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Microsoft

Microsoft Files Dispute Against Current Owner of XboxOne.com 381

Posted by samzenpus from the what's-in-a-name? dept.
MojoKid writes "Microsoft might have one of the most talked-about products at the moment with the Xbox One, but would you believe it doesn't own the rights to the most obvious domain name to accompany it? Domain squatting is a real issue for companies about to launch a new product. If they register a domain before the official launch, people can find that and subsequently ruin the company's surprise. This particular case is different, however. The domain name wasn't registered just the other day. Instead, a UK resident registered the name XboxOne.com in December of 2011, long before Microsoft itself even likely had a definitive name for its upcoming console. So, what can a company do in this instance? File a dispute with the National Arbitration Forum, an ICANN-approved organization that specializes in dealing with these sorts of matters."
Crime

LibertyReserve.com Shuttered, Founder Arrested In Spain 138

Posted by samzenpus from the long-arm-of-the-law dept.
hypnosec writes "Libertyreserve.com has been shut with the founder arrested by police in Spain this week over his alleged involvement in money laundering. Libertyreserve.com has been down for over three days now and the arrest seems to be the reason behind the outage. Arthur Budovsky Belanchuk, a 39-year-old male, has been arrested by Spanish authorities as a part of their ongoing investigations into money laundering. U.S. officials may very well seek his extradition."
China

Tests Show That Deadly New Flu Could Spread Among People 185

Posted by samzenpus from the patient-zero dept.
An anonymous reader writes in with another news story about how the bird flu may wipe us out. "A new bird flu that has killed 36 people in China can spread from ferret to ferret through the air. A laboratory test showing airborne transmission of the H7N9 avian influenza virus between the animals has raised fears that the virus is poised to become a human pandemic. The H7N9 avian influenza virus emerged suddenly at the end of February and has infected 131 people. A few patients may have caught the virus from other infected people, but no evidence has emerged that H7N9 can readily transmit from human to human."

Comment Re:GPL and Redistributing the code internally and (Score 1) 266

Relevant because the claim "it protects the end-user" is bunk.

Nonsense.

The exclusive job of a copyright license is to permit distribution.

Yes...

Well, distribution isn't something that end-users do, it's something that developers do.

A developer can be an end user. An end user may wish to have a developer make changes for them. They may even wish to redistribute it. Your definition of "end user" is excessively narrow.

Therefore if you're license doesn't permit distribution in some cases, you're only restricting the freedoms of developers.

Read what I wrote above, and realize that what you say is completely wrong.

This is, by definition, non-free.

No. NO. The GPL guarantees that no middleman can take the sources, add something to it, and give only binaries to the end user. It ensures the freedom of the recipient to do as they wish with the software. It prevents you from intervening and stopping them.

I see this same, terrible argument so often. I'm sure there's a nice rebuke of it somewhere on the FSF/GNU project's website.

Comment Re:GPL and Redistributing the code internally and (Score 1) 266

I'm talking about an EULA, not a copyright license. An EULA is supposed to restrict what the end-user is legally allowed to do with their own program on their own computer (but they're not making any agreement in return, it's only a promise, and should be legally unenforceable).

And this is relevant how?

A copyright license is legally incapable of restricting what an end-user is doing, it can only permit (re)distribution, nothing more.

Correct, but relevant how?

You don't just "close off the sources", once you've published source code, it's like, always out there.

Except if a middleman comes through, changes it, and gives the binaries to other people. That code is not out there. And it's that sort of action that the GPL pushes back against.

Comment Re:GPL and Redistributing the code internally and (Score 1) 266

If you want to respect the rights of end users, then, you know, don't include a licensing agreement.

What? If you don't include a license then no one can do anything with it.

It's not as if the GPL has a legal monopoly on this paradigm.

The GPL is the only one (off the top of my head) that prevents a middleman from stepping in and closing the sources on its way to the end user.

What exactly are you getting at?

Comment Re:GPL and Redistributing the code internally and (Score 1) 266

the equally crony capitalism of the copyleft "free" licenses

LOL

(not actually free by any definition, it's still restrictive and subjects you to lawsuits for failing to do any number of things)

Whereby "restrictive" means "forced to respect the rights of end users" and where "lawsuits" means "usually settle once the license is complied with."

