Anonycat writes "Michael Fricklas, a lawyer for Viacom, has an opinion piece in the Washington Post laying out Viacom's side in their $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube. Fricklas asserts that the DMCA's 'safe harbor' provisions don't apply because YouTube is knowledgeable to infringement and furthermore derives financial benefit from it. He also argues that putting the onus of spotting infringement onto the content providers represents an undue burden on them. Fricklas caps the argument by stating, 'Google and YouTube wouldn't be here if not for investment in software and technologies spurred by patent and copyright laws.'"

Ang writes "Is Microsoft having worries about selling Vista already? Ars reports that Microsoft has announced yet another 'discount program' for Vista, but these new discounts work out to only about 10% off list price — not much when you notice that retailers already sell Vista below list. To make matters worse, the discount program would still end up costing you $100 more than the older 'family' discount built around Vista Ultimate in some situations. Ars spends seven paragraphs explaining this convoluted offer. Is all of this complexity supposed to help sell Vista?" If you must buy Vista, it might be advisable to sit on your wallet for a while. The discounts are bound to get sweeter.

dark_15 writes "Microsoft has apologized for serving malware via its websites and Windows Live Messenger software. APC reader Jackie Murphy reported the problem: 'With Microsoft launching Vista along with their Defender software to protect users from viruses and spyware, it seems therefore to be an oxymoron that they have started to putting paid changing banner advertisements for malware, on the popular MSN groups servers.'"

ABCTech has an interesting article about an Emeryville-based tech startup, Amyris Biotechnologies, that is planning to use microbes to turn sugar into diesel. Ethanol is made by adding sugar to yeast, but Amyris believes that it can reprogram the microbes to make something closer to gasoline. The company was initially given a $43 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to attempt to research the applications of Synthetic Biology for making a cost-effective malaria drug. Jack Newman, the Vice-President of Amyris said, "Why are we making ethanol if we're trying to make a fuel? We should be making something that looks a lot more like gasoline. We should be making something that looks a lot more like diesel. And if you wanted to design, you name it, a jet fuel? We can make that too."

umdenken wonders: "I'd like to know how others on Slashdot do their server-side web programming. We have dozens of Perl CGI scripts, and are currently doing development by editing these production scripts in place on the web server (!). Our sysadmins have finally installed an SVN client on the server (Solaris), and have offered to create a new virtual host that we can use as the development server. What are some of the practices you use for organizing this kind of set up?"

PhreakOfTime writes "For the first time the rising ocean levels have washed away an inhabited island. Lohachara island was at one point home to some 10,000 people. It, along with several other spits of land near the Indian mainland, is now permanently underwater. From the article: ' As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities. Eight years ago ... the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.'"

doug141 writes "Liberal and progressive Christian groups say a new computer game in which players must either convert or kill non-Christians is the wrong gift to give this holiday season and that Wal-Mart, a major video game retailer, should yank it off its shelves.Players can choose to join the Antichrist's team, but of course they can never win on [his] side. The enemy team includes fictional rock stars and folks with Muslim-sounding names, while the righteous include gospel singers, missionaries, healers and medics."

UnderAttack writes "Spam submitted to web contact forms and forums continues to be a huge problem. The standard way out is the use of captchas. However, captchas can be hard to read even for humans. And if implemented wrong, they will be read by the bots. The SANS Internet Storm Center covers a nice set of alternatives to captchas. For example, the use of style sheets to hide certain form fields from humans, but make them 'attractive' to bots. The idea of these methods is to increase the work a spammer has to do to spam the form without inconveniencing regular users."

An anonymous reader writes "Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched the ultimate speech translation engine project that would be capable of real-time interpretation of television and radio programs as well as printed or online textual information in order to be summarized, abstracted, and presented to human analysts emphasizing points of particular interest." If combined with the tower of babel project we discussed earlier, it could only lead to awesomeness.

mr100percent writes "I'm sure most Slashdot readers remember the computer UI from the Star Trek universe. Now, a number of developers are at work making LCARS themes, including one for Nokia tablets. There's even a Standards Board, with a flash LCARS demo." Several of us here in the office had the opportunity to test out the Nokia 770 at LinuxWorld San Francisco. The "cool factor" of a UI like this may even outweigh some of the downsides to the device since most of them were interface difficulties.

darryl24 writes "Microsoft senior vice president Bob Muglia opened up TechEd 2006 in Boston Sunday evening by proclaiming that Windows Vista was the most secure operating system in the industry. But a bold statement can only go so far, and much of this week's conference has been spent reinforcing that point. Microsoft also acknowledges that nothing is infallible when it comes to computer security. In turn, the company has employed black hat hackers for what is called a penetration, or pen, test team."