Associate - Slashdot User

Submission + - Free global virtual scientific library

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 28, 2007 @06:02PM

An anonymous reader writes: More than 20,000 signatures, including several Nobel prize winners and 750 education, research, and cultural organisations from around the world came together to support free access to government funded research, "to create a freely available virtual scientific library available to the entire globe. The European Commission responded by committing more than $100m (£51m) towards facilitating greater open access through support for open access journals and for the building of the infrastructure needed to house institutional repositories that can store the millions of academic articles written each year. From the BBC article: "Last month five leading European research institutions launched a petition that called on the European Commission to establish a new policy that would require all government-funded research to be made available to the public shortly after publication. That requirement — called an open access principle — would leverage widespread internet connectivity with low-cost electronic publication to create a freely available virtual scientific library available to the entire globe." Isn't this the way its suppose to be?

Submission + - Watermark system scours the net for infringement

Submitted by Almond Cookie on Wednesday February 28, 2007 @05:52PM

Almond Cookie writes: What if all copyrighted material contained watermarks, and software could scan videos and images online for those watermarks in order to report back to the content maker? A new patent filing shows plans for such a system to crawl sites like YouTube and MySpace for images or video that's copyrighted, which seems to focus more on casual piracy than that being done on P2P networks. Will it really work though? From the article:

For the system to work, players at multiple levels would need to get involved. Broadcasters would need to add identifying watermarks to their broadcast, in cooperation with copyright holders, and both parties would need to register their watermarks with the system. Then, in the event that a user capped a broadcast and uploaded it online, the scanner system would eventually find it and report its location online. [...] Generally we've laughed off most watermarking solutions because they seemed like solutions in search of a problem. Now that Google has learned the hard way that content owners want to be paid when their content shows up on YouTube, we may see more of these "solutions" in the future.

Submission + - Big 'Ocean' Discovered Beneath Asia

Submitted by anthemaniac on Wednesday February 28, 2007 @05:50PM

anthemaniac writes: Seismic observations reveal a huge reservoir of water in Earth's mantle beneath Asia. It's actually rock saturated with water, but it's an ocean's worth of water ... as much as is in the whole Arctic Ocean. How did it get there? A slab of water-laden crust sank, and the water evaporated out when it was heated, and then it was trapped, the thinking goes. The discovery fits neatly with the region's heavy seismic activity and fits neatly with the idea that the planet's moving crustal plates are lubricated with water.

Audio Watermark Web Spider Starts Crawling 173

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday February 28, 2007 @05:44PM from the now-it-just-needs-to-serve-you-papers-automatically dept.

DippityDo writes "A new web tool is scanning the net for signs of copyright infringement. Digimarc's patented system searches video and audio files for special watermarks that would indicate they are not to be shared, then reports back to HQ with the results. It sounds kind of creepy, but has a long way to go before it makes a practical difference. 'For the system to work, players at multiple levels would need to get involved. Broadcasters would need to add identifying watermarks to their broadcast, in cooperation with copyright holders, and both parties would need to register their watermarks with the system. Then, in the event that a user capped a broadcast and uploaded it online, the scanner system would eventually find it and report its location online. Yet the system is not designed to hop on P2P networks or private file sharing hubs, but instead crawls public web sites in search of watermarked material.'"

Feed 'Fair Use' Bill Returns, Gutted (wired.com)

From feed by wiredfeed on Wednesday February 28, 2007 @05:12PM

Reps. Boucher and Doolittle try for a third time to tone down the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but a key revision takes the teeth out of the measure. In Listening Post.

Submission + - Slashdot in a sci-fi book

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 28, 2007 @05:06PM

An anonymous reader writes: I was reading 'Century Rain' by Alastair Reynolds and was very surprised to see Slashdot mentioned there. Apparently a powerful, technologically advanced human society in the future will be founded by Slashdotters. From the book: "It's all right," Niagara said. "I won't be the least bit offended if you call me a Slasher. You probably regard the term as an insult." "Isn't it?" Auger asked, surprised. "Only if you want it to be." Niagara made a careful gesture, like some religious benediction: a diagonal slice across his chest and a stab to the heart. "A slash and a dot," he said. "I doubt it means anything to you, but this was once the mark of an alliance of progressive thinkers linked together by one of the very first computer networks. The Federation of Polities can trace its existence right back to that fragile collective, in the early decades of the Void Century. It's less a stigma than a mark of community."

Submission + - XBOX360 Hypervisor Security Protection hacked

Submitted by

ACTRAiSER

on Wednesday February 28, 2007 @05:03PM

ACTRAiSER writes: "A recent Post on Bugtraq claims the hack of the XBOX360 Security Protection Hypervisor. It includes sample code as well. "We have discovered a vulnerability in the Xbox 360 hypervisor that allows privilege escalation into hypervisor mode. Together with a method to inject data into non-privileged memory areas, this vulnerability allows an attacker with physical access to an Xbox 360 to run arbitrary code such as alternative operating systems with full privileges and full hardware access.""

