adam - Slashdot User

Submission + - Italian judge says P2P OK if it's not for money

Submitted by Paolo DF on Saturday January 20, 2007 @02:21PM

Paolo DF writes: Two italian students have been recently condemned (at a three months and ten days confinement) for creating a p2p network sharing movies and music with other students, because they violated two articles of the Italian Copyright Law. Now, the "Corte di Cassazione" wikipedia entry (court of last resort, born to "ensure the observation and the correct interpretation of law") cleared their charges, since that law is about copying for profit, while they weren't making money out of the p2p network.
Here is the story, from the major Italian newspaper "Corriere della Sera"

Submission + - Google Checkout sees poor customer satisfaction

Submitted by

Aryabhata

on Saturday January 20, 2007 @01:07PM

Aryabhata writes: "As per an Arstechnica report on a survey by investment firm J.P. Morgan Securities, Google Checkout has had a relatively quick and modest market penetration of six percent since its launch in June of 2006, but lags behind in customer satisfaction vs PayPal. On the customer satisfaction front, only 18.8 percent reported having a "good" or "very good" experience with Google Checkout, while 81.2 percent indicated a fair to poor experience customer experience compared to PayPal's 44.2 percent reporting good experiences. Some users have reported anecdotally that Google Checkout mistakenly canceled sales without warning or that the checkout process took too long."

Submission + - Utah's Newest Attempt to Block Pornography

Submitted by gc8005 on Saturday January 20, 2007 @12:23PM

gc8005 writes: There's something brewing in Utah. A new, non-profit organization called CP80 that wants to segregate Internet content based on IP ports. To a lay person, it sounds plausible, as CP80 describes port segregation like cable TV channels. But unlike the cable system, it's easily bypassed. Even more disturbing are the founders and backers of CP80, which include Ralph Yarro, who was recently fired from his CEO position at Canopy Group (see SCO fiasco), and several venture capital firms. Even Darl McBride has donated to the cause. Why are VCs backing a non-profit anti-pornography organization? What's the real story behind CP80?

Submission + - Cake Printer Doesn't Speak Italian, Pens Errors.

Submitted by Radon360 on Saturday January 20, 2007 @11:14AM

Radon360 writes: From the engadget blurb:

While we doubt we've seen every single computing error that could possibly occur, there's definitely been a fair amount to surface, and while this story may not take the proverbial cake, it's good for a hearty chuckle if nothing else. Apparently, a certain Aunt Elsa was supposed to receive a custom baked (and messaged) cake from Wegmans Grocery to celebrate her birthday, and as the part-English, part-Italian message was emailed into Wegmans presumably automated printing machine, a bit of miscommunication ensued. Sure, it makes sense that the machine might not have been ready (or programmed) to handle languages outside of English, but surely someone actually looked at this thing before sending it out, right? Nevertheless, Aunt Elsa was graced with a cake that just barely got the whole "birthday" message across, and we presume even the supportEmptyParas tasted mighty sweet going down.

and Aunt Elsa ends up with commented out code on her cake instead.

Submission + - First AACS BluRay Content Decrypted

Submitted by kad77 on Saturday January 20, 2007 @01:16AM

kad77 writes: The anonymous coder 'muslix64', who earlier implemented the first public AACS decryption algorithm for use on HD-DVD movies (ed: need slashdot ref) (ed: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=119871), has decrypted files from the AACS protected BluRay disc "Lord of War". His methodology was described in another doom9 forum thread (ed: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=120869), as a "known-plaintext attack". BluRay's "BD+" enhanced DRM layer was not involved in this decryption, and has not been addressed to date. Ultimately, software content players were the weak point that lead to key discovery.

Feed Anytown, Online (nytimes.com)

From feed by nytfeed on Sunday January 14, 2007 @11:12PM

In suburban towns across the greater New York area, citizen bloggers and entrepreneurs are creating town-specific, and even neighborhood-specific, Web sites.

New Plan In UK For "Big Brother" Database 178

Posted by kdawson on Sunday January 14, 2007 @10:32PM from the for-our-own-good dept.

POPE Mad Mitch writes "The BBC is reporting that Tony Blair is going to unveil plans on Monday to build a single database to pull together and share every piece of personal data from all government departments. The claimed justification is to improve public services. The opposition party and the Information Commission have both condemned the plan as another step towards a 'Big Brother' society. Sharing information in this way is currently prohibited by the 'over-zealous' data protection legislation. An attempt to build a similar database was a key part of the, now severely delayed, ID card scheme."

