jkorz - Slashdot User

Submission + - Internet Tax Imminent?

Submitted by

jhigh

on Sunday June 03, 2007 @09:46PM

jhigh writes: "Proposals to tax the Internet are gaining steam as state legislators see a giant pot of money just waiting to be dipped into. "At the moment, states and municipalities are frequently barred by federal law from collecting both access and sales taxes. But they're hoping that their new lobbying effort, coordinated by groups including the National Governors Association, will pay off by permitting them to collect billions of dollars in new revenue by next year.""

Submission + - British civil liberties film is released

Submitted by on Friday June 01, 2007 @07:29PM

An anonymous reader writes: BBC News has an article about a British film likely to attract the attention of civil liberties supporters. The film, "Taking Liberties", is a documentary about erosion of civl liberties in present-day Britain. From the article:

Director Chris Atkins wants Taking Liberties to shake the British public out of their apathy over what he sees as the dangerous erosion of traditional rights and freedoms. "This film uses shock tactics. We needed to be unashamedly populist... Once you give up traditional liberties such as free speech and the right to protest you are not going to easily get them back," says Atkins.
The film can be seen at cinemas in major cities. Will the film lead to privacy reforms in Britain, or will most of the viewing population just shrug and go home?

Submission + - Do private companies have to keep their email?

Submitted by on Friday June 01, 2007 @06:29PM

An anonymous reader writes: So I'm an IT intern at a medium-sized manufacturing business. In short, my superiors have asked me to research if privately-held corporations have to archive all of their email.

Have any laws pertaining to archiving/backing up emails been recently passed or proposed in light of any headline corporate scandals?

Or, more simply put, is it legally ok for employees and administrators at private companies to permanently delete their emails?

Submission + - Novell welcomes, Stallman bemoans, some GPL3 terms

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Friday June 01, 2007 @06:10PM

Anonymous Coward writes: "While Novell has welcomed the provisions (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2140281,00.a sp) of the fourth, and final, draft of the upcoming GNU General Public License 3.0, which allow it to include technologies under this license in SUSE Linux Enterprise, OpenSUSE and other Novell offerings, Richard Stallman laments in an article he penned (http://gplv3.fsf.org/rms-why.html) that the explicit patent protection users get from the program's contributors and redistributors in GPLv3 does not go as far as he would have liked."

Submission + - Photo Tagging: A Privacy Problem? (harvardlawreview.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 01, 2007 @05:51PM

An anonymous reader writes: The Harvard Law Review, a journal for legal scholarship, recently published a short piece on the privacy implications of online photo-tagging. The anonymously penned piece dourly concludes that 'privacy law, in its current form, is of no help to those unwillingly tagged.' Focusing on the privacy threat from newly emergent automatic facial recognition search engines', like Polar Rose but not Flickr or Facebook, the article states that 'for several reasons, existing privacy law is simply ill-suited for this new invasion. First, traditional tort law does not recognize invasions of privacy that occur in public, such as the taking of a photo in any public location. Second, the few public invasions that do constitute torts involve celebrities or other individuals who have commercial interests in their likenesses. Third, courts have severely limited privacy protections in order to ensure that privacy claims do not limit the free flow of ideas.' The article suggests that Congress create a photo-tagging opt-out system, similar to what they did with telemarketing calls and the Do-Not-Call Registry.

Submission + - The Slurpr - Mother of all Wi-Fi Access Points!

Submitted by

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

on Tuesday May 29, 2007 @07:42AM

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten writes: "

On June 1, 2007 Mark Hoekstra (geektechnique.org) will preview The Slurpr at The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam. The Slurpr is a high speed Wi-Fi broadband router that takes up to six available Wi-Fi channels and combines them into one free and ultra broadband connection. Fast and Free Internet Access with just one box! Now you can enjoy the great advantages and comfort that come with a high speed internet connection, all for free.

The Slurpr automatically connects to the 6 strongest available Wi-Fi channels in your neighborhood to give you unparalleled connectivity. To make this happen, 6 Wi-Fi adapters are combined in one small package. The six extra sensitive antennae give you an even wider range of connectivity.

The Slurpr will be on display and available for pre-ordering at The Next Web Conference.

Technical specs:

The Slurpr consists of a Six-channel wardrive-box broadbandrouter with 6 11/54Mbit fully configurable Wi-Fi connections bundled and redistributed to 9 wired ethernet connections. A 266MHz MIPS CPU with 64MB RAM with Linux installed on a 1GB Compact Flash card powers this extraordinary set-up.

Both the hardware and software of The Slurpr will be released under a Creative Commons license making it easy for users to build their own Slurprs and using and enhancing the software.

