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Government

Senate Panel Approves Website Shut-Down Bill 390

Posted by timothy from the best-interests-at-heart dept.
itwbennett writes "The Senate Judiciary Committee has voted 19-0 in favor of a bill that would allow the Department of Justice to seek court orders to shut down websites offering materials believed to infringe copyright. 'Rogue websites are essentially digital stores selling illegal and sometimes dangerous products,' Senator Patrick Leahy, the main sponsor of the bill, said in a statement. 'If they existed in the physical world, the store would be shuttered immediately and the proprietors would be arrested. We cannot excuse the behavior because it happens online and the owners operate overseas. The Internet needs to be free — not lawless.' However, the internet will likely remain 'lawless' for a while longer, as there are only a few working days left in the congressional session and the bill is unlikely to pass through the House of Representatives in that short amount of time."

Submission + - Airports begin to go private, opt-out of TSA (wdbo.com) 4

Submitted by Dthief
Dthief writes:

Orlando Sanford International Airport has decided to opt out from TSA screening. "All of our due diligence shows it's the way to go," said Larry Dale, the director of the Sanford Airport Authority. "You're going to get better service at a better price and more accountability and better customer service."
Censorship

Submission + - Internet Blacklist Bill Up for Vote on Thursday

Submitted by Adrian Lopez
Adrian Lopez writes: The Internet blacklist bill known as COICA is up for vote on Thursday, with the first vote to be conducted by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Senators for California, Vermont, Wisconsin, New York, Minnesota, and Illinois will be the key votes in deciding whether COICA passes. Residents of those states are encouraged to contact their senators and let them know they oppose the bill.

COICA would let the US Attorney General create a blacklist of domains that every American ISP would be required to block. Wikileaks, YouTube, and others are all at risk. Human rights advocates, constitutional law experts, and the people who invented the Internet have all spoken out against this bill — but some of the most powerful industries in the country are demanding that Congress rush it through. The music industry is even having all of their employees call Congress to pose as citizens in support of the bill.

This bill is as bad for Americans and bad for the Internet. The decision to take down US and foreign websites shouldn't rest with the US Attorney General, and it should never be as easy as adding a website to a central list.

Demand Progress has a petition online which residents of the above and other US states are encouraged to sign.

Comment MSR is not an antivirus (Score 1) 3

by emeraldd (#34193824) Attached to: MS "Malicious Software Removal" tools
When running a windows box, you either have to keep it off the net completely and hope for the best or run a real antivirus. That MSR tool is pretty much a waste of time. Forefront, AVG, or Comodo are a few I've seen used reasonably well. I can't really speak to their effectiveness though.
Patents

Submission + - 3D printing may face legal challenges (idg.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "A coming revolution in 3D printing, with average consumers able to copy and create new three-dimensional objects at home, may lead to attempts by patent holders to expand their legal protections, a paper from Public Knowlege says. Patent holders may see 3D printers as threats, and they may try to sue makers of the printers or the distributors of CAD (computer-aided design) blueprints, according to digital rights group Public Knowledge."

Submission + - Cook's Magazine Claims Web Is Public Domain (livejournal.com)

Submitted by Isarian
Isarian writes: As reported on http://nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com/1553538.html, Cooks Source Magazine is being raked over the coals today as word spreads about their theft of a recipe from Monica Gaudio, a recipe author who discovered her recipe has been published without her knowledge. When confronting the publisher of the offending magazine, she was told "But honestly Monica, the web is considered "public domain" and you should be happy we just didn't 'lift' your whole article and put someone else's name on it!". In addition to the story passing around online, Cooks Source Magazine's Facebook page is being overwhelmed with posts by users glad to explain copyright law to the wayward publisher.
Social Networks

Submission + - Jon Stewart Slaps the Internet in the Face (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: Don't make Fark angry, Jon Stewart. You wouldn't like Fark when it's angry. But unfortunately, it may already be too late. Fark.com founder Drew Curtis is incensed that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert haven't given the online community due credit for the success of the Rally to Restore Sanity. The rally, co-hosted by the Comedy Central comedians, drew a crowd CBS News estimated at 215,000 this past Saturday on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. — a crowd inspired and fueled by community activism on Fark.com and online bookmarking site Reddit. Yet when Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian asked Stewart what role the Internet played in convincing him to hold the rally, the response was clear: "it didn't hurt." Curtis says the snub was hard to understand. "It's not that credit is deserved, it just doesn't make any sense that it's not there," he said.
Science

