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The Courts

Submission + - Utah Rethinking Anti-Keyword Advertising Law

Eric Goldman writes: "Slashdot previously reported on Utah's recent law banning trademark-triggered keyword advertising. This week, a group of technology executives met with Utah legislators to discuss the law, and it looks like the legislature is rethinking its position. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, "Legislative leaders are looking to tweak a troublesome trademark protection program rather than defend it in court, after an unprecedented meeting with Internet power brokers who would prefer the new registry be scrapped.""
Music

Jobs Says People Don't Want to 'Rent' Music 203

eldavojohn writes "PhysOrg is running a piece on a recent speech by Apple CEO Steve Jobs about DRM free music. While we know that Jobs is a self proclaimed proponent of DRM free music who's not all talk, he's now said that 'by the end of this year, over half of the songs we offer on iTunes we believe will be in DRM-free versions. I think we're going to achieve that.' Jobs pointed out what's obvious to us, the consumers, but isn't obvious to the music industry — 'People want to own their music.' He also dismissed subscription based music as a failure, and claimed a lot of other music labels are intrigued by the EMI deal."
Caldera

Submission + - SCO Given Delisting Notice

SCO Delenda Est writes: "The SEC has given SCO notice that they will be delisted from the NASDAQ if they cannot keep their share price above $1 sometime in the next 180 days. Although they may be able to avoid delisting for a while, their small market capitalization will hinder their efforts. Given their other financials, this just goes to show how desperate their current financial situation is."
Education

Student Attempting To Improve School Security Suspended 282

TA_TA_BOX writes "The University of Portland has handed a one-year suspension to an engineering major after he designed a program to bypass the Cisco Clean Access (CCA). According to the University of Portland's Vice President of Information Systems, the purpose of the CCA is to evaluate whether the computers are compliant with current security policies (i.e., anti-virus software, Windows Updates and Patches, etc.). Essentially the student wrote a program that could fool the CCA to think that the computers operating system and anti-virus were fully patched and up to date. 'In the design of his computer program, Maass looked at the functions CCA provides and identified vulnerabilities where it could be bypassed. He wrote a program that emulated the same functions as CCA and eliminated some security issues. He says that the method he chose is "one of six that I came up with." Maass says his intent was not malicious. Rather, the sophomore says he was examining vulnerabilities so that they could be fixed. "I was planning on going to Cisco with the vulnerability this summer," Maass says. '"
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Is Commercialization Killing Open Source?

An anonymous reader writes: IBM, Sun, Novell, and Red Hat all have a very significant open source element to their businesses. In addition to these juggernauts, there is growing investment in open source models. Will money flowing into open source destroy its roots? Mark Hinkle just posted an editorial asking the questions Is Commercialization Killing Open Source? in which he comments on "opensville" and gives some actual investmet data, and a lot of inisght into the growing trend in "open source commercialization".

Feed News: CSSEdit adds 'X-ray Inspector' (macworld.com)

MacRabbit is offering a major overhaul with its CSSEdit 2.5 update -- the CSS page editor now features an X-ray Inspector that integrates CSS files from your Web page and a selection builder that describes styles in plain English.


Feed Mac 911: Avoiding spam (macworld.com)

There are good tools for filtering spam, but what can you do to avoid it in the first place? Nothing will keep you spam-free, but these techniques can help lessen the load.


Hardware

What is Open Source Hardware? 143

ptorrone writes "In their piece 'What is open source hardware?', MAKE magazine divides up electronic hardware into layers, each of which has different document types and licensing concerns: Hardware (mechanical) diagrams, schematics & circuit diagrams, layout diagrams, core/firmware, software/API — each layer has an example provided and links to many of the open source hardware projects currently being worked on."

Feed Tin-Foil Beanies + 'Think of the Children!' = Newspaper Gold (techdirt.com)

The UK has seen its fair share of people freaking out over the health effects of WiFi, and a major newspaper there fanned the flames this weekend with its lead story saying children are at risk from "electronic smog". It's a strange article, though, because instead of finding any evidence that WiFi is actually harmful to people, it simply reports on how some groups are pushing for investigations into WiFi, then implies that's some sort of evidence that the technology is unsafe. This is despite previous reports that the radiation from being exposed to a WiFi network for a year is the equivalent of 20 minutes on a cell phone. Most of the noise about how harmful WiFi is comes from people claiming to have "electrosensitivity", though they generally fail double-blind tests checking out their claims that they can sense when they've entered a room with WiFi coverage. These sorts of stories are little more than hype-filled fluff that lack much substance to back up their wild headlines and implications of doom and gloom. Another case in point: a spate of articles -- started by one from the same paper as this latest WiFi scare story -- about how honeybees are being wiped out by radiation from mobile phones. The only catch was that the study in question had nothing to do with cell phones. The scientists also point out that the paper never bothered to get in touch with them, presumably because an accurate description of their research and findings would have made such a sensational story pretty dull.

Feed Commodore prices up games machines (theregister.com)

Commodore Gaming - the latest reviver of ye olde Commodore brand - has priced up its high-end Wintel gaming systems, pledging to "redefine the line between gaming and reality" - whatever that means - for up to £2899 inc. VAT.


Feed Hacking the U.S. Post Office (schneier.com)

This is clever: Many USA ecommerce shops don’t send their goods to Russia or to the countries of the Ex-USSR. Some shops send but delivery costs differ greatly from the homeland ones, they are usually much bigger. So what did...
Security

Submission + - Blood, bullets, bombs and bandwidth

jemevans writes: "Ryan Lackey wears body armor to business meetings. He flies armed helicopters to client sites. He has a cash flow problem: he is paid in hundred-dollar bills, sometimes shrink-wrapped bricks of them, and flowing this money into a bank is difficult. He even calls some of his company's transactions "drug deals" — but what Lackey sells is Internet access. From his trailer on Logistics Staging Area Anaconda, a colossal US Army base fifty miles north of Baghdad, Lackey runs Blue Iraq, surely the most surreal ISP on the planet. He is 26 years old.

A (nonfiction) tale of two California cipherpunks who went to Baghdad to seek their fortune and bring the Internet to Iraq."

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