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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 11 declined, 10 accepted (21 total, 47.62% accepted)

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Privacy

Submission + - EFF Sues US Govt Over Social Network Tapping (internetnews.com) 1

Submitted by gzipped_tar
gzipped_tar writes: Has the federal government overreached in tapping social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to investigate possible criminal activity? The non-profit civil liberties' group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) doesn't know, but it has filed suit to find out the scope of the government's investigations.

The lawsuit, filed at the Northern District of California's San Francisco division court, seeks information from a number of federal agencies under the Freedom of Information Act who are listed as defendants in the case. These agencies include EFF the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, Treasury, the CIA, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

"An agency normally has 20 working days, about a month, to respond to a request for documents but that rarely happens," said Marcia Hoffman, staff attorney for the EFF, in an interview by InternetNews.com. "Considering these agencies have violated the law by not responding by the deadline, we want to get the courts involved. Once we get the information we'll make it available to the public on our Web site."

"Internet users deserve to know what information is collected, under what circumstances, and who has access to it," said Shane Witnov, a law student also working on the case. "These agencies need to abide by the law and release their records on social networking surveillance."
Music

Submission + - Artists Attack RIAA after Thomas-Rasset Verdict (rollingstone.com)

Submitted by gzipped_tar
gzipped_tar writes: Last week a judge ruled that Jammie Thomas-Rasset owes the RIAA a $1.92 million fine for illegally downloading 24 songs. Richard Marx — one of the artists whose music Thomas-Rasset downloaded via P2P network Kazaa — spoke out against the court's verdict, saying he's "ashamed" to be associated with the massive fine.

"As a long-time professional songwriter, I have always objected to the practice of illegal downloading of music. I have also always, however, been sympathetic to the average music fan, who has been consistently financially abused by the greedy actions of major labels," Marx said in a statement. "These labels, until recently, were responsible for the distribution of the majority of recorded music, and instead of nurturing the industry and doing their best to provide the highest quality of music to the fans, they predominantly chose to ream the consumer and fill their pockets."

He continued, "So now we have a 'judgement' in a case of illegal downloading, and it seems to me, especially in these extremely volatile economic times, that holding Ms. Thomas-Rasset accountable for the continuing daily actions of hundreds of thousands of people is, at best, misguided and at worst, farcical. Her accountability itself is not in question, but this show of force posing as judicial come-uppance is clearly abusive. Ms. Thomas Rasset, I think you got a raw deal, and I'm ashamed to have my name associated with this issue."

Marx isn't the only artist to take umbrage with the ruling against Thomas-Rasset. Writing on his official Website, Moby said, "What utter nonsense. This is how the record companies want to protect themselves? Suing suburban moms for listening to music? Charging $80,000 per song? Punishing people for listening to music is exactly the wrong way to protect the music business."

In related news, Nate Anderson on ArsTechnica noted that "In the wake of the RIAA win, the organization's legendarily poor public image somehow got even worse". He quoted the words from a music critic Jim DeRogatis: "[the Thomas-Rasset ruling is] infamous as one of the most wrong-headed in the history of the American judicial system--not to mention that it will forever stand as the best evidence of the contempt of the old-school music industry toward the music lovers who once were its customers."

On the other side of the story, an RIAA spokesperson recently commented about their victory: "This group of 12 Minnesotans showed us that, despite the protestations of some pundits who suggest that the digital world should resemble some kind of new wild west, the majority understands and believes that the same laws and rules we follow every day apply online. Not just in theory, but in practice. Another group of 12 people presented with similar questions said the same thing two years ago. That makes a sample size of only 24, but it's certainly enough to learn from."
Portables

Submission + - Google Android May Run Asus Netbook (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by gzipped_tar
gzipped_tar writes: Tim Culpan writes for Bloomberg:

Asustek Computer Inc., which pioneered the market for sub-$500 laptops, may install Google Inc.'s free Android operating system on its low-cost notebooks, challenging the dominance of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows software.

Asustek has allocated engineers to develop an Android-based netbook by as early as the year end, Samson Hu, head of the Taipei-based company's Eee PC business, said in an interview on [Feb 20]. Asustek hasn't decided whether to proceed with a final product because the project is still under development, he said.

On the other hand, Microsoft remains confident on the netbook market. "We remain confident that people will keep on buying Windows, as we've seen strong growth in Windows on these small notebook PCs," Ben Rudolph, senior manager for Windows, said in an e-mail.
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - SCO Proposes Sale of Assets to Continue Litigation (sltrib.com)

Submitted by gzipped_tar
gzipped_tar writes: From Tom Harvey of The Salt Lake Tribune:

The embattled SCO Group Inc. is proposing to auction off its core products and use proceeds to continue its controversial lawsuits over the alleged violations of its copyrights in Linux open-source software.

The Lindon company has filed a new reorganization plan with the federal court in Delaware where it sought bankruptcy protection from creditors after an adverse ruling in the Linux litigation.

If approved by a bankruptcy judge, the plan could mean SCO's server software and mobile products lines are owned by other parties while SCO itself remained largely to pursue the lawsuits under the leadership of CEO Darl McBride.

"One goal of this approach is to separate the legal defence of its intellectual property from its core product business," McBride said in a letter to customers, partners and shareholders.

Jeff Hunsaker, president and COO of The SCO Group, said the litigation had been distracting to the company's efforts to market its products.

"We believe there's value in these assets and in order for the business to move forward it's imperative we separate it from our legal claims and we allow our products business to move forward," he said Friday.


