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The Courts

Video Professor Sues 100 Anonymous Critics 261

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the sco-business-model dept.
Techdirt is reporting that the Video Professor Company is suing 100 anonymous critics of their company. The Video Professor is known for their television ads hawking DVDs that teach you various skills like how to use your computer. Most of the complaints center around how their "free" product offering automagically signs you up for a subscription. Instead of addressing the concerns the Video Professor has decided to take the litigious route.
Software

Submission + - Skype blames Microsoft Patch Tuesday for Outage (skype.com)

Submitted by
brajesh
brajesh writes: "Skype has blamed its outage over the last week on Microsoft's Patch Tuesday. FTA — "The abnormally high number of restarts affected Skype's network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact." Previsously, it was speculated that Skype outage may have been caused by a Russian hack attempt. Further FTA- "The issue has now been identified explicitly within Skype. We can confirm categorically that no malicious activities were attributed or that our users' security was not, at any point, at risk." Butterfly effect?"
Power

Submission + - Benchmarking power efficient servers

Submitted by
modapi
modapi writes: "According to the EPA data centers — not including Google et. al, — are on track to double power consumption in the next five years. Forget about global warming, that is a lot of expensive power. Can we cut the power requirement? We could, if we had a way to reliably benchmark power consumption across architectures. Which is what JouleSort: A Balanced Energy-Efficiency Benchmark (PDF) by Suzanne Rivoire, Mehul A. Shah, Parthasarathy Ranganathan and Christos Kozyrakis tries to do. StorageMojo summarizes the key findings of the paper and contrasts it with the recent Google paper "Powering a warehouse-sized computer". The authors use the benchmark to design a power-efficient server and to consider the role of software, RAM and power supplies in power use."
The Internet

Submission + - Jimmy Wales on what's next for Wikimedia (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "The role Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, plays at the organization that supports the user generated and edited encyclopedia is changing as he shifts more of his time to activities in the wiki and open source communities, and shares time with his for-profit venture, Wikia. But despite a much busier schedule, Wales believes he'll be able to keep up with the new changes, and they'll give more people in the community a chance to step up and shine. The organization that collects the donations that support Wikipedia and other wiki projects, the Wikimedia Foundation, in fact, plans to double in numbers over the next year or so as it tries to build itself into a model organization similar to the International Committee of the Red Cross. http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/18365"
The Courts

Submission + - Lawsuit alleging false copyright claims 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Last month, Slashdot published an item, http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/14/17 19250&from=rss, about the growing problem of false copyright claims, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =787244#PaperDownload. Today, the Computer & Communications Industry Association, a trade organization representing Google, Microsoft, and other giants, has filed a consumer protection complaint with the FTC against Hollywood studios, the NFL, and major book publishers for including overly broad copyright notices on their products. The Wall Street Journal has the scoop: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118593806790484425 .html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Sci-Fi

Submission + - Mayor of San Diego Hates Comicon Attendees (pinkraygun.com)

Submitted by
Lisa Fary
Lisa Fary writes: "As we all know, 2007's Comicon International in San Diego ended this past weekend. Comicon is probably San Diego's largest, 4-day revenue generator, but that didn't stop the Mayor of San Diego, Jerry Sanders, from stating "We've put up the superheroes and now we're on to the people with actual talent." on the Cantore in the Morning show on 91X, the Monday morning AFTER the convention ended (presumably, when he thought that any of those pesky comics and sci-fi geeks were safely out of earshot). It's actually a pretty crappy thing to say about any group that brings such large amounts of hotel, restaurant, parking, transportation and retail revenue in to the city Can you imagine if something similar were said regarding almost any other group?"
Businesses

Submission + - Adblock plus users "accused" of stealing (mozilla.org) 1

Submitted by
derrida
derrida writes: "There is this Firefox Add-on called Adblock plus that promises (and delivers) removal of "all those ads and banners on the internet that often take longer to download than everything else on the page". And there is also an ongoing debate whether this is stealing or not. Quoting two different views:
"Do you have a devise that automatically blocks all commercials on television.[?] There's a difference between ignoring commercials and blocking them." and
"My a** it is [stealing]! If your going to argue I'm taking something from you by not waiting for your ads to load, I'm going to argue you are "stealing" bandwidth.".
Going one step further some web developers released scripts that blocks Adblock (watch the oxynoron!).
How is really slashdot going to react if Adblock plus is heavily used by its readers?"
NASA

