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Comment Re:Who cares? (Score 1) 284

Right. But even if you'd be ok with your corporate mail being monitored this law applied to any "community subscriber". This includes the high-speed Internet connection you are sharing with your neighbours. Would you like to give your neighbours legal right to capture all your protocol headers starting with IP? This is more than the police has authorization to do in normal circumstances. This law will do absolutely nothing to stop IP theft, just cause paranoia between people.

The Courts

Finnish Court Accepts E-Voting Result With 2% Lost 159

Nailor writes "The Helsinki Administrative court accepted the municipal voting result in an election in which 2% of votes cast were not counted at all. We discussed this situation at the time. The court noted that the e-voting machinery has a feature, that should be considered as an issue. However, it also noted that 'a little over two percent failure rate can not be considered as such as a proof that the voting official would have acted erroneously.' Does this mean 98% of votes is enough to figure out how the other 2% voted? Electronic Frontier Finland has a press release about the court decision (Google translation; Finnish original)."
Education

A Teacher Asking Students To Destroy Notes? 931

zwei2stein writes "I found this question with far-reaching implications in the off-topic section of a forum I frequent: 'My economics teacher is forcing us to give up all of our work for the semester. Every page of notes and paper must be turned over to her to be destroyed to prevent future students from copying it. My binder was in my backpack, and she went into my backpack to take it. Is that legal?' Besides the issue with private property invasion, which was the trigger of that post, there is much more important question: Can a teacher ask a student not to retain knowledge? How does IP law relate to teaching and sharing knowledge? Whose property are those notes?"

Comment SMS length 160 (Score 1) 12

I'm not very into mobile phones so correct if I'm wrong, but isn't the limit for a SMS message 160 characters? Now if you send a text message longer than that, it actually sends several text messages and thus is counted as several messages on the service provider side, even though it looks like one message on the modern mobile phones.

Now, filling 160 characters is not hard. With an average word length of 5.1 in English that would mean around 30 words per SMS when including whitespace. Even this post, that would be counted as not that long by Slashdot standards, would make up 7 SMS messages giving a count seven times larger than it actually is. Now imagine that you combine this with lots of short messages like "OK" you could easily get a large number of SMS messages even though your communication has really not been that intensive.

Does this explain the bizarre amount of messages this girl has sent? No. Is there a possibility that she has "broadcasted" her messages to all her friends for instance? That would explain a lot.

Handhelds

Submission + - Inside the iPhone: 3G, ARM, OS X, 3rd Partyware

DECS writes: After heading off the top ten myths of the iPhone, Daniel Eran of RoughlyDrafted has written a series of articles looking "Inside the iPhone," exploring why Apple didn't target faster 3G networks in EDGE, EVDO, HSUPA, 3G, and WiFi, a substantiated look at how the iPhone is indeed running OS X (contrary to reports that it isn't), what it means to users and developers, and how ARM is involved, in Mac OS X, ARM, and iPod OS X, and why the supposedly "closed system" Apple describes for the iPhone won't preclude third party development in Third Party Software.
Google

Submission + - Terrorists using Google Maps to plan attacks

the Gray Mouser writes: Fox news is reporting that maps printed from the Google Maps website have been found during raids of terrorists' homes. The map had a British base at Basra palace marked with exact coordinates plotted out.

Interesting to note is that some soldiers stated they had considered suing Google if mortar shells had dropped on them.

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