Biolo - Slashdot User

Are DMCA Abuses a Temporary or Permanent Problem? 163

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday January 24, 2007 @11:20AM from the still-on-the-books dept.

Regular Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton wrote in with a story about the DMCA. He starts "On January 16, a man named Guntram Graef who invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to ask YouTube to remove a video of giant penises attacking his wife's avatar/character in the virtual community "Second Life", retracted the claim and stated that he now believes the video was not a copyright violation. (He had sent similar notices to BoingBoing and the Sydney Morning Herald just for posting screen shots of the video.) His statements in a C-Net interview suggest that he didn't mean to alienate the anti-censorship community and was probably angry over what he saw as a sexually explicit attack on his wife. But the event sparked renewed debate over the DMCA and what constitutes abuse of it. I sympathize with Graef and I admire him for admitting an error, but I still think the incident shows why the DMCA is a bad law." Hit that link below to read the rest of his story.

A Competition To Replace SHA-1 159

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday January 24, 2007 @09:10AM from the securing-government-bits dept.

SHA who? writes "In light of recent attacks on SHA-1, NIST is preparing for a competition to augment and revise the current Secure Hash Standard. The public competition will be run much like the development process for the Advance Encryption Standard, and is expected to take 3 years. As a first step, NIST is publishing draft minimum acceptability requirements, submission requirements, and evaluation criteria for candidate algorithms, and requests public comment by April 27, 2007. NIST has ordered Federal agencies to stop using SHA-1 and instead to use the SHA-2 family of hash functions."

Submission + - Swedish bill to sniff internet traffic presented

Submitted by

swehack

on Wednesday January 24, 2007 @07:47AM

swehack writes: "The Swedish defense minister today presented a bill(Swedish) to let FRA(National Defence Radio Establishment) listen to all internet and radio traffic sent over Swedish borders. Internet service providers will be forced to allow access to their border points where FRA will be allowed to filter for certain search patterns. The search patterns the FRA will filter traffic for will be decided by the FRA. The swedish minister of defense, Mikael Odenberg, noted that the bill only applies to outsie threats, information transferred between two swedes will not be used."

Submission + - Microsoft breaks South African Patent Law

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24, 2007 @04:10AM

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft is ignoring a South African law that disallows software patents. South Africa does not examine the validity of patents registered, and Microsoft has used this loophold to register illegal patents. Once patents slip through, it can cost up to R1000000 (roughly $142 000) to invalidate the patents. Microsoft's national technical officer suggested that it was the government's fault for not enforcing the law.

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