Slashback: Wireless, Radio, Ralsky

Slashback with more on GNU Radio; BeUnited's ongoing bid for Gobe Productive's source code; AOL, IM and the USPTO; the consequences one observer faced for watching spammer Alan Ralsky and more. Read on for the details.

Don't Post While Sleepy: Hi, Chrisd here apologizing about that false post on Sony/Nintendo Playstation Trademark Settlement. Oops. Doh. No excuse. Mea Culpa. I'll be more careful next time.

Is "Rubber stamping everything" a patentable business practice? Brian Dear writes "With all the news these days about the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issuing a patent to AOL/ICQ/Mirabilis for Instant Messaging, I thought the Slashdot community would be interested in reading about TERM-talk on PLATO, which was announced on the PLATO network on this day in 1973. Here is the URL with a screen shot of the actual announcement."

Turing, Marconi and Rosen: pick any two. squiggleslash writes "Salon is running an informative and sympathetic story about GNU radio. The article discusses how the project could end up pre-empting the Hollywood producers and other content cartel's attempts to destroy modifiable consumer hardware by creating a blatently legitimate space where programmable hardware is a requirement, as well as opening up radio to groups outside of the current cabals. Good stuff."

We've mentioned quite a bit about GNU Radio before (see also Eric Blossom's interview questions and answers; this article delves into the fight that the GNU Radio folks are gearing up for over broadcast flags.

Suiteness and light. To follow up on our mention of the effort to buy from Gobe (and release as Free software) the sourcecode of Gobe Productive, Simon Gauvin of beunited.org writes "beunited.org has been pledged over $10,000.00 by the public and corporate community for the release of Gobe Productive for BeOS. Linux users have also pledged, and we encourage more members of the Linux community to participate for the release of the Linux version. Call all your friends and send them over to beunited.org to help raise awareness!"

Here's the relevant discussion thread if you'd like to learn more about this effort; I wish the site had a bar chart of some sort showing how much money was currently raised, and an obvious PayPal link or similar. Note that for now, beunited's first goal is to open the source for the BeOS version of Productive.

Ralsky, Ralsky, Ralsky ... IsoRashi writes "Over at the Register they have this short article about a guy who took some photos of spammer Alan Ralsky's home. After taking the photographs, the man was chased by someone in a black jaguar and he began receiving threatening phone calls the next day. Here is a direct link to the site the photographer set up."

Read your TOS carefully before you start downloading ... Sergeant Beavis writes "Nate Carlson was kind enough to create a HOWTO for connecting your Linux box to Sprint's Vision network via a Sanyo SCP-4900 phone. However Sanyo's store shows the cable to be out of stock. Now comes FutureDial to the rescue with both the USB cable and SnapDialer software for connecting to the Vision network with Windows instead of Linux. Oh, the cable only cost $19.99 at your local Radio Shack. Enjoy!"

And let this be a lesson (of sorts) to you! gh0ul writes "Looks like Uzi Nissan (for those of you who don't recall owns nissan.com) has lost his fight with Nissan Motors to keep his nissan.com (last name by birthright/company) domain. The site now reads "In compliance with a ruling issued by the United States District Court in Los Angeles on November 14, 2002, in the lawsuit of Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. v. Nissan Computer Corporation, this web site has been converted to non-commercial use." Are we ever going to have any protection against these kind of things?"

The Eye was never there. You never saw it. It was not creepy. Finally, Rob writes "The creepy all-seeing eye logo from John Poindexter and the Total Information Awareness project is suddenly missing from the TIA web site. Old site ; Current site Perhaps TIA is seeking suggestions for a new logo?"

The VMS PHONE utility is just like TERM-talk too

[sys$manager]

I assume that PHONE on VMS has been around a lot longer than any of the current IM systems, but not as long as TERM-talk. It has basically the same functionality as described on the TERM-talk site.

Re:The VMS PHONE utility is just like TERM-talk to

[bakes]

There is also of course the Unix 'write', and later 'talk'.

write of course didn't have the char-by-char display that TERM-talk and PHONE had, but neither do today's IM systems.

Buddy list? who, or even who | grep friendsloginname if there were lots of people online.

Look carefully

[dmaxwell]

C1everNickName versus CleverNickName.

This is an imposter.

Maybe Wil needs to end his posts with:

"The real CleverNickName has a uid of 129189."

Rawlsky

[bleckywelcky]

Probably a million people will sound the same on the phone, but if you listen to the phone call threats and Rawlsky's interview on NPR, they sound very similar. Although, I would think that Rawlsky wouldn't risk making threats at some guy just taking pictures, considering he gets death threats, etc. I find it funny too when NPR asks Rawlsky about blind relays and he responds with "no comment". If he wasn't using them he would condemn them as pollution and a problem in the email world, right? Because anyone can see the problem with leaving a blind relay completely open. Yet, he says "no comment" - pretty obvious he uses them (unless he has no idea what they are, which I find hard to believe). I don't feel sorry for this guy receiving death threats or being harassed every day. He does it to millions of people every day, and I doubt that when you want to be removed that he takes you off his list - what's his incentive? As far as I can tell, there are no "Do Not Email List" laws in the US, although some laws restricting the sending of some types of spam. The only miniscule incentive that exists is that it would give him some legitimacy as a marketer rather than some ass just sending bulk email - although, I think he has proably lost any chances at legitimacy already. I don't wish this guy any physical harm, but by all means, harass him to the end of time. (PS - You think he could afford a little more property rather than shoving his million dollar house right between two other houses with a couple feet on each side, sheesh!)

