castrox - Slashdot User

Submission + - Share links, become extradited to the US (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by

castrox

on Friday July 22, 2011 @09:07AM

castrox writes: "Sharing links online, particularly links to copyrighted material, may render you extradited to the United States of America.

The case is unique because the site, which the accused 23-year-old Englishman ran, was not located in the US in any way. Does this set a new precedent of things to come?

The agency responsible for the extradition request is Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). After contacting the site operator, shutting down the .com and .cc domain and finally paying the guy a visit in person, extradition is now on the table.

Read more on Ars Technica"

Submission + - Oracle cans commercial OpenOffice (arstechnica.com) 2

Submitted by

castrox

on Monday April 18, 2011 @04:43AM

castrox writes: "Oracle gives up on development of the commercial branch of OpenOffice. The reason appears to be the drain of mindshare from OpenOffice to the newly created, vendor neutral, LibreOffice fork. Control is to be handed over to the community. I guess we'll see the details to this handover in the coming days or weeks."

Submission + - Swedish Pirate Party headed for Brussels (thelocal.se)

Submitted by

castrox

on Sunday June 07, 2009 @04:20PM

castrox writes: "The Swedish Pirate Party gets 7.1% of the Swedish votes for the European Parliament. This means that the Pirate Party holds one seat out of a total of 18 representing Sweden. Here's to hoping they can make a difference. The make/female vote is 12/4%. The voters for the Pirate Party are also mostly under 30, but still has a big support older voters. The vote for the Pirate Party is much considered to be a protest against the sitting government and the EU."

Submission + - Pirate Bay Day 8 - IFPI working with Google (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by

castrox

on Wednesday February 25, 2009 @04:38PM

castrox writes: "As the 8th day kicked off in court in the Pirate Bay trial, a number of new details have been revealed. The day has been dedicated to try to prove the correctness of the estimations of the stated compensations (~3 million USD). IFPI claims that the decrease in sales from 2001 to 2008 have been 9 billion dollars or about 30 percent. The entire decrease is blamed on file sharing and file sharing sites such as The Pirate bay.

That piracy in some respect can contribute to more sales and act to promote music is forcefully dismissed by John Kennedy, chairman of IFPI, adding that such views are old and obsolete.

John Kennedy also revealed that IFPI works together with Google on a daily basis, to ensure that illegal distributions of recordings are reduced and kept in check. Upon describing how the friendship with Google came to be, John Kennedy said that IFPI approached Google and explaining that either Google was going to be a partner or an opponent and thereby avoiding any misunderstandings of IFPI:s stand on the issue.

The defense also asked John Kennedy if he's of the opinion that each and every illegal download corresponds to a lost sale, upon which he confidently said "Yes", elaborating that, of course, these are music fans we're talking about.

(There's also a Swedish source to this: http://www.svd.se/nyheter/inrikes/artikel_2516799.svd)"

Submission + - Dangerous old Internet, meet new Secure Internet? (nytimes.com)

Submitted by

castrox

on Sunday February 15, 2009 @04:21PM

castrox writes: "The New York Times is asking the question "Do We Need a New Internet?" The background being the spread of worms such as the rather widespread Conficker worm. Apparently the solution to operating system vulnerabilities is a secure Internet. So what would such a new Internet look like? NYT theorize that

What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a "gated community" where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety.
Some apparently prestigious scholars have their say. Nick McKeown, a Stanford engineer:
Unless we're willing to rethink today's Internet, we're just waiting for a series of public catastrophes.
Some people are not late to spout doomsday scenarios (Rick Wesson, the chief executive of Support Intelligence, a computer consulting firm)
If you're looking for a digital Pearl Harbor, we now have the Japanese ships streaming toward us on the horizon

It appears the Internet is just too unsafe for people and agencies all over the world."

Submission + - Wiretapping law sparks rage in Sweden

Submitted by castrox on Monday June 16, 2008 @08:17PM

castrox writes: This Wednesday at 9am the Swedish Parliament is voting on a new wiretapping law which would enable the civil agency (FRA — Defense Radio Agency) to snoop on all traffic crossing the Swedish border. E-mail, fax, telephone, web, SMS, etc. 24/7 without any requirement to obtain a court order. Further more, by law, the sitting Government will be able to instruct the wiretapping agency on what to look for. It also nullifies press tip or whisle blowing anonymity.

Many heavy agencies within Sweden have weighed in on this, with very hefty critic, e.g. SÄPO (akin to FBI in the U.S.), the Justice Department, ex. employees of FRA, and more. None the less, the ruling party block is supposedly pressuring its members to vote Yes to this new proposed law with threats to unseat any dissidents.

