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Submission + - Gov't Contractor Uses Copyright, Fear Of Hackers To Get Restraining Order Agains (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Garabito
Garabito writes: A recent copyright infringement (+ "threat to national security") lawsuit filed by a government contractor against its former employee highlights two terms the government frequently fears: open source and hacking.

Andreas Schou brought this restraining order granted by an Idaho judge to many people's attention. It's an ultra-rare "no notice" restraining order that resulted from a wholly ex parte process involving only the plaintiff, government contractor Battelle Energy Alliance. The restraining order allowed Battelle to seize its former employee's computer, as well as prevent him from releasing the allegedly copied software as open source.

  What this looks like is a government contractor hoping to shut down a competitor by deploying two "chilling" favorites: copyright infringement and "threats to national security." It also hurts itself by falling for government FUD — "open source is dangerous" and "hackers are bad" — both of which contributed to the general level of failure contained in its complaint.

Submission + - The Cloud: Convenient Till A Stranger Nukes Your Files (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Thanks to a plethora of cloud storage accounts, Dan Tynan thought his days of carrying a thumb drive around with him and worrying about email stripping out his attachments were over. But that was before he discovered that his Box.com account and all the files in it had vanished without a trace. With tech support coming up empty, Tynan had to put on his journalist hat to track down the bizarre sequence of events that ended with his account handed over to another user, who didn't ask for it and didn't even know who Tynan was.

Submission + - First Experimental Evidence That Time Is An Emergent Quantum Phenomenon (medium.com)

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: One of the great challenges in physics is to unite the theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity. But all attempts to do this all run into the famous 'problem of time'--the resulting equations describe a static universe in which nothing ever happens. In 1983, theoreticians showed how this could be solved if time is an emergent phenomenon based on entanglement, the phenomenon in which two quantum particles share the same existence. An external, god-like observer always sees no difference between these particles compared to an external objective clock. But an observer who measures one of the pair--and so becomes entangled with it--can immediately see how it evolves differently from its partner. So from the outside the universe appears static and unchanging, while objects that are entangled within it experience the maelstrom of change. Now quantum physicists have performed the first experimental test of this idea by measuring the evolution of a pair of entangled photons in two different ways. An external god-like observer sees no difference while an observer who measures one particle and becomes entangled with it does see the change. In other words, the experiment shows how time is an emergent phenomenon based on entanglement, in which case the contradiction between quantum mechanics and general relativity seems to melt away.

Submission + - White House Official Tracked Down and Fired over Insulting Tweets 1

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: BBC reports that Jofi Joseph, a senior National Security Council staffer who was a key member of the White House team negotiating on Iran’s nuclear weapons program, has been fired that after a probe that included an investigation into his travel and shopping patterns – parsed from over 2,000 tweets. Joseph was fired from his job on the NSC nuclear non-proliferation team a week ago after a months-long probe into a barrage of tweets that included caustic criticisms of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and top NSC officials, especially Ben Rhodes – whom he accused of dodging questions about Benghazi. Joseph, who posted under the now defunct Twitter name @NatSecWonk, gave a lacerating commentary on anything from policy to personal appearance. "Was Huma Abedin wearing beer goggles the night she met Anthony Weiner," he tweeted, referring to the scandal-hit former New York mayoral candidate and his wife, a former aide of Hillary Clinton. He tweeted that Mrs Clinton "had few policy goals and no wins" in the Middle East. He said Chelsea Clinton was "assuming all of her parents' vices" and targeted figures such as Republican commentator Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney's wife Ann for their looks and weight. Many in the foreign policy community reacted with shock to the revelation that Joseph was the mystery tweeter because Joseph was well known among policy wonks and his wife, Carolyn Leddy, is a well-respected professional staffer on the Republican side of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "What started out as an intended parody account of DC culture developed over time into a series of inappropriate and mean-spirited comments," said Joseph in an apology. "I bear complete responsibility for this affair and I sincerely apologize to everyone I insulted."

Submission + - Musopen will save Chopin from the knots of copyright (kingofgng.com)

Submitted by KingofGnG
KingofGnG writes: Target reached (and exceeded) for the Set Chopin Free crowdfunding campaign, a new initiative by the Musopen non-profit organization aiming at preserving the music of Frédéric Chopin with high-quality recordings available to the public without copyright-enforced limits: the funds collected on the Kickstarter platform have reached the final sum of $92,452, namely 123% of the 75,000 dollars requested by founder Aaron Dunn and the other Musopen volunteers.

Submission + - Open Rights Group International: Virgin and Sky blindly blocking innocent sites (openrightsgroup.org)

Submitted by stewartrob70
stewartrob70 writes: As reported by PC Pro, the systems implemented by both Virgin and Sky to stop access to websites blocked by the courts appear to be blocking innocent third-party sites with apparently little or no human oversight. For example the website http://radiotimes.com/ was reported to have been blocked.

In order to understand why this specific issue happened, you need to be familiar with a quirk in how DNS is commonly used in third-party load-balanced site deployments.

Many third-party load balanced systems, for example those using Amazon's AWS infrastructure, are enabled by pointing CNAME records at names controlled by those third-party systems. For example www.example.com may be pointed at loadbalancer.example.net. However, "example.com" usually cannot be directly given a CNAME record (CNAME records cannot be mixed with the other record types needed such as those pointing to nameservers and mailservers). A common approach is to point "example.com" to a server that merely redirects all requests to "www.example.com".

