701143
submission
yuna49 writes:
Last fall, MIT student Star Simpson was arrested at gunpoint when she wore a breadboard with blinking LEDs to Boston's Logan Airport. Today she was sentenced to a year of probation for "disorderly conduct" and required to spend fifty hours in community service. The more serious, and more controversial, charge of displaying a "hoax device" was dropped by the prosecution. I'm disappointed but not surprised that the hoax-device charge was not prosecuted because the premise on which the charge was based raises serious freedom of expression issues that now won't be heard in a court of law.
675738
submission
yuna49 writes:
Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles brought an indictment this week against a woman in Missouri for alleged cyberbullying. (Text of indictment here) The indictment includes a novel extension of the laws prohibiting hacking attempts against so-called "protected" computers, defined as any computer used in interstate commerce. The prosecutors argue that registering falsely as a teen-aged boy on MySpace and then using the service to harass a teen-aged girl constitutes accessing a protected computer to further a "tortious act." (The girl in question later committed suicide, but the local prosecutors in Missouri chose not to indict anyone in the case because they felt that no state laws were broken.)
While the case itself is certainly tragic, it does raise important questions about freedom of speech and protection of anonymity. Should it be a Federal crime to enter false information at sites like MySpace if you agree to Terms of Service which forbid such falsehoods? Doesn't this approach extend Federal protections to what are fundamentally private contracts between website operators and their users?
554266
submission
yuna49 writes:
Adam Liptak of the New York Times reports today about the plight of a Spanish tour operator whose domain names have been embargoed by eNom after they discovered the tour operator's name on a US Treasury blacklist. It turns out he packages tours to Cuba largely for European tourists who can legally travel there, unlike Americans. The article cites "a press release issued in December 2004, almost three years before eNom acted. It said Mr. Marshall's company had helped Americans evade restrictions on travel to Cuba and was 'a generator of resources that the Cuban regime uses to oppress its people.' It added that American companies must not only stop doing business with the company but also freeze its assets, meaning that eNom did exactly what it was legally required to do."
The only part of the operator's business in the United States is his domain name registration; all other aspects of his business lie outside the United States.
548332
submission
yuna49 writes:
ars technica writer Jacqui Cheng reports that Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society will join with MySpace, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! in an effort to develop tools to protect the safety of children using the Internet. One focus will be on methods for age verification. Is age verification as hopeless a task as it seems to this observer, or can the combined technological wisdom of Slashdot suggest some solutions for the general problem of identifying who's an adult and who's a child on the Internet? Even if we could make this distinction reliably, would that help us make children "safer?" Is there really anything this coalition of worthies can do, or are they just trying to reduce the pressures they're getting from the "think-of-the-children" groups?
322431
submission
yuna49 writes:
The New York Times reports today that both Houses of Congress are considering legislation to extend the temporary eavesdropping authority granted to the NSA last August. The version of the bill circulating in the Senate currently includes the White House's proposal that the telecommunications companies that cooperated in the wiretapping be granted immunity from prosecution for these actions both in the future, and more importantly, retroactively as well.
220369
submission
yuna49 writes:
Various people are reporting that the MS07-040 patch for .NET released on Tuesday can cause a variety of seemingly unrelated problems. According to the SANS Internet Storm Center "the reports we got so far seem not to lead to any specific thing that happens in many cases, just various things going haywire." Some commentators on The Register's report of this story indicate that the patch failed to install at all, while others report things like the mouse suddenly failing to work or long periods of hard drive thrashing. In some cases a hard reboot seems to fix the problem, but other reports suggest that a reinstallation of the .NET framework itself is required. The problems may be related to the MSCORSVW.EXE process which recompiles all the .NET assemblies when the patch is downloaded. While the recompilations are supposed to run as a background task, in some instances the recompilation will drive the processor to 100% usage.
