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Censorship

Three ISPs Agree To Block Child Porn 572

Posted by kdawson
from the camel's-head-and-neck dept.
Goobergunch and other readers sent in word that Sprint, Time Warner, and Verizon have agreed to block websites and newsgroups containing child pornography. The deal, brokered by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, occurred after Cuomo's office threatened the ISPs with fraud charges. It's of some concern that the blacklist of sites and newsgroups is to be maintained by the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, an NGO with no legal requirement for transparency. Here are two further cautions, the first from Lauren Weinstein: "Of broader interest perhaps is how much time will pass before 'other entities' demand that ISPs (attempt to) block access to other materials that one group or another feels subscribers should not be permitted to see or hear." And from Techdirt: "[T]he state of Pennsylvania tried to do pretty much the same thing, back in 2002, but focused on actually passing a law ... And, of course, a federal court tossed out the law as unconstitutional. The goal is certainly noble. Getting rid of child porn would be great — but having ISPs block access to an assigned list isn't going to do a damn thing towards that goal."
The Courts

RIAA Actually Won 'Make Available' Case

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday Slashdot had a story claiming that the RIAA's "make available" theory was rejected. However, that's not exactly what happened. Techdirt's writeup of the case shows how the RIAA really got almost everything it wanted. While technically the judge said "making available" wasn't infringement, he actually expanded the definition of "distribution" so widely that it effectively encompasses "making available." The RIAA is talking about what a great decision this is while the EFF is upset with the result, suggesting this is hardly the setback some have made it out to be."
IBM

IBM steals HP customers, then leases old HP gear->

Submitted by
jbrodkin
jbrodkin writes "It's no surprise IBM goes to great lengths to lure Unix customers away from HP. But IBM is pretty innovative when it comes to making money at HP's expense, even long after customers have switched to Big Blue. HP customers who take advantage of a new rebate program must stop using their old HP systems within 90 days and turn them over to IBM. What does IBM do with the HP servers? In some cases they are simply recycled in an environmentally friendly way. In other, more lucrative cases, however, IBM uses the HP servers itself or leases them out to other customers, according to IBM's Scott Handy. "We might be fairly unique in this," Handy says."
Link to Original Source
PC Games (Games)

CEO of Stardock says: Ignore the PC Pirates

Submitted by Dr. Eggman
Dr. Eggman writes "Ars Technica brings us an insight from Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock. Stardock has recently the surprisingly well recieved and highly rated Sins of a Solar Empire. Mr. Wardell has come to the conclusion that the pirates don't matter. This runs in striking contrast to Call of Duty 4 developer Infinity Ward's recent proclamation of troubling signs of PC slowing due to piracy. While having no CD copy protection, Sins of a Solar Empire has sold 200,000 copies in the first month of release and landed the #2 spot in Feburary best seller charts, just behind CoD 4 (sans Wal-Mart numbers.)

The way to make money in the world of PC gaming, according to Wardell, is to make sure many systems can play your games, while continuing to make them attractive. Find a market where people want to buy and support the games, and don't go by what the magazines and the blogs seem to think are the big name titles. Don't let people who aren't your audience control the titles you make, and ignore piracy.

The reason why we don't put copy protection on our games isn't because we're nice guys. We do it because the people who actually buy games don't like to mess with it. Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don't count.
"
Censorship

Censored Tibet uprising videos leaked online->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Wikileaks has announced that it has posted 120 videos and photos of the uprising in Tibet. Wikileaks calls on bloggers worldwide to republish this media in an easy to mirror format so it can not be suppressed from the people behind the "Great Firewall of China"... something the Chinese government is trying to achieve by censoring YouTube, the BBC, CNN, and the Guardian."
Link to Original Source
Sci-Fi

Copyleft movies, can it be done?

Submitted by
John Sokol
John Sokol writes "hypothetically speaking, let say some big name science fiction authors were willing to allow there older stories to be made into Copyleft films done in a similar production quality as I-Robot, Blade runner, StarWars or StarTrek. Would it be possible to raise enough to produce a big budget film that has a LGPL type license on it? Possibly as a Non-profit where authors are paid there typical fees and actors, are paid typical fees but no investors, just grants and donations? Proceeds would be wrapped back in to produce the next movie. Sort like PBS and NPR. How could money be raised? What are the ramifications? How to bootstrap such a project and get it played in theaters and legally distributed free on the net? It's an interesting concept, but could it really work? Imagine what this would do the the RIAA and the film industry."
Biotech

