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Sony

Submission + - PlayStation 3 is and will be steadily at a loss (kingofgng.com) 1

Submitted by
KingofGnG
KingofGnG writes: "Sony Computer Entertainment chairman Kazuo "Kaz" Hirai would like to sell 150 millions of PlayStation 3 in ten years, but even that wouldn't be enough to recover from the astounding cost of the 3 billions of dollars spent in research&development for the console. It has been said not by a Nintendo fanboy but by the Sony Corporation Chief Executive Officer Sir Howard Stringer, who has frankly admitted with the press that PS3 is and will be a product at a loss for the coming decades yet. Story continues here."
Businesses

Submission + - Refusing ELUA against federal law! 2

Submitted by Reefrash
Reefrash writes: OK, so I purchased EA Sports Tiger Woods 09 for the xbox360 Friday night. I fired it up and was presented with an EULA from 1984 ... Total big brother.

To play the game you MUST create an account with EA (automatically done for you using your XBOX live user information). They can track you, compile data on you, do whatever they wish with said data, and will give your info to their associates to spam you as they see fit (they explicitly include Social Security numbers as potential data). They also reserve the right to compile other data on you not related to their games. To be fair they also state you can login to their website to disable spamming.

So, i was quite annoyed by the conditions ... I just wanted to play the dang video game, not give up all rights to privacy (and who knows what else, I only made it through 5 of the 20+ page EULA). So I said no, I do not accept.
I tried to return the game to Target the next morning but they will not allow a return of an opened video game. Now here is where it gets jacked ...

The first person I spoke to (and then the manager) right off each made the claim that Federal Law says its illegal to accept a return on a video game once its been opened!!!?!?! I called BS on that. They couldn't site the statute that made the action a felony, but claimed it was true.

So to all of our legalize type folks out there ... are you familiar with ANY law which prohibits open game return at the federal level? Im pretty sure the DMCA doesn't, and i doubt any else does. Makes me think that Target trains their employees to make this claim to hide their own bad policy in this regard.

Three problems I have.
1. Cannot return a game that has been opened, but unable to see the terms and conditions until the game is opened ... Leaving no room to ever refuse the terms and conditions.

2. Returning an opened game is breaking federal LAW?!!? If this is not true (i don't think it is) ... would it be illegal to train your employees to site false laws as a policy?

3. I have the numbers for EA, Microsoft, and Target. I'm gonna end up spending hours and hours on the phone to try and get my $60 back. I only have a cell phone, and these companies can only be called during the hours of the day that will take up my minutes ... costing me even more money. So my third problem is basically that I am SOL =/
Privacy

Submission + - SPAM: Secret Spying Court Stays Secret, Rejects ACLU

Submitted by
Anti-Globalism
Anti-Globalism writes: "For the third time in a year, a secret spying court rejected an ACLU request to let some sunshine pierce its dark curtains of secrecy, ruling late Thursday that national security prohibits publishing even unclassified versions of court documents or allowing non-government lawyers to argue in the court."
Link to Original Source
Security

Submission + - Bush quietly seeks to make war powers permanent (rawstory.com)

Submitted by
Anik315
Anik315 writes: "Congress recently passed a bill giving telecom companies retroactive immunity for their participation in an illegal surveillance program, and now Bush is attempting to make these powers permanent by declaring an indefinite state of war. The New York Times' has placed an article on Page 8 which states that Bush seeks to affirm that the U.S. is at war with Al Qaeda, there by indefinitely extending his war powers."
Spam

Submission + - Have You Become A Spammer?

Submitted by
tmjva
tmjva writes: "Over the past month, I've noticed in yahoogroups, perfectly good messages marked and placed in the spam folder of the groups I own. I noticed it was the same user over and over again. O.K. I said to myself, the address got blacklisted somehow I need to approve his messages from now on. Then a couple of days ago, another yahoogroup owner/moderator noticed the same thing with some of his subscribers. Now today, I sent some messages to yahoogroups I belong to and they didn't show up, so I ended up asking the owner/moderators to check their spam folders. So apprarently I've gained the same status as the guy I'm watching. (The insidious thing is, unlike new subscriber notices or moderated messages, owner/moderators are not sent a notification that something is pending when it is put in a yahoogroup spam folder. So owner/moderators have to manually check every spam folder in every group they own or moderate, every day, or they'll never know.)

Also at work we have an e-mail server that sends perfectly good Invoices and Sales Orders to customers that have agreed to receive them. Then lately a few customers have been rejecting our Invoices. Turns out they subscribed to what used to be known as blacklist.zap blacklisting service (acquired by Microsoft back in 2005). When I contacted them and asked how did our e-mail server get blacklisted there was no specific incident of a spam report, they simply informed me they were using content heuristics to determine e-mail servers that were spam. So if all you're sending is a bit of plain text and a PDF Invoice, it may get your email address blacklisted."
Businesses

Submission + - National Federation of Blind & Target settle s

Submitted by wwsmith
wwsmith writes: Last week, the widely publicized lawsuit between the National Federation of the Blind and Target Stores was settled. The issue involved a class-action lawsuit of blind individuals that could not use the Target Stores web site. In other words, the web site was "not accessible" according to the NFB. As part of the settlement, the NFB is going to test the site quarterly, partly using software and partly using blind individuals. More details are located at http://www.dralegal.org/cases/private_business/nfb_v_target.php
Businesses