Re:this guy should lose his domain since you're la

[BJH]

I definitely don't agree with Nissan Motors' actions, but in the interests of accuracy, Datsun was the name used by a company (Kaishinsha Motors) which then was transferred to another company (Japan Motors) which changed its name to Nissan in 1934. Datsun was thereafter used as a brand name for Nissan-made cars.

Re:What is this fascination with .com domains?

[numark]

Under the domain name dispute rules ICANN adopted, it doesn't matter if you register a domain name that includes a trademark. What does matter if one of the following is true:

1. You bought the domain name specifically for the purpose of selling it to the trademark owner.

2. You have a past history of registering domains with trademarks specifically for the purpose of using them improperly.

3. You registered the domain specifically to disrupt the business of another company.

4. You intentionally registered the domain for the purpose of attracting people away from a legitimate company (note the inclusion of the word intentional).

Those are the rules under ICANN. Unfortunately, judges rarely follow these rules, instead using ancient laws concerning trademarks to turn over domain names to companies who sue specifically because they know ICANN won't give them the domain name. It's a pity, really.

Re:How about that other cheek thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know the "Eye for an eye" approach to justice is actually all about stopping retribution. The idea is that an eye for an eye limits the damage done, otherwise people would be doing the escalation thing of a life for an eye.

why the logo is scary

[Sarin]

The logo is indeed frightning, why is the eye watching at Europe for instance instead of the USA?

One more thing the eye in the background and the pyramid is the Illuminati logo.

For those who have never heard of The Illuminati, or are brand new to the study, and who might ask, "In a nutshell, what the heck is the Illuminati?" I'll give you here the basic assertion in a very brief capsule:

A man named Adam Weishaupt founded a secret society in Bavaria in 1776, that had as it's goal, to rule the world. The methods they would use would be assassinations, bribery, blackmail, revolutions, and espionage. Their model of organization was similar to the Jesuit Order and the steps and degrees of Freemasonry. They intended to control and manipulate banks and bankers, money-lending powers, the world's financiers. They intended to cause economic collapses, wars, bloody uprisings and revolutions around the world, with each upheaval calculated to re-structure the status quo leaving the Illuminati in greater positions of influence, and poised for their next step. The main enemies or "targets" of The Illuminati in the 1700s were the kings and queens, the monarchies of Europe, and, the Church. The two most-remembered Illuminati-caused revolutions in history, were, the French Revolution and Reign of Terror (1788-1799), and the Russian Revolution of 1917 that first made Communism a world power. The Illuminati and it's diabolical conspiracy was very real. These things actually happened and are a matter of world history. The Illuminati Conspiracy got exposed. The authorities made raids and seized Illuminati documents. In its day this was all public headline news, not some obscure, rare, or arcane knowledge. There you have the basic gist of it. That is the starting point. That is what people usually mean by "The Illuminati."

I guess they don't want to be associated with them or perhaps they want to hide this fact if you're more conspiracy-theory minded

Re:What's Rule 1, Rule 3?

[Oloryn]

In the Ralsky article, he said the threatening calls he received were right in line with Rule 1 and Rule 3.

What are they?

1. Spammers lie
2. If a spammer seems to be telling the truth, see Rule #1.
3. Spammers are stupid

Also, see http://drebbelstraat20.dyndns.org/~mvdwege/misc/sp amrules.html [dyndns.org]

Re:The VMS PHONE utility is just like TERM-talk to

[Brainchild]

IM is actually two independant services coupled together--messaging and notification. AOL's patent is specific to a system that couples these two services together. talk, this TERM-talk thing, IRC, zephyr all all allow for messaging, but none of them allow for presence notification.

So you mean that when, my ~/.ircrc file contains:

notify OoklaTheMok

and the IRC server notifies me when OoklaTheMok signs onto the server, that the server is lying, and OoklaTheMok really hasn't signed on?

And you mean that when gaim signs me onto the AIM server, it doesn't say anything to the server about ThundarrTheBarbarian being in my Buddy List, but the AIM server somehow magically knows to notify me when ThundarrTheBarbarian signs onto AIM?

Wow. So i guess ircII's notification facility that i was using back in 1995 wasn't really notification at all. You must know a lot more than i do about instant messaging....

Here is the new Logo

[goombah99]

actually they already have a new logo. its just not on the front page yet. see http://www.darpa.mil/iao/TIASystems.htm.

also if you check out the program power point slides you will see they have scrubbed the blatantly skin crawling ones. It used to show that they were going to collect data about your dogs veternary records, your mortgage payments, magazine subscriptions and known associates. Now this is gone. Also they have heftier looking compartmentalization of the records keeping shown, suggesting they are thinking of protecting you. (ha!).

finally poindexter's resume has been cleaned up.