The new proposed law has given rise to a MASSIVE people uprise which will likely result in huge street protests on Wednesday. People have been completely surprised since this law has not gotten any media uptake and for the most part been kept in the shadows.

After massive activity on blogs by ordinary citizens and street protests the story has finally been picked up by major Swedish news sources.

There is more information on the Swedish (in English) newspaper, The Local. Specifically, see here, here and here.

Submission + - Prince, Village People to sue The Pirate Bay (thelocal.se)

Submitted by castrox on Sunday February 17, 2008 @11:32AM

castrox writes: YMCA to all! It appears the long since famous artists Prince and The Village people are getting ready to sue The Pirate Bay, if only they can figure out who to sue.

The Local:

Sandberg has been hired on behalf of the US musicians by British law firm Web Sheriff, which wants to claim "several million dollars" in damages in both Sweden and the United States, he said.
It's unclear how many tracks of Prince and Village People are being swapped via TPB at this moment. They are to seek damages nonetheless, of course..

Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde told The Local that Giacobbi [Web Sheriff president] had "no clue" what he was doing but that he was welcome to try to sue the file sharing site.
You might remember TPB taunting Web Sheriff multiple times in their much appreciated legal threats section.

Submission + - Gmail backdoor vulnerability (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by castrox on Wednesday September 26, 2007 @08:48AM

castrox writes: From the article on The Register:

The technique comes courtesy of Petko D. Petkov, a researcher at GNU Citizen, who writes in a blog post that the backdoor is installed simply by luring a victim to a specially crafted website while logged in to Gmail. The naughty site uses a slight of hand known as a multipart/form-data POST, which writes a filter to Gmail that causes all email with attachments to be forwarded to collect@evil.com.
Looks like a nasty "POST injection" from a malicious site you're visiting while logged into Gmail is all it takes to alter your Gmail settings. Apparently, Google is investigating and has no further comments at this time.

Submission + - Dell considers bundling virtualization on mobos (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by

castrox

on Thursday August 09, 2007 @10:51AM

castrox writes: "Ars Technica is reporting on a rumor at The Register that Dell is considering bundling virtualization on some of their motherboards. No more dual boot or VMs inside the running OS? Quoting Ars Technica:

Any way you slice it, though, putting the hypervisor in a chunk of flash and letting it handle loading the OS is the way forward, especially for servers and probably even for enterprise desktops. Boot times, power consumption, security, and flexibility are all reasons to do this.
Though it looks like more than a rumor, considering the following quote from The Register:

Dell CTO Kevin Kettler today confirmed these plans during a speech here at LinuxWorld, saying the company expects to see major performance and power-saving improvements by dumping a hypervisor in flash.
"

Submission + - Microsoft patent infringement suit tossed (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by

castrox

on Tuesday August 07, 2007 @03:19AM

castrox writes: "Ars Technica reports on the just tossed verdict on the claimed Microsofts patent infrigement concerning MP3 compression, filed by Alcatel-Lucent. Quoting Ars:

A judge has overturned a jury's $1.52 billion award in a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Alcatel-Lucent against Microsoft. Ruling that Microsoft had not violated one of the two patents in question after all, Judge Rudi Brewster threw out the verdict and indicated that the second patent was on shaky ground as well.
The future of software patents, it seems, will be dominated by people in courtrooms."

Submission + - EU slaps Intel with formal antitrust charges (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by

castrox

on Friday July 27, 2007 @08:34AM

castrox writes: "Quoting Ars Technica

Intel faces a long and costly legal battle in Europe after the European Commission formally lodged antitrust charges against the world's leading CPU manufacturer.

Seems Intel has been playing dirty. A suit filed by AMD last year includes Intel making at least one sell-only-Intel deal in Germany. Sort of interesting since this is what e.g. Microsoft does on a daily basis?"

Submission + - Microsoft to simplify downgrades from Vista to XP

Submitted by castrox on Friday June 29, 2007 @08:21AM

castrox writes: It seems Microsoft have taken a notice that users may want to run XP instead of Vista. The new deal is to simplify downgrading for the OEMs. Currently, all OEMs must call Microsoft whenever a downgrade is done. After this "simplification" OEMs may submit batches of keys to Microsoft which will save time.

According to the Microsoft blog on ZDNet, the "downgrade software" will still need to be supplied by the end user. The deal is rather perplexing — it does not seem like you can convert the license since the only eligible versions for downgrading is Ultimate and Business.

Effectively, it seems nothing has changed. More on the downgrade "rights" (warning: PDF) here.

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