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The Internet

Warner Brothers: Automated Takedown Notices Hit Files That Weren't Ours 157

Posted by timothy from the let-god-sort-'em-out dept.
itwbennett writes "In a court case between Hotfile.com and Hollywood studios, Warner Brothers admitted they sent takedown orders for thousands of files they didn't own or control. Using an automated takedown tool provided by Hotfile, Warner Brothers used automated software crawlers based on keywords to generate legal takedown orders. This is akin to not holding the Post Office liable for what people mail, or the phone companies liable for what people say. But the flip side is that hosters must remove files when receiving a legal takedown notice from the copyright holder — even when the copyright holders themselves don't know what material they actually own."
Communications

Why the Fax Machine Refuses To Die 835

Posted by Soulskill from the pull-the-plug dept.
snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia waxes befuddled on the ongoing existence of the fax machine. 'Consider what a fax machine actually is: a little device with a sheet feeder, a terrible scanning element, and an ancient modem. Most faxes run at 14,400bps. That's just over 1KB per second — and people are still using faxes to send 52 poorly scanned pages of some contract to one another. Over analog phone lines. Sometimes while paying long-distance charges! The mind boggles,' Venezia writes. 'If something as appallingly stupid as the fax machine can live on, it makes you wonder how we make progress at all. Old habits die hard. It just goes to show you: Bad technology generally isn't the problem; it's the people who persist in using that technology rather than embracing far superior alternatives.'"

Comment Re:You don't git it (Score 1) 312

by msaavedra (#37276854) Attached to: Kernel.org Compromised

Most distributions (ie the archlinux one you linked to) digitally sign their packages with private keys, so the people who compromised kernel.org wouldn't be able to tamper with them without causing verification failures by the package management system.

One huge problem could be downloadable ISOs for live images or installer DVDs. Since you are booting up your system with them, there would be no reliable automatic signature verification.

I downloaded a Centos-6 ISO from the kernel.org mirror just the other day, and broke out in a cold sweat when I saw this story. However, Centos and just about everyone else publishes checksums of their ISOs. I compared my download against the checksum, and, to my relief, it matched.

It would be wise if everyone compared checksums immediately after downloading something like this. Alternately, you can use a protocol like BitTorrent for the download, which compares checksums automatically.
Government

Mass. Court Says Constitution Protects Filming On-Duty Police 473

Posted by timothy from the good-setting-for-the-scene dept.
Even in a country and a world where copyright can be claimed as an excuse to prevent you from taking a photo of a giant sculpture in a public, tax-paid park, and openly recording visiting police on your own property can be construed as illegal wiretapping, it sometimes seems like the overreach of officialdom against people taking photos or shooting video knows no bounds. It's a special concern now that seemingly everyone over the age of 10 is carrying a camera that can take decent stills and HD video. It's refreshing, therefore, to read that a Federal Appeals Court has found unconstitutional the arrest of a Massachusetts lawyer who used his phone to video-record an arrest on the Boston Common. (Here's the ruling itself, as a PDF.) From the linked article, provided by reader schwit1: "In its ruling, which lets Simon Glik continue his lawsuit, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston said the wiretapping statute under which Glik was arrested and the seizure of his phone violated his First and Fourth Amendment rights."
Patents

Patent Applications Hint Apple Wants To Eliminate Printer Drivers 323

Posted by timothy from the from-anywhere-is-a-nice-ideal dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Apple has filed two patent applications that describe an approach as well as file formats and APIs to eliminate the printer driver as a requirement for users to access a printer and print documents. If the company has its way, there will be three ways to access a printer in the future: The first will be via a conventional software driver. The second will be via a cloud service and the third will be via a driverless access method that supports 'universal' printing from any type device."
Communications

Why Public Email Needs a Police Force 133

Posted by Soulskill from the quis-custodiet-ipsos-spamodes dept.
jfruhlinger writes "Those of us who had email addresses in the early days of the Internet age remember sending notes to webmaster email addresses to report malicious email behavior — and actually getting a response back. But today, a huge majority of mail comes from public services like Gmail or Yahoo mail, and getting anyone at those companies to take responsibility for abusive users is nearly impossible. 'If they could agree on a third-party service that could be the receptacle on a 24/7 basis for rapid account suspension, the 419 Fraud problem might dwindle down to a trickle quickly. It would take trust among the email providers to do this, but it would also alleviate big problems that law enforcement officials are usually unable to handle. Call them the email cops.'"
Privacy

Researchers Expose Tracking Service That Can't Be Dodged 173

Posted by Soulskill from the advertising-arms-race dept.
Worf Maugg writes with this excerpt from Wired: "Researchers at U.C. Berkeley have discovered that some of the net's most popular sites are using a tracking service that can't be evaded — even when users block cookies, turn off storage in Flash, or use browsers' 'incognito' functions. The service, called KISSmetrics, is used by sites to track the number of visitors, what the visitors do on the site, and where they come to the site from — and the company says it does a more comprehensive job than its competitors such as Google Analytics."
Businesses

After a Decade, Mac Sales Again Top 10% 410

Posted by timothy from the in-many-ways-never-really-went-away dept.
GMGruman writes "The last time Apple's Mac sales accounted for more than 10 percent of the U.S. PC market was 1991. This spring, Apple finally returned to that market share high, with 10.7 percent of all U.S. PC sales, according to both IDC and Gartner. That's a major reversal from its 2004 share of under 2 percent. The sales report comes after some other good news this week for Apple: A third of big businesses now let employees choose a Mac as their PC — and more than half choose the Mac."
Biotech

