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In other words, except for YOUR guys eh? Sure, completely benevolent and not self serving advice there...

In an Arizona case against a defendant who has no legal representation, Atlantic v. Howell, the RIAA is now arguing — contrary to its lawyers' statements to the United States Supreme Court in 2005 MGM v. Grokster — that the defendant's ripping of personal MP3 copies onto his computer is a copyright infringement. At page 15 of its brief (pdf) it states the following: "It is undisputed that Defendant possessed unauthorized copies....Virtually all of the sound recordings .... are in the ".mp3" format for his and his wife's use.....Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs' recordings into the compressed .mp3 format and they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the authorized copies...."
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2007/12/riaa-files-supplemental-brief-in.html

Open Source IT writes "According to a presentation at Ubuntu Live 2007, Dell is working on getting better ATI drivers for Linux for use in its Linux offerings. While it is not known whether the end product will end up as open source, with big businesses like Google and Dell now behind the push for better Linux graphics drivers, hopefully ATI will make the smart business decision and give customers what they want."

The folks at XFire passed on a link to their recent interview with the people at Harmonix. Now working on hit of E3, Rock Band, the company's senior designer at Harmonix, Community Developer, and Associate Producer answered questions from the XFire audience about the upcoming title. "shrouded: Can you tell us about the challenges of designing the drumset? ... Answer: The hardest part was satisfying all of the stuff we wanted - we're a company of musicians, including a sizeable chunk of drummers. I think we spent at least half a year making sure that the pedal felt almost exactly like a real drum pedal, and not just some switch. We also had a bunch of non-negotiable things that we had to get in, like using real drumsticks. I could go on forever, but the basic summary is that from day 1 we wanted this to be as close to an electronic kit as possible, with as few compromises as possible."

jammag writes "In this article, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes points out why he keeps giving money to Microsoft and Apple despite the clear advantages of Linux: the scary legalese dialogs you have to click through to install codecs for common multimedia formats. Quoting: 'Despite strong points that go far beyond price, Linux falls short when it comes to legally supporting file formats such as MP3, WMA/WMV and DVDs.' He talks about using Ubuntu and booting up Totem Movie Player, only to be confronted with a burst of legalese about what a hardened criminal he'll be if he uses Totem without a license. This problem is 'a deal breaker' for him."

athloi writes "Detailed schematics of a military detainee holding facility in southern Iraq, geographical surveys and aerial photographs of two military airfields outside Baghdad and plans for a new fuel farm at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan are among the items accidentally left online by government agencies and contractors."

fatduck sends us a brief note from New Scientist about the overwhelming passage in the US House of Representatives of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. As written, the bill would prohibit insurance companies from charging higher rates, and employers from discriminating in hiring, based on the results of genetic tests. A Boston Globe editorial notes that the bill has been held up in the Senate by the action of a single senator, who has an (outdated) objection based on his anti-abortion stance. President Bush has said he will sign the bill if it reaches his desk.

twofish writes "In a somewhat hysterical letter Microsoft has accused IBM of trying to block its attempts to fast-track approval of its XML Office file formats as an international standard. IBM's goal is to deny customers choice by only promoting OpenDocument Format (ODF) as an international standard while also advancing Lotus Notes, Microsoft claimed.

"This campaign to stop even the consideration of Open XML in ISO/IEC JTC1 is a blatant attempt to use the standards process to limit choice in the market place for ulterior commercial motives — without regard for the negative impact on consumer choice and technological innovation," Microsoft says."

gribbler writes "This week a Vancouver based company debuted a teaser for their new SciFi show called Sanctuary, a compelling new science fiction series. Sanctuary's cast is led by internationally-recognized actor Amanda Tapping (Stargate: SG-1, Stargate Atlantis). Created by veteran science fiction writer/producer Damian Kindler, Sanctuary also stars Robin Dunne (Dawson's Creek, The Big Hit, Species 3) and Emilie Ullerup (Battlestar Galactica). "The future of media is convergence: television, video gaming and social networking will combine to become a single, powerful entertainment medium," says Marc Aubanel, co-founder of Stage 3 Media(TM). "Sanctuary is poised to be at the forefront of this revolution." Here are a few links to some info and the website with the trailer."

darkreadingman writes to mention a post to the Dark Reading site on the debate over bug disclosure. The Month of Apple Bugs (and recent similar efforts) is drawing a lot of frustration from security researchers. Though the idea is to get these issues out into the open, commentators seem to feel that in the long run these projects are doing more bad than good. From the article: "'I've never found it to be a good thing to release bugs or exploits without giving a vendor a chance to patch it and do the right thing,' says Marc Maiffret, CTO of eEye Security Research, a former script kiddie who co-founded the security firm. 'There are rare exceptions where if a vendor is completely lacking any care for doing the right thing that you might need to release a bug without a patch -- to make the vendor pay attention and do something.'"

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes, "USC student Jenova Chen's Flash game, "flOw," attracted interest from Sony, which commissioned an enhanced version that will be sold through its PlayStation Network, WSJ.com reports. From the article: 'Gameplay is incredibly smooth, particularly for a Flash game. But it's the design touches that set flOw apart. Players will notice faint outlines of the creatures lurking at lower depths, a foreboding sign that vicious manta- and squid-like enemies await. The water darkens as the creature advances to deeper levels. The game's ambient sound is somewhat hypnotic. The intuitive controls and design simplicity are among Mr. Chen's mandate: build immersive games for people who don't consider themselves gamers. "My parents and grandparents don't play games. My girlfriend, she doesn't play either," he says. "I want to make games that those people can appreciate."'"

An anonymous reader writes, "A spam-sending Trojan dubbed 'SpamThru' is responsible for a vast amount of the recent botnet activity which has significantly increased spam levels to almost three out of every four emails. The developers of SpamThru employed numerous tactics to thwart detection and enhance outreach, such as releasing new strains of the Trojan at regular intervals in order to confuse traditional anti-virus signatures detection." According to MessageLabs (PDF), another contributor to the recent spam increase is a trojan dropper called "Warezov."