Patent Office Head Lays Out Reform Strategy 253

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday February 28, 2007 @05:02PM from the long-overdue dept.

jeevesbond writes to tell us that Jon Dudas, the Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the US Patent and Trademark Office has laid out a plan for patent reform. "Speaking at the Tech Policy Summit in San Jose, Dudas said that characterizing the patent system as hurting innovation is a 'fundamentally wrong' way to frame the debate. 'I have traveled around the world, and every nation is thinking how it can model [intellectual property governance] after the U.S,' Dudas said. 'It's a proven system, over 200 years old. The Supreme Court, Congress and policy makers are involved [in cases and legal reforms] not because the system is broken. It's not perfect, and we should be having the debate on how to improve.'"

Submission + - Gmail let's you get mail from other POP3 accounts.

Submitted by

snower1313

on Wednesday February 28, 2007 @04:49PM

snower1313 writes: "Gmail has just added a new feature for a limited number of users that allows 3rd party POP3 account emails to be retrieved into your Gmail Inbox. "You can retrieve your mail (new and old) from up to five other email accounts and have them all in Gmail. Then you can even create a customized 'From:' address, which lets you send messages from Gmail, but have them look like they were sent from another one of your email accounts.""

Submission + - BBC Micro: Britain's First PC Hit

Submitted by on Wednesday February 28, 2007 @04:43PM

An anonymous reader writes: North American children grew up with the Apple II. Across the Atlantic, the BBC gave its blessings to the unreleased Acorn Proton (another 6502 micro) and it became the standard in education and home for almost a decade as the BBC Micro, even though there were cheaper, more capable machines on the market. Read about how Acorn won the lucrative contract and slowly disintegrated after their RISC home computer (released in 1987) failed to catch on.

Submission + - DHS Abandons RFID

Submitted by on Wednesday February 28, 2007 @04:28PM

An anonymous reader writes: The Department of Homeland Security has abandoned plans to embed RFID chips in arrival and departure forms carried by foreign nations in the U.S. The decision comes shortly after a General Accounting Office report found that the chips often were not properly scanned by sensors, and that they provided no additional assurance that the person arriving in the country was the same as the person leaving the country. Privacy groups had criticized the plan to embed the chips out of fear that they would allow people on the street to be scanned for forms that would identify them as non-citizens.

Submission + - IBM SW evaluation DVD with all its Linux apps

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 28, 2007 @04:10PM

An anonymous reader writes: This is the easiest way to get all of the fresh releases of IBM applications for Linux. A DVD with all DB2, Rational, Websphere, Informix, Tivoli, and Workplace applications for Linux will be sent to you at no cost.

Submission + - RIAA Prepares to Sue 400 College Students

Submitted by on Wednesday February 28, 2007 @03:51PM

An anonymous reader writes: The RIAA sent out "pre-litigation settlement notices" to 400 network users at 13 U.S. universities today, continuing a PR blitz that began last week with a much-publicized list of the 25 most notified universities for copyright infringement. Once again, Ohio University tops the list, with one out of every eight notifications. From the press release: "The RIAA will request that universities forward those letters to the appropriate network user. Under this new approach, a student (or other network user) can settle the record company claims against him or her at a discounted rate before a lawsuit is ever filed."

Submission + - The Green Grid helps IT to save money and power

Submitted by squishylimbs on Wednesday February 28, 2007 @03:44PM

squishylimbs writes: A new industry group called The Green Grid is made up of Intel, AMD, and other big tech firms, and it's trying to make the data center more efficient. Why? Because they claim that current servers are wasting almost 35 percent of their power through power conversion alone.

From the article: "Electricity is being wasted at an alarming rate by most current servers. A typical 2U server with dual processors runs on a 450W power supply. Of that, 35 percent (160W) is lost just in the power conversion process inside the machine. This doesn't just cost money for a bit of wasted power; it also costs money for the additional cooling required to keep the datacenter at a constant temperature, and it limits the total number of servers that can be installed in a datacenter due to power constraints."

Submission + - MPAA Fires Back at AACS Decryption Utility

Submitted by RulerOf on Wednesday February 28, 2007 @03:23PM

RulerOf writes: The AACS Decryption utility released this past December known as BackupHDDVD originally authored by Muslix64 of the Doom9 forums has received its first official DMCA Takedown Notice. It has been widely speculated that the utility itself was not an infringing piece of software due to the fact that it is merely "a textbook implementation of AACS," written with the help of documents publicly available at the AACS LA's website, and that the AACS Volume Unique Keys that the end user isn't supposed to have access to are in fact the infringing content, but it appears that such is not the case. From the thread:

"...you must input keys and then it will decrypt the encrypted content. If this is the case, than according to the language of the DMCA it does sound like it is infringing. Section 1201(a) says that it is an infringement to "circumvent a technological measure." The phrase, "circumvent a technological measure" is defined as "descramb(ling) a scrambled work or decrypt(ing) an encrypted work, ... without the authority of the copyright owner." If BackupHDDVD does in fact decrypt encrypted content than per the DMCA it needs a license to do that.

Slashdot Top Deals