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Music

Submission + - The Alternative Distribution Alliance and RIAA?

Submitted by ta11geese3
ta11geese3 writes: So as a slashdot reader and as an indie fan, I've been heavily influenced to look down upon both RIAA's music and policies. While reading up on Matador Records on Wikipedia, I find out that they said they were not under the RIAA. However, they are part of the Alternative Distribution Alliance, which has big name indie labels such as Merge (Spoon, Arcade Fire, M. Ward), Touch and Go Records (Pinback, Yeah Yeah Yeahs), and even the band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. It turns out, however, that the ADA is 95% owned by Warner. Does this mean that the whole time that I was actually supporting the RIAA the whole time? Am I doomed to listen to ultra obscure stuff if I want to really boycott the RIAA? Or is the ADA not covered by the RIAA, despite being owned by one of the Big Four? On a side note, I've noticed that the cds I bought under the ADA labels all lack the ugly FBI warning on the back of the typical RIAA bands.
NASA

Submission + - Atlantis launch delayed again (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Z80xxc!
Z80xxc! writes: According to an article by the Washington Post, NASA has delayed the launch of the space shuttle Atlantis until January 2nd, 2008 at the earliest. The latest in a series of delays is due to a faulty fuel gauge. NASA did say that it should not vastly affect either the space station construction or the launch the European Space Agency's $2 billion Columbus lab.
Graphics

Submission + - Photoshopping about to get harder to detect

Submitted by
Frosty Piss
Frosty Piss writes: "We all know by now that you can't trust magazine covers and advertisements for skin-care products. The power of Photoshop is startling when you see it in action, and realize how much the representations of reality we see all around us are distorted and "improved" according to whatever the current standards of blemish-free beauty are. While we learn how to detect the tell-tale smudges, spots of flat color, inconsistencies in lighting, and pixilated artifacts left behind by digital manipulation, Dr. Ariel Shamir has developed a technique called Seam Carving that will make detection of Photoshopping much more difficult in the near future. As shown in this video, it's astonishing and almost disturbing how easy and fast it is to distort distances or remove objects entirely with this new tool."
Biotech

Submission + - Role of endogenous retroviruses in human evolution

Submitted by mhackarbie
mhackarbie writes: The current edition of the New Yorker magazine has a fascinating story about endogenous retroviruses in the genomes of humans and other species. Although researchers have known about such non-functional retroviral 'fossils' in the human genome for some time, the large amount of recent genomic data underscores just how pervasive they are, in a compelling tale that involves humans, their primate cousins, and a variety of viral invaders. Some researchers are even bringing back non-functional viral remnants from the dead by fixing their broken genes.
Security

Submission + - California Testers Find Flaws in Voting Machines (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by quanticle
quanticle writes: According to Ars Technica, California testers have discovered severe flaws in the ES&S voting machines. The paper seals were easily bypassed, and the lock could be picked with a "common office implement". After cracking the physical security the device, the testers found it simple to reconfigure the BIOS to boot off external media. After booting a version of Linux, they found that critical system files were stored in plain text. They also found that the election management system that initializes the voting machines used unencrypted protocols to transmit the initialization data to the voting machines, allowing for a man-in-the-middle attack.

Altogether, it is a troubling report for a company already in hot water for selling uncertified equipment to counties.
Movies

Submission + - Microsoft fueling HD wars for own benefit? (electronista.com)

Submitted by
DaveyJJ
DaveyJJ writes: "According to Transformers' director Michael Ray, in a story over on Electronista, Microsoft is deliberately feeding into the HD disc format wars to ensure that its own downloads succeed where physical copies fail, he says in a response to a question posed through his official forums.

The producer contends that Microsoft is writing "$100 million dollar checks" to movie studios to ensure HD DVD exclusives that hurt the overall market regardless of the format's actual merit or its popularity, preventing any one format from gaining a clear upper hand. Bay's own Transformers is available on disc only in the less popular HD DVD format despite his stated preference for Blu-ray. To the director, this is primarily a stalling tactic while Microsoft refines its own online-only technology," Electronista reports.

