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Censorship

Submission + - SCO Chair's Anti-Porn Act to be Signed Into Law

Submitted by
iptables -A FORWARD
iptables -A FORWARD writes: "Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. of Utah reportedly plans to sign the ICPA (Internet Community Ports Act) into law. The ICPA proposes that online content be divided by port, rather like TVs have channels with adult and family content, so that certain internet ports will be "clean" and others will be "dirty." Thus, they hope to remove objectionable content from port 80 and require that it be moved elsewhere (port 666 was already taken by Doom, sorry), so that people could more easily block objectionable content, or have their ISPs block the ports with objectionable content for them. This law was originally suggested by the CP80 group, which is chaired by Ralph Yarro, who also chairs the SCO Group. That probably explains why they didn't choose to adopt RFC 3514, instead."
Censorship

Submission + - How Strong is Viacom's $1 bn Claim Against Google?

Submitted by Kermit
Kermit writes: Yesterday, Viacom sued YouTube and its owner Google for damages in excess of $1 billion for infringing Viacom's copyrights. Viacom is the media giant which owns television programming including MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and movie studios including Dreamworks and Paramount. Viacom claims that YouTube has actively infringed Viacom's copyrighted works by publicly performing these movies on its website, and by permitting copies to be embedded in websites across the Net. Central to Viacom's claim is how the court will interpret provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Will Viacom win, or will Google be granted a "safe harbor"? Read this excellent analysis by David Mirchin to find out.
United States

Submission + - Very thoughtful intellectual property article

Submitted by scrollpane
scrollpane writes: This article in Harper's is the most well reasoned and thoughtful discussion of intellectual property I have read. It starts with a general discussion of artists copying — or being influenced by — other artists and moves on to discuss intellectual property from a variety of angles, including files sharing OSS, etc. Check it out.
Music

Submission + - Internet Radio In Peril

Submitted by h890231398021
h890231398021 writes: A recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB, a part of the U.S. Copyright Office) will significantly increase royalty rates on internet broadcasters, to the point at which most small/medium internet streams will be financially unable to operate because all of their revenues will go to paying royalties, leaving nothing for bandwidth fees, staff salaries, etc. This site provides more information, and claims the CRB decision is all part of the master RIAA plan to Make More Money and shut out independent artists. CNN has a brief summary as well.
Software

Submission + - Sun NetBeans phones home

Submitted by aunt edna
aunt edna writes: The Register reports that Sun seems to have caught a Microsoft infection: http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/03/13/netbeans_ phone_home/ It's not clear whether or not users are prompted to allow such internet access back to Sun. Given the typical user of NetBeans would be a bit savvy (uh-oh), firewall alerts should have been noticed — or does it just look like Java's going off to check for an update?
Input Devices

Submission + - Comcast 911 Fails - 4yr Old Suffers

Submitted by
Anonymous Consumer
Anonymous Consumer writes: "Comcast 911 Fails — 4yr Old Suffers — Comcast Support Hangs Up On Father

I am writing about my absolute disgust with Comcast and what they did to me tonight.

It is 2:30 AM PDT. Yesterday was my Son's 4th birthday. An hour ago he had a seizer. He was taken by ambulance to the hospital with his mom, my wife. I am at home right now going out of my mind with worry. I have another son who is sleeping, so one of us had to stay here while the other went.

I am not sure where to start because I am really pissed off. I picked up my telephone and called 911. All I got was a buzzing sound on the other end. I hung up and called 911 again, another weird noise.

Frustrated, I start hunting for my cell phone. After finding it, I call 911 and spend the next 5 minutes (which felt more like 22 hours) trying to the dispatcher what our address was.

After my son went to the hospital, I am left alone infuriated at Comcast. This E911 thing they have is supposed to get my 911 call through. By law I thought. I pick up the same phone I used to call 911 and call Comcast support. Seems to work fine to call support. Over the next hour I am shunted from call center to call center to supervisor to supervisor. I want someone's head. I want to wake up a VP, CTO, or even the CEO and let them know that their service delayed my son from getting the medical treatment he needed. That they need to know that the poor service they provided can put a life at risk. That this system needs to work. It has to work. They need to know, and some supervisor is not going to be the one to champion that message. I want a friggin VP to be woken up. I want heads to roll.

After an hour, I get to a supervisor in Texas who tells me escalating beyond her is "outside of her procedure" and refuses to escalate. She has an attitude, of course, and no doubt I am getting more upset by the minute. This call was not roses and butterflies. After prodding her for 10 minutes to escalate the call, she tells me the management "has a right to sleep" as the reason for her not to escalate. Infuriated, I tell her "fuck you". She proceeds to hang up on me, but not before saying "Have a good day sir".

I know this blog looks new, that's because it is. I have an email I registered at gmail tonight for this. It's itcanhappentoyou@gmail.com. I can explain more of what happened if anyone wants to email me. This isn't some BS, pissed off Comcast customer who couldn't get online at 2:00 in the morning.

