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Censorship

Australia To Block BitTorrent 674

Posted by CmdrTaco
from the who-saw-that-coming dept.
Kevin 7Kbps writes "Censorship Minister Stephen Conroy announced today that the Australian Internet Filters will be extended to block peer-to-peer traffic, saying, 'Technology that filters peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic does exist and it is anticipated that the effectiveness of this will be tested in the live pilot trial.' This dashes hopes that Conroy's Labor party had realised filtering could be politically costly at the next election and were about to back down. The filters were supposed to begin live trials on Christmas Eve, but two ISPs who volunteered have still not been contacted by Conroy's office, who advised, 'The department is still evaluating applications that were put forward for participation in that pilot.' Three days hardly seems enough time to reconfigure a national network."
Image

jQuery in Action 154 Screenshot-sm

Posted by samzenpus
from the read-all-about-it dept.
Michael J. Ross writes "As perhaps the only substantial computer language embedded inside of the major Web browsers, JavaScript has brought an unprecedented level of power to client-side programming for the Internet. Yet as a result of cross-browser incompatibilities and other problems, it has probably also resulted in an unprecedented number of headaches for Web developers. JavaScript libraries attempt to mitigate much of these difficulties. One of the most popular such libraries, jQuery, is explored in a book by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz, titled jQuery in Action." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review.

Science Daily: Gene For Left-handedness Identified->

From feed by sdfeed
Scientists have discovered a gene that increases an individual's chances of being left-handed. The research revealed a gene called LRRTM1; the first to be discovered which has an effect on handedness. Although little is known about LRRTM1, it is conceivable that it modifies the development of asymmetry in the human brain.
Link to Original Source

Engadget: California official gives ok to voting systems that failed security audit->

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Yeah, remember those white hats that took out three separate systems with ease in a California e-voting system security audit? Well what do you know, the eminently wise and honorable California Secretary of State Debra Bowen up and decided Friday that those severely vulnerable Diebold, Hart, and Sequoia voting terminals would still be cleared for takeoff, provided the companies in question supply their machines with updated firmware, disabled access to unused ports, kill the wireless connections, and so on. So basically, the companies that deny up and down their voting systems are even vulnerable are now directly responsible for making them less vulnerable per seemingly vague security-hardening guidelines. As usual, we suggest preempt these fools' garbage tech entirely and go low-fi on it: if you suspect your district is or will be using e-voting machines, send your votes by mail.

[Thanks, Daniel]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!


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The Internet

+ - Senators call for universal internet filtering->

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes "US senators today made a bipartisan call for the universal implementation of filtering and monitoring technologies on the Internet in order to protect children at the end of a Senate hearing for which civil liberties groups were not invited. Senators call for universal Internet filtering Senators call for universal Internet filtering"
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Yahoo!

+ - Yahoo building open source Map/Reduce and GFS->

Submitted by
owenomalley
owenomalley writes "Yahoo is developing Hadoop, which is an open source implementation of key pieces of Google's infrastructure (namely, Map/Reduce and GFS). Hadoop's framework allows you to write applications that reliably process very large datasets (100's of terabytes) efficiently on large (1000+) clusters of computers. Without a framework like Hadoop, writing applications on large clusters requires a lot of duplicated effort as each application deals with distribution, reliability, and reporting. Hadoop handles those parts for you and just requires you to write your application logic.

Hadoop is managed under Apache."
Link to Original Source
NASA

+ - HAL, open source?->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "I was going through a list of NASA's open source licensed software and stumbled a project called Livingstone2. From their site: "Livingstone2 is a reusable artificial intelligence (AI) software system designed to assist spacecraft, life support systems, chemical plants or other complex systems in operating robustly with minimal human supervision, even in the face of hardware failures or unexpected events." They even have a SDK and a real-time interface to it."
Link to Original Source
Anime

+ - Singapore cracks down on Anime, RIAA style->

Submitted by Otaku
Otaku writes "The Straits Times reports that The Anti-Video Piracy Association of Singapore (AVPAS), the equivalent for RIAA in anime representing giant distributor Odex (owning 90% of rights in anime titles), is serving out hundreds of legal letters to individual downloaders of anime and fansubs in Singapore without advance warning. The largest local forum HardWareZone reports that users who received the letter are ordered to pay out-of-court settlements for around US$2500, and come mostly from a single ISP that is linked to the government.

