Censorship

CBS Interactive Sued For Distributing Green Dam 133

Posted by Soulskill from the one-dam-lawsuit-after-another dept.
Dotnaught writes "Solid Oak Software, maker of Internet filter CYBERsitter, on Monday filed a $1.2 million copyright infringement lawsuit against CBS Interactive's ZDNet China for distributing the Green Dam Internet filtering software. Green Dam was going to be mandatory on all PCs in China starting in July, but widespread criticism, including reports of stolen code, forced the Chinese government to reconsider. The lawsuit, if it succeeds, could force companies to give more thought to the risks of complying with mandates from foreign governments that violate US laws."
Communications

AT&T To Allow VoIP On iPhone 220

Posted by Soulskill from the writing-on-the-wall dept.
Toe, The writes "On Tuesday, AT&T announced it will allow Apple to enable Voice over Internet Protocol applications, such as Skype, to run on its 3G wireless data network. Apple stated, 'We will be amending our developer agreements to get VoIP apps on the App Store and in customers' hands as soon as possible.' And Skype, while happy over the move, also stated, 'the positive actions of one company are no substitute for a government policy that protects openness and benefits consumers.'"
Programming

Interview With Brian Kernighan of AWK/AMPL Fame 117

Posted by kdawson from the series-of-pipes dept.
Reader oranghutan brings us another in Computerworld's series of interviews with icons of the programming world, this one with Brian Kernighan, who helped popularize C with his book (co-written with the creator Dennis Ritchie) The C Programming Language, and contributed to the development of AWK and AMPL. In the past we've chewed over a few other interviews in this series, including those with Martin Odersky on Scala and Larry Wall on perl. "In this interview, Brian Kernighan shares his tips for up-and-coming programmers and his thoughts on Ruby, Perl, and Java. He also discusses whether the classic book The Practice of Programming, co-written with Rob Pike, needs an update. He highlights Bill and Melinda Gates as two people doing great things for the world enabled through computer science. Some quotes: 'A typical programmer today spends a lot of time just trying to figure out what methods to call from some giant package and probably needs some kind of IDE like Eclipse or XCode to fill in the gaps. There are more languages in regular use and programs are often distributed combinations of multiple languages. All of these facts complicate life, though it's possible to build quite amazing systems quickly when everything goes right.' 'Every language teaches you something, so learning a language is never wasted, especially if it's different in more than just syntactic trivia.'"
Games

How Video Games Reflect Ideology 244

Posted by Soulskill from the my-level-80-priest-provides-universal-health-care dept.
A recent article at Bitmob sought to tackle the question of whether games could carry political meaning, arguing the negative since "The money, the media representation, and the general shadow of 'triviality' will always trail the word 'game,' because that is what makes it open to all markets." An opposing viewpoint has been posted by Lee Bradley, who says, "Perhaps the most profound shift in the games industry in the last few years has been the explosion of co-op. Not only are developers dedicating more and more time to providing co-op experiences in their games, they are also finding new ways of exploring the dynamic within it. ... Even in games where the co-operative element of co-op is less pronounced, the ideology is the same; you are not on your own anymore, you are part of a team. What's more, that team is more than likely multi-cultural and/or multi-gender. ... Now, this isn't to say that the lone white-guy hero has been eradicated. Far from it; the bald, white space-marine is one of the most over-used characters in modern gaming. But it increasingly rare that they are lone heroes. A shift towards team-based, co-op featured games is undeniable. In this way, mainstream video games, even those seemingly void of political statement, are implicitly political. While for the most part they are not designed to tackle political issues head-on, or carry overt political messages, they do reflect the values and the popular ideology of the culture in which they were created."
The Courts

AU Legal Group Says ISP Allowed 100K Illegal Downloads 191

Posted by kdawson from the uncommon-carrier dept.
In Australia, a court wrapped up day one of what promises to be a 4-week trial of media interests against ISP iiNet. Reader bennyboy64 writes "iTnews reports that Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft investigators claim to have recorded almost 100,000 instances of Australian internet service provider iiNet users making available online unauthorized copies of films and TV programs, lawyers for the film industry said in the Federal Court in Sydney today. The lawyers for the film industry claimed iiNet had done 'nothing' to discourage copyright infringement on its network. iTnews also has a background piece on the case, with a Flash-y graph."
The Courts

Court Rules For Software Ownership Over Licensing 177

Posted by kdawson from the broke-it-you-bought-it dept.
valderost writes "Out-law.com reports on a finding of the US District Court for the Western District of Washington, in favor of an individual reselling Autodesk's AutoCAD software in 'his claim that he owned the software and had the right to sell it on.' The decision hinges on some technicalities in the Autodesk license and conflicting precedents involving a Vanessa Redgrave film, but it's good news for the idea that a software purchase is just that. 'The Court said that it had to follow [the film] case's precedent because it was older than another conflicting ruling, and that it could not choose a precedent based on the most desirable policy. "The court's decision today is not based on any policy judgment. Congress is both constitutionally and institutionally suited to render judgments on policy; courts generally are not," the Court ruled. "Precedent binds the court regardless of whether it would be good policy to ignore it."'"
Education

MIT Axes the 500-Word Application Essay 441

Posted by kdawson from the you-call-that-long dept.
netbuzz writes "No longer will those applying to MIT have to write the storied 'long' essay — long as in 500 words. 'We wanted to remove that larger-than-life quality to that one essay and take away a bit of the high-stakes nature of that one piece,' says the dean of admissions. Not everyone agrees with the bow to brevity, including a current MIT student who penned a scathing critique in The Tech and offers up her own essay as an example of what the form can provide to both MIT and the applicant." [125 words, including these.]
Earth

