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Comment The article and summary a bit misleading (Score 4, Informative) 166

The political process is not as straightforward as the article suggests: It will first be passed on to a committee which will listen for various experts and interested parties, including copyright holders' associations. The committee will then be free to make amendments and changes to the proposal, even though the proposal is already written in a form of law text. After the committee it will probably be subjected to other various committees for review, for example the constitutional committee to check if it is in alignment with the constitution. At the end of this long committee process is the public vote in the Parliament, which is most often just a formality.

Therefore it is not guaranteed at all that the intended changes will pass even if the law will be changed in the parliament.

Comment Re:Name Change (Score 1, Redundant) 151

The finnish legislation standard used to be (until 2000's where they passed some questionable laws) to lay down technologically neutral laws, where the technology used played no important role but the actual action by the person did no matter what the tool used. This proposed legislation is just an exception to be amended to the current law, which regulates the use of other people's property, which you currently are not allowed to use without a prior permission. Currently some of the facilities offer free WiFi without informing you of such and this behaviour would be illegal by the law even when it's not easy to detect or to prosecute. So they are for the sake of clarity, going to make an exception because it is often hard to find out whether you're allowed to use the open network or not.

The human translation for newstext:

Joining a wireless accesspoint to be legalized

The ministry of justice is forming a law to allow use of unprotected WiFi access points. By the current law the unauthorized use of open networks has been illegal.

The exception is rationalized by for example, the lack of harm done, impossibility of oversight and the relative easiness of protecting the network. For the end user it is also often difficult to find out when the network is meant for public use and when it is not.

The statements received by the ministry of justice (which includes EFFI, Electronic Frontier Finland, by transl.) remind that the avilability of free WiFi access has increased in public space such as parks and air fields and they don't always inform the end user of the free availability.

According to the ministry of justice, there has been only one sentence for the use of unsecured WiFi by the district court. Higher court upheld the decision and it never went to the supreme court.

Most of the statements were for the legalization. However, many of them held it in high value that the owner of the access point should be held innocent in case of the illegal use of the access point.

Experts' opinion is that a lot of the WiFi access points are unsecured and the unauthorized use of them is common. Securing of the access point is usually easy when following the manuals of the access point.

The unauthorized use of the access point might slow the network down but it is hard to note unless there's a lot of file transfers compared to the bandwidth available.

Comment Re:Name Change (Score 5, Informative) 151

The finnish legislation standard used to be (until 2000's where they passed some questionable laws) to lay down technologically neutral laws, where the technology used played no important role but the action did. This proposed legislation is just an exception to be amended to the current law, which regulates the use of other people's property, which you currently are not allowed to use without a prior permission. Currently some of the facilities offer free WiFi without informing you of such and this behaviour would be illegal by the law even when it's not easy to detect or to prosecute. So they are for the sake of clarity, going to make an exception because it is often hard to find out whether you're allowed to use the open network or not.

The human translation for newstext:

Joining a wireless accesspoint to be legalized

The ministry of justice is forming a law to allow use of unprotected WiFi access points. By the current law the unauthorized use of open networks has been illegal.

The exception is rationalized by for example, the lack of harm done, impossibility of oversight and the relative easiness of protecting the network. For the end user it is also often difficult to find out when the network is meant for public use and when it is not.

The statements received by the ministry of justice (which includes EFFI, Electronic Frontier Finland, by transl.) remind that the avilability of free WiFi access has increased in public space such as parks and air fields and they don't always inform the end user of the free availability.

According to the ministry of justice, there has been only one sentence for the use of unsecured WiFi by the district court. Higher court upheld the decision and it never went to the supreme court.

Most of the statements were for the legalization. However, many of them held it in high value that the owner of the access point should be held innocent in case of the illegal use of the access point.

Experts' opinion is that a lot of the WiFi access points are unsecured and the unauthorized use of them is common. Securing of the access point is usually easy when following the manuals of the access point.

