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Oracle

Oracle: Google Has "Destroyed" the Market For Java 457

Posted by samzenpus from the bad-name dept.
itwbennett writes: Oracle made a request late last month to broaden its case against Android. Now, claiming that 'Android has now irreversibly destroyed Java's fundamental value proposition as a potential mobile device operating system,' Oracle on Wednesday filed a supplemental complaint in San Francisco district court that encompasses the six Android versions that have come out since Oracle originally filed its case back in 2010: Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean, Kit Kat and Lollipop.

Submission + - Hacking Group Linked to Chinese Army Caught Attacking Dummy Water Plant (technologyreview.com) 4

Submitted by holy_calamity
holy_calamity writes: MIT Technology Review reports that APT1, the China-based hacking group said to steal data from U.S. companies, has been caught taking over a decoy water plant control system. The honeypot mimicked the remote access control panels and physical control system of a U.S. municipal water plant. The decoy was one of 12 set up in 8 countries around the world, which together attracted more than 70 attacks, 10 of which completely compromised the control system. China and Russia were the leading sources of the attacks. The researcher behind the study says his results provide the first clear evidence that people actively seek to exploit the many security problems of industrial systems.
Censorship

Submission + - Thailand jails dissident for what people thought he would have said (nytimes.com) 3

Submitted by
patiwat
patiwat writes: "A Thai court has convicted a man for censoring himself. In a 2010 anti-government rally, Yossawarit Chuklom said that several people were against the dissolution of Abhisit Vejjajiva's government. He mentioned a few names, and then put his hand over his mouth and said he wasn't brave enough to continue. A court ruled that he would have mentioned King Bhumibol Adulyadej — thus earning him a conviction for insulting the King, who is constitutionally banned from any political role."

Comment SLAC (Score 1) 363

by JonChance (#38158772) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Science Sights To See?
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

"SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is home to a two-mile linear accelerator—the longest in the world. Originally a particle physics research center, SLAC is now a multipurpose laboratory for astrophysics, photon science, accelerator and particle physics research. Six scientists have been awarded the Nobel Prize for work carried out at SLAC and the future of the laboratory promises to be just as extraordinary."

http://www6.slac.stanford.edu/maps_directions.aspx
Patents

Submission + - MPEG LA says 12 parties have essential WebM patent (h-online.com) 2

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: MPEG LA says 12 parties have essential WebM patents:

The hopes that the VP8 codec at the heart of Google's open source WebM video standard would remain unchallenged in the patent arena are diminishing after the MPEG LA says 12 parties hold patents that its evaluators consider essential to the codec. The disclosure came in a recent interview with StreamingMedia.com. MPEG LA says that, in response to their call for essential patents in February, a number of parties submitted patents for evaluation and twelve of those parties' patents have been examined and found to be essential to VP8.

The parties involved are as yet unnamed and MPEG LA told patent analyst Florian Mueller that "confidentiality precludes [MPEG LA] from disclosing the identity of the owners". Mueller thinks it is likely that there is an overlap between the twelve companies and the members of the MPEG LA AVC/H.264 patent pool.

H-online: http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/MPEG-LA-says-12-parties-have-essential-WebM-patents-1288232.html

Submission + - House Panel Approves Bill Forcing ISPs Log Users (cnet.com) 2

Submitted by skids
skids writes: Under the guise of fighting child pornography, the House Judiciary Committee approved legislation on Thursday that would require Internet service providers (ISPs) to collect and retain records about Internet users’ activity. The 19 to 10 vote represents a victory for conservative Republicans, who made data retention their first major technology initiative after last fall's elections. A last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers' names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses. Per dissenting Rep. John Conyers (D-MI): 'The bill is mislabeled ... This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It's creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes.'
OS X

Why IT Won't Like Mac OS X Lion Server 341

Posted by CmdrTaco from the sounds-oxymoronic-to-me dept.
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's John Rizzo sees Mac OS X Lion Server as a downgrade that may prompt a move to Windows Server. 'Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Server adds innovative features and a new low price tag, but cuts in services and the elimination of advanced GUI administration tools may force some enterprise departments to think twice about the role of Mac servers on their networks,' Rizzo writes. 'Looking more deeply inside Lion Server, it's impossible to avoid the conclusion that Lion Server is not built for those of us in IT. The $50 price tag — down from $500 — is the first clue that Lion Server trying to be a server for the consumer. But the ironic part for IT administrators is that Lion Server actually requires a greater degree of technical knowledge than its predecessors.'"
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - The Fed Audit (senate.gov)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve uncovered eye-popping new details about how the U.S. provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Canada

Submission + - Peter Adekeye Freed, Judge Outraged at Cisco's (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by puppetman
puppetman writes: Ars Technica has an article relating the recent release of Peter Adekeye, a former Cisco employee who was arrested in Canada on trumped-up charges that appear to have been fabricated by Cisco. Slashdot covered the story back in April, 2011, during which time Mr Adekeye was still being detained.
In the ruling, the judge squashed the US extradition request, rebuked both the Canadian and American authorities for "an appalling abuse of process", and goes as far as to say that the criminal proceeding was launched on behalf of Cisco, to mirror the civil proceedings that Mr Adekeye had launched against the powerful Cisco. The full judgement, which is quite readable and damning, can be found here.