Submission + - Why Computer Science Grads are unemployable (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A banking headhunter lets rip at the pathetic quality of new computer science graduates who only know Java and seem scared of the technology they are supposed to have mastered. To make it even nastier Dominic Connor is a CS grad himself, having debugged O/S code for IBM and Microsoft, a task that newbies seem to reagrd with the suspersititous fear you'd expect from medieval peasants.
Math

Submission + - Fermilab to Test Holographic Universe Theory (symmetrymagazine.org)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: Scientists at Fermilab have decided that it's high time they build a 'holometer' to test the smoothness of space-time. Theoretical physicists like Stephen Hawking have proposed that space-time is not smooth but it's been a lot of math and no actual data. By building two relatively small devices that act as "holographic interferometers" to measure the shaking or vibration in split beams of light traveling through a vacuum. If the team finds the shaking in their measurements and records them, the theory of a holographic universe will have some evidence of non-smoothness in space-time and perhaps a foothold in bringing light to the heavily debated theoretical physics.
The Internet

Submission + - DC Internet Voting attacked TWO ways

Submitted by mtrachtenberg
mtrachtenberg writes: University of Michigan Professor J Alex Halderman and his team actually had two completely separate successful attacks on Washington, DC's internet voting experiment. The second path in was revealed by Halderman during testimony before the District of Columbia's Board of Elections and Ethics on Friday.

Apparently, a router's master password had been left at the default setting, enabling Halderman to access the system by a completely different method than SQL injection. He presented photographs of a video stream from the voting offices.

In addition, he found a file that had apparently been left on the test system contained the PINs of the 900+ voters who would have used the system in November.

Others on the panel joined Halderman in pointing out that it was not just this specific implementation of internet voting that was insecure, but the entire concept of using today's internet for voting at all. When a DC official asked why internet voting could not be made secure when top government secrets were secure on the internet, Halderman responded that a big part of keeping government secrets secret was NOT allowing them to be stored on internet-connected computers.

When a DC official asked the panel whether public key infrastructure couldn't allow secure internet voting, a panel member pointed out that the inventor of public key cryptography, MIT professor Ronald Rivest, was a signatory to the letter that had been sent to DC, urging officials there not to proceed with internet voting.

Clips from the testimony are available on youtube at these links.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaR7n5PI_aE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDHtSU4qKzw

Submission + - Word Processors: One Writer's Further Retreat 1

Submitted by ch-dickinson
ch-dickinson writes: In 2003, I posted an essay ("Word Processors: One Writer's Retreat") here about my writing experience--professional and personal--that led to a novel draft in vi(m) and I outlined reasons I chose a simple non-WYSIWYG text editor rather than a more full-featured word processor.
        A few novels later, in 2010 now, I decided to try a text editor that predates even vi: ed. I'd run across ed about 20 years ago, working at a software company and vaguely recalled navigation of a text file meant mentally mapping such commands as +3 and -2: ed didn't click with me then.
        But writing a novel draft is mule work, one sentence after another, straight ahead--no navigating the text file. The writer must get the story down and my goal is 1,000 words a day, every day, until I'm done. I have an hour to 90 minutes for this. So when I returned after two decades, I was impressed with how efficiently ed generates plain text files.
        Documentation for ed is available on the Internet, but I found it a great help to take Richard Gauthier's USING THE UNIX SYSTEM (1981) with me when I reported for jury duty in Portland, Oregon. His 30-page discussion of "the editor" is thorough and gave me some sense of the power for this pioneer text editor (cut & pastes, for example).
        As I said, what drives my mule-like early morning routine is word count. The text editor ed has no internal word count tool (through dropping back to the command line gives, of course, wc). What I had to do was quite simple: I converted byte-counts (which ed does with each write to the file) into word equivalents. So if my style of writing runs 5.6 characters per word, then a word goal of 1,000 words is simply 5,600 bytes. Every day, I set my target byte count and once there, I quit.
        In less than three months, I finished a 72,000-word novel draft and give ed credit for not slowing me down. Based on my experience writing novels with plain text editors (vim, geany, and now ed), I understand how few computing resources are needed to take manuscript composition off a typewriter and put it on a personal computer. The advantages of the latter are several, including less retyping, easier revision, and portability among different systems. Whether going from typewriter to personal computer makes for better writing I'll leave to others for comment.
        What doesn't make for better writing is confusing text on demand (that daily word count that grows to a manuscript) with desktop publishing. Desktop publishing makes so many word processors into distracting choice-laden software tools. Obviously, there is a place for a manuscript as pdf file compliant with appropriate Acrobat Distiller settings, but that ends, not begins, the process. I like to think I'm not putting the cart before the horse.
        So why would I recommend ed for a wordsmith? I'd say it comes down to just enough computing resources to do the job. WYSIWYG word processors have a cost and intuitively I think there's cerebral bus contention between flow of words onto the screen and keeping a handle on where the mouse arrow is (among other things).
        But then perhaps I've a "less is more" bias (I have a car with nonpower steering--better road feel; I ride a fixed single-speed bike--ditto). That feeling is the sum of things there (and things left out). When I ride my fixie bike, it seems to know why I ride. Similarly, when I invoke ed, the text editor, it seems to know why I write. An illusion, sure, but also a harmony that goes with being responsible for all of it and staying focussed (without any distracting help balloons!).