Submission + - Restaurant Owners Use Zapper to Cook the Books

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The NY Times writes that thanks to a software program called a zapper, even technologically illiterate restaurant and store owners are siphoning cash from computer cash registers to cheat tax officials including a 12-store restaurant chain in Detroit that used a zapper to skim more than $20 million over four years. Zappers — also known as automated sales suppression devices — are a new twist on an old fraud. In the old days, restaurant owners who wanted to cheat on taxes kept two sets of books but because cash registers make automated records, hiding the theft requires getting into the machine's memory and changing that record. The more sophisticated zappers are easy to use: a dialog box shows the day's tally then the thief chooses to take a dollar amount or percentage of the till and the program calculates which orders to erase to get close to the amount of cash the person wants to remove. Richard T. Ainsworth, a Boston University law professor specializing in taxes says only two known zapper cases have been prosecuted in the United States. ""Why aren't cases being identified in the United States? This is my tax money. It makes me mad.""
Cellphones

Submission + - SSN Needed to purchase iPhone (apple.com) 1

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Like many people, I received an email from Apple reminding me of the upcoming iPhone 3G launch on Friday. I was surprised to read they want my social security number to purchase an iPhone http://www.apple.com/retail/iphone/

Unless Steve Jobs plans to make a contribution to my account, I don't see why they need my SSN to purchase a cell phone.
Networking

Submission + - Bandwidth Monitoring Tools

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I work for a school that has never had bandwidth problems. So they have never put any monitoring tools into place. Well last week that came to a crashing halt when something consumed our entire outbound pipe. So now we are in need of some good tools to figure out who and what is using our bandwidth. What we do have is a spanned port that duplicates the in/out bound traffic of our entire network. What we need is shiny charts and graphs to explain to the bosses what is going on. What you use to monitor our traffic. Bonus points if it works on Windows.
Government

Submission + - US Threatens Canada Over Copyright Legislation

Submitted by kwandar
kwandar writes: Word today from Michale Geist's blog that the Canadian Government led by Stephen Harper once again caved into US demands in the recently introduced Canadian Copyright Bill C-61. This legislation which is being sold as "Made in Canada" has received an outpouring of complaints by the Canadian public, with more than 6,000 people writing to their Members of Parliament (that averages 20 emails per member)and the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group increasing in size from 40,000 to over 50,000 members.

According to documents obtained under the Access to Information Act, the US made veiled threats about "thickening the border" between Canada and the U.S. if Canada refused to put DMCA style copyright reform on the legislative agenda. This is a clear threat to Canada's economy as our only border is with the US.

Perhaps some of our US friends would like to write to their representatives too, about the pressure being applied to other countries to adopt DMCA style legislation? We're in this together!
Space

Submission + - Pioneer anomaly seems 70% real (planetary.org)

Submitted by Tablizer
Tablizer writes: The so called "Pioneer Anomaly" is a slight acceleration of the now-defunct Pioneer probes that doesn't match gravity models, suggesting a mysterious force. Researchers have been subtracting out known forces, such as power-cell heat, to isolate the mysterious portion.

Pioneer Anomaly Project Director Slava Turyshev presented preliminary results of the thermal modeling efforts at a meeting of the American Physical Society. ...The magnitude of the Pioneer Anomaly is so very tiny that it could conceivably result from the uneven radiation of heat from the spacecraft...Turyshev reported that the [heat] model can generate an acceleration that amounts to about 30% of the Anomaly for that distance [25AU] from the Sun.
Software

Submission + - AVG causing false web analytics 1

Submitted by frovingslosh
frovingslosh writes: A story at The Register is reporting that the new version of AVG anti-virus scanner is causing major problems for websites, it adds "a tool that automatically scans search engine results before you click on them. If you search Google, for instance, and ten results turn up, it visits all ten links to ensure they're malware free." This is throwing website statistics way off, as well as burning through bandwidth for small sites that happen to hit high on a Google search for a particular term. Also from the article: "If AVG does mask its user agent — and fails to provide another workaround — its ghost traffic looks exactly like real traffic. And then the web is in trouble. After all, 50 million AVG users have yet to upgrade." And no mention that the very popular AVG Free seems to be going away, to be replaced by a for pay only version.
Google

Submission + - Google Developing ISP Throttling Detector

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "Google has been very vocal on its stance for net neutrality. Recently, Richard Whitt — Senior Policy Director for Google — announced that Google will take an even more active role in the debate by arming consumers with the tools to determine first-hand if their broadband connections are being monkeyed with by their ISPs. Google's stance is that if the ISPs won't disclose that information to the public, then consumers should have the tools at hand to determine for themselves what their ISPs are doing."
The Almighty Buck

Covert BT Phorm Trial Report Leaked 292

Posted by CmdrTaco from the look-at-what-someone-found dept.
stavros-59 writes "An internal BT report on the BT secret trials of Phorm (aka 121Media) Deep Packet Inspection has been revealed on Wikileaks today. The leaked document shows that during the covert trial a possible 18 million page requests were intercepted and injected with JavaScript and about 128 thousand charity ads were substituted with the Phorm Ad Network advertisements purchased by advertisers specifically for the covert trial period. Several ISPs are known to be using, or planning to use, DPI as a means of serving advertising directly through Layer 7 interception at ISP level in the USA and Europe. NebuAd claim they are using DPI to enable their advertising to reach 10% of USA internet users." CT: nodpi has updated their page with a note that says that the charity ads were "purchased and not hijacked"- read there to see what the latest is.

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