"'What you don't understand is corporate politics,' he says in the response," Electronista reports. "'Microsoft [officials] want both formats to fail so they can be heroes and make the world move to digital downloads.'"

More in the full article, including link to Bay's post in which he describes Blu-ray as the "leading, superior" format, over at http://www.electronista.com/articles/07/12/04/bay.on.microsoft.hd/."
Software

Submission + - Can my rights granted by the LGPL be limited? 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I recently had a brief e-mail conversation with the people of Ext JS — a rather neat JavaScript/AJAX library — about their licensing terms. They offer their library under the LGPL 3.0 which is their alternative open-source offering next to their commercial license.

However, unlike MySQL — where you can also choose between GPL and a commercial license — they limit your freedoms as to what you can do with their software under the LGPL 3.0 license. It is my understanding that once I obtain a copy of a work under LGPL 3.0 I can do with it pretty much anything I want — including re-distribute it — as long as I comply with the terms of the license.

Specifically, they say you cannot build your own framework on top of their software when using the LGPL 3.0 version. For that you need to buy their commercial license. It seems strange to me to limit users in such a way and still claim you're distributing under the LGPL.

I have two specific questions for the Slashdot audience:
  1. Is it allowed to extend the LGPL by imposing limitations in freedom of usage?
  2. If limiting the freedoms granted by the LGPL is not allowed, is their entire open-source licensing offer void OR only their additional limitations.


To ask the second question in another way: can I or anybody else consider their additional limitations void and assume they offer their software under the terms (and freedoms) of the LGPL?
The Internet

Submission + - 9thCirCourt Rules WebSearch for Nudity as Fair Use (techluver.com)

Submitted by
Tech.Luver
Tech.Luver writes: "U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday, Dec 04, reaffirming its earlier support for the socially redeeming value of searching the Internet for nudie pictures. The San Francisco court, in reviewing a case it initially considered in May, reiterated its finding that Google could display tiny versions of photographs by Perfect 10 Inc., a Beverly Hills-based adult publisher, in search results, even when those images were copyrighted. The court said, Google met that test. The justices ruled that a larger public interest in searching for information — or, in this case, images of partially clad women — amounted to a "transformative use" that trumped Perfect 10's copyright claims. ( http://techluver.com/2007/12/05/us-9th-circuit-court-of-appeals-rules-web-search-for-nudity-as-fair-use/ )"
Music

Submission + - Nokia's unlimited music offer turns market on head (reuters.com)

Submitted by superash
superash writes: Nokia's plan to offer unlimited music downloads challenges the dominant pay-per-track sales model and is likely to upset carriers already worried that Nokia is poaching their customer relationships.The world's biggest cellphone maker announced a deal on Tuesday with top record label Universal that will give customers buying particular Nokia devices unlimited access to millions of tracks for a year and allow them to keep the music afterwards.Nokia hopes the deal with Universal Music Group — a unit of Vivendi whose artists include 50 Cent, Sting and Mariah Carey — will be followed by deals with the three remaining major international labels, to whom it is already talking.
Novell

Submission + - Novell, RedHat being corporate on Real Time Linux (novell.com)

Submitted by
AndyST
AndyST writes: "Always interesting to see how rival GNU/Linux vendors treat each other. (Spoiler: Just like any other two companies.) On the subject of real time linux, and the companies' respective procucts, a Redhad executive claimed Novell was selling beta code, their code. Novell's rebuttal, with a smirk, contins a "Note to Red Hat: this is open source, remember? [...] Just because Red Hat is again late to market [...] doesn't mean Linux contains "beta code."" It's just business, nothing personal."
Communications

Submission + - Ham Radio Operators Are Heroes In Oregon (kptv.com) 1

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: We all know the impact that Ham radio can have in emergencies, but that often slips by the public and the authorities. Not so in Oregon, where a day after getting inundated with torrential rains and winds and suffering from the usually calamities those cause, Oregon's Governor called the local Ham radio operators heroes. When discussing how the storm affected communications, the governor stated: "I'm going to tell you who the heroes were from the very beginning of this...the ham radio operators." Kudos to the Oregon Ham operators for helping out in a bad situation, and getting the recognition they deserve.

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