The unauthorized use of the access point might slow the network down but it is hard to note unless there's a lot of file transfers compared to the bandwidth available.

Comment Re:Banking doesn't usually require anonymity (Score 2, Informative) 114

I'm also a Finn and I was counting the votes at the municipal elections in Helsinki late last year. The system is even more tamper proof than described previously. First of all, the ballot box is checked at the casting of the first vote that there's no extra votes within the box. The first vote is stamped (like the rest will be) and put in to the box. The parties have a right to set an observer for the whole time until the votes have been counted. The next day the votes are recounted (which is where I was part of):

All districts are dealt out randomly to counting groups. The groups then count the votes and if they agree on the number of votes with the first count - and don't disqualified any votes accepted previously due to certain criteria - then the result is accepted. The votes can be disqualified for multiple reasons: The vote paper might be completely unmarked and it is counted separately as an official form of protesting against every party. The other reasons are ambiguous number (usually trouble separating 1 from 7 and 6 from 0 or numbers that look different upside down, like 188 vs. 881 when a single vertical bar is used for number 1.), additional non-clarifying markings in the vote that could be used to link the person to the vote (to prevent vote buying & selling), lack of stamping (to prevent people slipping in multiple votes within the true vote) or using other than official voting paper in voting. Lot of votes disqualified contain all kinds of messages to the government, from a friendly "F U government!" to cryptic messages to God or Bavarian Illuminati.

If the result is in any way different from the previous count then it is dealt randomly to another counting group which will verify the result. All the disqualified votes go to the jurisdiction to give a final verdict on the votes and if possible decide the candidate the ambiguous vote is for.

All this counting is done in a group supervised by political parties, though in current stable political environment the supervision is only superficial. Being a member of this counting process has only increased my trust in paper voting and distrust in e-voting.

Privacy

Tool To Allow ISPs To Scan Every File You Transmit 370

timdogg writes "Brilliant Digital Entertainment, an Australian software company, has grabbed the attention of the NY attorney general's office with a tool they have designed that can scan every file that passes between an ISP and its customers. The tool can 'check every file passing through an Internet provider's network — every image, every movie, every document attached to an e-mail or found in a Web search — to see if it matches a list of illegal images.' As with the removal of the alt.binary newgroups, this is being promoted under the guise of preventing child porn. The privacy implications of this tool are staggering."
Robotics

Robot Rebellion Quelled in Iraq 317

opencity writes "The Register reports that the (perhaps inevitable) robot rebellion has been avoided ... for now. 'Ground-crawling US war robots armed with machine guns, deployed to fight in Iraq last year, reportedly turned on their fleshy masters almost at once. The rebellious machine warriors have been retired from combat pending upgrades.' Gizmodo also has a good photo."
Microsoft

Microsoft Says Vista Has the Fewest Flaws 548

ancientribe writes "Microsoft issued a year-one security report on its Windows Vista operating system today, and it turns out Vista logged less than half the vulnerabilities than Windows XP did in its first year. According to the new Microsoft report, Vista also had fewer vulnerabilities in its first year than other OSes — including Red Hat rhel4ws, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, and Apple Mac OS X 10.4 — did in their first years."

Bees Can Optimize Internet Bottlenecks 128

prostoalex writes "Georgia Tech and University of Oxford scientists claim bees can help up develop a better Internet traffic algorithms. By observing bees, the researchers noticed that bees pass back information on route quality. 'On a basic level, the honeybee's dilemma is a tale of two flower patches. If one patch is yielding better nectar than the other, how can the hive use its workforce most efficiently to retrieve the best supply at the moment? The solution, which earned Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch a Nobel Prize, is a communication system called the waggle dance.' Any practical applications of that? Well, apparently ad servers, serving banners across a variety of servers, can report back on the time it took to generate the page."
Power

