Virgil Tibbs - Slashdot User

Submission + - Help me fight the swiss dmca. (no-dmca.ch)

Submitted by

pyalot

on Sunday December 02, 2007 @12:31PM

pyalot writes: "The swiss goverment has passed a law that would make it impossible to cirvumvent effective copy protection measures. I have created a page to inform and organize a resistance against this law. If we collect 50'000 signatures until the 24th of January however, we can force a national vote on this law. Help me in any way that you can fight this law. I was first made aware of this two days ago by this article on slashdot."

Submission + - UK:TV rivals form on-demand service (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by

Ajehals

on Tuesday November 27, 2007 @01:28PM

Ajehals writes: "BBC Worldwide (a commercial, but wholly owned subsidiary of the BBC), ITV and Channel 4 plan to launch a joint web based TV on-demand service, which will bring together programming from the three major UK terrestrial broadcasters in one place. There is no indication at this point as to whether the service will be cross platform, or what kind, if any DRM solution will be in place to 'protect' content but it has been noted that this service will not replace the current offerings from any of the companies involved. If the service is tied to Microsoft's Windows Operating system it is likely to face opposition from groups currently opposed to certain elements of the planned BBC iPlayer ."

Submission + - Why is the iPlayer a multi million pound disaster? (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by AnotherDaveB on Friday November 23, 2007 @04:22AM

AnotherDaveB writes: The story of the BBC's iPlayer is of a multi-million pound failure that took years to complete, and was designed for a world that never arrived. More was spent on the project than many Silicon Valley startups ever burn through, but only now can we begin to piece together how this disaster unfolded.

Submission + - FSF Releases New License for Web Services (fsf.org) 1

Submitted by

mako

on Monday November 19, 2007 @05:05PM

mako writes: "The Free Software Foundation has released the Affero General Public license version 3. The license is essentially the GPLv3 with an added clause that requires that source code be distributed to users that interact with the application over a network. The license effectively extends copyright to web applications. The new AGPL will have important effects for companies that, under the GPL, have no obligation to distribute changes to users on the web. This release makes adds the license to the stable of official FSF licenses and is compatible with the GPLv3."

Submission + - Government ready to legislate on file-sharing (contactmusic.com)

Submitted by

Virgil Tibbs

on Thursday October 25, 2007 @03:47PM

Virgil Tibbs writes: "The UK government is prepared to legislate to stop the illegal file sharing of copyrighted content, a minister has told the BBC.
Speaking to [BBC] Radio 4, Labour Politician Lord Triesman, the parliamentary Under Secretary for Innovation, Universities and Skills, said that the [British] government was not prepared to tolerate "intellectual property theft".
When pressed on how file sharing might be tackled, Triesman insisted that the technology existed to locate and track file sharers, and to oblige ISPs to stop them.
"Where people have registered music as an intellectual property I believe we will be able to match data banks of that music to music going out and being exchanged on the net,"
In July the Conservative leader David Cameron made a speech in which he reasoned that, since ISPs were able to monitor their traffic for illegal material such as child pornography, there was no reason why they could not do the same for copyrighted material.
However Internet Services Providers' Association (ISPA) claims that ISPs cannot monitor or record the type of information passed over their network."

Submission + - Coupon Hacker sued for breaching DMCA (wired.com)

Submitted by

Virgil Tibbs

on Monday August 20, 2007 @07:23AM

Virgil Tibbs writes: "With a strange new twist, the DMCA is being used to combat coupon hacker, John Stottlemire
He is alleged to have posted instructions that allowed shoppers to circumvent copy protection on downloadable, printable coupons and is now on the receiving end of a lawsuit from Coupons Inc. However he claims he is not at odds with the DMCA:

"All I did was erase files or registry keys," he says. "Nothing was hacked. Nothing was decoded that was any way, shape or form in the way the DMCA was written."
The case continues..."

Submission + - Netflix Gets Hacked (tvsquad.com)

Submitted by

Dragontologist

on Tuesday August 07, 2007 @05:28PM

Dragontologist writes: "In an interestingly round-about way, a few hackers have posted publicly about how to get around the $17/month fee for Netflix streaming video. It's not particularly easy, you only get 17 hours of video a month, and you can't copy it onto your iPod (not without another hack, anyway), but it's free (assuming you don't mind the whole illegal thing). All I want to know is, who would think to exploit Windows Media Player?"

Submission + - BBC trust to listen to OSC about iPlayer (digital-lifestyles.info)

Submitted by

Virgil Tibbs

on Friday July 13, 2007 @09:44PM

Virgil Tibbs writes: "With the Launch of the BBC's iPlayer imminent, the BBC trust has agreed to hear the Open Source Consortium concerns regarding the BBC iPlayer's tie in with Microsoft's software. The move by the BBC to use Windows Media DRM & their apparent lack of commitment towards other platforms has caused outrage in many circles and prompted several online petitions."

Submission + - AjaxLife, Second Life-via-Web hack, goes BSD (blogs.com)

Submitted by

wjamesau

on Friday July 13, 2007 @08:35PM

wjamesau writes: "Last week, a 15 year old British girl named Katharine Berry created AjaxLife, a groundbreaking hack that lets you access some functions of Second Life via the Web. (This is possible because Linden Lab open sourced their client viewer in January.) This week, she's released the source code under a limited BSD license. Up to now, accessing SL requires a separate client download and a powerful graphics card; now, things are likely to get very interesting very fast."

Submission + - Media Defender p2p.net piracy sting foiled

Submitted by thefickler on Friday July 13, 2007 @06:05PM

thefickler writes: Media Defender has been busted registering P2P.net; rendering its undoubtedly expensive domain name useless.

Submission + - "Search warrants not needed to monitor interne (computerworld.com)

Submitted by

Freedom Party

on Friday July 13, 2007 @05:00PM

Freedom Party writes: ""July 09, 2007 (Computerworld) — A federal appeals court has ruled that the government does not need a search warrant to monitor a suspect's e-mail or Internet activity to determine the addresses of e-mails sent by the suspect or the Web pages he is visiting." Another win for the War on Privacy. Yee-haw. :("

Submission + - Sony sues developers of their CD rootkit

Submitted by angus_rg on Friday July 13, 2007 @04:53PM

angus_rg writes: Sony BMG Music Entertainment is now claiming that their CD rootkit was defective, and is now suing the company that developed it. Apparently, this defect cost the record company millions of dollars for something they did not intend, and they feel $12,000,000 will ease the burn. Call me crazy, but it seemed like it worked the way it was intended.

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

Submitted by on Friday July 13, 2007 @04:41PM

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

Submission + - Easter Eggs for Shaun Inman's Mint 2 (typpz.com)

Submitted by

Psy2k

on Saturday June 09, 2007 @05:26AM

Psy2k writes: "Here are some type combinations that will drive your Mint 2 installation to do weird things: Appear the Mintman (someone like Superman...) and show a really strange "approved" stamp! Of course these are not bugs, they are Easter Eggs, that Shaun himself put into Mint for fun. Here is a quote from the original article:

# Easter Egg 1: After you log in, type b a and look on your bottom right corner in your mint page!

# Easter Egg 2: If you want to see the Mintman, log in and type R L Y B

"

Submission + - TorrentSpy ordered to become MPAA Spy (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09, 2007 @05:05AM

An anonymous reader writes: "TorrentSpy — one of the web's most famous BitTorrent sites was told by federal judge Jacqueline Chooljian in the Central District of California that despite the site's privacy policy which states they will never monitor their visitors without consent, they must start creating logs detailing their user's activities. Understandably, this is a worrying move by the court — even more so when one considers these logs must then be turned over to the MPAA."

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