Submission + - NASA building largest single-kernel Linux system

Submitted by wellingj
wellingj writes: NASA and SGI are building a new Linux super computer that contains a total of 1024 Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 processors, resulting in 13.1 TFLOPs. This computer would rank as the 64th fastest computer. As some may know, 1024 cores is the current max for SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) support. SGI has therefor developed the necessary modifications and submitted them upstream.
Privacy

Submission + - MPAA: Plagarism good, Piracy bad? 1

Submitted by BillGatesLoveChild
BillGatesLoveChild writes: The MPAA is fast to complain about their Intellectual Property being violated, but have no qualms about violating the Intellectual Property of others. The SMH reports another case of a Hollywood Studio plagarizing a film as their own. Adam Sandler's I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (2007) is a tale of two firemen who pretend to be gay to get domestic partner benefits. Curiously Paul Hogan's Strange Bedfellows (2004) made three years earlier, is also a tale of two firemen who pretend to be gay to get domestic partner benefits. Universal Studios issued a statement claiming "the similarities are purely coincidental". The producers of "Strange Bedfellows" are amused but not convinced.

This isn't the first time, with similar accusations being made against Spielberg's Julie Newmar (1995) vs Priscilla (1994) and Eddie Murphy's "Coming to America" which the courts found was stolen from writer Art Buchwald. Add to that "Hollywood Accounting" fleecing artists (The Forest Gump movie didn't pay the author a cent in royalties), the Record Industry doing the same and the MPAA itself caught yet unrepentant for pirating movies. Before The Senate rushes off to do their bidding, shouldn't the MPAA and RIAA be ordered to clean up their own houses?
Christmas Cheer

Submission + - Russians dive under North Pole

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Russia is to send a submarine under the Arctic, primarily for scientific exploration but also to enforce its claim on the area. Both the US and Russia are bickering over who owns the North Pole, perhaps because it's been theorised that a lot of oil might be found there.
Slashdot.org

Journal Journal: Firehose Interaction: Missing One Thing 2

Journal by blavallee
It would be nice if a firehose submission would automatically minimize after a vote is placed.

Hopefully this shows up in the firehose. But, it is not meant to be a story!
I like the new feel, its just missing that one little touch.

I tend to expand a submission, read the content, place my vote, then minimize the submission before moving on to the next one.
Media

Submission + - BBC Trust Want iPlayer Mac And Linux Support: OSC (digital-lifestyles.info)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The iPlayer is a big thing for the BBC. The BBC boss called it "as significant as the release of colour TV!" Sadly, when it goes on public beta on Friday, it will only work if you have Microsoft everything, ie7, XP, WMP 11 and uses their DRM. The BBC Trust (that oversees all that the BBC does) went as far as saying that it would insist on platform neutrality in a meeting with the Open Source Consortium (OSC) yesterday.

The BBC Trust say it MUST support Linux and Mac. Hurrah.
Education

Submission + - Wikipedia corrects Enciclopaedia Britannica (wikipedia.org)

Submitted by
javipas
javipas writes: "Despite all the controversy about Wikipedia's work model, no one can argue the potential of a project that has demonstrated the usefulness of the "wisdom of crowds" concept. And that wisdom has been able to detect several mistakes on one of the most relevant references on human knowledge: the Enciclopaedia Britannica. All kind of data has been spotted as wrong, such as the birthdate of Bill Clinton or the definition of NP problems in Mathematics."
Security

Submission + - Oracle IP address = 9th in world for ssh hacking? (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: As voted for by servers which run the "denyhosts" software to block ssh brute-force password attacks:

http://stats.denyhosts.net/stats.html

A box (or group of boxes behind a proxy) at Oracle UK seems to have hit the top 10 of machines on the Internet for launching attacks on boxes which run SSH server software...

This would imply that not only has a computer (or multiple computers) at Oracle UK been compromised without them noticing, but the new owners have then spent the last 3 months using Oracle's bandwidth to hack other boxes elsewhere on the net.

http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net/

Not so hot for a company which "has built a reputation for delivering many of the industry's most secure solutions"

http://www.oracle.com/security/security-solutions. html
Communications

Submission + - Internet radio receives 11th hour reprieve (wired.com)

Submitted by
zerocool^
zerocool^ writes: "As I was only a few minutes into my first ever internet radio broadcast — and knowing that it might very well be my last — someone linked this story in IRC, letting us know that Internet Radio has been saved, or at least given a little breathing room. From the story: "The SoundExchange executive [Jon Simson, executive director] promised — in front of Congress — that SoundExchange will not enforce the new royalty rates. Webcasters will stay online, as new rates are hammered out." There is still more work to do — get caught up, call your representatives to let them know you support net radio, and stay tuned — literally and figuratively — for more info."

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