81317361
submission
ShaunC writes:
William Fisher, a professor of intellectual property law at Harvard, posted to YouTube a lecture titled "The Subject Matter of Copyright: Music." In discussing the complexities of music licensing and cover songs, Fisher played several short clips of music by Hendrix, Santana, and others. Sony responded by having the lecture removed from YouTube, ignoring any fair use protection in excerpting works for educational purposes. While the video was restored after public backlash, most YouTube users don't have Harvard Law School backing them up. Once again, a company has issued overreaching copyright claims with no penalty or consequence for harming an innocent party.
79507639
submission
ShaunC writes:
Soon after Comcast implemented its data caps in Tennessee, one customer began getting calls warning that he was approaching his monthly usage limit. The company's data cap meter was ticking up rapidly, even attributing 120GB of use — almost half of the monthly cap — to a period of time when he was out of the country. After months of back and forth and troubleshooting by the customer, Comcast finally admitted that a typo in a MAC address was causing another customer's usage to appear on his account. With data caps like Comcast's carrying a real financial cost in terms of overage fees, how can we trust providers to accurately track customers' bandwidth usage?
68765021
submission
ShaunC writes:
The US has announced new sanctions against North Korea in response to the infiltration and data leakage affecting Sony Pictures Entertainment. Despite a lack of hard evidence of wrongdoing, and amid competing theories of culpability, the US on Friday introduced new sanctions against entities like North Korea's General Reconnaissance Bureau and a state-sponsored arms dealing group which masquerades as a mining conglomerate. Most of the targets were already under sanction prohibiting trade with the US, and the Times notes that "none of the targets of the sanctions are likely to feel much sting."
62037051
submission
ShaunC writes:
Is there a glut of qualified American tech workers, or isn't there? Some companies like Facebook and Airbnb are now actively courting and recruiting high school students as young as 13 with promises of huge stipends and salaries. As one student put it, “it’s kind of insane that you can make more than the U.S. average income in a summer,” and another who attended a Facebook-sponsored trip said he'd "forego college for a full-time job" if it were offered. Is Silicon Valley taking advantage of naive young workers?
56446373
submission
ShaunC writes:
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes:
Have you even seen an elephant penis? Because I have, and the colors align to Slashdot. The beta is so bad, Roland Piquepaille is surrendering his account (as the French do). The GNAA has reorganized to post fake job offerings on Dice.com with an emphasis on affirmative action. Profane Motherfucker has come out of retirement simply to say: "fuck this shit."
21065282
submission
ShaunC writes:
Comcast today withdrew a charitable commitment after one of the charity's Twitter messages criticized the cable giant's recent hire of the former FCC commissioner. Said a Comcast VP, "I cannot in good conscience continue to provide you with funding." Comcast has since attempted to backpedal, saying "we sincerely apologize for the unauthorized action of our employee."
7068712
submission
ShaunC writes:
The iconic Paul Allen has been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, more than 25 years after he was treated for Hodgkin's disease. Allen has begun chemotherapy treatments. I would hope that we can set aside our platform wars and wish Mr. Allen the best.
2994807
submission
Bulworth writes:
Late Friday, I started seeing a noticeable delay in email traffic on a server that uses several DNSBLs for spam prevention. After some investigating, I discovered that blackholes.us seems to be suffering a DNS outage, at the very least. blackholes.us operates a number of country-level DNSBLs; the idea is that if you don't receive any legitimate email from a particular country, you can safely implement [country].blackholes.us as a DNSBL, to automatically block all inbound email from hosts in that nation. They've been a reliable DNSBL for several years without presenting any problems or delays for me, but now, not even their website is resolving. Does anyone have any information about the cause of the outage?
62282
submission
ShaunC writes:
A Florida high school senior recently had his home raided by a SWAT team after he made a one-word change on his school's website. Authorities spent two months investigating the "hacker," who had legitimate access and write permission on the web server.
21949
submission
ShaunC writes:
Today I witnessed the most widespread spam campaign that I've ever seen, an illegal pump-and-dump stock promotion that concurrently spanned standard email, mailing lists, Usenet, and Google Groups. Every email address I own received multiple copies of the spam; reports from family, friends, and coworkers indicate similar experiences. I'm curious as to whether or not others were so inundated by this spam, how many reported it to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and who will admit to attempting to profit from the obvious hype when it became clear that the stock was rising.