Of course, people releasing Free Software should just expect to have their license violated while proprietary software vendors shouldn't, right?
Government

US DOJ Lays Out Cybersecurity Basics Every Company Should Practice 58

Posted by samzenpus from the protect-ya-neck dept.
coondoggie writes "The mantra is old, grant you, but worth repeating since it's obvious from the amount of cybersecurity breaches that not everyone is listening. Speaking at the Georgetown Cybersecurity Law Institute this week, Deputy Attorney General of the United States James Cole said there are a ton of things companies can do to help government and vice-versa, to combat cyber threats through better prevention, preparedness, and incidence response."
Yahoo!

Entrepreneur On Yahoo/Tumblr: It's the Content Readers, Stupid 92

Posted by samzenpus from the cost-of-doing-business dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Weighing in on Yahoo's recent acquisition of Tumblr for $1.1 billion, social networking entrepreneur Adam Rifkin argues that Tumblr is extremely valuable business property because it has successfully organized itself around the 'Interest Graph' (people interested in the same hobbies or things), rather than the 'Social Graph' (family, friends, and coworkers/colleagues, as is typical for Facebook). He opines that, for a social networking site, readers are far more important than writers; writers, after all, 'have time but no money. Certain groups are going to be overrepresented: Students, stay-at-home moms, the underemployed, retirees.' While readers are just the opposite: they 'have money but no time.... They want to see a picture of a watch they like, and buy it now.' In other words, it's the readers of the content that businesses are trying to reach. And interest graphs can be specifically targeted by businesses, much more so than social graphs."
Biotech

Advanced Biological Computer Developed 40

Posted by samzenpus from the man-and-machine dept.
First time accepted submitter ben saad issam writes in with news about a new biological transducer built by Israeli scientist. "Using only biomolecules (such as DNA and enzymes), scientists at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have developed and constructed an advanced biological transducer, a computing machine capable of manipulating genetic codes, and using the output as new input for subsequent computations. The breakthrough might someday create new possibilities in biotechnology, including individual gene therapy and cloning."
Privacy

Eric Schmidt: Teens' Mistakes Will Never Go Away 335

Posted by Soulskill from the then-teens-will-just-stop-caring-about-mistakes dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Speaking at the Hay Festival in the U.K. this weekend, Google's Eric Schmidt spoke about the permanence of your online presence, and how that will affect kids growing up in an online world. 'We have never had a generation with a full photographic, digital record of what they did. We have a point at which we [Google] forget information we know about you because it is the right thing to do.' He makes the point that a lot of respectable, upstanding adults today had dubious incidents as kids and teenagers. They were able to grow up and move past those events, and society eventually forgot — but today, every notable misdeed is just a Google search away. CNET's coverage points out that 'mistakes' can often be events that put somebody's life on track. 'A word or an act can seem like a mistake when it happens — and even shortly afterward. In years to come, though, you might look back on it and see that, though it created friction and even hurt at the time, it served a higher and more character-forming purpose in the long run.' Of course, it's also true that some mistakes a simply indicators that somebody's a schmuck." Schmidt also made an interesting comment in an interview with The Telegraph while he was in the U.K. He said, "You have to fight for your privacy, or you will lose it." This is quite different from his infamous 2009 remark: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Software

Java Developer Says He Built, Launched Basic Open Source Office Suite In 30 Days 266

Posted by Soulskill from the quick-and-dirty dept.
alphadogg writes "A freelance Java developer claims it took him only 30 days to build and launch a basic open source office suite that runs on multiple OSes. Called Joeffice, it works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux as well as in browsers, according to the developer, Anthony Goubard. It includes a very basic word processor, spreadsheet program, presentation program and database software, Goubard said. The office suite was built with NetBeans and uses many popular open source Java libraries. That allowed him to built the program in 30 days, he said, a process that he documented daily on YouTube (video). The suite was released as an alpha version, which means that not everything works yet. Goubard's Amsterdam company, Japplis, launched the suite, which is available under an Apache 2.0 license. This license allows companies to change and redistribute the code internally without having to share the new code publicly, he said."

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