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Censorship

Technical Specs Released For Aussie Net Filtering 231

Posted by timothy
from the for-a-limited-time-only dept.
smallkathryn writes "Technical specifications have just been released for the Australian net filtering trial. The trial, which aims to prove that ISP-level filtering is a viable way to stop 'unwanted content' from reaching users, will go live on 24 December. The trial will involve ISPs choosing a commercially available hardware filter from an internet content filter (ICF) vendor, adding it to their networks, then loading the blacklist of unwanted sites. Still no indication of how peer-to-peer information will be addressed."
Patents

Microsoft's Internal Advice About Patents 100

Posted by timothy
from the had-that-idea-first dept.
BigPoppaT writes "Eric Brechner writes a best practices blog called Hard Code for Microsoft under the name I.M. Wright. His most recent post sounds like an endorsement of open source development (and does end with a call for Microsoft developers to participate in the shared source community). But even better is his advice regarding patents: 'When using existing libraries, services, tools, and methods from outside Microsoft, we must be respectful of licenses, copyrights, and patents. Generally, you want to carefully research licenses and copyrights (your contact in Legal and Corporate Affairs can help), and never search, view, or speculate about patents. I was confused by this guidance till I wrote and reviewed one of my own patents. The legal claims section--the only section that counts--was indecipherable by anyone but a patent attorney. Ignorance is bliss and strongly recommended when it comes to patents.' Interesting advice from inside Microsoft. I wonder if Ballmer would agree that ignorance should be 'strongly recommended when it comes to patents'?"
PHP

PHP Gets Namespace Separators, With a Twist 523

Posted by Soulskill
from the or-maybe-more-of-a-slant dept.
jeevesbond writes "PHP is finally getting support for namespaces. However, after a couple hours of conversation, the developers picked '\' as the separator, instead of the more popular '::'. Fredrik Holmström points out some problems with this approach. The criteria for selection were ease of typing and parsing, how hard it was to make a typo, IDE compatibility, and the number of characters."

If at first you don't succeed, you're doing about average. -- Leonard Levinson

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