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Submission + - The ethics of 3D printers

cheeseandham writes: We've all heard the words "Would you download a car?" — but what about a car key?

RevK finds that 3D printing of keys (for physical locks) is possible from scratch and are quite resilient, then experiments with embedding cheap neodymium magnets in order to make ABS keys ("British Kite Mark 3 star rated") and ends up with questions on the ethics of posting the OpenSCAD file for these keys.

Should the OpenSCAD files for the keys be posted? Should we have a 3D printing responsible vulnerability disclosure process? What other questions should be asked before 3D printing becomes mainstream?
Businesses

Submission + - Joule EV from South Africa is dead (iol.co.za)

SEEMonster writes: "Optimal Energy in South Africa, creators of the Joule EV have closed their doors for lack of funding. They required funding to industrialize the company for mass production, and the expected government funding never happened. So sad. An amazing company and an amazing car is no more.."
Privacy

Submission + - Enquiry Begins Into UK Snoopers' Charter (techweekeurope.co.uk) 1

judgecorp writes: "A UK Parliamentary committee will today start to evaluate the Communications Data Bill, proposed legislation also known as the "Snoopers' Charter", which would require service providers to keep records of all subscribers' online activity to be handed to the police and intelligence services on request. Opposition to the bill says it erodes privacy, and has not been thought through technically. Before Parliament discusses the bill, a Joint Select Committee of MPs and Lords will look at its legality and feasibility. Public comments are invited (PDF)."
Businesses

Submission + - EU fights for online rights again (rockpapershotgun.com)

cheeseandham writes: The day before the EU rejected ACTA the European Union Court Of Justice has ruled that people should be able to resell downloaded programs, after Oracle took a German company UsedSoft to court for reselling licenses to Oracle products.

Rock, Paper Shotgun dissect the ruling and apply it to games, with potentially huge implications for the likes of Valve, EA, Microsoft and Sony.

The question is, will anything change considering a lot of these providers have EULA's that pretty much allow them to ban you for any infraction?

Comment Re:copyright stuff (Score 1) 322

but mostly they will be cost additive rather than cost saving or even cost neutral compared to the mark up on a manufactured items

On full manufactured typical items that are readily available and have competition. But what about when you want to replace/fix something that is simple, but costs a lot due to the manufacturer being the only one that supplies them?
An example? How about a bit of plastic on a BMW bumper that saves replacing the entire bumper? (which you can only get from BMW or, if you are very lucky, a scrap yard)

Comment Re:Contributing or stealing? (Score 1) 545

From his reply on http://frameworkdev.wordpress.com/2011/07/30/my-open-source-dilema/

" I have no such agreement. It was done on my own time with the company’s full support. They knew it was open source. I think now that I’m not at the company, they want to “control” it. As far as I understand it, they need to abide by the license. I think the tricky part is compelling them to abide by the license."

and

"I was not paid on W2, and I never signed the rights away. I think your right, that the code is GPL. It’s out there. It is what it is. I’m going to report this to GNU project and warn them that if they don’t bring to code back in-line with the license, that I will send a letter to their customers to make them aware of the situation."

Comment Caps aren't the problem (Score 1) 530

Bandwidth costs money, an ISP has to have caps which realistically keeps overall usage to a level which the ISP can sustain with a given number of customers. If they don't and are offering "unlimited data" then they are over-subscribing their lines, lying or both. They can also over-subscribe their lines by simply selling their service to more customers than they can manage.

Obviously it can then be "managed" by traffic management, blocking protocols such as p2p etc but no-one likes these measures (especially here). I don't like them and I pay for an ISP that manages their data capacity honestly with caps and you buy bandwidth. It costs more, but it's worth it for me and they keep stats that show the number of unerrored seconds and buy capacity to keep up rather than traffic manage.

There is no such thing as "unlimited data" - period.