170467
submission
yuna49 writes:
Declan McCullagh reports that US Attorney General Gonzales announced this week that the Bush Administration will support the proposed "Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007." Among other draconian features, the Act would make "attempting to infringe copyright" a act punishable by up to ten years in prison. Jail time features predominantly in this act including life imprisonment for "anyone using counterfeit products who 'recklessly causes or attempts to cause death....' Justice Department officials gave the example of a hospital using pirated software instead of paying for it." Even more bizarre is a provision that would require the Department of Homeland Security to alert the Recording Industry Association of America if they discover an attempt to import CDs with "unauthorized fixations of the sounds, or sounds and images, of a live musical performance." Only the RIAA enjoys this privileged status; even the Motion Picture Association of America wouldn't qualify.
170193
submission
yuna49 writes:
eWeek reports that "some of the changes in the upcoming release of Windows Server 2008 are a response to features and performance advantages that have made Linux an attractive option to Microsoft customers." The article cites Linux's smaller "surface area," which appears to mean having fewer exposed services and open ports. In addition, it appears that Windows Server 2008 will run without a GUI, as do many Linux servers now. Other areas where Microsoft is playing catch-up include clustering and web-serving.
However Linux, with Xen, appears to be less of a threat in the virtualization arena. According to the general manager of Windows server division, "We can tell which hypervisor they are running on and to be honest, I see zero on Linux. We see VMware rather than Xen because it's not really out there in production versions of Red Hat and SUSE. But the long-term issue around virtualization will be who had the best management tools."
162653
submission
yuna49 writes:
Mark Shuttleworth told eWeek in a May 3rd interview that Dell will not include open-source software such as Wine, which lets users run Windows programs on Linux, with the PCs it plans to bundle with Ubuntu Linux. "I do not want to position Ubuntu and Linux as a cheap alternative to Windows," Shuttleworth said in an interview with eWEEK following the May 1 announcement that Dell plans to preload Ubuntu on some consumer machines. Does that mean Wine won't even be listed in the package manager?
116273
submission
yuna49 writes:
Last Thursday, the US Federal Communications Commission announced a "Notice of Inquiry" (warning: pdf) into "the behavior of broadband market participants, including:
- How broadband providers are managing Internet traffic on their networks today
- Whether providers charge different prices for different speeds or capacities of service
- Whether our policies should distinguish between content providers that charge end users for access to content and those that do not
- How consumers are affected by these practices."
According to this article at eWeek, the study is targeted at whether broadband providers are treating some content providers more favorably than others. Distinctly absent is any discussion about port filtering or other restrictions on Internet usage.
In published statements, the two Democrats on the Commission pressed for a "Notice of Rulemaking" rather than a "Notice of Inquiry" arguing that the Commission should declare a policy of non-discrimination now rather than waiting months or years for another study to be conducted. The Republican majority ignored these arguments and voted for an Inquiry to which the Democrats concurred.
95804
submission
yuna49 writes:
Thieves recently stole a laptop belonging to the estranged wife of a computer programmer in Minnesota. Luckily the husband had installed SETI@Home on the machine. He saw the computer appear on the SETI site three times in a week and gave the IP address to the authorities. This lead to the recovery of the laptop and a reconciliation between the estranged couple.
60066
submission
yuna49 writes:
eWeek reports that zero-day exploits for Vista are currently on sale for $50,000. The article as a whole gives some insight into the relative value of different types of exploits. Malware designed to create botnets fetches about $5,000. Account credentials for sites like PayPal or eBay are so widely available that they command only $7 apiece.
6431
submission
yuna49 writes:
In a report available from http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/ three Princeton computer scientists report on a variety of proof-of-concept attacks against the Diebold Accuvote-TS machine. They show that its possible to install malware on the machine that will surrepitiously switch votes among candidates and leave no trace of its operation. They further show how this malware could be spread across machines using a boot-sector virus. Finally they demonstrate how the machine is vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks which could be used to restrict access to the polls in selected locations.