Living Fossil is Fastest Evolving Animal

Submitted by
Pickens
Pickens writes "Researchers have found that New Zealand's "living dinosaur" the tuatara is evolving at a DNA level faster than any other animal. "Of course we would have expected that the tuatara, which does everything slowly — they grow slowly, reproduce slowly and have a very slow metabolism — would have evolved slowly," said DNA expert Professor David Lambert. "In fact, at the DNA level, they evolve extremely quickly, which supports a hypothesis proposed by the evolutionary biologist Allan Wilson, who suggested that the rate of molecular evolution was uncoupled from the rate of morphological evolution." In related news Henry the tuatara finally proved his manhood at age 111, when he was caught in the act by tuatara curator Lindsay Hazley mating with Mildred, a "prolific breeder" aged 70 to 80 years. The tuatara, Sphendon punctatus, is found only in New Zealand and is the only surviving member of a distinct reptilian order Sphehodontia that lived alongside early dinosaurs and separated from other reptiles 200 million years ago in the Upper Triassic period. The original paper is available for $31.50."
Upgrades

The 10 Video Formats HD DVD Will Meet in Heaven->

Submitted by
longacre
longacre writes "The bloody defeat of HD DVD under the knife of Blu-Ray has sparked countless discussions where someone invariably mentions Betamax. All too often we forget the scores of other standards that companies spent billions of dollars and millions of man hours developing, only to meet the same fate as the Laserdisc, landing in that big Nobody Beats the Wiz shopping cart in the sky. Popular Mechanics pays homage to those efforts, starting with more recent duds like Circuit City's short lived DIVX DVD rent-to-own scheme, back to the Avco Cartrivision system's watch-once video cartridges, and the CBS/Motorola venture that actually used film. Perhaps Toshiba can find some consolation in that Sony takes up three of the list's 10 spots."
Link to Original Source
AMD

AMD open sources its performance library

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes "AMD has open sourced its AMD Performance Library (APL), referred to as Framewave 1.0. The chip giant said that the move will expand APL functionality beyond its existing core media capabilities, and make high performance application development easier for developers. AMD hopes that by giving developers unfettered access to the performance library, a new base of open source code will be developed which can be plugged into future applications. Framewave is the result of nearly three years of effort by over a dozen developers, and comprises more than 3,200 high-performance software routines that enable developers to create multi-threaded applications for x86-class processor platforms."
Moon

UK scientists plan to build a lunar mobile network 3

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes "British scientists are planning to build a mobile phone network that operates on the Moon. The proposal was contained in a report compiled by Nasa and the British National Space Centre on joint co-operation for exploration of the Moon in the coming years. Plans include a space probe called MoonLITE (Moon Lightweight Interior and Telecoms Experiment) which will fire probes into the lunar surface and communicate using a mobile phone protocol to send back information on earthquake activity."
Hardware Hacking

Remote control implant to turn off your testicles 2

Submitted by holy_calamity
holy_calamity writes "New Scientist reports on Australian researchers developing radio-controlled valves to be implanted in the vas deferens that carry sperm from the testicles to the penis. The idea is to offer a reversible alternative to vasectomy. The silicone-based valves switch open or closed by converting radiowaves into acoustic waves that force the silicone-bases structures to change shape. To prevent security problems, "each valve responds only to a radio-frequency signal with a unique code"."
Education

Student outed for hate speech in course evaluation-> 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "A University of Georgia student was recently punished for remarks he made in two separate, supposedly anonymous, course evaluations. The University hired a handwriting expert to determine the identity of the student and subsequently required him to write an essay on how his remarks offended the LGBT community and also required him to undergo sensitivity training. Can a public institution say something is anonymous and then turn around and say its not? The New York Times ethicist thinks they can't."
Link to Original Source
Television

FCC Cites Buttocks as Sexual Organ 7

Submitted by
rgriscom
rgriscom writes "The Federal Communications Commission is proposing to fine ABC $1.4 million for airing in 2003 between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. an NYPD Blue episode showing a woman's buttocks. The details are in this Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture. According to the FCC, the episode violated its decency regulations because it depicts "sexual or excretory organs or activities". In response to ABC's argument that the buttocks are not a sexual organ, the ruling states:

"Although ABC argues, without citing any authority, that the buttocks are not a sexual organ, we reject this argument, which runs counter to both case law and common sense.""

It's not reality that's important, but how you perceive things.