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Education

Kansas School Board Wants Darwin Back

Submitted by Gryle
Gryle writes "According to an article in the The Register, the Kansas school board has decided to remove intelligent design from the science curriculum. According to Bill Wagnon, chairman of the school board, "This assures that Kansas children are appropriately educated for the 21st century.""
Software

QEMU Accelerator driver GPL'ed

Submitted by Jack
Jack writes "This driver, aka KQEMU, provides near-native performance when the guest and host architectures are identical (emulation of x86 guest on x86 host for instance). Without it the guest system remains desperately slow under QEMU.
While QEMU has always been open source, providing a free alternative to VMWare, KQEMU was previously distributed separately under a proprietary license. It is now available under the GPL version 2.
The announce on the developer's site is rather laconic and does not mention any specific reason for this change, but the recently discussed release of an open source edition of VirtualBox (which lacks important features, notably USB support and shared folders) may well have been an incentive to it."
Censorship

Invoices for deep links from krak.dk

Submitted by
TDJ
TDJ writes "A Danish person had a link in the footer of his homepage to krak.dk, a Danish map service. The link opened a new window on krak.dk homepage, and showed his location.
Now after two years krak.dk found out, and invoiced him DKK 4500 (about 750 USD) for previous usage of their service, and then asked him to remove the map. Krak.dk had no mentioning before in their TOS that deep linking is illegal. They do now, of course.
A court order from Denmark, February 2006, has previously ruled that deep links, when used in a fair way, is legal. (Danish text)

The whole story about Krak.dk in English"
Announcements

Wikipedia links no longer help your Page Rank

Submitted by
Mrs. Grundy
Mrs. Grundy writes "Wikipedia has started automatically adding rel="NOFOLOW" to all external links in an effort to combat link spam. Since wikipedia pages are hip-deep in high page rank they attract the unsavory sort of character hoping to gain a little love from Google on their coattails. By making pages NOFOLOW they essentially deny conferring any page rank points from google and hopefully reduce the incentive to spam the pages with offtopic links. This topic has come up before and the community voted to remove the NOFOLLOW business in 2005. Will this move actually reduce link spam or is even the potential clickthrough valuable enough without the boost in Google's ranking? And how does the value of ranking sites based on links change as more and more popular sites start tagging (eh...labeling) their links NOFOLLOW?"
Data Storage

Sony says no to porn on Blu-ray Disc

Submitted by jcatcw
jcatcw writes "Sony Corp. says it will not allow its disc-replicating subsidiary, Sony DADC Global, to handle adult film titles. The decision could have wide implications for Blu-ray Disc. Some analysts say it could eventually mean that Blu-ray loses out to HD-DVD in the battle to become the next-generation DVD format, in a repeat performance of the Betamax vs VHS competition. Nonetheless, a sequel to the classic Deb Does Dallas should be out on both Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD this spring."
Operating Systems

UN Univ. Report Confirms Open Source Superior

Submitted by
Edoko
Edoko writes "Open source software is a viable, and economic alternative to Microsoft, according to a report published by United Nations University."

The report is here: http://www.merit.unu.edu/publications/pb/unu_pb_20 06_01.pdf

Among the many recommendations is that "All Member States and other stakeholders should have the right to access public information made available in electronic format by the organizations and no one should be obliged to acquire a particular type of software in order to exercise such a right"

Also: "The Secretary- General should take the necessary measures to establish a data repository of UNESCO Free & Open Source Software Portal"

A summary is reported by the BBC here: http://http//news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/627065 7.stm"
The Internet

Krak demands money from blogger who linked to them

Submitted by
Paul O'Flaherty
Paul O'Flaherty writes "Krak.dk, a danish company has demanded that a blogger pay them 5625 DKK (about 940 USD) because he linked to their site. This was not hotlinking. It was a direct link to page. They have a "no deep linking" policy hidden away in the copyright section of their help pages. But no mention of it anywhere else on the site.


Per Kaarup, a good friend of mine who has been running a Danish WordPress blog about his two dogs received an letter from Krak.dk stating that they were going to charge him 5625 DKK (about 940 USD) because he linked to their site.

Per, for the last two years, has had a link in the footer of his web page, and on his contact page, to a page on Krak.dk which displayed his home. This page has a small copyright notice on the map section of the page itself stating in Danish that it is copyright and you can’t use it.

Per was not using the map, he was directly linking to the page on which it is displayed, and the page itself is much more than just the map.


How long before other sites start doing this?. Full story."

Given sufficient time, what you put off doing today will get done by itself.