Spanish Surgeon Performs First Synthetic Organ Transplant 91

Posted by timothy from the bet-they're-delicious dept.
Bob the Super Hamste writes "The BBC is reporting that surgeons in Sweden have transplanted a synthetic windpipe into a patient. The synthetic windpipe was grown from a scaffolding and coated with the patients own stem cells. The scaffolding was made using 3D images of the patient's own windpipe. The new windpipe was made by scientists in London."
Earth

The Intentional Flooding of America's Heartland 477

Posted by timothy from the best-laid-dams dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Joe Herring writes that sixty years ago, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began the process of taming the Missouri by constructing massive dams at the top to moderate flow to the smaller dams below, generating electricity while providing desperately needed control of the river's devastating floods. But after about thirty years of operation, as the environmentalist movement gained strength throughout the seventies and eighties, the Corps received a great deal of pressure to include specific environmental concerns into their Master Water Control Manual, the 'bible' for the operation of the dam system, as preservation of habitat for at-risk bird and fish populations soon became a hot issue among the burgeoning environmental lobby. The Corps began to utilize the dam system to mimic the previous flow cycles of the original river, holding back large amounts of water upstream during the winter and early spring in order to release them rapidly as a spring pulse. 'Whether warned or not, the fact remains that had the Corps been true to its original mission of flood control, the dams would not have been full in preparation for a spring pulse,' writes Herring. 'The dams could further have easily handled the additional runoff without the need to inundate a sizable chunk of nine states.' The horrifying consequence is water rushing from the dams on the Missouri twice as fast as the highest previous releases on record while the levees that protect the cities and towns downstream were constructed to handle the flow rates promised at the time of the dam's construction."
Power

Italy Votes To Abandon Nuclear Power 848

Posted by Soulskill from the giving-progress-the-boot dept.
ElementOfDestruction writes "Italy has joined Germany in halting the production of energy from atomic power generation. This differs from Germany in that the Italian decision was made by a public vote, rather than a government mandated shutdown. 57% of Italian Households voted in this public measure. While democracy should trump all, is it wise to hold majority opinion so high that it slows down progress?"

Comment Re:DNS and the world of wonders.. (Score 2) 289

by msaavedra (#36419424) Attached to: US Funding Stealth Internets to Circumvent Repressive Regimes

I often wonder what would happen if a group of nerds..like ourselves.. decided to start our own root DNS.. I would suspect that it would be shut down by the FCC in short order under some new or trumped up mangled misinterpretation of some law.

Alternative root servers have existed for years. The largest is probaby OpenNIC.
Education

Submission + - The $25/£15 computer from the UK (electronicsweekly.com)

Submitted by rrohbeck
rrohbeck writes: Electronics Weekly brings us a report on the Raspberry Pi, a computer the size of a USB stick with USB (for keyboard/mouse/network/storage), composite/HDMI video out and power connectors and a memory card slot. It runs a 700MHz ARM11 with 256MB of memory and is designed as a teaching tool, envisioned to boot Ubuntu right into interactive Python like the BASIC computers that got many of us hooked on programming.
There is a lot of interest from developing countries and chances are that there will be a buy one, give one program.

"There is an energy barrier at the start of the learning curve," said Upton. With the Spectrum or the BBC micro, even if you only wanted it to run a game, you turned it on and it immediately said 'BASIC' and you could write
>10 print "Hello world"
>20 goto 10.
A lot of us got sucked in by that and became programmers."

PCs just don't cut the mustard.
Science

Is Science Just a Matter of Faith? 1486

Posted by CmdrTaco from the you-can't-test-faith dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Pastabagel writes that the actual scientific answers to the questions of the origins of the universe, the evolution of man, and the fundamental nature of the cosmos involve things like wave equations and quantum electrodynamics and molecular biology that very few non-scientists can ever hope to understand and that if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that we accept the incredibly complex scientific phenomena in physics, astronomy, and biology through the process of belief, not through reason. When Richard Fenyman wrote, 'I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics,' he was including himself which is disconcerting given how many books he wrote on that very subject. The fact is that it takes years of dedicated study before scientific truth in its truest, mathematical and symbolic forms can be understood. The rest of us rely on experts to explain it, someone who has seen and understood the truth and can dumb it down for us in a language we can understand. And therein lies the big problem for science and scientists. For most people, science is really a matter of trusting the expert who tells it to us and believing what they tell us. Trust and belief. Faith. Not understanding. How can we understand science, if we can't understand the language of science? 'We don't learn science by doing science, we learn science by reading and memorizing. The same way we learn history. Do you really know what an atom is, or that a Higgs boson is a rather important thing, or did you simply accept they were what someone told you they were?'"
Crime

Drug Runners Perfect Long-Range Subs 428

Posted by timothy from the only-outlaws-will-have-submarines dept.
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Authorities have captured a 74-foot camouflaged submarine — nearly twice as long as a city bus — with twin propellers and a 5-foot conning tower that, with a crew of four to six, has a maximum operational range of 6,800 nautical miles on the surface, can go 10 days without refueling and was probably designed to ferry cocaine underwater to Mexico. The vessel carries a payload of 9 tons of cocaine with a street value of about $250 million and uses a GPS chart plotter with side-scan capabilities, a high-frequency radio, an electro-optical periscope and an infrared camera mounted on the conning tower—visual aids that supplement two miniature windows in the makeshift cockpit. "This is the most sophisticated sub we've seen to date," says Jon Wallace who has headed the Personal Submersibles Organization, or Psubs, for 15 years. "It's a very good design in terms of shape and controls." In the meantime jungle shipbuilders continue to perfect their craft."

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