Odex has been said to be facing financing difficulties due to its inferior product quality (notably, Engrish) sold on market that is said to be worse than what fans download. The action angers several hardcare fans who call for boycott of Odex, and worry about the future of the anime scene in Singapore."
Link to Original Source
Television

+ - BBC iPlayer Letter Writing Campaign->

Submitted by
AlexanderHanff
AlexanderHanff writes "Today I launched a Public Letter Writing Campaign in response to the BBC's decision to limit their new "On Demand" service called iPlayer to Microsoft Windows. Many will think why is this an issue? Well the BBC is funded by a compulsory TV License Fee payable by all British people who own a television. By excluding everyone who does not use Window XP SP2, they have exculded hundreds of thousands of British TV License holders, the same segment of the public provide revenues of 10s of millions (GBP) each year to the BBC through their TV License Fees. The BBC have a public mandate to provide services which give "Value to licence fee payers as individuals, Value to society as a whole through its contribution to the BBC's Public Purposes and Value for money and cost", they have failed in all 3 of these mandates with the iPlayer service. The aim of the campaign is to send more than 10 000 letters to 4 different public bodies to match an official petition which is rapidly approaching 10 000 signatures."
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The Media

+ - MS strikes GPLv3 from Linspire deal

Submitted by
rs232
rs232 writes ""Microsoft says software that's licensed under GPLv3 isn't covered by the patent protection deal it recently signed with desktop Linux distributor Linspire"

http://www.informationweek.com/windows/showArticle .jhtml?articleID=201001836
—

Did the original patent deal with Linspire explicidly mention GPLv3 and if not can they retrospectivly rewrite the terms of the license. If so what good is it?

http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=2007 0614085735536"
Announcements

+ - Italy forbids RIAA scare tactics->

Submitted by eiapoce
eiapoce writes "In Italy it is forbidden for anybody to monitor internet trafic. This is stated in a recent article by the national press agency ANSA that I gladly translate for the slashdot readers:

http://www.ansa.it/site/notizie/awnplus/internet/n ews/2007-07-18_11897954.html

ROMA, 18 LUG — An italian court "ruled illegal for anyone to monitor network trafic". This is as declared by the innovation responsible of the green party, Mr. Cortiana. As announced by the green leader the Giudges approved the points forwarded from the Privacy Authority in the case of Peppermint against Telecom. This is a important ruling, sais Cortiana, because it sets a important principle: On the internet it is a (exclusive) duty of law forces and judges to investigate and enforce the law.

— - —

The case Peppermin Jam Records VS Telecom originated when the Swiss firm Peppermint used scare tactics like those employed by the RIAA sending 3636 notification letters to Italian Users sharing licensed music on P2P network. Those letters were containing a invitation to deposit a sum of money or face a trial. Telecom initially opposed but was forced to deliver the names on spite of a european directive. Now the Giudges overturned this previous ruling.

On this page http://www.hardwaremax.it/20070718767/network/caso -peppermint-vietati-i-monitoraggi-in-rete.html

Cortiana also criticises the private firm: "Internet is not a 'nobody's land' where there are no rules and you can apply do-it-yourself laws, also on the internet real world citizenship rights apply" and continues as "business models should adapt and cosider that network sharing is a collective cognitive process""
Link to Original Source
The Courts

Facebook In Court 129

Posted by CowboyNeal
from the custody-battles dept.
ScaredOfTheMan writes "'The lawsuit, filed by brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accuses Zuckerberg, Facebook's 23-year-old C.E.O, of stealing the source code, design, and business plan for Facebook in 2003 when he briefly worked in the Harvard dorms as a programmer for their own fledgling social-networking site, now known as ConnectU. The plaintiffs have demanded that Facebook be shut down and that full control of the site — and its profits — be turned over to them.' I just wonder why they waited so long to sue? If he really stole their idea in 2003, why wait four years?"
Programming

+ - Lawsuit wants full control of Facebook

Submitted by ScaredOfTheMan
ScaredOfTheMan writes ""The lawsuit, filed by brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accuses Zuckerberg, Facebook's 23-year-old C.E.O, of stealing the source code, design, and business plan for Facebook in 2003 when he briefly worked in the Harvard dorms as a programmer for their own fledgling social-networking site, now known as ConnectU. The plaintiffs have demanded that Facebook be shut down and that full control of the site — and its profits — be turned over to them." I just wonder why they waited so long to sue? If he really stole their idea in 2003, why wait 4 years?"

"Facts are stupid things." -- President Ronald Reagan (a blooper from his speeach at the '88 GOP convention)

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