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eldavojohn writes "Wired is running an informative article on Paypal Founder Peter Thiel's investment in seasteading. There's a great graphic indicating how the spar design helps platforms weather rough seas with a ballast. There's a lot more than just Thiel throwing the half million towards this and they hope to pitch this to San Fransisco for a bay pilot. Ocean colonies can be both liberating and also downright human-rights-lacking scary."

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Tanya Andersen, the disabled single mom from Oregon who's been fighting the RIAA since 2005, has just been awarded $107,834 in attorneys fees against the record companies. This eclipses the $68,685 awarded in Capitol v. Foster and will no doubt inspire many more RIAA targets to fight back, and encourage many more lawyers to take these cases on. Jon Newton of p2pnet.net, who has been covering the Tanya Andersen case from Day 1, writes that "RIAA nemesis Tanya Andersen has achieved another milestone victory. She fought Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG's RIAA to a standstill, forcing it to drop its spurious file sharing case against her, and now an Oregon court has awarded her close to $108,000 in fees and costs.....[L]awyers representing RIAA victims....[wi]ll be able to proceed with counterclaims bolstered by the knowledge they'll be paid their work.""
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2008/05/tanya-andersen-awarded-107834-in.html

Josh Fink brings news of an Atlanta resident who has created a remote control robot to scare off criminals during the night. Rufus Terrill, an engineer, uses it to patrol the streets and encourage drug dealers and other shady characters to move on. Local residents call it his "Robocop." From CNN: "It's a barbecue smoker mounted on a three-wheeled scooter, and armed with an infrared camera, spotlight, loudspeaker and aluminum water cannon that shoots a stream of icy water about 20 feet. Operated by remote control, the robot spotlights trespassers on property down the street from his bar, O'Terrill's. Using a walkie-talkie, Terrill belts out through the robot's loudspeaker, 'That's private property. You guys need to get out of here.'"

An anonymous reader writes "ABS News in Australia is reporting that Egypt has denied that recent cable damage was caused by naughty ships. Also, a fourth cable was damaged on Sunday. So what's going on?"
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/04/2153455.htm

An anonymous reader writes "James Boyle has a column in the Financial Times http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f531a57c-939a-11dc-a884-0000779fd2ac.html arguing that, under current law, the practices of musical borrowing in jazz (and blues and in classical composers particularly people such as Charles Ives) are now illegal. "Music copyright has gone nano-scale." He argues that "the permissions culture" is poised to move beyond the world of rap. "Get a license or do not sample." Two great video links, too, to show what we'd lose. And while established art forms (like jazz) are safer from this kind of craziness... what about the next genre, the thing that would be the new jazz, blues, soul of the 21st century?"
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f531a57c-939a-11dc-a884-0000779fd2ac.html

An anonymous reader writes "If you've seen a Hollywood caper movie in the last 20 years you know the old video-camera-spoofing trick. That's where the criminal mastermind taps into a surveillance camera system and substitutes his own video stream, leaving hapless security guards watching an endless loop of absolutely-nothing-happening while the bank robber empties the vault.

Now white-hat hackers have demonstrated a technique that neatly replicates that old standby.

Amir Azam and Adrian Pastor, researchers at London-based security firm ProCheckUp, discovered that they can redirect what video file is played back by an AXIS 2100 surveillance camera, a common industrial security camera that boasts a web interface, allowing guards to monitor a building from anywhere in the world."
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2007/10/camera_hack

An anonymous reader writes "the good guys win! http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/070914/laf040.html?.v=101"

Microsoft's push for fast-track approval of its OOXML document format as an ISO standard has failed, according to a news article from PC World. The proposal now must be reworked to address comments made during the voting process and will be up for another vote by ISO members early next year. Details on the voting outcome can also be found at Groklaw, and you can read Microsoft's spin on the outcome here.

Slashdot users of the Discussion2 system now have a new 'Update' button visible on their floating control slider, as well at the end of the discussion. This button will update your page to include comments posted since the page was loaded, so now you can keep discussion pages up to date without doing a full reload. It's nowhere near complete yet, but it's a nice step that goes a long ways towards making it easier to use larger discussions while they are actively updating. If you aren't using Discussion2, you need to log in, and toggle the checkbox visible on every page. You probably need bother only if you are using Firefox 1.5 or 2.x or Safari. You can send bug reports to me if you want.