One of Charlie Dickinson's novels is available for download at cetus-editons.com

Submission + - ACT Caught Subverting EU Pannels for M$ (javier-carrete.com) 2

Submitted by twitter
twitter writes: Wikileaks has published a document that exposes Microsoft efforts to harm free software in the EU through front groups. RAND is promoted, free software advocacy is removed and other changes are made on Microsoft's behalf. Anti-trust regulators should be alarmed.

The file is a draft for an expert panel formed by the European Commission. This panel is divided into workgroup (IPR, Open Source, digital life, etc.). ACT and Comptia have been infiltrating every workgroup, even the one on Open Source (WG 7). They are doing the best they can to drown any initiative that would not only promote OSS in Europe but also that could help Europe create a sucessful European software sector. ... [the document has] original and modified text (in glorious colour, so it's really worth downloading it and taking a look), which means that we can see what exactly an organisation sympathetic to Microsoft –and partly funded by them– is worried about

it is important to have the public know how actual policy making is being influenced by lobbies that are precisely under the legal scrutiny of the European Commission. The urgency of the publication of this document is real in the sense that outside pressure would force the Commission to "clean the committees"

This is an issue that Boycott Novell, aka Techrights has been tracking for some time.
Government

Submission + - US Negotiators Cave on Internet Provisions to ACTA

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Ars Technica reports that with the release of the "near-final" ACTA text (PDF), it is becoming clear that the US has caved on the most egregious provisions from earlier draftss advocating "three strikes" regimes, ordering ISPs to develop anti-piracy plans, promoting tough DRM anticircumvention language, setting up a "takedown" notification system, ordering "secondary liability" for device makers, and have largely failed in their attempts to push the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) onto the rest of the world. Apparently, a face-saving agreement is better than no agreement at all—but even the neutered ACTA could run into problems with Mexico's Senate recently approving a nonbinding resolution asking for the country to suspend participation in ACTA, while key members of the European Parliament have also expressed skepticism about the deal. "One of the biggest stories over the three year negotiation of ACTA has been the willingness of the US to cave on the Internet provisions," says Canadian law professor Michael Geist. "Taken together, the Internet chapter must be seen as failure by the US, which clearly envisioned using ACTA to export its DMCA-style approach." With no more negotiating sessions scheduled, this is close to a final draft, and something like it will probably be adopted unless countries start pulling out of the agreement altogether."
Crime

The Bomb Squad Olympiad Starts Today 43

Posted by samzenpus from the explosions-for-all-ages dept.
The bomb suit relay and the robot obstacle course are just two of the events you can enjoy at the Bomb Squad Olympiad. Over the next three days squads from across South Carolina will compete and showcase their bomb defusing capabilities for the public. I hear the deep fried dynamite is especially good.

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