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Education

Wis. Teacher Arrested for Blog Comment->

Submitted by
stoolpigeon
stoolpigeon writes "James Buss, a Milwaukee high school chemistry teacher was arrested for allegedly posting an anonymous comment online praising the Columbine shooters. Some were disturbed by the post police say James Buss left on a conservative blog, but other observers said it was a sarcastic attempt to discredit critics of education spending."
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The Courts

US DOJ Defends RIAA's $9250-per-file verdict->

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In what has been dubbed "the Bush administration's most blatant support of the commercial music industry yet", the United States Department of Justice has intervened in the Capitol v. Thomas case, on the side of the RIAA and against Ms. Thomas, filing a brief (pdf) which defends the constitutionality of the $9250-per-song-file jury verdict. The Government justified the award by arguing that the damages awarded "were not 'so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportioned to the offense or obviously unreasonable'", and that "it is impossible to calculate the damages caused by a single infringement, particularly for infringement that occurs over the internet"."
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Google

Google Sued By Professor Over DB Architecture->

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes "Google is recently under fire from a Northeastern Professor who has filed suit against the search giant for their use of what he claims is his intellectual property. The patent being disputed is a method to retrieve data from a database in a faster manner. Baclawski and Jarg Corp have a few patents pending and assigned to them. While there may be a number of patents possibly infringed by Google, the most likely candidate's abstract reads, "A distributed computer database system connected to a network, e.g., the Internet or on an intranet, indexes interests of agents that have registered with the system, examines information objects, for example, that reside on the network, and, responsive to a match with the registered agents' interests, specifies to the agents the relevant information objects." For those of you familiar with Google's server farms, their modified Linux kernel & their anticipated contributions to the MySQL source, this sounds very familiar to how their run their grand caching scheme to make their search engine so fast and beat out the competition. Might other search engines face this patent lawsuit by default? What other method is there to distributing your search across databases aside from using massive server farms with 'intelligent' agents on each machine swarming over data?"
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United States

Judge rules against NSA wiretapping->

Submitted by
bl8n8r
bl8n8r writes "The Bush administration's attempts to change US wiretapping laws has apparently been biotchslapped in the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) secret court. FTFA: "Mike McConnell this spring began urging Congress to pass an emergency "fix" that would clarify and specifically grant the NSA authority to tap switches based in the United States without review by the FISA court". There has been, for some reason, a push within the Republican circle to persuade congress to rush through an expanded evesdropping measure before August recess (end of the week). So, how does this affect the elephant-in-the-living-room at the San Francisco switching center. in downtown USA?"
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Censorship

Q&A: Can a Pedophile Be Law-Abiding?->

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes "Jack McClellan blogs openly about where best to meet girls under the age of 12. The local authorities are watching him, warily. Should just talking about such matters be enough to get him locked up?"
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Security

teacher porn case

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes "Making sure what happened to Julie...doesn't happen again For me, the Julie Amero case was always about two things: 1. Seeing Julie go free. 2. Helping to make sure it didn't happen to others. (1) above is in progress. The judge has accepted the defense's motion for a new trial and now it's largely a waiting game. But there are many others who are in the same boat as Julie. Witness Matthew Bandy, the 16 year old, who went through a fairly controversial ordeal involving alleged malware infestations and child porn. Or the wife of a teacher who contacted me, who has spent practically all of the family's life savings in defense of her husband from apparently spurious computer "porn" charges — when it seems entirely evident that porn was downloaded on a classroom computer by one of the students. The problem is big. And it's not just schools. It's in business as well. How many people are never charged but quietly fired? Now, a lot can be solved with education: How many of you working for corporations have been to mandatory sexual harassment training every year? But how many of you have been to a company security training? (Answer: almost nobody gets security training). Consider it — a simple one or two hour training, with a nice video that explains the basics of security. IT departments layer on defense after defense, but because so much of the problem is social engineering, you have to teach the users. How many systems are infected because of people going to a website in a fake email? Or a bored salesman on the road, downloading some "harmless" porn on his laptop, only to have his system turn into a spam zombie, or worse — turning it into a warez server, serving child porn and pirated software? Or the administrative assistant who just wants to download some "cute screensavers"... Or the CEO who opens up an email attachment that turns out is loaded with a targeted zero-day exploit, stealing highly sensitive confidential information? It doesn't even have to be something horribly nefarious. A system can be infected with a simple piece of adware which produces its own search results. Some of those search results can be bad. You get the picture. And since our schools have made the decision that porn is a dangerous problem (which I have no argument with), then educators all over the world are operating "dangerous" machinery — without sufficient operator education. In law, there is a real problem: Many people involved in this field understand little about about computers. Fear and ignorance combined with great power is a very dangerous thing. So with this in mind, the small group of people who have been crusading to free Julie have started a new effort: The Julie Group. This is a group dedicated to the following objectives: a) Help to educate people on computer security and computer forensics. b) Do what we can to help others in a similar predicament to Julie's. c) Work to remove bad laws, such as the one that Julie was charged with (risk of injury to a minor, or impairing the morals of a child — Conn. Gen. Stat. 53-21, which if you read it, is so broad that almost anyone could be charged with it). So please join us — give us ideas, give us your comments. The Julie Group blog is at http://thejuliegroup.blogspot.com/. It's basic for now but we'll be fleshing it out over the next several weeks. Alex Eckelberry"
Portables

Is Nano-Generation the Solution to Battery Life?->

Submitted by
Matthew Sparkes
Matthew Sparkes writes "Nano-generation is the practice of equipping devices with the means to power themselves; wind-up radios, solar powered cell phone chargers, etc. Could it be the solution to two problems? Firstly you wouldn't have to charge up all your different devices everyday and they would never run out on you, and secondly they would reduce our energy consumption and be good for the environment. "Consider this: mobile phone chargers are responsible for a quarter of a million tonnes of CO2 in the UK every year. Now consider the fact that all it would take to wipe out these emissions would be the introduction of a small photovoltaic device to replace each charger.""
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Software

Wiki-based site compares open & closed softwar

Submitted by lisah
lisah writes "When comparison shopping for software, most sites let you adjust a small number of variables while you search: free vs. commercial, hosted vs. downloadable, Windows vs. Mac Vs. Linux. ITerating, a new site launching this week, lets you customize your software searches in greater detail than other sites to include price, license, vendor and more. The wiki-based Web site also encourages developers to add their own software to the database where users can review it, comment on it, and even vote it up or down Digg-style."

Algebraic symbols are used when you do not know what you are talking about. -- Philippe Schnoebelen