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The Internet

Submission + - U.K. bill would outlaw open Wi-Fi (zdnet.co.uk)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: The government will not exempt universities, libraries and small businesses providing open Wi-Fi services from its Digital Economy Bill copyright crackdown, according to official advice released earlier this week.

This would leave many organizations open to the same penalties for copyright infringement as individual subscribers, potentially including disconnection from the internet, leading legal experts to say it will become impossible for small businesses and the like to offer Wi-Fi access.

"This is going to be a very unfortunate measure for small businesses, particularly in a recession, many of whom are using open free Wi-Fi very effectively as a way to get the punters in.

Even if they password protect, they then have two options — to pay someone like The Cloud to manage it for them, or take responsibility themselves for becoming an ISP effectively, and keep records for everyone they assign connections to, which is an impossible burden for a small cafe" Lilian Edwards, professor of internet law at Sheffield University told ZDNet UK.

ZDNet : http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/0,1000000085,40057470,00.htm
Security

Submission + - Hackers target tsunami search results (sophos.com)

Submitted by xsee
xsee writes: Only hours after the earthquake and resulting tsunami from Chile, hackers appear to be manipulating search results to direct people seeking information on this event to infected webpages. Exercise caution as to where you get information on this tragedy.
Movies

Submission + - Software Helps Roger Ebert Find His Voice 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: It has been nearly four years since Roger Ebert sadly lost his lower jaw and his ability to speak. But now technology is giving Ebert his voice back. Ebert sounded like his former self Friday during a taping of The Oprah Winfrey Show, the show's producer said. It was no medical miracle, but a demo of new software that used audio recordings of Ebert to create a synthetic voice that sounds like his own. CereProc created the voice for TV's most famous movie critic using mostly audio of Ebert's DVD commentaries on Citizen Kane and Casablanca. 'I dream of hearing a voice something like my own,' Ebert wrote last year, lamenting that past attempts to use computer voiced left him sounding 'like Robby the Robot.' Ebert's appearance on Oprah will air Tuesday.
Social Networks

Submission + - Study: Ages of social network users. (pingdom.com)

Submitted by
Ant
Ant writes: "Royal Pingdom has age statistics for nineteen/19 different social network sites (Facebook, /., Digg, etc.) and crunched the numbers (note: to get consistent age data for the various sites we used site demographics information for the United States/U.S. gathered from Google's Ad Planner service and then did some additional calculations to get all the data we needed).

Seen on Neatorama."

Submission + - The School webcam spying gets weirder (tomshardware.com) 2

Submitted by
markass530
markass530 writes: "It seems that the Lower Merion schools aren't the only one with the spying capabilities that were apparently used in the current class action lawsuit. A reader of Boing Boing pointed out that PBS aired a documentary a few weeks ago called "Digital Nation." In it, vice-principle of Intermediate School 339, Bronx, NY, Dan Ackerman showed how he's able to remotely monitor students through webcam.

Ackerman demonstrates the webcam spying ability: "They don't even realize we are watching," "I always like to mess with them and take a picture," and "9 times out of 10, THEY DUCK OUT OF THE WAY."

Oddly there are no questions regarding student privacy, which is likely how the recent class action lawsuit came about.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/learning/schools/how-google-saved-a-school.html?play

Skip to around 4:36 to see the remote webcam monitoring."

Submission + - Appeals Court Knocks Out "Innocent Infringement" (blogspot.com)

Submitted by NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: A 3-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit has ruled that a Texas teenager was not entitled to invoke the innocent infringement defense in an RIAA filesharing case where she had admittedly made unauthorized downloads of all of the 16 song files in question, and had not disputed that she had 'access' to the CD versions of the songs which bore copyright notices. The 11 page decision (PDF) handed down in Maverick Recording v. Harper seems to equate 'access' with the mere fact that CD's on sale in stores had copyright notices, and that she was free to go to such stores. In my opinion, however, that is not the type of access contemplated in the statute, as the reference to 'access' in the statute was intended to obviate the 'innocence' defense where the copy reproduced bore a copyright notice. The court also held that the 'making available' issue was irrelevant to the appeal, and that the constitutional argument as to excessiveness of damages had not been preserved for appeal.

Comment Re:They Mentioned treasure hunt on the list (Score 2, Funny) 470

by dptalia (#31067178) Attached to: What Are the Best Valentine's Day Stunts?

This was my goal for every Valentines day. Don't worry about what she thinks, think about the story she will tell.

On February 13th, around 11:30 at night back in my college days, I got 3 rolls of ribbon and tied a bow around as many trees as I could between her dorm and her classes. I put a note under her door saying "Every time you see a bow, remember how much I love you". Cheesy, I know. But, she was the talk of the college campus. Word got around that I tied the bows for her, and she felt like the most popular girl in school. That made her feel like a million bucks. Total cost? $15.

It may be cheesy but it made this girl go "aaawwww". AND read it to her husband! (hint hint)
Microsoft

Hackers Counter Microsoft COFEE With Some DECAF 154

Posted by kdawson from the please-mister-moto dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Two developers have created 'Detect and Eliminate Computer Assisted Forensics' (DECAF). The tool tries to stop Microsoft's Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (COFEE), which helps law enforcement officials grab data from password-protected or encrypted sources. After COFEE was leaked to the Web, Microsoft issued takedown notices to sites hosting the software." The article notes that DECAF is not open source, so you aren't really going to know for sure what it will do to your computer.
Cellphones

Submission + - An Experiment in BlackBerry Development

Submitted by ballwall
ballwall writes: We've all read the stories about how lucrative selling apps on the iPhone can be (or not), but what about other platforms? BlackBerry accounts for twice as many handsets shipped as Apple, according to Gartner, so I decided to find out. I wrote about my experiences developing my first application including sales, platform issues, and anything else I thought new mobile developers might be interested in.

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