Submission + - Walmart Prevents Shopping With Firefox

Submitted by

mattfite

on Sunday January 14, 2007 @08:58PM

mattfite writes: "I haven't yet seen this on /., but while looking for an artist's recording, I went to Walmart to try out the $0.88/song download. The link informs me that "We notice you're not using Internet Explorer. To continue, please visit this page using Internet Explorer 6.0 or later." Others have noticed this, too."

Submission + - Internet's Largest Internet Forum to Shut Down

Submitted by

Neo_Mushroom

on Sunday January 14, 2007 @08:32PM

Neo_Mushroom writes: "From the article: "2channel, the largest Internet forum in the world and an ISP in Japan, has been shuttered by a Japanese court ruling in a civil slander case. The corporation managing 2channel was declared bankrupt and its assets will be seized. The ISP will close on January 15th, and the future of the famous "mega-BBS" is uncertain."

For those who've never heard of 2channel, the BBS is massively popular, recieving over 2.7 million posts every day."

Submission + - Big brother tracking (and taxing) on UK roads

Submitted by Thanster on Sunday January 14, 2007 @06:09PM

Thanster writes: The British government is working on plans to introduce pay per mile with GPS trackers in your car, this has massive big brother implications. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6160877.stm The government's proposal to introduce road pricing will mean you having to purchase a tracking device for your car and paying a monthly bill to use it. The tracking device will cost about £200 and in a recent study by the BBC, the lowest monthly bill was £28 for a rural florist and £194 for a delivery driver. A non working Mum who used the car to take the kids to school paid £86 in one month. On top of this massive increase in tax, you will be tracked. Somebody will know where you are at all times. They will also know how fast you have been going, so even if you accidentally creep over a speed limit you can expect a For any concerned UK slashdotters, a petition has been raised here: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/traveltax/

Submission + - Image Spam Becoming a Growing Challenge

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05, 2007 @07:08PM

An anonymous reader writes: Image spam is a serious and growing problem, not least because of its ability to circumvent traditional email spam filters to clog servers and inboxes. In just half a year, the problem of image spam has become general enough to be representative of 35 per cent of all junk mail. Not only this, but image spam is taking up 70 per cent of the bandwidth bulge on account of the large file sizes every single one represents.

Submission + - Open source Flickr-like app?

Submitted by Zanguinar on Friday January 05, 2007 @05:57PM

Zanguinar writes: I've been a Gallery user for years now. I have a ton of photos, organized by albums, mainly just for use by my family and close friends. However, some of my friends have begun using Flickr. I can't say I blame them. It's got a great design, and I love the tagging concept. However, I'm not eager to store my photos on somebody else's server, and don't want to pay for the privilege, especially since I already run my own web server. But I can't find any Flickr-like software to run on my home LAMP setup. All I want is to be able to tag my photos like Flickr and be able to display them by tag, tag intersection, date, etc. Why hasn't anybody published some OSS to do this yet?

Journal Journal: Japanese Instant Ramen Inventor died at age 96 1

Journal by oddmake on Friday January 05, 2007 @12:37PM

Accoding to Yomiuri Online(Japanese article), inventor of modern instant noodle,one of the best frineds of nerds, Momofuku Ando died of myocardial infarction ,on January 5. Ando claimed "chicken ramen" instant noodle was everyday diet of his own and largely contributed his healthy ,long life.Try another cup noodle for your hea

Submission + - Google drop tips service

Submitted by

Koninklijke

on Friday January 05, 2007 @12:36PM

Koninklijke writes: "Google have decided to remove the Google tips feature after some prominent bloggers questioned their impartiality. These tips were a way of promoting other services that Google offered by placing a notice above the search results whenever certain search terms were entered. Although most people admitted that the tips weren't a reason to distrust Google they believed it was a step in the wrong direction as Google as set high standards for itself in the past."

Submission + - Diet Pills

Submitted by Nitack on Friday January 05, 2007 @12:35PM

Nitack writes: Diet pill makers just got spanked by the Federal Trade Comission today. The FTC levied a $25 million fine for false advertising on four diet pill makers. Apparently psudo-science and testimonials are not considered scientific proof any more! FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras asserted that "They not only didn't have studies to support the claim, they actually had a study that went the other way." The fines are targeted against marketers of Xenadrine EFX, One A Day Weight Smart, CortiSlim and TrimSpa. Looks like Anna Nicole may be out of a job.

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