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I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Italian prosecutors are filing criminal charges against four Google executives over a submission to Google Video depicting a kid with Downs syndrome being taunted by his peers, on the grounds that it violates the child's privacy and is defamatory. The four executives charged were, at the time of the incident, the chairman of Google Italy, a Google Italy board member, the executive responsible for the European privacy policy, and the head of Google Video in Europe. A Google spokesman said that Google had complied fully with the police investigation and they do not believe themselves to be responsible for user submissions, only for taking such videos down once they're reported. The four kids who filmed the video also face criminal prosecution. It would be interesting to compare the verdicts."
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4397511.ece

An anonymous reader writes "Apparently the Italian government seems to think that it's Google's fault that a video showing some kids taunting and hitting a disabled boy was viewable on the internet recently. Italian prosecutors are looking to charge four Google execs with criminal charges, despite the fact that the video was merely posted on Google, and was taken down as soon as Google was made aware of it. Also, the kids in the video have already been charged in a separate lawsuit."
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080725/0010191788.shtml

Aglassis writes "The US Senate and House recently passed a $50 billion global health initiative that will spend $41 billion for AIDS relief, $5 billion for malaria relief, and $4 billion for tuberculosis relief in high risk locations around the world. This bill is an expansion of the $15 billion President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) that was authorized in 2003. Supporters of this bill have noted that it may save 5 to 7 million lives and train 140,000 new health care workers in the affected areas. Senators John Kerry and Gordon Smith also succeeded in removing HIV restrictions in the Immigration and Nationality Act which will allow HIV positive individuals to travel to the United States. An amendment to name the bill for the recently deceased Senator Jesse Helms was also defeated with the final name being the 'Tom Lantos and Henry J. Hyde Global Leadership Against HIV/Aids, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Reauthorization Act of 2008.' President Bush, an initiator of the original PEPFAR plan and a strong supporter of its reauthorization, is expected to sign the bill which has been widely applauded by human rights and AIDS advocacy organizations around the world."

If you're like me, your favorite part of the bar is the layer of cigarette stench that coats the walls, seats, air and eventually your clothing. It seems the Dutch agree. Rain Showtechniek, a Dutch company that specializes in stage effects, has created a machine that reproduces that wonderful bar smell we all love. "There is a need for a scent to mask the sweat and other unpleasant smells like stale beer. People find that smells such as Mocha coffee, Havana cigars or cigarettes can be about good moods and different ideas of living well" said Erwin van den Bergh, a spokesman for the company. The machines come in various sizes and prices, ranging from the giant £3500 model for exhibition halls to the smaller cafés machines, priced at £440.

Dave writes in with an interesting story suggesting that Major League Soccer is potentially violating the DMCA by issuing a takedown of footage for which it does not own the copyright. The details are a little confusing, and some parts aren't entirely clear -- but from the account at the link, two Major League Soccer teams participated in a separate tournament, called the U.S. Open Cup. The event was not televised at all, despite efforts among fans to provide a streaming webcast. Apparently, at the soccer match, a fight broke out, and the local news covered it, using footage from the game. Following this, some bloggers posted the news stations' story about the fight on YouTube -- at which point MLS sent a DMCA takedown notice. The question is whether or not MLS has copyright over the footage (MLS's trademarks are meaningless here, as the DMCA only refers to copyright).

What is not clear is who took the footage. Considering that the game was not televised and the event itself was not an MLS event, it's difficult to believe that it's MLS's footage, and thus, MLS wouldn't hold the copyright over it. However, even if it is MLS coverage, the fact that it was a newsworthy event, and the footage was used in a news report, it would suggest that this particular snippet was actually fair use as used in commenting on it for news purposes. And, if anything, the copyright on the overall clip of the newscast belonged not to MLS, but to the news company. Overall, it seems quite likely that this attempt to censor the clip from YouTube was illegal, as MLS is probably asserting copyright over content for which it does not hold the copyright. But, these days, that's just all in a day's work of misusing the DMCA.