Submission + - NH Man Arrested for Videotaping Police.. Again (nashuatelegraph.com) 1

Submitted by OhPlz
OhPlz writes: Back in 2006, a resident of New Hampshire's second largest city was arrested while at the police station attempting to file a complaint against officers. His crime? He had video tape evidence of the officers' wrongdoings. According to the police, that's wiretapping.

After world wide attention, the police dropped the charges. His complaint was found to be valid, but the evidence never saw the light of day.

Well, guess what? Round two. There are differing reports, but again the police arrested Mr. Gannon and again, they seized his video camera. This time it's "falsifying evidence" because he tried to hand off the camera, most likely to protect its contents.

Once again, if the police are free to videotape us, why aren't we free to videotape them? If there's the potential of police wrongdoing, how is it that the law permits the police to seize the evidence?
Security

Submission + - Security consultants warn about PROTECT-IP Act (nationaljournal.com)

Submitted by epee1221
epee1221 writes: Several security professionals released a paper (PDF) raising objections to the DNS filtering mandated by the proposed PROTECT-IP Act. The measure allows courts to require Internet service providers to redirect or block queries for a domain deemed to be infringing on IP laws. ISPs will not be able to improve DNS security using DNSSEC, a system for cryptographically signing DNS records to ensure their authenticity, as the sort of manipulation mandated by PROTECT-IP is the type of interference DNSSEC is meant to prevent. The paper notes that a DNS server which has been compromised by a cracker would be indistinguishable from one operating under a court order to alter its DNS responses. The measure also points to a possible fragmenting of the DNS system, effectively making domain names non-universal, and the DNS manipulation may lead to collateral damage (i.e. filtering an infringing domain may block access to non-infringing content). It is also pointed out that DNS filtering does not actually keep determined users from accessing content, as they can still access non-filtered DNS servers or directly enter the blocked site's IP address if it is known.

A statement by the MPAA disputes these claims, arguing that typical users lack the expertise to select a different DNS server and that the Internet must not be allowed to "decay into a lawless Wild West."

Paul Vixie, a coauthor of the paper, elaborates in his blog.
Cellphones

Submission + - Verizon Tells Customer To Get A Lawyer & A Sub (techdirt.com) 1

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: Verizon Tells Customer To Get A Lawyer & A Subpoena To Get An Itemized Bill:

A woman, who called Verizon to try to find out about the $4.19 she was being charged for six local calls, was told by Verizon reps that the only way it would provide her an itemized bill was to get a lawyer and have the lawyer get a subpoena to force Verizon to disclose the information.

Instead, the woman went to court (by herself) and a judge told Verizon to hand over the itemized bill info.

        It is a basic matter of fair business practice that a consumer should be able to contact a utility about a charge on a bill and learn what the charge is for and learn that the charge was correctly applied. The only verification that Verizon's witness could offer that a charge like [the customer's] $4.19 measured use charge was accurate and billed correctly was her faith in the accuracy of Verizon's computer system. The only way that Verizon would offer any information about a past charge in response to a consumer inquiry was to require that customer to hire a lawyer and subpoena their own usage information. By no reasonable standard could this be considered reasonable customer service.

The judge has also suggested Verizon should be fined $1,000 for its failure here, and that suggestion will be reviewed by the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission.

Techdirt: http://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20110715/02212815101/verizon-tells-customer-to-get-lawyer-subpoena-to-get-itemized-bill.shtml

Submission + - Can A Monkey Get A Copyright & Issue A Takedow (techdirt.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Last week, the Daily Mail published a story about some monkeys in Indonesia who happened upon a camera and took some photos of themselves. The photos are quite cute. However, Techdirt noticed that the photos had copyright notices on them, and started a discussion over who actually held the copyright in question, noting that, if anyone did, the monkeys had the best claim, and certainly not the photographer. Yet, the news agency who claimed copyright issued a takedown to Techdirt! When presented with the point that its unlikely that news agency, Caters News, holds a legitimate copyright, the agency told Techdirt it didn't matter. Techdirt claims that using the photos for such a discussion is a clear case of fair use, an argument that Caters has so far ignored.

Comment Server Names (Score 1) 722

by JonChance (#36495098) Attached to: I Name My Servers After:
When I worked on Yellow Brick Road in Mentor Ohio, I named them from Wizard of Oz places and characters. I use to run a domain called disgruntled-employees.org there was names for my servers like postal , militant, perturbed, discord etc... Naming servers was always genre specific.

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