Portable Nuclear Battery in the Development Stages 439

Xight writes "The Santa Fe Reporter has up an article about a portable nuclear reactor, about the size of a hot tub. Despite it's 'small' size the company that is planning to develop the product (Hyperion Power Generation), claims it could power up to 25,000 homes. 'Though it would produce 27 megawatts worth of thermal energy, Hyperion doesn't like to think of its product as a reactor. It's self-contained, involves no moving parts and, therefore, doesn't require a human operator. "In fact, we prefer to call it a 'drive' or a 'battery' or a 'module' in that it's so safe," Hyperion spokeswoman Deborah Blackwell says. "Like you don't open a double-A battery, you just plug [the reactor] in and it does its chemical thing inside of it. You don't ever open it or mess with it."' If all goes according to plan, Hyperion could have a factory in New Mexico by late 2012, and begin producing 4,000 of these reactors."
Biotech

Mapping the Brain's Neural Network 143

Ponca City, We Love You writes "New technologies could soon allow scientists to generate a complete wiring diagram of a piece of brain. With an estimated 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses in the human brain, creating an all-encompassing map of even a small chunk is a daunting task. Only one organism's complete wiring diagram now exists: that of the microscopic worm C. elegans, which contains a mere 302 neurons. The C. elegans mapping effort took more than a decade to complete. Research teams at MIT and at Heidelberg in Germany are experimenting with different approaches to speed up the process of mapping neural connections. The Germans start with a small block of brain tissue and bounce electrons off the top of the block to generate a cross-sectional picture of the nerve fibers. They then take a very thin slice, 30 nanometers, off the top of the block. 'Repeat this [process] thousands of times, and you can make your way through maybe the whole fly brain,' says the lead researcher. They are training an artificial neural network to emulate the human process of tracing neural connections to speed the process about 100- to 1000-fold. They estimate that they need a further factor of a million to analyze useful chunks of the human brain in reasonable times."
It's funny.  Laugh.

Law Firm Claims Copyright on View of HTML Source 601

An anonymous reader writes "A law firm with all sorts of interesting views on copyright has decided to go the extra mile. As reported on Tech Dirt, they've decided that viewing the HTML source of their site is a violation of copyright. From the site's EULA: 'We also own all of the code, including the HTML code, and all content. As you may know, you can view the HTML code with a standard browser. We do not permit you to view such code since we consider it to be our intellectual property protected by the copyright laws. You are therefore not authorized to do so.'"
The Courts

Germany Says Copying of DVDs, CDs Is Verboten 230

Billosaur writes "In what can only be seen as the opening salvo in an attempt to control what users can do with content, the German parliament has approved a controversial copyright law which will make it illegal to make copies of CDs and DVDs, even for personal use. The Bundesrat, the upper part of the German parliament, approved the legislation over the objections of consumer protection groups. The law is set to take effect in 2008, and covers CDs, DVDs, recordings from IPTV, and TV recordings." A few folks have noted that this story is incorrect. The original link seems to be down now anyway. Sorry.
The Almighty Buck

Monkey Business and Freakonomics 182

marct22 writes "Stephen J Dubner, co-writer of 'Freakonomics' said there will be a second Freakonomics book. One of the items that will be covered is capuchin monkeys' use of washers as money, buying sweets, budgeting for favored treats over lesser treats. He mentioned that one of the experiments had similar outcomes as a study of day traders. And lastly, he watched capuchin prostitution!"
Privacy

Major UK Child Porn Investigation Flawed 372

Oxygen99 writes "The Guardian (UK) is carrying a story on Operation Ore, a major police investigation aimed at catching online pedophiles. This has resulted in several high-profile arrests, such as those of Pete Townshend and Robert Del Naja (both falsely accused), while attracting significant press attention. Yet, the reality of the investigation is one of stolen credit cards, wrongful accusations, and ignorance leading to a significant number of the 7,292 people on the list being wrongfully accused of a very emotionally charged crime. There have been 39 suicides and a number of other people on the list will probably never be investigated. It seems to me this case highlights flaws inherent in the way law enforcement agencies handle evidence that only a small minority of front-line officers fully understand."

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