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Comment It's all about the contracts (Score 4, Interesting) 53

by canowhoopass.com (#39336859) Attached to: Rogers Joins Telus In Seeking National Regulation

Getting the cheap/free cellphone in Canada often involves signing up for long 3 year plan with huge penalties if you quit early.

I'm not sure of all the provinces, but I know that both Quebec and Manitoba have new laws in place requiring better contract disclosure and limiting those penalties.

I suspect that Rogers and Telus are afraid the other provinces will enact the same or stronger legislation.

Comment Re:On a side note... (Score 1) 164

When I went to the IIPA, Web of Trust went berserk and said the site has a poor reputation for "trustworthiness," "vendor reliability" and "privacy." It also scored a low score on "child safety."

I'm can't say I'm a fan of politics influencing security ratings like this. Not being a user of the tool, I must ask if this a common trait in Web of Trust's database?

I see that the sites for the riaa, and mpaa are also flagged and have piracy related comments on them.

Comment Prior Titles with Scroll (Score 1) 200

by canowhoopass.com (#37004956) Attached to: Bethesda Tells <em>Minecraft</em> Creator: Cease and Desist

I did a quick Google search and found several game titles with 'Scroll'. Several pre-dating the 1994 release of the first Elder Scrolls.

I suspect Bethesda will have troubles winning this one, but courts can be funny sometimes.

Comment Study too small... (Score 5, Interesting) 185

by canowhoopass.com (#34879862) Attached to: Research Suggests E-Readers Are "Too Easy" To Read

The study had 28 participants... and they were asked to remember species of aliens...

While this may be a sign that it's worth looking into the differences a font makes in learning, I'll wait until a bigger study comes out where participants were asked to read a more likely and involved subject matter like the history of the Ottoman Empire.

I have a feeling many participants will be less likely to read past the first chapter if it was written in Comic Sans.
Government

Senate Panel Approves Website Shut-Down Bill 390

Posted by timothy from the best-interests-at-heart dept.
itwbennett writes "The Senate Judiciary Committee has voted 19-0 in favor of a bill that would allow the Department of Justice to seek court orders to shut down websites offering materials believed to infringe copyright. 'Rogue websites are essentially digital stores selling illegal and sometimes dangerous products,' Senator Patrick Leahy, the main sponsor of the bill, said in a statement. 'If they existed in the physical world, the store would be shuttered immediately and the proprietors would be arrested. We cannot excuse the behavior because it happens online and the owners operate overseas. The Internet needs to be free — not lawless.' However, the internet will likely remain 'lawless' for a while longer, as there are only a few working days left in the congressional session and the bill is unlikely to pass through the House of Representatives in that short amount of time."
Piracy

Ubisoft's Authentication Servers Go Down 634

Posted by kdawson from the single-point-of-well-you-know dept.
ZuchinniOne writes "With Ubisoft's fantastically awful new DRM you must be online and logged in to their servers to play the games you buy. Not only was this DRM broken the very first day it was released, but now their authentication servers have failed so absolutely that no-one who legally bought their games can play them. 'At around 8am GMT, people began to complain in the Assassin's Creed 2 forum that they couldn't access the Ubisoft servers and were unable to play their games.' One can only hope that this utter failure will help to stem the tide of bad DRM."

Comment Better than the O'Reilly book (Score 1) 117

by canowhoopass.com (#28520009) Attached to: Unlocking Android
I'm subscribed to O'Reilly Safari, where I have both Unlocking Android and O'Reilly's Android Application Development in my bookshelf. The O'Reilly book uses the "build a big application" approach to teaching. So each chapter goes into adding a different feature. There is an expectation that the reader has the examples installed, but unfortunately they don't work with Android v1.5(cupcake). I was lost since I couldn't follow. Luckily I found this book which does a much better job of explaining things. The reviewer is absolutely correct on one thing though. It isn't great at explaining the initial install, and doing a hello world example. If you want to learn Android Development I recommend the following order:
  1. 1) Follow the Eclipse install guide from the Android dev site.
  2. 2) Complete the various Hello World, Hello Views, and Notepad tutorials from the Android dev site. They are kept updated and are well written.
  3. 3) Then read through this book. It really is a good one.

-Rod

Comment Re:Funny (Score 2, Funny) 232

Hockey is our national sport.

Actually, it's Lacrosse.

It's both. Hockey is the official winter sport, Lacrosse is the official summer sport. Check out the National Sports of Canada Act:

http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/ShowFullDoc/cs/N-16.7///en

You have to wonder how much time the politicians used up drafting this. The curling lobby must be pissed.
Security

Distributed, Low-Intensity Botnets 167

Posted by kdawson from the slow-probe dept.
badger.foo writes "We have seen the future of botnets, and it is distributed and low-key. Are sites running free software finally becoming malware targets? It all started with a higher-than-usual number of failed ssh logins at a low-volume site. I think we are seeing the shape of botnets to come, with malware authors doing their early public beta testing during the last few weeks."

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