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The Internet

The Pirate Bay — "Just a Very Large Hobby" 214

praps writes "In a fascinating interview with two of the founders of The Pirate Bay entitled 'Are they baby-eating monsters or what?,' Swedish news site The Local discovers that far from being the radical Robin Hoods of the digital age, Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij are actually 'polite, humorous and down-to-earth.' They may run one of the biggest sites in the world but 'it's just a hobby that's grown to be very, very large.' Financially, they are 'happy as long as it doesn't make a loss,' and both hold down regular IT day jobs. And apparently they spend a lot of time with a Bedouin in the Sinai desert."

Comment stop treating SSNs as secret (Score 3, Interesting) 187

It seems to me that we'd go a long way in fixing identity theft if we stopped treating knowledge of personal info as proof you are that person. My cable company uses my social security number as "proof" that it's really me - but god only knows how many people know my social security number. My bankers, my employer (and everyone who can touch the payroll system) my doctors office, my insurance companies. The list is very long.

It should be illegal to use the SSN as a shared secret, and anyone who does use it as a secret identifier should be liable for any expenses they incur. VISA would be a lot more effective at combating fraud if they had to pay for every false credit card opened in my name.

Even better, if we didn't have to treat SSNs as secret information anymore, it'd make our lives a lot easier. The SSN is a great primary key for me - it's one number I can remember, and it does a good job of uniquely identifying me. I want to be able to give it to more people.

If Congress really can act quickly when it wants to, a good way to bring this about is to require all members of Congress to publicly disclose their SSN on January 1st 2008.
Programming

Submission + - Results of Web Programming Contest Published

alvar-f writes: "The results and final report of the Plat_Forms international web programming contest were published today. For each of the categories Perl, PHP and Java, three teams of three people each competed to produce a comprehensive "social networking" application in just 30 hours. A short summary of the results: The Perl teams produced the most compact code and their solutions are very easy to extend. One Java team produced by far the most complete solution overall, the other two by far the most incomplete ones. The Java solutions are very hard to extend. The PHP teams used no autogenerated files, resisted SQL injection attempts and created the most similar solutions. There are also some pictures of the teams and you can guess what language they are using ..."
The Courts

Appeals Court Denies Safe Harbor for Roommates.com 253

Mariner writes "The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied Roommates.com Safe Harbor status under the Communications Decency Act in a lawsuit brought by the Fair Housing Councils of San Fernando Valley and San Diego. Roommates.com was accused of helping landlords discriminate against certain kinds of tenants due to a couple of questions on the Roommates.com registration form: gender and sexual orientation. 'Though it refused to rule on whether Roommates.com actually violated the Fair Housing Act, the Court did find that it lost Section 230 immunity because it required users to enter that information in order to proceed. As Judge Alex Kozinski put it in his opinion, "if it is responsible, in whole or in part, for creating or developing the information, it becomes a content provider and is not entitled to CDA immunity."'"
Security

Month of PHP Bugs Has Begun 165

An anonymous reader writes "The previously announced Month of PHP Bugs started three days ago, and already lists 8 security vulnerabilities in PHP and PHP related software. From the site: 'This initiative is an effort to improve the security of PHP. However we will not concentrate on problems in the PHP language that might result in insecure PHP applications, but on security vulnerabilities in the PHP core. During March 2007 old and new security vulnerabilities in the Zend Engine, the PHP core and the PHP extensions will be disclosed on a day by day basis. We will also point out necessary changes in the current vulnerability management process used by the PHP Security Response Team.'"
United States

Submission + - Geothermal energy will power America - MIT

amigoro writes: " This article says that mining the huge amounts of heat that reside as stored thermal energy in the Earth's hard rock crust could supply a substantial portion of the electricity the United States will need in the future, probably at competitive prices and with minimal environmental impact, according to a new MIT-led study.

The panel also evaluated the environmental impacts of geothermal development, concluding that these are markedly lower than conventional fossil-fuel and nuclear power plants.

And that might counteract the "imaginary" fears the world leaders have that global warming causes economic hardship"
Encryption

Submission + - The Truth Behind SSL usenet access

Anonymous Coward writes: "There is a lot going on in the usenet industry these days. A lot of providers worked hard to increase their retention and are closing up on Giganews' 90 days.But Giganews wasn't sleeping at all, they were just working on other things — SSL access to their servers! Since other providers are joining the trend of usenet ssl access, we think it's time to clear up some questions..Continue Reading"
Handhelds

Submission + - Would a cheap iPhone 'developer license' work?

JJC writes: "How about if Apple issued cheap 'developer licenses' for the iPhone that allowed you to develop and run unofficial software on your own device, but didn't give you the ability to distribute your software to regular iPhones that don't have the license. That way the tinkerers of the world could have all the geeky fun they wanted, without hurting Apple's and Cingular's business interests. The licenses would be cheap enough for "hobby programmers", but expensive enough that no-one would try and sell the software they'd developed, hoping that the users would buy a developer license in order to run it. I'm thinking $100 would be the sweet price-point, and I for one would be there in a flash."
Programming

Submission + - Ruby on Rails 1.2 Final released!

Pieter Steyn writes: "Get out your party balloons and funny hats because were there, baby. Yes, sire, Rails 1.2 is finally available in all its glory. It took a little longer than we initially anticipated to get everything lined up (and even then we had a tiny snag that bumped us straight from 1.2.0 to 1.2.1 before this announcement even had time to be written). So hopefully its been worth the wait. Who am I kidding. Of course its been worth the wait. We got the RESTful flavor with new encouragement for resource-oriented architectures. Were taking mime types, HTTP status codes, and multiple representations of the same resource serious. And of course theres the international pizzazz of multibyte-safe UTF-8 wrangling. Thats just some of the headliner features. On top of that, theres an absolutely staggering amount of polish being dished out. The CHANGELOG for Action Pack alone contains some two hundred entries. Active Record has another 170-something on top of that. All possible due to the amazing work of our wonderful and glorious community. People from all over the world doing their bit, however big or small, to increase the diameter of your smile. Thats love, people. http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2007/1/19/rails-1-2- rest-admiration-http-lovefest-and-utf-8-celebratio ns"

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