TRS80NT - Slashdot User

Submission + - UW cooperates with music industry in suing student (komotv.com) 1

Submitted by

Bomarc

on Tuesday June 26, 2007 @12:57PM

Bomarc writes: "From the article: The University of Washington says it will cooperate with the music industry as it tracks down and sues students accused of illegally downloading audio files.

A university official, Eric Godfrey, informed students by e-mail that it will use its computers to identify students and notify them of their settlement options.

The university will forward notices from the Recording Industry Association of America telling them they have about 20 days to settle before going to court.

Settlements range from $3,000 to $5,000."

Submission + - Mr. and Mrs. Spam (hungarytourism.hu)

Submitted by

Tamas Feher from Hungary

on Tuesday June 26, 2007 @09:57AM

Tamas Feher from Hungary writes: "CNN reports that some 200 american people recently became subjects of a targeted e-mail spam attack, which alleged a relative contracted them to a hitman. The message warned that they will be assasinated very soon unless they cough up some 30 to 80 thousand dollars in ransom. Those who disobeyed were harassed with a fake follow-up letter from an "FBI representative in London", warning the recipient that he/she is high up on a kill bill found with a recently arrested mafia messenger. The most resistant victims were even sent an ultimatum, full of personal and family details, ordering the recipient to pay immeditely or they will be retired. The real FBI is investigating this unusual strain of the infamous "nigerian 419" scam.

Here is the full article:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/06/18/lothian.cybercrim e/index.html"

Submission + - Pirates of the Caribbean ripped off Monkey Island?

Submitted by Winston Judt on Tuesday June 26, 2007 @08:02AM

Winston Judt writes: Did Monkey Island inspire Pirates of the Caribbean — or, even better, did Pirates of the Caribbean plain rip-off Monkey Island? This article explores some amazing similarities and dissimilarities between the two as well, to see if it's more of a rip off or just two series which have drawn from the same source material.

Submission + - IBM Visualization Tool Shows Earmark Disparity (sunlightlabs.com)

Submitted by

Gabriela Schneider

on Tuesday June 12, 2007 @05:10PM

Gabriela Schneider writes: "Find out how much money Congress gave to big companies via earmarks using the Sunlight Foundation's new Many Eyes data visualization tools. The seven companies that landed more then $100 million in earmarks are some of the biggest players in Washington — the sort of firms that spend millions each year lobbying on everything from taxes and trade policy to health care to appropriations issues.

The visualizations show how Congress awarded earmarks in 2005 by agency, state and organization. Sunlight is also offering its standardized data for download, a searchable database and an analysis of the current state of earmark reform (which hasn't exactly been working in practice.)"

Submission + - Ars takes a field trip: the Creation Museum

Submitted by VincenzoRomano on Friday June 08, 2007 @03:19AM

VincenzoRomano writes: There's a new interesting "review" (kind of) about the famous Creation Museum whose opening has already been covered few weeks ago.
Ars Technica is quite serious in this trip as they state, in the Editor's Note "Let it be known that Ars Technica's staff represents a wide range of religious backgrounds, political views, and opinions, (though we must admit that none of us are young-earth creationists)".
Some interesting points from the review:

As you walk through the museum, the contorted reasoning to explain the formation of the Grand Canyon in hours or the rapid creation of thousands of breeds of dogs in a matter of weeks is augmented by what can only be described as a house of horrors about the dangers of abortion and drugs and the devil's music.

For those who need a sneak preview of this ... ehr ... museum there's also a "virtual tour" available on Flickr.Enjoy it!

Submission + - Dell thinks Ubuntu makes computers more fragile? (dellideastorm.com)

Submitted by

WolfWings

on Tuesday June 05, 2007 @03:47AM

WolfWings writes: "Apparently Dell has decided that Ubuntu-based computers are ineligible for their famed CompleteCare service, or any form of hardware warranty what-so-ever. The news has only recently hit Dell's own IdeaStorm website, but after so recently decided to support Linux on their machines, including limited technical support, Dell seems to be squandering any possible good-will with this decision to leave purchasers of these machines high and dry for hardware warranty coverage."

Submission + - RIAA Drops Tanya Andersen Case

Submitted by

NewYorkCountryLawyer

on Tuesday June 05, 2007 @12:11AM

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "After 2 years, the RIAA has finally dropped its longstanding case against disabled single mother Tanya Andersen in Oregon, Atlantic v. Andersen. The dismissal (pdf) relates merely to the RIAA's claims against Ms. Andersen, and does not relate to her (a) claim for attorneys fees or (b) counterclaims against the RIAA, which are presently before the Court on a motion to dismiss. The counterclaims were first interposed in December 2005. This is the same case in which the RIAA insisted on taking a face to face deposition of a 10 year old girl. By the way, neither the mother nor the child had ever even heard of file sharing."

Submission + - Sued For Non-Existent Content?