Comment Re:SNI and other alternatives (Score 2) 173

"it would give us most likely a good 5 to 6 years to do a nice orderly IPV6 rollout instead of the mess we are in now."

We've had a decade to do a nice orderly IPv6 rollout. The problem is no one will spend the time/money to do it until it is absolutely unavoidable.

This.It wouldn't make a difference, as it would just mean everyone would continue doing nothing, and legitimate users would just pay more.

My ISP gives me a /27 for free on my home network and I enjoy not having to use NAT and I am using the addresses (well more than 16 of them). Now why should I have to pay an extra $30 for my net connection because the rest of the Internet providers haven't performed due diligence with this issue (and since my ISP has also been IPv6 ready since 2002 they are obviously doing their job properly)

Comment Re:Cue the cable company bashing in 3...2...1.... (Score 3, Informative) 113

HOWEVER, I also think that we should pass laws FORBIDDING a monopoly into the home. At the least, we should change the monopoly to be from the home to the greenbox and any company can then sign up for a deal with providing service to the greenboxes, AT THE SAME RATES. IOW, if comcast wants to own the greenbox-home monopoly, not a problem. However, they charge other providers the same price that they charge the rest of comcast.

That is kind of how it works in the UK (See how British Telecom has been split up).

BT Openreach was created to "Ensure that all rival operators have equality of access to BT's own local network" and it works pretty well, I have a BT line and BT Wholesale broadband, but provided by a different company with their own service levels, prices etc. And there are a lot of ISP's like this.

If an ISP doesn't want to use BT's infrastructure in the exchange, they can even install their own whilst still taking advantage of that piece of cable going from the exchange to the home, laid down by public money.

How is it not obvious to the US politicians that this is a sensible move? More to the point, how the hell did something sensible happen in a UK Parliament?

Comment Re:Routing prevents "market" from working (Score 1) 157

Oh what a shame, my ISP gave me a /27 last week included as part of the service - and I thought it was worth $337.50 according to this article. I wonder what my /48 is worth at these prices! If we move to IPv6 everyone can be billionaires! </sarcasm>

Seriously though, I was very surprised they handed out a /27 so easily though after my /28 ran out. Then perhaps because they have been IPv6 ready for 8 years and well aware of IPv4 exhaustion that they have been planning well and are perhaps a little more confident than most.

Comment To a point you generally can (Score 1) 246

In my experience you can generally trace an IP address back to a given location (using RIPE and then contacting the ISP and I presume using legal means to find out who was using that IP address at that particular time).
But of course after that you have no idea what happens, is it an open Wifi point? Is it a closed one but has been cracked? Has the wifi key been given out to a neighbour? All of these options cast doubt on the exact person who committed whatever criminal or civil act that is under investigation.

Submission + - Travelers opt out of National Opt Out Day

An anonymous reader writes: The reports are piling in from National Opt Out Day, and it appears to have been a bust. Wired.com reports, "A grassroots opt-out protest planned at airports around the country appears to have fizzled". Boston.com reports "Travelers in Boston and other airports around the country were mostly opting out of National Opt-Out Day". CNN reports that was a "non-event".

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/11/opting-out-of-opting-out/
http://www.boston.com/business/ticker/2010/11/early_logan_tra.html?p1=News_links
http://www.tampabay.com/news/transportation/so-far-so-good-at-tampa-international-airport/1136145
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TRAVEL/11/24/national.opt.out.day/index.html

This is definitely not the spin desired by the organizers of the protest. Did the internet buzz mistake a lot of noise made by a few people for widespread public support, which then failed to materialize?
Ubuntu

Submission + - Ubuntu Is NOT Moving To A Rolling Release (digitizor.com)

dkd903 writes: Well now we have official words from Canonical. Rick Spencer, the Engineering Director of Ubuntu at Canonical has said the Ubuntu is not moving to a rolling release. While a rolling release does have many things I like, since there has been no official word Mark Shuttleworth or anyone from Canonical I was somewhat hesitant to believe in it.

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