Comcast needs to be held responsible when their service fails. They need to have escalation procedures that gets the customer to the person that can champion change, or at least advocate for customers.

I told the supervisor that unless this call gets escalated, I am going to go to every website I know and post this experience. It's the only medium I have to express my frustration and the only way, it seems, that a consumer can be heard. If a service failure results in something like this, someone should be woken up and held accountable. The service should have never failed. I should be able to pick up my phone and call 911 and get through."
The Courts

Submission + - RIAA sues paralyzed stroke victim

Submitted by
Waylon
Waylon writes: "It seems the RIAA will sue anyone, anywhere, even if you're a paralyzed stroke victim. Yes, Warner Music and the RIAA are suing a retired railroad man in Florida whose left side has been paralyzed by a stroke and whose sole source of income is his disability check. From the article: "Although the defendant John Paladuk, an employee of C&N Railroad for 36 years, was living in Florida at the time of the alleged copyright suit, and had notified the RIAA that he had not engaged in any copyright infringement, and despite that the fact that Mr. Paladuk suffered a stroke last year which resulted in complete paralysis of his entire left side and severely impaired speech, rendering him disabled, and despite the fact that his disability check is his sole source of income, the RIAA commenced suit against him on February 27, 2007.""
OS X

Submission + - OneNote Replacement for OSX

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In my personal life, I have recently switched from an XP box to using OSX (filmmaker tired of fighting Adobe Premier). The one thing I miss is Microsoft OneNote. Its notebook style structure, ease of use and straightforward ability to share notebooks (and synch them) aided me in organizing both my personal and professional work. I have struggled to find something as intuitive (or feature rich) for OSX. Short of running parallels (and buying a legal copy of XP), can anyone suggest an alternative for OSX?
Microsoft

Submission + - Windows ME is an Apple OS?

Submitted by
Dmpstrdvr
Dmpstrdvr writes: "We have all heard that Microsoft has terminated support for Windows ME/98 etc. I still have several Windows ME machines that dual boot with Linux. Some applications only supply Windows client software.. but, still support Win ME. Today, I ran "Windows Update" on one of the Win ME machines, and got the following message: "Thank you for your interest in obtaining updates from our site. This website is designed to work with Microsoft Windows operating systems only. To find updates for Microsoft products that are designed for Macintosh operating systems, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/mac/. " link to the page here: http://update.microsoft.com/windowsupdate/v6/thank s.aspx?ln=en-us&thankspage=2& I repeated the "Windows Update" with another machine — same result! It appears that they are trying to "distance" themselves from Win ME!"
Music

Submission + - MP3 Patent Troubles

Submitted by
Vengance Daemon
Vengance Daemon writes: "The New York Times and many other sources are reporting that Microsoft lost the patent case regarding "...the way the Windows Media Player software from Microsoft plays audio files using MP3..." They go on to say "If the ruling stands, Apple and hundreds of other companies that make products that play MP3 files, including portable players, computers and software, could also face demands to pay royalties to Alcatel."

At first glance, it appears that Fedora, and the other distributions that did not include MP3 capabilities in their products because of patent concerns were quite right. Ogg Vorbis works great for music, and many commercial players support it."
Announcements

Submission + - Creative Commons Licenses Version 3.0 Released

Submitted by
lithis
lithis writes: "A new version of the Creative Commons licenses has been released. What's new: “we have spun off the "generic" license to be the CC US license and created a new generic license ... we are ensuring that all CC jurisdiction licenses and the CC unported license have consistent, express treatment of the issues of moral rights and collecting society royalties ... [the license now explicitly declares that] a person may not misuse the attribution requirement of a CC license to improperly assert or imply an association or relationship with the licensor or author ... licenses will now include the ability for derivatives to be relicensed under a "Creative Commons Compatible License" ... the licenses include minor clarifications to the language of the licenses to take account of the concerns of Debian and MIT.”"
Music

Submission + - Gizmodo calls for RIAA boycott in March

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Gadget review site Gizmodo is calling for a boycott of RIAA-signed bands in the month of March: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/home-entertainment/putt ing-our-money-where-our-mouths-are-boycott-the-ria a-in-march-239281.php Instead, they suggest spending your greenbacks on indy artists, or attending concerts/buying merchandise from your favorite RIAA artist (which puts money in the artist's pocket), rather than buying recordings (and further enriching the fat cats at the RIAA). All I can say is, "hell yes!"
Television

Submission + - BBC mulls less DRM; wider OS support for iPlayer

Submitted by
zombieflesheater
zombieflesheater writes: "The BBC has detailed its proposals for new on-demand services to be made available through its iPlayer software. Among the offerings are TV catch-up over Internet and live TV streaming. Now the Beeb asking its customers how they think the services should work. Under its new Public Value Test process, the BBC trust has started a public consultation to gather license payer opinion. Among other things, Auntie wants to know whether the proposed service should be made available to consumers who are not using Microsoft software. The removal of DRM restrictions from certain audio downloads are also being considered. The consultation period ends on 28 March."

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