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http://techdirt.com/articles/20080714/1625241674.shtml

Aglassis writes "The US Senate recently passed a $50 billion global health initiative that will spend $41 billion for AIDS relief, $5 billion for malaria relief, and $4 billion for tuberculosis relief in high risk locations around the world. This bill is an expansion of the $15 billion President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) that was authorized in 2003. Senators John Kerry and Gordon Smith also succeeded in removing HIV restrictions in the Immigration and Nationality Act which will allow HIV positive individuals to travel to and from the United States and to attain citizenship. An amendment to name the bill for the recently deceased Senator Jesse Helms was also defeated."

The Oshkosh AirVenture 08 might not otherwise qualify for "news for nerds" — if it wasn't for the debut of the Rocket Racing League, which is exactly what it sounds like: NASCAR 1000m above ground in rocket-propelled airplanes. Created by X-prize founder/CEO Peter Diamandis, this is "the next evolution of racing" (at least according to the promo video, which is definitely worth watching)...
http://www.rocketracingleague.com/

Here's a list of government problems, mostly anti-trust issues and corporate welfare:

• Allowing anti-comptitive practices that consolidated automobile making into three companies.
• Allowing GM to kill streetcars and other electric vehicles.
• Protecting their favorite companies from imports like the VW Bug, and later Japanese economy cars.
• Allowing GM to kill modest safety improvements at Ford
• Bailing out bankrupt companies in the late 70s and 80s.

Regulation that makes sense:

• Safety standards as measured by crash tests
• Emissions controls as measured by calibrated machinery at break tag stations
• Fuel economy standards.

The contnued availability of cheap cars from Japan show that the technology to do all of the above has been around for more than 30 years and it's not terribly expansive. Instead of promoting such things, government has been busy supporting companies that rip us all off. That's a crime.

An anonymous reader writes "The first federal marijuana decriminalization bill in 25 years was just introduced in Congress. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) and Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) introduced H.R. 5843, the "Personal Use of Marijuana by Responsible Adults Act of 2008," which would decriminalize possession of marijuana for personal use."
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:h5843:

theframeproblem writes "Paulette Cooper, one of the early critics of Scientology — the first to publish a book against the cult, was framed for bomb threats and attempted to have incarcerated in a mental institution by the cult. She speaks of a variety of acts of harassment by the cult unto her, including serious invasion of her personal life, and of course the framing not to mention speculation of attempted murder."
http://theframeproblem.wordpress.com/2008/04/22/paulette-coopers-sworn-testimony/

Professor Edward N. Lorenz who discovered in 1961 that subtle changes in the initial conditions of a weather simulation program could cause very large differences in its results died of cancer Wednesday at the age of 90. The contributions of the father of chaos theory who coined the term 'the butterfly effect' and also discovered the Lorenz Attractor are best summarized by the wording of the Kyoto Prize in 1991 which noted that his discovery of chaos theory 'profoundly influenced a wide range of basic sciences and brought about one of the most dramatic changes in mankind's view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton'.

From the NyTimes, Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity of military analysts on the major networks, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration's wartime performance. ( http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/washington/20generals.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin ) The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air. several dozen of the military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks. Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access. So much for objectivity in the media.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/washington/20generals.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

dinotrac writes "Somebody special is coming over for dinner. You're not a chef, but you can cook well enough to get by, so you grab your best cookbook and get to work.

That's the idea behind O'Reilly's Linux Networking Cookbook, by Carla Schroder. Carla has gathered a group of networking recipes that a reasonably Linux-savvy reader can use to address network needs like a seasoned sysadmin. If you want to find out how to hook your Linux workstation to a LAN, get another book. If you are reasonably comfortable with Linux, need to set up an LDAP server, configure single sign-on with Samba for a mixed Linux/Windows LAN, set up a VPN, or troubleshoot network problems without some uppity online geek telling you to RTFM, this book may be what you're looking for.

