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Music

Why the RIAA Doesn't Want Defendants Exonerated 199

Posted by Zonk from the so-many-reasons-just-pick-one dept.
RageAgainsttheBears writes "The RIAA is beginning to find itself in an awkward position. A few of its many, many lawsuits don't manage to end in success for the organization. Typically, when they decide a case isn't worth pursuing (due to targeting the wrong person or not having sufficient evidence), they simply move to drop the case. Counterclaims are usually dropped in turn, and everyone goes separate ways. But recently, judges have been deciding to allow the RIAA to drop the case, but still allowing the defendant's counterclaim through. According to the Ars Technica article: 'If Judge Miles-LaGrange issues a ruling exonerating Tallie Stubbs of infringement, it would be a worrisome trend for the RIAA. The music industry has become accustomed to having its way with those it accuses of file-sharing, quietly dropping cases it believes it can't win. It looks as though the courts may be ready to stop the record labels from just walking away from litigation when it doesn't like the direction it is taking and give defendants justice by fully exonerating them of any wrongdoing.'"
It's funny. Laugh.

Dresses Made from Wine 119

Posted by samzenpus from the julianne-whiskey-pants dept.
Horar writes "Australian researchers have combined art and science to make dresses from fermented fabric, using bacteria to 'grow' slimy dresses from wine and beer."
Television

Senators Smack Down WIPO Broadcast Treaty 100

Posted by kdawson from the read-my-lips-no-new-rights dept.
Tighthead writes "Two influential US senators want the US to support a pared-down version of the WIPO Broadcast Treaty that is still being negotiated. In a letter sent to the US delegation, Sen. Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the ranking Republican member, Arlen Specter, expressed their concerns that the Broadcast Treaty 'would needlessly create a new layer of rights that would disrupt United States copyright law.' They instructed the US delegates to work towards a treaty that is 'significantly narrower in scope, one that would provide no more protection than that necessary to protect the signals of broadcasters.' The next meeting of the WIPO Standing Committee will be in June."
Sun Microsystems

Submission + - Project Blackbox the World domination tour.

Submitted by
D10MR
D10MR writes: "It looks like Sun's Project Blackbox is alive and well and on tour across the US. I was able to get a guided tour of the container. Sun's rolling it around the country on the back of a flatbed trailer equiped with generator and chiller unit. There's only 2 1/2 racks worth of real running Sun gear in it, but it's pretty cool to see/hear/feel this thing running while it's riding piggyback on an we've-got-ourselves-a-convoy-18-wheeler, good-buddy. (Scary visions of Burt, Dom, Sally). They even stuck a couple of blade chassis and storage arrays in it.

Ok, so they had the usual marketing and sales droids, but they also had one of their project architects on hand to honestly answer real questions, everything from how do you move the container around, to how the Sunspots work...very cool. It looks like Sun eats their own sausage by using their hardware(sunspots) to realtime monitor their hardware(shake, vibration, temperature and gps position) Lots of stainless steel in the thing, too.

NOTE: If you take the tour, you get a neat Project Blackbox long-sleeve shirt molded into the shape of the truck/container OR you can get a toy trailer/container matching the tour unit. It was pretty cool and totally worth the time to listen and walk through the container. ciao — D10"
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Charging Businesses $4K for DST Fix

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "Microsoft has slashed the price it's going to charge users on the day light savings time fixes. As you know, the federal law that moves the date for DST goes into effect this month. Although this is 1/10 of the original estimate Microsoft made, it seems a bit pricey for a patch to a product you've already paid for. From the article, "Among the titles in that extended support category are Windows 2000, Exchange Server 2000 and Outlook 2000, the e-mail and calendar client included with Office 2000. For users running that software, Microsoft charges $4,000 per product for DST fixes. For that amount, customers can apply the patches to all systems in their organizations, including branch offices and affiliates, said Sweatt. "All they can't do is redistribute them," he said.""
Space

Total Lunar Eclipse This Weekend 133

Posted by CowboyNeal from the umbra-and-penumbra dept.
SeaDour writes "This Saturday night, March 3rd, a total lunar eclipse will be visible from nearly all inhabited parts of the world. A great shadow will stretch across the surface of the moon, eventually casting it in an eerie red glow as sunlight filters through our atmosphere onto the lunar surface. Viewers in Europe and Africa will have the best vantage point, able to watch the entire eclipse in action, while observers in most of the western hemisphere can see it eclipsed as it rises just after sunset."
The Internet

Submission + - Book Publishers Agree to Online Browsing

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "Random House & HarperCollins have agreed to allow book browsing and searching on all their books. From the article, "Book publishers are to trying to update their businesses as more young readers consume media via the Web, a trend that already has affected the music, movie and newspaper industries." Although this is a good step forward, I still have no way of searching the thomes of Robert Jordan (Tor) or any of the many standards of Penguin Classics. I am definitely looking forward to more publishers following suit. It's not that far of a stretch to imagine a person searching for a book, finding something else and then buying both books."
Windows