Captain Bligh's Logbooks To Yield Climate Bounty 232

Posted by kdawson from the ball-bearing-ink-smears dept.
Pickens writes "The BBC reports that researchers are digitizing the captains' logs from the voyages of Charles Darwin on HMS Beagle, Captain Cook from HMS Discovery, Captain Bligh from The Bounty, and 300 other 18th and 19th century ships' logbooks to provide historical climate records for modern-day climate researchers who will use the meteorological data to build up a picture of weather patterns in the world at the beginning of the industrial era. The researchers are cross-referencing the data with historical records for crop failures, droughts and storms and will compare it with data for the modern era in order to predict similar events in the future. 'The observations from the logbooks on wind force and weather are astonishingly good and often better than modern logbooks,' says Climatologist Dr. Dennis Wheeler from the University of Sunderland. 'Of course the sailors had to be conscientious. The thought that you could hit a reef was a great incentive to get your observations absolutely right!' The logbooks will be online next year at the UK's National Archives."
Security

Null-Prefix SSL Certificate For PayPal Released 351

Posted by kdawson from the don't-mess-with-mister-inbetween dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Nine weeks after Moxie Marlinspike presented at Defcon 17, null-prefix certificates that exploit the SSL certificate vulnerability are beginning to appear. Yesterday, someone posted a null-prefix certificate for www.paypal.com on the full-disclosure mailing list. In conjunction with sslsniff, this certificate can be used to intercept communication to PayPal from all clients using the Windows Crypto API, for which a patch is still not available. This includes IE, Chrome, and Safari on Windows. What's worse, because of the OCSP attack that Moxie also presented at Defcon, this certificate cannot be revoked." Update: 10/06 23:19 GMT by KD: Now it seems that PayPal has suspended Marlinspike's account.
Patents

Eolas To Sue Apple, Google, and 21 Others 252

Posted by kdawson from the foaming-cleanser dept.
vinodis and several other readers sent along the news that Eolas is suing 23 companies including Apple and Google for patent infringement. The company won $585M from Microsoft in a drawn-out, 9-year battle that the companies settled in 2007; in the course of it the USPTO upheld the "906" patent several times. Now, Eolas is also in possession of a newly-issued patent that they claim covers the use of any browser plugin with AJAX. Let's see how far this lawsuit gets before the Supreme Court plays its wildcard in the Bilski case, which we have been discussing for a while now.
Science

New Graphical Representation of the Periodic Table 140

Posted by kdawson from the thulium-and-thalium dept.
KentuckyFC writes "The great power of Mendeleev's periodic table was that it allowed him to predict the properties of undiscovered elements. But can this arrangement be improved? Two new envisionings of the periodic table attempt to do just that. The first uses a new graphical representation that shows the relative sizes of atoms as well as their groups and periods. The other uses the same kind of group theoretical approach that particle physicists developed to classify particles by their symmetries (abstract). That helped particle physicists predict the existence of new particles, but may have limited utility for chemists who seem to have discovered (or predicted) all of the elements they need already."
GNU is Not Unix

London Stock Exchange Rejects .NET For Open Source 498

Posted by kdawson from the next-stop-world-domination dept.
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "This summer, the London Stock Exchange decided to move away from its Microsoft .Net-based trading platform, TradElect. Instead, they'll be using the GNU/Linux-based MillenniumIT system. The switch is a pretty savage indictment of the costs of a complex .Net system. The GNU/Linux-based software is also faster, and offers several other major benefits. The details provide some fascinating insights into the world of very high performance — and very expensive — enterprise systems. ... [R]ather than being just any old deal that Microsoft happened to lose, this really is something of a total rout, and in an extremely demanding and high-profile sector. Enterprise wins for GNU/Linux don't come much better than this."
It's funny. Laugh.

Fans Come Together To Complete Star Wars Uncut 179

Posted by samzenpus from the in-a-backyard-far-far-away dept.
eldavojohn writes "Star Wars Uncut has taken a novel approach to remaking Star Wars IV: A New Hope. You merely sign up for a 15 second clip, film it and submit it. The trailer is now complete and I will suspect you might enjoy the high quality (and low quality) of some of the already accepted scenes. 251 scenes remain in need of claiming with 688 claimed and 291 finished. Do your part to remake one of the greatest movies by filming fifteen seconds of yourself and your friends!"
Data Storage

Google Finds DRAM Errors More Common Than Believed 333

Posted by kdawson from the forget-me-not dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A Google study of DRAM errors in their data centers found that they are hundreds to thousands of times more common than has been previously believed. Hard errors may be the most common failure type. The DIMMs themselves appear to be of good quality, and bad mobo design may be the biggest problem." Here is the study (PDF), which Google engineers published with a researcher from the University of Toronto.
Cellphones

Palm Frees Up webOS Development 117

Posted by kdawson from the more-open-than-thou dept.
Per Wigren writes in with news that Palm has just announced a number of changes to its webOS development platform that should really be welcomed by developers — especially after the chilly reception that Palm seemed to be giving to open source in recent days. OSnews notes that "This moves the webOS much closer to Android territory." Quoting TechCrunch: "The first is that they're allowing developers to fully distribute their apps via the web. What this means is that developers can simply submit their apps to Palm, and Palm will return to them a URL that they can then blog, tweet, do whatever they want to share it. When a person then clicks on that URL they can easily install the app, bypassing any kind of store. And while Palm is providing the URL, it is not going to be reviewing the apps in any way — a clear dig at Apple's approval process. The next announcement is that Palm is waiving the $99 yearly fee it normally charges to developers to make webOS apps if those apps are going to be open source."

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