Scott Devaney writes "HERES AN EMAIL I RECIEVED Hi, it's Tim from Pandora, I'm writing today to ask for your help. The survival of Pandora and all of Internet radio is in jeopardy because of a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora. The new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays and broadcast radio doesn't pay these at all. Left unchanged, these new royalties will kill every Internet radio site, including Pandora. In response to these new and unfair fees, we have formed the SaveNetRadio Coalition, a group that includes listeners, artists, labels and webcasters. I hope that you will consider joining us. Please sign our petition urging your Congressional representative to act to save Internet radio: http://capwiz.com/saveinternetradio/issues/alert/? alertid=9631541 Please feel free to forward this link/email to your friends — the more petitioners we can get, the better. Understand that we are fully supportive of paying royalties to the artists whose music we play, and have done so since our inception. As a former touring musician myself, I'm no stranger to the challenges facing working musicians. The issue we have with the recent ruling is that it puts the cost of streaming far out of the range of ANY webcaster's business potential. I hope you'll take just a few minutes to sign our petition — it WILL make a difference. As a young industry, we do not have the lobbying power of the RIAA. You, our listeners, are by far our biggest and most influential allies. As always, and now more than ever, thank you for your support."

8127972 writes "According to The Inquirier, the RIAA and the movie industry are lobbying lawmakers in a bid to be excused from the tough laws on pretexting. The RIAA and the MPAA say the law should not apply to them as they need to use subterfuge to deal with pirates. Methinks they've officially gone too far."

LabRat writes "Today, a jury found that Vonage violated 3 key patents held by Verizon. Vonage is ordered to pay $58 million in past damages and a 5.5% royalty on future sales revenue. While much smaller than what Verizon was seeking ($5/customer/month)...it's still quite a substantial financial blow to a company that continues to hemorrhage cash as it seeks to buy it's way to market share through a marketing blitz campaign. It's unclear at this point if this victory will embolden Verizon to pursue blackmail, erm, settlements from other VoIP providers..though it seems highly unlikely that Verizon would pass up the opportunity to generate cash flow from its IP holdings. No word yet if Vonage plans to appeal."

coondoggie writes "IBM wants to help you find out if UFOs are real. Well, sort of. With UFO sightings seemingly on the rise, Big Blue is teaming with The Anomalies Network to offer UFO Crawler, a new search engine specifically tuned to search for information about the paranormal, unexplained or just plain bizarre. The search tool employs IBM's OmniFind Yahoo! Edition enterprise search software and the UFO Crawler should help users precisely target and gather information from relevant sources, including thousands of documents and files collected in the vast Anomalies Network archive, as well as multiple global resources across the Web on topics such as such as ghosts, conspiracy theories and extraterrestrials."

jas_public writes "WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (AP) — A 16-year-old boy being sued by five record companies accusing him of online music piracy accused the recording industry on Tuesday of violating antitrust laws, conspiring to defraud the courts and making extortionate threats.

In papers responding to the record companies' lawsuit, Robert Santangelo, who was as young as 11 when the alleged piracy occurred, denied ever disseminating music and said it's impossible to prove that he did.

Santangelo is the son of Patti Santangelo, the 42-year-old suburban mother of five who was sued by the record companies in 2005. She refused to settle, took her case public and became a heroine to supporters of Internet freedom.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/MUSIC_DOWNL OAD_SUIT?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTI ME=2007-01-31-00-46-59"

Roland Piquepaille writes "Chemists from the University of California at Riverside designed two years ago a molecule which could move straight on a flat surface — a nano-walker if you wish. Now, they've found a way to force this walking molecule to carry packages. The nano-worker can now carry two CO2 molecules. And like yourself when you carry two heavy bags, this nano-worker is slower when it carries other molecules. The researchers think their discovery will lead to reliable ways of carrying molecules, an equivalent of the conveyor belts in today's factories."