An anonymous reader writes "Developers have been waiting since late June for Google to release their API to the public. Well, today is that day. Just a few minute ago Chris Chabot, from Google+ Developer Relations, announced that the Google+ API is now available to the public."

ozmanjusri writes "While Microsoft presented its recent embrace of the GPL as 'a break from the ordinary,' and the press spoke of them as going to great lengths to engage the open source community,' as is often the case with Microsoft, it turns out they had an ulterior motive. According to Stephen Hemminger, an engineer with Vyatta, Microsoft's Hyper-V used open-source components in a network driver and the company released the code to avoid legal action over a GPL violation. Microsoft's decision to embrace the GPL was welcomed by many in the open source community, but their failure to honestly explain the reason behind the release will have squandered this opportunity to build trust, something which is sadly lacking in most people's dealings with Microsoft."

WatersOfOblivion writes "Twenty years ago today, Edsger Dijkstra, the greatest computer scientist to never own a computer, hand wrote and distributed 'On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science' (PDF), discussing the then-current state of Computer Science education. Twenty years later, does what he said still hold true? I know it is not the case where I went to school, but have most schools corrected course and are now being necessarily cruel to their Computer Science students?" Bonus: Dijkstra's handwriting.

nathan halverson writes "Google recently launched Street View coverage in Sonoma and Mendocino counties — big pot growing counties. And while they hardly covered the area's biggest city, Santa Rosa, they canvassed many of the rural areas known for growing pot. I found at least one instance where they drove well onto private property, past a gate and no trespassing sign, and took photographs. I didn't spend a whole lot of time looking, but someone is likely to find some pot plants captured on Street View. That could cause big problems for residents. Because while growing a substantial amount of pot is legal in Mendocino and Sonoma County under state law, it's highly illegal under federal law and would be grounds for a federal raid."

BhaKi writes "Remember the Tree-View mode in many file management applications? It's shocking to know that this omnipresent feature was patented by Microsoft back in 1995 (granted in 1997). I'm not very sure about the implications, though. The patent is so general that it can be related to many things from tree-mode to virtual filesystems. Check out claim no. 3 of the patent for the most clear part."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) have just sponsored a new bill, the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008, which would combine the worst parts of the PRO-IP Act and the PIRATE Act. The basic idea is pretty simple: expand the Federal government to create something like the Department of Homeland Security for IP. The Copyright Czar then polices the internet and clogs the courts with thousands of civil lawsuits against individual infringers so the RIAA doesn't have to. Feel free to contact your representatives with your feelings about this bill. Right now, they believe the bill (PDF) will 'protect jobs.'"

Deli Korkmaz writes "The Washington Post reports that Sprint-Nextel spin-off Embarq, currently the US's fourth largest DSL provider, monitored Internet activity on some 26,000 customers in Kansas using deep-packet inspection technology NebuAd in order to deliver targeted advertising to users' desktops. CNet provides coverage as well. The House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce is investigating whether any privacy laws were broken. Users were informed of this test and invited to opt out only via Embarq's online Privacy Policy; a mere 15 subscribers did so."

Slatterz links to a story which shows that nowadays, it's sometimes possible to find out whether someone is a dog on the Internet, excerpting: "A freelance photographer is facing a £22,000 bill after setting up a fake Facebook page that libelled a former classmate. Grant Raphael, a freelance photographer, set up a Facebook page in the name of former school friend Mathew Firsht and posted false information about his sexual and political preferences. He also set up another page for Firsht's television company, the latter entitled 'Has Mathew Firsht lied to you?' ... 'The significance of this case is that it shows that what you post is not harmless, but has consequences,' media lawyer, Jo Sanders, of Harbottle & Lewis, told the BBC."

An anonymous reader writes "The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc. In a series of cases including In re Nuijten, In re Comiskey and In re Bilski, the Patent and Trademark Office has argued in favor of imposing new restrictions on the scope of patentable subject matter set forth by Congress in article 101 of the Patent Act. In the most recent of these three — the currently pending en banc Bilski appeal — the Office takes the position that process inventions generally are unpatentable unless they 'result in a physical transformation of an article' or are 'tied to a particular machine.'"

An anonymous reader writes "A group of researchers from the University of Colorado and University of Washington could face both civil and criminal penalties for a research project (PDF) in which they snooped on users of the Tor anonymous proxy network. Should federal prosecutors take interest in the project, the researchers could also face up to 5 years in jail for violating the Wiretap Act. The researchers neither sought legal review of the project nor ran it past their Institutional Review Board. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has written a legal guide for Tor admins, strongly advises against any sort of network monitoring."

Pippin writes "Memphis Police Director, Larry Godwin, is suing AOL for the names of the authors of the Enforcer 2.0 blog. The blog is rumored to be authored by a Memphis police officer, and is critical of the department, Godwin, and some procedures. Godwin is actually using taxpayer dollars for this and, interestingly, the complaint is sealed".

A US federal appeals court today struck down COPA, the Child Online Protection Act, a Clinton-era censorship law that the Justice Department has been struggling to get implemented for a decade. (The ACLU filed suit as soon as COPA was signed in 1998 and won an immediate injunction.) The battle has made it to the Supreme Court twice, and the DoJ has essentially never gotten any satisfaction out of the courts. This was the case for which the DoJ famously went trolling for search histories. In the ruling issued today, the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower-court ruling that COPA violates the First Amendment because it is not the most effective way to keep children from visiting adult Web sites. The law would require sites to check visitors' ages, e.g. by taking a credit card, if the site contained any material that is "harmful to minors," whatever that means.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A Florida patent troll called Channel Intelligence is suing everyone from Lemonade to Remember the Milk for infringing on patent 6,917,941, which covers storing a wishlist in a database. Amazon and eBay are absent from the list of targets, even though they very likely store users' wishlists in a database. With any luck, perhaps one of the defendants will get to use that precedent PJ found the other day from In re Lintner, which said, '[c]laims which are broad enough to read on obvious subject matter are unpatentable even though they also read on non-obvious subject matter.'"

azuredrake writes "Facebook, the largest social networking site in the US, has sued German social networking site studiVZ on the grounds that studiVZ has copied the look and feel of Facebook in order to piggyback off their success. According to the article, 'The German company sued by Facebook for running a "knockoff" of the social networking Web site said on Sunday it asked a German court to declare that Facebook's claims are without merit.' However, a simple glance at the two sites' homepages seems to tell a different story — studiVZ copies many things from Facebook, from their button layout down to the font they're using."