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Operating Systems

Submission + - Linux Battles DVD Piracy Issues (osweekly.com)

Submitted by Linuxbro
Linuxbro writes: Linux continues to battle DVD piracy issues despite education from the community. In the article, "One of the points made correctly is the legality of being able to play MP3s and DVDs in Ubuntu. With restricted codecs, the only time it is going to find themselves in actionable legal trouble is if they are distributing said codecs without paying the patent fees to the appropriate parties. Ubuntu does not have this issue. The note via Automatix, on the other hand, is basically done in interest to cover the the application's developers, despite the fact that the end user who chooses to install them is not at any actionable legal risk.
United States

Submission + - America's War on Drugs (rollingstone.com)

Submitted by ankura
ankura writes: Interesting look at America's War on Drugs and how it drug trade has evolved to meet it. "The product the Mexican cartels came up with, the new widget they could make themselves, was methamphetamine. The man who mastered the market was a midlevel cocaine trafficker, then in his late twenties, named Jesús Amezcua. In 1994, when U.S. Customs officials at the Dallas airport seized an airplane filled with barrels of ephedrine, a chemical precursor for meth, and traced it back to Amezcua, the startling new shift in the drug traffic became clear to a handful of insiders."
The Internet

Submission + - Hackers release 250 pgs of 7th Harry Potter Book

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "There is a torrent link on thepiratebay for a deathly hallows download. Contains the 1st 250 pages. by the time you get this it may be down, I don't kow, and I didn't download it myself. But my friend DID! and it IS real. Thought you'd like to be the first to post it on the web. It's a 1MB word document."
Television

Submission + - Macworld UK reviews Apple TV - only 2 stars

Submitted by
Mark Hattersley
Mark Hattersley writes: "Macworld UK has given the Apple TV just two stars. Here's a quote: "Apple TV suffers from a couple of rather big problems: it's very hard to get content onto it and it's very hard to connect it to most TV sets. It's inability to play DivX formats, plus reliance on the as yet non-existent UK iTunes store video content really do work against it. As such we can't recommend this product at this point in time.""
Google

Submission + - Captchas on Google Login

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: I, and presumably many others, tried to log into gmail today — to find a new feature. The user is presented with a username and password box, as normal. But when a user submits the form, the input is ignored, and the login widget refreshes, now with a captcha below the password field. Presumably, they don't want bots logging in and sending spam. However, POP3 doesn't support captchas, so the bots can still send their spam. With the famous hordes of brilliant minds at google, you'd think they could detect bots abusing accounts, rather than taking such a braindead approach that does little but harm the usability of their site.
Networking

Submission + - Massive $20 billion govt. telecom contract awarded

Submitted by
bednarz
bednarz writes: "AT&T, Verizon Business and Qwest hit the jackpot, winning a 10-year, $20 billion telecommunications contract with the U.S. federal government that is the largest of its kind in the world. Sprint Nextel wasn't so lucky. Even though Sprint held both predecessor contracts (FTS 2001 and FTS 2000) and served the federal government as a telecommunications provider for 18 years, it lost out on the so-called Networx Universal contract. The GSA announced the winners of the contract at a press conference in Washington D.C. Thursday morning. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/032907-netwo rx-20b-telecom-contract-awarded.html"
Privacy

Submission + - Students sue anti-plagiarism service

Submitted by jazzbazzfazz
jazzbazzfazz writes: It seems that some students in Virginia are not happy with the anti-plagiarism service Turnitin. The company checks prose submitted by its customers for signs that it has been copied in whole or part by comparing it to a large database of works that it maintains. Trouble is, it also adds the submitted prose to its files and stores it for use by the company in future scans, which the students feel is illegal use of their copyrighted materials. I think they've got an excellent case, especially since they seem to have prepared for this eventuality: they're A-students, never been accused of plagiarism, and they formally copyrighted their papers prior to their submission to Turnitin. Anyone out there know there copyright laws?
Handhelds

Submission + - Hope in sight for PalmOS?

Submitted by jetkins
jetkins writes: This is old news, but I don't see it slashdotted. Marc Blank, creator of the (deservedly) popular Chatter Email client for the Palm Treo platform, recently accepted a position with Palm themselves. This leaves Chatter without any active development, much to the chagrin of some users, but bodes well for the PalmOS platform given Marc's oft-stated aversion to all things WinCE. http://www.chatteremail.com/index.php?option=com_f orum&Itemid=71&page=viewtopic&t=4201 In an earlier life, Marc was one of the key developers at Infocom, responsible for Zork and several other of their popular text-based adventure games. Hopefully he won't find himself battling against any of Dimwit Flathead's descendants at Palm.

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