Windows Vista Keygen a Hoax 154

Posted by CowboyNeal from the too-good-to-be-true dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The author of the Windows Vista keygen that was reported yesterday has admitted that the program does not actually work. Here is the initial announcement of the original release of the keygen, and here is the followup post in which the same author acknowledges that the program is fake. Apparently, the keygen program does legitimately attack Windows Vista keys via brute force, but the chances of success are too low for this to be a practical method. Quote from the author: 'Everyone who said they got a key is probably lying or mistaken!'"
PHP

March To Be Month of PHP Bugs 292

Posted by kdawson from the open-season dept.
PHP writes "Stefan Esser is the founder of both the Hardened-PHP Project and the PHP Security Response Team (which he recently left). During an interview with SecurityFocus he announced the upcoming Month of PHP bugs initiative in March." Quoting: "We will disclose different types of bugs, mainly buffer overflows or double free (/destruction) vulnerabilities, some only local, but some remotely triggerable... Additionally there are some trivial bypass vulnerabilities in PHP's own protection features... As a vulnerability reporter you feel kinda puzzled how people among the PHP Security Response Team can claim in public that they do not know about any security vulnerability in PHP, when you disclosed about 20 holes to them in the two weeks before. At this point you stop bothering whether anyone considers the disclosure of unreported vulnerabilities unethical. Additionally a few of the reported bugs have been known for years among the PHP developers and will most probably never be fixed. In total we have more than 31 bugs to disclose, and therefore there will be days when more than one vulnerability will be disclosed."
The Courts

RIAA Admits ISPs Have Misidentified "John Does" 271

Posted by kdawson from the record-keeping dept.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA has sent out a letter to the ISPs telling them to stop making mistakes in identifying subscribers, and offering a 'Pre-Doe settlement option' — with a discount of '$1000 or more' — to their subscribers, if and only if the ISP agrees to preserve its logs for 180 days. Other interesting points in the letter (PDF): the RIAA will be launching a web site for 'early settlements,' www.p2plawsuits.com; the letter asks the ISPs to notify the RIAA if they have previously 'misidentified a subscriber account in response to a subpoena' or become aware of 'technical information... that causes you to question the information that you provided in response to our clients' subpoena'; it notes that ISPs have identified 'John Does' who were not even subscribers of the ISP at the time of the infringement; and it requests that ISPs furnish their underlying log files, not just names and addresses, when responding to RIAA subpoenas."
Google

Viacom Demands YouTube Remove Videos 225

Posted by Zonk from the moment-of-zen-everybody dept.
AlHunt writes "According to the folks at PCWorld Viacom has publicly scolded YouTube for continuing to host throngs of Viacom videos without permission. They are demanding that over 100,000 of its clips be removed from the site. This includes content from Comedy Central (no more Daily Show), MTV, Nick at Nite, Nickelodeon, Paramount Pictures, and VH1. YouTube has acknowledged receiving a DMCA request from Viacom, and the article notes what a dire precedent this could be if Google can't reach an agreement with Viacom and its fellow IP holders."
Space

China Tests Anti-Satellite Laser Weapon 552

Posted by samzenpus from the the-people's-laser dept.
schnippy writes "U.S. intelligence agencies believe that China has successfully tested an anti-satellite weapon by destroying one of their old weather satellites. The test, if confirmed, would be an order of magnitude more provocative than earlier reports of Chinese blinding lasers being. Arms Control Wonk has a good writeup on what this will mean for U.S. policy."

Fear of Snakes May Have Driven Pre-Human Evolution 553

Posted by Hemos from the snakes-on-a-plane dept.
Krishna Dagli writes "An evolutionary arms race between early snakes and mammals triggered the development of improved vision and large brains in primates, a radical new theory suggests. The idea, proposed by Lynne Isbell, an anthropologist at the University of California, Davis, suggests that snakes and primates share a long and intimate history, one that forced both groups to evolve new strategies as each attempted to gain the upper hand. Early primates developed a better eye for color, detail and movement and the ability to see in three dimensions — traits that are important for detecting threats at close range. Humans are descended from those same primates. "

McAfee Blames Open Source for Botnets 223

Posted by timothy from the how-conveeeeenient dept.
v3xt0r writes "It seems that 'the Open Source Development Model' is to be blamed for the recent increase in botnet development. 'We're not taking aim at the open-source movement; we're talking about the full-disclosure model and how that effectively serves malware development,' the spokesman for McAfee says. Why not just blame the IRC Protocol? Or simply admit that Proprietary vendors cannot keep pace with the Open Source Model?"

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