Software

Submission + - CrossOver for free on Oct. 28, thanks to Bush (softpedia.com)

Submitted by gzipped_tar
gzipped_tar writes: On Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2008, any one visiting the CodeWeavers' Web site will be given a deal code that will entitle them to one free copy of CodeWeavers' award-winning CrossOver software. Each copy comes complete with support.

In July, CodeWeavers launched the Great American Lame Duck Presidential Challenge to encourage President Bush to make the most of his remaining days in office by accomplishing a major economic or political goal by January 20, 2009. One of the goals is "reducing gas price": lower the average gas price in the Twin Cities below $2.79 per gallon.

On Monday, Oct. 14, gas prices in Minneapolis and St. Paul did just that.

White admits this is not how he foresaw the Challenge unfolding.

"I launched the campaign to inspire President Bush to make the most of his final days in office. Who knew that our Challenge would have this kind of impact on the country?" White said. "On the other hand, who knew that the economy would implode, causing oil demand to drop into the abyss and gas prices to plummet as well. Clearly, investigating Bear Stearns, AIG and those guys is misplaced — CodeWeavers is responsible for this mess. So it's free software for all!"

"I realize that by giving away all my software, I've caused horrific damage to my company's bottom line," White said. "In fact, our vice president of sales wretched Starbucks all over his shirt when he learned the news. But, I figure, the way the economy is going, in a few months everyone might be out on the streets, wearing potato sacks and standing in line for squirrel soup, so why not?"
Government

Submission + - COBOL Thwarts California Gov't's Salary Cut (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by gzipped_tar
gzipped_tar writes: COBOL has now taken center stage in the rumbling controversy over the State of California's budget. California is $15bn in debt and been without an approved budget for more than a month thanks to deadlock between legislators in the state parliament.

State controller John Chiang has said it would take six months to re-configure California's aging COBOL-based payroll system in order to cut the salaries of California's 200,000 state employees, under an order from Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to try and rein in the deficit. Chiang has reportedly refused to issue reduced pay checks on the grounds the system cannot be changed quickly enough.

Ironically, the only ones who can make the changes — part time retired COBOL programmers — were among 10,000 employees laid off as part of the cuts.
Censorship

Submission + - Sourceforge.net blocked in mainland China (moon-blog.com)

Submitted by
gzipped_tar
gzipped_tar writes: "SourceForge, the world's largest development and download repository of Open Source code and applications, appears to be blocked in Mainland China.

The current blocking may be related to the recent anti-China protests of Beijing Olympic Games, which will begin on 8 August. Some days before, a very popular free source code editor in SourceForge named Notepad++ start to boycott Beijing 2008. The project's developer said that the action is not against Chinese people, but against Chinese government's repression against Tibetan unrest earlier in this year.

SF.net has once been banned by China in 2002. However, the ban was lifted later in 2003.

Submitter's note: As a SourceForge user in Beijing, I can confirm this first-hand. I also tried traceroute to sourceforge.net, only to find the connection being dropped at a Beijing ISP's gateway router. It appears that the projects' respective homepages are available even if they are hosted by SF, but the summary and download pages are blocked."
Software

Submission + - Opera Releases Dragonfly (opera.com)

Submitted by
gzipped_tar
gzipped_tar writes: "Opera released Dragonfly, the "foundations of Opera's upcoming Developer Tools". It can be used by Web developers to debug JavaScript or inspect CSS and the DOM, on the computer or other devices supporting Opera. It has now been integrated into the Opera brower version 9.5 beta 2.

Dragonflies are known to be good bug-hunters, hence the name of this new software.

The new release is still in alpha, and documentations are coming soon. Notably, it is released under the BSD license in contrast to Opera's main product, the browser, which is close-source."
Censorship

Submission + - Wikipedia ban lifted in mainland China on April 1

Submitted by
gzipped_tar
gzipped_tar writes: "According to multiple independent evidence observerd by Chinese netizens from Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu as well as other places, the ban on Wikipedia has been lifted for Internet users in Mainland China. Except for the Chinese version, all locales had been able to be accessed before noon (Chinese local time). Still, there are reports saying that pages containing "sensitive" words could not be delivered.

Currently no infomation is known about the reason for this lift. It is speculated this could be at best temporary, as the Chinese authority has done multiple times. However, nothing from the officials could be heard as usual.

Most of Chinese Wikipedians are expressing their joy over the lift. But some consider this to be a (somewhat huge) April Fool's joke. This is not quite likely though, since April Fool's Day is not a Chinese tradition.

At the time I'm writing this, most of the reports are in Chinese so it's difficult to post some useful links here. Wikipedia has not confirmed this un-banning, while discussion has began on a Wikipedia talk page (The former link points to a static page of the discussion at the time of this writing).

By the way, I'm not joking."
Microsoft

Submission + - M$-Xandos deal on OOXML, software patents, more

Submitted by gzipped_tar
gzipped_tar writes: Xandos has announced "a broad collaboration agreement based on a set of technical, business, marketing, and intellectual property commitments." The Linux-based system provider Xandos will make efforts on the interoperation in system management , server protocols, office document compatibility, and intellectual property assurance with Microsoft. Notably, Xandos will be building desktop apps which do the translations between OOXML and other document formats, and Microsoft will make available patent covenants for Xandros customers.

One thing still mysterious, among the whole shebang. In the Xandos announce it is said:

Over the next five years, Microsoft and Xandros will focus on five primary efforts:
and there's only four of them listed there. There must be one deep magic going on?

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