From forum posts we can see that it's this redirection system, in this specific case an A record used for "http-redirection-a.dnsmadeeasy.com", that has been blocked by the ISPs — probably a court-order-blocked site is also using the service — making numerous sites unavailable for any request made without the "www" prefix.

These incidents strongly suggest that the opaque approach to website blocking by ISPs, and the apparent lack of oversight, has the potential to be hugely damaging to the internet. Open Rights Group calls for greater transparency in this area, beginning with making the court orders available for public inspection.

Source: https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2013/more-virgin-sky-blocking

Submission + - Obamacare Website violates GPL (weeklystandard.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to the Weekly Standard, the troubled Healthcare Marketplace website (www.healthcare.gov) uses code from DataTables.net, dual-licensed under GPL 2 or a BSD license, without attribution, even going so far as to remove the copyright notice. While the effort is undoubtedly a complex software engineering project, the lack of scruples is only slightly more troubling that the engine was designed by a company that apparently didn't realize that client-side code is easy to examine.

Submission + - Wild Games Studio take down YouTube review of Garry's Incident (youtube.com)

Submitted by msclrhd
msclrhd writes: The makers of Garry's Incident (Wild Games Studio) have issued a copyright infringement claim against Total Biscuit's "WTF is... Garry's Incident" video reviewing and criticising the game, alleging this is due to the video making ad revenue. The studio gave consent to make the review and allow YouTube videos to be made — indeed, various "Let's Plays" of Garry's Incident that generate ad revenue are still available on YouTube.

Total Biscuit goes into this more on the linked video, critiquing Wild Games Studio for the copyright infringement claim and takedown of the review video.

Submission + - MindCrack raises over $100K for ChildsPlay charity (mindcracklp.com)

Submitted by msclrhd
msclrhd writes: The MindCrack team have been running a 48 hour charity stream which has raised over $100K for the ChildsPlay charity as part of KurtJMac's Far Lands or Bust fund raising effort. Notch (the creator of MineCraft) donated $10 to the event.

The event still has just over an hour to go from posting this.

Submission + - Mark Shuttleworth launches diatribe on FOSS Tea Party (markshuttleworth.com)

Submitted by slack_justyb
slack_justyb writes: Mark Shuttleworth sends his congrats to the Ubuntu developers and before going on a rambling about 14.04's name, takes aim at what he calls "The Open Source Tea Party".

Mir is really important work. When lots of competitors attack a project on purely political grounds, you have to wonder what THEIR agenda is.

Citing that many other distros doing finger pointing at Mir have too also NIH (Not Invented Here) the heck out of standard stacks and even calls out Lennart Poettering's systemd, who is the past has pointed out Canonical's tendency to favor projects they control.. However, not all has earned Mark's scorn. Even going so far to show love for Linux Mint

So yes, I am very proud to be, as the Register puts it, the Ubuntu Daddy. My affection for this community in its broadest sense – from Mint to our cloud developer audience, and all the teams at Canonical and in each of our derivatives, is very tangible today.

While I can say that it is great that Ubuntu 13.10 has hit the download, it is doubtful that blindly ""not"" pointing fingers and calling them one of the more radical groups in America will win many supporters.

Submission + - Oracle attacks Open Source; says community developed code is inferior (muktware.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: Oracle has a love hate relationship with Open Source technologies. Oracle claims that TCO (total cost of ownership) goes up with the use of Open Source technologies, basically to build a case of selling its own over prices products to the government. Oracle also attacks the community based development model calling it more insecure than company developed products. You can read the non-sensical paper here.

Submission + - Apple Steals exclusive "iPhone" Trademark from Brazilian Firm (cnet.com) 4

Submitted by bhagwad
bhagwad writes: Brazil's IGB Electronica filed for the "iPhone" trademark way back in 2000 and it wanted to retain exclusive rights to the name. Apple didn't like this and filed a lawsuit. The Brazil's Institute of Industry Property (INPI) sided with IGB saying that Apple had no right to use the name "iPhone" since it was already taken. Apple appealed that. In a bizarre ruling today, the appeals court overturned the lower court's ruling saying "all the (Apple) product's renown and client following have been built on its performance and excellence as a product." So that's ok then. No exclusive trademark rights for someone who filed for it eight years before the iPhone was even a product. This begs the question though...why did Apple even take this to court? Shouldn't it just accept that someone else trademarked the name and move on?

Submission + - World first digital laser invented in South Africa by CSIR (greenitweb.co.za)

Submitted by khabza
khabza writes: Researchers at South Africa's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) have developed a world-first digital laser that could be a game-changer in the field, paving the way for new laser applications in areas ranging from medicine to communications.

Submission + - The Case of the Copyrighted Detective: The Saga Continues

Submitted by Dster76
Dster76 writes: Slashdot has discussed the tangle involving Sherlock Holmes and Copyright before. Well, they're at it again.

A new wrinkle has emerged: a 'Sherlock Holmes scholar' has filed for a declaratory judgement that all of the Sherlock Holmes writings are in the public domain. But the estate has responded — with hilarious arguments.

If this goes in favour of the Conan Doyle Estate, then it's hard to see how copyright is about expressions and not ideas.

Submission + - NSA hired VUPEN, "Darth Vader of Cybersecurity," for 0-day exploit

Submitted by v3rgEz
v3rgEz writes: Documents requested by MuckRock from the National Security Agency show it had a contract with the French security researcher VUPEN whose founder and CEO Chaouki Bekrar puckishly touts himself as the "Darth Vader of Cybersecurity."

While the NSA redacted the price of the subscription, VUPEN is apparently hoping the year-long contract is a sign of things to come: It recently tweeted it was setting up shop in Maryland.

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