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Crime

Submission + - Man Tunnels into GameStop, Steals Games (thinq.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Life imitates Minecraft: Computer game piracy is big business, but there are still those who prefer to get their games the old-fashioned way: by digging a tunnel into their local games shop and making off with as much stock as they can carry.
At least, that's the slightly bizarre approach taken by a man from Greeneville, Tennessee, who was arrested late last week after being caught tunnelling into his local GameStop store from an empty adjoining building.
Idle

Submission + - Coffee spill diverts United Airlines flight (cnn.com) 1

Submitted by PolygamousRanchKid
PolygamousRanchKid writes: A United Airlines flight from Chicago to Frankfurt, Germany, was diverted to Toronto this week after the pilot dumped a cup of coffee on the plane's communication's equipment. The unwanted liquid triggered a series of emergency codes, including one for a hijacking, according to Transport Canada, the agency that regulates transportation in Canada.
Google

Google Loses Street View Suit, Forced To Pay $1 225

Posted by timothy from the token-victory dept.
Translation Error writes "Two and a half years ago, the Borings sued Google for invading their privacy by driving onto their private driveway and taking pictures of their house to display on Google Street View. Now, the case has finally come to a close with the judge ruling in favor of the Borings and awarding them the princely sum of $1. While the judge found the Borings to be in the right, she awarded them only nominal damages, as the fact that they had already made images of their home available on a real estate site and didn't bother to seal the lawsuit to minimize publicity indicated the Borings neither valued their privacy nor had it been affected in any great way by Google's actions."
Quickies

Journal Journal: some open sores code for certain people

Journal by Bill Dog
As a public service, I hereby release the following into the public domain:

javascript:(function(){document.forms[5].elements[5].value='<Left-wing%20talking%20point%20/>'})();

It's bookmarklet code, designed for those who are exclusively one-sided in their political writings, to save them the time it would normally take to craft a lengthy JE or snotty retort here on Slashdot. And save the rest of us the agonizing boredom of predictability.
Privacy

Submission + - USB "Dead Drops" (datenform.de) 1

Submitted by Okian Warrior
Okian Warrior writes: Aram Bartholl is building a series of USB dead drops in NYC.

Billed as "an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space", he has embedded USB sticks as file cache devices throughout NYC.

From the Hackaday link: "Upload what you want, download what you want. They are completely offline which means monitoring gets a lot harder.

Current locations (more to come) include: 87 3rd Avenue, Brooklyn, NY (Makerbot), Empire Fulton Ferry Park, Brooklyn, NY (Dumbo), 235 Bowery, NY (New Museum), Union Square, NY (Subway Station 14th St), and West 21st Street, NY (Eyebeam)

Submission + - Competitor threatens suit - counter DMCA takedown?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Zen Magnets, a maker of neodymium magnets, has been under assault by the much larger and better distributed Buckyballs, a maker of a nearly identical toy. After Zen Magnets listed a couple of eBay auctions with a set of Buckyballs and a set of their own, asking customers to decide which was higher quality, Buckyballs replied with a legal threat. Zen Magnets responded with an open video response, in which they presented the voicemail from Buckyballs and demonstrated their claims of quality through repeatable, factual tests, providing quantitative data to back up their assertions.

Soon after, Buckyballs CEO Jake Bronstein got the video taken down from Youtube via a DMCA takedown, despite the fact that the only elements not made by Zen Magnets are the voicemail he left and some images of himself, which are low resolution and publicly available online.

Zen Magnets is now asking for help as they don't know what to do. It's appalling and I can't imagine that it is infringing, but I am not a lawyer. What would you do in this scenario?

(I am affiliated with neither company, although Thinkgeek sells Buckyballs...Slashdot & ThinkGeek share a corporate overlord.)

Comment Re:Really? (Score 1) 821

by Totenglocke (#30996990) Attached to: "No Scan, No Fly" At Heathrow and Manchester

remember when it was pleasant to fly?

No, I don't actually. Then again, I'm not old enough to remember flying before we already had the multi-hour waits at the airport before you could board the plane and it's only gotten worse as time has gone by. I haven't flown in almost 10 years and I'm glad about that.
Apple

Submission + - Fujitsu readies lawsuit over "iPad" name (nytimes.com) 2

Submitted by gyrogeerloose
gyrogeerloose writes: In an event eerily reminiscent of Cisco's suit over Apple's use of the "iPhone" name, Japanese firm Fujitsu is consulting it's attorneys in preparation for going to court over Apple's use of "iPad" for it's latest computing device. Quoted in a New York Times news story, Masahiro Yamane, director of Fujitsu’s public relations division, said “It’s our understanding that the name is ours.”

Fujitsu’s application to trademark the iPad name stalled because of an earlier filing by another company and The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office listed Fujitsu’s application as abandoned in early 2009, but the company revived its application in June. Apple, which has applied for an international trademark on "iPad" through a proxy company, has filed a number of requests with the U.S. Patent Office for more time to oppose Fujitsu’s application.

Submission + - Entire .SE TLD Drops off the Internet (pingdom.com)

Submitted by Icemaann
Icemaann writes: Pingdom and Network World are reporting that the .SE tld dropped off the internet yesterday due to a bug in the script that generates the .SE zone file. The .SE tld has close to one million domains that all went down due to missing the trailing dot in the SE zone file. Some caching nameservers may still be returning invalid DNS responses for 24 hours.
Businesses

Avatars To Have Business Dress Codes By 2013 221

Posted by samzenpus from the no-flaming-hair-at-pretend-work dept.
nk497 writes "With businesses increasingly using digital tech like virtual worlds and Twitter, their staff will have to be given guidelines on how they 'dress' their avatars, according to analysts. 'As the use of virtual environments for business purposes grows, enterprises need to understand how employees are using avatars in ways that might affect the enterprise or the enterprise's reputation,' said James Lundy, managing vice president at Gartner, in a statement. 'We advise establishing codes of behavior that apply in any circumstance when an employee is acting as a company representative, whether in a real or virtual environment.'"
Security

Submission + - Hackers send malware-infected CDs to credit unions (threatpost.com) 2

Submitted by redsoxh8r
redsoxh8r writes: Online criminals have taken to a decidedly low-tech method for distributing the latest batch of targeted malware: mailing infected CDs to credit unions . The discs have been showing up at credit unions around the country recently, a throwback to the days when viruses and Trojans were distributed via floppy disk. The scam is elegant in its simplicity. The potential thieves are mailing letters that purport to come from the National Credit Union Administration, the federal agency that charters and insures credit unions, and including two CDs in the package. The letter is a fake fraud alert from the NCUA, instructing recipients to review the training materials contained on the discs. However, the CDs are loaded with malware rather than training programs.
Businesses

Submission + - Global warming to be put on trial (latimes.com)

Submitted by Mr_Blank
Mr_Blank writes: The L.A. Times reports: The nation's largest business lobby wants to put the science of global warming on trial. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, trying to ward off potentially sweeping federal emissions regulations, is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a rare public hearing on the scientific evidence for man-made climate change. Chamber officials say it would be "the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century" — complete with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge who would rule, essentially, on whether humans are warming the planet to dangerous effect.
Censorship

Submission + - British Video Recordings Act 1984 invalid 1

Submitted by chrb
chrb writes: BBC News is reporting that the British Video Recordings Act 1984 is invalid due to a 25 year old legal blunder. The Thatcher government of the day failed to officially "notify" the European Commission about the law, and hence it no longer stands as a legal Act. There will now be a period of around three months before the Act can be passed again, during which time it will be entirely legal to sell any video content without age rated certifications.

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