17336816
submission
ais523 writes:
Wikia, the commercial wiki site founded by Jimmy Wales, has alienated many of its largest wikis by forcing a change to their styling, and using their Terms of Use to prevent wiki admins changing it back, despite huge opposition to the fixed-width nature of the new skin. Opposition to the change has mostly been centralised at the debate on WoWWiki, one of Wikia's most active wikis, about whether to leave Wikia for good, with the Wikipedia article on the subject containing an ever-increasing list of wikis that have moved away from Wikia already. Is this the first time people have paid sufficient attention to a website Terms of Service to actually leave in hordes as a result?
13781072
submission
ais523 writes:
In re Bilski has been judged [PDF]; the original verdict (that this particular business method patent was invalid) is now finally affirmed, but the Supreme Court fell short of ruling out or explicitly allowing software patents, as many had hoped. The verdict instead seems to be a rather narrow one, not even specifying any particular certain test to determine whether a process is patentable or not.
4186327
submission
ais523 writes:
Wikipedia (and other websites run by Wikimedia) have requested to opt-out from Phorm; according to the email they sent (quoted here), they "consider the scanning and profiling of our visitors' behavior by a third party to be an infringement on their privacy."
3079951
submission
ais523 writes:
The European Commission has again complained about antitrust behaviour by Microsoft, based on the 2007 complaint by Opera; this time, it's about alleged anticompetitive bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows, to the detriment of other browser manufacturers. (In a previous complaint, Microsoft ended up having to manufacture a version of Windows without Media Player, although its pricing meant that it was rarely bought.)
403439
submission
ais523 writes:
A judge was interrupted by a ringing mobile phone. So the judge demanded the phone. When nobody admitted owning the phone in question, the judge ordered the doors of the courtroom locked, and when the phone didn't turn up after a search, he sent all 46 defendants present to jail.
347169
submission
ais523 writes:
As reported by Tectonic, South Africa's new Mininimum Interoperability Standards for Information Systems in government (MIOS) explain the new rules for which data formats will be used by the government; according to that document, all people working for the South African government must be able to read OpenDocument Format documents by March, and the government aims to use one of its three approved document formats (UTF-8 or ASCII plain text, CSV, or ODF) for all its published documents by the end of 2008. A definition of 'open standard' is also included that appears to rule out OOXML at present (requiring 'multiple implementations', among other things that may also rule it out).