One of the great strengths and weaknesses of Linux is that everything you could possibly need to know is already on your computer in the form of man pages, or out on the internet in newsgroups, forums, or a massive autumn's leaf-pile of how-tos. Finding what you need in a form that you can use is sometimes a bigger problem than the problem you're trying to solve.

The Linux Networking Cookbook improves on that situation in a couple of ways. First is the author herself. Carla is an experienced System Administrator and a good technical writer. She was one of the early Linuxchix, and has spent years mentoring and otherwise helping new and experienced Linux folk through their assorted dilemmas. The result is a friendly and direct, information-packed and ego-free writing style. Unlike the typical how-to that provides a list of steps that have worked for the author, Carla's discussions fill in the blanks and tell you why she takes the steps that she does.

The Cookbook is organized into an introduction followed by 18 chapters that are complete stand-alone solutions to specific problems.

The obligatory introduction is short and is not required by any of the solutions in the book, but it's worth reading. Its' eleven pages read quickly, but contain, among other things, a good explanation of the difference between bandwidth and latency and a decent overview of the whys and whens of linux-based computers as routers versus mid-range and high-end commercial routers.

Each chapter begins with an introduction of the overall topic, Routing with Linux, for example, followed by a series of short recipes organized as problem-solution-discussion. This format is convenient for diving right into work and takes advantage Carla's mentoring talents.

One problem facing any writer of Linux books is the sheer number of Linux distributions, many of which have their own distinct ways of doing things. The Linux Networking Cookbook provides solutions for both Debian and Fedora Linux. It's an excellent choice when you consider that most Linuxes derive from one of those two bases, including all of the *buntus, Knoppix, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, CentOS, and many more. The recipes employ generic tools, which makes them easier to transport across distributions, even the SuSEs, which are based on neither Debian nor Red Hat.

For example, before obtaining The Cookbook, I needed to create a self-signed SSL certificate for a PostgreSQL server on an Ubuntu server. I'd done it a few times, but not enough to remember, so I went off to the net. The Ubuntu-themed How-To I found relied on a script called apache2-ssl-certificate. An apache script didn't bother me because I could move the pieces when I was done, or just break open the script and make it do what I wanted done. Ubuntu Feisty, however, had managed to leave the script out of the distribution, so I had to go back to the net to find an alternative approach.

Had I used The Cookboock, my task would have been simpler, though not quite as easy as it should be. Inexplicably for a book that includes network security and SSL-based VPNs, there is no entry for SSL Certificate in the index. A browse through the table of contents turns up a couple of recipes for Creating SSL-Keys for a Syslog-ng Server: one for Debian and one for Fedora. Fortunately, the Table of Contents is short and can be browsed completely in seconds, because those recipes are in the Troubleshooting Networks chapter, which is not intuitively obvious. They appear in that chapter because it contains the recipes for network monitoring, which includes installation of Syslog-ng.

The recipe itself is suitably generic, using the CA.sh script, which is part of openssl, and openssl itself to generate keys and certificates. A quick check of my Ubuntu servers, my Fedora VPS server, and my OpenSuSE workstation found CA.sh on all of them.

My OpenSuSE machine did throw one small curve:

CA.sh on my openSUSE box was located in /usr/lib/ssl/misc, as on the other boxes. However, the book tells us that CA.sh, and a moderatley competent Linux user is likely to know that rpm -ql openssl will list all of the files in the openssl package or that rpm-ql openssl | grep CA.sh will spit out the location of the script.

Given the variety of Linux distributions, it is hard to imagine a better approach to take.

The Glossary of Networking Terms in Appendix B deserves special mention. Each term is explained in plain but precise language that goes beyond the cursory definitions so common in glossaries. For example, the explanation for WEP notes that it is very weak protection and urges the reader to use WPA/WPA2 instead.

Sometimes, the extra information can soften a definition's focus, but, overall, the glossary is an outstanding tool for anyone who doesn't spend his or her time knee-deep in subnet definitions, routers, and tcp dumps.

The same is true of the book.

As is usual for O'Reilly, updates, errata, and scripts from the book are available on the web.
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