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Piracy

Submission + - The BSA's "nauseating" anti-piracy tactics (pcpro.co.uk)

Barence writes: "The Business Software Alliance (BSA) has been accused of heavy-handed tactics that could drive small companies to incriminate themselves.

The Microsoft-backed piracy watchdog generates a quarter of its cases by offering employees cash rewards for informing on their own employer. “It is basically harvesting allegations from disgruntled employees and farming them out to expensive law firms," one small business owner told PC Pro, who said he was "nauseated" by the tactics.

The BSA then sends out a letter demanding the business owner fill out a software audit, or potentially face court action — even though the BSA has no power to demand such an audit and hasn't pursued a court case in five years. “It’s designed to scare the recipient into thinking that they’re obliged to provide certain information when, in fact, it’s difficult to see that they are,” said a leading IT lawyer."

Businesses

Why Netbooks Will Soon Cost $99 221

CWmike sends along a ComputerWorld piece which predicts that "netbooks like the Asus Eee PC, the Dell Mini 9 and the HP 2133 Mini-Note will soon cost as little as $99. The catch? You'll need to commit to a two-year mobile broadband contract. The low cost will come courtesy of a subsidy identical to the one you already get with your cell phone. It's likely that HP is working with AT&T (they're reported to be talking), which announced a major strategic shift a couple of weeks ago that should result in AT&T stores selling nonphone gadgets that can take advantage of mobile broadband, including netbooks. What's more interesting is that low income and cheapskate buyers are starting to use iPhones as replacements or substitutes for netbook, notebook and even desktop PCs. The author's take: A very large number of people are increasingly looking to buy a single device — or, at least, subscribe to a single wireless account — for all their computing and communications needs, and at the lowest possible price."
Microsoft

Ballmer Admits Google Apps Are Biting Into MS Office 293

twitter points out coverage of a discussion between Steve Ballmer and two Gartner analysts in which the Microsoft CEO admits that Google Apps is enjoying an advantage over Office by users who want to share their documents. He points to Office Live as their response to Google, and adds, "Google has the lead, but, if we're good at advertising, we'll compete with them in the consumer business." Whether or not they're good at advertising is still in question, if their recent attempts are any indication. Ballmer also made statements indicating some sort of arrangement with Yahoo! could still be in the works, but Microsoft was quick to step on that idea. Regarding Windows Vista, he said Microsoft was prepared for people to skip it altogether, and that Microsoft would be "ready" when it was time to deploy Windows 7.
Security

Terrorist Recognition Handbook 344

Ben Rothke writes "There are two types of writers about terrorism, experts such as Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson who write from a distance and others that write graphic tales of first-hand from the trenches war stories. Terrorist Recognition Handbook: A Practitioner's Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities, is unique in that author Malcolm Nance is a 20-year veteran of the U.S. intelligence community and writes from a first hand-perspective, but with the organization and methodology of writers such as Pipes and Emerson. Those combined traits make the book extraordinarily valuable and perhaps the definitive text on terrorist recognition." Read below for the rest of Ben's review

Comment Re:FLOSS in Europe - In reality (Score 1) 210

But still, according to the report, the majority of FLOSS developers live in Europe :
The combined FLOSS (MERIT/FP5) and FLOSS-US (Stanford) developer surveys form the largest survey-based dataset (4282 cases) providing the geographical distribution of developers (see Figure 17). According to these surveys, more than three fifths of the worldwide FLOSS developer community live in the EU, one fifth in North America, and another one fifth or so live in other countries.

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