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Submission + - Google to users: All your base are mine!

Submitted by talledega500
talledega500 writes: Google apparently isn't being shy about coveting all the data thats fit to encrypt. In this article which contains no shortage of orwellian overtones, The Goo-sters want to rule your life on and offline. Is this the price of being a loyal Google user? Or is this the consequence of an ad-based economic scheme which must continually offer more and more invasive features to justify its existence and relevance?
Programming

Submission + - AMD will deliver open graphics drivers

Submitted by
derrida
derrida writes: "After Intel's announcement, AMD also announced that they will soon deliver open graphics drivers, as Henri Richard said, at the opening keynote of the Red Hat Summit. Richard, AMD's executive vice president of sales and marketing, promised: "I'm here to commit to you that it's going to get done." He also promised that AMD is "going to be very proactive in changing way we interface with the Linux community.""
Privacy

Submission + - Finland wants all Internet discussions moderated

Submitted by appelsiini
appelsiini writes: Finnish state-attorney Mika Ilman has proposed, that there will be a law for mandatory moderation of all web-boards and alike in the Internet taking out "irrelevant" messages. Ilman, who is specialized — hold your laughter — in freedom of speech, says operators and services would be forced to use moderators, and lack of moderation would be punishable by law. Current law states, that if board or newsgroup is not moderated, administrator is not responsible in any way what content messages has. It seems this is now going to change, and it goes the way it's done in People's Republic of China. Operators and services would be held punishable by all content that goes through, so they must filter out content like slandering. Self-censorship to the extreme, call it "Finlandizierung". We may just wait whole EU wide legislation. This kind of a action could also make services like Google Groups illegal, and therefore have to be filtered out from the Internet traffic nationwide. Even Russia will soon have more freedom of speech, than Finland. Article in largest Finnish daily-newspaper Helsingin Sanomat (In Finnish). English article will follow soon(tm).
Businesses

Submission + - OECD disputes piracy claims

Submitted by
jvillain
jvillain writes: "The OECD is now disputing the claims of the lobby groups about how much money is really being lost to piracy.

"The report, due for endorsement by the OECD board later this month, could prove embarrassing for international business lobbies, which have used the higher estimates to lift intellectual property rights up the global political agenda and to demand crackdowns in China and elsewhere."

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/acbd064c-fcb9-11db-9971-00 0b5df10621.html"
Education

Submission + - New, "More Reliable" Wikipedia Planned

Submitted by
Steevven1
Steevven1 writes: "Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger plans to launch a new, free online encyclopedia that's "more reliable than Wikipedia" under the name "Citizendium." Critics have long complained about Wikipedia's lack of reliable information, and Citizendium's solution is to make everyone register their real name and to have experts as chief editors. Will Citizendium become a more reliable source of information for students and the general public, or will its stricter rules and need for expert editors make it impossible to get off the ground?"
Amiga

Submission + - AmigaOS 4

Submitted by Second five-eighth
Second five-eighth writes: The Amiga is alive and sort of well (you can get the OS, but not the hardware), and Ars Technica has a review of the final version of AmigaOS 4. New features include limited memory protection, 3D display drivers, an improved suite of applications (the bounty for porting Mozilla to AmigaOS has yet to be claimed), and much better 680x0 emulation. Perhaps most telling, the reviewer was able to move his daily writing workflow from Windows XP to AmigaOS 4.0: 'Not only was it possible to do this, but having done so I feel no urge to switch back. It is nice to not have any distractions when working—there is no waiting for the system to swap out when switching between major applications, no constant reminders for updates or to download new virus definitions and even if the worst happens and the system locks up, it takes only seven seconds to reboot and get back to a functional desktop.
Music

Journal Journal: Music companies mull ditching DRM 318

Journal by PoliTech
Time to remove the restriction on MP3s

By Nick Farrell: Monday 22 January 2007

RECORD COMPANIES are closer to removing restrictions on MP3 distribution over the Internet.

According to iht.com, a meeting of executives in Cannes over the weekend revealed that the major record labels are wrestling with the question of unrestricted internet access to content.

Power

Submission + - British PM's PC hacked...

Submitted by
Xemu
Xemu writes: "British Prime Minister Tony Blair's computers have been "hacked" by London law enforcement to find evidence of party political corruption. The police "hacked" the PCs because they were deeply frustrated by the "very slim" pile of documents that they received after it twice asked the administration for all emails, letters and other material relating to the system of awarding seats in Britain's unelected upper chamber of parliament, the House of Lords, in return for financial support."
Real Time Strategy (Games)

Submission + - How to get (a board game) published?

Submitted by
cyclomedia
cyclomedia writes: "I've been dedicating a little of my Nerd Time to devising a strategy board game, pitched somewhere between Checkers and Chess but probably not as deceptively complex as Go. The next step in my plan is to see if I can actually create a prototype made of coins, stickers and cardboard and to attempt to teach the rules to my wife (Trek fan, hence the marriage). If I get past that stage ok then what do i do? Presumably I can't just show up at Hasbro with my jerry rigged setup and expect an enthusiastic response. Without giving too much away I can tell you that there's a nerd factor within the game itself, possibly leaning the possibility of marketing towards the Games Workshop end of the spectrum, but without the 80-sided dice and Orcs."
Music

Submission + - Startup Sells Music as Custom Service, not Product

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Springwise.com just reviewed a new record company that's focusing on customized music as a service. The concept is based on an idea invented by the open source community: making money through consulting services rather than through selling products. The company is attempting to gain a foothold by entering in an unexpected market — the gift market — and plans to expand into other areas in the future. Their long-term goal is to provide a sustainable alternative for working musicians.
The Internet

Submission + - Net Neutrality Act Once Again on the Agenda

Submitted by
Michael Talbert
Michael Talbert writes: "On January 9th, Republican Senator Olympia Snowe and Democrat Byron Dorgan reintroduced the Internet Freedom Preservation Act to the Senate. Better known as the Net Neutrality Act, the bill was killed by the Senate last year in a vote split down party lines (Democrats yea, Republicans nay), with the exception of Senator Snowe. With the Democrats having a slight majority in the Senate, the bill certainly has a better chance this time around, but it still needs 60 votes to prevent a Republican filibuster.

The impetus for the bill started back in 2005, when broadband network executives began discussing the possibility of charging companies that use a high percentage of bandwidth. Most notably, in an interview with a Business Week, SBC chairman Ed Whitacre Jr (now AT&T CEO) stated: "How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?"

Whitacre went on to say, "The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes free is nuts!"

What's nuts is that he actually said that...

Read the entire article Net Neutrality Act Once Again on the Agenda on VoIP-Facts.net."
Space

Submission + - Lost Moon landing tapes discovered

Submitted by de_smudger
de_smudger writes: For years 'lost' tapes recording data from the Apollo 11 Moon landing have been stored underneath the seats of Australian physics students. A recent search has uncovered them.

Recorded on telemetry tapes, they are said to be the best quality images of the landing (unconverted slow scan TV) yet to be seen by a public still fascinated by the early space race. These tapes were mislaid in the early 1980s on their way to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland.

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