mlauzon writes "The RCMP announced that it will stop targeting people who download copyrighted material for personal use (Google translation). Their priority will be to focus on organized crime and copyright theft that affects the health and safety of consumers, such as copyright violations related to medicine and electrical appliances, instead of the cash flow of large corporations. Around the same time that the CRIA successfully took Demonoid offline, the RCMP made clear that Demonoid's users don't have to worry about getting prosecuted, at least not in Canada. 'Piracy for personal use is no longer targeted,' Noël St-Hilaire, head of copyright theft investigations of the RCMP, said in an interview. 'It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it.'"

Arashtamere writes "A study on consumer perceptions about online privacy, undertaken by the Samuelson Clinic at the University of California and the Annenberg Public Policy Center, found that the average American consumer is largely unaware that every move they make online can be, and often is, tracked by online marketers and advertising networks. Those surveyed showed little knowledge on the extent to which online tracking is happening or how the information obtained can be used. More than half of those surveyed — about 55 percent — falsely assumed that a company's privacy polices prohibited it from sharing their addresses and purchases with affiliated companies. Nearly four out of 10 online shoppers falsely believed that a company's privacy policy prohibits it from using information to analyze an individuals' activities online. And a similar number assumed that an online privacy policy meant that a company they're doing business with wouldn't collect data on their online activities and combine it with other information to create a behavioral profile."

go_jesse writes in to make us aware of a MarketWatch article reporting on the battles that WiMAX partners Sprint and Clearwire are fighting — sometimes with one another — to put together enough spectrum to fill in their planned WiMAX coverage map. The problem is that decades ago the FCC passed out licenses in what would become the WiMAX band to schools and non-profits nationwide. Once Sprint began knocking on their doors asking to license their spectrum — once they began seeing dollar signs in a forgotten resource — dozens, then hundreds of these organizations applied to the FCC to renew long-dormant licenses. The FCC has granted the first of these requests and Sprint has asked it to reconsider. Confusingly, Sprint's partner Clearwire has sided with the schools and non-profits. The article sheds light in one messy corner of the battle to provide a "third pipe" into US consumers' homes.

An anonymous reader writes "A project called OpenChange is working to develop an open source client library for Microsoft Exchange. They are heavily dependent on Samba code for the underlying protocol support and have been forced to move to GPLv3 once Samba moved. This has gotten in the way of legally adding support to other software such as KDE, which is unwilling or unable to go GPLv3." It sounds like all the developers involved expect the GPLv2/GPLv3 issues to be resolved in time.

Update: 10/01 12:26 GMT by KD : Dan Shearer, of OpenChange and the Samba Team, wrote in to correct the anonymous submitter's mistaken implication that OpenChange moved reluctantly to GPLv3. Read on for his actual position.

mrspin writes in to note the demise of the Virgin Digital music store. Here is Virgin's announcement. It will shut down in stages: the service closed its doors to new subscribers on Friday; current subscribers will lose all access to it when their next monthly payment is due or on Oct. 19, whichever comes first. The store advises customers who have purchased downloads to back them up to CD and re-import them as MP3. It used to discourage such DRM-evading tactics.

mrscotty99 writes with a link to a Linux.com article about the rising star that is the Linux-based cellphone. Author Murry Shohat argues that the transformation of the cell into a mini-PC this summer is a landmark opportunity for Linux. Apple's offering and Motorola's US launch of the RAZR2 V8 (a linux-based device) may be heralds of great things to come for a new OS frontier: "In the cell phone market, consumers will pay for content, and corporations need to deliver secure content to applications in the palm of employees' hands. These trends suggest products that are simultaneously more functional and less expensive than a Treo or BlackBerry and more secure than an iPhone. MontaVista Software claims to have deployed Mobilinux on more than 35 million mobile devices worldwide. CEO Tom Kelley says, 'Linux is growing rapidly on mobile devices because of its solid reliability, its great flexibility, and because it accelerates the development cycle.' Vendors using or contemplating the use of Linux for mobile devices unanimously point to the operating system's footprint, memory usage, and fast growing ecosystem of developers producing software for graphics, multimedia, connectivity, and security." Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by SourceForge.

An anonymous reader writes "Scientists at a small startup called Walker Reading Technologies in Minnesota have determined that the human brain is not wired properly to read block text. They have found that our eyes view text as if they're peering through a straw. Not only does your brain see the text on the line you're reading, but it's also uploading superfluous information from the two lines above and the two lines below. This causes your brain to engage in a tug of war as it fights to filter and ignore the noise. The result is slower reading speeds and decreased comprehension. The company has developed a product that automatically re-formats text in a way that your brain can more easily comprehend."

An anonymous reader writes "IBM, Sun, Novell, and Red Hat all have a very significant open source element to their businesses. In addition to these juggernauts, there is growing investment in various open source models. Will money flowing into open source destroy its roots? Mark Hinkle just posted an editorial asking the questions Is Commercialization Killing Open Source? in which he comments on 'opensville' and gives some actual investment data, and a lot of insight into the growing trend in 'open source commercialization'. Is there such a thing as 'too much money' when it comes to developing software?"

Ashley Gittins writes "Users of the popular accounting package SQL-Ledger were being kept in the dark about a recent license change. Two weeks ago a new version of the software was released but along with it came the silent change of license from GPLv2 to the 'SQL-Ledger Open Source License' — presumably in an effort to prevent future forks like LedgerSMB. As it turns out, the author was making deliberate attempts to prevent the community from finding out about the license change. No posts to the SQL-Ledger mailing lists asking about the license change were getting past moderation and direct questions to the author were going unanswered. Just recently the license was switched back to GPLv2. This behavior is not a first for this particular project, and is part of the reason for the original LedgerSMB fork. Does a project maintainer have an ethical obligation to notify his or her community of a license change? What about a legal obligation?"

invisibastard writes to mention that Linux Tech Daily has an editorial on the merger between Compiz and Beryl. "This state of affairs was a shame. Something that was finally getting the general public excited about Linux, the 3D desktop, was wasting time with duplication of effort and fighting. There were concerns about the long term viability of Beryl. The perception in the community overall was, Compiz = old and stale, Beryl = fresh and exciting. This despite the feeling in the Compiz community that the "real work" was being done by David Reveman and Compiz, and there were exciting things with Compiz core (like input redirection, etc...) on the horizon."

An anonymous reader asks: "My cousin is about to graduate high school and wants to enter the game industry. I told him to get a day job (possibly as QA in a game studio) and get an online degree like DeVry's Game and Simulation Programming degree or The Art Institute of Pittsburgh's Game Art & Design degree. I have a BS and an MS in Computer Science, and I've only found what I learned mildly useful for my game programming hobby. Should he suck it up and get a 4-year degree, or is taking online courses focused on game development the way to go? Has anybody gotten one of these degrees and done well for themselves?"

An anonymous reader tips us to an AP story on a recent study of how much data we are producing. IDC estimates that in 2006 we created, captured, and replicated 161 exabytes of digital information. The last time anyone tried to estimate global information volume, in 2003, researchers at UC Berkeley came up with 5 exabytes. (The current study tries to account for duplicating data — on the same assumptions as the 2003 study it would have come out at 40 exabytes.) By 2010, according to IDC, we will be producing far more data than we will have room to store, closing in on a zettabyte.

jkwdoc writes "Vexed by Vista's hardware requirements and product activation issues, many have claimed on various boards that they plan to 'switch to Linux.' [H] Consumer spent 30 days using nothing but Ubuntu Linux to find out if this is truly a viable alternative for the consumer. Linux has indeed become much more than the 'Programmer's OS.'"