More information on:
http://geektechnique.org/
http://www.slurpr.com/
http://2007.thenextweb.org/

How it all started:
http://www.bomega.com/2006/07/31/who-will-build-me -a-wi-fi-canalizer/"

Submission + - Microsoft Wants Royalties from the FOSS Community

Submitted by

packetmon

on Tuesday May 29, 2007 @07:29AM

packetmon writes: "In it just got stranger news, I quote: "Microsoft wants royalties from the open source world, according to Roger Parloff of Fortune" . Ironically, they've also started four open source identity management products. What will be next for Microsoft? Suing consumers for thinking anything outside of the initial MS?"

Submission + - Battle Over RIAA Expert Reliability Continues

Submitted by

NewYorkCountryLawyer

on Thursday May 17, 2007 @04:24PM

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "The battle over the "reliability" of the RIAA's expert witness, Dr. Doug Jacobson of Iowa State, continues, with the RIAA defending its expert by arguing that "everyone in his field proceeds the same way he did", to which the defendant responded by reminding the judges of the witness's own testimony that his "method" was invented by himself a year and a half ago, and has never been shared with, much less accepted by, anyone else in the "scientific community".... a prerequisite for admissibility of expert testimony in federal court under the Daubert case."

Submission + - Win4Solaris? Wow!

Submitted by

nobu1993

on Thursday May 17, 2007 @04:01PM

nobu1993 writes: "On top of the OpenSolaris and GPL Java moves by Sun, does an integrated Windows capability for Solaris 10 make it a more viable option than Linux as a Vista Alternative? Look at the attention that Apple got with BootCamp. Look at how slow Linux vendors have been to embrace Windows co-existence. Here is the story: http://www.virtual-strategy.com/article/articlevie w/2020/1/7/ Here is the quote from Sun: "The ability for Solaris to host Windows applications is important for our customers," said Marc Hamilton, Vice President, Solaris marketing Sun Microsystems. "Win4Solaris elegantly addresses this need in a way that complements both our Solaris workstations as well as our Sun Ray thin clients. Customers are very excited when they realize they can keep familiar applications and at the same time reduce the vulnerability and cost of their desktop environments." Interesting times, indeed!"

Submission + - Hydrogen generation on demand

Submitted by fragMasterFlash on Thursday May 17, 2007 @04:01PM

fragMasterFlash writes: Physorg.com has an article detailing on-demand hydrogen generation techniques being perfected at Purdue University. "The hydrogen is generated on demand, so you only produce as much as you need when you need it"

Submission + - Kids Environment Influences Reproductive Function

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Thursday May 17, 2007 @03:46PM

Anonymous Coward writes: "Researchers demonstrate that female reproductive function is influenced by childhood environment. This suggests there is a critical window of time from about 0-8 years of age that determines the rate at which girls physically mature and how high their reproductive hormone levels reach as adults."

Submission + - Why is OpenDNS redirecting Google?

Submitted by bradt on Thursday May 17, 2007 @03:39PM

bradt writes: Yesterday, a friend suggested that I check out OpenDNS.com as a way to "speed up" my internet connection... I did a few DNS lookups with dig to see if they were faster than my ISP, and discovered that OpenDNS is redirecting www.google.com to their domain! It seems that this issue has been going on for at least a month, and has been discussed in the OpenDNS Forum and in Google Groups as well.

Submission + - Web 2.0: Find Mirrors And Caches Of Popular Digg N

Submitted by

msgbeepa

on Thursday May 17, 2007 @03:38PM

msgbeepa writes: "DuggBack is a service trying to help you find mirrors and caches of popular Digg news items. It is a service that lets you quickly find and shuffle through complete website mirrors and web caches of sites that has been hit by the Digg Effect."

Submission + - Poland: Held by police for translating movies

Submitted by

michuk

on Thursday May 17, 2007 @03:34PM

michuk writes: "Nine people involved in a community portal Napisy.org were held for questioning by the Polish police forces this Wednesday. They will be probably accused of publishing illegal translations of foreign movies (which is forbidden by Polish copyright law). Napisy.org website was shut down immediately afterwards by the German forces (since the servers were located in Germany). The service was the most popular Polish on-line portal where users were free to submit translated subtitles for popular movies."

Submission + - SF Elections Adopts Open Voting Policy

Submitted by Onymous Coward on Thursday May 17, 2007 @03:18PM

Onymous Coward writes: Last night (May 16), the San Francisco Elections Committee established two policies that promote Open Voting: that reasonable effort should be used to select technology that is at a minimum publicly-disclosed, and to prioritize systems and vendors that provide open voting-level security and transparency when contracting. The Open Voting Consortium provides an announcement.

Slashdot Top Deals