topical_surfactant - Slashdot User

Submission + - iTunes DRM called out by France and Germany

Submitted by

Aryabhata

on Monday January 22, 2007 @06:44PM

Aryabhata writes: "Apple is being challenged once again to open up its DRM by consumer groups in Europe. This time, Germany and France have joined the slowly-growing number of countries who are asking Apple to allow the protected songs purchased from the iTunes Store to be played on other music players besides the iPod."

Submission + - Lobbying reform bill not what it seemed

Submitted by

The Mysterious X

on Monday January 22, 2007 @06:07PM

The Mysterious X writes: "Remember the flurry last week over Senate Bill S. 1, which had the section regarding grassroots campaigning taken out?
Well, The Register is carrying a column, that claims that not all was what it seemed with the campaign against the bill. According to the article, the bill was not as nefarious as claimed, it would have only applied to those paid more than $25,000 per quarter, had a readership of 500 or more, and "if they spent all of their time encouraging the general public to contact an executive or legislative official over a matter of public policy."
The article also accuses the person who ran the campaign site of "spreading the Fear among the entire blogosphere."
The question is: has the article taken a little poetic license, or has the internet community been used as a tool in someone's political agenda?"

Submission + - Vista has "high impact issues" - Microsoft

Submitted by

EggsAndSausage

on Monday January 22, 2007 @05:18PM

EggsAndSausage writes: "Microsoft has admitted — in a roundabout way — that Vista has "high impact issues". It has put out a call for technical testers to participate in testing of Service Pack 1, due out later this year, which will address "regressions from Windows Vista and Windows XP, security, deployment blockers and other high impact issues."

It's hard to know whether to be reassured that Service Pack 1 is coming, and thus that there's now a sensible timeframe for considering deployment of Vista within businesses, OR to be alarmed that Microsoft is unleashing an OS on the world with "high impact issues" remaining in it.

In other news there's a battle raging over the top 10 reasons to get / not to get Vista. (And a rebuttal.)"

Submission + - Microsoft being anti-competitive with PatchGuard?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22, 2007 @05:09PM

An anonymous reader writes: While Microsoft was telling security companies that there was no way it could change its PatchGuard kernel protection to make their products work, it had already quietly released a hotfix that changed PatchGuard to make Virtual Server 2005 work with AMD's hardware. This from Skywing, who has written a pretty interesting paper on subverting PatchGuard. Skywing says, "despite Microsoft's statements that no exceptions would be made for PatchGuard, they have had to make adjustments at least once for their own code to run on PatchGuard. The conspiracy theorists among you might wonder whether Microsoft would be so gracious as to make such exemptions for legitimate uses of techniques blocked by PatchGuard for third party software with similar needs as Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, given their pointed statements to the contrary."

Submission + - Microsoft pays blogger to Wikipedia on OOXML

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Monday January 22, 2007 @04:07PM

David Gerard writes: "Rick Jeliffe from O'Reilly Media has had an offer from Microsoft: to be paid to edit articles on OOXML. As a Wikipedia editor and press contact, I found this interesting — the community is very negative about people being paid to edit Wikipedia, but articles on open source and free software are often a wasteland of advocacy from people who don't know or care about Neutral Point Of View — [[Internet Explorer]] is carefully written, but [[Mozilla Firefox]], [[OpenOffice.org]] (try saying it's fat and slow) and [[Linux]] seem IMO to suffer a surfeit of advocates. Slashdot readers who are Wikipedia editors are invited to look over all our software articles with attention to Neutral Point Of View ..."

Submission + - Big Business Wants Bush to Go Green

Submitted by Nitack on Monday January 22, 2007 @04:03PM

Nitack writes: CEOs of ten major industrial corporations call for Bush to address global warming in the State of the Union. Climate change is finally an issue that has galvanized those would be opponents such as BP, DuPont, and others. Even utility giant PG&E is on board.

Submission + - Proving Creative Commons Licensing Of A Work

Submitted by Q7U on Monday January 22, 2007 @03:56PM

Q7U writes: I recently posted a few Creative Commons licensed photographs from Flickr on one of my websites. I later noticed that one of the photographers had retroactively switched all of his photos from the Creative Commons license to a "All Right Reserved" notice. When I saw this I went ahead and removed his photo (even though I understand that CC licenses are perpetual unless violated) but this begs the question:

How does one prove one obtained a work under a Creative Commons license should there ever be a dispute between a creator and the licensee? Is a simple screenshot of the webpage where it was offered proof enough? Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.

Submission + - Caught in the Web: Top 10 Internet Scandals of All

Submitted by

Tiny Tuba

on Monday January 22, 2007 @03:52PM

Tiny Tuba writes: "The Web is a great way to deliver information, but it is also a great way to expose, spread, or jump-start a scandal. In this article, Dan Tynan looks back at some infamous scandals many of us have probably forgotten. It includes greats like how The Drudge Report surfaced the Monica Lewinksy scandal, and how AOL out-ed Senior Chief Petty Officer Timothy R. McVeigh.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,128554/article.h tml"

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