SegaVegas - Slashdot User

The Dangers of a Patent War Chest 125

Posted by Zonk on Saturday June 09, 2007 @01:29PM from the not-more-powerful-quicker-easier-the-dark-side-is dept.

Timothy B. Lee writes "I've got an article in the New York Times in which I make the case against software patents. Expanding on a point I first made on my blog, I point out that Microsoft has had a change of heart on the patent issue. In 1991, Bill Gates worried that 'some large company will patent some obvious thing' and use it to blackmail smaller companies. Now that Microsoft is a large company with a patent war-chest of their own, they don't seem so concerned about abuse of the patent system. I then describe how Verizon's efforts to shut down Vonage are a perfect illustration of Gates' fears."

Anti-DRM Activists Take On the BBC 200

Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday June 09, 2007 @12:21PM from the doing-what's-right dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Activists from Binary Freedom Boston have launched a campaign calling on the BBC to release their content online without DRM or proprietary formats. You might remember the BBC asking us about this earlier and even though the public chose not to use DRM by a landslide, they still decided to use it. EMI and Amazon have already ditched DRM. How long before the BBC does?"

Submission + - OpenOffice Virus Found in Use (zdnet.com.au)

Submitted by

eldavojohn

on Saturday June 09, 2007 @12:00PM

eldavojohn writes: "Remember the 'SB/Badbunny-A' virus that wasn't in the wild yet? Well, according to Symantec, it is and it's not caring what platform you're running. The respective behaviors of the designated worm in the wild: "On Windows systems, it drops a file called drop.bad which is moved to the system.ini in the user's mIRC folder, while executing the Javascript virus badbunny.js that replicates to other files in the folder. On Apple Mac systems, the worm drops one of two Ruby script viruses in files called badbunny.rb and badbunnya.rb. On Linux systems, the worm drops both badbunny.py as an XChat script and badbunny.pl as a Perl virus.""

TorrentSpy Ordered By Judge to Become MPAA Spy 372

Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday June 09, 2007 @09:20AM from the watching-the-watchmen dept.

PC Guy writes "TorrentSpy, one of the world's largest BitTorrent sites, has been ordered by a federal judge to monitor its users. They are asked to keep detailed logs of their activities which must then be handed over to the MPAA. Ira Rothken, TorrentSpy's attorney responded to the news by stating: 'It is likely that TorrentSpy would turn off access to the U.S. before tracking its users. If this order were allowed to stand, it would mean that Web sites can be required by discovery judges to track what their users do even if their privacy policy says otherwise.'"

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