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Thursday May 10, 2007 @12:12PM

Anonymous Coward writes: "I'd like to get the opinion of Slashdot readers on this (even though I know it''s not legal advice). Several years ago one of my websites (nameless for obvious reasons) used a CGI script to pull and display some publicly-available content from another site. The script is long gone and the content hasn't been available for several years.
Recently, however, I received a letter from an "internet law" firm claiming that the content was copyrighted and that I owed a bunch of money to the original copyright holder for my 'illegal use'. (The content was apparently found through Archive.org.) The content isn't on my site and hasn't been for years, so my question is just what is my liability? I never received any sort of takedown notice and the content was gone long before receiving this demand for money. What say ye, Slashdotters- am I liable? Is this a thinly-veiled extortion attempt? How would anyone actually determine what the supposed worth of this infringement is/was?"

Submission + - Hubble Space telescope detects ring of Dark Matter

Submitted by mknewman on Thursday May 10, 2007 @01:31AM

mknewman writes: NASA Breaking News http://www.nasa.gov/rss/breaking_news.rss is reporting that NASA will hold a media confrence on May 15 at 1pm EDT to discuss the stongest evidence to date that Dark Matter exists.

Submission + - Could Global Warming Make Life on Eath Better?

Submitted by mikee805 on Wednesday May 09, 2007 @08:12PM

mikee805 writes: A lengthy article in Spiegel talks of global warming making life on Earth better not just for humans but all life. From the article: "A warmer climate helps promote species diversity", "We have to take away people's fear of climate change.Unfortunately many scientists see themselves too much as priests whose job it is to preach moralistic sermons to people.", "the only distress the Scandinavians will face is the guilty conscience that could come with benefiting from global warming." Its not all positive however "The world's new drought zones lie in the southern United States and Australia, but also in Mediterranean countries like Spain, Italy and Greece". Overall they seem to conclude that a increase of 2 degrees will have more benefits than anything else.

Submission + - Bridging the Gap Between Hackers and Academics

Submitted by

Tal Garfinkel

on Wednesday May 02, 2007 @12:27AM

Tal Garfinkel writes: "There is long been a disconnect between academic computer security and underground forums like Blackhat and Phrack. A new USENIX sponsored workshop called WOOT (Workshop On Offensive Technologies) is looking to bridge that gap by providing a high quality, peer reviewed form for submitting attack papers, with top reviewers from the academic, open source, commercial IT and information warfare communities. Got a great attack paper, see if it makes the cut at WOOT ."

Court Rules Playlist Customization Is Not Interactive 54

Posted by Zonk on Monday April 30, 2007 @07:08AM from the licensing-makes-so-much-sense dept.

prostoalex writes "Is music played via customized playlist delivered interactively (i.e., via user participation) or non-interactive (i.e., decisions are made on the server side)? The question does seem metaphysical, but it took Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Yahoo! six years to figure it out via a protracted legal battle. User-driven playlists are bucketed with on-demand music services, while server-driven playlists are equaled to broadcasts, thereby causing different licensing mechanisms to take place. Yahoo! inherited the legal wrangle when it purchased a music startup Launch, which built a music recommendation feature. The court decision determined that recommendation algorithms that rely on usage data to build playlists server-side are still eligible for broadcast license, thereby substantially lowering the costs of operating a music recommendation site."

Qantas Ditches Linux for AIX 360

Posted by Zonk on Monday April 30, 2007 @02:26AM from the hope-that-penguin-has-a-parachute dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Australia's No. 1 airline Qantas will shift their underlying platform running its internal finance systems from Linux to IBM's AIX next month as part of a wide-ranging technology transformation project. 'We're moving from a Linux platform to an IBM AIX environment — we did that to address some stability issues we were having', said Suzanne Young, Qantas group general manager for finance improvement and segmentation. The decision was made last year, as part of the planning for the rollout."

Submission + - Microsoft rejects Visual FoxPro user petition

Submitted by

PetManimal

on Monday April 09, 2007 @04:03PM

PetManimal writes: "Computerworld reports that Microsoft has rejected a user petition signed by 2,400 people calling on the company to continue developing Visual FoxPro. Microsoft, which bought FoxBASE back in 1992, has said it will support Visual FoxPro users until 2015, and has open-sourced some VFP tools, but after this summer's release of Service Pack 2 for Visual FoxPro 9, will terminate development — i.e., there will be no Visual FoxPro 10. Jay Roxe, Microsoft's group product manager for Visual Studio, cited several reasons for the decision:

For Microsoft to continue to evolve the FoxPro base, we would need to look at creating a 64-bit development environment, and that would involve an almost complete rewrite of the core product. ... As far as forming a partnership with a third party is concerned, we've heard from a number of large FoxPro customers that this would make it impossible for them to continue to use FoxPro since it would no longer be from an approved vendor. We felt that putting the environment into open source on CodePlex, which balances the needs of both the community and the large customers, was the best path forward.
The article adds that while interest in Visual FoxPro has begun to drop in the United States, the database programming tool/language remains a 'rock star' in China and Eastern Europe. The user petition wiki was created by Spanish developers, and contains a letter that says '.NET still lacks many of the better features that Visual FoxPro has in it for years'. The petition suggested that MS open source the full Visual FoxPro source code or form a partnership with a third party to continue Visual FoxPro development."

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