is pressure from Brussels.”

The commission had said previously that it was concerned about possible abuse of patents like the ones at issue in the Apple-Samsung injunction request, those covering technologies needed for a device to function. Without some of these “standard essential patents” from Samsung, for example, phones cannot connect to high-speed wireless networks.

“Regulators have been saying, if the patent holders try to abuse these patents, then they are going to get in trouble,” Mr. Müller said.

The commission declined to comment directly on whether there might be a link between Samsung’s announcement Tuesday and the antitrust case in Brussels. “We take note of this development,” said Antoine Colombani, the spokesman for the E.U. competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia. “Our investigation is ongoing.”

Samsung, meanwhile, said it could not comment on the proceedings. It said it was “fully co-operating with the European Commission.”

“Samsung remains committed to licensing our technologies on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms, and we strongly believe it is better when companies compete fairly in the marketplace, rather than in court,” it said in a statement.

There has been speculation that Samsung and Apple have been in talks to try to reach a settlement, though the broad scale of the litigation between the two companies, with lawsuits seeking sales bans or damages continuing on several continents, could make that challenging.

“We cannot comment on details of ongoing legal proceedings, but we believe a commercial resolution is achievable,” Samsung said in a statement.

Alan Hely, a spokesman for Apple, declined to comment.

The announcement by Samsung does not end litigation between the two companies in Europe. Samsung said it planned to pursue lawsuits seeking damages from Apple for what it contends is patent infringement.

Apple and Samsung have also been battling over other patents, covering nonessential features of their devices, like design.

Apple, too, has previously secured bans on the sale of certain Samsung products. Last year, for example, a court in Düsseldorf ruled that Samsung could not sell one of its Galaxy tablet devices in Germany because it bore too close a resemblance to the iPad 2 from Apple.

While some analysts cited regulatory pressure as a possible reason for Samsung’s decision Tuesday, others said the company might have decided that the lawsuits were simply a distraction. Samsung’s phones, especially its Galaxy S3, have been selling well.

In the third quarter, the S3 surpassed the iPhone 4S to become the world’s best-selling smartphone, according to Strategy Analytics, a research firm.

“Maybe the market was telling them that they were succeeding and their time was better spent promoting sales of their product,” said Charles Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research.

James Kanter contributed reporting from Brussels.

Afghanistan Tries to Block Video and Head Off Rioting

The quick action stood in contrast to a slow government response in February after deadly rioting broke out at the news that American soldiers had burned Korans. In that case, Afghan officials were slow to try to head off violence, and American officials later said they were concerned and angered by the delay. At least 29 Afghans and six American service members were killed by members of the Afghan security forces in days of violence after the Koran burning.

The decision Thursday to ask Internet companies to block access to YouTube and related Google-owned Web sites through which people could have gained access to the video was a first for the country, where the Internet is still a rarity outside the capital. By early evening, YouTube, Google News and Gmail could not be reached in the capital, and Google’s browser, Google Chrome, was also blocked.

The blockage was not uniform and the sites were still accessible on some smartphone devices, but only a small percentage of Afghans own those.

The Afghan government also sent an official letter of complaint to YouTube for providing access to a video that insulted and abused Islam’s founder and asked that the company remove it from the Web site. In a statement, Google, which owns YouTube, said that the video would not be taken down, but that the company was working with the governments of Libya and Egypt, at their request, to block access to it in those countries. It was unclear late Thursday whether that cooperation was occurring in Afghanistan as well.

President Hamid Karzai condemned the video as soon as news of it spread on Wednesday afternoon, and repeated that condemnation Thursday in a sober statement that described his conversation late Wednesday with President Obama in which it said the two leaders “denounced the film and termed it as insulting to Islamic beliefs and values.”

While Mr. Karzai did not personally call for calm in his statement, he and his government turned to influential people in communities across the country to tamp down emotions and urged clerics to avoid provocation at the weekly Friday Prayer.

In the past, it has often been radical religious leaders here who have incensed the faithful to violence. In March 2011, it was clerics who inflamed their congregations over a Florida pastor’s burning of the Koran, contributing to angry men pouring into the streets of the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif and killing seven international United Nations staff members in a United Nations guesthouse.

“We must keep people quiet about this,” said Rangin Spanta, the national security adviser, describing Mr. Karzai’s behind-the-scenes call for calm. “We instructed all security forces of Afghanistan, all governors, all decision makers to work with the elders, to work with the clergy, to work with the imams to not talk, to not provoke people.”

The NATO-led international military command in Afghanistan immediately issued instructions to Western troops across the country to minimize their exposure to places and situations where there could be violence, said Brig. Gen. Roger Noble, the deputy commander for NATO Operations in Afghanistan. The military told troops to “minimize the chance of being at the wrong time or inadvertently being in a place that might inflame a protest in the next few days,” he said and underscored that the international forces have “strong” respect for the Afghans’ Muslim faith.

Although senior Afghan government officials said they understood that the video was the product of a fringe element in the United States, Mr. Spanta said, “We are very, very sad about it.”

The overwhelming majority of Afghans are deeply pious and conservative Muslims, and the worry is that the film’s trailer, which coarsely portrayed the Prophet Muhammad as a womanizer and murderous thug, would bring Afghans into the streets, willing to do violence both to the government’s forces, who work closely with the West, and to foreigners, especially Americans, many of whom live in Kabul.

In Kandahar, where the governor and local leaders followed Mr. Karzai’s orders and held a lengthy closed meeting to discuss the film and the appropriate reaction, there was an overwhelming sense of pain over the video.

“This is deeply and extremely unacceptable for all Muslims all over the world, and this actually generates loathing for the Americans,” said Mohammed Omar Satti, a tribal elder in Kandahar and a member of the provincial Peace and Reconciliation Commission.

Several Kandahar clerics emphasized that people of all religions were appalled by the video and asked the American government to arrest the man who made it. A Kandahar imam, Mullah Azhar, asked people to be tolerant and condemn it, but to refrain from damaging Muslim property.

Like many others, he was genuinely puzzled by free speech laws in the United States that allow such work to be made public. “I ask the government of America, why did they allow a person to insult a man, Muhammad, when by insulting him they sadden the whole Muslim world and create hatred toward Americans?”

Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, Afghanistan, and an employee of The New York Times from Kabul.

Minecraft Adding New Block

While more experimental players have been adding in numerous blocks via Minecraft mods, the rest have to wait until the Mojang team makes an official release. Today's news, announced via Minecraft developer Jens "Jeb" Bergensten's Twitter feed, shows off a new block targeted exclusively at server admins.

The block in question.

The block doesn't have an official name -- though the working name Bergensten has is "Adventure Mode Control block" -- or release date, but it essentially allows server admins to program scripts exclusive to their adventure mode. For instance they could write it so doing a certain action rewards the player with experience. Bergensten says the block runs commands "on red stone signals," and adds that "with proper commands, many things can be scripted." The block is not craftable, and Bergensten, answering questions from the community, insinuated that you could program it to do any number of activities, even possibly using it to change the game's difficulty.

For more on Minecraft, including a number of articles calling out really awesome mods, check out our exhaustive coverage.